Tag: worship

Post-Vatican Two liturgical reform slammed by then-future Benedict XVI

It’s a loser, said the cardinal.

“The liturgical reform, in its concrete realization, has distanced itself even more from its origin. The result has not been a reanimation, but devastation. In place of the liturgy, fruit of a continual development, they have placed a fabricated liturgy. They have deserted a vital process of growth and becoming in order to substitute a fabrication. They did not want to continue the development, the organic maturing of something living through the centuries, and they replaced it, in the manner of technical production, by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.”

(Ratzinger in Revue Theologisches, Vol. 20, Feb. 1990, pgs. 103-104)

The ineffable arrogance of the we-know-best school. Fixer-uppers interrupted the process. Didn’t even just speed it up. Nagging suspicion: They knew what they were doing.

Young Catholics sound off about today’s mass

And guess what some find offers them bread not a stone:

One Catholic, who did not want to trash his parish, says he finds more sustenance these days sneaking off to the old Latin Mass. This isn’t because he’s a traditionalist, but because of its quiet and almost mystical aesthetic: lots of bells, lots of incense, no “awful” hymns badly sung but gorgeous Latin chants instead.

Bad music — and bad singers leading the singing — was a frequent young Catholic complaint. One complainer, understanding how superficial that sounds, told me that bad music for him turns what’s supposed to be a sacred time into a cringing endurance test. It’s downright embarrassing when the cringeworthiness takes place at a Catholic funeral and he’s surrounded by non-Catholic friends. [italics mine]

My position is, in addition to the almost guaranteed mediocrity as above, substituting “Amazing Grace” and “An Irish Lullaby” (what Barry Fitzgerald sang to his mother in “Going My Way”) for church music that survived the ages, you have performers, clerical or otherwise, who are not up to the challenge.

Big, big problem here. The bread-for-stone business is Scriptural, I must add: “”Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” from Matthew 7.9.

A prayer for the supposedly praying Mass-attender

Gerald Manley Hopkins deserves attention. So other Christian poets, in search for someone to counter the drugstore fustian that greets us regularly at our 21st-century mass.

First, do no harm, God told the worship clerks, who asked, “What on earth are you talking about?”

I do them injustice. It’s not easy to tell people how to pray. They mean well, as do many a mis-doer, from whose misdirected, ill-conceived and -executed efforts God save us and them.

Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Mark, chapter 6: The dance, the promise, the beheading

John the Baptist, model of conscience.

Spoke truth to power, as many self-righteous of this day claim they do, when they know nothing of the kind of power he faced, autocratic, middle eastern, first-century A.D., rule by whim of ruler.

Herodias the trophy wife gave the word to her dancing daughter, voluptuous, tempting, the coolest of chicks. Her stepfather Herod, a potentially decent sort, got lassoed. Had been drinking, the kid got to him (and his hangers-on, watching his every move), he promised the world or half of the part he controlled (I said POWER). The fool.

The angry mother told her. The head. She told the fool in charge, gulp. He liked John, liked to listen to him. John used the occasions not to butter him up but to admonish him. He was not going to back down, knew what was right and what was his duty. Very gutsy guy. Went with his conscience, angered the spiteful woman.

Now what? The others are looking at him. He had promised, had he not? What kind of king was that whose promise meant nothing? He swallowed hard. Turned to the hatchet man (not a figure of speech, as we use the phrase today), said get the head. Hurry up, chop-chop.

The daughter, learning how things are done, took the head on a platter (not figurative), and the mother smiled.

St. John the Baptist, pray for us.