AN OUTSIDE VIEW

The Bishop of Stockholm gave a sermon this afternoon on the importance of Mary, at the conclusion of a pilgrimage to Oskarström on the eve of Pentecost, in honour of Our Lady. His themes were the importance of acceptance, following the example of Mary who said "Yes" to the Angel Gabriel, and of the incarnational nature of the Catholic faith - which teaches that Jesus - God made man - had a real human mother, which is the reason why Mary is to be honoured. The event was well attended, which is always encouraging. The rain held off until the very end, when the heavens opened. Most of those who came were from the south and west of Sweden, with many different nationalities being present - Swedish Catholics, of course, but also from Poland, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovakia, Vietnam, Iraq, the Philippines, Latin America and some English-speaking countries including Britain itself. The Catholic church in Sweden is playing an important part in helping immigrants to integrate into soc...

I was sitting on the boat to Brännö this afternoon when a half dozen or so young men in the "uniform" of the Chasidic Jews - dark suit, trilby hat and white shirt without a tie - got on and sat behind me, and one next to me. They were well away from where one would usually expect to see them, so I asked them where they had come from. The conversation went on and got to the point where I said I was of Jewish origin. The boy - he cannot have been much over twenty - promptly pulled out a bag with  tefillin (phlacteries) in them and said I should start using them. I told him, in the nicest possible way, that I would not use them if he gave them to me. Tefillin are leather boxes containing passages from the book of Exodus. Their use is a literal interpretation of Deuteronomy 6:8 " You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. " The conversation then went on with a mention of the forthcoming feast of Shavuot, which he as...

The Bishop of Shrewsbury Diocese has just got rid of his Justice and Peace co-ordinator. Justice and Peace groups were a feature of the early 1990s. There was a J&P coordinator in the Arundel & Brighton Diocese where I lived in the early 1990s. He did quite a good job in getting parishes focussed on J&P issues. A J&P group was set up at St Mary Magdalen's and we studied the Catholic Social Teaching (CST). From that group came two vocations. As we came to study it, CST itself proved to be a mixed bag. Rerum Novarum having been deficient, in particular in relation what it referred to confusingly as "property", further encyclicals were then issued subsequently in an attempt to fill the gaps. These culminated in the almost incomprehensible Centesimus Anno of 1991 which was not studied. Rerum Novarum did great damage in emasculating the Catholic working class movements for social justice at the end of the nineteenth century and helped open up the way for the ...

That is what people tell me when I complain about the poor quality of the liturgy. They are right. But you would not serve a meal prepared from the finest ingredients with the greatest of care by the most skilled of chefs - on a paper plate with plastic cutlery. That, roughly speaking, is where the Catholic church has got to in so many places following the Vatican 2 reforms. Any parish should be able put on a reasonable sung Mass, with the ordinary sung in Latin, on a Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation. It does not even need the presence of a choir, only the willingness of the priest to make sure that the congregation knows the music. All that is usually necessary to for it to be sung regularly, and even now, there would rarely be a shortage of people who can manage the Missa de Angelis, Credo 3, Pater Noster and responses. But too often the priest is clearly not willing, so all we get is a wordy vernacular Mass. What, if anything, does this have to do with Vatican Two? Post-Counci...

On the order of Michael Gove, schools are being sent copies of the 1611 King James bible. However, this is a filleted version of the text to suit the Protestant theological position of the early seventeenth century. The schools should have been issued with the Douai-Rheims version issued by Bishop Challoner in 1752. This includes all the books.

I can hardly believe this from an acquaintance " I've been in dialogue with a professor of land economics at Cambridge past 2 weeks. Astonishing, he did not understand the nature of economic rent! This embarrassed him and he tried to pretend he did know but it was too late and I could not rescue the situation. I got a load of dodgy excuses and accusations and now he is blanking me. I'm really annoyed with myself for not spotting it early enough." His predecessor was Donald Denman who knew all about it. I would have thought you were starting from a reasonable assumption. They should pick up some beggar off the street and give him the professor's job. Beggars know about location value.

There was a discussion about the practice of going for a blessing at communion time on Father Ray Blake's blog here . This practice seems to have popped up out of nowhere somewhere in the early 1990s, beginning with children. Someone must have thought it up and then given an instruction about it. It apparently has no support from authority and needs to be gently discouraged, probably by priests and catechists pointing out that is unnecessary anyway since everyone receives the final blessing at the end of Mass. Of course if someone turns up at in the communion queue then it is the simplest option for the priest to give a blessing. It would also be beneficial if the reception of communion was more tightly linked to confession, by pointing out that one is still in communion even if one remains in one's place, kneeling with the right spiritual disposition. This is not the only recent practice with communion that needs to be discouraged. Queuing is undignified. It also e...

Why is so much 20th century music still considered "difficult" if not downright unpleasant, and especially church music? I was looking again at a mass setting that we have been practising, that left me literally with a sour taste in the mouth. There were in fact, two particular ingredients. It was in the vernacular but I will refer to the parts by their Latin names. One was the rhythm of the Kyrie - a jazzy der-dit-di-der-dit-di-der-dit-di-der. A real get-you-moving rhythm. To make matters worse, the tune was not in a key, nor was it in a recognisable mode, though it seemed to be moving towards Gregorian mode 4 - the most difficult and unsettling one, being most removed from a major scale. All exactly wrong for the start of the mass, I would suggest. There seems to be a lack of sense of what is appropriate. Then there was the Agnus Dei, which goes 1 Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis 2 Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis 3 Agnus Dei, q...

Travellers attending Mass abroad will notice the widespread practice of celebrating it in English. This appears to be principally for students and for immigrants from former British colonial countries, though tourists will often attend these liturgies. There also seems to have been delays in introducing the English translation of the Mass, so they will often find the old 1973 version one still in use. The new version was prepared by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, following the principles laid down in 2001 in Liturgiam autenticam . The new translation was brought into use on the first Sunday in Advent 2011. Presumably that the new translation will be brought into use in non-English speaking countries when new missals have been obtained. It seems to me, however, that the opportunity could usefully be taken to re-examine the use of English abroad, especially where there is no significant English-speaking immigrant group, comparable to, for example, immigrants ...

The quality of music in the Catholic church is remarkably variable. The singing is shared between several local choirs, supplemented by visiting ones. The singing is generally of a high standard. This is a good arrangement as it allows plenty of preparation and takes off the pressure of having to produce something every Sunday. One of the features of the Swedish liturgy is the widespread use of traditional Gregorian tunes, but set to Swedish. Music written for Latin texts can be used for Swedish translations with little adaptation required, which is not the case with English. However, the sound of the language is very different, with more consonants, mixed vowels and some back-of-palate sounds specific to the language. During the Easter Triduum, much of the liturgy was in Swedish sung to the Gregorian tunes. There is a bit of a fashion to sing in English, which probably should not be happening in the context of a Catholic liturgy, but works by the earlier composers such as Tallis are ...

New improved translation notwithstanding, the use of English in the Catholic liturgy remains problematical. The English language is one of the battlefields on which the English speaking world's class war, racism, and regional prejudice is fought out. As soon as anyone opens their mouth and says a few words in English, they are pigeonholed. An Oxbridge accent is perceived as "too posh". People with some regional or colonial accents are perceived as stupid and poorly educated. This is precisely what is not wanted in the liturgy. It is at best a distraction and can be destructive. Even stranger is the widespread use in non-English speaking countries, of English in the liturgy. The idea has grown up that English has become a universal common language, replacing Latin. Often the priest's English is heavily accented, whilst the readers have strange accents from rural areas of the USA, incomprehensible to anyone not from that locality. A further issue relates to the mu...