Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

It's the Sacrament that really matters

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-Council documents are explicit that Gregorian Chant and Latin should continue to take pride of place. It is stated that the Mass may be said in the vernacular, which implied that this would be an exception, not a norm.

The model for the liturgy is Graduale Romanum, with a forward by the much-maligned Cardinal Bugnini. The calendar and readings have changed, but most of the Propers in the old Liber Usualis are still there, as are the settings of the Ordinary. If this had become the new norm, there would have been little to complain about.

Something happened. Priests turned their backs on the Lord and faced their congregations. We got, in English, a rotten translation. The musical settings that went with it were of about the same musical standard as TV advertising jingles. The Propers were omitted and replaced by hymns - at best, the traditional fare of the protestant churches, but with the addition of contemporary banalities - poor quality 1970s pop or pseudo-folk. The Gradual was replaced by the Responsorial Psalm, with the response "rhubarb! rhubarb! rhubarb!" Then came communion in the hand, received standing, then came communion under both kinds, then came a proliferation of eucharistic ministers, then came girls as altar servers, which deterred the boys. Then, to make sense of all these variations, parishes set up liturgy committees to decide what to do, when everything was already set out in the books.

Has this really anything to do with Vatican Two? And what is the way back? The ongoing negotiations with SSPX are relevant. It is unlikely that SSPX and the Tridentine Mass would have gathered the support they presently enjoy if the post Vatican Two reforms had followed what was clearly intended ie the liturgy to adhere to Graduale Romanum, the use of the vernacular to be an occasional thing and other practices to remain unchanged. It looks as if SSPX is going to split, with a rump which will suffer the fate of all previous rumps in the history of the church, and a group which will rejoin the main body of the church, and will, one must hope, undo the damage gradually.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...