AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Those photographs of the two popes remind me of this 1950s Persil advert.

Look how trim these girls look - this picture was taken at Blackpool one summer Saturday in 1970. You would be hard put to find youngsters looking as sleek as this nowadays, thanks to sugar-loaded soft drinks and junk food.

This is the standard 88 seat intermediate IEP vehicle. As I predicted, the seats will be crammed in, and mostly in the unidirectional arrangement. A Swedish survey showed is preferred only by about 30% of passengers. Many of the so-called window seats will not be window seats, including those in the facing bays, which are perfectly placed with a solid panel directly in people's line of vision. That adds up to an unsatisfactory travel experience for a lot of people. There is only one toilet for all this crowd. Note too, the shortage of luggage space - by the exit, where people will not be able to supervise it. Aren't we constantly being reminded to keep our luggage with us at all times? There was a notorious case when a thief who exploited the possibilities discovered that the suitcase he had stolen contained an IRA bomb. Only a few months ago, a couple of men were convicted of theft of passengers' luggage. Yet the problem is still not addressed, and this on trains which cou...

The government has been accused of attempting to suppress the drawbacks of its flagship transport project after previously unseen research revealed cities across the UK could lose up to £220m each as a result of HS2. The KPMG study, commissioned by the government, predicted more than 50 areas would be worse off as a result of the high-speed rail project – including Bristol, Cambridge and Aberdeen. Read article in The Guardian.

The Catholic church in Sweden existed in the shadows for over 400 years following the reformation. The broadcasting of a Catholic confirmation service last Sunday came as welcome evidence of its present acceptance in what has the reputation of being the most secularised country in Europe. Unfortunately, the event was not exploited as it could and should have been, to present the church's wares in the most attractive way. In fact, if one listened only to the sound, the service was hardly recognisable as Catholic. Latin, the sign and instrument of the unity of the Latin rite Catholic church, was absent. I waited for something, but in vain. Not even the familiar Missa de Angelis was sung. One might have at least expected that somewhere in the service, the congregation would have got the opportunity to sing the famous hymn to the Holy Spirit, Veni Creator Spiritus (upper), and that the choir would have performed the beautiful sequence for Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus (lowe...

At last, an increasing number of politicians and commentators are coming out against HS2, essentially for the reasons which have been repeatedly stated in this blog. The NIMBY lobby as at last lost its dominance in the debate to those who are arguing the real economic case against the scheme. It is not that the country cannot afford it. The scheme is just a bad way of spending the pot of money. Some of the opposition is from the roads lobby, which wants a share of the cake. The sad thing is that nobody has even now come up with costings for what is really needed to increase the capacity of the railway infrastructure, which would be a combination of upgrades of existing routes and the construction of some new conventional-speed routes, essentially on the alignment of HS2, which at the southern end is mostly on the former Great Central route, but with a lot of expensive straightening-out to cater for the higher speeds. With a conventional speed railway, this new construction becomes larg...

Women wearing the hijab in Sweden report that they are often treated abusively in public places. In response, some non-Muslims have taken to wearing the hijab as a gesture of solidarity. Abusing people for any reason is wrong and unacceptable. However, Muslims are world-leaders when it comes to abusing other people, since the principle of intolerance is built-in to the Koran and Hadith. Good Muslims are required to kill the unbelievers, and some of them have always interpreted these texts literally. Thus people who identify themselves very visibly as Muslims should not be surprised when other people react badly towards them. It is not right but it is understandable and explicable. There is a strong component of racism here because most Muslims have dark skins, but Islam is an ideology not a race, and that ideology is, in principle, fascistic. This makes it ironic that it is those on the liberal left who are promoting this solidarity. The same people are criticising Russia for its...

Treasury officials are privately warning that the cash cost of the controversial High Speed 2 rail line will hit £73bn. FT article

The burning of churches in Egypt this week needs to be seen in the broader historical context. This sort of thing has been going on for 1400 years. It looks as if, in the next few decades, the confrontation between Islam and the rest of the world will reach a level of hostility that will make people wish for the peaceful days when Nazism and Communism were the main disturbing ideologies and events like the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia and the Soviet Gulags were nothing more than a slightly over-the-top exception to a relatively peaceful state of affairs. We need to wake up. Things look as if they are going to get an order of magnitude worse. It also looks as if the only place in the Middle East where Christians can be secure in the foreseeable future is Israel.

Statistics collated by the Latin Mass Society show unambiguously how the collapse of the Catholic Church in England began in 1965 and that the decline has continued steadily ever since. This will accelerate as priests now in their fifties and sixties retire and there are no younger men to replace them. An increasing number of parishes will now be without priests, a state of affairs that is unsustainable and will ultimately lead to a wave of closures. Of course there are wider social factors behind this phenomenon but the liturgical and other changes that followed the Second Vatican Council must be a major cause. In my own experience of three parishes where I was a regular Mass attender, the exodus began not with the introduction of the Novus Ordo Mass but with the replacement of a Novus Ordo Latin liturgy with Gregorian chant by an English liturgy with hymns. At least one-third of parishioners would depart immediately, followed by a steady trickle after that. Some ...

Church Militant protagonist Michael Voris has been taken to task by Catholic writer David Armstrong for being sloppy about the background to the practice of receiving communion in the hand whilst standing. Armstrong points out that in the Orthodox rites communion is normally received whilst standing, whilst the practice of receiving communion in the hand can be traced by to the times of the early church fathers. Voris can be irritatingly sloppy at times but is not usually wrong in principle. We are talking about signification here. Customs and gestures acquire meanings. Voris understands this. The view is well supported by semiotic theory and contemporary understandings in cognitive psychology. He may or may not know this theory but he seems to have a sound overall grasp. Eastern (Orthodox) Rite churches receive do indeed receive communion whilst standing, but it is distributed in both kinds, using leavened bread, with the priest using a spoon, and it is received, of necessi...

Defenders of the type of music that was performed at World Youth Day argue that we are in the modern times and need to be contemporary. "Contemporary" is a term so vague as to be meaningless. However - we are no longer in the modern time. The presentation of WYD was as dated as a Gary Glitter song or a computer running DOS. We are in the Post Modern time, and have been for the past thirty years. Post Modernism itself arose out of the ruins of Modernism, whose theoretical basis was dismantled in the 1960s by anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. In the past two decades we have had huge advances in understanding in linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Building on this, philosophers such as Catherine Pickstock have demonstrated the unwisdom of tampering with the liturgy, and this is confirmed by empirical observation of the contemporary success of the Orthodox church, spectacularly in Russia. Culture needs fixed points and the liturgy is o...

The dreadfulness of the World Youth Day music has been widely commented on in conservative Catholic circles. Latin, and the modal Gregorian chant music that go with those texts, are both a sign of the unity of the Catholic church and a means by which that Catholicity are maintained. They also provide a direct link to the Jewish antecedents of Catholicism. Protestant metrical hymns were consciously composed IN OPPOSITION to the music of the Catholic church and has no rightful place in the Mass. There is a need for firm guidance on this matter. If people want to sing it, they should be given the opportunity in some kind of extra-liturgical non-denominational Songs of Praise type event. A few look enviously at the Orthodox churches which seem to have escaped this damaging nonsense, which has been going on now for forty years. That is understandable but to join the Orthodox camp would be illogical, when the Orthodox churches have long abandoned one of the markers of Catholic univ...

Speaking of the Brazilian church’s failure to keep its flock from straying to evangelical churches, challenging the region’s bishops to be closer to their people to understand their problems and offer them credible solutions, Pope Francis said this... “ At times we lose people because they don’t understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people... without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery. ” Read more in the Washington Times. I would argue that Pope Francis is right in his diagnosis and that it is actually a consequence of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council - possibly based on a misinterpretation of the Council documents - that people are straying. If you compare the Tridentine Mass with the Novus Ordo Mass as usually celebrated, it both cut-down and more wordy, especially when it is in ...

The new Thameslink trains from Siemens look like a near-copy of the old and unloved class 319 Thameslink train from BREL, apart from the even uglier front end and the lower bodyside curvature which will reduce the width at floor level. The doors and windows appear to be in exactly the same place. Why on earth didn't they just order some more class 377 units from Bombardier and avoid the row over the loss of jobs at Derby? How much did it cost in consultancy to develop this specification?

I have had some discussions with a priest recently on this subject. It has to be admitted that the Tridentine (Extraordinary Form) Mass has attracted, amongst others, a dubious clientele from the extreme right wing of the political spectrum, and not a few anti-semites amongst them. He does not want to attract with people with these kinds of attitudes or be seen to be associated with them. There are two sides to this issue. From the congregation's perspective, there is little difference between a Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in accordance with the definitive Latin texts in the Missa Normativa , with the chants from the 1974 Graduale Romanum . Thus it is a post-Vatican Two liturgy and people who deny the validity of the Council and its liturgy will keep away. There are problems with it, as described here , but it is good enough - in fact, it is hard to see the differences unless you know what to look for. The lack of silence can be remedied by saying the prayers for the Offertory an...

I was in a discussion recently with someone who is vigorous in her dislike of the "Tridentine Mass". She has actually been a couple of times, but, it seems, reluctantly, because it was the only one available. The picture I get is this. She was not there from choice. This suggests, though I might be wrong, that she had not done any work in the way of preparation. For example, there is a raft of theological reasons why the priest and congregation face the same way, just as Orthodox Christians, Jews and Moslems always do and Catholics almost always did until about 1965. The most accessible explanation is given in "Turning Towards the Lord" by Fr Uwe Lang. The reasons for the other differences, and the extended silences, are explained in "The Spirit of the Liturgy" by Joseph Ratzinger. Neither of the books is long or difficult but she would have had a little bit of reading to do in order to appreciate what was going on, otherwise she would have been in the...

If you are Jewish you can go to a synagogue anywhere in the world and will be able to join in the prayers, in Hebrew. There is a good chance that you will even know the music and be able to join in the singing. The same used to be true, a fortiori , in the Catholic church, which once offered a worldwide "product" worldwide. The Latin language, and the music which went with the liturgy, was both a sign of the church's universality and an important means by which it was sustained. It had important practical benefits too: for example, a priest could celebrate the same Mass wherever he was. Then came the Second Vatican Council and its relaxation of the rules, stating that the vernacular may be used. The word "may" is permissive. In this instance, it would mean that Mass would normally be celebrated in Latin, as before, but that there were special situations where the local vernacular language might be appropriate. Had this been held to, there would have bee...

Why do people need this kind of candy? The explanation is starting to be put on a scientific basis as a result of recent work in brain physiology, neurology, linguistics and psychology. As the findings in these separate but related disciplines are put together, some sort of an explanation is beginning to emerge. It seems as if spoken language addresses the most recent (in evolutionary terms) structures of the brain. And the act of thinking is also largely non-verbal and takes place below the level of awareness. Movement and gestures affect the older and longer-established brain structures. The brain is now known to contain "mirror neurons". This work like this. Movements are activated by particular neurons in the person making the action and the same neurons in your own brain are activated if you are watching the person making the movement. This is due to the presence of these mirror neurons. This activity of the brain has been detected through the use of new techniques o...

Arguments about the liturgy roll on. In my view it was a key factor in the implosion of the Catholic church in the last four decades. The reforms drove some people away altogether, and their withdrawal from the active life of the church cannot just be explained away as inadequate faith. There is a limit to the amount of liturgical abuse that people can be expected to tolerate. As the years wore on, those teenagers who had, as often happens, left the church before the reforms, returned in later life to find a church they could no longer recognise and relate to. Thus an important source of (re)-recruitment was lost. A further issue was, and remains, the use of special liturgies for children and indeed the infantilisation of the mainstream liturgy, which made the church childish-seeming and something to grow out of. I believe that the problems with the liturgy can be understood by reference to the anthropological theories developed by Barthes and Levi-Strauss in the 1960s, as these ...

I wish people would stop criticising the Pope, mostly because of the way he dresses. It is not my cup of tea but it takes at least 100 years to make a judgement on a particular pope. Every one has a different task for a different time. This one needs to cleanse the augean stables that the Vatican has seemingly turned into. Benedict stressed the need for "reform of the reform" and the need to develop Catholic Social Teaching. After more 120 years of Catholic Social Teaching since Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum , it remains deficient. Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritate effectively takes the subject back to square one, whilst Summorum Pontificum and the accompanying letter point the way to necessary liturgical reform. The Benedictine liturgical reforms now need to be driven through, especially at the local level. The laity also need to address the deficiencies in Catholic Social Teaching, working from the ideas set out in Caritas in Veritate . Discussion of the ...

See FT article here . As the price estimate is revised upwards it looks as if the message is beginning to sink in.

This post a couple of weeks ago aroused a lot of animosity because the musicians concerned chose to identify themselves. Which of course they did not need to do - they could have kept a low profile, taken notice and put their house in order. Being in charge of church music is like driving a bus. A lot of people are listening or watching - it is a very public affair. Those in the driving seat can expect criticism if they do it wrong. It is common sense for them to keep their backsides covered by making themselves familiar with the regulations and sticking to them. The music in the Catholic church should follow the calendar or occasion, in accordance with Sacrosanctum Concilium and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal. The Mass is not a concert and it leaves little leeway for personal taste.  If the choir is up to the task, it might do Britten's Missa Brevis , which would not be particularly to my liking but since it follows the text, there would be no grounds for me to com...

The previous posting (Turn round, Father) stirred up a surprising amount of antagonism. It seems as if there is some kind of phobia against the celebration of Mass facing the direction that orthodox Christians have done for 1900 years, and in Latin. It might be called Traditional Latin Mass Phobia. It is even widespread amongst priests, who refuse even to talk about the subject. You have to wonder what they have been taught at seminary and even why they want to become priests at all. Yet it is a misapprehension to imagine that we have understood the Mass if we have understood the words that are being said. This seems to be linked with the idea that the Mass is a re-enactment of the Last Supper which seems to be linked to the celebration of Mass facing the people which makes the altar look like a communion table which is presumably Protestant. As a convert from Judaism I find this disturbing in the extreme, as the Catholic doctrine of Mass as Sacrifice is so clearly a continuation o...

God is of course omnipresent but Mass takes place within a cultural context. We bring all our past experiences to it, which connect to, and then associate with, what is happening in front of us. In both the contemporary and historical cultural contexts, this confrontational versus populi configuration has been about with power. Such a universal association cannot be simply brushed away. The celebration of Mass facing the people has nothing to do with the Novus Ordo as such. It began as a 60s fashion based on an erroneous understanding of the architecture of some ancient churches in Rome. The effect is that many priests behave like actors, or worse - haughty and arrogant. When the priest celebrates Mass in the same direction as the congregation, it is clear that the priest is both servant and leader. When the priest celebrates Mass with his face towards the people, he looks like some kind of chief or ruler. Or perhaps a shopkeeper or petty official. We pick this up unconscious...

BBC programme with Melvyn Bragg

This was the Introit for last Sunday, the 11th of the year. The translation is Hearken, O Lord, unto my voice which has called out to you; deign to be my help, forsake me not, do not despise me, O God my Saviour. Ps. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? We did not get to hear it at my local church. Instead, Mass kicked off with a blast on the organ that would have been right for the start of a circus, followed by a version of " Morning has broken ", the children's hymn that was recorded by Cat Stevens in the 1970s. The rest of the liturgy was pretty dire as well. I mentioned this to some friends over coffee afterwards. They couldn't see the point I was trying to make. Their response, and it is a widespread view, is that Protestant hymns are a good thing to have in the Catholic Mass because we should be ecumenical in our choice of music. The problem with this is that the texts might not even be in accordance with Catholic doctrine, but even...

One of the reasons why I am so keen to see the wider use of the traditional forms of Catholic worship is that it draws in the atheists by addressing them at that level of cognition which cannot be answered by the intellect. I wish our theologians were better informed on recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology - they would then realise that the 1960s thinking that still seems to dominate in intellectual circles of the Catholic church has run its course. The architecture and liturgy that was leading-edge in the 1970s can have little appeal to the generation born in the 1990s. Why can we not learn from our Russian Orthodox brothers whose Church has sprung so vigorously back to life in the past decade, out of next to nothing, on the basis of traditional forms of worship? It is depressing to compare the start of this liturgy with that in my local parish. Mass begins with a fanfare blasted out by the organist, which would be exactly right to herald the entrance of the ...

I had a discussion with a friend the other day about the benefits of using Latin more widely in the Catholic liturgy. His response was that we should concentrate on getting a better Swedish liturgy and then to walk off. Of course one does not preclude the other, but it is over forty years since the vernacular was introduced into the Catholic liturgy and one would have thought that things would have settled down to the point that it would no longer be a contested question. Unfortunately, things never have settled down. The situation here in Sweden is in many ways better than in Britain, but it is far from satisfactory. In Britain, the vernacular was hampered by a banal translation that took liberties with the text. In due course the Ordinary was set to mostly banal music by composers with little talent, but more often, the hymn sandwich came be standard practice: hymns either newly written or of Protestant origin, interspersed with the Ordinary of the Mass spoken by the congregation...

The English composer William Byrd was a Catholic in Recusant times, when they were persecuted for their faith. The music he wrote for the underground Catholic community features in this edition of the BBC Early Music Show . The English Reformation was a slow process on the ground, as many priests did their best to maintain the practices of Catholic worship despite the changes that were going on all round. This was largely a story of betrayal by the Catholic bishops and clergy - the faithful bishops were in a minority and only St John Fisher paid the death penalty. There was, however, no firm break until Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570 and then the serious persecutions began. Known as the Penal times, the persecution of English Catholics did not come to an end until the 1680s, and the last legal disabilities were not removed until the nineteenth century. For the man in the pew, the transition time must have been a difficult one to negotiate, as it became necessary...

Latin is the official language of the church. This was affirmed by the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The only Masses round here that are celebrated in Latin, however, are those in the Usus Antiquior ("Extraordinary Form", I don't like to use the term as it is a mis-translation and suggests something weird). These are poorly attended because neither is at a convenient time and one of them is a twenty minute journey out of town.  Thus the number of people who go to them is no indication of the demand. One of them got the chop a few weeks ago as the curate had to go away to care for a sick parent. The other one will stop for several weeks because the priest who normally says it is taking an extended break. The alternative priest who was asked to say it has flatly refused. Worse still, he refused to say it in Latin in the Novus Ordo form, which should have presented no difficulties for him. That would have been a reasonable and acceptable compromise and way of me...

The choir's period at St Peter's, Hove, came to an end when the parish priest finally ditched the Latin Mass in 1986. We all determined to continue and set ourselves up as the SPEM choir, which stood for St Peter's outside the walls. Graham who ran the choir had someone to design a badge (above), though letters on a shield are bad heraldry. There were ties for the men, whilst the women had purple gowns. Our services were much appreciated by the Latin Mass Society and we sang at their events several times a year, with visits to London, Arundel, Portsmouth, St Leonards and West Grinstead, amongst other places. The bishop was niggardly in his consent, given under the 1971 Indult which permitted the celebration of Mass in the 1962 Tridentine Rite, and one has to ask why? The Masses were generally at inconvenient times and at places that were not easy to reach, and consequently they were not well attended. It was only a few determined souls that made their way to these events...

INTROIT • Cibávit eos ex ádipe fruménti, allelúja (Solesmes) from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo . Yesterday we had a Blessed Sacrament procession through the city, led by the Bishop. As far as I know, it was the first for 75 years. It is a wonderful thing to be able to do this in a country where for centuries it was forbidden to be a Catholic, and at a time when people all over the world are suffering for their Christian faith. For reasons which are particular to Sweden, the Catholic church has not suffered the catastrophic collapse which has led to the implosion which has been experienced throughout most of the western world. So it seems churlish to complain about the liturgy, but since the near- collapse of the church in so many countries today began with the collapse of the liturgy forty years ago, if one is concerned about the future of the church one should be aware of what is happening in the liturgy. If things continue on their current path, the present happy situat...

Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi, which was always traditionally on a Thursday, reflecting the fact that the Eucharist was instituted on Holy Thursday. Sadly, we shall not be celebrating the feast today as it has been shifted to the Sunday. That breaks loses the connection. It is also a pity to lose these weekday feasts and hopefully it will one day be shifted back to its proper day. Here are the Introit, Sequence and Communion for the Feast, together with the beautiful Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd. We are having a special Mass and procession on Sunday. That is an excellent thing. It would be an even better thing if this, the correct music for the feast day, were sung then, and that it was not diluted by music which really did not belong to the feast day or to the Catholic liturgy at all. One lives in hope. The interview below by Fr Guy Nicholls of the London Oratory puts this clearly.

Västlänken is a 20 billion kronor project designed to join the railway lines running north and south of the city, where all routes currently terminate at the Central station. It is mostly in tunnel and coloured green on the map. It goes round three sides of a square, though it is claimed that due to easier tunneling conditions it would be less expensive than a direct link. It will not make for fast through-journey times. Nor does not look like the most cost-effective solution to the problem of saving people travelling from north to south the trouble of having to change at the Central station (red on the map). One aim of the route is to bring rail services into the western side of the city centre with a new station at Haga, but connections to this part of the city centre could be improved at a fraction of the cost, and again, much more quickly, by extending the existing tramway, which now runs through the city centre, to run along the inner ring road direct to the Central station. The p...

  Saying the Rosary is a good way to get to sleep. In fact, I normally fall asleep when trying to say the Rosary. I rarely get past the first decade. There is something in favour of this if you are trying to sleep. It is safer than tablets, and if it did not work you will have prayed the Rosary, so you win either way, but it is not the point of the prayer. I have now found a solution to the problem. On Ascension Day I went with a group to Skänninge and after Mass in the church there, we walked to Vadstena, about 12 miles away. Ending at the shrine of St Birgitta, this was a pilgrimage organised by Kardinal Dante-Sällskapet , which was set up by priests from the Institute of Christ the King (IKC) to promote the Tridentine Mass in Sweden; it has the support of the Bishop. Fader Marcus Künkell led the pilgrimage, and on the way, we prayed all fifty decades of the Rosary. So there was no falling asleep even though it was after lunch. The conclusion is to say the prayer whilst walkin...

I have been complaining lately about the scarcity of Catholic music in the Catholic church locally. I was accused of being small minded and that anyway there was no alternative. Parry's "I was glad" is to be sung soon at a forthcoming event. This was written for the Coronation of King George V in 1911. It radiates British imperialist bombast in the highest degree. There is a softer setting by Purcell but that was written for the Coronation of King William III in 1695, so it too is hardly suitable for a Catholic liturgy. "I was glad" is the psalm Laetatus sum . A search on YouTube returned three thousand hits, including lovely settings by Haydn, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Zelenka, Gorczycki, Michael Haydn, Alessandro Scarlatti, Willaert, to name just a few of the better known composers. There is also, of course, a Gregorian chant setting of the psalm. No alternative to the Parry? Hardly. But why exactly are we ignoring the treasure in our attic? Have we forgotten...

This was originally a response to a posting on Fr Blake's blog. Eamon Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars", dealing with the sixteenth century Reformers in England, has a resonance with events within the Catholic church in the 1980s. Following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, there was little change in the sound of Catholic liturgy. Organisations such as the Association for Latin Liturgy were established to encourage the continuing use of Latin within the Novus Ordo Mass. During the mid-1980s, however, the use of Latin dwindled, mostly on the initiative of a new generation of priests. This was largely against the wishes of the laity, since the abolition of Latin in the liturgy would normally result in the immediate loss of about one-third of the congregation, who would then migrate to neighbouring parishes. The process was then repeated when these neighbouring parishes in turn lost their Latin liturgy with the arrival of a new incumbent. Eventually t...

The National Audit Office has issued this report . "Doubts" is code for total demolition of the economic case for the project.

Punk Girl #1 , a photo by Elmar Eye on Flickr. In his sermon last Sunday, a local priest put his finger on what must be an important factor in the decline of the Catholic church in Europe. He said that the Second Vatican Council addressed the modern world just as it was moving into the era of Post Modernism. Post Modernism grew out of, amongst other things, the understanding of signs and symbols, through the work of people such as Levi Strauss and Sperber during the 1960s. The first fruits of this were to be seen in fashion and music, in the Punk movement, which was about the recycling and re-use of signs. It was quickly picked up by, amongst others, the American architect Robert Venturi who wrote an influential book, best known under its revised title "Learning from Las Vegas", published in 1977. This knocked the supports away from the architectural movement known as Modernism, which had come to prominence just before World War 2 and dominated architectural theory unt...

The purpose of a church choir is to sing the music of the church to which it is attached. When people join they expect to sing that music - not, for instance, Irish folk songs. The limitations are part of the deal. If they want to sing Irish folk songs as well then they can join, or set up, another choir that specialises in that. If you join an Anglican church choir you can expect to spend most of your time singing the characteristic Anglican repertoire - Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Purcell, Blow, S S Wesley, Goss, Walmisley, Stainer, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Howells and probably something unpleasant and difficult to sing, by the current resident organist who fancies himself as another Bach. The main services being Matins and Evensong, an Anglican chorister will have to master the technique of Anglican chant. Put that all together in a large vaulted stone building with timber choir stalls and an organ with a solid diapason and you have the authentic Anglican sound which you can hear at a c...

Is there such a thing as Catholic music? The question arose because I argued that pieces from Bach's St Matthew's Passion, fine though they were, had no place in the Catholic liturgy. Did this mean that music written by non-Catholics should be excluded? I was accused of being narrow-minded for making such a suggestion. Surely music used in the Catholic liturgy should be music that was written for the purpose? The Catholic liturgy is not a concert, nor is it a performance. First and foremost, it is prayer. It is not as if there is a shortage of suitable music. In the case of the Good Friday liturgy, for which the St Matthew's Passion piece was suggested, there are, for instance, the well-know Allegri's Miserere and the recent composition by MacMillan. Another version by Lotti Adoremus te Christe by Palestrina Another version by Monteverdi Crux Fidelis by King John of Portugal There is wonderful but rarely heard music written for the purpose which is an in...

I heard an interesting sermon this morning. The point made was that "the Second Vatican Council set out to address the problems of Modernism and the rationality that characterised it, but that Modernism itself was soon to be supplanted by Post-Modernism, which is characterised by disorder and chaos, if anything at all." This could explain a great deal. The liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council, at their best, led to a liturgy of rationalism. If this is the case, then it is not surprising that the only real growth point within the contemporary Catholic church in Europe is within the Traditionalist movement, for the traditional Catholic liturgy alone is able to reach the dark corners of the human psyche that lurk beneath the surface of rationality. It was the acknowledgement of the existence of these dark corners that brought about the collapse of Modernism and led to the birth of Post Modernism. There is a fine irony in the notion that traditional Cat...

I have had a reply to a Facebook discussion, arguing that setting Gregorian chant in modern notation will encourage congregations to sing it. I don't know where this idea has come from that people can sing Gregorian chant more easily from modern notation which they are used to. I have looked to see if there is any research on the subject and have found none. Most people of course cannot read music at all and even those that can, cannot sing from a score but have to learn the tune and use the score just as an aid-memoire - which is what I and the majority of choir members do. I cannot even recognise music that I have sung for 40 years when it is set in modern notation. If people are not used to reading from musical scores they get used to Gregorian notation more easily - I could not read music at all and began with the Gregorian notation and then MOVED ON TO modern notation when it was required. Gregorian notation is best for beginners, and for those that are used to modern notat...

At our choir in Hove we used to sing an old hymn, with a dreary tune and well over-the-top words by the Ultramontane Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster, called " Full in the panting heart of Rome ". It must be the ultimate in Catholic kitsch music. " Panting hearts ", as we called it, became a standing joke, but then it was probably done as a joke in the first place. I suspect that the original Catholic triumphalist text was tongue-in-cheek, as the music came from the Calvinist Scottish psalter. We would laugh about it in the pub afterwards. We did not give up singing just because we did not like the music now and again. However, I gave up on the current choir a couple of weeks ago, and that was for the reason that the choir director had got the idea into his head that I was a bass singer, and there was nothing that I could say that would change his mind. It simply does not do to push singers into music that is physically difficult ...

The Railway Gazette reports that The first of 15 Vossloh UKLight diesel-electric locomotives for freight and charter train operator Direct Rail Services is now under construction at the Vossloh España plant near Valencia in Spain. DRS expects the first locomotive to be sent to the Velim test circuit in the Czech Republic for trial running in September, and the second to arrive at DRS’s Crewe depot by the end of October to start the UK approvals process. Designated Class 68, the UKLight is based on the EuroLight freight and passenger locomotive family. Intended for both freight and passenger operation, the 21·5 tonne axleload Bo-Bo will have a 2 800 kW Caterpillar C175 engine and AC traction equipment supplied by ABB. Differences from the EuroLight design include a smaller-profile to suit Britain's more restricted loading gauge, a higher top speed of 160 km/h rather than the 140 km/h and an increase in fuel tank capacity from 4 000 litres to 5 000 litres. The Class 68’s mixed-tra...

The Pilgrimage to Vadstena , a photo by Elmar Eye on Flickr. The Bishop of Stockholm, a Carmelite, came to Göteborg today and gave a talk about how Pope John Paul II had been influenced by Carmelite spirituality. He referred in particular to St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, St Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), and the spiritual significance and value of the Dark Night of the Soul. He did things the right way too - with a celebration of Mass and a ten minute sermon, and a 50 minute lecture after the Mass. We also had the opportunity for a buffet supper afterwards which was an enjoyable social occasion.

RT2240 , originally uploaded by jon jon be good . Some things can not be improved. One example is the RT bus. Introduced in London in 1939, and the standard London bus after the war, the type remained in service until 1979. A perfect marriage of form and function, there is nothing about it that could be added or taken away which would make it any better. It looks good from every angle. Faultless detailing and clean lines are enhanced by the simple livery and the LONDON TRANSPORT logotype on the side, in gold letters in the special Johnston typeface. The same can be said of the Tridentine Mass. In comparison, the Novus Ordo Mass is like one of those clumsy rear-engine jobs which weighs over half as much again, but without a corresponding increase in the number of seats, and with a fuel consumption to match its bloated weight.

fUnnerstal-preview , a photo by Nerammah on Flickr. Mass this morning looked more or less like this. Thanks to Pope Benedict and his document Summorum Pontificum , and thanks to our parish priest who took the initiative, we can, and do, have an Extraordinary Form Mass every Sunday, unfortunately at 8.00 am, which is hard when the mornings are dark and cold, and a difficult time for working people with families. There were about a couple of dozen people in the church, some of them regular weekday attenders. Unfortunately too, there was no opportunity for coffee afterwards so everyone just went straight home without talking to each other. The Mass was accompanied by discreet organ playing, though looking around at who was present, it could with preparation have been sung instead of said. There is a different atmosphere in the church. The action is simple and uncluttered. The sense of flow is smooth and quiet There is a stronger sense of presence. One is not straining to hear words ...