Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Perverse or what?

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 meeting parishioners half-way. But no.

Yet we have in the parish, four Masses on a Sunday in the vernacular (actually the mother tongue of only a minority of the parishioners), as well as regular masses in Polish, Croatian, Spanish, Chaldean, Hungarian, Slovenian and English. Everything, in fact, but Latin. Having Mass celebrated in all these different languages divides the parish into lots of separate groups who rarely get to meet each other. The English Mass is dire because the celebrants and readers are struggling with the language, a problem aggravated by the new ICEL translation. The vernacular liturgies are not very good either because there is little decent music for the language - there is no musical setting for the Creed and there is an over-reliance on depressing Protestant hymns. Matters are made worse because the parish musicians engage in a sort of acoustic terrorism and nobody has the gumption to stop them. It is all very depressing.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

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.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

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...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer