AN OUTSIDE VIEW

The idea has taken hold that because English is amongst the world's best known languages, it is suitable for use for Masses celebrated for students in countries which are not English speaking. The students will indeed probably all know English. Their courses may even be taught in English. With the English language seemingly on the way to taking the place that Latin occupied as a universal language from Roman times until well into the nineteenth century, this seems like an attractive idea. There are, however, difficulties with this assumption. Latin as a formal language, and particularly ecclesiastical Latin, was largely settled by the sixth century. What people spoke as vernacular languages would have been the dialects of Latin that would eventually evolve into, amongst others, Spanish, Italian and French. English, by contrast, remains a living language. It is constantly changing. The 1970 translation has already been replaced with a new one, which is truer to the Latin, but in t...

The principal motivation for the suggested relaxation of rules made at the recent Synod of Bishops was that it would arrest the decline in numbers by making the church more welcoming to homosexuals and people living in irregular relationships. In my experience at parishes in the south of England, declines in attendance during the 1970s and 1980s happened suddenly when new parish priests took over. It happened within a matter of weeks of their arrival. In each case the mass exodus was precipitated by the introduction of the vernacular liturgy. At first, people would move to adjacent parishes where Latin and Gregorian chant was still in use, but as these in turn were hit, there were fewer and fewer places to flee to. The situation eventually arose where for many people, attendance at a Mass where the liturgy was not dreadful could mean a ninety minute journey in each direction on sparse public transport. The experience of a family I know is perhaps typical. Dino, now in his 70s, is o...

What struck me about the synod of bishops which has just closed was its irrelevance. The teaching of the Catholic Church on sexual matters is clear - no sex outside marriage. That is not anti-gay or anti-anybody. We all find it difficult to keep to the rules. That is what the confessional is for, and the end of the matter. The real concern should be that families are failing, and that is what the bishops ought to have been talking about. There all sorts of pressures on the family - war and instability, economic insecurity, poverty, migration, housing priced out of people's reach, etc. For example, in most developed countries in Europe, one person's wages are often not sufficient to pay for the accommodation for a family. Wages are often dependent on employment opportunities which can vanish overnight. My former parish priest used to complain about the lack of large families, but the price of a house large enough for a large family was well out of reach of most people in tha...

This version of Purcell's Indian Queen by Peter Sellers is an example of the pernicious trend to re-work old material to present a left-wing political message. In this case, it is the dreadfulness of the Spanish and Portuguese occupation of America in the sixteenth century. Now, if we apply contemporary standards of what constitutes bad behaviour, it was indeed dreadful. The mistake is to do that. By their lights, they were mostly doing what they thought was right. People in the future will come back and judge us in a similar way for doing dreadful things that, judged by contemporary standards, we consider are right and good. Evil acts are normally justified by some argument or other to make us imagine that we are doing nothing wrong. The problem is that all this detracts from the work itself, which has the singers in contemporary military uniforms and is accompanied by sound effects of contemporary military actions, with the noise of bombs going off in the background. That is, ...

Decent Muslims are only just waking up to the unpleasantness of their religion, so they think it has been hijacked . Every Muslim is associated with the actions of its extremists, first of all because the mud sticks, but secondly, those extremists are modelling themselves on the words of the Koran and the actions of Mohammed, which all Muslims venerate. They are not getting their ideas from anywhere other than those sources. We do not get Zoroastrian terrorists or Methodist terrorists. If good Muslims do not distance themselves from the Koran and Mohammed, then they are in a position of moral ambiguity. The only honest thing to do is to cut themselves loose from it. That is obviously not going to be an easy thing for them to do as it will also involve cutting themselves away from family and community ties. One might hope that others in the family and community will follow the trailblazers.