Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

The Journey East #3

The local situation
The Catholic church in my part of the world is apparently in quite good shape. However, the liturgy is resolutely Lutheran in style and content. Far from the influence of Rome, it has become so thoroughly Lutheranised that Catholic services are almost indistinguishable from those of Svenska Kyrkan; any traditional Catholic music which happens to make its way into a Catholic Mass does so through a smörgåsbord approach to liturgy which draws primarily on Lutheran and English Anglican and Nonconformist sources. Sometimes, the result is hilarious, as when Britain’s favourite funeral hymn, “Abide with me”, was used a couple of years ago at an ordination!

I do not agree with the view of some Catholic traditionalists, that the Novus Ordo Mass is not valid. My objection is to the way it is almost invariably celebrated, which contravenes the guidelines in Sacrosanctum Concilium and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal to the point of abuse. Thus, in practice, if I am not to end up getting angry and in no condition to receive communion, I have to find a Mass in the Extraordinary Form. At my local parish it is squeezed in on a Saturday evening between a Spanish Mass and a Polish one, squeezed being the operative word when the Spanish one runs over time and the Poles are wandering in during the distribution of communion, so that one has to climb over them to get back to ones place. It is also celebrated on Sundays at a religous house out of town at 12 noon, not a convenient time for a lot of people, and at a cost of 82kr, about €8.5, for the return journey.

But it is not celebrated consistently or reliably. There are only the two priests who are willing to say it; the others are firmly opposed. So it stops when the priests are on holiday or sick, and in practice that means much of the summer.

In that situation it is tempting to look to the east for a consistently worthy form of worship. With the large influx of Christians from Orthodox countries, we are spoilt for choice.

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...