I much enjoy Scoop’s robust comments here, and fear they tend to get lost on those, perhaps the majority, who do not frequent the comments section. So let me engage with this comment he made on my post on ‘Flame 2017‘:
I have no earthly idea about all the conclusions you are drawing only that it is easy to tell a Rembrandt from a Pollock and a gourmet meal from a happy meal at McDonalds. As to what results from the changes in regards to the salvation of souls will only be known in the next world. But the impoverishment of the faith has undergone the same impoverishment of our tastes in music, art and cuisine and thereby we have lost perhaps the best means of communication of the spiritual life that ever existed. Sadly, most people these days have never seen or witnessed what they have lost. So you won’t see folks clamoring for that which they don’t know . . . just like I wouldn’t ask a restaurant owner to put an item on the menu if I had never tasted it. You seem to think that once you make a turn there is no way to correct course. The experiment has largely failed and Benedict XVI wanted us to integrate the older Rite into the New Rite . . . but he ran into resistance from bishops who apparently have no taste for doing so and folks like yourself who rather than trying to make things better are satisfied where things are clearly not working out as intended. And if these radical changes are working out as intended, then what does that say about the intentions themselves?
I am not sure the ‘Rembrandt/Pollock’ juxtaposition helps, as there are many people who like both; the notion that one could only like one form of art seems a trifle rigid. I love Bach, but I also like Johnny Cash, they serve different functions for me, and the notion that only one of them is’real’ art seems to me a false one.
As Scoop acknowledges in another comment, the Church once banned polyphony; how short-sighted that was. Some of the most soaringly beautiful music ever written was written to accompany the Mass. The Scoops of the day didn’t like or understand it – Gregorian Chant was their tradition and they didn’t see any need to change. Am I in danger of making the same mistake in my own (negative) attitude to ‘worship music’? I think not, but then those who opposed polyphony thought they were right too. No doubt those used to the beauty of the Greek Mass found the Latin version a little leaden, but now there are those who seem to think one form of the Latin mass is the only possible one. The Catholic tradition is richer and broader than one, relatively late, for of the Mass in a language better suited to warfare and engineering than theology. Having once attended a Mass in Aramaic, I’d be happy to say it was the most sublime Mass I have ever been to, and Jesus would have understood it more readily than Tridentine Latin; does that mean pone os superior to the other, or simply that we can have both>
When Scoop writes:
So diversity is the key word here for your money. Unity, which was the hallmark of the Christian message is now a type of relativist institution that offers to God the best that men have to offer as well as the schleppy stuff that we hear in most parishes?
He makes a judgement call no one is competent to make. Whose taste is so sublime that it can dictate what ‘the best that men have to offer’ consists of? So, the great guitarist cannot offer his best to God, except by becoming a great organist? Now, as it happens, I detest, abhor and loath organ music, but would not, on that account, say that it was not fit to offer to God. We each offer God what we can. We should all bear in mind the final verse of In the Bleak Midwinter:
What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.
Would anyone really say: ‘your heart is not of the calibre that God would appreciate, take it away’? No, so by what standard can any of us say that our own preferences are what God wants? Did we ask Him, and did I miss the memo back? God created mankind in great diversity, so it seems fair to assume that in so doing He was not wanting a uniformity – if that was His desire, He is omnipotent and He would have done that. We should not be looking to do it for Him.
On the one hand Scoop, objecting to any modern things in Church (perhaps we should get rid of electricity too, and tallow candles might be more traditional than modern wax one, oh, and whilst we’re at it, can we get rid of all those pews, a ghastly late addition to tradition? – and as for steeples on churches, don’t get me started, it was all so much better when we met in homes or catacombs), and on the other Bosco objecting to imagery and anything which offends his iconoclastic tendencies. In between, the lived reality of the Catholic Church which encompasses everything from the Tridentine Mass to the Folk Mass. What will survive is what men and women want – God made us to love Him and to serve Him – let no one say that there is only one approved way of so doing in a Church, or anywhere else. What God has made multi-coloured, let us not make monochrome. A Christianity which cannot embrace everything from high art to folk art would be a poorer one. After all, if someone brought up on the sublime beauty of Cranmer’s Prayer Book can adapt himself to the banalities of the current Roman Catholic Missal (a text of such lumpen prose that it must have been composed by a committee) then anything ought to be possible.
All Along the Watchtower 
Very well said. I think many people in the Church need to understand what you are saying. It is narrow-minded to think that any changes to music occurring after the invention of the organ are “modern” and “disrespectful”. The Church needs to understand, as you said so well, that God desires our hearts, not a particular type of music.
Music is a very powerful tool for reaching out to people. A large part of my own development in the Church came after my choir director invited me to play guitar at a mass. Once I felt that people in the Church respected what I liked, I was very open to what the rest of the Church liked. The Church has an abundance of beautiful music from ages past, but we cannot expect people to suddenly “fall in love” with past traditions if we reject outright what people value today. Again, well said.
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Your last sentence tells it all. We have gone from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to a service [not much different than a Protestant service and quite often referred to as a service these days] that seems written by a bureaucratic committee. And in the context of a lived experience for our youth while they are in the act of being formed in their faith, how is that eduacation working out for them or for you, or for the Church Universal for that matter?
The shift in the art and the music and architecture is not something that came from the people as a popular movement but it was thrust upon them by people who decided that this was what the people wanted. It was poor parroting of the secular popular art and music and as such it was second rate even though their ‘intentions’ were to entice and make the Mass more understandable for the modern youth. It is an equivatlent of saying that the people have not the capacity to learn to love beauty, or understand the concepts and ideas that are present in the Mass and therefore we have to dumb it down. Now if peasants did not go to Mass and expect to hear the bawdy tunes of the local pub or tavern in the past, I doubt that modern folk or rock music should be expected to be heard at Mass and surprise of surprise, they actually were instructed in things that they were not exposed to in their world; otherworldly music and art that seemed to create a representation of heaven itself. In the largest churches it drew the mind to God from the architecture, the art, the music and the form of the Rite. It was as if one had stepped out of the world and landed in a place where God Himself lived and breathed in a special way and was surrounded by angels and saints eager to hear our prayers and accept our sacrifices.
I truly find it rather demeaning that we have gotten to a place where we think people and especially our youth cannot understand such things or learn them. They can no longer read a text book like Our Quest for Faith . . . nor [after 50 years] can their parents. This is an obvious slight that is being paid to the laity and especially the youth. Are they really this stupid today and so uncultured that they cannot respond or come to understand anything without the aid of cheesy art, music and language? Once again, show me the fruit.
You especially, being an historian, know the importance of context and the value of knowing as much as you can about what came before a particular event that is presented. That is what we have lost; context. So if you expect to understand a book, a play or a movie set at a particular time in history you will not understand the experience except in a limited way if you remove it from the historical context. This is what we have robbed the Catholic people of for these last 50 years and if you want to keep giving them pablum and think the results might change I think you are mistaken. Now of course, your position might be that perhaps we haven’t dumbed it down enough for these folks. So you can always add copious amounts of sugar to the pablum and then maybe they will come to like it.
Bottom line; our kids take a hike after Confirmation and many never come back.
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But, again, your rose-tinted spectacles don’t match the version I get from life-long older Catholics here who grew up with TLM and the old system. You do seem in danger of taking a rose-tinted view of the past and saying we’ve gone to the dogs. But why if that past was as good as you maintain it was? This does not add up to me?
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It is you with your rose tinted glasses and a few of your old hippie friends who saw the liberalization of things quite to their liking.
How about a simple fact which I happen to know quite well. When Benedict Groeschel graduated from his High School class of 70 students, 4 became priests and 2 became nuns. In the last 50 years at OLPH in Camden, which has in the vicinity of 400 families, we produced 1 priest for who my wife works and he is as modernist as they come. Now I suppose that is progress.
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So, you are saying that this loyal and faithful traditional church was turned over by a few hippies?
How about a simple fact, when many of Fr Benedict’s generation got the chance to run, they ran; how may of those 4 priests and 2 nuns stayed with their vocations?
I fear you are positing a non-existent golden age with an unsatisfactory present. If that floats you boat, fine, but history it ain’t.
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Well when parishes used to have 2-3 priests per parish and today we have about 3 for every 4 parishes then something has gone south. Yes, I think I can rest on the reliability of that evidence and it happens to be the facts that history should record . . . not some ‘pie in the sky’ idealized notion of things are just getting better and better.
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I agree, but if you exaggerate where we really were before, you get to a distorted picture of where we are now. If you like facts, it is a fact that many priests and nuns left in the 60s – they were products of the pre-Vatican II Church; the same products did not resist the changes, so your version simply fails to match the facts.
You are telling us that this wonderful strong and catechised church simply turned over because of a few hippies?
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Saying they were the products of the pre-Vatican II Church does not carry any depth of thought with the problems with Modernism that the Church had been fighting for some time. In fact, Malcolm’s de Chardin was being read in relitious houses and seminaries although theHoly Office issued a monitum on his writings. For my money it is much of the new age stuff that we now see that was seeded during the 50’s that ended up making such a mess as soon as Vatican II unleashed them.
I didn’t blame it on a few hippies. I called your friends who seemed to think that a more worldly church was a good thing. As far as I can see the people in the pews were not the ones that had embraced modernism but a certain number of priests and bishops. Vatican II just unbridled the formerly banned theologians to spread their errors all over the place.
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So, you are pushing your perfect church back a bit further in time, but blaming on distinguished theologians who were a product of the pre-Vatican Church?
All these well-catechised people just went along with it because they were sheep?
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Does it have to be ‘perfect’ in order that it was better and much better catechized?
Yes, in the people formed in the pre-conciliar Church were familiar with a Church where from the Pope to the bisop and the priest they would hear the same teachings. So depending on their priest or bishop that is what they came to accept.
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Much of the time, as Francis pointed out, they heard very little. That was part of the problem. The pre VII Church had become lazy and complacent in many areas – which is why it was such an easy target for a determined group of reformers.
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It could be. But being ‘lazy’ was not the problem . . . complacent, yes. They had come to rely on the magisterium and their priests speaking with one voice. Now we have, as prophesised, bishop agains bishop, cardinal against cardinal. So if this is better, I’m a monkey’s uncle.
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Again, this is a very simplistic reading of Catholic history. It is as though you are ignoring the various debates with the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the Ultramontanes. If you can find a 100 year period in which there were no disputes within the Church, best of luck to you. You are idealising the mid twentieth century and then projecting back to a past that never was. In the NT itself we see disputes – it is what happens when something is alive. One can, of course, go for the fossilised option of Orthodoxy, but from St Paul onward, the Catholic Church has been marked by intellectual vigour and the disputes this brings.
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I haven’t projected back past the years preceding the Council . . . it is you who wants to keep speaking of a ‘perfect’ church. I am only saying that the Church functioned better in educating, producing saints, religious brothers and sisters and priests and they, at least to the common man, all agreed with one another. The great breakdown of the public dissention betweeen bishops and cardinals and thus priests was amplified by the creation of national conferences and such. It made certain bishops rather powerful regionally and some countries remained more faithful than others. Some were out on a limb like Germany and Northern Europe and none were severely corrected as they would have been in the past. It was a time of permissiveness and lack of direction. It was like a brood of children who were rarely if ever disciplined. It made a mess and it continues to make a mess. The laity is hurt by this more than any others. They get a new priest in most parishes in the US about every 5 years and they all seem to have their own version of what it means to be a good Catholic.
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Well, the last time I checked, Cranmer’s Prayer Book was used in a Protestant church, and still is occasionally. Same with some of those popular composers, Bach, Handel, and Wesley. Because something is popular doesn’t make it unholy, nor because something is unlovely, is it ungodly. Gregorian chant, used rarely in Lutheran services, moves me deeply, but most don’t care for it, polyphony appeals to others. Like C, I dislike organ music (recognizing it as a proper accompaniment), but the same piece in an orchestral (or choral) setting may be amongst my favorites.
One simply cannot characterize beyond very general characteristics, many popular songs, even today, if one actually listen, may have a proper message, sadly many do not, and dissonance is never welcome in my head, but that is me.
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As a lover of Bach’s organ music I think it is some of the most spiritual music ever written and moves the soul.
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I love Bach, and listen to him often, I’m just not a fan of organs, per se. In an orchestral setting, yes, with a choir, yes, as a solo instrument, not so much.
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NEO I learned to play the organ at school and it does make a difference. Its my favourite instrument.
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Malcolm, It’s just a place where we disagree, somewhat. I like organs in their place, but prefer symphony orchestras and bands, which is what I grew up with. Can’t fix it, but I can respect your love of your instrument.
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Your position summarises mine perfectly 🙂
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I thought it might. 🙂
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That was the Passacaglia in C minor BWV 582. I’m sure our Lord approves. Bach dedicated every piece of music he wrote to the Glory of God. The passacaglia is none of my favourites.
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Error “one” of my favourites.
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I figured that was coming.
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Polyphony music was banned by the CC , and is now unbanned. Say, I thought the Universal Pure and White Catholic Church changes not. That’s what it claims.
Well, so much for that claim.
Kids are leaving the CC after confirmation and never coming back…….that’s the best news ive heard all week. The boys who lived directly in from of me when growing up were catholic. I remember them worrying sick I they were gonna pass or not, and their parents made them study. What a horridble religion to do that to children.
Hell has enlarged its mouth for these people who torment kids. The poor kids are thinking they wont be accepted by the Lord and go to hell if they don’t pass. I recall the worry on their faces a few days befor their exam to see if they are good enough for Jesus. I was their age and I remember being glad I didn’t have to do that. I was my own man, even at that age. If I was told I had to do this confirmation, I would have flatly refused, and there wouldn’t have been anything anyone could do about it. My mother let me have my say on things. She fancied herself as a hippy. What a sick sad religion. They will have their reward.
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Bosco, you surely can’t be quite as stupid as you sound. Stop and think. If not changing meant everything didn’t change then everyone would be speaking Greek and dressing like the Apostles. It is the teaching of Christ we preserve which does not change. So, Protestants and their would-be imitators can say divorce is fine – what does Jesus say?
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Jesus wishes we don’t divorce, but if we do, provide a bill of divorce. The one who was in the wrong is not free to marry. but the innocent party is free to remarry.
I take not changing, as claimed by the Roman State run religion to mean that their dogma and policies and teachings don’t chance. Well, they have changed some and added others. Rolling with the punches, if you will. The devotees are left to explain it away, if put to the task. The 12th century popes who made a lot of these stoneage claims are long gone and don’t have to worry about it. Now, the faithful are put to the task by me and others. Oh, of course, im not shocked that the ridiculous claims didn’t hold up. I just like watching the devotees scramble to justify those stoneage claims. I keep wondering when they will realize their religion is nothing but air.
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No, that is not what he says. He says that is what the Pharisees do. Quote where he says the innocent party can remarry?
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If anybody (including me) involved in a divorce was wholly innocent…well, I’d be mightily surprised.
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Yeah well, I was totally innocent. We even lived together after she took her first husband back. She thought she was doing the rite thing trying her first marriage again.
So good brother Neo, what did you do to your wife? Im scared to ask. Beat her with chains or something (;-D
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9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.
Jesus is saying if a man divorces his wife for another reason besides fornication he commits fornication if he remarries. If he catches her in adultery, I assume, he is free to remarry.
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You assume – I asked you for the words of Jesus and you offer me the opinion of a clown?!
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I gave you the red letter words of Jesus. Youre never happy.
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He never said that the innocent party is free to remarry – you seem to mistake your interpretation of what you think Jesus must have meant for what he said.
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Well, your religionhas this absolve thing. pay enough and some guy in a costume pronounces that there never was a marriage. Then they are free to remarry. God says that what he joins let no MAN put asunder. Your religion thinks they are magically waving a wand and the marriage never happened. If the price is right. jesus said not to do a lot of things…and your religion does them all as a matter of routine.
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Do try thinking, your brain needs it. The word you are looking for in an annulment. What that means is that a real marriage never took place, so no man is putting anything asunder.
I suppose the only thing to say is that you can’t see how thick you are – which must be a blessing.
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tHE COUPLE GOT MARRIED BY A PRIEST OR SOME OFFICIAL IN A LEGAL MARRIAGE. Pay your local costume holyman and he will say they were never married. What a scam. Abbra caddabra…you were never married. that will be $500 dollars…thank you. (;-D I don’t really care about that, but since you bothered to hit me up about divorce, I thought id bring up your religions way around the Lords command. There are more pressing problems…like waking up in hell for eternity.
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You make the mistake of assuming what is legal is moral.
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Yeah, well, you cathols can feel free to wrangle about divorced people getting the cracker or not.
The time is at hand. After the rapturos there is no easy salvation. And if one takes the Mark, there is no salvation for that person, even if he realizes Jesus is Lord and wants salvation. Everyone wants salvation, but everyone doesn’t humble ones self to ask Jesus to come show himself. The religious have rituals and the non religious have everything else.
Hey, how come im in hell when I purchased my New Age Kit and followed the instructions?
Hey how come I woke up in ever lasting fire when I ate the cracker every sunday?”
During the trib, the religious will curse god by reason of the plagues. Religions will be banned. A new religion will emerge. Worship the Beast and his Image. many folks who belong to the big religion of today are very accustomed to Images and devotion to them. They get angry if one attacks their images. They are pre prepared for the Image of the Beast and 3will have no prob accepting it.
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We all have to be on our guard that we are not believing in belief rather than the Living God who opens us to new and creative understanding of the Cosmos. .
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I agree, Malcolm. We believe in the Church as the living body of Christ, not a fossilised remnant filled with closed minds who have sought refuge from having to think.
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chalcedon I have great respect for Pope Benedict.
While many in the Catholic Church are condemning Fr Teilhard de Chardin, Pope Benedict had this to say in his book the Spirit of the Liturgy.
In Chapter 2 of this book, Benedict describes how Teilhard’s theological vision of Christ is central to the Christian liturgical and Eucharistic experience:
“And so we can now say that the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same—divinization, a world of freedom and love. But this means that the historical makes its appearance in the cosmic. The cosmos is not a kind of closed building, a stationary container in which history may by chance take place. It is itself movement, from its one beginning to its one end. In a sense, creation is history. Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere”, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its “fullness’. From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological “fullness”. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.”
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In Chapter 2 of this book, Benedict describes how Teilhard’s theological vision of Christ is central to the Christian liturgical and Eucharistic experience:
“And so we can now say that the goal of worship and the goal of creation as a whole are one and the same—divinization, a world of freedom and love. But this means that the historical makes its appearance in the cosmic. The cosmos is not a kind of closed building, a stationary container in which history may by chance take place. It is itself movement, from its one beginning to its one end. In a sense, creation is history. Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere”, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its “fullness’. From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological “fullness”. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.” (emphasis added)
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Pope Benedict was a leader ho whilst embracing traditional theological views was open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. His views on Teilhard de Chardin were very positive.
In Chapter 2 of this book, Benedict describes how Teilhard’s theological vision of Christ is central to the Christian liturgical and Eucharistic experience:
” Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere”, in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians,
“Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its “fullness’. From here Teilhard went on to give a new meaning to Christian worship: the transubstantiated Host is the anticipation of the transformation and divinization of matter in the christological “fullness”. In his view, the Eucharist provides the movement of the cosmos with its direction; it anticipates its goal and at the same time urges it on.”
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chalcedon, there’s a remarkable observation in Meister Eckhart’s German Sermon “Hanc Dicit Dominus:Honora Patrem Tuum.
“And so I have often said , – The shell must be cracked apart, if what is in it is to come out; for if you want the kernel you must break the shell.
Certain thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin are not fearful of breaking the shell to get at the kernel.
As Fr Teilhard has said a number of times. – In all things there is a Within, coextensive with their Without.
“Deep within ourselves we can discern, as through a rent an “interior” at the heart of things; and this glimpse is sufficient to force upon us the conviction that this “interior” exists and has always existed everywhere in nature…the stuff of the universe has an inner face that is in its very structure.”
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We have a natural tendency to cling to safety, or what our fallen nature tells us is safety – but Christ calls us to set out into the deep and to trust Him.
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For some reason I cant go any further than this page. Something wrong somewhere.Heres something a cathol said;
As a Irish Catholic Christian, there’s nothing wrong or shameful about praying to any Saint like the Virgin Mary. So if I pray to a statue of Mary, I see no shame in it. She leads any Catholic to her son Jesus Christ who happens to be the way, the truth and the life. The rosary isn’t idol worship either. It’s a Catholic devotion to Mary. This is something that Protestants need to think about.
Heres an admission that cathols do pray to statues. This hardens the heart towards the invisible god. Most people are going to hell, according to the Master.
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That’s definitive then, one person says they pray to a statue.
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chalcedon will you please remove me from Jessica’s website.I see that I’m in two places. -as Malcolm & as Malcolmlxx
Thank you.
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Do you want to go altogether? That would be the most enormous shame.
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