From Regula-fidei:
The juxtaposition says it all. The faithful (Catholic priest that was flanked and supported by Baptist ministers) are carted off to jail for defending the unborn, while the treacherous (liberal Catholics) adorn Obama (Disciple of Christ) at Notre Dame (which supports the slaughter of the unborn).
The Lord our God promises us not to fear, for revenge will be His.
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From Jeffrey Tucker:
Here is a truth that most mainstream Catholic musicians will not want to hear: Catholics in the pews are deeply unhappy, nearly to the point of disgust, or even past that point, with the state of Catholic music in the average parish. The longer the status quo continues, the more demoralized and angry they are becoming.
I’m not speaking of cathedrals, which have been improving, or of famed and growing parishes that are currently working toward the great ideals of sung prayer in liturgy, and I’m not even speaking of seminaries, which are undergoing rapid and thrilling rates of reform right now.
Instead I’m speaking of the run-of-the-mill Catholic parish you happen into on your travels here and there, anywhere in the country, the parishes that don’t make the headlines, can’t afford the trained musicians, don’t have the wonderful organs, and just have to get by on the resources they have.
Here is where the status quo prevails in a nearly tyrannical way. The musicians here will not read this article. Even if you clip it and send it to them, they will say: “sorry, no time; I’m a volunteer so I don’t really need to read this stuff. People should be grateful that I’m doing anything at all.” They have a point; but the faithful too have a point that their Mass should sound a bit more like Church and less like sit-com theme songs.
These put-upon volunteers, however, are not curious about the reform of the reform, the extraordinary reform, the writings of Benedict XVI or Cardinal Ratzinger, and they are not attending sacred music workshops this summer. They don’t read the documents, are not interested to learn about the intrinsic qualities of the Roman Rite, own no CDs of genuinely sacred music, and never think to investigate their moral responsibilities to the liturgy.
How did they enter on this path from which they refuse to escape? Perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, they happened into a commercial trade show at the National Association of Pastoral Musicians and grabbed a few octavos that they dragged home to foist on unwilling congregations. Maybe there was a pastor who backed them. They were never able to manage to conjure up that spiritual high they felt at the magic weekend but they did finally get their way. And there is where it stayed – no progress, no movement, no action at all.
What is especially depressing is that the music they grabbed, like so much of the fare over the last 30-40 years, implies a certain peppy sensibility with it that requires a hopped enthusiasm (This is new! This is fun! This is exciting!) to make it sound right. It works, sometimes, but only for a while.
Build the City of God! Gather Us In! Sing of God’s Glory! If you are tired of this fare and sing it with a plain-Jane voice, the music sort of dies, and ends up eliciting no more excitement than “Benny and the Jets” sung by a boomer in a dentist-office waiting room.
And this turns out to be the way many, or even most, if not nearly all, regular Catholics describe the music they must endure week to week. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t receive a long, pained email from someone pleading to know why it is that their Mass-going experience must be wrecked every single week by this music that they can’t stand.
Phonecalls pour into my cellphone from people who long to hear something that hints of the sacred instead of the material that they uncharitably describe to me on the phone, mainly because they at least feel they have a chance to vent their frustrations. It is overwhelming.
I know what you are thinking. Jeffrey, you are just a magnet for these kinds of bitter complaints but they hardly represent the whole. Who else are they going to call? Well, I used to think this too. But lately I’ve been trying it out an experiment in different contexts.
I’ve been to conferences on non-music subjects where people are clueless about any connection I have to Catholic music projects, and otherwise know nothing of my connections and work. I will just casually ask a Catholic—having discovered their religion affiliation—how the music is in their parish.
Every single time the response is the same and it is like the dam breaks before my eyes. The words they use to describe their music, after breathing a heavy sigh are as follows: unbearable, dreadful, painful, insipid, insufferable, horrid, absurd, ridiculous and many other words that I can’t repeat here. I always listen attentively without encouraging the conversation in any particular direction.
Then once their complaints are over, and follow up with a simple question: what do you think about Gregorian chant? The answer is 100% positive, followed by trouble questions about why they can’t hear this at Mass. They tell stories of chant they have heard on CDs they own, of concerts on television, of radio shows, of moving trips abroad to hear Mass in some Cathedral in a foreign land, and their countenance changes. These are the experiences they hang onto for dear life, while they wait and wait for something (please God!) to change in their parishes.
Now, what these people do not know, and what I would like to tell them, is that a revival is in fact sweeping the country. It began only a few years ago to spread outside a few preserves and is making its way ever more into parishes of all sorts, big and small. There are more each year. Scholas are being founded every week. Thousands of people are being trained, and they are taking on themselves the task of rediscovering this glorious tradition and they are doing so outside the official channels, using downloadable editions, assembling scholas of interested laypeople, and their passion is spreading.
Young pastors have been enormously friendly to the new scholas, giving them a chance to sing and holding them up as models for other musicians in the parish to follow. They are delivering homilies on the topic, explaining the ideal to everyone so that the Catholic people can come to understand and love the music that is native to their Mass. It is happening in schools, and seminaries, and even in monasteries which are again finding their footing in the music that is at the center of their prayer life.
There is no question where the musical history of the Catholic Church is currently headed, and no question about what it is leaving behind, Deo Gratias. The trajectory is unmistakable, undeniable. Be patient. Pray. Work. And pray some more. The time will come, and that time is not as far off as many think. The tedium will slip away and our parishes will again be filled with the music that will inspire the faithful, give true Glory to God, and will even elicit awe in even the most secular ear.
In the meantime, we must avoid casting aspersions on those who are doing their best to provide music for Mass. In some ways, they are victims of a time and victims of a movement that has long outlived its usefulness. They devote countless hours to serving. What they need is guidance, direction, training, inspiration. I believe that most will embrace the challenge once it is presented to them.
Cultures change in mysterious and unpredictable ways. Change is coming. The line might be crooked and the timing might not always be to our liking, but the direction of change and the goal of the reform is highly centered and focused. The long period of suffering will not last forever.
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From
From Mary Victrix:
I was going through the pictures I took in Rome earlier in the month and I was inspired to post one last photograph. Click on the picture for a larger version.
This is San Andrea delle Frate (St. Andrew of the Bush). It is just down the street from the Spanish Steps in old Rome. In 1990, I lived for three months very near the church while studying at the Angelicum and had the opportunity to serve the noon Mass almost every day at this altar, which is a side altar originally dedicated to St. Michael, but now is known as the Altar of Our Lady of the Miracle.
The miracle in question was the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne, a rabid anti-Catholic agnostic and gentleman of influence, who received a vision of our Blessed Lady at this altar after having been given a Miraculous Medal. Those who are familiar with St. Maximilian Kolbe will remember that during his stay in Rome, while he was studying for the priesthood, the rector of the college, Father Stefano Ignudi, told the seminarians the story of Ratisbonne’s conversion. The Pontifical Theological University of the Seraphicum, the theological faculty of the Conventual Franciscans, the order to which St. Maximilian belonged, is about a fifteen minute walk from the Church of San Andrea delle Frate. St. Maximilian used to visit the Church quite often during his free time. I made a very similar walk during my weeks at school from where I lived to the Angelicum.
Father Ignudi, the rector of the college, was a confidant of Pope St. Pius X, and held deep within his heart the concerns of the Holy Father. It was the time of World War I and the Modernist crisis. Father Ignudi also told the friar seminarians about how the Freemasons had demonstrated in St. Peter’s square against the Holy Father, carrying a banner of Satan trampling St. Michael underfoot. St. Maximilian asked permission to go to the Roman headquarters of the Freemasons in order to convert the Grand Master. Father Ignudi refused the request but urged the saint to channel his zeal to a life of prayer and penance. St. Maximilian thought long and hard about the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne and concluded that the Immaculate was the real secret to being victorious in the battle against Satan for souls.
In 1917, three days after the miracle of the sun at Fatima, in the evening of October 16, St. Maximilian founded the Militiae Immaculatae, the Knights of the Immaculate. He gathered a number of his confreres in a little room in the Seraphic College in Rome, where they all signed the original statute for this movement of consecration to Our Lady. The primary condition for membership was the making and living the consecration to the Immaculate; one of the secondary conditions was the wearing of the Miraculous Medal and the daily recitation of the medal prayer, which the Saint adapted to read: “O Mary conceived without sin pray for us who have recourse to you, and for all who do not have recourse to you, especially for the Freemasons.”
St. Maximilian continued to be a zealous apostle for the faith. With his doctorates in both philosophy and theology and with his practical commons sense and speaking ability, he never neglected to engage unbelievers in apologetics. He crossed swords with socialists, communists, agnostics and atheists, many of whom were converted, but always his efforts bore fruit more through the help of the Immaculate than through his words and actions. This he knew. In fact, he always carried with him a handful of Miraculous Medals and gave them to everyone with whom he spoke.
St. Maximilian’s militant zeal for souls made him a true knight of Our Lady, always eager and ready to engage, and always open to prayer and sacrifice. The same zeal that led to him to beg his superiors to lay siege to the Masonic headquarters in Rome, led him to found the M.I., to hand out Miraculous Medals everywhere and to engage in apologetics. The same zeal led him to work day and night without rest in spite of his tuberculoses and to leave his homeland for the mission in Japan. When he was a novice, he almost left religious life itself in order to join the Polish army so that he could fight for his Queen and Lady, the Immaculate. Indeed, the Immaculate wanted him to fight for Her, and he did upon a spiritual battlefield.
St. Maximilian was a man at war. He wrote: “‘Knights,’ ‘battles’. . . these are all terms that have a warlike connotation. Ours, however, is not a war fought with rifles, machine guns, cannon, airplanes, poison gas . . . but still it is a real war.”
Indeed, the woman on the Miraculous Medal is the one mentioned in Genesis 3:15, that is, the Woman who crushes the head of the serpent and who is at war with the ancient dragon (Apocalypse 12). St. Maximilian called the Miraculous Medal his “silver bullet”:
During the apparition of the Miraculous Medal, She dictated an ejaculatory prayer, so this is our prayer and in it we include all men. She gave us the Miraculous Medal, so this is our weapon with which to strike hearts. In addition, any other means, provided it is licit, can be used, anything that zeal and prudence suggest–in a word, whatever love commands us, a love without limits–whatever this beloved Mother of ours, Mother of the whole world and of each and every souls wishes to do by our instrumentality.
I find it fascinating that St. Maximilian used the term, “silver bullet” in regard to the Miraculous Medal. How much reflection went into its use is by no means clear, but the context suggests that not only does the usage manifest a military bent in the Saint, but also his awareness of the demonic. As already noted, it is pretty clear from the medal itself that Our Lady’s power throws all hell into panic.
Folklore ascribes to the silver bullet the power to eliminate monsters of various sorts, most notably the werewolf. I am sure that European monster mythology is at least partly related to spiritual combat.
For example, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula spiritual combat is pretty explicit. The vampire is of demonic origin and is not only in pursuit of blood, but is also bent upon the destruction of purity and innocence. Literary critics almost universally apply Freudian hermeneutics to Bram’s text, saying that the work is largely about sexual repression and male fear of female sexuality. Whatever one’s attitude toward the Victorian mores out of which Dracula came, it takes a hypersexualized and conscienceless mindset to suggest that feminine purity is nothing but repression, and its ideal the product of chauvinism. Alas, but such is the case today. I mention this not so much out of praise for Bram and his work, but simply to indicate that the ideals of spiritual combat are so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that it quite naturally comes out in these mythologies.
Bram Stoker was not a Catholic, his family of birth belonged to the Church of Ireland. The main hero of his novel, Van Helsing, is a man of science, but also a man who values virtue and believes in the power of the supernatural, even though the novel leaves us guessing as to what the dimensions of the supernatural actually are. Anyway, its a myth. In any case, Van Helsing knows the power of the crucifix (a silver one at that) and of the Eucharist (even though Bram has Van Helsing use the Eucharist against the vampire in a sacrilegious way).
Even if one were to conclude that Bram is subconsciously criticizing Victorian morality, one thing is clear: there is a demon orchestrating our fear and threatening our existence. Science (reason) can go only so far to expel him. In the end only the sacrifice of courageous men under the influence of the supernatural will be able to withstand, protect their purity and defend that which is true good and beautiful. We must face the darkness, but we must also have a silver bullet.
St. Maximilian once, when speaking about spiritual combat, recounted how once Napolean was asked by a journalist what it took to win a war. The great general replied: “It requires three things: money, money and more money.” St. Maximilian then rhetorically asked what it takes to win a spiritual war. His reply: “prayer, prayer and more prayer.”
Our prayer needs to be Marian: “O Mary conceived without sin pray for us who have recourse to Thee.” She is the Woman Clothed with the Sun with Her immaculate foot on the head of our enemy. She is the Warrior Queen of which Judith and Jahel are merely the types. She is fair as the moon, bright as the sun and terrible as an army set in battle array (Cant. 6:10).
She is as beautiful as the moon. According to the monster myths the virtue of the silver bullet is associated somehow with moonlight (gold = sun, silver = moon). In the Old Testment silver is associated with purity and beauty: And he shall sit refining and cleansing the silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and shall refine them as gold, and as silver, and they shall offer sacrifices to the Lord in justice (Mal. 3:3). In the apparition of Our Lady to St. Catherine Labouré in which she revealed the pattern for the Miraculous Medal, Our Lady’s hands radiated silver light that represent the graces that she wishes to bestow upon us.
St. Maximilian spent many hours in the Church of San Andrea delle Frate meditating before the altar of Our Lady of the Miracle. That prayer was fortifying beyond what most of us can appreciate. It led him to hope and conquer even after passing through the gates of hell, that is, those of Auschwitz. After St. Maximilian was ordained a priest, he said his first Mass on the altar of Our Lady of the Miracle. After he entered Auschwitz, he “said mass” at the altar of the death bunker and was victorious. He had his silver bullet, over his heart, and his Lady and Queen within his heart.
Today in San Andrea delle Frate on the left side of the altar you will find a bust of Alphonse Ratisbonne, and on the right one of St. Maximilian (see photo). Between them over the altar is the Virgin of the Miracle in exaclty the same way She appears on the silver bullet.
Never allow the enemy to find you unarmed.
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A particularly lovely video. The Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia are expecting a large postulant class entering in August. Enjoy.
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From Inside Catholic:
For those who may be lamenting the seeming resurgence of the Catholic Left in the Age of Obama, I would like to point out some good news: This year’s spate of bishops’ assignments have been quite heartening. Since the beginning of 2009, there have been ten appointments announced by the Vatican. All of them should be encouraging to those who grumble about the “bishops this” and the “bishops that.”
Just as encouraging should be the record number of bishops who were outspoken during the presidential campaign in defense of unborn life, and those who publicly criticized Notre Dame for honoring President Barack Obama.
Of course, this new spirit of activism among the bishops is not good news to everybody. David O’Brien of Holy Cross tried to spin a theory about why many other bishops remained silent during the Notre Dame flap: “Their most recent engagements with politics sharpened divisions within the Church and left the bishops shaken, even embarrassed.” O’Brien hoped that the bishops’ conference, meeting in San Antonio last week, would put away their “shrill tone,” “make a new start,” and “build on hope, not fear.”
Dan Gilgoff, at his very fine “God & Country” blog at U. S. News & World Report, was prompted by O’Brien’s article to ask whether one could in fact claim that a “silent majority” of the bishops support Obama. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, responded to Gilgoff’s question by saying, “The real story here is not that most [bishops] said nothing, it’s about the 80 or so who spoke out. In my 16 years in this job, I have never seen that many bishops go public about an issue like this.”
I agree with Donohue completely. The same thing could be said for the record number of bishops who spoke out during the 2008 presidential campaign on subjects ranging from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Sen. Joe Biden on St. Augustine and “Faithful Citizenship,” to the question of whether a Catholic can vote for a pro-abortion candidate in good conscience. As Donohue added, “We have more bishops willing to speak out now on matters that conservative Catholics want them to address than we’ve seen in a very, very long time.”
As it turned out, the bishops’ meeting in San Antonio did not go as O’Brien had hoped. The bishops did not ignore the Notre Dame scandal — they took the opportunity to show their corporate support of Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who refused to attend the Notre Dame commencement for the first time in his 24 years as bishop. His fellow bishops wrote:
The bishops of the United States express our appreciation and support for our brother bishop, the Most Reverend John D’Arcy. We affirm his pastoral concern for Notre Dame University, his solicitude for its Catholic identity, and his loving care for all those the Lord has given him to sanctify, to teach and to shepherd.
What’s more, the bishops’ appointments of 2009 thus far suggest there will be more strong leadership in the future. As you look at the list, bear in mind that five are archbishops and four of the dioceses– New York, Detroit, New Orleans, and St. Louis — are among the most influential in the nation.
There’s still plenty of good news in the Church today… if you know where to find it.
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