Msgr Wadsworth's Tablet article re liturgy (Main Forum)

Reading this stuff Nehemiah I find might be likened to a situation where the government of a nation like Australia suddenly decided that the only music or theatre that was allowed to be performed anywhere in this entire land would be high opera and the people placed in charge of all theatrical and media would be high camp aficionados of high opera and the classical music that goes along with it. These people of course believe their kind of music is THE ONLY kind of music that people in the entire nation should listen to and everything else is vulgar and plebian. It is simply unbelieveable that this is happening but with people like Raymond Burke and Joseph Ratzinger "directing the traffic" that is the absurd reality that institutional Catholicism faces. Effectively they are saying "to hell with Jesus Christ's command to go out and bring the Good News to all of humankind, everybody will have to conform to our liturgical, music and language preferences or they can exit the Church". The great majority have chosen to do so. The likes of Raymond Burke and Joseph Ratzinger have been assisted of course by the bully boys who don't believe in anything, and personally have no particular preference for the likes of what Raymond Burke or Joseph Ratzinger believe is "sacred" or "holy" but they have the skills of Niccolò Machiavelli in discerning which way the ecclesial winds are blowing and they're prepared to say anything that will ensure their advancement up the hierarchical ladder of the empire. If the successors of Angello Roncalli instead of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger were the ones controlling the institutional agenda today the same "bully boys" would be as prominent today but whistling a completely different tune to the one they profess to prefer today.

George Orwell spelt it out so cuttingly over half a century ago in his books Animal Farm and 1984 which described behaviours in all regimes that become totalitarian.

Jesus must weep! The vast majority of people simply leave and I see no reason why that is the situation that will continue to prevail until the only ones left participating are these high camp boys with their affected language and their hangers on in the female sectors of the population. What we are witnessing is a tragedy on a massive scale.

In secular society most people have no complaints with people who are lovers of great opera even if they are a tiny minority in society. They don't even object when high opera consumes an inordinate proportion of the arts dollars a nation puts in to promoting the arts because there is an appreciation that good opera is expensive to stage. They begin to object if the lovers of opera are able to dictate the entire musical and theatrical agenda for an entire nation and have the power to ban all other styles of music and performance theatre. That is effectively the sort of situation we are watching the Roman Church moving to. The result will be an even greater exit out of the pews than we have already seen. The entire enterprise is highly divisive in society and leads to the people who are lovers of great opera becoming the objects of derision and detestation by the populace at large. Rather than promoting "High Opera" in some balanced way along with all the creative and artistic endeavours a nation supports, the people who are into "High Opera" become the objects of scorn, laughter and derision by the population at large and, in the final analysis, "High Opera" is held in such derision in society at large that it disappears off the cultural agenda of the nation entirely.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

Mgr Wadsworth: "I think we must admit that until relatively recently there has been very little scholarship that is able to accurately identify the sources of the liturgical reform."

If one such as he does not study the history of liturgical renewal, one remains as ignorant as he.

A second thought: Where does one find in the Church today a person of great theological scholarship, who has remained faithful in the past thirty years to what he had taught in the preceding twenty years, and who has risen to clerical positions of prestige and monetary reward?

A third thought: I enjoyed this article:

http://www.v2catholic.com/dtimbs/2012/2012-07-15mutual_enrichment_of_the_two_rit.htm

A fourth thought: Agenda of Reform of the reform:

http://www.v2catholic.com/background/agenda.htm

A fifth thought:

Ratzinger at Vatican II: a Pope who can & cannot change

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_11_137/ai_n56388266/?tag=content;col1

Strange as it may seem, there are times when simple people like me become simply confused.

Peter