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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, October 24, 2003
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"Why Did You Really Become Catholic?" A recent article by Carl Olson. (Thanks, Carl.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 10/24/03 04:27:23 PM |
The Lawyers Are For The Lawyers Yes, that's a C.S. Lewis allusion. The Corkmeister calls to our attention a story so predictable the headline could have been written a week ago: "ACLU joins husband in battle to stop feeding of brain-damaged woman". .... The intervention of the governor, however, altered the landscape, said Howard Simon, the organization's Florida director. Several other significant advocacy groups on the sidelines, such as the AARP, say they, too, are now looking at the issue. The entry of the ACLU and possibly other influential players into the life-and-death drama playing out in Tallahassee and the Tampa area underscores the growing dimensions of the coming court battle over whether the state's top leaders acted unconstitutionally in sidestepping the courts in the high-profile right-to-die case. By substituting his judgment for the judgment of the courts, the governor "set aside the role of the whole judicial system," Simon said, warning that a precedent has been set for Bush and legislators to write laws gutting any court decision they don't like.... The rest of us, non-lawyers, might call that "checks and balances" and "the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives". Note what's really going on here: lawyers are fighting for the continued power of lawyers that is, those lawyers among them who just happen to have been apotheosized into judges. They are hardly, therefore, disinterested parties: who among them doesn't crave the power a judgeship would bring to him? And that's what this is about for the ACLU: not the life or death of one woman, but the continued ability of our black-robed masters to impose the Culture of Death and anything else they desire onto the rest of us with impunity. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 10/24/03 02:50:24 PM |
Lest We Forget Eighteen months ago today, the U.S. Cardinals issued a statement. .... The pastors of the Church need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care.... (U.S. Cardinals, April 24, 2002) So, when has this happened? In any way whatever? And where? When? How? Where? Well?........ Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 10/24/03 07:15:54 AM |
The Homosexualization of the Liturgy? A fascinating article in the July/August 2002 issue of Culture Wars, by E. Michael Jones, recalling especially the role of Rembert Weakland in the reform of the Roman liturgy: .... Less than a year after Father Diekmann pleaded the case for the "hootenanny Mass" before the NCEA, Rembert Weakland did the same thing before a meeting of the bishops' Music Advisory Board in Chicago in February 1966. Anxious to obtain the board's approval, Archabbot Weakland gave an impassioned description of the success of liturgical experiments at the Benedictine college at Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Weakland was especially moved when the boys there sang during Mass "He's got the Archabbot in the palm of his hand" (cf. Cum Angelis Canere, p. 379). Like his letter to Paul Marcoux, Weakland's vision of the new liturgy was suffused with a homoerotic haze which fundamentally distorted its meaning. In his experimental Masses at the college at Latrobe, Weakland was no longer confronted by a liturgy whose sacredness called his limitations into question. Now in fact he as celebrant was the center of attraction. All those boys were singing about him, a fact which must have been doubly pleasing to a homosexual first of all because of obvious sexual reasons but also because the new desacralized hootenanny liturgy reduced the Mass to something which no longer pricked his conscience by troubling reference to a transcendent judge of all human action. The hootenanny liturgy was at once both sexually stimulating all those boys singing about the archabbot and soothing to the conscience. It was desacralized "folk music" which made this remarkable transformation of Weakland from priest to center of attraction possible. Therefore, Weakland campaigned vigorously and pleaded passionately for the dumping of musica sacra and its replacement with Dionysian "folk music." Eventually a much-modified approval of "music for special groups" got passed by a one vote margin, and once that non-canonical recommendation of the Music Advisory Board got passed it became the norm for the entire country completely contrary to canon law and the deliberations of the Council which had been used to justify it but the norm nonetheless. The fact that this resolution became the norm was largely attributable to the power that the media wielded in the '60s, a power which Rome was powerless to stop. "American newspapers, both secular and ecclesiastical," according to Father Skeris, announced that the American bishops had approved of the use of guitars, folk music and the hootnenanny Mass. Despite repeated statements from the Holy See prohibiting the use of secular music and words in the liturgy, the movement continued to be promoted in the United States and in Europe. Deception played a part, since American priests were allowed to think that the decision of the Musical Advisory Board was an order from the bishops themselves. In reality, an advisory board has no legislative authority, nor does a committee of bishops have such authority (Cum Angelis Canere, p. 379). The intentions of the Vatican Council on liturgy as expressed by Sacrosanctum Consilium were, in other words, subverted, largely through the efforts of Rembert Weakland, who, it turns out was a homosexual. His vision of the liturgy was similar to Charles Reich's vision of the counter-culture as expressed in his ephemeral best-seller, The Greening of America. Reich, who was also a homosexual but not forthcoming about that fact when he wrote Greening, wrote that "music has become the deepest means of communication and expression for an entire culture" (Greening, p. 260). By culture, Reich meant the counter-culture, which meant his eroticized view of young men in blue jeans and no shirts playing Frisbee at U Cal Berkeley in the '60s. ("Bellbottoms," Reich wrote, "have to be worn to be understood. They express the body, as jeans do, but they say much more. They give the ankles a special kind of freedom as if to invite dancing right on the street. They bring dance back into our sober lives. . . . No one can take himself entirely seriously in bell bottoms" [Greening, p. 255]). By music, Reich meant the Negro Dionysian pop music that was playing such a crucial role in the sexual revolution at the time: Unquestionably , the blacks made a substantial contribution to the writings of the new consciousness. They were left out of the corporate state, and thus they had to have a culture and life-style in opposition to the State. Their music, with its "guts," contrasted with the insipid white music. Their way of life seemed more earthy, more sensual than that of whites, They were the first openly to scorn the Establishment and its values; as Eldridge Cleaver shows in Soul on Ice and Malcolm X shows in his autobiography, they were radicalized by the realities of their situation. When their music began to be heard by white teen-agers through the medium of rock'n' roll , and when their view of America became visible through the civil rights movement, it gave new impetus to the subterranean awareness of the beat generation and the Holden Caulfields (Greening, p. 239). It was this music that Rembert Weakland brought into the Catholic liturgy shortly before "the summer of 1967 when," according to Reich, "the full force of the cultural revolution was first visible." On March 15, 1967, Pope Paul VI issued Musicam Sacram in a vain attempt to stem the tide of musical desacralization proceeding step by step alongside the cultural revolution in America. Musical descralization was, in effect, the importation of the cultural revolution into the Catholic liturgy. Four years later, Pope Paul VI was still warning a Church whose liturgists had no intention of listening. On April 15, 1971, Paul VI told a convention of the Italian Society of St. Cecelia, that "all is not valid: all is not licit; all is not good." Cheap Dionysian pop music, as the prime manifestation of secular culture, was "not meant to cross the threshold of God's temple." The fact that the liturgists were not listening became clear at a meeting of the Musical Advisory board in Chicago in November 1968, when the liturgical revolutionaries showed their "true colors." On November 21, Rev. J. Paul Byron celebrated Mass for the conference at Old St. Mary's Church. At the Mass folk songs by Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger were sung as the liturgy's music. The rationale for using this kind of desacralized music was given in an article appearing in Worship, which explained that "the hootenanny Mass can give explicit eucharistic and christological specification to youth's intense involvement in the movements for racial justice, for control of nuclear weapons, for the recognition of personal dignity" (CAC, p. 395). "Some," wrote Father Skeris, referring principally to Rembert Weakland, "were trying to assert that all things are sacred, and thus all music was suitable for the liturgy. They were in fact saying that nothing is 'sacred,' and the result was a desacralization" (CAC, p. 383). Misery loves company nowhere more than in the realm of sexual sin. As a result it soon became obvious that the horizontal, desracalized liturgy would appeal to a culture that was in the midst of being sexually engineered by succumbing to sexual passion. That meant that the homosexual as the vanguard of sexual liberation could count on a large following among Catholics who had rejected other aspects of the Catholic Church's moral teaching. The contraceptors were of one mind with the homosexuals in their willingness to defend sterile sex, and there were a lot more contraceptors in the Church than homosexuals. They too would derive comfort from a liturgy which had been neutered of its transcendental elements because that is precisely what they had done to their sexual lives by becoming contraceptors. The net result of the reform was clear: if everything's sacred, nothing's sacred. And if nothing's sacred, then why not use the Mass to promote political ends, especially if the political and the sexual were so intimately linked? Music was the crucial link in this equation. Dionysian music promoted subversion in the Catholic Church, but it promoted it subconsciously, in the way that only music can, bypassing the conscious mind and entering into the soul directly, creating there a sense that things hitherto forbidden were somehow now possible.... Jones' article provides illuminating background for this glib Boston Globe article by Mark Oppenheimer, Oct. 5: .... As early as 1964, the National Catholic Reporter ran a story about Sacred Heart, the "hootenanny parish" in Warrensburg, Mo.: "Hardly a Sunday goes by, say the ushers, but a stranger will nervously edge up to one of them during Mass and whisper, `Pardon me, but is this a Catholic church?"' Throughout the `60s and `70s, the movement grew steadily. According to one observer, by 1978 folk music had "invaded" Roman Catholic churches everywhere. Musical experimentation was an international phenomenon, celebrated in every country that had Roman Catholics. It was also decried by mourners from Auberon Waugh (son of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh) to America's Patrick J. Buchanan to Hutton Gibson, leader of the Australian Alliance for Catholic Tradition (and father of movie star Mel Gibson). "It all seems a pity at first," reflected the essayist Annie Dillard, "for I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars. Why am I here? Who gave these nice Catholics guitars? . . . What is the Pope thinking of?" Guitars, to answer Dillard's question, were not exactly what the pope was thinking of, but rather what some liberal Roman Catholics in America hoped the pope was thinking of. Once Vatican II gave priests the latitude to permit changes in the liturgy, the popular liturgies were going to find homes in the churches where Simon & Garfunkel and Peter, Paul & Mary were at first feared. In the end, the Church provided a place for the aesthetics of the late 1960s, but without liberalizing in any other sense. Compared with Episcopalians, say, or Methodists, the Roman Catholic Church's official stands on other matters changed the least: Neither abortion nor birth control would be approved, and women never became priests. Because Vatican II had given the folkies permission, aesthetic changes were almost entirely decoupled from politics. The hierarchy retained its tight, conservative control on what Roman Catholics were supposed to believe, even as the iconography of liberalism the sandals, guitars, and hugging seized the day, easily.... Once Vatican II gave priests the latitude to permit changes in the liturgy? Actually, Vatican II quite specifically forbade such a thing: .... 22. 1. Regulation of the sacred liturgy depends solely on the authority of the Church, that is, on the Apostolic See and, as laws may determine, on the bishop. 2. In virtue of power conceded by the law, the regulation of the liturgy within certain defined limits belongs also to various kinds of competent territorial bodies of bishops legitimately established. 3. Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.... (Thanks, A.A.E.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 10/24/03 06:50:22 AM |
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