Sung by the St. Ann Choir today:
Josquin des Prez, Tu solus qui facis mirabilia
William Byrd, Ave verum corpus
This was not a good Sunday to visit St. Thomas, so if you came this noon on the basis of my usually glowing reports, I'm sorry.
I arrived a bit late today to find that Fr. Nahoe, our young Franciscan who is so good at collaborating with Prof. Mahrt in introducing more and more Latin into our Latin Novus Ordo Mass, was absent. In his place was a priest I've seen once before at St. Thomas. On that occasion, too, he reverted to the English Novus Ordo, and interlarded that already-ugly rite with spontaneous, quasi-heretical inspirations of his own. I hate it when priests make up their own stuff. What is so !&%^%$#ing hard about just reading from the Missal? Aarrgh.
Even the choir seemed off today. They wandered so badly in the Offertory chant they had to restart it, which is practically unheard of.
I also had the additional pleasure of reading a lengthy excerpt/summary of the US bishops' statement on the Iraq war in the parish bulletin, assembled by our parish's "Human Concerns" committee (a wholly-owned subsidiary of VOTF and the Democratic Party) in which those mitred paragons of foreign policy expertise declare that we need to get out of Iraq as soon as possible while paying for all the damage caused by the insurgency while asking for nothing in return. Meanwhile, of the insurgents, of the Iranians and the Syrians who have been blowing up Iraqis regularly through their surrogates, they ask nothing at all. Idiots.
Finally, the bulletin also carried the welcome news that the spending of $100,000 to equip St. Albert the Great's sanctuary with an immersion-style baptismal pool is going forward nicely. Wow, we so need that!
I thought of those Peanuts comic strips in which Charlie Brown looks up in anguish to Heaven and cries, "I just can't stand it!"
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
