Musical treasure for the taking

Amazingly, you can now download the entire Liber Usualis -- the church's encyclopedic guide to Gregorian chant -- here. All 2,340 pages, 117 megabytes worth. (I'm giving the mirror site link at Musica Sacra due to concerns about bandwidth at the original post site, The New Liturgical Movement.)

Good news, I think, from Monterey

California Catholic Daily reports that Bishop Richard Garcia has announced that regular Tridentine Masses will be celebrated at two locations in the diocese of Monterey, California, starting in September, as soon as the motu proprio takes effect.

I'm chronically suspicious of any official sponsorship of the Tridentine that offers it only at a few specified locations. There have been too many decades of episcopal opposition to the rite to get over that attitude quickly. It can be a way of keeping the rite marginalized in out-of-the-way places, instead of putting it before the faithful in larger numbers in their normal parishes.

On the other hand, supposing that a bishop is sincerely trying to comply with the Pope's wishes, he might very well choose to get things rolling by arranging for the rite to be available as soon as possible in one or more places. And since it can't start again everywhere at once, if only because most priests don't seem to know enough Latin to properly perform even the Latin Novus Ordo mass let alone the Tridentine, it has to begin in those few places where circumstances permit.

There are some pitfalls. For instance, the priest who has been identified to re-learn the Tridentine and offer it near Paso Robles is 80 years old. What does it say about the rite if it is only offered by the old and perhaps crotchety (as I encountered recently in Santa Clara)?

On the other hand, if the Tridentine is to be truly reintegrated into the normal life of the Church, the laity have to be educated in it again. In order to actually participate in a Latin mass, you have to know how to follow what is being said. If the Tridentine is reintroduced too early, before people have a chance to learn what's going on, there could be a backlash -- an understandable one, too.

But it's a start. Thank you, Bishop Garcia. And Deo gratias.

Depart from us

So many others are marshaling and reviewing news and opinion articles after the announcement of the astonishing $660 million settlement for clergy sex abuse in the Diocese of Los Angeles that it's pointless for me to collect links to them here. But here's my take on Cardinal Mahony's future.

The most charitable attitude I think it's possible to adopt toward his reassignment of known molesters is that the Cardinal made an honest mistake in taking the advice of therapists who claimed to be able to cure such priests, permitting them to be sent back safely into situations of proximity to potential new victims.

Now, honest mistakes are likely to be overlooked at the lower echelons of most organizations. The stakes aren't high, and the staff are presumed to be still learning. But we are dealing here with someone near the pinnacle of leadership in a worldwide organization: an archbishop assigned to a large, very prestigious diocese, and a cardinal as well, one of the select group of bishops who, among other things, elect popes.

At such a level in any organization, you don't get and shouldn't expect the leniency extended to lower ranks. You've been given an enormous privilege; the position is not yours by right. You are expected to justify the trust you've been given with actions that are consistently worthy of it. If you want to be judged by your intentions, stay at the worker-bee level. If you want to rise to upper management, expect to be judged by results.

Maybe the Cardinal did make a series of honest mistakes. Maybe he did take bad advice. Maybe he intended no harm and merely did what he thought was best.

But those mistakes, as honest as they may have been, have cost the flock entrusted to his care over half a billion dollars, a humiliating public scandal, and worst of all a terrible blot on the reputation of the Church that will cripple its attempts to spread the Gospel for decades to come.

And that should get him removed from the leadership of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Period.

I leave it to others to analyze whether he should be held criminally liable, or disciplined within the Church in some other way than being removed from office. Those issues will hinge on evaluation of what he knew, and when he knew it. We'll have to wait for the opening of those files the Cardinal's been sitting on for years to know the truth of that.

But nothing more than the patent fact of his terrible errors in judgment is needed to justify an end to his term in Los Angeles, and his exclusion from any future job of high responsibility within the Church.

It needs more than good intentions to govern in the Catholic Church today. It needs wisdom and judgment that Cardinal Mahony has demonstrated he does not have.

Let the housecleaning begin.

Louder is not wiser

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

A useful reflection for journalists from one of the best, Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965). And for bloggers too, now that the web has given the rest of us a wider audience than anyone could have dreamed of having in Murrow's day.

New wave

Darn, it's so easy to forget our founding metaphors.

Dover Beach, that is. That long, melancholy, withdrawing roar. But with the motu proprio, we've been blessed to be alive to hear the good loud slap of a small wave of the turning tide.

Like most waves, it has receded again. Now it's up to you and me.

Let's make waves.

Everyone relax

Some people already seem to be getting discouraged at various signs of heavy opposition from bishops to the free celebration of the 1962 Missal as called for in Summorum Pontificum, and the lack of mobs of the faithful beating down various diocesan doors to demand it.

We should all take a deep breath and consider the magnitude of the task Benedict is calling us to: nothing less than the restoration of an entire culture, one which has been intentionally repressed for more than a generation. And this, while the reins of local power are still often firmly in the hands of those who did the repressing.

Those of us who are interested in advancing the work of SP need to be studying how other repressed or disfavored cultures have preserved their heritages, taught them to the next generation, and brought them back into vibrant current usage. Let's find out what has worked for others, and adopt the techniques that apply to our present challenge.

And let's hope for quick victories, but settle in for the long haul.

Faith and reason? We were there first.

From G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man:

... in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not merge until they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.

Once again, our ancestors in the Faith were no dummies, nor were they the cowled obscurantists they are often depicted to have been on the History Channel. Instead, they broke good new intellectual ground for the whole human race. We can be proud of them.

This has to be worth a plenary indulgence

Lumen Gentleman has established a database for those interested in helping celebrate the Latin Mass of the 1962 Missal, with a new feature that lets you find and request contact with other local like-minded people. What a great idea, and what a great service to God and His Church! And after only a few days of existence and no publicity other than web word-of-mouth, there are already hundreds signed up.

The revival of the Tridentine Mass won't happen overnight, and it won't happen without a lot of hard work, faithfulness, and in some places sheer dogged determination. And some smart organizing ideas, like this one.

(H/T Leticia)

Motu proprio

Well, as you all know already, the motu proprio restoring real access to the 1962 Missal is finally out. CWN has a fine and extensive comment, as does Gerald. Barbara Nicolosi has delicious in-your-face remarks here and here for those who rightly fear that their silly "Barney" and "Halloween" Masses are threatened by the big old Latin boogeyman.

I'll only add two things to what many others, far better equipped than I, have already written.

First, I'm delighted that we the laity, ignored and misled for forty years, can finally again have a Mass with an organic connection to the liturgical tradition of our Church, as the documents of Vatican II always intended (but were hijacked to subvert).

Second, I was a little disappointed that the MP tells us that the 1962 Missal is to be known as the "extraordinary" form of the liturgy, until I thought about it a bit, and then it hit me: we all know from the example of the "Spirit of Vatican II" folks' innovation of "extraordinary" Eucharistic ministers that "extraordinary" really means "mandatory, universal, and permanent."

Now I feel really good!

There and back again

From "On Fictions and Gospel" in Thomas Howard's The Night is Far Spent:

This is the paradox about stories: they seem to lead us away into imaginary regions, but they have an unsettling way of discovering for us the immediate place where we are.

Sudden resurrections

From Hilaire Belloc's Survivals and New Arrivals:

The good fortunes of stupidity are incalculable. One can never tell what sudden resurrections ignorance and fatuity may not have.

Belloc's book is about heresy, and the "survivals" in the title are the heresies that seem to come back again and again, despite having been roundly refuted in the past. That phenomenon is one that our Church ought to take more note of, and plan to fight a whole lot better than we have been lately.

For instance, the apparently sudden popularity of a new Gnosticism (given a big glossy expression in The DaVinci Code) took the Church by surprise. It shouldn't have. Gnosticism comes back periodically throughout history. So why are we constantly behind the curve? Why are we always reacting at molasses-in-January speed? Why are our scholars not anticipating the likely errors that contemporary thought might fall into, and bringing the truth to bear quickly to head off the return of yet another "survival"?

I've often come back to the theme of the crucial importance of time. We don't have forever to stand up against evil and error, and failing to strike at it when it's new and weak means that later you have to stand against it -- if at all -- when it's established and powerful, and has already destroyed many souls.

So to the Vatican, and to our Catholic scholars everywhere, and to all us lay folks on whom so much now depends, I'd say: work carefully, by all means -- but work quickly. And let's not let ourselves be surprised, ever again.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at the noon Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas today:

Orlando di Lasso, Tibi laus, Tibi gloria
Pierre de la Rue, O salutaris Hostia

One Lord left

For most of the world's history, people have had lords. That is, they lived under an authority they could not gainsay, whether he was called king, duke, count, emir, tuan, sheikh, or shogun. The lord's rights to direct and govern came directly from who he was. You didn't choose him; he was just there.

But we live today without lords. We live in democracies in which those in authority over us serve, to some degree, at our pleasure -- or those who control them do. Our Declaration of Independence asserts that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." If we don't like a congressman or senator or president, we organize ourselves to boot him out at the next election and replace him with someone whose actions might be more to our liking. We might stand when the President enters the room, but we bow the knee, literally, to no man.

Now, Christianity is a religion whose God is constantly referred to as "Lord". So, what happens when the very concept of an authority you can't change vanishes from a culture's ordinary life? C. S. Lewis sensed it: as he put it in the essay which gave the title to a very influential book, God ends up "in the dock", or in American English, "on trial". No longer does man stand guiltily before God; man demands an accounting from God for His actions.

This is a poisonous situation for Faith. God can't really be placed in the dock, of course; but man can deceive himself into thinking He's there instead of on His throne. The restoration of Christian presence in society is going to have to include a renewal of the concept of lordship.

I'm glad the "spirit of Vatican II" folks haven't wholly managed to stamp out the Catholic practice of kneeling during parts of the Mass, because bending the knee is going to help lead everyone back to sanity here, to an acknowledgment of God's Lordship. We don't kneel to anyone else anymore -- no king, no nobleman, and certainly no elected official, no matter how powerful. We kneel only to God.

Kneeling. A good, powerful symbol, rooted in physical action like the rest of Catholic practice, all the stronger now that its use has receded everywhere else in modern life. Time to use it to remind ourselves, and afterwards everyone else, that only God is Lord.

Dominus vobiscum. Please.

The problem with having the Mass in the vernacular is that priests are all too ready to change it to suit themselves.

At last Sunday's noon Mass at St. Thomas, Fr. Harris was ill, so we had a substitute priest. And like another substitute on another day, he too said "The Lord IS with you" instead of "The Lord BE with you."

So what's up with this new translation? Did the missal change and no one told us? Or was it just that the priest thought it didn't matter, or it sounded better?

I know some people would say, what's the big deal? So here's my take. The Latin is "Dominus vobiscum", and the English translation that everyone's been happy with for many years is "The Lord BE with you." It's a wish, a prayer. The word "may" is implied: "MAY the Lord be with you." God might be with you, He might not. Let's pray that He is.

So the important thing that the old version does for us is to remind us implicitly that it's possible for us to cut ourselves off from God through serious sin that we're not sorry for. And we can surely show up for Mass in that state. The priest prays for us that God will be with us, but since he has no spiritual X-ray vision, he doesn't know whether God is with each one of us at that moment. As far as I know, that's still Catholic teaching: in short, if you tell God to get lost, He'll respect your decision. He gave you free will, it's part of your human make-up. If you say to Him: Give me my inheritance, I'm off to squander it all in riotous living, He'll give it to you and sadly wave good-bye. He won't tag along. He'll let you go your own way. He hopes you'll come back, repentant and wiser, since He's got a feast waiting for you if you do; but He's not following you with the lunchmobile.

The important -- and wrong -- thing that the new version does is imply that no matter what state your soul is in, no matter how much you've told God to get lost, He's still happily right there, ignoring your free choice, ignoring the state of your soul, ignoring whether you're in the least sorry for the last eight zillion unconfessed sins you've committed. Like a house-elf in the Harry Potter stories, He's right there to serve you, no matter how many times you kick Him in the face.

We might prefer that God be like that. But as far as we know, He isn't. And it's wrong to change the words of the Mass to pretend that He is.

Letters from a great Catholic

When I can't sleep, I pick up my copy of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. I don't know why I do it, because it's exactly the wrong thing for drifting off to dreamland. I go from one letter to the next, hour after hour, fascinated. I re-read letters I've seen a dozen times already and still find new things. It's a disaster.

But a good one. Surely it must be one of those whispering hints of the turn of the tide, of the return of the Sea of Faith, that the man who wrote what the reading public has stubbornly insisted on voting the greatest book of the twentieth century (against outraged protests from the literary and academic establishments) could also write this:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. ... For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little, and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know...

As if to give us some consolation for the many things in the past fifty years that we Catholics have to be ashamed of, this humble, irascible Catholic professor gave us something to be very, very proud of indeed.

This Sunday at St. Thomas

Sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Thomas Aquinas today:

Thomas Mudd, Let thy merciful ears, O Lord
Heinrich Isaac, Dico vobis
Pierre de la Rue, O salutaris Hostia

The other thing Reagan said

On this twentieth anniversary of the momentous speech in Berlin in which Ronald Reagan famously said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall", Terence Jeffrey at Townhall.com recalls something else that Ronald Reagan said that day.

Pondering what sustained Berliners, surrounded as they were by the Soviet menace, Reagan concluded: "Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront."

Reagan was referring to the demolition of churches and removal of crosses and Christian statuary that was longstanding policy of the old East German communist government.

His point is interesting because he's linking human creativity to public acknowledgment of God.

When I recall life during the Cold War, it seems to me that the Soviet bloc did very well at inventing and building weapons, and planning for war. But the creativity of their societies seemed stifled in every other way, except when a brave soul like Solzhenitsyn could smuggle something through the censorship. And this was true not only in art, but in more mundane pursuits. Consumer goods were shoddy, scarce, and derivative of Western styles. Soviet cars were a joke.

Why?

I think it's because everything true and beautiful comes from God. Cut yourself off from Him, study to forget Him, and after a while, all you can make are things that are temporarily useful. While the memory, the thought-habit, of God's primary creation is still present, as it is the West now, things of lesser good can still be made; but soon, all effort turns to things that can be used for domination. And not just domination of the State over individuals, but also the domination of the weak over the weaker (e.g., abortion on demand, and the killing of human embryos for potential disease therapies). This, after all, was what Lucifer chose when he rebelled: better to reign in Hell, as Milton so colorfully gave him to say -- where I can dominate everyone and everything around me with my own demi-god inventions, according to my own lights and rules -- than serve in Heaven. Than acknowledge that God is God, and I am not.

Lucifer's choice was the Soviet choice. They were great (though ultimately not great enough) at the tools of domination and control, but they gave up all else to get that. And still they failed.

Which is why there's a very practical side to preserving and even expanding the acknowledgment of God -- and specifically, God as Christian faith understands Him -- in public life here in our own country. If we too study to forget God, to drive all mention of Him out of public life, we too will have made that same choice. And we'll go down that same road that took Lucifer to Hell, and the Soviets to the ash heap of history.

We'll give up God, who is everything, to get something -- and we'll end up with nothing.

Corpus Christi at St. Thomas

What a musical delight at St. Thomas Aquinas for Corpus Christi today (oops, sorry, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ):

Josquin des Prez, Missa Pange lingua
Gregorian sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem
William Byrd, Ave verum Corpus (motet)
O salutaris Hostia at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament
Pange lingua (eight verses!) during the procession of the Blessed Sacrament
Holy God, we praise Thy Name (in four part harmony!) at the dismissal

Poor St. Athanasius

We went to a local Episcopalian church this morning to hear a friend play her flute at the service. It's actually kind of educational, because it points out to me, every time we go there, why Episcopalianism is doomed.

The priest really seemed to be trying to preach a good, encouraging sermon about the importance of the Trinity. He clearly seemed to think that the Trinity was A Good Thing, sort of. Unfortunately, he seemed very hazy about why it was, or why it would make any difference to anyone.

I knew we were in trouble when he got the congregation to turn to the Athanasian Creed in the back of the Book of Common Prayer (and Catholics take note: why don't our missals have the Athanasian Creed in them?), and provoked a laugh -- a laugh -- with his reading of this sentence:

As also there are not Three Uncreated, nor Three Incomprehensibles, but One Uncreated, and One Uncomprehensible.

It was as if there were two people at war in the guy's mind: one who revered the mystery, and one who felt it was his modernist duty to say, Who can understand this stuff?

Ah, but he did get in a dig at Dick Cheney in the same sermon. Don't ask me how.

So, poor St. Athanasius. He fought hard for what we now take for granted as the orthodox view of the Holy Trinity, at, as they say, considerable personal inconvenience. His championing of our Catholic understanding of the Trinity saved Western Europe from Arianism, which, as Hilaire Belloc proposed, would have left us with more or less the same worldview as Islam. But for all that, he sure didn't get much respect this morning.

This Episcopal priest just seemed to be unable to make up his mind. Which pretty much sums up my impression of the Episcopal Church at large. Which is why it's doomed.

What a surprise

Charles Rust-Tierney, president of the Virginia ACLU until 2005 and a member of its Board until the day of his arrest, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for possession of some particularly nasty child pornography which, bright fellow that he is, he had purchased using his own credit card and using his real name.

He had been in jail since his arrest earlier this year, because two separate judges in pretrial hearings had rejected his request for freedom, describing the pornography as some of the most sickening they ever had encountered.

Mr. Rust-Tierney wasn't content to enjoy his interests himself. He worked hard to make them available to everyone:

It was Rust-Tierney who, nearly 10 years ago, had argued before the Loudoun County Library Board against any Internet filters on the computers at the public facility.

The library, which had been using filters on its computers, was ordered to change its policy by a federal court.

Coverage of this story by the New York Times and NBC: zero. The WorldNet story cited reports that even when the story is mentioned, the guy's connection with the ACLU is, well, overlooked.

Due to space and time constraints, I'm sure.