June 2011 Archives

Looks like John Corapi wants to start a new career in media and public speaking. I don't know if this means anything, but Matt Swaim noticed the other day that Corapi's Twitter account is "following" only one other user: Fox News. Mark Shea says that the priest wants to become Sean Hannity with a deeper voice.

Should we start a pool on how soon he'll get a talk radio show?

Incidentally, I'm thinking it might be best for the Church if he doesn't get to walk away from his vows. No dispensation, no laicization. And maybe even throw in an order against public speaking or publishing for money.

Reason #1: If he's going to play hardball and interfere with the Church's investigation (by demanding that former employees comply with non-disclosure contracts), he shouldn't get any unjustified favors.

Reason #2: Besides, he hasn't presented a persuasive reason to waive his vows.

Reason #3: That is, he hasn't been found guilty of an offense. Not yet, at least.

Reason #4: Can you imagine how Pope John Paul II would regard a laicization request from someone he ordained personally?

Reason #5: If he's going to insist on starting a new media/speaking career, let him not pretend that the Church approves of his abandonment of his vows.

I'm at the Sacred Music Colloquium of the Church Music Association in Pittsburgh, practicing music in one of the five SATB choirs and one of he five Gregorian choirs formed by attendees. Here's an audio excerpt from today's Mass at Epiphany Church, an Agnus Dei from the Missa Brevis by Antonio Lotti, conducted by Horst Buchholz, director of music at the St. Louis Cathedral.

Also, a Panis Angelicus by Claudio Casciolini.

Image via Wikipedia

The great novelist and witness of oppressed Russia Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave his diagnosis of the trouble at the heart of Western culture when he spoke at Harvard on June 8, 1978, and his words are still true today:

• A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.


• The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression


• Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required.... One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint.


• Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence.... Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.


• Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.


• Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.


• A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience.


• In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is.


• Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost, there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development.


• the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance... and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy:...with man seen as the center of everything that exists.


• If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

Fr. Mark Kirby, writer of the Vultus Christi blog, is in Italy for a few weeks, where is to present a talk at the Adoratio conference in Rome. He has some observations on the state of the liturgy in Italy: with priest celebrants omitting the daily Proper texts of the Mass and neglecting to sing, the celebration of the Mass is often impoverished there as much as it is here in the US.

Reflecting on the great letter on sacred music Tra le sollecitudini by Pope St. Pius X, Fr. Kirby offers some suggestions for a new papal letter to revive the practice of the sung Mass, where people and priest sing the real texts of the Mass, and not just songs.