Author: John Schultz

Haugen is getting more column inches in this blog than the cooked-up Bush/Cheney business ethics stories in the Washington Post. Can we agree this needs to stop?
I will get the last word though: If you need to give a hymn-text writer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to interpreting the text then it’s obviously not clear enough. And how can you pray when the text lacks clarity?

Ever called your parish to speak to a priest and have a curt secretary tell you he’s on retreat? Makes you think maybe they need a retreat for parish secretaries.
Schedule for the Day of Recollection for Parish Secretaries
9:30am Arrive St. Agnes Retreat Center
10:00am Welcome
10:10am Ice breaker: “Who moved my cheese?”
10:30am First Talk: “How Would Christ Answer the Phone If He Had 167 Calls Per Day Asking for the Mass Schedule”
11:30am Small Group Discussion: “If I Could Be A Gazelle, How Far Would I Run From The Parish Offices Before Returning?”
12:00pm Brown Bag Lunch and Errand of Your Choice: Pharmacy, Library or Catholic Book Store
1:15pm Second Talk: “Dealing With Nuns In Leotards”
2:00pm Small Group Discussion: “Do You Want to Smack the Nun with the Front or the Back of Your Hand?”
2:20pm Nap
2:45pm Third Talk: “I Might Wear A Leotard, But I Run A Tight Retreat Center Here at St. Agnes”
3:30pm Small Group Discussion: “Why is That Nun Such A Sourpuss?”
4:00pm Sending Forth: “Go Forth and Make A Healthy Dinner For Your Family Before Tuning In To Murder She Wrote”

Got this on the 4th of July.
A vernacular Mass can be reverent and an occasion for Heaven and earth uniting in praise. The operative word is that it can be.
True, true.
However, in this discussion one should remember that we should not have to “educate” people to like Latin, it is the language of the Church. For an English speaker/Spanish speaker it is just a snap to learn enough of it to make the ordinary parts of the Mass easily understandable. (Once I read a Jewish person commenting respectfully about Catholics because they too use a language in worship that is not usually part of every day life.)
You say, “Should not have to” but the fact is, due to the fact that Latin use in the Liturgy was run out on a rail there’s a huge amount of people who are abysmally ignorant of the roots of Catholic tradition. If you ask them the accomplishments of Vatican II, they will say it did away with Latin in the Mass. I’ll address the reason why they have this feeling below, the point here is we are at a point where the average Catholic is just plain ignorant of the why’s and wherefore’s of many things. We shouldn’t have to educate cradle Catholic adults about the Real Presence. We shouldn’t have to educate them about the authority of the Pope. We shouldn’t have to educate them about the Biblical foundation for confession to a priest. But we do, and the reason is the “average” Catholic can be very far from the Church and her teachings.
So we have to educate people about the beauty of Latin, the history and the fact that there’s something sacred in having the Mass be celebrated in a language other than the one you use to make grocery list.
It is no secret that the banishment of Latin from the liturgy is a cultural assault on the Church by fith-columnists calling themselves Catholic. They know perfectly well how distructive [sic] it is. They know very well that as long as it is in use the improvisations will continue. They know that going back to Latin is just a code word for recovering the sacred. They want no part of it. John, you cannot educate the committed ideologues. You are wasting your time. It is analogous to educating the cocaine edict [sic] about the benefits of sobriety. They hate being sober. That is why they are edicted. [sic] I am afraid what you are proposing is musical social work.
I’ll grant you the point that there are people that have an agenda and I’ll also agree with you that the nun in the leotard cannot be reasoned with.
But this is where lots of folks who enjoy Latin Mass run into trouble: they look down on 98% of their American Catholic counterparts as woefully informed and participating in a 2nd class Mass. They are not the coke addicts. They need to get some music with a sacred character back into the repertoire and the only way to do that is to gradually phase those works in, to explain patiently to people who come up to you after you’ve sung Latin chants at a Sunday Mass that they are the words have the same meaning as the English sung week after week, but these melodies are hundreds of years old and are meant to transcend our culture. You call it musical social work, I call it patient evangelization – it’s the same thing we are all called to do – by the grace of God we plant seeds that germinate over time.
If one doesn’t take that approach, all we have in an us vs. them mentality.

Hey, I’m for a certain amount of ecumenism in music, but there’s no need for slumming. Proulx si’, Haugen no’!
For those of you who don’t know, Richard Proulx is a composer and arranger who has written some great stuff, including an arrangement of “O God Beyond All Praising” based on some hymn tune that I can’t recall right now because it’s 100 degrees in Washington DC. In any case, I highly recommend his work. GIA has published a bunch.