Category: Arts & Culture

For several years, I’ve been bouncing around the idea of helping start a plainchant choir at my parish. Mainly, the idea has been bouncing around in my head, because my desire exceeds the amount of free time I can spare, as well as my expertise (which is pretty much limited to loving chant and having many CDs of early church music).
Then one of the organists at our parish said he would be willing to help coordinate a plainchant group and help with the music. He also knows of one other bass who could sing. This may come to nothing, but if the time commitment isn’t too great, I’m very excited to do it.
Anyone have any advice? How to pick music, how many voices to recruit? Your thoughts will be poured into the empty vessel that is my mind.

More comments on a movie I haven’t seen:
Charles Krauthammer’s column today about “The Passion” is most unfortunate, mostly because he’s wrong, but also because his analysis is one of the most penetrating.
So it is with sadness that I read him saying that “…Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ such a singular act of interreligious aggression. He openly rejects the Vatican II teaching and, using every possible technique of cinematic exaggeration, gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews.” Further, “these deviations [from the written Gospels] point overwhelmingly in a single direction — to the villainy and culpability of the Jews.”
Usually, Krauthammer’s Friday column is worth reading because his analyses are better-written and original than most writers. This column is a tired rehash of points that have been made a thousand times elsewhere, and the writing itself is perfunctory. Saying that Jews “come off rather badly” is completely disingenuous — does Jesus come off badly? How about his mother? Mary Magdalene? Simon of Cyrene? From what I’ve heard, they’re all portrayed sympathetically, and from what I’ve read, they were all…Jews!
What people are really objecting to is not “The Passion” but the Christian understanding of the Crucifixion — that it was an internal Jewish dispute that the Romans were dragged into. Preferring to keep the peace rather than do justice, the local imperial representative ordered Jesus of Nazareth to death.
The only way to call that an anti-Jewish interpretation is if you say that Christ and the members of his movement were not “really” Jews. Perversely, that’s what anti-Semites have done throughout history, and that warped tradition continues to this day. Is he saying that some portion of the Judean population could not have possibly urged the death of Jesus Christ? Or that a Jewish mob, constituting a small percentage of the population, might have urged his death — but we should never mention that fact, even if it is coupled with the teaching that whatever group was the proximate cause of Jesus’ death, we are all ultimately responsible for crucifying Christ because of his sins?
It’s extremely disappointing to see Charles Krauthammer lend his considerable prestige to a false and insulting charge against believing Christians.

British video artist Leo Earle has a clever two-minute Quicktime film about finding God in the midst of doing the dishes.

I thought Catholic theater companies only existed in places that have a Catholic culture: you know, like Poland. Not here in America.
Yes, there was the exception, Leonardo Defilippis, who for a long time seemed to have the Catholic theater niche all to himself, touring from his home base in Oregon.
Now the next generation is coming up. Boston’s Fiat Productions opened Arthur Giron’s Edith Stein tonight. The Epiphany Studio is active in Nebraska, there’s an outfit called “Theophany” in Washington — which I will see on Saturday doing readings from the Pope’s poetry — and San Jose has Quo Vadis, whose founder Cathal Gallagher has also launched a company in LA.
Any more out there?

Two years ago, Mel Gibson said he was going to make a movie about the suffering and death of Christ. The dialogue would be in ancient languages, spoken by obscure actors. People started snickering, saying this was an art-house movie nobody would want to see.
Next, they said people would want to see it, but they’d immediately start bombing synagogues and beating up Jews. The result? None of the major film studios wanted to bankroll the movie, and all the major film distributors rejected it.
On the first day of its release, “The Passion of the Christ” earned back nearly all of its production costs. By Friday, it will start turning a profit. And there are six more Sundays in Lent.
In a serious case of wishful thinking, the New York Times says, “New Film May Harm Gibson’s Career.” Riiiiight. Not with God and Mammon on his side.