Category: Uncategorized

Marty Haugen ain’t Catholic

I didn’t know Haugen wasn’t Catholic until this past Saturday. He’s Lutheran. Does it strike anyone as odd that his music has permeated Catholic liturgy? To be fair, the Protestants who wrote the awesome Protestant Hymns aren’t Catholic either. But they also haven’t been dumbing-down the faith for the past couple of decades.

I went to the Shrine yesterday

in the wake of July 4th revelry. As I crossed over the 14th Street bridge into the DC I saw a bunch of big boats anchored from the night before. Last year I saw the fireworks from the water on my boat in that very spot. It was worth the experience but even if I still had my boat I wouldn’t do it again. Drunk people stumbling around on land are bad enough. When drunk people are piloting boats on a dark and stormy night you stay off the water.

The Shrine was quiet save from some tourists knocking around with their young children. I had a wonderful confession with an elderly priest and prayed the Rosary in front of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. I also went a little nuts at the bookstore. I bought several copies of Mark Shea’s This is My Body for my Evangelical friends. That was my mini-retreat on my day off.

I requested last week that

I requested last week that you pray for Julie Vantree, a friend of my sister who was suffering from terminal cancer. She passed on on July 4 at 4 am. Thank you all very much for your prayers. Please continue to pray for the repose of her soul. Have a Mass offered for her if you can.

Mailbag

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.