[AMERICANTHINKER] I'm not a religious person, but I had the luck to sing Mozart's Requiem Mass in a community chorus, and I suppose I fell in love with it. The Western choral tradition is unbelievably wonderful, which is why Japan has its own dedicated choral society just to sing the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth. If you hadn't noticed, "Western culture" is now global, not because other cultures have been coerced into adopting what the left calls "imperialism," but because humans can't be stopped from loving what they love. European music of the last five centuries is loved all over the web, and it's a willing love and admiration, not a Politburo command.So now I read that the current Pope, who calls himself Francis, is dead set on dumping the Latin Mass.
Well, who cares?
I'm not religious.
But I'm outraged by this Pope's disregard of Mozart, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff, to name only a few.
I don't know why I take this personally, but I do.
In the last century it was the atheist totalitarians who massacred the priests and the devout laity by the millions, Jews, Christians, and Moslems (as in China today). But weirdly enough, in Soviet-era Moscow, the Ministry of Culture kept running fabulous performances of sacred works that even the most malignant ideologues had to admire. They were called "uncultured" if they didn't come to see the heights of Russian and European culture -- which is maybe 90 percent religious in inspiration.
It's tough, but it's true. The Communist elites in Moscow lived a double life (as Russians have always done), the life of politically correct obedience, and the secret life of the heart. Like many Catholics do today.
I don't have a vote in the Catholic world, but I secretly believe that Pope Francis
...Argentine liberation theologist, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He was elected pope in 2013. Rather than setting up shop in Avignon, where he belongs, the first Jesuit Pope chose to reside in the Domus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse instead of the papal apartments. He is big on climate change, against consumerism, and in favor of throwing a blanket over homosexual activity within the clergy. He's not real sure about the Resurrection, about Christ's divinity, and a few other things that would have gotten him burned at the stake a few hundred years ago, but he's hot for a certain South American Earth Mother Goddess...
is the Joe
The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. SOld, boring, a plagiarist, fond of hair sniffing and grabbing the protruding parts of women, and not whatcha call brilliant... or is that an act?...
of the Church.
My total guess as an outsider is that Francis has two big problems with the Latin Mass.
One is that the Mass is in Latin, which people love without knowing why, just as devout Jews love Biblical Hebrew and Moslems love Classical Arabic.
The second problem from the Pope's point of view is that the Mass is a worship ceremony with very ancient roots, going back to the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament, but before that to even more ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian beliefs. Which had even older roots in human cultures emerging, not just 6,000 years ago, but hundreds of thousands of years, as we can tell from sacred gravesites from the early Stone Age onward.
So - Pope Francis is trying to erase and "modernize" human nature, as if he has learned nothing from a century of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the idealistic destroyers who ended up being buried themselves, while their ancient traditions sprang back to life, like prairie grass after a rainstorm.
We buried Khrushchev and not the other way around. Pope Francis apparently did not notice that, but we can.
So, I'm placing my bets on Mozart and his endless creativity, which he believed to be a gift from God. Almost every great composer in Western history composed some final work as a last personal gift, but also as a last prayer for redemption.
Take that, Pope Francis.
The Latin mass was around for most of the Roman Church's history. There wasn't any secret to it. Missals came printed in two columns, the Latin on the left, the local language on the right. If you could read, you could understand. If you went to church on Sunday in New York, you heard the same mass that was being conducted in Rome, Saigon, Oslo, or Goa.There was also continuity; you were participating in the same mass your parents had, your grandparents, your great grandparents and so on.