I am pleased to welcome as an official occasional contributor and commentator, The Iron Chicken. I hope (s)he will provide countless hours of wit and amusement or alternatively bitchy comments and unlikely rumours from wherever (s)he hails.
I have a new pocket diary for the Iron Chicken if (s)he could let me know if it is wanted.
If anyone else wishes to become an official occasional contributor and commentator leave a comment and we can discuss a suitable nom de guerre.
Sitting in an internet cafe on the Lisburn Road in Belfast which is a first for me (internet cafe, not being in Belfast). Have just accidentally been at a funeral in a local church - not sure what its called, think its either St Bride's or St Brigid's but may have picked that up wrongly. Modern but not bad apart from silly use of glass toilet type bricks in the roof.
Anyway - music at funerals - Van Morrison singing Brown Eyed Girl. I mean, I know it's Belfast and maybe she had brown eyes but can we not do better than that. Naturally led to floods of tears all round. Actually the whole thing had a kind of staged managed look - Funerals by Franc.
The splendour of the Roman liturgy.
In Tullamore yesterday - if Mullingar is dreary, and believe me it is, Tullamore is worse. And worser still was the delightful dining experience I enjoyed in the Tullamore Court Hotel..
The manageress was a little brusque as the Pope might say. To me she was straight out of Sophies Choice. As I was moved through the buffet I began to plan which of my children I might choose to save.
Then the food - the chicken. I know one is not allowed in any circumstances to compare anything to the holocaust, but the chicken - well lets just say the last time I saw a bird as hard and tasteless as that she was falling out of taxi at 2am in Navan.
My last post mentioned children at Mass and provoked this comment from someone called Mercy:
I think it's wrong of you to be so sarcastic about children on the altar. The Alive-O programme encourages the priest to include them in liturgies like Sunday Eucharist and prayer services. How else are children to learn how to ritualise their lives and see the connection between their experience of Christmas and Christian faith?
Pleased to meet you Mrs Red Rag. Your sincerely Mr Bull.
Firstly I wasn't sarcastic. There was no intention to hurt anyone which I think is key ingredient in sarcasm.
Secondly, anything to do with Alive-O is by definition rubbish - from the cheap cartoon drawings to the silly songs and St Gobnait's bees and the missing underlying theology and respect for children. It is cheap, tawdry, 1970s inspired drivel.
Thirdly, children should be included in liturgy by saying their prayers and by being brought to a deeper understanding of what happens during the Mass. As children they can, if old enough, serve Mass and bring up the gifts. They can take up the collection. But always, like all the faithful, their full and active participation comes from their silent joining with the sacrifice of the priest.
Fourthly, I don't want them to ritualise their lives. I don't want them to equate silly little makey uppy rituals involving stones or leaves or standing round a candle with the liturgy - a ritual which God provides, not man.
Fifthly, I don't want to move from their experience of Christmas to Christian faith. This is the classic Alive-O mistake. We have a revealed religion. The Word of God has come down among us. We don't have to keep making it up again and again.
I had to go to Drogheda yesterday to see a friend in hospital so thought I would get Mass there. A fine example of post-VatII liturgy. Not blatantly awful but enough to remind us why we need the Pope to move ahead with the reform of the Reform.
For a moment I thought we'd moved to Spain and fast forwarded to the the Immaculate Conception. Blue vestments! Trimmed with purple I'll grant but still clearly blue. Then a "blessing" of the Advent wreath. This involved hordes of reluctant children being dragged from their seats to "help" father light the candle - i.e. they stood there while one selected little helper actually helped. And the blessing was typical of modern blessings - i.e. it didn't actually bless the thing - "Lord, bless your people who look at these candles - may they be a sympol of old episodes of Blue Peter when wreaths could be made from coat hangers and tinsel with no thought of dying of smoke inhalation." Father raised his hand in blessing but couldn't quite decide whether to make the sign of the cross over the candles or the people. So he compensated by using lots of incense (which he blessed) and lustral water.
Now the sermon - the sermon was a wonderful example of imagery, bits of quotes, references to things the ordinary person in the pew would get and yet completely empty. I have no idea what it was about. The only thing I can actually recall is that the odds of a white Christmas are 14 to 1.
Communion time - extraordinary ministers appear too early and because they are there one of them goes to the tabernacle and takes out ciboria. and because they are there Father gives them the Body of Christ before he himself has received and they all stand round the altar holding it.
Then the taped music comes on at communion time.
The glory which is the Roman Rite.
Would have liked to have gone back for evening mass but had to get home to Mullingar - 57 miles but two hours in that awful weather. At evening mass bishop was presenting medals Pro ecclesia et pontifice and bene merenti to two old dears.
The Christian world was shocked to its religious roots, today, when the Catholic Church announced that Pope Benedict XVI had been sacked for wearing a cross at work. The Pope had apparently been warned before that the likely consequence of his blatant and outrageous behaviour would result in his dismissal, but he refused to stop wearing his cross on principle.
His holiness had taken his case to an industrial tribunal, but his appeal was rejected on the grounds that the cross was seen as a Christian symbol and as such might give offence to other religious groups.
Senior members of the Vatican announced today that the Pope had been told not to discus the matter with the media and it is thought that his refusal to comply brought about his dismissal.
Supporters of the Pontiff openly expressed their anger today and a vigil was set up. Angry supporters said that it was unfair that other religious leaders were allowed to wear turbans, headscarves and bangles.
The Pope, a devout Christian, said that he would take his case to the European Court for Human Rights, although there seems little hope of success.
A similar case brought about by a British airline check-in operator resulted in her dismissal and at a subsequent trial at the Old Bailey, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The Pope has made a personal plea to Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, to help him in appealing against the decision.
Doing a little mental tour of Irish dioceses to see which is the worst. Achonry is a bad start. Who, apart from those who live there really know where it is? They have about fifty priests and one seminarian. In the good old days the ratio of seminarians to priests was about 1 to 5.
So Achonry, 23 parishes in nowhere, a diocese with no reason to continue and a cathedral in the great cathedral city of Ballaghaderreen. They've had 2 bishops in the last sixty years! Current guy will be going soon. Time to amalgamate that diocese.
And I notice one priest is working on the History of the Diocese - that's gotta be a euphamism for some sort of gardening leave or a hangover from too much celebrating of diversity.
Rumour has it that our old fiend, Iggy O'Donavan, has crossed the line again. Actually in his case he's so far beyond the line that the line is fast disappearing dot.
Seems the august one "concelebrated" a communion service with his anglican buddies in St Peter's Church of Ireland in Drogheda on Sunday 5th November, no doubt heeding someone's call for an oecumenical effort for Remembrance. Remember, remember the 5th of November, O'Donavan, Graham and plots.
And will anything be done? We're told he's lost his job in Rome, but apparently he's now working as a teacher in a girls school in Dundalk or Drogheda. Will Archbishop Brady take some action? Does he know of the latest incident? Do I know of the latest incident? Anyone with any further news leave it in the comment box.
Came upon this quote the other day - from 1923 - sort of struck a chord.
The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous.
...
Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.
Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.
This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.
H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism, October, 1923
