Thursday, August 2, 2007

OK - SO THIS IS JUST FOR LAUGHS...

I really thought this Jeff Harmon article at Agnus Daily was serious until I saw it posted by Argent under the humor category.

With Pope Benedict the XVI’s Summorum pontificum and Motu Proprio, the preconciliar Tridentine Mass seems as though it will be resurrected despite the concerns of many Catholics. Is the return of the Latin mass good for the Church? I disagree, and I’ll give you three reasons why it’s not, and why its implementation is doomed to fail.

1. Nobody understands Latin (and we're too damn stupid to simply pick up the Latin/English Missal that's most likely provided to us when we enter the church proper)
While many Catholics today attend mass in a zombie-like stupor even with a liturgy in their own language, imagine would happen when their common vernacular is ripped from them as a pacifier is torn from a newborn baby’s gummy mouth. Utter chaos my friends. Zombie-Catholics will turn into vegetables (which is still better than turning into fruits), and parishioners will have to be pulled out of each mass on stretchers. (Their souls are just too fixed to the Lord, dontcha know?)

I grant the argument that most Catholics don’t understand the mass as it is today anyway is valid, but that’s only because there is not enough liturgical guitar to guide them into spirit-filled worship. (No, but they do understand Mass, with a capital "M". "mass" with a small "m" is a term meaning how many molecules are in someone or something.)

2. The Latin Mass lacks guitar
The most beneficial change that came to the Church via “The spirit of Vatican II” was God’s ordained instrument of worship, the guitar. Light, portable, and made of wood, it’s beauty was finally recognized as a means of musical worship (by the folks at NaPalM, of course).

The Latin mass will deny us of this, bringing back organ drenched melodies that the parishioners simply cannot participate in, or relate to. Give me a woman who learned to play guitar last week (or perhaps a habitless nun), and I’ll give you some music to praise the Lord.

3. The Latin Mass is old
Anything that is old has to be bad, or else it wouldn’t be old. To go back to the Tridentine liturgy would be like going back in time, and nobody’s successfully done that except for Michael J. Fox. I am pretty sure he didn’t give the Church a flux capacitor or a DeLorean. The only way you can go back in time.

People want something new. Liturgical dancing, liturgical boxing, and liturgical cooking (and maybe a few other new liturgical innovations censored by the FCC) are the wave of the future - and are among the only means we can reach the parishioners of today who are starving for something more.

Quo Vadis?
We need to keep pressing forward. No more of the backward crazy talk. There are many different additions to the current liturgy that have yet been tried. If we do not at least experiment in new liturgical arenas, then we will never know if they will be successful.

Humor, folks! Humor!
Peace,
BMP

1 comment:

Argent said...

You know what liturgical boxing is, right? It's Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers vying for who'll get the ciborium. Happens every Sunday.

Now liturgical kickboxing...that would be something!