Easter Monday Liturgical Hell in Vienna 2008
Dance, "Go with God". The Recessional Act!
Clap along Mass
(apologies posted first video twice originally!)
Cathcon is recovering from the German TV Mass last Sunday. Rhythym and blues just after the consecration. A feature of decadence is that the participants slide further and further down, without properly realising how decadent they have become. The new Mass is going the same way as Ancient Rome.
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Comments
How different were the liturgical expectations before Vatican II! Even in the strictly human plane, propriety and achievement were indissolubly wed. There is extensive documentary evidence that in the Chapel Royal during the tumultuous and tragic sixteenth century, when the glorious music of Tallis and Byrd was composed for Tudors first Catholic and then Anglican, one's position in the choir was determined by a kind of unionized seniority. Yet there is also evidence suggesting that the senior, hence rather elderly choristers were strongly encouraged to remain silent lest they sour the music and disrupt the congregation's concentration on the liturgy. In the far humbler circumstances of the parish of my own youth, I knew of at least one "elderly" soloist (he was younger then than I am now!) whom the pastor would neither discharge after years of devoted service nor use in exposed solos in missa cantata requiems and nuptial masses. Such a balance between the sacred and the profane is most unlikely to reappear whilst I live and breathe.
I am reminded of Stravinsky's comment apropos his Symphony of Psalms: "One ought to worship God with a little art if one has any." The emphasis, need it be noted, is on worship. What the videos show, however, is an emphasis on ugliness at the expense of beauty, on semipornography at the expense of decorum, and on the secular at the expense of the sacred (to the extent, of course, that the Novus Ordo Missae may be spoken of as sacred in any sense).
In the words of the Tenebrae psalm, "Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvRRZkzu7Ok
uuugh!