The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

March 11, 2009 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

In most Catholic communities there is debate over the worship music. With the range of music available for churches it’s no wonder that there are differing opinions. The vast range of tastes reflects the vast range of music types.

What we must do is trying to choose liturgical music is sort out some basic questions: First of all, what is music at Mass for? It is not to make us feel good or even feel holy. It is to give us voice to worship God. There are secondary functions: it may inspire us. It may help us to express our love for God and our desire to serve him. It may build esprit de corps. It may encourage and uplift us. However, all of these functions, while worthy, are secondary. First of all a hymn is supposed to give us the words and music to worship the Almighty.

If this is correct, then we can therefore judge whether a hymn is successful in doing this. A few basic questions can be asked: First; are the words of the hymn addressed to God as words of worship? “Praise my Soul the King of heaven” works. “We the people are gathering now etc.” doesn’t. There are some devotional hymns that express personal devotion and work well, but they are better suited as communion or offertory hymns.

Many of the contemporary hymns are faulty in other ways. Many of them quote Scripture. This is worthy in some ways, but it becomes absurd when it is turned into a hymn. “I am the Bread of Life, he who comes to me shall not hunger. I the Lord of sea and sky. I have heard my peoples cry.” These are the words to a popular worship song, but why does it makes sense to sing the words that God speaks to the prophet or words Jesus said to us back to God? This is not worship, it is a musical Bible meditation.

These type of Scripture quotation hymns are often also what I call ‘comfort hymns’. “When you walk through the darkness I will will be with you. Be not afraid. I will bear you up on eagle’s wings. I will always hold you in the hollow of my hand. etc etc.” While these are wonderful Biblical promises, again, they are not hymns of worship directed toward God. They are hymns of comfort directed towards us.

This leads me to the final problem with many of the contemporary worship songs. They are frequently about us, the people of God and our mission in the world. “We can make a difference. We can make a difference, yes we can.” While there is certainly room for some hymns to be about our mission in the world (especially as a recessional hymn) when they are all about us, the community and our mission to change the world it changes divine worship into a sort of pep rally.

When I speak on this topic I am often accused of elitism or snobbery or ‘being Anglican’. Perhaps some of this is true. I would simply counter that I am only trying to do my job, that I am supposed to know something about worship, and I don’t pretend to be an total expert in the field, but I should know a little bit and try to apply it.

On Blaise and Throat Blessings

February 3, 2009 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

I love obscure traditions. Today is St Blaise day and we will Bless Throats with crossed candles. Now I’ve been to church on St Blaise day before and had my throat blessed, but didn’t understand the significance of blessed candles or the point of the blessing. Nobody really explains these things. Neither did they explain whether the candles should be lit or not. (They’re not) I was a bit worried lest a set some girl’s long hair on fire…

When I asked an older Catholic in England said, “It’s the time of the year when everybody catches cold and has a cough, so we bless throats.” OK, maybe, but why bless throats in Turkey or North Africa or Australia? “It’s just a tradition dear…”

It is easy when given such an answer to revert to one’s Protestant roots and dismiss the tradition as ‘just the traditions of men’, (that in itself being another kind of tradition of course) But instead of dismissing traditions we ought to stop and think them through. When something’s been around a long time that means people thought it was worth keeping. We’re fools to throw out the family antiques just because they’re not to our taste.There’s probably something we’re missing.

Then I noticed in some photographs of the enthronement of the new Patriarch of the Russian Church that he’s holding crossed candles. Three in one hand (for the Trinity) and two in the other hand for the dual nature of Christ in the incarnation. OK, I get it. By the virtue of Christ’s incarnation the physical and spiritual come together, so we bless throats with crossed candles.

So why throats? Well, I got thinking further about this, and the throat is where the voice is produced and the voice is the meeting place of the physical and spiritual within us. Voice production is a physical thing, but what comes out? Music and speech, and the content of music and speech is very much a mental and ultimately spiritual thing. So the throat becomes a symbol of the meeting place of the spiritual and physical in us.

This takes place the day after the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple where the physical and spiritual are met in the Christ child physically being presented in the Temple. The Temple of God (Mary) brings God to the Temple of God.

The nice thing is that all of this is really so ordinary. So the music teacher will bring our kids who sing in the chapel choir to have their throats blessed, our theology teachers who express God’s truth to our kids will have their throats blessed, and any others will come to ask God to bless their voices and their words and their song for his glory.

Richard Williamson’s Film Reviews

January 23, 2009 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Distinguished English film critic, Dickie Williamson (not to be confused with the SSPX bishop with a similar name) has published another stunning film review. The Cambridge grad and connoisseur of ecclesiastical fancy dress has this to say about Stephen Spielberg’s famous Schindler’s List:

“My Dear people, benefactors and friends. It is tempting when looking for a serious family film entertainment (either on digitally ‘versatile’ disc or video-tape) to consider a cinematic offering that is historical and inspirational. A ‘friend’ might innocently recommend the film Schindler’s List by the descendent of a survivor of the so-called ‘holocaust’ Stephen Spielberg. It should be obvious that this film is not suitable for family entertainment, and neither is this person a true friend.

Like the Sound of Music it presents a totally false view of the difficult times we refer to as the Second World War. Allow me, for a moment, to discuss this film and thus expose it’s faults. It seems at first to be a serious treatment of a serious subject. The hero, a factory owner named Oskar Schindler, is at first a totally harmless entrepreneur. He is a capitalist and knows how to make a profit, and there is nothing wrong with that. He is also a knowledgeable man of the world. He is, as our Lord has advised, ‘wise as a serpent’. Schindler fits in well with his superiors, and knows how to offer an honest man a job and reward him well. So far no problems.

Then this Schindler (who is portrayed as the hero of the tale) starts to do dishonest things. He disobeys the rightful authority in his native Germany and plots to kidnap Jewish people who are simply trying to earn a living doing an honest hard days’ work. He neglects the patriotic and inspiring motto, “Work shall Make You Free” and takes them away to a factory where they do next to nothing. Before long they are sabotaging their own country’s efforts to repel an invading enemy force.

The film gets worse. Before we know it we are being taken into a total fairyland of unreality. The historical errors this film portrays are mind boggling in the extreme. The trains that took the workers to a well earned vacation at a holiday camp are shown to be cattle cars. The hardworking and happy people are shown being unloaded at a ‘concentration camp’ where the loyal, patriotic (and handsome) German soldiers are portrayed as villains. Most ludicrous of all, the Jewish people are shown being herded into gas chambers and being killed.

It is easy to dismiss this with simple logic. Why would the Germans use perfectly good cattle cars for transporting humans? What did they do with the cattle? Are we supposed to imagine that they put the cattle into first class accommodation? Also there is not a scrap of evidence to prove that Jewish people went into gas chambers. Why would the Germans want to kill millions of people who were working so hard for them? Is this the sort of make believe you want your children to see? I think not.

We must not be surprised that a Jewish person has produced this film and that it has won awards and been praised by the Jewish controlled media men in Hollywood. Their whole plan from the beginning was to attack the Catholic Church and bring down a Catholic culture, and through films like this they portray good, well disciplined people in uniforms as villains and a shifty, disloyal and deceitful man like Oskar Schindler as a hero.

No, this film will rot the very souls and minds of our young people. Steer clear of it my dear people!

You won’t want to miss Dickie’s review of the seriously sick Sound of Music. For his review of the ‘practically pornographic in every way’ Mary Poppins click here.

and don’t miss how he makes a dog’s dinner of Lassie.

Beauty and Truth

December 18, 2008 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Anglo Catholic blogger Jeffrey Steel writes about the need for beautiful music in the liturgy. He quotes Pope Benedict XVI who criticizes music that is chosen merely for its ‘usefulness’:

A Church which only makes use of ‘utility’ music has fallen for what is, in fact, useless. She too becomes ineffectual. For her mission is a fair higher one…The Church must not settle down with what is merely comfortable and serviceable at the parish level; she must arouse the voice of the cosmos and, by glorifying the Creator, elicit the glory of the cosmos itself, making it also glorious, beautiful, habitable and beloved. Next to the saints, the art which the Church has produced is the only real ‘apologia’ for her history…The Church is to transform, improve, ‘humanize’ the world–but how can she do that if at the same time she turns her back on beauty, which is so closely allied to love?

Read the whole blog post here.

O Sapientia

December 17, 2008 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

From the 17th of December until Christmas Eve, the Church’s observance of Advent enters into an intense period of prayerful expectation for the coming of the Lord. This is reflected in the Church’s Great O Antiphons which are appointed to be recited at the Magnificat during Evensong/Vespers. And so today, O Sapientia :

O SAPIENTIA, quae exore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter disponensque omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O WISDOM, which camest out of the mouth of the most High, and reachest from one end to another, mightily, and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence.

The music from the Dominican brothers at Oxford. The text from Anglican Wanderings

Happy Warriors

October 30, 2008 By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

I was listening to talk radio (code for Right wing extremism) in the car the other day. This is my usual fare when not listening to the fundy preachers and country gospel music.

The guy said he was ‘a happy warrior’. It stuck in my mind when reading the epistle today at Mass from Ephesians about putting on the whole armor of God and fighting against principalities and powers and ‘the spiritual forces of wickedness in high places.’ I love that passage–especially at this most supernatural time of the Church year.

Tomorrow is Halloween when we admit that we are fighting against the monsters of the deep, the Leviathan, that great Serpent the Devil, the goblins, the ghoulies, the ghosts and things that go bump in the night. Then we worship with all the saints the next day and sing ‘for all the saints’ in triumphant procession. Next day we pray for the holy souls and offer the sacrifice for their benefit, then through the whole month of November we pray for the dead.

It is like a rich spiritual and supernatural harvest as well as a battlefield. Our weapons are the harvest scythe and sword of the spirit both.

This ‘happy warrior’ battle talk is what makes the faith vital and real for me, and I realize that the perhaps the greatest fault of the modern church is that it has lost the desire or the need to be the church militant. The church has become feminized, emasculated and undone. The great Church militant has become like a soppy old Labrador–only interested in another tidbit and rolling over to have her tummy scratched.

As we head into November and Advent, I’m for a renewal of the battle, a stronger commitment to the spiritual warfare and