Luke Mohan’s Reviews > Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo: The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture > Status Update

God does not need all the forms of “art” but human beings do: to express praise, thanksgiving, and total bafflement about what it all means.

If some medieval liturgical destruction – Latin, art, music – has been removed from liturgy, the reason given is that the old thing no longer makes sense in the modern world; but in some cases, the old thing is really destroyed because its beauty competes with the centralized individualist’s importance among others…

Use one or two first-class hymnals for the repertory; make sure that the congregation learns simple, “primitive“ chants, hymns, and other music that can stand on its own without accompaniment; on a regular basis, singing at least some music without instrumental support; unplug the microphone…; Keep the repertory stable and “repetitive“.

Why should we put our autonomy aside, why should we “empty ourselves” for this act of worship when the man up front… is not doing that sort of thing?

A Latin mass used to be a form of existentialist tension, in which the worshiper was caught in the paradox of anguish and assurance, the unknowable and the familiar, the enigmatic and the logical – but that is what the spiritual life is all about.

There is so much to be learned from [the high mass]... I am not referring primarily to the old language or the old music at that liturgy but to the old virtue of humility…

The dreamy, casual “Voice of God“ song, without the addition of phrases like, “the Lord said,“ is a radical break with Jewish and Christian tradition.

During the Latin mass “congregational participation” sometimes reached human beings (and helped them to “do good“) not through their craniums but through another part of human anatomy – their gut instincts.

Latin is largely avoided today in Catholic parishes and chapels not because of progress or the church’s new image of itself or the need for greater participation but because so many of Catholicism‘s influential leaders (clergy and laity) no longer believe in an “awesome” God who has entered into history in an “awesome” way.

A pre-Vatican II church emphasized that the Eucharist, the Mass, was a gift to the human race; the liturgy and art that surrounded it were symbols of gratitude for this unending gift. A postconciliar church, in some places, seems to be emphasizing that human beings are the gift…