Latin Mass tonight at St. Mark

There will be a Novus Ordo Latin Requiem Mass tonight at St. Mark in Plano at 7pm.  This is the last Novus Ordo Latin Mass at St. Mark until 12/31.

Oh, I have so very much to share with you dear readers!  I finally found a book that really explains what occurred in the Church after the last Council, a description of the revolution in progress written in the mid-80s, very near the nadir of truly Catholic belief and practice. Much more on that later, I pray!

But, for now, I wanted to add something I spotted at St. Mark recently.  This is not to pick on St. Mark, per se’ as this item was apparently commissioned by the Diocese and may be present at all parishes (I have no idea, I haven’t checked, as I still have, to some degree, a life). The item is an insert in the hymnals of a hymn to mark the 2012-2013 Year of Faith and concommitant celebration of the 50th anniversary of Vatican II.  Here it is:

The author of this piece is Delores Dufner, whose most famous work is “Sing a newchurch” One more traditional Church musician had this to say about Dufner’s work:

If you’ve heard (or sung) the contemporary hymn “Sing a New Church,” have you ever stopped to wonder precisely what “new” church the author meant? And why we need a new church, as we still have such a long way to go in order to fully realize the church Christ gave us?  Father Paul Scalia’s article “Ritus Narcissus,” from the Adoremus Bulletin, addresses the topic and a lot more.  He writes

[the hymn], a triumphalist paean to diversity by Delores Dufner, OSB, also fosters the Cult of Us: Let us bring the gifts that differ And, in splendid, varied ways, Sing a new Church into being, One in faith and love and praise

You’re not going to find the “Cult of Us” in music whose text is the propers of the Mass.  And if I’m not mistaken, Sister Delores is the same person who recently opined in Pastoral Music magazine that musical settings of the psalms didn’t seem “relevant” to people today.  If Scripture no longer seems relevant, the problem is with us, and the solution is not dumbing down the Mass but purifying our tastes and desires.

I fully agree, and the hymn commissioned by the Diocese is redolent of that “Cult of Us” mentioned above.  But that was rather the point, wasn’t it? That was the “new church” the revolutionaries had in mind, a church that shifted focus almost entirely from the mystical, eternal, spiritual Cult of God, and instead focused on the worldly, materialist cult of man.  That most of the revolutionaries had either completely lost the Faith at the time of their revolution after Vatican II, or were well on their way to doing so, only makes the point (if you read some of the writings of those most radical periti just prior to the Council, you will find that many were already denying such core Doctrines as the Incarnation, Resurrection, the historicity of the Gospels, etc, etc.)

Of course, it’s all of a piece.  I had hoped in this Diocese we might be a bit beyond this kind of hippy-dippy, anthropocentric, new age claptrap, but I suppose I was wrong.  But, then again, I don’t know to what degree this commissioned hymn is being used.  Hopefully, parish music directors are ignoring it.

As a final note, such is the nature of Dufner’s work that it appears quite liberally in the hymnals of liberal protestant sects like the methodists, lutherans, episcopalians, etc.