G'day,

I'm just touching base and telling you all how things have been since my last music update.
My friend in country New Zealand has settled in well, he has thanked me for the advice you helped me give him and he's excitedly now got a boy's choir of about 15 boys. He has also managed to convince his priest to have a crack at the Latin Mass which is truly exciting.

As for me. Currently I'm filling in for a vacant organist position at my local (incidentally if anybody wants to relocate it's a well paid position.) I was warned that things were pretty liberal but so far I've been able to include chant appropriate for the day (OF of course) and when an elderly parishioner came up to me and hoed into me for choosing "old person hymns" and asked me to "bring in the guitars" the priest stood up and said "You cannot possibly think your suggestion is better than what this choir has to offer us, our YOUTH are singing these OLD PERSON HYMNS!" I've been encouraged to choose traditional music, polyphonic works, and the priest has even asked me for my opinion on how to get rid of the distasteful hymnals in a small cupboard that he found so that nobody requests hymns out of it. I've been getting to various EF masses around the state and discovering a lot more of the underground EF movement. At the last minute on Monday (well okay half an hour before mass) I was able to ask a nice priest if we could turn his low mass into a missa cantata! After 15 minutes of printing and a further 10 minutes of teaching a raw beginner how to sing, we felt pretty calm as an ad hoc choir and with almost no rehearsal by some miracle we pulled it all together.

Late September there will be a short pilgrimage in the country with a new EF community. I am very excited about this as I know that if anybody is keen to join I am more than happy to take up to 4 people from the airport, if you stick around for longer there are also other exciting traditional things going on, this pilgrimage is a preparation pilgrimage for those interested in going to the Christus Rex Pilgrimage.

Next weekend I live a short stint of a Benedict option I'm looking into for 2018. I've been told by the priest that he's found a dismantled altar rail and a small organ both in good condition under the church, please pray that on the weekend I find a real chamber pipe organ that I can reassemble and not some electronic contraption. I don't want to see his face droop into a sorrowful expression.

At present it looks as though Catholic teachers in Catholic schools have been slowly losing their rights to practice their religion fully and offer a Catholic education with a Catholic ethos. I've just been told by a Catholic principal that trying for a job and electing a priest as a referee is risky and decreases your chances of getting the job because most Catholic school principals dislike their parish priest. Music teachers around in local Catholic school circles are being told to update their hymns and hire in "wiggles for church" type organisations which is an instruction from their principals which goes against that of the priest. Is anything similar going on in education around where you are? I would be fascinated to know.