I think the hymns are here to stay. I remember that hymns were sung before Vatican II, so they are nothing new. All that I think we can realistically do is select the best of the hymns out there.

I want

.

And that's pretty much a dead letter, as it is a rare bishop who wants to ]whitelist music or effectively blacklist music by failing to whitelist music in specific terms. The exceptions remain conspicuously rare. Even under B16, the appetite for taking this on on the part of some Curial staff and officials vastly exceeded the means. Catholics have not had a canonical obligation since 1983 to stick with their territorial parish if they prefer alternatives. A universal widget of sorts.

Not getting the EF and OF calendars in sync has made adapting music from one to the other difficult, sometimes nearly impossible.

if the bishops could screw up their courage to exercise the teaching role which the church requires of them, the church might gradually recover

Unicorns, pixy dust, peace for all!!

They are currently occupied exercising the role of keeping cash-flow positive for Catholic Charities. They are unavailable for other teaching stuff.

Ah yes, R. E. Lee, the great culture warrior. Around San Francisco churches have been keeping their heads pretty low, so it was something of a surprise for me to drive north for the eclipse and see that Oregon church marquees were without exception variations on "White supremacy is Sin. Say it".

If it's safe yet to return to music, I find it encouraging to see Palestrina and Mozart in the same breath.

?

http://www.usccb.org/news/2017/17-144.cfm

?

Of course, the Catholic church destroyed art (even sacred art) long before the 20th century (e.g., Old St Peter's - a destruction that came with a particularly high price).

But I am curious which Catholic bishops specifically demanded that racist monuments (no scare quotes) be pulled down.

I would note, as someone who lived in Charlottesville while in college starting in the late '70s (a time when Catholics were, if memory serves, in the single digit %% of the overall population of the Diocese of Richmond - my only experience, and it was most interesting, of being in what was a fringe denomination locally) and was horrified by what happened at the University and in downtown C-ville, the issue of two of the monuments in prominent locations in downtown was being addressed by normal civil law processes (a proposal to move them to a larger park north of downtown was stayed pending the resolution of a lawsuit about the law applying to the proposal). And Charlottesville, despite its current image as a liberal college town, had a darker history well within living memory (it was one of the citadels of Virginia's "Massive Resistance" to integration, among many other things) of its longtime residents.

To get back to sacred music, one lesson I learned long ago in the trenches of music ministry was never, ever to assume a person's political views corresponded to what you'd imagine their preferred liturgical/musical praxis likely was.

"What is so absurdly nutty about all the protesting, is that no one alive suffered what they are protesting."

Quite wrong - the monuments are not just about the Civil War's four years. Jim Crow - and the use of the Lost Cause mythos to reinforce it - was quite within living memory. Indeed, from what I can tell, the mythos is yet alive.

So it wasn't bishops. (So which one was it, and what specifically did he say?)

And America's cultural heritage includes things that monuments were purpose-designed to elide. I would strongly caution against linking the secular monuments issues too quickly to matters Catholic. (And, to be clear about how I see those issues, I think they are best addressed on a local case-by-case basis, as they can vary considerably.)

One of the more interesting secular liturgical events in Charlottesville was the dusk vigil at the University organized by word of mouth without use of social media on the evening after the funeral of Heather Heyer. It began in the same place (which is, oddly perhaps to outsiders, called Nameless Field) where the white nationalists began their conniving (because they had misled the University about the nature, size and placement of what they really were going to do) march five nights earlier. Instead of a torch-lit march, the much large group of vigilers re-traced the steps of the marchers/shouters, but in candlelit procession with spirituals/hymns/songs replacing the chants of "Jews will not replace us" of five nights earlier. (I could imagine Our Lady of Lourdes giving Mr Jefferson a nudge in the ribs and noting the value of the liturgical impulse he poo-pooed in life.)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHZ2nFUUMAEiMYF.jpg

Julie

I am quite aware of that case but, as I said, case by case. Just remember, the KKK and many other organizations of a similar spirit in the era in which many monuments went up were murderously anti-Catholic, more so than even current rabid secularists. The telescoping of historical memory operates on both sides of the ledger (in another case of elided historical memory, most people today are unaware of how influential the KKK was in the 1920s on the eastern half of Long Island, one of its redoubts of that era).

That would, were it to come to pass, be a case in point (which is remote, given it's under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, and the mayor's response about that was general blather about the city's review process in response to a question from press about the issue raised by a city councilor). But case by case. I think you overstate things much.

But which bishop, and what specifically did he say?

Quite wrong - the monuments are not just about the Civil War's four years. Jim Crow - and the use of the Lost Cause mythos to reinforce it - was quite within living memory. Indeed, from what I can tell, the mythos is yet alive.

There has always been some racism somewhere in the world. Human nature, I suppose. I can just imagine the Babylonians talking about how barbaric and worthless those people from Ninevah were.

Unfortunately, it appears some of the protesters are not educated well enough to understand what they are protesting. It's a mob running wild. Those monuments are to mark a time, place, and the people involved. Some of these snowflake protesters who are angry at everything, regardless of whether or not it affected them, should be dealt with much more harshly. Then they might grow up.

I read recently of a mob burning a statue of Lincoln over slavery. They were too dumb and stupid to know who Lincoln actually was. Was that in Chicago? If so, it is not a ringing endorsement of the quality of schools there.

This is what I saw

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Abe-Lincoln-Statue-Burned-on-Chicagos-South-Side-440897443.html

Then a couple of national news outlets and some newspapers picked it up. They may have elaborated on it, who knows? But I wouldn't consider Snopes to be that objective. They have a political agenda, too.

I'm not surprised at anything crazy coming from Berkeley. Seems like a lot of bad stuff starts there.

http://yellowhammernews.com/faithandculture/chicago-lincoln-statue-burned-will-history-go-flames-well-dbruce/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/17/abraham-lincoln-monument-torched-in-chicago-an-abs/

http://freebeacon.com/politics/chicago-pol-blames-trump-burned-lincoln-bust/

As you can see, the descriptions were all over the place. I also saw it on one of the cable news channels and they took the mob position, too.

"Unfortunately, it appears some of the protesters are not educated well enough to understand what they are protesting. It's a mob running wild. Those monuments are to mark a time, place, and the people involved. Some of these snowflake protesters who are angry at everything, regardless of whether or not it affected them, should be dealt with much more harshly. Then they might grow up."

Well, that likewise serves as an interesting additional characterization of the folks protesting to keep the monuments in place in Charlottesville . . . .

It may be that JulieColl is referring to the Bishop of Brooklyn who stated that 'racism is the pre-eminent sin of the Church and our nation.'

Well, that's his opinion.

Well, preeminence has two shades of meaning, one of which encompasses importance in relative order of time - foundational, as it were.

Well, preeminence has two shades of meaning, one of which encompasses importance in relative order of time - foundational, as it were.

It does. First the press ginned up Russia with little or no foundation in reality. Now it is Confederate "monuments," many of which are historic battlefield markers and memorials to fallen soldiers. They are not monuments or celebrations of the Confederacy. What next?

Julie

Except that wounds have remained open in many places, just being largely ignored.

Economic decline and hardship hasn't helped those situations. Higher paying jobs and opportunities for all Americans would help a great deal.

BTW, another case of misdirected statue hate, this time a Revolutionary War Hero, Colonel Crawford: https://twitter.com/WesleyGoodman/status/901131905642487808

Fortunate? Maybe. I live in a "Union" area and my great-great grandfather fought on the Union side. East TN did not support the Confederacy and did everything it could to undermine it. No plantations in this rocky, mountainous area, but a different culture existed and still does.

I can point to a historic black college that is now closed, partly because it didn't want to admit white students. This was at a time when black students were welcomed at state colleges, and at a lower cost. This black college could have admitted some white students but refused to do so as its enrollment dwindled.

I'm not sure you can compare California prices and heavy-handed liberal government to other areas. California is an aberration to the rest of us and our situation is different. Some good-paying opportunities would improve the lot of many a black and white youth.

Julie

And my school district (and my elementary and middle school's boundaries both) included the heavily African-American neighborhood of North Amityville just across the county line, where red-lining had largely ghettoized them. All was not well then, and for a while I had a playmate friend there.

I can still remember a neighbor approaching my mother circa 1970 to sign a petition to boycott local realtors who were showing homes on our lily-white side of the county line to negroes (well, that was the polite word then), and my mother, who had championed integration since her high school days in the late 1930s, asked who those realtors were, so she could hire them when time came to sell our house. (My own neighborhood was largely Irish- and German- Catholic when it arose over former woods and farmland in 1952, and some original residents were somewhat sniffy about the advent of too many Italian-Americans from Da Boroughs a generation later, who in turn felt the same way about the many Salvadorans who arrived another generation later. The original New Englanders who settled in the 18th century would have sniffed at all of them - and, by the 1920s, worse. Those were the days of building parkway bridges low enough to prevent buses of mosaics of city folk from enjoying eastward excursions. Anyway, I can remember that, in my excellent high school, four kids were killed circa 1974 when Mafia-affiliated high school drug dealers targeted non-Mafia drug dealers who were not challenged in the melanin department, shall we say. Drug use knew no class boundary then; the first time I was approached with drugs in the early 1970s, the 12 year old dealer was the child of a very upper middle class architect. Those were the years when our county police would invade homes and rip off wallboard and panelling to find drugs, but this kid's home sat just over the border from their jurisdiction. His county police would instead focus on the black homes just across Rte 110.)

Charles,

My point was not to demonstrate that California is an aberration -- it is in many ways, and neither you nor anyone else needs that demonstrated to you. My point was, rather, to dispute the notion that higher wages would make life more peaceful.