Sing the Mass (Not Hymns AT the Mass)
  • fcbfcb
    Posts: 338
    The Church has a long tradition of tearing down monuments built to figures who were judged (in hindsight) to be morally dubious. Have you seen the Roman Forum?
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  • JulieCollJulieColl
    Posts: 2,465
    LOL, fcb! An excellent point, but in the Renaissance other Churchmen resurrected all the old decapitated statues.
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    Julie

    My eldest brother was married in the Catholic church in Wyandanch in 1979.

    Of course, Levittown, to which my parents originally moved in 1948, originally had restrictive racial covenants. While a US Supreme Court decision rendered them legally nugatory early on, the longstanding practices of mortgage lenders and home insurers achieved largely similar intended results.
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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    I don't necessarily disagree with you Chris as it relates to your area. There are other places where good jobs could make a real difference in the quality of people's lives.
  • JulieCollJulieColl
    Posts: 2,465
    Wyandanch is on the upswing, which is good for the people there. So much potential in that area of Long Island now that the gangs are also being forcibly removed.

    Don't get me started on Levittown, an atrocity of suburban planning, the progenitor of extended societal dysfunction. Talk about artificial constructs as opposed to organic development. The intention was good, but that vision of large isolated islands of suburbia has thankfully pretty much been discredited.
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    While the removal of the Meso-American based gangs has been quite the effort in recent years, it should be noted that the origin of the problem was entirely home-grown, albeit smaller, gangs. I remember seeing the pizzeria owner paying his protection money to the not-so-wunnerful Mafia guy at the rear entrance. I remember the cops bodies being stuffed into their trunks. So, elimination of a terroristic form of gang doesn't mean no gangs. It likely means open space for new ones to fill.... (Zero tolerance, which I remember, effectively also meant much greater opportunities for police and political corruption, which there was tons of as a result.)

    Getting back to matters liturgical, there was but one island of good sacred music praxis in this area of the Guyland back that day, and it was courtesy of Benedictines out of St Leo's Abbey.
  • melofluentmelofluent
    Posts: 4,160
    Makes you wonder what the next "pre-eminent sin" will be after the popularity of racism dies off.

    Most likely "sloth," directed primarily and irrationally at POTUS, despite the reality that the mayor of Houston made the non-evac call.

    My point was, rather, to dispute the notion that (California's) higher wages would make life more peaceful.

    Concurrence from another Californian here, Chris.
    The pathetic sight of black clad (did they all buy their "uniform" at Amazon?) yout' careening about Bezerkley yesterday, acting all ISIS righteous-crazy, is enough to make more sedate residents wonder how they'd ("Antifa") react is encountered by the fully armed real Saracens. I'm pretty sure these idiots only act out because their enlightened parents forbade them playing army or cowboys and Indians when they were scamps.

    PS

    I also suspect they get a little tingly when they verbally self-refer to themselves as "Awn-TEE-fa." It just sounds all so exotic, doncha think?

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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    Most likely "sloth," directed primarily and irrationally at POTUS, despite the reality that the mayor of Houston made the non-evac call.


    I have concluded that evacuating any large city is nearly impossible in a short period of time. Cars break down, not to mention bad drivers, and clog the roads. Some people will not leave unless dragged kicking and screaming. Maybe if you could start a week ahead of time, but then you realize many people have no place to go even if they do leave. Bad situation.

    I think Antifa should stop all the useless crap and go help the people in Houston, if they really want to do something useful. Soros probably wouldn't fund that.
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  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    Well, other countries that have good intercity rail systems are capable of moving people effectively. Witness France and England in WW2. There were voices raised after Katrina about viewing passenger rail as a national security issue, but they were buried in what happened thereafter.
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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    Nothing irks me more than the state of railways in this country. For years, money was funneled into highways and the rails allowed to deteriorate. Huge mistake.
  • JulieCollJulieColl
    Posts: 2,465
    European railways amazing. It's a constant source of frustration that the railroad which is steps away from my house is too expensive to use on a regular basis. I traveled all over the UK for pennies as a teen, but can't afford now to take my kids into Manhattan on the train (at least $125 and no family discount!) very often. Absolutely absurd.
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    Well, America's railways are excellent - if you think in terms of freight rather than passenger rail. That's the rub.
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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    We don't even have passenger rail service in my area. Plenty of freight. Too bad, since I would rather travel by rail than fly.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    As I understand it there was a conscious decision made after The War to eschew a proper national passenger rail service in favour of the interstate free-way system. I think that the military was in favour of this as it would result in better troop movements in time of need. Another benefactor of the free-way system was the auto-mobile car industry. Plus, it made a lot of work for a lot of people in related industries.

    Actually, travelling by rail is far more civilised than by air. Even moreso now, what with the trashy inconvenience of going through the air port inspection regimen. If it weren't for this, air travel would be a pleasure - but not as great a one as rail. Plus, there is the inevitably claustrophobic element of being helpless in an aero-plane several thousand feet up in the air.

    Then there are those who look forward to space travel. I can only imagine that it will be no less pleasurable and tacky than air travel has become - pretty pictures of it notwithsatanding.

    As far as singing hymns at mass - this is not a minus, providing that the mass is sung at mass. To tie these two strands together, what sort of masses can one envision in space?
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  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    Higher paying jobs and opportunities for all Americans would help a great deal.


    Maybe. But what WILL help a great deal is INTACT FAMILIES. That happens to be the first building-block of Leo XIII's social teaching, as it is for any well-ordered society. Thus, the attack on the family (begun in earnest by LBJ in the early 1960's) should be reversed.

    And Bishops should be screaming about it. I'm sure you have heard from them on this topic, no?

    Bueller? Bueller??
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  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    what sort of masses can one envision in space?


    Ethereal?

    Universal?

    Galaxial?
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    Spacey.
  • StimsonInRehabStimsonInRehab
    Posts: 1,928
    Kaiser Souze?
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  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    ...INTACT FAMILIES...

    Avoiding any mention of the currently favoured whipping boys on which to blame the family's demise, I continue to assert that the gravest danger to the 'nuclear' family is due to none of those whipping boys but to 'normal' people - annulments, separations, divorces, wives who cheat on their husbands, husbands who cheat on their wives, abuse of wives, abuse of husbands, abuse of children, children's abuse of parents, abortion, the preposterous notion that fathers have no legal fatherly rights to their unborn children, and the trashy general sins of 'normal' hetero-erotic people. Is it any wonder that in the age of 'throw away' just about everything upon which no real value is placed on much of anything, that unborn children should be just another 'throw away'? I suppose that some (many?) would even murder them after they were born if they could get away with it.
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  • StimsonInRehabStimsonInRehab
    Posts: 1,928
    "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."


    Sorry. This is very off-topic. But I need to bring this up again in order to vent about it. Destroying monuments because they happen to fall on the wrong side of history - to engage in this damnatio memoriae is, without a doubt, the most illiberal and barbaric act I've had the opportunity to see in a long time. I have no sympathy for the white supremacists who are most prominent in this fracas - most of them of a Nietzschean type never sympathetic to Christianity - but to equate gentlemen like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackon (who taught African Americans how to read and write in his Sunday School class, mind you) is gross injustice.

    I'm done with the Antifas of the country. What we need are more Antigones - people who won't stand by and see the memory of their beloved dead kinfolk defaced to suit the current fashionable opinions of the powers that be. Proverbs 23:10 said it best.

    Please, continue. I apologize to interrupt.
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  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    Again, case by case: Charlottesville involved a proposal to *move* the monuments from their central core locations to a nearby park, not destroy them. That's not damnatio memoriae.
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  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    but to 'normal' people - annulments, separations, divorces


    Perhaps I was not clear. We currently have an illegitimacy rate which is around 70% in the black community (compared to 15% in 1960). In whites, it is currently 29%. THIS is the principal "non-intact" family problem

    The causes you list have always been around, of course, but there is an argument that "no-fault" divorce and AFDC payments make divorce a lot more attractive than what it was in the '50's or before.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    I rather agree with Stimson. It isn't altogether just (nor wise!) to obliterate history, however unpleasant it is for those who experienced the wrong side of it. Not to mention the truth of the old 'saw' that 'those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it'. Some in the south were irredeemably cruel and inhuman masters. Others, for their time and place, were more civilised within the context of their culture. Some, many more than 'some', thought of the black man as sub-human, whereas others were of the sort who were wont to say things such as 'we love our Negroes, and they love us'. Some of them really did, and some of them really did - each in his own perverted or emotionally dependent way.

    One of the great anomalies of history, though, is that the US (as in the very United States of America!) was the LAST great power, after France, Britain, Denmark, et al., to abolish not only the slave trade, but slavery itself - and the only one which had to fight a vicious civil war to do so. Truth be known, one of the unmentioned rationales for the American revolution was the fear that England was going to abolish the slave trade - a thing which struck fear amongst all those heroic freedom-loving southern planters (and northern merchant magnates) whose lives and wealth depended on it.

    I must say this. It gives me joy, nay, ecstasy, to see blacks now who have risen so far above that state in which their grandfathers (their great-grandfathers by now) lived as to beggar belief. These are not the people whom I observed as a child who saw his first black people when we moved from Springfield to Houston, crammed in the back of a bus, or cringing at the presence of 'white' people. I hated this nation for the hypocrisy which I witnessed in those closing years before the civil rights movement. I recently saw a young black man (really black - and very handsome) dancing and prancing in joyous non-chalance in full highland regalia at a Scottish highland dance event. Neither he nor anyone else noticed that he was the only black person in their midst. It makes one weep with joy to see how far 'they' - how far we all - have come. It's like Beethoven's ninth symphony dream come true.
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  • melofluentmelofluent
    Posts: 4,160
    It's like Beethoven's ninth symphony dream come true.

    That, and my other dream about the ninth: that sopranos and tenors can actually sing it without endangering their very lives!
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  • Richard MixRichard Mix
    Posts: 2,792
    Hmpf! If it were about remembering history one might suppose Atlanta would have a statue of Sherman by now. Do we even remember what this thread was about?

    I do think it's a pity Antifa didn't borrow from Wunsiedel's playbook but having Nazis and KKK attack bystanders as well as nonviolent picketers last time was bound to rile at least a few citizens. One could probably even find folk in Berkeley who consider the CMAA a nest of antidreyfusard, Franco-apologist monarchists and misfits, but part of my job here (a part that shouldn't be needed) is to prove it ain't necessarily the party of Trump at prayer.
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  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    ...one might suppose...

    Indeed!
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    I never accused you of prayer in the first place.

    That slavery era was the best of times for a few and the worst for many others. It was a different culture and economy based on slave labor. I don't know how long it would have lasted without the war, but my suspicion is that machinery would have eventually replaced human labor as it often does. However, the boll weevil did a successful job of making cotton growing an unsuccessful industry.

    The U.S. did not end slavery, since it is still with us in places around the world. The East India Company essentially enslaved Indian laborers on its tea plantations. Those sugar plantations south of us did the same. Are we now so noble that devoid of machinery and technology, our society, or any other society, would not take advantage of an available labor source ever again? If the money were right, it could happen again somewhere.
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  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    ...it could happen again somewhere.

    It is alive and well in Muslim Africa - Allah the All Merciful notwithstanding.
    I think that it's not a stranger in parts of the orient or certain Pacific nations, nor amongst certain Muslim Arabs.
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  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    (a part that shouldn't be needed)

    alas
  • francis
    Posts: 10,782
    OK y'all.

    I now have freedom to drift from ANY thread from this time forward as I have allowed you carte blanche on mine.
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  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    my suspicion is that machinery would have eventually replaced human labor as it often does


    It could do so in many areas of agriculture but for the near-endless supply of cheap labor. We don't call it "slavery" any more because, after all, the labor is given money. But the term "labor arbitrage" is around for a very good reason.
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  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    it ain't necessarily the party of Trump at prayer.


    Nor the Party of Marx & Engels. Not even in California.
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  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    I believe that it's a matter of record that the economy of the South improved, grew, developed (whatever the appropriate economic term is) exponentially after the war and the end of slavery. I read this somewhere many years ago. Someone here likely knows more about it than I. It is also notable that, until very recent times the South remained an economic infant (in comparison to 'the North') due to a culture which had hardly entered the age of the mechanical or industrial revolution. A state's highways are said to be a fair measure of its wealth. The poorest highways (some of them downright dangerous) on which I ever traveled have been in the South.

    Similarly, it has been said that the knowledge and technology for the development of the machine and steam age existed in the late Classical world but no one even thought of putting it to practical use because of the availability of slave and animal labour. Then, of course, one of the many factors contributing to the disintegration of the Western body politic was a shortage of slave labour, brought about by a general shortage of man power and population. This latter caused legislation binding plantation labourers to the great estates, which was one factor in the evolution of the feudal system. Also, the desperate need for manpower was one factor which led to the allowance, even the welcoming, of the Trojan horse of barbarian amici into the empire.

    OK, y'all....


    Thank you, Francis, for giving us 'carte blanche' on your thread. My remarks are not wholly inapropos, since it was, um, the feudal system that nurtured the culture that gave us chant and polyphony, and continued the tradition of singing the mass.... One may note that the demise of the feudal system and the innovation of saying the mass and singing hymns AT it are suspiciously nearly co-terminal?
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  • francis
    Posts: 10,782
    baloney... but i must admit you can talk a good piece on many a subject even if it smells balognaish
  • francis
    Posts: 10,782
    not fair... you went purple AFTER my astute observation.
  • Chris Garton-Zavesky
    Posts: 6,902
    intercity rail


    I must be too tired, Liam, for I read Inter-racial city systems.

  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,400
    ...AFTER...

    Sorry, Francis -
    Only because it should have been (had to have been?) evident that I was speaking in jest.
    So, I thought a corrective was needed, as if the 'um' wasn't enough. So your observation was astute alright. I'll do better the next time.

    Still though, perhaps there is just a tad of truth to be discerned in the purple words???
  • CHGiffenCHGiffen
    Posts: 5,182
    Just for the record, 13 years ago, after retirement, I moved to Hudson, Wisconsin, after having lived 38 years (then, about 60% of my life) in Charlottesville, Virginia, 35 years of which were spent as a member of the faculty of the University of Virginia. More than perhaps anyone here, I have been profoundly affected, inconsolably saddened, and personally troubled by the events in Charlottesville. Some of the comments that have been made here about these events, although perhaps well meant, have done little, if anything at all, to assuage these feelings.

    The idea or suggestion that the people who protested the presence of white supremacists, neo-nazis, KKK adherents, and other racists were simply "antifa" thugs is entirely erroneous and disingenuous. For, indeed, present day Charlottesville is a vibrant community with a large contingent of deeply peace-loving, non-violent, non-racist, people of various faiths and ethnicity, a very great many of whom protested - and even prayed - not because they look for causes to protest, but rather because they felt morally compelled to stand up against such flagrant racism and bigotry which has no place in our country, let alone in Charlottesville - and this they did: peacefully, not violently.

    Charlottesville's ongoing efforts to come to terms with its history and prominent presence of the statues of Lee and Jackson served as a most unfortunate pretext for the invasion by the hate-mongers who descended on the city, en masse, hell-bent on causing a riot to promote their own outrageously inhumane agendas, which led to the untimely, early, and tragic death of one of the genuinely peace-loving non-violent protesters as well as the injuries to dozens of others.

    More-or-less figuratively, I've "bit my tongue" - until now - over this (and other) issues that have arisen here that seem (at least to me) to be way off base and not pertinent to a forum devoted to sacred music. Perhaps I should have refrained from making these comments, for I have no desire to see this sordid, basically political - and (to some) hurtful - digression continued, especially in this (ostensibly) musical/liturgical thread. But, in good conscience, I could not remain silent on these issues.

    -1
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  • Chris Garton-Zavesky
    Posts: 6,902
    CHGiffen,

    Is it possible -- please, understand I mean it as a sincere inquiry -- that just as some outsiders planned one kind of protest, another kind of outsider (not a peace-loving Charlottesvillager, if that's the right term) stood up just because he (the other outsider) was itching for a fight?

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  • a_f_hawkins
    Posts: 3,451
    CGZ, experience in England shows that is perfectly possible. Now we even have convictions of people who were jailed for riotous behaviour being quashed, because it has been proved that they were in a group infiltrated by undercover police, and that the disturbance was organised by such an agent provocateur!
    Chesterton's "The Man who was Thursday" is a nice wry comment. But set aside a couple of days quiet to recover your sanity.
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    CHG

    And, for good measure, the priming-the-pump exercise that began by misleading University authorities and ended in violence at the University on Friday night was a one-sided matter of violence that didn't involve the antifa. Rather, it appears it was specifically designed to bring the antifa out on Saturday.
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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    stood up just because he (the other outsider) was itching for a fight?


    Yeah, there were thugs on both sides itching for a fight. The police did little to stop any of it and failed miserably in doing their jobs.
  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    ...For, indeed, present day Charlottesville is a vibrant community with a large contingent of deeply peace-loving, non-violent, non-racist, people of various faiths and ethnicity, a very great many of whom protested - and even prayed - not because they look for causes to protest, but rather because they felt morally compelled...


    Good people, on both sides. We are in times of sorrow, indeed.
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  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    I would avoid the false equivalence in terms of publicly manifested behaviors on Friday and Saturday in C-ville. The proportions within each "side" were badly skewed, so it just won't do - it's a form of avoidance of reality.
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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    I stick by what I said, without getting into politically correct liberal equivalence. We had a protest last week - kind of silly since this was a Union area and there are only a few battlefield markers, no monuments. The police blocked off the area, everyone went through a metal detector, no sticks, flags, bottles or anything that could be used as a weapon was allowed in. Also, no face coverings. The police provided water, since it was hot. Barriers both physical and the police were placed between the groups and they were not allowed to have contact with each other. No problems, no violence, and only one arrest - a snowflake who wouldn't turn over something she was trying to carry in. That's how you handle a protest.
  • Chris Garton-Zavesky
    Posts: 6,902
    Liam,

    I don't mean to engage in what you call "false equivalence". One reason I attend the Walk for Life West Coast with a spirit of trepidation is that 50,000 people getting together to be put to one purpose can -- relatively easily -- be put together for another. It doesn't take an equivalent number of agents. On the other hand, I am persuaded that there was evil present on both sides.
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  • Liam
    Posts: 5,069
    That is just a tad bit less shallow way of avoiding.
  • Chris Garton-Zavesky
    Posts: 6,902
    Liam --

    Let's take this off-line, so we don't clutter this board with your attempts to explain what my thick-headedness doesn't seem to be able to grasp.
  • melofluentmelofluent
    Posts: 4,160
    And now for something completely different: I would gladly roll down the least of North Carolina highways over the so-called finest out here in Kalifornia.
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  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,971
    Wish these too easily offended protesters with, apparently, too much idle time on their hands, would consider helping the folks in Texas. Those folks are being hammered and it isn't over yet. Just reading Jackson's post on another thread. What I am seeing on TV is terrible. Kind of makes the "statue" thingy seem irrelevant and foolish.
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