This may drive some of you to despair

Yes, indeed. Their blend, intonation and phrasing is spot on. The diction is exemplary and unforced, and their rhythmic flow belies meter. Oh, and no mile-wide wobbling vibrato is discernible. Can they come to California?

it just doesn't belong in my parish where it is completely out of context.

This is what many of us are used to hearing about Latin.

...used to hearing...

So I have heard.
But! There is a fundamental difference of context betwixt importing things from very different cultures than our own for whatever sentiments and in fostering appreciation of what is, in fact, a seminal element of our own culture and heritage. These people have it just exactly backwards. It is the stuff that they foist off on us that is absurdly 'out of context' in our true ecclesial. culture. And, somehow they should be made to comprehend this. And, whilst being polite and respectful, there is no need to cave in, back down, or blink when doing so.

This is what many of us are used to hearing about Latin.

Latin actually fits in our context. There are no problems with it at all.

Imperialist dog!!

Get over it! There's no political correctness here. LOL.

If you knew Sufi, like I know Sufi...

This thread has my head whirling and spinning. I'm going out for Sufi.

I'm getting better now. Found a Sufi in mufti, his moniker, Raffi, caused me to laughie, his fez e'er so spiffy, his orbits not iffy, the tune quite so riffy, I tipped him a fifty!

Latin actually fits in our context. There are no problems with it at all.

Really? With the exception of indigenous Americans and some folks imported against their will from Africa, I would have thought that most people in the US of A are descended from those who explicitly rejected European culture and crossed a big wide ocean to get away from it.

I would have thought that most people in the US of A are descended from those who explicitly rejected European culture and crossed a big wide ocean to get away from it.

Not necessarily. My ancestors, like many who came to the U.S. prior to 1800, did not leave Europe to escape western culture. They came for economic reasons and to escape the politics and management of a rigid class system. Granted, what passes for any kind of culture today is enslaved to political correctness and has seriously deviated from its authentic cultural beginnings. The Church which was once a bastion of western culture is now busy navel gazing and letting the inmates run the asylum.

such as the Spanish and some Orientals

People can have strange notions of what exactly counts as 'European'. Kastner strikes me as a bit apologetic when he describes the Iberian organ tradition as a phenomenon of "extreme Western civilization", and I bet a 'real' Anglo would be horrified to be called a European and lumped with continentals. Old world continentals, I mean ;-)

Well, certainly there were many, many immigrants who came voluntarily to the USA to erase their particular pasts (including family connections) - and not because those pasts were shameful, but because they knew that they could easily do this in America (it was incredibly easy to invent a new self - more than once!). The allure of freedom from the past was one of the most important selling points of America to the rest of the world (it still is, though diminished from what it was a century ago). *That* dream is very much a part of American culture.

The great American cinematic opera - the Godfather trilogy - opens with a pregnant scene about when this dream *fails*. The entire theme of the story is built on it. An immigrant thinks he was finally free of the handcuffs of the patron-client relationships that were the social foundation of the pre-Industrial world. But it was not so. "I believe in America." ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIBpHO1gZgQ

America has a rich culture - it's just not yet been ossified/amberized. It's not only European/Western. It's also very much built on indigenous cultures (even with genocide) and African cultures (not only even with, but because of, enslavement and what it enabled). As some Europeans like to point out, white Americans tend to be in denial about how non-"white" they are, culturally speaking.

I am very familiar with immigrants: I am one, and I deliberately choose to hang out with others. By the 2nd generation, what is honoured is the memory of the culture as it was, not the current living state of the culture. By the 3rd generation, it's gone except out of politeness to the grandparents. People have thoroughly adapted to the new location.

Most people only realise that when they try going back and realise that they share nothing of the attitudes and world-view of the old country. If those who see themselves as colonials tried to go "home" today
1) they would most likely not be allowed due to immigration restrictions
2) They would be unlikely to handle the class structures, "civil liberties restrictions" (as Americans see them) and pan-country agenda that are part of life in Europe,

White Americans are caucasian, not european.

in all of Europe--is Judaeo-Christian.

The drastic difference between the Christianities (and cultures) of Western European, Eastern European, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, India, and elsewhere suggests (to me, at least) that "Judeo-Christian" is not a specific enough description for the culture historically referred to as "Western."

Are you then, Adam, wishing to assert that there really is no such thing as 'Western Culture'? That the vaunted 'Judeo-Christian' and 'Graeco-Roman' basis of this supposed culture (or, perhaps we should say 'community of kindred cultures'?) is a myth? I'm attempting to ask this with a formally unbiased frame of mind, but suggest that if such is your intention you must needs demonstrate that there are no cultural binders amongst those nation states which logically would constitute this amorphous civilisation; such as art, literature, especially philosophy, musical patrimony, architectural styles, technological achievements, rule of law, and so on, not to omit religious experience (this last is, admittedly difficult due to 'the West's' religious fragmentation - though 'it' remains, at least [less and less] formally, a 'Christian' entity). I eagerly await your development of this interesting assertion. Of course, it is granted that there are within this culture-civilisation manifest differences between the binders mentioned above. This is what happens when one puts anything under a microscope. But, I think that you have your hands full if, removing the specimen from the microscope, you didn't notice that there are, and have been for many centuries, as many defining similarities as incidental differences, plus quite obvious and defining differences between this and other culture-civilisations.

It is pretty common knowledge that the occidental and oriental minds work in very different ways, and this doesn't even give consideration to the uniqueness of the African mind, the Amerind mind, and others.

And, Richard, I don't think that any of us really wishes to use our cultural affinities as a stick to beat 'that other Abrahamic tradition', or Christian Arabs, or anyone else. May they, both and all, be blest - they are what they are (which is admirable), but they are not 'western'; nor do they intend to be. (And, some of them beat us with their sticks - lest we think that anyone on this planet remains in a state of original grace.)

admiration for the Judaeo-Christian tradition implies honoring BOTH of those elements. The only other "Abrahamic" tradition (self-claimed, by the way) is that of Mohammed.

Not to mention the discourses of St. John Bosco.
OTOH, as I mirthfully coined earlier, the Sufi tradition has admirable features and qualities.

Interesting, Richard, about Orwell and all. Thanks. Very illuminating as we dance around that altar of culture.

Now for the win...bring this back...

Um, maybe didn't Judaeo-Christians and corner grocers dance in the 16th century? Some may have done so in churches in Spain?

...I did already...

Yes But! They didn't do it in front of an altar.
Why, they don't even have altars.

(I witnessed some dervishes once, here in Houston. Quite remarkable, deeply moving, the moreso precisely because their dance is prayer expressed as dance. But not on an altar - something tells me that the dervishes would know better.)

The more one looks at it, Adam, using 'Judaeo-Christian' as a presumed synonym for 'Western Culture' (whatever we mean by that) does, indeed, present difficulties. Not the least because Christianity is by definition 'Judaeo-Christian' wherever it flourishes or is persecuted. This may be in Africa, India, China, and so forth. The culture of Christians, to the extent that it can 'flourish' in these places is a 'Judaeo-Christian' one, albeit not a Western one. Perhaps it is profitable that you have brought this matter up. Still, though, we may assert (more lamely as the years pass) that Western Culture is a (as in one of several) 'Judaeo-Christian' culture. We may, though, lay a better claim to being 'Graeco-Roman' - at least in our philosophical foundations and intellectual formation, and in the basic premises of our law, not to mention the formal kinship between our arts and crafts, fine, literary, and otherwise.

I suppose one could write a doctoral thesis or author a magisterial tome about just exactly what is and is not 'Western Culture'. We, here, could but banter over bits and pieces of it, aspects of it, various manifestations of it, but not arrive at a scholastically respectable definition - if such a definition has an objective existence.

Compounding the matter are places or states which seem to share this 'Western Culture' but do not identify as 'Western'. Russia is a prime example. It is 'western' culturally, but not, at least according to its current czar um, president, by political kinship and social assimilation 'western'. And this does not address significant 'oriental' traits and paranoias in the Russian psyche. There are many such states in the world; and many overlapping facets of identity; and many which appear through their technology to be just like 'us', but are far from subscribing to the philosophy of human values that are essential to 'Western' identity. Then there is Australia at the bottom of the world. Definitely not 'western', but indubitably a key member of 'the west' and 'Western Culture'. I'll stop here before I get carried away. You have touched on an extremely complex complex of ideas.

Probably, though, all these cultures do dance, and have been doing so at least since the 16th century - but not in front of altars. (There!)

The most realistic term I have heard to describe European culture is "post-Christian."

W and I went on a nine day pilgrimage to Rome in early February this year. A sort of profound disappointment weighed upon us regarding the obvious lack of usage that the myriad churches/basilicas etc. receive by the populace. So much so, I remarked afterwards, "were it only possible to teleport these magnificent buildings to the USA so we wouldn't have to worship in pre-fab cafeteria-boxes." We're no where's near Rome in terms of lack of practicing catholics in my estimation. No wonder folks blithely give up (figuratively) edifices like Maria Maggiore to be mosques, they're totally disconnected.

Those magnificent buildings, transported to the USA a la the House of Loretto, would loose essential character. They are of a piece with their current placement AND people. Stick an American congregation in, say, Santa Sabina By The Marina, and it would not be what it is in Rome even with a sparse congregation. It *is* a quintessentially American thing to imagine the differences would not matter so much, however. A Roman would know better.

Just so long as we understand that the American Catholic pragmatic impulse for church architecture dates to circa 1929 rather that 1965.

Here's an immigrant church from Boston from the 1880s:

http://www.ballets-russes.com/images/PWH_5729_s.jpeg

By the 1930s, new churches were cookie-cutter historicist ripoffs with catalog art; with the vast expansion of parishes and parochial schools after WW2 (before Vatican II), began the direct plunge into even sparer and more functional "spaces" (because schools were prioritized over churches) with war surplus early on.... A generation of getting by without investing in beauty taught a hard lesson that bishops and pastors have been reluctant to unlearn ever since.

We are not at a loss for magnificent churches in this country, and some are, in addition to being 'magnificent', fine architecture. Unlike the Europeans, though, it seems to be likely that if they are as sparsely (or even, in too many cases, not near as sparsely) attended they will be closed (over the protesting pleas of their congregations), delivered to the wrecker's ball, and replaced with something that 'makes money'. That's the difference between the European and the American mentality.

(So, there is no question of dancing in them, certainly not in the 16th century.)

Dad29, I would go even earlier for that displacement. I am thinking 18th-Century Enlightenment folks who had already left Christianity for any practical purposes. No, those Masons didn't just run children's hospitals at the time, but had a much darker focus - the destabilization of the Church and government. To a great degree, they succeeded. What victories over the Church they couldn't win in the past, good old Paul VI and cronies handed them in the 1960s.