Posted on 09/18/2010 5:21:57 AM PDT by markomalley
As Pope Benedict was heading to the British Isles he was asked if he thinks the Catholic Church needs to change to be more attractive to an increasingly secular British culture.
This is what he said:
Entomology = study of insects
Etymology = study of word origins.
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Whoops.
“Church that is “with it” and “what’s happening now” is at the mercy of the trends of the times.”
If the message is not polluted, and is straight out of the Word I see no problem in attempting to appeal to todays under 40 crowd with updated worship music and family oriented recreational activities.
One does not have to choose one or the other.
A main-line Protestant church is not a good comparison, because that hymnal that you find so old and boring probably doesn’t even date to the 1950s . . . at least 1000 years younger than the Mass. A mere blip on the time line by comparison.
Most of the hymns in that book were written several hundred years ago.
There is no requirement that church be boring.
“I have faith in the gospel as written”
I have faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. The be all and end all. The crucified Prince of Peace.
The one from whom all grace flows. The one who saved my life, literally. But clearly as history shows, two people can read the same thing and understand it differently.
I am neither a doctor, a lawyer or a scientist. Latin is as foreign a language to me as is the “click-click” language of some african tribes.
I guess I like the Biblical education that I receive in a Protestant Church. You do explain things quite well however. Thank you for that.
“You receive the Blessed Sacrament, the Real Presence of Christ at all times?”
That is not what I mean’t and you are clearly intelligent enough to understand that one need not eat a cracker and drink some grape juice in order to have Jesus with them at all times.
You spoke eloquently and succinctly. And did not come close to responding to what I said.
“I go to Mass to honor God and pray.”
Neat, I go to church for the same reasons along with getting an education in His Word. But there is no reason that I can understand that man, through tradition or whatnot must try to make the church experience as boring as possible.
If you “have faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior” then you should believe the Gospel as it records His words. You don’t. You believe in other men’s interpretation of them. That is a defective faith.
Soo....you believe in your own interpretation of His Word?
These ar not words that require intepretation. “This is my body”; “do this in commemoration of me” are not in need of any interpreting. They mean what they say. Similarly, “by works a man is justified; and not by faith only” is a plain statement not in need of “interpreting”.
There are things that separate the Catholic and Orthodox Christians from the Protestant Christians that are a matter of interpretation, but these are not among them. These are a matter of believing the Scripture or not believing it.
I’m so very happy that you celebrate your ignorance.
"Several hundred years ago" rules out most of your typical hymnal content (at a minimum, 1810, before the Second Great Awakening). An Episcopal or Lutheran hymnal will have a few hymns from the 16th century German hymnals, and more 17th and 18th century hymns, usually English in the case of the Episcopalians. The Presbyterians rely heavily on the Scottish Psalter (1650).
But most selections in the typical evangelical hymnal date from after Moody and Sankey (the 1870s).
I find that the older hymns are more literate, more musically coherent and more joyful. "Joy" is different from "fun" - and more appropriate for worship of God.
Read Pope Benedict's take on modern music in church, The Spirit of the Liturgy. He's a scholar and a sensitive musician - and he really hits the nail on the head. Particularly here:
On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. “Rock”, on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), p 148]
The Church’s Tradition has this in mind when it talks about the sober inebriation caused in us by the Holy Spirit. There is always an ultimate sobriety, a deeper rationality, resisting any decline into irrationality and immoderation. We can see what this means in practice if we look at the history of music. The writings of Plato and Aristotle on music show that the Greek world in their time was faced with a choice between two kinds of worship, two different images of God and man. Now what this choice came down to concretely was a choice between two fundamental types of music. On the one hand, there is the music that Plato ascribes, in line with mythology, to Apollo, the god of light and reason. This is the music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness. It does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the senses, and it elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit. Thus this kind of music is an expression of man’s special place in the general structure of being. But then there is the music that Plato ascribes to Marsyas, which we might describe, in terms of cultic history, as “Dionysian”. It drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the senses. The way Plato (and more moderately, Aristotle) allots instruments and keys to one or other of these two kinds of music is now obsolete and may in many respects surprise us. But the Apollonian/Dionysian alternative runs through the whole history of religion and confronts us again today. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), pp. 150-51]
Even allowing for hyperbole, that isn't accurate.
Doctors mostly speak Greek, lawyers speak a bastardized Latin/law French hybrid, and scientists (at least chemists - I'm married to one) have German as their second tongue because that's the language most chemical abstracts are published in.
You speak an awful lot of Latin without recognizing it, because while English is Anglo-Saxon based, it acquired a huge number of Latin-derived words after the Norman Conquest.
In fact, looking back I see all sorts of Latin just in what I've written -- acquire, recognize, accurate, abstract, language, chemical -- and that's without resort to a dictionary.
That's the reason your high school teachers told you that one year of Latin was worth 200 points on the verbal portion of the SAT.
My my, how christian of you.
“Doctors mostly speak Greek”
My doctor mostly speaks english, at least to me.
They can't read the Greek alphabet or even one line of the Bible or the Iliad in the original though. I suppose it's a useful kind of Greek, but not the kind I like. My Latin is really shaky (except for the Ordinary of the Mass and certain of the Psalms and antiphons, which I've learned by heart), but my Greek is good enough to read the Bible in the original. Fun if you want to know What They Really Said.
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