Lutheran (EL
* as of August 19, AD 2009, a liberal protestant SECT, not part of the holy, catholic and apostolic CHURCH.
Veni, Sanctae Spiritus!
Posted on 05/31/2025 12:27:05 PM PDT by lightman
Whoever ‘approved this mockery … should be called upon to resign,’ music composer says
A doctoral student at the University of Nebraska recently orchestrated a drag performance appropriating the Catholic Mass for the final recital of his musical degree.
The performance imitated various parts of the Mass, including the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. It was hosted by Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Two Catholic and conservative advocates told The College Fix that this “mockery” of their faith reveals a double standard in singling out Christianity and highlights a significant lack of academic rigor in university programs.
Doctoral student Joseph Willette said in an Instagram video that the performance “truly feels like the culmination of [his] past couple of years studying music composition as well as gender, sexuality, and queer communities.”
“At the core of this work lies the juxtaposition of the holy and the profane, the sacred and the sinful,” he said.
The “sacred” is represented by the traditional Mass, while the “sinful” is shown in “the queer imagery and art forms,” Willette said.
A video of the performance was posted on YouTube, in which a drag artist can be seen performing near the front of the church while instrumentalists play on stage.
“Mass of Perpetual Indulgence for chamber orchestra, electronics, soprano solo, and drag performer was written to bridge the gap between queerness and spirituality, to sanctify queer people and celebrate our lives and communities,’’ the video description states.
“Amalgamating musical styles ranging from disco to opera, art song to EDM, this appropriation of the traditional Mass blurs the lines between the sacred and the profane,” it states.
Willette earned a doctorate of musical arts in composition at the Glenn Korff School of Music following the performance, according to the school website.
However, conservative critics condemned the performance as a bigoted mockery of the Catholic faith, arguing it should not be accepted by the school.
Peter Kwasniewski, a music composer and former Catholic seminary professor, told The Fix via email that the University of Nebraska academics “who approved this mockery or applauded it should be called upon to resign their positions.”
“What we’re seeing at work is a double standard, rooted in the old anti-Catholic bigotry that stains the history of the United States of America,” he said.
“We know that in any other context whatsoever, a public mockery of anyone’s religion — let’s say, Islam, or Judaism, or Buddhism — would have been vetoed by the faculty and, if not, would have created instant furor and demands for apologies and retributions,” he said.
He also told The Fix that anti-Catholic sentiments on campuses “likely stem from a broader anti-Christian and anti-Western bias driven by revisionist progressives in politics and academia.”
These progressives “perpetuate debunked myths or ‘black legends’ to secure cultural dominance—though they tend to misuse whatever influence they gain,” he said.
Similarly, Minding the Campus editor Jared Gould told The Fix that “the student’s choice to mock a Catholic Mass through a drag performance, rather than, say, reciting a surah of Muhammad in drag, raises questions about selective targeting.”
“Why is Christianity, and specifically the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, so often singled out for such provocations? This disparity suggests a lack of equal scrutiny across religions, undermining the intellectual honesty universities should champion,” he said.
Further, the Western university system only exists because of Christian churches and the early guilds that cultivated intellectual communities rooted in both faith and reason, Gould told The Fix.
He also said tax dollars should not be funding public institutions that reward such “cliché and intellectually shallow acts” that “add little to the arts or free speech.”
“Universities debase their own legacy by credentialing fools with the highest degrees for such trivial displays,” he said.
Finally, Gould said these courses need to be thoroughly reviewed for their clear lack of academic rigor.
“Universities that endorse such nonsense have abandoned their purpose, choosing cultural vandalism over wisdom and failing to uphold the standards of the civilization they claim to serve,” he said.
The Fix reached out to the University of Nebraska media relations office, the Glenn Korff School of Music, and Willette via email multiple times in the last week for more information on the performance. None responded.
* as of August 19, AD 2009, a liberal protestant SECT, not part of the holy, catholic and apostolic CHURCH.
Veni, Sanctae Spiritus!
Something is seriously wrong with Lutheran churches, or at least the old denomination.
On my drive to work each day I see a Lutheran church that posts little sayings each week:
Save trans kids
Queer lives matter
Love is love
On and on it goes with sexualized left wing shibboleths.
He’s a LGBT poofter....
Let me know when they do a skit mocking the adhan (the Muslim call to prayer).
(I won’t be holding my breath)
Near my local campus there is elca center and an islamic center right next to each other. One always has trans or trans adjacent flags flying from it. Guess which one.
It isn’t that he isn’t mocking another religion that is the problem.
The problem would show itself if another student mocked LGBT.
We all know how that would play out.
This mocking only goes one way... and it is allowed to go that way, not because those ideas are correct, it is because any other belief that challenges LGBT is heresy to those in power.
We have people in power who do not believe in equality, they believe in domination.
It’s actually the new denomination that is anti-Scripture. In the 1970’s seminarians at Concordia Seminary in St Louis, MO broke away from the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod because they claimed that the Bible is not the Word of God, it just has parts of it that are God’s Word, and it’s up to we humans to figure out which parts God meant and which He didn’t. Those breakaway professors and pastors formed their new church body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). From there, the teachings have gone as designed: wherever human idiocy leads, absent any real Word of God.
The LC-MS still believes Scripture.
Ew, haw-haw!
I knew Lutherans split up and I believe the one on the way to work is an ELCA I think.
The dwindling “woke” denominations should just join up into a more viable big church of woke.
I actually went to one by accident and they took a poll on what each person believed, not kidding.
I believe the “woke” congregations are basically the religious beast of Revelation. They push a one-world ideology that won’t tolerate the whole Bible.
The Seminex radicals formed the “American Evangelical Lutheran Church” (AELC) which became the catalyst for a three way merger with the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church.
The “new church” was the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)
E xtreme
L ibertine
C ult of
A ntinomianism
Trans: Remove the n and add an h. These people are sewage. 💩
Yes. I knew it was a union of the more liberal denominations within Lutheranism but I wasn’t sure of the exact ones. Thank you for clarifying.
Whenever you make men the decider of what parts of the Bible to cut out, you get a religion of man, which always ends up rotten, because that’s what men are without God’s wisdom.
The AELC wielded a disproportionate influence in the formation of the ELCA and most of their clergy became hard chargers in the sexual revisionista camp.
One notable exception: Rev. Fr. Leonard Klein who was part of the Seminex group who was Ordained in the AELC, but later in life left the ELCA and after a time of transition and formation was Ordained a Priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington.
https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/leonard-klein-a-remembrance
Interesting. I didn’t know that history. Thank you.
Or “Unheard”.
What a miserable excuse for MUSIC.
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