I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant. Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood! " It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility. .Mary Rose OReilley
About This Quote
Of course, if the pope is infallible, so is your local priest. I remember once how one of my parishioners used to go to church every morning and sit quietly in the pew. One day his wife said to him, "You're making me nervous. We're not Catholics." He replied, "But I believe in the infallibility of the Catholic Church." She said, "How can you know that?" He answered, "Because if I didn't believe in it, I would be saying prayers like that. I would know that there was no truth in it."
Source: The Barn At The End Of The World: The Apprenticeship Of A Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
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- I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965...