IF YOU HADN'T NOTICED, I am avoiding posting pieces with Latin texts because the neo-fascist, integralist, billionaire financed "traditional Catholics" have made the 1962 Latin liturgy a rallying cry in their overtly corporate fascist try at hijacking the Catholic Church like the various princes, bankers, gangsters and "Holy Roman Emperorers" of the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque did because it has great wealth and power and, since it is governed through the Cardinals, it is very open to being hijacked.
It's too bad because some of the best music of the Western tradition is based on Latin texts, little of it is based on the various vernacular languages, of course most of that is from the later Protestant musical literature. I have, over the past decade, gained an appreciation for a lot of that, even the Anglican-Episcopalian English language music, especially when the choir is trained to articulate the words as so many of the, especially, English choirs aren't. I love much of the Latin text music but till this neo-fascist romantic bull shit about the Latin liturgy subsides, I'm not doing anything that might risk encouraging them. Though I don't imagine they much read my blog.
If I were Pope, I'd commission a really good translation of the liturgy into Esperanto and tell the Latin mass lunatics - the ones who were merely lunatics and not flaming fascist materialists of the most vulgar variety - that if they wanted a universal language, it had to be that one. I'd commission them to make the texts of the entire liturgy as metrically and syllabically consonant with the old Latin as possible so the old music could just have that plugged in. I would think that the enormous flexibility of Esperanto grammar would make that far more possible than just about any national language could.* They'd certainly stand a far better chance of learning it to the extent that they'd understand what was being said, the texts being understood has long been a danger to the rich and powerful and neo-fascist, one of the reasons that at the most corrupt periods of the Catholic Church it was a capital crime to translate the Scriptures into the vernacular, the reason that they hung onto Latin as long as they did. They were afraid that if The People heard what Jesus and the Prophets said, the jig would be up for them. It's no wonder that fascists like Timothy Busch are such big fat fans of it and why that meat-headed Pope Benedict XVI tried to coax the Society of Piux X neo-Nazis back into communion with him by letting every ordained neo-medievalist-romantic** lunatic say it pretty much whenever they wanted to. As I've written recently, one of the ironies of that is that Pius X was a modest but real part of the history of the transformation of the liturgy that culminated in the reforms of Vatican II.
There, I wanted to get that rant over before Christmas really starts up.
* As an example, I'd post a video of the atrocity of the English language abomination of "Bach's Magnificat in D" as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and conducted with the full Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra by Eugene Ormandy but I can't bring myself to do it. It is one of the worst things I've ever heard done to such a great masterpiece.
** I've never encountered one of them who really knew anything about the medieval period, it's all 19th century and, especially 1930s-50s romantic cinematic nonsense with them. I think I mentioned the one who believed with all their little heart that they were hearing the mass as St. Francis heard it and, probably, St. Peter said it. I have found when I argue with those guys on things like Youtube comment threads that you can count on the most ridiculous accusations of "Free Masonry" and then the descent into the vilest of antisemitic allusions being thrown around. When I pointed out that I was against all secret societies including the odious Knights of Columbus and the Daughters of Isabella for the same reason things got really testy.
Update: Who cares what a bunch of atheist monoglot do-nothings think they think about it? You don't think about things you don't know about you just pretend you do.
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