Piero Marini and his book

A good review of this silly book on the NLM blog. My own problem with it is that it is so drearily out of date. (It reminds me of a former parishioner a couple of years ago who told me that my preaching should be more in accordance with the views of Modern Theologians. 'Such as whom?' I asked. 'Well, like John Robinson in his Honest to God [published in the 1960s]', he replied.)

Marini's world is one in which important work on Liturgy or its sociology or its ritual analogues since 1990 or even earlier has simply not happened. He ignores Anglican Liturgists such as Michael Moreton or Geoffrey Willis or Catherine Pickstock (After Writing, 1998). Well, I suppose we poor schismatics cannot merit the condescension of the notice of so grand a man. But he also ignores Aidan Nichols (Looking at Liturgy, 1996), not to mention Joseph Ratzinger, whom he is known to have met. Are they really so negligible?

Rather like an aging neo-Nazi who sleeps with a poster of Hitler over his bed, Archbishop Marini lives in a long-dead world whose heroes and villains, slogans and manifestoes, are those of an earlier generation whose glories must not be tarnished by any admission that something of significance might have been written since.