This is getting quite out of hand.
During Sunday's Sunday programme on the Beeb, there was a lot of stuff about how racist the Methodist Church is.
This is none of my business. I am not a Methodist. If you were to tell me that Methodist ministers habitually conduct their services dressed in SS uniforms, I would instantly disclaim any locus standi in the matter. But ...
Auntie Beeb produced just one Methodist minister ... a rather glib-sounding young man. Asked if he had evidence for Methodist Racism, he offered just one anecdote, concerning himself. Nobody else was brought into the programme in order to dispute, qualify, or contextualise his account. You would have thought that BBC journalists might have been familiar with the possibility that, in any dispute, there may be two ... or even more ... sides to an argument. No ... the Beeb, I have concluded, employs only the most naive ingenus/ingenues.
And the story he told? That he had been rebuked for having, during a funeral service, included in his talk a brief passage in a Ghanaian language which he had also uttered in English.
Let us pass over the rather obvious fact that this appears to be about language rather than race. Because it aroused in me memories ...
Immediately after the first Ordinariate clergy began to be let loose on main-stream parishes, the amusing tales came back about worshippers complaining, after Mass, "Why did we have to have all that Latin at the start of the service?" Such, apparently, can be the "excluding" effect of the Kyries. When teaching, I once came to suspect that a couple of Chinese students were exchanging subversive written comments about myself. I commandeered the piece of paper and thenceforth made them sit separately. Not that I was able to understand the Cantonese characters they had written, but ... I had felt "excluded". Rumour has it that, in some parts of Wales, if a holiday-homing Anglo-Saxon comes into a pub, its denizens immediately break into Welsh in order to make him feel "excluded". Indeed, I have, for convenience, sometimes conversed with my wife in Latin, deliberately in order to exclude somebody at a nearby table who might overhear what I do not want them to hear.
Whether people like it or not, Language not only enables communication.
Language is also most exquisitely potent to exclude.
This is not quite the End of the World. Except for those poor souls who have been brain-washed by the liberal gauleiters to complain about "feeling excluded". Those for whom "You are making me feel excluded" is the Whining Whinge against which there is no possible appeal.
The semiliterate chattering classes who wish to impose upon us all their own tedious shibboleths cannot have it both ways.
They need to decide which of these two slogans trumps the other:
(1) "People must be allowed to express their diversity"; or
(2) "People must not be made to feel excluded"?
The most extraordinary example I have heard of is a gentleman mowing the grass in a local churchyard singing *to himself* *in Latin* (probably an excerpt from Faure Requiem or other popular work he was learning with a local choral society). A complaint was made by a passing parishioner to the vicar, who to her credit, did absolutely nothing!
ReplyDeleteThe Marxist ruling class has decreed what citizens should value above all else. They have informed us what are values ought to be, and that whoever we are, if we are of paler complexion than others or if our ancestors resided in Europe, we are all hopelessly racist for having any preference whatsoever for our language, our culture, our history, our people, our values, our religion.
ReplyDeleteYou and I either get on board with that, accept their opinion as Truth, or we fight against it with all our might. It is late in the game, we have allowed them to become the ruling class, and it is going to be an uphill battle, since we don't even agree on definitions and terms.
Still, we might be motivated when we contemplate, that to give in to their definitions literally means the end of all we love and hold dear, and things will never, ever, be the same once we do. It would mean to agree, for all Caucasians, that we are hopelessly evil by merely being ourselves, and we and our future progeny must spend our lives doing everything we can to compensate people of color for the terrible fact that we were born Caucasian, now an unforgiveable sin, even if you put your fist in the air and shout black lives matter. Those imbeciles believe they will be eaten last.
For English Catholics before Vatican II there was a sense of being both excluded and exclusive. Excluded of course from the historic cathedrals and parish churches built by our Catholic forebears with Catholic money. They were in the hands of a still confident national Church which impudently called itself Catholic and looked on us rather disparagingly as 'Roman Catholics'. Exclusive in that we maintained, in for the most part undistinguished buildings, the rite that those historic churches were built to accommodate.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is an important aspect of identity, and it was Latin which marked us out as Catholic. No matter that most Catholic laypeople had never been taught the language (although the proportion who had was greater than it is today); they neither envisaged, nor desired an English-language Mass. They prayed in English anyway.
The late Colin Mawby recalled how, when the Council was underway, he read an item in the Daily Telegraph suggesting that Mass in the vernacular could be appproved. His reaction was 'Well, at least it won't happen here.'
ABS and The Bride were in Sarasota, Florida to see The Sad Trads celebrate The Feast of Irony. They were permitted into the Church after having first sought permission online, going name and location, etc. They were met at the entrance to Christ The King Catholic Church by a man with a clipboard who checked us off a list.
ReplyDeleteABS is the same age as Israel and this is the first time he has ever had to seek permission from the pastor to be admitted to a Catholic Church. He knows this is going to be the new normal...
POSTCOMMUNION
Tua nos, Dómine, medicinális operátio, et a nostris perversitátibus cleménter expédiat, et ad ea quæ sunt recta, perdúcat. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum, Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum.
May Thy healing work, O Lord, both mercifully free us from our perversities, and lead us to those things which are right. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who lives and reigns with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.
The FSSP is an postulate of Sad Trads who have taken the knee to secular rulers, who have cordoned off putative pestilential pews with yellow tape and who have their priests celebrate Mask Masses. Yes, the Priest wore a mask expect for the consecration and the semon.
Do the Priest think he might give Jesus Covid?
Good Lord. This sad order is beholden to the local Bishop - who prolly tells them how they must celebrate the Holy Holocaust in such an emasculating and ridiculous manner - because, unlike the SSPX, they have no Traditional Bishops.
The FSSP have existed for over thirty years and they are never - NEVER - going to be allowed to have their own Bishops.
What an embarrassment; this is not humility, this is public humiliation of The One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church and it is the result of AmBishops who have routinely succored the secular state and, for a very long time, have publicly praised Religious Liberty and The US Constitution.
Freedom of Religion, fellas?
Freedom of association, fellas?
Nope, it has all been surrendered without even a whimper. Gone with the winds of a fake epidemic.
ABS wonders if this sad order is aware of just how easy it would be for Pope Francis to ask the AmBishops to temporarily suspend the permission for The Holy Holocaust for the health and unity of The Catholic Church?
Of course, the "temporary" would be permanent; do they know, do they care?
Of course the idea that someone is racist simply because they are white skinned and of European descent I'd the very embodiment of racism as it assumes a quality about a person simply because of their color or race. But as we know irony is a lost art in today's world.
ReplyDeleteAs for ABS's comments on the FSSP the only FSSP mass I have attended recently had few masks no attendance taking, no clipboards. However it was in a diocese with one of the few good bishops so maybe that explains the lack of paranoia.
Not that it matters, but I intended "our" not "are" in the comment above. Oh dear.
ReplyDeleteYou know, we all seem to have given up. Reading comments about these things, not just here, one gets the sense that we are watching our Western civilization sailing away on a great, big ship...and that there is nothing we can do about it. I guess when sufficient numbers of people within the culture want to jettison it, there's not much the remaining people can do.
Then again, maybe we are useless sluggards who are giving up way too easily. One of the worst aspects of everything we have to see is how quickly we are giving up. Based on the glorious victories of the West our generation has failed to carry the torch or even a matchstick.
As it turns out the Marxists got in our heads as well.
On my first ship, the Disbursing Officer (a dear friend) had to instruct his senior petty officers that the business of that office was to be conducted exclusively in English, as neither he nor many of the more junior personnel understood Tagalog, and the business of that office was, after all, about large sums of the Government's money, this ship being an aircraft carrier.
ReplyDeleteThe divide between disbursing clerks from the Philippines and those who were US natives was such that the latter referred to themselves as the zebras, some being black and some being white.