Here's just enough of a fight I haven't been following to get us to the punch-line. A columnist for the Telegraph opined in his blog that much of what has passed for liturgical music in the the past 30 years is...how shall we say this delicately?...execrable. Feelings were hurt, but he's unapologetic:
Here’s why I don’t feel too guilty. First, the Mass settings produced by the “composers” of the SSG really are bad: they range from nails-scraping-down-a-blackboard painful to stuff that sounds like a wicked parody. Someone needs to say – in a loving way, of course – that it’s drivel.
Second, I’m getting a bit sick of the liberal response to any criticism, which is to bang on about how “hurtful” it is. The message is: emotions come first. So a congregation has to sit through a decade of wailed “folk Masses”, because if you complain you’ll hurt someone’s feelings.
Fr. Tim Finigan, from whom I'm getting this, makes this suggestion the next time you hear "Bind us together" (or, for us American cousins, perhaps "Gather Us In,"),
tell the parish priest that you felt "violated". Or take out a big box of paper hankies and run out sobbing with anger when the liturgical dance starts up.
Heh. My diocese doesn't have a liturgical dance problem, actually. But it
would be amusing to have people respond to a certain type of officious "open-minded" Church personality by collapsing into tears at their pronouncements.
