The novelist horrified by the English Mass
SIR – Canon David Cotter (Letter, March 17) queries my account of JF Powers’s decision to sit out of earshot of Mass (Cover story, February 24). Canon Cotter says it was “not from distaste over the post-Vatican II liturgy itself, but because he, the most careful of wordsmiths, disliked homilies with a particular intensity”. I sent the passage in question to Powers’s daughter Katherine, and asked her if I was right or wrong. I reproduce her reply:
“You are correct. He actually didn’t mind the homilies so much – or as much, especially if they were short – though sometimes they astounded him for their awfulness. They were often difficult to hear because of the infamous acoustics. But he tried to listen to them, not perhaps as a guide to life and prayer and so on, but as a connoisseur (of good and bad). He found the liturgy simply unbearable – the language, its bathos and cloddiness and lack of resonance with the KJV/Douay. (His retreat to the balcony was in part to escape hearing the liturgy and in part – great part – to escape the handshake business which was far less aggressive up there and sometimes absent.)
