✣ Highlights from the week online
A composer retires from the liturgy wars In Standpoint magazine, the composer James MacMillan recalled that liturgical disputes had afflicted the planning for the papal visit. “There were countless battles behind the scenes,” MacMillan wrote, about the public liturgies. “For example, the bishops asked me to write a new congregational Mass for the open-air liturgies, and a powerful faction fought very hard for this not to happen. It was said that a classical ‘art’ composer could not have the grass-roots parish experience and ‘pastoral insight’ necessary for – etc, etc.” By that “etc” MacMillan was referring to certain trends in Church music: “those aisle-dancing and numbskull jogging for Jesus choruses, maudlin sentimental dirges, faux American folk music and cod-Celticness. The American musicologist Thomas Day described this kind of liturgy as ‘a diet of romantic marshmallows indigestibly combined with stuff that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you into submission with its social message’.” Nowadays, MacMillan said, he doesn’t get involved in “the liturgy wars”. While still writing for choirs, he tends to “just sit in the pews, suffering with the rest of the Catholic faithful”. A safe pair of hands for the future? At Settimo Cielo, Sandro Magister said three candidates are being whispered about as possible future popes: Cardinal Luis Tagle of Manila (though he is probably too “liberal”), Cardinal Robert Sarah (though he is probably too “conservative”) and – most plausibly – the current Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. The cardinal is viewed as a safe pair of hands, as seen in his diplomatic efforts, who would continue the spirit of Francis. Moreover, wrote Magister, Parolin has a reputation as a pastor “with a solid theological formation, that is rarely found in a prestigious diplomat. His recent trip to Moscow was a crystal clear example of this, where discussions at the highest political level alternated with religious meetings with the heads of the Russian Orthodox Church.” But for the moment, of course, this is all hypothetical. A Nobel winner who Catholics might enjoy After Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Joan Desmond at ncregister.com said Catholics should applaud the decision. Unlike many contemporary novelists, Desmond wrote, Ishiguro’s “deeply moral stories go to the heart of the human condition with a spare narrative style that hints at deeper forces beneath the surface”. His “moral vision”, if not explicitly religious, “is compatible with the Church's own insistence that the truth is knowable, and that we ignore it at great cost to our own human flourishing.” Among other novels, Desmond commended The Buried Giant, an “examination of conscience” which reflects on “memory and forgiveness in marriage”.
