Off piste.

Having read some blogs, the odd book and the oftentimes very odd bits of The Pill online, I'm detecting a theme.

I think we are all meant to be stupid. I'm coming to believe it might even be an unofficial policy - at least in terms of music, liturgy, and catechesis we are being offered by them that knows what's best for us. You know, the ones who think sin's too big a word, let alone concept, for kids, when they can quite happily not get tongue tied saying deinonychus and iguanodon.

What amused me the most this week, apart from the funny and dare I say, dinosaur comments from Mr Inwood regarding Latin Masses (more of that in a minute), was the Pill's questionnaire of the new translation. Best mantilla twitch to Fr Finigan. UPDATE: They've done yet another version of the questionnaire. I think they'll keep changing it until they get the result they want. Go over and fill it in again, I have!

Oh my. Do pop over and have a look. It's quite frankly astonishing to be asked if your priest finds all those long words a bit much and might find them a tad, well, hard. I know educationally things have taken a bit of a dive in the past 20 or so years, but things are that bad? One burning question, do you see people around you struggling to follow the new text? Well yeah, but only when the Mass that's printed on the sheet isn't the one being said. That tends to confuse the best of us.

As I said. Oh. My.

I've been assisting at the new translation Masses since the beginning. A priest who wants to go off piste, still goes off piste. A priest who follows the rubrics still follows the rubrics. I don't find it to be the number of syllables in a sentence that causes the problems at the ordinary form Mass.

It's certainly better with the new translation, although I do find it a bit clunky, if I'm honest.

Ah, music. There's been a lot in the blogosphere about music lately on a more positive note, and Clare and Fr Ray show what's possible when you ditch Peace, Perfect Peace on repeat, but the naughty Eccles  has had his say, The Bones his, and our Chairman Joe Shaw, his.

Now briefly I'm going to have mine. The trite rubbish I had to sing (and still have to on occasion) from my earliest years is all thanks to the likes of Mr Inwood. I've suffered, yes suffered, guitars, tambourines, recorders, jazz guitar, jazz flute, hand clapping, keyboards, and choruses so repetitively inane they could be used for brainwashing and mind control on Homeland, and Mr Inwood has the nerve to infer that because I wasn't brought up with the Latin Mass, I have no right to it pastorally? I know this is a common mind set in those antipathetic to the Latin Mass, but it's no less irritating every time it's dredged up.

Instead of us all being lowest common denominatored a la school assembly, how about a little spiritual elevation?

In other news, I hear the heir of the heir is to have an heir. It's always lovely when a baby's on the way. Haven't heard anyone call this foetus anything other than 'baby' in the press, and yet surely, it's the same press that will quite happily call any other baby a mass of tissue, only a few cells, something less than human? Just saying.