MUST SEE VIDEO! The “Gilbert and Sullivan Mass”

16 Comments

1. The Egyptian says:

   27 March 2014 at 3:39 PM

   yes lets try it again in 50 years

   according to Rush, satire must be based in fact to be funny

   sadly it is factual
2. mamajen says:

   27 March 2014 at 3:40 PM

   Brilliant!
3. John Nolan says:

   27 March 2014 at 5:50 PM

   Back in the 1960s the suggestion that the Church should use popular music styles in the liturgy inspired Tom Lehrer to write the ‘Vatican Rag’.
4. Michael says:

   27 March 2014 at 5:55 PM

   lol. That was brilliant!
5. Gratias says:

   27 March 2014 at 11:52 PM

   Youths do not like our Catholic Reformed music and you can too.
6. kbf says:

   28 March 2014 at 3:22 AM

   The Crescat blog had another video from their collection up on St Patrick’s day. I saw this at the same time – sadly true.
7. Hank Igitur says:

   28 March 2014 at 3:28 AM

   Sorry to say but I thought this was pretty much rubbish really.

   
8. av8er says:

   28 March 2014 at 5:39 AM

   That was hilarious! Took a sec to realize that was Axl Rose (Guns N Roses) at the end.
9. Quanah says:

   28 March 2014 at 8:01 AM

   @ Hank Igitur,

   I’m sorry to say I have seen the effects of this with my own eyes all too often. Throughout my senior year of high school and my university years, I was quite active in a youth ministry program that heavily used contemporary forms of music to draw in teens. Draw them in it did. The youth Mass attracted so many people that it was moved from the church to the gym to accommodate the numbers. It was an incredibly vibrant program that drew many many teens to Mass weekly and about half of them (roughly 100) to the youth meeting afterwards. Unfortunately, many of them still had a malformed understanding of the faith and many of them fell away from the Church once they got to college. The reason I most often heard from those who had stopped going to Mass in college was that they couldn’t find a church with music or a preacher as good as our’s.
10. Gregg the Obscure says:

    28 March 2014 at 8:05 AM

    Just like Newton saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants, in many ways in today’s culture we are pulled down by vampire and zombie hands reaching out of the mud.

    In the metaphor vampires could represent contraception and zombies the various expressions of sexuality that do not transmit life . . .
11. bsjy says:

    28 March 2014 at 9:03 AM

    Classic proof of Shakespeare’s observation that brevity is the soul of wit. This video was about four minutes too long. [Methinks thou likest not its content rather than its length.]
12. Scott W. says:

    28 March 2014 at 9:30 AM

    Classic proof of Shakespeare’s observation that brevity is the soul of wit. This video was about four minutes too long.

    Hamlet is 4,030 lines and delivered at an average of 1,000 lines per hour. Most modern performances do lots of editing to get the time down, so I’d say your complaint says more about you than about the video.
13. Sonshine135 says:

    28 March 2014 at 11:37 AM

    @Quanah
    The sad thing is that you would probably lose the same amount of young Catholics formed in good solid Catholicity for the exact same reason.
14. The Masked Chicken says:

    28 March 2014 at 12:46 PM

    I am afraid this is more irony than satire, since Arthur Sullivan was a composer of sacred music, among which were a setting of the Te Deum, the oratorio, The Light of the World, and the classic, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” He, himself, however, was not particularly focused on virtue, having a weakness for the ladies.

    Also, it was neither the preaching nor the parenting that caused the collapse of music in the Catholic circles leading to the suggestion to try something, “relevant.” Remember, we still had the likes of Bishop Sheen on the eve of Vatican II, so, the Church was hardly lacking in good preaching and the concept of the, “good girl,” indicates that parenting was still focused on turning out devout children. The collapse in Catholic music was deliberate and from the hands of a few powerful clerics. Certainly, the idea of a Hootenanny Mass was not entertained by serious students of ecclesiology until after the Modernistic undercurrents began to surface after World War II.

    This is a cute video and quite well-done, but it is not really very correct with regards to the fall of Catholic music, at least insofar as how things actually developed. Music fell because of some bad leaven within the Church and a social period that allowed it to flourish, not because of preachers nor parents.

    I am not a sour grape, myself. Today, I am more of a dill pickle.

    The Chicken
15. Venerator Sti Lot says:

    28 March 2014 at 10:18 PM

    Masked Chicken,
    I suspect part of the satire is the likelihood of any late Victorians who thought like a certain sort of moderns to substitute the ‘pop’ G & S for the sacred S, just as I suspect part of the satire of Lehrer’s song mentioned by John Nolan is how a certain sort of moderns are in fact clueless about youth fashion to the extent that what they think ‘cutting edge’ will often be found by the intended audience as no longer fashionable, downright embarrassing, etc. Quanah’s experience of a sort of misguided success is not the only one, especially when the ‘out of touch’ try to be ‘up to date’.
16. The Ubiquitous says:

    1 April 2014 at 2:28 AM

    Hamlet is 4,030 lines and delivered at an average of 1,000 lines per hour. Most modern performances do lots of editing to get the time down, so I’d say your complaint says more about you than about the video.

    Hamlet as it exists even in the First Folio is not Hamlet as it was ever actually performed while Shakespeare was alive. Each of his plays are collections of “bits” remembered by actors after they were not performed. About half of any given Shakespeare play was cut for a theatrical run. Most likely, none of his plays were ever performed in the four-hour version until centuries later.

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