Actor Bill Murray misses the older, traditional Latin Mass. Rod Dreher brings this to our attention. HERE
Bill Murray Misses The Latin Mass
One new saint he does approve of is Pope John XXIII (who died in 1963). “I’ll buy that one, he’s my guy; an extraordinary joyous Florentine [ummm… Bergamo in Lombardy] who changed the order. I’m not sure all those changes were right. I tend to disagree with what they call the new mass. I think we lost something by losing the Latin. Now if you go to a Catholic mass even just in Harlem it can be in Spanish, it can be in Ethiopian, it can be in any number of languages. The shape of it, the pictures, are the same but the words aren’t the same.”
Isn’t it good for people to understand it? “I guess,” he says, shaking his head. “But there’s a vibration to those words. If you’ve been in the business long enough you know what they mean anyway. And I really miss the music – the power of it, y’know? Yikes! Sacred music has an affect on your brain.” Instead, he says, we get “folk songs … top 40 stuff … oh, brother….”
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Bill Murray and Jimmy Fallon should team up to help restore the Latin Mass
Heh. There’s one Hollywood type who didn’t get the Pray Tell memo!
A truly Christian person would be warmed at this, and pray earnestly for Bill’s complete reunification with the faith of his fathers.
Not being a truly Christian person, my reaction was more along the lines of: ‘Well, Bill, if you’d spent a bit less time making really awful movies like Where the Buffalo Roam and Hyde Park on the Hudson – both of which I am ashamed to say I paid good money to go and see at actual cinemas – and a bit more time picketing your local bishop’s chancery, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.’
Still, it’s nice to add this to the file onWhen Lefties Grow Up.
Like voiceinthewilderness, I too remember Jimmy Fallon remarking of his preference for Mass in Latin. How many have been lost from the True Faith because of the post Vatican II era ‘anything goes’ mentality? More to the point, if there is going to be true evangelization, it is only going to come from the Mass of All Ages. The TLM is to offer to God the highest form of worship, the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven. It excites our thoughts upward. It has nourished the faith of the saints for centuries and converted pagans. It does so today. Sorry to say, the Novus Ordo as we have it in most parts is not and has not cut the mustard.
He’s a lovely, thoughtful guy. Also, he has a sister who is a Dominican nun, and an expert on St. Catherine of Sienna.
A little while ago I heard an interview on the radio (I think it was EWTN Radio) by novelist Dean Koontz where he mentioned how he had grown up a faithful Catholic but had lost his faith when the post Vatican 2 craziness happened, especially the changes to the Mass and the loss of the TLM.
… and his sister is a Dominican who does a one- woman show about Saint Catherine of Siena.
We need to get back to the great music of the Church. I recently discovered “Absolve Domine”, from the Reqiuem Mass, on YouTube. It’s an incredibly beautiful plea for the Lord’s mercy and forgiveness and the granting of everlasting light! I want that sung at my funeral. What I’ll probably get is “On Eagle’s Wings”.
Bill, the next time you find yourself in Des Moines on a Sunday morning please feel free to join us at St Anthony parish. Mass starts at 8:30 and we’d love to have you join us.
Hey guys, don’t be angry. I think it’s wonderful that Bill Murray is talking about his faith; or his lapsed faith, which could always change back. Bruce Springsteen had several religious medals on the cover of his Magic album, don’t know if it means anything about his faith, but was a positive sign.
Also, Where the Buffalo Roam wasn’t a horrible movie, ok it was kinda bad, but at least it had a great Neil Young song in it.
OK, Occupy Chancery with Bill Murray and Jimmy Fallon :D
Most people don’t intend to make a bad movie, and actors especially have very little control how they turn out. Films are the result of a 1,000 different fingers in the pie. That said, Bill’s batting average has been pretty great.
Whose sister is a nun? Not sure if you mean Bill Murray, Jimmy Fallon or Dean Koontz. Thanks!
Father, Rod Dreher did not write this article. Catherine Shoard wrote the article.
It is great what he has said, and it has a lot truth to it. However, lets not all jump on board praising this guy. He has said in the past that “Religion is the worst enemy of mankind. No single war in the history of humanity has killed as many people as religion has.” and has supported the ruling class of democrats.
@CrimsonCatholic: May God catch him, “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
He has a house on Sullivans Island in South Carolina. Stella Maris parish, up the street from Bill Murray, perhaps a personal invitation to Mr. Murray for your 5:30 p.m. Sunday TLM ?
Sr. Nancy Murray OP is Bill’s sister. http://blog.albertus.edu/2014/02/11/interview-with-sister-nancy-murray-o-p/
Wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of these famous aging baby boomers, as they start to face their own mortality, return to the Church. Maybe they’ll even finally grow up and stop being moronic libruls.
I just don’t understand why it’s so compelling here to insult people. Have I missed somewhere in Church teaching or the Bible that that’s ok??
I agree with AnnTherese, insulting people is not cool, particularly when Bill’s being so open about his lapsed faith.
You see it all the time with lapsed Catholics, there is always a part of them that retains certain cultural elements of the faith. We should wish them all the best, and in the meantime pray for their return.
It wasn’t just losing the Latin (all missals had Latin on on page and the Vulgar on the opposite). The problem as I see it was changing it to something that could be acceptable to PROTESTants. The moving of the “Mystery of Faith” to after the Consecration was something any PROTESTant could go along with. Christ has Died, Christ has Risen, Christ will come again, denies the act of Transubstantion which without it it is just the same as any PROTESTant service . Was the removal of the Last Gospel because of the words “He came unto His own and they received Him not”?
Bill Murray did a great job as Larry Darrell in “The Razor’s Edge” in 1984.
Saying Masses in Latin will solve one major problem in the church: Not having to force priests to learn a language to say Masses to placate a minority. My old bishop would send his priests to Mexico enroll them in “immersion Spanish” to help them learn the language enough to say Mass in Spanish. They certainly couldn’t give the homily—and have it make sense—in Spanish, so they would give it in English and let the family translate. What a disaster.
I remember hearing that Roger Ebert missed the Latin Mass as well. More personally, my childhood neighbor, a retired writer of Christian books and an agnostic, said she’d sneak into Mass in her younger days and would have become Catholic herself had the Mass not changed. May they both rest in peace.
Bill Murray’s Apologia pro vita sua
His first episodes on Saturday Night Live were – somehow – not very funny, but his deadpan, heartfelt apology … for not being funny … was both funny and poignant. And it was unmistakably Catholic. It is still worth pondering.
https://screen.yahoo.com/bill-murrays-apology-000000646.html
When someone like a celebrity is talking about the faith, we should definitely encourage this and pray for a more fuller expression of the Catholic faith. This person is in a unique position to touch many people, who may start to question their own lives and make positive changes.
Is not one of our goals to help people so that at that review with Our Lord, we can get more people to stand on the right with the sheep and not to stand on the left with the goats, as we would wish for ourselves?
Mea culpa…. I wasn’t thinking so much of Bill Murray, but others.
His sister is an Adrian Dominican. Must be a whacky Thanksgiving.
Okay, this has nothing to do with Bill Murray, directly, but the Movie, Groundhog Day, is very similar to a movie made two years earlier called, 12:01. It was shown on Fox TV and starred Johnathan Silverman and Helen Slater about a man who keeps re-living the same day because of a supercollider that causes time to repeat. It co-stars Martin Landau as the villain. This movie was based on a short film of the same name with a similar, but more nebulous version of the story (no one knows what caused the time bounce), which is based on a short story by Norman Lupoff of the same name. He tried to sue the makers of the film for stealing his idea, but the legal wrangling finally wore him out and he quit. There are a few other time loop stories before that, the most famous being Asimov’s, The End of Eternity, rightly, the first episode in the a Foundation series.
I recommend 12:01. It is a fun film. Its two stars had so much on-screen chemistry (the director found out, after the fact, that they had dated) , that NBC was thinking about making a series around them (pity they didn’t), but chose to make a different series about seven people which they called, Friends :(
Another TV series that had time looping as its premise was Seven Days. It is a bit morally dubious, but the episodes are interesting.
The Chicken
Correction: 12:01 came out the same years as Goundhog Day.
The Chicken
Once a king and queen in Narnia, always a king and queen in Narnia–I like to think of lapsed Catholics as having a long rubber band around their heart which God will yank back when they are open again–maybe this is the time to pray seriously for this man.
pj_houston: I didn’t think you were talking about Bill Murray. And I wasn’t just referring to you. But you used the term “moronic liberals”–which I reacted to. This blog would feel a lot more like a real Catholic discussion if people weren’t so often judgmental and rude toward those who think differently than them. Words can be very powerful weapons… and I’d like to think that we Catholics are striving to be–well, Christian– in our words and deeds and attitudes.