Nice for Saturday!
Thanks to The Great Roman™!
The wonderful Benedictine monks of Le Barroux make great wine from the ancient vineyards of the Avignon popes. You can have some. Get some and help them. Win. Win.
Use FATHERZ10 at checkout
White to move and mate in 3.
Bobby Fischer v. Bent Larsen (Portoroz 1958)
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
Interested in learning? Try THIS.
As described at chess.com, the Champions Chess Tour 2023 (CCT) is “a massive chess circuit combining the best features of previous Champions Chess Tour editions with the Chess.com Global Championship. The tour comprises six events spanning the entire year and culminating in live in-person Finals. With the very best players in the world and a $2,000,000 prize fund, the CCT is Chess.com’s most important event to date.”
Wesley So and Fabiano Caruana were eliminated on Friday in Armageddon deciders. Magnus Carlsen defeated Alireza Firouzja who drops down to the “fight to the death” bracket where Denis Lazavik and Nodirbek Abdusattorov will play and the winner will then tackle Firouzja. In Division 2 Ian won and Levon didn’t. In Div 3: Shakh and Bok won.
I just returned from Saturday morning OTB. I got there a little late and had only two games, the first which I won by a spiffy tactic that lead to massive simplification in which I emerged with 2 rooks against my opponents lonely knight. Pawns equal, but not for long and he resigned. In the second game, with a long knight v bishop and two pawns each end game, I stumbled into a fork and I was “done”. Those knights… are hoppy and forky.
Returning home, I found I was famished. Famished also for a good museum. I haven’t been to the Met for several years, so I arranged a virtual visit from old photos. I shoot lots of photos in museums for, inter alia, this reason. Hence, not having the chance to munch a hot dog with kraut and mustard before mounting the museum steps…
I would have gotten a sandwich from Pastrami Queen on Lex to enjoy in the park before going into the Met, but sometimes a hot dog will do.
Before I picked up this book (below), I checked my hand for yellow mustard. Something newish from Peter Kwasniewski, which I have not yet delved into. I like to read a good portion before recommending, but, considering the author and publisher (TAN) how bad can it be, right? o{];¬)
My old pastor Msgr. Schuler (a world-level authority and “activist” in the realm of Sacred Music after the Council) used to say that for music to be suitable for liturgical worship, it had to be both a) sacred and b) artistic. Sacred in the sense of the musical idiom and the texts set. Art in the sense of being both good (and, no, beauty is not just in the ear of the hearer or the eye of the beholder) and well-performed. Think about those criteria and apply them to what you hear in most churches.
There’s a lot of chatter today from the papalotrous fanatics that anything that doesn’t adhere to their selective application of the secret knowledge only they possess about the true mean of “the Council”, then you are obviously against the Council. Just on the point of music, I would shoot back SC 116 and then watch them choke on their own abundant spittle froth.
If parishes aren’t praying with Gregorian chant, if bishops and priests aren’t fostering Gregorian chant, SIXTY years after the Council, then it is THEY who are 60 years out of step with the Council. The Council mandated Gregorian chant as having the first place in liturgical music in the strongest terms. Wiping away some of the spittle, the fanatics will fight back.
“But Father! But Father!”, the fanatics will squeak, “The Council Fathers in Sacrosanctum Concilium talk about the use of other kinds of music and they provide for welcome flexibility which is obviously what the Holy Spirit wants. And it doesn’t make any difference what the mere ink says in the documents as published! The real message of the Council is between the words… in the change of tone from all the other Councils. It’s a tone of welcoming and diversity, toleration that is also acceptance and then obliga… er… um… It’s the tone and the SPIRIT of the Council that chooses our welcoming music by drawing it forth from the community and it becomes the manifestory invitingness growing by walking together in … the … peripheries of … non-pastoreal … innovation and isn’t… IDEOLOGY! But you … If you don’t like our music then YOOOOU
HATE VATICAN II!”
You know, it’s the usual spittle-flecked nutty that results when you point out that they are little more than cracked Gnostics.
None of the provisions in SC 116 for other types of music eliminate or supersede or mitigate what SC 116 says. We don’t have to justify the use of Gregorian chant. The Church has done that for us. Everyone who doesn’t learn it and use it must justify the use of something other than Gregorian chant.
I digress.
Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life
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Rome Shot: I believe this one is the statue atop La Colonna di Santa Maria Maggiore.
Yes, indeed.
Perhaps also you remember my post from my last Roman Sojourn: ROME 22/10 – Day 25: Column of Columns
In that post I have some history of this column.
I’m a cradle Catholic who’s old enough to remember a bit about things before Vatican II, and whose family talked a good deal about what I can’t remember. It’s very interesting to me to see how out of touch Traditionalists are about how things actually were back then. For almost all churches, except perhaps in large cities, music meant the organ with perhaps a soloist, who sang in English. (My grandmother sang in church.) Only new converts tried to follow the Mass in the missal, and never for long because most priests recited the Latin at a mile a minute. And of course, this was further complicated by the silent parts.No resources were available to help laypeople learn Latin, and no priests encouraged it. Everyone just prayed their rosaries. I even remember hearing one elderly priest jokingly talk about how it seemed priests would compete with each other to have the shortest Masses, and how it was nicer then because people never knew when a priest got the words wrong.
If one allows for the changes in society since then, most laypeople were pretty much like the most of the OF crowd now. They went to Mass and followed the rules out of habit or fear. There was always a race to the parking lot as people, their weekly duty done, couldn’t wait to get on with their day. Recent immigrants did have a little more Catholic identity, because it was a way of preserving some of their culture. As later generations lost sight of the old ways, they also stopped being Catholic. Traditionalists like to think it was more authentic, but it simply wasn’t that much different from now.
Just one more thing. (Yes, I know I sound like Detective Columbo here.) Elsewhere it might have been a little different, but here in the South, being virtually ignorant about one’s faith and not caring to learn any more was so common amongst Catholics that it was, albeit unknowingly, the biggest marker for Catholic identity. My mother considered herself odd because she cared about her faith and wanted to learn as much as she could. Southern Baptists (I knew a lot of those in school) considered Catholics the easiest to convert of any faith. Almost too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s ironic that you (by this I mean Traditionalists in general) profess to dislike innovation, because in fact you are an innovation.
“It’s very interesting to me to see how out of touch Traditionalists are about how things actually were back then.”….
Sooo…the “good old days” were not all that good. Yes, so I’ve heard. A lot.
If we must go there, I’m impressed with neither the Church before nor the Church after the Council.
Nobody understood Latin and priests offered Mass a mile a minute. Indeed. Well, there’s quite a lot there; priests still offer Mass at least half a mile per minute. Use of vernacular has run rather wild. In America–the US–I assume English. Nope. My last parish saw Mass in English and Spanish. Another parish–still sharing our same building–used Vietnamese. I hear a California diocese has Mass in 42 different languages. …I still think the UN half insane with 5!
..Such assumes, of course, we all use “proper” languages, not dialectical derivates.
As for folks offering Roraries and whatnot, ….well…. there are worse things.
Someone offering a full Rosary ponders some 15 or 20 biblical events. Someone contemplating Stations examines different parts of Christ’s passion. Someone reviewing stained glass will consider…whomever might be depicted there. If not precisely attentive to Mass, better that than …other pursuits.
If the Church didn’t expend resources to teach Latin then, …I see no effort by anyone to teach any peoples any languages besides their own now either. Incidentally, I don’t see any effort or interest by minority groups to learn anything at all about their surrounding culture. Pretty tough for us to have universal interest in each other, never mind faith, if we don’t know or care about each other.
All this leads to one question: If the new Church clearly hasn’t created unity or taught the faith any better than the old Church, how much can it really hurt to allow for “old practice” to have a shot?
You’re overstating things. I have on my shelf my great-grandmother’s St Joseph’s Continuous Sunday Missal from the 1950s. She was a simple housewife but that missal is very well-thumbed and has her name inscribed on it. I have another mass book from the 1930s that is falling apart.
If you read Thomas Day’s Why Catholics Can’t Sing, you’ll see that the typical Low Mass with Sappy Hymns is a largely Irish-American phenomenon.
It’s not good to overgeneralize, though it is true that people would have fought against the Revolution more if they had been better formed.
1. Qh5+ Ke7
2. Qh7+ Kf8
3. Qf7#