Pope poops on modern music for mass

While the Episcopalians have taken to singing songs by U2 in their services, Pope Benedict XVI is telling Catholics they must return to medieval music in their masses.

The former Joseph Ratzinger is irritated by guitars and tambourines, the London Telegraph reports.

"It is possible to modernize holy music," the Pope said at a concert conducted by Domenico Bartolucci, the director of music at the Sistine Chapel. "But it should not happen outside the traditional path of Gregorian chants or sacred polyphonic choral music."

The pope believes that medieval music "creates the correct ambiance for perceiving God's mystery."

Catholic leaders are divided on the issue.

Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, the Archbishop of Ravenna, said, "Mass is the presence of Christ and the music adds so much more when the harmony allows the mind to transcend the concrete to the divine."

But Cardinal Carlo Furno, grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, said it was "better to have guitars on the altar and rock and roll Masses than empty churches." Modern music is a "sign of the vitality of the faith."

A week before the pope's pronouncement, on the website Catholic Answers, a forum member wrote: "Hi everyone. I bought a CD called Tai Chi — Music For Relaxation as a relaxation CD. It is quite clearly New Age music. Would it be a sin to listen to this CD?"

Are people so incapable of thinking for themselves, so afraid of doing something "wrong" or "sinful" that they must resort to asking permission of strangers before they listen to a particular piece of music? (And if so, why didn't she ask before she bought it?)

The responses to her question were even more bizarre than the question itself. Here are a few of the "well-reasoned" comments she received:

• "As long as you don't believe any of the trash they'll probably try to promote, I doubt it's wrong."


• "So long as there are no lyrics praising a false god or ideals, I don't see how."


• "No lyrics? I don't see a problem with the music itself. The money from the CD may be going to things you may not want to support, but I don't think the music itself is sinful/evil."


• "New Age music is on the same level as Rock, Rap, Country, Jazz, Bluegrass, Gospel, and every other form of anticlassical music. Anticlassical music, regardless of lyrical content or lack thereof, is essentially of the flesh, not the mind.
  
  "The only music that is truly of the mind, that is truly human, in other words, is Classical music, on the order of Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, as distinct from the anticlassical, so-called Romantic works of Wagner, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz.
  
  "Compare any of the first paragraph's indicated musical offerings, to Bach's St. Matthew Passion or the Jesu Meine Freude. There is a species-difference between the two. The former is animalistic, the latter is humanistic.
  
  "In other words, New Age music, lyrical or not, is, like all anticlassical music, a vice, like tobacco smoking or drinking alcohol. The only healthy form of music, from a cognitive perspective, is Classical forms."


• "Although I'm not sure if listening to New Age music is sinful or not I would suggest that it would be highly IMPRUDENT!
  
  "I used to listen to a LOT of New-Age music, everything from Enigma to Mike Oldfield, because I liked the way it made me feel! It never gave me peace but it did give me a feeling of peace. But it would never last.
  
  "Try to think of what is happening spiritually when you listen to music; and music does move your spirit. If you listen to Christian music where the musicians, etc. have prayed that whoever listens to their music will be moved closer to God, then anyone who listens to their music will receive grace when listening to it. You receive the 'Spirit' that the musicians intend for you to receive.
  
  "Same thing happens when New-Agers make music, you pick up the New-Age spirits.
  
  "If music helps you relax, I would suggest you find some good Christian/Catholic music. I personally like to listen to some of the Taizé music. Very peaceful."


• "It isn't wrong in itself, but buying these CD's provides financial support for those who promote New Age and other philosophies which are dangerous things to get involved in."


• "All music involves the flesh, but, not all is of it. Only Romantic and similar composers intend to please the ears through arbitrary sound arrangements. Classical composers compose their works around an idea — a mental construct — that the notes are indicators of. Until one understands this, one knows nothing valuable whatever of Classical music and all music is merely sensuality, all acoustical majesty merely frippery, all musical virtuosity merely egotism."

New age spirits? Animalistic? Anti-classical? Imprudent? Frippery and egotism?

Meanwhile, the Pope believes that if Latin Masses are reintroduced, more Catholics will learn the words to the Gregorian chants that he advocates.

Gregorian chants for your iPod. How 12th century!

Rock on.

It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
She moves in mysterious ways
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
She moves in mysterious ways
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright

We move through miracle days
Spirit moves in mysterious ways
She moves with it
She moves with it
Lift my days, light up my nights

— From Mysterious Ways by U2

U2 | Mysterious Ways | Pope Benedict XVI | Church Music | Gregorian Chants | Burning Taper | BurningTaper.com

Vision of Pope John Paul II appears in Polish bonfire

Images of Jesus are regularly seen on parking garage walls and spaghetti billboards. Visions of Mary used bring thousands of believers to suburban meadows near Atlanta. One devout Catholic woman struck a goldmine charging five dollars per person to view an image of Mary in some frozen food she found in her freezer. And Popes Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II have all voiced their acceptance of the Marian visitations to three children in Fatima, Portugal, 90 years ago.

And now, the Vatican News Service, a Rome television station specializing in news about the Vatican, is showing non-stop a photo of a flame supposedly in the shape of Pope John Paul II.

In a flame? What's a beloved, dead pope's spirit doing in a flame, a Christian symbol of Hell?

The Polish man who took the photograph, Gregorz Lukasik, told the press, "It was only afterwards when I got home and looked at the pictures that I realized I had something."

Director of the news service and close friend of the deceased pope, Polish priest Jarek Cielecki, went to Poland from Italy (on a Vatican expense account, I bet) to see the photograph for himself. "You can see the image of a person in the flames and I think it is the servant of God, Pope John Paul II," he said.

Religious websites across the world have crashed because of the increased traffic by devout and/or gullible believers wanting to see this photo.

Why, in our 21st-century scientific and technological world, are so many people so eager to believe something so ridiculous? What does that say about humanity? Do we constantly need supernatural reassurance that there is life beyond this one? Do Jesus, Mary, and the Pope need to make regular interdimensional stops to keep us on the Path, or to keep the Sheep in the Fold?

The schedule is unpredictable, but it's still a form of brand marketing. Every once in a while, it seems, the Catholics need a good "manifestation" to keep people believing.

How long has it been going on? How long have people who want to believe in Things Beyond been seeing their favorite Biblical or religious character in random oil blobs, frozen drippings, and flames? And why?

To me, this Christian phenomena calls into question all visions and supernatural sightings, including the one that started the whole thing. Did people really see a risen, living Jesus Christ two days after he was crucified? Or did someone imagine they saw him, and then the madness swept the countryside, and then the world for the past 2,000 years, all based on one person's "belief" that they saw something in a flame, a Pizza Hut billboard, or, in the early morning fog at that tomb outside Jerusalem? What better way to capitalize on people's need for something cosmic in their lives, than to repeatedly create manifestations where there are none, and then, if you'll pardon the pun, fan the flames?

Religious Visions | Catholic Church | Pope John Paul II | Sightings | Flames | Burning Taper | BurningTaper.com

Pope Benedict warns that Hell is real, eternal and hot

I read somewhere recently that if you bring up the Holy Inquisition or Hitler in any online discussion, you automatically lose.

If you agree with that, you can stop reading now.

Pope Benedict XVI, who was as a youngster a member of the Hitler Youth and later was Prefect of the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine and Faith (which until 1908 was known as Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, or the Holy Inquisition), recently warned the world that Hell was a real, eternal, and hot place, so you better behave.

One of Benedict's myrmidons, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a Church historian, said that the Pope was "right to remind us that Hell is not something to be put on one side" as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief, and admitted that the concept of Hell had been misused in the Middle Ages to scare the impressionable with "horrific visions" of damnation, as described in Dante’s Inferno.

And now Pope Benedict is trying to do it again... trying to scare the willies out of the Catholic faithful by reminding them they'll all go to the fiery pits if they don't toe the line.

What I find most interesting is this: Benedict's predecessor, the beloved Pope John Paul II, said less than a decade ago that Hell as a physical place does not exist.

In 1999 Pope John Paul II declared that Heaven was "neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God which is the goal of human life."

Hell, by contrast, was "the ultimate consequence of sin itself.... Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." [Emphasis mine.]

So, at the risk of offending the 1.1 billion Roman Catholics and the other billion Christians of other denominations, I must ask: How the hell do you take any of it seriously when back-to-back Pontiffs, whose words are supposed to be infallible, disagree on such a major point in your Doctrine?

Hell | Pope Benedict XVI | Catholicism | Pope John Paul II | Catholic Church | Burning Taper | BurningTaper.com

Catholic bishop reiterates Pope's words: Masonry is a grave sin

The Catholic World News is reporting that once again the Vatican wants the world to know that Catholics are not supposed to be Freemasons. They've been hammering this theme for a while now. [Previous Burning Taper article]

I wonder if after the sting they felt while The Da Vinci Code was in the news last year, the Church is trying to position itself ahead of time as against Masonry, before Dan Brown's new book The Solomon Key is published. The novel, expected this year, reportedly prominently features the Masonic fraternity.

Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, the regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary, told a Vatican Radio interviewer that membership in a Masonic lodge is not necessarily grounds for excommunication, but it is a grave matter.

The bishop was responding to a question about Father Rosario Esposito, an Italian Paulist who recently announced his membership in a Masonic lodge. Bishop Girotti reminded listeners that a 1983 statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly "The Holy Inquisition") remains in force today. That statement, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current pope, said: "The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion."

Image: Pope Benedict XVI

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Catholic priest becomes Freemason in Rome; calls Pope's ban 'a thing of the past'

Calling the Pope's edict against Catholics becoming Freemasons "a thing of the past," Father Rosario Francesco Esposito, age 85, took his Masonic obligations recently at the Masonic headquarters at Piazza del Gesu in Rome.

The Italian Paulist priest, along with Father Giovanni Caprile, SJ, was once commissioned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (known by the name the Holy Inquisition until the early 20th century) to study the Church's teaching on Freemasonry. In 1983 the prefect of the Congregation, then-Cardinal now-Pope Joseph Ratzinger, made a public announcement that the teaching of the Church had not changed. Earlier this month, the Burning Taper reported that Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum University, reiterated via a Q & A in the Zenit News Agency that a Catholic who joins a Masonic lodge should be given a[n unnamed] "just penalty," and one promoting Freemasonry or in a leadership role should be punished by interdict, an ecclesiastical penalty that deprives the person of the right to celebrate or receive the sacraments but is less harsh than excommunication.

Father, er, I mean Brother Esposito having joined a Masonic lodge must have rankled some Powers That Be in Rome, because the article about him becoming a Master Mason appeared today in Catholic World News. Apparently, it's not yet really a "thing of the past," at least not to his bosses or the Catholic press.

As I write this, there is only one comment on this story on the Catholic World News site, but it's a doozy: "This is one that needs to be slapped down, hard and fast. Freemasons continue to swear blood oaths, and profess belief in a Deist God. That merits roundly the excommunication latae sententiae acknowledged by Bishop Bruskewietz. This priest needs to be suspended fast."

Let's hope the Catholics don't burn him at the stake, and that the Masons don't hang him from a bridge.

Masons | Masonic Membership | Catholicism | Freemasonry | BurningTaper.com | Rosario Francesco Esposito | Vatican | Burning Taper