Boring, Boring Masses! Boring, Boring Masses!

Those of you who had the misfortune to be on religious retreats during your schooldays will remember that a common topic for "discussion" was the question of whether or not the Mass was boring. The standard response was the Guilt Trip, as first exercised by Jesus Christ Himself on the apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Could ye not wait up one hour with Me?" The priest running the retreat would put on a big hurt puss and ask us if really, were we so bad as to begrudge one hour to Him? And we'd shuffle our feet and say, no, not us, not after the crucifixion and everything. And the next Sunday when we became so transcendentally bored that our heads fell off and rolled out of the pew and out the door of the church, once we'd safely retrieved our heads we weren't that bothered going back to the Church. You have to be practical about these things.

Well, a fascinating article in the Spectator posits that the reason that the Mass is so boring is because the Church made such a hames of the transation from the Tridentine Rite. If you sit down with a latin missal in one hand and a latin dictionary in the other, you will slowly realise that the two things are not the same thing at all. Fascinating. The current Pope, as part of his long fight against Vatican II, is trying to return the Mass to feeling of the Tridentine original, and to ensure that Masses are the same the world over, as they should be in the supposedly Universal Church. He ought to bring back the Latin entirely, but that might be just too much to hope for.

Bob Dylan and Bono

RTÉ reports that Mr Bob Dylan, an entertainer, has high words of praise for a Mr Bono, also a entertainer, in Mr Dylan's new autobiography. Hmm. It seems to me that in describing Bono as having "the soul of an ancient poet," Dylan is talking a very modern form of shite.