Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: the word for blessed!

[The actual sedes vacans, courtesy of Charles Cole].

At the time of writing, the Vatican website still has a separate page on the election of Pope Benedict XVI (if that link dies you can go here).

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam: Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Josephum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger qui sibi nomen imposuit Benedictum XVI.

Now that is not what Jorge Cardinal Medina Estévez actually said.

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam: Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Josephum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger qui sibi nomen imposuit Benedicti decimi sexti.

He clearly uses the genitive "Benedicti decimi sexti".

There are two things wrong with this. Firstly the Latin for "sixteenth" is sextus decimus not decimus sextus. If you search the Perseus database using Philologic you can use lemmas to show this. At Perseus under PhiloLogic put (without the angled brackets) into the "Search for:" field and click the "Proximity Search in: Sentence" radio button. This will allow you to find any form of sextus which is in the same sentence as any form of decimus. Click the

button and you get 29 results, of which fifteen mean "sixteenth" (n.b. decumus is a variant spelling of decimus). There is no example of decimus sextus. It is worth noting that "sixteenth" in Spanish (Cardinal Medina Estévez' native tongue) is dieciséis, i.e. "ten" is followed by "six". (And in any case there is no need to include the numeral – see the video of the announcement of the election of Pius XII below).

The other thing wrong is indicated by the "official transcript". The Protodeacon should have used the accusative ending (-um) instead of the genitive (-i). The accusative is what was used in the past. It agrees with nomen, which is a neuter accusative (object of imposuit) and with which Benedictum is in apposition. When a noun is in apposition to another (typically a name as in "the orator Cicero", where Cicero is in apposition to orator) it agrees, so far as possible, in gender, case and number. Cicero, in his second speech against Verres, describes Syracuse in Sicily:

in hac insula extrema est fons aquae dulcis, cui nomen Arethusa est, incredibili magnitudine… (Ver. 2.4.118)

At the very end of this island is a fountain of sweet water, of which the name is Arethusa, incredible in size…

Arethusa agrees with nomen in case (nominative) and number (singular) . It does not agree in gender because there is no neuter form of Arethusa.

Camillo Cardinal Caccia Dominioni was Protodeacon at the conclave of 1939 when Pius XII was elected.

He clearly says "qui sibi nomen imposuit Pium". He also brings his hands together which strongly suggests (Italian stereotype) he has finished speaking and is not going on to say "duodecimum", although the video does immediately cut to a shot of the new Pope on the sedia gestatoria. It is somewhat nonsensical to mention the ordinal number. Papa Pacelli's name was not "Pius The Twelfth" but "Pius". The ordinal simply allows us to distinguish him from other popes of that name.

I cannot find footage of the relevant part of the announcement of John XXIII by Cardinal Canali in 1958. Here is Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani announcing the election of Paul VI in 1963 (beginning at 2:40):

He says "…qui sibi nomen imposuit Paulum sextum". The numeral creeps in (the name "Paulus V Burghesius" of course was inscribed straight above his head on the facade of St Peter's [large jpeg]) but he preserves the accusative.

Pericle Cardinal Felici got to announce a new Pope twice. Here he is announcing the election of John Paul I on 26th August 1978 (from 0:55):

"…qui sibi nomen imposuit Ioannis Pauli primi". It is clear that he uses the genitive.

(You can add a wrinkle to the "John Paul I was murdered" conspiracy theory by noting that Cardinal Felici used an ordinal – "the First" – when there was no need, since no other Pope had ever had that name…unless he knew that there would soon be another. Note the uploader inadvertently suggests this is the announcement of Pope St John I (523-526). One of the commentators in this video of the announcement of the election of John Paul II (at 4:14) says that John Paul I chose to have the numeral inserted.)

Cardinal Felici was back on the evening of 16th October 1978 to announce the election of John Paul II. The fullest coverage is from this capture of the live broadcast by ABC News in the United States. Some journalists like to insert themselves into any story (the BBC coverage of the funeral of John Paul II was egregious in this regard) but these blokes just manage not to obscure what he says. The Cardinal gets to the name at about 2:05.

"…qui sibi nomen imposuit Ioannis Pauli." Again he uses the genitive but this time he leaves out the ordinal (conspiracy!).

I have the Ordo rituum conclavis (you never know when you will need to run a Papal election) which at n.74 at the beginning of chapter 5 has the following for the Cardinal Protodeacon to say:

Annúntio vobis gáudium magnum;

habémus Papam:

Eminentíssimum ac Reverendíssimum Dóminum,

Dóminum N …… ,

Sanctæ Románæ Ecclésiæ Cardinálem N …… ,

qui sibi nomen impósuit N. ……

So that is no help on the case to put the name in. The text at the Vatican website suggests that someone with enough power over the website at least, thinks that the accusative to agree with nomen is correct.

So far as I can tell the formula used three times since 1978 – nomen + genitive – means, apart from the obvious (So-and-so's name), "a reputation for" or "the word for". For obvious reasons (a search for any form of nomen returns 1251 answers from the Perseus database, for Cicero alone) it is practically impossible to dig out every example of nomen taking the genitive. Somewhere I made a note of the fact that in Cicero nomen amicitiae (genitive) means "the word for friendship". In the De Natura Deorum i.122 he has:

carum ipsum verbum est amoris, ex quo amicitiae nomen est ductum.

There is something attractive in the very sound of the word 'love,' from which the Latin term for friendship [amicitiae nomen] is derived. (Loeb [facsimile]).

In the De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum ii.78:

quid autem est amare, e quo nomen ductum amicitiae est, nisi velle bonis aliquem affici quam maximis, etiamsi ad se ex iis nihil redundet?

What is the meaning of 'to love' — from which our word for friendship (nomen…amicitiae) is derived — except to wish some one to receive the greatest possible benefits even though one gleans no advantage therefrom oneself? (Loeb).

And again in De Amicitia 92:

…delet enim veritatem, sine qua nomen amicitiae valere non potest.

…it utterly destroys sincerity, without which the word friendship (nomen amicitiae) can have no meaning. (Loeb).

On the other hand, there are examples of nomen plus genitive of X meaning "the name X" in passages when someone adopts a new name. Famously Octavian (the Caesar Augustus of Luke 2:1) took the name Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus on 16th January 27 BC, an event which is taken as the start of the Imperial Rome. I don't have access to "Imperator Caesar: A Study in Nomenclature" by Ronald Syme which is the most important modern work on Augustus' name known to me. So far as I know the chief literary source for this event (Syme presumably also drew on inscriptions and coins) is Dio Cassius, a Roman who wrote in Greek. According to Wikipedia his Greek is full of Latinisms. Dio discusses the process in 53.16. Where necessary I quote the Greek and mention the grammatical form used.

And when Caesar had actually carried out his promises, the name Augustus [τὸ τοῦ Αὐγούστου ὄνομα – genitive] was at length bestowed upon him by the senate and by the people. For when they wished to call him by some distinctive title, and men were proposing one title and another and urging its selection, Caesar was exceedingly desirous of being called Romulus [Ῥωμύλος ὀνομασθῆναι – passive verb with a nominative], but when he perceived that this caused him to be suspected of desiring the kingship, he desisted from his efforts to obtain it, and took the title of "Augustus," [Αὔγουστος … ἐπεκλήθη – passive verb with a nominative] signifying that he was more than human; for all the most precious and sacred objects are termed augusta. (Loeb).

Suetonius mentions how the Emperor Caligula got his name in Caligula 9.

Caligulae cognomen castrensi ioco traxit, quia manipulario habitu inter milites educabatur.

He took the surname "Caligula" (genitive) from a joke in the camp, because he was brought up among the soldiers and dressed in a private soldier's uniform. 

I would like to think that Cardinals Felici and Medina Estévez had been reading the primary sources for the renaming of Caesar Augustus – even though one normally takes Cicero's Latin as an example above the Latin of Suetonius or the Greek of Dio Cassius – but I think they were simply mistaken.

Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran is the current Protodeacon. If he is elected Pope, presumably it will be the next deacon in precedence, Attilio Cardinal Nicer. Cardinal Tauran should use the form given on the Vatican website, putting the name in the accusative, and not in the genitive like his predecessors in 1978 and 2005.

A reason to go to Canberra

Further to the story from two weeks ago last year about a beer from a massive international brewery (named after the state of Victoria) winning a prize at the Royal Queensland Food and Wine Show the small brewers are striking back with the Small Brewer's Beer Festival.

"People have no idea how extremely competitive and ruthless the beer business can be, it really is war. And the big breweries don't take any prisoners. So instead of competing with them directly at other beer festivals we thought we would hold our own and just not invite them."

It's on 9th March. So plenty of notice then.

"In the dusty, damp or dismal purlieus of second-hand bookshops"

Theodore Dalrymple usually writes pessimistic pieces on the corruption of modern society. As a prison doctor he cornered the market in vignettes of the prison infirmary which expressed contemporary abdications of personal responsibility, laziness, fecklessness and cruelty.

He also likes second-hand bookshops.

How many hours, among the happiest of my life, have I spent in the dusty, damp or dismal purlieus of second-hand bookshops, where mummified silverfish, faded pressed flowers and very occasionally love letters are to be found in books long undisturbed on their shelves. With what delight do I find the word ''scarce" pencilled in on the flyleaf by the bookseller, though the fact that the book has remained unsold for years, possibly decades, suggests that purchasers are scarcer still. Alas, second-hand bookshops are closing daily, driven out of business by the combination of a general decline in reading, the internet and that most characteristic of all modern British institutions, the charity shop. Booksellers tell me that 90 per cent of their overheads arise from their shops, and 90 per cent of their sales from the internet.

The story in the last three paragraphs about the purchase of "a slim paperback entitled Making Sense of the NHS Complaints and Disciplinary Procedures" is hilarious.

One of the commenters gives additional pleasure – unintended by him – in his denunciation of Dalrymple's central thesis. With all due respect to citizens of the Great Republic (at least one of whom reads this blog), I fear this bloke might be ("book stores", "outlet stores", general love of order and efficiency) one of yours.

I like to pretend I avoid buying from charity shops because of the threat they pose to the trade. Actually it is because I hardly ever go in second-hand bookshops any more. However, I do dream about them.

A winner for teetotallers

Late last year*  the William Bull Brewery of New South Wales won the Grand Champion trophy at the Royal Queensland Food and Wine Show with its India Pale Ale. It is described as a "limited release". So limited you can't buy it anywhere.

Mind you:

… Victoria Bitter caused a massive upset by winning the Crermalt Australia Champion Queensland Beer of Show. Mr Chant said it was eligible for the award because it was brewed in Queensland.

So the upset was because something named after the state of Victoria won an award for Queensland beers. Nothing to do with the fact that it tastes like another yellow liquid chilled practically to zero.

*(I know, I know. Shocking delay, I'm catching up on this backlog, only eight more to go after this one).

On the usefulness of Latin

I am shocked at what I am about to do: post a link to something from an Australian newspaper – from the Sydney Boring Herald no less – and not simply to mock it.

Latin helps journalist get scoop on Pope

An Italian journalist who beat the world's media on Pope Benedict XVI's decision to resign got the scoop on the utterly unexpected news thanks to her knowledge of Latin.

It's even a reprint from the AFP, bene ego nunquam.

At the end of the article, the journalist's boss remarks "This is a strong argument for culture in training future journalists". I'll say. Take the following story:

Pope Benedict xvi sent out his first tweet in Latin

The Pope finally sent out his first tweet in Latin from his Twitter account @Pontifex_ln on Sunday, January 20, 2013: “Unitati christifidelium integre studentes quid iubet Dominus? Orare semper, iustitiam factitare, amare probitatem, humiles Secum ambulare.”

The Pope immediately followed it up with translations into the languages of his other Twitter accounts. He translated the Latin via his English language account @Pontifex this way: “What does the Lord ask of us as we work for Christian unity? To pray constantly, do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with Him.”

The Guardian apparently took the phrase corruptio optimi pessima and … erm … corrupted it.

Take the UK’s Guardian newspaper. It is responsible for propagating an erroneous Latin phrase in its reporting on the Pope’s Latin Twitter account. Lizzy Davies in Rome wrote this paragraph for the Guardian, misquoting Roberto Spataro (secretary of the Pontifical Academy for Latin Studies, which Benedict XVI founded last year) and attributing the quote to L’Osservatore Romano:

“Twitter is a tool which requires rapid communication. In English you say ‘the corruption of the best one is horrible’; in Latin, three words suffice: ‘corrupt optima pessima. It is a language which helps to think with precision and sobriety. And it has produced an exceptional heritage of science, knowledge and faith.” 

Chant Café has good word for promoters of Liturgical pop

Music that Broadens the Mind and Spirit

Over the years, I’ve had many people say to me, when discovering that I’m a Catholic musician, some version of the following: “I’ve learned to wince whenever I see that a chosen hymn was composed after 1965. I shut my book and try to brace myself until it goes away.”

I’m supposed to agree with this point of view, and I do sympathize with the feeling because I felt this way for years. But more and more, I find that these sorts of comments bother me. Most of the musicians singing post-1965 material are doing their best to make a contribution, and loathing their output can tend towards cultivating divisive antipathies.

Few of these musicians have any idea how many people are rubbed the wrong way by varieties of pop music at Mass. Plus, it seems like an odd demand that Mass should only have music written between, say 1850 and 1965. In the long history of the faith, that is a very small slice of time.

More substantially, the debate over hymns completely misses the essential point that has become more obvious over the last few years. The truth is this: the hymn war distracts from the core issue, which is whether we will sing what the liturgy is asking to be sung or whether we will sing something else. The Mass assigns texts throughout the year for the precise parts of the liturgy where hymns are often inserted.

The solution of course is the Roman Gradual (after all, this is the Chant Café) and use of the Mass propers, not the hymn sandwich.

[The Mass propers are those bits in the Mass which change from day to day. Here it refers to those parts sung by the choir or people (not the priest), printed in a book called the Roman Gradual. They are invariably replaced by a hymn or simply spoken.]

Christ the King propers are different from Advent which are different from Christmas and so on. They are all chosen with precision by the Church for a particular liturgical purpose. Therefore, they not only open the word of God to us; they also provide another means of spiritually accessing the overall liturgical experience in a way that accords with the calendar.

Discovering the Mass propers is a liberating experience, very much along the lines of what people feel when they first discover the Catholic faith itself. We don’t have to make stuff up. We don’t have to manufacture our liturgy from our own sense of how things should be.

Our main responsibility is to bury the ego, defer to the Church’s wishes, allow ourselves to become part of something larger than our own time and place, and serve the faith. This is a huge responsibility. Singing the propers makes being a Church musician and honor and a serious apostolate.

Life on Mars

Apparently not as easy as it might be.

"Absolutely, the astronauts can live in this environment. It’s not so different from what astronauts might experience on the International Space Station. The real question is if you add up the total contribution to the astronaut’s total dose on a Mars mission can you stay within your career limits as you accumulate those numbers. Over time we will get those numbers."

Assorted links on the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI

I don't want to keep putting up posts on this. It is a little depressing. I want people digging this out of some memory crystal of the first 100 centuries of the internet to say "why did he need to name the Pope in the title of this post? only one Pope in the third millennium resigned". So this post will serve as the dumping ground for any more stories I come across. Fr Alexander Lucie Smith fears

The ordeal awaiting us – watching all and sundry pontificating on all matters Papal and religious. 

Amen, Father.

Apparently the Pope will resign the Papacy exactly 365 days older than Blessed John Paul II was when he died.

 UPDATE 1
The Impossible "Road Map" of Peace with the Lefebvrists

How does Radaelli see the healing of this opposition? In his judgment, “it is not the model of Church obedient to dogma that must once again submit to the pope,” but “it is rather the model obedient to the pope that must once again submit to dogma.”
In other words:
"It is not Ecône [editor's note: the community of the Lefebvrists] that must submit to Rome, but Rome to Heaven: every difficulty between Ecône and Rome will be resolved only after the return of the Church to the dogmatic language that is proper to it.”

That was February 9th. Two days later all bets were off when the present Pope made his declaratio.

Catholic-bashers have embellished the truth about abuse in Catholic institutions. It's time to put the record straight

Brendan O'Neil, secularist agnostic (scroll down), rides to the rescue of the Church in Ireland.

UPDATE 2

Dr Edward Peters asks When will the conclave start? His conclusion is the same as mine (lucky him), i.e. not before 15th March. Also who can be elected Pope? Turns out married men are not excluded, also note the explanation at the end for why the 15 days don't begin until midnight 28th February-1st March (c.203). He also contradicts the assertion that the Cardinals might be able to adjust the start for the next Conclave: "There is nothing ambiguous about the two-week waiting period set out in [Universi Dominici Gregis] 37 and—long story made short—ambiguities in the law, not inconveniences, are what are subject to ‘interpretation’."

UPDATE 3

Tim Stanley lists the ways the mainstream media just doesn't get God or Catholicism.

If someone retired at work, who would you invite to give the farewell speech? Someone who liked and understood them, or someone who hated or never even met them? Parts of the media seem to overwhelmingly favour the latter, which is why we’ve seen the usual suspects wheeled out to give commentary on the abdication – campaigners for women priests, defrocked Marxists, "humanists" and, worst of all, the ubiquitous disgruntled cradle Catholics.

UPDATE 4

There are only two "Vatican watchers" worth reading. That is they know what they are talking about and they appear to have decent sources. John Allen discusses Cardinal Bertone.

(Among "Vatican watchers" I read some poor sap recently who talked about the Vatican having a "Swiss army" – that might be news to André Blattman).

UPDATE 5

The other Vatican watcher worth reading is Sandro Magister.

In the Philippines, which is the only nation in Asia where Catholics are in the majority, there shines a young and cultured cardinal, archbishop of Manila Luis Antonio Tagle, the focus of growing attention. As a theologian and Church historian, Tagle was one of the authors of the monumental history of Vatican Council II published by the progressive “school of Bologna.” But as a pastor, he has demonstrated a balance of vision and a doctrinal correctness that Benedict XVI himself has highly appreciated. Especially striking is the style with which the bishop acts, living simply and mingling among the humblest people, with a great passion for mission and for charity.

The antics of the Bologna school are regularly covered by Magister.

UPDATE 6

An evisceration of a story in the New York Times. Summed up in the opening line:

Gaaaaaaaaaaahhhh.

Msgr Gromier and the Restored Holy Week

I have for years been pushing the conférence of Msgr Léon Gromier, a Master of Ceremonies for Pius XII, on the restoration of Holy Week from the fifties. That was all I knew about him. Fr Christopher Smith provides more information as well as discussing Gromier's arguments.

One of the more interesting parts of the talk is when [Gromier] takes issue with the adjective solemn as applied in the 1955 Reform.  He writes, “The solemnity of liturgical services is not an optional decoration; it is of the nature of the service … Outside of this, so-called solemnity is not an amplifying enticement, to impress and score the goal … we made a prodigious use of the word solemn even for necessarily or intrinsically solemn acts.  We use words, believing that we can put more solemnity into the Procession of Palms than into that of Candlemas, more solemnity into the Procession of Maundy Thursday than that of Good Friday (abolished as we shall see).  Always on the same slippery slope, we learn that the Passion of Good Friday is sung solemnly, as if it could be sung in another fashion.”

Here Gromier identifies a crucial characteristic of the Reformed Liturgy that I had never been able to put into words.  Theologians often talk about the svolta antropologica, a man-centered volte-face of theology after Rahner.  Here we have a clear liturgical complement.  Solemnity no longer arises from the nature of the Christological mystery being celebrated, but of how we go about celebrating it, and what we do to celebrate it.  The Eucharistic Processions of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday were solemn before because of their reference to Christ being carried to and from the Sepulchre.  After 1955, Maundy Thursday remains solemn because incense and song and candles accompany the Procession.  Good Friday ceases to be so because those things that we do are omitted.  I think this is a point worthy of further reflection.  How often in our parishes, basilicas and papal liturgies have we seen attempts at solemnization of the liturgy interpreted as our use of Latin, candles and incense rather than the solemn nature of certain ceremonies rising from their intrinsic Christological import?

"Solemnity no longer arises from the nature of the Christological mystery being celebrated, but of how we go about celebrating it, and what we do to celebrate it." We do not add Latin, chant, candles, incense, etc to make a rite solemn. Instead we have these things because the rite is of its nature solemn.

Scraping the barrel on Pope coverage

The last Pope to resign was Gregory XII who did so on 4th July 1415. But he did so when there were two other claimants (a Benedict XIII and a John XXIII, not to be confused with Pietro Francisco Orsini or Angelo Roncalli) and so it was not immediately clear whether the real Pope was resigning or was being eased out (as the other two claimants were). So far as I know the only other resignation was St Celestine V who did so on 13th December 1294. Pope Benedict visited St Celestine's tomb in July 2010, and left his Pallium there. Anyway those are some facts.

I thought factoids were trivial facts. I was wrong. They are things presented as fact but actually false – such as the sowing of salt into the ruins of Carthage (didn't happen, made up I believe in the 20th century).

Five factoids about Popes and their Appointment.

Edward Peters asks When will the Conclave start?


Further to my theory that everybody in practice acknowledges the vast importance of the Papacy on its own terms, that is spiritually, not merely because he happens to be in charge of the world's largest religion, here are some more links.

Dan Hodges (Glenda Jackson's son) says A black Pope would be the liberal left's worst nightmare. Unlikely. They have no problem going after Clarence Thomas, Archbishop John Sentamu etc.

In a few weeks time they’re going to establish a new Papal Conclave, and when they do, they really need to get Alastair Campbell in there, or Simon Cowell.

This a few shades from Cosmopolitan decrying the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger because he would destroy the Catholic Church: We didn't know you cared!

Tim Blair says:

Pope Benedict XVI announces his resignation. I didn't know he was a Labor MP.

The Pope and the PM: Compare and contrast

On 30th January 2013 Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, announced that the next general election for the Commonwealth Parliament will be on September 14th.

That's a wait of 227 days.

On February 11th Pope Benedict XVI announced that he was renouncing the Papacy with effect from 8pm on 28th February (6am on 1st March in Sydney).

According to John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution Universi Dominici Gregis n.37, there has to be a period of 15 days from "the moment when the Apostolic See is lawfully vacant" before the Conclave can begin. The Cardinals can wait a maximum of twenty days. Given the advance warning it seems unlikely that the conclave will begin any later than 15th March. The mean length of all conclaves from St Pius X onwards is 3.1 recurring (you may want to check my arithmetic). Modal length is 3. Median is 3.5.

There should be a new Pope before 20th March 2013, Wednesday of the 5th Week of Lent. 178 days later Australia should get a new Prime Minister.

Philippa Martyr discusses the chances of the next Pope being a black lesbian. She also predicts every idiot and his dog (usually the less idiotic of the two) giving his opinion. She is pleased by this.

The good thing about it all is that the world - for whose salvation the Catholic Church exists - sees the Church as genuinely everyone's property, and something about which everyone can and should have an opinion. It was actually always meant to be that way - out in the open, big enough for anyone who wanted to join, and plenty of room for all comers.

Just after the Conclave of 2005 began I heard a reliable report that BBC news announced the extra omnes as "we will soon have a new Pope". The Reformation seemed to be over.

Brendan O'Neill – former editor of Living Marxism (which I heard him coyly refer to as "LM" when he was in Australia recently) and an agnostic – is honestly disappointed.

The news that the Pope has resigned sends out a powerful and probably unwitting message – that the Papacy is just a job, like being a bank manager or librarian. It is apparently something you can jack in when you feel past it or whacked out. I think the reason people have felt instinctively startled today by the phrase "Pope resigns" is because most of us, even non-Catholics, probably even the fashionable Pope-bashing set, feel that being Pope is not just a job but a calling, or at least a vocation; something one feels summoned to do and more importantly to be.

The fad of folk music

A while ago the Chant Café posted a link to an essay by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo C.S.J. at the Catholic News Agency on Church Music and the Fad of Folk Style, the following week they published a sequel. The essays are rather disjointed: more like a collection of useful quotes for such an essay than the completed work. But they do contain some zingers.

‘Folk’ style in church music is amply represented in The Music Missal (OCP), a flimsy, unattractive, and disposable handbook, which enjoys widespread use and influence. It contains other music like Ordinaries of the Mass, Reformed Protestant hymnody, and Gregorian chants. In no way does this ‘folk’ style, a misnomer, resemble authentic folk music. Whereas genuine folk songs were written by the community and were transmitted by the oral tradition, this material has been written by individuals. Genuine folk songs have a simple, limited melodic range as well as simple rhythm with little or no accompaniment. 

Bingo! She also has some good words to say for the guitar, but not as it is presently used.

The guitar needs to be defended.  It is a serious instrument, not to be trivialized. Belonging to the lute family, the guitar is first and foremost a solitary, gentle, soft-spoken plucked instrument with limited sonority. The lute and the lyra, the kithara and the harp are all related to the guitar (chitarra).  These string families were used in ancient and biblical times to sooth and console their listeners. They can foster meditation and can even mesmerize audiences, but they were not meant to rev them up to a frenzy, whether in a concert hall or in church. Whereas classical guitar is difficult to master, elementary guitar requires a minimum of formal training, and it thrives on basic chords, strumming, thumping, and pounding.

She quotes a reference in Benedict XVI's Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977 to "the disintegration of the liturgy" and comments:

Disintegration is not a pretty word, but Benedict XVI uses it to capture the liturgical crisis in the Church today.  A thing deteriorates when its natural form is so disfigured that the purpose for which it was intended is no longer recognizable. It is not simply irreverent music. At issue is that the faithful have become ‘the church,’ an alternate church, and they are celebrating themselves through the folly of faddism.

MUSTARD in space

In 1957 Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of loosely related stories in Tales from the White Hart. From the blurb to a recent edition:

Although written, as the author informs us in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, in such diverse locations as New York, Miami, Columbo and Sydney there is something inherently English about these stories. London's famed Fleet Street district has changed dramatically in the five decades since the collection's first appearance as a Ballantine paperback original… and, of course, many of the regulars of the White Hart (based on the White Horse pub on Fetter Lane) are no longer with us. But the White Hart's most prominent raconteur  Harry Purvis can still be found propping up the bar and regaling us all once again with tales of quirky and often downright eccentric scientists and inventors.

Some sense of the atmosphere of Clarke's stories – and the real life organisations on which they were based – can be got from Poking fun at Britain's Moon Men at Tor.com.

All this came back to me when I read the obituary of Tom Smith, one of the designers of the British Space Shuttle.

The idea of the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device, or MUSTARD as it was known, arose out of an Air Ministry contract for BAC to study “hypersonic” speed (five times the speed of sound and above). A team was formed under Smith’s leadership at BAC’s Warton airbase, near Preston, Lancashire. … MUSTARD was regarded as a suitable project for joint development by European aerospace companies, with a cost estimated to be around “20 to 30 times cheaper” than that of the expendable rocket launch systems of the time. Unfortunately, as with so many other British inventions, the government of the day decided not to proceed. About three years after MUSTARD was cancelled, the Americans became interested in a reusable aircraft.

The non-existent taboo against composing new Gregorian chants

It is obvious to anyone who attends a Catholic liturgy that despite repeated attempts by those in authority Gregorian chant is far from being "given pride of place in liturgical services". One problem is that it is not a form of music that can be easily and readily played by ordinary musicians. It requires specialist training. Another problem is that the chants themselves are complicated. Many of them can really only be sung by a choir. One way to overcome this was the Graduale simplex in usum minorum ecclesiarum. As its full title indicates, it was meant for the use of Churches too small to sustain a full Gregorian choir. Judging by the present situation that would be pretty much all Churches, including most Cathedrals.

According to Archbishop Bugnini, when the Graduale simplex was first presented, there were loud objections. In his memoir of the reforms he quotes an objection and answer document published by the Consilium.

II. "New forms would be introduced that are not adapted to the faithful and not in conformity with the art of the Church and with the liturgical renewal."
Answer: Not in the least! the melodies of the Graduale simplex are all in the present chant books. None of them is new. The manner of singing, in which one or more cantors alternate with the congregation, which sings a refrain verse, is the oldest and most traditional in the Church. Its use has shown how easy and possible this kind of singing is; the truth of this claim was seen at the fourth session of the ecumenical Council and can be seen every time the congregation responds to the chant with an easy verse, as often happens even in televised Masses. This manner of singing is completely in conformity with the Church's art, as is shown by the venerable tradition dating from the time of such Fathers as St. Ambrose and St. Augustine [presumably referring to Augustine, Confessions ix.7]. It is also consistent with the liturgical renewal, since one of the reform's basic principles is the active participation of the faithful in both the actions and the singing of the sacred rites. (Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975, chapter 58, p.894).

(Jeffrey Tucker discusses the Graduale simplex at the Chant Café).

This suggested to me that there is some kind of taboo against composing new plainchant melodies. I have seen it held against the Graduale simplex that it uses melodies from the Divine Office, so a fortiori one would expect there to be some rule against composing entirely new ones. It should be noted that Urban VIII's revisions of the Breviary hymns (mentioned the other day) to make them more Classical and in accordance with Classical metres, are criticised by the Catholic Encyclopedia (§VI) partly because in fact more recent scholarship has shown their Classicism to be defective. Perhaps the fear is that in composing new melodies unknown rules of composition would be broken.

On the other hand the Pope's Mass for the opening of the Year of Faith "used new compositions in the Gregorian tradition for the introit and communion".