Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Yesterday: San Gennaro.
• Liturgy and music: ‘the people’ and the pros. Thomas Day territory: the modernistic so-called ‘rebels for the people’ are really the establishment pros (since the 1970s) who ignore Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival, which often does come from ‘the people’, because it doesn’t fit their narrative and ideology. (The kind of people who think the kids like Mr Van Driessen and thus like them.)
• RC news including a survey that says most people in the pews are laissez-faire about the Tridentine Mass. Comment.
• As regulars know I hate anti-Western screeds but this person’s got a point that Eastern worship’s got soul. Filtering out the cr*p in that post, as I like to say it’s like the Tridentine Mass or a 1950s Anglo-Catholic one but with a mystical kick all its own.
• Patriarch Cyril: church should ‘go forward’ but avoid being reformed ‘to please modern tendencies’.
• Dom Gregory Dix on abusing the church as a national/ethnic booster: It has been the nemesis of all racial Christianities from St Paul’s opponents to the present day that they have proved sterile and inadequate just in proportion as they have expressed only the emphatic qualities of a race. Truth will be held most entirely and in due proportion in a church which is truly ‘universal’, supra-racial, and unaffected by the transient spirit of a particular age. From here. I’ve not read N.P. Williams on this question but one can talk about the virtues of Nordic culture and their influence on the local church without being a Nazi.
• Anglicans and councils. Comments here and here.
• Nats, Piskies and New York City churches.