lol, it is the best parade of the year. It is held, I believe, in honor of Our Lady of Copacabana, the patroness of Bolivia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgen_de_Copacabana whose feast day is August 5th. I think the parade occurs on the closest Saturday to the actual day. It is an amazing parade. It used to be done out of St. Boniface Church (now condos). I guess its been moved to St.Mary's on Second Street.

Juventutum NJ inaugurates itself with the Solemn High Mass, the Feast of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, at St. Anthony of Padua Church at 7:00 PM. St. Anthony?s is at the intersection of Monmouth and Sixth Street.
Per the Charter of Juventutem,[4] the commitments of each individual who joins Juventutem are:

? to pray the psalm Judica me or some other prayer each day for the sanctification of youth
? to visit a church and adore Our Lord, once a week (can be before or after Sunday Mass)
? to attend the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) at least once a year
? to go to confession at least once a year
? to participate in at least one Juventutem event per year
? to annually support the International Juventutem Federation head office with prayer and funds (10?)

The Feast of Saints Peter and Paul or Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul is a liturgical feast in honour of the martyrdom in Rome of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which is observed on 29 June. The celebration is of ancient origin, the date selected being the anniversary either of their death or of the translation of their relics. In the East, the day marks the end of the Apostles Fast.
The Men?s Schola will sing the propers from the Liber Usualis. Motets Include Palestrina?s Tue Es Petrus for Six Voices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDEfQq56ebcOther motets include Bone Pastor by Tallis and Exsultate Justi Ludovico Grossi da Viadano.

The Ordinary is Haydn?s Missa brevis Sancti Joannis de Deo, Hob. XXII:7, Novello 8, is a mass in B-flat major by Joseph Haydn. The missa brevis (short mass) was written around 1775 for the order of the Barmherzige Br?der(Brothers Hospitallers) in Eisenstadt, whose patron saint was St. John of God. Scored modestly for soprano, four-part mixed choir, two violins, organ and bass, it is known as the Kleine Orgelsolomesse (Little Organ Mass) due to an extended organ solo in the Benedictus movement.
The mass was written for the order of the Barmherzige Br?der, also called Brothers of Mercy, in Eisenstadt, Hungarian Kingdom (now Austria), whose founder and patron saint was St. John of God. Haydn lived in Eisenstadt, working for the court ofNikolaus II, Prince Esterh?zy. The date of the composition is not certain because the autograph score bears no date. A year of 1778 or earlier in the 1770s seems likely. Because of an extensive Organ solo in the Benedictus, it is known as the Kleine Orgelsolomesse (Little Organ Mass), referring to the Gro?e Orgelsolomesse (de) (Great Organ Mass), a colloquial name for the Missa in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae, Haydn's fourth mass in E-flat major. An organ solo in the Benedictus was common practice at the time.]
Haydn played the organ in the first performance in the hospital chapel of the Brethren in Eisenstadt. "Kleine" (little) may refer to the composition as well as to the organ, because the instrument there was a positive with six stops without pedal.]
The setting of the Latin mass is structured in six movements. It was originally scored for a solo soprano, a four-part choir (SATB), the socalled Wiener Kirchentrio (Vienna church trio) of two violins and bass, with an organ which has a solo function in the Benedictus. Kyrie[edit]
The Kyrie shows, according to the musicologist John Hsu "brilliant instrumental idioms and choral declamation.]
Credo[edit]

The Credo is structured in three parts, the center being formed by an Adagio for the birth, suffering and death of Jesus, delivered by the choir mostly in homophony, accompanied by broken chords in the violins and repetition in the bass. The third section recapitulates music from the Gloria.

Sanctus[edit]
Sanctus is called by the voices in a fast sequence of entries, some as bell-like long notes, other in flowing triplets. For the Osanna, the voices enter from the lowest to the highest, only one measure apart. The instruments play colla parte with the voices, violins with soprano and alto, cello and violone with the bass.
Benedictus[edit]

The Benedictus, the longest movement, is a dialogue of soprano soloist and organ, described as "expressive, elegant, and ornate melodic lines". It is followed by a repeat of the Osanna

Agnus Dei[edit]
Haydn marked the Agnus Dei carefully for dramatic contrast in dynamics, setting "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God) as a fortissimo homophonic call versus a pianissimo prayer "Dona nobis pacem" (Give us peace).[6] The end is marked "perdendosi, senza organo" (dying away, without organ), with a pizzicato bass.]
A reviewer of the Oxford edition summarized: "The work is accessible to most choirs. The music is not xcessively difficult, but the solid musical structure and the many passages requiring expressive singing make the work a rewarding pleasure for any size choir.2]H. C. Robbins Landon, an editor of the composition, ascribed to the work a "quiet spirit of devotion, even of mysticism, that is most appealing"]
Versions

While the mass was originally scored for choir, strings and organ, later versions include with trumpets and timpani, and clarinets.[3]
The mass was also used in Salzburg where the textual compression was deemed "unacceptable", therefore the composer's brother Michael Haydn expanded the Gloria, from 31 measures to 118.[9] Very few performances however, use this expansion. However, the Oxford edition presents Michael Haydn's prolongation in the main body of the text and Joseph's short original as an appendix.[2][10][11] Johann Georg Albrechtsberger wrote an alternate Benedictus.[3]

What's wrong with bikes in a pedestrian mall. If common sense and courtesy are used, all should be fine. 90% of the time, there is plenty of space for a biker to ride. 10% it is probably too crowed and the bicycle gets walked.

Dear I heart JC-

Thanks for the brotherly correction....

True I have not spent a lot of time there of late but my description still seems relatively accurate. Even if the beach front is entirely gentrified now, that still leaves the large ghetto west of the train tracks. Btw, I did not really mean my comments as a criciticsm, merely a description. I do know Asbury fairly well. I grew up in Manasquan, went to Convention Hall with my grammar school in th 1970s, the Stone Pony to hear "the Boss" in the late 80s, and lived in Ocean Grove in 1993. That 's a while back I know but I usually go to dinner there once a summer. Last time I was there was about a year ago. It still struck me as "on the verge" along the ocean and then everything west of the train tracks except for the Italian neighborhood bordering Allendale to still pretty downtrodden. Btw, I did not really think I was being negative about the place, just descriptive. And yes, it is a lot like Jersey City at the shore. And Jersey City is sort of a ghetto with a hiptster/gay downtown- except that we have all the finance people and Indians and Arabs etc. Personally, I enjoy going to places that are rather different than where I live for a change of pace.
There is also endemic political corruption in City Hall at Asbury Park which also makes it like JC!

Btw, I do love Jersey City.

Yours,

Mao

While Sandy Hook is nice and untouched and the ferry gets you there, it always seems to me like one is swimming in NY harbor. The water is kind of gross. I would brave the North Jersey Coast line. There are beach deals too.

Beach Packages
Don't worry about gas, tolls, traffic and parking when you can enjoy your trip to the shore on an NJ TRANSIT train or bus. From May 28 through September 5, save up to $5 with beach packages from any rail station, excluding Atlantic City Line stations. The cost of the package includes regularly priced round-trip tickets plus $3.50 for beach access at Asbury Park, Belmar, Bradley Beach, Long Branch or Ocean Grove.



NJ Transit stops like every mile after Long Branch. There is a nice public beach in Long Branch (Five Presidents?). Not sure how much the cab is from the train. There used to be express trains that would go almost non stop from Newark to Long Branch. After Long Branch favorite stops include:

Allendale- sleepy town

Asbury Park/Ocean Grove: crumbling ghetto on the Atlantic ever on the brink of gentrification now full of gays and hipsters. Ocean Grove is the same except with charming Victorian houses and still a pulsing vibe of 19th century style Methodism. Btw, Ocean Grove has free changing rooms with outdoor showers! This is key as many of the other towns have signs that glare: WARNING! Disrobing in this restroom is a crime punishable by death! (this is to keep the local bath house businesses afloat.

Bradley Beach: Compact town with nice beach and great restaurants

Avon: nice beach, beautiful homes. Salt water pool but for residents only.

Belmar: north part of beach is a drop beach (gets deep right away so no good for kids or body surfing). There is a "spring break" aspect to parts of the town.

Spring Lake/Sea Girt - formerly known as the "Irish Riviera," nice beaches, a little up tight, expensive estate style homes, cool WPA pavilions with salt water pools (but pools for residents only I think)

Manasquan: Something for everyone. Really nice beach

Pt. Pleasant: a true sense of Jersey. Great boardwalk for kids. The beach is also a drop off beach with no sand bar. Annoyingly, it is broken up into like ten privately owned beaches and you have to buy a badge for each one. Jenkinsons' has a salt water pool (or used to)

Bay Head: end of the line. Where one ends up if one falls asleep. Nice beaches. Limited commercial stuff. Shingled houses WASP ambiance. Train terminated here reportedly in mid 19th century because rail road executives had summer homes. Note that because the train stops so often, it is nearly an hour from Long Branch to Bayhead, though only about 25 miles probably.

Dear Drfter:

Well, I have come to have a very dark understanding of Islam. I started out as
a religious studies major at Bowdoin, uber politically correct place, where the line
you espouse was doctrine. However, I don't think that is correct.
I think it false to describe Islam as Abrahamic. Current scholarship
indicates that it was an ideology created to cover plunder.

Judaism is high moralistic. Christianity inherited that as well as a
radical other worldliness. The Church is full of sinners but Christ is the Victim. The apostles preached the Gospel.

What "saintly founders" of Christianity do you want to implicate?

Mao

Are some of you guys on the payroll in Planning? Or just true believers with no babies or old people in toe.


Mao the whiner

Frank et alFrank-

Not sure why the Left always resorts to ad hominems. Not that the right does not do it too, but if one did a study I think one would see that the Left wins in that regard hands down.

Speaking clearly and directly and honestly is generally helpful. Obfuscating to point of it being Orwellian is the problem. Most of the right, and Donald Trump (who is not a conservative), wrongly assert that Islam is fine but only a mutant strain is violent. But a

But Islamic Terrorism is something we should all be able to agree to use. It described terrorists who are Islamic and who claim to be inspired by Islam.

But, you know, historic Islam is intimately tied to violence. The consensus is that it is a religion, real more an ideology, invented after the Arab conquest of portions of the Byzantine Empire. See Luxenbourg, Christoph, The Syro Aramaic Reading of the Koran. Or for a more accessible introduction read Spencer, Robert, Did Mohammed Exist. The invented Mohammed in the Hadiths is a violent brigand and sexual predator. What kind of an ideology invents such a founder/hero? While the vast majority of Muslims seem to want to just live out their lives and support and love their families, it is because either they are irreligious or subscribe to a kinder more humane Islam.
People everywhere do terrible things. However, the most extreme examples that we see day in and day out (blowing up the twin towers, suicide bombers, beheading children, burning churches, raping and kidnapping girls, mutilating the genitals of women, sodomizing boys) either get an endorsement from aspects central to Islam or are an integral part of Islamic culture.


Mao

To DTJCer et alii:

To those of the "get a bike get a life" vien, the point here as most other posters noted is coordination. It is one thing to have detours and delays, another thing to completely shut a city down to the point that the JCPD intervenes to prevent a public safety emergency. And sure, we'd all like an urban utopia where we can walk to everything. JC is walkable but most of Jersey City is not entirely car free no matter what the youngsters in the City Planning Bureau think. Also those with old people and children in their care should be excused the reliance on the automobile.

Mao

Was this the worst of all traffic Armageddon's that we've had lately?

Grand Street, Monmouth, Varick and sundry other streets totally closed. The City has an entire division in Engineering dedicated to streets and roads. Who could possible have approved all of these closures?

Dear Pebble:
Reality will never get in the way of your passionate world view. Christians are easily the most persecuted group in the world. Persecuted Christian minorities which have managed to survive since the Moslem conquest are being liquidated throughout the Middle East (e.g. Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran). In sub-Saharan Africa, advancing Moslems are killing Christians. Recalcitrant Marxist regimes are harassing, arresting, and murdering Christians in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. Muslims in Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines are killing Christians, burning down churches. In India, Hindu nationalists murder and harass Christians.
In the first world, the persecution is much less severe. Still orthodox Christianity is considered a violation of the current social compact. As Frank Bruni, NT Times columnist (aka Platonic Guardian wrote), ?church leaders must be made ?to take homosexuality off the sin list.? If the Church does not, then it will be subjected to increasing persecution. First, removal of tax exemption. Then, perhaps, fines and harassment of various sorts. It will unlikely that any martyrs will be made., It will just be smothered by a thousand cuts of bureaucratic animosity. I remember way back in the late 1980s when I was in law school and I was shocked how all the liberals, particularly the LGBTers, were arguing that either the First Amendment had to go or it would have to be contextualized by new case law that prevented traditional minded people from contributing to the Public Square.
It?s already nasty on a daily basis. Try articulating the prevailing Western view (even championed by Hypocrites hundreds of years before Christ) that abortion is murder or that marriage is between a man and a woman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUTiEXdEsGk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEvpYQzU5DM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJPuzKfmt-8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI2_6mZi12k
Returning to the topic of this thread, a good argument can be made that Trump is a result of the crass and aggressive communication style of the Left. Trump is a fraud but maybe that is all our society can muster at this point.
Btw, Pebble, I don?t understand the quote on the bottom of your page?
Mao

Pebble-

Ha, the entire Left is premised on omnipresent victimhood- women, Muslims, gays, immigrants. Nice example of projection.

Mao

Dear Brewster:
Thank you for your assaultative response. The only place where the f word seems playful to me is in Ireland where the populace is ridiculously and pathetically addicted to say feck this and that.
But you are absolutely right about free speech being a two way street. The omnivore can attack the tenents of veganism and the vegan can attack the tenents of the carnivore. But the vegan won?t stand for it.
My wife and I follow traditional Christian fasting rules- that is no meat on Friday (hers are actually much broader since she is an Eastern Christian, e.g veganism about half the year). If someone thinks we do this because of animal rights, or the environment, or because we?re Buddhists, we get fawned over. If we say we do it because of the crucifixion of Christ, the gamut of reactions runs from solicitous disdain (you pathetic souls), to resentment (who do you think you holy rollers are) to angry and aggressive attack (you Taliban Christian).
Btw, the reason the Church?s are empty is because the priests and bishops have lost the faith. The opposite explanation you posit. Who is going to organize hisr life around a parish that is nothing more than social work directed by an emasculated and narcissistic and usually barely closeted homosexual man who is living a most comfortable life? The Church is desperate for approval from the world and is betraying Christ. If the Vatican is destroyed by Isis, we can thank Pope Francis. If Catholics are excluded from public office for objecting to the charade of gay marriage, we can thank Pope Francis. What young couple would bother to baptize their child and sacrifice for their parish for a religion that mocks itself?
Your association, btw, of atheism with intellect is wrong. Despite the strongly anti Christian ideology in the schools, higher education leads to higher levels of religious practice- though does seem, paradoxically to weaken belief.
The science in opposition to Faith is a false dichotomy. Science was still born everywhere but in the Catholic West where the Catholic Universities and religious order nurtured it undergird by a robust Aristoleanism. Albert the Great, Copernicus, Mendel, Pascal etc were Catholics. Galileo, was really just a shrewd courtier of le beau monde who mistakenly lampooned his patroon as SImplicus and so ended up with a mild reproof and detention. http://www.catholic.com/tracts/the-galileo-controversy
The stew of the Left which is a mishmash of isms of the last 500 years held together by hatred of Christianity will, I fear, make for a less beneficent society. More ominously, it makes us prey to things like Nazism, Marxism, and now Islam.
Mao

Dear Asif:
Thanks for engaging my argument substantively.
My understanding is that Allah is conceived in Islam as being above and beyond all law so that He is praised for the attribute of being capricious.
Yet here is a tome I find asserting natural law alive and well at the heart of Islam., http://www.academia.edu/9632719/Nature_of_Natural_Law_in_Islam
I remember from my undergraduate philosophy that Avicenna and Averroes were master Aristotelians, and so would appreciate natural law. However, they taught the ?two fold truth,? that there was one truth in religion and another in philosophy since they could not reconcile it with Islam.
Below is a lengthy excerpt from an article discussion the capricious and irrational aspect of Allah compared to the Triune God of Christianity which is the source of all reason.
Again, I appreciate your willingness to discuss.
Yours,

Mao

After all, how likely is it that the average believer?Muslim or Christian?could even fully grasp the differences between the Christian conception of the Godhead and the Muslim conception of Allah, let alone allow his behavior to be affected by such differences?
Perhaps we can begin to understand the importance that these differences hold for even the average believer by approaching this from a slightly different angle.
In De Potentia, St. Thomas Aquinas contrasts the Muslim view of physical causality with the Christian one, pointing out that Muslims believe that Allah interposes himself at every point in the chain of causality, while Christians believe that natural objects can act under their own power. Contemporary writers, such as Fr. Stanley Jaki, have argued that this Muslim misconception of natural causality is the primary reason science developed in Christian Europe but remained stunted in Muslim societies (the claims of current public-school textbooks and PBS propaganda specials notwithstanding).
Few people, however, have explored the moral implications of the Muslim understanding of physical causality. To take Aquinas?s example, if I were to take this lighter and apply the flame to this sheet of paper, everyone in this room would assume that, everything being normal, the paper would ignite?and it does. It took no special act of God to cause the paper to burn; in fact, all other things being equal, it would have required His intervention to prevent a fire, just as He intervened when Nebuchanezzer threw the three youths into the furnace. According to the Muslim view, however, when I strike the lighter, Allah has to decide whether the flint will spark, and whether the spark will ignite the fuel. When I apply the flame to the paper, Allah must decide whether the paper will ignite. If it does catch fire, it is because Allah willed that each in this series of natural acts would occur; if it does not, it is because Allah willed that the paper would not burn.
So we conclude that Muslims have a non-Western, non-Christian notion of physical causality. So what? Well, what if this weren?t a lighter, but an airplane? And what if this weren?t a sheet of paper, but one of the towers of the World Trade Center? Then, if the plane, being applied to the tower, were to cause it to burst into flames and crumble to the ground, it would not happen because the hollow steel structure of the tower created a chimney that caused an implosion, or because changes in environmental regulations prevented the use of asbestos above the 76th floor, but only because Allah willed that the tower would burst into flames and crumble to the ground. The complete capriciousness of Allah with respect to the physical world leads to a moral fatalism. If Allah did not want the towers to fall, he would not have made them fall. To Muslims who understand this?both in the United States and worldwide?the fact that the towers fell was a clear signal that Allah approved of the actions of the September 11 hijackers.
This moral fatalism helps to explain why many American Muslims?even some of those who seemed genuinely horrified by what had occurred?were unable or unwilling to condemn the September 11 attacks directly. If Allah approved the actions of the hijackers by causing the towers to fall, then to condemn the September 11 attacks is essentially an act of impiety. It is one of the many ironies of Islam that the Muslim insistence on the radical freedom of the will can lead to a moral fatalism which those who wish to wage jihad against the United States can use in order to silence dissent among their fellow Muslims.
Just as Christians believe that we are made in the image and likeness of God, Muslims see themselves as a reflection of Allah. And as we wish to conform our will to God?s Will, they attempt to conform their wills to Allah. But here, the similarities end. If Allah?s will, unlike God?s, is not bound up with rationality, then the discerning of that will takes a very different shape. In attempting to understand God?s Will, Christians can turn to the world around us, to natural law, to history, to tradition. We see the rationality?the consistent reasonableness?of God?s Will in the world that He created. But in Islam, the appearance of order is only that?an appearance. To the extent that the created world seems rational, it is only because Allah wishes it to appear so. His will could change at any moment, however?and the new order, or lack thereof, that he would create would be just as ?right? as this one.
Which brings us back to Regensburg. Pope Benedict?s address was only 16 paragraphs long; and contrary to the impression given by the media, only the first four paragraphs directly concerned Islam. The other 12 are a philosophical and historical meditation on, in the Holy Father?s words, ?the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.? Turning to Saint John the Evangelist, Pope Benedict declares that John ?spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God? when he declared that ?In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God.? In other words, the final word on the biblical concept of God is a Greek word, and one of paramount importance in Greek philosophy. In English translations of this passage, we normally render logos as word: ?In the beginning was the Word.? But logos, Pope Benedict reminds us, also means reason. ?In the beginning was Reason??not the modern, narrow, scientific conception of reason, which places reason at odds with faith, but the classical and medieval conception of reason, which accepts faith as the ?evidence of things not seen.?
Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights.

http://takimag.com/article/pope_bened ... ional/print#ixzz4BgdqrMe9

Dear MDM:

Home schooling and the catacombs might be one solution. Talking honestly and reasonably and in a civil matter to preserve the public square so that private values can be cultivated is my tactic now. But its probably a losing battle. Two vignettes: a junior boy, academically talented and heading to an Ivy who is also an athlete, posts on his Facebook, a down with gay marriage message. As a result, the all the girls in the junior class band together to denounce the "hater" and to shun him. So much for dialogue! Vignette number two: a Muslim hajiib wearing girl who is a senior is accepted into a Ivy League school with a full scholarship for next year. One of her teachers says to her: "Don't you love this country?" The girl stares at the teacher and says: "No, I despise this country."

Mao

Dear Brewster:
You are half correct. Christianity, from Judaism, strongly condemns homosexual acts and strictly reserves sexual intimacy for the marital act (heterosexual intercourse) open to procreation. The edicts of Moses and the Torah and the prophets were explicated in natural law terms by Christian theologians. And it is true that this understanding was enshrined in civil law so that there were penalties for homosexuality. This was the law in the United States, a formerly Christian nation, with had been resoundingly endorsed by our Supreme Court as recently as the 1980s in Bowers v. Hardwick. Indeed, it was inconceivable for our grandparents that homosexuality would be tolerated, let alone celebrated. As Winston Churchill, an English aristocrat, a class not unfamiliar with homosexuality said: ?You might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.?
Homosexuality was illegal in Christendom from the conversion of Constantine until recently. My impression was that it was most often considered a matter for Confession and repentance rather than punishment by the civil authorities.
Islam, see my previous post, is in some ways more tolerant of male homosexuality in practice than Christianity or Judaism, having a strongly misogynistic cast and no concept of natural law.
Orlando has nothing to do with homophobia but is merely yet another in an endless string of Islamic inspired terror and mayhem that flows from the very heart of the religion (which is really an ideology not a religion at all).
I hate Trump but the way Orlando is being covered has, for the first time, given me some insight as to why Trump resonates with a certain group of disaffected people.
It is wonderful to raise children in a City where people of all differing beliefs get along. However, I have three children who have been in private, public and charter schools. All of these environments are rabidly anti Christian and in an ignorant manner. Any divergence from the party line which is anti-Christian, anti Western, pro gay, pro promiscuity, pro abortion, pro euthanasia, is met with disdain and social opprobrium. Love of country is mocked as is its history and anyone willing to praise it and sacrifice for it. Tolerance is a one way street in this town of closing churches.
Yours,
Mao.

Dear Pebble:

I think a close look at the record shows sharply divergent approaches to violence between religions- with Islam being the only major religion that has a strongly violent character. The canard that criticizes the Crusades which were the belated response of a Christian society that had been on the defensive for four hundred years, is a case in point. Most scholars are afraid or unable to look clearly at Islam. The foremost scholar of the Koran, Christoph Luxenberg, writes under a pseudonym for good reason. Modern scholarship suggests that Islam was invented as post hoc ideolgogy when the arab tribes swept over weakened areas of the Byzantine empire and that it was constructed by barbarians out of heretical,mostly Nestorian, texts.

Mao

Pebble and Asif:
Do you think there is any relationship between Islam and violence? Is it correlation, not causation? Has any peace come from it?
Also, I do not think that it is correct to assert that Islamic culture is intolerant of homosexuality. Friends who travel in Islamic lands report constant harassment from Muslim men. See, this article in The Atlantic which argues for a gay friendly- Islam that only became anti gay at the beginning of the 20th century under the sway of Europeans. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a ... m-in-the-closet/305774/is One recalls the recent event where a US Commander in Afghanistan who objected to the local authority routinely abusing young boys. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/c ... h-young-boys-8911529.html
This makes the LGBT?s Islamo-philia that it shares with the Left as a whole somewhat comprehensible.
We don?t know a lot about this actor in Orlando. My guess is that the most likely understanding is that it is Islamic violence, an impulse intimately connected to the heart of the religion and its history, and which is aggressive and anti Western and picks both soft targets and targets that are paradigmatic of the West. From the World Trade to Charle Hebdo, to nightclubs. Before this gay club there were the Bali bombings, etc. The actor might have been lonely and alone etc. but the jihad impulse can get activated in various types of situations.
That being said, I don?t? think I can ever pull the lever for Trump who seems to me to be a showman more than anything- and certainly not a responsible guy who will reign in government and assert American power and order in a judicious fashion. My hope remains in a third party candidate who prevents anyone from getting a majority of electoral votes and requiring the House to choose.
Yours,

Mao

Trump is us- narcissistic, juvenile, labile, undisciplined, without a rudder, a shameless amoral entertainer. People who I had previously credited with integrity are supporting him. I am praying for a third party candidate to come in to the race so that no one gets a majority of the electoral votes and the House decides the race.

However, on the Muslim issue, Trump was right about 9/11.

http://nypost.com/2015/12/21/nj-polic ... ims-did-celebrate-on-911/

While there are many great people who are also Muslim, it is inspite of their "religion" not because of it.

The remnant faithful will gather for a sung high Mass for the Feast of Corpus Christi tonight at 7:00 PM at St. Anthony of Padua at 6th Street and Monmouth. The Mass will be offered in Latin and will be followed by a procession around the neighborhood. From the Catholic Encylopaedia:



Feast of Corpus Christi



(Feast of the Body of Christ)

This feast is celebrated in the Latin Church on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday to solemnly commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist.

Of Maundy Thursday, which commemorates this great event, mention is made as Natalis Calicis (Birth of the Chalice ) in the Calendar of Polemius (448) for the 24th of March, the 25th of March being in some places considered as the day of the death of Christ. This day, however, was in Holy Week, a season of sadness, during which the minds of the faithful are expected to be occupied with thoughts of the Lord's Passion . Moreover, so many other functions took place on this day that the principal event was almost lost sight of. This is mentioned as the chief reason for the introduction of the new feast, in the Bull "Transiturus."

The instrument in the hand of Divine Providence was St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon, in Belgium. She was born in 1193 at Retines near Li?ge. Orphaned at an early age, she was educated by the Augustinian nuns of Mont Cornillon. Here she in time made her religious profession and later became superioress. Intrigues of various kinds several time drove her from her convent. She died 5 April, 1258, at the House of the Cistercian nuns at Fosses, and was buried at Villiers.

Juliana, from her early youth, had a great veneration for the Blessed Sacrament , and always longed for a special feast in its honour. This desire is said to have been increased by a vision of the Church under the appearance of the full moon having one dark spot, which signified the absence of such a solemnity. She made known her ideas to Robert de Thorete, then Bishop of Li?ge, to the learned Dominican Hugh, later cardinal legate in the Netherlands, and to Jacques Pantal?on, at that time Archdeacon of Li?ge, afterwards Bishop of Verdun, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and finally Pope Urban IV. Bishop Robert was favourably impressed, and, since bishops as yet had the right of ordering feasts for their dioceses, he called a synod in 1246 and ordered the celebration to be held in the following year, also, that a monk named John should write the Office for the occasion. The decree is preserved in Binterim (Denkw?rdigkeiten, V, 1, 276), together with parts of the Office.

Bishop Robert did not live to see the execution of his order, for he died 16 October, 1246; but the feast was celebrated for the first time by the canons of St. Martin at Li?ge. Jacques Pantal?on became pope 29 August, 1261. The recluse Eve, with whom Juliana had spent some time, and who was also a fervent adorer of the Holy Eucharist, now urged Henry of Guelders, Bishop of Li?ge, to request the pope to extend the celebration to the entire world. Urban IV, always an admirer of the feast, published the Bull "Transiturus" (8 September, 1264), in which, after having extolled the love of Our Saviour as expressed in the Holy Eucharist , he ordered the annual celebration of Corpus Christi in the Thursday next after Trinity Sunday , at the same time granting many indulgences to the faithful for the attendance at Mass and at the Office. This Office, composed at the request of the pope by the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas, is one of the most beautiful in the Roman Breviary and has been admired even by Protestants.

The death of Pope Urban IV (2 October, 1264), shortly after the publication of the decree, somewhat impeded the spread of the festival. Clement V again took the matter in hand and, at the General Council of Vienne (1311), once more ordered the adoption of the feast. He published a new decree which embodied that of Urban IV. John XXII , successor of Clement V, urged its observance.

Neither decree speaks of the theophoric procession as a feature of the celebration. This procession, already held in some places, was endowed with indulgences by Popes Martin V and Eugene IV.

The feast had been accepted in 1306 at Cologne ; Worms adopted it in 1315; Strasburg in 1316. In England it was introduced from Belgium between 1320 and 1325. In the United States and some other countries the solemnity is held on the Sunday after Trinity.

In the Greek Church the feast of Corpus Christi is known in the calendars of the Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and the Ruthenians of Galicia, Calabria, and Sicily.

I guess there is more than we realize that goes on in trusts and estates than one would think. My mother mentioned one lawyer down the shore who was bilking the estates of all her friends. Yet people loved him. Joe got caught because he was probably not smart enough to get away with it. At least he gets a chance to repent. I feel badly for his wife and kids whom I used to see at swim meets.

The lost art of listening
Has classical music become irrelevant?
By Anna Goldsworthy
October 2015
Sometimes, while performing the Funeral March from Chopin?s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, I am struck by the fact that everyone in the auditorium is marching towards death at the exact tempo of the piece: 54 crotchets per minute or thereabouts, one foot in front of the other, until by movement?s end we are eight minutes closer to our collective destination. It is not an unpleasant thought, encapsulated as it is by the music: the pity it seems to extend to us all (including its long-dead composer), its moments of rage against the dying of the light. But its largest consolation lies in its inexorability. Even when this hall?s occupants are long gone this march will continue. I am only its carrier organism, its vector; in a hundred years, there will surely be another pianist on this stool, contemplating mortality in the key of B flat minor, before another audience, shedding tears for lives that have not yet begun.
It is the consolation of the humanistic tradition, of being part of a larger cultural project, but recently I have found such consolation harder to come by. Although we might all be marching towards death at the same tempo, it is difficult to escape the fact that my audience is several decades further down the road than I am. And I am less and less confident that a new audience will come marching in to replace them.
There is a conventional wisdom that you come to classical music later. Maybe you have a road-to-Damascus moment, in which Beethoven finally speaks to you. Or perhaps it is something more mundane: as you become an older thing yourself, you come to prefer other older things (although, ironically, much of the musical canon was composed by young men, with Mozart, Schubert, Chopin and Mendelssohn all dying in their 30s).
It is reassuring to imagine that our audiences will naturally renew themselves, but last year, on tour with my trio, Seraphim, I started to have my doubts. We began in Macedon, Victoria, where we delivered eulogies for two cherished audience members who had recently passed away; we then performed Beethoven, who did the job better. Up in Queensland, a chamber music society president confessed that since many of her former subscribers could no longer leave their homes, the society was drawing down its financial reserves and would soon shut up shop. In New South Wales, our presenter revealed that he was suffering from dementia, and was not sure how much longer he could continue.
That our audience is older than us is old news. It has been like that since we started playing together, 21 years ago. Occasionally, backstage, one of us might report the sighting of a brunette amid the sea of silver ? a peer! ? like a rare and glorious bird. These occasions are rare; the interloper is typically revealed to be a music student or a family member.
None of this ever troubled us. Our audience members are loyal and knowledgeable. They make us feel cherished, as our grandparents might, plying us with country hospitality after concerts, laughing at the bad jokes we make onstage. (Possibly, this has engendered a distorted sense of our own youthfulness: even as we approached 40, we continued to congratulate ourselves in publicity material on our ?youthful vigour?.) But over the course of this tour, something began to nag at me. Regardless of how much we had aged ourselves, we did not seem to be gaining ground on our audience.
American figures suggest that the average age of attendance at a symphony concert in 1937 was 30. Australian census data does not exist from that time but the demographic is likely to have been similar. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported that the largest proportion of attendees at classical music concerts in 2009?10 was the cohort aged 65?74. Carl Vine, the artistic director of the independent performing arts organisation Musica Viva, remains unperturbed: ?What would bother me would be if they were over 80. At 60, we still have 20 years of subscriber left.?
I feel less sanguine. Might there be a concert a few decades hence in which ? God willing ? my trio is still performing, but only to an audience of one? And if that listener were to perish mid performance, would we keep playing?Reports of the death of classical music are not new. There are those who have made a career out of eulogising it, such as the English journalist Norman Lebrecht, who has written the same book on the subject several times; the late pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen quipped that ?the death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition?. Classical music has absorbed a number of deaths already ? the death of patronage, of the composer-virtuoso, of tonality. Clearly it is made of stern stuff, but can it survive the death of its audience?
My concern is not exclusively with the fate of the formal recital, which is only a 19th-century invention, and not the only way to experience music. Much of what we consider the musical canon pre-dates it. At its worst, it can feel moribund, a historical re-enactment in period dress. The musician walks onstage and bows like a footman, before moving through the standard emotional simulations. The audience sits quietly and applauds in the correct places, tut-tutting those who do not. It can be a difficult thing to love. And yet, at its best, in a spellbound hall, when a performer spares herself nothing onstage, it is an experience like no other: a room full of people, meditating communally on human experience, framed by a silence that is rare in our lives today.
The musicologist Lawrence Kramer dates the ?invention? of listening to the 18th century, alongside the concept of the inner self. In his 2007 book Why Classical Music Still Matters, he writes, ?All music trains the ear to hear it properly, but classical music trains the ear to hear with a peculiar acuity. It wants to be explored, not just heard ? it trains both the body?s ear and the mind?s to hearken, to attend closely, to listen deeply, as one wants to listen to something not to be missed.?
Some classical music was composed as background music ? for a royal banquet or to soothe an insomniac count to sleep ? but most of it makes greater demands on our attention. As the invention of the written word allowed texts of magnificent complexity to be composed, so did the invention of notated music. It unfolds as a narrative in sound, with time as its canvas.
Sometimes this can be a large canvas indeed. Robert Schumann celebrated the ?heavenly length? of Schubert?s Symphony No. 9 in C major, a compliment difficult to imagine today, when ? despite increased longevity ? most of us feel ?time-poor?. In Western lives loaded with stuff, time is our contemporary scarcity. Last year, the Australian Chamber Orchestra presented a concert called ?Timeline?, charting the course of music over 42,000 years. It concluded with a mash-up by the Australian electronic dance music duo The Presets, and in the program notes The Presets? Julian Hamilton wrote, ?I personally count it as a win if I am able to hold a fan?s attention right through to the chorus of a new song before they click on another link to some place else.?
It would be foolish to lament the coming of the digital age. As a word-processing woman, I have no desire to return to the 19th century, much as I love its soundtrack. And yet there are elements of modern life that seem inimical to the appreciation of art music. The advent of recording allowed music to be everywhere ? in the car, in the supermarket, in the bathroom ? and yet we attend to music less than ever. As Les Murray writes in his poem ?Music to Me Is Like Days?:
they lost the off switch in my lifetime
the world reverberates with Muzak
and Prozac.
The smartphone wreaked further havoc with attention spans. In his 2013 book Focus, the science journalist Daniel Goleman describes digital technology?s capacity to rewire our brains and erode our capacity for sustained attention. Our thoughts shrink to fit the smartphone screen; the brain starts tweeting even to itself.
Earlier this year, my trio collaborated with the street artist Peter Drew for a project called ?Beethoven in Melbourne?. On a Tuesday morning in March, we constructed a makeshift concert hall backdrop out of paper and surprised the morning commuters in Campbell Arcade with Beethoven?s ?Ghost? Trio. This was not designed ? like the famous experiment in which renowned violinist Joshua Bell was largely ignored by passers-by at a metro station in Washington, DC ? to score points against contemporary society. It was simply intended to bring some beauty into a public space. If people would not step into the sanctified sphere of the concert hall, perhaps the concert hall could come to them.
Pedestrians poured past us as we performed, snapping our pictures with their smartphones but rarely removing their earphones to listen. I admit that the cards were stacked against Beethoven: these were people on their way to work. And yet there was something about that gesture ? of a thousand smartphones taking our picture, collecting the moment without occupying it ? that spoke to me of a fundamental dislocation. Beethoven and today?s commuter do not only occupy different eras: they occupy different versions of time.
Not so long ago, a familiarity with classical music was considered part of cultural literacy. Beethoven was in the kit alongside Shakespeare. When did this change? At what point did art music come to seem ? that dread word ? ?irrelevant?? The American musicologist Richard Taruskin identifies ?a trahison des clercs ? a defection of intellectuals to pop culture that was a by-product of the social and cultural turbulence of the 1960s?. He makes the point that although intellectuals ?distinguish between commercial and ?literary? fiction, between commercial and ?fine? art, between mass-market and ?art? cinema?, the ?distinction in music is no longer drawn, except by professionals?.
The traditions of art music live on in film via their scores but ? as if cinema cannot afford to acknowledge the debt ? classical music itself is often either the butt of comedy (American Pie?s ?This one time at band camp ??) or shorthand for snobbery or evil genius. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter snacks on a human face while listening to Bach?s Goldberg Variations; in the Die Hard franchise, Beethoven?s Ninth Symphony ? that great ode to freedom ? becomes a leitmotif of terrorism. Our metropolitan dailies devote virtually no space to art music. In August, the Sydney Morning Herald did not bother to commission an obituary for the distinguished composer Roger Smalley ? born in Swinton, near Manchester, but resident in Australia for most of his adult life ? but syndicated one from the Telegraph. A year ago, the Arts Issue of this very magazine celebrated ?the best of Australian arts 2014?. No classical concert music was mentioned.
Banished from the mainstream, classical music gets drafted into the luxury industry, becoming, in Taruskin?s words, an ?upscale niche product?. It is the image problem of Bronwyn Bishop arriving at the opera via limousine or what Mark Latham describes as the ?jewellery-rattling rows of the Opera House?. Certain concert presenters cultivate this demographic, marketing classical music as proof of taste or discernment. ?It?s all part of beautiful living,? a woman gushed to me earlier this year, at an ?exclusive chamber music weekend? in a winery, after one of Beethoven?s eviscerating late quartets.
My teacher, Eleonora Sivan, is unsentimental about her childhood in Stalinist Russia. ?And yet,? she tells me, ?when materialism is not an option, other things flourish.? In 1942 starving musicians performed Shostakovich?s Symphony No. 7 in Leningrad while the city was under siege. The musicians were given an hour-long ovation, and the concert was broadcast to German forces as a form of psychological warfare. Even today, Russian audiences consume art music with a particular urgency, a hunger. It is not part of beautiful living.
In the 19th century and the first part of the 20th, the piano was the spiritual hearth of the middle-class home: a gathering point and (as Jane Austen testified) the location of interminable recitals. This is not some distant European custom, but part of our own heritage. At the start of the 20th century, Australia boasted the greatest number of pianos per capita of any country in the world. They were a symbol of affluence and aspiration, but they also represented cultural continuity in a world in flux. Many people who loved Beethoven?s symphonies or Verdi?s operas never heard them performed live, but experienced them in a drawing room in an arrangement for four hands. Music was designed to be read and touched as much as listened to, a tradition that dates back to Bach?s collection of solo keyboard music, The Well-Tempered Clavier, created as a ?pastime of those already skilled in this study?; in the 19th century, with the industrialisation of the printing press, sheet music became more readily available, and piano miniatures designed for the amateur flooded the market.
The advent of recording led to a boom for classical music but also ? paradoxically ? sowed the seeds of its redundancy. You no longer needed to make music to enjoy it at home; classical music belonged instead to the professionals, whose immaculate craft was pressed into disc for eternity. This led to a new expectation of perfection from the performer, alongside a conformity of interpretation based on ?classic? recordings ? neither of which had an enlivening effect on the concert stage.
By the 1960s, families were less likely to gather around the piano than around the television; by the 21st century, they were no longer gathering around anything, but communing with private screens in their own private rooms.
Last year, at my son?s primary school Christmas concert, the children did not sing a single Christmas carol. I thought this might have been because the word ?Jesus? was verboten, but the principal later reassured me that it was not. I can only assume carols were deemed to be no longer ?relevant?. Instead, there was a celebration of Santa and the getting of stuff, set to the ubiquitous drumbeat of contemporary life. Despite all the enthusiastic dancing and bopping, my feeling was one of cultural impoverishment.
I had recently returned from Germany, where a woman had asked me whether Christmas in the Australian summer could possibly be gem?tlich. I sang one of the confected Australian carols I had learned as a child: ?Out on the plains / the brolgas are dancing, / Lifting their feet / like war horses prancing ? Orana! Orana! Orana! To Christmas Day!?
?Oh wow,? she marvelled. ?That sounds really awkward.?
This awkwardness was writ large at my son?s concert. It was a Christmas concert in search of identity; never mind Christ, there were not even any references to Christmases past. It spoke to me of a larger Australian malaise: because we dare not confront the realities of our own past, we prefer to imagine there was no past. Instead, we busy ourselves with our home renovations and hero ingredients, and forget the Western humanistic tradition. We celebrate culture if you can eat it. (If we do acknowledge a heritage, it is frequently one of failure: Gallipoli, the Eureka Stockade, a suicidal swagman. This might look like the championing of the underdog, but nothing in today?s national actions suggests that we champion the underdog.)
There is clearly something ersatz about celebrating a European Christmas in the Australian summer, and yet some of my happiest memories are of singing carols at primary school, as Mrs Vaughan pounded out the accompaniments on her ancient piano. The doors of the activity shed were flung open, and the smell of peppercorn and eucalyptus drifted in from the playground, as we sang ?Away in a Manger? and ?O Little Town of Bethlehem?, carols that had passed through the mouths of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents in this same hot country. The joy was partly the anticipation of Christmas, but it was also the joy that comes from access to beauty, and to myth: a silent night, a little donkey, a star in a night sky, new life. Even secular children deserve some contact with the numinous.
In this year?s federal budget, the arts minister, George Brandis, redirected $104.7 million of the Australia Council?s funding to a new National Program for Excellence in the Arts. One of the consequences has been an exacerbation of a scarcity mentality among artists: a wedge driven between innovative arts practice and what is being called (horribly) the ?heritage arts?, as if the two were natural antagonists. Surely the two belong on a continuum, and surely that continuum is what we call culture. This may be expressed more clearly in music than in any other art form, as it takes memory as its very material.
The continuum is larger than many of us like to imagine, holed up in our little music ghettoes; jazz and rock and classical and pop have common roots. In his 2014 John Peel Lecture, Iggy Pop emphasised the ?importance of study?: ?I played in my high school orchestra and I learned the joy of the warm organic instruments working together in the service of a classical piece. That sticks with you forever.?
One theory of music is that ? like poetry ? it evolved as a mnemonic device. Memory is the key structural element of any one piece of music, allowing us to make sense of its processes, its developments and recapitulations. On a larger scale, even before the advent of ?historical programming?, composers have always addressed each other in their music. It is an even more pronounced ?anxiety of influence? than in literature, as the very language of music only has meaning in the context of what has passed before. The conversation creates the language.
This occurs in ways that are both hidden and overt, through quotation, key meanings, adherence to and subversion of forms. Occasionally a composer raises a voice to address a peer in the distant past. The opening chord spacing of Bach?s first Prelude and Fugue in C is embedded in Shostakovich?s Prelude and Fugue in C, which picks up a conversational thread 230 years later. Bach?s co-operative polyphony is re-imagined in a Soviet context, implying alienation within the crowd, and yet there is vast comfort in that conversation: across cultures, across ideologies, across the ages.
Classical music may be a notated art, but playing an instrument is an oral tradition, passed from parent to child or teacher to student. The music ? the sacred object ? is passed literally from one hand to another, down the generations, even across cultures. The Austro-Germanic tradition spread to Russia via the imperial capital of St Petersburg; the subsequent Soviet diaspora populated the orchestras of the world, and provided me with a teacher in suburban Adelaide. Intrinsic to this is the winnowing JM Coetzee describes in his essay ?What Is a Classic??:
If there is anything that gives one confidence in the classic status of Bach, it is the testing process he has been through within the profession ? Bach is some kind of touchstone because he has passed the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of intelligences before me, by hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings.
This notion of ?passing things down? may now seem redundant. Thanks to technology, our lives have less in common with those of our parents than was true of any previous generation. Heirlooms no longer take up floor space; instead we renew our furniture at IKEA. Once our pianos were passed down the generations, and with them some of the music they contained. But we are unlikely to pass down our laptops, or our status updates, or our funny cats. We live in an age of the continuous now, with all the disposability this implies.
Of course, ahistoricism is not exclusively an Australian problem. In a 2014 essay for Aeon magazine, the American historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi lament the failure of memory that even extends to history departments, in which the vast body of research is now limited to the recent past:
The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value ? and to question values ? by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past.
It is unfashionable to speak of ?values? encoded in music. As even George Steiner ? that valiant defender of the classic ? acknowledged, ?after 50 years of teaching, the question remains, ?How to explain those who sing Schubert in the evening and torture in the morning?? ? I?m going to the end of my life haunted more and more by the question, ?Why did the humanities not humanise???
Singing Schubert is clearly not enough to cure genocidal impulses. But is it possible to make a more modest claim on the music?s behalf? If we properly engage with it, surely it offers an experience of empathy, and not just any empathy, but a transgenerational empathy, in which we try on human feelings from another era. Some of these feelings fit comfortably; others tug in places. Some of the underpinning values may seem quaint or suspect: chastity, honour, heroism. But great music transcends its origins, as indeed does human nature. So much of Schubert is a homecoming: his vulnerability, his ambivalence. Humanity has become a flabby word, but it has a rigorous core. It is the condition of being human, as well as humane. It is that intimate fact that lies at the heart of the humanities: we are all the same beneath our clothes.
In his brilliant essay on the impact of television, ?E Unibus Pluram?, the American novelist David Foster Wallace laments the modern-day scourge of irony: ?Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalised irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny.? He fantasises about the emergence of ?some weird bunch of anti-rebels ? who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles?.
Classical music is not always single-entendre (Shostakovich?s Fifth Symphony has a bruising subtext), but in an era dominated by irony there is something restorative about its sincerity. In an article by Alex Ross for the New Yorker, the pianist Mitsuko Uchida explains the purpose of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, in which young musicians are immersed in nature: ?The kids have to become more naive. Because there is something very naive about this music that they play, even the very greatest. What is it about? Mountains, trees, birds, young love, that kind of thing.? When I recently listened to a recording of the pianist Wilhelm Kempff playing Beethoven, I found myself thinking he had a beautiful soul. These words sound foolish today, in a way they would not have 150 years ago.
At Gough Whitlam?s memorial service last year, the actress Cate Blanchett quoted from his 1985 book, The Whitlam Government 1972?1975:
In any civilised community the arts and associated amenities must occupy a central place ? Of all the objectives of my government none had a higher priority than the encouragement of the arts, the preservation and enrichment of our cultural and intellectual heritage ? Our other objectives are all means to an end; the enjoyment of the arts is an end in itself.
It is difficult to imagine any of our leaders speaking this way today. Since Paul Keating ? who claimed to have reformed the Australian economy ?off the back of Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner and Mr Shostakovich? ? few have had the vocabulary. Perhaps Malcolm Turnbull will surprise us, but for some time the arts have not been an end in themselves; there has only been one end, and that is Growth. The essayist William Deresiewicz has lamented ?the death of the artist ? and the birth of the creative entrepreneur?; in Victoria, the Ministry for the Arts has become the Ministry for Creative Industries.
Acquiring a musical instrument for a child and teaching them to play it costs money. Achieving expertise as a musician demands an almost unrivalled investment of time: ?It takes ten years before piano even starts to share its secrets,? my teacher used to say. In 2011, the Tertiary Music Education Task Force reported that the ?dire position of the sector calls into question whether the country will have an effective national music education system in five years? time?. Four years later, our cash-starved conservatoriums are doing the sums, and finding one-on-one lessons too expensive; increasingly, it seems we can no longer afford the humanities.
But even if our leaders do not share Whitlam?s commitment to cultural heritage, there are good pragmatic reasons to invest in music education. Ironically, it might even contribute to Growth. Countless studies reveal that music education will improve our children?s executive function, social ability, literacy, numeracy, concentration, brain function, fine motor skills, creative thinking, working memory, study habits, and even their self-esteem.
Asian parents value the study of music as a discipline and craft: without exception, students of Asian background have dominated every Australian piano competition I have adjudicated over the past decade. It is a trend with repercussions for our conservatoriums, which are increasingly reliant upon the fee-paying Asian market to stay afloat.
Finland is a world leader in music education for children, with the value of music enshrined in the curriculum by government legislation. In the United Kingdom, the new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has undertaken to invest in musical education for all children. No such undertakings have been made here. The 2005 National Review of School Music Education announced a government policy goal of ?access to music education that is continuous, sequential and developmental, regardless of geographic location, socio-economic circumstances, culture and ability?. Research suggests that only 23% of government schools offer ?continuous and developmental? music education, compared to 88% of independent schools.
None of this bodes well for audience renewal, and, more problematically, it is a serious equity issue. Children of privilege enjoy the benefits of early music training, and the gap widens. It is no surprise that classical music becomes elitist, when only the privileged are taught its language.
Preparing for this essay, I spoke to a number of highly respected colleagues. Many of them denied there was any problem. When I asked why classical music was important, almost all were lost for words. Why this reticence among musicians to defend our art? Perhaps it is fear of grandiosity. The risks are many, as enumerated by Taruskin: ?pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialisation, pretence, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery?. Yet in the absence of other advocates it is we who must invite the audience back.
The music that is closest to my heart is chamber music. It is music on a human scale, a single voice to a part: the solo piano repertoire, the lied, the piano trio, the string quartet. A true child of the Enlightenment, the string quartet was described by Goethe as ?four reasonable people conversing?. Once, this conversation began in the home and only continued in the concert hall.
Last month, as my trio toured with the Beethoven piano trios, we started inviting audience members to sit between us on the stage, three at a time. It was an attempt to bring our audience into the fabric of the music, to share some of the purchase that comes from the playing of it. I was concerned that these extra presences would be disruptive, throwing interference into our connection, but they had the opposite effect. Whether schoolchildren in Roxby Downs or subscribers at the Melbourne Recital Centre, they sat with such attention that it funnelled our own. After each movement, they silently vacated their seats and were replaced by another three.
In my darkest moments, I wonder whether a transgenerational empathy is still possible, or whether we are drifting so far from the world of Beethoven and Schubert that they will soon have nothing to say to us. And if Beethoven becomes mute, Shakespeare cannot be much further behind. On a bad day, I fear for the entire Western humanistic tradition; classical music is only the canary in the coalmine. But on a good day onstage, something takes hold. Like a ouija board in a s?ance, the music goes its own way, guided by everyone and by no one. These are the rare moments of flight, and I can feel my heart pounding because the stakes are so high. Last month, as our audience members sat within our music-making, I did not look at their faces, but I could hear they were listening.

Solemn High Mass of Pentecost to Mark 40th Ordination Anniversary of the Rev. John Perricone
Pentecost is always kept with special fervor by the Latin Mass community in Jersey City, NJ, since that is the Feast on which the old rite was resurrected in 2003. This year the Mass will be moved from 9:00 am to 2:00 PM to permit it to be offered with particular care in order to also mark the 40th anniversary of the ordination of the Rev. John Perricone. Fr. Perricone regularly celebrates Holy Mass for this Latin Mass Community which is now part of the parish of St. Anthony of Padua and also teaches his famous Aquinas course for the parish. Fr. Perricone, a professor of philosophy at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, has spent his entire priesthood fighting for the integrity of the Faith and has been in the vanguard liturgical restoration. Fr. Perricone had organized that watershed event when Cardinal Stickler presided at a Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary form at St. Patrick?s Cathedral when the stunned New York Times wrote about the throng spilling out of the church onto 5th Avenue on page one of the paper the next day. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/13/nyr ... ome-back-an-old-rite.html
The resident choir at St. Anthony?s, Cantantes In Cordibus, will sing Mozart?s Missa Solemnis (KV 337) with orchestra under the direction of Simone Ferrarasi. The Propers will be sung by the Men?s Schola under the direction of Joseph Orchard, PhD. Motets will include Franck?s Dextera Domini, Biebl?s Ave Maria, and Desmet?s Ecce Sacerdos.
A dinner will be held afterward in honor of Fr. Perricone and tickets can be obtained through Dan Marengo. danmarengo@aol.com.
St Anthony of Padua, Jersey City, is a landmarked historic edifice in the Victorian gothic style at 457 Monmouth Street, Jersey City, NJ 07304. 457 Monmouth St, Jersey City, NJ 07302. There is off street parking on 6th Street between Coles St. and Monmouth. The church is walking distance from the Grove Street PATH station.

I was startled, to say the least, to see a huge red flag with a white crescent moon and star being dragged by an air plane heading south along the Hudson. My son and I got to see it just as it passed by Ground Zero. This flag was, apparently, the Turkish flag and, if anything, had secular overtones. It was later adopted by Islamisists and by the Nation of Islam. On some calendars, yesterday marks the so called nigh travels of Muhammad. The 24th of April is also the day of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks. Anyone have any other information on why this demonstration would have been made yesterday?

Dear JSleeze:

Well, upon reconsideration maybe the actual law is somewhere down the middle. That, anyway, is my impression if you read the whole statute or see the rather sparse case law. See infra.

I think it is correct to say that a car has the right of way unless as it approaches the cross walk the pedestrian ?is upon, or within one lane of the half of the roadway, upon which the vehicle is traveling or onto which it is turning.? NJSA 39:4-36(1). Moroeover, the pedestrian?s right of way is conditioned upon him exercising due care as ?[n]o pedestrian shall leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield or stop.? Ibid at (2).

I understand this to mean that a pedestrian comes to a cross walk and stops. He then looks to make sure that when entering the cross walk he shall not be encountering a car that can?t yield or stop. See, for example, Venghis v. Nathanson, 101 NJL 110 (1925) holding that a pedestrian has the duty of exercising reasonable care to avoid collision with the auto. On the other hand, the driver must be alert when approaching a cross walk for the likelihood of pedestrians and stay alert to stop for any that he comes upon in the cross walk.

My point is that driving around Hamilton Park these days, pedestrians seem to leap in to the crosswalk and then grab the station while yelling obscenities at you while you in a panic slam your brakes.

Cheers,

Mao






Effective: April 1, 2010
N.J.S.A. 39:4-36
39:4-36. Driver to yield to pedestrian at crosswalk; exceptions; vehicles approaching stopped vehicle from rear; yield of right-of-way by pedestrian; penalties; portion of fine deposited in Pedestrian Safety Enforcement and Education Fund
Currentness
a. The driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within any unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, except at crosswalks when the movement of traffic is being regulated by police officers or traffic control signals, or where otherwise regulated by municipal, county, or State regulation, and except where a pedestrian tunnel or overhead pedestrian crossing has been provided:
(1) The driver of a vehicle shall stop and remain stopped to allow a pedestrian to cross the roadway within a marked crosswalk, when the pedestrian is upon, or within one lane of, the half of the roadway, upon which the vehicle is traveling or onto which it is turning. As used in this paragraph, ?half of the roadway? means all traffic lanes conveying traffic in one direction of travel, and includes the entire width of a one-way roadway.
(2) No pedestrian shall leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield or stop.
(3) Whenever any vehicle is stopped to permit a pedestrian to cross the roadway, the driver of any other vehicle approaching from the rear shall not overtake and pass such stopped vehicle.
(4) Every pedestrian upon a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
(5) Nothing contained herein shall relieve a driver from the duty to exercise due care for the safety of any pedestrian upon a roadway.Nothing contained herein shall relieve a pedestrian from using due care for his safety.
b. A person violating any paragraph of subsection a. of this section shall, upon conviction thereof, pay a fine to be imposed by the court in the amount of $200. The court may also impose upon a person violating any paragraph of subsection a. of this section, a penalty of community service not to exceed 15 days in such form and on such terms as the court shall deem appropriate. If the violation results in serious bodily injury to a pedestrian, the person convicted of the violation shall be subject to a fine of not less than $100 or more than $500, and may additionally be subject to a sentence of imprisonment not to exceed 25 days, or a license suspension not to exceed six months, or both, in the discretion of the court. As used in this section, "serious bodily injury" means serious bodily injury as defined in subsection b. of N.J.S.2C:11-1.
c. Of each fine imposed and collected pursuant to subsection b. of this section, $100 shall be forwarded to the State Treasurer who shall annually deposit the moneys into the ?Pedestrian Safety Enforcement and Education Fund? created by section 1 of P.L.2005, c. 86(C.39:4-36.2).
d. In the event of a collision between a vehicle and a pedestrian within a marked crosswalk, or at an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, there shall be a permissive inference that the driver did not exercise due care for the safety of the pedestrian.
Credits
Amended by L.1951, c. 23, p. 75, ? 26; L.1981, c. 220, ? 3, eff. July 20, 1981; L.2005, c. 86, ?

I meant that you are the antithesis of hysterical.

And that you are well informed.

Well there are two sides to this story. Downtown, especially away from the main drags, there appears to be an aggressive hostility to vehicles at times. I think the little stanchions they put in cross walks are very misleading. The look like stop signs and then say something like "Stop for pedestrians in the cross walk." Of course, it is true that an automobile has to yield to a pedestrian in a cross walk. However, this does not mean that the pedestrian has the right of way. The car has the right of way and a pedestrian is supposed to stop and wait until there are no cars unless there is a stop sign. The stanchions make it seem as if it is a race so that if a pedestrian jumps into the cross walk, the car has to hit its brakes. Whose idea were these stanchions anyway?

Thanks Jersey City Frankie. I must say you seem the antithesis of hysterical and well informed.

Dear SOS:
Amusing! There is nothing like an English eccentric. His pics are striking and too bad they have not upgraded this board to allow images. Anyway a quote of his that sums it up is: ?I was not content to believe ina a personal devil and serve him, with the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get a hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.?
The connection between magic and religion is an interesting one. Christianity looks at magic as at based debased and at worst demonic. Sir James George Frazer (1854?1941), the founder of anthropology theorized that religion evolved out of magic. TS. Eliot who became a Catholic and poets and artists ever since (from Jim Morrison in his 1968 album to the ending of Coppola?s Apocalypse Now) who did no.
Personally, I think that the distinction centers on two things:
1. True religion is rational or supra- rational while magic is not. Thus, the oneness of God is attainable through philosophy (Plato, Aristotle).
2. True religion is ethical and provides ways of penance and forgiveness so that we can atone for our sins and attain salivation.
Anyway, if its all hocus pocus to you (btw, an anti Catholic phrase used to mock the words of institution at the Mass), I would not let it get in the way of an aesthetic experience. Allegri, Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, etc et al did sublime settings. And that?s another difference between true Faith and magic. The former creates transformative art while the later only kitsch or biting satire.
Anyway, last night 100 or so people stood in the dark watching candles be snuffed ceremoniously, longing for Jerusalem, lamenting our desolate city, asking forgiveness, and hoping in the light of the gentiles. Not doing magic but praying humbly.
Pax tecum,
Mao

Spy Wednesday





In the Old Testament Joseph, who prefigured Christ, was betrayed by his older brother, Judah -- the father of the tribe whence came King David and through which the Messianic prophecies were fulfilled -- when Judah sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt for so many shekels of silver (see Genesis 37-38, and also Psalm 68:2-29 and Acts 1:13-20).

From that tribe of Judah came Our Lord, Who was betrayed by another Judah, a man who is more commonly known as Judas Iscariot ("Iscariot" refers to Kerioth, a town in Judea). This Judas handled the money for the Apostles and became offended by the extravagance of Mary Magdalen's gesture of love toward Jesus:

John 12:1-8 1
Jesus therefore, six days before the pasch, came to Bethania, where Lazarus had been dead, whom Jesus raised to life. And they made him a supper there: and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that were at table with him. Mary therefore took a pound of ointment of right spikenard, of great price, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

Then one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray him, said: Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? Now he said this, not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and having the purse, carried the things that were put therein.

Jesus therefore said: Let her alone, that she may keep it against the day of my burial. For the poor you have always with you; but me you have not always.

Immediately after this, Judas met with the chief priests to betray Our Lord for thirty pieces of silver. Here is St. Matthew's version of History:

Matthew 26:6-15
And when Jesus was in Bethania, in the house of Simon the leper, There came to Him a woman having an alabaster box of precious ointment, and poured it on His head as He was at table.

And the disciples seeing it, had indignation, saying: To what purpose is this waste? For this might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.

And Jesus knowing it, said to them: Why do you trouble this woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For the poor you have always with you: but me you have not always. For she in pouring this ointment upon my body, hath done it for my burial. Amen I say to you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, that also which she hath done, shall be told for a memory of her.

Then went one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, to the chief priests, And said to them: What will you give me, and I will deliver him unto you? But they appointed him thirty pieces of silver.

For thirty pieces of silver was Our Lord betrayed, as prophecied by Zacharias: 1

Zacharias 11:9 -12
I will not feed you: that which dieth, let it die: and that which is cut off, let it be cut off: and let the rest devour every one the flesh of his neighbour. And I took my rod that was called Beauty, and I cut it asunder to make void my covenant, which I had made with all people. And it was made void in that day: and so the poor of the flock that keep for me, understood that it is the word of the Lord. And I said to them: If it be good in your eyes, bring hither my wages: and if not, be quiet. And they weighed for my wages thirty pieces of silver.

St. Luke explains how this vile betrayal happened: a devil entered into Judas:

Luke 22:3-6
And Satan entered into Judas, who was surnamed Iscariot, one of the twelve. And he went, and discoursed with the chief priests and the magistrates, how he might betray Him to them. And they were glad, and convenanted to give him money. And he promised. And he sought opportunity to betray him in the absence of the multitude (see also John 13:2).

But Jesus already knew this would happen, as we know from this earlier exchange with His Apostles, after He revealed that we must eat His Body and drink His Blood. He knew what Judas would do with the free will God gives to all men:

John 6:64-72
The words that I have spoken to you, are spirit and life. But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning, who they were that did not believe, and who he was, that would betray him. And He said: Therefore did I say to you, that no man can come to Me, unless it be given him by my Father.

After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with Him. Then Jesus said to the twelve: Will you also go away?

And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have known, that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God (see also John 12:26-29 and Matthew 26:25).

Jesus answered them: Have not I chosen you twelve; and one of you is a devil? Now he meant Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon: for this same was about to betray Him, whereas he was one of the twelve.

The Taking of Christ, by Caravaggio, 1598 (detail) After the Last Supper (commemorated tomorrow, on Maundy Thursday), Judas led the high priests to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani, and let them know Who He is by greeting Him with the words, "Hail, Rabbi" and kissing Him. Jesus responded, "Judas, dost thou betray the Son of man with a kiss?" (Matthew 26:48-49).

After Jesus's arrest, Judas returned to the chief priests and threw the thirty pieces of silver at them, repenting of his deed. The priests consider it blood money, so refuse to put it in the Temple's coffers. They instead buy a potter's field -- the "field of blood" -- to be used for burying strangers. Judas went and hanged himself, and his body burst open like the potter's vessel that Jeremias spoke of as a symbol of faithless Israel:

Jeremias 18:1-10
The word that came from Jeremias to the Lord, saying: Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there thou shalt hear my words. And I went down into the potter's house, and behold he was doing a work on the wheel. And the vessel was broken which he was making with clay with his hands: and turning he made another vessel, as it seemed good in his eyes to make it.

Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Cannot I do with you as this potter, saith the Lord? behold as clay is in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. I will suddenly speak against a nation, and against a kingdom, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy it. If that nation against which I have spoken, shall repent of their evil, I also will repent of the evil that I have thought to do to them. And I will suddenly speak of a nation and of a kingdom, to build up and plant it. If it shall do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice: I will repent of the good that I have spoken to do unto it.

Jeremias 19:1-13
Thus saith the Lord: Go, and take a potter's earthen bottle, and take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests: And go forth into the valley of the son of Ennom, which is by the entry of the earthen gate: and there thou shalt proclaim the words that I shall tell thee.

And thou shalt say: Hear the word of the Lord, O ye kings of Juda, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold I will bring an affliction upon this place: so that whoever shall hear it, his ears shall tingle: Because they have forsaken me, and have profaned this place: and have sacrificed therein to strange gods, whom neither they nor their fathers knew, nor the kings of Juda: and they have filled this place with the blood of innocents. And they have built the high places of Baalim, to burn their children with fire for a holocaust to Baalim: which I did not command, nor speak of, neither did it once come into my mind.

Therefore behold the days come, saith the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Topheth, nor the valley of the son of Ennom, but the valley of slaughter. And I will defeat the counsel of Juda and of Jerusalem in this place: and I will destroy them with the sword in the sight of their enemies, and by the hands of them that seek their lives: and I will give their carcasses to be meat for the fowls of the air, and for the beasts of the earth. And I will make this city an astonishent, and a hissing: every one that shall pass by it, shall be astonished, and shall hiss because of all the plagues thereof. And I will feed them with the flesh of their sons, and with the flesh of their daughters: and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege, and in the distress wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives shall straiten them.

And thou shalt break the bottle in the sight of the men that shall go with thee. And thou shalt say to them: Thus saith the Lord of hosts: even so will I break this people, and this city, as the potter's vessel is broken, which cannot be made whole again: and they shall be buried in Topheth, because there is no other place to bury in. Thus will I do to this place, saith the Lord, and to the inhabitants thereof: and I will make this city as Topheth. And the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of Juda shall be unclean as the place of Topheth: all the houses upon whose roots they have sacrificed to all the host of heaven, and have poured out drink offerings to strange gods.

Woe to Judas! Jesus said of him at the Last Supper, "The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man shall be betrayed: it were better for him, if that man had not been born" (Matthew 26:24). His name is synonymous with betrayal, and Dante, in Canto XXXIV of his "Inferno," places him in the very lowerst circle of Hell, being devoured eternally by a three-faced, bat-winged devil:

When we had gotten far enough along
that my master was pleased to let me see
the creature who was once so fair of face
he took a step aside, then brought me to a halt:
'Look there at Dis! And see the place
where you must arm yourself with fortitude.'
Then how faint and frozen I became,
reader, do not ask, for I do not write it,
since any words would fail to be enough.
It was not death, nor could one call it life.
Imagine, if you have the wit,
what I became, deprived of both.
The emperor of the woeful kingdom
rose from the ice below his breast,
and I in size am closer to a giant
than giants are when measured to his arms.
Judge, then, what the whole must be
that is proportional to such a part.
If he was fair as he is hideous now,
and raised his brow in scorn of his creator,
he is fit to be the source of every sorrow.
Oh, what a wonder it appeared to me
when I perceived three faces on his head.
The first, in front, was red in color.
Another two he had, each joined with this,
above the midpoint of each shoulder,
and all the three united at the crest.
The one on the right was a whitish yellow,
while the left-hand one was tinted like the people
living at the sources of the Nile.
Beneath each face two mighty wings emerged,
such as befit so vast a bird:
I never saw such massive sails at sea.
They were featherless and fashioned
like a bat's wings. When he flapped them,
he sent forth three separate winds,
the sources of the ice upon Cocytus.
Out of six eyes he wept and his three chins
dripped tears and drooled blood-red saliva.
With his teeth, just like a hackle
pounding flax, he champed a sinner
in each mouth, tormenting three at once.
For the one in front the gnawing was a trifle
to the clawing, for from time to time
his back was left with not a shred of skin.
'That soul up there who bears the greatest pain,'
said the master, 'is Judas Iscariot, who has
his head within and outside flails his legs.
'As for the other two, whose heads are dangling down,
Brutus is hanging from the swarthy snout --
see how he writhes and utters not a word! --
'and from the other, Cassius, so large of limb.
But night is rising in the sky. It is time
for us to leave, for we have seen it all.'



The Golden Legend, written in A.D. 1275 by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, recounts both fascinating, fantastical medieval legend and the true History regarding Judas in its section "Of St. Matthias." The writer clearly differentiates between legend and verified truth with his words "Thus far it is read in the history which is not authentic," so you can easily discern:

It is read in a history, though it be named apocrypha, that there was a man in Jerusalem named Reuben, and by another named Simeon, of the kindred of David, or, after S. Jerome, of the tribe of Issachar, which had a wife named Ciborea, and on the night that Judas was conceived his mother had a marvellous dream whereof she was so sore afeard. For her seemed that she had conceived a child that should destroy their people, and because of the loss of all their people her husband blamed her much, and said to her: Thou sayest a thing over evil, or the devils will deceive thee. She said: Certainly if so be that I shall have a son, I trow it shall be so, as I have had a revelation and none illusion.

When the child was born the father and mother were in great doubt, and thought what was best to do, for they durst not slay the child for the horror that they should have therein, neither they wist not how they might nourish one that should destroy their lineage. Then they put him to a little fiscelle or basket well pitched, and set it in the sea, and abandoned him to drive whither it would. And anon the floods and waves of the sea brought and made him arrive in an island named Scarioth, and of this name was he called Judas Scariotes.

Now it happed that the queen of this country went for to play on the rivage of the sea, and beheld this little nacelle and the child therein, which was fair, and then she sighed and said: O Lord God, how should I be eased if I had such a child, then at the least should not my realm be without heir. Then commanded she that the child should be taken up, and be nourished, and she fained herself to be great with child and after published that she had borne a fair son. When her husband heard say hereof he had great joy, and all the people of the country made great feast. The king and queen did do nourish and keep this child like the son of a king.

Anon after, it happed that the queen conceived a son, and when it was born and grown Judas beat oft that child, for he weened that he had been his brother, and oft he was chastised therefore, but alway he made him to weep so long that the queen which knew well that Judas was not her son, and at the last she said the truth, and told how that Judas was found in the sea. And ere this yet was known Judas slew the child that he had supposed to be his brother, and was son to the king, and in eschewing the sentence of death he fled anon and came into Jerusalem, and entered into the court of Pilate which then was provost. And he so pleased him that he was great with him, and had in great cherety and nothing was done without him.

Now it happed on a day that Pilate went for to disport him by a garden belonging to the father of Judas, and was so desirous to eat of the fruit of the apples that he might not forbear them. And the father of Judas knew not Judas his son, for he supposed that he had been drowned in the sea long tofore, ne the son knew not the father. When Pilate had told to Judas of his desire, he sprang into the garden of his father and gathered of the fruit for to bear to his master, but the father of Judas defended him, and there began between them much strife and debate, first by words and after with fighting, so much that Judas smote his father with a stone on the head that he slew him, and after brought the apples unto Pilate, and told to him how that he had slain him that owned the garden. Then sent Pilate to seize all the good that the father of Judas had, and after gave his wife to Judas in marriage, and thus Judas wedded his own mother.

Now it happed on a day that the lady wept and sighed much strongly and said: Alas! how unhappy that I am! I have lost my son and my husband. My son was laid on the sea, and I suppose that he be drowned, and my husband is dead suddenly, and yet it is more grievous to me that Pilate hath remarried me against my will. Then demanded Judas of this child, and she told him how he was set in the sea, and Judas told to her how he had been found in the sea, in such wise that she wist that she was his mother, and that he had slain his father and wedded his mother. Wherefore then he went to Jesu Christ, which did so many miracles, and prayed him of mercy and forgiveness of his sins. Thus far it is read in the history which is not authentic.

Our Lord made Judas one of his apostles and retained him in his company, and was so privy with him that he was made his procurator, and bare the purse for all the other, and stole of that which was given to Christ. Then it happed that he was sorry and angry for the ointment that Mary Magdalene poured on the head and feet of our Lord Jesu Christ and said that it was worth three hundred pence, and said that so much he had lost, and therefore sold he Jesu Christ for thirty pence of that money usual, of which every penny was worth ten pence, and so he recovered three hundred pence. Or after that some say that he ought to have of all the gifts that was given to Jesu Christ the tenth penny, and so he recovered thirty pence of that he sold him, and nevertheless at the last he brought them again to the temple, and after hung himself in despair, and his body opened and cleft asunder and his bowels fell out. And so it appertained well that it should so be, for the mouth which God had kissed ought not to be defouled in touching, and also he ought not to die on the earth because all earthly creatures ought to hate him, but in the air where devils and wicked spirits be, because he had deserved to be in their company.



Customs

Today and during the Sacred Triduum, the Matins and Lauds of the Divine Office are often sung in a haunting service known as the Tenebrae service ("tenebrae" meaning "shadows"), which is basically a funeral service for Jesus. During the Matins on Good Friday, one by one, the candles are extinguished in the Church, leaving the congregation in total darkness, and in a silence that is punctuated by the strepitus meant to evoke the convulsion of nature at the death of Christ. It has also been described as the sound of the tomb door closing. During the Triduum, the Matins and Lauds readings come from the following day's readings each night because the hours of Matins and Lauds were pushed back so that the public might better participate during these special three days (i.e., the Matins and Lauds readings heard at Spy Wednesday's tenebrae service are those for Maundy Thursday, the readings for Maundy Thursday's tenebrae Cercis siliquastrumservice are from Good Friday, and Good Friday's readings are from Holy Saturday's Divine Office).

Legend says that the tree upon which Judas hanged himself was the Cercis siliquastrum -- a tree that is now known as the "Judas Tree." It is a beautiful tree, native to the Mediterranean region, with brilliant deep pink flowers in the spring -- flowers that are said to have blushed in shame after Judas's suicide.


Footnotes:
1 St. Matthew attributes this prophecy to Jeremias in Matthew 27:9, "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying: And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was prized, whom they prized of the children of Israel." It is assumed that he was reading the prophecies of Jeremias and Zacharias together because of the latter's allusions to Israel being as a piece of clay in a potter's hands (Jeremias 18:1-10, Jeremias 32:6-9, Jeremias 19:1-13) and how this relates to Israel's fate as typified by Judas's body bursting open, etc.




Back to Customs of the Liturgical Year
Back to Being Catholic