Yea, of course, one should leave the innocent child out of this even if I was thrown out of the restaurant when I was there with my then six year old and 12 year old because the guy did not like a comment that saw good and bad in the place. It can't be easy to live in such a thin skin and I kind of think that the people of the LES will present their own challenges. I always thought the lady was sweet and was surprised to see some negative comments about her. Anyway, its better to eat at home in this economy anyway.

Have owned and lived in a row house on Pacific since 2006. Expectations initially of a rapid makeover of the neigborhood are not realistic now. However, slow and steady improvement seems to be what is happening- and maybe that is better. Strangely, I have lived all over Jersey City, including Paulus Hook and Hamilton Park and this is the only neighborhood I have never had any issue. One thing that has been a bit of a problem is that some of the landlords who formerly rented to yuppies have opted for Sec. 8 which can result in a nuisance in your backyard

Your're welcome RBNYFAN- and thanks for the positive feedback re Xmas. Truth in advertising thougjh: there will be no orchestra this time. We just couuldn't get our fund raising together in time. However, the choir is actually pitch perfect and there is a great young alto who is just graduating from McNair who will be doing the alto solos.

There will be a reprise of the Mosart Mass last sung on Christmas Eve, this Sunday at 10:00 am at Holy Rosary Church on 6th Street. It is his Missa Solemnis K, considered by many to be Mozart's finest sacred composition. The choir will be accompanied by Simone Ferasi at the organ. As this is the Feast of Corpus Christi, the traditional processession of the Holy Eucharist through the streets of downtown will follow at 12:30 pm in a joint expression of faith with St. Anthony's parish.

Johnston Avenue pool now filled and looks fantastic. No work from workers when it will open. For some reason, I have been told that it will not be for two more weeks. The place is awesome. I hope though that they have lane dividers and a pace clock. It seems a shame to pend 5 million on a first rate facility and then not spend the final $5k to do it right. Also, reports are that they good offices of Councilwoman Ahmad have ensured an early 7:00 am opening for the before work lap swimmers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTifjOaeuE8

The link should take you to a clip of the Agnus Dei at Midnight Mass at Holy Rosary from last Christmas. FYI, we are doing a Byrd Mass for Easter and, looking further ahead, we are planning to do Mozart's Requiem on Saturday, September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the attacks. We are looking for voices for both of these projects. Rehearsals are every Thursday evening in the church loft from 7 - 8:30. The Byrd is being practiced now. It is anticipated that the Mozart rehearsals will start in early May so that the piece can have been more or less mastered before the summer vacations. Call Dan at 201 406 9960 if you want more information.

It seems, finally, that there is a lot of activity now at Whitlock Cordage on the west side of Lafayette Park, with the parking lot full each day of tradesman and workers. Also at night, there are some lights in the buildings now. Does anyone know of a timetable for opening? Will it open as condos? Rentals? Or a mix?

Opposition to vouchers is raw anti Catholicism blended with teacher?s unions self interest and poverty pimps self propogation together with those who are stake holders in the high performing districts, e.g. Ridgewood, Rumson, who do not want their magic school threatened. Together the anti voucher forces seek to prevent the most stabilizing private institutions from benefiting the most at risk populations or, outside of the City, of providing an alternative to the cultural hegemony of the public school/ secularist system. .

Thomas E. Buckley | SEPTEMBER 27, 2004
I n recent years a better understanding of American history has gradually moved the U.S. Supreme Court away from a strict separationist perspective on church and state and toward a greater accommodation of religion. In Agostini v. Felton (1997) and Mitchell v. Helms (2000), the majority of justices expanded possibilities for government aid to church-related schools. Then in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the court approved the Cleveland voucher program, which allows poor students to use public money to pay for private and parochial school tuition. Voucher cases in other states, most notably Florida, have been less successful, because state courts have determined that such programs violated state constitutional prohibitions that are stricter than the First Amendment?s establishment clause. But the 19th-century history of such state provisions, commonly known as Blaine amendments, is instructive. As its recent rulings demonstrate, the Supreme Court has been reading that history.

In 1870, James Gillespie Blaine was 40 years old and a rising star in the Republican Party. After he served in the Maine Legislature, that state elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he soon occupied the speaker?s chair. His political trajectory and that of his party had risen together. Down Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House sat his friend, Ulysses S. Grant, whom he hoped to succeed in office. In addition to the presidency, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and were now completing a Southern reconstruction policy designed to gather the newly emancipated and enfranchised African-Americans into the political fold of Abraham Lincoln.
The advancement of public schools represented a key element in that program as well as an important part of the Republican drive for cultural homogeneity in post-Civil War America. The schools would lift up Southern blacks and Americanize newly arrived immigrants, especially Irish and German Catholics. Following the program laid out by Horace Mann in the 1840?s, public education would inculcate a nondenominational Protestant morality through Bible reading, hymn singing and the use of the McGuffey readers. The result would be a law-abiding, hard-working, broadly based middle-class society that embodied the values of capitalism embedded in Republican ideology.
The Catholic Church, most notably in the person of Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, resisted this vision of an essentially Protestant culture. Though a religious minority in that city, Catholics formed the largest single denomination, with 23 parishes. By 1870 Purcell?s Catholic school system enrolled 12,000 students in Cincinnati, in comparison with 19,000 attending public schools. The archbishop wanted his schools to share in the public school fund. The New York Legislature had recently passed a bill introduced by William Marcy Tweed, the Democratic boss of New York?s Tammany Hall, to provide public funds to private schools in the city and county of New York enrolling at least 200 students. Agitation existed for similar measures in places where Catholics were numerous. The New York law was soon repealed, and Purcell failed to get a share in the funds. But, confronted by the pervasively Protestant character of the public schools?the chief irritant to Catholics?a majority of the Cincinnati school board determined that Bible reading and other religious exercises should be discontinued. After a series of court battles, the Ohio Supreme Court ultimately upheld this decision.
Protestants committed to fostering a religiously based morality in the schools were outraged by the court?s action. In their view, Catholic immigrants who disagreed with this public policy should go home. By Protestant definition, Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign ruler in Rome, where the First Vatican Council had just upped the ante by proclaiming papal infallibility. Adherence to authoritarian, antidemocratic Romanism rendered Catholic claims of American loyalty dubious at best. Fallout from Cincinnati?s Bible war merged with the school-funding issue in New York and spread across the nation.

Perhaps the most extreme anti-Catholic reaction was the proposal in 1870 of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution proposed by Judge Elisha Hurlbut of New York, an expert in constitutional law. It would empower Congress to ban ?any foreign hierarchical power...founded on principles or dogmas antagonistic to republican institutions.? Some read in Hurlbut?s proposal the opening salvo of an anti-Catholic, nationalistic campaign akin to Otto von Bismarck?s Kulturkampf, which was gathering steam in Germany. Moreover, the campaign to identify the United States as a Christian Protestant nation, which had begun during the Civil War, now revived with the efforts of Supreme Court Justice William Strong and the National Reform Association to amend the U.S. Constitution?s preamble to read: ?Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and...the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government,? we the People, etc.
Although such proposals proved too extreme to rally widespread support in Congress, they showed the way to politicians anxious to distract voters from the financial mismanagement and gross scandals of the Grant administration. A Protestant minority, including such notable clergymen as Henry Ward Beecher, was willing to eliminate overtly Protestant religious exercises from the schools. But Beecher and his friends drew the line at public funding for Catholic schools. Where worried Protestants read signs of moral crisis and Catholic threat in the school fights, others saw political opportunity. School funding rather than school prayer became the defining issue. Constitutional amendment became the method. And political gain provided an important motivation.
A vigorous dose of anti-Catholicism always enlivened an otherwise dull speech. As the future President Rutherford B. Hayes informed Blaine in June 1875, the ?school question? had rendered the state Republican convention ?enthusiastic.? The party had ?been losing strength in Ohio for several years by emigration of Republican farmers,? he explained. ?In their place have come Catholic foreigners.... We shall crowd them on the school and other state issues.? Running on a blatantly anti-Catholic platform, Hayes narrowly captured the Ohio governorship that fall, despite the economic depression and the scandals enveloping the national Republican Party.
Grant seized the moment. In a speech in December 1875, the president proposed that Congress approve a constitutional amendment formally separating church and state, provide for the taxation of church property and forbid the states from allocating public funds to any schools that taught ?sectarian tenets.? Sectarian meant Catholic. A week later Blaine offered his amendment on the floor of the House. It included the most popular of the Grant proposals. After extending the language of the First Amendment to the states, it provided that ?no money raised by taxation in any state for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund thereof, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.?
As the University of Chicago law professor Philip Hamburger has demonstrated in his superb study, Separation of Church and State (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), Blaine?s proposal directly challenged Catholic efforts for school funding while leaving nondenominational Protestantism securely entrenched in public education. It was designed to secure the nomination for Blaine. Hayes?s victory in Ohio had made him an instant ?reform? Republican candidate. Blaine?s friends were concerned. Apart from the school issue, Hayes had failed to excite the voters. One Republican politician urged that Blaine needed only to make ?a good speech on the School question? to ?cinch the nomination.? But Blaine?s Catholic cousin, Ellen Ewing Sherman was not so sure. She and her husband, the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, wanted him in the White House, but Ellen Sherman warned that his proposals for ?the State Constitutions and school laws? would hurt him ?among our Irish friends and Catholics.?
Blaine lost anyway. Though he entered the Republican convention in June as the front-runner, allegations that he had accepted bribes from the Union Pacific Railroad fatally damaged his chances for the nomination; and the delegates eventually chose the squeaky clean Hayes, everyone?s second choice. They also recognized Hayes?s single successful issue in his Ohio campaign by incorporating Blaine?s amendment into their national platform. That August it almost passed Congress, winning 180 to 7 in the House of Representatives but failing to gain the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate.
Iowa and Illinois, however, had already placed variants of the Blaine Amendment in their state constitutions, and Congress quickly mandated that all states admitted to the Union after 1876 must follow suit. Washington State, for example, incorporated the following proviso in its 1889 constitution: ?All schools maintained or supported wholly or in part by the public funds shall be forever free from sectarian control or influence.?
Earlier this year in Locke v. Davey, a 7-to-2 Supreme Court majority decided that the state of Washington could deny a scholarship to a student seeking a ?devotional theology degree.? But the justices avoided directly ruling on the Blaine Amendment statement in Washington?s constitution. Instead they pointed out approvingly that the guidelines for the scholarship program permitted students to attend ?pervasively religious? institutions and take courses in ?devotional theology.?
Thirty-seven states have clauses modeled after the Blaine Amendment, and cases challenging such provisions are coming up in Michigan, South Dakota and elsewhere. A 19th-century concern has become a burning issue in 21st-century church-state jurisprudence. The question the U.S. Supreme Court will face is whether such provisions placed in state constitutions a century or more ago violate the religious liberty provided by the First Amendment.
As for Blaine, he finally received the long-desired Republican presidential nomination in 1884. His defeat in that year?s election has been attributed largely to a Republican charge, which he never made or endorsed, that the Democratic Party was one of ?Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.? That attack galvanized the Democrats. Blaine later said he could never have condemned ?that ancient faith in which my mother lived and died.? The son of a Catholic mother and Presbyterian father, he was raised as a Presbyterian. Among his cousins was a Jesuit priest, Thomas Sherman, son of the general. Given his relatives, Blaine may have hoped and expected, as some scholars assert, that the amendment he sponsored would not pass. Perhaps his anti-Catholicism had been ?just politics? after all. Shortly after he lost the 1876 Republican nomination, Maine put Blaine in the Senate. The next month, when that body defeated his amendment by a two-vote margin, Senator Blaine was absent.
Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., is professor of American religious history at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Calif.

No there are. St. Peters in Pt. Pleasant Beach is open 24 hours (but they have a motion sensor that goes off if one enters the sanctuary..). BTW, St. Joe's on the hill is open daily...

Actually, yes, it was a sign of the end of civilization when they started to lock Catholic churches (or at least that was how it was percieved by the citizens at the time). My family hightailed it "down the shore" in the great exodus in the late 1950, but grandma stayed on Kennsington Avenue in St. Aloysius parish. Visiting her was always an adventure. It must have been like 1973 when the church had been robbed of some of its precious art and the poor box broken into that the church was locked. This struck a deep cord. Crime had been rising since the late sixties and the city's sense of self was at risk. Churches remained a sanctuary, seemingly protected by the collective and by a palable taboo. When these were violated without any consequence for the violator the santuary was no more. Even the holy of holies was not immune. The psychological impact on these densely Catholic neighborhoods was palpable. Prior to that, the church was the home of the entire neighborhood who would go to the Tabernacle at any time, yes at 2:00 am, or 3:00 PM, to thank God, to implore God, to praise God. I remember a story of a friend's mother who was widowed when he was an infant. They would find his mother prostrate before the altar of St. Michael's at all hours because that was the only place she could find solace for the first years of her widowhood.

So after they locked St. AL's, the city was never the same for grandma and she gave up fighting to stay here and was moved to Bergen County where she died a few years later always pining for the old days. As so many of these passing customs, the rise in crime also conveniently meshed with the modernist mentality of the new priests in the 1970s who dismissed the Eucharistic presence of the Lord as superstituious and so wanted to close the church to discourage traditional piety and to pull the wool from the idea of the Holy, the mysterium tremdum et fascinans. Stalin would have approved. Modernists priests are sort of self limiting as they leave the priesthood, or "get asked to leave" after getting jammed up, out and modernist parisihioners logically just stop going. So Tradition is reasserting itself a bit. BTW, to clarify a point made in the tread above, Holy Rosary does not open its church but does have a chapel open most days for perpetual adoration.

...[continuing on with recreation offered by the area], a brand new competition eight lane 25 meter pool, a seperate recreation pool with three water slides and fountains and sprinklers, and Berry Park recreation which iis under construction which will have basketball, baseball, soccer etc.

Finally, restaurants and stores are about the last to arrive. Look how long it took for Newark Avenue to start to turn around. However, I can walk from my house to Grove Street in 25 minutes, so while you can't roll out of bed for a latte, it is well within reach.

PS
The ugly houses at the north end of the the neighborhood were built as affordable housing in the 1980s. They spent a fortune tearing down historic row houses and then were prevented from buiding in a historic idion by the Federal Regulations. On the other hand, the houses were sold for a minimal down payment to people who became owners. The houses have a tenant who is a Section 8 tenant. Thus the owner had an income stream and an incientive to police his tenant. It was a brilliant way to inculcate middle class values and seems to have worked.

Firstly, on nomenclature: the area down the hill is Lafayette and up the Hill, Bergen Hill, and the area together is called Bergen Lafayette. At least that is my understanding. I have lived at Pacific and Lafayette Street since 2006 having moved from Hamilton Park. I have had absolutely no problem (I should spit or knock wood now, I suppose). I have floor to ceiling French Windows, the kids have left their bikes on the stoop inumerable times over night only to find them there in the morning, and a nice mix of new, veteran, and virually original stock residents get along pretty well. There have been some horrific incidents of violence but they all seem to be gang related. Lafayette is a bit isolated so there is not much through traffic of pedestrians. I half jockingly tell people it is like Paulus Hook in the early 90s when the place looked like the south Bronx but also was sort of cut off.

It should also be noted that Lafayette is in the East District so it gets very rapid police reponse. Bergen Hill is in the West, strangely enough which together with the South District are the most overburdened.

I have to disagree with the poster who says that Lafayetter Park and the whole area is dangerous after dark. I run in the evening and never have a problem. Both I and my wife take turns walking the dog at night and have never had a problem. There is some hanging out in the Gazebo in the park and probably drugs assocaited with it, but that is true of Hamilton Park and Van Vorst also. I would only say that it may be a little too quite because if you encounter an issue you are unlikely to have another neighbor at hand.

The neighborhood will surely be helped when Whitlock Cordage is opened. It is a pretty innovative reuse of a 19th century industiral site that has been mired in litigation since 2006., Reportedly, the state has stepped in to ensure that the project is completed. Penultimately, Lafayette has an abundance of recreation: Liberty State Park, Lafayette Park,

How about shooting stars last night. I saw a huge comet at about 9:30 in the parking lot of Best Buy. Seriously, it was about half the size of a full moon as is flared out.

Bike-Lane:

Yes, definitely. There will be another symphonic mass for Easter and will post it here. Easter is really late this year (April 24th) so rehearsals will begin probably around early March.

Anyone who can carry a tune and blend is welcome to audition to sing Mozart's Missa Solemnis in C for Christmas at Holy Rosary Church at 344 6th Street. Rehearsals are Wednesday evenings, 7 - 8:30 in the choir loft. Come just a few minutes early to introduce yourself and sing a few bars for your audition. You enter the church through stair way at the back of the courtyard. The Chrismass Mass will be on Christmas Eve at 9:00 PM. The Director is Harold Bott, organist is Simone, and the choir manager is Art Manabat.

I got off the PATH Train at Exchange Place at about 11:00 PM last Thursday, June 3rd, and was really surprised by the unruly groups of teens hanging out all over the waterfront, with lots of cars with tinted windows and music blaring. I was particularly surprised that the Hyatt and the residents in the expensive towers there had not called the police. I imagine that the gangs had moved there abruptly and were not on anyone's radar.

Well, maybe I misconstrued it, but I thought I detected a bias against people not living directly around the park, e.g. black kids from Holland Gardens, and also a sense that only stakeholders, those right in the immediate environs of the park had standing to opine. I am happy to think I am wrong and that my discolure was extraneous.

Oh, actually I have a portable hoop in front of my house. The neighbors do not seem to mind (at least when asked they said they liked the neighborhood feel it creates). There was, in fact a problem of kids coming by and playing after dark but they were respectful pretty much when I told them not after dark. The us vs. them mentality is not neighborly or productive. Didn't know they had courts over at Holland gardens, but you know they won't look anything like the Hamilton Park courts.

I'll swap my house on Pacific and Communipau for anyone who is burdened by living on Hamilton Park (and before someone objects to my coming in to the neighborhood, my kids live there with their x, I lived there for five years, and my father and uncles went to St. Michaels and practiced track in the park in the 1930s). There is nothing better than the experience of a free public basketball court. It is a true democracy. Hamilton Park is the park for the people adjacent to it as well as the people who live in Holland Gardens. The players on the park represent that fact. I have been struck by how egalitarian and pervaded by a sense of fair play the court is infused with. They let an old white guy like me who can't jump play and are very kind when my youngest son, now 9, wants to play, gving the little guy great ball tips. The only trouble I have ever had with anyone in the park was with dogs, but lets not go there- especially since it now seems so elegantly resolved, that issue. And really, life in a city is about having public interaction with people like you and people not like you. Its about an agora like that which existed in the ancient polis as a defining aspect of civilization.
BTW, Van Vorst is a pretty park, nice for reading, strolling, etc. but no good for any recreation for anyone over the age of 4 or maybe 5. That might be ok because that is a smaller park and also that neighborhood abutts Liberty State Park (which also needs to get up to speed with active recreation and forget the bias for passive use that the Friends are obsessed with). Sure, basketball should stop at 10:00 pm, but there are many ways to accomplish this. I am sure that there is a way to ensure reasonable use that balances the concerns of all.

Sorry folks that I didn't post this before yesterday. Please pass this info on to anyone you know who might be interested from either a devotional or aesthetic perspective. The music under the direction of Harol Bott continues to improve in its execution of serious music with a broadening repetoire. BTW, Holy Rosary is on 6th Street between Brunswich and Monmouth.


Palm Sunday
March 28 - 9:45am
Blessing, Distribution and Procession with Palms
High Mass
Music by Allegri, Dubois, Goller & Pohl

Good Friday
April 2 - 3:00pm
Solemn Liturgy
Gregorian Chant, St. John Passion
with choral responses and Improperia by Victoria
Christus Factus Est by Anerio

Easter Sunday
April 4 - 9:45am
Solemn High Mass
Missa Simile Est
Regnum Caelorum by Victoria
Music by Handel & Pergolesi
Organ and Brass

Terri-

Really- that is hard to believe. My kids are in Elysian Charter School (wll actually one graduated) and while I am not really satisfied with it (I think the idea of progressive education is mostly bogus and an excuse for lazy teachers and lazy students), the kids do well enough vis a vis the regular public schools where progressivism is also regnant. Learning Community seems to be in the same category as Elysian. I do think there needs to be a shake down of Charter schools as some have sort of loopy premises. However, the mediocre performance of the public school system in light of its tremendous demand on resources is undeniable. Members of the teacher's unions make stevedore union guys seem like statesmen. There is a real anti intellectualism that has infected the Academy from K through PhD that does not help. School choice opens things up and makes this infection less likely to be global. This is one case where I think Canada is right: let the money follow the student where he chooses to go: public school, charter school, or parochial school.

Publius

Parking is not too bad as the church is across from the embankment to that whole block is open for on street parking. There is some off street parking in the convent lot on Brunswich before you get to 6th Street on the right. Then if you go West of Brunswich, the neighborhood just peters out so there is always parking there. Of course, the piled snow does not help, but those are shrinking as we speak. Hope you can make it and in any even have a very Merry Christmas.

Oh, spoke to soon. But that is friendly snark I would say.

Hey its been three days since I posted this and not one snarky comment! Maybe we are becoming a better on line community or perhaps its just an Xmas truce.

Alas, its alive and well at my kids' Charter School, Elysian Charter in Hoboken where Kumba Day is celebrated the Sunday before Winter Break (formerly Christmas Break) each year. Kumba is the 6th Day of Kwanza representing creativity. The kids do a nice African dance which is good. I object, though, to the founder, to the ideology behind it, to its strategic placement to obscure Chrstmas. There is no mention of the "C" word at the school. Raising any reservations about Kumba Day results in ostracism of one's child. BTW, the school is 90% white.

Peace on Earth to Men of Good Will!

OK, at the risk of raising the ire of some on this site, please accept this as a humble invitation to Holy Rosary on Christmas Eve. There will be a concert starting at 11:15 PM featuring a brass ensemble. In the prelude, the Choir wll also sing Victoria's Ave Maria and Tollite Hostias of St. Saens.

Mass begins at midnight (as it has since ancient times) with the congregational singing of Adeste Fideles to coincide with the the Gospel account of the birth of the Messiah as announced by angels bending near to earth.

The Ordinary of the Mass is Schubert's Mass in G, a masterpiece written when he was just 18 sung by the Holy Rosary Choir accompanied by strings. Monteverdi's Trumpet Voluntary will introduce the Gloria- which is the angel's Christmas saluation. The proper's for the Mass will be sung by the Schola and motets during the mass include compositions of Herbeck and Praetorius and other carols.

Mass will conclude with the procession to the creche to adore the Christ Child.

Christ Is Born- Alleluia!

NJLIST:

Of course, there there is a place for considering the pscyhological/biographical backkground to any thinker. Actually, I don't know too much about Sayers, having read one of her mysteries a long time ago, but I always liked the title of the Creed or Chaos. I was aware that her life was a bit irregular so that her defense of dogmatic Christianity was not self serving- actually it would work to be self accusing. I can see how an alternative view, and perhaps not without merit, would be that she is simply a hypocrite.

I got a chuckle out of the gist of your post though. Your "aha" "gotcha" tone that Holy Rosary is now out of the closet since you now know that it is not a place for music but a place for traditional, i.e. judgemental, Christianity. Your tone is what caused me to post the admittedly mildly provocative Sayers. It reminded me of an old New Yorker cartoon where a stylish couple upon leaving the Church remark to themselves; "Well, that was it, I just can't take going to church and being preached to."

Could I ask that at times you suspend your condemnation, the Christoper Hitchens,/Dawkins version of the village atheist who, attacks Christianity by mistaking the theology remembered from kindergarden?

It's amazing- even Marx and Freud had a much more realistic view of dogmatic religion, e.g., "the heart of a heartless world." The view that sees all the world's ills as the result of Christianity is just so distorted. Our civilization has many wonders about it, and arguably, most of its positive attributes can be traced to Christian concepts.

But to focus in more narrowly on the music: its appeal is immediate and universal and demands no faith. (four of the 12 regular singers are nonbelievers). An interesting quesiton, I think, is at a deeper level is there a connection between Western sacred music and Christian belief. But to charachterize the music program as a switch and bait is unfair. It is a sincere effort to produce something beautiful because, as Kant said, there are three transcendentals: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Consider another aspect of your typical Christian Church: charity. Would you say that Christians have soup kitchens to fool progrressives of good will into thinking that Christians really are not evil and that a church could be a cool thing to be involved in? No, like the liturgy, charity is essential to the Christian life and flows directly from dogmatic belief. Dorothy Day understood this radically when she founded the Catholic Worker. Unfortunately, her contemporary followers as with most nuns, now see themselves as mere social workers.

So, to recapitulate my original point. If prompted to search for truth, do not be satisifed with the thinest gruel, the most easility digested theology, the least demanding life. Look for truth. And when looking, expect to find people probably much more flawed (to the point of skeeving you out even) than yourself.

Hope to see you at Holy Rosary sometime.

Publius

Brooklynboy-

Sorry to have scared you and yes, you are right, a straightforward reference would have been the polite response to the original poster. I was just responding to both the sincere and polite aversion to dogma and traditional religion expressed in the ensuing discussion as well as the snarky and polemical aversion.

Pax Tecum!

PubliusIII

As Heights said above: "don't forget about the [ancient] Latin Mass offered every Sunday at Holy Rosary on 6th Street according to the Order of Melchisideck. There is nothing new under the sun, and, indeed, this liturgy on 6th Street would be recognizable to any citizen of the Western Roman Empire from about 100 AD onward. In addition, the Eucharistic sacrifice is offfered with sign and symbol fashioned by the creative genius of two millenia. In particular, the music, from the plain chant of the propers to the full polyphonic or symphonic masses communicate transendance. This is not a circle closed in open itself, or substituting good works for faith, this is the worship of the Lord in awe and trembling and thanksgivng. (BTW, Midnight Mass at Christmas will bring heaven to earth in a liturgy that will be more Roman than the Romans).

And yes, there is default rejection of dogma today. Is everyone going to become a Buddhist fashioned according to his own agenda? And for those who think this is something new, consider Dorothy Sayers writing in the 1940s:


It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose
that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple
and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.

-Dorothy Sayers in ?Creed or Chaos??

Thus begins essay number four in ?Letters to a Diminished Church.? This essay was the title piece of a collection of essays Sayers published under the same title in the late 1940s. Yes, that?s right, sixty years ago. (By the way, you may have noticed I skipped over the third essay in he book. Its title is ?Creative Mind,? and while it was interesting in its own right, I have yet to figure out exactly what the editor thought it had to do with arguing the relevance of Christian doctrine.)

And this is only the beginning. Sayers goes on to elaborate on the nature of the ninety-nine percent with a razor sharp perceptiveness and prophetic relevance to us that will take your breath away. She describes three classes of people: frank and open heathens, whose ideas about Christianity are a jumble of ?rags and tags of Bible anecdotes and clotted mythological nonsense;? ignorant Christians, whose idea of Jesus is based on a mild, gentle sentimentality combined with ?vaguely humanistic ethics? that she associates with the Arian heresy; and, finally, more-or-less instructed churchgoers, who know what the Bible says about some things, but whose battle readiness on fundamentals against a Marxian atheist or a Wellsian agnostic is comparable to ?a boy with a peashooter facing a fan-fire of machine guns.?

This is unbelievably good, relevant, challenging stuff for us to soak in. Besides Sayers wonderful skill with words, her laser focus on perhaps the most crucial issue for the church of our day make her work must reading for all of us. We have two choices?two ways?creed or chaos. There are no other options.

Ogden-

Thanks for the encouragement. Anyone joining now will get to learn three great compositions in this history of muusic by Xmas. Call me if you want more info (201 406 9960. We really need another alto and soprano!

Publius