Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Please, please make it stop! It's making my ears bleed ...

Damien Thompson is always worth a read, especially when he takes his well sharpened pin to the inflated egos of comfortable ecclesiastical mediocrities. His latest deflation is amusing but also rather distressing. Do the organisers of the Papal Visit to Great Britain really mean for people to listen to aural haemorrhage inducing pap like Urban Pilgrim or Deus Tuus Deus Meus? (MP3s available here.) Mind you, I disagree with some commentators who think that Urban Pilgrim sounds like The Birdie Song. In a sick, sad way The Birdie Song is memorable; it gets stuck in your head like some sort of loathsome mental fungus. Not so Urban Pilgrim, which resembles (and might have been lifted from) the incidental music for a Discovery Channel documentary about the building of the Concorde. Can't you just imagine this lame musical wallpaper in the background as some baritone voiceover artiste informs you that "... even then their technical woes weren't over, as Chief Widget analyst Bob Smith explains ..."?

Well, they may have a new MacMillan Mass for Scotland and even reprised for Birmingham but it looks like the musical & liturgical Babylonian captivity of the Church in England has some time left to it yet. At least, for once, it's not our Bishops and apparatchiks making an embarrassing mess of things but that's small consolation on this side of the Irish Sea and none at all to our Scots or English'n'Welsh Brethern who certainly deserve better.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good grief! Has the Holy Father not suffered enough!