TwoPhilip

On the Catholic-traditional OnePeterFive blog, David Mitchell put up a post contrasting the Anglican hymns he once loved, against the hymns in the Catholic Church today. The consensus of the comments there, was that the modern Catholic hymnal contains namby-pamby and/or even heretical content. I am not arguing with this much; the "Eccles And Bosco" parody blog has highlit an awful lot of cringe.

What I noticed in the comments, is a commenter "James" who said there should not be hymns at all in a Mass. And coming back to it now, I couldn't read my own comment until I signed into disqus. I believe this is known as a "Shadow Ban".

I am not going to argue the point, in this post. (My comment had suggested plainsong in presence of the Host; hymns before and after.) What I will do, is step back from the whole discussion, and observe how extremism happens, taking this discussion as evidence.

Rabbinic Judaism proposes the concept of the Fence Around Torah. The Torah - for rabbis - comes from the Most High God. A Jew must obey every injunction as far as possible unless a situation occurs where it cannot be obeyed, or it threatens the Jew's life directly. To avoid even the possibility of disobedience, the rabbis construct their "fence": for fear of the prohibition on mixing cow's milk and that cow's offspring's meat, the Jew cannot eat a cheeseburger. Before the rabbis, the priesthood had an analogous "fence" around the Temple; the Essenic Temple Scroll extended the Temple's holiness over all Jerusalem.

Every group of humans has a social hierarchy. Where a group is holy, that group contains a subgroup who assert dominance by claiming to be more holy. Synagogues today host Jews who love Torah more than the rabbi does; the Sadducees had the Essenes.

OnePeterFive has its Philip II Catholics, demanding an Escorial of our churches. And if they have a limit to how "Catholic" their commenters go, I haven't seen anyone run into that limit.

BACKDATING 8/12