Sunday, December 2, 2012

Singing Nuns

[Update Sunday, 2 December 2012]  The latest in this multi-faceted saga:

Nun Uses Music to Convey Spirited Message Against the Vatican’s Rebuke
When Kathy Sherman was in college during the final years of the Vietnam War, she played the guitar with friends in her dorm room and sang folk and protest songs over bowls of popcorn. They sang Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez, and some friends said her voice reminded them of Judy Collins.
Ms. Sherman graduated and joined an order of Roman Catholic nuns, the Sisters of St. Joseph of La Grange, but she never stopped making music. Last spring, when the Vatican issued a harsh assessment of the group representing a majority of American nuns accusing them of “serious doctrinal problems,” Sister Sherman, 60, said she responded the way she always does when she feels something deeply. She wrote a song.

The story goes on in this happy-talk vein, right to the end, steering clear of doctrinal matters.  As well it should.   Ms. Sherman (as the article refers to her, in addition to “Sister Sherman”)  is no doubt a lovely person, with a delightful voice, and the song is surely swell to listen to.  A perfect story for Sunday morning.   Only, the headline suggests that this all serves towards an actual rebuttal of the Vatican rebuke -- a true contribution to a genuine debate;  which it is not.

When I was in college during the Vietnam War, I too sat around in a circle with other young folks, singing, with such accessories as popcorn and a guitar.  And one day (moving incognito among the villagers like Harun al-Rashid) I sat with a group of young Weathermen (you could almost call them:  Weatherchildren) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, all happily singing, campfire-fashion, with shining eyes:

We lo-hove Ho Chi Mi-hi-hi-hinh!
We lo-hove Ho Chi Mi-hi-hi-hinh!
I say deep down in our hearts  (Right on!)
I say deep down in our hearts  (For sure!)
I say Deep  -- “Deep!”
I say Down  -- “Down!”
I say deep down in our hearts 

Which was all fine and good; but it was not a substantive contribution to the geopolitical debate.

The Vatican did not go after certain public actions and declarations of American nuns because it wished to stifle “Love” (as the song sings), or any light-hearted campfire-girl ethos.   It rebuked an unambiguous defiance of major Church doctrines.  Ms Sherman and her singing sisters no doubt have wonderful values, and can find a comfy home for them in your friendly neighborhood Unitarian Church.
The point is logical, not theological, and quite elementary.  Say you join the International Society for the Prevention of Penguins, and then go about handing out leaflets saying “Hooray for penguins!  Let’s have more penguins!”  Your sentiments may be admirable, but you do not belong in the International Society for the Prevention of Penguins.

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~ Commercial break ~
Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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A similar case from history, of a rift that were best made explicit:

Jung was long in admitting his desertion of psychoanalysis, and did not see why he should not hold radically different views from Freud.  There was, of course, no reason at all … But what troubled Freud was what he called sailing under false colors.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 362

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[Earlier post from 20 Nov 2012]

NPR just did a segment on how an album of Gregorian chants and traditional hyms  by an American convent of Benedictine nuns  has become the top seller in its category.  This in itself is welcome news, on several levels, the moreso as it reportedly displaces an album whose sole selling-point was a purely factitious publicity tie-in to a bestselling opuscule of sadomasochistic housewife porn. 
(That album itself is quite blameless, by the way.  I clicked on the playlist at Amazon, half-fearing to find things like the Velvets’ “Venus in Furs”, but the selections are all quite classical, even restrained.)

This rare popular breakthough of Catholic music  put me in mind of a song that was at the top of the charts when I was thirteen years old: “Dominique”, by a Francophone Belgian Dominican, Sœur Sourire, “the Singing Nun”.   The “Dominique” in question  I assumed at the time, in my blinkered American monoglot ignorance, to be a girl’s name;  whereas in fact the reference is to Saint Dominic. the founder of her Order.   The refrain is catchy, and its protagonist -- though no maid as I had fondly imagined -- sounds more like a rosy-cheeked St. Francis  than the formidable Dominic:

Dominique -inique -inique 
s'en allait tout simplement,
Routier, pauvre et chantant.
En tous chemins, en tous lieux,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu,
Il ne - parle - que - du - Bon - Dieu.

Quite charming, and well-sung.  But dig a bit, and the picture becomes rather more nuanced... 

The full French lyrics are difficult to find;  after googling for a while, I gave up and dredged them up from my desktop:

A l'époque  Jean Sans Terre,
D'Angleterre était le roi
Dominique notre père,
Combattit les albigeois.

The song,  you see, commemorates the Albigensian Crusade, a twenty-year bloodbath in the early thirteenth century.   Its principal target was the Cathar heresy,  though its far-reaching social effects went well beyond that.

The methods of this adventure were purely benevolent  in the Sister’s telling:

Certains jours un hérétique,
Par des ronces le conduit
Mais notre Père Dominique,
Par sa joie le convertit

However, when “joy” failed to turn the trick (nay, this very word joy has rather soured for us, ever since, a couple of years later, the egregious Hubert Humphrey peddled the “politics of joy” in his Presidential campaign -- a slogan absurdly out of tune with the times) -- when joy failed, there was always torture, wholesale massacre, and burning at the stake. 

Now, readers of this blog will have gathered that I greatly reverence the teachings of the Historical Church.  Yet somehow the Albigensian Crusade is not one of those episodes that cause me to leap from my couch with the rise of Brother Sun, warbling like a nightingale.    It has … shadows, and soft spots, and aspects discutables.  Among other things, it was responsible for the destruction of the troubadour culture. By all means let us study its history, with sobriety and without a smug Whiggish hindsight:  the Cathar heresy was indeed grave.  Still and all, it was a most unsuitable subject for the sugar-coated nursery-rhyme treatment of Sœur Sourire.

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In a bizarre afterpiece to the whole dubious affair, Sœur Sourire, hounded by Belgium for back taxes, committed suicide (in the Catholic view, a mortal sin), along with her lesbian lover.   And unfortunately (though I shall refrain from exploring the possible subterranean connections to our present case), this may be more than a mere tabloid sidelight.

I did not intend this post to relate in any way to NPR -- the point I began by intending to address  was simply the Albigensian crusade.   It was just that I happened to hear about the new album on “All Things Considered”.   Yet in the course of attempting to google a link to the tale of this album -- which proved fruitless, whether in “News” mode or general -- I came across the following sobering account  of an earlier and even more bizarre bit of the NPR journalistic ethos, in a similar case:


National Public Radio usually avoids the snide contrast and goes for the real story.  So I was taken aback by the way they handled the news that the Benedictine Nuns of the Abbaye de Notre-Dame de l’Annonciation had signed a contract with Decca Records for a CD of Gregorian chant.  After all, I don’t recall any cute stories about the Chant CD by the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos when it soared to the top of the charts.

Here’s what they said, in its entirety:

“Lady Gaga now shares a record label with a band of soul sisters – that is, a group of Benedictine nuns. Universal Music’s Decca Records discovered them at their convent in France as part of a global search for the best singers of Gregorian Chants. Unlike Lady Gaga, the nuns probably won’t have to worry about paparazzi. They live a life hidden behind closed doors. As for costumes, well, they’ll likely stick with something traditional.”

Lady Gaga? What did she have to do with this story?  The answer is: nothing, other than recording on the Decca label.

It would appear that the “hook” of that NPR piece  was not a genuine concern for the austere beauties of plainchant, let alone for the Catholic faith to which such observation gives tongue, but was rather its juxtaposition to the obscenely meretricious Lady Caca (as she is more aptly styled).   Such is the aethetics -- and the ethics -- of “Piss Christ”.

The aesthetic recurs, though somewhat attenuated, in the present piece:

Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album has been on Billboard's Classical Traditional Albums chart for 11 weeks, most recently in the top slot. But the album has been bumped this week by The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles — a group of singing nuns from Missouri. The Benedictines' album is called, Advent at Ephesus.

The nuns are indulged, but patronized;  one woman comments, with a sort of fey guffaw, “they’re really unplugged.”

The grotesque condescension of the NPR treatment  is quickly refuted by a glance at the interview with the charming, lively, aware, and beautifully well-centered, prioress of this nunnery:


Indeed, we might posit that the prioress and her sisters are indeed plugged-in -- but plugged into something more central and sound and essential than whatever fantasies flit through the minds of the masscult onanists  while they’re whacking off to Fifty Shades of Grey.  We might further hazard that, like the Father Brown of “The Blue Cross” or “The Queer Feet”, whose knowledge of the depths of crime far surprassed that possessed by the criminals, these sisters, despite the whiteness of their wimples, may well know more of the blackness of the human heart, than  that chattering airhead on NPR, whose summation was allowed to conclude the piece, to the effect that  the implicit equation of Fifty Shades of Grey  with Benedictine observance,  just goes to show that “art…”  (and by implication:  sexual morality, and religious faith) is “different for everybody” .  Algolagnia?  Necrophilia?  -- Hey, de gustibus.  That relativist’s night  in which all cats are shades of grey.


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Commercial Break
A private detective  confronts the uncanny;
an ecclesiastical mystery:
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[Historico-theological footnote]  Since the Cathar heresy had a horror of procreation, you might imagine that the simplest thing for the Church to do would have been simply to ignore it, allowing its adherents to naturally die out.  And yet, bizarrely, outside the self-cleansed RCC, the heresy lives on:

Q: You just took office as the first woman to head the Episcopal Church…
Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?
A: No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.


Thus, Bishop Shori finds herself in nominal agreement with the butler Ferris (promising material there:  “A bishop and a butler walk into a bar…”):

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love.  It merely mummifies the corpse.”
“But, Mr Ferris, if there were no marriages, what would become of posterity?”
“I see no necessity for posterity.”
“You disapprove of it?”
“I do.”
-- P.G. Wodehouse, The Purloined Paperweight (a.k.a. Company for Henry) (1967)


She is likewise at one with the Dickensian misanthrope Bitser, the boss’s stooge informer in Hard Times, who, expressing his contempt for the laboring population from which he rose, delivers himself of this choice opinion, to the great approbation of the withered widow Sparcit:

“I’m sure we are constantly hearing, ma’am, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families,” said Bitser.  “Why, look at me, ma’am!  I don’t want a wife and family;  why should they?”
“Because they … are im-prov-i-dent,” said Mrs Sparsit.

I say “nominal” because, unlike that butler, she probably lacks the courage of her convictions.  Were she asked, did her observations apply equally to those of African extraction, she would doubtless blush furiously and retort, “Of course not!”  She likewise may be presumed among the spporters of the octomom…

I jest a bit, citing Wodehouse;  but truly, hers is as foul a heresy as any that has ever blotted the face of Christendom.


[Update]  Just happened upon this, which I fling in the face of that Bishopess:

Renée has this upstairs neighbor who is a member of the Art Mafia.  She has her own gallery in Soho, along with a drinking problem, and she is unbearable.  She plays her quadrophonic machine at all hours, full blast.
I don’t know which Mafia I dislike the most.  I’m leaning toward liking the Italian Mafia  because they are just immoral  and still believe in mother and child.  But the Art Mafia is immoral and, from what I can tell, they’ve stopped procreating.
-- Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia (1985)

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