[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.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
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
~
[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.
~
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.
*
Commercial Break
A private detective confronts the uncanny;
an ecclesiastical
mystery:
*
[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
supporters 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)
