Bill Murray on the Mass

Taken from a recent interview with American actor Bill Murray in the Guardian. And I will take this opportunity to remind gentle readers that the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is still available worldwide.

One new saint he [Bill Murray] does approve of is Pope John XXIII (who died in 1963). “I’ll buy that one, he’s my guy; an extraordinary joyous Florentine who changed the order. 

I’m not sure all those changes were right. I tend to disagree with what they call the new mass. I think we lost something by losing the Latin. Now if you go to a Catholic mass even just in Harlem it can be in Spanish, it can be in Ethiopian, it can be in any number of languages. The shape of it, the pictures, are the same but the words aren’t the same.”

Isn’t it good for people to understand it? “I guess,” he says, shaking his head. “But there’s a vibration to those words. If you’ve been in the business long enough you know what they mean anyway. And I really miss the music – the power of it, y’know? Yikes! Sacred music has an affect on your brain.” Instead, he says, we get “folk songs … top 40 stuff … oh, brother….”

 I will take this opportunity to remind gentle readers that the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is still available worldwide. Here's what it looked like in 1944!

Notice how the soulful young lady is not wearing mantilla but a chic-for-then hat!