A travel piece in the NYTimes:
One of the tasks of Roger Server as mayor of this quaint village in western France is to console misguided tourists who want to hear the monks in its 11th-century monastery singing in Gregorian chant. “People come and ask, ‘Can you visit the concerts?’ ”
Tourists are restricted to the back of the church, he said, shaking his white hair in mock exasperation. “I tell them: ‘You can visit at the offices. You can admire the sculptures in the church.’ But the monks say, ‘We’re not here to receive tourists; we’re contemplatives.’ ”
The monks, 55 of them, inhabit the monastery that hovers over the village like some great granite mother hen over her chicks. But in recent times the monks have gained a measure of fame for their dedication to Gregorian chant, the simple vocal music whose cadences, in Latin, for centuries adorned the Roman Catholic liturgy.
Now, a constant stream of visitors comes to Solesmes to sit in the monastery church and listen while the monks sing the psalms and prayers, seven times a day, of the sacred liturgy.
“They want their calm,” Mr. Server, 65, a retired schoolteacher, said of the monks. “And after all, the monastery was there before us.”
One small note: Remember the "aequum est" question raised by Fr. Z and others about par. 62 in Sacramentum Caritatis? About the language for international liturgies..originally translated into English as "could be," but into every other language as something with more force like, "should be" or "fitting?"
(Eventually corrected, by the way, as noted in that link)
Well, SC finds its way into this piece. And look at the sense of it:
They were encouraged recently when Pope Benedict XVI, in a papal pronouncement known as an apostolic exhortation, decreed that — especially at international gatherings — the liturgies should be celebrated in Latin, except for the readings and the homily. Moreover, he said, “If possible, selections of Gregorian chant should be sung.”
It's kind of garbled (implying that SC says all liturgies should be celebrated in Latin) and the subsequent (2 paragraph) analysis of this is shoddy, relying on the "some see" mode of reporting, but I was struck by the rendering of this section, which skips right over that first moment of mistranslation...
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