"the defining event of their whole Catholic lives"

Jeffrey Tucker is writing some excellent articles on what might be called the "politics" of liturgical music. In the piece Our "differing needs" are not all that matter, he looks at an article by Rendler-McQueeney who apparently writes a very popular column in the magazine "Today's Liturgy".

He draws attention to the way that the "liturgical renewal" is spoken of in the present tense despite that fact that the music that still dominates the liturgy in many parishes was produced several decades ago. As Jeffrey Tucker points out, the time of liturgical reconstruction was the defining event of their whole Catholic lives. he goes on:
It was a heady time of liturgical reconstruction when a certain take on ritual music swept all before it and came to dominate the Mass. That movement is now tired and aging, lacking in intellectual and artistic inspiration. In a sign of their increasingly reactionary posture, they assume that anyone who doesn't like their jingles is seething with anger about events that most Catholics in the pews never knew and never experienced. What they need to realize is that not everyone who is tired of "Table of Plenty" is longing to refight the liturgy wars. Mostly, they just find this music trite and are ready to move on.
I have myself tried to explain this to people by looking at the time lapse. Let us fix on 1973, 35 years ago. (I was 15 then.) At that time, "35 years ago" was 1938.

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