My Fourth of July

I pretty much missed the entire day of the festival of jackassery that is the 4th of July hereabouts (fall-out from living near a really large city just over the state line when the state next to you has stricter fireworks laws than your state....) although we were home early enough to have our sleep postponed by the ungodly noise of what seemed to be block parties, or perhaps pagan rituals devoted to the worship of the M-80, on every street and alley within walking distance.
We had not intended to be home for much of the day anyway, our parish didn't have the usual First Friday Devotions (probably wise,) and we had planned on joining relatives for a cook-out.
But as it happened, I was able to both attend Mass and spend some short time in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament (although He was in the tabernacle,) at a hospital chapel.
Shortness of breath in a middle-aged man earns you much faster entree past the receptionist in Emergency than does a vast amount of blood on a child or teenager who seems otherwise his usual ornery self, (my only emergency room glimpses growing up, and always for a sibling's emergent incident, I am too lazy to ever do anything dangerous.)
Himself says, prepare for it, this is just a glimpse of your future, but I doubt it, despite the age difference he is more careful of his diet, exercise, etc., that is to say, he pays any attention to it at all.
And his system righted itself quickly, but not quickly enough to stave off a passel of tests, and hours of cooling our heels waiting for test results.
But I'd brought along a good book:
Sacred Music and Liturgy Reform After Vatican II
the proceedings of the Fifth International Church Music CongressChicago Milwaukee, August 21 - 28
Johannes Overath, editor (in concert with the later, great, Fr Schuler)
CIMS
(You can get yours, as I did mine, through the CMAA, and I recommend you do)
Papers and speeches by Archbishop (of Mexico City,) Gomez, Eric Werner, Joseph Lennards, the abbot ot Maria Laach, and the music critic Paul Lang have really resonated. (I am reading the book in a very unsystematic way.)
I shall not unpack them here as almost anyone with the interest and background to read them is bound to have much more cogent and interesting thoughts on the matter than I.
Suffice it to say that one takes pleasure in the fact that dangers were identified, warnings given, and remedies suggested by those in the know looooong before we came to this sorry pass;
yet distressed to see how the conclusions, that seem obvious to anyone who looks at the matter honestly now, were drawn before one was even involved in the matter, even cognizant of the situation AND WERE IGNORED, and even deliberately suppressed in favor of the proponents, actual cheer-leaders of the methods that have brought us to said sorry pass.
If you have ever read mysteries by Josephine Tey, there is one very un-formulaic one about a police detective temporarily constrained from actuosa investigative police work by an injury who decides to investigate an historical mystery. At the end, he discovers to his horror that an historical calumny, a "fact" which "everyone knows" is not only absolutely false, but the actual truth has been known by genuine historians, by the learned, by the informed, for decades, if not centuries -- AND IT DOESN'T MATTER.
In the popular imagination, the legend, the falsehood has supplanted the reality, so whatever the truth, everyone "knows" otherwise.
Lately someone online (I'll have to look for it and link to it,) has been running the actual texts of directives from local bishops at the times of The Changes, and we can see how at odds with the expressed intent of the Council as a whole they were.
When one first begins to realize that their is no tooth-fairy, that TPTB have misled you about the Liturgy, and Church music, and what is required by the Church, and what VCII actually said on the matter, one might sigh wistfully, oh, if only someone had told TPTB.
But oh look: someone did, and it made not a whit of difference.
TPTB acted not in ignorance, but in deliberate contravention of what they knew was right.
There is a man-about-blog, who likes to make pronouncements about liturgy and sacred music, and one of his favorite hobby-horses is that, whenever an incontrovertible truth or a good idea is being expounded by those he considers Church "traditionalists" or liturgical "conservatives," he and his ilk "got there first".
He can make a claim like "why, we progressives/GIA/members of NPM having been saying that for 40 years!", be shown the reference to it in a long ago Vatican document or a 1960s issue of Sacred Music or an essay from one of the lepers of Church music during the Weakland glory years, and still utter, (with an ostentatiously pacific disingenuousness,) well, about time they got on board.
If you are familiar with the original Star Trek, you will recognize Checkov, with his Russian boosterism that ignores all evidence, in this gent.
Frankly, I don't care if he wants his mentors to take credit for anything, as long as he endorses the truths that have been waiting around for him and his mentors to belatedly take notice of them.