The past is past

I stumbled on a video of the celebration in Montreal of the Dominican Order's centenary in Canada. A lot of old men. And included in it the First Vows ceremony of one new friar.  Just one. The Master of the Order was there to preside and talk...and talk. He's French. Not French Canadian, but French French. Or as the Quebecois refer to them, les maudits Francais de la France, the damn French from France. God, do they love the sound of their own voices. Zzzz. It was sad and alienating to watch.

I remember one morning in Rome while we were doing Lauds, the morning Office, the priest who was leading, a very French Frenchman who somehow combined a pixyish manner with a generalized genial contempt, exhorted us before one of the psalms to "proclaim this communitarian psalm in a communitarian manner." To me, even then, a great example of the vacuity of so much modernized religion.

As Allan Bloom riffed on Machiavelli, so much effort wasted on exhorting men "to practice virtues that they rarely perfect, whose goodness for the individuals who practice them is questionable, and the preachings of which are boring to everyone concerned."

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