THE P RTAL
March 2014
Page 12
A tale of two masses
by Geoffrey Kirk
‘It was
the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity.’ This is a tale of two masses, taking place within a week of each other,
though a thousand miles apart.
The first – a celebration
mass for the Lunar New Year- took place in St Joseph’s
Church, Victoria Street, Singapore. The liturgy was
traditional in form (well-trained servers, incense,
vestments); the language was English or Latin; but
the music! Such music! ‘It will be like going to the
is splendidly enshrined). It is, of course, a glorious
transplant from the Iberian peninsula, its fretted gold
reredos towering over the altar itself and dominating
an otherwise austere interior. The mass was in English,
celebrated simply and with dignity, without servers,
lights or incense. But the music! Oh dear, the music!
A single soprano with a mid-Atlantic accent was
accompanied by a backing group of guitars and
drums, all amplified within an inch of their lives
and reverberating threateningly in a building with
otherwise impeccable acoustics.
St Jospeh’s Church, Singapore
wayang,’ said a Singaporean friend on hearing that the
mass would be sung with an orchestra of traditional
Chinese instruments and to tunes adapted from the
Peking Opera. In the event it was no such thing. There
was dignity and solemnity.
The tunes were the banal ditties so familiar to massgoers in England or America. The texts of the ordinary
were farced with repetitive inanities to make them
fit the songs from the shows. The congregation of
about six hundred received these offerings supinely.
Participation was at a minimum. No Indian patrimony
here, I concluded. Abstract the event from its sixteenth
century setting, and you might as well have been in the
Bronx, or in inner city Liverpool.
dignity and solemnity
The music was strangely accommodated to the
Latin words of the ordinary of the mass, and even
the crescendo of drums and cymbals at the elevations
seemed natural and completely in keeping. The
chasubles of the concelebrants were red (the colour
of Chinese festivity, and in particular of the New
Year), and at the end of the mass blessed oranges
were distributed to the congregation (the traditional Basilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa
New Year gift symbolising prosperity). This, I said
to myself, is Chinese patrimony: a lesson in the
The lessons for the Ordinariate are obvious and
acculturation of Catholicism without the slightest irresistible. The Singaporean mass was a bold and
doctrinal compromise, or disloyalty to the tradition.
successful exercise in enriching the universal with the
particular. The Goan mass was sadly dependent on
guitars and drums
alien imports. How one longed, if modernity was to be
The other mass was in the Basilica of Bom Jesus the predominant flavour, for some of the razzmatazz
in Old Goa, (the church in which St Francis Xavier of Bollywood.