Seminary in the Netherlands
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 857
    Provided that Google tranlates better than did the late Eugene Nida, this video is from a diocesan seminary in Tiltenberg, Netherlands. It is one of my beliefs that clear statements of the faith come from frontline Churches where the stakes are great. E.g., Francis Arinze driving around Nigeria recruiting young men to be priests when the government threw out all foreign born priests, Joseph Ratzinger founding a new seminary after being driven out of a radicalized seminary in secular Germany, every step Karol Wojtyla ever took. Things are fuzzier and a different kind of difficult in a land like the US where the religious impulse is free and so manifests itself in wildly different ways.

    So, after the initial shock that something like this would come from the land of hypersecularization and systematized euthanasia, it makes more than a certain amount of sense. And it has the support of their cardinal.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfjgSvq6KA&feature=player_embedded#!
  • smvanroodesmvanroode
    Posts: 969
    The Tiltenberg is the only (and if that is wrong, one of the few) seminary in the Netherlands to teach also the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite: to its seminarists, as well as priests who want to learn to celebrate the older rite. Although the Netherlands is indeed a highly secularised country, Gregorian chant is still found relative alive: most church going catholics can sing along by heart with several masses from the Ordinary, and there are many well trained scholas singing the Proper chants too. As a matter of fact, this morning, we sang Mass XI in Breda.

    As an aside, your qualification of systematised euthanasia is very apt: the last couple of weeks their is some controversy in the national press, and among progressive catholics too, about a priest who denied a parishioner a funeral, because he choose to end his life by euthanasia. Luckily, the priest was backed up in public by his bishop, and today my own bishop also made a short, but clear statement during his Sunday homily.
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 857
    Two sweet sounds coming from the Netherlands in one morning--the seminarians chanting, and news of a priest who "was backed up in public by his bishop."

    But the rest of your comments go to my point. It is hard to generalize in the US, of course, because we stretch from "sea to shining sea," and there are dioceses where the forces of opposition are so strong that things are clear. But there is a strong sense of "if we don't look too different from the larger culture, we will be free to do our thing." So the voices are not so clear.

    But as long as the internet brings forth so many Jeffrey A. Tuckers posting relentlessly on the web, there is one extra ray of hope. I would love for Tiltenberg, and all scholas, to post as much as they can on the web, so that people such as myself can afford to learn Chant properly. Four videos for every chant in the Liber Usualis! That would be great. (See my post on learning Chant from yesterday.)
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