Minutiae Part Deux

Fr dear Fr: Is there a serious or profound reason why girls are not forthcoming about having their weddings in churches at the present time? Anything we can do?

Liturgically it is always possible that the wedding rites in the West and in these islands are just basically too verbose and banal as rituals, and this would explain the massicia popularitas of the young singing priest, Fr Dwayne or someone, in the Celtic islands for weddings, but also it is possible that the young people of today find the weddings of the westerners devoid of all serious meaningful ritual indeed, like something new something old, something silver something gold. Or it is also possible as a survey in the Southampton University once showed in 2005, the results of which were printed up and published in a booklet that Gorgianna approves, that young women cannot bring young men to the altars because the young men do not seek commitment at all, having grown spoilt on the platitudes of the celebrity culture of LA during this time frame. Kardashians to blame for shooting up the saloon bar in most young men’s hardening minds. Possibly the last one - not always entirely a ritual or liturgical issue, though listening to our own women in the Flowers Club after our last Eastern Rite wedding, which was a beautiful one, the women are adamant that it is indeed a ritual and liturgical issue - they cannot get the boys to come to the weddings because the weddings are just utterly banal and grey like a row of depressingly vernacular and overly familiar Edwardian terraces on a wet Saturday afternoon when boys prefer to watch football nowadays rather than commit to girls in a public Sacred Rite. General Revolt Needed. The Western Rite is devoid of any meaning now, since it abandoned the ancient customs and rituals of this once hallowed nation some time ago when reformed the first time round by well meaning didactic ritualphobes of the American ICEL kind. ICEL - a zombie walking disaster zone that produces no real ritual meaning - disaster writing rituals for astronauts on the grey terraces of the moon. No ritual. Just more and more words on top of more and more words. The excellent liturgical practitioners among the Irish Celts have taken the law into their own hands and super imposed song and rite and meaning on those dreadful rubbish guided rites of the modernity driven kind. Akayoz would write a song about it, like Now We Are Free, and sing some songs about love and Ondi and the Sun of Righteousness from the top of the Yural mountains, Flame on Flavon dearie. Right on. Get these absurdly verbose rituals out of the ballpark please. And ASAP. Like now. I shall never forget the day I was asked to present the new wedding rites of the banal ICEL kind to an audience of marriage experts in the hallowed halls of the old Jesuit University College in my local town and the audience howled in protest at the total absence of any custom. I had the embarrassment of letting the audience know that when the proposed English rituals went back to Rome for approval of the translation, the Romans found 301 mistakes in the English rites alone. Absurd. Too true.