To spurn the Mass is to violate the Catholic chronicle of history

Wednesday, 4th March 2009

Father Peter Kennedy’s dismissal highlights a growing belief in the archival importance of the pre-Vatican II Mass, says John Heard

Imagine someone sat down to write a record of all the information that has come down to us. A collection where, on the last page, at any moment, we could find the latest insight painfully learned, cross-referenced with the steady accumulation of human wisdom through the ages. Such a volume would include all the rich fruit of memory — delicious and harrowing, recent and primordial — and constitute the record of our collective longings.

It needn’t just take in the highbrow. It could catalogue the minutiae too, and the quotidian (which bathers fit best in summertime, what colour roses to give a lover) and it would be worth reading because it would link these to the overarching narratives, the radiant ideas that give meaning to our lives.

It would include serious sections on war and silly sections on peace, and because it is the catalogue of all human experience, it would reflect on the serious aspects of peace (recession, for instance, and the failure of banks), and the silliness in war (there would be a chapter on Joseph Heller, and a paragraph about Kevin Rudd swearing in Iraq).

With such a book, we could jumble everything up, in our daily lives, and then straighten it all out, bringing everything together, just by coming back to the record where all meaning is preserved, and all contexts accommodated.

There are precedents for such a work.

In the Western canon there is Hesiod’s creation myth ‘Theogony’, for instance, beloved of generations of morbid classics students, who delight in Kronos’s blood-spattered castration of his father. There are the more limited (if not more limpid) ancient histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Quintus Curtius Rufus and Josephus. In our own epoch, we have had Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (unread, by an entire generation!) and various specialist efforts such as E.H. Gombrich’s magisterial The Story of Art (read by art lovers everywhere). The Aboriginal people, too, have a profound sense of memory, weaving complex stories of the Dreaming on to bark with lines and dots that link with ritual dance and contain the knowledge of an entire language group.

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