RP Burke sends in this Anne Applebaum column

I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, “The Known World,” won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?

RP wonders if this is applicable to our current liturgical morass:

Popular culture has, once and for all, divorced itself from high culture. A couple of other examples:

1. The NBC orchestra was, at one time, not a blaring backup band for Johnny Carson, but a highly regarded classical ensemble directed by the formidable Arturo Toscanini.

2. Do you remember Looney Tunes from the 40s and 50s? Many of the gags were based on opera, of all things — including famous and absurd parodies of The Barber of Seville and Wagner’s Ring cycle.

3. Commercial broadcasting started with the likes of Omnibus (r.i.p., Alastair Cooke and Leonard Bernstein), Playhouse 90, and — for my first Christmas — Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors”

Imagine any of these things happening today?

Further, our public media markets are incredibly segmented. Our new pastor, a native of Uganda, brings a most welcome outsider’s view to our culture. He pointed out to me once that he’s encountered many Americans who will listen only to a single type of music — and run away from anything else. Easy listening (“soft rock”, the musical heirs to the cynically engineered Musak) and country-and-western partisans demand to hear their favorites and only theirs. Someone like me, who’s as likely to listen to the music he performs — organ and choral — as to oldies or Motown, is relatively unusual in his experience.

Much the same applies to books, as Ms. Applebaum writes. Only a few even touch the artistic, so that very few know how to discern good from bad — to use Duke Ellington’s famous adage that there are only two types of music, good and bad, and you can tell which is which by listening.

This week’s America gives some advice to parish liturgy committees, but it doesn’t address the really serious problem: some members may have technical knowledge of liturgy — meaning they can spout quotes from someone’s commentary about liturgy documents (the way priests in the old days never studied Aquinas, only someone’s book about Aquinas) — but can’t tell good texts and music from bad and dismiss any dissent as “personal taste.” Many priests are no better.

How do we get across the idea that we need to do our BEST work in our worship?