Lots of good stuff over at the Shrine of the Holy Whapping these days – Drew has some excellent historical posts, including a lengthy quote from Ratzinger on Charles Borromeo and true reform, and several really interesting architectural posts from Matthew.

Not to speak of a caption contest with hysterically funny responses.

Related: A FAQ on Sacred Music – worked on by many associated with the New Liturgical Movement and the Church Music Association, is available. It’s a pdf file, very suitable for printing and handing out to…people who might learn something from it.

Oh, I’ll just go ahead and post some of the Ratzinger quote that Drew posted:

"It can certainly be said that Charles Borromeo rebuilt ("restored") the Catholic Church, which also in the area around Milan was at that time nearly destroyed for awhile, without making a return to the Middle Ages. On the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church. How little ‘restorative’ such a reform was is seen, for example, in the fact that Charles suppressed a religious order that was nearly in decline and assigned its goods to new, live communites. Who today possesses a similar courage to declare that which is interiorly dead (and continues to live only exteriorly) belongs definitively to the past and must be entrusted with clarity to the energies of the new era? Often new phenomena of Christian awakening are resisted precisely by the so-called reformers, who in their turn spasmodically defend institutions that continue to exist only in contradiction with themselves.

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