But Can We Still Have the Folk Mass? (Anti-Rock Pope Edition)

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this Asia Times account of the new pope's view on the noise that the kids today mistake for music:

Rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility…[it is] among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today [1985] predominate more openly in the West than in the East. But that is precisely why rock music is so completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite. Hence music of this type must be excluded from the Church on principle, and not merely for aesthetic reasons, or because of restorative crankiness or historical inflexibility.

Whole thing here. And before any of us gets too judgmental, please note that the future pope was speaking in 1985, which saw the release of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 and 2

If John Paul II was the rock star pope, then Benedict XVI is shaping up to be more of a Sinatra, I'd say. (Francis Albert, after all, was the one who declaimed in 1957, "Rock and roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons. By means of its almost imbecilic reiteration it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.")

Well, what about the folk and endless choruses of "Let It Be"? From another article:

Benedict XVI rejects the "folk" Mass on the simple grounds that God, rather than the "folk", is the actor in the Mass.

That bit here.

No word yet on the proposed rap mass, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's black smoke on that one too.