Friday, September 14, 2007

Vienna: AP photo of me...


I was so moved to find myself at a Papal Mass in Austria that was orchestral and by Hayden, an Austrian himself, after having just visited the most hallowed shrine in all of Austria at Mariazell, that on my knees I almost wept!
Franz Joseph Haydn wrote this glorious "Mariazeller Messe" in 1782 and I grew up with it at the Church of St. Agnes in the New World in the 1990s and so I knew it!
I just want to add one piece of information, too. Once while in Rome in early 2004 I attended a lecture that Cardinal Ratzinger gave at the Oriental Institute. Toward the end of his lecture, with emotion, he took off his reading glasses, looked up, and explained in so many words: "When I was a boy we grew up with orchestral Masses in the Vienesse tradition in the part of the world that I lived in, in Southern Germany. After the Council such things were lost and quickly disappeared. I always felt sad about this and thought they should stay."

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