Our Angelic Defenders
I’ve sometimes said that I’m the youngest person you will meet who has strong memories of something that the tidal wave of social, educational, and ecclesiological change in the 1960s was going to leave in sticks and rubble. In part, that’s because I taught myself to read when I was three, so I could, for example, puzzle out the Latin on the left page of the handsome missal that my mother always took to daily Mass. I was too small to see the priest, so I thought his voice was coming from high up on the wall by the ceiling, not that I paid any mind to him. The book was more interesting.
Yet now I see that many things were already lost before I arrived. I suppose my fellow Christians in other communions can name some: congregations that sang in four-part harmony, without a choirmaster; weekly evening lectures on the Christian life—who can name them all?
The book I am holding can give us a few: Paroissien Romain [Roman Parishioner], printed in Belgium in 1956. It contains prayers, readings, and chants for the Mass and the Divine Office for every Sunday through the year and all feast days. Its inside cover is marked “Paroisse Notre Dame de l’Assomption, Arichat, 1958.” That’s the main church on the island in Nova Scotia where we live in the summer.
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Anthony Esolen is the author of over thirty books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House). He and his wife Debra publish a web magazine, Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com), on poetry, hymnody, language, classic films, and music. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more on Imagination from the online archives
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
19.10—December 2006
Training Up a Child Requires a Well-Formed Imagination by David Mills
more from the online archives
35.6—Nov/Dec 2022
on the Divine Promise Fulfilled by the Child of Bethlehem by James M. Kushiner
calling all readers
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