In his address to the Colloquium on Wednesday, June 27, Monsignor Andrew Wadsworth criticized a number of liturgical and musical choices made by the organizers of the closing liturgy of this year’s Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. His criticisms have been widely noted in the religious press.
In case anyone is wondering whether his criticisms are justly due, the video of the Mass is below. Much as I hesitate to criticize any liturgy whose homily concludes with quite a nice quotation from my great patron St. Ephrem, and whose ars celebrandi is in several important ways commendable, it seems to me that in terms of musical and choreographic sensibility, a stronger contrast could not be made between this celebration of the Mass and those liturgies in Cameroon and Angola which the Holy Father complimented some years ago in this way (my emphasis):
[I was] moved by the spirit of meditative absorption in liturgy, the powerful sense of the sacred; in the liturgies there was no self-presentation of groups, no self-animation, but the presence of the sacred, of God Himself; even the movements were always movements of respect and awareness of the divine presence.
May I draw your attention particularly to 1:54:20, 2:06:06, and 2:57:20
By enduring that Credo, I think I've paid my daily penance. It's made-up liturgy like this which distracts from the intended affect. The effect of 'universality' which I assume they intended with this polyglot version could have, and should have, been achieved by the Credo in Latin (with appropriate printed translations, if necessary)