"Cringe-making, smiley, cheesy folk groups" fill the churches...

Also found at Laudator Temporis Acti. My family is firmly in agreement; my kids flee from Jewish services whenever guitars get hauled out.

Extracts from
Composer damns happy-clappy din
By Eddie Barnes for Scotland on Sunday
Trendy guitar-strumming folk groups are ruining church services by playing "embarrassing, maudlin and sentimental dirges", Scotland's leading classical composer has declared.

James MacMillan ... has described modern hymns as "excrescences" and called for a return to traditional chants and organ music. [and] confesses his despair of the "screaming microphones" and "incompetently strummed guitars and cringe-making, smiley, cheesy folk groups" which fill churches every Sunday.

The effect of this on liturgy has been a triumph of bad taste and banality and an apparent vacating of the sacred spaces of any palpable sense of the presence of God."

He declared: "The Pope is presented as a stern-faced, party pooping disciplinarian, stamping out electric guitars, pop-crooning and the sentimental bubble-gum 'folk' used in many of today's Catholic churches. The people attacking him are the very ones who were responsible for the banal excrescences enforced on us in the name of 'democratisation of the liturgy' and 'active participation' over the last few decades."

Robertson highlighted one hymn for particular criticism. "The chorus is 'Jesus is wonderful isn't he, isn't he? Jesus is wonderful isn't he, isn't he?'"

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