If he had only waited a few years (and, I guess, not died) he could have blamed it on AI. There has been a whole lot of news in the last week. So there was not the coverage there otherwise might have been about the discovery of proof that the late Pope Francis was lying through his teeth when he announced four years ago next week that the world’s bishops hated the Latin Mass.
In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time. In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.