Strange how things go around in circles.

An after dinner conversation on the terrace some weeks ago was about the demise of the old Latin mass.
I , like most schoolboys of my generation , learned to serve mass and was thoroughly familiar with the Latin ritual- so much so that I can still quote large chunks of the mass, in Latin , without trouble .
Now even though I understand Pope John 23rd’s reasons for turning the Latin into English I also would think that I would date my first English Mass as the moment when I started to lose my religion.
In this case I reversed Spinoza’s saying , for me to understand all was to forgive nothing but to wonder what rot I had spent all my life mouthing.
And then as you do in La Ronde de la Vie I discovered that one of my heroes , Georges Brassens , felt just as I did about the vernacular mass.

He had written a Phillipic against the Catholic church ; Tempete dans un Benitier
(Storm in the Holy Water Font)

This has lines like:

Sans le latin, sans le latin,
La Messe nous emmerde

Which I suppose you could translate as :

Without Latin the mass is a heap of shit.

But what ties up my circle completely and brings me back to where I started (or at least to a blog I wrote just a few days ago ) is a line in the song.
To make his point Brassens deliberately mis-quotes my new motto , that enigmatic line from Le Mystére de la Chambre Jeaune

Le presbytère n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le jardin de son éclat

“The Presbytery has never lost its charm nor the garden its colours.”

Instead of this Brassens says;

La Presbytere sans le latin
A perdu de son charme

Or

Without Latin the Presbytery HAS lost its charm.

My thoughts exactly M. Brassens.