Liturgical Stooges, by Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, May 30, 2025

Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture, and the Christian life, whose most recent work is In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, Word and Song, devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College.

The project of “modernizing” ancient hymns turned into a search for rhyming words, at the cost of original meaning.

Along time ago, we hired a team of carpenters and plumbers to renovate a bathroom. Moe, Larry, and Curly were not masters of their craft. I should have fired them as soon as I saw what they had done to one of the doorways, removing the support for one of the uprights and turning what had been a rectangle into a quadrilateral in three dimensions, with no two angles alike. But I thought, “Maybe they’re better at plumbing.” Then one of them forgot that the toilet hadn’t been sealed when he turned on the valve and flushed, ruining the ceiling in the room below. And I still thought, “At least they can set up the shower, and I can repair the rest.” But no, they didn’t do that right, either. Then they disappeared before the job was done, taking my money with them.

The lesson is simple. Anyone content to turn a doorway into a buckling, three-dimensional quadrilateral cannot be trusted with anything else in the line of construction—and perhaps cannot be trusted at all. …