Yes, it undoubtedly, undoubtedly is. No, he did not go too far.
Do not fear to be thought overstrict; do not fear to be reproached as extreme; do not fear to be in a minority. - Cardinal Manning
This short article ought to help. I wasn't brought up with either (occasional filmed dramas via video as a treat), I've never listened to pop or rock music and I don't watch television at all now, so I can't give you any real personal experience. I have fudged together a short reply from my old posts for you on modern culture generally.
Rock and Roll - A Deadly Revolution by Bishop Richard N. Williamson. http://www.cathinfo.com/catholic.php?a=topic&t=13436&min=0&num=1'When I returned to England in 1965 after two years in Africa, and, school-mastering in London, found the school-boys, like their country, ravaged by, notably, four unworthy mop-heads known as the Beatles'
- Bishop Richard N. WilliamsonPopular music is thoroughly evil, lock, stock and barrel. I am always mildly surprised that people don't realise it. A brief study of the 1960s will quite easily confirm my assertion - that, in short, it is devilish. The tremendous collapse in morals since then is substantially due to this awful racket, with its crude rhythms (the jungle drums, anyone?) which inflame base passions; and its obscene lyrics.
It's a point I have been accused of intrasingence on but I maintain I am right - that all popular music is flatly evil. It is perversion, deliberate perversion. That it is so accepted - almost universally accepted - amongst all classes is always a matter for grave concern and dread. A great many traditionalists seem to see no harm in such evil 'music'. .
Of course, the good Bishop is scathing (and rightly so) of modern innovation in classical music (who was the Russian chap with the discordant racket? Skavinsky?), modern 'art' (which is wicked in itself to my mind). It makes perfect sense that the effluvia of modern society, which is so very evil and almost certainly deliberately so is itself evil - the Beatles, rock and roll, jazz and so on lead or greatly helped the appalling sɛҳuąƖ license today. Modern fashions, any traditionalist woman could tell you, are deliberately shameful and immodest. The Archbishop said we must 'resist them to their face' - resist it all, the Council, the New Mass, New Theology and I would say by practical extension 'New Music', 'New Art' and 'New Society'.
It's practically impossible not to come into some contact with the 'modern world' but at least we can react against, let us say, rock and popular music by refusing to listen to it, popular culture (and the undeniably corrupt Hollywood) by refusing to allow a television across our door-steps, the decline in manners by maintaining the old courtesies, bad modern books by reading good old ones, slovenly modern dress by dressing like men, effeminacy by behaving like men, the prevailing atheist humanism and liberalism by sending our sons and daughters to really Catholic schools and remembering (to borrow a revolting phrase) that to be a traditionalist Catholic is 'counter-cutural', it runs headlong to the massed scholarship and opinion of the age, yet we know it to be right. Nothing is more contemptible than a rallié.
Topic: Is it bad to listen to Rock music? Or watch cinema. (Read 941 times)