Paul Inwood Fan Club

I am thinking of forming the Paul Inwood Fan Club, and would be keen to hear from any potential members.

After all, how can one not admire a man who:

• Has given1 us the Gathering Mass;
• Has helped us to understand (with great frequency) that the EF is still prohibited really, except in a very small number of exceptional cases2;  
• Has written so perceptively about James Macmillan, explaining the correct way to view him and his work.3
• Has one of the most self-deprecating websites it has ever been my pleasure to read;
• Has courageously protested against hordes of wicked priests changing their principal Masses to be EF 4.

Here is my thinking on the costs and benefits of membership:

Membership will be by application to me, at a modest cost of 1 Liber Usualis and one copy of the Parish Book of Chant for lifetime membership. The Graduale Triplex will get you Gold Membership.

Members undertake to pray daily for the restoration of the Liturgy, and for Paul himself.

Membership benefits are the right to proclaim oneself a member, and ...  (err, and that's it).

Sounds too good to refuse, doesn't it.  

1 Let nobody be churlish enough to claim that Inwood and friends have a clique with a stranglehold over church music publishing in this country, and by no means give their work away: the labourer is surely worthy of his hire.

2 cf for example, his clarification that ‘The provision is there for members of a parish to petition their pastor for Masses in the extraordinary form if they have previously been used to having it, and feel that their spirituality is lacking without it. It is not a blanket permission,' an interpretation of the situation which one could certainly not arrive at without his expertise to guide us. Poor old Joe Shaw has clearly completely missed the point, by his attending to what Summorum Pontificum and associated documents actually say.

3 For example: Of course MacMillan is a well-respected and talented art composer, like many others writing today. But that doesn’t mean that you’re any good at writing music for a postconciliar liturgy, particularly when your experience of liturgy is limited to your own small ordinary Scottish parish and Westminster Cathedral, which of course is not small and ordinary at all, and when your interaction with other composers working in the field of Roman Catholic liturgy is minimal. (In the US and Europe there have for 40 years been groups of liturgical music composers who support and critique and educate each other.  A lot of formation has taken place as as result. I’m not aware that MacMillan is a member of any such group.)

4 It seems that this did not actually happen, but he was quick to protest, anyway.

H/T variously LMS Chairman, Damian Thompson, the satirical blog: Pray, Tell, and of course, the man himself!