A long 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.
Apply the lesson to Worship, the fourth edition. I choose it because it is handy, but what I say about it is true of all the other common and overpriced Catholic hymnals whose editors take it upon themselves to mangle hymns written before 1960.
I’m not Michelangelo. I don’t presume to improve the Sistine ceiling by whitewashing what I don’t like, or inserting smiley faces into the Last Judgment, or replacing the lion of St. Mark with a purple dinosaur. But I don’t have to be Michelangelo to leave excellent things alone. I just have to be modest and not stupid. Anyone who does the stupid vandalizing cannot be trusted in anything else.
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