I know some evangelicals who could benefit from following the pope in this.

Just as we believe in the power of fine music to enrich and ennoble, so we must admit the potential of the coarse to degrade and debase.

Let the uncshooled corrupt their spirits with savage music and straighaway they will begin to wear their baseball caps sidewise.

Peter, I think you're leaving out the mustachioed nun part of the demographic as well.

Liturgy is an act, as in drama and activity! The people leading the service and the people in the pews are indeed actors in a spectacle (the Pope's word, though I'd use drama). God is the audience and the one for whom worship is being acted out. Now, having said that, I'll agree with B-XVI that it is important that people of faith not lose sight of what worship is and who it's being directed toward. I've been to some flashy worship services where the leaders and people in attendance appeared to have forgotten.

There is some really phenomenal choral music from Bulgaria (though it's a women's choir, so one would hope that might be acceptable to His Holiness).

Really wild stuff that gets your head buzzing....
(I.e., if you're into overtones, then this is it!)

(Or, perhaps there's a bit of room here for compromise---Switched On Bach, for example? or Nirvana unplugged....Of course, I've been waiting for years now for Madonna to come out with her own version of Liturgica.)

I understand that jeans are banned as well, but plaid pants are encouraged.

It's about time! The pope should not worry about alienating people. He must do what is right! I hope the American priests actually listen to what he says. Guitars should not be played during Mass. Choirs should go back to the lofts, so Jesus can be the foucs instead of the "entertainment". Also, people should not be jabbering before and after Mass. They can talk outside.

Lou:

Don't forget the baggy, saggy shorts (for the, ahem, boys) and the low-rider jeans (for the, ahem, girls). They are probably more indicative of your point than the baseball caps.

In my childhood, there were few horrors more horrible than the 11:00 Folk Mass. Fifteen vocalists, two acoustic guitars, and a tamborine, and a catalog of hippy-dippy "social justice" songs.

Give me a 16th-century Latin High Mass over that any day.

It is a pity that this Pope doesn't like America more. An American Church righted by a strong new Inquisition could do wonders in the service of the worldwide church. One watches the feckless world church bowing to the Chicoms, passively letting its own European backyard go secular, siding with the milktoast regimes of France and Germany again and again, and one realizes that the American church has been left entirely on its own...to sort of self-eviscerate upon the tines of its bishops' liberal seminary educations.

I submit that Poland, as important as it was as a beachhead for freedom in the Cold War, was still less important for Catholicism than taking the American church and shaking it till all the modernist pedophiles and secularists ran for the hills and returning to a distinctly Catholic way of life that held meaning and purpose for those parishoners who remained.

Right now, in Metro Detroit, there are probably as many Catholics who are pro-choice as pro-life, more young adult Catholics who consider living with their girlfriends to be a valid "dry run" for marriage, and who see Sunday Mass was a histrionic interference with enjoying their weekend. Aside from paid speakers and deacons, I have never been evengelized by Catholic laypersons. I think the Bishops would consider active evangelizing an embarrassment to their money-raising fiefdoms.