Ingram's December 2022

B E T W E E N T H E L I N E S

Pointed Perspectives & Penetrating Punditry | by Jack Cashill

God Works in Strange and Mysterious Ways

In matters of faith, the past is always with us.

congregation, he sings it more slowly and dramatically than without a con gregation. Since we used the sound only from the first shoot, we had to recalibrate all the close-ups to make sure the lips synced. The bottom line was I spent a lot more time and money editing than I anticipated. On the plus side, more people at the production facility were drawn to the haunting Gregorian music coming out of our suite. They would stop by, watch, and linger, mes merized. More than a few asked why the Catholic Church would abandon such a moving and sacred ceremony. Even Fr. DeMentque did not have a good answer to that one. Pleased with the

The most tangible blessing of growing up Catholic was getting off from school the day after Halloween. Hung over from our candy bacchanal, we treasured Nov. 1, All Saints Day, even if we did have to go to Mass. Although it was entirely un-Christian of us to do so, we rubbed our freedom in the faces of our public school peers. Na-na-na-na-nah! Cut to 1997. I was doing a weekly feature for KSHB-TV in Kansas City. Each Wednesday, I would be assigned a one-man crew, and we would go shoot some footage to back up my three-minute commentary for the week. In 1997, Halloween fell on a Tuesday. Needing a feature for Wednesday, I recalled that there had been a revival of the Latin Mass, which had been all but banned since Vatican II. “Lapsed” though I was, I still thought that it might be worth a commentary. Provident ia l ly that year, Al l Saints Day fel l on a

Wednesday. Being a Holy Day of obliga tion, there would be a Mass to record and congregants to interview. I visited with the priest in charge, Father Edouard DeMentque, newly arrived from France and wooed him with my half-assed French. All went well during the shoot, and the feature aired on the evening news. That very evening, providentially once again, I found myself seated next to the very same Fr. DeMentque at a Protestant run pro-life dinner. We bonded over our vain search for the wine steward.

final product, the Pr ies t l y Fra t er- nity commissioned us to go to Rome in October of 1998 to shoot the ceremony surrounding the 10th anniversary of the reauthorization of the Latin Mass. Mike and the crew f lew out the day before I did. In this last moment before cellphones, we were to meet at the Vatican at

In 1998, I had the opportunity to inter- view a German cardinal name of Ratzinger. Fast forward to 2005 and white smoke over the Vatican. “Hey,” I said. “I know that guy!”

Over dinner, we got to talking. I sug- gested that if his order, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, ever held a con- fab in Kansas City, they might want to do a high-end video of a Solemn High Latin Mass. Sure enough, a few months later, the order did meet in Kansas City. Working with my long-time partner, Michael Wunsch of Outpost Worldwide, we did a four-camera shoot of two masses, the first mass with a congregation and Gregorian choir, the second a “dry mass” with no congregation and all four cameras on the altar for close-ups. When we started editing, I ran my 95 percent rule by Fr. DeMentque: make the video 95 percent as good as it could possibly be made as quickly as it could be made that good. No one, I explained, will notice the other 5 percent, and time is money. Fr. DeMentque offered his rule, the 100 percent rule. We compromised—on 100 percent. Editing proved much harder than I thought. It turns out that when a priest sings, say, “ Dominus vobiscum ” before a

noon the next day with a fallback time at 2 p.m. My flights hit one snag after another, and I arrived at Rome airport’s car rental facility at 1:15. “How long it would take to get to the Vatican?” I asked. Said the clerk, “45 minutes—if there’s no traffic.” Rome, no traffic—right! I sped out of there. The ring road and the ar ter ia l were sur- prisingly modern, and I was mak- ing good t ime unt i l the ar teria l ended, and I was dumped into the middle of a Fellini movie—a wild traf f ic circle with spokes leading

Jack Cashill Ingram’s Senior Editor P | 816.842.9994 E | Editorial @ Ingrams.com

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Kansas City’s Business Media

December 2022