Author: Dorothy McLean
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The Lord loved Andrew
For many years—over a century—the simple baldachin over the altar at St. Andrew’s Ravelston in Edinburgh bore the text “Dixit Andream Dominus in ordorem suavitatis.” I worked out that this meant “The Lord loved Andrew as an odour of sweetness”, and here it is in my 1958 Missal as the Alleluia verse for the Feast…
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Rules for Counter-Revolutionaries
Rules. Today we flinch at the word, assuming that rules limit our freedom in an onerous way. However, when we see a game that interests us, we want to know the rules before we join in. We know the rules help make the activity what it is, and knowing them puts us at our ease…
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Culture and connection
I have been reading about an interesting phenomenon: Generation Z’s feelings of nostalgia for times they don’t remember: the 1980s, the 1990s and the year 2000. They are buying flip phones and uttering blasphemies against wokery. It looks as if all that Gen X preening on Facebook—how as children we rode our bicycles around from…
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Burning floors
Dancing was so much a part of Catholic social life in the 20th century West, and forbidding dancing so much associated with Anabaptist sects, that it came as a surprise to me to discover that there had existed, throughout the history of the Church, a number of Catholic pastors who objected to the practice. It…
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Welcome, FIUV!
Hello to all readers of Gregorius Magnus magazine who have followed the link to the Mrs McLean Waltzing Party website! I hope to make the comments feature easier to access soon, but in the meantime I’ll be delighted to read your emails. One of the reasons for publishing this blog is to encourage you to…
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Dancing for Anders’ Army
As I’ve mentioned before, my principal hobby is not dancing but learning Polish. Last week I discussed with my Polish tutor the differences between celebrations of November 11 in the United Kingdom and in Poland. In the United Kingdom, as in Canada, it is Remembrance Day and melancholy. In Poland it is Dzień Niepodległości, i.e.…
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A short digression about fruitcake
The most traditional Christmas pudding in Scotland is, of course, the clootie dumpling, which is boiled in a cloth (the cloot). There there is its English cousin, the Christmas pudding, which is steamed. And then there are Dundee Cake and Black Bun. But there is also a dark cake stuffed with a large variety of…
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Nearly Irish in nature
For the first 60 years or so of the 20th century, parish hall dances were a staple of Catholic social life in Canada and the USA. They could be nightly affairs in Ireland, where the parish hall was the most common type of community building (after the church) and dancing a highly popular social and…
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The Ballroom Competition
For Sunday I planned something very new for MMWP: a trip to the Edinburgh University Ballroom Dance Society’s Inter-College Dance Competition (Waltz and Cha-Cha). It was one of my more daring suggestions, for all but one of our members have eschewed the EUBDS, which adheres to the mores of the Revolution: men can be follows,…
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Totally waisted
One of the sad things about popular dancing in the West is that the “fast dances” gave way to partnerless flailing and ballroom became “slow dancing.” “Slow dancing”, when I was a teenager, was a kind of two-step performed in a loose hug. Girls put their hands on the boys’ shoulders and the boys put…