Guitar antihero ... Pope Benedict XVI. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte
Since his election to the Vatican heights last summer, it was always fairly clear that Benedict XVI was going to be a conservative sort of Pope. With his remote manner, scholarly theology, and early war on the "dictatorship of relativism", no one was surprised when the pontifical press releases began to sound a little as if the populist concessions of the Second Vatican Council were all a terrible mistake.
But the holy father is beginning to sound as if the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, the Catholic response to the Protestant reformation, was all a touch too radical as well. Unplug the guitars, the patriarch has said, and let's get back to plainchant and polyphony, effectively undermining the counter-reformation's intention that church music be made more user-friendly.
And for once, the Pope's relentless anti-populism may prove popular, at least with the chattering classes, for there are few spectacles more unseemly than the kumbyah brigade's sickly strumming.
The occasion of a concert in the Sistine chapel was chosen by the Pope to speak out. "It is possible to modernise holy music," he conceded, "but it should not happen outside the traditional path of Gregorian chants or sacred polyphonic choral music".
So the appeal doesn't just seem to require the dusting off of hymnals, but rather seeks a restoration of the chantry in its place. After all, why turn the clock back a mere 50 years when you can go for a round 500?
And since his concerns could prove hard to enforce, maybe the Holy Father should help himself to another aspect of the church's discarded heritage, the Inquisition. What better way of clamping down on sacred cacophony than deploying battalions of Paul Bettany look-a-likes to spring unsuspected on the throngs of happy clappers?
The response of the Cardinals so far seems to be mixed. Cardinal Carlo Furno is reported as saying that "it is better to have guitars on the altar and rock'n'roll masses than empty churches", while his colleague the Archbishop of Ravenna, Cardinal Ersilio Tonini has supported the Pope by arguing that "music adds so much more when the harmony allows the mind to transcend the concrete to the divine".
Catholics in Britain, where all the old churches belong to the Anglicans, are of course used to having to transcend the concrete out of which most of their own places of worship are built. But what kind of music do you think churchgoers should be playing?
