At the end of the movie Amadeus, Mozart is shown on his deathbed, frantically trying to complete his Requiem Mass, a work that may be more beloved around the world than ever before, three centuries later.

"Requiem" means "may they rest," as an ancient prayer to whatever divinity our ancestors believed in, hoping and praying that the newly dead would rest in peace, as a heavenly reward for their virtues in life and as a petition for forgiveness for their sins in this life.

And also as a nice way to say, "Good to see you again, now go away, and stop haunting us."

Mozart was a devout and lifelong Catholic, which is something the movie script writers forgot to tell you, but if you like the most towering works of beauty in history, you can probably figure it out yourself.

I'm not a religious person, but I had the luck to sing Mozart's Requiem Mass in a community chorus, and I suppose I fell in love with it.  The Western choral tradition is unbelievably wonderful, which is why Japan has its own dedicated choral society just to sing the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth.  If you hadn't noticed, "Western culture" is now global, not because other cultures have been coerced into adopting what the left calls "imperialism," but because humans can't be stopped from loving what they love.  European music of the last five centuries is loved all over the web, and it's a willing love and admiration, not a Politburo command.

So now I read that the current pope, who calls himself Francis, is dead set on dumping the Latin Mass.

Well, who cares?

I'm not religious.

But I'm outraged by this pope's disregard of Mozart, Beethoven, and Rachmaninoff, to name only a few.

I don't know why I take this personally, but I do.

In the last century, it was the atheist totalitarians who massacred the priests and the devout laity by the millions, Jews, Christians, and Muslims (as in China today).  But weirdly enough, in Soviet-era Moscow, the Ministry of Culture kept running fabulous performances of sacred works that even the most malignant ideologues had to admire.  They were called "uncultured" if they didn't come to see the heights of Russian and European culture — which is maybe 90 percent religious in inspiration.

It's tough, but it's true.  The communist elites in Moscow lived a double-life (as Russians have always done), the life of politically correct obedience, and the secret life of the heart — like many Catholics do today.

I don't have a vote in the Catholic world, but I secretly believe that Pope Francis is the Joe Biden of the Church.

My total guess as an outsider is that Francis has two big problems with the Latin Mass.

One is that the Mass is in Latin, which people love without knowing why, just as devout Jews love biblical Hebrew and Muslims love classical Arabic.

The second problem from the pope's point of view is that the Mass is a worship ceremony with very ancient roots, going back to the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament, but before that to even more ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian beliefs, which had even older roots in human cultures emerging, not just 6,000 years ago, but hundreds of thousands of years, as we can tell from sacred gravesites from the early Stone Age onward.

So — Pope Francis is trying to erase and "modernize" human nature, as if he has learned nothing from a century of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all the idealistic destroyers who ended up being buried themselves, while their ancient traditions sprang back to life, like prairie grass after a rainstorm.

We buried Khrushchev, and not the other way around.  Pope Francis apparently did not notice that, but we can.

So I'm placing my bets on Mozart and his endless creativity, which he believed to be a gift from God.  Almost every great composer in Western history composed some final work as a last personal gift, but also as a last prayer for redemption.

Take that, Pope Francis.

Photo credit: Christoph Wagener, CC BY-SA 3.0 license.