Aging & Wisdom Quote by Richard Morris

There’s a sneer packed into Morris’s syntax: “All you hear” isn’t reportage, it’s a complaint dressed up as common sense. The line stages Catholicism as an institution without an authentic voice, reduced to imitation and trend-chasing. “Turning out” is the tell. It’s industrial language, implying mass production, cheapness, and a kind of cultural counterfeiting. Catholics aren’t singing; they’re manufacturing.

Calling them “pop versions” does double work. It flatters Protestant hymnody as the original, serious canon while portraying Catholic adaptations as diluted, vulgar, and designed to sell. “Pop” here isn’t merely “popular”; it’s a moral category. Morris is leaning on a 19th-century anxiety that mass culture - simplified, catchy, market-facing - corrodes doctrinal depth and discipline. The insult lands because it ties aesthetics to authority: if your music is derivative, your theology must be, too.

Context sharpens the edge. Victorian Britain saw aggressive Protestant self-confidence alongside Catholic revival and visibility (post-Emancipation), plus an expanding print and music marketplace that made hymns portable and easily repurposed. Inter-denominational borrowing was real; so was the fear that borrowing meant losing boundaries. Morris is policing those boundaries by making Catholic practice sound like cover songs: familiar tunes, suspicious motives.

The subtext is less about music than ownership. Whoever controls the anthem controls the story of the nation’s faith, and Morris wants Protestants cast as authors, Catholics as latecomers with a knack for packaging.