Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis

Requiem masses are customarily sung beautifully but unintelligibly in Latin, from a text promulgated by Pope Pius V in 1570. It begins and ends unobjectionably, asking rest eternal for the dead where God's light shines on them perpetually (an odd image for the literal-minded). In 1985, Vonnegut and wife Jill Krementz attend the world premier of a new setting by Andrew Lloyd Webber (of Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Cats fame) in St. Thomas Church before a black-tie Protestant and Jewish audience. Vonnegut's eye is drawn to the English translation, and he wonders at the performers' blithe ignorance of God's intending a Paradise indistinguishable from the Spanish Inquisition. "Get a lawyer," says the sadistic, masochistic mass.

Vonnegut writes a better mass, is turned down trying to get it translated into Latin at Fordham, gets John F. Collins to do it and on jury...