Rev dear Rev: I was visiting a parish near the shrine of Walsingham not long ago and attended a Saturday mass at which the priest celebrant wore blue vestments, is this a normal use of such a colour on church vestments in these times or was it entirely reduced to the locality around Walsingham - colour is nice, but blue?

Some years ago the McDonalds Corporation carried out some pretty extensive research all across California on the subject of which colours people found most appetising to eat around, blue came low down, but yellow and red and orange feature high up the scale. Hence the colour scheme for a long while in those restaurants, right up to recently - blue a no no, orange a yes yes. But when 60s or 70s or 80s visitors pop into catholic churches and spot blue vestments especially for the Saturday Memoria of Our Lady in Ordinary Time sometimes they find their way to the sacristy door and make a comment, but it is not to worry, there was a much broader range of colours to vestments in the past, and it is only in the 60s to 90s that liturgical wallahs of a certain vintage became all Jansenist and Purist about the four principle colours of modern times following the Sorgente schema below:

Purple

White

Green

Red

-----

Gold

Black

Blue

Silver

So after 1969, the colours of the top part of the table above were to be regarded as acceptable in the modern Sorgente era of modern semi-gothic vestments, where the colours of the bottom half of the table were now to be regarded as not so "liturgical" or "pure" in their association with the colours of an early toga-less Church. A sort of new "Cold Catholicism” began to find inroads into parishes after this date of 1969. It was almost as if the people concerned wanted their clergy to wear black and white ruffs on their uniform, just like the awful puritans. Also by the board went other colours and paintings and frescoes in the chapels and churches as stark black and white or total magnolia churches took hold. As a famous Dominican SCv agent from the Vatikan, Fr Fox, once said about the modern strictures of an ICEL Scottish priest - "That guy from purist Scotland actually said to me that it might be nicer just to have the frescoes of Michelangelo whitewashed over with a nice shade of magnolia!" He was utterly scandalised by the extremes to which Sorgente magnolia clergy would go to, just to have their ideal world of stark simplicity. Anything goes in SNP-ICEL Scotland evidently, he said.   

Incidentally, when the Conquistador monks first arrived in a very colourful Aztec empire they noted that the Aztecs had invented a totally distinct and new colour like tourquoise with which to festoon their worship celebrations. Like the purist conquistador chaplains, a new wave of liturgical commentators tried to impose a very strict codification of acceptable colours on many parishes for a long time between the 60s and the 90s, but it did not work - soon tradition and custom and also sheer open-mindedness and open heart piety pushed ahead with the recovery of the other colours alongside the officially pure colours of the new post-conciliar liturgical movements a many.