Actually, Tradition takes a whole lot of items under its huge umbrella. The faithful of Thessalonica didn’t get the Holy Sacrifice through osmosis. St. Paul introduced the Church’s form of worship to them. Such worship, no doubt, also included music. Surely instructions were given to the faithful to carry on with the liturgy even after St. Paul’s departure. The Holy Sacrifice is part and parcel of the Apostolic Tradition.
You are correct in that St. Paul introduced our traditions to the faithful of Thessalonica, however, using 2nd Thess. to bolster any assertion about the liturgy is not applicable since 2nd Thess. is talking about a totally different subject.
The fact that the Holy Father noted (even when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) that there are serious deficiencies in music is important enough to not be dismissed as mere personal opinion. He has stated quite clearly that one song is not as good as
another as far as the liturgy is concerned.
However, he has never stated which songs are better and which ones are worse.
Remember, the same hand that penned Sacramentum Caritatis also wrote “The Spirit of the Liturgy” and “A New Song for the Lord.”
Pope St. Pius X had to contend with theatrical and operatic stuff that had no business in the Mass. Pope Paul VI already suspected that the music flowing out as a result of the Second Vatican Council wasn’t a joyful noise at all. If not, why would he have said that not all is fit to cross the threshold as far as liturgical music was concerned? Pope John Paul II, the father of WYD, echoed those sentiments when he wrote his Chirograph on Sacred Music. Pope John Paul II was not all hearts, flowers and love. He had some pretty strong things to say about the decline in the quality of music and in liturgical abuses.
None of these pontiffs have restricted either a specific genre(s) or specific song(s).
Finally, I respectfully submit that you have missed the entire point of the liturgical norms dictated by God throughout significant parts of the Pentatuch. The Lord dictated just how He was to be worshipped going down to the smallest detail. The animal sacrifices and holocausts prefigure the perfect sacrifice of Our Lord, the new covenant, if you will.
I respectfully submit that you have missed the entire point that God did not dictate how He was to be worshipped in the New Covenant. He left that up to the leaders of HMC, who, over the centuries, introduced many changes from the original Seder meal at which Jesus actually instituted the Eucharist, combining them with elements of Temple worship.
If you notice, much of what the Church, the New Israel, does in her sacrificial worship of the Triune God, mirrors what ancient Israel did. We have a priest who wears vestments who offers a sacrificial victim on the altar (albeit in an unbloody manner, but He is offered, just the same). There are prayers and the sacrifice is consumed by both priest and faithful. Incense is used, as are sacred vessels made of the finest material. Hymns are sung. The Gospel accounts indicate that after the Last Supper, Jesus and the Apostles sang a hymn on their way to Gethsemane. They were chanting the psalms.
**Our worship today also mirrors what ancient Israel did. However, we do not use the same musical settings of the psalms which Jesus and the apostles sung as these have been lost to time. They certainly weren’t chanting in Gregorian chant.
Other than the knowledge of what a Seder meal consists of, and how Jews worshipped in the Temple, the rest of the New Testament is almost silent on the format of worship in the early Church. (Here, of course, I’m speaking only of that which is in the Bible, not in any early Church documents.)
The only references outside of the institution narratives in the Gospels are:
Acts 2:42 – They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.
The only decision I could come up with was that whomever had planned the music could not have prayed about it.
Don’t cringe, everyone! Protestant groups like 2nd Chapter of Acts did albums of old hymns in contemporary settings, and there have been several releases of “Young Messiah” with rock band and singers! So it CAN be done, and I predict that it WILL be done! And I’ll buy the CD (or download it from I-Tunes–I think that’s the way all the young people buy music nowadays.)