Wow. Brilliantly worded. Very sad that you and your fiancee must have such a hard time being fed by the Liturgies at your parish. How DO you keep from jumping off the pew and screaming 'STOP for GOD’s sake!!!"
We are not ultimately fed by the liturgy. We are fed by the very Body and Blood of Our Lord. I cannot speak for my fiancee in this regard, but often I tolerate the awful music at Mass and concentrate on the sacred mysteries. These days I don’t usually bother picking up the hymnal, and if the music group deviates from the authorised translations I quietly say the Latin. After all, active participation is in the first instance interior, mind and heart engaged in contemplation of the sacred mysteries.
And, may I ask, what do you do for your parish? In other words, if your parish gives any comfort whatsoever to your spirit, how do you return the gift?
Are we confusing active participation with “doing things”?
In any case, considering the sarcastic manner of much of your post, I don’t consider it to be any of your business what I “do” in my parish, as if somehow by “doing things” one can become a better parishoner, or that in order to have a valid opinion you need to “do things”. All you need to know is that I involve myself in the life of the parish and of the wider Church. Why would you wish to assume otherwise?
Will you start some crusade to ‘undo’ all the torment caused you by the likes of Marty Haugen and Bernadette Ferrell and Bob Hurd? Those awful composers of horrible Catholic Music!
Torment caused to me? No. This isn’t about me, or how I feel; the liturgy is no-one’s private property, as I remember John Paul II saying years ago. Damage done to the liturgy, however? Certainly.
How I feel about things has no bearing on anything; what the Church asks us to do, and what her standards for music in the Mass are, however, has all the bearing in the world. As I said before, whether we like it or not, the Church has standards for the music to be used in the liturgy. Chant meets those standards, and the Church has been quite clear and still is quite clear that chant is the
ideal; moreover, the further away liturgical music is from the ideal of chant, the less worthy it is for use at the Mass:
"These qualities are to be found, in the
highest degree, in Gregorian Chant, which is, consequently
the Chant proper to the Roman Church, the only chant she has inherited from the ancient fathers, which she has
jealously guarded for centuries in her liturgical codices, which she directly proposes to the faithful as her own, which she prescribes exclusively for some parts of the liturgy [or did at the beginning of the 20th century, anyway], and which the most recent studies have so happily restored to their integrity and purity.
“On these grounds Gregorian Chant has always been regarded as
the supreme model for sacred music, so that it is fully legitimate to lay down the following rule:
the more closely a composition for church approaches in its movement, inspiration and savour the Gregorian form, the more sacred and liturgical it becomes; and
the more out of harmony it is with that supreme model, the less worthy it is of the temple.” (St. Pius X,
Tra le Sollecitudini, para. 3, my emphasis and comment)
Your sarcasm does not substitute for serious debate on this issue: the writings of various Popes and the Second Vatican Council demonstrate that much of the music written after the Council in the 1970s and beyond is unsuitable for liturgical use. It is my further contention that this unsuitable music has damaged parish life and faith, but that would take a bit more elaborating.
When the first churches were started by Paul and the Apostles back in the day what do you suppose they used for music until Pope Gregory came along in 600 A.D. or so?
The Psalms. I suggest you read up on the history of liturgy, and the use of the psalms in Jewish liturgy; that way you may avoid looking decidedly foolish in your future use of sarcasm.
If the church had some form of liturgical music for the first 500 years did Pope Gegory help it to evolve into something more meaningful when he suggested his chants? So here we are; 1400 years since Pope Gregory started to chant the Psalms. I would love to know if there was someone sitting in a church in Ephesis around 590 A.D. grunting and squirming and wispering to his wife “I must undo this infernal chanting business!”
Considering that Gregorian chant was an organic development of earlier Church music, probably not.
The Church could have taken on the pagan musical custom of the Romans and Greeks and surrounding cultures. It did not–what it did was organically develop the existing Jewish liturgical chanting and recitation of the psalms, and took
that up into its liturgy. Why on earth we suddenly felt the need to (inorganically) take up the pagan musical customs of late 20th century culture is beyond me.
And if we did it well, I perhaps wouldn’t have so much of a problem with it taste-wise. But the folk and guitar-led drivel (among other drivel) really *is *drivel. There’s no escaping that. (Drag people in off the street and take a straw poll if you like!) If I want to listen to soft rock or folk music, I’ll go to the pub down the road for a drink and open-mic night. If I want wishy-washy, feelings-led lyrics, I can go out and buy pretty much any single in the top 40 of the pop charts. If I want really bad paraphrases of the psalms and ancient hymns of the Church, I’d go to the evangelical Anglican community down the road.
I’m not arguing for the use of what I prefer in the liturgy. The fact I happen to like chant is immaterial. I also like heavy metal and ambient electronica. What I am arguing for is a proper implementation of the Church’s guidelines and standards for liturgical music, and (seemingly) not a lot of what passes for music in Mass meets these standards or is congruent with the guidelines. As we start to come back to the chant and polyphony that served generations of faithful Catholics before us so well, we will start to recover a sense of mystery in the liturgy that we seem to have lost in the last 40 years or so. *
Lex orandi, lex credendi*.
I suppose if this Church that I love so much; that feeds my drooping spirit; continues to evolve I will ride it out to the very end, being fed along the way by my personal relationship with the Christ Who only asks one thing of me; 'BELIEVE IN ME AND YOU WILL HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE."
Christ asks a number of other things of us as well. We’ve nothing to do with the reformation cry of
sola fide in the Church.
