I try to focus on God all day long. I have no division in my life, between secular and sacred, because in my life everything is Sacred, or serves a purpose to unite me with the Sacred, or it’s out.
I understand that certain songs don’t fit in the MASS - example, Aaron Shust’s My Savior My God. But others do, and I don’t understand why one type of music is considered less Sacred than another - isn’t the MASS primarily about worshipping God through moving our hearts, our souls, our wills into communion with God?
and if some types of music help some types of person to achieve this state of communion better - to order their passions towards the Eucharist along with their wills - then who are we to deny them?
If “everything is sacred” then most likely nothing is sacred because sacred things are set apart to be used for God. Now, it
is possible that one could live a life largely in the realm of the sacred, but even monks don’t do it entirely. If there is no profane from which to distinguish the sacred, you might be over-sacralizing your dinner plates or your time in the bathroom.
I thought that was important because if all genres are sacred then none of them are. If a genre is ubiquitous and used in a large variety of settings, it seems rather unlikely that it has been dedicated solely to divine worship.
Lastly, the Mass is primarily about re-presenting the sacrifice of Christ to the Father. The music enables us to enter into this more deeply, but if it
begins with the passions it will most likely be shallow. Cdl. Ratzinger described sacred music as creating a sort of “sober inebriation” in order to distinguish it from music that plays primarily upon the passions. Passions are certainly not excluded from worship, but worship begins with the mind and will, by the very nature of human action.
Failing the purchase of competently written plain chant or more modern styles of music for liturgical use, the Vatican and the local churches will have to make do with the less well written works we have in the song books.
Certainly we should continue to foster the arts, but did I miss the Stalinist purge in which every worthwhile piece of sacred music from the last two millenia was purged from the face of the earth? There exists plenty of good music, so while we’re waiting on new pieces we have lots of material to get us by.
As a general comment, Delphinus85 expressed a concern with having something for everyone, which I think bears closer examination. As other posters have already explained, the Church herself holds up chant as
the gold standard by which all other sacred music must be judged, and then after that seems to hold out sacred polyphony as the next best thing. So the permission to use other music should always be read against the backdrop that this music is deemed better the more closely it approximates the gold standard.
But since other music
is allowed, what are we to do with it? I would submit that we should understand it as a matter of accomodation to weakness - we know the Church deems it less worthy of the liturgy the more it departs from chant, so if we’re going to use different genres we should be honest and acknowledge that a) the music is not as fitting but b) we think circumstances warrant using sub-par music for a time in order to achieve growth for more people. Now, at that point you would have to do some fancy footwork to convince me that giving people lower quality goods actually will help bring them along, but I can at least accept the general metaphor of milk and meat given us by St. Paul. Saying all the genres are equally appropriate, on the other hand, flatly contradicts what the Church has taught throughout the centuries, including at Vatican II.
