It’s Time We Stop Singing About Ourselves at Mass
What makes for a “suitable hymn”? How should we gauge “good” and “bad” hymns? I would suggest using a very simple litmus test by asking this question: “Whom are we singing to?”
Sometimes We Should Not Try to “Fix” the Local Parish
Once children are part of our lives, we need to think more carefully about the liturgy we attend week in, week out.
How to Save the Music at Mass
We all know that the music at the typical Catholic Mass is often cheesy and inappropriate. But what can we do about it?
The Loss of the Sacred
The grasping attempt to be “exciting” or “cool” seen at World Youth Day is but a symptom of disease of the “unsacred” nature of modern life.
The Excellence of the Mass
I found the many comments on my recent essay “What Is Sacred Music?” extremely interesting, and am grateful to the commenters who contributed such divers points of view on what for all Catholics is a vital subject. Unfortunately, among those I found most striking is exactly the one I’m now unable to find. Among the … Read more
What Is Sacred Music?
I have sung regularly every Sunday at Mass for nearly thirty years now, two years more than I’ve lived as a baptized and confirmed Catholic. As I’m not much use serving on councils or committees (although I did teach CCD for several years after being received into the Church), I decided at the start of … Read more
First Reactions of Teenage Boys to the Traditional Latin Mass
The first Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum of Pope Benedict XVI was promulgated when I was a friar in religious formation. As young friars, we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity the pope was extending to experience the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), and we quickly fell in love with everything about it. Learning and celebrating … Read more
Keep Sacred Music Sacred
Like a voice calling out from the wilderness, there are times when some of the strongest and wisest words from a bishop arise not out of the cultural centers of the world, like Rome or New York, but rather from unexpected places. This should not really be a surprise, as bishops designated for the major … Read more
Poetic Traditional Hymns Put Alternatives to Shame
I often hear that since most of what is produced in any age is garbage, the quality of the hymns in a compilation such as the Hymnal 1940 is partly an illusion, because the earlier bad stuff would have been tossed aside. This observation is by way of excusing the bulk of church songs composed since 1965; time … Read more
Why Traditional Hymns are Superior to Modern Ones
I’m sometimes accused, when I write about bad hymns, of wanting to impose a single style upon everyone. I find this strange. It’s like saying that all classical music sounds the same, and that Bach, Brahms, Dvorak, and Debussy are all the same. I point out that the hymns in a good hymnal were composed … Read more
Music and the Education of the Christian Soul
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates leads a group of ambitious young Athenians on a search for the best way of life. Their verbal construction of a perfectly just regime is not motivated by idealism, real or feigned, but by genuine perplexity about the one thing human beings cannot help desiring: happiness. Glaucon, Adeimantus, and their companions … Read more
Millennials Spur Liturgical Restoration in Western Canada
This may sound like the start of a “shaggy-dog” story: So … there are these three Western Canadian bishops at a Catholic youth conference called “One Rock 2.0.” The bishops are prepping for a Town Hall, a “Q and A” session with a tough audience, 620 millennials aged 18-35, and the episcopi are steeling themselves for … Read more
Longing for Eternal Presence
It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. ∼ G.K. Chesterton In the digital age of LED lighting, we risk losing all sense of the uncanny. Of course, in the age of science in general, we tend to grow numb to the mystery that calls us … Read more
When Will Our Priests Sing Again?
Imagine the scene, if you dare—for some readers this might be triggering or flat-out traumatic. There he is, a once-young, now-aging priest celebrating Mass, arriving at the homily, with Britney Spears headset microphone in place, center “stage” (er … Sanctuary), ready to “share” (not a homily, God forbid!), dripping and gushing with vacuous platitudes and, … Read more
Novus Quodlibet: The New Whatever Liturgy
I have attended the Novus Ordo Mass all my life. I do not believe it was necessarily a mistake to have the Mass translated into the vernacular so that people could more readily understand the words and actions. Yet I have great sympathy for people who flock to, or flee to, the traditional rite, and … Read more
Restore Liturgical Beauty with Chant and Polyphony
The tragedy of the loss of beauty in liturgy is not something which we should dismiss lightly, for if there is one thing we can glean from Scripture, and from the Church’s two millennia of Tradition, it is that we should offer the very best to God in our worship of him; yet what we … Read more
Abandoning Latin Changed Liturgical Music … for the Worse
After 35 years as a liturgical musician, it’s amazing how little I really know about the liturgical music of the Roman Rite. Then again, what should I expect when my earliest memories of music at Mass tend to involve now-forgotten attempts to make Ray Repp tunes, guitar-group versions of Beatles songs, social-justice-pop-folk songs, and patently … Read more
Liturgy and the Dance Band on the Titanic
I’m in the dance band on the Titanic Sing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” The iceberg’s on the starboard bow Won’t you dance with me. ∼ Harry Chapin, 1977 Back in the late 1970s, when I was an impressionable young lad, I was introduced to the … Read more
The Sacred Music of Stravinsky
“Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church in all its decoration; it is the church’s greatest ornament.” ∼ Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Igor Stravinsky is everyone’s idea of a “modern composer.” The riot that accompanied the premiere of his 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring has … Read more
Beethoven and the Catholic Church
Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart form the great trinity of Western classical composers. Of the three, it is Beethoven whose religious beliefs have proven the most elusive. We know all about the devout Lutheranism of Bach, who wrote his music “for the glory of God and the refreshment of the … Read more