Catholics don’t argue about abortion or the death penalty nearly as much as they argue about what music is sung (or not sung, or used to be sung) at their local Sunday Mass. It was ever thus — at least since the 1960s, when Sister first shortened her habit, strummed a G7 chord and, to hear some Catholics tell it, all heck broke loose.
Among his more fastidious devotees, Pope Benedict XVI is valued most for the fact that he is not Casey Kasem, and Mass is no place for a hit parade, and church is most relevant when it is serious. (The point of this trip is just that: G et serious.) Do not hold your breath waiting for “One Bread, One Body” — a ’70s liturgical hit at most American parishes — to be performed at His Holiness’s mega-Mass tomorrow at Nationals Park.
But don’t listen for too many sacred hits of the 10th century either. While Benedict understands the deep power of ritual, and loves little more than a Gregorian chant, what he and 46,000 others will be singing (or not singing) tomorrow will be a sort of compromise, neither modern nor traditional, but a little of everything. As soon as tomorrow’s Mass playlist hit the Web, the new traditionalists were fuming on blogs and comment threads. (The pre-show includes African hymns, a “celebratory merengue” and some Mozart; the Mass itself includes a gospel-style Kyrie, some traditional Latin chants and several new interpretations of standard hymns.)
Like devout record store clerks, American Catholics are still having a sort of Stones-vs.-Beatles debate about what the classics really are.
Imagine a bizarro world where all the 25-year-olds want Mozart and all the 60-year-olds want adult-contemporary. The kids think the adults are too wild. The backlash against “Kumbaya Catholicism” has anyone under 40 allegedly clamoring for the Tridentine Mass in Latin, while the old folks are most sentimental about Casual Sunday (even more rockin’, the Saturday vigil Mass), and still cling to what’s evolved from the lite-rock guitar liturgies of the 1970s. The result, for most parishes, has been decades of Masses in which no one is entirely satisfied, and very few enjoy the music enough to sing along.
“The great majority [of Catholics] are totally inert at Mass,” says Thomas Day, 65, a humanities and music professor at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I. Day wrote a book called “Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste,” which is often cited by those who’d like to see a return to Mass music that is to them more sacred. “Most Catholics have either forgotten or never knew traditional music,” Day says.
This isn’t just an American phenomenon. In South America, where I am most familiar with the Roman faith, it is collapsing to the extent that on any given weekend there are more South American evangelicals at worship than RCs. I say ‘weekend’ because the Adventistas are very active, and worship on Saturday.
I’ve been in several small towns where the Adventistas and the Nazarenos work together, share a building (because they worship on different days) and even share a small secretarial staff. Oh, yeah, there was a 68-year-old priest who came through town two years ago and browbeat the people for not maintaining the church in his absence.
In Spanish you say “Oir misa” — to hear mass — because it’s totally passive. When I first began working in small-town Latin America twenty years ago the RC churches were full of grubby, hungover peasants, standing (no pews) in the nave and watching (maybe) the magic up front. At the time it was all there was, but after a few tries I never bothered to go because there was no worship there.
Now the evangelical churches are full of families; there’s an emerging middle class because Ricardo and Pablo laid off the sauce and stopped chasing the girls once they got saved.
In South America, for centuries, the RCs were the only choice. Here in North America they were not, and thus attempted to address their core problem of “oir misa” by becoming ‘relevant.’ In so doing they largely abandoned their one ‘distinctive’. Not that pre-Vatican II congregations ever sang much of [i]anything[/i], so the comparison is a bit wonky.
What I’ve noticed at our Anglican church is that the classic service (8 am) is attracting more and more younger families, even at that hour, whilst the fully contemporary 11 am (no robes, procession, etc) is not growing at all. In between is a well-attended hybrid service with a mix of music occasionally including plainsong chant, formal robes, and so on.
What people want is a chance to [i]worship[/i] and the RCs’ core liturgical problem remains the desperately vapid music from the late ’60s, which is even worse than some of that Vineyard stuff from the late ’90s. There is, however, enough new, worshipful, music being written on the evangelical side that you can throw the trash overboard.
The RCs are largely stuck with singing the same songs again and again for 40 years, which has to be even worse than the interminable choral repeats of Vineyard.
I can’t speak much to RC hymnody because I am not familiar with it. The hymns that speak to me are the ones that spell out the human impasse and the salvation that comes only by God’s grace through faith in the blood of Christ shed at Calvary. My all time favorites are “A Mighty Fortress,” “Rock of Ages” and “Amazing Grace.” Actually, I think I have seen all of these in the RC missal as well, on the occasional time I have been to a service in one of their parishes.
I long for the return of traditional hymns. Even though I love my AMiA Church, I can’t stand the 24/7 praise songs, the same 7 words repeated over 24 stanzas, songs dominated by first person pronouns, “It’s All About You God” when in fact what the composer and the singers really mean is, “It’s All About Me,” the vapid, saccharine sweet, feminine lyrics, that rarely fit the music. Some Sundays I imagine seeing God Almighty sitting on his throne, fingers stuffed in his ears, saying “Please just stop it,” and I join in his plea.
Hymns (apart from the Ordinary Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) are not proper to the Catholic Mass, being a fairly recent innovation borrowed from protestant worship. The Latin Rite traditionally used psalms with antiphons for introit, gradual, offertory, and communion, reserving hymns to other occasions such as the Daily Office. A good bit of debate regarding hymnody rages in Catholic circles. “Rages” is not too strong a word, either, and applies to all matters liturgical: a Catholic blog post on a liturgical issues is likely to generate more comments than same-sex, Iraq War, or economic politics.
It’s simply not true that Catholics don’t sing. I have seen parishes switch over to a more classic hymnody, borrowed, largely, from Anglican and Lutheran sources. With music worth singing, and a period of time to learn the music, we do sing, quite as well as anyone. It is a cultural change, and takes time. But the results are worth it. And, even in otherwise non-singing parishes, I have heard the Our Father sung very well.
[i] When I first began working in small-town Latin America twenty years ago the RC churches were full of grubby, hungover peasants, standing (no pews) in the nave and watching (maybe) the magic up front. At the time it was all there was, but after a few tries I never bothered to go because there was no worship there. [/i]
You know, I don’t wish to preempt the Elves and I’m not a knee-jerk reactionary or anything, but I find this really offensive. Was it really necessary to say all of this? It’s stereotypical and rude.
I just read Peter Jensen’s article posted at Stand Firm regarding the wrath of God and how it is minimized in the contemporary church and found this line which I would like to add to my comments above, ” Third, to ignore the cross altogether and find the centre of Jesus’ mission in the Incarnation or even worse in his present friendship with us, sung about in endless trivial songs.”
Worship SHOULD be serious and trivial, “24/7” music undermines the sacredness of the service.
Anglicanum — how many Latin American RC churches were you in 20 years ago in the back country Andes? Ever get shot at by Maoist guerrillas for whom anyone doing agricultural development work was an enemy? Ever have to step over dozens of bodies in the midst of a virulent cholera epidemic?
As a matter of fact, did you ever hear the expression “El hombre es de la calle y la mujer de la casa.”? — “the man is for the streets and the woman for the home.” The “streets” meant hanging around, getting outrageously drunk on bad brew, pestering women endlessly, squandering every possible centavo, and generally accomplishing nothing.
It wasn’t every single one, of course, but at that time it was widespread and depressingly common. Unless you have personally intervened, as I have done at some risk to myself, to stop a drunken campesino and his brother from beating up one of their wives — who was not supposed to be “on the street,” please don’t talk to me about stereotypes and rudeness.
It is not rude (or stereotypical) to describe things accurately.
That’s the way things were, in village after village, and the basic scenario was nearly the same, whether in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia. Southern Mexico was somewhat different, but a close variant of that particular social pathology was nevertheless prevalent in a recognizable form.
Notice that I said “were.” Across wide swaths of Latin America it has changed — much for the better — as a direct result of evangelical protestantism. Even the Mormons in eastern Bolivia have had the same effect.
I had the deep delight of spending Palm Sunday in a small, evangelical Bolivian town a few years back. The town’s main street was filled with woven palm-leaf sculpture of Jesus, the disciples, and the whole triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The men (of both churches) had done it all in secret and brought the sculptures out of hiding Saturday afternoon, to the absolute astonishment of their wives and children. The entire population had a great party, complete with wonderful food and ‘dueling’ Andean bands from the two churches. There wasn’t a bottle of booze in sight.
I for one would like to thank Bart for his apparently godly work converting heathen Catholics in south america to the Christian religion. Once we convert all the Catholics to Christianity we can begin working on convering animists, Hindus and Muslims. Still, we should make sure we focus our evangilization efforts on those most in need of it, those furthest from the Truth. And for that I applaud all protestant missionaries bringing the true faith to that darkest of dark continents, Catholic South America!
Oh get off your high horse. The point of this thread is music in the RC Church (and specifically music at a papal liturgy), not the Amazing Evangelical Adventures of Bart Hall (Kansas USA). Can we please get back to the point?
I don’t know who he was (haven’t googled it yet), but the cantor at the Mass was amazing! He could have been a Gospel Singer on BET or American Idol, and you could tell he was holding back what he could do, but he was just amazing!
Pacem!
Jim Elliott <><
Hey, someone,
There are godless/heathen in all denominations who call themselves by the name of that denomination, whether ‘Baptist’, ‘Catholic’ or ‘Methodist’ or ‘Episcopalian’. they DO need converting to Christianity. Hopefully, then, they will stay in their denomination as a witness of the power of the Spirit.
Peace
Jim Elliott <>< a sinner, saved by Grace.
BTW, “someone” & Anglicanum, I never claimed to have converted a single one of those people, and gave full credit to the Adventists and Nazarenes.
The core issue is that in other areas of the world (outside the US) the RCs have also had some longstanding and serious problems — based on cultural expressions of their theology ?? — and that the “relevant” music approach to that problem in the US has fairly obviously not been particularly effective in addressing the issue either. You know, hundreds of parochial schools closed for want of students, and all that.
In Quebec, where I lived for thirteen years the RCs also tried the whole modern music thing, but dropped the ball so badly that in many areas they were displaced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When a non-Christian outfit like the JWs can speak more effectively in people’s lives than the Romans can … it’s a safe assumption the Romans have a problem of the first order.
The confusion over music is a symptom of something quite a bit deeper, and it’s not a bit off topic to lean in the direction of the underlying problem(s).
[blockquote]In defense of guitar Mass, was it really so bad? It was the soundtrack of a lot of social justice efforts. The St. Louis Jesuits stuff conjures up, for many, memories of food banks and felt banners, of youth group carwashes and, more nobly, martyred nuns and priests in Central America. Maybe that was the problem for some churchgoers? The groovier music really was of its time, and came with an agenda?[/blockquote]
“Soundtrack”?
To martyred nuns and priests?
Bart, Hall, I have not been to South America. But an old chaplain of mine had been a Maryknoller in Bolivia for 27 years, and told me about people canoeing down the river for Christmas mass, singing the Gospel of Luke on the way.
So I think the plural of anecdote still is not data.
I’ve heard Catholics tell tales as bad as Bart Hall’s, though without the elitist tinge to it. There’s no sense in defending a moribund local Church sadly in need of re-evanglization. Of course, presenting the local failures as a way of denigrating the universal… well, that’s a problem of argumentation too common.
As a parishioner in a Catholic parish with lots of Mexican immigrants, I hear all sorts of stories about wretched catechesis; it’s true that a lot of baptized and practicing Catholics haven’t a clue, since they were not taught properly coming up and, too sadly, didn’t get a proper hearing of the Gospel. I hope that’s happening in our Spanish Masses as it is in the English. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge, I’m told.
Actually, WordsMatter, we hear the same stories about the catechesis in the EPISCOPAL Church as well. No denomination is immune from the disease of liberalism and heresy and laziness in the faith. Of course, the EC is now reaping what she has sown. The Catholic Church is seemingly facing their problems and may be actually moving back towards a more conservate stance.
LJim –
American Catholics had really bad catechesis; from what I’ve been told, Mexicans from the rural interior had none at all. We’ve had some gang issues in the parish, and some other problems with the kids. There seems to be some syncretism, as well. Apparently, Father has ticked off someone, since a ring of ashes – a death curse, apparently – around his chair in the sanctuary. We’ve beefed up security, having found ashes and chicken parts around the place several other times lately, and even the Tabernacle was invaded and the Sacrament desecrated. Of course, this all goes beyond catechetical failures into spiritual warfare, but it’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Sidenote: I see these things as challenges for the Church; some see them as evidence against the Church. Same data, different conclusions. 🙂
Definately a challenge, and if handled in a Christian witness under the power of the Holy Spirit, a powerful chance for evangelism.
By the way, we haven’t seen that, but in one church we did hear about a witches coven who had members in the Episcopal Church we attended who also somehow gained access to the tabernacle and would steal the consecrated reserve eucharistic wafers for their desecration ceremony. At one time they actually did desecrate the altar necessitating a clensing ceremony.
I wasn’t a member of the EC at that time, but my wife was and told me about it after we were married. It turns out one of the undercover coven members was running for Vestry!