5 January 04

Vatican II and the Equalization of the Liturgy

Back in the days when I still attended Mass more or less regularly I always sought out the ones with no music. Not because I have no musical ear and hate singing-quite the contrary, actually-but because the music we are now forced to endure is so saccharine as to render the whole ceremony vacuous (or worse). This is a purely personal position, you understand. But Vatican II, with its well-meaning (and no doubt long overdue) proletarianization of the Mass, happened at a time when the worst excesses of pop culture could (and did) destroy Catholic liturgical music. When they aren’t trying to sound like Hollywood scores, contemporary American Catholic hymns sing about love and peace and soaring like eagles and guitars (which should never be brought within 100 yards of any sacred place, in my humble opinion).

This is not the Catholicism I left the Anglican church for so long ago: I wanted the beauty, the guts, the blood, the tangible fusing with the ineffable. It was a strange journey and has marked me, probably more than I’ll ever know. But if they keep making us sing that stuff, I’ll keep staying away. (Signs are that it is indeed compulsory: musicless Sunday masses are no longer permitted by the California bishops.)

Mel Gibson is now famous for his adherence to a Tridentine sect for whom the Latin Mass is the only acceptable medium for approaching the divine. I would never go to one of these ceremonies, but more for political than religious reasons. I have no argument with these people when they say that the Mass as currently served up in parishes across the continent, two, three, four times a Sunday is like eating porridge with treacle. (I don’t know if they DO say this, but someone should.)

Going back to St. George’s in Madrid in December with the beautiful singing of old, beautiful hymns, took me by surprise. I’d forgotten about the pleasure of beauty mixed with the divine. I would love to hear what Beth’s choir sounds like. And I wish someone could write contemporary holy music that didn’t sound like John Denver overdosing on aspartame.

Posted by at 07:31 PM in Miscellaneous | Link |
  1. Pica – we have a whole CD of Magnificats and Nunc Dimitti sung by an Australian Cathedral Choir (Anglican). We have personally chosen for you the “Magnificat in B minor” by Thomas Noble – this is one of our favourites. We could email it to you but it is a big file (4.3MB in ITunes) so maybe you will just have to come out here and listen in person!

    — Jenny & Geoff    6. January 2004, 00:21    Link
  2. Pica, your comments remind me of the beginning of Annie Dillard’s “An Expedition to the Pole” (in her collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk). She describes a sincere but dreadful folk group called “Wildflowers” who is singing at her Catholic church, then she remarks:

    ”...I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape Protestant guitars.”

    This has always been one of my favorite of Dillard’s wry moments; thanks for evoking it.

    — Lorianne    6. January 2004, 01:56    Link
  3. The closest I ever came to getting up and walking out of church (and from a front choir stall, it would have been quite an exit) was during a “folk-jazz mass” staged by our former rector (who was playing an electronic keyboard) and a praise-music youth director who came from a different Protestant denomination. I’m tolerant of most musical styles if they are a)decent, real music and b)have a backbone. But this treacly, limp, repetitive drivel for guitar, piano, and assorted voice is terrible music, and I can’t help but imagine God sticking cotton balls in his ears whenever those strings first plunk. And they call it “praise” music?? (Come to think of it, throwing up would have been OK too.)

    — beth    6. January 2004, 09:48    Link
  4. I am assuming your comment on a 100 yard boundary of sacred places pertains to the guitars and not eagles. Eagles, in fact, are sacred in spirit as well as world of nature. But you, of all people, know that best…. having had the blessed presence of a Golden Eagle on your day of wedded bliss.

    — tattler    8. January 2004, 16:27    Link
  5. Each and everyone of us has their own spirituality and each of us praises God in different ways. The only thing I want to say is; if you think that using God given talents like playing the guitar, or singing in a contemporary way would be an instrument that would make that person be close to God and would make him a very good person and of service to others, why should we forbid them.
    I think it’s just a matter of respect my dear brothers and sisters.

    If you use your talents in praising God I think God likes it to be that way.


    — samir    24. March 2005, 04:52    Link

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