Music, Politics, and Culture

Doubtless many of the nation’s Catholic leaders are wondering how in the world a majority of Catholics could vote for a man who not only has a 100% NARAL rating, but whose policies actively restrict the exercise of Catholicism.

Part of the answer, I maintain, is music.

Instead of filling our parishes with the music proper to the Roman Rite, Gregorian chant and music consonant with it, we play the most insipid, uncategorizable music possible, with inane and often enough heretical lyrics.

Any Hollywood producer would tell you, if you want to make a movie scene in a church and make it recognizably Catholic, play Gregorian chant in the background. Gregorian chant sounds like Catholicism.

We’ve sold our musical birthright for precisely nothing, and lost our identity along with it. If we want to continue promoting the complete disjunction of the Mass with any recognizably Catholic actions, we should continue making music just as we have been doing.

Or, we could make a change.