Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

The Secret of Kells, an animated feature film made in 2009, has been showered with awards since its release, including a Academy nomination for best animated feature film.

Maybe it is already famous in Catholic circles but I knew nothing about it, and had never heard of it before. It tells the story of the creation and preservation of the Book of Kells, the 8th century liturgical book of the Gospels from Ireland that contains many of the oldest images we have that form that basis of Western art. It is one of the great masterpieces of all ages, though I can’t say that I really knew about it at all before this before.

The movie focuses on life inside the Irish monastery where the book is created. It tells the story of a young boy’s relationship with a master scribe, and the tensions that develop with the abbot over how to prepare for a possible Viking invasion of the monastery.

This deals with some of my own personal favorite themes in history: the culture and technology of scribing, the role of monasteries in the fostering of civilization, the centrality of learning to Christian history, the problem of security in a time of severe threats. But when was the last time that a movie was made to feature all of these themes? In this film, Christianity is portrayed as the light, the hope of mankind. It’s true but we don’t often run across this truth, do we?

The animation itself is beyond spectacular. It is ravishing, gorgeous, astonishing. The music is perfect: liturgical where it should be (and in Latin!) and Gaelic/dance where it should be. How striking that it was made by an entirely secular animation studio!

In times of instant communication and universal distribution of text and images through digital media, we need to develop a greater appreciation for how we got from there to here. This film provides some of this background. It is suitable for kids and adults and everyone. Parishes could really benefit from a showing of this.

The one-year countdown to the new Missal is about to begin. Priest friends of mine tell me that they are so excited that they almost try not to think about it. Why? Because contemplating what is coming up might engender too much dissatisfaction with the current translation. Though it is now a lame-duck translation, there are still a year’s worth of daily and Sunday Masses to say, and too much disgruntlement is not good for the soul.

As a layperson, I’m beside myself with anticipation and glee about the change. For most people, it will not be a dramatic change. The words, and the music too we can hope, will be more fitting, more engaging, more compelling, more believable, but the difference will not strike people immediately. The big change is what the new translation will provide for people’s conception of the faith over long term. The new Missal translation will gradually but determinedly bring into alignment what we believe with how we pray as Catholic people.

The results, I predict, will be very profound.
We can read the Catholic Catechism and have those beliefs reinforced at Sunday Mass. We can read the old writings on the meaning and theology of the Mass and not be puzzled by references to to its sacrificial aspect and its theocentricity. The language will be more remote from everyday speech and thus elicit a deeper sense of reflection on the part of everyone present. Whereas the lame-duck translation has all the drama of a phonebook, the new translation with its high tone and accurate rendering of the Latin will impress upon everyone a sense of the profound significance of what is taking place.

Scholars and journalists will be busy for decades hence trying to make sense out of what happened to make this corrected translation so necessary. Regardless, what we are seeing here is a dramatic chance for a second liturgical reform long after the first one faltered so terribly and high very high cost.

The differences between the two are striking and reach into the very structure of even the ordinary chants of the Mass. The opening lines of the Gloria, for example, in the old translation seem to be an obvious mistranslation, but they had a purpose: to convert a beautiful hymn written in prose into metrical poetry.

To be clear here, the prayers of the Mass and all Catholic liturgy are not supposed to have a poetic meter (sequences are a different issue); they are elegant prose such as we find in the Psalms and Holy Scripture generally. For this reason, chant has always been the favored form of music. Even the polyphony that elaborates on the chant is not structure in a way to have the same catchiness and regular text-rhythm that you find in pop music.

Consider the Gloria. The current translation opens with the following accents:

Glory to God in the highest
and peace to his people on earth

This has the lilt of a limerick that sets well in metrical form. Notice where the accents occur and how they fit so well with a 6/8 musical meter, almost as if the translators intended it this way.

The new translation is different. It makes no effort to cram the words into some sort of metric pattern:

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth, peace to people of good will.

Composers complained bitterly about this second line, that it doesn’t fit into their models. The publishers of existing settings of the Gloria – settings that we know all too well – have had a terrible time attempting to shove this new translation into their existing melodic frameworks. Some of the results have been strained at best; laughable at worst. I’ve yet to hear even one “revised” Gloria based on an existing tune that sounds like it was written to work this way. You can put a square peg in a round hole, but it takes a lot of pounding and there is always something lost in the process.

I personally consider all of this great. And why? Because it tilts the balance of decision making toward chant-based settings. The purpose of chant is to give flight to the text. That is the central concern. It is not about writing catchy tunes or causing you to want to dance or sway side to side. It is supposed to be about prayer. We pray in prose. There are prayers written in poetry but guess what? Those are for children.

This new translation, then, gives a great new push forward for the third option that was never taken after the Second Vatican Council: English chant. What happened to it back when? Well, it was squeezed out in the great battle between two sides. One side was understandably reluctant to accept any compromise with the core of Latin chants. They worried that English chant for either the ordinary settings of the Mass or for the propers would end up as a deadly blow to the masterpieces of Latin chant. They were right to fear this, and, had I been alive and active at the time, I might have taken this position. It is a defensible position, one that attempted to hold back the tide.

The downside of this point of view is that it ceded the entire reform effort to people with an agenda that can only be described as goofy. The worst among this bunch exhibited an iconoclastic impulse: topple the power of the conductors, the organists, and fancy-pants scholas and replace them all with folk musicians without training so that they can lead the People of God into a new age! This was the catastrophic idea, one that ended up prevailing in more places that most people care to admit.

Lost in this entire struggle were the voices of moderation, the people who very sensibly saw that the liturgical reform provided an opportunity for chant in English and for learning from what was in fact a very long tradition of doing this very thing in the Anglican community. There were some people out there who took this position but their voices were drowned out and their manuscripts barely saw the light of day. We know the results.

Something of the same dynamic threatens us today as we look toward the new Missal release. On one side, there are growing numbers of people attached to the 1962 form, and it is wonderful thing that they have that attachment and the freedom to attend the old Mass. Once again, it is understandable but these people have very little interest in getting involved in the reform of the rite of Paul VI. They figure that they do not have a dog in this fight. On the other side, we have the publishers and advocates of “praise music” who do not want to see the market dry up for their existing styles and approaches. To them, English chant, especially that which is distributed at no charge, represents a threat to their long-term fiduciary interests.

I suspect that it is going to be a Herculean task to overcome this problem as we look forward to the new Missal release. ICEL is doing everything that it can. It has released a DVD (and at some point, this DVD might actually be made available for purchase, provided the USCCB can find someone who knows who to run a website). The publishers are being required to print the Missal chants in their liturgical materials. ICEL itself is sending people out to do workshops and explain to people who to sing the Mass. The goal is to promote a national Mass setting and a national model of sung dialogues.

There are several editions of chant propers in English currently being made available for free online. The Chantcafe.com is posting weekly propers. Fr. Samuel Weber is making his weekly propers available. By next November, some of these will be in print in books for sale.

The Church Music Association of American (which needs your support!) has already produced youtubes of all the chants of the Missal, beautifully sung with the sheet music on display as the voice proceeds. These have been viewed thousands of times by priests and directors of music. These are great first steps.

There are 12 months remaining, and there is a role for everyone here. It is actually possible that we might yet see something closer to what the fathers of the Council imagined. Now is the time. English chant in the Catholic Mass might be given a second lease on life. It is important that everyone who cares about solemn liturgy and the Catholic faith join in the effort.

Recent experience has brought to light, in my own mind, some false choices that many of us in the Catholic music world carry around. As we make our way toward a musical framework of the Roman Rite that is more in keeping with what the Council Fathers of Vatican might have imagined, we need to think about some of these issues. Clearing away false choices is a crucial step toward realizing that there are solemn options out there that stand somewhere between the schlock that we’ve lived with for far too long and the all-Gregorian Mass that we all know is the ideal native to the Mass in all its forms.

As regards the entrance, offertory, and communion, the usual choice is a hymn of some sort, perhaps one thematically tied to the season. The other option that I and many others have promoted is the ideal, that is the Gregorian antiphon: introit, offertory, and communion chant. The problem here is that there is a world apart between them. One is metric with a beat, and the other is free rhythm. One rhymes, and one does not. One is in modern notes, the other in neumes. One is in English, and the other is in Latin.

Many people have a very difficult time going from one to the other. The distance is great indeed.
The switch is a big undertaking from a pastoral angle. People worry about the response from the people in the pews. Even good pastors who “get” the music issue can be squeamish. Hardly any schola is prepared to work up three large-scale chants every week unless they are ready to rehearse several hours during a week. Young scholas are not competent enough to handle this. The ideal can be so remote that it is never even tried.

So what is the fallback position? To do a hymn. But this can be very disappointing once you understand the role of propers, which are part of the structure of Mass, both in the textual and musical content. Once we understand that, the world of chant can appear almost like an unreachable Valhalla. It is something we might long for and dream of but we are unwilling to die in combat to get there.

Why is it that we carry around this idea that we must choose one or the other? It must be a leftover from preconcilar times, when high Mass meant the Liber Usualis and low Mass meant pulling material from the St. Gregory hymnal, since it was believe that it is not permitted to sing the propers for low Mass. Hymns were the suitable replacement.

I do wonder if many of us still believe this as a holdover from the old days. In any case, there are not too many examples of other options out there. Between 1969 or so and very recently, parishes nearly universally sang hymns; the few that did not (and there are famous and heroic cases!) were using full Gregorian propers. Models of anything in between were non-existent.

Plenty of folks extant, many of whom are associated with Catholic publishing houses, want Catholics to believe that we must make a choice now and forever between 1) sprightly, jazzy, go-get-’em, pop songs, or 2) dusty, dreary, dreadful music of the inquisition. If that is the choice, there is no question of the results. I hope that the image of chant is beginning to change with great exposure. But what we still lack is the trigger to make the switch from music that does not really belong at Mass to music is that is native to the Mass.

Today, there are in fact many options for the English propers. Most recently, Adam Barlett has been posting Simple English Propers that are highly successful for parish use. They can be sung pretty much on the spot or with a quick rehearsal before Mass. They sound thoroughly Catholic, and thoroughly accessible. You can add as many Psalms to them as necessary. They adapt to different singing styles and really do well in bringing out the text of the proper of the Mass. They are far preferred to singing a hymn with a text from from an outside source. Or they can be used in conjunction with a hymn. Pastors should be pointing their musicians to them. They are a fantastic bridge from one world to the next.

In addition, there are many settings of propers now available mostly online, some composed in the 1960s but others being worked on right now, by, for example, Frs. Samuel Weber and Columba Kelly. There are alternative traditions that are well developed in the form of the Anglican Use Gradual. Others are in preparation. These strikes me as the most viable method forward. And what’s great about all of them is not only their inherent textual integrity but their relationship to the chant. They all point the way forward toward the Gregorian ideal.

The objection to all schola-sung propers is immediately raised: what about the people and their expectation of singing at the entrance, offertory, and communion? I’ve come to realize that the belief that either the people sing or the schola sings might in fact be another example of a false choice.

We should know by now that by Protestant standards the singing of the Catholic people, even under the best of conditions (one of the four hymns that Catholics tend to sing; can you name them?), the singing is still comparatively tepid. It is nearly always the case that the cantor or schola is driving forward the production of music, while the people’s voices, among those who choose to sing, are a shadow of a reflection of the primary voice of the cantor or schola.

Now, when I say things like this, I always receive communications from people who tell me of some congregation somewhere that has hugely loud and robust singing, crowds of people in the pews who are giving it their all at full volume. I’m not in a position to dispute this but I’ve been to regular parishes in most parts of the country, and I’ve never once been taken aback at the incredible singing (except at the extraordinary form recessional when the choice is Salve Regina).

Most of the time, the congregation is divided between those who refuse to pick up a hymnal, those who pick up a hymnal and vaguely mouth the words, and those who make slight attempts to produce something resembling a melody. In every case I’ve ever been part of as a person in the pew, my own singing can pretty much dominate an entire congregation, eliciting looks of shock and awe in every direction, as if people are thinking: “what the heck is with this guy? Doesn’t he know that Catholics don’t do that?”

In any case, my point is that these propers I am speaking about are all structured to highlight the text, using melodies that are largely formulaic and repeated. Those who want to join in the singing have every possibility of doing so, as robustly or more so than they would be singing the hymns in the first place. For those who would rather just speak the words as the cantor sings, that is possible, because not as fine a line divides speaking from singing when it comes to this kind of music.

In the Catholic ideal, to sing the entrance, offertory, and communion chants is the job of the schola and not the people, while the people are later called upon to sing the ordinary chants of the Mass that are repeated every week. This reflects the great wisdom of liturgical tradition and the division of labor: it makes sense that non-specialists would sing what is familiar but not be called upon to sing what is unfamiliar. In this way, these English antiphons begin to socialize the congregation into a greater degree of liturgical comportment during these periods of the Mass, so that they can watch the processions or prepare for communion or otherwise be mercifully left alone.

Three years ago, Pope Benedict XVI issued Summorum Pontificum, a motu proprio that liberalized the older form of the Roman Rite that had been brutally suppressed in 1970. This suppression was accomplished not by legislative design but intimidation and pressure coming from every quarter. It took courage to resist that pressure and those who did paid a large price.

Strikingly, they were not the only ones who paid a price in those days. Priests who celebrated the reformed liturgy was attention to rubrics and with strict adherence to the words of the Second Vatican Council — people like Msgr. Richard Schuler at St. Agnes — also suffered derision and marginalization simply for using the Latin language and Gregorian chant. The atmosphere was so poisoned that even quoting the very documents of the Council was enough to get you labelled as a troublemaker.

Clearly the damage done by the events of 1970 went far being the suppression of the older form, though this was the most conspicuous and shocking change endured by this generation. This was only part of a dramatic change in the culture of Catholicism. It was tradition itself, along with the doctrine and morals that are central to the faith, that were under attack. Intensifying the irony is that the words of the Council itself were being ignored or reversed in their meaning,

It is for this reason that Summorum has far greater significance than it would first appear. It not only freed the Tridentine Mass, now called the extraordinary form; it also provided license to re-embrace tradition in all its manifestations, and in ways that influence the entire life of the Church.

To say that this was a glorious event is an understatement. In the three years since its passage, the effects and results go far beyond even the most optimistic expectations. All over the country, the extraordinary form is being celebrated, not just in outposts created for that purpose but also in mainstream parishes, where young priests are learning the form and offering it to parishioners. This opportunity has helped to heal some of the terrible hurt that was caused all those years ago.

But the effects haven’t stopped there. We are seeing at massive outpouring of books, media, apostolates, and vocations that are centered on recapturing what had been lost and nearly forgotten. The change in the liturgical ethos for the ordinary form has been stunning. We are seeing for the first time in 40 years a deep questioning of what has become the standard manner of celebrating the liturgy with pop hymns and casual decoration. Instead of this, we are seeing a new dawning of consciousness about the propers of the Mass, with even the head of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy urging all musicians to revisit their significance – and the effects of this change alone will be enormous.

Matias Augé, former consulter to the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship, stated as as follows: “While there are still abuses and aberrations, there is also a growing recognition that the rite comes before individual innovations and must be respected and correctly interpreted. There is greater attention to silence and reflection which improve the quality of participation. Priests are more aware that they should not pull the assembly’s attention onto themselves.” (Translation by Fr. Anthony Ruff).

Augé, however, is reluctant to credit Summorum for this. He says that these positive development were fostered by responsible leaders long before Summorum appeared. While it might be true that these developments were favored, the question is what created the environment that permitted them to be realized and put into effective at the grass-roots level. And here is the critical point. It was Summorum that provided encouragement as never before toward a movement that has in fact been building for decades. The motu proprio, as I’ve said many times, was the key that unlocked the mansion of tradition and all the treasures that it contains. Lacking this encouragement, the atmosphere of intimidation, the prevailing ethos that all that had come before was now invalid, might have lasted much longer.

The striking fact is that it has been Summorum and its liberalization that has permitted the most optimistic and healthy motivations present at the opening of the Second Vatican Council to flourish. This is true even with regard to the lay participation in the life of the Church that the Council sought to encourage. Augé complains about the massive proliferation of “traditionalist” forums, blogs, newsletters, and other movements that become ubiquitous since Summorum. But why not count this as healthy lay involvement of exactly the sort that Vatican II favored?

I’m especially grateful that Summorum took the old Mass that had become the private preserve of a small movement, one that had perhaps understandably grown belligerent and strange, and and mainstreamed the cause, leading millions of unjaded and forward-looking Catholics to participate in its glories and beauties. And the influence of these new celebrations is having that expected spillover effect on the ordinary form. It strikes me that there would be more much controversy alive about the new translation of the Mass in English, appearing next year, had Summorum not sent such a strong message that the tide has turned.

The tide has indeed turned in the last three years, and Summorum has much to do with it. But the objection is sometimes made that the motu proprio has not led to healing but rather created division. My response is that for millions of people who had been estranged from the mainstream of Catholic life, Summorum has in fact been a occasion of healing and unity. Catholicism is starting to feel Catholic again, much to the relief of multitudes. Their perspective surely must be considered here.

As for those who feel estranged as a result of the return to tradition, it is hard to know what to say other than: look inside yourself and try to repair the problem. After all, if one’s intolerance toward tradition is so intense that one feels anger and hurt to know that it exists somewhere and can’t no longer be suppressed or stomped out, we might consider that the issue is with the person himself, and not the Church and the direction of change.

It would be too rough to say that Summorum is helping to separate the wheat from the chaff. But we can say that it has provided an opportunity for teaching and learning, for remembering what had been forgotten, for rediscovery the meaning of what it is like to see, hear, live, and breath the magnificence of the faith that the Church, in her generosity and liberality, hopes the entire world will embrace.

I’ve written uncountable numbers of words scolding ICEL for keeping its texts proprietary and charging for access – on grounds that this is a practice contrary to the whole history of Christianity. Even before Christianity, Judaism taught that the teaching of the Torah and the knowledge of the rabbis was not a commodity to be bought and sold. They could charge for the time, for the room in which they teach, and the books that contained the teaching, but the knowledge itself could not be commodified or limited.

“ALL you that thirst, come to the waters, and you that have no money make hast, buy, and eat; come ye, buy wine and milk without money and without any price.” Isaiah 55:1

The Christian ideal of the same impulse is embodied in the prohibition against “simony” – a sin named for Simon Magus (Acts 8:18-24) who offered disciples money in exchange for the laying on of hands. Peter said to Simon: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.”

But enough with the condemnations and lectures. I would like to make positive case for something wonderful and easy that ICEL could do right now. It could post a single note on its website that said: “All texts bearing an ICEL copyright may be distributed, copied, transmitted, or recorded, provided ICEL is acknowledged as the source.” Over time, the front matter of all ninety-six books could be customized with this announcement on the next printing, but, for now, the digital announcement would be enough.

ICEL could formalize this announcement with a legal stamp of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which is nothing other than a means for getting around certain legal contingencies on texts. The plainly worded announcement would do the same work. The point is to put the texts into the commons where they belong and where they would be were it not for modern legislation that artificially restricts the use of texts.

How could ICEL do this? It is just a matter of doing it. There is nothing more to do. ICEL owns the texts and can control them completely. It is as simple as that. It is a small step with enormous consequences.

For starters, the outpouring of joy across the entire world would be spectacular to behold. It would be one of the largest jail breaks in the history of Christendom, all this wonderful books set free at last, just as the teachings and sermons and liturgical books of all ages were free from restrictions on their distribution.

For decades, ICEL has been the subject of decades of derision and beating, and now with the new texts on the way, this problem has intensified. All of this would change instantly. The global sense of elation would be palpable. The world press would take notice. The New York Times would sing the praises of ICEL. The point of Christian generosity and charity would be undeniable. There isn’t a soul who wouldn’t praise ICEL for having done the right thing. It would be a bright day in the history of the faith.

In light of this, ICEL should put up a banner on its site that says: “If you support our efforts to evangelize the world with these free resources, please consider a contribution.” I would certainly dig as deep as I could. So would thousands, even millions of others. The gratitude would translate into vast financial contributions that I would expect would far exceed the amount that ICEL currently receives in royalties. Even better, this money would be given voluntarily, not extracted by force. The ICEL staff would feel better about itself and be flush with new resources to do its work.

What happens next? That’s when the world community of English-speaking Catholics gets to work. Imagine of blizzard of fantastic iPhone apps that contain the Rite of Baptism for Children, The Book of Blessings, The Book of Prayers, The Code of Canon Law, The Order of Christian Funerals, and the entire Roman Missal, right there in the palm of your hand. No more lugging around heavy books (though anyone would be free to do so). No more being stuck without the right blessing at your fingertips.

What would ICEL have to do to develop these? Nothing. They would all be developed within a matter of weeks and months, on the initiative of people like me and thousands of others.

Every single one of the texts would be scanned and put online, some low quality but many high quality, perfect for printing at a moment’s notice. These texts would appear on uncountable numbers of websites. They would be multiplied again and again and again without limit.

There would be Kindle editions and iPad editions and editions for every epub that is around. Publications that routinely pirate these texts without payment – you know who you are – would no longer have to fly under the radar screen or fear the copyright police. They could go about their missionary work with their heads held high.

Monasteries, convents, and parishes could all freely record their liturgical services and post them on youtube without having a sense that they are doing something wrong. They could sell CDs and custom missals to raise money for themselves.

The new missal, when it appears, would come in a huge range of editions. Some would be heavily bound with the most expensive leather and beautiful medieval stylings. Other editions would come in small paperback editions that you can carry in your pocket, and wouldn’t that be glorious to have an edition that every single Catholic could afford to carry (imagine a price of, say, $7)? Talk about evangelization!

The Bishops and ICEL are right now extremely concerned about catechesis on the new missal. Well, stop worrying about it. Making the texts part of the commons will allow all the creative energies of all Catholics to put to use in the cause of education. Nothing educates like the text itself, and so long as the text lives in copyright prison, there will be problems. Why limit the Gospel? Free it completely and 90% of the work is already done for you. ICEL has limited resources, so why not call upon the vast energies out there just waiting for a chance to help?

The next stage will be spin off publications. There will be manuals, hymnbooks, songbooks, children’s books, commentaries, reference sets, dictionaries, concordances, searchable files, illustrated books, and many other media types that no one has yet thought of. There will be audio books and instructional DVDs and CDs, as well as downloadable MP3s. Do you know of priests who have trouble singing the whole Mass? Well, this is an easy thing to correct if anyone can make a demo file and distribute it without paying for the privilege. Keep in mind that none of this can be done now, at least not legally, without jumping through hoops and paying ICEL. This is why it is not being done now!

Why not harness all of these energies on behalf of the Catholic liturgical project? ICEL needs help. It cannot be singularly charged with the whole burden. It cannot expect only four publishers who know the ropes to do the bulk of the work here. It is a very simple matter of freeing the texts that would make the difference. In other words, all of ICEL’s texts would take on the same precise status as all Christian texts have had from the first to the late nineteenth century when copyright enforcement first became global and some Christians wrongly took the bait and deliberately set out to limit their influence.

To be sure, many Christian texts are part of the commons already. The old Latin Missal is an example. No one has to pay anyone to publish that text. The same is true with Gregorian chant from all ages. The same is true of the Douay-Rheims Bible and hundreds of other translations that are in public domain now.

Take a close look here: all of these source texts are flourishing in every way right now! I can call take out my phone and look at the completely music in the old rite for the whole of today’s services, right now, and it takes about two seconds. I cannot do this with all of the texts that are under conventional copyright. There is a reason for this.

The ICEL decision would inspire other publishers too and perhaps put an end to the copyright arms race that is killing the life of the liturgical text. GIA might move to do the same with the Grail Psalter. The same could happen with the NAB translation of the Bible. Composers might even follow in line. The entire house of copyright cards could fall, and what a blessing that would be! But it all must start with ICEL.

So a plea to ICEL: thousands of others like me want to be involved. We want to help. We want to spread the Good News. We want to work as messengers for Catholic liturgy. Please allow us to do so in every possible way. It is just a matter of posting a simple sentence.

St. Augustine once gave a homily about the divine qualities of the word and its capacity for being shared. He pointed out that he need not parse out his words carefully for fear of losing them to the hearer, but rather that the hearer can take all of his words even as he can retain them. He made an analogy here to the way the Father and the Son can have the same thoughts and the same words without the one displacing the other. Herein lies the mystery and glory of the message, the magnificence of the idea and its infinite reproducability. It was precisely the capacity of words to be spread, and for truth to be held by an unlimited number of people, that inspired the spreading of Christianity all over the world.

Let’s recall that power, that glory, and make it happen again.

At a chant workshop that I co-conducted last week, I found myself intrigued by the demographics. Most attendees were in the 30s, 40s, and early 50s. In these busy times, it takes a special spark of something to attract a person to a two-day workshop in which you spend your time learning to read Gregorian notation and providing an ideal form of music for the Mass. Not many among the attendees had extensive music education, and this is fine. Chant is sometimes taught most easily to people who are not translating from one form of music to another but rather learning this unique kind of music on its own terms.

What draws the participants to such workshops? All the participants have that special something that causes them to define themselves as singers – a class of people that have been essential to the performance of the Christian ritual since the earliest years of the Church. Their art grew up alongside and integral with the ritual itself. This generation joins countless others from the past to take up this serious and sacred vocation of daring to improve on the beauty of silence with the glorious.

But why these people and why now? I spoke to a substantial number of them, perhaps more than half of the 75, who turn out to be converts to Catholicism, some of them recently and some of them from 10 or 15 years before. Most have come through the Episcopal faith, but that might have been a short stop from a more fundamental starting place in the Baptist or Presbyterian faith. From my conversations with these people, I began to put together an archetype of the convert who gets involved in the Gregorian chant movement.

These people did not convert because they preferred the music in the Catholic church to what they had in their own house of worship. It would be closer to the truth that they converted despite the music that is typical in most Catholic parishes. What attracted them to Catholicism was a different kind of beauty, one embodied in history, theological, doctrine, and spirituality.

Their conversion was inspired by the conviction of truth. Here we find the usual personal revelations taking place. Just to mention a few: The Bible was formed by the Church but the Church came first; the Apostolic succession is real and crucial; the Eucharist is in the body of Christ; the Papacy is a legitimate historical institution that has guarded the faith; the long history of saints and martyrs were faithful to scripture and tradition; the liturgy has been organically grown from the earliest times; it has been Catholic theology that has spawned the greatest developments in human history; grace comes from the sacraments offered by the Church.

To have these truths and a thousand other dawn on your is a transforming experience. And then to follow that intellectual change with access to the confessional and to a new form of intense spirituality is a glorious thing, the greatest event of a lifetime. St. John of the Cross writes that these new Catholics are carefully cradled in the Church’s bosom like children by their mothers. They feel secure and are fed what they need.

However, there comes a time when they begin to grow and begin to develop a critical mind toward their experience in their parishes. Here is where they begin to evaluate the practice of Catholicism against the ideal into which they converted. What stands out here are certain problems in the liturgy – and the music is the most conspicuous among them.

Converts tend to be historically and theologically minded, and so they notice the absence of deep tradition and robust spirituality in the music, much of which has been written in the last several decades. They style reflects popular culture, not theological culture. Indeed, so much of it is rather silly and not serious. There seems to be this disjuncture between Catholic teaching on the Eucharist and the aesthetic being created by the music we hear at Mass.

Then they begin to wonder what the Church actually teaches about music. Here is where their historical and literary skills come into play. They know to read the documents from the Second Vatican Council. They know that they can read the writings of the Popes, and so they do. The central truths that stand out from even a casual look is that the music of the Mass is organic to the Mass, that Gregorian chant is the foundation, that all musical development in all times is supposed to extent outwards from the sensibility inspired by chant.

They might stop at these revelations and try to put the subject out of their minds. After all, these people aren’t really singers. The musicians currently in power surely know what they are doing. And surely if there were something fundamentally wrong here, the pastor of the parish would put a stop to it. And so the converts wait it out.

And yet, the problems are inescapable. They come back every Sunday. The new convert then discovers that he or she actually has a more profound appreciation of quiet and spoken daily Mass than the Sunday Mass, and the music is really the only consideration that seems to be the defining issue.

After some time, the nagging feeling that something is fundamentally wrong begins to take over. The nagging sense is rooted in a great truth: the Catholic faith is the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven, and yet the music of most parishes is not beautiful. It is not even very holy. It seems timebound, popular, derivative of secular and not spiritual things. They begin to make inquiries only to discover than no one on the music staff knows anything at all about Gregorian chant. They fear Latin. Indeed, they seem to be confused about the ritual and theological demands that the Church is making of her musicians.

At this point, the convert can choose to do nothing or take the initiative to end the discord between theory and practice. The people who come to these workshops are those who have decided to make a gift of their time and their talent to making difference right in their own parishes, in whatever way they can. The goal is not to recreate the musical cultures of their past faith communities within the Catholic context. It is simply to help bring the music of Catholic parishes into compliance with the beauty of the faith more generally.

At the workshop, we encourage people to get involved in their parish music programs, not as agitators for chant but just as servants. Get to know the musicians. Get to know the organists and other instrumentalists. Help with liturgy and come to rehearsal. Then they can best apply what they have learned about reading the Gregorian staff and reading chant. Under these conditions, they are less likely to be seen as interlopers but rather as helpers and servants. It might take time, but eventually scholas can be formed out of this framework.

Every parish situation is different, and the musical scene within each parish tends to be its own world with its own features that have to be discovered from the inside. To make a difference requires wisdom, good will, and patience. If they follow this path, we might find that ten years from now we can look back and see that it was the converts who were most responsible for bringing beauty and tradition into our liturgical services.

Everyone knows that there are musical choices to be made within the ordinary form of the Roman Rite. You can do the normative thing, you can do a substitute for the normative thing, you can do a translation of the substitute of the normative thing, or…you can do something else deemed appropriate.

Who is to decide what is appropriate? Well, there some degree of fighting about this in every parish environment. Every parishioner with a voice has a view about what is appropriate. Sometimes the pastor prevails. Sometimes the music director or pianist prevails. Most of the time, the process of deciding works a lot like democracy: the most well-organized pressure groups prevail. Needless to say, this is not a good framework for the fulfilment of liturgical ideals.

The U.S. Bishops have added what is considered a reliable guide: a three-fold judgement. The music must meet the criteria of being good music, pastoral music, and liturgical music. This famous test was heavily emphasized in the now-defunct document called Music in Catholic Worship; it is much downplayed in its replacement document Sing To the Lord. In any case, I’ve never really been convinced that this three-fold judgement puts much in the way of limits on anything, since all three of criteria can be easily rationalized by whomever is selecting the music in question.

The provision that the music must be “pastoral,” while not technically prejudicing the choice against Gregorian chant, seems to indicate, in American parlance, something that meets the community’s immediate need for some kind of gratification. It doesn’t have to mean that kind of prejudice but the hint is embedded in the long use of the word “pastoral” in the American context. This test, moreover, puts excessive focus on the people who are present at the liturgy without regard to the millions of people who have been driven from the Catholic faith by bad music. What about the pastoral needs of those who have been long alienated by others’ choices of what constitutes an appropriate substitute for the normative ideal?

In any case, one aspect of the process of picking music for the ordinary form is interesting. It leads to a relentless trial and error of various musical approaches, which in turn allows us to compare the merits of many approaches. In this process, I’ve strengthen my own conviction that Gregorian chant (yes, in Latin) is the ideal. Actually of course it is not my conviction but rather the conviction of the Church, which is why it has been legislated at the right music for liturgy in every bit of Papal legislation on record. I only mean that I’ve experienced the wisdom of this teaching in real time through many different attempts to discover some suitable substitute.

In the ordinary form, every music director who has worked for some years ends up trying many different approaches. The usual approach to the entrance for example, prevailing in probably 95% of parish environments, is to sing a hymn in English. The hymn can be a traditional classic, a traditional contemporary (thinking 1970s here), or a praise and worship chorus designed to give the Mass a blasting start that gets everyone into some sort of frenzy. Whatever style you choose, the hymn is the conventional choice, even though it has never been the first choice in the whole of Catholic history. .

The trouble here is that the hymn follows a four-square beat that is not all that different from that offered by the secular world. It has a singable tune. It has a certain familiarity that enables people to sing along with it. There might not seem to be anything objectionable about any of this until you consider the rarefied environment offered by liturgy and liturgy alone. This is not just a time for the community to gather and not just a time to study the Bible and pray together. The liturgy makes dramatic and mystical claims in its forms and language and actions; it seeks the suspension of time and an intimate contact of God and the human soul.

Doesn’t it makes sense that the music should strongly signal the reality of liturgy at the entrance, and the entrance more than any other point in the Mass? This is when the general comportment of the Mass is established. It is the time when people prepare for a long prayer. It is the period when everyone needs to be reminded that this is a special place and a special time, not just for joining or gathering or socializing but for the extraordinary act of liturgy. And yes that might mean just a shade of discomfort, something that picks us up out of the world we’ve been living in all week and plants us in a new place so that we can prepare for the mysteries that will unfold before us.

At the very least, then, the text we sing ought not to be some text composed by someone else but rather than appointed text for the entrance at Mass. Is that really too much to ask, too much to ask that the choir sing the actual text of the Mass called the entrance antiphon? It strikes me that Laszlo Dobszay is correct that single weakest part of the rubrics of the ordinary form is that it permits replacing this text with some other text that could, conceivably, be made up right there on the spot.

Once we have the priority of the propers straight in our heads, there are many other options still, all of them better than a hymn. We could sing the Gregorian melodies to an English text. We could sing the English text with a new chant-like melody. We could sing a polyphonic piece with the English text. We could sing the Latin text with a Psalm tone. We could sing the English text with a Psalm tone. There are editions out there of all of these choices, and all of them have their merits.

Our own schola does not always have time to work up the Gregorian chant for the entrance, so these other options are highly useful for us. And yet when we do have time to sing the real chant that belongs to the Mass of the time, it really strikes me: this is what is perfect. It conveys the right message, has the right sound, make for the perfectly dignified entrance, suggests stillness but upward motion into another realm, and instills a quiet sense of prayer. It is quite something, and doesn’t really have a full explanation. I don’t mean just one introit in particular but rather all of them, each one carefully crafted for the needs of the day. I can only say with full confidence that the best introit in our own experience is precisely the one that the Church recommends: the Gregorian chant.

I wish we could do this every week but it just isn’t possible given time constraints and other musical demands. But when we can do it, we have a strong sense that we did precisely what the liturgy calls for. And after singing this, everything else we sing seems to go better than it otherwise would. The Mass already has that opening lift and is easily carried the rest of the way. The schola itself seems more relaxed, and the atmosphere of the Church more prayerful, patient, and attentive.

There is also something meritorious about leaving our judgement aside for once during the week and deferring to the judgement of our tradition. The tradition is most often more correct than we are. It embodies more experience, more wisdom, a broader outlook, and is less prone to mistakes than a single generation or a single person. In fact, I would suggest that if someone’s judgment about what is appropriate time again excludes the Gregorian chant, there is something very wrong with the method by which the judgement is being made.

Sometimes pop philosophers like to ask why God allows bad things to happen to good people. We might similarly ask why God allowed pop music to takeover the ordinary form of the Mass. One answer might be to instill in all of us a more profound appreciation for the music that the Church has given us to last the ages. As we work through another round of Gregorian restoration, may we never forget this lesson and cling to its beautiful words and melodies, world without end.