Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

But they have to write their stories anyway. I’ve been fielding lots of calls from these nice people and had to explain to them that the more substantive textual changes actually come not from the pews but from the sanctuary. The celebrant is the one who is fielding most of the robust changes, and they affect the entire Mass, from the collects to the canon to the post-communion prayers.

The language is completely different. What previously was choppy and plain is now extended and elegant. Options for prayers that aren’t even in the Latin edition have been eliminated. The incessant talk about “peace and love” that reflected the political-cultural concerns of 1970 are gone and replaced by actual English equivalents of the Latin. The language is generally higher and more prayerful. The text sounds like liturgy, sounds like Church, sounds like prayer, and the attempt to render all of this in dress-down-Friday prose is completely gone.

The overall effect is about more than the text, as important as that is. The really substantive change concerns the overall ethos of the Mass that will come through in the new language. It is serious, solemn, dignified, and even a bit remote in the way that mysterious and awesome things really should be. The sentence formulations are not like vernacular. They are elevated but without being affected.

The biggest evidence of this change concerns the music. There is a long history in the Catholic Church of missteps in this regard. The people who produce the Missals don’t think much about the music question. This problem vexed the years following the Council of Trent, and it was no less true in the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council. There is a tendency to focus on the words alone while forgetting that the Roman Rite really is a sung ritual and has been since the beginning.

The people involved in the production of the English version of the Third Edition of the Roman Missal got it right. They embedded the music as part of the text. You can hardly turn a page in this Missal without bumping into musical notation. This is just fantastic because it establishes a norm for both tunes and for the preferred style of the music to be used at Mass. This style is call chant. The prayers are all chant. The people’s parts are chanted. There is a provision for all the parts of the Mass to be sung from beginning to end. We won’t have to wait 50 years or 300 years for the music question to be settled. It is already settled with the printing of the Missal itself.

This is just great because it solves a serious and major problem that currently exists within the Catholic Church: the music that is commonly employed in the liturgy works at cross purposes with the ritual itself. The establishment of a new (actually old) musical norm will have a gradual effect on the choices that the musicians make in the future. Pop music will not fit in well with a chanted Mass. There will be a gravitational pull toward making the entire Mass a chanted event, thereby fulfilling one of the goals of the Second Vatican Council to grant chant “first place” at Mass.

Now, in talking about these issues with reporters, I’ve noticed something that Catholics rarely talk about. The existing problems in the musical area are well known by these reporters. They’ve variously attended Mass with the expectation of hearing chant but come away with a sense of alarm or even shock that this is not what they heard. They tell me nightmare stories I’ve heard a thousand times, stories of amateur guitar quintets that strum away from the altar, stories of bongos and electric basses and trap sets, stories that make your hair stand on end and make you want to hide from embarrassment.

In some way, all these reporters, Catholic or not, are rooting for a dramatic change. They want the Catholic Church to be true to itself. They are aware of what a mighty contribution that Catholicism has made to our culture and they worry that this contribution is not fully appreciated by the Catholic Church herself. They want it to come back, under the conviction that the world really needs Gregorian chant to be a beautiful place. And they want it to exist in every single Catholic parish.

For this reason, I’ve found a very friendly group among the reporters. They want to hear what I have to say and they are obviously sympathetic to what I’m saying. They freely laugh about the pathetic attempts to spruce up our formal prayers with finger snapping and groovy bass rhythms. As the interview goes on, these reporters become even more open about their disdain for this transparent attempt to popularize what is actually a robust and serious experience. No, they don’t believe in the faith but it makes sense to just about anyone that people who do believe in the faith ought to be serious about it.

To be sure, not everyone that these reporters call are willing to discuss the profound implications of these changes in the Missal. The USCCB is generally downplaying the extent of the changes so as not to alarm the faithful. The big publishers are only talking about their products and the marketing opportunities that the change represents – which strikes me as rather cynical. I don’t begrudge anyone a chance to make a buck, but there is still something unseemly about regarding the liturgy as a cash cow. What’s more, the best music for the Mass at this point is entirely free and available for instant download, offering a chance for total liberation from the cash nexus.

And so obviously we are talking about more than meets the eye here. This is a serious change, a big improvement, and wonderful opportunity for the Catholic faith to express itself with a new voice in changed times.

Years ago, I lamented that the end of the age of Catholic musical creativity had seemed to be upon us. In the 1980s, we became aware of these vast treasures of polyphony thanks to the secular popularity of great music of the Renaissance. On CDs, we listened to the amazing work of a thousand years and we wondered: what happened? Where are Josquin, Palestrina, Victoria, Mozart, Bruckner? What happened to smash this tradition? The documents of the Second Vatican Council talk about beauty, chant, and polyphony but all we hear in our parishes is something else entirely.

Then chant became popular the same way. We listened in our cars, in our living rooms, on our iPods. Chant was everywhere but in our parishes. Why did all musical greatest seem to be in our past but nowhere in the present and highly unlikely in the future?

Thinking about this more I began to understand. The liturgy was unstable, and composers aren’t drawn to that. Choirs were being disparaged and put down. Excellence in music was under attack in favor of an amateurism chic. The beautiful was unfashionable because it supposedly contradicted the real world in which we live our lives. Liturgy was supposed to be more like reality television than prayerful theater. No wonder the composers had lost interest. The musicians had all been chased away.

Well, that was all before this year. In 2011, we’ve seen an incredible outpouring of fantastic composition by excellent musicians, all of it structured for liturgical use using the musical and textual language of the liturgy itself. The books and collections are pouring out faster than even close observers can follow, and this new material is completely unlike the usual fare we’ve been treated to over the last decades, which has been essential pop music with made-up, feel-good lyrics. The new approach to composition takes the liturgy and its tradition seriously.

It is an astonishing turnaround, something that could only be expected by a person of a mighty faith and optimism.

What has inspired all of this? There are many factors. The propers of the Mass have been rediscovered as source texts after decades of neglect. The proliferation of the extraordinary form of Mass has given hope that order can prevail over chaos. Papal liturgy has been seriously upgraded. Gregorian chant is back has a living form of music.

More than anything else, the appearance of the Third Edition of the Roman Missal has provided incredible encouragement that the Church has once again begun to take its liturgy task seriously. The language is solemn, rhetorically high, and dignified. It is not pop language, so it strongly suggests in its own linguistic structure that draws from something. Pop music is not the appropriate approach. It calls for chanted music that comes from the liturgy itself. This is the thing that has inspired so much creative energy.

Most serious musicians I know are very excited about the opportunity. They sometimes wake in the morning with a melody in their heads and quickly write it out, just like in the movies. They fill in the other parts and, next thing you know, they have a Mass setting ready to go. There are many sites that are now posting these for free. Other composers have established their own commercial sites where you can buy the Mass for $75 and make as many copies as you want. Then of course there are the conventional sources for music.

Catholic musicians are increasingly taking these resources for granted so it can be hard to fully appreciate the difference between now and, say, five years ago. There was hardly any Catholic music online. Composers were not really doing the Catholic thing. There was little inspiration and plenty to inspire depression. The chant movement was in its infancy. The idea of the new Missal had long been rumored but most people figured it was eons away and there was not much hope for it at any point in the future.

And now suddenly, it is upon us. We are amazed to see a flurry of new names who are leading the way in new composition: Kevin Allen, Jeffrey Ostrowski, Adam Bartlett, Richard Rice, Arlene Oost-Zinner, Aristotle Esguerra, David Hughes, Fr. Samuel Weber, Brian Michael Page, Bruce Ford, Ian Williams, Kathy Pluth, David Friel, Chris Mueller, Richard Clark, Noel Jones, Charles Culbreth, Jacob Bancks, and so many others. Many of these people never imagine that they would find themselves in the ranks of Catholic composers. They were reluctant to accept the role, but they still answered the call.

We are all privileged to be alive in these times of the revival of the highest of the sacred arts. This is the dream of so many people for so long. Back in the sixties, a generation of musicians saw an astonishing collapse take place before their very eyes. No matter what they did, they could not stem the tide. Not only did their worst predictions come true, they were surpassed and then some. even more shocking was the the collapsed lasted much longer than anyone could have expected. Forty-five years is a long time to wait. And forty years is a long time to live with a Missal text that was nowhere near being what it should be.

The sufferings of those generations should be kept in mind as we go forward. They worked, prayed, wrote, and did their best to keep beauty alive in times when it was not appreciated or encouraged. They knew that it would return someday, but most did not live to see this day. They are our benefactors and we should be grateful and pray for them. They kept the tradition alive, and now it is thriving again, being refurbished so that it can be handed on to the next generation.

I was looking around youtube and found a nine-part epic on the new translation of the Missal. It turned out to be a round-table discussion with some top players in a diocesan office. The moderator would ask one broad question and then the microphone would be passed from person to person, and you know how this groupthink works. They all pretty much said what the last person said. There were dozens of questions, and I could detect no substance at all. I lasted about eight minutes and had to bail for fear of passing out from boredom. I didn’t even look at the other seven parts

Why are these films being made? The tedium of this Missal rollout is on the verge of making me crazy. There are gazillion pamphlets, films, commissions, meetings, speakers, monographs. The USCCB hasn’t gone door-to-door yet but maybe that is next. Nor can I tell that average Catholics care in the slightest about this new Missal. I was drafted to give two talks at a parish recently and I spoke to an audience of two and three. I tried to be as lively as possible in talking about the changes in the people’s parts, but this is rather difficult since a total of like seven words are changing.

To be sure, the Missal is actually a landmark but the changes are within the deeper structure: the music in the Missal (if it is used), the priest’s parts, the elimination of bad options that were never really in the Latin edition, the depreciation of regrettable options, and more. It will have a gigantic effect over time but this will not be obvious on the first-time hearing. For most people, the First Sunday of Advent will be just another Sunday.

So how can we account for the frenzied educational campaign that seems to mask some grave but hidden fear? The answer was given to me by an older man who came to a seminar I was giving. So few were that that we had time to talk about his life as a Catholic. He told me a story that I’ve heard a hundred times but I still listen in astonishment. It concerned that fateful year of 1969. He was in a small parish that was relatively unaffected by anything that had happened at or after Vatican II. The Mass was the Mass. The priest said it, the schola sang it, and the Catholic Church was the great refuge from all the nonsense going on in the world.

Then one day a package arrived. It was a book with the new Mass. It was mandatory. Starting now.

He was probably 40 years old. The structure that he had grown up with and had lived his whole life was suddenly gone. The prayers of the foot of the altar were gone. The beloved Latin language was gone. The schola had no idea what to sing. All the old liturgical books, beautiful and beloved, were suddenly useless.

This man tried his best to adapt to the new. His friends all drifted away, but he stuck it out. He saw the vestments change. The focal point of the entire sanctuary shifted from the high altar to a new table that was moved closer so that the people could somehow identify with what was going on. The choir melted. A guitar group took its place, and they sang pop songs.

And the priest became Mr. Personality and seemed to never stop talking to everyone and right at everyone from the first “good morning” to the last “go and serve others.” The Catholic ritual that had been defined by its precision and careful adherence to form, for longer than a thousand years, and which had shaped countless generations, had clearly been displaced by something like looked and felt strangely improvisatory.

It is interesting to talk to faithful Catholics of a certain age about this, people who were settled in life with children and with good careers and communities during the time when this upheaval took place. They speak about it only with a painful sense, still not sure if they were actually betrayed or if there was some wisdom in all this that they were missing. It is a bit like extracting war stories from veterans. They don’t talk easily.

We know what happened in the United States and Europe. The story is in the data. Where as many as 80% of Catholis went to Mass, now only 17% or so do. Religious orders collapsed. Schools collapsed. The priesthood was gutted. Moral life changed. Everything changed. The surprise is not that people drifted away but that a few stuck around. I’m always curious about these survivors and their perspective on the world. What they experienced can only be described as a shattering of a world they once knew and believed would last forever.

So after I finished my presentation, the old man in front of me summarized his view: “As I understand what you are saying, this Missal takes us back before all this stuff happened. If so, I think I’m going to like this change better than the last one.”

Of course that’s not really what I was saying, and this Missal does not take us back to the preconciliar rite. But it does capture some of the solemnity and seriousness that was so carelessly disregarded, so there was some truth in what he said.

The narrative that I provided above is still capable of inciting vast argument in the Catholic world. People protest that the loss of people was due to demographic and not ritual shifts, that the seeming meltdown would have been worse without the new Mass, and that, in any case, the old had to go away because it was stern, dark, dreary, confining, insular, and incompatible with the needs of modern people, and you can filled in the rest because we’ve all heard it a thousand times.

And yet, I would suggest that the extreme caution with which this current reform is taking place suggests a confirmation that the narrative is not only true; it is the conventional one. What that upheaval did was produce a Catholic people who are incredibly resistant to change and conservative beyond what they should be. Every change for the last fifty years has come at the expense of stable piety, solid doctrine, and reliable solemnity. Why would anyone want more of that? Why would they risk change at all? The Bishops, of all people, know this and hence the caution.

It is going to take another generation before Catholics start truly trusting again. Bugnini has left his mark on the world, and it one that makes progress incredibly difficult and popularly terrifying. We were supposed to be ushered into a new age of hyper flexibility and we all ended up becoming as implacably resistant to the new as any stick in the mud of centuries gone by.

And yet we must embrace, we must risk, change insofar as that change leads us to recapture what we’ve lost. Embracing the truths that were lost along the way is the only really means for helping us truly believe again.

In recent days, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to a number of different groups about the Third Edition of the Roman Missal and all that it means for our generation. In some ways, this is the first-ever Catholic Missal to finally get the music question right. Not even the Missal of the Council of Trent benefited from music experts involved in its creation. The music question was taken for granted, and it was years after its promulgation before the songbook to go with it was thought through. Over time, matters stabilized but not without fits and starts and quite a few botched books of chant having been produced along the way.

The Second Vatican Council produced no new Missal but merely a careful permissioning for one to be created at some point in the future, with no changes permitted that were not to the good of the Church. We know how that turned out. The interim Missal that came out in the United States was a quality product but a bit unstable, and hardly anyone believed that it would last very long. Sure enough, by 1969, a commission had produced the hoped-for new product, one that yielded coincided with, and assisted in causing, what is probably the largest upheaval and decline in Catholic institutions ever found on record.

The strange result of this event was the status quo today, which could be described as hyper conservative or perhaps more accurately described as stricken with fear of change. An odd stasis affects parish life. Bishops and priests all live in fear of doing too much in any direction for fear of alienating people yet again. Stability, blessed stability, is what the Catholic world seeks today because it is still recovering from the trauma delivered in the late 1960s.

And so, one can see why Bishops have been very cautious about the release of the new English translation. Even if the results are vastly better and correct most of the amazing errors of the past, there is a widespread fear that anything new could spark another meltdown. For my part, I expect the very opposite. I’ve large large portions of the Missal out loud to audiences and watched them swoon at the high language, the poetic cadence, the seriousness of the literary formulations. This Missal sounds and feels like Church. It turns out that people who go to Church rather like this.

But our times are not only about the new Missal. This is only the most visible symbol of improvement in our times. In the last few weeks, I’ve had some extremely exciting exchanges in both public and private that reveal what an amazing difference it has made to the world that we now have the first in-print book of sung propers in English for the ordinary form. The global distribution of the Simple English Propers book by Adam Bartlett has changed more than even I had anticipated.

I’ve told the story many times of how it suddenly dawned on me a little over one year ago that we really didn’t have anything to offer parishes that stood somewhere between the perfection of the ideal in the Graduale Romanum and the parish reality of four songs of nonliturgical text per Mass. So long as that was true, progress would be stopped simply because it is nearly impossible to leap from one to the other. You need musicians, training, experience, a pastor who is on board, and a people who are ready – ingredients that rarely come together all in one parish.

Today, we have the book and the viable option for any parish to start singing the real text of the Mass starting this next week! That is a glorious thing. The book is now used in many monasteries, convents, seminaries, and innumerable parishes. The North American College, for example, is all abuzz with the implications of this new book. This is helped by the fact that these are freely downloadable, so you don’t have to take the risk of buying for the entire year to try them out for one Sunday or just one communion chant.

The Simple English Propers are only the beginning. They serve as a model of the kind of music we need. I would also add that the Simple Choral Gradual by Richard Rice also falls into this category: simple music but absolutely beautiful in the real experience of Mass at regular parishes. There will be many other editions and approaches pouring out as the years go on. What matters most is that this book has finally begun to break up the old system that long predates Vatican II of singing any old thing at Mass.

This has proven to be strangely attractive to those good souls who inhabit the sectors of the Church known as Life Teen or the youth in general. I’m convinced that many of these people want to do the right thing but only need guidance and tools to get started. Now they have both. And what the youth are doing today is a foreshadowing of what everyone will be doing in the years down the road.

Keep in mind that what has inspired all of this is the new translation of the Missal. Most of all, it represents good faith on the part of the decision makers in the Church. No, the process was no perfect and it was even extremely messy at times. But the result is there for anyone to see. We will soon experience it – Advent I can’t come too soon. The results won’t be immediate but over time we are going to see the rebuilding process start to take shape.

The trends of our time show that hard work and prayer can make a difference in the Church and in the world. Millions have despaired for so long but today a new hope dawns, and it the privilege of this generation to be part of it.

For years I’ve heard the lamentations. Why can’t Catholics seem to put together a decent hymnal? We have all these companies, all these attempts, thousands of products available, warehouses of liturgical resources, pews stuffed with things, paper flying every which way. And yet, even after all this, there is no hymnal to compare with the clarity and competence that is so obvious in the book in the pews at the local Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian Church. Even the Mormons do a better job of packaging the songs of their faith for the people to sing at Sunday gatherings.

I can recall the very first exposure I had to what is laughingly called the Catholic hymnal and the practice of singing hymns. It was a small parish in Texas near the East coast. It might have been the first time I had entered a Catholic Church since I was an 8-year-old assistant to an organ repairman. I had started to develop an actual interest in the faith. The sheer shabbiness of the throw-away missallete and the seemingly universal refusal on the part of the people to sing a note startled me. Nothing has really changed in the intervening years. It’s the same most anywhere in conventional parishes: poor resources, silly music, and silent people.

I must be missing something, I thought. Well, over the years, I’ve developed a wide ranging theory that more-or-less removes responsibilities from the publishers, and I still think there is some validity here. Catholics are not historically a hymn-singing people as regards Mass. The Divine Office is another matter, but community participation in the Office has not been part of the Catholic experience for many generations. Mass is what Catholics today do, and the Mass isn’t a vessel that intrinsically calls for hymns. They will always be external to the liturgy itself, and Catholics are only responding to this reality. It is the ordinary chants, the propers, and the dialogues that are to be sung.

Further, and unlike Protestants, Catholics have never developed the practice of singing in parts and that must explain why these hymnbooks only have the melody line. There’s also the problem of the relatively recent change to the vernacular, which left the Catholics without their Latin-hymn heritage and introduce opportunities for second-rate song writers to foist their untested 70s kitsch on the faithful.

There are a number of problems with the theory. The biggest one is that there is a massive demand for a good hymnal that is not throw away, includes all readings, has good arrangements of English hymns, includes some Latin hymnody, has the Mass propers, has quality Psalmody, has solid chant in Latin and English, and otherwise offers theologically reliable texts of dignified hymns that people can sing. A hymnal is not a magic solution to the problems of bad Catholic music but it can vastly improve a parish.

Why haven’t publishers met this demand? They’ve had nearly half a century, and yet you have to dig and dig to find anything that is even presentable beside a protestant pew resource.

Right now, there are bad and not-so-bad options. If your parish gets roped into one of the bad options, years of disaster can follow. It really is true, however strange, that people refer to parishes by which publisher own them. People call this parish an “OCP parish,” that parish a “GIA parish,” and another as a “WLP parish.” You can be one of the three, some worse than others.

When out of town I like to tour parishes, and I can discern all I need to know by looking at the hymn racks. If anyone asks my opinion about what a parish should do, I always say: save your money and don’t get a hymnal at all. The readings are in English, so why do we need a book that repeats them? The Psalms can be downloaded for free. All the music of the Mass is free online in fact. As for hymns, many sites have public domain hymns for recessionals or post-communions. You can always make weekly pew aids. Rather than risk being owned by a publishers, it’s better to just do without.

Our own schola in my parish does without. We now plan liturgy without any recourse to the hymnal. This has saved us endless hours of frustration over crazy music, bad theology in texts, terrible arrangements, goofy Psalms, pathetic Mass settings, and more. We are free, and now the Roman Rite speaks for itself.

I’ve not had much luck in persuading pastors of this opinion. Taking the hymn-free option does indeed require some degree of musical expertise. You have to be pretty savvy to know how to pull it off. Not everyone can do this. New pastors who don’t entirely trust their music staff still need a hymnal just to work as a filtering device, and many pastors believe that the people do indeed need something to look at during Mass.

In this case, I’m happy to report that after half a century, there is now a viable alternative. The book is the Vatican II Hymnal. It is published by Corpus Watershed. This is not a big publisher. It is actually one person, and his name is Jeffrey Ostrowski. He has virtually no money at all, but tons of talent and passion. Alone, he has done this hymnal. I find this completely amazing.

Peter Kwasniewski wrote the following about his review copy: “How fitting, as this hymnal represents nothing short of a total elevation of the musical level of Catholic worship in a way the English-speaking world has never seen — before OR after the Council. Instead of sappy, sentimental stuff (as in too many preconciliar low Mass hymnals), it offers an excellent selection of poetically and theologically robust hymns. And refreshingly, unlike most postconciliar hymnals, there are no self-referential pop-song imitations. The rest of the hymnal is filled out with a diversity of highly useful material. What blows me away particularly is the inclusion of the entire Lectionary for Sundays and Feastdays. In one fell swoop, this hymnal obviates the need to pay big bucks to throw-away hymnal manufacturers (and, incidentally, fill dumpsters with environmental waste each year as the copyright runs out). All the readings are there; good responsorial psalms settings are there; the texts of the propers are there; the order of Mass. In short, this hymnal is a masterpiece.”

Another reader said: “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” An astute older musician said “It is beyond comprehension how our young lions (of both genders) have virtually, single-handedly revolutionized the editorial process of compiling worthy hymnals and propers collections.” And yet another reader said: “the book really is a beautiful work! The excerpts that Jeffrey kindly shared with us in advance isn’t quite the same as actually seeing it in-hand. This ought to come in editions with ribbon bookmarks and gilded pages! The book certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of content — my gosh, just about everything is in here. Every accent, every translation, every explanation and alternative ending and twenty-plus different Mass settings and references to online resources! Bravo! And I will be sharing this with my pastor for his consideration!”

For emphasis, please consider what this means. This book was done not by some old, bureaucratized, mechanized, industrialized publishing house. It was done by one person working alone and crowd sourcing the review process online. It uses mostly public domain resources. It has full approval from the USCCB, which he obtained in record time. Everything in here is 100% reliable. The whole enterprise is truly astonishing.

I don’t want to take away anything from other valuable attempts in this past but this book really is different, mainly because of the inclusion of readings, propers, and a full English-Latin Kyriale, plus excellent hymn layout. It does indeed raise the bar. It is the perfect marriage of the old faith with modern technology. Jeffrey is an excellent musician with a lifetime of experience, and he has finally put together his dream hymnal. That same dream is shared by many.

Now that it is available, I among many others will be curious to see what happens. Will it become a bestseller in the Catholic world? Many people are watching very carefully. You can order for $19 by calling 810.388.9500 or by visiting http://www.ccwatershed.org/vatican/