Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

Writing at the New Liturgical Movement, I provide some background that readers of this site already know and also some conditions today that are ripe for progress in a direction that might have been taken 40 years ago.

The new English Missal currently being rolled out throughout the world publishes more music than any previous edition of the Roman Missal. All of it is English chant – vernacular versions of traditional Gregorian chant. With this Missal, the Church has very wisely seen that if liturgical/sacred music is to have a future in the current environment, it will need to begin with the vernacular, not only for pastoral and pedagogical reasons but also because there is an inherent integrity associated with this genre of singing.

The Missal chants will cover the ordinary chants and dialogues of the Mass. This music is the foundational song of the new Missal. The International Commission on English in the Liturgy has given away sheet music for these chants and encourages their download and use. ICEL has also posted high-quality accompaniments.

It is a requirement that all pew hymnbooks now being printed including this Missal setting of the Mass. Many organizations such as the CMAA have posted tutorial and videos (see this page). For those of us who love sacred music and seek to teach it to a new generation, it is a fantastic thing for us to be able to say, with clarity and conviction, “this is the music that the Church desires for the ordinary form of the Roman Rite.”Truly, this represents a sea change in what is arguably the most problematic area of Catholic liturgy today.

English chant is the great missed opportunity of the 1960s. REST THE REST

A main issue in the struggle for improving Church music today concerns pedagogy. In order to teach anything, you have to know where you are starting from. You have to have the right objectives, the right tools, and the right method for getting from here to there.

Where are we starting from with regard to Catholic music? So far as I can call, there are essentially two classes of singers that make up the overwhelming number of people providing liturgical services today: a comparatively small (even tiny) number of people who can sing the chant that the General Instruction speaks of, and then there is everyone else. Everyone else has not been given the opportunity. Mostly their singing lives have consisted in showing up at rehearsal and liturgy and duplicating the melody line of contemporary hymns or Mass settings that they hear on the organ or piano. Unplug the instruments, unplug the microphones, take out the pop-dance meters, and what are you left with? Fear and hence silence. This description applies in nearly every parish save special ones that have had an emphasis on real singing and excellence in music

This is the reality, and we must deal with it. For all the regrets that many Catholics have over their local music programs, they do need to understand that fixing the problem is not merely a matter of passing out new music, getting a new hymnal, or hiring a new organist. The problem goes much deeper: the singers are not prepared to upgrade. It is just not possible to sing the usual repertoire one week and switch to the Graduale Romanum (the body of chant that applies to the Mass) on the next week. There are pastoral problems with that plan, yes, but, more fundamentally, the singers are not prepare technically or temperamentally. Many of us have concluded after years of workshops that this plan of action makes for interesting continuing education classes, generating unfulfilled longings in some and confusion in others, it does not actually engage in the singers in a real-life parish situation enough to make a fundamental difference in the life of a parish.

Well, all of this is to report the results of a wonderful workshop I was pleased to be part of in Lansing, Michigan last week. I can honestly say that it was the most effective workshop I’ve attended. The singers where almost entirely of class two that I listed above: good singers who had never really been asked to use their voices before to sing, really sing, plainsong in a parish environment. They were perfectly capable of doing so but did not know it, since the parish was like most every other: defaulting week after week to accompaniment/metrical conventions. There are several elements that came together to make this a smashing success.

1. Marketing. This workshop was billed as a workshop in English chant. The critical word here is English. Most people have never heard of that but the idea is intriguing. It is the great missed opportunity after the Second Vatican Council. In this time of change, it seems worth revisiting. And for many people, taking the Latin of the table eased the mind. It’s wrong but the truth is that modern Catholics fear Latin; they don’t that they don’t understand it, they will miss pronounce it, that it is too hard, and it is not pastoral. I don’t agree with a single one of these points; I’m merely drawing attention to the reality. People will come to a workshop on English chant whereas they might be marginally nervous enough about Latin to cause them to think about something else to do that day. English is not threatening in the slightest. Moreover, a workshop billed as English chant makes it clear that the organizers do not have a extremist agenda and that the music that people learn might actually prove useful, even immediately. Sure enough, there were two and three times the number in attendance than were expected.

2. Materials and tools. For the first time, we actually do have English chant resources readily at hand. Most fundamentally, we have the blessed Missal chants of the forthcoming Missal. They are normative. They are in the celebrant’s book. They will be in all the pew aids. They are free to download and distribute. They are easy, solemn, beautiful, and standardized for the whole English-speaking world. This is an incredible gift! We’ve never had anything like this before. It’s true that there was English chant in the old sacramentary but it is was typo ridden and buried in the back of the book so that no one could even see it. It was also not as good. In addition, we now have another blessed thing: an in-print book of chant Mass propers in English for the full liturgical year. The Simple English Propers are also free online. They have Psalms for the full liturgical action. They are beautiful and solemn and easy. They are fantastically well aligned with the spirit of the Missal chants. Finally, we have sources for Psalms for the Responsorial Psalm. Again, they can be downloaded. If all goes well, we will have Arlene Oost-Zinner’s in print in the not-too-distant future. These are solemn, beautiful, and, again, free to download and distribute. These are all the tools that one needs to transform a liturgy! This is an amazing thing, and completely new.

3. Organized pedagogy. If you are going to sing authentic Gregorian chant, there are three hurdles: learning to sing free rhythm plainsong, reading a four-line staff with neumes, and dealing with language. This workshop took two elements off the table first and dealt only with the first issue, using the Missal chants. This took a good part of the morning. People were singing for the first time. I explained the purpose of this style of music and its place in history and current Catholic life. We sang all through the new Missal music. I can tell you this: the singers were completely enthralled. They had never experienced anything like this before. Truly it is like flying for the first time. It is glorious. They discovered that great truth is the Church has long taught: the voice is the primary liturgical instrument. Then the afternoon sessions came, and here the focus was on the propers. That meant dealing with a four-line staff and neumes. I sat in the back and watched with amazement at how Arlene was able to teach this entire group how to navigate pitches and scales and read them off the page. It took little more than one hour, and everyone was not only singing from square notes; they were loving them. We continued to sing and sing, using the Missal chants as a main example and moving on to the Psalm and to the propers sung in English. At this point, the remarkable thing happened. I took the men and we learn the entrance and offertory chants for the day. Arlene took the women and here was the key: they turned to the Latin Gregorian communion of the day, and learned in in about 20 minutes. Incredible right? Right. But here is the key: the group had already learned plainsong, had already learned to read neumes, so it was just a matter of adding that one final element of the language. Were people upset to learn Latin at an English workshop? On the contrary. The joy and exuberance was like nothing I had seen in any similar event.

4. Clarity of scheduling. The workshop only lasted six hours. It began at 10am and ended at 4pm, with 90 minutes for lunch. That is not a big investment of time. The morning had its focus. The afternoon had its focus. Then we were done. It was six of the most exciting hours of musical instruction these nice people had ever experienced. Not one singer was left behind. They stayed with the program from start to finish.

5. The absence of performance pressure. In most every workshop I’ve been part of, the event ends with Mass at which we sing what we learned in the day. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it turns out that there might be a number of reasons why this is not a good idea. People get really nervous for live liturgy. They do not sing as well as they might. Because the music is new, mental flake outs are common. The parishioners in the parish might be confused. Then you have a problem: the culminating event becomes the disappointing event. So this workshop took a different route. We did a demonstration liturgy, a practice run-through. People were still nervous but not as much, and mistakes didn’t have huge consequences. We were all in this as learners. It was beautiful, fun, and inspiring.

But let me tell you about the final thing sung at this event. This was the communion chant. I had my doubts that the Gregorian could really happen after such a short period. Then the women began to sing. Jaws dropped across the entire room. It was beyond-belief beautiful. They sang it so well, and they were so very happy. Keep in mind, this was Latin Gregorian chant – a very complicated piece. No one here had ever done anything like this before. And yet there it was in its full glory, as marvelous as a professional recording but even better because this was done after just one day of teaching. Everyone left with a sense of total excitement. But note here what happened: the workshop billed as English chant ended up putting on display – with heighten prominence – the true Gregorian chant of the Church. That was the final piece! Even people who claimed not to like Gregorian came away practically swooning!

I pass all this along because this experience can inform workshops going forward. It all reminded us of that television show Restaurant Impossible that transforms failing restaurants in two days. This was Liturgy Impossible, and the experience was nothing short of delightful. We even talked about doing a series called Liturgy Impossible. This can work.

Choirs that are just starting to sing the propers of the Mass, whether in Latin or English chant, usually begin with the communion chant. This is for a number of reasons, all justified. The next step is the offertory, usually sung in English and not the original Latin chant. The last of the propers to be sung with its correct purpose in mind is the entrance, and the delay is mainly because of the (faulty) perception that it would be a trauma to end the practice of singing a rousing hymn at the opening of Mass.

In any case, any progress on any of these chants of the Mass is great. As William Mahrt has emphasized, the chant is not just a pretty piece of music. Each serves a liturgical function that is reflected in the music and text.

The communion action is more elevated with the proper communion chant. So too for the offertory, which, when the chant is sung, becomes a liturgical action of importance rather than just a time to sit and sing. The entrance strikes me as enormously important in this respect. It makes a clear statement about where we are and what we are doing, establishing the aesthetic and theological tone for all that follows.

Well, in my own parish, we’ve been fussy about singing the propers for years, but we’ve tended to mix and match styles and language within each Mass, based on the availability of singers and rehearsal time. The piece from the Latin chant in the Graduale Romanum that we have tended to keep on the shelf is the offertory, choosing rather to sing an English setting.

For the first time this past weekend, our schola managed to do all three from the Graduale Romanum. This was a revelation to me. The effect was very striking. It was no longer the case that each of the propers appeared in isolation part of a time-bound liturgical action. Instead, they were integrated more in the sense of a musical suite. The offertory seemed to recall the entrance, and, in retrospect, the memory of the entrance seems like a foreshadowing of what happened later. It was the same with the communion, which seemed to recall the entrance and offertory and tie the entire liturgical experience together in a balanced and beautiful way from start to finish.

To be sure, I’ve sung in many Masses that used all three. At the colloquium each year, we do this every day. I sang for the extraordinary form for years at a parish. We’ve had workshops where this happened. But, I tell you, there is nothing quite like a regular Sunday parish Mass – your own parish –  to test a theory and observe the results. The special occasion Masses are always special but the proof of a musical and liturgical idea is in its regular, routine use in a normal setting.

I found the unity of the trio of Gregorian propers to be nothing short of perfect in every way. It was remarkably balanced. No longer did a Latin piece seem like the strange outlier in an otherwise English liturgy. The consistent use of the Latin seemed to “normalize” the textual and musical language throughout. This was the notable thing, the added advantage of singing all three. It was not merely a matter of piling on more of a good thing. There was a sense in which all three in the proper use and place became a single piece of music.

Of course there are practical advantages and even aesthetic ones from the addition of variety in the propers: some English, some Latin, some choral. There is nothing wrong with that and this will continue to be our normal way, as it is in growing numbers of parishes. I’m only drawing attention to what I found unexpected, that there are notable advantages to unifying a theme when and if this is possible. This suggests to me that this consideration is worth adding as an aspiration going forward.

These observations really do raise a more fundamental point and it concerns how we go about evaluating liturgical music. Right now, all choirs, pastors, and directors of music are busying themselves shopping for new music for the third edition of the Roman Missal. We have three months to do this, and the way people go about doing this is listening to MP3 samples online, watching youtubes, sight-reading scores, and perhaps getting a group together in the choir room to sing through the choices.

This is unavoidable of course but it is fraught with problems. A Gloria heard from your laptop is going to be a different piece of music with a different effect than the same Gloria sung in your parish Mass. A sanctus setting heard on a youtube is very different from the same piece that occurs in the liturgy at the crucial time during the Eucharistic prayer. Nor can we just stare at a page with black notes and gain a sense of precisely what it will be like in the space and time in which is serves a liturgical function. In is different piece of music when embedded in its intended home and place.

Of course we can judge its musical merit in some sense, but even here, there is reason to be careful. Something can look ridiculously simple on a page. But when used in liturgy, it can emerge as beautiful, elegant, quiet prayer, something beautifully suited for its purpose. Just look at a Psalm tone for example. On the page, it is only a few notes with the same not repeated again and again. In liturgy, it becomes nothing short of angelic.

This is why it is just a profound error to judge liturgical music the same way that we would judge a song on the radio or something selected for us by the “genius” setting on the iTunes software.

There is a real danger to the presumption that we can really make that final judgement on our own, outside the spiritual and theological environment of the real liturgy. I’ve heard this time and again with regard to the Simple English Propers, for example. On paper, they might seem uneventful. In real life, they are just thrilling. This is because our voices and the text are no longer isolated things but rather mix into the mysteries of the liturgical action. The melodies take flight under these conditions.

It was real-life liturgy that illustrated for me the point of integrated styles on the use of sung propers. This is really the only context in which we can presume to use our own judgement to evaluate. Once again – and inevitably – the only music truly perfect for the Roman Rite is the music of the Roman Rite itself.

Some three months from implementation, how stands the transition to the Third Edition of the Roman Missal? In terms of the text and acceptance overall, the dissidents have calmed down, the publishers are printing the Missals, the workshops are proceeding apace, and we can all look forward to a vastly enriched liturgical experience beginning in Advent.

But there is another issue that is hugely important to the overall presentation of the Roman Rite, and that issue is music. Commentators tend to underestimate the significance of this factor, but if you talk to average Catholics, this issue turns out to be decisive. The music provides the aesthetic framework that is communicated to the faithful, and it is one they readily understand as a sign of the well being and confidence of the Church herself.

More than any other issue, the music issue was the one that most traumatized Catholics when the first Mass of Paul VI was promulgated. In the same way that this new Missal corrections that serious translations of that edition, so too does this Missal offer a chance for making things right.

The text issue can be settled from on high, and it has been. It was a matter of making a new translation and implementing it, and this has been done. The music issue is not so simply solved. It relies on parish-by-parish cooperation in the spirit of the change. Legislation can suggest, the Church can publish, influential voices can explain and guide. But, in the end, it is all about the parish, the pastor, and the directors of music at all levels.

Pastors, however, have come to fear the music question because it continues to divide people like few other questions. Uncountable numbers of people simple refuse to go to Mass because they can’t stand what has happened to music at Mass, and the people who remain continue to be as divided as any group that fights over song selections. As for the musicians themselves, no matter what they are playing or singing, they take great offense at the slightest suggestion that they have made less than stellar choices and need to change.

All this wrangling is completely understandable given the near-total loss of the music that is native to the ritual, namely the chant. Chant is music specifically crafted beautifully elucidate the text of the Mass in a stylistic manner than transcends social divisions. It does not draw from contemporary cultural archetypes so that it does not go out of fashion. It worked in the first century and it works today to accomplish what liturgical music is supposed to do.

This tradition has been completely replaced because of a series of missteps following the close of the Second Vatican Council. The Council made a strong call for chant. The Vatican published two books of chant, one before and one after the new Mass appeared. But the voice calling for chant was always an “uncertain trumpet.” The right to pick any music for the Mass, embedded in legislation, led to an untenable situation in which the Mass music and therefore vast aspects of the liturgy itself were effectively contracted out to third party publishers – and not just the composition and printing of the music but also every aspect of the text and style.

A few years ago, the tipping point arrived for many Church officials. They discerned that something had to be done about the loss of the chant tradition. The introduction of the new Missal seemed like the best vehicle for this: a more authentic translation should go along with more authentic musical experience of the Mass. This idea was to reduce in our liturgical environments the role of artificial, industrialized, commercial pop music and increase the role of simple chant that people can actually sing and grow to love.

This is why so much effort was put into composing chants for the Third Edition of the Roman Missal. Just enough of the words of the Order of the Mass are changed in the new Missal to make nearly all existing “Mass settings” unusable. The metrical elements of the old text that caused them to be said in a syllable-driven 6/8 meter (“Glory to God in the highest / and peace to his people on earth”) were changed to be more accurate and eliminate meter and hence encourage plainsong.

Strategically, this amounted to a stroke of genius. With the slate clean, the next step was to formulate music that consistent with the Roman Rite tradition but is also easy enough for parish musicians to sing and implement in their parishes. Further, this music should be in English in order to overcome the great fear of our age of Latin, and doing this explores that largely neglected possibility opened up by the Council.

The chants were made integral to the Missal text itself. ICEL officials have said, time and again, that the Missal chants themselves should be thought of as a baseline music for all parishes. To this end, the USCCB has given approval for all of this music to be used in liturgy in the months before the Missal is scheduled to be implemented.This is why the music has been be given away free online far in advance, so that everyone could practice it. Publishers outside the Catholic Church, however, were not excluded but rather invited to offer settings consistent with the new text and the emerging ethos.

It was all very bold and brilliantly done. It’s probably the plan that I would have crafted had anyone asked me. It strikes me that this overarching plan had a high probability for success in dealing with the problem, which is that the music in all but a few parishes bears any likeness to the historical experience of the Roman Rite or the hopes of the Second Vatican Council.

If the whole idea was a great one, is it working? For the well educated musicians in parishes with savvy pastors, the answer is yes. My own private estimate is that perhaps 1000 parishes that were otherwise stuck in a pop-music rut are already making the shift. They are embracing the singing of the Missal chants without accompaniment. These same parishes are using the occasion to implement sung propers (see the Simple English Propers) and make some efforts to unify all the parishes Masses around this theme.

There is no question that this is progress, even amazing progress. It is tempting to look on the downside I will discuss below and forget that all of the above would have been unthinkably wonderful even two years ago.

However, there were some missing pieces in the bold plan. A major factor has to do with the competence of the musicians in the parish that are to be the front line for implementation. I’m not sure that I’ve seen solid data how many of these people are trained to read music, receive a professional salary, and have knowledge of the structural demands of the Roman Rite. But I can say that in my own experience, most seem to be well intentioned volunteers who, if they are paid at all, receive just a small token for their services.

I’ve given speeches to large gatherings of diocesan musicians and ask for a show of hands of how many can name the minor propers of the Mass; only a few hands in a hundred go up. Fewer still can read basic notation; most follow along with the piano or affect singing based on what they have heard before. The prospect of hearing a note in their heads and breaking a silence to intone the Sanctus absolutely terrifies many of these people.

As just one example, at the largest gathering of Catholic musicians this year at the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, a speaker began singing Ave Maria, and several separate reports suggest that perhaps only one quarter of those in attendance could pick up the singing. And this is with 3,000 people in attendance.

The bottom line is that despite growing pockets of expertise and obvious progress over the last ten years, the major swath of people who have been pressed into service in Catholic liturgy over the country are not prepared to manage what exists much less lead in a transition to a liturgy in which the human voice predominates in chanted settings of the ordinary and propers.

There is, in addition, a deep conservatism that has taken hold in all our parishes, and it takes the form of preferring the status quo to any change. This results from the depleted musical capital just discussed and also a leftover effect of the great upheaval of the 1960s that continues to leave many people in the pews completely shellshocked. Even among those who eventually became used to the new rite of Mass did not look upon the revolutionary fervour of the period with affection. Forty years later, we are in a strange position of panicking about the slightest change to anything at all. And so it is with Catholic musicians today. The deep irony is that lasting legacy of the Council of change has been a profound fear of change.

The new Mass text changes about 10 words in total for the full set of ordinary chants. But based on the level of panic on the part of musicians, one gains the impression that they are all being asked to sing in a long recitative in Swahili and an aria in Galician. My inbox certainly testifies to the level of hysteria. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t receive pleading notes of “save me, save me.” When the head of ICEL gave a talk in New York recently, he took time for questions and they were nearly all asked with a tone of fear and loathing underscore by deep confusions.

What happens to a large community of people who are barely getting by as it is and then are asked to change toward something that is arguably more difficult? They throw themselves at the mercy of the institutions promoting the familiar. This is pretty much what has happened in a large number of parishes, as the old-line publishers who have learned ways to flatter amateurs with settings that get them through the day are thriving once again.

It’s possibly true that ICEL, the USCCB, and Vox Clara all overestimated the capacity of average Catholic musicians to adapt and sing what strikes experienced liturgical musicians are ridiculously easy chanted settings of the Mass text. Even so, it could be the case that even this material is too difficult for their current abilities – or, at least, this is what many singers believe.

What about sending teachers out to parishes to get them going? Many of us have done workshops and worked with singers. We’ve made youtubes that have received as many as 7,000 views. We’ve produced editions in four-line staves and modern notes. But all our efforts combined are dwarfed by the influence of the large publishers, who have lobbied hard at every Office of Worship in this country (“you should have one Mass setting for the entire diocese and it should be the one we sell”), done non-stop seminars all over the country, and promoted proprietary music at every stop.

Pastors are in a position to get the musical transition on track with simple interventions. But, again, they are in the habit of not intervening in their music programs and are not interested in starting now.

None of this is to say that there has not been and won’t continue to be progress. After all is said and done, hundreds of parishes will be singing Catholic ritual music whereas they might otherwise after sung something else forever. But all these efforts are too little to amount to a wholesale counterrevolution that many have long awaited.

Some years ago, Michael Joncas wrote a book on sacred music that concluded that if chant were to make a serious return to American Catholic parishes, it would require concerted, relentless educational efforts over the very long term. It would appear that he was precisely right. Is it worth every effort? It is worth as much effort as the faith itself requires.

Remember too that this is only round one, and that this struggle isn’t about us vs. them. It is about creating space to let the voice of the liturgy itself speak and sing. There is every reason to be confident about the long-term future. The high hopes of the Council will eventually prevail.

In normal times, it should be possible for singers in Churches of the same tradition to share singers. The repertoire would be the same, and because music requires some degree of expertise, not just anyone can step into the role should one need a part filled or a substitute cantor.

This is not often done in the Catholic Church today because not even parishes in the same community share the same basic material. It’s not that singers can’t handle the material. It is that traditions are now hyper-localized and singers fear that they can’t really get a handle on it or it is not worth trying just for one Mass.

Actually the situation is even stranger for the Catholic Church today. Even within parishes, singers are typically attached to a single Mass time and do not venture out of it to sing another one. This is a matter of keeping the peace, but it is also a matter of taste and competence. Singers are hyper-specialized one Mass to the next, one parish to the next.

This creates a serious problem that we don’t often think about simply because we are not the habit of substituting for each other. Quite simply, it is hard to find replacements during absences for vacations or sicknesses. Priests do this all the time but not so with singers and instrumentalists. They repertoire is just so different and the the practices are so varied. We end up being isolated in our liturgical performance techniques.

So let me explain why I’m bringing this up, a subject that had never really occurred to me before. I received a call from a priest in medium-sized town where there are five parishes with seven priests, all of whom are friends.

This priest told me that his experience with the Simple English Propers has been mind blowing. For many, many years he has wanted to implement chant in his parish but he could never find the singers who could start and inspire stability in a chant group. But now the SEP has made all the difference. The singers spend the same time in rehearsal as they did before but now they have the rewarding experience of singing the liturgical text itself plus singing chant in the way they all know, in their hearts, they are supposed to sing.

And much to this pastor’s astonishment, he has been able to implement this book at all the Masses in his parish – finally providing blessed relief from the “stodgy” Mass where they sing 19th century classics, the hip youth Mass where experimental garage bands try out their wares, and the single-cantor Mass where the singer fumbles around looking for the right note for an hour. Now, within his parish, any singer can sing at any Mass, and each is glad to do so because the experience is so rewarding.

He now has a glimmer of hope that at least the communion chant from the Graduale Romanum can actually make an appearance in time, and, from there, it is straight up into the normative chant propers of the Roman Rite.

So lately, all the pastors in this community have talking about strategies for implementing the new edition of the Roman Missal. They all talked about how they love, love the SEP, and how this book holds out the prospect of finally doing something about the music problem in their parishes.

Now to the really cool idea: they have all decided to implement the SEP as the standard music of all five parishes. And then one of them hit on the key idea here. This means that they can share singers! Obviously all the singers live within quick driving distance of each other. They can put together a database of them with contact information and this way the director of music can easily call for substitutes when one is needed.

There would be no need for an additional meeting or a rehearsal even. They can just show up and sing because they will already know the music. It will be the same music that the singer will have sung in the prior Mass or the same music that will be sung at a later Mass.

This also has advantages for the priests, so that they are not alarmed at the puzzling selections of music when they are substituting for the friend across town.

These are the advantages of standardization. We get to pool resources within a single parish and now within a single town. This improves the programs of everybody, and we even get to experience that thing that everyone talks about but hardly anyone really experiences: unity. And unity in form should surely be a feature of the Roman Rite.

Just as importantly, the Simple English Propers help to form people in how to sing, which permits us to begin to build up the musical capital that is a first step toward instituting solid music programs in our parishes. The children can hear them and aspire to sing them. New singers will be recruited from among the adult population. The celebrants will begin to have a higher respect for music and its contribution to the liturgical life of the parish.

To me, this is just a brilliant scheme, and a testimony to the appeal of chant across everyone demographic. Instead of fighting over the radio dial, they all agree to turn it off and make universal and completely different music themselves. Instead of being competitors or even enemies, the musicians can cooperate together and be friends, working together in the great project.

The Missal chants, which aspire to be the fundamentum of the liturgical repertoire, also help here. Everyone can count on these chants as the core on which everything else is built. If there is ever a question about what to sing, the answer can come easy: sing what is in the Missal. And now to add to that, the answer concerning what else to sing no longer inspires fist fights and ignorant statements about how toe-tapping something is. The answer is the Simple English Propers.

Even for parishioners, this is a blessing. Choosing a Mass to attend is no longer a dangerous undertaking fraught with fears of aesthetic shock and awe. It is simply a matter of finding out the Mass times and attending.

It’s remarkable to think that one book can make such a difference, but it underscores a point I’ve made many times. We cannot solve our problems until we have the tools to solve our problems.