Category: Jeffrey Tucker

Somewhere, I have the communion chant for this following Sunday, ordinary form, printed on a white t-shirt, so that I end up singing it throughout the year. Someone will walk up and say, “hey, that looks like music. How does it go?” Then I can sing the whole chant, looking upside down, because of course no one ever cuts you off if you are singing a Gregorian chant, even if it is in the middle of baked-goods part of the grocery store.

Also, this chant has an exuberant youthfulness about it, and I’m especially appreciative of it because it reminds me of the opening words in the order of Mass in the extraordinary form – words I first heard when I would listen to Bernstein’s Mass as a young child. Writing in the early sixties, Mr. Progressive Bernstein put the words in English, not knowing just how progressive people would become less than a decade later when it was cut out of the order of Mass entirely.

In any case, the text survives in this communion chant for a week from Sunday, and appears in the same way in the extraordinary form for sexagesima (the link for us unfortunate souls for whom this day has been eliminated).

Pre-Lent – Sexagesima: Communio from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.

Jonathan Ryan might be so described. He has a new website.

We just heard from the USCCB that these Mass settings have been approved for liturgical use:

• Jeffrey Ostrowki honor of St. Ralph Sherwin
• Richard Rice, English Chant Mass
• Adam Bartlett’s Gloria
• Jacob Bancks, Mass of the Most Sacred Heart

I link my favorite portions:

Free Glory To God using the new ICEL translation (Roman Missal) from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.

ENGLISH CHANT MASS • Richard Rice • CREDO (Creed) from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.

You can follow the sheet music here or purchase the octavo from OCP.

There was a time when a channel so named might not have been a place as wonderful as this.

Thanks to a very special donor with a far-seeing vision, three fantastic books from the past have been digitized and thereby liberated into the infinite sector of the global commons. Many, many priests who celebrate the extraordinary form will rejoice at this news. These books that cover chants for Holy Week have been nothing short of impossible to obtain. You see them sometimes in choir lofts that miraculously escaped the great gutting of the late 1960s. Now they are back. If you print them, they appear on 8.5×11 sheets. I decided to forgo the color for load speed and convenience.

Cantus Passionis (1952): Volume I, Volume II, Volume III

For me personally, the least controversial aspect of the new translation is the restoration of “And with your spirit” as opposed to the street-talkin’ “And also with you.” In fact, I was disappointed that we are not to say, “and with thy spirit” because this is the phrase one hears most commonly in literature and legend. In any case, the transliteration of the Latin is most welcome.

But does it make sense? This is the question that got us in such trouble in the first place, for it implies a kind of liturgical rationalism and a mandate to come to understand and thereby approve — construct — every aspect of the liturgy. The rationalist project requires that we throw out as ancient cruft all that strikes us as odd and only retain that which makes sense to us in our generation. Here we have a serious problem because the liturgy itself is larger than one generation. It stretches back into a history the details of which grow foggier the early we go. More than that, there is an element of the divine at work in the development of liturgy, and this means that ultimately it might include words, rubrics, and even music that is beyond human comprehension. This is why a good rule is: defer to tradition. Changing things risks doing violence to a divine thing.

In any case, and understandably, people do want an explanation for the modern move to “and with your spirit,” and Fr. Austin J. Milner has provided a beautiful one today. The phrase is an ancient greeting, unique to Christianity, and intended to underscore our conviction that the spirit of God exists in every human person. This is certainly in contrast to the belief in the ancient world, which lacked this kind of mystical universalism at its ethical core.

This is such a beautiful explanation, one that helps underscore ideas that we too often take for granted: the dignity of the human person, the universality of human rights, the breath of God as the source of rationality, and much more. All of these were the great contributions that Christianity made to the world. I’m happy to read this explanation so that I can say these words with greater appreciation – and this is precisely the best use of these kind of studies, not to call into question a tradition but to shed light on its meaning and implications.

This article should certainly be shared with all Catholics.

By the way, this was apparently Fr. Milner’s last article that he wrote before he died.