And most of his reasons for eschewing so-called ‘contemporary’ worship give evidence of its equal unsuitability to our Catholic worship, the superficiality, the manipulation, commercialism, over-emphasis on the performer…
Jonathan Aigner, a Methodist musicians, writes at “Ponder Anew” on the Evangelical “channel” at Patheos, (a site I mostly avoid because something about it provokes intense dyspepsia in my computer, so be warned)
The common Catholic variation on his number three objection seems even more egregious, ISTM:
I never joined because it comes from the wrong sources. The best of the church’s hymnody was written by pastors and theologians. It was crafted by poets and scholars. The result are texts of high quality. But the industry in its quest to be marketable only has room for marketable people who write marketable songs. It entrusts sacred storytelling to many with dubious credentials as artists, poets, or theologians.
Some of the most widely published, shilled and used “Catholic” songs, (they are often not really hymns,) are the work of, not dubiously credentialed theologians, but OTHER-credentialed theologians, people who cannot possible create texts which reflect our Catholic beliefs because they do not share our Catholic beliefs.
Some of these at least have the integrity not to claim to be Catholic, but nominally Catholic or not, some seem to me to seek to change Catholic teaching by inserting their own “sung theology” into our liturgies.
Anyway, interesting piece.
(The combox has an insight into the whys and wherefores of judging an appropriate volume for the, uh…. band.)