Recovering the lost art of honoring God

Anthony Esolen indicts pop Church music, for excellent reasons.

The implicit message of such music is that the worship of God is just like everything else: putting the moves on a girl at a drinking party, chilling out with college friends in the wee hours, selling a fashionable automobile, advertising a soap opera. We have enough and more than enough of that already. We need far more, and other. It’s as Aidan Nichols puts it, in Looking at the Liturgy: “Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.”

Plenty more here.

Final Shopping Day for Advent Weekdays in the Hymn Tune Propers Emporium

If you or a Pastor or Music Director you know would like to do something liturgically special for Advent Weekdays here at the last moment, just click here, print out as many copies as you need for your daily Mass crowd, place them on a table where they will be noticed, and sing these versified Entrance Antiphons at the beginning of daily Mass.

Any Long Meter tune that is familiar in your parish will work fine. It might work well to use the tune to use the tune for Creator of the Stars of Night until December 17th, and then switch to the familiar O-Antiphon tune for O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

The Hymn Tune Propers Project provides an easy first step away from randomly-selected hymnody and towards the use of the proper liturgical texts of the Mass. The proper texts are spiritually beneficial for Catholics, and for those parishes that might be ready to take a first tentative step, this Advent Calendar of Hymn Tune Introits might be just the way to begin the process.

Prayer of Thanksgiving

A wonderful prayer found in the new Missal, expressing our thanksgiving to God that we (at least in America) give in a particular way today.

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For, although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation, through Christ our Lord.

Common Preface IV, 2010 Roman Missal (OF)