Chant Café

Andrea Tornielli at Vatican Insider reports that in the coming weeks the Congregation for Divine Worship will establish a new “Liturgical Art and Sacred Music Commission…whose task will be to collaborate with the commissions in charge of evaluating construction projects for churches of various dioceses. The team will also be responsible for the further study of music and singing that accompany the celebration of mass.”

A few months ago Pope Benedict released the motu proprio Quaerit semper which reorganized the CDW, relieving the office of the duty of handling cases of the validity of priestly ordinations and marriages, and now we see a reason why this may have been done. The new Liturgical Art and Sacred Music Commission is now freed up to be able “to promote the training of priests, clerics and catechists, starting from the bare basics,” and it will aim “to revive a sense of the sacredness and mystery of the liturgy.”

The last instruction on sacred music to have come from the Vatican was Musicam Sacram in 1967, which contains many aims and directives that are still unfulfilled. Should we expect to see a new Vatican instruction on sacred music from this new commission with the CDW? 

Tornielli closes his article recalling that 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and 2013 the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium. Has the time come for an official clarification on the council’s true vision of sacred music? You can be sure that we will be following the work of this commission very closely. We should all pray for the successful establishment of this new commission, and for its success in helping guide the new era of liturgical renewal that is before us, especially as the English speaking world embarks forward this coming week into the new translation of the Roman Missal. 

Read Tornielli’s piece in its entirety here.

Msgr. James Moroney, executive secretary of Vox Clara, has posted the first in a year-long series of reflections on the Sunday collects as found in the new translation of Roman Missal at his blog Dignum et Iustum Est. 

Having been so intimately involved in the process of the translation of the Missal, he is sure to offer some powerful insights into these newly translated texts.

Something to consider is that for those who have been attending Mass celebrated in English according to the Missal of Paul VI for the past several decades, next Sunday is the first time that you will hear the ancient collects of the Roman Rite with clarity and integrity. The collects, in particular, were one of the most poorly translated portions of the liturgy in the 1973 ICEL translation, and many times even these were not heard because of the use of the composed “alternate collects” of the old ICEL.

Many graces surely await us on the First Sunday of Advent when the texts of the liturgy will shine forth with clarity and purity, emanating spiritual depth and theological truth.

I would love to see a similar effort take place with the sung propers of the Mass, another part of the liturgy that has been largely neglected and obscured in post-conciliar era.