Ron has done the yeoman's work in getting this off the ground. I have helped where I can and am currently participating in the schola. We have a fabulous schola director who is a priest pursuing a graduate degree in liturgical music. The organ was recently restored and sounds beautiful.
The article is rather charitable, considering its in the New York Times. They couldn't resist getting in a dig or two, but there are also some paragraphs that seem quite out of place for the New York Times.
Goetz, this is a possible alternative, accessible via public transportation (PATH), should crossing the Hudson River lose its appeal or convenience.
I'm with you 100% that the Traditional Mass needs to be restored.
Plus, the present scandal demonstrates just how out of touch the bishops are regarding the wishes of the laity. We request the Latin Mass and are ignored; we request the bishops remove pedophile priests and are ignored.
But the Traditional Mass is not in and of itself a solution to the current crisis, as the scandal surrounding the Society of St. John makes clear.
Or: The American Catholic Church goes against many aspects of true Christianity.
"Being a traditionalist," he said," is not just Mass. It's a mindset. It's orthodoxy plus culture, an entire milieu of Catholic living."
That has been my experience with the Latin mass and the burgeoning community that mass has created. I have never met nor been inspired by so many knowlegable and faithful Catholics as those who attend the Latin mass. I am in full agreement that the orthodoxy that the Latin mass can't help but inspire is precisely what the Church needs today.
This scandal probably wouldn't bother the American Catholic Church too much. Goofy journalists need to know that there is a difference between the Roman Catholic Church in America and a group of heretics. Isn't "liberal reform" an oxymoron.
patent
WOW. Now I am really getting excited. Is it true that your priests used to face the altar, as ours still do?
Thanks for posting this, by the way. What seems to be needed is some basic framework put in writing by the bishops affirming that some standards of reverence, solemnity, and dignity be restored to the celebration of Mass. I have seen liturgies which come across as sort of a mix of a PTA meeting and a consciousness-raising rally. Too giddy. Too Protestant in a folksy sort of way. What seems to be happening is that the informal and vulgar elements of secular American mass culture are creeping in. Someone once wrote an article on post-Vatican II liturgical music entitled "Guitar Theology." Can't recall the author, but it hit a few nails on the head. Mass is not a townhall meeting. It's not an encounter group. It's not a political rally. It's not a folk concert. And it's not a public opinion comedy talkshow hosted by the "presider" to air his opinions on everything under the sun. There is a great need for clarification on the sacramental nature of the Mass. The current scandals didn't happen in a vacuum. They took place in a context already marked by the "dilution of the solemnity of the Mass." This isn't a coincidence. When Mass is celebrated with a lack of seriousness and solemnity, it's more likely there will be a lack of seriousness and solemnity in some vocations and in the handling of the teachings of the Church.
Abortion is murder. Premarital sex is a sin and wrong. Sexual perversions, which, by defnition includes homosexuality, are wrong. God forgives people who repent of their sins, not people who rationalize them.
Pope John XXXII was an old fool. A nice man, but an old fool. The evils wrought by Vatican II are sowing their seeds today in the Catholic Church and its fellow Christian faiths. Ecumenicalism is fine, as long it doesn't include tolerance of sins and abominations.
I wish the Catholic Church a speedy return to the Tridentine Mass, unbending standards of right and wrong, a faith centered on God instead of man, and the religious recovery which will accompany it.
I wish a simlar recovery to its sister Christian faiths, mired in the same morass of moral relativism.
Remembering "the Long Hot Summer"
How the Church and American society have changed since 1968.
By James Hitchcock
(excerpt):
Modernity enthroned
In Church and secular society the Sixties also spawned a "lost generation" —people who were young at the time, who imbibed the spirit of the age as naturally as they breathed, who grew into adulthood merely assuming that the outlook of the Sixties reflected reality. It was a phenomenon which made the Democratic Party the permanent stronghold of Sixties beliefs and produced a generation of Catholic priests and religious, now in their 50s, whose formative years were spent amidst total theological and spiritual confusion and in the belief that renewal meant the repudiation of as much of the Catholic past as possible. Although many religious of that generation believe they were liberated by post-conciliar events, in reality most were merely passive victims of a cultural upheaval which they scarcely even began to understand. Had the culture remained stable, most of those who are now bitter towards their religious past would have continued to be happy and productive in their vocations.
Thus such counter-revolution as exists, both in the Church and in the world, tends to be the work of younger people, too young to have been deeply affected by the Sixties. These young people, as they grew up, could readily see the destructive legacy of the previous decades. In the Church, then, there is a rising generation of orthodox priests in their 20s and 30s.
Among the many dramatic events of the year 1968, the death of America's most liberal prelate. Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan of Atlanta, was not much noticed. But following his death his young auxiliary bishop, Joseph L. Bernardin, was made general secretary of the newly reorganized National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference, and under his guidance that body was shaped to make it cautiously receptive to Sixties ideas. Ever since that time, the NCCB/USCC has defined the dominant spirit of American Catholicism in ways which even the most intrepid bishops seem unable to resist.
* The full implications of the spirit of the Sixties were not understood even by many of its proponents, for the simple reason that it cut so deep and spread so wide. It was nothing less than a global attack on the idea of truth itself, on the very possibility of any understanding of reality which might lead to stable social relationships. It was a visceral, compulsive reaction against anything or anyone making claims to such truth. *
Ultimately this has been merely the final and inevitable working out of the spirit of modernity itself, because the modern spirit has for three centuries defined itself precisely as the autonomous but oppressed self systematically struggling to liberate itself from outside constraint. Thus all authoritative claims must be rejected, not on their merits but simply because they are authoritative. As modernity understands it, the self will be truly free, and truly a self, only when all vestiges of external "infringement" have been eliminated. This logic reached its inevitable climax in the Sixties and was only half-coherently expressed in the counter-culture. Although various ideological reasons were given for the violent upheavals of the Sixties, finally acts of destruction were simply self-validating.
...In the Church also it is now the visible agenda of groups such as feminist nuns who casually speak of "christofascism" and identify themselves with Eve in her defiance of God's command not to eat the forbidden fruit. There is a concerted movement to grant a privileged position in the Church to every kind of sexual deviation, even as traditional forms of worship are abandoned and the liturgy stripped of all traces of transcendence.
Both in Church and society such efforts proceed according to a kind of irrational compulsion, and will never cease while anything sacred is still left standing, so long as the revolutionaries encounter no effective resistance...
James Hitchcock is a founder of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and a history professor at St. Louis University. © The Catholic World Report, P.O. Box 591300, San Francisco, CA 94159-1300, 800-651-1531.
The Catholic World Report, July 1998, 44-51.
The Hidden Hand Behind Bad Catholic Music
By J.A. Tucker
(excerpt):
Musical Gnosticism
...But why should the liturgy team go along with this program? The average parish musical team is made up of nonprofessionals. Its poorly paid members are untrained in music history; they have no particular craving for chant or polyphony, which often seems quite remote to them. Most musicians in average Catholic parishes would have no idea how to plug into the rite an extended musical setting from, say, the high Renaissance, even if they had the desire to do so.
The OCP (Oregon Catholic Press) understands this point better than most publishers. In an interview, Michael Prendergast, editor of Today's Liturgy, pointed again and again to the limited resources of typical parishes. The OCP sees serving such needs as a core part of its publishing strategy; its materials keep reminding us that we don't need to know Church music to get involved.
Lack of familiarity with the Church's musical tradition would not be a grave problem if there were a staple of standard hymns and Mass settings to fall back on. But it has been at least 30 years since such a setting was available in most parishes. The average parish musician wants to use his talents to serve the parish in whatever way possible, but he's at a complete loss as to how to do it without outside guidance. The OCP fills that vacuum.
Under its tutelage, you can aspire to be a real liturgical expert, which means you have attended a few workshops run by OCP-connected guitarists and songwriters (who explain that your job as a musician is to whip people into a musical frenzy: loud microphones, drum tracks, over-the-top enthusiasm when announcing the latest hymn). These "experts" love the OCP's material because it allows them to keep up the pretense that they have some special knowledge about what hymns should be used for what occasions and how the Mass ought to proceed.
Real Catholic musicians who have worked with the OCP material tell horror stories of incredible liturgical malpractice. The music arrangements are often muddled and busy, making it all but impossible for regular parishioners to sing. This is especially true of arrangements for traditional songs, where popular chords give old hymns a gauzy cast that reminds you of the 1970s group Chicago.
The liturgical planning guides are a ghastly embarrassment. Two years ago, for example, the liturgical planner recommended "Seek Ye First" for the first Sunday in Lent ("Al-le-lu-, Al-le-lu-yah"). In numerous slots during the liturgy, OCP offers no alternative to debuting its new tunes. When traditional hymns are offered, they're often drawn from the Protestant tradition, or else the words are changed in odd ways (see, for example, its strange version of "Ubi Caritas"). The liturgical instructions are equally pathetic. On July 8 this year, the liturgical columnist passes on this profound summary of the gospel of the day: "Live and let live."
What You Can Do Right Now
The truth is that no one is happy with the state of Catholic liturgical music-least of all musicians-and the OCP is a big part of the problem. So, what can you do? Step 1 is to get rid of the liturgical planning guides and use an old Scripture index to select good hymns that have stood the test of time (if you absolutely must continue to use the OCP's materials). Step 2 is to rein in the liturgical managers and explain to them that the Eucharist, and not music, is the reason people show up to Mass Sunday after Sunday. Step 3 is to get rid of the OCP hymnals and replace them with Adoremus or Collegeville or something from GIA (no, none of these is perfect, but they are all an oasis by comparison).
Finally, reconsider those innocuous little missalettes. These harmless-looking booklets may be the source of the trouble. Parishes can unsubscribe-accept no OCP handouts or volume discounts. There are plenty of passable missalettes and hymnals out there, and all the choral music you'll ever need is now public domain and easily downloadable for free (www.cpdl.org).
In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2000), Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger states clearly that popular music does not belong at Mass. Indeed, it's part of "a cult of the banal," and "rock" plainly stands "in opposition to Christian worship."
This is very strong language from the cardinal. And yet we know that many liturgy teams in American parishes will continue to do what they've been doing for decades-systematically reconstructing the liturgy to accommodate pop aesthetic sensibilities. The liturgy is treated not as something sublimely different but as a well-organized social hour revolving around religious themes.
It's up to you to decide the future course of your parish's liturgy: reverent worship or hootenanny. Despite what the OCP might tell you, you can't have both.
J.A. Tucker is the choral director of a schola cantorum and writes frequently for CRISIS.