The Hidden Hand Behind Bad Catholic Music

Well, if your missalettes are like those issued in more than half of American parishes, they're copyrighted by the Oregon Catholic Press (OCP)-the leading Catholic purveyor of bad music in the United States. Four times a year, it prints and distributes 4.3 million copies of the seemingly unobjectionable booklets (which OCP doesn't call missalettes).

But that's just the beginning of its massive product line, where each item is integrated perfectly with the others to make liturgical planning quick and easy. To instruct and guide parish musicians and liturgy teams, the OCP prints hymnals, choral scores, children's song books, Mass settings, liturgy magazines (with detailed instructions that are slavishly followed by parishes around the country), and CDs for planning liturgies and previewing the newest music.

This collection of products, however, does not include a hymnal-or anything else-designed to appeal to traditional sensibilities (its Heritage Hymnal is deceptively misnamed). The OCP's experts never tire of promoting the new, rewriting the old, and inviting you to join them in their quest to "sing a new church into being" (as one of their hit songs urges). The one kind of "new" that the OCP systematically avoids is the new vogue of traditional music that has proved so appealing to young Catholics.

The bread and butter of the OCP are the 10,000 music copyrights it owns. It employs a staff of 150, runs year-round liturgy workshops all over the United States, sponsors affiliates in England and Australia, and keeps songwriters all over the English-speaking world on its payroll. In fact, it's the preferred institutional home of those now-aging "St. Louis Jesuits" who swept out the old in 1969 and, by the mid-1970s, had parishes across the country clapping and strumming and tapping to the beat.

The OCP also sails under the flags of companies it has acquired, established, or represented along the way: New Dawn Music, Pastoral Press, North American Liturgy Resources, Trinitas, TEAM Publications, White Dove Productions, and Cooperative Ministries. Every time it purchases-or assumes the distribution of-another publisher, its assets and influence grow.

But while the OCP dictates the liturgies of most U.S. parishes, it has no ecclesiastical authority. It's a large nonprofit corporation-a publishing wing of the Diocese of Portland-and nothing else. It has never been empowered by the U.S. bishops, much less Rome, to oversee music or liturgy in American parishes. The OCP's power over Catholic liturgy is derived entirely from its copyrights, phenomenal sales, and marketing genius. Nonetheless, it wields the decisive power in determining the musical culture of most public Masses in the United States.

And once a parish dips into the product line of the OCP, it is very difficult to avoid full immersion. So complete and integrated is their program that it actually reconstructs the sense that the liturgy team has about what Catholicism is supposed to feel and sound like.

But few of those subject to the power of the OCP understand that it's the reason why Catholic liturgy so often seems like something else entirely. For example, pastors who try to control the problem by getting a grip on their liturgies quite often sense that they're dealing with an amorphous power without a name or face. That's because very few bother to examine the lay-directed materials that are shaping the liturgies. Too many priests are willing to leave music to the musicians, fearing that they lack the competence to intervene.

Meanwhile, the nature of the OCP is completely unknown to most laypeople. Many Catholics shudder, for example, when they hear the words Glory & Praise, the prototypical assortment of musical candy that was already stale about 15 years ago but which mysteriously continues to be repackaged and rechewed in parish after parish. "Here I am, Lord," "Be Not Afraid," "City of God," "One Bread, One Body," "Celtic Alleuia," and (wait for it) "On Eagle's Wings"-these all come courtesy of the OCP.

But at the publisher itself, this moldy repertoire is not an embarrassment. On the contrary, the publisher brags that Glory & Praise, whose copyright it acquired in 1994, continues to be the best-selling Catholic hymnal of all time. And what about those prayers of the faithful that seem far more politically than doctrinally correct? They're probably from the OCP, too. A new edition of its Prayer of the Faithful is printed every year. (In what is surely great news for the unrepentant, the OCP brags that the volume helpfully includes "creative alternatives to the Penitential Rite.")

It wasn't always like this. Before 1980, the OCP was called the Oregon Catholic Truth Society. It was founded in 1922 in response to a compulsory school-education law that forced Catholics to attend public schools. Archbishop Alexander Christie got together with his priests to found the society. Its aim: to fight bigotry and stand up for truth and Catholic rights.

In 1934, the Oregon Catholic Truth Society released a missal called My Sunday Missal. It was good-looking, inexpensive, and easy to use. It became the most popular missal ever (you can still run across it in used bookstores).

But the rest of the story is as familiar as it is troubling. Sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Oregon Catholic Truth Society began to lose its moorings. Catholic truth had to make room for the Age of Aquarius.

Thus, in the course of a single decade, a once-reliable representative of Catholic teaching became reliably unreliable. Money given to the organization to promote truth was now being used to advance a revolutionary approach to Catholic life, one that repudiated traditional forms of the faith. The only thing that did not change was the breadth of its influence: Under the new dispensation, it was still a powerhouse of Catholic publishing.

If you've been keeping up with the OCP's latest offerings, you know that the songs from the mid-1970s don't begin to plumb the depths. The newest OCP hymnals are jam-packed with music from the 1980s and 1990s, with styles meant to reflect the popular music trends of the time. (Actually, they're about five years behind the times.)

They sail under different names (Music Issue, Journeysongs, Heritage Hymnal, Glory & Praise), but the content is similar in all of them: an eclectic, hit-and-miss bag with an emphasis on new popular styles massaged for liturgical use. (Worst choice: Spirit & Song, which "encourages the youth and young adults of today to praise God in their own style.")

Some of the newer songs sound like variations on the musical themes you hear at the beginning of TV sitcoms. Some sound like Broadway-style love songs. Others have a vague Hawaiian, calypso, or blues feel. You never know what's going to pop up next.

Not all of it is terrible. In fact, there are real toe-tappers among the songs. The question to ask, however, is whether it's right for liturgy. The answer from the Church has been the same from the second century to the present day: The Mass requires special music, which is different from secular music and popular religious music. It must have its own unique voice-one that works, like the liturgy itself, to bring together time and eternity. It's a style perfectly embodied in chant, polyphony, and traditional hymnody.

The OCP revels in its ability to conflate these categories; indeed, that's the sum total of its purpose and effect. And judging from its newest new line of songs and CDs-"we just couldn't wait until our next General Catalog to tell you about it"-your parish can look forward to a variety of ska and reggae songs adapted for congregational purposes.

But let's go back to that innocent, floppy missalette. The OCP claims it has many advantages. Missalettes "make it easy for you to introduce the latest music to your parish, and changes in Church rituals are easy to implement." Thus the missalette is "always up-to-date."

It's also quite a bargain. If you buy more than 50 subscriptions to the quarterly missalette, you receive other goodies bundled inside. You'll get a Music Issue (the main OCP hymnal) to supplement the thin selection in the missalette. In addition, you'll receive a keyboard accompaniment book, a guitar book, the Choral Praise Comprehensive, a handy service binder, two annual copies of Respond & Acclaim for the psalm and the gospel acclamation, biannual copies of Prayer of the Faithful, two subscriptions to Today's Liturgy (which tells liturgy teams what to sing and say, when and how), and one master index. And the more you buy, the more you get.

Why would you want all this stuff? Well, if you're in parish music, you'll quickly discover that the missalette has too few hymns to cover the whole season. The Music Issue seems like an economical purchase. But there's something odd about the OCP's most popular music book: There's no scriptural index. How do you know what hymns fit with what gospel reading?

No problem. Just buy a copy of Today's Liturgy, which spells it all out for you. If you want a broader selection of possible hymns, you can also order the OCP's LitPlan software or its monthly Choral Resources, which is visually more complicated than the Federal Register (but still contains no scriptural index).

If you follow the free liturgical planner closely, you'll notice you can purchase a variety of choral arrangements and special new music (copyright OCP) that match perfectly with the response, the hymnal, and the missalette (copyright OCP), which is itself integrated with the prayers of the faithful (copyright OCP) and the gospel (not yet OCP copyright). And so it goes, until you follow the complete OCP plan for each Mass, from the first "Good morning, Father!" to the last "Go in peace to love and serve others!" By making each element dependent on the next, the OCP has ensured a steady-if trapped-clientele.

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 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."

Nevertheless, the OCP seems to have solved a major liturgical rift affecting today's local churches. Just as every parish used to have a low-Mass crowd and a high-Mass crowd, there are now two factions in parishes:

One wants more "contemporary" music of the sort seen in Life-Teen Masses-loud, rhythmic, and rockish. Another wants traditional music and sensibly asks whatever happened to the hymns of the old days. These two groups are forever at loggerheads and have been so for decades. In fact, most pastors are so sick of the dispute that they'll do anything to avoid talking about music at Mass.

This is where OCP steps in and serves as the peacekeeping moderate. After all, it's an established music publisher, and thanks to the missalette, it doesn't appear (at first) to be particularly partisan. Its literature contains enough traditional material to allow the liturgical team to claim they're sensitive to the needs of both the contemporary and traditional factions. Indeed, the OCP eschews the most extreme forms of grunge-metal Life-Teen music (though its Spirit & Song comes close). At first sight, it does appear to take the middle ground between two extremes. In truth, however, it's only slightly behind the curve of the most radical liturgical innovators-as it's always behind the curve in the popular styles it tries to imitate.

What about the other option of splitting up the Masses according to style, so that those who like traditional music can have their own Mass and the people who compose for the OCP can have theirs? Prendergast rejects this. Whether the style is traditional, contemporary, folk, or even "rock," Prendergast says, "everyone in the parish has to be exposed to it." And what if a pastor just doesn't like rock and other contemporary styles? Prendergast says, "I would talk to the [chancery's] Office of Worship about him." I asked whether that means he would turn this poor priest in to the bishop. His response: "I would try to arrange for him to attend a workshop on liturgy."

With a great deal of knowledge, careful planning, and conscious intent, it is possible to manufacture decent liturgies even if the OCP music is all you have. You'll have to dig to find the good hymns (10 to 20 percent in the typical OCP publications), but it can be done. It's also true that not everyone involved with the OCP wants to destroy all that has gone before. There are probably many people on its middle-aged staff who from time to time cringe at the music, just as the people in the pews do. For his part, Prendergast is sure that he thinks with the mind of the Church, and there's no reason to doubt his sincerity.

In fact, there are periodic signs of hope. Regular readers of Today's Liturgy might have been astounded to see the recent one-page article buried in its pages that urged children be taught Latin hymns and chant. "The Second Vatican Council did not destroy the tradition of chant," said the writer, who was a student of the excellent English composer John Rutter. "We can still claim our chant heritage as part of the living Church's journey into the future." Indeed we can! But the news seems to be slow in getting around the OCP office. (The same issue contained a blast against a poor old lady who read a prayer book during Mass instead of singing goodness knows what.)

What's completely amazing about the entire OCP family is how lacking it is in self-awareness. The poor quality of contemporary Catholic music is a cultural cliché that turns up in late-night shows, Woody Allen movies, and Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. It is legendary among real musicians. Ask an organist what he thinks about today's Catholic music, and you will receive a raised eyebrow or a knowing laugh.

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.

I am no expert, but I do remember, back in the old pre-Vatican II days when I was in Catholic elementary school, the Gregorian Chant of the High Mass. It was wonderful, rather like our Divine Liturgy. It occurs to me, however, and please understand I am no liturgical music expert in anybody's faith, that there is a fundamental difference between the purpose of our Byzantine Chant and the old High Mass Gregorian Chant and the singing that goes on during an NO Mass. For us Orthodox, the chanting is an integral part of the prayers of the liturgy or the service. The chanting, the music, is always the same for any given liturgy or service on any given day. There is no place for the choir, or the psaltis or the congregation to just sing some random hymn chosen by either the priest or the choir director or whomever. For example, after communion we chant

"We have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit; we have found the true faith, worshiping the undivided Trinity, for the Trinity has saved us."

We never sing anything else, except for a special hymn at Pascha time. This is because our chanting, like that in a High Mass, is an integral part of the prayer of the Liturgy and has a specific place in the liturgy for a specific liturgical and catechetical purpose. I get the impression that the singing at an NO Mass really is, generally, pretty random and more like what one hears in a protestant service than a Liturgy; something nice but rather like an add on or embellishment rather than an integral part of the service. Am I seeing something which isn't really here?

I can only speak for my own parish, but as a member of the choir I would say that you are correct that N.O. Mass music is pretty random. Sometimes we try to follow a theme, but often its just choosing something we haven't sung in a while, or something moving and reverent for post Communion like Panis Angelicus or Ave Maria. Sometimes the choir and the organist just rebel and refuse to sing something. Last Easter we all flat out refused to sing "Baptized in Water." Our organist said he absolutely would not play "that Cat Stevens tune. So, our choir director chose something else.

"Sometimes we try to follow a theme, but often its just choosing something we haven't sung in a while, or something moving and reverent for post Communion like Panis Angelicus or Ave Maria."

I think perhaps, based on your response, that I have perceived a real difference. In the Divine Liturgy or the old High Mass, the chanting would have had a purpose as an integral and important part of the sacrifice and thus the words of the chant (which is really everything that is heard in a Divine Liturgy and an old Hign Mass). Whether something was moving or reverent really wouldn't be the issue, though everything in a Liturgy should be moving and reverent.

"In the Divine Liturgy or the old High Mass, the chanting would have had a purpose as an integral and important part of the sacrifice and thus the words of the chant (which is really everything that is heard in a Divine Liturgy and an old Hign Mass)."

Right you are. The High Mass (Missa Cantata or sung Mass) had the Ordinary Chants for the people/choir(Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) sung, using one of several modes, at every Mass.
In addition to these, there were the Proper Chants (Introit, Graduale, Alleluia, Offertory, and Communion). These had their own melodies and varied from Sunday to Sunday and feast to feast.
All of these were integral to the Mass. The hodge-podge of banal songs we are burdened with in today's vernacular services are extraneous to the Mass itself. In almost all vernacular Masses these songs replace the prayers proper to the Mass itself for which vernacular "translations" exist.
These translations occassionally have some similarity in meaning to the Latin Propers from which they were "translated".

You're correct. Most of the crummy "songs" you hear in at the NO-masses are fine for wedding receptions or communion parties, but they are divorced from our liturgy and historic faith.

We traded a wealth of beautiful, reverent sacred music for shallow pop songs that could be mistaken for the theme songs of 1970's sit-coms.

Sometimes I wonder if those who believe that Catholics are stupid aren't onto something.

It's been years since I've heard "Panis Angelicus" at Mass. I tried to get them to let the kids (mine included)sing it for their First Holy Communion last year but was told, "Oh, they can't memorize that. It's too hard."

Nevermind that MY kid already knew the words ("Panis Angelicus" is included on Luciano Pavarotti's O Holy Night album which we listen to every Christmas season), or that we all sang it for our own First Communions. In fact, I think it was sung at EVERY First Communion ceremony I attended when I was a kid.

I guess they just think the little tykes today are not as bright as we all were back in the day. I disagree.

Regards,

PS: The songs they DID sing? "Table of Plenty" and "I Got The Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy Down In My Heart." BLEEEECHHH. You know it's bad when your Lutheran mother-in-law is clapping away, exclaiming, "Why, it's just like Vacation Bible School!"

I could see in her eyes that she was relieved that this whole First Communion thing wasn't too....(shhhh!) Catholic.

"Why, it's just like Vacation Bible School!"

I have heard an almost identical comment from a converted Lutheran friend in our parish, only she said "...just like the songs in Vacation Bible camp".
She made it clear that these songs would never make it in her Lutheran Church but they were just fine in Bible camp.

We have much of history's best sacred music at our disposal and we buy and use OCP pop-slop crapola.
No wonder so many of us are disgusted with our bishops. I am especially disgusted with my bishop, the publisher-in-chief of OCP.

I think that it is greatly underestimating children to think that they can't learn a hymn in a foreign language. After all, childhood is the very best time to learn a foreign language and kids pick it up quickly. In my Catholic elementary school we gave a Christmas program every year and sang carols in Latin, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. We had no trouble at all learning the words.

The problem is that how you worship has a great bearing on what you belive, and vice versa. Most of these new "hymns" contain lyrics that subtely or overtly contradict true Catholic teaching. We sang one last week in my parish that actually referred to the bread as a "symbol"!! And they wonder why so few Catholics believe in the true presence of Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist! Also, the old hymns are often revised to be more pc and less "Catholic". Remember "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty"? Don't look for the line "tho the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see" anymore...it's been rewritten to remove the word and idea of "sin" because its just so, you know, negative (sarcasm).

This is the sort of thing that really ticks me off. It ticks me off so badly that I can't concentrate on THE MASS.

I don't understand why they've done what they've done, and I find myself getting more and more depressed about it.
Was it to become "more like the real world?" To become "more relevant?"

Well, it ain't relevant to me.

Somebody once said that church should be a refuge from the outside world, not a mirror of it, and he was right.

Too bad TPTB in the American Church can't see the wisdom of his words.

Regards,

It sure does seem to be fast slipping away. Here's one for you, in case you haven't seen it. http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=1325254%2C1 The aesthetic so perfectly represents the present emasculation and discombobulation (sp?) of the RCC Priesthood. It is right out of Python.

Now to the actual subject of the thread. I don't ever remember chanting being part of any Mass I ever assisted at, and my memory goes back 40 years to clear memories of actually participating in the Mass around the time of my First Holy Communion.

The NO had already been introduced. High Mass included singing responses to the Priest in Latin, I don't remember the congregation being part of that, though it is now, at the Latin Mass I currently attend.

We have the Eastman School of Music here in Rochester, NY, which boasts a solid reputation for attracting and keeping talent, and at one of the Latin Masses a few weeks before Advent, an Eastman student played his trumpet at High Mass. It was just him and the organist, though the organist played very little.

The sound of his lone trumpet went right to your marrow. It was the most beautiful music I've ever heard at Mass.

When I soke of chanting at a High Mass, I was speaking of the choir singing Gregorian Chant,

I was referring to the same, when I mentioned I'd never heard it sung.

The only recording of chant I have is a recording by the Tallis Scholars.

I have somewhat low blood pressure, and I can easily tell when it drops, and within a minute or so of hearing this CD my heartrate slows, and I can feel my bp drop. That's the kind of calming influence Chant has on me.

Its really a shame you never heard one or attended one. You know, no matter how Orthodox I am, I'll never forget those High Masses as a Catholic school kid. Ranks of choir members in red and altar boys in black cassocks with white surplices, the head altarboy with a red trimmed cassock, a thurifer and a cross bearer, clouds of incense and of course, the old monseignor with his beretta and magnificent robes. By God, you knew what you were about when you were at High Mass! That will always be my image of Roman Catholicism and the Mass. Its a wonderful memory, too!

I haven't, but thanks for the recommendation. I know next to nothing about classical music, but I listen to NPR once in a while and some time ago they played chant and I was really moved by it. So I went to my local Borders listened to few CDs and decided on the Tallis Scholars, it was just what I was looking for at the time.

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