An Idiot's Guide to Square Notes
Learn About Gregorian Chant with the Abbaye de Solesmes
Attend the Gregorian Chant Summer Camp in D.C.
Listen to chant online:
Posted on 06/07/2006 6:58:11 AM PDT by NYer
Look up “Gregorian chant” in just about any current dictionary or encyclopedia and you will see a description that says it “is the liturgical chant of the Roman Catholic Church.” Notice that the tense of the verb “to be” is in its present form of “is.”
What Should Customarily Be? Choirs of Angels The Banal or the Holy?
The definition doesn’t place Gregorian chant in the past tense and tell us that it “was” a liturgical chant that we Catholics long since forgot. If it is our current liturgical chant, isn’t there something odd in the fact that so many of us Roman Catholics never hear it at Mass?
Redemptionis Sacramentum (RS) is an instruction recently issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacrament. This instruction was developed to help stop abuses in the liturgy and it reiterated the right every Catholic has to truly sacred music in the liturgy. “It is the right of the community of Christ’s faithful that especially in the Sunday celebration there should customarily be true and suitable sacred music…”(RS 57).
Although many of us see little or no evidence of it, the Church holds a high preference for Gregorian chant in the Mass. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM 41) states that “Gregorian chant holds pride of place because it is proper to the Roman Liturgy” [emphasis mine]. Again we note the tense of the verb “to hold.” Rome could have said “once held.” But they didn’t. They said “holds.” There goes that present tense popping up at us again.
Some think that Gregorian chant was swept out the door by Vatican II. But Vatican II never swept Gregorian chant away. The real truth is that Vatican II preferred Gregorian chant. The Vatican II document Sacrosanctum Concilium (116) stated that “the Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as especially suited to the Roman liturgy; therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” This past December, Monsignor Valenti Miserachs Grau, President of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, explained the problem: “Gregorian chant has been unjustly abandoned and its place in the life of the Church should be recovered” [emphasis mine].
I’ve waited expectantly for Gregorian chant to recover its place at Mass in response to Rome’s instruction. The way that I look at it, if Rome has a preference for it, well, then I prefer it, too. It seemed for a while that Gregorian chant wasn’t going to come to me, so I went to it. I asked for and received CDs of Gregorian chant at Christmas.
So now I was in the odd situation where I was hearing Gregorian chant at home, but not in church. That was until one Friday night during Lent at Stations of the Cross. I knelt before the tabernacle to pray before the start of Stations. And that is when I heard it. First it echoed through the church. Then it echoed through my heart and soothed my soul with songs so lovely and so joyous that that there might well have been choirs of angels singing and lifting me upon their wings for flight. This sacred music lifted my prayers to a higher plane.
But it did more than that. It rooted those in the church with a solid sense of spiritual unity and rich tradition. At one point, I glanced quickly around at fellow worshippers. With faces all aglow and sparkling eyes, they let me know with approving nods that their joy was equal to, if not surpassing mine. Because Gregorian chant is the traditional music of the Church, it unites us to the Church. This unity was there that night at Stations because an individual in church said yes to Rome, and in saying yes to Rome, thus said yes to Christ. Just as Our Lady surrendered all to God in her "fiat" (“let it be done to me according to thy word”) and Christ surrendered all to God at Gethsemane (“Father, not my will but Thy will be done”), so we are called to surrender everything to the Father — even the music that we play in church and at Mass.
Gregorian chant opens the door between heaven and earth and rather than bringing the world into the church (which some pop Christian music can) it lifts us up toward heaven. Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI (then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) expounded on the problems with pop music in his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy: “Pop music...is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and...has to be described as a cult of the banal” (p. 148). And because it is banal, no matter the good intent, pop music can stifle our yearning for holiness and block our journey in spiritual depth.
Unlike popular music, Gregorian chant is not banal. It is holy. And because it is holy, it helps make us holy. Gregorian chant is named after Pope Gregory I, and is part of our rich Catholic heritage. The sacredness of this music has stuck to the church and helped to transform the souls of saints through the ages. Just as the sacredness of this music has stuck to the church, so it sticks to the soul.
There is lots of fun and lively popular music at youth conferences and conventions in this modern age. Such music can come and go at almost anybody's whim. Sometimes this lively music is transported to the church building, before the Tabernacle of our Lord, during the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. In an interview from Rome, Francis Cardinal Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, gently reminded us that the music we find at youth conventions is different from the music that we sing in church. He had this to say of singing and musical instruments at Mass:The local church should be conscious that church worship is not really the same as what we sing in a bar, or what we sing in a convention for youth. Therefore it should influence the type of instrument used.... People don’t come to Mass to be entertained. They come to Mass to adore God, to thank Him, to ask pardon for sins, and to ask for other things they need.
Surrendering to entertainment and popular music is easy. Surrendering to Christ and Rome is not. But who said Christianity was easy? Rome has given plain instructions that Gregorian chant ought to hold “pride of place” at our Catholic Masses. For love of God — and for our Holy Father, the bishop of Rome, who cares for us so tenderly — let’s show our loyalty to Rome. Let’s demonstrate that loyalty by restoring Gregorian chant to its most proper “pride of place” in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Thanks for the ping, NYer.
I recently started going to a church where they do the Conventual Latin Mass and Gregorian Chant. It is so beautiful and it truly is the "choir of angels." Some people come from quite a distance to come to this church because there is no other church like it around.
I remember that in years before VatII, considerable effort was being put into the restoration of chant and the removal of a bunch of gloppy hymns that had somehow collected around the Mass and driven out chant. The Missa de Angelis was an attempt to bring a sort of singable, easily accessible chant to the parish level, and it was also taught to Catholic schoolchildren.
I have never figured out how the effect of the Council was actually to drive out chant and replace it entirely with the very same (okay, different and worse) gloppy hymns that the liturgical reforms had spent the preceding 50 years or so trying to eliminate.
And although entrance antiphons, etc. are provided, we get sentimental, unsingable hymns about "each other." This is because the Vatican II directives gave pastors the option of replacing the antiphons with hymns, and I think there are probably only about 10 in the country who didn't do so. The same is true in Europe.
One of the biggest problems with Vatican II is that, no matter what some of its documents said, it provided an enormous loophole by allowing bishops and pastors to decide which of the directives they actually wanted to follow and how much they wanted to follow them. Many of the worst abuses are the result of the "pastoral discretion" granted by Vatican II.
An Idiot's Guide to Square Notes
Learn About Gregorian Chant with the Abbaye de Solesmes
Attend the Gregorian Chant Summer Camp in D.C.
Listen to chant online:
Of course it can't compare with "Gather Us In" by Marty Haugen /sarcasm
Was that "it" or was that pastors and "liturgists" deciding on their own that the "spirit" of VII was telling them what to do?
Sacrosanctum concilium, First General Norm:
22. 1. Regulation of the sacred liturgy depends solely on the authority of the Church, that is, on the Apostolic See and, as laws may determine, on the bishop.
And liturgical reform was a parallel movement to the Council, wasn't it?
Our music director used to exhort the congregation to "sing like Baptists". I always used to think, "give us something a good Baptist would sing, not this dreck."
Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum.
Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem:
sed libera nos a malo. Amen.
LOL!!
Liturgical reform pre-dated the Council, and most of us (fools that we were) simply assumed that the changes to the Mass were going to be the culmination of these years of research and training. And in the documents, it does look as if this is going to happen. Of course, it didn't...
But this was primarily because, when it came time to implement the Novus Ordo, the bishops were offered options (such as substituting hymns for the antiphons, etc.) which almost all of them used to take the path of least resistance. This was the famous "pastoral provision," that is, they were permitted to accept or reject what they liked for "pastoral reasons." IMO, the NO is pretty flat and undistinguished, but it would have been much better if the bishops had not been able to take advantage of this provision to strip the rite down even more and banalize it to what it is today, in most places, at least.
Anyone have a good link to Credo III?
This sounds just like the choir at my parish - Tridentine Mass of course.
Thanks, I have that one. I didn't post it because I find the sound of the person coughing through it ... annoying. =(
I was hoping someone had a version with no coughing =D
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