"We are moving into an era of liturgical revolution. Benedict detests the feeble "folk Masses" that have remained the staple fare of Catholic worship long after they went out of musical fashion."
Posted on 11/20/2007 1:34:30 PM PST by NYer
For decades, the standard of singing in St Peter's basilica has struggled to match that of a Gilbert and Sullivan society.
Church music in Italy is generally atrocious, and the Vatican is no exception.
Since he arrived in Rome nearly 30 years ago, the music-loving Joseph Ratzinger has had to endure the sub-operatic warbling of bad 20th-century music. Now he has had enough.
The Pope, who last year appointed a new choir director of St Peter's, wants Gregorian chant, polyphony and baroque masterpieces to dominate the repertoire in the basilica and the Sistine chapel. And, by making his preferences clear, he is sending out a message to the whole Catholic Church.
We are moving into an era of liturgical revolution. Benedict detests the feeble "folk Masses" that have remained the staple fare of Catholic worship long after they went out of musical fashion.
He wants the Church to rediscover the treasure of its heritage - and that includes Gregorian chant as well as the pre-1970 Latin Mass that can now be celebrated without the permission of bishops.
The old guard of trendy choir directors and composers (many of whom have signed lucrative contracts with dioceses) will fight his reforms every inch of the way, egged on by philistine bishops.
But younger church musicians, like young priests, are conservative in their tastes.
The next generation of choir directors have been charged by the Pope with the task of reintroducing beautiful music into church. If they succeed, then at long last the pews may begin to fill up again.
Damian Thompson is editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald
Ping!
"We are moving into an era of liturgical revolution. Benedict detests the feeble "folk Masses" that have remained the staple fare of Catholic worship long after they went out of musical fashion."
What, no Ozzy or Dio tunes? LOL.
“..the standard of singing in St Peter’s basilica has struggled to match that of a Gilbert and Sullivan society.”
You mean, no more drums, bongos and loud meaningless screams at Mass? Leave anything up to liberals (I hate to say that we have a large supply of them in the Catholic Church) and you’ll have chaos. B16 brings a breath of fresh air. Gruss Gott.
SWEET! No more kum-bah-yah!
I like G&S, though.
I HATE BONGOS!
Hmmm, no soulja boy for the Pope.
GO HAM ON EM SOULJAH GO HAM ON EM
Could very well be true. Never underestimate the power of bad music to keep people away.
The problem is that modern music has not had time to show which of it is good and which crappy. I bet, hard as it is to imagine, that there was once banal, trite Gregorian chant. If you listen to Salieri and then Mozart, you realize that being a long time ago is/was no guarantee of excellence.
But when the choice of music is based on a bogus ideological misunderstanding of aggiornamento then, well, kum ba yah.
If we just looked for GOOD music with lyrics that managed either Doric simplicity or other excellence, we'd be okay.
As it is, I'm always grateful for awful hymnody. It provides a legitimate outlet for the rhetoric of abuse.
There’s many an old Protestant hymn that’d be suitable for singing in Catholic church as well. Just not anything written after around 1900, for the most part.
The bad news is that the dodos think that we're too dumb to understand:
"Thou art, Which wert, thou hidest, he taketh," and other older than yestrday inflections of English verbs.It's so LAME and irritating (especially if you know the hymns by heart.) Then you get the revisions of texts so that nobody ever has to sing the masculine 3rd person pronoun and mean Gawdamighty by it.
Maybe it's a "marker" of bogus ideology that it's allergic and hostile to beauty and elegance.
C.S. Lewis would have agreed with your concluding sentence.
Oh my, Don't get me started. It IS God, it IS His church and the body of His Son. He HAS redeemed us and shared Himself and all He has with us, and to get too worked up about the hymns is disproportionate.
Speaking of disproportionate, have you seen their version of ...
NO! Mad Dawg! Get a hold of yourself!
I attended Mass at a neighboring parish and almost fell of my seat when the music director ran his hand down the length of the keyboard, burlesque style, during the Alleluia. I found it to be unsettling and inappropriate.
Ah, but have you heard the ‘Lamb of God’ sung to the tune of Edelweiss?? It’s enough to make you think you should be on meds.
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