An Interview with Abp Cordileone: The William P. Mahrt Sacred Music Chair (Part 2)

Last week, we published a guest article by Roseanne T. Sullivan about the recent establishment of the William P. Mahrt Chair in Sacred Music at St Patrick’s Seminary in the archdiocese of San Francisco. We follow up with her interview with His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, about the new chair, and what he hopes to achieve by instituting it. Our thanks once again to Mrs Sullivan for sharing this with NLM.

Roseanne T. Sullivan: Your Excellency, what can you tell about how this new chair came about?

Salvatore Cordileone: I have had this in mind for a long time. The seminary already has a course in church aesthetics and history of the liturgy, which covers the principles of sacred music, architecture, and art.

(Note from Father Mark Doherty, Rector of St. Patrick’s: The course in Church aesthetics has been taught by Father Samuel Weber since he arrived at the seminary about a decade ago. The course is mandatory, situated at the front-end of formation, in pre-theology, precisely because the course content is so central to a man’s overall formation for the priesthood.)

SC: Out of those three, music is highest in the order of priority, because priests will be dealing all the time with music in parish life, at least on a weekly basis, to ensure the music for the Sunday Masses is suitable.

The other two are also important: architecture, because priests may at some point need to build a new church or renovate or restore a parish church they’ve inherited. So they need to know the basic principles of church architecture and have good taste and good judgment in that area.

And they’ll also be furnishing their churches and other spaces with art. So they also need to have knowledge of art.

But most especially music—because it’s such an important part of worship, because music has such a strong effect on people’s experience of worship, and priests will be dealing with music all the time.

It’s reasonable that the priest should have an understanding of our tradition of sacred music, that they know about the principles of Gregorian Chant, its origins and how to sing it, and that they have an understanding of polyphony and that whole tradition.

Now, granted, almost all parishes use contemporary music, but I think this kind of a formation deep within the tradition of the church’s musical heritage will help them to have better judgment about what is, on the musical side, worthy of worship.

And just by the aesthetics of it, the music of it, their theological formation will also give them good judgment about what words are appropriate for worshiping and not. So they need both aspects to get that with their theology courses, but they also need to have the musical formation to make those judgments.

St Patrick’s Seminary

RTS: What made you decide to name the chair after Professor William Mahrt?

SC: Professor Mahrt is a revered world class scholar in sacred music. He teaches at Stanford University only a few miles away from our seminary. He’s contributed so much to the Church’s musical life, no one would be more appropriate to honor in naming this chair.

For decades at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, also nearby in Palo Alto, the St. Ann choir Professor Mahrt directs has been singing beautiful sacred music at Novus Ordo Masses, according to the current edition of the Roman Missal. He demonstrates how this kind of music is not something that the Church left behind when changing the form of the Mass, but it is actually in keeping with what the Vatican II taught. It’s something to be treasured and used so that people can experience its beauty. So he’s realized that vision there and has been doing so for ages.

RTS: How was Professor Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka selected for this position?

SC: I first met her in 2015 at the Sacra Liturgia Conference in New York, which she organized. And so I became aware of her tremendous gifts and her ability to teach. She was teaching at the seminary at Dunwoodie in New York. She had great experience in educating Church musicians, principally seminarians but lay people and priests too for that matter. When I first met her back seven years ago, I would have loved the idea of her teaching at my seminary. To be honest, I didn’t think it would be possible. And now it’s happening.

I’m very grateful for some large bequests we received for Catholic education, which are helping us to get this chair established.

RTS: What should people realize about the significance of there being a chair in sacred music at a diocesan seminary?

SC: Music and the arts in general are not sort of a luxury, an optional add-on after we take care of everything else. They are essential, central to evangelization.

I refer a lot to the three transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. We need all three to evangelize this culture that’s getting further and further away from God.

We need the Church’s witness of care for the poor, the Church’s ability to transmit the truth and help people understand the truth and how that sets us free. But also, again, the area of beauty. And again, the area of music is paramount when it comes to people’s everyday experience in the pews. So we need beauty. As I also like to say, goodness feeds the body, truth feeds the mind, and beauty feeds the soul. People need their souls fed as well.

Beauty has this power to elevate the soul and to unite people and touch upon the transcendental in a way that we can’t with truth, because, in this age of relativism, you know, we argue, “You have your truth, I have my truth.” But when something’s truly beautiful, it cannot be denied. Beauty circumvents that whole denial process. It touches us in a different way. And I think it kind helps to prepare the soil for the seeds of truth to be planted, so people become more receptive to the truth.

To produce seminarians better formed in this whole area of the Church’s musical heritage will add a lot to enhancing the experience of beauty and reverence at liturgies.

There’s been a lot of talk about this lately, since Pope Francis has been focusing a lot on liturgy in these last couple of years. The arguments about the Traditional Latin Mass aside, he is decrying liturgical abuses, encouraging more reverent and beautiful celebrations of the Mass. And this will certainly help us to do that.

The William P. Mahrt Sacred Music Chair (Part 1): Guest Article by Roseanne T. Sullivan

We are very grateful to guest contributor Roseanne T Sullivan for this article about a new chair in Sacred Music, named for our publisher, and long-time president of the Church Music Association of America, Dr William P. Mahrt. The chair has been established by His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, Archbishop of San Francisco, at the archdiocesan seminary and university of St Patrick in Menlo Park, and its first holder is our contributor Dr Jennifer Donelson-Novicka. This post will be followed by a second part with an interview with Archbishop Cordileone.

His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, Archbishop of San Francisco has created an endowed chair in Sacred Music at St. Patrick’s Seminary and University, which forms clergy for the San Francisco archdiocese and for other dioceses throughout the West and the Pacific Rim. With the establishment of this new William P. Mahrt Chair in Sacred Music, many courses in the history and practice of the Church’s sacred music will be available to seminarians and to others who are interested.

St Patrick’s Seminary

The overall quality of music at the seminary liturgies will be enhanced by the musical direction and example of the new holder of the chair, Professor Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka. In her new role as Associate Professor of Music and Director of Sacred Music at the seminary, she will also serve as the director of sacred music, overseeing all the musical activities in the seminary chapel, and accompanying liturgies at the organ, while both developing and directing a schola cantorum, which will sing Gregorian chant (in Latin), chant in English and Spanish, and sacred polyphony.

Here are some quotations from her paper “Emotion, Intellect, and Will: The Fruits of Sacred Music in the Spiritual Life”, which was given on June 29 at the Sacra Liturgia 2022 Conference in San Francisco.

“The Church has long been the greatest patron of beauty, feeding Christ’s sheep. Beauty is food for the soul. The world needs the material charity of the Church, but also Her spiritual charity.”

“It is possible to get to heaven without understanding much of anything about music, thanks be to God. But to willfully cling to ignorance or even an anti-knowledge which prizes ugliness or mediocrity is to choose to be deaf to one mode through which God makes known His glory.”

“Mediocre music, banal music is not spiritually neutral. It has a numbing effect on the soul, feeding the senses with the mere shadow of the glory of God’s love, but never really piquing our interest or helping us see God clearly. ... Bad music is a sort of spiritual junk food—food that looks like food, but makes us fat and lethargic. Musical junk food has no place in the sacred liturgy.”

Prof. Donelson-Novicka speaking at the Sacra Liturgia conference this past June; to her right are His Eminence Robert Card. Sarah, Archbishop Cordileone, and Fr Mark Doherty, the rector of St Patrick’s Seminary.

Professor Donelson-Nowicka wrote this to me in an email: “The chair is named after Dr. Mahrt in honor of his decades of devoted service to the cause of sacred music, not only in the Bay Area through his work at Stanford University and with the St. Ann Choir, but also nationally and internationally through his leadership as president of the Church Music Association of America (CMAA), and editorship of the CMAA’s journal Sacred Music.

“His scholarly work highlights, for example, how the Church’s Gregorian chant not only fittingly conveys the texts it adorns, but serves an integral role in the Church’s worship by expressing the nature of the liturgy itself. An Introit is an integral component of the liturgical action, moving the hearts of worshippers to the altar, and the procession to the sanctuary, sounding in a music that likewise moves. The Alleluia, in its profusion of notes on a short text, affords the opportunity for contemplation and meditation which, as the Church points out for example in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, is a dominant characteristic of the Liturgy of the Word. The Church’s polyphony, too, expresses a particular splendor, reminiscent of the glory of God in His creation.

“All these are insights that Dr. Mahrt has patiently developed in his own work and in the hearts of his listeners and readers. They are the thoughts of a man who takes seriously the worship of God as the center of his life, and who devotes his intellectual energies towards the probing of the gifts the Church gives her children to ‘worship the Father in Spirit and in truth.’

“Inspired by Dr. Mahrt’s work, the mission of the chair is likewise to bring together prayer, worship, theology, beauty, and academic and technical excellence in sacred music.”

Professor Donelson-Nowicka is also organizing an international sacred music conference to be held at St. Patrick’s seminary in November of 2023 celebrating the work of Dr. Mahrt.

The choice of Professor Mahrt is particularly exciting to me because I have been writing for years about his achievement of keeping chant and polyphony alive while it was out of favor. [1] I sang with the St. Ann Choir that he directs at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto for a few years beginning in 2005, and was very impressed when I learned that he had persisted in directing that choir in the singing of Gregorian chant and motets at Sunday Masses, and polyphonic Masses on feast days, in liturgies where that kind of music belongs, even during the long decades when that kind of music was virtually banned in the Church after Vatican II.

Dr. Mahrt directing the St Ann Choir... 

and here, showing a large decorated folio with the introit of the choir’s patronal feast. 

Music at the Heart of the Archbishop’s B16 Institute

This exciting innovation is tightly aligned with the goals of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Liturgy, which Archbishop Cordileone founded in 2013.

I’ve also written several articles on Archbishop Cordileone’s initiatives to promote more-reverent liturgies through the Benedict XVI Institute. On January 5, 2014, I was present when Archbishop Cordileone along with Father Samuel Weber, O.S.B., the original director, announced the founding of the new institute. During its “opening night,” the archbishop announced, “The heart of the institute is music.” Among other related goals, he said that he wanted “to reclaim the sacred music that is so much at the heart of our celebration of the Mass.”

To do this, he continued, the institute would promote “what the Church has been asking us to do for a really long time, beginning at the Second Vatican Council” and continuing with “so many documents since, including the current General Instruction on the Roman Missal: Gregorian chant is to have first place in music at Mass.”

Archbishop Cordileone speaking at the Sacred Liturgia conference.

After the archbishop’s introduction, Fr. Weber demonstrated that it is easier than generally imagined to train people to sing chant well without much instruction on how to read the chant notation. Rehearsing with a program he had prepared with English chants of his own composition, Fr. Weber prepared the 200 or so people who attended to sing hymns and psalms at Benediction and Vespers of the Epiphany. As one commenter on Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s blog noted, “Vespers was fantastic, presided over by Abp Cordileone, and cantored by Fr. Weber, chanted in its entirety. Before we went into the Church for vespers, Fr. Weber did a quick tutorial/run-through of the chants for vespers, and unsurprisingly, everyone picked them up quite easily.”

The scope of the activities of the Benedict XVI Institute has widened in the ensuing years. On July 26, 2017, Catholic San Francisco announced that the institute’s name had changed a little, replacing “Liturgy” with “Worship” and that it was expanding its focus from sacred music to include also Catholic art, architecture, and literature under the new executive director, Maggie Gallagher.

Part of the expanded focus is to promote the creation of new works of art and literature and to build community and recognition between Catholic creatives, potential patrons, and other lovers of Catholic sacred arts.

The importance of music to the institute is evidenced by Archbishop Cordileone having named Frank La Rocca to be the institute’s composer in residence. The institute has commissioned several Mass settings so far from La Rocca: the Mass of the Americas, the Requiem for the Homeless, and Missa Sancti Juniperi Serra (in honor of St. Junipero Serra). La Rocca's new Messe Des Malades: Honoring Our Lady Of Lourdes, will premiere in February 2023.

The first Mass setting La Rocca composed for the institute, Mass of the Americas, continues to be performed in more and more cathedrals and churches long after it first premiered December 8, 2018.

Another great indicator that the results of the institute’s initiatives are also spreading into mainstream culture is a new album with a studio recording of the Mass of the Americas by Grammy-winning producer Blanton Alspaugh. After the album was recently released, it quickly rose to the top of the Billboard charts.

The institute also frequently sponsors events where other music, also art, and poetry from talented living creative Catholics is performed. “Our artists need to know we value their work, including a creative genius like Frank La Rocca, but also young artists,” Archbishop Cordileone has said.

The creation of the new Sacred Music chair that is the main topic of this article emphasizes the vital importance of priestly formation in survival of the Church’s heritage of sacred music. It seems to me to be an exciting step forward in achieving the goals of the institute, perfectly in line with the archbishop’s plan from the beginning to foster reverent liturgies.

The ripple effects of this new program may continue to be seen in many places in years to come. The Vatican Council II document Sacrosanctum concilium states, “The treasury of sacred music is to be preserved and cultivated with great care.” Those who benefit from training and the example of music skillfully performed at St. Patrick’s by an expert in expounding and performing the treasury of the Church’s sacred music will in their turn go out to spread the good news to many more places.

[1] See my articles “Gregorian Champ,” (National Catholic Register, 18 November 2007) and “Palo Alto’s secret gift to the Church,” (California Catholic Daily, 20 December 2017.)

An Open Letter to Pope Francis, by Roseanne T Sullivan

After a career in technical writing in the computer industry while doing other writing on the side, Roseanne T. Sullivan now writes full-time about sacred music, liturgy, art, and whatever strikes her Catholic imagination. She has published many essays, interviews, reviews, and memoir pieces at Latin Mass Magazine, Sacred Music Journal, Dappled Things, National Catholic Register, and other publications, and she writes for the Benedict XVI Institute of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. We are glad to welcome her for yet another fine guest contribution to NLM.

Dear Holy Father,

When I read your Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes on July 16 and realized the effects it will have on the free celebration and future growth of the traditional Latin Mass, I cried. It seems like an excessively harsh measure uncharacteristic of an otherwise kindly seeming pope, after the comparative freedom we enjoyed after your predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI released Summorum Pontificum in 2007.

To explain my reaction, I think it would help for you to know some things about my background. I am a 76 year old Catholic lay woman, with a B.A. in art and English and an M.A. in writing. I was for many years a technical writer in the computer industry in Silicon Valley, and I now write full time as a passionate amateur about Catholic sacred music and divine liturgy, architecture, art, and literature.

I was a cradle Catholic who left the Church in 1963 in adolescent pride, a university freshman who thought that intelligent people don’t believe in God, and I returned in the late 1970s, a “sadder and wiser” divorced mother of two. In the meantime, from lots of hard experiences, I had realized that the Church is not a big meanie trying to steal our joys and that God’s commandments are for our protection.

At first I accepted the new Mass without any question. After all, I had come back because I had learned to believe in and trust the Church as the Body of Christ, so why would I not trust the changes made to the liturgy?

At the first parish where I went to Mass after I returned to the Church, I saw many examples of the kinds of jarring things I continued to see in the years since then. Long-haired hippies in blue-jeans played rousing spirituals and folk songs on guitars, banjoes and tambourines at the parish Masses —not that I was averse to hippies or to spirituals, but to the lack of reverence and to the way in which performance was emphasized over worship. I still hear the same types of distracting music that brings the rhythms of the world into the Mass even now when, for example, I’ve attended Masses at my diocesan cathedral, with its current large ensemble of cantors and musicians located to the right of the altar with a jazz piano, electric guitars, and drums.

During Mass at that first parish I attended in 1978, we stood in a half circle facing each other. After the novelty wore off, over time I realized that everyone was showing off, everyone was looking at everyone else, and the focus was no longer on the sacrifice that was taking place at the altar.

The priest was now at the center of attention and, since then, as I’ve seen again and again, many priests have trouble resisting the temptation of playing to the audience, spouting their own opinions instead of the Church’s teachings, sometimes telling jokes, even off-color ones, from the pulpit. The constant rather lame improvisations and the folksy or jazzy songs remind me of the old TV show The Ted Mack Amateur Hour.

I also grew more and more appalled at the experimentations that led to what Pope Benedict XVI and you have termed objectionable improvisations of liturgy. But not only that, deformations of doctrine and practice were and are rampant.

What is especially shocking is that over the ensuing years in various parts of the country where I’ve lived almost every Catholic lay person, priest, religious sister or brother or Catholic university professor I talked with believed that not only had the Mass changed but morality had changed also. Statistics show that non-traditional Catholic couples are unashamedly casually engaging in the intimacy that belongs in marriage, living together outside of marriage, contracepting, aborting their babies, and divorcing at the same rate as the rest of the society.

I think it’s due perhaps to an unexpected after-effect of Vatican II. Many Catholics believed during the 1960s, when the council was going on, everything formerly taught and practiced by the Church for two millennia was up for grabs. Some simple-mindedly seem to reason, for example, that if the Church taught before Vatican II that we would go to hell for eating meat on a Friday, and the Church removed that penalty that the Church could and was probably going to remove the penalty for all sorts of other things. As the song goes, a new Church was being sung into being, and in many respects it was nothing like the old Church.

Another false assumption came to light for me in the late 1990s when I went to a Franciscan retreat center. At Sunday Mass, the Franciscan priest who managed the center walked away from the pulpit into the middle aisle and acted out the Gospel of the day, in which Jesus says that God hates divorce. He then proceeded to claim in his homily that Jesus was really not against divorce.

After Mass, I asked the priest how he could have contradicted the words of Christ. By the way he answered me, I learned that he believes the Gospels were written by committees, each of which had its own agenda—which is a theory, as I learned later, I taught at most Catholic universities and seminaries. Many, like that priest, go on to infer logically from that premise that no passage of the Gospels needs to be taken literally, and so there’s no such thing any more as Gospel truth. And for those type of Catholics, it seems, the Church’s perennial teachings are no longer to be consulted. The priest told me that a moral theologian had written Jesus was not against divorce, and the opinion of a theologian trumped the Church’s teachings in that priest’s mind.

After I started studying at my bishop’ institute for leadership in ministry in 2002, I found there the speculations of theologians were taught as if they were settled doctrine, even thought in many cases, the theologians’ claims had been rejected by popes or by decisions from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

My own bishop taught the class on Penance. He told us that Jesus had not instituted the seven sacraments, and that that the Eucharist forgives mortal sins. Professors from nearby Catholic universities and priests from the Bay Area taught that morality had changed, that the Church was no longer a hierarchy but a circle, that the church’s teachings against contraception and homosexual acts did not have to be followed. (I still have my notes.) No classes taught about personal holiness. No classes used the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I heard referred to disparagingly as a “pre-Vatican II document,” even though it was published in 1992; CCC came out during the reign of Pope Saint John Paul II, who many apparently regard as objectionably conservative.

Back to the music. In 2006, I joined a choir that had managed to keep singing Gregorian chant and polyphony during ordinary form Masses, even after that kind of music had practically been banned since 1969. After I was re-exposed to the Gregorian chants of the Ordinary I had learned as a Catholic school girl in fourth grade, and I learned the many more chant Mass settings, I then learned about the wonderful chants for the Propers of the Mass that varied every day throughout the liturgical year.

I read Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Vatican II document on the liturgy, for myself. I learned that it actually says “Gregorian chant should be given pride of place,” and “the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem.” And that it didn’t say that chant should be replaced with folksy or jazzy tunes or that the organ should be replaced with guitars, drums, pianos, banjoes, or tambourines. SC does say that the vernacular could be “allowed,” not that Latin should be banished. So, what happened there?

I also learned that SC doesn’t say anything about Communion in the hand distributed from one pair of unconsecrated hands to another, about Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers, about the priest celebrating facing the people, or about “girl altar boys.”

For these and several other reasons, I started to wonder what is behind the claim that the new Roman Missal expresses the mind of the Second Vatican Council. Maybe someone will explain that to me some day. But I digress.

Over time, I found myself unwilling to go to Mass at other churches where a “four-hymn sandwich” had replaced the chants. As a result of abandoning the Church’s sacred music, Catholics were singing at Mass instead of singing the words of the Mass.

And the hymns they were singing were seemingly chosen at random and had no relation to the feast of the day or the day’s place in the liturgical year. Besides, the words of the hymns were often doctrinally unsound. For example, one Christmas Eve midnight Mass, when I joined my parish church’s combined choirs, I was shocked when one of the members of the Spanish choir played his electric guitar and sang Imagine, John Lennon’s atheistic hymn against religion.

In 2007, after Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum freed up the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass, the San José diocese erected an oratory as the diocesan center for the TLM. I joined their newly formed choir, and since then I have mostly attended Masses at the oratory.

I can’t help but grieve that you, my pope, my papa in the original meaning of the word, have made this decision to prevent the further growth of the traditional Latin Mass. Already many bishops around the world have used your motu proprio to justify the suppression of these Masses. These measure seems cruel and heavy handed.

Dear Papa Francis, I and the vast majority of us who love the traditional Latin Mass prefer it not because we are divisive, but because we love and are loyal to the Church.

We prefer the traditional Latin Mass because we prefer the reverence, the beauty, and the emphasis on the Holy Sacrifice of the altar that we find at the old Mass and have seldom found at the new. We know that the priests are not going to be doing comedy routines from the pulpit and they will not be contradicting the words of Our Saviour either.

Generalized accusations against traditional Catholics unfairly disparage the deep and authentic devotion that I and thousands, perhaps millions, of Catholic men, women, and children express when we worship God and remember the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ at the traditional Mass. Besides, how can we deny what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Summorum Pontificum? “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”

You call for more reverent Masses that are true to the rubrics of the current Roman Missal. Pope Saint Paul VI did too, as did Pope Benedict XVI. But sixty years have passed since the experimentation began, and many more may pass before misinterpretations of Vatican II are done away with and the Church that celebrates the Mass of 1969 stops being the electric Church —as Mother Angelica once said, “because every time you go, you get a shock.”

Please reconsider. Please don’t take the Mass of the Ages away from us. Don’t divide us. Let us live side by side together with those who find their comfort with the new Mass, all of us tolerant of our differences, in peace, and united in true obedience to God.

Sincerely and respectfully yours in Christ,

Roseanne T. Sullivan

The St Ann Choir Celebrates Its 58th Anniversary

Thanks to one of our long-time guest contributors, Roseanne Sullivan, for this tribute to Dr William Mahrt (who is also our publisher) and the St Ann Choir, for the extraordinary work they have done over almost six decades to preserve the great tradition of Catholic liturgical music.

Lovers of the traditional music of the Roman Catholic liturgy may want to stop a moment and marvel about the St Ann Choir’s unique achievement: fifty-eight years of continual performance of Gregorian chant and polyphony at weekly liturgies in diocesan churches—even while this kind of music was out of favor in the Church.

Dr William Mahrt and the St Ann Choir

This coming Sunday, September 26, will be the choir's fifty-eighth anniversary; they began singing on the last Sunday of September in 1963, and have almost miraculously managed to keep chant and sacred polyphony alive as it should be performed, as part of sacred liturgies, during the long decades since then when the Church’s traditional sacred music was virtually banned. The choir now sings at St Thomas Aquinas Church, which is located at 751 Waverly St. in Palo Alto, California. Every Sunday at noon, the choir and congregation sing the ordinary chants of the Mass, at Latin Masses in the Ordinary Form, and the choir also sings the proper chants for the day of the Church year —in addition to polyphonic motets from great Renaissance composers, with organ preludes and postludes. For special feasts, the choir also sings polyphonic Mass settings by Renaissance composers for the ordinary, along with chanted propers for the feast. All are welcome to these Masses with their unique musical enrichment.

A poster advertising the choir’s patronal feast in 2018, with music by Josquin des Prez.

The choir is directed by Stanford Professor William Mahrt, who also leads the Stanford Early Music Singers, is president of the Church Music Association of America, and editor of the CMAA journal Sacred Music. Mahrt joined the St Ann Choir when he was a Stanford graduate student, and has directed it, with some breaks totaling about five years breaks, since 1964, its second year of existence.

“The main achievement of our choir is to have maintained the traditional music of the Roman Catholic Church. We began singing Gregorian chant and classical polyphony and included organ music in liturgies before the council, and our program is pretty much the same as it was when we started,” says Prof. Mahrt. “Our choir started one year before the language changed [from Latin to the vernacular]—if we had tried to start one year later, we might not have been able to do it.”

The choir got its name because they originally sang at the St Ann Chapel in Palo Alto, which was the Stanford University Newman Center at the time. In 1998, the diocese decided to move the Newman Center to Stanford Memorial Church and an on-campus office. After efforts to keep the chapel as a place for Catholic worship failed, it was sold to a conservative Anglican group in 2003.

The chapel has a remarkable history of its own. It was built by Clare Booth Luce as a memorial for her daughter Ann, who was a Stanford senior when she was killed in a car accident while returning to campus in 1944 after Christmas vacation. The loss of her daughter precipitated a crisis that showed Luce the meaninglessness of her own life. After months of instruction and counsel from then-Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, Luce converted to Catholicism.

Luce intended the chapel to illustrate her conviction that modernity and sacred art are compatible. She commissioned artists to decorate the chapel with expressionistic (and experimental) painted windows instead of stained glass, painted Stations of the Cross, a cubist-inspired mosaic of the Madonna, and a steel mesh flat baldachino decorated with mosaics and Cubist-inspired angels. It was dedicated in 1951. For years after the chapel was sold to the Anglican group, the choir was allowed to sing Vespers and some occasional liturgies there, until COVID precautions suspended those arrangements. Prof. Mahrt says, “I anticipate that we will go back, not for the expressionism and cubism, but the acoustics.”

As Susan Benofy wrote in Adoremus 20 years ago, “It is rare to hear chant in Catholic churches, and it is rarely taught in Catholic institutions. Catholoics who are familiar with the chant and polyphonic repertoire are more likely to have gained this familiarity from listening to recordings than to have experienced this music as an integral part of the solemn liturgy.” (Adoremus Online: March 2001) Another very telling commentary comes from René Girard, Stanford Professor Emeritus, and one of only 40 members, or ‘immortals,’ of the Académie Française: “When I first attended, I assumed that the Catholic Church and the University actively supported this unique contribution to the spiritual and cultural life of the community. The truth is that ever since 1963, Professor Mahrt has been very much on his own in this enormously time-, talent- and energy-consuming enterprise.” 

Christmas Music of William Byrd: Guest Article by Roseanne Sullivan

Our thanks once again to one of our frequent guest contributors, Roseanne Sullivan, for sharing with us this article on one of the great English Catholic composers, William Byrd. It was originally published in the Christmas 2019 edition of The Latin Mass Magazine, and is reproduced here with their kind permission, in a slightly edited form.

In honor of the season, this article takes a comparative look at the circumstances in which two of composer William Byrd’s works for Christmastide were created. The first piece is an English carol from a songbook that Byrd dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I’s chancellor. The second is his polyphonic setting of a Christmas day Mass from a collection that he published late in his life, which he dedicated to a baron who secretly held prohibited Catholic Masses in his home.

A medallion portrait traditionally said to be of William Byrd by Gerard Vandergucht, ca. 1750, based on an original by Nicola Francesco Haym. No authentic contemporary likeness of the composer exists. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) 

William Byrd (1543-1623), as you know, was a brilliant English Catholic composer, whose music is still treasured and often performed today during traditional Latin Masses—and also in Ordinary Form Masses that in some places are reverently celebrated in Latin. For example, the Saint Ann Choir of Palo Alto, California, directed by Stanford Musicology Professor and New Liturgical Movement publisher, William P. Mahrt, often sings Byrd Masses on feast days, and motets composed by him on Sundays throughout the year at Ordinary Form Latin Masses. Saint Mary’s Church in Norwalk, Connecticut, sings Byrd Masses at their regularly scheduled Mass in both the Ordinary Form and Extraordinary Form Masses. Even the volunteer choir at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory that I attend in San José, which is dedicated to the Extraordinary Form, sings Byrd’s “Mass for Three Voices” at traditional Latin High Masses on special occasions, and frequently sings his Ave Verum Corpus and other motets by him at Sunday Masses.

Byrd led a paradoxical life, to say the least. He was a Catholic who worked for Protestant Queen Elizabeth as a court composer and musician, and was prominent among Elizabeth’s Protestant courtiers. But he also composed music that he and his harried Catholic co-religionists would sing at Masses, which they were forced to celebrate covertly in fear of a knock at the door, imprisonment, steep fines, and even death. It’s almost miraculous that he kept his job and his life.

As Dr Kerry McCarthy, a scholar and singer of Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, noted in her highly readable 2013 biography titled Byrd, he was born at “an unusually volatile moment in English history.” (All quotations in this article are from this work.) The year of his birth, 1540, was the year that King Henry VIII “finished dismantling the monasteries and convents.” Monastic libraries were looted and their books used for scrap paper and even as toilet paper, so totally despised were the ancient liturgies and music of the Catholic Church. “1540 was the year the workshop of Hans Holbein produced the iconic ‘Rome portrait’ of the forty-nine-year-old Henry VIII, glowering at the viewer with fists clenched, the massive canvas (94 by 53 inches) barely able to contain his bulk.”

The ruins of Fountains Abbey near Aldfield in North Yorkshire, one of the largest and most important Cistercian abbeys in England until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. This view shows the abbey church from within the ruins of the former infirmary. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by DrMoschi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

It is hard to deny the obvious similarity between the attitude of destruction of traditional Catholic liturgy and music that was in progress when Byrd was born and the widespread disdain and neglect on the part of many since the Second Vatican Council for the beautiful Gregorian chant and polyphonic music that had evolved as an intrinsic part of the Mass and the Divine Office over the centuries.

“[Byrd] was as well known in his day as any court poet or playwright, and just as close to the centers of power. A monumental painting made in 1604, illustrates the point nicely.” Although he is not pictured, Byrd had close ties to many portrayed in this painting. “At a distance of more than four hundred years, the atmosphere of luxury, gravity, and political tension is still palpable in this painting. That was the world in which Byrd’s music was created and performed.”

During his youth, the traditional Latin Mass was banned outright, replaced with a stripped down English service. “What had taken place daily at every pre-Reformation altar, from the humblest parish church to the greatest cathedral, was now a rare and dangerous luxury.”

As court composer, William Byrd published a wide variety of music. Protestants at that time allowed polyphonic settings of Psalm texts, so most of the religious works he published were motets that set Psalm texts in Latin or English. He also published religious songs in English.

Byrd not-so-subtly thumbed his nose at the Protestant majority by his choice of texts, many of which were about throwing off oppressors and pleading for God to rescue (an allegorical) Jerusalem. Some were ‘gallows texts’—Psalm verses that were well known among Catholics as the last words of priests martyred during the persecution of the Church in England during the Reformation.

“Lullaby,” a Christmas Carol

In 1588, Byrd published an elegant songbook, Psalms, Sonnets and Songs; according to McCarthy, this may have been part of an attempt to reestablish his reputation at court. “He spent most of the decade under constant suspicion of illegal Catholic activities.” The title page reads in part “Songs very rare and newly composed are here published for the recreation of all such as delight in music, by William Byrd, one of the gentlemen of the Queen’s Majesty’s honorable Chapel. With the privilege of the royal majesty.”

Fortunately for Byrd’s reputation, the songbook was a great success, and his English Christmas carol from that songbook, “Lullaby, My Sweet Little Baby,” became an enduring favorite. The Earl of Worcester wrote fourteen years later, in 1602, that “we are frolic [joyful] here in court ... Irish tunes are at the time more pleasing, but in winter Lullaby, an old song of Mr. Byrd’s, will be more in request, as I think.”

Remembering Byrd’s earlier thinly-disguised protests in the texts of his Psalm settings, it is tempting to see a similar vein in the “Lullaby,” with this line, “O woe and woeful heavy day when wretches have their will!”, and a prediction that even though the wicked king sought to kill the King (Jesus), the Son of God would reign, “whom tyrants none can kill.”

Lullaby, My Sweet Little Baby: Lyrics

1. My sweet little Baby, what meanest Thou to cry?
Be still, my blessed Babe, though cause Thou hast to mourn,
Whose blood most innocent to shed the cruel king has sworn;
And lo, alas! behold what slaughter he doth make,
Shedding the blood of infants all, sweet Saviour, for Thy sake.
A King, a King is born, they say, which King this king would kill.

Refrain: O woe and woeful heavy day when wretches have their will! Lulla, la-lulla, lulla, lullaby.

2. Three kings this King of kings to see are come from far,
To each unknown, with offerings great, by guiding of a star;
And shepherds heard the song which angels bright did sing.
Giving all glory unto God for coming of this King,
Which must be made away — King Herod would Him kill. Refrain.

3. Lo, lo, my little Babe, be still, lament no more:
From fury Thou shalt step aside, help have we still in store;
We heavenly warning have some other soil to seek;
From death must fly the Lord of life, as lamb both mild and meek;
Thus must my Babe obey the king that would Him kill. Refrain.

4. But thou shalt live and reign, as sibyls hath foresaid,
As all the prophets prophesy, whose mother, yet a maid
And perfect virgin pure, with her breasts shall upbread
Both God and man that all hath made, the Son of heavenly seed,
Whom caitiffs none can ‘tray, whom tyrants none can kill. Refrain.

Third Mass of Christmas Day, Puer Natus Est

In 1607, nineteen years after “Lullaby,” and about a decade after he published his still-famous settings for the Ordinary of the Mass, Byrd published his polyphonic setting of the Latin propers for the Third Mass of Christmas Day, Puer Natus Est. This was included along with various Christmas motets in the second volume of Gradualia, a large collection of his settings of the Propers for major feasts, published in two volumes in 1605 and 1607.

McCarthy noted that Byrd’s version of the Introit Puer Natus Est was unique among his compositions for the following reasons. In Gregorian chant, multiple singers sing the same melody together at exactly the same pitch. When polyphonic music developed with multiple voice lines, Gregorian chant was used as a single cantus firmus (a “fixed song”) around which multi-voiced improvisation were developed. Byrd departed from that cantus firmus tradition in most of his polyphonic compositions, using melodies from sources other than chant, with one exception, the Puer Natus Est Mass.

The Introit begins by quoting the Gregorian chant for the day (Puer natus est nobis/A child is born for us) in three of the four voices. “This gesture seems to have been a brief nod to the old tradition of chant-based polyphonic Mass Propers, something that Byrd never took up again in quite the same way.”

The following bit of history gives a vivid glimpse into the risks Byrd and his fellow Catholics were taking. In 1605, after publication of the first part of the Gradualia, a French traveler named Charles de Ligny wrote home that he had attended a musical evening during which Byrd played the organ and other musical instruments, together with the Jesuit Henry Garnett, some other Jesuits, and English gentlemen. De Ligny was arrested and briefly thrown into Newgate prison “on account of certain papistical books written by William Byrd” that he carried, the partbooks of the first Gradualia. In spite of being the composer of those papistical books, Byrd narrowly avoided imprisonment through the indulgence of Queen Elizabeth, and continued to live free until he died in 1623.

Byrd had retired from the court to live in Essex by the time he published Gradualia, and he worshipped with, played for, and composed sacred music for a gathering of Catholics in the nearby home of Baron John Petre. In the dedication of his second Gradualia to Petre, he wrote that the music had “proceeded from his house, most generous to me and mine.”

Byrd somehow managed to get the necessary approvals for printing the Gradualia from no less a Protestant personage than Richard Bancroft, the Anglican Bishop of London. According to McCarthy, the bishop who approved the printing apparently did so because he thought the Propers would contribute to dissension among Catholics.

Perhaps partly due to the danger of discovery that he envisioned for singers of his Propers, Byrd kept the individual pieces short. “His elegant little offertories and communions—some of them are barely a minute long—could hardly be further removed from the leisurely Latin motets.”

“When he described his settings of the Mass Proper in his 1605 preface, he called them ‘notes as a garland to adorn certain holy and delightful phrases of the Christian rite.’”

Catholic to the End

In spite of all the associated risks, Byrd increasingly used his talents to serve the Catholic liturgy over the same years when almost the entire English population was abandoning the ancient Faith. Almost certainly, he had his own end in mind. In the will he signed in 1622, the year before he died, Byrd wrote this prayer, “that I may live and die a true and perfect member” of the “holy Catholic Church, without which I believe there is no salvation for me.”

Saved by the Mass: Sohrab Ahmari’s From Fire by Water

Our thanks to one of our frequent guest contributors, Roseanne Sullivan, for offering us permission to reprint part of this article from her blog Catholic Pundit Wannabe. In it, she summarizes journalist Sohrab Ahmari’s experiences of the Catholic liturgy, and the role they played in his conversion, as recounted in his recent book From Fire by Water, published by Ignatius Press.

One Sunday evening in 2008, after two nights in a row of binge drinking — part of a pattern of compulsive misbehavior that shamed him when he was sober — Sohrab Ahmari was pacing around the block near Penn Station in New York City, killing time waiting for a train back to Boston. After several turns past a building that had what he described as a “nondescript brick façade” with “a relief above the entrance of an almost alien Jesus,” he went in and found a passage into a church where Mass was about to begin.

The Capuchn church of St John the Bapist in New York City, with the “alien Jesus”.

Sohrab Ahmari’s First Mass

Ahmari had never attended a Mass before. “The first thing I noticed on entering the vestibule was the serenity of the place, which struck me as almost impossible. Miraculous even, amid the pandemonium of midtown.”

A young guitarist with a man-bun played and led the congregation in singing hymns. While the congregation around him stood, kneeled, sat, prayed, and sang, Ahmari stayed seated in the back and wrestled with his ambivalence about religious belief. He paid little attention to what the friar was doing at the altar.

Skepticism had been ingrained in him in Iran from his bohemian family, and it had been reinforced by his experiences after he came to live in the United States with his mother at the age of 13. He had deep spiritual longings, but he didn’t want to be counted among the gullible by his intellectual peers. He thought he was too smart to be a believer. “But all of a sudden, the singing and the strumming dissolved into that all-encompassing serenity, and something extraordinary happened.”

During the consecration, he began to cry, not tears of sorrow or of joy, but of peace. The Mass appealed to two deeply-rooted parts of his personal make-up that he described in the first chapters of the book: he had always admired heroic self-less sacrifice, and he longed for cosmic and moral absolutes. The words of the consecration struck him because they made present at the Mass the redeeming death of the blameless Victim, who humbled Himself to become human and died on the Cross that all may live. On his way out after Mass, he saw a photo of Pope Benedict XVI in the vestibule, and that set off a new bout of tears—because he intensely craved loving, paternal, moral authority and the continuity that the papacy stands for.

He attended another Mass, and, from then on, he found that he could no longer honestly say he was an atheist. As he said in a Fox News interview, although he felt the faith was true on the level of his imagination and emotions, “it took, still, a long time to finally assent to faith.”

Wrong Worship (without the Mass)

Seven years later, Ahmari was married and working in London as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal’s European edition. He had come to believe in Christianity and — with the encouragement of a zealous friend — he occasionally worshipped at evangelical services. He lived near an evangelical Anglican church called Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), and he began to occasionally attend services there. “[T]he Regency church with its elaborate stained-glass windows and vaulting arches, played host to charismatic worship that included JumboTrons, rock bands, and funky lighting.”

The Latin OF Mass at the Brompton Oratory

On the way home after one such charismatic service at HTB at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, Ahmari noticed a sign at the nearby Catholic Brompton Oratory (Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) advertising a Solemn High Latin Mass, starting at 11, and he went in.

It was Pentecost Sunday. The richness of the church decor with abundant marble and carvings, the way that the architecture beautifully leads every eye to the altar of sacrifice, and what he felt was the rightful inclusion of the carving of the Immaculate Heart of Mary under the baldacchino and in a painting above the main altar, all captivated him. “It was a holy place. It was a place of right worship.”

A world-renowned choir chants and sings traditional sacred music at the Brompton Oratory’s Solemn High Latin Masses. The priests celebrate ad orientem, facing towards Jesus, towards liturgical East. Instead of staying aloof as he had at that first Mass, Ahmari threw himself into following along with the other worshippers as best he could, standing, sitting, kneeling, and blessing himself (a few times with his left hand).

Ahmari was struck that “the metalwork and masonry and painting directed my imagination to spiritual realities,” and in contrast to what he had just experienced at the HTB service, “the Catholic Church didn’t need to bend herself to the vacuous fads of 2016.”

The very next day he sought out a priest at the Brompton Oratory’s offices and announced he wanted to become a Roman Catholic.

There is more of great interest in Ahmari’s story, much more; the rest of the fascinating story is told in From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith. Conservative journalist and media figure Sohrab Ahmari wrote it to show the influences and events of his life and the changes in his convictions that brought him — from the fire of misery and the captivity of sin, through the water of Baptism — and into the Catholic Church.

Ahmari Speaks About the Mass with Ignatius Press

As noted above, From Fire by Water was published by Ignatius Press. In the following video, one of a series of videos discussing Ahmari’s book as part of the Ignatius Press FORMED Book Club series, he talked about the differences between his experiences at the two Masses described above, and the form of the Mass he prefers, beginning at 4:40. The relevant portion of the interview is also trascribed below.

Father Joseph Fessio, S.J. (founder and editor of Ignatius Press): In your conversion story two liturgical events were critical. One was right around Penn Station . . . when you went into the Capuchin Church. The other was when you went into Brompton Oratory. Vivian, why don’t you make your point about the first experience?

Vivian Dudro: When you went to the chapel near Penn Station, . . . that Mass was a low Mass in English. At the consecration when you heard those words, “This is my Body,” you made the association that a sacrifice was occurring, and that was an “aha” moment for you. And then later you were at a Brompton Oratory Mass in Latin. I was wondering if your first experience of the Mass had been the one at the Brompton Oratory, do you think you would have understood that a sacrifice was being made if you hadn’t been able to understand the words of the consecration?

Sohrab Ahmari: I think it would have struck me more, but I would have understood less. That [Brompton] Mass is a richer presentation of both the symbolism and the supernatural action of the Mass, and it would have been an experience I would not soon have forgotten.

But I don’t think I would have put two and two together to understand that this is an altar like any altar of every civilization that has offered sacrifice—which all civilizations have—but in this case, it’s God Himself offering Himself up as the sacrificial Lamb. I don’t think I would have understood that as much, but at the level of mystery and emotion and imagination I have no doubt that the Brompton Mass would have made more of an impression on me.

But overall my state of mind in going to that mass was one of ‘I am lousy. I am abject. I need something to redeem me,’ and as it happened, I found the Mass but thereafter within twelve hours I had forgotten about it.

In either case it would probably have taken some time to get to the point of willingly seeking out the Roman Catholic Church.

Father Fessio: What’s your preference liturgically now?

Sohrab Ahmari: I have a son who I like to take to Mass. [Since the interview, he has also a baby daughter.] I’m registered at a church that has a Solemn High Latin Mass on Sundays. But my son can’t sit through all of it. I vary. Sometimes I need that beauty of the Latin Mass. . . . So that means I will go alone on some Sundays to have that. And then on other Sundays, when I want to take him and my wife, then we’ll go to a different church where the liturgy is fifty minutes, a reverent Novus Ordo Mass [in English]. I try to go to Mass daily; I don’t always succeed. My day is so packed that I’m grateful for the twenty-minute daily English Masses at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Father Fessio: I celebrate ordinarily the Novus Ordo mass, but in Latin, with English for the readings and prayers and the Preface and for everything that changes each day. I celebrate the rest that stays the same especially the Roman Canon, [Eucharistic Prayer I in the Ordinary Form] in Latin.

Sohrab Ahmari: I have to mention the Mass that is described in the book in the final chapter at the Brompton Oratory was not the Traditional Latin Mass. It too was a Novus Ordo Mass in Latin—also with the variable parts being done in English. I’m quite fond of that format.

Father Fessio: You’re young and energetic and a talented writer, so I hope to pass the torch onto to you from the Brompton Oratory and from me that in the future you can agitate for more widespread use of the Novus Ordo in Latin. I call it the Mass of Vatican II because it’s what the Vatican fathers were thinking about when they were talking about the reform of the liturgy.

“Mass of the Americas” and the Flourishing of Religious Culture: Guest Article By Roseanne T. Sullivan

In our era, new musical Mass settings are rarely commissioned. So, it’s notable that a new musical Mass was commissioned and celebrated by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone in San Francisco last December. For this article, Roseanne T. Sullivan interviewed by email the respected Bay Area traditional sacred music composer, Frank La Rocca, who composed the Mass. They discussed when it is legitimate to call a musical composition a “Mass,” and how he was able to incorporate multiple languages and non-traditional musical instruments and elevate them into a composition suitable for the sacred liturgy of the Catholic Church. This article was previously published on the blog Dappled Things.

On December 8, 2018, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the “Mass of the Americas” premiered at San Francisco’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption. The Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Cordileone at the end of the 25th annual “Cruzada Guadalupana,” a 12-mile pilgrimage in honor of our Lady of Guadalupe—which is held every year on the closest Saturday to her feast day December 12. This popular annual event draws thousands, many of them Mexican-American, from around the Bay Area.

Mark Nowakowski—who is also a composer and who attended the “Mass of the Americas”—wrote in his review “Return to Liturgical Glory?” that even though many mass goers were exhausted from the pilgrimage, the music elicited their rapt attention.

This reaction was confirmed for me personally by Lety (Letitia) Hernandez, who cleans house for me once in a while. She lives in San José, which is an hour’s drive from San Francisco. She told me the next Monday—with great enthusiasm, in a mixture of Spanish and a little English—that she took part in the walk, attended the Mass, and (¡Me gusto mucho!) she liked the music very much.

The Mass was sung by a 16-voice choir and by soloists singing different parts, in Spanish, Latin, English. One hymn was sung in Nahuatl, the language in which Our Lady of Guadalupe spoke when she appeared to Saint Juan Diego. The singing was accompanied at various points by an equally unusual ensemble of organ, string quartet, bells and marimba.

Frank La Rocca, who composed “Mass of the Americas,” is a classically trained musician and composer, and he is the composer in residence for the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship—which was founded by Archbishop Cordileone.

When I first read the announcements at the Benedict XVI Institute website about the planned inclusion of multiple languages and non-traditional instruments in “Mass of the Americas,” I feared the result might be a hodgepodge that departed from the accepted traditional norms of musical Mass settings. But in the process of researching the Mass and interviewing its composer, I became convinced that composer La Rocca deftly incorporated the non-traditional elements with the best possible understanding and reverence for what a Mass is supposed to be.

How It Came About

Mass of the Americas was envisioned by Archbishop Cordileone as an intertwined tribute to our Lady of the Immaculate Conception as Patroness of the United States and our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of all the Americas, with sacralized folk music. “I’m trying to model how the Church has always appropriately enculturated the Gospel by adapting aspects of the local culture, but within the sacred tradition” — Archbishop Cordileone

The quotes in this section are from “The Making of the Mass of the Americas” by Maggie Gallagher, the director of the Benedict XVI Institute, from an interview with La Rocca. More specifics about why and how La Rocca used various languages in the parts of his “Mass of the Americas” are in the Gallagher interview and in my own interview at the end of this article.

La Rocca at first resisted Archbishop Cordileone’s request. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool Western European classical composer. All of these things take me well outside the orbit of what I know.” However: “It is the job of a composer-in-residence to respond to commissions.”

In response to the commission, La Rocca researched the Mission period, the music, and the various versions of Mexican Marian folk hymns that the archbishop suggested, including Las Mananitas and La Guadalupana. “La Mananitas is the Mexican equivalent of Happy Birthday, although originally the tune was created for a text about the Virgin Mary and King David, so it has a devotional history even though it’s not used that way now. . . . La Guadalupana has always been, and it sounds like, a typical Mexican Mariachi tune: the oompah, oompah guitar, the crooning violins, and the two robust male singers. The challenge before me was to make the tune recognizable enough so anyone paying attention would sit up and say, ‘I know that,’ but with the words changed and the sounds of the guitars, the violins, and the voices lifted up and transformed.”

“That occupied a great deal of my time trying to figure out how close to the surface to bring the tune – how close to what listeners would be literally familiar with — in order for it to be recognized, and yet still get absorbed into the fabric of reverent music for the liturgy.” His challenge was to do it “in a musical style appropriate to the tune while taking it to sacred places that, for all I know, no other arranger ever has.” In some ways, it’s not that different than what many classical music composers have done over the centuries in incorporating folk tunes into the classical tradition.

Frank La Rocca, “Mass of the Americas” Composer

Sixty-eight year old La Rocca has a B.A. in Music from Yale, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Music from University of California at Berkeley. He was a cradle Catholic who left the Church as a young man and returned after forty-two years of being away. The first piece of sacred choral music he ever composed as a Catholic was his Ave Maria, which is included the Mass of the Americas.

He dedicated his Ave Maria to a friend, an old Cistercian Nun, Sister Columba Guare, O.C.S.O. When he sent it to her and told her he had come back to the Church, Sister Columba told him that her whole community at Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa had been praying for his return! (You can listen to La Rocca’s Ave Maria here).

La Rocca has said he approaches his work in sacred choral music as “a kind of missionary work” and regards himself in that role “as an apologist for a distinctively Christian faith—not through doctrinal argument, but through the beauty of music.”

MOTA’s Use of the Ordinary

La Rocca stayed true to the traditional practice of using the words of the Catholic Mass for his settings of the Ordinary. For example, La Rocca set the text of the Kyrie with each Greek verse preceded by a Spanish invocation (trope) from the Spanish translation of the Missal. For example, “Tú que vienes a visitar a tu pueblo con la paz. Kyrie Eleison.”

MOTA’s Use of Historic Hymns

La Rocca’s Mass included the music for three hymns that have deep roots in California history. The Processional (Entrance Hymn) “El Cantico del Alba,” the “Canticle of the Dawn,” is a morning hymn in Spanish to Our Lady. Historians have recorded that hymn was sung upon rising and on the way to Mass, by almost everyone, every day, and everywhere Catholics lived throughout Alta and Baja California, in the missions and the pueblos, during the years of Spanish and Mexican rule.

A unique musical setting by La Rocca was used for the Communion meditation. He set the text of a translation of “Aue Maria,” “Hail Mary” in the Nahuatl language, which he discovered in a collection used for teaching Nahuatl-speakers that was written in 1634 by a mixed-race missionary in Mexico who was fluent both in Spanish and in Nahuatl.

La Rocca’s Mass ended with a Recessional setting of the Latin Marian Antiphon for the season, “Alma Redemptoris Mater,” which melded gradually into counterpoint between “Alma” and the melody of “La Guadalupana,” a musical symbol of the unity Archbishop Cordileone asked La Rocca to embody in the work. As La Rocca explained, the tune of La Guadalupana was “elevated into a high classical sacred musical language” to suit the reverence due the liturgy. The tune was also subtly woven into a number of other movements, most notably the Gloria.

The words themselves are charming; they tell about how Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, in the form of a young native woman, how she asked for an altar in her honor to be built on the hill where she appeared, and how from the time she appeared she has been the mother of all peoples in Mexico. Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego in 2002 and declared Our Lady of Guadalupe the patroness of the all the Americas.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Why Does the Modern Age Need the Mass of the Ages? An Interview with Peter Kwasniewski by Roseanne T. Sullivan

Our thanks go once again to Roseanne T. Sullivan, this time for sharing with us her interview with our own Dr Peter Kwasniewski, concerning his recent book.

RTS: In your new book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness: Why the Modern Age Needs the Mass of Ages (Angelico Press, 2017), you write as an unabashed apologist for the traditional Latin Mass. You are positive not only that “the Mass of the Ages” is far superior to the new Mass, which Pope Benedict XVI called the Ordinary Form, but also that the Roman Catholic Church should go back to the Extraordinary Form.

Can you summarize here why the Church should return to the Extraordinary Form?

Dr. Kwasniewski: The reason is simply that we are debtors to our tradition, we are beholden to our heritage, and we become ungrateful and arrogant wretches when we throw it overboard. The attitude of true humility is to assume that the accumulated wisdom and piety of the Church should continue to guide and inform us. This is how it has always been seen, no matter what century of the Church you look at. It could only have been in the twentieth century, at the pinnacle of evolutionary conceit, that a group of eggheads would have dared lay hands on the rich and subtle worship of the Church to force it into their imaginary categories of relevance or efficacy. Their work was justly punished with desolation and apostasy.

In short, the traditional liturgy expresses the fullness of the Catholic Faith and preserves the piety of Christians intact. This is more than sufficient reason for adhering to it and for insisting that it be the norm, always and everywhere.

RTS: What are some of the ways the older form of the Roman Rite expresses the fullness of the Faith?

Dr. Kwasniewski: The older rite is impressively theocentric, focused on God and the primacy of His Kingdom. It is shot through with words and gestures of self-abasement and penitence, attentive reverence and adoration, acceptance of God’s absolute claims upon us. Its prayers and ceremonial bear witness to both the transcendence and the immanence of God: He is Emmanuel, God among us, but also the One who dwells in thick darkness, whom no man has seen or can see. He is our Alpha and Omega, our all in all. The traditional liturgy is uncompromising on this point. Even in what you might call its “instructional” moment, the reading or chanting of Scripture, it remains fixed on the Lord, as if we are not so much reading to ourselves as we are reminding Him of what He said to us—as if we are asking Him to fulfill it again in our midst, according to His promise. The old Mass never deviates from the gaze of the Lord, always remains under His eye, conscientiously turned to Him. It plunges us into the life-and-death necessity of prayer. Padre Pio said “prayer is the oxygen of the soul.” We breathe that oxygen in the old Mass.

RTS: Don’t we do that in the new Mass, too?

Dr. Kwasniewski: We might do that in the new Mass, but it is much more difficult to do. The oxygen is harder to get. The needs and demands of the spiritual life are muted, swept under the carpet, in this stripped-down vernacular liturgy facing the people, replete with sappy songs, announcements, constant chatter. It was designed to be populocentric, to connect people with one another and with the priest around a table, a meal. As Ratzinger has said, God disappears in such a set-up. He may be there on the altar, but the people’s minds and hearts are elsewhere. Should we really be surprised that, according to repeated polls, most Catholics who attend the Novus Ordo do not believe in the Real Presence—do not even know that the Church teaches it? The liturgy does not help them to see, to experience, that truth. It is not just about adequate catechesis. It is about whether the liturgy vividly expresses the truths of the Faith.

To take just one example, the old liturgy’s prayers unflinchingly subordinate earthly life to heavenly life; they repudiate the pomps and vanities of fallen secular life. The new liturgy refuses to do this, and in fact its redactors systematically wiped out the old prayers that talked of “despising earthly things” for the sake of heaven. Has there ever been a generation since the creation of Adam and Eve that more needed to hear this message than today’s? Materialistic hedonism is the broad way along which countless souls are walking to their own destruction—and the Church smiles and waves at them, saying “God bless you.”

RTS: You say in your book that these problems have to do with a certain attitude towards modernity.

Dr. Kwasniewski: Exactly. Or maybe better, a certain attitude of modernity. At its root, modernity is anti-sacral, anti-religious, anti-incarnational, and therefore anti-clerical, anti-ritual, anti-liturgical. You can see this from the many philosophers of the Enlightenment who rejected both divine revelation and organized religion. A few centuries later, we moderns who have imbibed all this philosophical baggage have almost no clue what a solemn, formal, objective, public religious ritual is supposed to look like. We are at a total loss about corporate worship in which the individual ego is subsumed into the greater community of the Church across time and space. That is why we must clutch to the traditional liturgy for dear life. It is, for all intents and purposes, pre-modern—so old that it is unaffected by our contemporary shallowness, biases, prejudices. It breathes a realism, a spaciousness, a strength, a chivalry even, that has become foreign to our age and so, for that very reason, is desperately needed by us. Modern man needs nothing so much as to be delivered from the prison of his Promethean modernism. He needs to be challenged with that which is older, deeper, wiser, stronger, lovelier, happier. He needs to be ignored, not coddled; mystified, not lectured to; silenced, not uncorked.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

“In Heaven, There Is Only Singing” : An Interview with Fr George Rutler

The following interview with Fr George Rutler was published on the website of the Homiletic and Pastoral Review on August 18th; we thank them and the author, Roseanne T. Sullivan, for their gracious permission to republished it on NLM. (The original version included a preamble which we omit here for considerations of space.) I would especially call our reader’s attention to the last paragraph, and Fr Rutler’s choice words that “The Church must convert the barbarians and not be converted by them.”

Whether hymns should be sung, or not sung, at Mass, and which hymns are acceptable, is a fraught topic. The issues are described in more detail in an interview I did with Professor Peter Kwasniewski, called “The Propers of the Mass Versus the Four-Hymn Sandwich.” (which was published at Homiletic and Pastoral Review and republished on NLM).

The phrase “We should not be singing at Mass, we should be singing the Mass” is used often among Church musicians and liturgical experts who believe it is important it is that the actual texts of the Mass be sung. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone wrote this in his “Foreword” to The Proper of the Mass for Sundays and Solemnities, by chant composer Father Samuel Weber, O.S.B., who founded with Archbishop Cordileone the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Liturgy at the archdiocesan seminary.

“It is often said, and rightly so, that we should aim at singing the Mass not singing at the Mass, but old habits die hard, and in many places the ‘four-hymn sandwich’ is still being served, a relic from the days before the Second Vatican Council when provision was made to allow vernacular hymns to be sung at Mass.” The archbishop went on to write that the best hymns can enhance our liturgical celebrations, but that hymn singing is a recent innovation in terms of Church history.

Experts claim that singing of any old hymns at Mass became entrenched after Vatican II because vernacular versions of the Proper texts were not available, and hymns filled the void. Many feel that choirs and congregations should be singing the texts of the Mass, which are the Ordinary and the Proper texts of the Mass. Venerable Pope Paul VI wanted congregations to be able to sing the Ordinary in Latin set to simple chants, as published in his booklet Jubilate Deo. And eighteen more-complex settings of the Ordinary are available in the Kyriale. Many musicians, including Father Weber, are composing English versions of the Propers.

Because of the controversy about where hymns belong in Ordinary Form Masses, my questions to Father Rutler focused mainly on the paragraph at the end of his “Preface” to his Stories of Hymns, in which he wrote about how the hymns he wrote about may be included in Catholic liturgy. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t read and enjoy the rest of the book, and I hope you will read and enjoy it too.

Where Can Catholics Sing These Wonderful Hymns?

RTS: At the end of your preface to Stories of Hymns, you wrote:

The hymns that follow complement the Liturgy but are not part of it. The whole Mass itself is its own gigantic hymn, and it is only by indult that it is said at all instead of being sung. It is liturgically eccentric to “say” a Mass and intersperse it with extraliturgical hymns. Hymns may precede or follow the Mass, but they should never replace the model of the sung Eucharist itself with its hymnodic propers. In the Latin Rite, that model gives primacy of place to the Latin language and Gregorian chant, according to numerous decrees, most historically those of Pope Pius X in Tra le Sollecitudini and Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium. The Church has normally reserved other hymns for other forms of public prayer, especially the Daily Office. And, of course, all hymns can be part of private prayer, following the Augustinian principle that he who sings prays twice.

What do you mean by: “The hymns that follow complement the liturgy but are not part of it”?
Father Rutler: Those hymns would qualify as “tropes,” or embellishments of the proper liturgical texts, but not substitutes for them. The guidelines for the Ordinary Form would accord a certain validity to hymns, other than the traditional Propers, as part of the Liturgy provided the texts are approved by the legitimate ecclesiastical authority, but this is by way of exception.

RTS: Do you agree that we should not be singing at Mass, we should be singing the Mass?
Father Rutler: Since the Mass is the highest act of praise, and singing is the highest form of praise, the Mass is a song, and is not therefore interrupted by song.

RTS: Can you explain what you mean where you wrote, “The whole Mass itself is its own gigantic hymn, and it is only by indult that it is said at all, instead of being sung.” How is the Mass a hymn? What indult do you mean?
Father Rutler: The Second Vatican Council described the Holy Eucharist as the song of the Heavenly Jerusalem brought to earthly altars. For expediency in the Latin Rite, recitation is permitted instead of chant, but this should be only by exception. Expediency is not a concern of the Oriental Rites, or of Jewish prayer, for that matter. In Heaven, there is only singing, no mere talking.

RTS: You wrote, “Hymns may precede or follow the Mass, but they should never replace the model of the sung Eucharist itself with its hymnodic propers.” In layman’s terms, what are the “hymnodic propers?”
Father Rutler: The Propers are the Scriptural texts and other sacred texts. The Psalter is the Church’s main hymnal. To recite Psalms, rather than chanting them, is an oddity. It would be better to sing brief texts (antiphons) rather than rather drearily recite a Psalm between the readings. Indeed, as I understand it, the provision of lengthy Psalm verses between the Readings was granted at the last moment in the revision of the Mass, to satisfy a minority opinion.

RTS: If hymns should not be sung during Mass, when might hymns from this rich collection you wrote about in Stories of Hymns be sung by Catholics?
Father Rutler: I did not say that hymns should not be sung at Mass. In the Ordinary Form they are permitted, but should not replace the Propers (for example, the Introit and Gradual). A hymn after Communion would not be inappropriate but the “Hymn Sandwich” of an Entrance Hymn, Offertory Hymn and Closing Hymn accompanied by a static “said” Liturgy should be avoided.

RTS: You also wrote in your “Preface” that outside of the Mass, these hymns might be used in the Divine Office and private prayer. The stories for some of the hymns also often mention how stirring some hymns can be when sung in procession, for example, the Easter hymn “Hail Thee Festival Day,” with its alternative verses that can make it also appropriate for processions on Ascension Day, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and at dedications of churches. You also wrote about “Daily, Daily Sing to Mary” as “a marvelously raucous hymn, which is especially suited for processions.” And you wrote about a favorite hymn, “Jerusalem the Golden,” which you fondly recalled singing as a choirboy. Do any others still appeal to you particularly?
Father Rutler: “Jerusalem the Golden” was my favorite boyhood hymn–I had good taste in youth–and it remains such. There are others I especially like, such as “Brightest and Best” and “Hark, Hark My Soul”–but it is difficult to choose. Obviously some are more appropriate for particular seasons. One hymn that I wish I had included in my book was the Wesleyan one: “And Can it Be That I Should Gain.”

RTS: I remember enthusiastically singing, “And Can it Be That I Should Gain,” “The Church’s One Foundation,” and “All Glory, Laud, and Honor”–and other hymns that I recognized in the Stories of Hymns–when I worshipped at an Evangelical Free Church, which is one of the Protestant denominations I sampled on my way back to the Catholic Church after I lapsed as a college student. I missed that enthusiastic hymn singing when I came back to the Church, until I started singing with a Gregorian Chant choir, and all the treasures of the chant repertoire opened to me. More important than hymn singing is the Eucharist, and the Eucharist and the teaching authority of the Church are a large part of what brought me back. Now it seems to me that Protestant denominations filled up their worship services with long sermons, and lots of hymns, because they removed the Sacrifice out of the Mass.

How do you use music in Masses in your current parish, St. Michael’s in New York City? Do you, the choir, and/or the congregation sing the Propers?
Father Rutler: We have a small choir that sings the Introit and Gradual and, often a special setting of the Gloria. Otherwise the people sing the chants. (Plainchant, or Gregorian chant, should have pride of place, even as Vatican II prescribed.)

It is highly preferable that the choir be in a loft, or at least positioned to support the people’s voices. Choirs should never face the people. And “song leaders” are entirely counter-productive. No ritualistic: “Please join us in singing…” and so forth, and no arm waving. Highly recommended on the topic are two books: Why Catholics Can’t Sing by Thomas Day, and Real Music: A Guide to Timeless Hymns by Anthony Esolen.

We sing the liturgical texts and, as provided in the rubrics for the Ordinary Form, we usually have an additional hymn at the Offertory. I think that if there is a hymn, it may best be at the end of the Mass. Hymns should not displace the liturgical texts, and normally one hymn is adequate.

RTS: By saying that your congregation sings the chants, do you mean the Ordinary chants? If the Ordinary is chanted by the congregation, what settings do you sing? Do you cycle during the year through the some of the eighteen Gregorian chant Masses available from the Kyriale, such as Mass I: Lux et origo (for Paschaltide), Mass XI: Orbis factor (for Sundays per annum)? Or do you follow a simpler scheme?
Father Rutler: To encourage participation, the Missa de Angelis is a Plainchant setting that everyone can sing easily–then on special feasts other Gregorian settings can be sung from the choir.

RTS: What might you add to help Catholics who are attached to singing their favorite hymns at Mass, and who might object to the idea of any change?
Father Rutler: In a time of cultural decay, such as ours, the Church has an obligation to preserve and promote the best human achievements, including music, and the visual arts. The Church must convert the barbarians and not be converted by them. Many of the aging “baby-boomers” who resist change, imposed it wantonly on others right after Vatican II. That period of aesthetic destruction may take a long time to repair, but bad music should not be allowed to drive out the good, just as bad money should not be allowed to drive out good money. To deny that there are superior forms of aesthetics is simply to enlist oneself in the ranks of the relativists for who quality is nothing more than opinion. That is not aestheticism; it is narcissism. The astonishing collapse of church attendance in recent decades, cannot be blamed on St. Gregory, Palestrina, and Mozart, and there are many reasons for it other than a defective psychology of worship, but the cloyingly grotesque, pseudo-Christian elevator music in many parishes is not guiltless of the damage done in those post-Conciliar years.

Roseanne T. Sullivan is a writer from the Boston area who currently lives in San Jose, CA. Sullivan studied graphic design, painting, journalism, fiction and poetry writing while completing a BA in Studio Arts and English, and an MA with writing emphasis at the University of Minnesota. She has a deep and abiding interest in sacred music, sacred art, liturgy, and Latin, and she teaches Latin to homeschoolers. Many of her writings and photographs have appeared in the National Catholic Register, the New Liturgical Movement, Regina Magazine, Latin Mass Magazine, and other publications. Her own intermittently updated blog, Catholic Pundit Wannabe, is at catholicpunditwannabe.blogspot.com.