Ecclesial and Ethical Consequences of Poor Church Music

Much has been written about the manner in which Church music has, in the postconciliar period, deviated from its properly liturgical purpose and sacral characteristics. [1] I will limit myself here to observing that there has been a tendency for the lyrics of Catholic hymns or songs to be emotionally saturated, narcissistic, pantheistic, horizontal, this-worldly, and, at times, effeminate. [2] They focus not on objective (usually revealed dogmatic) truths and man’s appropriate response to them — sober jubilation, humble adoration, and devout thanksgiving — but on subjective states, how we should feel, how we are together as one family, how we will overcome prejudices, judgmentalism, differences, and such “social evils.”

The musical language follows suit, with “lounge chords,” syncopations, meandering melodies, and awkward leaps replacing the more orderly rhythms, dignified melodies, and stylized harmonic progressions of classic hymnody, or better yet, the peaceful and flowing lines of Gregorian chant, illuminating ancient texts in angelic arcs.

A musical repertoire that is people-oriented rather than God-oriented, turning us towards each other rather than to the Blessed Trinity and the mysteries of salvation, inculcates the false impression that worship is something we do from and for ourselves, a communal self-help ritual that vaguely gestures towards the divine but in a way that validates our own assumptions. (It was, after all, in a similar though artistically superior way that Protestants in the sixteenth century used music to express, transmit, and validate their doctrines and supplant Catholic dogma. It remains a scandal that the best music often to be met with in Catholic churches today are the Protestant hymns of the last several centuries, rather than our own distinctively Catholic musical repertoire in monophony and polyphony.)

In expressing themes of togetherness, equality, and non-judging attitudes, the message of popular liturgical songs is too easily assimilated to or confused with secular ideas of equality between all humans and especially between men and women (on every level), barring the way to making necessary judgments about states of objective human disorder or discordance from natural law and divine law. One might put it this way: if contemporary church music tells me that Mass is all about forming a warm, affective community of people who are “there for each other,” and I buy into that message, then of course I can’t deny someone the “symbol” of belonging in that community: the full participation in the communion rite. I’d risk hurting that affective community by making a person feel offended and excluded.

This is exactly the mentality we are up against in a world run by Amorites. [3] It will eventually undermine every aspect of Catholicism if it is not vigorously combated, because it is an acid that breaks down intellectual assent to propositional truths and spiritual commitment to inflexible principles, that is, revealed religion as such.

The direction of popular liturgical music after the Council therefore furnishes the archetypal instance of the ecclesial surrender to the seemingly invincible forces of secularization. The music reflects and strengthens a worldview or mentality that is at odds with traditional Christian doctrine, morality, and devotion, thus playing into the hands of those who would see Church doctrine altered, morals recast in a flexible postmodern form, and devotions reconceived as delivery systems for political agendas.

Put simply, if the great Catholic liturgy and its centuries-old music can be changed overnight, written off as irrelevant and virtually abandoned at the whim of the Church’s shepherds, why cannot women become deacons, or some types of contraception be approved, or remarried divorcees be admitted to communion? While such reasoning would be terribly simplistic, it cannot be denied that there are powerful forces at work in the Catholic Church that suggest and support this very inference, and pastors have done far too little to counteract those forces.

These difficulties concerning music surface also in matters of architecture, furniture, sacred vessels, and liturgical vestments — indeed, any area in which the categories of fittingness and beauty must be dominant concerns. There is an intimate relationship between beauty and evangelization, as Bishop James Conley explains:

We speak of beauty as something “transcendent.” Every instance of real beauty points beyond itself, toward the infinite perfection of God. … We can think of beauty as a kind of language, through which God speaks to our hearts and souls. ... The first point — and the most essential — is that we must present the truths of faith in a beautiful way. Our liturgical worship, in particular, must reflect God’s own beauty and holiness. Worship, after all, is the basis of Christian culture. The beauty of the sacred liturgy is meant to radiate outward into the world. Liturgical beauty shapes the common life of believers, and it can also help to attract those who are outside the Church. A leading liturgical scholar, Monsignor Nicola Bux, has said that: “a mystical liturgy celebrated with dignity can be a great help for people searching to find God.” ... Monsignor Bux is right. To renew Catholic culture, and evangelize our contemporaries, we must restore beauty to the sacred liturgy. If we cannot restore beauty and holiness to our sanctuaries, we will not be able to restore it anywhere else. [4]

The recovery of the beautiful in worship — the specifically and unmistakably sacral beautiful, one might say — is an urgent priority for the Church in an era of obsessive utilitarianism, “scientific” material reductionism, technological excess, and saturation with banality and superficial messages. The works of the fine arts of the Catholic tradition have a spiritual power, deriving from their inherent qualities and consecrated status, that is capable of awakening modern man to an awareness of an entirely different realm of being and manner of action. [5] In particular, liturgy beauty plays a part in ordering the communion of persons in marriage to God, its source, strength, and shield, restraining the downward tendency of fallen human beings to turn in on themselves and their own fleshly desires, and making it easier to keep one’s mind on the things of the spirit and to live according to the desires of the spirit (cf. Rom 8:5; Gal 5:16–17).

If the lyrics and style of church music do not continually elevate the soul to God in such a way that a habit of meditation and even rudimentary contemplation can be formed, it is not clear that they will not have the contrary effect in the long term, producing habits of distraction or emotional self-absorption.[6] This will not assist the individual in his pursuit of holiness, nor will it assist married couples in their striving for a shared life of prayer, purity, and fidelity. [7]

As Bishop Conley’s observations imply, the paucity of vibrantly and transcendently beautiful works of art in Christian worship is a tragedy of the first order, since it blunts the keen edge of man’s longing for the transcendent God and His supernal beauty — a longing that draws man out of himself towards his divine exemplar and relativizes earthly desires by placing them in a greater context. [8]

NOTES

[1] See, inter alia, William Mahrt, The Musical Shape of the Liturgy (Richmond, VA: Church Music Association of America, 2012); Joseph P. Swain, Sacred Treasure: Understanding Catholic Liturgical Music (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012); Edward Schaefer, Catholic Music Through the Ages: Balancing the Needs of a Worshipping Church (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2008); Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can’t Sing: Revised and Updated with New Grand Conclusions and Good Advice (New York: Crossroad, 2013); Jeffrey Tucker, Sing Like a Catholic (Richmond, VA: Church Music Association of America, 2009).

[2] Lucy E. Carroll, among others, has exposed these aspects of modern Catholic lyrics: “Singing for the Supper or the Sacrifice?,” Adoremus Bulletin 8.8 (November 2002); idem, “A Choir Director’s Lament on Lyrics for Liturgy,” Adoremus Bulletin 12.3 (May 2006). See also Anthony Esolen, “Pop Goes the Mass: The Curse of Bad Liturgical Music.”

[3] That is, proponents of the pastoral accommodationism of Amoris Laetitia as codified in the Buenos Aires documents.

[4] Bishop James D. Conley, “Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Role of Beauty in the Restoration of Catholic Culture,” Crisis, October 10, 2013.

[5] For a thoughtful reflection along these lines, see the concluding document of the 2006 Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture: The «Via Pulchritudinis», Privileged Pathway for Evangelization and Dialogue.

[6] For more discussion of the dangers of emotionalism in church music, see "Sacred Music vs. 'Praise and Worship': Does It Matter?"

[7] Here is the bare-bones argument: Those things that communicate or constrain Catholic beauty have an effect for good or for ill on the spiritual life of married couples; we have lost the things that communicate Catholic beauty and added things that constrain it; therefore, there has been an ill effect on the spiritual life of married couples. The liturgical reform is a contributing cause to the breakdown of marriage and family in the last half-century; it must therefore be resisted and supplanted as part of the strategy of renewal.

[8] It is part of God’s providential plan that we be steeped in the beautiful in divine worship so that our ability to recognize and resonate with the beautiful in nature and in human persons can be awakened and energized. The spread of body-piercing, prolific tattoos, and other forms of mutilation and defacement seem to show that, as a culture, we are blind to the simple beauty of the human body and deaf to the primacy of spiritual realities. How can this not affect the most natural of all relationships, that of man and woman, in which the body and the spirit are uniquely interwoven? One is reminded of the words of Gaudium et Spes, in one of its less woolly moments: Creatura enim sine Creatore evanescit. ... per oblivionem Dei ipsa creatura obscuratur — “for without the Creator, the creature disappears ... when God is forgotten, the creature itself is darkened” (n. 36).

College Students on Why Church Music Should Be Sacred Music

It is often assumed as a given that the only way to reach youths today with the message of Catholicism is to hand it to them on a platter of their own design, couched in the language of their world, with the soundtrack of their music. And while this approach has had its ephemeral successes, the once-promised mass conversion of young people to the Lord of the Dance has never materialized, with studies showing an accelerating exodus from all organized religion, including Catholicism, no matter how emotional and relevant we think we are making it. (I have frequently addressed what is wrong with the “deculturation” approach and why we should harness the uncanny “shock value” of tradition: see, for instance, here, here, here, and here.)

What I want to write about today is the fact that there is a quiet counter-witness rising up from the very same young people to whom things like LifeTeen and the charismatic renewal are supposed to appeal, even though they often do not. Now I am not saying that these youths are the norm (if only!), but only that they represent a greater thoughtfulness and spiritual hunger than our society, and all too often, I'm afraid, our Church, believes to be possible in men and women their age.

So, then, to the quotations I would like to share. In the final examination for my music course at Wyoming Catholic College, students wrote essays in which they tried to express why contemporary styles of music are not appropriate for the liturgy. While most of what they said was a rehashing of Pope Pius X and Benedict XVI (not a bad thing—would that we had more rehashing in a world of forgetfulness), there were certain statements that struck me as well said and full of wisdom. Here are a number of passages I transcribed from their handwritten finals.

Man should be struck dumb with wonder at the immortal freshness of Christ’s unimaginable sacrifice and wish only to sing what is most like the choir of angels. Bringing in “rock Masses” or Praise and Worship not only fails to grasp the solemnity of the event, but turns it toward the people, who at that moment should be emptying themselves to God. … Far beyond accenting the participation of the individual, sacred music must aid men in decentering and forgetting themselves, so that they can melt like wax into the fire of the divine romance.

Another student made a similar point about the incurving trajectory (incurvatus in se, as St. Albert the Great says of self-love) of what is fashionable to our own generation and reflective of our preoccupations:

Instead of coming to worship God and conform oneself to His rationality, popular styles are necessarily the expression of a particular community. This quality encourages worship to cease movement towards God and reflect back to the congregation: it is their music, their choice, their expression of their emotions toward their God. Such action is not worship, but self-indulgence.

(One has to admit that this student has put a finger on a problem that is now endemic to the Latin rite, with its option-ridden and pluralistic Novus Ordo and the availability of the Tridentine Mass as well as the Anglican Ordinariate, namely, that how we worship as Roman Catholics becomes a matter of choice rather than something inherited, accepted as a given. But discussion of this point surely belongs to a different post than the present.)

Another student:

The mysterious nature of the liturgy keeps us from comprehending it, but also draws us closer because of the beauty and depth.  If we destroy this sanctity through a desire for acceptance by contemporary culture, then we have abandoned the great mystery.

And another:

Arvo Pärt’s music now contributes to the manifestation and diffusion of God’s holiness, artistry, and universality.

Could this not be said of all worthy sacred music? Its three qualities, as St. Pius X defined them in Tra le Sollecitudini, end up being a means by which God’s own perfect possession of those qualities is made known in the world.

Yet another:

Thus, “relevant” music should not bow to the influences of the century, but rather the truly relevant music of the liturgy ought to influence the people of the century to refocus and worship the presence of the Lord within the Mass.

I like how this student redefined relevant as that which is inherently so, and therefore informs and impresses itself on people, to make them relevant, in a way, to it, and to the Lord it announces. We are the ones who are clay in the potter's hands, and we need to be reshaped until we are relevant to God, rather than the other way around.

A different student had written in similar fashion:

Far from seeking a temporary, debatable, and always shifting “relevance,” church music must retain within itself elements that will keep it relevant to tradition.

That's a striking thought: our practices themselves, summoned to the court of truth, must defend their own relevance to the tradition we have inherited. If they are foreign to it, in tension with it, at oblique angles to it, they lose and tradition wins.

Another student, drawing on insights of Ratzinger:

Liturgical music must reflect the knowledge that liturgical action is an historical, cosmic, and mysterious reality. Pop music rejects the notion that sacred music takes part in a rich history which draws from its past as it develops. It also ignores the notion that worship is larger than any one person, any one group, or any one time; it drives all sense down into the particular alone. Finally, pop music treats worship as something to do, not as something to receive. In other words, the use of popular styles directly undermines the approach to God in the most insidious way possible; it preys on the congregation’s own enthusiasm and emotion towards their God and shuffles it back into themselves.
The sacred, far from needing help from modern styles, remains relevant: it is a conduit to universal truths. With its ground in transcendent reality, true sacred music needs to shake off modernizing influences like dust from its feet.

I find in the foregoing words an admirably precise critique of popular musical styles in the liturgy. They are bad, spiritually bad, because they are divorced from history, particularized, and activist, and thus anti-incarnational, anti-ecclesial, and anti-receptive. Essentially, this approach undermines Catholicism as such.

Again:

Pop music is not timeless. The music of the Church ought to be like her — transcending age, taste, mood, etc. However, pop music is specific to our modern time. We have decided to make shallow music for shallow men. We must remember that the music of the liturgy should reflect the reality it describes. Since the Mass contains mysteries ineffable and transcendent, should not our music reflect this? 

Should it not, indeed? That is the million-dollar question, as they say, and it is only our Catholic tradition, in its lofty ideals and clear priorities amidst artistic variety, that furnishes an answer not doomed to premature obsolescence.

A better paradigm

Objective Form and Subjective Experience: The Benedictine/Jesuit Controversy, Revisited

Almost three years ago, I published an article here entitled “The Ironic Outcome of the Benedictine–Jesuit Controversy,” which in rewritten form became part of chapter 5, “Different Visions, Contrary Paths,” of my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness. A reader recently contacted me with some interesting observations that prompted further thoughts. I am grateful to him for contacting me — as I am to everyone who sends me such reflections. They are often the germ for NLM articles!

In any case, here is what he wrote:

I have been subjected to two “Life Teen” conferences this summer, and I must say they are the true challenge to the return of Tradition. For they don’t attempt to be heterodox, just the opposite in fact. Those folks who wish the Church could just “get with the times” are dying off, and their children, if they had any, have apostatized. But the Life Teen business is so painfully anti-intellectual that you can barely argue with it, and so it’s tough to defeat. You know things by their fruits, and the fact is that these people are able to exercise a decent attraction for a time. It’s the longer view that comes into question, and it requires more subtle arguments about form and the nature of the spiritual life.
          Your book touches on the Benedictine–Jesuit divide in terms of liturgy, but I think that it can be pushed even further. On my view the Benedictine life is the practical working out of the Augustinian theological/spiritual synthesis. At the heart of that synthesis is the conflict between pride and humility. Pride is self-indulgence to the point of contempt of God. Humility is God-indulgence to the point of contempt of self. At the heart of this is Augustine’s profound self-effacement. He knows how complicated, tangled, and inverted things can become. As he says in the Confessions: “I have become an enigma to myself.” The Augustinian (and therefore the broadly Catholic) method for resolving that question is through submission to form that is not self-created or self-perpetuating. This, for two reasons. One, the self is untrustworthy and deceived, and two, because there is no coming to faith without mediation. That’s why he concludes the opening of the Confessions: “I call upon thee, O Lord, in my faith which thou hast given me, which thou hast inspired in me through the humanity of thy Son, and through the ministry of thy preacher.” The humanity of the Son, that is the one who takes the mediation of flesh through Mary, and the ministry of the preacher — i.e., Ambrose, and the episcopal office more generally.
          Thus, it’s not by accident that humility, submission to the rule and the abbot, are the very foundations of Benedictine life. It is through obedience — both to the rule and to the abbot, which are parallel to Augustine’s ministry of the preacher and humanity of the Son — that one draws near to the Lord. Here there is no room for self-expression or self-presence as we’ve come to understand those things. On the other hand, that’s why Benedict constantly exhorts the abbot to patience and magnanimity, never abusing that great authority.
          In a similar way, in Benedictine life the liturgy, the opus Dei, is the reception of and adherence to form, down to the last detail. Salvation comes through conforming yourself to the mediated image, just as the mediated image, in the case of the Host, becomes salvation, when a priest conforms himself to the given form (no wonder Augustine understood ex opere operato in his refutation of the Donatists). In other words, ‘experience’ understood as “conscious seeming,” has almost no role to play in Augustinian–Benedictine spirituality. Contrast that with the Jesuit tradition. Experience is everything. Self-presence, self-knowledge can be read (and indeed in the consciously modern period have been read) throughout the Exercises. It becomes very easy then to cast such things as fixed liturgical forms, rubrics, traditional chant as evils just to the extent that they put a damper on experience. To an experientialist, if something becomes rote, it doesn’t seem like anything. Options, flexibility, creativity, become paramount.
          Now, I’m not claiming this is what Ignatius had in mind, but in broad strokes, I think one can see clear differences. These are differences that aren’t merely contrasting; they are contradictory. The two schools disagree on the nature of knowledge, on the formation of the soul, indeed, on the very purpose of the liturgy.
          I may be way off base on all that, but I think there’s something to it. I’m curious to know your reaction to this theory.

I sympathize with many things my interlocutor is saying; his singling out of subjectivism as a modern vice is correct, and it is hard to dispute that the Jesuits have played a role in the decentering of the Church from her public liturgy. But I have to take some exceptions to his interpretation of Augustine.

Augustine can be and has been used to support just about any position under the sun (just think of the Protestant reformers who continually cited him, or later, the Jansenists). The reason is simply that he is so rich, so comprehensive, and so subtle that he really did see every angle of a problem. He gives us a lot to work with — and to take out of context. In his mature thought, however, there is a perfect balance of the subjective and the objective, or to put it differently, as a Platonist with a deep spiritual hunger for the reality of God, he was absolutely fixed on the Good which is above and beyond us, and in love intimately with this Good as it came to possess his own heart. The usual contrasts between, say, “objective spirituality” (i.e., liturgy, sacraments) and “subjective spirituality” (e.g., personal prayer, emotion, experience) fall apart when it comes to him: his most personal experiences were precisely ones of the reality of God as mediated through the order of creation and the order of redemption. He would look at us with extreme puzzlement if we started to make an opposition between Eucharistic worship and personal friendship with God, or between adoration through stable external signs and inward conviction or conversion. He would say: The Eucharist, the divine liturgy, is the locus of that friendship; and that friendship cannot exist unless nourished by God Himself. We have to be drawn out of ourselves into the transcendent mystery of God through sacramental signs in order to know and love ourselves aright and to have His indwelling presence in us.

This brings me to an Aristotelian point, which will supply a key premise. Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics that pleasure is the accompaniment of a good action, in some sense a concomitant or result of it, and that the best pleasures accompany the best actions. So, if you want the pleasure, you have to seek out the action; and if you want the best pleasure, you need to seek out the best action a human being is capable of. The reason we reproach “pleasure-seekers” is that they are aiming for easier, low-hanging fruit, usually of a sensual or emotional kind. The paradox is that if you seek pleasure in itself, you miss the better pleasures, which require a certain self-denial and self-transcendence. The virtuous man aims at good or great actions, and experiences a deeper, purer pleasure in doing them.[1]

Now let us consider worship as an action, and religious experience as a pleasure. Liturgical action, when pursued for its own sake, i.e., in adoration and praise of God, is accompanied by the best religious experience. But if we seek the experience as our goal, we will be denied the experience at its best, which comes only from pursuing something nobler than a mere experience. Hence, the person who will be most delighted in worship is the one whose motto is: “I want to find God” — not the one whose motto is “I want to have an experience of God.”

One may draw a parallel here with marriage. If a partner begins with the attitude: “I want an experience of a deep relationship,” the marriage is doomed. If he or she begins with the attitude: “I want to do right by this person, no matter what,” the marriage can flourish. What is vitally important is that the aim be not some experience gained by using another, but simply the other himself or herself: he or she is the aim.[2] It is the same with having children. For a parent to think “I want to have the experience of being a parent/having a child” is a subtle form of selfishness. The parent who thinks instead: “I want to bring a child into the world for his or her own happiness” is focused on the good of the other and willing to sacrifice himself/herself to accomplish it.

The result of this analysis is that we should not set form or objectivity over against experience, as if they are in opposition. Rather, form, or a formal action, will always come with an experience. A higher form will come with a higher experience. A lower form will be accompanied by a lower experience.[3] This, I believe, is exactly what Augustine is saying throughout the Confessions and other works.

That a lower form will be accompanied by a lower experience is what we see in a phenomenon like like Life Teen.[4] It’s easy to get the immediate emotional experience; it requires so little in the way of form or action. But it is correspondingly shallow and unsatisfying for that reason, and must be repeatedly sought, perhaps with attempts made at intensifying the same experience. In this way it is somewhat like drugs, where people start with small doses and eventually try bigger doses or move to more potent drugs, because they are seeking more of that experience, more of that pleasure.

With traditional worship, it is quite different. At first, the form is lofty and remote, the action difficult for our nature. We may feel dry, at a loss, perplexed, even offended at the lack of consideration for our feelings and (what we think to be) our needs. We are confronted with the otherness, the strangeness of God. But if we stick it out, something calls to us in our remoteness from Him. As we dwell with it more, it slowly seizes hold of us and lifts us up to a higher level, to higher perceptions of the truth of what we are doing and Whom we are dealing with. As this worship becomes more connatural, we experience more delight. The delight does not grow stale or cloying but, in fact, builds upon itself without limit, because it is of a spiritual or intellectual order (although not separated from the physical domain). At the limit, beyond this life, we enjoy the beatific vision, where the experience and the objective reality, the form, are utterly at one.

In conclusion, humility, obedience, submission to rule, reception of form, and adherence to form do not need to be (or be seen as) opposed to experience, self-presence, self-knowledge, and fulfillment. With Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas as our guides, we see that the latter are best accomplished by following the narrow road of the former, and the former is necessarily accompanied by the latter in its purest state. But we cannot pursue the latter for their own sakes if we ever wish to practice the former well; indeed, such a mistaken prioritization leads to a skepticism towards and an eventual abandonment of those “objective” foundations and qualities.

It is for this reason that Life Teen and programs like it are harmful to the spiritual development of adolescents, who are at a particularly vulnerable point in their lives, with anxieties about self-image, a tendency towards emotional instability and excess, and the temptation of pleasure-seeking. They will benefit the most, over time, from the traditional emphasis on formal liturgical action to which worshipers anonymously submit, all facing in the same direction and offering a visible sacrifice such as the nature of man requires, avoiding the psychological inflations and distractions of a contemporary style of worship.

I should like to give the last word to Dom Guéranger, as reported by Abbess Cécile Bruyère:

“Let us note well,” said Dom Guéranger in his familiar conversations, “that the science of the Christian life is a determined and definite science. Therefore we must not rest satisfied with repeating conventional phrases or with multiplying sentimental formulas [‘Oh, ah, I ah-dore you-ou-ou’—Ed.]; it is by labour, and not by dreaming and excitement, that we must learn the secrets of a science which has its axioms, its deductions and its certain rules. All must be drawn from divine sources, that this science may be truly that of the spiritual life in the Christian Church.”[5]

NOTES

[1] The reason pleasure-seeking leads to a bad end is that action grounds pleasure rather than pleasure grounding action. If you seek the best action, you have a grounded approach to the best pleasure; but if you seek the greatest pleasure, the pleasure itself will not guide you on to the best action.

[2] Obviously, not as an ultimate end, but as one ordered by charity to God.

[3] By “higher” and “lower” here, I mean more in accord with man’s rational or spiritual nature as capax Dei, a nature open to the knowledge and love of God, which are attained most of all in contemplation.

[4] A similar critique could be offered of tendencies in the Charismatic Movement.

[5] Cécile Bruyère, The Spiritual Life and Prayer according to Holy Scripture and Monastic Tradition (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 121.

Is “Contemporary” Church Music a Good Example of Inculturation?

Today, I have an article under this title over at OnePeterFive. Some excerpts:

          It seems that the missionaries who went to the New World were able to take up elements of the culture of the people they encountered, including something from their music. Vatican II tells us that we should do the same thing wherever the Gospel is preached. Why can we not take up elements of today’s popular culture around us, such as rock or pop styles of music, and turn them into vehicles for evangelizing our contemporaries?
          My answer—at least as far as the realm of the liturgy is concerned—is a resounding no, for the following reasons.
          Inculturation, correctly understood, is the process of carefully discerning and integrating harmonious elements of an indigenous culture into the teaching and practice of the Faith, so as to make the Faith at home in a culture. In this way the people to whom it is being introduced experience it not as something completely foreign to them but as something that completes and elevates the good already present in their midst. . . .
          Today’s Westerners, in contrast, are post-Christian aliens, estranged from their own history and the great cultural synthesis that could and should be theirs. The history of modern music, whether atonal or jazz or rock or pop, is a history of deliberate rebellion and revolt against the great tradition of Western music, against its high art forms, its slowly developed musical language, its explicitly or implicitly Christian message. In its origins and its inner meaning, much of modern Western music is a rejection of the Catholic (and European) tradition. As a result, it is not morally, intellectually, or culturally “neutral”; it is already laden with an anti-institutional, anti-sacral, anti-traditional significance. This music is not naïve raw material waiting to be Christianized, but highly articulate anti-Christian propaganda. It rejects the ideals of lofty beauty and grandeur, spiritual seriousness, evocation of the divine, openness to the transcendent, and artistic discipline, in favor of vapidity, frivolity, profanity, sensuality, and banality. 

Read the rest at OnePeterFive.

Two-part Essay on Sacred Music vs. Praise & Worship

NLM readers may wish to have a look at my two articles published recently at OnePeterFive, contrasting the characteristics of “Praise & Worship” music with the characteristics of authentic Catholic sacred music as developed in the Church's tradition and defined in her magisterium (see here for Part 1, and here for Part 2).

Some excerpts:

Whenever the popes speak about sacred (i.e., liturgical) music, the very first quality they put forward is holiness or sanctity, which they describe as a certain worthiness of or suitability for the celebration of the sacred mysteries of Christ, and freedom from worldliness or even that which is suggestive of the secular domain.[1] This is why it is especially important that liturgical music both be and seem to be exclusively connected with and consecrated to the liturgy of the Church. If the musical style is borrowed from the outside world and brought into the temple, it profanes the liturgy and harms the spiritual progress of the people.
        This also explains why Gregorian chant is held up as the supreme model and the normative music for the Roman Rite: it is a type of music that grew up together with the liturgy and exclusively in service to it, having no other realm or purpose.[2] When we hear chant, there is no ambiguity or ambivalence about what it is or what it is for; it breathes the spirit of the liturgy and cannot be mistaken for secular music in any way. Something quite similar is true about the pipe organ, which, after 1,000 years of nearly exclusive use in churches, is so completely bound up with the ecclesiastical sphere that its sound practically equates with “churchliness” in the ears of most people. For the popes, these strong and deep associations are good and important. It follows that music with a “double identity,” music that involves teleological and tropological ambiguity, is problematic.

[...]

A test for whether a style of music proposed for church is truly universal is to ask whether imposing it on a foreign country or people would be a kind of imperialism. With Gregorian chant, the answer is obviously no, because, like Latin, chant belongs to no single nation, people, period, or movement: it developed slowly from ancient times to more recent centuries, across the entire map where Christianity was planted; its composers are predominantly anonymous; it was taken up by the Latin-rite Church as the definitive musical clothing of her liturgy (which cannot be said even of polyphony, as praiseworthy as it is). In short, wherever the Latin liturgy traveled throughout the world, there too the Gregorian chant traveled, and it has never been perceived as anything other than “the voice of the Church at prayer.”
        In contrast, the style of Praise & Worship songs is obviously contemporary, American, and secular. If missionaries were to impose these songs on some indigenous tribe elsewhere in the world, it would be comparable to asking them to dress, eat, and talk like Americans. It is, in that sense, comparable to jeans, Coca-Cola, and iPhones.

[...]

A culture predisposed to think everyone should be “on a high” via athletics, drugs, sex, or rock concerts will likewise incline people (whether openly or implicitly) to think that prayer and worship should be the same way. One should feel “on a high”! Sacred music has never aimed at such an emotional high. In fact, it has conscientiously avoided it, to guard against the danger of fallen man becoming submerged in (and limited by) his feelings.

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