This blog is going to tack Catholic for a while since the inner workings of the Church have lately been more interesting to me than anything going on in politics. Especially this obsession the Democrats have with Barack Obama. What’s up with that? I think the party is so star struck that it is underestimating the country’s latent racism. Hopefully I’m wrong but it will be hard to tell. Racist bias is a notoriously difficult issue to get accurate polls on since racists tend to lie to pollsters when asked if they’re racists. Whatever, I’ll be voting Green anyway.
I’ve been thinking about how the sad state of the Catholic liturgy has probably been partly responsible for driving Cradle Catholics away from the Church. As a part-time musician I have been especially annoyed at what passes for music in Church these days. A little Googling on the issue showed me that I was not alone in my critique:
“The awful stuff that has passed for liturgical music in the Catholic Church for the past thirty-five years is a continuing disgrace and embarrassment. The insipid "hymns" and utterly trite musical settings of parts of the Ordinary of the Mass suddenly appeared from nowhere sometime shortly after Vatican II.
Overnight, fifteen hundred years of some of the most beautiful, inspired music in all of Western culture was thrown out and replaced by what sounds like bad 1960's folk-pop-elevator music. In fact, it's worse than that. Nothing in pop music ever sounded quite as loathsome as what is played and sung in the church today.” http://www.tommcfaul.com/escritaria/litmusic.html
Pretty strong stuff. The likely explanation is that the Church has simply aped the secular West's obsession with "accessibility", "inclusiveness", "democracy" and "anti-elitism". The effect of this on liturgy has been a triumph of bad taste and banality and an apparent vacating of the sacred spaces of any palpable sense of the presence of God.
Try to imagine what it would be like if the rest of the Church's art were dumbed-down to this degree. Imagine the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel redone in a more modern style. Would the clergy and faithful stand for such a desecration? I doubt it. Apparently music is considered a less important art form in the eyes of the modern church. But why? How did bad folk guitars and bongos replace choirs and Gregorian chants in the United States.
Here is an interesting explanation:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/january2002/feature2.htm
3 comments:
I am not Catholic, not even Christian. But I have a certain fascination with the pomp and ceremony of the church. I am amazed at how bad the music is that comes out of the Vatican, i.e. at the Christmas eve midnight mass, the pope's funeral, etc. Is this the best that they can muster. It isn't reflective of pop music, but a classical musician's equivalent of elevator music, foresaking the musical tradition of the church - be it chant, renaissance polyphony, or the sacred music of the central European tradition, it substitutes faceless and characterless pablum that offends no one, but probably inspires n one either.
The music coming out of the Vatican is not nearly as bad as what goes on in the pews on Sunday, although it mystifies me that with all of the beautiful music to choose from the best we get is "On Eagle's Wings".
Hey JC, JC won't you fight for me?
Sanna Hosanna Hey Superstar
Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
sing hosanna to the king of kings
sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
sing hosanna to the king.
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