In many ways, the world in which you grew up had already been thoroughly de-Catholicized, and this was tragically true even of your own parish. The ghosts of the Catholic past were everywhere in movies and popular culture: people kneeling for communion, priests in black for Requiem Masses, Latin, elaborate vestments, stories of rigorous server training, incense, and tough nuns in schools – but you knew none of this. There were new and odd names for everything: confession behind a screen became face-to-face reconciliation, CCD became CFF, Mass became the "Eucharistic celebration," processionals were "gathering songs," and you knew nothing of traditional devotions like Holy Hours and novenas.
The adult teachers and leaders in your parish lacked enthusiasm.Įven Mass, as much as you tried to throw yourself into it, began to seem blasé. The catechism materials used in your CCD classes, even for confirmation, were unchallenging and cliché. In your childhood and early teen years, you were part of a parish structure that had settled into a kind of routine that you found to be uneventful and static, even faithless. The music problem reflected a larger problem. This was what was considered "traditional Catholic music," and it didn't seem to mean much to young people by the time you were coming of age. When your parents were very young, the standard music was new and innovative, but by the time you heard it, it had grown old and tired.Īnd there didn't seem to be much of it: the same few Glorias and Holy Holys, and about twenty or so songs sung again and again, most of it suggestive of half-hearted attempts at folk music of some sort. You were the third generation raised after the major changes following the Second Vatican Council.
The historical context here is everything. Many of you have written to me that you would greatly appreciate a parish setting in which Gregorian chant and polyphony (the only two musical forms explicitly cited at Vatican II as proper to the Roman Rite) were sung as part of Mass.īut this is not the parish setting you inherited and it doesn't seem like an option now. It is not that you have overtly rejected tradition in favor of innovation. You are not unaware that the style of music you have chosen has no liturgical precedent in the history of the faith.
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