The day the music died cannot come quick enough for Pope Benedict XVI. He has called for an end to popular music in churches.
“It is possible to modernise holy music”, his Holiness broadmindedly conceded, “but it should not happen outside the traditional path of Gregorian chants or sacred polyphonic choral music.”
Since the reforms of the 1960s (when the Second Vatican Council curtailed the use of Latin), Catholic parishes and dioceses have increasingly conducted mass with new types of music, in an effort to draw the crowds.
Folk songs aren’t uncommon in America; flamenco grows more popular in Spain. Italian and South American Catholics occasionally worship to guitar music, Africans to the beat of dumps. A US band, the Electric Prunes, recently released a psychedelic album specifically designed for use at mass.
As Cardinal Carlo Furno puts it, “guitars on the altar and rock and roll Masses (are better) than empty churches”.
The Pope’s call to psalms, however, will strike a chord with many in the flock. We cannot continue to “uncritically adopt the alien secular musical styles that surround us” says Catholic academic Quentin Faulkner. “Secular culture … is driven by ideals and assumptions that can hardly be considered Christian.”
In a “reform of the reform”, recent years have seen some Catholics move back to traditional music. Publications of CDs, song books and how-to books in the chant and polyphonic tradition all seem to be on the rise.
“It is now widely acknowledged that Catholic music is in a period of transition”, declares a group specifically devoted to that transition: the New Liturgical Movement. “If this trend hasn’t yet reached your parish … you might begin to see a change in the coming years.”
Is this all really just a matter of taste – a case of a few music traditionalists getting a carried away with missionary zeal? The pope, after all, is a classical pianist; his brother, a famous choir director.
Proms director Nicholas Kenyon thinks so. The pope’s comments, he says, are like British Culture Minister “criticising anything he does not personally like on the radio and insisting on a diet of his own favourites.”
“Who is to say that different generations cannot worship to the music of Palestrina or pop, Josquin or flamenco? We should encourage all who want to worship to do so in the style closest to their hearts.”
But is the difference between “sacred” and “popular” music really just in the ear of the beholder? For Benedict, the answer is no. “An authentic updating of sacred music”, he said, “cannot take place except in the wake of the great tradition of the past, of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony”.
Sacred music, then, cannot just be religious words tacked onto random tunes. Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony don’t just have a unique sound, they have a unique religious role.
What is it? Musican Sacram, (the Vatican’s official word on sacred music, released in 1967) said that sacred music made for the listener’s “internal”, rather than just “external”, participation.
For Pope John Paul II, the right sort of music “point(s) to the divine and beckon(s) man into a stance of awe before the cosmos and gratitude for the gift of existence.”
Sacred music, then, has a spiritual, transcendent quality – creating the right sort of atmosphere for appreciating God. CanticaNOVA (another “reformer of the reform”) sums up the appeal of chants and polyphonies in a single word. They’re “otherworldly”.
But clearly more words are required. Drumming has an otherworldly quality for shamans. Chanting mantras does the job for Buddhists. It’s all very well for the pope to talk about medieval music being the “human spirit(‘s) … dialogue with God”, but surely everyone’s got something different to say?
Perhaps, but the Church says this. “By sacred music is understood that which, being created for the celebration of divine worship, is endowed with a certain holy sincerity of form.” That, again, was in Musicam Sacram. The document then quotes Pope Pius X, who like his predecessor, denounced contemporary music fads in favour of Gregorian chants, back in 1903.
To have a “holy sincerity of form” is to “avoid everything that is secular, both in itself and in the way it is performed.” For the Vatican, the essence of “sacred” music is not so much spiritual as semantic. It is music designed for, and originating from, Catholic rites. “Sacred music and sacred liturgy are … naturally interwoven”: it is music of the church and for the Church.
The Reverend Benzmiller puts it neatly. “The definitions and standards (of sacred music) are objectively set forth in the documents of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, and that therefore the issue is not merely a matter of taste or inculturation.”
“It might seem too obvious, but the very fact that Vatican documents use the term sacred to refer to music for the Liturgy, indicates that the Church believes there is such a thing as music which is sacred. There must therefore be a distinction between that music which is sacred and therefore appropriate for use in the Liturgy, and that music which is not sacred, and therefore not appropriate for use in the Liturgy.”
And as one Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said before he was pope: “Christian Liturgy is cosmic Liturgy … It must never renounce this … however attractive it may seem to work with small groups and construct homemade liturgies.”
For the pope, then, if there is one true church, there can only be one true church music – whatever your personal tastes. At the last meeting of the Latin Liturgy Association, Fr. James Jackson deplored “the false reliance on psychology in … which has promoted a sense of self-fulfillment or self-actualization … instead of self-transcendence that encourages the renunciation of self for Christ.”
You’d suspect that Benedict might just agree.
