For today, I would just like to mention one thing. In his homily today, Fr. Pasley described the relationship between sacred music and the Holy Scriptures. He said that, “Just as the Blessed Virgin was the Earthly tabernacle of her God, so too is sacred music the tabernacle for the Word of God. It adorns and beautifies it, keeping it safe and preserving the sacred.”
The sooner that our music directors, schola leaders, cantors and the like realize that the Mass isn’t a performance, but a prayer, the sooner we will see a profound love for the Gregorian Chants which are so proper and conducive to our worship. To have a crisis in chant is to have a crisis in the Church – no other music is as perfectly suited to the sacrifice of the Mass, in either form, than is Gregorian Chant.
The Church asks little of us in terms of the Liturgy. We must participate as we ought to, and we must follow what Her documents set forth. The liturgy documents NEVER decreed that we should do away with chant, but rather, to place it at the head of our liturgical lives. When you remove the chants particular to a certain day, you lose the theme set in place in the earliest days of the Church. And that is a travesty. Fr. Phillips of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius noted that Gregorian Chant is attracting people to the Church. Young couples come to him and say, “We want that music we heard at Mass on Sunday.”
They don’t know what it is, but their souls certainly grasp the sacredness and profound nature of the treasury of that loftiest and simplest of art forms. When we find ourselves in a diocese that experiments with everything except Gregorian Chant, it is only fair and proper that we bring this “experiment” of chant to more churches. Without fail, it will prove to unify a scattered flock. Why? The soul appreciates beauty, even when the mind can’t verbalize what it conjures up. Chant is an echo of the divine, a suggestion of the glories to come, the glories of the Heavenly Court.
Tags: Colloquia 2010 and 2011, Liturgy, Music Sacred Catholic Liturgical and Chant, Orthodoxy at Work
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“The soul appreciates beauty, even when the mind can’t verbalize what it conjures up. Chant is an echo of the divine, a suggestion of the glories to come, the glories of the Heavenly Court.”
Yes. Well said.