Liturgy

Here is an interesting post at Free Republic of an indult Mass held at the Arizona State prison by Fr. Richard J. Rego, STL of the Saint Gianna Latin Mass Community.

Another article details news that the diocese of Catholic Diocese of Wichita has granted permission to have the indult Mass there weekly, previously it was twice a month.

How beautiful is the sight of the cross! Its beauty is not a mingling of evil and good, like in former times the tree in the Garden of Eden. It is entirely admirable, “good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.” (Gen 3:6) It is a tree that gives life and not death, light and not blindness. It makes people enter Eden and not leave it. This tree upon which Christ went up like a king on his triumphant chariot, has lost the devil who had power over death, and has rescued the human race from enslavement to the tyrant. On this tree, like an elite fighter, the Lord, wounded in his hands, his feet and his divine side, healed the wounds of sin, that is to say, our nature that was wounded by Satan.

After being put to death by means of the wood, we have found life by means of the wood. After being deceived by means of the wood, we have driven back the deceitful serpent by means of the wood. What surprising exchanges! Life instead of death, immortality instead of corruption, glory instead of shame. Rightly did the apostle Paul exclaim: “May I never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!” (Gal 6:14)… Beyond all wisdom, this wisdom, which blossomed on the cross, rendered stupid the pretences of the wisdom of this world (1 Cor 1:17f.)…

By the cross, death was killed and Adam was returned to life. By the cross, all the apostles were glorified, all the martyrs were crowned, all the saints sanctified. By the cross, we have put on Christ and been stripped of the old man (Eph 4:22). By the cross, we have been brought back as Christ’s sheep and have been gathered together in the sheepfold on high.

Saint Theodore the Studite (759-826), Monk in Constantinople (DailyGospel.org)

Address of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI
at the Blessing of the New Organ
(Wednesday, 13 September 2006, Regensburg, Alte Kapelle)

This venerable house of God, the Basilica of “Our Lady of the Old Chapel”, has been splendidly refurbished and today receives a new organ, which will now be blessed and solemnly dedicated to its proper aim: the glorification of God and the strengthening of faith.

An important contribution to the renewal of sacred music in the nineteenth century was made by a canon of this collegiate church, Carl Joseph Proske. Gregorian chant and classic choral polyphony were integrated into the liturgy. The attention given to liturgical sacred music in the “Old Chapel” was so significant that it reached far beyond the confines of the region, making Regensburg a centre for the reform of sacred music, and its influence has continued to the present time.

In the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council (Sacrosanctum Concilium), it is emphasized that the “combination of sacred music and words … forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy” (No. 112). This means that music and song are more than an embellishment of worship; they are themselves part of the liturgical action. Solemn sacred music, with choir, organ, orchestra and the singing of the people, is not an addition of sorts that frames the liturgy and makes it more pleasing, but an important means of active participation in worship. The organ has always been considered, and rightly so, the king of musical instruments, because it takes up all the sounds of creation and gives resonance to the fullness of human sentiments. By transcending the merely human sphere, as all music of quality does, it evokes the divine. The organ’s great range of timbre, from piano through to a thundering fortissimo, makes it an instrument superior to all others. It is capable of echoing and expressing all the experiences of human life. The manifold possibilities of the organ in some way remind us of the immensity and the magnificence of God.

Psalm 150 speaks of trumpets and flutes, of harps and zithers, cymbals and drums; all these musical instruments are called to contribute to the praise of the triune God. In an organ, the many pipes and voices must form a unity. If here or there something becomes blocked, if one pipe is out of tune, this may at first be perceptible only to a trained ear. But if more pipes are out of tune, dissonance ensues and the result is unbearable. Also, the pipes of this organ are exposed to variations of temperature and subject to wear. Now, this is an image of our community. Just as in an organ an expert hand must constantly bring disharmony back to consonance, so we in the Church, in the variety of our gifts and charisms, always need to find anew, through our communion in faith, harmony in the praise of God and in fraternal love. The more we allow ourselves, through the liturgy, to be transformed in Christ, the more we will be capable of transforming the world, radiating Christ’s goodness, his mercy and his love for others.

The great composers, each in his own way, ultimately sought to glorify God by their music. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote above the title of many of his musical compositions the letters S.D.G., Soli Deo Gloria – to God alone be glory. Anton Bruckner also prefaced his compositions with the words: Dem lieben Gott gewidmet – dedicated to the good God. May all those who enter this splendid Basilica, experiencing the magnificence of its architecture and its liturgy, enriched by solemn song and the harmony of this new organ, be brought to the joy of faith.

I just love his comparison of the organ to that of community since it is such a good analogy. When I think of dissonance in this analogy it is easy to relate it to dissidence. The tone deaf theology that does not unite and sounds quite discordant. As if each pipe has it’s own player with each person going by their own score. Truth has often been described as orchestral where truths seen together both build upon and enforce the other.

I also love how the Pope can give a speech about the dedication of an organ and then goes on and explores the theological richness of it and especially of the liturgy.

The more we allow ourselves, through the liturgy, to be transformed in Christ, the more we will be capable of transforming the world, radiating Christ’s goodness, his mercy and his love for others.

Amen.

On a recent Monday at the Abbey of Regina Laudis here, about 35 nuns gather in a dim chapel to chant, as they do every day at noon. Making their way through Psalm 118, the nuns sit or stand; some face different directions, while others bow steeply. Throughout, their voices remain in unison.

Pope Benedict XVI would approve. After a concert of 16th- and 17th-century music recently, the pope said he would prefer to hear Gregorian chant and other traditional types of music play more of a role during Mass.

That’s good news for the cloistered nuns at the Bethlehem abbey, which is known around the world for its devotion to Gregorian chant and is one of the few places where it is sung with such frequency and intensity. The nuns sing seven times a day; some interrupt their sleep to chant at 2 in the morning.

But the pope’s comments also raise certain questions: What is sacred music supposed to sound like? And what’s wrong with new music in church?

It’s a debate that has raged since 1963, when Vatican II reforms brought contemporary music to Catholic churches. Just as the Latin Mass almost immediately disappeared amid attempts to modernize, chants gave way to guitars and snappy folk tunes.

The new music helped fill pews, but it left church conservatives and formally trained musicians reeling. How could the church that brought about Gregorian chant, polyphony and musical notation — all profound influences on Western music — be the same one leading sing-alongs of "Love Is Colored Like a Rainbow" and songs from hit musicals? What, bemoaned the purists, had the folkies wrought?

The new music helped fill pews? In what alternative reality was this? There has been a consistent decline of Catholics going to Mass over the last forty years. There of course are a lot of cultural factors explaining this besides a change in the liturgy. But to assert that contemporary music is filling the pews when there has been a decline in Mass attendance is plain mistaken. I can’t recall one conversion story that mentions comtemporay music as a factor. Though I have read some where they come into the Church despite comtempoary music at Mass.

"There’s a sense of mystery and religious atmosphere that seems to be lost in the new days," says Scott Turkington, the choirmaster at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Stamford. "The fact is that the older music is better. Ask any serious musician, and he’ll agree with that."

The chants sung at Regina Laudis are more than 1,000 years old. But Sister Elizabeth Evans says "old" doesn’t mean "irrelevant."

Sister Elizabeth, 46, was a corporate securities attorney and law professor before she came to the abbey in 1997. Each of the nuns is assigned certain responsibilities; hers are music and dairy. Sitting in a small room behind a wooden screen (which symbolically separates the nun’s world from the visitor’s, though there’s enough space to shake hands), Sister Elizabeth remembers stumbling onto the sound of chant when she was 14. To her, it was anything but off-putting. She played it for her friends, who were equally taken.

"And I mean, these were 14-year-old gum-chewing delinquents like myself," she says.

To the untrained ear, the unaccompanied chant named after Pope Gregory the Great can sound emotionally muted, droning at times and otherworldly. That it’s sung in Latin doesn’t help.

But to Sister Elizabeth, it sounds more recognizably human than any other music, down to earth and in tune to the rhythms of life.

It’s based on the Scriptures, after all, which are filled with human foibles. She says chant is like bluesman Muddy Waters — a comparison that conjures the improbable image of nuns chanting "Baby Please Don’t Go." She explains that both have a certain earthiness and deal with the nitty-gritty of life.

What they chant depends on the time of the day (the morning lauds, for instance, often celebrate beginnings and creations; at noon, they chant the sext, which deals a lot with chasing down noonday demons). Subjects also change along with the seasons. Lately, they’ve sung about taking in harvests, filling storage houses and other day-to-day concerns.

So if chant is like Muddy Waters, what’s contemporary Christian music?

"Donny and Marie," Sister Elizabeth says, laughing.

Amen to that.

Roc O’Connor, one of the St. Louis Jesuits — a musical group of then-seminarians at St. Louis University that led the folk Mass movement in the 1970s — says he recently visited a poor church in Brazil where the parishioners sang local songs.

"I thought, `How can these people make sense of Gregorian chant or polyphony?’ " says O’Connor, whose group still raises the hackles of musical purists. "The cultural and economic issues that are tied to it all make the issue more complex. Not everyone can afford an orchestra or singers who can handle it."

Yes Brazilian are too stupid to learn Gregorian Chant or least that what it sounds like what the condescending Roc O’Connor is saying. He obviously has no idea of the history of when Gregorian Chant was first introduced to Catholic converts who were natives of South America. That not only did they take to it, but composed their own Chants.

Nobody’s expecting Gregorian chant to fill churches en masse. But many say the pendulum had been swinging toward traditional music even before the pope weighed in on the subject.

"You had one generation in the 1960s that had the general mode of questioning authority," says Kurt Poterack, editor of the journal Sacred Music. "Now you have, not quite the children, but the grandchildren. They tend to be people in their 20s who are saying, `Hey, this is kind of beautiful stuff."’

As Fr. Tucker said on his blog today "I’d be hard pressed to think of anything written after 1960 that’s worth teaching a congregation to sing."

Gerald has a real nice page up of newly built St. Stephen Catholic Church, where Fr. Stephanos acted as liturgical consultant.

Beautiful modern churches are rare. Certainly, there are quite a few beautiful "NEO" churches being built, but it certainly is important to develop a contemporary architectural style that, while drawing from the past, is not a mere carbon copy. I believe that Fr. Stephanos has succeeded wonderfully with "his" church.

This church is a good example of what can be done in a more modern context, but still retain beauty. I have seen some good examples of this in my own dioces with more modern churches that at the same time did not become iconoclastic. Though some built within the last ten years have fallen into the church-in-the-round minimalism that is a divorce from the past. Meeting halls with no soul.

I recently found a picture of my own parish on a Tridentine Mass site while searching for something else. The picture is fairly recent since it shows the restoration done last year.

Though right now the stained glass windows are gone since they are being refurbished. No matter how often I go to my parish the interior once again hits me and reminds me why I am there. The whole church is directed towards worship and a reminder of the saints that went before us. My parish is also a liturgical oasis where I can easily leave at home my copy of Mass Confusion. In fact I sometimes go to other parishes just so I can commiserate with others over liturgical abuses.

One of my favorite quotes is from today’s memorial, Saint Rose of Lima

Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.

Annunciations of a New Springtime came across a 2003 Adoramus article of Cardinal Arinze’s speaking on liturgical dance that I had not seen before.

Now, some priests and lay people think that Mass is never complete without dance. The difficulty is this: we come to Mass primarily to adore God — what we call the vertical dimension. We do not come to Mass to entertain one another. That’s not the purpose of Mass. The parish hall is for that.

So all those that want to entertain us — after Mass, let us go to the parish hall and then you can dance. And then we clap. But when we come to Mass we don’t come to clap. We don’t come to watch people, to admire people. We want to adore God, to thank Him, to ask Him pardon for our sins, and to ask Him for what we need.

Don’t misunderstand me, because when I said this at one place somebody said to me: "you are an African bishop. You Africans are always dancing. Why do you say we don’t dance?"

A moment — we Africans are not always dancing!

Moreover, there is a difference between those who come in procession at Offertory; they bring their gifts, with joy. There is a movement of the body right and left. They bring their gifts to God. That is good, really. And some of the choir, they sing. They have a little bit of movement. Nobody is going to condemn that. And when you are going out again, a little movement, it’s all right.

But when you introduce wholesale, say, a ballerina, then I want to ask you what is it all about. What exactly are you arranging? When the people finish dancing in the Mass and then when the dance group finishes and people clap — don’t you see what it means? It means we have enjoyed it. We come for enjoyment. Repeat. So, there is something wrong. Whenever the people clap — there is something wrong — immediately. When they clap — a dance is done and they clap.

It is possible that there could be a dance that is so exquisite that it raises people’s minds to God, and they are praying and adoring God and when the dance is finished they are still wrapped up in prayer. But is that the type of dance you have seen? You see. It is not easy.

Most dances that are staged during Mass should have been done in the parish hall. And some of them are not even suitable for the parish hall.

I saw in one place — I will not tell you where — where they staged a dance during Mass, and that dance was offensive. It broke the rules of moral theology and modesty. Those who arranged it — they should have had their heads washed with a bucket of holy water!

Why make the people of God suffer so much? Haven’t we enough problems already? Only Sunday, one hour, they come to adore God. And you bring a dance! Are you so poor you have nothing else to bring us? Shame on you! That’s how I feel about it.

Somebody can say, "but the pope visited this county and the people danced". A moment: Did the pope arrange it? Poor Holy Father — he comes, the people arranged. He does not know what they arranged. And somebody introduces something funny — is the pope responsible for that? Does that mean it is now approved? Did they put in on the table of the Congregation for Divine Worship? We would throw it out! If people want to dance, they know where to go.

Somebody needs to start a Cardinal Arinze Fan Club blog. He always provides a wealth of great commentary and common sense on the liturgy.

VATICAN CITY – Silently processing out of the sacristy of St. Peter’s Basilica at 7 a.m. each day, the altar servers look like angels, but the women who cook and clean for them say they are normal boys.

Well, maybe not totally normal. After all, these 11- to 18-year-olds live at the Vatican during the school year.

During the 2005-06 academic year, 21 of them ate, slept, studied and occasionally created chaos at the St. Pius X Pre-seminary inside the Vatican walls.

Father Enrico Radice, rector of the pre-seminary, said four students graduated from high school in June, and three of them are entering diocesan seminaries in September.

This year’s percentage of students going on to a full-fledged seminary is high, even by Vatican standards, he said. About 10 percent of the 700 boys who have lived at the pre-seminary in the past 50 years have become priests.

Some of the boys return home before finishing high school, and one or two, suffering severe cases of homesickness, leave before their first Christmas at the Vatican, according to the women who not only cook and clean, but also confess to mothering the boys on occasion.

The pre-seminary opened its doors in 1956 at the urging of Father Giovanni Folci, a priest of the Diocese of Como, Italy, who founded an association of priests committed to promoting vocations to the priesthood. The association, still made up mostly of Como priests like Father Radice, runs the pre-seminary.

Father Radice said the pre-seminary purposely does not call itself a minor seminary; its primary function is not to prepare young men to enter a seminary.

…"Our first aim is to provide a decorous liturgical service in St. Peter’s Basilica. We try to create a spiritual atmosphere appropriate for that service," he said.

When the pre-seminary is effective, he said, the boys get more of a taste of what the priesthood would be like than they would as altar servers in their home parish.

While serving daily Mass is their primary responsibility, Father Radice said, "at least two or three times a year" each of the boys enrolled in the pre-seminary gets a chance to serve a papal Mass.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, currently under construction, is the vision of His Excellency Raymond Burke, Bishop of LaCrosse. It is meant as a place for the faithful to come on pilgrimage and to foster devotion to the Blessed Virgin under her title of Patroness of the Americas. In the tradition of pilgrimage churches, the shrine is located high upon a hill outside of the city with a campanile and dome which will be visible from afar.

The interior of the Shrine is a cruciform domical church inspired by Italian examples such as the Gesu, San Andrea della Valle, and San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini in Rome. Generous side aisles with shrines flank the nave, and major shrines to the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart are placed at the transept. Corinthian pilasters support a full entablature inscribed with names of the Virgin from the litany of Loreto. Images of the four evangelists reside within the pendentives which support the dome with its clear windows and oculus. The vaulted ceiling is punctuated by stained glass windows which follow the life of the Virgin. [Via AMDG]

This site shows the construction process and this looks like a shrine well worth visiting when it is completed.

The design is quite the opposite of the bleakness and sterility of a Fr. Vosko type church. Which reminds me of a joke I thought up.

Q. Where does Fr. Vosko stay while working as a consultant for a church.

A. The Wrectory.