Sing praises to our God, sing ye:
—Ps. 46:7 (psallite sapienter in Vulgate)
Sing praises to our king, sing ye.
For God is the king of all the earth:
Sing ye wisely.
On May 1, the Associated Press ran a story called “A step back in time: America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways.” The article reflected on what they described as an “immense shift” happening in some Catholic parishes around the country evidenced by a return to a more traditional approach to worship. The article’s first sentence is: “It was the music that changed first.”
Coincidentally, this article appeared while an interesting conversation was taking place in the Word on Fire Institute’s Communities. Someone began a thread they titled, “Saccharine Music at Mass,” and it ignited a disproportionate number of comments compared to other topics that don’t quite hit the same personal points of pain this one does. The one who raised the topic was commenting on their preference for “Latin hymns, chants, and gospel music.” Some agreed and others didn’t. The reasons for supporting or disagreeing with the initial comment were all rooted in personal preferences.
As Word on Fire’s Fellow for Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, I’m stepping out of my lane to write this article and reaching back into my past expertise to offer some thoughts of my own on this topic. The way we worship is critical to the life and health of the Church, and music is usually at the forefront of comments and complaints about Mass.
I have an extensive background in sacred music and my degrees are in music. I served as the Director of Sacred Music at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for ten years, and during that time, I taught courses, directed the seminary choir, prepared men for the liturgical celebrations, and planned all the daily liturgies for the seminary. I was also treasurer of the first board of the newly formed Society for Catholic Liturgy way back in 1995 or 1996 and involved at the national level in liturgical renewal. During my decade at the seminary, I had a first-hand view of the transition this article presents. New seminarians arriving each year were growing progressively more interested in learning the traditions of the Church and less interested in “saccharine music at Mass.”
It is difficult to find a single quote from Tra le sollecitudini that would give the reader an adequate understanding of the task Pius X had before him.
I didn’t become a Catholic until 1987, so I bear no nostalgia for the so-called Tridentine liturgy, or Traditional Latin Mass. That’s not what this article is about. My work at the seminary was focused on teaching seminarians to understand the documents of the Second Vatican Council and how to faithfully apply them in their future pastoral role to the worship of the Church. To be consistent with our theological and liturgical tradition, I believed (and still do) that the only way to do that with authenticity is to understand how the documents of Vatican II were in continuity with the past. In my classes, we mainly focused on the twentieth-century Popes Pius—Pius X in his motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini, Pius XI in Divini cultus, and Pius XII in Musicae sacrae and Mediator Dei—to show how the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, of the Second Vatican Council was a natural progression from reforms that had begun years earlier.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pope St. Pius X ignited a general reform in sacred music with his motu proprio called Tra le sollecitudini in 1903. He was writing in response to abuses that were taking place that he attributed to various causes, “to the very nature of this art . . . or to the succeeding changes in tastes and habits with the course of time, or to the fatal influence exercised on sacred art by profane and theatrical art, or to the pleasure that music directly produces . . . that is not always easily contained within the right limits, or finally to the many prejudices on the matter, so lightly introduced and so tenaciously maintained even among responsible and pious persons.”
Pius X’s document was consistent with an earlier reform of Benedict XIV’s that he announced in his edict Annus qui hunc (1749). To prepare for the Jubilee year in 1750, Benedict sought to clean up the churches of Rome, which apparently had fallen into somewhat of a mess, and to eliminate the operatic and secular influences that had crept in to the liturgy by insisting on a return to the traditional music of chant and polyphony. Tra le sollecitudini, about 150 years later, did the same and inspired numerous composers to produce sacred music for worship during the first half of the twentieth century whose inspiration was drawn from the acceptable tradition of polyphony, whose undisputed master was Palestrina. Pius X’s reform included supporting the restoration of Gregorian chant that had already begun in France at Solesmes Abbey at the request of Pope Leo XIII. The emergence of polyphony in the late Middle Ages had distorted the phrasing and rhythm of Gregorian chant, and Pius X encouraged the monks to continue their scholarly research into the original manuscripts to bring it back to its original glory.
The excesses in polyphony during the late Middle Ages mentioned above caused some of the fathers at the Council of Trent to call for a total ban on polyphonic music at Mass. For an intriguing aside, read the legend of how Palestrina saved church music here.
It is difficult to find a single quote from Tra le sollecitudini that would give the reader an adequate understanding of the task Pius X had before him. I would encourage anyone with interest in music at Mass to at least read the introduction. You will likely find yourself drawn into reading the rest. Those who do read on may say, “Well, this isn’t the way we understand the liturgy now”; or, “There is no longer any ‘right rule, prescribed by the end for which art is admitted to the service of public worship’” (TLS, Introduction). Both comments would show a lack of understanding of what has always been the governing principle of authentic development used by the Church to protect her theology and worship from innovations that “profane” the “solemn prayer of the Church.”
Part 2 of this three-part series will move on to a discussion of what the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council provided as guidelines for the revision of the liturgy in the first of four constitutions to come out of the council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.