LeoWatch: Music?
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
strange how “traditional” music began 1970 Anno Domini and ended soon after…
Every Sunday for me. The only break I had from the slop was about 2015-20, when our pastor effectively banned the contemporary stuff. But then we moved and my current parish feels like a time warp back to 1992.
I call most of this music “the near location of sin” because it has the opposite effect on me. It just irritates me especially if the musicians feel the need to run through every stanza in the recessional hymn even though the priest is in the parking lot and has been there for 5 minutes. Fortunately I’m in a parish that has five Sunday masses and couple of years ago the pastor decided to standardized the music. One Mass has contemporary music, one has praise and worship music, one has traditional music and one has predominantly Latin music and responses. Sadly most parishes don’t have this option.
Amen to Donald and all comments above. This is a pet peeve of mine, as well. Here is a link to the first of a series of essays by Anthony Esolen, one of the more astute and amusing critics of Modernist “hymns.”
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8485
More often than not, I am inaudibly humming a better hymn to myself (and God.) I have found it helps to keep out the bad theology set to music that would otherwise live in my head for the rest of the day.
To do this requires very “active participation” indeed. 😉
Over dinner out on Saturday after 5 Mass, a few of us were reminiscing about the
0730 Sunday Mass, the quiet Mass, where one could pray without hearing off key music. Our priest will not reschedule it because he is not a “morning person”.
That said, the 0900 Mass on Corpus Christi finished with a procession around the church and corn fields. Replete with incense, the priest under a canopy carrying a monstrance, and all singing Pange Lingua