A Preferential Option for Ugliness

I think banal would be a description of the architecture and twee would be a description of the music. What’s happened to church architecture in the post-war period has happened to every kind of non-residential architecture. As for the music, people put up with it. You can complain to the pastor / administrator and you’ll be stonewalled. There’s a segment of the congregation who like this cr!p and that will include your music director and choir because people who do not care for it do not volunteer for the choir. I do know of a parish in the Diocese of Syracuse where grumbling about the music prompted the pastor and parish council to recruit a local music professor who is a specialist in early music to improve the music program. After some time trying to work with the music director, he gave up. The music director played Or!p Press selections on an upright piano once a week and had never recruited a choir. What the professor discovered was that the pastor’s policy when all was said and done was that the purpose of the music program was to please the music director. I took a quick-and-dirty census of her musical selections. We have a thousand year history of sacred music and 85% of her selections consisted of music composed after 1965.

The reason, I think, that the preferential option for ugliness seems to exist is that such was (and to some extent still is) a dominant movement in the arts in which ugliness was not necessarily sought for its own sake, but rather because of its perceived transgressive value in that it subverted conceptions of beauty, art, etc. I think that a lot of people who grew up in that environment (which permeated every facet of society) imbibed that mentality.

It thus may not be that they actually like the ugliness for its own sake but rather because it has the transgressive and subversive quality to it. It tends to tear down artistry as a skill and calling and flattens everything out in an egalitarian nightmare. That, I think, is why ugliness is found to be “beautiful” or at least desirable, and why the results are so objectively ugly and banal. It reduces beauty to feeling and art to the mere act of making something, which then encourages the race to the bottom that resulted in badly played “folk” music, felt banners, kitschy vestments and concrete buildings painted beige inside. And it’s also why there is often so much resistance to beatifying anything.

Art-
I agree.
The people for this sort of music do not *seem* to be available because, as you said, they don’t participate in a choir that sings cr*p.
(Speaking from first hand knowledge as a guy who can carry a tune who stays in the pews so I don’t have to sing the worst of the quasi heretical ditties.)

Years before St. Thomas More was a cathedral and the bishop resided down in Richmond, the pastor hired Dr. Cordone. He taught the grade school students music theory. I do not remember what grade it started but I do remember we sang the scale and could read music. On the Thursdays before first Fridays the IHM nuns marched the classes who had their First Communion over to the church for confession. The next day, first Friday the whole school attended Mass and sang Gregorian chant.
Thanks to Dr. Cordone and the pastor the Sunday high Mass had sacred music played on an organ. The all boy choir was attired in either black or red cassocks, white surplices and celluloid collars with bows, again either black or red. My mother was one of the moms who was a bow tier.
Christmas, Holy Week and Easter services were especially beautiful.

I think the problem behind almost everything banal and ugly in the church life of the last 60 years arises from a common source–absence of supernatural faith! If you don’t really believe in God, and heaven, and that He really came down to earth and Jesus Christ, all you have left is what you see around you. And if it is corrupt, weak, and empty, what you produce will reflect that. That’s what we’ve seen.

A singer named Beth Nielson Chapman released a CD a couple of decades ago called “Hymns.” Some of the songs are: Salve Regina, Tantum Ergo, Ave Maria and Dona Nobis Pacem.

https://www.amazon.com/Hymns-Beth-Nielsen-Chapman/dp/B00064VQVW/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2UQ2K50DBQWSB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KfkFHjZA-piPG1GYf1pnatsHAySEJhGTIC0gzvxYzWjZW1rQ5YLBlHqQK45uLk1sz9esXwJT-oZuUruJNf4n1jg-TeU57lNJZJW5aXPgkbZo7vf5eSdGjIz-vvHl6oYBSWi0bWbQrf7wGuyOuNtEUw.gZ3a2JI1-_OBGlxos3XTx2SSZ-Fg6wmTih5kCCs-Cw8&dib_tag=se&keywords=beth+neilson+chapman+hymns+cd&qid=1751310381&sprefix=beth+neilson+chapman+hymns%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-3

This is my review I wrote for Amazon:

You can almost smell the incense.

Joni Mitchell sang “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” That is what occurred to me when I listened to this disc. Sometime after Vatican II these classic melodies were shelved in favor of music that was considered more… accessible. The beauty of these hymns is timeless and sung by the bell-like voice of Beth Nielsen Chapman evokes a time when the Catholic Church and its rituals held a sense of mystery and awe.

Additionally, Chapman contributes a new song of her own, “Hymn to Mary” that is so beautiful and reverent that one might conclude she was born a few centuries too late.

Whereas Ratzinger realized, before he became Pope, that the ugliness infected everything in the Church in the West and Summorum Pontificum was a step in the right direction, Bergoglio grew up hating the preconciliar Church and those who revered it.

Pope Leo has few good people he can choose from for any position in the Church. Bergoglio saw to that. Anthony Stine losing his mind over Leo’s appointments..that and his combox responders…better get used to it.

Pope Leo will have to rescind TC lest the Peter’s Pence contributions totally disappear. I’m sure Cardinal Burke informed him of it I don’t know the ages of Cupich or Tobin or the clowns running things in Charlotte and Detroit (McElroy, the Washington Archschmuck is 72 or 73) but Burke can let Leo know who in the US is worthy and who is a dufus and at least here, maybe we can get some better bishops.