Shut Up! They Explained.

#9: Don’t be afraid of the hymns-sing out–they’re part of the Mass, too.

I almost always attend the TLM, but during the times I attend a NO mass, this is one of the more trying aspects of it. And I’ll admit, most of the hymns I do not sing. Not because I’m afraid, but rather because most of them within the OCP fare are so bad.

It seems like such an unforced error to me, because even people who are otherwise musically talented end up sounding awful when performing these songs, because most of the songs themselves are schmaltzy and banal, not to mention all the tied notes and syncopation make congregational participation nearly impossible. And it’s not like there isn’t an embarrassment of riches of really good vernacular hymns that are solid musically and theologically and written for congregational singing. I don’t understand why the dreck from the 70’s and 80’s persists.

The thing which prevents the pastor / administrator from instructing the music director to modify the program is that he’s reflexively deferential to a certain demographic in the parish. The pastors own the messes over which they preside.

In my little country parish, the Boomer demographic (and no disrespect to any of the wonderful people here of that generation) has an ironclad grip on *everything* – the worship, the music, who “gets” to do what, and so forth.

When I volunteered to do the narration for the Passion on Palm Sunday a couple of years ago, there was a huge uproar about the “younger folk not knowing their place and paying their dues.” The territoriality is astonishing to behold, and it is one of those unintended consequences of Vatican II.

Or maybe it *was* intended?

At the time of publication, was that illustration aspirational of what was to come or more indicative of things at the time of the introduction of the NO? I’ve heard there was quite a bit of experimentation in the 50s and 60s, but I’m curious how widespread it was.

Not sure who the ‘boomer demographic’ is supposed to be. Size of annual birth cohorts increased from 1936 to 1957 and declined from 1957 to 1976. The youngest ‘boomers’ are now 68 years old (the median age of Stephen Colbert’s audience per published reports). Your parish is run by a geezer clique?
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I was referring to the ‘Hallmark Channel” demographic, not the boomer demographic.
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I knew a music director whose programs consisted of Oregon Catholic Press material played on an upright piano (with no one singing). Her enabler was the administrator of the parish. Both were born in 1932. Her obituary made her sound like quite the dynamo and she did produce six children in addition to two stints as a teacher and operating a small business. She wasn’t putting much effort into her position as music director. Important things in her life did not go well. She and her husband divorced, she had fewer grandchildren than children, and her obituary concluded with “there will be no services”. (Her estranged husband had died 16 years previous and hadn’t had any services either). The past
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or enabler had died five years earlier; his family put in his obituary a menu of complaints he had about the Church refusing to end priestly celibacy, ordain women, and allow contraception. I’d once asked him what he thought of the wild variation in the number of seminarians per capita from one diocese to another; he hadn’t heard of it and could not have been more indifferent.

The term “baby boom” typically refers to those born from 1946-1964.
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That’s an arbitrary convention.
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It was a big cohort,
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Live births from 1926-45 were about 52 million; from 1946-64 about 76 million; from 1965-83, about 65 million; from 1984-2002 about 76 million; and from 2003-21 about 76 million.
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and they largely came of age during / immediately after Vatican II.
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If by ‘immediately after’ you mean a decade later.
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They’ve been the largest earners and the majority of adults for decades.
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They’ve never been the majority of adults. Their earnings vis a vis the rest of the population might have peaked around about 2010.
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I don’t know if they’re overly influential in the Church, but they have a reputation for self-righteousness without self-reflection, which makes them stand out and not in a good way.
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I think you’re talking about a modest segment of the bourgeois youth population ca. 1970. Most of them grew up. What distinguishes the cohorts in question (in comparison to those who came before) was a higher propensity to make use of divorce courts, a higher propensity toward street crime, and a higher propensity toward the use of street drugs, a higher propensity toward out-of-wedlock child bearing, a higher propensity to hire abortionists, a higher propensity to enroll in tertiary schooling, and a lower propensity for military service. You compare them to those who came after, and the picture is more mixed.