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CNP Articles – Musical Obesity
by Gary D. Penkala

Obesity is a very serious problem in the United States. Over 35% of adults are classified as obese [body mass index greater than 30]. The causes are over-eating, eating the wrong kinds of food, and lack of exercise. My assessment is that liturgical music programs in our parishes might just exceed this 35% rate; I would say well over half our parishes suffer from obese music programs.

Let me give some examples of musical obesity at Mass.

I. Over-Hymning

I’ve been to Masses where the congregation was asked to sing six hymns: Gathering, Preparation of the Gifts, three at Communion, and Sending Forth [and aren’t these titles telling]. Hymns are heavy material. They often have deep, poetic theology and multiple stanzas that tell a progressing story. They’re the Chateaubriand of congregational music. I can’t imagine singing six of these at one Mass, where the subliminal goal may be to keep Mass at 55 minutes or less anyway. The Church, in her wisdom, does not call for a single “hymn” during Mass, Yet for how many parishes is a standard diet of four at every Mass the norm?

Healthy adjustment

Just like dieters learn to replace Whoppers/Fries with Salads, and Lasagna with Pasta Primavera, and Pound Cake with Angel Food Cake, so too should the health-conscious music director begin replacing hymns. Not all at once, but gradually. There are easy ways to start.

Replace the Communion Hymn with a Communion Psalm, where the congregation needs to sing only a refrain. This could be any of the hundreds of Responsorial Psalms available in your worship book. You could make up your own refrains, using a section of a familiar hymn (e.g. the first part of “At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing”). The cantor or choir could chant psalm verses to a Gregorian or Meinrad tone.

The Offertory Hymn is the one most often replaced already, usually by a choral motet. At non-choir Masses this could certainly be an organ piece. Or you might introduce the congregation to a Proper they’ve never heard, since these antiphons were not translated into English in the Roman Missal. They’re available at Offertory Antiphons, and you could sing them to a familiar tone.

The Introit has the potential for making perhaps the most impact, and may be the hardest to “pastorally” implement. There are numerous sources for this Proper — just visit any CNP Liturgical Planning Page. However, the absolute easiest, no-excuses method for singing the Introit Proper is found in our recently-completed Mass Propers for the Liturgical Year. These are simple, straightforward ways to begin singing the Propers instantly!

It’s also possible to drop the Closing Hymn, replacing it with an organ recessional. There’s nothing called for here in the rubrics anyway — and the people might just enjoy being able to leave when the deacon really says, “Go!” A less drastic path might be to sing a consistent, brief antiphon prior to the organ music. The seasonal Marian antiphons [Alma redmeptoris Mater, Ave Regina cælorum, Regina cæli, Salve Regina] are great for this. An argument can also be made that, since the rubrics say nothing about what kind of music should happen at the end of Mass, this is a convenient place for a congregational hymn, since no Propers are being omitted.

II. Surfeit of Music

It’s laudable to use the Rite of Sprinkling during the Easter Season, in fact, the Roman Missal recommends it. This is normally accompanied by singing. But just what does this do to the”heaviness” of the Introductory Rites during Eastertide? Imagine: singing a multi-verse Opening Song, then another hymn during the Sprinkling, immediately followed by a through-composed Gloria. It’s like Country Paté, then Caesar Salad, plus Creamy Clam Chowder; and we’re not even at the entrée yet! Can you feel the bloat?

Healthy adjustment

Streamline. Combine some of the disparate music. Sing verses of the same hymn for Entrance and Sprinkling. Or have the choir sing Vidi aquam during the Sprinkling — yes, it’s legit! Be careful what kind of Gloria is sung.

III. Gloria

Speaking of the Gloria — this is likely the biggest block of music that will be sung at Mass (unless you sing the Credo). It’s rich, dense, heady text. There are several ways composer approach this hymn (one of the few precribed in the liturgy):

Through-composed — the congregation sings everything
Through-composed, but with a choral middle section
Alternatim — the cantor or choir alternates phrases with the congregation
Responsorial — a congregational refrain is sung between choral verses… Please don’t use this one, except as a temporary measure to familiarize the congregation with the entire Gloria!

Healthy adjustment

Format 1 is the heaviest, since the congregation sings the whole thing with no break. Think of this as a thick slab of Prime Rib. Format 2 is less heavy, since the people get a break in the middle, but it requires a choral group and won’t work at the other Sunday Masses. This is perhaps a moderate Ribeye Steak. Format 3 is the best option for the Roman Rite; it’s used almost exclusively at the Vatican, and has centuries of precedence. It makes for a comfortable interplay between cantor (or choir) and congregation. It’s a Beef Kebob, with healthy vegetables between the chunks of meat. Format 4 is an aberration, a quirk, an anomaly, which destroys the structure of the Gloria as found in the Roman Missal. It’s no more correct than singing, “Lamb, Lamb, Lamb of God, you take, take take away…” Don’t even consider using this … ground meat by-product!

IV. Communion Concentrate

Some Music Directors take the Church’s rubric about congregational singing at Communion time to a ridiculous extreme, programming one hymn after another, just to keep the crowd singing. That’s exhausting!

Healthy adjustment

Participation (a laudable goal) is not tethered to our vocal cords. The congregation can listen to organ music, choral music, or instrumental music during part of Communion time. Using some of these would alleviate the “revival-tent-hymn-sing” atmosphere from singing many hymns in a row.

V. Over Amplification

A strong cantor singing into a microphone can carry a hymn alone. Why does the congregation need to sing at all? The hymn “happens” whether they sing or not. And this amplificatis is an epidemic that has infected almost every Catholic church in the country. It’s amazing what ensues when the congregation is needed for music to happen — they’re not just an addendum to a miked soloist. Congregational singing in churches flourished before the advent of Shure and Dolby. It can still happen — heavens! what would we do in a power outage?

Healthy adjustment

Move the cantor back a few steps for hymns; or don’t use the microphone at all.
Try a verse without any accompaniment; let the people hear themselves!
Try a whole hymn without accompaniment. Come on, you’re doing it already during the Triduum… or you should be. It can happen more often — Advent? Lent?
In general, we can avoid the problem of musical obesity in our churches if we consider balance. Too much of anything upsets the equilibrium inherent in the noble Roman Rite. Gonna have meatloaf and mashed potatoes for dinner — think about some fruit for lunch. Chicken Pot Pie coming this weekend — work in a Stir Fry the day before. And more importantly, when you plan Sunday’s liturgy, don’t swing out the plastic music template with four hymn-holes in it. Be fresh, be creative, be healthy. Chuck some of those carnivorous hymns for a Proper or two. We’re all aware of the deadly health outcome of four Big Macs a day; four hymns are similarly lethal to liturgy.

Article written 29 August 2015

One of the Youtube comments reads “the most beautiful mass ever recorded”. As far as masses in English go, that is probably correct. A must-watch for any Catholic in North America!

Thank you to Alvez, music director at St Francis of Assisi for his practice files of the Graduale Romanum proper. Both in Latin and English (Father Weber’s translation).

https://www.chantacademy.com/post/5-short-lessons-on-reading-chant-notation

Fr Hugh Somerville Knapman, OSB, penned a brilliant article at the Catholic Herald. Worth reading. Since the article is behind a paywall, here it is for your reading pleasure.

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The Emperor’s New-Rite Clothes
September 7, 2022

All the sides in the wearying debates on matters from synodality to liturgy invariably invoke a legitimacy deriving—directly or indirectly—from Vatican II. This fact alone signals that reception of Vatican II is neither settled nor even clear-cut. Which version of Vatican II does one accept? The competing versions focus on either the Council’s decrees, or its “spirit.” In all this Vatican II risks becoming an ideological totem, empty of any objective meaning and employed primarily for polemical purposes. The Vatican is adept at this as anyone, but in the current liturgical fracas has it overplayed an already weak hand, and underestimated the laity?

Pope Francis’s two apostolic letters on the liturgy in 2021 and 2022 restrict the use of the pre-conciliar missal while calling for an enhanced liturgical formation of the laity. What the Vatican seems to miss is that adherents of the older missal are generally younger, largely better-informed than their elders, and thoroughly imbued with the democratic forthrightness of expression that the Holy Father has strongly advocated under the banner of parrhesia. Many of them have read the decrees of Vatican II themselves and discovered a marked difference from what has subsequently been done in its name.

Perhaps the intention was that only certain subsets within the Church should employ parrhesia. One assumes, in the context of other strands to Pope Francis’s teaching, that this frankness was encouraged for those on the peripheries. However, the recent swingeing restrictions on the older liturgy, so generously lifted under Benedict XVI in the name of ecclesial communion, have forced a significant proportion of practising Catholics (proportionally far younger than in most parishes) onto a very real periphery. Perhaps this is not what that the Holy Father intended when he encouraged young people to make “mess” in July 2015. Having restricted the older liturgy for the sake of “the concord and unity of the Church,” the result has been the opposite, with many Catholics now experiencing new divisions and hurts. Wounds that had been healing have been reopened.

Ostensibly, the new restrictions were occasioned by those traditionalists who were apparently too outspoken and doctrinaire in their advocacy of the pre-conciliar missal. No doubt some were guilty of this. Yet to punish the many for the misdeeds of a few seems remarkably intolerant, if not totalitarian. This is especially so given that so many of the committed young, with whom the Church desperately seeks to engage, seem to prefer the traditional liturgy. Moreover, the media-savvy young see online, or experience first-hand, grievous liturgical abuses of the new liturgy and ask why there are no restrictions focused on these. The young have an especial sensitivity to inconsistency and injustice.

That the restrictions are explicitly aimed at addressing “non-acceptance of the liturgical reform” serves only to highlight the issue of whether the reform as enacted corresponds to the decrees of Vatican II. In a recent interview with The Tablet Cardinal Arthur Roche said the new restrictions derive from liturgical dicastery’s mission to promote “the renewal undertaken by the Second Vatican Council.” It is not mere pedantry to point out that no liturgical reform was “undertaken” by the Council. The reforms were undertaken by a body called the Consilium, erected on papal not conciliar authority to implement the reforms decreed by the Council.

The reformed liturgy devised by the Consilium often departs markedly from, and exceeds, the decrees of the Council. The “new order of Mass” was indeed radically new, and distinctly post-conciliar rather than conciliar; being enacted in the name of the Council does not itself guarantee that the reformed liturgy conforms to its will. The tepid, even negative, reception given at the Synod of Bishops in 1967 to an experimental celebration of what was substantially the Novus Ordo exposes this fallacy. Many of the bishops did not recognise the experiment as embodying their decrees just three years earlier. Cardinal Heenan observed that if the experimental rites were adopted then he would be left with congregations of mostly women and children. From today’s perspective Heenan appears remarkably optimistic.

Furthermore, Cardinal Roche asserted in his interview that those who disregard “the Council” in the matter of the liturgical reform are putting themselves “sideways, to the edges of the Church. You are becoming more Protestant than you are Catholic”. It is a remarkable claim, and only conceivable if one accepts the enacted liturgical reform as faithfully implementing the decrees of the Council, which Cardinal Roche calls “the highest legislation that exists in the Church.”

This is precisely the contested issue, and here a real problem emerges. Cardinal Roche seems to require that the Church deny herself, and to employ her authority today to negate her authority in former days. Many will echo Benedict XVI in asking how what was holy yesterday—and indeed for preceding centuries—can suddenly be a danger to faith and the Church today. Rome is making a serious mistake in its programme to shore up the practical reception of the reformed liturgy, and in so doing is backing itself into a corner.

The liturgical reforms were expressly pastoral, intended to increase congregational participation. The severe decline in the numbers in congregations since the promulgation of the reformed liturgy over 50 years ago suggests that the reforms have not achieved their purpose. Equating the reformed liturgy—which I celebrate, but which for all its virtues has failed in its purpose—with the will of Vatican II leads logically to the conclusion that the failure is the Council’s when in fact it is the Consilium’s.

The current policy of suppressing dissatisfaction by the restriction and marginalisation of anyone who points out imperial nakedness aligns disturbingly with that of a totalitarian regime desperate to shore up its legitimacy in the face of dissent and dissatisfaction at the failure of its policies. It shocks those who try to hold the middle ground of fidelity to the Church and to reason, but it need not be so. The Vatican could simply continue to allow the old and new liturgical forms to coexist and so allow the people to choose which nourishes their faith and Christian living.

That would treat lay Catholics as adults, but it is precisely this that Rome seems anxious to avoid. On the other hand, in restricting the legitimate expression of the Roman rite to “the liturgical books promulgated by Paul VI and John Paul II” Rome has allowed some room for manoeuvre, and for saving face. The Ordo Missae of 1965 is a post-conciliar reform promulgated by Paul VI which correlates very closely to the conciliar decrees in adapting the old rite more organically to their expanded liturgical vision. It offers a basis for revisiting the reforms that have so patently failed in their purpose, a failure that restrictive legislation will not hide, but only further expose.

Whatever one’s approach to the current crisis, the solution must lie in an approach that entices rather than repels, that includes rather than marginalises, and—if Vatican II must remain the gold standard of Catholic identity—that is manifestly and unambiguously faithful to the decrees of the Council rather than any ideological appropriation of it. This is, in fact, expressly what Pope Francis has urged with Desiderio desideravi. May Rome practise what the Pope preaches.