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Views from the Choir Loft

Biography • Father David M. Friel

Fr. David Friel · January 10, 2013

EV. DAVID M. FRIEL, STD is a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, ordained in May 2011. He presently serves as Director of Liturgy at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia and holds a doctorate in liturgical theology from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He studied philosophy & theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, where he also served as organist, cantor, and liturgical Master of Ceremonies. While there, he studied organ under Dr. Theodore Kiefer. His music has been published by CanticaNOVA Publications, and his Mass in Honor of St. John Neumann is available online through the Creative Commons. Upon ordination, Father Friel served for five years as Parochial Vicar at Saint Anselm Church in Northeast Philadelphia. During that time, he also served several communities of Catholic young adults and coached CYO basketball and volleyball. For several years, he also served as Vocation Director for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Father Friel is a member of the Society for Catholic Liturgy and the Church Music Association of America. Among his research interests are aesthetics, sacred music (particularly sequences), the feast of Christ the King, and twentieth-century liturgical reform. His master’s thesis centered on the Proprium Missae (the chanted propers of the Mass), while, in his licentiate thesis, he studied the origins and theology of the term progressiva sollemnitas (the principle of “progressive solemnity”). His doctoral dissertation explores the liturgical theology of the feast of Christ the King.

Born in Bethlehem, PA, Father Friel grew up in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish. He enjoys climbing mountains, visiting national parks, running, reading, and sports of all kinds. Father Friel lives in Philadelphia and serves a number of area parishes on Sundays and feast days. Father Friel may be contacted via email.

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Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles, Biographies Last Updated: November 27, 2024

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About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel is a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and serves as Director of Liturgy at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary. —(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    “Yahweh” in church songs?
    My pastor asked me to write a weekly column for our parish bulletin. The one scheduled to run on 22 June 2025 is called “Three Words in a Psalm” and speaks of translating the TETRAGRAMMATON. You can read the article at this column repository. All of them are quite brief because I was asked to keep within a certain word limit.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
    Some have expressed interest in perusing the ORDER OF MUSIC I prepared for Pentecost Sunday (8 June 2025). If such a thing interests you, feel free to download it as a PDF file. Because our choir is on break this week, the music is relatively simple.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)
    I stumbled upon this live recording of a PROCESSIONAL I played on the pipe organ in 2002. It’s an excerpt from a much longer composition by Sebastian Bach. In those days, there weren’t sophisticated recording devices allowing one “fix” wrong notes. (Perhaps they existed, but we didn’t have machines like that.) So it was necessary to play the entire piece from beginning to end. If you’re a church organist, feel free to download the PDF score. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until some joker uses “artificial intelligence” to play music at church … but there’s something so satisfying about playing an organ in real life.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    When to Sit, Stand and Kneel like it’s 1962
    There are lots of different guides to postures for Mass, but I couldn’t find one which matched our local Latin Mass, so I made this one: sit-stand-kneel-crop
    —Veronica Brandt
    The Funeral Rites of the Graduale Romanum
    Lately I have been paging through the 1974 Graduale Romanum (see p. 678 ff.) and have been fascinated by the funeral rites found therein, especially the simply-beautiful Psalmody that is appointed for all the different occasions before and after the funeral Mass: at the vigil/wake, at the house of the deceased, processing to the church, at the church, processing to the cemetery, and at the cemetery. Would that this “stational Psalmody” of the Novus Ordo funeral rites saw wider usage! If you or anyone you know have ever used it, please do let me know.
    —Daniel Tucker

Random Quote

“The priest coming nearer to the faithful; communicating with them; praying and singing with them and therefore standing at the pulpit; saying the COLLECT, the EPISTLE, and the GOSPEL in their language; the priest singing in the divine traditional melodies—the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo—with the faithful: these are so many good reforms that give back to that part of the Mass its true finality.”

— Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1965) praising vernacular readings at Mass

Recent Posts

  • “Yahweh” in church songs?
  • “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
  • “Participation” • Recovering its Receptive Dimension
  • “Breathtaking Photographs” • First Mass of Father Michael Caughey, FSSP (Muskegon, MI)
  • “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)

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