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Views from the Choir Loft

The Gather Hymnal

Jeff Ostrowski · June 24, 2013

ROWING UP in the 1990s, I missed a lot of the “liturgy wars.” I will forever be grateful to my parents who remained faithful to the Church, no matter how many scandals they witnessed along the way. It’s no secret that a great many people tried to harm the Church from within following the Council. What I am only just now beginning to realize is how creative some of these people were! Perhaps “creative” is not the right word. Let me describe a few instances, and the reader can devise his own word.

Just think about the very title, the very name, of one of the most popular Catholic hymnals: “Gather.” Without going into conspiracy theories, ponder that title. Is the emphasis not obvious? Mass is all about us. Our “gathering” is what’s important. Forget about the Sacrifice of Calvary, forget about the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. The main emphasis is placed on the fact that we, the important, highly-evolved, 21st-century people are taking time to “gather” with other important, highly-evolved, 21st-century people.

Perhaps I’m the odd man out here. Perhaps I’m the one whose religious sense is skewed. But let me be clear: growing up, especially on those occasions we attended the Extraordinary Form, I never thought about the act of “gathering.” I thought about Christ. I thought about my sins. I thought about the precious gift of the Mass. I engaged in silent reflection and adoration of God. I thought about how transient life’s pleasures are. I thought about many things, but not “gathering.”

I suppose the enlightened “piccoluomini” will be tempted to chime in and explain Matthew 18:20 (“Where two or three are gathered together . . .”), but such an explanation is not needed. I fully believe and accept Matthew 18:20, a truly beautiful and important verse, as the Catholic Church explains it, but here I am speaking of emphasis.

LET US CONSIDER another example: kneeling. When I was little, I heard my parents talk about people trying to “get rid of kneeling during Mass.” I said to myself, “Yeah, right. Take a chill pill. Who would ever get rid of kneeling at Church? C’mon.”

Well, it turns out this movement is still alive. I received via Email (from a reader who will remain anonymous) the following comment, made on 30 May 2013, by the former president of Universa Laus, an organization specifically requested to “dissolve itself” by Pope Paul VI:

The desire to get people onto their knees shows a one-sided view of history, both liturgical and general. Standing is a sign of respect, whereas kneeling is a sign of self-abasement. We don’t kneel down when the President or the Queen enters the room, we stand out of respect. Yes, we bow to both of those, and ladies curtsey when presented, but we don’t kneel or kiss feet. If Jesus entered the room, we’d be on our feet in an instant. I have little time for a mediaeval posture which is to a large extent a distortion of the traditional prayer postures of the Church.

LET ME SAY AGAIN: I couldn’t even dream up some of this stuff! Another piccoluomini movement I remember hearing about in the 1990s was NAAC (“No Adoration At Communion”). It turns out NAAC is also still around. One of the signers of the Snowbird Statement on Catholic Liturgical Music wrote on 12 October 2012:

There are fourteen hymns contained in the section titled “Blessed Sacrament.” These hymns are meant to be sung at communion and/or Benediction. I see this as a major theological gaffe. Hymns that memorialize the sacrificial meal of Jesus should be distinct from those intended for adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The communion bread at Mass is not appropriately called the Blessed Sacrament, [Huh?!!] a term reserved for the adoration of the element in the context of Benediction. The two are indissolubly linked, of course, but they are two distinct moments in Catholic liturgical life and devotion. The editors should have made a clear distinction between the two.

AS A CHILD, I was taught about the transcendence of God. At Mass, time seemed to stop. It was all about peaceful prayer and adoration. It was contemplative. Statements like the following, by Fr. William Bauman (former Chairman of the Music Committee of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions) would never occur to me:

These would not be destined to go into a hymnal, for by their very nature as popular music, they finally pass out of popularity. They would, however, be able to be quickly used by those who make their own hymnals, quickly printed in periodical publications while they are still fresh and useful. [source]

More strange quotes can be found here. One such quote:

The hootenanny Mass can give explicit eucharistic and christological specification to youth’s intense involvement in the movements for racial justice, for control of nuclear weapons, for the recognition of personal dignity.

IN THE WORDS OF VANESSA WILLIAMS, I have “saved the best for last.” The winner is Fr. Frederick McManus, who once made the following claim. Note in particular the mental gymnastics necessary to twist the clear meaning of the Second Vatican Council (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §36):

“Although it is not the original language of the Roman rite by any means, [Excuse me, but who EVER made such a claim??] the Latin language is here acknowledged to have the first or principal place, and as such it is to be retained. It may be that in some areas the retention will simply mean employing the Latin texts as the basis for translating into the vernacular [!!!!!], at least in the case of those parts of the Roman rite which are themselves original, such as the collects.”

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

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: GIA Worship IV Hymnal, Heretical GIA Hymns Last Updated: July 7, 2021

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About Jeff Ostrowski

Jeff Ostrowski holds his B.M. in Music Theory from the University of Kansas (2004). He resides with his wife and children in Michigan. —(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

On October 14, 1968, our Holy Father, Pope Paul VI, in an address to the Roman liturgy Consilium, pointed out the abuse which wants to “remove the sacred from liturgical worship and replace the holy with the commonplace and the every-day.”

— Quoted by Roger Wagner in a 1970 article

Recent Posts

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

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