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Views from the Choir Loft

One more regrettable mistake by the Bishop of Boise, Idaho

Veronica Moreno · April 8, 2020

Y PANDEMIC DAYS are full of the life of my children and my husband. After that, I prepare to cantor at Mass and somewhere in all of this, try to cook dinner. I don’t have time for “liturgy wars”. I am obedient to my pastor, to my bishop, to my choir director every week as I diligently prepare my role in the Mass to the best of my ability. But I could not remain quiet when my husband told me this: Bishop Christensen’s recent letter was plagiarized.

See for yourself. On the left is the letter from 2020; a 2016 blog post is on the right:

My thoughts about this:

1) I started this post by saying that I don’t have time for “liturgy wars”, but this letter is terrifying. Everything about its “record-keeping” request to tally all Extraordinary Form Masses sounds ominous when paired with the rhetoric of the rest of the letter. This fear prompted me—and my husband—to re-read the text, and with a simple internet search…he found the original from 2016.

It took all of seven seconds to find the original.

2) Which then brought up a second thought direct from the Bishop’s letter: “Sources such as independent websites and social media platforms that are unaffiliated with the Holy See or the USCCB are not to be considered trustworthy or appropriate for catechesis.”

I thought about this line over and over last night.


Surely much more can be written, and will be written.

As for me, I have to finish this because my pastor needs me to prepare for Good Friday liturgy. But if we worshiped in the Diocese of Boise, I would find myself increasingly confused by this letter and wondering what to do about the inevitable effects of one Rite’s “gravitational pull” on the other.

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

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Ad Orientem, Bishop Peter Christensen, GIRM Paragraph 299, Mass Facing The People Last Updated: November 15, 2020

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About Veronica Moreno

Veronica Moreno is married to a teacher and homeschools five children. She has been cantor at her local Catholic parish for over a decade.—(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

“We decided to entrust this work to learned men of our selection. They very carefully collated all their work with the ancient codices in Our Vatican Library and with reliable, preserved or emended codices from elsewhere. Besides this, these men consulted the works of ancient and approved authors concerning the same sacred rites; and thus they have restored the Missal itself to the original form and rite of the holy Fathers.”

— ‘Pope St. Pius V (Quo Primum, 1570)’

Recent Posts

  • PDF Download • “Text by Saint Francis of Assisi” (choral setting w/ organ: Soprano & Alto)
  • “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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