ELOW YOU WILL FIND an impressive new setting of the Responsorial Psalm for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B). I have spoken of the CHAUMONOT COMPOSERS GROUP in the past, and I intend to promote several of their offerings over the next few months. While now isn’t an appropriate time to explore in exhaustive detail the origins of the RESPONSORIAL PSALM, I will be sharing a few thoughts about its history (see below).
Here To stay • Regardless of its provenance, the RESPONSORIAL PSALM is “here to stay”—at least for the foreseeable future. In light of this reality, I feel the liturgical compositions by the CHAUMONOT COMPOSERS GROUP are praiseworthy. Below is their musical setting of the Responsorial Psalm for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B).
My pronunciation will show I’m not a native speaker!
* PDF Download • 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
—Musical setting by the CHAUMONOT COMPOSERS GROUP.
Resp. Psalm History [Part 1] • The Catholic Church consists of sinful men who sometimes make mistakes. A “case in point” in the musical arena would be Romanorum Pontificum Sollicitudo, solemnly issued by Pope Leo XIII on 10 April 1883. That document was later found to contain inaccurate information. As a result, it was withdrawn by the Vatican.1 On 3 April 1969, Pope Saint Paul VI announced that Responsorial Psalms were now a valid option. His Holiness claimed that the Responsorial Psalm had been restored to the Mass. Such a notion is no longer accepted by scholars—but during the 1960s that wasn’t the case.
Resp. Psalm History [Part 2] • This situation is comparable the “notion” or “argument” or “belief” that the Roman Rite formerly had an extra reading. This idea was quite popular in the 1960s, but—as far as I can tell—has been abandoned by all serious scholars. As Father John Parsons wrote in 2001:
As regards the Old Testament, we are repeatedly assured that there was an Old Testament reading each Sunday morning at Mass, but that quite mysteriously these all vanished by the seventh century, and vanished leaving no memory that they had ever existed: no homilies on them by Leo or Gregory, no inadvertent cross references to them in any surviving source, not one palimpsest listing one pericope and the Sunday to which it was assigned, no tradition as to what Pope suppressed them and why; just an a priori assertion that there is a reading missing between the Gradual and the Alleluia, which would, incidentally, place the Old Testament reading after the New, contrary to practice elsewhere in the MISSALE VETUSTUM. This argument from silence is wildly improbable. There are indeed Old Testament lessons on penitential days in the traditional Roman lectionary, but these are quite a different matter. The alleged set of vanished Old Testament readings are, I fear, a romantic fantasy like the vanished peoples’ offertory procession.
Resp. Psalm History [Part 3] • As I mentioned above, at the inception of the RESPONSORIAL PSALM (circa 1968), it was believed to be restoring of a practice lost since the primitive Church, circa 300AD. Half a century later, scholarship has “swung” like a pendulum. All serious liturgical historians now agree its introduction was not a restoration. Rather, it added something new to the Mass. That’s why the Responsorial Psalm—unlike the Introit, Gradual, Offertory, etc.—has no ancient melodies.
Jeff’s Prediction • I personally believe that someday the RESPONSORIAL PSALM will be eliminated, because its introduction violated the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, which explicitly said: There must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them. In other words, the fathers of Vatican II desired to promote the sacred liturgy. Their desire was not to annihilate the sacred liturgy, replacing it with innovations that had never existed before.
1 As Dom André Mocquereau wrote in June of 1920: “The Sacred Congregation of Rites recalled this decree some years later, as soon as it realized that the facts upon which it was based were false.”
