HE SECOND VATICAN Council solemnly declared: “The treasury of sacred music is to be preserved and fostered with great care.” Unfortunately, many priests and bishops since 1970 have interpreted the words preserved and fostered with great care to mean “banished, condemned, and outlawed.” I can’t explain how this situation arose; only God knows.1 In the 1960s, clerics wrote to Pope Saint Paul VI seeking permission to get rid of Gregorian Chant and the Church’s immemorial lingua sacra. (Their requests contradicted the explicit mandates of Vatican II.) On 15 August 1966, Paul VI replied:
“We must acknowledge that We have been somewhat disturbed and saddened by these requests. One may well wonder what the origin is of this new way of thinking and this sudden dislike for the past. One may well wonder why such things have been fostered.”
(1 of 2) Feeling Discouraged • When choir members are absent for rehearsal or Mass, this can cause discouragement. The conscientious choirmaster must understand such things will happen—especially in volunteer choirs. A topic we’ll discuss at length this summer during Sacred Music Symposium 2025 will be “the best attendance policy.” One must learn to come to each rehearsal with a PLAN B (and also a PLAN C). Indeed, this week, many of our singers will be absent from rehearsal due to illness and unavoidable travel. As a result, I have “scaled back” somewhat our musical outline for Sunday:
* PDF Download • ORDER OF MUSIC (23-Feb-2025)
—For the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C).
The OFFERTORY CHANT this week is particularly beautiful and we’ll use a special hymn traditionally sung during the season of “Pre-Lent.”
(2 of 2) Feeling Discouraged • I mentioned earlier the flagrant disregard for Vatican II. What does this mean? Should we become discouraged and throw in the towel? Or should we imitate saints like Father Noël Chabanel, who did his best and left the rest to God? Let us never fail to offer each day to our Savior: our joys, our sufferings, and even ‘dumb’ mundane things like brushing our teeth. Never turn on your phone until you have made your daily offering.
1 The “treasury of sacred music” is sometimes referred to by its Latin name: THESAURUS MUSICAE SACRAE. It excludes secular styles inappropriate for the Holy Mass: Rock-N-Roll; Country; Bluegrass; off-Broadway; Jazz; and so forth. Some of the songs written in the classic Disney movies are quite beautiful (although they’re too emotional for the public worship of Almighty God). Many ‘popular’ church composers like David Haas, Marty Haugen, Michael Joncas, and Ernest Sands imitate—in a clumsy and slipshod way—the style of the Disney songs. This is very sad and has nothing to do with the THESAURUS MUSICAE SACRAE. In 2013, Sir James MacMillan pointed out that: “A lot of the favoured new settings are musically illiterate, almost is if they were written by semi-trained teenagers coming to grips with musical rudiments.”
