A note before we begin: I recognize this article is arriving at the eleventh hour. Many music directors have long since finalized what they’ll be singing throughout Lent, and the last thing I want to do is create anxiety on the eve of Ash Wednesday. Consider this less a prescription for this season and more an invitation to think ahead—toward Easter, toward Ordinary Time, toward what our musical choices are quietly teaching our congregations all year long.
ODAY, millions of Catholics will walk into their parishes, receive ashes on their foreheads, and hear the ancient words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” For many of them, it will also be the day they notice something different about the music: the familiar contemporary Mass setting has been set aside and suddenly there’s chant. And then Easter will come, and for many parishes, the chant will disappear again until next year.
This pattern is so common in American Catholic parishes that most people don’t think to question it. I argue that it’s worth questioning, in fact, I think it’s something that we very much need to begin to question because what we’re teaching our congregations through music, quietly and without any explicit instruction, is something the Church has never intended.
The Lesson We’re Accidentally Teaching • Every year, many parishes deliver the same unspoken catechesis: chant is what you sing when the season calls for penance. The moment Easter Sunday arrives—the greatest and most important solemnity of the Church year—the chant vanishes and the familiar contemporary settings return.
Consider what this teaches.
If chant is consistently and exclusively associated with Lent, the congregation gradually associates that it only belongs to the penitential seasons. It becomes something that signals sacrifice and fasting rather than something that simply is the Church’s music in all her fullness. Chant becomes the Lenten sound and then when we’re overcome with the triumphant return of the “alleluias” at Easter, chant is forgotten.
I do not believe that this is the lesson anyone intends to teach, but it is the lesson being taught, year after year, through the choices we make about when to use the Church’s most ancient and privileged musical tradition.
What Chant Actually Is • Gregorian chant is not penitential music. It is the music of Holy Mother Church. Full stop.
The chant tradition grew organically from the Church’s liturgical prayer over centuries, shaped by monks, cantors, and scholas who were singing not just during Lent but throughout the entire liturgical year. The most joyful music in the Church’s repertoire is chant. The great Easter Alleluias are chant. The Victimae Paschali Laudes is chant. Puer Natus Est Nobis—the Introit for Christmas Mass at Dawn—is chant. The Missa de Angelis (Mass VIII), one of the most exuberant settings in the Kyriale, is chant. These are proclamations of joy and divine glory expressed in the Church’s own sacred musical language.
It is without a doubt that the modal character of chant lends itself beautifully to the reflective quality that Lent calls for, and I believe that this is one of the reasons many find chant is so fitting during this season. Music written in a minor key can convey longing, but we can say this without making every minor-key composition inherently mournful. Mahler wrote in minor keys. The result wasn’t sadness; it was profundity.
Chant’s modal beauty encompasses the full range of the human and spiritual experience—penitence and triumph, Gethsemane and the empty tomb. For us to confine it to one season is to offer our congregations only a fraction of what the Church’s musical tradition has to give.
It is also worth remembering: while Lent is a penitential season, every Sunday—including those that fall during Lent—is a solemnity. Our music should reflect the season’s character, but the celebration of the Holy Eucharist is always and without exception, the most solemn and sacred action we can ever experience. Chant serves the solemnity of these sacred acts not despite its gravity, but because of it.
The ICEL Chant Mass: A Universal Gift • In April 1974, Pope Paul VI sent a personal gift to every bishop in the world: a small booklet of simple Gregorian chant called Jubilate Deo—a “minimum repertoire,” he called it—so that Catholics everywhere would share a common musical language for the Mass. The vision was one of universal communion: Catholics from New Bedford to Nairobi to Manila joining their voices in recognizable, shared prayer. Corpus Christi Watershed’s President, Jeff Ostrowski, recently wrote an article all about this, which can be found here.
When the new English translation of the Roman Missal was introduced in 2011, ICEL provided English chant settings adapted from these same simple melodies. The ICEL Chant Mass was intended to serve the same purpose: a simple, dignified, and official setting that any parish could learn and any congregation could sing—not a seasonal option, but a common musical home.
The intention was never that every Catholic would associate it with ashes and fasting. The intention was that every Catholic would simply know it.
In practice, many parishes use it during Lent and relatively rarely otherwise. Instead of experiencing it as a permanent foundation, people come to associate it with the penitential character of the season. The music that goes away when the alleluias return.
Every parish should know how to sing the ICEL Chant Mass—not just as a Lenten setting but as a permanent part of its musical life. Hearing this Mass setting should immediately invoke a sense of home and familiarity, not purple vestments (the correct color for Lent is actually Violet, but that’s beside the point) and a barren sanctuary.
Chanting in Lent Is Better Than Not Chanting • Before pressing this argument further, please allow me to clarify one thing: if your parish uses chant during Lent and doesn’t use it at any other time, please don’t take this article as a reason to stop using it all together. Chanting only during Lent is significantly better than not chanting at all, and there is genuine wisdom in allowing the season’s character to shape the music.
If the only window you currently have is Lent, please use it and use it well. Sing the chant with care and intention, let your congregation experience the same ancient melodies that flowed from the lips of millions of Catholics before us, from the lips of the saints, and hear melodies that have outlived empires. Now, from there—and this is the point of this entire article, the point that I would get down on my knees to implore every Music Director in the world to consider—don’t stop there. Let Lent be the beginning of a formation process, not its entirety.
The goal isn’t to remove chant from Lent. The goal is to expand it beyond Lent.
Practical Ways to Expand Chant Throughout the Year • For music directors looking to broaden their parish’s engagement with chant, there are accessible and gentle ways to introduce it throughout the liturgical year without disrupting your parish’s liturgical norm.
One of the most natural entry points is the time after Communion. Rather than programming a meditation hymn—which, as any honest music director will admit, carries the perpetual risk of becoming a brief solo recital—consider replacing it with the seasonal Marian antiphon. The Salve Regina, the Regina Caeli during Easter, the Alma Redemptoris Mater in Advent and Christmas: these are brief, beautiful, and deeply embedded in the Church’s tradition of post-Communion prayer. Congregations often take to them quickly precisely because they’re short, melodically memorable, and clearly devotional in character.
Similarly, the Communion Antiphon itself, the Church’s appointed text for that moment in the Mass can be chanted in place of, or before, the communion hymn. Many resources such as Simple English Propers, the St. Isaac Jogues Missal, the Lumen Christi Missal, and others provide accessible settings that don’t require a professional schola. Even a simple psalm-tone setting sung by a cantor while the congregation receives Holy Communion introduces people to the proper texts and to chant’s rhythmic freedom in the most natural possible way. One could even make use of the Seven Ad Libitum, which are seven Latin Eucharistic antiphons that can be sung any Sunday of the Church year. These settings are a great way to get your parish familiar with something without changing text every week.
Another possibility is to chant the Kyrie each Sunday from one of the many settings in the Kyriale Simplex or the Graduale Romanum. The Kyrie is brief, the melody easily learned, and its Greek text carries a natural solemnity that even first-time hearers tend to receive with reverence. A parish that chants the Kyrie every Sunday—regardless of season—has already taken a meaningful step.
If your parish has been using the ICEL Chant Mass exclusively during Lent, consider moving it to Ordinary Time instead. Let the long green Sundays of summer and fall be the season where your congregation learns to hear it as simply the Church’s music rather than a marker of penance. When you make this shift, a brief bulletin article explaining why will go a long way. Parishioners who have come to expect the chant Mass in Lent may be genuinely puzzled to hear it in July and something else in March but a few sentences of catechesis can easily turn that confusion into formation. As for what Mass settings to use during Lent itself in place of the ICEL Chant Mass, here are just a few of my recommendations:
- Mass XVII from the Liber Usualis is the classic Gregorian choice for penitential seasons, designated specifically for this purpose. Its modal austerity genuinely suits the character of Lent.
- Mass of All Saints by Mr. Russell Weismann offers a contemporary composition written in a genuinely sacred style—accessible to ordinary parish choirs while maintaining the dignity the liturgy demands.
- Mass of St. Anne by Mr. Benjamin LaPrairie is beautifully crafted, modal in character, and suited to the reflective quality of Lent without being indistinguishable from the ICEL settings people may already associate with the season.
- Mass in Honor of the Immaculate Conception by Dr. Peter Latona carries a modal quality that suits Lent, though I find it most compelling for solemnities—its musicality has a gravity and beauty that rewards the higher feasts particularly well.
- Mass in Honor of Saint Noël Chabanel by Mr. Jeff Ostrowski is, in my estimation, a setting that works beautifully in any season. Its compositional quality is exceptional, and its character is sacred without being severe—a setting that forms the ear and the heart simultaneously.
A Closing Thought • Ash Wednesday invites us to remember what we are: creatures of dust entirely dependent on the mercy of God. It’s a day of beautiful but stark simplicity. The ashes, the ancient words, the Great Fast—all of it strips away pretense and returns us to what is essential.
There is something fitting about the Church’s most ancient music accompanying this day. Chant, too, is stripped of pretense. It simply is—ancient, modal, and deeply, permanently sacred.
But that strangeness should not be confined to forty days. The music that serves the stark beauty of Ash Wednesday is the same music that can serve the blazing joy of Easter Sunday, the quiet awe of a Tuesday morning Mass in Ordinary Time, the exuberance of Christmas, and the solemnity of little child’s First Holy Communion.
This is the music of our Church. All of it. All year long.
Use it accordingly.
