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Views from the Choir Loft

The Responsorial Psalm: What You Never Knew!

Guest Author · September 1, 2015

347 Replace Psalter ERE’S SOMETHING I bet you never realized: the Ordinary Form rubrics allow the responsorial psalm found in the Lectionary to be replaced by any other psalm. If this coming Sunday has psalm 25, you can replace it with psalm 56. If the following Sunday has psalm 68, you can replace it with psalm 104. Here’s the proof:

“In the Dioceses of the United States of America, instead of the Psalm assigned in the Lectionary, there may be sung … an antiphon and Psalm from another collection of Psalms and antiphons—including Psalms arranged in metrical form—providing that they have been approved by the Conference of Bishops or the Diocesan Bishop.”

—§61d of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal

I WANTED TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE, so I recently wrote to the USCCB. Here’s what they said (with their emphasis):

It seems pretty clear to me: “instead of the Psalm assigned…”. It appears that, yes, an entirely different Psalm can be chosen, so long as it comes from an approved source.

As someone who has labored—with very little success—to introduce the propers at my parish, this whole thing came as quite a shock. Why does almost every Catholic parish replace the propers each Sunday, but never the Responsorial Psalm? Whenever I try to promote the propers, people inevitably say, “The GIRM allows us to replace the propers; it’s called fourth option.” Yet, the GIRM also allows us to replace the Responsorial Psalm…

I was prepared to present my theory about why this is, before I submitted this guest blog. I was going to say that the liturgical books only give certain options, and not others. I was going to say something like, “Why isn’t there a book which provides the traditional Gradual psalm as an option? What about that?” However, before posting, the editor at CCW pointed out that the Jogues Missal does provide the Gradual as an option, although somehow my eyes never noticed this before:

349 Gradual


It turns out the Gradual is specifically listed by the GIRM as an option; sometimes it’s listed as 1st option, while other documents place it as 2nd, behind the Lectionary psalm. Perhaps I’m the only one who never knew about all this stuff…

If so, feel free to ignore my article!   🙂


We hope you enjoyed this guest article by J. Michael Ney.

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

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Responsorial Psalm Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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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

If they protest and want, for example, to retain at least the familiar chants of the ordinary Mass in Latin, they are told that their protest is worthless. They are not “trained.” There is no reason to take account of what they say!

— Father Louis Bouyer (1968)

Recent Posts

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