This is a repost from Facebook of my thoughts as of this date.

Here it is, midway through cycle A and 2017, and after 47 years of commitment to Roman Catholic Music Ministry all I can declare is “This is pathetic,” save for advocates of tradition in sacred music, this that the post-conciliar church hath wrought. Those of us who’ve labored faithfully and ardently to increase the viability of “contemporary” sacred music in all its genres and forms have had as our vanguard mediocrity, ironically no matter what genre or form.
Considering some thoughts of a fellow traveler, Peter Kwasniewski, that virtually all of the fifty years of composition and performance in the last to current century prove as abject failure, when I know to the core of my being that not ALL of what his cohort designate as “ditties” is, in fact, the case and state of liturgical composition, I am nonetheless bereft at the poverty of purpose exhibited by so-called composers, publishers and consumerist performers of what Peter would easily dub “sacropop.”
I suppose if Ockeghem’s musical misadventures with Mass settings relegated his legacy to popular obscurity, I shouldn’t be so disturbed that the efforts of certain modern composers and writers wither on the viability vine due to an insidious saturation effect: from LAREC to NPM conventions, certain mysteriously pre-ordained composers and their latest “product” are then over-watered into sterility and decay. It shouldn’t have taken a film director to point out that “Somos el Cuerpo de Cristo” is hardly an appropriate “soundtrack” to the dispensation and reception of the veritable Body of Christ at Holy Communion. Oob la di, oob la da. Even Ockeghem’s parodies blush at this with shame and hilarity.
A recent column by Phil Lawler advances that the maladies affecting Holy Mother Church and ecclesiology require a radical shift in paradigmatic thought that boils down to “it ain’t working!” (Vatican II) I suggest that, in point of fact, the Novus Ordo Mass de Rigeuer be re-christened (how appropriate) the “Titanic Liturgy” doomed to tragedy not only to design, but ill-manners by crew and passengers, and by the inviolate justice of nature, a failure to account for the massive iceberg underneath the scenic crest of its visible crown.
There have been two major systematic efforts to re-orient (pardon moi) liturgical music praxis in the two millennia of Roman Catholicism; they have in the short run both failed to impress. So we are still at stasis, do we want to yield to the hardcore truths of tradition, yea exemplified and codified under the conciliar aegis, and accept that chant, in the wide horizon of its forms, be once and for all mandated as the musical handmaid to the Divine Liturgy….or, acquiesce to the slow digression of form and performance that is depriving the Church’s song of oxygen? I do not prefer “either or” scenarios, but this ambivalence is surely destroying any role music plays in the confluence of heaven and earth.

BTW, I always fail at Strunk and White.