It's great that this book has been made available for download, and I am glad to have been able to download it.

But "Hymni_Veri_Valoris" (which is presumably a nom de plumefor Jeff Ostrowski): Why on earth do you feel you have to insert nearly a dozen pages advertising CCWatershed and the Jogues Hymnal? After all, we have to visit the CCWatershed in order to download the book in the first place.

I shall have to (once again) do my best to excise the CCWatershed advertising from my downloaded copy, as I much prefer to have a copy that preserves, unaltered, the integrity of the original.

Interesting hymnal.
It is worth noting, that many of the older hymnals go up to Eb or E.
This hymnal seems to have a rather high tessitura.
No congregation could regularly reach eb or e's today. it seems that congregational pitch is going down. Is this because we just don't sing anymore??

E-natural and even F were seen when I was growing up, but now E-flat is rare for a high note. Yes, people don't sing anymore. Why? Because, for the most part, schools and churches take little to no interest in teaching children to sing, let alone to sing well. One only has to look at the typical children's "repertoire" (I use the term loosely) to see why. More and more, singing has become something for the pop soloist (and often isn't very good). Our own National Anthem isn't an anthem anymore, it's the National Solo (or the National wobble-and-stagger-all-over-the-place-so-that-it's-barely-recognizable Screech piece ... and people eat it up as if it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I wonder if vocal ranges are shifting as the average stature of people rises over time.

I have observed that it strongly depends on the piece to be sung whether E or even D is perceived as a high note. This is also not limited to congregations, I have seen and heard (and even observed with my own voice) it in choirs too. When a piece is well-known, such as a hymn to the Blessed Sacrament for the Corpus Christi procession or the Tantum ergo tune most widely used in Germany, or Holy God we praise Thy Name, there are no problems and the congregation is singing the roof off the building, even if the highest note is the natural E, and in choir rehearsal it is no problem in the warmup to reach notes as high as E-flat for altos and basses; but when singing something that is not that well-known the participation drops noticeably even in the region of C or D.