Right after it happened, my priest called me in exultation and exclaimed,

"JAMES: GRAB YOUR LIBER AND MEET ME IN THE CHURCH!
THE SUPREME COURT JUST OVERTURNED ROE v. WADE—
WE NEED TO CHANT THE TE DEUM!!"

He immediately came over from the rectory, set the bells to ringing, and we knelt down and chanted the solemn Te Deum in alternatum. It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life. We were shaking. (And it's positively one of the best phone calls I've ever received, lol.)

We are now going to chant the Te Deum at the end of all the masses this weekend. I'm SO EXCITED.

Is topic relevant to a Sacred Music Form? What is the criteria for a post? Just anything that relates in anyway to the Catholic Church? If it’s a forum for Sacred Music, I cannot find much commonality between that and abortion.

Even if you don't see anything related to religion in the RvW reversal, there is reason for it in secular terms. For too many years, the federal government has chipped away at the authority of the states and arrogated powers to itself. Maybe this reversal is a trend. As to the relevance to sacred music, Te Deum, Te Deum, Te Deum.

Francis,

Ariasita isn't kidding. I've been corresponding with her via PM, and she's not prone to pointless sandbagging or hyperbole.

Ariasita,

Our esteemed host has actually written in these pages about giving wide latitude to topics which are relevant to Catholics and thus to this forum about Catholic music. He entertained several COVID threads until they became (mostly) unproductive, in part because the question of musicians making music (and/or losing their jobs) is relevant to the public health requirements imposed by various levels of government. He closed, on the other hand, a thread about geocentrism vs. heliocentrism just quite recently, for various reasons. Given that several musicians already posting here will be changing their plans for the weekend so that they can sing Te Deum, the decision is immediately impacting parish musicians.

I’ll celebrate when the maternal death rate in the states with a trigger ban goes down, when no one ends up in medical debt from childbirth, and when there’s paid maternity and paternity leave nationwide. Until then….this isn’t going to do anything for abortion rates and there is much work to do.

Gamba,

Trying to honor Ariasita's inquiry about keeping everything relevant to sacred music, I will propose an analogy for you.

60 years ago, the Second Vatican Council announced the coming of a new springtime. I wasn't alive, so I couldn't take up the mantle of curmudgeon, but even at the time some did, and they insisted that the promised spring time would never materialize because of the manner chosen to bring it into existence. After the Council closed, a group of experts produced a "revision" of the Mass and a pope duly promulgated it.

If someone had said at the time "You have exactly 4 bright afternoons in an Alaska winter to show good results from the liturgical reform" it would not have been unreasonable to protest that since bright afternoons in an Alaska winter don't exist, 4 x 0 = 0, and the appearance of tolerance was a sham. There were other reasons for knowing that the reforms couldn't produce the promised fruit, but some magical timeframe wouldn't change those reasons, and wouldn't be adequate to show any good fruit. (Someone, like our Francis Koerber, might argue that there couldn't be any good fruit, so no time was exactly the right amount of time).

Imagine someone saying to any of the musicians who introduce actually Catholic music into their parishes and receive howls of consternation from people who say "we need Traditional Catholic music like Imagine, and Be not afraid and Michael, Row your boat Ashore, not that Latin which no one understands anyway!"

To your other points:


No one going in to debt from childbirth can be achieved by a different method than a Supreme Court decision. Train doulas. Stop treating pregnancy as an illness which needs maximum medical intervention. Will some moms still need help from doctors, and might some still need hospitalization? Yes, for which the solution is real Catholic hospitals run without a profit motive, not paid maternity leave or paternity leave.

Finally, you and I fundamentally agree that there is much work still to do. Part of the Church's compassionate response is to improve (i.e., really improve) her architecture, her art and her music, so that the hearts of the faithful in stormy weather can be buoyed by beauty and turn their hearts to God.

Francis, kudos to your music being aired on EWTN. What an honor for you that must have been. I commend you.

I’m trying to follow your logic. Correct me please if I err. What was sung when the current administration protected over one million noncitizens from deportation and gave them eligibility to apply for a work permit by expanding TPS? Was that considered an event that helped eradicate injustice? Even if only partially? Respectfully asking.

.

The church does not directly involve herself in every civil and societal issue. It trusts the government to handle particulars and the church affords checks and balances in her oversight. In the matter of abortion, the church is required to step in as the government failed to protect the most fundamental of rights. That is why we pray and fight for justice. Each issue bears a certain moral weight. Protecting abortion is the most tragic moral failure of any government.

I was unaware that abortion carried more moral weight than the lives of immigrants.

This is an oversimplification and generalization. Are 100% of the immigrants being murdered for no reason?

The fate of every abortion is the murder of a human being who made no legal or illegal choice. The fate of (each) immigrant is no where near that black and white.

Even desperate immigrants have more opportunity to provide for their own actions and self-defense than the unborn child.

If they are literally fleeing for their lives, is that a big difference?

I’ll bow out, respectfully. I’m sure this thread’s original author never intended it to devolve into a discussion about the moral weight of immigration, legal or otherwise, vs. abortion. Good day, all.

You have not, in fact. But again, the thread is yours. Celebrate your day.

It is a little funny to me that this discussion devolved so quickly into a debate about forum etiquette when the third post (my own) was about rushing to the church to chant the Te Deum in thanksgiving.

This is an absolutely momentous milestone, and we are adjusting the weekend’s schedule accordingly.

Must we avoid celebration simply because there are other injustices which exist in our society? If this were the case, we would never celebrate or rejoice over anything. There are, arguably, systemic problems with how immigrants are treated. However, this does not disable us from celebrating a fundamental victory for human dignity. I cannot understand how one would not be pleased with these results as a Catholic Christian.

For us easterners today is Feast of the Nativity of the Holy Forerunner, Prophet and Baptist John. It doesn't get any better than this.

I cannot understand how one would not be pleased with these results as a Catholic Christian.

Because the issue is not that abortion was legal, but that abortions occurred. Roe v. Wade was a questionable decision that did not stand up to neutral legal scrutiny. The fact that half of America is nonetheless wedded to it betrays a fundamental sickness that will not be solved through partisan politics.

I worry that Catholics become too caught up in the legal aspects of abortion and lose sight of the real issue, which is that extinguishing life out of convenience is not even seen as a moral quandary.

PRAISE BE TO GOD!! My heart has longed for this!!

IDK, all of the liberals — the Jesuits; Cardinals Tobin, Gregory, and Cupich, as well as Bishop McElroy — have said that this is a day to celebrate and rejoice, even if much work is to be done, both in making abortion illegal (as Cupich spoke about with respect to Illinois) and in taking care of the poor, whom we will always have among us…

@Ariasita Our Lord and Saviour in Matthew 18 spoke about children, they cannot speak for themselves so deserve the greater protection.

And Jesus, calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them. And said: amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven. And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me. But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.

For the first time in my life, I can say that abortion is illegal in my state and that the systematic murder of my generation in my state has come to an end. Perhaps the joy I feel is not dissimilar from the joy of the fourth-century Christians when they learned that the Emperor Constantine had legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Gloria in excelsis Deo!

The deliberate murder of innocent people is always and everywhere objectively evil, and gravely so. But if we were to compare one murder to another, we must look at the circumstances around each to see which is particularly heinous or especially grave, by answering questions such as: Who, how, why, by whom, etc.

For example, the murder of a priest is especially heinous, not because the priest is more of a human being than a layman, but, because the victim is a consecrated soul, and there is added to the crime the sin of sacrilege. It would be especially heinous for a Catholic to murder a priest, for the priest is--particularly in that case--the murderer's spiritual father.

Consider abortion. The victim is utterly innocent and helpless, and one of the murderers is the very person ordained by God to give the victim life (the child's mother)! In many circumstances, one of the murderers is the person God ordained to protect and provide for the victim (the child's father). So beyond murder, abortion involves a total corruption of parenthood. When a significant portion of American society is screaming bloody revenge because Roe is overturned, we see just how far the corruption of the family has corrupted society. Next, the method employed in this kind of murder is exceptionally cruel.

Perhaps most importantly, in every single case of abortion, the murderers prevent any possibility of baptism for that soul (outside the possible extraordinary workings of God known only to Himself). Such a thing is satanic, and it is no wonder that Satan is reeling from this court decision because it does, in fact, reduce the number of human sacrifices he receives -- even if it is still legal in many states.

No, the pro-life work is not over, and in some ways it is just beginning; but this is more than a simple legal victory.

Pax,

Yes, we can have a thread about sorting American gun laws, if our host permits it, but you seem to be treating gun laws and abortion laws as equal, but they're not.

A gun can be used for a morally neutral or morally positive purpose (and, as you can rightly point out, a morally reprehensible one) but abortion, that is, the intentional removal from the womb of a living human person for the express purpose of making that living person no longer alive, can not.

Medical people sometimes call "spontaneous abortion" that which most of us call a "miscarriage". Unless the miscarriage is caused by violence, drugs, or some similar agent, this is not the moral (or legal) equivalent of the abortion Roe discusses.

So, yes, a thread about guns would be possible, and as Nihil suggests there may be a wide variety of opinions on this Forum about both guns and gun violence.

This irrelevant thread has made me decide to end participation in this forum after 15 years.