Maybe the Episcopalians have adopted Latin because we are not using it? Stranger things have happened.

I agree with you on the need for English texts that are understood by the congregation. Your work speaks for itself, and you have served well, for some time.

If you want to sample reality, ask the congregation, not another musician. Musicians can be prone to extremes. At one time, during the years when I did not want to spend my time playing and conducting at liturgies, I actually thought like the congregation. Many times I would listen to church musicians following prevailing trends, and think, "Have they lost their minds?"

Bruce, having said all that, I am still caught in the 'fad' of trying to present the beauty of chant to the church as it is today. We are awash in a great confusion, in an eclipse of the Church. I am also setting chant to Engish as you are well aware, but I only do this as a temporary bridge back to the full and rightful place of the GC.

(PS. Do you still want that Magnificat in English by the way? I am still working on it! lol)

marajoy, of course, Bruce is right. It is an outburst of joy. And in comparison, the Propers are specific and if the reason for going to the vernacular is to make the people able to understand at their level of comprehension, then it is much more important for the people to understand the words of the propers which are just as important as the readings for the Mass of that Day.

So, on a level of importance of understanding by the people, if one were to sing the propers and the Gloria at a Mass the propers would be the most important ones to be sung in the vernacular rather than the Gloria, for example. Bruce is absolutely correct.

The ordinary of the Mass, since it is repeated day after day, is more important to be learned and sung in Latin by the congregation than the Propers. That's why Jubilate Deo contains no....propers.

I have restricted my postings recently due to an increasing amount of uncharitable personal rage against the non-Roman Catholics who continue to bash the Roman liturgy of today and yesterday. The moderators, in their great wisdom and charity, have quickly erased some postings that I made that were not made with charity of spirit and I thank them and apologize again. BUT, I have tremendous respect for non-Roman Catholics, such as Bruce Ford whose name in enshrined in the 1982 hymnal for his work there, who love the Roman Liturgy and participate in this forum and add so much to it.

The Roman Church is using Latin. There is a wonderful engraving of the Holy Ghost dictating chant to Pope Gregory. Jubilate Deo is the work of a Pope who said Latin and the Chant must be preserved. Benedict has asked for chant and polyphony to be part of the like of every church again.

No parish priest is saying this, no Bishop is saying this, no Cardinal is saying this. The Pope, the leader of the church selected by the Holy Ghost has said this.

So...it is our job to do so. Those who are against it really do not have a place in a forum with the goals of CMAA. While I do not think they should be banned, I would suggest that they, themselves, moderate their comments against the instructions of the Pope.

The little school musicians forum I have created is only for people doing it...as I am not interested in being told what we should be doing by those who are not doing it themselves.

No, it's not that simple. Unfortunately, the people I encounter who hate Latin chant, also hate English chant. They hate chant, period! The guitar lovers actually love those instruments, the music played on them, and sung to them. It's not a matter of education, but rather of two conflicting camps with no common ground.

Let us all take a moment and pray for our pastors.

Speaking for the future of my particular situation, I'm thinking very intently about assigning Latin propers to Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Paschaltide, and holy days, with English propers (The American Gradual [PDF], and possibly offertories from RIchard Rice's Simple Choral Gradual [PDF]) for Ordinary Time. Lectionary options for the major propers, as per standard practice.

CharlesW's point is well-taken, and you'll always have people having certain connotations about plainsong. I tend to think that vernacular propers would take the edge off the foreignness of the chant, and the Latin can be used to heighten the sense of sacramental numinousness.

Still, the ultimate language of the Church is truth in charity at all times.

Aristotle:

I utilize English propers from Adam, Bruce, the AUG and my own adaptations. They work quite well. It is my RITE to do so!

And by the way, we absolutely LOVE your setting of Responsorial Psalms. I was composing them before I got yours, and they are very close to the manner in which I was setting them. So be encouraged that they work very well AND they are beautiful.

Bruce:

I didn't know you were Episcopalian! Then again, I tend to assume that most everyone on this board is a Catholic or at least interested in Catholicism unless they make it known otherwise.

There is no difference between songs that are sung with a guitar and chanted songs.

There is a difference between music that is secular in style and sacred in style.

People that love secular music at Mass....

Gavin said:

For the topic, I share Bruce's fears. There are many blessings from the intelligibility and accessibility of English propers, and if the Gregorian melody and characteristics can be preserved, it is all the better.

English has also driven many away into heretical and schismatic sects, including the ugliness of the music that has accompanied it.

Yet any mention of English propers is usually as a "stepping stone" to get to Latin propers.

Well, you can drink SuperEconoCola or CocaCola. Which one tastes like and is the real thing?

Latin IS the language of the Roman Rite, and as such MUST have pride of place...

Latin Rite... Latin Language... seems like a natural.

but surely for the average parish is it not enough to have a Latin ordinary and use Latin propers for festal Masses? Mind you, there is NO reason that a Roman Rite cathedral shouldn't have a principle mass with all Latin... but why must the average parish go full tilt to Latin when there are high quality English propers available?

Hmmm... Let's think about this. "We are average and therefore should not have a Latin Mass." That is absurd. It used to be the other way around until the bio-engineers of liturgy emerged a few years ago.

Cathedrals are the "special places" that can offer both. Us average parishes should offer the Latin Rite in the Latin. Let's keep it simple.

I am not absent from the Roman Church. I work there every Sunday for approximately 8 hours. I don't belong to it, I work for it. I am fully Catholic, just not Roman. The Catholic Church is not exclusively Roman or Latin.

I probably hear and sing more chant in a year, both English and Latin, than most of the Catholics in the U.S. hear in a lifetime. But I am telling you there are people in the western Catholic church who despise chant. I know, I have met them, and they can be priests, laity, and musicians. The position that Latin chant is the music of the church is not accepted in some quarters, religious and secular. That might be an ideal, but it is not a reality in many or most places. I would say that if you took a job in such a parish, it might be in your best interests to leave for a more welcoming congregation. You would, at least, lower the stress level in your life.

Jesus never spoke Latin, either. Since the church started in the east, the language spoken by the early Christians would likely have been either Greek, or one of the local languages that existed along with Greek.

Then convince the rest of the Romans and start with the U.S. bishops. Next move on to NPM. It's your own people in your own rite of the Church who keep shooting you in the foot. I am speaking of how things are at a practical level, of course, not the ideal. Outsiders didn't sneak into the Roman Rite and create the current mess. It was an inside job with many willing accomplices. The wounds are self-inflicted.

Charles

We (do you mean Roman Catholics) don't have to convince anyone including naive, uncatechized or confused Catholics. We will simply move toward what the Church wants, asks and expects in educating the Masses (pun intended). Eventually they will wonder why they did anything askew from what is the norm.

M.

Vatican II did not intend an all-vernacular Mass. The documents are clear. Only in the Mission Field is an all-vernacular Mass permitted.

The US Bishops attempted to do what you feel is correct...no bi-language Masses, all Masses in the US to be in English.

Rome said no then.

And Charles... if "they" are shooting us in the foot, which body part are you continually aiming for?

Forty-something years after the Council is too soon to speak so dogmatically of the place of the vernacular in the Western Rite as to say it should never be mixed with Latin and Greek. We are still working this out. It seems to me that there is an argument from authority and practice for a Greek and Latin Ordinary within an othewise vernacular Mass, as a connection with the wider Church over space and time; but we've hardly begun to think about the Propers in this respect. Give it another 40 years and the issue might be clearer.

Bruce - I greatly appreciate and appluad all of your hard work and efforts in chant! Keep up the great work.

@Jam:

I don't think mixing languages is wrong in liturgy either. Even in the Latin Mass you have the Greek Kyrie...

And the Hebrew Alleluia, Hosanna and Amen.

...so I think the idea of not mixing languages in liturgy is more pedantic than anything else.

The 'language' issue for me is one of appropriate musical language more than linguistics. While this puts me at odds with M. Jackson Osborn's statement above regarding language, I'm in agreement with his preceding statement:

The truth is that a real musician can very well sing chant to a variety of languages, can do so artfully and with quite satisying musical and spiritual results. The shiboleth that chant and Latin are mutually dependent needs to be laid to rest by genuinely thoughtful musicians. Nor is it true that Latin, because of its particular vowels, is somehow more musical than English with its particular vowels (wronglfully inferred to be ugly). English is, in fact, a very beautiful language and can be chanted very well by musicians who earnestly intend to make it spiritually rewarding.

I'm personally wild for English chant and I see it as a very viable step - even an essential one. It is to me an amazing tragedy that the Roman rite went from a combination of Latian chant and vernacular hymnody straight to the pit in the 1960s - bypassing the English chant option altogether. I don't see English chant as an endpoint however. I can see where it is all pointing. I just don't see the need to get there in our lifetimes. However, there is an additional problem of the unstable texts themselves. You can't write music for texts that change constantly. It is demoralizing (Proulx is a good case in point).

Since we (Latin Romans) are one of the oldest traditions and our heritage harkens back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, we do not have to argue anything for ourselves, come to our own defense, or make excuses. We do not have to craft a new way, or find a new fad. We simply look back and unburry the gold that we already own. It is a testimony of generations that carried the Light of the Faith before us.

A good Catholic always asks, 'what is old?' not 'what is new?'. We utilize the new only to harken back to the basics, to what is absolute, to what is primary, to what is the foundation of our faith. That is only found in the earliest of our liturgical celebrations, in our writers, composers, and celebrators of our most prized liturgy. There is no greater testament, no greater proof and no greater mystery than what has already gone on before us. The book has already been written, the stories already told, and the blood of martyrs have signed the pages. We have only showed up to write the epilogue in our later time.

Our proof is in our Palestrinas and our Popes, our Bishops and their Basilicas. You will find the proof in our earliest liturgical books; a few of which are the evangelarium, epistolarium, sacramentarium, liber, antiphonarius or gradualis, liber responsalis, the psalterium, later still the hymnarium, liber sequentialis, troponarius, and on, and on. There is no erasing or forgetting the greatness of God as He resides still in his One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

These are also the testimony to the greatest language of liturgy, and in fact what is known throughout history as "The Liturgical Language". Latin is not the invention of novelty, but the result of the longstanding test of time and practice that was forged into what the Roman rite is today.

I leave you with the thoughts of one of our great writers about the liturgy.

"Latin is naturally terse, austere, compared with the rhetorical abundance of Greek. It is a natural tendency of Latin to curtail redundant phrases. And this terseness and austere simplicity are a noticeable mark of the Roman Mass."

"Since the Council of Trent the history of the Mass is hardly anything but that of the composition and approval of new Masses. The scheme and all the fundamental parts remain the same."

"The liturgical student cannot but regret that we so seldom use the old offices which are the most characteristic, the most Roman in our rite, of which many go back to the Gelasian or even Leonine book. And merely from an aesthetic point of view there can be no doubt that the old propers are more beautiful than modern compositions. It is these old propers that show the austere dignity of our liturgy, that agree in feeling with the Ordinary and Canon..."

"It is astonishing that the people should have so little sense of congruity, apparently never think of following the old tradition, or of harmony with the old ordinary. We obey the authority of the Church, of course, always. But it is not forbidden to hope for such a Pope again as Benedict XIV who will give us back more of our old Roman Calendar. (a prophetic statement for our day as we now have Benedict XVI)

"Our Canon is untouched, and all the scheme of the Mass. Our Missal is still that of Pius V. We may be very thankful that his Commission was so scrupulous to keep or restore the old Roman tradition. Essentially the Missal of Pius V. is the Gregorian Sacramentary; that again is formed from the Gelasian book which depends on the Lenonine collection. We find the prayers of our Canon in the treatise de Sacramentis and allusions to it in the IVth century. So our Mass goes back, without essential change, to the age when it first developed out of the oldest liturgy of all. It is still redolent of that liturgy, of the days when Caesar ruled the world and thought he could stamp out the faith of Christ, when our fathers met together before dawn and sang a hymn to Christ as to a God. The result of our enquiry is that, in spite of unsolved problems, in spite of later changes, there is not in Christendom another rite so venerable as ours.

The Mass, A Study of the Roman Liturgy, Adrien Fortescue, 1926

I continue to aver that liturgies should make up their minds as to which language they are in and be consistent in the use of that language. This is not pedantic, but is borne of a desire for an aesthetic and prayerful continuum throughout a single liturgy. Of course, even in Latin masses one is required to have the readings in the vernacular. If I had my way they, too, would be in Latin.

this just doesn't make sense to me, because according to your guidelines, the Greek Kyrie in the Latin Mass disrupts the "prayerful continuum"... Ancient practice testifies to the use of much Greek chant/hymnody in the early Roman church (in really old Vatican documents like what Ensemble Organum digs up). I think that the oldest traditions of the church have always involved a mixture of liturgical and vernacular languages, and it was rather a later Roman innovation to insist on Latin and Latin only. Of course, it is the right of the Latin rite to insist on a liturgical language... and, like I said, there are benefits to that. Personally I find Latin beautiful; I'm minoring in Latin here at university, and I go to Latin Masses once a month or so.

If you would like the readings of a Latin Mass in Latin too, would you insist on the homily being in Latin as well? If not, is the homily somehow not a real "part" of the Mass? (Note my biases: I go to a Serbian parish whose liturgy is half Serbian, half English. Obviously I don't see a problem with it.)

I don't think that Latin is more holy than any other language though. I always wondered why they didn't just translate the perfectly good Tridentine Mass into the vernacular at Vatican II instead of trying to write a new one. I would love to see a Tridentine Mass in English, but somehow I doubt that would happen, due to a lingering concept in Roman Catholicism that Latin is somehow sacrosanct... I think liturgical languages need to serve the people of God, rather than the other way around.

I have no problem with the Latin church having a liturgical language, if it decides to do so. Now you just need to convince its leadership that it should have one. I also believe its fairly well established that Trent tinkered significantly with the mass, although elements of the liturgy do precede Trent. A number of rites were even supressed by Trent. Much of this sacrosanct EF mass doesn't go back any further than Trent. The eastern liturgies are hundreds of years older and less altered.

This holy church Latin, as language scholars will testify, is nothing more than common street Latin which resulted from a whole-scale degradation of the language. After the fall of the western empire, Rome was a depopulated city and a cultural backwater. What was there lasted more from ossification than from any grand design.

As I said, I have no problem with the Latin church having a liturgical language. Some of the eastern churches have one, as well. But much of what I am reading about the glories of the Latin language and liturgy going back to the time of the apostles is nothing more than romantic nonsense. If not that, at least nostalgia run amuck.

Is the Latin chant gorgeous? Yes, definitely so. And it should be preserved. But plenty of good church music has also been written since chant. I tend to use Anglican chant, as well as, Latin. The Anglican chant is in no way inferior to the Latin, and is equally as well-written and inspiring. Some of our English language chant writers are doing a magnificent job today, as well.

Kathy asks, well then, should the homily be in Latin too? I say (only half-tongue-in-cheek) why not? As for the Kyries: I put them in a special category - they are the only part of the mass which the ancient and undivided church has ever sung in the same language.

CharlesW makes excellent observations. Trent assuredly can make no claim to great antiquity. I'll take Sarum any day I'm offered it. As for the retention of Latin: those who wish to argue Latin on the basis of antiquity should be arguing for Greek instead. Educated Romans were not a happy lot when change was made to vulgar Latin. Also, the retention of Latin in the West for so long was a very practical rather than spiritual matter; namely, owing to the fact that 'vernaculars' all over the West were in a state of development and were quite unstable for centuries; nor, for the most part, were they written until rather late. So Latin remained by default the only 'literate' tongue. Then came the 'Reformation', and Latin was retained on the grounds that a change to the vernacular would be 'Protestant'. How silly! There were, in fact, many bishops and priests of the time who were quite vocally in favour of vernaculars. Just imagine what a beautiful, and by now hallowed and hieratic translation we would be enjoying if these gentlemen had had their way!

.

Mass does not serve the people of God. It is our doing as Christ has commanded and then He is sacrificed for us.

I did not say "Mass," I said "liturgical languages." That's a straw man right there. Christ gave us the sacraments--Christ did not give us Latin, nor did He command that we use Latin. Therefore, if we do use Latin, it has to serve the people of God, or maybe I should say serve the Mass and sacraments. The Mass and sacraments should not be subservient to the liturgical language. What I'm saying is, Latin is not an essential part of the sacraments--all Rites of the Catholic church, AND the Orthodox church, have the sacraments, and only ONE of those Rites uses Latin. I find that you have conflated Latin with the entire Catholic Church at many points on this board, and that is what I have a problem with.

You seem to be saying at times that Eastern Rite Catholicism and Orthodoxy are somehow inferior to Latin Rite Catholicism, and I say that is abjectly false. I can understand your having a problem with Orthodoxy; but you are in communion with the Eastern Rites, aren't you?

Jam

Sorry. My misunderstanding. So you have said.