Good Friday Intercessions
  • JDE
    Posts: 588
    Dear Sacred Music Colleagues,

    my pastor, like most priests in this Diocese, serves a sizable congregation alone. He has no help but the altar servers and the singers for the Holy Week liturgies, and he is not thrilled with all the sight reading that will be required of him in this first year of the new translation. He said he was especially concerned about reading the intercessions on Good Friday, so I offered to write a setting of it for cantor and schola that we could sing to relieve him of this burden.

    Today, however, I read the following in my brand new copy of the Roman Missal:

    "…The Deacon, if a Deacon is present, or if he is not, a lay minister, stands at the ambo, and sings or says the invitation in which the intention is expressed. Then all pray in silence for a while, and afterwards the Priest … sings or says the prayer."


    To me, this sounds like my "commission" is moot (or as a work colleague says with a straight face, mute). Is there any circumstance in which a lay minister (particularly a cantor) could sing these intercessions, given that the Lector reads them the other 365 (this year, anyway) days of the year?
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,221
    It's not clear to me what the snag is. Can you clarify a bit?

    Are you expecting that you will have a deacon present and therefore the lay cantor would be excluded?

    Thanked by 1Richard Mix
  • JDE
    Posts: 588
    No, we don't have a Deacon. But the rubric says the Deacon or lay minister sings the first half of the prayer, not the second, and that isn't really saving Father from that much "sight reading."

    I guess what I'm looking for is a loophole for the cantor singing both halves of the prayer and the schola/choir singing the Amen.
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,221
    The second part of the prayer, in each case, is in the form of a collect, and it's not surprising that those appear to be reserved to the priest.

  • BenBen
    Posts: 3,114
    Does your priest ever sing collects other times, either to the missal collect tones, or other tones? It shouldn't bee too hard if he has ever done that. If not, well, then yeah, it might be a little harder. But I'm not sure there's a real loophole for the cantor singing both parts. It is, after all, a collect (more or less).
  • Adam Schwend
    Posts: 203
    If the priest is truly concerned, he certainly could sing the collect section in a reciting tone.
  • JDE
    Posts: 588
    He really doesn't sing at all. I suppose if the Collect portion were completely separate from the first portion, he could just sing a reciting tone. I'll try to convince him to try it. I am still shaping the piece in my mind based on the new translations. I can't produce music as fast as a lot of composers; with few exceptions, I have to think about pieces for quite a while before I actually create the work.

    If I actually write this thing, I will share it with all of you. I suspect it might fill a need for more parishes than just my own.
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