Congregational singing at the Offertory (1962 MR)
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 509
    I am thinking increasingly about possible congregational music to follow the singing of the Offertorium in the 1962 Missal.

    The Catholic Encyclopedia indicates that no pieces in the Offertory repertoire deal with the theme of the offertory itself. Now, that not entirely correct (I think Hostias et preces is an exception) but the general point stands. The same article seems to argue that Offertoria are on themes broadly consonant with the ‘theme’ of a Mass. It occurred to me that on that basis some Office hymns would sit well at the Offertory… but then I run into the commentary on music in O’Connell/Reid (by Nunn) that indicates that ‘relocations’ from the Office to the Mass are inappropriate. I don’t know what to make of that… Would it mean Victoria’s ‘O Magnum Mysterium’, which is a setting of a Magnificat Antiphon, would be inadvisable?

    The legislation refers to a ‘motet’. That is a vague term indeed. Can a congregation sing a ‘motet’? Is a repurposed office hymn then a motet?

    When a place has a choir, everything is easy. When they don’t (and a lone cantor is called upon to supply the propers), questions about what music might legitimately follow a proper seem more difficult to answer. Of one thing I am sure, however: the singing of seemingly random Latin texts to fill a gap is as far removed from any liturgical spirit as the Low Mass hymn sandwich.
  • FSSPmusic
    Posts: 427
    The 1958 instruction De musica sacra says the following:
    expleta antiphona ad offertorium, etiam aliqua cantiuncula latina, quae tamen huic Missae parti congruat
    The usual English translation:
    any Latin song may be used after the Offertory antiphon provided it is suited to the spirit of this part of the Mass
    Cantiuncula is the same word translated as motet in Tra le sollecitudini, with mottetto written in parentheses in the Latin version. Although I'm not crazy about the any Latin song terminology, it corresponds to cantiuncula, which is a somewhere broader category of compositions than what motet means to most musicians.

    Yes, you can use a congregational hymn in Latin. I didn't schedule it this year, but have sometimes used "O Sanctissima" as a congregational offertory hymn on either Immaculate Conception or Our Lady of Guadalupe, especially if only the men's schola was singing the Mass. The opinion against singing Office texts at Mass is just that: an opinion. Although it's not "best practice" to sing Office hymns routinely after the offertory chant, there is no ecclesiastical prohibition against doing so. TLS stipulated that the cantiuncula was to have "words approved by the Church," which was generally taken to mean a text from the liturgy or scripture, not extraliturgical Latin hymnody/poetry. That requirement is relaxed with DMS's "any Latin song."
    Thanked by 2Andrew_Malton Roborgelmeister
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 3,225
    Yeah. We have long done O Sanctissima in that situation, with Salve Mater Misericordiae being the second text. (I’m not particularly scrupulous about the non-liturgical devotional Latin texts, so…) but in any case the problem is length. The offertory is usually the longer chant of the two, and an office text can get quite long (the chant of something like Ave Maris Stella might be equal to the length of a polyphonic motet for example!)

    But unless it’s prohibited I prefer for our organist to play a bit at the offertory and then we do verses with the communion, if not also something else.
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