You deny the council!
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I don't know if you've ever been the target of the objection "your music is against the Council." A little over a year ago, we founded a group that, with the support of the parish priest, sings a repertoire of Gregorian chant and polyphonic music, often in Latin, at some liturgical celebrations. The accusation was leveled at me during a "pastoral" meeting on the liturgy. I responded to the objection by citing the council itself, and subsequently prepared a written defense that I submit to you, translated from the original Italian. The text lacks originality, being a collection of quotations from the Second Vatican Council, but I'd like to hear your opinion:
"Just over a year ago, a choral group was formed to animate the liturgies in the three churches of our parish. Composed of about a dozen members of various ages. Our mission is to revive the beauty and spirituality of Gregorian chant and classical and modern polyphony, in full harmony with the directives of the Second Vatican Council expressed in the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) on the Sacred Liturgy.
Guided by the principle that sacred music aims at the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful (SC no. 112), we recognize Gregorian chant as "specially suited to the Roman liturgy," reserving for it the pride of place in our performances (SC no. 116).
Alongside chant, we perform works of polyphony, which are explicitly provided for by the Council’s Constitution. Due to their quality and beauty, these works elevate the soul and foster that "full, conscious, and active participation" of the assembly which is at the heart of the liturgical reform (SC nos. 14, 30, 121). To this end, within the context of the celebration, we often alternate sections reserved for the schola with moments of simple Gregorian congregational singing or appropriate modern pieces (SC no. 114).
In line with the Council, we value and strive to play the pipe organ—with which our churches are equipped—as the "traditional musical instrument" of the liturgy. Its ability to sustain the singing and create moments of meditation allows the liturgical action to be enriched with solemnity and beauty (SC no. 120). When possible, we do not exclude the use of acoustic instruments (strings or woodwinds) chosen for their ability to blend with the human voice.
We are aware that the Latin language, while being the Church's own heritage and recognized as such by the Council (SC no. 36), can represent a barrier to understanding today. For this reason, in every celebration, great care is taken in preparing leaflets. In these aids, every Latin text is accompanied by a side-by-side translation and sometimes the musical score. This allows everyone to fully understand the theological meaning of what is being sung, to follow the spiritual elevation of the music with awareness of the Word, and to join the celebration not as a spectator, but as an active and informed participant, as desired by the Council.
The use of Gregorian chant and the recovery of the Church’s great musical tradition must not be an exception for grand occasions performed only by experts; our goal is for it to become a common and popular heritage at all levels of the Church's liturgy. To this end, the Council even prescribed the publication of a renewed edition of Gregorian chant books (the Roman Gradual) and a simplified version containing melodies for "smaller churches" (SC no. 117), while requesting that all faithful be able to sing at least the Ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and the Lord's Prayer) in Latin (SC no. 54).
Regarding the repertoire and chosen authors, we privilege texts derived directly from liturgical sources: the Gradual, the "Proper" of the season, and Sacred Scripture, particularly the Psalms. To these are added many hymns composed by the great Doctors of the Church, including St. Ambrose, Thomas Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, Bridget of Sweden, and modern theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In terms of music, some Gregorian melodies derive directly from the Jewish tradition and are therefore likely very close to those sung by the Apostles themselves. Since music is often the best vehicle for interpreting a text, Gregorian monody in some cases reaches us almost alongside the sacred text as its finest interpretation. In addition to the theology of the Church Fathers and the ancient, anonymous sources of Gregorian music, the Cappella draws from the art of the greatest composers of all time who wrote for the Church: Frescobaldi, Palestrina, Bach, and Mozart, to name but a few. Our commitment to the participation of the assembly (SC no. 30) also leads us to include modern authors such as Berthier (Taizé) and other less-known contemporaries who have interpreted the liturgy with an accessible yet noble language.
In conclusion, the service of our schola aims to be a bridge between the Church’s millennial musical tradition and the liturgy as it is lived today. We do not view sacred music as a museum piece, but as a living language, capable of making the liturgy and the Eucharistic celebration the real "source and summit" of Christian life. This is achieved through a direct reading, "without gloss," of the clear and explicit indications of the primary source of Conciliar liturgical renewal: the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium." -
Reading that made my eyes and brain hurt. Too many words and paragraphs.
I suggest running it through ChatGPT and having it edited for readability, ADHD accessibility, and for your intended audience (be very specific describing your intended audience.). You’d be amazed at what ChatGPT can turn overwhelming verbiage into.
Also, I recommend looking up the letter that accompanied the small chant booklet for the laity, “Jubilate Deo” issued by Pope Paul VI in 1974 entitled, “ Voluntati obsequens”. Voluntarily obsequens, was a Letter to the Bishops on the Minimum Repertoire of Plainchant Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship issued in April 14,1974. Rome reissued it again in 1999 urging Bishops to see to it that the laity learned it and is put to use. I’ve been contemplating sending it to my pastor to have it implemented in our parish, and perhaps the diocese. We need to be obedient to Rome and Vatican II, you know.
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I'd suggest you edit it down yourself, since this will undoubtedly enhance your own understanding of the principles you are seeking to articulate. Don't outsource your thinking.
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Meanwhile, I'm seeing this and thinking - that's similar to how I would write and communicate that. Edit as you feel you need to, and focus on editing for who your audience is... That said, I don't find any fault with what you wrote here.
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Here is an important point. Most people born after 1990 only know the council in what they have read. The coucil is no longer the touchpoint it once was. Some one who asks that question is stuck in the time warp of the past. I have choir singers below 35 who don't really care what the council said. They only want one thing, "tradition." They dont really care about the the council or what a dear friend of mine says,"Vatican II purity spirals."
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I used Gemini to translate the original text into English from Italian with some minor changes, and the result is quite literal: probably this is a reason why it sounds heavy to English native speakers. Also I already sent the text to the people of the Liturgical commission who criticize our choir. They are learned ones who have studied theology and liturgy, and their opinion (that I do not share) can be eventually confuted only with direct references to the council. So I’ve adopted a more pedantic style to ensure my arguments are rooted firmly in Council documents. I sent the text to this forum to know if you agree with the content and if you ever found yourself in a similar situation, in need to explain the reason you sing Gregorian chant and poliphony at Mass.
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I did not find it difficult to read.
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It looks(*) to me like you are focussing only on what the Council said about music.
How does what you are doing fit with the council's statement that the Church is the entire community of believers - not just the hierarchy. Is your choir the only music group? If your style the only musical style? Are there opportunities and encouragement for the entire assembly to sing some pieces in every Mass (not ALL -but some).
(*) I say looks because I'm on the "that's a wall of dense text" side. I'm not confident that I've understood everything you've written from a quick on-screen read. I'm not going to plow thru it line-by-line, and I doubt your target audience will, either. -
CMAA has a questions-and-answers page that might provide some ideas for formulating your own piece about the Church's teaching on sacred music:
https://churchmusicassociation.org/24faq/
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How does what you are doing fit with the council's statement that the Church is the entire community of believers - not just the hierarchy.
The council has made some very general statements about the renewal of the liturgy, and a few practical examples to give the direction of the renewal, such as the priority of Gregorian, the importance of pipe organ, the publishing of Graduale simplex and so on. Our "adversaries" love to quote the generale statement as if they were in conflict with the practical examples, that they totally ignore and never quote. I think we need to oppose this wrong reading of the Council, and quote all the articles about sacred music that have been forgotten.
Is your choir the only music group? If your style the only musical style? Are there opportunities and encouragement for the entire assembly to sing some pieces in every Mass (not ALL -but some).
Our parish is composed of the three merged former parishes, but the churches are very near each other (less than 5 minutes on foot). The groups are different, but they all sing a kind of pop liturgical music, all in Italian. We sing once a month in one of the three churches, you can check our repertoire here:
https://www.parrocchiadeisantireggioemilia.com/about-9
We encourage the assembly to sing the fixed part of the Mass by singing always the simplest Gregorian Mass. Unlike the English tradition, we do not have a huge repertoire of hymns with beautiful music and traditional Latin lyrics translated into Italian.Thanked by 1Chant_Supremacist -
@probe - A major reason is linguistic diversity in Italy. At least a dozen languages separately evolved from Latin, each with dialects. No 'national' language until 1923, when Mussolini imposed Tuscan. The English evolved theirs over 700 years before Cranmer/Elizabeth I required everybody to worship in one version, and we have had another 400+ years to standardise
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Out of curiosity: why not? It would seem like an easy step.
I think there are more English and German hymns because of the reformed tradition. A large use of non Latin hymns during Mass is common only after Vatican II. We have now many newly composed modern hymns, with a pop taste, and some classical choral hymns from German or English Protestant tradition translated into Italian. We do not have a strong native tradition of translated from Latin hymns like for example this one: https://youtu.be/ERSz7EMMjtY, which is a beautiful English version of "Jesu rex admirabilis". Italian religious songs were more a devotional than a liturgical use.
There are difficulties in translating German or English hymns into Italian because our words are longer than yours, and they all end with a vowel, and the metric is hard to combine. Even words with the same Latin origin, like commandments, in English is three syllabs , in Italian five with a strong and a secondary accent (comandamenti). -
A major reason is linguistic diversity in Italy. At least a dozen languages separately evolved from Latin, each with dialects. No 'national' language until 1923, when Mussolini imposed Tuscan.
Mussolini has nothing to do with national Italian language. Apart from Medieval Italian, like Dante, which can be difficult to understand now, modern Italian evolved mostly but not only from Tuscan and became widespread among the learned people in XV / XVI century. Just to stay in musical context, Italian operas were written since XVII century. XIX Italian is very similar to modern language. It is true that dialects were very strong, but the real linguistic unification in all social classes has been made by television in the second half of XX century.Thanked by 1Chant_Supremacist -
I am English, and know (learnt/have forgotten) only French and Latin, but many people feel strongly about their birth tongue :- https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/vfb1bc/a_rant_about_the_linguistic_policies_in_italy/
Television is undoubtedly a major unifying force. -
There is a "national repertory" of songs for the liturgy in Italy, developed by the liturgical committee of the bishops' conference, so here's a link to a copy of it.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9vkegdyp9hwenva56q7k8/Canti-per-la-Liturgia-Repertorio-Nazionale.pdf?rlkey=9ye6mqx6jk6zbul4zkteiq159&st=hc0xa8iy&dl=0 -
It indeed would seem that the reformers have something to do with vernacular traditions (I just been investigating Czech Bible translations, having programed Dvořák for Misericordia.) English Wikipedia has this on Italian Bibles.
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One thing I’ve learned is that simply citing Church documents or even the writings of Popes and bishops often doesn’t settle these conversations. People tend to read those sources selectively, or interpret them through what they already prefer. In practice, agreement at that level isn’t always what determines whether something succeeds in a parish. We need to work above a layperson's perspective.
What matters most is whether your pastor supports the work. If he understands the vision and stands behind it, that gives it the stability it needs to take root over time.
Interestingly, my biggest challenge hasn’t been introducing chant or traditional polyphony—it’s been working within an aging music ministry where change of any kind is difficult. By contrast, teaching chant to children in a Catholic school setting has been surprisingly effective. Chant is simple, structured, and easy to internalize. When you see children naturally singing something like the Salve Regina as they go about their day, it becomes clear that this music is not inherently inaccessible—it just needs to be taught.
For that reason, I wouldn’t be discouraged by resistance. Some hesitation is inevitable with any change, especially in parish life. But I’ve found that chant, when introduced patiently, often resonates precisely because of its clarity and universality.
Two ideas I keep returning to are “relativism” and “inculturation.” Both are important, but they can become unbalanced. When everything is adapted to local preference, something of the Church’s shared identity can be lost. Chant, in a quiet way, helps restore that sense of continuity—it connects people not just to their parish, but to the wider Church across time and place.
One of my first directives at my parish was to retire a group of musicians who played at every Saturday Vigil mass. Flute, guitar, stand-up bass, tambourine, and three singers. They called themselves a choir, but it was just a really bad band, and much to the embarrassment of the priests, they insisted on playing on EVERY single part of the mass. I suffered a lot of anxiety and angst trying to explain the reasons why this was necessary, but if I were to do it again, I wouldn't feel the need to explain anything.
In the end, this isn’t about winning an argument. It’s about building something that endures—something that can be learned, lived, and passed on. -
Chonak
Just a speedy visual stroll through that offers a striking contrast to English/German-language hymnals: there's precious little in terms of metrical strophic hymnody conceived in multi-voice (e.g., SATB) parts. Overall, it's just melodies with accompaniment. And, as with Spanish, Italian lyrics are rich with synalephas in ways much less common in English lyrics where elisions are usually merely within a given word for syllabic compression. (Singing of metrical strophic hymns in corporate worship came emphatically to English and German speaking peoples in the Early Modern Era and became deeply and widely rooted in their cultures, including the Catholic ones in the Germanic-languages world; in the English-speaking world, Ireland lost out on this early development because of persistent dearth and poverty in places of Catholic dominance and the restrictions on Catholic corporate worship, with consequences in later generations.) -
To the OP, don't forget to mention the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM)—the literal instructions for how to say Mass encourage chanting from the Graduale Romanum as a perfectly licit option. In fact, you can even chant a gradual in place of a responsorial psalm. Just saying. So this isn't even theory based on other documents... it's what the directions for the Missal itself say to do.
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I took a quick look at the Repertorio. I know some of the pieces, but many are by modern composers and I don't particularly like them. Some are translated Protestant chorales, especially from the Geneva Psalter. The introduction to the Repertorio states that only the soprano melody and a simple organ accompaniment are indicated, and for the other ATB voices, one must refer to the original music or harmonize the lead voice. The use of hymns in the vernacular in the Catholic Mass is a very recent introduction, I believe dating back to the 1950s. I also looked at the Italian Waldensian hymnbook, but the translations are of poor quality, with truncated words and inconsistent accents.
The Catholic translations are generally metrically better, but still poorer than the original due to the problem that a verse can fit fewer words and therefore fewer ideas than in German or English. For example, this is the Italian translation of "Es ist ein Rose entrprungen":
https://www.ariberti.it/natale/natale-canzoni-sacre/e-nato-il-salvatore.html I think the meaning is much simpler than the original German.
Thanked by 1tomjaw -
This. This is what you will have to follow. No matter what the documents or the missal, or the GIRM say or require, this is what gives you the authority to do whatever you do.One thing I’ve learned is that simply citing Church documents or even the writings of Popes and bishops often doesn’t settle these conversations. People tend to read those sources selectively, or interpret them through what they already prefer. In practice, agreement at that level isn’t always what determines whether something succeeds in a parish. We need to work above a layperson's perspective.
What matters most is whether your pastor supports the work. If he understands the vision and stands behind it, that gives it the stability it needs to take root over time.
Unfortunately building over time is only as much guaranteed as long as the priest is in that position. Often times he is moved before the musician, and then the music suffers upheaval… again and again.
Unfortunately I speak from reoccurring experience. At my last full-time job, my first question to the pastor was, how long are you gonna be there? To which he replied, why would you ask that? My favorable position lasted for two years, the pastor was moved, and I was kicked to the curb.
Unfortunately, this is the state of Novus Ordo situations as personal taste rules the roost.
In the traditional Latin mass, there is almost no room for personal taste to trump the rubrics on music. It’s Gregorian chant, polyphony, and organ. -
FWIW, there is a complete translation of the Genevan Psalter from 1740 by Andrew Planta, which is (currently) available as online facsimile from Google books. There are plenty of multi part settings of the highest quality (Sweelinck, L'Estocart, Goudimel among others) under which you can lay these translations and which you can use alternatim with the congregation. This makes only sense, however, for hymns included in the hymn book used at your parish (pesumably (?) the "Canti per la Liturgia").
After a quick glance at the "Canti per la Liturgia", it seems to me that it mostly provides simple organ accompaniments (also for those pieces translated from the Kyriale). There are, however, many pieces that work very well alternatim with choir and congregation, provided you replace the organ part with newly written choral parts for your choir. I am quite sure that there is a way to meet both ends: the wishes of those criticizing you and aiming for high quality and reverent music.Thanked by 1Paolo -
How can the liturgy committee get away with dismissing your music with one sentence that requires you to defend it with a book. Also how dare the comittee issue an executive decision at all. If they want breaking bread they can easily find a community in which to feel comfortable.
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Continuousbass has a bit of a point. Really, the onus of the burden is upon the people who accuse you to prove you’re in the wrong. Challenge them back to show how you’re denying the council. And then, IF they even make the attempt, you can rebuttal with the council documents themselves.Thanked by 1CHGiffen
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How can the liturgy committee get away with dismissing your music with one sentence that requires you to defend it with a book. Also how dare the comittee issue an executive decision at all.
Local situations are always more nuanced than they appear to outsiders. Our parish is formed by the union of three churches, each of which had a musical group with its own tradition of music, entirely in Italian and "contemporary," that is, a kind of melodic pop. Our choir sings extensively in Latin, Gregorian chant, and polyphony, occasionally in all three churches, where it is usually appreciated, except in one where some people of the Sunday choir, who have always worked generously for the parish, have ideas I don't share about the type of repertoire and the way of understanding the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council. They don't like Latin, they don't like the use of the ancient choir loft with pipe organ, and they sense that we don't like their repertoire. Their way of thinking is widespread in Italy, also because it is the mainstream of diocesan liturgical offices. Therefore, I am happy when I can demonstrate, with appropriate citations, that our repertoire is perfectly compatible with the indications of the Second Vatican Council. We are not in direct conflict because there is room, in our merged parish, for all kinds of sensibilities, but we need to discuss some general principles on how to understand the liturgy and contemporary sacred music.
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