Pater Noster

Choose Hymns or Propers?

Can hymns licitly replace Propers? I think not! Check it out here.

The Beauty of Chant

Chant Presentation from O.L. of Guadalupe Seminary

Ave Verum Corpus

Why Latin Hymns

Jeffrey Tucker has this to say: (as posted on New Liturgical Movement)

Part of our ambition as a schola is to bring popular chant hymns from all ages back into the life of Catholic people. So this year, we made an effort to sing the Marian antiphon for Lent—Ave Regina Caelorum—following communion every single week. We put it in the program each week and we have sung it without fail. Today, on the fifth week, the people joined the singing as if they owned it. It is now part of their experience of the faith. Some might have carried the lovely song with them to brunch or while playing sports later in the afternoon. Perhaps it will be sung quietly in their heads before drifting off to sleep tonight, and perhaps it will be recall tomorrow morning as well. This was not true only weeks ago, when hardly anyone in the parish knew this song. Now it is a living reality in their lives, and they have added it to their intellectual and aesthetic store of understanding of what comprises the marks of the Catholic faith. This song is added to a thousand other signs, from holy water to rosary beads, of what it means to be a Catholic. Read more here.

If This is a Liturgy War, Then Who is the Enemy?

Forty-plus years of marginalization and de-construction of the musical heritage of the Church left it's advocates bitter and vengeful in many instances, ready to portray anyone walking in the church with a guitar case as the enemy, and ready to aim the criticism at individuals rather than at the real source of the problem which was the widespread acceptance of a flawed and destructive vision of liturgical music and it's role in Catholic worship. Read more here.

Pope Benedict XVI on Sacred Music, Part 9

Popular and Rock Music

On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. “Rock”, on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober ine­briation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments. [The Spirit of the Liturgy, (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), p 148]