What Kinds of Music Should We Be Using at Mass?
Dr. Peter A. Kwasniewski
October 25, 2025
Abbotsford, BC, Canada
A warm thanks for Fred Pecson of Fiat Lux Catholic Photography for recording and photographing this event!
Transcript
In order to address sacred music, we first have to speak about music. Most of the mistakes people make when it comes to music for the liturgy stem from their lack of understanding of the art of music itself and why it’s important to exercise discernment in its regard. The first part of my talk will therefore be about good versus bad music, or we could say, more modestly, better versus worse music. The second part will then turn to the kinds of music suitable and unsuitable for the Holy Mass.
Music in itself
What is the one thing (and perhaps the only thing) that Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Josef Pieper, and Joseph Ratzinger all agree on 100%? They agree that music penetrates into the soul of man, stirring and shaping his inner life, and thereby affecting his perception of and engagement with reality as a whole. Music works from within, pulling one’s character to itself, and shaping the soul until one feels pleasure only in its embrace and sharp pain in being severed from it.
A friend of the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré once said: “Music never lies.” How true this is! People can lie, the lyrics of songs can lie, but the music itself can never lie. In a mysterious way that will always baffle analysis, music contains and conveys a certain spirit, embodied in its rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. We cannot translate this spirit into a sequence of descriptive words; music is not just a vaguer form of poetry but speaks its own ineffable language, by which cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart. Every piece of music bears a message that it makes present, transmits to the listener, plants within him. “Music does not speak of things, but tells of weal and woe” (those are the words of Josef Pieper); it is capable of communicating the giving and receiving of love, trials and pains, intimacy and majesty, nostalgia for what has been, hope against hope for what might still be; in its highest forms, it can point to a grandeur not of this world, more real than this world, glimpsed like a sliver of sun through the clouds, drawing us on and dispelling our despair. It is also possible for music to evoke rage, anxiety, lasciviousness, despair. Is it not something of a miracle that music, even without words, can speak of all this? A wordless language that in some ways is more eloquent than any words!
The philosopher Roger Scruton observes:
Nobody who understands the experiences of melody, harmony, and rhythm will doubt their value. Not only are they [in their traditional forms] the distillation of centuries of social life: they are also forms of knowledge, providing the competence to reach out of ourselves through music. Through melody, harmony, and rhythm, we enter a world where others exist besides the self, a world that is full of feeling but also ordered, disciplined but free. That is why music is a character-forming force, and the decline of musical taste a decline in morals.
The inescapable reality is that we internalize the music we sing and listen to―it becomes a part of us, it shapes us in its image. Sometimes people hastily dismiss the idea that the music they listen to forms their moral character, that is, how they perceive what is good for themselves and how they should live, but this is impossible for any observant person to deny. A friend of mine explains it this way:
Extremes in music create recognizable populations: heavy metal fans dress and walk alike and are often pale and thin; huge belt buckles and hats pick out the serious country music buffs; rap consumers fit a stereotype; and on it goes. Along with the visible similarities go internal resemblance: heavy metal folks are brooding and angry, rap people are bouncy but irascible, country music people are cheerful and loyal, and so on. Few things [in life] create visible populations the way music does: drugs do, jobs can, religious vocations do. Sports don’t, foods don’t—you can’t pick out baseball fans from hockey fans in a crowd, or lovers of Italian cuisine as opposed to French cooking. Living in a certain region can produce a particular “look,” but the effects of music will override regional differences. The fact that extremes in music create visible populations of people who morally resemble one another indicates that less extreme musical forms—light jazz, pop, classical music, and so on—are also forming populations, in less visible ways. After all, if factor X produces an extreme difference when applied heavily, wouldn’t factor X produce some difference if applied more lightly? If extreme musical forms like heavy metal produce extreme visible and moral differences, then wouldn’t jazz or Baroque music produce real but less extreme moral differences in men? Certainly, the hypothesis that music is morally indifferent doesn’t predict the observed results of the extremes. In fact, the observed facts say that music is a powerful moral force: it is used in ecstatic cults for a reason!
As Roger Scruton says pithily: “To withhold all judgement, as though a taste in music were on a par with a taste in ice- cream, is precisely not to understand the power of music.” Put simply, music expresses and reinforces a chosen identity—chosen either by the listener himself, or pre-chosen by a tradition into which the listener is inserted by his parents, his teachers, his pastors.
You are what you listen to and look at, far more than you are what you eat. What we take in through our senses is the food and drink of our souls, and we will be mentally and spiritually healthy or unhealthy depending on the quality of that food and drink. Your eyes and ears are the mouth of your soul. If our music is that of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of truth, of peace, of beauty—we will be eating and drinking the spirit of truth, the love of the Father and the Son. If our music is that of the world or the prince of this world, we will be eating and drinking the spirit of worldliness. We cannot be too careful about this musical dietary discernment! In the letter of St. James we read: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (Jas 4:4). St. Paul gives us our resounding “marching orders” when he declares to the Romans:
I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:1–2)
Art and ethics are to some extent distinct from each other: a virtuous man will not necessarily produce good art, and a vicious man will not necessarily produce bad art. The former may give us sentimental kitsch, and the latter a masterpiece. However, over time, and in ways both subtle and obvious, moral evils and intellectual evils—I mean, vices and errors—will damage or destroy the soundness of the art that emerges from a soul infected by them. Hence we should be vigilant, even scrupulous, about the influences we allow into our souls. This has always been true and will always be true: no matter how “different” modern man may appear to be, he still has a mind to nourish, a heart to shape, and a soul to save, and that soul will be saved through the same virtues, the same harmony of faith and reason, reason and passions, as that of pre-modern man, post-modern man, and any other type of man there may ever be. As rational animals, and even more, as Christians who worship the crucified and risen Logos, the incarnate Word of God, we ought to nourish our souls, to the extent possible, on the best of the fine arts, giving less room to what is mediocre or shallow, and none at all to what is base. As St. Paul says to the Philippians: “Brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil 4:8). We are called to pursue excellence in all aspects of life, including our leisure and recreational activities. St. Paul writes to St. Titus: “The grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men, training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world” (Titus 2:11-12). Indeed, our rational human nature and the grace of God drive us toward perfection. We ought, therefore, to be concerned about our culture’s descent into mediocrity, banality, sensuality, ugliness, and violence. This slide threatens to destroy high culture and authentic folk culture, both of which are beautiful in their own ways.
We should not be relativists or subjectivists about artistic truth any more than we are about the objective reality of human nature and the natural law. Anyone who is consistent will see that the beautiful, like its companions, the good and the true, is not reducible to subjective whim but is based on objective criteria that already point towards the divine. Palestrina and Bach are great not because they just happened to cough up nice music as if by an irrational spasm, but because their minds and hearts were beautifully attuned to the microcosmic and macrocosmic principles of melody, harmony, and rhythm. A lot of different styles of beautiful music can emerge from these principles, but the principles themselves are real and not created by man—they are discovered, internalized, and brought to fruition in works of art.
Critique of popular music
But so far I am painting with a broad brush. Can we be more specific about what’s wrong with certain kinds of music and what’s good about more artistically refined music?
Rhythm is the most basic element of music, the most primitive. This is why the music of some primitive cultures consists mostly of drumming. More advanced cultures, presupposing the framework of rhythm, develop beautiful melodies above it. The most advanced cultures, presupposing both rhythm and melody, develop a system of harmony. When you listen to a piece by (e.g.) William Byrd, Antonio Vivaldi, Mozart, or Tchaikovsky, the rhythm, although discernible, is subordinated to the melody and harmony, which take “center stage.” Rock, rap, metal, pop, trance, and other such “popular” styles invert this rational hierarchy of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Such styles accentuate the beat, strip the harmonic framework to a bare minimum, and employ repetitious, unlyrical “melodies” (if they can even be called that) in order to stimulate the concupiscible and irascible sense-appetites in a disordered manner. In everyday language, that means the music is designed to overstimulate passions like desire for sense pleasure and anger or rage at real or perceived threats to ourselves. We are dealing here with music deliberately primitive, passionate, and sensual. It is one thing for such music to proceed from barely literate savages who don’t know any better, but it is quite another for it to proceed from the descendants of a rich folk culture and a resplendent high culture. In this case, it amounts to a rejection of one’s own providential inheritance. We are the beneficiaries of over a thousand years of glorious Western music, a heritage that has no parallel in any other civilization. Each one of us, as a rational animal, as a citizen of the West, and as a Christian, should take hold of it and take advantage of it. As I said before, we should be striving for excellence—not only spiritual and moral, but also intellectual and artistic.
A steady diet of rock, heavy metal, rap, or pop carries with it the serious risk of stunting or warping one’s moral growth, narrowing one’s intellectual horizons, and impeding or clouding one’s spiritual life. In a world of commercialized propaganda in favor of hedonism, materialism, and relativism, we need to be very careful about the message we are taking in.
Am I saying that popular music always has to be bad? That the only good music there is is that of a cultural elite? Are all of us supposed to become snobs? No, not at all. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt to develop some cultural sophistication; after all, it’s a perfection of our rational nature as made in the image and likeness of God. Yet the point is not sophistication for its own sake. The point is to develop an ear for what is beautiful and fitting for every occasion, with all the diversity that occasions call for. When sitting around a campfire, one should sing folk songs. At a square dance, one should have good old-fashioned square dance music. At a wedding reception, one might showcase waltzes, swings, and country dances. I’ve been to many weddings where the selection of music at the reception is tasteful and where real dances are done by adventurous young people.
Allow me to digress for a moment about dancing. The rarity of the use of triple-time (3/4 signature) in pop music bespeaks a loss of the art of dance. Dances in triple time—the waltz being the most famous, but there are many others too—are notable for their lilting, gentle, noble, or debonair attitude. If ever there was a manifest sign of cultural degeneration, it would have to be the descent from minuet to waltz to swing to disco to deafening nightclub mixes of throbbing monotony, where people “dance” by pulsating and gyrating in an aerobic-type exercise of random individuals. With each step in the descent, we see a lessening of the social and communal dimension of dance, which is supposed to be an imitation of the orderly cosmos and of the complementary relationship of the sexes within it; with each step, we see a decrease of formal beauty, a lapse of dignity, a loosening of morals, and a growing contempt for order, symmetry, and coordination of partners.
Every normal human occasion has well-crafted music that suits it. Let me be clear: popular music does not have to be bad! The popular music of a healthy age, like the Catholic Middle Ages with its pilgrim songs and troubadour ballads, is beautiful through and through. Music, to be good, does not have to be “boring” and straight-laced, or super-refined and subtle. Medieval music displays immediacy, spontaneity, innocence; its inventive melodies, harmonic ingenuity, and rhythmic drive are compelling and captivating. Much the same could be said about any kind of genuine folk music, which happily has experienced a tremendous revival in recent decades—think bluegrass, or Celtic and Scottish music.
You may find it surprising that, so far, I have spent relatively little time talking about lyrics. For many conservative critics, the lyrics are the only thing or the main thing they object to.1 But if there is anything I want to impress on you today, it would be that we must give full acknowledgment to the greater power exercised by the music itself. A so-called “Christian heavy-metal” band would still harm its listeners’ souls by the style of music, even if they took their lyrics straight from the Bible. That being said, it is no small problem that vast swaths of today’s music is plagued with bad lyrics. Sometimes these lyrics are just plain repulsive—vulgar, obscene, violent, satanic, et cetera. There can never be an excuse for listening to pieces with lyrics of that sort, no matter what the music may be like. However, the deeper issue, I would say, is the death of worthwhile poetry. Music-lovers protest bitterly when I attack the lyrics of their favorite genres, but if you just read the words out loud like a poem, you can hardly keep from cringing or laughing at lyrics that rarely rise above pubescent preoccupations conveyed in high school vocabulary that barely rhymes and almost never respects meter—in short, crummy poetry.
Catholics, above all, should have no difficulty admitting that there are objective standards in the arts; that poetry, like any other art, has its rules and ideals; and that we should care enough to seek out good poetry in music, since we will be giving it a permanent place in our souls. The difference between rock, pop, or rap lyrics on the one hand and medieval popular songs or European lyric poetry on the other is starker than the difference between night and day. In its diction or word-choice, use of metaphor, meter, and rhyme, and conceptual content, the poetry set to music by the great composers is on a level as far above that of today’s popular music as the heavens above the earth, or the earth above the underworld. When you listen to Victoria setting to music the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, Haydn setting the poet Milton, Schubert setting Goethe, or Vaughan Williams setting George Herbert, then you discover what great poetry united to great music sounds like.
If all that I’ve been saying so far is true—even if it’s largely true or probably true—it follows that the music and lyrics we use in Catholic liturgy are of the utmost importance in outwardly expressing to one another and inwardly impressing upon ourselves what we think we are doing and the meaning it has for us, how it will shape us as worshipers in spirit and in truth, or the opposite.
General qualities of sacred music
Whenever the popes of modern times speak about sacred (i.e., liturgical) music—I am referring here above all to Pius X and Pius XII, though Pius XI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have made notable contributions as well—the first quality they put forward is holiness or sanctity, which they describe as worthiness of or suitability for the celebration of the sacred mysteries of Christ, as well as a lack of worldliness or even that which is suggestive of the secular domain. The Fathers of the Council of Trent frowned upon the use of secular melodies even when transformed into the style of sacred music, and Pius X fought valiantly against the influence of Italian opera. It was not that such music was not good as far as the rules of composition were concerned; sometimes it was artistically excellent. Rather, the problem was that the music carried strong associations with celebrating the goods of this life and not the heavenly goods of the life to come. If the musical style is carried over from the outside world and brought straight into the temple, it profanes the liturgy and harms the spiritual progress of the faithful.
Liturgical music should not only be but also seem to be exclusively connected with and consecrated to the liturgy of the Church. It is not enough for a type of music to have been intended for the sake of performance in a church; it is crucial that it be felt or experienced as associated with divine worship. To some extent, this will be a matter of cultural conditioning: some people will know more about liturgy and its panoply of fine arts than others. But as followers of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word who extends His real presence throughout space and time, we acknowledge as a principle of faith that there are hallowed traditions of prayer, ceremonial, and music, slowly matured over many centuries, that practically “cry out” Catholicism—signs that identify us and bind us to each other and to Our Lord. Over the course of more than three decades of experience singing in a variety of churches and settings, I have been astonished by the way in which Catholics, even relatively unchurched or uncatechized ones, immediately recognize Gregorian chant as distinctively Catholic and, more often than not, appreciate some presence of it in the liturgy. Even Hollywood movie directors know that much: whenever they want to evoke a “Catholic atmosphere,” they make sure there’s chant wafting in the background. Perhaps, in this case only, our clergy would be right to take their bearings from the secular world’s business sense!
The reason Gregorian chant is held up as the supreme model of sacred music and the normative music of the Roman rite is not far to seek. It is music that grew up together with the liturgy, fraternal twins from the cradle, as intimately united as soul and body. This, in fact, is why the Second Vatican Council, in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, elevated chant above all other forms of music and urged the careful adherence to tradition on this very point.
The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art. [!!!] The main reason for this pre-eminence is that, as sacred chant united to the words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy. . . . Accordingly, the sacred Council, keeping to the norms and precepts of ecclesiastical tradition and discipline, and having regard to the purpose of sacred music, which is the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful, decrees as follows. Liturgical worship is given a more noble form when the divine offices are celebrated solemnly in chant…. The treasure of sacred music is to be preserved and fostered with great care. Choirs must be diligently promoted…. The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited [or characteristically belonging] to the Roman liturgy, with the result that, other things being equal, in liturgical services it should hold the foremost place.
It is probably accurate to say that no other passage from Vatican II has been more systematically ignored and ruthlessly contradicted than this one.
Chant is the musical home of the words of divine worship, the servant of its actions. Its exclusive function is to clothe in music God’s holy words to us, and our words to Him and about Him; it has no other realm or purpose. When we hear chant, there is no ambiguity or ambivalence about what it is or what it is for; it breathes the spirit of the liturgy and cannot be mistaken for secular music in any way. Its eight characteristics—primacy of the word, free (i.e., non-metrical) rhythm, use of modes instead of keys, unison singing, unaccompanied vocalization, anonymity, emotional moderation, and unambiguous sacrality—show that Gregorian chant is not just a little bit different from other types of music but profoundly different, both beautiful and strange, as God Himself is. Something similar is true about polyphonic singing and the use of the pipe organ, which, after many centuries of nearly exclusive use in churches, are so completely bound up with the ecclesiastical sphere that their sound equates with “church” or “religion” in the ears of most people. The long line of popes who have taught on sacred music maintain that these strong and deep associations are good and important.
It follows that music with a “double identity,” music that is ambiguous in purpose and morality, is deeply problematic. Many contemporary church songs, especially in the so-called Praise & Worship genre, are nothing other than religiously-themed pop songs, as one can see by examining the chord sequences, the shape of the melodies, the particular use of syncopation, the style of the singing with which it is marketed, and the ease with which percussion could be added or has been added. We can develop this critique if we look at the three criteria enunciated by Pope Pius X and expounded by Pope Pius XII: holiness or sanctity, goodness of form or artistic soundness, and universality (which one might also think of as catholicity).
Specific qualities of sacred music
As for the first quality, holiness or sanctity: sacred music is not to have any reminiscences of purely secular music, either in itself or in the manner in which it is performed. Consider this thought experiment: play a random sampling of contemporary American church music for someone who does not speak English, and ask (in his own language, of course) what he thinks the songs are all about. He might reasonably assume that they were secular love songs. A different way of running the same experiment: take the same piece of church music, substitute lyrics about falling in love or world peace, and see if the words are incongruous with the musical style. In contrast, think of the absurdity of singing such lyrics to the music of a Gregorian chant, Palestrina’s “Sicut cervus,” a chorale by J.S. Bach, or Duruflé’s “Ubi caritas.”
Moreover, the instrumentation and technique used for Praise & Worship, with strummed guitars and/or piano and even percussion, strongly conveys the atmosphere of secular music, since these instruments originated in, and are still associated with, a variety of styles that have in common their extra-ecclesiastical nature: the Romantic concert-hall repertoire, jazz, early rock, country, and pop-influenced folk. The style of popular Christian singing is one of its biggest problems. The voice slides from pitch to pitch, with the scooping and warbling that derive from jazz and pop styles. In its origins, this manner of singing was intended to be a more passionate, “realistic” style, as opposed to the highly trained and therefore “artificial” voices of operatic singers. But it is no less opposed to the pure tone and lucid harmony aimed at in polyphonic ensembles and the tranquil unanimity aimed at in unison chanting, both of which symbolize the unity and catholicity of the Church.
As to the second quality, artistic goodness, sacred music should be resplendent for its formal integrity, radiating grandeur, majesty, dignity, loftiness, and transcendence, as the liturgy should do in all respects. Songs in the “praise & worship” genre are lacking or weak in those attributes just mentioned, being characterized instead by simple (not to say simplistic) melodies and harmonies, and expressing a narrow emotional range. Such songs do not express or evoke their divine object or the human person’s spiritual nature with appropriate musical means. The regular metrical beat and the predictable, sentimental melodies suggest a confinement to earthliness and the comfort of familiarity, as opposed to the free-floating word-based rhythms and the soaring, at times capricious, modal melodies of traditional chanting and polyphony, which so well evoke the eternity, infinity, and “strangeness” of the divine.
If someone were to object that the Holy Eucharist is a humble sacrament, given under the signs of simple bread and wine, and that humble music, décor, and ceremonial is more appropriate than something elaborate and rich, the response would be that this is never the way the Church has acted, whenever she has been free to express her innermost nature. Her liturgy in the first centuries had, of necessity, to be relatively simple, since Christians were a bitterly persecuted minority who had to meet in secret, without shrines or temples of their own. After the legalization of Christianity by Emperor Constantine, the liturgy moved out of the homes and catacombs into great basilicas, and all of its latent doxological energies were released. The basis of the Christian cult, the Word made flesh—the splendor of the eternal Father irrupting into our world of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell—furnished the best (indeed irresistible and illimitable) reason for incarnational worship, for outward and upward expansion in regard to its publicity, formality, solemnity, and glory. Thus, the Council of Trent declares:
Since we must confess that no other work can be performed by the faithful that is so holy and divine as this awe-inspiring mystery, wherein that life-giving Victim by which we are reconciled to the Father is daily immolated on the altar by priests, it is also sufficiently clear that all effort and attention must be directed to the end that it be performed with the greatest possible interior cleanness and purity of heart and exterior evidence of devotion and piety.
Pope John Paul II makes explicit what Trent implies:
Like the woman who anointed Jesus in Bethany, the Church has feared no ‘extravagance,’ devoting the best of her resources to expressing her wonder and adoration before the unsurpassable gift of the Eucharist. With this heightened sense of mystery, we understand how the faith of the Church in the mystery of the Eucharist has found historical expression not only in the demand for an interior disposition of devotion, but also in outward forms meant to evoke and emphasize the grandeur of the event being celebrated.
According to St. Pius X, music that has the first two qualities (holiness and artistic soundness) will perforce have a third quality, universality—it will in some way be accessible to all believers and recognizable as appropriate for the liturgy. This is the trickiest quality of the three, because some cultures are so primitive or uneducated that initially they may not have “ears” to appreciate the sanctity and beauty of a certain type of music that other Catholics already take for granted as sacred. On the other hand, Benedict XVI posits that the great music of the Western tradition has a universal power to move souls; he is therefore also of the opinion that the greatest sacred music has an inherent power to speak to God-thirsting souls and to convert them to Christ. Certainly we can see in the historical records that Gregorian chant and polyphony were welcomed and taken up by peoples to whom European missionaries preached, leading to amazing examples of inculturated but recognizably Catholic music, a blend of the European aesthetic with native colors and accents.
A test for whether or not a style of music proposed for worship is truly universal is to ask whether imposing it on a foreign country or people would be a kind of imperialism. With Gregorian chant, the answer is in the negative, because, like Latin, chant belongs to no single nation, people, period, or movement: it developed slowly from ancient times to more recent centuries, across the entire map where Christianity was planted; its composers are predominantly anonymous; it is the native musical clothing of the Latin-rite family of liturgies (something that cannot be said of polyphony, as praiseworthy as it is). In short, wherever the Latin liturgy traveled throughout the world, there too Gregorian chant traveled, and it has never been perceived as anything other than “the voice of the Church at prayer.” To this day, many Africans sing and love to sing the Gregorian chant that was taught to their ancestors by the missionaries, a fact to which Cardinal Sarah has borne eloquent testimony on more than one occasion. In contrast, the style of Praise & Worship songs is obviously contemporary, American, and secular. If missionaries were to impose these songs on some indigenous tribe elsewhere in the world, it would be comparable to asking them to dress, eat, and talk like Americans. It is, in that sense, comparable to blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and iPhones.
The right place and kind of emotions
But what about emotions? A student once objected to me that Saint Augustine considers affection of the heart so essential a component of prayer that if one’s heart is not stirred, one is not truly praying—even if one has the right thoughts and the right intention. Out of this patristic axiom, my interlocutor extrapolated the conclusion that emotionally rousing music, such as one finds in Praise & Worship, is helpful for animating prayer, perhaps even necessary for some people or in some circumstances.
Not so fast. We cannot assume that our conception of emotional engagement is what Augustine meant by “affection of the heart.” Given that he famously objected to what he considered to be the “sensuality” of Ambrosian liturgical chant—which would doubtless not seem especially emotional by today’s standards!—it is in fact far more likely that Augustine would have strongly disapproved of contemporary Christian music. In the Confessions we see him struggling with whether or not music should have any role in liturgy, because of the danger that it may draw too much attention to itself or to its performer. He finally concludes that it can and should have a role, but only if it is restrained. A beautiful singing of a psalm might lead to tears, but these are the tears of the spiritually sensitive. Augustine’s “affection of the heart” is a gentle movement of the heart towards the divine and away from reliance on the senses and the appetites of the flesh. The words of a modern Byzantine commentator about icons apply just as well to music for church, which ought to have an iconic function: “Icons lift our soul from the material to the spiritual realm, from a lower level of being, thought, and feeling, to a higher level.”
We have to be extremely careful how we understand the role of emotions in worship. Unless we are sleeping or totally distracted, our emotions will inevitably be engaged in some way, at some level. It is not really a question of emotionlessness versus emotionalism but a question of whether the emotional state we are in is (1) a state of self-contained boredom, (2) an excitation and agitation of feeling, or (3) the quiet intensity of looking and listening for the truth above and beyond oneself. The first and the second differ in the degree of activity, but they do not differ in regard to whether there has been a genuine transcendence of oneself and one’s worldly frame of reference.
A culture predisposed to think everyone should be “on a high” as often as possible via athletics, drugs, sex, or rock concerts will likewise incline people to think that prayer and the worship of God ought to be the same way. One should feel “on a high.” Sacred music, however, has never aimed at such an emotional high. In fact, it has conscientiously avoided it, to guard against the danger of fallen man becoming submerged in (and thus, limited by) his feelings. As Dom Gregory Hügle observes, “Divine Providence has arranged that liturgical music should be austere and unyielding to personal whims; the sentiments of profound reverence mingled with fear and love break the snares which Satan has laid for the church singer.”
Sacred music gently moves man’s emotions in order to foster the intellectual activities of meditation and contemplation. This approach corresponds to the timeless advice of the spiritual masters, who, while recognizing that emotion has a legitimate value, are cautious about deliberately stoking it or tapping into it for religious purposes. Emotion is more likely to have a clouding or distracting effect than a clarifying or concentrating one; instead of facilitating the ascent of the mind to God, it can lead to an illusion of self-transcendence that is evanescent and disappointing. The much-loved spiritual author Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection opines: “Outside feelings of surprise, a person should not allow himself to be carried away with his feelings, because God should remain the Master and center of our attention.” Brother Lawrence warns:
Those who conduct themselves in the spiritual life only by following their particular dispositions and feelings, who believe that they have nothing more important to do than to examine whether they are full of devotion or not— this sort of person could not possibly be stable or certain in his conduct, because these things change continually, whether by our own negligence, or by the order of God, who varies His gifts and His conduct towards us according to our needs.
An expert on Carmelite mysticism, Father Thomas Dubay, writes in his magnum opus:
Holiness does not consist in delights at prayer. When God does not give the feelings of devotion even to generous people, they should not be in the least upset but should rather merely conclude that this emotional dimension is not presently necessary.
The basic problem with Praise & Worship
To summarize our critique: Praise & Worship music is not suitable for liturgical use. Its style reinforces a false conception of the Church’s liturgy as communal gatherings in which subjective feelings, informality, and spontaneity play a large role. In reality, as Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger show, divine liturgy is characterized by objectivity, formality, and unspontaneity—and only because it has those qualities can it have the power to be, for all of us, the fixed principle of our thoughts and actions, the rock on which we can build our interior life, the infinitely pleasing worship that is offered not so much by us as by our High Priest, and by us in union with Him.
The Mass, in particular, must not be so weighed down with sentimentality and subjectivity that its essence is clouded by its accidents and we lose sight of what it actually is: the mystical re-presentation of Christ’s supreme sacrifice on the Cross. We know this truth only by faith-informed intellects, and never by a psychosomatic faculty, whether it be the external senses, the imagination, or the emotions. We participate in this objective, public, solemn offering primarily by uniting our mind and will to the prayers of the priest and to the realities they point to. At the same time, the “externals” of the liturgy should lead our minds and hearts in the direction of the faith-perceived mystery so that what we sense and what we believe do not seem to be at odds but rather converge in harmony. The sensible elements of the liturgy are meant to evoke and gesture towards the imperceptible mystery, inviting us to make acts of adoration, contrition, supplication, and thanksgiving in the presence of Our Lord’s redeeming sacrifice and to participate in it most intimately by receiving Holy Communion. All of this is something that totally transcends the emotional realm as such, and while it is true that the Lord sometimes grants strong emotions to individuals as an encouragement or prompting or consolation, we relate to the essence of what is taking place through our intellect and will properly cleansed, focused, and directed.
Moreover, there cannot be a place for contemporary pop-inspired or pop-influenced music in the liturgy because it violates several of the principles repeatedly given in authoritative Church documents. The fact that many priests and bishops do not enforce these rules and do not seem to care is beside the point, just as the fact that most Catholics dissent from Humanae Vitae (including many members of the clergy) does not justify contraception. Many Catholics are in a state of colossal ignorance, habitual carelessness, and sometimes outright disobedience, and we must plainly admit that the current crisis of identity, doctrine, and discipline in the Church is an unsurprising result.
I would go further and say we need to be moving away from the fashion or fad of using music derived from contemporary popular styles at any liturgical or devotional activity. We would do well in Eucharistic Adoration, for example, to allow silence to predominate and, at judicious moments, to make use of simpler chants. Silent prayer, combined with chant, allows people of very different temperaments, personalities, ages, and situations they may be going through to be united in prayer in a way that can be adapted to the needs of each. A more “stirring” form of music, while it may have a place in Christian recreational settings, does not facilitate group prayer (a fortiori, liturgical prayer) in the way that silence, chant, and polyphony do.
At this point, we need to consider a commonly made objection: isn’t the Church’s traditional music is too hard, too difficult for people nowadays? They need easier stuff to sing!
When my son, who was no prodigy, was five years old, he could sing the four major Marian antiphons (Salve Regina and so on); by the time he was six, he could sing the Missa Orbis factor, the Missa De angelis, and other chants familiar in our church, without being able to read the music. My daughter was the same way. Other boys and girls in the community were no different. Since children are gifted learners by ear and many chants have captivating melodies, children quickly pick up these chants if they live in families and communities that prize them.
That is how tradition was and is always passed down: naturally, painlessly, orally, through a common treasuring of traditional things and a common use of them. In the heyday of the burgeoning Gregorian chant revival before Vatican II, Justine Ward had developed an incremental method by which schools across the world were successfully teaching chant to thousands of children. There were public liturgies at which crowds of boys and girls would beautifully chant the Ordinary of the Mass. At the principal Mass of the Eucharistic Congress in Chicago in 1926, a choir of 62,000 children drawn from hundreds of parochial schools came together to chant the Mass in unison. Such endeavors could easily have kept growing and continued well into our day, propelled by Vatican II’s encomium of chant, but the 1960s and 1970s were not a propitious time for the preservation of tradition. Those in charge of institutions gambled on the supposed evangelistic benefits of modernization and let go of precious cultural treasures, even when sociologists of religion were predicting a renewal of interest in tradition among those searching for meaning in an increasingly chaotic post-Christian West and were expressing doubts about the staying power of shallow contemporary substitutes for perennial practices.
If we look East to the Byzantine sphere, we can still find congregations accustomed to singing liturgical texts in three or four harmonized parts. This is common throughout the Eastern Christian world. Western Christians quickly pick it up, as I experienced firsthand in Byzantine liturgies at the International Theological Institute in Austria and at Wyoming Catholic College.
Truly, the capacity of the human soul for great music is limitless. We should not underestimate either the capacity or the need for excellence in this domain. No one should ever assume that young people today cannot become cultured or acquire a wide intellectual purview, as if being primitive or illiterate is an unavoidable condition of modern youth. It is a social and cultural choice we have made in creating the artificial post-World War II category of “the teenager.” In reality, as Romano Guardini asserts:
A fairly high degree of genuine learning and culture is necessary in the long run in order to keep spiritual life healthy. By means of these two things [learning & culture], spiritual life retains its energy, clearness, and catholicity. Culture preserves spiritual life from the unhealthy, eccentric, and one-sided elements with which it tends to get involved only too easily. [The Church] desires, as a rule, that spiritual life should be impregnated with the wholesome salt of genuine and lofty culture.
The Church has an obligation to immerse her children in her own heritage, from birth onwards. As Jean Piaget demonstrated, the early years of a child are the “cultural womb” that completes the process of gestation. All Catholic children should be singing the Salve Regina and the Gloria by the age of five or six. A failure to give this heritage of beauty and spiritual strength to the little ones so loved by Our Lord is a kind of high treason against the supernatural polity of the People of God. We must not underestimate the capacity of young people and of the laity in general to enjoy, appreciate, participate in, and grow spiritually from the traditions of the Catholic Church. A true spiritual hunger exists in the world. It is not only growing, but also unfortunately assuming deviant forms because it does not find satisfaction in much of what is being offered in the name of “relevance” and “inculturation.”
I will bring my talk now to a conclusion. In the sixties and seventies it was often said that the Church had to reconfigure herself from top to bottom because “Modern Man” needs something different from his forebears—and today, alas, the same message is repeated ad nauseam. But modern man is not essentially different from the man of any age; his spiritual needs are fundamentally the same as they have always been. What people today need is not something new, changing, ephemeral, fashionable, but something timeless and perennial, connecting them across the ages with their forebears and uniting them to the Lord in adoration. “Thus saith the Lord: Stand ye on the ways, and see and ask for the old paths which is the good way, and walk ye in it: and you shall find refreshment for your souls” (Jer. 6:16). The life of prayer and worship that sustained centuries of faith— the glorious army of confessors, virgins, martyrs, holy laity—will sustain us too, better than any modern innovations. On a certain occasion when Pope Benedict XVI was speaking about the great Byzantine poet and composer Romanus the Melodist, he explained that the work of such artists
reminds us of the entire treasure of Christian culture, born of faith, born of the heart that has found Christ, the Son of God. From this contact of the heart with the truth that is love, culture is born, the entire great Christian culture. And if the faith continues to live, this cultural inheritance will not die, but rather it will continue to live and be current. Icons continue to speak to the hearts of believers to this day, they are not things of the past. The cathedrals are not medieval monuments; rather they are houses of life, where we feel “at home,” where we find God and each other. Neither is great music—Gregorian chant, Bach or Mozart—something of the past, rather it lives in the vitality of the liturgy and our faith. If faith is alive, Christian culture will never be “outdated,” but rather will remain alive and current.
Thanks to the profound teaching and compelling example of Pope Benedict XVI, which also remain alive and current in spite of successive assaults against them, we have entered a new era of rediscovering a lost heritage and rejoicing in its wondrous beauty. The Church of the future will have a growing number of people who ask for, and deserve to receive, the treasures of tradition that the Catholic Church, and she alone, can offer them.
Back in the Ronald Reagan era, Al Gore’s wife,
Tipper Gore, “led a successful fight to have parental warning labels affixed to record albums that contained sexually explicit lyrics, portrayed excessive violence, or glorified drugs.”
Tipper Gore ↩︎
