Mystagogy
Mystagogy
On Sacred Music (Musicam Sacram) by Pius XII
In this session, guest speaker Dr. Cynthia Nicolosi gives an overview of magisterial teaching in the 20th century on the use of music in the liturgy. Dr. Nicolosi is a professor of music, philosophy, psychology and the Great Books. She has her doctorate in philosophy from Santa Croce University in Rome.
Intro: Hello and welcome to the Mystagogy podcast, offered as part of the Adult Faith Programs at Saint Stephen Martyr Church in Chesapeake, VA.
In a tradition dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, newly initiated believers were prepared for ongoing lives of faith through mystagogy, a period of formation designed to deepen their spiritual, liturgical and community life. Mystagogy is a Greek word which means "leading through the mysteries."
This program has been developed by Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a university professor of screenwriting, cinema, Great Books and theology.
In this session, guest speaker Dr. Cynthia Nicolosi gives an overview of magisterial teaching in the 20th century on the use of music in the liturgy. Dr. Nicolosi is a professor of music, philosophy, psychology and the Great Books. She has her doctorate in philosophy from Santa Croce University in Rome.
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Dr. Cynthia Nicolosi:
So our topic tonight is sacred music. And right away we have a problem. Because I bet you just don't use that phrase. I bet you don't even hear that phrase. Sacred music. I teach at a Protestant university. And I love my brethren, my sisters and brothers in the faith of Jesus Christ. But I promise you, I will never hear sacred music.
Amen. Never. What would I hear? I would hear worship music. I might hear, on a whim, somebody might say some prayer. But I would never hear sacred music. And the sad part of my story is that, in this room, we Catholics, okay? We should be saying sacred music, but we don't. Okay. Because we have been absorbed into the Protestant culture that surrounds us.
And as many good things as we could say about the Protestant versions of Christianity, there is one very heavy truth that distinguishes the Catholic faith from Protestant faith. And that is, they live for this world. It's a secular faith. It's a faith that looks to realize itself primarily through social justice Through community, through making music through building buildings, gathering a lot of money, supporting philanthropic causes, none of that to be condemned.
But it is not the Catholic version of the Christian faith. Because what's supposed to distinguish us as Catholics is the mystical, the sacred. Before I came to have dinner with you tonight, I sat in the church for a while to pray. You can actually see, those of you on this side, you can look through the door and you can see a candle in the darkness.
A little red candle by the tabernacle. That's because this space is sacred, because the living God is in there. If you go to a Protestant church, it's a hall. It can have beautiful images and wonderful prayer happens there, but it will not have that candle because it is not a sacred space. It is not a holy space.
It is a community space. So that's, I'm saying some very challenging things right now. I know that. Okay. And I want to go on now to talk to you about a document which applies this kind of thinking. to music, to sacred music, to our music, our heritage as Catholics. We are not Protestants, but we have been Protestant eyes.
So let's find out what does it mean for Catholics to use music in their liturgy? And why is that so different? There are three terms that the church uses over and over again in her documents about sacred music. And I should warn you, if you get interested in this tonight and you decide to do your own research, you better buckle down for six months.
Because from, for two thousand years the church has had to address this issue. There's so many documents, from the fathers of the church all the way up to the present day. There's so many documents about music. In the story of our Catholic faith, but that makes sense because there's nothing more powerful in human life to move the emotions than music.
There is nothing that can bring a message more sweetly and easily and uncritically into your soul than music. There is nothing that is a better reflection of the culture in which you live than the music you are enjoying and the music you are making. So from the very beginning of Christianity, think of the challenges.
The Romans loved their music, their military music, their pagan temple worship music, their hedonistic party music. You're a Christian in the middle of that? The church had to teach what sacred music was supposed to be for the Christians. How they were supposed to be different than the Romans.
That they weren't having temple services. They were having the celebration of the Eucharist. They had to teach the Christian faithful how their music was going to be different. We know how serious a discussion this was, thanks to St. Augustine. Because St. Augustine was drawn to the Christian faith partly because of the music.
He loved the chant. His great father in the faith was St. Ambrose, who's one of the first major writers of Christian hymns. And Augustine, Augustine, really anybody can be saved, Augustine, okay? Totally given to the pleasures of the flesh, the self indulgence of his emotional life. He falls in love with the beauty of the music that he hears when he goes to the Christian liturgies, the Catholic liturgies, and he's drawn towards the church, and he becomes a Christian.
And then he writes some very interesting words. He says, I came to the faith partly because of the music. I love the music. He who sings, prays twice. Famous line from Augustine. But sometimes I wonder if I enjoy the music too much. If I enjoy the melody and the feelings and the pleasure of the music too much.
This is a great father of the church who's telling us, reminding us, don't mess around with music. Because you can get so caught up in the sound and in the emotional responses and the physical responses you have to the music, you stop caring about the words. This is a point we're going to make from Musicum Sacrum tonight, because We have music in our faith because it's the words that are prominent.
We're not into music in our church to feel good. The music that is specifically Catholic music is music connected to text. It is so that we can hear and participate in the meaning of those truths expressed in the text. You might get a little organ there in the background when you're coming back from communion.
There might be a few nice little chords being played, as the priest is putting the stuff on the altar. That's the exception, because Catholic music is about conveying the truths of the text, and we'll get back to that in a minute. The three words in all of the history, and we could talk for days about the history of, Christian music and in the Catholic Church, but the three words that are always used in the document, Our sacred music has to have sanctity, beauty, and universality.
Now you notice I yellowed sanctity. Because you know what? Beethoven's Ninth has beauty and universality. People in Communist China, they perform the Ninth Symphony. And sing the Ode to Joy with great passion and bad accent. It has a universal appeal. Every single country in this world loves Beethoven, loves Mozart.
In fact, the greatest performers right now we have of classical music tradition are the Asians. Because Americans are too lazy to practice. It's hard. It's hard to make great music. It has universality. Names like Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Bach, Handel. Why do they move everybody? They have universality.
Universality is a quality. You can see the word universal. It is something that appeals to everyone in every time and in every place. Universality is a characteristic of a great work of art be it music, literature, architecture, poetry, whatever. Universality is that thing that appeals to everybody. And beauty is not in your feelings and it is not in the eye of the beholder.
We could have a whole night just on that one. Beauty is an intellectual experience. Beauty is when the vision of the true, the good, and the beautiful is expressed through a deliberate structure, which is manifest in harmony, symmetry, proportion, so that you look at that, you look at this beautiful thing, and you say, Who could think of putting that together?
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is a long discussion of how human beings can stop fighting with each other and rise above the pain of life and find a common point of unity and peace in the beautiful. And he does that. If you don't know your Ninth Symphony, after this talk tonight, at least the Fourth Movement.
So all great art, all great music has beauty and universality, but the church says her music has one more characteristic sanctity.
Why am I looking at your prayer? Okay, here we go.
Of all the documents you could read, okay, we're going to talk tonight about Briefly about jubilate deo, but mostly about musicum sacrum. I understand you did the constitution on the liturgy, sacrosanctum concilium. Was that one of the documents you've done recently? Because in that document was all about the Second Vatican Council saying this is the liturgy.
This is what you have to think about if you're a Catholic in liturgy. There's a chapter in there, it might have been mentioned to you, about music. But because there were so many problems following Vatican II, okay, all these things being done in the name of Vatican II, which had nothing to do with Vatican II, but it was like this open door.
We can change everything because of Vatican II. No one actually read the documents or cared to find out why they said the things that they said. And so one of the things that happened was the massive abuse of sacred music in the Catholic church. They did things they weren't supposed to do. And so the church said in 1967, Okay, let's go back to Sacrosanctum Concilium.
Let's remember the principles that were laid down there, okay? And let's repeat them in just a few pages with some practical tips and with the hope that the pastors and the bishops will make sure that these norms are applied. So we're going to get principles, but we're also going to get norms. That's rules.
These are the things we're supposed to be doing. Okay? So when I started, I mentioned there are two things you learn from the history of looking at, Catholic church music. Sacred music. One is that it's constantly up against the culture because the culture is constantly changing. But the other thing you learn when you read these thousands of documents that came out of the church over 2000 years about her music, there is a line of principles that never changes.
There are principles that are absolutely solid and in place. And if we want to distinguish our music as Catholics from the music of the Protestant churches, we must be able to identify those principles because they've been there from the beginning and they're supposed to be there still today.
If I asked you right now, what is the purpose of sacred music? And I couldn't say sacred music because we don't use that phrase anymore. So I'd have to say, what do you think is the purpose of the music when you go to church? Here's what most people would say. You have to examine your conscience and your mind while I put these ideas out there.
But here's what most people would say. It makes us feel good. If you're really stressed and you come to church and the music is really good, you relax. You can stop worrying. If you had a fight at home before you came, you feel good it, And it makes you happy you know You love God and you want to celebrate God and say feelings of joy feelings of peace feelings of celebration It pumps you up Maybe you came to mass and you're a little bit tired and you know Kind of weary with the world and then the music starts going and you're feeling energized And you're feeling alive, and yeah, it really makes you feel good. And it makes everybody feel like, we all have kind of the same, we're one community. And then, please excuse this expression, but, okay. Laughter That is not. Now, that may be an outcome of sacred music. That may be what happens when we have great music happening in a liturgy, okay?
But that's not what it is. And I want to apologize. I should have put this disclaimer out there right in the beginning. I myself was a choir director for nine years. I myself have sung in choirs. I was also an instrumentalist in choirs. I want to, I'm not dissing anyone, criticizing anyone, or condemning anyone with the things that I'm about to say.
What I'm, what I am is a prophet, reminding a people of a message which they have forgotten. And I have to be a little urgent about it, because if I don't act like it matters, it's not going to register. If you are a church musician here at this parish or another parish, Barbara, did you bring a chicken?
There's a chicken outside the door. There is a chicken outside the door.
I'm sitting here talking to you guys and there's a chicken going back and forth. So I am now going to tell you, and you can keep this now for life, If it ever comes up, if anybody ever asks you, comes up to you on the street and says, what is sacred music, why do we sing in church, here's your response.
These words come right out of Sacrosanctum Concilium, right out of the Constitution about the liturgy. They are repeated in Musicum Sacrum, they're quoted. This is the purpose of sacred music. It is for the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful. Amen. Amen. Amen. We have to dig a little to understand what that means, because we don't know what that means.
But clearly, one thing, it isn't. It's not about our feelings. And it may make us more united, but not in the sense that we're all singing the same song, so it's really fun and we get along. No! Okay? It's not mundane and secular and ordinary. When we say the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful, It's We mean something very particular.
I'm just going to skip that because I'm going to go over it later. Okay. Before I continue, I want to just call your attention to this point. Because sacred music, as I'm going to describe it from the document for you, is not like music in other churches. It has a very specific function and identity in the Catholic Church.
No one but the Pope. And the bishops in charge of their diocese can decide what happens with sacred music. They are the ultimate authorities for the music itself, the kind of music and the words being sung. I want to make this point first because we have got Catholics putting together hymnals today and selling them with no authority.
We don't get to just come up with a nice song for mass on Sunday. The music that belongs to our Catholic tradition comes from those sources which have the backing of the authority of the Holy Father and the bishops in communion with him. And that's just the way it is. And I think you'll see why that is so important as we go forward.
This is the crux of everything. The next couple slides. This is the part that's going to be hard, but this is the part that if you get it, you got it. We call it sacred music. What is sacred? Why don't we just call it worship music, like our protestant brethren? Why don't we just call it some prayer? Why is it sacred music?
We've got to talk language for a minute. Sacred comes from a Latin verb, sacare, which means to make sacred, to make holy. To consecrate. And if you look at the etymology, okay, what is it that it means to consecrate something? It means to set it apart. So you take something ordinary from the everyday world, you take that thing out, and you consecrate it.
It is no longer ordinary. It's no longer part of the secular involvements of our lives. You take a man out, And you ordain him, and he's a priest now. A priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. He looks like a normal guy, a lot of them act like normal guys, but he's not. He's a priest forever because of the ordination which has fundamentally changed his soul.
He is an other Christ who can consecrate and forgive in Christ's name. Did you ever notice the pronouns change? On the night he was betrayed, he took, he did, he said, this is my body. Did you ever notice the change in the pronoun? Because in that instant, he's not Father Joe. He's Jesus. That's what ordination did.
It set him apart. He's a sacred thing now. He's a sacred man. The presence of the Holy Eucharist in the tabernacle here makes this not a hall anymore. It makes it a sacred space. This room has been set apart. And if you've been a Catholic a long time, you've had that experience on Holy Week, on Good Friday, after the Lord has died, we take him out of there and the tabernacle door is wide open so you can see it's empty.
And you feel, you get to feel for 24 hours what this world would be like without Jesus. That room in there is a sacred place. And the word sacred is connected to another Latin word, Sanctus. Which we use, in English, we use the word holy. Holy is actually one of the proto Germanic words, heilig that went into feeding our language.
But we use that word holy for Sanctus. Sanctus is a Latin word that means holy and it has an interesting history.
When we go to Mass, we have, the first part is Liturgy of the Word, second part is Eucharist. And right before we get into heavy duty prayers, for the consecration, we have a big prayer called the Preface. Remember the Preface? It changes every week, so you always have the different thing there.
And so he says the Preface, and he gets to the end, you always know when the Preface is winding up. Because the priest gets to the end of the Preface and he says, And with all the angels in heaven, we sing. This is familiar to you? You know this moment? Okay. And then we all break into some version of Holy, God of Hosts.
Okay. In Latin Sanctus. Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabao. Familiar to you? That was the Latin. And then the Latin was translated into English with Holy. Oh no. Go back. You're just going too fast, Cynthia. Slow down. Okay. So where did holy come from and where did Sanctus come from?
They came from a prophecy in the book of Isaiah, chapter 6. The prophet Isaiah has a vision of God sitting on his throne, surrounded by angels. And the angels are singing holy God of hosts. But we don't get it, because we don't know what holy means, or sacred. So I'm going to tell you right now, this is the pivotal point right here.
What we're doing is translating a Hebrew word, Kadosh. Can you say that? There you go. The angels standing around God are actually praying in Hebrew. Praising Him and singing to Him Kadosh. And Kadosh means something completely different. Something completely set apart. Something completely outside of my experience.
The best word I can offer you is the word other. Completely other. So you've got to picture this now. You have to have, use your imagination. Picture those angels, standing around the throne of God going other. Because God is nothing that we know. God is not familiar to us in any way, shape, or form.
God, in his majesty, is completely not of this world, even though he made this world. We are not pantheists who think that the world is God. No. He is outside of his creation. He created ex nihil from nothing. He is not his creation. He is completely other. Now the first thing people will say to me when they hear this But that's depressing.
How can I warm up to something that's completely other? My friend, you need to deepen your spiritual life. Because in the secular world, okay, the things that satisfy you as a natural being, Food, drink, sleep, sex, community life, work, accomplishment, achievement, wealth, the good things of a good life, none of them can satisfy you because you were not made to be in this world forever.
You were only made to use this world as a launching pad to live through this life and do the best you can. So that you can get to the thing for which you really were made, other. It is not depressing to find out that God is completely other. It's good news. Because human beings disappoint us. And all of the hedonistic pleasures that we have in the body, I mean if you're lucky, two minutes, right?
All of the pleasures that we have and we know. You eat too much Lindt chocolate, you're sick. There's nothing in this world or in this body, not even children, not even a spouse, not even all those things that the world tells you are the only ticket you're ever going to have to happiness. You live.
I'm 61. And those of you like me, that are on the other side of the curve, we know. So it's very consoling to us to find out that our God is none of those things. He's none of the things with which I'm familiar. He is completely other. He is the thing for which I have been thirsting my entire life. So when the angels are standing in front of that God on His throne and singing Holy, they're telling us to rejoice.
This same prayer shows up in the book of Revelations, by the way. And when Jesus comes, this is His message. Your God is not like human beings. Your God is not like anything on this earth. Your God is God. And I have come to tell you the truth about him.
To be a sacred thing is to be something of God. So when the Hebrews use the word kadosh, not only do we find in this beautiful passage from Isaiah, and just to finish that story, if you want to know how consoling it is, okay, Isaiah sees this vision in which these angels are chanting other. He looks at himself and despairs.
He's not like that thing. That perfect otherness. He knows nothing of that. He looks at himself and he despairs. He says, I am an unclean man with unclean lips. And then God sends an angel with a charcoal briquette to touch his lips. And then he says to God, Send me, here I am. The passage of Isaiah in that, that reading, okay, is for all of us.
We have to get past the false gods of this culture. And the false gods of many of the religious traditions that we grew up with, and unfortunately sometimes Catholic, which have secularized our faith, which have democratized our faith, and which have taken away from us the heritage of the sacred. And the mystical and the spiritual, we need to get, we need to get through that dark valley and feel that brokenness that Isaiah felt and then truly turn in utter need towards our God and admit it.
I am not God. I'm not you. Whatever you are, I'm not it. Because at that point, in that humility, in that profession of faith, God changes us. He moves into our lives with power. And He makes us able to carry His very life into the world. So when we talk about the sacred, the Jews considered themselves kadosh.
Because they were a people set apart. They considered the furnishings of the temple kadosh, because everything in the temple was only for God, only for the service of God. And we Christians inherited that belief. We are a people set apart. We are a nation on a hill. We are a lamp on a lamp stand. Why? Not because we are right about things.
Not because we're such moral specimens. Not because we have wonderful social justice causes. None of those things. Those aren't just the secular things. They're of us. We are a people set apart because we have received through baptism the living God who dwells within us. Paul says in baptism, I died with Christ.
You're dead. Your humanity died when that water hits your head. And you started a new life in the spirit in Jesus Christ. You don't even know yet the fullness of that mystery. But that is what it means to be a person set apart. You are a vessel. of the living God. It's a clay pot. Yeah, but this is the fundamental.
Sacred music is sacred because it glorifies God and it sanctifies the faithful. It has nothing to do with our feelings, our collegiality, our community sense. It is sacred music because, first of all, it glorifies God. What is the glory of God? It's when you manifest His greatness. The music that we sing in the liturgy should be the most beautiful and the most universal in its message.
It should have what the church calls holy sincerity of form. It should be the kind of sound that makes you think of God. I'll say that one again. The sound of sacred music should make you think of God. Think of God, not a God of money, not a God of mannin, not a God of political ideologies, not a God of social justice causes, a God who is completely other.
It should raise your mind to a mystery beyond you and yet a mystery in which you live and to which you are called. And that having happened. The music having the sincerity of holy form that raises your heart and mind to God and give some glory. That activity sanctifies you. What does it mean to be sanctified?
It doesn't mean you're a better person necessarily to be sanctified means the Holy Spirit is within you. The Holy Spirit is built up in you in strength to be sanctified is to have A greater participation in the living God. Are you seeing now why sacred music is not worship music? And that what we've been doing in church is a loss of our tradition and a loss of our heritage We're not practicing sacred music in our catholic churches
sacred music is kadosh. It's completely other. So let me see if I can make that really concrete for you, okay? Let's say you're coming out of school or work and you've had a rough day. You get in your car to go home. You're stressed out. So you put the radio on. You go to your preferred music. It could be country.
I have no understanding of that. But it could be country. I'm in Virginia now. It's probably country. It could be classical music. It could be, I don't know, it could be like the swing tunes from the 40s. It could be anything. It's your preferred music. And you put it on, and you groove out, and you tune out, and you rock out, and you feel better.
Okay? You're not supposed to have that experience in that sacred space. That is not what is supposed to happen. So again, I'm not dissing anybody or the efforts of people who make music at church, but if you come into this space on a Sunday, and you're rocking out, because most of the music we're singing today is highly metered, it is highly rhythmic, it immediately embraces our desire for pattern, and so we actually find ourselves grooving, okay?
And if the melodies are the same kind of melodies that you would hear on that radio that you turned on in the car, if you're hearing those romantic tones and those lovely suspended sevenths, and those little harmonies that come right out of jazz, that's not what's supposed to happen in that sacred space.
That is the secular world. It is a good world. And we enjoy the pleasures that we have in the flesh and in the secular world. But that is not sacred music. Because sacred music takes you away from the ordinary, away from the regular, the mundane, and the secular, and turns you towards other. Towards something which is completely other.
And if it doesn't, then you went in and you came out exactly the same. Think about that for a minute. If you go in there and the music you hear is the same kind of music you could hear from Beyoncé.
Oh, what's that big song now, they don't do that in my town? I don't know. All this, there, see, you know what I'm talking about. If you go in there and you're singing country western, you went in and came out exactly the same. Because the music that we're supposed to be having in our liturgy is sacred.
It is kadosh. It is a music set apart for a specific function. So what happens with this function? This is from, right from Musicum Sacrum, okay? Let's look at what this incredible experience of the sacred means for us when we make music as Catholics. The church spells it right out. First of all, when we make truly sacred music, we experience the mystery of the liturgy which is hierarchical and communal.
It is hierarchical because Jesus is the priest. He is the only priest. He is the one priest. And the man that we see consecrating, okay, he can only do that because he has been ordained to receive the spirit of Jesus. He's in Jesus. It's not Father Joe Smith that makes the bread turn into the Eucharist.
It's Jesus. This is one of the things our Protestant brethren misunderstand so much about us. They think we put a priest between ourselves and Jesus. They don't understand. Listen to the pronouns. My body. Go to confession. And I absolve you from your sins. And the Protestants are horrified by that because they think we're putting a human being between ourselves and God, but that's not the teaching.
The teaching is those pronouns can change into the pronoun. I, because that power is in virtue of being Jesus extended through time, Jesus ministry still happening when we are in the liturgy and we are singing sacred music, we are experiencing a hierarchy that God has created his priest, His servers, his ministers of music, his lay faithful.
There is a beautiful hierarchy there. Everybody in that sacred space has a function in that space to fill. We also experience unity of hearts is more profoundly achieved by the union of voices, but let's be careful. Okay. Because remember, I started off by saying the secular world will tell you your church music makes you one, but they don't know what one means.
Okay. They think that you're one when you go to church and sing, because you're all, getting into the same song. You're all enjoying the same song. You're all singing the same words, no! That unity that we enjoy is a sacred reality that comes from our life in the Holy Spirit. When the church says this, They don't mean that same kind of, oh, we're singing the same songs, we're all together.
No, you can do that at Fenway Park. Go to Fenway Park and sing Neil Diamond's Caroline, and you're doing the same thing, okay? You all get together, you sing the same song, you all love the Red Sox. Is that what's supposed to happen in that space? No. We don't feel, we don't have a celebrate unity of hearts because we're all enjoying the same musical experience together.
Remember, the music, sacred music, glorifies God. We look towards God together in that sacred music and that vision of God sanctifies us. So sacred music means that we are made one because the Holy Spirit is in us, in all of us, singing together, hearts, minds, and voices, all attuned to the glory of God. That is the meaning of unity that, and we have lost it.
We really don't know what it means to be unified in the Christian faith. The other thing that happens, okay, Our minds are easily raised to heavenly things. I've said it again. I'll say it again. Again, you can't go in there, listen to the same music you listen to on a daily basis and come out and think that you've been changed.
What you hear in there and what you sing in there should turn your heart and your mind to God who is the other. And that is what gives you hope. And that is what changes you. And the last thing, this is my favorite. This is why I love going to mass. And those of you who love going to mass, you're going to get this right away.
When you understand what's really happening in the sacred place by that sacred priest in these sacred functions with the sacred music, the whole celebration more clearly prefigures that heavenly liturgy. which is adapted in the holy city of Jerusalem. My friend P. J. And I were talking earlier this evening.
We're you know, we're on the other side of 60, and we have more. I have more friends in heaven now that I have on earth. And it's so sad. Oh, no, please. There's a party waiting for me. We're not here to stay. We're When I go to mass, I celebrate getting out of here. Do you know what St. Teresa of Avila calls this life?
A bad night in a bad inn. And when you're young, you don't know that yet. And you shouldn't. Because you need to be moved by enthusiasm and curiosity and hormones and all those things to do what human beings do in a natural sense. You need to live a young life and go with those things. But when you finally get of age, on that day, call me, okay?
And, I remember that night you said, There is nothing sad about finishing this journey and going home. And when we go to Mass, we practice living in heaven. If you go into that room and just keep living the way you do everyday, your whole secondary, ordinary, everyday existence, and then come out, you haven't had it, you haven't had it changed.
You go into that room, you sit in that pew, try this on Sunday. I am now officially dead. I am now officially in heaven. I am no longer here. It is such a relief. You don't have to worry about your family. You don't have to worry about your job. You don't have to worry about your rotten disposition and your bad habits.
You can let it all go. And I know this for a fact because when I was in my, when I was 35, I was told I had ovarian cancer and I had six weeks to live. Whole story. And I was so happy. And so everybody thought I needed a psychiatrist, okay, because you shouldn't be happy when somebody tells you have six weeks to live.
I was like, you people don't understand. Life has been hard. I'm going home, and then I get to live another 30 years, where is the fairness in that, okay?
But if you are a person of true faith, if the faith has really seized your heart, okay, and you know that what happens in that sacred space is supposed to remind you of your ultimate destiny and console you. Yeah, so my sister always let me know. I've gotta wrap it up. Okay, so a couple things to finish.
I think I've made the biggest point with you that I need to make today, but let's talk about a couple of things quickly. What I have taught you is not being taught by the bishops or the pastors. Most of them don't even know it. We have, we are at least two to three generations away from our Catholic heritage.
And so we need a younger generation who's gonna rediscover the truth of what distinguishes us. from our Protestant brethren. Why would somebody want to be Catholic? Fortunately, most of you became Catholics. You have some good answers. The sacraments, very good answer. Yes, that's sacred. You touch the sacred in the sacraments, but there's so much more to that tradition.
It is the responsibility of our pastors to teach us.
How should we select music for a liturgy? This is impossible right now because we don't even know our Catholic heritage of music anymore. But we could at least try to do this. When you select music for the liturgy, some practical considerations. Don't pick music that your people can't sing, because it will be ugly.
And I know that sounds funny, but it's completely consistent with where we started. Sanctity, beauty, universality. If your music isn't beautiful in the liturgy, how are you turning your people to God? You do not use your choir to make an old lady feel better about herself. You can do that afterward at the potluck.
You make the best daffodil potatoes I've ever had. You can do that at the potluck after mass. But when we're in there, the point is to make beautiful music. One of the problems we have in the Catholic Church that other denominations do not have, they pay their musicians. We don't pay our musicians.
We don't give them a living wage. We don't ask great soloists to come to give us that one Sunday Ave Maria that just might make our week. We do not invest in our sacred music. This is an embarrassment to our church. And something that really needs to be dealt with. The other thing is, it's very interesting to know, the church does not prohibit any particular style of music, any kind of music.
She welcomes it all with two caveats. It has to be appropriate to the liturgical season, that liturgy, and the part of that liturgy that it's being sung for. You wouldn't take a Gloria, okay? Gloria in excelsis deo. You wouldn't take the Gloria and go, Gloria, in excelsis
deo. You wouldn't do that! You don't come up with music that's not appropriate to the liturgical season, the part of the liturgy in which you need that music, and and that, there's like common sense here. And one of the last point there, because this is a really good point, especially for musicians, some of you who are musicians, We all want to show off.
We love to sing. We love to perform. It's not holier because it's more ornate. And it is not holier because it's more harder to play. And it's not holier because it's more intricate. Simplicity. The most the music the church holds in pride of place is Gregorian chant, which is one freaking melody line.
It doesn't get holier because it's more complicated. And we people in church music, we need to remember that.
Oh, let's talk just for two minutes about active participation. After Vatican II, everybody was going to hold hands and do, ring around the altar, ring around the posy around the altar, and we were all going to dance, and we were all, this was going to be active participation. My friends, you now know after tonight's lecture what active participation means.
First of all, Your mind and your heart are turned towards a God who is not like anything else. You are plunged in mystery. That's first. Secondly, the music that you're singing to worship is a music that is beautiful and that raises your heart and mind towards that God. And you actively participate internally and externally.
You are a whole person. You're not like Descartes would have you believe from the neck up and to the left. It's only your mind that is who you are. We are incarnate. Jesus became like us. We are body and soul together. So active participation does not mean that we have circus masses so that everybody can have fun.
That is not what active participation means. It means that your mind, your heart, and your body are all focused on a god who is other, and for whom you thirst so profoundly, and hope that through the prison bars of human music you might get a glance of him. That's how I feel about reading Hebrew. It's so beautiful, but you feel like you're looking through the bars.
Active participation has to be taught. We are not taught to actively participate in our liturgy. You're supposed to pick it up by osmosis, the pastors are supposed to teach us how to really actively participate. First, very minimally, the church asks us. To care, first of all, about the responses.
Dominus fobiscum et cum tuo spiritu. That's Latin, right? In English you would say, the Lord be with you. And you would say back, and with your spirit. Okay? First thing that we need to learn to sing are those kinds of short responses in which we go back and forth with the celebrant. The other thing after that we wanna be able to do, like the refrain in the psalm, does anybody ever really do the psalm?
I, they're really cool. You usually have a soloist who does the verses of the psalm, right? Take that minute to pick up your missile, find the music, learn the response between the verses and sing it with your whole heart, mind, and soul. That's participation. Active participation and active participation doesn't mean you do everything.
You can have soloists doing things. You can have acquired. Third, we are not to entrust to the choir alone the work of prayer. Some people come, everybody comes to midnight mass at Christmas, right? I just love listening to the choir. Go find another church, please. Give us a break. We're not there to listen to the choir.
We're there with the choir to participate actively in our role with the choir. Now that could be after communion, a meditation song of great beauty that we don't sing with them, that we listen to, but we're still actively participating. We do not leave to the choir the job of sacred music. It is the function of a communal and hierarchical situation.
Okay. I'm gonna, I know I'm running out of time. I'm going to go quickly through this. Why does Gregorian chant have pride of place? My friends consider this for 1100 years. That was it. There was no other church music. There was no other sacred music. For 1100 years, Gregorian chant was sacred music.
1100 years. It gets better. When they finally decided to put another voice on top of the melody line, they still didn't want to get rid of it. It was still so sacred. So for another 400 years, it's there. You might find it in the tenor and then it moves down to a baseline. Then they start like stretching out the notes so that you can't even recognize that it's there anymore.
For 1500 years, the sacredness of Gregorian chant was accepted by the Catholic church and it wouldn't die a quick death. No one would let go of it quickly. Why is Gregorian chant so powerful? Because it's different than what you're used to. You're used to this. Holy God, we praise thy name. Lord of all, we bow before thee.
All on earth. Isn't that great? It's so simple, right? That is so different. So different. Salve, Regina, Mater, Nesere, Cordier, Vita Dulce Do. Where's the rhythm, folks? Did you pick out your rhythm? No, see, the word chant does not lock you into your body. It doesn't, your body doesn't pick up on a rhythm. It doesn't start rockin out.
And also, the melodies, okay? Look how repetitious and simple our melodies are, okay? You have something like, what would be another Now thank we all our God With hearts and hands and voices Who wonders things, see what happened there? It's repetitious, right? Some chants will repeat a line, a melody.
Most do not. Most do not repeat the melodic pattern. They're free flowing melody. So not only can't you get locked into the rhythm, you also can't get locked into the melody. Your body and mind are open to You're open! And in order to sing chant well, you have to breathe carefully. It's almost all those Eastern traditions telling you to do there's breathing in prayer. There's breathing in making contact with your spirituality. And the Gregorian chant is fundamentally breathing. You have to breathe right in order to pull it off. There's so many things about it. But I think probably we need to mention too, okay? It's in Latin.
And why does that matter? Because of an ancient principle. This is another one you can put in your pocket tonight when you leave. Lex Orande, Lex Credende. Can you say that? Lex Orande, Lex Credende. This is an ancient principle. It's in Latin, and it means the law of prayer is the law of belief. What you pray becomes what you believe.
And if singing is praying twice, In the words of St. Augustine, and singing brings words sweetly and uncritically into our minds. Then the words that we sing in our sacred music will become the things we believe. So that's why the church changed the Sanctus. Holy. We used to say God Almighty. Now we go back to the original Latin.
Sanctus. Dominus Deus.
Lord God of hosts. Them there's fightin words. He is not a God who's just powerful. He is a commander of a mighty army of angels. The law of your prayer is the law of what you believe. And if you're not singing, it matters that in a beautiful hymn, like Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. It used to be that saved a wretch like me.
You know what it is now? Do you remember? Saved a soul like me. Oh, forget it. That doesn't speak to me at all. Wretch? I get it. The law of prayer is the law of belief. What we sing is going to become what we believe. Because Latin preserves intact, see it's a dead language. The easiest answer to your question, it's a dead language.
It doesn't change. I'm over 60 as when I was a kid, gay meant you wore brightly colored clothes and you were the life of the party. Anybody as old as I am? I don't mean that anymore. We didn't even have the word transgender. Words change. Their meaning in a living language evolves.
Anybody who teaches literature in English in here, you teach this to your kid. Connotative meaning, denotative, and they change. The advantage of a dead language, it does not change. We can't mess with it, we can't play with it. When we sing those prayers, okay? Credo in unum Deum Credo, not we believe in one God.
I believe in one God. Because that's what happened for a while. The church decided to go in there after Vatican II in the spirit of renewal, right? And we're going to take all those famous Latin prayers that we all grew up with. We're going to make them more relevant. We're going to be like Martin Luther.
He put everything down in the hands of the people. Yeah, that happened. And so I grew up saying every Sunday, We believe in one God, the Father Almighty. We believe and we believe we'll be. And what a shock it was to me to get to be an adult studying Latin and find out it was not kind in us. Is credo, I believe.
And there's a whole section in the Catholic catechism that talks about why it's, I believe that we can all say together because of the Holy Spirit, because when each of us says, I believe we are saying it in the Spirit. So it is not a denial of a, we believe it's a deeper understanding of it. My sister's given me the high sign back there.
Just one last thing, this little document if I've inspired you and you really do want to take a look at some chant. In 1974, Paul VI, out of his love for the church, asked his experts to put together a little booklet called Ubilat de Deo. He called it The Minimum. He saw it disappearing and he said, This is just the minimum that you should know.
You'll know some of it, because some of it we do regularly. Some of it we've already lost. So you can get a hold of this, go online, buy it. In fact, you can download it for free. Find out what is at least a minimum. That we should know of our truly sacred music.
Can I ask, can I take questions or? Yeah. Okay. Yes, ma'am. The reason we don't sing more is because we have too many whiners. Oh, yeah. And they push after mass, and they complain to the father. And so we were told not to sing Gregorian. That's why I started with a, disclaimer about not wanting to offend anyone tonight.
We cannot, just, in fact, my friend over here asked me, Why don't those bishops do what you said last week they should be doing? I last heard, no. You can't, this isn't like you can march in there and just change things. What has to happen is a renewal at a deeper layer first. We have to get back to understanding what sacred means.
Let's stop being Protestants. Can we go back to just being Catholics? to really rediscover our mystical theology and our spiritual heritage. Let's start there. And then from there, we can build a culture, which is more informed by the sacred. And so when we talk about things like chant, we might have a fighting chance, but if we start at the top and try to work down, it's just going to be frustrating and people are going to leave.
They're going to go over to St. Benedict's. It's been sold for so many years as being We've moved beyond that. The past was problematic. And it disconnected people. And the perception is, Oh we're going backwards. What would you say to that? I would say there's been a very long standing misunderstanding about Jesus Christ and his desire for us.
People coming out of, say, the, that sort of perspective, right? Jesus brought God down to man. And he wants to sanctify everything in our ordinary experience. No. He came and became man so that he could make us God. This goes back to one of the fathers of the church, St. Irenaeus. It is a very amazing concept.
Yes, he came down from heaven, but not to wallow in the mud. He wallowed in the mud to the point of death. He took the form of a slave to the point of dying. But then he rose from the dead and ascended back to the Father where he sits at the right hand and sent his Holy Spirit into us. So that we will join him at the right hand of the Father.
This is why we're not supposed to celebrate the mundane, the mediocre, and the dull, and the ugly. We are not called to this world. We are called to be at the right hand of the Father. It's a theological problem that's at the root of it all. And we can thank Martin Luther too. I like a lot of things about Martin Luther.
But I tell ya, He decided that he was going to put sacred music in the hands of the people. He put it in German. He wrote original little melodies on poetic ditties, sometimes scripture in German, and he established a tradition that grew into the most, some of the most incredibly beautiful music the world has ever seen.
The Bach chorales. They started as one line melodies, from Martin Luther. But his notion was precisely that. Put the faith, in the hands of the people. He forgot the other side of the equation. There has to be an element in our ecclesial life, which invites us to the right hand of the father.
That's why there are different stages in life. There are childhood and teenage years and young adulthood, and there's a proper liturgical music for every one of these ages. And the notion is one of ascent and growth in the sacred. Sorry, that was such a long answer. Gary.
There has to be a aspect of God that is innately familiar because man is only man because he has the amount of damage of God. Absolutely. That's why you're hungry for him. It's like magnet. You can't not want him. You were made for him. And there also has to be a spiritual capacity. Which we know that even the pagans had, Socrates and Aristotle, very clearly mystics.
But Jesus came and upped the ante, because he took us beyond even a natural spiritual capacity that God gave us by nature, and he made us the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. Garrett, you're absolutely right. That's because you're my student, and that's why you're right.
Barbara Nicolosi Harrington:
Okay, we gotta break it up, but thank you very much.
We will, this actually concludes our regular series of Mondays. We have one more session, which will be on Saturday, August 26th. We'll have Andre, the biblical scholar, back, and he will do Historicity of the Gospels and Dei Verbum from Vatican II on Scripture. And then I'm going to preview the coming series.
The fall series of mystagogy is going to be all on the Eucharist. Father Charles asked for that. And so I threw out mission, and I'm working on the Eucharist. And great. But we'll have John Paul II's document on the Eucharist too.
Thank you very much for this summer. Thank you for being part of it. Hopefully we just got a few glimpses of what's out there in terms of church magisterium. And hopefully you found it inspiring. And you know now where to go. But thank you very much. Hopefully see you Saturday the 26th.
Nothing next Monday. Okay? Very good. Thank you.
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Outro: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Mystagogy podcast.
The music for the podcast is provided by George Sarah. Learn more about his music over at GeorgeSarahMusic.com or by following the link in the show notes.
Until next time, be well and God bless.
