ST. LOUIS, Missouri, JULY 6, 2008 (Zenit.org). Although learning Gregorian Chant might imply a little effort from parishioners, the end result is worth it, says the director of the Institute for Sacred Music in St. Louis.
Archbishop Burke, who has since been named to head the Apostolic Signature, the Church’s supreme court, appointed Benedictine Father Samuel Weber as the first director of the new institute earlier this year.
Father Weber is a professor in the divinity school of Wake Forest University in North Carolina and also a monk of the St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana.
In Part 2 of this interview with ZENIT, Father Weber discusses why he thinks chant is “the song that [God] wants to hear from our lips and our hearts.”
Q: Why did the Second Vatican Council state that Gregorian chant should be given “pride of place” in the Church’s liturgy?
Father Weber: The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy, “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” as well as numerous statements of the Popes and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal [GIRM], teach us that Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony — that is, sacred music sung in harmony — such as compositions of Palestrina, are to enjoy “pride of place” in sacred worship.
This means that chant is not only to be in common use in the liturgy, but it is also to provide examples and inspirations for new compositions.
The reason for this is to assure a genuine organic development in the sacred music Catholics experience in worship — in continuity with the Church’s history, and transcending limitations of time and cultures.
Understanding and appreciating this universality in Catholic music for worship might be seen as one facet of the obedience of faith.
We need to remember, of course, that the Council teaches under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. God is telling us both how he wants to be worshiped, and what best serves the religious needs of those gathered for sacred rites.
Before all else, worship is about God. It is the duty of the creature to know, love and serve the Creator, and to render to God the service of prayer, praise and thanksgiving that is his due.
Worship is about us, the creatures, only insofar as we desire with all our hearts to serve God as he tells us he wants to be served.
Historically, Gregorian chant is in direct, organic development with ancient cantilation — chanting — patterns of the psalms in temple and synagogue. This was the background and experience of the first Christians. So our chanting today is in direct relationship with theirs.
One can see, then, that when we sing the chant, we are truly “in connection” with our fathers and mothers in the faith.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph heard and sang many of these patterns of sacred chant in synagogue and temple worship. The apostles, the martyrs, the great saints whose witness continues to inspire us today, were all nourished on these traditions of sacred chanting.
Even the saints and blesseds of our own day — Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, St. Pio of Pietrelcina, St. Gianna Beretta Molla, for example — all sang, heard and knew the chant and the traditions of sacred music inspired by the chant.
They were formed in this “school of sacred music” that is the chant, and, to borrow a phrase from St. Athanasius, the “gymnasium of spiritual exercises” that is the Psalter — the Psalms of David.
I think, too, of my grandparents and parents, so many beloved family members, teachers and friends, who have gone before us “marked with the sign of faith.”
How they loved the sacred chants, and passed them on to me with piety, devotion and reverence. What an opportunity to participate in the Communion of Saints. What could be richer or more spiritually satisfying?
Gregorian chant serves the word of God. It has no other purpose than to draw us to the sacred text, especially the Psalms, and to enable us to treasure God’s word ever more deeply in our hearts.
It is entirely free of anything that is contrary to the faith, free of purely human agendas or experiences that lead us away from God’s will and plan for us. To use the language of our computer age: The chant is “safe and secure.” No viruses can enter.
Q: Benedict XVI has given a number of speeches discussing the importance of preserving the Church’s heritage of sacred music, and a number of documents have been issued by the Holy See calling the universal Church back to that grand tradition, yet little seems to have changed on the ground. Why is there resistance to what should be seen as a form of Vatican II’s concept of “ressourcement,” that is, return to the sources?
Father Weber: Perhaps it is not so much resistance as a lack of communication and ineffective teaching that stalled things.
Pope Benedict is tireless in his teaching — even before he became Pope — for example, “A New Song for the Lord.” An accomplished musician himself, he fully understands the power of music on the human heart, thus the central role of music in the liturgy.
Clearly, part of our task is to help “get the word out.” I think we can already see many positive results of the recent actions of the Holy See concerning the liturgy.
For one thing, there is a growing interest among Catholic people in reviving their immensely rich heritage of music and art, and a real desire for greater beauty, reverence and solemnity in worship.
But when there is actual resistance? In the end, I believe that this comes down to the perpetual struggle between good and evil. God is constantly giving us all the grace we need to know, love and serve him.
But we are tempted by the devil, and suffer under the effects of original sin, so we sometimes make choices that, sadly, draw us away from God our Creator, and even extinguish the fire of love in our hearts.
It is the duty of all the pastors — that God in his love has given us — to call people back to that which will bring us true peace and blessedness. With great wisdom, over the centuries the popes, the Councils, have understood the importance of sacred music, art, architecture and ritual in the spiritual formation of the human person.
As a result, they have never ceased to teach us about the care that must be exercised in cultivating all sacred arts that serve divine worship.
Now it is our job to receive this teaching and implement it in our lives for our spiritual good.
Q: The book “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” highlighted the abysmal state of congregational singing present in most American parishes. Why do you think parishes will be able to handle Gregorian chant? Isn’t that harder to sing?
Father Weber: The author, Thomas Day, suggested — among other things — that people don’t sing because the music they often encounter at Mass is not really worth the effort. Silence is one response to music that is inappropriate — whether from the standpoint of aesthetics or theology.
Another factor is the disappearance of choirs from parishes, since choirs can effectively lead and encourage congregational singing.
It’s encouraging to know that many people who are discovering chant for the first time are so strongly attracted by its beauty and solemnity that they want to become a part of its revival.
Speaking from experience, I would agree that Gregorian chant may require a greater discipline, more attention and sacrifice of time and energy in order to “make it happen” in our parishes.
But difficulty is not a real impediment.
In our American society we greatly value sports. I’m a Green Bay Packers fan myself, rabid, actually. I’m really grateful to the Packers for all the hours they spend in practice and preparation for their games. All the sacrifices they make. It’s worth it.
The payoff is really something awesome. We, the fans, would settle for no less. Doesn’t this same expectation apply to the things of God? It really isn’t that hard to understand, is it?
St. Augustine taught the people of Hippo: “Cantare amantis est.” Singing is characteristic of a lover. If the supreme love is, as we believe, between Christ, the Bridegroom, and the Church, his Bride — can any effort be spared to express this love in true beauty? Is any sacrifice too much?
We don’t have to guess at the song. This tremendous Lover of ours tells us the song that he wants to hear from our lips and our hearts.
This is our Catholic faith. What more need be said? Let us begin!
For nearly 20 years, those who supported the return of the old liturgy (now the “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman rite) scoured the news for the rare bishop who used the 1962 Missal on such-and-such occasion, favorable comments by someone — anyone — about the traditional liturgy, or indeed any reference to the old Mass at all. The single year since the release of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum last July 7, on the other hand, has been so full of firsts and about-faces that one can hardly keep track of them all.
This is all to the good. For as Pope Benedict XVI says, the Extraordinary Form is a great treasure of the Church, and “must be given due honor for its ancient and venerable usage.” Even non-Catholics once understood this: Nearly four decades ago, when it looked as if the traditional Mass would be permanently supplanted by the new, a petition drawn up by Catholic and non-Catholic cultural luminaries in England and Wales declared,
The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and nonpolitical, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere. They wish to call to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the traditional Mass to survive.
The pope’s initiative has already borne much fruit, and interest in the Extraordinary Form continues to grow despite the cold if predictable indifference of so much of the episcopate. The Fraternity of St. Peter, the first of the orders of priests established by Pope John Paul II to offer the traditional liturgy, has been offering well-attended training seminars for priests interested in learning the Extraordinary Form. Word is that one thousand priests have requested the training DVD that the Fraternity prepared with EWTN.
Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, secretary of the Congregation for Worship, has said that those bishops who obstruct the implementation of the motu proprio are allowing themselves to be used as instruments of the devil. And reaction among the bishops has indeed been mixed: Some have been cooperative, aware of how intent Benedict is on seeing this through. Others have attempted to block Benedict’s move by tendentious interpretations of certain phrases in the relevant documents. The pope’s observation that the celebrating priest should have some competence in Latin has been used as the basis for making priests take Latin exams prior to receiving authorization (the very concept of episcopal authorization being at odds with the document’s intent) to offer the Extraordinary Form. The Latin original suggests only that priests, at a minimum, be able to pronounce the words — though, naturally, the more Latin they can learn, the better.
Summorum Pontificum’s reference to a “stable group” of faithful making a request for the Extraordinary Form has been transformed in some dioceses into a requirement (in terms of numbers of faithful, etc.) that is extremely difficult to satisfy and that has disqualified countless lay inquiries. On the other hand, we learn from Castrillón Cardinal Hoyos, president of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei and former prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, that a “stable group” may consist of as few as three or four people, who need not even be from the same parish. With a clarifying note on Summorum Pontificum expected from the Holy See at any time, some observers are convinced that Cardinal Hoyos’s comments reflect the contents of that forthcoming document.
Although the pope was gentle where possible in his fraternal letter to the bishops, he was extremely bold where it counted, both in the letter and in the motu proprio itself. For example, Benedict officially declared — as some had argued in vain for decades — that the old liturgy was “never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.”
That’s not what those who specialize in divining the innermost thoughts of the popes told us all these years: A well-known 1982 book by two authors at pains to refute traditionalists declared, “We cannot conclude other than that the celebration of the Tridentine Mass is forbidden except where ecclesiastical law specifically allows it (aged or infirm priests celebrating sine populo) or under special circumstances where a papal indult applies (as in England and Wales under special circumstances).” According to Benedict, that conclusion is dead wrong, but such baseless theorizing was routinely used to marginalize and demonize Catholics in good standing.
The Catholic world has changed so much since July 7, 2007, that it is almost hard to believe that people devoted to the Faith were once relegated to the margins of the Church (when their opponents were feeling generous) for saying precisely what Benedict has made a career out of saying. Benedict has not merely declared his sympathies for the old Missal — that would be one thing. He has said that it is not normal for a brand new liturgical book to be introduced into the life of the Church, and that such a rupture (1) had never been seen before in Church history, and (2) is “absolutely contrary to the laws of liturgical growth.” He has criticized not merely the abuses we associate with the new liturgy but even the new liturgical books themselves, which “occasionally show far too many signs of being drawn up by academics and reinforce the notion that a liturgical book can be ‘made’ like any other book.” The new Missal, he says, “was published as if it were a book put together by professors, not a phase in a continual growth process.”
He goes on to say that the
formulae of the [new] Missal in fact give official sanction to creativity; the priest feels almost obliged to change the wording, to show that he is creative, that he is giving this Liturgy immediacy, making it present for his congregation; and with this false creativity, which transforms the Liturgy into a catechetical exercise for this congregation, the liturgical unity and the ecclesiality of the Liturgy [are] being destroyed.
I’ve written in much greater detail on this very site about Benedict’s liturgical thought. No longer must the faithful walk on eggshells: With such a man as pope we can at last speak frankly about the liturgical crisis in the Church. And, as I’ve discovered many times over the past year or more, it has now become possible on Catholic radio to make commonsensical observations about liturgical issues that in the old days they would have hung up on you for.
In recent weeks, Cardinal Hoyos has made clear just how ambitious Benedict’s expectations are. The cardinal made headlines when, in response to a journalist’s inquiry as to whether the pope wanted to see the Extraordinary Form in “many ordinary parishes,” he replied, “All the parishes. Not many — all the parishes, because this is a gift of God.” “This kind of worship is so noble, so beautiful,” he said.
According to Cardinal Hoyos, the Ecclesia Dei Commission is instructing seminaries to teach seminarians not only the Extraordinary Form itself but also the theology and language of the old Missal. He suggests that parishes hold classes to prepare their people for the traditional liturgy, so they might “appreciate the power of the silence, the power of the sacred way in front of God, the deep theology, to discover how and why the priest represents the person of Christ and to pray with the priest.”
I never expected to live to see this.
The traditional liturgy is of great pedagogical value to a world that knows nothing of reverence or of respect for tradition, and that takes for granted that all institutions of whatever provenance or antiquity are to be adapted and updated to suit modern man. That modern man might not in fact be the apogee of human civilization, and could perhaps stand to conform his own behavior to something outside himself instead of thoughtlessly vandalizing everything around him, is a message the modern West just might need to hear. Long live Pope Benedict.
ST. LOUIS, Missouri, JULY 4, 2008 (Zenit.org). Parish music directors — and congregations — in the Archdiocese of St. Louis soon will benefit from Archbishop Raymond Burke’s recent initiative: The Institute for Sacred Music.
Archbishop Burke, who has since been named to head the Apostolic Signature, the Church’s supreme court, appointed Benedictine Father Samuel Weber as the first director of the new institute earlier this year.Father Weber is a professor in the divinity school of Wake Forest University in North Carolina and also a monk of the St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana.
In Part 1 of this interview with ZENIT, Father Weber discusses how the Institute for Sacred Music will try to restore Gregorian chant’s “pride of place” in the liturgy.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Sunday.
Q: Why did Archbishop Burke found the Institute for Sacred Music? What is its mission?
Father Weber: As Archbishop Burke explained, he established the institute to help him to cultivate more fully sacred music in the celebration of the complete Roman Rite.
The Institute will have many activities. First, it will form programs of sacred music, especially Gregorian chant, for parish musicians, musicians of other archdiocesan institutions and interested individuals.
Second, it will assist parishes with the singing of the Mass in English, for example, the entrance antiphon, the responsorial psalm and the Communion antiphon. Third, it hopes to foster the singing the Liturgy of the Hours.
A fourth activity of the institute is assisting parishes that wish to develop a “schola cantorum” for singing Gregorian chant; a fifth goal is aiding the full implementation of the English translation of the Roman Missal in the archdiocese.
Lastly, the institute aims to give particular assistance to the programs of sacred music at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis and at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary.
Q: Is there a difference between sacred music and religious music?
Father Weber: Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, we can make a distinction.
Sacred music, properly speaking, is music that is united to a sacred text — especially psalms and other scriptural texts and texts of the Mass, such as the Introit, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, etc., and it includes certain traditional hymns that are — or have been — part of the official liturgical books.
The authority of the Church must confirm all the liturgical texts; these sacred words are not to be altered in setting them to music.
All sacred music is “religious music,” obviously. But religious music would encompass everything from classic hymns to contemporary songs with a religious theme in a wide variety of styles and varying quality. Not all religious music is suitable for sacred worship, certainly.
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of competent authority — i.e., the bishop or the Holy See — to determine the suitability of all religious music for sacred worship, even though parish musicians will usually choose the music for a parish Mass and other liturgical celebrations.
All Church musicians need to be able to make truly informed choices about appropriate music for use in the liturgy, based on authentic Church teaching. This is not always easy, nor is the choice simply a matter of taste.
Q: Many complain about popular or secular forms of music creeping into the liturgy, but this has been a perennial problem for the Church. What causes this recurring problem, and how have the great renaissances in sacred music such as those fostered by Palestrina and Pope St. Pius X turned the tide?
Father Weber: Yes, you could say that the concern about secular — or frankly anti-Christian — musical styles supplanting sacred music in worship is perennial — though it may manifest itself differently in different cultures and historical periods.
For example, in early centuries, all music other than chanting was strictly forbidden by Church authorities, because use of musical instruments had strongly pagan associations.
In the 19th century, the style of opera had so greatly influenced Church music that Pope St. Pius X warned strongly against this “profane” music, and forbade composing music imitating operatic styles. He initiated the 20th Century Liturgical Movement by his 1903 document, “Tra le Sollecitudini.”
In particular he encouraged Gregorian chant, which he said in the third paragraph of the document, “has always been regarded as the supreme model for sacred music,” thus “it is fully legitimate to lay down the following rule: The more closely a composition for Church approaches in its movement, inspiration and savor the Gregorian form, the more sacred and liturgical it becomes; and the more out of harmony it is with that supreme model, the less worthy it is of the temple.”
It was Pope Pius X, also, who coined the phrase “active participation” of the people. And he also said in paragraph five of the document that “modern music is also admitted to the Church, since it, too, furnishes compositions of such excellence, sobriety and gravity, that they are in no way unworthy of the liturgical functions.”
After the Second Vatican Council it was the pop and folk style music of the late 1960s and 1970s that dominated newly composed music for worship — Catholic and Protestant. Despite the Constitution on the Liturgy’s emphasis on the “pride of place” for Gregorian chant in the liturgy, the council’s teaching was ignored, and chant virtually disappeared.
The reasons for this are many and complex. But one major element was plain confusion and misunderstanding. The liturgical reform following the Council was astoundingly rapid, and serious upheavals in the secular world of those times also affected the anti-authoritarian mood within the Church.
This was played out dramatically in the liturgy. Changes were made precipitously with too little consultation with the bishops.
During the papacy of Pope John Paul II, we began to see a sober reassessment of the post-conciliar liturgical changes, culminating in his last encyclical, “Ecclesia de Eucharistia.”
The present “renaissance” in liturgical music we are now seeing is in large part due to Pope Benedict XVI and his many scholarly works on the subject even before he became pope.
The historic heritage of sacred music, then, always serves as an indispensable teacher and model of what best serves the celebration of sacred worship, and leads worshipers to greater holiness.
In today’s second reading, St. Paul exhorts us to take the more excellent way: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:8-9).
Please view the previous three blog posts to see the witness of three women who also embraced the call to “excellence,” and now can speak of knowing REAL peace — the peace of God is with them.
The name “Jane Roe” has become synonymous with “abortion.” It is revered by those who call themselves “pro-choice” and strikes a chord of sorrow in “pro-life” camps. And though Roe v. Wade has been cited and debated countless times in the nearly 30 years since its decision by the Supreme Court, Jane Roe, the famous plaintiff, has been all but forgotten.
A Christian since her conversion in 1995, Roe’s real name is Norma McCorvey, and her life is dedicated to her ministry called “Roe No More.”
In an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily last week, McCorvey shared her life story and explained how she was “used” by pro-abortion attorneys in their quest to legalize the procedure.
At the age of 21, McCorvey was pregnant with her third child. She had given her other two children up for adoption and McCorvey did not want to say goodbye to her offspring a third time. She decided to have an illegal abortion, but the Dallas clinic she went to had been recently raided and shut down. So McCorvey made up a story — she had been raped, she told her doctor and two lawyers. She signed an affidavit on condition of anonymity, and the lawsuit began.
“After finding myself pregnant,” McCorvey told WorldNetDaily, “I considered abortion and, because of this, I was put in touch with two attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. They had just recently graduated from law school and were interested in challenging the Texas abortion statute.”
Describing how she was viewed by the pro-abortion community, McCorvey said, “Plain and simple, I was used. I was a nobody to them. They only needed a pregnant woman to use for their case, and that is it. They cared, not about me, but only about legalizing abortion. Even after the case, I was never respected — probably because I was not an ivy-league educated, liberal feminist like they were.”
In a 1994 New York Times interview, McCorvey describes her meeting with the young attorneys, with whom she had a rocky relationship.
“Sarah (Weddington) sat right across the table from me at Columbo’s pizza parlor, and I didn’t know [then] that she had had an abortion herself,” she said. “When I told her then how desperately I needed one, she could have told me where to go for it. But she wouldn’t because she needed me to be pregnant for her case. I set Sarah Weddington up on a pedestal like a rose petal. But when it came to my turn, well, Sarah saw these cuts on my wrists, my swollen eyes from crying, the miserable person sitting across from her, and she knew she had a patsy. She knew I wouldn’t go outside of the realm of her and Linda. I was too scared. It was one of the most hideous times of my life.”
The relationship with Weddington was not unique as McCorvey began meeting other pro-abortion activists.
“My experience with pro-abortion leaders is that they are snobs. They claim that they care about women and their rights but, in my experience, they care for nothing, not even themselves in a way,” she told WorldNetDaily.
McCorvey, the name Norma took as a result of her short-lived, teen-age marriage, grew up poor and felt unloved by her mother. She has a ninth-grade education, was a drug and alcohol abuser, and has taken jobs as a carnival worker and house cleaner. As the Roe v. Wade trial progressed up the judicial ladder, the plaintiff never saw the inside of a courtroom as “Roe.” She says she was told she didn’t need to be there. It was only after the Supreme Court made its decision in 1973 that she began to follow the ramifications of the case. By that time, McCorvey’s third child was 2 years old. McCorvey never had, nor has she ever had, an abortion.
For many years, McCorvey preferred to remain the anonymous “Roe,” but in 1980, she broke her silence and gave an interview to a Dallas television reporter. Through subsequent interviews, she revealed that she had lied about the rape — an important point in the fact pattern of the Roe v. Wade case. She became a pro-abortion speaker and was hailed as a hero due to her suffering for the cause.
McCorvey said in a 1990 New York Times interview that the rape lie caused her to be “terribly depressed.”
“I was brought up not to lie and, because of this story, I had to lie all the time. And the depression periods got deeper and longer until the night I cut my wrists,” she told the Times. McCorvey made several suicide attempts and eventually received psychiatric help.
A few days after the 1990 interview, she was given an honorary degree from the New College Law School of San Francisco “in recognition of your courageous refusal to allow Texas politicians, religious fundamentalists or Supreme Court justices to deprive women of their autonomy and human dignity.”
Her feelings about abortion and “religious fundamentalists” would be changed as well in 1995, when she encountered Pastor Phillip “Flip” Benham, who brought Operation Rescue to the abortion clinic at which McCorvey was then working. O.R. had moved into a neighboring office space and protested for several months outside the clinic. In her written testimony, McCorvey tells of a particular conversation she had with Benham in the middle of an Operation Rescue demonstration.
“During one friendly banter, I goaded Flip, ‘What you need is to go to a good Beach Boys concert.’ Flip answered, ‘Miss Norma, I haven’t been to a Beach Boys concert since 1976.’ The seemingly innocuous response shook me to the core. All at once, Flip became human to me,” she writes. “Before, I had thought of Flip as a man who did nothing but yell at abortion clinics and read his Bible. In fact, I even pictured him sleeping with his hands across his chest, Dracula-like, with a big Bible tucked under his arms. The thought that he was a real person — a guy who had once even gone to a Beach Boys concert — never occurred to me. Now that it had, I saw him in a new light.”
McCorvey summarized her conversion experience to WND: “Simply put, it was the love and persistence of two small children: Emily and Chelsea Mackey.”
Her written testimony elaborates on the experience. “As my mind was challenged to consider the truth of the Gospel, God began working on my heart through a 7-year-old girl named Emily, the daughter of O.R. volunteer Ronda Mackey,” she wrote. “Emily’s blatant affection, frequent hugs, and direct pursuit disarmed me. The little girl’s interest was all the more surprising considering Emily made it very clear that her acceptance of me wasn’t an acceptance of my lifestyle.”
The girl’s “childlike faith cut open my heart,” McCorvey explained, “making me receptive to the truth being shared by the adult volunteers at Rescue. I wasn’t won over by compelling apologetics. I had a ninth-grade education and a very soft heart. While the O.R. adults targeted my mind, Emily went straight for the heart. And over time, Emily began to personify the issue of abortion — especially when Ronda broke down and told me that Emily had almost been aborted.” McCorvey eventually accepted one of Emily’s invitations to church, and the activist’s life would never be the same.
Now a member of the Catholic Church, McCorvey devotes her time to “Roe No More.” According to its mission statement, the Dallas-based ministry “strives to network pro-life speakers throughout the nation in order to provide a base of educational and informational speakers and presenters for organizations who wish to promote the sanctity of human life and the message of love and forgiveness.”
Since her conversion to both an anti-abortion position and Christianity, McCorvey is no longer sympathetically portrayed in the establishment media. In fact, she’s no longer portrayed at all. There were a handful of stories in 1995 when McCorvey announced her change of heart but, since then, if she is mentioned at all, it is only to put a name on the once anonymous “Roe.” McCorvey used strong words to characterize her treatment by the media.
“I would say the media’s criticism is more harsh now that I am ‘on the other side.’ My experience with ‘big’ secular media outlets is that they don’t report, they share their opinion. They are obviously pro-abortion and in many ways aren’t dedicated to the truth,” she said.
McCorvey did appear Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes,” where host Sean Hannity gave McCorvey a forum to tell her story. During the Fox interview, McCorvey repeated what she told WND and had written in her testimony — that she had been “used.”
Asked if she felt abortion defenders championed her rights and best interests in Roe v. Wade, she responded, “I firmly believe that the only ‘champions’ of this whole situation are the women who have been lucky enough to not be aborted since Roe v. Wade was handed down. The national pro-abortion organizations or, as I call them — National ‘want to be women’ [organizations] — keep demanding more and more. Take, for instance, partial-birth abortion. They simply can’t get enough of ‘killing their young.’ My only response to them is, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
Dr. Alveda King, niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke out powerfully in favor of life Tuesday as she compared abortion to slavery and among the worst inhumanities of our times.
“I look forward to the day when we can celebrate a holiday commemorating the end of the most devastating and dehumanizing practice since slavery, abortion,” she said in a statement.
King made her remarks as part of the upcoming nationwide celebrations commemorating the official end of legalized slavery throughout the United States. The holiday, which occurs on June 19, is colloquially known as Juneteenth.
“Juneteenth reminds us that the recognition and protection of basic human rights can take a long time, but it also reminds us that American society can change so as to honor its founding principles,” King said.
“Over 150 years later, however, an entire class of Americans is still treated as nothing more than property. Babies living in their mothers’ wombs are regarded by our laws as non-persons. It’s a tragedy and a disgrace,” King explained.
King, who has had two abortions, has spoken frequently at pro-life rallies about the traumatic, lingering effects of abortion on women and its connection to racism and injustice.
At a Black History Month rally in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, she noted the huge abortion rates that were destroying African American communities, calling abortion a “racist, genocidal act.”
King also generated media attention when she spoke out in favor of life in April during the 40th anniversary commemoration event for her late uncle. At the event, she likened the fight against abortion to the historic struggle of civil rights.
“The fight against abortion is a new frontier in the civil rights movement,” she told the Daily Journal.
Dr. Alveda King, a pastoral associate of Priests for Life, the nation’s largest Catholic pro-life organization, is a former two-term member of the Georgia House of Representatives and founder of King for America –a faith-based organization “whose purpose is to the enrich the lives of people spiritually, socially, intellectually and economically.”
Back in my pro-choice days, I read that in certain ancient societies it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them to die of exposure. I found these stories to be as perplexing as they were horrifying. How could this happen? I could never understand how entire cultures could buy into something so obviously terrible, how something that modern society understands to be an unthinkable evil could be widely accepted among large groups of people.
Because of my deep distress at hearing of such crimes against humanity, I found it irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as “killing babies.” Obviously, nobody was in favor of killing babies, and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate as much was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their “insane” societies. We were not in favor of killing anything. We simply felt that a woman had a right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced a crisis pregnancy. It was unfortunate, but that was the sacrifice that had to be made to prevent women from becoming victims of unwanted pregnancies.
At that time I was an atheist and had little exposure to religious social circles. As I began to search for God and open my mind to Christianity, however, I could not help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often, and I was put on the defensive about my views. One night I was discussing the topic with my husband, who was re-examining his own pro-choice stance. He made a passing remark that startled me into reconsidering this issue: “It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other-people’s-life,” he quipped. “Everyone is pro-their-own-life.”
Growing Discomfort
His remark made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints had put me in the position of deciding whose lives were worth living, and even who was human. Along with doctors, the government and other abortion advocates, I decided where to draw this crucial line. When I would come across Catholic Web sites or books that asserted “Life begins at conception,” I would scoff, as was my habit, yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense. I realized that my criteria for determining when human life begins were distressingly vague. I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human, and I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard about things like the 3-D ultrasounds that showed fetuses touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion acceptable. As modern technology revealed more and more evidence that fetuses were humans too, I would simply move the bar for what I considered human.
At some point I started to feel I was more determined to remain pro-choice than to analyze honestly who was and was not human. I started to see this phenomenon in others in the pro-choice community as well. As I researched issues like partial-birth abortion, I frequently became stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon witnessing the level of evil that normal people can support. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read of reasonable, educated professionals calmly justifying infanticide by calling the victims fetuses instead of babies. It was then that I took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be pro-choice, I was not pro-choice.
Yet I still could not quite label myself pro-life.
I recognized that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was some tremendous pressure that kept me from objectively looking at the issue. Something deep within me screamed that not to allow women to have abortions, at least in the first trimester, would be unfair in the direst sense of the word. Even as I became religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect. It became too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being “at conception,” as opposed to some arbitrary point during gestation. It was not until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group that I was able to release that internal pressure I felt and take an unflinching look at abortion.
Sex and Creating Life
Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.” In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex” did not mention children once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest the videos came to connecting sex to the creation of life was a brief note that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.
All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives.
My pro-choice views (and I imagine those of many others) were motivated by loving concern: I just did not want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Since it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex, and that sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendency to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize their fellow human beings on the other side of the line in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized what we saw as the enemy of sex.
As I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex, marriage and contraception, everything changed. I had always assumed that Catholic teachings against birth control were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.
Burdens or Blessings?
The way I had always seen it, the generally accepted view was that babies were burdens, except for a few times in life when everything might be perfect enough for a couple to see new life as a good thing. The Catholic view, I discovered, is that babies are blessings and that while it is fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a “contraceptive mentality”—feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties—we not only fail to respect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.
I came to see that our culture’s widespread use and acceptance of contraception meant that the “contraceptive mentality” toward sex was now the default attitude. As a society, we had come to take it for granted that we are entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we are opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we see children as a burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon. Even if it would be a huge crisis to become pregnant, we had a right to have sex anyway. If this were true—if it were morally acceptable for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives—then abortion, as I saw things, had to be O.K.
Ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone, but the lie was just too tempting. I did not want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity. Terminating pregnancies simply had to be acceptable, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal, and society had made it very clear that sex was not a huge deal. As long as I accepted the premise that engaging in sex with a contraceptive mentality was morally acceptable, I could not bring myself to consider that abortion might not be acceptable. It seemed inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.
Given my background, the Catholic idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we are opposed to its life-giving potential, was a revolutionary message. Being able to consider honestly when life begins, to open my heart and mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible for me until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.
All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I became officially, unapologetically pro-life. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering how normal people could do something like that, and I felt a chill rush through me as I thought: I know how they did it.
I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people—people like me—can support gravely evil things because of the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state where they could leave a newborn child to die. The very real pressures of life—“we can’t afford another baby,” “we can’t have any more girls,” “he wouldn’t have had a good life”—left them susceptible to the temptation to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, the same process had happened with me, with the pro-choice movement and with anyone else who has ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.
I suspect that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they couldn’t talk, the couldn’t sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles were just involuntary reactions. I bet they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them something like “fetuses.”
Jennifer Fulwiler is a Web developer who lives in Austin, Tex., with her husband and three children. She converted to Catholicism from atheism in 2007 and writes about her conversion at http://www.conversiondiary.com/.
Infanticide is becoming a touchy subject for Barack Obama. So much so that his supporters either deny that their candidate ever voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, or they describe his votes as “procedural,” as if Obama never really opposed providing medical treatment for infants who survived an abortion.
The facts show otherwise.
The Born Alive Infant Protection Act was first introduced in the Illinois legislature in 2001 after nurse Jill Stanek revealed that babies born alive in Christ Hospital in botched abortion procedures were left to die, unattended by medical personnel.
That same year Stanek testified before the Judiciary Committee, where Obama asked whether the bill would subvert a woman’s right to abortion. Obama voted against the bill in committee but “present” on the Senate floor.
When the bill was reintroduced in 2002, Obama again voted against it in committee and was the only state senator to speak against it on the Senate floor. Again the bill was defeated with Obama voting “no” and leading the opposition.
Here is what he said:
Whenever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected by the Equal Protection Clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a 9-month old — child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the Equal Protection Clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an anti-abortion statute.
2002 was the year the U. S. Congress passed and President Bush signed the federal version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. Unlike Obama in Illinois, Sen. Hillary Clinton voted to support the bill. In fact, the bill passed the Senate 98 to 0 with pro-abortion senators like Boxer (D-CA) and Reid (D-NV) supporting it.
In 2003, the bill was introduced in the Illinois legislature for the third time and directed to a committee chaired by Obama, Health and Human Services. They refused to bring the bill to a vote.
Only when Obama left for Washington in 2005 did the Born Alive Infant Protection Act pass the Illinois legislature. It’s for good reason Barack Obama has been called “the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever.”
The Roman Catholics for Obama Web site has no mention of his opposition to the Born Alive Infant’s Protection Act. Look under its section “Life and Dignity of the Human Person,” and you will find statements on the death penalty, the Iraq War, gun control, and the promise to nurture “a socio-economic environment” that will provide “a safety net that will make abortion increasingly unnecessary and rare.”
Some of Obama’s infanticide apologists argue that since the declared intention of Obama in voting against the BAIP Act was to uphold Roe v. Wade then it was not evidence of “support for infanticide.” Such poor logic completely detaches Obama’s act of voting against the bill from its consequences. Without the passage of the bill, infants born in Illinois remained vulnerable to the lack of treatment witnessed first-hand in Christ Hospital by Jill Stanek.
It would be like a senator arguing that his vote to approve Iraq War funding was just to “support the troops” but not the war. How can you put a gun in a soldier’s hand without taking responsibility for what happens when he shoots it?
Democratic pundits don’t want to talk about Obama on abortion or infanticide, either. On a recent CNN broadcast, Wolf Blitzer asked Bill Bennett what he would ask Obama, if given the chance.
Bennett said he would ask Obama about his abortion extremism and why he “doesn’t see a problem with killing a baby after it’s been born after eight months.” Donna Brazile, well-known Democratic consultant, reacted strongly: “You want to have a conversation about narrow issues, but the American people want to talk about gas prices.”
Brazile can be sure that$4.oo per gallon gasoline isn’t going to divest the millions of religious conservatives who care about the dignity of human life of their repugnance for infanticide. The last thing the Democrats want to hear are questions raised about Obama’s “moral judgment,” as Bill Bennett did on CNN.
Obama’s attempt to move to the middle of the political spectrum will have to overcome two major obstacles: the memory of Rev. Wright at the National Press Club and Obama’s voting record on the BAIP Act.
Obama does seem to have distanced himself successfully from his old pastor, but once Americans start asking why he would allow doctors to deny medical treatment to a newborn child, it may raise larger questions about moral judgment.
ROME, Italy, June 27, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In an excusive LifeSiteNews.com interview, Mercedes Wilson, founder and President of the Natural Family Planning organization, Family for the Americas, explained the negative effects contraception has on a woman’s body and on a couple’s marriage. She also described Family for the Americas’ mission to spread knowledge of NFP to the poor and confirmed that when practiced properly, it is 99 percent effective. Her organization has taught millions in over 100 nations and in 20 different languages about NFP, not only by teaching people how to practice it, but also how to themselves become teachers of NFP.
Q: How does your organization carry out its mission to spread awareness and knowledge of NFP?
A: Our main work for the last 10-15 years has been training new teachers. We have developed the most comprehensive training manual for training teachers.
We do this all over the world, including the U.S., the developing world, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia, including China. We train by using CD ROMs and videos, but we believe the most useful tools are the simplest materials, and that is why our book has been published in 21 languages. We have training manuals and posters, because many times the poor countries don’t have electricity. Our systems of posters teach the whole method for women undergoing every situation of the reproductive life, from fertility to pre-menopause.
Q: Which types of birth control methods do you find the people who come to you are using the most and what are the dangers associated with these?
A: It depends on the country. In the U.S. women are still using the pill, but less, because the media has given some info on the negative side effects and people are getting scared. Young people, however, are still using patches and other forms of contraception, and they are falling into this trap because society continues to lure them into being promiscuous; that is the main problem. By the time they come to us, by the time they get married, they are already wounded because they have tried a lot of things; we are the last resource in the first world.
In the third world, however, they are still using the 3-month injections the most. It does so much harm to the poor. They are given it while mothers’ are breastfeeding their babies. The steroids are going right through the breast milk to the babies and that is a calamity. It causes cancer, heart disease, you name it; the list is interminable. And with the lack of the health facilities in the third world, it is criminal.
The pill, IUDs, injections, and the patch are devastating to the poor because they all carry the same steroids, which are known to be toxic and carcinogenic. 21 scientists with the World Health Organization in 2005 confirmed that estrogens in birth control methods are carcinogenic of the number one type, which is the most dangerous type of all.
Q: Aside from protecting women from bodily harm, how else does NFP benefit those who practice it?
A: A study of the most important work we have ever done confirms that married couples that practice NFP have a lower divorce rate than couples that use contraception. In couples where NFP was practiced, we found a miniscule .2% divorce rate. As well, happiness and success in the family life was very obvious in those families that respect the natural law by practicing NFP.
Q: What do think is the reason for the lower divorce rate?
A: There are many reasons, but the main reason is that both husband and wife are cooperating to bring life into the world or postpone it. The husband is fertile all the time and the woman is only fertile for 100 hours; most women don’t know this. God in his wisdom has put this natural science in the women’s body and it’s very obvious. Just like menstruation is obvious, the fertile time is obvious. It is a matter of paying attention.
The problem is, is there is such a money making business in contraception, so they are very anxious to keep NFP in the dark.
Vatican City, Jun 25, 2008 / 04:51 pm (CNA).- In interview published in the Wednesday edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict’s new Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations, Monsignor Guido Marini, says he believes that people receiving Communion kneeling and on the tongue will become common practice at the Vatican.
Msgr. Marini’s comments were made during an interview with Gianluca Biccini on some of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent liturgical decisions and their meaning.
Biccini noted in the exchange that Pope Benedict distributed Holy Communion to people who knelt and received the host on their tongues during his visit to Brindisi (Southern Italy) last week.
When he was asked if this would become a common practice at the Vatican, Marini responded, “I believe so.”
“In this regard it is necessary not to forget the fact that the distribution of Communion on the hand remains, up to now, from the juridical standpoint, an exception (indult) to the universal law, conceded by the Holy See to those bishops’ conferences who requested it,” the liturgical master of ceremonies reminded.
Canada, Mexico, the Philippines and the United States are all countries that have been granted an exception from the universal practice of receiving Communion on the tongue.
It seems though that the Pope wants to provide an example for the Church, according to Msgr. Marini, “The form adopted by Benedict XVI is meant to highlight the force of this valid norm for the whole Church.”
“It could also be noted that the (Pope’s) preference for such form of distribution which, without taking anything away from the other one, better highlights the truth of the real presence in the Eucharist, helps the devotion of the faithful, and introduces more easily to the sense of mystery. Aspects which, in our times, pastorally speaking, it is urgent to highlight and recover.”
It usually starts with the missalettes — those lightweight booklets scattered around the pews of your parish church. They contain all the readings of the Sunday Masses, plus some hymns and responses in the back. There’s nothing between the covers that would offend an orthodox sense of the faith, and most of the songs are traditional by today’s standards.
So, what’s the problem?
Well, if your missalettes are like those issued in more than half of American parishes, they’re copyrighted by the Oregon Catholic Press (OCP) — the leading Catholic purveyor of bad music in the United States. Four times a year, it prints and distributes 4.3 million copies of the seemingly unobjectionable booklets (which OCP doesn’t call missalettes).
But that’s just the beginning of its massive product line, where each item is integrated perfectly with the others to make liturgical planning quick and easy. To instruct and guide parish musicians and liturgy teams, the OCP prints hymnals, choral scores, children’s songbooks, Mass settings, liturgy magazines (with detailed instructions that are slavishly followed by parishes around the country), and CDs for planning liturgies and previewing the newest music.
This collection of products, however, does not include a hymnal — or anything else — designed to appeal to traditional sensibilities (its Heritage Hymnal is deceptively misnamed). The OCP’s experts never tire of promoting the new, rewriting the old, and inviting you to join them in their quest to “sing a new church into being” (as one of their hit songs urges). The one kind of “new” that the OCP systematically avoids is the new vogue of traditional music that has proved so appealing to young Catholics.
The bread and butter of the OCP are the 10,000 music copyrights it owns. It employs a staff of 150, runs year-round liturgy workshops all over the United States, sponsors affiliates in England and Australia, and keeps song-writers all over the English-speaking world on its payroll. In fact, it’s the preferred institutional home of those now-aging “St. Louis Jesuits” who swept out the old in 1969 and, by the mid-1970s, had parishes across the country clapping and strumming and tapping to the beat.
The OCP also sails under the flags of companies it has acquired, established, or represented along the way: New Dawn Music, Pastoral Press, North American Liturgy Resources, Trinitas, TEAM Publications, White Dove Productions, and Cooperative Ministries. Every time it purchases — or assumes the distribution of — another publisher, its assets and influence grow.
Power Without Authority
But while the OCP dictates the liturgies of most U.S. parishes, it has no ecclesiastical authority. It’s a large nonprofit corporation — a publishing wing of the Diocese of Portland — and nothing else. It has never been empowered by the U.S. bishops, much less Rome, to oversee music or liturgy in American parishes.
The OCP’s power over Catholic liturgy is derived entirely from its copyrights, phenomenal sales, and marketing genius. Nonetheless, it wields the decisive power in determining the musical culture of most public Masses in the United States.
And once a parish dips into the product line of the OCP, it is very difficult to avoid full immersion. So complete and integrated is their program that it actually reconstructs the sense that the liturgy team has about what Catholicism is supposed to feel and sound like.
But few of those subject to the power of the OCP understand that it’s the reason why Catholic liturgy so often seems like something else entirely. For example, pastors who try to control the problem by getting a grip on their liturgies quite often sense that they’re dealing with an amorphous power without a name or face. That’s because very few bother to examine the lay-directed materials that are shaping the liturgies. Too many priests are willing to leave music to the musicians, fearing that they lack the competence to intervene.
Meanwhile, the nature of the OCP is completely unknown to most laypeople. Many Catholics shudder, for example, when they hear the words Glory & Praise, the prototypical assortment of musical candy that was already stale about 15 years ago but which mysteriously continues to be repackaged and rechewed in parish after parish. “Here I am, Lord,” “Be Not Afraid,” “City of God,” “One Bread, One Body,” “Celtic Alleluia,” and (wait for it) “On Eagle’s Wings” — these all come courtesy of the OCP.
But at the publisher itself, this moldy repertoire is not an embarrassment. On the contrary, the publisher brags that Glory & Praise, whose copyright it acquired in 1994, continues to be the best-selling Catholic hymnal of all time. And what about those prayers of the faithful that seem far more politically than doctrinally correct? They’re probably from the OCP, too. A new edition of its Prayer of the Faithful is printed every year. (In what is surely great news for the unrepentant, the OCP brags that the volume helpfully includes “creative alternatives to the Penitential Rite.”)
Hijacking Of Catholic Truth
It wasn’t always like this. Before 1980, the OCP was called the Oregon Catholic Truth Society. It was founded in 1922 in response to a compulsory school-education law that forced Catholics to attend public schools. Archbishop Alexander Christie got together with his priests to found the society. Its aim: to fight bigotry and stand up for truth and Catholic rights.
In 1934, the Oregon Catholic Truth Society released a missal called My Sunday Missal. It was good-looking, inexpensive, and easy to use. It became the most popular missal ever (you can still run across it in used bookstores).
But the rest of the story is as familiar as it is troubling. Sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Oregon Catholic Truth Society began to lose its moorings. Catholic truth had to make room for the Age of Aquarius. Thus, in the course of a single decade, a once-reliable representative of Catholic teaching became reliably unreliable. Money given to the organization to promote truth was now being used to advance a revolutionary approach to Catholic life, one that repudiated traditional forms of the faith. The only thing that did not change was the breadth of its influence: Under the new dispensation, it was still a powerhouse of Catholic publishing.
De Profundis
If you’ve been keeping up with the OCP’s latest offerings, you know that the songs from the mid-1970s don’t begin to plumb the depths. The newest OCP hymnals are jam-packed with music from the 1980s and 1990s, with styles meant to reflect the popular music trends of the time. (Actually, they’re about five years behind the times.)
They sail under different names (Music Issue, Journeysongs, Heritage Hymnal, Glory & Praise), but the content is similar in all of them: an eclectic, hit-and-miss bag with an emphasis on new popular styles massaged for liturgical use. (Worst choice: Spirit & Song, which “encourages the youth and young adults of today to praise God in their own style”)
Some of the newer songs sound like variations on the musical themes you hear at the beginning of TV sitcoms. Some sound like Broadway-style love songs. Others have a vague Hawaiian, calypso, or blues feel. You never know what’s going to pop up next.
Not all of it is terrible. In fact, there are real toe-tappers among the songs. The question to ask, however, is whether it’s right for liturgy. The answer from the Church has been the same from the second century to the present day: The Mass requires special music, which is different from secular music and popular religious music. It must have its own unique voice — one that works, like the liturgy itself, to bring together time and eternity. It’s a style perfectly embodied in chant, polyphony, and traditional hymnody.
The OCP revels in its ability to conflate these categories; indeed, that’s the sum total of its purpose and effect. And judging from its newest new line of songs and CDs — “we just couldn’t wait until our next General Catalog to tell you about it” — your parish can look forward to a variety of ska and reggae songs adapted for congregational purposes.
How It Hooks You
But let’s go back to that innocent, floppy missalette. The OCP claims it has many advantages. Missalettes “make it easy for you to introduce the latest music to your parish, and changes in Church rituals are easy to implement.” Thus the missalette is “always up-to-date.”
It’s also quite a bargain. If you buy more than 50 subscriptions to the quarterly missalette, you receive other goodies bundled inside. You’ll get a Music Issue (the main OCP hymnal) to supplement the thin selection in the missalette. In addition, you’ll receive a keyboard accompaniment book, a guitar book, the Choral Praise Comprehensive, a handy service binder, two annual copies of Respond & Acclaim for the psalm and the gospel acclamation, biannual copies of Prayer of the Faithful, two subscriptions to Today’s Liturgy (which tells liturgy teams what to sing and say, when and how), and one master index. And the more you buy, the more you get.
Why would you want all this stuff? Well, if you’re in parish music, you’ll quickly discover that the missalette has too few hymns to cover the whole season. The Music Issue seems like an economical purchase. But there’s something odd about the OCP’s most popular music book: There’s no scriptural index. How do you know what hymns fit with what gospel reading?
No problem. Just buy a copy of Today’s Liturgy, which spells it all out for you. If you want a broader selection of possible hymns, you can also order the OCP’s LitPlan software or its monthly Choral Resources, which is visually more complicated than the Federal Register (but still contains no scriptural index).
If you follow the free liturgical planner closely, you’ll notice you can purchase a variety of choral arrangements and special new music (copyright OCP) that match perfectly with the response, the hymnal, and the missalette (copyright OCP), which is itself integrated with the prayers of the faithful (copyright OCP) and the gospel (not yet OCP copyright). And so it goes, until you follow the complete OCP plan for each Mass, from the first “Good morning, Father!” to the last “Go in peace to love and serve others!” By making each element dependent on the next, the OCP has ensured a steady — if trapped — clientele.
Musical Gnosticism
But why should the liturgy team go along with this program? The average parish musical team is made up of non-professionals. Its poorly paid members are untrained in music history; they have no particular craving for chant or polyphony, which often seems quite remote to them. Most musicians in average Catholic parishes would have no idea how to plug into the rite an extended musical setting from, say, the high Renaissance, even if they had the desire to do so.
The OCP understands this point better than most publishers. In an interview, Michael Prendergast, editor of Today’s Liturgy, pointed again and again to the limited resources of typical parishes. The OCP sees serving such needs as a core part of its publishing strategy; its materials keep reminding us that we don’t need to know Church music to get involved.
Lack of familiarity with the Church’s musical tradition would not be a grave problem if there were a staple of standard hymns and Mass settings to fall back on. But it has been at least 30 years since such a setting was available in most parishes. The average parish musician wants to use his talents to serve the parish in whatever way possible, but he’s at a complete loss as to how to do it without outside guidance. The OCP fills that vacuum.
Under its tutelage, you can aspire to be a real liturgical expert, which means you have attended a few workshops run by OCP-connected guitarists and songwriters (who explain that your job as a musician is to whip people into a musical frenzy: loud microphones, drum tracks, over-the-top enthusiasm when announcing the latest hymn). These “experts” love the OCP’s material because it allows them to keep up the pretense that they have some special knowledge about what hymns should be used for what occasions and how the Mass ought to proceed.
Real Catholic musicians who have worked with the OCP material tell horror stories of incredible liturgical malpractice. The music arrangements are often muddled and busy, making it all but impossible for regular parishioners to sing. This is especially true of arrangements for traditional songs, where popular chords give old hymns a gauzy cast that reminds you of the 1970s group Chicago.
The liturgical planning guides are a ghastly embarrassment. Two years ago, for example, the liturgical planner recommended “Seek Ye First” for the first Sunday in Lent (”Al-le-lu-, Al-le-lu-yah”). In numerous slots during the liturgy, OCP offers no alternative to debuting its new tunes. When traditional hymns are offered, they’re often drawn from the Protestant tradition, or else the words are changed in odd ways (see, for example, its strange version of “Ubi Caritas”). The liturgical instructions are equally pathetic. On July 8 this year, the liturgical columnist passes on this profound summary of the gospel of the day: “Live and let live.”
The Middle Way?
Nevertheless, the OCP seems to have solved a major liturgical rift affecting today’s local churches. Just as every parish used to have a low-Mass crowd and a high-Mass crowd, there are now two factions in parishes: One wants more “contemporary” music of the sort seen in Life-Teen Masses— loud, rhythmic, and rockish. Another wants traditional music and sensibly asks whatever happened to the hymns of the old days. These two groups are forever at loggerheads and have been so for decades. In fact, most pastors are so sick of the dispute that they’ll do anything to avoid talking about music at Mass.
This is where OCP steps in and serves as the peacekeeping moderate. After all, it’s an established music publisher, and thanks to the missalette, it doesn’t appear (at first) to be particularly partisan. Its literature contains enough traditional material to allow the liturgical team to claim they’re sensitive to the needs of both the contemporary and traditional factions. Indeed, the OCP eschews the most extreme forms of grunge-metal Life-Teen music (though its Spirit & Song comes close). At first sight, it does appear to take the middle ground between two extremes. In truth, however, it’s only slightly behind the curve of the most radical liturgical innovators — as it’s always behind the curve in the popular styles it tries to imitate.
What about the other option of splitting up the Masses according to style, so that those who like traditional music can have their own Mass and the people who compose for the OCP can have theirs? Prendergast rejects this. Whether the style is traditional, contemporary, folk, or even “rock,” Prendergast says, “everyone in the parish has to be exposed to it.” And what if a pastor just doesn’t like rock and other contemporary styles? Prendergast says, “I would talk to the [chancery's] Office of Worship about him.” I asked whether that means he would turn this poor priest in to the bishop. His response: “I would try to arrange for him to attend a workshop on liturgy.”
With a great deal of knowledge, careful planning, and conscious intent, it is possible to manufacture decent liturgies even if the OCP music is all you have. You’ll have to dig to find the good hymns (10 to 20 percent in the typical OCP publications), but it can be done. It’s also true that not everyone involved with the OCP wants to destroy all that has gone before. There are probably many people on its middle-aged staff who from time to time cringe at the music, just as the people in the pews do. For his part, Prendergast is sure that he thinks with the mind of the Church, and there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity.
In fact, there are periodic signs of hope. Regular readers of Today’s Liturgy might have been astounded to see the recent one-page article buried in its pages that urged children be taught Latin hymns and chant. “The Second Vatican Council did not destroy the tradition of chant,” said the writer, who was a student of the excellent English composer John Rutter. “We can still claim our chant heritage as part of the living Church’s journey into the future.” Indeed we can! But the news seems to be slow in getting around the OCP office. (The same issue contained a blast against a poor old lady who read a prayer book during Mass instead of singing goodness knows what.)
What’s completely amazing about the entire OCP family is how lacking it is in self-awareness. The poor quality of contemporary Catholic music is a cultural cliché that turns up in late-night shows, Woody Allen movies, and Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. It is legendary among real musicians. Ask an organist what he thinks about today’s Catholic music, and you will receive a raised eyebrow or a knowing laugh.
What You Can Do Right Now
The truth is that no one is happy with the state of Catholic liturgical music — least of all musicians — and the OCP is a big part of the problem. So, what can you do? Step 1 is to get rid of the liturgical planning guides and use an old Scripture index to select good hymns that have stood the test of time (if you absolutely must continue to use the OCP’s materials). Step 2 is to rein in the liturgical managers and explain to them that the Eucharist, and not music, is the reason people show up to Mass Sunday after Sunday. Step 3 is to get rid of the OCP hymnals and replace them with Adoremus or Collegeville or something from GIA (no, none of these is perfect, but they are all an oasis by comparison).
Finally, reconsider those innocuous little missalettes. These harmless-looking booklets may be the source of the trouble. Parishes can unsubscribe — accept no OCP handouts or volume discounts. There are plenty of passable missalettes and hymnals out there, and all the choral music you’ll ever need is now public domain and easily downloadable for free (www.cpdl.org).
In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2000), Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger states clearly that popular music does not belong at Mass. Indeed, it’s part of “a cult of the banal,” and “rock” plainly stands “in opposition to Christian worship.”
This is very strong language from the cardinal. And yet we know that many liturgy teams in American parishes will continue to do what they’ve been doing for decades — systematically reconstructing the liturgy to accommodate pop aesthetic sensibilities. The liturgy is treated not as something sublimely different but as a well-organized social hour revolving around religious themes.
It’s up to you to decide the future course of your parish’s liturgy: reverent worship or hootenanny. Despite what the OCP might tell you, you can’t have both.
J. A. Turner is the choral director of a schola cantorum and writes frequently for Crisis.
QUEBEC CITY, JUNE 22, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is encouraging the faithful to revisit the Second Vatican Council constitution on the liturgy, so as to go deeper in the mystery of faith that is the Eucharist.
The Pope made this appeal today when he delivered via satellite the homily for the closing Mass of the 49th International Eucharistic Congress, which ended today in Quebec. The papal legate, Cardinal Jozef Tomko, presided over the Mass.
In his address, given in French and English, the Holy Father said,
“‘The Mystery of Faith’: this we proclaim at every Mass. I would like everyone to make a commitment to study this great mystery, especially by revisiting and exploring, individually and in groups, the Council’s text on the liturgy, ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium,’ so as to bear witness courageously to the mystery.”
Here it is … The Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (Sacred Council). I urge you to take our Holy Father’s direction and spend some time with this.
Also, if you’re feeling like REALLY digging in, you might want to take the time to enrich your understanding of Sacred Music by reading the most important encyclical on this in Pius X’s, Tra le Sollecitudini. I realize this is all for the heavy hitters, but I encourage you all to “hit away.”
I revisited the Vatican II liturgy document earlier today, and I was reminded just how many “liberties” were taken from some of the language used in this document. It is quite a “stretch” made by those “spirit of Vatican II” folks who managed to “spin” this document’s intent into a liberal agenda which has left us in utter liturgical ruins.
I recall one parish who would tearfully tell the story of how, year’s ago, their once beautifully adorned church was gutted out and converted into the likes of a lecture hall, while they saw their magnificent back altars laid in a pile by the dumpster behind the church for months.
At the same time, we have witnessed the uplifting angelic sound of Gregorian Chant and sacred polyphony replaced with a range of hippy ballads, campfire songs and the modern medley of night club style “entertainment.” All of which have gone a long way to distract us and startle us out of prayer rather than draw us into any kind of encountering with the Risen Lord in a life-changing way.
Pope Benedict’s priority of restoring the sacred essence of liturgy stems from his understanding that, in order for us to restore “right relationship” with God, we must know how, first, we should approach Him. In other words, how we should offer “right worship.” Recall how God asked Moses to remove his sandals because he was on holy ground. Recall how God has spent all of salvation history instructing his faithful to build him a temple fitting his majesty.
… the word “orthodoxy.” Literally, “ortho” means “right” or “correct,” and “doxy,” though it does have a connotation of “belief,” literally means “praise” or “worship.” So orthodoxy, more than “right belief,” means “right praise” or “correct worship.” When we say we wish to be “orthodox,” we are really saying that we want to do what King David said all of us should do: worship God with “all that is within us” and to do this in the correct way, in a way pleasing to God and worthy of him. The central problem the Church faces today, as always, is the problem of orthodoxy. (From the opposite point of view, it is the problem of apostasy, of making the decision to no longer praise God in the right way, or to no longer praise him at all.) But orthodoxy is not simply a matter of dogmas, of doctrines, of phrases memorized, of a series of propositions. It is a matter of “right praise.”
In conclusion, sacredness of life, sacredness of marriage, sacredness of relationships, sacredness of conjugal love, etc. will all return when we return to “right relationship” with God. And this right relationship will come when we return to the “sacred way” we once knew in how to come to “right worship.”
Barack Obama: “But if they (Obama’s daughters) make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
Let’s keep it going …
Here is another impassioned comment – from someone ”out in the trenches” – on the Bill Donahue article at InsideCatholic. These comments are doing a tremendous job in reflecting all of our frustrations as ”Catholics” are about to give this Infanticide Candidate the edge he needs to win this election. Truly this is a consequence of silent leadership and poor catechesis over the past four decades. My friends, we have work to do. But, first, we must pray, pray, pray!!!
I suppose you all know all the answers. After all you all have been in the trenches of the pro-life movement of the last 30 years and you have seen where we have been kicked in the teeth by our political friends and taken to court and sued by our enemies. You have tried with every bone in your body to save some girl you don’t even know from killing her baby only to fail and wonder what you could have done different.
Yet you stand in judgment over the mistakes of those who trusted and believed in a better way or a new direction or an incremental approach. Now you curse the political process and demand purity in a world so messed up that the lead story reports that 17 girls made a pact to get pregnant, while the west coast papers gleefully report the onslaught of the next homosexual revolution.
So cast your vote for a third party candidate and feel good about yourself. Help Obama get elected so he can promote abortion worldwide. Ignore what we CAN do and pontificate about how evil Bush and his friends are.
I will not give up. I will support John McCain because while he may not be the perfect candidate, he is far and away the better of the lot. He can get elected, unlike the minor candidates mentioned above. None of them is electable. None of them are serious campaigners. For them it is about ego.
Obama will be a disaster, just as Clinton was a disaster. Two days after Clinton was elected on January 22, 1993, he repealed the Mexico City Policy restricting federal funding of international organizations that work to reverse countries’ abortion laws, reversed Title 10 regulations banning abortion referral by federal employees,negated the ban on funding for fetal tissue transplants, ordered military hospitals to perform abortions, and asked the FDA to “review” the import ban on RU 486.
Clinton nominated Ginsburg and Breyer. Who do you think Obama will select? A pro-abortion liberal pro-homosexual, anti-Catholic judge.
As for the Missouri effort, two more weeks and the pro-lifers would have won. It was a classic case of no one believing we could win and our weakness proving the point. Yet in spite of the nay sayers, they almost pulled it off.
As for the other important issues of the day, how many of them are killing 3600 babies a day? Stop abortion and see the trickle down effect on society. Stop abortion and export the concept of real honest to goodness respect for human life. Stop polluting the womb and maybe people will understand why they should not pollute the environment.
As for pro-life Democrats, please stop telling Republicans how evil they are while my former party continues to have blood on its hands. I remember when the party was taken over by hte pro-abortionists. I also remember how pro-life voting democrats one by one surrendered their convictions, sold heir souls and pandered to the pro-abortion Left. Gore, Biden, Kennedy, Durbin, Gephardt, all turned their back on the children to remain in or seek to advance in power. Then there were the Cuomos and the Moynihans and O’Neils who time and again talked about the being “personally opposed” in order to defend their pro-abortion policies. And who can forget our own Fr. Drinan who went out of his way to defend the abortionist politicians and voted that way himself. What have any of them done to help the unborn?
I suppose you all know all the answers. After all you all have been in the trenches of the pro-life movement of the last 30 years and you have seen where we have been kicked in the teeth by our political friends and taken to court and sued by our enemies. You have tried with every bone in your body to save some girl you don’t even know from killing her baby only to fail and wonder what you could have done different.
Yet you stand in judgment over the mistakes of those who trusted and believed in a better way or a new direction or an incremental approach. Now you curse the political process and demand purity in a world so messed up that the lead story reports that 17 girls made a pact to get pregnant, while the west coast papers gleefully report the onslaught of the next homosexual revolution.
So cast your vote for a third party candidate and feel good about yourself. Help Obama get elected so he can promote abortion worldwide. Ignore what we CAN do and pontificate about how evil Bush and his friends are.
I will not give up. I will support John McCain because while he may not be the perfect candidate, he is far and away the better of the lot. He can get elected, unlike the minor candidates mentioned above. None of them is electable. None of them are serious campaigners. For them it is about ego.
Obama will be a disaster, just as Clinton was a disaster. Two days after Clinton was elected on January 22, 1993, he repealed the Mexico City Policy restricting federal funding of international organizations that work to reverse countries’ abortion laws, reversed Title 10 regulations banning abortion referral by federal employees,negated the ban on funding for fetal tissue transplants, ordered military hospitals to perform abortions, and asked the FDA to “review” the import ban on RU 486.
Clinton nominated Ginsburg and Breyer. Who do you think Obama will select? A pro-abortion liberal pro-homosexual, anti-Catholic judge.
As for the Missouri effort, two more weeks and the pro-lifers would have won. It was a classic case of no one believing we could win and our weakness proving the point. Yet in spite of the nay sayers, they almost pulled it off.
As for the other important issues of the day, how many of them are killing 3600 babies a day? Stop abortion and see the trickle down effect on society. Stop abortion and export the concept of real honest to goodness respect for human life. Stop polluting the womb and maybe people will understand why they should not pollute the environment.
As for pro-life Democrats, please stop telling Republicans how evil they are while my former party continues to have blood on its hands. I remember when the party was taken over by hte pro-abortionists. I also remember how pro-life voting democrats one by one surrendered their convictions, sold heir souls and pandered to the pro-abortion Left. Gore, Biden, Kennedy, Durbin, Gephardt, all turned their back on the children to remain in or seek to advance in power. Then there were the Cuomos and the Moynihans and O’Neils who time and again talked about the being “personally opposed” in order to defend their pro-abortion policies. And who can forget our own Fr. Drinan who went out of his way to defend the abortionist politicians and voted that way himself. What have any of them done to help the unborn?
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