https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QirPH_eOpQM
Okay, let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Hail Mary. Holy Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou, one woman, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and over the hour of our death, amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Okay, so the liturgical vision of Vatican II. Obviously, I’m not gonna cover everything that Vatican II said about the liturgy in the next half hour. That would be a little ambitious for just about anybody. So I’m really gonna focus in on the vision of music. So we’re gonna talk about what the church means by liturgy, what Vatican II briefly said about liturgical music, and my interpretation as to why Second Vatican Council would have said what it said. So you’re gonna get a little bit of my opinion. I think it’s pretty well grounded. That’s why I’m comfortable presenting it. But I’m not the pope, and I can’t speak authoritatively on these things. So here we go. First question, what is liturgy? We’ve got this quotation from the Letter to the Hebrews. Now the point in which we are saying is this. We have such a high priest, the one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in heaven, a minister in the sanctuary, and the true tent which is set up, not by man, but by the Lord. So in this part of the Letter to the Hebrews, the author is talking about the heavenly worship, and it’s very clear in the context, I only put so much scripture on the board here, that this high priest is Jesus. The high priest ministering in the heavenly sanctuary is Jesus. He is the one who is offering the perfect sacrifice. And the author moves on to call him a minister in the sanctuary, in the true tent, which is set up not by the man, but by the Lord. Now this word minister there is in Greek, leitourgos. It’s where we get the word liturgy from, leitourgos. Now that had a meaning outside of Christian worship. It had a meaning outside of Jewish worship. It comes to us from pagan Greek festivals. So you can imagine yourself being in ancient Athens. There would be a festival of some god. They would come together, they would have a play, or a speech, or a song, or some kind of festival gathering, which everybody would gather together in the community. It would help them worship the gods, it would also help reinforce them what it means to be in Athenian, and then afterwards they would have a feast. The person who was put in charge of that, it was always sponsored by somebody from the nobility. Somebody was, some nobleman was tasked with arranging things, getting the poet in order, getting all the food together, when are we starting, how do we do this? That was the leitourgos. And so this nobleman would be responsible for leading this whole festival. So what the letter to the Hebrews is telling us is that Jesus himself is the leitourgos in the heavenly court, and that he leads everybody in the worship of the Father, presenting eternally his sacrifice on the cross as the pleasing oblation, which reconciles heaven and earth, forgives all of our sins, makes us adopted children of God, and welcomes us into the kingdom of God. It’s Jesus himself who does that, Jesus himself who leads us in that. And so what’s going on in heaven is happening on earth at the same time. Jesus is leading the whole people of God in worship of the Father, and the priest, as a priest of Jesus Christ, participates in that in an earthly image and reflection of what’s going on in heaven. So I am not leading this, not the way that Jesus does. Jesus is the one who is the great high priest of the whole cosmos. My job is to imitate and reflect what Jesus is doing in that heavenly liturgy. So I have the Second Vatican Council, I don’t have the quote up here, but basically says no one, even if he’s a priest, has the authority to change the liturgy in his own direction, that is for the supreme authority of the church to regulate that. So it’s not up to Father Seitz’s creativity or his personal genius or his whims and his desires, how we are to worship God. I don’t determine that all on my own. Jesus taught his apostles how they were to pray. Certainly, you know, with the Our Father, certainly at the Last Supper when he said, do this in memory of me, but the apostles faithfully handed down what they had been given from Jesus and also what they had been enlivened with in the Holy Spirit. And the church holds that tradition, that sacred tradition, which our liturgy is a part of. It’ll develop it at some point, make explicit what was once implicit. There will be some changes, but the basic pattern of worship doesn’t come from man, it comes from Jesus himself. So we all have to be humble in the sight of that. And so, this is just hopefully a helpful reminder, a high fidelity technical schematic here, made by me. We receive from the Lord the pattern of worship, how we are to do this. This is something that comes down to us from Jesus, through the apostles and preserved by the church. We also receive the grace from the church. And it’s not like we’re all just receiving, but in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass especially, but in all things, we offer up adoration, thanksgiving, propitiation, and petitions. Those of you who went to Father’s Miller Mass, you probably would have just heard that. We offer that up to the Father in this divine exchange, this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. So it’s important to remember, this pattern of worship comes down to us. We receive it, we imitate it. That’s all to set up what the council said. Now I was, I’ll just read it first. The church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy. Therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of liturgical action as laid down in Article 30. So this comes to us from Sacrosanctum Cichillium, the Second Vatican Council Constitution on the liturgy. This is what set in motion the whole liturgical reform of the second half of the 20th century. I remember very clearly being a first year seminarian. I have hair up here, none right here. I was writing a research paper for, it was just a research paper class. How to write a research paper. I was curious about this because the music that we were doing at the seminary was a little different than what I had grown up with. When I read this paragraph specifically, I was like, what? How come I’ve never seen this before? It was a bit of a mind blowing experience. I know being kind of a dumb 19 year old, I kind of just wanted to go out and start burning organ catholic press signals. Because I was a dumb 19 year old. Don’t do that. And so a lot of this, a lot of this presentation, when I’m trying to come up here, is how I’ve come to understand this and reconcile it with what’s happening in regular parishes. So the goal here then, for the rest of this presentation, is to explain why the church holds up specifically Gregorian chant and in second place, sacred polyphony as being most suited to the Roman liturgy and then at the last point, we’ll do some practical tips on how to actually bring this about in your parishes. So what I’m going to do is, we’re going to listen to six examples. Oh, no, I’m gonna get to the next thing first. In order to explain this, I learned this way of talking about music when I was in seminary and I think it’s just absolutely spot on. That not all music does the same thing to the people who are listening to it. That there’s kind of three distinct, you call them modes of music. You can always tell we’re being intellectuals when we say we’re talking about a mode of something. Oh boy, that sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Three modes of music, three ways that music moves us. And those are the Apollonian, the Romantic, and the Dionysian. Nice big academic words there. If you’re confused by those words, it’s okay, I’ll make it simple for you. The Apollonian is head music. It’s music that’s pointed at your head, trying to get your intellect engaged. It works primarily on the intellect. The Romantic is heart music. It’s going straight to move your passions and your emotions. Gonna not hit the intellect quite as much, but go for the heart. And then the Dionysian mode of music is body music. Sort of gets into your body without going through your head and your heart first. Now you shouldn’t think that these three modes music are hermetically sealed, that they never touch each other. They’re probably more often than not a little more mixed together. That they don’t only do the one thing, but they can also kind of do two. I’ve been thinking about one that might do all three. I’m not sure about it, so I’m not gonna go there. So the Apollonian engages the intellect, that’s head music. The Romantic engages the emotions, the passions, that’s heart music. And the Dionysian engages the body directly. We call that body music. So now we’re going to go through six examples of what I think are exemplars of these three different modes of music. Three of them are going to be from pop music, and then the next three are going to be from church music. So let’s take a look here. I’ve gotta get this set up a little bit. But we shouldn’t have the sound problems that we did last time. So I won’t be in quite as much as a desperate hurry. So here’s the first one. This is something that I’m gonna hold up as an example of the Apollonia. And I don’t want it to be spoiled, so you’re just gonna have to listen. Okay, so that was Bob Dylan. I’m sure some of you have heard of Bob Dylan before. Maybe some of you haven’t. You don’t show up to a Bob Dylan concert to hear his voice. He’s got kind of a wheezy, raspy voice, got a very thin tone to it. And he doesn’t seem to care that much about proper singing, stances, nice whole vowels, and all those things that we’ve been working on. And so, and the music there, you know, it was just a nice guitar beat, nothing too spectacular. So I hold this up as a good example of the Apollonian music, right? What was the point of that song? Why was it written the way that it was written? It was primarily to even listen to his lyrics, because that’s what you show up to Bob Dylan for. He’s a brilliant poet who just, he just wrote this brilliant poetry, and he sent it to music. So anyway, maybe you disagree, maybe you don’t like Bob Dylan, that’s fine. But certainly, that mode of music was going for the head. All right, and now we’re gonna move on from the Apollonian to the romantic. I’m sure you’ve all heard this one before. Now unlike Bob Dylan, people heard up to hear Whitney Houston sing, right? Just beautiful, beautiful soprano voice. And that’s really an example of romantic music right there. The concept is very simple. I will always love you. And we’re not there for like some kind of brilliant poetry. We’re there to feel what Whitney Houston is feeling when she’s singing that song, to express this romantic commitment to each other. But it hits the passions first, especially if you’re not just listening to the chorus at 1.30 in the afternoon. If you were really there in the concert, or you were really in the mood for it, it’ll just absolutely smack you. Get those passions all riled up, making you think thoughts of romantic love. And so certainly, heart music right there. This last one is a favorite of middle school dances everywhere. There’s no Bob Dylan poetry there. And it’s not even supposed to make you feel strong emotions. That beats and then just kind of the drone behind it is just to get into your body. You might as well just start tapping your foot without even having to think about it. And for a middle school dance, you just get some kids out onto the floor. I was a middle schooler at one point too. I was a middle schooler at one point too. So yeah, that is an excellent example, I think, of this body music. It bypasses the intellect. You’re not there thinking, there’s nothing really going on in the heart, but man, are you kind of pumped up and just moving. So we’ll move on to the three examples here from the church music, basically. So I’m starting with a paparone again. We don’t got all day. So that one’s a little different than the Bob Dylan because it’s a curiellae song from the Misa Papo Marcelli by Palestrina. So that’s one of the greatest masses that’s ever been written. And so the text itself is very simple. It’s just curiellae song kind of bouncing around there. But you can notice the very way that this music is structured, it’s very orderly, it’s very harmonious. It’s almost rather logical. So the point’s where it’s not, and that’s where it gets really good. Kind of going for the mind first. Now, like I said, these things aren’t hermetically sealed, and so maybe you felt your heart get into that too. That’s just great. But I really feel like that is a good example of what goes for the mind as well. And a lot of the chanting that you’ll do, the Gloria chant, I think, does that in an even better way because it’s just the text kind of painted with the music a little bit. So that might have even been a better example, but I don’t have time to pull up the chant. And we’ve been kind of chanting all weekend. So you’ve encountered that. Those for the intellect first. Next, going for the romantic. I’m sure you guys have probably heard this one before. So it’s just a little snippet there. If you hear the whole thing, that bit just knocks you right on your feet. That’s the Miserere Mei by Allegri. Just a real classic there. And that soaring soprano line, I don’t think that goes to the intellect directly. I think that plays on the passions directly to draw out feelings of compassion and pity for our crucified Lord. And that was what that was for there. So it doesn’t go straight to the intellect because it just pulls the emotions out of you. This last one’s going to be a little bit of a change of pace. So we’ll just listen to it, and you’ll see what you think. Okay, so I don’t think that’s quite as pure Dionysian as the techno one was. But you can still see that nobody had to tell those young ladies that they needed to start jumping up and down, right? Just kind of the beat and the groove they had going and the spirit in the room, and they just kind of started bouncing up and down quite naturally. And so it’s not quite as pure a version of that as the techno was, but it’s still got that bouncing sense to it, just bouncing up and down to the beat of the music there. Alrighty, so there’s all the YouTube links there. So let’s talk about it a little bit. I think when you’ve got kind of the pure Apollonian music, it goes through the head, but I think especially when things are really lined up, things are really connected, it’ll come from the head and it’ll flow down into your entire person, right? The text of whatever it is that you’re listening to will stir up something in the heart and create an appropriate response throughout your entire body, because we worship with our bodies, not just our spirits, right? So it kind of comes from on top and flows down. Now the romantic goes straight for the heart, and it’ll send something up, and it’ll also affect the whole rest of your body. And there’s a question with the romantic mode of music of what exactly is it going to put into your head? You can listen to I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, and maybe you’ll think about your beloved spouse. Yes, I will always love you. Maybe it’ll make you think about your ex and actually cause feelings of bitterness there, right? Or kind of a despair at the loss of love that was once good in your life. So what do we do when we start playing with these emotions? What sort of response is that going to be? If we just kick up emotions into people, we don’t know how they’re going to understand that, how they’re going to embody it, how it’s going to come into their intellect. We’ve got to be careful with just tugging on people’s heartstrings. And then with the Dionysian, you know, it comes straight to the body, and usually doesn’t go, pass go through the intellect and collect the $200, right? And so in the heart, what it usually creates is just a whole lot of excitement. They’re really just kind of wound up and passionate. And then in the head, you know, it’s just like, maybe I’m the only one who did this at a middle school dance, but I remember going out there and bouncing up and around, but there wasn’t anything going on in my head. It was just kind of an ecstatic movement of the body. So, you know, that’s why we shouldn’t be having rave masses. We can all agree on that, right? Why on earth would you do that? So it sort of just kind of chaotically erupts upwards, and who knows what’s going to happen? And, you know, that’s not to say that you should never do these things, but, you know, it’s like if you, middle school dances are fine, you know, go ahead and bounce up and down to the music there, listening to romantic music, fine, but it needs to be in its appropriate place. Now my understanding, and here we’re getting back to the point of why the church would hold up Gregorian chant in the first place and also sacred polyphony, is that I think our pattern of worship and the way that the music engages the human person matches up perfectly there. We receive the pattern of worship from our Lord. It comes to our mind first and then flows down, just as the pattern of worship flows down through the centuries from Jesus, from on top, through the apostles, down to the church in a whole way. It fills our mind first with the truths of our faith, the truth of who Jesus is, the encounter with that person, and then makes its way down through the whole of the rest of us. We can also do a little bit of the romantic in there, right? And if it’s joined with the Apollonian, right, so we’ve got the head and the heart being moved by the same thing, like in that Musa Re Mei, right? It’s not like it was just playing with our emotions, but it was waiting for mercy from God and that passion being joined with the text. I think that works out pretty well. But because of the chaoticness of the dialysian mode of music, you won’t find much sacred music from the treasury of the church in that mode there. You won’t find much of that body music. It’s all much more head music, and then also some of that romantic mode of music there. So, does that make sense, everybody? Everybody following? That’s my interpretation of the council. Obviously, I’m not even a bishop, so I can’t force you to do that, but I hope I’ve made some good points and helped to convince you. So, what do we do now? What do we do now? Well, like I said, we’re not going to realize this vision overnight. You know, it’s really funny. You can go all the way back to kind of the high Middle Ages, and you will find documents from the pope and documents from the bishops saying, you know, we really need to be just sticking with the plain chant. We shouldn’t be introducing secular melodies into the church’s music. It should go with the ancient melodies, and it’s just been kind of a continual point, and probably basically continual wrestling between the bishops and the musicians. Not that that would ever happen here in the Diocese of Parnell. Yeah, so there’s always this innovation, and then there’s always this call back to the division of the church. We’re not trying to force things onto people here. So, what do I think you should do? I think in your musical selections, right, many of you will go back to your parishes. You’ll be tasked with selecting music, and you won’t be able to rule the parish with an iron fist, and I don’t think you should. Prioritize the Apollonian as much as you’re able to. I think we can do that. If you’re selecting the hymns that you’re using at your parish, you can prioritize certain things. It’s going to feed the intellect and the whole person besides there. So, I recommend old hymns. So, how many of you right now could stand up and recite an entire poem from memory? I’m not talking about pop music. I’m talking about poetry proper. Raise your hands if you could do that. We’ve got one, two, three, four. This is probably above average for any group of Americans. How many? A couple. A couple? Probably only a couple. Couple? Two. Two? Probably, yeah, a couple. Although, if you take hymn lyrics into account… I’m not taking poetry. Yeah, poetry. I’m talking something very specific and verified. You go to any classroom in the United States in the 1850s, the eight-year-olds there would be able to recite a whole bunch of poems. It was a part of the fabric of American life that we would force children to memorize poems. And they probably didn’t like it at the time, but guess what I didn’t like at the time? Being made to bathe every day. It turns out my mom forcing me to do that has made me socially acceptable. So, you know, sometimes you just got to make your kids do things. At that time we had this real culture of poetry in the United States where it was something that people shared freely. We didn’t have Netflix, we didn’t have YouTube, we didn’t even have high school sports in those days. So they shared poetry. And lots of people got really, really good at it. We had some real geniuses writing hymn lyrics in those days. I just don’t think we’ve got that same culture here anymore. You know, like you get the occasional Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, but there’s a lot more and all stuff out there. And it just doesn’t have the same intellectual heft about it. It doesn’t have the same depth to it, where you can come back to it over and over again and find something new ten years down the line like you can with a great poem or a great piece of literature. So I like the old hymns. And I think, you know, it’s not just being old, but I think you’re more likely to find that real depth there in the old hymns. And the second thing I would do is I would look at the antiphons when you are doing hymn selection. I know it’s very common to look at the readings for hymn selection. That’s fine. I’m not going to try and stop you from doing that. Take a look at the antiphons as well. Look at the entrance antiphon. Look at the communion antiphon. These are the texts that the Church is holding up to us for our consideration as an integral part of this liturgy. Every time that we do a hymn for our entrance or communion, we are replacing the antiphon with the hymn. But when we look at the liturgical books, it prioritizes the antiphon above all things. Because of this Apollonian nature, this is what we want you to meditate on and really embody inside yourself while you’re doing it. So in addition to looking at the readings, look at the antiphon. Maybe even look at the antiphon first and the reading second. You know, we’ve got a core of people here who really do believe in what the Church taught at Vatican II about Gregorian chant. People who really do love that and appreciate it. And we understand that we’re not at a point where we can just flip a button, deploy it, everybody’s going to be happy, this is going to work. Nobody thinks that. But if we’re able to just start taking little steps to educate people, to share with them the Church’s treasury of sacred music and to open that up for them, I think that we have the opportunity to at least plant a sapling here. You know, you plant a sapling and sometimes they don’t grow, that’s very sad. But even when they do grow, you’re not going to see that tree in its full glory for 20, 30 years. And that’s okay. We can do little steps to try and realize this vision of the Second Vatican Council in our parishes. So I think that’s about as much as I have. I think we’ve got about five minutes for questions. Does anybody have anything that they’re curious about? Well, as you can see, I’m no youngster anymore. I was around during the 70s and 80s. I guess my question is, how did we go kind of totally opposite with the way? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Well, you know, it was a lot of it. You know, we went practically to the sonic actually, you know, because that’s… I think I’ve just got to speculate because even answering that question well would take a long time and a lot of research. This Article 30 here, which I think is important, you know, to promote active participation, that people should be encouraged to take part by means of acclimations, responses, songody, antiphons, and songs, as well as by actions, gestures, and bodily attitudes. And at proper times, all should observe irreverent silence, right? And so this was, you know, that active participation. I think people with good intentions thought that the best way to encourage active participation would be to bring to them what’s familiar, to bring to them what’s popular as a way of bringing that. And as Father Kramer was talking about this morning, you know, probably a more effective way of doing that is to welcome people into the liturgy rather than bringing the liturgy down into pop culture, right? Pop culture isn’t always bad, but like liturgy and pop culture should be very different things. You know, I drive around with 103.3 on a lot, so it’s not like I’m against listening to popular music entirely, but I don’t want to bring 103.3 into the liturgy. And I think people disagreed with me on that, and that’s how we got the music that we got. It wasn’t, I’m not saying that it wasn’t necessarily bad, because I think the kids and stuff at that time, it kind of brought them kind of in. Just a big question. Yeah, it’s a big question. It’s almost like people stopped reading, to add the word active, and then it was like jump around, you know, but like there’s such a depth in the rest of that quote, and as we’re experiencing this weekend, it’s like going to the end. And silence. What’s the problem with that? A little bit of silence can go a long way, you know. And I’ve also heard from people who are top-level Latin scholars that this word active in the Latin might be more accurately translated as actual. So it’s like you have your acts participating in what’s going on with the action at the altar, right? So active, you know, especially in American English, means a lot of movements and busyness, you know. That’s what activity looks like. So that’s okay. You’re acting with the priest there. Okay. Do you have any book recommendations or anything? Spirit of the Liturgy, both by Gorgi and Ratzinger. They both wrote books called Spirit of the Liturgy. That one’s a classic. Actually reading Sacrosanct and Concilium. You know, it’s like people talk about that if you do all the time. Far fewer have actually sat down and really dove into… Now, don’t try and read everything, because, you know, like the decree on social communications was very relevant in 1964. Needs updating because the way we communicate is just so different now. But the four constitutions, Lumen Gentium, Dei, Variable, those are both… Those are probably the two most important. Sacrosanct and Concilium in the third place, and Gallaudet and Spez in the fourth place, I think. Actually just sitting down and reading it. Yeah, that should be plenty of reading. We can talk about it if you need more books. Okay, looks like we’ve got our two o’clock session coming up. So, thank you all for listening.