Status Updates From Why Catholics Can't Sing: T...

I can remember the days when the farmers and the laborers would come from miles around to attend Vespers in a Benedictine monastery.

Not long ago, in nearly every middle-class living room there was a piano… In today’s living rooms we find an elaborate stereo system, not a piano, and the children are much too busy with video games, text messaging, gymnastics classes, and so on to be bothered with piano lessons.

Of course, the unstated and thoroughly embarrassing fact here is that the people love packages and ribbons and gold and things they do not completely understand.

[Karl Rahner] states that … the sort of music identified with Christian worship for centuries, especially compositions by the great masters, is alien to true liturgy.

“Start from scratch,” he advised his students; the past has nothing to offer.

Rarely was there an atmosphere of deeply prayerful involvement.

they can instinctively detect “poor or altogether inappropriate selections of prayers, readings, and especially music,” which they might protest by not singing.

The liturgy often does not seem to proceed with its own inexorable logic; instead the sacramental Mass recedes into the background while, in the foreground, hospitality moments and musical “happenings” are aggressively prepared for your enjoyment.