Luke Mohan’s Reviews > Why Catholics Can't Sing: Revised and Updated With New Grand Conclusions and Good Advice > Status Update

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

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.

Blended music for a liturgy might begin with a classic hymn; a favorite by the St. Louis Jesuits might come next; Catholic contemporary songs at Communion time; and then another classic hymn to send people home. Blending styles sounds like an astute compromise, but sometimes the contemporary enthusiasts hate this arrangement because "Churchy" music, presented well, always makes their items sound anemic by comparison.

I wonder if the great majority of Catholic laypeople sense [perhaps unconsciously] that the theology behind the music is confused at best, and to protect the orthodoxy of the Church they frequently refrain from singing.