Music For The Masses

The Pope’s here. Did you realize the Catholics too are torn in a worship war? You would think that a historical, hierarchical, traditional-to-a-fault church that dogmatically defines (again, to a fault) every detail of worship could avoid debates over “worship styles.” But no. In fact, as I know from experience, contemporary Catholic worship is even worse than contemporary Protestant worship, the songs even more banal and the music even more sappy. In further fact, at least one scholar (was it John Pless?) has traced the unravelling of traditional worship practices in all traditions, including those of Protestant evangelicals, and their replacement with contemporary modes to Roman Catholicism, specifically, to the worship “reforms” of Vatican II.

Anyway, here are some telliing lines from the article Between Medieval And Folk, Two Mass Audiences – washingtonpost.com:

Imagine a bizarro world where all the 25-year-olds want Mozart and all the 60-year-olds want adult-contemporary. The kids think the adults are too wild. The backlash against “Kumbaya Catholicism” has anyone under 40 allegedly clamoring for the Tridentine Mass in Latin, while the old folks are most sentimental about Casual Sunday (even more rockin’, the Saturday vigil Mass), and still cling to what’s evolved from the lite-rock guitar liturgies of the 1970s. The result, for most parishes, has been decades of Masses in which no one is entirely satisfied, and very few enjoy the music enough to sing along.