Our crazy pastor has us chanting more and singing fewer hymns.  Granted, at least most of it is in English, but still, hymn singing is part of Catholic tradition and the chant is so boring.  Give me a tune that I can hum any day.

Sincerely,

Kent Zingwell

Hymn singing is a venerable part of Catholic tradition, just not at Mass.

Believe it or not - your Rev. Know-It-All, though remarkably well preserved, is old enough to remember when we didn't sing hymns at Mass.

He also remembers when, in about 1962, we started the custom!  It came as a shock to many.  The only hymns at Mass were the Latin language sequences and the “Aspereges me” (“Sprinkle me , O, Lord”).

Most of the singing at Mass was the chanting of Bible verses.  Hymns were only sung at the recitation of the divine office, also called the breviary, and at devotions like Benediction, novenas etc.

Hymns were not part of Mass! 

I wish to preface the rest of my remarks with the following statement.

Protestants are, on the whole, lovely people.  They love the same Lord that I love and frankly, they are better at church suppers than most Catholic parishes (not the Italian ones, of course) and I don’t mean Scandinavian Lutheran church suppers that involve lutefisk.  That stuff is just unnatural.

Where was I?  Oh.... 

There are a lot of wonderful Protestants.  However, I am always bemused when Protestants try to look Catholic and Catholics try to look Protestant.  We are different for perfectly good reasons.  If I didn't think the Catholic Church was the church founded by Jesus through the ministry of the Apostles I would probably be a Methodist or something.  Remember I like good church suppers and I respect convinced Protestants.

I, however, am a convinced Catholic.  What has this to do with anything?  Allow me to proceed. 

After western civilization had its guts ripped out in the first and second world wars a lot of people thought the best way to unite broken western Christianity would be to remove everything offensive to Protestants.  They sang hymns, we would sing hymns.

Well it didn't work.  All it did was empty the churches.  We don't need to be popular.  We need to be faithful to who we are.  If we aren't faithful to our calling, we have nothing to offer anyone, Protestant or Catholic. 

Chanting is what we have always done at Mass.

Catholics breathe the Bible,  Yup, you read correctly.

We breathe the Bible.  Protestants may memorize it, but we breathe it.  Chanting is more like deep breathing than like singing.  The great majority of texts in the Mass are Bible texts.  There is really a lot more Bible at Mass than at most Protestant services.

If Sunday Mass is done right, there are eight (8) Bible passages:

Chanting goes all the way back to the days of the first Christians who learned it in their synagogues and in the temple.  Remember, they were almost all Jews.  They sang psalms and they used the melodies they had always used which probably had their roots in the times of the first temple 1,000 years before Jesus.  Some of the melodies you hear in a Catholic church would probably be recognizable to Jesus and the Apostles. 

Hymns are very important in Protestant worship.  Martin Luther, who founded Protestantism 500 years ago, was a law student who became a Catholic priest, but he was also a teacher and a song writer.  We still sing some of the tunes he wrote, like “A Mighty Fortress” and “Lo, How a Rose” — one of my favorites.  They are beautiful, but they are not Bible.  They are about the Bible, filtered through the songwriter’s theology.

It makes me crazy when someone wants to substitute a “meditation” hymn for the psalm after the first reading, or anywhere else for that matter.  Is a sentimental piece of mediocre poetry better than the Holy Scriptures?  Call me crazy, but I like the Bible better than pop culture theology.

So, Kent, sing all the hymns you want.  I’ll stick to the Bible.

Yours truly,

Rev. Know-It-All