By sacred music is understood that which, being created for the celebration of divine worship, is endowed with a certain holy sincerity of form. The following come under the title of sacred music here: Gregorian chant, sacred polyphony in its various forms both ancient and modern, sacred music for the organ and other approved instruments, and sacred popular music, be it liturgical or simply religious.
No kind of sacred music is prohibited from liturgical actions by the Church as long as it corresponds to the spirit of the liturgical celebration…
In permitting and using musical instruments, the culture and traditions of individual peoples must be taken into account.
- Musicam Sacram, 4, 9, 63
It entirely depends on the individual and what they respond to. I have many favorites – hip-hop, rap, pop, country, folk, classical, opera. So it’s not about genre for me… I’ve found that “familiar music,” or songs that you enjoy and know best, are the most effective for maximizing concentration.
- Harvard neuroscientist Srini Pillay, M.D.
A couple weeks ago, I had the honor of attending a talk entitled Embracing the Spiritual Mission of Music Ministry, hosted by the National Association of Pastoral Musicians (NPM). With me were Danielle and Peg Coles from the St. Bart’s choir, and my trusted colleague and best friend, Kathy Fritz. We were blessed to hear from three very accomplished practitioners in sacred music and liturgy: Fr. Austin Fleming, Margaret Felice, and Dr. Eric Bermani. What stood out for me as a common theme emphasized by all three was the weight of a music minister’s responsibility, and how the music must serve the liturgy, never making itself the main attraction.
I think all of us would agree that liturgical music must serve, and that it is not meant to be a performance. The tricky part is that everyone has a different idea of how to adhere to these principles. What sounds like performance to one parishioner may well be the thing that raises another parishioner’s mind to God. And while the Church has a rich history of liturgical music ranging from Gregorian chant to sacred polyphony, if you’ve been around the world (or even just the internet!) enough, you’d find that sacred music means so many different things to different people. As is evident from the epigraph above, the Church’s definition of “sacred music” is very broad, perhaps for good reason.
Consider this snippet of the Offertory procession at a particular Mass in Uganda:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxdQYSlFL6Q
Or, consider this rendering of Schubert’s famous Ave Maria by a mariachi band at a Mass in Santa Ana Catholic Church in Albuquerque, NM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkWUMojKel4
Or perhaps consider this snippet of one of my favorite worship songs, Tell the World of His Love, sung at Pope Francis’ Papal Mass during his visit to my home country, the Philippines, in 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAEg-sjrCE
The Mass was attended by 6-7 million people, making it the largest Papal crowd in history!
Of the many colorful styles of sacred music in this wide and diverse world, is there any particular style that distinguishes itself as innately more holy and better for Mass? Allow me to answer this question using the dialectical method employed by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae:
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Question: Is there a best style of music for Mass?
Objection 1. It seems that Gregorian chant is the best kind of music for Mass, for “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as especially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 116)
Objection 2. It seems, further, that Gregorian chant is a holier kind of music, as Fr. Chad Ripperger, a renowned exorcist and Thomistic theologian, notes the power of Gregorian chant to repel demons. Therefore, Gregorian chant must be a holier kind of music.
Objection 3. It seems that certain styles of music are not suitable for Mass. As then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writes, “On the other hand, there is pop music… aimed at the phenomenon of the masses… [it is] industrially produced and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. ‘Rock,’ on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship.” (The Spirit of the Liturgy, 148)
On the contrary, Pope St. John Paul II writes: “Contemporary compositions often use a diversity of musical forms that have a certain dignity of their own. To the extent that they are helpful to the prayer of the Church they can prove a precious enrichment.” (Tra Le Sollecitudini, 14).
I answer that, the liturgical propriety of any style of music (assuming its text is sacred in nature) is to be assessed primarily according to how effectively it raises a person’s mind to God. This is why “The Church also acknowledges new forms of art which are adapted to our age and are in keeping with the characteristics of various nations and regions. They may be brought to the sanctuary since they raise the mind to God, once the manner of expression is adapted and they are conformed to liturgical requirements.” (Gaudium et Spes, 13, emphasis mine) Adopting that as the primary parameter, we may respond to the above objections accordingly.
Reply to Objection 1. The preference for Gregorian chant is drawn from the preference for tradition. Notice the ceteris paribus provision, i.e. “other things being equal.” The assumption is that, all things being equal, traditional styles of music are more likely to raise the mind to God because they are already within the prevailing psychological schema of what parishioners are used to hearing in church. This is why the Church also states that “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 23) However, younger generations of parishioners do not have as firm a mental schema of how church music “ought to sound,” hence, what raises their minds to God may be quite different from that of preceding generations. In other words, the ceteris paribus provision clearly does not apply, i.e. the circumstances are in fact not equal. For this very reason, the Church tells composers that “[they], filled with the Christian spirit, should feel that their vocation is to cultivate sacred music and increase its store of treasures.” (Ibid., 121)
Reply to Objection 2. One must inquire as to the reasons to which Fr. Ripperger attributes the efficacy of Gregorian chant in repelling demons. He cites two reasons: 1) the sacred content of the chant, i.e. the words, and 2) the musical properties of beauty and order. Demons, after all, are revulsed by goodness, and as Thomas Aquinas writes, “Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally…” (Summa Theologiae, I q5 a4) Surely, we must recognize that every kind of music is at least beautiful to someone. And as a music theorist, I would point out that every style of music follows some systematic order, be it the melodic and rhythmic modes in Gregorian chant, the isorhythmic structure of the motets of Guillaume de Machaut, the invertible counterpoint in the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms’ developing variation, Milton Babbitt’s hexachordal combinatoriality, the Indian ragas, the slendro and pelog scales in Indonesian gamelan, and yes, the cyclical chord progressions in the songs of Taylor Swift and many other popular musicians – all these possess beauty and order. Thus, if the musical power to repel demons comes from a combination of sacred text, beauty, and systematically ordered sound, then it stands to reason that any kind of music that sets sacred text could potentially repel demons as effectively, or even more so, than Gregorian chant. It is therefore my professional opinion, both as a music theorist and church musician, that no kind of sacred music is inherently more or less holy than any other kind.
Reply to Objection 3. The third objection may be addressed like the first. To remain consistent with the Church’s instructions in the epigraph from Musicam Sacram, Ratzinger’s words must be interpreted in view of sensitivity to mental associations. To a parishioner who has lived in a time when the idiomatic elements of pop and rock music were nowhere heard in church and only in secular concerts, to hear the same in church would no doubt invoke only worldly sentiments and thus fail to raise that parishioner’s mind to God. However, this is no longer the case, especially for the younger generations who are more sensitized to hearing sacred music that draws on those elements which, at an earlier point in time, were only found in secular music. A similar case to Ratzinger’s was given in the 14th century by Pope John XXII, who advocated against the new compositions at the time, "For they sunder the melodies with hockets, loosen them with descants, trample them sometimes with three-part polyphonies and motets in the vernacular... For they run, they rest not; they fill ears with impertinence, and they relieve them not; they imitate gestures that which they have mustered, by which gestures devotion that is to be desired is contemned, and lasciviousness that is to be shunned is made manifest." (Litterae Decretales Extravagantes Communes Dictae) Later on, those musical devices, formerly associated with the secular music of the time, became common in much of the sacred music that followed, which the Church today regards as treasures of sacred polyphony. Had composers restricted themselves to so rigid a conception of sacred music, we would not have Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, and so on. Therefore, Ratzinger’s words, like those of Pope John XXII, must be interpreted contextually rather than indiscriminately.
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To conclude, I say that the best kind of music for Mass is whichever kind of music raises your mind to God. Granted, this differs from person to person – a hymn that doesn’t do that for you may be doing exactly that thing for the person next to you. And this is also why our music ministry at St. Joe’s provides three different “musical menus” for each of the three Sunday Masses with music (9:30am, 11:00am, 5:00pm). In the talk we attended, a participant asked, “How do I deal with having to sing songs that I don’t like?” One of the speakers, Margaret Felice, shared how she once had to sing a song she absolutely disliked, only to find that a woman approached her after Mass to convey how meaningful it was to her. Margaret now thinks of that woman every time she is tasked with singing a song she doesn’t exactly like. Then, Danielle, who was with us, added: “When there’s a song I don’t particularly like, I think that God put that song in there for someone else.” What Danielle doesn’t know is that in that moment, I whispered to my seatmate Kathy, “I need more people like that in my groups.” And I'll point out that when one conceives that God put a song in there for someone else, that in itself raises the mind to God.
With my peace,
Carlo Serrano, Music Director
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