In general the last two decades have seen an amazing resurgence of serious singing in many different venues, especially among young people. Given the efforts of various Catholic publishers and of groups like the National Pastoral Musicians, there now exists a liturgical repertoire with a high level of musical, literary, and theological quality and there are many places where congregation, cantor, and choir collaborate in shaping a liturgical experience where both soul and body sing.
In many places the guitar group and the keyboardist still bang out the hits of their youth, or the organist chooses some generic standards. A good many Catholics, on both ends of the ideological spectrum, found this a penitential experience. And so the guitar group led us in repurposed pop songs. Borrowing from the Protestants’ robust tradition of hymn-singing was possible-until we discovered that they were “thee-ing” and “thou-ing” away in what was distinctly not a contemporary vernacular. Other than Christmas carols, waltz tunes like “Bring Flowers of the Fairest,” and a few ethnic standards like “Holy God,” there was little Catholic repertoire in the vernacular. Admittedly, the challenge a half-century ago was daunting. The state of Roman Catholic music is also often questionable. One recent example relates how the priest’s words about his parishioner in the homily bungled some important details of the deceased’s life in another, the homily consisted of a theological reflection on purgatory and the importance of indulgences. Some of the stories that I hear are awful and, God help us, often seem to involve funerals. Surveys for years have shown that Roman Catholic preaching, with some exceptions, is still not that strong. Today that liturgical and ecclesial aggiornamento, to use the sixties term, has been called into question and in some cases even abandoned-and often with good reason. The first great result of that conciliar process was the approval of the Constitution on the Liturgy, which inaugurated the decade-long reform of the liturgical books of the Roman Rite, and the still longer process of their translation and adaptation to various cultures.
But then came Vatican II-it unfolded during my college years-bringing with it an education in how to deal faithfully with profound change through humble honesty, charitable discussion, and openness to the full riches of tradition. I was raised in the nineteenth-century fortress of immigrant Catholicism, where I learned, as my first foreign language, Latin the first music I sang in school was Gregorian chant, and I was twenty-one years old before I heard a word of English at Mass, other than the homily. The experience of my generation of American Roman Catholics is summed up in a remark attributed to Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich: “The risen Christ is always doing something new with his church.” In some eras that seems less obvious than in others.