Category: Liturgy and Music

Douglas LeBlanc kicked off this thread about bad church music at Get Religion back in March, but I get the feeling we’ll be enjoying the comments for some time to come.

The Australian media has obtained what appears to be a copy of ICEL’s draft for the new English Mass translation.
(Thanks to AAE and Fr. Keyes for the news.)

I was out of town over the weekend at a conference, and attended Sunday Mass at a seminary near the place. Later that day I went to visit a friend some miles away; he’s in a religious order and currently serving as a transitional deacon. We talked over pizza:
RC: Well, here’s the latest liturgical war story.
Bro: Oh, boy. What happened now?
RC: [pauses:] What’s the worst liturgical accident possible?

My wife was leaving daily Mass and overheard a woman telling our pastor something about “Dancing With the Psalms.”
Here’s the Sibleyan link to what she might have been talking about.
Check out the high-tech flip-chart action. The section about “Writing Original Psalms” looks promising as well.
And here’s a keeper from the section about how the program was developed:
“…when experimentation with LSD was banned…”

The Litany of the Saints – Chanted
And it wasn’t even close.
I know why some people like the Becker. It’s likable in the same way that Big Macs and Happy Meals are. It’s fun to perform if you crave theme songs from children’s shows. Clowns. Pandas. Big Colorful Banners. That’s what the Becker is.
The Chant – in English or in Latin – is a prayer, pure and simple. And prayerful people like to pray when then sing.
The Chant is praying twice.
The Becker is clanging – twice, twice, twice again.