The Recovering Choir Director

The article focuses on the visual arts, but it applies equally to music.

Every recent pope has spoken about the need for renewal of the arts in the Church. Paul VI, a man who enjoyed intimate friendship with artists and was a great lover of art, especially understood the difficulties involved. Speaking in 1974 to a group of artists gathered in the Sistine Chapel, he said:

Forgive us for having placed on you a cloak of lead. Then we abandoned you. We resorted to oleographs and works of little real or artistic value, our only justification being that we have not had the means of understanding great things, beautiful things, things worthy of being seen. We have walked along crooked pathways where art and beauty, and even worse, the worship of God have been badly served.

Paul VI was later to exhort artists to cease to be exiles waiting at the gates of the Church, to come in and find their true home, to discover their calling as prophets. He did not use the word lightly. All prophets have responded in various degrees of trepidation to their call. They understand the very human Jonah who sailed as fast as he could in the opposite direction. Yet in the boy Samuel and in the prophet Isaiah there is another kind of response. Samuel says, “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” And Isaiah, despite his “unclean lips,” cries out “Here I am, Lord, send me.” [Read on...]