The Recovering Choir Director

Miserachs: Vatican Entity Needed to Preserve Sacred Music

“Sacred music is not an aesthetical question, it is essential to the life of the Church: Lex orandi, lex credendi (as you pray, so you believe),” the priest said.

“In chapter 6, the dogmatic constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium says that it is good to promote popular forms of sacred music in keeping with modern sensibility, but without disregarding venerable Gregorian chant or classic polyphony,” he added.

Tradition and innovation in sacred music were already implied in Pius X’s 1903 motu propio on sacred music.

Father Miserachs also defended the need to safeguard Gregorian chant noting that “Gregorian chant is universal; it is an instrument of catholicity.” The maestro, a composer as well, added that “the composer of my homeland, Lluis Mollet, used to say that Gregorian and the popular repertoire are anonymous precisely because they have descended from heaven.”

Father Valenti Miserachs is president of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, an institution of an academic nature whose mission is to form, orient, and counsel students who come to Rome to learn Western liturgical music.

(Via Zenit.)