The Recovering Choir Director

Fr. Rob Johansen weighs in on all the madness.

I’m all for creativity, properly understood and directed. Certainly the Church has been the beneficiary of an incredibly rich outpouring of creative effort throughout the ages. Our churches have been adorned with some of the finest efforts of artistic creativity ever acheived by Man. Our worship has been solemnized with much of the most glorious and moving music ever written. But those artists and composers all attempted to work within tradition, both the theological and liturgical Tradition of the Church, and the tradition they received in musical technique and composition. Thus the Mass settings of Victoria and Bruckner, though written centuries apart, and in markedly different styles, nonetheless share a common informing spirit. All great art is the product of, and in some sense is subject to, some form of discipline. Great sacred art emerges from the discipline of the Faith of the Church, and its incarnation, the Liturgy. [emphasis added]