The Recovering Choir Director

At least, that seems to be the implication of one individual’s comments, quoted verbatim below:

Speaking of the words of His Holiness on this subject, here are his words from that very homily [Washington D.C. Papal Mass]:

“Two hundred years later, the Church in America can rightfully praise the accomplishment of past generations in bringing together widely differing immigrant groups within the unity of the Catholic faith and in a common commitment to the spread of the Gospel. At the same time, conscious of its rich diversity, the Catholic community in this country has come to appreciate ever more fully the importance of each individual and group offering its own particular gifts to the whole. The Church in the United States is now called to look to the future, firmly grounded in the faith passed on by previous generations, and ready to meet new challenges — challenges no less demanding than those faced by your forebears — with the hope born of God’s love, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (cf. Rom 5:5).”

It seems to me that this was very much a case of “each…group offering its own particular gifts to the whole.” Or as His Holiness said in his message to the US Bishops: “Many of the people to whom John Carroll and his fellow Bishops were ministering two centuries ago had traveled from distant lands. The diversity of their origins is reflected in the rich variety of ecclesial life in present-day America.” Indeed.

If one were to assume, as the commenter does, that Pope Benedict’s homily also addressed the music contained within the liturgy for that day, how would one reconcile the Holy Father’s isolated statement above with all of his previous remarks on the Sacred Liturgy and its music? Two excerpts follow.

The first is from an address delivered in June 2006:

An authentic renewal of sacred music can only happen in the wake of the great tradition of the past, of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony.

For this reason, in the field of music as well as in the areas of other art forms, the Ecclesial Community has always encouraged and supported people in search of new forms of expression without denying the past, the history of the human spirit which is also a history of its dialogue with God.

The second is from his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in 2000 (more here, links and emphasis added below):

The writings of Plato and Aristotle on music show that the Greek world in their time was faced with a choice between two kinds of worship, two different images of God and man. Now what this choice came down to concretely was a choice between two fundamental types of music.

On the one hand, there is the music that Plato ascribes, in line with mythology, to Apollo, the god of light and reason. This is the music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness. It does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the senses, and it elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit. Thus this kind of music is an expression of man’s special place in the general structure of being. But then there is the music that Plato ascribes to Marsyas, which we might describe, in terms of cultic history, as “Dionysian”. It drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the senses. The way Plato (and more moderately, Aristotle) allots instruments and keys to one or other of these two kinds of music is now obsolete and may in many respects surprise us. But the Apollonian/Dionysian alternative runs through the whole history of religion and confronts us again today. Not every kind of music can have a place in Christian worship. It has its standards, and that standard is the Logos. If we want to know whom we are dealing with, the Holy Spirit or the unholy spirit, we have to remember that it is the Holy Spirit who moves us to say, “Jesus is Lord” (I Cor 12:3). The Holy Spirit leads us to the Logos, and He leads us to a music that serves the Logos as a sign of the sursum corda, the lifting up of the human heart. Does it integrate man by drawing him to what is above, or does it cause his disintegration into formless intoxication or mere sensuality? That is the criterion for a music in harmony with logos, a form of that logike latreia (reasonable, logos-worthy worship) of which we spoke in the first part of this book.

Can one safely assume that the Holy Father’s positive remarks about the American Church, cited by the commenter, may be applied justifiably to the music that in text, delivery, and arguably spirit replaced the propers for that day?