The following guest essay was written by Garrett Meyer. For many years, defenders of Gregorian chant have leaned heavily into Sacrosanctum Concilium, and there can be no doubt that the drafters of its chapter on sacred music were indeed committed to the primacy of chant. However, Meyer challenges us to rethink the implications of the phrase “ceteris paribus” and to ask whether this was not, in fact, a gentle kiss of death.—PAK
Catholics have become liberals, as it were, all the way up. We have all been “oppressed” with freedom (of the liberal sort) since at least Vatican II, if not the Fall. Religious freedom gets all the headlines, but sacred music suffers as well from what we might call inverted smothering. While a superficial reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium §116 [2] suggests otherwise, Catholics are indeed forced to refuse Gregorian chant true pride of place [3] in liturgical services. Let us carefully read every word of this disputed article:
The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.
When deploying Vatican II to boost Gregorian chant, conservative Catholics almost always omit the phrase, “other things being equal.” Barnes, to his credit, defends this clause with full-throated gravitas. For him, it belongs to “the nature of the Church, the people of God at liberty, by Grace, to determine whether or not other things are, indeed, equal.” [4] This is not the only instance of Barnes identifying the Church’s mission as something unusual—I’m looking at you, “Hats Off” [5]—but at least the act of hatting admits of many metaphorical meanings. The same cannot be said for determining-the-equality-of-other-things. Try finding a single synonym.
This phrase, ceteris paribus in Latin, is neither scholastic nor patristic nor biblical, but comes from liberal economic theory. [6] It is strange for Vatican II to slip in the expression, and stranger still for Barnes to double down on it. From John Stuart Mill [7] to Investopedia.com [8] to even the farmers Beth and Shawn Dougherty [9], it is applied to an economic law as a qualifier. It means that the pertinent rule only perfectly holds in a model, for it requires conditions to be so static that it would be unusual if the rule simply held true in relentlessly-dynamic reality. Even if “other things are equal” now, they never stay that way. The use of ceteris paribus thus reveals not just a simplification, but an oversimplification.
To show this, suppose that you are on a field trip for your economics class. You go out to a local farmer’s market, or car dealership, or megacorp boardroom. You see friends disregarding the sticker price and enemies insisting upon it. You return to your instructor and shout, “The law of supply and demand is no law at all!” He condescends to comfort you, saying, “My dear, dear child. The principle only applies ‘other things being equal’—and they were not.”
When it comes to Vatican II and SC §116, some Catholic commentators inflect the phrase differently, saying that the liturgical law holds even if other things are equal, not only if. In their minds, ceteris paribus is an insufficient disqualification, not a necessary precondition. Gregorian chant should thus always (or at least normally) hold pride of place.[10] Barnes’s co-authored “Manifesto of the New Traditionalism” seems to interpret things just this way: “According to the very constitution initiating these reforms, the Sacred Liturgy should emphasize … Gregorian chant.” [11] The Manifesto then laments, “How rarely this is accomplished!” and calls the liturgical reform “betrayed” (by whom it does not say). [12]
But in his New Polity letter, Barnes changes tack. He stresses that one should not be offended if “the people of God at liberty” determine that Gregorian chant deserves demotion, precisely because of ceteris paribus. The reason that he appears a conservative in one instance, and a progressive the next, is not that he is flip-flopping. Indeed, he is one of the most radically consistent men which I have had the pleasure to meet. His honesty is indeed why I do not quite believe his gracious excuse for my own rash misreading—namely, that he co-wrote a document which misrepresented his own views, a slipup made possible because he “is not, say, a bishop in council.” [13] He would not sign something he did not believe, and he would retract it if he did. With great trepidation, therefore, I accuse Barnes of dancing around on the stage of liberalism, instead of his happier pastime (and greatly needed service) of ripping it up plank-by-plank.
Here is my evidence: If you grant that ceteris paribus in SC §116 means anything at all, then you are already a liberal. For you have made the deserved place of Gregorian chant not a consequence of its inner nature, but an imposition (however benevolent) from without. Progressives maintain that the environments which afford Gregorian chant pride of place are rare, conservatives complain that they are common, and Barnes is content so long as the Church determines them. But no group questions that ontologically violent presupposition which says that the honor due to a thing flows not from what it is, but only from what the context makes it. Should Gregorian chant be given pride of place in liturgical services of the Roman Rite? The postliberal says, “yes,” while the liberal says, “it depends.”
This is the more believable interpretation of SC §116, not just because of the aforementioned etymology and my testimony (as well as my once-corrected-but-still-surely-incomplete interpretation of Barnes). [14] It just makes more sense of the historical data. What did Catholics by-and-large do from 1969 to this day? A few one-off parishes continue to plainchant [15], but the rest promptly and completely forgot all of it—that is to say, a liberal prescription was applied liberally in a liberal world. I was delighted that a simple tone Salve Regina broke out one night of the inaugural New Polity conference. Barnes and I seem to agree that this was an oddity among collections of Catholic men because of SC §116, not despite it. [16]
Our common ground, however, quickly gives way to questions which neither Barnes nor I can answer. What are these “other things” which must be equal for Gregorian chant to deserve pride of place? “Equal” to what? How close is close enough to constitute equality? How frequently must we check? Who decides? Thankfully, we lay Catholics are not on our own in interpreting the passage. The most extensive exegesis from the Magisterium comes the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2007:
73. The “pride of place” given to Gregorian chant by the Second Vatican Council is modified by the important phrase “other things being equal.” These “other things” are the important liturgical and pastoral concerns facing every bishop, pastor, and liturgical musician. In considering the use of the treasures of chant, pastors and liturgical musicians should take care that the congregation is able to participate in the Liturgy with song. They should be sensitive to the cultural and spiritual milieu of their communities, in order to build up the Church in unity and peace. [17]
This may feel more solid, but, intentionally or not, the ambiguity remains. The bishops could be implying that only Gregorian chant allows a congregation to participate with song in the Roman Rite; that it alone responds sensitively to the depraved cultural and parched spiritual milieu of our communities; and that it is uniquely capable of building up Church unity. However “based” the kids might find this interpretation, it is a strained one. If it were true, the “pride of place” given to Gregorian chant would not need to be “modified” in the first place. [18] Rather, our bishops most likely anticipated Gregorian chant as an obstacle to the full participation of the faithful, an insensitivity to modern needs, and a disturbance of the peace, and so duly qualified it to impotence.
We cannot blame the USCCB if, in their equivocal statements, they allow Gregorian chant to be considered a stumbling block. Certainly, they needed to accommodate the unequivocal statements of Pope Saint Paul VI. In 1969, six years after Sacrosanctum Concilium and just prior to the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, Paul VI gave a frank address to the pious people disturbed most by the impending changes:
8. It is here that the greatest newness is going to be noticed, the newness of language. No longer Latin, but the spoken language will be the principal language of the Mass. The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power and the expressive sacrality of Latin. We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.Notice what Paul VI is and is not asserting here. He did not want Gregorian chant to simply stop being sung. Indeed, in 1974, he sent a booklet with some of the easiest chants to every bishop in the world for the edification of the faithful. [20] His sacrifice was much more subtle. Paul VI redefined Gregorian chant to be an impediment to modern man, in lieu of precisely what modern man, once converted, was to sing. The ancient custom was no longer a tradition, to be faithfully received and passed down, but a left-handed tool that no longer suited the understanding or participation of a right-handed world. Gregorian chant could still be sung within the Roman Rite, but no longer as the Roman Rite.
9. We have reason indeed for regret, reason almost for bewilderment. What can we put in the place of that language of the angels? We are giving up something of priceless worth. But why? What is more precious than these loftiest of our Church's values?
10. The answer will seem banal, prosaic. Yet it is a good answer, because it is human, because it is apostolic.
11. Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more—particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech. [19]
Paul VI rhetorically asked, “If the divine Latin language kept us apart from the children, from youth, from the world of labor and of affairs, if it were a dark screen, not a clear window, would it be right for us fishers of souls to maintain it as the exclusive language of prayer and religious intercourse?” [21] This question assumes the worldview of the world, wherein “divine” things can bar bishops from helping the rest of men. In granting this anti-Incarnational premise, Paul VI trusted not in the philosophy of Aristotelian-Thomism, but of Coca-Cola.
Within fourteen months of Paul VI’s self-professed “grave change” [22], Coca-Cola and ad agency executives hatched one of the most famous television advertisements of all time. [23] They wrote: “On a hilltop in Italy, we assembled young people from all over the world…” to sing these lilting words:
I’d like to buy the world a homeThe advertisement presents attractive youth of all sexes, races, and dress united in Italy (of all places!) by one creed, actively participating in a perfectly intelligible English song about a soft drink. This is the diabolical inversion of the vision of Isaiah:
And furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtle doves
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company.
It’s the real thing. Coke is…what the world wants today. [24]
And in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it. (Isaiah 2, 2)
From its fleeting molehill of monetary profit, the world mercilessly mocked the Church as failing to accompany the young, failing to unite the common man, and failing to understand “the real thing.” And Paul VI in some sense agreed.
With the blame squarely cast upon Latin, Paul VI’s solution was not to replace Gregorian chant with any one genre. The sacrificial victim becomes holy by the very law of God, and no other goat can be substituted for the scapegoat. [25] Rather, he presumed that dethroning Gregorian chant as the chief musical expression of Roman Catholicism would clear the way for a democratic invigoration of the entire religion. In the same 1974 booklet advocating for a “minimum repertoire of plain chant,” the Vatican encouraged bishops to encourage the musically-inclined to pick up the slack:
When vernacular singing is concerned, the liturgical reform offers “a challenge to the creativity and the pastoral zeal of every local church.” Poets and musicians are therefore to be encouraged to put their talents at the service of such a cause, so that a popular chant may emerge which is truly artistic, is worthy of the praise of God, of the liturgical action of which it forms part and of the faith which it expresses. [26]
After 50 years, I compare the glory of Gregorian chant, just now being rediscovered, with the “popular chant” that Paul VI attempted to summon into existence, and wonder if a mistake was made. Paul VI sacrificed a real thing to first allow, then “challenge,” then require his flock to invent a new thing. Thus, he could not praise the tradition as such, but only insofar as it historically served the private goals of understanding and participation—goals which, in his mind, were far better served today by the chosen genres of “every local parish.”
The immediate successor to Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, came tantalizingly close in 2003 to reinstating Gregorian chant as the template for sacred music. He said:
12. With regard to compositions of liturgical music, I make my own the “general rule” that St Pius X formulated in these words: “The more closely a composition for church approaches in its movement, inspiration and savour the Gregorian melodic form, the more sacred and liturgical it becomes; and the more out of harmony it is with that supreme model, the less worthy it is of the temple”. [27]
Though this rule is made “general” (scare quotes per the Vatican website), it remains shockingly illiberal. Gregorian chant itself—down to its simple, monophonic, free-rhythm “melodic form”—is held up as the exemplary cause of all sacred music. If John Paul II had extended his quotation of Pope Saint Pius X, he would have effectively abrogated SC §116: “The ancient traditional Gregorian Chant must, therefore, in a large measure be restored to the functions of public worship.” [28]
But John Paul II did not say this. Instead, he continued:
It is not, of course, a question of imitating Gregorian chant but rather of ensuring that new compositions are imbued with the same spirit that inspired and little by little came to shape it. [29]Anyone seeking a return to Gregorian chant as such is thus rebuffed by a fiery sword. We can even imagine John Paul II as lamenting this exile, but he admits no power to end it. In this new world, “of course” the plain meaning of Pius X’s rule cannot hold. The “spirit” of Gregorian chant remains to be imitated, but its sharply distinguished letter has been relegated to out of the question.
Lament for paradise lost can easily give way to anger at the intransigence of “restorers.” How dare someone today compose a new free rhythm Gradual? Who lacks the pastoral heart or musical skill to go beyond merely “imitating Gregorian chant”? A man can press on and still sing a plain old Sanctus XVIII, but no longer is he doing so in humble obedience to Rome. Instead, it is borderline selfishness, filling the air with a dead language that few—perhaps not even he!—understands. If Gregorian chant itself is opposed to modern man’s active participation, then how much more so a lofted Latin schola which includes only the diligent or the talented?
The victory of liberalism over Roman sacred music comes into view. Gregorian chant appears no longer good for the whole body of Christ. Instead, it is of varying degrees of usefulness to individual Christians in each’s musical quest to understand and participate. It is hard for me, American that I am, not to see this as the outworkings of the American Revolution.
In The Politics of the Real, D.C. Schindler proposes that the Declaration of Independence installed “ ‘Nature’s God’ as the sovereign principle of the new political order. This is a God defined specifically abstracted from any particular, i.e., actual, tradition so as to be potentially available to any and all of them.” [30] What Schindler says of the American Revolution and traditions broadly construed seems to apply, with only slight tailoring, to Vatican II and sacred music:
It represents the liberation of all possibilities, the inclusiveness of all possible traditions and cultures—within certain minimal constraints (the tradition one chooses for oneself cannot disrupt the public order, it cannot threaten public safety, it cannot harm others or exclude their own cultural expressions.) The point is that all of the contents of tradition can be affirmed, but now only in a new form, as not traditional, no longer representing something that precedes me as an authority and entails a claim on me prior to any choice I might make. All traditions are welcome—indeed, the greater diversity of traditions the better, since a single tradition would inexorably tend to take on a traditional form. But they are welcome only as “neutralized,” as various species of “tradition” in general that present themselves now as objects of choice, submitted to the only actual authority in play—reason as exercised by the private individual. [31]It may be the case that Schindler’s argument can only hold because Roman Catholicism and liberalism are each totalizing forms, while Gregorian chant is not. Pope Boniface VIII declared, stated, and defined that “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff,” [32] not “that every human creature sing Tantum Ergo.” But we should expect that if liberalism is, in fact, a societal form, it is re-presented fractally within every subdomain of human activity, and analogies from subworld to world can hold water.
In the analogy, the SC §116 places Gregorian chant in the same liberal domain as the Declaration places the true God. A pastor cannot settle the liturgy wars—as a true authority could—because he himself is recast as just one more private individual taking a side. These wars have resulted in statistically less Gregorian chant, instead of more, because Gregorian chant fails to meet Paul VI’s new “minimal constraints”: music cannot disrupt public participation (analogous to order) nor threaten public understanding (analogous to safety).
Each citizen within a parish’s boundaries (not just the fraction that attend Mass) has similar veto power over traditional music in the sanctuary as he does over religious direction in the neutral public square. In both cases, this veto is made stronger by his absence, since a music minister or state representative can more easily indict custom by pointing to an empty chair than to a man. Once living, breathing people are involved, piety sometimes wins.
Coming to the present day, it seems that Pope Francis has reaffirmed the private ability to negate tradition and neglected the corporate strength required to live it. In revoking Summorum Pontificum, Francis indicated that bishops should “discontinue the erection of new personal parishes tied more to the desire and wishes of individual priests than to the real need of the ‘holy People of God.’ ” [33] Francis frames the Traditional Latin Mass, so intimately bound to Gregorian chant, as nothing more than a hobby of individual priests that today competes with the unity of the Church. Anyone who maintains love for it is thereby suspected of schism. Barnes himself makes no excuses for the “dissent, disobedience, and sedevacantist playacting that characterizes the traditionalist movement today” (emphasis mine). [34] In his letter, Barnes does not praise Gregorian chant above the liberty to refuse it. Within liberalism, no one can.
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In the place of allegiance to actual traditions, liberalism ushers in all traditions in potentia. Likewise, after SC §116 supposedly elevates Gregorian chant, it states the following:
But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action, as laid down in Art. 30.
This neutralizes the (already hopelessly hypothetical) “pride of place” due to Gregorian chant should it somehow spill over from potency to actuality, from bridesmaid to bride, and root itself in that highest of liturgical celebrations, the Mass. [35] Just how married are you to a particular woman if you “by no means” forsake any other? When you appear to compliment your lawfully-wedded wife, do you take pains to reassure other women of your continued favor? Even the holiest saint on Earth cannot sing both the Introit and the St. Louis Jesuit’s “Let us build the City of God” [36] at the same time. One genre must be excluded, and only one option (by its membership in the set of “kinds of sacred music” other than Gregorian chant) merits Vatican II’s protection from exclusion.
To clarify the marriage metaphor, it is not every soul on earth that should be wed to Gregorian chant. Rather, it is the Roman Rite which was historically, culturally, and theologically wedded to Gregorian chant till death. And who has checked in on the widower since his house fell silent? Liturgists of both conservative and progressive persuasions concur that the traditional Roman Rite was “destroyed” in the making of the new, [37] but this will nonetheless seem exaggerated to those unfamiliar with all that changed in 1969. I include Dr. Barnes in this category because of the attempt in his letter to backhandedly compliment traditionalists. He wrote that traditionalists’ local parish “could probably use their knowledge of the propers,” [38] but I can assure him that devotees of the 20th-century Tridentine Mass do not know the Novus Ordo propers in the first place. Only 13% of the 1,273 rotating orations of the traditional Roman Missal were preserved intact in the “flood,” [39] and precious few readings were left in their original place in the impossible-to-memorize triennial lectionary.
I know that reform-of-the-reformers such as Barnes earnestly wish to hear Gregorian chant again fill the sanctuaries of the Roman Church. But the Council Fathers gave and Paul VI confirmed an infinitely wide cop-out which we laity cannot rescind. What is worse is that we liberals, more than anything, love “keeping our options option.” We felt privileged rather than slighted to honor Gregorian chant with our fingers crossed behind our back. Where before there was a gold standard of sacred music, now there is a free market, with every individual as the arbiter of value.
It takes considerable virtue to deny such license. Suppose that a father of a bride makes a solemn request to his soon-to-be son-in-law: “Take care of my baby girl.” The groom starts to promise, “I will”, but the father continues, “other things being equal, of course.” Would not the righteous man, in a fit of offended chivalry, reject this interposed condition, saying “no, sir, other things being damned!”
It is with this degree of fervor that I wish for the Roman Catholic Church to un-sacrifice Gregorian chant, relinquishing in totality the potential to conjure up something better. Restoring Gregorian chant to true pride of place would in fact exclude other worthy genres such as polyphony, motets, and hymns from occupying the exact same honor. However, I grant D.C. Schindler’s point that “there is no going back” to simply reproducing the old pre-liberal forms. [40] Recommending that every smartphone-wielding Catholic download the free app Chant Tools [41] will not fix things to God’s satisfaction, but I suspect that seeing again the good of Gregorian chant might do the trick.
I myself cannot teach the depths of this good, but I can defend chant as not evil. Gregorian chant is a wonderful gift of “priceless worth” [42] (as Paul VI affirmed) because by its nature it fosters actual participation and understanding of prayer (as Paul VI denied). If it did not so augment the faith of all, it would not have “priceless worth” in the first place, nor would Pope St. Pius X have described active participation by the laity as precisely contingent upon it in his 1903 command: “Special efforts are to be made to restore the use of the Gregorian Chant by the people, so that the faithful may again take a more active part in the ecclesiastical offices, as was the case in ancient times.” [43]
A mere sixty years later, Vatican II required the Church to forever look this gift horse in the mouth, rather than ride it roughshod over Her spiritual enemies. SC §116 may at first seem to level the sacred music playing field for the benefit of all men, but it only succeeds in erecting the prison of human opinion. Within it, Satan holds our musical dowry from the ancient fathers, our patrimony from St. Gregory the Great, the crown of the crown of all sacred art, behind illusory gates constructed of our own pride. No one should prize the “freedom” to respect the liberal mirage.
[1] Barnes, Letters, New Polity Issue 3.1
[2] https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html
[3] I believe that “chief place” is a better rendering of the original Latin, principem locum, but the translation on the Vatican website, when read charitably, conveys the same sentiment.
[4] Barnes, Letters, New Polity Issue 3.1
[5] https://newpolity.com/and-another-thing-feed/hats-off
[6] I am sure that there is a better story here than I can tell. Can it be a coincidence that, per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the words ceteris paribus were scarcely used between Cicero and Luis de Molina, those two bookends of Christendom?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ceteris-paribus/index.html#ref-1
[7] “John Stuart Mill used the explicit phrase ‘ceteris paribus’ only occasionally but it had an important impact because he characterized economy by its way of coping with disturbing factors: ‘Political economy considers mankind as solely occupied in acquiring and consuming wealth […] not that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind is really thus constituted […] when a concurrence of causes produces an effect, these causes have to be studied one at a time, and their laws separately investigated […] since the law of the effect is compounded of the laws of all the causes which determine it.’” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ceteris-paribus/index.html#ref-7
[8] “The difficulty with ceteris paribus is the challenge of holding all other variables constant in an effort to isolate what is driving change. In reality, one can never assume ‘all other things being equal.’” https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/ceterisparibus.asp
[9] “Now, food independence is a great goal, and all things being equal we’d love to reach for it, but given all the demands already made on our time, is it realistic to imagine that we can keep a dairy cow?” Considering the Family Cow: Why you want one and what it takes, page 8, Beth and Shawn Dougherty, 2021.
[10] December 04, 2007 “Ceteris Paribus: proving the principle or undermining it?,” Jeffrey Tucker. New Liturgical Movement.
“What does Ceteris Paribus mean?“ New Liturgical Movement, December 12, 2008; “What does Sacrosanctum Concilium 116 really say?,” Fr. Z’s Blog, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, 23 May 2012
[11] https://gaudiumetspes22.com/blog/a-manifesto-of-the-new-traditionalism
[12] Nor does the Manifesto say why, in its words, “the liturgy was unable to develop organically in this [the modern] era, all while Christian culture endured centuries of militant secularism and industrialization.” This sounds much like the liturgy was “smothered by an oppressive, institutional body,” since it would be hard to argue that the Church was not in control of Her own liturgy for hundreds of years. The New Traditionalists may be as guilty of liberalism as the Old.
[13] Barnes, Letters, New Polity Issue 3.1
[14] We are joined by other interpreters of various philosophical stances:
- Summing up Joseph Gelineau’s position, Anthony Ruff states that “in effect chant has priority only when other factors do not overweigh, such as ‘functional value, or pastoral concern regarding the language employed, and also regarding the adaptation of the melodies to the capabilities of the assembly, etc’.” Ruff, Anthony. Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform: Treasures and Transformations (Chicago, IL: Liturgy Training Publications, 2007), 321-332
- Joseph Swain states “The famous qualifier ceteris paribus (other things being equal) makes its appearance here to accommodate local conditions that might obstruct the use of plainchant or warrant its replacement by something more suitable for the sacred liturgy. In the light of both the theoretical nature of plainchant and the experience since the council, it is difficult to imagine what these conditions might be in any general case. The American Gospel Mass, sung where the local people have grown up with an alternative musical language owning a true sacred semantic, might be judged a situation where ‘other things’ outweigh the Gregorian advantages of biblical Mass propers specific for each Sunday: a universal and neutral language and a musical means to connect with the rest of the world.” Swain, Joseph P. Sacred Treasure: Understanding Catholic Liturgical Music (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 321.
[15] “A few” is very likely less than 1 in 20, based on a straw poll of ReverentCatholicMass.com and some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the number of parishes listed versus the total parishes in the United States..
[16] Conservatives may be right when they assert that Msgr. Johannes Overath and the Council Fathers did not intend this outcome. I, however, cannot read the hearts of the Council Fathers, but only their words. Nor can I change what those words mean. If their words misrepresent their will, I require another word from them (or their successors) to know this.
[17] “Sing to the Lord: Music in Divine Worship“: Guidelines developed by the Committee on Divine Worship. Approved by USCCB on November 14, 2007.
[18] The bishops’ intent to qualify any deference to be paid to chant, rather than boldly promote it, is also seen in their footnote citing the Vatican’s 1967 Instruction on Music in the Liturgy Musicam Sacram, which they write “further specifies that chant has pride of place ‘in sung liturgical services celebrated in Latin.’”
[19] “Changes in Mass for Greater Apostolate,” Pope Paul VI, Address to a General Audience, November 26, 1969
[20] Congregation for Divine Worship, Jubilate Deo, 1974.
[21] Ibid., “Changes.”
[22] Ibid., “Changes.”
[23] The executives were quite explicit in their desire to fill the “niche” of uniting the world: “So that was the basic idea: to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be — a liquid refresher — but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes… Davis slowly revealed his problem. ‘Well, if I could do something for everybody in the world, it would not be to buy them a Coke.’ Backer responded, ‘What would you do?’ ‘I’d buy everyone a home first and share with them in peace and love,’ Davis said. Backer said, ‘Okay, that sounds good. Let’s write that and I’ll show you how Coke fits right into the concept.’” “Creating ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.’”
[24] Coca-Cola, 1971 - ‘Hilltop’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VM2eLhvsSM
[25] To this day, Catholics are associated only with Gregorian chant despite its disuse and disfavor among them. Steve Martin, a comedian and agnostic, sings in a 2019 song “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs”: “Catholics dress up for Mass and listen to Gregorian chants. Atheists just take a pass, watch football in their underpants.” Steve Martin and The Steep Canyon Rangers, Rare Bird Alert, 2019, Universal Music Group,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byPVyKBlosw
[26] Jubilate Deo, ibid.
[27] November 22, 2003. Chirograph of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II For the Centenary of the Motu Proprio “Tra Le Sollecitudini” on Sacred Music. In-text citation: Moto Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini, n. 3, p. 79.
[28] Nov 22, 1903 Motu Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini, Pope Pius X, n. 3. Pius X’s word choice of “restored” dispels any false history of a pre-Vatican II “golden age” for Gregorian chant. We can grant Mike Lewis’s point in his article “Gregorian chant and the post-Vatican II liturgy” that chanters today may be more competent, or even more in love with chant, than before. However, consistent with my argument, Pius X also said the word “must” without qualification, insisting on a moral obligation which was turned inside out post-Vatican II.
[29] Chirograph of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II For the Centenary of the Motu Proprio “Tra Le Sollecitudini” on Sacred Music.
[30] Page xvii, The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism. D.C. Schindler, New Polity Press, Steubenville, OH, 2021
[31] Ibid., p. 57.
[32] Bull Unam Sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302.
[33] Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the whole world, that accompanies the Apostolic Letter Motu Proprio Data “Traditionis Custodes” 16 July 2021
[34] Barnes, Letters, New Polity Issue 3.1
[35] Out of my own ignorance, I am neglecting the impact of the loss of Gregorian chant on the Divine Office. I presume it to be great.
[36] Dan Schutte, “City of God”
[37] “At this critical juncture, the traditional Roman rite, more than one thousand years old, has been destroyed.”
- Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy, K. Gamber ( Harrison, N.Y.,1993), p. 99. “Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.” [Gelineau, Demain la liturgie: essai sur l’évolution des assemblées chrétiennes, Éditions du Cerf , Paris, 1976 pp. 9-10.]
[38] Barnes, Letters, New Polity Issue 3.1
[39] Rotating orations defined as “collects, secrets/super oblata, postcommunions and super populum,” excluding prefaces, hymns, and sequences. (October 01, 2021, “All the Elements of the Roman Rite”? Mythbusting, Part II, Matthew Hazell, New Liturgical Movement)
[40] Politics of the Real, p. 37
[41] https://bbloomf.github.io/jgabc/propers.html
[42] Paul VI, “Changes.”
[43] Tra le Sollecitudini
