LET’S GET THIS RIGHT, LIBERALISM HAS AND STILL IS DRIVNG PEOPLE AWAY FROM THE CHURCH!

In an article at Crisis entitled “Do Conservatives Drive People Away from the Church”, the author makes several great points that it is untrue, that liberals, be they Catholic or Protestant, are the ones driving people away from the Church and have done so since liberal Protestantism’s embrace of modernism in the late 1800’s that inspired Protestant fundamentalism in the late teens and 1920’s. 

But what the author includes in his article is this on the liturgy. Enjoy:

 I am not, here, going to get into an argument about the traditional Latin Rite and the Novus Ordo. I will say two things, which may end up pleasing nobody, but I say them because I want to bring good and beautiful things to as many people as are ready to receive them. One is that the Novus Ordo, as I have seen it celebrated in most places, is underwhelming. It features clunky or stupid or heretical lyrics sung to hippity-hop show-tune melodies, or, incongruously, to a genuine hymn melody dragged into service, as if you might fit a portrait of St. Ronald McDonald into Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment. The ambience is chatty rather than joyful, slightly bored rather than solemn. Much of the action is performed, as it were, ad lib, as if it did not much matter how it is done, or even if it is done at all.

I have also witnessed the Novus Ordo celebrated both reverently and intelligently and filled with beautiful music, solemn ceremony, and devout prayer. I will freely grant that a pastor must go out of his way to do so: for one thing, it means getting rid of both the bad music and the show-off way in which it is presented to the audience, I mean, the congregation. But here I warn the traditionalists that people starved for beauty may need more help than a series of Latin chants can give them.  Chant melodies are horizontally difficult, and you lose the effect of singing a fine poem in your own language to a melody you can remember exactly.  

We must try to approach people where they are; and we should keep in mind that at least one of the aims of sacred music is akin to that of sacred poetry, that it should enter the memory and make it fruitful; it may thus be more than what you have heard, or even what in a special setting you have sung, but what you can hear in your mind’s ear ever after, and sing out when the Spirit moves you.  

It is good that the traditional rite is not approachable as a deli counter is. But it is also good if what is sung is approachable, indeed memorable in the strict sense, as the Psalms were for any faithful Hebrew who wished, in the quiet of his mind, to pray by singing. 

In general, though, the more sharply distinct the liturgy is from the mundane, the better. If you want lousy music, you don’t have to haul yourself to church to get it. It is readily available on the radio or the net. If you want superficial bonhomie, you can go to a park and get some sunshine and fresh air along with it. Eastern Rite churches are drawing people in droves, if for no other reason than that the rites are not like anything else in our usual experience, which, again, is singularly drab, even when drab comes in garish color.