The Folk Mass Fraud

 

Many lament that, in possession of the world’s richest musical heritage, the Catholic Church has since the 1970s insisted instead on the “folk mass.”

I love folk music. I resent the term being misapplied here. A folk mass would be great. The music of the modern mass is not folk music.

It is supposed to be. Musicam Sacram, issued in 1967 in the wake of Vatican II, called for “adapting sacred music for those regions which possess a musical tradition of their own.” That was the charter from which this has emerged. And there is a rich North American tradition of sacred music. There is a rich European tradition of sacred music. There is a rich African, African-American, and Caribbean tradition of sacred music. Real folk music is religious. Just pull out any old folk album: the religious element is obvious, and must be a puzzlement or an embarrassment to all the modern lefties who are also folkies. “By the Rivers of Babylon”; “Wayfaring Stranger”; “Go Tell It on the Mountain”; “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” It’s all either overtly religious or conveys a moral lesson. 

But instead of drawing on this tradition directly, new songs were composed hastily by a small body of men, the St. Louis Jesuits. This is by definition the opposite of folk music.

While real folk music is generally emotionally profound, these new songs were Tin Pan Alley superficial. 

O city of gladness, now lift up your voice.

Proclaim the good tidings that all may rejoice!

 

I guess I experienced the height of it when, walking past a church in Syracuse in 1978 or so, I heard the carillon chime out the tune to John Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders.”

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy

Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry

Sunshine on the water looks so lovely

Sunshine almost always makes me high

 

It is all so blandly cheerful. Compare any real folk or gospel song:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 

Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. 

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

 

Or:

I am a poor wayfaring stranger

Travelling through this land of woe.

And there's no sickness, toil or danger

In that bright world to which I go.

 

Why are we stuck with music at the level of The Archies singing “Sugar, Sugar” in the very presence of the great mystery of the ages? Why did we deliberately reject existing beauty, even against the Vatican recommendation, for mediocrity?

I look up the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ official Guidelines for Liturgical Music. It quotes, in turn, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal to say “singing is the sign of the heart’s joy.” 

Aha. Is it? Anyone who is familiar with folk music, is your typical folk song unrelentingly cheerful? Isn’t there a reason why “the blues” is called “the blues”? For that matter, is your typical piece of classical music? Mendelssohn is generally consigned to the second tier of classical composers precisely because his music is too cheerful.

The bishops continue: “It arises from joy and, if we look closer at it, from love. Singing and making music belong to lovers.” The General Instructions vaguely cites St. Augustine as their authority here, but without quoting him to that effect; and the writings they do cite seem to say nothing like this.

People who see art as no more than entertainment are people who are spiritually shallow. A blues musician would say that they have no soul.

 “The foremost reason for all song during the liturgy,” the document goes on to maintain, “is to give praise and thanks to God.” The idea is enshrined in the title of the common Catholic hymnal, Glory and Praise. Happy, happy, joy, joy. 

But wasn’t there something in the mass about dying on a cross, about mea maxima culpa, about mercy, about prayers and petitions, about turning from sin, about drinking blood and eating flesh? If the bishops as a body really think the mass is a celebration of all creation as it is, we have a deeper problem than the music.

To be satisfied with the world as it is, with sunshine on your shoulder, to say that we are right now in “the city of gladness,” is the opposite of the Christian message. It is a surrender to the first of the three great temptations, “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” I suspect it is a surrender to all three: what the hallelujah chorus attitude wants most, I suspect, is to deny the existence of sin.

It is a message that would appeal to Dives, not Lazarus.