There is controversy over whether liturgical music should include pianos. Is the piano a perfectly valid and equally good choice, or is it too profane for the Mass?
Knowing that this issue can set off a firestorm of opinion on both sides, we may be better served to first examine Catholic principles of beauty and sacred music as presented clearly by the Church. The way to respect pastoral musicians who may disagree with this perspective, as well as meet people with their preferences in the pews, is a deeper consideration of Catholic musical principles and the Church’s guiding documents on the matter.
It seems that most Catholics, including most parish priests, are unaware that the Church provides clear and abiding guidance on music style, performance, and instrumentation, centered on a clear musical tradition reaching back toward the time of the Church Fathers.
Despite this guidance and the clear wishes of the Second Vatican Council, our international liturgical musical landscape has become more of an anarchic wasteland dominated by amateurism. Yet there are small oases of musical quality which have emerged much to the credit of their liturgical communities, and we can follow their lead in considering what the Church truly desires of pastoral musicians.
Quality and the Catholic Musical Ideal
We begin with the idea of musical quality. For the Christian, musical quality is not aesthetically or culturally relative. Rather, from East to West and across many centuries, the pre-conciliar Church cultivated a musical tradition uniquely suited to its worship, and in the process developed a stylistically diverse yet unified musical tradition.
Sacred art and music are not “just aesthetic preferences” for the liturgy, nor are they mere ornamentation (and therefore interchangeable taste-based accompaniments) for the Mass. As Cardinal Robert Sarah recently wrote in The Song of the Lamb,
one commonly held idea of art in general, and music in particular, is that it serves an ornamental function. Art, in this view, is an addition to beautify what is made; it does not, in fact, touch the essence of the thing to be embellished. . . .
But this conception reveals a superficial understanding of artistic work and creation from various points of view. . . . Sacred music—when it is true art—is an epiphany: it signifies a divine manifestation through its revelation of Beauty. In sculpture, music, and poetry, he who is Beauty is incarnate in the artistic form, though in a much less full and substantive manner than in the Eucharist or in the manger at Bethlehem (25).
Cardinal Sarah’s conversation with Peter Carter presents a brilliant synthesis of the Church’s musical life and thinking. In this excerpt, aside from disabusing us of the notion that sacred art and music are merely ornamental, he also echoes Pope Benedict XVI (who himself echoed the grand Catholic tradition of beauty) in reminding us that Beauty is an objective reality. He capitalizes the “B” in Beauty and says that God is “Beauty incarnate.”
In Catholic tradition, we can speak of “small b” beauty, and “capital B” beauty. The former is a label we may give to what gives us pleasure but remains a realm of personal opinion. The latter, however, is a statement of objective fact, meaning that the thing called “Beautiful” is a clear reflection of the nature of Beauty himself.
One may think by analogy of the way a man sees his wife. Objectively, the woman is God’s child, and so she is objectively Beautiful. Another man may find her subjectively beautiful in her person and physical appearance, and he may even perceive some of the objective Beauty that she embodies and toward which she points as a person. Yet the man to whom it is given to love and marry her not only will find her beautiful, but will see the deeper Beauty of her as a unique creation. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but that doesn’t mean that it is all a mere manner of opinion.
To take the analogy farther, if a man respects and loves his wife as Beautiful, and builds a family around this love toward Beauty himself, others then will be more likely to respect his wife and be spiritually attracted to the fruits of his love. Conversely, a man who disdains his wife publicly or treats her carelessly will not only bring shame upon her, but ultimately discredit himself in the process. Who would trust such a man?
We are in much the same place with Church art and music today. The beautiful traditions born in the bosom of the Church have gone forward over the centuries, but now they return battered, bruised, and rejected by wider society to their home. Upon arriving back to the doorstep of the Church, the scorned beauty finds that a spiritual and aesthetic amnesia has taken hold, and men are largely unable any longer to recognize her beauty. This draws scorn and disdain on the Church, grows mistrust, and ultimately contributes greatly to an exodus of the faithful.
Beauty is a primary concern in the Church and a central aspect of the liturgy. What the Catholic sacred arts have traditionally done is seek, through the highest development of craft and constant seeking after the refinement of method, to approach Beauty himself—the ineffable, the transcendent—with both diligence and humility. This means that the best sacred art is made by the best artists subordinating their gifts (natural and developed) to the service of the liturgy. It is the highest of art, yet it is grounded in profound humility.
This indeed is an image of holiness: the doing of our very best for God, from a place of deep humility. This is why when in 1903 Pope St. Pius X wrote Tra le Sollecitudini, he insisted that liturgical music “be holy, and must therefore exclude all profanity not only in itself, but in the manner in which it is presented by those who execute it.”
Profane Music
What is profanity, or the profane? Whereas in modern times we may tend to think of parental advisory warnings for the lyrics on an album, the traditional understanding of “profane” is that which is, quite simply, “not sacred.” In Pius X’s time, this would include music that evoked memories of secular entertainment, the theatrical, and that which directed attention entirely toward the performance as opposed to facilitating a spiritual orientation proper to liturgical worship (which is, by its nature, contemplative and growing out of reverent repose).
Since modern music has risen mainly to serve profane uses, greater care must be taken with regard to it, in order that the musical compositions of modern style that are admitted in the Church may contain nothing profane, be free from reminiscences of motifs adopted in the theaters, and be not fashioned even in their external forms after the manner of profane pieces.
In 1955’s Musicae Sacrae Disciplina, Pius XII reinforced that liturgical music “must be holy. It must not allow within itself anything that savors of the profane nor allow any such thing to slip into the melodies in which it is expressed. The Gregorian chant which has been used in the Church over the course of so many centuries, and which may be called, as it were, its patrimony, is gloriously outstanding for this holiness” (42).
In both cases, these documents were reacting to the pop-driven musical abuses of their time. What is more, no contradiction to this guidance has yet been issued. Indeed, the next great document which deals with liturgical music—Vatican 2’s Sacrosanctum Concilium—is entirely conservative in its approach, reinforcing the “inestimable value” of the Church’s sacred music tradition, “even greater even that of any other art.” It encourages the highest level of musical education, preferences Gregorian chant and polyphony, encourages the cultivation of high-level church choirs, and admits only musical works of great quality to the liturgy. Nowhere is there an expression that could be honestly used to justify our post-conciliar spirit of musical amateurism and pop-adjacency.
In the liturgy, Beauty himself is our aim. We inherit a profound tradition of approaching this ineffable reality, and we dismiss that tradition at our peril.