It is always a privilege to go to Mass, one for which some people in the world risk their lives. And if I weren’t such a wretched sinner, I am sure I wouldn’t notice it as much as I do, but the only thing more painful to me than a guitar-strumming “folk mass” by baby boomers with songs from the 1970s is listening to them after Mass, justifying this awful adventure in irrelevance with the comment: “We do it
for the young people.”
I defy them to go through the music of young adults and find even one CD or mp3 with St. Louis Jesuit-type music. If some people in a parish favor such music, fine. But please,
don’t claim it is being done
for the young people. That is a falsehood and, in its way, a dangerous one.
Frankly, it hasn’t been the music “of the young” perhaps
ever, but certainly not since the mid-sixties. I was in college in the early 1980s, and no one listened (without being forced) to the music of the St. Louis Jesuits and their ilk. We liked the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan, Dire Straits, the Cars, and a host of others. The small cultural group that liked “folk music” had passed on years before. Even Dylan moved on. Did people assume that Peter, Paul, and Mary would be popular forever?
I can remember going to my first Catholic Mass and thinking: “These Catholics have the right idea: stand up, sit down, kneel, stand up: keep the blood flowing.” The “sermon” was mercifully short. But the music! After it was over, I said to my Catholic friends: “I liked it, but two things. You need to get rid of the orange carpet, and you need a good Methodist hymnal.” I said this as someone who always
hated singing those long Methodist hymns. I still do. But a test-your-patience, eight-verses long Methodist hymn was still preferable to “Gather Us In.”
Now, granted, being the sinner I was, I had always hated this sort of sappy religious music. In my teens, I rejected all Christianity because “youth ministry” taught me that “Christianity” meant guitar music and sappy slogans on posters of waterfalls or sunrises, and so I wanted nothing to do with any of it. It didn’t help that many of the guys doing “youth ministry” were using it as a way to pick up girls.
Continued below.
Randall Smith: Let’s dump guitars and dance at Mass, initiate a “renaissance” in the liturgy, and recover the best Catholic musical traditions.
www.thecatholicthing.org
Talk about painting with a broad brush. It would be like me calling all cradle Catholics jerks. And there are a lot of those too. There has always been division. Just stay off the welcoming committee. The Church has itself to thank for its problems.
