Damian Thompson's blog entry the other day on trendy liturgical music is right on but I can only bring myself to say, no kidding. Saying that the "liturgists" have made our liturgical life a laughing-stock is correct but it's clearly an understatement and patently too polite. In my mind the poor state of the Liturgy has driven more people away than we care to admit.
Here Thompson is relating to us the reflection (informed judgement) of James Macmillian to the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols. MacMillan is considered Britain's "best" liturgical musician alive. His insight is nothing new and in fact doesn't go far enough. People of reasonable intelligence and liturgical sensibility think --not feel-- that the state of the Liturgy today, particularly in parishes, is rather rotten to the core. Little of the liturgical music we get today is beautiful, true and good.
Hence, I think we live with horrid agenda-driven sense of the sacred Liturgy which praises humanity more than the divinity, especially when it comes too music because we don't know any better plus we've been beaten down by the ecclesiastical establishment who want no controversy. Add to this the vapid liturgical formation purported to be the mind of Vatican II and current scholarship. I'd like to hear, just once from the pastoral musician crowd, that they've only been serving pablum since the end of the Holy Synod in 1965. The experience of the Liturgy is more often than not off-putting and too often trite. AND we wonder why many abandon the Catholic faith.
