Liturgy News

The easiest place to find pictures on the net of a 1960s folk Mass is on 'traditional liturgy' sites. They love to mock the early liturgical music in the vernacular and like to pretend that all supporters of the liturgical renewal up to the present day are superficial and irreverent happy-clappers. They set up straw dogs to knock down.

Like the sixties culture in general, the folk Mass is easy to ridicule. Yet for the first generation of liturgical reformers after the Second Vatican Council, 'folk' was a badge worn with honour. The magazine called Ministry and Liturgy, formerly known as Modern Liturgy, was founded with the title Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy and kept his title for three years until 1976. Between 1974 and 1978 the English publisher Mayhew-McCrimmon released ne less than four volumes of the 20th Century Folk Hymnal for parish use. In 1971 in Australia, Tony Newman and Peter Stone produced Travelling to Freedom: A Journey of the Spirit, a hymnal with guitar chords, designed with contemporary photographs, poetry and quotes, and published by the living Parish Series.

Why would serious liturgy and music people, intent upon the pastoral renewal of the Church's liturgical life, light upon the folk genre and the embarrassing term 'folk Mass' to define what they were doing? Perhaps we can let Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, give us the answer. Writing in 1990, he describes a place for church music somewhere between elitist art music and democratic pop music. Has the Church not always been the home of folk music? he asks. Folk music in its original sense is the musical expression of a clearly defined community held together by its language, history and way 0/ life, which assimilates and shapes its experiences in song - the experience with God, the experiences of love and sorrow~ of birth and death, as well as the experience of communion with nature. Such a community's way of structuring music may be called naive, but it does spring from original contact with the fundamental experiences of human existence and is therefore an expression of truth. Its naivete belongs to that kind of simplicity from which great things can come. (Published in A New Song for the Lord, 1997, p. 107).   

We are dealing here with traditions of music whIch are known by heart, which spring spontaneously to the lips, which play an integral role in everyday life; folk music in its simplicity is communal and accessible to all. This seemed the ideal kind of music to ensure that Christ's faithful, when present at the mystery of faith, should not be there as strangers or silent spectators ... [but] should take part in the sacred service conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full involvement (SC 48). Liturgical music that was accessible was needed if, to promote active participation, the people [were to be] encouraged to take part by means of acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons and songs (SC 30).

Unfortunately, the early years of the liturgical renewal corresponded with a 'folk music revival' which comprised new compositions performed by professionals (W. Guthrie or J. Baez). Even this appealed to church people at the time, however, because this 'folk' music had a message - justice, freedom, peace. But 'folk' changed is meaning. This new genre took folk music in the direction of pop and rock music which in turn became important influences on the developing repertoire of liturgical music. Church music was then judged to have devalued its 'high art' tradition in favour of mass popular culture.

The problem is not just ecclesiastical. In the last half century, we have been trying to forge a suitable repertoire of sacred music against the cultural background of rupture between art and the artist on the one hand and the public on the other. Cardinal Ratzinger commented that faith and the culture of faith have a hard time of it in the interstice between aesthetic elitism and industrial mass culture. Their position is difficult simply because art and people themselves have a hard time of it in this situation and can hardly hold their ground... Undoubtedly we will also have to let considerable tolerance reign on the margins, at the points 0/ transition to the two antitheses of liturgically appropriate music (p. 109).

I believe the early instinct to adopt the badge 'folk' for liturgical music was a serious, reasonable and worthy attempt to achieve what the Council fathers were asking for in a participatory liturgy. If it has not been entirely successful. I would argue that it does not stem from a capitulation to low-brow popular culture or the abandonment of a sense of the sacred in the liturgy. I suggest that the problems are much deeper cultural issues. Ultimately we need to explore the Church's relationship to the world. How do we harness contemporary forms and styles of art and music to express our worship before God? We cannot answer this question when there is a fundamental alienation in Western society between contemporary arts and popular appreciation. Liturgists and church musicians do not have the cultural foundation stones upon which to build. Pope John Paul II pleaded for a rapprochement between the church and the arts in his 1999 Letter to Artists (www.vatican.va, then go to 'holy father'). But what good will this do us if the artist is isolated from the populace?

 In this issue of Liturgy News, we try to sketch the background to these questions and suggest a way forward. Gerard O'Dempsey offers an overview of our 'adventures' in liturgical music over the last fifty years. Ralph Morton, in view of the fact that we will soon have new Mass texts and therefore require new music settings for the Mass, sets out some important considerations for the composers who will write them and the communities who will receive them. We know by now that producing music worthy or the sacred liturgy and our celebration of it is no easy task.