Catholics, music and the Pope

All year I've wanted to post something to the effect that while us Anglo-Catholics are emulating many of the best liturgical practices of the Roman Catholic Church, since Vatican II that liturgy has morphed (or even disappeared) from RCC parishes, at least in the US. (I've held off, hoping to have time to do more research, but that time hasn't materialized).

The incongruity -- of Anglo-Catholics being more “Catholic” in their worship than Roman Catholics -- hit me when visiting two of the oldest Christian churches in the Western United States. Over the past year or two, our family has been visiting as many of the 21 California missions as opportunity permits. These missions -- established from 1769 to 1823 -- were established (mainly) to bring Christianity to the natives of California.

On two occasions, we went to church services. At the Carmel Mission (established 1770) we attended morning mass, while at Mission San Antonio de Padua (est. 1771) we just missed services due to out-of-date information on their service times. At Carmel, they had a great choir and a wonderful organ, but the worship (from Today's Missal) was definitely a Rite II-style contemporary hymn approach. We didn't hear the service at Mission San Antonio, but given that they were putting away the amplifiers for the electric guitar, it seems reasonable to presume that it was praise-type music.

Of course, this week Pope Benedict XVI is visiting the East Coast, including celebrating two mega-Masses. In reading Hymnography Unbound, the bloggress noted how the Pontiff and his American bishops are trying to straddle various musical traditions within the American church.

This week, the story was updated by others who had more time to pursue the details. First, on Wednesday the Washington Post wrote about the musical tensions within the American RCC and how this week's masses fit into those tensions. Then on Thursday, GetReligion (Lutheran) bloggress Mollie Ziegler made sense of the Post article by providing context around all the existing tensions in the church.

I don't know that anyone knows how the revival of interest in traditional liturgy (and music) will play out in the RCC or in the American Anglican tradition. After all, the 19th century Oxford Movement was not anticipated before it happened.

However, what is clear is that the Catholic church (with 50 million American adult members) has a lot more room for specialized tastes than do the Anglican/Episcopal churches (with 3+ million). So in terms of sheer numbers, in the US there will always be a larger pool of Catholics interested in Gregorian chant (if not Wesleyan hymns) than there will be Anglicans or even Lutherans or Presbyterians.

What is a church?

The continuing Anglicans of Virginia who formed CANA have won round #1 in their property fight. Certainly continuing Anglicans around North America are celebrating this victory, even if many rounds of appeals remain.

In reading the hometown news articles — in the Washington Post and Washington Times — I was struck by a fundamental question: what is a church? Here are some of the critical quotes from the latter story:

"We are obviously disappointed in yesterday's ruling," said a statement from Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about the 83-page decision released late Thursday night.

The decision "plainly deprives the Episcopal Church and the Diocese, as well as all hierarchical churches, of their historic constitutional rights to structure their polity free from governmental interference," she said, "and thus violates the First Amendment and cannot be enforced."

...

Henry Burt, diocesan spokesman, suggested the ruling imperils religious freedom.

"At issue is the government"s ability to intrude into the freedom of the Episcopal Church and other churches to organize and govern themselves according to their faith and doctrine," he said.

In a letter to members of the diocese posted on www.thediocese.net, Virginia Bishop Peter Lee said the 11 churches are still "wrongfully occupying Episcopal Church property" but that "this was not a final decision and the court did not award any property or assets."

Doug Smith, executive director for the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy in Richmond, called the judge's decision "chilling," adding leaders of other mainline denominations represented by his center are "gravely concerned."

"It seems that government is attempting to take over governance of the Episcopal Church," he said. "This preliminary ruling puts every hierarchical denomination on notice that a group of persons who no longer wish to be part of the particular denomination can now split off, form a new group, self-declare they are a branch of the original group and assert rights under law regardless of the denomination's own rules."

Of course, some of this is pure nonsense. The government is not “intruding” — it was, after all, TEC that asked the government to get involved in enforcing a property rights dispute. I’m a firm believer of freedom of religion, but the government retains a clear role in enforcing certain secular rules (such as who owns what property and who owns who what money).

But fundamentally, the TEC apologists make a claim that might be true in England, but not here. A state church is the norm in much of Europe, but a major motivation for the initial settlement of New England was religious freedom.

Also, the leadership of PECUSA is elected and not appointed — suggesting a bottom-up, American view of governance. If churches are voluntary associations of individuals, how does TEC assert a right to tell individual branches what to do — particularly since those branches provided the resources to create their branches?

Finally, the national church doesn’t legal title to the resources — the PECUSA model until recently was a confederation of bishoprics. In dioceses where the bishop holds the title to land, the legal options for the seceders are more difficult, but for much (most) of Protestant America, the individual parish is what a “church” is.

The Issues behind Issues

The real story behind the death of Issues Etc. has come out, and it’s not pretty.

As I expected, the famous LCMS blogger Mollie Z. Hemingway (of GetReligion.org) knew what was going on, and she published the answers in the Wall Street Journal’s Friday “Houses of Worship” column. (Also available at the Religion News Blog). I didn’t know Mollie was a former LCMS communications leader, which makes it even more clear why she was able to find where all the bodies were buried.

To make a long story short, the LCMS has been getting ready to split for a decade or more. The traditionalists (known as "confessional Lutherans”, i.e. ones who believe what Luther believed) long had the upper hand, but since 2001 the denomination has been led by the church growth (pop culture) faction. Rev. Todd Wilken and his Issues Etc. show was strongly identified with the former (which is why I recommended it), so now it’s toast.

Perhaps this will hasten the inevitable split of the LCMS, or at least rally some of the faithful to reassert control of the LCMS leadership. I imagine that many LCMS types (like conservative PECUSA types) will be scared to leave the institutions behind, but — as with us Anglicans — it’s long since clear that the world-views cannot be reconciled.

Updated Thursday April 3: The best sites for tracking this story seem to be:

• Augsburg 1530
  
• Bring Back Issues Etc.
  
• Save the LCMS
  
• Kyrie Eleison
  

So give three cheers

Although best known as the composing half of 19th century Britain’s dominant light opera partnership, Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan began his career as a church organist, and composed a series of hymn tunes in the 1860s and 1870s, the best known being St. Gertrude (“Onward Christian Soliders.”).

Hymnal 1940 lists Sir Arthur as the composer or arranger of 12 of its 600 hymns (double-counting the tune Hanford); if I had TEH (1906), I would expect to find even more. Three of the 12 are Easter hymns, including this week’s Easter processional, St. Kevin (Hymn 94, 2nd tune).

While the music for Hymn 94 is 19th century operetta, the words of this hymn can be traced back (via translation) to an 8th century text by St. John of Damascus:

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness;
God has brought his Israel into joy from sadness
Loose from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke Jacob’s sons and daughters;
Led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters.

Even if not an ancient hymn, this medieval sentiment is certainly one of the oldest extant hymns in the church today.

But, of course, in the TEC the need to “modernize” and “improve” the theology of worship continues unabated. At his blog The Continuum, Fr. Robert Hart this week offers an alternate Easter setting for St. Kevin, one more suited to contemporary TEC theology. Here are the first two of four verses:

Episcopalians, hide those eggs!
Display that branch a-greenin'
But remember, as you do,
The season's truer meaning!
No, I don't mean Jesus Christ,
Or even resurrection,
But what we preach to take His place:
Environmental protection!

Jews and Christians are at fault
For all the world's pollution,
By their foolish rejection of
The Caananite solution!
Fertility goddesses, and the Baals,
And Love Children of the '60s,
Were right instead -- but don't despair...
We've got your new B.C.P.s!

It seems hard to imagine that any sentiment so narrowly focused on contemporary issues — whether satirized or merely self-satirizing — would survive for use by Christians 13 centuries from now.

No more Issues

Regular readers know that I’ve enjoyed quoting interesting interviews run on the KFUO radio show Issues Etc. Particularly interesting to me have been the ones by Terry Mattingly on the pop culture-ization of American worship.

This morning I caught on to Tuesday’s story that Issues Etc. has been cancelled and the staff fired, with the St. Patrick’s Day episode being the last. The KFUO website (which appears sluggish due to unusually high traffic) says

For programmatic and business reasons, the decision was made this week to discontinue the "Issues, Etc." program on KFUO-AM. We look forward to bringing you new programming in this time slot in the near future. Also, we thank "Issues" host Rev. Todd Wilken and producer Mr. Jeff Schwarz for their years of service on behalf of the station. Those interested may still download past "Issues, Etc." programs from the "Issues" archive on this website. Thank you sincerely for your continued support of KFUO's radio ministry.

I tried to find more of an explanation but apparently nobody’s talking.

However, dozens of LCMS bloggers and other former listeners have been critical of the decision, led by LCMS Pastor William Weedon, who called the act “Holy Tuesday Treachery”. Rev. Weedon has compiled a long list of listener testimonials.

Some station donors are angry and are instead donating money to the ex-employee financial support fund. There’s the obligatory online petition which has 1200 signatures. There’s even a brand new blog “Bring Back Issues Etc.”

I don’t know the issues and not being in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, it’s not my fight. I hadn’t listened to the show recently (because I was upset over the ignorance displayed by a guest they had for an hour in February), but one mistake does not negate all the good work they’ve done since 2003.

Appropriately, the next to last episode (on Sunday) was about a hymn. (Alas, it’s about a modern hymn with sappy music, but...) As far as I know, there’s no radio show anywhere on the Internet that has spent so much time on liturgical music, so the loss is a great one.