A failing star system; bad liturgy transcends ideology.

Could you please tell me: What do they want? The exasperated acquaintance who asked me this question is a Protestant and a very conscientious organist; she had recently agreed to help a suburban Roman Catholic parish with the liturgical music for its Saturday Masses, and she was baffled.

She told me that most of the parish's music was confined to a narrow selection of "contemporary songs," which the parishioners did not sing with any particular gusto. When she suggested that the parish might want to broaden its repertory to include some standard hymns and other compositions in the missalette, she received a lecture: The revolution in the Catholic church required a revolution in its music. All this lecturing she could take, but what really bothered her were the little cutting remarks she would receive from the pastor and his staff about her "classical" music--a broad category which included any music that sounds "churchy." The organ music of the Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach, the melodies of Gregorian chant, choral music, and even a lot of Protestant hymns were all under suspicion in this parish because of their "classical," churchy" sound. My acquaintance was mystified. " What did they want?" I responded by informing her that her situation was not unusual and that her days as an employee of that church were probably numbered.

I hear regularly about yet another Catholic parish or chapel--even a cathedral--that has fired a competent organist and tossed into the trash its musical repertory, built up over the years, all in an effort to cleanse the place of "classical" music. Sometimes I even hear about a Protestant church that has proudly discarded its "churchy" music (including most hymns) and is packing in people by the thousands. But Catholics are far ahead in this area. In fact, I would estimate that more than half of the Catholic parishes and chapels in the United States are places where the congregation sings or hears very little music written before the 1970s. If they do happen to sing an old hymn or Christmas carol, the music might be accompanied in a way that suggests -easy listening" rock. Some Catholic parishes do go back to their musical roots, at least occasionally, and there are many churches that shift back and forth between the old "classical" traditions and "contemporary hits." But, whatever the case, they all have to fight against a powerful wave of "anticlassical" sentiment. Exactly what does the "anticlassical" faction want? Why have its adherents seceded from their own musical heritage in such great numbers?

The explanation heard most frequently is that "those conservatives and liberals are at it again." The conservatives supposedly want "classical" music because it symbolizes tradition, authority, adherence to unchanging values, and a remote God who is transcendent; the liberals supposedly want music that gives the impression of a breaking free from a stuffy, deadening past, and a surrender to a God who is immanent and part of our lives, here and now. This explanation--the eternal clash of conservative and liberal viewpoints--has the virtue of neatness, but life is not neat. I have met priests who are more conservative than the Roman Curia, and their idea of "classical" music for the liturgy is an assortment of rousing Protestant hymns. I have met priests who would describe themselves as "liberal" and they love Gregorian chant.

This distinction between transcendence in worship (pre-Vatican II, "classical," repressive, bad) and immanence (post-Vatican II, "contemporary," energizing, good) is fashionable today and even useful but, it easily becomes another way of forcing an either/or neatness onto complexity. If you read the lives of the saints, you notice how, in the past, Catholics managed the complex job of worshiping a God who is "other" (and can only be expressed in rituals that are somehow transcendent) but, at the same time, immanent (and the motivation for doing saintly things, from prayer to social action in the world).

I stopped believing in neatness when I read about a recent theological controversy in a seminary run by the Benedictines. A committee of bishops and seminary rectors had visited this very distinguished institution to investigate rumors of incorrect theological teaching. The committee had ordered that one teacher, a nun, be fired because she advocated the ordination of women. In addition, another error had surfaced that needed to be corrected. Seminarians who were not Benedictines would henceforth not be permitted to sing morning prayer in Gregorian chant (mostly in English) with the monks, because that sort of thing is useless for their future pastoral work. Apparently, in the orthodox Catholic church of the future, Gregorian chant will have no place in the parishes or the seminary training of diocesan priests.

Another justification for the removal of "classical" music in many Catholic and Protestant churches runs like this: "Listen to what is on radio and television; look at what is sold in stores. Most people today want to hear pop music, especially rock, not the classics. If the church wants to reach these people, especially the young, it must communicate with them in a cultural language they understand. Today, a pop music style is that language."

This sounds eminently common-sensical, but the logic collapses if you switch the statement to another time or era. Imagine someone in 1940 saying, "The swing band sound is what people want. If the church is going to reach contemporary Christians, it must abandon its classics and use the swing band sound." Such tortured reasoning comes across as laughable, yet it is not unusual today to hear some Catholics and Protestants brag about their cultural chauvinism, insisting that only music which represents "us" (our style, our culture, today) deserves to be sung in church.

But, risible or not, the reality is complex. The fact is, the Catholic church, throughout history, has constantly tried to modernize its music. Over the centuries, all kinds of doubtful "improvements" were made to Gregorian chant, so that it would sound more modern. The great choral music associated with the Catholic church--Renaissance polyphony, the Masses of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Bruckner, and so on--once sounded modern and "contemporary" (at least in part) to the congregations that heard this music when it was new.

Roman Catholicism has a long history of "modernizing" its liturgical music, for the purpose of better communicating with the congregation. But this "modernizing" (even when grossly inappropriate) used to mean borrowing music from the secular world and transforming it. The borrowed material, like the human race through the Incarnation, was somehow dignified, elevated, and raised to a higher level. Today, many of the fervent promoters of "contemporary Christian music" are not interested in being transformed by the church; their operating theory is that the church will come to their music and be transformed.

Is "classical" music so out-of-date and unpopular that Catholic congregations can no longer comprehend what it tries to communicate? Once again, the answer is complex. The very finest musical traditions of Christianity--magnificently presented--come across as an empty, pretentious bore if they seem to be imposed from above by people who "know better." But those musical traditions are symbols of a thriving faith when they are "owned" by the whole community. Two examples of this are to be found at Saint Agnes Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Saint Paul Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Saint Agnes, an orchestra sometimes accompanies the choir at Mass; the choir sings chant, Renaissance Masses, and Mozart. (The parish also has many vocations to the priesthood, with thirteen First Masses in the past twelve years. `At Saint Paul's in Cambridge, the boys' choir, the adult choir, and the extensive use of an old, "classical" repertory, for some odd reason, always give the impression of being boldly modern but not "high church." In both parishes, support for the music cuts across divisions of race, economic level, education, and age.

Generalizations are not easy to make. There are many parishes where "classical" music receives solid support from the community, but others where a tired, moribund, traditional repertory seems mummified. A parish with a militantly "antichurchy" faction in control might be doing quite well, while another parish, with virtually the same repertory, might turn worship into the liturgical equivalent of a train wreck. By itself, a certain type of music will not magically produce "success" and liturgical heaven on earth.

What do they want? cannot be answered by looking at "classical" versus "contemporary" or conservative versus liberal. To find out what is really going on, we have to examine a relatively new feature of Catholic worship, one that controls everything but is usually ignored. Two anecdotes:

A television interview. A Catholic priest explains that the church is fooling itself by keeping its liturgical and musical traditions. Those antiques are not what Jesus Christ really wanted, the priest insists. Scrap the whole thing. Then the scene changes. We see the same priest, dressed in a gold chasuble and wielding a portable microphone, racing up and down the center aisle of a church, waving his arms wildly and screaming, "God! God!" He is a white man and he is exhorting his largely black congregation to greater out-bursts of religious frenzy. Evidently, this is what true worship is all about: a man dressed in gold who is the one and only star attraction of his own show; around him is a supporting cast.

The second anecdote takes us to a rural parish. The community spirit is wonderful in this place. Every year, the organist rehearses the children's choir for the Confirmation Mass. Sometimes a group of brass instrumentalists volunteers to accompany the hymns. The music is plain (a missalette version of "classical" . About a week before Confirmation, the organist receives a call from the new director of the religious education program. Stop the rehearsals: the choir, organ, and brass instrumentalists will not be needed. "But how will we support the singing?" the organist asks.

"Oh, I have my guitar!" answers the director proudly.

And indeed, she did. The Confirmation Mass looked like a solo recital by the education director, who was interrupted occasionally by prayers. The congregation barely made a sound.

These two little dramas are extreme examples, but they represent thousands of less extreme stories and reveal a significant development in liturgical practice since Vatican II: the emergence of liturgical stars. You can go to a Catholic liturgy today and, one hour later, forget the prayers, readings, homily, and the songs, but the personality of the liturgical star--the priest or the solo musician up front--will be riveted in your mind for hours, maybe for years.

Imagine balancing scales. On the left side, put all kinds of postconciliar liturgical developments: the vernacular, new songs, new awareness of the congregation's role, etc. On the right side, put the priest and the solo musician. It would be like putting a pebble on the left side and a brick on the right. There is no comparison. In many churches and chapels, everything--from the architecture to the amplification system--has been arranged so that the priest and soloist will monopolize your attention, utterly and totally.

The Catholic church foresaw the dangers of liturgical monopoly centuries ago. To create e a sense of common purpose, the church devised ways to submerge the priest's personality during worship. One of the most effective ways was with "classical" music. Those chanted dialogues between priest and people, a fine old hymn sung by everybody as equals, perhaps a Gregorian chant sung at Communion--all of that produced what someone has called a "leveling-out process," a symbol of people putting their individuality aside and, with collective humility, expressing joy for being a part of something so immensely important.

But not today. We live in a society that places enormous importance on the individuality of the entertainment star, not on humble joy. More than a few Catholics believe--and I am not the first to observe this--that the priest really should behave like a star at Mass. They search for that ideal priest whose magnetic "liturgical personality" will entertain and captivate them, and they search for that new music which will speak personally to them and release their internal energies. They are convinced that, once you get rid of "classical--liturgical music (which has a tendency to take glory away from the star) and replace it with "contemporary" songs, the result will be a surge of spiritual renewal, a Catholic Great Awakening. The churches will rock, there will be spiritual rolling in the aisles, and everybody will be a star. And the catalyst for all this released energy will be the priest and the vocal soloist.

In July 1995, I attended the national convention of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians. About 3,500 people registered. The convention was so large that sometimes more than twenty-five different "sessions" on a huge variety of topics were going on at the same time. The "classical," "contemporary," multicultural, and charismatic were all represented in abundance. There was a Mass beautifully sung, with great fervor, in Gregorian chant; there were sessions on African-American, Caribbean, and Hispanic music for the liturgy. If the convention proved anything it is that nobody can say definitively "what Catholics want today" in liturgical music. A thousand flowers are blooming, among a million weeds. (And the most invasive weed, everywhere, is that sound of a domineering soloist behind a microphone.

A few years ago I happened to attend Mass in a parish church that was having financial difficulties, although you would never guess it from the music. Plain, direct, confident, and based mostly on the better selections in a missalette, the congregational singing sounded "like a million dollars." Alas, a new (and rather conservative) pastor arrived afterward. All this classical- music is not what Catholics want today, he declared; within a few weeks the organist--who had practically donated his services--was gone. In came the "contemporary" hits: a very narrow, constantly repeated repertory of music such as "Here I Am, Lord," "Let There Be Peace on Earth," and "Eagle's Wings." When I returned to the church recently, I barely noticed the "hit" music, which got a rather limp reaction from the congregation. What did strike me was the way the weak music made it easy for the priest and the musician to monopolize our attention. We watched passively as the pastor welcomed, explained, joked, embellished the liturgical texts with ad-libs, and seemed to float around the sanctuary; we watched as the soloist, did all of the singing for us.

Is this what Catholics want? Perhaps the question is unfair and sounds too much like something that would be asked in an advertising agency. Perhaps the more realistic question would be: Is this all that many Catholics are allowed to know? What a pity.

Thomas Day is professor of music at Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island. He is the author of Why Catholics Can't Sing and Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo? The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture (both from Crossroad).