Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste by Thomas Day; Crossroad Books, New York, 1991; $40.00. Reviewed by Michael Shaw

Described on the back cover as 'brilliant', 'devastating' and 'very much on target', Thomas Day's book is very good indeed. It is with a sense of relief that you learn that Day has never been a priest or a seminarian. Nor is he an ex-Catholic with an axe to grind. He doesn't even work for the ABC. 'I am just a concerned American Catholic layman who has searched for reasons behind the uninspired singing at most . . . Catholic liturgies.'

What excites Day's concern about liturgy is the current parlous state of music in Catholic churches in America. Presenting himself as an ordinary Catholic, Day appears uninterested in the current renaissance of the traditional rite of Mass. Nevertheless, what he says of modern American Catholicism is important, not only for Australian Catholics generally, but also for those attached to the traditional Roman liturgy.

The key to understanding the unenthusiastic singing of American Catholics at Mass is, Day explains, Irish Catholicism. With some justification, he argues that history has immunised Irish Catholics against singing at Mass.

"During the worst years of British domination, the Catholic Irish were . . . reduced to abject poverty, taxed heavily, and given no room for private initiative. They were also cut off from artistic and cultural developments in the Roman Catholic parts of Europe. A Bavarian farmer saw nothing unusual about worshipping in an ornate Rococo church; he thought it perfectly normal that the choir would sing a Mozart Mass occasionally."

When the Irish left the Emerald Isle, they carried their ways with them. At Mass, their silence was a sign of their devotion. They didn't have to sing like Protestants to be heard by God. "In their opinion, the courageous and the strong kept the faith, while the weak, lured away by music and other niceties, became apostates." With or without music the Mass was still the Mass.

Please do not sing in the church!

This attitude is not limited to the Irish, however. Sir Richard Terry's attempts to introduce carols at Westminster Cathedral prompted numerous indignant protests from Catholics who abhorred carol singing which they mistakenly believed to be an exclusively protestant activity. Terry was compelled to point out that, in Catholic countries, carol singing had never died out as it had in protestant England.

The common factor here is not the Irishness but the protestantism. Though English and Irish Catholics remained faithful children of the Church, by the time Catholicism was allowed to breathe again in England and Ireland, the actual practice of the Faith was moribund. (Terry's Herculean effort to resuscitate it sparked the revival of interest in Renaissance Catholic music which is still gathering force today.) In countries colonised by protestant England, like America and Australia, the problem of poor liturgical music seems to be the same.

What is the relevance to traditionalists of a book about the triumph of bad taste in the liturgical music of the New Rite?

There used to be, and perhaps there still is, an argument that the Catholic hierarchy tolerated the traditional Mass merely to satisfy the antediluvial demands of the dwindling number of old people who still hankered for it. Once that generation died, so the argument ran, the next generation could bravely grasp the nettle of the New Rite and proudly make it its own.

But the next generation has shown itself deeply recidivistic. Often accused of wanting to return to the past, many of the next generation are too young to remember the traditional Mass in its heyday with any clarity. Nevertheless, they have stumbled upon the traditional Mass in their town and they like what they see. They have now set about helping to preserve it.

Along with this instinct of preservation, comes a desire to rebuild the rite to its fullest extent. But a certain discordancy of purpose has emerged between those who desire to restore the liturgy according to the historical traditions and legislation of the Church and those who desire to restore it according to a pattern set by memories of pre-conciliar days. There are those, formed on the sparse liturgical pastures of the Irish diaspora church, who naturally prefer Mass the way it used to be: said quickly with no singing. And there are those, emerging from the post-conciliar collapse of Irish-Catholic identity, unburdened by the memory of things lost, who look to the wider and deeper experience of the whole Western Church to set liturgical standards.

Consequently, while many people, both old and young, would like to see a full restoration of the traditional Rite, including the singing of Renaissance polyphony and, yes, even Gregorian Chant, there are some folk attending the traditional Mass with deep devotion who find themselves at odds with the idea of a sung liturgy.

Our foibles begin to show

While it brings us the best of the Catholic past, the traditional Mass also brings out some of our cultural foibles. Today, as in the past, there are those for whom the sung Mass poses a problem. In their judgement, the higher forms of liturgical singing are a 'performance' which distracts from the real business of the liturgy. Sad to say, there are even people, though very few, who are not essentially interested in the traditional Mass. They are concerned only that it exists, or rather that the memory of it lives again, until they die. There is no room in these relived recollections for a solemn liturgy. In people who have suffered long and hard the chaos and betrayal of an officially inspired religious revolution, and who are old enough to remember 'better times', one can readily understand such reactions. But the fact is that the Church does desire a sung liturgy - and not just for great and rare occasions but ordinarily. The sung Mass is the norm.

Where the Church has spoken through its history and its laws, private judgements should be treated with a lively scepticism, even where they were received with mother's (catholic) milk. A cursory perusal of the Church's documents on sacred music ought to be enough to register in any Catholic mind the consideration that orthodoxy and tradition is not restricted to faith and morals but also extends to the liturgical worship of God.

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