All This Is That: The Pope

Friday, November 23, 2007

Pope to eliminate modern music from the Vatican

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The Pope is about to overhaul the Vatican to enforce a return to traditional music.

Now that the Pope has reintroduced the Latin Tridentine Mass, he wants His church to go back to the Gregorian chant and baroque sacred music. In an speech to bishops and priests at St. Peter's Basilica, he said the church needs "continuity with tradition" in their prayers and music.

He referred to "the time of St Gregory the Great", the pope for whom the Gregorian chant is named. The Gregorian chant has become the prevalent form of singing by the new choir director of St Peter's, Father Pierre Paul.

The Pope has also ended the tradition, started by John Paul II, of having a choir drawn from churches all over the world, to sing Mass in St Peter's.

The International Church Music Review recently criticised the choir, saying: "The singers wanted to overshout each other, they were frequently out of tune, the sound uneven, the conducting without any artistic power, the organ and organ playing like in a second-rank country parish church."

Monsignor Valentin Miserachs Grau, the director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, which trains church musicians, said that there had been serious "deviations" in the performance of sacred music. "How far we are from the true spirit of sacred music. How can we stand it that such a wave of inconsistent, arrogant and ridiculous profanities have so easily gained a stamp of approval in our celebrations?"

The Pope favoured the idea of a watchdog for church music when he was the cardinal in charge of safeguarding Catholic doctrine.

According to my friend Daryle Conners, who produced a documentary on The Vatican, Cardinal Ratzinger, as he was known then, was referred to as Darth Vader by Vatican insiders. I believe it! I wonder if anyone has even had the heart to tell Pope Darth that in America we have such perversions as folk-rock masses? Or that I have heard folk music, gamelon, rock and roll, and jazz in the sacred confines of his sanctuaries in the states?
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