Commentary
See the composer's article as featured at CanticaNova.com.
Composer Addresses the 15th Annual Society of Catholic Social Scientists
Huntington, Indiana - - “They have by their actions set church music back to a state far worse than when Pope St. Pius X began the work of reform in 1903. They have promoted their own ideas of what music and liturgy should be, but these fail to correspond to the decrees of the council. A careful analysis of the legislation given for the Universal Church and the reality as it is presently promoted in the United States exposes a considerable divergence between the two.”
Though written in the mid-1970s, these charges by the late Msgr. Richard J. Schuler of Saint Paul, MN, an eminent priest-musician, conductor, scholar, and benevolent pastor, bear witness to the like convictions of Pope Benedict XVI. Adding her studied findings to these, musician and composer Mary Oberle Hubley addressed the 15th Annual Society of Catholic Social Scientists at Queens, New York, at the St. John’s University School of Law, October 26-27, 2007. Dr. David L. Gregory, the Dorothy Day Professor of Law at St. John’s School of Law, and Dr. Joseph A. Varacalli, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Catholic Studies and Professor of Sociology at Nassau Community College-SUNY, hosted the conference.
A homeschooling mother of seven children, Mary Oberle Hubley is the composer of an ever increasing collection of Catholic hymnody entitled Gate of Heaven, and had been the director of the Midwest Conference on Sacred Music, held annually from 1994 through 2004 near Plymouth, Indiana. Notable authorities addressing the MCSM included Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska; the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Chicago, now an auxiliary Bishop of Chicago, Thomas J. Paprocki; Msgr. Charles N. Meter of Chicago, the above-mentioned Msgr. Richard J. Schuler; and Rev. Dr. Robert A. Skeris of the Catholic University of America. Other speakers included the eminent priest-musician and conductor, Father Eduard Perrone of Assumption Grotto Church, Detroit; composer/conductor Father Edward J. McKenna of Chicago, former editor of The Collegeville Hymnal; and Father Stephen Somerville of Toronto, a musician/composer, and resigned member of the International Committee on English on the Liturgy. Scholars such as classicist Dr. Thomas Fleming of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois, editor of Chronicles, and cultural historian, Dr. E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars magazine, were also speakers at the Midwest Conference on Sacred Music.
The two talks given to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists by Mary Oberle Hubley addressed “Trends in Catholic Church Music in America During the Twentieth Century,” and were followed by discussions led by assigned discussants. Dr. James T.H. Martin of the Philosophy Department of St. John’s University, also a Director of Music at St. Raphael’s Church in East Meadow, New York, led the discussion for the first talk. The second discussant was Dr. Adrian T. Calderone, an attorney in Uniondale, New York, who writes on Catholic issues, and is locally involved in the evangelization of Catholic youth.
During the first talk, entitled “Singing a New Song: The Subversion of Post-Conciliar Catholic Church Music, 1995-2005,” the composer observed that “Great strides were made in America in the first half of the twentieth century toward continuing the liturgical reform first initiated in the 1830s by Abbot Dom Prosper Gueranger, whose cause for canonization is currently underway. But in 1938, the untimely death of the great Father Virgil Michel, O.S.B., a Benedictine monk at Collegeville, Minnesota’s St. John’s Abbey, dramatically altered the trajectory toward authentic liturgical reform set in place through decades of American efforts.”
Fathers Martin Hellriegel and Gerald Ellard, S.J., both of St. Louis, MO did foundational work toward implementing a greater popular understanding of the liturgy, as did Fathers William Busch of Saint Paul, MN, Michael Mathis, C.S.C, of Notre Dame, Indiana, and Reynald Hillenbrand of Chicago. Additionally, an early promoter of the liturgical reform, especially in the area of Gregorian chant pedagogy, was the heiress, Mrs. Justine Bayard Ward of New York. Besides establishing the Dom Mocquereau Foundation, a trust which to this day still funds the work of the Benedictines at Solesmes, Mrs. Ward financed the construction of the School of Music at Manhattanville College in New York City, and funded the building of several famous pipe organs, including those at Solesmes in France; at the Pontifical College of Sacred Music in Rome; and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where Mrs. Ward also established the endowed Ward Chair of Chant Pedagogy, occupied presently by Rev. Dr. Robert A. Skeris.
Mary Oberle Hubley continued that, besides devoting his life and scholarly work to the promotion of the liturgical reform first begun in Europe, Father Virgil Michel simultaneously was a key figure in organizing fair and lasting social and economic reform in rural and urban America. He was instrumental in the origins of The Extension Society’s outreach to rural America; and, inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s famous 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum (“On Capital and Labor”), encouraged economic betterment movements through cooperatives initiated in New York City, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and various other places. Additionally, Father Michel befriended and encouraged Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in their founding of The Catholic Worker movement; as well as the former Russian baroness Catherine de Heuck Doherty, foundress of the Madonna House community in Combermere, Ontario.
Mrs. Hubley recounts that, in the massive injustices generated in the wake of the two fratricidal world wars with their consequent economic disorders, the far-seeing Father Virgil Michel recognized the blueprint for a practical, and yet spiritual, solution. As had St. Pius X in 1903, Father Michel taught that the root motivation and intrinsic value of all social concerns flowed, simply, from the age-old Catholic liturgy. It is in the Solemn Liturgy, promulgated unaltered at the hands of the Universal Church since its Divine Institution at the Last Supper, that the ordained priest makes the Body of Christ sacramentally present during the public worship of the Mass. Echoing the 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, Father Michel taught that mankind finds in the Catholic Mass its only sure hope for healing in those most troubled of times. The issuance of the great Mystici Corporis Christi (“Mystical Body of Christ”) confirmed for the aching world the traditional sense of authentic, historical Christianity: that the root of Christian unity resides only in and through the Mystical Body of Christ.
According to musician Mary Oberle Hubley, in the hands of Father Virgil Michel these immortal teachings had been a faithful transmission of Pope St. Pius X’s teachings, as enunciated in his 1903 Moto Proprio, Tra le Solicitudini. They faithfully reiterated continual Church teachings throughout the centuries regarding the meaning and purpose of the Church’s liturgical rites, most especially the Sacrifice of the Mass: the sum and summit of all treasures.
However, in the hands of Father Michel’s immediate successor, the self-admittedly unprepared, inexperienced Father Godfrey Diekmann, O.S.B. of Collegeville, MN (who was not trained in the many-faceted disciplines of the liturgist, but instead was a student of Patristics, i.e., the early Church Fathers), such was not the case. According to Mary Oberle Hubley, merely twenty-five years after Father Michel’s death the precious doctrine of the Mystical Body became reduced to a mere utilitarian “function.” The faithful became “empowered” and thereby socially united for the purpose of “making community”: a subtle and spiritually deadening theological error.
Thus came about the post-Conciliar “New Music,” with its “anything goes” jettisoning of all musical and theological standards in the practice of Catholic Church music in America, including the heretofore unheard of use of Protestant hymns.
“Much of Protestant hymnody,” said the composer, “represents the antithesis of our Catholic doctrine and tradition, and is consequently alien to Catholicism. Many of these Protestant songs - - including those of the Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist sects - - are eminently singable, but they are not Roman Catholic, for they retain strong non- (if not anti-) Catholic associations. They, thus, are not Sacred music. They confuse and oftentimes antagonize our Catholic faithful. Moreover,” continues the composer, “interest in the use of Protestant hymnody reflects a telling symptom of not only ignorance regarding our Catholic musical and historical background, but also a serious misunderstanding of the fundamental premise of Catholic evangelization.”
In her second panel address, “Sing Pro-Life in Your Churches,” Mary Oberle Hubley noted that, from the aforementioned error follows the noticeable absence of hymnody in the Catholic churches specifically promoting pro-life principles. She offered for the hearing and review of the conference participants a hymn of her writing, entitled Jesus, the Lord of Life. It is of this hymn that the internationally known “Apostle for Life,” Benedictine Father Paul B. Marx, O.S.B., of Collegeville, MN stated: “This great hymn, Jesus, the Lord of Life, fulfills a real need in our churches today, where the music and hymnody often seem far away from the promotion of the sanctity of life. “
Further information in regard to this and other hymns from Gate of Heaven, the collection of post-Conciliar hymnody written by composer Mary Oberle Hubley, as well as her commentary in regard to Catholic Church music, may be accessed at the Nicholas-Maria Publishers website at www.nicholasmaria.com.