Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Martin on Patriotic Songs at Mass


Over at America, Father James Martin comes out against patriotic songs at Mass.. His argument rests on the first commandment,  worship is due to God alone. Hard to quarrel with that. We cannot put anything else in the place of God, not money, our parents, or our country. That would be idolatry.
However Martin neglects that we do honor our parents, the saints, and a lot of other holy things. The real problem is that often our honor of Mary, the saints, the church, and our country looks far too much like the worship due to God alone
I liked Martin's quote from John Baldovin, S.J., professor of historical and liturgical theology at Boston College as a practical solution:
Frankly, I do not favor patriotic songs like ‘America the Beautiful’ at liturgy. My reason is that they are addressed to the nation and not to God. There are patriotic hymns, e.g., ‘God of Our Fathers,’ ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save,’ ‘This is My Song’—all of these are addressed to God.
I like Baldovin’s solution. “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” paraphrases the ideas in the litany for protection for people who travel by land, sea, and air. I think it is an appropriate entrance or preparation hymn. “America the Beautiful” although it contains invocations to God, seems to address the nation more than God. I would give it a pass only for the recessional, and then only because the recessional is not technically a part of the Mass.
What are your thoughts?

26 comments:

  1. Last Sunday our choir wanted to do The Battle Hymn of the Republic for a recessional, and asked me to do the organ accompaniment, which I did. It didn't go that well, seemed like we were out of sync, but the congregation sang loudly, also out of sync, and seemed to enjoy it. Today there was no choir or accompaniment, so Father started My Country Tis of Thee for entrance, and America The Beautiful for exit, and the congregation sang a capella. I would have preferred not to do any of the above, but meh, we're done with it for another year. I am not in favor of liturgical micromanagement of songs which are borderline acceptable if the congregation loves to sing them,which they do.

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  2. Love "Eternal Father, Strong to Save", especially when sung near the end of "The Perfect Storm". One of those hymns that gets to me. As for flag waving patriotism in Church, not at this moment, thank you.

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    1. I like that one, too. My mom (also a church organist) used to play it for funerals if she knew the deceased had been in the navy.
      Another one I like is "God of Our Fathers". Can't really call all the lyrics to mind, but it makes a nice, stately recessional with a bunch of principal and diapason stops pulled out.

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  3. Yeah, a lot of the honor of mom, Mary, the saints and church furniture (the chair of Peter) smacks of idolatry. If we must wave the flag -- and, I assure you, we must or a lot of nice people will be sore offended -- America the Beautiful seems OK to me as long as we include the second verse ("God mend thine every flaw").

    Nor do national flags belong on the altar. A bright pastor long ago erected three 20 foot flagpoles (the one in the middle is slightly higher) for the flags, from left to right, of the state, the United States and the Vatican. Whenever he was asked why there was no flag on the altar, he asked if the questioner had somehow missed the huge flag on the tall pole. That lasted until a slow-witted pastor got cornered by one of the God-and-country patriots (who never heard of the Know-Nothings) and put the Vatican and U.S. flags on the altar. There will be no getting rid of them now. But every time my eye falls on them, I think, "The abomination of desolation."

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  4. Past Sunday, recessional was God Bless America. Music in sync, congregation loud and in sync, tears running down faces. Not a fan of patriotic songs, but the times are such that I thought the choice was right....People do want God to keep America from going berzerk. (Maybe Stanley K. can work that in his volume on his and all of our inner berzerks!)

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    1. There is a small parish in Mendocino, CA and the pastor is a retired Navy chaplain. EVERY Sunday the closing hymn is "God Bless America." We go up there for one weekend in November every year. I have told him more than once that Kate Smith will be alive so long as St. Anthony's sings. He just grins. The parish is small and the demographics are such that almost everyone in attendance know who Kate Smith is.

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  5. Fine to pray for the country. I do every time Imread Trump's tweets.

    Putting the flag on the altar and singing hymns of praise to the nation smacks too much of "Gott mit uns."

    Even if the words aren't strenuously nationalistic, these thins have been co-opted by right-wingers and now take on nationalistic overtones.

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  6. I have always favored the used of Finlandia, Op 26, as a closing hymn. I clearly favors NO country in particular and does an excellent job of countering the "America First" heresy that seems to have found favor in a significant portion of the U.S. There is no reason that US Catholics are any less guilty of this sin.

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  7. Fifty, sixty? years ago there was a group of atheists in New York who sang that Finlandia version on Sunday mornings. Reason I know is that a Jesuit seminary in St. Marys (no apostrophe) Kansas -- it's now a Pius X parish -- invited the atheists for dialogue. I was assigned to cover it. The talk was mostly serious and often deep, but at one point, while they were discussing the need/lack of need for liturgy, one of the atheists let down his "side" and said,"Well, we get together once a week and sing Finlandia, so I guess we need something like that." Everybody laughed.

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    1. Is this the Finlandia the atheists were singing?

      This is my song, O God of all the nations
      A song of peace, for lands afar & mine
      This is my home, the country where my heart is
      Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine
      But other hearts in other lands are beating
      With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

      My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
      And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine
      But other lands have sunlight too, and clover
      And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
      O hear my song, thou God of all the nations
      A song of peace for their land and for mine

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    2. That's the one. The tune is great, too. Almost made me want to be an atheist whenever I am in New York. But being an atheist there would be redundant.

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    3. Did they actually sing "God"? Or 'Whatever of all the nations'?

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    4. Finlandia is one of those tunes where there are bazillion sets of lyrics. Like Hyfrydol and Old Hundredth. I like it when the hymnbooks have cross indices with tunes and lyrics; it's a lot easier match them.

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    5. MOS, On the God-line, I think they did sing it. They didn't believe in an a human-looking, human-thinking god, but they did believe there is a higher principle than Ayn Rand, for one, admitted to.

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  8. Here's "Finlandia" by the Indigo Girls. https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=c0OcZdzfOV8

    Our Unitarian Church used "O Brother Man" a lot: https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=Xx2KlFoFed0

    I found a couple of versions of this sung to the tune of "Danny Boy." You can also do the Doxology to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway," but I don't recommend either of these alternatives.

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  9. I am among the small minority who prefer mass without any music at all. Do away with the music and the problem solves itself. ;)

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    1. If an iconoclast wants to eliminate images from our worship. what is the word for one who wants to eliminate music from our worship?

      Perhaps an odai-clast? odai being plural for the Greek word for song, from which we get the word ode.

      Now there have been a lot of people who want to eliminate musical instruments from the liturgy, in fact that is the Orthodox position. Somewhere along the way there must have been some people who wanted to deny song any place.

      Maybe Anne needs to find out whose they were. One of the nice things about studying liturgy is that you can almost always find someone somewhere who has done what you want to do.

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    2. If I remember correctly it was the Arians that really liked hymns, and Ambrose introduced singing hymns to orthodox congregations to counter the Arians.

      The result of all that singing controversy was to encourage the singing of psalms and other biblical passages to avoid heretical language of hymns.

      So maybe that is the beginning of a case against hymns.

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    3. I'm with Anne C. Where the music is so bad and unenthusiastic as to be distracting, get rid of it. Ditto that hand-holding at the Our Father. And tell married couples that the peace is not for extended cooing and billing at each other. Yeesh. Rent a room, people.

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    4. Jean, Without a song the day would never end. Without a song the road would never bend. When thing go wrong, a man ain't got a friend without a song.

      Everybody knows that.

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    5. Hahaha. Like Lawrence Welk said, "Frents, pudda zong in your hard-a."

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  10. Tom and Jean, if I ever win the powerball, you two are set for life.

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  11. Well, just so long as you don't make me sing for my share, Stanley. Unless it's Roy Orbison. I do love me some "Cryin'"! Or Ethel Merman. This is religious. I'd sing it: https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=xKPLJySDn2Y

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  12. Just to keep the record straight. I love music. I like classical and chant (some of it anyway). I am pretty old now, and love 60s and 70s rock and folk. I love a lot of show music - Les Mis, Mamma Mia, Phantom etc.because I also love singing music and belt those songs out as loud as I can if I'm alone - I was involved in multiple choirs and small choral groups when I was young. But while most parish choirs do their best, most are not very good and some are somewhat painful to listen to. But the main reason I like no music at mass (even when well done) is because I prefer contemplative prayer to spoken prayer. I prefer silence to liturgy. When I still attended a Catholic parish regularly, I often skipped Sunday mass for a quiet weekday mass at a small Jesuit chapel in DC. Ten people, priest, 5 minute homily (short and usually pretty good). No music. Closest a liturgy comes to contemplative prayer and creating a meditative mood. Basically, I really don't like liturgy much, but it took me decades to get up the nerve to stop going to mass. My childhood indoctrination was strong. I feel God's presence in quiet places, in nature, in silence and not in churches and in group prayer. A personality quirk.

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