It may not be popular to say it and, often in the Church, it seems there are some subjects we are all not supposed to talk about.
But sometimes we must face up to our responsibilities. One significant problem in the life of the Church today is what we call liturgical music.
The problem is that much of the liturgical music used in the average Australian parish is… awful. It is impossible to put any kind of figure on it, and the hymnals used in many parishes seem to vary quite widely.
But, nevertheless, the problem is real. Much so-called liturgical music which seems to exist as a kind of default setting in Australian parish life is a serious problem because it serves to hamper the evangelisation that is meant to occur in a parish. In that sense, much of what is called liturgical music is anti- or contra-liturgical.
Throughout the history of the Church, great attention has been paid to the liturgy as the central act of Christian worship.
The liturgy is, after all, the highest prayer of the Church and the time and the place when the baptised come together to enter into communion with God, to adore, praise and worship the creator of the universe.
In the liturgy we touch the other plane of existence and in its confines we are meant to glimpse our own true homeland.
Whatever one may call it, one does not call the liturgy trite, nor should it be treated as if it is. Rather, it is a moment of surpassing drama, when heaven descends like lightning into our midst.
Imagine for a moment the average young secular Australian adult – anyone up to the age of, say, 35 years.
Imagine that, somehow, over a series of encounters, arguments and conversations of the kinds that friends have over such issues, one convinces a friend or an acquaintance to come and have a look at Sunday Mass in one’s parish or perhaps at what is called a youth mass in order to glimpse the Church.
Young average Australians today may be part of the fabric of a culture that has no values and no belief in a fixed truth but the average young Australian is neither stupid nor moronic.
In fact, they are usually very intelligent.
Deep down, just like everyone else, they are searching for the truth to their lives – the truth of something they can hold on to with a certitude that they feel will lead them to happiness and fulfilment.
These are the very people the new evangelisation seeks to speak to.
Imagine that one could take such a person to an average Australian parish experience.
Here the problem of the contra-liturgical musical mentality emerges more clearly.
What they would experience, overwhelmingly, is the music adopted from largely American composers of the seventies who were themselves powerfully immersed in and influenced by pop culture that reduces the experience of the liturgy to the level of the trite.
Those searching for inspiration or wanting to touch the eternal would find instead all too often the electric bass, the drums, the acoustic guitars and occasional wind instruments deployed enthusiastically but not necessarily terribly proficiently, by parish musicians who often seem like they are looking more for the opportunity of a gig rather than to lead the baptised to a sense of the ethereal.
To argue that much of the average music used in the average Australian parish is not good enough or is actually toxic to the new evangelisation on the grounds that it is too influenced by contemporary trends in pop culture is not to argue that contemporary music is bad.
Much contemporary music is good, but it is not composed by its creators with the intention of enabling the listener to sense the existence of mystery, to inspire or to recollect.
The problem is that a sizeable chunk of current liturgical music is either mediocre or profane, which is to say that whatever it is, it is not of the timeless nor the eternal.
Partly, the root of the problem has been parish and diocesan liturgistas, fired up with an inadequately-informed enthusiasms originating largely out of the seventies but possessed of enough power and influence to introduce changes that have progressively aided a decline in this dimension of the experience of liturgical life.
The task of liturgical music and of parish musicians is to inspire and recollect, to create an atmosphere that will assist the faithful to enter into timeless mysteries, to introduce the baptised to the grandeur and the subtlety of a tradition that is two millennia old, not to copy Hillsong and Riverview who, in any case, do contemporary praise and worship music far better than any Catholic parish in the country.
Why do we, the Church, with the astonishing liturgical musical tradition that we possess, feel that in order to be successful today we have to copy or emulate Hillsong or Riverview?
Faced with the average musical experience in the average Australian parish and the atmospherics it produces, our imaginary secular young Australian searching for a sense of the sublime and of eternal truth will simply turn around and walk out because he or she understands with clarity the principle that one produces what one is.
The experience of mediocrity in Church music probably leads powerfully in almost every case to the impression or conclusion that the Church is itself mediocre.
The impression may be wrong but it is not obtuse to ask, by how far? If we wish to launch the new evangelisation we should also consider launching a renaissance of liturgical music aimed at lifting the mind and the heart to truth, beauty and goodness.
A good glimpse can be already be seen in the liturgical musical excellence of our own St Mary’s Cathedral. It is possible. It always was.