Grassroots Liturgist

I was lucky enough to catch the BBC Radio 3 programme, Private Passions, while driving in my car the other week.   The guest was Eamon Duffy, Catholic historian and Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge. The whole programme is worthy of a listen, but at 23 minutes 42 seconds into the programme he is asked about the current state of music in the western Catholic liturgy.   He begins his response with, “That’s rather a depressing question”.   He singles out James MacMillan for praise and vaguely refers to (I’m guessing a very few) other Catholic composers, but otherwise he paints a very grim scene indeed.   I highlight a few key things that were said below…… #      “….we sing in Church the kind of music we would never dream of listening to and that we only otherwise hear at school assemblies….” #      “…[there has been] a radical impoverishment and a loss of the sense of the numinous.”   ...

It was some time in the summer of 2012 that, out of the blue, our recently-arrived parish priest asked me to start a music group to minister to our Saturday Vigil Mass; a group that, in particular, he wanted to attract young people to be involved in the life of the Church. First, a little background information.   For about six or seven years, since moving to the area, I had been involved in the music ministry at the Sunday morning Mass at one of the two parishes in our small town.   It was very low-pressure stuff; there was already in place a very talented musician/singer/composer who planned everything and I merely turned up and added some strumming on my guitar, some vocal harmonies and, occasionally, a solo or two.   However, due to family circumstances, we started to attend the Vigil Mass at the other Church and my guitar rarely left its case for several years.   The new Parish Priest became aware of my musical inclination because I had been asked to pl...

Welcome to my new blog. It has been suggested to me for a while to start this blog.   But I was reluctant for a number of reasons; not least of these being (I must admit) that I didn’t really have an idea of what a blog is as I don’t follow any myself.   When I started looking at some liturgical blogs there were a couple of things that struck me – it seems that virtually all of them are somewhere between “rather” and “very” traditionalist; and more often than not they aspire to a “quality” (for want of a better word) of music than most parish groups (in my experience) are incapable of – much as I love a bit of Byrd, Palestrina and Allegri I have never been involved in a parish where we had the resources and skills to pull it off. So, deeply influenced by the Dirty Harry philosophy of life (“A man’s got to know his limitations!”), this blog is aimed at grassroot liturgists like myself.   Based on my own experiences – successes and failures – it will contain refl...