Dear brothers and
sisters in the Lord, this weekend we have in the parish the Assumption Seminary
Choir or Schola cantorum. Pope Hilary
(d. 438) is sometimes credited with having inaugurated the first Schola cantorum, but it was Gregory the
Great, as we are told in his life wrote by John the Deacon, who established the
school on a firm basis and endowed it. With these lines I want to publicly
thank them for their presence and of course Gilbert Aldrete, our 3musical director,
and Mrs. Amy Zuberbueler for making this event possible. I would like also to quote
a text of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. I'm sure that these ideas will
help us to appreciate sacred music, to give thanks to God for the presence of
these young seminarians in our parish community and to raise our voices in
praise to God ■ Fr. Agustin.
«The importance of music in biblical religion is shown
very simply by the fact that the verb "to sing" (with related words
such as "song", and so forth) is one of the most commonly used words
in the Bible. It occurs 309 times in the Old Testament and thirty-six in the
New. When man comes into contact with God, mere speech is not enough. Areas of
his existence are awakened that spontaneously turn into song. Indeed, man's own
being is insufficient for what he has to express, and so he invites the whole
of creation to become a song with him: Awake,
my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn! I will give thanks to
you, O Lord, among the peoples; I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the
peoples; I will sing praises to you among the nations. For your steadfast love
is great to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds[1]. We find the first mention of singing in the Bible after the crossing of
the Red Sea. Israel has now been definitively delivered from slavery. In a
desperate situation, it has had an overwhelming experience of God's saving
power. Just as Moses as a baby was taken from the Nile and only then really
received the gift of life, so Israel now feels as if it has been "taken
out of the water": it is free, newly endowed with the gift of itself from
God's own hands. Year by year at the Easter Vigil,
Christians join in the singing of this song, because they know that they have
been "taken out of the water" by God's power, set free by God for
authentic life. Liturgical singing is established in
the midst of this great historical tension. For Israel, the event of salvation
in the Red Sea will always be the main reason for praising God, the basic theme
of the songs it sings before God. For Christians, the Resurrection of Christ is
the true Exodus. He has stridden through the Red Sea of death itself, descended
into the world of shadows, and smashed open the prison door. In Baptism this
Exodus is made ever present. To be baptized is to be made a partaker, a
contemporary, of Christ's descent into hell and of his rising up therefore, in
which he takes us up into the fellowship of new life. The man who believes in
the Resurrection of Christ really does know what definitive salvation is. He
realizes that Christians, who find themselves in the "New Covenant",
now sing an altogether new song, which is truly and definitively new in view of
the wholly new thing that has taken place in the Resurrection of Christ. The definitively new song has been intoned, but still all the sufferings
of history must be endured, all pain gathered in and brought into the sacrifice
of praise, in order to be transformed there into a song of praise. Here, then, is the theological basis for liturgical singing. We need to
look more closely at its practical reality. With regard to the singing of the
Church, we notice the same pattern of continuity and renewal that we have seen
in the nature of the liturgy in general, in church architecture, and in sacred
images. The Holy Spirit is love, and it is he who produces the singing. He is the Spirit of Christ, the
Spirit who draws us into love for Christ and so leads to the Father. In the
musical sphere, biblical faith created its own form of culture, an expression
appropriate to its inward essence, one that provides a standard for all later
forms of inculturation. The question of how far inculturation
can go soon became a very practical one for early Christianity, especially in
the area of music. The Christian community had grown out of the synagogue and,
along with the christologically interpreted Psalter, had also taken over the
synagogue's way of singing. Very soon new Christian hymns and canticles came
into being: first, with a wholly Old Testament foundation, the Benedictus
and Magnificat, but then christologically focused on texts, preeminently
the prologue of Saint John's Gospel[2],
the hymn of Christ in the epistle to the Philippians[3],
and the song of Christ in the first epistle to Timothy[4]
» ■ Music and Liturgy. How does music express the Word of
God, the Vision of God? by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
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