Tea at Trianon: The Church Needs Beauty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 29, 2022

The Church Needs Beauty

From Maggie Gallagher at First Things:

Since Vatican II, the Church has largely ceased to play its historic role as commissioner of liturgical music. Sacred music composers have thus found that they are mostly asked to write for the concert stage. We risk losing something when two generations of composers are never given the opportunity to master the craft of writing for the liturgy, for the worship of God. What Archbishop Cordileone has accomplished is thus no small thing. He recognized that beauty’s power to shape our souls—to remind us that we have souls—is missing in the Catholic effort to evangelize. The archbishop of San Francisco understood that more needed to be done to energize “a Catholic culture of the arts.”
The Church responded to the Reformation by investing in new works of art, including sacred music for the Mass, which won over audiences in the great cathedrals. In today's classical music world, holding a successful premiere for a new work by a relatively unknown composer is difficult. To get a second performance is almost impossible. The Mass of the Americas, by contrast, has been performed in less than four years in San Francisco, Tijuana, Houston, New Jersey, D.C., New York, and, most recently, Rome. Frank La Rocca’s second commission from Archbishop Cordileone, a Requiem Mass for the Homeless, is following a similar path. It premiered first in San Francisco, before being repurposed as a fundraiser for Ukrainian refugees in New Jersey. It is scheduled for celebration in Dallas next year.

Cappella Records reports brisk sales both here and abroad: “We are seeing signs of a great deal of interest in the Mass of the Americas from Spanish-speaking countries as well, as befits a unity Mass,” Mark Powell, executive director of the company, told me.

Numbers are one thing. But Mass of the Americas is also touching souls. “As a Mexican-American Catholic who is entrenched in the world of choral music, I never imagined my spheres coming together so closely,” one young musician wrote to Frank La Rocca. “I couldn't believe I would ever listen to such a powerful piece of music that was also laced with the hymn that my late grandmother used to sing to me as a child.” (Read more.)