Liturgical Music Mayhem Madness...

Ok... I need to be as charitable as possible with this post. That will be hard since I am going to be discussing traditional vs. modern music at Mass.

Our local parish has 2 Masses every Sunday: 9:00am & 11:30am. We have only attended the late mass twice. We also chose the church (1 of 2) because it seemed more... traditional? conservative? orthodox? Anyways, I don't want to turn my blog into a 'bash my parish' type site, I don't think that is helpful most of the time. For the most part, things are done well, with the usual ups and downs any parish has.

Yet, I cannot help but be frustrated with this 11:30 Mass. The first one we went to there was a video screen and a "Band" of some type. It seemed from some of the comments and discussions that it was a fairly new thing. So I took it as an experiment, and hadn't been back since. Until today...

The video screen was back, along with guitars, drums, BONGOS, a triangle, and a RAIN STICK. Really... a Rainstick. Now, we came from a pretty orthodox parish, housed in a pretty new and modern church. It was an interesting but GOOD mix of traditional and modern. The music at our old parish was traditional for almost every mass, except the late 5pm Mass on Sundays, which was specifically set up as the Life Teen Mass. In other words you knew what you were getting, and it was at a time specifically set aside for the teens.

This Mass is not that, at least it isn't set up that way. Now don't get me wrong, I like worship music, the sort of stuff you hear on the radio. I like it when I am driving in my car, studying, getting ready for sleep, etc... I don't expect to walk into Mass and see Casting Crowns or Third Day setting up to play a set. I think that Pope Benedict covers the issue well in "The Sacred Liturgy." The point is... Mass is not the place for a RAINSTICK.

Now for those of you that think I am being to harsh... the worst part was that the video screen didn't aid us most of the time. For one of the songs, the person controlling it was flashing through all of the songs. Now they didn't just have the songs, they had EVERYTHING that the congregation is supposed to sing or say. Which I think is counterproductive, especially since the church already has missalettes. It proved to be quite distracting, and like I said counterproductive. On top of that, the songs they have in their repertoire didn't exactly match up with All Saints Day. Overall, I just wish more churches were focused on making the Liturgy more meaningful as opposed to making it more entertaining.
We as Catholics should focus on Christ and not on ourselves. That music was not selected to worship God better, but instead was played to make us feel better. When we do things like that with the Liturgy we have already begun to erode its meaning. Instead of focusing on God, we are focusing on ourselves, which is the reason Christ had to get up on the cross in the first-place... it's almost as if we have learned  nothing.

I think The Crescat sums things up with this post: "Still not a liturgical instrument"