Wandering around down south

Laurent hasn't been to Mass since Easter. To eliminate all his usual excuses, I agreed to Metro down to his neighborhood and go to Mass with him at his neighborhood church, St. Dominic. It takes him probably less time to walk to the church than it does for him to get to his Metro stop, yet at one minute til Mass, I still found myself dialing his cell phone wondering where he was. Fortunately, the music director opens the Mass with a bunch of announcements, so we were able to slip into a pew just in time before the opening hymn started.

I always find this parish to be a place of so much potential, but so much misguided liturgy and music. This morning was no exception.

The parish uses Breaking Bread 2008, one of those disposable paperback hymnals that have to be replaced every year, and most of the service seemed to come from there. The opening hymn was Kingsfold. So far, so good. For the offertory, they had a congregational hymn the congregation didn't sing called "Glory in the Cross" by Dan Schutte, one of the dreaded "St. Louis Jesuits." What particularly drove me crazy about the "hymn," though, wasn't so much the music, but the vocal performance: each verse has the phrase "the cross of Christ" at the beginning and at the end, and the music director very emphatically kept singing it as a jaunty and choppy "crossssssssssss.....of.....Chrisssssssssssst." The communion hymn was "You satisfy the hungry heart," a well-known bad Catholic song that, surprisingly, had very little congregational support (usually they at least sing the refrain). The recessional hymn was Easter Hymn (Jesus Christ is ris'n today), the only hymn all morning that seemed to be heartily sung by the congregation, but even though things were going just great, they only did three of the four verses!

The Mass setting started off with a sort of responsorial Gregorian chant Kyrie, followed by a Gloria I didn't know and couldn't locate in any of the Mass settings in the hymnal. It must be a great secret; the parish newsletter has a column where the later portions of the setting are listed with hymn numbers, but the Gloria isn't mentioned at all. The rest of the Mass setting was that great abomination, Mass of Glory by Ken Canedo and Bob Hurd, one of the biggest arguments in favor of abortion the Catholic Church has. For the responsorial psalm setting, the music director (who cantored the Mass) sang an antiphon setting that was not anywhere I could find in the hymnal.

The liturgy itself was very low church, with very little chanted and no incense used. The priests weren't overly social or friendly shaking hands after the service. The homily was read by a deacon/monastic from the archdiocese, but as is typical with archdiocesan speakers, it was sleepy. There's a weird acoustic in the church, too, that makes spoken words from the ambo hard to hear via the speaker system.

The parish is fortunate, though to have a beautiful church with gorgeous 19th century stained glass windows and a very nice organ in the balcony loft. They have a good organist (he played an arrangement of "Ode to Joy" as a postlude) and the few times I've been to Mass here, there's been a good flutist in the loft occasionally playing along with the organ. They also had a choir of five women and three men this time that was positioned on risers up front and heavily miked that seemed interested and enthusiastic. So, with a little liturgical and musical rethinking (basically getting rid of the bad contemporary Catholic music that the congregations at this Mass seem not to prefer), they could have a very nice service, and, perhaps, start to fill up all those empty pews.