For the last semester-plus, I've been wanting to go hear my friend Drew at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, where he sings in the choir and sometimes cantors, before he graduates and leaves D.C. next month. The day I pick? Yesterday, when the rain was falling so heavily that I came downstairs with just an umbrella and had to go back upstairs to get my trenchcoat so I could stay dry (at least from the knees up) for the long walk to Georgetown. Even with the Circulator bus taking me to Georgetown, the half-mile walk from Wisconsin Avenue to the church and university was soggy.
Holy Trinity is the oldest Catholic parish in Georgetown and the District, started by the Jesuits who previously in 1789 had started the university. It was also the parish church of President and Mrs. Kennedy during his days in the U.S. Senate when they were living in Georgetown.
I found the nave to be interestingly spare, even Presbyterian-looking, and in the early American congregationalist cracker box design. The sanctuary is dominated, naturally, by a large cross, but rather than the traditional Catholic crucifix, they use a large, contemporary, glass and metal cross with biblical scenes etched into the arms of the cross and then back-lit so those scenes glow. Tall, stained glass windows line the sides of the nave, but rather than the usual portraits and scenes, the windows are simple, colored glass with a few geometric designs—again, very Protestant-looking.
The service leaflet announced that the organ prelude before Mass, surprisingly, was going to be the Final from
Symphony No. 1 by Louis Vierne, a rather massive and festive work usually done as a postlude to major services. When the organist began to play, it definitely wasn't the Final; I think he was playing a softer, simpler movement from earlier in the symphony.
The procession started. It was First Communion Sunday, so they had about eight cute little kids, all
very nicely and preppily dressed, processing in. What caught my attention, though, were the altar boys: all of the servers yesterday were women in that late middle-aged to elderly age group! Not only were the servers mature women, so were the cantress and the litanist.
Hymns for the day were
O filii et filiae for the processional and
Hymn to Joy (Sing with all the saints in glory) for the recessional. Jesuits have a reputation for bad liturgy and bad contemporary music (remember the "St. Louis Jesuits"?) during their Masses, and they didn't disappoint at Holy Trinity, doing a really hideous Marty Haugen song called "Come to the Feast," each verse of which begins like "Ho, everyone who thinks...." (an interesting choice so soon after the Don Imus debaucle) after the offertory anthem that the congregation didn't sing. During communion, the organist/choirmaster chanted Psalm 34 with a congregational alleluia antiphon, all
a capella.
The Mass setting also had the taint of bad contemporary music with unsingable congregational responses and antiphons, beginning with the "St. Augustine's Gloria" by Christopher Walker. While I'm used to responsorial Glorias in this diocese, this version had four different antiphons. The problem was that one never knew when the choir was done singing verses and when the antiphon would start, plus we didn't know which antiphon to sing. There was a similar challenge with the psalm, where some verses were sung by the cantress and some by the choir and some by both alternating, again, with it hard to know when to sing the antiphon. The Sanctus and Eucharistic Acclamations, at least, were the familiar ones from the Proulx
A Community Mass, though the organist introduced the acclamations (five single, repeated notes that establish pitch and rhythm) not with voices from the singing registration, but with a loud, honky trumpet stop. The Sanctus was a plainsong setting I didn't know, and neither did the congregation, that didn't stay together and probably could have used organ accompaniment.
The musical bright spot, though, was the fact they had a decent, small choir in the balcony. They sang "Come, ye faithful, raise the strain" by R.S. Thatcher for the offertory, a piece that used an original melody by the composer instead of being an arrangement of the familiar hymn tunes.
Liturgically, they did a few different things. First, there was a touch of inclusive language (something not normally heard in a Catholic church), when at the end of the consecration, the congregation said "to the praise and glory of God's name" instead of the usual "His name." They also remained standing after the Agnus Dei instead of kneeling, and kept standing until they had returned from being communicated. The pastor, who was the celebrant, didn't incense the altar properly either at the begining of Mass or during the preparation, during the prayer of consecration he bowed instead of genuflecting after the elevations (perhaps it was a physical or health matter, but he wasn't geriatric and he didn't seem to have any physical difficulty moving around), and he wasn't a chanter.
The service leaflet stated the postlude would be the Toccata from
Symphonie No. 5 by Charles-Marie Widow, something many of you probably heard last weekend after Easter Mass. As the organist began to play, though, I immediately knew that he wasn't playing the Widor! This, though, was where the Vierne came in. I stayed in my pew to hear it, and the organist acquitted himself quite well. They have an E.M. Skinner organ with about fifty ranks, all up in the balcony. Drew later told me that the organist was actually the assistant, the organist/music director having gone to Paris after Easter. Here's a picture of Drew turning pages for the organist during the postlude.
