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A sacred music grant project helped Catholic parishioners from many ethnicities—Anglo, Eritrean, Filipino, Latino, Nigerian, Vietnamese, and more—experience the awe and mystery of faith and God.
is the inaugural director of , a parish-based Catholic Cultural Center on Chicago’s North Side. Before helping to found St. Gregory’s Hall, he managed projects at the , a Catholic intellectual apostolate serving the University of Chicago. In this edited conversation, Franzen discusses how a 2023 Vital 91, Vital Preaching grant helped Catholics from many cultures encounter God through sacred music.
St. Gregory’s Hall is a parish-based Catholic Cultural Center serving and Chicago’s North Side. We promote Catholic culture through sacred art and music, education, community, and prayer. Our activities nourish the faith of parishioners and invite neighbors to encounter Jesus Christ through beauty, goodness, and truth.
Our grant focused on evangelization through Catholic sacred music traditions both within and beyond our racially diverse parish. We commissioned , our , to write new sacred music. We hosted several special feast day liturgies, such as for and Candlemas. We offered receptions after choral liturgies, sacred music talks, and a . The project confirmed that sacred music can help people with no background in these traditions of sacred music to have a meaningful experience of worship.
St. Gregory’s Hall promotes a revival of sacred art and music, inviting the faithful and others to encounter the beauty of the art and architecture of church buildings and learn about the history, spirituality, and theology that inspires these arts. Similarly, sacred music has been developed over centuries in the Roman Rite to illuminate scripture, express the breadth of human experience, and emulate the heavenly hosts. All this is in service of worshiping God. Giving Catholics a fresh experience of these rich traditions opens them to an encounter with the mysteries of our faith that can be profound and life changing.
Many Catholics have not heard Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, or traditional hymnody at all, or have only heard them in a concert or performance setting. Very few Catholics have heard traditional forms of sacred music in the context for which they were created: worship. Events like this have potential to draw in people to experience Catholicism in a new and unique way. This is especially true for services like vespers and , which are more ecumenical. Inviting people to “come pray with us,” with a profound experience with sacred beauty, can speak to peoples’ hearts and open them up more directly than can more common parish events.
For Catholics, is about living out the gospel as a witness to those outside the faith. It is about the church being the light of Christ. Evangelization requires that we in the church experience anew the love of Christ, his saving power, and our need for redemption and healing.
Pope Paul VI said, “The are changed lives and a changed world—holiness and justice, spirituality and peace.” As a result of inviting people to “come pray with us” throughout our grant year, several people joined the parish choir. One person decided to go through the rite of Christian initiation for adults to enter the Roman Catholic Church.
I would estimate somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of our parishioners were born in another country. Our grant events had an average attendance of 100 to 150 people, comparable to what we draw at each of our three parish churches on an average Sunday. Our parish’s diversity was fairly well-represented in the grant events and is currently represented in our parish choir. We also have choirs dedicated to serving the liturgy in particular languages (Spanish and Vietnamese), which naturally attracts native speakers to those Masses.
The liturgies for the grant events included a combination of choirs and congregational singing. Each liturgy included several compositions by Kevin Allen, our composer-in-residence. Our events featured some music in English, but most was in Latin, the sole language used in Catholic churches around the world before the Second Vatican Council. Many ages attended, including young adults and families who weren’t parishioners but came because they were interested in—or curious about—sacred music.
Sacred music during our grant project included Gregorian chants from the ninth and tenth centuries, a Eucharistic text by Thomas Aquinas, from the Renaissance, and new music by Kevin Allen, mostly in Latin and traditional forms.
A lot of people talked about how sacred music helps make the liturgy more prayerful and contemplative. The musical repertoire in our church, as in many Catholic parishes around the world, has been primarily nineteenth-century hymns and contemporary songs such as by and the . We’ve had only very occasionally. When we did a Mass with violin and harp, it particularly struck people because we don’t usually have those instruments in worship.
Immigrant parishioners tell me that in their home countries they sang mostly hymnody and folk music in their own languages. None mentioned experiencing church music back home as transcendent. We noticed that people old enough to remember Latin-only Catholic Masses had almost a muscle memory for Marian hymns sung in Latin to plainchant tunes.
have been traditionally sung at the end of (daily night prayers) throughout the year and also at Mass during processionals, communion, and recessionals. The four main Marian hymns, sung in Latin, have been set to multiple musical settings, but the simple tones of plainchant are most familiar and accessible to all.
Kevin Allen composed a setting for the Marian hymn text “” for our Solemn Evensong for Epiphany. That hymn is often sung during Advent and Christmas too because it focuses on the angel Gabriel’s announcement and Mary’s divine motherhood. The other hymn texts are “,” sung during Lent; “,” sung from Easter through Pentecost; and “,” sung after Pentecost (Ordinary Time).
We had minor pushback, and here’s the historical context. Before the Second Vatican Council, the Mass was only in Latin. Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, , allowed for the use of vernacular languages along with Latin as part of an effort to encourage “full and active participation by all the people” in the sacred liturgy. This emphasis was intended to inspire the spiritual renewal needed to fulfill the church’s mission of evangelization, not to snuff out centuries of tradition.
Today, Catholic worship in many places has all but lost ancient forms of sacred music that help the faithful recognize God’s transcendence and open us to the interaction of the supernatural with the here and now. Although our grant included English translations of any Latin texts, a few people found Latin alienating. Some people asked, “What am I supposed to be doing while the choir sings a long ‘Gloria’?” They saw the Latin and choirs as barriers to full active participation.
The actions of singing, speaking, and communing aren’t the only ways to participate in the liturgy. Listening to a choir singing Gregorian chants can create an inner space open to a sense of transcendence, sacredness, and solemnity. From this space, we can offer up our prayers as the choir sings. This is another way to assist in participating in the Mass that we have lost sight of in a world obsessed with efficiency and business.
Our parish and visitors experienced traditions of sacred music as living liturgical traditions rather than just historical relics. Continued conversation and reflection contributes to more integrated and beautiful worship in our churches. Overwhelmingly, parishioners who attended the choral liturgies were excited that this music could be heard in their church during Mass. When asked whether they would prefer that music at Mass sound like this every week, some said yes, and others thought it appropriate only for solemn occasions.
Our parish and visitors experienced traditions of sacred music as living liturgical traditions rather than just historical relics.
Our parish now includes seasonal Marian hymns as processionals at normal Sunday Masses. And the has become a much-anticipated Advent event. Its prayer-song-reading cycle is similar to a service of lessons and carols. Kevin Allen designed ours to focus on the Immaculate Conception and Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In emphasizing her role in the story of salvation, we’re not putting Mary in competition with Jesus. We’re offering a different way to experience beautiful sacred music in a season when people are already in the mood to come to church.
It has to be done incrementally with the cooperation of willing pastors. Introduce it not as turning back the clock, but as introducing or reintroducing something that is part of the of our faith. Sacred music helps us experience and live out the joyful proclamation of the gospel.
We learned that, when introducing sacred music traditions less familiar to the congregation, there is more power in showing than explaining. People are less likely to be convinced by arguments or authoritative teachings. 91 is an embodied and sensory activity, and the beauty of sacred music is much more apparent and obvious when it is encountered in the liturgy. This immersion approach is closer to how the Holy Spirit works. Instruction on the theory, history, and theology of sacred music is more suitable for an audience that is more fully initiated into the experience of sacred music traditions.
Yes, music isn’t the only sacred art. Catholic traditions naturally emphasize the church’s unity and universality, but always mediated through the stories of particular people, a particular church, a particular place. In our , one might be amazed to find that has English-inspired architecture built by Luxembourger immigrants and filled with works made by artists from Spain, Italy, and Central America. was built in French Gothic style, and its medallion windows contain more than 200,000 pieces of stained glass by an Irish congregation.
, dedicated to the , has shrines dedicated to the martyrs of England and Wales, Vietnam, Laos, Korea, the Philippines, China, and Japan, and to Franciscan missionaries to South America, plus shrines for Marian apparitions from Eritrea, Vietnam, England, and Portugal. The universal language of the faith is expressed through many people groups who represent part of the parish’s current or past identity. St. Thomas of Canterbury is also our .
Learn more about and its of sacred art, sacred music, Montessori-inspired catechesis, and more. Listen to choral Masses hosted at St. Gregory’s Hall for the and for the , which included ’s “.” Read how St. Gregory’s Hall’s joys and concerns.
