AND we come back to the question again, as we have done so before where did the Catholic Church go wrong? How is it possible that the most powerful and vibrant institution in Irish life could have so mistaken its essential cultural values that it ditched what people loved, and embraced the meretricious, the shallow, the ephemeral? The Church possessed a vast body of music, ancient and recent, and dumped the lot, and reached instead for a curious stew of trendiness and bogus folk.
Tell me does your heart not sink when you hear the organist wrap his or her fingers around the opening chords of Kumbaya? Why? Because you know it lacks all authenticity. It is a bastard hybrid of the Catholic Church mated with The Black and White Minstrel Show a musical piccaninny that presumably is meant to appeal hearts which were once stirred by the thought of all those baptised Little Black Babies millions of grinning, misfortunate samboes destined for limbo.
Old Attitudes
Maybe it is because so many people are retrospectively appalled by the old attitudes to Africans that the Church reached for the Negro Spiritual as a reassurance to our little Black brothers and sisters that We Am All Equal, and We Gonna Sing One Of Dem Dere Slave Songs Using One Of Dem Dere Phoney Slave Voices. One always senses that whenever a church choir breaks into Kumbya, one is meant to sway - ethnically, of course, with a touch of mournfulness in our voices, Cause, Lord, We Am Just In From Pickin Cotton Yassuh, Indeedy, And Our Black Asses Is Plumb Tuckered Out.
If Kimhaya doesn't finish us off, Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore almost certainly will as we drown in a sea of simpering semiquavers and glutinous crotchets. And then, as we go down for a third time, we are clobbered across the forehead by some new Ecumenical Anthem, probably called a Hyrr, which offends nobody is gender inclusive, vegetarian and deals with the plight of Cross Dressing HIV positive Lesbian Whales, and most unbearably of all, has no melody whatsoever.
Yet these dirges and politically correct twitterings have replaced, almost in their entirety, the vast body of methodically enchanting music whose only crime - like the interior of so many lovely churches - did not suit modern liturgical requirements, and like the interiors, were unceremoniously dumped.
In 30 years time, today's 10 year olds will not break into whatever musical bilge they are being fed through the churches; but take any gathering of adults who were raised to the old music, give them a line of Queen of the May or I'll Sing a Hymn to Mary or Soul of My Saviour, and they're away, big grins on their faces as they lustily remember words unsung over three decades or more, but remembered as perfectly as they remember the names of their brothers and their sisters.
No doubt values and habits were different in those days. Processions and church services formed a bigger part of children's lives than they do today, and what's gone is gone. You will no more get today's 10 year olds to shuffle in a May or Corpus Christi procession than you will get them to go to Mass at eight on a wintry Sunday morning.
Simple Melodies
Yet children are children; they love strong and simple melodies, and that was the great merit of that body of songs which the Catholic Church disposed of in those few, fell years when it was also ransacking old churches and pulling up monstrously ugly new churches which resembled airport terminals or, sometimes, in a fit of pseudolithia, pagan stone cairns.
This purely voluntary destruction of music and architecture only makes sense in the context of suicide cults in Guyana and mass sutti on the Ganges, yet it happened. We who spent our childhood in a darker epoch infested with sin, limbo bound black babies and fine hymns should be grateful a least for the third of these.
It was when John Kearns heard an elderly priest break into these old heretical anthems at an evening Mass recently, and saw how the entire congregation relaxed, smiles on their faces, that he realised that the demand for this music remains for not merely is it fine music, for most Irish people over the age of 35 it is childhood, innocence, and fond memories. He and his business associate Bernard Bennett rapidly assembled singers - Frank Patterson, Regina Nathan, the monks of Glenstal - shooed the lot of them, plus the RTE Philharmonic Orchestra, into a recording studio, spent £80,000 recording the lot of them and produced the fastest selling cassette/CD of the year, Faith of Our Fathers.
No Sweet Sacrament Divine, I notice an oversight which, might be corrected in the next cassette/CD. But otherwise, so many of the melodies which gave one a profound love of music in the days when sin was telling a fib or not saying one's prayers, in hymns which contained mystery words and mystery concepts like womb and seed and virgin, which we mouthed with blithe enthusiasm. Childhood was mystery womb et alia were just another mystery, but surrounded by a vast firmament of music which we bawled out with infantile relish. And even as I write these words, I ask again - how could such a treasury have been so lost, so purposelessly squandered?
These hymns are not, as people might think they are, uniquely Irish. Quite the reverse - perhaps most of them are by English Catholics such as Frederick Faber and Edward Caswall. And one hymn which used to be sung at Croke Park has vanished because finally people discovered it was not what they had thought it to be. It is Faith of Our Fathers, the second verse of which explains how the GAA lost its appetite for it at All Ireland finals:
Faith of our Fathers, Mary's prayers.
Shall win our country back to thee.
And by the truth that comes from God,
England shall then indeed ne
Quite.