By JAMES MONTI
Sacred music has been a fundamental component of the Church’s liturgy from Day One, as manifested by the hymn that the apostles sang when our Lord was about to leave the Cenacle for Gethsemane following the Last Supper (Matt. 26:30). Even earlier, music had been a key feature of Jewish worship for centuries. Across the ages, the Church has not only offered praise to God through her music, but she has also annunciated her teachings by this means.
It is precisely because of sacred music’s efficacy in forming the hearts of the faithful that sadly those seeking to re-engineer what we believe as Catholics have for several decades sought to fill parish churches with banal and theologically defective music. But real sacred music expresses what is eternally true and does it with beauty and artistry. Genuine Catholic musicians have been aiming high in this manner for many centuries.
It was about two months ago that I received a copy of a Catholic hymnal published in 1911 for the faithful of Ireland bearing the title St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book (not to be confused with the Saint Cecilia Hymnal, an entirely different work). This book provides an amazing glimpse into how the intense religious devotion of the Irish people in the early 20th century was nurtured through choral music.
The Belgian-born choir director and organist who compiled this hymnal, Arthur de Meulemeester (1876-1942), is a remarkable figure in his own right. In 1898 he came to Belfast, Ireland, to direct the choir of the Redemptorists’ Clonard Monastery. Exemplary in his fidelity to the music reform measures of Pope St. Pius X (1835-1914), De Meulemeester received from this Pontiff in 1912 the “Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice” medal of honor.
Poorly composed church music was by no means unknown in De Meulemeester’s time, some of which he saw as motivated by an elitist, modernist scorn for music that is beautiful and inspiring. In his 1936 book The Reform of Church Music, De Meulemeester rebuffs the exponents of this elitist mentality, asking whether sacred music is expected by them “to disfigure itself to appear before God.”
Moreover, he adds, “Pius X willed that the ‘beautiful’ should help the prayers of his people. . . . And need we be ashamed to allow ourselves to be touched by the marvelous power of music upon the soul? Is such a state censurable, when it leads us to prayer and meditation?” (The Reform of Church Music, Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, 1936, p. 45).
The majority of the pieces in St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book are vernacular songs. These hymns were therefore intended not for use during the Mass, but rather for occasions such as non-eucharistic processions, confraternity devotions, pilgrimages, and (it appears likely) the non-liturgical portions of the parish missions for which the Redemptorists were justly famous.
The music for Mass, according to the liturgical laws at that time which are still generally observed in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, was confined to settings of various portions of the Latin text of the sacred liturgy (the Introit, the Gloria, etc.), with anything beyond this limited to Latin pieces (Latin hymns during Holy Communion, etc.).
The St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book is doubly fascinating, for what is familiar in it demonstrates that many of our traditional vernacular Catholic hymns were already in use a century ago, while what is unfamiliar brings to light a number of hidden treasures of Catholic piety that nurtured the faith of earlier generations.
Among the hymns that many readers will recognize are Holy God, we praise Thy Name (p. 8), Ye sons and daughters (p. 83), Soul of my Saviour (p. 66), Crown Him with many crowns (p. 20), Blessed John Henry Newman’s Praise to the Holiest (p. 192), and Come, O Creator, which is Come, Holy Ghost with slight differences (p. 1).
The prolific English Catholic author and hymnist Fr. Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) is well represented, with selections ranging from his very popular pieces, Faith of our Fathers (p. 158) and Jesus, my Lord, my God, my all (Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore) (p. 27), to his 1861 hymn, Souls of men, which assures the downcast, “There is no place where earth’s sorrows/ Are more felt than up in Heaven;/ There is no place where earth’s failings/ Have such kindly judgment given” (p. 196).
Among the lesser known hymns in the St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book is the piece Jesus, ever-loving Saviour, a text traceable to the 1860 English collection entitled The Holy Family Hymns and evidently composed by Fr. Robert Aston Coffin (1819-1885), a convert who later became bishop of Southwark.
The third verse paints a touchingly human portrait of the death of St. Joseph: “Kindest Jesus, Thou wert standing/ By Thy foster-father’s bed,/ While Thy Mother, softly praying,/ Held her dying Joseph’s head./ Jesus! Jesus!/ By that death so calm and holy,/ Soothe me in that hour of dread” (p. 64).
In his preface for the hymnal, De Meulemeester notes, “Ireland is essentially a believing and a singing land; and her prayer will easily voice itself in song” (p. viii). Several of the hymns are distinctly Irish in their content, with references to what Irish Catholics had suffered for their faith during more than three centuries of Protestant rule.
Thus the Hymn to the Sacred Heart for Ireland urges the Irish faithful to persevere in their profession of faith: “May Erin’s sons to truth e’er stand,/ With faith’s bright banner still in hand” (p. 34). The children’s hymn I am a little Catholic does not hesitate to prepare the young for the adult reality of standing ready to suffer for what they believe: “I will be true to Holy Church/ And steadfast unto death. . . . I love my Cross,/ I love my beads/ Each emblem of my Faith;/ Let foolish men say what they will,/ I’ll love them until death” (p. 210).
Two of the hymns are in honor of Our Lady of Good Counsel. Irish devotion to this miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin venerated since the 15th century in Genezzano, Italy, grew rapidly after the missionary Msgr. George Dillon (1836-1893), author of a book about Our Lady of Good Counsel, returned to his native Dublin in 1884 and urged the foundation of a shrine commemorating this image at the city’s Augustinian church known as John’s Lane Church.
One of the hymns (entitled To Our Lady of Good Counsel) includes the beautiful thought, “The sword has opened thy large heart/ To shelter all mankind” (p. 100). In the other hymn, O Virgin Mother, the supplicant repeatedly begs our Lady for guidance: “When my soul is most perplexed and weary,/ Mother, tell me what am I to do!” (p. 94).
Spiritual Battle
The St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book also contains the deeply moving penitential hymn, “God of mercy and compassion” (p. 79), an extraordinary expression of utter contrition, the stark words of which are mirrored by the plaintive melody to which it is set: “God of mercy and compassion,/ Look with pity upon me….By my sins I have deserved/ Death and endless misery,/ Hell will all its pains and torments,/ And for all eternity. (Refrain:) Jesus, Lord, I ask for mercy,/ Let me not implore in vain;/ All my sins I now detest them,/ Never will I sin again.”
Regarding the source of this hymn, the St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book simply describes it as an “English melody,” but the piece has considerably more history behind it than the attribution suggests. The origin of this hymn begins around 1680, when the original French version, known as Au sang qu’un Dieu va repandre, was composed by Archbishop Francois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon (1651-1715) as a stations of the cross hymn for a community of young woman converts in Paris of which he was then the spiritual director.
Archbishop Fenelon’s original text is a hymn of 13 verses devoted entirely to the subject of the Passion. The original music for it is unknown, but sometime between about 1730 and 1765 it was set to a haunting melody said to have been derived from an opera of the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) and popularized by a French singer, Charles-Henri Riboutte (1708-1740), who employed it for the secular song Les Tendres Souhaits.
The hymn appears with this melody assigned to it in a 1765 hymnal of the congregation to which Archbishop Fenelon had belonged, the Sulpicians (Cantiques spirituels, vêpres et prières à l’usage des catéchismes de la paroisse de Saint Sulpice).
The English version of this hymn, “God of mercy and compassion,” is the work of the British Redemptorist priest Fr. Edmund Vaughan (1827-1908). While the fourth and final verse of Fr. Vaughan’s version adheres to the Passion theme of the French original, and the “Pergolesi melody” is retained, the first three verses and the refrain recast the hymn as a deeply humbling plea for divine mercy and an ardent pledge of repentance, themes well suited to the parish missions of the Redemptorists.
Traditional hymns have a way of rallying the faithful for spiritual battle. Speaking of faith in God as the “one fair treasure” that even in the midst of sacked altars and prison chains no persecutor can plunder from the sealed shrine of the heart, the hymn Ireland’s Faith (St. Cecilia’s Hymn Book, p. 162) concludes with a powerful admonition to the Irish people not to take for granted the faith they had inherited.
In our own time, when the fires of divine love desperately need to be rekindled both in Ireland and in our own land, may these words summon us all to preserve our faith no matter what we must suffer for it:
“O guard it, Eire, and part it never. . . . For ‘twill win thee welcome, beyond all measure,/ That day of days at the Golden Gate.”
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