Sacred Withdrawal

One of the most common defenses of poor liturgy, bad music, and casual irreverence is deceptively simple: “They’re doing their best.” It’s offered as a shield against critique, a plea for patience, a way to sanctify low standards. It is often said with sincerity. But sincerity is not the issue.

The issue is truth and whether what is being offered is worthy of the name liturgy at all.

Yes, many parishes are under-resourced. Yes, not every community has a trained musician or a willing choir. Yes, some pastors are overwhelmed. But to say that “everyone is doing their best” ignores two things: the difference between effort and formation, and the gap between intention and consequence.

Good intentions are not enough

A well-meaning person with a guitar and a heart full of love can still lead music that is theologically shallow, musically inappropriate, and spiritually unmooring. The kindness of the effort does not change the content of what is offered or the long-term impact it has on the faithful.

In no other area of sacramental life would we accept this logic. We do not say of a poorly formed priest, “Well, he’s doing his best, let him make up the Eucharistic Prayer.” We do not allow untrained volunteers to hear confessions or write catechisms. But we routinely hand over the Church’s public worship to those with no liturgical, musical, or theological preparation, because it feels kind to do so.

But misplaced kindness can do real harm.

Poverty of resources is not poverty of standards

It is true that many parishes are small and rural. Not every community can afford a professional musician. But this does not mean that beauty and reverence are inaccessible. It means we must form communities to understand what the Church asks, and teach them how to respond within their means.

A small parish that learns the Ordinary of the Mass in chant, well and simply sung, is closer to the mind of the Church than a large parish with microphones, praise bands, and endless novelty. The issue is not scale. The issue is orientation.

You do not need a pipe organ to offer God something beautiful. You need fidelity. You need silence. You need seriousness.

The problem is not resources. The problem is expectations.

Most parishes are not failing because they lack money. They are failing because they lack vision. The liturgy is not seen as the source and summit. It is seen as a weekly obligation, a backdrop for social belonging, or a platform for emotional uplift. When liturgy is not understood, it is not prioritized. And what is not prioritized declines, quietly, but inevitably.

“Doing our best” becomes a substitute for formation. And mediocrity becomes moralized.

There is no charity without truth

It is not uncharitable to ask whether what we are offering at Mass is worthy of God, worthy of the tradition, and worthy of the people. It is not uncharitable to expect competence, preparation, and reverence. In fact, to withhold those expectations is a kind of neglect.

The Church’s tradition is clear: liturgy is not a personal project. It is a sacred act that demands our highest attention and our most honest effort, not just emotionally, but intellectually and liturgically.

So yes, some are doing their best. But many are not. And even when they are, that effort must be oriented by something greater than sentiment.

Doing your best only matters if you know what you’re aiming for.

Recovery is not reversal. It is the act of reaching back, not to replicate, but to retrieve what should never have been lost.

The state of Catholic liturgy today is not a reflection of postmodern culture alone. It is the consequence of intentional forgetting: forgetting the nature of the Mass, the purpose of sacred music, the relationship between worship and doctrine. If renewal is to be more than cosmetic, certain things must be recovered, not as artifacts, but as foundations.

These are not aesthetic preferences. They are pillars.

1. A Theology of Worship

The liturgy is not a vehicle for spiritual motivation. It is not a communal celebration of values. It is the Church’s participation in the eternal worship of Christ to the Father, in the Spirit.

This means we must recover the vertical dimension of liturgy, its Godward orientation. Adoration must take precedence over affirmation. The question is not “Did it feel meaningful?” but “Was it true worship?”

Unless we begin here, everything else is just decoration.

2. Liturgical Discipline

The liturgy is not a container for improvisation. It has form because it has meaning. Rubrics are not bureaucratic constraints, they are theological guardrails. Every gesture, every silence, every word belongs to a tradition that speaks more clearly than we do.

We must recover the humility to submit to something greater than personal expression. To do the red, say the black. To understand that reverence is not rigidity, it is fidelity in action.

3. Sacred Music

The Church has told us, repeatedly, what her sacred music is: Gregorian chant and polyphony, supported by organ and forms rooted in the Roman Rite. (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §116; Tra le Sollecitudini, §2–4).

We must recover this not to exclude the new, but to re-anchor it. Sacred music is not whatever we happen to sing at Mass. It is music that sounds like the faith, shaped by prayer, drawn from silence, and oriented toward mystery.

The Church does not need better performances. It needs music that serves the liturgy, not the congregation’s mood.

4. Hierarchy of Presence

The loss of sacred space has led to a loss of sacred time. Churches have become halls. Sanctuaries have become stages. Vestments have become costumes. But these were not accidents of culture. They were signs of the invisible, rendered visible.

We must recover a sense of hierarchy, not in the clerical sense, but in the cosmic one. A sense that some things are holier than others. That there is an order to reality. That the sanctuary is not a space for inclusion, but for encounter.

5. Liturgical Memory

Most Catholics under fifty have never seen a Mass celebrated with real solemnity. Their memory is not of incense or chant, but of announcements, guitars, and handshakes. We are now several generations removed from any organic memory of the Church’s liturgical tradition.

This memory must be rebuilt, not nostalgically, but generatively. Through catechesis. Through beauty. Through consistency. Through fidelity to the Rite in whatever form it is celebrated.

The memory of the Church lives in her rites. When we alter them beyond recognition, we forget who we are.

This is not about going back. It is about going deeper.

The Church does not need another new program. She needs to become recognizably herself again. That begins not with strategy, but with worship.

We must recover what was lost, not because it was old, but because it was true.

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The disintegration of liturgical life in the Catholic Church did not happen overnight. It was not the result of a single document, papacy, or committee. It was the slow unraveling of form, accelerated by good intentions, administrative naivety, cultural upheaval, and theological drift.

To understand where we are, we must see how we got here. Not to assign blame, but to name reality.

1. From Continuity to Experimentation

Before the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Rite, though not perfect, was structurally stable. Its language, calendar, music, and gestures formed an integrated whole. The liturgy was not subject to local creativity. It shaped the faithful through consistency.

After Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), the initial call for “noble simplicity” and active participation was interpreted, by many liturgists and bishops, not as a renewal from within tradition, but as permission to reconstruct. Rubrics became flexible. Latin gave way to vernacular. Chant gave way to hymnody. Architecture shifted from verticality to utility.

The result was not engagement. It was instability.

2. The Collapse of Musical Formation

Liturgical reform occurred precisely as musical literacy declined in the culture at large. Catholic schools, once a bastion of musical education, began eliminating sacred music programs. Gregorian chant and polyphony, declared by the Council to be of primary importance (SC §116), were functionally abandoned within a decade.

Composers of popular devotional music became the new standard-bearers. Congregational participation was redefined: not attentive listening, but communal singing. Volume replaced form. Accessibility replaced theological depth. In the absence of a stable musical canon, the lowest common denominator prevailed.

3. Clericalism in Pastoral Clothing

The term pastoral became a theological wildcard. Anything deemed emotionally resonant or accessible to the people was declared “pastoral”, even when it contradicted the Church’s liturgical theology or musical tradition. Meanwhile, decisions about music, architecture, and liturgy were increasingly made by priests with little formation in those fields.

This was a new clericalism, not rooted in power, but in untrained spontaneity. Lay musicians, even highly skilled ones, found themselves subject to the whims of clergy who had no interest in the liturgy as a theological event. The result was incoherence: one parish sang chant, another sang pop. One genuflected. Another clapped. There was no longer a Roman Rite, only local preference.

4. The Rise of Functionalism

Liturgy began to be treated as a means to an end. “Does it bring people in?” “Is it welcoming?” “Is it efficient?” These are managerial questions, not theological ones. But they became the operative standard.

Under this logic, beauty became suspect, associated with elitism or aestheticism. Silence was awkward. Transcendence was replaced with familiarity. The altar became a table, the sanctuary a stage. The sacrificial language of the Mass was softened or removed. What had once been a participation in heavenly worship became an exercise in community-building.

But community without mystery is not the Church. It is a club.

5. The Fragmentation of Authority

Finally, the Church ceased to speak with a unified voice on liturgy. Documents from the Congregation for Divine Worship were routinely ignored. National bishops’ conferences issued contradictory guidelines. Seminaries offered conflicting liturgical formation, or none at all. Rome alternated between issuing clarifications and remaining silent.

The result is what we see now: an atomized liturgical landscape in which the experience of Mass varies not just by diocese, but by zip code. Faithful Catholics travel miles to find a parish that takes the liturgy seriously. Some find it. Most do not.

The current state of the liturgy is not the product of malice. It is the product of decades of drift, born of confusion, neglect, and a tragic underestimation of what the liturgy actually is.

We got here by treating form as negotiable. By severing theology from worship. By mistaking relevance for renewal.

We will not return by reversing time. But we will not go forward meaningfully until we reckon with the cost of what was lost, and the shallowness of what replaced it.

There is still time to recover the center. But only if we stop pretending we never left it.

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• Liturgy is not one thing the Church does. It is what the Church is doing when it is most itself.

• The Eucharist is not a reminder of Christ’s love. It is His love, made edible.

• A Church that treats liturgy as optional will soon find belief itself optional.

• What is not offered at the altar will be surrendered to the culture.

• To say “we don’t need beautiful liturgy, we just need to live the Gospel” is to forget where the Gospel becomes flesh, on the altar.

• The opposite of liturgy is not justice. It is ideology.

• The more spontaneous the liturgy, the more predictable the decline.

• Lex orandi, lex credendi is not a slogan. It is an anthropological law.

• A Christian who does not pray liturgically is living off borrowed time.

• When the sanctuary becomes a stage, the people stop being worshipers and become spectators.

• You cannot preach Christ while performing yourself.

• The Church does not need to become more relevant. She needs to become more real.

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It has become a common refrain, particularly in post-conciliar pastoral circles: “Liturgy is important, yes, but it’s not the heart of Christianity. What matters is how we live.”

The implication is clear: the liturgy is a support mechanism, a symbolic gesture, perhaps even a cultural relic, but not essential. What truly matters is justice, love, service, or some other abstraction, often untethered from sacramental form.

But this framing is not only theologically incoherent. It is historically ignorant and spiritually impoverishing.

The Catholic tradition has never treated the liturgy as secondary. On the contrary, it has always understood it as the source and summit of the Christian life (Sacrosanctum Concilium, §10). That line is often quoted, rarely understood. The liturgy is not one ministry among many. It is the act through which the Church becomes what it is: the Body of Christ, gathered in worship, formed by word, fed by sacrament, and configured to eternity.

To subordinate the liturgy to “real life” is to invert the spiritual order. It is through the liturgy that we are shaped into Christians at all.

Liturgy is not an aesthetic preference

The common modern attitude toward liturgy treats it as a matter of taste. “Some people like incense and chant. Others prefer guitars and hand-holding.” But this relativization is only possible when the liturgy is seen as an external event, rather than as the Church’s interior life made visible.

Liturgy is not what we do. It is how we become. It is where heaven and earth intersect, not metaphorically, but sacramentally. It is where doctrine becomes flesh and time is caught up into eternity.

To treat it as a backdrop to the “real” work of Christian ethics is to sever Christianity from its mystical core.

Form is formative

In the pre-conciliar Church, liturgical formation was not optional, it was organic. A child raised in the rhythm of the calendar, the architecture of gesture, the sound of chant, was being catechized long before any textbook appeared. The faith was absorbed through form. Lex orandi, lex credendi. The law of prayer shapes the law of belief.

Today, this has been reversed. We attempt to teach doctrine through lectures, videos, and youth ministry strategies, while the liturgy itself collapses into informality and improvisation. Then we wonder why belief disintegrates.

If the liturgy is incoherent, so too will the faith be.

Christian life is impossible without liturgical life

We are frequently told to prioritize “encounter” and “mission.” But the Church cannot give what she does not receive. The liturgy is not a weekly pep talk for private virtue. It is the public act of the Mystical Body, through which grace is given and identity is formed. Without it, Christian life is reduced to moralism or sentiment.

St. Benedict did not build his Rule around pastoral initiatives. He built it around the Divine Office. The early Church did not spread by clever slogans. It spread through awe, beauty, martyrdom, and the Eucharist.

When the liturgy is sound, even flawed Christians are gradually conformed to Christ. When it is hollow, even noble efforts become scattered and unsustainable. We cannot live rightly unless we worship rightly.

Liturgy is not a distraction. It is the thing itself.

Those who say “Christianity is not about liturgy, it’s about love” fail to see that the liturgy is the love of God made form. The Eucharist is not an accessory to Christian life. It is its center. And the structure that surrounds it, the calendar, the rites, the music, the gestures, is not incidental. It is how the mystery becomes visible and livable.

To dismiss the liturgy as peripheral is to treat the Incarnation as optional. But God did not save us through abstraction. He saved us through flesh, time, sound, and matter.

So too does He sanctify us now.

Let us be clear: without liturgy, there is no Church. Without form, there is no transformation. Without worship, there is no mission, only activism.

And without the liturgical center, the Christian life becomes not deeper, but thinner.

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With the death of Pope Francis, the ecclesial commentariat is already rushing to define an era. They speak of simplicity, humility, dialogue. Of a Church that “opened its arms” and “met the world where it was.” But such phrases are not analysis. They are branding.

For those of us formed in the deep structure of the Church’s liturgical, musical, and doctrinal tradition, this moment invites not eulogy but reckoning.

Pope Francis presided over a decade-long dismantling of the fragile efforts to recover a coherent, tradition-conscious liturgical culture in the wake of the Council. His papacy did not simply shift emphasis. It redirected the Church’s institutional imagination, away from continuity, and toward managerial improvisation. What was marginal under Benedict XVI became mainstream under Francis. What was once held in cautious tension was declared obsolete.

The most obvious expression of this was Traditionis Custodes (2021), a motu proprio whose title was ironic at best. Far from “guardians of tradition,” bishops were empowered to suppress it, to recast longstanding liturgical forms not as gifts to be preserved, but as threats to unity. Dioceses that had carefully built communities around the usus antiquior (often with reverent liturgy, robust catechesis, and rich musical programs) were given no presumption of good will. Instead, they were treated as liabilities to be managed.

But Traditionis Custodes was not an isolated gesture. It was the culmination of a clear and consistent trend:

• The suppression of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute’s reform trajectory. Under Francis, voices associated with the “Reform of the Reform” were steadily marginalized within academic liturgical circles. The once-respected Pontificium Institutum Liturgicum in Rome saw a noticeable shift in tone and faculty, emphasizing anthropology and enculturation over sacramental theology and continuity.

• The effective sidelining of the Office for Liturgical Celebrations. Under Benedict XVI, papal liturgies were marked by a renewed sense of Roman sobriety, musical integrity, and attention to symbolic continuity. Under Francis, this office was hollowed out. The emphasis turned to simplicity, spontaneity, and frequent liturgical improvisation, even at major papal Masses.

• The gradual deprofessionalization of sacred music. The Cappella Sistina, long a bastion of musical excellence, underwent significant restructuring in 2018. Longstanding personnel were replaced or redirected. The general aesthetic movement turned away from the polyphonic and toward the pastoral-populist. Gregorian chant, once called “the supreme model of sacred music,” became effectively invisible.

• The appointment of liturgically indifferent bishops. Perhaps most devastating has been the appointment pattern of bishops with little or no liturgical literacy or musical imagination. Dioceses that once had flourishing music programs watched them wither under new leadership more concerned with optics than tradition. Institutions that trained liturgical musicians found themselves out of sync with ecclesial priorities.

Even symbolic gestures sent unmistakable messages. The decision to celebrate Holy Thursday Mass in prisons rather than cathedrals. The impromptu foot washing of women and Muslims without catechetical framing. The rejection of liturgical vestments traditionally associated with hierarchical solemnity. None of these acts were neutral. They reflected a calculated reframing of what the Church values and what it is willing to abandon.

This is not a caricature. It is the observable pattern of the Francis era.

To critique this is not to deny his moral sincerity or pastoral heart. But it is to assert that tradition, real tradition, is more than a stylistic preference. It is a living continuity of belief, expression, and worship. And when that continuity is treated as optional, the entire sacramental architecture begins to fragment.

Francis did not kill tradition. But he emboldened a generation of bishops, liturgists, and pastors to treat it as backward, dangerous, or irrelevant. And that, more than any document or statement, is the legacy his successor will inherit.

The end of his pontificate is not the end of a war. It is the end of a ceasefire.

There will now be calls for unity. For moving forward. For healing. But let us be honest: unity cannot be forged on erasure. Healing cannot come from pretending the wound was never inflicted.

We who remain, formed by the liturgical mind of the Church, not just its policies, must now do the work of memory. Not to return, but to anchor. Not to repeat, but to preserve. There can be no sacred future without sacred continuity.

Let the next papacy begin not with amnesia, but with reckoning.

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Opening Statement

This is not a resignation letter.
It is an acknowledgment of reality.

After more than thirty years serving the Catholic Church as an organist and director of music, in parishes, schools, and diocesan contexts, I have formally withdrawn from active professional ministry. This decision is not born of personal injury or loss of faith. It is the logical conclusion of a long and measured observation: that the conditions required for serious liturgical music to flourish within the Roman Catholic Church no longer meaningfully exist in most settings.

There was no singular breaking point. Only a slow and visible dissolution, liturgically, culturally, theologically. The tradition that once undergirded our work has been progressively displaced, not merely neglected but actively dismantled. In its place remains a fragile scaffold of habit and sentiment, lacking coherence or conviction.

The Church's own documents are clear. Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms that “the musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art” and insists that “Gregorian chant... should be given pride of place in liturgical services.”[1] Likewise, Musicam Sacram (1967) offers careful guidelines on the hierarchy of musical elements in the liturgy and warns against both clerical overreach and liturgical theater.[2] Tra le Sollecitudini, issued by St. Pius X in 1903, identifies the qualities of sacred music (sanctity, goodness of form, and universality) as non-negotiable.[3] These are not abstract ideals. They are concrete, ecclesial norms.

But they have ceased to govern actual practice.

Today, the musical landscape of the average parish liturgy is characterized not by theological integrity but by aesthetic expediency. The faithful are not formed in the Church’s musical tradition. Clergy, for the most part, are indifferent. Schools lack the capacity or interest to educate. In this climate, excellence is not misunderstood, it is incompatible. One cannot meaningfully sustain a program of sacred music grounded in the Roman Rite when the Rite itself is obscured, diluted, or reinvented week to week.

Some will interpret this withdrawal as elitism, rigidity, or an inability to adapt. That is not the case. I believe in pastoral care, but not at the expense of ecclesial amnesia. Pastoral work, rightly understood, must be oriented toward transformation. And transformation is not possible in a liturgical culture that has ceased to expect anything of the faithful, either spiritually or intellectually.

The failure is not stylistic. It is systemic. We are no longer operating within a shared theological framework. We are improvising within a vacuum.

To continue offering serious music in that vacuum is not virtuous. It is incoherent. So I have stepped back. Not from belief, not from the mystery, but from the institution’s refusal to make that mystery intelligible through form, beauty, and continuity.

This blog is not for complaint. It is for clarity. For memory. For those still trying to piece together a coherent vision of what sacred music once was. Not because we are nostalgic, but because we are faithful. Sacred music, properly understood, does not decorate the liturgy. It reveals it. And the liturgy, properly celebrated, is not performance. It is theologia prima.

Let those who remain serious find one another again.

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[1]: Sacrosanctum Concilium, Second Vatican Council (1963), §112, §116.
[2]: Musicam Sacram, Sacred Congregation of Rites (1967), §5–28.
[3]: St. Pius X, Tra le Sollecitudini (1903), §2–4.