Sacred Withdrawal
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the Catholic Church as an organist and director of music, in parishes, schools, and diocesan contexts, I have formally withdrawn from active professional ministry.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.
[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.