E18 • Practice: Today’s Issues and Opportunities

This episode examines singing Gregorian chant today, noting how contemporary habits, technology, and expectations differ dramatically from the past. It reflects on hearing with modern ears, the realities of current liturgical settings, and the task of introducing an ancient sacred language to communities. Chant requires patience, attentive listening, discipline, and liturgical objectivity—traits often in tension with modern culture. The discussion considers obstacles such as weakened formation, low confidence, and parish difficulties, alongside opportunities like new resources, renewed interest, and the potential for meaningful transmission. Gregorian chant is ancient yet not obsolete; the challenge is to let it live authentically in today’s world.

Content

• Modern culture often works against chant by rewarding immediacy, self-expression, and entertainment rather than patience, quietness and discipline.
• Gregorian chant nevertheless speaks to modern souls precisely because it offers silence, order, and transcendence in a world marked by hurry and fragmentation.
• The practical revival of chant requires formation, since people must be taught not only the notes but the liturgical and spiritual instinct that makes the music intelligible.
• Digital tools, recordings, and online resources are genuine opportunities, provided they serve living transmission rather than replacing it.
• Parish and school contexts matter enormously, because chant will not flourish through theory alone but through regular, embodied practice in real communities.
• The discussion resists the temptation to modernise chant into something else, insisting instead that accessibility must come through pedagogy and patience rather than through dilution.
• The episode therefore offers a hopeful realism: the challenges are serious, but the opportunities are equally real if we are willing to invest in truth, beauty, and continuity.

Sponsors

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠National Lottery Heritage Fund⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: 
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Global Sound Movement⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠University of Lancashire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

External Links

Available on ⁠⁠⁠⁠all podcasts platforms⁠⁠⁠⁠
Watch on YouTube ⁠⁠⁠⁠@Beyond_the_Spire⁠⁠⁠⁠
Listen to the album: Now on Spotify

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More about St Walburge’s Shrine

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Beyond the Spire, a podcast of the Save Our Secretsons project here in Preston at the Catholic Shrine of St. Wahl, supported by the National Lottery. In each episode, we go beyond what you see from the street. We explore the story and the sound of Gregory and chant the Church's own voice, so that this treasure of faith and culture is not just preserved, but lived and loved again. I am Canon Bunens. Whether you are a musician, a member of a parish choir, or simply someone curious about the Catholic faith heritage, you came to the right place. Let's begin. In the last episode we talked about the restoration of Gregory and Shint, and with such a restoration driven by the monks of Salem, we should have plenty of initiatives, plenty of Gregorian choirs. But what's happening today? Today Gregory and Shint vanished. Today Gregorian has not the place we can think he should have. So the Church acknowledges Gregory and Chant as especially suited to the Roman liturgy. Gregory is confirmed as the proper music of the Roman rite and ordered that it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. In practice, in the seventeenth and eighties, chant had almost disappeared from ordinary parish life, replaced by vernacular and popular styles. Why? It was perceived as an old fashioned and incompatible with a desire of emotionally driven music that reflected personal feelings more than the regularity and equanimity required by the liturgy. Combined with the cultural upheaval, a drive for constant innovation and maybe institutional negligence, this led to a near total rupture with the received musical tradition. With the loss of chant, parishes lost a central dimension of their prayer, the singing of the liturgical texts themselves in the form that are organically grown with the Roman rite. This broke its audible continuity with the church's monastic and parish past, but there are still signs of recovery and maybe real obstacles, but there is now a real visible renewed interest in the traditional Latin Mass, new chant communities, and explicit encouragement from Rome. Pope Benedict XV asked that Gregorian chant be suitably esteemed and employed as the chant proper to the Roman liturgy in Sacramentum Caritatis. But challenges remained. A few trained musicians, hence the importance of listening to good recordings and where possible, learning in monasteries but chant is still part of the daily life of the monks. Another thing is scepticism about old ways, and so here as usual by the church with humility before a treasure we did not create, and we just received. Maybe this is what is missing. We need to care about what have been left and follow the steps of the ancient generations that crafted during years and decades and centuries of Gregor and Chant practice. This is a huge treasure we have not created, but we can just humbly receive and try to give back to the new generations. And finally comes the lack of resources. But nowadays with modern technologies and digital resources, we can't afford a huge repertoire of Gregory and chant pieces. Monasteries like Solem released new editions of Gregorian books, and new chant book editions are coming. At the end, what comes first is practice, and concretely means exist more recordings and workshops. For in for instance, the Schola Saint Gregoire at Monijon founded by Don Gajar himself, still offers solid formation rooted in prayer, and there are local initiatives and religious communities showing how chant and interior life grow together. For the parishes, a realistic model is to imitate the structure of the monastery at the parish level. A few capable singers handle the more difficult propers. A constituted scholar gathers those willing to commit themselves and practice on the common chant, the common pieces, beginning by one or two propers, and then trying to involve the congregation for the most common parts, the ordinary, the curiale, the answers to the celebrant singing during the Mass.