The Vatican II Rag

We went to a concert last night at our home parish, St. Rose of Lima. The concert featured three of the most important contemporary liturgical composers in the Catholic Church, David Haas, Marty Haugen and Fr. Michael Joncas. If you've gone to Mass in the last 30 years, chances are quite good you have heard the music these three men have created.

This is one of Haas's most well-known hymns, "We Are Called":

A representative example of Haugen's music is "All Are Welcome":

And for Joncas, there is the ubiquitous "On Eagles Wings":

It was fascinating to attend the concert -- the work of these three men is heard nearly every Sunday. It was, at times, thrilling to hear the music performed by the composers themselves. People came from all over to see the concert -- St. Rose has a pretty big parking lot and it was filled, with cars lined up for blocks on the side streets behind the church, and I saw license plates from neighboring states in the lot.

In the wake of Vatican II and the changes in liturgy that flowed from it, finding contemporary music was a challenge. Most of the hymns of my youth dated back hundreds of years and didn't mesh very well with the tone of liturgy in the 1970s, so the music of Haas, Haugen and Joncas was a welcome development.

At the same time, the relative age of the audience was, frankly, a little alarming. We saw very few young people there and I would peg the median age at somewhere north of 60. And while much of the music we heard last night was contemporary in sound, we're now 20-40 years past the date many of these hymns were first heard. We are at the point now where the renewal is becoming a bit long in the tooth. I don't know if we are reaching the younger generation.