Transcript

Last October, Bishop Sean McKnight of Jefferson City, Missouri banned about a dozen hymns from being played at masses in his diocese.

Unfortunately, he reversed the ban a few weeks later, because if Susan from the parish council doesn't get to sing Table of Plenty, there will be hell to pay.

But in today's episode, I'm gonna talk about what's wrong with these hymns and why they need to die.

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Now, to be clear, I give a wide tolerance to the kind of music people like.

I mean, I'm the guy who goes to see Chicago cover bands, so I'm not one to judge anybody's musical preferences.

I also appreciate having guilty pleasures when it comes to religious hymns.

For example, do I think On Eagle's Wings is cheesy?

Yes.

Do I cry when I hear On Eagle's Wings played at a funeral?

Every time.

But the hymns I wanna talk about today are the ones that have bad theology, so if singing is praying twice, then singing bad theology drills that error deeper into the soul than just hearing the error.

So let's start with a classic example of this with the song All Are Welcome.

Whenever you say this is a bad hymn, you get accused of being, well, not welcoming.

But this song makes it sound like we're trying to recruit people into our club to boost membership, not call people to repentance to receive the holy sacrifice of the Eucharist.

Here're some of the lyrics.

Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live, a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive, built of hopes and dreams and visions, rock of faith and vault of grace, here the love of Christ shall end divisions.

The hymn keeps repeating the phrase, Let us build a house, which makes it sound like we sinners create the Church instead of the Church creating or recreating us in Christ's image.

The USCCB's doctrinal committee agrees with this, and it calls the hymn objectionable on ecclesiological grounds.

This hymn also makes it sound like God died on the cross and now it's just up to us to grow the Church, so we need to make sure everyone feels welcome for that to happen.

Which for some people who love this song, it means not sharing any Catholic teachings, like on things such as sexuality, that could remind people of their sins that they have to reject and thus make them feel unwelcome.

The idea that human beings create the Church also pops up in other popular bad hymns, like the song Sing a New Church, which says the following: Let us bring the gifts that differ and in splendid varied ways sing a new church into being, one in faith and love and praise.

Sing a new church?

There's only one Church.

It's the Church that Christ built on Saint Peter, the Rock.

It's the Church that Saint Paul called the pillar and foundation of the truth.

As the US Conference of Catholic Bishops notes, this implies or even states outright that the Church is essentially our creation.

It also leaves open the possibility that there could be a new Church replacing the old one.

God makes the Church, and we cooperate with God by allowing Him to incorporate us into the body of Christ by receiving His grace.

Hymns go south really fast when they make it seem like that we do that as well, as can be seen in a common hymn sung on Ash Wednesday called Ashes by Tom Connery.

It goes like this: We rise again from ashes, from the good we failed to do.

We rise again from ashes to create ourselves anew.

If all our world is ashes, then must our lives be true, an offering of ashes, an offering to you.

Wait a minute.

We create ourselves anew?

Christ makes us new.

As Second Corinthians 5:17 says, If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away.

Behold, the new has come.

The hymn only mentions Christ at the very end when it quickly notes the Son dying for us and, quote, the Spirit who creates the world new.

But by this point, the damage is already done.

However, a bad hymn does not have to stay bad, or at least it doesn't have to remain erroneous, as can be seen in the 2021 revision of the song Ashes, which changes the first verses to this: We rise again from ashes, from the good we fail to do.

We rise again from ashes, redeemed, oh Lord, by you.

Our penance, Lord, our sorrow, our grieving hearts renew, an offering of ashes, an offering to you.

Now, let's check in on All Are Welcome.

Let us build a house where love is found in water, wine, and wheat, a banquet hall on holy ground where peace and justice meet.

The USCCB says, Someone who sings this song frequently would have a hard time imagining that the Eucharist can be and is worshiped or is in any sense a sacrifice.

Instead this song, like many bad hymns, treats the Eucharist as a common meal whose purpose is just to gather us into one place from which we will then go out and do works of social justice or something.

In fact, the most common reason a hymn is theologically bad is because it pushes a false view of the Eucharist.

The USCCB's doctrinal committee gives three principles to keep hymns from pushing Eucharistic heresy.

Number one, language that implies that the elements are still bread and wine after consecration should be avoided.

Number two, language that implies the bread and wine, still bread and wine, are merely symbols of another reality or person should be avoided.

And number three, poetic license should conform to customary usage of scripture and liturgical tradition.

Bread, bread of life, are scriptural synecdoches for the Eucharist itself and so are permitted.

On a side note, a synecdoche, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, is a way of figuratively speaking that uses a part to refer to the whole.

For example, if a military officer says, We have 50 boots on the ground for the mission, he means there are 50 soldiers for the mission with the boots representing the whole soldier.Likewise, a hymn can in some cases use the word bread to refer to the entire reality of the Eucharist, which only has the appearance of bread.

However, as the USCCB goes on to say, Wine is not used in the same way, and to call the consecrated element wine gives the impression that it is still wine.

This in turn has an impact on the way the word bread is heard, so that legitimate uses of the word bread are heard differently, not as a synodical okay for the Eucharist as a whole, but as a reference to the element which remains bread.

Scripture speaks of the cup, not of wine.

A few hymns that commit this error include God Is Here, which says, Here as bread and wine are taken, Christ sustains us as of old, and Three Days, which says, The dead do not arise, yet He walks among us.

And with our own eyes, we've seen Him at this table.

We've shared His bread and wine, both of which were on Bishop McKnight's original prohibited list.

But one of the worst offenders is Table of Plenty, which I admit, it's hard for me to resist letting out my inner hippie and belting along with that song.

But I can stuff my inner hippie deep down when I hear lyrics like this.

My bread will ever sustain you through days of sorrow and war.

My wine will flow like a sea of gladness to flood the depths of your soul.

So we have the prohibited wine language, but also if you listen to the entire song, there's no mention of the bread and wine becoming Christ's body and blood.

The other common trait in most of these bad songs is that they're all about us.

We sing about how good we are, how God uses us, or what we want God to do for us, instead of just singing the praises of the Almighty.

For example, the song Gather Us In says the following.

Here we will take the wine and the water.

Here we will take the bread of new birth.

And the rest of the song just talks about us.

We are the young, our lives are a mystery.

We are the old who yearn for your face.

We have been sung throughout all of history, called to be light to the whole human race.

I spend the whole week hearing about the young and the old, and all the people of this life who think they're so important.

And of course, we are important when God chooses to use us as His vessels to spread His grace throughout the world, but is it too much to ask that for one hour a week I sing about the greatness of the God who our society almost never talks about instead of singing about myself and other people?

Oh, and before I talk about the biggest problem with these hymns, I need to add an honorable mention to these bad hymns, Mary Did You Know.

The problem with this song is that you don't want hymns to confuse people theologically.

Hymns and worship songs are a means to boldly proclaim theological truths, not ponder theological mysteries whose answer isn't clear.

That's why I cannot stand the song Mary Did You Know, whose lyrics were written by Mark Lowry in 1985.

That's because in the song, the answer to the question Mary did you know is sometimes yes and it's sometimes no, so it's really confusing.

For example, consider these lyrics.

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?

Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new?

This child that you've delivered will soon deliver you.

The answer to these three questions is probably not, absolutely yes, and ha-ha, what a story, Mark.

Yeah, you can say that again.

Did Mary know Jesus would walk on water?

Well, that isn't explicitly prophesied in the Old Testament for what the Messiah would do, so probably not.

Did Mary know Jesus would save His people?

Obviously.

In Matthew 1:21, the angel tells Joseph in a dream, She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.

And this child will make Mary new and will soon deliver Mary?

While this can be salvaged with some rhetorical gerrymandering, most people take this line to mean that Mary was a sinner like you or me who needed to be saved from her sins like everyone else, instead of Her being saved preemptively from her sins by her immaculate conception.

So for more on this particular song, check out my colleague Joe Heschmeyer's episode that's linked in the description below.

But at least a song like Mary Did You Know has a proper perspective on God and His saving actions being the center of our worship.

The worst hymns not only make it all about us, but they say God gets in the way of us trying to fix the world.

For example, in the hymn As a Fire is Meant for Burning, it says, As a fire is meant for burning with a bright and warming flame, so the Church is meant for mission, giving glory to God's name.

Not to preach our creeds or customs, but to build a bridge of care, we join hands across the nations, finding neighbors everywhere.

Right, because it's not like lots of people throughout church history have died for elements of the creed that we recite at Mass.

Or there's the more obvious heresy in the 1965 song For the Healing of the Nations, which says this.

All that kills abundant living, let it from the earth be banned.

Pride of status, race, or schooling, dogmas that obscure your plan.

And in some versions of the song it says, Dogmas keeping man from man.

Ah, those pesky dogmas.

If only we didn't have dogmas like Christ's divinity that just make everyone so mad.

I mean, this hymn is basically John Lennon's Imagine.

You know, imagine there's no countries or religion and everybody's all happy.

Yeah, because communists who wanted no borders, no religion made life very swell for people in the Soviet Union.

All right, let's pull everything together about these hymns, which only covered some of the songs on the bishop's prohibited list.

Many bad hymns are essentially humanist screeds dressed up in God language.

Their message is that God should just help us be nice to one another and not upset anybody, and just have religious talk sprinkled in there.

In my previous episode on why liberals love ugly art, I said that that was because ugly art turns us inward to glorify human traits like subverting expectations, whereas truly beautiful art lifts us up to the divine.

The same is true of banal, ugly music.

It keeps us focused on ourselves instead of lifting us up to the divine.

That's why the Second Vatican Council said, The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy.

Therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.

I'll link to Bishop McKnight's original decree below, as well as the USCCB's notes on bad liturgical music, which include examples of modern hymns that do not have these kinds of errors or abuses in them.

Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.