Esolen Gets (Part of) It

Anthony Esolen is not always an enlightening read.  But in this column, he says something we've known for quite a long time.

... at the website of those music men the Saint Louis Jesuits, I’ve read a short piece in which once-priest Bob Dufford describes how much he loved Hollywood musicals when he was a boy, naming Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Lowe, as his most significant influences.

I thought as much.  The “folk” music common at Mass has little or nothing to do, in melody or lyrics, with any folk tradition anywhere in the world.  Such songs as Dufford’s “Like a Shepherd” or Dan Schutte’s “Here I Am” are show tunes. They are not like medieval plainsong, or the Scottish Psalter, or the Lutheran hymns that Bach arranged, or American revival hymns, or English carols....

In fact, the Jesuit crap is 'Tin Pan Alley' updated to the '40's/'50's 'Show Tunes.'  

But Esolen doesn't mention the Tin Pan Alley fixation in Catholic hymnody of the early 20th century.  Mother Dearest O Pray for Me, Mother Dearest, Mother Fairest, and Jesus, My Lord, My God, are  nauseating tunes straight outta Tin Pan Alley still demanded by Catholics of a particular age--and their children--because those trash-tunes are "traditional."

Yah, well.  No accounting for taste.

Esolen is right about the Jesuit crap.  There is much more, not written by the Jesuits.  There is a vast ignorance, even from publishers, about the distinction between "sacred music" and "hymns."

Were it only the Jesuits!