Joseph Ratzinger on Music
Some Musical Quotes from the Late Pope Benedict XVI
Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was trained in music from a young age in Germany in the 1930s. It is said that he was most fond of the music of Mozart. He and his older brother both went into the priesthood; his older brother (Georg) pursued formal music training while in seminary, and the younger Joseph remained more of a skilled amateur.
So when I read of the passing of Pope Benedict XVI on December 31st, I grabbed my copy of his book, A New Song for the Lord,1 and decided I would thumb back through it some. I thought I would share some of his commentary on music.
In this first quote, Ratzinger describes the splitting of music culture and where he sees church music in the midst of it:
“The difficulties that art has gotten into through the complete secularization of culture are becoming particularly clear in the area of music. Like any other cultural expression, music always had different levels, from the unsophisticated singing of simple people, which is nevertheless genuine in itself, to the highest artistic perfection. But now something completely new has occurred. Music has split into two worlds that hardly have anything to do with each other any more. On the one hand there is the music of the masses, which, with the label “pop” or popular music, would like to portray itself as the music of the people. Here music has become a product that can be industrially manufactured and is evaluated by how well it sells. On the other hand there is a rationally construed, artificial music with the highest technical requirements which is hardly capable of reaching out beyond a small, elite circle. In the middle between these two extremes we find the recourse to history, staying at home in the familiar music preceded such divisions, touched the person as a whole and is still capable of doing this even today. It is understandable that church music mostly settles in this middle ground. But since the Church, after all, is living in this age it was inevitable that she also try her hand at the two opposing spheres of today’s cultural schizophrenia.”2
Ratzinger rightly sees pop music as “industrially manufactured,” and I would add manipulated into something driven primarily by sale potential. He doesn’t camp out here but does seem to allude to church music which rightly understood should be neither pop nor elite. The “middle ground” music could be described as “folk.” By folk, I am not referring to a genre of music in the likes of Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. Instead, I’m taking folk at face value to be the music “of the people” in the pew that’s both accessible and, therefore, participatory.
“Christ as Choir Director”
Ratzinger then highlights some biblical directives and commentary on this folk—or church music. He does so by immediately underscoring the importance of the Psalms:
“…The Bible contains its own hymnal: the Psalter, which was not only born from the practice of singing and playing musical instruments during worship but also contains by itself—in the practice, the live performance—essential elements of a theory of music in faith and for faith. We must pay attention to the place of this book in the biblical canon in order to appreciate its significance properly. Within the Old Testament the Psalter is a bridge, as it were, between the Law and the Prophets.
It has grown out of the requirements of the temple cult, of the law, but by appropriating the law in prayer and song it has uncovered its prophetic essence more and more. It has led beyond the ritual and its ordinances into the "offering of praise," the "wordly offering" with which people open themselves to the Logos and thus become worship with him.
In this way the Psalter has also become a bridge connecting the two Testaments. In the Old Testament its hymns had been considered to be the songs of David; this meant for Christians that these hymns had risen from the heart of the real David, Christ. In the early church the psalms are prayed and sung as hymns to Christ. Christ himself thus becomes the choir director who teaches us the new song and gives the Church the tone and the way in which she can praise God appropriately and blend into the heavenly liturgy.”3
Types of Music
The last section is from a 1985 address in Rome by the then Cardinal Ratzinger titled “Liturgy and Music.” A pastor friend in northern Idaho shared the following quote with me. Ratzinger does not have a “restorative crankiness” or “historical inflexibility,” but he does see the formative power music has in church music and why certain types should be rejected:
“music has become today the decisive vehicle of a counter religion and thus the showplace for the discerning of spirits. On the one hand, since rock music seeks redemption by way of liberation from the personality and its responsibility, it fits very precisely into the anarchistic ideas of freedom that are manifesting themselves more openly all over the world. But that is also exactly why such music is diametrically opposed to the Christian notions of redemption and freedom, indeed their true contradiction. Music of this type must be excluded from the Church, not for aesthetic reasons, not out of reactionary stubbornness, not because of historical rigidity, but because of its very nature.”4
“Gregorian Chant to Bruckner & Beyond”
I would be remiss if I did not include this gem of a quote as well:
“There is an agitational type of music which animates men for various collective goals. There is a sensuous type of music which brings man into the realm of the erotic or in some other way essentially tends toward feelings of sensual desire. There is a purely entertaining type of music which desires to express nothing more than an interruption of silence. And there is a rationalistic type of music in which the tones only serve rational constructs, and in which there is no real penetration of spirit and senses. Many dry catechism hymns and many modern songs constructed by committees belong to this category. Music truly appropriate to the worship of the incarnate Lord exalted on the cross exists on the strength of a different, a greater, a much more truly comprehensive synthesis of spirit, intuition and audible sound. We might say that western music derives from the inner richness of this synthesis, indeed has developed and unfolded in a fulness of possibilities ranging from Gregorian chant and the music of the cathedrals via the great polyphony and the music of the renaissance and the baroque up to Bruckner and beyond.”5
Conclusion
I hope these snippets of the former Pope’s writings are as thought-provoking to you as they have been to me. May more pastors and clergy (both protestant and Catholic) be more than musical amateurs but skilled musicians and apologists for the rich treasure that music has been to the church throughout the ages.
The original book was released in German as Ein Neues Lied für Den Herrn: Christusglaube und Liturgie in der Gegenwart in 1995 and translated into English in 1996.
Benedict XVI, Pope. A new song for the Lord: faith in Christ and liturgy today. New York: Crossroad Pub., 1996; 121.
Benedict XVI, Pope. A new song for the Lord: faith in Christ and liturgy today. New York: Crossroad Pub., 1996; 122–3.
Ratzinger, Joseph, and Reverend Richard. “Liturgy and church music.” Sacred Music 112, no. 4 (1985): 20.
Ratzinger, Joseph, and Reverend Richard. “Liturgy and church music.” Sacred Music 112, no. 4 (1985): 20.