Anthony Esolen - Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church

H E who sings prays twice, says St. Augustine.

See that panel on the front of the altar, said my friend, the priest, pointing to a wooden relief sculpture of the Lamb of God. You wont believe where I found it. It was in the basement of a tavern. It had been torn out of some church somewhere, and I have no idea how it ended up where it did. We asked for it for the church here. If you look hard you can faintly see a seam across the sculpture where it had been split in two, Father explained. The rest of the church was grand, filled with impressive works of art in stone and glass. The parish was too poor in the 1970s to afford any renovation, but the art survived, he said.

Richer parishes were not so fortunate. My own home church, Saint Thomas Aquinas, was built by Irish coal miners in the nineteenth century. They built a large neo-Romanesque structure, one great barrel vault without internal supports. The ceiling, entirely open, was covered with paintings executed by an Italian they hired and brought over from Europe. No square foot was left blank, not even the area between the stained glass windows and the arc of the ceiling. There were painted medallions of ten of the twelve apostles, five on each side, with large hanging medallions of St. Peter and St. Paul in the sanctuary. The background was a warm, muted purple, decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis.

But the wave of New Iconoclasm hit. Most of the ceiling survived, but Peter and Paul disappeared, leaving the church in the absurd position of commemorating the Ten Apostles, bereft of their chief and of the great apostle to the Gentiles. The delicate background was painted over in icy white. The marble communion rail and the great altar met the jackhammer. The organ in the loft was removed, and no one knows in what landfill its hundreds of pipes have been crushed.

Almost every parish in the United States and Canada has such a story to tell. A priest instructs workmen to take away the statues of saints and throw them in the pond. A bishop orders the removal of wooden pews boasting hand-carved reliefs of the local Appalachian flora and fauna. What is harder to notice, though, is that the same rage for reduction and removal did its work on the very prayers of the Church. It is easy for someone to notice the emptiness of a large sanctuary whose dimensions were set precisely for the altar that used to be there. It is harder to notice words no longer spoken, or melodies no longer heard.