Is it required to have music at Sunday Masses?
While quiet is very helpful for contemplation and has a rightful place even with our eucharistic liturgies, it is most appropriate to have singing in a Sunday Mass. After all, we can pray at any time, and we should all have habits of daily prayer — and these should absolutely have extended time for quiet and contemplation. But when we gather the community to worship each Sunday, we do more than find a time to pray together.
From the earliest Christian tradition, Sunday was the day believers celebrated the resurrection of Jesus. If you have ever wondered why the Christian sabbath is Sunday instead of Saturday (as in Judaism), it is because Jesus’ resurrection happened on Sunday. While we still recognize the sabbath as a day of rest, for Christians, its primary purpose now is to celebrate the paschal mystery — the death, resurrection and glory of Jesus (which the Eucharist makes present).
To understand the need for these regular ritual celebrations, we might consider how we celebrate birthdays. The purpose of a birthday is to recognize how special a person is and how beloved they are. While that person is beloved and special every day of the year, we need a regular reminder of that fact (with cake and singing!) to keep us from taking it for granted.
So, great! We need that regular reminder, so why don’t we celebrate a person’s birth every day? While the cake lovers in us might think that a good idea, we all intuitively know it wouldn’t remain that way long. Soon enough, we would start to take the celebration itself for granted. It would become a burden, and people would start looking for excuses to skip the party or, worse, get sick of eating cake! We need a regular celebration, but one not too regular or overwhelming.
The Church applies a similar thinking to her liturgical celebrations. To keep special things special, the Church applies a principle of “progressive solemnity.” It recognizes that different liturgies should have progressively more or less solemnity and celebration depending on how important the feast is.
Easter and the celebrations of Holy Week are the holiest days of the year; therefore, they should have the most elaborate and (on Easter itself) joyful celebration of the resurrection. On the other extreme, an ordinary weekday Mass should be a relatively simple affair to prevent us from getting exhausted and to allow room to celebrate more on feasts.
In between these extremes is the Sunday Mass. It is a “mini-Easter,” celebrating the resurrection in more ordinary circumstances. To celebrate the resurrection without appropriate levels of song and joy would be a counter witness, undermining the greatness of what we celebrate. Therefore, we celebrate on Sundays with appropriate singing and joy, but we still save something special in the tank for our greatest celebrations — like Easter itself!
Father Chris Schroeder is senior associate pastor of St. Charles Borromeo and St. Peter parishes in St. Charles.
