Ministry Monday

The next episode in Ministry Monday’s Advent series features part two of my conversation with Dr. Benjamin Cornelius-Bates, Professor of Musicianship at Duquesne University. Last week Dr. Cornelius-Bates shared some basic tips on how to improvise on traditional and contemporary Advent hymn tunes this Advent and Christmas season. If you haven’t listened to it, I strongly encourage you to! This week we pick up where we left off and see how we can develop his improvisation tips into more complex ways of sparking creativity in the liturgy.

The next episode in Ministry Monday’s Advent series features a conversation with Dr. Benjamin Cornelius-Bates, Professor of Musicianship at Duquesne University. Dr. Cornelius-Bates shares tips on how to improvise on traditional and contemporary Advent hymn tunes this Advent and Christmas season. Ben’s tips are practical for well beyond the Advent season, but I hope that they spark some creativity during a trying time like Advent for the pastoral musician.

Ministry Monday will be celebrating the Advent season alongside you through the Advent Series of episodes. The next four weeks of episodes are designed to provide you, pastoral ministers, with added support during, quite frankly, one of the most stressful times of our year. Please also know that we are praying for you as we all journey through Advent and Christmas together!

Each week in the Advent series will be centered around the psalm for that Advent weekend, and will be read at the end of the episode for reflection.

The first episode in Ministry Monday’s Advent series features a conversation with Fr. Jan Michael Joncas. Fr. Joncas helps us explore the liturgical texts we will be hearing in the weeks to come. How can we hear them with a sense of newness? And how can we, as pastoral musicians, be renewed in a season of Advent preparation, so often fraught with extra responsibilities and stress? How can the wisdom of the Church and its prayers guide us?

Today we speak to John Angotti, composer and music director in the Nashville, Tennessee area. John's passion is truly fostering the youth of today, and it shows: this episode is a great framework for how to attract youth into a music program, and how to establish a foundation of prayerful, intentional music ministry. John is a fabulous, self-proclaimed “music missionary”, and this interview was just plain fun to record.

Today we offer a short reflection from Kathleen M. Basi on the nuances of praying while "working" in pastoral music. Similar to the topic we discussed with Every Sacred Sunday, pastoral musicians experience the liturgy in a different way than many others. Kathleen offers great tips and suggestions in this Key Change presentation, taken from NPM's 2021 National Convention.

Part of the cultural fabric of our parish life is the songs we sing. We, as pastoral musicians, are highly aware of this fact. There are so many considerations we make when choosing the repertoire for our parish: instrumental, scriptural, melodic….but what about cultural? How much does our music adequately represent the varied, complex, beautiful human existences that make up the Church? Do we really consider the representation we provide in our music?

That is where our conversation starts today. I am pleased to introduce M Roger Holland as my guest for this episode. Roger is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Music and Religion and Director of The Spirituals Project at the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver. In this episode, Roger shares his reflections on the need for representation of all races, musical and cultural styles in what we do in music ministry.

Today we in the Catholic faith celebrate All Saints Day, followed by All Souls’ Day tomorrow. I’ve always been impacted by the two celebrations being on consecutive days. It almost provides a “weekend”, if you will, for us pastoral musicians to sit with our communities in renewed ways. Calling upon the saints on All Saints Day seems so immense and powerful, to me, it almost felt intimidating. Saints have always been this powerful presence in my Catholic faith that I can only hope to aspire to. I visualize them with those golden translucent halos that they’re so often depicted with. They seem to have a holiness that I’ll never reach.

And then the next day we celebrate All Souls’ Day. All Souls’ Day was always a day in my community where we invited all of the loved ones of those who passed away in the last year, to join us for a night of community and prayer, i.e. All Souls’ Day Mass. It always had this sense of, a spiritual homecoming, if you will, as I saw the faces of so many from throughout the year. They were there to find solace, to find comfort, and to find hope in the resurrection as we all believe. The holiness in the church seem to envelop me each year.

The celebrations of All Saints and All Souls Day bring about conversations of holiness: holiness in those we believe to be saints in the faith, as well as the holiness we find among ourselves each day. How can we better recognize this holiness in others, and in ourselves? I called Brother Louis Canter from the Diocese of Lakeland, Florida to talk about this exact topic.

Two years ago Pope Francis canonized John Henry Newman, English theologian, scholar and poet. Saint Newman was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, which, in time evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland.

I had the opportunity to interview Steven C. Warner, founder of the Notre Dame Folk Choir, who attended the canonization of St. Newman in Rome in 2019. This replay episode is a great one, highlighting the ways that John Henry Newman can still influence our Church today. Not only that, it’s a great episode to hear as we prepare for All Saints Day. Enjoy! 

Let’s face it. Many pastoral musicians encounter the sacred Liturgy differently than a congregation member. We’re truly, deeply into the activities that facilitate prayer for others, especially with music. As we know, it’s a beautiful, humbling, blessed calling, but it does mean we can become distracted. Now, at this point, I’ll only speak for myself when I say that I’ve struggled to be truly present for the Liturgy, especially during the Liturgy of the Word. I’ve been so focused on the psalm- is my cantor ready, don’t forget to add an extra measure between the refrain and the verse so the cantor can catch her breath, did I ever tell the violinist that we’re adding that extra measure? And what is the second reader doing, coming up to the ambo already? The cantor is on her way over for the psalm! Will the presider help and gesture for the reader to sit? Wait a minute, is the presider’s mic still on?

You get the idea.

Today I had the gift of speaking with Kassie Manning. Kassie is the co-creator of Every Sacred Sunday, a Mass journal intended to help all Catholics absorb the readings and cultivate their own scripture study and prayer habit. Now, you might be saying, “Amanda, I already pray regularly. Why would I need this?” I will say that this Mass journal has truly changed my faith. A fellow pastoral musician recommended it to me after I saw it at her church when I played a funeral there. Every Sacred Sunday has allowed me to stay focused on weekends after playing the fifth liturgy of the weekend, hearing the fifth homily of the weekend.

Now, before we get into the interview, I want to say that this episode is not sponsored by Every Sacred Sunday! But it is a great opportunity to sit and reflect and say: how often do I take time for myself to sit, be still and listen to the Word of God, especially in the midst of me helping others to pray through music? How can I deepen my own prayer experience?

Today is the final week of a 4-week mini-series, focusing on The Singing Priest. Last week we heard from Fr. Michael Stumpf, pastor of Mary, Queen of Peace Parish in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Today we hear from a different Michael: Michael Olbash, the Director of Sacred Music at Saint John’s Seminary, Boston, MA, and Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary, Weston, MA.

It’s clear that Michael’s expertise lies well within the support, musical and liturgical education of clergy in the Church today. We discussed practical tips for the increasing confidence in singing for clergy, and how we can deepen that trust and relationship between clergy and music minister.

To close out this 4-part series on The Singing Priest, Michael discusses the need, post-pandemic, to address and heal the wounds for ministers and clergy in the last 18 months. How do we support each other, and as pastoral musicians, how do we support ourselves?