Wat is sacrale muziek?

Hier kan u een zeer goed essay lezen van Peter Kwasniewski, een Amerikaanse filosoof en theoloog die aan het International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Gaming (Oostenrijk) doceert. Enkele fragmenten:

"My basic objection to the popular idiom of guitar music in church—whether the tunes are sentimental or snappy makes no difference—is that it is nothing other than a conforming of our minds to our secularized age, to the artistic, psychological, and spiritual degeneracy of our times."

"The point is that although our baptized bodies are the temple of the Spirit and we are to worship the Lord with heart and voice, still our worship is not at the level of body, it is not a sensual moving and being-moved, but a spiritual sacrifice and adoration served by a well-disciplined body whose passions are chastened, whose emotions are purified. that it is nothing other than a conforming of our minds to our secularized age, to the artistic, psychological, and spiritual degeneracy of our times."

"What we listen to does not remain “outside” of us, but it enters into us and changes our way of feeling, reacting, perceiving. That means we cannot help being affected morally by long-term exposure to certain kinds of music."

"But the Church has always protested whenever composers allowed those earthly thoughts and emotions to enter into the temple and dominate the music. Inspired by the teaching of Jesus, nourished by his life-giving body and blood, our calling as Christians is to bring holiness from the altar into the world, and, as much as we can, to transform the world, renew it, sanctify it by the power of the sacred mysteries. "

"The real goal of the Council was not to accommodate the Church to the world, as if the latter were the measure to which the former should submit itself, but rather to make it possible for the Church to understand better the world’s situation and thus have power to speak convincingly to it, bringing about its conversion. In other words, it is the world that has to awaken to its need for assimilation to Christ and his Church. So too with liturgy: the goal should be to let the riches of a genuine liturgical life spill over into (and sanctify) all aspects of our human social life, not to horizontalize and squeeze out the liturgy after the pattern of a desacralized world."