One of the banes of modern liturgies is worship songs that fail to reflect the beauty and truth of the Faith. In the worst cases, these songs undermine the Faith through dubious if not downright heretical lyrics. The U.S. bishops even have a document on the subject, “Catholic Hymnody at the Service of the Church: An Aid for Evaluating Hymn Lyrics.”
All Are Welcome
One hymn that serves as an excellent case study in applying the document’s message would be “All Are Welcome” by Marty Haugen, which was at one point banned in some dioceses.
Whenever you say “All Are Welcome” is a bad hymn, you get accused of being . . . well, not welcoming. But this song makes it sound as though we are trying to recruit people into our club to boost membership, not call people to repentance to receive the holy sacrifice of the Eucharist. Here are some of the lyrics:
Let us build a house
Where love can dwell
And all can safely live
A place where
Saints and children tell
How hearts learn to forgive
Built of hopes and dreams and visions
Rock of faith and vault of grace
Here the love of Christ shall end divisions
The hymn keeps repeating the phrase “let us build a house,” which makes it sound as if we sinners create the Church instead of the Church creating us. The USCCB doctrinal committee agrees with this and calls the hymn objectionable on ecclesiological grounds.
It also makes it sound as though God died on the cross, and now it’s up to us to grow the Church, so we need to make sure everyone feels “welcome”—which, for some people who love this song, means not sharing any teachings on things like sexuality that could remind them of sins they must reject because then they might feel unwelcome.
Bad Hymns and the Eucharist
But the hymn gets even worse when we get to how it describes the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith:
Let us build a house where love is found
In water, wine and wheat
A banquet hall on holy ground
Where peace and justice meet
The USCCB says, “Someone who sings this song frequently would have a hard time imagining that the Eucharist can be and is worshiped or is in any sense a ‘sacrifice.’” Instead, the song, like many bad hymns, treats the Eucharist as a common meal whose purpose is to gather us into one place, from which we will then go out and do works of social justice or something.
In fact, the most common reason a hymn is theologically bad is because it pushes a false view of the Eucharist. The USCCB doctrinal committee gives three principles to keep hymns from pushing eucharistic heresy:
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Language that implies that the elements are still bread and wine after consecration should be avoided.
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Language that implies the bread and wine, still bread and wine, are merely symbols of another reality or person should be avoided.
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Poetic license should conform to customary usage of Scripture and liturgical Tradition. “Bread,” “Bread of Life,” etc. are scriptural synecdoches for the Eucharist itself, and so are permitted.
A synecdoche is a figure of speech that uses a part to refer to the whole. For example, if a military officer says, “We have fifty boots on the ground for the mission,” he means there are fifty soldiers for the mission with the boots representing the whole soldier. Likewise, a hymn can in some cases use the word “bread” to refer to the entire reality of the Eucharist, which has only the appearance of bread. However, as the USCCB goes on to say,
“wine” is not used in the same way, and to call the consecrated element “wine” gives the impression that it is still wine. This, in turn, has an impact on the way the word “bread” is heard, so that legitimate uses of the word “bread” are heard differently, not as a synecdoche for the Eucharist as a whole, but as a reference to the element which remains bread. Scripture speaks of the “cup,” not of “wine” (see 1 Cor. 10.16-17).
A few hymns that commit this error include “God Is Here!”, which says, “Here as bread and wine are taken, Christ sustains us as of old,” and “Three Days,” which says, “The dead do not arise, yet he walks among us, and with our own eyes, we’ve seen him at this table, we’ve shared his bread and wine.”
All Are Welcome, All About Us
The other common trait in most of these songs is that they are all about us. We are singing about how good we are, how God uses us, or what we want God to do for us, instead of just singing the praises of the Almighty God. “All Are Welcome” puts the emphasis on those of us attending church. This is especially prominent in Haugen’s other well-known hymn, “Gather Us In”:
We are the young, our lives are a mystery
We are the old who yearn for your face
We have been sung throughout all of history
Called to be light to the whole human race
I spend the whole week hearing about the young and the old and all the people of this life who think they’re so important. Is it too much to ask that for one hour a week, I just sing about the greatness of the God, whom our society almost never talks about?
Many bad hymns are essentially humanist tracts dressed up in God language. Their message is that God should just help us be nice to one another and not upset anyone, especially with religious talk.
Ugly Art Hurts the Faith
In a previous episode on my channel on why liberals love ugly art, I said it is because ugly art turns us inward to glorify human traits, like subverting expectations, whereas truly beautiful art lifts us up to the divine. The same is true of banal, ugly music: it keeps us focused on ourselves instead of lifting us up to the divine. That’s why the Second Vatican Council said, “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 116).
Ironically, worship songs that focus on glorifying God and exhibit the objective traits of beautiful music will be appealing to all people . . . and let them know, as human beings hardwired to pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful, that “all are welcome” in this sacred space.