How can a Catholic approach to secular music restore modern culture?
Installment #5 in a series of 100 questions around Catholic music: answering real questions The Vigil Project encounters in our work forming musicians.
In the last post, we discussed the Catholic Church’s wide vision for devotional music and the life of prayer through music outside of the liturgy. In this post, we take one step further in asking, “Can other kinds of music be called Catholic?”, and later, “How can a Catholic approach to secular music restore modern culture?”
Can other kinds of music, beyond sacred music, be called “Catholic”?
At first glance, this might seem like a dangerous or useless question… why look to add labels to music if it’s simply not sacred music? Sacred music is the ultimate height of music making for prayer, so does it matter if we label the rest of music for use in the lives of Catholics?
Of all the core misunderstandings that I hope to address with this series of articles, this one seems to be most urgent for our current generation: all sacred music is for musical prayer, but not all musical prayer is sacred music.
Throughout the life of a faithful Catholic, there exist many moments that music can lead us into prayer or an experience of the Lord, flowing first from the source and summit moment of the Mass into the more common experiences of everyday life. We addressed these at length in the last two articles. While the Mass is certainly the most refined application of music, it is hardly the only musical moment in the life of a Catholic. In fact, we need vastly more music in every other moment of the Catholic faith than we do in the Mass, especially if the refined treasury of sacred music for Mass is to remain protected as such a gift to the Church.
In the section that follows, we begin to define these many moments where music can serve the Catholic faith. Think of this less as a definition of genre or category, and more as an application of purpose for music in the life of faith:
Sacred Music: A narrow lens for liturgical prayer held in the “treasury” (Chant, Polyphony, Antiphons, Time-Tested Hymns, Organ)
Modern Sacred Music: Qualified modern music that is approved by an authority of the church that has not yet had the opportunity to stand the test of time. Thus, the criteria expressed above must be held with merciless rigor. In this exercise, there is certainly no agenda of upsetting modern sacred music composers and their sensibilities, but rather to ruthlessly defend the purpose of sacred music itself. A composer with a true love of the liturgy should share the goal of protecting the Mass from music that doesn’t squarely fit that narrow purpose. (An aside, an excellent article was just posted by James Richardson on how to properly approve sacred music with the relevant authoritative bodies in the US Church: a worthy read!)
Devotional (Popular Religious) Music: A wide lens for non-liturgical & extra-liturgical prayer with few qualifiers, such as an alignment with Catholic teaching and understanding, as well as an appropriateness for prayer. This might be songs, prayers, hymns, or other music that isn’t heretical in lyrical content and that draws the heart and mind to a devotional encounter with God.
Religious Music: A very wide lens for non-liturgical song meant for evangelization, or that draws the secular world toward an encounter with God without the explicit purpose of prayer. Think instrumental or orchestral music with a religious inspiration, an improvised song, or any music that might be derivative of the faith with some connection back to it.
Transcendentally-Oriented Secular Music: This is a big bucket of secular music that points you toward the true, good, and beautiful. While it need not be religious in nature, there is something still qualifying its value. Folk music, for instance, is often found in this category from a Catholic worldview, because it can so effectively reveal something about the human condition and our need for a Savior.
Disoriented Secular Music: Lastly, we have a category of secular music that (intentionally or not) points you away from the good, true, and beautiful. It doesn’t mean that these songs are bad or that they can’t be redeemed by God. . . I know many people who say that, for instance, they learn a lot about their faith and relationship with God through jazz. But we can’t look at jazz, which is built upon the musical tensions between order and disorder, and say that its inherent nature is to point people to the good, true, and beautiful. Can God use jazz, pop, rap, etc., to draw souls to Himself? Of course, but these genres do not exist with this as the intention.
In these qualifiers, what typically grabs people’s attention is the nuances between sacred, devotional, and religious — where would something like “On Eagle’s Wings” fall in this spectrum? Obviously, some use it as sacred because of the way it employs psalm texts, while others rightly argue more of a devotional or religious purpose. We’ve already dealt, at length, with these nuances between sacred and devotional music in the last post (with religious music being one further step removed from devotional music, in that the music is related to the faith without necessarily the purpose of prayer). We can also see nuances between oriented and disoriented secular music, where a song like The Beatles’ “Let it Be” can, for some, be a clear path toward the transcendentals, and for others, a clear path away from them.
This is not a determination of what music is worthwhile or likable, but rather whether the music we’re discerning has a divine orientation or not.
You Believe What You Sing
I grew up during the peak of the 1990s “You are what you eat” advertising campaign. I have fond memories of a childhood friend saying to me, “You better not eat all of those gummy bears… you’ll probably turn into one!”. I didn’t... but this idea stems much further back than the 1990s—all the way back to 1826, in fact, when the French-Catholic writer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillant-Savarin penned the phrase, “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es,” or “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”
In a sense, the Church has taken a similar perspective on prayer. Since about the 5th century, Christians have held the maxim, “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” meaning “The law of prayer (i.e. how we worship) is the law of belief (i.e. how we believe), with the phrase sometimes extended to say “Lex vivendi” (i.e. how we then live). Applied to music, there is a foundational truth to this precept, and perhaps we can propose this statement: “You believe what you sing.”
There is a gravity to music: it has the ability to form and transform our beliefs, our habits, our emotions, and our priorities. This was understood well in the early Church when Christians saw the sway that music held over pagan rituals, where the persuasive melodies of flutes would sway men so greatly that they would be willing to be led into a castration ceremony (... yikes!). While our modern music might not lead us to such physical extremes, it is no less deserving of a close spiritual examination by thoughtful Christians. Modern music, while it might seem innocent enough, demands evaluation.
Why should it make a difference whether we listen to geniuses like Bach and Beethoven or whatever three-minute pop song happens to be on the radio? … Our life is not bifurcated into two hermetically sealed compartments – namely, inside the church and outside the church. It is one single life. As Saint John Chrysostom preached to his flock: ‘Some people make their houses a theater; you should make your home a church’. Music outside of church, while it need not be sacred, should still be in harmony with the music proper to church. They ought to be consistent with one another: Two areas of a single coherent Christian life. … According to the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, whenever we listen to music, we are allowing it to come inside and make its home in our souls. We are saying: shape me; make me like yourself. (Peter Kwasniewski, Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence)
We can easily see that certain secular songs are inherently bad for our human flourishing, especially when we consider songs with lyrics that unabashedly detail themes of sex, violence, drug use, and so on. Yet we can also find secular music that is inherently good for the building up of a Christocentric society. Think about songs like Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind:
How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Of course, Bob Dylan isn’t writing religious music, and is certainly not writing devotional or sacred music. He is something of an entirely different category. It’s not veering from the path of good human formation, yet it draws us out of ourselves and into an experience of knowing greater truths about God and our need for salvation.
These qualities of music are very commonly found in genres like folk music, where the human condition is frequently expressed in lyrics that are refined generation after generation. Even when these songs are of the most extreme topics like suffering and death, they still lead us into a deeper understanding of virtue; in the knowing of who we are, and who God is.
A Return to the Hearth: a Catholic Approach to Song to Restore Modern Culture
This is why we ought to value a sense of “hearth culture” in the home: tradition passing from generation to generation through songs, tales, poems, and the like. These moments, especially when lived well in the domestic Church, are unparalleled in how they effectively build up a Christocentric society. John Senior tirelessly promoted this kind of thinking:
Our Lord explains in the Parable of the Sower that the seed of His love will only grow in a certain soil–and that is the soil of Christian Culture, which is the work of music in the wide sense, including as well as tunes that are sung, art, literature, games, architecture–all so many instruments in the orchestra which plays day and night the music of lovers; and if it is disordered, then the love of Christ will not grow. It is an obvious matter of fact that here in the United States now, the Devil has seized these instruments to play a danse macabre, a dance of death, especially through what we call the “media,” the film, television, radio, record, book, magazine and newspaper industries. The restoration of culture, spiritually, morally, physically, demands the cultivation of the soil in which the love of Christ can grow, and that means we must, as they say, rethink priorities. . .
First, negatively, smash the television set. The Catholic Church is not opposed to violence; only to unjust violence; so smash the television set. And, positively, put the time and money you now spend on such entertainment into a piano so that music is restored to your home, common, ordinary Christian music, much of which is very simple to play. Anybody can learn the songs of Stephen Foster, Robert Burns, the Irish and Italian airs, after even a few hours of instruction and practice. And then families will be together at home for an evening and love will grow again without thinking about it, because they are moving in harmony together. There is nothing more disintegrating of love than artificial attempts to foster it in encounter groups and the like: Love only grows; it cannot be manufactured or forced; and it grows on the sweet sounds of music. . . (The Restoration of Christian Culture, John Senior)
Right now, the domestic Church—the households where we live out the daily moments of our lives, rooted in Christ—is arguably facing the greatest musical crisis in human history. We have lost a sense of “hearth culture”, where music today is a self-centered individual expression shared in the isolation chambers of our headphones. Only one or two generations ago, it was still common to find people playing music together as a shared communal expression, whereas now music’s value has been reduced to a utilitarian fame. If I’m not going to pursue a career as a musician (or if I’m not talented enough to become famous), it’s not worth learning to play music. We must see that this kind of thinking is completely antithetical to what music is, which is a God-given gift that unites us laterally with each other and vertically with our Creator.
A recent study conducted by the University of Münster examined religious transmission within households in countries where secularization is on the rise. Many studies have previously shown us the importance of fathers in the transmission of the faith, and that a stable household with two parents is a strong indicator of future faith affiliation for children. Their findings, though, takes these insights one step further: “Our surveys and family interviews in Germany, Finland, Italy, Canada, and Hungary show that, in all countries, religion is passed on to the younger generation above all when the family cultivates a religious self-image, engages in joint religious practices such as prayer or singing, and when both parents belong to the same denomination – the most important role in religious socialization is played by mothers”. We must begin to explore the role of music in the home once again, especially as it pertains to the rooting of the domestic Church in prayer: hymns, chants, folksongs, and especially the singing of the Liturgy of the Hours.
Until the mid-20th century, many households had songbooks and psalters easily accessible. For generations, it was clear what a family could sing, whether they learned it from their own family members through a passed-down aural tradition, or they found it in a printed resource. Maria Von Trapp’s 1955 book, Around the Year with the Trapp Family, is an excellent example of this kind of text. Over the past years, I’ve collected many of these books to study them and begin to revive this sense of hearth culture in my own home. As a dad of five daughters and a Catholic musician myself, I’ve long contemplated the need for a rooted culture of music and musical prayer in my own home. What was shocking was when I realized that it had been 70 years since an influential volume like Around the Year had circulated Catholic households, and that the musical needs I was feeling in my own domestic church were being felt by countless households in all corners of Western society. There has not been a significant resource offered to the domestic Church since the time that secularism and the individualization of music took strong hold of American culture… UNTIL NOW.
Announcement: Word on Fire’s New Book to Bring Music to the Domestic Church
Consider this an early announcement… In 2026, Word on Fire will publish a new resource of music for the domestic Church that I’ve co-written with David Clayton (author of Way of Beauty, The Little Oratory, and more). This two-volume project contains hymns, chants, folk songs, and practical instruction on singing psalms in English with Gregorian tones. The book is organized by liturgical season, providing selections of these hymns, chants, and folk songs for every season of the Catholic liturgical year, for use in home prayer, communal gatherings, and more. We write for the modern household in exactly what they are experiencing today… providing them with resources, music selections, training, and encouragement to bring song into the heart of their own domestic Church. Our sincere hope is that this two-volume book builds the culture of the domestic Church in and through the great gift of Catholic music, from the sacred to the secular, and everything in between.
Want to hear more about it? Sign up to be notified about its release here.
What’s next?
This series will continue from here and will take a turn into some common objections to teachings around sacred music, devotional music, and more. These questions start to get way more real… and are heartfelt objections that musicians have asked us over time. We’ll start with a common one: Who sets the criteria of the Church’s music, why should I—as a seasoned musician—listen to them, and what do I do if I don’t agree with the Church’s criteria for sacred or devotional music?