As my mother was dying this past October—and at age 100 and fading, she was obviously not going to be with us much longer—my greatest fear was: Would we really have to sing “Blest Are They” at her funeral Mass?

I didn’t realize at the time that this upbeat funeral favorite in “contemporary” Catholic parish music had recently been banned in many dioceses after dozens of women in 2020 accused its composer, David Haas, of sexual misconduct at a summer music program for teens that he had overseen. But that hardly mattered. There were plenty of other faux-folk post-Vatican II hymns that seem to be the standard repertoire at the Catholic funerals I’ve attended: “Be Not Afraid,” “On Eagle’s Wings,” “Here I Am, Lord.”

I dreaded all of this, but what I dreaded most was the prospect that my mother’s parish church in California wouldn’t have a choir or a music director able to handle anything else.

Many parish music directors are part-timers who love music but have little formal training. Their main familiarity with Mass music seems to come from Oregon Catholic Press (OCP), which, along with its Chicago-based competitor, GIA Publications, seems to have a lock on the distribution of the disposable paperback missalettes. The OCP has its own stable of affiliated composers, whose easy-listening religious “songs,” attuned to three-chord guitar accompaniment, typically focus on friendly feeling or social justice rather than transcendent mystery. Many Catholic Mass-goers know only the OCP offerings, and music directors in turn tend to cater to those expectations. It is a seemingly endless feedback loop that can make attending Sunday Mass in many parishes a banal and dispiriting experience: the plodding monotony of the “four hymns” mumbled by the congregation.

So as my mother’s end drew near, I sent a diplomatically worded email to Steven Ottományi, the music director at St. Andrew’s. In it I wondered politely if there could be some sung arrangements for her of, say, In paradisum, which is supposed to be the recessional hymn of the Mass of Christian Burial but is often bypassed. I love the traditional “Tridentine” Latin Mass but I decided to stick with the Novus Ordo for my mother. For one thing, Pope Francis had just issued his apostolic letter Traditionis custodes restricting celebration of the old rite, and I didn’t want to stir up political wasp’s nests in a parish 3,000 miles from my East Coast home. So my best hope, at a meeting I set up with Steven during what was to be my last visit to my mother, had been to adorn the Novus Ordo with as many traditional elements as pragmatically possible.

And what a surprise that meeting turned out to be! Right off, Steven, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval music at the Claremont Graduate University, informed me that there is actually a complete sung Gregorian-chant Missa pro defunctis in Latin, including an optional Dies irae Sequence (thought by most Catholics to have been abandoned after the Second Vatican Council), right in the Novus Ordo itself.

There was? I had never heard of such a thing in all my years of attending post-Vatican II funerals. But there it was, Steven showed me, its chant-notation buried in plain sight. I ordered it up, along with Maurice Duruflé’s Ubi caritas as a Communion hymn.

My mother died five weeks later, and she had, I am proud to say, the most beautiful funeral Mass I have ever attended in any rite. Attendees who had scarcely set foot inside a Catholic church in their lives commented on the beauty.

My point is that there are transformative things that can be done musically and liturgically with the Novus Ordo Mass—and that at least in some parishes they are already being done. Furthermore, there is also a small but growing body of parish music directors eager to incorporate serious and beautiful traditional sacred music into Sunday Masses, as well as a small but growing body of Catholic composers writing new sacred music that is also serious and beautiful, including entire sung Masses.

On Saturday, Nov. 6, 2021, the Benedict XVI Institute and the Archdiocese of San Francisco sponsored a “Requiem Mass for the Homeless,” a Mass mourning and reminding attendees of the human dignity of the lost and often mentally ill and drug-addicted who live and die on the San Francisco streets, especially in thes crime-beset Tenderloin District not far from the archdiocese’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption. San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone was the celebrant, as he had been at two previous Masses for the homeless in 2018 and 2019. The rite was Novus Ordo. The music had been specially commissioned from Frank La Rocca, the Benedict XVI Institute’s composer-in-residence. A brand-new shrine at the rear of the cathedral, Patron Saints of the Homeless, painted by artist Bernadette Carstensen in a style reminiscent of the Renaissance yet unmistakably contemporary, depicted Our Lady of Sorrows with her Child surrounded by saints new and old: Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Maximilian Kolbe, St. Josephine Bakhita…all patron saints of the causes of homelessness from drug addiction, poverty, human trafficking.

The hundreds who attended the Mass included San Francisco civic officials, many of them non-Catholics, and a large contingent from the Church’s social-justice wing, which isn’t known for its interest in musical or liturgical conservatism. But there they were, under the spell of La Rocca’s music and the dignity and reverence of Archbishop Cordileone’s celebration of the Mass—all for the sake and the souls of lost and despised human beings.

The most moving moment aesthetically and emotionally was the post-Communion interlude, La Rocca’s haunting arrangement, nearly 7 minutes long, of the Latin antiphon O vos omnes: “O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention, and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.” The antiphon, its scriptural text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, is most often associated with Good Friday—but here the association was with the misery of the homeless, shunned and ignored by passers-by on the sidewalks; their sufferings joined the sufferings of Christ on the cross. La Rocca’s composition recalled the famous setting of Jeremiah’s words by the sixteenth-century composer Tomás Luis de Victoria—but it was also strikingly original. Among the hundreds listening to it that Saturday morning, “there was absolute silence,” veteran Stanford music professor William Mahrt recalled afterwards at a Mass-related panel at the archdiocese’s St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. “You could hear a pin drop,” Mahrt said. Everyone there was completely taken out of themselves.”

The palpable awe in a congregation of people who had probably never experienced anything in their churches like La Rocca’s O vos omnes was a lesson in liturgical supply-side economics: If you build it, they will come. Of course, a professional-level production with a full, classically trained chorus and orchestra like the Benedict XIV Institute’s Requiem Mass for the Homeless is out of the question for the average tightly budgeted parish and its underpaid music director—so how do you bring musical beauty to the grassroots—the 98 percent of Catholics who have never seen a traditional Catholic liturgy and probably don’t even know who Palestrina was–in any practical way?

Providing possible answers to that question was the theme of a composers’ and musical directors’ strategy session at St. Patrick’s on Sunday, Nov. 7, that was perhaps even more important in its pastoral implications than the Mass for the Homeless itself. Attendees included La Rocca; prolific sacred-music composer Jeffrey Quick, who directs a schola cantorum singing Gregorian chant at St. Sebastian Church in Akron, Ohio; Kent State University music professor Mark Nowakowski, who scored Cameron O’Hearn’s Mass of the Ages, the documentary that celebrates the traditional Latin Mass; and Massimo Scapin, the new director of liturgical music at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago.

But Breaking Bread, as several participants pointed out, is typically the only musical resource many parishes offer, and “It’s not in the hymnal” is the frequent response of music directors when it’s suggested to them that they might introduce their choirs and congregations to, say, Gregorian chant. The average choir director “isn’t paid enough to research alternative sources,” Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka, associate professor and director of sacred music at St. Joseph’s seminary in New Yorkpointed out, even if the sources are as readily available as the Choral Public Domain Library and the Church Music Association of America’s free Musica Sacra website on the internet. The solution might be as simple as providing better hymnals to the pews: There was much praise for the St. Michael’s Hymnal, a handsome hardback with generous chant sections in Latin and English produced by a small nonprofit publisher in Lafayette, Ind., and now in its fifth edition. Some parishes have compiled and published their own hymnals. Others foster Gregorian chant by teaching it to children in parish schools and summer chant camps.

Or simply persuade Catholic composers (and make it monetarily feasible for them, which isn’t easy—that, too was a topic of discussion) to write music for parish choirs that may be thinly stocked with trained talent and lack the range of voices needed to produce complex Renaissance-style polyphony.

“I’m a working parish musician, and I’m here to make a plea to the composers in this group,” said Kevin Faulkner, music director at St. Luke’s Church in West Palm Beach, Fla, and conductor of boys’ and girls’ choirs at the parish school.  “The greatest corpus of music that lacks any contemporary expression are the Latin Offertories. There are plenty of Palestrina Offertories that are often for six voices or more, and I can do that on Sundays if I’m feeling good, but not always, and the need is out there for something simpler.”

“If you can compose for two voices, male and female, and put chant in the middle, that would work,” said Rebecca Ostermann, who teaches choral conducting at the Catholic University of America. “People are interested in chant, but they’re afraid of it.”

The need is out there—and so, as my mother’s funeral Mass and Archbishop Cordileone’s Requiem Mass for the Homeless, is the potential for heartfelt response by congregations when they are introduced to the tradition and liturgical beauty that the Catholic Church offers the world. One of the composers at the St. Patrick’s workshop reminded his fellows that every piece of music composed in the West for the last millennium uses a system of “do re mi” staff notation invented by a Benedictine monk named Guido who taught music to singers at the cathedral in Arezzo, Tuscany, during the tenth century: “I’m using the tools developed by the Catholic Church every single day. I always tell my fellow film composers that they should have a shrine to Guido of Arezzo.”

Quietly, a renaissance of American Catholic sacred music appears to be building. “We need to create a better pipeline between parishes and living Catholic composers” said Maggie Gallagher, executive director of the BenedictInstitute.org. “Our great Catholic high sacred music tradition is not closed and dead. It has deep roots and new flowers. Bringing together music directors and composers at St. Patrick’s Seminary was a pivotal step.”

The next step?  Bringing the Sacra Liturgia conference to San Francisco June 28-July 1. Cardinal Sarah and Cardinal Pell will join Bishop Lopes and Archbishop Cordileone celebrating beautiful liturgies.  The final Mass will be a newly commissioned Frank La Rocca Mass honoring St. Junipero Serra at Mission Dolores (which he founded in 1776) (by the Benedict Sixteen Choir and Orchestra (Richard Sparks, conducting) which is fresh off a triumph in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral of The Mass of the Americas. (For more information visit BenedictInstitute.org)

Speaking at the same post-Mass conference Archbishop Cordileone summed it up: “In the times we’re living in now there’s such a need for timeless beauty. This is what sacred music needs to do—to take a classical tradition and continue it, a living tradition of timeless beauty.” He added: “When people see and experience something beautiful, maybe they’ll do something similar in their parishes. Historically the Church has suffered brutal attacks, but it has always been able to offer the truth and to offer beauty. It’s a strategy for evangelization that the Church has used from the very beginning.”

Charlotte Allen is executive editor of Catholic Arts Today.

A Review of Robert B. Wilkins and Sarah Cortez’s The Carlucci Betrayal (Texas, White Bird Publications, 2021)

On January 10, 1999, The Sopranos aired on HBO. Before the days of Nextflix and Amazon Prime streamed on laptops, phones and tables, The Sopranos was broadcast on the soon to be eliminated cable television.

The Sopranos narrates the story of Tony Soprano (played by the late James Gandolfino), an Italian American mobster who, like The Godfather’s Michael Corleone, is a loving father as well as a vicious mobster. However, unlike Michael Corleone, Tony has a fragile weakness: he suffers from panic attacks, which he treats with the aid of his psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi, who eventually proscribes him Prozac.

Gandolfino’s Tony Soprano was a thoroughly postmodern man, haunted by his childhood and weakened by his anxiety, he was a deeply “existentialist” figure. Like Homer Simpson, Tony was also the American everyman balding and overweight with a taste for classic rock, sports, and World War II history.

However, more than his flaws or quotidian all American “dad-ness,” Tony was a man’s man, an intelligent and educated tough guy who was able to navigate labyrinthian wilderness of mirrors in the criminal world while managing the terrors and tedium of the postmillennial American cultural landscape.

This manliness and intellectual toughness matched with a fatal flaw would inaugurate what some critics have called the Third Golden Age of Television (ca 2000-present) (some critics have even gone so far as to call our era The Golden Age of Television).

With brilliantly crafted series such as Mad Men (2007-2015), Breaking Bad (2008-2014), and Season 1 of True Detective (2014), the Third Golden Age of TV has been marked by The Sopranos’ exploration of wounded masculinity attempting to navigate a world in which men are, in the words of NY Times columnist Maureen Down, no longer “necessary.”

While these TV series are, in many ways, “conservative” or “right wing” in as much as they, at times, present masculinity as well as various “natural” virtues such as courage and self-sacrifice as positive goods, most of the best of post-Sopranos TV is so filled with impurity, violence, and such dark and scandalous ideas as to make watching such series difficult if not impossible (as with True Detective) for most Catholics.

In their recent work, The Carlucci Affair, Robert Wilkins, a medical doctor turned author from Galveston, TX, and Sarah Cortez, a former active-duty police officer and current reserve officer  turned artist and fellow for the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, skillfully craft a gangster novel that dramatizes the rise of two brothers from gangster wannabe barbers to heads of a major mob business on the fictional island of Zapata, Mississippi.

The Carlucci Betrayal tells the story of Frank and Vince Carlucci, two ambitious Italian-American  brothers, attempting to make it during the Prohibition era in the Deep South. Allying themselves with a more powerful gangster named Tony DeLuca, the Carlucci brothers battle against Cajun bootleggers, the powerful Chicago mob, hypocritical preachers, the WASP establishment, and their own demons in order to build a “boardwalk empire” before Prohibition threatens to upset their illegal liquor trade.

While built around the life of organized crime, The Carlucci Betrayal is also a tormented love story about the battle between Frank and Vince for Lisa, a runaway turned (almost) prostitute turned owner of a half way house for reformed women of the night. Vince overpowers Frank (and Lisa) and makes Lisa “his girl,” but Frank and Lisa undertake an affair that produces a child, Randall, who must be left with relatives in Oklahoma.

What makes The Carlucci Betrayal so distinct is the honest love that Frank has for Lisa; he finally admits this love to his brother in the final scenes of the novel, stating: “True love, Vince. Lisa is my true love.”

However, like The Godfather trilogy before it, The Carlucci Betrayal is also a story about the consequences of sin and the effect of a life of violence that claims the lives of those caught up in the orbit of crime and ambition.

From the very first page of the novel, we learn that Vince “was always ready” for a fight; however, this violence in him, like the impurity of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, grows into a monster as Vince is consumed with the violence that he perpetuates in order to build the Carlucci criminal empire (there are a few passages that readers with a “chaster muse” may want to skip over).

Vince and Frank are brothers but almost doppelgangers or two sides of every man: the beast and the king, the strong man and the lover.

With their strength and pathos, Vince and Frank are much stronger and more powerful than Tony Soprano or even Mad Man’s Don Draper; they are members of a stronger and earlier time in American history before men were finally broken and tamed by post-industrial bourgeois life.

The Carlucci Betrayal is additionally the story of redemption and the possibility for God’s grace to transform the lives of those who are receptive to it as well as God’s ability to “heal the broken hearted” and bring a happy ending from a tragedy.

Indeed, God’s presence radiates throughout the novel in a manner atypical to most gangster films, which (with the exception of Martin Scorsese’s recent Christ-haunted Irishman) usually dismiss Christian faith with an ironic postmodern shrug.

In a scene deeply redolent of the bittersweet “dinner scene” ending of The Godfather 2, Lisa has the entire Carlucci (literal) gang over at her place and prays with genuine sincerity:

My dear God, bless my dearest friends and protect Vince on his journey. May you see fit to allow us to celebrate again like this—together—in the future. Bless us all as we go with you on each of our individual journeys in life. Bless this food, we ask.

By the end of the novel, many of the characters at the dinner are dead, and, in another work with out a theological center, would only convey a jagged bitterness and irony.

However, in The Carlucci Betrayal. God is a hidden but nonetheless present force guiding the lives of the main characters.

Frank, the brother who keeps his hands (relatively) clean from the violence that ultimately consumes Vince, himself prays in St. Catherine’s Church, humbling beseeching God: “Please, God, I have no right to talk to you, but I know you are up there watching over me. Please guide me through this maze I have created with my life. Please don’t let me lose Lisa, dear God.”

Both Lisa and Frank’s prayers are answered, but not quite in the ways that they anticipated and not without the suffering that is endemic in this “valley of tears” into which humans are thrown.

The book can be purchased here.

Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Southwestern State University, Jesse Russell has published in  academic journals such as Literature and Theology, New Blackfriars, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. His books Irony, Liberalism and Fantasy and The Redemption of Geoffrey Hill are both forthcoming from Lexington Books.

Stroll the wide sidewalks of downtown’s Main Street in seaside Rockport, Massachusetts, home of one of the U.S.’s oldest artist colonies.  You’ll see a striking oil painting of the Crucifixion in a front window of a gallery: Christ’s body hangs, a whitened cipher painted in the unabashed agony of redemptive sacrifice.

Dan DeLouise is the Crucifixion’s painter and the gallery that displays it is his own. The path that has brought this artist known for his secular work to this moment in his career has been winding, unpredictable, and deeply spiritual.

Like the Wyeths, he began his career as an illustrator.  A Long Island native, DeLouise graduated from Syracuse University with a major in commercial illustration after a two-year stint at a junior college. Five years of pounding the pavement in Manhattan’s mean streets brought him commercial art assignments, and eventually a specialization in the toy and game industry.  Recruited by Hasbro for a rare in-house position as an illustrator, DeLouise focused on the digital techniques required for commercial fantasy art.

With time, the physical art-making skills that he had previously trained in and utilized in mediums such as oil, gouache, and watercolor seemed to him to deteriorate.  As Dan DeLouise puts it “my skills as an artist were in jeopardy” despite (or perhaps because of) his commercial success.

In addition to this troublesome erosion of certain of his technical skills, DeLouise missed “the interaction of the artist and the paint,” he told me. This crucial incarnational aspect of art-making had become too distant. Another missing piece, he said was the internal dimension inside the artist illumined by St. John Paul II’s words in his “Letter to Artists” (1999): “In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where this work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and how they are what they are.”

Certain new moral challenges arose for DeLouise in the corporate arena, such as an assignment to work on Ouija boards.  He settled that particular conflict out to the satisfaction of his conscience, but on the horizon more conflicts clearly loomed. DeLouise decided to quit his job and instead devote himself to a freelance painting career, principally working in oils.

Soon afterwards, as he walked through Rockport’s commercial center in 2013, Dan DeLouise found himself face-to-face with a “For Lease” sign on the front of 53 Main Street, a three-story, shake-cedar shingled building with several street-front arches, only feet away from a men’s retailer selling a wide array of woolen plaid shirts and waterproof footwear. He only meant to inquire about the cost of a lease, but instead moved by impulse or the Holy Spirit, he signed a contract for the space now called DeLouise Studio.  He began painting nonstop.

The demand for his plein-air landscapes provided income (and still does), but DeLouise’s invigorated commitment to painting outdoors brought something else—a deepening relationship to God.  “There is a certain closeness to God when you are painting in nature,” DeLouise mused to me, “There is something about seeing God’s creation and trying to emulate it.  Many artists have spoken about it—such as, contemporary painters David Curtis, Mitch Baird, Jonathan Stasko.”  Other personal matters pushed DeLouise to seek the solace of daily Mass and a deeper prayer life, both of which sustained him and his burgeoning artistic outpouring.

But within a few years DeLouise experienced a deep yearning to paint another kind of art: sacred art.

The first image that called to DeLouise to paint it was the Crucifixion.  It is this painting of the Crucifixion that can still be seen today through a large front window, only a short walk from the ice-cream parlor and near the Pendleton shirts next door.

DeLouise’s Christ hangs suspended on a muddied background, arms outstretched without even a cross.  Clearly, He is nailed and, just as clearly, racked by the physical and mental torture required to attain the redemption of mankind.  A light illuminates Christ from above and brings his blood-drained, whitened flesh into focus in the shoulder and torso area on one side of the corpus.

Much of the painting’s power derives from the omission of standard attributes: no cross, no halo, no crowd of holy mourners, no INRI placard above Christ’s head. Gone are the other figures typically portrayed in attendance at the Crucifixion: the crucified robbers flanking Jesus’ cross, the Roman soldiers. In fact, Christ’s legs and feet below the knees barely appear. One nailed hand recedes into darkness, while the thorns on Christ’s head assume cruel prominence.  The painting becomes a crucible for all the elements of Christ’s self-sacrifice and functions like an alchemical crucible to concentrate them into their purest form: Jesus Christ Himself.

Christ’s head inclines downward (toward the viewer’s left), so there is no accusatory gaze or tender eyes of merciful acceptance. Perhaps, this Christ is already dead; perhaps He is overcome with exhaustion and pain, hanging limp until His final moment. Only the viewer can supply his/her own relationship toward the Christ Crucified, toward the already (or almost) completed gift of redemption purchased by Christ’s obedience to His Father’s will.

This extraordinary reach into the viewer’s soul to complete the painting accounts for part of this image’s power. Sometimes people stop in front of this Crucifixion and kneel in the street; sometimes people stand and openly weep. Some people keep walking and ignore the 36” x 24” canvas. There have been no negative reactions and a wealth of compliments.

DeLouise had thought about painting the Crucifixion for five years before he summoned the courage to begin. He fretted about the difficulty of painting such a complex religious image and worried over whether the appropriate references in the historical tradition could be correctly honored. A visit to the Louvre and its acres of sacred art ignited his passion to paint Christ Crucified: “When I returned from the Louvre, I painted it—which wasn’t what I had planned to paint or thought of doing.  What came out from the brush wasn’t mine, almost.  It typically would take me two weeks to paint a canvas of this size, but this painting took me two days.  I’ve never experienced anything like this at all.”

DeLouise offered the painting as meditative art to his parish where it was displayed on the altar from Holy Thursday to Holy Saturday. Immediately after, the Covid-19 shutdown began and he brought the painting to his gallery where it provided solace to all viewers through one of the large front windows with a light illuminating it throughout the entire night.

To his surprise, he has found a burgeoning market for his works of sacred art. One of his sacred paintings is entitled “Under Watchful Eyes” showing a calm, but alert, Blessed Mother with a drowsy Child Jesus.

Foremost in DeLouise’s mind is a desire to paint spiritual truths as they should be painted, grounded in tradition and truth. “I want to gain more knowledge so that I am honoring God as He should be portrayed, that I am portraying Truth so that I don’t confuse people. Sacred art reveals the spiritual understanding of the artist,” says DeLouise, “This is a responsibility we have as artists of sacred art.”

Daily Mass and frequent reception of the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist sustain DeLouise: “We forget how transforming the Eucharist is. It is the one thing that has changed me the most.”

If you stroll down Main Street in Rockport, Massachusetts, pause in front of DeLouise’s gallery.  Peer beyond the white window sills. Allow the deep mystery of Christ’s sacrifice to transfix you. The interior movement of your heart will complete the Crucifixion painting’s meaning revealed through Dan DeLouise’s artistry. Stand and weep, or kneel and pray. Do not keep walking.  Allow yourself to be both wounded and healed.

Sarah Cortez is president and founder of Catholic Literary Arts. http://www.catholicliteraryarts.org

Dan DeLouise can be contacted at http://www.delouisestudios.com