Triduum 2025 was – as always! – a whirlwind, a glorious and sleep-deprived delirium of music and liturgies and long drives everywhere. On the morning of Holy Thursday, I was able to arrive mid-Gospel at the Chrism Mass in Bridgeport. Bishop Frank Caggiano preached his homily on the life of Blessed Michael McGivney. In addition to founding the Knights of Columbus, Blessed Michael was a priest of the Diocese of Hartford, which covered the present territory of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Archdiocese of Hartford, and Diocese of Norwich. The prospect of his future sainthood was an overarching subordinate theme of the whole liturgy, which closed with a ceremony to bless a new statue of McGivney before the dismissal.
From the instant I heard Bishop Frank’s preaching, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, what I had to do – to put into motion the composing of a Mass setting: The Mass of the Poor, to the honor of Fr. Michael McGivney.
The canonization of a first American-born priest saint might open the path for some to embrace an alleged “greatness,” a Stars-and-Stripes aesthetic of bombast, to appropriate the saint as one more trophy to the Empire of Mammon and Spectacle. Nothing could be more antithetical to Fr. Michael’s character and how he lived his priesthood. I want to see to it that he is celebrated, at least somewhere, with music influenced by a different America – the numinous yet understated sublimity of the shape tone tradition, the music of the poor, the immigrant, and the ostracized. Though now associated with Appalachia and the American South, this music first arose right here in New England, with the Bay Psalm Book and the “Yankee tunesmiths” of Colonial times.
At this moment in history, when the spirituality of this country is at once so fraught and so central to the global Church, the legacy of Fr. McGivney is urgent. For many years, I attended daily Mass at St. Mary’s, New Haven, invariably sitting in the last pew on the left, directly in front of the blessed’s tomb. When my friend Danny was mortally ill with osteosarcoma at nineteen, he chose Fr. McGivney to be the intercessor to whom all of us who prayed for him should turn. I believe that the spirit of humble service at the margins exemplified by Blessed Michael (and the Holy Father!) gives Americans something authentic to be proud of, in these times of ours. I hope that the Mass of the Poor may in some small way join in fostering that spirit, in America and beyond.
To date, we have the congregational melodic line with keyboard accompaniment for the Sanctus, and I, personally, love it dearly. The composition of the Gloria, however, is really blowing me away.
The Gloria is inherently linked to Christmas, both Scripturally and historically. I have often been called upon to sing Glorias which have multiple repetitions of the angelic proclamation, set as a refrain. While this could certainly be debatable as a device toward fostering active participation, to break up the flow of this text was not an option for this Mass (not to mention that St. Pius X held prolonging the Gloria to be “a very grave abuse.”) Moreover, I know of such Gloria refrains in which the word “glory” is written with a literal exclamation point (and the dynamic markings to prove it). We want our exclamation to be implicit, an intensity of sweetness and quiet inner rejoicing… lest we occasion an undiscerned boisterousness lazily passed off as joy. This is the song of the angels – it is pure contemplation unfolding itself, embracing the reality of Emmanuel, God-among-us, in worship.
My original idea for the Gloria was to treat of the pathos and poverty of the Christ Child; this is the Mass of the Poor, after all. I’ve spent a veritable lifetime wearing out my copies of the devotional works of St. Alphonsus Liguori – very much including The Incarnation, Birth, and Infancy of Jesus Christ (perhaps the most beautiful of them all). It has always been difficult for me to see how so great a nostalgic, garish and consumerist frenzy should commemorate the Nativity – itself an inauguration into a winter’s night of rejection, displacement and destitution. These days, the penitential waiting of Advent has transformed into daily pampering with December calendars of little niceties: beauty products, chocolates, cat treats (okay, for this last I cave to the zeitgeist). Let us listen to Alphonsus:
“The Creator of Angels” (writes St. Peter Damian) “is not said to have been clad in purple. but to have been wrapped in rags. Let worldly pride blush at the resplendent humility of the Savior.”
and:
Our Redeemer, after being born in such poverty, was obliged to fly from his own country into Egypt. In this journey, St. Bonaventure goes on to consider and compassionate the poverty of Mary and Joseph, who, travelling like poor people on so long a journey, and carrying the Holy Infant, must have suffered very much on account of their poverty: “What did they do for food? Where did they repose at night? How were they lodged? What could they have had to eat except a little hard bread? Where could they have slept at night, in that desert, if not on the ground, in the open air, or under some tree? Who that met these three great pilgrims on their way would ever have taken them for anything else than three poor beggars.”
As my creative partner and I worked together, the Gloria started to coalesce – and I heard in the music itself something I never would have dared, nor even thought to have addressed. Yet it was nonetheless plainly there: the Incarnation from the vantage point of the imminent Trinity. As in Messiaen’s “Amen de la Création” (the first movement of his Visions de l’Amen), the sonorities took on a music-of-the-spheres character, as if it were a deep and primordial Theology as its subject. It was unmistakable, this unfolding inner logic of the text, being decoded rhythmically, melodically and chordally. According to these, as it were, hidden patterns which we had stumbled upon, everything was cohering and becoming mutually supportive: text, meaning, articulation. I set out to portray a decisive moment in human salvation history – yet, as von Balthasar so rightly identifies, “a predominantly horizontal theo-drama must give place… to the primacy of the vertical one.”
It took me several dumbfounded days to realize that the composition of this piece is itself prayer, that there is a sort of mysticism to the doing of the work, that there is contemplative fire embedded within it – something holy, light years beyond our poor agency.
Remarkably, the breakthrough coincided exactly with the release of Pope Leo’s first official papal pronouncement. (It is hard for me to remember how recent all of this has been. The music has a necessity that makes it feel timeless, as if it has always existed, even though its composition is barely begun.) To read Dilexi te in the rich world is to be promptly and thoroughly convicted of what amounts to one’s indifference in the face of poverty, no matter how seriously one may take the issue. The question that Leo suggests but does not fully answer is why poverty is at once so foundational and so integral to the practice of Christianity – and even more: What is poverty, originally, in God? I will explore that question in the second part of this article.
Image: 19th Century studio photo, photographer unknown.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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