The Chant Café

Last February (it seems like years ago), InsideCatholic ran my article called Pay to Pray: The Church's Simony Problem. Based on years of thought and research, I took aim at the practice of using civil law to maintain legal exclusivity to liturgical texts and charge for their use. It works like a tax for evangelization. The practice not only contradicts Christian experience and ethics, I argued; it might be classified as a form of simony.

A primary example concerns the secret dealings over the Revised Grail Psalter. Relatively few people have actually seen this book; it has not been published. But if it so happened to land in my hands and I posted it on this blog, I would be hearing from the GIA - the agent that manages international rights on this book - in about 20 minutes. If I didn't take it down, I would hear from lawyers. If I didn't respond after that, I would probably face a DMCA attack from the government. Regardless of the merits of the book, I find it deeply regrettable that the U.S. Bishops seemed to have embraced it for liturgical use.

I've written many articles on this entire topic, but I've dropped the topic recently because it would appear that the Grail will not be introduced for the Responsorial Psalm text in the Roman Rite anytime within the next decade.

Imagine my surprise when yesterday, composer Paul Innwood notes in a comment box that the Leaked Missal, or what is being called the Moroney Missal, seems to have relied on the Revised Grail for the re-rendering of the approved Missal proper texts submitted to Rome. To what extent we cannot know because we do not have a copy of the Revised Grail; it has not yet leaked. Thanks to other internet leaks, however, we do have a copy of the Gray Book submitted by the conferences and the leaked Missal, with its legendary 10,000 plus changes, from the CDW, and it is clear that the texts of the propers are very different. I had assumed that it was some committee doing what committees do, which is mostly make a mess of things, but perhaps there was a purpose for the changes after all.

In other words, the Revised Grail seems to have made an early appearance in the newly translated Missal, the one we will be using one year from now. What this implies about royalties, copyrights, permissions, or other dealings between interested parties is pure speculation at this point. But we can be sure that such speculations are going to be rampant in the coming weeks, and the search for more evidence will continue. Print this post