This article was originally published at Regina Magazine in 2014. Since the article is no longer available in Regina's online archives, I'm posting the article here as I submitted it before editing, with a few updates. One update is that the Ostrowskis and their two children now live in Los Angeles, California, where Jeff is the choir director at St. Vitus Church, which is administered by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP).
Ama, ora, et labora, Love, pray, and work, could be the motto that governs the life of a talented young married couple in Corpus Christi, Texas. Jeff and Cynthia Ostrowki are just barely in their thirties, but the Ostrowski's collaboration with each other and with others who work with them at Corpus Christi Watershed has produced some of the most intelligently and beautifully designed liturgical aids to be found anywhere.
Jeff and Cynthia and their coworkers bring to each project their deep understanding of the Catholic tradition in liturgy and chant, along with impressive skills in art, design, photography, videography, sound recording, book design, page layout, typography, and the typesetting of chant and polyphony.
Corpus Christi Watershed has created and posted 8,500 scores, videos, and Mp3 recordings at their website, all of which are downloadable for free. They maintain a popular blog Views from the Choir Loft (Reflections on Sacred Music and Liturgy). But the most notable of their achievements are the highly lauded Vatican II Hymnal[ for the Ordinary Form of the Mass, which was replaced in 2018 by The Saint Jean de Brébeuf Hymnal for both forms of the Mass] and the equally well-received St. Edmund Campion Missal and Hymnal for the Traditional Latin Mass.
“Have you seen the Vatican II Hymnal? . . . It's amazing… [T]he astonishing thing about it is that you could hand it to a brand new Music Director at a Novus Ordo parish and they could start doing decent music immediately. . . "And recently, in a move that seems in some respects to be even bolder than anything they've done before, CCW published a similar "all-in-one" resource... FOR THE TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS! [It’s a] gigantic triumph of a publication that is not just a hand missal—it is a text book, a treatise, a documentary. The St. Edmund Campion Missal and Hymnal for the Traditional Latin Mass is 992-page wonderment. [I]t's from CCW, so of course the typesetting is beautiful and the layout is great and it's especially formatted to avoid page turns. Of course. We would all, at this point, expect nothing less."—“An overly ecstatic ode to Jeff Ostrowski, Corpus Christi Watershed, and the Campion Missal” by Adam Wood at The Chant Café.
Even though the "overly ecstatic ode" gave credit only to Jeff, the couple actually works together on everything, along with many gifted volunteers. For example, for the first edition of the Campion Missal, Jeff edited the missal, and Cynthia directed visual arts and photography. Jeff’s sister Kristen Ostrowski gathered more than 300 pieces of line art from traditional sources, Jeff and Cynthia electronically enhanced them. They selected seventy-five of the most suitable images for use in the missal. In a trip to create photographs for the missal, the Ostrowskis took their one year old daughter along with them to Europe, where Cynthia took gorgeous photos of priests from the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter wearing antique vestments and celebrating Mass at stunningly beautiful churches. Graphic artist James Ridley created sixty illuminated letters for use at the beginnings of the chants, and Jeff re-typeset the chants for readability and beauty.
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| Jeff and Daughter in Fribourg, Switzerland |
More About the Hymnals and Missal
“The Vatican II Hymnal was the first pew book to contain the complete Mass Propers for the Ordinary Form."
[After Saint Jean de Brébeuf Hymnal was released, the New Liturgical Movement website (6/10/2019) called the St. Brébeuf “hands down, the best Catholic hymnal ever published.” It contains hymns for both forms of the Roman rite.]
One of the challenges that faces many priests when they attempt to introduce the Extraordinary Form into their parishes is how to provide the faithful with an easy-to-follow hand missal so they can follow the prayers of the Mass. . . . Enter the St. Edmund Campion Missal and Hymnal for the Traditional Latin Mass. . . . It is a complete Sunday and Holyday Missal with all the major feasts of the year including the Easter Triduum and the Nuptial and Requiem Masses, but, in addition to that, it also contains a very robust hymnal of over 150 traditional congregational hymns.—Fr. Justin Nolan, FSSP
What Is Behind the Name Corpus Christi Watershed?
Corpus Christi means Body of Christ, and Watershed refers to the water that was shed from the wound in Christ's side.
Jeffrey M. Ostrowski: “Watershed got started in late 2006 by a group of Catholics who wanted to respond to Pope John Paul II's 'Letter to Artists.' They had big plans.” They wanted to create “drama, painting, architecture, literature, film work,” and more, in the service of the Kingdom of God. Jeff Ostrowski started working part-time at CCW in 2007. On January 22, 2011, the board of directors elected him president of Corpus Christi Watershed.
“As time went on, God revealed to the Board of Directors that the projects bearing the most fruits were the Liturgical projects, so the Board of Directors felt called by God to focus more on Liturgical projects.” The staff is “very small. Most of our people are generous volunteers. We rely on donations. Currently, our average donors give $5.00 per month. We possess no endowment, savings, or property. Nothing. . . . Each day, we wait and see what God provides and He has NEVER let us down. We have many volunteers who help us.
“Our website has received many millions of visitors. Therefore, it seems that our ‘madness’ is working somehow, in a small way, to further God's Kingdom." For more about CCW, see here.
Corpus Christi Watershed is a 501(c)3 public charity dedicated to exploring and embodying as our calling the relationship of religion, culture, and the arts. This non-profit organization employs the creative media in service of theology, the Church, and Christian culture for the enrichment and enjoyment of the public.
How the Ostrowskis Met
The couple’s ethnic origins are so diverse, that it is a bit of a wonder that they ever met, and in Texas of all places. Jeff’s parents are Irish and Polish, and after they met and married in Chicago, they moved to Kansas, where Jeff grew up. Cynthia’s parents are Filipino, and because she came from a military family, she grew up all over the world, including the Philippines. They both come from families with five children. When Jeff moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, in 2005, Cynthia’s family was living there. Jeff told this reporter, “I lived in Kansas all my life until I got sick of doing Graduate Studies in Musicology (because of all the silly ‘Gender’ musicology nonsense) and moved to Corpus Christi to accept a church job.” He became friends with Timothy O’Brien, who was very interested in the Latin Mass and had worked for Catholic Answers, and who is married to Cynthia’s identical twin sister, Christine. When the O’Brien’s invited Jeff for dinner, Cynthia was there, and Jeff and Cynthia met there for the first time.
Jeff was too shy to talk much to Cynthia that night, but as time progressed, they fell in love and then married a few years later at a spectacular Solemn Traditional Latin Wedding Mass on April 14, 2007. They are now parents of a three-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy.
How They Married
Jeff and Cynthia married in 2007 in Immaculate Conception Chapel at John Paul II High School, where Jeff was teaching at the time. Their extraordinary form wedding Mass was the first Solemn Pontifical Nuptial Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form anywhere since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
The Most Reverend René H. Gracida, Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi and Laredo, was the celebrant. Because he was Bishop Emeritus, it was a “Mass at the Faldstool.” Bishop Gracida wore vestments that had been the personal travel-vestments of a saint, Mexican Bishop Saint Rafael Guízar Valencia, who was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI.
Note: A “Pontifical Solemn Mass at the Faldstool” is the most solemn form of Extraordinary Form Mass that a bishop may celebrate if he is not the Ordinary (chief bishop) of a diocese, or if he is an Ordinary but is not in his own diocese. A faldstool is a bench or small chair on which the bishop sits.
Jeff built the High Altar against the back wall himself for the occasion, since the chapel had only a freestanding table. He had to take the altar down again within two days of the wedding to return the chapel to the school’s preferred layout for the Novus Ordo Mass. Jeff also built the liturgical lanterns that were carried by altar servers.
Bishop Gracida used a chalice fabricated by Fr. Fryar, who designed it himself and did the gold plating before he used the chalice for the first time at his own First Mass in 2004. The chalice is featured in a beautiful photo in the Campion missal.
“We wanted to make sure everyone could follow the Mass,” says Jeff. The Campion Missal didn’t exist yet, so the groom’s mother made drawings for the Mass booklets to guide the wedding guests.
Bishop Emeritus Gracida is a revered churchman with a colorful past. Among other things, Gracida had been a tail-gunner in the 303rd Hell's Angels during World War II. As Jeff says, "He made bombing runs against the Nazis. He already fought Hitler so he is not afraid of progressives who hate him because he against abortion, and because he is for tradition."
More About the Campion Missal
Roseanne T. Sullivan: How did you decide to produce the St. Edmund Campion Missal?
Jeffrey M. Ostrowski: I started attending the Latin Mass in the 1990s (as a child). When I first went, I thought it was the most boring thing I ever saw. But, as time went on, I began to deeply love the Traditional Mass.
I have attended many Latin Masses over the years, and one thing that often bothered me was observing the low quality of pew books— indeed, the cheaply produced copies seem out of place with the grandeur of the ancient, traditional liturgy. Many people don’t have a Missal at Mass (or forget theirs at home) and so they just sit there the whole time. Others use a Missal lacking the Proprium [Proper prayers of the day for the Mass]. Others use missals with the incorrect Holy Week.
Furthermore, I’d never observed a truly congregational hymnal in any of the Traditional communities. How can the congregation sing if they don’t have a book? The same three exit hymns were sung week after week.
Some have produced hymnals for the choir, but none have been produced for the people in the pews. The hymnals for the Novus Ordo Mass cannot be used for the Latin Mass, because those books are filled with music written in a secular style, and some contain heretical lyrics. These were the primary reasons we created the Campion Missal, but there were many others, too, such as the desire to show Catholics the beautiful ancient manuscripts and beautiful poetry of the English Martyrs."You can read more about the St. Edmund Campion Missal here. And you can read about the 3rd edition, which is being prepared, here.
The soundtrack for the video is a motet by William Byrd (+1623), from a poem composed in honor of the Jesuit martyr St. Edmund Campion soon after Campion’s martyrdom. All the parts were sung by Matthew J. Curtis.
Why doe I use my paper inck and pen, / and call my wits to counsel what to say, such memories were made for mortal men, / I speak of Saints, whose names cannot decay, an Angels trump, were fitter for to sound, / their glorious death, if such on earth were found."
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