Archbishop Cordileone Answers Questions about Mass of the Americas, a Polyphonic Mass Setting Composed by Frank La Rocca

The following interview was conducted with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone via email by Sophia Feingold as background for a feature article published by National Catholic Register September 22, 2022, "‘Mass of the Americas’ Is Coming to CD at the Hands of Grammy-Winning Producer."

Q:  What is the significance of the plural in the title, “Mass of the Americas”? 

The idea first came to me early in 2018 as I was looking at the calendar for the year. In the Archdiocese of San Francisco we hold our archdiocesan-wide celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the Saturday before the actual feast day. That year it occurred on December 8. So, we would be celebrating the Mass of the Immaculate Conception, the patroness of the United States and a holy day of obligation here, in the midst of our festivities to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of Mexico and all of the Americas. 

I realized that this was a golden opportunity to lift up Our Lady as a unifier of God’s people, of all races and languages, from both sides of the southern border. With all the tensions and divisions in society today, we need to look to our Blessed Mother. We all love her, and, like all mothers, her love unites us into one family of God. I conceived of the "Mass of the Americas," then, as a unity Mass to Our Mother. In Europe they see all of the Americas as one continent, “America.” In our hemisphere we refer to the “Americas,” because of the geographical, historical, cultural and linguistic differences. But we can learn a lesson from how the Europeans see this hemisphere, and seek to build up better mutual understanding and unity. Our Blessed Mother is the way there, and the music of this Mass in a twin honor to Our Lady under these two titles unites these themes. Thus, the “Mass of the Americas.”

Q.  Why have a new Mass composed, as opposed to singing Palestrina, Purcell, etc.?  How does this affect American liturgy?   

Well, in the first place, there is no Palestrina Mass, nor of any other great sacred music composer in history for that matter, conceived as a twin tribute to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Great music in the high sacred tradition composed on themes spiritually appropriate for our times is our vision. Great art in any form is appropriate and relatable to the culture of a particular time and place and reflects that culture, but also elevates it by bringing it into a continuity of tradition that has withstood the test of time and attained the status of classic beauty, giving it the quality of universality: beautiful in every age, culture and generation.

Secondly, it is important that the Church’s great tradition in sacred music and the arts not be viewed as a dead tradition, but one that has been handed on and lives today. This is how it works with secular classical music: the great orchestras of the world continue to play the great symphonies of the great composers – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so forth; but new compositions of the same genre are being made all the time, and the great orchestras of the world also play those. Likewise for religious classical music, that is, sacred music: our artists need to know we value their work, including a creative genius like Frank La Rocca but also young artists. The circle of composers gathering around the Benedict XVI Institute want primarily to use their gifts for the worship of God. If the concert stage is the only place that welcomes sacred music, we have a problem. 

Q:  Many people are musical purists, who feel they only pray well with chant—or with Marty Haugen—or some other subgenre of religious music.  Can people be wrong about what music helps them experience transcendence?  And is personal spiritual experience (even when it is genuine) the right metric for deciding what music to use at Mass?  (I think of Sacrosanctum Concilium here, which gives chant “pride of place,” but also allows for “other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony.”) 

You’re certainly right about what Vatican II taught on sacred music, a principle going back to Pope St. Pius X and continuing right up through Vatican II, Pope St. Paul VI, and the current documents on the Sacred Liturgy: that the people learn to sing the Gregorian chants together in Latin, while allowing for other kinds of music suitable to the liturgical action. Polyphony developed organically from chant, and has withstood the test of time. Again, this is what gives it the status of classic, the quality of universal beauty. Contemporary compositions have not yet been subject to such a test of time. So only time will tell. But let us keep in mind that the purpose of the Mass is to worship God and to bring us into an encounter with Christ in the Eucharist. If that is happening for anyone in their current parish I don’t want to take that away. But our emptying pews suggest it is not happening for many people.

More beauty and reverence in the liturgy is needed, for that is what, in the first place, qualifies as fitting for the worship of the one, true God. I am convinced it is also central to the key problem we are confronting nowadays, namely, that so many Mass-going Catholics don’t understand or experience the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Every Mass is a miracle. When the outward form of the liturgy doesn’t correspond to the reality of the Mass, people have trouble understanding and experiencing Jesus Christ in the Mass. 

Q: Is the length of "Mass of the Americas" a problem for celebrant and congregation?  There are other great compositions—Bach’s B Minor Mass, or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis—that are almost never sung in context for this reason. 

The "Mass of the Americas" is really conceived of as a Cathedral Mass. It’s not so much the length as the orchestra that makes it prohibitive for parish use in most parishes. That is one reason we recently released at the Napa Institute the parish version for choir and organ (https://benedictinstitute.org/larocca/). That said, the "Mass of the Americas" has touched a chord and has been celebrated in Tijuana, Houston, New Jersey, New York, Washington D.C., Rome, Chicago and more. 

The orchestrated Mass compositions you mention are certainly beautiful, but they are really written more for the concert hall than for worship. This was the movement begun by Pope St. Pius X when he introduced for the first time the principle of active participation into the Church’s Magisterium with his Apostolic Letter Tra le sollecitudini of 1903. The Mass had become more of a performance, with the people as passive observers. Gregorian chant is the Church’s patrimony of liturgical music, and he sought to restore the principle of people actively involved in worship by singing together the chants that are the music proper to Catholic worship. But by holding up polyphony as a prime example of other types of music suitable to the liturgical action, Vatican II acknowledges that there is also a place for choral music, which engages the people with active listening, as is the case when the word of God is proclaimed in the liturgical assembly.

Q:   "Mass of the Americas" has been used in both the Novus Ordo and the Traditional or Tridentine Rite.  Was it deliberately composed with both rites in mind?   

I originally conceived the Mass for our Cathedral on the occasion of our celebration for Our Lady of Guadalupe, and so as a Novus Ordo Mass with the musical pieces in Spanish, Latin, English and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztec people). When I later was asked to celebrate a Solemn High Pontifical Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, I asked Frank LaRocca to adapt it to that form of the Mass. I did not originally conceive it for that, but that is how it happened.   

Q: Who would you say is the audience for "Mass of the Americas," or for whom would you say it was commissioned and composed?  

My first intent was to offer a fitting unity Mass for the faithful of San Francisco. As I mentioned, in 2018 our archdiocesan-wide celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe was going to be held on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Since Hispanic Catholics and Catholics descended from European immigrants of generations ago tend not to intermingle too much, I thought that this would provide some impetus to bring the two communities closer together and allow us to celebrate both great Feast days together.   

We later brought it to Tijuana as part of a national liturgy conference the Mexican bishops were holding. It was also enthusiastically received there. That’s when we conceived of an international Marian unity tour. It has certainly touched a chord in people’s hearts. I’m especially gratified that U.S. priests are beginning to use the music in their First Mass celebrations. I hadn’t imagined that, but it certainly seems fitting. 

A Look Back at the Bay Area Visit of Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop from Kazakhstan

His Excellency Bishop Athanasius Schneider has been referred to in the National Catholic Register as “one of the leading voices of fidelity, continuity, and tradition in the Church today.” In some ways, it is hard to account for the scope of his influence, in light of the fact that Bishop Schneider is only an auxiliary bishop of Astana, in Kazakhstan, a country with only around 150,000 Roman Catholics. (Astana is the former and about to be restored name of the city currently named Nur-Sultan, which is where Pope Francis visited this past week.) 

Even though Kazakhstan is the world’s ninth largest country, many have never even heard of it (at least not until Pope Francis' recent visit there).  So it is a bit of a marvel that, in spite of the relative humble obscurity of his role as an auxiliary bishop serving in that less-than-famous locale, Bishop Schneider is invited often to appear in many far-away places.

In 2018, I had the privilege to interview Bishop Schneider in the San Francisco Bay Area after he celebrated a Pontifical Mass at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory when the oratory was still hosted at Five Wounds Portuguese National Church in San José. 

You can read the interview here at Homiletic and Pastoral Review. 

After the interview, Bishop Schneider went to Monterey, where he was the principal speaker for the 2018 Latin Mass/Keep the Faith Conference, which was the main event that brought him to the Bay Area. Then, after the conference, Bishop Schneider was a guest for dinner at Archbishop Cordileone's residence. 

Enmity or Fraternal Correction?

Bishop Schneider is portrayed by some as an enemy of Pope Francis, because he speaks frequently in what he refers to as fraternal correction to some of papal actions. For one example, in our interview, he spoke about how he and two other Kazakhstan bishops released a statement on the indissolubility of marriage on December 31, 2017 in response to the much-disputed footnote to the pope's Apostolic Letter Amoris Laetitia, which allows some couples living in unblessed marriages to receive Communion after "accompaniment." 

More recently, in January 2022, Bishop Schneider asked the pope to rescind the provisions contained in Traditionis Custodes and in the Responsa ad dubia issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CDW) just before Christmas, which restricts the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass and the sacraments according to the books in effect in 1962. See here.

And then this week, a Reuter's article titled "As pope Kazakhstan visit ends, conservative critic speaks out," described Bishop Schneider as an "arch conservative who has often pointedly criticised the progressive pope on a host of issues."  The article quoted Bishop Schneider's objections to the pope's visit to Kazakhstan for the Seventh Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions:

"'While praising the congress' ability to 'promote mutual respect in the world,' Schneider, 61, said he believed it risked the 'danger' of putting Catholicism on the same plane as other religions."

So, I wondered if Bishop Schneider would meet Pope Francis when the pope was in Kazakhstan, and if so, whether the meeting would be cordial—until I saw the following photo. The photo looks pretty cordial to me.

Catholicism in Kazakhstan 

(Excerpt from the earlier-mentioned Homiletic and Pastoral Review article titled "Kazakhstan Bishop Schneider Broadcasts Seeds of Faith Around the World")

The story of how Bishop Schneider came to become a contributor to the renewal of Catholicism in Kazakhstan in the post-Soviet area, before he become a world-traveling proponent of traditional Catholic teachings, is well worth reading about. 

Bishop Schneider was born, baptized, and was named Anton in 1961 in the former Soviet Union. He first learned to practice and treasure his faith from devoutly Catholic parents, who experienced extreme hardships and upheavals during World War II, and later under Soviet rule.

His parents were originally among hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans whose forebears had settled in villages near Odessa in the Ukraine, on the Black Sea. In an interview quoted in a Zenit article, Bishop Schneider spoke extensively about his childhood, and the following quotes are from that article. Other biographical details were gleaned from other sources.

At the end of the Second World War, “the German Army took all these German people — 300,000 of them — [from the Black Sea area] to Berlin …. And when the Russian Army occupied Berlin, they took back these people as ‘forced labor’ to three places — Kazakhstan, Siberia and to the Ural Mountains.”

His parents were among those sent to the Ural Mountains. “They were forced to work there, and it’s a miracle that they survived. When they were freed, they moved to Central Asia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, a little republic close to the Chinese border, just below Kazakhstan.” He never went to the neighboring country of Kazakhstan to the north until many years later.

“There, I was born and spent my childhood. Then we moved from Kyrgyzstan to Estonia, which was still part of the Soviet Union. There, I lived for four years.”

Always when they lived under Soviet rule, the family had to practice its Catholic faith secretly, because religion was suppressed.

Finally, they were able to attend Mass when they lived in Estonia, but it was not at all easy. “We had a church which was 100 kilometers [62 miles] away, and we had to travel that 100 kilometers to attend the Holy Mass.” His parents took their four children to Mass by train once a month (because they could not afford the fare to go more often). At the time, he was between 10 and 12 years of age. They left for Mass on the first train before dawn, and returned on the last train after dark, and “it was dangerous, because, during those times, the Communist government forbade children from participating in the Holy Mass.”

Communion in the Hand Gave Him Pain in His Soul

In 1973, after Bishop Schneider made his First Holy Communion, he emigrated with his family to Rottweil in West Germany. Shocked at the age of 12 when he first saw people taking Communion in the hand, as he told the National Catholic Register, “I carried this pain in my soul,” and it prompted him to write his 2009 book on the Eucharist, Dominus est—It is the Lord: Reflections of a Bishop of Central Asia on Holy Communion.

As a young man, he joined the revived Order of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross of Coimbra in Austria in 1982 and took the religious name of Athanasius. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) in Rome, and theology at the Sapientiae Institute of Anápolis, Brazil. After he was ordained a priest in March 1990, he obtained a doctorate in patristic theology in 1997 from the Augustinianum in Rome.

Bishop Schneider returned to Central Asia only by chance. When he was still in Rome, and planning to return to Brazil, a priest whom he had not previously met invited him to help foster the revival of the Catholic Church by coming to teach at the newly formed seminary in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. In Karaganda, Bishop Schneider not only taught, but he helped build the seminary, and while he was also building the Cathedral of Our Lady of Fatima, he commissioned the Italian artist, Rodolfo Papa, to make a series of fourteen paintings for the crypt of the cathedral on the theme of the Eucharist, a subject which is always close to his own heart.

After Athanasius Schneider was ordained a bishop in June of 2006 in St. Peter’s Basilica, he was first assigned as auxiliary bishop in Karaganda. In 2011, he was transferred to the position of auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Astana, also in Kazakhstan. He also still manages to teach at the seminary.

When I listened to Bishop Schneider’s description about how he tries to evangelize in Kazakhstan through presence, through witness, and through personal contacts—I also thought about how widely he travels and teaches. This made me realize that he is doing the same thing around the world as he does in his own diocese in evangelizing through presence, through witness, and through personal contact. He seems to me to be a kind of saintly “Johnny Appleseed,” planting seeds of authentic Catholic doctrine as he travels around.