Simple English Propers to debut at Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine

The Schola Cantorum of the Knights of Divine Mercy [KDM] is a small group of amateur male singers who sing for KDM First-Friday events at St. Mary’s Church of Pine Bluff, WI and at a few other events around the Diocese of Madison. The repertoire focuses primarily on chant (English and Latin) and simple TTB pieces.

For the past two years, the KDM Schola has been invited to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, WI to sing at the Saturday-morning Mass celebrated by then-Archbishop Raymond Burke for the Marian Catechist Apostolate. This year, as the schedule permitted, the KDM Schola will be singing for the 11:00 AM Sunday Pontifical Ordinary-Form Mass at the Shrine Church on August 7, celebrated by Cardinal Burke.

This presented a problem and an opportunity for the schola, especially as three of its members will be unavailable (two will be in Spain for pre-World-Youth-Day events), leaving a grand total of eight singers available.

While the schola has tackled some Gregorian proper chants, the repertoire of the Graduale Romanum would have been perhaps a bit ambitious given both the singers’ relative lack of exposure to singing the genre (which, it should be said, is well above the global average) and infrequency of rehearsals. However, the schola’s fluency in English-language chant (every rehearsal starts with Evening Prayer from The Mundelein Psalter) and the publication of the Simple English Propers allowed for a unique opportunity — the singing of the processional propers of the Mass (Entrance, Offertory, Communion) in the vernacular, in their proper liturgical contexts, and in the context of a Pontifical Ordinary-Form Mass.

Furthermore, to highlight the Church’s desire that the Latin language be retained in liturgical services especially for the Ordinary of the Mass, all of the ordinary will be sung in Greek and Latin. Further, many of the dialogues will be sung in Latin.
For those interested, here are two PDFs:

• Order of Worship
• Simple English Propers for 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

Rehearsal videos are also available.
A final note: It was incredible to discover how appropriate the Introit antiphon and verses for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time are for a Mass during which Marian Catechists would be consecrated. Obviously this alignment won’t happen every year, and yet for some reason it happened this year.

The Recovering Choir Director

Wow, this sounds fantastic!