Hymns

A few times, over the years, I have been passing by Carter Barron when the carillon at the Presbyterian church opposite was working. The first time, I was nearly out of earshot before I recognized the tune as that of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God". The next time, I quickly recognized "Faith of Our Fathers". Now, I don't know what a classically Presbyterian hymn would be, but I was interested that they drew on the Lutheran and Catholic traditions.

My interest in this really began years ago, when happening to be in a Lutheran church, I noticed that the hymnal, and maybe the service, included a text by Peter Abelard. Since then, whenever I happen to be in a strange church, or near a new hymnal, I have a look for ecumenical borrowings. Owing to a falling off in weddings and graduations, I seldom have a chance to look now. It seemed to me that

• The Catholic hymnals reliably carry Charles Wesley, and Martin Luther. John Newton's "Amazing Grace" will almost certainly be there, Calvinist though it clearly is.  Alexander Means's "What Wondrous Love Is This" will be there. You will also find "We Gather Together", and a number of hymns by Isaac Watts.
• In a Protestant hymnal you will likely find Aquinas for "Adoro Te Devote", but of course not for "Pange Lingua"/"Tantum Ergo". Probably you will find Frederick Faber's "Faith of Our Fathers", and you may find the Jesuit martyr Brebeuf's "In the Moon of Winter". You can count on finding the "Come Holy Spirit" of Rabanus Maurus.

This weekend, in a Methodist church for a concert, I had a chance to browse the United Methodist hymnal. It was about as I expected: Brebeuf and Faber were there, also Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux though not Aquinas. At the end of the list of sources, I was interest to see "Wotyla, Karol: see John Paul II"--a litany for peace.

(Is it cheating to count as Catholic the hymns from before 1517? I think not, at least in the case of Abelard and Aquinas: both did a great deal to fit Aristotelian thought into Christian theology, and Martin Luther did not approve of Aristotle.)

On the other hand, the (Catholic) International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) does take only so many Protestant hymns. In Worship, there are seven by Charles Wesley, six by Isaac Watts, and three by Martin Luther, one by Alexander Means. By comparison, Richard Haas, who must be known mostly to choirmasters and the obsessives who read the matter in the back of Worship and Gather, has something like 30, as does Rory Cooney, though some of these must be psalm settings.

One sees, in looking through the hymnals, that there are only so many periods that have produced great hymns. There are notable Latin hymns from the high Middle Ages and before. The Reformation, particularly the Lutheran portion, produced some remarkable hymns, as later did the early Methodists and the American "Great Awakening". But  there are long periods that produced nothing memorable. In the United States, the later 19th Century produced a lot of Protestant hymns that one charitably might call "indifferent", and I don't know that the English contributions of that day were consistently better. A Catholic friend, an amateur of musicology, says hard things about the St. Louis Jesuits, who produced some of the hymns that linger on in American Catholic churches. Nor are they the only offenders in Gather and Worship.