THIS paper's Religious Affairs correspondent discussed the hit CD Faith of Our Fathers last week in terms of religion. I don't think its phenomenal success has anything much to do with religion.
Its subtitle is "Classic Religious Anthems of Ireland". A most inaccurate piece of marketing speak. All my life, I've thought of these pieces - O Sacrament Most Holy, Soul of my Saviour, Holy God we Praise Thy Name and the like - as hymns. So I looked up the dictionary. They are hymns, according to it anthems, like psalms, are distinguished from hymns by being part of the text of the Bible.
But I can see why the people behind the CD preferred to call them anthems. They're ambiguous pieces now, occupying a no man's land between the church and the home music centre. People like them very much, but they're no longer able to use them without a touch of conscious antiquarianism. And "anthem" refers to the same range of feelings that national anthems evoke.
These pieces evoke an Irish past. They would seem to many middle aged Irish Catholics to have been the authentic songs of the tribe. It is hard to believe that they're not Irish at all, most of them, not even Faith of Our Fathers. If it comes to that, they're not "classic" either. I don't know how you would categorise the tunes, but the words are late Romantic, in spirit if not in chronological fact.
They're not very good words, often. In fact, I would put a line of Faith of Our Fathers into contention as one of the worst lines ever written. I refer to the line, about how sweet it would be for the faithful, "If they, like them, could die for Thee."
Frank Patterson negotiates this series of words beginning with "th" with unruffled aplomb on the CD. But then, it is almost a condition of singing these pieces that you don't allow the words fully into your consciousness. If you did, what would you make of "deep in Thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me"?
On the CD, Regina Nathan delivers that last one with a little operatic sob. This is entirely against the native way of coping with flowery sentiments. The native way is to belt the words out, loudly but entirely woodenly. The appeal of Sweet Heart of Jesus was never its intensities, but the great drag and haul up the elongated vowels of "sweet" and "heart."
There was no other way to sing the words but lustily. Maybe that's one reason why these big hymns were so popular singing them was the only thing in the whole repertoire of popular worship that asked you to do something prideful with your body.
In the little booklet that comes with the CD (though not the tape) the words of the hymns are given. I am fascinated by their style. I would love to know where, for instance, or when, the idea of addressing Jesus by addressing His heart came in. I would love to know why English language hymns were brought in to what must have been Irish speaking congregations.
I wonder why the stance of the speaker in the hymns is so defensive. "When wicked men blaspheme Thy name," we will sing a hymn to Mary, and we'll turn to our Redeemer "when danger is nigh" and Blessed Jesus will guard and defend us from "the foe malign" and, of course, our faith will live "in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword."
THOSE hymns were deliberately introduced to the schools and churches of Ireland - I presume - at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of this. (I don't know how to find out exactly.) The bishops must have chosen to promote their tones of the most extreme abjectness and persecution.
But the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland wasn't being persecuted at the time, as far as I know, and indeed never was persecuted to the extent that the English Roman Catholic Church was, never mind the French or the Mexican. The bishops must have been expressing a more general - political - even nationalist - paranoia.
I know, of course, that in front of God or even the gods humankind apologises and begs. But Hymns Ancient and Modern does not leave the impression of florid - ostentatious - emotionalism that these pieces do. I suppose you could call them Victorian, in the sense that the Ladies' View in Killarney is Victorian, or exminster carpets, or potted ferns.
They are the opposite of the spare or functional. But exact information about them is hard to come by. Sweet Heart of Jesus is, I'm told by one of the people behind the compilation, a German tune, and the words are by C.A. Walworth (1820-1900). Soul of my Saviour is "by some pope, back in the 12th century," and the tune is by W.J. Maher (1823-77). Hail Glorious Saint Patrick is by one Sister Agnes. Queen of the May is by "a nun.". Faith of Our Fathers, by Father Faber, was originally a Welsh Presbyterian hymn. The words of We stand for God were taken from a 1963 Redemptorist hymn book. That's all I know.
These hymns become anthems were rare theatrical flourishes in the dour Ireland of my childhood. Their extravagance was one of the few permitted extravagances. And they were a shared thing. We sang these hymns together, men and women and children, in the church and in procession, all of us on equal terms.
Now that community is broken. The younger people don't know these pieces. And the simple wholeness of a crowd singing unaccompanied or to an organ accompaniment has gone.
On the CD they've taken these pieces and tarted them up - lathered them with strings and brass, decorated them with glockenspiels and drumrolls and descants and boy sopranos and lisping children's choirs until you can hardly make them out under the weight of ornamentation.
The very last thing these hymns were concert pieces. They were not performed: they were the voice of us, the crowd. Now they have been handed to performers, placed out there rather than in here, turned into "light classical" pops. They only had one thing going for them, aesthetically speaking. That was their robustness. The full of Croke Park could handle them mightily. They were great party pieces for roaring around two o'clock in the morning. Now, they've been made to mince.
Yet they still retain some power. Not of any ideological kind - the people in this society who never knew these hymns should not fear them. Their revival is no threat. They are not timeless prayers, in the way that the Gregorian chants sung on the CD by the monks of Glenstal Abbey are. They are not timeless at all.
They belong alongside another half forgotten repertoire - On the One Road, Twas Down hy the Glenside, Step Together Flow on Lovely River, The Kerry Dances, Sean O Duihhir a Ghleanna, The Lark in the Clear Air ... That's a CD that'll sell, too, as soon as some smart young entrepreneur, only half understanding the currency songs like those once had, puts it together. It's not about belief, all this. It's about nostalgia.