First Folk Mass: 1968

This is the original draft of the Introduction to my book, Keep the Fire Burning: The Folk Mass Revolution. I eventually decided on a different Intro but this draft serves as a remembrance of my very first Folk Mass when I was a sophomore at Queen of Angels High School Seminary, Mission Hills, California.

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In 1968 the world was a mess. The spring assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were followed by urban unrest and a violent Democratic convention in Chicago. The Soviet Union had crushed out dissent in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Millions were starving in Biafra as bloodshed escalated in the endless war in Vietnam. Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control, drew the ire of progressive Catholics and was widely ignored.

Within the cloistered confines of Queen of Angels High School Seminary, this global turmoil was far removed. It was time for morning meditation, and the seminarians were supposed to focus on the spiritual platitudes from their olive green prayer book. But all that went out the window on this glorious autumn morning. There was a definite buzz in the air, a tangible excitement that sliced through the mandatory silence like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Here at the minor seminary of the conservative Archdiocese of Los Angeles, we were going to celebrate our very first Folk Mass!

I was a rowdy sophomore, ill at ease in my black-and-white boarding school uniform. Most of us seminarians, despite our fresh-faced youth, were already professional liturgists. We prayed a modified version of the Divine Office together morning, noon, evening and night. We celebrated Mass daily at 6:30 am, sometimes in silence, but usually in song with the seminary’s grand pipe organ swelling out in the “four hymn” mode so prevalent in the mid-1960s. On feast days we sang High Mass with Jan Vermulst’s Mass for Christian Unity. Occasionally, we sang in chant, and our alma mater was the beautiful Gregorian “Ave Maria.” But on this memorable morning, as Father Ready and the altar servers processed out of the sacristy, our voices rang out with a fire that we never before experienced at liturgy.

Come, let us worship the Lord, our God.
Come, sing praise to his name . . .

The accompaniment was simply three acoustic guitars and an upright bass, without a microphone, and the student musicians stood in the back of chapel, behind the assembly. Their stirring blend reminded me of my favorite Peter, Paul & Mary records. There was no cantor. In fact, that word had not yet been applied to Catholic liturgy. The momentum of the singing was carried by our unabashed youthful enthusiasm. We were worshipping God with the sound of our generation!

Something was happening in our Church, something that was quite beyond our secluded existence in California’s San Fernando Valley. As I sang along with my brother seminarians, I glanced down at the copyright credits on our printed worship aid. Our music director, Monsignor Gerken, had taken care to do everything properly.

“Come, Let Us Worship” by Bro. Gregory Ballerino. Copyright © 1967 by the Gregorian Institute of America, Chicago, Illinois.

“They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love” by Fr. Peter Scholtes. Copyright © 1966 by F.E.L. Church Publications, Ltd., Chicago, Illinois.

These exciting songs came from the Midwest a year or two prior to our singing them. Clearly, an extraordinary Spirit was sweeping the land. After that first Folk Mass, my life would never be the same.

The story of the Folk Mass is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of liturgical renewal in the United States. The mere mention of those words brings a variety of reactions ranging from wistful nostalgia to the rolled eyes of outright derision. The Folk Mass movement has been blamed for everything from the allegedly poor state of liturgical music today to the beginning of the end for the sensus mysterii. It conjures up images of guitar-wielding nuns in modified habits, too-groovy-for-their-own-good priests, and liturgical experimentation gone haywire. And yet, for many American Catholics, the Folk Mass was the only tangible way that the Second Vatican Council came to life.

The Council was certainly groundbreaking. News accounts of the bishops’ deliberations filtered back to Americans by way of official condensed reports in their diocesan newspapers or in Xavier Rynne’s “eyewitness” accounts in The New Yorker. Terms like Sacrosanctum Concilium, “ecumenical dialogue,” and “The Church in the Modern World” were weighty and even intimidating to the average person in the pew. But celebrating Mass in English? That got people’s attention. Congregational singing? It was awkward at first, but people reluctantly caught on. Guitars and folk music? Good Lord! What next? The Folk Mass was either embraced whole-heartedly or rejected vehemently. For the former, it was the means by which a whole generation became personally involved with their Church. . .


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Keep the Fire Burning: The Folk Mass Revolution
by Ken Canedo

Available on Amazon.com