In early 2020, the University of Mary published a collaboratively and anonymously authored 90-page book called From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age under the leadership of Monsignor James Shea. It has since gained a lot of attention and inspired much conversation about what the future of the Church might look like in the decades, if not centuries to come.

The book’s big idea is that, today, we no longer live in a Christendom context where the broader culture that surrounds us generally supports and reinforces the Christian imaginative vision of the world and of reality. Instead, it says, the Church is quickly returning to a time much like the early apostolic age where our fundamental aims are largely at odds with those of the surrounding culture. And so, the book invites us to change our mode of operation as a Church from “Christendom mode” to the mode of “Apostolic Mission”, also offering some general pastoral strategies to assist us in the effort.

The role that the liturgy has to play in making this shift, according to the book, is fundamental. And that is why Source & Summit is excited to be partnering once again with The Evangelical Catholic in support of Priests for an Apostolic Age, a conference for Catholic priests that will be held in San Antonio in January of 2025. Source & Summit will be providing musical support for the daily Masses and Liturgy of the Hours throughout the conference, helping elevate liturgical prayer and offering practical models for what liturgical music can be in our parishes in the coming apostolic age. 

Here are some further reflections on the role that the music of the liturgy has to play in the apostolic age that lies ahead, following some of the key insights offered in this prescient title published by the University of Mary Press.

The Main Problem

The essence of the problem that we face today, according to From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, is rooted in the alternative vision of the world that the secular culture both proclaims with words and incarnates in the tangible things that it produces. It illustrates this problem, saying:

Our current society, once visibly ordered to Christianity, has been transformed; it now incarnates a very different vision undergirded by a very different set of principles. It has largely forgotten the invisible world, such that its rhythms and practices are bounded by the visible and the temporal. Those under its influence will naturally have a hard time maintaining a clear sense of invisible and eternal realities. They will come to believe what they see and practice (See p. 50).

Put differently, living in our present cultural context—which none of us can avoid, no matter how hard we may try—is having a profound formative effect on our minds and souls whether we realize it or not. It is quietly and even subconsciously shaping us because the things that surround us which we perceive with our senses, according to the sacramental nature of things, are necessarily leading us to an encounter with their inner realities, whether the truth of those realities is good, disordered, or even evil. And these encounters shape the way that we see the world and the cosmos. They invariably impact and in some ways form our imaginative vision.

The book describes this situation further, saying that, in our present time,

[T]hose who present the Gospel, whether to their parishes or to their families, should assume that the majority of their hearers are unconverted or half-converted in mind and imagination and have embraced to some degree the dominant non-Christian vision. The new evangelization aims at the renewal of the mind, because it recognizes that people’s minds have been barraged by a daily onslaught of false gospels, leading to confusion and distraction away from the invisible realities to concerns solely of this world (See p. 66).

The Principal Solution

The picture painted here is bleak, especially for those of us that serve in parish contexts. But of course, the book is not only the bearer of bad news. It also turns this situation upside-down, showing how we can take full advantage of the sacramental nature of things to help restore and form an authentic Christian imaginative vision in ourselves and in the souls of our parishioners. It tells us that

In order for the unseen, spiritual world to become a living force in our minds, this invisible world needs to be visibly incarnated in space and time…. Liturgy takes on great importance in this regard as the focal point, the seed crystal, of the invisible incarnation of invisible reality. (See Ch 4, Section 4, emphasis added).

And, in further detail:

In showing himself to be the creator, the center of all being, the helper and redeemer of humanity, [God] did not merely get [the ideas contained in the Christian imaginative vision] going esoterically in peoples’ minds. He fashioned these invisible truths into visible forms that would be reminders of them and roads to experiencing them…. [T]his principle of the invisible manifesting in the visible took definitive form in the coming of the incarnate Word of God. Ever since then it has been expressed in a thousand ways by the Church. While faith is far more than its outward forms, without those forms it cannot long survive (Ibid.).

Here we find one of the principal answers to our dilemma in the apostolic age. Of the countless ways that the Church has expressed the invisible truths and realities of the faith through sensible things, the liturgy has always been at the center. It is the primary antidote to seeing the world wrongly or in any other way than that which it truly is. The liturgy is meant to help us see the world rightly—created by God, redeemed by Christ, and in the process of being restored to the Father according to his Divine Plan, just as we read in Ephesians 1: 3-10.

In the Church’s mind, and central to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the liturgy is the primary locus for the formation of the minds and souls of the faithful in a fully Christian and supernatural imaginative vision of the world. This is why it is called the sacred liturgy—precisely because it is set apart from the world around us that can so easily present us with a competing vision. The liturgy is meant to point us to the invisible realities that transcend the world and that we are journeying toward on our pilgrimage toward the Heavenly Jerusalem.

And this is also why the Church calls the music of the liturgy “sacred music.” Sacred music is also intended to be set apart from any other kind of music, so that, along with sacred art, sacred architecture, and all of the other perceptible elements that give form to liturgical celebrations, it can imbue within us the invisible realities that point us to heaven.

Liturgical music in the apostolic age must be sacred music. It must draw us into the prayer of the Church, into the scriptures and the Psalms, and into the musical tradition that since the earliest centuries of the Church has made sensible for us the sound of the heavenly liturgy. It should help us hear the voices of the hosts of angels and saints singing God’s praises eternally, and, even more, it should assist us in joining our voices to theirs in a fully conscious and actual participation in the reality that is to come fully at the end of time.

From Christendom to Apostolic Mission makes clear for us the primary task that lies ahead for the Church:

The main evangelistic task in an apostolic age, a task that also needs to be directed at many within the Church, is the presentation of the Gospel in such a way that the minds of its hearers can be given the opportunity to be transformed, converted from one way of looking at the world to a different way (See p. 65).

Monsignor Shea and his collaborators will surely agree that evangelists cannot give what they do not first have themselves. And that is why our success in the apostolic age will rest, not solely, but in the first place, on an authentic renewal of the liturgy and its music so that our parish liturgical celebrations can truly become epicenters for the formation and commissioning of missionary disciples.

Our Opportunity

The fourth pastoral strategy given in the book, entitled “Establishing and strengthening practices that incarnate the Christian vision” concludes with a further challenge that we face, while also offering us a profound opportunity and invitation:

At a time of Christendom’s wane, the liturgical reforms of Vatican II were an attempt to reinvigorate the liturgy with the potency of holding together an alternative vision of the world. That purpose was unfortunately subverted by much post-Vatican II liturgical experimentation, which went instead in the direction of embracing and incarnating the visible and secular vision of the broader society. Our liturgical practice demands thoughtful attention if it is to serve as the centerpiece of an incarnate Christian culture (See p. 51).

In other words, the aims of the council for the authentic renewal of the liturgy are far from being fully realized in the Church today. Rather than serving as a radiant sacramental embodiment of an alternative vision of the world in our secular time, our celebrations of the liturgy all too often have become instead a faint echo of the secular culture, actually reinforcing a secular imaginative vision rather than radiating a radically different, Christian one. Perhaps more unfortunately, this situation has caused many—and especially those in the younger generations—to lose interest in the unique and transformative worldview that the Church has to offer, with many of them fully abandoning the practice of the faith.

But we should not lose hope. Happily, the Church has already given us a plan for the authentic renewal of the liturgy, and all of the resources needed to execute it are readily available to us. The blueprint can be found in the writings of the classical Liturgical Movement, the Church’s documents on liturgy and music from the 20th century, Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II, Sacramentum Caritatis of Pope Benedict XVI, and also in Desiderio Desideravi of Pope Francis. 

Our coming apostolic age has the advantage of a 2000-year history with untold riches that are ready for the taking. They are Christendom’s gift to us—our inheritance, ready to be recovered and put to use in our parishes today. Unlike the initial apostolic age, we are not starting from square one or even starting over. New tools and resources like the Source & Summit Missal and Digital Platform have been thoughtfully developed, taking full advantage of the tools and technology available to us in our times, in order to assist parishes like yours in the task of elevating the liturgy in the apostolic age. Thousands of parishes across the country are already making tremendous progress in this effort, and are bearing great fruit. As we continue on our journey from Christendom to Apostolic Mission, may your parish be one of them.