It is one of the happier signs of the times that we have advanced so far on the road of reform in our liturgical music that the Bishops can now order (what, in the past, they could only recommend) that, whenever the priest sings his peculiar part of the Mass, the choir should sing theirs. Yet, on account of certain fixed ideas, the new regulation is more honoured in the breach than the observance. One is that the Kyriale must always be sung to some harmonised setting taken from Cary’s or Fischer’s catalogue. No parochial body but a select choir can sing such a composition and therefore the peculiar business of the choir is the Kyriale. This duty they have always carried out to the best of their ability; but as it exhausts all their energies, any additional work must be ignored as a counsel of perfection. It takes time to absorb such a revolutionary idea as that the Kyriale, which the choir have only recently usurped, is the canonical right of the people; and that the Proper, which the choir have systematically neglected, is their only raison d’etre.

Another fixed idea is that the Proper of Mass, like that of Vespers, if sung at all, must be sung to the official chant. The choir know nothing of this ancient idiom and there’s an end on’t. Now Catholic choristers are sensible men and women, quite as ready as other parochial workers to do the right thing when they know it.