Emeritus Pope Benedict's Honorary Degrees and Sacred Music

From Vatican Radio:

Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI received Doctorates honoris causa on Saturday from the Pontifical John Paul II University of Krakow and the Krakow Academy of Music. The motivation for the honors issued by the University’s Academic Senate specifies five contributions Pope Benedict has made to knowledge and culture: his great respect for the musical tradition of the Church and remarkable sensitivity to the music of faith; the life-long and constant demonstration of a special concern for the noble beauty of sacred music and its proper place in the celebration of the sacred liturgical rites of the Church; his constant insistence on the didactic importance of the via pulchritudinis – the way of beauty – which can become a way of knowing and worshiping God for the modern man; his lifelong commitment to Truth, which strengthens the Christian faith in times of spiritual confusion caused by liberalism, postmodernism and relativism, and his tireless efforts to restore the spiritual dimension of Europe; his kind support for the work of transforming the schools of the Pontifical Academy of Theology into the Pontifical John Paul II University.

Father Benedict had some prepared remarks. In The Spectator, Damian Thompson writes:

One of the finest speeches Benedict XVI ever delivered was about sacred music. It is a small masterpiece, in which Benedict recalls his first encounter with Mozart in the liturgy. ‘When the first notes of the Coronation Mass sounded, Heaven virtually opened and the presence of the Lord was experienced very profoundly,’ he said.

Benedict robustly defended the performance of the work of great composers at Mass, which he insisted was necessary for the fulfilment of the Second Vatican Council’s wish that ‘the patrimony of sacred music [is] preserved and developed with great care’.

Then he asked: what is music? He identified three places from which it flowed. First, the experience of love, opening ‘a new grandeur and breadth of reality’ that inspires music. Second, ‘the experience of sadness, death, sorrow and the abysses of existence’. These open ‘in an opposite direction, new dimensions of reality that can no longer find answers in discourses alone’. Third, the encounter with the divine. ‘I find it moving to observe how, in the Psalms, singing is no longer enough for men — an appeal is made to all the instruments: reawakened is the hidden music of creation, its mysterious language.’

Our musical Pope Emeritus changed liturgical music practices at St. Peter's, as this Crisis article notes, and those changes have reverberated throughout the Church:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was different. He had written an entire book on the music issue. He had written another book on the liturgical question. He had spoken about the subject on many occasions. He never feared the subject and this is for two reasons: 1) he understood the goals of Vatican II and saw that they had been seriously distorted, and 2) he was a trained music (sic) of the highest calibre who understood the role of music in the Roman Rite.

When he became Pope, the changes began and they were relentless. We started hearing chant in Papal liturgy, just a bit at first and then more as time went on. With Summorum Pontificum (2007) he took away the stigma that had been attached to traditional chant by granting full permission to the liturgical structure that had originally given rise to chant. This was deeply encouraging for a generation that was ready to move forward. We started seeing chant workshops fill up. Groups began to form at the parish level. New resources started to be published by independent publishers. A real fire had been lit in the Catholic music world. And it all happened without any impositions or legislation.

The musical program of St. Peter’s Basilica began to attract the attention of serious musicians. A new standard came to be applied to visiting choirs: you must know the basics of Gregorian chant or you cannot sing at St. Peter’s. This was a gigantic decision that fundamentally upset the dynamic that had long developed between Rome and traveling choirs. Now choirs had to learn and discover chant if they hoped to take that long-sought pilgrimage to Rome.

Meanwhile, Joseph Ratzinger’s writings on music were selling more than ever, and having an ever larger influence. Benedict XVI spoke about the topic often in homilies and spontaneous remarks following concerts. He worked to elevate high art to a new status on his travels. His team worked hard to encourage groups that sang for liturgy for his trips to embrace chant and polyphonic music of the Renaissance. It didn’t always work but the progress was obvious.

Read the rest there. The issue that Pope Benedict addressed was that the Church, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, had mistakenly jettisoned our great heritage of beautiful Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphonic Mass settings, and even high classical Masses, like Mozart's Coronation Mass. The fathers at Vatican II had said positively that Gregorian chant should have pride of place in the celebration of the liturgy, and yet I grew up never hearing chant at all--until it became popular as background music and the different chant discs (for Meditation, Relaxation, etc) came out. 

This reminds me of course of that "Agatha Christie Indult" letter, the one sent from England to Pope Paul VI, descrying the elimination of the traditional Latin Mass. Remember that it was signed by many non-Catholics and several musicians and they were concerned of the loss of so much culture:

The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts - not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians. In the materialistic and technocratic civilisation that is increasingly threatening the life of mind and spirit in its original creative expression - the word - it seems particularly inhuman to deprive man of word-forms in one of their most grandiose manifestations. The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and non-political, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere.

Perhaps along with the Anglican Ordinariate, this revival in sacred and liturgical music will be one of Pope Benedict's greatest legacies, God bless him!

St. Benedict of Nursia, pray for us!

E.I. Watkins, Friend of Christopher Dawson

Sometimes I stumble across something on the web (ouch!)--the other day, after posting on Sir Colin Davis's death, I remembered that Davis had been one of the musicians who signed the letter to Pope Paul VI that led to the "Agatha Christie" indult for the traditional Catholic Mass (now aka the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite). Another name in that list is E.I. Watkin, whose biography was recently issued:

The Watkin Path: An Approach to Belief [by his daughter Magdalen Goffin] is a panorama of twentieth-century social and political history seen through the life of E. I. Watkin (1888–1981). The interplay of love, friction, war, politics and money, together with a relentless search for religious truth, makes this book read more like a novel than a biography.

Watkin was the only child of Emmeline Paxton Ingram, a daughter of Herbert Ingram, the founder of the Illustrated London News. His father was the nephew of Sir Edward Watkin, the Liberal MP and railway magnate, who started to build the first Channel Tunnel and later a tower to rival Eiffel’s where Wembley Stadium now stands. At birth Watkin was handed over to his Ingram grandmother, an old lady who lived alone in a mansion by the river at Walton-on-Thames. He met few other children, and his strange childhood may account for some of his eccentricities.

Watkin became a Roman Catholic when he was at Oxford. His experience as one of the inner circle of Catholic writers is revealing: He was allowed to publish his books on philosophy, history or literature, but when it came to the interpretation of the Catholic faith he was persistently harassed by the censors. Although Watkin was one of the foremost English precursors of the Second Vatican Council, he deeply deplored some of its consequences.

His extraordinary life experiences were many and varied: from sitting on Mrs Gladstone’s lap at the ceremonial opening of the Watkin Path up Snowdon, to falling instantly in love with Helena Shepheard at a party in 1912, at which point he stopped his diary writing. The story of that marriage, and the Watkin family’s engagement with politicians and theologians about the political and social issues of the time, make for a truly fascinating biography of a most extraordinary man.

At Oxford, Watkin studied at New College (which is actually quite old; founded in 1379, it was called "New College" to distinguish it from the older college at Oxford, Oriel, founded in 1326). Watkin was a mentor to Christopher Dawson in the latter's conversion to Catholicism and worked with Eric Gill and Donald Attwater on the Catholic pacifist movement Pax; additionally, he wrote many books:

Some Thoughts on Catholic Apologetics: A Plea for Interpretation (1915)

A Little Book of Prayers for Peace (1916)
The Philosophy of Mysticism (1920)
The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience (1931)
A Philosophy of Form (1935)
Theism, Agnosticism And Atheism (1936)
Men and Tendencies (1937)
The Crime of Conscription (1939)
The Catholic Center (1939)
Catholic Art and Culture (1942)
Praise of Glory (1943)
The Balance of Truth (1943)
Poets and Mystics (1953)
Neglected Saints (1955) -- Ignatius Press reissued this in paperback
Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 (1957)
The Church in Council (1960)

His son was a Benedictine monk, Abbot Aelred Watkin, of Downside Abbey:
Abbot Aelred Watkin was one of the most loved and most respected monks in the Benedictine Order. The two most conspicuous features of his character - a deep spirituality combined with an infectious love of life - are encapsulated in one of his favourite quotations from William Blake: "Everything that lives is holy; life delights in life."

He was born Christopher Ingram Watkin in 1918, the son of a Roman Catholic philosopher and historian, E.I. Watkin, their common middle name perpetuating descent from Herbert Ingram, the founder of the Illustrated London News. His mother, Helen Shepheard, was the daughter of Maria Pasqua, who had been a penniless Italian model until she was adopted by a member of the Baring family, the wealthy Comtesse de Noailles.