Hymns and the Common Good

Forgive a slight detour from Catholic legal theory.  I'm almost always glad to be Catholic . . . except when I'm singing Catholic worship songs, at which time I get the unmistakable sensation that I'm at a very sleepy campfire sing-along.  This does not mean that I want to bring back the Gregorian chant.  Traditional Protestant hymns have long provided an inspirational, rousing, and accessible worship form that I have yet to experience in a Catholic parish.  Apparently, I need to read Christopher Brown's new book, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation, in which he focuses on the role of hymns in the life of a 16th century German town, Joachimsthal. 

A reviewer notes that:

We live in a world where technique, allied to advertising, is determinative in all areas of our life, not just in the technical ones. Because we read the past in our image, a study like Brown's tempts us to view 16th-century Lutheran hymn singing as a skillful technique, a means to get people to buy into Lutheranism. We then jump to the conclusion that if we could only find a comparable technique, we could get people to buy into our version of Christianity. Sometimes this perspective is even considered evangelical and missional. But it widely misses the mark, partly because the freedom of the Christian message itself breaks the tyranny of such manipulative intent, and also because it misconstrues the Christian community in Joachimsthal and the Lutheran understanding of the faith.

The Christians in Joachimsthal did not believe in a technique. They believed in the God who "calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies" the church, as it says in Luther's Small Catechism. Proclamation then was not about technique. It was about the centrality of God's gracious action and the comfort the recipients experienced. Hymns were not gimmicks. They were part of the fiber of life together under God.

The reviewer also makes the broader observation that many of the differences in sacred music stemmed from theological differences in understanding the role of music:

Lutherans tied their music to proclamation, Roman Catholics used it as intercession for the purpose of satisfying a debt, and Calvinists saw it as congregational prayer.

I'll be the first to admit that, in the past, Protestants occasionally became a bit exuberant in their whole hymn-as-proclamation theme (see, e.g., this classic), and that the "seeker-sensitive" movement has reduced a lot of today's Protestant worship music to technique.  But what is the role of today's Catholic liturgical music?  If Gregorian chants served to erase the debts of the faithful, what mountain of eternal debt are we accumulating every time we sing "On Eagle's Wings" or "Morning Has Broken?"

Rob