The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1916-02-19

uTTERANcE IN DEVOTIONAL
HYMNS DEALING WITH THE
MYSTERIES OF FAITH.
When Richard Lederde, who was
Bishop of Ossory in the first half of
the fourteenth century, wrote his
"Cantilenae," or songs to be sung by
his clergy on feast-days and holidays,
the literary result was hardly inspir-
ing, says Father Cuthbert, O.. S. f. c.,
in THE Ave Maria" The Bishop was
no poet, though he seems to have been
good Bishop. His motive in writing
his songs was to induce his clergy to
cease from singing secular and the
atrical ditties" when they met to make
merry. How far he succeeded we do
not know, but the interest of his song
making lies in the fact he wrote his
religious verses to be sung to the pop
ular airs which were already in use.
Moreover, he was a franciscan friar
In view of the assertion made by a
recent writer, that large number of
the popular religious songs which were
sung in England at this period were
probably written by the friars,''
Bishop Lederede's method of writing
religious songs to popular airs, as we'll
as his motive, may point to a tradi-
ton in his Order Certainly, about
the same time the Franciscans in Italy
were producing song writer's whose
songs were caught up by the people
and passed into common use, and en-
tered largely into the friarS' work of
evangelizing the multitude. These
songs were written sometimes in
Latin, but more often in the dialects
of the Italian people. 1t was the YER
,nacular songs, however, which became
household treasures, and it is in these
songs, too, that the heart of the people
found utterance. Into them the sing
ers poured a simple human feeling
which could hardly find expression ex-
cept i'll the language of everyday life.
The mysteries of the Faith were thus
taken home to the peoples affections,
and became the object of their warm
emotions of love or pity, of wonder or
gratitude, and these emotions found
expression in their song. The Latin
hymns were, for the most part, an as
sertion or exposition of the dogmatic
truths themselves, and with few
glorious exceptions, were stilted and
without inspiration in their expression
Of the human emotions. Only when
the singers took as their medium of
expression the language of the people
did they find their freedom; and then
it was that Medieval devotion found
its true voice in song.
How delightful that song could be
may be learned from the book already
referred to, where for the first time
we have collection of English Me-
diRval songs and poems, modernized
SO that the ordinary reader may enjoy
and understand. Be it remembered
that these songs were, most of them,
in common use: they were the peo-
pies songs. When we bear that in
mind, they tell us much the sort of
people our Medieval forefathers were:
how the Faith entered into the very
fibre of their souls and cast a CLAM
our over all their thought, and sancti-
fed their joy and sorrow in life.
Their Faith was not thing apart from
their common daily life. The love OF
nature which was characteristic of the
Medieval English, their strong domes-
tic affections, and the new feeling for
romance which lit up existence in the
later Middle Ages,-all entered into
their religion at once intensely hui
man and sublimely divine. Never did
Catholic devotion express more prac.
tically and simply the mystery of the
Incarnation, in which it is founded.
And that is the instructive thing about
these Medieval songs. See, for in
stance, how sincerely the mystery of
motherhood is voiced in the songs OF
the Nativity:
A lovely Lady sat and sang,
And to her Son did say:
my Son, my Lord, my dear Darling
Why Hest Thou thus in hay?
Mine own dear Son,
How art Thou come!
Thou art my God verey.
But never the Jesse s.
/ will not cease
To sing: By, by, lully, lulIey!"
One is reminded of Fra Jacopone' s
hymn Stabat Mater Speciosa, which
begins:
Stood the Mother sweet and holy,
Joyous by the manger lowly,
Where she loving vigil kept;
Ger her soul, its measure filling
With glad, ecstatic thrilling,
Floods Of purest rapture swept.
Oh, how blest, how transportation
Was that fair, unsullied Maiden,
Mother of the Holy One!
How she joyed, her vigil Willing,
All entranced by that beguiling
Vision of her newborn Son!
There is the same human mystery OF
motherhood commingling with divine
worShin in 0ur Tady'S gaze ag she