Two years ago, because it felt inevitable and right, I took the happy leap of faith that I had been approaching for years and became a Catholic. The reasons why are perhaps fodder for another letter at another time. Let me just say here and now that current church music and liturgy were not among the compelling forces.

Not that mackerel-snappers are worse in those respects than any other denomination—but that’s my point. They sound just like any other denomination, and all of them are pretty lame these days when it comes to the glorious possibilities of the sung English language as a path to the salvation of the soul. I expected more from the church that spawned Palestrina, the church in which Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is not considered merely symbolic. (As Flannery O’Connor said, if it’s just a symbol, then to Hell with it.) I expected more from the church that gave rise, literally, to the great cathedrals and can trace its popes directly back to the day when Christ commissioned Peter. In short, I expected less silliness.

Most egregious among the Catholic Church’s linguistic sins are those it shares with other mainline churches: the “corrections” to avoid “sexism.” “Sexism” is defined, by, those who make such decisions, in two contradictory ways: as any action or language hinting that there is a difference between men and women, that we might possibly have complementary responsibilities in the church and in life; and, alternately, any language in which the male gender is presumed to include the female. It’s a bore, these days, to bash wimmin’s lib—like communism, it’s a bankrupt ideology and everybody knows it—but somehow these people are still allowed to interfere with real church business. My husband and I each teach a Tuesday-night third-grade CCD class, and at the “commissioning” of the teachers, we did all the right things, including “journaling,” which wasn’t journaling at all—that would have been bad enough—but merely writing on paper intimate things about ourselves to “share” with the persons sitting near us while some wacky space-music played too loudly. When it came time for the prayer and responses, the CCD coordinator—a lovely woman whose salary the church pays—carefully changed every “His” to “God’s.” The Devil made me ask her why she’d done that. We got a five-minute explanation about the genderlessness of God and the creative power of the womb, and how we should teach our classes that God is both male and female. Then we said the “Our Father.”

Some modern musical emendations are puzzling but harmless, such as changing “Brothers all are we” to “We are family,” and “Let me walk with my brother” to “Let us walk with each other” in “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955). I’d even be charitable enough to call these two changes improvements—if I didn’t hate the tune so much. It screams for an accordion.

On the other hand, consider “How Great Thou Art.” Frankly, I don’t like many hymns that aren’t at least one hundred years old (the German and English ones are the best, although some of the old Negro spirituals are exquisite), and this one has always seemed like exactly the kind of selection that should be featured—as it so often is—on a “Greatest Gospel Hits” album (“Order Before Midnight Tonight and Receive FREE This Lovely Cubic Zirconia ‘Last Supper’ Dashboard Ornament”). Still, the song rhymes and scans, I can whistle it in the shower, and it’s got twenty years on most of the other songs we sing. Why, though, did the Oregon Catholic Press, which publishes the yearly music issue accompanying the seasonal missal that my church uses, feel compelled to change “all the works thy hands have made” to “all the worlds thy hands have made,” and “mighty thunder” to “rolling thunder”? My husband and I decided that the words “works” and “mighty” were deleted because they offended the sensibilities of some small, lazy minority—children? More probably, though, the two words were simply felt to be too . . . manly.

Rhyming and scanning (to say nothing of making sense) are precious commodities in the liturgical music of today. My husband’s all-time least favorite song has to be this “Hosea”:

Come back to me / with all your heart.

Don’t let fear / keep us apart.

Trees do bend, / though straight and tall;

So must we / to others call.

The wilderness / will lead you

To your heart / where I will speak.

Integrity / and justice

With tenderness / you shall know.

You shall sleep / secure with peace;

Faithfulness / will be your joy.

Long have I waited for your coming home to me

And living deeply our new life.”

Riveting, isn’t it?—whatever it might mean. Couple these words with a pachydermal 4/4 dirge-tune and you’ve got instant narcosis. I give it a 70, Dick; it’s hard to dance to.

The song that makes me shudder is:

One bread, one body, one Lord of all.

One cup of blessing which we bless[?].

And we, though many, throughout the earth.

We are one body in this one Lord.

Gentile or Jew, servant or free, woman or man, no more.

Give me “Old Hundredth” any day. Actually the words here are more or less scriptural; it’s the tune that sounds like the lowing of many cattle. But I believe I like even this song better than the numerous “shalom” songs (with mandatory, embarrassing, choreographed actions) giving off the faint, cloyed odor of false ecumenism. Catholic nuns who like to dress like all the rest of us, and women who attend “women bonding seminars” are especially enthusiastic about the “shalom” songs.

As for the introductory rites and liturgies of the Word and the Eucharist, I haven’t much except the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer with which to compare their language, and even the Episcopalians have sacrificed that gorgeous tool of reverence to modern fads. The language in the Catholic “missalette” (what further proof that the Mass has been demeaned?) does what its designers intended—makes the Mass accessible to even the least educated or discerning among us—and who would be foolish enough to say that that is lamentable? But what I try to do, when I remember to, is rise above my baseness, and, aside from the lessons and the Gospel reading and sometimes the homily, there is little in the rest of the service that helps me do that. I want a wonderful string of words, heavy with meaning, to muse upon, a turn of phrase that embodies all poetry and all truth. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint”: something like that. I need reassurance that, bad as I am, I am not bad alone, and can be healed. Think of the sad handful of really good American novelists of the past decade, and then think of all the self-christened writers messing with our souls’ food. It’s a sin.

And while we’re on the subject; since when are word-lovers the one minority that can be abused with impunity?