In this first part, Father Robert Skeris opened a Colloquium on Musica Sacra at Christendom College on June 28, 1991 with this address:
But what sort of music furnishes the appropriate form for such supremely meaningful content? Plainly, a music which will permit man to feel that transcendent attraction or "pull" which elevates him to a higher level, or at least to higher moments. In practice, the matter is settled when we have given an honest answer to the one absolutely fundamental question: is the cult (and here more precisely, the Divine Liturgy) really a sacred action (actio sacra) in the strict sense, in the course of which God Himself becomes present in Jesus Christ? Or is it simply a matter of an event in which nothing real actually occurs, nothing which would in principle surpass the merely human? Once this question has been answered in the spirit of true faith, then nothing more need be said. . . .The point is worth repeating: if Holy Mass is indeed a sacrifice, an actio sacra praecellenter (as the last Council rightly termed it), then one of its necessary and integral parts will be a musica which perforce is also sacra (Liturgy Constitution Sacros. Concilium, art. 112). But if something else is being "celebrated," for example the fraternal gathering of a given community or a merely commemorative meal, then a very different kind of musica will be required. . . . perhaps a "polka Mass," or some "contemporary" music through which "the congregation (and each individual in it) becomes the Voice of God."
