(ZENIT News / Rome, 16.04.2024).- “Requien for the Forgotten” reached no. 1 on the Billboard list, the company in charge of quantifying the amount of people that listen to a song, according to the physical and digital sales of records in the United States.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco commissioned composer Frank La Rocca to compose a Requien (a composition sung in a Mass for the deceased), which would commemorate the victims of the war in Europe and the Middle East, and “for the repose of the souls of marginalized people: tramps, refugees escaping war and political or religious persecution, the martyrs of totalitarianism in all its forms .. . . ,” said composer La Rocca.
This Requien was presented for the first time this past Holy Week in Miami’s Epiphany parish, on the occasion of the Lord’s Passion, during a Mass presided over by Archbishop Cordileone, who is the founder of the Benedict XVI Institute of Sacred Music and Divine Worship. The Institute’s objective is to recover appreciation for the sense of the sacred and all the artistic patrimony of the Catholic Church in the course of the centuries. One of its slogans is “we open the door of God’s beauty, offering practical resources for a more beautiful liturgy and dynamizing a Catholic culture of the arts.”
This is Frank La Rocca’s second Album, launched by the winning team of the Grammy prize of Cappella Records. La Rocca said: “fifty years ago, when I was a young composer, I was told that I should adapt my music to a twelve-tone model to have success” (the twelve-tone model is a 20th century technique to make atonal music). Ten years ago, when a political wave took over the world of the arts, I felt that the doors to the beauty of sacred music were being closed again. The Lord has opened this new door, showing that the human heart and soul cannot be blinded by any ideology to our need to experience the sacred. It’s been a great honour for me to help Archbishop Cordileone achieve his prophetic vision.”
The Archbishop affirmed that the classically Catholic practices and especially the liturgies work to heal souls and bring them into the Lord’s presence. Sacred beauty works to overcome the cognitive barriers to God raised by our public culture, increasingly mean and ugly. And, above all, the beautiful sacred liturgy, enhanced by the new music of the high sacred musical tradition of the Church, which works to help Catholics experience the Eucharist as the miracle it is.
Included among the new proposals is a Mass in honour of the Chinese martyrs who died at the hands of the country’s Communist regime. The presentation will also take place, in May 2024, of the World-Premiere of La Rocca’s Mass for Eucharistic Renaissance, which seeks to aid the American Bishops’ initiative, called the National Eucharistic Revival, to recover the meaning of the Eucharist among Catholics, a Eucharistic rebirth, as they call it.
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