Contemporary Catholic liturgical music

Contemporary Catholic liturgical music encompasses a comprehensive variety of styles of music for Catholic liturgy that grew both before and after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). The dominant style in English-speaking Canada and the United States began as Gregorian chant and folk hymns, superseded after the 1970s by a folk-based musical genre, generally acoustic and often slow in tempo, but that has evolved into a broad contemporary range of styles reflective of certain aspects of age, culture, and language. There is a marked difference between this style and those that were both common and valued in Catholic churches before Vatican II.

In the early 1950s the Jesuit priest Joseph Gelineau was active in liturgical development in several movements leading toward Vatican II. In particular the new Gelineau psalmody in French (1953) and English (1963) demonstrated the feasibility and welcome use of such vernacular language settings.

Contemporary Catholic liturgical music grew after the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council, which called for wider use of the vernacular language in the Roman Catholic Mass. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal states:

It adds:

The first English language Mass was of Gregorian chant style. It was created by De Paul University graduate Dennis Fitzpatrick and entitled simply "Demonstration English Mass". Fitzpatrick composed and recorded this mass on vinyl in mid-1963. He distributed it to many of the US bishops who were returning from a break in the Second Vatican Council. The Mass was well received by many US Catholic cleric and is said to have furthered their acceptance of Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC). This Vatican document on the sacred liturgy restructured the Mass and permitted the use of vernacular. Fitzpatrick's Mass had allow the bishops to imagine what an English Catholic liturgy might sound like.

The revision of music in the liturgy took place in March of 1967, with the passage of Musicam Sacram ("Instruction on music in the liturgy"). In paragraph 46 of this document it states that music could be played during the sacred liturgy on "instruments characteristic of a particular people." Previously the pipe organ was used for accompaniment. The use of instruments native to the culture was an important step in the multiplication of songs written to accompany the Catholic liturgy.

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