SHOWING THE WAY TO GOD
Fr Chris Willcock SJ at St Ignatius’ Church in Richmond. Photo: David McMahon
By Fr Chris Willcock SJ
A somewhat diverse collection of factors contributed to the composition of Mass: Hope for our World. The commission, from Archbishop Peter Comensoli, was for a Mass that in the first instance would be used during the 2025 Australian Catholic Youth Festival to be staged in the Archbishop’s Archdiocese of Melbourne.
The Mass setting would be youth-oriented but would also embrace congregation members belonging to categories outside the “youth” description. And further, it is hoped that the setting would be used beyond the time of the Festival for diverse occasions, large or small. The Mass’s title (Mass: Hope for our World) with the inclusion of the word “hope”, points to the designation of 2025 as the Jubilee Year of Hope, with the Church celebrating it as “Pilgrims of Hope”, and it also places some weight on the words “for” and “our”.
There was another perspective as well, recognising the alarming statistic among young people of mental illness and even suicide, of hopelessness and despair about the future of the world, of mistrust of authority and of disappointment in not reaching personal goals. All these factors inspired me to create a work during which a group of largely young people could sing their faith, however strong or frail it might be, in the company of each other and with the support of each other. The gathering of the Eucharist would be both praying for, and working towards, nourishing the seeds of hope in our young people and for our world.
Photo: David McMahon.
At the nuts-and-bolts level, what went into the construction of this setting? The Archbishop was keen that I explore the possibility of using a well-known melody as the basis or springboard for the melodic cast of the setting. A number of ideas about choosing such a melody were floated, including tunes that would be considered outside strictly church or liturgical use. In the end, the lot fell to the melody of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the one immortalised in his setting of Schiller’s text in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony.
The tune has already had a multi-faceted career, turning up in many guises, in many countries, and sung in many different languages. There’s no doubt about it being a well-known and accessible item of our culture. Its vocal range is modest, its rhythm is almost pedestrian and not likely to catch people wrong-footed, while its harmonic implications can swing from the most elementary to the more highly stylised. In short, it is a very pliable medium with which to work. And so it proved when I got down to marrying liturgical text and this supposedly secular music.
Now that the unison and choral versions with keyboard accompaniment have been completed, I’ll be test-driving what I’ve done with younger groups of people. It has already been run past some senior students at Mandeville Hall here in Melbourne, and will soon be tested with a group of senior boys at Melbourne’s Xavier College. I’ve already had some valuable feedback from a couple of close colleagues here in this city.
What now remains to be done is to provide supplementary instrumental parts where such resources exist. It’s a work in progress.
Banner image: David McMahon.
Last year, in recognition of his liturgical, psalm and service compositions, Fr Chris Willcock SJ was made a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music. Read about it here: Psalm pilot.