How has that become a plus in working on The St. Michael Hymnal?
There are two components to every piece of music we sing in church. One is the music itself, and the other is the text. The Church has always said that the purpose of the music is to clothe the text in beauty. The text is and always has been primary. For that reason, my background as a literature major gives me more competence as an editor, because the first thing I look at in choosing the hymns is the text. With your background, what problems did you confront that later led to the hymnal? I became choir director at St. Boniface nearly 20 years ago, probably at the very crest of the changing of the words to feminist political language. I would never sing those words. They were disrespectful of the text, the Church, the original authors and composers. They distorted absolutely beautiful texts, beautiful poetry by world-class poets, to make political statements. It takes a lot of nerve to bowdlerize this beautiful poetry. You obviously started correcting the situation by bringing back ri
