The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

Music is one of the arts of life which the Church has used constantly and consistently in her services from the very earliest times. As with all the other arts music owes ever so much more to the Church however than is the Church's debt to music. Indeed the Church has enriched music to such an extent as the consequence of the devotion with which the art has been cultivated for the worship of the Most High that practically all the great developments in music have come as the result of effort made by Churchmen to enlarge musical modes for the ceremonial uses of the Church.

Of music in Greek and Roman days we know almost nothing. Undoubtedly the beauty loving Greeks had a magnificent development of music, but it was lost. Music as we have it in modern times may well be declared to be little more than the result of the evolution of the use of melodious and harmonious sounds for Church purposes. The original musical mode of the Christian Church came to us from St. Ambrose. The tradition in this matter has been doubted in some regards, but there is universal agreement that between the fourth and seventh centuries a series of great new developments in music took place in connection with the Christian ceremonials. The most noted example of this was the establishment of antiphonal singing at Milan by St. Ambrose, bishop of that city, toward the end of the fourth century. This fact St. Augustine, a contemporary, mentions in his Confessions. After this a musical system called the Ambrosian sprang up. Four authentic scales, the basis of the medieval musical system, have been attributed to St. Ambrose, but like many of the hymns also declared his, they were probably rather the development during succeeding centuries of the needs of the Church ceremonial and were due to many minds.