Feliz Navidad and Merry Christmas! Yes, I know that New Year's Day has already come and gone. But the beautiful Christmas songs that continue at daily Mass in the Catholic Church remind me that Dec. 25, 2012, was not the end of a season but the beginning. Everywhere around me,...

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The "Golden Century" of Spanish sacred music owes much of its splendor to Cristóbal de Morales -- a Roman Catholic composer whose works were as famous...

The turn of the year brings with it the usual slate of retrospective pieces -- notable stories of 2011 that, more often than not, were of a sensational variety: Osama Bin Laden, Penn State, Steve Jobs, the Arab Spring. The more circumscribed world of music and religion had its notable...

At daybreak on Sept. 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo, a Roman Catholic priest at the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, led the first of several uprisings that would ultimately lead to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821.

El dieciséis de septiembre is a momentous...

Pope Benedict XVI reminds us in a thought-provoking book (The Spirit of the Liturgy) that "the importance of music in biblical religion is shown very simply by the fact that the verb 'to sing' (with related words such as 'song,' and so forth) is one of the most commonly used...

In April 1791, events were set in motion that would have changed the history of sacred music forever. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (whose mild notoriety as a Freemason tends to eclipse the fact that he was a Roman Catholic) had inquired about the possibility of becoming an unpaid assistant to Leopold...

Christina Aguilera's widely panned performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the start of Super Bowl XLV reminds us of the sacred nature of music. The world's religions have long recognized the power of song in worship. On Super Bowl Sunday 2011, it became clear that, even in fiercely...

The musical arts of the Roman Catholic Church rank among its greatest contributions to contemporary culture. Music existed outside of the Church, of course. But it was the Catholic Church that first truly cultivated the art as we know it. In the service of praising God, it fostered a number...