JANUARY 2022 T


hroughout my childhood, the Cuban and the American liturgical expressions of my Catholic identity felt like two distinct expressions of


the same reality. My weekly experience of the sights and sounds of the Catholicism of the small town in Southern Minnesota in which I was raised were markedly different from the sights and sounds of the Catholicism of the predominantly Cuban churches we attended during our annual visits to Miami. Neither of those expressions seemed in conflict with each other. Neither seemed like a “right” or “wrong” version of Catholicism. But they felt separate. Te songs, devotions, and dominant cultural imagery of each community were largely contained to people with shared expectations, understandings, and hopes for how Catholic liturgy should look, sound, and feel, even as they were both authentic expressions of the same truth.


Troughout my adulthood, the changing face of the Catholic Church in the United States has gradually brought those expressions closer together. Te statistics are, by now, likely familiar. A third of U.S. Catholics are Latino/a. Younger Catholics are primarily Latino/a, making up nearly 50% of all young U.S. Catholics. Te so-called “shared parish”—a church campus shared by two or more distinct cultural or linguistic groups who tend to retain their own languages and customs in and beyond worship—is an increasingly common reality throughout the country, even in rural areas like the one in which I was raised in Minnesota. Something like the two expressions I experienced as separate realities in my childhood now often coexist in the same parish, frequently alongside many other rich cultural expressions.


Tere is perhaps no more significant liturgical challenge for those who minister in such a context than the preparation of the Paschal Triduum. While two dominant linguistic groups might opt to celebrate weekly Masses and other feasts separately, the rubrics of the Triduum insist on the unity of the Church in these days. And yet, because shared cultural expectations take on particular strength at major holidays and feasts and because preparing the Triduum in even a single language is profoundly challenging work for a pastoral musician, there is often a gap between the unity we celebrate and how it is expressed during the liturgies of the Tree Days.


“There is often a gap between the unity we celebrate and how it is expressed during the liturgies of the Three Days.”


Sing to the Lord offers wise pastoral guidance for liturgical preparation in a multicultural community that is particularly valuable for thinking about the liturgies of the Triduum in a multicultural context. It calls us to move beyond merely multilingual or multicultural celebrations to instead work toward intercultural liturgies:


When prepared with an attitude of mutual reciprocity, local communities might eventually expand from those celebrations that merely highlight their multicultural differences to celebrations that better reflect the intercultural relationships of the assembly and the unity that is shared in Christ. Likewise, the valuable musical gifts of the diverse cultural and ethnic communities should enrich the whole Church in the United States by contributing to the repertory of liturgical song and to the growing richness of Christian faith.1


At this year’s annual convention, I have the opportunity of offering two workshops reflecting on what that movement—from merely highlighting multicultural differences toward better reflecting the intercultural relationships of the assembly—might look and sound like during the celebration of the Paschal Triduum. Much of my own reflection on this work emerges out of my ministry in bilingual communities over the past two decades—out of both our failures and our successes in embodying intercultural relationships during the liturgies of the Triduum. And it emerges also out of my own experiences as a bi-cultural person with a deep appreciation for the ways the beauty of the Paschal Mystery is revealed through difference.


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