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Good News!
Dear Friends,
Thanks for the day off yesterday. I thought it was going to be spent catching up on a whole lot of stuff in my office but it ended up being spent in high quality time with a couple of members of my extended family. Just me and them for most of the time and then Amanda joined us around midnight when she'd finished at the recording studio. They're now into the final touch-up stages on all the songs that have been composed over the last couple of years and recorded over the last couple of months. Two cd's are going to be released — one will be a cd of Mass settings for young people, the other a cd of music that can be used for retreats, personal reflection, to accompany multi-media presentations produced by teachers and others for school and parish situations, and for settings in the wider community, like the Vinnies Winter Sleep-Out which Amanda will be performing at live tonight at Eastern Creek Raceway raising money for the homeless.
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Amanda McKenna inset against the current Willow album, "As One Voice" |
This is a really exciting project the Bishop and Diocese of Parramatta have taken on along with the Parramatta Catholic Education Office. The Church has long had a good repertoire of classical liturgical music for formal settings, general parish music and music that works well in primary schools with younger children. This endeavour has been particularly targeted to producing a range of high quality music, recorded to the same sort of production standards that other Christian churches like Hillsong put into their endeavours but specifically directed to appeal to secondary students and young adults — one of the main sub-sets in the community the Church seems to have had most difficulty in keeping its lines of communication open to. This ain't music for "young nuns on skateboards" from Steubenville and such places though — although we do hope they end up liking it too. This is an endeavour to try and reach out to the mainstream of Catholic young people today — the sort of young people who might be the children and grand children of any of us who are increasingly attracted to places like Catholica Australia around the world. I don't think I am talking out of school here but I can disclose that Amanda's publisher, Willow, has already been busy promoting the material to various church groups around the world and one of the really big evangelical protestant churches in the United States has indicated in recent weeks that based on the preview material they've heard so far they want to pick up the whole repertoire of what Amanda has produced. It's great to be exporting a bit of contemporary music back the other way, eh? I've provided a couple of samples of her music at various places on the forum in the last month or so. I'll put a new post up there making those samples accessible in one place. Let's let the whole cat out of the bag: you know how Cardinal Pell has been busy importing Hillsong music for WYD? Well Bishop Manning, the Bishop of Parramatta — the diocese in which His Holiness is going to land at Richmond RAAF base, and the Diocese in which Hillsong is actually located — has been engaged in this nefarious plot for two years now to actually produce Catholic music that might be exported to the Protestants and Evangelical Churches all over the world. (Only joking, but there is more than half a truth in it if you think about it.) You might keep all the people involved in this project in your thoughts and prayers as this project now moves into its next phase of being promoted to young people around the world — and around the schools in Parramatta which actually is the diocese which continues to have one of the highest participation rates anywhere in this nation.
Talking about reaching out: as you know the Bishops of Australia are in the middle of an advertising campaign across this nation to call some of the 86% back. I've already asked before "Back to What?" given that if present trends continue there won't be enough priests in a short time to provide much of a sacramental and liturgical life unless we do some serious re-thinking. Fr Kevin Murphy has been doing a bit of that and presents a few ideas worth thinking about in today's lead commentary. <Read Fr Kevin Murphy's commentary> |
