We sang a Renaissance Missa Brevis every Sunday at the main Mass, and I recall one Sunday a small group of U.N. chaplains waiting for us after Mass to tell us how we were the best choir (i.e., sang the most beautiful music) they had heard in all the countries they visited.

Of course there were also opposite reactions. I recall reading an opinion by a well-known writer of contemporary church songs–writing in a magazine devoted to such–that he had visited New Orleans expecting to hear (in effect) his kind of music or other such contemporary jazzy settings, but instead heard what he described, typically, in unflattering terms as the musical equivalent of old dead white-man’s art. (Sigh)

That era ended when Archbishop Hannan was succeeded by a bishop with less interest in the Church’s musical heritage, whose tastes, apparently, were more in line with the disparagers of beauty than its practitioners. The choir was disheartened and slowly disbanded after that.