"There is not and there is never likely to be any religious poetry in the world worthly to be compared with the hymns of the Latin Office.... Our old Latin hymns are immeasurably more beautiful than any others ever composed.... It would be a disgrace if we Catholics were the only people who did not appreciate what is our property. And, from every point of view, we of the old Church cannot do better than to sing to God as our fathers sang to Him during all the long ages behind us. Nor shall we find a better expression of Catholic piety than these words, hallowed by centuries of Catholic use, fragrant with the memory of the saints who wrote in that golden age when practically the whole of Christendom was Catholic."

Fr. Adrian Fortescue

. Tradition provides a way for the young to ground themselves in the wisdom of the past. This applies not only to cultural things but to the liturgy and the spiritual life as well. The third thing that the ancient liturgy provides is repetition. Now modern man has rejected repetition because he has a fixation on novelty. Novelty, of course, gives our appetites delight but does not necessarily indicate depth. To enter into something in depth requires time and repeated considerations of a thing. Repetitio mater discendi, as we say in Latin: repetition is the mother of learning. This principle applies not only to learning but to our spiritual lives as well. By repeating a prayer, its meaning becomes more known to us and therefore is able to be entered into more perfectly and with greater depth. Since the ancient rite allows not for novelty but repetition, it provides a way in which people can focus on the mysteries present rather than the new things that are constantly popping up. With the silence quieting our faculties and the repetition that characterize each Mass, we are able to participate in and enter more perfectly into the mysteries of the Mass. Too often participation is equated with physical activity rather than the higher and more active form of participation which is spiritual participation.

Ironically, we live in times that are awash in authentic sacred music. We hear it in concert halls, on our CD players at home, in our cars, in movies, on television, in shopping centers and even in Protestant churches. Never have so many recordings of the great Masses and motets been in wider circulation. Record stores have whole sections devoted to the chant. Groups such as the Anonymous Four, the Tallis Scholars and the Monteverdi Choir perform Catholic music to sold-out audiences wherever they go. I just heard a young honors chorus from Georgia, which consisted of a gaggle of Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian kids. They gathered together for a secular concert, under a world-famous conductor, and what do they do? A Haydn Mass, the Mozart "Salve Regina" and a Padre Martini motet-an all-Catholic program! Catholic liturgical music, it would seem, is everywhere but in the Catholic Church itself. Only the Catholic Church seems blind to its power. This is one of the greatest travesties of the post-Conciliar period. We've abandoned the sacred treasury and replaced it with drivel.

from An Interview with Richard Morris who ranks among the world's greatest organists

Among liturgists and theologians, it is generally considered true that each form of ritual embodies a kind of spirituality which is proper to that ritual. Thus, for example, the Eastern rites tend to emphasize the mysterious aspects of the spiritual life as well as the role of icons in promoting devotion to Our Lord, Our Lady and the saints. The ancient rite of Mass embodies a spirituality and spiritual lessons that can appeal to every generation and time. By ancient ritual is meant that rite which was codified by St. Gregory the Great and which underwent a very slow organic development over the course of centuries. The last missal promulgated that enjoys that organic growth is that of 1962.
Father Chad Ripperger, F.S.S.P

Poetry, with which this book is fundamentally concerned, is the free creativity of the spirit, and the intuitive knowledge through emotion, which transcend and permeate all arts, inasmuch as they tend toward beauty as an end beyond the end. Then poetry, like Plato’s mousike, is taken in a primary, most universal sense.
Jacques Maritain Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Bollingen/Pantheon, 1955)