Since March 2020, several churches in Goa have live streamed Mass, so
it is easy to sample the musical fare across the region. The feast
Mass of Saint Francis Xavier at Old Goa recently featured a
beautifully chanted responsorial psalm, proof that Konkani lends
itself quite naturally to the Gregorian idiom. Sadly, the music at
that Mass was an exception. In most of our churches, the congregations
seem content with ‘praise and worship’ songs at Mass, and possibly
care not at all for our priceless legacy. Maybe secular heritage buffs
could help raise awareness.
India is a party to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the
Intangible Cultural Heritage, and maintains state-wise inventories as
well as a national one. Goan Christian liturgical chant is not listed
yet, and it never will be, unless priests, choirs and congregants
learn to value it and revive it. The heritage tag is gladly given to
objects of Christian art which fetch a price in the antique market.
Remember the uproar in 2012 over the heist at the Museum of Christian
Art in Old Goa? Gregorian chant is not made of gold or ivory, so it is
hard to convince people of its value as Goan heritage.
The Indian touch in Goan Christian architecture and artefacts has been
the subject of scholarly research for a long while. We need
musicologists who will do the same for Goan church music, especially
Gregorian chant as it took root in Goa. Chant developed differently in
each country, in each medieval monastery. At chant conventions in our
own day, specialists argue fiercely about musical interpretation.
Surely Goan Gregorian was different too. I say ‘was’ because, along
with other forms of traditional Goan church music, much is probably
gone forever. Every time I hear the Song of Farewell, Devachea
Bhagevontanno at a funeral I suspect many equally beautiful vernacular
Gregorian hymns were composed but have not been preserved by constant
The arc of Goan proficiency in liturgical music goes from 1543, when a
choir of Goan boys sang at the inauguration of the College of Saint
Paul in Old Goa, right until the mid-1970s when village congregations
comfortably sang Latin litanies, as well as hymns in Portuguese and
Konkani. The chapel mestres upheld a truly Goan heritage which now
lies gasping. Fr António Da Costa’s painstaking collection Adlim
Kristi Bhogtigitam (published as Songs of Praise) points to a rich
repertoire earlier known by the common people. As for specialists,
Rachol Seminary boasted the only Gregorian schola (choir) in India.
There is surely enough room for the old and new in church music. To
value heritage is by no means to denigrate the oft-sung hymns composed
in the 1960s and 1970s by the prolific Fr Vasco Rego, SJ, and his
pupils, for instance. The two generations born after 1970 are
emotionally attached to those hymns, just as earlier generations were
attached to the church music they grew up with, which happened to
include a treasure of inestimable value, as Vatican II described
From the documents of the Second Vatican Council, it appears the
bishops of the world, after much debate, agreed on a streamlined mass
in Latin, with readings and several prayers in the vernacular. That is
not what came to pass. ‘We will lose a great part of that stupendous
and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant,’
Pope Paul VI lamented at his 26 November 1969 general audience, days
before the New Order of the Mass became obligatory.
Permission to celebrate Mass in the older form was given mostly to old
priests celebrating alone. Many Catholics in those days took the loss
of the Latin chanted Mass to heart. Here and there, small groups
applied to the church authorities for exceptional permission (indult)
for maybe a monthly celebration of the Mass in the old form. As well,
there were non-Catholic and even atheist intellectuals for whom the
Tridentine Mass was an outstanding work of art and their heritage too.
In 1971, Alfred Marnau, a member of the Latin Mass Society in London,
garnered their signatures on an earnest appeal to the Pope for an
indult. He contacted a number of well-known personalities and spoke
personally to Graham Greene, Kathleen Raine, Cecil Day Lewis and many
others. The story goes that Pope Paul VI read through the famous names
with interest, exclaiming, ‘Ah, Agatha Christie!’ before he signed his
permission. It has ever since been popularly known as the Agatha
Since most Catholics in Goa seem unaware of the diamonds they have
thrown into the sea, I earnestly hope heritage enthusiasts of whatever
faith will do an Agatha Christie for what remains of Goan Christian
art music.No appeals to the Pope are needed, since every single Pope
since Pius X has encouraged the faithful to regularly sing Gregorian
chant and sacred polyphony. In 1974, Pope Paul VI actually sent every
bishop in the world a copy of Jubilate Deo (Rejoice in God), a booklet
with the ‘minimum’ Gregorian repertoire he felt every Catholic should
What is needed is to gather, preserve and sing Goan sacred music, and
to use the Gregorian backbone in new compositions. The current form of
the Mass can easily accommodate simple congregational Gregorian – most
obviously the responsorial psalm, but the fixed ‘ordinary’ parts of
the Mass too – and the occasional Jubilate Deo selections. As
envisaged by Vatican II, choirshave a liturgical role beyond prompting
Festivals like the Ketevan Festival of Sacred Music are expensive but
a possibility. More urgently, we need scholars who can record, in
notation and audio, the shreds of repertoire that a few still
remember. Most of all, we need influencers to sell liturgical
appreciation toparish priests, to the singers who would be obliged to
practise, and to those in the pews who think any pious song is
suitable for Mass. Unlike art in gold or stone, chant is exists only