I never encountered this music growing up, but experiencing liturgies with the Polish Dominican music (chant and polyphony), though completely foreign, felt like home to me. The beauty of the sound and the contemplative style draws me into prayer in a way I have never experienced before. Hearing and singing it draws me to close my eyes and raise my mind to the heavens. It has taught me to pray with scripture through music. When I had the privilege of having this music as a part of my church’s daily liturgies, the music, and in turn, scripture and prayer, became a part of my day, a part of my breathing. The simplicity of the words and the undeniable beauty of the music draws me in and remains in me. It has given me a little taste of fulfilling our call to ‘pray without ceasing’, infiltrating my mind and my day with this sung prayer.

Over the course of the past few decades, the Polish Dominicans have fostered and developed a tremendous corpus of vernacular liturgical music, written in a simple and beautiful choral style that both ennobles liturgical worship and readily invites congregational participation in it. It is wonderful to see more and more of that treasury of contemporary liturgical music being adapted into English and made widely available to the English speaking world through the work of the Dominican Liturgical Center. To anyone who is interested in prayerful and dignified liturgical music in the English language, I highly recommend the work of the Dominican Liturgical Center and its new “Soul of Christ” project, as well as its future projects to share more of the Polish Dominican liturgical music tradition with English-speaking worshippers throughout the world. While the worship of God in different vernacular languages necessarily differs in some ways throughout the world, beauty is universal, and the Polish Dominican liturgical music tradition has a special contribution to make to this beautiful and dignified worship of God in sacred song.

This Polish Dominican style of writing is evocative not only in harmonies but in theology, meditation, and depth of text. This music is ideal for parishes to participate in experiencing the mysteries of our blessed Catholic faith with reverence and accessibility. There are so many ways to share this music – the four part harmonies are wonderful and mesmerizing, and yet a piano or organ playing the other parts while a choir or single voice singing the melody can be just as prayerful and enticing. This music mixes beautifully the tradition of the Church in four part motets of the Renaissance in polyphony and the Novus Ordo with vernacular prayers and simple melodies.

This music is simple and striking. The harmonies are not distracting from the text, but rather they draw me into a prayerful and personal encounter with the Word of God.

The style is reverent and dynamic. It is not afraid to claim our Catholic tradition, but also freely creates something new that corresponds to a world that is longing for its redeemer.

This music taught me to love singing at mass, and more importantly, it taught me to love the mass as a divine song of sacrifice and praise. I’m a convert, and to me “music at mass” always just meant “music that we sang in my Protestant churches”: 19th-century hymns, pop-folk from the ‘70s and ‘80s, or praise choruses from the ‘90s. When I first encountered this Polish Dominican music as a grad student, I was completely blown away: here was music that sounded totally different from anything I’d heard before, in church or on the radio, but was at the same time totally intuitive; here was music that a handful of amateurs could pick up and learn in five minutes, and somehow turn into captivating beauty; here was music that was drew me in, that actually made me want to sing it.

And the more I sang it, the more I realized I was singing the mass. Singing this music taught me what the mass was, and taught me to love it. I’ve been a Dominican now for more than a decade and a priest for almost five years, and I cannot possibly express my gratitude to God for how he formed my love of his liturgy through music like this. I hope it helps you to learn to love, too.