Concert of the Year: Mother Teresa Trumps Taylor Swift

    What an uplifting, holy, magnificent experience. 

    I’ve just come back from seeing Journey of Faith: A Musical Tribute to Mother Teresa. The concert played at  the Music Center at Strathmore, a gorgeous music hall in Maryland. Journey of Faith celebrates Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a venerated saint who gave her life to imitating Jesus Christ and serving the poor. Yet the music program is also bracingly modernist. St. Augustine said the Christian faith is “ever ancient, ever new.” Journey of Faith delivered that message with unforgettable musical performances.     The concert was conducted by Dante Santiago Anzolini and featured the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, baritone Sean Michael Plumb, and soprano Catherine Wethington. Wethington also curated the show. In 2019, Wethington sang in a chamber music festival in the Balkans, which included a concert in the hometown of Mother Teresa. She researched Mother Teresa’s life and was introduced to a piece of music titled “Divine Waltz, Hymn to Mother Teresa,” which was composed by Genc Tukiçi. In 2023, Wethington was invited to be the soprano soloist for the piece’s Albanian premiere commemorating the 20th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s beatification. “The experience of performing this piece in Tirana and recognizing that St. Teresa continues to have a revolutionary impact on people’s lives today led me to create a program that celebrates her journey, her courage, and her faith,” Wethington told the Catholic News Agency in an interview.

    Wethington was brilliant in the concert, her voice so powerful at times that it seemed like the heavens cracked open. There was also a choral choir that spiritually lifted the hall. Most stirring was the fact that the concert never dragged – in fact, it was much more exciting, and stayed with me longer, than the times I’ve seen Taylor Swift. Swift writes catchy but conventional pop songs. The program Wethington put together actually offers some challenging modernist pieces, including ones from Leonard Bernstein, Missy Mazzouli, and Philip Glass. It takes chances. Albanian composer Genc Tukiçi, Composer of “Divine Waltz, Hymn to Mother Teresa,” was at the concert, and it was touching and beautiful when he came out to thank the audience. Bach and Holst were played, as well as a breathtaking rendition of “Ave Maria.”

    In recent years, people have realized that Christianity is offering a more thrilling, and even dangerous, explanation for the meaning of life than the secular alternatives. There has also been a rediscovery of Christianity’s interaction with modernism, which has not been all rejection. In The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform, Catholic scholar George Weigel explores how Catholicism has interacted with modernity over the last several hundred years. Weigh describes the dynamic as “the Church’s relationship to the demise of the traditional political order and the rise of new forms of government (including, but not limited to, democracy); the Church’s relationship to the passing of the traditional cultural order (the displacement of metaphysics at the center of Western intellectual life and the rise of the scientific method as the dominant paradigm of knowledge); the Church’s relationship to the transformation of traditional society into new forms of community (including new forms of economic life).”

    Weigel explores how Catholicism went from condemning these modern changes to cautiously engaging with them – and then finally calling for modernism to align itself with the moral laws and teachings of Catholicism. In short, both sides gained, with modernism reminded of its spiritual aspect and the Catholic Church able to shape and enrich the good parts of modernism. “Cultural and intellectual modernity certainly challenged the then regnant forms of Catholic intellectual life,” Weigel writes. “The modern ‘social question’ posed by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of an urban proletariat eventually compelled a new Catholic appraisal of modern economic life and its impacts on society.” Modernism challenged the church and made the church better and more responsive to people by forcing it to respond. The church responded, making it relevant to more people.

    All of which is to say that Journey of Faith is a beautiful, stirring show that reveals the faith to indeed be “ever ancient and ever new.” The biggest disappointment came afterwards, when I was told that it would not be perfumed again after only two shows in America. It should be performed every year.

[Ed: Mark also did an interview with Chronicles that discusses the experience. Be sure to read that as well.]

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