Setting the Record Straight - Great Composers? Mostly Catholic!

Haydn was a daily communicant. Mozart was an ardent Catholic. Mahler converted from Judaism. Schubert, Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven were deeply Catholic. Listen to their music and you will hear how it reveals their faith. Gounod played organ at Notre Dame to accompany his tenor soloist, his fellow Catholic, the painter Pierre August Renoir as he sang Gounod’s famous “Panis Angelicus”. 

Want more? Vivaldi was a priest, he was called the “Red Priest”. Of course Palestrina and Hildegard von Bingen were Catholic, but even in virulently anti-Catholic Elizabethan England the greatest composers, like Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, were hidden Catholics. Much like the other high arts, all the world music we hear today bears the authentic birthmarks of its true parentage in the Catholic Church, for example in its use of harmony and our musical notation. 

Oh yes, even the errant bon-vivant Rossini was a believing Catholic.

Saint Cecilia