(Clockwise from Left) Dominican Father Robert Mehlhart, president of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome. Mary Stone conducting her choir on August 29, 2024. Floriani performing at the National Eucharistic Congress July 2024. Floriani during a parish performance. (photo: Courtesy photos / Munich/Floriani/Patrick Ryan)
Devoted to preserving the Church’s tradition of sacred music, the men’s choral vocal ensemble Floriani has sung at Masses and concerts in shrines, basilicas and cathedrals across the United States.
This summer, they sang before thousands of pilgrims during Eucharistic adoration at the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.
“I don’t think we understood the gravity of it prior to coming to the Eucharistic Congress,” the ensemble’s founder Giorgio Navarini told the Register. “They put us on the stage in the Lucas Oil Stadium, and there were 60,000 people in front of us worshipping the Lord.”
Describing the response they got as “tremendous,” Navarini shared: “We were told that this was the highlight of the entire congress. And I think a lot of people said that because they had never heard the beauty of sacred music before.”
Floriani performing at the National Eucharistic Congress. (Photo: Courtesy photo)
Named after St. Florian, the group met while studying together at Thomas Aquinas College in California. Although the four men pursued various paths individually after college, they eventually reunited and decided to begin singing professionally in 2021 for different parishes throughout the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“When we saw the response of congregations — where the music is very modern and contemporary — to the beauty of the tradition of the Church, we realized that this could be a mission,” Navarini said.
Since then, Floriani has been dedicated to bringing beautiful, sacred music back to life on social media, in parishes, in schools and in homes across America. This trend honors St. Cecilia, patron of music whose feast is Nov. 22, as it is said that she, during her wedding, “sang in her heart to the Lord.”
Essential Part of the Liturgy
The Church has often highlighted that its musical tradition is “a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art,” and perhaps more importantly, that it is “a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 112).
By looking back at the early Church, “when everything in the liturgy had to be sung,” Navarini explained that we can better understand how “music is an essential part of the worship of God.”
“In fact,” he added, “there are some rabbinical scholars who think that whenever Christ was preaching and quoting the Old Testament, he actually would have sung it according to a specific melody, which is just really fascinating.”
Floriani performing at a parish. (Photo: Courtesy photo)
“When we talk about sacred music, we are talking first and foremost about music that has been set apart for a sacred purpose outside of the secular realm, for the worship of God,” Mary Stone, the graduate assistant for music and liturgy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., told the Register.
With the help of a choir of students she directs, Stone provides sacred music to “help the students on campus enter more deeply into the liturgy.”
Noting a national and worldwide “rediscovery of what the Church has preserved for centuries,” Stone shared how she, like many others, is gradually discovering that “the Church has a rich heritage of music created specifically for the liturgy.”
“There are Gregorian chants, propers and antiphons, composed centuries ago for every Sunday, feast day, votive Mass and special occasion, all deeply rooted in Scripture,” she explained. “Knowing this truly allows us to enter more deeply into the liturgy and its profound prayers.”
‘To Sing Is to Pray Twice’
“When you sing the sacred texts of the Bible of the Church in the liturgy, you penetrate them intellectually, as expressed by the great composers of our Church and of humanity, and at the same time you live that content by singing it in the liturgy, where God is present,” Dominican Father Robert Mehlhart, president of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome, told the Register.
It’s not for no reason, he said, that “to sing is to pray twice” — a quote often attributed to St. Augustine — is often used to explain the role of music in the Church.
Dominican Father Robert Mehlhart conducting his choir during Mass. (Photo: Robert Kiderle) Robert Kiderle Fotoagentur
Educated at Regensburg, Vienna and Oxford, Father Mehlhart served as choirmaster and organist of St. Cajetan Church in Munich before being appointed president of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education.
Offering a wide range of courses and degrees, including composition, choir conducting, organ and chant, the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music trains church musicians and teachers of sacred music, rendering a service to the Church throughout the world.
Father Mehlhart emphasized how vital it is for all who work with Church music to learn and familiarize themselves with “the great works of our tradition.”
“Even if you are an organist,” Father Mehlhart stressed, “it doesn’t matter, you have to have sung Ave Verum by Mozart, Locus Iste by Bruckner and Sicut Cervus by Palestrina. You cannot be a Church musician without knowledge of these pieces.”
“Music adds a very beautiful and important layer to the meaning of the text and draws you into the text in a way that the spoken word just can’t,” he said. “This is what music does. It elevates you and it brings you into that embrace of glory that you are immersed in at the end.”
Referencing the Gospel of the Nativity where a multitude of the heavenly host sing the praises of God, Father Mehlhart explained, “This is what we do when singing: We join the heavenly host of angels in the praise of God made man in Jesus Christ.”
“When we are singing, we are proclaiming something out loud, using our whole being,” Stone added, “and in that way we enter completely, with both body and soul, into the act of worship.”
Since learning about liturgical music and having the desire to help fill the lack of sacred music in the liturgy in many churches, Stone observed, “It’s like my whole being is moved to sing God’s praises and the texts that proclaim the truth of our faith.”
“There is nothing that has made me fall more in love with prayer and dialogue with God than singing the antiphons, the psalms, the prayers of the Church.”
Powerful Tool of Evangelizing
While emphasizing that “the first goal of sacred music for the liturgy is to sing the prayers and texts of the liturgy,” Stone noted that it also has a power to evangelize — a power “not just on an aesthetic level but on a theological level.”
“When you sing the antiphons and other sacred texts, like, for example, the Adoro Te Devote by St. Thomas Aquinas, the theology is so rich,” she explained, “and you can reflect on it for the entire Mass and make it your prayer. In that way, sacred music is a very powerful tool of evangelization and turns the participants’ hearts to God.”
Reflecting on three of the Church’s three particularly great sources of attraction — “the saints, holiness and beauty” — Father Mehlhart added: “Choirs are a beautiful and effective way to draw people to God,” not only because they are beautiful, but also because “every good choir rehearsal is really also a catechesis,” where the texts are explained and shared, which helps “people find their way to the liturgies, to the Church.”
Mary Stone conducting during the Mass of the Holy Spirit on August 29, 2024. (Photo: Courtesy photo)
As C.S. Lewis — similarly to G.K. Chesterton and other Christian apologists — expressed it in his book The Weight of Glory, beauty is a strong tool of evangelization, since “we do not want merely to see beauty, we want […] to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
“The books or the music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them,” Lewis writes. “It was not in them, it only came through them; and what came through them was longing.”
A Revival of Sacred Music
Referencing Pope Pius X’s 1903 motu proprio Tra Le Sollecitudini and his three criteria for sacred music — sanctity, goodness of form and universality — Navarini underscored that sacred music “evokes a sense of the transcendent,” pointing out how many movies use sacred music to evoke “the spiritual and the sense of there being something beyond.”
And precisely because it points to something transcendent and is written in Latin — the Church’s universal language — Navarini argued, “it is accessible to everyone who is listening to it, regardless of time period, place or culture.”
“I think it is absolutely essential that we as Catholics hold on to this great heritage and pass it on to the next generations,” Navarini stressed. “We see it as an indispensable part of our mission.”
Mary Stone conducting the choir during a performance. (Photo: Courtesy photo)
Commenting on the surge of other groups promoting the renewal of sacred music within the Church — such as the Catholic Sacred Music Project at Princeton University — Navarini said that he doesn’t find it “shocking that we have this huge resurgence of young Catholics, who want to transmit the beauty of tradition, who want to transmit this fire to the world.”
“The culture is so much in flux. Everything’s always changing. There’s always a new trend that’s coming about, and I think young people want something to hold on to, something stable, something firm, something that doesn’t just shift with the trends of the world. And sacred music and liturgy really go hand in hand in delivering that: It is an unchanging, beautiful thing that roots us in our identity as Catholics.”