Episcopal vs Catholic Services

For over twenty years, I've been earning part of my living as a professional singer in churches, usually as part of the choir but sometimes as a cantor.  Most of the churches I've sung at have been Catholic or Episcopal, where the western classical music tradition is represented in the liturgical music.  Though both churches and their services adhere to the same basic ideas and have many similarities in traditions, there are distinctions between the two that in some ways define each.

The most obvious difference is the clergy.  Catholic clergy are all male, frequently foreign born.  In the past many came from the "old country" of Ireland which had abundant resources of young catholic men desperate for work.  The Celtic Miracle absorbed many would be priests into more worldly work, so today many of the clergy are from South America and the Philippines, where the allure of a lifetime career in the church is still a enticing alternative to a life of uncertain poverty.  During services the clergy are in traditional robes that wouldn't have looked unusual 50 years ago.

Though still mostly male like the Catholic church priests, the Episcopal church clergy has a steadily growing proportion of female clergy.  Though the source of angst among older Episcopalians, a growing number of clergy are openly gay, sometimes introducing their partners to the congregation as wives were introduced a generation ago.  In the past many of the clergy seemed to be would-be professor types that didn't want to bother with doing a dissertation.  Today they are more likely to be social welfare or health care workers that wanted to reach for more than the basics of life or were weary of the bureaucracy prevalent in those fields.  Many are former catholics that yearned for a life in the church but wanted to have a family.  Having the option of families, they are not without the shame of catholic pedophile priests, as I have known married Episcopal clergy who have been convicted of similar crimes.

The people of church are the first major difference.  With its origins in the English Anglican tradition, the Episcopalians tend to look alike.  With the exception of the occasional convert from the former English colonies or African American in upper class neighborhoods, they are overwhelmingly pasty white, the only browner shades coming not from birth but from time at the summer beach house.  The Catholics tend to be all shades.  The attire of the Catholics vary as well, some dressing in "Sunday best" while others in jeans.  I've even seen some come in running clothes for services.  The variety in Episcopal attire is essentially whether the blue oxford shirt is from Brooks Brothers or Lands End.

The variety in services is the opposite of the variety of people.  In the Catholic church, despite the variety of people in the congregation, the basics of the service, apart from the service music, is the same week to week, church to church.  The prayers are the same, the responses the same, the communion is the same.  Likewise the crucifixes, candles, and vestments of the service participants, which look unchanged for 40 years.  The Episcopalians try to make up for their lack of variety of people with a sometimes bewildering array of services.  On a morning a church can have a communion or morning prayer service, with prayers of differing rites, Rite I (with lots of thees, thous, vouchsafes, etc) or Rite II (with contemporary language) or clergy designed prayers with inclusive language.  The vestments experience a similar splurge in different colors and designs, sometimes including artificial birds on flung about the air on sticks.

The music of the services is sometimes at odds with the texts.  While the texts of prayers experience constant revision, Episcopalians are drawn to the music repertoire extending back hundreds of years of classical music history.  Hymns are sung together, with many in the congregation singing in harmony, as a frequent draw of churches is the music.  The Catholics in many cases have turned their back on hundreds of years of musical masterpieces for what some I have sung with term "Bad Broadway."  As Catholics notoriously don't sing, a cantor sings meandering melodies (biblical verses are not strophic, so it is difficult to set the words of a text to a repeating melody) to which the congregation responds with a simple dull melody.   I have sung "oo" in music at the high altar, waiting for directions for jazz hands.

The Episcopalian service music borrows much of the music composed for and abandoned by the Catholic church, with some additions. Whereas the principal text setting of the Catholics is the setting of the mass along with settings of scripture passages, the Episcopal church has assorted text settings, canticles, for use during non-communion services, such as morning prayer or evensongs.  All in English, some brilliant, some ok, some best forgotten, much composed in the either the 16th century or the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These differences then emphasize different things.  Episcopalians, an attempt to satisfy all, improvising along the way.  Catholics, a tradition, sometimes bland, to serve as a comfort.  At an Episcopal church, the leaflet tends to be a masterpiece, with images, texts of the service for that morning, hymns printed out, complete with harmonies.  At a Catholic church, it is a single sheet, with the responsive melodies printed and the hymn numbers for those inclined to defy tradition and sing hymns included for reference.  As the words don't change, except for a couple upheavals per century, there's no reason to print them.

So what you have in Catholic church is a variety of people all saying the same thing every week in every church with a constantly changing set of bad music.  At the same time a homogeneous group of people in an Episcopal church experiments each week with new texts and centuries old music.  Some talk of reunifying the two churches again, as the core beliefs are the same.  That might be a little tricky.