Communion, Chant and the Ordinary Parish

For centuries most Catholics received Communion rarely, often once or a few times a year, a habit reinforced by a strain of piety that stressed unworthiness and by lingering Jansenist rigour about who was fit to approach the altar. The 1905 decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus reversed the emphasis, declaring that frequent and even daily Communion was open to any baptized person in a state of grace with a right intention, and was to be encouraged rather than restricted. The 1910 decree Quam Singulari followed by lowering the age of first Communion from around twelve to the age of discretion, roughly seven, on the argument that a child old enough to distinguish the Eucharist from ordinary bread is old enough to receive it.

The effect on ordinary parish life was larger than any doctrinal document of the period. Within a generation the queue at the altar rail had become a normal part of Sunday for most practising Catholics, and the age at which a child made a first Communion had shifted permanently.

He legislated for church music with the same directness. The 1903 motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini declared Gregorian chant the church's own music and the standard by which other sacred music should be judged, and ruled operatic settings and theatrical performance out of the liturgy. He also reordered the Roman Breviary so that the whole psalter was again recited weekly, and set in motion the codification of canon law that appeared as the 1917 code. He died in August 1914, weeks after the outbreak of the war he had tried and failed to avert.