With Chant: Music for Paradise, the Cistercian monks of the Stift Heiligenkreuz Abbey have debuted at #9 on the British pop charts. Nice. Zenit interviews Father Karl Wallner, OCSO.
(This cd) was born from joy and carries joy. And the reason is that the singing is based on our liturgy for the dead. The entire Requiem is on the CD, that is, the Mass for the dead.
Joy? Yes, because true joy is joy for eternal life. We experienced this in February of this year at Heiligenkreuz, when over the span of 16 days, three of our brethren died, while in the preceding five years, no brother had died. One of them had reached 100 years of age: At the time of the Nazis he had been imprisoned in a death cell.
However, for many of the young monks who have come to us in recent years and who experienced for the first time the gentle death of one of our brothers, to participate in songs of the liturgy for the dead made a great impression. In convent life, there is no liturgy more edifying than the liturgy for the dead, because one of us has arrived where we all want to go: to eternal communion with God. For this reason the CD is called precisely “Music for Paradise.”
Catholic Sensibility 