Advent Sunday Introit X

The hymn ‘To you, O Lord, I pray’ from Hymn Introits by Christoph Tietze.

When Catholic communities don't sing the Proper introit - and let's face it: most of them don't - what they sing instead is usually a strophic, congregational, vernacular song. In other words, a hymn. Christoph Tietze (not to be confused with the seventeenth-century hymn writer of the same name) has come up with a brilliantly simple way to bridge the gap. He has written strophic paraphrases of the introit antiphons and Psalms, and set them to hymn tunes which are already well known to English-speaking Catholics. The rationale, and the texts, are given in his book Hymn Introits for the Liturgical Year; a volume with the confusingly similar title Introit Hymns for the Church Year is for use - it contains the texts and music.

So, for the first Sunday of Advent, the introit hymn begins as follows:

To you, O Lord, I pray;
I trust in your great name.
Let not my enemies exult
Nor put my soul to shame.

Imagine a world in which Tietze's cycle of hymns is adopted wholesale by the editors of popular hymnals; what a difference that would make to the ethos of Catholic hymnody, without any significant effort on the part of parish musicians.

For: Tietze offers a paraphrase of the introit for all Sundays and major feasts. He allows for the preservation of the antiphon-Psalm alternation, as the first verse of each hymn usually contains the substance of the antiphon, and it can simply be repeated as a refrain. For communities used to singing a hymn at the entrance, this scheme can be implemented without any change in musical practice.

Against: There is no relationship between the suggested hymn tune (St Bride) and the chant of the original introit; and antiphon texts are sometimes truncated (as in the example above) in order to fit into a single stanza. Other liberties are taken, as well: 'To you I pray' is one possible reading of 'Ad te levavi animam meam' - after all, doesn't the catechism offer us 'the raising of the heart and mind to God' as a definition of prayer? But the loss of the great metaphor of upward movement seems to me to rob this introit of some of its dynamism. Query: have these texts been approved for liturgical use?