Britt Spencer
Bill Clinton chose “Be Not Afraid” for the service preceding his inauguration. Susan Sarandon sang it a cappella in Dead Man Walking. Other songs by The St. Louis Jesuits were used when Tony Blair became prime minister; on Netflix’s Love and ABC’s The Mistresses; in Cantonese, Finnish, Samoan, Latvian, Portuguese, and Swedish translations…
Who are these guys, and how did they acquire such reach?
It all started in the Kumbaya era after Vatican II. Priests stopped singing the Mass in Latin with their backs turned, and staid old hymns no longer sufficed. Folk guitar music wafted through the church’s open window. But the new lyrics were often bland, shallow, and smug: Look at us, all praying together in the sunshine…
Five young Jesuits at Saint Louis University filled the void with a noticeably different sort of guitar music, still influenced by folk but deeper and more complex, emotionally resonant, musically sophisticated. They used Scripture—a terrain Catholics had previously left to their priests—and set the words to music with a poet’s ear, pulling out every nuance.
Each man wrote his own songs; the power of the group lay in their critiques. Only one of the five, John Foley, was classically trained; Roc O’Connor loved The Who as well as Debussy, and Tim Manion had inhaled Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. The mix worked. Bob Dufford struggled with his famous “Be Not Afraid” until Foley suggested a different beat on one line; that changed everything. The original second line to Dan Schutte’s “Here I Am, Lord” struck the group as arrogant. He sighed, resisted, stewed—then replaced the line with a simple question: “Is it I, Lord?” Human frailty, uncertainty, eagerness, all wrapped up in four words.
People started to ask for copies of these songs, which were cranked out on mimeograph machines before services. Then a publisher offered to put out a double album, Neither Silver Nor Gold. It was billed as music by St. Louis Jesuits, a tag that wound up capitalized as The St. Louis Jesuits. They worried that it looked pretentious. This was workaday music, written not to be performed in a studio but instead to be sung by a motley group of worshipers, sometimes off-key.
It captured people’s hearts. Even non-Catholics asked for these songs when they wed, or grieved, or lay dying. More albums followed, five winning Grammy nominations; Earthen Vessels’ sales broke 1 million. The St. Louis Jesuits had started a revolution—in liturgical music, and in the sort of prayer it inspired. As one woman said, when she introduced them in D.C.: “You have written the soundtrack for our spiritual lives.”
