Great Catholic Music online service to pay tribute to St. Louis Jesuits

Aug 24, 2019

|Contributor

Great Catholic Music online service to pay tribute to St. Louis Jesuits — In a Sunday, July 7, 2019 photo, Rev. Dr. Stephen Smith plays his Reverend Guitars Pete Anderson PA-1 that was a gift from his congregation to celebrate his 15th anniversary with the St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church of Dublin and music director Jennifer Bell, the bassist in his band, inside the sanctuary. (Credit: Adam Cairns/The Columbus Dispatch via AP.)

CANTON, Ohio — Great Catholic Music, a free audio web streaming service, will honor “the music legacy” of the St. Louis Jesuits a week ahead of the group reuniting for a final performance Sept. 29.

Great Catholic Music is a project of the Living Bread Radio Network, a group of Catholic radio stations in northeast Ohio. From Sept. 23 to Sept. 28, the group’s music will air an hour a day starting at 11 a.m. (EST) online at GreatCatholicMusic.com, the service’s mobile app and on Alexa devices.

A spokesman said the streaming service planned the special programming to pay tribute to “a big milestone for Catholic music.”

The St. Louis Jesuits first met and began composing music together as young Jesuit scholastics in the early 1970s while at St. Louis University. The composer-performers inspired a generation of Catholic liturgical music.

The group’s songs, including “One Bread, One Body” and “Earthen Vessels,” have become staples of Catholic liturgies, and the St. Louis Jesuits, as a group, have recorded 35 albums and several anthology collections.

The concert is “expected to be a nostalgic celebration of the five’s most beloved hymns and songs for worship and personal prayer, both as St. Louis Jesuits and as solo artists,” said a story about the concert on the university website, https://bit.ly/2Sa5rNJ. The site also has information about buying concert tickets.

The concert is presented by the Ignatian Spirituality Project and all proceeds past expenses will benefit the project.

The Great Catholic Music service launched March 1 and plays a mix of pre-and post-Vatican II hymns and liturgical music all day, every day.

In a July interview with Catholic News Service, program director Michael Roberts said response to the music service “so far has been absolutely amazing.”

“The first night that we launched,” he said, “we received an email from someone in Santa Barbara, California, saying, ‘Thank you so much.'”

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