Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Morris

A clean little jab, sharpened by the kind of disappointment only an insider can manage. Richard Morris, a clergyman writing in 19th-century Britain, isn’t attacking Catholic music as much as the Catholic Church’s relationship to it. The line hinges on a paradox: if Catholic liturgical music is “everywhere,” why is it missing from the very place it ostensibly belongs? That contradiction is the point. It frames the Church not as guardian of tradition but as the institution most likely to misplace its own treasures.

The subtext is less ecumenical curiosity than clerical frustration with how sacred art gets displaced by convenience, fashion, or bureaucratic drift. “It would seem” adds a veneer of polite observation, but it’s performative restraint; Morris is signaling that the evidence is obvious to anyone paying attention. The implied culprits are familiar to any era: undertrained choirs, simplified repertoire, congregational impatience, and leadership that treats music as decoration rather than theology in sound.

Context matters. Morris is writing in the long shadow of post-Reformation English religious identity, when “Catholic” music (think chant, polyphony, the prestige of continental composers) could be admired in concert halls, salons, and antiquarian revivals even as actual parish worship moved toward whatever was practical. The barb lands because it names a recurring cultural irony: institutions that brand themselves as timeless often outsource the care of their “timeless” art to outsiders who have the leisure, funding, or taste to preserve it.