Education Quote by Richard Morris

A quiet jab disguised as pastoral realism: Morris is indicting a system where authority and aesthetics are delegated by default, not discernment. The line lands because it’s framed as “typical,” the bureaucrat’s favorite alibi. He isn’t describing one bad priest or one unlucky hire; he’s sketching a structural failure that repeats parish after parish, the kind that slowly degrades a tradition without anyone ever deciding to vandalize it.

The specific intent is corrective, even disciplinary. As a clergyman writing in the 19th century, Morris is speaking into a moment when church music was being tugged between inherited chant practices and newer, more popular styles, with industrial printing and growing urban parishes making “music programs” easier to staff but harder to govern well. His complaint isn’t merely that pastors lack musical training; it’s that their lack of formation produces a vacuum, and vacuums get filled by whoever arrives first with confidence and a résumé.

Subtext: liturgy is being treated like a service industry. The “first music director who walks through the door” implies desperation, but also misplaced trust in convenience. The pastor remains the nominal guardian of worship, yet relinquishes the actual shaping of it to a hire made without criteria. Morris is warning that sacred music doesn’t collapse through overt rebellion; it erodes through casual outsourcing, where taste and theology are set by accident. The wit is in the grim simplicity: negligence, dressed up as normal parish life.