EWTN News reports that a U.S. jury dismissed the copyright infringement claim brought by Catholic composer Vincent Ambrosetti against songwriter Bernadette Farrell and Oregon Catholic Press. Ambrosetti had alleged that Farrell’s 1993 hymn “Christ Be Our Light” unlawfully copied his 1980 composition “Emmanuel.” The jury found that Ambrosetti failed to prove his case “by a preponderance of the evidence,” siding with the defendants after deliberating for less than a day. The case, originally filed in 2020, was briefly dismissed in 2024 before an appeals court revived it in August 2025. Despite testimony from a New York University music professor claiming “strong objective musicological evidence of copying,” the jury was unconvinced. Ambrosetti has signaled a possible further appeal. On its surface, this is a mundane intellectual property dispute. Yet examined from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the case is a revealing symptom of the profound liturgical, theological, and spiritual collapse wrought by the conciliar revolution — a collapse so total that the Church’s own “publishers” and “composers” now litigate over the ownership of songs that, in many cases, should never have been sung in any Catholic liturgy in the first place.
The Liturgical Wasteland That Copyright Disputes Cannot Conceal
The article presents the dispute in neutral, procedural terms: a composer claims his work was copied; a jury disagrees; the legal process grinds on. But what the article entirely omits — what it cannot even conceive of asking — is the far more fundamental question: What are songs like “Emmanuel” and “Christ Be Our Light” doing in the worship of the Catholic Church at all?
Both compositions belong to the genre of so-called “contemporary Catholic hymnody” that flooded the Church’s liturgical life following the implementation of the conciar reforms. These songs — characterized by banal melodies, sentimental and often doctrinally vacuous texts, and a musical idiom indistinguishable from Protestant evangelical worship or even secular popular music — are themselves fruits of the same Modernist revolution that produced the Novus Ordo Missae. The 1967 Instruction on Music in the Liturgy (Musicam Sacram), issued under the authority of the conciliar apparatus, opened the floodgates by permitting “modern compositions” and effectively marginalizing Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony, which the Council of Trent had solemnly defended and which the Church had recognized for centuries as the supreme norm of liturgical music.
St. Pius X, in his Motu Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini (1903), established with prophetic clarity that sacred music must possess the qualities of holiness, beauty, and universality — and that it must be, above all, Gregorian chant as the supreme model. He wrote: “These qualities are to be found, in the highest degree, in Gregorian Chant, which is therefore the proper chant of the Roman Church, the only chant she has inherited from the ancient fathers, which she has jealously guarded for centuries in her codices, which she directly proposes to the faithful as her own, which she prescribes exclusively for some parts of the liturgy, and which the most recent studies have so happily restored to their integrity and purity.” The compositions at issue in this lawsuit possess none of these qualities. They are not holy in any meaningful sense; they are aesthetically impoverished; and they are particular products of a specific cultural moment, not universal expressions of Catholic worship.
The fact that two “Catholic” composers are now litigating over the ownership of such compositions is itself an indictment. The conciliar sect has not merely impoverished the Church’s liturgical music — it has reduced it to a commodity, subject to the same commercial logic and legal disputes as any other product in the marketplace. The sacred has been replaced by the proprietary.
Oregon Catholic Press: An Instrument of Liturgical Revolution
The article identifies Oregon Catholic Press (OCP) as one of the defendants. OCP is not a neutral publishing house. It has been, for decades, one of the primary vehicles through which the conciar liturgical revolution has been imposed on English-speaking Catholics. OCP publishes the hymnals and missalettes used in countless parishes across the United States and beyond — the very materials that have systematically replaced the Church’s authentic liturgical heritage with the products of the post-conciliar reform.
The article notes that Owen Alstott, then-publisher of OCP, allegedly met Ambrosetti at a convention in 1985 and received a copy of “Emmanuel.” Alstott later married Farrell, the composer of “Christ Be Our Light.” The article presents this as a mere factual detail relevant to the question of “access” in the copyright case. But the deeper reality is that OCP, Alstott, and Farrell all operate within the same ecosystem of conciliar liturgical production — an ecosystem that is, by its nature, parasitic on the Church’s authentic tradition while simultaneously replacing it.
The article’s framing — treating OCP as a legitimate “Catholic press” and Farrell as a legitimate “Catholic songwriter” — is itself an artifact of the conciar regime’s success in redefining Catholic identity. In the integral Catholic understanding, a truly Catholic press would publish works of sound doctrine, authentic liturgy, and genuine sanctity. OCP, by contrast, has been a principal distributor of the very materials that have emptied Catholic worship of its supernatural content and replaced it with a naturalistic, anthropocentric parody. That a composer must sue such an entity in a secular court to protect his “intellectual property” in a hymn is a spectacle that would have been inconceivable before 1958.
The Secular Court as Arbiter of Catholic Liturgical Disputes
Perhaps the most damning aspect of this entire affair — and one that the article treats as entirely unremarkable — is that a dispute between two “Catholic” composers over two “Catholic” hymns is being adjudicated by a secular jury in a United States District Court. The article reports without comment that jurors were “played selections of both songs” and heard expert testimony from a music professor. The secular state is determining questions of originality and ownership over compositions that claim to be Catholic worship music.
This is the logical consequence of the conciliar revolution’s abandonment of the Church’s own juridical sovereignty. The Church, before the conciliar upheaval, possessed a complete and self-sufficient legal system — the Corpus Iuris Canonici and, from 1917, the Codex Iuris Canonici — under which disputes involving ecclesiastical matters, including those touching on liturgical and sacred matters, would be adjudicated by ecclesiastical tribunals under the authority of the Roman Pontiff. The Church recognized, as a matter of divine law, that she possessed jurisdiction over all matters pertaining to her mission, including the regulation of worship, the approval of liturgical texts and music, and the resolution of disputes among the faithful touching on these matters.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), declared with unmistakable clarity: “The Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it, which it cannot renounce, full freedom and independence from secular authority.” The relegation of a dispute over Catholic hymns to a secular court is a practical denial of this principle. It is an act of submission to the very “secularism” and “laicism” that Pius XI identified as a “plague” and a “crime” in the same encyclical.
The article’s complete silence on this point is itself symptomatic. The conciar mentality has so thoroughly internalized the subordination of the Church to secular authority that it does not even recognize the scandal of the situation. A Catholic composer sues in a secular court; a secular jury listens to Catholic hymns and renders judgment; and no one — not the reporter, not the “Catholic” press, not the “Catholic” composers — perceives anything amiss.
The Theological Vacuity of “Contemporary Catholic Hymnody”
The article does not quote the texts of either “Emmanuel” or “Christ Be Our Light,” nor does it subject either to any theological examination. This omission is characteristic of the conciar approach to liturgical music, which treats hymns primarily as vehicles for communal emotional expression rather than as acts of worship carrying precise doctrinal content.
The integral Catholic tradition demands that liturgical texts — including hymns — be vehicles of sound doctrine. The Roman Breviary and the Roman Missal contain hymns of incomparable theological depth and poetic beauty: Pange Lingua Gloriosi, Veni Creator Spiritus, Ave Maris Stella, Dies Irae, Stabat Mater. These compositions are not merely “old songs”; they are doctrinal treasures, each word weighed and measured in the light of faith, each phrase a precise expression of Catholic teaching. They were composed by saints and Doctors of the Church — St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory the Great — under the guidance of the Holy Ghost and in communion with the Church’s Magisterium.
The compositions at issue in this lawsuit belong to an entirely different genus. They are products of the post-conciliar liturgical reform, which, under the influence of Modernism, deliberately emptied Catholic worship of its doctrinal precision and supernatural orientation in favor of a vague, sentimental, and anthropocentric “celebration of community.” The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (1864) condemned the proposition that “the method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times” (Proposition 13) and that “philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation” (Proposition 14). The entire enterprise of “contemporary Catholic hymnody” is built on precisely these condemned principles: the rejection of the Church’s inherited liturgical tradition in favor of modern, naturalistic compositions that reflect the spirit of the age rather than the mind of the Church.
The Deeper Apostasy: Liturgy as Intellectual Property
The most profound lesson of this case is not about copyright law. It is about what happens when the Church’s liturgy is severed from its supernatural foundation and reduced to a human product. In the authentic Catholic understanding, the liturgy is not the property of any individual or institution. It is the worship of the Mystical Body of Christ, offered to God the Father through the hands of the ordained priest acting in persona Christi. The texts, the chants, the rites — all belong to the Church’s sacred patrimony, handed down from the Apostles under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and subject to the Church’s authority but never to private ownership.
The conciar revolution shattered this understanding. By replacing the Church’s authentic liturgy with a fabricated “reform,” the architects of the new order effectively claimed ownership over Catholic worship — the right to compose new texts, write new music, and impose new rites. The composers and publishers who operate within this system are, in a sense, the inheritors of this usurpation: they produce “liturgical” materials that are their own creations, subject to their own intellectual property rights, and distributed through commercial channels.
That two such composers must now resort to secular litigation to settle a dispute over their respective claims is the reductio ad absurdum of the entire conciar project. The liturgy of the Catholic Church — the unbloody renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary, the most sacred action on earth — has been reduced to a matter of copyright law.
The article reports all of this with the detached neutrality of a court reporter. It does not ask the questions that matter. It does not challenge the legitimacy of the conciar structures that produced these hymns, employed these publishers, and drove these composers into secular courts. It does not invoke the Church’s own teaching on the nature of the liturgy, the rights of the Church, or the duty of Catholics to worship God according to the forms He has established. It is, in short, a perfect specimen of conciar journalism: technically accurate, spiritually blind, and doctrinally empty.
The faithful who seek the true worship of God will find it not in the hymnals of Oregon Catholic Press, not in the compositions of Ambrosetti or Farrell, and not in the verdicts of secular juries. They will find it in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as offered in the ancient Roman Rite — the Mass of all ages, the Mass that needs no copyright, the Mass that belongs to Christ and to His one, true Church.
Source:
Jury dismisses copyright claim brought by Catholic composer over 1980 hymn (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 17.04.2026