The National Catholic Register reports that a U.S. jury dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Catholic composer Vincent Ambrosetti against songwriter Bernadette Farrell and Oregon Catholic Press (OCP), finding that Ambrosetti failed to prove his 1980 hymn “Emmanuel” was unlawfully copied by Farrell’s 1993 hymn “Christ Be Our Light.” The case, originally filed in 2020, dismissed in 2024, revived by an appeals court in 2025, and finally decided by jury in March 2026, reveals the absurdity of subjecting sacred music — or what passes for it in the post-conciliar wasteland — to the judgment of secular courts and the logic of commercial intellectual property. That such a dispute even arises within the structures of the conciliar sect is itself a symptom of the utter degradation of Catholic worship and the reduction of the sacred to the profane.
The Reduction of Sacred Music to Commercial Product
The entire premise of this lawsuit — that a hymn, a form of prayer addressed to God, can be “owned” and that its melodies and lyrics are subject to “copyright infringement” — is a grotesque manifestation of the worldliness that has consumed the post-conciliar structures. When the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was the center of Catholic life, sacred music existed ad maiorem Dei gloriam — for the greater glory of God. Gregorian chant, the supreme law of Roman liturgy as declared by St. Pius X in Tra le Sollecitudini (1903), was never “copyrighted.” It was the patrimony of the Church, composed not for personal enrichment but for the worship of the Most Holy Trinity.
The fact that Vincent Ambrosetti and Bernadette Farrell are litigating over who “owns” a hymn is a direct consequence of the destruction of authentic Catholic liturgy. The conciliar sect, having replaced the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary with a “memorial meal” and Gregorian chant with banal, Protestantized ditties, has created an entire industry of “liturgical music” that is neither liturgical nor truly music in the Catholic sense. It is, rather, a commercial enterprise — and commercial enterprises litigate. Oregon Catholic Press, the publishing arm of this degradation, has profited enormously from the post-conciliar liturgical revolution, flooding parishes with songs that would have been unrecognizable to any Catholic before 1958.
The very existence of “Oregon Catholic Press” as a dominant force in “Catholic” music is itself an indictment. In the true Church, the authority over sacred music belongs to the Holy See and to the bishops in communion with it — not to a publishing corporation operating under civil law and motivated by profit. The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1261) established that the Church has the right to regulate sacred music. The post-conciliar structures, having severed themselves from authentic ecclesiastical authority, have no such regulation — only the anarchy of the marketplace.
The Secular Court as Arbiter of Sacred Things
Perhaps the most scandalous dimension of this affair is that a jury of laymen in a United States federal court was asked to determine whether one piece of music “copied” another. The jury listened to selections of both songs. A New York University music professor, Lawrence Ferrara, offered expert testimony about “musicological evidence of copying.” The jury deliberated for less than a day and found against Ambrosetti.
What competence does a secular court have to adjudicate matters pertaining to sacred music? None whatsoever. Yet this is the inevitable consequence of the conciliar sect’s embrace of the secular order. When the Church truly reigned — when Christ the King was acknowledged in law and custom, as Pius XI demanded in Quas Primas (1925) — such disputes would have been resolved by ecclesiastical authority, not by civil tribunals applying the standards of “preponderance of the evidence” and “access” and “striking similarity.”
Pius XI taught that Christ’s kingdom “extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The state has no authority over the internal affairs of the Church, including her sacred music. Yet here we see the conciliar structures — which long ago surrendered the Church’s independence from secular authority, in direct violation of Quas Primas — running to secular courts to settle their internal disputes.
The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (1864) condemned the proposition that “the sacred ministers of the Church and the Roman pontiff are to be absolutely excluded from every charge and dominion over temporal affairs” (Proposition 27) — but it also condemned the inverse error, that the state has authority over the Church. The conciliar sect has embraced both errors simultaneously: it has abandoned its spiritual authority while eagerly submitting to secular jurisdiction in all things.
The Theological Bankruptcy of Post-Conciliar “Hymns”
Let us consider what is actually being litigated. The 1980 hymn “Emmanuel” and the 1993 hymn “Christ Be Our Light” are both products of the post-conciliar liturgical revolution — a revolution that destroyed the Catholic liturgy and replaced it with a Protestantized parody. Neither hymn would have been tolerated in a Catholic church before the advent of the conciliar sect. Neither possesses the qualities that St. Pius X demanded of sacred music: holiness, beauty, and universality.
St. Pius X wrote in Tra le Sollecitudini that sacred music must be “holy, and must, therefore, exclude all profanity not only in itself, but also in the manner in which it is presented by those who execute it.” It must be “true art” and must be “universal in the sense that, while every nation is permitted to admit into its ecclesiastical compositions those special forms which may be said to constitute its native music, still these forms must be subordinated in such a manner to the general characteristics of sacred music, that nobody of any nation may receive an impression other than good on hearing them.”
What are the “hymns” of the post-conciliar era? They are sentimental, theologically vacuous compositions that could as easily be sung in a Methodist or Baptist church. “Christ Be Our Light” — the very title reveals the problem. Christ is not merely “our light”; He is the Light, the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). The reduction of Christ to a source of personal illumination is characteristic of the Protestant pietism that has infected the conciliar sect. The true Catholic hymnody — the Pange Lingua, the Adoro Te Devote, the Veni Creator Spiritus — is saturated with dogmatic content, Eucharistic theology, and the reality of the supernatural order. The post-conciliar “hymn” is a product of the same modernist spirit that Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907): the reduction of the supernatural to the natural, of dogma to sentiment, of worship to communal self-expression.
That two composers are litigating over which of them owns the “rights” to a theologically impoverished song is not a scandal for the Church — it is a judgment on the conciliar sect.
The Symptom of Systemic Apostasy
This lawsuit is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of the systemic apostasy that has consumed the structures occupying the Vatican since the death of Pius XII. Consider the chain of events:
1. The conciar sect destroys the Traditional Latin Mass and replaces it with the Novus Ordo Missae — a rite that even Cardinal Ottaviani and Cardinal Bacci, in their famous Ottaviani Intervention (1969), declared to represent “a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session XXII of the Council of Trent.”
2. Authentic sacred music — Gregorian chant and polyphony — is banished from parishes and replaced with compositions that have more in common with folk music and Protestant hymnody than with Catholic tradition.
3. A commercial industry arises around this new “liturgical music,” with publishing houses like Oregon Catholic Press profiting from the sale of hymnals, missalettes, and recordings.
4. Composers, having been formed in this degraded environment, produce works that are neither sacred nor original — and then litigate over who “owns” what.
5. Secular courts are called upon to adjudicate these disputes, because the conciliar sect has no functioning ecclesiastical authority capable of doing so.
At every step, the logic of the conciliar revolution leads further away from the supernatural and deeper into the profane. The Church, as Christ instituted her, is a supernatural society ordered to the salvation of souls. The conciliar sect is a naturalistic organization ordered to self-preservation and commercial viability. The lawsuit of Ambrosetti v. Oregon Catholic Press is the conciar sect behaving exactly as what it is: a worldly institution with no supernatural life, no sacred authority, and no connection to the Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Silence About What Truly Matters
What is conspicuously absent from this entire affair — from the lawsuit, from the jury’s deliberation, from the reporting of the National Catholic Register — is any mention of what truly matters: the state of souls. The conciliar sect’s “liturgical music” is not merely aesthetically inferior or theologically impoverished. It is, in many cases, a vehicle for heresy, indifferentism, and the destruction of faith. When hymns are sung that deny or obscure the Real Presence, that promote false ecumenism, that reduce the Mass to a “celebration” of community rather than the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary, the faithful are not merely being offered bad music — they are being led into sacrilege and spiritual ruin.
There is no warning in the Register’s report that receiving “Communion” in post-conciliar structures, where the Mass has been reduced to a table of assembly and the rubrics violate the theology of the propitiatory sacrifice, constitutes sacrilege. There is no mention that the Novus Ordo Missae itself is suspect of heresy. There is no acknowledgment that the entire edifice of post-conciliar “worship” — including its music — is built on the ruins of the true Faith.
Instead, we are treated to a dispassionate report about a copyright dispute, as if the only question that matters is who owns the rights to a song. This is the conciliar sect in microcosm: utterly absorbed in the temporal, completely blind to the eternal.
Conclusion: The Inevitable Fruit of Apostasy
The dismissal of Vincent Ambrosetti’s lawsuit is, in the final analysis, a matter of complete indifference to the true Church. Whether Ambrosetti or Farrell “owns” a post-conciliar hymn is as relevant to the salvation of souls as whether a particular brand of incense is used in a temple of Baal. The real question — the only question that matters — is whether the faithful are being offered the true Mass, the true sacraments, and the true teaching of the Catholic Church.
They are not. The conciar sect offers a counterfeit liturgy, counterfeit sacraments, and counterfeit doctrine. Its “music” is a reflection of its spiritual bankruptcy. Its lawsuits are the inevitable consequence of its worldliness. And its continued existence as a dominant institution in the landscape of “Catholicism” is one of the great chastisements of our time — a sign that the warnings of Our Lady (if indeed the approved apparitions are to be trusted, which is itself doubtful given the Masonic operation “Fatima”) have gone unheeded, and that the structures occupying the Vatican have become, in the words of the Third Secret’s likely content, the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place (Matthew 24:15).
Let the conciliar sect litigate over its hymns. The true Church endures — in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, who offer or attend the true Mass of all time, and who await the restoration of all things in Christ the King.
Source:
Jury Dismisses Copyright Claim Brought by Catholic Composer Over 1980 Hymn (ncregister.com)
Date: 17.04.2026