Project Details
Projekt
“This could be just right for the sweaters of the world…” Sacro-Pop as young Catholic’s criticism of society and church
Applicant
Professor Dr. Andreas Holzem
Subject Area
Roman Catholic Theology
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410907407
Among other media, the struggle between the first- and second-generation of and after World War II was fought out in the field of music. By many Catholics born in the 1920s and 1930s, Jazz was racist denunciated as ‚nigger music‘. Rock and Pop were conceived as inappropriate for liturgy and as an ‚Americanization‘ of German culture. So this music was conceived as a medium of protest and provocation.Recent research was concentrated on (church) politics and history of theology. Music and its texts among Catholic youth culture haven’t been seen worth more than a marginal note. But for the semantics, the practice and the emotions of a whole generation of adolescents and young adults the Sacro-pop musicals, the new forms of worship in youth services, the group culture within the Catholic youth associations (BDKJ), their engagement in the peace- and environmental-movements, early NGOs triggered by the Latin American “Theology of liberation” had a ground-breaking effect to invent Catholicism in a new way.This research project analyses the production, performance, and reception of Sacro Pop, including its controversial discussion, within the following three dimensions: 1. Texts – 2. Music – 3. Critical discourse.1. Texts: Sacro-Pop musicals, in a provoking way, combined intrinsic patterns of traditional religious language with the topics of coeval politics: peace, global justice, ecology, sexuality. In this vein, Sacro Pop was a significant medium of a new, left winged Catholic identity. 2. Music: As the texts, the music has been controversial from the very beginning. For the composers, the musicians and the fans, it was an implementation of II. Vatican’s ‘aggiornamento’, a contribution to the emphatic notion of “recognizing the signs of the times”. Conservatives, instead, were convinced to listen to music unsuitable for ‘real’ worship.3. Discourse: In the middle of the 1960s, already, the adversaries of Sacro-Pop formed a massive front of disaffirmation and denunciation. They claimed a point of view that it had been their generation and their religious style, being able to resist against Hitler and Nazi Germany, surviving the Third Reich without contamination, mastering the rebuilding of Western Germany after 1945. Sacro-Pop, instead, shaped and expressed the identity of those groups, who threatened this self-sufficient standpoint by emphasizing their deep unrest.
DFG Programme
Research Units
