If you haven’t pre-ordered your CD or digital copy yet, you can keep us performing strongly and even help us chart once the official release date hits! If you prefer other outlets outside of Amazon, several have gone live in recent days, and are listed below. Also, here’s a link to our FOURTH PROMOTIONAL VIDEO on Instagram.

Current retailers taking pre-orders:

Collector’s Choice Music

Barnes and Noble

Import CD’s.com

Deepdiscount.com

Amazon Digital. (current best price!)

Amazon CD

Thank you everyone!
-Mark

And now, as a special thanks, here is promo video #2! Thanks, and spread the word!
-Mark

Thanks for your support.
-Mark

While I promise to only send you emails a few times a year, I’ll be sending several emails to remind you about the stages of this album’s release, to announce new related social media posts, and to humbly request your support along the way.

(Don’t forget to follow my Instagram and my Facebook accounts for more posts!)

Before I tell you about the origins of the project, I’d like to share the original fundraising trailer we created which helped garner your support during the publication stage of the project, as I think it does a good job of representing the sound and spirit of our efforts:

A brief background of The Seven Last Words of Christ album:

After the premiere of Speravit anima mea in Domino for orchestra and soprano soloist at the 2022 Soni Spatium festival in Poland, I began an extended conversation with the director of the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard, Monika Konopczynska, who soon came back to me with an ambitious commission: a setting of the the seven last words of Christ from the cross for chamber orchestra and bass-baritone soloist. The timing was perfect as I was going on sabbatical, and seven months later I presented her with the score for this work, which would be premiered on a moody and chilly evening in March of 2024. This was the first concert I had ever experienced entirely featuring my music. As darkness set and the fire illuminated this ancient church, I found myself transported by the technical excellence and deep emotional investment of these wonderful musicians. The resulting recording would become the first work on this forthcoming album.

After this first concert, we immediately began to plan for a second premiere, which would become one of my most personal works - O Mater Dolorosa! - this time featuring the orchestra’s concert-master, Karolina Hyla-Wybraniec. It was a significant expansion of a piece about violence, tragedy and redemption (by the same name), commissioned by the Benedict XVI Institute as a work for violin and organ, and originally premiered by two inestimable musicians in their own right: Fiona Hughes and Ben LaPraire. When the Camerata’s Konopczynska began to speak to me about composing a work to feature a violin soloist, a process of discernment made me strongly suspect that O Mater Dolorosa! could be meaningfully expanded, and that the work could bear even deeper fruit. The existing work became the second movement of a new two-movement work, adding chamber strings and bass drum into the ensemble. I think both versions of the work are complete in their own right, with each representing a particular stage in the journey of grief and growth, just as the work itself does on a macro level. This would become the second recording on the forthcoming album.

The final recording on the album is of the work O Pieknosci Niestworzona — O Beauty Uncreated. Original commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Projekt Mozart festival in 2012, the assignment was to compose a contemporary work for choir and chamber orchestra using the same instrumentation as the featured work of the festival, Mozart’s Coronation Mass. At the time a financial shortage in the festival prevented a proper recording session, leaving us with only a tantalizing capture using an amateur handheld recorder. Knowing that I would once again have the opportunity to work with my friend and commissioning conductor Szymon Wyrzykowski for this last recording, we decided to bring back O Beauty Uncreated for the proper recording session we always envisioned for the piece. The work, which sets a beautiful text from the spiritual diary of St. Faustyna, has always been one of my favorites, and I am so glad that it can now conclude The Seven Last Words of Christ album. And while you wait for your copy to arrive, I can also share a luminous live performance from my time with the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard.

In the coming weeks I’ll write again to share details of the forthcoming release, and also to share purchase platforms as they become available. For now, it goes without saying that your purchase of an album in digital or physical form would represent the culmination of the efforts of many dedicated people. We thank you for your support in advance!

-Mark Nowakowski

The highlight of my fall was the somewhat unexpected inclusion of my recent choral work, Lacrimosa, in a concert at Carnegie Hall celebrating the 1000^th anniversary of the establishment of the Kingdom of Poland. My friends in the Sonus Cantus Chamber choir, under Katarzyna Ganczarska, did a truly beautiful job. Having shared this surreal moment, they then returned to Poland to complete a studio recording of the work which will be released as a single in the coming months. Stay tuned!

After this I enjoyed a number of performances of my Chesterton Carol, which much to my joy now seems to be performed annually as part of various Christmas programs. A particular highlight was this absolutely luminous interpretation by Maestro Steven Ottamanyi, leading his Cappella Musica of Saint Andrew Catholic Church, Old Pasadena, California:

Previous to these events, I had the great honor of speaking at the 2025 Catholic Art Institute National conference. My talk: “Beauty, Discernment, and the Creative Imperative: the Dignity of the Vocation of the Sacred Artist” is now available on youtube:

Also successful was our fundraising effort for my third CD, The Seven Last Words of Christ, undertaken alongside the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard. . We were thrilled to meet and healthily exceed our fundraising goals, and are currently working with the DUX label (North American distribution through Naxos) to coordinate a spring or early summer release: stay tuned!

I was also very pleased to continue my work as composer-in-residence with His Majesty’s Men. Last year when they premiered my “I am a Flower of Sharon”, I was very ill and could not travel to the premiere at St. John Cantius in Chicago. I was therefore thrilled to finally hear it live as they reprised the work at what could only be described as 2025’s Center of the Choral Universe: The Palestrina 500 Festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you haven’t heard the work, here it is!

I enjoyed as a composer being able to leave my comfortable confines and tackle the composition and music direction for the first episode of MOTA’s “Discover Tradition”, a travel documentary which begins its life during Holy Week in Spain: Semana Santa. Here is a sneak peak:

Much is planned for this coming year. Already I am working on a “Hymn for the Victims of Communism in Poland”, writing both music and text under commission from the Benedict XVI Institute. I am also working on a covert commission which I will reveal to you as soon as possible, along with new works for choir and orchestra.

Thank you as always for your support, and I hope that we may be rewarded with an early spring soon!

As always, if you’d like to contribute to my work, paid subscriptions to this substack are the easiest way to do so!

Subscribe now

-Mark Nowakowski

But is Beyonce really better than Elon Musk? Let’s strip away the clear personal character flaws of both individuals, and instead consider the way they have made their money. Beyonce is engaging in the crafting of music and messaging which, by its very definition, lacks musical integrity as a goal and is instead specifically designed to achieve and hold attention long enough for something to be purchased, or for streaming (or ad) revenue to take hold. She does not, like a real composer, obsess over the perfection of her craft or the seeking after moments of profound aesthetic connection or transcendence: like an internet floozy, she’s just chasing the next click.

She was the thirst trap before social media perfected thirst traps.

Pop music has perfected the art of convincing the masses that second-rate two-bit temporary entertainment — most often designed to generate sexual frustration (the most classic method of selling things, after all) — is the height of musical experience.
In the process of people like Beyonce becoming billionaires, we’ve become a culturally deracinated populace devoid of any real musical sense. We’re cogs in a profit machine.

This is exactly where the pop industry wants us, and now they want you to celebrate Beyonce’s ascendence into the billionaire club as some kind of image of an every-woman achieving her dreams. This is end point of girl power! The carefully-crafted story continues, while the puppeteers behind the scenes continue to become unimaginably rich and powerful through this exploitation of the real opiate of the masses.

Is Elon Musk really worse than Beyonce? Musk pays his valued employees well, and creates products of actual value. He rescued online discourse from one-sided political domination, and is the closest to actually sending a man to Mars. His employees build lives on their work. What has Beyonce done, despite skillfully exploit our mass psychosis to her own gain? (Indeed, if she has even done that, as opposed to being targeted for presentation because she aged well enough to be palatable?)

Which brings us to the topic of the industry’s traditional exploitation of women. As I regularly tell my students, the entertainment industry - including popular music - has now for decades used and exploited attractive young women to put a temporarily alluring face on their pursuit of ill-gotten gains. It is, unlike so much progressive fantasy-exploitation, a real “use and discard” type of situation. A young woman who finds herself in this crucible her two choices: total submission until she is “used up”, or stepping out of the way for the next Disney-trained girl waiting eagerly in line.

Recently (as my job requires some knowledge of the emerging music scene across many genres) I listened to the music of the young and (actually) talented Sofia Isella. What I heard were the often compelling crafted sonic landscapes brought to life by a skilled multi-instrumentalist and singer, and some really compelling compositional choices.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend Isella to my more sensible (and sensitive) readers, as her music contains frequent profanity and is sometimes guilty of the very things it criticizes: you cannot fight pornography with pornography. I also cannot agree with the core message of her music, which is feminist outrage directed towards the generation of even more feminist outrage. Yet she grows her fanbase because she seems, with utter sincerity, to have put her finger directly on a real pain point among young women. I cannot, for instance, help but see that she diagnoses a problem clearly when she sings:

Everything above the neck
Everything but the imitation of youth must be given up at the desk
Everything but the look that sells
You're twelve looking twenty, or you're twenty looking twelve
And you're tight, and you're baby, and you're sexy about it
And you're subtle and doe-eyed in a toddler's outfit
And her eyes are crossed and big and bright and bug
And she withers around like a salty slug
There's a beautiful balance to realize and reach
When the women act like both a child and a sex beast
Men are titillated by that delicate line
Between sex song and nursery rhyme
Over time, you'll not remember normalcy
Because normalcy is what you see repeatedly
So there will be nothing to miss
It must be so relieving for you to hear this

So what is Isella pointing to? It could easily be the type of “normalcy” achieved through the sexualization of an under-aged Britney Spears, or the just-not-explicitly pornographic meat-puppet presentation of a “almost a little girl” Sabrina Carpenter (who certainly “slithers around like a salty slug” and , soon enough, go the sad way of a Spears). It can also be about the clear sexualization of children, everywhere from the Disney channel to mainstream Netflix shows and movies. And finally there is the supposed libertine paradise - now aided by a slurry of apps — which has instead turned into a nightmare for young women and even (surprisingly) a nightmare for most young men. We now have a society where the top 10% of desirable young men are having their way with the young women desperately fighting over them, while these young men have no incentive to elect a longer-term mating strategy. What’s left in the wings are masses of women feeling justifiably exploited, and the majority of young men (who are not “it” enough to play this game) feeling increasingly rejected and justifiably frustrated. And as Dr. Jordan Peterson has aptly observed, the application of technology and social media to the attempted libertine paradise of an open sexual market is global in nature, taking away society’s natural ability to communally isolate the dark-triad narcissists who engage in such pursuits most skillfully. Now, the pursuits of the darkest among us have no natural borders, and the Isellas of the world are right to rage. And the growing division between feminst-influenced young women and Groyper-like young men? Entirely predictable.

A further aside from the main thrust of our conversation may be warranted: What Isella later sings about (in lyrics too explicit for me to post here) is male exploitation through the bizarre, pedophilic-adjacent content of so much online pornography, as well as the way many of these women present themselves as the just underage (or just old enough?) girl next door. But she then hits up the presentation of women in broader Hollywood, wondering for instance how a modern super-heroine could possibly effectively fight crime with half of her anatomy hanging out. Her lyrics hit at user and provider at once, and they are refreshingly honest even if their rightful biting mockery offers no solution. In other places, Isella — a modern, more edgy incarnation of a Fiona Apple — recycles feminist tropes and mocks religious people. And her musical choices, while not my cup of tea, are - unlike a Beyonce - musically intelligent and artistically respectable. Yet what this classically-trained violinist turned pop-phenom in her young age has not yet grasped is that it is precisely in social norms and religious tradition that the equilibrium she apparently wishes for can be found. For instance: Young Catholic women in traditionalist circles aren’t raging about being used and discarded, because they are not even attempting to navigate modern dating and the hook-up culture: they reject it entirely, and seek for men who do the same. That they are on average far happier than their atheist and liberal peers cannot be ignored. Of course they are: they are distancing themselves from the poisonous game, or rejecting it entirely. It’s not rocket science, though it is profoundly counter-cultural at the moment.

Back to the topic at hand: So what is a Beyonce? She’s certainly a survivor in an industry built on the exploitation of beautiful women. But she is no musician, as being a musician requires a deep training and commitment that she has not undertaken. Not knowing even the fundamentals of musical craft, she is at best a talented puppet and now herself a puppeteer of sorts, though it is difficult to discern the line between manipulation and manipulator from an impersonal distance. She is apparently a good businesswoman (itself not a virtue), as well as somebody shrewd enough to transcend the attempted exploitation of her very self. And she may well be the high-priced investment of the men in the shadows, willing to drop a paltry billion to direct attention elsewhere. And it is already a successful psy-op, as many are already celebrating her girl-power achievement, somehow missing the obvious nature of what is really happening before their very eyes.

This is the cultural thoughtlessness that the pop culture industry has inculcated in the masses over the past 60 years, and it depends on this ignorance to generate its substantial profit. The proof is ever before you: the modern internet provides no shortage of aesthetic choice, and music of real quality is only a click away. The best of the best has never been easier to reach for, and yet remains the same minority niche that it always was. In the meantime, the same types of sexualized tropes continue to dominate our mainstream aesthetic discourse, and the industry continues to maintain strong control despite of the choices available to everyone. It is indeed a psy-op, and it is also a mass-psychosis, all built upon our natural human tendency to go with the flow.

It is not a great achievement to enrich yourself on the backs of others. It is even worse to enrich yourself on the wave of mass psychosis now gripping our society. It is for such people, scripture warns, that millstones are made.

Enter Beyonce.

If recent history has taught us anything, it is that one interview given - or retracted - can change history. May God therefore reward Dr. K, and may he protect him from the spiritual retribution which will doubtless come.

From now on and into the long foreseeable future, if ever I meet a Catholic of good will who is either captured by some aspect of modernism or leery of the return to tradition, I will simply send them this episode. It is truly that brilliant. It’s all there.

And what of those Catholics who are the denizens of such confusion? What of the authors of America magazine, or those who would like to explain to the rest of us where Peter is? I am simply done with them. Let God sort them out. Let their cause fade away, even if we are doomed to the slowest fade-away possible. They cannot win.

And I’ll tell you where Peter is: he is in this interview, talking about the rightful barque which he loves.

One must always remember the Jews in the desert, heading towards the promised land. They became proud, entitled, and grumbled ceaselessly, and so God sent them through another spin through the desert until the corrupt generation died away. I feel that we are in another spin in the desert, and the proper attitudes in response are not grumbling, but rather filial love and ceaseless spiritual striving.

Either the world will end, or tradition will re-emerge triumphant in the Church (even if the manner and form of this reemergence shocks everyone along the way, as I suspect it will). Personally, I see no other way.

Second, we’re less than 400 dollars away from our fundraising goal to release “The Seven Last Words of Christ” album to the world! Please, if you haven’t contributed yet, do so now!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-support-mark-nowakowskis-third-album?lid=uhuy7ry7mw4k&utm_source=product&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TXN_donation_alert&utm_content=fundraiser_page

Thank you for reading these additional messages. I won’t write again until my fall update, so I wish you all well!

-Mark Nowakowski

Thanks to your generosity, we are only 700 dollars away from our fundraising goal to release “Seven Last Words” to the world. Can you contribute today and help us reach our goal? Any money above the 5K will be used to increase the quality of the release through deeper printing options, advertising, and travel.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/please-support-mark-nowakowskis-third-album?lid=uhuy7ry7mw4k&utm_source=product&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TXN_donation_alert&utm_content=fundraiser_page

-Mark Nowakowski

I know that with your help, we can do it again and maybe even surpass our previous effort. For my part, my work with the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard has been the most rewarding collaboration of my career, and the performances they have captured are deeply considered and sizzling with energy.

Second, I’m now confirmed as a speaker for the 6th annual Catholic Art Institute National Conference in Washington, DC! My talk — The Dignity of the Vocation of the Sacred Artist — will take place on the first evening of the conference. The speaker list is terrific, so I would encourage you to register and attend. I hope to personally meet you there. Please click here for more information and to register!

Finally: His Majesty’s Men are coming back to the United States, and they will be reprising my piece “I am a Flower of Sharon” for two nights in August, as part of yet another luminous and far-reaching program. This year’s concerts will be:

As part of the Palestrina 500 celebration: Grand Rapids, Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, Friday August 15. Choral Meditation 5:30; Traditional Latin Mass at 7 with music by Palestrina.

Saturday, August 16 in Chicago, 7:30 pm at St Rita's Church, 5500 N. Broadway.

Stay tuned for more news, and please share our album fundraiser with your music-loving friends!

sincerely,
-Mark Nowakowski

(Please consider also following me on Twitter/X and Instagram!)

All the way back in December (yes, I promised I wouldn’t spam your inboxes!) I received the video for my final residency project with the Stargard Orkiestra Camerata: “O Beauty Uncreated!” A brief backstory to the work: Back in 2012, my dear collaborator Szymon Wyrzykowski invited me to set words by St. Faustyna Kowalska to a work for choir and chamber orchestra for the tenth anniversary of his “Projekt Mozart” festival, to be paired with a liturgical presentation of Mozart’s Coronation symphony. While the festival and performances of the work across Poland were a great success, a perfect storm of confluences prevented us from getting a satisfactory recording of the work. That is why, when given the choice of pieces to put before Szymon again as part of his Soni Spatium Festival, I decided to resurrect this favorite work of mine (with some revisions, of course!) The performing ensemble here is the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard, the Chor Omnia Slovakia, and members of Szymon’s own wonderful “Chaps” choir from Szczecin. This time, despite several opportunities for disaster, they managed a wonderful performance and recording which I am thrilled to share with you all. We’ve also learned from the past and placed subtitles to the work, so that non-Polish speakers can understand the text (St. Faustyna’s diary, #342-343).

Immediately upon returning from this trip to Poland, I dove headlong into something much different: a commission from the Stony Brook University Premieres series. For 35 years they have been inviting composers for noteworthy premieres, and I was honored to join this year’s cohort. I decided to give in to my longstanding interest in the work and music of St. Hildegard of Bingen, and write a five-movement work for Pierrot ensemble & percussion titled “Hildegard Songs.” The program notes follow:

”In recent years I’ve spent a fair deal of time drawing in influence and orientation from ancient writers and mystics – Augustine, Boethius, the classical philosophers – and trying to see how they approached the idea of Beauty in their work. This research is primarily driven by the unrelenting sense that – despite our modern capacities – we have lost something essential regarding beauty, creativity, and perception in modern times. St. Hildegard of Bingen is the first of such figures whose work I spent time with, and she struck me as a fitting subject for this foray into composing for Pierrot Ensemble. I also felt that the work of Hildegard – which moved from intimately focused music to shattering apocalyptic visions – matched well with the Pierrot Ensemble’s breadth and capabilities, able to move from the smallest and gentlest gestures of chamber music to a near orchestral heft. The inspiration for the work is drawn from a number of areas. The first movement imagines Hildegard at her morning prayer (Lauds), when the first of her monumental “Scivias” visions take hold. What became known as “The Iron Mountain” is a deep meditation on ontological finality and the troubled yet hopeful path of man. Movement 2 – O Virtus Sapiente – is based on Hildegard’s composition of that same name, and contains the most obvious musical quotation in the work. The title for Movement 3 – For the eye rages, the nose robs, the mouth kills – is taken from Hildegard’s letter to Pope Anatasius in 1153/54, where she strongly chastises the Pontiff for ineffectual leadership and the keeping of evil company (something, as a Catholic, that I saw as analogous to our modern situation in early 2025). Movements 4 and 5 are meditations upon meditation: Herein I imagine the headstrong, brilliant, and yet appropriately humble visionary Hildegard first in deep repose, contemplating the visions and responsibilities which have come her way, while the final movement is the active and positive application "outwards" into what would ultimately be remembered as an astonishingly fruitful, faithful, and creative life.”

Currently I am working on two new choral works. The first is a commission from the Church Music Association of America for inclusion in their forthcoming new three-voice Book of Motets. The second is a commission by the BXVI Institute - in collaboration with Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation - to compose a poem and musical hymn in memory of the victims of Communism in Poland.

Finally, I am putting the final production touches on my third commercial album, the result of the past year of collaboration with the Stargard Orkiestra Camerata. I’ll be writing soon to let you know how to be a part of this project!

As always I appreciate your subscribing to this newsletter, and the support you offer my work. If you like the music, please share it! And if you feel compelled to support the arts in a very concrete and real way, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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All the best to you in these summer months!

My graduate school years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, were especially formative. Although I originally hail from Chicago, it was Colorado that felt like the bigger world to me—not just because of the accomplishment and challenge of navigating a large, well-established university program. For a flatlander, the towering peaks of the mythical western horizon awakened something entirely unexpected in my soul. At the time, I was only beginning to explore the idea of a vocation in music composition. The concepts that now shape my daily life were then nothing more than blurred edges, always seeming just out of reach. If anything, the breathtaking natural landscape lifted my thoughts higher, toward God, as John Paul II once observed. This spiritual elevation helped me endure the persistent gap between moving in what felt like the right direction in life and yet continually falling short in the vocational tasks I set for myself.

As a student and artist, this was also the first time I had a faculty member attack me for my faith and politics, while the vigorous defense a brilliant violinist friend helped me craft resulted in two things: a newfound love of philosophical argumentation, and a lifelong friend. Later, when I ran afoul of an administrator for reasons I today still cannot understand, the professor who originally attacked me came to my defense. It was a textbook case of earning respect by standing up for yourself and telling the truth, while remaining the easiest person to deal with in any room. (And yes, it seems from this paragraph that I am trouble-maker, but I assure you that is not the case. This Dean was a troublesome personality who would later be dismissed for sexual harassment, and this would not be the last time I’d attract the ire of such a compromised bully.)

This was also my first brush with a western forest fire: I still remember the fall night where the entire western horizon of Boulder glowed orange, and yet the locals seemed entirely nonplussed. Recent scenes from Los Angeles also bring this memory vigorously back to me.

It was also a time where I continued to prayerfully discern whether or not to become a composer, something which involved an often painful reaching towards ideas that seemed like they could be mine, and yet often eluded me. It is good that I lived alone at this time, as there is something monastic about this daily searching self-abasement, this regular alternation between intense searching work and contemplative reflection.

There was finally a Pierrot piece that came through which seemed to have “it” somehow, and which my professors recognized as such. And then one evening, as I was sitting on my balcony, the entire world seemed to go silent as a beautiful snowfall began. It was a brief moment of transcendence, and I spontaneously wrote this short poem as I sat there:

In the night
I still my breathing
In the night and stillness
In the night I hear the snow falling
Gently coming to rest on virgin fields of white
It is the whisper of God
As He stoops to kiss the earth
lovingly, and for a moment
making it pure and whole
In the night

I didn’t think it would win any awards for poetry, but it certainly captured the moment for me, while the words came immediately with music in tow. This ultimately lead to my first premiered choral composition, a piece for SSAA women’s choir titled “Snow.” I include a nicer recording later done by Vox Musica of Sacramento. It’s an interesting piece for me to listen to today, as the tonal language is rather different from that which I came to develop, and reveals perhaps an early infatuation with composers like Eric Whitacre. I think it mostly works, though I remain tempted to go back and tinker the ending (should works from 20 years ago be revised?)

Later in Boulder I would have the experience - thanks to “Saint” Nadia Boulanger - that would seal my creative vocation, but that is a story to tell another time. For now, I leave you with “Snow”.

St. Hildegard has also unfortunately been frequently adopted by modern moral dissidents — including radical feminists — due to her penchant to lecture the powerful male leaders of her time (including emperors and Popes.) Others wonder if her astounding visions were due to lead poisoning or even strong migraine headaches. Of course such ideological attributions reveal not only a lack of knowledge about the Catholic faith, its hierarchical structure, and its core contemplative spirituality: they often emerge from a lack of spiritual experience itself. (Hang out around people of the spirit long enough, and you’ll see things which makes the words of Hildegard shockingly ordinary.)

Such modern readings also fail to notice the deep theological roots of Hildegard’s sometimes scathing criticisms, while missing the most important point: she does not speak from herself as some kind of 12th century version of an emancipated woman: Rather, she speaks from a deep font of humility, the same deep font of prayerful humility which I believe allowed her to access both her visions and her astounding creativity (including her wonderful work as a composer).

Modern critics also miss that during the supposedly “most misogynistic time ever (TM)”, Popes and Emperors not only corresponded with the Sybil of the Rhine, but humbly accepted her guidance and sometimes fierce criticisms. Hildegard was, I am quite certain, drawing on a well of divine fire, and the authorities of her time recognized this and (whatever their manifest faults) took their deserved scoldings in a similar public posture of humility.

She was also not blind to the corruption of her time, and did not measure her Catholicity by her ability to contort herself into any conceptual pretzel necessary to pretend that orthodoxy still reigned. She rather centered herself in Christ, and judged the good and bad of her days accordingly.

I’ve recently received some email pushback for some brief comments about the corruption of the current Papacy. Since that time, the Pope has nominated one of America’s most radically progressive Bishops — Robert W. McElroy — as the Archbishop of the important Washington archdiocese. A strong supporter of revising Catholic teaching on sexuality in ways entirely incompatible with revelation, and somebody who certainly fits the Francis model of Jesuit Casuistry (that same Casuistry which has decimated the Church), he is also accused of covering up sexual abuse cases and of sweeping one of the most heinous cases I’ve ever heard of under the political rug.

This is certainly par for the course for this lavenderite Papacy which raises men like Blaise Cupich and James Martin as spiritual exemplars while demoting and passing over the very men most deserving of promotion. Yet in the time I’ve been spending with Hildegard these past few months, I could not help but read her scathing letters to Popes as if they were written this past week. Take, for instance, this letter to Pope Anastasius from around 1154. Writing to an old man elected in his 80’s, she says:

“You, O man, who are too tired, in the eyes of your knowledge, to rein in the pomposity of arrogance among those placed in your bosom, why do you not call back the shipwrecked who cannot rise from the depths without help? And why do you not cut off the root of evil which is choking out the good and beneficial plants of sweet taste and delightful aroma? You are neglecting the King’s daughter who was entrusted to you, that is, heavenly Justice herself. You are allowing the King’s daughter to be thrown to the ground: her beautiful crown and tunic torn asunder by the crudeness of those hostile people who back like dogs and who, like chickens trying to sing at night, raise up their ineffectual voices. … Why do you put up with depraved people who are blinded by foolishness and who delight in harmful things, like a hen which cackles in the night and terrifies herself? Such people are completely useless.”

and more:

”And you, O Rome, when you are lying at the point of death, you will be so shaken that the strength of your feet, upon which you have stood so far, will no longer sustain you.”

And yet chastisement is always met with hope:

”Yet the high mountains will offer help to you still, raising you up and supporting you with the branches of lofty trees, so that your nobility (that is, the majesty of your betrothal to Christ) will not be completely destroyed.”

Refusing to cut off evil? Silly men like cackling chickens? A leadership in mortal danger? Indeed, you could have written it this morning. McElroy, when asked about pressing matters for the Church, responded that “climate change” is near the top of the list. That these men are parodies of themselves — singing chickens in the night — seems not to occur to them.

Or to Pope Hadrian:

”He who gives life to the living says: O man, because you allow the fierce rage of she-lions and the mighty strength of leopards, you will fall victim to them yourself, and you will come to realize that there is shipwreck in the capture of booty, because you heave been given to all those who run to you in weariness. But you have an intelligence keen enough to confront the fierce character of men, and by raging against them, you will rein in those careening horses which never leave off running down the paths of plunder.”

And then, the spirit of humility and acknowledgment of spiritual authority well-exercised when writing to Pope Alexander III:

”Now, O gentlest father, my sister and I bend our knees before your paternal piety, praying that you deign to regard the poverty of this poor little woman. We are in great distress…”

It’s stunning and fascinating reading. See for yourself: the letters start on page 43.

One can only imagine what would happen to a modern-day Hildegard: The good Abbess would lack no shortage of absurdities to chastise. Certainly she’d be removed from her position of authority, banished, and ultimately mocked by the same journalists who take joy in the downfall of every good Priest and Bishop under this papacy. That her sanity would be questioned and her good will maligned is without question. Her goodness and the rightness of her visions would largely fall on deaf ears. In many ways, Hildegard was lucky to live in the 12th century.

And yet in an age where the sycophants and water-boys of the current order insist on near Papal impeccability which demands “complete docility” of reception as the only properly Catholic response — including to those decisions which send absolute corruption into vital seats of ecclesial power — we are reminded that the criticism of spiritual authority, along with the presence of deep corruption in the Papacy — is nothing new.

Of course before any of us dare to write with such vicious rebuke to a Pope, we must first imitate Hildegard’s humility and docility in the face of spiritual authority. And we must be willing and even more frequent to offer praise and support to good prelates, working in clever and fruitful ways to elevate their missions. Hildegard’s letters of praise and encouragement certainly outnumber her letters of condemnation.

We end with Hildegard’s guiding words to the shepherds of the Church.

”O my children, who you feed my flocks as the Lord commanded, why do you not blush, since none of the creatures desert the precepts they received from the Master but, rather, bring them to perfection? I set you like the sun and the other luminaries so that you might bring light to people through the fire of doctrine, shining in good reputation and setting hearts ablaze with zeal.”

Good fathers: give us fire.

For years now, I’ve staked my small part in this battle on the power of traditional Beauty — Beauty as a spiritual discipline — to be the wind in the sails of positive cultural change. As part of this journey, I’ve been honored to serve on the Board of Directors for the Catholic Art Institute. This organization — founded in the storied center of beauty and liturgical renewal that is St. John Cantius church — has flowered to have an international presence and is responsible for bringing together and networking the once scattered voices of Catholic creativity throughout the world. The result is that we’ve discovered that not only is beauty not lost or hopelessly rare in this plastic world of ours: rather, we have an astounding bounty of Catholic artists of the highest quality, enough to even give us hope that a real second renaissance could be possible.

Don’t believe me? Just browse this years winners and runners up in the annual Sacred Art Prize: https://www.catholicartinstitute.org/sacredartprize2024

Therefore as this year closes, I kindly ask you to consider making any gift, big or small, to the vital efforts of this amazing organization. It’s rare that you can be confident that your donations may go immediately towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, but this is certainly the case where the CAI is concerned.

Please, be a part of the solution: donate today!

And as you discern your donation, here is a snippet of the other incredible efforts being undertaken by the Catholic Art Institute. If an organization like this thrives, then both church and wider culture will benefit immeasurably.

Merry Christmas!
-Mark Nowakowski

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The paradoxical freedom of organized religion, and surviving a time of uncharitable unclarity

One of the key things which brought me out of agnosticism and back into Catholicism as a young man was what seemed to me a paradoxical realization at that time. Years of intellectual inquiry - and asking the questions that often made my family and friends uncomfortable at our various gatherings (yes, I was that guy) - helped me to see that the supposed freedom of modern secular living was breeding the most intolerable of herd mentalities, while the supposed strictures of this “organized religion” were actually the guide-rails to free, independent, and aspirational thought.

At the time I knew very little about the Church’s history of beauty outside of the small sampling of sacred music that I had studied as a young composer. While I certainly believed in a God and prayed in a sense daily, I also was not yet cognizant of why Christ was an unavoidable necessity in the human story. But it was precisely the Church’s intellectual tradition, and a handful of its modern teachers who presented it clearly and without apology, that brought me in for a second, third, and ultimately a final look. Simply put, the world had nothing like it.

In the intervening 23 years, the “intolerable herd mentality” I mentioned has taken shape into a monstrosity that even my pessimistic and dystopian young imagination could not have foreseen, while the Church - at least at her traditional core - remains a lone bastion. In our time, the only organization which will give you a picture of human dignity daring in its breadth and clarity is the Catholic Church. For example, concurrent with various hot-button “culture war” issues, the only place where you can have an ideologically unencumbered discussion about the full import, meaning, and ontological orientation of human sexuality is in the Church. Outsiders may scoff, but the fact remains that for a well-read Catholic, modern secular talk about gender and sexuality is painful and eye-roll inducing, because it always reveals an unread ignorance which often culminates in a hormonally-driven narcissism. In reality, there is no “culture war” — there is only an island of sane clarity, and around it the waters sometimes come to a boil. And here we are.

The Church’s intellectual clarity is part of her mission and her strength, which is why so many faithful Catholics these days find the Francis papacy to be so distressing. I think that we can charitably form a picture of a pontiff who really is deeply concerned with those at the peripheries. Yet in seeking lost sheep, the shepherd must remain a shepherd, and cannot stop thinking about the sheep he has temporarily left behind to find the lost ones. In this particular case, the method of engaging the peripheries has often involved a blurring of moral boundaries and concomitant Jesuit casuistry, which have proven to be poor methods of engagement indeed. The lack of clarity is never the beginning of charity.

Clarity is charity.

This is something I always remind myself of, especially as I have a naturally diplomatic personality which is often ready to hem and haw and compromise in order to bring order and direction to a situation. For those who prefer to cook with honey rather than vinegar, we must remember that unclarity is the equivalent of cooking with gall.

One of the most distressing aspects of this current Papacy is how it has excluded many of the brightest leaders in the Church, and in their stead brought in previously exiled people from the intellectual margins. Perhaps this is just another of Francis’s attempts to bring in the marginalized and make sure that all are heard. Yet margins exist for a reason, and when one brings margins to the center, chaos occurs. In this case, the type of thinking which sought to bring secular terminology into Catholic conversations — shaping the Church into the world’s mold as opposed to boldly Christifying the nations — has now taken center stage in the most distressing of ways. And as is almost always the case, those Christians who “wish to find people where they are” have little plan of where they actually want to get them, while this “lost sheep” mentality often is merely cover for the attempt to conform the ecclesia to the koinos.

Recently we saw a day of Jubilee for 2025 be declared for “LGBTQ persons” on the Vatican website, one which was summarily deleted and denied once the appropriate uproar occurred. To those outside of the ecclesia who live in the mind of the world, this might seem hateful to that particular group of people. Yet it is nothing of the such. For the Church, it remains essential to define and steer the conversation towards charitable clarity, and this cannot be done using a terminology which normalizes and embraces various forms of ideological confusion. You do not help the heroine addict, for instance, by labeling them a heroine addict. You help them by insisting on their God-given and immutable - and yes, eternal - dignity. This is why 12-step programs begin with an essential metaphysical reorientation, and why they are successful. As great as 12-step programs are, the Church has something much better to offer, and she forgets this identity at her own peril.

Meanwhile in the world, there is no shortage of contradiction in supposed freedom. This past week, I was struck by how many of the same people who demanded obedience to the apparent omniscience now cheered as a vigilante shot down the CEO of a Health Insurance company. Or how the press cheered the freeing of Syrian prisoners with the fall of Assad, failing to mention that the liberators would soon have full prisons of their own. Such confusion arises when one lacks a clear intellectual center, as such a center is necessary to live with clarity in a world where taking sides isn’t always a moral option.

I return to the early days of my reversion, when I attended a painfully rendered modern mass at our local Newman chapel. The building was horrifically ugly, the music clanged away with misplaced juvenile enthusiasm, and I found the entire process mostly horrifying. I was back in the Church that I had rejected years ago, and much of it behaved in the way that disgusted me back then. Yet I intuited that I had a responsibility to be there, and so — outside of the homily and consecration — I mostly focused on a single small beautiful icon of what I later learned was Our Lady of Perpetual help. I didn’t know yet about the traditional mass or the rising tide of beauty taking shape in our Church. The uglier things became, the more I focused on that beautiful small icon, losing myself in our Mother’s presence until the consecration came.

A few years later, in prayer, I wrote what would be my first sacred peace: a setting of the Ave Maris Stella. It became a part of my private prayer, and I only attempted a choral setting two years ago for His Majesty’s Men. At that time I also — driven by my experiences in a Paulist-run church — discovered the vital movement of traditionalism in the Church, and along with it the still scattered and disorganized but growing renaissance of traditional North American Catholic artists and creatives. The work is posted below.

Nor could I imagine working with an organization like the Catholic Art Institute, and the types of beautiful works on display in their annual national art competition. Just look at this gallery of winners and honorable mentions - look at what the modern Catholic imagination is creating!

https://www.catholicartinstitute.org/sacredartprize2024?utm_campaign=fe911b3a-f83f-40b2-89b2-e16c303f73a0&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail&cid=268354b6-7f4c-4d9c-ba0a-edca2fcff114

Clearly, there is great beauty to be found in this time of hunger.

For those who felt the renaissance about to dawn under the guidance of Benedict XVI, the regression under Francis has been beyond distressing. The dissenters, experiments, and clowns at the periphery have indeed taken the citadel. But we must remember that their grip hangs on a single unhealthy lung, while word reaches me that the discontent from this time has suffused even more liberal members of long-term Church leadership. It is unlikely that we will have to endure a Francis the Second, but in the event that we do, then this time in the desert should be pursued fruitfully: in mortification, the growth of patience, the cultivation of a (very) long-term vision, and the pursuit of Beauty Himself.

We cannot expect a world which crucified the perfect man to immediately embrace the wonders of truth, beauty, and goodness so quickly, and we cannot expect a church which has become drunk on the spirit of the world to remember her identity overnight. Not even a hero Pope could accomplish this in short order.

The transformation of societies from goodness to chaos can happen in a heartbeat, as we have all just witnessed. Building goodness is comparatively difficult and by nature an uphill, generational slog. Meanwhile the one “who makes all things new” works on His own timeline.

A blessed Advent to you.

The late summer and fall has continued a flurry of activities for me, headlined by the conclusion of my residency with the Orkiestra Camerata Stargard. We were joined this time by conductor Szymon Wyrzykowski, members of his choir, and the excellent help of the OMNIA choir from Slovakia.

During this last weekend together, we recorded one of my favorite works, the long-dormant setting of St. Faustyna’s text “O Beauty Uncreated.” The youtube video for this is in the works, though I can instead happily share the recent youtube premiere of my second collaboration with this fine ensemble, the world premiere of my “O Mater Dolorosa!” for solo violin and chamber orchestra with organ:

What remains now is my own work editing and producing the commercial album we hope to release of our fruitful and joyous collaboration: please stay tuned for more information.

A few weeks before this, I continued my work as composer-in-residence with His Majesty’s Men, this time with a shorter work setting Song of Songs 2:1-2, “I am a Flower of Sharon”:

If you enjoyed this particular performance, I can also direct your attention back to their excellent performance of my “Ave Maris Stella” last fall:

The late fall and winter will continue a flurry of exciting projects, while I will soon let you know about an exciting opportunity to be a part of my next album release.

In the meantime, I would like to thank you all for subscribing, for your support, and wish you a most beautiful onset of the colorful season.

-Sincerely,

Mark Nowakowski

***
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This year’s conference is moving from Chicago to Washington, DC, and I would hope those of you who are able would help us to make it yet another smashing success. Ticket sales end September 20th. Below I place a link to the conference website, as well as a link to an article I wrote for onepeterfive about the conference as a whole. These events have become a deeply personal place of celebration and renewal for me, and I cordially invite you to join me in this vital event about this most needed work.

If you happen to register, please reach out and ask to be seated at my banquet table.

Thank you!

-Mark Nowakowski

https://www.catholicartinstitute.org/conference2024

https://onepeterfive.com/traditional-catholic-art-conference-moves-to-dc/