English Hymns
This collection aims to amass the best hymns for use within the services of English speaking Catholics. It relies heavily on classic English contributions to hymnody, especially English (British) translations of Latin, German, and Greek texts. American contributions have not yet been thoroughly explored, principally because of copyright concerns.
Like every English language hymnal since the early 20th century, this collection is heavily indebted to the English Hymnal of 1906. Musically, it is hard to improve upon that volume, both in selection of tunes and in harmonizations. However, in selections culled from its pages, occasional variations have been made from its rhythms in favor of a more widely adopted rendering, especially in tunes from the psalter traditions.The texts are, as much as possible, presented in their original versions, the adaptions being found in many hymnals having been often rejected. However, in some instances, the original version bears little resemblance to that found in nearly all hymnals, and thus the traditional text has been used.
Use of the original texts has entailed the inclusion of gender-specific language, and a more ancient, perhaps hieratic, English. The former has been required by the Vatican of all translations from the sacred texts, and is clearly in keeping with the tradition of the sacred texts. Plus, such an inclusion avoids the politically correct linguistic hoop jumping that hymnary.org has endured in changing "God of our Fathers" to "God of the Ages." The latter issue, however, seems to be presently a matter of personal preference. It is, admittedly, very difficult to eliminate the older language from the hymns without completely destroying the poetry. In fact, even today, such a major music publisher as GIA, while changing quite a few gender-specific nouns and nearly all archaic wordings, refuses to alter certain extremely popular texts, leaving "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name" untouched. Thus, the texts presented here remain as they have traditionally been sung. On a few occasions, the original text, rather than the most common, has been used, the original carrying greater meaning or more depth.