By Jim Davis - Florida Catholic
MIAMI |The Feb. 25 Miami festival at St. Mary Cathedral was the first of 15 scheduled by Pueri Cantores around the U.S.: from Los Angeles to Chicago to Houston to New York. The only other Florida site this year will be Sts. Peter and Paul Church, Winter Park, on April 29.
The American Federation Pueri Cantores has its roots in France, where a priest named Father Fernand Maillet began bringing Les Petits Chanteurs la Croix de Bois (The Little Singers of the Wooden Cross) to various towns around 1917.
Other nations began growing their own youth choirs, and in 1947 Father Maillet formed the federation known as Pueri Cantores. There are now 37 national federations.
Jan Schmidt, executive director of the American federation, spelled out the group's goals:
- To evangelize students through music.
- To broaden the academic base of sacred music teaching in Catholic schools. "You have to teach it from a historical standpoint," Schmidt said. "You don’t just teach one style since 2000."
- To create leadership among Catholic youth. "Many young choir members end up leading in the Church," Schmidt said. "They’ve been conditioned to it."
The American federation, based in Orange, Calif., was launched in 1953, but it took a sharp downturn after Vatican II, caused by changing musical tastes and relaxed worship guidelines of Vatican II.
"Music swung very much toward the casual," Schmidt said. The federation only started to recover about a dozen years ago, she said.
Now the organization aims to get about 10,000 singers involved, or one percent of the one million students in Catholic middle and high schools. And the Miami archdiocese has the potential to become one of the largest groups, Schmidt added.
