I am finally getting around to a proper look at The New Living Parish Hymnbook that I bought at a Lifeline booksale many years ago.
Published in 1987 and edited by Father John de Luca it comes from an astonishingly fruitful time for Catholic hymnals in Australia. We had the Catholic Worship Book, Gather Australia, the Praise to God Parish Hymnal and As One Voice all published within ten years of each other.
I have never had an old Living Parish hymn book but this is his new one.
The more I look at the sheet music, the more amazing Father John de Luca’s acheivement was. He only died in 2023 and sadly looking at his legacy on Google, I found AI scraping an old post of mine about him, which is kind of useless.
His home organ did look great.
There were tributes at his death:
Fr John is the eldest of six children who grew up in Coogee.
It is with sadness that I advise of the death of Fr John de Luca.
Fr John passed away today, 18th January 2023 at his home in Little Bay. He was 80 years of age.
Fr John was born in Randwick on 19th May 1942. He was a seminarian at St Columba’s College, Springwood and St Patrick’s College, Manly and was ordained to the priesthood on 16th July 1966 at St Mary’s Cathedral by Cardinal Gilroy.
He served as Assistant Priest at Surry Hills (1966), Chaplain to the Christian Brothers’ Training College at Strathfield (1968), Assistant Priest at the Cathedral (1970), Assistant and then Administrator at Mona Vale (1977) Asquith (1984), Matraville (1985) before being appointed Parish Priest of Revesby (1992). He then served further terms as Administrator of Drummoyne (1995) and as Parish Priest of Maroubra Bay / Beach (1995) before retiring to lesser duties in October of 2007.
There is a lengthy Golden Jubilee homily he gave that mentions his music only in passing:
The thing that is special about this hymnal apart from its clear layout and occasional guitar chords provided by Chris Wilson, are his arrangments. Even with folk mass material he was not content to leave things rudimentary when the music could be enhanced. One idiosyncrasy of the good Father was that all titles are the first lines of the song.
I will likely cover every song here, mainly because of his arrangements, but also because many of the traditional songs are worth another look and better backings. There will be a lot of wind up BIAB church organ, but I have been making a fuller sound of late.
I gather the publisher went bankrupt and the hymnal is sadly, like most other Australian hymn books, AOV excepted, out of print. I can’t find second hand copies anywhere but have a look in old storerooms in the church hall, you never know your luck.
Be mindful that many of the hymns in this book have variations, owing to some of the source material, including Faber Music’s New Catholic Hymnal (wah) and the OG Living Parish Hymnal (yay).
What I really like are the fact that the good old Latin hymns and chants are in there, together with singable translations. They aren’t the *best* , but it is really helpful to have.
The People’s book is a words only version, alphabetically ordered, with the title with the number. Having the first line as a title is one of the things I’d say come from a hymn tradition, but it does annoy me to have it repeated so much. OG living Parish did it much better by going straight to the verse, unless there was a title, where it was suggested in italic text.
This is one of the best hymnals around in my opinion, and it has so many things going for it.
Gio
Do you think there are many copies of it floating around these days?
Geoff
I managed to snag a copy of the people’s book. It’s falling apart cos they were all paperback.
There’s a parish I know that was really lucky to get a small horde of them, which was far more appropriate than the red Adoremus Hymnal from America.
I’ve seen Kevin Mayhew’s Hymns Old And New (1979) appear more often, and then the fancier parishes would have had CWB, and then Glory & Praise for the folksier peoples. Seeing that As One Voice was so widespread when it came out, I feel people would have been more used to that type of music.
The sequel is never as popular as the first.
Lke a lot
I fully agree with your comments about the arrangements. I’m particularly impressed that a lot of the chant hymns have arrangements that work well on piano; not a strength of CWB2! It’s also bound a lot better than CWB2 and lies flat! The whole project was very accessible with the paperback hymnals being quite cheap – if I remember correctly, you could purchase the books with or without a protective plastic over-cover. I was introduced to this in a small country parish back in the 80s, but I can’t recall it being widely used elsewhere.