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.