Walther: “Unbelievable!” Salve regina in Ev. church?; Luther on Lutheran hymns

      This short blurb was spotted when processing the journals of the Old Missouri Synod. Walther gives us some history of this papal doctrine. — From Lehre und Wehre, vol. 20 (1874), p. 380 [EN]:

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Worship of Mary in the Evangelical Church. Yes, that is how it is. Unbelievable and yet true! The writer of this article has already noticed it repeatedly when he was in Leipzig and found the announcement among the church news in the Tageblatte [Daily News] that a “Salve regina” would also be sung as a motet at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon at Vespers in the St. Thomas Church. We calmed ourselves, however, by assuming that they had probably only used some famous composition of that old text, but had added a different text to it, since we could not believe that in a Evangelical church, and especially in Leipzig, a chant in which Mary is worshiped as the Queen of Heaven would be performed. But lo and behold, the other day we got hold of the musical text of the two motets which were performed on May 9 of this year in the Thomaskirche, and there again a "Salve regina" [Hail Holy Queen] by Robert Papperitz is mentioned as the second motet, and at the same time the whole text is printed, in which Mary is addressed as mater misericordiae, vitae dulcedo et spes nostra [mother of mercy, the sweetness of life and our hope], even as advocata nostra [Our advocate], and is invoked for her help. According to this, it is certain that in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, prayers are sometimes said to the Virgin Mary. If Pope Pius IX knew this, how he would rejoice, he, the great devotee of Mary, who raised her Immaculata conceptio to dogma and thus took her out of the ranks of the sinful children of men. (Sächsisches" Kirchen- und Schulblatt.) Also Luther once kept the beautiful melodies, which he found and with which papal idolatrous texts were decorated, but put purely evangelical texts under them. In his preface “auf die lateinischen und deutschen Begräbnißgesänge” (on the Latin and German funeral chants) of 1542, he writes of this: “The chant and the notes are precious, it would be a pity that they should perish; but unchristian and unrhymed are the text or words, which should perish. Therefore we strip such idolatrous, dead and mad texts and strip them out of their beautiful musica and put in place of them the living, holy Word of God to sing, praise and honor it with; so that such beautiful ornaments of musica serve their dear Creator and His Christians in the right way, so that He is praised and honored, but we are driven in the heart by His holy Word with sweet song, improved and strengthened in faith.” (See Luther's Works. Hall. A. Tom. XIV, 414 f. [StL 10, 1427 ff.]) Incidentally, the rationalistic sapless and powerless text of many of the more recent popular church choir hymns is not much better than a papist “Salve regina,” in addition to which the music that is supposed to decorate it is usually either a mindless tinkling, or of a thoroughly unchurchlike character. W. [C. F. W. Walther]

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I can only hope that this is not the case in any LC-MS congregation, but nothing surprises me about them now, especially with their Romanizing tendencies.