Some monks also worried that putting chants, which are, after all, prayers, into a commercial product amounted to a kind of profanity “like using Leonardo da Vinci as wallpaper,” in the words of one.

“There was a lot of concern at first that this would destroy the serenity of the monastery.” “I’m like a shield around my community,” said Father Wallner, who has been a monk for 26 years.

His cellphone, its ring tone set to chant, sings constantly. When not in prayer, he spends his days fielding calls from reporters as far away as New Zealand. Heiligenkreuz the name means Holy Cross has put one of its more worldly monks, Karl Wallner, in charge of public relations. Too late: the album has made the monks of Heiligenkreuz a crossover hit, the latest example of how Gregorian chant, a once-neglected 1,000-year-old part of the Roman Catholic liturgy, can be repackaged for a secular society that savors its soothing, otherworldly cadences. “We’re not pop stars, and we don’t want to be pop stars.” “We’re monks,” said Johannes Paul Chavanne, 25, a Viennese who entered the monastery after studying law and is training to be a priest. Now this monastery, where the daily rituals of prayer and work have guided life for 875 years, finds itself in a media whirligig at once exhilarating and unsettling for its 77 brothers. (The CD will be released in the United States on Tuesday.) 7 in the British pop charts, at one point outselling releases from Amy Winehouse and Madonna the trickle of press attention turned into a torrent. When the album, “Chant: Music for Paradise,” was released in Europe in May and shot to No. It has been like this since last spring, when word got out that the Cistercian monks of the Stift Heiligenkreuz, deep in the Vienna woods, had been signed by Universal Music to record an album of Gregorian chants. Their soft voices wash over the ancient stones, replacing the empty clatter of the day with something like the sound of eternity.Įxcept, that is, for the clicks of a camera held by a photographer lurking behind a stone pillar.

Wood carvings of saints peer down on them from the austere Romanesque nave.īells peal and the chant begins low at first, then swelling as all the monks join in. They line up in silence, facing each other in long choir stalls. HEILIGENKREUZ, Austria As noon draws near, the monks glide into the church, their white cowls billowing behind them.

Gregorian catholic chants music