Thankfully, there are no carols about that. A friend of Neale’s had given him an old Catholic hymnal from the 1500s, where he found the tune. He then took a story he had written earlier about We ...

Catholic hymnody has a less happy history. I have an old Pius X hymnal and it is filled with hymns, mostly to the saints and the blessed mother, that can generously be described as saccharine.