Emma Lynch, the new music director at Saint Thomas Aquinas in Indianola, joins the Catholic Morning Show to explain why music at Mass is ministry rather than a soundtrack. A sacred music graduate of the University of Mary, Emma unpacks the incarnational logic behind singing at Mass — that it engages the body, expresses belief, and strengthens the faith it expresses — and why forming musicians spiritually matters as much as rehearsing them. She also talks through the practical realities of stepping into a parish job at 22 and points listeners toward the Church documents and local associations that can deepen anyone's understanding of sacred music.
Emma Lynch, newly installed as music director at Saint Thomas Aquinas in Indianola — and a former student of Bo Bonner's — joins the show as part of what's looking more and more like a genuine revival of young Catholics caring about how the Church worships.
Emma traces her own formation back to piano lessons at six and, from age ten to eighteen, singing in a Catholic youth choir at the Basilica of Saint John, which she credits as the crucial years that shaped her not just as a musician but as a sacred musician. She walks through what the job actually entails week to week: planning weekend liturgies, running rehearsals, scheduling cantors and instrumentalists, and preparing special liturgies like confirmation Masses that most people in the pews never realize took separate planning. The piece she considers most important, though, is the spiritual formation of her musicians — because they aren't performing songs, they're leading a congregation in worship, and they need to know their place in the liturgy to do it well.
Asked why music holds a distinctly theological place in Catholic worship, Emma points first to a tradition that runs back through the Psalms to the very beginning, then to what makes music unusual among forms of prayer: it's physical. You sing with your voice, play with your hands, worship with the body God gave you — which is why "the one who sings prays twice" is more than a nice line. And because participating in the music means outwardly expressing what you believe, the act of singing strengthens the belief it expresses. She points to Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium, which calls sacred music a treasure of inestimable value, as evidence this isn't just a musician's opinion.
Emma graduated from the University of Mary in Bismarck with a bachelor's degree in sacred music — a degree type she notes is showing up at more and more colleges — where coursework spanned theology, Church documents, and practical work like planning hymnody for Advent and navigating disagreement about music choices. The formation she names as most transformative wasn't a class at all: singing a cappella in her college chapel choir taught her to pray through her music rather than simply perform it, and helping others reach that same place is now what she wants her ministry to do.
On landing at a real parish for the first time, Emma is candid: classroom discussion of parish life is a different ball game from actually navigating it. Learning her specific musicians, their instruments, and the repertoire the congregation already knows — rather than swinging a complete 180 — has been most of the job, and she says being close to family in Des Moines has made it that much better.
For listeners who want to go deeper on the Church's understanding of sacred music, Emma recommends the National Association of Pastoral Musicians (there's a Des Moines chapter, with a workshop on Lent coming in October), associations and online communities of church musicians, the Church Fathers, and the documents themselves: Sacrosanctum Concilium, Musicam Sacram, and the USCCB's Sing to the Lord.
Hear Emma's choir at Saint Thomas Aquinas in Indianola: Mass is Saturday at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday at 8 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. — mysta.org.
Heard on the Catholic Morning Show, weekdays at 7 a.m. Central on Iowa Catholic Radio. More at IowaCatholicRadio.com.
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