In Memory of Mons. Angelo Amodeo

The very first Ambrosian liturgy I ever attended was a votive Mass in honor of the Blessed Ildephonse Schuster, celebrated in the Duomo itself in December of 1998, at which Monsignor Amodeo and another canon sang the Ambrosian propers of a Confessor Bishop. (They were joined by a choir of Korean music and voice students, who sang the Gloria in excelsis and Sanctus from a Mozart Mass.) After Mass, we processed from the altar of the left transept around the church to the right nave, and sang the Ambrosian litany of the Saints at the altar in which the Bl. Schuster is buried. Subsequently, I attended and served other Ambrosian Masses in Venice (after one of which I wrote my very first article for NLM), Rome and elsewhere.

Monsignor remained a strong singer all of his life, and celebrated Mass in a way that showed how thoroughly he loved and lived the liturgy; he was always dignified, but completely natural, and precise, but completely graceful. He tended to begin his sermons rather slowly, and in what seemed at first a rather disjointed fashion, but I soon learned that he would always bring them together into something that was not just theologically useful to hear, but genuinely beautiful.

Here is a video of him sing the Preface, which has a very beautiful melody in the Ambrosian Rite, at the church of San Rocco al Gentilino in Milan on Palm Sunday of 2012, just over six months before he died.