Redemption story behind the music of LA Requiem Mass
For a generation, Catholics from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles have sung, prayed, lit candles, and wept each January during the Requiem for the Unborn.
Offered at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for two decades, and in parishes before that, the Mass mourns every unborn child killed by abortion during a single day in the greater Los Angeles area. It began as a memorial to one of those children — the son or daughter of its composer, John Bonaduce.
Now 72, Bonaduce is a church musician known for combining traditional and contemporary styles in a way that is both reverent and unabashedly joyful. After an early career in Hollywood, he entered liturgical music fulltime in 1990.
The turning point of his faith journey had come more than a decade earlier when at the age of 26, he paid for his girlfriend to have an abortion.