By Amy White
The Texas Catholic
Almost two decades ago, under the expanse of a deep and starry Arkansas sky, Cesar Jesús Anguiano lifted a quiet prayer to the Lord: a request for the opportunity to make music — and to make it for the Church. Now, he lives that answered prayer daily as director of music ministry at the National Shrine Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Anguiano’s professional start at the cathedral in 2016 — first as the community’s Spanish choir director and then, beginning in 2023, as its director of music ministry — was like a homecoming for Anguiano, who had initially encountered the community in 1998 after relocating from south Texas to Dallas.
“This was actually my home,” the director said of the cathedral. “I would come here every day for the 7 p.m. Mass, and I would try to contribute with my guitar music and singing.”
It was his involvement in the cathedral’s music ministry, Anguiano said, that planted the seeds for his current career: As he became increasingly involved in the community’s choirs, including as a Psalmist, he desired to contribute more skillfully.
“I wanted to do [music ministry] at the level that I thought God deserved,” he said.
To that end, he began taking voice and guitar lessons at a local college. His study of music gave rise to a greater love for it, and he began to desire a more wholehearted pursuit of music — now as a career. So, he joined a professional mariachi group in Dallas.
It was while traveling with that mariachi group, Anguiano recalled, that he offered his whispered prayer to heaven under the vast night sky: “Dear God, I wish I could do what I’m doing here,” he remembered praying, “but in the Church.”
In early 2008, his prayer was answered: He was hired at St. Rita Catholic Church as a choir director. His eight-year tenure at the parish served as the “training ground,” he said, that prepared him to return to his first spiritual home in Dallas, the cathedral, as a choir director in 2016.
“I have very fond memories and a very profound love for this parish,” Anguiano said of the cathedral. “Everything that I do is honestly out of profound love and gratefulness.”
‘We join our voices’
As director of music ministry, Anguiano shoulders the responsibility of fostering an atmosphere of prayerful chorus, a sacred space of euphonic worship for the cathedral’s congregation. He oversees the community’s choirs, Psalmists, and instrumentalists, he said, and does so in each case with an eye towards excellence. After all, Anguiano mused, “Our God deserves the best.”
“He wants the [music] to be presented to a level that he knows will be professional, that will be pleasing,” the cathedral’s Father Jesús Belmontes said of Anguiano, referring to the director as “a gem for our church.” “Our voices join the voices of the angels, and we worship God in a very meaningful and profound way through the instruments and through the greatness of the music.”
Noting that the music ministry at the cathedral has expanded and evolved under the director’s guidance, reaching new heights of professionalism and versatility, the rector added, “He can be playing mariachi; he can be playing instrumental music… He will do it very professionally, no matter what the style of music.”
Responsible for directing the bulk of the cathedral’s Sunday Masses, Anguiano leads both English and Spanish choirs, as well as a mariachi group, which the director started in 2018, and a children’s choir, which he formed this year. In his role as director of music ministry, he also assumes responsibility for several diocese-wide Masses.
“The office of Worship relies on Cesar for all diocesan Masses that are celebrated at the cathedral,” said Jeanne Marie Miles, director of the diocesan office of Worship. “We rely on him and his musicianship and his connections between musicians not only at the cathedral but across the diocese in order to provide the level of music that the bishop expects for diocesan Masses.”
“He is very good at bringing people from different places together in order to create beautiful music for the bishop’s Masses,” Miles continued. “We join our voices together, and so our hearts and minds and voices are all aimed in the same direction, towards God.”
The fundamentals
In an effort to increase musical literacy at the cathedral and beyond, Anguiano has also kickstarted a new venture: “Fundamentales de Musica,” or “Music Fundamentals,” which commenced early 2025. The program is designed to teach participants to read music — from notes to staffs to clefs — and apply that knowledge to the music they encounter in ministry.
“More than 90% of the people that are in our ministries here in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas do not know how to read music,” Anguiano said. “This is the mother church of the diocese, so we saw fit that we start it here.”
The course was inspired by a preceding Diocese of Dallas program for the formation of Spanish language music ministers, which attracted more than 175 participants over the course of four sessions.
“[Anguiano] capitalized on that energy and that momentum that we had created with the diocesan program,” Miles said. “He really has done an excellent job of working with the community and helping to improve their musicality and their musicianship.”
Already, the program boasts the involvement of participants from nearly 15 parishes, Anguiano shared, and he hopes its reach will grow.
As the music ministry at the cathedral continues to transform under his tutelage, the director said he desires for the ministry to be a source of respite and unity for the local Church.
“The biggest impact of the Virgin was to unify,” he said, referencing the cathedral’s patron, Our Lady of Guadalupe, “and music is a tool that can do that here at the cathedral in Dallas.”
Cutline for featured image: Cesar Jesús Anguiano, director of music ministry at the National Shrine Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, credits the cathedral community for fostering his almost two-decade career in music ministry. (AMY WHITE/The Texas Catholic)
