Some twelve years ago, a kind American priest very graciously sent me some extremely interesting books; most of which bear the autograph (and annotations) of Fr J B O'Connell ... a name which appears nowadays sandwiched between Fortescue and Reid. His whose reactions to emerging 'reforms' from the 1940s to the 1960s one could trace. I am not prejudiced against Dom Alcuin; but I would like to think that an immense need might suddenly arise for the 1943 Edition instead of for the Reid Edition which tells people how to use the 1962 Missal.
Tucked inside one of these books was a 1946 envelope, with rough notes on the back, from 'Great Southern Hotels'; the Irish Hotel group which includes Parknasilla, where G B Shaw wrote St Joan and other plays, having reached there travelling bolt-upright in the back of his Rolls Royce all the way through the Rebel County of Cork ... and where my family played golf while I read and watched the otters and kingfishers on a then-secluded ruined quay ... it's a small world ... is that ruined quay still 'undeveloped'?).
One of these gifted volumes bears a stamp of ICEL in its earliest days; it is Mary Pierre Ellebracht's highly erudite and still very useful Remarks on the Vocabulary of the ancient Orations in the Missale Romanum of 1964. I wonder if the Liturgy of the Anglophone churches might have been in safer hands if early ICEL had hung onto their Ellebracht.
Other volumes include many papers on Latinity by the ever-great, ever-admirable Christine Mohrmann.
Over these twelve years, this blog has been very much enriched by that benefaction. If you read this, thank you very much, Father.
Fr Hunwicke, those are wonderful books to get and I might be the only one sad the CIE owned Great Southern Hotels vanished into history (although most of the best are open under new owners, albeit with over modern decoration inside). Burns and Oates did publish a 1962 version, twelfth edition, which I own, actually a reprint of same from 20 decades ago, published by Saint Austin Press. This manual has a fine spare prose and reads like something written for a priest offering the Roman Rite of old (I suppose it should!). It is also notes the Irish and British customs like flowers on the altars for festivals. (I wonder if the editor of mine, Scott M.P. Reid is related to the Australian Dom Alcuin Reid). Books with traces of old owners, other than coffee stains, say inscriptions, or even an ex-libris sticker, are almost better to my mind, as they have a past. Some of these books were on archive.org as they were out of copyright, but nearly all can only be rented on that site. Please pray for me, for a private intention (ir)regardless I offer my poor prayers for your intentions and any who might read this.
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