A Novus Ordo Postcommunion and Rosa Krebb

Here is the original text of the Postcommunion appointed for December 17 in the Novus Ordo. It served in the Sarum Missal for the Last Sunday After Trinity, and is found there in many early Western rites.  I take the text below from 'the Gelasianum'.

The Bugnini 'reformers' rearranged the clauses; and made changes in the words I have highlighted in red.

Animae nostrae, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus, hoc potiantur* desiderio, ut a tuo Spiritu inflammentur; ut sicut lampades divino munere satiati, ante conspectum venientis Christi Filii tui velut clara lumina fulgeamus. Per.

(* Sarum reads pascantur)

 I think the removal of animae nostrae tightens the structure and, until better advised, I advance no criticism (Sarum had done some rearranging too). inflammentur is replaced in the modern rite by accensi; and sicut lampades is omitted. I think the elimination of inflammentur ('go up in in flames') and the omission of sicut lampades ('like torches') snatch away from us a very vivid piece of pictorial imagination.

The original provides a striking picture of a gang of enthusiasts with torches charging through the dark, unilluminated streets of a city, lighting their way with torches, to meet Someone who is Coming. Remember that Roman houses faced inwards to their courtyards, so that in the narrow streets there would not even be such faint illumination as could be provided by the light of oil lamps flickering through windows.

Changed, the prayer becomes Sixties and platitudinous. Indeed, one does rather wonder why Novus Ordo runners would now need any lights at all; surely, the massive electrical illumination from the Car Show Rooms opposite would be enough to keep them from stumbling over into the sterquilinium.

Poor antique Arthur Roche recently claimed that the Novus Ordo contained most of the euchology of the Usus Authenticus; and was more 'rich'.  I do understand what the dear old gentleman has in mind. The Bugninioids did rescue a fair bit of material from early liturgical sources, especially in their (self-imposed) mission to provide different propers for weekdays in Advent and Easter.

But:

(1) the motives controlling the selections they made, and their editorial alterations, have a consistent mens, videlicet, to enforce a levelling-down: we end up with a liturgical culture squeezed everywhere into the straight-jacket (adjusted to the dimensions of a Procrustean Bed!) of one decade. On the other hand, the Authentic Use, having evolved organically over two millennia, picking up like a glacier diverse materials from every age it passed through, contains within it so much more cultural diversity. (C S Lewis's point in The Reading of  Old Books applies here.)

(2) the really ginormous elephant in the NO room is the following thought-provoking fact: 

Most modern Christians who are not lapsed go to Mass on Sundays; very few go day-by-day on every weekday. So they gain no advantage from the fact that the old Sunday prayers for Advent, Lent, and Eastertide have sometimes ... if they've been fortunate ... been relocated to weekdays or to 'Ordinary Time'.

Yes; not a single Advent, Lent, Easter, Sunday collect in the old rite survived into the Novus Ordo as a collect for a Sunday within that season.

Not one. 

Did you hear me?

Every single one of the Sunday Collects for the Three Great Seasons, prayers which had served Latin Christendom for a millennium and a half, was deemed by the self-important, ipseinfallibilist 'scholarship' of one single decade to be totally unfit for Sunday use in those seasons.

In particular, the fine series of Excita collects disappeared from the Sundays of Advent.

This intolerance towards the ancient Sunday collects, this act of arrogant censorship and violent cultural vandalism and shameless ecclesial rupture, in itself alone, is more than enough to render the NO suspect ... for me personally, quite unusable (although, of course, both valid and licit).

PF threatens Chinese-style 're-education' for anybody dim enough to have problems with the Novus Ordo (" ... to provide for the good of those who are rooted in the previous form of celebration and need to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Ss Paul VI and John Paul II ..."). We 'need' to have kindly sensitive people to assist us 'to return' to the 1970s; "to help them understand the essential principles of renewal called for in the Second Vatican Council", as PF's sad-eyed little friend Cupich put it. It is so important to boldly stride ahead from 2021 to 1970! But it would take a a terrible amount of the Maoist re-education threatened by Bergoglianity to drag me back to the flawed and tatty (though fully valid and totally licit) aging liturgical compilations of the Sanguinary Seventies. 

Been there. Done that. Now I know better. 

Thanks be to God that He did not leave me floundering in that old quagmire.

Anybody trying to 'accompany' me on such a prescribed Bergoglian journey 'back to Bugnini' (... hus lousamene eis kulismon borborou, as Scripture puts it ...) is likely to get a very special kicking at every step along the way.

I have some Rosa Krebb boots and, even in my enfeebled ninth decade, I think I could still swing a finely honed toecap. 

Does that allusion verify my 1960s credentials?