Most of the Ordinations in the Roman Church happened at the December Embertides. The next Ember season after that would be in June. That left half the year without an Ordination Season. I favour the conjecture that the Spring Ember Season, this week, originated in a need to fill that gap.
There are clues which point in this direction. Egbert of York, S Leo the Great, and the Liber Pontificalis associate the Ember with Moses. So does 'a short anonymous Carolingian tract' edited by Dom Morin.
Moses.
Did that make your ears prick up? MOSES!
The Wednesday Ember Mass gives us Exodus 24:12 ... in which HWHY summons Moses up the Mount, and gives him tables of stone and a Law and commandments. On the Ember Saturday in the First reading, Moses brings that Torah down to the People of Israel ... and, in the Second, he commands them diligently to keep it. And, in the Third reading, "The priests made a prayer whilst the sacrifice was consuming ...".
The association of Moses with our Ministry is one the earliest parts of our Traditional Roman Liturgy. It even seems to go back to I Clement and the account there of how Moses arranged the Ministry. I need hardly remind presbyteral readers that the Great Prayer (still surviving) of Priestly Ordination in the Roman Rite is based around the narrative that HWHY took the Spirit of Moses and shared it among the Seventy Elders.
And the last reading in the Ember Saturday Mass is S Matthew's account of the Transfiguration ... in which Moses appears with the Lord and Elias on the Mountain of the Transfiguration.
We are not Marcionites. We know that we are in unbroken continuity with the earliest covenantal relationship between HWHY and his only, his chosen, people. If we have the privilege of Priestly Ordination, that sets us within the Ministries which God gave of old, so very anciently, among humankind.
To deny this is, I think, practical, liturgical, Anti-semitism. It needs to be hounded out of the Church!
Sadly, the Old Testament texts in the Missale Romanum which witness to us during this Ember Week of Moses and of our Mosaic Priesthood were ruthlessly eliminated by the post-Conciliar 'reformers' from the lections of their newly-confected Unicus usus.
This vandalism is what the orotund authority of Arthur Roche calls "Enrichment"!
Even worse: when Dom Botte and his colleagues got their hands on the rite of Episcopal Consecration, which made much of the parallel between the Christian Pontiff and the Aaronic High Priest, they ruthlessly smashed it all up.
What they put in its place undoubtedly possesses validity. It even possesses liceity. We must never let any of these slippery operators put us in the wrong by tricking us into appearing to question this.
But ... AUCTORITAS ... the newer rites certainly do not possess that.
Not a nanogram.
Dear Father. Numbers 4
ReplyDelete5 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
19 And have delivered them for a gift to Aaron and his sons out of the midst of the people, to serve me for Israel in the tabernacle of the covenant, and to pray for them, lest there should be a plague among the people, if they should presume to approach unto my sanctuary.
Philip II William by Thomas Walsh. Page 547
When he saw a little girl climb over the altar rail in San Lorenzo, he lifted her out and said ‘Neither you or I can go up there where the priests go."
God ordered His chosen people to worship Him a certain way and He prohibited the laity from entering the sanctuary with promises he would punish them in they did and that praxis was continued in His chosen people of the New Testament and that multi-millennial year praxis continued until the modern revolution when Catholic experts chose to ape the protestants and have the laity, especially women, act as ministers in The Sanctuary, as Lectrix, as Altar Servers, dispensing the Sacred Species etc because, apparently, the unspoken motto is, He must decrease and we must increase.
All of this seems to be part of a long term plan (The Devil is indeed in the details of this long game) to make women priests and we are in the middle of that long plan in which women will first become Deacons - for the periphery don’t you know.
Catholics have become so inured to women in the sanctuary that I suspect the vast vast majority of the N.O. Catholics, especially males, would have no problem with a woman walking down the aisle vested for service and presiding at the Liturgy.
Likely response to such an abomination, It’s about time we ended the sexist attitudes and had a woman as a priest.
Vatican Two was a revolution that overturned the then existing order owing to ecumenism and the desire of the modernists to be more like the protestants they admired.
Ecumenism is the Universal Solvent of Tradition and because us Catholics do not seem to consider God as the Rule of Faith, we moderns embrace and promote novelties endlessly and do what He forbid.
The Altar Girls Surrender/Debacle..
http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt88.html
HWHY
ReplyDeleteIs that a DROL shorthand for DOG?
I've ever only seen it as JHWH or YHWH. O now i see! It is spelt backwards, as in Hebrew.
ReplyDelete@Albertus: It’s fortunate that all the Latin letters involved happen to possess vertical-line symmetry (provided, of course, that one uses Y rather than J). Otherwise it would be a bit like the joke that ambulances have ECNALUBMA on the front.
ReplyDelete