Monday: The Holy Angels.
Tuesday: The Holy Apostles.
Wednesday: S Joseph.
Thursday: The Most Holy Sacrament.
Friday: The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Saturday: The Immaculate Conception of Blessed Mary the Virgin.
Such were the Votive Offices granted in the circumstances I explained yesterday. There is, by the way, no obvious relationship between these Offices and the votive Masses for the days of the week in the Carolingian Little Missal attributed to Alcuin.
The sources of the materials in these votives are, for the most part, fairly obvious. Modern readers might be puzzled by the Friday office; most of it is taken from the Commemoratio Passionis Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, which, in the nineteenth century Appendix pro Aliquibus Locis, comes on the Tuesday after Sexagesima. The hymns are characteristic of the Counter Reformation; affective; emotional. "Grieving eyes, scatter tears"; such imperatives will combine with rhetorical questions ("Who is such a person as not to weep?"). Perhaps they are the metrical equivalents of the the paintings of Zurbaran; of the polychromatic statues still displayed in public in Iberian Catholic cultus. Perhaps they lose some of their vitality out of that context. Perhaps not.
They apparently supplied a need! The volume containing these votive offices is officially dated to July 1883; in April, 1896, Imprimatur was given to an additional Office of Ss Peter and Paul, alternative to the Tuesday Office of the Apostles in general. But in 1911, Divino afflatu suppressed the entire initiative.
D'you know, I can't remember where I bought that book. I thought I purchased it in a shop selling second-hand Catholic books in the Strand ... called Ducketts ... but an internet search reveals to me no evidence of any such emporium. I must have imagined it!
It definitely existed. There was a statue of Blessed Duckett on the pavement outside.
ReplyDeleteDear Fr. Hunwicke.
ReplyDeleteThere is a Book Shop called DUCKETTS BOOKS in Pall Mall, London. Tel: 020 7839 5871.
Perhaps it is the Book Shop you referred to, possibly previously in The Strand ?
Their description is at https://www.yelp.com/biz/ducketts-books-london
Their Blurb states: “An independent shop specialising in books of smaller publishers of mostly non-fiction, history, political comment, philosophy, current affairs, RELIGION, are the chief, but not exclusive, themes of publications on sale.
Searching online newspaper indexes, I found Duckett's in the Strand ("London's greatest Catholic book centre”) being blessed by the Apostolic Delegate in Oct 1945. And also being “lively” but only now a “bookshop”, from a column Jan 1962.
ReplyDeleteA correction: Under Pius IX, the Votive Offices of the Blessed Sacrament and the Immaculate Conception already existed.
ReplyDeleteOr St Philip’s the excellent book shop in St Aldgate’s?
ReplyDelete