So ... what does the Appendix Pro Aliquibus Locis ... see yesterday ... teach us about Life and Liturgy?
The Lenten Liturgy of the Roman Church was, once upon a time, an intense but a sober and stately affair. Daily, the Pontiff was booked to visit his 'stational ' churches, accompanied by his clergy and his household. The liturgical texts often gracefully related to the church thus visited, but not to the details of the Lord's Agony. They were not the colourful, melodramatic, emotional extravaganzas of late medieval or post-Reformation piety.
Readers will recall the words of Edmund Bishop about the characteristics of the Classical Roman Rite: "this simplicity, this practicality, this gravity...", contrasting it with "the effusive, the affective, and devotional ..." He added: "If I had to indicate in two or three words only the main characteristics which go to make up the genius of the Roman Rite, I should say that those characteristics were essentially soberness and sense."
That was all to change, and the PAL offers you the symptoms.
On each of the Fridays in Lent, the PAL provided (this year's dates) ...
February 16: the Crown of Thorns; February 23: the Lance and the Nails; March 1: the Shroud; March 8: the Five Wounds; March 15: the Precious Blood.
You see how the affective piety of the Counter-Reformation has changed the emotional liturgical expectations of the clergy and people.
Even in our own irreligious days, not everything has disappeared. The polychromatic wooden statue carved by Gregorio Fernandez still makes an appearance on Good Friday. Juan Martinez Montanes was known to be, personally, a deeply religious man. Francisco de Zurbaran is still one of the great figures of Western Art. Their artefacts were not, of course, cheap or easy to produce: in the process, the Confraternities (cofradias) played a large economic role. But what people pay for may indicate what strikes them as important.
To be concluded.
2 comments:
It may have played into this that these feasts were somewhat conveniently doubles, which takes away the long ferial offices (unless you choose, which was possible, the semidouble Votive Office for the Lord's passion), which included, if I am rightly informed, not only rather long psalms for Matins, Lauds (including a rather long Canticle perhaps, other than Benedicite, not known by heart), the 2nd psalm of Prime, and Vespers, but also, if I am rightly informed, the full Officium Parvum of our Lady in addition, plus possibly, if the previous days were feasts, the Officium Defunctorum also - and furthermore, specifically for Fridays in Lent, the Penitential Psalms plus the whole Litany of the Saints (which, granted a hebdomadarius who does not sing is quicker, takes about half-an-hour when done in Church). Conveniently, feasts-of-nine-lessons always excepted (with the pity that the Penitential Psalms as a complete block followed by the Litany weren't ever said any-more at all.
An interesting final observation, in view of this year's controversy at Seville over the Holy Week poster of the painter Garcia Cruz, although I have no idea what 'economic role' the cofradias may continue to play in the Spanish Church.
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