MEA MAXIMA CULPA

In an idle moment, I thought I would just check.

Let me explain. When the CDF authorised those 'new' Prefaces three or four years ago,  I decided to give the Preface for Martyrs a bit of a whirl, it being of respectable, ancient, origin ('Leonine Sacramentary' alias Verona Sacramentary, circa 600). So I typed it neatly out and gummed it in. There ought to be a special prayer for performing this essential liturgical manoeuvre.

But now I got a shock.

The villains of the 1960s took indecent liberties with this Preface when they incorporated it. 

I have now removed it from my Altar Missal. I won't get caught like that again. There definitely ought to be a prayer for such removals ... purple stole and all that.

The venerabilis with the sanguis of the Martyrs has, of course, disappeared. But where the present post-Vatican II text reads "vires infirmas ad testimonium roboras", the Verona codex had "ita nostris et studiis dat profectum et fragilitatibus praestat auxilium." And the subject of these verbs is now the Father, not, as in the Codex, the outpoured blood of the Martyrs.

In other words, the old ... probably original ... text did not inform God that he strengthens us to bear witness; it explained that the outpoured Blood of the Martyrs gives us progress in our endeavours and grants assistance to our weaknesses.

(The traditional syntactical framings ... sicut ... ita ... have, not surprisingly, disappeared.)

You might think that "progress in our endeavours" (studiis dat profectum) is rather bathetic. You might feel that commemorating the Martyrs by talking about Strength to Bear Witness is a distinct improvement (I think 'enrichment' is the technical term).

But this morning, while ploughing through another breakfast jar of Frank Cooper's Original Oxford Marmalade ... Coarse Cut ... I browsed through those early 'April' pages in the Verona Sacramentary; they appear to provide a collection of Masses for Martyrs. I looked, of course, particularly at the Vere Dignums.

And it seemed to me that the conceptual connection we enthusiastically make between the 'Witness', Martyrion, of the martyrs, and our vocation also to 'bear witness' in our own generation and context, was not terribly much in the minds of those who composed (or those who collected) the Prefaces in these old Masses.

Hence the apparent bathos with which this Preface, adopted and adapted by the 'reformers' of the 1960s, concludes.

Perhaps and perhaps. But I like to know where I'm standing; whether some ingenious connection in a text is the product of a clever-clogs of circa 600 or of a smartie-boots of circa 1970.

In future, I'll go slower on the glue-pot.