Up and down the King's Road

Yesterday evening, as I was strolling up and down the King's Road in Chelsea looking for a bit of Night Life - we old gentleman tend to do that sort of thing - I noticed the familiar figure of Fr James 'Ubiquitous Camera' Bradley, who has chronicled every significant event in the Anglican Catholic world for decades - lugging his equipment along. Curious, I followed him discretely and discovered myself in a Roman Catholic place of worship which I gather was originally (1568) founded at Douai by a fellow of Oriel College, Principal of St Mary's Hall, and Proctor in this University called William Allen, after he very wisely scarpered abroad in the dark days of Elizabeth Tudor. Not that I'm sure Dr Allen would have recognised the Chapel as a place of Catholic worship ...

As you know, I am dreadfully ill-informed about the complex niceties of Novus Ordo worship, so I can't give you an intelligent account of what was going on. However, it seemed to involve our three Bishops, so I guessed it probably had something to do with this ORDINARIATE thinggy. Just in case I ever find myself having to use the Ordinary Form, I watched carefully what happened. There were some striking differences from what most Anglican Catholics are used to. For example: after the Consecration we tend to ring bells and waggle incense. But, it seems, in the Novus Ordo Mass, all the fire alarms go off while the celebrant is actually uttering the verba Domini over the Host; and keep ringing until after the Consecration of the Chalice. They come on later, too, to remind the congregation that it is Communion time.

The episcopae seemed to have a big role to play. They brought up the elements at the Offertory (yes ... I know what you're thinking ... a bit Parish Communionny) and had special blessings and things at the end. From time to time, the bishops seemed to kiss them. The service began with the sort of music you get in a Crem - Jesu joy or Come down O love Divine or something like that. It ended with the sort of business you get at weddings, with various fluctuating groups of people coalescing and dispersing and regathering for photographs. Altogether, a rich liturgical event. I felt most at home in the sung Ordinary of the Mass, Kyries etc., which was sung in dead languages, and when Bishop Andrew sang the Ite missa est at the end.

But, craftily, nobody accepted his rather peremptory order to "Go". We all tucked into some strikingly good food, wine, and conversation with some very agreeable people. Some of them had even read my blog.

Changing the subject rather, I have had a sudden illumination about what might be a good Coat of Arms for an Ordinariate. You remember that lovely medieval shield used by the Abbey at Walsingham: Silver; a black cross; on it, four lilies. Something like that ... perhaps the cross changed to blue or even S George's red ... would look very well.

Oops ... I 'm going to be late for my Home Communiuons. More later.

Benedictus es ...

A writer on another blog recently criticised a priest who conflated the Offertory prayers into a singular formula. Since this is an unauthorised alteration, the writer was right to call it a liturgical abuse. But he also criticised it on the grounds that the separate offering of Bread and Wine was "theologically significant". Well; perhaps it is; I don't know what reasons he had in mind for saying this. But I think anybody going very far down that particular path needs to watch what they say. In the Sarum Rite, the Bread and Wine were offered together, with one prayer, and the Ecclesia Anglicana was for a thousand years in peace and communion with the Holy See. And the Dominican Rite - the traditional one - still offers the elements together; and the Order of Preachers is still in full communion with Rome. This represents a sustantial piece of traditional praxis. It can't be theologically unCatholic to offer the elements together.

Personally, I intensely dislike those prayers anyway on a practical ground: because I find them immensely difficult to say. Since they are so similar to each other, you can't lift the elements up and say the prayer on autopilot; you have to look at a printed text or else concentrate mentally on getting each lot of words right. I bet there isn't a priest in the Latin Church who hasn't at some time bungled it.

I also dislike the words "spiritual drink". I know poma pneumatikon is a clever borrowing from I Corinthians; but as a spoken formula judged in literary terms -particularly in its English versions - it seems to me to make the end of the prayer collapse into an unattractive bathos. I certainly understand those people who improve it with the phrase, from the Canon, "Cup [Chalice?] of Salvation".

But the plain fact is that these prayers are not ordered by the rubrics to be said aloud; that is merely an option on those occasions, and only those occasions, when there is no singing at the Offertory. For twenty or thirty years I did say them aloud in English at said Masses; but quite a long time ago I took to saying them, when I celebrated a Novus Ordo said Mass, silently and in Latin.

Well, to be honest, for some time now I have silently said Suscipe ... etc. instead. Happily, thanks to a writer on another blog, I can now justify this as Common-sense-and-mutual-enrichment.

Accipe potestatem offerre Missam ...

Very best wishes to our three bishops as they tomorrow revisit the concept of diakonia. I wonder if they will wear their old light-weight pontifical dalmatics for the ceremony.

On Saturday there will follow necessary formalities ensuring that their sacerdotal ministrations are acceptable to all Roman Catholics everywhere. I suppose that later in the year there will be similar ceremonies for those priests and deacons who decide to apply for entry to the ministry of the Ordinariate and are accepted. God bless them, whoever they may be.

I wonder if they will all be 'done' simultaneously. Let us suppose - just to pluck a number out of the air for the sake of hypothesis - that some 50/60 or so priests were concerned. Wouldn't that be rather a lot of prostrate bodies to accommodate on one floor? We wouldn't want Fr X to kick Fr Y in the eye ... er ... purely, you understand, by accident.

If there were two such events, would it not be be very much in the spirit of Summorum pontificum for one of them to be OF and the other Antiquior? There would be an additional bonus of an ecumenical kind. It would mean that, when the Vatican is finally reconciled to the SSPX, those ex-Anglicans who had been 'done' antiquius would not have the inconvenience of having to be 'ordained' yet again to satisfy SSPX scruples. It would also make our orders acceptable to all those other fussy traditionalists who have noisy doubts about the adequacy of the post-conciliar Pontificale and even amusingly suggest that it falls under the condemnation of Apostolicae curae.

Mgr Rifan must be one of very few working bishops in full canonical union with the See of Ss Peter and Paul to have been consecrated with the glorious old Prayer for Episcopal Consecration used in the Roman Church before iffy Oriental formulae were substituted by Bugnini (if one wanted to be tendentious, a failing which I have always avoided like the very plague, one could argue that the Rite of Episcopal Consecration in the Prayer Book Ordinal retained more features and phrases from pre-Reformation rites than does the current Pontificale). So Rifan would be the ideal chap to do this job. Orders conferred by him would never need to be repeated (until, that is, the Latin West submits in all humility to Third Rome).

Aesthetically, it would be rather jolly if the antiquior ceremony were done within the genuine baroque lay-out and furnishings of the Brompton Oratory - the Gesu near Harrods - rather than in the midst of the totally unconvincing 'Byzantinism' of the Hagia Sophia by Victoria Station. Those involved would feel more at home, too; there is somehow something cosily familiar and Anglican about the atmosphere of Romanita created in their churches by the Sons of S Philip. I wonder why.

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*New readers, if any, may - passim - be assisted hermeneutically if I confess that I have sometimes been suspected of writing with my tongue in one of my cheeks.

Ordinariate

I'm a trifle puzzled by the Westminster announcement that the Ordinariate will be erected "on or before Saturday January 15". Our three bishops are due to be deaconed on Thurday January 13; and Canon Law appears to say that a deacon has to be incardinated to ensure that there are no horrid acephalous clerics roaming around (a delightfully grotesque, even Gothick, piece of imagery to scare to the kiddies with ... "Swallow your Cod Liver Oil, dears, or the ACEPHALOUS CLERIC will GET you"). But we Anglicans know nothing about Canon Law ... perhaps a Roman Catholic can explain this oddity to me.

I had rather hoped that the erection of the Ordinariate might have been dated January 6. I will delete comments which purport to explain why I had rather hoped this.

culture changes (1)

In my experience, pretty well every clergyman in the C of E knows exactly how services should be done. Indeed, in some cases he knows so well that he is constantly growing into even better knowledge, with the result that his people often have to adjust periodically to the particular stage which their pastor's liturgical researches have reached. Whether such is true in other communions, I have little first-hand knowledge. But I suspect that it is not only among Anglicans that there can sometimes be a gap between clergy and laity, which can result not only from the changes they are made to experience in their own churches but the surprises which they encounter when they move house and parish. This is partly because the laity are naturally conservative; by which I mean that they often find it less than easy to change instincts which they acquired 20, 30, or 40 years ago.

For 40 years now, many worshipers in the Western Churches have become accustomed to a particular form of 'participation', in which there is an expectation that liturgy is for them in the sense that it has some of the characteristics of entertainment or didaxis. They expect that their hierophant will relate to them; look at them; anticipate their spoken or assumed responses; be concerned that he is 'getting through' to them. He gathers them into what he is doing by looking at them across the altar; he interjects little relational asides to keep them with him; instead of standing in a pulpit six feet above contradiction, he walks up and down the church as he informally sermonises. It is possible that these expectations have been reinforced by the interactive and participatory modes fashionable in television.

I think we priests sometimes fail to realise how very different (and difficult) it is for laity, who for a generation have known nothing but this, when they are offered 'traditional' worship. Worship, I mean, where the fundamental sense is that something objective is being done which, for its essential effectiveness, depends not one tiny bit upon the understanding or 'participation' or even presence of laity. We find it easy to yawn at phrases like " ...with his back to the people." Oh dear, we cry, not that old nonsense again. But for people whose liturgical experience has hitherto been a priest preoccupied with their responsiveness, suddenly to experience a liturgist who is focussed primarily on what he is doing coram Deo, must be just shattering.

continues.

Noveritis, fratres carissimi ...

... as I proclaimed after the Gospel at Mass this morning. Then, after the Last Gospel, I blessed chalk. It was the first year I have done this; Wikipedia says that it is a central European custom. I have been wondering whether its spread in recent years to England is related to immigration by groups from EU member countries. I have wondered the same thing about the Rorate Mass. OR were both these things taken by immigrant groups to North America, from where they have now drifted across on the Gulf Stream? Are further such goodies on their way by whatever route?

I have also been wondering about a Responsio ad dubium which the Ecclestone Square Liturgy Office secured from PCED and which they represented as ordering that even in celebrations of the EF the Epiphany should be transferred to a Sunday. My recollection is that Ecclestone Square refused to disclose the actual text of the Responsio they had received, so that the LMS then submitted its own dubium which elicited a rather different reply. Has the Ecclestone Square Responsio ever been published, or is it still covered by some sort of Official Secrets Act?

I hasten to add that at S Thomas's we did keep last Sunday as an External Solemnity of the Epiphany. We are terribly mainstream.

You won't like this ...

... but, if I were the Commission Ecclesia Dei, I would be working towards a new Editio Typica of the Extraordinary Form in which some very minor changes would indicate that the EF is not fossilised. We are not 1962 fetichists (or are we?). The way ahead for the EF is for the most judicious of minor corrections in the 1962 missal. Nobody should take any notice of fundamentalists who believe that anything which the reformers of the 1960s favoured is automatically beyond the pale; and a reincorporation of elements - Vigils, perhaps, and Octaves - which were unwisely cut out during the early Bugnini tinkerings of the 1950s, is most desireable. Have I got this right?

The main change I would make in the Ordo Missae would be in the Preface. I would punctuate Domine, sancte Pater, omnipotens aeterne Deus. Because: Domine reproduces in Latin the tetragrammaton YHWH and reminds us that the God we worship (for are we not all, as Pius XI put it, Spiritual Semites?) is the God of our forefathers in Faith, the People of Israel. Sancte Pater is the way in which the Incarnate Word addressed his Father, particularly in the Gospel according to S John, Chapter 17.

Or would you be happier if I simply omitted all the commas, leaving the word-division to the celebrant?

Or will you only be happy if I make no change whatsoever?

Why?

We were told in Summorum Pontificum that some of the OF Prefaces would be incorporated in the EF and a recent interview given by Mgr Pozzo implies that this will soon happen. I can't see why it should cause any ill-will do do this, particularly if they are made optional. The SSPX ORDO reveals that in that Society they use Prefaces for the Saints and for Advent ad libitum. And if it is acceptable for the inter-war popes to have added prefaces for the Sacred Heart and Christ the King and ... most most revolutionary of all in view of the large numbers of Requiems that used to be said ... for the Departed, why are Prefaces from fifty years later problematic? (I do, on the other hand, strongly support the caution shown by Mgr Pozzo with regard to allowing the post-conciliar lectionary to be used with the old Mass. The old readings are inextricably bedded down in the old propers.)

My own preference, however, would be that OF Prefaces incorporated in the Traditional Missal should be mainly restricted to those which were recovered for the OF from the early Roman sacramentaries ... not least those identified, by liturgists such as Callewaerts and Capelle, as probably from the pen of S Leo or other early pontiffs ... rather than being Clever Compositions by post-conciliar committees headed by ... er ... And I do not favour the very jejune conclusions which link some of those newer prefaces to the Sanctus.

Fr Zed and the verb histemi

I notice that Fr Zed spells Apostacy sic. I have also noticed, in American books, Exstacy.

Is this a 'regular' Americanism? We in Old Europe (what is the objectionable Rumsfeldt doing nowadays?) tend to assume, for fairly obvious reasons, that derivatives of histemi* are spelled (spelt?) -stasy. I wonder what our transpontine cousins consider the countervailing arguments to be.

Enough on Fr Zed for today.

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*I doubt if I have ever blushed more deeply than I did when, in my first term in this university, my Tutor for Greek Prose Composition, the immortal, the fabulously erudite, the magnificently Australian Margaret Hubbard irritably moved her cat off her gin-bottle, drew heavily on her cigarette, and said "Tush, Mr Hunwicke, do we not know histemi?"

Fr Zed comes into line.

On December 16 I did a post suggesting that, while Say the Black and do the Red was a splendid exocet to direct against liberals, traditionalists should not bother too much about it themselves.

Now: January 3: Fr Zed announces his conversion to my tentative suggestions. Dealing with the question of starting the Canon while the Sanctus (and Benedictus) are still being sung, he invokes Common Sense and the Mutual Enrichment of both forms of the Roman Rite to justify it, at least when the sung Sanctus is a bit long.

Perhaps the next edition of his mug should read COMMON SENSE AND MUTUAL ENRICHMENT.

What is most striking about this, of course, is that Fr Zed, most laudably, is suggesting direct and unambiguous disobedience with regard to a very clear rubrical direction. IGMR para 30* clearly describes the Eucharistic Prayer as the principal "oratio praesidentialis". And para 32* requires that all these 'presidential' parts must, because of their inherent nature ("Natura partium 'praesidentialium' exigit ..."), be rendered "clara et elata voce ... et ab omnibus cum attentione auscultentur".

Bugnini could hardly have made that clearer, could he?

Three cheers for Fr Zed in his new incarnation! Don't forget you read it in Hunwicke first.

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* paras 10 and 12 in the 1975 Missal.

And now Fr Zed has spotted it too

Regular readers became completely bored, months ago, by my continual ranting about the typographical carelessness, and illiteracy with regard to the Latin Language, in the modern Vatican.

In the last week, Fr Zed has done two posts on the subject.

Those of you who use recent editions of the Liturgia Horarum can amuse yourselves by very easily looking up one of the worst examples of culpable carelessness. It concerns Feb 22: Cathedra Petri. This Feast has to be printed in Vol 2 and Vol 3, because it might come before, or during, Lent.

In Vol 3, the Patristic Reading is printed, as far as I can see, accurately [except for utraque (neuter plural) being printed with the accent on the middle syllable: a systemic mistake in Vols 2, 3, and 4 of LH (not, curiously, in Vol 1)].

But in Vol 2, a couple of lines are omitted from the first paragraph of the Reading from S Leo. This omission makes the entire passage gibberish. (Correct your Vol 2 from your Vol 3!)

And S Leo is the most lucid and graceful of Latinists.

An elegant reminder ...

... on the NLM, of M l'Abbe Quoex. C A P D . Incidentally, Did Fr Quoex have a bobble on his biretta? Look at the first photograph in NLM. Does being a Savoyard rather than French mean that one eschews the froggy bobble?

And I hope you read, on Fr Tim's blog, his brilliant "Ten Reasons Why I Never Wash".

But, most of all, I was moved by Fr Ray Blake's piece on the Church in Iraq.

Can anyone dispute the immensely high quality of the English Catholic blogosphere?

Westminster

There seems to be surprise about today's news.

Well, I did try to drop massive hints on December 18 for anybody who cared to read between the lines and didn't need everything spelt out as for toddlers.

The Five Bishops are very considerable men who have tirelessly, selflessly, done an impossible job, tending struggling oases in a parched and hopeless desert. God bless them and reward them.