Who is entitled to use the Pope Francis Missal?

A valued clerical reader and supplier of comments raises a good point which has been made to me by quite a number of clergy. There is now a canonical lack of fairness and balance in the liturgical Law of the Latin Church. Any priest thereof, including of course any Ordinariate priest, has full liberty to celebrate the Roman Rite in both its Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms without seeking permission from anyone. In addition, the Ordinariate clergy can, of course, use the Ordinariate Rite. But that disadvantaged sector, Latin-priests-not-in-the-Ordinariate, poor victims of unfair discrimination, are not allowed to use the Pope Francis (i.e.Ordinariate) Missal, except in circumstances where they are ministering to an Ordinariate Group.

I do not even know if there are provisions for them to seek an indult to secure this privilege. That would, indeed, give a new meaning to the now obsolete expression "an Indult Mass"!

The only way I can see round this problem is for every well-disposed and sensible cleric who, very naturally, wishes for this privilege, to find, or create, within his parish, an Ordinariate Group for whom he could say Mass. It need only be a couple (preferably stable). As long as Father makes sure, when receiving Mr and Mrs Ex-Anglican into Full Communion, to have them canonically entered into the records of the Ordinariate, they will provide him with a canonical context for using the Ordinariate Form. (Actually, you only need one ex-Anglican, because just one ex-Anglican, even if he/she entered into Full Communion decades ago, can transfer to the Ordinariate and then carry members of his/her family into the Ordinariate with him/her.)

Oops. Mea culpa. I had forgotten. During this blessed Pontificate, we rather despise legal minutiae. We are not rubric-fixated. Anybody who still has feet can have them washed on Maundy Thursday. We do not run around devising heavy Burdens to lay upon people. Liberation!! Mercy!!! Everybody, especially those bishops who are most committed to Papa Bergoglio's ideologies, will be consumed with unalloyed joy when parish priests within their jurisdictions introduce the Pope Francis Missal to diocesan congregations without bothering about silly old Canon Law and its petty paltry piffling pettifogging prohibitions.

Just imagine it. Your Bishop or Archbishop is paying his regular visitatorial visit. You have got him togged up and have fitted his polyester pallium neatly round his shoulders. He had, just previously, Bergoglio fashion, been embracing the necessary clutch of repellent babies, so you have wiped him down carefully and now you are manoeuvring him towards the Sacristy door for the start of Mass. "Oh, by the way, archbishop", you purr nonchalantly as you offer him Holy Water, "there's been just one little change since you were here last. We're Ordinariate Rite here now ..."

Worth it, just for that, surely?

Go for it, Fathers! Don't risk waiting until Papa Bergoglio has retired to some argentinian favela and been replaced on the Throne of Moses by some neo-Pharisaical Gnostico-Pelagian!

I hope readers appreciate that the second half of this piece comes within the genre "Light Hearted Frivolity". LHF is one of God's greatest gifts. BTW, in answer to a comment on one of my other posts, I refer to the Missal as the Pope Francis Missal because I don't see why a Pope should be denied the credit for what happens on his watch. Each of them gets enough brickbats as the result of things for which they can't justly be held responsible. Perhaps I am even trying to burnish his image a bit in the eyes of fellow-traddies! I think he may yet surprise them!

Misericordia et Supplex Omnipotentia (in English!)

Today, looking forward, we thank God for the Jubilee Year of Mercy which the Sovereign Pontiff has declared; and we thank Him for one particular Mercy already bestowed, that on this most blessed day fifty years ago the Second Sacred Ecumenical Vatican Council, through our Lady's powerful intercession, came to an end.

Talking about Mercy, I wonder if our Holy Father has still got the Monsignore and the Brunette locked up in his little prison. Probably he plans to visit them on Christmas Morning disguised as Santa Claus and carrying crackers and Indulgences.

Lucky things! What a Christmas of Mercy that will be!!

Ordinariate Use (aka the Pope Francis Missal) (12)

Ah, the Nicene Creed. It's almost died out in a lot of 'diocesan' churches. So many clerics seem intensely focussed on achieving extreme brevity in the important parts of Holy Mass (by using, pretty exclusively, the Dewfall Trattoria Eucharistic Prayer; the Apostles' Creed ...) so as to provide plenty of time for highly unfortunate unmusical ditties to drivel on and on. No wonder so many of their faithful are so poorly catechised. The Pope Francis Missal will prevent that from happening among us! Viva il Papa!

A brief lesson for Germans (and their disciples) on how to gloss the words of Pope Francis

Reading the accounts in the Bolletino of what our Holy Father said to the Evangelisation people the other day, I was constantly reminded of how his words must need henceforth to be glossed, if we are to accept the unscriptural and novel dogma of the German episcopal conference (and their disciples) to the effect that the Gospel is not for the Jews. Here are some snippets in black from what the Sovereign Pontiff said, to which I have added in red what henceforth, in Germany and its cultural colonies, will need to be added, at least tacitly, as essential glosses.

" ... projecting [missionaries] in every direction, to the very limits of the world, except to Israel and anywhere there are Jews ... going forth is innate in our Baptism, and its boundaries are those of the World, except where there are Jews ... so that [the Church] may always know how to listen to the cry of the poor and the distant, unless they are as distant as Jews, to meet all and announce the joy of the Gospel except to Jews ... ." etc.etc.. You get the hang of it?

Gracious me, how difficult missiological discourse, not to mention the sort of vivid papal rhetoric which is so dear to our beloved Holy Father, is going to become under this Kasper/Marx/Nichols dogma ... "The Gospel According to St Gallen", as we shall have to learn to call it. And how rigorously somebody is going to have to censor the New Testament so as to eliminate all signs of that silly stuff about preaching the Gospel to all the world; not to mention the texts of Vatican II. My tip to readers: buy shares in companies that manufacture blue pencils. And parish treasurers should start setting money aside for the purchase of new extrasuperexpurgated Lectionaries and Missals.

Footnote: I seem to recall that the German episcopate refused to obey Pope Benedict's instruction to abandon their mistranslation of the Lord's words. In the Last Supper Narrative in the Eucharistic Prayer, He speaks of His Blood as shed "for many", which in Germany is still, I think, erroneously rendered as "for all". I wonder what the German is for: "For all except the Jews"? Goodness gracious me, how Hitler must be giggling, if one can do that where he is, which one probably can't.

A jolly little exhibition in the Ashmolean ...

 ... which has just over a month to go, proving to us that although Venice may have put coloratura before disegno, those Venetians certainly could draw. On show, Venetian drawings from the Ashmolean's own collections; from Christ Church (just think of all those Noblemen Commoners of the eighteenth century, Grand Touring so as  to develop their inner connoisseur and the pox, before returning laden with Tiepolo sketches); and from the Uffizi.

Some happy reunions: a Gabriel from Christ Church beside his Blessed Virgin Annunciate from the Uffizi; the modello for an Our Lady of the Rosary Altarpiece reunited with that of the medallions of the Fifteen Mysteries.

One criticism: the captions give very little information about the subject matter of the drawings, considering that both Classical Mythology and Catholic Devotion are closed books to so many of the poor souls around us.

No matter; the Baroque Rules OK. I realised that as a tiny boy when we had a holiday in the Tyrol, back in the happy days of Christendom well before the Council. For me, the Oratories at Birmingham and Brompton are the exemplaria of Noble Simplicity.

Ordinariate Use (11)

Rubrical Directory Paragraph 3: the "Anglican liturgical Patrimony, understood as that which has nourished the Catholic Faith through the history of the Anglican tradition and prompted aspirations towards ecclesial unity". In the introductory decree signed by Cardinal Sarah, there is a reference to "Anglican Missals" and the words "Therefore wishing that the fruits of the labours of pastors, religious, and lay faithful of years past may remain ever abundant in the Church ...".

How ecumenical and reassuring to find the Magisterium accepting that, in separation, we did have the Catholic Faith. How understanding to have the years and culture of "The English Missal" (and other such volumes), as it were, validated.


Above all, notice the significance of the term "remain" and the implication that Anglican "pastors" are to be distinguished from "lay faithful". I personally appreciate the sense expressed here of a continuity between our years in the Anglican Communion, and our present status within the Catholic Church.

As well as textually, our Missal is theologically a highly significant ecumenical advance; it is interesting that a CDF official without any "Anglican Previous" so immersed himself in our culture, our ways of thinking, our self understanding, that he was able to secure ... I nearly said, "get away with" ... such an achievement. Again, three and more cheers for Bishop Elect Lopes.

There surely must be Anglicans out there, teetering on the brink, who will be moved to enter into Full Communion by this demonstration of the theological, historical, cultural authenticity of the Ordinariate Enterprise ... the corporate reception into Catholic wholeness of Anglicanism ... Cardinal Mercier's old dream at the Malines Conversations of a Church of England United and Not Absorbed ... the triumphant conclusion of the ARCIC process ... the "Corporate healing of a Corporate Schism" for which the papalists of the Fr Fynes Clinton and Fr Hope Patten era so hoped. Dear Pope Benedict set all this in place by providing that the Ordinariates should not be subject to local Latin hierarchies but directly to the Roman Pontiff; that the terna for a new Ordinary should be sent to Rome by the Council of Priests rather than by a Nuncio who might have been influenced by local Latin bishops. Now comes the Missal, the Icing on the Cake, the great public symbol that we are in Communion with, but not absorbed by, the Diocesan Churches.

What more could anybody ask for?

The Primate of the Americas ...

 ... sounds a thoroughly Good Egg.

Ordinariate Use (10)

The 'Rubrical Directory' to our Missal (Paragraph 11) provides that "another cleric or even an instituted Acolyte may serve the subdiaconal ministry and read the Epistle".

Nice to have this splendid encouragement for restoring the proper old High Mass with the three Sacred Ministers walking one behind another up the church "just like a train", as one very approving girl at S Thomas's commented.

Could be the first mention of Hypodiakonia in a Roman document since the 1960s?

Priests are clerics: so a spare priest could "Do subdeacon". How delightfully flexible we are in the Ordinariate. Since this is possible, ex analogia a presbyter could also deacon.

Browsing in Byzantium: Liturgical Greek (3)

Orthodoxy is not as monolithic as orthodoxophile Westerners sometimes like to imagine. Not surprisingly, there has been (at least) one call, in 2007, from a dozen "dissident" priests within Orthodoxy, for 'antisemitic' texts found on Good Friday and elsewhere to be excised from the Liturgy. [I don't like the word 'antisemitic' because Jews are not the only Semites. I prefer 'antijudaic'.] The 'Foreign Minister' of the Moskow Patriarchate, Archbishop Hilarion, gave a lecture which, I think, I can easily leave to speak for itself. His Excellency is one of the few people around who seem on occasion to be able to put things even better than I could myself!!

"Another divorce which needs to be mentioned is that between theology and liturgy. For an Orthodox theologian, liturgical texts are not simply the works of outstanding theologians and poets, but also the fruits of the prayerful experience of those who have attained sanctity and theosis. The theological authority of liturgical texts is, in my opinion, higher than that of the works of the Fathers of the Church, for not everything in the works of the latter is of equal theological value and not everything has been accepted by the fulness of the Church. Liturgical texts, on the contrary, have been accepted by the whole Church as a 'rule of faith' (kanon pisteos), for they have been read and sung everywhere in Orthodox Churches over many centuries ...

" ... The lex credendi grows out of the lex orandi, and dogmas are considered divinely revealed because they are  born in the life of prayer and revealed to the Church through its divine services. Thus, if there are divergences in the understanding of a dogma between a certain theological authority and liturgical texts, I would be inclined to give preference to the latter. And if a textbook of dogmatic theology contains different views from those found in liturgical texts, it is the textbook, not the liturgical texts, that needs correction.

"Even more inadmissable, from my point of view, is the correction of liturgical texts in line with contemporary norms. Relatively recently the Roman Catholic Church decided to remove the so-called 'antisemitic' texts from the service of Holy Friday ..."

(Query: have the liturgical texts of the Byzantine Churches in Full Communion with the Holy See, such as the Ukrainians and Melkites, been tampered with, 'neoLatinised',  for the sake of Political Correctness, or are they still intact? I'm sure the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has carefully checked up on this, considering how enormously concerned they are about such matters.) 

Browsing in Byzantium: Liturgical Greek (2)

The Good Friday texts we examined in my first post may have seemed bizarrely antijudaic. One could cite a dozen others: there are many texts, along the lines of our Western Improperia, which recount the goodness of God to the Jewish People and, in the voice of the Lord, ask "Why have you treated me thus?". There are repeated cries "Alla dos autois Kyrie kata ta erga auton" [But give to them Lord according to the works of them]. What are we to say?

Much Byzantine hymnody (a subject in which I am but an amateur) appears to my eye to be in quite a different genre of poetry from nearly everything with which we are familiar in our terse and objective and austere Roman Rite (although I think I could possibly find parallels in some Gallican texts). It is as if we are taken back in time to the raw events on the streets of Roman Jerusalem; immersed in the passions, the cries, the agonies, the terrors, the emotionalism of it all; and that we respond in terms of our instinctive human reactions to the immediacy of these events. Naturally, we resent the actions of the leaders of the Jewish people and of the mob on Good Friday. As participants in those hours of the Lord's Passion, we express ourselves vividly, helplessly, and without nuanced reservations. It does not follow that we, in our day jobs as twenty first century Christians, should be thought to direct these same animosities against our contemporaries of Jewish faith or origin in the world of today. As Nostra aetate wisely reminds us, "True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead did press for the death of Christ; but what happened in His Passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today". 

 There were 'Godkillers' around, because Christ is God and someone killed Him ... the Nicene Creed makes each of these statements a compulsory belief for Catholics; but the killers included Romans as well as Jews. And they include me, whenever I fall into sin, as the Catechism of the Council of Trent pointed out. Clearly Jews who were not in Jerusalem cannot realistically be held to share in the guilt of a Deicide in which they did not share any more (or any less) than I can. Not even all those then physically in Jerusalem share that guilt; one such person whom we know to have been in the Holy City and even in the midst of that Mob was a thoroughly Jewish woman with the name of Mary whom the Catholic Church has formally defined to have been free from all sin and guilt. She stood beside the Cross as Co-Redemptrix. Ergo ... if anyone shall say that all Jews in every age, or all Jews alive at the time of the Lord's Passion, or all Jews in Jerusalem at that time, are guilty of His Death except in the same mode that all sinners are guilty, Jew and Gentile without distinction: anathema sit.

However ... I can understand an argument that, when all is said and done, the sort of texts we have been studying might lend themselves to the encouragement of a practical culture of antijudaism.  And even, that this, historically, has happened. Pogroms ...

I have always followed a personal rule of not lecturing Byzantines on how they should worship; but today I will go as near to doing that as to say: Were the authorities of the Latin Church to attempt to include the sort of Byzantine poetry we have been examining into liturgical forms offered for use  on Good Friday in the Latin Church, I would resist such Byzantinisation as robustly as I resist the Byzantinising incorporation of Epicleses of the Holy Spirit into "Latin Rite" Eucharistic Prayers.

I'm quite a "Purity of Rite" chap!

(One final piece of this follows, and then I will consider any possible Comments.)

Ordinariate Use (9)

One of the great Anglo-Catholic figures of the first part of the twentieth century (until he entered into Full Communion) was Ronnie Knox, later the Rt Revd Mgr Ronald Arbuthnott Knox M.A. P.A.. He collaborated in the cheeky fun of the Society of SS Peter and Paul. He used to come down to S Thomas's to say Mass in Latin. And he did a superb translation of the Exsultet, for singing at the Easter Vigil.

Yup! You guessed! His translation is in our Missal! All the Patrimony, gathered in so that nothing be lost!

Browsing in Byzantium: a lesson (1) in very simple liturgical Greek

Megas kai hieros SYNEKDEMOS orthodoxou Christianou is always a good book for browsing when you are at a loose end ... or even, to be serious, when a Latin Christian need something not quite within his own usual daily comfort zone. Something we all, from time to time, do need. I turned the pages until I got to Megale Paraskeue ... and stopped there, because, years ago, when I was a curate in Inner London, I used often upon that day to drop into the [Cypriot] Orthodox Cathedral along the Camberwell New Road. Since Archimandrite (later Bishop) Christopher Commodatos had no Deacon, he occasionally used me as a sort of dumb diaconal stand-in, not least on Good Friday. Happy days; happy memories of tottering through the wondering streets of Camberwell carrying the Gospel Book in the procession. I have never lost my love of the Orthodox peoples and their religious tradition. Dear Mr Putin! So, the other day, I revisited the Good Friday services between the covers of my Synekdemos.

Philologically, they provide good examples of the propensity of the Greeks (rather like the Germans) for constructing compound words. Many of you may already know one such Greek compound: Theotokos. Theo- is the Greek root for 'God'; tek the root for childbearing. So Theotokos means 'Godbearing'; the one who gives birth to God; the Mother of God. Along these lines, you get a Good Friday troparion which begins Olethrios speira theostugon, ponereuomenon theoktonon synagoge epeste. Spot the two compound words: theostugon and  theoktonon; again, each takes theo- and combines it with another root. stug is the root for 'abominate' (the Lexicon blandly says "stronger than miseo, to express abhorrence"). So theostugon means 'Godloathers'. kten is the Greek root for 'kill'; so theoktonon means 'Godkillers'. You get the hang of it? So, put together, the line means "A destructive band of Godloathers, a synagogue of wicked Godkillers, was at hand ..." ('Deicida' is the exact Latin equivalent of the Greek 'Theoktonos', giving the English word 'Deicide', which you may still find in some of the more old-fashioned English dictionaries, provided they lack a Nihil obstat from an English or German bishop.)

Let me explain to you about another compound. para, in combination with another word, often means 'against'. nomos is Greek for 'Law', and in a New Testament context refers to the Torah, the Jewish Law or Code of Life (those of you who have dipped into the study of the New Testament may remember dear old Ed Sanders' neat and accurate but revolutionary summary of Jewish religion as 'Covenantal nomism'). So paranomos, which occurs quite often in the Byzantine Good Friday services, means 'against the Torah'. The sublime poets who composed these services were, neatly and succinctly, suggesting "You may have prided yourselves on being enthusiasts for the Torah, but in fact by your collaboration in the Passion of the Messiah, you were great Torah-breakers". paranomos is used together with dussebes; seb is the root meaning worship, perhaps often 'pious'; dus makes it mean the opposite, so that dussebes means something like impious; irreligious. Hence phrases like Laos dussebes kai paranomos; kai means 'and'; I will leave you to guess what laos means! And a final phrase for you to agonise over: O! pos he paranomos synagoge ton Basilea ... katedikase ... The root dik relates to judgement. I suppose the juxtaposition of paranomos and synagoge is what you litcrit types would call an ironic oxymoron. Clever!

More liturgical Greek another day. Enjoyable, isn't it? I will delete unread any comments until I have published all of the three parts in which this post will, Deo volente, come to you.