Bouyer (2)

 In the extract which follows, Bouyer favours the provision of more Proper Prefaces, but criticises the treatment by the 'reformers' of Lenten (and some other) collects.

"Le seul element non critiquable dans ce nouveau missel fut l'enrichissement apporte surtout par la resurrection d'un bon nombre de prefaces magnifiques reprises aux anciens sacramentaires et l'extension des lectures bibliques (encore que, sur ce dernier point, on allat trop vite aussi pour produire quelque chose d'entierement satisfaisant). Je passe sur nombre d'anciennes oraisons pour les temps de penitence ... qu'on nous obligea a estropier de maniere a en evacuer le plus possible ... precisement la penitence!"

As far as the Sunday Lectionary is concerned, I do think the Council left to the next generation quite a problem. But how would something like the following work out so as to preserve Tradition but also to enable a wider exposure to Scripture? (SPV means the readings in the missal of S Pius V.)

Year 1: SPV.

Year 2: S Matthew or SPV.

Year 3: SPV

Year 4: Ss Mark and S John or SPV. 

Year 5: SPV.

Year 6: S Luke or SPV.

Years 2, 4, 6 involve the three-year sets of Epistle and Gospel readings produced and used in fact now with the Novus Ordo.

The option of always using SPV would safeguard Tradition. 

Fr Louis Bouyer (1)

There is a splendid English translation of Bouyer's Memoires; but I often think that ... especially when the content and vocabulary are racy .. there's a lot to be said for peeping at the original.

So here is a quite famous passage from pp 199-200. (Sorry I don't know how to type accents etc..)

"Je prefere ne rien dire ou si peu que rien du nouveau calendrier, oeuvre d'un trio de maniaques, supprimant sans aucun motif serieux la Septuagesime et l'octave de Pentecote, et balancant les trois quarts des saints n'importe ou, en fonction d'idees a eux!

"Comme ces trois excites se refusaient obstinement a rien changer a leur ouvrage, et que le pape  voulait  vite en finir pour ne pas laisser le chaos se developper, on accepta leur projet, si delirant fut-il!"

Later, another bit of Boyer, on Prefaces and Lenten Collects

 

Is next Sunday a bit extreme??

 The Mass provided by the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite for next Sunday, Lent III, strikes me as extraordinarily interesting. (Needless to say, it has disappeared from the Forma Mutila et Corrupta.)

The theme of Epistle and Gospel recognises the risk of falling from Grace and from our Baptismal Covenant; and appears to emphasise the need to make our language conform with the Law of God. If we talk unchristianly, the malady will spread from our lips to our hearts and thence to our lives.

Here are some samples of the vocabulary; I offer the Prayer Book translation and the Greek original.

In the EPISTLE:

fornicationporneia, uncleannessakatharsia, covetousnesspleonexia, reprove them for it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret ... elengkhete; ta gar kruphe ginomena hup' auton aiskhron estin kai legein ...

In the GOSPEL,

observe the rigorism and uncompromising character of He that is not with me is against me; there is no half-way house, no nuance to hide under. And for the lapsed (semi-lapsed??) Former Christian The last state of that man is worse than the first. 

 I suspect that the Roman context here is as follows: on Sunday Lent III, the 'Scrutinies' were announced which, beginning this week, prepared the catechumens for their initiation at Easter. The 'rigorist' emphasis on the dangers of recidivism, of falling back into the clutches of the Zeitgeist, seem particularly relevant to this period.

I habitually view with suspicion any assumption (whether in interpretation of a Gospel or of the Church's lectionary) that a passage is simply a 'unit of material' which somehow finds itself shoved into a hotchpot collection of unrelated materials. The concluding two verses (27-28) of Luke 11 ... about the Woman in the crowd who blessed the womb which had born the Lord and the breasts which he had sucked ... seem to me, even in merely literary terms, an absolutely stunning conclusion to the entire preceding passage: 

Those truly Blessed are those who, having heard the Word of God, keep (phulassontes) it.

And I am not in the least surprised that this entire passage of S Luke was treated so dismissively by the post-Conciliar 'reformers'. Manfully, they resisted any temptation they might have felt to allow Luke 11: 27-28 to retain its Lucan purpose: of concluding, and epigrammatically summarising, the themes of Luke 11: 14-26. 

"Enrichment", indeed!!!  ('Enrochement' ?)

I wonder if those 'reformers' included the luminaries described by Fr Louis Bouyer as Les Trois Maniaques.

I do beg readers to peruse both of these Biblical passages. They urge upon all of us a deeper and more exclusive commitment.

Dialects

I was a patient some years ago in a West Country hospital; a nurse with a strong Scottish accent addressed me. I couldn't make out what she was saying, so I smiled broadly and nodded. 

But this was not good enough. 

She repeated her message. It had some of these sounds in it: "w'nid so' o' y'wi". I smiled even more affirmatively. What else could I do?

She went off, looking miffed. A couple of minutes later, another nurse, manifestly armed for combat, came up to my bed. "My colleague tells me that you are refusing to supply a urine sample", she said.

Going back over the Scottish syllables I had been offered, I was able to reconstruct them in my mind as "We need some of your Wee." 

What I had been grappling with was two tough linguistic barriers. (1): A propensity to elide consonants;and (2): In medical English, I now understand, 'urine' is a non-term; 'wee' has supplanted it. (I now also know that another piece of modern professional technical medicalese is 'poo'. Had I then been aware of this, I could have replied to the nurse with a warm and inviting "Poo too?") 

I suspect that a reason for this all-important 'wee' and 'poo' is an underlying convention whereby medical functionaries believe it is important to infantilise patients. The smart way of doing this is perceived to be the imposition of baby-talk as the lingua franca of the ward. When I was again hospitalised during this past twelve-month, one officiant kept addressing me as 'My lovely'. I put up with this for three days; then something snapped within me and I snarled "I am not your lovely and, for that matter, you are not my lovely".

Dialects, dialects. During the Beeb's Thought for the Day not long ago, an 'academic' twice confused the verbs lie and lay. 

There is a remedy for this. 

If every little boy and girl passing through the English educational system were again to be taught the Attic Greek of the 'Classical' period, before s/he embarked upon Modern English, they would all be well primed in the verb Histemi, which, as you will recall, has some parts transitive and other parts intransitive. 

Then, when these delighful tinies approached the more advanced stumbling-blocks of our current chilly Northern dialect, they would be fore-armed. As well as properly formed in the dialogues of Plato.

Should I patent this as 'Hunwicke's New Elementary Linguistics'?

A Sweet Little Book

 A little above four and a half inches by three, all this little book reveals on its spine is COMMON PRAYER   Hymns A & M       OXFORD.

But inside the cover, there is a picture of a corpulent gentleman labelled "His Majesty King Edward VII", covered by tissue. Peering at him hopefully through the tissue is "Her Majesty Queen Alexandra". Interestingly, the curiously pedantic "Queen Consort", so de rigeur in our own happy days, does not appear.

On the next page, "The Royal Commemoration Prayer Book" frames an Art Nouveau design showing a Knight in Armour clutching a helmet, flanking a person of indeterminate gender holding in its right hand a crown or coronet, and, in its left, a Church, which I suppose might be the original Westminster Abbey. Under the Shield (Quarterly England Scotland Ireland England badly executed) a scroll advises us FEAR GOD, HONOUR THE KING. And, at the bottom "OXFORD 1902". 

But bound in between the Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern, is "The Form and Order of the SERVICE that is to be performed and of the Ceremonies that are to be observed in The Coronation of Their Majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in the Abbey Church of S. Peter, Westminster On Thursday, the 26th day of June, 1902 Oxford: Printed at the University Press ..."

I wnder why it is still called an 'Abbey' Church after Bloody Bess supressed the Abbey in 1559. Wouldn't "Collegiate" be more appropriate?

And then XIX "Sections" follow. 

Several thoughts occur to me. The portly representation of 'Edward VII' reminds me of the curious piece of furniture created for his, er, greater ease and more commodious use in some establishment in France. This leads me on to the question of whether the Keeper of the Royal Conscience, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of All England and Primate, ever took it upon himself to address the King pastorally on the subject of giving up Fornication and Adultery. At the Coronation, however, the Litany was shortened and, doubtless to save time, "fornication, and all other deadly sin" have done a runner.

 

All over England, there are deluded people who possess a mug produced to commemorate the Coronation of the next Edward. These folk assume that, since this personage never was crowned, the curiosity factor must have greatly enhanced the monetary value of their mugs. 

But, I gather, so many zillions of these potatory goodies were produced that their value is practically nil.

I wonder what memorabilia the 2023 event will throw up. Mrs Parker Bowles, perhaps, wearing a crown?

 

"I baptise you ... in whose name?"

ARCIC. What is ARCIC doing?

For decades now, I have been arguing that ARCIC (if not closed down) should be discussing new or imminent matters of controversy and dissent. It should move out of the sixteenth century.

The C of E has embarked upon a discussion about non-gendered language in Liturgy. We all know what this means ... that in the foreseeable future, it will be licit to baptise in the name of Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. OK ... this will only be an optional alternative. So what?

Such a formula has been ruled by the organs of the Catholic Church, not to be valid.  

Acceptance of a Common Baptism lies at the heart of the Ecumenism of the last century. ARCIC should discuss, and provide documents on, this matter, soon.

Leaving the question kicked into the long grass and keeping our fingers crossed that Time will be the Great Healer ... however tempting to the minds of Anglicans and Ecumenists ... simply will not do.

The Crunch is coming. It has already bought its ticket and caught the train.

They know how to manage things. There will be all sorts of hysterically emotional appeals ... all sorts of angry protestations against Rigid People.

What on earth is supposed to be the point of ARCIC??

Only for Sarum and BCP enthusiasts

 While most followers of the Authentic Version of the Roman Rite were hearing the Matthaean account of the Transfiguration yesterday, the very select readers I itemise above heard, for their Sunday Gospel, the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman whose daughter the Lord exorcised. 

The still useful Anglican handbook Liturgy and Worship (1932) explains as follows (auctore K D Mackenzie ... I have expanded some of his abbreviations): "Lent II. Originally a vacant Sunday (cf. Advent IV). Hence there are great variations in the Proprium. Schuster speaks of the 'patchwork composition' of the [Modern Roman] Mass, and [the Medieval English uses in general have] not much more individuality. When the local Roman Sacramentary and Lectionary were adopted in other places, it was necessary to make up a Proprium from various sources. [The Comes of Murbach also offers the Syro-Phoenician Woman.]"

My Question: Why should that pericope have been conseidered, in Northern Europe and elsewhere, appropriate for this Sunday? Or for bringing an Ember Week to its conclusion? 

Things have reasons!

Has it really come to this?

There is today [Saturday] ... and has been ... correspondence in The Times about alleged antisemitism in the writings of Dorothy Sayers.

I think DLS has been defended on the grounds that her thought-crime was simply that of her time, so she can be forgiven. 

I think this entirely, horribly, grossly misses the point. In DLS's first whodunnit, it turns out that the killer is an upper-class WASP intellectual with the socio-ethical assumpptions of his time. The victim is a Jew to whom Sayers ascribes every human virtue that the human mind can conceive.

 Modern 'critics' lack intelligence and subtlety. They are not fit to read or to comment on writers who had a capacity to use and to understand nuance or to handle the implicit.

And censorship of un-PC language in the children's books of Roald Dahl has recently been a News item. You're right: wokery rampant and horrible. I won't get onto Blyton ...

And Billy Bunter ... I recall wokery and the Modern Age getting their nasty little noses in there, too. I believe Bunter was censored so that the Kickings of the Fat Boy were eliminated. Moreover: the passages, some of them hilarious funny, which end with Henry Samuel Quelch M.A. flogging Bunter for comical errors in his construe of Latin, still make my nostrils twitch. The only intelligent member of the Greyfriars Remove seems to be an Indian aristocrat ...

Some readers may have noticed that I rather like reading well-written 1930s English ... Lewis, Sayers ... yesterday I was travelling in that Time Machine again, and noticed this in Mgr Knox's The Body on the Silo: "Wherever you went, there was noise; there a loudspeaker breathing out throaty inaccuracies about tomorrow's weather, there a gramophone, wallowing in the revolting eroticism of the American negro, and his still more revolting religiosity; nor did anybody seem inclined to hush these noises as a prelude to conversation."

In Waugh, we meet Chokey, who "though graceful of bearing and irreproachably dressed, was a Negro. ... 'What price the coon?' [Sam Clutterbuck] asked ... 'I've got a friend lives in Savannah ... he's told me a thing or two about niggers ... to put it bluntly, they have uncontrollable passions ' ... 'What a terrible thing!'said Grimes."

And Sayers: "'God bless my soul,' said Sir Charles, horrified, 'an English girl in the hands of a nigger. How abominable!' [An English girl] 'carried off for some end unthinkably sinister, by a black man ... [a newspaper] came out ... with a patriotic leader about the danger of encouraging coloured aliens." 

These last three writers were sophisticated commentators of the 1930s cultural scene; the absurdities they parody most certainly did not coincide with their own attitudes. In the novel by Sayers, the 'clues' were confected by the murderess herself, a very English and upper-class girl (the only actual negro in the story is totally innocent, harmless, admirable and decent). In Waugh, the loftily censorious Harrovian Captain Grimes is ... the reader has been very clearly told ... a disreputable paedophile.

Let me be clear about what I am saying.

The finest writers of that period, particularly those from a Christian stable, subverted the prejudices of their time by putting them onto the lips of disreputable or risible characters. 

Parody can be a profoundly elegant way of making social comments, and should cetainly not be illicit.

I think it is disgraceful ... and a bad genre-error ... to be blind (or do I mean deaf?) to nuanced writing.

Are we to be deprived of the opportunity of hearing the finest satirists of that period attacking the absurd prejudices of their dim contemporaries?

And all because their vocabulary, which neatly mirrors the bigotry of the time, happens to have fallen foul of some rule-book arrogantly imposed upon us by adolescent modern wokery?  

Vere Vix Credibile ...

Axion kai dikaion se hymnein ...; Dignum et iustum est ... Hos alethos axion estin kai dikaion, prepon te kai opheilomenon ... Alethos gar axion esti  kai dikaion ... Thus begin the Eucharistic Prayers in (respectively) the rites of S John Chrrysostom; of the Mozarabic Rite; of the Rites of S James and S Mark. 

In our dear Roman Rite, Vere dignum et iustum est, aequum et salutare ...

And, for us of the Anglican liturgical heritage, It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty ...

Curiously, "vere" is not used (according to Sr Ellebracht's data) in the Roman collects. Perhaps such superlatives are indeed best kept for the moment the Priest approaches the Mysterium tremendum. Or as the Paschal Deacon gets launched into his Exsultet.

Nasty old Zwinglian though he was, as a composer of liturgical formulae Cranmer so often seems to feel the tug of earlier, and Latin Catholic, formulae. (G J Cuming, in his A History of Anglican Liturgy, is particularly sensitive to this.) So, faced with translating Vere dignum et iustum est, the dominating echo of the Latin took over, and Cranmer wrote It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty ...

For many of us, hearing the vicar intoning these words to their ancient melodies will be one of our earliest churchy memories. Only later will it have dawned upon us that very here must function as an adverb synonymous with verily, truly.

But we live in an age hostile to such language. vere disappears from most 'modern' translations. And now it is, finally, disappearing also from our vernacular. When did you last hear it used? "It's very sunny today"?

No, learned reader. You, as a modern man or woman, speaking modern English, will say "It's incredibly sunny today". 

"This newspaper report is Incredibly Ordinary". Language is such fun, isn't it?

I can't prove this, but my impression is that the terminal decline in the use of very coincides with the Pandemic. We had so many superlatives offering themselves to us ... superlatives about the new and terrifying disease itself; superlatives about its social consequences; superlatives about the heroes and heroines, in the medical professions, who struggled in combat with the malady ...

That is when it no longer ... somehow ... seemed adequate to say that the Vindaloo was very hot; we only felt we had said enough if it was incredibly hot. Politicians were no longer allowed to repose in an understated category of the very corrupt ...

No? You think I'm being silly yet again? Try listening to some jounalists, and doing a count.

I'm not suggesting we can or should do anything about this.

But when you hear the Vicaress saying in Church It is incredibly meet, right, and our bounden duty ... , please remember that it was this blog that gave you the news first. When the Cathedral Dean prints at the head of his notepaper The Incredibly Reverend Frances Arabin ... nuff said ...

(Did I hear somebody murmur hyperbole? How incredibly pretentious ...)

Ember Sacerdotalism

 It is always worth taking seriously the views expressed by Abbot Rupert of Deutz (ob ca 1130) with regard to the reasons behind the liturgical choices made in our present (S Gregory I/S Pius V) liturgical books. So I offer to your learned consuderation his views on the Transgfiguration Gospel shared by the Saturday Ember Mass and the Sunday which follows it.

"Priests [sacerdotes] having been ordained on Saturday, and the other ministers of Christ's Altar, this Gospel is fitly read ... For priests and the other ministers of the Altar, when they are promoted to so great a ministry, as it were ascend with the Lord up a very lofty mountain, that with no veil [revelata facie] they may gaze upon his glory, so fit to be contemplated, and might understand what with him or concerning him Moses and Elias, that is, the Law and the Prophets, are saying, and may proclaim it to the people below [inferiori], and having with the faith of Christ the morality which comes from the Law and the doctrine which comes from the Prophets, they may be ready to give an account to everyone who seeks it ..." 

Expositors sometimes offer clever and elegant accounts of why we hear the Transfiguration at the start of every Lent. I feel pretty confident that Abbot Rupert gives us the real reason for the choice of this pericope in the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite. 

Archbishop Myers remarked upon how many opportunities are offered for Ordination in the Lent of the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite. I suggest a pragmatic reason for this ... all the actuosa participatio in the rites of Holy Week and Pascha required a full complement of clerical functionaries!

This stuff is sacerdotalist, even clericalist, and unashamedly so. Priesthood is an august mystery, an intimate association with the Lord himself. (Rupert's own priesting, incidentally, was delayed because of his refusal to accept Holy Orders from an excommunicated bishop.) 

The imagery of going up and apart with the Lord to behold his glory, may have been the more striking to priests and people alike when (visually) it meant going with the Domnus Papa beyond the great curtains or hangings which surrounded the Altar. As one of the Ordines puts it, the Pontiff "intrat in Canonem".

So where have this week's Ember Masses disappeared to?

 SEPTUAGESIMA/SEXAGESIMA/QUINQUAGESIMA

Where have these gone to? In the 1969 Vatican Document Calendarium Romanum, page 59, reasons are given for abolishing the 'Pre-Lent Season', but this promise then follows: "Textus proprii harum trium Dominicarum alibi ponentur in Missali romano".

"Will be placed somewhere else in the Roman Missal".

So where are they? 

ROGATION DAYS AND EMBER DAYS

In the same Vatican document, we are told that the Masses for these days "non amplius in Proprio de Tempore, sed inter Missas votivas, locum habebunt." 

Oh Yeah? So where are they?

VATICAN II?

When Sacrosanctum Concilium was put together and then promulgated as the first of the Council's decrees, nobody knew ... they had not been provided with crystal balls ... how much of the old would, in less than a decade, be just dumped, and replaced (if replaced at all) by shiny new compositions. It is against that background that the historian will read Paragraph 107. It prescribes that the liturgical year should be so revised that "servatis aut restitutis sacrorum temporum traditis consuetudinibus et disciplinis ... ipsorum indoles nativa retineatur ...".

The Council accepted that many of the contents of the Rogation and Ember Masses related to seasonal agricultural processes which would (for example) differ in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

This was not an irrational concern. It is not surprising that the Fathers went along with it.

But, even given this awareness, the Council mandated that "Accommodationes autem, secundum locorum condiciones, si quae forte necessariae sint ... "

Good heavens!!!

Remember: this is "the Council!!!" which the Bergoglios and the Roches rely upon for their radical and aggressive agenda.

And notice the phrase "if any changes were perchance to be necessary". And notice the subjunctive verb sint rather than indicative sunt.  

 

I am making two points: (1) the Council anticipated the retention of much that in fact disappeared; and (2) the Fathers, when they voted for the text of Sacrosanctum Concilium in front of them, had been given not an inkling of the broad, extensive mandate which would be assumed by the post-Conciliar 'revisers'.

Ember Weeks (2)

 Most of the Ordinations in the Roman Church happened at the December Embertides. The next Ember season after that would be in June. That left half the year without an Ordination Season. I favour the conjecture that the Spring Ember Season, this week, originated in a need to fill that gap. 

There are clues which point in this direction. Egbert of York, S Leo the Great, and the Liber Pontificalis associate the Ember with Moses. So does 'a short anonymous Carolingian tract' edited by Dom Morin.

Moses. 

Did that make your ears prick up? MOSES!

The Wednesday Ember Mass gives us Exodus 24:12 ... in which HWHY summons Moses up the Mount, and gives him tables of stone and a Law and commandments. On the Ember Saturday in the First reading, Moses brings that Torah down to the People of Israel ... and, in the Second, he commands them diligently to keep it. And, in the Third reading, "The priests made a prayer whilst the sacrifice was consuming ...".

The association of Moses with our Ministry is one the earliest parts of our Traditional Roman Liturgy. It even seems to go back to I Clement and the account there of how Moses arranged the Ministry. I need hardly remind presbyteral readers that the Great Prayer (still surviving) of Priestly Ordination in the Roman Rite is based around the narrative that HWHY took the Spirit of Moses and shared it among the Seventy Elders.

And the last reading in the Ember Saturday Mass is S Matthew's account of the Transfiguration ... in which Moses appears with the Lord and Elias on the Mountain of the Transfiguration.

We are not Marcionites. We know that we are in unbroken continuity with the earliest covenantal relationship between HWHY and his only, his chosen, people. If we have the privilege of Priestly Ordination, that sets us within the Ministries which God gave of old, so very anciently, among humankind. 

To deny this is, I think, practical, liturgical, Anti-semitism. It needs to be hounded out of the Church!

Sadly, the Old Testament texts in the Missale Romanum which witness to us during this Ember Week of Moses and of our Mosaic Priesthood were ruthlessly eliminated by the post-Conciliar 'reformers' from the lections of their newly-confected Unicus usus. 

This vandalism is what the orotund authority of Arthur Roche calls "Enrichment"!

Even worse: when Dom Botte and his colleagues got their hands on the rite of Episcopal Consecration, which made much of the parallel between the Christian Pontiff and the Aaronic High Priest, they ruthlessly smashed it all up.

What they put in its place undoubtedly possesses validity. It even possesses liceity. We must never let any of these slippery operators put us in the wrong by tricking us into appearing to question this. 

But ... AUCTORITAS ... the newer rites certainly do not possess that. 

Not a nanogram.