QUATENUS

 I have noticed a grammatical construction which I can thus describe: you have an ut-clause; and dependant upon that clause you have another subordinate clause which might reasonably begin with another ut. In these circumstances, the second potential ut may be replaced by quatenus.

Here is a Patristic example, taking us back a few centuries, from the sermon of S Gregory the Great, read on Easter Sunday: "sic quippe necesse est ut audiamus quae facta sunt, quatenus cogitemus etiam quae nobis sunt ... facienda."

Here is a liturgical example: "Deprecantes, ut beatus confessor Birinus ... nobis obtineat, quatenus ipsius societate perfruamur ..."

And here is a curial example: " ... rogamus, ut ita in dei opere perseverare studeas, quatinus regi regum deo placere valeas ..."

My second example was from a 12th century liturgical book probable connected with Abendon; my third from a letter sent by or associated with Pope S Leo IX, to King Edward the Confessor.

Now here are my queries.

 Is this particular construction widespread? Should we consider it "Christian"?

According to Lewis and Short (sub voce E and F), we should think of Lactantius (d. 326), Cassiodorus (d. 575), and the Digest, which would be heavy enough hints even if we were not advised "(eccl. Lat.)" and "(post-class)." Here we are certainly being referred to temp S Gregory.

But what about the other end of things? I am referring to Renaissance Latin. Is this a usage stylists such as Cardinal Pole, or Bembo or Gigli, would have been happy with? Or would they have deemed it a relic of the Dark Ages?

Has anybody spotted it in any non-Christian texts?

EASTER MORNING (1)

So, at what point, would a medieval Englishman feel that his Easter was really starting? 

The ceremonies of Holy Week have left his parish church with the Most Holy Sacrament, together with the Cross, in a recess, probably on the North side of the Sanctuary and called "the Sepulchre". On Easter Morning, very early (ante matutinas) the clergy enter and go straight to the Sepulchre. Having censed it, they take the Sacrament to the High Altar, where it is replaced in the usual place of Reservation. They then return to the Sepulchre.

The clergy, genuflecting, then extract the Cross. The most senior cleric present "with another most excellent person begins in an alta voce this antiphon Christus resurgens, with which antiphon let the procession proceed with the choir singing the whole antiphon with its verse. And then all the bells are to be rung for a classicum ... the antiphon being sung with its verse by the whole choir ..." [I have given the Exeter version of this]. All then "kneel joyfully before the Cross and kiss it in worship ... The crosses and images throughout the church are unveiled now". [Urquhart.]

So, as this antiphon is loudly chanted, and the bells are rung in a jangling peal, and his church sheds its penitential Lenten aspect, the lay worshipper realises that Easter, surely, is under way! Here is the text of the antiphon  (Romans 6: 9).

"Christus resurgens ex mortuis jam non moritur, mors illi ultra non dominabitur. Quod enim vivit, vivit Deo. Alleluia. Alleluia. Versus Dicant nunc Judaei Quomodo milites custodientes sepulchrum perdiderunt regem ad lapidis positionem, quare non servabant Petram iustitiae aut sepultum reddunt, aut resurgentem adorant nobiscum dicentes Quod enim vivit, vivit Deo. Alleluia. Alleluia.

And so firmly was this fixed in the traditional memory that Cranmer preserved parts of it in his 1549 Prayer Book, to be used "in the Morning afore Matins, the people being assembled in the church". ... indeed, damaged fragments are still present in the BCP.

There are wider cultural references here, rarely or never noticed, to which I intend to return tomorrow. 

I have had a brilliant idea ...

... in the interest of good and harmonious 'community relations' ...

... how about the following:. 

Moslems fast; in fact, their customs so resemble what Christians (vide exempli gratia the Tudor Anglican Book of Homilies) used to do, that it has been argued that there is a connection. 

My suggestion: during the days when Ramadan and Lent overlap, all those who self-identify as 'Christian' should join in the fasting customs of Islam.

Makes sense?

MARIA CONSOLATA: O VERE BEATA ET MIRABILIS APIS!

Well; youve guessed. My own personal, private Maria Consolata devotion this Easter Evening will be the section of the Exsultet about the Bee  ... the section which is missed out of the current formula. Followed by the Regina Caeli.

And my mind goes back to happy years, spending summers in the Diocese of Ardfert. We used to travel through County Cork, and, before leaving the Cork Gaeltacht, we always visited the shrine of S Gobnait in Ballyvourney. She was the Patron Saint of Bee-keepers; she set her swarms to work putting some robbers to flight. I suspect she might have been a Producer of Paschal Candles ... perhaps even of Lucernaria Requisites in general. There is a fantastically splendid window honouring her, by Harry Clarke, in the splendidly magnificent Honan Chapel of Cork University. It shows the Saint with some five magnificently huge bees, and some terrified would-be fantastically-tiny robbers. 

We used to perform what we could of the Exercises in Ballyvourney before admiring the dippers under the bridge in the River Sullane and then carrying on to Knightstown, domain of the Hereditary Knights of Kerry.

The imminent coins for 'Charles III' have a couple of bees ... very anaemic bees, if bees have blood anyway ... on the One Pound coins. I don't seem to be able to discover the identity of the designers of this sad new set of flora'n'fauna coins. If I were among the guilty, I would keep jolly quiet about it, too. 

This idea is not new; in 1928, a new set of coin designs started appearing in the Twenty Six Counties, featuring their fauna. The only overlap I have noticed is the leaping Salmon, common to  both sets of coins.

An Advisory Committee including W B Yeats had commissioned the Irish coins from Percy Metcalfe, and they are extremely fine.

The earlier ones are inscribed SAORSTAT EIREANN; after Brexit, I did wonder if, after Brexit, we should have responded with SAORSTAT BHREATAIN on our coinage. 

The great Irish glass-maker, Harry Clark, was born on S Patrick's Day, 135 years ago this year. 

CAPD.

The Easter Vigil with Benedict XVI, 2012

 At Easter, on the morning of the First Day of the week, God said once again: "Let there be light". The night on the Mount of Olives, the solar eclipse of Jesus' passion and death, the night of the grave, had all passed. Now it is the First Day once again -- Creation is beginning anew. "Let there be Light, says God, "and there was Light". Jesus rises from the grave. ... The darkness of the previous days is driven away the moment Jesus rises from the grave and himself becomes God's pure Light. But this applies not only to him, not only to the darkness of those days. With the Resurrection of Jesus, Light itself is created anew. He draws all of us after him into the new Light of the Resurrection and he conquers all darkness. He is God's new Day, new for all of us. ... 

On Easter Night, the Night of the new Creation, the Church presents the Mystery of Light using a unique and very humble symbol: the Paschal Candle. This is a Light that lives from sacrifice. The Candle shines in as much as it is burnt up. It gives Light, in as much as it gives itself. Thus the Church presents most beautifully the Paschal Mystery of Christ, who gives himself and so bestows the great Light. Secondly, we should remeber that the Light of th Candle is a fire. Fire is the power that shapes the world, the force of transformation. And fire gives warmth. Here too the Mystery of Christ is made newly visible. Christ, the Light, is fire, flame, burning up evil and so reshaping both the world and ourseves. "Whoever is close to me is close to the fire", as Jesus is reported by Origen to have said. ...

The great hymn of the Exsultet, which the Deacon sings at the beginning of the Easter Liturgy, points us gently towards a further aspect. It reminds us that this object, the Candle, has its origin in the work of bees. So the whole of Creation plays its part. In the Candle, Creation becomes a bearer of Light. But in the mind of the Fathers, the Candle also in some sense contains an implict reference to the Church. The cooperation of the living community of believers in the Church in some way resembles the activity of bees. It builds up the community of Light. ...

EXSULTET: the Bee (2)

ICEL: ... accept this candle, a solemn offering, the work of bees and of your servants' hands, an evening sacrifice of praise, this gift from your most holy Church. ... for it is fed by melting wax drawn out by mother bees to build a torch so precious.

S Pius V: ... suscipe sancte Pater, incensi huius sacrificium vespertinum, quod tibi in hac Cerei oblatione solemni, per ministrorum manus, de operibus apum sacrosancta reddit Ecclesia. ... in hac cerei oblatione solemni, per ministrorum manus, de opere apum sacrosancta reddit Ecclesia ... Alitur enim liquantibus ceris, quas in substantiam pretiosi huius lampadis, apis mater eduxit.

Knox: ... accept , O Holy Father, this our evening sacrifice of incense: which as at this time thy holy Church maketh before thee, and offereth to thee by the hands of thy servants, the works of the creatures which thou hast made ... For the wax that melteth doth but feed the flame, for thereunto have the creatures of God's hand brought it forth ...

Ordinariate: ... accept, O Holy Father, this our evening sacrifice of incense, which as at this time thy holy Church maketh before thee, and offereth to thee by the hands of thy servants, the work of the bees, thy creatures. ... For the wax that melteth doth but feed the flame, for thereunto have the creatures of God's hand brought it forth ...

 A careful eye might observe here a recurring embarrassment with the presence of the Bees. And that Eye would be right.

But, in fact, once upon a time the bees were even busier in the Exsultet. They had an entire paragraph to themselves. It came immediately after the point where, in the S Pius V text, we have the words  mater eduxit. (This paragraph had already fallen into disuse when the Sarum Missal was printed; but it had appeared in Praefatio hucusque of the 'Gregorianum'.)

Some have used the term 'curious' to describe this extra, apian, material. I don't agree. If you are blessing Olives, you naturally include a bit of back-history about Olives in your liturgical formulae.Why deny it to the bees who produced the wax?

Not that the Latin texts address plural bees; we read 'apis mater'. "O vere beata et mirabilis apis'. But I think these are collective and dignified singulars: the activities of The Bee are certainly described in the plural. We learn that some (parte) collect flosculi with their mouths and return with these burdens to their castra; in there, aliae line the cells with gluten: aliae cram in the flowing honey; aliae turn the flowers into wax; aliae shape their offspring with their mouths; aliae includunt nectar.

This might easily prompt suggestions that Bees can offer us an example of hard work and collaborative ministry within the Church. Perhaps they can, the poppets. But the texts go on to ... er ... praise Virginity! This is because it was a commonly held belief that Bees perpetuated their race without masculi violating their sex or filii destroying their chastity.

Although the Queen Bee is indeed ... um ... versatile, this theory is not now, in its entirety, maintained! Perhaps this accounts for the textual difficulties many have discerned within this passage. But the pericope does end Thus did the holy Virgin Mary conceive; Virgin she gave birth; and Virgin she remained.

Some have detected the malign influence of Vergil at work here. I'm not so sure. Much of Georgics IV is indeed on Bee-Keeping, but it is really mock-didactic. I think Vergil comes closest to the Exsultet in his 'epic' similes (e.g. Aeneid 6: 707sqq.) But perhaps Apollonius of Rhodes got there first (despite Iliad B 87 sqq). The Argonauts have been consorting with the Man-murdering Men-crazed Women of Lemnos ... until Heracles (friend of Hylas!) speaks strictly to them. As the Fleece-Seekers prepare to sail off, the Lemnian women flock enthusiatically and affectionately around their departing lovers. They are like bees pouring out of their hollow rock into the meadows and in clusters flying to the sping-time flowers. This is very much in the spirit of what the Exsultet  bees do cum canitiem pruinosa hiberna posuerint, et glaciale senium verni temporis moderata [= moderatio?] deterserint ...

But, when it comes to it, I doubt whether the Author of the Exsultet was very much concerned with the views on Reincarnation of an Augustan Roman; or the naughty tongue-in-the-cheek slapstick of a Ptolemaic Alexandrian. My instinct about those Christian centuries is that writers might make their own use of any thaumata, wonders, that suited their book(s). A sound instinct!

O vere beata et mirabilis apis!

EXSULTET: some notes (1)

piaculi ... pio cruore is nice little Latin pun which won't go into English (?).

patres nostros filios Israel educens de aegypto. I am glad that patres nostros (ICEL: 'our forebears, Israel's children') survived; it is very important to remember and to emphasise the identity between the 'Fathers' who escaped through the Red Sea; and ourselves. 'Our Religion' is not some sort of successor to Judaism; we are the authentic people of God, the old promises now having been fufilled. That is why the Canon of the Mass so confidently refers to Abraham as 'our  Patriarch'.

Later in the Exsultet, the authentic text blesses warmly the Night which 'despoiled' the Egyptians, but enriched the Hebrews'. That, again, is a reference to us; and it is a shame (anti-semitic?) that the post-Conciliar 'reformers' eliminated it.

Haec nox est ... The Exsultet treats the Night as if it were a person ('hypostasisation'?). This is particularly striking when the words proclaim that this Blessed Night is the only one (sola) which meruit scire tempus et horam of the Resurrection (ICEL: 'worthy alone to know'). Hypostasisation ... what parallels are there; how far back does the usage go? The parallel which sticks in my mind is the beginning of Job chapter 3, where the Night of Job's Birth is hypostasised so that it can be roundly cursed! It occurs to me that this literary trope should not be ticked off as ... a literary trope, but viewed as an example of the realism with which we embrace the gifts of the God who has created Day and Night; the seasons ...

O felix culpa ... I recollect that, some time ago, the C of E produced a silly little book called Lent Holy Week and Easter, which omitted this passage. It also encouraged the antisemitic nonsense of not lighting the Paschal Candle until after the Prophecies ... as if the centuries of the 'Old Covenant' were just a deplorable period of unrelieved Darkness. (ICEL: 'O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer'. Knox [vide infra]: 'O blessed Iniquity'.)

curvat imperia ... I love this bit. Imperium means the power of a lawful Magistrate to command with the right to be obeyed. It was a concept taken very seriously both during the Republic and during the Principate/Empire. In these words of the Exsultet, subversion reaches its boldest pitch. (ICEL: 'brings down the mighty').

curvat means 'to force to bow down'; 'to bend over'. Knox rendered it "boweth down mighty princes". Knox's translation, incidentally, was used at the Church of England's most Tridentine seminary, St Stephen's House, and now has its proper place in the Ordinariate Missal.

On Saturday, I plan the second half of these Notes, when I hope to write a few words about the Missing Beasties: the Bees, which make only the most fugitive appearances in modern versions of the Exsultet.

Humble Access

"We do not presume to come to this thy table (o mercifull lord) trusting in our owne righteousnes, but in thy manifold and great mercies: we be not woorthie so much as to gather up the cromes under thy table: but thou art the same lorde whose propertie is alwayes to haue mercie: Graunt us therefore (gracious lorde) so to eate the fleshe of thy dere sonne Jesus Christ, and to drynke his bloud in these holy Misteries, that we may continuallye dwell in hym, and he in us, that our synfull bodyes may bee made cleane by his body, and our soules washed through hys most precious bloud. Amen."

Since the Holy See has approved the Ordinariate Missal, approval has automatically thus been given to a Eucharistic Theologoumenon which is distinctively Anglican. The use of the above Prayer is mandatory in the Ordinariate Missal.

Just before its end, the Anglican Prayer has, since 1552, concluded by asking "that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, and that we may ever more dwell in him, and he in us. Amen."

This association of the Lord's Body with the needs of our bodies, and of his Blood with the needs of our souls, is a medieval idea going back to an unknown writer whose works were mixed up with those of S Ambrose, so that he is for convenience known as Ambrosiaster. S Thomas Aquinas, who in the Summa (III, lxxiv, 1) teaches this distinction (as had that enthusiastic Carolingian upholder of the Real Presence, S Paschasius Radbertus), quotes it as from S Ambrose; and I think it is clearly what the Angelic Doctor had in mind when he wrote the third stanza of his Verbum supernum prodiens; I give a literal translation: To whom [i.e. the disciples] He gave flesh and blood under twofold appearance that He might feed the whole Man of double substance. That is to say, He gave himself in the two species so that He might feed the entirety of Man who is composed, doubly, of both body and soul.

In his first (1548) liturgical experiment in the Eucharistic Liturgy, Cranmer carried this Thomistic distinction even into the formulae at the administration of Holy Communion: The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ .... preserve thy body ... and The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ ... preserve thy soul .... 

Successive generations of Anglican liturgists have been nervous about this Thomist, non-Biblical distinction between the effect of the Body upon our bodies and of the Blood upon our souls; Dix cattily remarked "there is no particular reason why people should be made to pray medieval speculations in a Reformed church". The Puritans asked for its removal, and it has been eliminated from most modern Anglican rites. 

But in the Ordnariate we faithfully preserve this highly distinctive piece of Patrimony!

An erudite correspondent once told me that Garrigou Lagrange argued for the Blood being more efficacious than the Body, because the reception of the Body ipso facto remitted all venial sins repented of, thus leaving the soul the more cleansed and ready to profit from the Chalice (medieval monarchs at their coronations were given the Chalice "ad augmentum gratiae").  

Lagrange also held that a desire thus to profit was a sufficient motive for desiring the Holy Order of priesthood!

"So what does it SYMBOLISE?"

I sometimes think that this is a profoundly UnCatholic question to ask. 

Of course, as concerns the Consecrated Eucharistic Elements, the prods both inside and outside the Church will give this answer: "They symbolise Christ's Body and Blood". It may then become our duty to embark upon the laborious task of explaining yet again that the Elements ARE the Lord's Body and Blood.

But I fear that the malaise may go even deeper. My view is that the natural and the supernatural interrelate, interpenetrate, in the Liturgy, and especially during these days of the Paschal Mysteries.

Let me begin with the Oil of Chrism.

S Cyril of Jerusalem taught his catechumens that, after the invocation of the Holy Spirit, just as is the case with the the Loaf of the Eucharist becoming the Body of Christ, so (houto) this holy muron is not 'bare' (psilon)--or as someone might say 'common' (koinon)--oil, but the kharisma of Christ and, by the presence (parousiai) of the Holy Spirit is become 'causal' (energetikon) of his  Godhead. "And the body is anointed with the visible muron, while the soul is made holy by the holy and unseen Spirit."

Here comes the first of today's two funny bits.

When the 'reformers of the 1960s incorporated this passage in the Liturgy of the Hours, they chickened ... the wimps chopped out the strong parallelism between the Consecration of the Eucharistic Loaf, and the Consecration of the myrrh.

But, hey ... 

In the Traditional Paschal rites of the Roman Church, the Pontiff begs the LORD, the Holy Father, through Jesus Christ His Son, that he might deign to sanctify the richness of this creature with his blessing and to mix into it the virtus of the Holy Spirit through the power of his Christ.

Immiscere is a natural, functional term such you might find in any recipe book, such as the much-fingered 1960s volumes on our kitchen shelf.

This is what, at the Chrism Mass, our Bishop asked God to make an ingredient in the Oil of Chrism. I do not think that we are here a million miles from the instincts of S Cyril. 

And here's another thing the Bishop did. He breathed (three times) on to oil as he consecrated it.

This clearly symbolised ... er, No; it didn't "symbolise" anything.  

As Dix used to explain, the Bishop is "the mediatorial, sacrificing priest ... the unique organ of the Holy Spirit who indwells the Church ... ex officio a prophet, ex officio a healer and (the highest form of healing) a supremely potent exorcist." [Today's second Funny Bit: Dix's powerful advocacy thus assigned to (Anglican) bishops something most of them neither wanted nor for the most part believed in: the status of Sacrificing Priest and of  'supremely potent' confector of Sacraments. But Dix denied them what they were really ravenously hungry for: the Bergogliological  jurisdiction to ban and to extirpate the hated Tridentine Eucharistic Rite.]

Your Bishop at his Chrism Mass is homo mixtus Deo, the Powerful Organ of the Spirit. As he breathes on the Oil, his breath is the Breath, the Pneuma, of the creating Father (Genesis 1: 1) and of the Incarnate Lord (John 20: 22) who in this rite so empowered his disciples. It is one of the most powerful elements in the mysteries of these three mystery-laden days.

You know how universal the use is of the Oil  of Chrism. At what in the West we call Confirmation, the Bishop uses it with the words Signo te Signo Crucis et confirmo te Chrismate Salutis (and what a tragedy it was that anybody thought to tamper with those words). Ordinations; Coronations; the Blessings of Bells and of Churches ...

The Mystery of the Chrism binds together these three days, and the ancient liturgy rightly speaks of a Sacramentum perfectae salutis vitaeque; it refers to the constitutionis tuae  sacramentum, using the word Sacramentum in a broad and prescholastic sense. 

Incidentally, if we are to believe Prudentius, the Blessing of the Easter Candle, as an instance of a Lucernarium, involved the use of Chrism: Lumen ... tinctum pacifici Chrismatis unguine.

Good Friday: Holy Communion?

 I think that I ... and perhaps, you ... am so habituated by, and to, modern customs, that we might not always realise that Receiving the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar on Good Friday is neither universal; nor the custom, traditio, of all the ages. And not even 'primitive'.

It may now be the almost universal custom in the modern Roman Rite, even in those places where pre-Conciliar usages are valued, for everybody to do what by custom they do every Sunday: to go 'up' and to receive the Sacrament. But "the first witness of the reception of the Eucharist on the Friday of Holy Week is found in the Ordo Einsiedlensis written in the eighth century but recording the custom of the middle of the preceding century". 

Pope Innocent I (401-417) wrote to the the Bishop of Gubbio that "the Tradition of the Church is very strongly that the sacraments are not celebrated" on this Friday and Saturday. 

Was this an abstinence peculiar to Rome? Etheria (circa 385), in her detailed account of the liturgical use in this Week in Jerusalem, makes no mention of Communion on this day. I rather think that some Byzantines abstain from Communion on this Day ... and what was the Ambrosian traditio before the Council?

And when we do start to hear of lay people receiving Holy Communion on Good Friday, it persists in being an option which people might choose. For example, we read that the Pope and the Deacons do not communicate at the Mass in the Basilica of the Holy Cross ... people who desire to communicate will go to other Roman churches, perhaps one of the titulares, and do so there. Amalarius (circa 830) informs us that "in ea statione ubi Apostolicus salutat crucem, nemo ibi communicat".

It rather looks to me as though we see here new 'customs' gradually, untidily, making their way in ... customs which  the Roman Pontiff himself might not publicly adopt. This rather laisser faire approach seems to have gone on for a very long time; only on 19 February 1632 does the SRC prohibit lay Communion on this day ... a prohibition which was not universally implemented!

You will have gathered that I am not strongly in favour of dragooning everybody up to the Altar on Good Friday.

In the 1930s, an Anglo-Catholic Bishop wrote about the "Eucharistic Fast" on Good Friday as being "perhaps the most moving ceremony of the whole liturgical year. No one who has not experienced it can realise what a climax it makes to the observance of Good Friday, or how near we are brought to the Divine Victim of the Cross. In theory perhaps we ought to wish for the restoration of the general Communion of Good Friday, but in practice the very fact of abstinence from Communion is felt by many to enhance the essential feeling of the day, that the Bridegroom is taken away from us."

Bishop: you were right about 'moving' and 'felt' and 'essential feeling' , but wrong about 'in theory' and 'ought'.

DIES valde AMARITUDINIS!

Good Friday: what colour is suitable for a Dies Amaritudinis?

 (In a few remarks during Holy Week, I draw on information in the Commentary on the 1955 Holy Week by Braga and Bugnini.)

Incidentally, I rather like the old Latin appellation Great Week.

In the Ordinariate Missal, the rubric intimates that the "Priest and Sacred Ministers, wearing Red or Black vestments ...". This permissive use of Black is interesting and tempting. In the 'reformed' rite of 1955, the rule was still the use of Black, long customary in the Roman Rite (exchanged for Violet in the part of the rite which involves the Most Blessed Sacrament). I do not see the point of Red, the modern usage, a colour which is also used at Pentecost and on other occasions. Is there any more sombre and sober marker of this unique Day than the denuded church and the Ministers, in Black, silently making their way to the Sanctuary?

S Ambrose calls this Day a Dies Amaritudinis; that is, of luctus et dolor (bitterness ... sorrow ... anguish). Dictionaries quote Cicero and Quintilian and talk of passionate expression, pathos). It is necessary, I think, for us occasionally to face up to the role (or absence) of psychology in our liturgical deliberations. I do not think that it is entirely healthy to relegate such considerations entirely to those eras of Christian history which in our lordly way we might consider more emotional or affective. Is our religion not designed to apply to every part of our lives and personalities? If I were in a Hispanic area (and healthy enough), I would take the advantage of all those rites and public, communal usages which centre upon baroque images of the Sacred. Call me a peasant if you like ...

And if Amaritudo has no relevance on this particular Day, when will it be relevant?

I suspect that the old Anglo-Catholic practice of devotions to Maria Desolata on the evening of Good Friday (and then to Maria Consolata on Easter Sunday) does have its point.

Palm Sunday (3)

The admirable Fr Thurston, I have argued, may not have spotted all the exciting possibilities of the Palm Sunday Rites in the Missal of S Pius V. He writes: "It is a regrettable fact that in many of our Catholic churches the oldest and certainly most interesting portion of the ritual of Palm Sunday is too often not carried out". Interesting! Apparently, palms were blessed and distributed, but in 'many' churches there was no Procession! This was also once the 'moderate' Anglican practice, because processions were High Church. The Blessing and Distribution of Sacramentals, apparently, was not!

"The whole essence of the ceremonies peculiar to this day lies in the procession." [Thurston's italic.]

 This fundamental assumption lay, too, at the basis of the Pacelli-Bugnini changes in 1955.

"... we can only admire the piety which leads the faithful to preserve [their palms] thoughout the year ... [but] the boughs were consecrated primarily to be used in the procession ...".

Well ... ... up to a point, Lord Copper. But the next prayer calls these olive branches a 'tuae gratiae sacramentum'. This interesting phraseology must go back to before the word 'sacramentum' had had its meaning limited by the precisions of systematic theology (O'Connell/Finberg nervously translate it 'sacred symbol'). But it was, surely, even then a strong word.

I think we may have here a genuine deepening of understanding resulting in a, frankly, more sophisticated appropriation both of Scripture and of Ritual. The much despised peasant kneeling and kissing her palm cross and carefully preserving it throughout the year may, just possibly, have been onto something which Archbishop Bugnini and Papa Pacelli never quite spotted.