28 May 2016

CORPUS CHRISTI ... various afterthoughts

(1) It seems to me very jejune to leave this great feast with the Common Preface, as the not-entirely-satisfactory Missal of 1962 does. Many people were happier with the older usage of employing the Nativity Preface; if this is not restored, surely the 'Gallican' Preface should be made universal. It probably doesn't need an explicit decree to facilitate this, since a Bishop of Rome who has not hidden his views about Law is not going to waste his time being enormously upset about such details.

(2) What a shame we don't have a Patristic Preface for the Blessed Sacrament ... but stay: we could have! The Verona ('Leonine') Sacramentary provided, at Christmas, a superb little Preface (VD tuae laudis hostiam), mentioning ... as you would expect ... the 'typical' figures of Abel, Passover Lamb, Abraham, and Melchisedek. Beautifully Roman; elegantly phrased and terse enough to have come from a very august pen.

(3) The EF and OF texts in Missal and Breviary for Corpus Christi are robustly supersessionist. Take the Lauda Sion (novum Pascha novae Legis Phase vetus terminat; Vetustatem novitas, umbram fugat veritas, noctem lux eliminat) and the Pange lingua (et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui). Comments on this blog earlier in the year established that German "translations" of the Liturgia Horarum, as early as the early 1970s, eliminated prayers for the Conversion of the Jews. Do German translations of S Thomas's hymns eliminate his supersessionism? Are the German and English hierarchies known to be agitating for the Angelic Doctor to be mutilated ('abelardised'?) so to make him Politically Correct?

3 comments:

Patrick Sheridan said...

Recently pope Francis blessed a sculpture by Joshua Koffman called "Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time." Unlike the old statues on Strasbourg Cathedral it depicts two crowned ladies, standing at equal height, one bearing a Torah scroll and the other a Bible. I suppose if the older statues were presented to him he'd order them to be locked away like embarrassing old furniture and apologize unreservedly to his Jewish friends, his "older brothers" in the faith.

John Nolan said...

My Liber Usualis (1961) includes, under 'Praefationes propriae aliquibus dioecesibus', two prefaces of the Blessed Sacrament for use on Maundy Thursday, Corpus Christi and votive Masses. Couldn't either of these be used?

Matthew Roth said...

Many priests just use the Nativity preface. I need to doublecheck which one to use.