20 September 2022

Looking ahead to the Solemnity of our Lady of Walsingham

In celebrating the Usus Authenticus, a cleric is supposed to follow the Universal Calendar as modified by the local Calendar granted by the Holy See for particular Dioceses or Religious Orders, and to use the appropriate accompanying liturgical texts.

But since 1967, the (now, of course, non-existent) Sacred Congregation of Rites has not made provision for changing local needs by granting new local calendars for the Extraordinary Form. The English LMS ORDO wisely explained "Four dioceses have been created since 1962 and for these exist no appropriate calendars. To provide calendars [for them] ... the calendars of [dioceses] ... from whose territory respectively the new dioceses were created have been adopted with changes where appropriate". I suggest that this wise procedure is precisely what is ordered by the provisions of Canon 19 (q.vide). So, for a jurisdiction - for a diocese or whatever - which did not exist in 1961, one should create a Calendar along precisely the same lines which the Sacred Congregation of Rites used in doing this in the decades before 1961. This obviously applies as much to the Ordinariates as it does to new Dioceses.

I have a particular suggestion to make with regard to the Solemnity of our Lady of Walsingham, who is given as "Title" to the English Ordinariate and is to be observed on September 24. It is that those who use Mass and/or Office from the Extraordinary Form use the propers once provided in the Appendix pro aliquibus locis for the Feast of the Translatio Almae Domus BMV [the Holy House of our Lady of Loretto*] on December 10. You should find, in the old thread attached to an earlier version of this post, links to that Proper in the Breviary. (One needs to omit the last section of Lection vi, which relates specifically to Loretto.)

An English translation of this Mass was regularly printed in the Pilgrims' Manual of the Anglican Shrine as the "Mass of our Lady of Walsingham" in the years after the reconstruction of the Holy House in 1931** until the shift in liturgical fashions after 1967. One very minor adjustment was made: the omission from the Collect of the words eamque in sinu Ecclesiae tuae mirabiliter collocasti [referring to the wondrous translation of the Loretto Holy House from Palestine to safer climes].

My proposal may seem to you the less radical when you have mulled over this fact: the English Mass of our Lady of Walsingham, which I first heard in Full Communion as a Votive at our Ordinariate Pontifical Mass on September 19 2015 (celebrated by Archbishop di Noia, adjunct Secretary of the CDF), and is provided in the Divine Worship Missal, uses the Collect and Secret*** from that December 10 Mass adjusted exactly as I described above (and the Post Communion appears to be a modified version of the one there provided). A powerful nod and an expressive wink.

Fr Hope Patten and Fr Fynes Clinton****, I am confident, beam down upon us with much approval as we use this liturgical provision. They know where it is that their Patrimony is now incarnated! Quorum animabus propitietur Deus! Qui Dominum pro nobis deprecentur!

EXTERNAL SOLEMNITY (Extraordinary Form)
On the Sunday before or after the Solemnity of OLW, two Masses (or one high/sung and one low) are allowed of OLW, with a commemoration of the Sunday. Those whose memories retain such things as octaves will probably find it more natural to do this on the Sunday after the Solemnity. (But Office is still of the Sunday.) The Mass may, of course, be used as a Votive on any day when the rubrics permit votives.

* This Mass and Office seem to date from the pontificate of Pope Innocent XII (1691-1700).
** Nearly 400 years after the destruction of the old Holy House.
*** Just think of those thousands of devout priests during those three and a half decades who stood in the smoky atmosphere of candles and lamps within the Holy House and, as it dawned outside, murmured those same words which Archbishop di Noia sang at the High Altar of Westminster Cathedral.
**** It will have been Fynes who sorted out the Mass of OLW; Patten was no latinist.

1 comment:

Albertus said...

Last year on her very feastday i had the privilege of singing Mass in honour of Our Lady of Walsingham at Walsingham itself, according to the authentic Roman rite, for a group of Catholics who had invited me, and for the villagers who at the last moment also showed up upon hearing of the Mass. But since the organisers could not get permission from the official Catholic sanctuary authorities for a Mass secundum ritum authenticum, i celebrated outside under the ruins of the entrance to the ancient sanctuary,located upon private property. It was a windy day, the altar was inside a tent set up for the Mass. I fearedthat the tent might collapse, but Our Lady protected us, and the Mass was sung to the very end without problems. A very memorable occasion for me, of which i have a framed photograph here at home.