17 December 2021

A Novus Ordo Postcommunion and Rosa Krebb

Here is the original text of the Postcommunion appointed for December 17 in the Novus Ordo. It served in the Sarum Missal for the Last Sunday After Trinity, and is found there in many early Western rites.  I take the text below from 'the Gelasianum'.

The Bugnini 'reformers' rearranged the clauses; and made changes in the words I have highlighted in red.

Animae nostrae, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus, hoc potiantur* desiderio, ut a tuo Spiritu inflammentur; ut sicut lampades divino munere satiati, ante conspectum venientis Christi Filii tui velut clara lumina fulgeamus. Per.

(* Sarum reads pascantur)

 I think the removal of animae nostrae tightens the structure and, until better advised, I advance no criticism (Sarum had done some rearranging too). inflammentur is replaced in the modern rite by accensi; and sicut lampades is omitted. I think the elimination of inflammentur ('go up in in flames') and the omission of sicut lampades ('like torches') snatch away from us a very vivid piece of pictorial imagination.

The original provides a striking picture of a gang of enthusiasts with torches charging through the dark, unilluminated streets of a city, lighting their way with torches, to meet Someone who is Coming. Remember that Roman houses faced inwards to their courtyards, so that in the narrow streets there would not even be such faint illumination as could be provided by the light of oil lamps flickering through windows.

Changed, the prayer becomes Sixties and platitudinous. Indeed, one does rather wonder why Novus Ordo runners would now need any lights at all; surely, the massive electrical illumination from the Car Show Rooms opposite would be enough to keep them from stumbling over into the sterquilinium.

Poor antique Arthur Roche recently claimed that the Novus Ordo contained most of the euchology of the Usus Authenticus; and was more 'rich'.  I do understand what the dear old gentleman has in mind. The Bugninioids did rescue a fair bit of material from early liturgical sources, especially in their (self-imposed) mission to provide different propers for weekdays in Advent and Easter.

But:

(1) the motives controlling the selections they made, and their editorial alterations, have a consistent mens, videlicet, to enforce a levelling-down: we end up with a liturgical culture squeezed everywhere into the straight-jacket (adjusted to the dimensions of a Procrustean Bed!) of one decade. On the other hand, the Authentic Use, having evolved organically over two millennia, picking up like a glacier diverse materials from every age it passed through, contains within it so much more cultural diversity. (C S Lewis's point in The Reading of  Old Books applies here.)

(2) the really ginormous elephant in the NO room is the following thought-provoking fact: 

Most modern Christians who are not lapsed go to Mass on Sundays; very few go day-by-day on every weekday. So they gain no advantage from the fact that the old Sunday prayers for Advent, Lent, and Eastertide have sometimes ... if they've been fortunate ... been relocated to weekdays or to 'Ordinary Time'.

Yes; not a single Advent, Lent, Easter, Sunday collect in the old rite survived into the Novus Ordo as a collect for a Sunday within that season.

Not one. 

Did you hear me?

Every single one of the Sunday Collects for the Three Great Seasons, prayers which had served Latin Christendom for a millennium and a half, was deemed by the self-important, ipseinfallibilist 'scholarship' of one single decade to be totally unfit for Sunday use in those seasons.

In particular, the fine series of Excita collects disappeared from the Sundays of Advent.

This intolerance towards the ancient Sunday collects, this act of arrogant censorship and violent cultural vandalism and shameless ecclesial rupture, in itself alone, is more than enough to render the NO suspect ... for me personally, quite unusable (although, of course, both valid and licit).

PF threatens Chinese-style 're-education' for anybody dim enough to have problems with the Novus Ordo (" ... to provide for the good of those who are rooted in the previous form of celebration and need to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Ss Paul VI and John Paul II ..."). We 'need' to have kindly sensitive people to assist us 'to return' to the 1970s; "to help them understand the essential principles of renewal called for in the Second Vatican Council", as PF's sad-eyed little friend Cupich put it. It is so important to boldly stride ahead from 2021 to 1970! But it would take a a terrible amount of the Maoist re-education threatened by Bergoglianity to drag me back to the flawed and tatty (though fully valid and totally licit) aging liturgical compilations of the Sanguinary Seventies. 

Been there. Done that. Now I know better. 

Thanks be to God that He did not leave me floundering in that old quagmire.

Anybody trying to 'accompany' me on such a prescribed Bergoglian journey 'back to Bugnini' (... hus lousamene eis kulismon borborou, as Scripture puts it ...) is likely to get a very special kicking at every step along the way.

I have some Rosa Krebb boots and, even in my enfeebled ninth decade, I think I could still swing a finely honed toecap. 

Does that allusion verify my 1960s credentials?

5 comments:

Simon Cotton said...

Rosa Klebb's boots carried a concealed weapon, a steel knife coated with tetrodotoxin, a deadly molecule used by the fugu fish, a thousand times more poisonous than potassium cyanide, which kills upwards of fifty Japanese a year. See https://www.chemistryworld.com/podcasts/tetrodotoxin/3005972.article

motuproprio said...

For comparison the NO text and current translation.
Divíno múnere satiáti, quǽsumus, omnípotens Deus, hoc desidério potiámur, ut, a tuo accénsi Spíritu, ante conspéctum veniéntis Christi tui, velut clara luminária fulgeámus. Per Christum Dóminum nostrum.
Nourished by these divine gifts, almighty God, we ask you to grant our desire: that, aflame with your Spirit, we may shine like bright torches before your Christ when he comes. Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

IaninEngland said...

Yes it does, but it's Rosa Klebb, I'm afraid

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

Dear Father. The observation by Father Gregory Hesse is worth reading and thinking about

Every valid rite of Mass of the Catholic Church, Fr Hesse argues, is addressed to the honour and glory of the Blessed Trinity.  In the Roman rite this is expressed in the prayers Suscipe sancta Trinitas at the close of the Offertory, and Placeat tibi after the Ite Missa est.  Let the reader study the novus ordo missal to see if he can find anywhere in its texts a prayer acknowledging that the Mass so offered is addressed to the honour and glory of the Blessed Trinity.

This is a copy and paste from the interesting blog linked to below. It is not a post for the faint of faith


https://www.superflumina.org/status-novus-ordo.html

Colin Spinks said...

At the risk of appearing facetious to the observation cited above, I would contend that one does have to look very far in the NO Mass to find an acknowledgment that the Mass is addressed "to the honour and glory of the Blessed Trinity". "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti". Perhaps one of the strongest evidence to support this comes from looking at how the Anglican Church and Protestants have regarded and still regard this clause: Dr Cranmer removed it altogether, so HE certainly thought it had such (by his own lights) dodgy sacrificial connotations. Not until 2000 did it appear in the official liturgies of the CofE, and only then as an 'option', not explicitly prescribed, and it is not universally used. I have also noticed a number of clergy prefacing the Invocation with such phrases as "We meet in the name etc" or "We gather in the name etc" suggesting that they too want to say: "We're only gathering for a meal, not *offering* anything in honour of these Three Persons" Yes, I agree that the loss of the "Suscipe Sancta Trinitas" and "Plceat tibi" impoverishes the liturgy, but I cannot agree that it renders it invalid.