Ember Days? (1)

So this first full week of Lent is also an Ember Week!

But, er, what does that mean?

Originally, there were only three Ember Seasons: around Pentecost; in September;  in December. They arose (I still suspect) out of the old pagan Roman celebrations of harvests: respectively, of the harvests of the Corn, the Wine, and the Oil. There were special Masses on the Wednesdays, the Fridays, and the Saturdays within these three weeks.

But unlike more recent harvest celebrations, they were decidedly sober occasions. The Community fasted!

The fast appears to have led to the association of Ordinations with the Ember Weeks, since it is appropriate to approach the Sacrament of Holy Order with prayer and self-denial and even exorcism. The actual Ordinations would be done during an all-night vigil between Saturday and Sunday. The minor Orders, followed by the Major Orders, were conferred one after another in the gaps within the series of Readings.

TRIA TEMPORA.

So how does it come about that we have an Ember week at this time of the year? How did Tria Tempora mutate into Quattuor Tempora? ["Three Seasons" into "Four Seasons".] After all, February and March, in our Northern hemisphere, are not months one would immediately associate with Harvest!

To be concluded. I have tried to find a path through data mainly given by the great Anglican liturgist, student and admirer of the Classical Roman Rite, Fr G G Willis [Essays in Early Roman Liturgy, 1964]. And I have made a few connections of my own.. I do not find Talley convincing.

CORONATIONS ... English Unction

Legg again ... "In days of Anglo-French rivalry the prestige accruing to the King of France from being anointed with this heaven-sent oil [of Clovis: see yesterday's post] was a source of much jealousy to the King of England, and we find traces of a rival story under Edward II, which ripens under Richard II into the detailed legend that the Virgin Mary had given to St  Thomas of Canterbury, when in exile, a phial of oil for the anointing of the King of England. It would seem that Richard had had ideas of being anointed a second time with oil from this phial, which was miraculously anf opportunely found at the Tower, but nothing was done before his deposition. To Henry IV the discovery of the phial was a godsend. In view of the weakness of his title to the throne, he could obtain great prestige as compared with Richard, if he could say he had been consecrated with oil from St. Thomas' holy ampulla, while his rival had not. The phial was therefore placed in a golden eagle ..."

I wonder whether this oil was used at the coronations of Bullen and of Tudor's two daughters. Objects connected with Byshop Bekyt may not have enjoyed much favour in the years between 1532 and 1552. Perhaps 'plain' Chrism was used. 

After the Great Rebellion, the regicides included the eagle-shaped ampulla in their disposal of the implements used in coronations (so a new eagle had to be made at the Restoration).

Nowadays, most Anglican diocesan bishops consecrate the customary oils, and most probably Chrism is used in the coronation. Or, perhaps, they continue the earlier Anglican custom of having oils specially blessed on the morning of the coronation by an episcopal member of the Westminster Chapter.

Does anybody know?

Spitting

 Spitting, liturgically, has a secure and respected place in the Traditional Roman Rite. The collect for the Third Sunday AFTER Easter is thought to have emerged from a context in which the Roman Pontiff was campaigning against pagan survivals, particularly, perhaps, the Lupercalia (February 15) celebrations; so we pray that all those whose names are on the Official Christian List [Christiana professione censentur] may "spit back upon" [respuere] everything  which is inimical to that Name. (I think the collect survives in the Forma Mutila et valde Deterior of the Missal, on Sunday XIV per annum.)

And there is First Millennium evidence that the Pope, when proceding through the City, was preceded by a minister carrying a spittoon to receive the papal ejections.

Good rich wholesome traddy stuff.

And I noticed the other day a Tudor example. It was a great day ... 1553, June 1 ... when Anne Bullen (Boleyn) went to her coronation. She had set off from the Tower of London days before "Apparelled in riche clothe of golde, [she] entered into her barge ... the bachelors' barge going on to the Queeene's right hand, which shee took great pleasure to beholde": quite probably ... perhaps one of those admiring bachelors was her own favourite (perhaps very favourite?) brother ...

Days later she sat, crowned, in Westminster Hall "under her clothe of estate ... on her left hande stoode the countesse of Worcester all the dinner season, which divers times in the dinner time did hold a fine clothe before the queene's face when she list to spit, or do otherwise at her pleasure ..."

Ah, those days of 'otherwise' pleasures and of limitless listing ...

I don't know how common this good old custom still is today. In S John Henry Newman's day, the future Archbishop Whately still kept up, in the Oriel Common Room, the habit of spitting into the fire.

I think the tradition is now confined to Association Footballers, whether or not they are in Oxford Common Rooms. Do our Oratorians ... er ...

From my childhood I recall that public conveniences for the use of males once had notices designed to be read as officiants prepared to walk out: COMMIT NO NUISANCE.

Y'know, I never did.

CORONATIONS ... French Unction

 L G Wickham Legg writes:

"There should be no need to remind the reader of the famous story of how at the baptism of Clovis a crystal phial was brought down from heaven with the chrism for the anointing of the King, and how every French King down to the ill-starred Louis XVI was anointed at his coronation  with chrism into which a small fragment of the solidified oil of Clovis was mixed."

I've looked at the vestments worn by the clergy at the coronation of Charles X; as I did so I couldn't help wondering with what Louis XVI and Charles X were anointed; because, possibly, Robespierre and his buddies and his successors may not have been over-sedulous about the careful protection of the fabled and historical Oil of Clovis. Did they simply make do with (or get the pope to help make special provision) the 'ordinary' Oil of Chrism?

A similar problem was to arise in England.

Popes Rescriptive, Popes Prescriptive ...

There is a tacit assumption that licit Liturgy rests on a basis of Papal positive legislation. What he decrees, everybody has to do. When he changes his mind, the world must be deafened by the sound of bishops and presbyters all changing their minds. "Catholic Liturgy" is what he grants!!

The very word grants says it all.

Consummate rubbish. Liturgy rests upon Custom and Tradition, not the latest motu proprio on your computer. Or even a Rescriptum ex audientia Sanctissimi. No man on earth grants Liturgy to us.

No Pope did (because no Pope could) issue world-wide or general mandates regarding Liturgy before the invention of printing (in the middle of the 1400s).

I suppose that today's fanatical uebersuperhyperpapalists could argue that, nevertheless, the power so to legislate was tacitly incorporated in the Lord's mandate to S Peter, designed to lurk there unrecognised until, a millennium and a half later, the technological moment arrived for it to spring into action ... 

... but, frankly, that is a theological fantasy-world whose daft sci-fi games I feel little interest in playing.

If only PF were to relocate to Mars and govern the obedient Martian sands with his fearsome decrees ...

The notion that we must all obey positive legislation was, I suspect, invented by the English Protestant regime in 1549 in order to impose Heresy. Which, ultimately, it succesfully did. The Evil One simply adores Liturgy which is by Motu or by Rescript or by Prescript. It enables him to display himself at his most effective.

But, earlier, there had ... I admit it ... been people who had views about Liturgy and Uniformity ... it's just that they weren't the popes! The Emperor Charlemagne was one of them. He wanted to establish in his own imperium Romanum redivivum the authentic Rite of the Urbs. Here is the description of Dom Gregory Dix of how he embarked upon this policy.

"Charlemagne therefore applied to the Pope Hadrian I, for an authentic copy ... as early as 781. The Pope was a busy man, and irritatingly uninterested in the great project of securing perfect uniformity throughout the West to the rite of his own see. No book arrived, and Charlemagne was forced to repeat his request. At last, somewhere between 785 and 793 the long-awaited copy came. After all this delay the book the Pope had sent turned out to be unusable as it stood for Charlemagne's purpose. Not only had the text been carelessly copied, but the book itself must have seemed to the emperor strangely defective. ...  It is perhaps regrettable that history records no expression of Charlemagne's opinion of the Pope or his book when the latter was presented to him after getting on for ten years of expectation."

Yes!! Pope Hadrian was "irritatingly uninterested in the great project of securing perfect conformity to the rite of his own see"! 

I don't think this delightfully lazy old gentleman is likely to have stamped around ranting and roaring about unicus usus!

He reminds me of an even earlier Pope, S Gregory the Great, who (according to S Bede) responded to a request from S Augustine of Canterbury. Augustine had discovered how diverse liturgical habits were, and wanted advice on how to regulate the worship of the new Anglo-Saxon Church. So Gregory explained to him that there was only one (unicus) usus of the Roman Rite and that Augustine should impose it ruthlessly. "Check the parish newsletters to ensure that they mention no diversity", he boomed. "Obey my words and do this before you had your breakfast croissant three weeks ago."

No; of course S Gregory didn't say anything like that at all. I don't even think he was aware that the Roman Church only had an unicus usus. I don't think the bergoglian supergod (the uebergott?) had revealed to him that the whole world had got to worship according to some unicus usus. 

Bede claims that he replied ... ah ... how careless and carefree those popes were! ... "Ex singulis quibusque ecclesiis, quae pia, quae religiosa, quae recta sunt, elige ..."

Archbishop Myers on Living Lent with the Authentic Roman Rite

 A few days ago, I included a paragraph from Fr Adrian Fortescue about the immense auctoritas, the antiquity and majesty and theological importance of the Authentic Roman Rite ... the rite by which most Western Christians were worshipping before 1970.

My purpose was to expose (yet again) the dishonesty of those who go around arguing that the publication of the Novus Ordo by S Paul VI in 1970 is somehow equivalent to the publication of an edition of the Roman Rite by S Pius V in 1570.

To state or even to hint at this is disgraceful. What S Pius promulgated was an edition of our rite which had evolved, gradually and organically and gracefully, since the Patristic period. In fact, S Pius made so few changes that it was still possible, after 1570, for a priest to use at the Altar the previous edition of the Roman Missal. In his Bull of Promulgation, the Pope in fact mandated the continuance of earlier 'dialects' of the Rite. 

Mandated: he did not "permit"  the continuance of editions such as our English Sarum or York Missals. He "ordered" their continuance, provided that they had been established more than a couple of centuries before.

Today, I set before you another learned writer of the pre-Conciliar period ... which was a golden age in liturgical studies before Liturgy fell into the hands of men for whom telling the truth was not their primary consideration.

Here are some words by Archbishop Edward Myers, Coadjutor Archbishop of Westminster:

" ... if we take the text of our Missal and consider the Ferial Masses, it is surely an inspiring thought that the prayers that the Church asks us to say with her day by day during Lent are the self-same prayers that have inspired the sanctity of close on fourteeen hundred years. The epistles and gospels read during Lent, with one or two exceptions, are the self-same as were read on the same days in Rome in the sixth century. The prayers of the Proper of the daily Mass come to us straight from the records preserved in the Gregorian or Gelasian Sacramentaries. In the Introits, Graduals, Offertories and Communions of the Ferial Lenten Masses, we pray as prayed the Saints of old, and draw our inspiration from the self-same sources."

Myers was born in 1875; priested in 1902; consecrated Bishop of Lamus in partibus infidelium in 1932; translated to (the Pauline See of) Beroea in 1951 as coadjutor Archbishop. He died in 1956.

This Lent, I have beside me his masterly Lent and the Liturgy published by The Grail in 1948 (44 pages). It contains the paragraph I have offered above.

Is his work still available?

ASHES (2)

So, according to the old Roman Pontifical, on Ash Wednesday the Bishop expelled the Ashed Penitents from Church "with tears" (did the MC have to provide the Pontiff with a sliced onion?).

On Maundy Thursday, the Penitents were received back into the Church, the following Prayer being used.

Perhaps one of the ills which lie at the roots of our present problems is the loss of a sense of an actual Order of Penitents in the Church. There is evidence that, in first-Millennium Ireland, there were special areas, below the Church on 'ritual' hillsides, where the Penitents were expected to stand.


It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto thee, O Lord, Holy Father, almighty everlasting God, through Christ our Lord; 
Whom, almighty Father, thou didst will ineffably to be born, that he might loose the debt of Adam to thee the eternal Father, and destroy our death by his own, and carry our wounds in his own body, and wash away our stains with his own blood; that we who have fallen by the envy of the ancient enemy might rise again by his mercy. Through him, Lord, we humbly beg and beseech thee that thou vouchsafe to hear us on behalf of the excesses of others, though we are not sufficient to pray thee for our own. Do thou therefore, most merciful Lord, call back to thyself, with thy wonted love, these thy servants, whose sins have separated them from thee. For thou didst not despise the humbling of Ahab the most wicked, but put away the punishment which he deserved. Peter also thou didst hear when he wept, and didst later commit to him the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and to the confessing thief didst promise the rewards of that same kingdom.
Therefore, most merciful Lord, mercifully gather back those for whom we pour our prayers before thee, and restore them to the bosom of thy church, that the Enemy may in no wise have the power to triumph over them, but that thy Son may reconcile them to thee, and cleanse them from all sin, and deign to admit them to the banquet of thy most holy supper. And may he so refresh ["reficiat" ... remake?] them with his flesh and blood, that after the course of this life he may bring them to the kingdoms of heaven; even he, Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

You might like to observe that this Prayer is after the pattern of the Roman Canon as it must have been before the insertion of Sanctus-Benedictus: 
     "Vere dignum ... ";
     A 'legalistic' recitation of precedents from both the Old and New Testaments;
     "Therefore most Merciful ..."; and finally
     Request that the Rite be efficacious.

After many more prayers and psalms, the Pontiff gave a solemn Absolution, framed in the old 'precative' way rather than in the modern 'declarative' mode.

These elements witness, surely, to the great antiquity of the rite.

ASHES (1)

I noticed, winking at me from my revolving book-case, my 1845 (Hanicq) Pontificale Romanum. Nice engravings! Idly wasting the lazy moment, I just happen to notice that, on Ash Wednesday, the Pontiff expels the Penitents from Church and warns them not to darken its doors again until Maundy Thursday. 

Ah, happy days, when the clergy told people not to come to Church!

The (barefoot) penitents were to be garbed in sackcloth and ashes; the penitential psalms and the Litany were to be sung and then the Pontiff was to say: "Look! You are chucked out today from the thresholds of Holy Mother Church on account of your sins, just as Adam the first Man was ejected from Paradise on account of his transgression." 

Then the choir were to sing a couple of very heart-warming anthems: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread ... etc. etc.."

Tomorrow: the next stage (2) in the story.

I wonder how this penitential system fits into the conviction of PF and his Teutonic Knights that (as long as people pay their Church Tax) they ought not to be expelled?

And I do rather wonder how those people nuance I Corinthians chapter 5 (especially arthei ek mesou humon ... ego kekrika ... paradounai toi satanai ... me sunanamignusthai pornois ... exarate ton poneron ex humon auton ...).

It is often a good idea, when listening to a slippery/dodgy politican, to notice what s/he is very careful not to claim. When PF claimed not long ago that Jesus never sent anybody away (datum sed non concessum), what about S Paul's praxis? 

Or are the 'Pauline writings' yet another bit of the Bible which Ming the Mighty and Merciless has cut out of the Canon of Holy Scripture?

When PF issues to the Bishops some document headed Sacrae Scripturae custodes, what action should we take?

Big Man, Huge Errors, Hefty Scissors.

Obligations

 From Gueranger: "The ancient discipline of the Church obliged all the faithful, under pain of being considered as no longer Catholics, to receive Holy Communion on Christmas Day, as well as on Easter and Whit Sundays. We find a formal decree of this obligation given in the fifteenth canon of the Council of Agatha, (Agde,) held in 506."

I wonder how this relates to the old Anglican rule ...

 

Sayers (2): Abortion?

DLS was, from the beginning, not averse to writing ... erotically? ... not, I think, the right word; 'explicitly', perhaps. Her first draft of her novel Whose Body had laid some emphasis on the status, in terms of Circumcision, of a naked male corpse. Busman's Honeymoon is full of John-Donnery; Donne was an author himself awake to the possibilities of bringing together the corporeal and the geographical. DLS was not above writing a novel the key to which is Interbellum Lesbianism. But I do not think that anything she wrote earlier was quite as explicit as the episode early in Thrones and Dominations, situated at the back of a Parisian taxi, where Wimsey takes his wife's hand and starts burbling on about "cherishing worms". 

And the relationship between Laurence and Rosamund Harwell is given a basis in the sexual exploitation of sexual frustration. He wants a baby; she is determined not to allow this to happen. The role of her ridiculous dog in chapter 6 is, in my view, masterly.

My hypothesis, advanced as nothing more than a hypothesis, is that Rosamund, having become pregnant, seeks a solution to this problem in Abortion. Harwell loses his temper when he finds out.

I wonder if Sayers slips into her draft an allusive reference to the sexual act which had resulted in that conception.

On the night when Lord Dawson killed George V, Rosamund has gone to bed, while Laurence listens to the bulletins. After the announcement of the Royal Death, he goes to bed. "His sudden arrival startled her. She said, 'Not already?' and he answered. 'Yes; he's gone,'  and she could only cry, 'Oh Laurence!' and cling to him. A rich melancholy enfolded them. They felt the grief of a nation lap them in luxurious sheets of sympathetic bereavement. A whole epoch was collapsing about them, while at the core of darkness they lit their small blaze of life and were comforted."

How exactly does one 'light a small blaze of life'?

Sayers, with ironic detachment, characterises this as "a night of stars and love".

Only for those interested in Dorothy L Sayers (1)

 DLS used to spin 'mysteries' for her living ... and for the amusement of her devotees. But she herself left behind a mystery, in the form of a detec-fiction narrative which she gave up, incomplete, after writing six chapters.

Thrones and Dominations ... so ... whodunnit ; and why?

DLS's literary executors commissioned the late Jill Patton Walsh to "finish" the book ... to solve the mystery. The solution JPW came up with was: Laurence Harwell strangled his wife Rosamund because he erroneously believed that she had arranged an adulterous tryst with another man.

Incidentally, I do not subscribe to the claim advanced in several of the 'blurbs', that the junction between DLS's chapters, and JPW's 'completion', is seamless

Nobody, unfortunately, has published surviving materials which may have led JPW to her conclusion. There exists a diagram ... there are alternative versions of some parts of he story ... there is, apparently, a description of Peter Wimsey's 'initiation' into sex ... which have all been kept from us (was JPW a prude? Sayers certainly wasn't). Given DLS's deserved distinction as a Christian thinker, a stylist, and a writer, I feel that this is unfortunate. Moreover, even in the chapters which DLS wrote, there are one or two solecism which suggest to me that JPW tampered with the text.

And there is another embedded mystery. Why did DLS give up writing her novel? Was it because the unfolding Abdication Crisis threw up some disconcerting parallels between a sexuality described (graphically) in her typescript, and the passion of 'Edward VIII' for the dominant Mrs Simpson?

Very possibly. But, next time, I shall offer an alternative hypothesis. I shall not repeat great swathes of text, because these pieces are directed at the interests of Sayers-enthusiasts who will know her published texts anyway.

Repetition of the Sexagesima Mass

 After my words about the repetition of the Sexagesima Mass on ferial weekdays, wise and intelligent friends have asked the obvious question: "Why don't you just use Votives?".

Respectfully, I disagree with the implications here. Votives are not provided simply to enable presbyters to avoid the old Sunday Masses. It's more that ... Ah; I think Adrian Fortescue has put it better than I can: 

"The liturgical student cannot but regret that we so seldom use the old offices which are the most characteristic, the most Roman in our rite, of which many go back to the Gelasian or even Leonine book. And merely from an aesthetic point of view there can be no doubt that the old propers are more beautiful than modern compositions. It is these old propers that show the austere dignity of our liturgy, that agree in feeling with the Ordinary and Canon, happily still unaltered."

Some of the disiecta membra of some of those ancient Roman propers, Prayers and Readings, survive, scattered around in the Novus Ordo. But it is in the loss of the entire Masses in the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite that I feel the biggest wound inflicted by the liturgical innovations of the 1960s.

In fact, those words supra from Fortescue explain, for me, precisely what is most wrong with the actual texts of the Bugnini Rite. 

Sexagesima, from its Introit onwards, recalls the dying agonies of the Roman Empire: the death of S Gregory's predecessor as Pope from water-born disease after the floods; the incursions of the Lombardic slavers. So, on Sexagesima, the People of Rome went to the Basilica of the Teacher of the Gentiles, one of the three great churches which, like sentinels, guarded the City with the suffrages of its three greatest Saints. The sermons Pope Gregory the Great preached on the three 'Gesima' Sundays, explaining in particular the choice of the Gospel readings, still survive and are still illuminating.

Rather as we also might do in our own time of wars and earthquakes, the Roman Christian called upon the Almighty for mercy in such terrible days. Sexagesima was in the liturgical books which S Augustine probably brought to Canterbury (vide Orchard, HBS Leofric, Vol I page 131) and copies of which were undoubtedy used in England for nearly a millennium. In partial form, indeed, Sexagesima lasted for much more than a millennium: even Thomas Cranmer in 1549 preserved Sexagesima, and the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel remained substantially the same. In 1649, when (in Dix's words), "medieval England came to its final end", Bishop Juxon read the Sexagesima propers when he gave King Charles I his last Holy Communion as the regicides met in their 'Parliament' to abolish the Monarchy and the Church of England. (Did you know that in 1649, in the Julian Calendar, January 30 came within Sexagesima week?)

When, after the Parting of Friends, S John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey walked separately in Birmingham and Oxford, they both still kept Sexagesima. The imprisoned Anglican priests of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England observed Sexagesima, just as the heroic Catholic martyrs had done during the long and bloody penal centuries.

A Papacy which, by the stroke of a pen, thinks it can prohibit the Liturgy of 1,500 and more years, is an expression, not of service to the Church, but of arrogant repudiation of that Church. The persistent lie that the older rite "dates only from 1570" should be shown up for the piece of shameless (if spectacular) mendacity which it truly is.

I can think of nothing more utterly ridiculous than any notion that men like Bergoglio and Roche should consider themselves Lords of the Liturgy (Cfr Ratzinger Spirit pages 165-6), omnicompetent not only to abandon the Roman Rite themselves, but even to pretend to forbid the Holy People of God to use it. 

Such mighty hubris; such gross, overweening pomposity.