July festivals

I've been mad and wild. It started off when I realised that, this year, the Visitation on May 31 would be expunged by Pentecost. I resolved to observe, here at S Thomas's, the Visitation on its original date of July 2. Then ... you know how one thing leads to another ... I succumbed to the temptation to start July in a fully EF way. So the Precious Blood went onto the S Thomas's Calendar for July 1: the day from which Bugnini removed it on the specious ground that it duplicated Corpus Christi (which he accordingly and cumbrously renamed Corpus et Sanguis Christi). Nonsense. The Festival of July 1 concentrated on the redemptive power of the Precious Blood, Corpus Christi on the Eucharist. Of course they are connected, but they are not a duplication. Bugnini also claimed that Holy Cross day was duplicated by the Precious Blood ... you see the daft logic. The reductio ad absurdum would be to reduce the calendar to Christmas, Easter Day, and All Saints. Though, come to think of it All Saints really duplicatesEaster ...

Actually, we have a splendid start to July here in the Ebbsfleet Apostolic District. The Apostolic Administrator decided to celebrate his Jubilee on July 1, in S Barnies.It should be a good event.

Ordo, Ordo

I hope everybody is diligently buying my 2010 ORDO. But there are, of course, other ORDOs.

Not many people will be able to follow to the letter the calendar and rites prescribed by the ORDO published by The Saint Lawrence Press. But, if one can read highly abbreviated Latin, it will prove a treasury of information about a past (?) age; the age of the Roman Rite as it existed before Pius XII, before 1939. Follow this thread ...
... on the first Sunday in July, all Masses are permitted of the Precious Blood. This is explained in the introduction, page 3: "Where an external solemnity of feasts, which before the last reform of the Roman Breviary were permanently fixed to some Sunday with the rank of double of the first or second class, is celebrated on that Sunday to which the feast was formerly attached, all masses are permitted ...".
For example: The feast of Precious Blood, made universal by Pius IX to celebrate the end of the Roman Revolution in 1849, was by him put onto the first Sunday in July. But the early Liturgical Movement objected to the large number of Sundays in the year on which the ancient Sunday Mass was superseded by a sexier and more fashionale pious celebration. The great Adrian Fortescue wrote: "We obey the authority of the Church, of course, always. But it is not forbidden to hope for such a pope again as Benedict XIV who will give us back more of our old Roman Calendar. Footnote Since this was written the hope has been already in great part fulfilled. The decree Divino afflatu of November. 1, 1911 does give us back much of the old Proprium temporis for office and Mass." In this reform of S Pius X, a lot of the festivals attached to particular Sundays were transferred to fixed days, so that only infrequently would they displace a Sunday Mass . The Precious Blood was moved to July 1. There, it preceded the Visitation. This meant that that it didn't get a proper Second Vespers, since both were of the same rank (double of the second class) and the Visitation was entitled to a first Vespers . Accordingly, in 1934, Pius XI raised the precious Blood to a double of the first class so that it outranked the Visitation.

Incidentally, nothing much changes. How many Sundays nowadays are cluttered up with the currently fashioble Themes:Environment Sunday, Education Sunday, Vocation Sunday ... There is a law of liturgical history: clutter clutter clutter prune, clutter clutter ...

Brichtelmestunensis dixit ...

Some time ago, a blogger whom I read and admire wrote : "the centre of communion is the person of the bishop of Rome". I wonder if this is quite accurately focussed.

A long time ago the well-know Anglican Catholic theologian Eric Mascall, described by Fr Aidan Nichols as a separated Magister fidei Catholicae, pointed out that there are papal vacancies, and this must have a significance. History provides us with examples as long as some three years, but even if the longest papal interregnum were only three minutes the logical problem would remain. During that three minutes, would we have to say that the Church Universal had no visible and earthly centre of unity?

I feel we are on safer ground in asserting that the centre of communion is the Roman Church, which at the beginning of the second century S Ignatius decribed as presiding over the Agape. The Roman Church, unlike the Roman Pontiff, never for a moment ceases to exist. And the Roman Pontiff himself is not a conceptually isolated individual, an episcopus vagans. His existence and meaning and ministry and significance are rooted in and inseparable from the fact that he is Bishop of Rome, Peter's Church, where Peter still speaks with authority.

My proposal in no way disturbs the definitions of Vatican I about papal Primacy and Infallibility. The bishop of any church is that church's authorised Spirit-endowed teacher, equipped with what S Irenaeus described as his charisma certum veritatis [reliable gift of truth]. So the bishop of Rome is the one who authoritatively articulates the teaching which the Roman Church authentically preserves and expresses.

CORNWALL

Perhaps I should explain that I have just been in Cornwall for a fortnight; therefore I have not been able to reply to blog comments or to many of my emails. If I have replied, you probably think that my response is briefer and less chummy than usual: please forgive this! I have read all communications with great interest.

(The posts were written before I went off, pretimed to pop up.)

To whom do we pray?

Classically, to the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. Eucharistic Prayers are thus worded; and the collects in the old Sacramentaries usually do this. Antiphons and hymns, and 'private' prayers such as Veni, Suscipe and Placeat, however, can address the Son, the Spirit, the Trinity, the Saints.

Quite early, however, some confusion arose about which person of the blessed Trinity is being invited to "come" in some of the more 'immediate' Advent collects ("Stir up thy power and come ..."). In the Middle ages and later collects were composed addressing the Son; the most celebrated example of which is the one which was (probably) composed by S Thomas for Corpus Christi. Amusingly, the 1980 Anglican Alternative Service Book primly reconstructed this prayer so that it addressed the Father! But are there collects addressed to the Holy Trinity?

Since 1549, there has been at least one in the Church of England: look at the Trinity Sunday collect as offered by Cranmer. Since 1980, we have had another prayer addressed to the Trinity - now labelled as a postcommunion - which originated in the church of South India. And Cranmer went even further: the Preface for that Sunday was so modified by him that it, too, addresses the Trinity. So here we have (part of) a Eucharistic Prayer addressing not the Father but the Trinity. The latest Church of Ireland Prayer Book goes even further; it has one which addresses the Father in the Preface, the Son in the Institution narrative, the Spirit in the epicletic paragraph, and the Trinity in the Doxology! I have wondered whether such a prayer can even be a valid Form, and have declined to use it.

But I think I have read somewhere that in, for example, the Ethiopian Church, there are Eucharistic Prayers which address the Son and even ... Our Lady!!

Can anyone put me right on this?

Legal Confusion (2)

So, in 1935, the 'Report of the Archbishops' Commission on the Relations between Church and State' despairingly wrote:" No one obeys the law so construed [by the Privy Council in 1868]. Not the clergy, since there is scarcely one of them who makes no change in the authorised forms of service. Not the Bishops, who are charged to see that this impossible law is carried out. Worse still, by the Declaration, as interpreted by the Courts, every priest solemnly undertakes to do that which in fact none of them actually performs."

After the war, Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, a resolute persecutor (while Bishop of London) of his Roman Rite parishes, masterminded the provision of a completely new Code of Canon Law. This cut the gordian knot which the Privy Council had tied in 1868. It decreed that "the minister who is to conduct the service may at his discretion make and use variations which are not of substantial importance". "Trivial" rules, OK.

Where does this leave us now? Most bishops steer clear of getting into liturgical wars. But there is a handful (curiously, mostly 'Catholic') which takes the line "My dear boy, I'm prepared to turn a blind eye to pretty well everything you do, and I'll even go along with it when I visit your parish. But just one thing: you MUST say an approved Eucharistic Prayer after the Sanctus." (I know one episcopal fool who commends this approach by saying "I've got to persecute you so that I can persecute the Evangelicals too".)

One can see a reason for this. The Eucharistic Prayer, in recent Anglican history, is rather like the Ypres Salient; every yard doggedly fought over; gallons of blood spilt; whole acres dangerously mined. The 'approved' Eucharistic Prayers are supposed to have been so crafted that not a syllable treads on any toe, whether it be a Zwinglian or Transaccidentationalist one. (Gregory Dix foresaw these hypocrisies: " There is really something very profane about the idea that we can only come before God with circumlocutions which it has been agreed to misunderstand differently".) The only fly in the ointment is that Canon Law elsewhere makes it clear that the same degree of regulation applies to every part of every (legal) service; the notion that the Post-sanctus is a unique and privileged area can find no justification in the text of the canons.

It would legally be possible to test whether certain 'variations' were contrary to 'Anglican doctrine'. But if it were to be argued that - for example - the Canon Romanus was contrary to Anglican doctrine, there is morass of quicksand that the troops would have some trouble getting their heavy armour across. A few years ago the Anglican bishops, while nagging the RC authorities to allow 'intercommunion', said that Anglicans ought to be admitted to Roman Catholic altars because Anglicans "can, with good conscience, say a heartfelt Amen at the end of the [Roman] Eucharistic Prayer".

These ad hominem arguments can get you into such a fix. You can't have things both ways. Not even if you're a bishop. Not even if you're an Anglican one.

Legal Confusion (1)

The liturgy imposed by the Reformation state on the Church of England was embodied in statute and interpreted by the organs of the Crown. In 1868 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council adjudged that " It is not open to a Minister of the Church, or even to their Lordships in advising Her Majesty as the hightest Ecclesiastical Tribunal of Appeal, to draw a distinction, in acts which are a departure from or violation of the Rubric, between those which are important and those which are trivial". Thus a legal straightjacket was deemed to exist unlike any which had ever existed in Catholic liturgical tradition. Before the invention of printing, in Gregory Dix's words, "broadly speaking, the sanction in liturgy was not 'law' but 'custom'."

But - you cry - especially those of you schooled by Fr Zed to Say the Black and Do the Red - what about the minute regulation clamped upon the Roman Communion by S Pius V? Was this not another Law of Medes and Persians?

No. Although the Counter-Reformation church was a tighter ship than the craft which had cheerfully navigated the preceding fifteen liturgical centuries, it didn't operate like the English Privy Council. As J O'Connell put it in 1940, "Even usage contra legem can obtain the force of custom, even against the rubrics ... the Sacred Congregation of Rites has never declared that no usage which is contrary to the rubrics may ever become a custom ... and from time to time it has not only tolerated usages contra or praeter legem, but has approved them, and sometimes even ordered them to be observed."

In the Church of England, the clergy of the Catholic Revival cheerfully operated on such principles and, by the second and third decades fo the 20th Century, a whole gamut of customs had been nurtured which went beyond (praeter) or contrary (contra) to the statute law. Bishops and Crown lawyers tried to do something about this. But what hindered them at every turn was the fact that it was not only Catholics who disregarded the law, but everybody else too. Evangelicals ignored what they saw as relics of popery surviving in the Prayer Book, and middle-of-the-road men interfered pragmatically and pastorally with the strict letter of the law.

Things got worse after 1928, Parliament turned down a new draft Prayer Book - and the Bishops promptly said that they would tolerate the use of it, thus conniving in the use of a rite which, in 'Establishment' legality, had no more authority than the Liturgy of S John Chrysostom. The 'authorities' would have liked to turn a blind eye to 'sensible' flexibility while exterminating 'Romish' illegalities ... but the illogicality and unfairness of attempts to do this were glaringly apparent. (Concludes tomorrow)

Offering a Blessing

I have seen an Order of Service at the end of which the rubric says "The Bishop will offer his Benediction". (I don't think this is a reference to Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.)

I have been wondering what gut instinct makes me so dislike this phrase. Perhaps it is that, in customary parlance, to 'offer' a blessing means to say "Would you like me to bless you?" But the bishop concerned could argue that, as with the Sacraments, so with a sacramental like a blessing, a potential recipient can refuse the grace proferred (the manuals use the phrase obicem ponere; to put an obstacle in the way). OK. So, in a sense, a blessing is only offered. It is ineffectual unless it is received. But then, the same is true of, for example, Confirmation and Ordination. But, at least in the Provinces of Canterbury and York, Letters of Orders do not tell us that the Bishop merely offered the priesthood (We, wozname, Bishop of wozname, on such-and-such-a-day, while solemnly administering Holy Orders in Our Cathedral Church of wozname, did rightly and duly ordain wozname to the Office of Priesthood in the Church of God ...).

Why is it that such a phrase is now to be used, and what cultural baggage is it carting along with it?

The English Missal

For most of the 20th Century, Anglican Catholic worship meant a volume called "The English Missal". It contained the whole Missale Romanum translated into English; into an English based on the style of Thomas Cranmer's liturgical dialect in the Book of Common Prayer. The "EM" took everything biblical from the translation known as the King James Bible or Authorised Version. Cranmer's Eucharistic order was incorporated into Ordo Missae of the Missal of S Pius V. On days for which Cranmer provided a collect, that collect of his - whether it was a translation or a new composition - was provided.

The book, however, was a trifle protean. As the century progressed, the (anonymous) editors grew more and more uneasy about diverging from the strict letter of the Missale Romanum (translated); you might call them forerunners of Liturgicam authenticam. So, where Cranmer had translated a little freely (and, as I explained some time ago, he had a natural tendency to expand his Latin originals), later editions of the English Missal pruned his texts down to conformity with the Latin. And the collects which were Cranmer's own compositions were either removed or allowed to survive as mere alternatives to versions of the Latin. It was deemed necessary to provide translations of the Masses for all the "Sundays after Pentecost", where earlier editions had assumed that Anglican Catholic priests would be happy to use Cranmer's propers, taken from the Sarum Rite, for the "Sundays after Trinity" (supplemented by the portions which Cranmer had omitted: Introits, etc.). It was assumed that clergy were getting less and less willing to interpolate Prayer Book formularies into the Roman Rite, and also more anxious to say as much as possible in Latin. This had an unfortunate effect: the book on the Altar increasingly offered different texts from those the devout laity found in their hand editions. I prefer the more 'Anglican' earlier editions. Like Joseph Ratzinger and the other Vatican supporters of the Book of Divine Worship (the Liturgy used by those American ex-Anglican communities who are the "Anglican Use of the Roman Rite"), I think there are excellent reasons for Anglican Catholics to have there own distinctive dialect of what remains the one Roman Rite: Extraordinary Form, Anglican Form, Ordinary Form, Dominican Form. After all, whatever undesireable ruptures accompanied the birth of our English rites in the 16th century, 450 years of devout use to carry their own sanctification. But, in whatever edition, the English Missal is a very fine vernacular version of the classical Roman Rite, in a very fine liturgical, hieratic, dialect. When the great Christine Mohrmann lamented that modern European vernaculars did not possess a hieratic form, she had not met the English Missal. I deeply regret that most Anglican Catholic clergy deemed it obsolete when Old ICEL in the 1970s issued the horrrendous current English RC liturgy. I am glad that EM is now again in print; and I trust that traditionalist Anglican clergy may be inclined to bring it back into the Church's repertoire. Sadly, I recognise that it is not fair to urge this upon Roman Catholics at a time when they are gearing up to cope with the New ICEL translation.

A begging note: does anybody know of - or have unwanted sets of - booklet editions of (just the) the Order of Mass, for the laity?

Cranmer, Dix, Sarum, 1549 ... (2)

Unfortunately, that plan to celebrate a Sarum Votive of the Five Wounds of Jesus came to nothing; the energetic and enthusiastic priest who was organising it discovered that, to his dismay, the resurgent Cornish Nationalists whom he expected to rally round were mostly antipathetic to Christianity; those who were not, tended to regard Methodism as the authentic native religion of Cornwall. But I have not lost faith with the Votive of the Five Wounds; I made the discovery that this votive is in fact very nearly the same votive which appears in the Missale Romanum of S Pius V as the Votive de Passione Christi; with two or three phrases pencilled into the margin, one more or less has the English medieval Votive. It used to be said on Fridays; I sometimes use it as an alternative to the Sacred Heart Votive.

Wills and tombstones make clear that this Votive was one of the most popular in late Medieval England (see Duffy's 'Stripping of the Altars'). Dr Thomas Cranmer clearly knew it off by heart: in the Prayer Book he composed in 1549 the Intercession ends with most of the Collect of that Votive, translated so closely that we can almost decide which edition of the Sarum Missal Cranmer knew it from.

In his Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix notoriously fantasises about what was going through Cranmer's mind during the last minutes of his life in Marian Oxford. It's a fine piece of Dixian rhetoric (if my RC readers have not read Dix, I suggest they do so: written in 1944, the book is still in print and will do nothing at all to weaken their Catholic Faith). Naturally, the train of thought Dix reconstructs neatly confirms the reconstruction Dix has just done of Cranmer's theology. I would dare to reconstruct a different sequence of reflections that might have passed through the old man's mind as he hurried of his own accord out of S Mary's and along the Turl to where the stake sood in the middle of the Broad. I suspect that as he struggled to sustain in his Protestant heart that Faith, that feeling, that fiducia, which alone, according to Reformation Protestantism, stands between the soul and eternal damnation, he prayed that, the other side of the stake, he might find not Balliol College but his Lord, and that at the day of the generall resurreccion he might be set on Christ's right hand, and heare that his most ioyfull voyce: Come unto me, O ye that be blessed of my father, and possesse the kingdom.

Poor old gentleman. What an enormous amount of harm he did. But how superb his liturgical English. The older editions of the English Missal (in which Cranmer's texts, and the Authorised version of the Bible, are reproduced and supplemented by translations of those Missal texts Cranmer failed to translate, done into an English which is a very creditable attempt at the liturgical dialect he created) is in my view the finest vernacular liturgical book ever produced and deserves to be given a new lease of life. It is certainly getting one here in S Thomas's, where in liturgical use it takes pride of place immediately after its Latin original.

Punctuation

No liturgical edition is perfect. Here are some changes that ought to be made in a new edition of the Missal of S Pius V.

The Creed: "sub Pontio Pilato" should be punctuated to go with "Crucifixus etiam pro nobis", and not with "passus et sepultus". The Pauline Missal is right here, as the Greek makes clear.

The Preface: We should punctuate "Lord, Holy Father, Almighty everlasting God". "Lord" stands for LORD=YHWH= the ineffable Name of the God of our Hebrew Fathers. "Holy Father" is taken from John 17, our Lord's High Priestly Prayer, and is his distinctive mode of addressing His Father.

I feel the Amen should go from the end of the Pater noster.

There! I've finally come out in my true colours as a sort of second Bugnini.

Another detail: "... in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus per omnia saecula saeculorum." If one pauses, should one pause before or after Deus? My generation was taught to pause after it. I think this is right: Deus refers to the divinity of the Son with the Father and the Spirit, not to the Eternity of Divinity. In the Pian Ordo the ecphonesis "Per omnia saecula saeculorum" (not Deus per ...), and the punctuation of the text of the prayers before Communion indicate this. But some (self-taught?) young men make an emphasis of linking Deus with what follows it.

Cranmer, Dix, Sarum, 1549 ... (1)

The school in which I was educated, although in existence in the 12th century, was refounded by Henry VIII and rerefounded by Elizabeth I (who was it who said that the schools the Tudors 'founded' were the ones they left unsuppressed?). We were made to sing a School Song which included the words " ... for we are sons of men who marched/ beneath the Tudor banners". I never felt happy about this and I still don't. Apart from an occasional boader skirmish against the Scots, what glorious land battles did the Tudor armies ever win? As a teenager I already knew that the victories won by Tudor Arms were largely won in the suppression of insurrections by native Englishmen against the religious innovations for which the Tudors were guilty. And they were won largely by foreign mercenaries ... so did the School Song mean that we were all descended from the bastards begotten by these German and Italian soldiers in the raping sessions which will undoubtedly have followed their 'victories'? My queries were not well received; nor was my suggestion that if anybody gave me a Tudor Banner I would subject it to certain traditional indignities.

I suspect that, for most readers of this blog, the Banner of the Tudor period which they would most respect would have been the Banner of the Five Wounds of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which was carried at the head of the rebellions of the Catholic loyalists during the Tudor period; a banner which Protestants were most embarassed by. It was so Christocentric, yet the central PR lie of the Protestants was that they were the ones who were restoring Christocentricity to religion. I studied the medieval votive Mass of the Five Wounds when I was writing about a Scots priest who became an Archdeacon in Devon and Rector of one of my Seven churches there. He had these words carved on some choir stalls he put in one of the churches: Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo. I discovered that they were the opening words of the psalmus of the Introit of that Votive. And, in church after church in Devon and Cornwall there still survive bench ends, carvings, and stained glass representations of the Five wounds, sometimes known as the arma Christi, with the Sacred Heart in the middle and two pierced hands above and two pierced feet beneath.

So I jumped at the opportunity to celebrate a Sarum Votive of the Five Wounds in memory of those who died in the Western Rebellion of 1549. (Continues later.)