Good Lord deliver us

After the Quicunque vult, so you will discover, your Prayer Book has the Litany. But when, be you Protestant or Papist, did you last hear that said or sung in church or in procession? Yet Cranmer ordered it to be 'sung or said' three times a week.

Cranmer's Litany affords, as Cuming pointed out in his history of Anglican Liturgy, a superb example of Cranmer's mind at work, a mind which was a capacious repository of everything Cranmer had ever prayed, or heard, or read. Essentially his Litany is derived from the Sarum Litany but phrases and expressions and ideas break in from an extremely wide spread of sources within the Tradition of Western Latin Christendom. Except that it omits the Saints - a fault easily remedied - it is a scintillating summation and efflorescence of that Tradition. Yet we Anglicans so often fail to realise we're sitting on something good.

Its predecessor Litanies were used in ordinations, in Rogation processions for the crops, when processing the relics round the town ... The great Forty Hours Devotion - the Sacrament exposed for three days as a stimulus for prayer in times of great adversity - has the Litany at its heart. We used the Litany once a year before the whole College at Lancing, and I was always moved by the humbled silence of the student body ... not all of whom were always exempt from the temptations of adolescent self-consciousness ... as priest and choir moved round that great Minster Church of the Assumption and S Nicolas singing Cranmer's Litany to the old Sarum tones.

Once a year is not enough. Or, to be practical, Fathers, chopped-up bits of it go very well into Benediction.

Heady stuff

Well, last night I said the pre-1950 Mattins; and what heady stuff. The way the service starts with Assumpta est ... "Mary is taken up into heaven: the Angels rejoice ..." makes it seem as if you're back nineteen hundred years and someone comes dashing into the room shouting the exciting news. And the way this antiphon is repeated (likewise, the formula Exaltata est ..."The Holy Mother of God is exalted above the choirs of Angels to the heavenly realms") is just how it is when one has heard something transportingly wonderful and for joy one just cannot help continually iterating and reiterating it (which is why I love the Byzantine Easter with its incessant "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death with death, and, to those in the tombs, gracing Life"). By comparison, there is something schoolmasterly about the Bugnini first antiphon, with its downbeat and careful theological reminder that Christ went up first to prepare a place for his Mother. Paedagogues and Bugninis can kill anything.

Donnishness did not start with Paul VI's rite. The Office decreed by Pius XII in 1951 (doesn't change the antiphons but does) eliminate those wonderful First Nocturn Readings from the Song of Songs, and replaces them with Genesis 3 and I Corinthians 15, to instruct us on the Pauline theology with which Pius XII (quite rightly) associated the Assumption.

I think there's a whole Octave's worth of meditation in those old lections from the Song of Solomon (1:1-16), and the relationship of their imagery to our Lady.

A jolly nice and keen congregation at my 10.30 EF pre-1950 Mass. I suspect my Altar Missal must be one of the very few in the world into which the Mass Gaudeamus has been pasted!

Tomorrow, modern propers. In the Asperges I shall sprinkle them with water from Lourdes and, Deo volente, we shall sing "I'll sing a hymn to Mary" (who was the Fr Wyse who wrote it?) to the tune of the Eton Boating Song (an idea I picked up from the late and lamented Fr Melrose at S Giles, Reading). And, at the end, ""Daily daily ...". The spirit of Fr Faber and the English Catholic Hymn Book still flourishes at S Thomas's.

Quaeritur

It caught my eye in my (English) Altar Missal: you know the collect A cunctis ... which used to be said so often as a commemoration after the collect of the day ... it has a rubric, all of course translated from the Latin, attached to it about the addition of the name of the Titular of the Church. At the end there is an abrupt note"NB in England the mention is always of S George".

Really? When and by whom was this direction given?

Assumptive fastings

A little while ago I made a catty crack about Orthodoxophile Anglicans who go a bit light on observing the traditional Byzantine fasts. Perhaps I could balance it by pointing out that Western Traditionalists have a similar question to answer. Why are we so shy of taking seriously all those vigils in the old Western rites, the days preceding festivals? The question might, for example, be put to members of the Prayer Book Society whether they observe the 16 fasting vigils which the Prayer Book orders to be kept in addition to Lent and Fridays. Keen devotees of our Lady might ask ourselves whether a new devotion for us to adopt might be fasting on the vigil of the Assumption. Easterners, as I observed before, fast for a forthight before the festival and in some places give a Lenten character to the Liturgy. In some places, the Eve of the Dormition is celebrated with a Service of the Burial of our Lady, based on the rites used in Holy Week to commemorate the Burial of our Redeemer. A Roman version of such a celebration is described in my ORDO.

In the old texts, that day seems sometimes to have a sense of alluding to her death as a prelude to her Assumption. It is well-known that Pius XII deliberately left undecided, in the definition of 1950, whether her Assumption was preceded by a death. But the tradition of both East and West strongly suggests that it was.

I have in mind the old postcommunion for August 14: "Grant, we beseech thee, O God, thy protection to our weakness; that we who celebrate the repose [requiem] of the holy Mother of God, by the help of her intercession may rise from our iniquities".

Is Fr Zed infallible?

Something on WDTPRS about whether the priest, when praying secreto in the EF Mass, should be audible. Fr Zed says that the authorities say that the server should be able to hear him.

Not what I was taught in Mass-practices in seminary in the pre-Novus Ordo days. So I looked in the Rubricae Generales and found that the priest should not be heard by the 'circumstantibus'; which O'Connell glosses as 'those nearby'.

Does anybody know whether there is any authority for Fr Zed's utterance? Or is it an example of how, when he is very busy indeed, even Homer nods?

Nearly Naked

I think my favourite Calendar is the one done by the Blue Biretta Brigade: the ICKSP. I have one in my study and one in my sacristy. BUT the August picture ... well ... it shows an almost naked Cardinal.

I expect better from them.

Nondum beatus?

According to the Calendar of the Church of England, today we have the choice of observing S Clare ... or John Henry Newman. In the modern Roman Calendar, S Clare rules OK; this is her compulsory memorial. So I suppose JHN will get pushed onto tomorrow? Incidentally, in the Old Calendar, S Clare is tomorrow, so I suppose JHN would appropriately occupy today. Unless - Rubricarius could put us straight on this - the day in S Lawrence's octave were to prove too prickly an obstacle. What tricky areas calendar and ORDO making are.

We have angelic doctors, seraphic doctors, and goodness knows what sort of doctors; when JHN is made a Doctor of the Church, qualis Doctor should he be called?

JHN ended his sermon on the Assumption by quoting:
"Her spirit is sweeter than honey, and her heritage than the honeycomb. They that eat her shall yet be hungry, and they that drink her shall still thirst. Whoso hearkens to her shall not be confounded, and they that work by her shall not sin".

No Rumours?

Given the propensity of people to create rumours about what the Holy Father is going to do and when he is going to do it, I am surprised not to have noticed rumours that since tomorrow is the Year's Mind of Cardinal Newman, Rome will take the opportunity of telling us when the beatification will take place.

Frilford

Before their 2009 season came to a recent end, the University Archaeological Department were continuing to work on their enigmatic site at Frilford. I went down there and was shown around in footsteps of Professor Martin Henig and before a visit to the excavation team from the illustrious and still active Professor Sammy Frere ( there can't be many people who have moved on, as Frere did, from schoolmastering at Lancing straight to a fellowship at All Souls).

Palimpsest doubly palimpsested is about the shape of Frilford; the last layers being late Roman and early Saxon. There is the ubiquitous Romano-Celtic Temple; then, built c 340, an orientated building with a rectangular 'chancel' at both East and West and what I think of as a 'porticus' on the North. Not far away is what looks like a stone amphitheatre ... except that it collects water and seems to have been designed to do so (with a leat draining off to a nearby river). Am I barmy, or do we have here ...

NEW LITURGICAL MOVEMENT: A CORRECTION

A recent article in NLM deals with Masses at which there is not even a server present. Needless to say, I dealt with all this on my blog quite a time ago. Read it first here. Mistakenly, NLM claims that the post-conciliar Missal makes no provision for Mass a solo. But Para 211 of the 1969 Instructio Generalis, amended by para 254 of the recent edition, prescribes the omission of the Greetings, Monitions, and Blessing.

Erroneously NLM suggests the omission of Greetings and Blessing when the EF Mass is said a solo. Somewhere - I think it is in his book The Celebration of Mass [I don't have it to hand] - O'Connell gives the rules laid down by the old Sacred Congregation of Rites for Mass a solo and it is quite clear that apart from the modifications listed in these decrees everything is to be said and done.

Assumptions

Tomorrow is the festival of the Dedication of the Roman basilica of S Mary, said to be the first Western church to be dedicated to our Lady (she tended to lose out in the dedication stakes because church buildings often took dedications from the martyrs or saints who might be buried in them. For some reason or other, nobody has ever even thought of forging relics of the Mother of God.) Its dedication occurred in the aftermath of the declaration in the Council of Ephesus that Mary is theotokos.

The new liturgy provides, for tomorrow, a collect which, in the preconciliar rite, was the collect for Assumption day. I plan to post on its history and theology tomorrow. For the time being, I suggest we treat its appearance on August 5 as a hint to prepare for Assumption day. I suggests it should put into our minds the propriety of keeping novenas in preparation for the Assumption. And the same collect is offered in the new rite as one of the options for the Saturday celebration of our Lady. My own custom is to use it on Saturdays and Marian votives between now and the Octave day of the Assumption.

Here is another suggestion which I offer to a limited constituency: those Anglicans with a gut anti-Romanism that expresses itself in flourishing little details of Byzantinism: "We're not Romanisers but we are traditional Christians and we do celebrate August 15 but we call it the Dormition." Remember: genuine Byzantines (and Oriental Christians) prepare for the Koimesesis by a fortnight''s fast in honour of our Lady. Do you? Put your belly where your rhetoric is!

CONCELEBRATION

Today I decided that I would concelebrate the Funeral Mass of Fr Michael Melrose, Vicar of S Giles, Reading. My reasons were: the Mass was presided over by our Bishop, Andrew, Bishop of Ebbsfleet. It seemed appropriate to join with Bishop and sympresbyteroi in the eucharistic Farewell to a departed sympresbyteros, a fellow member both of the presbyterate of the Universal Church and of the presbyterate of the Ebbsfleet Apostolic District.

Readers will be aware that I am less than enthusiastic about the post-conciliar fad for incessant concelebration, accompanied as it is by a disuse of the priest's own daily Mass. The two factors that influenced me today were: the episcopal presidency; and the koinonia in sympresbyterality which, with my fellow presbyters, I shared with Fr Michael, in and through our joint corporate membership of Bishop Andrew's Presbyterium (I had, incidentally, already said Mass in S Thomas's).

And it wasn't just theologically right; it felt right. It was a last expression of collegiality - no, drop theology, friendship, with a dear friend, a learned priest, a caring pastor. Fr Michael represented all that is best about Anglican Catholicism: its commitment, its erudition, its love of God in the glory of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in the guardianship of our blessed Lady. We are no mean people; the Church of England may be anxious to exterminate and humiliate us; the English Roman Catholic hierarchy may be suspicious of us; but we are the friends of Laud and Kenn, of Pusey and Keble; of Walke and Wason. God has been good to us; we have treasures which no other corner of Christendom possesses; whatever God wills for us now, his splendour has been seen and loved among us. May Fr Michael rest in peace and glory; may he pray.