Christine Mohrmann

Today is the Year's Mind of a woman who could fairly be considered the greatest mind in Catholic historical studies of the last century.

Christine Mohrmann (1903-1988) took a Tardis (a type of British Time Travel Machine) back to the earliest Christian centuries, travelling via philology. Her minute and erudite study of Christian Latin (and Greek) enabled her to demonstrate that it was a distinct dialect of Latin which grew up ... and, to a degree, was consciously devised ... by the Christian communities. She rescued it from the contempt of all the poor little schoolboys who had been brainwashed into thinking of Latin as meaning the "Classical" Latin of Cicero, so that any prose that differed from Tully's was to be deemed degenerate.

This was not a new error. When Urban VIII, Papa Barberini, 'reformed' the Breviary hymns in the 1630s so that they looked as if they had been written by Horace, he was victim of the same disastrous mistake. Vatican II wisely ordered that the texts of the hymns should be restored to their original state (obviously, nobody revealed to the Council Fathers that, within five years, recitation of the Office in Latin would have all but disappeared).

But those tinkerings were confined to the Corpus Hymnorum. In Mohrmann's own days, the great perpetrator of this same superstition was a fly-blown German Jesuit called Bea. In collaboration with Pius XII, Papa Pacelli (whose influence on the Liturgy was the beginning of the rot), this person produced a new translation of the Psalter which defenestrated the Latin of the Fathers, of the Vulgate, and of the Liturgy. It was approved for optional use. To this day, if you buy a second-hand breviary from the 1940s or 1950s, it is important to check that it does not include the Bea Psalter. Incidentally ...  good news ... that Psalter was implicitly consigned to the bin by the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. (The 'Neo-Vulgate' authorised by S John Paul II does not contain so much as a hint of the disastrous Pius XII/Bea project.)

Mohrmann's studies led her to a strong belief in the necessity for a special priestly hieratic language in the Liturgy (an idea which might not have seemed outrageous to Orthodox Jews!). So (with exceptions such as the lections) she was strongly opposed to use of the vernacular in Liturgy. Not absolutely opposed; it was just that she felt that no modern European vernacular was anything like ready ... that is, sacral enough ... to be employed at the altar.

By the 1960s, direction of the (originally admirable) bandwaggon labelled "Liturgical Movement" had fallen into bad hands. Most of its adherents were by now second rate and semi-literate camp-followers out to make their careers. Even the ones, like Dom Bernard Botte, who were not illiterate were academically flawed. In Botte's case the root problem was his conviction that a weird document then mistakenly identified as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus was the Liturgy of early third century Rome, a view widespread in the 1960s but now no longer held. As a result of this mistake, the "Second Eucharistic Prayer", now almost universally and exclusively used by Modernist clergy, was put into the Missal, and a rite for the Consecration of Bishops was, scandalously, inserted into the Pontifical, displacing the immemorially ancient Roman Prayer for making bishops.

The Enemy had so far corrupted Catholic Academe that the work of Mohrmann -- and its practical implications -- were ignored, just when they were most needed, throughout the Conciliar and post-Conciliar periods.

What a neat, what a decisive triumph for Evil.

Her seminal 1957 work Liturgical Latin Its Origins and Character can still be purchased: I know, because, a few years ago, a kind benefactor sent me a copy, reprinted by "Maximus Scriptorius". I was thus enabled to dump the tattered photocopies upon which I had previously relied!

She was, she is, a very great woman. May she rest in peace.

Christine Mohrmann ... de Saussure ...

Christine Mohrmann followed de Saussure and Bally in pointing out that "language by no means serves only to communicate actual facts but is also ... a medium of expression. Whereas ... language used purely as a means of communication normally strives towards a certain degree of efficiency, which results in linguistic simplification and standardisation, language as expression usually shows a tendency to become richer and more subtle. It aims at becoming, by every possible means, more expressive and more picturesque, and it may try to attain this heightened power of expression ... by the preservation of antiquated elements already abandoned by the language as communication". It is on these grounds that she resisted the introduction of the vernacular into the liturgy (except for the readings); modern languages, in her view, develop their efficiency as media of communication, but this makes them less suitable for sacred stylisation.

It was not until 1997 that the Magisterium of the Latin Church caught up with the questions Mohrmann had posed, and in an admirable instruction Liturgiam authenticam (hysterically vilified by the illiterate vested interests) called for nothing less than the creation of new sacral vernaculars. Unhappily, this document is now very much under a cloud. But here is one of its points which have lasting validity, irrespective of the views of the current degenerate Vatican regime.

"If, indeed, words or phrases can sometimes be employed in liturgical texts which differ from common and everyday speech, this in fact quite often actually leads to the texts being more memorable and more effective in expressing heavenly things. So it appears that observance of the principles explained in this Instruction tends to the gradual production in every common language of a sacred style, which also is to be recognised as the correct dialect for worship (sermo proprie liturgicus). So it can happen that a certain way of speaking which might seem a trifle obsolete in everyday speech, can be preserved in a liturgical context". 

Perhaps those of us who are not ashamed to be traddiish should do our bit to keep alive the authority of Liturgiam Authenticam.

Christine Mohrmann (2)

 "Father Mars, I pray thee that thou wouldst forbid defend-against avert diseases seen and unseen dearth and ravage calamities and disorders". " I beseech solicit and seek favour of thee that thou desert this people and state and leave the sacred defined spaces and their city and go away from these ...". The first was a prayer for the lustration of fields used in ancient Rome centuries before the age of the Caesars; the second the text of a prayer by which the Romans attempted to persuade the Gods of an enemy city to desert it. Here are the original texts; and I ask those who do not understand Latin to spot at least the parallelism, the wealth of words, the alliteration, the rhyme, the lawyer-like precision. "Pater Mars, precor uti tu morbos visos invisosque vidueritatem vastitudinemque calamitates intemperiasque prohibessis defendas averruncesque". "precor veneror veniamque a vobis peto ut vos hunc populum civitatemque deseratis loca templa sacra urbemque eorum relinquatis absque his abeatis ...".

These pieces of archaic Latin were used by the great Christine Mohrmann (the towering intellect of liturgical scholarship in the generation before the Council, whom the Conciliar generation ignored or chose to forget) to explain the nature of the Latin of the Canon of the Mass. She has in mind, to offer but one example, the words of the Quam oblationem: benedictam adscriptam ratam rationabilem acceptabilemque [blessed written-up ratified reasonable and acceptable]. What she is demonstrating is that there is nothing vernacular about such language, nothing simple and clear, nothing that the-man-on-the-top-of-a-Clapham-or-Aventine-omnibus could understand.

Mohrmann argues that Christian liturgical Latin is a hieratic dialect deliberately created in the image of the liturgical Latin of pagan Rome centuries before Christ. The rhythmically balanced flow of words, the juridical precision, the monumental verbosity, combine with scrupulosity towards the Gods.

Forget the idea that when the Roman Church replaced its Greek liturgy with the Latin, it was trying to be more understanded of the people and comprehensible by the man in the street. It was trying to do exactly the opposite. It was trying to be dignified and obscure.

Continues ...

Mohrmann (3)

I have enabled some intelligent comments questioning whether ... granted that Liturgical Latin is the way it is presented in the ancient Roman Sacramentaries and as it is analysed by Christine Mohrmann ... we really do need to worship like that. To this point, I would reply:
(1) The Liturgy we use is described as the Roman Rite. That is the label on the tin.
(2) Vatican II, which I regard as a true Ecumenical Council, did lay down in Sacrosanctum Concilium that the Roman Rite, while being up for revision, was to be substantially retained.
(3) In the fifth part of this series, I shall summarise Mohrmann's own account of twentieth century work on linguistics and varied linguistic registers.
(4) Liturgical Greek ... which Mohrmann also worked on ... is certainly not reductive or banausic. I do not know Coptic and Church Slavonic, but I have been told that the same is true of them.
(5) There is currently a sweet little exhibition in Bodley including a late Medieval Altar Missal with the Roman Rite in the Croatian language. I would love to be told what sort of Croatian that is!
(6) If we do not retain the tradition of the Sacral Language, I do not entirely see why we should retain traditional gestures, traditional vestments ...
(7) One comment, which suggests that we should change the language because we now see God differently, seems to me to give several games away.
(8) I think that most societies have had a more sophisticated set of linguistic presuppositions than Modern European Man. Classicists will recall the Homeric rhapsodes, who did business in a dialect of Greek which never ever had been used anywhere in Greece. And the Doricising traits of choral lyric.

I conclude with a passage kindly sent in by Thomas a couple of years ago, taken from The Earliest English Poems by Michael Alexander (Penguin 1966).

" ... old English prose never achieved the sophisticated word-order and complex synrtax of Greek or Latin. This does not apply to verse ... the poets used a special archaic diction inherited from days when their art had been purely oral. This word-hoard amounts almost to a language within a language; it differs greatly in vocabulary and syntax from the rudimentary attempts of the prose writers - because ... the poet is the keeper of the traditions which hold the cynn (the kin) together ... the older a word was, the more it was vlued by the cynn ... the poet is historian and priest, and his songs have ritual significance. That is why the language of the poets was so deeply conservative, and why the written records of it that we have show it so different from the language of the earliest prose-writers."

To which I would add a reminder of (the Anglican) Catherine Pickstock's brilliant account of the Classical Roman Rite in terms of oral culture (Beyond Writing). As well as reading Mohrmann, the tinkerers in Rome would be well advised to read Pickstock.

"PIETY/PIETAS/GODLINESS"

Today's Sunday Collect in the Old Roman Rite and in the Ordinariate Rite is a beautiful and ancient prayer asking God to guard (custodi) his Household (familia) with "continua pietate".

Pietas is the word which gives us the English term piety; but there is rather more to it than that. After all, the English word piety suggests a humble human attitude of devout religious attention to God. Perhaps it even evokes a vision of an old woman of either gender who belongs to multiple religious societies. That is misleading. And it would confuse you as you read this particular prayer: after all, God isn't pious towards us; We're supposed to be pious towards him.

Pius is a Latin adjective and pietas is the noun that comes from it; pietate is what's called the Ablative, so pietate means "with pietas". And what these words refer to is the sense of duty and obligation which somebody has towards those to whom he is bound by bonds of kinship or religion or country or friendship or whatever. In Vergil's epic the Aeneid, the hero is called "Pius Aeneas" because he is dutiful to the Gods (he rescues the sacred Palladium); to his country Troy (for which he fights as long as possible: when there is no further hope, he guides its remnants to a new country); to his Father (whom he carries out of the wreckage of Troy upon his shoulders); to his friend Pallas (an adolescent whose death in battle Aeneas avenges in the bloodthirsty climax at the end of Book XII of the Aeneid).

But Vergil also uses pietas to refer to the gods themselves: "May the gods, if there is any pietas in heaven ...."; and "Almighty Juppiter ... if any ancient pietas regards human labours ..." (compare "If pia divinities can do anything ..."). The idea was that the Gods, too, can be thought of as having their duties towards mortals (or particular mortals). And this sense was to be very common in Christian Latin, which developed as a special dialect crafted to serve the needs of Christians and especially of their Liturgy. So pietas becomes pretty well synonymous with misericordia (mercy) and clementia (clemency). And the end of this story of the evolution of words is that we get the English derivative pity. (Incidentally, the old Lewis and Short is rather less helpful on this than the newer Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So ... does pietate in this collect mean (1) our devoted duty to God, or (2) his covenanted loving-kindness to us? In his English translation, Archbishop Cranmer got it wrong and thought it meant the former (1): so he rendered it as "true religion" (and, in another similar collect, "godliness"). Experts are agreed, however, that it means the latter (2). But Cranmer was aware of the two possibilities: for Epiphany 1 he correctly rendered caelesti pietate ('heavenly pietas') as "mercifully".

In fact, there is a slight difference between 'ordinary' Christian speech and the usage of prayers like the collect we are considering now. In more 'ordinary' everyday Christian Latin, for example, in sermons, pietas refers to human attitudes towards God more often than the other way round; in prayers, the word most commonly refers to God's loving attitude towards us. As it does in this collect. This may be a spin-off from the way that, in Roman Imperial circles, people addressed the Mighty. Another possibility is that this may be another example of how 'Christian Latin', as used in prayer, adopted much of the style and vocabulary of very ancient pre-Christian Roman prayer-language; a process brilliantly documented by Christine Mohrmann.

[The main expert on Christian Latin was the great Christine Mohrmann. Today's post also benefits from books by Sr Mary Gonzaga Haessly and Sr Mary Pierre Ellebracht (which I gather can both be found on the Internet). This is a subject to which, before the collapse of both liturgical scholarship and of women's religious communities in the 1960s, women scholars made very significant contributions. What a tremendous shame that even their names are now so little known! I regard it as a demand of pietas to do what I can to remedy the situation!]

Cosi fan tutti

We've lived with "Vatican II" for sixtyish years now ... which makes the current papal attacks on "Backwardism" a tadge quaint. Surely, resurrecting the corpses of the nineteen sixties is what really counts as "Backwardist"? 

But, this morning, I suggest that what happened in that decade had already been done ... at least once before.

The stages of the 1960s revolutions began with academic ferment. Conferences and trendy 'calls' by trendy 'experts' prepared the way. Authority then cautiously permitted some 'progress'. Next, the committees set up to carry this permission into effect soon decided that the modest 'reforms' which Authority had in mind were nothing like enough ... the committee-men, after all, were massively expert and could do far, far, better. Within a very few years, their labours produced results which went very much further than Authority had intimated ... further than the Council Fathers had in mind when they signed Sacrosanctum Concilium.

So we have had the Pseudocracy ... the Rule of the Big Lie reinforced by the Big Stick ... of the last sixty years ... two generations of radical depravations of Tradition, with every novelty labelled as The Reform Of Vatican II. I suspect that most clergy and laity never looked at the Conciliar documents ... after all, if bishops and Cardinals were going around, mendaciously claimimg that "the Council" required wall-to wall vernacular and the radical architectural vandalisation of all sanctuaries, who are we little people to cry out that the Emperor is not only naked, but a vulgar nudist liar too?

On January 9, 1941, Pope Pius XII, Papa Pacelli, gave the Biblical Institute instructions to make "a new Latin version of the Psalms, which was to follow presse fideliterque the original texts and veteris venerandae Vulgatae aliarumque antiquarum interpretationum, quantum fieri posset, rationem haberet."

The academic demands for this had come most noisily from ... ... yeah, you guessed right, ten out of ten ... from Germany. 

The results of this papal initiative were quite shocking. Far from respecting the ancient Latin translations of the Psalms, the 'experts' ... led by a German Jesuit called Bea ... even went so far as to produce a Psalter which paid practically no attention to early Christian Latin but even went so far as to invent a whole new dialect of Latin which was totally divorced from Christian Latin, being based upon the usages of the pre-Christian lawyer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero. As Christine Mohrmann indignantly complained, "there has been a complete break with tradition and ... a failure to carry out the programme set before the translators, viz., that they should as far as possible take account of the ancient versions ... is it right, or rather, is it justifiable to mutilate a liturgical book such as the Book of Psalms, a mass of poetry which since the earliest centuries has been part and parcel of Christian worship and has--so to say--grown up with the Christian idiom--to mutilate such  book by dressing it up in a pre-Christian language?"

Indeed, that is the basic question (there are others ... such as whether Bea's persistent programme of demanding the elimination of all 'Hebraisms' was, in the decade of the Nazi extermination camps, particularly tactful).

Readers will have noticed the parallels between my narrative and the realities of Vatican II. At this point, happily, the similarities break down. The campaign led by Christine Mohrmann, a brilliant scholar of quite exraordinary erudition and universally respected, led to the "New Psalter" being a complete and total flop.

In our own time, booksellers marketing old Breviaries have to be very careful to inform potential buyers which psalter they contain.

Christine Mohrmann (4)

The ancient Romans were very legalistically minded. When they prayed to the Gods, they did their best to ensure that they covered everything; that they addressed the Gods by the right titles (and all of them) so that they could be assured that they were heard; that they asked for everything that they required so that an accidental omission would not frustrate their petitions. Christine Mohrmann showed that there is more than a little of this attitude in the prayers which comprise the Roman Rite of the ancient Latin Church.

In the Canon of the Mass, perhaps this is shown most clearly in the word 'adscriptam'. It means, I suppose, "written on the list". It's lawyer-like. If something's in the Statute, in the inventory, then it's covered. If not, not. We pray that our oblation be "written up". The old ICEL version simply ignored the word; the new ICEL, currently in use, renders it "acknowledged", which is still a trifle coy.

It is not difficult to understand the nervousness of the translators. "Legalism" is not instinctively seen as a virtue in modern culture, still less in modern religious thought. God is not, we feel, a crabbed old backwoods attorney or solicitor just looking all the time for an opportunity or a pedantic excuse to catch us out. He's loving, merciful, generous, understanding. Perhaps, it is suspected, the authors of the Roman Canon were a little bit too Roman and a little bit less Christian than they should have been.

But No. Long before the Roman Canon was written, S Ignatius of Antioch wrote that the Eucharist had to be celebrated by the Bishop, or by one to whom the bishop committed it, for it to be bebaios: a Greek word meaning sure, certain, secure, safe. Conditions have to be fulfilled. To some, this may seem like Legalism. But it is a principle which in turn is based on two root principles of our Faith.

God is true and will do what he has promised. We are called to be faithful and to do what he has commanded in the way that he has commanded. When we are obedient we know that what we have done is official, valid, in the archive, stamped by the clerk.

Praise to him for his faithfulness.
Continues.

Recent liturgical shenanigans in Rome; this blog revisits Mohrmann (1)

Unhappily, there are still people who wish to involve the Anglophone Catholic Church in new Liturgy Wars ... not least with regard to the English translations to be used in Novus Ordo worship. Again, we shall hear ... we already hear .. the same spurious arguments paraded in the pages of anti-intellectualist periodicals such as the Tablet. And now, this morning, Riposte Catholique tells us more about a probably iffy Commission which has been set up in Rome.

So, with apologies to those of you who are bored with all this, I am going to dive back in!

Here is a narrative which I think is often at least implicit:

In the Early Church, Worship was always in the same everyday language that common people used all the time. So, in Rome, as soon as Greek became less common as a language, Latin, the prevailing vernacular, replaced it. Sadly, as the centuries passed, Latin in turn became incomprehensible to most. So, happily, the Second Vatican Council decreed that all worship should be in the vernacular again. And in the simplest possible language so that the greatest number of people could understand it. Because this would serve the cause of Active Participation.

You are waiting impatiently to explain to me that the last three sentences represent a complete travesty of what Vatican II decreed. Well done. But I think it is important to understand that the whole of this narrative is completely erroneous, and constitutes a deception.

One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century was a Dutch Classicist called Christine Mohrmann. In a long series of articles and books in all the main European languages, she demonstrated that Liturgical Latin (and, indeed, Liturgical Greek) were never intended to be be vernaculars; that, indeed, they were deliberately designed to be formal, archaic, and hieratic. I will let her speak to you in her own words (1957):

"Liturgical Latin, as constituted towards the end of Christian Antiquity and preserved unchanged - in its main lines at least - is a deliberately sacral stylisation of Early Christian Latin as it gradually developed in the Christian communities of the West. The Latin Christians were comparatively late in creating a liturgical language. When they did so, the Christian idiom had already reached full maturity and circumstances rendered it possible to draw, for purposes of style, on the ancient sacral heritage of [pagan] Rome ... As regards the plea which we hear so often for vernacular versions of the prayer texts, I think ... that we are justified in asking whether, at the present time, the the introduction of the vernacular would be suitable for the composition of sacral prayer style. As I have pointed out, the early Christian West waited a long time before adopting the use of Latin. It waited until the Christian language possessed the resources necessary to create an official ecclesiastical prayer language. ... the modern, so-called Western languages ... are less suitable for sacred stylisation. And yet we must realise that sacral stylisation forms an essential element of every official prayer language and that this sacral, hieratic character cannot, and should never, be relinquished. From the point of view of the general development of the Western languages - to say nothing of the problems raised by other languages - the present time is certainly not propitious for the abandonment of Latin".

Much Mohrmann follows.

AVE MARIA, GRATIFICATA

Are the senior Archangels punsters? S Gabriel certainly was; he hailed our blessed Lady with the words Khaire kekharitomene (incidentally I consider it highly probable that the Holy Family, and the Twelve, were Greek-speaking).

The second of those two words is a Greek perfect participle passive. Perfect participles in Greek refer to a present state which is the result of a past action (like our English expressions "the married" and "the dead"). So the word means that Mary is a having-been-graced-person; as the result of her Immaculate Conception (in the past) she is (now) crammed full of grace. Christine Mohrmann tells us that "several early translations, the North African Codex Palatinus (e), as well as the European , perhaps Illyrian, translation of Codex q29, render the words of St Luke ... by ave gratificata!

This Latin word looks exactly like a Latin equivalent of that Greek perfect participle passive. Mohrmann points out that words formed like this "were very popular in Early Christian Latin ... [i]n this way, one single word was sufficient to reproduce the full meaning of the Greek ... one cannot dismiss the early Bible translations as clumsy products of semi-literates, as is too often done in Classically minded phililogical circles."

It is, I am sure, no coincidence that the next paper in this Collection, Volume III of Mohrmann's collected papers, is her deservedly celebrated 1947 hatchet job in Vigiliae Christianae on the disgraceful new translation of the Psalms concocted by Cardinal Bea at the instigation of Pius XII. She quotes Bea's words advocating "Una Traduzione latina dei salmi che ... si attenga al vocabulario, alla grammatica e allo stile di quel migliore periodo della latinita", i.e. the Augustan period.
 

I'm sure they used to say in German seminaries, "Sancte Tulli, ora pro nobis" and "Sancte Horati, ora pro nobis.". I wonder what they say nowadays.

Christine Mohrmann, 1 August 1903 - 13 July 1988

Today is the (35th) obit of one of the greatest intellectual figures of the last century. Mohrmann it was who demonstrated that Liturgical Latin, like many liturgical dialects, was an artificial construct deliberately invented so as to be as worthy as possible for the August Sacrifice (forget the creaky old Protestant and 1960s superstition that 'the Primitive Church' was dead set on 'vernacular' liturgies designed to be 'understanded of the people').

One of the tragedies of the 1960s was that a particular version of a 'Liturgical Movement' got its grip upon the minds of superficial 'professional liturgists' who had their sticky hands upon the levers of power. Men (yes, I think they were all men) who were deaf to Mohrmann's scholarship and her immense erudition. Men (well, let us say half-men) who knew what was best for little Johnny and insisted on little Johnny's jaws being clamped open while they force-fed him with their revolting gruel.

In those middle years of that century there were other very competent women liturgists. I wonder if the "Liturgical Reform" would have been less disastrous if it had not been forced through by an insensitive illiterate narrow-minded fascist androcracy.

Curious, isn't it, that our male culture went pretty well straight from a crass and arrogant assumption that the little woman had little capacity for intelligent thought, all the way to a servile and creepy subordination to every whimsy of femino-fascism.

Men are such odd creatures.

More Mohrmann (5)

Since I wrote my posts on the great Christine Mohrmann, I have noticed - purely by chance - in Bodley a translation of the Roman Breviary into English (Imprimatur by that strange character Francis Cardinal Spellman 1964) in which the Prayers are translated by Mohrmann. Samples, with Cranmer in italics Latin in bold.
Pentecost 13
Almighty eternal God, grant us an increase of faith hope and charity; and make us love what you command so that we may be made worthy to attain what you promise.
Trinity 14
Almighty and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith hope and charity; and that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command.
Per annum 30
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei spei et caritatis augmentum, et, ut mereamur assequi quod promittis, fac nos amare quod praecipis.
Comments? It seems to me that Cranmer had read Liturgiam authenticam quite carefully.

"A Direct Frontal attack on Christian Tradition."

 A visit to the princeps bibliopolarum, Mr Christopher Zealley, M.A., down opposite the entrance to Christ Church Meadow. He has on sale a translation of the Breviary as translated into English during the brief period when clergy who had such faculties were allowed to say the old Office in an approved vernacular translation. The Collects are ... translated by Christine Mohrmann!

Also, another interesting curiosity, which was among my purchases. Readers will know that the beginning of the whole modern disastrous onslaught upon the Latin Rite was the authorisation by Pius XII of a new Latin translation of the Psalter, known as the Psalterium Pianum but popularly as the Bea Psalter. Mohrmann did (in French) a beautiful hatchet-job on it in Vigiliae 1947; reprinted in Volume III of her Etudes. But a year later she read a Dutch version of her paper to a society of Dutch graduates, which is a trifle less academic and noticeably more combattive (it was translated into English by an American Benedictine). 

It is very jolly to compare the two versions.

Just one little example.

In the published French version, she refers to one of the mistakes of the Bea Psalter as "peu heureuse". But in the Dutch paper, as translated by Abbot McCann and purchased by me, she described it as ...

(... come to think of it, one could apply this lapidary phrase to the entire process of liturgical mayhem perpetrated by Pius XII and S Paul VI from 1941 onwards ...)

"a direct, frontal attack on Christian tradition".

St Philip's Books is at 82 St Aldates, Oxford OX1 1RA (sales@stphilipsbooks.co.uk) 

00 44 1865 202182 

Unfinished Business of Vatican II

I hope no reader disagrees with the policy of PF's admirers ... and, indeed, of the Holy Father himself ... that the intentions of Vatican II must now finally become effective throughout the Whole State of Christ's Church Militant Here In Earth. Better late than never.

Here are two examples.

(1) V2 emphasised the role of the Bishops as successors of the Apostles. But yet the corrupt old usage of the word "Apostolic" to mean "Papal" still, more than half a century after the Council, continues.

Mary Pierre Ellebracht, in her erudite Remarks on the Vocabulary of the ancient orations in the Missale Romanum (1963) cunningly noticed a shift in the liturgical use of the adjective apostolicus. 

In some early texts, it was used instead of the genitive Apostoli ("of an Apostle"). E.g., "Apostolicis Iacobi ... praesidiis": literally, "by the Apostolic protections  of James". But this was later changed to "Apostoli tui Iacobi ... praesidiis". 

Both mean the same. It may simply be that use of the adjective appeared more stylish. (Augustan epic poets would tend to refer to "the Herculean Hands" rather than referring to "the hands of Hercules" with a plain genitive singular). 

My own suspicion is that the adjectival Apostolicus was increasingly being reserved for the See of Rome.

We need to put this trend into reverse. Apostolic Nuncios ... Constitutions ... Palaces ... you name it: they should be deapostolicised.

Would "Papal" do instead? Perhaps; but in the earlier centuries every bishop was a Papa; and His Beatitude the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria is still "papa". We mustn't be anti-ecumenical.

Perhaps "Vatican" or "Lateran" would be a sensible substitute.

(2) Dr Ellebracht's doctoral supervisor was none other than Christine Mohrmann. I think there should be a massive act of penance for the way brilliant Catholic women liturgists and academics were ignored in the Sixties (and since). An Instauratio Memoriae Christinae Mohrmann, accompanied by a lock-stock-and-barrel complete reconsideration of the entire corrupt liturgical settlement of the late Seventies, would be in order. Some Grilloids could be ceremonially eundo et lustrando flogged round the city walls. "From the tyrannye of Bysshop Bugnini and al hys detestable enormities, Good lord, deliuer us" could ... by a deft appropriation of a brilliant idea of Archbishop Cranmer's ... be added to the Litanies ... a contribution from the Ordinariates ....

You know it makes sense.

Are the Institution Narratives of the Roman Rite legalistic? (2)

The mindset which led to the distinctive composition of the Institution Narratives in the Roman Rite could easily be dismissed as one preoccupied by overloaded rhetoric or flowery diction. Indeed, such glib judgements were common in the 1960s. This is a profound mistake ... a misunderstanding combining fragments of 'Enlightenment' superstitions with 'Romantic' follies in which subjective feelings, especially if they are warm and fuzzy and "sincere" and seem "authentic to me", are prioritised above formality and precision and legality.

The key to a balanced understanding here is the assumption integral to the Pentateuch, that the Sacrifices of Israel needed to be done exactly as the inspired texts directed. And that itself goes back to the very meaning of Covenant. This, quite simply, links the Faithfulness of our Covenant God (what we Latins call his pietas) with our obedience to His Law (what we Latins call our pietas).

As Christine Mohrmann established, the legalistic character of Liturgical Latin goes back way beyond the Fourth century Latin which we find in the early Roman Sacramentaries. She discussed "rhe almost juridical precision" of the Canon in terms of the surviving fragments of preChristian, preclassical Roman prayer texts used in agriculture as much as in warfare. She was not afraid to talk about "this monumental verbosity coupled with juridical precision, which is so well suited to the gravitas Romana but which also betrays a certain scrupulosity with regard to higher powers". " A sacral style has been created which links up with the old Roman prayer of the official Roman cult ..."

Incidentally, it is tragic that Mohrmann's researches fell upon ears determined to be deaf: the fashionable assumptions among the liturgical intelligentsia were, by the 1960s, wedged securely onto tramlines leading in exactly the opposite direction to hers. The hands which firmly controlled the levers of power would undoubtedly have exclaimed of her, as they so notoriously did of Joseph Ratzinger: "Ah, but (s)he's not a liturgist."

To be concluded.

What you want is the English Missal

Christine Mohrmann wanted the development of sacred, hieratic vernaculars; Aidan Nichols envisaged the diffusion of the EF Mass in just such 'high verbnacular'. Anglicans will be panting to point out that Anglicanism developed just such a sacral vernacular in the sixteenth century; and that the English Missal, the Altar Book of Anglican Catholics before they unwisely dumped it to follow slavishly post-conciliar RC liturgy, provides just what Fr Aidan says he wants.

The sixteenth century was a propitious age; liturgical Latin had owed a fair bit of its genius to the Roman passion for legal precision and completeness - and Tudor English had many of the same characteristics. So, if the Canon of the Mass could talk of haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrifucia illibata, Cranmer, a Protestant with a Protestant agenda, could write of a full perfect and sufficient sacrifice oblation and satisfaction. How distant was his theology from the patristic theology of the ancient Canon; yet how close his style! A great Anglican mystagogue, Dom Gregory Dix - let us hope that he is enjoying Chridstine Mohrmann's company on that further shore - who was an Anglican and yet said the ancient Latin words of the Missa Romana most of the days of his priestly life, hit the nail upon the the head when wrote about the Sunday collects of the Roman Rite that " they are lovely things, grave, melodious and thoughtful, and compact with evangelical doctrine - characteristic products of the liturgical genius of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. Cranmer's reputation as a writer of english prose largely rests on his translations of some seventy of these prayers ... And rightly so, for his are among the very best translations ever made, and his products when he is not working on a Latin original are not always so happy". Only the occasional phrase from the Canon survived the Zwinglian prism of Cranmer's mind, but how those survivors whet one's appetite: not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences for "non aestimator meriti sed veniae ... largitor". And if It is very meet right and our bounden duty is not quite a literal translation of "Vere dignum et iustum est", how exquisitely it echoes the majestic syllables with which the Roman Rite begins the Great Eucharistic Prayer.

S John Paul's legacy is under threat, but it is safe in the Ordinariates

That marvellous Roman document of 2001, Liturgiam authenticam, is currently reported to be under threat by the wolves who are becoming ever more unrestrained as they circle hungrily round the reinstatements of Tradition which blessed the end of the Pontificate of S John Paul II and that of Benedict XVI.

I rather think that it is arrant hypocrisy to canonise a Saint and, not more than a decade and a half later, to strive contemptuously to dismantle his legacy.

Although LA subverted the assumptions of Comme le prevoit, and thus of the style of vernacular Liturgy created in the 1970s, it was very soundly based on the very sound work done by an earlier generation of immensely erudite scholars; men and women the destruction of whose scholarship is one of the disgraces of the Rupture Years.

Prominent among these was the great student of liturgical Latin Christine Mohrmann. She expressed the hope that modern European vernaculars might develop sacral, liturgical dialects. So LA talked about "the gradual creation in every vulgar tongue of a sacred style, to be recognised as the correct way of talking liturgically (sermo proprie liturgicus; para 27)" and the production of a "sacred vernacular language the vocabulary, syntax, and grammar of which are to be proper to divine worship" (para 47).

Patrimonial readers, of course, will reflect that the liturgical tradition initiated by Dr Cranmer's Prayer Books had provided just such a vernacular sacred dialect. A couple of years ago, the Ordinariate Missal came on stream, so that Cranmer's hieratic English - although not his heterodox theology - is now a liturgical usage in good standing within the liturgical community of the Roman Catholic Church. I wonder what Professor Mohrmann would have thought of it ... I like to imagine her warmly approving.

Cranmer had a characteristic habit of expanding, padding out, just by a few syllables, his Latin originals. The original Roman prayers were so spare, terse, and elegant that - to put it bluntly - a literal English version might be over before the congregation had started attending to what it said. This can be illustrated by the collect for the Second Sunday in Lent in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite ... and in Ordinariate Use. Bold italic type indicates Cranmer's supplementing of the Latin Original.

Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourseves: keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul (Latin: in mente).

This superb old collect, from the Sacramentary sent by Pope Hadrian I to Charlemagne, does not feature at all among the Lenten Sunday collects in the modern Roman Rite ... which eliminates all five of the old Sunday collects before Palm Sunday and replaces three of them with new compositions (two of these 'worked up' from some phrases found in the Mozarabic Rite). The Anglican Common Worship also eliminates them. Silly Tweedle Dum is so often to be found panting along just behind silly Tweedle Dee.

The old collects were just too simple, profound, austere; too imbued with that wonderfully dignified Romanita which formed Western European culture for nearly two millennia ... for blinkered modern liturgical committee-men, both Anglican and Roman, to be able to tolerate them.

LITURGY: the simmering warfare bursts out into the open again

Three years ago, a Fr M J Butler, at that time the liturgical supremo in the diocese of Brentwood, wrote to the Tablet  a letter which he then sent to all the clergy of the diocese; and a Mr Denis Archdeacon, writing on the Tablet website, backed him up. They demonstrated that everything we thought was wrong with the liturgical culture of the post-Conciliar Church, as it had developed in Anglophone countries, was wrong. I think it is worth adding that Butler wrote his letter, not as a private individual, but as from the Brentwood Liturgical Commission ... that is an indication of how high these gentry were then flying.

Now they're right up there, flying, if anything, even higher.

OK, the then Bishop of Brentwood dealt admirably with that little local difficulty. But it demonstrated (to adapt Gerry Adams' observation about the IRA) that they hadn't gone away. And, according to reports, they're now back at work in a CDW committee, revisiting the splendid document Liturgiam authenticam. In other words, they still haven't gone away. The menace has returned. I blogged a little while ago about the immensely sinister words of an Andrea Grillo who had gone public on how, very soon, something would be done about restoring full episcopal authority over liturgy in a diocese. And about the 'Commission' set up some weeks ago in CDW.

 Perhaps a prayer for isolated, beleaguered, devout, admirable Cardinal Sarah would be in order.

Curmudgeons had for years complained that there was a self-supporting, self-validating network of so-called 'experts' or 'liturgists' who were determined to impose their own very narrow group agenda upon the Church. Fr Butler's actions confirmed this. He told us that the Roman document Liturgiam authenticam was "a laughing stock among academics and scholarly linguists". Clearly, that last phrase means, in the (much desired) Vernacular, 'me and my chums and people who agree with us'. So Butler was not a lone, ridiculous, figure. His own claim was that he represented a significant group. These were, presumably, the same jokers who, when Joseph Ratzinger started to write about Liturgy, threw up their hands in outrage and cried "But he's not a liturgist!" The ones with regard to whom somebody coined the good old witticism about what the difference is between a terrorist and a liturgist ("You can negotiate with a terrorist").

And it is an apparently illiterate group. Specimens of its illiteracy were Butler's absurd discussion of the word 'vernacular' and Archdeacon's bizarre statement that "there is nothing sacred about Latin". Clearly, despite the lofty manner which each of them adopted in putting us lesser mortals straight, they did not have at their finger-tips ... to take but one example ... any of the many works of the great linguist and liturgist Christine Mohrmann, who dominated her field for decades. Writing in English, French, German, and Dutch, she demonstrated how Christian Latin emerged, was consciously developed, in order to fill the needs and instinct of the worshipping community for a deliberately sacral language. She felt that the time was not ripe for vernacular liturgies in the late twentieth century, because modern European languages had not developed their sacred vernaculars. Liturgiam authenticam, interestingly, echoed her words in its call for the development of such vernaculars, even if this meant the possible use of archaisms. In other words, 'vernacular' does not possess anything like the univocal, simplistic sense which Butler implicitly claimed.

Now: I'm not saying that everybody has got to share my own views about Mohrmann (I think she's Mega) or the questions her work raised, or about Liturgiam authenticam (which I happen to regard as a particularly fine document); I am only saying that such people as these are either ill-informed illiterates for not being aware of such matters and of the existence of opinions different to their own; or else dishonest charlatans for concealing them from the readership of the Tablet (and from the diocesan clergy of Brentwood). I'm waiting to see if the new Committee shows any awareness of such scholarship ... but I'm not hlding my breath.

Like many such agenda-driven single-issue enthusiasts, Butler mentioned Sacrosanctum concilium of Vatican II. But SC 22 (3) (the sub-section which lays down that nobody is to do things by their own authority) did not deter him from informing his readers that "it is legitimate to use our previous Missal". And it was clear from his letter that, in his official capacity, he had been going round the clergy of his diocese with an agenda which did not noticeably include encouraging them to behave legally, or helping them by explaining to them things they do not understand. By listing dissentient malpractices with such cheerful relish, he was either naive or he was encouraging others to join in breaking the Law.

Perhaps the most entertaining of his absurdities was his characterisation of the current 'new' translation of the Missal as 'illegitimate'. Amusingly, this precisely echoed the rhetoric of Archbishop Lefebvre, who often remarked that the post-Conciliar rites were "illegitimate" (sometimes translated as 'bastard')!

I might remind you of the old adage about the Extremes Meeting, were it not that this would be an insult to the Archbishop.

The Collect

Christine Mohrmann (whom I usually praise to the skies) provided this translation of the Collect in the Tridentine Missal for Pentecost 17:
Grant we beseech you O Lord that your people may avoid the temptations of the devil, and with pure minds follow you the only God.
Cranmer (1549) rendered it thus, from Trinity 18 in the Sarum Missal:
Lord we beseech thee grant thy people grace to avoid the infections of the Devil and with pure heart and mind to follow thee the only God.

Here is the Latin original as provided by S Pius V:
Da quaesumus Domine populo tuo diabolica vitare contagia, et te solum Deum pura mente sectari.

I just love the way Cranmer kept the idea of diabolical Evil as a contagion or infection which we catch and pass on. The 1662 Prayer Book, followed by Mohrmann, mess this up. But there are hundreds of sermons in it.

Today's OF Collect

... is an interesting one. Found in the Leonine, Gregorian, and Gelasian Sacramentaries, it settled comfortably into the 'Green' season; Pentecost VIII in the Tridentine Rite but Trinity IX in many Northern European dialects of the Roman Rite, including Sarum, York, etc..

First point to note: the Bugnini revisers, having taken the fervour out of Lent, found the old Lenten collects too fierce and drafted into use to replace them collects from Ordinary Time.

Secondly, there is a textual oddity. Largire nobis, quaesumus, Domine, semper spiritum cogitandi quae recta sunt, propitius et agendi ... "Propitius" is a common word in liturgical Latin, which borrows it (I have Christine Mohrmann in mind here) from pagan liturgical Latin. It means that the Deity is or has been rendered favourable to the suppliant. Problem: it is separated from noun which it adjectivally qualifies - Domine - and dropped into mid-sentence. This is by no means impossible (" Grant to us, we beseech thee O Lord, ever the spirit of thinking the things which are right, and, being favourable, of doing them ..."), but it is pretty well as odd in Latin as it is in English. Cranmer found it so and simply left it out.

One of Bugnini's men had - or found somewhere - a very clever idea. Perhaps the word is a scribal corruption. m was often reproduced in abbreviation by a line over the previous vowel. This line could easily not be noticed in transcription. So if the original had read "promptius", that could easily appear as "proptius" - which is non-existent - and then be "corrected" to the very common " propitius".

"Promptius" would mean "and rather more promptly". So the prayer would mean that we desire the spirit of thinking good things; but not just of thinking them: of also getting on and doing them rather more quickly. I 95% buy 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?