Romanitas Press has just made available a very useful resource for the study of Holy Week, and particularly, of the reform of it promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1955. This is a three volume series by a German Jesuit priest named Herman Schmidt, who taught liturgy at the Gregorian University in Rome, compiled with all the thoroughness one would expect from a German and a Jesuit. The first volume is occupied almost entirely by the text of the traditional Roman Holy Week, placed in parallel columns with the new one. The second is in two parts, the first of which gives a catalog of sources, then a summary of their contents according to the various genres: sacramentaries, lectionaries, antiphonaries etc. The secunda secundae, as it were, offers a commentary on the various rites as they appear in the different sources. (It should be noted that all three volumes are entirely in Latin, and a fairly high level academic Latin at that.)
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| The frontispiece of Schmidt’s first volume. (This was provided to me by Gregory; the Romanitas pdf is in black and white, and not word-searchable.) |
Now it should be noted that Schmidt was writing in the 1950s, and exactly as one would expect, he accepts and repeats some of the commonly held mistakes of his time. So, e.g., in his commentary on
the Good Friday Mass of the Presanctified (vol. 2.2, p. 133), he repeats
the erroneous idea that the fraction rite “seems” to arise from a theory of “consecration by contact”, which held that the wine was consecrated by having a consecrated host put into it. (Note the word “seems”, which also appears in the Vatican’s official commentary on the reform, written by Annibale Bugnini and Carlo Braga, and published in the
Ephemerides Liturgicae in 1956. As explained in the article linked above, this theory is completely untenable.)
But on the whole, these are minor issues. Far more importantly, these volumes are an invaluable resource for demonstrating how completely devoid of any foundation in the Roman tradition the 1955 Holy Week actually is. For example, here we have a comparative table of Scriptural readings from volume 2.2 (pp. 674-675), which shows very clearly that
no historical Roman lectionary ever omitted
the first part of the three Synoptic Passion narratives, the parts which include the Last Supper and the preparations for it. (This is one of the errors of the 1955 reform which was recognized to be so serious that it was partly walked back in the Novus Ordo.)
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| One of these things is not like the others... |
And of course, these volumes also help to demonstrate how the 1955 reform was in some ways a preparation for the more thorough reform of the liturgy that would be enacted after the most recent ecumenical council. E.g., here we see from volume 1, pp. 44-47, the introduction of a responsorial psalm into the procession of Palm Sunday...
as opposed to the traditional antiphons.
As the Church continues to slowly recover the fullness of its authentic liturgical tradition, books like this are extremely useful for making us more aware of what has been lost, and what needs to be rediscovered. Our thanks to Romanitas Press and its editor, Mr Louis Tofari, for such making a significant contribution to this vital process.
