Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Roman Mass of Holy Thursday

Compared to other ancient liturgies, the Roman Rite is unusual in treating the Mass of Maundy Thursday as a feast of the Lord, vesting the clergy in white, and saying the Gloria in excelsis and the Creed. It is far more unusual in not reading one of the Synoptic accounts of the Lord’s Supper as the Gospel, but rather John 13, 1-15, the washing of the disciples’ feet. In the Ambrosian Rite, for example, the vestments are red for the whole of Holy Week, including both Holy Thursday and Good Friday, a custom which the church of Milan received from antiquity, when red was a color of mourning; the Gloria and Credo are not said. The Gospel is Matthew 26, 17-75, which goes from the preparations which the Lord orders the disciples to make for the Last Supper until the crowing of the rooster after Peter’s betrayal.

The Washing of the Disciples’ Feet, 1308, by Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca. 1255/60 - 1318/19), part of the great altarpiece of the cathedral of Siena known as the Maestà. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)
In the Byzantine Rite’s Divine Liturgy of Holy Thursday, the psalms and antiphons with which the Eucharistic rite normally begins are replaced by the first part of Vespers, but the hymns which are sung are of a decidedly non-festal tone, heavily focused on the betrayal of Judas.
“Judas the transgressor, o Lord, who dipped his hand with Thee in the dish at the supper, lawlessly stretched out his hands to take the silver pieces; and he that reckoned up the price of the myrrh, did not shudder to sell Thee, that art beyond price; he who stretched out his feet to be washed, deceitfully kissed the Master to betray him to the lawless; cast from the choir of Apostles, and having cast away the thirty silver pieces, he did not see Thy Resurrection on the third day; through which have mercy on us.”
The Gospel is also from St Matthew, chapter 26, 1 – 27, 2; the washing of the disciples’ feet, John 13, 3-17, is inserted after verse 20, and three verses of St Luke, from his account of the Agony in the Garden (22, 43-45) are inserted after verse 29. The Mozarabic Rite also reads a longer and more complex composite Gospel of the same episodes, while the Armenian liturgy reads the Last Supper twice, as part of longer readings from the first chapter of the Passions of Matthew (26, 17-30) and Mark (14, 1-26), as well as the washing of the feet. The Syro-Malabar tradition is similar to the Ambrosian.
In other words, by far the dominant tradition in Christian liturgy is to emphasize the Institution of the Eucharist as a part of the whole Paschal mystery, by placing it in the context of the Passion narrative. The same narrative then continues on Good Friday, as e.g. in the Ambrosian Rite, which reads most of Matthew 27 at a synaxis of readings done after Terce, the principal commemoration of the Passion on that day.
A photo of the Good Friday post Tertiam in the Ambrosian Rite, from 2017. At Matthew 27, 50 “And Jesus again crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost”, all kneel, and two servers (subdeacons in the solemn rite) strip the altar. All the candles and lights are extinguished; a sign is then given with the bells, which are then “bound” the Easter vigil. The Passion then resumes, but the rest of it is said in a lower voice.
However, it would be very superficial to think that by reading only John 13, 1-15, and that in a Mass of a more festal character, the Roman Rite does not do the exact same thing as the others. For after the Gloria in excelsis is sung, the bells are “bound”, as the Italians say, replaced with the dissonant noise of the crepitaculum, and the organ is silenced, signs that the Church’s joy at receiving the gift of the Eucharist is overshadowed by the impending sufferings of Our Lord. The saying of the Creed emphasizes the fact that at the Institution of the Eucharist and priesthood, Christ established the apostolic college that would go forth to preach and teach the Faith to the world, and as time went on, commission others to do. But it is worth remembering that the Creed itself speaks of the Incarnation, death and Resurrection of Christ, i.e., the Paschal mystery, but does not say anything about the Mass or the Eucharist.
This also explains why the chants of the Foremass of Holy Thursday, the introit, gradual and offertory, also make no mention of the Eucharist, but all speak of the Passion and Resurrection. “in whom is our salvation… and resurrection… wherefore God also did exalt Him… I shall not die, but live, and tell of the works of the Lord.” The collect refers to the betrayal of Judas and the confession of the good thief, and also speaks of the Passion and the Resurrection, but not of the Eucharist.
Offertorium Déxtera Dómini fecit virtutem, déxtera Dómini exaltávit me: non moriar, sed vivam, et narrábo ópera Dómini.
Offertory Ps. 117 The right hand of the Lord hath wrought might: the right hand of the Lord hath exalted me; I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.
As I noted earlier this week, the Roman Mass of the Lord’s Supper originally had no Foremass, but began with the Secret. By the time this custom was changed, in the later decades of the 8th century, the text of the liturgy was regarded as a closed canon, and so all of the elements are taken from elsewhere: the introit from Holy Tuesday, the collect from Good Friday, the epistle and gradual from Tenebrae, the Gospel (reduced to the first 15 verses) also from Holy Tuesday, and the offertory from the Sundays after Epiphany. It is the epistle from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that sets the Institution of the Eucharist in the broader context of the Passion which the chant parts and oration speak of.
“(T)he Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread, and giving thanks, broke, and said, ‘Take ye, and eat: this is my body, which shall be delivered for you: this do for the commemoration of me.’ In like manner also the chalice, after he had supped, saying, ‘This chalice is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as often as you shall drink, for the commemoration of me.’ For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord, until he come.” (verses 23-26).
The canon of the Mass on Holy Thursday has both a variable Communicantes and Hanc igitur; here again, the Institution of the Eucharist is set in the broader context of the Passion. The former refers to “the most sacred day on which Our Lord Jesus Christ was given over (traditus) for us”, i.e., to His Passion, while the latter refers to it as “the day on which Our Lord handed over (tradidit) to his disciples the mysteries of His Body and Blood to be celebrated.”

The Ambrosian Mass of Holy Thursday

The mandatum ceremony according to the Ambrosian rite
One of the most beautiful features of the traditional Ambrosian Rite is its unique manner of celebrating the Mass of Holy Thursday, which includes a special form of the Canon used only on that day. The Mass takes place ‘inter Vesperas – in the midst of Vespers’, although the Vespers in question are very much simplified, relative to the normal form. In fact, the Divine Office of the entire Milanese Holy Week is unusually austere; among other things, the Magnificat is omitted at Vespers, and the Benedictus at Lauds, as a sign of mourning over the death of the Savior.

The rite begins with the regular lucernarium, a responsory originally to be sung during the lighting of candles and lanterns in the church. This is followed by a hymn, and another responsory called the “responsorium in choro”; in the Duomo itself, this chant is to be sung by the archbishop. A reader then sings the entire book of Jonah, a custom which, as Nicola de’ Grandi has noted before, is attested in the writings of St Ambrose himself; this is followed by a psalmellus, the Ambrosian equivalent of a gradual. The Mass then begins without an introductory chant, (the Ambrosian Rite has no Kyrie), starting from the collect, the same that of the Roman Rite; the epistle which follows is of course St Paul’s account of the institution of the Holy Eucharist and the Sacrifice of the Mass from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 11, 20-34, which is read in the Roman Rite at both Mass and Tenebrae.

There follows a cantus, the Ambrosian equivalent of a tract; its text is taken partly from the reading of the Passion according to St. Matthew which follows, (chapter 26, 17-75), and partly from St. Luke 22, 47-48.
You are come out as it were to a robber with swords to apprehend me. Daily I was with you, teaching in the temple, and you laid not hands on me, and behold you hand me over to be crucified.

V. As He yet spoke, behold a crowd, and he that was called Judas came, and drew near to Jesus to kiss him. And Jesus said to him: Judas, dost thou betray the Son of man with a kiss to be crucified?
All the readings for the principle services of the Triduum are taken from the Gospel of St Matthew; the Passion therefore stops with the cock-crow which reminds St Peter that Christ prophesied his betrayal, and resumes in the morning service after Terce at the beginning of chapter 27. (The other three Passions, of Ss Mark, Luke and John, are read in the second of two nocturns at Matins of Good Friday.)

The Mass continues as normal, with a few modifications similar to those of the traditional Roman Rite. The normal antiphon “after the Gospel” is sung; its text is taken with slight modifications from the Byzantine Rite, which on this same day sings these words in the place of the Cherubic hymn at the Divine Liturgy.
Thou receivest me today, Son of God, as a partaker of Thy wondrous Supper. For I will not reveal this mystery to Thy enemies; I will not I give Thee a kiss as did Judas; but as the thief, confessing to Thee: remember me, O Lord, in Thy kingdom.
In accordance with the very ancient custom that the Kiss of Peace is not given on Holy Thursday, since it was the sign by which Judas betrayed the Lord, the deacon does not sing “Pacem habete” after laying the corporal on the altar, is as usually done in the Ambrosian Rite.

The prayer “over the Offering” is the same as the Roman Secret; the Mass has a proper preface, as do most Masses in the Ambrosian Rite.
Truly it is worthy and just etc. … Through Christ our Lord. Who though He was God in heaven, descended unto the earth to cancel the sins of men; and He that had come to liberate the human race, was sold in an unlawful purchase by His servant, like a debtor and a guilty man, even the Lord; and He that judgeth the Angels, was set in the judgment of man, that He might deliver from death man, whom He Himself had made. And therefore with the Angels etc.
The Canon of the Mass is the normal Ambrosian Canon, which is in most respects fairly similar to the Roman Canon, but today is said with several very long interpolations. The first of these is in the Communicantes:
Communicating, and celebrating the most sacred day, on which Our Lord, Jesus Christ, was betrayed. Thou, o Lord, didst command us to be partakers of Thy Son, sharers of Thy kingdom, dwellers in Paradise, companions of the Angels; ever provided we keep the sacraments of the heavenly army with pure and undefiled faith. And what may we not hope of Thy mercy, we who received so great a gift, that we might merit to offer Thee such a Victim, namely, the Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ? Who for the redemption of the world gave himself up to that holy and venerable Passion; Who instituting the form of the perennial sacrifice of salvation, first offered Himself as the Victim, and first taught that It be offered. But also venerating the memory etc.
The words “keep the sacraments of the heavenly army – caelestis militae sacramenta servemus” refer to a common pre-Christian sense of the Latin word “sacramentum – a military oath of allegiance”.

The first part of the Ambrosian Canon of Holy Thursday, in a missal printed in 1548.

The Hanc igitur is not so much interpolated as completely rewritten.
We therefore beseech thee, o Lord, graciously attend to this offering, which we make to Thee because of the day of the Lord’s Supper, on which Our Lord, Jesus Christ, Thy Son, instituted the rite of sacrifice in the New Covenant, when He transformed the bread and wine, which Melchisedech the priest had offered as a prefiguration of the mystery that was to come, into the sacrament of His Body and Blood; and so for the course of many years, in health and safety may we merit to offer our gifts to the Thee, o Lord; and may Thou order our days in Thy peace etc.
The Qui pridie is then interpolated as follows:
Who on the day before He suffered for our salvation and that of all men, that is, on this day, reclining in the midst of His disciples and taking bread etc.
The second part of the same canon.
The rest of the Canon is said as normal; however, after the Nobis quoque, there follows a lengthy addition unique to the Ambrosian Rite.
We do these things, we celebrate these thing, o Lord, keeping Thy commandments: and at this inviolable communion, by the very fact that we receive the Body of the Lord, we also announce his death. But it belongeth to Thee, almighty Father, to send now Thy only begotten Son, whom Thou didst send willingly to them that sought Him not. Who though Thou art infinite and unknowable, didst also beget of Thee God infinite and unknowable; so that Thou may now grant His Body unto our salvation, by whose Passion Thou didst grant redemption to the human race. Through the same.
In the Ambrosian Rite, the fraction of the Host is done before the Our Father, accompanied by an antiphon called the Confractory, which on Holy Thursday reads as follows:
This is the Body, which shall be given up for you: this Chalice of the New Covenant is in My Blood, sayeth the Lord. As often as you shall receive these things, do this in memory of Me.
The Lord’s Prayer is then preceded by a special formula of introduction used only on this day, in place of the usual formula common to the Roman and Milanese rites.
It is His commandment, o Lord, which we follow, in Whose presence we now ask Thee. Give to the sacrifice its Author, that the faith of the matter may be fulfilled in the loftiness of the mystery; so that as we carry out the truth of the heavenly sacrifice, so we may draw in the truth of the Lord’s Body and Blood. Through the same Christ Our Lord, saying: Our Father etc.
The Transitory, the Ambrosian communion antiphon, also refers to the Passion Gospel of Matthew 26.
My soul is sorrowful even unto death: stay you here, and watch with me. Now you shall see the crowd that surroundeth me, and take flight, and I will go to be immolated for ye.
The Post-Communion prayer is different from that of the Roman Rite.
Lord, our God, grant in Thy mercy; that we who have received the Body and Blood of Thy only begotten Son may be set apart from the blindness of the faithless disciple, we who confess and worship Christ our Lord as true God and true man. Who liveth etc.
As in the Roman Rite, the Blessed Sacrament is taken to the Altar of Repose in solemn procession at the end of the Mass; afterwards, the end of vespers is sung. This consists of psalm 69, sung together with the two psalms 133 and 116 added to it, sung with a single doxology, according to a common custom of the Ambrosian Rite on feasts. The rite then concludes with four prayers, the Magnificat being omitted as noted above.

Palm Sunday 2024 Photopost (Part 1)

I am glad to say that we have received a pretty good number of contributions to our Palm Sunday photopost series, and it will certainly run to at least three separate posts. There is always room for more, and of course the Triduum starts today, so please send photos of any and all of your Holy Week liturgies, in any of the various rites and forms, to photopost@newliturgicalmovement.org, and remember to include the name and location of the church. We wish all of our reader a most blessed celebration of the mysteries of Our Lord’s Holy Supper and Passion, looking forward to the glorious Resurrection.
St Martin – Martinville, Lousisiana
St Stanislaus – Milwaukee, Wisconsin (ICRSS)
Tradition will always be for the young.
St Anthony – Calgary, Alberta (FSSP)

Photopost Request: The Sacred Triduum and Easter 2024

Our first Palm Sunday photopost will be put up later today. In the meantime, as we traditionally do, we will plan on having a whole series of photoposts of your Holy Week liturgies, with individual posts for Tenebrae, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. As always, we are glad to receive images of the OF, EF, Eastern Rites, the Ordinariate Use, etc., including any part of the liturgy. Please send your photographs to photopost@newliturgicalmovement.org, and remember to include the name and location of the church, along with any other information you think important.

Please read this! – I would ask people to do a few things to make it easier for us to process the photos. The first is to size them down so that the smaller dimension is around 1500 pixels. The second is to send the pictures as zipped files, which are a lot easier to process, (not links, and not as photos attached to an email). The third is to not mix photos of one ceremony with those of another, and to put the name of the ceremony (“Tenebrae”, “Holy Thursday”, “Good Friday”, “Holy Saturday”, and “Easter Sunday”) as the subject of the email. Your help is very much appreciated.

“Beauty is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation.” – Pope Benedict XVI.
From our first Holy Thursday photopost of last year: the altar of repose at the Oratory of Ss Cyril and Methodius, the church of the Institute of Christ the King’s apostolate in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
From the second post: the Mandatum at the Norbertine priory of Our Lady of Sorrows in Peckham, England.

Last year, this series stalled out after Holy Thursday, due, as I mistakenly thought at time, to a lack of submissions. I realized MUCH later that our email filters were putting things sent to the photopost email address into the spam box, and I never saw them. (The Big G routinely makes changes to the way its email works without telling us; its own notifications to the editor that a post has been made also go to spam for months, and then randomly start show up my inbox for months, then stop happening completely, then back to spam, etc.) The problem has been fixed; I check spam regularly, and for months, I haven’t seen anything in it that shouldn’t be there, so we should be good to go.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The Mass of Spy Wednesday

As I noted in articles published yesterday and the day before, the Gospel of Holy Monday was originally John 12, 1-36, and that of Holy Tuesday was originally John 13, 1-32. This meant that the Passion of St Luke, which has always been the Gospel of Spy Wednesday, would originally have been the first retelling of the Passion during the Roman Holy Week, after the Mass of Palm Sunday. (As I have also noted on various occasions, this anticipation of the events of the Passion before the liturgical days on which they actually happened is a custom almost unique to the Roman Rite.)

This connection between the Masses of Palm Sunday and Spy Wednesday is highlighted by the introit of the latter, which is taken from the epistle of former, Philippians 2, 5-11.

Introitus In nómine Jesu omne genu flectátur, caelestium, terrestrium et infernórum: quia Dóminus factus est oboediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis: ideo Dóminus Jesus Christus in gloria est Dei Patris. Psalmus Dómine, exaudi oratiónem meam: et clamor meus ad te veniat. In nómine Jesu…
Introit (Phil. 2, 10; 8 and 11) In the name of Jesus let every knee bend, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth: because the Lord hath become obedient unto death, but the death of the Cross. Therefore, the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. Psalm 101, 2 O Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come to thee. In the name of Jesus…
The psalm with which it is sung, the hundred-and-first, dominates this Mass as Psalm 34 does that of Holy Monday, providing the text of the tract, offertory, and communio. It is also the fifth of the penitential psalms; in his Exposition of the Penitential Psalms, St Gregory the Great makes the connection between it and the epistle of Palm Sunday that surely inspired the creation of this introit. He begins with psalm’s biblical title.
“ ‘The prayer of the poor man, when he shall be anxious, and pour out his supplication before the Lord.’ Who is this poor man whose prayer is noted in this psalm, if not he of whom the apostle said, ‘who when he was rich became poor for our sakes’? (1 Cor. 8, 9) For He, that He might make us participants in His riches, took on the necessities of our poverty; for ‘He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.’ (Phil, 2, 7-8) And just as He became poor for us, so also was He made anxious for us, and at last was handed over to death for us, and for us hung upon the Cross. For He died, as the Apostle, says for our sins (1 Cor. 15, 3) and rose for our justification. (Rom. 4, 25) Now He was able to be anxious from His human nature, from which also He was able to die. Therefore, our (mystical) Head prays in this psalm that through grace we may be led back thither, whence we fell through the fault of our first parent.”
The Risen Christ and the Mystical Winepress, by Marco dal Pino, often called Marco da Siena, 1525-1588 ca. Both of the figures of Christ in this painting show very markedly the influence of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
The Roman station church for this day is St Mary Major, as also on the Ember Wednesdays. As on those days, and on the Wednesday of the fourth week of Lent, there are two readings before the Gospel. The first is Isaiah 63, 1-7, preceded by a part of verse 62, 11.
Thus sayeth the Lord God: Tell the daughter of Sion: Behold thy Savior cometh: behold his reward is with him. 63, 1 Who is this that comes from Edom, with dyed garments from Bosra, this beautiful one in his robe, walking in the greatness of his strength? I, that speak justice, and am a defender to save. Why then is your apparel red, and your garments like theirs that tread in the winepress? I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the gentiles there is not a man with me: I have trampled on them in my indignation, and have trodden them down in my wrath, and their blood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my apparel. etc.
The Church Fathers understood this passage as a prophecy of the Passion of Christ, starting in the West with Tertullian. (Adv. Marcionem 4, 40 ad fin.)
The prophetic Spirit contemplates the Lord as if He were already on His way to His passion, clad in His fleshly nature; and as He was to suffer therein, He represents the bleeding condition of His flesh under the metaphor of garments dyed in red, as if reddened in the treading and crushing process of the wine-press, from which the laborers descend reddened with the wine-juice, like men stained in blood.
This idea is repeated in very similar terms by St Cyprian (Ep. ad Caecilium 62), who always referred to Tertullian as “the Master”, despite his lapse into the Montanist heresy; and likewise, by Saints Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechesis 13, 27) and Gregory of Nazianzus (Oration 45, 25.)
The necessary premise of the Passion is, of course, the Incarnation, for Christ could not suffer without a human body. Indeed, ancient heretics who denied the Incarnation often did so in rejection of the idea that God can suffer, which they held to be incompatible with the perfect and incorruptible nature of the divine. St Ambrose became bishop of Milan in 374, after the see had been held for by one such heretic, the Arian Auxentius, for twenty years. We therefore find him referring this same prophecy to the whole economy of salvation, culminating in the Ascension of Christ’s body into heaven, in his treatise On the Mysteries (7, 36):
The angels, too, were in doubt when Christ arose; the powers of heaven were in doubt when they saw that flesh was ascending into heaven. Then they said: “Who is this King of glory?” And while some said “Lift up your gates, O princes, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.” In Isaiah, too, we find that the powers of heaven doubted and said: “Who is this that comes up from Edom, the redness of His garments is from Bosor, He who is glorious in white apparel?”
In the next generation, St Eucherius of Lyon (ca. 380-450) is even more explicit: “The garment of the Son of God is sometimes understood to be His flesh, which is assumed by the divinity; of which garment of the flesh Isaiah prophesying says, “Who is this etc.” (Formulas of Spiritual Understanding, chapter 1) Therefore, like the Mass of Ember Wednesday in Lent, this Mass begins with a prophecy of the Incarnation, as the church of Rome visits its principal sanctuary of the Mother of God, in whose sacred womb began the salvation of man.
The icon of the Virgin Mary, known as the “Salus Populi Romani”, in the reredos of the Borghese chapel of the basilica of St Mary Major. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0)
This is particularly appropriate for the day on which the Church reads the Passion of St Luke, who has a special association with the Virgin Mary. Most of what the New Testament tell us about Her is recorded in his writings, including almost all of the words actually spoken by the Her; this fact lies behind the tradition that he painted a picture of the Virgin, which is figuratively true if not literally. It is his account of the Passion that tells of the meeting between Christ and a group of women on the way to Mount Calvary, (chapter 23, 27-30); although he does not say that Mary was among them, art and piety have long accepted that it was so.
The gradual is taken from Psalm 68, which, as I noted yesterday, figures very prominently in the liturgy of Holy Week, and not just in the Roman Rite.

Graduale Ne avertas faciem tuam a púero tuo, quoniam tríbulor: velóciter exaudi me. V. Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intravérunt aquae usque ad ánimam meam: infixus sum in limo profundi, et non est substantia.
Gradual, Ps 68, 18; 2-3 Turn not thy face away from thy servant: for I am in trouble, swiftly hear me. V. Save me, o God, for the waters have come in even unto my soul. I am stuck fast in the mire of the deep, and there is no sure standing.
The Breviarium in Psalmos, (an exegetical treatise traditionally but erroneous ascribed to St Jerome) beautifully explains the application of the first part to the Passion. “(This is) the voice of Christ, who took on the form of a servant, speaking to the Father… ‘swiftly hear me’ that I make take up my spirit again, which I commended into Thy hands.” The Passion of St Luke which is read at this Mass is the only one that records Jesus saying these words of Psalm 30, 6, “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit”, right before His death.
The prayer which follows it is the first to explicitly mention the Resurrection on the ferial days of Holy Week, another reminder of the unity of the Paschal mystery. For this reason, the Church also uses it for the suffrage of the Cross in Eastertide.
“O God, who willed that for us, thy Son should suffer the gibbet of the Cross, that Thou might drive far from us the power of the enemy; grant us thy servants, that we may obtain the grace of the resurrection.”
(Attributed to the Spanish painter Alonso Cano, 1601-67. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) 
The second reading, Isaiah 53, 1-12, is the fourth and last of the passages of his book known as the Songs of the Suffering Servant. It is cited as a prophecy of Our Lord several times in the New Testament, and figures very prominently in the Holy Week liturgy of most ancient rites, so fully does it describe and conform to the events of the Passion.
If space permitted, St Jerome’s commentary on this chapter would be worth quoting in full, but here I must limit myself to this part, which is particularly relevant to this Mass, explaining the common theme of the two prophecies.
“He was despised and ignoble (verse 3) when He hung upon the Cross, and having become a curse for us (Gal. 3, 13), bore our sins. … But He was glorious and comely of appearance when at His Passion the earth trembled, and the rocks were broken, and as the sun fled, the elements feared that eternal might had come. Of him the bride says in the Song of Songs (5, 10), ‘My beloved is bright and ruddy’: bright in the fullness and purity of the virtues, ruddy in the passion, of which we shall afterwards read, ‘Who is this that cometh up from Edom, from Bosra with garments ruddy?” (Isa. 63, 1), chosen from among the thousands for the resurrection, that He who was the first-born of all creation might become the first-born of the dead.”

A New Setting of the Stabat Mater by Peter Kwasniewski

Just in time for Holy Week, Peter has posted to his YouTube channel a recording of his setting of the Stabat Mater, which was premiered by the ensemble His Majesty’s Men on Saturday, August 12, 2023 at St John Cantius Church, Chicago. Although the Stabat Mater hymn is not officially a part of the liturgy of Holy Week, it has long been customary to sing it as an offertory or communion motet; at St Peter’s basilica, for example, Palestrina’s version was sung at the principal Mass of Palm Sunday.



A note from Peter:

“In this work, I set ten of the verses (1–3, 5, 9–11, 16–17, and 20) for five-part men’s choir, interspersing them with the Gregorian chant for the remaining ten verses (4, 6–8, 12–15, and 18–19); the latter verses are sometimes sung plainly and sometimes with an ison and contrary organum. The purity and simplicity of the chant lines contrast well with the intricate texture and dense harmonies of the polyphony parts.

“This is, moreover, a very live recording — complete with car brakes, city buses, and honking horns, courtesy of the busy neighborhood of St John Cantius! John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and Henry Cowell would no doubt be pleased.”

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

The Mass of Holy Tuesday

In the oldest lectionary of the Roman Rite, ca. 650 AD [1], the Gospel of Holy Tuesday is not the Passion of St Mark, as it is today, but John 13, 1-32: Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet (1-11), His words to them immediately afterwards (12-20), the revelation of Judas as the betrayer (21-30), and Christ’s declaration that “Now the Son of man is glorified, etc.” The Divine Office preserves a relic of this in today’s antiphon for the Benedictus, which is the first verse of this Gospel: “Before the feast day of Passover, Jesus, knowing that His hour had come, having loved His own, He loved them unto the end.”

The Washing of the Disciples’ Feet, ca. 1305, by Giotto, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)
This may seem a very counter-intuitive choice, since the Gospel begins with the words “Before the day of Passover,” which began on the evening of Good Friday when Our Lord died; and indeed, the first part of this Gospel, verses 1-15, is now read on Holy Thursday. The key to understanding this is the Roman Rite’s unique arrangement of Holy Week: it is the only rite which reads an account of the Passion on Palm Sunday, anticipating the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday. This arrangement celebrates Holy Week as a unit, with all the parts fully and equally related to the same Paschal mystery. Likewise, the Epistle read before the blessing of the palms refers to the Good Friday rite of the Presanctified, and one of the prayers of the blessing refers to Noah’s dove, a story which is told among the prophecies of the Easter vigil.

Therefore, the original Gospels of Holy Monday (John 12, 1-36) and Tuesday (13, 1-32) supplemented the Passion narrative of Palm Sunday with material which is not included in any of the synoptic Gospels. This includes the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, since the ancient lectionaries do not indicate any use of the Gospel which is now read at the blessing of the Palms, Matthew 21, 1-9, or its parallels in Mark and Luke. (The evidence for how Palm Sunday was celebrated in Rome in the early centuries is very scant; we cannot dismiss the possibility that such a reading was part of a blessing of palms, but we have no proof one way or the other.)
The first part of the old Gospel of Holy Tuesday, John 13, 1-32, in a Roman lectionary of the later 8th century known as the Purple Lectionary of Verona. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits, Latin 9451, folio 69r)
This would also explain two other curious features of the Roman Holy Week. One is that the Passion of St Mark was not read at any of the Masses [2], since it differs very little from Matthew’s, whereas St Luke’s, which does include several things not in Matthew or Mark, is read on Spy Wednesday. The other is the custom attested in the same lectionary mentioned above, and in the oldest Roman sacramentary, that the Mass of the Lord’s Supper began with the Secret, and hence, had no Scriptural readings. This could be done, since all that needed to be read of the Last Supper had already been read earlier in the week.
As I have noted several times, when Masses were assigned to the formerly aliturgical Thursdays of Lent, almost all of their chant parts were taken from other Masses, since the liturgical repertoire was regarded as a closed canon. In a similar way, when the Mass of the Lord’s Supper was supplied with a foremass (by the later decades of the 8th century), every element of it was taken from somewhere else in the liturgy: the introit from Holy Tuesday, the collect from Good Friday, the epistle and gradual from Tenebrae, the Gospel (reduced to the first 15 verses) also from Holy Tuesday, and the offertory from the Sundays after Epiphany.
Introitus Nos autem gloriári oportet in Cruce Dómini nostri Jesu Christi: in quo est salus, vita et resurrectio nostra: per quem salváti et liberáti sumus. Ps. 66 Deus misereátur nostri, et benedícat nobis: illúminet vultum suum super nos, et misereátur nostri. Nos autem…
Introit But we must glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection, through who we are saved and delivered. Ps. 66 May God have mercy on us, and bless us: may he cause the light of his countenance to shine upon us, and may he have mercy on us. But we must glory…
In the Tridentine Missal, this introit is cited to Galatians 6, but it is really an ecclesiastical composition, and hardly even a paraphrase of any verse of Scripture. Here again, the unity of the Paschal mystery as celebrated in the Roman Holy Week is expressed by “glorying in the Cross” three days before the day of the Crucifixion, and by speaking of it as the source of our “salvation, life and resurrection” five days before Easter.
The use of the epistle from Jeremiah, chapter 11, 18-20, is beautifully explained by St Jerome in his commentary on the prophet. “The consensus of all the churches is this, that in the person of Jeremiah they understand these things to be said by Christ, because the Father showed him how he ought to speak… and He Himself, like a lamb led to the slaughter, did not open His mouth and did not know, which is to say, did not know sin, according to what is said by the Apostle, ‘Who when he had not known sin, became sin for us.’ (2 Cor. 5, 21)
St Jerome in His Study, by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (1587-1625). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.
‘And they said, Let us cast wood into his bread’, which means, the Cross upon the body of the Savior, for He Himself is the one who said, ‘I am the bread which came down from heaven’ (Jo. 6, 41)… but on the other hand, according to the mystery of the body which He assumed, the Son speaks to the Father, and calls upon His judgment… that He might render to the people what they merit. And He says, ‘May I see my vengeance upon them’, that is, upon those who persevere in their crime, and not on those who are turned to penance, of whom He said upon the Cross, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ (Luke 23, 34) He reveals to the Father and lays open His cause, because He was crucified, not because He in any way deserved this, but for the crime of the people, saying, ‘Behold the prince of this world comes, and he finds nothing in me.’ ” (Jo. 14, 30)
Regarding “the consensus of all the churches”, the same passage is read as the beginning of a longer lesson (Jeremiah 11, 18-23; 12, 1-5a; 9-11a; 14-15) which the Byzantine Rite reads at Prime of Holy Thursday and None of Good Friday. The Gallican and Armenian Rites both have these verses on Good Friday, while the Ambrosian copied it from the Roman.
The gradual is taken from Psalm 34, which dominates the Mass of Holy Monday.
Graduale, Ps 34, 13 et 1-2 Ego autem, dum mihi molesti essent, induébam me cilicio, et humiliábam in jejunio ánimam meam: et oratio mea in sinu meo convertétur. V. Júdica, Dómine, nocentes me, expugna impugnantes me: apprehende arma et scutum, et exsurge in adjutorium mihi.
Gradual But as for me, when they were troublesome to me, I was clothed with haircloth, and I humbled my soul in fasting; and my prayer shall be turned into my bosom. V. Judge thou, O Lord, them that wrong me: overthrow them that fight against me. Take hold of arms and shield: and rise up to help me.
A treatise known as the Breviarium in Psalmos, traditionally but incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, says that the opening words of this psalm (the verse of this gradual), are “the voice of Christ in His Passion, and of the Church in tribulation.” It then explains verse 13, the beginning of the gradual, as follows: “For the Lord put on the roughness (asperitatem, i.e. the roughness of a hairshirt) of the Passion. … He celebrated a fast unto the evening, when in the evening of the world, He was offered for its salvation. … Christ fasted not carnally but spiritually. … He hungered for the salvation of the human race, He thirsted for the faith of the church. He hungered in the passion when all, and especially the Apostles, denied Him, except the thief, who confessed Him on the cross.” (PL 26, 923D; 926B)
The offertory of Holy Monday is a verse of Psalm 142, which is said at Lauds of Friday, the day of the Passion; while the offertory of today is from Psalm 139, which is said at Friday Vespers. This psalm is also said at Vespers of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, with an antiphon taken from the same verse as this offertory.
Offertorium, Ps. 139, 5 Custódi me, Dómine, de manu peccatóris: et ab homínibus iníquis éripe me. (Keep me, O Lord, from the hand of the sinner: and from unjust men deliver me.)
The communio is from Psalm 68, which figures prominently in the Holy Week liturgy of various rites because of its general tenor, and specifically because of verse 22, “they gave me gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink”, a prophecy of one of the events of the Lord’s Passion. (Matt. 27, 34). As St Augustine writes (Enarr.), “Christ speaks here; we are not permitted to doubt this, for here are the express words which are fulfilled in His passion.” It also provides the offertory of Palm Sunday and the gradual of Spy Wednesday, and is sung as the first psalm of the first Tenebrae service. The Ambrosian Rite does not have Tenebrae, but also sings it as the first psalm of Holy Thursday Matins, repeating it on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. In the Byzantine Rite, it is said at None of the Royal Hours of Good Friday.
A statue of an angel holding the sponge and reed by which the Lord was given vinegar to drink while he was on the Cross, by Antonio Giorgetti (1635-69), working as an assistant of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This is one of ten statues of angels holding instruments of the Passion which Pope Clement IX commissioned from the elderly Bernini in 1669, to decorate the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, the main bridge by which pilgrims crossed the Tiber to get to St Peter’s basilica. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Jean-Pol Grandmont, CC BY-SA 3.0
Communio, Ps. 68, 13-14 Adversum me exercebantur, qui sedébant in porta: et in me psallébant, qui bibébant vinum: ego vero oratiónem meam ad te, Dómine: tempus benepláciti, Deus, in multitúdine misericordiae tuae. (They that sat in the gate were stirred up against me: and they that drank wine sang against me. But as for me, my prayer is to thee, o Lord; the time of thy good pleasure, o God, in the multitude of thy mercy (hear me.))
The Breviarium in Psalmos begins its commentary on Psalm 68 by saying, “This psalm resounds with Christ’s Passion”, and offers this very good explanation of the final words of the communio. “ ‘The time of (Thy) good pleasure, o God.’ The time of good pleasure is the time of the Passion, in which the Father said, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ ‘The time of good pleasure, in the multitude if Thy mercy.’ For all Thy times are well-pleasing, but especially this time, in which by Thy Passion Thou redeemest the human race…”
[1] The Comes Wurzburgensis is not, properly speaking, a lectionary, but a list of liturgical days, the Scriptural pericopes assigned to them, indicated by the title of the book, and the incipit and explicit, and the Roman station church, where applicable. The Latin words “cŏmĕs – a companion” (the origin of the noble title “count – one who accompanies a king”) was used to designate a lectionary, a book which accompanies the celebration of the Mass.
[2] The Passion of St Mark (14, 1 – 15, 46) was read in some Uses of the Roman Rite as the ninth lesson of Matins on Palm Sunday. This custom is attested in the Liber Politicus (a.k.a. Ordo Romanus XI) of a canon of St Peter’s basilica named Benedict, ca. 1140, and was still observed at the end of the 17th century in the Use of Lyon, which also maintained the original Gospels of Holy Monday and Tuesday.

Workshops in June for Composers, Conductors and Choristers, with Sir James MacMillan

This June, the Catholic Sacred Music Project, run by Peter Carter, offers three separate residential workshops on the beautiful campus of Princeton University in New Jersey. They will be led by a stellar team of composers, conductors and composers: Sir James MacMillan, Gabriel Crouch, Paul Jernberg, Dr James Jordan and Dr Timothy McDonnell.

In the week of June 9-15, the CSMP Composition Institute and CSMP Choral Institute will occur simultaneously, culminating in the choristers singing the new works by the composers. The following week, the CSMP Conductors’ Institute will take place, June 16-21.

Details are given in the three posters below, one for each workshop; also see the Catholic Sacred Music Project website: sacredmusicproject.org.
The Catholic Sacred Music Project was founded in 2021 to provide spiritual and musical formation for Catholic musicians in order to effect a widespread renewal of sacred music in the Church. 

I will be present through my association (as Artist-in-Residence) with one of the co-sponsors, the Scala Foundation. Other co-sponsors are Paul Jernberg’s Magnificat Institute, the Benedict XVI Institute and the Aquinas Institute, which is the Catholic campus ministry for Princeton University.

Monday, March 25, 2024

The Mass of Holy Monday

At the Mass of Holy Monday, three of the four chant propers, the introit, gradual and communion, are taken from the same Psalm, the thirty-fourth. (The tract, Domine, non secundum, is not proper to this Mass, since it is sung on most of the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent, and for the last time on this day.) Like most of the texts from the Psalms which speak in the person of a man suffering or in distress (“Judge them that harm me, o God,” etc.), this Psalm was taken by the Church Fathers as a representation of Our Lord in the midst of His Passion. For example, a treatise known as the Breviarium in Psalmos, traditionally but incorrectly attributed to St Jerome, says that the opening words are “the voice of Christ in His Passion, and of the Church in tribulation”, and explains verse 13, “I was clothed with haircloth, I humbled my soul with fasting” as follows: “For the Lord put on the roughness (asperitatem) of the Passion. … He celebrated a fast unto the evening, when in the evening of the world, He was offered for its salvation.” (PL 26, 923D; 926D) Cassiodorus (ca. 485 – 585) begins his commentary on the same Psalm by saying, “Through this whole hymn, the words are those of Christ the Lord, spoken from the dispensation by which He suffered.” (In Psalt. Expos.; PL 70, 241B)

Introitus, Ps. 34 Júdica, Dómine, nocentes me, expugna impugnantes me: apprehende arma et scutum, et exsurge in adjutorium meum, Dómine, virtus salútis meae. ℣. Effunde frámeam, et conclúde adversus eos, qui persequuntur me: dic ánimae meae: Salus tua ego sum. Júdica, Dómine...
Introit Judge thou, O Lord, them that harm: overthrow them that fight against me. Take hold of arms and shield, and rise up to help me, o Lord, my salvation. ℣. Bring out the sword, and shut up the way against them that persecute me: say to my soul: I am thy salvation. Judge thou...
In his Enarrationes in Psalmos, St Augustine discusses this psalm as a prophecy of Christ’s Passion in a particularly beautiful way, in reference to the sufferings of the Church. “Here we understand the voice of Christ; the voice, of course, of both the head and body of Christ. When you hear of Christ, do not separate the groom from the bride, but understand that great mystery, ‘and the two shall be in one flesh.’ … the Lord suffered by His will, we by necessity; He in His compassion, we in our condition. Therefore, His voluntary passion is our necessary consolation… however much the enemy raged, he was able to come only so far as the death of the body; and yet, was not able to destroy it in the case of the Lord, because He rose on the third day. That which came to pass in Him on the third day, the same shall happen to our body at the end of the age. The hope of our resurrection is put off: is it therefore taken away? Let us therefore recognize herein the words of Christ…”
The Man of Sorrows, with the instruments of the Passion, ca. 1345-50; part of an altar in the cathedral of Cologne, Germany.   
Following this same understanding, the Ambrosian Rite gives this Psalm a particularly prominent place in the liturgy of Holy Week. It provides the text of both the psalmellus and cantus (the equivalents of the gradual and tract) at the Mass of Palm Sunday, plus the psalmelli of the special synaxis of readings after Terce of both Holy Thursday and Saturday, and is sung four times in the Divine Office. In the Byzantine Rite, at the special form of the day Hours of Good Friday known as the Royal Hours, it is said at Terce.
A page of an Ambrosian Missal of 1594, showing the end of the prophetic reading (Isaiah 53, 1-2), the psalmellus, the epistle (2 Thess. 2, 14  3, 5), the cantus and the Gospel (John 11, 55 12, 11).
The Epistle is the third of four passages of the prophet Isaiah known as the songs of the Suffering Servant (42, 1-4; 49, 1-6; 50, 4-11; and 52, 13 – 53 12), but does not include its first or last verse. This choice is of course made especially because of verse 6, which prophesies some of the injuries done to the Lord during the Passion: “I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that plucked them: I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me, and spat upon me.”
The fourth song (starting with the first verse of chapter 53) is read at the Mass of Holy Wednesday. Here too we note a parallel with the Byzantine Rite, which places the song from chapter 50 at the Vesperal Divine Liturgy of Holy Thursday, and the latter at Vespers of Good Friday, the principal commemoration of the Our Lord’s Crucifixion and Death. (Both passages are also read at the Royal Hours of Good Friday.)
In his commentary on the prophet Isaiah (PL 24, 478D-479D), St Jerome notes that the Jews of his time (understandably, from their point of view) tried to refer this prophecy to Isaiah himself, and “by every reasoning, turn the prophecies away from Christ.” To this he responds that “These things also are to be referred to the person of the Lord… and He who kept silent in His passion now speaketh in all the world through the Apostles and their followers. … This discipline and learning opened His ears (verse 5), that He might bring to us the knowledge of the Father; and He did not contradict (or ‘resist’) Him (i.e. the Father), but became obedient even unto death, the death of the Cross.” And likewise, he explains the words of verse 8, “who will contend with me?”, to mean, “If anyone thinks that I am rightly condemned to the Cross, and have committed some sin, let him resist me.”
The Mocking of Christ, ca. 1617, by the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.
In the oldest lectionaries of the Roman Rite, the Gospel of Holy Monday is John 12, 1-36. This includes the anointing of the Lord’s feet by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus (verses 1-3); Judas’ complaint about the expense of the ointment, St John’s “inside explanation” thereof, and the Lord’s response (4-8); the plotting of the priests to kill Lazarus (9-11); the events of Palm Sunday (12-19); Philip and Andrew bringing some gentiles to Christ (20-23); and Jesus’ speech (23-36), which is interrupted by the voice of the Father (28-30).
This passage was clearly chosen because of its opening words, “Six days before the Pasch” (i.e. Passover), since Holy Monday is six days before Easter, and “Pascha”, the Greek form of the Hebrew “Pesach – Passover”, is the Latin word for Easter. This places St John’s account of Palm Sunday on the day after it. It would be foolish to think that the first compilers of the Roman lectionary, men of extremely fine literary sensibilities, did not understand this. Their purpose seems to have been rather to reset the stage, as it were, for the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection in the rites of the sacred Triduum and Easter.
The Anointing of Christ’s Feet at Bethany, depicted in the Vaux Passional ca. 1503-4. Mary and Martha are shown serving at the table; the Lord has stuck one of His feet out from under it, looking forward to the anointing. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)
Later, however, the Gospel was split into two parts, with the second one (verses 10 to 36) assigned to the formerly aliturgical Passion Saturday, forming a kind of vigil of Palm Sunday. The Apostles’ introduction of the gentiles to Christ is thereby now read one week before the baptismal ceremonies of Holy Saturday, at which the successors of the Apostles fulfill the great Commission, to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28, 19) This leaves today with the washing of the Lord’s feet as its focus.
The offertory is taken from Psalm 142, the last of the Penitential Psalms, and the second of Lauds on Friday, the day of the Passion. Of it, St Hilary of Poitiers writes, “David now prophecies by his own sufferings those of the Lord, not complaining about Absalom, but about those who urged him on (literally “ignirent – kindled him”) to the crime of impiety. For according to the Apostle (Eph. 6, 16), the darts of the devil are fiery, which stuck themselves in the heart of Judas, that the Lord might be betrayed.” (Tract. super Psalmos; PL 9, 838B)
Offertorium, Ps 142 Eripe me de inimícis meis, Dómine: ad te confúgi, doce me fácere voluntátem tuam: quia Deus meus es tu. (Deliver me from my enemies, o Lord, to thee have I fled: teach me to do thy will, for thou art my God.)
In the Gospel, “Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray him, said, ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’ ”, and as St John explains, “he said this, not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and having the purse, carried the things that were put therein.”
St Augustine (Enarr. ibid.) agrees with Hilary that the Psalm it about the Passion, and comments in it in general: “Therefore the Lord shall preach about His own Passion in this Psalm.” Then, commenting on the specific verses used in the offertory, he writes: “ ‘Deliver me from my enemies, o Lord, for I have fled to Thee.’ (This means) not Judas, but he who filled Judas. … For Judas accepted the morsel, and Satan entered into him, so that this David (i.e. Christ) might suffer persecution from his own son. How many Judases does Satan fill, who unworthily receive the morsel unto their own judgment? For ‘he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment unto himself. (1 Cor. 11, 27).” It seems likely, therefore, that this offertory was deliberately created as a reference to the interpretation of Ss Hilary and Augustine.

New Printing of “The Liturgical Rosary”

I wish that I could wish my readers a blessed feast of the Annunciation, but this year, as happens often enough, the feast is catapulted to the Monday after the Easter Octave, so, April 8. Nevertheless, our Byzantine brethren continue to observe it, and a Marian post does not seem unfitting.

Back in October 2023, I announced at NLM the publication of Arouca Press’ unique devotional book The Liturgical Rosary. (You can read about its contents there.) The popularity of the book was such that within weeks the first printing had been sold out.

Happily, Arouca has done a second printing of the book, but this time, with an imitation leather cover, thin Bible paper, and gold edges. It is more compact than the first edition. Here are some photos.

Order exclusively here from Arouca Press. Shipped from the USA. International shipping available. Bulk discount prices are calculated automatically during checkout.

God bless Arouca Press and the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary!

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Passiontide 2024 Photopost (Part 2)

As always, we are very grateful to all everyone who has shared their photographs of their churches veiled for Passtiontide, and two very nice sets of rose-colored Laetare vestments. We are looking forward to see pictures of your Palm Sunday liturgies. Please send them in to photopost@newliturgicalmovement.org, and remember to include the name and location of the church, and any other information you think important. Keep up the good work of evangelizing through beauty!

Christ the King – Sarasota, Florida (FSSP)
Chapel of the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot – Parris Island, South Carolina
Before veils...
and after.
Oratory of St Stanislaus – Milwaukee, Wisconsin (ICRSP)

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