I am sure that our readers will enjoy this interview with the liturgical scholar Fr Uwe Michael Lang of the London Oratory, which was recently published on the YouTube channel of the Totus Tuus Apostolate. It covers a wide range of subjects: Pope Benedict’s teaching on the liturgy, the liturgical abuses in the post-Conciliar period and our own time, some of the historical problems behind the creation of the reform, the use of Latin in the liturgy, etc.
In addition to his other scholarly work, Fr Lang has recently published two very useful volumes on the history of the Roman Rite. The more recent one, A Short History of the Roman Mass (Ignatius Press, 2024), a survey of the fixed parts of the Roman Rite (Canon, Offertory prayers, etc.) is an abbreviation of his 2022 volume The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He currently lectures at St Mary’s University and Allen Hall Seminary in London, and serves inter alia as an editor of the liturgical journal Antiphon. From 2008 to 2012, he was a staff member of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and from 2008 to 2013, was a consultor to the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff.
Before the early eighth century, the church of Rome kept the Thursdays of Lent (with the obvious exception of Holy Thursday) and the Saturdays after Ash Wednesday and Passion Sunday as “aliturgical” days. (The term aliturgical refers, of course, only to the Eucharistic liturgy, not to the Divine Office.) This is attested in the oldest liturgical books of the Roman Rite, and in the collection of papal biographies called the Liber Pontificalis, which tells us that Pope St Gregory II (715-31) instituted the Masses of these days. This is why even in the Missal of St Pius V, the Thursdays of Lent borrow their chant parts (the introits, graduals, offertories and communions) from other Masses; the respect for the tradition codified by St Gregory the Great was such that it was deemed better not to add new pieces to the established repertoire. (The two formerly aliturgical Saturdays simply repeat the Gregorian propers from the previous day, indicating that their Masses were added by a different Pope.)
Illustration of Dives and Lazarus in the Codex Aureus Epternacensis, a Gospel book created ca. 1030-50 at the Abbey of Echternach, one of the oldest and most important Benedictine abbeys in Europe. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)
The Gospel for today, Luke 16, 19-31, the story of Dives and Lazarus, was originally assigned in the Roman Rite to the beginning of the period after Pentecost: the Friday of the fourth week in the Wurzburg lectionary, the oldest of the Roman Rite, ca. 650 A.D., or the Second Sunday, in that of Murbach, about 100 years later. This may in part explain why the Gradual which precedes it is taken from the same period; in the Mass of St Pius V, it is sung on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
Graduale Ps. 78 Propitius esto, Domine, peccatis nostris, nequando dicant gentes: Ubi est Deus eorum? V. Adjuva nos, Deus, salutaris noster, et propter honorem nominis tui, Domine, libera nos.
Gradual Be merciful, o Lord, to our sins, lest ever the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’ V. Help us, o God, our salvation, and for the sake of the honor of Thy name, o Lord, deliver us.
The Introit and Offertory, however, are both taken from the Twelfth Sunday, on which the Gospel is that of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10, 23-37. This choice is certainly motivated by the fact that in the one Gospel, the rich man is punished for not taking care of his neighbor, and in the other, the Good Samaritan is shown to be a true neighbor for doing so. These chants therefore link two foundational texts for the uniquely Christian understanding of charity and duty towards one’s fellow man. In this context, the request to “be merciful to our sins” in the Gradual may be seen specifically in regard to our failure to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, etc., those whom Christ calls “the least of (His) brethren” in Matthew 25, 31-46, the Gospel of the first Monday of Lent, which was originally the Roman Lent’s first lesson on this subject.
The Thursday Masses instituted by Pope St Gregory are replete with interesting allusions to the other Masses within the series, and to the Masses from which their chants are taken. Here we may note that in the Gospel of Dives and Lazarus, the latter wishes to be sated from the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, “but no one gave (them) to him”, and “the dogs came and licked his sores”. In the Gospel of the previous Thursday (Matt. 15, 21-28), Christ uses similar images when speaking to the Canaanite woman, to whom He says, “It is not good to take the bread of the children, and cast it to the dogs,” to which she replies, “Yea, Lord; for the whelps also eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters.”
As the Church Fathers teach, and as was clarified in the Pelagian controversies, especially by Ss Jerome and Augustine, a Christian can only fulfill his duty with the help of the Lord, and this is a theme that permeates this Mass. The opening words of the Introit are the same which the Roman Rite, with its characteristic simplicity, places at the beginning of each Hour of the Divine Office, so called from the Latin word “officium”, which has “duty” as one of its many meanings.
Introitus, Ps. 69 Deus in adjutorium meum intende: Dómine, ad adjuvandum me festína: confundantur et revereantur inimíci mei, qui quaerunt ánimam meam. Ps. Avertantur retrorsum et erubescant: qui cógitant mihi mala. Gloria Patri. Deus in adjutorium...
Introit O God, come to my assistance; o Lord, make haste to help me; let my enemies be confounded and ashamed that seek my soul. Ps. Let them be turned back and be ashamed, who devise evils for me. Glory to the Father... O God, come to my assistance...
On the same theme, the verse of the Gradual says, “Help us, o God, our salvation...”
In the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, the majority of the Masses have two collects at the beginning, a rather mysterious feature that admits of no easy explanation. [note] The Collect of today’s Mass was originally the second collect of the preceding day, and continues the theme of the Introit, that we achieve whatever we achieve in our spiritual lives, be it in the service of our neighbor, or in the Lenten discipline by which we subdue our bodies to the service of God, only by the help of His grace.
“Grant us, we beseech Thee, o Lord, the help of Thy grace, that, being properly intent upon fasting and prayer, we may be delivered from the enemies of mind and of body.”
Likewise, the Epistle from the book of Jeremiah, 17, 5-10, contrasts those who put their trust in the Lord with those who do not.
“Thus saith the Lord: Cursed be the man that trusteth in man… Blessed be the man that trusteth in the Lord, and the Lord shall be his confidence.”
The same Epistle contrasts the dryness of the cursed man, who is “like a tamarisk (a kind of small shrub) in the desert, … he shall dwell in dryness in the desert,” with the blessed man who is “like a tree that is planted by the waters, that spreadeth out its roots towards moisture: and it shall not fear when the heat cometh.” This alludes to the end of the Gospel of Dives and Lazarus, in which the former pleads with Abraham to “send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, to cool my tongue: for I am tormented in this flame.”
Since the Gospel ends with Christ saying to the rich man, “if they will not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they believe if a man rise from the dead,” a clear allusion to Himself, the Offertory chant immediately after it presents Moses praying for the people. On Wednesday of the previous week, the first reading describes Moses’ forty days on Mt Sinai, and on Saturday and Sunday, he appears in the Gospel as a witness to the Lord’s Transfiguration. Here, as William Durandus explains, “it is shown that the prayer of a just man is efficacious, for Moses was like a sheep, because he was the meekest of men (Num. 12, 3), and is the model of fasting; and obtains propitiation for that wrath by which the Lord was wroth with the Jews about the molten calf.” It likewise refers to Abraham, who also appears in the Gospel.
Offertorium Precátus est Móyses in conspectu Dómini, Dei sui, et dixit; Quare, Dómine, irascéris in pópulo tuo? Parce irae ánimae tuae: memento Abraham, Isaac et Jacob, quibus jurasti dare terram fluentem lac et mel. Et placátus factus est Dóminus de malignitáte, quam dixit fácere pópulo suo.
Offertory Moses prayed in the sight of the Lord, his God, and said, Why, o Lord, shalt thou be wroth with Thy people? Spare the wrath of Thy soul: remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to whom Thou swore Thou wouldst give a land flowing with milk and honey. And the Lord became appeased of the evil which He said He would do to His people.
The Communion is that of the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, from the Eucharistic discourse of John 6: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him, saith the Lord.” (verse 57) It seems likely that this was chosen to encourage observance of what was originally a liturgical novelty, the celebration, and therefore also the reception, of the Eucharist on a Thursday in Lent.
[note] It would be tempting to see this extra prayer as the equivalent of the prayer in the Ambrosian Rite that closes the Mass of the catechumens called the “super sindonem – over the shroud”, which is said after the corporal has been spread on the altar by the deacon. The problem with this theory is twofold: it is never labelled as such in any Roman book, while it is always called the “oratio super sindonem” in Ambrosian books, and many of the Gelasian Masses don’t have it, while other have three collects.
Truly it is worthy and just... eternal God: Who didst exalt Thy most blessed Confessor Joseph with such great merits of his virtues, that by the wondrous gift of Thy grace, he merited to be made the Spouse of the most holy Virgin Mary, and be thought the father of Thy only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Wherefore, venerating the day of his birth unto heaven with due devotion, we ask for Thy ineffable grace, that with the help of so excellent a Patron, we may please Thee with the pure service of mind and body, and be joined everlastingly to the same Thy Son, the Spouse of our souls. Whom together with Thee, almighty Father, and the Holy Spirit, the Angels praise... (The Ambrosian Preface for the feast of St Joseph.)
The Holy Family, with Ss John the Baptist, Zachary and Elizabeth, ca. 1740, by Pompeo Batoni (1708-87); originally commissioned for the church of Ss Cosmas and Damian ‘alla Scala’ in Milan, now in the Brera Gallery. St Joseph is often shown wearing a brown robe over a garment of royal purple, to show that his royal descent from King David was hidden by his humble station in his earthly life.
Vere quia dignum et justum est... aeterne Deus. Qui tantis virtutum meritis beatissimum Confessorem tuum Joseph sublimasti; ut sanctissimae Virginis Mariae Sponsus effici admirabili tuae gratiae dono mereretur: atque unigeniti Filii tui Jesu Christi Domini nostri Pater putaretur. Quapropter natalitium ejus diem debita devotione venerantes, ineffabilem tuam gratiam postulamus; ut tam excellentis patroni suffragio, pura mentis et corporis servitute tibi placeamus; atque eidem Filio tuo, animarum nostrarum sponso, perpetuo copulemur. Quem una tecum, omnipotens Pater, et cum Spirito Sancto laudant Angeli...
Confession is a sacrament in which we confess dark deeds, shameful sins, cowardly compromises, repeated rifts. It is something we often wish more to be done with than to do; we know we must go, that it is “good for us” as a visit to the dentist’s or the doctor’s is good for us. It might seem as if the place where we fess up, red-handed, and receive the cleansing bath of the Redeemer’s Blood should be a discreet, hidden, almost unnoticed spot, somewhere over in the corner, perhaps fused into the surrounding architecture like a broom closet (indeed, some confessionals were turned into broom closets after Vatican II, though the brooms had surely done nothing to deserve an environment reserved to rational animals).
Yet the designers and builders of Catholic churches and of their furnishings operated under a very different mentality. They made confessionals beautiful works of art (sometimes even extravagant), put them in prominent places where no one could miss them, and multiplied their number, so that you couldn’t avoid seeing them.
This, at least, was the Catholic (Counter-)Reformation’s way of reaffirming what the Protestants denied: that the Lord had, in His great mercy, provided the Catholic Church with an efficacious means for blotting out post-baptismal grave sin, a “second plank after shipwreck.” Contrary to some early heretics, grave sin after baptism, even including apostasy, could be forgiven; no sin permanently barred the penitent soul from grace. Contrary to the more recent heretics, faith alone was not enough, but faith must be faith in the Blood of Christ applied to souls by the ministry of the Church, at His bidding—ultimately, so that we could be rightly humbled and utterly certain of our having been forgiven.
These are some of the thoughts I had on my mind as I explored churches in Sicily in February and started taking pictures of the lovely Baroque confessionals that nearly every church contained. I will not try to label exactly which church each one belonged to, as that is somewhat beside the point; I doubt anyone will ever make a trip to a church just to see a confessional. Rather, one can marvel at the artistic creativity employed, and the strong, silent, steady love of this sacrament that such furnishings convey.
Unveiling the middle ground where faith, philosophy, and beauty all meet in the person of Christ, image of the invisible God.
Authentic Christian art strikes a balance between abstraction and realism, rejecting the extremes of Abstract Expressionism—where meaning dissolves into unrecognizable chaos—and Photorealism, which reduces reality to soulless or meaningless matter. Rooted in a worldview shaped by faith and philosophy, the Christian artist uses partial abstraction to blend naturalistic forms with spiritual depth, revealing the soul and invisible truths of existence. This tension, distinct from modern art’s dualistic pitfalls, defines its unique purpose and beauty.
John the Baptist, by David Clayton, 21st cent.
The Limits of Abstraction and Naturalism
If a painting of a man is so abstracted that it is not recognisably what is meant to be—as is the case with Abstract Expressionism —then put simply it is a bad painting. There can be no Christian Abstract Expressionism. On the other hand, extreme naturalism, such as we see in Photorealism, is also bad art from a Christian point of view because it reflects an attitude that says there is no meaning or spiritual dimension in what we are looking at, only matter. There is no Christian Photorealism. Christian art sits between these two poles of dualism. It has traditionally aimed to reflect naturalistic appearances so that we know what we are looking at, but to stylise the image through partial abstraction to suggest to the observer the invisible aspects of what we see, such as its meaning and importance, and in the human person, the soul.
The Profound Connection Between Faith, Philosophy, and Art
A painter’s artistic choices are not made in a philosophical or theological vacuum. Rather, an artist’s ‘worldview’—his ‘personal philosophy’ or understanding of reality that combines philosophical and theological truths—profoundly shapes what he paints and how he depicts it. At a more general level, everyone possesses an underlying philosophical framework that informs his perceptions and judgments, whether he recognises it or not. This “worldview” also determines an artist’s decisions when he paints, including what he deems worthy of imitation and the specific stylistic techniques he employs to emphasise those aspects of reality that matter most to him. Therefore, a Christian artist must have a correct worldview; otherwise, he might lead people astray and misrepresent aspects of the faith through his paintings' content and style.
Lessons from Ancient Greece
Ancient Greek philosophy can help us here. Ancient Greece was a great cauldron of ideas. Indeed, there are so many ideas that it could be argued that just about any personal philosophy we encounter today was represented in some form by the ideas of at least one of those ancient Greek philosophers. Many of those ideas of ancient Greece passed into Roman civilisation, and the best of them, subsequently, into mainstream Christian thought. Of course, two Greek philosophers stood out as giants: Plato and his greatest student, Aristotle. Together, they came closest to describing the nature of man, God, and the world through natural reason alone and without the benefit of Revelation.
Plato, Aristotle, and Christian Thought
The ideas of these two philosophers have continued to be of great interest to Christians because the philosophical methods of inquiry they developed have helped Christians understand more deeply what Christ revealed to us and how it can be applied in everyday life today and in the past. Perhaps the Christian who did more than any other to integrate Christian teaching with Aristotelian and Platonic thinking and the Fathers who preceded him is St Thomas Aquinas (1215-1274 A.D.), who integrated their philosophies with the gospel.
Raphael’s School of Athens: A Visual Parable
To illustrate the continued importance of the ancient Greeks to Christian thought, consider this painting. It is called the School of Athens, and it was painted in 1511 by the Italian artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520), generally known in English as Raphael. His painting is on a wall in the Vatican Museums.
It shows many great philosophers of the ancient world. Despite the name of the painting, not all of them lived in Athens. Indeed, some are not even Greek, but collectively, they represent the tradition of philosophy that originated in Athens and lasted over 1,000 years from about 600 BC. At the centre, featured most prominently, we see these two great figures already mentioned, Plato and Aristotle. Raphael has shown Plato pointing upwards to the metaphysical world, what we might call the spiritual world, which exists beyond the material realm (which he called the world of Ideas or Forms). Plato is talking to Aristotle, who is pointing downwards to the earth to symbolise his more significant interest in the goodness and reality of the material realm of existence.
The Eternal Tension in Art
This detail of a great painting symbolises the tension in all art: that is, how do we describe the relationship between the spiritual and the material worlds, especially when painting people, between body and soul? Some people believe that the essence of human nature is what we think and feel. An artist who believes this might dispense with the portrayal of the human body and try to represent pure emotion, thought, or subconscious aspects through abstract shapes (20th-century abstract artists did this, for example). The ethos of the abstract expressionists is testable - we can present people with these paintings to a hundred people (who haven’t studied art history at university) and ask the question that only 5-year-olds dare ask…what is it? If the majority respond with the artist’s intention without being told in advance, then we can concede a point to them. However, in my experience, few, not even the critics who promote their work, seem to see what the artists hope to portray.
Jackson Pollock No. 1
Mark Rothko, Untitled
At the other extreme, some people, called ‘materialists’, believe that man is only made of matter and has no soul. An artist who is a materialist might decide to paint the man in perfect correspondence to natural appearances, as close to perfect in every visible detail as possible, but would have no interest in communicating that he possesses a soul or that a painted scene has a meaning that indicates a Creator or loving God. If executed skillfully, such a painting or sculpture would be dazzling in its lifelike detail but sterile and lifeless in appearance, like a death mask or an image created mechanically without human artifice. Photorealism is an example of the art of the materialist. For example, I invite the reader to look at the work of Ron Mueck, who sculpts in an extreme form of photorealism called Hyperrealism (it is difficult to find photos that can be reproduced here).
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Remember Thy compassion, o Lord, and Thy mercy, that are from of old; lest ever our enemies be lord over us; deliver us, o God of Israel, from all our distress. Ps. 24. To Thee, o Lord, have I lifted up my soul; o my God, I trust in Thee, let me not be put to shame. Glory be ... As it was... Remember Thy compassion... (A very nice recording of the Introit of the Second Sunday of Lent, more moderno, i.e., without ‘Gloria Patri’.)
Reminíscere miseratiónum tuárum, Dómine, et misericordiae tuae, quae a sáeculo sunt: ne umquam dominentur nobis inimíci nostri: líbera nos, Deus Israël, ex ómnibus angustiis nostris. Ps. 24 Ad te, Dómine, levávi ánimam meam: Deus meus, in te confído, non erubescam. Gloria Patri. Sicut erat. Reminíscere.
Those who follow the traditional Divine Office and Mass closely will notice in them an unusual feature this weekend. In the Mass, the same Gospel, St Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration (17, 1-9), is read both today, the Ember Saturday, and tomorrow. In the Divine Office, there are only four antiphons taken from this Gospel, where the other Sundays have six; on Sunday, the antiphons of the Benedictus and Magnificat are repeated from Saturday, and the same antiphon is said at both Prime and Terce, which happens nowhere else. At the Sunday Mass, all of the Gregorian propers except for the Tract are repeated from the Mass of Ember Wednesday.
The traditional explanation for this given by Dom Guéranger (The Liturgical Year, vol. 4. p. 183 of the 1st English ed.), the Bl. Schuster (The Sacramentary, vol. 2, p. 73 of the English ed.) and others is as follows. In many ancient liturgical books, the Masses of the Ember Saturdays are titled “duodecim lectionum – of the twelve readings” or something similar. This was understood to mean that there were originally ten readings from the Old Testament, rather than the five which we have now, plus the Epistle and Gospel. (Mario Righetti, Manuale di Storia Liturgica, vol. 3, p. 232) According to a custom attested in several ancient sources, the readings at the papal Mass were each done twice, once in Latin, and again in Greek; a form of this custom is still to this day kept from time to time. (A friend of mine who is a priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church served as the Greek deacon at two Masses celebrated by St John Paul II.)
The chanting of a Gospel in Church Slavonic at a Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Croatia in June 2011.
This would mean an effective total of twenty-four readings. These were also the traditional days for ordinations in Rome, which were held at St Peter’s Basilica. The combination of twenty-four readings and seven ordination rites within a single Mass would have made for an extraordinarily long service that lasted through the length of the night. Therefore, the Mass of the Ember Saturday effectively became the Mass of Sunday morning.
What was taken to be further confirmation of this is found in several ancient liturgical books of various kinds, in which the Second Sunday of Lent is marked with the rubric “Dominica vacat – the Sunday is empty”, i.e., had no Mass of its own. The liturgical texts for this Sunday would therefore have their current arrangement because it was only given its own Mass and Office later. According to this theory, the custom of saying the Saturday Mass with so many readings and the ordinations was specifically Roman; when other places received the Roman Rite, they did not observe this same lengthy service through the night, and having confined the Ember Saturday to Saturday itself, could not leave the Sunday without a Mass.
This would also explain why in many Uses of the Roman Rite, the Mass of the Second Sunday of Lent differs in one detail or another from that of the Missal of St Pius V. To this very day, for example, the Dominican Missal has two Tracts on this Sunday, rather than a Gradual and Tract. Many medieval liturgical books also attest to a different Gospel on the Sunday; at Sarum, that of the Canaanite woman was read (Matthew 15, 21-28), preceded by a unique Tract taken from the Gospel itself, rather than from a Psalm. (This Gospel is read in the Roman Rite on the previous Thursday.)
Folio 29r of the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD., with the rubric “Dominica vacat”, followed immediately by the words “II Domi(nica) in Quadra(gesima) – the Second Sunday in Lent.” (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 12048)
For several reasons, I believe this explanation to be incorrect on every point.
First of all, there is a strong antecedent improbability (I do not say an absolute impossibility) to the very idea of doing such a lengthy service at all under any circumstances. The median date for the Ember Saturday of Lent is March 3rd; in Rome, the sun sets on that date just after 6 p.m., and rises the next morning at 6:40 a.m. Assuming the liturgy started after None, in accordance with the well-attested ancient custom of the Church, this would make for a ceremony about 17-18 hours long. (I do not grant the absurd and unattested possibility of a liturgy designed with breaks for food, sleep, and visits to the bathroom in mind.) This is made all the more improbable by the fact that the main celebrant, the Pope, would usually be elderly, and in the days of the Church’s more serious Lenten fasting discipline, would have to do this on an empty stomach.
Secondly, there is not a single liturgical source that attests to the supposed twelve different readings on any of the Ember Saturdays. The Wurzburg lectionary, the oldest of the Roman Rite (ca. 650 AD), has four Old Testament readings in Lent and after Pentecost (without the reading from Daniel 3 that is now common to all four Ember Saturdays), plus an Epistle and a Gospel; “twelve readings” would therefore refer to the custom of doing each of these six readings twice, in Latin and in Greek. This source also has six Old Testament readings at the Ember Saturday of September, and five in Advent, indicating that there was originally some flexibility to this rite. But in every subsequent lectionary, every Mass of an Ember Saturday has five Old Testament readings, plus an Epistle and a Gospel. The term “twelve readings” would therefore have been understood to refer to the six before the Gospel, each done twice.
Furthermore, all of the ancient lectionaries, including Wurzburg, also have the two different epistles for the Ember Saturday and the following Sunday (1 Thess. 5, 14-23 on the former, chapter 4, 1-7 of the same epistle on the later), in the same order, and in the same place. If the Mass of Ember Saturday was in fact the Mass of the following Sunday, celebrated in the early hours after the ceremony had lasted through the night, what need would there be of this second epistle?
Folios 27v and 28r of the 9th century Lectionary of Alcuin, with the Epistles of the Ember Saturday and Second Sunday of Lent. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 9452)
Third, even doing all seven of the readings twice would not have made the liturgy so inordinately long that it would last through the night. The Roman Rite is almost always more succinct in its presentation and use of Scripture than any other historical Christian rite, and the Ember Saturdays are no exception to this; the longest of them in terms of the Scriptural readings is that of September, in which they amount to 51 verses, just under 900 words. Likewise (and this is a far more significant point), the ordination rituals which are attested in the oldest liturgical books of the Roman Rite are very much shorter and less complicated than the ones we know today, which began to take something more like their current (EF) form in the mid-10th century. The Ember day Masses also have no Gloria and no Creed, and were instituted before either the Offertory prayers or the Agnus Dei were added to the Mass.
Fourth, and I think most decisively, the ancient sacramentaries of the Roman Rite ALL have separate Masses for the Second Sunday of Lent. The very oldest, the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, simply titles it “the Second Sunday in Lent”, but many others include the rubric “Dominica vacat” in the title. This is noteworthy because the Old Gelasian and certain other manuscripts like the Wurzburg lectionary attest to the very ancient arrangement by which the Thursdays of Lent had no Mass at all, but these Thursdays do not have a rubric “feria quinta vacat”; there is simply nothing at all between Wednesday and Friday. Clearly, there was a distinction between a day with NO Mass and a day that “vacat”.
To this it may be objected that these manuscripts are of the Roman Rite, but are not from Rome; they were all copied out in Merovingian or Carolingian Gaul. We may therefore legitimately surmise that what they attest to on the Ember Saturdays represents an adaptation of the Roman custom, dropping the liturgy that lasts through the night. To this I answer that all these manuscripts preserve many things that are Roman, but were clearly not of any use outside of Rome, or at any rate, not useful in Gaul. For example, the Wurzburg lectionary lists all the Roman stational churches, and the Old Gelasian Sacramentary gives the text of the Creed in Greek for the day when the catechumens had to show that they had learned it. In the absence of any source attesting the custom of twelve separate readings, and any source that specifically states that the liturgy was done over the night and into the morning, we have no reason to believe that these Gallic manuscripts have in fact changed the Roman custom in this regard. Quite the contrary, the general tendency in the history of the liturgy is the opposite; places which receive a liturgical tradition from somewhere else tend to be MORE conservative in maintaining its oldest forms, while it continues to evolve in its place of origin.
What, then, did the rubric “Dominica vacat” actually mean? It seems clear that originally, it must have simply meant a day without a Lenten station. Although the Mass of Ember Saturday was not as monstrously long as proposed by the scenario given above, it was still, of course, lengthy, and likely very taxing to the elderly celebrant, who would have had to travel with his court across the city from the ancient papal residence at the Lateran to get to the Ember Saturday station at St Peter’s Basilica, and then back. The Popes therefore gave themselves a well-deserved day of rest by staying home on the Second Sunday of Lent, before resuming the regular observance of the stations on the following afternoon.
A modern drawing of the old St Peter’s Basilica.
We know from certain features of the ancient liturgical books that there was not an absolute uniformity of practice even within Rome itself, and it can also hardly be supposed that every person in Rome would attend the Papal Mass at St Peter’s. Therefore, the parishes would have had their own separate Masses on Sunday morning, and this would explain why the Gospel (but again, not the Epistle) was repeated from the previous day. The people who attended Mass in the parishes on the Sunday would thus hear the important story of the Transfiguration, which did not get its own feast day until the 15th century, and was read nowhere else in the liturgy.
This would also explain the discrepancies between the Gregorian propers of the Mass of the Second Sunday as it appears in various Uses of the Roman Rite. In Rome, the cantors would know their own tradition well enough to know which Mass they sang on the day with no propers of its own. When people outside of Rome received their copies of the Roman liturgical books, the Second Sunday of Lent was marked as “Dominica vacat”, so they filled in the gaps in their chant book and lectionary as they saw fit. But even here, the variation is limited to a very narrow range; already by the 10th century, it had become the established custom to repeat the Mass of the previous Ember Wednesday.
If the repetition of the Gospel of the Transfiguration was instituted in Rome for the benefit of those who had not been present at the previous day’s station, it seems likely that the custom of repeating the chants of Ember Wednesday on the Second Sunday of Lent also originated in Rome. The two Masses are connected by the fact that the two Epistles of that Wednesday are about the forty day fasts of Moses and Elijah respectively, who appear in the Gospel of the Sunday as witnesses to the Transfiguration. This custom also does not fit at all with the idea that the Mass of Ember Saturday was said on Sunday morning; if this had ever been the case, one would reasonably expect that the Mass chants of the Saturday would be used on the Sunday.
Finally, in regards to the Divine Office, the oldest Roman Office antiphonary does in fact have on Ember Saturday six antiphons taken from the Gospel of the Transfiguration, three of which are repeated on Sunday. The current arrangement by which two of these have dropped out of use appears to be an historical accident of no significance.
In the Byzantine Rite, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated on the weekdays of Lent, but only on Saturdays and Sundays; an exception is made for the feast of the Annunciation. Therefore, at the Divine Liturgy on Sundays, extra loaves of bread are consecrated, and reserved for the rest of the week. On Wednesdays and Fridays, a service known as the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is held, in which Vespers is mixed with a Communion Rite. (It is also held on the first three days of Holy Week, and may be done on other occasions, but twice a week is the standard practice.)
The first part of this ceremony follows the regular order of Vespers fairly closely, and the second part imitates the Great Entrance and the Communion rite of the Divine Liturgy. After the opening Psalm (103) and the Litany of Peace, the Gradual Psalms are chanted by a reader in three blocks, while a portion of the Presanctified Gifts is removed from the tabernacle, incensed, and carried from the altar to the table of the preparation. This is followed by a general incensation of the church, as the hymns of the day are sung with the daily Psalms of Vespers (140, 141, 129 and 116), the entrance procession with the thurible, and the hymn Phos Hilaron. Two readings are given from the Old Testament (Genesis and Proverbs in Lent, Exodus and Job in Holy Week), after which, the priest stands in front of the altar and incenses it continually, while the choir sings verses of Psalm 140, with the refrain “Let my prayer rise before Thee like incense, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” (The first part of this refrain is also NLM’s motto.)
Here is a very nice version in Church Slavonic, a modern composition by Fr Ruslan Hrekh, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, sung by clergy of the eparchy of Lviv.
And a Greek version sung by monks of the Simonos Petra monastery on Mt Athos.
Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)
The Answer: As I suspected would be the case, this proved to be a stumper. This vestment is a kind of stole which is used in the cathedral of Milan, but not at the Mass. On the weekdays of Lent and Holy Week, there is a service after Terce, which consists of two readings from the Old Testament with a responsory after the first, and a prayer borrowed from the Rogation days after the second. The readings are done by deacons who don this long white fascia in the manner shown above, over the rochet, and then put the dalmatic on over it, whereas at the Mass, the deacon places the stole outside the dalmatic.
Originally, the deacons did not wear a dalmatic for this service, but a vestment which the ancient ordines of the Ambrosian Rite call an “alba rubea”, which little means a “red alb”. It has long since fallen out of use, and no pictures of one exist, but one may guess from the name that it was shaped like an alb, but red instead of white. The information in this post was provided, of course, by our expert in all things Ambrosian, Nicola de’ Grandi.
Congratulations to Fr Mateusz Kania, a priest of the diocese of Warsaw, who got this almost right, mentioning that it was used in Holy Week. (Father left his comment on Peter K’s Facebook page.) The Best Wildly Incorrect Answer goes to Mark for guessing that it is some kind of rationale, a vestment which is worn only by the bishops of four dioceses in the world. Special mention to a few people who guessed it was a Byzantine subdeacon’s stole, which it does indeed resemble, even though I specifically gave the hint that it was not from an Eastern Rite. The Best Humorous Answer goes to Mark Ingoglio, for his idea that it is a harness by which misbehaving clerics can be yanked out of the sanctuary with a rope - not a terrible idea, really...
Like the vestment, the readings at this service after Terce, which are done as part of the preparation rites of the catechumens for their baptism at Easter, are a very old part of the Ambrosian Rite. They were inherited from the ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, and are still preserved in other rites as well. In Lent, the first is taken from Genesis, and the second from Proverbs; in the same period, readings from these books are done at Vespers in the Byzantine Rite, while the Mozarabic Divine Office has readings from both of these books in the first two weeks of Lent. In Holy Week, the Ambrosian Rite has readings from Job and Tobias in their place, where the Byzantine Rite has Exodus and Job. Here is the rubric which mentions this service in the Ambrosian breviary.
And the special tones in which the readings were sung.
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