World War I Army Mass Kit

Many readers will be familiar with the site Sancrucensis, where they will find the learned lucubrations and edifying epigrams of Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., not to mention a fair share of uplifting photographs of the yearly round of monastic life at the thriving Heiligenkreuz Abbey.

Recently Pater Edmund shared with me the exciting news that he had received the gift of a portable Mass kit that once belonged to a World War I chaplain, which an antique store in Oberösterreich had put up for sale.[1] It features a built-in altar stone and altar cards that fold out, and in the compartments inside there are not only chalice and linens, etc., but even four chasubles in different colors (!). The chalice seems to have been made in Fulda, while the Missal is from Regensburg. The whole set-up is typical of kits in the World War I era.

Pater Edmund asked that I share these pictures at NLM. I must say, it is both a pleasure and a challenge to do so. A pleasure, for obvious reasons; how could a more complete and better portable kit ever be devised? A challenge, because this war-time worst, this compact gear meant to be carried through mud and bullets, is more complete and more appropriate than what one might find in many peace-time sacristies today!

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A Tour of the Bernardikapelle in Vienna

In my recent visit to Vienna for a liturgical study day sponsored by Una Voce Austria, I spent a morning walking around the center of the city with an old friend, Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., whose name will be known to some from his blog Sancrucensis. At a certain point, Pater Edmund mentioned that Heiligenkreuz Abbey owns a large building in the center of Vienna that it now rents out as a series of apartments to support the monastery. He said it housed a beautiful little chapel in honor of St. Bernard and asked if I'd like to see it. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued, and we made our way to it: the Bernardikapelle in the Heiligenkreuzerhof. The chapel is in the care of a monk who celebrates Mass there from time to time.

Although I am not generally a huge fan of southern German and Austrian Baroque, I found this intimate Baroque chapel quite a lovely, harmonious space, with a number of interesting features. The high altar has been preserved and is still used for both forms of the Roman Rite (always in Latin):

The ceiling is decorated with typical Baroque exuberance:

There is a little balcony at the back of the chapel that opens on to the abbot's private Viennese apartment. Business or politics would bring the abbot to Vienna, and he needed a place to stay. What could be better than to be able to pray his office looking upon the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel below?

The main altar was draped for Passiontide. Over the altar is a painting of the famous scene where St. Bernard mystically received milk from the Virgin Mary. Pater Edmund told me that a later generation found the literal representation too distracting and painted over the stream of milk and the uncovered breast:

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The Art of the Book in the Third Millennium: Heiligenkreuz Choir Books

Last May while visiting a dear friend, Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., a monk of the Abbey of Heiligenkreuz in Lower Austria and maintainer of the ever-thoughtful blog Sancrucensis, I had the opportunity to see certain parts of the monastery that I had never seen (or seen up close) before. Among the stages of our tour were the immensely beautiful wooden choir stalls where the monks chant the daily Divine Office, to which they are very devoted.

But it was not so much the woodwork that caught my attention as it was certain over-sized wood-covered leatherbound volumes set up between every other stall.

As a cantor and schola director, these naturally engaged my curiosity and I asked Pater Edmund to tell me about them. Seeing my great interest, he not only obliged me at the moment, but sent notes and photos to be shared with the readers of NLM who might be interested in this fine example of contemporary book-making on a scale rarely seen. What follows is Pater Edmund’s account of the genesis of this project.

Heiligenkreuz Choir Books

Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

In the 1970s Heiligenkreuz put together an edition of the Divine Office that was meant to adopt some of the reforms of the new Roman Office, while preserving many traditional monastic elements. It was decided to adopt a two-week Psalter developed by Fr. Guido Gilbert-Tarruel, O.Cist., which sought to preserve many features of the division of the Psalms given by St. Benedict in the Rule. (Fr. Gilbert-Tarruel’s division, included in the latest edition of the Cistercian Ritual as one among many options for Cistercian monasteries, is reproduced below.) At the time, it was hoped that other Cistercian monasteries would adopt our breviary, but today Heiligenkreuz is the only monastery that uses it, as well as the only monastery that uses this particular Psalm-division. It could be said, therefore, to constitute a sort of local usage, the “Heiligenkreuz Office.”

In the 1970s, hand-size editions of the breviary, hymnarium, antiphonarium, and psalter were printed. Inevitably, the wear and tear on the books, together with the desire for something more permanent and more worthy of the splendor of the liturgy, motivated the monastery to take a decisive step. In the early years of the millennium, work began on the large choir edition of the Psalter. For the new edition, everything was newly typeset by one of the monks, including all the music (this took him several years).

The choir Psalter is printed on thick Italian paper, usually used for reproducing art prints (size: DIN A3). It was bound by the monks in our own book-binding shop. The covers are made of wood harvested from the abbey’s own forests in the vicinity. The tabs are made of goat leather, and were cut and printed by one of the monks. The pictures are reproductions of pencil drawings by Michael Fuchs, drawn especially for this Psalter.

The monks have been using these magnificent books for close to ten years. The books are durable, easy to read, and beautiful. One may hope someday for a widespread revival of the art of the book, which, despite or perhaps because of its extremely ancient techniques, has much to recommend it in our high-tech world. As a Navajo Indian says to the elderly Bishop Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop: “Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

Pater Edmund on Mass Facing the People and Political Ideology

Some readers of NLM will already be familiar with the blog "Sancrucensis," written by Pater Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk of the Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, not far from Vienna. Pater Edmund often blogs about political philosophy and the arts. In a recent post he makes some fascinating observations concerning the liturgy. I have reproduced some paragraphs of the article below; be sure to visit his website for the full text.

POLITICS AND THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

... I don’t deny that there are some continuities between the pre-1947 Liturgical Movement and mainstream liturgical thought in the 1960s and 70s, but when I read pre-’47 liturgical theology now, I am far more struck by how different it is from what followed. I claim that this discontinuity is partly a reflection of changing political ideology, and that it is present even in apparently unchanging liturgical projects. I want to show this with the example of celebration versus populum.
          Both the pre-’47 Liturgical movement (or at least many influential figures in it) and the post-conciliar liturgical establishment (obviously) were for versus populum, but for very different reasons. The pre-’47 promotion of versus populum had to do with an anti-individualist, anti-subjectivist, reactionary politics that fit with the authoritarian and totalitarian political movements of the times; the post-conciliar promotion of the same liturgical posture was on the contrary tied to an anti-authoritarian, egalitarian ideology that reflected the egalitarian/fraternalist movements of the 1960s.
          Charles De Koninck's masterpiece On the Primacy of the Common Good provides a key for understanding what was going on. De Koninck shows that there are two opposite errors concerning the common good. The first is the individualist error (which he somewhat misleadingly calls “personalist”). This is the error of considering every common good as merely a useful good, a means to realizing purely private goods. The second error is the totalitarian error of considering the common good to be the good of a reified totality (“the nation,” “the classless society” etc.), to which individuals are entirely subordinated. The true position, which De Koninck unfolds with unrivaled brilliance, is that the common good is more truly the good of the person than any merely private good, so that the necessary and just subordination of the individual to the common good is not the alienation of the individual to someone else’s good. Now each of the two errors about the common good tends to produce a reaction toward the opposite error, and this is the key to understanding the Liturgical Movement.
          The original Liturgical Movement was (in part) a reaction against an overly subjectivist, individualistic piety that its proponents saw as being prevalent in late 19th century bourgeois society. ... In this context versus populum celebration had the purpose of letting the congregation see the objective liturgical action so that they would not be shut up in their own private devotions, but rather absorbed into the action of the Mystical Body, considered as a kind of giant individual.
          After the Second World War, however, people were understandably rather disillusioned with authoritarian and totalitarian ideas. It took a while for the reaction to set in with full force, but in by the 1960s egalitarianism was everywhere on the rise. It was in this climate that the liturgical reforms were carried out, and while liturgists continued to press for versus populum (without any mandate from Vatican II of course), the reasons had changed. Now versus populum took on an egalitarian, horizontalist, anti-hierarchical, almost anti-supernatural sense. The Wir sind Kirche [We Are Church] ideal of a happy brotherhood gathered around the table.

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