St John Henry Newman to be Declared a Doctor of the Church

Less than an hour ago, the news was published on the Bolletino Vaticano that St John Henry Newman will be formally recognized as a Doctor of the Church. “On July 31, 2025, the Holy Father Leo XIV received in audience His Most Reverend Eminence Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints, in the course of which, the Holy Father confirmed the affirmative judgment of the Plenary Session of Cardinals and Bishops, the members of said dicastery, concerning the title of Doctor of the Universal Church, which will soon be conferred on St John Henry Newman, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, founder of the Oratory of St Philip Neri in England; born in London (UK), on February 21, 1801, died at Edgbaston (UK), on August 11, 1890.”

The famous portrait of Cardinal Newman made in 1881 by Sir John Everett Millais. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

With this decree, St John Henry becomes the 38th Doctor of the Church, the first Oratorian to be granted the title, the second Englishman, after the Venerable Bede, and the third cardinal, after Ss Bonaventure and Robert Bellarmine. (St Anselm, the eleventh Doctor, is often called “of Canterbury” because of the episcopal see he held, but he was Italian by birth, from the northern region of the Val d’Aosta.) He is also the first Doctor of the Church who converted from Protestantism.

The late and greatly lamented Fr Hunwicke repeatedly stated his belief that this honor would be conferred, and almost four years ago, on the new Doctor’s feast day (October 9th), he prophetically guessed at the name of the Pope who would confer it, and wrote,  “S John Henry had to wait for the election of Papa Pecci (i.e. Leo XIII) before he received proper honours (i.e. the cardinalate). May we hope for a Leo XIV? Subito!” Of course, this has been in process for a while, but nevertheless, I cannot think of any occasion on which a Pope declared a Doctor so early in his pontificate, so subito it has been indeed - feliciter!

Fr John Hunwicke, RIP

I am very saddened to report (via the Facebook page of the Oxford Oratory) that the great Fr John Hunwicke died on Tuesday, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. As many of our readers know, he was a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham; his blog, Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment, has long been an incomparably valuable repository of wisdom, wit and erudition, and we have very often highlighted his articles here on NLM over the years. Many of his posts have been devoted to the defense of the authentic liturgical tradition of the Roman Rite, and the exposure of the scholarly impostures that underpinned its would-be replacement. This series which touched on the historical question of the epiclesis was a particularly fine achievement, one among many:

https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2015/04/reforming-canon-of-mass-some.html

Fr Hunwicke and I corresponded a few times; he was very generous in allowing us to reproduce what he had written, and in his gratitude for some assistance I was able to provide him on some points of liturgical history. He is survived by his wife, children and grandchildren; let us pray for their consolation, and, of course, for his eternal repose.

Deus, qui inter apostolicos sacerdotes famulum tuum Joannem sacerdotali fecisti dignitate vigere: praesta quaesumus: ut eorum quoque perpetuo aggregetur consortio. Per Christum, Dominum nostrum. Amen.

God, who among the apostolic priests made Thy servant John to flourish with priestly dignity: grant, we beseech Thee: that he may also be joined unto their perpetual society. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Please Pray for Fr Hunwicke

I just noticed the following on Fr Z’s blog: “Father Hunwicke has been told that his suspicious heart requires a ‘procedure’, which is due to happen this Wednesday. He would be grateful for everybody’s prayers. Because he has been in hospital for the last eight days, he has been unable to read Comments, or to moderate them. But a new post, he trusts, is still popping up on his blog daily, because he has drafted quite a number in advance. I am told that Father H is in good spirits.” Fr Z adds this prayer from the Mass for the Sick:

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, salus aeterna credentium: exaudi nos pro famulo tuo, pro quo misericordiae tuae imploramus auxilium; ut, reddita sibi sanitate, gratiarum tibi in Ecclesia tua referat actiones. Per Dominum...
Almighty ever-lasting God, eternal salvation of believers: graciously hear us as we beg the help of Thy mercy for your ailing servant; so that, once health has been restored to him, he may give Thee thanks in Thy Church. Through Our Lord...

As I am sure all our readers already know, Fr Hunwicke is a superb and superbly erudite writer, always worth reading no matter the topic of the day. In the liturgical field, he has done yeoman’s work in exposing some of the common falsehoods that have long plagued the field of liturgical scholarship. To name just a few of the topics he has tackled ad rem: the misuse of the legacy of St Pius V’s liturgical reform; the proper understanding of the diaconal ministry; on the reform of the Canon: on the false premises of modern Biblical scholarship. May the Lord preserve him in this service for many years to come!

East-West Disagreements about the Epiclesis and Transubstantiation

Back in February, Hieromonk Enoch published an article entitled “Pre-Schism West Against the Scholastic View of Eucharistic Consecration.” The author weaves together a fabric of half-digested quotations from Western and Eastern authors to argue his claim that it was not the words of institution (Hoc est enim Corpus meum, Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei, etc.) but the Supplices te rogamus prayer that was seen by “pre-Schism” Latins as the prayer that effected the mystery of transubstantiation.

It is certainly true that the Eucharistic Prayer was understood in a more holistic sense by our predecessors who were not yet in the grips of what can be called “neoscholastic reductionism,” but it is certainly going too far to claim that granting a special status to the words of Christ spoken over the elements was a medieval scholastic development.

Ludwig Ott’s ever helpful Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (I shall be referring to the revised edition from Baronius Press, with a corrected translation newly typeset) qualifies the following proposition as sententia certa: “The form of the Eucharist consists in Christ’s Words of institution, uttered at the Consecration” (416). He continues:

While the Greek-Orthodox Church wrongly placed the power of change either in the Epiclesis alone, following after the narrative of the institution, or in the connection of the words of institution with the Epiclesis (Confessio orth. I 107), the Catholic Church adheres firmly to the view that the priest consummates the transubstantiation solely by the uttering of the words of institution.

Ott then cites the Decretum pro Armenis of Florence and the parallel passage of Trent, and makes an argument from the Gospel narrative. He then cites testimonies from Tertullian (“He took bread…and made it into His Body, by speaking: ‘This is my Body,’” Adv. Marc. IV 40), St. Ambrose (“The words of Christ bring about this Sacrament,” De sacr. IV 4,14), and St. John Chrysostom (“The priest stands there and sets up the outward sign, while speaking these words; but the power and the grace are of God. ‘This is my body,’ he says. These words transmute the gifts,” De proditione Judae, Hom. I 6). Implicit testimonies are cited from St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and Origen; St. John Damascene metnions both the words of institution and the Epiclesis (De fide orth. IV 13).

So, then, what are we to make of the Epiclesis? I find the next bit in Ott especially interesting:

In agreement with Cardinal Bessarion, the words of the Epiclesis are to be taken as referring to the time to which they are related, and not to the time at which they are spoken. That which happens in one single moment in the consecration is liturgically developed and explained in the subsequent words of the Epiclesis. It has only a declaratory, and no consecratory, significance. The view of H. Schell that the Greeks consecrate by the Epiclesis alone, and the Latins by the words of institution alone, must be rejected, since the substance of the Sacraments is not within the disposition of the Church. DH 3556. (417)

Cardinal Basilios Bessarion (1403-1472)

An enlightening discussion of this issue is found in Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s grand commentary on the Summa theologiae, much of which, sadly, has never been translated. For my students in Gaming, Austria, some time ago I produced a translation (available here) of interesting passages in De Eucharistia et Poenitentia. On Tertia Pars, question 78, we find this commentary:

It is clear that the questions that have arisen between Catholics and schismatics concerning the form of consecration and the epiclesis may only now be treated, the questions of the Real Presence and of transubstantiation being presupposed.
       To begin with, we have before our eyes definitions of the Church. The Church has declared that the form of this sacrament are the words of Christ, not the epiclesis (the subsequent prayer, as the Greeks call it). Cf. Denz. 414, 698, 715, 876, 938, 3043, 3035. [1] The Council of Florence (D. 698) says: “The form of this sacrament are the Savior’s words, with which he confected this sacrament; the priest then speaking in persona Christi, confects this sacrament. For by the power of those words the substance of bread is converted into the body of Christ, and the substance of wine into His blood.” ... The Council of Trent (D. 876) says: “By the force of the words [of consecration], the body of Christ is under the appearance of bread and the blood under the appearance of wine.” [See also D. 938 and 949.]
       Innocent IV, in the year 1254, concerning the Greek rite, declares: “The Greeks should be permitted to celebrate Masses at the hour which is according to their own custom, provided that they observe, in the confection or consecration, the very words expressed and handed down by the Lord” (D. 3043). In fact, Pius X, in the year 1910 (D. 3035), condemning doctrine recently defended, declares against certain errors of the Orientals: [in brief, consecration is effected by the words of consecration, not by the epiclesis, which is not strictly necessary]. Denziger notes here that many earlier popes have declared that the epiclesis is not required for consecration, namely Benedict XII (D. 532), Clement VI, Benedict XIII, Benedict XIV and Pius VII.
       From the fourteenth century on, schismatic Greeks say that the Eucharist is confected by the prayers which are poured out after the words “This is my body, This is my blood” have been pronounced, according to their liturgical prayers as follows: “We beseech you, Father, that you send Your spirit over us and over these gifts set before us, and make this bread the precious body of your Son and that which is in the chalice the precious blood of your Son.” To say that this prayer is necessary for consecration is to affirm that the Masses celebrated in the Roman Church are invalid and is, moreover, contrary to the declaration of the Council of Florence (D. 698 and 715). The chief proponents of this error were Cabasilas, Mark of Ephesus, and Simeon of Thessalonica, who were refuted by Cardinal Bessarion in his work De Eucharistia, as well as by Allatius and Arcudius. (Cf. Dict. Théol. Cath., s. v. «Epiclèse», P. Salaville.)

Then Garrigou-Lagrange proceeds to give an account of the liturgical meaning of the epiclesis:

There is a twofold explanation of the meaning of the epiclesis after the words of consecration.
       (1) One explanation is: When it is read after the consecration, as it now is [in the Greek rite], the epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit, not to effect transubstantiation, which is already accomplished, that is, not so that the bread become the body of Christ, but that it may become this for us, namely, that it may profit the priest and the faithful, especially those who are going to receive communion. In this way speak Vasquez, Bellarmine, Suárez, de Lugo, Billuart, and among the recent authors, Billot. But this explanation does not seem literal enough [i.e., it doesn’t account for the seemingly obvious meaning of the prayer].
       (2) The second explanation, which is more common, was proposed by Cardinal Bessarion. The epiclesis invokes the Holy Spirit exactly inasmuch as the consecration, being a work ad extra, is common to the three divine Persons, and accordingly the Holy Spirit is invoked, so that, with the Father and the Son already having been invoked, He Himself [in unity with them] may bring about transubstantiation. Indeed, this transubstantiation is accomplished in an instant, by the words of consecration already pronounced; but because, by our human speech, all these things cannot be expressed in one and the same instant, “things which are completed in an instant are declared one after another.” In this way speak Bessarion, Bossuet, Ferraris, Cagin, Franzelin, Salaville.

Later, Garrigou notes that a similar principle is at work in the narrative of the Last Supper, where Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and speaks the words: “narration is successive and announces words after facts, when really the words spoken are simultaneous with the facts.” [2]

These two theories, in spite of their superficial disagreement, help us to understand the “moment of consecration” in a non-reductionist sense. Even if there must be a moment after which the real Body or Blood of Our Lord is present and thus deserving of the worship of latreia, as we can extrapolate from the behavior of clergy in every traditional Eucharistic rite [3], nevertheless beings like ourselves, who live, think, and speak in time, must pray in such a way that our anaphoras (and our liturgies as a whole) draw out, step by step as it were, the meaning of mysteries that occur timelessly.

The reason why this kind of temporal disjunction happens is not hard to see. We humans can only speak of an instantaneous coming-to-be in language of change and therefore of measurable duration (consider all the troubles theologians have had to face when speaking of “creation ex nihilo”). Thus, every orthodox Christian liturgy speaks at length of the conversion of the gifts—it calls down the Spirit, recalls or repeats the institution, offers up the gifts to the heavenly Father, and so on (in different sequences for different rites)—but really, these things are occurring simultaneously. This we cannot express with our time-bound language.

This explains why traditional rites grow, over time, in their textual witness to the substance of what is happening: they grow in doctrinal precision, spiritual amplitude, poetic grandeur, and ascetical demands. It would be unworthy of the magnitude of the moment of consecration to treat it cheaply and to think that, having said “the magic words,” we’re pretty close to being done with what we have come to do. The attitude of a true believer is quite the opposite: so great is this moment that it must be surrounded by wall after wall of language, silence, chant, incense, gesture; it must be placed like a mighty jewel in the most exquisite setting; it must be approached by many steps, and these not always audaciously forward-moving, but sometimes circular, hesitant, reiterative.

Thus, so far from supporting a reductionist view of consecration, the position summarized by Garrigou-Lagrange works against it, and in favor of the fullness of expression one finds in the Greek tradition as well as in the undeformed Latin tradition.


NOTES

[1] These are not the most up-to-date Denzinger numbers; they would reflect the edition nearest 1948.

[2] We need not linger here over the issue of whether or not the traditional Roman Rite has or ever had an epiclesis, and whether its absence is anything of a defect. The debate has gone back and forth for a long time. Readers today are likely to encounter it in two authors: Martin Mosebach and Fr. John Hunwicke. Mosebach claims that the Veni Sanctificator of the Offertory is an epiclesis. Hunwicke, having noted that the Roman Canon predates the Macedonian controversy through which the epiclesis entered the Greek liturgy, argues that the Roman Canon rests on a theology of the Father’s omnipotent good pleasure sufficient to account for the transformation of the gifts when He is asked to do so in the Name of His beloved Son (see here for an NLM round-up).

[3] I defend this position in my article “On ‘Pinpointing’ Consecration: A Letter for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.” I also defended this position in the hardest possible case, namely, for an anaphora that seems to lack the words of institution. See my article “Doing and Speaking in the Person of Christ: Eucharistic Form in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari,” Nova et Vetera 4 (2006): 313–79. Br. Ansgar Santogrossi has subjected my arguments to a welcome critique; some portions of this may be found here and here. I am not particularly wedded to a defense of this anaphora. My stated goal was simply to see if any way could be found, on the basis of principles of Thomistic sacramental theology, to explain how transubstantiation might be efficaciously signified and recognized without the words of institution.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website, SoundCloud page, and YouTube channel.

Fifty Days of Easter?

I recently had occasion to cite an article by Fr Hunwicke from about four years ago, in which he explains the rationale for many of the changes made to the liturgical texts of the Easter season. “The post-Conciliar reforms made much of Easter being 50 days long and being one single Great Day of Feast. … I wonder just how securely founded in both the Bible and the patristic traditions, of West as well as East, this newly minted view of Eastertide is.” Here I propose to give at least a partial answer, but a short answer would be “Not very.”

“Pentecoste” is the feminine singular of the Greek adjective “fiftieth”, the noun “hemera – day” being understood; it is one of several terms which the Western Church used from very early on in their Greek form (like “diaconus”), without translating it, and it would always have sounded like a foreign word to Latin speakers. The Latin Fathers therefore often explain that the feast is called “Pentecost” because it occurs on the fiftieth day after Easter.

There are also two customs which they solidly agree should not be observed in the whole period from Easter to Pentecost, namely, fasting and kneeling. Just to give two among many possible examples: in his book “On Prayer” (chapter 23), Tertullian writes that “We (Christians)… just as we have received, only on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection ought to guard not only against kneeling, but every posture and office of solicitude (or ‘anxiety’); … and likewise, in the period of Pentecost, which we distinguish by the same solemnity of exultation.” In one of his epistles, St Jerome writes “I do not say that I think one ought to fast on feast days, or that I remove the weekdays covered by the fifty days (i.e., remove them from the number of days without fasting – Ep. 71 ad Lucinium, cap. 6).

Immediately after this, however, Jerome writes “Each province may follow its own inclinations, and the traditions which have been handed down should be regarded as apostolic laws”; this clearly implies an awareness of other customs. The passage from Tertullian is specifically about kneeling; it is too much to generalize from it that the fifty days of Easter were celebrated the same way in every other respect. In any case, we know far too little about the liturgy in the Patristic era to speculate about other customs that may have been common to the whole Paschal season.

St Ambrose gives a brief but far more explicit statement of this idea. “Our elders handed down (tradidere) to us that all fifty days of Pentecost are to be celebrated as days of Easter.” (Exposition of the Gospel of St Luke, 8.25) In this he is followed by St Maximus of Turin, who writes “Your holiness [1] must know, brethren, in what manner we take care (to celebrate) this holy day of Pentecost, and why it is for us a perpetual and continued festivity for the number of these fifty days…” (Homily 61, first on Pentecost.) Maximus’ expression “continuata festivitas” seems to be a popular one to cite in modern scholarly literature.

However, both of them immediately state that the principal manifestation of this is that the Church does not fast between Easter and Pentecost. Ambrose concludes the paragraph by saying “Therefore, for these fifty days the Church knows no fast, as on the Sunday when the Lord rose, and all the days are like Sunday”, at which point he is finished with the topic. Maximus concludes the sentence given above as follows: “so that in the whole season we do not proclaim the observance of any fast, nor do we fall on our knees to pray the Lord….”

Whatever the thoughts of the Church Fathers on the subject, the Roman liturgy historically always articulated a clear difference between Easter with its octave and the rest of the Paschal season. The oldest liturgical books of the Roman Rite agree in calling the period after Low Sunday either “after Easter” or “after the octave of Easter”. Fr Hunwicke rightly notes that they also use the term “clausum Paschae – the close of Easter”, albeit inconsistently, and some of the Sundays of the season are denoted in the Gelasian Sacramentary as “post clausum Paschae” rather than “post octavas Paschae.” Even though Easter night sees the return of Alleluia to the liturgy after nine weeks, the Masses of Easter and its octave retain the use of the Gradual after the Epistle; only on the Saturday of the octave is it replaced by an Alleluia, which continues through the rest of the Paschal season.

The prayers of that same day, and of the next, Low Sunday, which come into the Missal of St Pius V from the tradition of the Gregorian Sacramentary, also clearly refer to the idea that Easter itself is in some sense over. That of Saturday reads “Grant, we ask, Almighty God, that we who have kept (egimus) worshipfully the feasts of Easter, may merit through them to come to eternal joys.”, and that of Low Sunday, “Grant, we ask, almighty God, that we who have completed (or ‘passed through – peregimus’) the Paschal feasts, may, by Thy bounty, keep them in our manners and our life.”

It is true that neither of these collects is found on these days in the older Gelasian Sacramentary. However, those of the five Sundays that follow, none of which makes any reference to Easter, are attested in both the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries in the same order in which we find them in the Missal of St Pius V. As Fr Hunwicke also notes, in order to create a fifty day “continual festivity” in the new rite, all of them had to be changed. That of Low Sunday is moved to the last day before Pentecost, and those of the remaining Sundays are moved to “ordinary time.” The Gregorian prayer for Low Saturday is replaced by a bowdlerized version of the Gelasian one, which makes no reference to Easter being complete. Likewise, the Sundays “after Easter” have been renamed “of Easter”, and like Easter itself, cannot be impeded by any feast.

What makes the forcing of this conceit into the Roman Rite so odd is not merely that so many ancient texts were displaced in order to make the liturgy conform to it. The same Fathers and the same ancient liturgical books, and indeed the entire liturgical tradition of historical Christianity, agree far more strongly and consistently that Pentecost itself is a baptismal feast. In the course of researching this, I found several articles in Italian that cite two words from Tertullian’s On Baptism (chapter 19), “laetissimum spatium – a most joyous period”, in support of the idea that he regarded the whole Paschal season as one great feast. [2] The full sentence, however, is this: “After (Easter), Pentecost is a most joyous period for conferring baptisms; in which also the Lord’s resurrection was repeatedly proved among the disciples, and the grace of the Holy Spirit prepared, the hope of the Lord’s coming indirectly pointed to, since, when He had been received back into the heavens, the Angels told the apostles that He would come, just He had ascended into the heavens; at Pentecost, of course.”

The same is said explicitly by Pope St Siricius (384-399) in a letter to bishop Himerius of Tarragon (Ep. ad Himerium cap. 2 : PL XIII, 1131B-1148A); Pope St Leo I (440-461) also asserts that this was the practice of the Church in a letter to the bishops of Sicily, exhorting them to follow the example of the Apostle Peter, who baptized three thousand persons on Pentecost day. (Epist. XVI ad universos episcopos per Siciliam constitutos: PL LIV, 695B-704A) The so-called Leonine Sacramentary, which predates even the Gelasian, contains a series of prayers “on Pentecost, for those coming up from the font.” In the Gelasian itself, the vigil of Pentecost begins with the rubric “On the vigil of Pentecost, you will celebrate baptism as on the holy night of Easter”, followed by the imposition of hands and exorcism of the catechumens, etc.

Despite the antiquity and universality of this custom, the baptismal character of Pentecost, which has a far better pedigree than the “fifty days” of Easter, was partly expunged by the Holy Week reform of Pius XII, and completely expunged in the post-Conciliar reform.

[1] In their sermons, the Fathers often address the congregation as “Your (plural) Holiness”, “Your charity” etc.
[2] Tertullian’s Latin is generally quite difficult and idiosyncratic, but it would appear that the correct reading is rather “latissimum spatium – a most broad period.”

“Irreversible” Round-Up

For a variety of reasons, I thought it best to wait a while before saying anything about the now famous (or infamous) “irreversible” speech which the Holy Father recently gave to the participants in the 68th Italian National Liturgical Week. A number of good articles have come out in the week following its publication.

- Canonist Dr Edward Peters, on his blog In the Light of the Law, addresses the proper object of the magisterial authority which the Pope invoked in declaring that the post-Conciliar liturgical reform is “irreversible.” The sum of it is “… I think it can be confusing to the faithful for any prelate to ‘affirm with certainty’ and/or with ‘magisterial authority’ that liturgical reform is ‘irreversible’ precisely because such language connotes in Catholic minds the exercise of a charism given not to underscore the importance of what is being asserted, but rather, to identify certainly and without error either what is divinely revealed and thus to be believed or what is required to safeguard reverently the deposit of faith and thus to be definitely held.”

- Fr Zuhlsdorf begins his very useful commentary by stating “Given what I have seen and heard in Italy, my mind reels in dread at the very notion of a room full of Italian liturgists.” This is a completely reasonable reaction; the state of the liturgy in Italy is appalling, with a particular emphasis on very bad music. (For example, it is not an exaggeration to say that most churches sing the sixth mode triple Alleluia at every single Mass outside of Lent.) I especially enjoyed his comments on these words from the Pope’s discourse: “Just as there is no human life without a heartbeat, so too without the beating Heart of Christ there is no liturgical action.

“Our heart rates speed up and slow down according to activity, etc. The resting heartbeat is a baseline which is consistent, even, continuous. When our heartbeat is erratic there are problems. An arrhythmia can result in cardiac death. This is probably what happened with the artificial imposition of many liturgical changes after the Council (not actually called for by the Council Fathers in SC): liturgical arrhythmias. … Screw around with the Church’s liturgical heartbeat, and you wind up with what we have seen in the Church for the last 50 years, as virtually every aspect of Catholic life has become enervated, weak, lethargic and even necrotic.”

- We can always rely on Fr Hunwicke for intelligent commentary on any matter, and particularly on the true scope of Papal authority. (The dashes here are in the original, and do not represent omissions.)

“...But the liturgical texts and practices established after the Council are themselves not immutable. If a papal instruction, such as that of S Pius V in Quo primum, was in itself subject to change ... and Bergoglio seems to assume that it was changeable ... then clearly what Blessed Paul VI did, and what the current occupant of the Roman See now says ... are themselves changeable; they cannot be set in stone for ever.

Pope Francis has exactly as much papal authority as S Pius V. He does not have a milligram less.

And he does not have a milligram more.

And if it was acceptable (the Holy Father seems to assume that it was) for ‘experts’, in the decades before the Council, to explain at great length what (in their view) was wrong with the Liturgy as it then existed ... ... then it acceptable now for us to explain, at any length we like, what (in our view) is wrong with the Liturgy as it is done now in so many places.”

- Geoffrey Kirk, who writes a very funny blog called Ignatius His Conclave, gives an excellent example of how liturgical reform was reversed within the Anglican church.

- I particularly commend to our readers’ attention an article by Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman OSB, on his blog Dominus mihi adjutor. Fr Hugh rightly, in my view, says that the speech itself is really not all that interesting, and in any case, much of what it does say is at best unclear. (The Pope speaks, for example, of “practices that disfigure the liturgy.” It would take no time at all to come up a list of perfectly licit practices of the reformed liturgy which one may reasonably regard as disfigurements; leaving the celebrant to choose the Eucharistic prayer comes immediately to mind.)

“What is remarkable is the nostalgia that lies so close to the surface in so many commentators in the mainline reform movement. Seeing in the eyes of traditionalists the mote of a nostalgia for a golden age that never was, they fail to see the beam of the same in their own eyes. …

If ever there was a group stuck in a rut of nostalgia it is the mainline liturgical reformers. They have not seen that the world, and the Church, have moved on from the heady days of hippies, free love, the brotherhood of man and revolution in everything that marked, indeed scarred, the 60s. The mainline liturgical reformers have failed in their express intention of producing a liturgy that engages modern people actively, a failure proved by the precipitous decline in Mass attendance since the reform was introduced.

Blaming social change and militant secularism is just passing of the buck and does not stand much scrutiny. It was precisely such a changed and more secular society that the reformers sought to accommodate liturgically. … ”

- Matthew Schmitz published an article yesterday on the Catholic Herald about the continually growing interest in the traditional Rite on the part of the young, with the one title I most wish I had thought of myself, “The Kids Are Old Rite.”

“Who are these terrifying young traditionalists? Step into a quiet chapel in New York and you will find an answer. There, early each Saturday morning, young worshippers gather in secret. They are divided by sex: women on the left, men on the right. Dressed in denim and Birkenstocks, with the occasional nose piercing, they could be a group of loiterers on any downtown sidewalk. But they have come here with a purpose. As a bell rings, they rise in unison. A hooded priest approaches the altar and begins to say Mass in Latin. During Communion, they kneel on the bare floor where an altar rail should be.

In a city where discretion is mocked and vice goes on parade, the atmosphere of reverence is startling. ...”

- Just a few thoughts of my own then, to wrap up.

The post-Conciliar liturgical reform has been in every way a complete success. The Fathers of Vatican II knew ahead of time that the letter of Sacrosanctum Concilium would be repeatedly disobeyed in the actual execution of the reform, and approved of this, knowing that the same Spirit which inspired such holy foreknowledge within them would lead to greater and better achievements than they themselves could ever have envisioned. The committees that produced the reform acted from only the very highest and purest motives; their liturgical scholarship was impeccable in every way, nor has any part of it subsequently been proved wrong or outdated.

Shortly after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, an article in the Osservatore Romano proclaimed that the Council had officially embraced and approved of the goals of the first Liturgical Movement. And indeed, the wildest hopes of Dom Gueranger, the Blessed Schuster, Fr Fortescue and Dom Beauduin have been fulfilled in our times. Liturgical piety now flourishes as never before among the Catholic faithful, who have almost all joyfully embraced the reformed rites.

Of course, every movement within the Church, be it ever so obviously led and driven by the Spirit, encounters some resistance from reactionaries. “Reactionary” is a word to conjure with, as are the many abstract nouns which are helpfully employed to categorize the unhealthy motives lurking in the dark corners of the reactionary mind. The –isms take the lead here, with “clericalism” as the perennial favorite, alongside “triumphalism” and “formalism”; beyond them wait “rigidity”, “nostalgia”, and a panoply of others. In this most blessed age, however, the reactionaries are so few, their complaints so unreasonable, their challenge so baseless, that there is no need to respond to them at all.

Indeed, given the perfect triumph of the reform, it is difficult to see why any need was felt at all to assert (whether directly or obliquely) that it cannot be undone. We may even question whether such an assertion is altogether prudent, since it might suggest to some a degree of insecurity about its future, which is of course wholly unwarranted.

Fr. Hunwicke Visits Norwalk, NYC

Popular blogger and eminent classicist the Rev. John Hunwicke is visiting the Northeast this weekend and into next week for two talks, sponsored by the St. Hugh of Cluny Society.

Fr. Hunwicke will celebrate the 9:30 Solemn Mass (Extraordinary Form) at St. Mary’s Church in Norwalk, Connecticut on Sunday, October 16, and then give a talk in the school hall at 7 p.m, entitled, “Could A Pope Abolish the Extraordinary Form?” St. Mary’s is located at 669 West Avenue.

He continues his visit on Tuesday, October 18, in Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, discussing, “Kasperism and the Aspirations of Episcopal Conferences.” That talk is at 7 p.m.; the church is located at 263 Mulberry Street.

Fr. Hunwicke is a priest of the Anglican Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in the United Kingdom. He is author of the popular blog, “Mutual Enrichment,” known for its pithiness and straightforward opinions on issues facing the Church.

Those wishing more information can call St. Mary’s, (203) 688-5546, or go to www.sthughofcluny.org.

Fr Hunwicke Weighs In on the Ad Orientem Controversy

Everyone who is interested in the ongoing controversy over Cardinal Sarah’s proposal to begin celebrating ad orientem more generally should betake himself to Fr Hunwicke. The immediate controversy is, of course, largely not real, inasmuch as the celebration of Mass ad orientem has always been a perfectly legitimate option, one which is foreseen in the rubrics of the Missal, and which recent Popes, including Pope Francis, use on occasion. Fr Hunwicke has rightly understood what this is really about:

“Sarah and Nichols are both 100% right: this does matter. It goes to the heart of the question of what the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass really is. It touches upon that whole raft of practical changes (“Reordering”) which were not in any way whatsoever mandated by the Council but which were put into effect by those who subsequently got their hands on to the levers of power. It bears powerfully upon the crucial question of whether the mighty task of the redintegratio of Catholic worship, set in motion by Papa Ratzinger, will continue under Papa Bergoglio’s successor.

Even further than that, it encapsulates the fundamental question raised by Benedict XVI, of whether we should see Vatican II in terms of reform within a hermeneutic of continuity, or whether the structural ruptures inflicted on the Church in the 1970s, with such catastrophic effects within the Church over the following four decades, are now to be set in dry, cold, inflexible stone.

We have reached a turning point at which every priest knows that if he heeds Cardinal Sarah’s exhortation, he makes it easier for his brother priests also to do the same; and that that if he opts for a quiet life, it will be that bit easier for the Tablet and ACTA (the English liberal group ‘A Call to Action’) to pick off his bolder brother clergy by demanding their episcopal persecution. There is no reason why a start cannot be made, after catechesis, by introducing versus Orientem on alternate Sundays, or even just on the first Sunday of each month. Advent, when priest and people go forward together to meet the Lord who Comes to us, is indeed a highly suitable occasion.”

And thanks to Eye of the Tiber for this hilarious take on the controversy: “Cardinal Nichols Asks Priests To Face Him During Mass.”

Recent Items of Interest (Passion Sunday 2016)

Here are some recent items which you might find useful and interesting.

1. Another superb series by Fr Hunwicke, this time on “Diaconia in the Tradition of the Roman Church.” (part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5). “So, despite having no mandate from the Council to change the Church’s teaching on Holy Order as expressed in her lex orandi, the activities of the post-Conciliar liturgical ‘reformers’ offered us, as they so often did, an unedifying example of illiterate mischief. As so often, they gave us a sound lesson on how to eliminate babies without losing a single drop of bathwater.”

2. Dr Anthony Esolen (another writer whose every article is worth reading) : “The Catholic Church’s priest shortage crisis: a self-inflicted wound.”

3. Russell Shaw on the “Oppressive Splendor” of serving as an altar boy back in the day. “I suppose I have gotten more sophisticated about religion since then, but I doubt that the intensity of my faith has increased much.” (Inspired by a famous photograph of an altar-boy by Henri Cartier-Bresson.)

4. Yesterday was the Saturday of the Akathist in the Byzantine Rite. (This is one of several different akathist hymns to the Mother of God.)

5. Today is Passion Sunday; the Veil of St Veronica is exposed for the veneration of the faithful in St Peter’s Basilica after Vespers. (NLM article from 2012)

6. Recordings of the Passion Sunday liturgies from our friends of the Schola Sainte Cécile in Paris.

7. Two Monks Illustrate the Bible. Part of a very funny series in which two monks discuss the contents of their manuscript illuminations.

8. A Different Kind of New Order (Just for laughs; completely irrelevant to liturgy, but one of my favorite songs of all time.)

Another Excellent Series from Fr Hunwicke

Fr Hunwicke has just published a series of three articles called “A Bluffer’s Guide to Pauline Pseudonomy.” Although the topic is per se tangential to liturgical matters, his articles will certainly be of interest to our readers, not the least because everything Fr Hunwicke writes is interesting, but also because much of what he says applies equally well to the dubious methodologies which were in the air, so to speak, at the time of the liturgical reform. (Click these links to read part 1, part 2 and part 3.)

“Pseudonomy” and “pseudepigraphy” are the terms of art which Biblical scholars use to indicate that the putative author of a work did not actually write it. (A classic example in the liturgy is the large number of hymns falsely attributed to St Ambrose.) It has long been a conceit of New Testament scholarship that several of St Paul’s letters were not really written by him, but by his admirers of a generation or two later. Some have even gone so far as to declare authentic only one or two of the Pauline letters, but most modern NTEs, as Father calls them (New Testament Experts), will settle somewhere between 4 and 7: broadly speaking, Romans, I and II Corinthians, and Galatians, with Philippians, I Thessalonians and/or Philemon thrown in for good measure.

The first four, he writes “are sometimes called the Tuebingen Four, because F.C. Baur of that University demonstrated that they alone are Pauline in the early nineteenth century. This conclusion (surprise surprise) fits snugly into the Lutheran assumption that, since Justification by Faith Alone is manifestly the heart of S Paul’s Gospel, Romans and Galatians are clearly his most important writings.” And he notes that this judgment was confirmed in the 1960s by the research of one A.Q. Morton, whose stylistic analysis purportedly demonstrated that there is a considerable difference in style between the Tuebingen Four and the rest of the Pauline Corpus.

In the second article, Fr Hunwicke goes on to note a phenomenon which has been well-known for a long time, and inexplicably (or perhaps not so inexplicably) ignored by many Biblical scholars; namely, that the same stylistic analysis which proves that St Paul did not write many of his letters also “proves” any number of manifestly absurd things about other bodies of literature. It has been “demonstrated”, for example, that Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake cannot be by the same author, and that Jane Austen’s novels were not written during the Napoleonic Wars, since she never mentions them. Father also refers to (without explaining in detail) a famous episode in the career of Mons Ronald Knox, who once delivered a paper in which he “proved”, with the methods of modern (i.e. early 20th-century) Biblical scholarship, that many of the Sherlock Holmes stories were not written by their putative author, but by an admirer whom he dubbed “Deutero-Watson.” (The notoriously credulous Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, not realizing that the paper was written as a satire, sent Knox a letter to assure him that he was indeed the author of the entire Corpus Holmesianum.)

Unsurprisingly, the digital age has given us more sophisticated methods of stylistic analysis than Morton had at his disposal in the 1960s, and Fr Hunwicke reports that Sir Anthony Kenny of Baliol College, Oxford, in his 1986 book A Stylometric Study of the New Testament, “comprehensively torpedoed below the waterline” several of the basic NTE assumptions about St Paul. Not only does he vindicate the Pauline authorship of the two Epistles to Timothy (the three Pastoral Epistles are generally considered the least Pauline of all), but also shows that the Letter to the Hebrews “achieves a correlation with ‘Paul’ higher than any other correlations in the New Testament except that between the three Synoptic Gospels.” (It is now titled in the modern lectionaries “A Reading from the Letter to the Hebrews.”)

To be fair, this kind of research has not been entirely shut out from consideration by the world of Biblical scholarship. Some years ago, I attended a lecture by the grand doyen of liberal Biblical scholars, Fr Raymond E. Brown, on this very topic. I was pleasantly surprised to hear him denounce as false the comparison between pseudonomy among the letters of St Paul and pseudonomy in the Old Testament. He stated that while everyone understood that the attribution of books like Ecclesiastes and Wisdom to Solomon was a literary device, because Solomon had been dead for hundreds of years when they were written, no one denies that the supposedly pseudonomous letters of St Paul were only written about 10-20 years after his death. I remember him saying, “What did the Ephesians think, it got lost in the mail?” (A priest sitting next to me whispered “He hears the rustling of death’s wings behind him”, and he did indeed die a few months later.)

Fr Hunwicke gives more details in his articles, judiciously presenting Kenny’s research and conclusions without giving a lot of the technical jargon behind it. Again, I would encourage you to read all three articles. It remains to note here, however, how this applies to the field of liturgical studies; I will offer only one example. One of the continual sources of complaint about the Novus Ordo is the widespread displacement of the ancient Roman Canon by the blink-and-miss-it Second Eucharistic Prayer. At the time of the reform, this latter was considered one of its great triumphs, since it supposedly restored to use the even more ancient Eucharistic Prayer of Hippolytus. Laying aside the fact that very little of Hippolytus’ prayer found its way into EP II, no one would any longer seriously defend the idea that the original was ever used by the Church of Rome in her liturgy. The question therefore arises: how many of the other certitudes of modern liturgical scholarship will also eventually be proved false?

Fr Hunwicke Needs Your Help - A Linguistic Challenge

Since today is the OF feast of the Holy Family, the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas, the great Fr Hunwicke, with his usual wit and erudition, has put up a bit of commentary on one of the hymns for the feast. The three original hymns (for Matins, Lauds and Vespers) were written by Pope Leo XIII personally, who was both a scholar of Latin poetry and a talented Latin poet in his own right. Although the Vesper hymn was basically left alone, the man in charge of revising the hymns for the Liturgy of the Hours, Dom Anselmo Lentini OSB, tore the Matins hymn Sacra jam splendent almost completely apart, and substituted the Lauds hymn with a new composition of his own. (Dom Lentini is the single most frequently represented author in the corpus of Latin hymns in the Liturgia Horarum, by a margin of four-to-one over Prudentius and five-to-one over St Ambrose.)

Fr Hunwicke calls attention to one change in particular; any linguistic scholar who may happen to read this is called upon to look it over carefully, and propose answers to his query either here, where I will be happy to pass them on to the good Father, or over at his own combox on his page.

***

“fessis”. Disgusting? You may wonder what is problematic about that word.

Leo wrote that Mary, a good Mother and a good spouse, gave a helping hand to both Son and husband,

.................. felix
si potest curas relevare fessis
munere amico.
[ ................. happy
if she can lighten, with a friendly duty,
cares for the weary.]

But, apparently, ‘fessis’ suggests to the Francophone ear not ‘weary’ but ‘buttocks’. So Dom Anselmo Lentini changed it to the problem-free word ‘lassis’, thus spoiling the alliterative “felix ... fessis” but sparing the blushes of that notoriously bashful constituency, the French clergy. (I will award this Blog’s Order of Chastity, Fourth Class, which authorises you to have a pink pompom on your biretta, to any reader who can demonstrate that there is another language in which ‘lassis’ is even more indelicate than ‘fessis’ is in French.)

Leo was a fluent French speaker. Yet, as a cultivated Latinist, he wrote “fessis” without a moment’s anxiety. What sort of cultural shift has landed us with an ‘emancipated’ society in which the word is too sniggerworthy to be printable?

Reforming the Canon of the Mass: Some Considerations from Fr Hunwicke

I have had several occasions to recommend the writings of Fr John Hunwicke on his blog “Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment”, formerly known as “Liturgical Notes”. Last month, he published a series of six articles on “Consecration in the Roman Canon”, in which he has given us an important contribution towards understanding the essential differences between the Roman Canon, and the various models for its alteration in the post-Conciliar reform. I here offer only a summary of some of his more salient points, and inevitably must skip over a great deal of very useful material. Do yourself a favor and read the whole series; not only for the information and ideas contained therein, but also to enjoy his writing (the fruits, no doubt, of 30 years spent in the study and teaching of Latin and Greek.) I also wish to thank Fr Hunwicke personally for his kind permission to cite his work. [part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5; part 6.]

In part one, he considers the absence of a formal invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Roman Canon, and its prominence in the Eastern rites.

(M)uch was made of this absence in the 1960s by the pensants who reformed the Roman Rite. Constructing new Eucharistic Prayers, they made sure that the Holy Spirit was called upon in each one of them to work the miracle of transsubstantiation. I remember similar stuff being churned out in the C of E: we neo-ordinati were to do the propaganda for these innovations by descending on worshippers who from their tenderest years had listened to Cranmer’s Eucharistic Prayer; we were to point out to uneasy individuals (who, I recall, could only be persuaded reluctantly to receive change by the categorical assurance that it would bring the Young People flooding in) that the Holy Spirit was all but missing, and culpably so, from Cranmer’s sonorous periods. And so the revised Anglican rites were, as in the Roman Communion, fitted up, like Edwardian roués being forced into corsets, with Epicleses of the Holy Spirit. The great Begetter of liturgical reform in the C of E, Dom Gregory Dix, must have been rotating in his grave. He had, as recently as 1944, devoted a fair number of pages in The Shape of the Liturgy, to explaining that the Epiclesis was not ‘primitive’ …

He goes on to explain in the second article why the absence of the Epiclesis was felt to be a defect in need of remedy, and the fundamental error on which this assumption rests, (the same error which led to the creation of the modern three-reading system.)

The answer is embarrassingly simple. Pretty well all rites except the Roman had an epiclesis. Therefore it must be ‘Primitive’. Therefore it was desireable. The alternative possibility, that Rome lacked an epiclesis because it was older than those other rites, occurred to very few. So, for a hundred years or more, the question had been (not why did the other rites add an epiclesis, but) Whatever Happened to the Roman Epiclesis ... deemed to have existed originally but, for some mysterious reason, to have gone missing. … The conviction was bolstered by an inclination to believe that all the existing rites of Christendom must have descended from an Original Liturgy which, at least in its dominant features, was fairly uniform, and could therefore, in principle, be reconstructed from a comparison of existing liturgies. This assumption, as the pendulum swings, is currently highly unfashionable; …

The difference between the Eastern Rites and the Roman, in regard to the Epiclesis, depends on how the canon or anaphora petitions the Father to consecrate bread as the Body of Christ. “(T)he East says Send the Spirit so that He may change bread into Christ’s Body, while Rome says Accept our Offering so that it may become Christ’s Body.” In the third article, he explains, on the basis of Christine Mohrmann’s work on the origins of Christian Latin, why the Roman Rite chooses to make this petition with a certain kind of language, terse and legal, and very different from the florid (and more Scriptural) Eastern approach. He then argues forcibly, (and, for what it’s worth, I think these words should be held for all time as a charter for any future efforts to meddle with the Eucharistic prayers), that neither the East or West should have its Rites altered on the basis of the other’s tradition.

It is not my purpose to discuss which of these attitudes is preferable, … What I do wish to highlight is, quite simply, that they are different. … One of the very few things I object to very strongly about Orthodoxy is that it sanctions ‘Western Rites’ in which an Oriental Epiclesis has been violently shoved into the Roman Canon. I would complain with no less vigour if some daft Latinising imperialist tried to mangle or eviscerate an Eastern Anaphora. Each of our rites has its own integrity, its own logic, its own grammar. Neither should be bullied into conformity with the other. To do so ... I would go so far as to call it sacrilege.

This inevitably leads to the question, addressed in the fourth article, of whether the addition of new Eucharistic prayers (or ‘anaphoras’, if you prefer) makes the Novus Ordo a different Rite from the classic Roman Rite, which never had any Canon other than that found in the ancient Roman sacramentaries and the Missal of St Pius V. He begins by pointing out that various scholars, not all of them conservatives, have held the position that they are essentially different rites.

Fr Joseph Gelineau, described by Bugnini himself as “one of the great masters of the international liturgical world”, a liturgical radical who wholeheartedly applauded what happened after Vatican II, did not make (the) claim (that they are the same rite). He wrote “We must say it plainly: the Roman rite as we knew it exists no more. It has gone. … Fr Aidan Nichols points out that ‘the Rite of Paul VI contains more features of Oriental provenance than the Roman Rite has ever known historically, and notably in the new anaphoras, for these are central to the definition of any eucharistic style.’ ”

He further notes that the presence of so many features imported from other rites led the Anglican scholar Dr G. G. Willis to define the modern Roman Rite as a “hybrid”. Fr Zuhlsdorf has stated a similar position on various occasions, that the identity of the two Forms, Ordinary and Extraordinary, as one Rite, is essentially a legal fiction: a good and useful legal fiction, to be sure, but a legal fiction nonetheless. (In a future article, I plan to offer some considerations of my own on this matter.) In any case, Fr Hunwicke declares that it is

a cause worth taking seriously, to restore the Roman Rite to use by using exclusively the Roman Canon. The GIRM itself has pointed to this by saying, in each edition it has been through, that “This Prayer may be always used” (Editio tertia para 365. ‘semper adhiberi potest’); a comment it makes about none of the other anaphoras.

He is also very careful to state, in clear and very red letters at the end of the fourth article, that the status of the Novus Ordo as a different Rite does not make it any way invalid.

The ecumenical implications of this question should not be lost on anybody, for if a formal Epiclesis is indeed essential to the Eucharistic Consecration, the unavoidable conclusion is that the Roman Rite has always been invalid.

It is true that ‘the Great Church of Constantinople’, replying in 1896 to overtures of unity from Leo XIII, alleged that “The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils used to receive [the teaching that] the precious gifts are hallowed after the Epiclesis of the Holy Spirit by the blessing of the priest”, apparently thereby implying that the Church and Rite of Rome did not exist in the centuries between Nicaea I and Nicaea II in 787. But this only proves that we Latins are not the only ones who quite often say and do extremely foolish things. Happily, a few years ago a writer in the theological journal of the Moscow Patriarchate declared himself content with the Roman Canon. It is a shame that the dominant school among the fashionable intellectuals of the Western Church in the 1960s did not share this contentedness.

The sixth part concludes the series with a beautiful consideration of the Sacrifice of the Mass, and how the Eastern tradition can help us to understand It as an offering made once, and yet continually made anew.

(God) created a multiplicity of times and a multiplicity of places. Within those multiplicities, He could have created just one, monic, being to exist and to be loved; but He chose instead to create a multiplicity of beings. And so it is into that complexity of times, places, beings, that His ‘Once for all’ is graciously communicated. The sacrifice of the Eternal Son is, in the Mass, made ‘sacramentally’ present on earth, in and to that plurality of the times and places which the Creator God in his fluent generosity has given to the innumerable multitudes He has created in which to worship him and to work out their salvation. And whenever it is so made present, Christ our God does “go forth to be slain in sacrifice”. (citing the Liturgy of St James) Furthermore, each Eucharist, bestowed from Eternity into Time, is not merely the offering of a monic being, but of Christ in his social body the Church, associating with him and in him those who are partaking in that new Mass in that new moment, so that the sacrifice of the Mass is ever one and unchanging and rooted in Eternity, and yet for ever here and for ever new.
So I’ve never had any problems with that offertory prayer in the Sarum Mass, in which the priest referred to hoc sacrificium novum. But, of course, the ‘Reformers’ did object, and the idea of a nova mactatio (new slaying) has come to be regarded as one of the worst corruptions of medieval Catholicism. It is good to have the Rite of S James to remind us that this way of employing language is not only sound and wholesome but is guaranteed by the witness of East as well as of West.

Thoughts on the Easter Octave from Fr Hunwicke

Speaking of the Byzantine Rite, the wise Fr Hunwicke has posted some excellent observations (as always) on the relationship between the Octave of Easter and the rest of the Easter season.

The post-Conciliar reforms made much of Easter being 50 days long and being one single Great Day of Feast. They renamed the Sundays as ‘of Easter’ rather than ‘after Easter’, and chucked out the old collects for the Sundays after Easter ... because they didn’t consider them ‘Paschal’ enough. To replace them, they cobbled together a set of collects which was substantially new. They gave their game away by transferring the Collect for the Sunday after Easter (with its talk about now having finished the festa Paschalia) to the Saturday before Pentecost.
... It certainly seems to be true that the reforms of the 1970s represented a new divergence between the customs of West and of East: by leveling out Eastertide we lost the ecumenical practice, which we shared with Orthodoxy, of marking the unique character of this one very special week by allowing it to retain a whole lot of unique (mostly archaic) liturgical features. The Byzantines delightfully call it ‘Bright Week’ ... and they make the service each day to be completely unlike that of any other week of the year. One example in our Western idiom of thus making Easter week ‘strange’ was the traditional Western disuse of Office Hymns during this week; in place of them and of other elements in the Office, we used simply to sing the anthem Haec dies. Considering the enthusiasm with which the ‘reformers’ orientalised so much of the Roman Rite, it seems extraordinary that in other respects, such as this one, their concern was to drag the West out of a usage common to both of the Church’s ‘lungs’. But then, they always did what suited their whimsy.
There is an even profounder ‘ecumenical’ aspect to this question. S Paul assumes the familiarity of his largely Gentile Corinthian congregation with the Jewish usages of a seven-day Passover Festival celebration ... This suggests that the Paschalia festa, that is, of Easter Sunday until Easter Saturday, represent not only Apostolic practice but are part of the immemorial continuities linking the Old Israel with the New. Which would make the post-Conciliar alterations seem even more irresponsibly capricious ...

Read the whole piece over at “Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment.”

Some Liturgical Notes on St Joseph the Worker (and a Few Dominican Saints)

From Fr Hunwicke, who always manages to combine erudition, wisdom, and a prose style that is truly enjoyable to read.

This week provides a good example of how the Calendar of the Vetus Ordo is starting to to groan a bit because it has been unchanged since 1962. (I bet that’s never happened in liturgical history before; and this sort of unresponsiveness to natural, gradual, evolution is itself, in fact, Untraditional.)

(1) May 1. I'll be fair: I can see why Pius XII had the S Joseph idea in 1956. But it never caught on, and little more than a decade later the Novus Ordo reduced it to it an optional memorial, leaving the poor old Vetus Ordo lumbered with this enormous, innovatory and untraditional whale, marooned and decaying just above the tideline. It would be absurd to do anything other than to clean up the beach and to return pipnjim to May 1 in both Calendars. (Keen Josephites might enjoy the restoration of the Patronage of S Joseph on the Wednesday of the second week after the Octave of Easter. The propers for that feast played quite nice typological games with S Joseph and his OT namesake.)

The references to the Patriarch Joseph as an Old Testament type of Christ’s foster-father are indeed one of the most beautiful features of the old Office and Mass of the feast of St Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church. The Church often applies to him the words “Ite ad Joseph – Go to Joseph”, from the words which the Pharaoh spoke about the Patriarch in Genesis 41, 55, telling the people of Egypt to ask him for grain during the great famine. These words are quoted in the second responsory of Matins, which in the first nocturn sums up the story of how Joseph became “as it were, the father of the king, and the lord of all his house”. The Epistle of the Mass, Genesis 49, 22-26, applies to St Joseph, as the heir of the Old Testament Patriarchs, the words by which Jacob blesses his son Joseph before his death, “The blessings of thy father are strengthened with the blessings of his fathers: until the desire of the everlasting hills should come; may they be upon the head of Joseph, and upon the crown of the Nazarite among his brethren.” Already in the fourth century, Paulinus of Milan, the biographer of St Ambrose and a faithful follower of his teaching, explains the “desire of the everlasting hills” to be Christ Himself. (De Benedictionibus Patriarcharum, X, 15; P.L. XX 730C)

St Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church; this is the image used as the header of the Mass of St Joseph in liturgical books printed by the Pustet company in the later 19th and early 20th century.

The origins of the earlier feast go back to St Theresa of Avila, who had a great devotion to St Joseph; he was traditionally honored as a Patron of the Carmelite Order, even before Bl. Pius IX gave the feast to the universal Church in 1847. The Carmelite supplement to the Roman Breviary has a special hymn for Vespers of the feast, which reads in part, speaking to St Joseph, “Our kindly mother Theresa revered thee in her prayers as a most holy patron, of thy great bounty receiving protection in all her trials.” It also has a special versicle sung three times in the Office, “From my mother’s womb thou art my protector.” In her autobiography, (6.9) St Theresa herself writes:

I took for my patron and lord the glorious St. Joseph, and recommended myself earnestly to him. I saw clearly that both out of this my present trouble, (a temporary episode of paralysis) and out of others of greater importance, relating to my honor and the loss of my soul, this my father and lord delivered me, and rendered me greater services than I knew how to ask for. I cannot call to mind that I have ever asked him at any time for anything which he has not granted; and I am filled with amazement when I consider the great favors which God hath given me through this blessed Saint; the dangers from which he hath delivered me, both of body and of soul. To other Saints, our Lord seems to have given grace to succor men in some special necessity; but to this glorious Saint, I know by experience, to help us in all: and our Lord would have us understand that as He was Himself subject to him upon earth--for St. Joseph having the title of father, and being His guardian, could command Him--so now in heaven He performs all his petitions. I have asked others to recommend themselves to St. Joseph, and they too know this by experience; and there are many who are now of late devout to him, having had experience of this truth.

From a strictly literary point of view, the liturgical texts of St Joseph the Worker are a clumsy set of pieces, quite inferior to those of the earlier feast. Especially ill-chosen is the Gospel, St. Matthew 13, 54-58, which asks but does not answer the question “Is this not the carpenter’s son?”, and ends with the words “And He wrought not many miracles there, because of their unbelief.” The Secret of the Mass contains an interesting foreshadowing of changes which would later be made to the Offertory, referring to the “hostias” which are offered as coming “from the works of our hands.” I am given to understand by those who really know chant that the Gregorian Mass-propers are particularly bad. This is due at least in part to the opposition to the feast by members of the Sacred Congregation for Rites, who also objected to the removal of the Apostles Philip and James from their very ancient traditional date of May 1st to what was then the next free day, May 11th. (With the suppression of the Finding of the Cross, they were then moved again in 1969, to May 3rd.)

St Teresa of Avila receives a veil and necklace from the Virgin and Saint Joseph, by Cristóbal de Vaillalpando, 

Fr Hunwicke also notes a problem with the feast of St Catherine of Siena, one of the six “Patrons of Europe” established as such by Pope St John Paul II. “S Catherine being a Patron of Europe, it is weird to have her on different dates in the two Calendars. A choice should be made.” 

St Catherine is kept on the 30th in the traditional Calendar because the day of her death, April 29th, is occupied by another Dominican Saint, Peter the Martyr. St. Peter was killed by Cathars, sectaries of one of the weirdest and sickest heresies the Church has ever known, on April 6th, 1252. Almost venerated as a Saint in his lifetime, (he was often in danger of being crushed by the crowds which came to hear him preach), he was canonized in less than a year, and remains to this day the single most rapidly canonized Saint in history. (I am speaking here of the formal process of canonization, which was of course simpler, but nevertheless very thorough, in the 13th-century.) A walk through any art museum in Europe, but especially in Italy, will easily show how widespread the devotion to him was.

An illustration from a Missal in the Dominican church of San Marco in Florence, ca. 1430, by one of its most famous residents, and another Dominican Saint, the painter Fra Angelico. (1395-1455) St Peter is shown writing the Apostles’ Creed with his own blood as he dies, a testament to the faith in one God against the bizarre dualist theories of the Cathars. One of his assassins, Carino, was eventually converted to a life of repentance, entered the Dominican house at Como, and is now venerated as a Blessed.

The day of his death is almost exactly in the middle of the period in which Easter can occur; his feast was therefore assigned to April 29th, where it would only rarely be impeded by the Paschal Octave. This was the date on which St Catherine herself, a Dominican Tertiary, kept the feast of St Peter, and the date on which she died in 1380. In her time, Saints Dominic, Peter Martyr and Thomas Aquinas were the only canonized Saints of the Dominican Order, and it is should be counted as one of the many graces given her that she should die on such a feast.

St Catherine was then canonized by Pope Pius II (1458-64), a fellow citizen of the Republic of Siena who also wrote the proper Office of her in the Dominican Use. Her feast was originally kept on May 2nd, and another Dominican Saint, Antoninus, archbishop of Florence from 1446 to 1459, was granted the grace to die on that day. She was later moved to April 30. St Pius V, yet another Dominican, died on the feast of Ss Philip and James, and was originally assigned to the next free day, May 5th, while St Antoninus was moved to the 10th for the sake of the older and more universal feast of St Athanasius.

Dominicans Leading the Faithful to Salvation; fresco on the east wall of the former chapter hall of the Dominican house of Santa Maria Novella. The hall was later converted into a chapel for the use of the Spaniards in Florence, and is now known as the Spanish Chapel. Andrea da Firenze, 1366-67. Ss Peter Martyr and Thomas Aquinas are shown on the lower right, disputing with heretics.

In the post-Conciliar Calendar, the feast of St Peter Martyr has been suppressed, one of its least justifiable changes. This cleared the 29th for St Catherine, and thus the 30th for St Pius V; the latter is kept at the very lowest rank, as an optional memorial, although the Constitution which promulgated the Missal of 1969 begins by stating “Everyone acknowledges that the Roman Missal, promulgated by Our Predecessor St Pius V in the year 1570, by a decree of the Council of Trent, must be counted among the many and wonderful useful fruits that flowed forth from that same most holy Synod to the universal Church of Christ.”

In point of fact, St Vincent Ferrer and Albert the Great are the only Dominican Saints who kept their traditional feast days on the 1969 Calendar, both as optional memorials. Saints Dominic, Thomas Aquinas and Rose of Lima (the last also optional) were all moved to new days, while Antoninus and Hyacinth were suppressed. The feast of the Holy Rosary is a Solemnity for the Dominicans, and may be kept as an external Solemnity on the first Sunday of October in the traditional Rite; on the general Calendar of the Ordinary Form, however, it was downgraded, from the 2nd of six ranks to the 3rd of four.

Fr Hunwicke aptly describes the Calendar of the Extraordinary Form in the title of his piece as “Frozen solid in pack ice”. Of course, feasts have been moved and suppressed before, and will be moved and suppressed again; the original Calendar of St Pius V contained neither Peter Martyr nor Catherine. But it is still something to hope for that, come a future thaw, it be remembered that the liturgical Calendar is not only a list of feast days which we keep, but also a list of feast days kept by the Saints before us.

Clarifications on the Reform of the Reform Controversy

Reading through the comments to my recent post, as well as the welcome contribution of Most Rev. Peter J. Elliott, I have noticed that there may be some confusion concerning the skeptical stance taken by Fr. Kocik, myself, and several others on the Ordinary Form and on the “reform of the reform.” My goal in this short article is to lay out several clarifications that, I hope, will assist everyone in the conversation.

It seems to me that there are two very different meanings of the ROTR. First, it can mean simply celebrating correctly according to the latest edition of the revised liturgical books, following the desiderata of Vatican II (use of Latin as well as vernacular, Gregorian chant and polyphony, appropriate silence, only the right ministers doing what belongs to them, good mystagogical catechesis, etc.), and featuring everything traditional that is permitted in the celebration. Second, it can mean undertaking the step of a reform or revision of those very books, to re-incorporate unwisely discarded elements and to expunge foolishly introduced novelties. For convenience, let us call these ROTR-1 and ROTR-2.

I am completely in favor of ROTR-1, that is, celebrating the Ordinary Form in the most reverent, solemn, beautiful, and sacred manner possible, since that is the way Catholics ought to celebrate Mass in any rite or form. In this sense, I agree with Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s oft-repeated statement “when the tide rises, all the boats rise with it.” As for my bona fides, I have been directing choirs and scholas for Novus Ordo celebrations for over 20 years and am presently in charge of the music both for a weekly traditional Latin High Mass and a weekly sung Novus Ordo Mass with vernacular propers and hymns. On certain weekdays, our schola sings the Gregorian Ordinary and Propers out of the Graduale Romanum at OF celebrations. Our altar servers follow Msgr. Elliott’s Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite—truly a gift to the Church!—with the keen devotion that traditionalists have for Fortescue and O’Connell. So I am personally quite familiar with and supportive of ROTR-1 ideals.

What precisely is the object of controversy, then?

Many Catholics who deeply love the Church have been led by long experience and careful study of the liturgy to the conclusion that the reform carried out by the Consilium and promulgated by Paul VI is not just the unfortunate victim of a wave of abuses but something deeply and inherently flawed in structure and content [Note 1]. It is not in continuity with the Roman liturgical tradition as organically developed and received at the time of the Council. As a result (touching now on ROTR-2), it cannot serve as a suitable platform for the long-term future of the Roman Rite.

The reference to "failure" in the title of my last article refers to the fact that the revised sacramental rites of Paul VI:

1. failed to adhere to fundamental principles and many particular desiderata of Sacrosanctum Concilium (inter alia, SC 23, 28, 36, 54, 112-116);
2. failed to uphold the inherent auctoritas, the morally binding authority, of the liturgical tradition as such, as Fr. Hunwicke has shown[2];
3. failed to reflect the duties and limits of papal authority vis-à-vis the liturgical tradition, as Ratzinger argued[3];
4. failed to respect basic laws of psychology and sociology concerning behavior towards a cultural patrimony, requirements of ritual stability for group identity and harmony, etc.[4]

Now, none of this amounts to saying that the OF “no longer has a place in the life of the Church.” Obviously, it occupies and will continue to occupy a huge place—and may the Lord, in His mercy, grant people everywhere the grace, as long as this form remains the status quo, to implement ROTR-1. Nor does it amount to saying that the OF should be immediately discontinued and replaced by the EF, which is not practicable or advisable at this time.

What it does say, however, is that there are intrinsic and inescapable limits to the scope and success of the ROTR project. Even assuming a happy day when every OF celebration across the globe is reverent, solemn, beautiful, and sacred, in full accord with Vatican II and the post-conciliar Magisterium, there will STILL be a profound discontinuity between what came before the Council and what came after, in the very bones and marrow of the rites themselves, in their texts, rubrics, rationale, spirituality—even, to some extent, their theology.

In a superb series of posts in the past few days, Joseph Shaw, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, has compellingly argued that even ROTR-1 often ends up being an awkward “falling between two stools” because it respects neither the genius of the Vetus Ordo nor the specific motivations behind the Novus Ordo.[5] I have experienced firsthand exactly what Shaw is talking about and can only say that it makes the task of any kind of ROTR extremely tiring, a constant struggle with the plethora of options[6], the rationalistic assumptions, the minimalism, antinomianism, and horizontalism that define the culture in which the Novus Ordo was received and from which it has acquired long-standing habits difficult to overcome. Shaw concludes that it is much easier and far better simply to begin celebrating the age-old liturgy of the Church: it starts at a healthy place, it is a coherent whole, it is serenely and admirably just what it is and there is no nonsense about it. Whether it needs minor reforms or not, it is not hamstrung from the starting block.

One cannot recover lost continuity by stubbornly insisting on it. The only way it will happen is either if one should start afresh with the Vetus Ordo, which all agree embodies the received Roman liturgical tradition on the eve of the Council, or if one could modify the Novus Ordo in so radical a manner that it might as well have been abolished and replaced with a lightly adapted version of its predecessor. In any case, what we have now is not an evolutionary step towards that future authentic Roman Rite; it is a detour, an evolutionary dead-end. It is like those modernist churches that do not suffer gently the passage of time, that are trapped in their own era and mentality, never able to escape from it. The way forward is not to keep developing the modernist aesthetic but to abandon it resolutely and definitively, embracing and cultivating in its place the noble artistic tradition we have received, which retains tremendous power to speak to us of realities that are timeless and transcendent.

That, to me, was the point of what Fr. Kocik, Dom Mark, Fr. Somerville-Knapman, Fr. Cipolla, Fr. Smith, and others have been saying—not, Deus absit, that it is not worthwhile or even urgent to celebrate the Ordinary Form as well as can be done. Those who celebrate the OF have their work cut out for them, and those who already love and cherish the EF have their own work to do, for all celebrations of the liturgy should be as fitting as can be. Nevertheless, if this analysis is correct, there are systemic problems that the ROTR cannot address; it is good that we should not ignore or dance gingerly around these problems but truthfully and courageously admit them, in order to direct our efforts most of all towards a restoration that will bear the fruits of renewal denied to the Consilium’s reform.

Prompted (it would seem) by the controversy surrounding the ROTR, Dom Mark Kirby offered another and very poignant reflection on the issue, "Home from the Liturgical Thirty Years War." He admits that, after spending decades of labor on the revised rites, working to elevate them as much as he could, he came to realize how much richer and more fruitful the traditional liturgy is—and that his time all along would have been better spent within this welcoming and lovely house. Moving from the cramped urban apartment bloc into the spacious old country home (the family seat, one might call it), may not be an option yet for many Catholics, but we can surely pray, hope, and work for the day when it will be a familiar and beloved house of prayer for every baptized member of the Roman Rite.

NOTES

[1] One need only study Lauren Pristas’s book, The Collects of the Roman Missal, to see what was done to the Collects and why. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; the same thing can be seen with all the prayers for all the sacraments.

[2] One of Fr. Hunwicke's recent posts is simply titled "Auctoritas." However, a search under that word at his blog turns up many helpful (and fascinating) discussions on such topics as the auctoritas of Latin in the liturgy and the auctoritas of having but one Anaphora, the Roman Canon, in the Roman Rite.

[3] Here is how Ratzinger expresses himself in The Spirit of the Liturgy: “After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not ‘manufactured’ by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity. . . . The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition. . . . The greatness of the liturgy depends—we shall have to repeat this frequently—on its unspontaneity” (pp. 165-66)

[4] One thinks, for instance, of the work on cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas or Anthony Archer. For a discussion of the latter, see Joseph Shaw, "The Old Mass and the Workers".

[5] I cannot recommend these posts too highly: "The Death of the Reform of the Reform? Part 1"; "Part 2: The Liturgical Movement"; "Part 3: Falling Between Two Stools"; "Part 4: Novus Ordo in Latin?" Shaw provides knock-down arguments against thoroughly vernacularizing the old rite, which has kept floating up in recent days as somehow a good idea.

[6] Just yesterday Dom Mark Kirby gave us an incisive treatment of the problem of what can be called 'optionitis': see "Laws of Degenerative Liturgical Evolution." For my take on the issue, see "Indeterminacy and Optionitis."

POSTSCRIPT

Some readers have pointed out that this whole conversation is, in a way, “behind the times”; have we already forgotten about great contributions made in the past to a fundamental critique of the Novus Ordo? For an exceptionally fine example, see Fr. John Parsons, “Reform of the Reform?,” originally published in Christian Order, November–December 2001. Apart from its magnificent clarity and depth of thought, this article demonstrates that the skepticism about ROTR-2 recently expressed by Fr. Kocik and others has been around for quite some time among those who know their liturgical history and theology. Would that more people took the time to learn for themselves just how the liturgical reform was actually done—the principles by which it acted, the judgments it made—and what that means for the life and health of the Mystical Body of Christ on earth.