A Roman Rite Pontifical Mass in Church Slavonic

Here is an interesting thing I just stumbled across via a friend on social media, a video of His Excellency Bishop Athanasius Schneider celebrating a Pontifical Mass in the Roman Rite, but in Church Slavonic, rather than Latin. The Mass was celebrated in Friday, September 16, 2016, for the feast of St Ludmilla, a martyr of the very early years of the conversion of Bohemia in the later 9th century.

One week before this Mass was celebrated, we published an article about a Glagolitic Mass, as it is called, celebrated in Croatia: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2016/09/glagolitic-mass-celebrated-in-zagreb.html. This tradition of celebrating the Roman Mass in a Slavic idiom rather than Latin goes back, of course, to the missionary activities of Ss Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs. On Monday, I wrote about a Saint named Procopius who is very important in Bohemia, and whose religious community in the later 11th century may very well have celebrated the Roman Rite in Church Slavonic. Without prejudice to the importance of Latin, or to the importance of preserving its liturgical use, as both St John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council wanted, this custom can be a useful reference point for continuing the essential work of correcting the botched post-Conciliar reform, since it uses a form of “vernacular” without compromising the ceremonial or textual tradition of the rite.

Glagolitic Mass Celebrated in Zagreb, Croatia

As some of our readers may remember from previous articles, there was a long-standing custom in parts of Croatia that the Roman Rite be celebrated in the Croatian recension of Old Church Slavonic, rather than in Latin. Shawn Tribe published an article about the Glagolitic Missal, as it was called, from the ancient script originally created for the Slavic languages, back in 2011. Recently, a Mass was celebrated according to this Missal for the first time in 50 years in Zagreb; we are grateful to one of the faithful who were present for providing us with this account of it.

Let me start with a brief introduction. The current situation concerning the Extraordinary Form in Croatia is that there is not a single diocesan Mass available anywhere in the country. The only regular Sunday Mass was available from February 2011 to October 2014 , when the priest assigned by the Archdiocese of Zagreb suddenly died. So now, we, the Coetus fidelium of Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia, have been without a priest for almost two years, so we have to rely on the generosity and availability of the visiting priests to at least have occasional Masses. Such was the recent case when a priest from the Institute of the Good Shepherd, Fr. Mateusz Markiewicz, currently stationed in Bordeaux, was on a three day long visit in Zagreb.

During those three days, Father Markiewicz celebrated the Traditional Mass in the church of St. Martin. For the first two days, these were Latin Masses, but on the third day, we had a Low Glagolitic Mass, a first public Mass of its kind in Croatia after approximately 50 years. It was a votive Mass of St. Joseph, the patron of Croatia, and also of our local ordinary, Cardinal Josip Bozanić. The Mass was celebrated from the so-called “Vajs Missal” (Missale Romanum Slavonico Idiomate), the last printed Glagolitic Missal from 1927, written in the Croatian recension of Church Slavonic. This Missal was transliterated to Latin script, unlike the previous Glagolitic missals, see other examples here: http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/parcic_misal.html.

As a side note, the first printed Croatian book was a Missale Romanum Glagolitice dating from 1483. You can find the digitized version here: http://dk.nsk.hr/stara_knjiga/NSK_SK_ID01/.

The copy of the “Vajs Missal” we used was purchased recently from the United States by the society “Benedictus”, the Croatian chapter of the Una Voce Federation. As the celebrating priest is a Slav, he had no problem in reading the Church Slavonic or Croatian. Here is a short clip of the prayers at the foot of the altar.

As a gift from a local priest, we also had the Church Slavonic altar cards. A small curiosity - it was not unusual in southern parts of Croatia along the coast of Dalmatia, to have two-sided altar cards, one side containing the Latin text and the opposite side the Church Slavonic – here is an example of the Church Slavonic side from a church in Split.

Unlike the southern parts of Croatia, the Glagolitic Mass was not something usual in northern Croatia, Zagreb included. However, it was regularly celebrated in the 20th century by the Zagreb Third Order Franciscans (TOR). A common name for them in Croatia was “Popi glagoljaši”, or Glagolitic friars/fathers). The Blessed Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac celebrated a Glagolitic Mass in 1942, during the opening of a new TOR parish in Zagreb.

Sadly the TOR friars completely abandoned the Glagolitic Mass, a tradition that lasted over thousand years, after the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, a big part of our Glagolitic legacy, for instance praying the old Breviary, was preserved on some islands in Dalmatia, especially in the Zadar Archdiocese. You can hear the examples of the ancient Glagolitic chant still used today on the island of Iž here:

or here (singing of Vespers):

There are plans for celebrating a sung Mass with the Glagolitic chant in Croatia for the next year, so we will keep you informed. We sincerely hope that this Mass in Zagreb will serve as an encouragement for priests in Croatia, especially the younger ones, to learn the old rite, and to embrace the ancient Glagolitic legacy passed to us from the “Apostles of Slavs”, the saintly brothers Cyril and Methodius. A fun fact to end with – one of the oldest monuments of the Croatian language is the “Baška tablet,” dating from around 1100, who has an inscription in the Croatian recension of the Church Slavonic language. The tablet itself is part of a pluteum, or a partition that separated the sanctuary from the nave, so this remains one of the few communion rails that actually survived the numerous “renovations” following the Second Vatican Council.

(Parts of this article have been translated into English from a report originally published on www.tradicionalnamisa.com (http://tradicionalnamisa.com/hleb-nas-vsedanni-daj-nam-danas/)

The lighting of the Sanctus candle

The Glagolitic Missal - Missale Romanum Slavonico Idiomate

Recently, one of our readers sent in something that we have yet to have shown here: scans from the last preconciliar edition of the Roman Missal in Glagolitic as published in 1927. (In point of fact, the reader in question sent in a scan of the entire missal, but for now I will simply show a few select pages from this.)

As it was explained to me, the 1927 edition of the Glagolitic Missal was transliterated into Latin script since knowledge of Glagolitic script was already in great decline by this time. Glagolitic script was only used for the Ordinary of the Mass and in parallel to the same in Latinized script.

For the sake of interest, however, let me first show you the original title page of the Glagolitic Missal as published in 1631; you can see the Glagolitic script beneath the Latin title:

Here then is the title page of the 1927 edition of the Glagolitic Missal:

Background of the Glagolitic Missal

Before we continue, a few words are likely in order about the Glagolitic Missal.

The Catholic Encyclopedia offers the following summary which should suffice to give the core background context:

These Slavs were converted to Christianity and to the Roman Rite by Latin missionaries, and gradually the Roman alphabet drove out the use of the Glagolitic, so that the Bohemians, Slovenians, Moravians, and part of the Croatians used Roman letters in writing their languages. In Southern Croatia and in Dalmatia (often treated as synonymous with Illyria in ancient times) the Glagolitic has continued in use as an ecclesiastical alphabet in writing the ancient Slavonic. Although the Slavic peoples bordering on the Adriatic Sea were converted to the Roman Rite, they received the privilege, as well as their brethren of the Greek Rite, of having the Mass and the offices of the Church said in their own tongue. Thus the Roman Mass was translated into the Slavonic, and, in order to more fully distinguish the Western Rite from the Eastern Rite among the Slavic peoples, the use of the Glagolitic alphabet was reserved exclusively for the service books of the Roman Rite, just as the Cyrillic was used for the Greek Rite.

The use of the Glagolitic Missal and office books, while permitted in general among the Slavs of Dalmatia and Croatia from the earliest times since the Slavonic became a liturgical language under Pope John VIII, was definitely settled by the Constitution of Urban VIII, dated 29 April, 1631, in which he provided for a new and corrected edition of the Slavic Missal conformable to the Roman editions. In 1648 Innocent X provided likewise for the Slavic Breviary...

For those who would like to read more about this a detailed consideration may also be found on pp. 58-67 of Archdale King's The Liturgy of the Roman Church.


Scans From the Glagolitic Missal

What follows then are a few pages from within the missal. I have tried to select pages which would be reasonably familiar to many of our readers. (Click on any of the photos to enlarge them.)

(The beginning of Mass)

And here in these images, we see the Glagolitic script in parallel to the Latin script:

(The Canon of the Mass)

(More from the Canon of the Mass)

For those who are curious about the chant:

Speaking of music, our reader also draws our attention to the following traditional Glagolitic liturgical chant. (Click the video as well as the audio samples in the grey box.) Other examples of Glagolitic church music are also available here, here and here.