 |
| Stained glass window from St Dominic’s in London (Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew OP) |
Deus, qui hodierna die beatum Henricum confessorem tuum e terreni culmine imperii ad regnum aeternum transtulisti: te supplices exoramus; ut, sicut illum, gratiae tuae ubertate praeventum, illecebras saeculi superare fecisti, ita nos facias eius imitatione, mundi huius blandimenta vitare, et ad te puris mentibus pervenire.
O God, who on this day brought blessed Henry, your confessor, from the summit of earthly sovereignty into the eternal kingdom, humbly we implore you, that, as you, going before him with the abundance of your grace, granted him to overcome the enticements of the age, so may you grant us, through imitation of him, to shun the allurements of this world and attain unto you with pure minds.
The modern rite of Paul VI replaces this Collect with the following, loosely based on it:
Deus, qui beatum Henricum, gratiae tuae ubertate praeventum, e terreni cura regiminis ad superna mirabiliter erexisti, eius nobis intercessione largire, ut inter mundanas varietates puris ad te mentibus festinemus.
O God, who having gone before blessed Henry with the abundance of your grace wondrously raised him from care of earthly government unto things caelestial, grant, through his intercession, that amid the diverse things of this world we may hasten toward/unto you with pure minds.
A similar set of changes may be observed in the Collect for St. Louis IX, King of France, whose feast we celebrate next month on August 25. The original Collect:
Deus, qui beatum Ludovicum confessorem tuum de terreno regno ad caelestis regni gloriam transtulisti: eius, quaesumus, meritis et intercessione, Regis regum Iesu Christi Filii tui facias nos esse consortes.
O God, who brought blessed Louis, your confessor, from an earthly kingdom into the glory of the heavenly kingdom, we beseech you through his merits and intercession, grant us to be partakers of Jesus Christ, your Son, the King of kings.
The modern rite replaces it with this:
Deus, qui beatum Ludovicum, e terreni regiminis cura ad caelestis regni gloriam transtulisti, eius, quaesumus, intercessione concede, ut, per munera temporalia quae gerimus, regnum tuum quaeramus aeternum.
O God, who brought blessed Louis from care of earthly government into the glory of the heavenly kingdom, we beseech you, grant through his intercession, that, through the earthly responsibilities that we bear, we may seek your eternal kingdom.
Fr. Antoine Dumas, who worked on the Consilium’s coetus for “prayers and prefaces,” wrote a famous article explaining why such a large number of Collects were revised, which Dr. Lauren Pristas, an expert on the subject of Collects, translated and commented on in her important article “Theological Principles That Guided the Redaction of the Roman Missal (1970),” in The Thomist, vol. 67 (2003): 157–95. She first quotes what Fr. Dumas says about the above prayers:
It is easy to understand why, in certain collects for Christian leaders, the expression: culmine imperii was changed to cura regiminis (Saint Henry), while terreno regno gave way to terreni regiminis cura (Saint Louis): a simple change of perspective for the same reality.
However, as Lauren Pristas points out:
The actual revisions to the two collects were far more extensive than Dumas reports. The revisions as a whole are underscored; those of the kind that Dumas mentions are also italicized. We will begin with the small change in each prayer that Dumas names.
She then continues (and I shall now quote at length from her article):
 |
| Window in St Sulpice in Paris (Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew OP) |
In order to appreciate the nature of the other changes made to the collect for Henry, we need to know what the editors sought to achieve in their revision of the sanctoral orations. Dumas tells us: “In the sanctoral prayers we . . . put greater emphasis on the personality of the saint, his mission in the Church, the practical lesson that his example gives to men of today. All the corrections or new compositions in the new missal proceed in this direction.”
When the editors excised mention of Henry “overcoming the enticements of his age” by the grace of God, they created a prayer that tells us nothing about Henry’s personality or his way of holiness. The failure of the corrections to this prayer to proceed in the direction established for all the sanctoral orations suggests that the editors of the new missal did not view Henry’s example of freedom from worldly enticements as something suitable for imitation by modern Christians, or that they thought the original collect posits too great an opposition between heaven and earth, or possibly both. Since these themes recur and become more explicit in later examples, we shall consider them as they reappear below.
There are three other differences that a more extensive treatment would examine that can only be identified here. The new text (1) omits the reverential formula “humbly we implore you,” (2) asks that Henry intercede for us rather than that we imitate him (a change that flows directly from the decision to omit reference to Henry’s particular virtue), and (3) severs the connection between purity of mind and freedom from the attractions of this world established by the original prayer.
The change in the petition of the revised collect for Louis is striking and shares common features with the new oration for Henry. The 1962 prayer for Louis begs that we may have partnership with Christ who is the King of kings—here, particularly, the King of King Louis—whereas the revised text asks that we may seek, but does not specify that we also find, “your eternal kingdom.” The petition of the revised text, therefore, is stunningly effete in comparison to that of the original collect which seeks nothing less than full incorporation into Christ. Similarly, the old collect for Henry begs that God make us attain unto, or reach (pervenire), himself, whereas the new version asks only that we hasten (festinemus) unto him. The verb pervenire stipulates arrival, festinare does not.
A second feature common to both revised collects is a new emphasis on the things of this world which, in addition, are presented in a wholly positive light. In the revised prayer for Henry, we hasten “amid the diverse things of this world,” instead of asking, as in the original version, to be able to shun its allurements. In the somewhat convoluted revised collect for Louis, we ask God to grant, through the intercession of the saint, that we may seek his eternal kingdom “through the earthly responsibilities that we bear.” In the source text we ask to be granted partnership with Christ “through the merits and intercession”of the saint. »
By way of summary, Dr. Pristas concludes this section of her article with a warning:
The changes to these prayers, which are much more extensive than Dumas indicates, highlight the methodological importance of returning to the sources. Those who desire to gain a full and accurate understanding of the work of the Consilium must examine all the pertinent primary texts, and not rely exclusively upon even those articles, like Dumas’s own, that were written by the reformers themselves for the express purpose of describing and explaining their work. The number of changes is too great, and their nature too substantial, for even the most thorough summary to be adequate.She is too kind to say it expressly, but authors like Dumas are not actually telling you the whole story. And it very doubtful that they are doing so because they are unaware of it or have just forgotten to do it. These men were über-experts in their subdisciplines, conversant with many languages, and compelled by committee work to share and explain themselves frequently. If, when they address a broader audience, they leave a lot out, it’s probably because they are aware that their audience will trust them to tell the truth and not bother to do the heavy lifting of consulting all the sources. Indeed, that is why certain defects in the new liturgy have taken decades to emerge into the light of day.
Turning our attention to the saint of today, Henry II, I would simply point out that the authentic Collect of his feast exhibits to perfection several aspects of the Catholic worldview:
- The subordination of the temporal to the eternal
- The need for self-denial and mortification
- The legitimacy and fittingness of earthly monarchs reflecting the divine kingdom
Thus, we can confidently say this figure would be hated by modernists and liberals for several reasons:
- They would despise his vow of virginity; even “conservatives” would likely mock it as contrary to the demands of the “theology of the body” popularly understood (aka, The Joy of Ethical Sex);
- They despise monarchy because they hold the ideological view—essentially indemonstrable and contrary to available evidence—that democracy is the best and perhaps the only legitimate form of government;
- They do not see political authority as being inherently from God and therefore given with a view to worshiping God and building up His kingdom on earth through the construction of churches, the endowment of monasteries, and the like.
That is, Henry II manages to wrap up in one package celibacy, monarchy, and integralism—a few of the least favorite things of the self-consciously modern and modernizing Christian. It’s actually rather surprising he was kept in the general calendar, where he manages to hang on to the status of Optional Memorial on July 13. I wonder how many choose the option… Meanwhile, at my parish, we will celebrate today the obligatory feast of the only Western Christian emperor-saint.
 |
| Window by Capronnier in St Stephen’s Catholic Church, Skipton (Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew OP) |
The feast prompts a few melancholy reflections. The old Mass was sustained by a love of chivalry and ceremonial, noblemen and kings; indeed, these men were its principal benefactors who led Catholic culture to unequaled heights of magnificence. But that whole world was swept away by the Revolution: and the Mass has been in decline since then: the cathedral chapters were eradicated, noble patronage of art and religious orders ceased; and ideologically, nothing in that world will appeal to our latter-day Marxists (whether they proudly claim the label or merely correspond to its content).
We can see a strange change that comes over liturgical commentary in the later modern period. Commentators in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have an instinctive love for ceremony and splendor. Their ideal is the imperial Rome of the Ordo Romanus I, with its high station liturgy. Later, after the Revolution… all of a sudden, everyone is tired of those things. The rich ceremonial life of pre-Napoleonic Europe gave figures like Benedict XIV, Bona, and Cancellieri a native understanding of and taste for liturgical ceremony that nineteenth and twentieth century writers generally sorely lack. The ceremonialists knew that their own experience was in direct continuity with St. Gregory’s seventh-century stational liturgy. Even if not moved by a particular ideology, a twentieth-century bourgeois has little to nothing in his experience of life that can relate to the ritual of the pontifical liturgy. So, he likes the simpler pseudo-apostolic “domus ecclesiae” house liturgy better.
The old Mass presupposes a whole culture that is vanished; and yet it hangs on, like St. Henry’s optional feast, by a thread: it is the option chosen, as a matter of principle, by a resolute minority who are as displaced as it is possible to be in a social body, enjoying neither official support nor ample resources. If John Senior is right to say that Christendom grew up around the Mass, will we discover over time if the old Mass still retains its inherent power to rebuild the world around it, as some creatures can rebuild their damaged bodies?
The liturgy cannot stand for long without a surrounding culture. That culture, in the West, was already teetering in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wavering between sentimentalism and nihilism, and then came the coup de grâce of the Council and the reform. The revival of the traditional Mass is a risky experiment because it is like a floating city without a determinate “place” yet.
Reading the history of the Latin rite, I’m more and more convinced that communities of clergy are vital for liturgical life. The cathedral chapters and the monasteries are the only organizations that can do the full liturgy, from Matins to Compline, from the silent devotional Mass to the Solemn High Mass and pontifical ceremonies. They are the ones chiefly responsible for the health of the liturgical culture that they receive, foster, and hand down. When chapters and monasteries are strong, they set the tone for an entire territory. When they are weak or non-existent…
And yet, is it not strange, and hopeful, that so many young people today respond, at some level, even if incoherently and postmodernistically, to lavish displays of liturgical ceremony? That political conservatism is growing stronger again among the youth? I cannot imagine (in a sort of Freudian reductionism) that it is all about an emotional frisson or a fetishism for color and spectacle in a world of gray fashion and greenbacks. If depth calls to depth, then the depth of tradition calls to the depth of denuded, alienated postmodern man, and summons him to the heights of liturgy, fine art, political order, in the company of Henry II and Louis IX.
