A Particularly Beautiful Altar Missal from 1863 (Part 2)

Following up on a post from Tuesday, here are some more photographs of a very beautiful altar missal which is owned by the church of St John Cantius in Chicago, Illinois. It was printed by the Pustet firm, based in Regensburg, Germany, in 1863, and is remarkable not only for the very large number of images, but the fact that they are in color. (I own a two-volume lectionary which was part of the same print run, and which has many of the same images, but all in black-and-white.) Several of these pictures appeared on his Substack Tradition and Sanity a few days ago; I thank him for letting us reproduce them here. (There are definitely enough of these to make more than one post.)

These are predominantly taken from the Proper of the Saints, and most of the images are illuminated letters at the beginning of the Introits. They are arranged here in liturgical order, except for the first, which is that of today’s feast of the Assumption. 

The introduction to the proper of the Saints. 

St Andrew the Apostle, November 30

St Thomas the Apostle, December 21

Pope St Marcellus I, January 16

Ss Marius, Martha, Audifax and Abbacum, a group of martyrs celebrated on January 19.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

A Particularly Beautiful Altar Missal from 1863 (Part 1)

Peter recently had the opportunity to see and photograph an especially fine altar missal which is owned by the church of St John Cantius in Chicago. It was printed by the Pustet firm, based in Regensburg, Germany, in 1863, and is remarkable not only for the very large number of images, but the fact that they are in color. (I own a two-volume lectionary which was part of the same print run, and which has many of the same images, but all in black-and-white.) Most of these pictures appeared on his substack Tradition and Sanity a few days ago; I thank him for letting us reproduce them here. (There are definitely enough of these to make more than one post.)

The original binding is very well preserved; the metal knobs in the corners are called bosses, and help to prevent wear and tear on the leather cover.

First title page

Second title page

The order of incensing the oblata...

and the altar.

The beginning of the Temporal cycle, the first Sunday of Advent.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

St. Thomas Aquinas: Mystagogue on the Proper Approach to Holy Communion

From an embroidered banner in St Dominic's, Newcastle. Photo by Lawrence Lew, O.P.

Today, March 7, is the dies natalis of St. Thomas, and thus, his feast day. We know from his biographers that he was famed for his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. He used to pray with his head resting against a tabernacle. On his deathbed, he hailed the Host and specifically said that if he had taught anything amiss concerning this great sacrament, he submitted to the judgment of the Church—as if to say that his mind was most occupied with Eucharistic theology. He went to Mass twice a day: first saying his own Mass, served by his socius Reginald, and then serving Reginald’s Mass.

(Before anyone says “oh, that’s the usual hagiographical exaggeration again,” it should be pointed out that our sources on Aquinas are remarkably detailed and have stood up to the most exacting scholarly scrutiny; the process of fact-collecting for his canonization was especially thorough, the records were well-organized, and the men in charge put all the right questions to as many eyewitnesses and confreres of the friar as they could find. Reports from independently interviewed and widely differing sources agree on all the most important aspects.)

We are therefore not surprised to find among his writings many beloved prayers and hymns in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. Most of these belong to the deservedly praised Office and Mass of Corpus Christi, one of the great liturgical achievements of the Middle Ages, with its poetry standing at a consistently high level of eloquence and fervor. Fr. Paul Murray has written a most engaging book that should be required reading for every Thomist and every Catholic theologian: Aquinas at Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism, and Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2013).[i]

Looking at a famous prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, printed in the Praeparatio ad Missam pro opportunitate Sacerdotis facienda of the traditional Roman Missal, will show us what the proper approach to Holy Communion is and ought to be:

All-powerful and everlasting God, behold,
I approach the sacrament of Thine only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ.
As one infirm, I approach the medicine of life;
as one unclean, the fountain of mercy;
as one blind, the light of eternal splendor;
as one poor and needy, the Lord of heaven and earth.

Therefore, I ask Thee,
from the abundance of Thine immense generosity,
to cure my illness,
wash away my uncleanness,
illuminate my blindness,
enrich my poverty,
and clothe my nakedness,
that I may receive the Bread of Angels,
the King of Kings and Lord of Lords,
with such reverence and humility,
such contrition and devotion,
such purity and faith,
such pur­pose and intention,
as is expedient for the salvation of my soul.

Grant, I beg Thee, that I may receive
not only the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood,
but also the reality and power of this sacrament.
 
O most gentle God,
grant me so to receive the Body of Thine only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
which He took of the Virgin Mary,
that I might be worthy
to be incorporated into His Mystical Body
and counted among His members.

O most loving Father,
give to me Thy beloved Son,
whom I intend to receive now
in veiled form on my pilgrimage,
that I may one day contemplate Him
with unveiled face for all eternity,
who with Thee liveth and reigneth
in the unity of the Holy Ghost,
world without end, Amen.

There is so much one could say about this fervent, tender, all-encompassing prayer! It begins with a very deliberate placing of oneself in spiritual position: “Father, behold, I approach Thy Son.” It then probes with wide-eyed honesty all that is lacking in the one approaching: he is sick, unclean, blind, poor, and needy, who calls the One to whom he approaches his healing, mercy, light, and ultimate treasure, God Himself.

This honest confession of his weakness and of the divine largesse of the Savior having been made, the saint pivots to petition. On the basis of my lack and Your wealth, O God, I ask You to cure, wash, illuminate, enrich, and clothe me, thus to prepare me to receive the King and Lord of all—and with the right dispositions.

These dispositions the saint spells out with characteristic clarity and order: reverence is mentioned first (that’s not insignificant!); humility, the foundation of all virutes, comes next; contrition, because the impediment of attachment to sin should be removed before receiving the all-holy, most pure Body of Christ; devotion, which is an expression of the virtue of religion by which we give to God what we owe Him; purity, that is, chastity, so that we do not “unite the members of Christ with a prostitute” (1 Cor 6:15); faith, without which it is impossible to please God, indeed without which one cannot even know what one is doing, or whom one is approaching, in the Mass; purpose: to be single-minded in what we are proposing to do, and not, e.g., seeking the applause of the world or acting from thoughtless routine; intention, to receive God for the love of God and for the right love of one’s salvation. We can see in this list a sort of commentary on the conditions laid down under Pius X for frequent communion.

Aquinas begs the Lord, next, to admit him not only to the sacramental sign (the sacramentum tantum to use technical language), but also to the “reality and power” of it (the res tantum). He goes on to say immediately what that reality of the Eucharist is: incorporation into the Mystical Body, the corpus mysticum, of Christ, to have Him as one’s head and to be His living member. Here we see that the prince of scholastics could never be reproached by the denizens of nouvelle théologie as one who had lost sight of the intimate relationship between the Eucharistic Body and the Mystical Body.

In two tender superlative phrases—O mitissime Pater and O amantissime Pater—Thomas twice cries out to the Father to give him the Son: “grant me so to receive…” and then, more urgently, “give to me Thy beloved Son.” He is veiled now in the sacrament, hidden under the appearance of food, in order to be (as He truly is) the bread of wayfarers, the manna from heaven by which we attain to heaven; but the goal of this partaking is nothing other than the face-to-face vision of the Son—with the Father and the Holy Spirit—in eternal glory. That is the goal to which the Angelic Doctor is straining, the goal that stamps his entire theological enterprise.

This goal has something to tell us also about how our earthly liturgy should be celebrated. It should be such as to foster in us these virtuous dispositions, intimate longings, and aspirations to heaven. It should not throw up impediments to a good preparation for the Holy Eucharist that endures from before Mass, through Mass, to the end of Mass when giving thanks for the supernal gift received. We could go so far as to say this prayer gives us a kind of “checklist” or “grading rubric” to measure how well or how poorly a given liturgy prepares us to approach the Son of God, how well it disposes us for our communion with Him, or at least how well it provides conditions within which such dispositions are most likely or most favored or most free to be developed. I think it would be difficult to dispute that a Tridentine low Mass or high Mass would typically score very high while the Novus Ordo would typically score very low in terms of the “Aquinas Gold Standard.”

Studying this great theologian’s great prayer shows us—to our shame and, one hopes, our repentance—just how far the liturgy has fallen away from a truly Catholic sensibility, and just where the remedy lies: in the simple and uncompromising return to the traditional rite of the Roman Church.

NOTE
[i] This work is an especially good antidote for the ludicrous blasphemies of the pseudo-mystic Adrienne von Speyr, whose Book of All Saints contradicts the canonization records and seven centuries of papal teaching on the heroic sanctity of St. Thomas.

In Defense of Allegorical Interpretation of the Liturgy

Allegorical interpretation of the liturgy was totally rejected during the period of liturgical reform, and even earlier by liturgists who tended towards rationalistic or reductionistic explanations (Fr. Adrian Fortescue comes to mind, although he was fortunately inconsistent). You know the kind of argument I mean:

“We know that the lifting up of the chasuble by the deacon and subdeacon, or the servers, at the elevation of the host and the chalice was only because the Gothic chasuble was made of such heavy material and ornament, and the priest needed help getting his arms up high.” The implication is: “And therefore it can’t have anything to do with the story in the Gospel about the woman with a flow of blood who touched the garment of Christ in order to be healed. That’s just a wilful, arbitrary connection some ignorant person made in a devotional book, and then it got spread around.”

This, as can be plainly seen, is no more than a Catholic version of the modern tendency that C.S. Lewis called “nothing buttery,” namely (in the words of George Gilder) “dismissing non-material qualities as ‘nothing but…’ some lower physical property.” Life is “nothing but” chemical processes; mind is “nothing but” firing neurons; love is “nothing but” hormones; and so forth. The liturgical equivalent is easy to recognize. The subdeacon’s use of the humeral veil for the paten is “nothing but” a holdover from the early Roman fermentum rite. The conclusion, whether stated or not, is always: “And therefore it should be abolished.” Which, indeed, is what the reformers did: they stripped away nearly everything that no longer served an immediate practical function, and allowed almost nothing to remain that had lost its original (known or hypothesized) purpose.

Those who study the history of the liturgy often discover that certain practices later held to be richly symbolic had or may have had quite prosaic, practical, or accidental origins — origins in which their later symbolism played no part whatsoever. Yet this makes no difference at all to the validity of allegorical interpretations, for the simple reason that any given practice (construed broadly to include minister, object, action, cessation of action, etc.) presents itself to the worshiper now as part of an ensemble of ceremonial and symbolic actions, thereby acquiring, as if magnetically, new meanings, new interpretations, new resonances. In its fine texture of details, the traditional liturgy speaks both the same messages and new messages to each generation. Like an ancient epic poem, the same text reads differently in this or that age, without losing its remarkable ability to transcend them all. The most potent and transformative signs are not those that are limited to a single definite meaning, but those that are, to use a favorite word of Dante’s, “polysemous,” turning this way and that, accumulating layers of associations.

As with patristic and medieval Scripture exegesis, it simply does not matter if we “read into” the liturgical rites an intention that was not present in the human author’s or initiator’s mind, and this for two reasons.

First, the ultimate author is God, the First Cause, who sees further and intends more than His created agent is capable of seeing and intending. For example, it was no surprise to Him that the number of signs of the Cross made in the Solemn Mass would achieve, after many centuries, the numerological perfection of 7 * 7 + 3.

Second, even subjective or arbitrary interpretations can be essentially in harmony with the objective referent, as meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary can be essentially in harmony with the re-presentation of these mysteries in the Mass (cf. Pius XII, Mediator Dei), and, moreover, can be personally helpful to the one who “indulges” in them. It is like St. Augustine’s rule for Scripture: any interpretation or application that is not contrary to the Church’s faith or to the sovereign rule of charity is legitimate — indeed, was already known to God from all eternity, even if some interpretations are superior to others in their contextual fidelity, applicability, nuance, or depth.

This ancient-medieval exegetical freedom, exercised on the traditional rites given to us by the same ancient and medieval Church, has very often led me to notable breakthroughs in my understanding of the mysteries of faith and how to live my life, in ways that I don’t recall happening with the Novus Ordo. There are several reasons for this difference, but for my present purposes, the key difference is that the Novus Ordo was fashioned by its architects to be immediately understandable and understood: “what you see is what you get.” It tends to “make sense” immediately and without remainder, and that is precisely why it is boring, and why people have to write books and articles about how to make Mass not a boring experience. In contrast, the old liturgy has accumulated so many features over the centuries that, like a vast rambling mansion that seems never to run out of rooms, closets, attics, passageways, gardens, fields or forests to explore, one really never “sees it all” or “gets to the bottom of it.” It is more of a closed book than an open book, yet a book that is freely offered to be opened and pondered ad libitum.

The analogy between the Bible and traditional liturgical rites deserves to be underlined: on the one hand, a book that was written by a single divine author and as many as a hundred inspired human authors, coming together over a period of 1,300 years (from ca. 1200 BC to AD 100); on the other hand, Christian rites that were guided by a single Holy Spirit, built up into their mature form by apostles, bishops, popes, and other saints over a similar period of time (the period from the apostolic age to the high Middle Ages). With similar gestations, guiding principles, and aims, it seems probable, at very least, that Scripture and Liturgy ought to be susceptible to the same spiritual creativity in tandem with fixity of content. A reverse confirmation is found in the fact that biblical modernism rejects the spiritual senses just as liturgical modernism rejects liturgical allegory.

Therefore, lovers of the liturgical tradition: Do not be afraid to attach meanings to ministers, objects, or actions, or to adopt the meanings given in devotional literature, if they help you to pray. One sign of a great work of art is that it makes room for, and has the wherewithal to provoke, many responses, all more or less closely tied to its own ingredients, and drawn back into them. The Mass is the greatest work of art the West has ever known, exceeding all others in its intelligible density and its fertility of cultural power. Reading off “spiritual senses” from its literal sense is no less natural and fitting than doing the same with the narrative of Israel in the Old Testament or the narrative of Christ in the New.

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

New Prefaces and Feasts for the EF Missal

Today, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, exercizing the authority that came to it with the absorption of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, has issued two decrees updating the Missal of the Extraordinary Form. This been done in accordance with what Pope Benedict XVI said in his letter to the bishops of the world regarding  the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum: “new Saints and some of the new Prefaces can and should be inserted in the old Missal.”

The first decree pertains to a new group of seven prefaces that may now be used ad libitum. Four of these are taken from the Missal of the Ordinary Form: of the Angels, of St John the Baptist, of the Martyrs, and for the Nuptial Mass. The Congregation’s note presenting the decree states that “their central section(s), known as the ‘embolism’, appear in ancient liturgical sources. In order to guarantee consistency with the rest of the Corpus Praefationum of the old Missal, in three cases, the standard forms of Preface conclusion of the forma extraordinaria have been used.” Three others, the Prefaces of All Saints and Patron Saints, of the Blessed Sacrament, and of the Dedication of a Church, are among the group originally promulgated in the neo-Gallican Missals (especially that of Paris) and later approved for use with the Roman Missal in France and Belgium. “From now on, these may be used wherever Mass is celebrated in the forma extraordinaria.” (The decree does not mention the neo-Gallican Preface for Advent, which is generally found in any Missal that includes the others, and is probably one of the best composed among them.)

The second decree, regarding the calendar of Saints, contains the following provisions (my translation):

1. Festive Masses in the broader sense, as specified by the General Rubrics of the 1960 Missal (302) can be celebrated for a good reason (justa de causa) on all festal days of the third class, except those which are listed below (no. 8), and also on 3rd vigils of the Saints.

2. Furthermore, as far as GRMR 302c is concerned, Mass is permitted of any Saint canonized after July 26 1960, on the day on which it has been established that the liturgical memorial of said Saint be kept by he universal Church. A votive Mass of the same is also permitted, in accordance with GRMR 311, in keeping with the other rubrics about Votive Masses.

3. Whenever the festive Mass in the broader sense is said, the whole Divine Office can (my emphasis) be done together with the Mass, as the ordinary Office.

4. The ordinary commemoration of the feast or vigil omitted according to these three provisions is always made, together with other commemorations that occur according to the rubrics. (An example of this would be St Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast is on August 14th, the vigil of the Assumption. This provision specifies that if his Mass is celebrated, the vigil is not therefore to be omitted.)

5. In order to choose the formula of the Mass and Office in accordance with these provisions, if there is no (such formula) in the Supplement for certain places in the Missal of 1962, or the new supplement approved by the Holy See, (said formula) is taken from the Common of the Missal or Breviary. Whenever there are several formulae in said Common, the choice is left to the celebrant. ...

6. Furthermore, an ordinary commemoration can be admitted at the will of celebrant of a Saint or mystery on that day on which it is listed in the Proper of the Saints for certain places, or in the new supplement, both in the Mass and Office, on liturgical days of the 3rd and 4th class. (Again, as an example, one could now add a commemoration of St Maximilian Kolbe to the Mass of the vigil of the Assumption.)

7. In the houses of religious institutes or societies of apostolic life, it is the duty of the superior of the house, not of the celebrant, to determine the manner of putting these provisions into practice in the conventual Mass and in the choral or communal celebration of the Office.

8. Feast days of the third class which cannot be impeded or omitted by these provisions (i.e., which cannot have a new Saint dropped on top of them) are listed in the following table. These feasts can also be celebrated on the third class ferias of Lent and Passiontide, with a commemoration of the feria, according to the rubrics.

(editor’s note: This provision corrects one of the worst mistakes of the 1960 Missal, by which a number of Saints whose feasts always or almost always fall in Lent were to all intents and purposes abolished from the General Calendar, among them Ss Thomas Aquinas, Pope Gregory the Great, Benedict, the Archangel Gabriel, and Pope Leo the Great. The full list is given below.)

The CDF has also issued an note of presentation for this decree.

“Specifically, the Decree broadens the scope of missæ festivæ latiore sensu referred to in n. 302-c of the Rubricæ Generales Missalis Romani (which hitherto only applied to IV class days), to a number of III class feasts and to III class vigils (cf. Decree, n. 1). It is therefore clear that the new provisions will not in any way affect other celebrations, and in particular those of the I or II classes. (my emphasis) In addition, the Decree specifies that missæ festivæ latiore sensu may be celebrated in honour of Saints canonized after 26 July 1960 (which is the date of the last amendment to the Martyrology of the forma extraordinaria), on their respective liturgical feast day (n. 2).

With this principle in mind, the other provisions of the Decree give the necessary indications that derive therefrom, such as the applicability to the Divine Office, which in such a case is to be celebrated in full in honour of the Saint (n. 3), the requirement to make a commemoration of potentially occurring III class feasts, as the case may be (n. 4), and the rules relating to the selection of the liturgical texts to be used (n. 5). Regarding this particular point, one should note the three successive sources from which texts are to be drawn, namely in the first place the Proprium Sanctorum pro aliquibus locis which already exists in the Missal of the forma extraordinaria, secondly a special Supplement to be published by the Holy See in the future, and finally, should the two former sources be lacking, the existing Commune Sanctorum.

It is noteworthy that the celebration of more recent Saints pursuant to the new provisions is a mere possibility, and therefore it remains optional. (my emphasis) Accordingly, those who wish to continue to celebrate the Saints according to the existing calendar of the forma extraordinaria as it appears in the liturgical books, remain free to do so. In relation to this, one should be reminded that the existence of optional feasts in honour of the Saints is not a complete novelty in the Roman Rite, given that throughout the post-tridentine period, and up till the rubrical reform carried out by Pope St. Pius X, the calendar included no less that twenty-five such so-called ad libitum feasts.

The new Decree also opens a further possibility for cases in which whilst following the existing calendar, one wishes at the same time to honour eventual other occurring Saints. Specifically, according to n. 6 of the Decree, an ad libitum commemoration of an occurring Saint may be made, if said Saint appears in the Proprium pro aliquibus locis or in the future special Supplement.

In choosing whether or not to make use of the provisions of the Decree in liturgical celebrations in honour of the Saints, the celebrant is expected to make use of good pastoral common sense. As regards the particular case of celebrations in Religious Institutes and Societies of Apostolic Life, n. 7 of the Decree provides some useful clarification.

The Decree concludes (n. 8) with reference to a list of seventy III class feasts that may never be impeded by its provisions. This list, which is provided as an annex, reflects the particular importance of the feasts in question, on the basis of precise criteria, e.g. the importance of these respective Saints in the Plan of Salvation or in the history of the Church, their importance in terms of either the devotion they have generated or their writings, or the antiquity of their worship in Rome.”

A 15th-Century Critic of the Franciscan Liturgy

We are grateful to our friends at Canticum Salomonis for their kind permission to publish here on NLM their recent translation, the first ever in English, of part of an important 15th-century liturgical treatise. This treatise offers an interesting critique of the Franciscan influence on the liturgy of the Roman Church, particularly in regards to the Missal and Breviary of the Roman Curia which they adopted, and which are the principal late-medieval source of the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V. 

Radulphus of Rivo (d. 1403) was a Dutch jurist, liturgist, historian, and dean of the chapter of Tongres cathedral, whose several works on the liturgy are of primary importance for understanding the development of the Missal and Breviary.

His work De Canonum Observantia examines the sources of liturgical authority – Scripture, tradition, canons, papal decretals, etc. – and describes how the Mass and Office should be celebrated in accordance with them.

In Proposition XXII, which appears here in English for the first time, he harshly criticises the Franciscan breviary compiled by Haymo of Faversham for departing from the traditional Roman order while claiming to be its only true representative. The piece raises interesting questions about the nature of Rome’s liturgical primacy.

The frontispiece of a Roman Missal printed in Venice in 1520. Although it is not stated here explicitly that it was made for the Franciscans, this is clearly indicated by the fact that some of the Order’s canonized Saints are listed with octaves in the calendar.

Proposition XXII [1]

The Ordo of the Holy Roman Church is to be gathered not from the practices of the Friars Minor but from the canons, the authentic Scriptures, our ancient books, and the general practice of each particular church.

(1) Introduction

So glorious and famous was the Roman Church of old, that living waters gushed up from beneath her feet, and from her rose, as from the source of a stream, examples for the doing of all things, and sure rules of ecclesiastical government. Hence it is that all the Scriptures enjoin us to follow her authority and hold fast to her order (ordinem). As the most blessed Pope Innocent says to the Bishop Decentius (in his letter to the church of Maguelone, cited earlier in Proposition VII, dist. xi):

“For there is no man who does not know and acknowledge that what has been handed down to the Roman Church from Peter the Prince of the Apostles and is conserved there faithfully even now is something that must be observed by everyone, and that nothing should be added or introduced that does not have its authority from her or seems to take its example from elsewhere. This is all the more obvious since throughout all of Italy, the Gauls, the Spains, Africa, and Sicily, and the islands lying in between, no church has been founded that was not established by the venerable Apostle Peter or his priestly successors. Let them read, and let them tell me whether they find that another Apostle has been their founder in these provinces. But if they have not read it, because indeed it is nowhere to be found, then they are obliged to obey what the Roman Church has conserved, from whom it is certain that they have taken their beginnings: lest while they lend too eager an ear to foreign ideas, they might forget the instruction of their head.”

Consider also the material under the third proposition above.

But in what pertains to the Divine Office, today there is a widespread belief and opinion that the Friars Minor are the only ones who observe the order of the Holy Roman Church, which (they claim) is contained in none other but in their own Breviaries and books. Why? Because in their Rule Bl. Francis prescribed that the clergy should perform the Divine Office according to the Roman order wherever they are able to obtain the Breviaries.

During my stay in Rome, I learned that the truth is quite to the contrary. In fact, when the Roman Pontiffs resided at the Lateran, they observed a less complete form of the Roman Office than what was observed in the other collegiate churches of the city. Moreover, the chapel clergy, whether by papal mandate or on their own authority, always abbreviated the Roman Office and often altered it, according as it suited the Lord Pope and the Cardinals to observe it. [2] I also had the opportunity to study an Ordinary of this Office compiled during the time of Innocent III. [3] It is this abbreviated office that the Friars Minor follow. This is the reason why they give their breviaries and office books the sub-title “following the custom of the Roman Curia” (secundum consuetudinem Romanae Curiae), but they have taken no pains to receive and observe the customs of the other churches of the city of Rome. Now if the Chapel Office in question really can be called the ORDO of the Holy Roman Church, then they have done what the rule prescribed. If not, they have not.

Several nations of the Roman world have their books and office directly from the Roman churches and not from the Papal Chapel. This can be easily inferred from the books and treatises of Amalarius, Walafrid, Micrologus, Gemma Animae, and other writers on the Divine Office. [4]

Having said all of this by way of introduction, let us proceed to examine who is closer in their Divine Office to the order of the Holy Roman Church: whether the Friars in question, who keep a rather singular liturgical use along with their rather singular rule, or the other nations and religious orders. Either truly or falsely, I claim that the use of the Friars Minor is further from the true Roman order when it follows the chapel office in question, as may be deduced in the following way:

(2) Thesis

According to St Augustine (De Civitate Dei 19, 13), an ordo is the disposition of equal and unequal things each in their proper place; and in De Ordine Rerum, II, he says that ordo is that by which all the things ordained by God are done; and in the second book of the same, Ordo is that by which God moves all things that are; and on the Epistle to the Galatians: confusion is the opposite of order. With regard to the Divine Office, therefore, whenever everything is done just as the Roman Church has ordained, and each thing assigned its place as a right judgment deems proper, then we have the ordo prescribed by the Roman Church. And where the contrary subsists, this is confusion. But the other nations and religious orders observe these things more exactly than the Franciscans. Therefore, etc.

I will speak only briefly about a few things that come to mind, and (God willing) it will be more amply discussed in the writings coming from the City. [5]

(3) Argument

(a) General Observations: Sermons, Passions, and Propers

First, with regard to things that are read and things that are sung, the Lateran and the other Roman churches have sermons and homilies, the Passions of the saints, and other such things in very great number. Likewise the ancient Roman antiphonaries contain [proper] chants for Saints Nicholas, Sebastian, and Maurice; and long responsories for Terce, Sext, and None in Lent; the Sunday Psalms divided for the Vigil [i.e Matins] in Easter Week, Easter Vespers ordered by Kyrie eleison [6], and several antiphons for the Sunday Benedicite, [7] and in several places variant antiphons and responsories.

(b) Propers of the Saints

(i) Omission of the Legenda and other ancient customs [8]

Likewise in the proper Masses of the saints, we find their proper offices listed on their days, and many other things that are observed throughout the whole world in imitation of the Roman churches. But the Friars, for the sake of brevity and in imitation of the Papal chapel, have omitted or altered this custom. In their abbreviated use they usually read the Chronicles of Damasus on the saints, or something from the Pontificale. [9]

(ii) Difficulties caused by the transfer of feasts. [10]

Likewise, the Apostolic See assigns universal feasts of nine lessons, [11] and for local feasts permits the diocese to make additions, as in the proposition XVII above. And hence among all religious congregations and nations, there are few local feasts of nine lessons added beyond the universal ones, and many feasts of three lessons. [13]

But today the friars observe the feast days of all their saints and the major octaves with nine readings, and none with three. As a result of this observance there is continuous disorder in their use and a great confusion caused by the feasts transferred from Sundays and during Octaves. [14] For out of any six places or persons that observe their use, hardly two observe the same nine-reading feast on the same day. [15] Therefore, they rarely say Matins. [16] They rarely observe the Seven (Penitential) Psalms [17] and other ferial practices, they entirely neglect Sacred Scripture in their office, [18] and they often omit the Office of the Dead. [19]

From a Book of Hours written in 1533, the Resurrection of Lazarus at the beginning of Vespers of the Dead. (Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Ms-640 réserve)

(c) Confusion of the local and universal calendars: Adoption of local Roman feasts outside Rome.

Further, the Apostolic See desires proportion (between local and universal feasts). Rome observes the (feasts of the) holy Roman Pontiffs and other local feasts of the Holy City; in the same way, others should observe their own local saints in their own local uses. Just as in Rome they are not held to observe our local saints, so neither are we held to observe theirs. But the Friars, contrary to this general custom, which is tacitly approved by this See, have added local Roman saints to their rite, such as Hyginius, Anicetus, Soter, Pius, Cletus, Marcellus, Eleutherius, John, Felix, Silverius, Anacletus, Victor, Innocent, Evaristus, Pontianus, and Melchiades, all Roman pontiffs; the same for Anastasius the martyr on St. Vincent’s day, whose monastery is situated beyond St. Paul’s; Gilbert the Confessor from England, and the Forty Holy Martyrs of Armenia, who have their church near the Colosseum; the Apparition of St. Michael of Apulia; the Martyr Elmo of Gaieta; Rufina and Secunda, virgins and martyrs of the Lateran; Nabor and Felix of Milan; Symphorosa with her seven sons, martyrs from Tivoli; Pastor, priest and confessor, who was a companion of Praxedes and Pudentiana, Roman virgins; Susanna, virgin and martyr, who has a church near the Baths (of Diocletian); the twelve brothers martyrs on St. Giles’ day, where Urban IV ordered that Giles be celebrated as a nine-lesson feast; Cerbonius, bishop of Populonia; Tryphon and Respicius, martyrs, whose church is held by the Augustinians; the feast of (Our Lady of) the Snows; the dedication of the three major basilicas; and Sabas the Abbot, whose abbey is located beyond the church of St. Alexis. It is remarkable that none of the aforesaid Roman feasts have propers in the Gregorian Office, which may be evidence that generally they were not celebrated.

Besides what we have just mentioned, in various other calendars of the churches of the city, I have seen other Roman Pontiffs and saints celebrated in many places, as feasts of nine or three lessons, whom the Friars have omitted. In the ancient calendars of the city, moreover, though many local saints are assigned feasts of nine lessons, I have seen very many saints assigned only three lessons. In this, the books of the Friars Minor have been deficient from the beginning, for they did not note which saints are assigned nine lessons, so that they could observe all the others under three lessons. [20] Some of their books, which they admittedly do not use today, assign at most four or six saints’ feasts of three lessons, so that all the others are kept as feasts of nine lessons. And in this regard they oppose all other religious congregations and nations. But about this confusion regarding feasts of nine lessons I have written sufficiently in Proposition XVII above.

The Apostolic See has ordered local custom to be observed on feast days of saints, but the Friars observe the contrary in the feasts of the aforementioned saints, as we noted in Proposition XVII.

Further, if the Friars observe the feasts of their own order’s saints with major octaves, such as Francis, Anthony of Padua, and St. Clare, who are not found in the Roman office, when do they not leave the Romans some of their own local saints that the Franciscans are not bound to celebrate?

(d) Invention of a “Common of Saints.”

For the saints who have proper masses, Blessed Gregory wrote down in the Liber Gradualis and the Missal [21] the proper chants, epistles, and gospels to be observed on their days. Whenever these are repeated, he referred users to other pages, as the seculars’ books often do. The Friars’ books, however, contain a sort of mish-mash Common the Saints, composed from scratch by collecting all the introits by themselves, then the other parts by themselves. [22] Further, they have omitted the temporal and ferial Epistles and Gospels that are contained in Roman books. [23] They have also neglected to include genuflexions and many other ancient ceremonies, perhaps because they are not observed in the pope’s chapel. [24]

(f) Imposition of the Franciscan Office in Rome. [25]

Another point to be considered is the fact that Pope Nicholas III, a Roman from the family of the Orsini, who began his reign in the year of our Lord 1277 and constructed a palace at St. Peter’s, ordered the Antiphonaries, Graduals, Missals, and 50 other ancient office books to be removed from the churches of the city, and ordered that henceforth the same churches would use the Books and Breviaries of the Friars Minor, whose rule he also confirmed. This is why all the books in Rome today are new and Franciscan.

(g) Disappearance of the ancient chant notation.

Likewise, the ancient form of chant notation that is used by the Ambrosians and Germans, along with many other ecclesiastical observances, has been banished from the City. [26]

(4) Conclusion

Therefore, with regard to the Divine Office, we will observe the order of the Holy Roman Church if, disregarding the use of the Friars, we follow the sacred canons, authentic Scriptures, and the more universal local customs (consuetudines locorum generales) and, in points of doubt, the more ancient ones. And in other particulars let us follow the proportion mentioned above in the section on local saints.

NOTES:

[1] Translation from the edition printed in Magna Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, vol. 10, 1149A–1151D (Paris, 1654).

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“What Were They Smoking?”: On Liturgical Art from the 1970s

My liturgical library contains two types of books: ones that I look at because they are beautiful, edifying, or full of wisdom and piety; and ones that I keep precisely because they are the opposite. As I once said to a friend, “You need to know what people were thinking when they destroyed the liturgy. We can make all the guesses we want, but if we don’t actually read the authors of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, we won’t be able to get into their mindset and see what makes them tick.” In this latter category of my library would be such recently added gems as the collection of essays Secular Priest in the New Church (Herder and Herder, 1967), George McCauley’s Sacraments for Secular Man (Dimension Books, 1969), and Leonardo Boff’s Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments (a translation of a 1975 book). Boff’s book is notable for the coffee cup, hunk of bread, and burnt-out cigarette on the cover, which allude to the chapter “My Father’s Cigarette Butt as Sacrament.”

Among these peculiar treasures is a smallish fake-leather-covered red book called The Sunday Missal, first published in 1975 by Collins in London. Here it is, in all its faded glory:

The book opens with a hauntingly melancholy Preface by the long-suffering John Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, well known to traditionalists for his correspondence with Evelyn Waugh, in which he repeatedly stated that the liturgical reforms were just about over -- right when they were going to get worse and worse. Heenan’s Preface is pathetic, as he palpably longs for a better past and half-hopes that this missal will half-match up to it:

The Introduction, while not heretical (unlike the original version of the General Instruction that was hastily rewritten after the Ottaviani Intervention), nevertheless displays the same sort of “theology lite” that was and still is characteristic of the post-conciliar period. Characteristically, “eucharist” is not capitalized. Jesus gives himself “under the eucharistic signs of bread and wine to be the life and food of the community.” (This could be straight from Boff, incidentally.) “When the priest greets the people with the words ‘The Lord be with you,’ he is stating a fact -- the Lord is with his people as they gather to celebrate the eucharist.” Curious how a blessing in the subjunctive has turned into a declarative statement. The second paragraph is actually pretty Tridentine. The third paragraph apologises for the length and number of the readings. In the fourth paragraph we see the conciliar tricolor waved from the barricades as the old city smoulders below: “The more the people enter into the mystery of the eucharist by conscious, active, and fruitful participation, the more they grow in holiness.”

The real wonders begin when we start to see the block prints that are, it is to be believed, meant to depict in graphic form the wonderful liberating energy, the controlled chaos as of split rocks, and the implicit but nearly emergent parousia brought to the People of God by the renewed rites.

Since the art speaks for itself, no more words are necessary. Enjoy!

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The Fixity of Liturgical Forms as an Incentive to Prayer and Lectio Divina

Catholics who assist at the traditional liturgy of the Church quickly come to love one monumental fact about it: its stability, regularity, constancy. With a few exceptions due to local calendars or unannounced votive Masses, one can come to any usus antiquior liturgy and know within moments which Mass in the missal is being celebrated—and then know, with certainty, exactly how that Mass will unfold for the remaining half-hour or hour, since everything is fixed in place.

What a consolation to know that the celebrant is not being asked to exhibit the state of his mind in extemporaneous remarks, or his pastoral judgment in choices between this or that prayer! The Mass is simply the Mass—older, greater, stronger, and steadier than any of us mere mortals, and we gratefully submit ourselves to its lofty spiritual pedagogy and accumulated wisdom. We are not the drivers but the passengers. The driver is Christ our Lord, and never once in the liturgy (except perhaps in the homily) are we confronted with a jarring disjunct between the principal celebrant and His intelligent instrument.

People who have practiced lectio divina know that it benefits from the slow assimilation of a chosen text. One must mortify the desire to read too much or to skip all over the place. One often has to re-read and re-read a passage before it penetrates the mind. In just the same way, the great strength of the one-year lectionary contained in the traditional Missale Romanum is that it affords the worshiper time to absorb a certain set of luminous biblical passages, extremely well chosen for their liturgical purpose. Meeting these texts repeatedly, one puts them on like a garment, or assimilates them like food and drink. One begins to think and pray in their phrases.

What happens with the lectionary happens, in turn, with the entire liturgy. The fixity of the usus antiquior from top to bottom, from collect to postcommunion, from Psalm 42 to the Prologue of John, faciliates a liturgical lectio divina that can range over the words of the entire missal, in both its repeated (Ordinary) and changing (Proper) parts.

To have the light and warmth of contemplation, you first need the fire of prayer; to fuel prayer, you need the wood of meditation; and to have meditation, there has to be reading. Reading presupposes something fixed and stable to be read, internalized, remembered, pondered. Any improvisation at this level, or any overwhelming quantity of text or a constantly changing text, will tend to thwart the slow and steady building of memory, the shaping of the imagination, and the fertilizing of the intellect. If you throw too much wood on the fire, you put it out. If the wood is green, the fire smokes. And if there is no kindling and no match, the fire can’t be started.

All of these things have to be in place: the right ingredients in the right order, with the right proportions and the right timing. Fifteen hundred years of slow and highly conservative liturgical development produced the right content, the right order, the right proportions, and the right timing. Because the new liturgy has vastly more content and the way things play out is subject to the choices of celebrant and musicians, the proportion of parts is quite malleable and liable to enormous imbalance, and the pacing or feel of the liturgy is not comfortingly invariable and focused.

This, then, is the fundamental problem with praying the new liturgy: it is too pluriform, too gigantic, and too mutable to sustain a meditative or lectio divina engagement with the texts, chants, and gestures. One cannot simply surrender to it and take on its own identity, since the wills and intellects of various secondary agents are too much in play, making its identity like the chameleon’s color. “Will the real Novus Ordo please stand up?”

In the traditional liturgy, the daily stability of the Mass and its relatively limited selection of readings, together with the recurrence of the psalms in the weekly cursus of the Divine Office, strongly supports a liturgical lectio divina that is decisive in deepening the spiritual life of clergy and laity. In particular, one profits from the immensely powerful correlation of the antiphons and readings of the Office with those of the Mass.[1] It would be hard to deny that there are correlations between the character of the revised liturgical books, the customary crowd-oriented ars celebrandi, the lack of ascetical-mystical life among so large a part of the clergy, and the shallowness, if not heterodoxy, of preaching. All these things reinforce one another; there is little to oppose them from within the form of the liturgy itself.

Moreover, the overwhelming fixity of traditional liturgical forms makes the times when there are differences in the prescribed liturgy so much more striking. The omission of Psalm 42 and the doxologies during Passiontide makes us feel we are being stripped and humiliated with Christ. The dona eis requiem of the Agnus Dei at the Mass for the Dead reminds us (as do so many other details of the Requiem Mass) that we are offering up our prayers for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed and not thinking of ourselves.[2] One thinks of the rare times in the year when genuflections are called for during the course of a Tract or a Gospel, such as during the octave of Epiphany or during Lent[3]; one thinks of the peculiarities of the Divine Office on All Souls or in Holy Week—examples are numerous. These changes in an otherwise monolithic and highly determined pattern can be shattering in their psychological effect. It is like a great composer who knows how to use a touch of sharp dissonance that makes the prevailing consonance all the more powerful, or a great painter who adds a touch of bright red to an otherwise subdued canvas. The old liturgy shows a masterful grasp of how human psychology works.

The same rationalistic instinct that multiplied the quantity of texts also abolished almost all such unique features and differentiations, so that there was a simultaneous flattening of rites into uniformity and an uncontrolled expansion of material in the lectionary and missal. Sadly, we can note that both the uniformity and the expansion are characteristic of industrial methods of mass production. Indeed, the word “mass” in contemporary English has two meanings: the density of matter and a widespread group of similarly-minded individuals. The modern Mass exhibits excess of material as well as a democratic leveling of difference within that material. This phenomenon has been demonstrated with regard to the revised lectionary, which, although many times larger than the old one-year lectionary, nevertheless contains less of the total breadth of Scripture’s actual message because of its studied avoidance of any passages that could “offend” or be “misunderstood.”[4]

But we have reason today to be of good cheer, for these problems are more and more widely acknowledged, and the only sensible solution to them—the restoration of the fullness of traditional Catholic worship—is gaining ground, even in spite of semi-official resistance. What will happen when the last barriers fall down is not difficult to predict. The traditional liturgy—both the Missale Romanum and the Divinum Officium—is ideal for the life of prayer to which we are all called by God, and to which our baptism invisibly impels us. As a locus of lectio divina, the classic Roman rite stirs us to ponder and linger over particular phrases of Scripture or particular liturgical prayers hallowed by tradition and to make them the basis of a most fruitful meditation and preparation for Holy Communion. It will continue to gain ground, one prayerful soul after another, one seminarian, priest, or bishop at a time, one altar and parish to the next.


NOTES

[1] I speak here from personal experience. Although I had already attended the usus antiquior Mass and had fallen in love with it at Thomas Aquinas College, I really came to know it well when, at the International Theological Institute in Austria, I was able to attend a daily 6:00 am Low Mass for several years—something, alas, that has not been possible for the past 10 years, and how I miss it! Going through that cycle day by day profoundly formed me and won my heart and mind over completely to the old prayers and calendar. I believe it would do the same for any serious Catholic who was given the grace of such consistent exposure. Later on, as I began to pray the old Divine Office, the connections were a cause of continual delight and strengthened my life of prayer. I know that a similar discovery happened for the monks of Norcia years ago when they finally saw that there was too much of a disjunct between the monastic office and the Novus Ordo Missae. In order to achieve an internal “reconciliation” of all their daily prayer, they chose the Vetus Ordo, albeit retaining an openness to celebrating the Novus Ordo when assisting local clergy or certain groups of pilgrims.

[2] This in contrast to post-conciliar funerals and Masses for the dead, which are almost entirely focused on the living who are present, due to the assumption (often stated explicitly) that the deceased requires no prayers and is already rejoicing with all his friends and relatives in heaven. The traditional Requiem Mass in a severe manner orders the entire service to the benefit of the deceased soul, which is no doubt why it was particularly loathed by the reformers, both in the 16th century and in the 20th.

[3] As I noticed in my article “In Defense of Preserving Readings in Latin”: “Among the most moving and beautiful signs of the latreutic or adorational function of the readings in the usus antiquior are those times in the course of the liturgical year when the priest, ministers, and faithful genuflect during the reading of the Gospel at a passage that narrates some reality that cries out for the total response of the believer, in body and soul. Thus, on Epiphany and during its octave, when the priest reads or chants that the Magi fell down and worshiped the Christ-child, he, and everyone with him, bends the knee in silent adoration. In Lenten Masses the priest kneels at the Tract Adiuva nos; on the second Passion Sunday, the Finding of the Holy Cross, and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, at the Epistle (‘ut in nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur’); and on a number of other occasions, such as at the third Mass of Christmas, when the Prologue of John is read; at the end of the Gospel for Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent (Jn 9:1-38); during the Alleluia before the Veni, Sancte Spiritus sequence; and at votive Masses of the Holy Spirit, the Passion of the Lord, and Deliverance from Mortality.”

[4] See my article “A Tale of Two Lectionaries: Quality versus Quantity” and the further references given there.

Missals from Silverstream Priory (4): A Defaced Missal from the Post-Conciliar Revolution

In our series of missals from the library of the Benedictine Monks of Perpetual Adoration, we have so far looked at magnificent works of art from the 20th century (Maria Laach, Regensburg) and from the 18th century (the Augustinians).

Today, instead of basking in beauty, we will come face to face with the diabolic disorientation of the Church in the mid- to late 1960s, when prayers and practices of half a millennium’s duration or longer were being discarded and burned like so much chaff. Not even the Roman Canon, that ancient pristine shrine of Romanitas, was safe from this barbarian appetite for conquest, this insatiable lust for violating the sacred under the guise of “simplification” and “modernization.”

Too much kissing!

It is not surprising, in fact, that this massive appetite for cultural destruction paralleled the sexual revolution, and that the same generation of radicals that was dismantling the liturgy was also leaving the consecrated celibate life in droves and favoring so-called “liberation” of the id or the libido. As Augustine pointed out in The City of God, power among fallen human beings, without the grace of God, is exercised as libido dominandi, the lust for domination.

In the liturgical sphere, this took the form of standing in arrogant judgment over centuries of the most holy practices of faith and laying profane hands on a sacred inheritance, following the principle (if it can be called a principle) of “might makes right.” In the sphere of religious life, it took the form of abandoning the choral office and high Mass, casting off habits and veils, diluting constitutions, softening rules, and losing one’s supernatural identity by amalgamation with secular social work and civil rights. The so-called “superiors” who guided the process were guilty of the same libido dominandi as the liturgical revolutionaries, and left in their wake a similar post-nuclear desolation.

What was important for the Catholic radicals of the mid-twentieth century was to shatter, bit by bit, the taboo of an untouchable liturgy, an object of collective veneration transmitted from generation to generation.[1] They started by messing with the existing prayers and rubrics, as if to say: “See what we can get away with! We haven’t been struck dead by lightning yet. You see now that all these things must be merely human inventions; we can do as we please. Suppress or invent rubrics; omit, rearrange, bawdlerize, or make up new texts; throw out the entire aesthetic of ‘awe’ and replace it with one of ‘brotherhood’ or ‘caring community’ — we must do all this and more, quickly, before our game’s called and our time’s up.” Their eventual success, more complete than they could ever have dreamed at first, is a remarkable testimony to the limits to which Divine Providence permits evil, in order to demonstrate His power in bringing forth good from it and in spite of it, as the phoenix rises from the ashes.

To me, a poignant sign of that Providence is the fact that Catholics are returning in growing numbers to the use of just those liturgical books that were placed on the butcher’s block half a century ago, and are now praying those very prayers that were canceled out and pasted over. The Benedictines have a motto: Succisa virescit — cut down, it grows back again. It’s a variation on one of the oldest sayings of all: sanguis martyrum semen christianorum. Perhaps there is a special fruitfulness in the blood that, over the centuries, so many priests and faithful have shed (literally or metaphorically) as their Catholic worship was attacked by iconoclasm, be it of the Byzantine, Protestant, or Modernist variety.

The movement to recover and restore Catholic worship cannot be eradicated. That has been tried and it failed. It can be cut down by persecution or lack of support, but its roots remain and the new growth will be taller and stronger.

Below are additional photos from this melancholy "interimized" missal.

NOTE

[1] Before you write in the comments that the liturgy has never been untouchable and that there have been countless little changes down through the centuries, pause for a moment and ask yourself whether it is likely that I am unaware of this fact. What I am talking about is a general attitude of conservatism and respect for the liturgical rites, such that even archaic elements whose function or meaning may no longer be clear to us (or may have acquired a different, allegorical meaning over time) are jealously preserved. The trend was almost always towards retaining what had been added over the centuries; and certainly the magnitude of the modifications from the 1950s and 1960s has nothing remotely like it in the entire history of the Catholic Church.

A comparison of two similar missals -- one defaced, one unharmed

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Missals from Silverstream Priory (3): Augustinian Missal of 1716

One of the oldest missals, if not the oldest, that the Benedictine Monks of Perpetual Adoration at Silverstream Priory have in their possession is this lavish volume from 1716, the title page of which clearly proclaims that it is a Roman Missal with all the feasts proper to the order of Augustinian hermits.

As is typical with books of this period, the artwork is monochromatic, while the text features red rubrics (that’s a redundancy of course!) and red capitals. The book is in excellent shape given that it is exactly 300 years old.

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Missals from Silverstream Priory (2): Regensburg

For an explanation of this series, see this article from last week.

Today, we will look at a German altar missal.

Unfortunately, I did not record the date of this particular missal printed in Regensburg by the famous publisher Friedrich Pustet, but judging from the artistic style and the use of color printing, it is likely from the 1920s or 30s. (It certainly must predate the dogmatic definition of the Assumption, for reasons that will become clear later.)

This missal takes the prize for the largest number of thematic drawings I have ever seen in any altar missal. An incredible attention to detail governs every page, with capitals illuminated in reference to the particular day of the liturgical calendar rather than generically styled.

There is a luxuriant creativity at work here, perhaps at times distracting and whimsical, but full of vitality and boldness, that bespeaks a laudable desire to produce a new work of art rather than merely regurgitate past conventions. I cannot show all of the artwork (I took about 150 photos of this missal!), but the selection below will give a good sense of this missal’s uniqueness.

I wonder: Could we ever commission another such missal, where every saint had his or her proper emblem, where each solemnity was graced with an illumination? Perhaps one day, in better times, it will happen again -- once we are no longer fighting about such arcane questions as whether sacramental marriage is between one man and one woman for life, or whether it is permissible to murder unborn humans (or to elect officials who think it is). We need a little Pax Romana first. But I digress...

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Missals from Silverstream Priory (1): Maria Laach Altar Missal of 1931

In my family’s week-long visit to Silverstream Priory this past July — a visit that I can only describe as a time of profound grace for me, my wife, and our children[1] — my son Julian and I (not too surprisingly) spent a fair amount of time in the library of the good monks. Like the best libraries in the world, this one is not large in number of volumes but prizes quality over quantity. In addition to books of theology and spirituality, the shelves house a treasure-trove of monastic and liturgical literature. Of this genre, we were particularly impressed with the altar missals we found, and photographed many pages from them:

My plan is to share, over time, pictures of the very best of these missals, to show the kind of care and artistry that used to be invested in books for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,[2] to rejoice in their wonderful aesthetic qualities (which ought to be imitated and revived), and to document this piece of liturgical history, which is quickly being forgotten as the decades inexorably pass by. My commentary will be minimal; the pictures can speak for themselves.

Today's featured missal is a magnificent altar missal published in 1931 under the auspices of the Benedictine monastery of Maria Laach, which, as many will recognize, played an important role in the early phase of the Liturgical Movement. When we look at this missal, we see a number of noteworthy features. First, its artwork, though based on traditional models, is distinctively modern; it can be taken as an example of "the Other Modern."[3] Second, the craftsmanship is impeccable, sturdy, meant to last for centuries. Third, the content of the missal, its age-old prayers, is treated with what might be called artistic reverence: initials are beautifully decorated, texts are laid out thoughtfully and proportionately, and the images, where they appear, are bold and refreshing. It shows the original Liturgical Movement's deep love for the Church's traditional liturgy -- that is, the actual inheritance of our rite, instead of the thought experiments of innovators -- and the desire to rediscover it, re-present it to a new generation as the treasure it is and will always be.

The preface by Abbot Ildefons Herwegen

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