First Issue of Sophia Press’ Benedictus (August 2021) Now Available

A surprise greeted me in my mailbox last week on July 7 (an auspicious date, to be sure): the first-ever full issue of Benedictus, the new daily Latin Mass companion published by Sophia Institute Press. This issue covers the whole month of August. Readers may recall that this initiative was announced at NLM on February 10.

My hopes were already high, given the short sample that was mailed out during Lent and the detailed advertising, but I have to say that the first issue exceeds all my expectations. It is an absolutely gorgeous publication. I will share now some photos along with brief comments. (If any of the images are blurry, that’s the fault of my bucket-o’-bolts camera; make due allowances.)

For the sake of scale (it’s a compact book that would fit in a purse or a jacket pocket, but not a pants pocket; a bit larger than Magnificat):

The two-tone artwork (black and gold) with gray shading is more elegant by far than anything I’ve seen in a missallette like this; the layout is handsome, the font easy on the eye; the meditations and features are exquisitely chosen from traditional sources, which will be one of the great benefits Benedictus bestows on its users.

First, for the layout of the Order of Mass, which is repeated with full Propers and Ordinary for each Sunday and Holy Day (so, no page turns in those cases):

 

 

 

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Sophia Press Announces Benedictus, a New Monthly Guide to the Traditional Latin Mass

Sophia Institute Press has announced a major new initiative that should be of exceptional interest to Catholics in the USA: Benedictus: The Traditional Catholic Companion. Think Magnificat, except keyed to the Tridentine Mass, making use of the Roman Breviary, and quoting from classic authors.

The dedicated website (www.praybenedictus.com) tells us what subscribers will find in each monthly booklet:

DAILY MASS COMPANION

Pray the Traditional Latin Mass, with the 1962 Missale Romanum presented in a clear and simple format. Continuous Latin and English text with reduced rubrics are included for Sundays (no page-jumping required), and complete Mass propers are offered in English for weekdays and feasts of each month.

MORNING AND EVENING DEVOTIONS

Enter the broader stream of Catholic liturgy with daily excerpts included from both Lauds and Vespers of the 1960 Breviarum Romanum, the official morning and evening hours of prayer used by traditional clergy and religious throughout the world. Excellent for family devotions, which, as a result, will synchronize better with the prayers and atmosphere of the traditional Latin Mass.

DAILY MEDITATIONS

Learn at the feet of Catholic spiritual masters each day, with devout meditations curated exclusively from saints and scholars who prayed and loved the traditional Mass, from the early Church to the early 1900s. Guaranteed to be free of soft modernism or fluffy pablum.

INFORMATIVE COMMENTARY

Dive deeper into our heritage of Faith through insightful mini-essays on the feasts and saints of the traditional calendar, as well as brief catecheses and ideas for extending a liturgical life into the home. Unlock the riches of Tradition like never before.

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“Reactive Participation”: Further Thoughts on the Missa Murmurata

In light of last week’s kerfuffle, it may be helpful to introduce to some readers a certain book that should be familiar already, but in these days of confusion, one hardly knows. Wasting no time in preliminaries, here, then, is an altar missal:

Yes, the one depicted above is black, while most extant copies are red or burgundy, but that’s an accidental difference. Here’s the title page:

This is a 1920 missal (as indicated in the mention of Benedict XV) in an edition published in New York in 1947. Classic years of the untampered-with Missale Romanum.

In this book, as in its precursors and successors (to 1962), there is a section entitled Rubricae Generales Missalis. These are the general rubrics — directions for the priest using the missal, telling him what to do and say, and how to do it and say it. Within, there is a chapter numbered XVI:

Voilà! These are the paragraphs on the parts of Mass to be said aloud or silently, as translated in my preceding post. The paragraphs with their clear content really do exist and really do govern the celebration of Mass. They are not “a personal preference,” or an attempt at quashing legitimate diversity, or a Trojan Horse for the Dialogue Mass or the Radical Liturgical Movement.

The article “The Parish Low Mass is Not a ‘Silent’ Mass” met with fierce resistance on the part of some who do not read carefully or make distinctions.

Let’s review what was said.

1. Priests should observe the rubrics of the missal.

2. This is even more the case if the rubric is designed to share the public prayer of the Church with the public.

3. It is a good thing to be able to hear the prayers of the Mass that are meant to be said or sung aloud, regardless of whether one has a daily missal to hand or not. Indeed, if one likes to follow the Proper of the Mass but happens to be sans missal, audibility becomes still more important.

And let’s review what was not said.

1. There should never be any silence at all for meditating or for praying the Rosary.

2. Everyone should be saying everything at Mass — “dialogue till you die!”

3. A silent monastic Mass is evil and should be abolished.

4. My personal preferences should be those of everyone else.

5. Everyone should have his eyes or nose glued into a hand missal.

Here are five pieces of advice for critics of the Missa recitata:

1. Learn to read the rubrics. They are quite interesting, have a rich history, and are there for a good reason. At least, this can be safely assumed until the reform, at first tipsy, later intoxicated, gets into full swing in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.

2. Abusus non tollit usum: the deformation of right principle by the reformers does not diminish the rightness of said principle. The reformers wanted the liturgy to be within the hands and hearts of the faithful. Fair enough. Then they slashed and burned the inherited liturgy, with its immeasurable treasures, and built a sleek new liturgy that reflected their modern prejudices. Bad business. The desideratum did not necessitate the disaster.

3. Slippery slope arguments are amongst the weakest. “If you think the priest should speak up, or the faithful join their prayers to the Church’s, then — then — it’s only a matter of time before you’ll want — the vernacular! and communion in the hand! and altar girls! and…” Really?

4. A Low Mass offered according to the rubrics still has plenty of silence in it. No one in the traditional movement will want to do away with the silent Canon that we all dearly love. By this time, we have learned a thing or two from the dark years of autodemolition.

Why have some people arrived at the idea that a stone-silent parish Low Mass, contra rubricas, is either ideal, or at least a form of legitimate diversity? (Again, please read carefully: I am speaking of a regular parish Mass intentionally offered in the presence of a congregation, not a monastic side-chapel Mass at 6:30 a.m. with a couple of boy scouts on their knees in the dim shadow.)

1. The Missa Murmurata was a highly useful precaution against English soldiers combing through the hedges and bogs to arrest Irish priests. Noise attracted danger.

2. The Missa Murmurata is also as remote as possible from the Novus Ordo and all its pomps and works. One gets to relish a nice chunk of quiet personal prayer, while leaving “that liturgy business” to the priest, and then one can receive Communion. In short: the ideal communion service! (And people wonder where the abuses of the postconciliar period came from? Hint: they were already in place, albeit less offensively!) This is what I call “Reactive Participation”: anything that happens to be done in connection with the Novus Ordo should never be done in the old Mass.

While skittishness about repeating the abuses that the Novus Ordo ushered in, especially the reformers’ faulty notion of what constitutes participatio actuosa, is understandable, one ought not to allow such a fear to cloud one’s judgement. Likewise, while the practice of silent Masses was prudent in Ireland under English oppression (see Mass in a Connemara Cabin by Aloysius O’Kelly) and indeed testifies to the heroic fortitude of a great Christian people under trying circumstances, it hardly constitutes an exemplar of the best we can offer to God in a time of freedom.

Priests who remember starting up the TLM again after its near extinction remember what it was like in those bumpy days. Any movement towards having the people participate, other than flipping pages and suppressing noisy kids, was met with “You don’t mean the DIALOGUE MASS, Father?” In other words, anything but Cleveland 1956 was perceived as stepping onto the slippery slope.

Now one need have no particular bone to pick with Cleveland or 1956 in order to have a fundamental objection to the notion that the public prayer of the Church should not be given to God in a public manner that the faithful themselves, if they wish, can internalize in the normal way in which speech is heard and pondered. The very texts of the old Mass are full of ageless wisdom and burning charity. [1] This is our common possession as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, and some of it — the parts codified in the rubrics under discussion — is meant to be prayed in common, in such a way that those who either have a missal or have learned Latin can follow and internalize those antiphons, prayers, and readings if they wish. Outside of individual higher states of prayer, which in any case go beyond words, people have a normal human expectation to hear and grasp the words of the liturgy. After all, it is not, as such, a private ineffable ecstasy, but a verbal sacrifice of praise.

The admiration for St. Pius X is surely well-deserved. It was this Pope who not only encouraged frequent communion but also urged Catholics to “pray the Mass, not merely pray at Mass.” There is more than one way to carry out this advice, and indeed, as Pius XII famously said, not even the same person always wants to pray the same way. Some days we look at a missal, other days we don’t; some days we might pray the Sorrowful Mysteries and meditate on the Crucifixion during the Canon, other days we might sit there quietly, watching, listening, silently absorbing the gestures that are themselves a sublime form of prayer. The rubrics of the Church are meant to guard and foster all these ways of participating, not to dictate only one way to the laity; and yet, allowing for slight differences, there must be a correct way for the priest to offer the Mass if our worship is not to explode into as many different liturgies as there are celebrants. This, in fact, is what the Novus Ordo has done for the Church, and we can see the fragments of faith and innocence scattered about, past all hope of recollection.

In short, there ought to be an objective stability in how Mass is offered so that the faithful know what to expect, know what Holy Mother Church is sharing with them to nourish their prayer, and can, accordingly, conform themselves to the liturgy in order to pray as best they can, in their several ways.


NOTE

[1] This is why I tend to agree with the perspective of a sermon on the use of the missal by Fr. Joseph Kreuter, OSB, printed in Orate Fratres of October 7, 1933, and reprinted at Rorate Caeli.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

Is Passivity Mistaken for Piety? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Participation

This essay will have two contrasting parts. In the first part, I will defend being a “silent spectator” at Mass, one who looks and listens, or perhaps prays the Rosary. In the second part, I will suggest that there is, in postconciliar times, a danger of bending the stick so far in this direction that one risks cultivating a habit of liturgical passivity rather than true devotion. I am confident that each part will offend a different cohort of my beloved fellow traditionalists, and I only ask in return their prayers.

Part I: Pope Pius XII subtly corrects Pope Pius XI

A recent NLM article commemorated the 90th anniversary of Pope Pius XI’s Apostolic Constitution on Sacred Music Divini Cultus, promulgated on December 20, 1928. This document has many fine passages (as the quotations in the commemorative article demonstrate.) Nevertheless, there is one phrase in section 9 that should give us pause:

In order that the faithful may more actively participate in divine worship, let them be made once more to sing the Gregorian Chant, so far as it belongs to them to take part in it. It is most important that when the faithful assist at the sacred ceremonies, or when pious sodalities take part with the clergy in a procession, they should not be merely detached and silent spectators [non tamquam extranei vel muti spectatores], but, filled with a deep sense of the beauty of the Liturgy, they should sing alternately with the clergy or the choir, as it is prescribed.

The notion that laity who sit or kneel quietly at Mass and do not vocally participate are “disengaged and mute onlookers” is something of a caricature, and the mantra-like use made of this phrase in subsequent decades of the increasingly audacious Liturgical Movement culminated in a fascist enforcement of “active participation” that numbered among its casualities the interior participation that often thrives on silence and sacred music. The majority of the faithful, even those who may be utilizing paraliturgical devotions, are still participating in the mystery of the Holy Sacrifice; following a missal word-for-word, which seemed to be the ideal of the Liturgical Movement, is not only not required, but can even be an impediment to offering up the holy oblation in peace. [1]

Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Mediator Dei contains the best treatment of participation — and of the related topics of the priesthood of the faithful and how they offer the sacrifice of the Mass in union with the priest — to be found in any magisterial document. [2] In paragraph 80 he writes:

It is, therefore, desirable, Venerable Brethren, that all the faithful should be aware that to participate in the Eucharistic Sacrifice is their chief duty and supreme dignity, and that not in an inert and negligent fashion, giving way to distractions and day-dreaming, but with such earnestness and concentration that they may be united as closely as possible with the High Priest, according to the Apostle, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2, 5). And together with Him and through Him let them make their oblation, and in union with Him let them offer up themselves.

Pius XII explains in paragraph 106 the purpose of any actions by which the faithful join in more directly with the liturgy taking place, such as following a daily missal or chanting the responses and the Ordinary — “their chief aim is to foster and promote the people’s piety and intimate union with Christ and His visible minister and to arouse those internal sentiments and dispositions which should make our hearts become like to that of the High Priest of the New Testament” — but then cautions against those who, “led away by false opinions, make so much of these accidentals as to presume to assert that without them the Mass cannot fulfill its appointed end”:

Many of the faithful are unable to use the Roman Missal even when it is written in the vernacular; nor are all capable of understanding correctly the liturgical rites and formulas. So varied and diverse are men’s talents and characters that it is impossible for all to be moved and attracted to the same extent by community prayers, hymns, and liturgical services. Moreover, the needs and inclinations of all are not the same, nor are they always constant in the same individual. Who, then, would say, on account of such a prejudice, that all these Christians cannot participate in the Mass nor share its fruits? On the contrary, they can adopt some other method which proves easier for certain people; for instance, they can lovingly meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ or perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers which, though they differ from the sacred rites, are still essentially in harmony with them.

This was Pius XII’s typically nuanced response to a complex situation. On the one hand, he applauded efforts made to inform and involve the laity in the actual liturgical rites — in this regard no different at all from Dom Guéranger’s purpose in writing The Liturgical Year and Explanation of the Prayers and Ceremonies of Holy Mass. [3] On the other hand, he rebuked the haughty proponents of “objective piety” who considered it wrong for Catholics to “tell their beads” during the Mass. It is as if the Pope is saying to each Catholic who assists at Mass: Pursue whatever it is that will most unite you in mind and heart to the mysteries of Christ and especially to His Sacrifice. For different people, this will take different forms; and even for the same person it will take different forms at different times.

Medieval manuscript showing layfolk at Mass.

When my son Julian interviewed Bishop Athanasius Schneider in June 2018 at the Sacred Liturgy Conference in Oregon, he asked him how the Rosary and the Mass complement one another, how they might “work together.” I was delighted to read the good bishop’s profound answer:

The Rosary is a beautiful synthesis of the entire mystery of the Incarnation, redemption, and work of salvation. And the Holy Mass is the recapitulation of the work of salvation. Christ became incarnate for what reason? To offer Himself as the Lamb of God and to offer Himself on the Cross for the salvation of humankind, and to glorify the Father. This is what it means. When we pray the Rosary, which we can pray even during Mass, we do participate very actively in the Joyful Mysteries, centered around the Incarnation — and the holy Mass is a continuation of the coming of Christ in the Incarnation, under the veils of the sacred species of bread and wine. And then the Sorrowful Mysteries, of course, they are the specific meditation of the holy Mass: they help us to contemplate the real presence of Golgotha under the sacramental veil. And then the Glorious: Christ present in the holy Host is the Risen One, the Glorified One, with His luminous wounds.
          So we have in the prayer of the Rosary a really beautiful synthesis of the entire Mass. And therefore in ancient times, those who could not read, I mean the peasants and farmers, did participate in the Mass with the Rosary. Often times after the Council, priests ridiculed these people, and humiliated them for praying the Rosary. But this is bad; it is unjust. They participated more deeply with praying the Rosary because they are meditating on what is now going on at the altar with the Rosary, the prayer of the Gospel, because the words of this prayer are of the holy Gospel.
          And so, of course, I do not want to say that we should only pray the Rosary during holy Mass, but it is a possible way of participating — not the only one, maybe not the main one, but it is legitimate. This I would say for people who have a special affinity for this.

As Pius XII said, and as Bishop Schneider beautifully explained, we should have no objection to people praying the Rosary during the traditional Latin Mass. I remember when I used to parrot the fashionable objections against such “private devotions” and “subjective piety.” But sooner or later, I learned a different lesson, thanks to my encounters with priests who say the old Mass especially slowly. This was a new phenomenon: I had so much time on my hands that I could read the propers of the Mass five times and still be left wondering what to do with myself. So I tried praying the Rosary and was surprised as how well it worked. (These “peasants and farmers” knew a thing or two! — a tough lesson for a kid who grew up in suburban New Jersey.) Or I will pray the preparatory Psalms printed in my St Andrew’s Daily Missal of 1945 — Psalms 83, 84, 85, 115, and 129 — or a Litany during the Offertory and the Canon, and often the prayer of St Ambrose or St Thomas while the priest is reciting his prayers immediately before communion. So far from detaching me as a silent spectator, all of these practices have enriched my offering of the prayer of the Mass, the prayer of Christ.

Part II: Liturgical Quietism and the Deactivation of the Laity

All this being said, however, I have noticed in some pockets of the Catholic traditionalist world a pendulum swing to an extreme opposite to outward participation and intelligent assimilation of the liturgy. I will call it a refusal to engage the liturgy at a bodily level, be this in the manner of gestures, reading, or singing; almost a taking pride in saying or singing nothing, and making as few motions as possible. There are many examples of the phenomenon; I will offer a few for consideration.

If you are literate and can follow the orations (collect, secret, postcommunion), or ponder the Epistle and Gospel, why would you not do it — at least sometimes? Why sit there and let the foreign words float over your head while you think about something else than what the liturgy is presenting to God on your behalf and with you (at least partly) in mind? Yes, it’s efficacious ex opere operato, but you can also make it your own prayer and your own meditation. It seems a perfect occasion for having the Church’s words in your soul, illuminating your mind and warming your heart. [4]

If the priest makes the sign of the cross at the start of his homily, and doesn’t himself say “Amen,” as if expecting the people to say it, why should they not say “Amen”? Yet I have seen congregations sit there, silent as stone, and never say “Amen.” Are we worried that it would be Protestant to hear the sound of our voices?

If you know the melody of Credo III and can sing it, why would you not sing it? The profession of faith is yours, too, and there’s no reason to consider it exclusively the property of the choir or schola. Congregational singing of the Ordinary is something the 20th century popes spoke consistently in favor of, and for good reason.

If you know that it’s a custom to strike your breast three times with the servers at the Confiteor, or during the Agnus Dei and the “Domine, non sum dignus,” why wouldn’t you do it? And if the faithful don’t know it, why couldn’t the priest tell them about it in a sermon? The same could be said of the many times when the priest makes the sign of the cross (“Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini…”; “Indulgentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem peccatorum nostrorum…”; “in gloria Dei Patri”; “vitam venturi saeculi”; etc.). Admittedly, many of the faithful do cross themselves at these moments, which is a beautiful custom; why should it not be universal? What about the slight bowing of the priest’s head at certain points in the Gloria and in the Creed? Such actions, for me at any rate, remind me all the more forcibly of what is being prayed and why. When bowing the head at “simul adoratur et conglorificatur,” one is aware in one’s very muscles as well as in one’s intellect that the Holy Spirit is God, deserving of latria.

When the priest turns towards us with the Blessed Sacrament, why shouldn’t we say together: “Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea”? Of all the moments in the Mass, this one seems the most appropriate for a corporate exclamation before the corporate action of processing forward for Communion.

Now, I am not suggesting (quod absit!) that rubrics be imposed on the faithful to that effect, for we have seen how harmful such regimentation has been in the sphere of the Novus Ordo. I am merely pointing out a kind of passivity among the faithful that inhibits a fuller response to the texts and motions of the liturgy. [5] For, as Hilary White insightfully put it, liturgy is “theology in motion,” and this means our motion, to the extent that it pertains to us. [6]

A friend of mine once quipped that traditional Catholics too often “dress like Amish and pray like Quakers.”

At this point many readers may be itching to accuse me in the comments of being in cahoots with the tumid Liturgical Movement, of trying to sacerdotalize the laity, of importing Novus Ordo expectations into a classical context where they do not belong, of confusing participatio actuosa with activism, etc. But all of this I have argued against elsewhere repeatedly and at great length, and nothing I am saying need be construed as implying or promoting those errors.

What I object to is a situation where there is nothing in common between the two parts of the church — the nave and the sanctuary — except that the people in each part happen to be in the same building at the same time with the same generic intention. This strikes me as a low-water mark in the practice of liturgy, and a fruitful cause of the evils of liturgical reform. The solution isn’t to change the liturgy, or to force laity to do something; the solution is that clergy and laity alike learn to know and love the liturgy as it stands, and to insert ourselves into it with our powers of soul and body. Unlike the “pastoral priests” who are bent on repeating the errors of the past, we must be intelligent supporters and sustainers of the liturgical tradition as it comes down to us.

This does require some preaching specifically on the liturgy; it requires catechesis and ongoing education. The family of St Thérèse of Lisieux read aloud Dom Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year, which formed the souls of the Martins. Lest it be thought that no one today could read such a book within the family, I happen to know of a family that did it — with about a dozen children, ranging from infants at the breast to young adults. More is possible than we tend to think possible.

I am convinced that it is too trite and simplistic to say “well, all that the priest says at the altar belongs to him, it’s his business; all the stuff the schola sings is their business; and the laity should just do their own thing.” No. The liturgy belongs to everyone in the church, because it belongs to Christ our Head. It is our common inheritance and activity. We have different offices and roles within it, but the liturgy is not like a pie divided up into different pieces that are served up to different people. It is a common good, like a philosophical truth or a theological mystery that can be equally and fully possessed by everyone at the same time. What the priest is doing and saying is also mine, albeit in a different mode. [7] When the schola sings the propers, they are my prayer, too, sung on my behalf — words that the Church places before me and within me.

It is also trite and simplistic to say “participation is interior.” Yes, it is principally interior and spiritual; as we all know, without this inner component, any amount of physical activity is useless or worse. But “principal” implies a comparison with something else that is secondary. The soul of man is primary and his body is secondary, yet you cannot have a man without both. The liturgy is a physical action and the man who participates in it is a physical being who engages with it through his bodily senses. Thus the body should be engaged as much as is consistent with the role a given person has in the liturgy. To my mind, that means not only kneeling, but also beating the breast, making the sign of the cross, bowing the head, singing the responses, and singing the Ordinary.

Ultimately the right disposition is not passivity, where we sit or kneel and otherwise keep still as if we were schoolchildren in the 1950s, afraid to call down on our heads the displeasure of the sister in charge. The right disposition is receptivity — and this means receiving not simply invisible graces but the particular goods the liturgy itself, in all its human richness, offers us.

The inscription reads: "Joseph, rising from sleep..."

NOTES

[1] In Yves Chiron’s biography of Annibale Bugnini, we learn about the latter’s radical liturgical experiments in the 1940s, where he began manipulating the liturgy for the sake of “participation.” In Bugnini’s own words: “I suddenly wondered: how could I have this people, with their elementary religious instruction, participate in the Mass? Above all, how could I make the children participate? I started out by painting big signboards with the easier responses for the people to say in Latin… Then I did the same with signposts in Italian… I knew that I had found the formula: the people willingly followed the Mass. The ‘inert and mute’ assembly had been transformed into a living and prayerful assembly” (p. 25). Note how Bugnini himself reverts to the formula of Pius XI.

[2] See sections 76 to 111. As to the common priesthood, there is no question that the traditional liturgy accentuates the one who is sacramentally configured to Christ in Holy Orders and who represents the Head of the Church within the assembly, the ekklesia. However, this would seem to cancel out the priesthood of the faithful only if one had an activistic notion of what it means to exercise this universal baptismal priesthood, which, in reality, is one of consent and self-offering.

[3] For the latter, I recommend this new edition from Angelico.

[4] I do not take into account the relatively rare situation of a layman who is so capable in Latin that he can perfectly understand what the priest is saying or singing. But a missal is still useful because often, perhaps even more often than not, issues of church architecture, acoustics, idiosyncratic pronunciation, or the speed of delivery make it difficult to follow the Latin of the priest even when it is spoken aloud.

[5] For the record: I am not a proponent of the so-called “dialogue Mass.” The kind of responses I have in mind are those that are sung during a High Mass (“Et cum spiritu tuo,” “Gloria tibi, Domine,” “Amen,” etc.) and the Ordinary of the Mass (from the “Asperges” through the final “Deo gratias”).

[6] For many examples of bodily participation in the usus antiquior, see my article “How the Traditional Latin Mass Fosters More Active Participation than the Ordinary Form,” which became the center of chapter 8 in my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness (Angelico, 2017).

[7] As mentioned above, Pius XII’s explication of this point in Mediator Dei remains unsurpassed, whatever the flaws of that encyclical may be in regard to the axiom of Prosper of Aquitaine.

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for information, articles, sacred music, and Os Justi Press.

PDF Download: The Fulton J. Sheen Sunday Missal (1961)

A GUEST POST BY JEFF OSTROWSKI

The famous Fulton J. Sheen Sunday Missal (1961) is now available for free download. Needless to say, Archbishop Sheen did not produce the Missal alone: it was a joint effort by many, especially the Jesuit priests Rev. Philip Caraman and Rev. James Walsh. However, Sheen did compose the lengthy Introduction (which every Catholic ought to read) and seems to have exercised an influence on the general contents. For example, the choice of English translations—Msgr. Ronald Knox for the Lauda Sion, Gerald Manley Hopkins for the Adoro Te, and so forth—is a clear signal of Sheen's involvement, because of his well-known admiration for those literary giants.

Download: "Part 1 of 2" : Fulton J. Sheen Sunday Missal (1961) 

Download: "Part 2 of 2" : Fulton J. Sheen Sunday Missal (1961) 

In addition to the aforementioned Introduction, Sheen's Missal has several other remarkable features. The descriptions of priestly vestments are excellent. It also includes the entire "Fore-Mass" (as Fortescue called it) alongside the readings for every feast. That choice meant printing the "Kyrie Eleison," for example, close to eighty times. Finally, certain translations employed are noteworthy, especially poetic texts like the sequences and Pange Lingua. Similar to the Campion Missal, the editors made judicious use of drop caps and went out of their way to print all the "extra" post-Pentecost Masses in addition to every feast that could ever occur on a Sunday—a tremendous help to Catholics in the pews. The date of publication (1961) is fascinating, considering what would come a year later! The pages use a single numbering system for matching Latin/English pages. Furthermore, it's nice that this book contains most of the changes of the 1962 Missal, such as the Holy Week of Pius XII and optional dialogue Masses.

This book must have been in production for many years. For one thing, it shows such elegance. The unified, lovely images (such as the Divine Pelican, often preached on by Sheen) appear to have been created specifically for this layout. In general, the book seems like an effort to make a significant contribution to Catholics' liturgical life. I mentioned earlier the distinctive translations such as: "Raise your hearts."—"They are raised to the Lord."

For myself, the most interesting part of the book is the translation used for the Pange Lingua of Fortunatus (Good Friday). Producing the Campion Missal, we spent two whole weeks searching for different translations of this magnificent hymn. Sheen ultimately decided upon a metered translation which doesn't rhyme: a truly marvelous choice.

A Traditional Missal for Young Catholics

A few years ago, I noticed that my children were ready to follow the real prayers of the traditional Latin Mass—they had long outgrown "baby missals" that have photos of the priest at the Introit accompanied by a text in big letters, like "Watch Father ascend the steps: he is going to pray to God for us," etc.—but they were also not ready to deal with a full 2,000-page missal like the Baronius or the Angelus Press.

Not being able to find anything that served this intermediate purpose, I decided to create the resource and try it out. My children used copies of it for a good while, and versions of it were passed around to families in the local community. The feedback was that it served its purpose well and should be made more widely available. I am happy to announce that A Traditional Missal for Young Catholics can be purchased from Lulu, and to help you get a better sense of what it's like, I've appended a bunch of photos.

The book is decorated throughout with beautiful artwork to help inspire and focus a child’s easily wandering attention. The artwork is drawn from a wide range of masters and chosen to match the meaning of the text, so that it can stir up piety and prayer. It offers to a child something worthwhile to ponder in the extended periods of silence during the Mass, thus forming the imagination as well as the intellect.

The booklet contains, in easy-to-read print, the fixed and unchanging parts of the Mass. It prepares the young reader for the eventual use of an adult daily missal. Many features—such as the clear indications of when the proper prayers and readings take place, so that a child, if he or she wants, may consult a parent or sibling next to them for the proper—assist the reader to follow the Holy Mass more easily and come to a deeper understanding of both its unchanging and its changeable parts. This book serves as a tool to help the parents, as the first teachers of their children in the school of the Faith, to be inspired in passing on knowledge and love of the traditional Latin Mass, as so many Catholics have done through the centuries.

Having made this book for love of the Mass and to help out parents, I've set the price as low as Lulu will allow. The relatively high cost of the book ($18.87) is entirely due to its being in full color on every page, with a total of 47 artwork reproductions.

The “Mass of the Ages” is a sign of order, beauty, sacredness, and holiness to children in the midst of our rather confused world. This booklet will help children to begin their quest of understanding the mysteries that the Church offers to them in her sacred rites. It would make a lovely Easter gift!

Here can be seen the "red box" feature that identifies any proper antiphon, prayer, or reading.

The book has prayers for the Pope and for one's Bishop at the end.

A Traditional Missal for Young Catholics may be purchased here.

The Beauty of Holiness: An Appreciation of the Campion Missal

Among my favorite verses from Saint Paul is this, in the Epistle to the Philippians:

Brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil 4:8). 

Unlike worldly men who think, speak, and act more or less as they please (to the extent that they can get away with it), Christians are supposed to live conscientiously in the sight of their heavenly Master, thinking on Him and how to please Him. Instead of thinking on what is ugly, clumsy, vile, ignoble, or vicious, they should train their minds to true doctrine, honorable principles, just deeds, pure affections, lovely and gracious ideas, images, and words. In short, they are to strive for praiseworthy excellence in all things—and that striving should, of course, extend especially to everything connected with the sacred liturgy, the very “source and summit” of the Christian life. Here, we do not, we cannot, settle for what is mediocre, slipshod, superficial, profane, or unworthy of the temple of God; we aim at the beautiful, the holy, the finely made and nobly done, as much as lies in our tradition and in our power.

These words in Philippians bring to mind a statement in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: 

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:2)

“Good and acceptable and perfect.” Is this our program for liturgical life, for sacred music, books, vestments, vessels, furnishings, architecture? Do we seek that which is good because it has the requisite qualities of holiness, artistry, and universality? That which is acceptable to the Lord because it accords with the traditions, teachings, and laws He has given us? That which is as perfect as we can make it, because it shares in that litany of attributes related in Philippians?

A comparison of the Campion Missal (Solemn Mass section)
and a popular daily missal

It is such thoughts as these, together with a compelling sense of good news that must be shouted from the rooftops, that prompt me to share with the readers of NLM my personal reaction to the Saint Edmund Campion Missal & Hymnal. I say “personal reaction” because I do not intend to offer a standard review; the content and layout of the Campion Missal have already been reviewed and discussed in a number of excellent articles, which may be found gathered here. 

My intention is to praise this book as a book that, to an unusual degree, embodies exactly what Saint Paul says to the Philippians and the Romans—to such an extent, indeed, that it should grace the shelf of every Catholic layman, deacon, priest, and bishop, and fill the pews of every church and chapel privileged with at least the Sunday celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. I would add that no Catholic bookstore or gift shop should fail to stock this book.

Why are the reviews gushing with superlatives, exclamations, and imperatives for acquisition? Why all this enthusiasm, this (as it were) sober inebriation? After all, a book is just a book, one might think, and there are several missals already in print for the usus antiquior. What makes the Campion Missal special?

A comparison of the Campion Missal (Low Mass section)
and the familiar red booklet

Let me try to say this as simply as possible: this book is a magnificent book. It is stunningly beautiful. It contains all the texts of the Mass for Sundays and Holy Days, well translated, handsomely typeset, tastefully ornamented, and lavishly illustrated. It is a treasure-trove of all that is most true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and gracious in the Roman Rite; from the first to the last page, it is a manual of liturgical, spiritual, and theological excellence, speaking and singing of mysteries and mercies and majesty, of all that is ultimately and eternally worthy of praise. And as a result, it causes one to think about these things—to ponder them long, with joy and wonder, with fear and trembling, with inward peace and consolation, with a spirit of reverence and adoration. Its greatest glory, one might say, is precisely that it humbly helps along that process of the Christian’s transformation by the renewal of his mind, turning it again and again to heavenly realities. It could have been called the Epiphany or Theophany Missal, so well does it open up vistas of meditation and prompt one to prayer.

In a world of video games and movies, sexual utilitarianism, flashy advertising and journalistic manipulation, people have a hard time understanding beauty pure and simple—beauty as a gift from God, to be welcomed and rejoiced in as part of our prayer of praise and thanksgiving to Him. The traditional Mass and sacramental rites and Divine Office are full of a transcendent spiritual beauty that brings deep joy and peace to a receptive soul, but obviously not without the participation of the body at every stage. It is precisely the aesthetic dimension, the sensuous appeal, that first captivates the mind and stirs the heart, leading the worshiper from shadows and images to mystery and truth, and back again, in an upward spiral. The external beauty of the traditional liturgy serves an evangelistic and catechetical role even as it prepares the way for a more profound internal experience of the Lord. The external and the internal are in harmony, as body and soul are created to be.

The Campion Missal layout for the Propers of the Mass:
here, Palm Sunday

Because man has both a soul and a body, it is important that the entire experience of worship be dignified, well-ordered, and beautiful, as befits its inner nature. By providing in a single book all that is or could be needed for Sunday and Holy Day Masses—the Order of the Mass, the Propers of the day, a complete Kyriale, and a generous selection of hymns—the Campion Missal facilitates a full and fruitful participation in the Mass, both interiorly (which is the most important kind of participation) and exteriorly, in all the ways called for by Holy Mother Church, in keeping with the teaching of Pope Saint Pius X and all of his successors.

The care for beauty in the Campion Missal extends to the smallest detail, and, far from being old-fashioned, has an adventurous side as well: Corpus Christi Watershed commissioned Kevin Allen, one of our most gifted composers of sacred music, to contribute several new hymn tunes for the book. Exquisitely crafted and eminently singable, with noble lyrics truly worthy of the liturgy, these new hymns stand as worthy heirs of the English hymn tradition brought to its peak by the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst almost a century ago.

(A digression on hymns: if any reader is wondering whether the Campion Missal has enough hymns in it, this would be my response. There are 151 hymns in the book—a generous number in the context of the Extraordinary Form, where hymn-singing, though it finds a legitimate place, does not have nearly the prominence it does in many Ordinary Form situations. Nevertheless, to focus on the quantity of hymns is to miss a crucially important point. Like the Campion Missal’s chief editor Jeffrey Ostrowski, I have in my personal library a large collection of traditional hymnals from the 19th century to the present, and I have found, in scanning their pages, that it is rare indeed to find a hymnal from which a discerning music director could make use of even 50% of the pieces included. The rest are just too painfully sentimental or musically inept or textually vapid or all of the above. The genius of Ostrowski is that, drawing upon his good taste as a musician and his sound theology as a traditional Catholic, he has brought together 151 of the choicest hymns—the most singable and beloved, as well as lesser known or new hymns with soaring melodies and profound texts. Whereas most hymnals are like a flea market of good, bad, and indifferent, an Ostrowski hymnal is like a satchel of precious and semiprecious stones: every item is beautiful and apt for its purpose. Hence, I would rather have the 151 choiceworthy hymns of the Campion Missal and sing every single one, than sift through 400 hymns of wildly variable musical and textual quality in hopes that I can find enough to satisfy.)

from the Low Mass section

As I draw to a close, I am afraid that my words will be inadequate for those who have not yet held and viewed and prayed with the Campion Missal and totally unnecessary for those who have already seen it with their eyes and taken it to heart. All that I can do is express my amazement that such a book has been created and published in our day and age, when so much of the print world seems to be vanishing into the internet, and so much that remains in print has declined desperately and pathetically in quality. Whoever owns the Campion Missal will find it a princely book, a golden measure for what can be done when human talent throws itself passionately into the glories of the sacred liturgy, for the glory of God. I predict that it will become a cherished, even necessary companion to every Catholic who uses it to pray the traditional Mass.

To read more about the Campion Missal, for more photographs, and for information on placing orders, go here.

A postscript: the Campion Missal is now in its second edition. The first edition had a very colorful cover and florid graphics in the center section. The second edition, while mostly the same, has a more “classic” look to it: the cover is a subdued slate gray, the Solemn Mass section more restrained and easier to follow. A handy ribbon has been added and a few typos were corrected. However, the pagination and contents of both editions are IDENTICAL in all other respects, so they are entirely compatible.