An Important New Online Resources: Dom Lentini’s Te Decet Hymnus

My colleague Matthew Hazell has uploaded to archive.org a scan of an important resource for the study of the reform of the Divine Office, Dom Anselmo Lentini’s book Te decet hymnus: L’innario della “Liturgia Horarum”. Dom Lentini (1901-89), a monk of the abbey of Montecassino, was the head of the coetus (subcommittee) that reformed the Office hymns, and this book is the official account of their work.

The bulk of the book is taken up with the hymns themselves, with information on the author and date of each one, if known, or if not, an estimate at least of the period in which it was composed. In the cases where hymns are excerpts from longer ones, it indicates which strophes of the original text are used. (This is not by any means an innovation of the reform.) It also indicates where relevant, some of the other which breviaries had the hymn in their repertoire, i.e. Dominican, Premonstratensian etc. Prior to the internet age, the tools for researching other medieval breviaries were very limited, and so this information is certainly useful, but far from comprehensive. There are also many bibliographical references to scholarly collections of hymnography in which the original texts have been collected, such as the Analecta hymnica.

There is also detailed information about the changes which were made to the hymns for various reasons. I have often referred to these changes in articles that I have written here, and my favorite adjective to describe them is “cack-handed”. As with the rest of the liturgy, the hymns were subjected to an aggressive campaign of ideological censorship, based on the Bright Ideas of the members of the each coetus as to what Modern Man™ could bear to hear in his prayers. So for example, all references to fasting in Lent are replaced by “abstinence” or something similar.

There is a common notion that the Liturgy of the Hours undid Pope Urban VIII’s classicizing reform of the Latinity of the hymns, and reverted to the original texts. This is largely true, but not entirely so. In addition to imposing the aforementioned ideological censorship, Dom Lentini also “corrected” many metrical irregularities, and changed unusual words. Many of these changes are well made, but many of them were unnecessary, and together, they have the unfortunate effect of homogenizing the hymns.

Lastly, I note that the non-Latin text (all the notes, the prenotanda etc.) is in Italian, but I hazard to guess that at least the more basic notes are simple enough as to be intelligible to those who know some Latin, or one of the other Romance languages.

Update for RSS Feed Users

Some readers who follow NLM through its RSS feed have been reporting a lack of article updates since September 22, so here is a technical update for them.

On that day, Google disabled its old “feedburner” services, one of which was that RSS feed.  But the feed is still also available under this link: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/feeds/posts/default, so if you use that URL instead, you should be able to get the latest articles as usual.

Users who are already on this newer RSS link probably did not have any interruption in service, and don’t need to make any changes.

I’m adding an RSS icon with the same link in the right-hand column:  

New Resources to Restore the ’54

Last year, we published notice of Mr Nicholas Morlin’s book A Sacristan’s Guide to the Traditional Roman Rite, which covers all of the major things a sacristan needs to know to properly prepare for the celebration of the traditional rite: vessels, veils and vestments, and the use of liturgical colors; other ceremonial items; the altar; the furniture in the sanctuary, with notes for particular ceremonies. There is also a section on the specific events of the whole liturgical year, based on the customs of the Roman Rite before the pre-Conciliar changes (folded chasuables, old Holy Week etc.); the celebration of the other Sacraments, the Divine Office and Benediction. The book is now available in an updated hardcover edition which includes every single Pontifical Ceremony (Vespers, Mass, Consecration of a Church, Imposition of Relics etc.) in its pre-55 version, new illustrations and diagrams, sacristy and sanctuary preparations for functions in the Dominican Rite, and an English translation of the Clementine Instruction for the 40 Hours Devotion.

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/nicholas-morlin/a-sacristans-guide-to-the-traditional-roman-rite/hardcover/product-y6keq8.html?page=1&pageSize=4

His Excellency Bishop Athanasius Schneider writes: “The worldwide rediscovery of the riches of the traditional Latin liturgy, especially in its older (pre-1955) form, has brought about the need for adequate handbooks. The present guide is intended specifically for sacristans who play a usually unseen but nevertheless vital role in preparing for the ceremonies and ensuring that all is done in accordance with the best principles, customs, and authorities. I warmly commend this text and hope that it will bring further beauty to the liturgy and greater glory to God.”

Our own Dr Peter Kwasniewki provided the foreword for this book, in which he writes, “With plentiful experience of the classical Roman Rite at his disposal, Nicholas Morlin has done us all a service by creating the present guide as to how these liturgical ceremonies should be prepared. I thank him for his effort and express my hope that this work will come in handy at places where the traditional liturgy is the norm as well as those that are yet to experience the solemn beauty of the classical Roman Rite. ... As we see a younger generation stepping forward to embrace their inheritance as Catholics, we can offer up thanks to Almighty God that He who inspired our great liturgical tradition to begin with will not in the end abandon it, but will keep it alive in the hearts of believers, and in their churches. This guide will play its modest part in reversing the amnesia and indifference that have called down wrath upon our sanctuaries, and counts as a step towards that long-overdue restoration of right and worthy worship, by which we give to God that which befits His nature and our needs.”

In the same vein, the Restore the ’54 website has just recently begun publishing a daily ordo, which gives all the basic indications for both the Mass and Office, and have also added a useful comparison table of all the changes instituted in the later 1950s. We are sure many of our readers will find this an extremely helpful resource; multa ceciderunt ut altius resurgerent.

An App for Those Learning to Sing the Chants of the Church

Here is an app for Android or iPhone to help people learning the chants of the Mass, which I found on the Google Play store: Mass Propers for the Proper of Seasons, in both the Ordinary Form and Extraordinary Form; some propers for major feasts and solemnities; most commons for both the OF and EF; the Latin Kyriale, including all 18 traditional Masses and 6 Creeds; some Marian antiphons (simple and solemn forms) and a smattering of other antiphons and hymns.

It is produced by the Oblates of St Joseph, who certainly deserve a mention for producing such a helpful device which costs only $2.99. They promise more to come, and invite people to let them know what to add. With that in mind, I had an app called iChant which seems to be defunct now, and which allowed me to tap notes from a Gregorian scale relative to the note do, the pitch of which I could change to suit my own voice. Perhaps you could introduce this feature too, Oblates of St Joseph if you’re reading?

With this app you can listen to the melodies of the chants, adjusting speed and pitch, and stop and replay sections of each chant repeatedly. The viewing settings seemed to be convenient for use on my Android; I was able to change settings easily, zooming in, zooming out. There is a great search function that allows for search by name, or by entering words or phrases from the body of texts.

Square Note plays through the notes when you tap the screen, beginning at any note on the score, which you tap. The sound is in a clear, (if rather anemic) electronic tone, but putting that aside I can see it improving my accuracy in singing the chants.

What it would not do is help with the interpretation of the notes once you know them, so for that I would probably refer you to Corpus Christi Watershed. I see the two resources as complementary.

I can imagine some questioning the value of learning from a device like this. I have sung in choirs where learning from libraries of recorded chants - such as this or Corpus Christi Watershed - is frowned upon, as it is felt that it would undermine the ability to sight-read scores.

In response to this, my thought is that in the ideal, chant is primarily an oral and aural tradition. It is best learned, therefore, by standing next to someone who knows how to do it and listening to them repeatedly. This is what would happen in a monastery for example. The first grasp of the memory is of the sound of the chant, not the pattern of the notes as they appear on a printed page. The score then becomes a secondary aide-memoir. Oral transmission as a method of passing on a tradition lends it breathing space - it is through the potential for slight imprecision that you will get gradual changes in accord with the broad principles that define what chant is.

If written scores are the primary method of transmission, which is the condition that existed when the scholars of Solesmes began to resurrect the ancient chants of the Church in the 19th century, then it is frozen in time. The scores should reflect what is sung well, rather than the other way around. These technological aids are in fact helping us, at least in part, to move towards an ideal of learning by listening, and are therefore more traditional in method than that of relying solely on the ability to sight-read.

As an example of this idea: when I was learning chants at the church I go to now, the pastor encouraged me to listen first to home-made recordings of a cantor he knew well. Only then, he said, once I was familiar with the sound of it, should I look at the score. Wherever the two were at variance, he told me to go with the cantor, not the score. That seems about the right balance to me. It could, of course, also go wrong, since it relies on the good judgment of the pastor to recognize the cantor’s expertise of the cantor, but that is a risk worth taking. The alternative is a sterile, fossilized tradition that will wither on the vine as it almost did before.

As ever, I will read any views readers have on this topic with interest!

New SoundCloud Page for Audio of Dr Kwasniewski’s Lectures and Interviews

For a number of years, readers have been asking me to make available video and audio files of my lectures and interviews. This is indeed something I have wanted to do, but there are two limitations: one is my technological ineptitude, and the other is the need for planning in advance to have recordings made at events, which doesn’t always happen.

Nevertheless, over the past couple of years, a good many such recordings have in fact been made, so I finally created a dedicated SoundCloud page on to which most of them have now been uploaded (and more will be added). Below, I have listed the content currently available. I encourage you to explore and to recommend the site to others who appreciate audio content. All of the files are freely downloadable.

In no particular chronological or topical order:

“Beyond Smells and Bells: Why We Need the Objective Content of the Usus Antiquior” (Minneapolis lecture, November 13, 2019)

“What Happened in the Liturgical Reform? And Why Does It Matter?” (OnePeterFive Podcast, June 2017)

“The Growing Popularity of the Latin Mass — and Troubles People Have With It” (Interview on Laymentality, November 23, 2019)

“Gregorian Chant: Exemplary Music for the Catholic Liturgy” (Sacred Liturgy Conference, Spokane, WA, May 29, 2019)

“Against Memoricide: The Importance of Preserving Liturgical Tradition” (given under the title “Dew, Tears, and Torrents: The Living Waters of Tradition,” Sacred Liturgy Conference, Spokane, WA, May 30, 2019)

“Why Catholics Must Take Culture and the Fine Arts Seriously” (Campion College, Toongabbie, Australia, April 5, 2019)

“A Short Interview on Beauty and the Art of Music” (The After Dinner Scholar, 2017)

“‘From the East to the West’: A Defense of Ad Orientem Worship” (Maternal Heart of Mary, Sydney, Australia, April 6, 2019)

“The Sacred Liturgy and the Ecstatic Orientation of Man” (Silverstream lecture, July 28, 2016)

“The Roman Canon: Touchstone of Divine Faith, Foundation of Immovable Rock” (Maternal Heart of Mary, Sydney, Australia, April 7, 2019)

“Problems and Prospects for Recovering Traditional Catholicism” (Q&A Session, Oxford, UK, October 26, 2018)

“Liturgical Obedience, the Imitation of Christ, and the Seductions of Autonomy” (Silverstream lecture, July 18, 2017)

“From the Liturgical Movement to Vatican II to the Novus Ordo” (Interview with Steve Koob, One More Soul radio program, August 2017)

“Replying to the Arguments of Modern Liturgists” (Interview with Hrvoje Juko in Norcia, Italy, July 2017)

“What’s Wrong with the New Lectionary? Why Is the Old One Better?” (Interview with Br. Andre Marie, Reconquest Episode 196, September 18, 2019)

“A Theological Review of the Amazon Synod” (Lecture at Regina Caeli, Houston, November 24, 2019)

“Question & Answer Session in Vancouver” (November 12, 2016)

“Have We Gone Liturgically Insane?” (Interview with Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., September 4, 2019, for The Catholic Current on The Station of the Cross Catholic Radio Network)

“The Words of Our Lady and the Spirit of The Liturgy” (Lecture for the Vancouver Latin Mass Society Annual General Meeting, November 12, 2016)

“Does Today’s Communion in the Hand Really Revive an Ancient Custom?” (Fr. Z podcast, November 27, 2019)

“‘Death by Verbosity’: How the Novus Ordo Drowns Us in Words” (Fr. Z podcast)

“Explaining and Defending Worship Ad Orientem” (Interview with Br. Andre Marie, Reconquest Episode 156, December 5, 2018)

*       *       *

For those who prefer video, a number of items can be found on YouTube, posted by various people and organizations; my personal YouTube channel is more heavily tilted towards sacred music, but it does have both the recent lecture on the Amazon Synod and the Minneapolis lecture listed above.

A New Gregorian Chant App

A reader has written in let us know about a new Gregorian chant app for mobile devices called Square Note, published by the Oblates of St Joseph, and available via iTunes and Googleplay. According to their website, it includes a repertoire of over 600 chants, cataloged for both the OF and EF, including Gregorian Mass propers, the Ordinary, and a variety of supplementary chants. I must admit (and Ben will bear witness to this) that I am pretty useless with technology, and I don’t actually own a device on which I could test this out; perhaps our readers can suggest in the combox whether they have used it and what they think of it.

New Web Resource : Blog for the TLM in Vietnamese

A new blog, published on both wordpress (thanhlemisa.wordpress.com) and tumblr (thanhlemisa.tumblr.com), has been created to provide information and translations of the liturgical texts of the Extraordinary Form in Vietnamese. The creator of the blog had a good deal of difficulty finding a Missal, partly because the climate of Vietnam is extremely humid, which is bad for books, and one which he did find was in very bad shape; partly because not many editions were needed or made before the Council; and partly because many Catholic books were destroyed by the Communists, or had to be gotten rid of by their owners to avoid persecution. The Ordinary of the Mass has been scanned and uploaded, and the author is continually adding the Sundays and major feasts.

Here are a few images sent in by the author. The first is of a procession during a Eucharistic Congress held at the Cathedral of St Joseph in Hanoi in 1931. Note that the priests are wearing hats in procession, since in Vietnam, it was considered shameful for a man not to wear a head-covering. (One of our quizzes was about liturgical head-coverings in China, where a similar custom prevailed.) Below that is seen another view of the same procession, with the minor semiarians at the fore, and below that, a devotional image of Christ and his Vietnamese flock.

Digital Resources for Liturgical Studies

Following my recent series of posts on the feast and octave of All Saints, I received two requests from people who wanted to know how to get their own electronic copies of the 1529 edition of the Roman Breviary, from which the sermon included in those posts (in English translation) was taken. This seemed like a good opportunity to share some information with all of our readers about some liturgical resources available to anyone on the internet.

The Breviary of 1529, which I have cited in many articles here, is available for consultation and free download in pdf format from Gallica, the digital collections website of the Bibliothèque National de France in Paris; this link will take you to it directly. From there, you can insert the names of various kinds of liturgical books in the search bar at the top of the page, and find all kinds of missals, breviaries, ancient sacramentaries etc. You can use French (missel, breviaire, sacramentaire etc.) or Latin (missale, breviarium, sacramentarium) for the search criterion. There are some really extraordinary treasures at the BnF, such as the Sacramentary made in 869-70 for use at the court of Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, from which this incredible image is taken.

The French words “livre(s) d’heures” (book(s) of hours) and the Latin “Horae” (hours) will also lead to some treasures, such as the 14th century Book of Hours, the Très Belles Heures de Notre Dame, from which this image is taken.

The BnF site also provides different views of its books, which are selected with a button on the left side of the page, below the title of the book. This is a very useful feature if you are looking for a particular kind of text or image within a book.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliotek (Bavarian State Library) in Munich also has a very large digital collection, from which one can download anything for free. (When downloading, one must declare that one is doing so for personal use and research, and not for commercial purposes.) One of the highlights is the 11th-century Reichenauer Gospel book, from which this image is taken.

This collection also includes a very large number of breviaries and missals printed in the later 15th and early 16th century, according to the uses of various German sees; not surprisingly, since movable type was invented in Germany, and followed by an explosion of new printed editions of commonly used books. (Fr Thompson noted some links to incunabula printed Dominican missals earlier this year.)

One should know, however, that liturgical books in this era generally have few images, and are printed in different kinds of fraktur type which can be difficult to read and heavily abbreviated. For example, the words seen in this fragment of the 1529 Breviary are “ut resipiscerent a dyaboli (diaboli) laqueis, quibus capti tenebantur, et converterentur ad Christum, verum Deum, cuius fidem et cultum prosequebantur. Illi autem (quorum salutem quaerebant isti) impias manus inferunt in mitissimos agnos”.

It has to be said that the site is not quite as user-friendly as that of the BnF. Nevertheless, there is a real goldmine of stuff to be had, and not just in liturgical studies. Classicists, theologians and medievalists will find enormous numbers of books of interest by an immense variety of authors.

 Lastly, I would remind our readers that there are a huge number of liturgical books of all kinds available for free on googlebooks, such as this 1640 edition of the Ambrosian Missal.