Online Resources for Papal Ceremonies

The creators of the Poland-based website Caeremoniale Romanum have contacted us to share news of a couple of important new resources which they have recently added to the site.

At the following page: https://caeremonialeromanum.com/en/caeremonialia-papalia-dykmans/, you will find links to two different works by the Belgian Jesuit Fr Marc Dykmans. The first is his four volume series, “Le Cérémoniale papale de la fin du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance (Papal Ceremony from the end of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance)”, and the second is his edition (in two volumes) of the papal ceremonial of Agostino Piccolomini (died 1495), which became the basis of all the papal rites used in the Tridentine period. Note that these are critical editions of the relevant liturgical books in the original Latin, with copious notes, prefatory and explanatory in French. There is also a link to another ceremonial from one of the manuscripts in the Vatican Library (Urb. Lat. 469), which predates just predates Piccolomini’s reform, in the edition by Mons. Joaquim Nabuco.

The frontispiece of a copy of Piccolomini’s Caerimoniale, ca. 1500. The kneeling man, whose identity is unknown, presents a copy of the book to Cardinal Georges d’Amboise; the inscription says “My Lord, on my return from Rome, I give you this book.” (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Latin 938)

The second page: https://caeremonialeromanum.com/en/sacramentaria-romana-sacramentarium-leonianum-gelasianum-gregorianum/ has links to two different editions of the so-called Leonine Sacramentary, three of the Old Gelasian, and three of the Gregorian. We have previously highlighted the editions of the first two by Leo Mohlberg, which are the most recent and up-to-date, but all the subsidiary material on both of them is in German.

As a reminder, the site also has a YouTube channel with many interesting videos of papal liturgies (and not only papal ones.) Since tomorrow marks the first anniversary of Pope Leo’s election, here is a brief one which they posted today of the three occasions in the current century (2005, 2013 and 2025) on which the papal MC pronounced “Extra omnes! - Everyone out!” before the conclaves began.

A New Holy Week Resource: Latin-English Tenebrae Booklets

A friend of mine, Mr Matthew Roth, has made some very nice new booklets for Tenebrae which include all the Gregorian chants, and a full translation in English. The text follows the Divino Afflatu reform (1911), with the music found in the Solesmes editions. They are on letter paper, and Matthew informs me that they don’t look good saddle-stitched (which tends to be too small anyway), so if the are printed out, they need to be need to be scaled for A4 if you are using A4 paper. Printer software should be able to do this easily. The files for each day may be found at these links: Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Typographical or other errors may be reported via the comments here on NLM, or this thread on the Musica Sacra forum; the PDFs will be promptly replaced, and this does not break the relevant Dropbox links.

Photo by Allison Girone

Liturgical and Spiritual Resources on New Online Platform

Readers may have noticed that I’ve been absent from NLM the past few months. That's only temporary. The explanation is simple enough: I’ve been totally absorbed, along with about a dozen other people, in the creation of Pelican+, a comprehensive traditional Catholic digital platform that combines a writers’ forum (e.g., it’s the new home of Tradition & Sanity where I publish most of my online writing), a podcast network, ebook, audiobook, and music libraries, a vault of classic prayers, family-friendly programs, documentaries, and more. All designed to be orthodox and beautiful, without any advertising, secular agendas, or hidden algorithms driving it.

Of particular interests to NLM readers, Pelican+ offers users an array of liturgical and spiritual resources to explore. I’ll share some screen shots below.

The Prayer App is the section of most obvious relevance (click on any image to enlarge — bearing in mind that on the Pelican+ app itself, all of these pages would be dynamic, allowing you to click on any of the buttons):

The categories are Prayers to Our Lord (the options go further down, but I'm limited in how much I can show in one picture):

Eucharistic prayers:

Prayers for Mass:

Prayers to Our Lady (there are a lot of these, including many versions of the Rosary):

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Online Resources: Critical Editions of the Pontificale Romanum

A friend has brought to my attention the work of the website Caeremoniale Romanum, which is based in Poland, and also has a wonderful archive of films of old liturgies on its YouTube channel. They have recently made available scans of some important works for the study of the Roman liturgy, scans of critical editions of the Pontificale from two different periods, which may be accessed at this page: https://caeremonialeromanum.com/en/pontificalia-romana-andrieu-dykmans-vogel/. The first is in three volumes, and the second in four.

The ordination of a bishop, depicted in a Roman Pontifical of the later 15th or 16th century.  

The first of these is the theoretical reconstruction of the so-called Pontificale Romano-Germanicum, from the 10th century, a work begun by Cyrille Vogel and completed by Reinhard Elze, and based in no small part on the earlier research of Michel Andrieu. This work as reconstructed would represent the watershed transformation of the primitive Roman Pontifical, done at the abbey of St Alban in Mainz, Germany, around the year 960, which then became the basis for all future versions of the Pontificale, up until the definitive edition issued by Pope Clement VIII at the end of the 16th century. However, it must be noted that the validity of the reconstruction has been seriously questioned by Prof. Henry Parkes in his book The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church (Cambridge, 2014); this is a topic largely outside my wheelhouse, but one of the wise men whom I consult on this sort of thing informs me that Parkes’ basic conclusion, that the PRG never really existed at all, has won broad acceptance.

The second work, published by Andrieu himself in 1938, is the new edition of the Pontificale produced for the use of the Popes in Rome in the 12th century, when they were reestablishing their place in the city and the Church after the long period of decadence of the 10th century and the first half of the 11th.

Upgrade to SingtheOffice.com - Now Compliant with the Rubrics of the Daily Office of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

Ten months ago, I wrote a post about an excellent online resource for chanting the Office at home, SingtheOffice.com. Now it is even better, as it has been upgraded so as to provide daily Offices from the English prayerbook tradition, fully pointed for Gregorian chant, and compliant with the rubrics of Divine Worship: Daily Office (Commonwealth Edition) of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. You can read about the changes here.

It provides all the Propers, as well as the Ordinary for Morning Prayer,  Evening Prayer, and Compline. There is also access to recordings of every tone as a help for those like me who are not able to sight-read the chant notation.

 

The changes include Collects and Antiphons for the saint of the day:

There are settings for either a lay or priestly officiant, for simplified or complex chant settings for the Canticles. In addition, there are now full settings for the Te Deum and Old Testament canticles assigned to each day, such as the Song of Hannah, the Exultavit cor meum, and a greater range of liturgical hymns.

New Videos of Old Liturgies on YouTube

We are glad to see that after some years of inactivity, the very interesting YouTube channel Caerimoniale Romanum has begun posting new videos again - feliciter! More than 80 have gone up in the last few weeks, so here are just a few recent example (unfortunately without sound), footage of liturgies celebrated by His Eminence Manuel Cardinal Gonçalves Cerejeira, who was Patriarch of Lisbon from 1929 until 1971. The first is of a Mass celebrated in 1959.

Another from 1960.

And another from Pentecost Sunday of 1968, which shows him wearing the fanon.

A New Sacristan’s Guide to the Traditional Roman Rite

We are very glad to share the news of a recently-published resource which I am sure many of our readers will find extremely useful, A Sacristan’s Guide to the Traditional Roman Rite, by Mr Nicholas Morlin. The 90+ page document is free to download at the following link: https://www.restorethe54.com/media/2020/a-sacristans-guide.pdf.

Donations can be made to the author at the following link: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/sacristansguide. Inquiries and possible corrections may be sent here: sacristansguide@gmail.com. (One of the benefits of having such resources in electronic format, as opposed to print, is that they are so much easier to revise.)

This guide covers all of the major things which 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 chasubles, old Holy Week etc.); the celebration of the other Sacraments, the Divine Office and Benediction.

His Excellency Bishop Athanasius Schneider has written about this publication as follows: “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 Kwasniewski contributed a foreword, 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. ”

Online Resources: Critical Editions of Two Ancient Manuscripts of the Roman Mass

I recently discovered that two very important resources for the study of the Roman liturgy are now available for free on the archive.org website. These are critical editions, both by Dom Leo Mohlberg OSB (1878-1963), of the oldest Sacramentary of the Roman Rite, known as the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, and of the so-called Leonine Sacramentary. The former was published in 1960, the latter posthumously in 1966; in both cases, Dom Mohlberg, a monk of the German abbey of Maria Laach, worked in collaboration with his Benedictine confreres Leo Eizenhöfer and Pietro Siffrin. The scans were made of the text, and not as pictures of the pages, so one can also do a word-search within them in the pdf format.

https://archive.org/details/mohlberg1960libersacramentorum
https://archive.org/details/mohlberg1966sacramentariumveronense

The end of the Preface, the Sanctus (written in Greek letters), and the beginning of the Canon, in the Gellone Sacramentary, which is only about 30 years later than the Old Gelasian Sacramentary. (Bibliothèque National de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 12048, folio 143v).

Unfortunately, Italian libraries generally are far behind their French, German and English counterparts in digitizing their holdings and making them available electronically. There do not appear to be any pictures at all of the Leonine manuscript on the internet, and the Capitular Library of the cathedral of Verona which holds it has no digital collection. The Old Gelasian Sacramentary is at the Vatican Library, and can be consulted online in a high quality scan, but is held under copyright, and each page is watermarked.

The so-called Leonine Sacramentary is not actually a sacramentary at all, which is to say, a book which contains the priest’s parts of the Mass, the Canon, and the variable prayers and prefaces of individual Masses. (All sacramentaries also include other materials such as blessings and catechumenal rites, which vary according to the context in which they were made to be used.) Before the creation of such books, the prayers and prefaces were written down in booklets called “libelli Missarum”, which might well vary from one church to another even within the same city. The manuscript in question is a privately made and highly irregular collection of these libelli, generally dated on internal evidence to the mid-6th century. The collection was certainly made in Rome itself, since it contains numerous specific references to the city. Its traditional name “Leonine”, in reference to Pope St Leo I, is no more than a fancy of its discoverer, Fr Giuseppe Bianchini (1704-64), a canon of Verona who later joined the Roman Oratory, and in his time, was a well-respected scholar of Christian antiquity.

The manuscript is very damaged, and begins with the sixth of a group of 43 different Masses for several martyrs. (The group is numbered within the manuscript itself.) The only parts of the Temporal cycle which are included are the Ascension, Pentecost and the following Ember Days, “daily prayers” for Mass, Vespers and Matins (without any indication of specific days), the Ember Days of September and December, Christmas, St John the Evangelist, and the Holy Innocents. One of the many things that demonstrates the collection’s wildly irregular nature is the placement of eight Masses for St Stephen the First Martyr on August 2nd, the feast of Pope St Stephen I, even though there can be no doubt that the feast of the former was kept on December 26th long before the collection was made.

Most of the remaining Masses are those of feast days; five for the Nativity of St John the Baptist, eight for Ss John and Paul, twenty-eight for Ss Peter and Paul, etc. Despite the complete irregularity of the collection, a considerable number of its texts passed into the regularized books properly known as sacramentaries, and in one form or another, some are still used to this very day. Many of the prefaces added to the Roman Rite in the post-Conciliar reform are derived from it, including two of those recently made optional for use in the Extraordinary Form, those of the Angels and of the Martyrs. The traditional Offertory prayer said when water is added to the chalice “Deus qui humanae substantiae” is first attested as the Collect of the first Leonine Mass of Christmas.

A great deal has been written and discussed about the second book, the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, which is the first known actual sacramentary of the Roman Rite. Broadly speaking, the scholarly consensus seems to be that the manuscript is physically from about 750 AD. It includes the Masses of the four great Marian feasts (Nativity, Annunciation, Purification and Assumption), which were added to the Roman Rite by Pope St Sergius I (687-701) at the very end of the 7th century, but does not include Masses for the Thursdays of Lent, which were instituted in the reign of Pope St Gregory II, 715-31; the text from which it was copied can therefore be dated fairly narrowly to about 700 AD.

The liturgical texts are divided into three books. The first contains the Masses of the Temporal cycle, from the vigil of Christmas to the octave of Pentecost; there are no Masses at all for the time after Epiphany. After the octave of Pentecost, there is a large group of Masses and prayers for particular occasions, including ordinations and church dedications. The second book mostly contains the Masses of Saints, including a few commons, but also the Ember Days of September and December, and the Masses of Advent. The third book begins with 16 Masses labelled simply “for Sundays”, all of whose contents are found in later manuscripts on the Sundays after Pentecost, followed by the Canon, a group of a “daily Masses” then a large number of votive Masses and prayers for special occasions, including the Masses for the Dead.

Although there are any number of differences between this Sacramentary and the Missal of St Pius V, there can be no mistake whatsoever that the former is the predecessor of the latter, and even the most casual perusal of the text of this manuscript will immediately impress the reader with the extraordinary degree of continuity between them.

The Sherborne Missal and the Medieval Artist Who Suffered for His Art

One of the great benefits of the internet and digital imaging, ironically, is the increased availability of medieval illuminations. I was recently notified that the British Library has now made the Sherborne Missal available online to the public. The original was completed at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset, England, around the turn of the 14th century (1399-1407).

You can see the introductory page on the British Library site here, and the reproductions of the nearly 700 pages here. The British Library now has over 800 manuscripts online.

The Feeding of the 5,000

The British Library blog entry on the release of the Missal has more photographs and interesting insights into the artists.

The principal artist, a Dominican friar named John Siferwas, included his portrait and coat of arms several times in the manuscript. In one extraordinary instance, he depicted himself floating in the lower margin, his habit entwined around the branch of a rose bush which forms the lower border to the page, in the same way that angels are represented throughout the manuscript. Another of his surviving works is the Lovell Lectionary commissioned by John, Lord Lovell, for presentation to Salisbury Cathedral.

The Sherborne Missal also provides portraits of the master scribe, John Whas, who was probably a monk of Sherborne Abbey. Whas recorded his name in several colophons, for example, emphasising the physical effort of scribal work: “John Whas the monk has worked to write this book, and rose early, his body becoming much wasted in the process.” (Librum scribendo Ion Whas monachus laborat, Et mane surgendo corpus multum macerabat, p. 661).

So even scribes suffered for their art! 

Self-portrait of John Siferwas, the artist of the manuscript, floating or kneeling in the lower margin, his habit entwined around the border of roses.

As a result of this, these ancient works can be seen by more people than ever before. One hopes that their availability might inspire more creation of beautiful works by artists today. I am not so interested in the emergence of new illuminated manuscripts, as in new forms that participate in the tradition but are more likely to be seen and used in order to promote faith and the Faith. We might see, for example, art that is created to be seen primarily via electronic media - exactly how you are viewing this page now!

Princeton University’s Index of Medieval Art Available Free Until June 1st

Thanks to a reader who sent me the following information: the database of the Index of Medieval Art of Princeton University, which is normally accessible in just a few research libraries because of the high subscription costs, is, due to coronavirus, freely available on the internet until June 1st (https://ima.princeton.edu/).

This Index started as a library of early Christian imagery (hence the original name “Index of Christian Art”), but it was later expanded to include images of any classification until 1400. It is primarily a database for scholarly research, with often small images (many are still in b/w, but there are also decent color images of most, if not all, manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library) and very rich descriptions, that allows users to quickly find images of specific iconographies.

If one follows the “browse” section (see screenshot) one can find long lists of illustrations of liturgical scenes.

One would naturally hope that this resource might remain public after the current crisis, so it may not be a bad idea to write to the Index, praising its importance even outside the academic community.

There are photographs not just of paintings, but of art on liturgical artifacts too. For example, you can follow this link to see a Gothic image of the personification of Prudence on a crozier. Copyright issues do not allow me to show the photograph directly.

Canons of St John Cantius Relaunch Sancta Missa Website

Our thanks once again to the Canons Regular of St John Cantius in Chicago for sharing the following information with us about the relaunching of the SanctaMissa website.

“In the wake on the unexpected task of live streaming their Masses, the Canons Regular of St John Cantius have taken the opportunity to revamp and reorganize their website about the Extraordinary Form, https://www.sanctamissa.org/, which was first launched in 2007. The site offers a wide range of information, including video tutorials, lists of important documents, FAQs, and Gregorian Chant resources, all of which can help anyone, both the clergy and the laity, in learning more about the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

Since 2007, following Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, the CRSJC have been hard at work in educating priests, deacons, seminarians, servers, and the laity in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Using the 1962 Missale Romanum, the Canons have come to be known for their beautiful and reverent celebrations of the Extraordinary Form, and have taught over 1,500 through their Sancta Missa Workshops, and countless more through the online tutorials. Following on the new design of the site, more tutorial videos and resources will be added in the coming weeks. In conjunction with this re-launch, the Canons are offering onsite training in the Extraordinary Form for priests and seminarians this summer and fall; there are three workshops planned, August 24 to 28, September 21 to 25, and November 9 to 13.”

Live-Streaming the Absurdity of Versus Populum and the Prayerfulness of Ad Orientem

Now that thousands of parishes, chapels, and cathedrals around the world are livestreaming Masses on a weekly or even daily basis, it is more possible than ever to experience the bankruptcy of that postconciliar innovation that Msgr. Klaus Gamber considered the single worst liturgical change to be visited on the Catholic Church: the stance of the celebrant facing the people at Mass.

NLM has featured many articles over the years critiquing versus populum from theological, liturgical, and psychological points of view — see, for example, “Mass ‘Facing the People’ as Counter-Catechesis and Irreligion”; “How Contrary Orientations Signify Contradictory Theologies”; and, highly pertinent in light of the recent memo sent by a certain bishop in the American Mountain West, “The Normativity of Ad Orientem Worship According to the Ordinary Form’s Rubrics.” (This memo was the subject of an extended critique here.)

But with broadcasting, the problem is compounded a thousandfold, because the celebrant stands not towards a congregation, as if in a closed circle with them — for in this situation, at least there is something of a human symbol, albeit not the precise symbol called for by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — but towards a camera, like a talkshow host or a cook at a cooking demonstration.

Joseph Sciambra comments on his blog:

The COVID-19 crisis has also clearly revealed another point of polarization in the Church: the Novus Ordo and the Traditional Latin Mass. One is priest-centered and lends itself well to the media-age—it is suited to live-streaming over the internet with the focus on the personality of the presider; hence, many parishes have a cult of personality around a charismatic priest who is mainly known for his amicability. I remember these priests; for their rainbow-colored vestments; for their stupid jokes told during the homily; and for how they endlessly wandered about the church, hugging everyone, during the “kiss of peace.” Over the years, I have been to countless Latin Masses offered by many different priests; I do not remember the priests very well, but I remember that Christ was there.

That there is great confusion about the very essence of the Mass and the meaning of the ministerial priesthood may be gleaned from newspaper articles that interview priests who are now at loose ends because they have no congregation to engage. Having been led to define priesthood as a relation with the people when it is a relation with Christ first and foremost, on behalf of the people, they search in vain, or at least with great difficulty, for an intrinsic and transcendent meaning to the offering of due worship to the Most Holy Trinity, such as animated centuries of so-called “private Masses,” which the Magisterium of the Church encouraged right through Benedict XVI (see my article “The Church encourages priests to say Masses, even without the faithful”).

Dan Millette points out that half a century of priests being trained to “say Mass for the people” has built up in many of them a habit of thinking of Mass solely or primarily in terms of seeing and interacting with the congregation, “touching” them with eye contact, a certain tone of voice, a suburban ars celebrandi:

It [live-streaming] does raise the issue, caused by a versus populum paradigm, of priests’ need for an audience—that saying Mass alone is somehow unfulfilling or even weird. Thus, a camera is set up, often right on the altar mere inches away from the priest’s face, and his well practiced liturgical voice and gestures are given their desired audience. Along those lines, I think of an earlier story to come out of the COVID-19 crisis in Italy. It was of a lonely priest, forbidden from saying public Mass, who decided to post printed selfies of all his parishioners on the pews of the church. The action, which other priests soon imitated, was perhaps heartfelt, but nevertheless a sentimental absence of real liturgical understanding. This is not a live-stream issue per se, but it coalesces with the need priests have for saying Mass with an audience.

Here is the innovative use of taped photographs to which Millette refers:

If ever there was a reductio ad absurdum for the versus populum stance, this, the final outcome of the closed-circle mentality, would be it. If the church in which this priest is standing happened to have a tabernacle behind the altar, the inversion would be complete: a priest praying towards pieces of paper with faces, instead of praying towards the God who dwells with His people as their Head, their King, and their Shepherd, in Person—the Son of God whose bloody sacrifice on the Cross, sacramentally enacted upon the altar, is the reason Mass is said at all, for the profit of the living and the dead, wherever they may be.

Although perhaps this photo of a bishop saying Mass to a camera is just as effective a reductio ad absurdum:

More examples may be seen in an article just posted at PrayTell, including a photo of a man proclaiming the Word to an empty church:

Seeing this photo brought home to me once again the wisdom of the tradition in having the Epistle chanted eastwards and the Gospel chanted northwards: in this way the position of the reader is dictated by theological and symbolic ideas that lead to no weirdness when implemented in an empty church, unlike the scenario depicted above.

The current wealth of live-streaming opportunities has, however, brought with it a change for the better: the sheer number of ad orientem Masses (almost always in the usus antiquior) that are now just as easily available via social media as the versus populum options. To my knowledge, such eastward-facing Masses were not nearly as plentiful or visible in the eyes of the Catholic people as they are today. I wish I could find out statistics about viewers, but just as there can be no doubt that more (private) TLMs are being said right now than at any point since 1969, I would guess that the number of Catholics currently viewing ad orientem Masses from their homes is a significantly higher number than the Catholics who were already attending ad orientem Masses in person every week. The bishops’ rapid shutdown of public worship, whether or not it was required by civil authorities, may backfire on them in surprising ways.

A Catholic who desires a more prayerful immersion in the holy mysteries can end up viewing such liturgies as these instead:

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Collecting Information about Live-Streamed Masses

As everyone certainly knows by now, in many, many places around the world, the celebration of public Masses has ceased entirely, or almost entirely, because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Since it is now impossible for so many people to go to Mass, or even to go to a church to pray privately, many churches have begun live-streaming Masses or other liturgical services and prayers. I make bold to encourage as many priests as possible to do this, remembering the words of St Padre Pio (and many other sayings like it from many other Saints), that “the world can live without the sun more easily than it can live without the Mass.” It is important for people to know, when they cannot go to Mass, that it is nevertheless being continuously offered as a propitiatory and efficacious sacrifice for the living and the dead.

It seems like a good idea, therefore, to put together a list of these with appropriate links. Regular live-streams of the Divine Office celebrated in church will also be included. I would ask those who wish to contribute to the list to either leave a note in the combox, or send me an email (gdipippo@newliturgicalmovement.org), with the name of the church, location, and time of the live-streaming, and where to find it (Facebook, YouTube, website etc.). I will update this post as warranted, and periodically change the time of the post so that it moves to the head of the blog for a while. (If readers make a bookmark of the post, the url will not change when it is updated.)

Update: Several new entries have been added; don’t forget to check specific sites for Holy Week schedules.

Live-Streamed Masses

We start with the FSSP’s LiveMass website, http://www.livemass.net/, which live-streams the Mass daily from 5 different apostolates: Fribourg, Switzerland; Warrington, England; Sarasota, Florida; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Los Angeles, California. The schedules of each individual church are on the website. Update: A reader informs me that the increased comsumes a good deal of bandwidth, which increases the cost of keeping the site functional. Please consider making a donation.

Eastern Rites Update: a reader alerted me to a newly created website, LiveLiturgy.com, a clearing house for links to live-streamed liturgies in the Eastern Rites. The links are grouped into Catholic and Orthodox, European and North American. Many thanks! (Remember to check times zones for churches in Europe!)

A London-based Catholic creative studio called Peter’s House is posting videos daily with priests speaking about the daily Mass readings (OF), offering some spiritual guidance, and leading an act of spiritual communion. Videos will be released at 10:00 (GMT) each day. (The first one, for the feast of St Joseph, featured our own Fr Lawrence Lew.)

The Institute of Christ the King has the webstreams of many of its apostolates in both the United States an Europe listed here: https://www.icrsp.org/direct/mass.htm

IN EUROPE

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Spanish-language TLM Handouts and OF Chanted Propers

In keeping with my advice last Thursday on taking advantage of this down-time to plan ahead for the future, it seems opportune to mention here some Spanish-language Catholic Mass resources that have come to my attention.

The FSSP apostolate in Sydney, Maternal Heart of Mary, has added Spanish-Latin versions of their popular single-sheet bookfold Propers of the Mass for the Temporal and Sanctoral cycles of the traditional Latin Mass:

Propios del año

Propios de los santos

Space has been left at the top of each .pdf so that parish priests who have Adobe Acrobat Pro may insert their own parish header.

The South American district of the SSPX has also made available printable PDFs for most of the Sunday Propers either in Spanish and Latin or in Spanish alone. A sample:

On the Ordinary Form front, the indefatigable Fr. Samuel Weber, working with Ignatius Press, has developed what is by far the best Spanish pew missal: ¡Canta la Misa!, an annual subscription-based book with high production values in art, layout, and musical selection. In particular, as with the English version (Ignatius Pew Missal), entrance and communion antiphons are set to simple chant melodies, and plainchant Mass settings are included. The Order of Mass is also present in parallel Latin and Spanish. Bulk discounts are available (see here) and, of course, free examination copies are available (email this address with requests or questions).

Here are sample pages from the 2019 edition:

It is good to see Spanish-language materials of this quality emerging after quite a dry spell in this regard. Readers who are aware of other pertinent items should add further links in the comments. Let's make this a go-to place for those who are in search of materials.

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

Complete Braga Missal of 1924 Now Online

The author of the blog “Alma Bracarense”, a Benedictine oblate named Brother Gregory, informs me that he has completed the scanning of the entire 1924 edition of Missal of Braga, whch is now available for consultation and download in a series of pdfs. The site contains lots of information about the Use of Braga, one of the few places in Europe that maintained its proper medieval Use after the Tridentine reform, and even into the 20th-century. It contains many of the classically medieval features of the liturgy, which will be familiar to those who use the Dominican, Premonstratensian or Old Carmelite liturgical books, or those who have studied the Uses of Sarum, Paris etc., but also many features unique to itself.

From two years ago, some images of the Mass of Palm Sunday according to the Use of Braga, celebrated at the church of the Holy Name in Providence, Rhode Island. (Details explained on the original post.)

A New Chant Resource from CCW: the 1908 Solesmes Graduale Romanum

Corpus Christi Watershed has just made available an important resource for Gregorian chant, a pdf of the rare 1908 Solesmes edition of the Roman Gradual, which you can download for free from their website at the following link: https://www.ccwatershed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/80291-Graduale-Romanum-Solesmes-1908-Reduc.pdf.

The first two pages of the Graduale, with the Introit, Gradual and most of the Alleluja for the First Sunday of Advent.

The accompanying article by Jeff Ostrowski, whom we think for bringing this to our attention, gives a detailed explanation of the place of this edition in the revival of Gregorian chant that took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. This was the period when the simplified versions of Gregorian chant in use since the 17th century were replaced by new editions based on more ancient manuscripts, thanks to the work of the monks of Solesmes.

The same chants in the simplified version from an 1871 Pustet edition; the simplified version of the Introit antiphon is shorter than the restored version by 28 notes, the Gradual by 83!

OPChant: A New YouTube Channel of Dominican Chant

Here is a great new music resource: two Dominican seminarians studying at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, Brs Alexandre Frezzato from the Wallis region of Switerland, and Stefan Ansinger from the Netherlands, have recently started a YouTube channel called OPChant, on which they share their recordings of chants from the traditional Dominican books. The channel was begun in October; as explained in this interview in French, their long-term goal is to provide a systematic resource for promotion of the Dominican chant reportoire, which is only sporadically available on the internet. This will certainly prove helpful to those who sing at the ever-increasing number Masses in the Dominican Rite, and of course, there is no reason why such chants cannot also be used in the post-Conciliar rite of Mass. Each video is accompanied by brief notes in English explaining the use of the chant (which is very often the same as in the Roman Rite), and a GoogleDrive file with the score. Here are a few recently posted examples from the repertoire for Advent: let’s encourage them by driving up their viewing numbers, and be sure to share information about the channel with anyone you know who might be interested, and subscribe to the channel. Feliciter!!

Conditor alme siderum, the hymn for Vespers in Advent; the Dominicans and other orders who retained their own liturgical Uses (Premonstratensians, Cistercians) etc., never adopted Pope Urban VIII’s revision of the Office hymns, and so the text differs from that which is found in the Roman Breviary.

Ad te levavi, the Introit (which the Dominicans call “Officium”) of the First Sunday of Advent.

Populus Sion, the Officum of the Second Sunday

The antiphon Alma Redemptoris Mater in the more solemn tone. In the Dominican Rite, the Salve Regina is sung at the end of Compline throughout the year, accompanied by a distinctive procession; the Alma Redemptoris Mater is sung as the antiphon of the Magnificat in the Saturday Office of the Virgin between the feast of the Purification and Easter.

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 Online Resource for Researching and Preparing a Latin Mass Wedding

A young, enterprising, very organized and well-informed lady named Sharon Kabel has put together a fantastic website dedicated to “the Latin Mass Wedding.” This is a resource that has long been urgently needed, with the growing number of “Benedict XVI” and “Francis Effect” Catholics who are interested in tying the knot with a ceremony and Nuptial Mass in the usus antiquior or Extraordinary Form. Years ago (as when my wife and I got married with a Missa Cantata on the feast of St. John, December 27, 1998), this was still fairly far-out, in the misty fringes of possibility, but nowadays one reads about it happening pretty often, and pictures and videos are abundant. Nevertheless, it should be much more frequent than it is, and I wonder if the lack of easily accessible information is part of the problem.

After all, there are a LOT of differences between the Novus Ordo approach and the traditional approach. In the Novus Ordo, the vows are sandwiched into the Mass between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, in a pattern that Nicola Bux complains about as depriving both the Mass of its integrity and the inserted item [sacrament, commissioning, exercise, etc.] of its own dignity. In the old way of doing things, in contrast, the bride and bridegroom exchange their vows at the foot of the altar prior to the start of Mass — almost, you might say, their own version of the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar — and then they assist at Mass for the first time as husband and wife. (I remember how special it was at my own wedding to kneel with a ring newly on my finger, with my wife next to me, and hear the priest say: “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Introibo ad altare Dei...,” knowing that we were going unto the altar of God, united by the God of Israel about whom the schola was singing: “Deus Israel conjungat vos.” As always, the timing of things in the traditional liturgy is magnificent.)

This preceding matrimonial ceremony is usually more elaborate, with some very beautiful prayers (though these have varied and still vary a great deal from country to country, and from century to century); for its part, the ancient Nuptial Mass is extremely rich in its antiphons, readings, and prayers — all of which are required, none optional.

The Nuptial Mass, especially in the form of a Missa Cantata or a Solemn Mass, can be a particularly splendid and festive way to introduce family and friends to the traditional Roman liturgy, a real opportunity for “evangelizing through beauty.” If a young man and woman are serious Catholics, they will already seem strange to many of their relatives and acquaintances, so they might as well go all out rather than trimming the liturgy down to the imagined expectations or tolerance threshold of attendees. You can count on there being many more guests who afterwards say they were moved by the beauty and solemnity of it than there will be grumblers and complainers. No matter what your congregation will be like, it is helpful to provide a missallette or a handout that helps those in attendance to have some clue about what is unfolding before their eyes and ears.

Sharon understands all these things, and she is thorough in providing resources and references. The page “Rite of Marriage” talks about the history of the ceremony and furnishes a full text of the rite found in the 1962 Rituale Romanum for the region of the United States. The page “Wedding Mass” gives in full the English texts of the Missa pro sponso et sponsa. Then comes the page “Resources,” which is fun to explore:

Note that Sharon provides ample information about and links to the text of the traditional Rite of Betrothal, which is also happily returning to the Catholic world after a long period of desuetude. (Just recently, NLM published a piece on it, with photos: check it out.) Betrothal can best be understood as a solemn promise to marry, made before God and His minister, and asking of the Lord the grace of a chaste engagement blessed by His favor. It is really worth doing; my fiancée and I, and many of our friends, and now the children of our friends, have done it. It fits into the general pattern of the Church wishing to bless all created realities: homes, fields, animals, equipment, wine, throats, candles, and the rest. In addition, it serves as a countercultural witness in our times of a serious intent to lead a life in accord with the commandments and virtues. (The U.S. bishops not long ago cobbled together and published a “blessing of an engagement,” but, like all postconciliar liturgical rites, its lameness beggars belief. It will deserve a proper dressing-down someday, not right now.)

Sharon provides a page of FAQs that assume no prior knowledge, so if you are new to all of this, you have found a good place to go.

The website will also be valuable to priests; among other things, Sharon has included Haydock and Catena aurea commentaries on the Scriptural texts of the antiphons and readings of the Nuptial Mass, which could be mined for homilies.

On the website Sharon says she wants feedback about any ways to improve her site, or any further resources to include. Please take her at her word! Let’s make this the single best go-to place on the web for traditional Roman-rite weddings.

(Other wedding-related articles that may be of interest to NLM readers:

• Problems with Weddings and How We Might Remedy Them
• Solemn Music for a Wedding
• The Velatio Nuptialis: An Ancient (and Forgotten) Part of the Latin Marriage Rite
• The New Lectionary and the Catholic Wedding
• When in Florida: The Priest Who Refused My Wedding
• The Wedding: How to Be a Catholic Music Patron, at Least Once)