Summer Feasts and Multiple Feasts

On July 11, 2022, I published an article here entitled “The Feasts of St. Benedict and Their Proper Texts in Benedictine Churches,” in which I discussed how certain very eminent saints have multiple feastdays. St. Benedict has at least five proper Masses that developed in the monastic tradition: his dies natalis or transitus on March 21; July 11 as the translatio of his relics; July 18 as the octave of the translation (with different texts); December 4 for the “illation,” that is, rediscovery, of at least some of his relics; and its octave on December 11 for the veneration and reinstatement of the holy relic of the head of St. Benedict. Maybe there are still others I don’t know about.

St. Walburga’s Many Feasts

A reader of this blog notified me that Benedict isn’t the only monastic to enjoy so many feasts. At the glorious Benedictine Abbey of Saint Walburga (founded in Eichstätt, Germany, in 1035), four feasts are still observed for Saint Walburga:

February 25: The Solemnity of Saint Walburga (the anniversary of her death) [see A Benedictine Martyrology, Feb. 25, pg. 54]

Last Sunday of April: The Memorial of Saint Walburga’s remains being found incorrupt in her grave (see A Benedictine Martyrology, May 1, pg. 118]; traditionally, however, May 1st was the feastday, and this is why April 30th earned the name “Walpurgisnacht” (Walburga’s Night).

August 4: The Memorial of Saint Walburga’s arrival from England

October 12: The Memorial of the first flowing of the Holy Oil from Saint Walburga’s bones

Regarding April 30:

Because Walpurgisnacht falls on the same date as Beltane Eve, one of the four great pagan Gaelic holidays, this will be, for some pagans and witches, a night much like Hallowe’en (the Eve of All Saints), when the pagan Samhain coincides calendrically with our Feasts for the dead. In Germany, where sometimes this night is called “Hexennacht,” witches are said to fly to the top of the often mist-covered mountain named the Brocken (or Blocksberg) in order to rendezvous with the devil. And like Hallowe’en, the veil between this world and the afterworld is said to become thin tonight, the damned dead are believed to become restless, and devils are said to cause trouble…. The spooky nature of Walpurgisnacht because of witches’ doings is recalled in Goethe’s Faust, and in his poem The First Walpurgis Night which was set to music by Felix Mendelssohn.

Saint Benedict’s summer feast brings mind to the tradition of other saints who have summer feasts in addition to their usual feasts.

The translation of St Thomas Becket’s relics. (Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew)

Other Summer Feasts

July 4: Translation of Saint Martin of Tours, which is also the anniversary of his ordination as a bishop

In German, “Sommerfest des heiligen Martin,” or “Martinus aestivus.” Gregory DiPippo talks about this here. Martin’s main feast is November 11.

July 7: Translation of Saint Thomas Becket

According to an article by Dr. John Jenkins:

The organisation of Becket’s translation was the work of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the most important figures in the drafting of Magna Carta. In his own struggles against King John, he saw himself as something of a Becket figure, and in translating Becket’s relics he wanted to make a powerful statement about the importance of the cause—the rights and freedoms of the Church – that the saint had died for. The date chosen for the event, 7 July 1220, was both symbolic and practical. It was the ‘jubilee’ anniversary of Becket’s martyrdom, not simply 50 years but calculated according to the Biblical definition of 49 years, 7 months, and 10 days after the event. It fell on a Tuesday, a day of great significance in Becket’s life as supposedly it was also on a Tuesday that he was born, was condemned by the King’s council, fled into exile, had a vision of his martyrdom, returned from exile, and was martyred.

But this next bit is of particular importance, as it verbalizes something one often notices when studying the sanctoral calendar—namely, that summer feasts are often preferred to winter ones for reasons of weather, or a summer feast is added in order to heighten a figure’s importance:

The date of the anniversary of Becket’s martyrdom, 29 December, was awkward as it not only fell during the Christmas celebrations but was at a time in midwinter when pilgrims were unlikely to travel. By establishing another anniversary of equal importance in the middle of summer, at the height of the pilgrimage season, and at a time when it would not clash with other church feasts, Archbishop Langton ensured that the feast of the translation would become one of the highlights of the English religious calendar.

July 29: Translation of the Blessed Emperor Charlemagne

Celebrated in Aachen for about a century, ending in 1932. Ripe for integralist restoration? Aachen currently celebrates a Mass in honor of the emperor on the last Sunday of January, which is near to his dies natalis of January 28. (I am not saying Charlemagne was above-board in all his actions; but if the Emperor Constantine can be venerated by our Eastern brethren as “Equal to the Apostles,” then we can make some room for an analogous figure in the West.)

August 3: The Finding of Saint Stephen

Sadly, this is one of many long-observed feasts that was abolished in the 1960 revisions to the Roman calendar that guide the rubrics of the 1962 missal. This feastday commemorates the “invention” or finding of the body of the Protomartyr Stephen:

His relics were found in the year 416 by a priest named Lucian. A church was built and dedicated to him at the site of the discover—outside the Damascus Gate—and his relics were housed there for centuries. In 1882, the ruins of the church were discovered by the Dominicans, and a new church was built there; however, his relics were subsequently moved to the Papal Basilica of Saint Lawrence outside the Walls (San Lorenzo fuori le Mura) in Rome, Italy. The church is one of the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome, and it is a fitting place for Stephen’s relics to reside, as the church commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, one of the first seven deacons of Rome to be martyred in 258.

So, it sounds like Stephen was found not just once, but twice—reminiscent of the entry in the Roman Martyrology for the “third finding of the head of St. John the Baptist”!

August 17: Festival of Saint Agatha

The Festival of Saint Agatha is the most important religious festival of Catania, Sicily, commemorating the life of the city’s patron saint. It takes place annually from 3 to 5 February and (again) on 17 August. The earlier dates commemorate her martyrdom, while the latter date celebrates the return to Catania of her remains, after these had been transferred to Constantinople by the Byzantine general George Maniaces as war booty and remained there for 86 years. (source)

A site devoted to Sicily notes:

The night of the 17th August the sound of bells woke up the people of Catania announcing the return of the mortal remains of St. Agatha from Constantinople. The citizens came out their houses barefoot and in their nightgowns to greet the arrival of the Saint. This is the reason why during the feast devotees wear white dresses (called “sacco”), that represent the white clothes of those citizens…. The celebration starts in the morning with different liturgies at the Cathedral dedicated to St. Agatha. In the evening at 20.30, there is a short procession near the Cathedral and piazza Duomo. The reliquary casket and the half bust of St. Agatha go around from piazza Duomo to Uzeda Door, via Dusmet, via Porticello, piazza San Placido, via Vittorio Emanuele II and then come back to piazza Duomo. As every celebration of the Patron Saint of Catania, this feast is also features spectacular fireworks in piazza Borsellino when the relics leave and return to the Cathedral.

However, the February celebration of St. Agatha is considerably more extensive, lasting for days. And that’s good, because I’ll be leading a pilgrimage to Sicily in February 2025, accompanied by a chaplain who will offer the traditional Mass daily (sung whenever possible), and we’ll be in Catania for the feast. Read more about that trip here or here.

Sr. Wilhelmina (courtesy of Benedictines of Mary)

New Summer Feasts?

The tradition continues as a new summer feast seems to be emerging:

August 11: Saint John Henry Newman

Although he died on August 11, his appointed feastday is October 9—but one notices that a number of people privately celebrate August 11 in addition to the official feast of October 9. On the other hand, the weather in most places in early October is pleasant, and the two dates are quite close together, so it would be improbably that an August date would ever attract broad observance, let alone find its way on to a liturgical calendar.

And one may well speculate about this date:

May 29: Death of Sr. Wilhelmina Lancaster, OSB

Yes, she is not yet a saint, nor has a process for her beatification been officially opened (as far as I know); and yet, she has four things very much in her favor: (1) a reputation for holiness among the many sisters who lived with her for years at the monastery she founded; (2) an incorruptible body exhumed on April 28, 2023; (3) a steady flow of pilgrims to her body, on a scale that has not been seen in this country since the Council, and who knows how long before that, indicating popular devotion, that once-indispensable adjunct to any valid case for canonization; (4) many stories of healings and other possible miracles attributed to her intercession, which are being carefully collected.

May 29 is already observed on the old calendar as the feast of St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi, but a future Benedict XVII or Leo XIV could certainly add a commemoration, if it ever comes to that…

Celebrating in style: The Feast of Saint John by Jules Breton (1875)

Lost jewels of May

A last note about the month of May itself.

Given the wonderful, edifying second feasts in the traditional Roman calendar—the Conversion of Saint Paul; the Chair of Saint Peter; the Second feast of Saint Agnes on January 28—it is most regrettable that a number of second feasts were abolished under John XXIII in the 1960 calendar: think of the Finding of the Holy Cross on May 3, Saint John at the Latin Gate on May 6, and the Apparition of Saint Michael on May 8. All of these fall in the merry merry month of May, which, although not technically summer, is, as Newman says at the beginning Meditations and Devotions, “the month of promise and of hope.” He continues: “Even though the weather happen to be bad [at least in the UK…], it is the month that begins and heralds in the summer” (italics in original).

Indeed, even Christmas is reprised in the summer. As Gueranger observers in his Liturgical Year: “The Nativity of St. John Baptist [June 24], indeed made holy [in the womb], is celebrated with so much pomp…because it seems to enfold within itself the Nativity of Christ, our Redeemer. It is as it were midsummer’s Christmas day. From the very outset, God and his Church brought about, with most thoughtful care, many such parallel resemblances and dependences between these two solemnities.”

One might make the same observation about the thoughtful care that went into many other parallelisms between feasts.

It is good to do what we can to remember, to retain, and to celebrate these special feasts, at least for saints that have a connection to our parish or community, or to whom we have a personal devotion, or some other connection such as when one bears the saint’s name.

Bulgakov on the Benefits of a “Tedious” Liturgical Prayer

Not long ago I was reading a fascinating book, Sergius Bulgakov’s Spiritual Diary—newly translated and published for the first time in English by Angelico Press—and found myself frequently nodding in agreeing with various points he had to make about life, the world, politics, and ecclesiastical matters. Written in 1924–25 in Prague, after Bulgakov had been exiled from Soviet Russia along with many other intellectuals, the diary offers a fascinating window on the interior struggles of a man who was longing for his fatherland and continually suffering from feelings of discouragement and confusion at the direction in which the world was going. (Sound familiar?)

In the midst of worldly troubles and personal woes, Fr. Bulgakov found a constant source of strength and peace in the Divine Liturgy, about which he speaks with glowing eloquence. I am reminded in this regard of Fr. Bryan Houghton, who closes his moving autobiography Unwanted Priest with the words: “You have in front of you a priest rejected because of the old Mass, but whom the old Mass alone keeps going.”

It was highly edifying to read Bulgakov’s defense of the need for commitment, persistence, and a certain ascetical violence to self when it comes to the rigors of prayer, including liturgical prayer. He says we will often be cold in soul and the only way we will ever warm up is by forcing ourselves to “go through the motions,” as if trying to let the body, the tongue, rule the soul, or steer the soul into its proper course. The presupposition, needless to say, is a rigorous course of prayer to follow, so that it becomes possible for the soul to awaken as it should.

Here are his words, written on May 6, 1924:

We must love the work of prayer and never slacken in it. People seek spiritual pleasures, and if grace ever shows its face to them, when it is taken away from them they languish and their soul grows cold. But the work of prayer—persistent, never slackening, tenacious—is the expression of our active love for God that strives to bind our sinful being and bring it to the altar. The Kingdom of God is taken by force [Matt. 11:12]. And this work never remains unjustified [cf. Matt. 11:19].
       At times you pray but the heart remains cold and callous, the tongue wooden. And yet, if you force yourself and make absolutely no concessions nor grant any indulgence to your laziness, after prayer the soul feels itself renewed, resilient, and strengthened.
       The same thing also happens when you attend church services and the experience is accompanied by a certain coldness; after this too do you feel yourself strengthened. Therefore, work, brothers, and even you, wicked servant [Matt. 25:26], work. For work is love, and the one who does not work and is lazy in love—his heart is cold. (58)

How different is this from the attitude of the liturgical reformers! They would solve the “problem” of modern man’s difficulty with prayer by shortening, simplifying, easing up the prayer, making it less painful, less demanding, less “worky,” to use a favorite expression of a dear college student I once knew. How foolish and myopic. One must make “absolutely no concessions nor grant any indulgence to laziness.” This is the ascetic way that leads through dryness and lack of desire to the warmth of love, tears, and contemplation. The Eastern tradition has never forgotten this. Why has the Western? Although traditional Latin enclaves are certainly many steps ahead in this regard, one still notices some cutting of corners. There are some who avoid the High Mass because it is too long and demanding; others who never pray part of the Divine Office (e.g., Vespers, which was once nearly as common as Mass). In traditional circles, rather than priding ourselves on the great good we have in the Tridentine liturgy, we should be finding ways to live still more fully a life of prayer centered on it but not limited to it.
 

The same book contains an appendix called Remembering Fr. Sergius, written by his long-time friend Sr. Joanna Reitlinger. In a wonderful passage she shares her recollections of Bulgakov’s attitudes about the Lenten Tridion and repetitious prayer.

Having been brought up in the church from childhood, Fr. S. grew up organically together with its life. While still a little boy—as he used to tell the story—he anxiously awaited when they would sing the canon, “Beneath the waves of the sea” and was afraid to miss it. This sacred and almost childlike attitude towards all the services of Holy Week remained with him for his entire life. While there was much that he criticized about the archaisms and rhetoric of our canons (especially those for the commemoration of certain saints, which were written without any inspiration), the services of Holy Week he singled out and considered particularly inspired. Not long before his final illness he once again recalled with enthusiasm: “‘O Lord, the woman fallen into many sins perceived your Divinity’—Exactly so!”

Note: he criticized these things in private, but he never sought to change them. He accepted them as part of the cycle of public prayer, with its peaks and troughs, its moments of sublime inspiration and its more humdrum business. Sr. Reitlinger continues:

He likewise highlighted not so much the intrinsically tedious content of our services’ interminable repetitions as much as the atmosphere they would create—especially our services at the St. Sergius Representation Church—during the first week of the fast [Great Lent]. Although these services greatly wore him down, he would return from church as if from a long journey in unknown lands, having scaled the great heights of the spirit, and would say that the soul in this season breathes the particularly rarified air of these heights. And thus even this private critique of these services in their particulars, which was entirely justified, became somewhat discordant, especially later in his life, with these feelings of his. He recommended treating these Holy Week services with even some superstitious fear: “do not skip them.”
       But many of our prayers seemed to him burdensome, archaic, unmodern. This was especially true of the rule of prayer for preparation for Holy Communion. We often spoke about this, how burdensome it was and how it did not correspond to our feelings and thoughts before the holy mystery of Communion in the Body and Blood of Christ. Despite this, he never allowed himself any sloppiness or nihilism toward the “rule” and recited it strictly. At the end of his life, when he was very weak, he almost always read them while sitting at his writing desk.
       As for the archaic canon of Andrew of Crete, he liked to poke fun at it; but as I mentioned earlier, he valued the atmosphere it created, as he valued the entire atmosphere of the first week of the fast. He even tried to define what the “magic” of this rhythm consisted of, locating it in the mysterious repetition of “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me,” in the mysterious sighs of repentance. (175–76)

Here, then, we see a man of immense learning who totally dedicated himself to liturgical prayer as it concretely existed, not as he might have privately wished it could be. Not for him a Consilium to turn everything inside-out and upside-down. Rather, he valued the spiritual fruit derived from even what seemed, to the flesh, wearisome repetition. The idea that there is “useless repetition” in the liturgy—a view that could be held with far greater reason of the Greek and Slavic liturgical rites!—would have struck him as verging on blasphemy. He knew that the Church’s prayer was too sacred, too strong, too far beyond the realm of the individual, to dare allow oneself “any sloppiness or nihilism.” He did what was written as to be done, even to his final days.

Such reflections could likewise be of benefit to those who pray the (traditional Latin) Divine Office (or any other lengthy liturgical ceremony) and who may find that its repetitions may sometimes feel “tedious or interminable.” There is a way to deal with such thoughts and feelings. It is the way we see in Bulgakov, not the way we see in Bugnini. In fact, I have no hesitation in saying the former was far more Catholic in mentality than the latter.

Prostration during the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete

The Alleluia of Christmas Day, the Protomartyr, and the Beloved Disciple

I always feel that the feast of the Beloved Disciple, the Eagle Evangelist, the Divine, the Theologian, the Seer of Patmos, ought to receive much more attention than it does. Part of the reason for that feeling might be personal: my wife and I chose this feastday for our nuptial High Mass twenty-three years ago. But it also has to do with my study of St. John’s Gospel and St. Thomas Aquinas’s commentary thereupon, which is his most profound biblical work; it has to do with my brushing up against St. John nearly every day in the form of the Prologue that serves as the traditional Mass’s “epilogue.” And ever since I read Scott Hahn’s book The Supper of the Lamb, I have thought about St. John’s Book of Revelation as the template for Catholic liturgy.

As a church musician, it pains me that the feast of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents, indeed every day of the Christmas octave until the Circumcision, relatively rarely sees a sung Mass or a solemn Mass. Most clergy and musicians are exhausted after the liturgical (and other) excesses of Christmas, so church tends to be sparsely attended on these octave days. I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon during the octave of Easter. Even though each day of the octave has a splendid proper Mass, all of them graced with some of the most sublime chants of the entire repertoire, one will be lucky to see a motley group sprinkled in the church for low Mass. I wonder if it has been ever thus. Perhaps readers more knowledgeable of historical precedents regarding the observance of days within these two octaves could add some observations in the comments.

Fortunately, over the past three decades, I have been called upon, at one time or another, to sing Mass for most of these octave days, and thus have slowly become acquainted with their more exotic riches. Singing for the feast of St. Stephen last year, I was surprised by the challenge presented by the grand Offertory “Elegerunt Apostoli Stephanum levitam”—with its exultant flourishes on the words plenum fide and Domine Jesu, and its climbing figures on lapidaverunt and spiritum—and the equally grand Communion “Video caelos apertos.”

What really caught my attention was the fact that the same melody is used for the Alleluia on December 25th (Mass of the Day), December 26th, and December 27th, with only the words changing. In this way, the liturgy establishes a subtle but profound connection between these three feasts and their respective Gospels. The Christ-child, Word made flesh, the faithful witness, “the only man who was born to die” as Fulton Sheen once said, is accompanied in the Gospel procession by His first martyr, and by the virgin disciple who followed the Lamb whithersoever He went, even to the foot of the Cross and the empty tomb. The great light descends to the earth; the heavens are opened for the just; true testimony is borne to the Light who is the Life of men.
 

CHRISTMAS DAY

Dies sanctifícátus illúxit nobis: veníte, gentes, et adoráte Dóminum: quia hódie descéndit lux magna super terram. (A sanctified day hath shone upon us: come ye Gentiles and adore the Lord: for this day a great light hath descended upon the earth.) [The Gospel of the day is the Prologue of St. John.]

ST. STEPHEN

Video cælos apertos, et Jesum stantem a dextris virtutis Dei. (I see the heavens opened, and Jesus standing on the right hand of the power of God.) [The Gospel of the day is from Matthew 23, Christ's prophecy of the coming persecution of His disciples, and His lament over Jerusalem.] 

ST. JOHN

Hic est discipulus ille, qui testamonium perhibet de his: et scimus, quia verum est testimonium ejus. (This is that disciple who giveth testimony of these things: and we know that his testimony is true.) [The Gospel is from John 21, the curious passage where St. Peter asks Jesus about John, and receives a response that is then said to be misinterpreted as John not dying.]

A pragmatically-minded person might point out that it’s also a mercy to the singers to give them the same melody three days in a row, so that if they are going to sing all these Masses right after Christmas, some of the weight has been lifted off their shoulders. How like the tradition of the Church, to do something at once so beautiful and so practical!

Photos by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.

Is Modern Man “Incapable of the Liturgical Act”?

In 1964, “forty-six years after the publication of his seminal work, The Spirit of the Liturgy, and just after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium, Romano Guardini reflected on the challenges of the Liturgical Movement in a letter to a Congress on the Liturgy in 1964.” [1] He famously claimed that Modern Man is “no longer capable of a liturgical act”:

Is not the liturgical act and, with it, all that goes under the name of “liturgy” so bound up with the historical background – antique or medieval or baroque – that it would be more honest to give it up altogether? Would it not be better to admit that man in this industrial and scientific age, with its new sociological structure, is no longer capable of a liturgical act? And instead of talking of renewal ought we not to consider how best to celebrate the sacred mysteries so that modern man can grasp their meaning through his own approach to truth? [2]

In the same letter, Guardini states:

The question will arise whether our present liturgy contains parts which cannot mean much to modern man. I remember a conversation with the late Abbot Ildefons Herwegen of Maria Laach, the great champion of liturgical renewal. We had been considering various aspects and I said a sign that the work for liturgy was really coming to life would be a liturgical crisis, and Abbot Herwegen thoughtfully agreed.[3]

While Guardini himself only a few years later would dismiss the Consilium’s drafts as “plumber’s work,” it would be impossible to exaggerate the harm he himself caused by the remarks he made in the 1964 letter, which seemed to suggest, as many other semi-modernists had done, that the entirety of Christian liturgy from as early as Constantine, and certainly no later than the Middle Ages onward, was irrelevant, useless, inaccessible, ready for the scrap heap. What is surprising is that a theologian of Guardini’s stature, who was so attuned to the sacred liturgy's “irrelevance” and “uselessness” (properly understood) [4], was able to embrace this kind of chronological relativism.

On the one hand, we might sympathize with Guardini to this extent: the liturgical reform seemed to be premised on the idea that if the liturgy as it stands “isn’t working,” then all we need to do is redesign it — find a “working” model — pack it up, ship it out, and roll it off the skids to the expectant populace. In this vision, the problems are all on the side of the liturgical rites; it is not men who need to be reformed, but only the rites.

Yet what if the problem is in man? If he were judged to be incapable of the liturgical act, then he would be incapable of any liturgy, whether it comes from the scriptorium of Gregory the Great or the desk of Annibale Bugnini. He might be capable of something else, like a Bible study, a soup kitchen, prison ministry, or volunteering for scouts, but the leitourgia, the sacrificial action of one on behalf of the many [5], will not have any purchase in his individualistic world. In that sense, perhaps the avant-garde liturgists underestimated the challenge they were up against. It’s not about “tweaking” something to get it to “work” better, much less of piling on more and more Scripture so that one can check off a box that says “Bible is being read—done.” For it is not the reading or the text, the chant or the ritual, that is a problem, but the modernity of modern man, which prevents him from engaging, cosmically, symbolically, ascetically, and mystically, with the very realities Scripture is about, and short of which it fails of its aim.

“More than words: Signs, symbols, metaphors”

On the other hand, in defense of the common man, it might be asked: Why should we buy this typically pessimistic German view to begin with, reminiscent of Wotan lamenting the ineluctable collapse of Valhalla, the Götterdämmerung? To say that moderns are not able to be liturgical in the same way that all men prior to them have been is a path leading to despair: as if man were now a different species that requires a different religion, that is, a different system of signs ordered to divine worship. This subterranean despair was part of the motivation for the Novus Ordo. It led to the belief that a simplified, abbreviated, intelligible, vernacular, communal celebration will obviously appeal to modern man, who is incapable of vertical, theocentric, densely symbolic, archaically uttered ritual. But this seems to be basically false, and has led to a massive falling-away, as well as to the surprising resilience of the old rites that were supposed to be outdated and unapproachable.

The truth that is really inevitable is not Guardini’s fatalism, but an acknowledgement of the requirements of human formation. Just as we cannot give ourselves permission to stop teaching each new generation how to speak, how to read, how to write, and how to think, so we must not fail to immerse ourselves in ritual that is uncompromisingly ritualistic, for this is the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of revealed religion, in both Testaments and in the history of the Church. It enjoys a universal anthropological basis that makes it always learnable, but since it is rather strange within rationalistic modernity, it is now more capable, not less capable, of confronting us with the transcendence of God, which calls us out of our comfort zone, as Abraham was called from Ur of the Chaldeans. When people have the sense that in the liturgy they are entering the domain of the sacred, somehow stepping into the realm of the divine, then their ears will begin to open to listening to the words of God in Scripture. The focus, the starting point, has to be elsewhere than Scripture. That is exactly contrary to where the reformers, in their homotextuality (so to speak), wanted to place the emphasis.

Another way of seeing this is to look at the repetitiousness of the old rite, much maligned of course by the reformers. In “Repetition Is the Mother of a Great Many Things,” I discuss the value of the frequent use of the same pericopes and verses of Scripture (and non-Scriptural texts) in the traditional liturgy precisely as a method for making us deeply familiar with the words. Eventually these words, or many of them at any rate, will be memorized; they come to live within us, forming our consciousness as the floor, walls, and ceiling of our inner architecture. The way to get modern Christians to take Scripture more seriously would be to take memory more seriously, and to preach and teach about ways in which our modern way of life is sapping or emptying our memories of what is divine and filling them with what is secular, profane, and, at times, diabolic. Once again, what modern man needed and still needs is what traditional liturgy rites and practices give him, not something newly fashioned à la Guardini.

Learning the old liturgy in the midst of ruins

It is also true, and I will be the first to admit it, that without some catechesis, whether outside of liturgy or in the homily, most modern people will not be able to grasp enough of the message of liturgy to get a good grip, a good foothold, for making further progress. In that sense, education simply cannot be bypassed. Dignified and beautiful liturgy can accomplish immense good, even conversions from atheism or paganism; but for most people, entering deeply into all that the liturgy has to offer is going to require at least some investment of work, slowly, over a long period. And it has always been so; there’s a reason St. Benedict speaks of the opus Dei, the work of God. It is work that, as the Holy Rule stresses, requires repetition, study, and expertise, though — as Guardini rightly says — it is also the highest-level play, since it does not have an ulterior motive, an end for which it is merely a means.

Let us return to our starting point. Guardini said that modern man could no longer perform the liturgical act. This was taken by many in the later phase of the Liturgical Movement as an indisputable truth and a warrant for unlimited experimentation, with the goal of equipping the liturgy to elicit or solicit the “correct” participation from the faithful. Ironically, what happened instead is that the liturgical act was transformed into its opposite: the celebration of the community itself by itself. In a strange twist, Guardini’s dour assessment was not disproved by the Novus Ordo but inculcated by it: what had been a risk of missing the properly liturgical became a habit of missing it with confident ease. In short, it is above all the reformed liturgy that has made modern men, to the extent humanly possible and divinely permitted, incapable of performing the liturgical act.

NOTES

[1] Editorial introduction at Corpus Christi Watershed.
[2] “1964 Letter from Romano Guardini.”
[3] See Christopher Carstens, “Romano Guardini Was Careful What He Asked For: A Liturgical Crisis.”
[4] See Fr. Daniel Cardo, “At Prayer in the Fields of the Lord: The Playfulness of the Liturgy.”
[5] See William Daniel, Christ the Liturgy (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020), 1-39, on the correct meaning of the term leitourgia.

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

On Feast of Holy Name, Tradition Crushes Rupture, 27–7

In a short but pungent article at CatholicCulture.org (“Guess Whose Name Is Missing?”), Phil Lawler notes the following curious fact about the optional memorial of the Holy Name of Jesus on January 3 in the Novus Ordo calendar:

Today, January 3, the Church calendar offers us the (optional) feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. At Mass the entrance antiphon reminds us, “At the name of Jesus, every knee should bend…” And then something curious happens. Through the rest of the proper prayers crafted especially for the day’s celebration, guess what Name is never mentioned. Right.
       Take, just for example, the Collect: “O God, who founded the salvation of the human race on the Incarnation of your Word, give your peoples the mercy they implore, so that all may know there is no other name to be invoked but the Name of your Only Begotten Son. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”
       Isn’t there an obvious place there, right before “Who lives and reigns,” for the invocation of the name of Jesus? I mean, isn’t that kinda the point?
       The Offertory prayer, similarly, speaks of “the Name that saves” — but does not mention it. The Communion prayer alludes to the sacrifice “to honor Christ’s Name,” which is honored in silence.
       Could someone please explain to me why, on the day that we celebrate the name of Jesus, we don’t celebrate the name of Jesus?

That is an excellent question, Mr Lawler. And given the fact that in many places, the “entrance antiphon” is neither sung nor recited, it is quite possible that what he is calling the “proper prayers” of the Novus Ordo Mass would not mention the Holy Name once on the putative and optional feastday in honor of it. [1]

How illuminating it is to turn, for the sake of contrast, to the traditional feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, which is obligatorily celebrated on the Sunday after the Octave of the Nativity, that is, the first Sunday of the New Year (or, if that Sunday happens to be January 1, 6, or 7, then on January 2). For comparative purposes, I would like to enlarge the definition of the Proper of the Mass to include the readings of the day. A quick glance at the old Proper shows that the Holy Name will be mentioned (no options involved) TWELVE times. Notably, the full doxology is retained after the Secret and Postcommunion in the traditional rite, whereas the new rite opts for the short form “per Christum.” The theological richness of the prayers deserves to be noted, in comparison to their easy-listening replacements. [2]

Introit. In nomine Jesu omne genuflectatur, cælestium, terrestrium, et infernorum: et omnis lingua confiteatur, quia Dominus Jesus Christus in gloria est Dei Patris. Ps. 8. 2 Domine Dominus noster: quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra. V. Glória Patri. In nomine Jesu…
(In the Name of Jesus let every knee bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth; and let every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. Ps. O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is Thy Name in the whole earth. Glory be to the Father. In the Name of Jesus…)

Collect. Deus, qui unigenitum Filium tuum, constituisti humani generis Salvatorem, et Jesum vocari jussisti: concede propitius; ut, cujus sanctum nomen veneramur in terris, ejus quoque aspectu perfruamur in cælis. Per eumdem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum…
(O God, Who didst appoint Thine only begotten Son the Saviour of mankind, and didst bid that He should be called Jesus: mercifully grant that we may enjoy the vision of Him in Heaven, Whose holy Name we venerate on earth. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…)

Epistle. In diebus illis: Petrus repletus Spiritu Sancto, dixit: Principes populi et seniores, audite: Si nos hodie dijudicamur in benefacto hominis infirmi, in quo iste salvos factus est, notum sit omnibus vobis, et omni plebi Israel: quia in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi Nazareni, quem vos crucifixistis, quem Deus suscitavit a mortuis, in hoc iste adstat coram vobis sanus. Hic est lapis, qui reprobatus est a vobis ædificantibus: qui factus est in caput anguli: et non est in alio aliquo salus. Nec enim aliud nomen est sub cælo datum hominibus, in quo oporteat nos salvos fieri.
(In those days: Peter filled with the Holy Ghost, said to them: Ye princes of the people and ancients, hear: If we this day are examined concerning the good deed done to the infirm man, by what means he hath been made whole, be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Whom you crucified, Whom God hath raised from the dead, even by Him this man standeth before you whole. This is the stone which was rejected by you the builders, which is become the head of the corner: neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.)

Gospel. In illo tempore: Et postquam consummati sunt dies octo, ut circumcideretur puer vocatum est nomen ejus Jesus, quod vocatum est ab Angelo priusquam in utero conciperetur.
(At that time: After eight days were accomplished that the child should be circumcised; His Name was called Jesus, which was called by the Angel before He was conceived in the womb.) [3]

Secret. Benedictio tua, clementissime Deus, qua omnis viget creatura, sanctificet, quæsumus, hoc sacrificium nostrum, quod ad gloriam nominis Filii tui, Domini nostri Jesu Christi, offerimus tibi: ut majestati tuæ placere possit ad laudem, et nobis proficere ad salutem. Per eumdem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum…
(May Thy blessing, by which all creatures live, hallow, we beseech Thee, most merciful God, this our sacrifice which we offer to Thee to the glory of the Name of Thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that it may please Thy majesty and bring Thee praise, and avail us unto salvation. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…)

Postcommunion. Omnipotens æterne Deus, qui creasti et redemisti nos, respice propitius vota nostra: et sacrificium salutaris hostiæ, quod in honorem nominis Filii tui, Domini nostri Jesu Christi, majestati tuæ obtulimus, placido et benigno vultu suscipere digneris; ut gratia tua nobis infusa, sub glorioso nomine Jesu, æternæ prædestinationis titulo gaudeamus nomina nostra scripta esse in cælis. Per eundem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum…
(O almighty and everlasting God Who didst create and redeem us, look graciously upon our prayer, and with a favourable and benign countenance deign to accept the sacrifice of the saving Victim, which we have offered to Thy Majesty in honour of the Name of Thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: that through the infusion of Thy grace we may rejoice that our names are written in heaven, under the glorious Name of Jesus, the pledge of eternal predestination. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…)

The sweet Name occurs over and over again, as if one could not speak it enough — as in the great office hymn “Jesu dulcis memoria.” One sees clearly how this feast originated with the Franciscans, one of whose greatest preachers, St. Bernardine of Siena (about whom I have written here), chose the Holy Name for his special devotion and insignia.

What if we add a consideration of the Ordinary of the Mass? In the traditional celebration of the Holy Name, the Mass (whether it falls on a Sunday or a weekday) always includes the Gloria and the Credo; the Novus Ordo celebration would not include either. The Gloria mentions the Holy Name twice; the Credo mentions it once; the prayer at the mingling of water and wine, once; the Suscipe sancta Trinitas, once; the Roman Canon, thrice; the embolism, once; the commingling, once; the priestly prayers of preparation for holy communion, thrice; the taking of communion by the priest, twice. Not including all the times the Holy Name is pronounced with each act of giving communion to the faithful (“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi…), this adds up to FIFTEEN times, for a total of 27 (12+15).

In the Novus Ordo, the Ordinary of the Mass on this day would mention the Holy Name possibly once at the start, if the second or third greeting formula were chosen; not a single time during the Offertory; then a variable number depending on the Eucharistic Prayer chosen (for EP I, 3 times; for EP II, 2 times; for EP III, 2 times; for EP IV, once); once in the embolism; once in the post-embolism prayer; once in the priestly preparation for communion (since there is an option between two prayers). This adds up to anywhere from 4 to 7 times.

Taking the Proper and Ordinary together, this brings the total number of mentions of the Holy Name on its Novus Ordo memorial to 4 at a minimum and 13 at a maximum. If I were a betting man, I would place my bet on 7 as the most likely number, assuming the following: recitation of the entrance antiphon, the use of greeting #2, the standard lectionary readings rather than special ones, [4] and EP II.

So, in a comparison simply of texts, we would be looking at an obligatory 27 mentions of the Holy Name of Jesus in the course of the TLM, versus an optional approximately 7 mentions of the Holy Name in the Novus Ordo, give or take a few.

We know that the liturgy is so much more than the texts out of which it is composed. It is the chants to which the texts are sung (or not sung). It is the ensemble of gestures and ceremonies performed by the ministers, the collection of signs and symbols that bring to mind the mysteries of our Faith while pointing to what eludes our rational grasp. Nevertheless, the liturgy still IS a textual reality, however many other layers it has; and what we say — and how often we say it — matter profoundly. One cannot automatically assume that more is always better, since then we might as well say the Holy Name a hundred times, or a thousand. The liturgy, as such, is not the Jesus Prayer. But we can assume that a certain number of mentions is appropriate for a feast day held in honor of that very Name by which we are saved; we can assume, moreover, that a severe reduction in the number of mentions, against a fuller tradition of several centuries’ duration, is altogether inappropriate. This would not be, alas, the first or the only time the reformed liturgical books displayed such a disconnect from warm tradition and meet devotion.

It is comparisons like this — which are not difficult to come by on the internet or in books — that prompt one to ask: Where is the true patrimony of our Church, liturgical, devotional, theological, best preserved and celebrated? In the traditional rite, or in a “banal on-the-spot fabrication” that cannot even properly celebrate the personal name of the founder of Christianity?

A night that lasted fifty years is passing; a new day is at hand. As the Christmas season so often says, let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, for the honor and glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

NOTES

[1] It is, as usual, difficult to talk about how often the Holy Name would be mentioned at a Novus Ordo Mass on January 3, because of the moving target nature of the options (something I discuss in an old article).

[2] For a comparison of the Collects, see this article.

[3] This is the totality of the Gospel! Only one verse: the shortest in the traditional calendar. The Novus Ordo also goes to this portion of Luke, but expands it to Luke 2:21-24, which does not have the same impact and focus; it becomes a mere doublet of the Presentation.

[4] There are multiple optional readings, with, accordingly, varying mentions of the Name: 3 times (1 Cor 1:1-3), 3 times (Phil 2:6-11), or once (Col 3:12-17) in the reading from Paul; and once in the reading from Luke. I have seen with my own eyes, and I imagine most who are reading this have also seen, that the regular daily lectionary readings are more frequently used than votive readings, regardless of what memorial is on offer, so there is no guarantee that any of the possibilities for the Votive Mass of the Holy Name of Jesus will be actualized on January 3.

Photos in this article are by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press, his SoundCloud page for lectures, interviews, and readings, and YouTube for lectures and sacred music.

Why the Confiteor Before Communion Should Be Retained (or Reintroduced)

The Confiteor at the start of Mass

In this article, I will defend the fittingness of the repetition of the Confiteor by the ministers immediately before their communion — sung by the deacon and subdeacon at Solemn Mass, said by the acolytes at the Missa Cantata and Low Mass. I shall argue that it not only deserves to be retained, but that it should be used everywhere in the usus antiquior, and not omitted.

Before moving to this question, let us consider for a moment why there ought to be a double Confiteor at the start of the Mass, in the penitential section at the foot of the altar, prior to the ministers’ ascending the mountain of the Lord to offer the twofold sacrifice: first, the verbal sacrifice of the readings, followed by the unbloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

At first glance, it might appear that there should be only a single Confiteor of priest and people together, and indeed, this is what the Novus Ordo Missae provides, having relied on scholars to purge it of “useless repetitions.”

Nevertheless, the double Confiteor is far from useless. It strongly brings out the dialogical nature of liturgical worship, where the celebrant acts as a mediator for the people, and where each member of the body is praying for the other. The doubling formalizes the mediation as well as the mutual assistance. It reinforces the humility needed in the celebrant, who confesses his sins alone coram omnibus, and also exhibits the dignity of the servant who says to the master: “May almighty God have mercy on thee, and having forgiven thy sins, lead thee to eternal life.” It reflects the truth of cosmic and ecclesiastical hierarchy and pushes against one of the dominant errors of our time, that of democratic egalitarianism, which lumps everyone together into an undifferentiated mass (or Mass).

Bishop Athanasius Schneider once told of a Low Mass he was offering in Africa at a large traditional Catholic school for girls. When he had confessed his sins, he heard all these little girls say to him, in perfect Latin, “Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam aeternam.” He was overcome with feelings of humility, littleness, and joy. This experience of the priest confessing his own sins in front of the people—or, for that matter, the bishop, or the pope—is something we could use a great deal more of in the Church today, together (of course) with the confession of the people. And all of this in the humbling and strengthening presence of the saints invoked by name, twice: “Blessed Mary ever-virgin, St. Michael the Archangel, St. John the Baptist, the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints” — not (as we were just saying) lumped together in an undifferentiated mass of “all the angels and saints,” mentioned only once, for efficiency’s sake. There are no shortcuts in penance and forgiveness.

Now, moving to our main topic — the Confiteor before communion — it was not only the repetition at this moment of something that had “already been done” earlier in the Mass that the liturgical reformers objected to; it was rather the impression that the communion rite for the faithful is “tacked on to” the Mass as an extrinsic piece rather than something intrinsic to it. Eliding the communion rite(s) was a way of underlining the unity of liturgical action.

Yet the old practice makes theological sense, at least from the vantage of the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent. The communion of the offering priest is essential to the completion of the sacrifice in a way that the communion of no one else is. In fact, the obscuring of this point by having a single communion rite in which the priest announces “Ecce Agnus Dei” prior to receiving Christ and distributing Him to the faithful is among the many factors that have contributed to the obscuring of the difference in kind between the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of the faithful.

Moreover, one should not evaluate this practice only from a low Mass standpoint, but also from the Solemn High Mass, the normative Mass of the Roman Rite. Seeing the priest flanked by his close companions, the deacon and the subdeacon, with the deacon chanting the Confiteor, throws into sharp relief how the sacrifice is essentially complete with the communion of the priest, who stands in for Christ the High Priest, and that the further communions are an extension of this sacrifice to the ministers and the faithful, a sacramental “rippling out” comparable to the rippling out of the Pax, the gesture of peace, passed down from on high — much as the higher angels communicate illuminations to lower angels.

The one offering brings the sacrifice to completion by himself partaking of the sacrificial Victim. No other communion is necessary for this completion, although obviously the Church rejoices in the participation of as many faithful as are in a state of grace and prepared to receive Our Lord. The scholastic distinction between intensity and extension is helpful here. For example, the separated soul in heaven fully possesses beatitude intensively, but when the body is reunited to it in the resurrection, that happiness will overflow into the flesh and so the beatitude will be greater extensively, i.e., it will have a greater extension.

The separate communions of priest and people, with the Confiteor as a visible and audible caesura, is the liturgy’s way of representing the dogmatic truth spoken of by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi when he distinguishes between the “objective redemption” that Christ accomplished in full on the Cross and the “subjective redemption” of Christians, which occurs through the application of the merits of His Passion to our souls in the sacraments of the Church. St. Thomas speaks of this point often, as when he explains why the faithful need not receive the chalice: “The perfection of this sacrament does not lie in the use of the faithful, but in the consecration of the matter. And hence there is nothing derogatory to the perfection of this sacrament, if the people receive the body without the blood, provided that the priest who consecrates receive both” (Summa theologiae III, q. 80, a. 12, ad 2). “Our Lord’s Passion is represented in the very consecration of this sacrament, in which the body ought not to be consecrated without the blood. But the body can be received by the people without the blood: nor is this detrimental to the sacrament, because the priest both offers and consumes the blood on behalf of all; and Christ is fully contained under either species, as was shown above (q. 76, a. 2)” (ibid., ad 3).

This aspect of the usus antiquior points unambiguously to the essence of the Mass as the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross at the hands of the ordained minister, and forcefully sets aside the Protestant conflation of the Mass and the Last Supper, i.e., the simple identification of the Eucharist with communion — an error so ubiquitous in our day that Catholics not only take it for granted but are unaware that there is any other way of thinking about the matter.

Again, at a high Mass, the faithful are usually not able to hear the Confiteor of the priest and the servers at the beginning, as these preparatory prayers in the sanctuary are muffled under the soaring sound of the Introit. Thus, when the deacon sings or the servers say the Confiteor right before communion, everyone is able to hear it and make it their own, since there is nothing else “covering over” this action.[1] Holy Mother Church offers all the faithful one final opportunity to bow low before the altar, express contrition for sins, call upon saints and angels as intercessors, and receive a minor absolution prior to approaching the Sanctissimum, the Most Holy One, before whom even the Cherubim and Seraphim veil their faces. Thus we see that this Confiteor is both theologically appropriate and spiritually profitable.

To my mind (and probably, I’ll admit, for quite incidental reasons), the suppression of this Confiteor before communion in the missal promulgated by Pope John XXIII serves as the “poster child” of all that went wrong during that strange no-man’s-land between Mediator Dei (1947) and the imposition of the Novus Ordo (1969). In this period of two decades, official papal language still paid lip service to the binding force of tradition and the non-negotiable good of continuity, while at the same time three Popes in succession permitted changes to the liturgy — at first tentatively and in smaller ways, but subsequently growing in audacity to embrace whole sacramental rituals from top to bottom — that led with a kind of inevitability to the jettisoning of the historic Roman Rite and its replacement by the “modern papal rite” (as Gamber calls the Novus Ordo).

Let there be no mistake about it: the incremental changes of Pius XII and John XXIII to the Mass and its rubrics — the abolition of most octaves and vigils, multiple collects, doubled lections, the “Benedicamus Domino,” folded chasubles, etc. — are also corruptions, even if lesser corruptions than Montini’s, and deserve to be rejected by those who care for the Roman Rite in its integrity and plenitude just as readily and easily as the more egregious novelties of the late sixties.

A last consideration, since we are on the subject of the Confiteor and the role of penitence in the rite of Mass: I read in an article at PrayTell about the proposal, fashionable among today’s “with-it” liturgists, to move the penitential rite to after the “Liturgy of the Word.” Their theory (fine on paper, as always) is that we should first hear the Word of God summoning us to faith and repentance, and then express our acceptance of the message in the Creed and a penitential rite immediately prior to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Probably the sign of peace would be moved into this intermediate section as well, so that we can take care of all the Eucharistic preliminaries at once.

Now, I have two reactions to this idea.

First, this proposal and any other like it would make sense only if liturgy is just something we make up according to our own brilliant ideas, rather than a form of prayer we receive from those who came before us and whom we revere as our fathers in Christ, from whom we receive the faith together with its enactment in rites. And surely this is a tempting view, since modern people are seen consistently to have better ideas and to produce greater art than their predecessors. Just think of primitives like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare, Bach and Mozart, and compare them with Rorty and Derrida, Cummings and Kerouac, the Beach Boys and Eminem. We are clearly in a better position to design liturgy than the men who built Hagia Sophia or Notre Dame Cathedral.

What is astonishing to me is that such proposals can be made, let alone taken seriously. Do we know better than the millennia of Latin Catholics who started off the liturgy with penitential preparation—or for that matter, Eastern Christians who can’t help chanting “Lord, have mercy” from the get-go? But we can forgive them and, well, ignore them; after all, among professional liturgists, Byzantines get a pass for everything, no matter how outlandish; the more litanies, processions, blessings, and chants, the better. The East is the exotic “other” whose presence allows us to loathe ourselves in a perpetual inferiority complex, which prompts us to “act out” irrationally from time to time by lopping off another ancient feature that connects us with the East.

Second, in an irony that repeats itself on a regular basis, what the fashionable liturgists say they want is already present in the unreformed (I mean, pre-1962) traditional Mass. They say they want a moment, after the Word and before the Eucharist, in which to express our repentance. The old Mass gives us the Confiteor before communion and the threefold “Domine, non sum dignus...” with the minor absolution from the priest. The old rite, embodying a deep instinct for symmetry, has in that sense two penitential rites: the one prior to receiving the Word, and the one prior to receiving the Word-made-flesh.

The more we ponder the inherited liturgy, the more riches we find in it, and the less we are inclined to tinker with it or accept the tinkering of others, bereft of the fear of God the Father, the love of Christ the High Priest, and the unction of the Holy Spirit. We give thanks to the Most Holy Trinity for beginning to deliver His people from the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of liturgical reform (ca. 1948–2018), stretching from Pius XII’s creation of the committee that would produce the neo-Tridentine Holy Week to the year when Ecclesia Dei granted permission to the ICKSP and FSSP to return to the unreformed Holy Week. We are coming full circle at last, and there is no turning back.

(Portions of this article are excerpted from my lecture at St. Mary’s in Norwalk, “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen — and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.”)

Note

[1] Needless to say, if it is to serve a corporate purpose, the Confiteor needs to be heard at this point rather than mumbled or muttered into the acolyte's sleeve. No need for loudness; an articulate voice and a reasonable pacing will suffice to make the prayer audible even in a large church. For more thoughts along these lines, see my article "Two Modest Proposals for Improving the Prayerfulness of Low Mass."

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

Further Thoughts on “Useless Repetitions” in the Office

As a follow-up to Peter’s article on Monday, I would here like to offer some further considerations of the subject of “useless repetitions” especially in regard to the Divine Office.

The phrase “useless repetitions” occurs in paragraph 34 of Sacrosanctum Consilium, in the section of general norms concerning the didactic and pastoral character of the liturgy, paragraphs 33-36. “Ritus … repetitiones inutiles evitent… – let the rites … avoid useless repetitions.” It is difficult to think that the Council Fathers regarded this as a matter of particularly high importance, since it is mentioned nowhere else; nor are there any other occurrences of the words “repetition(s)” or “useless” in the document. The verb “evitent” is a subjunctive form of the verb “evitare – to avoid”, of the type called a “jussive” subjunctive, which expresses something between a wish and an order. (I once heard a canon lawyer explain at a liturgical conference that this kind of subjunctive is used to indicate that “something is a good idea, but not good enough to be enforced by the law.”) Latin has several other ways to express the idea more forcefully, e.g. “evitandae sunt.”

Paragraph 34 is part of a larger section (paragraphs 21-40) “on the restoration of the sacred liturgy”, which is to say, on changes to be made in the future. This section is not intended to serve as a description of the condition of the liturgy as it stood at the time. One is therefore perfectly free to hold and defend the opinion that the liturgy as it stood at the time contained no useless repetition, and take the words of paragraph 34 as no more than an admonition that no useless repetitions are to be added in the upcoming reform.

As such, it is a perfect example of what Michael Davies long ago branded the “time-bombs” in Sacrosanctum Concilium. The expression sounds nice, especially to the ears of the early 1960s, the age of the efficiency expert and the wholly inexplicable and unmerited optimism of the post-war era; who wants a liturgy filled with things that are “useless”? But, as is so often the case in the documents of Vatican II, no parameters are given to determine what exactly it means or how exactly it ought to be applied. Therefore, which repetitions, if any, are to be regarded as “useless”? All of them? Some? If so, which ones, and according to whom? Are daily repetitions “useless”, but weekly ones “useful”? This lack of clarity and precision (qualities which one should expect above all in the documents of an ecumenical council) gave the reformers free reign to dismiss as “useless repetition” almost anything they had previously decided they disliked and wished to get rid of. A classic case is that of the Offertory prayers, removed on the false pretext that they repeated ideas already present in the Canon, before the latter became one of several canons and was put on the endangered species list.

Textually, the Roman Breviary, which is based on the medieval liturgical use of the Papal Court, is just about the simplest and least variable form of Office that exists among the many Uses within the Roman Rite. Ceremonially, even when celebrated at its fullest, it is not particularly complicated or elaborate, as anyone who has ever attended the singing of the Office in the Byzantine Rite knows full well. There is therefore no reason to suppose that when talking about the restoration of “rites”, the Council Fathers had the Office in mind at all, and particularly in regard to useless repetitions.

Guess which rite.

There are nevertheless a few aspects of it to which the category “repetition” does apply, although I hesitate to add the qualifier “useless.”

With its traditional austerity, the corpus of chapters and orations in the Roman Breviary is quite limited, and most other Uses follow a similar arrangement. On feast days, the same chapter is read at both Vespers, Lauds and Terce; on many occasions (not all), it is taken from the Epistle of the Mass. There are a few feasts where the Mass Epistle is also read at Matins, as for example, the Epiphany; the same single verse of Scripture, Isaiah 60, 1, is therefore read six times on a single feast, and quoted almost exactly in a responsory of Matins. Since the Roman Breviary also uses the Collect of the Mass as the only proper prayer of each Office, that prayer will be said seven times, six in the Office and once at Mass.

There are, however, exceptions even within the Roman Breviary. The Sundays per annum have a different chapter for each Hour, as do the ferias of the major seasons of Advent, Lent and Passiontide. Many chapters do not correspond to the Epistle or Matins readings. On the ferias of Lent, the oratio super populum from the end of Mass is said at Vespers instead of the Collect, and the Hours of Prime and Compline have their own proper prayers. The Roman Office does therefore give space to the idea that a greater variety of these texts is possible.

I specifically refer to “most other Uses” above because in the Middle Ages, there were a number of exceptions. Particularly in Germany and the Low Countries, it was common to vary the chapters and prayers much more, as for example in the proper Use of the principality of Liège. The Premonstratensian Breviary maintains the same custom with the chapters, although not with the prayers, to this very day. In the Ambrosian Office, there is no chapter at either Lauds or Vespers, but these same hours can have several prayers on one day, as many as six or seven on occasion. All of this material might profitably have been mined for use in the Roman Breviary, perhaps at least to reduce the amount of repetition and enrich the text. In point of fact, the new Liturgy of the Hours has a very much greater variety of both of these features, with variable readings and prayers, and provision to change the former more or less ad libitum in public celebration; the new corpus of this material, however, owes very little to traditional sources.

The first page of the Common of the Saints from a Breviary according to the Use of Augsburg, Germany, 1493, with 21 different chapters for the feasts of Apostles.

The traditional corpus of Office hymns is also quite repetitive. The church of Rome took a long time to accept the use of hymns at all, and in its habitual conservatism, adopted fewer of them than other medieval Rites. Those of the minor Hours are completely invariable, while some other Uses changed them on various occasions, most often at Compline (this is still done by the Dominicans), more rarely at the day Hours. Each of the great seasons, such as Advent or Lent, has three proper hymns, one each for Matins, Lauds and Vespers, but many major feasts like Christmas and the Epiphany have only two, the hymn of either Vespers or Lauds being sung also at Matins. A similar conservatism is found among the hymns of the Saints; of the 40 Saints named in the Roman Canon, only the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist and the Apostles Peter and Paul have their own hymns.

The restriction on the number of hymns, and their frequent repetition, was most certainly not “useless” in its original conception. A limited corpus of hymns made them easier to learn by heart, no small matter in an age in which books were not cheap to produce. Nevertheless, it is true that some of the finest gems of medieval hymnody are not found in the historical Roman Office, such as the Christmas hymn Veni, Redemptor gentium, the Easter hymn Chorus novae Jerusalem, and the hymn of the Assumption O quam glorifica. These are all commonly found in other medieval breviaries, and have been duly incorporated into the Liturgy of the Hours, along with a huge number of other compositions old and new.

It cannot be denied, however, that the removal of much of the frequent repetition from the Office has achieved nothing by way of restoring its regular sung celebration to our churches. It would not be out of place for a future correction of Sacrosanctum Concilium to add “ritus … repetitiones utiles non evitent.”

Useful Repetition in the Divine Office

On Thursday, February 14, I gave a lecture at St Mary’s parish, Norwalk, Connecticut, on “Poets, Lovers, Children, Madmen—and Worshipers: Why We Repeat Ourselves in the Liturgy.” (The full text of the lecture may be found here.)

Ever since I first read the words of Sacrosanctum Concilium §34 about how “useless repetitions” (repetitiones inutiles) needed to be removed from the traditional Roman liturgy, I have been on the lookout for instances of repetition as I pray the old Divine Office — or to be more precise, the monastic office as it stood in the 1940s — and as I attend Mass in the usus antiquior, and receive or observe other sacraments in the older use. After over twenty years of observation and reflection, I have still not been able to find a single example of a repetitio inutilis.

Yes, yes, I know the examples that people like to toss out, and in my foolish youth, I would do the same thing. It sounds sophisticated to be able to criticize liturgical practices that have endured for centuries: “You know, those poor Catholics were so conservative that they just kept these irrational customs in place, even though we now see clearly that they make no sense. Far better to streamline the rite, make it more logical.”

That juvenile point of view was replaced by a growing appreciation for the subtlety of the elements of the liturgy, small and large — even those that seem to have come about “by accident.” As Padre Pio once said: “With God, there’s no such thing as chance.” Such appreciation requires both the patience to await meaning and the imagination to see it, neither of which seem to be widespread in our times.

Examples from the Divine Office

After the hour of Prime [1] the Martyrology is read, and then prayers before the day’s work. These prayers commence with a triple “V. Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. R. Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina,” followed by a Gloria Patri, a Kyrie/Christe/Kyrie, a Pater Noster, versicles, another Gloria Patri, and an oration.

There is a lot of repetition here. I have no elaborate rationale to offer, but my experience, having prayed it for a long time, is that this arrangement has a steadying effect and is well suited to begging God’s help at the start of the day's work. The one who begs asks for what he needs more than once, indeed insistently. This is the origin of the Jesus Prayer and of every litany that has ever existed. Praying the Lord’s Prayer a second time, only a few moments after having said it at the end of Prime, typically alerts me to the fact that I had not prayed it the first time with due attention, which prompts me to make my second go at it more earnest. The same is true of the doxology: resisting the temptation to rush through it, one enters more deeply into the origin and goal of all of our actions, the supreme actuality of the Blessed Trinity.

A second example, and one of the most familiar: the Benedicite. Talk about a repetitious prayer! But once one is familiar with it and realizes that we are standing in for the whole of creation, transforming its mute necessities into voluntary praise, there is a special privilege in uttering the verses and a comfort in their lilting succession, like the rolling of waves: “Benedicite omnia opera Domini, Domino: laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula. Benedicite, Angeli Domini, Domino: benedicite caeli, Domino.”

The interruptions of the pattern prompt a reawakening of attention. After saying “Benedicite” 17 times, we say: “Benedicat terra Dominum.” After 8 more iterations of “Benedicite,” we say: “Benedicat Israël Dominum.” Then “Benedicite” is said 5 more times, until we reach “Benedicamus Patrem et Filium cum Sancto Spiritu” and “Benedictus es, Domine.” 30 times we say “Bless” as an imperative; 3 times we say “Let this or that bless” in the subjunctive; and 1 time we say “Blessed art Thou” in the indicative. A pronounced Trinitarian and Christological numerology undergirds this hymn, which is placed on our lips as a kind of litany of blessing admirably suited to Sundays and Holy Days.

A third example, also from Lauds, is the daily repetition of Psalms 148 to 150, which was done by everyone in the West for at least 15 centuries but now remains alive only among the monks and nuns who retain their ancient cursus. This trio of psalms puts on our lips some form of laus or laudare 23 times, giving Lauds its very name, and emphatically stamping it the principal office of pure praise in the Church. There is something captivatingly beautiful in a prayer that has no obvious “use value,” one that is not directed to obtaining a benefit or ridding oneself of an evil. The “gratuitous” repetition, as one might call it, both symbolizes that for-itselfness and serves as a vehicle for inculcating it in us impatient beings who are too often preoccupied with ulterior motives.

A fourth example is the refrain quoniam in aeternum misericordia ejus, repeated 27 times in the recitation or chanting of Psalm 135. A psalm praising the eternity of God’s mercy distantly echoes eternity in its unchanging refrain, like an anchor holding a ship in place, despite the churning waves. It may be hard at times to keep our minds from wandering as we repeat the phrase, but obviously the divine Teacher designed this psalm, as He did all the others down to their last letter, with the spiritual needs of each and every disciple in view.

A final example, and of a rather different character, is the indirect repetitiousness found in Psalm 118, recited daily in the Roman Breviary and once a week in the monastic (namely, divided over the little hours of Sunday and Monday). It takes no great intimacy with Psalm 118 to see that it is conceptually highly repetitive, weaving as many variations with “law, testimonies, commandments, statutes, precepts, judgments, justifications, and sayings” as the psalmist can devise. The Church puts this psalm consistently before us in order to fix our meandering minds and rebellious hearts on the unchanging law of the Lord, which is ultimately His eternal law, His very self, His mercy expressed to us as a rule of life in which we will find life. The layout of the psalm implies that in all the variety we see, in all the vicissitudes we suffer, and even in the seeming pointlessness of the neverending cycle to which Ecclesiastes bears witness, there is a single order of wisdom, a single manifestation of the mystery of God’s love.

So far I have spoken only of textual repetition, but a thorough treatment of our subject would have to include repetitions and seeming redundancies in personnel, ceremonial, gestures, and chant.

The Fate of Repetition

Some of these elements of repetition in the Divine Office were retained in St. Pius X’s breviary and later on in Paul VI’s Liturgy of the Hours, but sadly, many of them were lessened or abandoned. As the Mass was simplified by the reformers to make it briefer and self-explanatory, transparent and accessible, so too was the Office simplified and abbreviated for busy clergy — and this, in spite of the fact that a majority of the Council Fathers, judging from their speeches in the aula, supported neither major changes in the Mass nor a major reduction of the breviary.

Nevertheless, after decades of the new liturgy running alongside the somewhat unexpected survival of the old, it has been possible not only to conceptualize but to experience how the trend toward simplification, the abandonment of formalities, and the rude dismissal of aesthetic principles has brought about a damping of spiritual impact and a lessening of spiritual discipline.

Even the late Fr. Robert Taft, outspokenly anti-Tridentine though he was, admitted this point:

The West might learn from the East to recapture a sense of tradition, and stop getting tripped up in its own clichés. Liturgy should avoid repetition? Repetition is of the essence of ritual behavior. Liturgy should offer variety? Too much variety is the enemy of popular participation. Liturgy should be creative? But whose creativity? It is presumptuous of those who have never manifested the least creativity in any other aspect of their lives to think they are Beethoven and Shakespeare when it comes to liturgy. [2]

What he failed to note, however, is that the liturgy as it came down to us is already the equivalent, albeit on a far greater scale, of a symphony by Beethoven or a romance by Shakespeare. Like the cycles of medieval mystery plays, traditional Catholic worship has a depth, variety, color, and subtlety that defies simple explanation and resists simplification. Patterns of intelligent repetition are one of its most common and effective means for achieving a formal expression of earnestness and a mounting intensification of desire.

Whether, in practice, repetition always retains this value is a subject for the examination of conscience, but it is surely not difficult to see why it is a feature of every historic Christian liturgy, indeed of every religion known to man. From this perspective, the rather ruthless purge of repetitions from the Divine Office, the Mass, and many other rites is yet another angle from which to demonstrate the essentially unhistorical, unliturgical, and irreligious drive behind the liturgical reforms of the last century.

NOTES

[1] It may be noted in passing that the suppression of the very ancient office of Prime, in and of itself, is sufficient to prompt serious doubts about the entire campaign of revision announced in Sacrosanctum Concilium, and allows us to bury once and for all the lie that the liturgical reform was about “restoring ancient worship.” See Wolfram Schrems, “The Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy: Reform or revolution?,” published online at Rorate Caeli on May 3, 2018.

[2] “Return to Our Roots: Recovering Western Liturgical Traditions,” published online at America, May 26, 2008.

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