What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

I don’t think I posted this one earlier.  Enjoy!   I think I might have the best place in Rome to watch the fireworks when they are near San Pietro.  As a matter of fact, folks have come to sit in my bathroom for the view!




If you were watching the Z-Cam tonight, you would have seen fireworks behind the dome of Sant’Agnese!

You’ve seen them before… shots of Roman evenings and sunsets. I guess I just can’t help myself.

You can see the swallows swooping around as they love to do in the mornings and evenings.

COLLECT:
Deus, cuius gratia iusti ex impiis
et beati efficiamur ex miseris,
adesto operibus tuis, adesto muneribus,
ut quibus inest fidei iustificatio
non desit perseverantiae fortitudo.

This prayer was not in pre-Conciliar editions of the Missale Romanum.  It had a precedent in the Sacramentarium Bergomense.  There are elegant parallels here as well as snappy rhythmic phrases.  This is a delight to pronounce.

SUPER LITERAL VERSION:
O God, by whose grace we are made
just people out of impious and happy people out of wretches,
be present with Your works, be present with gifts,
so that the fortitude of perseverance will not be lacking
to those in whom there is the justification of faith.

SMOOTHER VERSION:
O God, by whose grace we are made
into just people after having been impious and blessedly happy after being miserable,
be present to us now with your works, be present with Your gifts,
so that the strength of perseverance will not be lacking
to those in whom there is the justification of faith.

God, who created the universe and everything in it out of nothing, makes justified people out of the wicked and the sinner.  He makes those who are wretched and miserable into joyous children of God.  

One of the things that popped into my mind as I translated this prayer today was the verse of the awful Amazing Grace.   "Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) / That saved a wretch like me!"  The idea is that we are wretches before and remain always wretches, "wretch" being a description of our totally corrupt nature which remains corrupt even after baptism.

Catchy tune, of course, but that is not Catholic teaching.

Let’s have some catechism.

In the Fall of our First Parents the whole human race contracted original sin and our human nature was wounded.  On our own we are incapable of repairing the damage, for it is simply disproportionate to man’s powers to do so.  The one who is both man and God, however, was proportioned to this work and He repaired the breech.  When we are incorporated into His Person, we benefit from the merits of the Sacrifice He made on our behalf.  The way we are integrated into Him is, fundamentally, the sacrament of baptism.

In the sacrament of baptism we are at once both justified and sanctified.  We are justified in the sense that the debt we owed on account of our sins (including Original Sin).  God cleanses us of the guilt of those sins and we are just in His sight.  At the same time, we are also made holy by the indwelling of the Trinity.   We are cleansed and made pleasing at the same time.  Classical protestant teaching says that baptism justifies but we still remain filthy in our nature.  We are justified but not sanctified.  We remain interiorly corrupt
 no matter what we do, but Christ interposes Himself between us and the Father so that we appear to be clean even though we are not.  This is not Catholic teaching, of course.   For Catholics sanctification and justification are two sides of the same coin.   

Spinning this out a little more, as an example I recall from Lutheran doctrine that a justified person remains forever a sinner because of concupiscence, which is not removed by baptism.  Concupiscence describes the disordered desires and difficulty we have in controling our appetites we have because of the wounds to our will and intellect.  The baptized person is described by Lutherans as simul justus et peccator ... righteous and sinner at the same time.

On the other hand Catholics know that concupiscence is not in itself a sin.  Justification in baptism removes sin but not concupiscence.  Lutherans think concupiscense itself is sin.  Thus, they separate justification and sanctification from each other.  For them, concupiscence itself makes people sinners.  Concupiscence makes us guilty before God and it is never removed from us.  This was and is contrary to Catholic teaching.  The Council of Trent correctly taught that justification makes us righteous.  It condemned with an anathema the error that justification is only an "imputation" of Christ’s righteousness (which is at the heart of the Lutheran description of man as a heap of dung covered over with white snow).  Trent also condemned with an anathema the claim that concupiscence itself is sin.

We have been given great gifts by God, including sanctification.  Christ’s merits become our merits.   What we need to do is persevere in sanctity to the end of our lives.  It is difficult, this life of grace and sanctity, but it is possible.  This is part of what the late Pope was trying to show the world through the great emphasis he placed on beatifications and canonizations.  

I hear the movie is risible.

This from the NY Daily News.

Some quotes:

Most offered only lukewarm praise or shrugs of indifference.

Others laughed or jeered at parts of the nearly 2-1/2-hour thriller and dumped on star Tom Hanks’ performance as well as what they called a potboiler script.  ... "Nothing really works. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not romantic. It’s certainly not fun," according to Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald. ... The Cannes audience of critics – arguably the toughest in the world – clearly grew restless as the movie dragged on to a long sequence of anticlimactic revelations. ..."I kept thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going and going, and not in a good way," said James Rocchi, a film critic for CBS 5 television in San Francisco. ...One especially melodramatic line uttered by Hanks drew prolonged laughter and some catcalls, and the audience continued to titter for much of the film’s remainder.

 

I am going to rush out and see this one! 

COLLECT:
Deus, innocentiae restitutor et amator,
dirige ad te tuorum corda famulorum,
ut, quos de incredulitatis tenebris liberasti,
numquam a tuae veritatis luce discedant.

In the Gelasian Sacramentary this appeared on Saturday of the Octave of Easter.  However, The Redactors changed infidelitatis to incredulitatis.  A little "p.c." touch there, perhaps, and I don’t mean "post communionem".

LITERAL VERSION:
O God, restorer and lover of innocence,
direct the hearts of your servants toward You,
that, those whom you freed from the shadows of religious disbelief
may never deviate from the light of Your truth.

Obviously, incredulitas or "religious disbelief" as the superb Lewis & Short Dictionary reveals, could apply to just about any religion, and even more obviously in the context of this Collect the religion in question is Christianity.  Given the antiquity of this prayer, the original word infidelitas was a shot at the Jews and pagans still wandering in the shadows of errors.  

Let us not forget the document Dominus Iesus issued from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over the signature of Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000.  Here is a nice part:

22.  With the coming of the Saviour Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31). This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism “characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another’”. If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.  However, “all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ. If they fail to respond in thought, word, and deed to that grace, not only shall they not be saved, but they shall be more severely judged”. One understands then that, following the Lord’s command (cf. Mt 28:19-20) and as a requirement of her love for all people, the Church “proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6). In him, in whom God reconciled all things to himself (cf. 2 Cor 5:18-19), men find the fullness of their religious life”.

Just for kicks let’s stroll down memory lane to John Paul II’s 1998 document Ad tuendam fidem.  I really like these bits:

Canon 598 – § 1. Those things are to be believed by divine and catholic faith which are contained in the word of God as it has been written or handed down by tradition, that is, in the single deposit of faith entrusted to the Church, and which are at the same time proposed as divinely revealed either by the solemn Magisterium of the Church, or by its ordinary and universal Magisterium, which in fact is manifested by the common adherence of Christ’s faithful under the guidance of the sacred Magisterium. All Christian faithful are therefore bound to avoid any contrary doctrines.

§ 2. Furthermore, each and everything set forth definitively by the Magisterium of the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals must be firmly accepted and held; namely, those things required for the holy keeping and faithful exposition of the deposit of faith; therefore, anyone who rejects propositions which are to be held definitively sets himself against the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Canon 1436 § 2 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, consequently, will receive an appropriate reference to canon 598 § 2, so that it will now read:

Canon 1436 – § 1. Whoever denies a truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or who calls into doubt, or who totally repudiates the Christian faith, and does not retract after having been legitimately warned, is to be punished as a heretic or an apostate with a major excommunication; a cleric moreover can be punished with other penalties, not excluding deposition.

§ 2. In addition to these cases, whoever obstinately rejects a teaching that the Roman Pontiff or the College of Bishops, exercising the authentic Magisterium, have set forth to be held definitively, or who affirms what they have condemned as erroneous, and does not retract after having been legitimately warned, is to be punished with an appropriate penalty.

Did you notice that above we read "all Christian faithful" and not "Catholics"?

I think you should all organize Ad tuendam fidem anniversary parties for tomorrow, 18 May.  Bring a questionable book and… well… have fun.

I am thrilled to report that a friend of mine has provided us with a version of The Internet Prayer in Mandarin Chinese.  It took time and effort for him to put this together, so I would appreciate you’re saying a prayer for him. 

CHINESE (MANDARIN)   NB: This may not appear correctly if you do not have the proper fonts.
  LISTEN
浏览网际网络祈祷文 汉语（华语）

全能永生的天主，
是您照您的肖像创造了我们人类，
并赐给了我们您的独生子—耶稣基督，
帮助我们发掘生命中的真，善，美。
在教会圣师怡铎主教（Saint Isidore）的代祷下，求您护佑我们，
让我们在浏览网际网络时，
能够善用五官三思，只做讨您喜悦之事;
并让我们以恒久的爱心来关爱生活中遇到的每一个人。
以上所求，是靠我们的主基督。啊们。

At a recent press conference that never took place a journalist shouted, "Hey, Holy Father!  Whaddya thinka Washington D.C.??"

"I haven’t been there for a while, but if given another chance, I’ll give it Wuerl."

BaDumBum

Mike Aquilina, a fellow patristicist, posted an amusing piece which you ought to look at.  He states he cannot find a link to the Fathers, however.  

I grant you, this is a task. At least it is a task to make a good link.  However, picking up on the Latin word bufo, perhaps something can be done.  My first reaction was make a connection with the first Georgic of Virgil.  I know that more for the great phrase exiguus mus, rather than for the reference to the bufo, but there it is. 

"But Father!" you say, "that’s not patristic!"  Yes, I know.  But let’s have some fun with it.

Augustine uses a form of bufo once, and not in a very interesting way; it is mostly a comment on word forms in De grammatica: regulae, namely, "Ab epicoeno struthio hirundo hirudo curculio bufo et talia. Ab u uocali solum neutrum, quod in singulari indeclinabile est, in plurali declinatur, ut cornu ueru genu tonitru:..."  blah blah blah  I do like the reference to the struthio or "ostrich" here, however.  Each year when we sing Tenebrae at St. Agnes in St. Paul (I think you have all heard of that place by now), in one of the Lamentations (I think on Saturday) we get the forelorn image of the struthio in deserto, which I always find amusing.  (I hope Dr. LAL, M.D. is reading this!)

Cassiodorus in De orthographia 5 is equally uninteresting and even more pedantic about the bufo.

You don’t get into any interesting texts until you move into later centuries.  To make a far too long post longer, medieval authors really have a thing about the poor little bufo who takes it on the chin, or whatever you call what they have, everytime.  Bernard of Clairvaux has something to say about the bufo but I would rather not write it here.  Look it up in the Vitae sancti Malachiae 41.  Even the critter loving Franciscan Bonaventure was pretty hard on the bufo (not to mention the Jews) when talking about the salvific water and Blood from Christ’s side in a Sunday sermon (6,6): "Hoc autem medicinali liquore impii Iudaei adeo sunt offensi ut ruinam mortis incurrerint et ruinam super ruinam multiplicarent spernendo medicamentum saluberrimum et antidotum quo genus humanum salvabatur simile bufonibus qui adeo offenduntur de bono odore fragrante de arboribus vinearum ut in fugam convertantur."  I mean, really, was that slander necessary?  Poor bufo.

The famous Thomas a Kempis in his Sermones ad novicios (Sermons to novices) is simply cruel to our bufo, though admittedly with real style!  Thomas the Novice Master is literally giving these kids hell, saying that to get over the desire for honors or even simply to stay in their cells for a little extra sleep, they should picture the ghastly flames of hell roasting their twisting crackling bodies.  They should summon to their minds the scariest things pppppossible, including the bbbbufo!  Get a load of those great active participles all strung together.  Read it aloud, shout, wave your hands around like flames as if you are trying to scare a bunch of novices!  "Pone in mente tua quae naturaliter horribilia videntur, scilicet ollam succensam pice plenam, sulphure foetentem; attende leones frementes, canes mordentes, serpentes saevientes: bufones corrodentes, dracones glutientes; et vinces citius turpissima vitia ad cor tuum maculandum per diabolum tibi immissa: fugabisque longius a te torporem mentis, somnolentiam corporis, et desiderium vanissimae laudis."  Wasn’t that fun?  You have got to read the whole thing sometime.

My favorite reference, is perhaps applicable to the whole DaVinci Code "thing".   I think Dan Brown would do well to keep this one in mind.  Keep in mind what a bad reputation the wretched bufo has by the time Thomas de Chobham (+c.1233/6) in his Summa de arte praedicandi says, and I think rightly:

Melius autem esset homini habere bufonem in ore, quam diabolum… It would be better for a man to have a toad in his mouth, than the devil.

COLLECT:
Deus, qui ad aeternam vitam
in Christi resurrectione nos reparas,
da populo tuo fidei speique constantiam,
ut non dubitemus implenda,
quae te novimus auctore promissa.

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