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

I mentioned in another post that St. Jerome didn’t like St. Ambrose.  He really didn’t like him.  This needs an explanation.  Why?  Do you ever get the sense these days that many think the chief role of a priest is to be a nice guy?

Let us consider St. Jerome.  He has a mixed reputation for a saint.  Right?  

First, keep in mind that Jerome (+420) was not canonized in the modern sense of the term, which involves a detailed examination of the life and works of a Servant of God so as to discern within a reasonable doubt that he lived a life of heroic virtue.

What’s with Jerome and Ambrose?  Well, to get at this we have to bring in a third character, Tyrannius Rufinus of Aquileia.  

You are no doubt aware that Jerome and his old friend of his youth Rufinus (+410) had a titanic clash over the writings and teachings of the early Alexandrian exgete Origen.  When they were young, they were very close, forming part of a group of dedicated Christians at Aquileia and then later at Jerusalem.  They began to argue over the theology of Origen, but they patched things together before Rufinus left Palestine for Italy. 

However, once in Italy Rufinus began to translate Origen Peri archon (De principiis).  In his preface Rufinus made the mistake of assuming that just because Jerome had translated some of Origen’s work, therefore Jerome was a fan of Origen.  People around Jerome also thought Rufinus purposely made Origen sound more orthodox than he was.  These folks wrote to Jerome to let him know what they thought Rufinus was up to and asked Jerome to explain what was going on.  In response Jerome translated Origen himself.  In a letter he strongly denied being a partisan of Origen’s theology, even though he admired Origen’s skill.   Jerome focused his laser on Origen’s statements about the resurrection and the preexistence of souls, and how the Persons of the Trinity related to each other which made him sound like a subordinationist.  Jerome, in this second phase of translation, interpreted Origen in a very strict and harsh way.

When you look at the way Jerome spoke of Origen the first time around, 12 years before, and what he did to him in the second round, it is pretty clear that this was a reaction to Rufinus’s written assumption about Jerome.  Jerome was afraid that his own reputation was going to be damaged by a positive association with ideas which seemed very strange to many people, especially in the West.  In short, he turned savagely on both Origen and Rufinus in order to defend his reputation.  In defending himself Jerome was a little less than sincere.  

Rufinus responded, of course.  He had too.  Rufinus pointed out, for example, that in a commentary on Ephesians Jerome had referred without objection to ideas of Origen about the preexistence and fall of souls into bodies.  There are other points as well.  Jerome responded with vitrolic force saying that some people (e.g., Rufinus), "love me so well that they cannot be heretics without me."

Of course the ways of saints are strange and fraught with problems.  The postal service, or lack of one, actually plays an importance role in all of this.  Jerome wrote a friendly letter to Rufinus assuring him of his high esteem and speaking of their past friendship and the passing of his mother.  He expressed his desire to avoid a public fight.  

The letter never reached Rufinus.  Jerome’s friend Pammachius kept it, and pubished instead a letter of Jerome which accompanied his translation of Origen’s De principiis.   Not having seen Jerome’s irenic gesture, Rufinus published his Apology, in response to Jerome the attacker.

In Book II of his Apology, Rufinus points out how Jerome had attacked Ambrose.  He mentions, as a matter of fact, Ambrose’ work De Spiritu Sancto which I wrote about yesterday.  Thus, Rufinus about Jerome’s view of Ambrose.  Rufinus relates more of Jerome’s distain for his "rival" in Milan (Apology 2,23-25) as he digs into accusations of plagiarism which were being hurled around.  Rufinus says in 2, 23 that Jerome referred to Ambrose as a raven, a bird of ill omen, croaking and ridiculing in an strange way the color of all the others birds on account of his own total blackness… "praesertim cum a sinistro oscinem corvum audiam croccientem et mirum in modum de cunctarum avium ridere coloribus, cum totus ipse tenebrosus sit."

Again, going on about Jerome’s accusation against Ambrose of plagiarism, in 2,25 Rufinus continues about Jerome’s treatment of Ambrose with his own counter charges:

25. You observe how (Jerome) treats Ambrose. First, he calls him a crow and says that he is black all over; then he calls him a jackdaw who decks himself in other birds’ showy feathers; and then he rends him with his foul abuse, and declares that there is nothing manly in a man whom God has singled out to be the glory of the churches of Christ, who has spoken of the testimonies of the Lord even in the sight of persecuting kings and has not been alarmed. The saintly Ambrose wrote his book on the Holy Spirit not in words only but with his own blood; for he offered his life-blood to his persecutors, and shed it within himself, although God preserved his life for future labours.

Suppose that (Ambrose) did follow some of the Greek writers belonging to our Catholic body, and borrowed something from their writings, it should hardly have been the first thought in your mind, (still less the object of such zealous efforts as to make you set to work to translate the work of Didymus on the Holy Spirit,) to blaze abroad what you call his plagiarisms, which were very possibly the result of a literary necessity when he had to reply at once to some ravings of the heretics. Is this the fairness of a Christian?

Is it thus that we are to observe the injunction of the Apostle, “Do nothing through faction or through vain glory”? But I might turn the tables on you and ask, Thou that sayest that a man should not steal, dost thou steal?

I might quote a fact I have already mentioned, namely, that, a little before you wrote your commentary on Micah, you had been accused of plagiarizing from Origen. And you did not deny it, but said: “What they bring against me in violent abuse I accept as the highest praise; for I wish to imitate the man whom we and all who are wise admire.” Your plagiarisms redound to your highest praise; those of others make them crows and jackdaws in your estimation. If you act rightly in imitating Origen whom you call second only to the Apostles, why do you sharply attack another for following Didymus, whom nevertheless you point to by name as a Prophet and an apostolic man?

For myself I must not complain, since you abuse us all alike. First you do not spare Ambrose, great and highly esteemed as he was; then the man of whom you write that he was second only to the Apostles, and that all the wise admire him, and whom you have praised up to the skies a thousand times over, not as you say in two, but in innumerable places, this man who was before an Apostle, you now turn round and make a heretic.

Thirdly, this very Didymus whom you designate the Seer-Prophet, who has the eye of the bride in the Song of Songs, and whom you call according to the meaning of his name an Apostolic man, you now on the other hand criminate as a perverse teacher, and separate him off with what you call your censor’s rod, into the communion of heretics. I do not know whence you received this rod. I know that Christ once gave the keys to Peter: but what spirit it is who now dispenses these censors’ rods, it is for you to say. However, if you condemn all those I have mentioned with the same mouth with which you once praised them, I who in comparison of them am but like a flea, must not complain, I repeat, if now you tear me to pieces, though once you praised me, and in your Chronicle equalled me to Florentius and Bonosus for the nobleness, as you said, of my life.

And from Jerome’s own pen we have this vicious attack on Ambrose (ep. 69,9).  Jerome was writing in the year of Ambrose’ death, 397, to a Roman named Oceanus who wanted Jerome to help him fight against a bishop in Spain who had married a second time.  Jerome tells Oceanus to drop it, since that bishops’ first marriage had been before baptism.  However, Jerome uses the occasion to take a somewhat less than oblique swipe at Ambrose.  Ambrose had been popularly proclaimed bishop in Milan in 374 even though he had not even been baptized and had no theological training. The emperor, who wanted peace, acceded and within a week Ambrose was baptized and consecrated bishop.  Jerome, who had probably been disappointed that he hadn’t been made bishop of Rome, surely felt the sting of this meteoric rise of Ambrose.  In any event, listen to Jerome:

One who was yesterday a catechumen is today a bishop; one who was yesterday in the amphitheatre is today in the church; one who spent the evening in the circus stands in the morning at the altar: one who a little while ago was a patron of actors is now a dedicator of virgins. Was the apostle ignorant of our shifts and subterfuges? Did he know nothing of our foolish arguments? (Heri catechumenus, hodie pontifex; heri in amphitheatro, hodie in ecclesia; uespere in circo, mane in altari; dudum fautor strionum, nunc uirginum consecrator: num ignorabat apostolus tergiuersationes nostras et argumentorum ineptias nesciebat?) 

Okaayyyy!   That’s "NO!" vote from Jerome. 

This is all very discouraging, in a sense, but important matters in the Church are sometimes hammered out through the instrumentality of weak men who are driven by love and zeal.  Sometimes nice guys finish last, too.   Still, all of us are bound to seek the truth and God will be the final Judge of our intentions.

In case you were looking, I posted a synthesis of my articles on Corpus Christi last Thursday.  Here is a LINK.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  11^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2002
 

The lamentations continue.  As one could have easily predicted, the reactions to the Congregation for Divine Worship’s (CDW) Liturgiam authenticam (LA), which establishes norms for vernacular translations of the Latin Rite’s liturgy, have been both mixed and strong.  While many have been elated and have praised this development, there are others who have moaned that it does more harm than good.  For example, offering little cause for surprise the National Catholic Reporter has both an editorial in their 24 May 2002 edition, as well as an article by their nearly ubiquitous and well-informed Rome correspondent John L. Allen, Jr., that LA is killing ecumenism.  The editorial trumpets, “Alarms sound over latest blow to ecumenism.”   Apparently Horace Allen, a Presbyterian liturgist and member of the group called Consultation for Common Texts (a forum for ecumenical cooperation on liturgical translation comprised of 21 different Christian groups, including the U.S. bishops’ conference, the Canadian bishops’ conference, and the International Commission on English in the Liturgy) has opined that “the entire ecumenical liturgical conversation and dialogue is over—finished, dead, done.” 

Some Catholics do not know that there exists something called the Revised Common Lectionary containing readings from Sacred Scriptures for Sunday worship.  It was published in 1992 by the above-mentioned Consultation on Common Texts.  It was based on the 1969 Lectionary used by Catholics and differs from it only in readings from the Old Testament used after Pentecost.  Perhaps 70 percent of Protestant churches in the English-speaking world use this lectionary.  Some people see this common lectionary as being important for the ecumenical movement since Catholics and many Protestants often have the same readings on the same Sundays.  Now we hear that the Holy See has put a stake through the heart of ecumenism with the hammer of LA, which requires more accurate translations of texts used in the liturgy, including Scripture.  It is a little hard for me to see precisely what the problem is since we will be using the same verses on Sundays just as before.  The translation will eventually change in time, but…there it is.   In any event, the NCR continues its hysterical denunciations of LA referring even to the “Vatican march to undo liturgical reform that had begun to take hold during the past three decades.” 

Apparently what has been going on for the last few decades was actually healthy.  However, the myopic mandarins of Holy See never allowed the ever-more fruitful movement of liturgical reform to mature.  As a result, “those most deeply engaged in liturgical reform and translation issues had to spend most of their time in recent years fending off attacks from curial officials appointed during this papal regime” (Emphasis added).   I don’t think anyone will disagree with that summary.  Who will deny that they were fending off the Holy See. 

Must one surmise that insisting that liturgical norms be followed and that both consultation and permissions be obtained before experimentation and adaptation take place ad libitum actually constitute an “attack” on the part of Apostolic “regime”?   Who is attacking whom? The NCR’s John Allen, who – say what you will about the NCR itself – is a darn good reporter, wound up his coverage of this with how Horace Allen said he had visited St. Peter’s Basilica, had seen the body of Blessed John XXIII, and then complained that “His body is on display, and his council is in ruins.” 

I disagree.  I think the implementation of what the Council offered regarding worship was miserably hijacked, and it is “in ruins” from that point of view only.  I don’t think that we have had something marvelous and wonderful after the Council, because we haven’t been given the chance to have what the Council asked for.  To claim that the Holy See has treacherously begun to raze to the ground all the great things going on is absurd.  LA is, in my opinion, a concrete step toward the proper implementation of the Second Vatican Council’s mandates for the liturgy.  It is not a step backward.

SUPER OBLATA: LATIN (2002 Missale Romanum):

Deus, qui humani generis utramque substantiam
praesentium munerum et alimento vegetas et renovas sacramento,
tribue, quaesumus, ut eorum
et corporibus nostris subsidium non desit et mentibus.

This was the secret of the prayers Pro defensione ab hostibus…For defense against enemies in the 1962MR found in the Orationes diversae which could be added according to the rubrics after the other required proper prayers for the day.  I also found this in the prayer In tempore famis… In time of hunger. 

LITERAL TRANSLATION:

O God, who the two-fold substance of human kind
both quicken by the nourishment of the present gifts and renew by sacrament,
grant, we beg, that their support not be lacking to both our bodies and our minds.

ICEL:
Lord God,
in this bread and wine
you give us food for body and spirit.
May the eucharist renew our strength
and bring us health of mind and body.

We turn now to our weighty Lewis & Short Dictionary for some help with a few words and find right away that the verb vegeto means “to arouse, enliven, quicken, animate, invigorate.”  Think of the different kinds of living beings with bodies that there are (remember, angels are alive too, but they don’t have bodies): vegetative, animal and human.  This word seems to be used mostly in later Latin, for the references we find in L&S are from the Christian poet Prudentius and from the Latin Vulgate.  The noun subsidium stands in the first dictionary entry for the third line of troops, also called triarii, held in reserve during a battle behind the principes.    As a result this technical military term also means “support, assistance, aid, help, protection.”  You can see from these two words how the content of this super oblata was appropriate for imploring God for help both in time of famine and against the attacks of enemies.   The military language of subsidium and the imagery is summons underscores how this prayer is used against real enemies.  The language of alimentum and vegeto harken to the “daily bread” we must have from God, both spiritual and physical, nourishment for our “two-fold” substance of matter and form, body and soul.   This prayer is a bit convoluted in its structure and doesn’t transfer into smooth English very easily.  Because certain elements in the Latin are paired with more than one thing at a time we need to leave something out.   Were we to write the whole thing out, we would have to say something like: “Lord, God, who the two-fold substance of human kind both quicken by the nourishment of the present gifts and renew by sacrament of the present gifts.” We easily see in Latin that praesentium munerum goes with both alimento and sacramento but it gets a little too ponderous to repeat it in English. The Roman Missal has always had very practical prayers meant to be used in all the occasions and challenges of life, as well as in times of celebration.  The Church intends that Holy Mass be celebrated for the most fundamental of our life experiences, whether it be praying for rain for the good of crops or for the sake of consecrating men and women to the service of God or of Christian marriages.  We should have recourse to the source and summit of our sanctification in time of want and of plenty, peace and war, certainty and uncertainty. 

This is a time when there is a great deal of uncertainty in the Church.  There is a battle raging for the very soul of Europe.    The Church and Christians in general are persecuted in some parts of the world, such as China, Sudan, Indonesia.  In many third world environments the Church is growing rapidly in numbers though not without attendant problems syncretism and lack of proper formation.  In the United States there are ghastly problems of corruption and scandal.   Indeed, while they are without question providing a useful purging and scouring of the Church, the members of the mainstream media are conducting an impassioned campaign against the Church.  It must be said that the hierarchy of the Church have no one to blame but themselves for the present media coverage of the scandals.  Still, clearly this is also a chance for the Church’s enemies both within and without to both weaken the Church’s influence as a moral voice in the public square and also to push that she conform more to the wisdom of the world and bend under the onslaught of secular trends.  This is a time when we need to pray to God for help against the attacks of the Church’s enemies, and against the Enemy behind them.  As our beloved Holy Father is clearly suffering terribly with his physical ailments, Rome and everywhere else is all abuzz with debates over the next possible successor of Peter.  Even though he has lost some support through recent missteps, one of the men counted as a strong front-runner is the cardinal archbishop of Genoa, His Eminence Dionigi Card. Tettamanzi.  His Eminence last year wrote a book on “The Great Tempter” entitled in the original Italian Il Grande Tentatore (Edizioni Piemme, 2001).  In this useful little volume, indeed on the book’s back cover, Card. Tettamanzi gives us ten salutary points by way of a “decalogue against temptation”:

1. Do not forget that the devil exists.
2. Do not forget that the devil is a tempter.
3. Do not forget that the devil is very intelligent and astute.
4. Be vigilant concerning your eyes and heart.  Be strong in spirit and virtue.
5. Believe firmly in the victory of Christ over the tempter.
6. Remember that Christ makes you a participant in His victory.
7. Listen carefully to the word of God.
8. Be humble and love mortification.
9. Pray without flagging.
10. Love the Lord your God and offer worship to Him only.

In this time when the Enemy is savagely gnawing at the Body of the Church we must remember to pray in a special way both for our spiritual and physical daily bread, for there are more than one kind of hunger today, and also for the grace to resist wicked temptations and physical and spiritual attacks on the Church and her members from both within and without.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?  11^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Yes, this is Corpus Christi most places, such as Italy, but since I live in an Extraterritorial building of the Holy See, it is the 11th Sunday inside these walls.)

ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN The Wanderer in 2005

Many e-mails have come with questions and comments.  GF of CA had a question about the rubrics in Latin of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal as it was adapted for the USA.  Fr. MK wrote about the Collect of the Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter.  EU wrote asking (among other things) about how to get the bishop to have people kneel again.  (Good question, that.)  BJ wanted to know about the music used at the funeral Mass of Pope John Paul II.  Br. PM wrote about a prayer in Latin for the canonization of the same Pope.  There are many more.  I am so grateful for the messages and I read all of them.  Alas, I cannot mention or respond to everyone individually.  Please do not, on that account, hesitate to write by e-mail or by post in care of The Wanderer.  The editor is not forwarding your snail-mail to me in Rome, but I will get everything when I return to the USA soon.  Here is a missive I must share.  A while ago a priest fraternally took me to task for observing that Jesus’ use of “Abba” for God the Father was like saying “Daddy”  “Abba” doesn’t mean “Daddy”, of course.  Therefore, JO of RI asks, “So what does ‘Abba’ really mean?  May I assume it still has that very intimate meaning?”  No, JO,  “Abba” means “Father” in either a direct address (vocative) or an emphatic form, giving it a highly prominent place in a sentence.  JO also kindly mentioned having heard a talk I gave at a conference last year in Providence, RI.  It is nice to meet readers in person when the occasion presents itself. 

This week’s Collect has a few stylistic word order changes but it is the same as that for the First Sunday after Pentecost in the 1962 edition of the Missale Romanum and in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary.   How do I know this?  Another WDTPRS reader, CD, asked via e-mail:  “Is there any type of list or cross-reference of the prayers used between the Tridentine Rite and the Novus Ordo?”  I am greatly helped, CD, by an issue of Notitiae (32 (1996) 1/3), the official publication of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS).  Frs. Anthony Ward, S.M. and Cuthbert Johnson, OSB, looked into the fonts of the prayers of the Novus Ordo.  I use some other tools of research as well.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Deus, in te sperantium fortitudo,
invocantibus nostris adesto propitius,
et, quia sine te nihil potest mortalis infirmitas,
gratiae tuae praesta semper auxilium,
ut, in exsequendis mandatis tuis,
et voluntate tibi et actione placeamus.

Patience, folks.  A more accurate English version is in theory being prepared by the new and improved ICEL under the watchful eye of the Vox Clara Committee and the CDWDS.  Let us now, however, go straight to the lame-duck version you will hear in your parish church on Sunday.  Keep in mind your WDTPRS Rule of Thumb: When the English is shorter than the Latin, be suspicious. 

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Almighty God,
our hope and our strength,
without you  we falter.
Help us to follow Christ
and to live according to your will.

By means of the Lewis & Short Dictionary we go from ICEL shakiness to Latin “strength”, which is precisely what the L&S says fortitudo means.  In classical Latin fortitudo rarely means physical strength.  It is, instead, “firmness, manliness shown in enduring or undertaking hardship; fortitude, resolution, bravery, courage, intrepidity”.  In the Vulgate of the Old Testment the Lord is often described as “my strength… fortitudo mea”.  Latin and Greek Old Testament versions translate Hebrew maw’oz and ‘oz which indicate a place or means of safety, a refuge or stronghold.  You all know the great “battle hymn” of the 16^th Protestant revolt in Germany “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott … A Mighty Fortress is our God”, the translation of a psalm by Martin Luther (+1546).   Since ancient times the battle of orthodox Catholicism with various heresies and schismatic movements has involved the use of hymns and songs.  They help people learn and remember things.  St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) composed a ditty with sound theological points to combat the Donatists who had set up their schismatic altars against those of Catholics.  This is true in more modern times as well.  If the Lutherans had A Mighty Fortress is our God we Catholics all know Grosser Gott, Wir Loben Dich or Holy God, We Praise Thy Name composed in 1774 as a paraphrase the Te Deum going back to the late 4^th or early 5^th century, perhaps having a connection to St. Ambrose (+397).

Auxilium is of course “help, aid, assistance, support, succor”.  WDTPRS has often criticized the ICEL versions which constantly have us asking for some “help” from God (who is, after all, really big and a really nice guy).  Old-style ICEL “help” is nearly always inadequate because the concept of “grace” has been obliterated along with the word itself.  More than one writer has observed that ICEL “help” smacks of Pelagianism.  In our Latin prayer we ask God for the “help” of grace.  In looking for possible sources for this somewhat wordy Latin Collect, there immediately came to mind through the word pairings fortitudo and infirmitas, voluntas and actio, St. Augustine of Hippo’s anti-Pelagian writings.  I think that is a pretty good starting point for reading this prayer. 

Voluntas is mainly “will, freewill, wish, choice, desire, inclination”.  This is the power of our free will which together with our intellects distinguishes us creatures of body and soul from brute beasts.   It can also be more simply an “intention” or something we interiorly “will” to do, as in “I want ICEL to do my will… er um… the will of the Congregation for Divine Worship as expressed in Liturgiam authenticam and give us good translations.”  The deponent exsequor is “to follow to the end, to pursue, follow” and therefore “to perform, execute, accomplish, fulfill”.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:

O God, strength of those hoping in You,
graciously be present to us invoking,
and, because without You mortal weakness can do nothing,
grant always the help of Your grace,
so that, in the carrying out of Your commands,
we may please You both in will and in action.

In the fall of our first parents, we were wounded and weakened in our intellect and will.  It is hard for us to reason to what is good and right and true.  Then, when we do attain them with our reason or learn about them by authority, it is hard at times for us to will to choose them.  Our intellects and wills must be disciplined over time and through repetition of choices and actions in the right times, moments, and measures so that we have good habits, virtues.  In our prayer voluntas is set in juxtaposition with actio “action”.   We have “inclinations” to this or that thing, but in actions our inclinations become concrete.  Some actions are entirely mental or spiritual, in that they are actions of the mind.  We have an initial idea or inclination, and then we use our free will to grasp or refuse that idea.  We can bring an inclination to a deeper thought, contemplate it.  There are intellectual acts (for good or ill).  There are also physical actions.  We get an idea and then, with our intellects and wills, we figure out how to do it and choose to act (for good or ill).  Because of the weakness in us from Original Sin, in order to will and act properly we must have the help of grace.  God begins and completes in us all the meritorious things we do.  He gives us the strength to carry through with all good acts.

At this point, I could rattle on about other theological things in this prayer, but let me digress instead.  I mentioned above making the content of our faith memorable through song.  Thus, I am compelled to add a note about a Corpus Christi Mass and procession I attended some few days ago.  Each year for Corpus Christi pilgrims from German speaking countries come here to Rome for a Mass celebrated at the Teutonic College within the grounds of Vatican City.  After Mass there is a procession with the Blessed Sacrament through the famed Vatican gardens.  Swiss Guards carry the canopy over the Blessed Sacrament.  It is rather splendid.  It was a wonderful moment which both revealed and strengthened the deep faith of these Catholic people.  Being a very German event it was well organized.  The orderly groupings of pilgrims and clergy, the band and Swiss Guards marching in step, all kept their places.  After years of coping with the Roman way of doing things it was a real contrast to be so very … managed.  Italian liturgies are sometimes like a rugby scrum crossed with a tug-of-war.    

The music was fine.  The choir, the Vokalensemble of Biberbach and Chorus Angelorum of Öhling, both of the Austrian Diocese of Sankt Pölten, sang a capella a splendid little Mass with German and Latin texts called the Altenmarkter Messe by Christian Dreo, clearly modern but with a strong Renaissance idiom.  We also enjoyed the Ave Verum Corpus by W. A. Mozart, and Anton Bruckner’s Tantum Ergo.  To underscore how deep the choral sacred music tradition is among German speaking Catholics, I could hear the congregation singing both the Mozart and the Bruckner in four part harmony.  People wept.  For the procession a band from Ernsthofen, Austria played songs.  The faithful sang hymns and responded boldly to the litanies.  At the end we nearly raised the dead in the ancient cemetery next to the church with a four part singing of Holy God We Praise Thy Name, without which no celebration of this kind would be complete.  This beautiful event confirmed for me – as if that were necessary – the need for these fine public displays of Catholic faith and also the wisdom of a special Year of the Eucharist.   They strengthen us in our weakness.  They help us love God and carry out His mandates, especially the command to love our neighbor in actions, not just good intentions.  A good rousing procession is worth far more than bales of documents and, yes, even WDTPRS columns.

And there have been processions.  In Rome on the Thursday of Corpus Christi, thousands of people turned out in the streets for the procession in which Benedict XVI bore the monstrance from Rome’s cathedral St. John Lateran to the Basilica of St. Mary Major.  Meanwhile, in the hills just south of Rome in Velletri (the main city of my diocese and the titular See of Francis Card. Arinze, titular bishop of Velletri-Segni) there was a fine long procession through the city lasting a couple hours, part of it across sacred images made from flower petals upon the cobblestones in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. 

Yesterday I was back near same place in the Vatican where the Teutonic College is, next to the so-called Paul VI Audience Hall, where that procession had begun a couple days before.  I was waiting for my bishop who, poor man, was involved in a meeting of the Italian Bishops Conference.  When Their Excellencies exited the building at the end of their session the bishop wearily sighed that they had endured about 20 votes during the day.  I responded, “Ci vogliano meno votazioni e più processioni, Eccellenza…  Your Excellency, we need fewer votes and more processions.”  He was on board with that.