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

While I tip my biretta to Dominic Bettinelli, I do so with irritated amusement.  o{]:¬

I am not irritated at Dominic, of course, but at Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

The Rep from CA did something truly dopey on the floor of the House.  She cited Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical (there is only one so far, so you know what it is) and Benedict’s quotation of St. Augustine in her argument against repealing the "death tax".  Grrr…. Here is what she said:

Pope Benedict just recently put out his new encyclical, “God is Love.” And in his encyclical, he quoted Saint Augustine when he wrote, this is in the Pope’s encyclical. You can find it there. He talked about the role that politicians have and that a government should be just, and we should be promoting justice. And he goes on, Pope Benedict does, to quote Saint Augustine. He says: “A state that is not governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves.” This is the Pope saying this in an encyclical, quoting a saint. “A state which is not governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves.”

I ask this Congress, is it justice to steal from the middle class to give tax cuts to the ultra-superrich?

It is not just. And it is an injustice we cannot afford. Americans can no longer afford President Bush and the Republicans. It is time for a new direction. We can begin by rejecting this estate tax giveaway to the wealthy and insist on a vote to increase the minimum wage. That would be a real values judgment.

o{]>:¬

I respond: Congresswoman, I know Pope Benedict.  Congresswoman, you are no Pope Benedict. 

The citation, by the way, is from DCE 28a and in turn from De civitate Dei, 4,4: Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia.

Whose is the thief?

The Pope was talking about the proper ordering of society in terms of a distinction of what belongs to the Church and of what belongs to the State.  The Church doesn’t impose on the State, but the Church must have freedom and autonomy.  He explains that the Justice which is for the ordering of society must be rooted in ethics.  Of course the whole point of this is to underscore what is due to every human being on the basis of reason and natural law. Benedict wants to form the consciences of politicians and give them  greater insight into the "authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest."

I wonder if she will quote him about abortion?

Today is the Feast of the one whom the Lord called the greatest man ever born of woman.

COLLECT:
Deus, qui beatum Ioannem Baptistam suscitasti,
ut perfectam plebem Christo Domino praepararet,
da populis tuis spiritalium gratiam gaudiorum,
et omnium fidelium mentes dirige
in viam salutis et pacis.

I like the sound of the ends of the clauses – suscitásti… praeparáret… gaudiórum and then a big change with salútis et pácis.   Remember!  These prayers are to be sung!   Suscitasti is as you now recognize a syncopated form, short for suscitavísti, which would have ruined that nice rhythmic coherence in the first three clauses.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who raised up blessed John the Baptist,
so that he would prepare a perfect people for Christ the Lord,
grant to your peoples the grace of spiritual joys
and guide the minds of all the faithful into the way of salvation and peace.

This modern Collect of the 1970 Roman Missal is based on the Collect of olden days (as well as nowadays for those you who enjoy with your bishop’s permission the use of the 1962 Roman Missal:

Deus, qui praesentem diem honorabilem nobis in beati Ioannis nativitate fecisti: da populis tuis spiritualium gratiam gaudiorum; et omnium fidelium mentes dirige in viam salutis aeternae.

Perhaps the terrible wars of the 20th c., by far more bellicose than even the 16th c., drove the composers of the newer version to include the petition for peace.  One can hardly object.  The first part of the present Collect also is a bit more theological and significant.  All in all, it seems to me that the newer Collect represents an improvement over the older version: which we cannot always say when comparing old and new prayers.

 

If these little messages here seem to crawl at a snail’s pace, here in Rome today on the feast of St. John it is the custom to eat snails.  I will be looking snails for supper later in the evening, since this is my "onomastico".  It is nice to have as your Patron the great Baptist, for I get two feasts a year, his Nativity and his Beheading. 

Snails apart, I cannot help but remember a marvelous St. John’s Day when rather than snails I had wonderous mussels with a dear friend, an occasion I would repeat every year, if I could.  In honor of the memory, if I can’t get snails tonight, I will try for mussels or some other mud bug.

For the Vigil of St. John in the old Roman Ritual the priest would once bless bonfires!   This is lovely custom calls to mind that many places celebrated the feasts of saints with great festivity.  By this day all the cuttings and trimmings of the orchards and vineyards were dried and crackly and ready to be burned.  The evening is about as long as the year can offer, so a great party could be had well into the night with much cooking in the open and revelry.  After the usual introduction, the priest would bless the fire:

Lord God, almighty Father, the light that never fails and the
source of all light, sanctify + this new fire, and grant that
after the darkness of this life we may come unsullied to you who
are light eternal; through Christ our Lord.
All: Amen.

It is almost as if the fire, and our celebration, is baptized.  At this point the fire is sprinkled with holy water and everyone sings the hymn Ut quaent laxis which is also the Vespers hymn.

For the feast of St. John in June for centuries the Church has sung at Vespers the hymn beginning Ut queant laxis.  Those of you who are lovers of the movie The Sound of Music will instantly recognize this hymn as the source of the syllables used in solfège or solmization (the use of syllables instead of letters to denote the degrees of a musical scale).  Both the ancient Chinese and Greeks had such a system.   The Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo (c. 990-1050) introduced the now familiar syllables ut re mi fa sol la for the tones of the hexachord c to a… or, more modally, the tonic, supertonic, mediant, etc. of a major scale.   The Guidonian syllables derive from the hymn for the feast of St. John the Baptist:

Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum
Sancte Ioannes.

After the medieval period (when music became less modal and more tonal) to complete the octave of the scale the other syllable was introduced (si – probably taken from S-ancte I-oannes) and the awkward ut was replaced sometime in the mid 17th c. with do (or also doh – not to be confused in any way with the Homeric Simpsonic epithet so adored by today’s youth, derived as it is from the 21st century’s new liturgical focal point – TV) and do came to be more or less fixed with C though in some cases do remains movable.

So, now you know where Doh, Re, Mi comes from!   Build a fire tonight and sing something in honor of St. John!

Have you ever kept a ratty old pair of jeans, or maybe a threadbare robe, maybe a pair of shoes that should have long gone to the dump simply because they are familiar?  "New and far more useful dish rags and sponges are in that packet under the sink.  Take a new one out and throw the old one away… yeech!"

For three whole decades people have been using the lame-duck ICEL version in most places where English is spoken.  There will be changes in the translation to parts both regular and rare, familiar and occasional.  When the changes are made, some people who haven’t had a chance to understand what the prayers really say in the Latin original are going to freak out, thinking that they are being robbed of something precious, something familiar.

When you are a beggar in rags, or simply aren’t thinking, a familiar rag seems pretty important. 

However, Holy Church clothes our liturgy, and us, in gorgeous words, magnificent verbal garments.  The Latin is overwhelming.  When the new translation is given to us, at last, don’t be tempted to cling to the rag. 

But, some people want us to beg for more rags. 

When you come to understand that the rag isn’t maybe as good as what you ought to have, indeed that you have all these years been robbed of what you were supposed to have, you might be less inclined to hesitate accepting, nay rather demanding, your rightful patrimony, and tossing aside the rag for the rag it is. 

So, we should strive to learn what we have now and what we ought to have had all along.  The Fathers can help us.

You probably don’t know much about Chromatius of Aquileia (+c.407).  He became bishop after the death of Valerian and he carried on a epistolary exchange with Rufinus and Sts. Ambrose and Jerome.  As a matter of fact, he tried to make peace between Jerome and Rufinus… yah right.
He wrote quite a few exegetical treastises, especially on the Gosepl of Matthew, to which we now turn our attention.

In his tr. in Mathaeum 39 (CCL 9A ) reflects on the Centurion and his declaration of faith in Jesus’ power to heal his servant.  

Whence that Centurian, even though he saw our Lord and Savior as a man according to the flesh, nevertheless recognized that He was God by the sight of his mind and of his faith.  So, it goes: Speak but a with a word and my servant will be healed, for he believed that He was present in all places by the power of His divine nature and it was enough that he would want to say a word to be able to cure all things, knowing He was the one of whom it was written: He sent his word and healed them.  And again: He didn’t cure them with a poultice but, O Lord, it was Your word which heals all things.   For he believed he was Him to whom the angels and archangels and all the powers of heaven were subjected in the obedience of servitude.  Whence also it was for him that he said: I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but speak but with a word and my servant will be healed, is understood to mean that his house is this world, defiled with the sacrileges of the gentiles and the superstitions of idols, which is attested to as unworthy for God.

Most of the Fathers make use of the Centurion as a symbol of the Gentiles, taking a hint from the Lord Himself about how God’s favor is also to be extended to them and not only to the Jews.  In the above, did you catch a foretaste of the great hymn of St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274)?  Can one of you say what verse I am thinking of?

Flipping a few centuries forward we find also a note or two from the interesting 13th century commentator Durandus (+1296 – Guillelmus Duranti senior, dictus Speculator) in his Ratione divinorum officiorum.  Durandus explained many of the words and gestures of the priest during Holy Mass, giving them very interesting allegorical interpretations which have continued to influence our thought about Mass even today.  Here is Durandus (4, 42, 30).  He is explaning the gestures and words of Mass (as it was in the 13th  century, mind you).  He uses the examples of the two officials of the New Testament, the Tax Collector Zacchaeus and the Centurion, to speak about those who desire to receive Communion daily or only occasionally.

There follows: "Howeverso often as you will have done these things" etc.  This clause, because it concerns the consecration both of the Body and of the Blood, must be said after the chalice is set down.  Truly we must use great discernment in the perception of the Body and Blood of Christ.  We must be very careful lest this matter be shelved, and danger of death is incurred, as the Lord strongly declares: Unless you will have eaten the Flesh of the Son of man and will have drunk His Blood, you will not have life in you.  But if someone takes (Communion) unworthily, as the Apostles puts it: he eats and drinks for himself judgment, namely of damnation.  And thus according to the same Apostle: Let a man test himself and thus eat of that bread and drink of that chalice, etc.

So, someone will say that one must receive Communion daily, but another will say the contrary. Therefore let each person do that which he will have piously believed must be done, for they didn’t conflict with each other, nor did one of them place himself above the other: as an example, Zacchaeus and the Centurion, when the one was happy to receive Christ in his home and the other said: Lord, I am not worthy that you enter under my roof.  This is what Augustine says: Some communicate daily of the Body and Blood of the Lord, and others receive only on certain days, for one has in this a free custom.

We should remember that frequent reception of Holy Communion is a very modern development.  However, perhaps not so many people always take stock of what reception of Holy Communion is all about.  They do not exercise any "discernment" of what they do.  Week after week they may even go to church on Sunday… well… maybe when there aren’t other things more interesting… and go forward for Communion as if they are going to get their parking ticket validated.  For those who are in the state of grace and who are truly participating with "active receptivity" nothing could be more advantageous than frequent Holy Communion.  And for those who aren’t… well….

We should have healthy awe-filled respect for the Blessed Sacrament and our reception of Holy Communion should never be taken for grant or made into a thing of little importance by the fact of our neglect.   Let the words of the Centurion be our constant reminder of the fearful act of receiving Communion.