What Does The Prayer Really Say?
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I got a very interesting e-mail.

Emphases and comments mine.

Bishop Victor Galeone was on the WQOP Live Show today in the Diocese of St. Augustine, answering questions live from callers. I will record the encore show tomorrow (which will air at 12PM EST) and transcribe his response for you to post (if you like) on your blog.  [Is the Pope Catholic?]

A caller asked the bishop what sort of "qualifications" he will be expecting the clergy to exhibit before they’ll be "permitted" to use the extraordinary form in this diocese.  The caller also asked the bishop if he would be personally willing or able to use the extraordinary form. The bishop’s response was that he will expect the clergy to be able to exhibit knowledge of Latin and the rubrics of the rite.  He also acknowledged the memorandum "leak".  Furthermore, he said that he will not prohibit anybody from using the extraordinary form. 

Next, he read an excerpt from an article in some magazine on how some have said that the solution to irreverent liturgies is to bring back the old Mass.  The bishop said that he sees that it’s irreverence exhibited by priests that needs to be corrected, and that the solution is not found in bringing back the Latin Mass.  He stated that "the people don’t know Latin". 

He also said that he prays in Latin, English, and Spanish privately on a daily basis, however he would "prefer not to" offer the liturgy in the extraordinary form.

He sounds like he was prepared for a question on this, interestingly enough.

If you want to alert your readers to tune in tomorrow to the encore broadcast of the WQOP  Live Show, that would be great but I’ll be sure to transcribe it for you.

WQOP
AM1600 Atlantic Beach-Jacksonville
Saturday, September 1, 2007
12PM
WQOP Live Show (encore)

Guest:  Bishop Victor Galeone of the Diocese of St. Augustine
www.qopradio.com

This is a public service announcement.

I watch lots of Chinese language movies.

Last night I spent a week watching Yi Yi (A One And A Two).  

Run for your lives.  

Despite a good Rotten Tomatoes review, this is a 2:53 hours of your life you will never have back.

I hated this movie so much that I had to warn you.  

First reports about the recent workshop at Merton College, Oxford, are coming in.  Damian Thompson of The Telegraph has an initial impression... and it was a good one.

My emphases and comments.

A glorious Mass at Merton College

Posted by Damian Thompson on 30 Aug 2007  at 12:58

My spirits are soaring after attending yesterday’s solemn traditional Mass at Merton College, Oxford, during the training course for priests organised by the Latin Mass Society.

It was glorious to see the sunlight piercing the pillar of incense as priest, deacon and sub-deacon performed the ancient liturgy for which Merton Chapel was built.

I’m going to write about this in more detail elsewhere, but the conference (which ends today) has been a triumph. What delighted me most was the enthusiasm and patent holiness of the priests attending – most of them ordinary parish clergy, not dyed-in-the-wool “traditionalists”.   [This is the truly significant bit in the whole event, I think.]

Everyone was buoyed up by the Archbishop of Birmingham’s sermon on Tuesday, which underlined the fact that the old barrier between older and newer forms of worship has been abolished by Pope Benedict.

Let’s hope that that the social barrier between Catholics attached to the newer and older forms of the Mass also disappears. The Pope understands that liturgical renewal will reinvigorate the whole Church; what Catholics need now are diocesan bishops who are willing implement his reform.  [And how!]

Do you remember that there was going to be a workshop in England for priests who want to learn the older form of Mass?

Here is a report from The Telegraph about the participation of the Archbishop of Birmingham (not Alabama), Most Reverend Vicent Nichols who preached to the assembled men.  My emphases and comments:

Apparently, His Excellency told the congregation:

    So the first invitation of the Holy Father is for us to avoid speaking or writing or thinking in terms of two rites: the ‘Tridentine Rite’ and the ‘modern’ or ‘post Vatican II Rite’. We should respond attentively and consistently to this invitation.

    Why does the Pope insist that there is one rite of the Mass? Because, whichever form is being used, the same mystery is being celebrated, the same rite is followed. There is one mystery and there is one movement, or structure, through which that mystery is enacted …

    I hope that your study of the Missal of Pope John XXIII will help you to appreciate the history and richness of that form of the Mass. And I trust that you will bring all that you learn to every celebration of the Mass you lead in the future.

    I have no doubt that each of us must strive for improvements in the way the ordinary form of the Mass is celebrated so that its inner mystery and spiritual movement is more clearly set forth. As Pope Benedict says, we must do all we can to bring out the spiritual richness and theological depth of the Missal of Paul VI, ‘for that will guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI will unite parish communities and be loved by them’.  [Certainly one of the objectives of Pope Benedict in issuing these provisions was to create a gravitational pull by the older Mass on how the newer Mass is celebrated.]

    Please remember that what you study here is not a relic, not a reverting to the past, but part of the living tradition of the Church. It is, therefore, to be understood and entered into in the light of that living tradition today.

    The Missal of Pope John XXIII will remain the extraordinary form of the celebration of the Mass, for, as Pope Benedict says, its use ‘presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation and some knowledge of the Latin language; neither of these is found very often’. And the decision of the Church was that, for general use, it needed to be revised. But there are truths of which it can still remind us and it has treasures and consolation to offer.

    May the Lord bless your efforts in these next few days and draw you closer to the heart of the one saving mystery, that mystery which we now celebrate together.

I like this sermon.  

Whether His Excellency is for the older Mass or against it, this sermon has precisely the correct tone.  He is showing up where the priests are gathering. 

He is taking a leadership role. 

Here is a suggestion to those bishops who are hostile to the provisions of Summorum Pontificum. 

If you don’t want that celebrations of the older Mass spread in different parishes of your dioceses, then take control of the situation by being friendly toward the older Mass, not hostile.  Take control by making sure that there are stunning Masses at the cathedral or a couple well suited places.  Go yourselves, Your Excellencies, often to be the celebrant or be in choro wearing every scrape of fancy duds you can put on.  Since the moon doesn’t look very interesting when the sun is shining, take control of the situation by leading, not by promises of tests for clergy and undue, and probably illicit, restrictions or impositions. 

People won’t be as interested in what they can have in the parishes when they can have it all in splendor with the bishops himself.

Lead from the front.

Today is the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. I consider this (also) my name day, and in a way it is even more appropriate than the Nativity of John in June!

Here is the Roman Martyrology entry for " the greatest man born of woman", as the Lord called him:

Memoria passionis sancti Ioannis Baptistae, quem Herodes Antipas rex in arce Macherontis in carcere tenuit et in anniversario suo, filia Herodiadis rogante, decollari praecepit; ideo, Praecursor Domini, sicut lucerna ardens et lucens, tam in morte quam in vita testimonium perhibuit veritati. ... The memorial of the suffering and death of St. John the Baptist, whom King Herod Antipas held in the prison in the citadel of Macheron and, on his birthday, since the daughter of Herodias was making the request, ordered to be beheaded; thus, the Precursor of the Lord, like a bright shining lantern, gave witness to the truth in death as much as he did in life.

St. Augustine spoke often of St. John the Baptist, "the voice" of Christ’s "Word".

Here is a piece of s. 380, preached in a year we can’t quite figure out. As a matter of fact, it might not be an actual sermon, but something assembled from other pieces. Still, it is Augustinian:

8. So let us recognize these two things in the very differences of [Christ’s and John’s] deaths. We read that John suffered martyrdom for the truth; was it for Christ? It wasn’t for Christ if Christ isn’t Truth. It certainly wasn’t for His Name, and yet it was for Truth itself. I mean the reason John was beheaded, after all, was not that he had confessed Christ. But he was urging self-control, he was urging justice; he was saying, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife" (Mk 6:18). The law, you see, which had commanded this, had also commanded about those who died without children, that brothers should take the wives of their brothers, and raise up seed for their brothers. Where this reason was lacking, the only motive was lust. It was this lust that John was rebuking, a chaste man rebuking an incestuous one; because this too is what he represented: "It is necessary for him to grow, but for me to diminish" (Jn 3:30).

The commandment had alredy been given that if anyone died without seed, his closet relation should take his wife and raise up seed for his brother. After all, why had God commanded this if not to signify in this way that the brother’s seed was to be raised up to the brother’s name? The commandment, you see, was that the child to be born would have the name of the deceased. Christ was deceased, the apostles took His spouse, the Church. Those whom they begot of her they did not name Paulians or Petrians, but Christians.

So let both their deaths also speak of these two things: "It is necessary for him to grow, but for me to diminish." The one grew on the Cross, the other was diminished by the sword. Their deaths have spoken of this mystery, let the days do so too. Christ is born, and the days start increasing; John is born, and the days start diminishing. So let man’s honor diminish, God’s honor increase, so that the honor of man may be found in the honor of God.

Augustine makes the connection between the change of seasons and the births of John the Precursor and Christ the Messiah. Very nice.

It is something to reflect on when on the deck of The Sabine Farm. 

The days are getting shorter.

At various times in my articles in The Wanderer, during talks and on this blog I have opined that if we are serious about an authentic ecumenical dialogue, we have to get our liturgical act together: "What must the Orthodox think when they see how we Latins conduct ourselves liturgically?"   At the same time, the solemn Mass in the older use of the Roman Rite is as grand as anything the Easterners do.

I see now that the estimable Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale has posted that the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias, Alexis II, looks with favor on Pope Benedict’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum and the derestriction of the older form of Mass.

He also speaks clearly about his view of relations with the Holy See.

The patriarch had finished celebrating the Divine Liturgy for the Dormition of Mass (15 August, The Assumption), in the similarly named Cathedral at the Kremlin.  He was briefly interviewed. 

Here are some of the significant points from Mr. Tornielli’s article (my translation):

n. 203 del 2007-08-29 pagina 25

"The recovery and valuing of the ancient liturgical tradition is a fact that we greet positively.  We hold very strongly to tradition.  Without faithfully guarding the liturgical tradition, the Russian Orthodox Church would not have been in a position to resist during the period of persecution, in the 20’s and 30’s in the 1900’s.  In that time we had many new martyrs, whose number can be compared to the epoch of the first Christian martyrs."

Holiness, how do you see the relationship between Rome and Moscow right now?

"It seems that Pope Benedict XVI has repeated may times that he desires to work in favor of dialogue and collaboration with the Orthodox Churches.  This is positive."

For years already there has been talk of the possibility of a meeting between you and the Pope.  Do you think this is possible?  When?

"A meeting between the Pope and Patriarch of Moscow must be well prepared and absolutely ought not risk a reduction to a photo opportunity or to walk around together in front of television cameras.  It must be a meeting which truly helps firm up the relations between the two Churches…".

You speak of it as if it were rather remote hypothesis.  Why?

"Unfortunately today there are still some Catholic missionary bishops who consider Russia as missionary territory.  But Russia, Holy Russia has already been enlightened with a centuries old faith which, thanks be to God, was preserved and passed on in the Orthodox Church, and is not missionary territory for the Catholic Church.  This is the first point about which it is necessary that problems be clarified and smoothed in view of a meeting with the Pope.  The other problem concerns ‘uniatism’."

Why do the uniate communities, those which maintaining the Eastern Rite and Eastern tradition reentered in full communion with Rome, are regarded as a problem?

"The phenomenon of uniatism is troublesome because we see this tendency also in regions where it never was before, for example in the Eastern Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakhstan and in Russia herself.  When these problems are dealt with and resolved then a meeting between the Pope and Patriarch of Moscow can be considered.  Then it will truly have its proper meaning."

Users of Firefox know about extensions.  I saw one today that got me thinking.

There is an extension for Muslims called Pray Times.  It shows the time remaining to the different points of the day when Muslims are to pray.

Would it not be great to have one of those for the liturgical hours and the Angelus/Regina Caeli?

I bet a code savvy reader could develop one.

Get to work!

o{]:¬)

Augustine died on 28 August 430. His friend and biographer Possidius describes his last days during the siege of Hippo by the Vandals. Sometime before the early 8th century, Augustine’s remains were translated from N. Africa to Sardinia for fear of desecration. It is possible that St. Fulgentius of Ruspe took Augustine’s body to Sardinia. Fulgentius had run afoul of the Arian Vandal overlords in N. Africa and was driven out.

During the 8th century Augustine’s remains were in danger again, but this time by another gang of vandals called Arabs, who were swarming all over the Mediterranean as pirates and brigands. Sometime between 710 and 730 King Liutprand of the Lombards translated Augustine a second time and, on some 11 October, had him interred in Pavia in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. It is thought that Liutprand had to pay a huge ransom the bones from some muslim thug. (Hard to believe, I know.) Eventually, with the passage of time people simply forgot where the saints bones actually physically were in the church. Eventually the church itself came to be controlled by two different Augustinian groups, the Canons Regular and the Hermits. Let’s just say their relations were strained and leave it at that. Then something happened that set off the war between them.

In 1695 a group of workman were excavating under the altar in the crypt of the church. They found a marble box containing human bones. The box apparently had some charcoal markings spelling the part of the word "Augustine", though those markings disappeared. Great chaos ensued.

The memory of just where the relics of Augustine were placed in the church had been lost through the passing of the years. Finding them again set off a rather unedifying battle for their control between the Augustinian Hermits and the Canons Regular. Eventually Rome had to step in to resolve things. Pope Benedict XIII, a Dominican who changed his numbering from XVI to XIII so as to avoid counting an anti-pope, got involved personally. He was very interested in saints and canonized the huge number of 18! This was also at the time when the future Pope Benedict XIV, Propsero Lambertini, published his fourth and final volume On the beatification of the servants of God and of the canonization of the blessed. Pope Lambertini would give us the legislation for the canonical processes of canonizations that has lasted with some few changes to today.

In any event, Benedict XIII sent a letter to the Bishop of Pavia telling him to get their act together and figure out the questions of authenticity and control. Additional studies were made under someone appointed by Benedict and by 19 September of 1729 things were wrapped up. Processions were held, solemn proclamations made about the authenticity of the relics, a great Te Deum was sung and there was a fireworks display, and anyone who decided to disagree and start the bickering again would be excommunicated. Ah! Those were the days, no? The next year under Pope Clement XII the Cardinal Secretary of State (and a patron of the Canons Regular) commissioned the carving of the large main altar with its reliefs, completed in 1738, and which you can now see today in the church where Augustine’s tomb is even now.

The Sabine Chapel has some very nice relics.  Here are St. Augustine and his mother St. Monica.

I got a very nice note from a new seminarian at the North American College in Rome.  He had listened to the newest PODCAzT in which I have an audio bit of the wonderful exchange between Pope Benedict and the new men who have arrived for their studies.

This seminarian needs some help, and I think the readers here might be helpful. 

Dear Fr. Zuhlsdorf,

I am one of the new men at the Pontifical North American College in Rome and a daily reader of your blog.  Thank you for all that you do and mentioning us during your most recent podcast.  Hearing again the words of the Holy Father to us reminded me of the primary reason that I am here to study:  Peter. [I would have said "Jesus", but… we all know that being in Rome and being near Peter is what he means!  o{];¬)  ] Yesterday we were greeted by his successor and tomorrow I will have the privilege to go on the Scavi Tour of St. Peter’s. 

Father, I came across your blog during the media buildup in anticipation of the motu proprio while looking for a Catholic response.  Thank you again for your work.  In reading your blog, I became aware of the SanctaMissa.org site that offers training for priests to say the Missal of John XXIII.  Do you know of any such resource to learn how to serve the Mass?  A priest from my diocese, is coming to Rome to celebrate the Motu Proprio going into effect by saying the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite in St. Peter’s.  He has asked me to serve.  I have been practicing the responses but have not been able to find help in learning what to do while serving.  Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if it is not too much to ask, if you are ever available, I would love to meet you and, providing I learn how to, serve Mass for you.  I will be in Rome for the next four years.  Father, I can not thank you enough for your blog and work.  It is an inspiration to me and a supplement to my formation.  The NAC has a new Director of Liturgy, so I look forward to see what he will do in terms of the Motu Proprio and the extraordinary form of the Mass.  With best wishes.

NYY (72-59)  000000000   0  3  1     
DET (71-60)  12313060X 16 20  0

o{]:¬)

Sometime back I wrote that a new book had been published to.  It is by Lee Bradshaw, A guide to the Celebration of Low Mass according to the traditional Roman Rite. (Melbourne: Gavantus, 2007, pp.65).

A kind soul, probably Mr. Bradshaw, sent me the book.

It is a paperback, larger format.

There are no images.  There is a helpful, and very well-balanced introduction by Alcuin Reid. 

The book is designed to help a priest or seminarian who knows nothing about how to celebrate the usus antiquior learn step by step, with patience, what to do. 

However, there is the introductory section an excellent note:

"No amount of reading can take the place of actually assisting at Masses celebrated by other priests, and you should also do this whenever possible.  Although it is now common for laymen to serve Mass, the norm is for this to be done by a cleric and serving other priests’s Masses will also give valuable experience." (p. 14)

The Introduction includes an elementary pronunciation guide for Latin.  It is very good.  In the Introduction there are also notes about the Altar Cards and some extremely good notes on timing of words and ritual actions.

There are good descriptions of how to set up for Mass, how to put on vestments together with the vesting prayers.  At the end, in appendices, you find the prayers which a priest ought to memorize, if possible, and common variations in the low Mass, such as those expected for a Requiem or Mass without a server.

A flaw is perhaps in the lighter, gray, used for rubrics and responses, the crosses indicating the moments when the priest is the make signs of the Cross.  Perhaps color will be available in a future printing or, perhaps, different type faces.

The pages are divided into two columns, separated by a verticle line.  The priest’s Latin text is on the left, without Latin rubrics.  The right column are English descriptions of the priest’s actions.   The descriptions are not overly picky, or wordy.  There are some good points added.

This is a great tool!   It would be of little use for a layman, but I recommend especially that people consider giving copies to seminarians and priests (and perhaps a younger bishop or two). 

Today we hear from our frequent guest, St. Augustine of Hippo who speaks to us about the death of his mother, St. Monnica in 357 at Ostia, the port of Rome.  Augustine describes his mother’s life and death in Book 9 of his Confessions.  We hear both English and Latin today.

Also, we learn of the Via Francigena, the famous pilgrimage route.  The Holy Father mentioned it during his Angelus address on Sunday.  We will hear what happened when the Holy Father greeted the new American seminarians who are beginning their studies in Rome.

Finally, I have some of your voicemail feedback.

 

 07-08-27 St. Monica dies, Augustine weeps; Pope Benedict greets American seminarians [33:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From Serge Lancel’s Augustine, the best biography I know of the great Bishop of Hippo (p. 8 ff – emphases mine):

Before devoting himself entirely to Mother Church, as he approached the age of forty, Augustine had had a concubine for about fifteen years, fo whom he had beem very fond and who had given him a son; then, at the same time as a fleeting engagement, a second short-lived liaison.  But only one woman really counted in his life, and that was his natural mother, Monica.

As we may guess from reading a few pages of Book XI of the Confessions, Patricius had taken a wife in Thagaste from a milieu close to his own.  He had married Monica, as his would describe it in a phrase borrowed from Virgil, "in the fullness of her nubility", which means that he had not married a child, a practice that was in any case more rare then in Agrica that in Rome itself.  The couple had three children, in what order we do not know: a girl, who remains anonymous to us, but who, once widowed, would later become the superior of a community of nuns, and two boys, Augustine and Navigius, whom we shall find with his brother in Italy, at Cassiciacum, then at Ostia at their dying mother’s bedside.  ...

So Monica had been born into a Christian family and was, as we would say today, a practicing believer.  The religious practices of Christians at that time, in North Africa, sometimes included aspects that would be surprising to us, such as the custom of taking offerings of food to the tombs of martyrs, for agapes that only too often degenerated into orgies; an obvious survival of the pagan festival of the Parentalia.  Of course, Monica did not indulge in those excesses.  If the baskets she brought to the cemetery contained, besides gruel and bread, a pitcher of unadulterated wine, when the time came to share libations with other faithful, she herself would take only a tiny amount, diluted with water, sipped from a goblet in front of every tomb visited.  Was this sobriety a memory of some experience in her early youth?  Augustine tells this story which he says he heard from the lady hersself.  Raised in temperance by an old serving-woman who enjoyed the complete trust of Monica’s parents, she had fallen into a bad habit.  Well-behaved girl that she was, she was sent to the cellar to fetch wine from the cask, but before using the goblet she had brought to fill the carafe she would just wet her lips with the wine, not because she liked it, says Augustine, but out of childish mischief.  But gradually she had acquired a taste for it, to the point where she was drinking entire goblets of it with great gusto.  Fortunately she had cured herself of this incipient liking for drink in a burst of pride: the maidservant who accompanied her to the cellar, having fallen out one day with her young mistresss, insultingly called he a "little wine bibber".  Stung to the quick, Monica had immediately stopped her habit.

A biretta tip goes to Rogue Classicism   o{]:¬)  who alerted me to a yummy article in Business Standard about ancient garum, the fermented fish sauce which was the ketchup of the ancient world.  

Ancient ketchup
DIET/ The Romans loved their fish sauce, and globalised it
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi August 26, 2007

Things that have fermented make some of the most appetising flavours on the modern table. Wine, beer, vinegar, bread, cheese, sauerkraut, achar, dahi, dosas and idlis all come from fermentation. Nice things (mostly) go into these foods. Would you, however, be quite as interested in garum, a fish sauce that the ancient Romans adored, and which was made of fermented fish entrails?
 
Perhaps not. But similar fish sauces are still around, especially in Southeast Asian cuisines. Vietnam’s ubiquitous nuoc mam is made much like garum was, and then diluted or flavoured with a variety of ingredients to go with many dishes.
 
The India-inspired English Worcestershire sauce is another. Worcestershire was invented quite by mistake in the 1830s, after a barrelful of an attempted anchovy sauce turned out too pungent and was left in a basement and forgotten. When it was finally opened years later, the liquid was discovered to be quite tasty, and Messrs Lea & Perrins (whose basement it was) marketed it very successfully.
 
This is how garum was made: fresh fish parts, the blood and innards of mackerel, say, were layered alternately in large containers with generous amounts of salt. Over about a month of standing in the sun, the enzymes within the fish broke them down into a thin liquid — the garum — and a paste that settled at the bottom known as allec. (Pliny the Elder writes that allec heals burns; it was also eaten as a savoury spread.) The process was so unbearably smelly that laws forbade Romans to make garum at home; thus one of Rome’s few suburban factory industries came into being.
 
The sauce itself was not strong-smelling, and seems to have been used very widely as a condiment, in place of salt. In fact, the Romans took it from the Greeks, whose garos was designed to avoid wasting all the assorted little fish at the bottom of the net which couldn’t be eaten as separate dishes.
 
As imperials, the Romans added snob value to the food, by discriminating between garums made from different raw ingredients, such as single species of fish, more blood, or more intestines (which added to the pungency). Garum is thus one of the earliest manufactured, processed foods with a global market. Ancient ketchup, in other words.
 
Fermented fish, anyone. Or garum, as the Romans liked to call it.

Speaking of recipes we have a 1st c. A.D. cookbook of a fellow named Marcus Gavius Apicius. There are some modern editions which have worked out the measurements and substitutions for things hard to obtain today, like silphium (Grk. silphion called in purer Latin laserpitium, “laser”) which was related to the fennel plant. Silphium was cultivated into extinction by the 2nd c. A.D. because it was a known abortifacient “contraceptive”. The 1st c. B.C. Roman poet G. Valerius Catullus (+c. 54) said that he and his main squeeze “Lesbia” could enjoy as many metonymous “kisses” as there were grains of sand as on Cyrene’s silphium bearing (lasarpiciferis) shores (cf. c. 7). In any event, a copy of Apicius in the kitchen could be handy in the USA, given the hurricane induced tomato shortage or even if you are refusing to use certain brands of tomato ketchup. Of course, ancient Romans didn’t have tomatoes, which came from the New World. Thus, in time of lycopersical scarcity check out the tomatoless ancient Roman cuisine. In no time you too could be dining on nightingale tongues and dormice. Well, take that cum grano salis. There are great appetizing recipes in Apicius, honestly. Virtually all of them require the ancient version of ketchup too! Ketchup, as you may not know, comes from Eastern Asia: it was a salty pickled fish sauce – ketsiap. The English word catchup appears in 1690 and ketchup in 1711. In the mid-1800’s Americans began using tomatoes in their pickled sauce. In ancient Roman cookery, a heavily predominate ingredient was garum, an intense salty picked fish sauce. I’ll spare you a description of how it was made. The city of Pompeii, destroyed by Vesuvius in A.D. 79, was a major producer and exporter of some of the very best garum, also called liquamen. Archeologists found in Pompeii some amphorae, shipping and storage containers for liquid, with preserved garum still inside. Analysis determined that garum is closely analogous to present day Vietnamese fish sauce … ! Without question garum is the ketchup of the ancient Romans. They cooked with it and poured it generously over everything. Yum! 

This is the chapel in the church of St. Augustine in Rome (literally across the street from my back door) where the mortal remains of St. Monica (+387), the mother of Augustine of Hippo now rest. 

To the right is a shot of the chapel on the day a couple years ago when the bones of of St. were brought from their resting place in Pavia (near Milan) to Rome. For the first time since 387, son and mother were reunited.

Most visitors to the Eternal City find it puzzling and wondrous that Monnica’s remains would be in Rome and even more so that Augustine’s should be in northern Italy, or that we have them at all.  How did this come to pass?  Monnica died at age 56 of a malarial fever at Ostia, Rome’s port city, not far from where modern Rome’s port, DaVinci airport, is situated.  After Augustine’s baptism in 386 by Milan’s bishop St. Ambrose (+ AD 397), Monnica and Augustine together with his brother Navigius, Adeodatus the future bishop’s son by his concubine of many years whom Monnica had forced Augustine to put aside, and friends Nebridius, Alypius and the former Imperial secret service agent (agens in rebus) Evodius were all waiting at Ostia to return home to Africa by ship.  They were stuck there for some time because the port was blockaded during a period of civil strife.  As she lay dying near Rome, Monnica told Augustine (conf. 9): “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.”  She was buried there in Ostia.  In the 6^th century she was moved to a little church named for St. Aurea, an early martyr of the city, and there she remained until 1430 when her remains were translated by Pope Martin V to the Roman Basilica of St. Augustine built in 1420 by the famous Guillaume Card. D’Estouteville of Rouen, then Camerlengo under Pope Sixtus IV.  As fate or God’s directing have would have it, in December 1945, some children were digging a hole in the courtyard of the little church of St. Aurea next to the ruins of ancient Ostia.  They wanted to put up a basketball hoop, probably having been taught the exciting new game – so different from soccer – by American GIs.  While digging they discovered the broken marble epitaph which had marked Monnica’s ancient grave.  Scholars were able to authenticate the inscription, the text of which had been preserved in a medieval manuscript.  The epitaph had been composed during Augustine’s lifetime by no less then a former Consul of AD 408 and resident at Ostia, Anicius Auchenius Bassus, perhaps Augustine’s host during their sojourn.  It is possible that Anicius Bassus placed the epitaph there after 410 which saw the ravages of Alaric the Visigoth and the sacking of Rome and its environs.  One can almost feel behind these traces of ancient evidence Augustine’s plea to his old friend sent by letter from the port of Hippo Regius over the waves to Ostia.  Hearing of the devastation to the area, far more shocking to the ancients than the events of 11 September were for us, did Augustine, now a renowned bishop, ask his old friend to tend the grave of the mother whom he had so loved and who in her time had wept for her son’s sins and rejoiced in his conversion?

Some new from Down Under: 

Archdiocese of Melbourne:

Solemn Pontifical Mass at the Throne will be celebrated in the traditional Latin rite (1962 Missal) by His Grace, Archbishop Denis Hart, at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, on Saturday, 25 August, at 10.30am.

The Mass will be celebrated in thanksgiving for Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio.

* Priests interested in learning to celebrate the extraordinary usage of the Roman Rite (1962 Missal) are invited to contact Fr Glen Tattersall, on (03) 9532 4154, or email: chaplain@latinmassmelbourne.org

* Solemn Mass in accordance with the 1962 Missal is celebrated every Sunday at 11am at St Aloysius’ Church, 233 Balaclava Rd, Caulfield North. After Mass on Sunday, 19 August, instruction will be available for those lay faithful who wish to learn more about the older usage of the Roman Rite. Please BYO lunch. The day will conclude with Vespers at 4.00pm.

* * *

Archdiocese of Sydney:

In addition to the FSSP Apostolate at Maternal Heart Chapel in Lewisham, Mass according to the 1962 Missal will now celebrated in the Lady Chapel at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, every Wednesday and first Friday of each month at 4pm.

A Latin-English Booklet Missal is now available for $5.00.

Inquiries: The Alliance of the Holy Apostolic Tradition, PO Box 4, Allawah, NSW 2218; tel (02) 4358-3861; email: lmonteiro@munichre.com

SOURCE: AD2000 Vol 20 No 7 (August 2007), p. 4