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

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.

Folks, let’s help this young man.  We need online resources for how to serve Mass, probably low Mass.

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.

 

043 07-08-23 Benedict XVI on Mass “toward the Lord” and a prayer by St. Augustine
042 07-08-10 St. Augustine on St. Lawrence and how to be a Christian
041 07-08-09 Ratzinger on liturgical silence; silent Eucharist Prayer
040 07-08-02 Eusebius of Vercelli in exile; my column in on detractors of Summorum Pontificum
039 07-07-27 St. Augustine on Christ the Mediator; “for all” or “for many”?
038 07-07-25 Ratzinger on “active participation”; The Sabine Farm; Merry del Val’s music
037 07-07-18 The position of the altar and the priest’s “back to the people”

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.

I wrote about garum and the other fish sauce liquamen in the pages of The Wanderer when I was examining the 4th Eucharistic Prayer.  Here is an excerpt:

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.

How did St. Monica’s tomb wind up here? 

Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Inside the Vatican (December 2004) on the abovementioned event.  I used the alternate (and more accurate Punic) spelling of the saint’s name – "Monnica" (emphasis not in the original):

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?