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

Sacred Triduum will be celebrated with the 1962 Missale Romanum at St. Augustine’s in South St. Paul, MN.

Holy Thursday – 8:00 pm
Good Friday – 7:30 pm
Vigil of Easter – 11:00 om 

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict will reduce his activity at this week’s Good Friday procession by watching most of the service from a vantage point instead of walking around Rome’s ancient Colosseum, a spokesman said on Tuesday. [Entirely understandable.  What a slog that is, and he, an octogenarian, has a lot to do in these days!]

Rev. Federico Lombardi confirmed the change, reported earlier on Tuesday by the French religious news agency I-Media.

Lombardi said there were no worries about the health of the pope, who will turn 81 during his trip to the United States in April.

"It is reasonable that he would want to conserve his energy," Lombardi said in response to a question.

Instead of walking around the Colosseum for all 14 of the "stations of the cross" as he did in previous years, the pope will watch most of the event from Rome’s nearby Palatine hill. [Where he wil engage in Zen Meditation.]

Benedict is expected to walk the procession only for the last three "stations". The 14 stations commemorate the events between Christ being condemned to death and his burial.

Since his election in 2005, the pope has reduced papal activities and delegated a number of events, such as beatification Masses, to his top aides.

No other changes in the pope’s hectic schedule in the four days from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday were planned.

Benedict was 78 when he was elected, whereas his predecessor John Paul II was 58 at the time of his election in 1978.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; editing by Sami Aboudi)

The results are in for the 2008 Catholic Blog Awards.

Thank you!

How did WDTPRS do?

• Best Apologetic Blog – 1st
• Best Blog by Clergy/Religious/Seminarian – 1st
• Best Designed Catholic Blog – 3rd
• Best Group Blog – N/A
• Best Individual Catholic Blog – 1st
• Best Insider News Catholic Blog – 1st
• Best New Catholic Blog – N/A
• Best Overall Catholic Blog – 1st
• Best Political/Social Commentary Catholic Blog  – 2nd
• Best Written Catholic Blog – 1st
• Funniest Catholic Blog – 2nd
• Most Spiritual Blog – 1st
• Smartest Catholic Blog – 1st

This wouldn’t be a WDTPRS entry unless I included my emphases and comments.

We rebooted the server.

Are we faster?

The insightful Anna Arco has a good article in The Catholic Herald, WDTPRS’s favorite Catholic newspaper of the UK.

You will like this, I think, unless you … well… you’ll see what I mean.

My emphases and comments.

Benedict XVI proclaims that baroque is back

The Pope’s sartorial choices are provoking rage among liberal Catholics, says Anna Arco. But there is a deep theological point to his finery

Priests dance on roller-skates and ridiculously lacy surplices flutter down the catwalk. Copes made entirely of mirrors are followed by chasubles and mitres covered in blinking neon lights, while eerie atonal music reaches its crescendo when glittering, heavy, overly embroidered hyper-Baroque vestments glide through the darkened room. The audience at the "clerical fashion show" consists of decaying, ancient aristos; and Rome’s old guard is presided over by an ageing cardinal, so decrepit that he falls asleep during the silken extravaganza. [Reminds me of some parishes I have seen.]

For many, any discussion of liturgical dress conjures up this scene from Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma: it seems like the theatre of the absurd and the surreal, a vestige of a former, more decadent time in the Church’s history, more interested in form than in substance, that is far removed from what is essential in Catholicism today. It is often seen as a subject that should long have been relegated to the dusty storerooms of the collective memory, much like the pre-conciliar vestments have been consigned to museums, depots or sold to junk shops and decorators. Ecclesiastical dress, be it ancient or modern, has the power to provoke strong emotions.

"The sartorial choices of Benedict XVI fill me with indescribable anger," lamented one Tablet reader last week, [Remember Fr. Pecklers’s article?] reacting to the Pope’s choice of vestments on Ash Wednesday which were based on patterns from Pope Paul V’s pontificate. "What message is all this ostentation giving to the poor and deprived in the rest of the world? What need have the cardinals, or the pope, for ermine-trimmed capes, red velvet shoes, chasubles commissioned in the style of the 17th-century pope, priceless lace albs and surplices, ornate gold rings, jewelled mitres (or even mitres at all)? ‘I am the Way,’ said Christ; what would he think of all this richesse? " On the other side of the spectrum (quite literally) the bonanza of tie-dyed blue and yellow that the Pope wore for the Mass in Mariazell in Austria was met with a mixture of grim mirth and despair.

The liturgical reforms of Vatican II changed attitudes to sacred vestments. They came in part to be a physical symbol of the renewal of the Church that the Council was hoping for, but also for some of the overly liberal interpretations of the Council documents which led in turn to some liturgical excesses never envisaged by the Council Fathers.

In 1971, shortly after the liturgical reforms were implemented, Mgr John Doherty, the executive secretary of the Liturgical Commission of the Archdiocese of New York, wrote: "The Church’s attitude toward the use of vestments of our time grows out of her present view of her mission and image. While firmly committed to sacred vestments in the performance of the liturgy and to maintaining the basic tradition of the past, the Church will see adaptation and creativity grow and increase, based not on a Roman or a Catholic or a baroque model, but arising from varying cultures and local expression."  [We must have good and authentic Catholic inculturation.  But it is important to understand what authentic inculturation is.  WDTPRS has written about this many times.]

Many old vestments were discarded; opulent Renaissance and Baroque vestments especially were relegated to museums, warehouses or simply thrown away. In the mainstream Church, the poncho-like Gothic shape of the chasuble (the vestment worn by the celebrant) replaced the rounded shield shape of old Roman vestments; maniples stopped being used and abstract images and shapes replaced traditional patterns. Albs, the white vestment worn under dalmatic, chasuble, and cope, lost their lace and became simpler.

Since Pope Benedict replaced Pope John Paul II’s creative Master of Ceremonies, Archbishop Piero Marini, with Mgr Guido Marini last year, a number of changes have crept into the papal wardrobe. With the liberalisation of the 1962 traditional form of the Mass, which requires the use of items that have fallen out of use like the maniple and the biretta, he has slowly started mixing the old with the new.  [Gravitational pull, boys and girls, gravitational pull!]

As Archbishop Marini’s favourite liturgical designers, X Regio, said in a 2005 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, what the Pope wears sets trends. For the Palm Sunday procession this year Benedict XVI wore an old-fashioned cope, a long mantle-like liturgical vestment which was less widely used in the mainstream Church after the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s (although it was not suppressed), while the cardinal deacons wore dalmatics which were similar in style. The Pope’s chasuble during the Mass was plain, in the modern Gothic shape.

Pope Benedict’s renewed use of older forms of liturgical vestments is more than just a taste for showy clothes and is in keeping with his concept of the liturgy, which is informed not by a nostalgia for an older Church or by an elaborate "aestheticism" but by his profound understanding of the reforms instituted by Vatican II and what he sees as their place in both the long history of Church tradition and its philosophical and theological underpinnings. [This is a direct shot, in the WDTPRS line, at critics of Pope Benedict and indeed anyone attached to traditional forms of worship!]

As the Australian theologian and philosopher Dr Tracey Rowland argues in her excellent new book Ratzinger’s Faith; The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, beauty plays an important role in Pope Benedict’s faith, not as an optional pedagogical tool or a "question of taste" but as an integral part of his understanding of Christ. While Dr Rowland does not write about vestments, she outlines Pope Benedict’s theology and how it informs his understanding of the liturgy. Beauty and God are inseparable and for Pope Benedict the liturgy is "a living network of tradition which had taken concrete form, which cannot be torn apart into little pieces, but has to be seen and experienced as a living whole".

Summing up Pope Benedict’s attitudes both to some of the liturgical malpractices which came out of certain interpretations of Vatican II and the need for beauty in the liturgy, Dr Rowland writes: "Beauty is not an optional extra or something contrary to a preferential option for the poor. [Right!] It is not a scandal to clothe silken words in silken garments.  [Marvelous phrase!  I think I need this book.] Catholics are not tone deaf philistines who will be intellectually challenged by the use of a liturgical language or put off by changeless ritual forms. However, banality can act as a repellent."   [Remember that great artic"le in the National Review? "…if good music does not always save the soul, bad music never does.” ]

As the discussion about liturgical vestments heats up (which by the looks of things, it will) [D’ya think!] the Pope is said to have ordered a new series of vestments copied from pre-Tridentine vestments which he was to wear last Sunday. It is worth remembering one catchphrase which has qualified Benedict XVI’s papacy so far: the hermeneutic of continuity.

By wearing older, pre-conciliar style vestments to celebrate the Novus Ordo, a practice common in his native Bavaria as well as other pockets of the world, the Pope is sending a signal that the post-Vatican II Church should not turn its back on its long history, but rather that it should celebrate it.

  I tip my black biretta  o{]:¬)   to The Black Biretta who presents another set of helpful texts.  One has a variation on Say The Black – Do The Red

ROFL!!  When Fr. Triglio is made a bishop will he change the blog name to The Paonazza Biretta?  (Great name for a bishop’s blog…)

It is so true that bad liturgy, unfaithful liturgy will kill vocations dead.  Great point!  Where liturgical life is strong, faithful and traditional, vocations to the priesthood emerge because young men will resonate with it.  That is the case with women’s religious vocations, too.

And also,...

And don’t forget the other volumes!

 

and also…

I don’t especially follow college basketball, but I do follow the Men’s Hockey team of my less than "Alma" Mater the University of Minnesota.

The WCHA/NCAA scheduled playoffs during the Triduum.

Grrr….

In this day and age of DVR’s this is not so much of a problem, except for fending off new of results before you see the recording. 

But … really…. how insensitive is that?

Let’s get everyone in on this.

Here is a question from a reader:

Do you know of any particular good commentaries on the beatitudes, especially what is means to be poor in spirit? 

I imagine that in your lenten reading, some of you found good material on this.

A United States Marine writes with a query:

Father – at a recent Mass I noticed that the priest forgot to mix a small amount of water with the wine just before consecration, as is usual.  Did this invalidate the consecration?  Was it a serious failure?  Thank you!

and

Yes, this is a serious failure.

The consecration is effected so long as what was used was wine of grapes, the priest is validly ordained, and he says the proper words of consecration with the right intention. The water is accidental, part of the rite, but of the substance of the matter of the sacrament.

It is a serious failure for several reasons. 

First, people have a right to the rites of the Church.
Second, the mixing of wine and water has a beautiful meaning.
Third, the priest is showing himself (if this is his usually way) not to respect the Church’s liturgy or his people.

The priest at the offertory of the Mass when he puts the tiny bit of water (symbolic of our humanity) into the wine (God’s divinity) in the chalice: "Per huius aquae et vini mysterium efficiamur divinitatis consortes… Through the mystery of this water and wine may we be made partakers of His divinity, who condescended to become a partaker of our humanity."

It may be that the core of this prayer is found in 2 Peter 1:3-4: "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature (efficiamini divinae consortes)."

Consider that the water, the symbol of our humanity, in a sense disappears into the wine, the symbol of Christ’s divinity.  Christ takes us up in His incarnation and transforms our humanity, though without destroying it.  Also, Christ takes each of our offerings and transforms them.  Putting the drops of water into the wine to be transformed is another beautiful symbolic representation of how we offer our sacrifices, each in our own way, to the Father through Christ.

At the time of the offertory this is a good moment to unite all you bring to Mass to the actions of the priest as he places put that small amount of water into the chalice. 

Our friend Fr. Blake has a good piece about Card. Arinze, Cardinal Bishop of Velletri-Segni (oh yah… and also Prefect of the CDWDS) about inculturation.

Be sure to check out Fr. Blake’s page.

Emphases and comments mine.

Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Church’s head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments recently made a speech in Kenya in which he criticized liturgical abuses and protested Masses where the recklessly innovative priests act as “Reverend Showman”.

The Nigerian-born Cardinal Arinze, who is Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, was in Kenya to conduct a workshop and a retreat on liturgy for the bishops, according to CISA. While he was at the Catholic University of East Africa, the cardinal delivered a public lecture in which he discussed the importance of following liturgical rubrics and the proper place of inculturation in the liturgy.

The cardinal discussed sentiments that cause errors in worship, such as

• regarding everyone as an expert in liturgy,
• extolling spontaneity and creativity to the detriment of approved rites and prayers,
• seeking immediate popular applause or enjoyment,
• ignoring approved liturgical texts.

He said that liturgical abuses were often due to an ignorance that rejects elements of worship whose deeper meaning is not understood or whose antiquity is not recognized.

Cardinal Arinze clarified the nature of the reforms of Vatican II, saying they must be seen as continuous with the past rather than as a dramatic break. “The Catholic Church is the same before and after Vatican II. It isn’t another Church,” he said.

Some aspects of liturgical rites can be modified according to pastoral needs. “The Church does not live in the Vatican Museum,” [Excellent!  I usually say "Jurrasic Park", but this is good!] the cardinal said. However, he said that incorporating local traditions into the practice of the faith, which is known as inculturation, should be compatible with the Christian message and in communion with the universal Church.

Inculturation, he said, “should make people part of a Church which is universal but also local.”

Cardinal Arinze attacked distortions of inculturation, saying, “It is a caricature of inculturation to understand it as the invention of the fertile imagination of some enthusiastic priest, who concocts an idea on Saturday night and tries it on the innocent congregation the following morning. He may have good will, but good will is not enough.”

The cardinal also condemned individualistic experimentation, saying, “the person who of his own authority adds or subtracts from the laid down liturgical rites is doing harm to the Church.”  [For example….. washing the feet of women on Holy Thursday?]

Proper inculturation, the cardinal said, required bishops to guide the introduction of new elements into worship. Innovations should take place only after careful consideration, after bishops have set up a multi-disciplinary group of experts to study a cultural element to be included in the liturgy.

The group of experts should then make their recommendation to their bishops’ conference. If both the bishops’ conference and the Holy See approve the innovation, after limited experiment and “due preparation” of the clergy and the people, the new element may be incorporated. “Otherwise it is wild liturgy,” said Cardinal Arinze.

Cardinal Arinze characterized a successful celebration of the Mass as one that “manifests the Catholic faith powerfully, encourages those who have the faith already, shakes up those who are slumbering and those who are at the edge, and makes curious those who are not Catholics at all.”

The Mass must send Catholics home “full of joy, ready to come back again, ready to live it and to share it.”

The cardinal encouraged future priests’ proper formation in liturgy and the ongoing liturgical formation of both clergy and lay people.

A reader posted a comment about the new pastoral staff, which we discussed in the entry on the Holy Father’s Palm Sunday Mass.

He pointed out that the staff used by Pope John Paul II, and also by Pope Benedict, is presently on tour in the the Vatican Splendors exhibit, which is moving around the world.

I suspect that this is the occasion Pope Benedict could use to make a change.  I don’t think we will see that older staff of John Paul II back during this Pontificate.  I wonder if the Holy Father will use just one staff now, or it he will perhaps mix them up a bit.  My guess is that this is the one.

But we shall see!

The meditations of Card. Zen for the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday are available, only in Italian, on www.vatican.va.

The artwork for the Stations is in a Chinese style. 

For example, here is Jesus before the Sanhedrin:

The Holy Father sent a letter to Catholics in China last year.

There is now civil strife in Tibet, spreading to neighboring provinces.

Joseph Card. Zen Ze-kiun, Bishop of Hong Kong, is the author of this years Stations of the Cross for the Pope’s Good Friday celebration in Rome.

Interesting. 

Today SIR has a little article about Card. Zen and the Stations.  Here it is in my translation:

From SIR:

Way of the Cross: Card. Zen ze-kiun, The Pope’s "attention" to Asai and especially China

"When His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, through the Most Eminent Lord Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, asked me to prepare the meditations for the Way of the Cross for Good Friday this year at the Colosseum, I did not have the slightest hesitation to accept such a task.  I understood that the Holy Father, with this gesture, wanted to show his attention for the great Asian continent and to involve, especially, in the solemn exercise of Christian piety the faithful of China, for whom the Way of the Cross is a deeply felt devotion.  The Pope wanted that I should bring to the Colosseum the voice of those sisters and brothers far away."

This is how the Salesian Joseph Cardinal Zen Ze-Kiun, bishop of Hong Kong, present the meditations and prayers composed by Him for the Pope’s Way of the Cross at the Colosseum (21 March 9:15 pm).  "Certainly", the Cardinal writes in his forward, "the protagonist of this sorrowful Way is Our Lord Jesus Christ, as presented in the Gospels and the tradition of the Church.  But behind Him there is the mass of people of the past and of the present, who are we."

"Let’s leave aside", Card. Zen Ze-kiun wrote, "that tonight many of our distant brothers also in time are present spiritually in our midst.  They, probably more than us today, have lived in their bodies the Passion of Jesus.  In their flesh Jesus has been arrested anew, calumniated, tortured, derided, driven, crushed under the weight of the Cross and nailed to that wood like a criminal.  Obviously this evening at the Colosseum, we are not alone here.

"Present to the heart of the Holy Father, and all our hearts, are all the ‘living martyrs’ of the 21st century".  For the bishop of Hong-King, "thinking of the persecution, let us think also about the persecutors.  In composing these meditations, I realized with great fear that I am not much of a Christian.  I had to make a huge effort to purify myself of feelings of little charity toward those who caused Jesus to suffer and those who are causing our brothers to suffer in the world today.  Only when I stood myself before my own sins and my infidelities, did I manage to see myself among the persecutors and I was able to melt from remorse and gratitude for the forgiveness of the merciful Lord"

The whole text of the meditations is available at www.vatican.va.

The Holy Father spoke about Tibet at the General Audience today.

Here is a an oldie PODCAzT from last year.  Yes… I am into recycling.

This PODCAzT was dated 14 April 2007, and I was in Rome. It was Wednesday of Holy Week, as today is, so we can use it today to hear the second reading from the Office of Readings in the Liturgia horarum.

However, I made reference to audio recordings of the Internet Prayer made in a couple languages, which were, alas, lost when I did a server migration.  Eventually they will be replaced.

I hope over the last year the quality of these recordings has improved!  There are a couple sharp bumps in this one, I’m afraid.  I was learning then, and I am still learning now. At least these days I don’t have the sound of Roman buses in the background.

____________________

Today’s PODCAzT concerns the second reading from the Office of Readings, taken from St. Augustine of Hippo’s commentary on John 15:13 in tr. Io. eu 84.  I also talk about St. Isidore of Seville as a possible patron of the internet and the prayer I wrote. 

I am a bit stuffed up today from a touch of allergies, and you can hear it in the recording.  Life is popping out here, now that it is spring. 

Since today was a super busy day, I put this together pretty fast after getting home from a trip down to Velletri for the Chrism Mass this evening.

 

 Augustine tr. Io. eu. 84 Christ is Vine and Life; Internet prayer [20:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Latin:

Plenitudinem dilectionis qua nos invicem diligere debemus, fratres carissimi, definivit Dominus dicens: Maiorem hac dilectionem nemo habet, ut animam suam ponat quis pro amicis suis. Fit ex hoc consequens, quod idem iste evangelista Ioannes in epistola sua dicit: Ut quemadmodum Christus pro nobis animam suam posuit, sic et nos debeamus pro fratribus animas ponere; diligentes utique invicem sicut ipse dilexit nos, qui pro nobis animam suam posuit.
Nimirum hoc est quod legitur in Proverbiis Salomonis: Si sederis cenare ad mensam potentis, considerans intellege quae apponuntur tibi; et sic mitte manum tuam, sciens quia talia te oportet praeparare. Nam quae mensa est potentis, nisi unde sumitur corpus et sanguis eius qui animam suam posuit pro nobis? Et quid est ad eam sedere, nisi humiliter accedere? Et quid est considerare et intellegere quae apponuntur tibi, nisi digne tantam gratiam cogitare? Et quid est sic mittere manum, ut scias quia talia te oportet praeparare, nisi quod iam dixi, quia sicut pro nobis Christus animam suam posuit, sic et nos debemus animas pro fratribus ponere? Sicut enim ait apostolus Petrus: Christus pro nobis passus est, relinquens nobis exemplum, ut sequamur vestigia eius. Hoc est talia praeparare. Hoc beati martyres ardenti dilectione fecerunt; quorum si non inaniter memorias celebramus, atque in convivio quo et ipsi saturati sunt, ad mensam Domini accedimus, oportet, ut quemadmodum ipsi, et nos talia praeparemus.
Ideo quippe ad ipsam mensam non sic eos commemoramus, quemadmodum alios qui in pace requiescunt, ut etiam pro eis oremus, sed magis ut ipsi pro nobis, ut eorum vestigiis adhaereamus; quia impleverunt ipsi caritatem qua Dominus dixit non posse esse maiorem. Talia enim suis fratribus exhibuerunt, qualia de Domini mensa pariter acceperunt.
Neque hoc ita dictum sit, quasi propterea Domino Christo pares esse possimus, si pro illo usque ad sanguinem martyrium duxerimus. Ille potestatem habuit ponendi animam suam, et iterum sumendi eam; nos autem nec quantum volumus vivimus, et morimur etiamsi nolumus; ille moriens mox in se occidit mortem, nos in eius morte liberamur a morte; illius caro non vidit corruptionem, nostra post corruptionem, in fine saeculi per illum induetur incorruptionem; ille nobis non indiguit ut nos salvos faceret, nos sine illo nihil possumus facere; ille se nobis palmitibus praebuit vitem, nos habere praeter illum non possumus vitam.
Postremo etsi fratres pro fratribus moriantur, tamen in fraternorum peccatorum remissionem nullius sanguis martyris funditur, quod fecit ille pro nobis; neque in hoc quid imitaremur, sed quid gratularemur contulit nobis. Quatenus ergo martyres pro fratribus sanguinem suum fuderunt, hactenus talia exhibuerunt, qualia de mensa dominica perceperunt. Diligamus ergo invicem, sicut et Christus dilexit nos, et tradidit semetipsum pro nobis.