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

Some help from the Laudator:

Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns (December 30):

It is a fine thing, of a winter’s afternoon, to be a man, a fortunate man, reading in an old Greek’s stately thoughts, out of a well bound book, while the snow falls, pure and decent, and the birds, his friends, come to his door. But only the accidents of life have placed him there, and not in a smoke-filled street where in others’ eyes he might be forced to read his own despairs, his own brute thoughts.

I decided during Advent to drill into the hymns in the Liturgia Horarum. 

We continue our drilling with the hymn for the Office of Readings in the post-Conciliar Liturgia Horarum called Verbum supernum prodiens, with its unhappier variation from the 1632 reform which is used in the Breviarium Romanum. 

I dissect this hymn, sing it in the Gregorian chant tone, and we hear different translations and many other musical versions.

Once again I ramble a great deal while digging into the meaning of the hymn.

I need to make a correction to something I mention in the PODCAzT.  I once accidentally say "cursus declivus", wrong declension, rather than "decllivis". ARGH!  Declivis, nominative, is "inclining downwards, sloping".  That declivus grated on my ear, but it is too much work to correct the recording right now.  I also made an edit to a comment about the use of the Nativity preface.

Sing the hymns! Buy a Liber Hymnarius! 

  

Along the way you might hear these versions of Verbum supernum prodiens:

On yoolis night: medieval carols and motets – Anonymous 4
Christmas Lullaby – Kim Robertson
Noveaento – Coro Citta’ di Roma – Damijan Mocnik
Phos Hilaron – O heavenly Word – Paul Avgerinos (this is pretty "new age-ie", beware)
O Heiland reiss die Himmel auf, Op. 74, No. 2 – J. Brahms – Emerson String Quartet & Leon Fleisher
Tryin’ To Get Ready – O Heild reiss die Himmel auf – Janet Sullivan Whitaker

The iTunes feed is working.  It stops and starts again… mysteriously.  Beats me!

075 08-12-04 An Advent hymn dissected "Conditor alme siderum"; Fr. Z digresses far afield
074 08-11-26 A hymn to Christ the King dissected – before and after Vatican II; a proclamation; "Sieze the Day" in Scots
073 08-11-16 Augustine on Ps. 95(96) and Fr. Z on how to avoid going to Hell
072 08-11-11 The death of St. Martin; starlings, cuckolds, bell ringing and a skull
071 08-11-06 "Faith inscribed across your heart": Benedict on Cyril of Jerusalem & Cyril on faith, your treasure
070 08-11-01 Venerable Bede on All Saints; a collage; don Camillo (Part IV)
069 08-10-30 Augustine on Ps 103; Benedictines can sing!

http://www.wdtprs.com/podcazt/08_12_07.mp3

From a priest reader:

Attended [Mount St. Mary Seminary] open house festivities this evening, including Service of Lessons and Carols, at which Mount rector Msgr. Rohlfs announced the planned celebration of EF Mass tomorrow at 4:15 pm at the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, Mount Saint Mary’s College, Emmitsburg, MD, for the first time in about 50 years.  A choir will travel from Washington, DC, to assist at the Mass.

 

And from a seminarian:

This is the required Mass for the seminarians, and will be celebrated by Monsignor Pope from the Archdiocese of Washington.  I believe it to be the first solemn Mass in the Extraordinary Form there in many years, and the first in as many that the seminarians are required to attend.  This is their Mass, so I assume they will be singing the Mass and fulfilling all of the offices. 

 

Here is part of an article I wrote a few years back on the Super oblata, or Prayer over the gifts, in the 2002 Missale Romanum.

SUPER OBLATA - (2002MR):
Placare, Domine, quaesumus,
nostrae precibus humilitatis et hostiis,
et, ubi nulla suppetunt suffragia meritorum
tuae nobis indulgentiae succurre praesidiis.

This was the Secret for this same Sunday in 1962 editio typica  of the last Missale Romanum before the Second Vatican Council.  If the ancient and elegant sound of this prayer made you think that it was in Gelasian Sacramentary you were right on target.     

For you Latin students, placare looks like an infinitive but it is actually the passive imperative of placo, “to reconcile” and also “to soothe, assuage, appease”.  Think of English “placate.”  Hostia, in your dog-eared copy of the Lewis & Short Dictionary, is “a victim, a sacrifice.”  The complicated suppeto means essentially, “to be at hand or in store, to be present” and then by extension, “to be equal to or sufficient for; to suffice, to agree with, correspond to any thing.”  A suffragium is “a voting tablet” and therefore “a vote, voice, suffrage” (as in “suffragettes”, who wanted voting rights for women) and also “a favorable decision, assent, approbation, applause.”  In ecclesiastical lingo a “suffrage” is a recommendation or intercessory prayer as, for example, when pray for the Poor Souls in Purgatory.  The plural suffragia means something like “points in our favor.”  In other words, we have no good marks of our own merits (nulla meritorum suffragia) on our side of the column by which we can expect anything favorable from God.  Succurro means “to run or hasten to the aid or assistance of one; to help, aid, assist, succor”.  It can also be “to be useful for, good against”.  Its root curro, “to run”, lends succurro an element of haste.  

Our Super oblata today simply screams for the “thees” and “thous” of older liturgical language. 

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Be Thou appeased, O Lord, we beseech Thee,
by the prayers of our humility and by our sacrificial offerings,
and, where no favorable points of merits suffice for us,
succor us by the helps of Thy indulgence.

This Sunday’s “prayer over the gifts” must be kept in context.  This is a season of preparation for the Lord’s Coming.  The Baptist warns us from the wilderness that we ought to “make straight His path” for someday we will face Him.  If ahead of time we have not taken the proper steps, He will straighten us out Himself.  This is a fearful thing to ponder.  Indeed, were it not for the First Coming of the Lord and the Sacrifice He made for us, our impending judgment would reduce the thoughtful soul to abject terror.  During the offertory of Mass the priest, on our behalf, raises to God the elements to be consecrated together with all our gifts of praise and prayers of need.  We seek to please and appease God, whom we distance from us by our sins.

A note about my choice this week to use “thee” forms.  “Thee” forms of address were actually the familiar forms, while “you” was formal.  This distinction of formal and informal died out in English, but here in Europe we pay attention to formal “Lei” in Italian and the familiar “tu”, German “Sie” and “du”, French “Vous” and “tu”.  The proper or improper use of these forms can establish, support or damage a social situation.  Today, unless you are a Quaker, “thee”, “thy” and “thine” sound formal or courtly probably because they are archaic.   Precisely for this reason, I think, “thee” forms work well for liturgical prayer.  Why? 

Today’s egalitarianism, laxity and lack of respect for other people’s dignity together with a dominant “me-my-mine” mentality have leached formality both from our language and also our treatment of each other.  Latin prayers of Mass retain a courteous style lost on most English speakers today.  This is a real loss, too!  When we lose language we lose concepts.  The philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein (+1951) said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” and “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”  We have lost so very much in the present ICEL translations.   Are the powers-that-be who are preparing the new translations going to give us something substandard again?  Versions leached of the original content? 

Moreover, the CDWDS document Liturgiam authenticam states that we need accurate translations but also a sacral style for our liturgical prayers.  Let us recover the spirituality communicated by the style of the prayers!  Latin prayers of the Mass give us a model of “formal intimacy” with God, a “daring familiarity”, opposed to the raw familiarity conveyed in the present ICEL translations and street speech.   Of course, it is unrealistic to think that the American and other Anglophone bishops are going to adopt “thee” and “thou”, which is sad.  As a matter of fact, I picture a few of them now chuckling over this quaint suggestion with knowing wags of their purple-beanied heads.  Fine!  So far, Reverend sirs, and with due respect, your translation balance sheet isn’t exactly bleeding lots of black ink, is it?  Check out our most beloved Catholic prayers which we learned at mother’s knee: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name…”; “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”; “…and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host…”; “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts…”; “…never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession…”.  What do people remember?  What prayers do they love?  What style sounds like “church” and like “prayer”?  In lieu of old fashioned English, I suppose we could have more Novus Ordo Masses in Latin.   Imagine… Latin Masses for Catholics of the Latin Church!  People could bring whichever “hand missal” with whichever translation they preferred, one with daringly familiar older language or else … 

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Lord,
we are nothing without you.
As you sustain us with your mercy,
receive our prayers and offerings.

Hmmm … Maybe not so much the ICEL version. 

Is something missing?  A constant feature of Latin “prayers over the gifts” is the desire to appease God.  People today often assume God is automatically pleased with them all the time.  Many of us assume our relationship with God is just fine or that we are robotically forgiven the peccadilloes we “struggled with” without further consequences.  Being sorry for a sin, even confessing it and receiving sacramental absolution, isn’t all there is to being forgiven.  We ask for and obtain God’s mercy but we also must pay attention to justice.  We must make restitution.  We must do penance.  If we don’t do penance in this life we will do it in Purgatory – if we die in God’s friendship.  When we consider our past sins we truly have a lot of work to do.  Furthermore, nothing we do on our own merits the great gift of redemption: we are saved by the merits of Christ who makes our good works His own.

Salvation is a gift freely given by God through the merits of Christ’s Sacrifice, but salvation is not a free gift in the sense that we don’t have to do anything to obtain it.  We must cooperate.  Christ died “for all”.  “Many” will be saved, thanks be to God.  We have through Christ the free opportunity of salvation.  Good works cannot merit salvation in themselves, but we are required to perform good works to merit salvation.  In today’s translation I used the phrase “favorable points of merits” but never imagine God as a celestial accountant “up there” keeping books on what we do or haven’t done.  Salvation is not based on a ledger’s bottom line.  How God disposes all things is mysterious, though He has revealed something of His plan through the Catholic Church.  Until our final judgment God alone knows what our good works merit and how they balance against our sins.  In fact, the Church hazards to offer indications of only “partial” or “plenary” indulgences for works we perform.  The only thing we can be sure of is that we must not become lax or presumptuous.  If we want salvation, God must be appeased by our prayers, sacrifices and works, which all must be joined to Christ’s Sacrifice.  At Holy Mass we join all we do and are to the Sacrifice being renewed in God’s sight by the priest.  The priest raises the paten with host and then the chalice with water tinged wine.  He prays: “In a spirit of humility and with a contrite heart may we be accepted by Thee, O Lord; and may this sacrifice today be of such a kind in Thy sight as to please Thee.”  Place yourselves and your needs in that chalice, on that paten, to be transformed.

We need to hear what the prayers really say.  This is becoming more and more urgent.  Holy Church must form and sanctify us so that we, in our turn, can shape the world around us.  In order for the Church to have the impact Christ intended on all corners of the world, the liturgical translations must reflect faithfully and beautifully what the original texts really say.   

Hey ICEL!  Hey CDWDS!  Hey BISHOPS!  Give us sound and beautiful translations!  Need some help?  Drop me a line. 

 

From the wonderful Space Weather:

AURORA WATCH: High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras tonight. A solar wind stream is buffeting Earth’s magnetic field, sparking Northern Lights as far south as Michigan: gallery.

COLORADO SUPERBOLIDE: Last night, Dec. 6th at 1:06 a.m. MST, a meteor of stunning brightness lit up the skies of Colorado. Astronomer Chris Peterson photographed the event using a dedicated all-sky meteor camera in the town of Guffey, near Colorado Springs:

"In seven years of operation, this is the brightest fireball I’ve ever recorded," says Peterson. "I estimate the terminal explosion at magnitude  – 18, more than 100 times brighter than a full Moon."

Fireballs this bright belong to a rare category of meteors called superbolides. They are caused by small asteroids measuring a few to 10 meters in diameter and massing hundreds of metric tons. Superbolides trigger seismic detectors on the ground, produce waves of infrasound that can travel thousands of miles, and they are tracked by military satellites scanning Earth for nuclear explosions. Recent examples include the El Paso fireball of 1997 and the Slovenian Superbolide of 2007.

Last night’s fireball is on the low end of the superbolide scale. Nevertheless, it was still a beauty and likely peppered the ground with meteorites when it exploded. Sighting reports are welcomed; they could help guide the tracking and recovery of debris.

LISTEN! 250 miles south of the fireball, radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft of New Mexico photographed the flash and recorded radio echoes from the superbolide’s ion trail. Click here to listen.

TUMBLING TOOLBAG: The space station’s famous sidekick, the ISS Toolbag, is circling Earth and producing flashes of light bright enough to record using off-the-shelf digital cameras. Peter Rosén sends this report from downtown Stockholm, Sweden:

"I photographed the toolbag when it passed above the moon on Dec. 3rd. It was invisible to the naked eye, but my camera (a Canon 40D) detected it in a series of 4 second exposures. The toolbag must be rotating as the light seems to flash and disappear." (continued below)

Photo details: Canon 40D, 85mm lens, f/1.2, ISO 100, 26×4 sec

He combined 26 images to create this composite. "The other paths are from airplanes; the short interruptions in their lights are caused by the lag between shots." Longer "black-outs" in the path of the toolbag appear to be genuine, a result of tumbling and flashing.

Readers, the toolbag and the ISS are making a series of evening passes over Europe and North America this weekend. Check the Simple Satellite Tracker for flyby times.