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

Here is my piece for The Wanderer for Pentecost Sunday:

What Does the Prayer Really Say?   Pentecost Sunday (1962 Missale Romanum)

The more celebrations there are of Holy Mass with the older, extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, using the 1962 Missale Romanum the greater potential there will be for adjustments and corrections in the manner of celebration of the newer form with the Missale of Paul VI reissued by John Paul II.  Summorum Pontificum, Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio which derestricted the so-called “Tridentine” form of Mass, changed our liturgical landscape.  More and more young priests, and seminarians, are learning the older form now.  Unburdened with the liturgical baggage of their parents’ generation, young people are demonstrating interest in the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).  At Catholic universities students are asking their school chaplaincies to have celebrations of the TLM.  For example, at Franciscan University at Steubenville, OH, there was at first great resistance on the part of some faculty.  However, the students obtained celebrations of the TLM and things are proceeding calmly and joyfully.  A student sent photos of a Mass celebrated by Fr. Dan Pattee, TOR, which I posted on the WDTPRS internet blog. From Seton Hall University, where recently a TLM was celebrated, one student wrote to tell me:

In attendance were over fifty students, a great many of them seminarians. In his homily Father John Grimm stressed the importance of Catholic traditions, stating that the Extraordinary Form is the same Mass of countless saints including Padre Pio and Elizabeth Ann Seton. After Mass students who never experienced the Extraordinary Form were greatly impressed by the beauty and reverence of the Mass, remarking that they would like to see the Extraordinary Form celebrated on campus more often.

I have even heard that students at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN, where controversy and conflict abound, have petitioned for celebrations of the TLM.

Celebrations of the TLM will exert a “gravitational pull” on the way the Novus Ordo is celebrated.  Combined with the good example provided by His Holiness Pope Benedict, many parish priests are rethinking celebrating Mass “facing the people”.  They have started to instruct their flocks about the deep advantages to ad orientem or sometimes ad Deum worship, where all face toward God rather priest and people facing each other in a closed circle over a table altar.  In the past I told you how at St. Mary’s Church in Greenville, SC, Fr. J. Scott Newman instructed his flock about ad orientem worship in the parish bulletins during Lent.  Now we read in the bulletin for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, “In the last of those five columns I announced that sometime during Eastertide we would restore the custom of ad Deum celebration here at St. Mary’s to follow Pope Benedict’s lead in recovering our own authentic traditions of liturgical prayer, and we begin this practice today.”

Pope Benedict issued Summorum Pontificum to help heal the rupture in our Church’s liturgical practice since the Council, as well as to reinvigorate Catholic identity and heal the tears in the fabric of the Church’s unity.  His initiative is bearing fruit on all fronts.  I read this week that a separated group called the Transalpine Redemptorists, religious men associated with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) founded by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, are rethinking their position of formal separation from Rome and the Vicar of Christ. They are not in formal union with Rome or the Redemptorist order.  In a declaration they wrote:

We must ask ourselves if a glimmer of light has not begun to show through the clouds of confusion that for many years have darkened the sky of eternal Rome.  For we now have a Pontiff, a successor of Peter, ready to allow us to adhere fully to this timeless tradition of the Church and its complete expression in Catholic life without apparent compromise. He seems ready to “let us do the experiment of Tradition” as Archbishop Lefebvre asked so many years ago.  This glimmer of light has manifested itself above all in recent months in the courage with which the successor of Peter stood up against opposition from many quarters in promulgating his letter Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. ...  Can we choose to remain where we are under these circumstances? We have argued for years now of our “state of necessity” and of the resulting supplied jurisdiction that the Church supplies to us.  [Fr. Z adds: A flawed argument in my opinion, but read on…] But can we continue to argue this when ordinary jurisdiction is offered to us without any compromise in the Faith? Can we choose freely to remain in this irregular canonical situation where we are? In other words, can a state of necessity be the object of a choice without moral fault? Clearly not.  And on the other hand: are the authorities ready to accord us regular faculties? If the answer to this second question is affirmative, then we are no longer in the same case of necessity!  All these serious considerations, dear friends, move us to go and see what Rome has to say.

I am deeply impressed with the attitude expressed by these traditionalist men.  Their willingness to start a new conversation with the Holy See is the direct result of Pope Benedict’s liturgical signals and his important document Summorum Pontificum.

Many of problems in Holy Church could be resolved through demonstrations of good will and generosity of spirit.  So many hurts could be healed between laypeople in their families, between laypeople and priests, between priests and their bishops, even between bishops and the Roman Pontiff.  May the Holy Spirit melt our hearts, bend in us what is too rigid to budge.

Let’s move to today’s Collect, which you will recognize as the prayer after saying the Veni, Sancte Spiritus.

COLLECT - (1962MR):
Deus, qui corda fidelium
Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti:
da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere,
et de eius semper consolatione gaudere.

I am pretty sure that this ancient prayer, from at least the time of the Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis and probably older, survived the Consilium’s expert scalpels to live in the Novus Ordo only as the Collect for a Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit. ­

I promised to tell you more about the Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis, or Gellone Sacramentary (LSGell hereafter). 

There is a critical edition of the LSGell in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina edited by A. Dumas, whom WDTPRSers know as the guy who reedited Albert Blaise’s handy dictionary of Liturgical Latin we call Blaise/Dumas.  The manuscript of the LSGell is in the Bibliotèque National in Paris and dates to around 780.  It is part of the super complicated web of manuscripts descending from what we called the Gelasian Sacramentary, the source of so many of our ancient prayers found in the Roman Missal.  There are two types of Gelasians, “old” and “new”, which in turn descend from the far more ancient Roman Libelli.  The some dozen 8th century Gelasians that survive can be used to reconstruct a lost archetype sometimes called the Roman Sacramentary of King Pepin (+768 King of the Franks, son of Charles Martel and father of Charlemagne), thus showing the blending the Roman and Frankish influences in the Church’s prayer life. One of the keys to rebuilding the archetype is a manuscript called the Gellone Sacramentary, our LSGell, written perhaps in Meaux between 790-800.  King Pepin wanted a sacramentary, or missal, for use in his territory to promote liturgical unity. But this was later supplanted by what we call the Gregorian Sacramentary, a more prestigious book, which Pepin’s son Charlemagne obtained directly from Pope Hadrian in Rome between 784-791.  The Gregorian, put together by Pope Honorius (+638), was originally the book used by the Bishop of Rome.  It later developed into different versions, including the Hadrianum type, which Hadrian sent to Charlemagne.  In any event, the 8th century “new” Gelasians were later used to fill in gaps in the Gregorian.  So, Frankish developments from the more ancient Gelasians are exemplified in the LSGell which has 3024 prayers divided in two parts, the first mainly for Mass, and the second for other rituals.  The LSGell seems to have been an attempt at a complete book for liturgical services.  And now you know.  See why I put this off for a while?

In any event, our old Pentecost Collect from the LSGell was shoved to the back of the bus in the Novus Ordo in favor of two Collects from the Gelasian, also existing in the Hadrianum version of the Gregorian.  See how those references make more sense now?  Maybe? 

Again this week there is nothing especially challenging in the Latin vocabulary. The source of Latin consolation and wisdom, Messrs. Lewis & Short’s dictionary, says that sapio (infinitive  sapere) means first of all “to taste, savor; … to have a taste or flavor of a thing”. Logically it is extended to “to know, understand a thing”.  It is often paired in literature with the adverb recte, “rightly”, when wisdom is indicated.  Think of the English word “insipid” (the sap- shifts to sip-) for something without flavor and also a person without taste or wisdom.  A homo sapiens is someone of “good taste”, who knows the savor of life, as it were.  Sapiens is thus connected with Greek sophos, or “wise”, or “sage” (also a savory herb!).  Sapientia, “Wisdom”, is a figure for the Holy Spirit as well as one of His Gifts.  The Holy Spirit, Parácletus, is our Counselor, leading us rightly, and Comforter, bringing us consolation.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who taught the hearts of the faithful
by the light of the Holy Spirit,
grant to us, in the same Spirit,
to know the things that are right,
and to rejoice always in His consolation.

What leaps to my mind, steeped in the literature of late antiquity, is the connection of wisdom, inherent in the phrase recta sapere, with consolation.  There was a genre of consolation literature in classical times and late antiquity into the medieval period.  This was part of the province of philosophy (“love of wisdom”).  This literature was used as a moral medication for the soul.  In the famous work of the imprisoned Boethius (+525) before his execution, the Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Wisdom, Philosophy, comes to the author in his cell and diagnoses the true nature of his sickness of sadness.  She does this in a dialogue, so that Boethius can understand things rightly (like our recta sapere), and therefore be consoled. Lady Wisdom descended so as to raise Boethius up to God.  This is our pattern too, both in creation and in our renewal when we have sinned. Two weeks ago in these pages I told you how the Collect show influences of the ancient philosophical concept of that all creation proceeds from God (exitus) in and then turns (conversion) to thus take determinate form and return again to God (reditus). These prayers of late antiquity are echoes of these ancient philosophical concepts.  We can’t read them without knowing these things.  

Think now of our prayer and also the Veni Sancte Spiritus with which it is connected: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts (corda) of Thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy love. V. Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created R. And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.”

In the Holy Spirit, who breathed life into the Body of Holy Church on Pentecost, may we all be renewed.  May He help us to return to God when we have strayed, and to return to each other in the embrace of our Holy Catholic Church when we have parted from clear unity.

Here is the last article I dashed off for The Wanderer about the Sunday after Ascension Thursday in the 1972 Missale Romanum:

What Does the Prayer Really Say?   Sunday after Ascension Thursday (1962 Missale Romanum)

During Pope Benedict’s apostolic visit to the USA I followed very carefully the Holy Masses he celebrated and pondered the question: What does this prayer really say?  I am not so concerned with the texts or their translations.  What most interested me was the liturgical style, the manner of celebration which the 2005 Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist and Pope Benedict in Sacramentum caritatis called ars celebrandi.  Necessarily such a consideration had to focus intensely on the choice of music, which the Second Vatican Council calls pars integrans, an “integral” or better “integrating part” in the liturgy. 

 The Mass at Nationals Stadium near Washington, D.C., betrayed the worst tendencies of liturgy and liturgical music that have devastated our Church since the liturgical reforms of Vatican II began to go off the rails.  The Mass and music, seemingly inspired by the laudable theme Benedict himself proposed repeatedly during his visit – that of a new anointing by the Holy Spirit for the renewal of the American Church and our whole nation – were blatantly so focused on how wonderful and diverse we all are that there was little room left for the true purpose of liturgical worship: an experience of mystery… awe at transcendence.  The in-your-face multiculturalism left little room for anything else.  Of course there were ways in which people who attended were moved by the moment! They were inspired by being with Peter and praying with him together with many others. But from what I can tell the wider reaction, especially in the Catholic blogosphere, was shock.  It struck me that for his first visit to the United States as Pope, perhaps someone could have read at least something of what Papa Ratzinger has written consistently about liturgy and music over the last few decades.

After that profound disappointment, I was genuinely pleased by what the Archdiocese of New York organized for the Holy Father’s Masses in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and then in the Stadium in the Bronx (I avoid naming the associated team in conjunction with the Pope).  The music chosen was elegant, the liturgical movement dignified.  The fact that a Mass was celebrated inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral underscored how cathedrals are for Mass while stadiums are for baseball.  For the Mass in the Bronx, there was none of the silly pandering to the false assumption that young people need edgy “tunes” at Mass or they won’t be engaged, or that every possible ethnic group ever to tread the Land of the Free had to receive a musical head nod. Limit youth to the ephemeral, and they will walk away thinking that anything having to do with the Faith can change with the times.  Pigeon-hole peoples by musical styles during Mass and you risk being condescending or insulting.

In the balance, after experiencing those three papal Masses, what did the prayer really say?  I was left with the impression, shared by others in the Catholic blogosphere such as WDTPRS’s friends over at The New Liturgical Movement, that perhaps the liturgical tide has begun to shift.   The sharp contrast between the first Mass at Nationals Stadium and then, well, everything after that, brought me hope. 

Since Pope Benedict ascended to the See of Peter, he has been making changes to the papal ceremonies.  Nationals Stadium reminded me of the old days of former master of ceremonies H.E. Archbishop Piero Marini, and Masses riddled with what are now seen as clichés left over from the goofy years of liturgies so oozing with stuck-in-the-moment “relevance” or apse-backward inculturation that they entirely rupture the aim of Catholic worship.  The New York Masses were fresher, informed with Benedict’s ideal of liturgical continuity with our tradition.  They revealed also his new spirit of the liturgy, which he has been gently proffering for decades, which the new master of ceremonies Msgr. Guido Marini has been patiently implementing item by item.  Benedict’s new and fresh liturgical continuity, now profoundly accelerated by the fruits of Summorum Pontificum, are springing forth in cathedrals and parishes throughout USA and in the world.  Ad orientem worship is slowly turning congregations away from themselves and toward the Lord.  Latin is no longer so stigmatized. People are exploring again the advantages of silence, of Gregorian chant, of polyphony.  Communion received on the tongue and kneeling is more and more seen as the appropriate physical response to the reality of the Most Holy Eucharist. 

Sure there is a lot yet to be done, and some traditional Catholics might have wanted even more.  But once upon a time I would have been thrilled to hear a Palestrina Sicut cervus or some Gregorian chant.  After the Holy Father left Washington, we had a steady stream from our Church’s magnificent treasury of integrating sacred music.  In the contrast, I think, is the lesson about what the Holy Father’s Masses really say for the future of Catholic worship.

This time following Easter can be confusing.  In the post-Conciliar, Novus Ordo calendar by all rights we ought to be observing the 7th Sunday of Easter.  However, some years ago the Holy See allowed that conferences of bishops could (they don’t have to… nor I believe do individual bishops) transfer the celebration of Ascension Thursday to the following Sunday.  I call this chimera “Ascension Thursday Sunday”.  I know, I know, … the bishops hope to expose more people to the mystery of the Ascension of the Lord.  Since Ascension Thursday has always been and still is (as per the 1983 Code of Canon Law c. 1246) a Holy Day of Obligation, they also may have wanted to lift the burden of going to Mass twice in a week.  This same calendrical tinkering occurs in the Novus Ordo with Epiphany which properly ought to be twelve days after Christmas (“Twelfth Night”).

WDPTRS remains suspicious that when expectations are lowered, people get the idea that Holy Days of Obligation just aren’t very important.  Maybe none of it is important.

The other problem is, frankly, the arrogant novelty of displacing so ancient a Christian feast. We read in Holy Scripture that nine days, not six, intervened between the Lord’s physical ascent to the Father’s right hand and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Ascension Thursday was fixed at the 40th day after Easter from about the end of the 4th century. In the Latin West, St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) called it Quadragesima  (“fortieth”) Ascensionis. In the Greek East, St. Gregory of Nyssa spoke of it in 388.  That’s only a 16 century tradition.  Eastern Christians haven’t transferred Ascension.  What must they think of us?

But let’s be more positive.  With the third, 2002 edition of the Missale Romanum we have once again a Mass for the Vigil of Ascension.  This wasn’t in the 1970 or 1975 editions. Moreover, there are now proper Masses for days after Ascension until Pentecost, most having alternative collects depending on whether or not in that region Ascension is transferred to Sunday.  Nine days?  Six? 

Today’s prayer survived the Consilium’s scissor and gluepot ministrations to live in the 2002 Missale Romanum as the alternative Collect for Mass on the day of Ascension.  Rather, the Collect rose to new life in the 2002 edition.  It wasn’t in the 1970MR or 1975MR.  We can spin this positively: someone considered Ascension Thursday Sunday important enough to merit special attention.  In a sense it was brought into greater continuity with the pre-Conciliar Missale Romanum!

Today’s Collect is ancient, and is found in the Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis.

COLLECT - (1962MR):
Concede, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus:
ut, qui hodierna die Unigenitum tuum Redemptorem nostrum
ad caelos ascendisse credimus;
ipsi quoque mente in caelestibus habitemus.

Our hard working Lewis & Short Dictionary can have a little rest today, I think.  There is nothing especially noteworthy in the vocabulary.  Let us therefore move on to a straight-forward…

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
Grant, we beseech You, Almighty God,
that we, who believe Your Only Begotten Son our Redeemer,
to have ascended on this day to heaven,
may ourselves also dwell in mind amongst heavenly things.

Bl. Abbot Columba Marmion, OSB (+1923), wrote in Christ in His Mysteries that “of all the feasts of Our Lord … the Ascension is the greatest, because it is the supreme glorification of Christ Jesus.” Then, speaking about the very Collect we are looking at today, Bl. Columba says, “This prayer first of all testifies to our faith in the mystery in recalling the title ‘Only-begotten Son’ and ‘Redeemer’, given to Jesus, the Church shows forth the reasons for the celestial exaltation of her Bridegroom;—she finally denotes the grace therein contained for our souls. … The mystery of Jesus Christ’s Ascension is represented to us in a manner suitable to our nature: we contemplate the Sacred Humanity rising from the earth and ascending visibly towards the heavens.”

Of course it is not only Christ’s humanity but our humanity that ascended into heaven.  Preaching on 1 June 444 St. Pope Leo I “the Great” said, “Truly it was a great and indescribable source of rejoicing when, in the sight of the heavenly multitudes, the nature of our human race ascended over the dignity of all heavenly creatures, to pass the angelic orders and to be raised beyond the heights of archangels. In its ascension it did not stop at any other height until this same nature was received at the seat of the eternal Father, to be associated on the throne of the glory of that One to whose nature it was joined in the Son.” 

Leo says in another sermon of 17 May 445, “This Faith, reinforced by the Ascension of the Lord and strengthened by the gift of the Holy Spirit, has not been terrified by chains, by prison, by exile, by hunger, by fire, by the mangling of wild beasts, nor by sharp suffering from the cruelty of persecutors.  Throughout the world, not only men but also women, not just immature boys but also tender virgins, have struggled on behalf of this Faith even to the shedding of their blood.  This Faith has cast out demons, driven away sicknesses, and raised the dead.”  The knowledge that our humanity is now enjoying heaven can work wonders for us in the hour of need. Keep this in mind in time of trial. 

We Catholics know that what was not assumed, was not redeemed (St. Gregory of Nazianzus).  Our humanity, body and soul, was taken by the Son into an unbreakable bond with His divinity. When Christ rose from the tomb, our humanity rose in Him.  When He ascended to heaven, so also did we.  In Christ our humanity now sits at the Father’s right hand.  His presence there is our great promise and hope.  It is already fulfilled, but not yet in its fullness.  That hope informs our trials in this life.

When the Lord ascended to heaven He did not lose touch with us His people in this vale of tears.  St. Augustine in s. 341 talks about Christ’s presence in every word of Scripture as Word equal to the Father; or as the mediator in the flesh dwelling in our midst; or Christ as the Head and Body together as in a spousal relationship, Christ and His Church intimately bound. 

This means that Christ is not insensible to our sufferings.  Our faith in this unbreakable bond of Head and Body calls us to be clean and worthy of this saving intimacy.

 

Here is part of my article for The Wanderer in which I look at a prayer in the Mass for the coming Sunday:

In the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary today’s prayer was the Collect for the Fourth Sunday after the close of the Easter Octave. The Gelasian or Liber sacramentorum Romanae ecclesiae (Book of Sacraments of the Church of Rome) was assembled from older material in Paris around 750. 
It has elements of both the Roman and Gallican (French) liturgies of the Merovingian period (5th – 8th cc.).   This Collect survived the cutters and snippers who pasted the Novus Ordo together on their desks.  You hear it now on the 10th Sunday of Ordinary Time where the 2002MR is being used.

COLLECT - (1962MR):
Deus, a quo bona cuncta procedunt, largire supplicibus tuis:
ut cogitemus, te inspirante, quae recta sunt;
et, te gubernante, eadem faciamus.

The Novus Ordo version slightly rearranges the word order, saying “tuis largire supplicibus”, which I actually prefer since it flows better, but the more ancient version in the Gelasian omits the “tuis” altogether.

The Lewis & Short Dictionary, unsullied by coffee cup rings, says procedo means “to go forth or before, to go forwards, advance, proceed” and more importantly “to go or come forth or out, to advance, issue” and even “to issue from the mouth, to be uttered”. Largire looks like an infinitive but is really an imperative form of the deponent largior, “to give bountifully, to lavish, bestow, dispense, distribute, impart… to confer, bestow, grant, yield”. The neuter substantive rectum, i (from rego), is “that which is right, good, virtuous; uprightness, rectitude, virtue”. Rego involves “to keep straight or from going wrong, to lead straight; to guide, conduct, direct”. The core concepts are “straight” and “upwards”. In its adjectival form, rectus, a, um, there is a moral content, “right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting” again having reference to that which is “above”. Cogito is more than simply “to think”. As in Descartes’ often quoted “Cogito ergo sum… I think, therefore I am”, it is really, “to pursue something in the mind” and “to consider thoroughly, to ponder, to weigh, reflect upon”. The English derivative is “cogitate”.

A PRETTY LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, from whom all good things issue forth, bountifully grant to Your supplicants,
that, as You are inspiring, we may think things which are right,
and, as You are guiding, we may accomplish the same.

In today’s classically sculpted Collect, without diminishing other possibilities, there is a key concept extremely important for theological reflection by the ancient Church through the medieval period. A theological key helps us to open up what the Church is really saying to God, on our behalf, locked up in words.

Ancient theologians, both pagan and Christian struggled alike for answers to the same questions. If all things come from God, did God create evil? If all things come from God, then are all things, in fact, also God? If in the cosmos there are only God and everything else which is not-God, and if God is the only Good, then are all created not-God things evil? Is matter evil by nature? Are we evil, destined to doom or nothingness?  Pagans and Christians, using the same starting points and categories of thought, came up with differing solutions.

Rejecting the idea of both a good god principle and an evil god principle, pagan theologians of the Platonic stream of thought posited a kind of creation through an endless series of intermediaries to avoid the conclusion that God, the highest good, created evil. For them, the perfectly transcendent One overflowed with being through descending triads of intermediaries down to the corrupt material world from which we must be freed. This solved nothing, of course, because no matter how many hierarchies of intermediaries you propose, those hierarchies always must be further divided into more hierarchies. Christian theologians, who were also Platonists, using the same categories of thought found another solution: creatio ex nihilo… immediate (that is “unmediated”) creation of the universe from nothing. Evil was explained as a deprivation of being, essentially a “nothingness”, not created by God. All things which have being come forth from God, are good, and will go back to God.  This is the key for unlocking our prayer.

Let us now look at the lame-duck version people have had to hear in church for over thirty years on the 10th Sunday of Ordinary, brought to you by…

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
God of wisdom and love,
source of all good,
send your Spirit to teach us your truth
and guide our actions
in your way of peace.

BLECH! Folks, translation is hard but it ain’t that hard.

In fairness, at least this week ICEL didn’t make us ask God for “help”, like good little Pelagians, or take the time to tell God who He is (“O God – in case you didn’t know – you are good.”) or chop the sentence into a grocery list of things we want done.

It is hard to get the Latin structure, with its propensity for complex subordination, into smooth English, but ICEL rarely tried.  The lame-duck versions shatter the unity of thought in prayers by creating separate sentences. The translation norms in Liturgiam authenticam require that the structure of the Latin be respected.

The Latin vocabulary is challenging, as you WDTPRSers have seen. Back in the bad old days ICEL chose simplistic words or left concepts out completely when they were too challenging, concepts like grace and humility and majesty and judgment and sin.  What will the new ICEL, Vox Clara, and the Holy See give us?  From what I have seen so far, I think people will be pleased.

Back to happier things.  When our Collect was probably composed, Western theologians (still really Platonists in many respects) were mightily struggling to solve thorny problems about, for example, predestination. This required them to gaze deeply at man’s nature and the problem of evil. In this titanic theological battle we find on all sides the ancient Platonic view of creation. All creation proceeds (procedo) forth from God in indeterminate form. In a reflection of the eternal procession of uncreated divine Persons of the Trinity, the rational component of creation (man) turned around when proceeding forth in order to regard his Source and, in that turning, that conversio, took determinate form and began to return to God. This going forth and returning, this descent and rising (in theology exitus and reditus or Greek exodos and proodos) is everywhere present in ancient and medieval thought… and in liturgical prayer today when the ancient form was too messed up by the redactors.

For Christians of the Neoplatonic Augustinian tradition, man, the pinnacle of creation, “drags” as it were all of created nature with him in a contemplative “conversion” back to God. Man’s rational nature was not destroyed by sin in the Fall. However, were it not for the Incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh, the union of uncreated with created, the descent of creation would have simply continued “exiting” away from God for eternity.

If not for the Incarnation man and all creation with him would never turn back, doomed to become ever more indeterminate. Instead, rational man, the image of the rational Word, and all creation with him can turn back to God. The Son entered our created realm and made possible man’s conversio after the Fall. As John Scotus Eriugena (+877) put it, man is “nature’s priest”. Through rational acts man plays a part in God’s saving plan for creation.

This pattern of exitus and reditus is perfectly exemplified in the writings of theologians in a line from pagan Neoplatonic writers like Plotinus (+270), to Christian Platonists like St. Augustine (+430), Boethius (+525), Eriugena, St. Bonaventure (+1274) and St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274). This is the theology behind many ancient prayers. Our Collect echoes the Neoplationic theology of late antiquity and early Middle Ages together with the Scriptural James 1:17, a text used frequently by these same Merovingian and Carolingian thinkers.

We need what our prayers really say. They are the bones of our daily lives. Our Mass should give us thick red steak and cabernet, not pureed carrots for baby teeth. I want meat, not goop. I want you to thrive through our Mass not just survive. Mass is succulent, not ordinary. The content of our prayers will reach through to us when we have accurate translations of the Latin. Then with the help of preachers we can crack them open with adult teeth, chew their marrow.

This is one of the reasons why Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum is so very important.  In the assembling of the Novus Ordo, with the revision of its prayers, we lost concepts important to our Catholic identity.  That is not the case with this week’s prayer, happily.  Moreover, the revised Novus Ordo prayers often emphasize some positive elements not so present in the older prayers.  However, what we lost, perhaps to be characterized as “negative” concepts, are vital to who we are as Catholics.  Summorum Pontificum will help us reclaim as a praying Church much of what has been lost in our worship and therefore provide nourishment for a revitalized Catholic identity.

Here is a taste of one of my articles for the print version of The Wanderer:

What Does the Prayer Really Say?   2nd Sunday after Easter (1962 Missale Romanum)

Pope Benedict XVI spoke of ad orientem worship, facing “liturgical East”, during his magnificent sermon for the Vigil of Easter.  After explaining how the Lord went away so that he could return, the Pope said:
 

"In the early Church there was a custom whereby the Bishop or the priest, after the homily, would cry out to the faithful: "Conversi ad Dominum" – turn now towards the Lord. This meant in the first place that they would turn towards the East, towards the rising sun, the sign of Christ returning, whom we go to meet when we celebrate the Eucharist. Where this was not possible, for some reason, they would at least turn towards the image of Christ in the apse, or towards the Cross, so as to orient themselves inwardly towards the Lord."

His words provide liturgical starting points, helpful to a reform of our contemporary liturgical practices.  And he did it on global television.

One of the truly devastating changes after the Council was the widespread abandonment of ad orientem worship.  Authors such as Klaus Gamber, for whom Papa Ratzinger has great respect, thought changing our altars was perhaps the most damaging change in the post-Conciliar reform.  Sadly, the destruction of ad orientem worship was based on misuse of scholarship, surely, but most on ideological choices rooted in a hermeneutic of rupture and an ecclesiology which was little in harmony with our Catholic faith.  The results for Catholic worship were viciously corrosive.

Pope Benedict has long written of the meaning of and need for ad orientem worship.  In practical terms he knows we cannot force abrupt changes.  We must be gentle in reintroducing it.  However, as we have been watching him during the last year or so, reintroducing many traditional elements our Roman Rite into the full view of the world, including ad orientem worship in the Sistine Chapel, I think he considers the time is ripe for more decisive moves.

This week we will do something a little different.  We will see what happened to today’s Collect in the 1962MR when it was ported over into the 1970MR.  The version in the 1962MR is quite ancient. 

COLLECT (1962MR):
Deus, qui Filii tui humilitate iacentem mundum erexisti:
fidelibus tuis sanctam concede laetitiam;
ut, quos perpetuae mortis eripuisti casibus,
gaudiis facias perfrui sempiternis.

With a slight variation this prayer was in the Gelasian Sacramentary on the Sunday after the Octave of Easter, which is today’s Sunday: Deus, qui in filii tui humilitatem iacentem mundum erexisti, laetitiam concede <fidelibus tuis>, ut quos perpetuae <mortis> eripuisti casibus, gaudiis facias sempiternis perfruere.  So, not many changes.  (The words in < > were illegible or missing in the manuscripts, and were supplied by Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, editor of the critical edition of the Gelasian.)  The infinitive of perfruor, deponent, is really perfrui.  However perfruere, here, is also an infinitive: once in a while, like today, active forms crept into use for deponents. 

In the meantime, think laterally: isn’t the last phrase of the Collect similar to the end of the prayer recited after the Salve Regina?  “Grant us your servants, we pray you O Lord God, to enjoy perpetual health of mind and body, and, by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary ever-Virgin, may we be delivered from present sorrow and enjoy everlasting happiness (aeterna perfrui laetitia).”  The themes here are similar to today’s Collect in that there is a shift from sorrow to joy through God’s providential gift.   Moreover, when the priest vests for Holy Mass, traditionally he says special prayers while putting on each vestment.  For the alb, the symbol of our baptism, he prays: “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my heart, so that having been made white in the Blood of the Lamb, I may enjoy everlasting joys (gaudiis perfruar sempiternis).”  There is similar vocabulary in the other vesting prayers, which could once be found posted in every sacristy in the world.  I use them daily and exhort other priests to do so as well.

My hook for these last comments was the verb perfruor, one of a few famous deponent verbs used normally and classically with the ablative case: utor, abutor, fruor, fungor, potior and vescor.  In different periods of Latin these verbs could have active forms, as we saw above, and could also take objects in the accusative or even genitive.  In modern liturgical usage they are deponents and always get ablative “objects”.  Actually, these aren’t really objects, but rather a kind of instrument: e.g., vescor, “I feed myself from...”; fruor, “I get fruit/benefit from...”; etc.   A good grammar explains how these verbs work.  Latin Students: If you want a really good Latin grammar get the superb Gildersleeve & Lodge, or fully, Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar (enlarged with the additional help of Gonzalez Lodge).   Basil L. Gildersleeve said, and this is true in the world of WDTPRS, “No study of literature can yield its highest result without the close study of language, and consequently the close study of grammar.”  Should we send copies of the Lewis & Short Dictionary and G&L to those who are working – seemingly without end in sight – on the new translation? 

Two words in the prayer, gaudium and laetitia, can be rendered into English with the same word “joy” and variations.  We don’t want to give undue emphasis to the different sorts of “joy” possible with different words.  However, our chockfull L&S states that gaudium suggest a joy which is interior whereas laetitia suggests a unrestrained joy having outward expression, even though L&S also says gaudium in the plural (as it is in our prayer) can also be “the outward expressions of joy”.  In a supplement to the L&S, A. Souter’s Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D., we discover that gaudium is “everlasting blessedness” while laetitia is simply “prosperity”.  So, in Souter we still uncover something of the spiritual versus material distinction.  Blaise/Dumas, or Le Vocabulaire Latin des principaux thèmes liturgiques, implies that laetitia and gaudium are pretty much the same thing. 

Are these distinctions really important?  The dictates of ancient rhetoric (and this prayer is ancient) required copia verborum, a richness of vocabulary to avoid boring repetition.  Nevertheless, each word gives us “joy”, but with shades of meaning.  Perhaps a solution is found in L&S’s explanation that gaudium is “like our ‘joy’, for an object which produces joy, a cause or occasion of joy”.  You might think in terms of someone saying, “You are a real joy to me!” For us who, raised up from our sins, die in God’s friendship, the object which will produce joy is, in this world the state of grace and a clean conscience and, in the next life, the Beatific Vision and Communion of Saints.

L&S indicates that erigo, giving us erexisti, means “to raise up, set up, erect” and, analogously, “to arouse, excite” and “cheer up, encourage.” The verb iaceo (in the L&S find this under jaceo) has many meanings, such as “to lie” as in “lie sick or dead, fallen” and also “to be cast down, fixed on the ground” and “to be overcome, despised, idle, neglected, unemployed.”  Humilitas is “lowness”.  In Blaise/Dumas, humilitas has a more theological meaning in the “abasement” of the God Incarnate who took the form of a “slave” (cf. Philippians 2:7).  Blaise/Dumas cites this Collect in the entry for humilitas.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who raised up a fallen world by the abasement of Your Son,
grant holy joy to Your faithful;
so that You may cause those whom You snatched from the misfortunes of perpetual death,
to enjoy delights unending.

Our Collect views material creation as an enervated body, wounded, weakened by sin, lying near death in the dust whence it came.  In the sin of our First Parents all creation was wounded.  The harmony there ought to have been between the rest of material creation and man, its steward, has been damaged.  Because of the Fall, the whole cosmos was put under the bondage of the Enemy, the “prince of this world” (cf. John 10:31 and 14:30).  This is why when we bless certain things, and baptize people, there was an exorcism first, to rip the object or person from the grip of the world’s “prince” and give it to the King.  God is liberator.  He rouses us up from being prone upon the ground.  He grasps us, pulling us upward out of sin and death.  He directs us again toward the joys possible in this world, first, and then definitively in the next.  But we must get back to our feet: rise again.  Our Savior rose for this reason.  We have seen in many of our ancient Roman prayers a pattern of descent and ascent, of exit and return.   Before the Resurrection there is the Passion.  Before exaltation there is humiliation.  The descent, exit, Passion and humiliation bring an even more exalted joy which will embrace the entirety of man in both soul and body, the interior and the outward human person.  Ultimately, it will embrace the entire cosmos.
 
This Collect survived, in part at least, the censoring editors who snipped and pasted together edition of the Missale Romanum approved by Paul VI.   It was “splinched”, alas, in being transported into the new book for the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time.  The change is indicated in my emphasis.

COLLECT - (2002MR):
Deus, qui Filii tui humilitate iacentem mundum erexisti,
fidelibus tuis sanctam concede laetitiam,
ut, quos eripuisti a servitute peccati,
gaudiis facias perfrui sempiternis.

Servitus means “the condition of a servus; slavery, serfdom, service, servitude”.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, who raised up a fallen world by the abasement of Your Son,
grant holy joy to Your faithful,
so that You may cause those whom You snatched from the servitude of sin
to enjoy delights unending.

The 1970/2002MR version, however, says quos eripuisti a servitute peccati (“those whom You snatched from the servitude of sin”) whereas the 1962MR says quos perpetuae mortis eripuisti casibus (“those whom you have snatched from the perils of everlasting death”).  As mentioned above, today’s Collect in the 1962MR is virtually the same as that in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary.  The experts appointed by the Consilium under Cardinal Lercaro and Annibale Bugnini took it on themselves to change a prayer in use for over a dozen centuries.  They changed the meaning of the prayer.  They knew better, apparently.

A highly polemical but interesting little booklet called The Problems with the Prayers of the Modern Mass (TAN, 1991) compares the 1962MR version of this Collect with the 1970MR version.  The booklet’s author, the odd “Sede Vacantist” Anthony Cekada, opines that the redactors of the Novus Ordo intentionally eliminated from the Latin the concept of damnation and substituted the “less threatening idea of deliverance from the ‘slavery of sin’” (p. 14).   Cekada is right, of course, though it must be said that “servitude of sin” is fairly terrifying, given the consequences for someone standing before the Eternal Judge, the King of Fearful Majesty.  Still, the Novus Ordo version eliminates the obvious reference to the final consequences of sin, “eternal death”, in favor of this world’s “servitude”, grave as that may be.

Perhaps understanding “raised up a fallen world” in the sense of liberation prompted the change from “eternal death” to “servitude of sin”.  Christ’s “abasement” and later “raising” freed us from future death and present enslavement in sin. 

Either way, in Christ’s resurrection we were raised up to the joy (present and future) of being God’s faithful ones. 

This is what comes out when you translate the Latin prayers, both old and new, accurately.   Instead, on Sunday most of you who attend Holy Mass with the Novus Ordo will hear this lame-duck version from…

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Father,
through the obedience of Jesus,
your servant and your Son,
you raised a fallen world.
Free us from sin
and bring us the joy that lasts forever.

 If we are going to be forced to have a vernacular liturgy, we have the right as Catholics to hear what it really says through a good, accurate English translation.

Here is an excerpt from my WDTPRS article in the current issue of The Wanderer.  The articles are available on line through The Wanderer’s subscription website.

What Does the Prayer Really Say?   “Low” Sunday – “in albis” (1962 Missale Romanum) - Roman Station: St. Mary Major

...

The Pope has something up his sleeve, so to speak.

As Anna Arco points out so well (emphases mine):

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.

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. It is not a scandal to clothe silken words in silken garments.  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."

“It is not a scandal to clothe silken words in silken garments.” Well said!

We must “enflesh” the Word who seeks to act in our midst sacramentally.  All the words and gestures of Holy Mass are the dicta et acta of the Risen Lord.  He acts and speaks now as the Head of the Body, the Church, in the person of the priests who is alter Christus, now as the Body joined to the Head in the voices and gestures of the congregation, and then as Christ one and whole, Christus totus, when they both act and speak together.  It may be that the Novus Ordo manifests this reality somewhat more clearly.  The sacred words and deeds should reflect outwardly their inner beauty and power to transform.  They demand from us our very best and brightest.

Pope Benedict has given us a tremendous gift with Summorum Pontificum.  The use of the older form of Mass in more places will help us recover a sense of who we are as Catholics, how we worship, what reverence is.  His choices of vestments of historic cuts, both new and lifted from the too-long locked cupboards of the papal sacristy, his recovery of ad orientem worship and even small details like the seventh candle for papal Masses, all speak to the need for continuity with our deep Catholic tradition.

_______

What we have done in the first seven years of WDTPRS is try to show how we should clothe the “silken words” of the liturgy with…well… silken words and not the lame-duck ICEL sow’s ears. This year in this series we have turned our attention a bit more to the prayers of the older form of Holy Mass, in the 1962 Missale Romanum.  However, we have not lost sight of the need to keep hammering for good translations of the Novus Ordo.  We know that the translation revision is well underway, but it is taking a ridiculously long time. 

In the post-Conciliar calendar this is the “Second Sunday of Easter”.  In traditional parlance today is called “Low Sunday” or   sometimes “Thomas Sunday” because of the Gospel reading about the doubting Apostle.  It is called “Quasimodo Sunday” for the first word of the opening chant, the Introit (cf. 1 Peter 2:2-3).  According to the post-Conciliar way of speaking, it is often called “Mercy Sunday” because of the emphasis on the merciful dimension of God’s redemptive act celebrated at Easter: the new Collect (based on a prayer in the Missale Gothicum) for the begins by calling God merciful.  The newest, third edition of the Missale Romanum of 2002 specifically labels this Sunday: Dominica II Paschae seu de divina Misericordia. 

However, since ancient times this Sunday is called “Dominica in albis” or also “in albis depositis”... the Sunday of the “white robes having been taken off.”  1 Peter 2:2-3 says: “Like (Sicut modo (Vulgate) or Quasimodo (pre-Vulgate Latin) newborn babes (infantes), long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.” Some of our antiphons for Mass, such as today’s which starts with the more ancient Quasimodo, reflect a Latin Scripture version predating St. Jerome’s (+420) Vulgate. 

In the ancient Latin Church the newly baptized were called infantes.  They wore their white baptismal robes for an “octave” period after Easter during which they received special instruction from the bishop about the sacred mysteries and Christian life to which they were not admitted before the Vigil rites.  On this Sunday they removed their robes, which were deposited (albis depositis) in the cathedral treasury as a perpetual witness to their vows.  They were then “out of the nest” of the bishop, as it were, on their own in living their Catholic lives daily.  St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) uses the imagery of spring and compares his newly baptized infantes to little birds trying to fly from the nest while he, the parent bird, flap around them and chirp noisily to encourage them (s. 376a).

The Collect found in the Extraordinary Use of the Roman Rite today comes at least from the 8th century and is found in the Liber sacramentorum Gellonensis.  The Gellonian Sacramentary … well… one of these days I’ll get into that. 

COLLECT (1962MR):
Praesta, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus:
ut, qui paschalia festa peregimus;
haec, te largiente, moribus et vita teneamus.

The first meaning of perago in our very much present Lewis & Short Dictionary, is “to thrust through, pierce through, transfix”, but it comes logically to mean also “to carry through, go through with, execute, finish, accomplish, complete”. This past tense drives home that are at the end of the Easter Octave.  This prayer survived into the Novus Ordo.  It is found on the Saturday after Ascension in the 7th Week of Easter.  In other words, peregimus points out that Easter season is over. 

SUPER LITERAL VERSION:
Grant, we beg You, Almighty God,
that we who have carried through the paschal feasts
may, You bestowing it, hold to them in morals and in life.

OTHERWISE A BIT LOOSER:
Almighty God, we beg You,
that we who have completed our observance of days of the paschal cycle,
may as You lavish this grace upon us, hold fast to them still in our life and outward conduct.

The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual (Baronius Press):
Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God,
that we who have celebrated the Paschal Feast,
may, by Thy bounty, retain its fruits in our daily habits and behaviour.

ICEL (1973 translation of the 1970MR):
Almighty Father,
let the love we have celebrated in this Easter season
be put into practice in our daily lives.

What about the Collect for the Novus Ordo?

COLLECT (2002MR):
Deus misericordiae sempiternae,
qui in ipso paschalis festi recursu
fidem sacratae tibi plebis accendis,
auge gratiam quam dedisti,
ut digna omnes intellegentia comprehendant,
quo lavacro abluti, quo spiritu regenerati,
quo sanguine sunt redempti.

The use of those clauses starting with quo, having no conjunctions (a trope called asyndeton) gives this prayer a very forceful feeling.  I like that sole sunt (with abluti…regenerati…redempti) imbedded elegantly in the last phrase.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God of eternal mercy,
who on this recurrence of the paschal feast
kindle the faith of a people sanctified for Yourself,
increase the grace which You have given,
so that all may comprehend with worthy understanding
by what laver they were washed,
by what Spirit they were regenerated,
by what Blood they were redeemed.

Recursus is “a running back, return, a returning path.”  In reference to sight it is something that has power to bring back an image.  Recursus harkens to the cyclical, “recurring” nature of the Paschal observance.  We have the opportunity to experience the Paschal mysteries each year.  This is more than a memorial or re-enactment.  These mysterious events, historically past, sacramentally take place again each year.  The vast verb comprehendo is too complex to treat here.  This is a profoundly interiorized “grasping” in the sense of true possession. 

A lavacrum is a bath.  In Titus 3:5 we have, “He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy (misericordiam), by the washing of regeneration (lavacrum regenerationis) and renewal in the Holy Spirit, which he poured out upon us rightly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life (vv. 5-7, RSV).”  This harks to both the process and effects of baptism.  In our Collect is abluo, “to wash off, wash away, cleanse, purify.”  In classical Latin, abluo is used by Cicero (+43 BC) to describe a calming of the passions coming from a religious rite of washing away of sin (Tusc 4, 28, 60) and even by the poet philosopher Lucretius (+ AD 55) in De rerum natura to describe the removal of darkness by the bringing in of light (4, 378).  Early Latin speaking Christians lacked vocabulary to express their faith.  Abluo was ready made to be adapted to describe the effects of baptism.  Accendo means “to kindle anything above so that it burns downward” and “to set on fire, to kindle, light to light up, illuminate, to inflame a person or thing, to incite, to round up.”  This word evokes the imagery of the fiery Easter Vigil!

In a sermon addressed to the catechumens before their baptism at the Easter Vigil, St. Augustine used images of light and fire to help them understand who they were to become (cf. s. 223 and s. 260c): “Keep the night Vigil humbly.  Pray humbly with devoted faith, solid hope, brightly burning charity, pondering what kind of day our splendor will be if our humility can turn night into day.  Thus, may God who ordered the light to blaze out of the dark make our hearts blaze brightly, that we may do on the inside something akin to what we have done with the lamps kindled within this house of prayer.  Let us furnish the true dwelling place of God, our consciences, with lamps of justice”.

In the 1962 Missale Romanum, the Extraordinary Use of the Roman Rite, this is First Passion Sunday.  In the Novus Ordo we also call Palm Sunday “Passion” Sunday.  Today is the beginning of “Passiontide”.  It is known as Iudica Sunday, from the first word of the Introit of Mass, from Ps 42 (41).

We lose things during Lent.  We are being pruned through the liturgy. Holy Church experiences liturgical death before the feast of the Resurrection.   The Alleluia goes on Septuagesima.  Music and flowers go on Ash Wednesday.   Today, statues and images are draped in purple.  That is why today is sometimes called Repus Sunday, from repositus analogous to absconditus or “hidden”, because this is the day when Crosses and other images in churches are veiled.  The universal Church’s Ordo published by the Holy See has an indication that images can be veiled from this Sunday, the 5th of Lent.  Traditionally Crosses may be covered until the end of the celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday and images, such as statues may be covered until the beginning of the Easter Vigil.  At my home parish of St. Agnes in St. Paul, MN, the large statue of the Pietà is appropriately unveiled at the Good Friday service.

Also, as part of the pruning, as of today in the older form of Mass, the “Iudica” psalm in prayers at the foot of the altar and the Gloria Patri at the end of certain prayers was no longer said.  
 
The pruning cuts more deeply as we march into the Triduum. After the Mass on Holy Thursday the Blessed Sacrament is removed from the main altar, which itself is stripped and bells are replaced with wooden noise makers.  On Good Friday there isn’t even a Mass.  At the beginning of the Vigil we are deprived of light itself!  It is as if the Church herself were compl