“OF COURSE!”

Today I have been working on the next offering for over at One Peter Five (a weekly commentary on upcoming Sunday Mass texts with the TLM).   I had a funny image flash through my mind.  It wouldn’t have fit in what I was writing there, but maybe here it has a place.

What was I writing?

Paul says that the Corinthians – and we, their distant heirs – have been “enriched with all speech and knowledge,” so as to lack no spiritual gift while we wait for the Lord’s revealing. This enrichment is not mere eloquence or erudition but the infusion of faith that blossoms into wisdom. … Isn’t St. Paul’s paean of thanksgiving also for us a summons to vigilance? It is we who have been magnificently enriched with faith and knowledge. Consider what we have now, which has been handed down with love through countless generations! We have the treasury of the saints, the witness of martyrs, the splendor of the sacraments. We have ever clarified teaching, the deepening of doctrine, the outward expression of both in our polished and tended and perfected sacred liturgical worship.

To squander these gifts would be a sin against gratitude. To tamper, tinker, and trivialize them would be a crime against God and neighbor.

Paul expected much of his Corinthians who were just in their first steps in this journey called the Church. We, on the other hand, possess centuries of reflection, the accumulated fruit of our forebears’ contemplation, sweat, blood and tears.

Would, therefore, Paul not expect even more from us?

So… I’m writing away and I start thinking about the pseudo-archeologizing liturgical nitwits out there who stand in contempt of the solemn rites of the Roman Church in favor of a pristine clay platter and cup, burlap, and a chunk of crumbly and yet still oddly unchewable bread.

My mind drifts to St. Paul, perhaps coming out of something like that, though I’m sure they would have tried to use their very best things for their worship, suddenly being transported into the middle of our Solemn Mass last night for the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

There stands Paul, in Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini.  He sees the symbols of Trinity everywhere, including the magnificent painting by Guido Reni.  “What’s a Rosary?”  An angel illumines his mind.  The vestments, clergy in choir, baroque polyphony – the Gregorian chant sounds kind of familiar – the accoutrement of the altar, dozens of seminarians in choir dress, the architecture itself.  Familiar psalm verses and unfamiliar… Creed? Again the angel illumines his mind.  Incense, he gets that.  The two fold consecration!

Taking it all in he suddenly straightens up, slaps his forehead and cries,

כַּמּוּבָן!