Fr. Z's Blog

Many of the figures in the Old Testament are commemorated by Holy Church as saints.

Here is the entry in the 2005 Martyrologium Romanum:

1. Commemoratio sancti Iob, admirandae patientiae viri in terra Hus.

We could talk about Job all day and into next week or next year.

The photo does not do it justice.

Please remember me when shopping online and use my affiliate links.  US HERE – UK HERE  WHY?  This helps to pay for health insurance (massively hiked for this new year of surprises), utilities, groceries, etc..  At no extra cost, you provide help for which I am grateful.

At the Rapid and Blitz in Warsaw, the lowest rated seed, Kirill Shevchenko (a Ukrainian playing under the Romanian flag) went 3 for three to lead the pack after day 1 with a score of 6/6. Magnus and Nodirbek follow with 4/6. It is, of course, still early days.  At 33 years old, Magnus is the oldest player!

Meanwhile, it’s blacks move. Mate in 3.

NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.

Priestly chess players, drop me a line. HERE

I am sorting mail these days, which piled up during my Roman Sojourn.  One thing I am doing is looking for things to read for a new edition of News of the Church.  I immediately noticed interesting news of from the wonderful Benedictine nuns of Gower Abbey in Missouri, the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles.  So, stay tuned.

Meanwhile, they have two new music CDs (and downloads).  One of them focuses on martyrs.  Here are three tiny tastes.  I like that they put the famous Ut queant laxis into the collection.  I did a podcast about it back in 2007!

US HERE – UK HERE

Let’s see if we can sell out all the discs and break the downloads.

You get their music.  They get more income.  They open more daughter houses.  More room available for vocations and happy traditional nuns.

See how that works?

Also, lest I forget, the chess.com Classic is revving up.  Several of the players are also playing in Warsaw.  There were real fireworks yesterday, with some spectacular blunders (which I find consoling) and missed mates (which I do often when playing fast).  The highly unlikeable Hans Niemann with what was probably a mouse-slip blundered his queen. He’s out.  Play continues today.  Several players have already made it to Division 1 because of past performances, including Magnus.

Because this is a chess.com event, chess.com is offering discounts on premium memberships (there are free memberships, too).

Go Wesley!

There are many images of the Lord’s Ascension to heaven through history, and rightly so.  With the Annunciation, the Ascension is perhaps the greatest of all the Feasts of the Lord and for our own humanity.  Imagine!  Our humanity, taken into an indestructible bond with the Lord’s divinity at the Annunciation, with the Ascension is seated – RIGHT NOW  – at the right hand of the Father.

Now HE.  Later WE.

The Ascension is an article of the Creed and it behooves us to reflect on it.

The depictions of the Ascension I like the most are the medieval illustrations which show the Apostles, often with Mary, looking upward as a pair of lordly Feet at all that remains to be seen.

The Ascension of Christ, historiated initial ‘C’, Italy, 15C (State Library of Victoria, RARES 096 IL I)

Who better to turn to for some insight into this than Ratzinger?

From the site Ignatius Insight, providing an excerpt from “The Ascension: The Beginning of a New Nearness,” from Joseph Ratzinger’s Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts (Ignatius Press, 2006 – UK HERE).  My emphases and comments:

You are surely familiar with all those precious, naïve images in which only the feet of Jesus are visible, sticking out of the cloud, at the heads of the apostles. The cloud, for its part, is a dark circle on the perimeter; on the inside, however, blazing light. It occurs to me that precisely in the apparent naïveté of this representation something very deep comes into view. All we see of Christ in the time of history are his feet and the cloud. His feet—what are they?

We are reminded, first of all, of a peculiar sentence from the Resurrection account in Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said that the women held onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worshipped him. As the Risen One, he towers over earthly proportions. We can still only touch his feet; and we touch them in adoration. Here we could reflect that we come as worshippers, following his trail, close to his footsteps. Praying, we go to him; praying, we touch him, even if in this world, so to speak, always only from below, only from afar, always only on the trail of his earthly steps. At the same time it becomes clear that we do not find the footprints of Christ when we look only below, when we measure only footprints and want to subsume faith in the obvious. The Lord is movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and ascending, do we recognize him.

When we read the Church Fathers something important is added. The correct ascent of man occurs precisely where he learns, in humbly turning toward his neighbor, to bow very deeply, down to his feet, down to the gesture of the washing of feet. It is precisely humility, which can bow low, that carries man upward. This is the dynamic of ascent that the feast of the Ascension wants to teach us.

In the readings for the Sunday after Ascension, what does Peter teach us?  Charity covers a multitude of sins!

Let’s have a few more images of the Ascension of different styles, animi caussa!

From the Parisian Missal

With footprints on his blasting off pad.

And there is the more, “It’s a bird!  It’s plane!” style.

Note the reactions…

Getting a helping hand.  Christ is carrying a scroll.  What could be written on it?  It must mean something.

Here’s 15th c. Flemish version where we see Christ getting to the right hand of the Father.  Nice!

In some places the Feast of the Ascension (which since the 4th century has fallen on a Thursday because before that it always would have been on a Thursday) has been transferred to next Sunday, thus making it “Ascension Thursday Sunday”.  That’s just wrong.

The 3rd edition of the Missale Romanum of 2002 provided a Mass for the Vigil of Ascension, which wasn’t in previous editions of the Novus Ordo.

The prayers for the new Vigil of Ascension are not the same as those found in the pre-Conciliar Missale for the Vigil.

In case you don’t have the Latin texts, here are the antiphons for the Vigil. Ant. ad introitum: Regna terrae cantata Deo, psallite Domino, qui ascendit super caelum caeli; magnificentia et virtus eius in nubibus, alleluia. (Ps 67:33,35)  Ant. ad communionem: Christus, unam pro peccatis offerens hostiam, in sempiterum sedet in dextera Dei, alleluia. (Cf. Heb 10:12)

COLLECT (2002MR):
Deus, cuius Filus hodie in caelos,
Apostolis astantibus, ascendit,
concede nobis, quaesumus,
ut secundum eius promissionem
et ille nobiscum semper in terris
et nos cum eo in caelo vivere mereamur.

This was modified from a prayer in ancient sacramentaries such as the Liber Sacramentorum when it was used on Ascension Thursday having its Station Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica.

The eucological formulas (the collection of prayers), for the Ascension could be the oldest prayers we have in the Roman liturgy!  They are found in what was once often called the Leonine Sacramentary, which survived in one 7th c. manuscript in Verona, thus making it what modern scholars call it: the Veronese Sacramentary.

You might not immediately recognize astantibus as being from asto or adsto, which that ascendant lexicon of Latin lemmata, the Lewis & Short Dictionary, says means, “to stand at or near a person or thing, to stand by”  The L&S will also inform you that asto has the synonym adsisto.

If you have ever heard the phrase “to assist (adsisto) at Holy Mass” this is the concept: you are present and actively participating.

Also, during the Roman Canon, the priest describes the people as circumstantes, “standing around”.  This doesn’t mean they there around the altar with their hands in the their pockets (though that happens in the Novus Ordo). Rather, they are there morally and spiritually “around” the altar, participating each according to their vocation and capacity.  So, circumstantes is used to identify the baptized who are present.

The Apostles, who were adstantes, actively participating in the Lord’s Ascension before, during and after the actual moment of the Ascension, both listened to the Lord and watched the Lord.  Similarly, at Holy Mass we actively participate before, during and after the consecration, both by listening to the Lord speak through the texts and watching what the Lord does in the liturgical action.

LITERAL VERSION:
O God, whose Son today ascended
into the heavens as the Apostles were standing close by,
grant us, we beseech You,
that, according to His promise,
we may be worthy both that He lives with us on earth,
and that we live with Him in heaven.

NEW CORRECTED ICEL (2011):
O God, whose Son today ascended to the heavens
as the Apostles looked on,
grant, we pray, that, in accordance with his promise,
we may be worthy for him to live with us always on earth,
and we with him in heaven.

When the Second Person took up our human nature into an indestructible bond with His divinity we were thereby destined to sit at God’s right hand, first in Christ and then on our own.

Christ makes us worthy, no one else.  Christ alone.  It’s all His.

Because it’s His, it’s ours.

Our Lord’s Ascension brought our humanity to the right hand of the Father in glory, a first-fruit and token of what awaits us.

The Collect for the Vetus Ordo is from the 5th Sunday after Easter.

Deus, a quo bona cuncta procédunt, largíre supplícibus tuis: ut cogitémus, te inspiránte, quæ recta sunt; et, te gubernánte, eadem faciámus.

O God, from Whom all good things come, grant to Your supplicants, we beseech You, as You inspire we may think what is right, as You guide, accomplish the same.

God loves us so much that He makes us cooperators in His action. He gives us good things to do. He then makes our hands strong enough to handle them, such as His works are also our works. As Augustine says, he crowns His own merits in us.