After the Creed, the priest begins the so-called Mass of the Faithful with the Offertory Rite. In the traditional Missal this rite consists of several prayers that were added to the liturgy of Rome from Gallican-transalpine sources around the fourteenth century. The style of these prayers is more florid and poetic than what Adrian Fortescue calls “the genius of the original Roman Rite,” which he characterizes as “almost bald” in comparison to “the exuberant rhetoric of the East” and other liturgical traditions. [1] Nevertheless, these Gallican additions are more of an enriching engrafting rather than an alien insertion. The prayers also provide an excellent summary of Eucharistic theology.
The first prayer, during which the priest offers the bread to God, is the Suscipe Sancte Pater, an early version of which first appears in the prayerbook of Charles the Bald (823-877).
Súscipe, sancte Pater, omnípotens aeterne Deus, hanc immaculátam hostiam, quam ego indignus fámulus tuus óffero tibi, Deo meo vivo et vero, pro innumerabílibus peccátis, et offensiónibus, et negligentiis meis, et pro ómnibus circumstántibus, sed et pro ómnibus fidélibus Christiánis vivis atque defunctis: ut mihi, et illis proficiat ad salútem in vitam aeternam. Amen.
Which the Baronius Missal translates as:
Accept, O holy Father, almighty and eternal God, this unspotted host, which I, Thy unworthy servant, offer unto Thee, my living and true God, for my innumerable sins, offenses, and negligences, and for all here present: as also for all faithful Christians, both living and dead, that it may avail both me and them for salvation unto life everlasting. Amen. [2]
The prayer is beautiful, in part because it contains gratuitous decorations: the Deo meo vivo et vero (my living and true God) rolls sweetly off the tongue but is logically unnecessary, and so is et offensionibus et negligentiis meis (offenses and failings) since both of these are covered by peccatis (sins). For although most translations treat peccata, offensiones, and negligentia as three different things, they are overlooking the et…et construction, which in Latin indicates “both…and.” The addition of etoffensionibus et negligentiis meis, therefore, serves as an elaboration of sin (in this case, sins of commission and sins of omission), and so the line should be translated “for my innumerable sins, both my offenses and my failings.”
The priest refers to the bread he is holding in his hands with the paten as an immaculata hostia, which most translations render as an unspotted or immaculate host. The translation is valid but misleading insofar as the average Catholic thinks of the small unleavened wafer when he hears the word “host.” But the Latin hostia here refers to a sacrificial victim, and thus the prayer boldly conflates the unconsecrated wafer with a consecrated Host, Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Examples of this kind of dramatic anticipation can be found in all apostolic liturgies. [3] In the Byzantine Rite, for example, all bow before the unconsecrated gifts of bread and wine when they are processed to the altar. Such practices are an admirable counterweight to neoscholastic reductionism, which only cares about defining the exact moment of consecration and nothing more, and they are well-suited to human psychology. As Peter Kwasniewski explains:
Beings like ourselves, who live, think, and speak in time, must pray in such a way that our anaphoras (and our liturgies as a whole) draw out, step by step as it were, the meaning of mysteries that occur timelessly…. We humans can only speak of an instantaneous coming-to-be in language of change and therefore of measurable duration (consider all the troubles theologians have had to face when speaking of “creation ex nihilo”). Thus, every orthodox Christian liturgy speaks at length of the conversion of the gifts—it calls down the Spirit, recalls or repeats the institution, offers up the gifts to the heavenly Father, and so on (in different sequences for different rites)—but really, these things are occurring simultaneously. This we cannot express with our time-bound language.
Further, just as immaculata hostia looks forward to the consecration, it looks back to the rich theology of sacrifice in the Sacred Scriptures. The Mosaic Law had five basic kinds of sacrifice or offering, and every one in some way appears in the traditional Offertory Rite. In the Suscipe Sancte Pater, we see shades of the Grain Offering (Minchah), since bread is being offered, and with the reference to a unspotted host we see an allusion to the Peace Offering (Shelem), which required an animal without defect for the sacrifice. The Peace Offering, in turn, could be used as a Purification Offering (Chattah), which purported to purge the offerer of sin, and which, according to this prayer, is the purpose of the priest’s offering of bread.
Two other words are worthy of note. The priest refers to himself as a famulus rather than a servus, the other Latin word for a servant. In so doing he draws from the linguistic world of the Roman orations, which likewise evince a preference for famulus, [4] perhaps because it is slightly more and is etymologically related to familia. Second, the priest refers to the assembled congregation as circumstantes, which literally means, “those standing around.” Circumstances, for example, are those things that stand around the essence of the matter and affect that essence but are not a part of it. It is possible that the prayer has in mind those standing around the altar, namely, the sacred ministers, but it is more likely that it is recalling those standing (and they would have been standing prior to the use of pews) in front of the altar in the nave.
Finally, when the prayer transitions to include all faithful Christians, living and departed, it uses a disjunction. Sed et, which means “But also,” adds here a hint of improvisation, as if the priest were formulating his intentions on the spot and just came up with the idea of including the whole Church militant and Church suffering. The convention is also used in the Canon at the Hanc Igitur, Unde et Memores, and the addition of Saint Joseph, thus providing a stylistic bridge between the Offertory and the Canon.
Notes
[1] Adrian Fortescue, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1912), 183.
[2] The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual (Baronius Press, 2007), 923-24.
[3] See Fortescue, 305.
[4] Mary Pierre Ellebracht, Remarks on the Vocabulary of the Ancient Orations in the Missale Romanum (Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1963), 30.
Following up on a post of two days ago, here are some more pictures which Nicola took in the abbey of St John in Müstair, Switzerland. The previous post showed the remains of the original fresco decorations of the Carolingian period; here will will see the Romanesque frescos in two of the churches three apses. (Unfortunately, the central apse is currently under restoration.) Here we see the apses from the outside.
Around the year 1200, when the abbey was over 4 centuries old, a new community of Benedictine nuns took possession of it, and commissioned a redecoration of the church’s interior; the new frescoes largely reproduced the iconographic program of the older one. (In the left apse seen here, we have episodes from the lives of Ss Peter and Paul.) As was done in countless other places, the older layer of fresco (from the first decades of the 9th century) was knocked full of holes to make it rougher, so the new layer would have more to grip on to. In this particular case, however, the procedure did not work very well, and much of the new layer simply slid off, exposed the older one. The frescoes were then further damaged by architectural changes at the end of the 15th century. Given all these vicissitudes, it is still remarkable how much remains, and how good a state it is in, relatively speaking.
At the top (Carolingian), the scene of the traditio Legis. Second register, left, Peter and Paul meet in Rome, right, the contest with Simon Magus. Third register: left, Nero condemns the Apostles. Under the window (the first surviving part of the Romanesque work), Peter and Paul praying, and the fall of Simon. In the bottom register, the deaths of the Apostles and their burial.
In the right apse, at top (Carolingian), Christ in majesty surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists, and the Virgin Mary in a medallion at his feet. In the second register, the ordination of St Stephen (?) and the celebration of a Mass. In the third register (Romanesque), the ordination of St Stephen, his mission, his speech to the Sanhedrin. At the bottom, his stoning, the preparation of his body, and his burial.
The wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold becometh a King, frankincense is offered in sacrifice to God, and with myrrh are embalmed the bodies of the dead. Therefore, by these mystical gifts did the wise men preach Him whom they adored; by the gold, that He was King; by the frankincense, that He was God; and by the myrrh, that He was to die.
The Meeting of the Magi with King Herod, and the Adoration of the Christ Child; from the Ingeborg Psalter, ca. 1195, now at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, France.
There are some heretics who believe Him to be God, but do not at all believe that He reigns everywhere; these offer unto Him frankincense, but refuse Him gold. There are some others who think that He is King, but deny that He is God; these offer Him gold, but refuse Him frankincense. There are some who profess that He is both God and King, but not deny that He took up mortal nature. These offer Him gold and frankincense, but not myrrh for the mortal nature which He assumed.
Let us, therefore, offer gold unto the new-born Lord, that we may confess His universal rule; let us offer unto Him frankincense, that we may believe that He Who hath appeared in time, was God before time was; let us offer Him myrrh, that, just as we believe Him not subject to suffering in His divinity, we may also believe that He was mortal in our flesh. (From Pope St Gregory the Great’s 10th Homily on the Gospels, read in the Breviary of St Pius V on the third day within the Octave of Epiphany.)
It is understandable that many would see liturgical disaster as a unique product of the last Council, and particularly of the implementary body headed by Annibale Bugnini, the Consilium ad exsequendam. Others who have read more widely will understand that it is linked to the gradual radicalization of the Liturgical Movement, as it went from the restorationist and educational model of Dom Guéranger to the pastoral utilitarianism of the postwar period. Relatively few, it seems to me, recognize that the roots of this disaster go far back to (in varying ways) the Protestant Revolt, the Enlightenment, and the age of industrialization.
Lately, a number of fine studies have been published that help us to see these more remote pretexts and premises of the liturgical reform of the 1960s, when the program of the Synod of Pistoia finally entered every suburban parish.
It is commonly believed that Children’s Masses are a unique development of the modern liturgical reforms, a direct outgrowth of the Second Vatican Council. In reality, however, special Masses for children – including what might now appear to be shocking liturgical innovations – stretch back more than a century before the Second Vatican Council. These Masses began as a 19th century attempt to grapple with dramatic social changes and challenges wrought by the modern world. They gained widespread popularity and even gave rise to the creation of vernacular participatory Mass methods for adults years before Vatican II. In total, hundreds of editions of these methods for children and adults were published, running to millions of cumulative copies, between 1861 and 1961. They were published with approval, printed for decades, and used with permission around the world. This is the story of the surprising origins of “Children’s Masses” in the early 1800s, their widespread popularity around the world, their sudden fall from favor immediately before the Second Vatican Council, and their rebirth during the initial years of the revised Roman Missal of Paul VI.
While Fassino shows us how deeply the rot of bad liturgical ideas had already set in well before the Council, it also happily shows how men of principle strongly resisted this literally juvenile mentality. One does not have to question the good will of these would-be reformers in order to see that such efforts at promoting “participation” are bought at the expense of “dumbing down”—a superficialization that subtly implies that liturgy is a thing for children to grow out of, not a thing to which we are apprenticed in a lifelong process of assimilation.
Archbishop John Gregory Murray (1877-1956), a native of Connecticut, became the Archbishop of St. Paul (Minnesota) in 1931. During his 24-year tenure he became a frequent visitor to the monks of St. John's Abbey in nearby Collegeville, Minnesota. In those years St. John’s was the largest Benedictine Abbey in the world and they had made a name for themselves as the American epicenter of the Liturgical Movement and what came to be called the liturgical apostolate, coming into fashion after the First World War.
In 1938 Archbishop Murray laid the cornerstone of the new English Gothic Revival church of the Nativity, under construction in a beautiful new residential neighborhood in St. Paul’s Groveland neighborhood. The architect of the church was a non-Catholic by the name of James B. Hills. It was during this time that Archbishop Murray approved a plan that was heretofore unheard of: the altar in the basement crypt chapel was to be set permanently facing the people.
In those days this represented a forbidden stratum of liturgical experimentation that was not yet conceived by most, or sanctioned with approval by the Holy See. An innovation in its day, such a thing had not been tried anywhere in the country. Proponents of the Liturgical Movement in northern Europe had been slowly promoting the idea of Mass facing the people, but it was still a novelty concept in the rest of the world.
Here is the altar John is talking about, in the only photo that has survived of it (today the room is a recreational space):
We can see this sort of thing in a 1930 photo from the Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany, a hotbed of progressive liturgism. Note that here, there is a more deliberate effort to make the altar look like a meal table:
Returning now to Fassino’s statement that “vernacular participatory Mass methods for adults” were being promoted “years before Vatican II,” I thought readers of NLM would appreciate seeing the photos of a section contained in a Missel-Vespéral Romain edited by the redoubtable Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, OSB, and published in 1946. The reader who kindly shared these photos noted that she also has another edition of the same missal from 1942, which contains the same section.
The photos were sent page by page; I cropped them and combined them for ease of viewing, which explains the mismatches from left to right. (As always, click to enlarge.)
Title page and copyright page
What is most striking about this entire method, which, as Yves Chiron describes, was also practiced by (indeed, pioneered by) Bugnini in Italy, is how much blathering is going on. Throughout the Mass there is “Une Voix,” presumably a layman, who acts as the reader or “commentator” in some cases; and there are many short texts and some long texts that “Toutes” (All) are supposed to say.
The priest, meanwhile, is doing his part at the altar in Latin, so there is a parallel Mass: his in Latin and everyone else’s in French.
A rather heavy-handed attempt is made to bring out the Trinitarian structure of everything: the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo... Yes, of course, it’s there and it’s important, but whatever happened to not hitting people over the head with a didactic shovel?
There is a lot of chatter DURING the Roman Canon, as Une Voix laboriously explains to Toutes that now we are praying for the Church militant, now we are offering the Victim, now we are praying for the dead... What strikes me the most is how the pious paraphrase being spoken throughout by the people is so much akin to the “methods of hearing the Mass” that the same Liturgical Movement held in such disdain! It’s as if they simply transferred private devotion into a public mode. This was surely a far cry from Pius X’s “don’t merely pray at Mass, pray the Mass!”
It is actually refreshing to see the act of Spiritual Communion placed right where it is, as a gentle reminder that not everyone should go up to Communion, but only those properly disposed to do so. And thankfully, this act is left... unannounced and unrecited by Toutes. Sadly, even the Last Gospel has to be paraphrased and simplified.
Even the thanksgiving after Mass is corporate and vocal.
It is very difficult to read a method like this and not to wonder, “What in the world were they thinking?” Just because you recite a lot of pious phrases about the Mass all along does not mean you are participating in the holy oblation, the ultimate sacrifice. In fact, you might just miss it altogether by skating on the surface and having no opportunity for recollection, assimilation, and self-offering from the depths of one’s soul.
In his 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii, Pope Paul VI—who only six years earlier had unleashed on the world a Mass that was patterned after this kind of “Messe Dialoguée en Français”—lamented: “Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”
Our Ambrosian expert Nicola de’ Grandi recently visited the abbey of St John in Val Müstair, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, at the extreme east of the country. (The Italian border is only three-quarters of a mile away.) This abbey is well-known to art historians as one of the few places which preserves a substantial amount of fresco from the Carolingian era, although they are not in the best condition, and many parts of the original cycle have been lost, including most of the pictures on the south wall. Their precise date is not certain; the general opinion holds that they date to the first half of the ninth century, a generation or two after the church was built ca. 775. In later phases of the abbey’s history, they were covered over by new layers of fresco, and then later whitewashed, only to be rediscovered during restorations carried out between 1947 and 1951. The church and the attached museum contain a number of other artistic treasures, and there will be at least two more posts on them. Our thanks to Nicola for sharing his pictures with us.
The large tower on the right, which now houses the museum, was built in 960, but gutted by a fire in 1499, and rebuilt by the abbess Angelina Planta, after whom it is now named. The first floor became the store room, the second the refectory, and the third the dormitory.
The painting in the nave are arranged in a regular grid, originally on five levels, showing scenes (in descending order) of the life of David (almost completely destroyed by the lowering of the roof, subsequent to a fire at the end of the 15th century), the early years of Christ, His public ministry, His Passion, and some episodes from the lives of the Apostle and early martyrs. Here we see part of the Passion cycle, Christ before the Sanhedrin, and before Pilate, and the crucifixion of a Saint (possibly the Apostle Andrew.)
The registers above the preceding: second register, the dream of Joseph (mostly destroyed by the insertion of a window) and the Flight into Egypt; third register (badly damaged), the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, and the Transfiguration.
Upper register: Christ among the Doctors, and the preaching of John the Baptist; second register, Christ blessing the children, Christ speaking to the women taken in adultery; third register: the Descent into the Limbo of the Fathers, and the woman at the tomb.
In the Byzantine Rite, a “synaxis” (“σύναξις” in Greek, “собóръ – sobor” in Church Slavonic) is a commemoration held the day after a major feast, to honor a sacred person who figures prominently in the feast, but who is, so to speak, overshadowed by its principal subject. The most prominent example is the feast of the Holy Spirit, celebrated the day after Pentecost, since Pentecost itself is the feast of the Holy Trinity. Likewise, the Synaxis of the Virgin Mary is kept the day after Christmas, that of St Gabriel on the day after the Annunciation, etc. For those of the Byzantine Rite who follow the Gregorian date of Epiphany, today is therefore “The Synaxis of the Holy and Glorious Prophet and Forerunner, John the Baptist.” A synaxis is a commemoration, and not the principal feast of the person honored thereby; the Byzantine Rite celebrates the same two principal feasts of St John as the Roman Rite, the Nativity on June 24, and the Beheading on August 29. There is also a feast of his Conception on September 23rd, and of the various occasions on which the relics of his head were lost and recovered, the “First and Second Finding” on February 24, and the “Third Finding” on May 25th. (The Conception of St John is occasionally found on ancient liturgical calendars in the West, but never really caught on.)
Troparion: The memory of the righteous (is celebrated) with hymns of praise, but the testimony of the Lord will be sufficient for thee, O Forerunner. For, being received in truth as the most honorable of the prophets, thou wert deemed worthy to baptize in the streams the One foretold (by them). And therefore, having suffered for the truth, with joy thou proclaimed even to those in hell God who was made manifest in the flesh, who taketh away the sin of the world, and granteth us great mercy.
Тропарь Памѧть праведнагω съ похвалами, тебѣ же довлѣетъ свидѣтельство Господне, Предтече: показалбосѧ еси во истинну и пророкωвъ честнѣйшїй, ꙗко и въ струѧхъ крестити сподобилсѧ еси Проповѣданнаго. Тѣмже за истину пострадавъ, радуѧсѧ благовѣстилъ еси и сущымъ во адѣ Бога, ꙗвльшагосѧ плотїю, вземлющаго грѣхъ міра и подающаго намъ велїю милость.
All feasts begin with Vespers of the preceding day, and there is no such thing as Second Vespers as there is in the Roman Rite; therefore, the Vespers of a Synaxis are celebrated on the evening of the main feast’s calendar day, and there is always a very clear thematic link between the liturgical texts of the two celebrations. At some of these Vespers, the responsorial chant called the Prokimen is sung in a longer and more solemn form than usual, and in the Slavic choral tradition, gives baritone deacons a chance to really show off! The Psalm from which this chant is taken, 113, is sung at Vespers of Epiphany and throughout its octave in the Roman Rite. (This video starts at the place marked with an asterisk in the translation given below.)
The refrain, sung first by the deacon, then repeated by the choir, Psalm 113, 11: Our God is in heaven: He hath done all things whatsoever He would. The verses sung by the deacon:
- When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. * Choir: “Our God is in heaven etc.”
- The sea saw and fled: Jordan was turned back.
- What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou didst flee: and thou, O Jordan, that thou wast turned back? Deacon: Our God is in heaven: Choir: He hath done all things whatsoever He would.
In the traditional Roman Divine Office, the only Hours which change their Psalms according to the specific feast day are Matins and Vespers. [1] On the majority of feasts, the first four Psalms of Vespers (109-112) are taken from Sunday, but Psalm 113, the fifth and longest of Sunday, is substituted by another; on the feasts of martyrs, by Psalm 115, on those of bishops by 131, etc. There are, however, four occasions on which Psalm 113 is not replaced, three of which are very ancient indeed, and the fourth relatively recent in origin.
The three ancient feasts are Easter, Pentecost and Epiphany, on which it is said on the day itself and through the octave. (Some medieval Uses, however, vary this.) This custom reflects the traditional baptismal character of these celebrations, which goes back to the very earliest days of the Church.
The Psalm numbered 113 in the Septuagint and Vulgate is really two Psalms joined together, those numbered 114 and 115 in the Hebrew. [2] It is the first of these which speaks of the passage of the Jews out of Egypt, and then of the Crossing of the Jordan into the Holy Land.
“When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people: Judea became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The sea saw and fled (i.e. the Red Sea): the Jordan was turned back. … What ailed thee, O sea, that thou didst flee: and thou, O Jordan, that thou wast turned back? … At the presence of the Lord the earth was moved, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turned the rock into pools of water, and the stony hill into fountains of waters.”
The Church has always understood the story of the Exodus as a prefiguration of salvation in Christ, and specifically, the Crossing of the Red Sea as a prefiguration of the Sacrament of Baptism. The reading of the relevant passage from Exodus is attested in the very oldest surviving homily on the subject of Easter, the Paschal homily of St Melito of Sardis, from the mid-2nd century; it begins with the words “The Scripture about the Hebrew Exodus has been read”, and this custom continues into every historical Christian liturgy. Following the lead of St Paul, who says that the rock which provided water to the children of Israel in the desert was Christ (1 Cor. 10, 4), St Melito attributes all of the events of the Exodus directly to Him.
“This was the one who guided you into Egypt, and guarded you, and himself kept you well supplied there. This was the one who lighted your route with a column of fire, and provided shade for you by means of a cloud, the one who divided the Red Sea, and led you across it, and scattered your enemy abroad. This is the one who provided you with manna from heaven, the one who gave you water to drink from a rock, the one who established your laws in Horeb, the one who gave you an inheritance in the land, the one who sent out his prophets to you, the one who raised up your kings. This is the one who came to you, the one who healed your suffering ones and who resurrected your dead.”
Psalm 113, therefore, which speaks of the Red Sea fleeing to make passage for the children of Israel as they go out of Egypt, and the rock that becomes a pool of water, is perfectly suitable to the two most ancient feasts on which the Church celebrates the Sacrament of Baptism, Easter and Pentecost. Likewise, on Epiphany, the Church commemorates the Baptism of Christ in the waters of the Jordan, to which the Psalm also refers. On the fourth feast, that of the Holy Trinity, which was instituted much later, it reminds us that our Faith in the Trinity was first manifested on the occasion of Christ’s Baptism, when the Holy Spirit came upon Him in the form of a dove, and the Father spoke from heaven; and likewise, of the baptismal formula which Christ gave to the Church, as recounted in Matthew 28, 16-20, the Gospel of Easter Friday.
The Baptism of Christ, by Giusto de’ Menabuoi; fresco in the baptistery of Padua, ca. 1378.
The nine psalms of Epiphany Matins are 28, 45 and 46 in the first nocturn, 65, 71 and 85 in the second, and 94, 95 and 96 in the third. The antiphons with which they are sung, and which determine their meaning for the feast, are attested quite uniformly in the ancient antiphonaries. The choice of these psalms and antiphons reflects some very ancient interpretative traditions found in the writings of the Church Fathers.
Psalm 28 is sung with an antiphon taken from its first two verses: “Bring to the Lord, o ye children of God: adore ye the Lord in his holy court.” The full text of these verses is “Bring to the Lord, o ye children of God: bring to the Lord the offspring of rams. Bring to the Lord glory and honour: bring to the Lord glory to his name: adore ye the Lord in his holy court.” The antiphon removes the three objects from the verb “bring”; the act of bringing is in itself to sufficient indicate the gifts which the Magi brought to Christ at the Epiphany.
Although St Matthew does not specify how many Magi there were, the representation of three of them is one of the most ancient and consistent traditions of Christian art. It is commonly assumed that artists settled on three to correspond to their three gifts, which, in turn, have been read from very ancient times as symbols of Christ’s divinity, mortality and regality. This is undoubtedly true, but there is another, equally important reason for showing three. The Greeks, following the Babylonians, divided the world into three parts, Asia, Africa and Europe; this division predates Christianity, but was received by Christians and Jews as part of their sacred history. Each continent was believed to be populated by the descendants of one of the sons of Noah, Asians from Shem, Africans from Ham, and Europeans from Japheth. The three Magi are therefore the symbolic representatives of these three parts of world, coming to worship the Creator and Savior.
A third-century fresco in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla, showing the three Magi each painted in a different color, to indicate that each one represents one of the three parts of the world.
Particularly in Rome, where people from every part of the Empire lived, an image of three Magi represents the revelation of Christ as the Redeemer of all men, and the coming of all peoples to salvation. The antiphon of Psalm 28 on Epiphany reflects the fact that the gentiles are also numbered among the “sons of God.” The antiphons of Psalms 65 and 85 are chosen on a similar theme. “Let all the earth adore thee, and sing to thee: let it sing a psalm to thy name, o Lord.” (Psalm 65, 4) “All the nations thou hast made shall come, and adore before thee, O Lord.” (Psalm 85, 9) Pope St Leo I quotes the second of these in his third sermon on the Epiphany. [3]
The Church Fathers also associate Psalm 28 with Christ’s Baptism. St Basil teaches that the words of verse 3, “the voice of the Lord is upon the waters” refer to St John the Baptist. (Homily 2 on Ps. 28) St Ambrose understands them to refer to the appearance of the Three Persons of the Trinity (De mysteriis 5.26), and likewise St Peter Chrysologus writes in a sermon on the Epiphany, “Today, as the prophet saith, the voice of the Lord is upon the waters. Which voice? ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Sermon 160)
A work known as the Breviarium in Psalmos, (traditionally but incorrectly attributed to St Jerome), explains the words of the antiphon of Psalm 45, “the stream of the river maketh joyful the city of God,” as a reference to both the waters of baptism and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. “After the worship of demons is overthrown, the washing of baptism and the pouring fourth of the Holy Spirit maketh joyful the soul, the city of God, or else the Church which is the city of God that is set upon a mountain, and is not hidden.”
The Adoration of the Magi, from the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, ca. 975. By this point the tradition has emerged of showing the Magi with royal crowns, inspired by the words of Psalm 71 cited below, and a verse of the Epistle of the Mass of Epiphany, “And the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising.” (Isaiah 60, 3)
A commentary on the Psalms of the later 4th century, formerly attributed to Rufinus of Aquileia (345-411), reads the antiphon of Psalm 71, “The kings of Tharsis and the islands shall offer presents: the kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring gifts” (verse 10), in reference to the Magi. “The Magi, led by a star, fulfilled this bodily, and the kings and princes of all the earth still do not cease to imitate them even daily. … by these gifts which are said to be brought to Lord, those faithful men are indicated, whom the authority of kings brings into the society of the Church.” It then refers the following verse, “And all the kings shall adore him”, to the end of the worship of the Roman emperors, for the sake of which Christians were so often persecuted before the reign of Constantine. “All the kings shall adore him, who were formerly wont to be adored, … and all nations that were formerly wont to serve earthly kings, will serve Him, that is our heavenly King.” (Commentarius in LXXV Psalmos; PL 21, 0939B). The mention of kings from three places in the East (Tharsis, Arabia, and Saba) also fits in with the traditional artistic representation of three mentioned above.
Psalm 94 was clearly chosen for the close similarity between its words “venite, adoremus, et procidamus ante Deum – come, let us worship, and fall down before God,” (verse 6 of the Old Latin version) and those of the Gospel, “venimus adorare eum. … et procidentes adoraverunt eum – we have come to worship him … and falling down they worshipped him. ” (Matt. 2, verses 2 and 11.) The antiphon with which it is sung on the Epiphany is therefore “Come, let us worship Him, for He is the Lord, our God.” This Psalm is normally said at the beginning of Matins every day with a refrain called an invitatory, which is repeated in whole or part between its verses. On the Epiphany, however, the invitatory and Psalm 94 are omitted from the beginning of Matins, and the psalm is said in the third nocturn, with the antiphon repeated between the verses in the manner of an invitatory.
In his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (6.16.9), William Durandus also notes this prosaic explanation for omitting the invitatory on Epiphany, the mere avoidance of repetition. Before it, however, he explains that the invitatory is omitted “to show that the Church in its first fruits came from the gentiles to the Lord, not invited, or called by a herald, but with only the star to lead it, … so that shame might be inculcated on those who are late to believe, even though they have many preachers. For the Magi came to worship Christ, even though they were not called.” He then gives a second explanation, a more traditional one which dates back to his ninth-century predecessor, Amalarius of Metz: “Secondly, so that we who are daily invited and urged to worship and beseech God, may be seen to detest the deceitful invitation of Herod when he said to the Magi, ‘Go and inquire diligently concerning the Child.’ ”
A page of 1490 Breviary according to the Use of Passau, Germany. In the right column, the rubics just above the middle of the page begins “At Matins, we do not say the Invitatory, so that we may differ from Herod’s deceitful invitation.”
[1] The regular psalms of Sunday Lauds (92, 99, 62-66, the Benedicite, and 148-149-150) were traditionally said on all feast days in the Roman Rite. In the reform of St Pius X, psalms 66, 149 and 150 were removed, but the group thus reduced continued to be used on all major feasts, including Pentecost. The psalms of the day hours were likewise traditionally invariable for all feasts (53 and the eleven parts of 118), and those of Compline always invariable; this was also changed in the reform of St Pius X, but not in a way that applied to major feasts like Epiphany.
[2] There are four places where the Psalms are joined or divided one way in the Hebrew and another in the Greek. There are also psalms which both traditions have as a single text, but are generally believed to be two joined together, (e.g. 26), and others which both traditions have as two (41 and 42), which are generally believed to have originally been one, later divided. It is quite possible that these variations come from ancient liturgical usages of which all knowledge has long since been lost. Likewise, the meaning of many words and phrases in the titles of the Psalms had already been lost when the Septuagint translation was made in the 3rd century B.C.
[3] It is tempting to think of this as proof that the antiphon itself goes back to the time of St Leo, but it is of course just as possible that its unknown composer was inspired to choose this text by reading Pope Leo’s sermon.
The liturgy of New Year’s Day, in both the Mass and the Divine Office, is one of the richest and most complex of the Church’s year, joining together elements of several different traditions. It is traditionally known as the feast of the Circumcision; the Gospel, St Luke 2, 21, recounts that the infant Jesus, in fulfillment of the ancient covenant given to Abraham, was circumcised on the eighth day after His birth. Likewise, following the custom of the Jewish people, He was named on the same day, with the holy name given to Him by the Angel before He was conceived. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, following the tradition of the Fathers, refers to the Circumcision as the first shedding of Christ’s blood for our salvation: “Worthily indeed is He called ‘Savior’ when He is circumcised, this Child who was born unto us, because already from this moment He began to work our salvation, pouring forth that immaculate blood for us.” This Gospel is repeated on the feast of the Holy Name, the Sunday after the Circumcision, and the homily quoted above is read at Matins of that day.
The first of January is, of course, the octave day of Christmas, and the circumcision and naming of Christ are set by the Mass as the consummation of the feast of His Nativity. The chant propers are repeated from the third Mass of Christmas Day, with the exception of a special Alleluja; the epistle, however, is repeated from the first Mass. In many uses of the Roman Rite, such as those of Sarum and of the Dominican Order, the three prayers of the Mass are an ancient set which refers explicitly to the octave of the Nativity. However, many ancient sacramentaries also have the prayers which are used in the Missal of the St Pius V, the first of which refers neither to the Circumcision, nor to the octave of Christmas, but to the role of the Virgin Mary in bringing the “author of life” to the human race. The Office of the Circumcision, one of the most beautiful of the entire year, brings together all three of these aspects of the day’s feast.
There is, however, a fourth element to the day’s observance, which was formerly of the greatest importance. In the ancient Roman world, as in our own, New Year’s was generally celebrated with a great deal of raucous behavior, dancing and drinking of a sort not in keeping with Christian morals. In many places, therefore the liturgy of the day was celebrated as a day of fasting and penance, against the excesses of the pagan world. A few traces of this survive in various places; for example, the Mass of the Circumcision repeats the epistle of the first Mass of Christmas because of the words “…instructing us that, denying ungodliness and worldly desires, we should live soberly and justly, and godly in this world.”
The station of New Year’s Day was originally assigned to the Pantheon, a building understood by medieval Christians to have originally been a “temple of all the gods”, which was dedicated as a church in honor of the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs in the year 609 by Pope Boniface IV. The choice was clearly made so that the commemoration of the Mother of God could be celebrated in a place which also symbolizes the victory of the Christian faith and the one God over all of the many gods of the pagan world.
Mass celebrated in the Pantheon on May 13, 2009, the 1400th anniversary of the building's dedication as a church. Photo courtesy of Orbis Catholicus.
The station for this day was later transferred to another Marian church, Saint Mary’s in Trastevere, the foreigners’ quarter of ancient Rome. We do not know why or when the change was made, but we do know why this particular church was chosen. The pagan historian Cassius Dio records that in the year 38 B.C., a fountain of oil sprang from the ground in Trastevere, near a tavern frequented by retired solders, (called a 'taberna meritoria' in Latin). This event is understood by Saint Jerome, in his continuation of the Chronicle of Eusebius, as a prophecy of the grace of Christ flowing forth to all of the nations; later on, the miraculous flow of oil was believed to have happened on the night of Christ’s birth. In the late thirteenth century, the Roman artist Pietro Cavallini added to the apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere a beautiful series of mosaics of the life of the Virgin; the third of these shows the birth of Christ, and the fountain of oil flowing forth from the taberna meritoria. (pictured right) The place believed to be the site of the fountain is now within the church, very close to the main altar; the motto of the church itself and of its chapter is still to this day “Fons olei.”
There are no stations assigned to the days between the Circumcision and Epiphany. The second, third and fourth of January were traditionally kept as the octave days of St Stephen, St John and the Holy Innocents respectively, and octave days very rarely have their own station. The feast of the Holy Name was only added to the universal Calendar in 1721, although the devotion is, of course, much older; it was not assigned to its current place, the Sunday after the Circumcision, until the reign of Pope Saint Pius X.
The very ancient vigil of the Epiphany on the fifth of January also does not have a station. It is possible that just as the vigil of Christmas was kept in the same church as the first Mass of Christmas, so the vigil of Epiphany was kept in the same church as the feast. The station for the feast is assigned to the basilica of St Peter, for the same reason that the third Mass of Christmas was originally celebrated there as well; a very large church was necessary to accommodate the large congregation on one of the greatest solemnities of the year.
Interior view of Saint Peter ’s Basilica, by the workshop of Raphael, ca. 1520
One of the most beautiful antiphons of the office of the Epiphany, sung at the Magnificat of Second Vespers, reads: “We celebrate a holy day adorned with three miracles; today a star led the Wise Men to the manger; today water became wine at the wedding feast; today in the Jordan, Christ did will to be baptized by John that he might save us.” All three of these aspects of the feast are mentioned daily in the office of the Epiphany and its octave; the Mass, however, has always been principally focused on the coming of the Magi. In the Byzantine rite, on the other hand, the Gospel of the Magi is read on Christmas, and the Epiphany is more markedly the feast of the Lord’s Baptism. The Latin church has reserved its principal commemoration of the Lord’s Baptism to the octave day of the Epiphany; despite the great antiquity of this custom, it does not have a stational observance.
As mentioned above, the Roman Rite has preserved a few traces of the early Christian reaction to the pagan celebration of the New Year; in the traditional Ambrosian Rite, this aspect of the day is far more pronounced. At Vespers, psalm 95 is sung with the antiphon “All the gods of the nations are demons; but our God made the heavens”, and psalm 96 with the antiphon “Let all those who worship the idols be confounded, and those who glory in their statues.” The first prayer of Vespers and of the Mass reads, “Almighty and everlasting God, who commandest that those who share in thy table abstain from the banquets of the devil, grant, we ask, to thy people, that, casting away the taste of death-bearing profanity, we may come with pure minds to the feast of eternal salvation.” All seven of the antiphons of Matins, and most of those of Lauds, refer to the rejection of idol worship. In the Ambrosian rite, there are two readings before the Gospel; on the Circumcision, the first of these is the opening of the “letter of Jeremiah”, (Baruch 6, 1-6 in the Vulgate), in which the prophet exhorts the people not to bow before the idols of the Babylonians.
The Basilica of Sant’Eustorgio in Milan. The previous church on this site was destroyed in 1164, and the relics of the Three Kings removed to the Cathedral of Cologne by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.
The book is full of rich reflections on the thought and culture of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity, and the spiritual and liturgical implications of the shifts. Rather than attempt a mere summary, I thought I might offer some quotations chosen specially for NLM readers.
« Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. So too, Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or “theurgy,” but they have held that such magic possesses the power to conquer demons and sacralise the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptised theurgy Christians have given the name of liturgy. This brings us to the great political work to which Christians ought to be dedicated, namely the endeavour to establish liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative to such a civilisation is the accursed dominion in which nations are first fragmented and then dissolved altogether in the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement. » (p. 4)
« The pre-eminence of the mystical life understood not as spiritual ascent out of the created order, but rather as embodied induction into shared life with a personal God who meets us in the world that is an emanation of His own inner life, is emphasised by me largely because I observe that in the epoch of ideology—namely, modernity—we have lost a sense of the existentiality and immanence of the Sacred Mystery. Tragically, this spiritual blindness has encroached on many aspects of religious devotion and piety. In turn, religion is understood ever less as ongoing transformation through the liturgical and sacramental life, and it is instead understood as mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and spiritual ascent away from the concrete reality in which we find ourselves. Religion is hence tacitly reframed for a people formed by virtual reality lived from an online existence. Unfortunately, such a life is no life at all. And the upshot is the reduction of Christianity, or whatever we mean by Christianity today, to a base species of ideology, just one among a plethora of squabbling ideologies in the modernist arena of competing “systems.” » (p. 11)
« I dare say we must rediscover our liturgy as a baptised form of “theurgy,” a term largely gone from Christian theology today, but one that was repeatedly deployed to discuss Christian worship by such an eminent authority as St. Dionysius the Areopagite. By Christian theurgy, I mean the fulfilment of all religious sacrifice, during which those offering the sacrifice commune with the divine spirits and call God down into the inner chamber as they chant the sacred words and perform the sacred rituals. » (pp. 38-39)
« Latin Christians have long emphasised “assent,” and hence the possession of ideas, over existential transformation through right worship (an emphasis that has only swelled due to the unexamined acceptance of the rationalist paradigm). It is unsurprising, then, that serious Catholicism is more likely to be found online— where ideas are offered and bought up— than in the local church. And those Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—have for some time now been actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leaders have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct. » (p. 66)
« Whenever I step foot onto Benedictine grounds, I feel as if I have come home. The chanting of the psalms, the sacrifice offered on the altars, the way of life lived under a Rule that’s over a millennium and a half old— all the sacrality of these abbeys seems to have seeped into the stones themselves. Even after all the scandals, the collapse in vocations, and the ruination of the liturgy following that unhappy Vatican Council that baptised the fleeting fever of the 1960s— from which it will take many, many centuries for the Church to recover— the monasteries still appear as loci of divine grace, by which little parts of the diabolical principality we call the world has been captured and placed under Christ’s kingship.» (pp. 97-98)
« In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied only by nobles and peasants. Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population.» (pp. 109-10)
« Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated rascals who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Perhaps this ought not to surprise us. After all, the men who fill the Church’s higher offices today were all formed in the crucible of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive theology, and their intellectual habits were fashioned by daily exposure to the so- called liturgical “reform.” The “experts” who subjected the Church’s liturgical heritage to ongoing experimentation did so on the grounds that it was somehow legitimate to call into question— and redact or even reject altogether— huge swathes of prayer and mystical experience inherited from our ancestors in religion, the sum total of elder-wisdom in ritual form. The very Council, then, that claimed power to renew the Church’s youth in fact emptied the churches, and by so doing it aged the Church rapidly, in turn aging the civilisation she once animated.... And this process of aging the Church, far from recovering her charism as the Great Elder of our civilisation, merely rendered her decrepit.» (p. 124)
In the midst of his critique Morello examines the paths of and conditions for renewal or regeneration in the Church, and offers very concrete advice for how tradition-loving Catholics struggling with the hierarchy and the postconciliar devastation can strengthen their faith, love, and perseverance. N.B.Os Justi Press is running an Epiphany sale from now through January 6, with 10% off sitewide. Discount is automatically applied at checkout.
This article is the second part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute, on the subject of popular participation in the liturgy. The first part covered up to the 20:50 mark, the point at which Dr Pitre begins his would-be explanation of how and why popular participation was lost in the high Middle Ages, and putatively recovered by the post-Conciliar reform. This is done by contrasting an ancient description of a Roman stational liturgy known as the Ordo Romanus Primus, the “First Roman Order”, with the later medieval manner of celebrating the Mass in the papal chapel which gave us the so-called Tridentine Missal. The supposed contrast is, however, based on a genuinely astonishing amount of historical error.
He begins by introducing the Ordo Romanus Primus (henceforth ORP) as a description of a papal stational liturgy “from the 7th century”, without further qualification. This gives the impression of a greater and more certain antiquity to the text than is really the case. The earliest manuscripts of the ORP are from the first quarter of the 9th century, but most are from the 10th or 11th. However, as noted by Michel Andrieu in his exhaustive critical edition of the Ordines Romani, the ORP contains many references to customs which are certainly later than the 7th century, such as the Agnus Dei, which was added to the Mass at the very end of the eighth. Furthermore, the manuscripts of it are not Roman, and most of them are not even Italian, a fact which raises a whole series of complicated questions about modifications made to the text over the centuries. The ORP is unquestionably a valuable witness to the liturgical customs of the Roman Church in late antiquity, but it is neither comprehensive nor wholly reliable. [note]
More to the point, Dr Pitre’s presentation gives a false impression of the degree to which the ORP is concerned with the people’s participation in the liturgy, which is minimal. In Andrieu’s edition, the text occupies 42 pages; at least half of every page is filled with critical notes in a smaller font. The total number of references to “the people” in the text and all the notes is fifteen. Six of these refer not to what the people are doing, but to the celebrant turning towards them at specific points, because, of course, the Mass it describes was not celebrated versus populum.
In point of fact, the ORP is almost entirely about the roles of the clergy and the various officials of the papal court. To give just two simple examples, there are over 50 references to the subdeacons in the main text, and dozens of variations on them in the critical notes, while the acolytes are mentioned more than twice as often as the people.
At 21:33, Dr Pitre incorrectly states that the ORP says that the people sing the Gloria; it actually says that the schola sings it. He also states that when the pope says, “Peace be with you,” the people respond (i.e. “And with thy spirit”); the ORP does not say this. In both cases, it is certainly possible, even likely, that the people did sing along with the schola. But in light of the contrast which Dr Pitre will draw later between the ORP and the liturgy of the high to late Middle Ages, this becomes a much more serious historical misrepresentation.
At 21:38, he states, “the Scriptures are read to the people from the ambo (this is important), they are facing the people when they are reading the Scriptures. We’ll see that’ll change in the second millennium.” But the ORP does not say anything to suggest that the ambos faced the people, because they didn’t. (See picture below.) This would be a minor mistake, but for the fact that later, much is made of this point vis-à-vis further erroneous claims about changes supposedly made to the liturgy in the high Middle Ages.
The rest of this section (to 22:25) is basically accurate, although again, we are left with a false impression that the ORP says a lot about the people’s role in the liturgy, where it really says very little. This false impression is then reinforced by Dr Pitre’s description of it as if it were fully representative of “the Roman tradition well into the Middle Ages,” and the “active participation of the laity” as “part and parcel” that tradition. And all of this is aimed at setting up a series of false claims that will be made about how this tradition changed in the 13th century.
Later, Dr Pitre will unfavorably contrast the ORP’s few references to the people with the almost complete absence of any reference to them in the Missal of St Pius V and its high medieval predecessors. And in turn, this will supposedly show that the introduction of rubrics for the laity in the Missal of the post-Conciliar Rite is a return to an earlier tradition, and therefore a great achievement. We must therefore mention here that the earliest Roman sacramentaries, which are older than the oldest manuscripts of the ORP, have even less to say about the people’s role in the Mass than the ORP. This is important because the sacramentary, not the ordo, is the ancestor of the missal, and the comparison of ordo with missal which Dr Pitre makes is based on a serious category error.
The beginning of the Canon in the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780. Search in vain through this manuscript or others like it for references to the people’s participation.
Now (23:00) we come to the 13th century, and the development of a new form of papal liturgy alongside that of the stations, the daily liturgy of the pope’s “private” chapel. After referring to this once in passing as “quasi-private”, Dr Pitre then repeatedly calls it the “private liturgy” or “private Mass” without further qualification, in a matter where further qualification is absolutely necessary.
To the modern ear, the expression “private liturgy” or “private Mass” gives the impression that the pope was routinely celebrating low Mass in a small chapel, perhaps attended by a secretary or two, much like any other priest’s low Mass.
The private chapel used by St John XXIII in his summer residence.
This impression is false. The pope’s “chapel” was private, in the sense that it was not open to the public like a cathedral or a parish; not just anyone could walk in to attend the services held there. But it was nevertheless the home of a corporate body of clergymen, and quite a large one at that, who sang the Divine Office and Mass together on a regular basis, just like the canons of a cathedral or the monks of a monastery. These clerics were known as “cappellani – chaplains”, from which position derives the official title of monsignori to this very day, “chaplain of His Holiness.”
Furthermore, the pope was not by any means the only major prelate in the high Middle Ages who had such a “private” chapel with its own clerical staff. Such institutions existed within the households of many bishops, and heads of large religious houses such as the abbey of Cluny, as well as within many noble courts. Some of the greatest composers of sacred music that the Church has ever known, such as Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, worked as choirmasters for chapels of this sort, including the papal chapel, and it doesn’t take much to figure out that their works were not intended to be sung as background music for low Mass.
Josquin des Prez’s signature on the wall of the choir gallery of the Sistine Chapel, where he was a member of the choir from June 1489 until at least April of 1494. (Public domainimage from Wikimedia Commons.)
Dr Pitre goes on to contrast the liturgy of the papal court as it was in the early 13th century with the “communal, stational Masses of the pope that we see in Ordo Romanus I.” This part is full of really grave historical errors; I will explain why in detail, but the simple version is that his essential contention is completely wrong. There was no substantive difference between the Mass of the Papal court on the one hand, and any other version of the Mass on the other, including that which is described in the ORP, such that it would per se exclude the participation of the laity.
At 23:45, as he speaks about the liturgy of the papal chapel, a citation appears at the bottom of the screen from Christian Worship in East and West, by Herman Wegman. “Beginning in the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth, the popes began to withdraw from direct pastoral work in the city… the pope… had his own chapel where he celebrated the liturgy isolated and closed off from the clergy and faithful of the city.” This quote (which Dr Pitre does not himself repeat) is itself very misleading. Beginning in the middle of the 11th century, the popes became very active in the great reform movement that was sweeping through the Church, and as a result, spent a great deal of time traveling. Over the 250-year span from 1050 to 1300, they were out of Rome for about 180 of those years. When they were in Rome, however, they did continue to celebrate major feast days in the city’s great churches, as attested by e.g. the eleventh Ordo Romanus (1134-43) and the ordinal of Innocent III (ca. 1200). Moreover, many members of the Roman clergy were also members of the papal chapel.
Part of the papal residence in the city of Viterbo (roughly 52 miles to the north-northwest of Rome), built by Pope Alexander IV from 1257-66. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY-SA 4.0)
This is then contrasted with the stational Masses, the supposed focus of popular participation, without ever mentioning that stational Masses were never celebrated every day. The temporal cycle of the Missal of St Pius V has about 80, several of which were not on the list in the days when the ORP was first written, so call it seventy. There have never been stations for the Sundays per annum. The pope also kept stations at some of the major basilicas on their titular feasts or other pertinent occasions; there is no reason to think this was done with the same consistency and frequency as with the Masses of the temporal cycle. The Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD, gives one station for a feast in the sanctoral, the Purification at St Mary Major. Granting for the sake of argument, and with absurd generosity, that there were fifty such occasions, this gives us a total of 120.
This means that even the most devout among the Roman faithful, those who attended Mass every single day, could attend a stational Mass with the Pope for one-third of the year at most. Therefore, ALL of the Roman faithful were used to attending Masses without the pope, i.e. in a manner on some level different from what is described in the ORP, and thus, the Mass of the ORP, even if it were as fully participatory as any modern liturgist could desire, cannot ever have been normative to begin with.
Now (23:50) the villains, as it were, of the cause of popular participation are introduced, the Franciscans. “When St Francis of Assisi goes to Innocent III and asks for his blessing on the missionary work of this new order of Franciscans (sic), … the Franciscan order is going to adopt as its liturgy … not the communal, station Masses of the Pope that we see in Ordo Romanus I, but the private (sic) liturgy of the papal chapel.” I say “villains” because, in Dr Pitre’s telling, their use of the papal liturgy spreads all over Europe a form of the Mass in which there was no provision made for the people’s participation.
Everything that follows for the next several minutes is a gross distortion and oversimplification.
At 24:25, Dr Pitre adduces a passage from Fr Uwe Michael Lang’s book The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which purportedly “summarize(s) this shift very nicely”, i.e. from stational liturgy described by the ORP to the “private” liturgy of the papal chapel. And he quotes Fr Lang as follows: “Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) popes increasingly used the Vatican… ‘chapel’ (his vocal emphasis) for liturgical celebrations. However, these ceremonial spaces were relatively small, and did not allow for the processional elements that characterized the stational liturgies in the churches of the city.”
Dr Pitre comments on this by saying “…think here of the communal participation of the people.” This is a very tendentious explication. What Fr Lang says here is specifically and solely about the lack of processions in the liturgy of the papal chapel. He says nothing at all about changes to the manner of celebrating Mass, much less about changes which exclude popular participation.
Furthermore, the ellipsis in the quote seriously misrepresents what Fr Lang says. The full quote is as follows; I underline the words which Dr Pitre omits. “Beginning with the pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) popes increasingly (n.b.) used the Vatican palace as a residence, and its ‘great chapel’ (no emphasis) (cappella magna) for liturgical celebrations. However, these ceremonial spaces were relatively (n.b.) small, and did not allow for the processional elements that characterized the stational liturgies in the churches of the city.”
First, we should note the word “increasingly”, because until the popes moved to Avignon at the beginning of the 14th century, papal stational liturgies continued to be celebrated in Rome all along, when the popes were there. As noted earlier, they often were not in Rome in this period, a fact which Fr Lang also mentions, and which unquestionably played a significant role in diminishing that aspect of the tradition.
But much more important here is the way Dr Pitre omits the word “great” where Fr Lang talks about the “great chapel”, and vocally emphasizes “chapel” where Fr Lang does not emphasize it. Once again, this creates the false impression that what we are talking about is a privately celebrated low Mass, a false impression which Dr Pitre’s subsequent statements reinforce. (25:35: “This has a dramatic effect on the whole history of the Roman liturgy for the next thousand years. (sic: a thousand years have not elapsed even since the birth of St Francis.) … the form of the Mass that they adopt is a private (his emphasis) Mass from the Pope’s private chapel … organized primarily around just the priest and whatever servers or ministers might be assisting him in the chapel.”)
But the “great chapel” was in fact a great chapel; “relatively small”, as Fr Lang says, which is to say, compared to the major basilicas like the Lateran or St Peter’s, but still not small. The version of it at the Vatican known to Innocent III and St Francis no longer exists, but this is what the popes built as its equivalent when they moved to Avignon.
And its modern equivalent, the Sistine Chapel, consecrated in 1483, is also not small.
Again, neither of these spaces is designed for low Mass. (I can personally attest that they both have magnificent acoustics.) “(W)hatever servers or ministers might be assisting (the pope) in the chapel” is a large group of clergy, and a full-time professional liturgical choir, who regularly and solemnly celebrated both the Mass and Divine Office. Dr Pitre’s presentation creates the false impression that the Mass which the Franciscans copied from the papal chapel was a low Mass served by a priest and altar boy, to the exclusion of the people.
The next article in this series will examine Dr Pitre’s claims made about the supposed absence of popular participation in the papal/Franciscan Mass.
[note] Fr Lang writes the following about the Ordo Romanus Primus in the very book which Dr Pitre adduces in favor of his own contentions about popular participation. (p. 213): “Interpreting the extant sources of the papal stational liturgy presents us with a fundamental problem, since they are prescriptive texts that communicate how the rite should be enacted. As historical scholarship has made us increasingly aware, however, we cannot simply assume that such prescriptions are identical with the way in which the liturgy was in fact carried out. Ordo Romanus I was originally designed for the solemn papal mass on Easter Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; as a template for other occasions it was likely to be adapted to the spatial arrangements, local resources and (quite possibly) particular observances of the stational church chosen for the day. Moreover, it is a script for liturgical actors who were, for the most part, clerics (the papal court included also lay officials). As such (it) can easily give the impression of a ‘clericalized’ liturgy, but such a view would be misleading since it abstracts from the genre and purpose of the document. Liturgical books in the strict sense are not concerned with how people in general participated in the rite, let alone how they experienced it.” (my emphasis)
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