The Mater Ecclesiae chapel in Berlin, New Jersey, celebrated its 24th annual solemn Mass for the feast of the Assumption in the cathedral basilica of Ss Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. Our thanks once again to one of our favorite photographers, Mrs Allison Girone, for sharing her pictures of the Mass with us.
Getting ready.
Tradition will always be for the young!
The Mass is accompanied not just by finely executed chant and polyphony, but also an orchestra, here conducted by Dr Timothy McDonnell.
Before the Mass begins, the major ministers go to the chapel next to the main sanctuary, which is dedicated to the Assumption; the large mosaic image over the altar is incensed, and a young woman placed a bouquet of flowers on it at the Virgin Mary’s feet.
Following the Gloria in excelsis, the priest kisses the altar, turns to the people, and says:
Dóminus vobiscum, or “The Lord be with you.”
To which the people reply:
Et cum spíritu tuo, or “And with thy spirit.”
The exchange serves as a way for the priest to call the attention of the congregation to what is about to happen next. It often follows a part of the Mass in which the ministers and the faithful are involved in two different theaters of action and therefore need a call to return to the same page. In the case of the Gloria in excelsis, even though it is a hymn common to all, the priest recites it in a low voice to himself while the choir (and congregation) sing it at a different pace.
The Dominus vobiscum appears eight times in the Mass, from the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar to the Last Gospel. During four of those times, the priest turns to the congregation when giving the greeting, no doubt as an added way of getting the people’s attention. But there is a mystical significance as well. Thanks to these four turns and the priest’s semicircular turn at the Orate Fratres, the priest turns a total of five times to the people during the Mass. For St. Thomas Aquinas, this repeated action denotes “that Our Lord manifested Himself five times on the Day of His Resurrection” [ST III.83.5.ad 6.]
“to the women at the sepulcher;
to the same on the way from the sepulcher;
to Peter;
to the two disciples going to the town;
to several of them in Jerusalem when Thomas was not present.” [ST III.55.3.ob 3.]
If we are to follow this interpretation strictly, the Dominus vobiscum after the Gloria and before the Collect signifies Our Lord’s greeting to the women at the sepulchre.
Mary Magdalene and Women at the Empty Tomb of Jesus
Translation Controversies
In the English-speaking world, most of the controversy in translating the Dominus vobiscum has centered on the response, Et cum spiritu tuo. “And with your spirit” is a Hebraicism, but in the Roman liturgy it is also an allusion to the spirit of holy orders; hence, only a deacon or above can issue the greeting Dominus vobiscum, for only deacons, priests, and bishops have the spirit of [major] holy orders. When the Divine Office is celebrated and the hebdomadary is a layman or minor cleric, the greeting is dropped and replaced with Domine, exaudi oratiónem meam. Et clamor meus ad te véniat (O Lord, hear my prayer. And let my cry come before Thee.)
Perhaps because this greeting acknowledges a difference between clergy and laity, and perhaps because the original ICEL translators of the Mass were influenced by an egalitarian spirit, the translators chose to bury the distinction and translate “and with thy spirit” as “and also with you.” When the 2011 translation finally translated the words accurately, it corrected an unwarranted liberty taken in the 1970s, but it also made obsolete a good Catholic joke, about the time when the celebrant was struggling to begin his homily at the ambo. “There’s something wrong with this mic,” he told the congregation.” To which the people, in good Pavlovian fashion, replied, “And also with you.”
The Implied Verb
Despite this focus on the second verse, it is my contention that the first verse presents a greater challenge to the translator. The words themselves are easy enough: Dominus means “Lord” and vobiscum means “with you” (plural). The challenge lies in the fact that the verb “to be” is not articulated but only implied, and so the verb can be either in the indicative or the subjunctive. In the indicative, the greeting means “The Lord is with you.” In the subjunctive, it means “May the Lord be with you.” It can even mean “The Lord is about to be with you.”
Every translation that I have ever seen uses the subjunctive, and understandably so. Still, we should not lose sight of the ambiguity of the original Latin. If Aquinas is right and every Dominus vobiscum hearkens to the Risen Christ greeting people, then there is a way in which it means “The Lord is with you, come back from the dead.”
Context is also crucial in deciphering which meaning may be in the forefront. For the Dominus vobiscum before the Collect, perhaps the meaning is “May the Lord be with you and help you be present as we collect our thoughts into this important common prayer.”
But during the times of the Mass in which Jesus Christ is made present in a heightened way, the meaning could be “The Lord is about to be with you.” Dominus vobiscum begins the Preface to the Canon, and the Canon, of course, is when Jesus Christ is made truly present on the altar in the form of bread and wine. But Christ is also made present (not in the same way, of course) during the proclamation of the Gospel, for the Gospel reveals the real person of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the Dominus vobiscum that the priest says before the Gospel and the Last Gospel should be interpreted in this light.
And when the priest says Dominus vobiscum before the Postcommunion, could the meaning be, “The Lord is with you, you have just received the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ within your very bodies and souls”? And when moments later, the priest says Dominus vobiscum before the dismissal, could it not mean “May the Lord be with you as you go out into the world and fulfill your mission to bring Christ to it”? Much can be gleaned from three words and the context in which they appear.
Today the Church celebrates the feast of Blessed Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, who served as Archbishop of Milan for just over a quarter of a century, from July of 1929 until his death on this day in 1954. Born in Rome in 1880 to German parents, he entered the Benedictine monastery of St Paul’s Outside-the-Walls at the age of 18, and was professed two years later, taking Ildefonso as his name in religion. Ordained priest four years later, he served as master of novices, prior, abbot, procurator general of the Cassinese Congregation of Benedictines, and president of the Pontifical Oriental Institute. Having made a visitation of the seminaries of Lombardy, Campania and Calabria from 1924 to 1928, in 1929 he was created Archbishop of Milan by Pope Pius XI, his predecessor but one in the venerable See of Saint Ambrose. He was made a Cardinal less than a month after his appointment, and consecrated bishop by the Pope himself in the Sistine Chapel a few days later.
During the difficult years of his episcopacy, the years of Italian Fascism and the Second World War (in which Milan was one of the hardest hit cities in Italy), the Bl. Schuster showed himself truly a worthy successor of St Charles Borromeo, and shepherded his flock in much the same way, visiting every parish of the diocese five times (occasionally riding on a donkey to some of the more remote locations), holding several diocesan synods, and writing innumerable pastoral letters. He passed to eternal life at the seminary of Venegono, which he himself had founded in 1935.
We have had occasion to write of him several times here at NLM, partly in connection with our interest in the Ambrosian liturgy, of which he was a great promoter, but also as one of the most notable scholars of the original Liturgical Movement. His famous work Liber Sacramentorum, known in its English translation as The Sacramentary, was written while he was still a Benedictine monk of the Roman Rite, and although inevitably dated in some respects, remains an invaluable reference point for liturgical scholarship. (It has been republished, in paperback and hardcover, by the indefatigable Arouca Press of Ontario.) Upon his transfer to Milan, he embraced the Ambrosian liturgy wholeheartedly, and as the ex-officio head of the Congregation for the Ambrosian Rite, strongly defended the authentic uses of the Ambrosian tradition. He also oversaw important new editions of the Ambrosian musical books, which are still used in both the Ordinary and Extraordinary Form of the Rite to this day.
Our dear friend Monsignor Amodeo, a canon of the Duomo of Milan who was ordained a subdeacon by the Blessed Schuster, told us many stories about him over the years, among which one has always stood out in my mind in particular; in his lifetime, even the communist newspapers noted his continual presence in the Duomo at all of the most important functions of the liturgical year. Nicola de’ Grandi, our Ambrosian writer, once showed me a video of Cardinal Schuster giving Benediction from the façade of the Duomo, to a crowd that completely filled the huge piazza in front of the church.
When his tomb was opened in 1985, his mortal remains were found to be intact; he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1996, and his body was exposed for the veneration of the faithful in one of the side-altars of the Duomo. My first experience of the Ambrosian liturgy was a votive Mass in the traditional rite held in his honor in 1998, at which Monsignor Amodeo and another canon sang the Ambrosian propers of a Confessor Bishop; after Mass, we processed from the altar of the left transept around the church to the altar, and sang the Ambrosian litany of the Saints at his tomb. The Ambrosian manner is for the cantors to sing the name of the Saint (“Sancte Ambrosi”) as in the Roman Rite; the choir responds by repeating it, and adding “pray for us.”
Beate Ildephonse. Beate Ildephonse, ora pro nobis!
The relics of Bl. Cardinal Schuster
His episcopal consecration
A pastoral visit
Preaching from the great elevated pulpit in the Duomo
Corpus Christi
The blessing of a church bell
Pontifical Mass in the Duomo
Surveying bomb damage to the Duomo during World War II
Today is the feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist; by a nice coincidence, I happened to consult the part of William Durandus’ Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, the Summa Theologica of medieval liturgical commentaries, which discusses the rites of Mass (book 4), and thus discover his interesting explanation of the subdeacon’s singing of the Epistle, which he sees as a symbol of St John and his role in the life of Christ.
The Epistle should be read, according to Master William of Auxerre, on the right side of the Church, because Christ came first to the Jews, who are said to be on the right (i.e. the place of honor); nonetheless, it is better that it be done in the middle of the church, since John was in the middle between the Apostles and the Prophets. ... (This also refers to the opening words of the Introit of St John the Evangelist, ‘In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth’, Sir. 15, 5, also used in several other places in the liturgy.)
But the Epistle is put before the Gospel, for it designates the office which John exercised before Christ, since he ‘went before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, as he himself bear witness, ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the desert” prepare ye the way of the Lord.’ John is therefore like the subdeacon, the minister under Him who said about Himself, ‘The Son of man came not to be served.’ Wherefore, just as the preaching of John went before the preaching of Christ, so the Epistle goes before the Gospel. The Epistle also bears the figure of the Law and Prophecy, which preceded the coming of Christ, just as it precedes the Gospel; for the Law preceded the Gospel, as shadow goes before light, as fear before charity, and a beginning before perfection.
Only one acolyte accompanies the subdeacon when he is about to read the Epistle (a very typical medieval custom), because few followed the preaching of John, since the Law brings no one to perfection, but when the deacon is about the read the Gospel, subdeacons and acolytes and others accompany him, because very many received the preaching of the Gospel, which does bring to perfection. It can also be said that by the procession of the subdeacon and deacon to read, the two-fold manifestation of Christ in His two comings is signified. The first of these had only one Forerunner, namely John, which is signified by the procession of the subdeacon. The second will have two, namely, Enoch and Elijah (Apoc. 11), who are figured by the two or more who go before the deacon.
The face of the one who reads the Epistle should be turned to the altar, which signifies Christ, because the preaching of John directed himself and others towards Christ, from Whose countenance come forth judgment and justice. But (the acolyte) who goes before the subdeacon as he goes to read, does not turn his face towards the reader, because John directed those who heard him not to himself, but to Christ.
However, those who go before the deacon as he goes to read look towards the Gospel, and towards the face of the one who recites it, first, so that by the mutual regarding of each other, the love and charity of Christ may be designated, which are preached in the Gospel: secondly, that they may show themselves to be witness of the teaching of the Gospel, as we read in Isaiah, ‘Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord.’
But because John was the boundary between what preceded and what followed, in the middle between the Apostles and the Prophets, (for ‘the law and prophets (were) unto John, and from then, the kingdom of God was proclaimed’ (Luke 16, 6)), therefore the Epistle is not always read from the prophets, nor always from the Apostles, but sometimes is taken from the Old Testament, and sometimes from the New. For John, whose voice the Epistle represents, preached along with the ancients that Christ would come, saying ‘He that is to come after me was before me’, and with the more recent, he shows that Christ is present, saying, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, behold him that taketh away the sins of the world.’ ”
The Beheading of St John the Baptist is one of the oldest and most universal feasts that exists, attested in the sermons of the some of the Church Fathers already in the early fifth century; it is kept on the same day in the Roman, Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Gallican and Byzantine Rites. However, even though the Church’s devotion to the Saints in ancient times was very much focused on the martyrs, the day which commemorates John’s martyrdom has always been less celebrated than that of his birth; thus we find among the works of St Augustine fifteen sermons for the feast of his Nativity, but only two for his Beheading. The Nativity also had a vigil from very ancient times, and somewhat later, was given an octave, while the Beheading has neither. Durandus explains that this is because at John’s birth “many rejoiced”, as the Angel said, but at his death, he did not go straight to heaven, which was not yet opened by the death and Resurrection of Christ.
The Beheading of St John the Baptist, by Caravaggio, 1608; from the Co-cathedral of St John in Valletta, Malta.
In the Roman Rite, the feast of the Nativity has a fully proper Mass and Office, while on the Beheading, the majority of the liturgical texts are shared with other Martyrs. The Introit of the Mass is one normally used for Virgin Martyrs, but was selected for his feast day as a text particular apposite to the cause of his death, that he spoke to King Herod the truth about his unlawful “marriage” to his sister-in-law. “I spoke of thy testimonies before kings, and I was not ashamed; and I meditated also on thy commandments, which I loved.”
This is also expressed by the Epistle of the Mass, Jeremiah 1, 17-19, which follows from the Epistle of the vigil of his Nativity, verses 4-10 of the same chapter.
“Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak to them all that I command thee. Be not afraid at their presence: for I will make thee not to fear their countenance. For behold I have made thee this day a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass, over all the land, to the kings of Juda, to the princes thereof, and to the priests, and to the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail: for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee.”
The Roman Rite historically makes very little use of the Gospel of St Mark, notwithstanding the evangelist’s traditional association with the first bishop of Rome. There are three very prominent exceptions: Easter and the Ascension among the feasts of the Lord, and today’s feast among those of the Saints, on which the Gospel is Mark 6, 17-29. The same Gospel is read in the Ambrosian Rite, and also in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, with one additional verse at the end.
In the Roman version of the Divine Office, the majority of the musical propers (antiphons, responsories, hymns) are taken from the common Office of a single Martyr, but there are a number of propers as well, which follow the text of this Gospel fairly closely. At Second Vespers, the antiphon for the Magnificat is slightly more rhetorical than the Gospel itself. “The unbelieving King sent his loathsome messengers, and commanded that John the Baptist’s head should be cut off.”
A page of the Antiphonary of Hartker, written at the monastery of St Gallen in Switzerland at the end of the 10th century. (Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 391, p. 107 – Antiphonarium officii https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0391)
Other Uses of the Roman Rite have more proper texts, which vary greatly from one to another; most of these are also taken from the Gospel, with some notable exceptions. The Premonstratensians have this extraordinary antiphon, the text of which comes from a sermon by St Peter Chrysologus, (ca. 380-450), bishop of Ravenna, whom Pope Benedict XIII declared a Doctor of the Church in 1729. As Canons Regular, St Augustine is one of the principal patrons of their order, and his feast therefore ranks higher than that of the Beheading; this antiphon is used to commemorate the latter at Vespers on August 28th.
Aña Joannes schola virtutum, magisterium vitae, sanctitatis forma, norma justitiae, virginitatis speculum, pudicitiae titulus, castitatis exemplum, poenitentium via, peccatorum venia, fidei disciplina; Joannes major homine, par Angelis, legis summa Evangelii satio, Apostolorum vox, silentium Prophetarum, lucerna mundi, Praecursor Judicis, Christi metator, Domini testis, totius medius Trinitatis: hic tantus datur incestui, traditur adulterae, addicitur saltatrici.
Aña John, the school of virtues, the master of life, the form of holiness, the norm of justice, the mirror of virginity, the glory of modesty, the model of chastity, the way of penitents, the forgiveness of sinners, the discipline of the Faith; John greater than man, equal to the Angels, the greatest plant of the law of the Gospel, the voice of the Apostles, the silence of the Prophets, the light of the world, the Forerunner of the Judge, that showeth Christ, the witness of the Lord, that standeth amid the whole Trinity; this man so great is handed over to the unchaste, he is delivered to the adulteress, he is consigned to the dancer.
An ancient responsory for Matins places in the mouth of St John as he dies in prison the words later later spoken by his cousin on the Cross; note how the doxology is cleverly incorporated into the repetition. It appears in the Dominican Office with a slight variation.
R. In medio carceris stabat beatus Joannes; voce magna clamavit et dixit: * Domine Deus meus, * in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum. V. Misit rex, et decollari jussit Joannem in carcere, orantem et dicentem. Domine Deus meus. Gloria Patri. In manus…
R. In the midst of the prison stood the blessed John; with a great voice he cried out and said, * “O Lord, my God, * into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” V. The king sent, and ordered John to be beheaded in the prison, as he prayed and said, “O Lord my God. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”
There is also an antiphon used by the Cistercians and Dominicans among others, whose text is actually that of a Collect attested in the Gelasian Sacramentary; a surprising number of collects were set to music in this fashion in the Middle Ages.
Aña Perpetuis nos, Domine, sancti Ioannis Baptistae tuere praesidiis; et quanto fragiliores sumus, tanto magis necessariis attolle suffragiis.
Aña Defend us, o Lord, by the perpetual protection of St John the Baptist; and the more fragile we are, the more do Thou sustain us by such prayers as we need.
A Greek icon of the Beheading of St John from the second half of the 18th century.
The Byzantine Liturgy is famous for the use of highly complex rhetorical language in its Office texts, and those of the “Cutting-off of the Honorable Head of the Holy and Glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John” are no exception. The following hymn is sung at the blessing of bread (‘artoklasia’ or ‘litia’) which is held at the end of Vespers on major feast days. Its author seems to presume that Salome is the daughter of Herodias with Herod, rather than with Philip, and that Herod connived with her at the oath, as an excuse for the murder.
Today, the mother of the murder, skilled in the works of impiety, contrives with murderous counsel to send her own wanton daughter, born from a lawless embrace, against the greatest of the prophets chosen by God. For as the most hateful Herod completes the banquet of his unlawful birthday, he contrives with an oath to be asked for the honorable head of God’s herald, whence pour forth wonders. And this he accomplished, the senseless man, giving it as a reward for a vulgar dance, for the sake of his oath. Nonetheless, the prophet of Christ’s coming did not cease to denounce their union that was hated of God, even after his death; but he cried out in rebuke, saying “It is not licit for you to commit adultery with the wife of your brother Philip.” Oh, this birthday that slayeth the prophet, this banquet full of blood! But let us, in accordance with piety, in the beheading of the Forerunner, keep the festival, brightly clad, and rejoicing as if on an auspicious day, and ask him to propitiate the Trinity for us, to deliver us from every danger and calamity, and save our souls.
(In Greek, the words “skilled in the works of impiety” are a single word, “ἀνοσιουργότροπος” (anosiurgotropos), which in Church Slavonic becomes the jaw-cracking eleven-syllable “непреподобнодѣлоѻбразнаѧ” (neprepodobnodjeloobraznaja). )
Despite his overwhelming importance to Western theology, there was very little liturgical devotion to St Augustine in the Roman Rite during the first millenium. His feast does not appear in the majority of ancient liturgical books; his day was originally kept in Rome itself as that of an obscure martyr named Hermes, who is still celebrated as a commemoration on August 28th in the traditional rite. Towards the end of the eleventh century, however, as the great reform movement within the Western Church gained momentum, there emerged a huge number of new religious congregations of the sort which we now call canons regular, followed within a few generations by the mendicant friars. [1] Many of these, such as the Premonstratensians and Dominicans, took the Rule of St Augustine as their own, since it is very simple, and permitted a wide variety of adaptations and additional customs. Augustine himself then began to be honored in the liturgy as the great legislator of canonical life, just as St Benedict had long been honored as the great legislator of monastic life.
Sometime in the 12th century, a proper Office was composed for him, and widely adopted by many of the Augustinian orders in their various kinds. Here is the hymn which the Dominicans sing at Vespers and Matins, the Premonstratensians at Vespers and Lauds. The prose translation given below is my own.
Magne Pater Augustine,
Preces nostras suscipe,
Et per eas Conditori
Nos placare satage,
Atque rege gregem tuum
Summum decus Praesulum.
Great Father Augustine,
receive our prayers,
and by them, seek thou to
reconcile us to the Creator,
and rule thy flock,
o highest glory of bishops.
Amatorem paupertatis
Te collaudant pauperes:
Assertorem veritatis
Amant veri judices:
Frange nobis favos mellis
De Scripturis disserens.
The poor praise thee
as one who loved poverty:
true judges love thee
as a defender of the truth;
share with us the sweetness
as thou expound the Scriptures.
Quae obscura prius erant
Nobis plana faciens,
Tu de verbis Salvatoris
Dulcem panem conficis
Et propinas potum vitae
De Psalmorum nectare.
Making plain to us
what was once obscure,
thou makest sweet bread
from the Saviour’s words,
and offer us the drink of life
from the nectar of the Psalms.
Tu de vita clericorum
Sanctam scribis regulam
Quam qui amant et se-
quuntur
Viam tenent regiam
Atque tuo sancto ductu
Redeunt ad patriam.
Thou didst write the holy rule
for the life of clerics;
and they that love and follow it,
keep the royal way,
and under thy holy leadership
return to the Father’s land.
Regi regum salus, vita,
Decus et imperium:
Trinitati laus et honor
Sit per omne saeculum:
Qui concives nos adscribat
Supernorum civium. Amen.
To the King of kings be life,
salvation, glory and rule:
to the Trinity praise and honor
be through every age:
and may He make us fellow-
citizens of those that dwell
in heaven. Amen.
The Office also includes a full complement of proper antiphons and responsories; here is the antiphon for the Magnificat at Second Vespers, set as a polyphonic motet by Sulpizia Cesis (1577-1619 ca.), an Augustinian nun from Modena, Italy.
Aña Hodie gloriosus pater Augustinus, dissoluta hujus habitationis domo, domum non manufactam accepit in caelis, quam sibi, cooperante Dei gratia, manu, lingua fabrefecit in terris, ubi jam quod sitivit internum gustat aeternum, decoratus una stola securusque de reliqua. – Today our glorious Father Augustine, the earthly house of this habitation being dissolved, received a house not made by hands in heaven, which he built for himself with his hand and tongue, helped by God’s grace, where now he tastes within himself forever that for which he longed, graced by one stole, and sure of the other. (i.e., of the final resurrection.)
[1] See the introduction (p. 430) to the article “On the Prose Historia of St Augustine” by Janka Szendrei, in “The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography”, edited by Margot Fassler and Rebecca Baltzer; Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
On Saturday, September 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, His Eminence Gerhard Cardinal Müller, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, will celebrate a Pontifical Mass at the church of St Clement in Ottawa, Ontario, home of the FSSP Apostolate in that city. The Mass will begin at 10am; the church is located at 528 Old St Patrick St.
Two video interviews and an article about his philosophy of sacred music, recently published in the National Catholic Register.
I am delighted to share with you two hours of interviews with Sir James MacMillan, master composer and conductor, about how creating beautiful music can save culture from the ashes of modernism. One is by myself and the other by my wife, Margarita Mooney Clayton. Aside from being one of the greatest living composers and conductors of classical music, Sir James is a Catholic whose faith informs all his work. As you will see, he is a deep thinker who communicates clearly the nature of the creative process when one seeks to create beauty to bring Glory to God.
Further, my wife’s reflections on music and silence in the light of these interviews were published, recently in The National Catholic Register!
In June 2024, Margarita and I each sat down with MacMillan in the studios of Princeton Theological Seminary. He was leading master classes for composers of choral music in an event jointly sponsored by Peter Carter’s Catholic Sacred Music Project and the Scala Foundation, whose mission is to make authentic beauty accessible to wide audiences, a cause that MacMillan shares. Another major sponsor was the Benedict XVI Institute.
Here is my interview:
And, here is Margarita’s:
In addition to the two full-length interviews, we are delighted to share clips from each of the interviews on these topics:
MacMillan’s statement that “the war against silence is a war against ourselves and against our interior life” rang true because I see many turning to thoughtless political activism to fill their interior void.
Finally, some music! Here is a beautiful performance, in the presence of the composer, of Sir James’ Give Me Justice in the chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary at the event. The conductor is Tim McDonnell, also of the Catholic Sacred Music Project.
In running through his eventful life, Joseph Bevan describes the practice of English Catholicism before, during, and after the Council: he shows the strengths and weaknesses of the preconciliar routine, the confusion unleashed in the 1960s, the collapse of the liturgy and especially of sacred music “in real time,” as it was unfolding.
Eyewitness accounts are important for the history of the traditionalist movement, as they flesh out our more abstract claims with concrete examples, and help fend off accusations that we are inventing or exaggerating the problems.
Those who are interested in Benedictine monasticism will learn a lot of intriguing (and sometimes disturbing) things about Downside Abbey in this book, including the time when some students got themselves involved with demons, and one of them died on account of it.
Downside Abbey, where many events in Two Families took place.
Two Families takes the form of contrasting the family into which Bevan was born with the family that he himself established later on. His family of origin was largely swept along with the tide of the times. Joseph Bevan and his wife decided to pursue the opposite course as they rediscovered tradition in the Society of St. Pius X and turned their lives upside-down to ensure a proper upbringing for their own large family of ten children.
At a time when it was not fashionable to homeschool, they homeschooled, and later on moved to a town from which their older children could more easily get to traditional schools in France; at a time when priests were being persecuted for fidelity to tradition, they welcomed into their home an old and faithful priest. God has blessed them with two priest-sons and a daughter who is a nun (and, in fact, just made her solemn vows).
The memoir is filled with honest self-assessment of failings and opportunities, falls taken and graces received; it contains some excellent, hard-won advice for parents. Kennedy Hall contributes a fine Foreword. The book has received glowing endorsements from The Right Reverend Dom Cuthbert Brogan, OSB, Abbot of St. Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough; Dom Alcuin Reid, OSB, Prior of Monastère Saint-Benoît, Fréjus-Toulon; Edward Pentin, Senior Contributor, National Catholic Register; James Bogle, barrister, retired army officer, former President of the Una Voce Federation; and Anthony P. Stine of the Return to Tradition Podcast. Now for some excerpts of particular liturgical and musical interest.
A view of Somerset, the county where the Bevans lived for much of their lives
Wise words, to which we can all relate:
Although this book contains some stern criticisms of monks and priests who have crossed my path, I still regard them as belonging to my Church, and the wholesale collapse of the clergy is something I mourn. I have no idea how God is going to put things right, but I am sure that, sooner or later, he will, and it might take 100 years. In the meantime, I just carry on in my own quiet way, trying to save my soul and the souls of my nearest and dearest. (xix)
Speaking at one point of Westminster Choir School where he attended for a short time, Bevan describes the daily routine of the choristers. This is a great passage for giving the lie to the idea that the artistic standards were not high prior to the Council. In fact, they were much, much higher than they would ever be afterwards. Even now, we have not quite caught up to “the way things were,” and I doubt we ever shall until there is a complete restoration of tradition.
The choir school supplied the sopranos and altos for the cathedral choir. Even in the 1960s it was being proclaimed as one of the best choirs in Europe, and its schedule was punishing. There was a Sung Mass every morning, and new music had to be prepared to a professional standard. We would rise early and have a school Low Mass in the crypt of the cathedral. After breakfast there would be lessons followed by sung Mass but, as a probationer, I was too young to sing in the choir, so we juniors sat in the front two rows in the nave…. The cathedral choir sound was utterly unique and a total contrast to the politeness of its Anglican cathedral rivals. We had daily High Mass in the cathedral. Even with my disturbed brain, I could see how beautiful and solemn was the drama being played out before my eyes— all accompanied by music which was often sublime. My musical tastes were maturing rapidly, and I was transported by Victoria and Palestrina…. It was a rare privilege as a youngster to witness daily the dignity and the beauty of the liturgy at the cathedral, which managed to cling to the traditional rite of Mass well into the 1970s, until the death of Cardinal Heenan. Once the glories of Catholic worship have been seen at first hand, one cannot fail to be unimpressed by the sterile and turgid offerings of the reformed liturgies in the Catholic Church following on from the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II. I happen to know that anyone who sang in that choir was probably marked for life, as I was, and many ex-choristers still keep in touch with each other and often meet up to sing. The old cathedral is affectionately referred to as “the drome,” but nowadays the previously grand liturgy has degenerated into a patchy concert of words and music. My three elder brothers, who attended the school at Westminster, spent their lives campaigning for proper music to be incorporated into the New Mass and have found the going extremely bumpy in the face of reluctant clergy up and down the country…. The lasting benefits of the choir school on my life were a love of the liturgy and a love of prayer. I learned to pray, and this stayed with me even during my non-churchgoing period. I never completely lost touch with Our Lady and the Saints, and this saved me from disaster, I think. (24–27)
There was a lot of confusion, silliness, and Pelagianism in the shift from the old rite to the new rite:
We [the Bevans] were the official choir at St Michael’s Church in Shepton Mallet, and every Sunday in the holidays we sang the Mass. My father was the conductor and organist, and he laid out treats for the congregation in the form of plainchant and polyphony. With the closing of the old Catholic church in Shepton we moved to a spick-and-span affair of concrete and glass, which had been built by the diocese to accommodate the new springtime in the Church anticipated by the recent Second Vatican Council. With the new building came the New Mass. I was first made aware that something wasn’t right when, during the Canon, I received a dig in the back from Neville Dyke, who was sitting just behind me. I turned round in surprise and said, “Hello, Neville!” I received the reply, “Peace be with you!” I answered, “Talk to you later.” I can still see the Catholic families of Shepton Mallet sitting in their habitual pews: the Tullys, the Dykes, the Quins, the Dampiers, the Todds, and many others with lots of young children. With the advent of the New Mass in December 1969, the services became chaotic. The parish priest, Father Carol, wrestled with the new liturgy; he would suddenly break into Latin and correct himself. The music we sang as a family in church was becoming irrelevant to the goings-on at the altar, and the congregation became restless for more change. Mrs Todd, the wife of the owner of Darton, Longman & Todd, which was a leading Catholic publisher, became an agitator for change in the music. One Sunday, as we struck up with some William Byrd, she simply marched out of Mass in full view of the whole congregation. Pa, like the Elizabethan composers before him, adapted to the demand for change and started writing “congregational Masses” to be sung by everybody at Mass. I have to say that these compositions were so trite and turgid that we got thoroughly bored with them. In actual fact, Mass on Sunday became a frightful bore with its “sweet nothings” prayers, “hello children everywhere” readings, and faulty microphones. It took a great personal effort to rise on Sunday morning and go to church. As it dawned on our new parish priest, Father Meehan, that the reformed liturgy was turning out to be a bit of a flop, he decided upon a more “energetic” approach to the liturgy. As a result, we were made to endure all kinds of humiliating displays, such as parading the children in the sanctuary and the priest quizzing them over the microphone. We all hated it, but Pa said, “If you live at home you go to church!” I think Pa liked the changes. In fact, he did say in an unguarded moment— following a session with the gin and martini bottles— that it was like coming home to his Church of England past. Ma endured the revolution patiently and, much later, embraced Catholic Tradition again. In those days we were witnessing the changes in the Mass, which were bad enough. Little did we know that there was a wholesale offensive against the Catholic faith going on at the highest levels, and the New Mass was just a symptom of this attack. My mother has testified to the gradual meltdown in Catholic moral theology amongst her own teenage daughters, who were only following the example of their friends. (33–35)
This next passage reminds me strikingly of my own experience in a private Benedictine high school, when by my senior year I was acting the role of conservative in the midst of almost exclusively liberal teachers and largely indifferent, if not contemptuous, fellow students:
There were various Benedictine monks at the school who occupied the senior positions such as headmaster and housemasters. My instincts informed me that most of these gentlemen lived a fairly soft life and seemed to wear expressions of self-doubt, evidenced by furrowed brows and the inability to look one in the face. This was the period after the Second Vatican Council and, as I mentioned before, the whole Church seemed to be indulging in an orgy of self-doubt. Religious Instruction (RI) classes were pure comedy, where the boys would come up with bizarre theories and discuss them in a free-for-all. The monk running the class almost seemed to be more avant-garde than his charges. Needless to say, I had conservative leanings and was by nature abrasive. Accordingly, I became an obvious target for the whole class, which regularly produced the situation of “Bevan contra mundum.” That was the trouble with knowing things but not knowing why. Everything was subject to scornful ridicule without limit. Apart from RI classes at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, where we studied the Penny Catechism, I had received no further formal training in religion. Hence, I knew nothing whatever about the faith apart from the odd phrase which had stuck. My classmates at Downside, however, knew absolutely nothing about their religion and used the RI classes as an opportunity to let off steam about how boring the school Mass was (indeed it was). Time-worn words were bandied about such as “irrelevant” and “participation.” I found myself—although I had no idea at the time— defending the Novus Ordo Mass, which all 500 boys had to endure in the abbey church every Sunday. I became identified with it alongside my father, who was organising the music, and this inflamed further antipathy towards my family. I do not believe that anyone in the school or the monastery next door liked the New Mass. There were many plots afoot to undermine it, and grievances were aired during RI classes all over the school. There was a very sharp and outspoken member of the class by the name of Grace, ironically, and his opinions were deferred to by everyone except me, of course. During one session in the RI class of Dom Ambrose Lambert, Grace pointed out that we should dispense with incense at Mass because, “after all, it was only introduced in the Middle Ages to keep off the smell of the plebs!” Everyone nodded, and I could see the furrowed brow of the monk also nodding in thoughtful sympathy. I instinctively made a fuss simply because this did not sound right at all, but as my knowledge of these things was non-existent, I was quickly shouted down. I have alluded to the school Mass in the abbey church. The abbey had been closed for two years to allow the bulldozers in to reorder the interior, in accordance with the liturgical movement’s slogan “out with the old, in with the new!” In the meantime, the school theatre was used for the Sunday Masses. I was not present at these events, as they were just before my time. However, I am assured by people who were present— my father among them— that the Masses degenerated into a riot, as the boys would constantly bang the sprung theatre seats up and down in the auditorium. My arrival at Downside coincided with the grand reopening of the abbey church for school Masses. Although the sanctuary had been rearranged with an altar placed in the middle (as opposed to at the far end), the congregation area was untouched, which led to wholesale discontent and open rebellion by the boys. The point of the New Mass, as it is called, is to encourage outward participation by the 500-odd boys, which they would do by joining in the prayers and singing the hymns. In spite of the hugely expensive loudspeaker system recently installed, the boys were really isolated from what was going on in the distance at the altar and responded to the energetic blandishments booming over the loudspeakers with a stony silence. I was present when, during an evening benediction, the lights failed. As we were plunged into darkness, a huge cheer went up from the whole school. The whole experiment with the New Mass was— and still is— an unmitigated disaster because the whole point of Mass is to achieve union with Christ, which is essentially an interior union necessitating silent prayer and adoration. (55–57)
Long-time musicians will recognize, with a groan, the truth in Bevan's discussion of the problems with transferring the treasury of great sacred music that grew up organically in the old rite to a new rite that was not designed with it in mind, and in fact works at cross-purposes to it:
I joined the Schola Cantorum, which provided the music for the New Mass in the abbey church, and Pa was the conductor. Because Pa thought we should sing music from the treasures of the Renaissance as though there had been no liturgical revolution at all, noses were put out of joint amongst the innovators in the monastery. The boys also complained (and who can blame them?), so an attempt was made to curtail Pa’s counter-revolutionary activities by the organising of a folk Mass in the abbey. That, too, was a flop and the last we heard of the guitars. I have to say that my father was mistaken in his belief that the boys would in any way profit from listening to William Byrd and plainchant in the context of the New Mass. Effectively, his critics were correct. He was turning the Mass into a concert, and a rather dull one at that. Renaissance church music was written for the Tridentine Rite of Mass, the “Old Mass.” It was strictly liturgical and as much a part of the Mass as the priest was. In the New Mass, the proceedings at the altar are interrupted and the irritable priest sits down with a thump while “Bevan and his choir strikes up!” Writing about these matters now, nearly sixty years on, all arguments in favour of the Old Mass are as relevant now as they were in the 1970s, but nothing gets done. This is why I now believe, in retrospect, that the attack on the traditional Mass was on ideological grounds and had nothing to do with getting the best out of the liturgy. The Old Mass had to be completely destroyed to clear the decks for what was to follow, and that was not the Catholic faith. In fact, it hardly mattered what replaced it. The liturgical anarchy that has been prevalent in the Catholic Church for sixty years is preferable, in the eyes of the reformers, to the pre-Vatican II Mass. At worst, the new liturgy is irreverent, blasphemous, and chaotic. At best, it is turgid, vacuous, and boring. It is almost as though the Catholic Church was deliberately trying to put people off religion, which it succeeded in doing, deliberately or not. (63–64)
Although Hamish Fraser played no role in my coming to tradition, Michael Davies certainly did, as he has done for countless people. The seeds planted by good reading bear fruit in due season:
By the time I had left school, my religious feelings were at a very low ebb. I was what could be described as a semi-lapsed Catholic, and this was the same for my brothers and sisters, so far as I could see. My mother, I think, had a prayer life and shared it with my father. We offspring were not interested. It was one afternoon in the spring of 1976 that we received a visit from Martin Blake, a retired French master who taught at Worth monastic school in Sussex. He was a frequent visitor, as he was Jeremy’s godfather. Whereas normal godparents would donate money and presents, as mine did, Martin would give Jeremy holy books. On this visit, he dumped a pile of tatty magazines entitled Approaches, which were edited by a certain Hamish Fraser. As nobody else was interested, I scooped up the pile and took them to my bedroom. Much later, for want of anything else to read, I sat up in bed and flipped through the pile of literature, which was badly reproduced on a home printer. I began to read about a certain archbishop in Switzerland who was being persecuted by the Catholic authorities for running a seminary that was out of step with the modern direction of the Catholic Church. My reaction was one of outrage for everything which annoyed me about the Church, such as the palsy-walsy clergy, the boring Mass, the warfare between the Downside monks and my father, the attacks on the faith in RI classes at school and the complete lack of religious education. It was all explained by Hamish Fraser. What I had dismissed until now as simply an emotional attachment to a vague conservatism was clarified by the rebellion of Archbishop Lefebvre. In all my time at Downside, the Second Vatican Council was hardly mentioned by the monks, who tried to give the impression that the Church was always like this. It would be stretching things to say that I now became more virtuous or religious, as I was happy in my state of semi-lapsation. However, the thoughts of returning to the true faith of the Church were never far away, and I had privately resolved to do something about it— but what? I knew that I would have to change my life and pull up my socks, so any thought of a real conversion was put on the back-burner, as they say… In the end, I forgot all about Archbishop Lefebvre as soon as I entered into my legal studies, because my whole position was built on sand. I still knew nothing about my religion and was easily disposed of by my intellectual superiors. I was glad, though, that Hamish Fraser, and later Michael Davies, were both planted in my sub-conscious and never left me. (73–74)
I could keep quoting all day long, but that would spoil the pleasure of discovering the work for yourself! So I’ll stop here, but do consider reading this meaty but still compact (under 200 pages) memoir of a Catholic caught between a false modernization that failed to fulfill its promises and a return to tradition that actually delivers the goods—the interesting story of a man, typical of his era in many ways, who was led by grace from lazy lapsation to burning zeal for the Faith.
When the Consilium ad exsequendam was engaged in its work of radical liturgical reform in the 1960s, it was the ‘expert consensus’ that the so-called Apostolic Tradition was written by Hippolytus of Rome, and provided a witness to the liturgy more ancient than the Roman Canon. Thus, we were given various “restorations” in the Roman Rite, such as Eucharistic Prayer II, popularly known as the ‘Canon of Hippolytus,’ as well as an epiclesis in every one of the new eucharistic prayers, since this was thought to be a primitive feature of all liturgies that mysteriously went missing from the Roman Canon. Indeed, one still hears these sorts of things from time to time, even from people who ought to know better!
Of course, the current scholarly consensus is that the Apostolic Tradition is neither the work of Hippolytus or any other individual. Rather, it is now considered to be a composite work redacted over several centuries, and not at all representative of the early Christian liturgical tradition in Rome (being West Syrian in origin). [1] Eucharistic Prayer II is thus the best-known example of previously ‘assured results’ of historical-critical scholarship making their way into the post-conciliar reforms without, as it turns out, much of an ‘assured’ basis at all—in spite of the admonition of Sacrosanctum Concilium 23 that “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.”
It should not be terribly surprising, then, that there are many other examples of dated scholarship influencing aspects of the work of the liturgical reformers, and I would like to highlight one that recently jumped out to me. Is the famous passage from Philippians 2, 6-11, used in the post-Vatican II Liturgy of the Hours as a canticle at I Vespers of Sundays every week, really an early ‘Christ-hymn' that was used in the primitive liturgy?’
“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2, 8)
Well, on a personal level, this is certainly what I was told by my biblical studies and theology lecturers back when I was at university. Many scholarly commentaries on Philippians claim that 2, 6-11 is an early Christian hymn. For example:
[T]his is a hymn devised for and taken from the context of public worship… [T]he unusual vocabulary of the hymn, with its many hapax legomena, the careful parallel construction, and the rhythm of the Greek original all suggest a pre-existing hymn. The passage is different in tone from what surrounds it, uses many non-Pauline terms and the sort of servant language that is largely absent from Paul’s other letters. On stylistic grounds it seems that Paul, like a good preacher, is using a pre-existing hymn illustratively in his exhortation to the Philippian congregation. Just as modern preachers may use a stanza or two of a well-known hymn to illustrate a point in a sermon precisely because the hymn is well known to the hearers, Paul is using a similar approach here. [Bonnie B. Thurston and Judith M. Ryan, Philippians and Philemon (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), pp. 85-86]
In what he says about Jesus Christ, the Apostle is not simply proposing him as a model for us to follow. Possibly transcribing an early liturgical hymn adding some touches of his own, he is—under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—giving a very profound exposition of the nature of Christ and using the most sublime truths of faith to show the way Christian virtues should be practised. [The Navarre Bible: Saint Paul’s Captivity Letters (New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), p. 102]
To give greater force to the plea which Paul has just addressed to his readers, he now introduces one of the earliest Christological hymns. This hymn embodies the essence of early Christian faith, the faith which acclaims the humiliation and exaltation of Christ… The stately and solemn ring of the words of this hymn are unmistakable even in English translation. The passage has a liturgical style, with its majestic rhythms, balanced clauses, and artful parallelisms.The hymn may be pre-Pauline, since it contains some uncommon words and ideas not found in other Pauline writings. [I-Jin Loh and Eugene A. Nida, A Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (New York: United Bible Societies, 1995), p. 54]
The Catechism of the Catholic Church also makes the claim that Philippians 2, 6-11 is a hymn, on multiple occasions:
In a hymn cited by Saint Paul, the Church sings the mystery of the Incarnation: ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus…’ (CCC 461)
Like the inspired writers of the New Testament, the first Christian communities read the Book of Psalms in a new way, singing in it the mystery of Christ. In the newness of the Spirit, they also composed hymns and canticles in the light of the unheard-of event that God accomplished in his Son: his Incarnation, his death which conquered death, his Resurrection, and Ascension to the right hand of the Father [footnote 125: Cf. Phil 2, 6-11; Col 1, 15–20; Eph 5, 14; 1 Tim 3, 16; 6, 15-16; 2 Tim 2, 11113]. (CCC 2641)
The most usual formulation, transmitted by the spiritual writers of the Sinai, Syria, and Mt. Athos, is the invocation, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners.” It combines the Christological hymn of Philippians 2, 6-11 with the cry of the publican and the blind men begging for light. (CCC 2667)
In terms of liturgical studies, no less a figure than Klaus Gamber, taking the form-critical work of numerous other scholars such as H. Lietzmann, R. Deichgraber and J. Jeremias as reliable, wrote in 1970 that “The basis thesis, that this passage is itself a pre-Pauline (liturgical) hymn, has become almost universal today.” [2] However, as Ralph P. Martin pointed out in the late-1960s, “It is a singular fact that it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the unusual literary character of Philippians ii. 5-11 was detected and classified.” [3] This ought to have been a red flag for exegetes and interpreters, yet, as so often in academic biblical studies, theory and reconstructions quite quickly overtook the actual evidence—which, as Markus Bockmuehl noted in his 1997 commentary on Philippians, has always been basically non-existent:
Everyone agrees on the fact that exalted, lyrical, quasi-credal language is employed in these verses. There is an undeniable rhythm here, combined with typically poetic tension, repetition and a Hebraic-sounding parallelism (e.g. v. 7b, 8b), although occasional proposals to identify a clear meter have been forced and implausible… Despite continuing assertions of this ‘hymn’ being sung in one setting or another, we have in fact no contextual evidence of such use; nor is the passage ever cited in this connection in Christian literature of the first or second century… Perhaps another telling argument against a ‘hymnic’ reading of this passage is the observation that scholars have advanced at least half a dozen mutually incompatible proposals of how the different stanzas are to be arranged and divided. Some of these in fact depend on surgery on the text as it stands, involving various omissions or rearrangements… This lack of agreement about the very form and outline of our passage suggests that, even though poetic style and credal language are undoubtedly present, it is unwarranted and potentially misleading to call it a ‘hymn’ in the absence of evidence for its liturgical usage. [4]
As with the so-called Apostolic Tradition, more recent scholarship has moved away from the idea that Philippians 2, 6-11 (as well as other New Testament passages) was ever a ‘hymn’ at all. For example:
The reconstruction of ‘Christ hymns’ and other formulaic pieces considered to originate from early Christian liturgy seemed to allow a deeper insight into the worship of the first Christians. These optimistic attempts found their climax in the thesis that 1 Peter as a whole (except for the epistolary frame) contained a complete baptismal service held at Rome, including all the songs and even the sermon!
From the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s, several monographs summed up the discussion on the early Christian hymns that had meanwhile been discovered, so that a certain scholarly consensus was reached. Ever since, early Christian “hymns” or “songs” have been an integral part of introductions and handbooks to the New Testament…
Phil. 2, 6-11 has turned out to be a ‘praise of Christ’ written by Paul himself and firmly interwoven with its immediate context (2, 1-11) as well as with the letter as a whole. Appropriate to the subject-matter, it is written in an elevated, one can even say “hymnic” style. But the passage is neither poetic (because of the lack of meter) nor is it a hymn (because of the lack of the typical three-part structure)…
[It is] a ‘praise of Christ’ within the letter, but is neither a hymn nor pre-Pauline. Since this text is often introduced as the principal witness for ‘hymns’ in the New Testament, the result of my investigation raises reasonable doubt concerning the other comparable passages.[5]
The Consilium would go on to fall prey to the erroneous 1960s scholarly consensus regarding these so-called New Testament ‘hymns.’ In September 1966, Coetus III of the Consilium proposed that canticles from the New Testament [6] be introduced to Vespers in the reformed Divine Office. They admit this is an innovation, [7] but they give the following reasons for this, among which is a “resurgence of biblical studies on the New Testament”:
1. Tradition. Regarding this, [such canticles] are not present in the tradition of the Roman rite. But in the Mozarabic liturgy, there are some excerpts from the New Testament, which are called canticles: Matthew 22, 23-32; 1 Timothy 6, 12 and 4, 12-16; Revelation 15, 1-4; Revelation 19:, 5-8. (Cf. Porter, “Cantica mozarabica officii,” in Ephemerides liturgicae [49], 1935, [pp. 126-145].)
2. Utility. The resurgence of biblical studies on the New Testament has highlighted sections where a hymnic literary genre is prominent. The clearest examples are the canticles from the Apocalypse. Their literary form is similar to that of laudatory psalms, which begin with an invitation and continue with reasons for praise, e.g., “Praise the Lord, all nations, for great is his steadfast love…” (Ps. 116 [117]). They are also similar to prefaces for the same reason. Therefore, such canticles can excellently foster the spirit of liturgical prayer.
Additionally, the faithful and priests of our time have a certain difficulty in reciting the psalms because the psalms inherently carry the spirit of the Old Testament. However, since the [time of the] Fathers, they have been sung in a figurative sense about Christ and the Church. Therefore, it will be essential to teach everyone, especially priests, how to chant the psalms in the spirit of the New Testament. If, besides the psalms, everyone can sing something specifically Christian, it will greatly assist in a Christian understanding of the psalter.
Moreover, the psalms speak of the mystery of Christ only prophetically and indirectly, whereas the canticles of the New Testament do so directly. Thus, whoever recites these canticles after the prophetic psalms experiences spiritual joy in meditating on the glory of Christ.
3. Possibility. In Coetus IX, there was extensive discussion about the placement of new canticles in the Divine Office, and it seemed to us that canticles of this kind could most fittingly occupy the fifth place in Vespers. In this way, after the prophecy of the psalms, the hearts of those who recite [these canticles] will ascend to the truth of the mystery of Christ, perfectly prepared for the climax of the entire Hour, namely, the canticle from the Gospel, with exultation: Magnificat. [8]
So, we can see that Coetus III justified the general introduction of New Testament canticles into the Roman Office on several dubious grounds:
first, though never part of the Roman tradition, we can freely import them from the Mozarabic liturgy—this seems highly questionable, and not consistent with what Vatican II says about “innovations” in the liturgy (SC, n. 23);
second, as we now know certain passages of the New Testament, including some not used in the Mozarabic liturgy (such as Philippians 2, 6-11), were hymns composed and used by the ancient Church, we should use them in the same way today—except this seems to be a 20th century scholarly fiction, with no actual evidence to back it up—and even if there was evidence, this would be the sort of archaeologism and antiquarianism condemned by Pope Pius XII (Mediator Dei, nn. 61-64);
third, that this innovation will alleviate the alleged ‘difficulties’ clergy and laity have with praying the psalms, and imbue the psalter with the ‘spirit of the New Testament’—yet if the Christological nature of the psalter had been lost by ‘modern man,’ such an innovation does not seem sufficient to rectify this—and in any case, the psalter in the Liturgy of the Hours still ended up censored because of “certain psychological difficulties” (General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours, n. 131)!
With regard to the so-called Apostolic Tradition, the liturgist John Baldovin wrote in 2003 that “[t]here is a very real possibility that the Apostolic Tradition describes liturgies that never existed.” [9] Likewise, there is a very real possibility that the ‘hymns’ of the New Testament used at Vespers in the reformed liturgy never existed as hymns. They are just yet another item on the long list of scholarly fictions, myths and “restorations” that the liturgical books of the Novus Ordo are currently saddled with. It is to be hoped that these historical falsehoods will be corrected by younger generations who do not treat the work of the Consilium as absolutely identical with the intentions of the Second Vatican Council.
NOTES
[1] Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002), p. 14:
[W]e judge the work to be an aggregation of material from different sources, quite possibly arising from different geographical regions and probably from different historical periods, from perhaps as early as the mid–second century to as late as the mid–fourth, since none of the textual witnesses to it can be dated with any certainty before the last quarter of that century. We thus think it unlikely that it represents the practice of any single Christian community, and that it is best understood by attempting to discern the various individual elements and layers that constitute it.
See also Matthieu Smyth, “The Anaphora of the So-called Apostolic Tradition and the Roman Eucharistic Prayer”, Usus Antiquior 1.1 (2010), pp. 5-25, at p. 24:
The purpose was to enrich the patrimony of eucharistic prayers of the Church of Rome; that which was done was based on the belief of the Romanitas and of the supposed antiquity of this document [i.e. the Apostolic Tradition], which [Bernard] Botte had defended with so much ardour. What a paradox for a document that in reality never had a relationship with the city and which in many respects was less ancient than the Roman Canon, the authentic eucharistic prayer proper to the Church of Rome!
[3] Ralph P. Martin, Carmen Christi: Philippians ii. 5-11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 24. Of course, this is not a problem for Martin, who goes on in his monograph to treat the so-called “hymnic character” of Philippians 2, 6-11 as an important 20th-century form-critical discovery, hidden to all previous generations!
[4] Markus Bockmuehl, The Epistle to the Philippians (BNTC; London: Continuum, 1997), pp. 116-117. See also the comments of Michael Peppard, “‘Poetry’, ‘Hymns’ and ‘Traditional Material’ in New Testament Epistles or How to Do Things with Indentations”, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 30.3 (2008), pp. 319-342, at p. 322: “most of the major scholarship on this subject has not so much argued for the hymnic qualities of certain New Testament texts as much as it has assumed these qualities and then analyzed them.”
[5] Ralph Brucker, “‘Songs’, ‘Hymns’, and ‘Encomia’ in the New Testament?”, in Clemens Leonhard and Hermut Löhr (eds.), Literature or Liturgy? Early Christian Hymns and Prayers in their Literary and Liturgical Context in Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), pp. 1-14, at pp. 2 and 7-8. See also Benjamin Edsall and Jennifer R. Strawbridge, “The Songs we Used to Sing? Hymn ‘Traditions’ and Reception in Pauline Letters”, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 37.3 (2015), pp. 290-311; Paul A. Holloway, Philippians: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), p. 116; Gordon D. Fee, “Philippians 2:5-11: Hymn or Exalted Pauline Prose?”, Bulletin for Biblical Research 2 (1992), pp. 29-46.
[6] The list of “canticles” given in Schema 185 (De Breviario, 40), Adnexa, 19 September 1966, p. 1, is as follows:
1 Corinthians 13, 1-7
Ephesians 1, 3-10
Colossians 1, 12-20
Philippians 2, 6-11
Revelation 4, 11 + 5, 9-10, 12
Revelation 11, 17-18 + 12, 10b-12a
Revelation 15:, 3-4
Revelation 19, 1b-2a + 4b + 5b + 6b-8a
[7] As does the liturgist Rubén M. Leikam, “The Liturgy of the Hours in the Roman Rite,” in Anscar Chupungco (ed.), Handbook for Liturgical Studies, V: Liturgical Time and Space (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), pp. 59-98, at p. 83: “It must be noted that, historically, the introduction of a canticle from the New Testament into the psalmody of the Vesper hour was an innovation.”
[8] Schema 185, pp. 1-2:
1. De Traditione. C[ir]ca talia non adsunt in ritu romano cum traditione sua. Sed in Liturgia mozarabica inveniuntur nonnulla excerpta e N.T., quae ut cantica dicuntur: Mt 22, 23-32; 1 Tim 6, 12 et 4, 12-16; Apc 15, 1-4; Apc 19, 5-8. (Cf Porter Cantica mozarabi officii in EL 1935.)
2. De utilitate. Renascentia studiorum biblicorum de N.T. in lucem posuit sectiones in quibus viget genus litterarium hymnicum. Exempla clarissima sunt cantica apocalypseos. Forma litteraria similes sunt psalmis laudatoriis, qui incipiunt cum invitatione et prosequuntur cum motivis, e. gr. “Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, quoniam confirmata est ---” (Ps 116). Similes sunt etiam praefationibus ex eadem ratione. Quapro[p]ter talia cantica optime fovere possunt spiritum orationis liturgicae.
Accedit, quod fideles et sacerdotes nostrae aetatis quandam difficultatem habent in recitatione psalmorum, quia psalmi ex se habent spiritum Veteris Testamenti. Sed iam a Patribus in figura cantantur de Christo et Ecclesia. Quare valde laborandum erit, ut discant omnes, maxime sacerdotes, modum talem psallendi in spiritu Novi Testamenti. Si vero praeter psalmos omnes possunt aliqua saltem specifice christiana cantare, valde iuvabuntur adintelligentiam christianam psalterii.
Insuper psalmi de mysterio Christi loquuntur prophetice tantum et indirecte, cantica autem N.T. directe. Ita qui post psalmos propheticos haec cantica dicit, spirituali laetitia gaudet in meditatione gloriae Christi.
3. De possibilitate. In coetu IX multum disceptatum est de loco novorum canticorum in officio divino et visum est nobis cantica huius generis optime locum habere posse quinto loco Vesperarum. Ita post prophetiam psalmorum corda recitantium ascendunt ad veritatem mysterii Christi optime praeparata ad culmen totius Horae, canticum nempe de evangelio, cum exultatione: “Magnificat”.
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