Chairman's Blog

Leading articles feature Buckfast Abbey, The Old Mass and Children, a round-up of an extraordinary Christmas for the Traditional Mass and Gregory Hogan reports on plans to open a new Catholic academy in the Diocese of Portsmouth. These, together with the usual features, a wealth of news, reviews and reports all show how love of the Traditional Mass is growing around the country.

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Reposted from May 2013, in response to the strange blog post arguing for various improvements to the Extraordinary Form, one of which is that it adopt the OF Liturgical Calendar. (There's another response here, from the excellent Fr Albert Marcello.)

The lectionary seems to many to be an obvious example of something the OF does better than the EF, but it doesn't take long to see why things aren't so simple. The brevity, and the basis of the selection, of the traditional lectionary have their own advantages. As for swapping one lectionary for another, this would produce an incoherent muddle.

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Today I'm publishing a Position Paper for the Una Voce Federation on the Lectionary. Go over to Rorate Caeli to read it.

As I remark there, the claim is often made that the lectionary of the 1970 Missal is an obvious improvement on the old one, on the simple basis that more is better, and the 1970 Missal has more scripture in it. Clearly, however, there are other considerations. First and foremost, the lectionary must make sense liturgically: if we understand that, we will understand the value of the old lectionary,  in the context of the old Mass, and why it should be preserved. To replace it with the new lectionary, as if the lectionaries can just be swapped in and out of rites, would be a disaster for the Traditional Mass.

One of the five extra readings on an Ember Saturday, celebrated in Caversham

In the Traditional Mass, the readings of each Mass are connected with the other proper prayers and chants of that Mass. There is a series of Sundays (some of the ones After Pentecost) in which, for historical reasons, the gospels have got out of sync with the other propers by one week; because of the nature of the progression of texts this doesn't matter very much. What we never have, however, in the Traditional Mass is a set of readings with absolutely no connection with the chants or prayers, and that is something which is inevitable with a multi-year cycle of readings, unless it were accompanied by the multi-year cycle of prayers and chants. But, obviously, there aren't enough appropriate ancient prayers and chants to go round. (This, of course, is part of the story of why, in the Ordinary Form, the chants are a sort of optional extra, which don't seem very closely connected with the other liturgical texts.) Imposing a multi-year cycle of Sunday readings on the EF would destroy the coherence of its propers.

Another suggestion often made is that we should have a cycle of readings for the ferias outside Lent. There were, once, such cycles (though only for three days each week), so it might even seem a 'traditional' thing to do. Before trying to restore things from the distant past (in the Roman Rite, this cycle disappeared in about 13th Century), we should ask why things developed as they did. The answer is, probably (there is no record of a debate, this is one of those things which just happened), that with the rich sanctoral cycle, and the increasing use of Votive Masses, the ferial cycle didn't get much use outside Lent, so it was pretty pointless. If we want to reverse this development, we have to reverse the whole of it: we have to impoverish the sanctoral cycle, and get rid of Votive Masses. Or else render them liturgically incoherent by insisting on readings with no connection with the theme of those Masses. Is that something we really want to do?

Why not say, with Pope Pius XII, that what happened was an organic development which made the liturgy answer the developing needs of the Faithful? And that our needs are pretty well the same: we need the sactoral cycle, because we have lots of saints to celebrate, and we need Votive Masses, because we have lots of devotions to maintain. These two things, the saints and devotions, are major parts of Catholic life and spirituality, and have been since roughly the period in which the ferial cycle dropped out of use. It's not a coincidence.

Here's Pius XII, again:
Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation. 

This is all not to say that we can't increase our liturgical exposure to the scriptures. There are a couple of suggestions in the paper which deal with this, notably that, in line with the Second Vatican Council, the recitation of the Divine Office be encouraged. The readings of Sunday Matins are, in fact, closely connected with the readings of the Sunday, and serve as a liturgically coherent expansion and commentary on them. This would be a better outlet for our liturgical zeal than reducing the ancient liturgy to a shambles in the attempt to shoehorn more Gospel passages into it.

The exhibition Opus Anglicanum in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is about to close: it does so on 5th. Right now the exhibition webpage is still up so you can see a few things about it. We went to see it before Christmas, and I thought I'd put up some random observations.

The exhibition shows off the work of Medieval English needlecraft, which was famous in its own day. This is embroidery used on a lavish scale, not simply to decorate an orphery but to cover entire chasubles, the vast copes they used in that period, and all sorts of other things.  It is a tradition dating back to before the Norman Conquest: the Bayeaux Tapestry was made by English needleworkers. However, most of the surviving examples, in this exhibition, are from the 14-16th centuries. English work was so prized that these pieces made good diplomatic gifts, which is the reason that several of the things in the exhibition have survived, in cathedrals in continental Europe. Liturgical vestments covered in pictures of virgin martyrs could have a short life-expectancy in Protestant England.

Something which did survive in England was a truly wonderful coffin-cover made for, and still owned by, the The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, complete with mermaids. The survival of these curious medieval institutions, and their innate conservatism, is one of the fun things about England.

The practice of English embroidery was saved from extinction by (what became) the Royal College of Needlework, founded in 1872: we owe the Victorians a lot. What they do, the kind of stuff you see above all on state occasions and in well-resourced Anglican cathedrals, is a direct descendant of this medieval work. What is interesting, however, is that the medieval artists used a very limited number of techniques. The great majority of the embroidery is one kind of stitch, called 'split stitch'. Another type, 'tent stitch', was used for heraldic embroidery, which was less fine and designed for hard use; it makes sense to create blocks of colour.

This split-stitch embroidery is very similar to modern 'silk shading', which you'll see today, for example, for faces on vestments; but the thread used was far coarser. The result is a wooly, rather than a silky, effect, which would I suppose have been more hard-wearing and also much faster to execute. Like silk shading, it can shade seemlessly from one colour into another, with texture being created by the direction of the stitches. So the cheeks of a female saint, for example would shade into a deeper pink in the middle, with the impression of roundness being given by a pattern of stitches in concentric circles.

The skill of the artisans must have been immense, and the value of their work enormous. To have a cope covered with more than a dozen saints and associated symbols and decoration can't have been any cheaper than covering it in semi-precious stones, and it was valued accordingly. Indeed, among the sumptory laws of the period, intended to restrain extravagance, embroidery on clothing was restricted to people of a certain income and social standing.

I noted some time ago on this blog something else about this exhibition which is interesting. Before it opened The Guardian carried a story about it, noting

'for the first time in decades, the museum has dared to use Latin in an exhibition title.'


It explained:

“We were a bit worried that people would find the title baffling,” said co-curator and textile expert Clare Browne. “Older people thought that younger people would find it off-putting – but in fact younger people thought it was mysterious and exciting.”

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Latin Mass Society Waling Pilgrimage to Walsingham.

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