In a recent discussion on plurk about YALI (Yet Another Liturgical Infraction) someone asked me why I even care about this or that particular issue.   In this particular case the person wasn’t implying the issue wasn’t important, but questioning why I burned energy on something that is very unlikely to change and even if it does in one small place is likely still to be done improperly all over anyway.  The question of liturgy has surrounded me it seems since before I was even Catholic.  Story time … suffer through, if you will – it’s a short one, I promise.

Back when I was in College, still “unchurched” as the old term goes, I borrowed my mother’s Bible – partly to impress my then-girlfriend’s mother, partly out of an inner curiosity as to just what this book had in it that was so important to so many people.  Not knowing what I was doing I read it as any other book, from page 1 forwards.  I didn’t get much past Kings doing it that way before the lineages bogged me down.  In comes the local priest, whose name to this day I do not remember, who told me to read John first (as an aside, I often wonder why anyone would ever recommend the most mystical and multi-layered Gospel as a starter, but there it is).  It is, I think looking back  on it now, no coincidence that one of the first verses I would read was John 2:17:

His disciples recalled the words of scripture, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

Those words have never left me since then, even for a day.  As I moved on in my life and eventually entered the RCIA process and learned of and about the Mass those words took on a new meaning and a new depth of meaning.  The Mass is and always has been a core part of God’s plan for our salvation; Christ, as it is said, is the only person ever born with the express intention of dying – to die on the Cross, to give us that which we could never give ourselves and do so even at the price of His own Blood, to offer us salvation.  And not only salvation of which we are but bystanders, but one in which we actively participate by our very lives, in choosing in each and every action to live in and for Him, something we can only do through the strength offered us in the Eucharist.  How, I came to wonder, could you not be zealous for, and therein protective of, the way in which this great Gift is offered?

There are many things I’ve seen that irk me, some that genuinely bother me, and some that simply infuriate me.  When I read stories like this one from Jimmy Akin it makes me wonder, if we are called to conform our lives as closely as possible to Jesus’ and a very obvious part of that is this zeal the disciples all noticed as mentioned by John, why would I not care?  There is, in the end, nothing we do on this planet more important than the Mass.  Without the impossibly generous plan of salvation of which the Eucharist and therein the Mass is an integral part, nothing else we could do or say would amount to a hill of beans in the end estimation.  It is, as St. Pio said, that “[i]t would be easier for the world to survive without the sun than to do without Holy Mass.“  As I wrote in my comment on Jimmy’s post, Christ died to give us the Mass, martyrs shed their blood to protect it and Holy Mother Church has sheltered it in her bosom for centuries – it is not ours to do with as we please, no matter how wise or well-intentioned we may think we are.

There is, besides those pious observations, another reason.  I would say, for the purpose of picking a reasonably accurate number, probably 80% of your average parish that attends Mass even weekly does not attend any other formational activities.  That means that the great number of even the “committed” Catholics will never learn anything of their faith in their adult life if they do not learn it at Mass.  So if you play with the words, the signs or the symbols of the Mass you necessarily alter what the people learn.  Just as the Deposit of Faith is not ours to reinvent at our pleasure, so is the Mass which passes on that Faith not ours to reinvent.  Christ died for us, he died to give us the Mass – let us treat it as the great treasure it is.

Via NLM:

His Eminence Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, announced this monday his intention to ask the Holy Father, in this Year for Priests, to extend the Feast of Jesus Christ the Eternal High Priest (D.N.J.C. Summi et Æterni Sacerdotis) to the Entire Church (source: Religión Confidencial).

Not bad for a guy who is adamantly not involved in liturgical concerns.  You can’t love the Church and not think long and hard about Her Liturgy.

The Papal MC, Msgr. Guido Marini’s talk on a host of liturgical issues (many thanks to NLM for posting the text) has been making the rounds throughout much of St. Blog’s.  It is a relatively long presentation so it has taken me some time to get through, and I’m pretty sure I’ll need to go through it again to get it all, but I wanted to post here before it got away from me any further.  One thing that struck me:

“My Lord and my God,” we have been taught to say from childhood at the moment of the consecration. In such a way, borrowing the words of the apostle St. Thomas, we are led to adore the Lord, made present and living in the species of the holy Eucharist, uniting ourselves to Him, and recognising Him as our all. From there it becomes possible to resume our daily way, having found the correct order of life, the fundamental criterion whereby to live and to die.

Here is the reason why everything in the liturgical act, through the nobility, the beauty, and the harmony of the exterior sign, must be condusive to adoration, to union with God: this includes the music, the singing, the periods of silence, the manner of proclaiming the Word of the Lord, and the manner of praying, the gestures employed, the liturgical vestments and the sacred vessels and other furnishings, as well as the sacred edifice in its entirety. It is under this perspective that the decision of his Holiness, Benedict XVI, is to be taken into consideration, who, starting from the feast of Corpus Christi last year, has begun to distribute holy Communion to the kneeling faithful directly on the tongue. By the example of this action, the Holy Father invites us to render visible the proper attitude of adoration before the greatness of the mystery of the Eucharistic presence of our Lord. An attitude of adoration which must be fostered all the more when approaching the most holy Eucharist in the other forms permitted today.

Read the whole thing, there is a lot more where that came from.  There is so much damage to recover from in so many areas, but the Pope has already begun the great work.  Some day, perhaps, we will talk of this indeed as his Great Work.

Thanks to the much-maligned decision to transfer the celebration of the Solemnity of the Epiphany to a Sunday many people don’t realize that today, Jan. 6 is the actual date of the great feast.  Then again, many people don’t even realize that it is indeed the Christmas season, so there’s plenty of re-education to go around.  All that crotchety-ness aside, I thought a quote from Dom Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year would be in order:

The Magi, the first-fruits of the Gentile world, have been admitted into the court of the great King whom they have been seeking, and we have followed them.  The Child has smiled upon us, as he did upon them.  All the fatigues of the long journey which man must take to reach his God – all are over and forgotten; our Emmanuel is with us, and we are with him.  Bethlehem has received us, and we will not leave her again:  for in Bethlehem we have the Child and Mary his Mother.  Where else could we find riches like these that Bethlehem gives us?  Oh! let us beseech this incomparable Mother to give us this Child of hers, for he is our light, and our love, and our Bread of life, now that we are about to approach the Altar, led by the Star of our faith.  Let us at once open our treasures; let us prepare our gold, our frankincense, and our myrrh, for the sweet Babe, our King.  He will be pleased with our gifts, and we know he never suffers himself to be outdone in generosity.  When we have to return to our duties, we will, like the Magi, leave our hearts with our Jesus; and it shall be by another way, by a new manner of life, that we will finish our sojourn in this country of our exile, looking forward to that hapy day when life and light eternal will come and absorb into themselves the shadows of vanity and time which now hang over us.

…as if Fr. Z needed any help driving traffic to his blog.

In an effort to get my new blogging string off to a roaring start, I thought I’d pull a draft from the archives that I didn’t quite have the guts to finish blogging before.  In all the discussions I’ve had with people from the many corners of the Catholic faith I’ve found that not even the issue of denying the Eucharist to pro-abortion politicians invokes the level of emotion one finds in a discussion about … liturgical music.

I have to admit that I don’t yet know why this is so but it seems there is some sort of innate personal identification between music and belief.  I think there are two aspects which form this identification: 1) the ages old maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (or, the law of prayer is the law of faith) ; and 2) an innate understanding that liturgical music is a part of the Mass, not added to it – that it flows from the faith expressed in the Mass and is a part of it.

But that’s not what I’m here for with this post.  I’m here to cause a little trouble with a quote from then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, a work I’d say is a must-read for anyone interested in discussing the Catholic liturgy in the modern day.  Why cause trouble?  Because he displays the question of music in the liturgy in this quote in a way that opens the discussion on both sides of the new music / traditional music divide with equal parts gratitude and remorse for those who would hold to either.  In just this short paragraph he gives everyone a great deal to think about and an opportunity to reassess old positions.  And people wonder why I’m so impressed with this Pope…  Here’s what he had to say:

As the Church was uprooted from her Semitic soil and moved into the Greek world, a spontaneous and far-reaching fusion took place with Greek logos mysticism, with its poetry and music, that eventually threatened to dissolve Christianity into a generalized mysticism. It was precisely hymns and their music that provided the point of entry for Gnosticism, that deadly temptation which began to subvert Christianity from within. And so it is understandable that, in their struggle for the identity of the faith and its rooting in the historical figure of Jesus Christ, the Church authorities resorted to a radical decision. The fifty-ninth canon of the Council of Laodicea forbids the use of privately composed psalms and non-canonical writings in divine worship. The fifteenth canon restricts the singing of psalms to the choir of psalm-singers, while “other people in church should not sing.” That is how post-biblical hymns were almost entirely lost. There was a rigorous return to the restrained, purely vocal style of singing taken over from the synagogue. We may regret the cultural impoverishment this entailed, but it was necessary for the sake of a greater good. A return to apparent cultural poverty saved the identity of biblical faith, and the very rejection of false inculturation opened up the cultural breadth of Christianity for the future.

So now, I ask you, what does it say to you?  I find great challenge for those on both sides of the debate in this writing, but I’m curious if I’m alone.  Don’t let the combox grow cobwebs…

The Triduum is upon us, having started yesterday with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.  Walk into a church now and you will find it starkly empty – a reminder that the life of a church comes through the Lord in the Eucharist and not through anything we can do.  Today we will venerate the Cross upon which our Savior hung, winning us our Salvation.  Finally, tomorrow the Easter fire will pierce the darkness, the Paschal Candle will be held aloft and Deacons and Priests throughout the world will proclaim “Christ our Light!”.  We will welcome new members into the Church and there will be, should God so will it, goosebumps all around.

I wanted to point you to some far greater posts on the Triduum from the Dominican Friars at Godzdogz.  You can find their post on Maundy Thursday here, and their post on Good Friday here.  They are, in the good Dominican tradition, excellent reflections.  Should they publish a reflection on the Easter Vigil, which I’m quite sure they will, I shall try to be sure to link to that one as well.

May your Triduum be blessed and draw you ever deeper into the mystery of God and His love for us!

There are a few priests around St. Blog’s that I think would be quite worthy of receiving the mitre and crosier some day, even though I wouldn’t necessarily wish that much stress on anyone.  Fr. Fox at Bonfire of the Vanities is one of them, and his homily this past Sunday shows, in part, why.  A couple of snips to whet your whistle:

To me, it suggests that true worship,
the way we really are supposed to worship,
is not something that comes from us, to God—
but it is God who tells us how to do it, and we respond.

In other words, we don’t create worship;
we learn how to do it, from the Lord.

…

Remember, when God’ People arrived at Mt. Sinai,
they did not form a liturgy committee
and to plan how they would worship God.
God already had a plan for them—
which he gave to Moses, on top of the mountain.

Well, let me correct myself.
While Moses was up the mountain,
they did form a committee.
And the result was the golden calf.

Now I’m quite sure that it’s impolite to say it, but that last part had me roaring in laughter.  Not necessarily because it was intended as a joke, but because it’s so very, very accurate.  When we try to create our own form of worship we wind up worshiping either ourselves or some dead non-God.  “Save the liturgy, save the world” is more than just a battle cry for embittered rad trads.

Last year during one of our RCIA sessions on the Liturgy the question was asked, “if this is the Latin rite, why is the ‘Kyrie’ still in Greek?”  Stumped, we all were.  Some fidgeting about how “Amen” is Hebrew and thus even the Latin Rite was never entirely in Latin ensued.  But why, when the Church transitioned from Greek to Latin this part remained, well, who knows?  The Catholic Encyclopedia from New Advent gives some help:

Its introduction into the Roman Mass has been much discussed. It is certain that the liturgy at the Rome was at one time said in Greek (to the end of the second century apparently). It is tempting to look upon our Kyrie Eleison as a surviving fragment from that time. Such, however, does not seem to be the case. Rather the form was borrowed from the East and introduced into the Latin Mass later. [...] The first evidence of its use in the West is in the third canon of the Second Council of Vaison (Vasio in the province of Arles), in 529. From this canon it appears that the form was recently introduced at Rome and in Italy (Milan?): “Since both in the Apostolic See as also in all the provinces of the East and in Italy a sweet and most pious custom has been introduced that Kyrie Eleison be said with great insistence and compunction, it seems good to us too that this holy custom be introduced at Matins and Mass and Vespers” (cf. Hefele-Leclercq, “Histoires des Conciles”, Paris, 1908, pp. 1113-1114; Duchesne, “Origines”, p. 183). The council says nothing of Africa or Spain, though it mentions Africa in other canons about liturgical practices (Can. v). It appears to mean that Kyrie Eleison should be sung by the people cum grandi affectu.

…

We may suppose, then, that at one time the Roman Mass began (after the Introit) with a litany of general petitions very much of the nature of the third part of our Litany of the Saints. This would correspond exactly to our great Synapte in the Syrian Rite. Only, from what has been said, we conclude that the answer of the people was in Latin — the “Miserere Domine” of Etheria, or “te rogamus, audi nos”, or some such form. About the fifth century the Greek Kyrie Eleison was adopted by the West, and at Rome with the alternative form Christe Eleison. This was then sung, not as in the East only by the people, but alternately by cantors and people. It displaced the older Latin exclamations at this place and eventually remained alone as the only remnant of the old litany.

So … we don’t have exactly a specific answer, but at the end it looks to say that at one point it was said in Latin in the Western Church, but by the fifth century was nearly universally in Greek.  That’s the history.  The why, well, I’m still working on that.  I’m going to drop the folks at NLM a line and see if they have any ideas.