Dominica Prima Adventus at the Cathedral in Wichita

Bishop Carl Kemme offered the 10:00 a.m. Mass for the First Sunday of Advent at our Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the Novus Ordo in Latin and Ad Orientem. In fact, the Cathedral will offer most of the Masses during Advent Ad Orientem and provided a pamphlet to explain why. The rector of the Cathedral also made some comments before the dismissal on the use of Latin and Ad Orientem throughout this shortest of Advents: three weeks and day.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent is December 24, so Christmas Eve Masses will be held that night! I guess it's really three weeks and half a day!

We still had the four hymn structure--no Introit or Offertory verses, but we sang Veni, Veni Emmanuel during the Processional and Creator Alme Siderum for the Recessional. The choir sang Jesu Dulcis Memoria during the Offertory and invited us to sing along with O Esca Viatorum at Communion.

O Esca Viatorum has been attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, but since no publication of it is known before the mid to late seventeenth century in Germany, it was more likely composed by anonymous "German Jesuit" as this source notes. It has been translated often, but one translation that pops up is by Athelstan Riley.

Riley (full name John Athelstan Laurie Riley) was born on August 10, 1858 in Bayswater, London and died on November 17, 1945, in Jersey on the Channel Islands:

Riley graduated from Eton and from Pembroke College, Oxford (BA 1881, MA 1883). He helped edit The English Hymnal in 1906, and the revision of the Prayer Book in 1911. For much of his life he was a member of the House of Laity for the Province of Canterbury. At some point he acquired the Manoir de la Trinité in Jersey, and thus became Seigneur of the Island of Jersey. He was on the island when the Germans invaded in World War II, and spent the rest of his life there. Riley’s works include:

• Athos, or the Mountain of the Monks, 1887
• The Religious Question in Public Education, 1911
• Concerning Hymn Tunes and Sequences (London: A. R. Mowbray & Company, Ltd., 1915)

The most common tune for the translation is Innsbruck by Heinrich Isaac with harmonization by J.S. Bach. I don't know what tune the choir sang on Sunday.

Note that when I went to the evening Mass at Blessed Sacrament with my husband, that Mass was offered Ad Orientem as is the custom and one of our Parochial Vicars reviewed the use of Latin for the Ordinary before Mass began. One of the sopranos in the Schola sang the Alma Redemptoris Mater antiphon after Holy Communion. Driving home we had a beautiful view of the Super Moon!

Deo Gratias!