Sarum Rite Holy Thursday: The Stripping of the Altars

As this blogger notes, the Sarum Use celebration of Holy Thursday is more solemn than the Latin Rite. As the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite remembers the institution of the sacraments of Holy Communion and Holy Orders, the priest wears white vestments; the Gloria is sung; bells ring, and the Altar is quietly stripped after the Blessed Sacrament has being processed to the Altar of Repose. An air of solemnity sets in with that procession and the chanting of St. Thomas Aquinas's Eucharistic hymn, Pange, lingua and we try to meet Jesus's challenge in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Could you not watch one hour with me?"

The Sarum Use Holy Thursday omits the Gloria, uses Red vestments (as on Palm Sunday and Good Friday), and the Altar is ceremoniously and significantly stripped in preparation for Good Friday, as this post describes.

• When the Altar is stripped, that symbolizes the stripping of Jesus at Calvary before He is nailed to the cross.

• When the Altar is washed with wine and water, that symbolizes the blood and water that poured from His wounded side, representing Baptism and Holy Communion.

• When the Altar is scrubbed with a brush, that symbolizes the scourging at the Pillar. 

More about the Sarum Use here.

A friend of mine posted on his Facebook page that his students were having trouble understanding or relating to Josef Pieper's theories of the relationship between religious ritual and leisure. They are Catholic high school students, but they have been secularized to degree that they don't see the connections between the great public work of the Church and their private lives. Sadly, I think the post-modern Catholic Church liturgy--not because of the Holy Thursday rites at all, which I think are wonderful--has contributed to this problem. The suppression of the prayers of Tenebrae, for example, stripped Holy Week of some of its mystery, not to mention the great cultural riches of musical settings of Jeremiah's Lamentations. Note that many Mainline Protestant churches celebrate Tenebrae, because they recognize the conflict between good and evil during Holy Week, and that we all participate in that conflict and live it everyday. When we remember the Passion and Death of Jesus, we should experience darkness and silence in the liturgy.

Father James V. Schall, SJ, identified the issue in his Foreword to the Ignatius Press edition of Leisure: The Basis of Culture:

When a culture is in the process of denying its own roots, it becomes most important to know what these roots are. We had best know what we reject before we reject it. If we are going to build a chair, the first thing we need to know, above all else, is what a chair is. Otherwise, we can do nothing. We are not a culture that never understood what a human being was in his nature and in his destiny.

Rather we are a culture that, having once known these things, has decided against living them or understanding them. Indeed, we have decided to reject most of them, almost as an act of defiance—as an act of pure humanism—as if what we are is not first given to us. We have let an empty future that we propose to make by our own standards become the ideal over and against a real past that revealed to us what man really was and is: namely, a being open to wonder who did not create himself or the world in which he dwells.

During Holy Week, being "a being open to wonder who did not create himself or the world in which he dwells' also means being a being open to wonder who did not redeem himself and whose suffering and striving only has meaning because of Jesus, who suffered for us, died for us, and rose for us. Something indeed to wonder about through prayer and meditation--which require leisure and time and attention.

What Catholics Lost Because of the English Reformation

I think that Devin Rose expresses these thoughts very well, after attending an Anglican Use Mass:

The Order of the Mass for the Anglican Ordinariate is what the English Mass should be: traditional, yet in the vernacular; accessible, yet reverent.

We’ve been to the Extraordinary Form (Latin) multiple times, and of course to the normal Ordinary Form (English) thousands of times, and the Ordinariate Mass captures the best of each Form in its own unique style.

What We Lost As English Catholics

In studying for many years the history of the Protestant Reformation, I have slowly realized the devastating loss that we as English-speaking Catholics have suffered due to King Henry VIII and the Anglican Protestant usurpation of Catholic England.

I know that sounds extreme, but it is the candid truth.

We should have had five hundred years of English Catholic music, culture, and life, but instead Catholics were hunted down and killed and the Church went underground there for a long time.

So Pope Emeritus Benedict showed great wisdom and brilliance in establishing the Anglican Ordinariate. He realized what we had lost, and he saw a way to retrieve some part of it, all while building a bridge to Anglicans (including Episcopalians) who have grown appalled at the fall of the Anglican Communion into unsalvagable heterodoxy.

He established the Ordinariate to include a reverent Mass, in English, of the Roman Rite, that also includes aspects of authentic Anglican patrimony. The result is a breath of fresh air: the accessibility of our English language with the reverence and tradition of the Extraordinary Form.

The only comment I would make is that Catholics in nineteenth century England, most of them converts from the Church of England, did work hard to revive the Catholic spirit of English literature through good translations of Latin hymns and prayers, and good original poems and hymn lyrics. I'm thinking of Blessed John Henry Newman, Father Frederick Faber, Father Edward Caswall--three Oratorians, and I'm sure there were others. Like Father Frederick Oakeley, who started out with Newman's community but then followed Cardinal Wiseman to Westminster. T.E. Muir describes this period in his book from Ashgate: Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791–1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? Perhaps here in the USA we did not receive the benefits of this revival, partially because of--as I have read and written about before--the Irish influence here. 

Read the rest there.

I wish that Pope Benedict XVI would have been able to live out the normal course of his pontificate instead of having to cut it short because he could not fulfill his obligations. His program of renewing the liturgy, saving it from banality and reviving the sense of reverence and mystery was developing in the Extraordinary Form, the Ordinary Form (new English translation, the "Benedictine" Altar arrangement, return to the use of the Propers of the Mass instead of hymns and songs), and the Anglican Use. What might have been: what might still be.

Suppressing Septuagesima--Surprised by Lent?

As I have been preparing for my Cardinal Newman Day talk next Wednesday (Ash Wednesday) and reading Blessed John Henry Newman's sermons for Lent and Septuagesima, we've been attending Sunday Mass at St. Anthony of Padua with a mixture of liturgical seasons in evidence. In the Extraordinary Form we've celebrated Septuagesima and Sexagesima so far, the first two Sundays of the transition season from Epiphany to Lent. The priest wears purple vestments--we do not sing the Gloria or the Alleluia or any hymns--but the church is still filled with Christmas poinsettias and the Infant of Prague statue in the side chapel is wearing green since in the Ordinary Form it's Ordinary Time. The purple vestments and humeral veil do look beautiful against the background of red poinsettias!

As Amy Welborn notes on her blog, the suppression of the Septuagesima season after the Second Vatican Council was unfortunate for many reasons, including ecumenical ones--after all, the Church of England observes it, some high church Lutherans observe it, and Eastern Rite Catholics observe a pre-Lenten season too. Within the Roman Rite, the Anglican Use of the Ordinariate (thus the poster from St. Luke's Ordinariate in Washington, DC) and the Extraordinary Form still observe Septuagesima.

Welborn links an article explaining the development and purpose of Septuagesima and why it was suppressed--Welborn summarizes the latter: "As usual, it was determined that all this was too hard for us."

The intuition of faith that gave rise to the season of Septuagesima, then, is a recognition of the goodness, or even the necessity, of preparing oneself mentally, physically, and spiritually for the ascesis of Lent. The same recognition expresses itself in the Eastern practice of observing the Sundays of Meatfare and Cheesefare on the second and first Sundays, respectively, that precede the last Sunday before Lent. From Meatfare Sunday the faithful lay aside all flesh foods until the Pasch. From Cheesefare Sunday the faithful abstain from animal products such as eggs, milk, yogurt, butter, and cheese.

Meatfare and Cheesefare Sunday are practiced and well understood in Eastern Rite Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities, but the committee reviewing Septuagesima thought it was too hard for Western Roman Rite Catholics:

"The penitential character of the time of Septuagesima or pre-Lent (the suppression of the Gloria and Alleluia, the color violet) is difficult for the faithful to understand without many explanations. At present the exterior signs of a penitential season are used as in Lent, but are not retained for the sake of particular penance as in Lent. According to the mind of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the arrangement of the liturgical year may become clearer through the suppression of the penitential character of this season. As it pertains to the names Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima: because these names are also used by some of our separated brethren, it is necessary to proceed cautiously in this matter and to promote conversations on this matter as on others."

If you go to Welborn's blog post she gives examples of easily understood catechesis for 7th graders on Septuagesima's preparation for Lent. 

I'll be citing Parochial and Plain Sermons by Newman from all three Sundays next Wednesday and really look forward to saying their names: Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and QUINQUAGESIMA!

Christ the King

Today is the Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe in the Ordinary Form; it is also the last Sunday of Ordinary Time--Advent begins next Sunday. In the Extraordinary Form we celebrated the Solemnity of Christ the King on the last Sunday of October, before the Solemnity of All Saints. The New Liturgical Movement site posted a link to an explanation of the different purposes of the different timings of this great solemnity--as originally intended by Pope Pius XI in 1925 and as intended after the Second Vatican Council:

Pius XI’s intention, as can be gleaned from n. 29 [of the Encyclical Letter Quas Primas, which proclaimed the feast], is to emphasize the glory of Christ as terminus of His earthly mission,a glory and mission visible and perpetuated in history by the saints. Hence the feast falls shortly before the Feast of All Saints, to emphasize that what Christ inaugurated in His own person before ascending in glory, the saints then instantiate and carry further in human society, culture, and nations. It is a feast primarily about celebrating Christ’s ongoing kingship over all reality, including this present world, where the Church must fight for the recognition of His rights, the actual extension of His dominion to all domains, individual and social.

Indeed, there's also the obvious fact, unmentioned in Quas Primas but surely in everyone's mind, that the last Sunday in October had, for centuries, been celebrated as Reformation Sunday. A Catholic counter-feast, reminding the world not only of the comprehensive Kingship of Jesus Christ—so often denied socially and culturally by various teachings of Protestantism—but also of the worldwide kingly authority of His Church, would certainly be a reasonable application of the principle lex orandi, lex credendi.

In the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council, its place was changed to the last Sunday of the Church year—that is, so that one week later would fall the first Sunday of Advent. This new position emphasizes rather the eschatological dimension of Christ’s kingship: the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, though begun in time, is here present “as in a mystery” (as Lumen Gentium phrases it) and in a “crucified” way. This Kingdom will be perfected and fully manifested only at the end of time, with the Second Coming. Hence in the new calendar the feast comes at the very end of the Church’s year, as the summation of the whole of salvation history and the symbol of what we hope for:expectantes … adventum salvatoris nostri Jesu Christi, as the liturgy in the Ordinary Form proclaims after the Lord’s Prayer.

Read the rest here.