Just A Week Before Lent

Just a week before Lent and The National Catholic Register has posted my latest blog, in which I discuss Muriel Spark's Memento Mori and St. Thomas More in the Tower:

Muriel Spark was a convert to Catholicism from Scottish Presbyterianism and started writing novels after joining the Church. Her most famous novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, made into an award-winning movie in 1969. (Remember “Jean” sung by Rod McKuen?) Memento Mori, however, was Spark’s first great success as a novelist.

The characters in the novel, all in their seventies, begin to receive phone calls with the brief message: “Remember you must die”. Memento Mori. They each respond to this statement differently: with fear, anger, resignation, even acceptance. The plot of the novel is the investigation into who is making the calls; the theme of the novel is old age and death. Dame Lettie Colston reacts with increasing paranoia, disconnecting her phone and secluding herself in her home. She rejects the advice of a Catholic convert, Jean Taylor, who is confined to her bed in a nursing home: "It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die," she says. "It is best to form the habit while young." Through the depiction of several characters in her novel, Sparks makes clear that the virtues and vices of youth stay with us as we age. We don’t become angels just because we get older; we have to work at becoming saints through God’s grace at every age.

And St. Thomas More in the Tower:

Just a few years ago, I began to study St. Thomas More’s “Tower Works”, especially the spiritual treatises and meditations he wrote about Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden (The Sadness of Christ) and His Passion and Death. Thomas More had been forced into his retirement home: the Tower of London. He knew that he would never leave the Tower alive. He had always prepared for a happy and holy death by trying to live a happy and holy life.

As Thomas Cromwell and others tried to convince him to take the Oath that Henry VIII demanded after he broke away from the universal Catholic Church and the Vicar of Christ, they also tried to get him to say why he would not take the oath. He protested that he was beyond that now: “I had fully determined with myself, neither to study nor to meddle with any matter of this world, but that my whole study should be upon the passion of Christ and mine own passage out of this world.” When they reminded him that his monarch had the power of life and death over him, More replied: “And I am dying already, and have since I came here, been divers times in the case that I thought to die within one hour, and I thank our Lord I was never sorry for it, but rather sorry when I saw the pang passed. And therefore my poor body is at the King’s pleasure, would God my death might do him good.”

Please read the rest there and share if you like! It's gratifying to a writer to see the number of shares one of the blog posts get!

And if you missed the Register Radio episode during which I talked about "Septuagesima, Shrovetide, and Pancakes", it's available here.

EWTN's Register Radio

I recorded an interview with Jeanette DeMelo and Matthew Bunson for EWTN's Register Radio yesterday which will air this weekend on EWTN Radio (Saturday at 6:00 p.m. Central and Sunday at 10:00 a.m. Central)--and will also be linked on the National Catholic Register home page.

We discussed my latest blog post for the Register: "Septuagesima, Shrovetide, and Pancakes":

The Super Bowl is over and the next great commercial social event is St. Valentine’s Day, but Easter candy is already sharing shelf space with Valentine’s candy in our stories. We are in a transitional time in our liturgical year too. Last Christmas seems a long time ago.

Before the reform of the liturgical calendar in late 1960’s, there was a name for this transitional time: Septuagesima. For three Sundays, the Church adopted a pre-Lenten period and in parishes where the Extraordinary Form is celebrated today, those Sundays are observed. The priest wears violet vestments, the Gloria is omitted, and the Tract replaces the Alleluia before the Gospel. The loss of the Alleluia, as the liturgical scholar Dom Gueranger explains, reminds us of our situation: “During the rest of the year [the Church] loves to hear us chant the song of heaven, the sweet Alleluia; but now, she bids us close our lips to this word of joy, because we are in Babylon . . . We are sinners, and have but too often held fellowship with the world of God's enemies; let us become purified by repentance . . .”

I like the image the Register chose for the post: Pieter Aertsen's "The Pancake Bakery" which depicts a family preparing Shrovetide pancakes for sale. According to the Rijkmuseum:

Although Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575), known as ‘Lange Pier’, came from Amsterdam, he lived in Antwerp for many years. After he returned in 1556, various Amsterdam churches, his principal patrons, commissioned Aertsen to make large altarpieces. Soon, however, he abandoned religious art and started to paint scenes from peasant life. He was known above all for his paintings of market scenes and kitchen tableaux, which contained an abundance of fruit, fish, poultry, cheese, bread and much besides. His younger cousin and pupil Joachim Bueckelaer also painted in the same genre and developed it further.

The Wikipedia article on this artist, however, provides greater context to his career:

Later in life, he also painted more conventional treatments of religious subjects, now mostly lost as during the iconoclasm of the beeldenstorm several paintings that had been commissioned for Catholic churches were destroyed. Several of his best works, including altarpieces in various churches in Amsterdam, were also destroyed during the days surrounding the event known as the Alteratie, or "Changeover", when Amsterdam formally reverted to Protestantism from Catholicism on 26 May 1578 at the start of the Eighty Years' War. One surviving religious work is the Crucifixion in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Aertsen was a member of Antwerp's equivalent of the Accademia di San Luca. In the official books of the Academy he is known as "Langhe Peter, schilder" (Tall Peter, painter). His sons Pieter, Aert, and Dirk became acclaimed painters, and other notable pupils trained in his workshop included Stradanus and Aertsen's nephew, Joachim Beuckelaer, who continued to develop Aertsen's formula.

Aersten's exact formula of still life and genre figures in the foreground, with small scenes from history painting in the background only persisted for the next generation (or two, as Joachim Wtewael painted some similar works), but history paintings with very prominent and profuse still life elements in the foreground were produced by Rubens and his generation, and in the 17th century both Flemish Baroque painting and Dutch Golden Age painting developed important genres of independent still life subjects, which were just occasionally produced in Aertsen's day.

Music for the Septuagesima Season

In the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite, we are in the midst of the pre-Lenten season of Septuagesima and thus I've started listening again to this CD of Spanish Choral Music. Matthew Shorter reviewed it for BBC Music in 2002:

If most British listeners have an image at all of Spanish choral music, it will be of Renaissance masters such as Victoria and Lobo, who brought a special fervour to the seamless 16th-century contrapuntal style.

So neglected is 19th-century Spanish choral music that the majority of recordings on this disc, recently selected by Gramophone as a Critics' Choice CD of the year, are world premières. The Coro Cervantes - Britain's only professional group devoted to Hispanic classical repertoire - and their director Carlos Fernández Aransay are clearly on a mission of discovery and recovery. Their zeal shines forth in these performances, whose passion is balanced by finely-nuanced direction and precise ensemble.

The excitement of discovery is especially palpable in the first four tracks of the disc, which in their awestruck polyphony capture something of the spirit and technique of the Renaissance greats, from the numinous opening of Albéniz's a capella psalm setting to Vicente Goioechea's impassioned Christus Factus est, via some splendid organ fanfares in Granados' Salve Regina and a perfect minute-long sliver of a motet by Falla.

One reason that this music is so little known is that, as Shorter notes, it is from "a period in which Spanish church music seems to have been under attack from all sides, as first Napoleonic invaders and later the Spanish government itself seized church assets, closed music chapels and finally banned lay musicians from performing in churches."

You can hear some samples here. The revival of sacred choral music in Spain came through Pope St. Pius X's moto proprio on sacred music, Tra le Sollecitudini.

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!

Septuagesima: Easing Into Lent

I have been reading through many of Blessed John Henry Newman's Lenten Sermons for my Cardinal Newman Lecture at Newman University on Ash Wednesday, February 18. This sermon is for Septuagesima Sunday, and in it, Newman balances the real need for self-denial and even sorrow in the world with the joy and gratitude we should always feel for God's great blessings:

Gloom is no Christian temper; that repentance is not real, which has not love in it; that self-chastisement is not acceptable, which is not sweetened by faith and cheerfulness. We must live in sunshine, even when we sorrow; we must live in God's presence, we must not shut ourselves up in our own hearts, even when we are reckoning up our past sins.

These thoughts are suitable on this day, when we first catch a sight, as it were, of the Forty Days of Lent. If God then gives us grace to repent, it is well; if He enables us to chasten heart and body, to Him be praise; and for that very reason, while we do so, we must not cease rejoicing in Him. All through Lent we must rejoice, while we afflict ourselves. Though "many be called, but few chosen;" though all run in the race, but "one receiveth the prize;" though we must "so run that we may obtain;" though we must be "temperate in all things," and "keep under our body and bring it into subjection, lest we be castaways;" yet through God alone we can do this; and while He is with us, we cannot but be joyful; for His absence only is a cause for sorrow. The Three Holy Children are said to have stood up in the midst of the fire, and to have called on all the works of God to rejoice with them; on sun and moon, stars of heaven, nights and days, showers and dew, frost and cold, lightnings and clouds, mountains and hills, green things upon the earth, seas and floods, fowls of the air, beasts and cattle, and children of men,—to praise and bless the Lord, and magnify Him for ever. We have no such trial as theirs; we have no such awful suspense as theirs, when they entered the burning fiery {272} furnace; we attempt for the most part what we know; we begin what we think we can go through. We can neither instance their faith nor equal their rejoicing; yet we can imitate them so far, as to look abroad into this fair world, which God made "very good," while we mourn over the evil which Adam brought into it; to hold communion with what we see there, while we seek Him who is invisible; to admire it, while we abstain from it; to acknowledge God's love, while we deprecate His wrath; to confess that, many as are our sins, His grace is greater. Our sins are more in number than the hairs of our head; yet even the hairs of our head are all numbered by Him. He counts our sins, and, as He counts, so can He forgive; for that reckoning, great though it be, comes to an end; but His mercies fail not, and His Son's merits are infinite.

Let us, then, on this day, dwell upon a thought, which it will be a duty to carry with us through Lent, the thought of the blessings and mercies of which our present life is made up. St. Paul said that he had all, and abounded, and was full; and this, in a day of persecution. Surely, if we have but religious hearts and eyes, we too must confess that our daily and hourly blessings in this life are not less than his.

Newman then outlines five blessings: 1) the gift of life; 2) the gift of sleep; 3) the blessings of Christian brotherhood; 4) the present peace of the Church, and 5) the privileges of daily worship and weekly Communion. Read the rest here!

Confessing and Feasting in Shrovetide

As I mentioned yesterday, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show to talk with Matt Swaim about Shrovetide and its aspects of confessing and feasting: the spiritual and practical preparations for Lent. You may listen live here on the EWTN Radio network.

Here is a good source for a description of this season:

Shrove Tuesday is the last day of what traditionally was called "Shrovetide," the week preceding the beginning of Lent. The word itself, Shrovetide, is the English equivalent for "Carnival," which is derived from the Latin words carnem levare, meaning "to take away the flesh." (Note that in Germany, this period is called "Fasching," and in parts of the United States, particularly Louisiana, "Mardi Gras.") While this was seen as the last chance for merriment, and, unfortunately in some places, has resulted in excessive pleasure, Shrovetide was the time to cast off things of the flesh and to prepare spiritually for Lent.     

Actually, the English term provides the best meaning for this period. "To shrive" meant to hear confessions. In the Anglo-Saxon "Ecclesiastical Institutes," recorded by Theodulphus and translated by Abbot Aelfric about AD 1000, Shrovetide was described--w as follows: "In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him as he then may hear by his deeds what he is to do in the way of penance." To highlight the point and motivate the people, special plays or masques were performed which portrayed the passion of our Lord or final judgment. Clearly, this Shrovetide preparation for Lent included the confessing of sin and the reception of absolution; as such, Lent then would become a time for penance and renewal of faith.     

While this week of Shrovetide condoned the partaking of pleasures from which a person would abstain during Lent, Shrove Tuesday had a special significance in England. Pancakes were prepared and enjoyed, because in so doing a family depleted their eggs, milk, butter, and fat which were part of the Lenten fast. At this time, some areas of the Church abstained from all forms of meat and animal products, while others made exceptions for food like fish. For example, Pope St. Gregory (d. 604), writing to St. Augustine of Canterbury, issued the following rule: "We abstain from flesh, meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, and eggs." These were the fasting rules governing the Church in England; hence, the eating of pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.

The Latin term for this pre-Lenten period is Septuagesima (roughly seventy days before Easter). The short liturgical season of Septuagesima is still observed on the Liturgical Calendar for the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite (and is also observed in the Anglican Use for the Personal Ordinariates). For the past three Sundays, our priests at St. Anthony of Padua's Extraordinary Form community have worth purple vestments; we have not sung either the Gloria or the Alleluia. It's a time to prepare for Lent as Lent helps us prepare for Holy Week and Easter.

As Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicted in The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (above), we can get carried away with the possible excesses of Carnival/Fasching/Shrovetide/Mardi Gras--we don't want to incur sins of gluttony just before the season of penitence and repentance!! Shrovetide seems to achieve the right balance: spiritually preparing for Lent with confession of sins and penance while practically getting ready for fasting and abstinence by using up what you won't be using any more from Ash Wednesday to Easter!

As they say before the great Pancake Races in Olney, England and Liberal, Kansas: On your mark, get set, GO!

Shrovetide on Monday's Son Rise Morning Show

This is just a preview of a coming event: tomorrow I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central to discuss Shrovetide with Matt Swaim. We'll talk about the spiritual and practical aspects of Shrovetide, the meaning of the word, pancakes, and the International Pancake Day Race competition between Olney in England and Liberal, Kansas!

You can listen live here.

The Green Season: Ordinary Time

Soon after my piece on Time in the Liturgy appeared on PraytheMass.org, the site administrator put out a call to the regular contributors for an article about Ordinary Time, and I volunteered, making up for skipping a December contribution, I think:

On September 2, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass in Loreto with 300,000 young people in the congregation. He spoke about our stewardship of creation. Unfortunately, the mainstream media thought his homily was all about environmentalism and one writer thought the pope had chosen his vestments to fit with the “Green” theme. The journalist did not know that Pope Benedict XVI was celebrating Mass during Ordinary Time and that green is the liturgical color of Ordinary Time. To avoid errors like that journalist committed, let’s look more closely at Ordinary Time on the Church calendar.
 

The term “Ordinary Time” is the English translation of the Latin name for this season on the Roman Calendar: Tempus per annum (literally “time through the year”). There are two periods of Ordinary Time through the year: the first (and shorter) begins Monday after the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord (which is the end of the Christmas season) and ends on Tuesday before Ash Wednesday  (the beginning of Lent); the second begins Monday after Pentecost (which is the end of the Easter season) and ends on the Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent. These two periods of Ordinary Time are designated by naming the Sundays of Ordinary Time numerically (the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, etc), although there are Sunday Feasts during Ordinary Time: Corpus Christi (moved in most dioceses in the United States to Sunday from Thursday), Trinity Sunday, and Christ the King, for example. Note that there is no First Sunday of Ordinary Time, since the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord preempts it. Most years, there are 33 weeks of Ordinary Time through the year. The term “Ordinary” could indeed refer to the ordinal numbering of the weeks of Ordinary Time.

 

Please read the rest here. This is my 13th submission to PraytheMass.org! Lucky #13!

Pre-Lent Liturgical Time: Septuagesima

I look forward to receiving my Pre-Lent Supplement from Laudamus Te which

will contain morning/evening prayers, meditations, and feast propers for Septuagesima Sunday, January 27, through the Feast of the Seven Servite Fathers, February 12.

This is pre-Lenten period known as Septuagesima (seventy)--part of the liturgical year in the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite which was replaced by Ordinary Time after the reform of the liturgy in the 1960's and 1970's. Septuagesima begins the fast before Lent: we fast from the Alleluia and the Gloria, and begin voluntary fasting.

The Sundays of Septuagesima are: Septuagesima, and Sexagesima, Quinquagesima and the traditional name for the first Sunday of Lent is Quadragesima. They all mark the time before Easter: 70 days, 60 days, 50 days, 40 days. More about Septuagesima here.

The period before Lent included feasting as well as fasting: in earlier times, Catholics used up all the meat, cheese, and other meat products before Ash Wednesday: Carnival (farewell meat!). And that period ended with Shrovetide in the final days before Ash Wednesday, finishing up the last of the meat and going to Confession just before Lent began. In Kansas, we have an interesting commemoration of Shrovetide with the annual Pancake Race in Liberal, Kansas, held in conjunction with a race in Olney, England. (Making pancakes is a good way to use up grease!) The race recalls an event in the 15th century:

In Olney, the Pancake Race tradition dates back more than 500 years to 1445. A woman engrossed in using up cooking fats (forbidden during Lent) was making pancakes. Hearing the church bells ring calling everyone to the shriving service, she grabbed her head scarf (required in church) and ran to the church, skillet and pancake in hand and still apron-clad. In following years, neighbors got into the act and it became a race to see who could reach the church first and collect a "Kiss of Peace" from the verger (bell-ringer.) The kiss is still the traditional prize in both races.