The arbitrary changes in
the liturgical calendar
Feasts of many worthy saints are
often displaced or moved to and fro
28 June 2017
Today, in the Roman Rite, is traditionally the Vigil of the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul.
Before the changes initiated under Pius XII began, St Irenaeus had been put onto this day. So, in the admirable ORDO published by the Saint Lawrence Press (giving the Roman Rite as it was circa 1939), Mass today is of that Saint, with commemorations of two octaves and of the Vigil. Or ad libitum, it is of the Vigil, with commemorations of the Saint and of the octaves.
In 1962, St Irenaeus was moved to July 3 so as to unclutter the observance of the Vigil (octaves had by now been abolished). Less than a decade after this, the Novus Ordo Calendar put St Irenaeus back onto today.
Summary: (1) Today is the real festival of S Irenaeus (as well as the Vigil of the Apostles). He spent less than a decade (1962-1970) in exile on July 3. As it happens, the Novus Calendar agrees with the pre-Pius XII Calendar. What the 1962 calendar provides is both 'untraditional' AND out of sync with what the Novus part of the Roman Rite does. This is a matter of everybody in the regiment except my 1962 Johnny being out of step.
(2) Would it really be an act of base treachery to Tradition to correct the 1962 Calendar, at least in those places where the pre-1962 Calendar and the Novus Calendar are in agreement with each other against 1962?
(3) The Roman Rite, like the Byzantine Rite, should be more welcoming to the custom of observing two commemorations on the same day. As it was before the 1960s.
(4) As happened before Pius XII and Bugnini, there should be more ad libitum in the 1962 missal.
(5) Would it be the ultimate crime to allow the use of Last Gospels of commemorated Sundays and Vigils, as used to happen before Pius XII let Mgr Bugnini loose on the Roman Rite?
But there is yet another Saint with a claim upon today!!
St Leo II and S Peter
and the Papal Magisterium.
29 June 2017
Well yes, and so: three cheers for St Irenaeus (see yesterday's blogpost). But as I look into the pre-Pius X breviary by my desk, I discover that in even earlier days, June 28, yesterday, was occupied by a great pope, St Leo II (681-683). (After the introduction of S Irenaeus, he was moved ahead to July 3; isn't calendarical life complicated?)
Did I say a great pope?
Our Holy Father Pope S Leo II was great because he undertook the unhappy but necessary duty of ratifying the condemnation, by the Sixth Holy Ecumenical Council, of his own predecessor, Pope Honorius I (625-638), as a heretic.
As the Vicar of Christ wrote to the Spanish bishops,
Pope Honorius "did not, as befits the Apostolic dignity, extinguish the fire of heretical teaching when it began, but by his negligence fostered it".
Some people believe the Petrine Ministry means that a Pope is set in place and guided by the Holy Spirit in order to give exciting new perspectives, perhaps even surprises, to the Church. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays.
As Blessed John Henry Newman taught, in a memorable passage in his
Apologia,
the ministry of the Roman Church, its "extraordinary gift", has always been negative in a way - to be a remora, a barrier against novelty, innovation.
At the jagged edge of that precipitous cliff, the Pope is the Council Workman whose very simple job it is to put up a notice saying DANGER: KEEP AWAY. 'Negative', laconic, but, oh, so necessary.
A mischievous or homicidal or mischievously homicidal pope who put up a notice reading
ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND: YOUR CONSCIENCE WILL TELL YOU WHERE TO JUMP would be failing in the duty set him by his Master.
Through two millennia, it has been the duty of successive Bishops of Rome to resist, condemn, and extirpate novelty and any attempt to change the Faith.
That is why St Vincent of Lerins (circa 450?) quotes Pope St Celestine (422-432) as writing
"Innovation should stop attacking what is ancient", and the next pope, S Sixtus III, (432-440) as writing
"Innovation has no rights, because it is inappropriate to add anything to what is ancient; clearly, the faith and belief of our ancestors should not be stirred up by any mixture of filth".
The Anglican historian of the Papacy, Trevor Jalland, wrote of
the "supernatural grandeur" of the Roman Church; "its strange, almost mystical faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent".
On this great feast of the Holy Apostles of the Church in Rome, we can do worse than listen to those powerful words of St Leo II.
His predecessor Honorius had been Pope when a particular error arose; it had been his duty as domnus Apostolicus to extinguish the blaze; but he was negligent; he failed to do his (negative) duty of repelling innovation; and his negligence led to the growth of the error.
It therefore fell to an Ecumenical Council to condemn him, together with the leaders of the heresy he failed to extinguish, with the unambiguous noun heretics and the unambiguous verb anathematizomen.
There is more than one way of qualifying for the title of Heretic!
[What about 'Apostate'? Canon law does not bother about how to deal with apostates because by definition, they are no longer in the Church, i.e. - they have rejected the Church. Of course, out of sheer convenience - he cannot conceivably give up being Pope of the Roman Catholic Church - Bergoglio is currently and most awkwardly straddling the fence that divides the one true Church of Christ from all its would-be replacements, in this case, the church of Bergoglio. Does being this straddler keep us from calling him an apostate de facto???]
P.S.
Fr H pursued his thoughts on his blogpost today.
Romanitas
and whatever is a Pope for?
June 30, 2016
Yesterday, the great Feast of the Holy Apostles of Rome, I strolled down to Sandford lock. I took with me my battered "summer picnic" volume of the
Pars Aestiva; and, since Blessed John Henry Newman, Patron of our Ordinariate, must often have walked there from nearby Littlemore, I took also his
Apologia pro Vita sua.
I love the Matins readings for the Second Nocturn, from St Leo I's First mighty
Sermon In natali Apostolorum Petri et Pauli. It gets to the heart of the
Romanita of the Western Church, and especially of the English Church.
St Leo I the Great, the finest Latin stylist since Cicero, explains to the
plebs Romana (now the
plebs sancta Dei) how all that is meant by being Roman has been transformed ... yet, in transformation, preserved and enhanced ... by the Gospel.
"For although, glorified by many victories, you have advanced the jus of your imperium by land and by sea, yet, what the labour of war subdued to you, is less than what the Pax Christiana subjected to you".
The culture of classical Roman antiquity was baptised by St Leo; my view is that he is the one who finally recast the Roman Eucharistic Prayer in a Latinity moulded by the the prayer-style of the old, pre-Christian, prayer-style of early Rome.
Under St Leo, being a Christian finally ceased to be adherence to a foreign and dodgy sect largely followed by Greekling immigrants, and became the new majestic embodiment of all that it meant to be Roman in culture and law and liturgy.
And, with St Augustine, that
Romanita was parachuted into Kent and became the marker too of the Anglo-Saxon Church: the Church of Augustine and Justus and Mellitus; of Wilfrid and Bede and Alcuin. The Kentish king who had considered it beneath his dignity to adopt his wife's Merovingian Christianity rejoiced in the opportunity to receive Christianity from its august and Roman fount. Therein lies the exquisite beauty of "the Anglo-Saxon Church", a Roman island beyond the Alps.
And that same Mr Newman expressed the essence of the Petrine Ministry, of the
munus of the Successor of Peter, in an epigrammatic passage:
"It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or brake in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift".
It is precisely along these lines that Cardinal Ratzinger in a passage of lapidary elegance criticised the bloated and corrupt hyperpapalism of the post-Vatican II period, with its disordered, disordering belief that a pope, especially if backed by a Council, could monkey around at will with Tradition.
It is, Ratzinger asserted, the Pope's job to be the Guardian of the Tradition and the preserver of its integrity and authenticity. This is where the essence of our Holy Father's Ministry lies ... not (as some very foolish and dreadfully noisy people mistakenly think) in being a charismatic innovator, the herald of a God of Surprises. Heaven forbid that any Pope should ever sink so low, so far beneath his true ecclesial vocation.
I feel that we in the Ordinariate, loyally conscious of the teaching of our Patron Blessed John Henry, and with our warm attachment to the charism of our Founder Pope Benedict XVI, may be particularly called by God to support our beloved Holy Father Pope Francis in this important Ministry and at this critical moment.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/07/2017 00:33]