The Faithful

If you get annoyed by traddies grumbling about the Novus Ordo, this would be a good time to click away (or skip to the bottom). Or, if you're curious, keep on reading. I shall strive for a pleasant tone. Minimal snark.

On Sunday Benedict Ambrose and I took the the train north to visit his mother. We were under the impression that the Extraordinary Form of the Mass would be available in her town that day, but we were wrong. Alas. We took the train back south and debated how to fulfill our obligation. And yes, "how to fulfill our obligation" is a wretched way to think about Mass.

"Polish Mass," I said as B.A examined our options via train wifi.  "Polish Mass."

B.A. did not look too happy at the thought of Polish Mass.

"You won't understand the homily, but I have it on good authority it's usually kind of boring. You could play a [mental] drinking game to it. Every time the priest says "miłosz" (love), you get a sip."

B.A. did not look amused. Tappity tappity.

"There," he said, pleased, and I looked to see an English-speaking Mass at a church not too far from the railway station.

"But will we get there on time?" I asked.

"Chalice veils," said Benedict Ambrose, which refers to his belief that the absolute bare minimum to Sunday Obligation is being at Mass between the Offertory, when the chalice is (or was) unveiled and when the chalice is covered up again after the Communion of the Faithful.

I was not happy. I would rather have gone to Polish Mass than show up late for English Mass, but I admit that Polish Mass can be rough going if you don't understand Polish or aren't moved by the traditional hymns. The English Mass started before the train pulled into the station, and I wondered if we could still get to Polish Mass on time if we missed the bare-minimum moment. I hoped there would be a long homily, even if the long homily was about how rotten the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is and how silly the people who want us all to go back to it.

We got off the train and scurried through the station and ran through the dark, wet streets to the handsome old church, which glowed in the night, and found ourselves among 160 or so people saying the Nicene Creed. Great was my relief. We scurried to the very back, and I hoped we didn't stick out too much in the half-empty church. We could have taken a pew of course but like most people who go to the EF week after week, we're allergic to the Sign of Peace.

This is not because we are jerks but because we take Mass seriously. If we really were jerks, we would really yuk it up during the Novus Ordo, crossing the aisle to shake hands, kissing the prettier people, blessing the babies, singing twice as loudly as everyone else, in a spirit of angry irony. Oh dear, how wicked that would be.

Anyway, we stood at the back, behind the last pew, in which two cherubic moppets played a slapping game, which we found very distracting, but hey--their parents may have picked the back pew for a reason. And I noticed two things that shocked me although mentioning the first one is an old traddie cliché.

1. The priest prayed at the congregation.

First of all, I know this was not his fault. Once I had a look at the "how to say liturgy properly" book that came out in 1971 or so, and it was adamant that priests really had to put their back into presenting the prayers with emotion, expression and volume. And this priest obediently did that. He was miked, and so although he was purportedly praying to God, he was obviously speaking to/for/at us, the congregation. In his defense, his delivery was not all about him. He didn't show off, mug, make jokes, chat wittily or do any of those populist-priest things that some people love, and I loved myself until I went to BC.

2. The priest sang to the congregation.

The congregation did not sing, but a pleasant male voice sang the offertory and communion hymns through a microphone to the organ accompaniment. I looked in vain for the excellent cantor before realizing he was the priest. The congregation sat in silence while the priest sang verse after verse. I looked over at another man standing at the back, and although he was reading the hymn paperback, he wasn't singing either. Afterwards, B.A. explained to me that these were difficult hymns for a congregation to sing, and he thought the priest should have picked hymns the congregation would know.

It was Gaudete Sunday--the priest was not wearing rose vestments but sad old purple--but I didn't feel very happy. I looked at the singing  priest and the sparse congregation, and wondered how long this state of liturgy can continue. It was a big church, but in the 1950s it would have been packed to the door with Scottish Catholics whose faith too often meant social marginalization  but was strong nonetheless.

Those Catholics, though, had the solemnity, grandeur, silences, music, rhythms and certainties of the Old Mass. These faithful 160 do not--or don't know they do--but still they came to Mass on a wet Sunday evening. Still they fulfilled their obligation. Many received communion from either the (surely redundant) Extraordinary Minister or the priest. Some brought their children. "It's a miracle," I told B.A.

When I didn't recognize the recessional hymn, I nudged B.A. and off we went into glistening night. I have been to Sunday Mass almost every Sunday of my life, and missing Mass feels like a minor trauma. "Chalice veils" is really not enough. However, my husband has been a trained liturgist since he was a child in a fine Anglican choir, and public worship is very important to him. Witnessing a shift in the focus of worship from God to the community hurts him, just as bad singing hurts my musician brother, who has perfect pitch.

But as for me, if others can be bi-ritual, surely I can be bi-form. I never knew anything but the Novus Ordo from birth to the age of 37, and I do believe it can be done well, can be made a true child of the Mass of Ages, and I think merely turning the focus of the priest from the congregation back towards God, facing the same way as the congregation, is the best place to begin. Will the faithful accept it? Thinking of those faithful 160, I would hazard that the remaining faithful of Scotland will accept just about anything.

***
The O Antiphons. I was going to write about the O Antiphons today, but I was moved to write about  our experience at Sunday Mass instead. Here is an article about the O Antiphons by our friend Gregory DiPippo

***
Update: I've been reading through the Father Z comments on Sunday obligation, and I was struck by a comment about a woman who came to Mass for the barest of the bare minimum, lit a candle before the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and was on her way. It occurred to me that this woman's trip to church might be longer than the time she spent in church. The journey itself was less tedious to her than an extra minute spent in church. Why? The commentator assumes the woman was caring for the sick; I wonder if she wasn't a brokenhearted trad.

Ember Days

Good morning! It is Traddy Tuesday, the day I enthuse about traditional Catholic worship, belief and devotions. I have it on good authority that the Trads in Edinburgh manage to talk about all these delightful things in a way that is interesting and amusing, so let's hope I can live up to that reputation.

Time is very important to Trads, who preserve the Old Calendar, fasting (or abstaining) on fast days and feasting on feast days. We are also capable of honouring two feasts falling on the same day, so on December 6, we celebrated both the Second Sunday of Advent and the Feast of Saint Nicholas, whom we (now being adults) revere not so much for the Santa Claus stuff but for slapping the heretical Arius (or an Arian bishop), apparently at the Council of Nicaea.

Personally I think the Synod on the Family would have been greatly improved if the bishops had slapped each other although perhaps they remembered that in the story of St Nicholas, St. Nick was thrown in jail for it. (Naturally I do not think anyone but a bishop has the right to slap another bishop unless she is his mother.)

Anyway, I was at two suppers honouring Saint Nicholas, and since I am trying to have a strict Advent between the big feast days, I feasted both times with great jollity. I was sitting at the head of the beautifully-laden table at the second, the lone woman at a table of Trads, when I remembered a mystery in my missal said "By the way, what are Ember Days?"

"What!" the men shouted. "You don't know what Ember Days are? You ask such a question when you write posts on traditionalism!?! Oh, shame!", etc, etc., itp.

This did not answer my question about Ember Days although it certainly made clear why men hate asking other men for directions.

Eventually they settled down long enough for the ex-Anglicans to explain they were for fasting and that Anglicans still observe them, which no doubt led to much reminiscing about the Good Old Days, to which I did not listen. Instead I later checked the Catholic Encyclopedia,  the Old Calendar and the Missal and learned some interesting things.

First, Ember Days is an English-language corruption of "Quattuor Tempora", which means four seasons. They have nothing to do with embers.

Second, they are a way of marking the change of seasons with fasting and prayer. It was one of those steal-it-from-the-pagans-and-Christianize it deals. But it is also a way to thank God for good harvests and to pray for the next one and to think about using the gifts of the earth well--moderation for self, gifts to the needy.

Third, Pope Saint Gregory VII (1073-1085) "arranged and proscribed" the dates of the four Ember Weeks, but three of them date back at least to the 3rd century, but may be even older. St. Leo the Great thought they were apostolic. St Augustine of Canterbury brought them to England in the 6th century.

Fourth, they are not really a week but three days in the appointed week: Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

Fifth, according to the Old Calendar (not the Catholic Encyclopedia) they fall after St. Lucy's Day (Dec 13), after the First Sunday in Lent, after Whitsunday (Pentecost), and (this year, anyway) after St.Matthew's Day (September 21).

Looking at my Papa Stronsay Calendar (whose advert is below because it is cool), I see that this December's Ember Days are marked in as Ember Wednesday (Dec. 16), Ember Friday (Dec. 18) and Ember Saturday (Dec.19).

Meanwhile, my missal shows that the readings for St. Lucy's Ember Week are very Adventish. The "Secret" Prayer for Ember Wednesday mentions fasting; on Ember Friday. it mentions "our prayers and offerings." Mass on Ember Saturday has a gazillion readings, graduals, a canticle and a tract as well as the Gospel. I shall have to figure out a way of asking my FSSP priest if he includes all these readings and prayers in his Ember Saturday Mass without giving him the false hope that I might be there. I will be in Italy that day, finding out if the nearby traditional Benedictine monks include them.

So that solves the mystery of what "Ember Days" are, and as they are fasting days, I imagine there is no complicated traddy thing to bake. Or fun things to drink. I see that "Ember Days" are called "Suche Dnie" (Dry Days) in Polish.

A Glad Trad

Good day! It is Traddy Tuesday, the day in which I usually poke a bit of fun at the liturgies, priest and parishes that disappoint would-be converts unaware that Catholic culture has changed a lot since Flannery O'Connor died. However, I see that it is time to put that to a rest, as I have had ample opportunity to reflect that, though funny (to me at least), it was not helpful.

There is a lot of anger in the opinions section of the Catholic blogosphere, and many people enjoy it. I enjoy it, too, when it's clever, funny and well-written, but last week I discovered that Someone had drawn a line into how much lyrical anger I could take.  It made me wonder how much I myself have been adding to a hermeneutic of the "mad trad."

I think the path best taken is to eliminate all my little jibes against the novelties adopted since the beginning of the Second Vatican Council and just talk about why I love traditional devotions, particularly the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. I might even add a list of the novelties I actually like. (Or that my mother likes. My mother very much likes the protracted congregational singing, and the jollier and more the hymns make her feel like dancing, the better she likes them.) I could even point out where the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, so long in developing, may further develop: e.g. the sermon returned to the end, before the announcements. Those who want to hear the announcements will have to hear the sermon.

One of the lovely things about traditional theology, the Extraordinary Mass and traditional devotions is that there is so much to learn. Once you get hooked on the traditions of the Church, and how they foster devotion to the Blessed Trinity, to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Saints, you never run out of wonderful books to read or helpful ideas on the internet.

Another lovely thing is how they all match up. The more I read the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, the less satisfied I felt at ordinary English-language Mass. I wasn't really satisfied until I began to attend the Extraordinary Form of the Mass regularly. It astonishes me that I have been going to the same parish--only once feeling dissatisfied (tremendous confusion of self re: Triduum as had wrong missal that year)--for almost seven years.

Because everything matches up, everything is treated with great importance. I am not sure how ministers of music usually pick the hymns for the Ordinary Form, but the singing in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is inextricable from the (Traditional) Calendar. For example, every Sunday has its proper-to-it Introit and the Master of our Schola carefully considers what day it is before he chooses any extra music or decides the congregation should sing an English-language recessional hymn instead of our usual, seasonal Marian anthem.

Even if he were blind, a Catholic time traveller would have known it was Advent had he stepped into our little borrowed wooden church, for after the Communion antiphon, the schola sang Conditor Alme Siderum.  (Video link not to schola!)

A thought came to me of a tapestry. You can add to the end of a tapestry and you can freshen up its colours if it becomes faded, but you can't start messing around with, and picking out, its threads without making a massive confusion.

Traditional Catholicism is like that tapestry. You can add things--for example, the Master of the Schola composes new music suitable for Mass--but if you start taking things away, other parts become confusing. They cease to make as much sense, especially when you are reading what all saints who died before 1962 have to say about the Mass.

When I was a child, I began to notice that many aspects of Catholicism writers of old (or reprinted) books took for granted did not feature at Mass, at school, or even in my Catholic youth group. When I asked a teacher at my Catholic school to tell me what the Mass was like before Vatican II, he couldn't tell me. (In exchange for full governmental funding, the school board had agreed to hire non-Catholic teachers.) Therefore, I never really understood what the old writers all took for granted until I was in my late 30s and stumbled upon the Extraordinary Form. And now I'm very glad I did.

Have Yourselves a Gloomy Little Advent

Good morning! It is Traddy Tuesday,the day I rekindle the flame in the hearts of would-be converts to Catholicism who have been misled entranced by Catholic books written before 1960, only to be shocked by their local RCIA class/parish liturgy/obscenity-dropping parish priest. Oh dear, I see your astonished faces in my mind's eye: "B-b-b-b-but Chesterton!" Yeah, I know.

But despair not! There a gazillion Roman Catholics who believe as (and what) Chesterton did and thousands who do their best to worship as he did, too. Our world is considerably worse than his was, so we are much crankier than he, however. Sorry about that. I apologize on behalf of the old lady who turned around at the Extraordinary Form of Mass and snarled at your friend's noisy baby. In her defense, she either traveled two hours to get to this Mass or she sold her house to live within walking distance. Try to forgive her--and offer to take the baby out.

So today's theme is ADVENT and the challenge of keeping it a penitential season when most of the English-speaking world thinks that Christmas begins the day after American Thanksgiving (at latest) and ends at midnight on Christmas Day. If I still have any Eastern Orthodox readers or Byzantine Catholic readers, please reveal in the combox how you manage to keep your fasts when all around you are having Christmas parties.

My dear friend Calvinist Cath does not believe in Christmas at all, so avoiding the December-long celebration of Christmas is a challenge for her too. Amusingly, the challenges of not observing Christmas before Christmas could unite the Orthodox, the Greek Catholics, the Latin Catholics and, amazingly, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.* (This last avoids it completely , of course, but never mind that for now.)

I read somewhere that one of the reasons why the Latin Church doesn't fast like the Greek Church or the Eastern Orthodox Churches is the large number of important feast days during Advent. Just now I looked them up on the trad calendar on the front hall (from the monastery of Papa Stronsay), and the only one that leapt to the eye is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8), for both the Feast of Saint Nicholas (December 6) and the Feast of Saint Lucy (December 13) fall on Sundays this year. That said, for Latins Sunday is always a Feast Day, and never a Fast Day, except for the Eucharistic fast, of course.

Feasting and fasting are hallmarks of traditional Catholicism, and B.A. and I can't have a dinner party with Catholics without B.A. leaping up to see whose feast day it is. He flips the pages in his missal looking for the right Collect (prayer of the day) while the soup gets cold. Drives me nuts. However, B.A. has the right attitude, and the solution is for me to mark the place beforehand. My church friends take feasting very seriously and are wont to chide those who refuse to partake of wine on Sundays, which I think is taking feasting a bit too far.

Rather less fun is fasting, although fasting is the good servant of feasting. As two nice Byzantine Catholic girls explained to B.A. and me recently, if you don't fast, you can't really feast. And it is certainly true that food, wine and coffee all taste amazingly better if you have done without them for a bit.

However, we are Christians, not Epicureans, so fasting is also supposed to make us feel physically uncomfortable, a discomfort we willingly embrace so as to do penance for our sins and the sins of others. Meanwhile we have to look cheerful when we do it, and not tell others we are fasting so that they will think well of us (Matt 5: 16-18).  It's supposed to be between us and God, which I remember when Toronto Greeks get too noisy about how much better they keep Lent than us rotten Roman Catholics. (Admittedly, they do.) However, I suppose "I'm sorry, it's against my religion" is okay when well-meaning people tempt us into Advent gluttony. It has the added bonus of making us socially uncomfortable, too--yay!

Occasionally I get emails from women from traditional Catholic backgrounds who have developed eating disorders from fasting. It is dreadful when this happens, and it really shouldn't. A good spiritual director will not let this happen, and in the absence of a good spiritual director, the fasting Catholic should just use her head. If you don't eat at all on Friday, you had better have a good nutritious breakfast on Saturday. If you fast on Wednesdays, don't fast on Thursdays. Meanwhile, contemporary eating is such that if you merely eschew anything made with refined sugar, that's a painstaking fast. Especially if you try to eschew refined sugar in Advent, aka secular Christmas.

I'm kidding about having a gloomy Advent. However, the fact is the Advent is a penitential season, traditionally involving fasts, abstinence, prayers, special masses and almsgiving. But, also traditionally, there are Feast Days to break it up a bit, like St. Nicholas' Day, and every Sunday.

One of the tricky things about re-establishing traditional fasting and abstinence procedures in a Roman Catholic household is that all the other healthy adults have to agree to it. If the Church doesn't impose fasting-and-abstinence, who is the lady of the house to do it, eh? (My mother didn't bring back Friday abstinence until John Paul II said he thought it a good idea. "Right," said Mum and fed us the orange sawdust fish triangles of doom ever after.) So I have consulted with my Liege Lord (i.e. B.A.) and we have come up with our own private Advent plans.

Because, really, it's not cricket to embrace all the fun things about traditional Catholicism without cheerfully taking on its disciplines, too. One helpful community penance would be to help dust and clean the church, any fellow Edinburgh traddies who are reading this (Saturday 2-4).

But to end on a celebratory note, we rejoice in the establishment of the Fraternity of the Priests of Saint Peter's first proper parish church in the United Kingdom. (The rest of us piggyback, like the Maronites who shared my childhood church.) The archdiocese of Liverpool gave the FSSP a BEAUTIFUL church first owned by the Benedictines, and you can see photographs of the inaugural Mass here.  Naturally we EF-loving Catholics are still praying for a church of our very own. I like the pretty wooden one we steal borrow share, but the choir wants one with better acoustics.

*Leaving aside the age-old Dec 25/Jan 6 issue, naturally.

Update: Note the complete lack of women in the sanctuary, o-the-humanity #weeping #wailing. There's some in the choir. Presumably they made up at least a third of the congregation.

Traditional Servantless Entertaining

It's Traddy Tuesday,  the day I usually write about some aspect of traditional Catholic practice and belief. However, today I have behaved like a traditional lady-of-the-Historical-House and spent the morning in bed. As this bed is in our attic flat, once the servants' quarters, I am sure the original occupants of this room would stare at me in disbelief and disgust. But too bad for them. If I want to behave like Lady X (or Miss Y) after a party, I may. Besides, I did a lot more work than Lady X (or Miss Y) ever did for a dinner party. I'd like to see Lady X lug my shopping up three flights of stairs.

B.A. and I rarely go to the cinema, theatre, concert hall, pub or any other of the public entertainments on offer, mostly because they are too expensive. For entertainment, we like to entertain, which in our case means having dinner parties. We don't have as many as we used to, for various reasons, but I always enjoy getting in touch with my inner Mrs Dalloway. If I could, I would colonize the glorious public rooms of the Historical House and have wonderful dinners for 25 every week, but then B.A. would lose his job, and where would we be? Thus, I have to keep the guest list small, and seven is really the limit, unless we put two tables down the length of our sitting-room and invite thirteen.

Having a dinner party is simple . You think up some theme-excuse, you invite people to a meal, you clean your home, you buy food, you cook it, you greet your guests and give them a drink, you eat the food while everyone chats companionably, you wash the dishes (either in snatches during or afterwards), and you send your friends on their way at a mutually agreeable time. If our guests come from central Edinburgh via the bus, that time is 11:30 PM, for the last bus to town rumbles past the gates at 11:41. This is ideal, for it means that B.A. can be in bed by midnight and be fresh for work in the morning.

The most important thing is not to panic. B.A. hates it when I panic and always gives me a lecture beforehand on not panicking, which makes me so extremely anxious that I shout. However, once I get all the shouting out of my system, I am better able to relax afterwards. There is no reason to panic over a dinner party, as my mother has cooked dinner for up to eight people almost every night for forty-five years.

The next most important thing is flexibility. You must be able to change your menu on a moment's notice. Then simplicity. A dinner party for nine is a bad time to try anything new or particularly complicated. Four people, okay, but the more guests you have, the more sense apple crumble for pudding makes. If you begin to panic, simplify your chosen menu further.

Here is the schedule for my supper.

Two weeks before
1. Hearing of unrest among Youth of the Parish, I decide to have a Youth Supper.
2. I consult representatives of Youth about guest list and dates over Facebook and in one face-to-face meeting.
3. I inform husband, who says I should have told him first, which is true.
4. Representatives of Youth tell guests they're invited.

One week before
1. Husband makes inquiries about ultimate guest list, adds a guest over mobile phone.
2. I hoover whole flat, which was lucky, as I had no time to do it yesterday.
3. Continuing Facebook conversations re: guest list. I tell representative "Young Fogey wear", so as to ensure relative elegance.

Yesterday before 7:30 PM:
1. Husband washes dishes before work, as is saint.
2. Final guest list confirmed by representatives of Youth over Facebook.
3. At 2 PM, I call up taxicab companies trying to book a taxicab from Tesco in advance. Fail.
4. I determine menu: żurek (white kielbasa soup), roast, chocolate meringue pie.
5. I walk to the polski sklep for zakwas (essential ingredient for the żurek), and there is none. I look high, I look low. I consult the shopkeeper po polsku. "In bottles?" she asks in that ancient tongue. "Tak," I affirm. "If you can't find them, they're not there," she says. "We'll have them on Wednesday."  I stop myself from panicking by thinking up Menu Plan B.
6. I walk to Tesco. No zakwas. I change to Menu Plan B . Now we are having barszcz ukrainski, roast and Polish plum cake because chocolate meringue pie is difficult and I can make plum cake with my eyes shut.
7. I collect gin, tonic water, white wine, red wine, a pork roast, 2 punnets of plums, single cream, a family size bag of frozen peas, 2 Kg Maris Piper potatoes, two carrots, garlic, a leek, a white cabbage, beets, fresh dill, sour cream, beef stock, a bag of ground coffee, chocolates and 2 bags of potato chips.
8. I call various cab companies. The second one deigns to send me a cab in ten minutes. Yay!
9. I lug grocs up three flights of stairs. Husband is in. Husband seizes roast, does magical things, and puts it in an oven to slow-roast for three hours. Husband goes back to work.
10. I make soup.
11. I make two plum cakes. (We have a double oven, thank heavens.)
12. I wash dishes. Husband sets table and tidies sitting-room. Husband is a genius both at roasts and at setting the table.
13. I tidy up guest-room and library/office.
14. I put on party dress, cover my face with slap, etc.
15. I test the cakes. They're done. Upper oven off. B.A. puts on party tie, etc.
16. I completely relax for a crucial five relaxing minutes.

GUEST ARRIVE
1. Take wine and flower offerings from guests, who obviously were all well brought up.
2. Send girls to guest-room to de-coat. Send boys to office to de-coat.
3. Ask them if they want gin-and-tonics. They do.
4. Send guests to sitting-room
5. Husband makes gin-and-tonics.
6. Chat with guests.
7. Reheat soup.
8. Announce dinner. Husband offers seating suggestions. Guests arrange themselves around the table.

 DINNER
1. It's the Feast of Saint Margaret of Scotland, so she gets a mention in Grace.
2. Soup. Seconds of soup as B.A. tends the potatoes.
3. Main. Dishes of mashed potatoes and peas brought out for passing around, then pork and gravy.
4. Much eating of pork, potatoes, peas and gravy.
5. Pudding. Two cakes, so enough for seconds.
6. Coffee and chocolates.

And everyone is happy, especially me, as I had the time and energy between courses to wash the dishes. The only truly challenging part of a traditional sit-down dinner party, besides making sure no one person dominates the conversation to the boredom of others, is facing the greasy army of crockery the next morning. I avoid this as much as possible by doing the washing up right away.

I hope you noticed that one thing you most definitely do not need for a proper, traditional sit-down dinner is paper invitations. Paper invitations are all very elegant, but as God has given us technological advances in communication, let us enjoy them.

Domestic Priestess

Hello, it's Traddy Tuesday, the day set aside for discussion of traditional Catholic liturgy and belief, and I am later than usual because I have been making the Christmas Cake. I am sure you don't want to think about Christmas already but Pentecost is speeding to a close, and Christmas Cake must sit in its brandy-soaked swaddling cloths for a minimum of five weeks, preferably more.

I was going to write about how beautiful Requiem Masses are--how solemn, how sober, how appropriate for everyone. A few years ago a very popular English priest was, around the time of his death, accused of historical child abuse. Victims were very bitter about the five-ring "celebration of life" held for him weeks after his death; if only he had had a trad funeral, black and gold, accompanied by stern chanting of the Dies Irae, and sacerdotal hinting that without serious prayer the departed would sizzle under Purgatory's grill like a toasted cheese sandwich, and it was left at that, those he had hurt would not have been so upset.

But my thoughts have turned kitchenward, as you can see, and so I would like to write about women and Christmas, which falls under the category of women/religion/food, for it is an example of how women stress religious observance through food preparation. Traditionally, observant Jewish women keep a kosher kitchen. Traditionally, observant Muslim women prepare the sun-down meals for the Ramadan fast. And traditionally, Eastern Christian women cope with a complex fasting-and-feasting-schedule while we lightweight Westerners sigh over our Friday tuna casseroles. (Full disclosure: I never make tuna casserole, actually. Fresh fish is cheap and plentiful in our island nation.)

I posit that Anglo-Saxons are not particularly talented at fasting foods-- when it comes to fasting we could most definitely learn from the Greeks--but we are absolute geniuses at Christmas. At Christmas old-fashioned rituals suddenly become very important. Millions of people in the British Commonwealth even tune in for the Queen's Christmas Message, and thousands who don't make a habit of it actually go to church.  Christmas trees--completely unheard of in the UK before Queen Victoria married a German--are bought despite the mess they make of the carpet. And then there's the food. The food. The food.

"Dear Lord," I prayed at Mass the other day, "I've never had Christmas without Mum's Chelsea Bun, and this year we are going to Italy and I may not be able to make the Bun. Will it still be Christmas without the Bun? Please help me be less emotionally attached to the Bun."

I didn't bother asking to be less emotionally attached to the Christmas Cake. Like a bird sensing it was time to go South for the winter, I walked to Tesco and bought half a pound of candied peel and half a pound of candied cherries. For lo, such is the custom of my tribe. My mother has made an enormous Christmas Cake every year of my life, and now that I can't eat hers, I make my own, and if it doesn't taste exactly the same as hers does I feel I have failed as a woman, etc.

Actually, my Christmas baking obsession, this unbridled feminine business with butter, sugar, eggs and flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and candied cherries, unnerves my only-child husband so much that he eagerly embraced the idea of going to Italy for Christmas, thinking that this would make us more relaxed. I wouldn't say that he is actually frightened when suddenly I turn into a Christmas-cooking-and-baking-automaton, but as he comes from a Scots Protestant background (and Christmas was all but illegal in Scotland before 1950), it's not what he's used to. I explain that I can't really help it, which he did not believe until my mother came for Christmas last year and make several million cookies. Great was her wrath when she returned this summer and found a dozen chocolate-mint pinwheels still in their tin. (I explained that, being only two middle-aged people, not five adolescent carpet beetles, we could not eat them all.)

I must say that it was awesome having my mother come and do her baking instead of me doing her baking while she also did her baking, if you see what I mean. Of course I had to do the Christmas Cake myself, as it has to be done in November. But I did not complain or flinch or even think about it all that much. I just went about mindlessly buying ingredients, washing the raisins, mixing the batter in our biggest bowl with my right arm and buttering brown paper.

"What is the point of all this mad seasonal baking?" you may very well ask. "Your mother had five children and three of them are still within comfortable driving distance of the cookie tins. There is also a grandchild within cooky-stealing range. Her enormous fruitcake will not outlast Epiphany. You will have to give large chunks away. Why bother?"

And I keep falling back into faux-Biblical sentence structures, for lo, I must make the Christmas Cake, yea, unto the rolling out of the marzipan between two sheets of wax paper dusted with icing sugar, for such is the custom of my tribe. To eat exactly the same foods as my family in my youth is to continue to celebrate Christmas with the family of my youth, be they living or dead. To taste the Christmas Cake in 2015 is to taste it in 1985, 1995, 2005, and perhaps 2025. To eat the Chelsea Bun with B.A. is to eat it with my grandmothers, who have died. To make the Chelsea Bun is to honour my mother, yea, she who got up every Christmas morning to bake the risen dough.

Tradition is a form of time-travel. Or, better, tradition is a way of escaping mundane time and the demands of time. Tradition creates a sacred space in which we can honour our ancestors and even, in a mysterious way, be in communion with them. And that is why I used such a click-bait title as "Domestic Priestess." Silly people wail that women have been robbed of sacral roles in the Church. How ridiculous. At Christmas time, especially, home becomes another church, and traditionally the women are in charge of the kitchen. We create the smells and tastes of Christmas that our men and children will remember for the rest of their lives and will help them slip the surly bonds of time.

Personal Reflections on the Mass

Good morning! It's Traddy Tuesday, the day on which I blog about some aspect of traditional Catholic worship and practice. This is important to me because I was once told the story of a Protestant would-be convert to Catholicism who went to her local parish church and was deeply disappointed by what she found there. She looked on the internet to find something closer to what she had been expecting and came upon my jesting run-through of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. That was it! That was what she wanted! She found out where the nearest EF was and contacted a priest there.

The priest who told me said that I had converted the girl, and although I think he was exaggerating--she was already looking, after all--I am delighted to have helped.  As far as I know, I totally failed at winning souls for the Faith before I started blogging, so I was chuffed. There's a nice man who told me my blog converted him to the Faith, so that makes two. He also attends the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

Naturally I attend the Extraordinary Form of the Mass every Sunday, even when abroad. If I really can't get to an FSSP (Fraternity of the Priests of Saint Peter) church or chapel or to the Oratorians' EF in Toronto for some reason, I find a Polish parish. In Toronto's St. Casimir's,  the atmosphere  is one of rapt devotion, and when I was there the church was packed to the doors. I imagine other "ethnic parishes" are like that; before I met the Extraordinary Form, I often took refuge at Toronto's St. Patrick's German.

From what was I taking refuge? Well, a better question is, What did I find at St. Patrick's German? Three aspects stand out: the attentive devotion of the (mostly elderly) immigrant Germans; the careful and deeply respectful prayers and rubrics of the German-Canadian priest, the grandson of German immigrants; and the difficulty of the language. For me it was not an everyday language. It was a language I had to work at to understand and so every word I understood was a precious jewel in itself. It was distant from me, and so--like a far-sighted person--I could fathom its meaning better.  Meanwhile, when a hip priest from Mittel Europa came to visit, he dazzled the simple congregation with his novelties--an elderly man enthused to me about it afterwards--and I understood barely a word of his homily, for which I am grateful. Homilies are not always edifying, and I don't count on a stranger for the Real Thing unless I go to an FSSP or Oratory Mass.

When I first went to the FSSP Mass in Edinburgh, I was startled by how different the Extraordinary Form was from the Ordinary Form. First, it was prefaced by the Asperges (or "sprinkling") rite, which is a purifying preparation for the Mass. Then instead of a processional hymn sung by the congregation, there was a Latin "Introit" sung by the choir. The priest sank to his knees at the foot of the sanctuary, as did the chief altar server, whom B.A. called the "MC." The priest began to pray, but I couldn't hear him. Between the end of the Introit and Kyrie--sung only by the choir--there was silence.

Silence! There is a lot of silence in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. More than once I looked around at the rest of the congregation to see what they made of this silence. Were they fidgeting or whispering or what?

They were not. They were all looking towards the altar (on which the tabernacle resides) in deep, deep contemplation, with a reverence even more marked than that of the devout Germans in Toronto. "Hmph!" I thought with grudging respect.

It took me some time to get used to it all, of course. I juggled missal (with cartoon illustrations) and the propers (on the White Sheet or Whyte Sheete, as I dubbed it) and it took me an age, it seemed, to replace "Herr, ich bin nicht wuertig dass..." with "Domine, non sum dignus ut..." at the front of my memory. But I valued from the first the deep contemplative silence.

As the years go on, I find more and more to love in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Sometimes it takes me an age to get there--traffic jams right before the 6:15, ugh--but I never regret the journey. Yesterday there was a sung Mass for the Feast of All Souls', and poor B.A. looked vexedly at the time on his phone as the bus crawled through the rush hour mess on Princes Street. But we got there during an early verse of the Sequence ("Dies Irae") and the Mass felt all the more solemn and peaceful for Father's black-and-gold vestments and the northern dark pressing against the windows.

My head had been full of the Douthat Affair and second-guessing my decision to write the CWR piece. But when my eye fell upon the three young altar servers I imagined how horrible it would be if any of them were accepted to the same PhD program I had dropped out of. There are a lot of eager young Catholic students out there, whose heads could be turned by the stipend and the glamour. Forewarned is forearmed. So I stopped second-guessing and just prayed for the department and everyone who was totally cheesed off at me and asked forgiveness if anything in my writing of the article was displeasing to God.

Those were not prayers terrifically easy to pray, but the Mass made it possible. The silences especially. It does not surprise me that among our congregants are three very visually impaired people, one of whom is completely blind, because these silences are not empty. They are incredibly full; they are multidimensional. They are beautiful.

The Church has been well buffeted about this autumn, and we were hit with two more scandals yesterday: Scalfari (again) and a Vatileak (again). It's disturbing, of course, but I comfort myself that we have the Latin Mass. If anyone complains about Benedict XVI, I say, "Yes, but he gave us back the Latin Mass." If anyone complains about Pope Francis, I think, "Yes, but we have the Latin Mass." The Pope may change--popes rarely last a whole 30 years--and priests may change--leave, get married, die--and bishops may be discovered unfaithful, but by and large the Extraordinary Form of the Mass does not change. So I pin my earthly hopes for consolation to the mast of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, and if it should ever be taken from Edinburgh, then--if B.A. agrees--we will follow it from Edinburgh.

Mad Trad--Spiked! N is for Novus Ordo

Hello! It is once again Traddy Tuesday, the day I chat about traditional Catholic beliefs and devotions. This post is later than usual for I spent the morning in traditional housekeeping, the hoover being a natural and organic development upon the carpet sweeper.

Today I shall post up the last of my Mad Trad columns, which I believe I posted before to show you what could get you fired from Catholic newspapers back in 2011. However I think the column was doomed when my cheerful piece about John XXIII's love of Latin came out. (By the by, I wonder if it is true that Saint John cried "Stop the Council! Stop the Council!" on his deathbed.)

I know people who simply can no longer bring themselves to attend the Novus Ordo. If they can't find an FSSP (Fraternity of the Priests of Saint Peter) or ICK (Institute of Christ the King) church or chapel, they go to the  SSPX (Society of Saint Pius X) for Sunday Mass.

I have never been to an SSPX Mass myself; when I was growing up adults talked about the SSPX with a contempt they did not express for Protestants, Jews, Sikhs or any other religious community. Today I find this pious disgust bizarre. Are we really supposed to admire all religious groups except the one closest to us, one that is, in fact, in communion with us and would have been indistinguishable from (the rest of) us in 1962? All the same, I have not been to an SSPX Mass, and if I cannot get to a Traditional Latin Mass permitted by the local Ordinary, I go an Ordinary Form Mass.

If I seem utterly fascinated by the differences between the Usus Antiquor and the Novus Ordo, it is partly because when I was a child in the 1970s, I had no idea that that Mass I went to on Sundays, Holy Days of Obligation and  First Fridays was much different from the Mass the saints all knew. It was as if all memory of the Old Mass had been buried under the floor and the carpet firmly nailed down.

Well, enough about me. Here is my spiked column, which is also about me. To get past me, I recommend reading accounts of Catholic adults who were attached to the Mass they had always known and suddenly couldn't get to anymore. I highly recommend Dom Alcuin Read's "A Bitter Trial" for Evelyn Waugh's take on the replacement of the Vetus Antiquor for the Novus Ordo.

When the Ordinary Form isn't Ordinary

On the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, I did something I don’t do often: I went to the Ordinary Form of the Mass. It was a Friday evening Mass in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. The Basilica was two-thirds full of students. I’m not sure what impressed me more: that Notre Dame has its own basilica or that so many of its students chose to go to Mass on a Friday evening.

The Basilica was built in the 19^th century and modelled in part on the Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus in Rome, built by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola in 1568. The Basilica has been renovated three times, most recently to clean it up and to restore such art and artifacts (like the confessionals) banished in the 1960s. In keeping with contemporary sensibilities, it has been repainted and gilded and is once more a truly beautiful church. I gazed at the gorgeous Gothic revival ceiling and tried not to feel weird about my bare head.

When you get into the habit of going only to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, you grow attached to customs that seem odd in the Ordinary Form and find customs attached to the Ordinary Form newly odd. Like many women, I choose to wear a mantilla during the Extraordinary Form and not during the Ordinary Form, where it might distract and even annoy people. (That said, there were girls in the Basilica wearing mantillas.) But if I don’t wear anything on my head in church, my head now feels cold and funny.

Other Ordinary Form customs that seem odd are—bear with me here—laypeople reading the readings and laypeople handling the sacred vessels. In the Extraordinary Form only clergy read the readings and only clergy handle the sacred vessels, so when a woman’s speaking voice breaks the silence or a woman opens the doors of the tabernacle, it does seem decidedly odd after months of attending the Extraordinary Form.

That said, I went to the Ordinary Form of the Mass almost every week for over 38 years, so this Mass felt like an old home, a home whose traditions I know like the back of my hand, and I made the customary reach for the hymn book when the organ rang out overhead. The congregation stood, and the sanctuary party, which included retired bishop John D’Arcy, processed to the altar.

The Mass was solemn and reverent. The cantor sang too high for easy following, but she certainly had a beautiful voice. The altar servers were unobtrusive. Bishop D’Arcy preached on the Gospel, the feast day and St. Edith Stein, in whose honour Notre Dame was having a conference. The students hung on to his every word, and I could sense how much they love him. Mass was very moving. The one thing that bothered me was the lack of a communion rail.

There should not be a war between the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Mass. I know that there are traditionalists who deplore the Ordinary Form—the “Nervous Ordo”—for its imperfect paraphrase of original prayers, for its “three hymn sandwich” and for its inexplicable and unofficial innovations. However, when it is celebrated in a reverent spirit, without a cast of thousands thronging around the sanctuary, with due respect for beauty—the beauty of music, the beauty of art, the beauty of the English language—and trust in the words actually written down on the page, the Ordinary Form is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

But countless Catholics have been scandalized by the Ordinary Form of the Mass done badly. I won’t go into detail—since 1970 Catholics have written ad nauseum about liturgical abuses—but I think it worthwhile to note the empty pews in our churches and wonder if rushed and informal, jokey, innovative and “creative” liturgies might not have something to do with them.

Of course it is important to create a sense of community in our parishes, but Mass should not be merely a community-building enterprise. It is a memorial of Christ’s passion, it is the paschal sacrifice, it is the sacrament of redemption. It must be treated with reverence, so that our children learn to reverence it and not put it away with other things of childhood.

To solve the problem of the communion rail, I decided to do what the girls in the mantillas did. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember what that was. But whatever it was, I had the sense afterwards of having attended a beautiful Mass amongst the reverent young people who are the future of the Church.  

***

Speaking of the future of the Church, how about that Synod, eh? 

There were 74 people at  the Edinburgh FSSP Extraordinary Form of the Mass this Sunday, a big number for us. I spoke to a newcomer whose third visit this was; he found us through the internet and already has a shiny new Baronius missal . It didn't occur to me to ask what had triggered his search for us, but let me see. Three weeks ago from this Sunday...25-21 = 4 October. One week later, he was with us. Hmm....

Mad Trad 14: M is for First Friday Mass

It's Traddy Tuesday, the day I write all about some traditional devotion, like Benediction, or doctrine, like marriage being between one man and one woman. For the past 13 weeks I have posted my old Mad Trad Corner columns (2010-2011) from the Prairie Messenger.

If you are from the Canadian prairie provinces, you may be rolling about on the floor at the thought of my traddery appearing in the PM, but it did, thanks to the editor, who admired Seraphic Singles. The editor's love for sparkling writing has trumped ideological concerns more than once, and this seems to have caused dismay among the clerics behind the curtain.

As a writer, I sympathize with this love. When all were freaking out because this editor hired my co-national, the schismatic Mr Coren, from whom the rest of  Catholic media had shrieking fled, I discovered that, naturally, she had admired his writing. Well, of course.

However, he who pays the piper picks the tune, and the men signing the cheques at the PM didn't like mine. Therefore, this is the last of the Mad Trad columns to make it into the Prairie Messenger.   I am sorry that the editor bore the brunt of my missionary effort, both from her bossleagues and from letter-writers, but I thoroughly enjoyed the adventure. Although naturally not everyone enjoys my writing at the Catholic Register, Toronto is--and always has been--a reasonably conservative archdiocese, thanks to the massive immigrant population and, very possibly, the patronage of Saint Michael the Archangel. To write a column about traditional Catholicism to the dioceses in Alberta and Saskatchewan was really a thrill, and if it didn't win me any converts, it certainly won me friends among the traditional Catholics suffering out there.

But without further ado, here are my thoughts on First Friday Mass and the devotion to the Sacred Heart.

The Nine First Fridays

When I was a little girl in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, the pupils of my elementary school walked to Mass on every first Friday of the month. “First Friday Mass” was a school-wide devotion in a school that rarely talked about devotions. I had no idea that there was a traditional devotion known as the Nine First Fridays until as a teenager I found it mentioned in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Having subsequently done the math, I realize that my class must have fulfilled the Nine First Fridays, from September to May, or from October to June, every year. That was a nice idea of someone’s. I wonder if it was an intentional parish holdover from what some call the pre-conciliar era (i.e. Pentecost to 1963).

Devotion to the Nine First Fridays was born in the seventeenth century as part of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (i.e. our Lord’s great love for humanity). Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was widespread amongst the English-speaking grandparents of my friends, but it was not mentioned in my family—perhaps because my mother grew up Protestant and was not catechized until 1969.

The name most associated with the Nine First Friday devotion is that of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. In her writings, Saint Margaret Mary wrote down twelve promises of the Sacred Heart to devotees, one of which directly concerned First Fridays:

1. I will give them all the graces necessary for their state in life.
2. I will give peace in their families.
3. I will console them in all their troubles.
4. They shall find in my heart an assured refuge during life and especially at the hour of death.
5. I will pour abundant blessing on all their undertakings.

 6. Sinners shall find in my heart the source of an infinite ocean of mercy.

7. Tepid souls shall become fervent.

8. Fervent souls shall speedily rise to great perfection.
9. I will bless the homes in which the image of my sacred heart shall be exposed and honoured.
10. I will give to priests the power to touch the most hardened hearts.
11. Those who propagate this devotion shall have their name written in my heart, and it shall never be effaced.
12. The all-powerful love of my heart will grant to all those who shall receive communion on the first Friday of nine consecutive months the grace of final repentance; they shall not die under my displeasure, nor without receiving the sacraments; my heart shall be their assured refuges at the last hour.

I did not know of these promises all the years I trooped through the playground, up the street and around the corner to the parish church on first Fridays, which seems a pity. Those were ten years in which I could have consciously fostered a beautiful devotion.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart first appeared in the thirteenth century, most notably in the writings of St. Gertrude of Helfta (1256-1302), Gertrude the Great. Subsequent mystics, particularly Carthusians, also developed a devotion to Christ’s heart. At first a German devotion, it passed to a number of religious orders outside Germany, particular to the Society of Jesus [i.e. the Jesuits], who carried it to missionary countries. 

In France, St. John Eudes (1601-80) encouraged devotion to the Sacred Heart, and in Paray-Le-Monial from 1673 to 1675, a Visitation nun named St. Margaret Mary (1648-1690) received her revelations. St. Margaret Mary, her order, and her confessor, the Jesuit priest Claude de la Colombière, zealously published abroad her visions and fostered devotion to the Sacred Heart.

The devotion became well-established in the eighteenth century, and then immensely popular after the Napoleonic Wars. Religious orders were founded under the name of the Sacred Heart, more confraternities of the Sacred Heart were established, and the first “month of the Sacred Heart” was celebrated in 1856. In 1875, to mark the 200^th anniversary of St. Margaret Mary’s visions, Pope Pius IX asked all Catholics to consecrate themselves to the Sacred Heart. On June 11, 1899, Catholics obeyed the exhortation of Pope Leo to consecrate the whole world to the Sacred Heart. Pius X asked that this consecration be renewed annually, and in 1925, Pius XI directed that this be done on the Feast of Christ the King.

It might have surprised Pius XI to know that fifty-five years later, a Catholic schoolchild could have gaily skipped off to First Friday Mass without the foggiest idea what devotion to the Sacred Heart was all about. However, in the 1970s it was fashionable to disparage those devotions that were widespread in the nineteenth century, and certainly devotion to the Sacred Heart was a great comfort to our ancestors in that much-maligned era. So perhaps my childhood ignorance is not so surprising. What might be surprising—and a source of amusement to grandparents in heaven—is that my school kept the Nine First Fridays at all.

Mad Trad 13 : L is for Latin

Good morning, my little ones. I scrubbed yesterday's post because I wrote it when I was sad, and decided later it was TMI. Meanwhile, I am tired of writing about myself, so I will get right down to the business of the day, the day being Traddy Tuesday!

Yes, it is Traddy Tuesday on Edinburgh Housewife, the day I write something about the traditional devotions and practises of the Church, like not giving the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist to people who are living in sin. Fortunately I don't have to write about that, as the Polish Bishops Conference has just made an excellent presentation on the topic.

I have come across arguments by--surprise--Americans that English should be made the new Language of the Church. As it happens, the unofficial Language of the Church is Italian, and this is now the default second language of the international clergy in Rome. Personally, I like Italian, but this development would have been a surprise to Saint John XXIII, who, at the time of my writing this piece, was still just a Blessed. Here is the 13th of my Mad Trad Corner pieces, which first appeared in the Prairie Messenger in February 2011

Latin the Language of the Church

Perhaps the most beloved of those who have defended Latin as the universal language of the Roman Catholic Church is Blessed John XXIII. In 1962, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John promulgated an apostolic constitution named “Veterum Sapientia”. It is concerned with the study and promotion of Latin, which had fallen into some neglect.

Pope John echoes the tribute of the Early Church Fathers to the wisdom of the ancient pagan Mediterranean world in which Christianity first appeared. “The inauguration of Christianity did not mean the obliteration of man’s past achievements,” he writes. “Nothing was lost that was in any way true, right, noble and beautiful.” Although the Church prized other ancient languages (including those still used by Eastern churches today), it gave a primary place to Latin, the language which “proved so admirable a means for the spreading of Christianity throughout the West.”

For nineteen hundred years, Latin—which after a point did not change as other languages changed—was the common language of educated people in the West. However, as Pope John observes, “it does not favour any one nation.” He quotes his predecessor Pius XI, who wrote “for the Church, precisely because it embraces all nations and is destined to endure until the end of time…of its very nature requires a language which is universal, immutable and non-vernacular.”

Pope John goes on to list the other advantages of Latin and to lay down a number of instructions for the promotion of the study of Latin, most of which were ignored and even forgotten in the excitement of the Second Vatican Council. What is evident is that Blessed John XXIII neither expected nor sought the virtual eradication of Latin from Catholic life. It would have surprised him very much to know that the official language of instruction in Rome today is Italian, and that American, African and Asian priests sweat under the Roman sun over Italian textbooks. It certainly surprised me to discover that the official language of the Asian Bishops Conference, surely a body well steeped in post-colonial discourse, is English.

Moreover, it would have staggered John XXIII to know that Latin would be almost entirely dropped from the Latin Rite, replaced rather than supplemented by vernacular languages, and that those who loved the ancient Latin liturgy would have to fight so hard to keep it. The constitution Sacrosanctum Consilium, promulgated by John’s successor Paul VI, called for some use of the vernacular, not a radical rejection of 1800 years of Latin.

Some jokester has observed that we once taught Latin in Canadian schools, and now we teach remedial English in Canadian colleges. Forty-five years after the revolutions of the 1960s, it is easy to forget that Latin was once a core part of the Canadian curriculum, just as it was in the American and the British.

“When did you start Latin?”I asked my Canadian mother.

“Thirteen,” she replied.

“When did you start Latin?” I asked my American father.

“Fourteen,” he replied.

I started tentatively at twelve, tutored by my father. To this day I can remember my first Latin sentence, which was Dorothea nautam amat, Dorothy loves the sailor. The mind of a twelve year old sucks up information and hangs on to it forever. In old age, no matter what else I forget, I will remember Dorothea nautam amat. My father learned the server’s responses to the traditional Latin Mass when he was fourteen; the trick to languages is to begin them young.

The Western Church shifted to liturgical Latin when she was young and borrowed heavily from the Greek of her infancy to express uniquely Christian concepts. Educated Roman pagans sneered, and Saint Augustine, a master of classical Latin, defended the Christian innovations. Over the next two thousand years, the Church developed a rich treasure of Latin prayers, hymns, and texts, much of which has not yet been translated into English or any other vernacular language.

It may seem madness to love and prize a language which most Canadian schools have not taught for the past forty-five years. However, few Canadian schools teach Hebrew, Arabic, Church Slavonic or Greek, and yet our Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox Christian brethren prize their traditional languages. At a bat mizvah I attended, the traditional Hebrew recitation from the Torah was acknowledged with a volley of candies. The candies represented the sweetness of learning.

I think it is safe to say that Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians derive no little amount of their identity—and indeed, a sense of unity—from their ancient languages. They do not condemn them as elitist or argue that their children are too stupid to learn them. And at a time when Catholics are more likely to praise other traditions than to cherish our own, the importance of Latin to Catholic identity is even more apparent than it was in the days of Blessed John XXIII.

****
I sent off this column just before I went to give a lecture to the St. Edith Stein conference at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and the end was very, very near for "Mad Trad Corner".

Mad Trad 12: K is for Kneeling

Fondly known by alumni as St. Alcan.

Good morning! It's Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, and also Traddy Tuesday! Traddy Tuesday is the day I write about traditional Catholic practises and devotions.

Lately I've been posting my old "Mad Trad Corner" columns from the Prairie Messenger.  Sadly, I have not saved the readers' letters from those days, but I see from my email archives that there had been quite an indignant response to my Gregorian chant piece, or perhaps it was the Holy Name one that caused the fuss. Surely nobody could have been annoyed by my close reading of "The Holly and the Ivy."

Amusingly, it was not the Trad who was mad, but some of the Prairie Messenger's left-leaning readers.

My column ran over a period of 26 weeks in 2010 and 2011 before the PM decided it was not as much interested in "balance" as it had imagined, which is to say my poor editor was badgered into dropping me. I was a little sad, but it was inevitable, and given the divisions in the Church, it was amazing that my column lasted that long. Monsieur Coren, who was picked up by the PM after all other Catholic media fled screaming from his suddenly-not-so-secretly-Anglican-convert self, lasted only one column. I think what this means is that the right side of the aisle can scream even more loudly than the left.

However, the gauche redoubled its efforts, I have reason to believe, after this piece because it flies right smack in the eye of  "communal meal" theology.  Also, it is no doubt very painful to have to see the weirdo who kneels down before a priest in the communion queue as a human being.

 Standing and Kneeling are Both Acceptable

Before the Council of Trent, ordinary laypeople were so often too timid to approach the Blessed Sacrament that the Council decreed that Catholics must receive the Eucharist at least once a year, “and that at Easter, or thereabouts,” to quote The Penny Catechism. And because it remained sacrilegious to receive the Eucharist in a state of serious sin, the Council also asked that Catholics go to confession at least once a year. The two sacraments went together, giving rise to long queues outside confessionals on Saturday night and large numbers of communicants on Sunday mornings.

The fasting law, which first asked Catholics to refrain from food and drink from Saturday midnight, and was later shortened to three hours before Mass, gave Catholics who chose not to receive communion an alibi, as it were. Non-reception did not, or perhaps not as easily it does now, excite suspicions that one’s neighbour in the pew was in a state of serious sin. Although it took place during public worship, one’s own personal communion was just that: personal.

One contemporary liturgical approach overemphasizes, to quote a popular hymn, “our oneness in the Lord” at the expense of our own personal communion with the Lord. Row after row of congregants automatically clears and joins the communion line. Sometimes even non-communicants process to the front, cross their arms over their chests, and are blessed by the priests (or blinked at by extraordinary ministers who cannot, in fact, give blessings). The pressure to join the queue, to express solidarity with the group, no matter what one’s private feelings, is almost inexorable. Receiving the Eucharist is very much a regimental activity nowadays, and that is perhaps why it seems so odd when a person at the end of the line kneels at the feet of a priest and sticks his tongue out.

It is uncomfortable to be the only person in church who kneels to receive the Eucharist, as I know first-hand. I was that person for a few weeks when I was a teenager, and it embarrassed both my family and the priest very much. Fortunately, my pastor was a kind and generous man, and simply laid the Eucharist on my tongue. Since then I have heard and read many stories of priests and extraordinary ministers passing over kneeling weirdos with a sneer or snarling at them to get up. Such priests and extraordinary ministers cannot have read Redemptionis Sacramentum with any attention.

Redemptionis Sacramentum is a 2004 instruction by the Congregation of Divine Worship, of which Cardinal Arinze was the head. Its English title is “On certain matters to be observed or to be avoided regarding the Most Holy Eucharist,” and every word is balm to those with a particular devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. The whole document is as thrilling as a novel, so I recommend that you read it online. I will quote solely from Chapter 4, as it pertains most closely to the theme of this article:

‘The faithful should receive Communion kneeling or standing... “However, if they receive Communion standing, it is recommended that they give due reverence before the reception of the Sacrament…”

‘In distributing Holy Communion it is to be remembered that “sacred ministers may not deny the sacraments to those who seek them in a reasonable manner, are rightly disposed, and are not prohibited by law from receiving them”. Hence any baptized Catholic who is not prevented by law must be admitted to Holy Communion. Therefore, it is not licit to deny Holy Communion to any of Christ’s faithful solely on the grounds, for example, that the person wishes to receive the Eucharist kneeling or standing.

‘Although each of the faithful always has the right to receive Holy Communion on the tongue, at his choice, if any communicant should wish to receive the Sacrament in the hand, in areas where the Bishops’ Conference with the recognitio of the Apostolic See has given permission, the sacred host is to be administered to him or her…(90-92).

What I hope is clear is that communicants have choice in this matter. Catholics may receive the Eucharist standing, and they may receive the Eucharist kneeling. They may receive on the tongue—which is, in fact, the norm—and in Canada, at very least, they may receive the Sacrament on the hand. What is not okay is to pass over the kneeling Catholic with a sneer, or to bark at him to get up. Perhaps it is time to replace the communion rails, to make him more comfortable.

In the cathedral of my diocese, the communion rail still stands. On the rare Sunday that I am there, I watch as communicants queue before extraordinary ministers or kneel before the altar. Some of those kneeling receive on the tongue, and some of them receive on the hand. The scene is disorderly, but happy and welcoming. I can’t remember how I received or if I received when last I attended Mass there. I don’t receive every week, but that is a personal matter.  

****

Speaking of personal matters, today is the seventh anniversary of Benedict Ambrose's reception into the Church. Congratulations, dear Benedict Ambrose! It is also a matter of congratulation for me, for when B.A. became a Roman Catholic, he became a highly eligible Catholic bachelor in his thirties, and I snaffled him before other Single Catholic women had a chance to notice.

It is also, therefore, the seventh anniversary of my introduction to the Extraordinary Form, i.e. the Traditional Latin Mass. Before my Edinburgh trip, I had seen it only once, years before, and thought it incredibly dry and dull. However, it made an enormous impression on me in 2007 and became a bright ribbon in the polychromatic braid that was my astonishing European Vacation.

It was the liturgical solution I had been longing for ever since I was introduced to the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, to say nothing of Saint Augustine and other Early Church Fathers. It was the bridge between the old Catholic world of Butlers' Lives of the Saints and the desert to which I fled after my demoralizing misadventures in American Catholic academic theology. Lex orandi, lex credendi, some priestly professor once taught me, and at last I had found a liturgy that powerfully prayed what I believed, in which "liturgical abuse" and scandal are almost impossible as opposed to, I'm sorry to say, almost inevitable. The poor Novus Ordo is like a little baby; it needs a lot of protection.

And now let's all pray the Prayer to Saint Michael together:

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and may you, O prince of the heavenly host, by the Divine Power of God, cast into Hell, Satan and all the evil spirits, who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Święty Michale Archaniele, broń nas w walce. Przeciw niegodziwości i zasadzkom złego ducha bądź nam obroną. Niech go Bóg pogromi, pokornie prosimy; a Ty, Ksiaże wojska niebieskiego, szatana i inne duchy złe, które na zgubę dusz krążą po świecie, mocą Bożą strąć do piekła. Amen.

P.S. In case you are dying to know, that is an aluminum statue of Saint Michael the Archangel at the University of Saint Michael's College, University of Toronto. As Saint Michael is an archangel, he doesn't actually look like anything, so actually a few planes of aluminum could really... Oh, sigh.

Mad Trad 11: J is for the Holy Name

Good morning! It's Traddy Tuesday, the day I write about some aspect of traditional Catholic practice. Lately I've been posting my old "Mad Trad" columns from Canada's Prairie Messenger, a periodical not known for traditionalism, but the editor liked Seraphic Singles and so took a risk. Evangelizing in the Prairie Messenger was fun while it lasted; the Spirit of Vatican II set fairly danced with rage. 

One of the mysteries of contemporary Catholicism is why some Catholics go apoplectic when another Catholic professes love for some old Catholic tradition. To be fair, traddies are not unknown to foam at the mouth ourselves, but generally we are fretting about some perceived insult to God, whereas a love of Latin or Gregorian Chant or Saint Augustine is at worst positively harmless. And yet I once saw a Jesuit liturgist go purple and shake with rage merely because a visiting scholar--no less a personage than Eamonn Duffy--praised Benedict XVI's liturgical sense.

Therefore, if you are a would-be convert, or a recent convert, and you absolutely love traditional aspects of Catholicism, please do not be shocked and disappointed when the priest, sister or lay minister to whom you mention your traddy love makes a face, or looks frozen, laughs nervously, or behaves in some other odd way.  This is perfectly normal--insofar as Catholics can be said to be normal. Direct the conversation right back to our Risen Lord, and he or she will relax.

Speaking of our Master, one lesson I learned by moving from Canada to the UK is that British Catholics, particularly converts from Anglicanism, feel very uncomfortable discussing our Lord by His name. In Canada and the USA, I happily talked about +Jesus+ like everyone else; in the UK, people don't like to do that. My husband has an edifying story about people cheering rowers from Jesus College, Cambridge. As the British think it blasphemous to shout "Jesus, Jesus!" when cheering on a college team, supporters would cry out, "The Name! The Name!" instead.

So now I too try to get around using the Holy Name as much as possible, so as not to make the Scots and English Christians around me wince. And naturally when I hear it, I bow my head because Trads are a set of head-bobbers, for reasons my column will explain. When B.A. hears someone blaspheme at work ("GEE-zuz!"), he attempts to repair the damage by interrupting with "...make haste to save us" or some other prayer.  

Above All Other Names

A young priest I know celebrated his first Solemn High Mass according to the Extraordinary Form. He was preceded into the cathedral by a virtual army of priests, most of whom were wearing black birettas. They sat in choir, so whenever during the liturgy the most Holy Name of Jesus was uttered, there was a choir-wide flutter of birettas as the priests uncovered their heads. This impressive display of piety took a comic turn, however, when the homilist, unfamiliar with this tradition, spoke the Holy Name several times in rapid succession. My own priest left off his biretta for the duration of the sermon.

Where I go to Mass, everyone bows the head at the Holy Name of Jesus. Well, almost everybody; I frequently forget. As a child, I long wondered why, since we sang that “in the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bow,” knees usually didn’t.  As an adult, I recently wondered why the heads around me do. And I was delighted to discover the answer to the second question in the 1274 Second Council of Lyons, where Christians were officially enjoined to reverence the Holy Name:

“Those who assemble in church should extol with an act of special reverence that Name which is above every Name, than which no other under Heaven has been given to people, in which believers must be saved, the Name, that is, of Jesus Christ, Who will save His people from their sins. Each should fulfill in himself that which is written for all, that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow; whenever that glorious Name is recalled, especially during the sacred Mysteries of the Mass, everyone should bow the knees of his heart, which he can do even by a bow of his head.”

Therefore, bowing your head at the Holy Name is definitely in keeping with the spirit of Lyons II.

But devotion to the Holy Name began long before 1274. As we know from Scripture, “Jesus” is the name through which we are saved (Acts 4.12, Rom 10.9), and the use of which enabled disciples to cast out demons, heal the sick and perform other wonders (Mark 16.17-18).  St. Peter cured a crippled beggar by saying, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk” (Acts 3.6).  It was St. Paul who proclaimed that “God gave [our Lord] the name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend…” (Phil 2:9-10).

The Holy Name of Jesus was long written “IHESUS,” and there exists a gold coin from the 8^th century with the monogram IHS stamped upon it. St. Anselm wrote a meditation upon the Holy Name around 1070, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux encouraged the devotion in the 12^th century. The first hymn to the Holy Name, Jesu Dulcis Memoria, is ascribed to him, but some believe it was written by 11^th century Cistercians instead. In the 13^th century, St. Guibert of Tournai wrote the earliest extant theological treatise on the Holy Name.  In the 16^th century, St. Ignatius of Loyola included the IHS monogram in the emblem of his Society of Jesus.

But perhaps no-one did more to foster devotion to the Holy Name than the Franciscan St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444). Whenever he went into a city to preach, he walked behind a banner with the Holy Name emblazoned on it, and preached with the banner prominent beside the pulpit.  He also held up a tablet with a gold IHS painted on it, and encouraged his hearers to give up their sins, to do all things in the Holy Name and to put up similar tablets in their churches and homes.  The devotion spread throughout Italy.

This raised the ire of theological rivals, who accused St. Bernardino of heresy and superstition, and he was called before Pope Martin V. During his trial, I am informed by a devotional pamphlet, 62 doctors of theology made cases against him. However, when it was St. Bernardino’s turn to speak, he rose and “showed so convincingly that the veneration of the Holy Name, as he preached it, was so entirely in accordance with the doctrine of the Church since the earliest times, that the Pope and Cardinals dismissed the charges of the opponents as unfounded and calumnious.” 

His devotion, sanctioned by Rome, spread through Europe and beyond. In the 1950s, the Holy Name Society numbered a hundred thousand members in the USA alone. (Their numbers have dropped since then.)  

Reverence for the Holy Name is not confined to Catholics. Many Anglicans bow their heads when they hear the Name spoken, and the Lutherans celebrate the Holy Name on January 1^st. In the Catholic Church, the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus was celebrated first by the Franciscans in 1560, and then by everyone from 1721 to 1969, when the feast was suppressed.  Happily, it is permitted in the Extraordinary Form, and this January 2nd I was delighted to hear Jesu Dulcis Memoria sound forth in church again.