Monday 17 May 2021

Update - and hopefully a return to more regular programming after July

It has been a fair while since the last update here - apologies! I have been busy both at work and on a number of liturgical projects. Some highlights:

  • A few volumes have been added to the Acta Synodalia links section on the right hand of the page. The project to scan in and make available all the volumes of the Acta of Vatican II continues: it would be nice to be done or nearly done by the time the 60th anniversary of the Council's opening comes around next year, but I can't make any firm promises!
  • A new links section has been added: Draft Schemata to be Discussed at the Conciliar Sessions (Vatican II). This will be made up of the four volumes of schemata, entitled Schemata Constitutionum et Decretorum de quibus disceptabitur in Concilii sessionibus, that were given to the Council Fathers so that they could examine them and prepare for the various discussions. These volumes do not officially make up part of the Acta Synodalia, but they are very much related.
  • I have updated the links to my books on the left hand of the page to include my recently-released title The Post-Communion Prayers of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite: Texts and Sources. More information, along with a sample of pages, can be found at this post at New Liturgical Movement
  • My recently-published article, "An English Bishop at the Second Vatican Council: George Patrick Dwyer and the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy" can be read in vol. 25, no. 1 of Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal. This is an excellent journal, published three times per year, that I have read for a good while now, and if good scholarship on the liturgy is the sort of thing you'd be interested I would thoroughly recommend a subscription! The article itself is an annotated transcription of one of the Council notebooks of George Dwyer, at the time Bishop of Leeds, later Archbishop of Birmingham, that contains his handwritten account of the discussions on Sacrosanctum Concilium at the first session of Vatican II. It was a surprising amount of work to get this completed, and I am very happy that Antiphon accepted it for publication!
  • The 13th Fota International Liturgical Conference scheduled for last year had to be postponed, along with many other things, but it will hopefully take place in Cork (Ireland) this July, circumstances permitting. I will be presenting a paper on the suggestions for the reform of the Mass lectionary in the vota of the Council Fathers and at Vatican II itself, and looking at whether or not the eventual post-conciliar reform of the lectionary was really carried out with the "spirit of the liturgy" in mind.
  • Finally, the paper I gave at the 2019 Fota International Liturgical Conference, "A Historical Survey of the Reform of De Benedictionibus (1959-1984)" will be available later this year, along with the rest of the conference proceedings. Summaries of each day of the 2019 conference can be found at New Liturgical Movement.

I have also been working on various projects related to the lectionary and missal, including the Index Psalmorum, but I have not had as much time to devote to these as I would like recently - primarily because half of our house is due to be renovated over the summer, and the preparations for things like this always take up more effort than one expects. However, once both the building works and Fota XIII are finished, I hope to get back to blogging a bit more regularly!