Interesting journal article (in French) from 1965 regarding the lectionary

I have scanned in an article from a liturgical studies journal called Ephemerides Liturgicae (some of you may have heard of it) entitled "Choix de lectures pour la liturgie dominicale". According to Bugnini* one of the authors of this article, José Féder, S.J., was from November 1965 a member of Group 11 of the Consilium, which was responsible for the post-conciliar reform of the lectionary. The article was published in Eph. Lit. 79.4-5 (1965), pp. 249-316, but p. 252 gives a date of September 1964 for the completion of the article.

Please click here to view the article - bearing in mind that it is in French! At first glance, it makes for interesting reading: partly because it gives an example of a three-year cycle not built around the idea of one year for each synoptic Gospel (as we ended up with), partly because it gives some of the liturgical sources for its selection of pericopes, and partly because one of its co-authors was drafted into Group 11 of the Consilium.

I hope to get round to translating the article into English and tabulating the order of readings this year, though since my French language skills are not great, that will depend on when I can get some help from a couple of my friends.

* Cf. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), p. 409 fn. 12.

Happy New Year - and plans for 2015!

A very Happy New Year to all! I pray that the Lord will bless you all in this coming year, and that your faith in Him will grow and deepen.

Plans are afoot for this blog, some quite ambitious - so we'll see how it goes this year! :-)

I started work towards the middle of December on Volume 2 of the Postcommunion comparisons of translations and sources. The second volume will comprise the Proper of Saints and the Commons. There's still a bit more work to do before that's finished, but hopefully by the end of the winter (i.e. end of February) it'll be done and then I can get started on Volume 3. Once all the volumes are finished, I'll wrap them up into one large PDF (which will probably be around 600 pages or so) for those of you who don't like fiddling around with multiple files. It's my aim to get the Postcommunions project finished by the end of this year. If I finish earlier, then I may get a similar project started on either the Collects or the Prayers over the Offerings.

Another project that I am aiming to make a good start on this year has come about rather fortuitously:

Volume 1, Part 1 of the Acta Synodalia

The Acta Synodalia occupying a significant space on my bookshelves!

Over Christmas, I managed to acquire (for a pretty good price) a complete set of the Acta Synodalia of the Second Vatican Council - the complete record of every speech made by the Council Fathers at all of the 168 General Congregations and the 10 Public Sessions held over the four sessions of the Council. Quite the interesting find!

As a beginning project, I thought it would be interesting to chart the progress of the Council's liturgy constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium. I'm currently typing up the first draft/schema, which was first discussed at the 4th General Congregation (22 Oct 1962), and then I'll type the others out and arrange them with the final document ratified by the Pope and the Council. I may attempt to provide some sort of commentary and analysis on the changes made to SC during the 1st and 2nd session of Vatican II, but that will probably be a several-year long project because it crosses over with another more personal aim for 2015 - to learn ecclesiastical Latin properly!

I'd also love to get a few book reviews done, if there is time...

Finally, there are a few lectionary projects in the pipeline: well, this blog is called Lectionary Study Aids, after all! One thing I hope to be able to do is compile the relevant parts of the Council Fathers speeches that refer to the proposed lectionary reform, partly to see if any of them had particular things in mind when they signed off on SC.

Finishing off the Christmas port before work begins in earnest!

So, a busy 2015 is ahead for me, it seems! I hope everyone reading this blog has something they're especially looking forward to!

Oh, and if anyone has any suggestions for books or resources that I might be interested in (hint: I'm interested in pretty much everything liturgical and Catholic!), or if there's a resource that anyone would like to see on this blog, e-mail me at mrmphazell-AT-gmail-DOT-com or leave a comment, and I'll see what I can do.

The Postcommunion Prayers of the Missale Romanum (1970/2002): Translations and Sources

The following document is the reason why the French experimental lectionary table was finished much later than I would have liked. It isn't, strictly speaking, lectionary-based, but I thought that the idea was interesting enough to make into a freely-available resource. (And where else am I going to host it?) :-)

Please click here to view the resource!

The aim of the resource is to take each of the postcommunion prayers in the Proper of Time (i.e. Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time), compare four different translations of them, and also give each of their sources. As an example, for the postcommunion for the 1st Sunday of Advent, one can see on a single page:

• the postcommunion as it appears in the Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia emendata, with the 1972 interim translation of the National Liturgical Commission of England & Wales, and the 1973, 1998 and 2011 ICEL translations of it, all in a side-by-side table;
• the Latin source text(s) of the prayer (in this case, it is a combination of two prayers from the Veronese Sacramentary) with some very rough English translations of the source(s), alongside the prayer as it appears in the current Latin and English Missals.

Over the years, there has been much ink - physical and electronic! - spilt over some of the differences between the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms, from both (so-called) conservative and progressive viewpoints. There are quite a large number of popular and scholarly books and articles that examine issues such as the two different calendars, the differences in each Missal's Order of Mass, the changes in the rubrics, etc. Less numerous, and much less accessible, are those works that deal in some detail with the sources used in the compilation of the prayers of the post-conciliar Missal.

My feeling is that, in critical examinations of this Missal, the real spade work is only just beginning. Some prayers in the OF Missal have been taken direct from their sources and used basically 'as is'; some prayers come from sources that have been edited (some lightly, some much more heavily) before their inclusion; other prayers are effectively newly composed around one or more a phrases lifted from a source; still others are newly composed in their entirety. It is very interesting to see which sources from the ancient sacramentaries and previous Missals have been edited and how they have been edited.

Back in 1970, in article in Notitiae, Archbishop Bugnini praised what he called the "ricchissimo e splendido tesoro eucologico" (rich and splendid euchological treasures) of the new Missal.* Are these treasures quite so rich and splendid if they have been edited to fit with the perceived mentality of 'modern man'? Can the prayers of the OF Missal be meaningfully described as "treasures" if they are not quite the same as those that, in some cases for more than a thousand years, previous generations of Catholics prayed? 

Part of my aim in compiling this study resource is to help examine these sorts of questions, and to enable people to delve a little deeper into all this editing and rearranging of source material that the group responsible for the post-conciliar liturgical reforms, the Consilium, engaged in. I hope that you all find it useful and interesting!

* Cf. "De Editione Missalis Romani Instaurati 'Paulus Episcopus Plebi Dei'", Notitiae 6 (1970), p. 163.

French experimental lectionary table now available for download!

Well, it has been slightly more than a couple of weeks, but I have finished the French experimental lectionary table!

Please click here to download it!

The reason for my tardiness is because I have had another, slightly more involved project on the go, which will be explained in the next blog post...

Comparison table of EF and OF readings for the liturgical year 2014-15

I have compiled a table that compares the readings in the EF and OF for the upcoming liturgical year (2014-15). Please click here to download it!

The comparative table of the EF and OF readings in the previous post is limited in a number of ways. The three year Sunday cycle of the OF lectionary, the differences in the OF and EF calendars, and the fact that Easter is movable, all make it difficult to compare the two sets of readings. However, by chronologically going through a whole liturgical year, we can start to get a feel for how the two lectionaries compare when put side-by-side.

Again, this table has its limitations, notably that it only works for one year. The sheer number of options in the OF lectionary does not help with compiling a table, either! But I hope that some of you find it useful nonetheless.

Oh, and for those who are interested, the French experimental lectionary table is almost done. My wife and I are going away this week for our wedding anniversary, so I hope to be able to upload that table in a couple of weeks.

Comparison table of OF and EF lectionary readings

Further to Fr Z's request for resources to compare the OF and EF readings, I have quickly knocked up the following table, which can be downloaded from here.

The font is unfortunately quite small, but that's mainly down to the sheer size of the OF Sunday lectionary!

Updates and fixes

Hello to those of you coming here from Fr Z!

I have fixed some of the links to the tables and other resources that have been broken over the last year or so. Please let me know in the comments if you are experiencing difficulties in accessing any of them.

The French experimental lectionary table is coming along nicely, and will hopefully be ready next month!