Sacra Liturgia UK 2016

Registrations are now open for this year's Sacra Liturgia UK conference! Robert Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the CDWDS, will be giving the inaugural address, entitled "Towards an Authentic Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium", and many others, including Bishop Alan Hopes, Mgr Andrew Burnham, Dom Alcuin Reid, and Fr Uwe Michael Lang will also be speaking on various topics.

Click here to go to the registration page!

The conference runs from the 5th-8th July at Imperial College, South Kensington, London, with the liturgical celebrations being held at the London Oratory and Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory (the central church of the Ordinariate).

The cost is £100 for ordinary registrations, £65 for students (not including accommodation or meals). Great value for what is bound to be four days of immensely interesting lectures, and joyful, solemn liturgical celebrations!

Lots more information can be found at sacraliturgiauk.org.

I have booked my place, so if people want to have some lectionary-based conversations over a beer in London in early July, you now know where to come! :-)

The O Antiphons

Since it is the season, I thought I would share a talk I gave earlier this Advent to the Diocese of Hallam branch of the Ascent movement on the O Antiphons.

The O Antiphons: History, Theology, Spirituality (PDF)

Hope that you find the talk interesting, and also that you are all having a blessed Advent!

Interesting lectionary news from the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales

Some interesting news from the November plenary meeting of the English and Welsh bishops:

The Bishops' Conference agrees to seek the approval of the Holy See for the use of the Revised Standard Version (2nd Catholic edition 2010) and the Revised Grail Psalter (2010) in the preparation of a Lectionary for use in England and Wales. [link]

IMO, a good choice of translation for the biblical readings, but not a great choice (though a predictable one) for the psalter. The authorisation, even if only for optional use, of the Coverdale Psalter - which as far as I am aware can be used in the Ordinariate Use - would be preferable (and also thoroughly ecumenical!).

However, given that the RSV2CE is in use in the Ordinariate, and the Revised Grail Psalter (with adjustments) has already been authorised for use in other countries like the USA, one would have thought that the Holy See's approval would be fairly quick in coming. Perhaps in time for publication by Advent 2017?

This resolution is particularly interesting in light of the collapse of the International Commission for the Preparation of an English Language Lectionary (ICPELL), which was supposed to have produced a common lectionary for conferences where English is used in the liturgy (excluding the USA). For more on that saga, see the relevant posts on Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman's blog.

Pinpointing the Origins of the Multi-Year Lectionary: (1) Heinz Schürmann

Note: This is the first post in an occasional series, which will look at proposals and suggestions made about the lections of the Roman Missal from before the Second Vatican Council, and ultimately attempt to pinpoint the origins of the idea of a lectionary with cycles for multiple years.

It is well-known that, with regard to the reform of the lectionary, Sacrosanctum Concilium 51 stated that a "more representative portion of the holy scriptures will be read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years [intra praestitutum annorum spatium]". The Fathers thus did not specify exactly how this desire was to be practically implemented; like most of the other reforms, this was ultimately left in the hands of the Consilium. In the case of the lectionary, Group 11 of the Consilium¹ was responsible for producing what is used today in the forma ordinaria of the Roman Rite: a lectionary with a three-year Sunday cycle, and a two-year weekday cycle.²

Where did this desire for a multi-year cycle of readings for Mass come from? After all, it was not particularly controversial or much discussed at the Council itself.³ For the vast majority of the Council Fathers, it apparently seemed obvious that there should be more scripture read at Mass, and having it over more than one year was a sensible way of achieving this. Still, ideas like this do not just come from nowhere without having been previously discussed (even if only privately) by bishops, priests and liturgical scholars.

Our quest to find out more about the origins of this idea starts a decade before the Council. In 1952, the new (at that time) liturgical journal Liturgisches Jahrbuch published an article entitled "Eine Dreijährige Perikopenordnung für Sonn- und Festtage" by Fr Heinz Schürmann - who would, incidentally, later be a member of Group 11 of the Consilium. In this article, what he says about the order of readings in the Roman Missal is that it is Nachteil, a disadvantage, and suggests his own, three-year cycle.⁴ Below are download links to the German-language article, and my English translation of it.

• English translation: "A Three-Year Order of Readings for Sundays and Feast Days"
• Original German: "Eine Dreijährige Perikopenordnung für Sonn- und Festtage", LJ 2 (1952), 58-72.

Interestingly, Schürmann's proposed readings do not particularly exhibit the lectio semi-continua we see in the post-conciliar reforms, and neither is there the approach whereby each year is organised around one of the synoptic Gospels. Instead, his approach utilises Gospel pericopes with roughly similar meaning and content for each Sunday ("die Evangelienperikopen durch solche ungefähr gleichen Sinngehaltes zu ersetzen"), so there is an attempt at thematic consistency throughout each year of the cycle. The Epistle readings are, however, thematically linked to the Gospel, much like the Old Testament reading is linked to the Gospel in the Ordinary Form lectionary.

As we shall see, a number of suggestions were made about lectionary reform (and liturgical reform generally) in the 1950s. We shall look at some of these in the next post in this series, and afterwards go a little further back in time to trace the history of this particular reform.


NOTES

¹ The personnel of Coetus XI were as follows (cf. A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 [Liturgical Press, 1990], p. 409 fn. 12.): relator: G. Diekmann (until June 1965), C. Vagaggini (after June 1965); secretary: G. Fontaine; members: H. Schürmann, P. Jounel, P. Massi, E. Lanne, H. Kahlefeld, and J. Féder (from Nov. 1965). There were also some members added to the group, presumably in 1966 when the work really got going: A. Rose, A. Nocent, A.-M. Roguet, K. Tilmann, H. Oster, J. Gaillard, H. Marot, and L. Deiss.

² In reality, it is a little more complicated than that (e.g. the Gospel reading on weekdays is the same in Years I and II), but this brief description will do for now!

³ For the Latin texts of the interventions of the Fathers dealing with SC 51, 24 and 35, see my resource Lectionary Reform at the Second Vatican Council (which can also be found in this blog's sidebar).

⁴ Interestingly, as a member of Coetus XI, Schürmann (along with Heinrich Kahlefeld) would later go further by championing the idea of a four-year Sunday cycle of readings: cf. Bugnini, Reform, p. 417.

The Consilium and ad experimentum lectionaries, 1965-69

A couple of new lectionary resources for you all!

Between 1965 and 1969, the Consilium gave permission to many countries regarding the use of ad experimentum lectionaries for use on weekdays and on occasions such as confirmations, weddings, funerals, etc. These permissions were detailed every so often in the journal Notitiae, which I recently had the opportunity to go through. My resource Permissions given by the Consilium for the use of ad experimentum lectionaries, 1965-69 collects them into two tables: one organised by date, the other organised alphabetically by country/diocese/order. It is perhaps surprising quite how many countries asked for and were given permission to experiment with the readings at Mass (around 60 countries/areas, as well as 5 dioceses and 3 religious orders)!

The weekday lectionaries were the first experiments in this area authorised by the Consilium, but from the beginning of 1967 permissions to use experimental sets of readings for particular occasions such as marriages and funerals started to be given. This culminated in the Consilium's Lectionaria particularia, published in its entirety in Notitiae 4 (1968), and tabulated in my resource Text and Tables of the Consilium’s « Lectionaria particularia ». There are ten sets of readings in total. Conferences of Bishops could ask permission - which would readily be given - to use some or all of the sets of readings contained in it.

Finally, a reminder that for more information on the experimental weekday lectionaries, you can see the posts and resources on the German and French schemes!

General update

It's been a little while since I've posted - sorry about that! - but there are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, Gregory DiPippo and Peter Kwasniewski of the New Liturgical Movement very kindly and generously asked me if I wanted to become an occasional contributor to the site. So, I now also write for NLM every now and then! For those who are interested, here are the links to my first few articles:

• The U.S. Bishops' Interventions on the Liturgy at Vatican II
• The Acta Synodalia of Vatican II (1st Session) - Now Available for Download (the links to PDFs of the Acta for the 1st session of the Council can also be found in this blog's sidebar - look out for the remaining three sessions during this year!)
• "Advertising" the Lectionary - An Insight into its Reform
• "Mediator Dei? Never heard of it! Sacrosanctum Concilium's Disappearing Footnotes

Secondly, as I was about two-thirds of the way through with the third and final part of my postcommunions study, Fr Daniel McCarthy e-mailed me with some suggestions about how I could improve it, and Dom James Leachman of St Benedict's Abbey in Ealing, London, was kind enough to let me stay for a few days and consult the abbey library in order to gather the information I needed. Both Fr McCarthy and Dom Leachman are part of the Institutum Liturgicum based at Ealing - many thanks to both for their help, suggestions, and hospitality!

All this means that I am in the process of reworking the study into a single volume, with much more detailed information about the manuscript history of each prayer. I'm pretty excited about it, though the reworking is proving to be more time-intensive than I thought it might be at first (isn't it always the way?). Look out for more news about this project during the year!

Finally, with regard to the Lectionary - because, given the title of this blog, we are perhaps overdue for some more Lectionary study aids! - I have been busy compiling a few more resources that I'll post and talk about both here and at NLM over the next few weeks. 

PDF Download: C. Vagaggini, “The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform”

Dom Cipriano Vagaggini, O.S.B., was one of the more influential members of Group 10 of the Consilium, the group responsible for the revision of the Ordo Missae. This revision was to involve, among other things, the composition of three new Eucharistic Prayers to sit alongside the Roman Canon. (For more information on how new anaphoras were transplanted into the Roman Rite, see the Adoremus article From One Eucharistic Prayer to Many: How it Happened and Why by Dom Cassian Folsom, O.S.B.)

As part of this work, Dom Vagaggini published a book called Il canone della messa e la riforma liturgica in 1966, and this was translated into English the following year under the title The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform. In this book, Vagaggini went through what he saw as the ‘merits’ and ‘defects’ of the Roman Canon (perhaps unsurprisingly, the defects outnumber the merits by a ratio of more than 2:1), argued for the introduction of one or more new Eucharistic Prayers to ‘enrich’ the Roman Rite, and gave a couple of examples of what they might look like.

Vagaggini’s book is, in my opinion, one of the more important works contemporary to the post-Vatican II liturgical reform itself, and is illustrative of some of the attitudes of the reformers towards the liturgical tradition. Unfortunately it has been out of print for a good while, and, at the time of writing, second-hand copies of it are difficult to come by. So, I am happy to say that a PDF copy is now freely available by clicking the link below:

C. Vagaggini, The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967) (PDF, 23.5 MB)

Also, since what we now know as Eucharistic Prayer III has its genesis in Vagaggini’s book above, I have also put together a side-by-side comparison of his “Canon B” (see chapter 4 in the book above) with EP III, which can be downloaded by clicking the following link:

Comparison of Eucharistic Prayer III with Dom Vagaggini’s draft “Canon B” (PDF)

There are more historical goodies and curiosities to come very soon, so watch this space!