Monthly Archives: December 2020

Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment: Mary Mother of God

Try this on for size, my hearties:

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago in the great basilica of Blachernae in Constantinople, high up on the ceiling near the Altar, was an enormous picture of a Palestinian teenager, that selfsame Girl who is such a lead-player in the Christmass celebrations. There she stood orans, Mediatrix of All Graces, as we Westerners would say, her hands raised in prayer, and in front of her womb, in a round circle, a painting of her Divine Son – his hand lifted in blessing. That image of Mary was called Platytera tou kosmou, the Woman Wider than the Universe. Mary was Great with Child; her Child was Almighty God. She contained the One whom the heaven of heavens is too narrow to hold. Can a foot be larger than the boot or an oyster greater than the shell? For Christians, apparently, Very Often. Mary’s slender womb enthroned within it the Maker of the Universe, the God who is greater than all the galaxies that stream across the firmament. The tummy of a Girl was wider than creation.

Then on the crisp night air came the squeal of the newly born baby. It came from the cave that was both a stable and a birth-place. That stable in Bethlehem, as C S Lewis memorably explains in The Last Battle, ‘had something in it that was bigger than our entire world’. The stable, like Mary, was great with child; very great, for that Child is God. And what is true of the womb of the Mother of God, and what is true of that stable at Bethlehem, is also the great truth of the Sacrament of the Altar. Bread becomes God Almighty; little round disks of unleavened bread are recreated by the Maker of the World to be Himself. As Mary’s Baby was bigger than all creation, than all the stars and clouds and mass of it, so the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is bigger than the Kosmos.

As you made your Christmass communion, glorious and loving Infinity came to make His dwelling in your poor body; so that, as you walked or drove home for the rest of Christmass, you were platyteroi tou Kosmou: broader than the Universe.

He spells Christmas with two s’s, you see. Not a typo. It’s what he thinks about the Mass.

Blithe Spirit

Try this on for size, my hearties:

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago in the great basilica of Blachernae in Constantinople, high up on the ceiling near the Altar, was an enormous picture of a Palestinian teenager, that selfsame Girl who is such a lead-player in the Christmass celebrations. There she stood orans, Mediatrix of All Graces, as we Westerners would say, her hands raised in prayer, and in front of her womb, in a round circle, a painting of her Divine Son – his hand lifted in blessing. That image of Mary was called Platytera tou kosmou, the Woman Wider than the Universe. Mary was Great with Child; her Child was Almighty God. She contained the One whom the heaven of heavens is too narrow to hold. Can a foot be larger than the boot or an oyster greater than the shell? For Christians, apparently…

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The mentality and modus agendi of Novus Ordo reformers, in a few words . . .

Key words and phrases here, help us understand what we have in Novus Ordo masses:

The feast of St. Thomas the Apostle has been kept on . . . December 21 from at least the ninth century. It was moved to July 3, the day mentioned by St. Jerome as the date of his martyrdom in India, by those who revised the calendar after the Second Vatican Council. They did this so that his feast would not interrupt the major ferial days of Advent leading to Christmas.

They wanted to tidy things up, calendar wise. They considered the feast of St. Thomas in later Advent out of place. Their liturgical rationalism made them blind to the wonderful interruption of late Advent made possible by the feast of this apostle.

You see this in the masses, where it’s almost a head trip that is offered worshipers. No room for what does not fit the outline.

The Gospel of the day is

the famous Gospel of “doubting Thomas” . . . heard also on the Sunday after Easter, Low Sunday. Heard on Low Sunday it makes sense as the continuing narrative of Jesus’ resurrection and appearances to the disciples. But it also makes sense in a discontinuous way today, four days before the celebration of the birth of Christ.

More later on this very point about liturgical fixers . . . Fussbudgets . . .

RORATE CAELI DESUPER, “Rain down ye heavens . . . “

Mass by candlelight just before dawn.

“THE RORATE MASS”A beautiful custom arose in Germany and Eastern Europe of saying an Advent Votive Mass of our Lady in the darkness just before dawn, entirely by candlelight. As well as being very ancient and very suitable to the few days before Christmass, it also comes round about the time (in the Northern hemisphere) of our shortest day. It thus has pastoral potential just when the human frame and psyche need to be cheered up by the prospect of lengthening days and the return of Light.

Mass goers went without their missals, were caught up in what they knew was happening. A lesson here.

(Oh. “Rorate coeli” are the first words of the post-introductory mass. “Rain down” is mine.)

Differences in the Old and New Liturgical Calendars: Slaughter of the feast days . . .

More of why liturgical change. “Armchair strategy of academics,” then-mere-cardinal Ratzinger called it.

It was incomprehensible and pointless to move feast days that people have been celebrating on particular days for hundreds (or thousands) of years, thus totally disrupting the annual nature of the liturgical year. And why change the calendar all around to a three year cycle named as years A, B, or C? Whoever thought that one up?

. . . .

From “the Feast of Faith” By J. Ratzinger ( later Pope Benedict XVI) in 1986:

“One of the weaknesses of the postconciliar liturgical reform can doubtless be traced to the armchair strategy of academics, drawing up things on paper which, in fact, would presuppose years of organic growth. The most blatant example of this is the reform of the Calendar: those responsible simply did not realize how much the various annual feasts had influenced Christian people’s relation to time. In redistributing these established feasts throughout the year according to some historical arithmetic – inconsistently applied at that – they ignored a fundamental law of religious life.”

Of course, Ratzinger later put his authority where his mouth (or pen) was, in 2007 as pope giving carte blanche approval for the Old Mass.

How the 1960s reformers treated the liturgy like mechanics putting car parts together, says Peter Kwasniewski

For instance, what ever happened to Ember Days?

The ancient tradition of Ember Days, like so many other traditions, was just wiped away in the 1960s, as part of the “extreme makeover” approach of a Vatican committee that suppressed or invented what they thought the world now needed. It’s completely contrary to the way the liturgy has always been treated: as an inheritance to be proudly maintained and jealously protected. How could such a thing have happened?

We were something new that had happened. Whoopee.

A purge of this magnitude arose from the belief that modern man is essentially different from his predecessors, to such an extent that what past generations possessed and made use of can no longer be assumed to be profitable to modern people. This belief, as false as the day is long, dovetailed with the mania for a system and method characteristic of modern times: with enough taxpayer dollars and enough committees, we can build a better world, or, in this case, a better worship.

A zest for tidiness came over the land.

There are multiple reasons for the mania, but they converge on one thing: the triumph of rational method and its (attempted) application to every domain of human life. By “rational method” I mean the sort of thing one finds in rationalist thinkers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, or Comte: the attempt to dominate reality by a self-contained logical system of axioms, theorems, and corollaries. In civil society, this becomes the attempt to create a rational “science of politics” and a system of human rights so that man’s happiness can be procured on Earth and the evils the flesh is heir to can be banished.

Romanticism was a failed response to the rationalist mania, and its failure was all the heavier because it bought the premise of the mania — namely, that system and method are the only ways to be rational. In reacting against rational method, romanticism thought it had to react against rationality itself.

So went the Church:

The groundbreaking essay “Bishops Unbound“ by Bronwen Catherine McShea exemplified how this mania invaded the Church long ago. To respond to the rise of rationally organized states, the Church adopted the same type of rational organization herself, overriding and overwriting centuries of local, organic traditions. To be fair, Protestantism had played those traditions to its advantage: get all the local canons to be heretics, and they’ll elect a heretical bishop. Some response, then, was needed. But in adopting the tactics of modernity, the Church began to drink in the view that system and method are the answer to every problem. We see that mentality extending to governing structures, seminaries, advice for confession, spiritual manuals, mass-produced artworks, you name it. The Church imitated the secular state in its absolutism, its legal codes, its proceduralism, and its regimentation. John Lamont’s analysis of the corruption of the concept of obedience (“Tyranny and Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Jesuit Tragedy”) fits into this picture as well.

Etc. etc. I love this guy. Heard him at a Catholic Citizens of Chicago luncheon some months back. If you are up to a deep dive into what’s gone wrong, he’s your man. More later in this piece and in general . . .

A Lutheran explains the importance of preaching the reality of Christ at Mass

If you haven’t got the faith, it doesn’t mean a thing.

[W]hen Christ is not proclaimed as the One who sits on the altar—whose true body and blood that were offered to God for the sin of the world are given to the Church for the remission of sins—when this reality is not understood or clearly confessed, then there is nothing left but window dressing and show.

Why concern yourself with paraments and vestments, or with liturgical propriety and rubrics, if the reason for all this is missing? Gottesdienst [a Lutheran movement and
organization] aims to provide a defense for the liturgy by confessing in no uncertain terms what the liturgy is for.

We don’t genuflect, or make the sign of the cross, or bow, just because it’s the faddish thing to do, or because we happen to think it would be stylish to look Catholic. We do happen to do those things for pretty much the same reason they do them, though in their case it might be more of a matter of obligation than of confession, considering the fact that they have for centuries had a penchant for speaking of matters of the Gospel in terms of “holy obligations.” We are, however, quite willing to agree that where Christ is present, there solemnity is appropriate, and any lack of solemnity is inappropriate.

Bingo.