What has become of Advent Sunday?

When the Roman Rite of Mass was  revised after the Second Vatican Council, the Collect for the First Sunday of Advent was changed. Before Vatican II the Collect for the First Sunday of Advemt was (my translation):

Stir up your power, we pray, O Lord, and come,

that with you as protector

we may be freed from the imminent danger of our sins,

and with you as our liberator

we may be saved.

 

This contrasts with the Collect that we have now:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,

the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ

with righteous deeds at his coming, 

so that, gathered at his right hand,

they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

The contrast between the two texts is clear: the 1570 text dwells on sins we have committed, the 1970 one on good deeds we aim to perform. The current prayer has a degree of optimism that its predecessor lacks. Both come from early Sacramentaries.

A Christian looks to the future with a mixture of hope and fear. Our Lord’s parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25, 31-46) illustrates this. In the Middle Ages a tendency grew of emphasising the challenge of Christian teaching at the expense of the comfort that it offers. For instance, representations of the Last Judgement are to be seen in many of our churches and cathedrals of that period, and consideration of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell) held an important place in Catechesis.

The Second Vatican Council, concluding its statement on the Church in the Modern World, looked forward to a time when ‘humans throughout the world will be aroused to a lively hope - which is the gift of the Holy Spirit -  to be raised up eventually in peace and the highest blessedness in that homeland which is radiant with the glory of the Lord’.

The revisors of the Liturgy after the Council wanted to reflect this rediscovered emphasis on hope. Consequently, they demoted the old Collect for Advent Sunday to Friday in the First Week of Advent and replaced it with the current one.

Collect for the Twenty-third Week per annum.

O God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, 

look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters, 

that those who believe in Christ 

may receive true freedom 

and an everlasting inheritance.

This prayer did not occur in the Roman Mass before the Second Vatican Council. It has come down to us in some thirty manuscripts, which show minor differences among themselves. Those who were entrusted with the revision of the Missal chose to follow most closely a manuscript that was copied in the eighth century and used in Eastern France, perhaps in the cathedral city of Autun. The rubrics in this and many other manuscripts of this prayer specify that it is to be used in Easter Week. It clearly refers to Baptism and its effects,

The prayer follows Saint Paul (Rom 8, 15. 23; Gal 4,5; Eph 1,5) in drawing a parallel between Baptism and the Roman practice of Adoption. A slave could achieve freedom by being purchased by another man, who thus became the former slave’s legal adoptive parent. The freed man could hope to receive s legacy from his legal father after the father’s death.

The four elements of this process are mentioned in this prayer: Redemption, Adoption, Freedom and Inheritance. 

We owe gratitude to the Christians of eighth-century France for giving us this luminous prayer, and to the post-conciliar revisers of the Roman Missal for bringing it into the Roman Rite.

Collect for week 19

 This week's Collect has been used for many centuries in both the Roman and Ambrosian rites. It is clearly influenced by Saint Paul's words in Romans 8,15: 'we cry, “Abba, Father”.'  In Milan it was used on the Saturday after Easter, when the newly baptised came to church to deposit the white garments they had worn at baptism. It alludes to the fact that neophytes had only been taught the 'Our Father' just before baptism, and so recited it publicly for the first time just before their First Communion. (Things are different nowadays. The ancient discipline has not changed - see the RCIA - but we seem to divulge the Lord's Prayer to all and sundry: I have heard whole classes of children, including adherents of many different religions, obediently parroting the Lord's Prayer.)

This Collect is found in various manuscripts of the Roman Rite but not in so prominent a position. After Vatican 2 it was promoted, so to say, by giving it a Sunday all of its own. And it was expanded by the addition of Saint Paul's phrase 'the spirit of adoption' (Romans 8,15 again).This is particularly appropriate in Year A, when we are reading from Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

There are some who regret the reform of the liturgy. This Collect is one example of the thoughtful scholarship that was involved. It deserves our respect,

COLLECT for Week 14

This week's Collect deserves the description that has been given to so many of the orations in our current English missal - it is CLUNKY:

O God, who in the abasement of your Son

have raised up a fallen world,

fill your faithful with holy joy,

for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin

you bestow eternal gladness.

The problem is word-order. In two places the translators have placed an adverbial phrase before its verb, whereas the verb would more naturally come before the phrase, thus:

O God, who have raised up a fallen world

in the abasement of your Son,

fill your faithful with holy joy,

for you bestow eternal gladness

on those you have rescued from slavery to sin.

But there is a further problem. The Latin has the word ut, which it uses to introduce clauses of purpose ('final' clauses) and of result ('consecutive' clauses). The translators have ignored ut, joining the two parts of the prayer with 'for' instead. The original asks God to make us joyful in this world, and so prepare us for eternal joy in the next. A more faithful translation would be:

O God, who have raised up a fallen world

in the abasement of your Son,

fill your faithful with holy joy,

so as to bring to eternal gladness

those you have rescued from slavery to sin.

God’s love or ours?

 The Collect for February 10, the Memoria of Saint Scholastica, (a new composition in 1970) contains the clause obtineamus tuae dilectionis effectus, which can be translated ‘that we may obtain the effects of your love’. Our official translation reads ‘that … we may … receive what comes from loving you’. But does this correctly render tuae dilectionis? Would we not expect to find tui (pronoun) if the author had intended to speak of our love of God? And does not the Latin collect speak rather of God’s love for us and of its effects?

Candlemass 2023

 On February 2nd this year I went to a nearby Catholic church to take part in Mass for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, or Candlemass. The liturgy was composed, I found, of a mixture of elements from the current rite of Mass and the pre-conciliar, or Tridentine, rite.

The Mass was celebrated in the evening, which was unthinkable before the reign of Pope Pius XII,

Before the recent liturgical reform, February 2 was known in the Roman Rite as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. Mass was preceded by the blessing and distribution of candles and a procession, which set off from the sanctuary and ended there. At one time, violet vestments were worn for these ceremonies, a relic of a pentiential procession that was held in Rome on this day in earlier times. The colour of the vestments offered a foretaste of Septuagesima and Lent. This custom was abandoned before Vatican II.

The ministers at the Mass I attended accepted these changes of name, schedule and vesture, wearing white throughout. But they rejected the change mandated after Vatican II, which requires the procession to begin from outside the sanctuary, preferably outside the Church building. It thus resembles the processions that begin the Masses of Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil, being a procession to the altar, and so a reminiscence, even a reenactment, of the journey of the Holy Family to the Jerusalem Temple. Our procession began and ended at the altar, thus being reduced to a mere choral walk.

I was disappointed, not for the first time, to find clergy ignoring the laws that govern Catholic worship, and consequently failing to communicate to their flock in full the rich significance of our liturgy.

Collect for the Third Sunday per annum

 This prayer is found in the Gregorian Sacramentary and many other manuscripts. In 1570 it was the Collect for the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas. The 1970 revisers sought out prayers for the Christmas season more clearly suited to its themes. 

This brief text is very difficult to translate, as discrepancies among the versions in pre-conciliar hand-missals clearly demonstrate. The heart of the problem is the verb mereamur. In classical Latin, mereor means 'I earn' or 'I deserve'. Mereor is very common in liturgical texts, but theology teaches us that we cannot earn or deserve God's gifts. To think otherwise is the heresy of Pelagianism, to refute which Saint Augustine said 'when God crowns our merits, he is crowning his own gifts'.

How, then, should we translate mereamur? That is not an easy question to answer, and I do not offer a complete answer here. But I should welcome comments and suggestions from readers of the blog.

The prayer under discussion is unusual: the verb mereor in liturgical texts usually has God's reward as its object, as when we pray the we may 'merit the rewards of the blessed'. But here, we pray 'that we may deserve to abound in good works', to borrow Fr Adrian Fortescue's translation.

When preparing a new translation, ICEL proposed . . . that in the name of your beloved Son we may be made rich in good works. The passive 'be made' was intended to indicate that our good works are God's gift. The Vox Clara committee rejected this, so that now we pray that we may abound in good works. This leaves mereamur untranslated.

We shall need to speak about mereor again as we make our way through the liturgical year.

Prayer over the Gifts for the Second Sunday per annum

Found in the Gelasian Sacramentary and many subsequent MSS, this prayer has been assigned to many occasions in the liturgical year. In the 1570 Missal it is the Secret for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost. It occurs three times in the 1970 book - as the Prayer over the offerings for the Second Sunday of the Year, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, and the Votive Mass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest. 

It has played a significant role in the history of Catholic doctrine. St Thomas Aquinas quotes it (STh 3a q83 a1) in support of his statement that through the sacrament of the Eucharist we are made participants in the fruit of the Lord’s passion. It was mentioned in discussions at the Council of Trent (but not, I think, in the Council’s documents). Pope Pius XII quoted it in Mediator Dei, and Vatican II in Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the Catechism it is quoted twice (1364 and 1405). 

 The last word of the body of the prayers, exercetur, has been questioned, since one very early manuscript has a different reading - exseritur. This, if accepted, would make the final line mean ‘the work of our redemption is made known’. Exercetur is more difficult. 

The official translation ‘is accomplished’ should not be ‘ taken to mean ‘is completed’ like Jesus’ word from the Cross (John 19,30) sometimes translated ‘it is accomplished’. Rather, an ongoing process is implied: ‘is being accomplished’ would make this clearer. 

 Because of the prayer’s long history, there are many translations of exercetur to compare. Here is a selection:- 

‘exercised’ (Husenbeth 1847) 

‘wrought’ (Fortescue 1926) 

‘renewed’ (English Dominican translation 1948) 

‘every offering of this memorial sacrifice carries on the work of our redemption; (O’Connell and Finberg 1952) 

‘accomplished’ (Caraman and Walsh 1961) 

 And from official translations of the Catechism: ‘s’opere’ ‘s’effettua (Italian) ‘se realiza’ (Spanish) ‘is carried out’ (English in section 1364) ‘is carried on’ (English in section 1405).

The Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum alludes to this prayer when it speaks of priests 'remembering always that in the mystery of the Eucharistic Sacrifice the work of redemption is constantly being carried out', 'constantly' rendering continuo.

The official English translation of this prayer would be improved if its final line was 'the work of our redemption is being accomplished' as the International Commission on English in the Liturgy proposed, before the Vox Clara committee, chaired by the late Cardinal Pell, advised the Congregation for Divine Worship to adopt what we now know as the official text.