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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 21, 2013 8:00:20 GMT
I don't mean to engage in an old versus new debate, but in the EF today is Pentecost Tuesday. The whole week is Pentecost. This reflects the importance of the feast, which is on a par with Christmas and Easter. This is not the way in the new calendar where Pentecost ends on Sunday. This I think sends out the wrong message.
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Post by hibernicus on May 21, 2013 20:07:39 GMT
The octaves after the major feasts were abolished in the OF, and this sends out quite the wrong signal (just as secular celebrations of Christmas encourage self-indulgence when we ought to be fasting, then end the celebrations when they should just be beginning). It's also slightly odd given that one of the guiding principles of the post-Vatican II changes was to emphasise the liturgical cycle over the sanctoral cycle, and that is what the octaves do (which is why in the EF yesterday was Monday after Pentecost rather than the feast of St Bernardine).
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 22, 2013 7:50:08 GMT
And I wondered if I was the only one who thought Advent had become a feast (Christmas Party Season) and Christmas had become a fast (called a diet in secular terms).
The other thing is not withstanding Lyric FM's commitment not to play Christmas music until 8 December, one is bombarded by carols and the like from at least mid-November on. Then after 25 December, one hears nothing. If we had an eye to the liturgical calendar, the time for carols would be between 24 December to 6 January, when we would be breaking our Advent Fast, as the Orthodox do (though they usually wait until 7 January, as they follow the Julian calendar).
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Post by Askel McThurkill on May 22, 2013 7:52:40 GMT
There's even a station called Christmas FM that comes on the air in December just to play Christmas songs. Then it disappears. Pathetic or what?
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Post by melancholicus on May 26, 2013 0:41:03 GMT
I find myself particularly exercised by the suppression of the season of Septuagesima in the run-up to Lent.
Going to Mass on Septuagesima Sunday (and on the two Sundays thereafter) and seeing green vestments with both Gloria and Alleluia never fails TO MOVE ME TO WRATH!
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uriah
New Member
Posts: 25
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Post by uriah on May 26, 2013 12:14:05 GMT
melancholicus; but to whom is your wrath directed? The priest wearing the vestments or the local bishop? One can hardly blame them. The source of the decision to 'suppress' that season came from Rome. The season was never mentioned during my time as a seminarian in Maynooth. I suspect that many Catholics are not even aware that it ever existed.
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Post by melancholicus on May 26, 2013 23:34:42 GMT
Naturally neither the celebrant nor the local bishop are to blame. The loss of Septuagesima is not their doing.
You are correct in stating the decision to suppress the season came from Rome. My wrath is directed at the liturgical 'experts' of the early post-conciliar period who bequeathed us this mess and who, with a stroke of the pen, abolished nearly two millennia of tradition, thinking (in the hubris of their modern educations) that they were improving, whereas they were actually destroying.
In the modern calendar, Lent has been flattened out. Previously, however, it was composed of three distinct seasons—Septuagesima, Lent proper, and Passiontide. Each of these had its own unique character. Septuagesima was suppressed by the reformists, and the distinct character of Passiontide was lost when the season was swallowed up by Lent proper. One of the problems I have with the modern calendar is that Lent steals upon one almost by surprise: suddenly it is Ash Wednesday, and there has been no observance of Septuagesima to prepare the faithful for the discipline of Lent. At the other end of the season, when Passiontide ought to be beginning, there is no longer any veiling of the images in the churches and of course the switch from the old to the new rite has destroyed the liturgical distinctions that once prevailed between Lent proper and Passiontide. Passion Sunday has become merely the 'Fifth Sunday of Lent' and its former name is now regarded as synonymous with Palm Sunday a week later.
In the novus ordo the season of Septuagesima was suppressed absolutely; not even an 'option' for its continued observance was provided in a missal otherwise noteworthy for a proliferation of 'options'. It is interesting, however, to note that among the Anglicans, observance of Septuagesima survived the 1960s. In England it is still observed as it has always been by parishes which have maintained the use of the traditional (1662) Book of Common Prayer. Even after the introduction of liturgical experimentation which yielded the Alternative Service Book of 1980 (C of E) and the Alternative Prayer Book of 1984 (C of I), Septuagesima survived as a ghost of a season, as provision was made for it in the liturgical books. Unfortunately, Septuagesima has now completely disappeared from both the C of E's Common Worship (2000) and the C of I's so-called Book of Common Prayer (2004). I dare say the Anglicans were influenced by the bad example of the holy Romans in their abandonment of the tradition.
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Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2013 20:26:39 GMT
The Orthodox also have a pre-Lenten period of 3-4 weeks (before "Great Lent" as they call it), so the abolition of Septuagesima moves us further from them as well. This is an oddity given that one of the rationales of so many changes was to rediscover what we have in common with the Easterners.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 28, 2013 8:12:24 GMT
I would say that Irish Catholics have a relatively good sense of Lent and there are at least places where Passiontide traditions are still observed. The tri-partite nature of Septuagesima, Lent and Passiontide is better.
On the penitential side, the sense of Advent and Fridays as times of penance is very weak (though there are survivals: tomorrow is National Fish and Chip day and Irish Italian chippers will offer fish and chips at half-price; the Irish Italian chippers' association made a conscious decision never to run this day on a Friday which is still by far the best sales day for fish).
Part of my problem is that we don't do the feasts good. There should be a sense that Christmas begins on the evening of 24 December and continues to 6 January, and at a reduced level to Candlema (2 February); that Easter lasts til Pentecost; that Pentecost should go right through to Trinity Sunday. These are not incompatible with the new liturgy.
Another problem I have - celebrants are very casual about the cycle of saints' feasts and find it easy to omit the Gloria or Creed on Solemnities on which they should be said. I would be willing to bet that your average Mass on 19 March or 25 March (St Joseph and the Annunciation) will have no creed. Ditto on 24 June or 29 June (nativity of St John the Baptist and Ss Peter & Paul - both these take precedence over Sunday).
The sanctoral feasts, apart from those central ones I mention, are secondary. But the question is are we taking the seasons into our own homes? In Germany and Austria, Catholic families have an advent wreath at meals in December. In some houses, the Christmas tree goes up on 24 December and stays til 2 February (this is counter-cultural). Many Catholics abstain from meat on Friday other than solemnities (you are not obliged to do so, but you are obliged to do some form of prayer or penance or an act of charity on Fridays and it is up to you to know what the substitute is if you are eating meat). And to show how it is not all about fasting, we can feast on the festive days, of which there are many. How many people here mark their personal feast days, the feasts of their saints? Has anyone here had anyone congratulate them on their name day (bit difficult here since so many of us are anonomous)?
Now, this tread is about the way the liturgy is celebrated rather than personal practices. But if the liturgy emphasised these things, there would be more evidence of personal practice.
BTW, patrons of parishes and of trades/professions are important too.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 28, 2013 8:13:58 GMT
I suspect Uriah is correct that most Catholics are unaware of Septuagesima. BTW - was there awareness of Friday as a day of penance when you were in Maynooth, Uriah?
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 15, 2014 20:30:14 GMT
The LMS chairman Joseph Shaw makes an interesting observation about why (for example) St Valentine was dropped from the OF liturgical calendar despite his prominence in popular culture. That "despite" should actually be "because" - some of Mgr Bugnini's comments show that he actively wanted to distance the liturgical calendar from popular culture for fear of its being contaminated (for example, he said that he would have liked to move Ash Wednesday to a Sunday, and one reason he gave for this was that such a move would break the connection with Mardi Gras). This I must say reflects one of the iffier aspects of the liturgical reform - a distrust of popular piety as not coming up to the standards of the experts, an attitude that everything must be immediately comprehended in the "proper" manner and that anything less that complete participation is so undesirable that it is in no way preferable to not participating at all. Think of that the next time you hear someone complaining that the problem with Irish Catholicism is that people were "sacramentalised without being evangelised" - all too often the people who say this seem to think that if people are not "properly" evangelised it makes no difference whether they are not sacramentalised either. (To be fair to BUgnini, he was reacting to a problem which is very prominent in certain parts of Italy, and not just in Italy, which might be summed up by the image of the mafioso carrying holy medals and praying to the Virgin Mary for the successful completion of his next hit. Whether the most effective response to such deplorable behaviour is to do away with holy medals is another matter entirely.) I might note that the same concern to dissociate popular culture from Christianity is also shared by certain types of atheist (e.g. those who go out of their way to remove religious references from Christmas - aka "holidays/Winterval" celebrations). The fact that they are so afraid of such "Infection" indicates the problem with the Bugninian mindset discussed by Shaw www.lmschairman.org/2014/02/the-churchs-calendar-and-popular-culture.htmlEXTRACT It is hard to find anyone (at least, on Twitter) willing to defend the decision to take away the liturgical celebration of the saint who has, however unwillingly, given his name to the secular phenomenon of Valentine's Day. But by chance I read something which suggests that it may not be just a coincidence, that in their clear-out of the saints of ancient Rome from the calendar (where they used to be heavily represented: this is, after all, the Roman Rite we are talking about), the reformers turfed out someone with the cultural significance of St Valentine. It was Bugnini, talking about Ash Wednesday. It is inconvenient to have it on a Wednesday, he thought; much better on a Sunday. This is impossible, however: you can't have a penitential liturgy on a Sunday. So he had to leave it on Wednesday after all. (A close shave for another ancient tradition!) But he wanted to allow the imposition of Ashes to take place any day between Ash Wednesday and the following Monday. Having it on the Wednesday, you see (The Reform of the Liturgy, p307, n7) In England, admittedly, the celebration of the day before Ash Wednesday is a little more restrained. 'had the drawback of keeping the association with Mardi Gras.' Come again? The association with Mardi Gras is a drawback? The fact that calendar and the practice of penance has become so deeply embedded in popular culture that it is impossible to avoid it, in many cultures: this is a bad thing? A third example occurs to me: Halloween, the Eve of All Hallows (All Saints). When All Saints falls on a Saturday or a Monday, the bishops of England and Wales, in their wisdom, move it to Sunday. This means that, except in the Extraordinary Form, Halloween is not followed by All Saints. Either it is separated from it by a day, or it falls on the same day. This horrible clash happened in 2010. But perhaps the bishops, when this decision was made (many years ago), didn't actually want to make the connection with Halloween. What is going on here? It is true that in each case, the secular celebrations have taken a problematic turn. In the case of Mari Gras, this has been the case for many centuries. They have become unCatholic, to say the least. The response of Bugnini and those who think like him seems to be that we should retreat into a bunker, at this point, stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that they are not happening, or at least have nothing to do with us. The Church, they seem to think, should disown them. This kind of response is regularly made by puritanical types in relation to the secular celebration of Christmas: we should eschew Christmas trees and Father Christmas and presents and having fun, and pretend this has nothing to do with the Birth of the Saviour. The spirit of the New Evangelisation, however, takes the opposite view. These are opportunities to evangelise. We Catholic invented all these things, or (in the case of the Christmas tree and Father Christmas), have long made them our own. Even the worst aspects, the occult references in some places in Halloween, for example, are a sort of shadow of the Catholic teaching, and can give us the opportunity to talk about it. We don't need to approve of fornication on St Valentine's Day, or getting drunk on Mardi Gras, but rather than ignoring these things, we should engage with them. That is what Pope Francis was doing by giving special blessings to engaged couples on the ... feast of SS Cyril and Methodius, yesterday. (Funnily enough, the Vatican News Service called it the Feast of St Valentine. Those trads must be infiltrating...) The liturgical reform is usually characterised as optimistic, open to 'secular values', and in some ways it is. I think, however, that deep down there was a lot of timidity, of fear, a feeling that the Church has lost control of popular culture and needs to return to the catacombs, where the chosen few can 'participate', and outsiders can be made to feel as though they have stumbled into an intimate gathering of chums. This attitude doesn't get us anywhere. We have to go out there and make use of whatever vestiges of Christianity we can find. Even those embedded in cultural artefacts with origins in anti-Catholic polemic can be useful, like cult of the anti-hero Guy Fawkes. Soon, after all, there will be precious little in the way of Catholic institutions to shelter us. END www.lmschairman.org/2014/02/the-churchs-calendar-and-popular-culture.html
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 9, 2015 8:19:46 GMT
I've been giving this some thought of late, and I have a few questions.
First of all, does anybody here who goes to weekday Masses (OF or EF don't matter, as I think the problem applies to both) notice any difference between Advent/Lent on one hand (with or without Septuagesima); Christmas and Easter on the other; and ordinary time on yet another? I suspect nobody does. And if this is the case, we have a problem.
Secondly, does anyone here find the procession of post Easter feasts stirring: Ascension Thursday; Pentecost; Trinity Sunday; Corpus Christi (and these are four Sundays in a row in the OF and also some EF congregations)? If not, they should be. And Sacred Heart comes up the Friday after Corpus Christi (not the following day; 8 days later, or five if it is on Sunday). There are a couple of feasts before Easter of major significance: St Joseph and Annunciation or after Easter, St John the Baptist and Ss Peter and Paul. Is there any marked difference here? Once again, there should be.
I know the Mass focuses on one particular mystery and that in a certain sense, incarnation, passion and resurrection take place at every Mass. But the cycle of seasons and feasts direct our attention to aspects of the faith. Advent and Lent as preparation; Christmas, Easter and Pentecost as celebration. But we go through the Life of Christ through the year: Annunciation, Nativity, (EF: Circumcision on 1 January), Epiphany, Candlemas,(OF Baptism of Our Lord - linked with Epiphany and Wedding Feast of Cana in the Eastern Rite), Transfiguration, Holy Week Triduum, Easter Sunday, Asension Thursday, Corpus Christi and the related feasts of Sacred Heart and the Triumph of the Cross. I would pick out the Marian feast of the Immaculate Conception, Nativity of Our Lady, Presentation, Visitation and Assumption as of more importance than the other Marian titles as they are Christocentric. Naturally every saint in the calendar has an importance - today is St Colmcille; but some have universal significance. There is a reason why St Joseph (19 March), St John the Baptist (24 June) and Ss Peter & Paul (29 June) have solemnities in the universal church and it is annoying to see celebrants dispense with this.
But when it comes to transmission of the faith, liturgy is of crucial importance. If you teach a child in school the significance of the Christological dogmata and then celebrate Mass as if these are no consequence, then it cannot be surprising if it dies. Now let me get it clear that I am not sniping at the OF Mass in favour of the EF Mass. Though celebrated with dignity, there is no point even trying if the congregation are allowed to continue being as remote from the celebration as they are in many Irish EF congregations. For many worshippers, the only way they get the significance is via the Missal. This is a start on the road, and should be seen as such. But effectively, it is a stasis. I wonder how many of those who attend the EF ever come to appreciate how beautifully scriptural the older liturgy is? I suspect many simply avoid the Bible to a degree that this goes above their heads. And this should not be the case. In an ideal world, the liturgy, scripture and Christocentric devotions such as the rosary and stations should complement each other. And the liturgical cycle is there to help, or at least it should be. And it should reinforce both catechesis and study of the faith. But does it do this?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 9, 2015 8:54:43 GMT
Alasdair, I have never attended the EF Mass. But I feel this absence of specialness in the OF Mass, certainly.
I only started going to Mass five or six years ago and one of the greatest unsuspected joys of the liturgy was the rhythms of the liturgical year. It satisfies a thirst one was barely even aware of. And yet, I feel unsatisfied, and feel that it should be even more the case.
There are some differences, like the purple hangings in Advent, or the phrase "but in this time to laud you yet more gloriously" at Easter. And I appreciate those. But I hanker for the difference to be more evident.
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Post by Ranger on Jun 9, 2015 10:58:18 GMT
I'd very much agree with you here Alaisdir. I think that this rhythm of the liturgical seasons is incredibly important. I think that there are three key reasons why I find it difficult to really take part in these: (perhaps causes would be a better word)
1) The Church itself doesn't place enough emphasis on them, as you point out
2) I myself don't make enough of an effort to make them a part of my life. This is more difficult because of the first reason, but at least I have an idea that there is such a thing as a liturgical calendar which is meant to help shape our lives so I really should put in the effort; it would be impossible for those who don't know that there's meant to be a liturgical cycle to take part in it
3) The cycle of seasons in the world, so to speak, seems quite out of sync with that of the Church, at least as a student. I have found that during my time in university, the last few weeks of Lent coincide with essay deadlines, whereas the Easter octave coincides with the study period and the Easter season coincides with the exam period. This makes it difficult to concentrate on living the mysteries of Lent and especially Holy Week, and it makes Easter feel like more of a drag than the rest of the year, especially compared to the relaxation of the summer holidays, by which time we're already into Ordinary Time again almost. The same is true of the Christmas/Advent period, which as was pointed out previously on this thread has become the inverse of the Church's seasons (Advent is festive; Christmas is diet time). I would raise a quibble over whether Advent is truly a season of fasting; I have heard that this is not universal within the Church. Perhaps, now that I am leaving university soon, this will change, with summer obviously not being an extended break from everything, but for most of my life now I've been a student and so have followed Academia's version of reality.
Now, while I think that point 3 is a problem, it also presents an opportunity for the building of a sense of community and of difference from the world, in that families and communities which make the extra effort to place emphasis upon the liturgical cycle will create what has been described in relation to the Benedict Option as 'thick Catholicism,' in other words a Catholicism with a strong enough identity to withstand the culture around.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 9, 2015 11:08:40 GMT
I think Ranger's point 3 is an opportunity. An opportunity for individuals, families and communities to make the liturgical cycle part of their life in small steps. As the Eastern Orthodox blogger quoted elsewhere says, there is a need for religious practice in the home as well as in the church.
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