Remembering Aspects of the Leonine Office

The pontificate of Leo XIII can be remembered as a genuine mini-Renaissance of Catholic life and culture in between the collapse of the Ancien Regime and the introduction of modern malevolences. In Phoenix from the Ashes Henry Sire associates the light handed, pastoral style of Leo with that of the paternal Pius XI and John XXIII, a last gasp before centralization stuck its tentacles into any remaining ecclesiastical crevices. 

Leo's reign saw a revival of the gothic style as Romanticism and the return to Patristics set the Christian view beyond the immediate baroque era. Soaring arches, anachronistically left pale, graced new churches along with wooden statues and richer vesture. 

In theology, Leo initiated a return to Scholasticism which, for all the short comings of manuals and Thomas's unimaginative imitators, marked a needed departure from the mechanical and narrow view of the theology coming out of Western Europe, particularly France, in prior generations. Newman, who one Jesuit described as the "first original thinker since Augustine", came into the Church and with him several positive aspects of the Oxford movement: a return to the Fathers, a return to local community as the basis of prayer, and an understanding that devotions should be done out of devotion.

However, not all aspects of the last Leonine papacy deserve historical approbation. His reign saw the continued extension of feasts of nine lessons that replaced the ferial schedule of canonical hours. Of the 18 saints canonized by Leo, half received Offices of nine lessons while some existing saints, like St Cyril or St Boniface, saw their feasts upgraded to Duplex. Outside of Advent and Lent the psalms of the day hardly ever appeared by the accession of Giuseppe Pecci to the Petrine chair. If the ferial Office did appear it was hardly ever available on consecutive days, meaning the 12 Mattins psalms of the day would be read, but Vespers would be taken from the Common of a saint. Only during pentitential seasons and during the sanctoral vigils could the ferial Office even presume to appear. Under Leo, however, it would appear less, should a cleric desire a more timely Office.

Enter the below 1883 legislation from Pope Leo granting to clerics certain votive Offices of nine lessons, based on the Offices of associated feasts and said according to the rubrics of a semi-Duplex, which gave priests, if they desired, near-full authority to ignore the Roman psalter outside of Ash Wednesday, Passiontide, and the last week of Advent. These votive Offices created Commons out of feasts (Holy Angels, Immaculate Conception, Holy Apostles etc) while integrating the occurring Scripture into the first nocturne and commemorating the feria. One imagines that after Passiontide, psalm 134 might not be said by a priest until Advent. The ancient principle that the psalter is the public prayer of the Roman Church evanescenced more and more.

And yet, this author is not sure Leo is to be condemned outright for what is, more or less, a legalized abuse of the psalter. I do not know if this permission extended to those in religious orders who sang a public Office daily. If not, then this legislation merely confirms what this blog has said for years: secular priests serving the faithful outside of canonries should not have been bound to the entirety of the daily Office. The parish parson is not a monk and the forced familiarity with the Office only bred contempt for the onus Dei. Votive Offices figured greatly into medieval piety and prebendary clerics were employed by the faithful for no other reason than to offer votive Masses and Offices of the Dead, of the Five Wounds, and of local saints for their intentions. The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary was especially popular among wealthy, literate laymen and members of guilds who wished to foster communal prayer. Secular priests, at least in England, would offer Vespers and votive Offices daily in their parishes in conjunction with any prebendary clerics. With the Council of Trent, itself medieval in mindset, the parish priest became bound to the entire ferial Office and found himself something of a monk, one set apart from the very world he served.

Even with these votive Offices, the Roman rite retained more variability than the sister Byzantine rite, but something was further lost. The heart of the Greek rite are the troparia and stichera. The Roman Office is uniquely the psalms and the antiphons which adorn them.

The schedule of the Leonine Offices are:

• Monday: Holy Angels
• Tuesday: Holy Apostles
• Wednesday: Saint Joseph, Spouse of the BVM and Guardian of the Universal Church
• Thursday: Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist
• Friday: Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
• Saturday: Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Leo foresaw that priests might be especially bothered by repetition during Lent and gave additional options for Fridays of that season, the Offices of which at least relate to the general theme of the feast.

• First week of Lent: Lance & Nails of Our Lord Jesus Christ
• Second week of Lent: Holy Crown of Thorns of Our Lord Jesus Christ
• Third week of Lent: Five Holy Wounds of Our Lord Jesus Christ
• Fourth week of Lent: Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ

HJA Sire on the Recent Church

Bookends of an era look at each other.

Fr. Hunwicke continues to plug for H.J.A. Sire's Phoenix from the Ashes, a book about the decline and aspiring restoration of Western Catholic culture. While the book begins very factually and Eurocentric, it develops a broader and spiritual view of the Church and her influence on the West. I have only recently begun the book, but Sire's comments on the Church's last 120 years demand some reflection:

"When Leo XIII died in 1903, distinct progress had taken place in the intellectual life of the Church. Nevertheless, the revival of Thomism had among some an unintended consequence. These fell into treating St. Thomas's work not as a philosophical system but as a store from which infallible answers were to be extracted on any subject. While some were thus making Thomism the basis for innovative thought, others made it into a system that was unlikely to convince minds not predisposed to accept it. Partly for that reason, the extension of the Thomist approach beyond seminaries and its acquisition of a real influence on contemporary thought was not achieved." (137)

"The integrist frame of mind, now as a hundred years ago, may be defined as follows: its exponents are clericalist in their sympathies, and they were also strongly papalist until events since the 1960s forced them to shift their position. Their outlook is distinctly Western and relatively modern, tending to see the period from 1850 to 1958 as the norm of Catholic practice. They regard popes Pius IX, Pius X, and Pius XII as the models of what a pope ought to be, but (with due respect for their sacred office) really look upon Leo XIII and Pius XI as rather letting down the standards of papal authority. They show little sympathy with political and social pragmatism in the framing of religious policy. In philosophy, they hold to Thomism as the bastion of orthodoxy, to the extent of considering any lapse from the pure word of St. Thomas as inherently unsound." (139)

 "What can be said, however, was that [Pius X's] measures [against Modernism] were over-influenced by conditions in Italy, where Modernism was a pretentious, elusive, and even underhand phenomenon, and where there was, in parallel, a strong need to tighten standards in seminary training. In Italy, his measures may have been successful, but in the world as a whole they must be considered to have had a narrowing effect on the clerical intellect. Theologians need to be lean greyhounds, seeking out heresy and hunting it down; instead they became fat lap dogs, yapping foolishly at the enemy beyond the window. The results of Pius X's policy were seen in the Second Vatican Council, when two thousand bishops who had solemnly taken the anti-Modernist oath at their ordination were unable to recognize Modernism when it jumped up and bit them" (140)

"Journalistic opinion, remembering as always nothing beyond last week, worked to give [John XXIII's] reign the appearance of a new era, a distortion that has imposed itself ever since; but at the time those who remembered Pius XI and Leo XIII would have regarded his pontificate, apart from a certain naive optimism that distinguished it, as a return to a familiar style. Essentially, the reign of John XXIII is in the tradition of the period since 1814." (145)

"Linked with this clericalism was the dominance of a seminary-bound school of theology, losing something of the human fullness of earlier centuries. Thus, in natural theology there was a certain over-intellectualisation of the understanding of God, which lost sight of the potency of love as a divine attribute; akin to it, an over-spiritualisation of the doctrine of the Eucharist, obscuring the reality of physical union with Christ." (147)

Sire is fond of the post-Napoleonic period and even equates it with the revivals of the Middle Ages and Counter-Reformation, but also readily acknowledges that its limitations and drawbacks impeded it from influencing society and the Church in the same way.

The below documentary could be a primary source document for Sire's last observation. Ushaw, sadly, had to close a few years ago for lack of students. It had over 400 when this footage was filmed.

Anglican Orders?

In 1896 Leo XIII, the best pope since Benedict XIV in his Traddiness's opinion, issued Apostolicae Curae, which surmises that owing to a historic defect of form and a congruous defect of intent—the second following the first—Anglican Holy Orders are to be considered "absolutely null and utterly void." Does this still hold?

I have no opinion on the matter and it does not impact many of us necessarily, but it could be an important question in the future. Some things have changed since the days of Papa Pecci. AC notes that the Anglican ordination rite was improved to say something about what is meant by "Receive the Holy Ghost" at ordination and concedes that "this addition could give the form its due signification," albeit too late given that succession had been broken by over a century's use of the invalid Edwardian rites (AC 26). What may have changed things was the introduction of the "Dutch touch" in the 1930s or there about. Anglican clergy would often ask schismatic "Old Catholics" from continental Europe to "confirm" their orders using the Roman ordination and consecration rites.

Fr. Hunwicke has written about the concept of intention and its implication for the "invalidators" of Sacraments quite a bit in the last year or so. What is to be done if the Church of England has indeed undergone the "infection" (Hunwicke's wording) of the Dutch touch? Then again, we may be presuming too much. Papa Pecci in AC 28 states that the context of the episcopal consecration rites defects the intention regardless of the improved form. Michael Davies used to like to quote a 19th century case of a Methodist minister in Oceania who said something to the effect of "Baptism is only a symbol, it does not do anything at all" and then proceeded to pour water over the inhabitants' heads, saying, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." The Holy Office determined that regardless of the minister's disbelief, he had enough belief that there was such a thing as Baptism that his intention was sufficient for the Sacrament to be valid. Is there a distinction to be made between the two cases that might shed more limpid light on the matter?

And of course there is the curious case of the Anglican bishop of London, Graham Leonard, who converted to Catholicism after having had his orders "confirmed" by Old Catholics in Utrecht. Cardinal Hume wrote "prudent doubt" about the invalidity of Leonard's orders existed. Consequently Leonard was conditionally ordained a priest. Personally, I think he should have been conditionally ordained a bishop in order to respect the possibility that he really was a successor to the Apostles, but I suspect Rome wanted to avoid the question of a married bishop (the Rad Trad has not heard of a married bishop since Pope Hadrian II). 

None of these questions amount to an opinion. They really are just questions and points of discussion. Perhaps some of our Thomistic readers and Anglophiles would be kind enough to join in the comment box and share their wealth of knowledge with the rest of us. Are there any recent studied on this subject?