Don Quoex on the Ancient Papal Mass

Those attached to the memory of Franck Quoex, formerly of the ICRSS and later of the diocese of Vaduz, will recall his expertise on the history of the papal liturgy. Br. Aelred has translated his explication of the papal rites outlined in the Ordo Romanus I into English. Take a gander here.

The Ancient Roman Mass

St. Mary Major, from a recent trip by the Rad Trad to Rome

Title says it all. I am re-producing below the text of the Papal Mass of Pascha Sunday as it likely would have been in the eighth century. The source is Cuthbert Ashley's translation of the Ordo Romanus Primus, which contains a proposed reproduction as the third appendix. The book, printed in 1905, is in the public domain and available on Google Books, so do not fret over copyrights.

Pay attention to what has changed and what has remained. The Mass would be at St. Mary Major, to join with our Lady in celebrating her Son's Resurrection, and possibly to give the Pope a breather after no less than three liturgies at the Lateran Cathedral. The opening antiphon, in Latin, would be the familiar Resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum Mass of Pascha, but is here sung with more than one psalm verse in between repetitions of the antiphons. As an entrance chant, it would be sung as long as the entrance procession lasted. Before the "little hours" became popular in the Roman Divine Office I am not so sure there would be a long introit, as Mattins and Lauds would precede such a Mass. But the introduction of the little hours put the Mass after Terce, meaning a return to the sacristy for Mass vestments.

The Kyrie is not in its more ancient litany form, and probably had not been since before St. Gregory the Great. The Gloria is sung, as it was on festal occasions at Papal Mass. Pay attention to the orations, which are the same as they are in the traditional Mass today. There is certainly more antiphonal singing throughout, which only comes to us in rare occasions like Holy Week (the real old Holy Week). I suspect this looked more like the prokeimenon of the Byzantine rite and less like the "responsorial psalm" of Pope Paul VI's rite. Yet the antiphonal singing was primarily, though not exclusively, handled by the cantors and "district officials"—probably meaning additional deacons and subdeacons who vested for Mass but did not perform the main actions associated with those orders such as assisting the celebrant with the chalice and reading the Gospel or Epistle; you get the idea. This brings up another important point: there would be several deacons and subdeacons at this Mass, and probably some priests who might have or might not have concelebrated. Concelebration was done on festive occasions and with the bishop (in this case the Pope) as a sign of the communion between the bishop,the parish priests, and the parish faithful. It was not done as regularly and as casually as today. It had meaning. Some remnants of this existed until 1964 at Papal Mass, where the cardinal-priests and cardinal-deacons would wear chasubles and dalmatics with mitres over their choir dress.

See the cardinal-deacon, left, and cardinal-priest, right, remnants of the ancient manner of Papal Mass, which survived in the Papal liturgy until 1964.
source: http://interminomaris.tumblr.com

The preface and Canon are basically the same as we have received them today. Some things differ though. The prayer for the dead is noted as a weekday practice that eventually became fixed on all days. There is a prayer of blessing for the first fruits of the season. With no supporting text the editor as inserted a Gallican prayer and a Roman prayer from the Feast of the Ascension right before the minor [and at this point, only] elevation.

With large gaps of inactivity on the celebrant's part—awaiting the end of the entrance, the gap at the offertory, the time for an exit procession to line up etc)—we can see how and where private prayer, which eventually became institutionalized, entered the Mass—prayers before the altar, the longer offering prayers for the Host and Chalice, and the Prologue of St. John. We also see some ritually and spiritually awkward practices and can understand why they died, such as announcing the location of tomorrow's Mass before the Communion of the Faithful!

Like it, love it, hate it, this is a fairly accurate reconstruction of a first millennium Roman Mass celebrated by the Pope. We see the very firm roots of the traditional liturgy, both in prayer and in movement, meaning it is the root in spirituality, too. Moreover, this is the clearest piece of evidence I have seen to support Fr. Quoex and Fr. Conrad's thesis that Papal Mass is the standard in the Roman  rite, not parish Mass. Pontifical Mass and Solemn Mass clearly descend from the rite shown here, with some adjustments for the qualitatively different celebrant.

Enough of me. Look at the Mass and realize how the saints prayed then—and how they still pray now!

  

The "Organic" in the Roman Rite

When reviewing Fr. Sven Conrad's Ratzingerian paper on the development and changes in the Roman liturgy since the 1960s, one criticism I levied was an excessive, albeit implicit, reliance on the notion of the "organic" within the pre-Conciliar Roman rite.

Fr. Conrad's article defined, or exemplified, organic as concerning the development of secondary customs around a set Roman form. This is certainly true concerning local usages, but I would argue that it is true of the form itself. A look at the appendices of the Ordo Romanus Primus reveals a Roman Mass clearly a predecessor to the "Tridentine" form of the Roman rite. The structure is darn-near the same, although quite a lot is different: much of the chants we think of as reserved for the schola were sung antiphonally, like the Resurrexi introit for Pascha as is illustrated in this edition; many of the prayers and responses were handled by the subdeacons (yes, plural); there was no Agnus Dei; communion was distributed in a manner similar to how the Byzantine churches do it now; and the general use of space was much more similar to that of Papal Mass than a Solemn Mass or even Pontifical Mass in the "extraordinary" form, lending a lot of credibility to Fr. Franck Quoex's thesis that Papal Mass ought to be taken as the norm when considering the Roman rite, rather than, as the reformers took it to be, parish-level Mass.

Moreover, the private prayers most of us love—the prayers at the foot of the altar, the offertory prayers, the blessing, and Last Gospel—came midway through the Middle Ages and were not original to the rite. Far from being corruptions or secondary customs, these were marvelous developments. I would hardly call the prayers at the foot of the altar a secondary custom, but rather part of the form. Their exact character could be considered secondary.

Perhaps we could even consider the diffused use of the Roman rite to be inorganic but related to the form, rather than the secondary. Fr. Conrad draws attention to Pepin's mandate that the Roman rite be used throughout the Frankish kingdom, eliminating local rites very distinct from the Roman rite. Milan similarly adopted the Roman Canon. Ditto for rites of far northern Europe. One could tell a similar story of the spread of the Byzantine rites throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, where political centralization quashed local, but obscure to us, liturgical rites.

Why am I saying all this? To complain? No. I just wanted to say that liturgy, good or bad, is often spread and promulgated by broad steps. However, the Roman rite, in its form and not just its customs, was subject to organic change for a long time, indeed distribution of Holy Communion was not explicitly prescribed until 1962 (was Communion a secondary custom I wonder?), the spread of the Roman rite was sometimes natural and sometimes imposed.

How does this fit into Fr. Conrad's article? Not everything in the Pauline or 1962 rites can be judged as traditional or novel. Many things in the old liturgy we treasure, like the opening of Mattins or singing hymns in the Divine Office, were once novelties. The question should be: Does this improve upon what it replaces? or: Does this additional to an existing practice enrich it? Does this help the practice of the liturgy in a given setting?—be it Papal or private Mass. The Pauline rites, unfortunately, have little to no organic element, which is what separates it from the older rites. But we should not think everything in the older form was made entirely by custom. Some centralization did exist. Local adaptations followed centralization, rather precede it.

Just some thoughts....

The Rad Trad