Akathist Hymn to St. Joseph the Betrothed

The following hymn is sung in the Kyivan (Ukrainian) Catholic Church. Translation from the Russian is from the Akathist Collections blog. I have not found the origin of this hymn, and I have no guesses as to its antiquity.

~

KONTAKION

O righteous Joseph! Chosen protector of the Most-Holy Virgin, Mary, and instructor and nurturer of the God-Man: glorifying your service to the ineffable mystery of the Incarnation of God the Word, we dedicate hymns of praise to you. Standing now before the throne of Christ our God, and having great boldness before Him, pray for us that cry out to you:

Rejoice! O righteous Joseph, ready helper and intercessor for our souls!

FIRST IKOS

Preserving the mystery of the birth of God the Word by the all-Pure Virgin, which is inaccessible even to the angels, from the slander of people and the craft of the devil, God chose you, O righteous Joseph, a lowly carpenter, to be the protector and witness of the virginity of the all-Holy Mary. Therefore, glorifying you as a chosen initiate of the mysteries of God, we cry out to you:

Rejoice! Honored offshoot of the root of Jesse!

Rejoice! You who were adorned within with royal majesty!

Rejoice! By lack of earthly things, you acquired spiritual wealth!

Rejoice! Through obscurity you obtained everlasting glory!

Rejoice! You who are far more glorious than kings!

Rejoice! You who are more righteous than the patriarchs and forefathers!

Rejoice! O righteous Joseph, ready helper and intercessor for our souls!

SECOND KONTAKION

Beholding the Virgin Mary who had grown to maturity in the Temple, Zachariah the High Priest cried out to the Lord: Show me a man worthy to be betrothed to the Virgin, O Lord! And when the rod of Joseph blossomed forth, committing the Virgin to him, he cried aloud to God: ALLELUIA!

SECOND IKOS

Your righteousness is known to all the ends of the earth, O holy Joseph! You were accorded the incomparable honor of being betrothed to the most blessed Virgin. From her Christ God came forth without the aid of man. You were chosen for this because of your steadfast faith, purity, humility and excellence in all the virtues. Therefore, we cry out to you:

Rejoice! O righteous One: betrothed of the most-Pure one!

Rejoice! O man of faith: taking under your roof the holy Virgin, Mary, who, through faith was made the throne of God!

Rejoice! You who are humble of spirit!

Rejoice! You who are simple of heart!

Rejoice! You who are exceedingly adorned with virtues!

Rejoice! O holy one, who ministered unto the most holy!

Rejoice! O righteous Joseph, ready helper and intercessor for our souls!

The Sin & I

There is a murky discussion on pain and evil over here which caught my attention for the sake of one comment:

"I often feel like both Rome and Orthodoxy make too much of human goodness and that men like Blessed Augustine and Martin Luther were more correct. We are fallen, corrupt, and absolutely and completely incapable of moving one millimeter towards salvation without Jesus Christ. Salvation is a free gift. The sheer evil in all of us, and in human history and current events should show us just how sunk in corruption we are."

This is not a proposition I share. The Ancestral Sin severed man from God, but did not eviscerate it entirely, at least not enough to make mankind spiritual excrement, as Luther put it. In his On the Incarnation St. Athanasius wrote that God became man because man was an image and a likeness to God, and that to allow an image of God to whither was to allow a thing of God to vanish, antipodal to the very nature of God. Salvation is not a free gift to the elect, but an act of embrace in exchange for moving an inch towards the one loved.

In a world of Calvinistic pre-destination the elect are chosen individually out of a humanity mired in sinfulness. Is this Christian? In the Gospel at yesterday's ferial Mass the adulteress stormed into a Pharisee's dining room, where a man of the Law was breaching the norms of his brethren and entertaining the subversive Jesus with a rare liberality. The woman is unique among the miracles Jesus performed before the Resurrection. Were there many prior miracles that did not arise from need? A soldier wanted his servant cured. A man wanted to walk. A woman wanted her hemorrhages to desist. Thousands needed to eat. Simon Peter simply wanted not to drown. Christ normally concluded miracles with "Your sins are forgiven you." Poor people wanted Christ to alleviate their known ailments while He in turn relieved them of their sins, a sickness at the time thought beyond curing. That she asked for the forgiveness of sins and cried sufficiently to wash the Lord's feet reflects her trouble. Sinfulness did not bother her, but her own actual sins. Tears of that kind come not from acknowledging past sins, but from sinning and knowing one is wrong while sinning. It is a torment in the soul, ripping up one's inner fabric like a meat grinder. She sought forgiveness, not the beginning of her personally pre-determined destiny. Similarly, the prodigal son returned to his father for all the wrong reasons and his father did not care; the father awaited his son and the moment he caught his offspring in his eye he ran for the son. The father's joy reflects a hope for the son's return more than an expectation just and his compulsion to feast rather than hearing explanations tells us he was simply happy his son was back. His son still could have been lost.

Aside from the narcissism that pre-destination creates—a Swedish Baptist I knew in college, when he was not plagiarizing academic work and currying favor, once told me that he did not know what he would do if he didn't know he was saved—this line of thought loses sight of that fact that mankind corporately fell and is corporately redeemed. Creation is not healed, but healing in available in the new creation of Baptism, water itself being a symbol of creation. Individuals can join it, although not all do. "Many are called, few are chosen" applies neatly to salvation. God calls all; few accept the invitation wearing the proper garment (a Savile Row suit no doubt). Salvation is an interplay.

Today we recall the suffering of Mary at her Son's Passion. Was Mary pre-destined for salvation? She was planned in creation to carry and give birth to the God-Man, but she still had to give her "Be it done unto me." Were this not so jarring an act on its own would the Annunciation have been so popular an art motif? She said "yes" and began the restoration of humanity after Eve said "no" and wounded it.

Many are called to the Cross, but few are chosen. The rest pass by.

Finger-Pointing While Rome Smolders: A Lenten Reflection

Reading through Augustine’s City of God, one inevitably begins to draw parallels between the Fall of Rome to the Descent of the West in modern times. Catholics might also see similarities between the ancient Fall of Secular Rome and the Auto-Demolition of Catholic Rome in the last half-century. As Rome’s glory was unceremoniously snuffed out, the finger-pointing began in great earnest. Those attached to the previous religious tradition (so to speak) accused the newfangled Christians of removing the supernatural protection that Rome had once enjoyed from the pagan deities. Augustine calmly explains that Rome had experienced many such calamities at the time when Terminus and Jupiter supposedly protected her from all harm, and exposes the inanities of the neo-pagans’ nostalgia.

More realistically, attributing the cause of the Fall of Rome was not as simple as pointing to this or that religious cult. Augustine notes that God sometimes allows the destruction of worldly kingdoms as an opportunity for their citizens to detach themselves from the world and to begin attaching to the heavenly kingdom. He also suggests, in keeping with the more ancient Hebrew prophets, that the sins of the citizens may cry out for vengeance so much that their kingdom is taken from them utterly.

I don’t wish to go too far in comparing the neo-pagans of Augustine’s time with the traditionalists of today, but it cannot be denied that Tradistan is popularly an eclectic museum of half-baked devotions and ideas that are mistakenly thought to have composed the foundation of a vigorous and stable religious society. The way back is not necessarily the way forward, and the Tradistani belief in the restorative power of St. Joseph Feast Day Celebrations (sponsored by the parish homeschool group), Creationism Seminars, and the mere celebration of the Latin Mass is evidence that there is a fundamental failure to build a culture based on reality.

St. Augustine was no crude triumphalist, except in the belief that the City of God would prevail eternally while the City of Man would finally crumble into futility. He had no particular illusions about the earthly glory of the Church, and was quick to point the blame at least in part at Christians:

What, then, have the Christians suffered in that calamitous period, which would not profit every one who duly and faithfully considered the following circumstances? First of all, they must humbly consider those very sins which have provoked God to fill the world with such terrible disasters; for although they be far from the excesses of wicked, immoral, and ungodly men, yet they do not judge themselves so clean removed from all faults as to be too good to suffer for these even temporal ills. For every man, however laudably he lives, yet yields in some points to the lust of the flesh. Though he do not fall into gross enormity of wickedness, and abandoned viciousness, and abominable profanity, yet he slips into some sins, either rarely or so much the more frequently as the sins seem of less account. (i.9)

The contraceptive practices, for instance, of Western Catholics mimics the rest of the world, and our own population collapse is as inevitable as the world’s. It might be that traditionalist Catholics “win” the liturgical wars simply because we are the only ones bearing and rearing children, but it will surely be a Pyrrhic victory. “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people,” Jeremiah laments. Christians are suffering the judgment that is coming upon the world because we sin just like the rest of them.

There are no winners in the finger-pointing game of Catholicism’s collapse. Humility, penance, and friendship are the only ways forward towards rebuilding. We could certainly do with a new Augustine to provide us with a fresh vision of the City of God for today’s Catholic, as well.

Oratorian Mass

I am told that since the Birmingham Oratory has switched their Sunday Mass from a solemn Latin Paul VI Mass to the 1962 rite attendance has plummeted like George Bush's approval rating in 2005. This is a shame to be sure. I never had any interaction with the Birmingham Oratory, only Oxford's, but the English Oratorian manner of celebrating the new rite can be very instructive and moving. It would be a shame to lose it in place of the rather dull replacement that seems to have come into place in Birmingham.

The old old rite benefits from octaves, vigils, dramatic ceremonies, varied choir movements and other diversities that keep the assembled faithful's attention. One of HJA Sire's observations about the compact, streamlined post-Tridentine liturgy is that the simplification of cathedral worship turned Mass from an action to a spectacle. Paul VI's rite, when well celebrated, can also engage the faithful. The English Oratories sing the entirety of the Mass in Latin, but read the lessons in the vernacular and the Gospel sung, even the Passion during Holy Week; traditional hymnody is employed; in the 1980s the Canon was sung; processions are usually observed. While one can approve of a given Sunday Mass in the 1962 Missal, it is not as pastorally potent as either what preceded it or, when celebrated in a traditional manner, what came after it.

Devotees of traditionalist communities who are familiar with particular changes to the lectionary, orations, and Ordinary of the Mass may disagree, but what of the mainstream parishes which, like Birmingham or Oxford, were opened for any Catholic in town and not adherents of a specific set of ceremonies? There is also the possibility that the traditionalists, occasionally their own worst enemies, rubbed the congregation at Birmingham the wrong way.

John R may advocate my immediate execution, but would it be so bad to repeat the readings in English immediately after their proclamation in Latin so that they are an integrated part of the Mass rather than a prelude to the sermon? The solemn Masses at the Chartres pilgrimage last year followed this habit. In France Missae Cantatae often see the epistle in French and the Gospel in both Latin and French. The FSSPX and its daughter organizations (FSSP etc.) in France, Germany, and Switzerland typically read in the local tongue at low Masses. Perhaps the old rite cannot learn from the new textually, but it could learn from the Oratorians pastorally.

Passiontide

Some Light Political Commentary

But the worshippers and admirers of these [pagan] gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. "Only let it remain undefeated," they say, "only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us?

"This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure.

"Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear.

"Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him.

"Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate.

"Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to.

"Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of any kind."

What sane man would compare a republic such as this, I will not say to the Roman empire, but to the palace of Sardanapalus, the ancient king who was so abandoned to pleasures, that he caused it to be inscribed on his tomb, that now that he was dead, he possessed only those things which he had swallowed and consumed by his appetites while alive? If these men had such a king as this, who, while self-indulgent, should lay no severe restraint on them, they would more enthusiastically consecrate to him a temple and a flamen than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.

(St. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God ii.20)

The Way We Were

I found this video on Fr. Ray Blake's website, a video I had sought for years and thought quite lost. The video is two separate features, one focused on the traditionalist movement in the wake of Msgr. Lefebvre's episcopal consecrations and the other a series of vignettes of Norman life called Fr. Quintin's Normandy. 

This clip gives us some insight as to what life was like in good parishes "back in the day." Fr. Montgomery-Wright sought eccentricity at every step, but aside from wearing an unnecessary monocle he had a remarkable genteel pastoral demeanor, a kindred spirit for the farming community.

The Masses he celebrated were more elaborate and less ceremonial than today's traddy Masses: coped cantors, servers in tunics, a full choir, and the priest yelling the Gloria, laus, et honor tibi sit when no one else will. His movements are both reverent and not contrived. There is a holy informality which compliments country life and which I miss greatly in Dallas.

Montgomery-Wright cared for a disabled person named Christian and extended his caring outlook to the rest of his 1,000 faithful scattered across three parishes and the Mass center in another town he ran. Even at 75 he gave no thought to leaving what he was ordained to do.

The same person who posted the clips of Fr. Montgomery-Wright also has another video entitled "SSPX UK History", which is three hours long and only worth occasionally skipping through. It is presented by Fr. Edward Black, then district superior of the Fraternity. Around the 17 minute mark there are pictures of the real Roman Holy Week at St. Joseph's in London. A few minutes later comes footage taken by a local news crew of Palm Sunday, which shows the knocking at the door and the haunting Gospel tone as Fr. Black tells the interviewer about the dilution of rites. Later on bishop Richard Williamson is shown celebrating a pontifical Mass from the faldstool in a garden; evidently the Fraternity bishops had not yet abusively assumed the practice of celebrating Mass from the throne, which was a prerogative Lefebvre was granted by Pius XII as an apostolic delegate. Most Masses for pilgrimages and special events were sung and Tenebrae was observed during Holy Week. The crowd noticeably evolves from an older group dressed quite casually (women in trousers sometimes, not all the ladies veiled, not all the men in ties) to a younger, more formal set of congregants.

Seeing these two pieces makes one wish the old rite communities nowadays had the same pastoral zeal and familiarity that those groups had in their early days, as well as their desire to maximize their liturgical functions. Have we lost something of the way we were?