Monday, May 1, 2017

May 1 Repost for Pip'N'Jim

I had entirely forgotten about Jerz the Werz day and even wore a red tie with a matching pocket square to the Divine Liturgy today. A Tradistani chorister, hiding from the novel feast at Byzantine services, reminded me. While reading the Mattins of the feast this morning I recalled that the hagiography of James the Greater fits in quite well with the traditional narrative of St. Joseph.

From the second nocturne:
"So great was James' holiness of life that men strove one with another to touch the hem of his garment. When he was ninety-six years old, and had most holily governed the Church of Jerusalem for thirty years, ever most constantly preaching Christ the Son of God, he laid down his life for the faith. He was first stoned, and afterward taken up on to a pinnacle of the Temple and cast down from thence. His legs were broken by the fall, and he was wellnigh dead, but he lifted up his hands towards heaven, and prayed to God for the salvation of his murderers, saying " Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do " As he said this, one that stood by smote him grievously upon the head with a fuller's club, and he resigned his spirit to God. He testified in the seventh year of Nero, and was buried hard by the Temple, in the place where he had fallen. He wrote one of the Seven Epistles which are called Catholic. "

Ss. Jim'n'Pip, pray for us!

16 comments:

  1. Dear Rad Trad. ABS has been going to the Divine LIturgy of St. John Chrysostom at a gorgeous eye-popping icon laden Melkite Church about 30 minutes away from his house and he is close to confessing he finds the D.L. superior to the Real Mass he was born into and brought up in.

    The two processions with the D.L. the vestments, the belled censor from which waft sweet clouds of incense (the heavier-handed the Priest and Deacon are the better), the hymns, the sacred words of the DL etc etc and all conducive to sanctification and the lifting-up of one's mind and soul to the ineffable.

    The fam ain't too keen on the DL for a number of reasons but the 90 minutes fly by for ABS.

    Given the desuetude into which our once solemn worship has fallen, ABS would never ever go back to the Real Mass (the 1962 rite we get now) were it not for his fam.

    ABS absolutely LOVES every single about it.

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    1. Dear ABS,

      You are fortunate to have a Melkite presence near you and you should thank God for it every opportunity you have. They have a more beautiful Divine Liturgy than any of the other Eastern Catholic Churches in my not so humble opinion. I love their Great Doxology, their Cherubic hymn, their "Let My Prayer Rise" at Vespers, and many other melodies. I think they are also superbly comfortable with themselves and rarely betray any fussiness.

      I was once close to declaring the Melkite liturgy superior to the Real Mass (which is NOT 1962), but eventually they are different things. The Greek liturgy is outwardly jubilant and I am certain very close to what the heavenly court is like. The Roman liturgy, with its pregnant silences, otherworldly music, and Scriptural words, are more like God Himself is talking and the rest of us attentively listen. One need not be better than the other if properly celebrated (a Missa Cantana in a plaster statue filled parish will NOT compete). Today these rituals are at least accessible to people in a way that people craving a different authentic liturgy can have the full church life.

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    2. I must admit, too, the beauty of the Melkite Divine Liturgy. I was entranced with the music when I went to the local Melkite Church back in California; I just wished the shaking of hands wasn't introduced there [it was a bit of a jarring note in an otherwise good liturgy].

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    3. A few Orthodox churches on the Left Coast have introduced that particular narcissism, too. What an unnecessary accretion!

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    4. The big shame was that they were doing beautiful Greek and Arabic chant. There was an old man who led the Arabic chanting and it was done so well.

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    5. Albeit, for me, it's a Russian Greek Church instead of a Melkite parish.

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  3. Dear Rad Trad. ABS always profits from your wisdom and it is there in aces in your last paragraph.

    You help ABS to see what is before his very eyes , but eyes blinded by so much beauty.

    What really STRUCK ABS was the bolded words in the prayer here:


    Priest: With these blessed powers, O Master who love mankind, we too cry out and say: Holy are You and all holy, You and Your Only Begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit. Holy are You and all holy and magnificent is Your glory: who so loved Your world as to give Your Only Begotten Son, that every one who believes in Him shall not perish but may have eternal life. When He had come and fulfilled all that was appointed Him to do for our sake, on the night on which He was delivered up, or rather delivered Himself up for the life of the world, taking bread in His holy, spotless and blameless hands, giving thanks and blessing, sanctifying and breaking it, gave it to His holy Disciples and Apostles and said...

    ABS almost yelled, YES, the first time he was at the D.L. for he had becomes so inured to the passive prayers in which Jesus is depicted as merely a poor victim rather than who He truly was/is..The Divine Person willingly sacrificing Himself as the pluperfect sacrifice of The Holocaust in which His burning love of man substituted for the material fire of the Old Testaments Holocaust types.

    There is so much positive in the antitype of Jesus Christ in the way He fulfilled and perfected the old testament type of holocaust.

    In any event, ABS cannot get past the idea that Quam Oblationem is somewhat deficient in not specifying His self-sacrifice.

    This is prolly a prejudice of ABS but it exists nevertheless

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    1. The Roman Canon is more reserved and implicit than the Eastern anaphoras, but that doesn't make it deficient; the idea of his self-sacrifice is there, but not spelled out as the Easterns do. I myself find both equally good.

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  4. Dear Paul. The problem with the translation of the Greek into Latin (even in the Real Mass) is the Greek original is to be understood as to be sacrificed> or to give oneself in sacrifice .

    As Msgr Brunero Gherardini, (The Ecumenical Council Vatican ll, A Much Needed Discussion) noted (page 180, 181) During a meeting during the 80s, I presented the fact that the phrase, in qua nocte tradebatur....must not be translated on the night he was betrayed but on the night in which He sacrificed Himself, consigned Himself to death, or was sacrificed

    One of the Reverend Fathers (recently deceased) responded to me with angelic sweetness, "Even if the sense is literally as you say, pro bono animarum we have chosen "on the night in which He was betrayed." Stupendous; for the benefit of souls we have a gross error which is notalbo, but nigro vel rubro sigandus lapillo."

    The Thomist was detailing this vis a vis the translation of 1 Cor 11:23 and Euc Prayer III.

    In any event, ABS suspects the Melkites have the right words translated from the Greek to English, which is no surprise given the source.





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    3. How is the translation wrong, again, I ask? All the liturgies didn't keep to Scripture but made up several expressions of their own.

      "in qua nocte tradebatur....must not be translated on the night he was betrayed" Huh? This is the correct translation of St. Paul's words!! Again, I say, the Easterners added other words, and the Roman Canon uses "the day before he suffered".

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  5. Dear Paul. Not according to Msgr. Brunero Gherardinin who observes, Unfortunately, I have not had the joy of seeing any consideration of my objections to the meaning of the Latin tradere which, in the original Greek (especially in the passive and reflexive forms) means "to be sacrificed" or "to give oneself in sacrifice" and this is based on a vast, classical documentation.

    To ABS, it is no surprise that the Melkite Greek Catholics would have a more accurate translation.

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    1. Even if this be true, though, it doesn't impugn the authority of the Vulgate when Pius XII said it was good to use. And anyways, in Latin, that meaning is kept, so the translations have to be blamed.

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