Close the Doors of Mercy!

Saint Louis Catholic is reporting that the confessional door stolen from St. Francis de Sales Oratory has been returned. After all that work they put into the replacement tarp...

Open the Doors of Mercy!

As an unfortunate followup to our earlier photo series on the St. Francis de Sales Oratory in St. Louis, Missouri, we note that one of the hand-carved confessional doors has been stolen.

KMOV.com

If this were an average diocesan parish, the priest would probably shrug, place a tarp over the doorframe, and move on. Then again, if this were an average parish, nobody would have bothered to steal the door in the first place.

(Thanks to Saint Louis Catholic)

Walking through St. Francis de Sales Oratory: Odds and Ends

A few more items of note from St. Francis de Sales Oratory in St. Louis.

Jesus is ready for the Year of Mercy!

Good Shepherd window.

A view from the Infant of Prague transept.

An unused confessional booth sitting in the transept. Its brother booth rests in the other transept.

My Latin isn't good enough to know what this is all about.

A closer look.

Roofed pulpit.

The in-use confessionals are positioned rather awkwardly in the middle of the nave. There is another on the opposite side, and it can be grimly humorous to watch penitents walk back and forth between them during Mass as priests come and go according to their duties.

This and the following grotesques appear to be representations of the kinds of workmen who built this temple.

A wide view of the baptistery. Eight-sided, according to tradition.

A closer view shows a little more of the golden color in the mosaics.

One last farewell look at the oratory before I leave.

Definitely worth a visit, lace and all!

Walking through St. Francis de Sales Oratory: Altars & Saints

Continuing our tour through St. Francis de Sales Oratory, this time looking at the various altars and saint images. Click on the photos for higher resolutions.

The sanctuary and the main high altar.

The Mary altar, to the left of the sanctuary.

Another view of the Mary altar, with a view of the apparently random heraldic symbols.

The St. Joseph altar stands to the right of the sanctuary.

Wide view of the Joseph altar.

To the far left of the sanctuary stands the Infant of Prague, topped by an image of the Annunciation. During the Christmas season this area is turned into a crèche.

To the far right is the Mother of Perpetual Help, topped by an image of the Fall of Man.

Another view of the Perpetual Help transept, flanked by the Immaculate Heart statue and the Mother of Sorrows window. I don't know whose idea it was to insert so many disparate Marian devotions into one area—and all with unique styles.

The Holy Family gets its own space, a little past the Infant of Prague. At the bottom is the Death of Joseph.

Various saints are scattered around the oratory. There are far more stained glass windows than are pictured here, as most of them were too high or otherwise difficult to photograph.

The patron himself, positioned neatly next to a few appliances. That fan is the oratory's air conditioning in the summer months.

He looks very episcopal.

John Nepomuk shushing troublesome children.

Six of the Twelve Apostles. Note that James the Greater is standing on higher ground than James the Lesser.

Martin de Porres.

Rita of Cascia and Theodore flanking the Holy Cross.

John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary, very properly grouped together.

(to be continued)

Walking through St. Francis de Sales Oratory: The Exterior

My travels recently brought me through St. Louis, Missouri. While there I visited the famous St. Francis de Sales Oratory, one of the midwestern strongholds of The Institute of Christ the King. The following are photos taken around and within the oratory. Although I took no photos during Mass, be assured that the Institute's love of lace, dusty blues, and operatic dress was well on display.

The outdoor photos were taken from the south and east (front) sides of the building. Click the photos for a higher resolution.

The famous "leaning tower" from a distance.

The original church (built by German immigrants) was destroyed a year later by a tornado. It was not fully rebuilt until 1908.

Stonework on the south side.

The baptistery is visible even from the exterior.

Telephone lines run past the front of the church.

A rather whimsical depiction of St. Francis in green.

Indeed, that website has useful information about the history of the oratory and its needed repairs.

Another view of Our Lady of Fatima.

And another. The run-down neighborhood can be glimpsed in the background.

Even the planting pots have attractive carvings.

Main doors.

This plaque may have been the only thing that kept the building from demolition during its impoverished years.

A view from the pew.

More interior shots in the next post.

(to be continued)

Rite of Gricigliano

You have heard of the Rite of Econe. It is the 1962 liturgy with bows toward the Cross, St. Joseph in the Canon, the Confiteor before Communion, perhaps birettas in the sanctuary, and, in some daring places, no kneeling at the prayer for the Jews on Good Friday. This, not the 1962 typical edition, is what most traditionalists use as their base liturgy. But there once existed another usage of the 1962 Roman liturgy, one which was short lived and has since fallen into disuse: the Rite of Gricigliano.

Nowadays the Institute of Christ the King does 1962 with a few tweaks: Tenebrae in the evenings of Holy Week, violet during the Candlemas processions, proper doxologies during former octaves at the little hours of the Office, proper Last Gospels and commemorations, as well as the former ritual for solemn high Mass wherein the priest reads the lessons while they are sung. This is not the Rite of Gricigliano, but the rite of 1962 in the hands of Frenchmen. The Rite of Gricigliano is the old rite in the hands of a German.

When they began in 1990 in Gabon, the Institute of Christ the King was doing the pre-Pius XII Roman liturgy, as were most traditionalists outside of the FSSPX. Indeed, even many of Msgr. Lefebvre's independent allies used the old rite. This continued when they moved to their current house at Gricigliano in Tuscany. Their liturgy professor and master of ceremonies Abbé Franck Quoex assiduously taught and practiced the Roman liturgy with Pius XII's accession as the cutoff date, a praxis confirmed to me by a former rector of the Institute's seminary. The 1962 Missal was in the "hell" section of the library, with all the other books no one ever used. The Pacellian-Johannine book was be withdrawn from hell in case an astute jurist visited from Rome only to be returned swiftly to the folios and flames. Internal politics and the expulsion of a great number of priests caused for some changes within the Institute early last decade (a blog is not the appropriate place to discuss these issues). Around 2003, when a photographer took the photographs of Holy Week on this blog, the Institute ceased to use the old rite.

Rome decided to put all its traditional eggs in one legally uniform basket. The Pope, or those writing with his pen, resolved to place all communities using a pre-Conciliar form of the liturgy under the facies of the indult Ecclesia Dei and the pontifical commission of the same name. Fr. Wach was told to switch to 1962 and most of the Institute did. They were celebrating Holy Week according to 1962 by 2005 in most locations, but a few places held out with the inventiveness and ingenuity of a German priest within the Institute who did not obstruct the liturgical transition, but rather made it a process. Good Friday in many places saw the Gregorian Mass of the Pre-Sanctified celebrated, but with the administration of Communion—reserved on the credence table—during Vespers. Holy Saturday was done at the Pian times and with the Pian lessons rather than the ancient ones. The baptismal font would be blessed rather than a container of water during the Vigil and Pian Lauds replaced ancient Vespers. Thus was born the Rite of Gricigliano, a mix-and-match of the old and transitional forms of the Roman rite, a rite meant to transition from the old to the transitional! This went on for a few years. The oratory in St. Louis last celebrated the Rite of Gricigliano in 2008. I have heard of some celebrations in Europe that lasted as long. 

As more communities reconsider their usages, the larger priestly groups are more entrenched in the Pian and Johannine years because of oversight. A diocesan bishop will neither know nor care about happened in 1956, but the local FSSP rector might! The Rite of Gricigliano lasted less than a decade. Now the Roman options of between the old rite, the middle rite, and the new rite.

Rise of the Technocrats

I recently came across this article in Forbes concerning another major retooling at my alma mater, my university in New York. Articles like this depress me as do most trends in the evolution and devolution of modern university education in the United States. While smaller liberal arts schools fill the void once occupied by the Ivy League in educational content, they lack the prestige and financial power to attract elite students. Conversely the Ivy League and similar schools like Stanford are committing academic suicide by loaning themselves out for a high escort fee like "ladies of ill repute" to major technology firms such as Microsoft and Google who in turn substitute these schools for career training and project development. What is lost in all this is education.

When I first saw my school's campus in 2006 its older structures, dating to the 19th century—infantile to my European readers, were undergoing major restorations, especially the residential West Campus below Libe Slope. Ivy still crawled up the sides of the Arts Quad buildings in spring time and the wild flowers and evergreens emitted sweet fragrances that permeated the summer humidity and carried throughout the 800 acre plantation. The buildings were a magnificent medley of neo-gothic, Beaux arts, neo-Romanesque, and Victorian/Edwardian English. Now much of that beauty and the symbolism beneath it has been drowned in an inundation of modernity.

Coming soon to Roosevelt Island, NYC!
source: blogs.cornell.edu

When I graduated in 2012 several new glass monstrosities masquerading as science laboratories—in part paid for by donor from major technology firms like Bill Gates of Microsoft (a Harvard drop out with no standing affiliation with my school)—popped up like pustules on the once immaculate grounds. The school president, popular with donors and unpopular with professors, students, and alumni, won a bid to build a special "tech campus" in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was given the opportunity to give our commencement address as his reward.

The university's entire focus has shifted towards technological development and giving science students practical experience in preparation for S&T, R&D careers. The Humanities and Social Sciences have been largely forgotten. The Cornell History department was the first in the United States to have a professor dedicated to colonial American History. Now it has none. The last colonialist left the year before I arrive and he has not been replaced. The Anthropology department holds a major collection of 20,000 pieces of archaeological history dating to the Lower Paleolithic age, including an Egyptian mummy. It receives $1,000 per annum in funding. I wonder, if a physicist wanted the latest IBM toy would the university hesitate?

Community and unquantifiable types of knowledge are on the downswing and will remain so for the near future. Having grown up in the northeast, where the towns were originally modeled on Congregationalist theology and the typical English village, I have found the utilitarianism of urban and suburban Texas startling. Up north every town, with few exceptions, had a green and a white First Congregational Church at the center, inevitably near the City Hall or Court House. Small shops and office buildings grew up around it a century ago. Larger industrial parks and office buildings would be at the outskirts of the town and people would live in rural settings 10-20 minutes away. Dallas has no center. It has a downtown with no distinction of zoning or districts. The suburbs are former farm towns, flat and open, with the occasional industrial park, glass office building, or gated McMansion community. Nearby my residence in the Dallas area is an outdoor shopping mall built to resemble the layout of a northeastern small city, replete with one-off restaurants and shops so as to counterfeit the organic feel while not taking the upper-middle class nouveau riche clientele out of their element. The shops are not an attempt to create a real town in northern Dallas. They are weekend entertainment for the efficiency minded men and their wives who built the stark work holes and McMansions that now blot out the Texan fields. No doubt their employers will benefit from Cornell's new "tech campus."

And at the town center was once the Congregational church. Then when all the Catholics came we built our churches at the center of residential areas, often with schools. Any kind of society needs an intelligentsia and the Church is no different. With Greek, Latin, History, Philosophy, and common sense debased in academic settings, the newly "educated"—would "processed" be a better word?—will move into their McMansions without the communal mindset that once existed through the Church. They will not be able to replace it with any effective substitute either.

The sole point of optimism one finds here is in the people who still do value community, the Humanities, history and the like. They value these fleeting things more than ever before and are willing to do something about it. In this article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch covering the American ordinations for the ICRSS the journalist seems a bit surprised that a man who graduated from Harvard would be interested in being a priest dedicated to celebrating Mass in a dead tongue. Fr. Altiere said, "There is a saying that the priest does not go to heaven alone. My goal as a priest is simply to lead as many souls to heaven as possible."

Maybe he can find Cornell's soul, too!

Open Question on the ICRSS

When did their clergy become canons and is this title consistent with its historical use? I am probably ignorant on this matter, but I always thought of a canon as priest permanently attached to a collegiate church or cathedral immediately under the bishop, meaning the church is directly subject to the ordinary and that there is no layering of authority as in a monastery. In Italy canons are called Monsignor Someone while elsewhere they are usually addressed Canon Someone or Fr. Someone. As far as I can see this does not describe the Institute's situation.

Am I missing something? Does anyone else have insight on the matter? Regardless, the Institute does seem to have undergone a significant paradigm shift last decade.

Holy Saturday in 2003

Holy Saturday in 2012