Some Blunders

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 08, 8 October 1908, Page 9

Some Blunders

American humorists, from the days of Artemus Ward and the Danbury News Man, have sluiced many a nugget of humor put of such incongruities as the description; of a prize-fight by the religious editor, or of a show of agricultural produce by the sporting reporter. The reports of Catholic events in the secular press, contain, at times,- gems of unconscious humor of purest ray serene that might, without blushing, take their place beside the conscious "and deliberate blundering of America's "professional funny men. In a- recent issue, the Melbourne Argus ' worked off * a passably good instance of the minor sort- when it said of Pius X. that he ' performed the ceremony of the Mass, 1 and that he ' hears and recites the Mass in the Shelta Sistina in the Vatican Palace.' The ' Shelta Sistina ' is, presumably, the' famous Cappella Sistina (Sixtine Chapel). The Advocate properly takes exception to the expressions, ' reciting the Mass ' and ' performing the ceremony of the Mass,' and makes no secret of its surprise that ' ignorance of the doctrines and the ceremonies of the Catholic Church ' is so ' often displayed ' in the offices of great daily newspapers. "-■.

These occasional slips of the secular press are perpetrated in good faitn and usually with a friendly intent, and arise solely from lack of acquaintance, with our creed and ritual. Some years ago an Otago contemporary added to the gaiety of its Catholic readers by describing an ' evening Mass ' ; it was really reporting Vespers— only that and nothing more. The Sydney Morning Herald spoke of Bishop Higgins as ' administering High Mass.' An' American daily paper told how a priest down in Omaha prevented a panic in his church by boldly throwing a ' blazing sacristy ' into the street. And a writer in the Catholic Sun tells the following entertaining story : — ' I had been requested, as being a Catholic, and thus familiar with church ceremonies, to report the obsequies -of a celebrated archbishop for a daily paper. Having been taken ill, I could not attend. On the following morning an article appeared, very good in the main, # but with this ludicrous description of the entrance of the bishops and priests to the sanctuary : " They wore long, flowing stoles and berottas, with cassocks on their heads, which they removed as they advanced to the altar." Picture to yourself the 1 effect!' A historic instance of the blundering that is a joy for ever was that of the reporter on an English daily paper who, in his description of the new Westminster Cathedral, averred that he had seen ' several thurifers suspended from the ceiling '—forgetting, poor fellow, that the thurifer is the person who carries the thurible or censer. Reports of High Church Anglican functions have from time to time added their quota of inspired and well-meant blunders in ecclesiastical terminology. Thus, the Westminster Gazette some years ago quoted a report printed in a London daily paper which conveyed the portentous information that an Anglican vicar in the Modern Babylon had just been ' reported to the Archbishop of Canterbury for wearing a baldacchino ' — a baldacchino being, by the way, the Italian name of a canopy erected over an altar or borno by four men over the Blessed Sacrament in Eucharistic processions.

In 1904 we reprinted from the Glasgorv Observer some tolerably good specimens of ecclesiastical malapropisms which appeared in a local secular paper's elaborate report of the consecration of a Catholic bishop in St. Andrew's Cathedral. ■ Some of these will bear repetition here. ' The writer,' said the Observer, ' noting that the procession genuflected as it passed the Lady Altar (where the Blessed Saciamcnt had been temporarily plared) stated that the clergy " paid homage to a brazen image of the Virgin." The vesting of the consecrating archbishop was summed up in the phrase: "His Grace was adorned with the amice,' that all that was said of the long and solemn function was that " 'he Archbishop engaged at Mass nt the foot of thi altar.'". The Observer also tells of a reporter of a Highland paper who, describing a High Mass celebrated at the Fort Augustus Bejiedictine Monastery by the late Prior, the Very Rev. Jerome Vaughan, penned this inimitable sentence: 'At. this point of the proceedings the very tev. gentleman turned round and observed in stentorian tones, " Donrinus vobiscum!'" 'It was an Edinburgh paper,' adds our Glasgow contemporary, .' which gravely stated that ," the Bishop of Argjll and the Isles sang Haydn's Sixteenth Mass"; and if supplemented this remarkable item with the statement thar "the thurifer was swung gently to and fro in front of the altar."' There is no danger of the extinction of the joy-giving race of the Malaprops so long as there are non-Catholic reporters

who have the courage— and the simplicity— (o report the details of a Catholic ceremonial with which the) are unacquainted, a. tl of which (like Kipling's blackboard) they tell all tTiey know— and very much that they don't.