LITURGICAL YEAR

New Zealand Tablet, 27 February 1913, Page 13

LITURGICAL YEAR

THE NEW OFFICE AND THE LAITY Several years ago a controversy raged in tho Catholic press as to the form of Sunday evening best suited to the needs and capacities of Catholics in England (writes the Rev. T. A. Newsome in the Catholic Times). Some among the laity, having learned to love and understand the form of evening prayer consecrated by the Church's use throughout the centuries, were strong advocates of the custom of singing Vespers. Others, desirous of attracting those who are outside the fold,, urged the claims of the Rosary or of other popular devotions in the vernacular. To both sides, however, was equally clear the Great Difficulty that the majority of the laity experience in discovering the proper psalms, antiphons, and hymn of the Vespers. Probably one has often heard the remark, ' I like Vespers, when I can follow them.' Most of us have experienced in our early days the futility of endeavoring to do so armed only with a Garden of the Soul or some similar manual. We look out our Sunday Vespers and are ready. The ' Deus in adjutorium ' 'we know by heart, the succeeding antiphon scarcely ever seems to correspond with that in our book, but we know we are safe with the ' Dixit Dominus.' The unknown antiphon is again intoned, followed by yet another, but whereas our book informs us that the ' Confiteor tibi' should come next, it doesn't; and after that we are lost until the 'Magnificat,' which comes practically at the end. Perhaps we followed all the psalms and then the chant would wander off into the unknown. The reform of the Psalter and the new rubrics for the recitation" of the office, which came into force on New Year's Day, will do away with this objection against

'_ The Popular Use of Vespers . ~ and will enable the laity to follow them without any great difficulty. Hitherto it has been only by way of rare exception that the Sunday Vespers have been actually recited. As a general rule the ones prescribed by the rubrics have been either the second Vespers of some feast kept on the Sunday or the first Vespers of the feast of the following day. How this has arisen will bo best understood by a glance at the history and construction of the Divine Office. The liturgical year of the Church may be considered as a great drama, in the course of which the whole history of the Redemption is re-enacted before the eyes of her children. Beginning with Advent, the time of eager expectation, we have successively presented to us the mysteries of the sacred Infancy, the public life, Passion, and Death of our Lord, His triumphant Resurrection, and the events of His risen life, His Ascension into Heaven, the coming of the Holy Ghost, and The Birthday of the Church, and finally the solemn commemoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which, as it were, gathers up all these past events into the great Reality of the present. The remaining Sundays of the year present to us the continual growth of the Church throughout the ages until the coming of our Lord foretold in the Gospel of the last Sunday after Pentecost. • In addition to this great yearly cycle, each week of the year is a less solemn representation in miniature. The Friday abstinence recalls our Lord's death, and each Sunday commemorates His Resurrection from the tomb. The week is therefore the liturgical unit, and from the earliest times it has been customary to assign a certain number of psalms to each clay of the week, so that at the end of seven days the whole Psalter is said by those reciting the Office. a We have now to turn our attention to the festal calendar of the Church. It is easy to see that the further we go back historically the fewer become the festivals of the saints. In the early days their cultus rarely affected the due recitation of the whole Psalter during the week. During the Middle Ages, however, the great multiplication of saints' days, owing to fresh canonisations or the extension of feasts to the whole Clrarch which before had been kept only locally, caused the character of the ecclesiastical year to be somewhere obscured. The long ferial offices became replaced by the far shorter offices of saints, and instead of the whole Psalter being recited in the week, a small number of psalms were, with but small variations, repeated day after day. Much of the variety and devotional beauty of the office was thus lost. For several centuries the Popes have had before them the problem of harmonising these two conflicting elements. Their aim has been to restore the Sunday and week-day offices to their proper position without interfering with the due cultus of the saints, and at the same time to avoid placing any additional burden on the clergy. In his characteristic way, the present Holy Father has found a perfect solution to the difficulty. In the first place the Psalter has been redistributed throughout the week, and by avoiding all repetitions of psalms, the length of the Office has been reduced. The Sunday Vesper Psalms remain the same, while the only change in Compline for Sundays and festivals is that the second psalm, 'ln te Domine speravi,' is now omitted. The Great Change is, however, in what may be termed the ' dignity of the Sunday Office. Up to the present most of the Sundays of the year could have their office and Mass replaced by the festival of any saint having the rank of a double, and of these there are very many. The Office and the Mass would in that case be of the saint with a commemoration of the Sunday. In times now past this happened almost every Sunday, and a green Sunday was a rarity. But by the new rubrics no Sunday in the year can have its Mass or Office displaced by that of any feast of less rank than a double of the first or second class, or some feast of our Lord. Certain Sundays can have their Office and Mass displaced only

by a double of the first class, while others, such as the first Sunday in Lent, cannot be displaced by the occurrence of any feast whatever. Consequently the g'reen vestments will be used almost as regularly on the Sundays throughout the year as are the purple ones in Advent and Lent. The Epistle and Gospel said or sung in the Sunday Mass will be in nearly every case those assigned to that particular Sunday. When this is not the case, the feast that is being celebrated _ will be of such a rank that its Epistle and Gospel will be probably found in the ordinary prayer-books. The Vespers on nearly all the Sundays of the year will be the ordinary Sunday Vespers as found in the prayer-books. The little chapter and hymn will vary with the time of the year, the antiphon for the ' Magnificat' from Sunday to Sunday, but these changes can be readily understood and need perplex no one. If Vespers are sung in vestments of a color different from those used at the Mass of the day, it is a sign that the Sunday Vespers have been displaced by the first Vespers of some great feast that will be kept the next day. The color for the Vespers of Septuagesima Sunday will not be purple, but white, on account of the feast of the Holy Name that is observed the following day. Those who are present at daily Mass during Lent will notice that purple vestments are used with greater frequency than before. Private votive Masses are now forbidden during Lent, and private Masses for the dead may be said only on one day each week. Moreover, on all week-days during Lent, with the exception of those on which doubles of the first and second class occur, a priest may say, if he so wishes, a purple Mass of the feria with a commemoration of the saint whose feast happens to fall on that day. With the multiplication of cheap books and the spread of what passes for education it is to be hoped that the Catholic masses will have a more extended knowledge of the marvellous treasures of the Church's liturgy. There may be many excellent ways of hearing. Mass, but none is so excellent as that in which we follow the sublime words which the Church puts into the mouth of the priest who offers the Holy Sacrifice. There may be many devotional prayers of rare beauty, but none can in any way rival the great prayer of the Divine Officeendless in its variety, sustained in its majesty, the ecstatic outpouring of the heart of the Church during the centuries of her existence. With a deeper knowledge of these things is certain to come a deepening of true devotion.