A Colonial Williamsburg Approach To The Paschal Sacrifice

A reader asked me about the Rites of Holy Week prior to the 1955 revision by Pius XII.  Let me refer anyone interested to a fascinating (fascinating to those of us who love the arcane) series of articles by Gregory DiPippo on the Blog New Liturgical Movement.  As I have pointed out in previous postings New Liturgical Movement has definitely gone down the rabbit hole into ecclesiastical surrealism, but the historical research can actually be quite good.  Mr. DiPippo’s series of articles begins with the Palm Sunday offices http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2009/03/compendium-of-1955-holy-week-revisions_28.html and will lead you to the subsequent articles as he gives an extraordinarily detailed description of both the pre-1955 rite and the revisions of Pius XII. 

Let me first explain the importance of the 1955 revisions in preparing the way for the extensive liturgical changes that have followed the Second Vatican Council.  The earlier rites were taken from the 1570 Missal of Pius V which was accompanied by a Papal Bull known as Quo Primum.  Quo Primum declared that

"Let all everywhere adopt and observe what has been handed down by the Holy Roman Church, the Mother and Teacher of the other Churches, and let Masses not be sung or read according to any other formula than that of this Missal published by Us. This ordinance applies henceforth, now, and forever, throughout all the provinces of the Christian world" Pius V went on to say: "By this present Constitution, which will be valid henceforth, now, and forever, We order and enjoin that nothing must be added to Our recently published Missal, nothing omitted from it, nor anything whatsoever be changed within it…. No one whosoever is permitted to alter this notice of Our permission, statute, ordinance, command, precept, grant, indult, declaration, will, decree, and prohibition. Should anyone dare to contravene it, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul."   In other words, Pius allegedly fixed the Roman Liturgy unchangeable for all time and in all places.  No liturgical changes.  Or so it was held. 

Despite Pius’ monitum to the contrary, over the centuries from the Pius V to Pius XII various minor alterations had, in fact, been made to the Liturgy.  New propers were composed and new feasts were added as saints were canonized.  Prayers were appended to the end of the recited or low Mass.  The communion of the faithful was re-introduced into the body of the Mass rather than more usually being a separate rite before or after Mass.  But none of these changes were nearly as drastic as the revisions to the Holy Week rites that Pius XII introduced in 1955 and yet there was no claim that Pius lacked the authority to change the rites established by his predecessor.  The changes proceeded smoothly but in many respects they were the Fort Sumter of our current Civil War of Liturgical renewal.  Neo-Trads are beginning to identify the original villain of Liturgical Reform of Vatican II as Pius XII and Holy Week as his Trojan Horse. 

Mr. DiPippo goes into great detail about both the pre and post 1955 rites and it would take me, as is did him, a long series of turgid postings to go over them in detail.  Let me just outline a few for you.

1. In the pre-1955 rites only the priest received Holy Communion on Good Friday.  At the Holy Thursday Mass the priest consecrated two large hosts, one for Holy Thursday and one to be reserved in the altar of repose for Good Friday.   The Good Friday host was placed in a chalice covered by an inverted paten and pall and then veiled.  The veil was ties securely around the knob of the chalice and it was carried beneath a humeral veil in solemn procession to the altar of repose where  it remained until the Communion Rite of the Good Friday “Mass of the Pre-sanctified.”   It was then carried in solemn procession back to the main altar of the church where it was placed on the corporal.  Wine and water were poured into the chalice and the priest celebrant communicated.  The other ministers and the laity did not communicate.  In the 1955 revision, Pius XII mandated that sufficient hosts be consecrated for the faithful to also receive on Good Friday

2. In the pre-1955 rites the Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the Friday “Mass of the Pre-Sanctified,” and the Saturday Easter Vigil were all celebrated about 9 a.m.  The Vigil was a totally separate liturgy from the First Mass of Easter, which was to be celebrated at, or about midnight of Saturday into Sunday.  This Saturday morning vigil led to the perception that “Lent is over at noon on Holy Saturday—pass the chocolate.”  Similarly, Tenebrae (the offices of Matins and Lauds) which should have been said in the final hours of the night before dawn had shifted to early evening of the day before. 

3. The pre-1955 rites required at least six sacred ministers in Holy Orders: a priest, four deacons, and a subdeacon. (It was common for priests to take the liturgical roles of deacon and subdeacon so you didn’t have to have four actual deacons or an actual subdeacon, six priests would do.)  The unavailability of sufficient clergy in most churches led to a bit of cheating where the priest/celebrant, the deacon, and the subdeacon of the Mass of the Pre-sanctified removed their chasubles and assumed diaconal stoles to stand in as deacons for the chanting of the Passion. 

4. The deacons and subdeacon(s) for the various ceremonies did not wear dalmatics and tunicles but the planetae plicatae

or folded chasubles—a chasuble—usually in the “fiddleback” style pinned up over the chest.  (I remember seeing these as late as an ordination in 1964 and they were pinned both front and back, but Mr. DiPippo speaks only of them being pinned in front.  I suspect the ordination folded chasubles were of a different symbolism than the ones in the Holy Week rites as this particular ordination was held a good nine years after the folded chasubles of Holy Week had been abolished.)  At certain times the deacon also wore the chasuble folded over the left shoulder and caught at the right side below the hip so as to give the impression of the “broad stole.”  This was worn over the deacon’s proper stole.  The 1955 revisions did away with all this and replaced the planetae plicatae with tunicles and dalmatics. 

5. The Blessing of Palms on Palm Sunday was an especially curious custom as while it preceded the Mass of the Palm Sunday it was a rite of its own that in many ways paralleled the Mass.  The congregation met ideally in a church or chapel distinct from the sanctuary where the Mass was to be offered.  The rite is a bizarre parallel to the Mass.  The palms awaiting the blessing were placed flat on the altar.  As the sacred ministers entered there was a sung introit followed by collect, epistle, gradual and gospel.  This was followed by a prayer that corresponds to the “Prayer over the Gifts at Mass,” and that, in turn was followed by a preface, Sanctus, and a pseudo-canon consisting of five prayers over the palms.   The palms were the distributed and a prayer, corresponding to the post-communion prayer is said before the procession leaves for the main church where the Mass was to be said.  Violet vestments were used throughout both the Blessing of Palms and the Mass.  (In the 1955 Rite, Red vestments are used for the Rite of Palms, Violet for the Mass.  Similarly the Good Friday Service is done entirely in Black Vestments but in the 1955 revision, violet is substituted for black during the communion rite.  This required   more changes of vestments in the 1955 Rite than in the previous rites, especially for Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter.) 

I could go into far more detail about the pre-1955 rites but the point that strikes me most about both the 1570 Rite and the 1955 Rite is how little it incorporates the faithful.  Other than for the Procession of Palms, there is no point in a congregation gathering—they are entirely irrelevant to the Sacred Action.  It is, at best, an elegant ballet carried out by the corps des prêtres; often it was more of a “Chinese Fire Drill” of confused clergy, obtuse chierichetti, and unmarried men of a certain age and a seminary background who just like to hang around inside the altar rail fussing over burses, discarded copes, and the occasional humeral veil.  I have seen a lot of this crap (carefully chosen word) lately on some neo-trad blogs about how one can have “full, active, and conscious participation” in the Liturgy simply by being present attentively.  I understand that.  That is how I fully, actively, and consciously participate in La Boehme as I don’t think I can any longer hit the higher notes and besides I would lose my season tickets if I even tried.  But La Boehme is not the Mystery by which I am saved.  Popes going back to Pius X have encouraged direct participation in the liturgy by the assembly.   There have always been those liturgical mandarins who have wanted to restrict the liturgy to their own private preserve.  Some are priests.  (You know the pathology: “It’s my Mass!!!  We will do it my way!!!) Others are choir directors.  And now we have “liturgists.”  It can be Father’s “friend” who has his or her hand in every pie.   It can be any combination of people but in the end we must remember that the Liturgy is the work of the entire Church and it belongs equally to every member of the Church. 

So I was delighted to participate in the simple and reverent rituals of my parish church with beautiful music, devoid of pomp, prayerful and solemn but not stilted with our women getting their feet washed alongside the guys, our altar girls and boys, lectors and catechumens.  The only drama it encouraged was to walk the way of the Cross interiorly, in one own’s heart, as we accompanied Christ from the Upper Room of Thursday to the Empty Tomb of Easter Morn.

Egeria--The Tourist Pilgrim Nun From the Fourth Century and the Liturgy of Holy Week

Egeria 

I think one of the reasons I am so enamored of the Holy Week Liturgies is that they continue the oldest known liturgical forms of worship in the Church.  While there are hints about the worship of the late first century in the Book of Revelation, and while the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and Hippolytus provide some glimpses into the liturgies of the second and third centuries, tt is the travel journal of Egeria, a nun from modern Galicia (North-western Spain) describing the annual commemoration of the Lord’s Pasch in Jerusalem that really fills out our understanding of the Church’s foundational liturgical practices. And reading her account of the festivities of Palm Sunday and the drama of the Triduum we can see just how our liturgical uses developed from the practices of the early Church. 

The Christians of Jerusalem in Egeria’s day were far more devout than we—Holy Week was an almost continuous single prayer with the faithful gathering from before cockcrow in the morning until after dark at night for the singing of psalms and attentive listening to readings, but the noted elements of our Holy Week—the procession with palms, the evening Eucharist on Holy Thursday, The veneration of the Cross on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion, the baptisms at the Great Vigil—are all there in the last decades of the fourth century at Jerusalem.  There is also a somewhat primitive sense of the Stations of the Cross—admittedly not a liturgical service for us but it was for them—on the Friday of the Lord’s Passion, when the faithful gather at the various sites such as the column of the scourging for prayers.  Egeria (I prefer the more classic spelling Aegeria but no one else seems to) spent three years in the Jerusalem and wrote her sisters back in Galicia a fervent and detailed account of the Church practices.   

Reading Egeria’s account I cannot but wonder what we can do to deepen our appreciation of the mysteries of Our Lord’s death and Resurrection during Holy Week.  I think an increased use of the daily offices and in particular the re-introduction of Tenebrae, would be a good step.  Modern adaptations of the singing of psalms and prayers such as Taizé prayer also can be deeply moving.  Night time processions with guided meditations and hymns at various stations would recapture the way the Church moved from the Garden of Olives to Golgotha and the tomb.  Even reviving the medieval tradition of the “watch at the tomb” could deepen the experience. 

From a historical point of view, Egeria’s journal is particularly fascinating not only because she shows us the basic development of the Holy Week Liturgy as it had evolved by the end of the fourth century, but because we have a woman who is free to travel as extensively as Egeria did on her pilgrimage that lasted over a period of years; we have a woman who can comment insightfully on the Liturgy  and on the practices of the Church, and we have a woman who is—unlike other women in the Romano-Christian world, in charge of her own destiny and not subject to the oversight of a male superior, familial or ecclesiastical.  Today she would be on the leadership team of the LCWR or one of the “Nuns On The Bus.” 

A careful reading of her account permits us to see the fissures that were already developing between the Liturgical approaches of the Eastern and Western Rites.  Some of the ceremonies she describes survive only in the West, many more only in the East.  In both the East and West the liturgies would become more and more elaborate over the centuries but the central core would remain.  In the Middle Ages, both East and West began to play around with the clock giving the ceremonies of Holy Week a surrealism.  Matins and Lauds gradually get shifted from the earliest hours of the pre-dawn (say 2 am until 4:30) to the evening before so as not to discourage the sleepy from prayerful vigil.  And thus prayers and hymns written for the morning are being celebrated at night.  To balance this out, Vespers—the evening prayer—is being said at midday and often even in the morning.  The Good Friday Liturgy is moved from the Hour of the Lord’s Death into the morning and the Easter Vigil is now on Holy Saturday morning.  The Liturgy had become, as the Irish say, “a dog’s dinner”—a mashup of all sorts of things that are totally out of step with the mysteries being celebrated.

During the Second World War the German and Austrian clergy, and especially the monks, restricted from so much of their pastoral work by the Third Reich undertook extensive research in the history of the Liturgical development.  The Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany was particularly ambitious in reconstructing the older forms of the Triduum liturgies.  Their work paid off when in 1955 Pius XII decreed the first reforms in centuries of the Holy Week Liturgies, stripping away much of the bells and whistles that had been added over the years and restoring the Liturgies to their proper hours. These reforms of the Holy Week Liturgies were the precursors of the far more widespread Liturgical Reforms mandated by the Council and carried out by Paul VI in the Missal of 1970.

When Faith Is Left a Body Without A Soul

I had the opportunity some years back to spend Palm Sunday and Holy Week in Seville.  No one does Holy Week like the Spaniards and Seville is the most famous of the Spanish cities for the marvelous processions of the pasos depicting scenes from the Passion and Death of our Savior.  The figures —some centuries old—depicting Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the apostles and others in the various tableaux are made of wood, wax and wire.  They are dressed, for the most part, in exquisite silks, velvets, and brocades with jeweled ornaments set in gold and silver.  The figures are arranged in their various scenes on large platforms that are carried by several dozen men standing beneath the curtained stages on which they are

arranged.  The platforms are then filled in with silver candelabra and magnificent floral pieces.   The carriers can move only a few steps at a time—perhaps as little as two or three yards—before needing to rest due to the weight of the pasos.

Each procession—and in Seville there are eight and nine each day—are sponsored by the various hermandades and confridias  (brotherhoods and confraternities) which plan their processions for the entire year from the previous Easter.  The members of each brotherhood or confraternity wear their distinctive silk and velvet habits—a tunic, mantle, and large pointed hood covering the face but with slits for the eyes.  The different confraternities and brotherhoods are distinguished from one another by the color combinations of their habits.  Each pasos is also accompanied by its own crucifer,

thurifer, and lucifers—carrying the processional cross, the incense, and the candles.  These men—usually young men in their early twenties—are clad in lace albs and tunicles of various liturgical colors.  The confraternities and brotherhoods also hire bands to precede each pasos in the procession.  The most famous and revered of the pasos is La Macarena, Our  Lady of Hope (also Our Lady of Sorrows). Her procession is in the very early hours of Good Friday morning. 

One would expect all this to be very moving—and it is—but not in the way intended.  As hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to Seville for the spectacle, it has become something like a weeklong circus parade.  Vendors go up and down alongside the procession selling ice cream and cold drinks and balloons for the kids.  Viewers stand there with hot sandwiches and beers as the processions pass by.  Even some of the “penitents” lift back their hoods and quaff a quick glass of wine or, when their procession is done, sit in the cafes, still in their gorgeous robes, feasting on tapas and beer.   And the churches are empty!!!  I was staying in a monastery where I have some friends—all services were cancelled for the week.  I went to church after church planning where to go for the Holy Thursday and Good Friday Liturgies only to find out that, other than in the cathedral, there were no scheduled services.   At the suggestion of my priest friends, I took a train to nearby Jerez de la Frontera and stayed with the friars there.  In Jerez there were the processions too.  Not as many, but five or six a day.  They were just as splendid with flowers and the silver ornaments and the bands and hooded penitents.  But the crowds along the street were dressed in suits and ties, the women in the traditional high combs holding their mantillas.  They watched in respectful silence as the various tableaux were carried by.  Yes there were people in the cafes and bars—we all have to eat—but the atmosphere was both serene and profound.  The churches were filled for the

evening services.  The music was beautiful and young families were well represented. 

When the processions started—centuries back during the late fifteenth-century reforms of the Church of Spain, they were genuine acts of piety.  The immense amount of gold and silver ornaments, processional crosses, candelaria, processional staffs and other accouterments testify to the genuine devotion of the faithful.  But with the increasing secularization of our culture the soul has been eaten out of so much devotion.  What was once faith is now often reduced to mere show.  The urgency of a new evangelization is cannot be overstated. 

Ancient Roots of Today's Ritual

The Altar of Calvary in

the Basilica of the Holy

Sepulcher today

Well, Pope Francis has continued to show his colors—and they strongly signal a change in style not only for the papacy but for the Church—but more about that after the Triduum.  Now back to our account of Aegeria’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the fourth century and her description of the Holy Week rituals there at that time. 
The Good Friday services in the Jerusalem Church were not terribly dissimilar from today’s ritual.  In fact, the Good Friday Liturgy of the Roman Rite is a more ancient form, a far more ancient form, of the Liturgy than either the “Extraordinary Form” (pre-conciliar Tridentine Rite) or the revised Rite of Paul VI (Novus Ordo.)  Some attribute the Good Friday liturgy to Pope Saint Gregory but you will see that it has elements of the much older Jerusalem ceremony recorded by Aegeria.
Today the Sacred Ministers on Good Friday enter the church in silence, prostrate  before the altar and then the Presider stands and offers a prayer.  Then scripture lessons regarding the Passion are read.  After the Passion according to John’s Gospel is read, the Deacon calls for prayers for the needs of the Church, civil society, and various categories of believers and non-believers.  This is followed by the Cross (not a crucifix but a plain cross) being shown to the people for their veneration, after which the Sacred Ministers and the laity come forward to kiss the Cross or show some other act of veneration.  Finally the Deacon  brings to the altar Eucharist consecrated at the Mass on Thursday and all receive the Eucharist.  (For Traditionalist purists who insist on celebrating the Rites as they were done before 1955, only the priest receives Holy Communion.)  There is a prayer after communion and a prayer over the people, but no blessing or dismissal.  It is a very elegant ritual, noble in its simplicity and notable in its starkness.  It reflects the ancient Liturgy of the Church before the addition of penitential rites and Kyries and Glorias and intercessory litanies, and creeds, and other accretions.  It is my favorite liturgy of the year for its simple beauty.
When Aegeria visited Jerusalem in the late fourth century, the rites were very simple.  You may remember from my previous posting that on Thursday evening the Bishop and faithful had set out on an all-night vigil and procession from the Garden of Gethsemane commemorating the Lord’s agony in the Garden and his arrest.   That procession would have arrived about dawn at Calvary where the account of Jesus before Pilate was read to the people and then the Bishop sent the people home for a brief rest.  On their way home, the people would stop at the pillar of the scourging for prayer but then go home and rest for a few hours.  About eight they would return to the chapel of Calvary where the Bishop would take the wood of the Cross from its silver reliquary along with the sign that Pilate had ordered to be hung over the cross and place them on a table.  With the bishop holding the relic, the faithful would come forward to touch their forehead and then their eyes to the wood of the Cross, and finally to kiss it, but without touching it with their hands.  The deacons would display various other relics in possession of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  At noon the Cross was brought down to the open courtyard before the Holy Sepulcher and with the bishop seated facing it, the faithful spent the next three hours listening to the psalms and scripture readings from both the Old and New Testaments that mention of the suffering of Christ.  The Evangelists’ accounts of Christ’s suffering and death are read last.  This continued from noon until three in the afternoon.  Afterwards the people are dismissed but many would remain to pray until all gather again at the Tomb in the evening for a reading of the account of Joseph of Arimathea asking Pilate for the Body and then burying it in his tomb.  While the bishop encouraged people then to go home and rest, many—and especially younger people—remain at the tomb praying psalms and listening to the scriptures.    So we have here the Passion and the Veneration of the Cross. There was no communion service on this day in the Jerusalem Church—that was a later innovation in the Roman Rite, probably dating to the time of Saint Gregory the Great c. 600.  The style of the prayers—the Deacon’s call and the Presider’s collect or prayer—also reflects Roman usage and probably also comes from this time.  They are good examples as the Western Liturgy is considered to have reached the apex of its development in the time of Pope Gregory and most of the reforms of Paul VI in the 1970 Missal were an attempt to adapt the Gregorian Ritual to the modern era.  It seems that Pope Francis is anxious to restore that noble simplicity to the Liturgy which had in many placed begun to devolve anew into a baroque mishmash of superficial piety and clerical pomp.  Go Francis!!!