Church

The Parisian Greek Mass

One of our favorite television shows was James Burke’s Connections. It was—and is—a great program, essentially a Wikipedia rabbit hole avant la lettre. Essentially, Burke would trace the often labyrinthine developments that led some some simple, everyday object or concept. The stories were often fascinating, helped along by Burke’s engaging persona. We want to remember that the Discovery Channel presented Connections, back in the days before Discovery discovered that there was money to be made in compelling real-life dramas.

Earlier this weekend, we read, at New Liturgical Movement, Gregory DiPippo’s longish, interesting piece about the Greek Mass said at the Abbey of St. Denys outside Paris. The story behind the Mass is interesting: Dionysius the Areopagite was a judge of the Areopagus of Athens converted to Christ by St. Paul (Acts 17:34). According to tradition, Dionysius then became the first bishop of Athens. He later went to Rome, where Pope Clement sent him north to convert the Gauls. He became, then, the first bishop of Paris. (Where Dionysius became Denys.) His evangelization did not go down so hot with the pagan priests, who managed to convince the Roman authorities to kill Dionysius and his companions. One explanation for the name of Montmartre is that it is where Dionysius and his companions were martyred. His feast day is October 9. There were likely three Dionysii—the Areopagite, the bishop of Athens, and the bishop of Paris—over a couple hundred years.

Fast forward several hundred years. DiPippo notes that the Byzantine emperor Michael sent the Holy Roman Emperor Louis a collection of writings purportedly by Dionysius. Few—if any—people today think that the author of these works was Denys or even the Areopagite. Instead, the view is that he was an anonymous Neoplatonist using the Areopagite’s name. So there were really something closer to four Dionysii. This being the ninth century, there were not a lot of Frenchmen running around with great Greek. So, Dionysius’s works were translated, and they caught on. DiPippo notes that St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, who cites Dionysius throughout the Summa, knew him in a Latin translation. We note that, as late as 1490–92, Marsilio Ficino translated the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names into Latin, together with his not-always-hugely-helpful Neoplatonic commentary. (Harvard brought out a nice, two-volume set earlier this year.) Michael Allen explains in his introduction to Ficino’s translations that Dionysius was important to the Neoplatonists because, if Dionysius was who he was supposed to be, then there was among the Apostles—remember Paul converted Dionysius—an advanced Platonism, and the Neoplatonic tradition gets rescued from its evident paganism by a secret Christian origin. Or something like that; Renaissance thinkers did not have Dan Brown, so they couldn’t call something “a Dan Brown story.” To make this long story short, after the introduction of these works, Dionysius became even more strongly associated with Greek learning and culture.

So, DiPippo tells us, the monks of St. Denys’s Abbey honored their founder by translating the Roman Mass for the octave day of Denys’s feast—that is: October 16—into Greek. That’s right: the Roman Mass, not an eastern Liturgy, but in Greek. This was, therefore, the very opposite of a vernacular translation. But their hearts were in the right place. What better way to honor one of the preeminent Greek thinkers of all time—so they thought—than by saying Mass in his memory in his tongue? DiPippo tells us that the tradition developed in the 12th century. We would be interested to know how that dating is derived. Apparently, the monks continued to say the Greek Mass for Denys’s octave until the Revolution. The date on the printed edition, brought out in Paris by De Hansy, is 1777, which would have been at the very tail end of the tradition. There must be something in the air about this Mass. Father John Hunwicke hosted earlier this summer posts by a friend of his, who addressed the Greek Mass of St. Denys at considerable length, presenting a transcription not only of the propers but also of the ordinary of the Mass.

The Mass makes for fascinating reading (even with our rudimentary Greek), as translations often do. It really does appear that the monks began with Latin and translated it into Greek, resisting the schoolboy’s (novice’s?) impulse simply to crib extant Greek texts where available. For example, some of the commenters at Father Hunwicke’s place point out that the Greek Credo (Pisteuo?) contains a Filioque translation. Fascinating stuff like that. Not being any judge of Greek composition, we wonder how the translation of the Mass sounds in Greek. We suspect that the great eastern Liturgies are probably more elegant, but we would expect native Greek speakers to produce more elegant Greek than a bunch of French monks. (We have long coveted a copy of the Pléiade edition of Shakespeare, not because our French is so good that we work more naturally in it, but because we want to see how the quintessential English author sounds in French.)

How would James Burke sum it up? St. Paul converted an Athenian judge named Dionysius, who later went to Rome. When in Rome, St. Clement sent him to Paris to convert the Gauls. He became known as Denys, the first bishop of Paris, and he did such a good job that pagan priests got the Romans to martyr him. Later, a Neoplatonist used his name to write a series of theological books in Greek. In the ninth century, the Byzantine emperor made a gift of these books to the Holy Roman emperor, and Dionysius became associated with Greek Neoplatonic thought. But no one could read Greek. In order to understand Denys, his works were translated into Latin often for the next few centuries. But, to commemorate Denys, some Parisian monks in the 12th century translated the Roman Mass, which was in Latin, into Greek. And so they celebrated it in Greek on his octave day for five hundred years, until the Revolution. Just before the Revolution, in 1777, a Parisian printer brought out an edition of the Mass. And, in the Year of Our Lord 2015, two separate blogs on the Internet posted two lengthy articles about it.

Probably not as compelling as some of Burke’s summaries. It is sort of amazing to us, however, that this one setting of one Mass that was said one day a year, which probably was not hugely well known outside Paris, received serious attention in the summer of 2015. What is even more amazing is that the story of this one Mass encompasses almost the whole of Christian history—and, by extension, the history of the West. You can begin this story at New Liturgical Movement or Father Hunwicke’s blog and travel back to St. Paul preaching in Athens, taking any number of detours along the way.

We think that’s pretty neat, James Burke or not.

Good P.R.

Father John Hunwicke has an interesting piece at his blog. As usual, you should read it in full. However, one point in the post struck us. Father Hunwicke suggests that the progenitor of the modern publicity cult of the papacy was—wait for it—Pius XII:

Nor is a world-wide personality cult of the Roman Pontiff required by Catholic Dogma. Such a cult might, indeed, be a corruption of the Petrine Office, and indicate too much influence within the Church of the modern, Media-driven cult of the ‘celebrity’, so characteristic of our global village. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the first glimmerings we had of this cult were during the 1930s, the decade of the Nuremburg rallies, the decade also when Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII, but then Secretary of State) enjoyed displaying his charisma by going on foreign, even world-wide, tours and became known as il vice-Papa, il Cardinale volante. I wonder if these circuses have disadvantages as well as advantages. Papa Ratzinger obviously loathed doing them, but went through it all out of a sense of duty: I wonder how much the strain sapped his strength. Even Madonna seems to do them less.

It was, moreover, Papa Pacelli who appears to have started the silly game of having babies handed up to him while swaying along in his Gestatorial Chair (I would be interested if anybody could falsify this tentative suggestion by finding videoclips of popes earlier than him indulging in this insanitary game … so unhealthy, isn’t it? … you never know what diseases these poor children might pick up from a pope … after all, in the reception at the airport, the Sovereign Pontiff will quite possibly have shaken hands with some extremely unsavoury politicians … I wouldn’t have wanted some pope putting his hands anywhere near one of my children or grandchildren after he had been shaking hands with … er … um … )

This adds a different gloss to the perception of dear Papa Pacelli as a serious, even severe, man with a strong mystical streak. (We think this perception may have been fostered by Pius’s physical appearance—even if he had been fond of loud laughter, good food, and the occasional glass or two of vino at dinner, which he may well have been [we don’t know], he would have looked like a mystic shopping for a new hair shirt.)

But, as any Gilbert and Sullivan fan will tell you, things are seldom what they seem. Did you know that Cardinal Frings, the first Council father to speak on the schema of the constitution De Sacra Liturgia, praised the schema as a testament to Pius XII? (Acta Synodalia I.1.309.) Indeed, it was Pius’s 1955 reforms of Holy Week and the Breviary that mark the beginning of the phase of action that brought us the transitional 1960/62 books and, finally, the Novus Ordo Missae and the Liturgia Horarum. Indeed, Pius had brought an ambitious young expert—name of Bugnini—into the mix in 1948, by appointing him secretary of the commission established to study liturgical reform.

So, while we confess that we had put the rise of the unique public gestures of the Roman Pontiff somewhat later, we are not that surprised by Father Hunwicke’s argument that good Pope Pius was the man who invented—or sparked the invention of—the public perception of the modern papacy.

Good intentions

We really didn’t mean for Semiduplex to become “interesting things other people wrote” and “Synodmania 2015.” Honest. But it isn’t like people are discussing Callewaert’s interesting treatment of the ferial preces—including their apostolic and patristic origins—in what was left of the old Breviary, in his fascinating De Brevarii Romani Liturgia (nn. 292–93), published in 1939 after Pius X’s Divino afflatu reforms. (This reminds us of a recent piece touching, not favorably, upon those same reforms.) At any rate, we did not intend for Semiduplex to be a showcase of other people’s best writing. But here we are. All of which is long way of saying, at Athanasius Contra Mundum, there is a very good reflection on why the author—a traditional Catholic—is not covering the Synod where basic teaching, to say nothing of traditional teaching, is up in the air for the first time, well, in a long time.

The desert’s quiet and Cleveland’s cold

We have noticed Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò come in for some criticism lately for allegedly masterminding the visit between the Holy Father and Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who had the temerity to resist the wonders of Obergefell. How could such a saintly—that is, liberal—pope meet with the denim-bedecked villain of the age? Surely there was trickery! Now, some folks are demanding he resign the nunciature.

We are having a good laugh. Don’t these critics know that Archbishop Viganò set in motion—probably inadvertently—the process that led to Benedict’s abdication and Francis’s election? Archbishop Viganò, formerly a close collaborator of Cardinal Sodano and Cardinal Filoni (and probably, frankly, Cardinal Tauran) at the Secretariat of State, was moved, when Cardinal Bertone became secretary of state, to the governorate of the Vatican City State. While at the governorate, Archbishop Viganò started looking closely at the books. For his trouble, Cardinal Bertone, who was always Ratzinger’s man, not Sodano’s, rewarded him with the nunciature to the United States. Archbishop Viganò did not see the transfer as a promotion. He wrote Pope Benedict a letter. That letter touched off the Vatileaks scandal, which weakened Benedict to the point where he felt it better to abdicate than stick it out.

But it gets better: there are some who suggest that Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago—the Francis-style bishop now filling Bernardin’s seat—was appointed on Archbishop Viganò’s motion over the preferred candidate of Cardinal Ouellet and the Congregation for Bishops. We find the suggestion plausible. We recall hearing several reports that the likely choice was Archbishop Joseph Tobin, the Redemptorist archbishop of Indianapolis. And, on paper, Archbishop Tobin would have been a more attractive candidate than then-Bishop Cupich. Tobin had been superior general of the Redemptorists and secretary of the Congregation for Religious under Cardinal Rode and Cardinal Braz de Aviz. Cupich, on the other hand, had been bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota and bishop of Spokane, Washington. Solid posts, to be sure, but not quite as glittering as superior general of a major religious order and secretary of a Curial dicastery. But Tobin remains in the Circle City while Cupich has succeeded the great Cardinal George.

In other words, we think it may be a little ungrateful to portray Archbishop Viganò as a cold-hearted culture warrior out to embarrass the Holy Father. We’ll put it like this: the liberals in the Church, feeling free for the first time since October 16, 1978, likely couldn’t throw “Who am I to judge?” in the face of anyone who questions the new order if Archbishop Viganò hadn’t gotten shirty about Cardinal Bertone’s plan to sideline him. And the American Church wouldn’t have gotten its kinder, gentler—that is, liberal—face, some say, if Archbishop Viganò hadn’t pushed Cupich over Cardinal Ouellet’s preferred candidate (whoever he was). A little gratitude is in order, we think.

The spirit of the Council

It appears that the Holy Father has intervened at the Synod, largely to address (see edit below), not especially favorably, Cardinal Erdo’s superb relatio ante disceptationem. It is, of course, the Holy Father’s right to do just that. It is, after all, his party.

However, the Holy Father’s criticism of a “hermeneutic of conspiracy” is, perhaps, a little unnecessary. Edward Pentin’s reporting shows, fairly convincingly, we think, that figures in the Synod secretariat are carrying a brief for certain changes in Church doctrine. One suspects that they may even be supported by figures in the Curia outside the secretariat. It is beyond doubt that there are quite a few bishops and priests who, for whatever reason, support these doctrinal changes. (Though they are, to a man, careful to avoid calling them doctrinal changes. We would be, too.)

These bishops and priests are well organized—as the convenient confab at the Gregorian a while back shows—and well prepared to make doctrinal changes that will help the Church become every bit as vibrant as, say, the Anglicans or the liberal Lutherans or any other mainstream protestant church, all of which are characterized, apparently, by pews full of young families who never stop paying the Kirchensteuer. One needn’t adopt—we don’t think, at any rate—a hermeneutic of conspiracy to come to this conclusion.

Of course, there are antecedents for all of this, and within living memory.

Edited to add: Out of charity, we should note that John Paul Shimek, writing at the National Catholic Register, adds a little more to what we will call the “three official texts” statement. One, he states that Cardinal Baldisseri made a similar statement at the third general congregation. (The Catholic Herald piece suggests that Father Lombardi reported on the Holy Father’s intervention. The two possibilities are not, to our mind, mutually exclusive.) Two, he notes that, under the “three official texts” position, the calamitous Relatio post disceptationem is, therefore, not an “official text” of the Synod. We suppose, carrying the reasoning forward a piece, that the problematic Instrumentum Laboris is likewise not an “official text,” except to the extent that it reproduces the Relatio Synodi. The problem with a hermeneutic of conspiracy—or, for that matter, a real conspiracy—is that it is only supported by confusion.

“Be ye warmed and filled”

Brandon McGinley, writing at Ethika Politika, has a very interesting piece about poverty and the limits of libertarianism—even so-called Christian libertarianism—in the context of his native Pittsburgh. Check it out.

If there is one unreservedly good thing about this Pope, it is that he has put the Church’s traditional social teaching front and center again. One would have to go back a long time to find such an engaging exponent of the Church’s social teaching. Would you be surprised to hear Francis say,

Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic dictatorship which has recently displaced free competition can still less perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and rule itself. Loftier and nobler principles – social justice and social charity – must, therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship may be governed firmly and fully. Hence, the institutions themselves of peoples and, particularly those of all social life, ought to be penetrated with this justice, and it is most necessary that it be truly effective, that is, establish a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life. Social charity, moreover, ought to be as the soul of this order, an order which public authority ought to be ever ready effectively to protect and defend. It will be able to do this the more easily as it rids itself of those burdens which, as We have stated above, are not properly its own.

Of course not. The Holy Father, you may have heard, is a dreary, conventional leftist, who, like all of his ilk, misunderstands and mistrusts the free market, which is, after all, the only force for good in the world. But Francis did not say that. The great Pius XI (Santo subito!), did, in his groundbreaking 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo anno. As on so many matters, Papa Ratti foresaw the shipwreck before the rest of us even left port.

It is an unfortunate fact of life in the Church in the United States that the traditional social teaching of the Church is eschewed by the public defenders of orthodoxy, who, for what we suspect are largely political reasons, run after dreary, conventional liberalism.

McGinley’s piece is good medicine for that sad affliction.

Semper idem.

Elliot Milco at The Paraphasic has a second really good post today: a personal reflection by the author on the question “Why Stay Catholic?” The impetus for the mediation being a question by an Orthodox acquaintance of the blogger’s, “I would be curious to know, given the Synod and the current pontificate, what keeps more faithful Catholics from becoming Eastern Orthodox.” Rod Dreher has implicitly asked the same question in the context of Michael B. Dougherty’s overheated piece in The Week. (Which we will not link to.) We encourage you to read the piece in full at The Paraphasic. It concludes on a hopeful—maybe even inspirational—note, and it is well worth your time.

As for us, we cannot help—as we said in a previous post—but think of Cardinal Ottaviani in all of this. It is no secret, though perhaps not as widely known as it ought to be, that he was humiliated time and time again on the floor of the Council. He was shouted down on the floor of the Council while discussing the schema that became Sacrosanctum Concilium (thus hanging ten thousand felt banners in ten thousand churches in the round) and “in Aula fit plausus” when his microphone was eventually cut off. (Acta Synodalia I.2.20.) Likewise, Norman Cardinal Gilroy, archbishop of Sydney, presiding over the Council, went out of his way to undercut Ottaviani’s legal argument regarding the multiple “alternative” schemata offered as replacements to his De Fontibus Revelationis. (Id. at I.3.132; cf. 1917 CIC 222 § 2.)

And the constant battle took its toll. Ottaviani’s introduction to his schema De Ecclesia, delivered on December 1, 1962, at the very end of the first session of the Council, is worth reading in full:

Exhibiturus vestro examini schema constitutionis de Ecclesia, illud vobis commendo utpote praeparatum diligentissima cura a fere 70 membris commissionis praeparatoriae, deinde examinatum a commissione centrali et, subiectis igitur propositionibus factis a membris commissionis centralis, a commissione emendationum fuit etiam perpensum. Hinc, post hoc iter, Summus Pontifex iussit ut illud exhiberetur vobis examinandum.

Cura eorum qui praeparaverunt schema fuit, ut quam maxime pastorale esset, biblicum et etiam accessibile captui etiam multitudinum, non scholasticum sed potius forma quadam actualiter ab omnibus comprehendenda. Dico haec quia exspecto audire solitas litanias Patrum Conciliarium: non est oecumenicum, est scholasticum, non est pastorale, est negativum et alia huiusmodi.

Immo vobis aliquam confidentiam debeo facere. Puto me et relatores incassum esse locuturos quia iam res praeiudicata est. Illi enim qui solent dicere: tolle! tolle! substitue illud!, illi iam sunt parati hoc proelium facere. Vobis revelationem quamdam facio: antequam schema istud distribueretur, audite! audite!, antequam distribueretur, iam conficiebatur schema substituendum. Igitur ante praevisa merita iam iudicatum est!

Non restat inde, ut taceam, quia docet Sacra Scriptura: ubi non est auditus noli effundere sermonem.

(Acta Synodalia I.4.121 [emphasis supplied].) We see more than a little sadness and even some bitterness in this. As Ottaviani saw it, the questions before the Council were prejudged by an organized clique intent on going through the motions until they got the results they wanted. And Ottaviani had to know that the modernists at the Council were angling at the dismantling of the Church’s doctrine and practice. Ecumenism and pastoral tone were little more than buzzwords intended to obfuscate and conceal this goal. (Sound familiar yet?) Yet, Ottaviani persevered. His episcopal motto was Semper Idem. Always the same. Funny how that works.

As for us, we may be perplexed, concerned, or even disturbed at the developments in Rome. (Though we are not, it seems, as perplexed, concerned, or disturbed as others.) But if Ottaviani endured and stayed not only faithful but also loyal in the face of all that, what else can we do?

Not the wreck but the raft.

As we said a little while ago, our Italian is nonexistent. But our ability to get from Google Translate to something like English is at least average. So, we were able to pick through—gingerly, gingerly—Cardinal Erdo’s relatio ante disceptationem from the Synod this morning. Lots of good stuff in it, near as we can tell, though we thought this was bang-on right:

Riguardo ai divorziati e risposati civilmente è doveroso un accompagnamento pastorale misericordioso il quale però non lascia dubbi circa la verità dell’indissolubilità del matrimonio insegnata da Gesù Cristo stesso. La misericordia di Dio offre al peccatore il perdono, ma richiede la conversione. Il peccato di cui può trattarsi in questo caso non è soprattutto il comportamento che può aver provocato il divorzio nel primo matrimonio. Riguardo a quel fatto è possibile che nel fallimento le parti non siano state ugualmente colpevoli, anche se molto spesso entrambe sono in una certa misura responsabili. Non è quindi il naufragio del primo matrimonio, ma la convivenza nel secondo rapporto che impedisce l’accesso all’Eucarestia.

(Emphasis supplied.) Good medicine, we think, and cheering to a certain extent to hear no less a personage than the general relator of the Synod dispense it so liberally. But, of course, we recall—thanks to New Liturgical Movement’s publication of the Vatican II Acta Synodalia—some of Cardinal Ottaviani’s relationes (and interventions) at the Council. We have in mind especially Cardinal Ottaviani’s relatio in support of schema De Fontibus Revelationis (“Revelatio“), delivered—though by Fr. Salvatore Garofalo—on November 14, 1962. Deeply orthodox, clear-eyed, precise, but doomed all the same.

One wonders, however, if the modernists at the Council would have been able to run rings around Cardinal Ottaviani in the age of Twitter.

Reading “Pastor aeternus”

The Paraphasic, which just had a series on “practical Mottramism,” which is, of course, the disorder that affected poor Rex Mottram so hilariously in Brideshead Revisited, and which has made an unhappy reappearance in our time, is engaging in a “close reading” of Pastor aeternus, the dogmatic constitution of the First Vatican Council that defined the dogma of papal infallibility—and the narrow circumstances under which infallibility can be invoked. We shall follow The Paraphasic‘s series with interest.

“Non è un parlamento”

Our Italian is not good, which is a decorous way of saying it is nonexistent. But Google Translate was made, apparently, for people like us, who never quite got around to studying a modern language. At any rate, the Holy Father, as expected, gave an address to the Synod fathers today in Rome. We suspect that those who enjoy—or cannot help themselves from—reading the tea leaves, so to speak, will find much grist for their speculative mills in the Holy Father’s address.

Cari fratelli, come ho detto, il Sinodo non è un parlamento, dove per raggiungere un consenso o un accordo comune si occorre al negoziato, al patteggiamento o ai compromessi, ma l’unico metodo del Sinodo è quello di aprirsi allo Spirito Santo, con coraggio apostolico, con umiltà evangelica e con orazione fiduciosa; affinché sia Lui a guidarci, a illuminarci e a farci mettere davanti agli occhi non i nostri pareri personali, ma la fede in Dio, la fedeltà al magistero, il bene della Chiesa e la salus animarum.