Liturgi

Jeg leste nylig om regler for når de troende kan motta kommunion under begge skikkelser, fra Phoenix, Arizona. Biskop Thomas Olmsted har i det siste prøvd å begrense bruken av kommunion under begge skikkelser – i USA har man typisk 10-12-14 ekstraordinære kommunionsutdelere og 6-8 kalker med Kristi blod i store menighetsmesser – men ser ikke ut til å lykkes med dette. Den samlede bispekonferansen i USA oppfordrer ganske sterkt til kommunion under begge skikkelser, og selv om biskop Olmsteds nye normer (under) på en måte er tydelige nok, så vil de nok ikke få særlige konsekvenser. Dette skriver han:

Conditions for the use of Holy Communion under both kinds:

i. The faithful present at Mass are properly catechized and continually receive catechesis regarding the dogmatic principles on the matter laid down by the Ecumenical Council of Trent.

ii. The ordinary ministers (i.e., priests and deacons) are able to purify all the sacred vessels either during or immediately following Dismissal of the people at the conclusion of the Mass.

iii. There exists not even a small danger of the sacred species being profaned.

iv. There is not such a large number of communicants that it is difficult to gauge the amount of wine for the Eucharist. There is no danger that more than a reasonable quantity of the Blood of Christ remains after distribution of Holy Communion.

v. There is an adequate number of ordinary ministers of Holy Communion for the distribution of Holy Communion. When this is not the case, there is an adequate number of properly deputed and trained extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.

vi. The role of the Priest and Deacon as the ordinary ministers of Holy Communion is not obscured by an excessive use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion; the bond between the ministerial priesthood and the Eucharist is clearly manifest.

vii. There are no health concerns such as influenza or some other contagious disease that would deter the faithful from approaching the chalice.

viii. “The chalice should not be ministered to lay members of Christ’s faithful where…a notable part of the people continues to prefer not to approach the chalice for various reasons, so that the sign of unity would in some sense be negated.”

Jeg hadde tenkt å skrive noen private kommentarer til dette, men det får komme senere,

Slik leste jeg i dag til Matutin på festen for den hellige Martin av Tours:

Martin, born in Sabaria at Pannonia, was ten years old, when against his parents’ wishes he went to a Church and asked to be enrolled the catechumens. At fifteen he enlisted as soldier, and served first in the army of Constantius, and then in that of Julian. At eighteen, when he had given part of his cloak to a poor man at Amiens, he was strenghten by a wonderful apparition of Jesus Christ an eagerly received baptism. Then leaving the military life, he was received among the acolythes of Hilary, the bishop of Poitiers. Later made bishop of Tours, he built a monastery, where with eighty monks he lived in a most holy way for some time. When he was seized with severe fever at Candes, a village of his diocese, he had pity on his disciples, and thus prayed to God: «Lord, I am still necessary for your people, I will not refuse the labor.» Shortly after, when death was imminent, the enemy of mankind appeared him. «Why are you here, cruel beast?», said Martin. «You will find no deadly sin in me.» With those words he gave back his soul to God at the age od eighty one, famous for many miracles.

Det er bare to uker til den nye engelske messeoversettelsen skal tas i bruk – og Jeffrey Tucker skriver begeistret om dette:

… The language is completely different. What previously was choppy and plain is now extended and elegant. Options for prayers that aren’t even in the Latin edition have been eliminated. The incessant talk about “peace and love” that reflected the political-cultural concerns of 1970 are gone and replaced by actual English equivalents of the Latin. The language is generally higher and more prayerful. The text sounds like liturgy, sounds like Church, sounds like prayer, and the attempt to render all of this in dress-down-Friday prose is completely gone.

The overall effect is about more than the text, as important as that is. The really substantive change concerns the overall ethos of the Mass that will come through in the new language. It is serious, solemn, dignified, and even a bit remote in the way that mysterious and awesome things really should be. The sentence formulations are not like vernacular. They are elevated but without being affected.

Den nye oversettelsen vil også få betydning for musikken i messen, skriver Tucker, og der trengs det virkelig en revolusjon i de fleste engelskspråklige menigheter – ofte er ikke-katolikker blitt skikkelig sjokkert når de har overvært en katolsk messe, skriver han:

The biggest evidence of this change concerns the music. There is a long history in the Catholic Church of missteps in this regard. … The people involved in the production of the English version of the Third Edition of the Roman Missal got it right. They embedded the music as part of the text. You can hardly turn a page in this Missal without bumping into musical notation. This is just fantastic because it establishes a norm for both tunes and for the preferred style of the music to be used at Mass. This style is call chant. The prayers are all chant. The people’s parts are chanted. ….

This is just great because it solves a serious and major problem that currently exists within the Catholic Church: the music that is commonly employed in the liturgy works at cross purposes with the ritual itself. The establishment of a new (actually old) musical norm will have a gradual effect on the choices that the musicians make in the future. Pop music will not fit in well with a chanted Mass. There will be a gravitational pull toward making the entire Mass a chanted event, thereby fulfilling one of the goals of the Second Vatican Council to grant chant “first place” at Mass.

Now, in talking about these issues with reporters, I’ve noticed something that Catholics rarely talk about. The existing problems in the musical area are well known by these reporters. They’ve variously attended Mass with the expectation of hearing chant but come away with a sense of alarm or even shock that this is not what they heard. They tell me nightmare stories I’ve heard a thousand times, stories of amateur guitar quintets that strum away from the altar, stories of bongos and electric basses and trap sets, stories that make your hair stand on end and make you want to hide from embarrassment.

In some way, all these reporters, Catholic or not, are rooting for a dramatic change. They want the Catholic Church to be true to itself. …

Jeg nevnte nylig boka “The Mass and Modernity” av P. Jonathan Robinson. Der innleder han et oppsummerende kapittel slik:

I will now spell out some of the consequences of my contention that the celebration of the Novus Ordo must be developed to include characteristics of the Old Rite. The most important of these characteristics is the capacity of the Old Rite to teach the transcendence of God and at the same time to inculcate a sense of Christ’s salvific work in the Mass through the operation of the Holy Spirit. The Old Rite does this in a variety of ways that lead the worshipper beyond the immediate ceremonies of the Rite itself to a contemplative encounter with «the nameless God of many names».

By contemplative here I mean an experience that is a largely wordless, serene, and attentive prayer to the presence of God. There is nothing extraordinary about this, and it is common to most people who pray and participate in the sacraments; the development of their prayer follows the traditional map of progress in prayer that is to move from the complex to the more simple. At the beginning, prayer consists in petition, meditation, and thanksgiving; but as it develops, it becomes less and less a matter of words, acts of the imagination, and motions of the will and develops into a loving attention to God ….

… This sort of prayer is not a substitute for liturgical prayer, but liturgical prayer should lead to it, and there ought to be enough silence and serenity in liturgical celebrations to allow it to develop. The liturgy is not supposed to lead to a mindless submersion of the individual in a communal experience; it should, on the contrary, leave the individual with a heightened sense of his own self and lead him deeper into the mystery of the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ and who shares himself with us in the sacraments.

It is not solely the verbal aspects of the Mass that should help to develop this contemplative attitude. In the Eucharist the reality of the presence of the Paschal Mystery is impressed on the worshipper by the structure of the rite itself, by the position of the priest for the Eucharistic Prayer, by the choice of the readings from Scripture, by the use of a formal archaic language (Latin), as well as by the controlled movements and gestures of the officiants; and all these characteristics of the Eucharist help to develop the contemplative attitude. It is from this perspective on liturgy that von Balthasar speaks of the liturgical attitude as one «silent, recollected adoration».

A supporter of a more community-oriented liturgy ought to be quite willing to admit that the Old Rite did in fact encourage a liturgical attitude of «silent, recollected adoration» and that this is precisely what was wrong with it. …

Dagens tekster – 32. søndag i kirkeåret – handler om (1 – første lesning) å være vise, slik at vi vet hva som er viktig i livet, (2 – andre lesning) om det evige liv, hva som skjer når dette jordeliv er slutt, og (3) i evangeliet om de fem kloke og de fem tåpelige ternene/jomfruene. Jeg tar i prekenen i dag eksempelet fra dåpslyset, som tennes for oss når vi blir døpt, men så må vi gi det næring gjennom vårt liv ved Kirkens sakramenter, ved bønn, et godt liv etc. – slik at vi kan være klar til å møte Herren når han kommer igjen. Som evangelieverset uttrykker det: «Så våk da! For Menneskesønnen kan komme i den time dere minst venter det.» (De norske tekstene og bønnene kan leses her.)

Father Z. skriver også om denne søndagen, og legger stor vekt på de åndelige våpen vi må bruke i kampen mopt det onde. Han analyserer også kollektbønnen grundig – se denne på ulike språk og oversettelser nedenfor:

Latin:
Omnipotens et misericors Deus,
universa nobis adversantia propitiatus exclude,
ut, mente et corpore pariter expediti,
quae tua sunt liberis mentibus exsequamur.

Norsk:
Allmektige og miskunnsrike Gud,
hold nådig borte alt som kan skade oss,
så vi frigjort på legeme og sjel kan følge din vilje.

Literal English translation:
Almighty and merciful God,
having been appeased, keep away from us all things opposing us,
so that, having been unencumbered in mind and body equally,
we may accomplish your things with free minds.

English 1973:
God of power and mercy,
protect us from all harm.
Give us freedom of spirit
and health in mind and body
to do your work on earth.

English 2011:
Almighty and merciful God,
graciously keep from us all adversity,
so that, unhindered in mind and body alike,
we may pursue in freedom of heart
the things that are yours.

“What can explain such a glaring howler? Why was it not spotted early on, rather than left to appear in a lavishly produced final text? Are priests expected to read the prayer as printed? . . . . « kan vi lese i the Tablet (s19-29), på PrayTell-bloggen (som stadig raser over den nye oversettelsen), og hos Father Z (som gir en god oversikt over hvordan teksten egentlig skal forstås).

Bønnen man slik diskuterer er postkommunionbønnen (jeg liker ikke begrepet «avslutningsbønn» i vår messebok, det er ikke presis) på første søndag i advent. Under viser jeg den latinske originalen (nykomponert i 1969, men fra to gamle kilder – se mer om det hos Father Z.), samt noen oversettelser på engelsk og norsk. Den engelsk oversettelsen fra 1973 er nesten latterlig forkortet (det er jo også grunnen til at de trengte en ny oversettelse), mens den norske oversettelsen har med det meste – men ikke alt, ikke «frequentata».

Latin:
Prosint nobis, quaesumus, Domine, frequentata mysteria,
quibus nos, inter praetereuntia ambulantes,
iam nunc instituis amare caelestia et inhaerere mansuris.

Svært bokstavelig oversettelse:
May they be profitable for us, we beg You, O Lord , these oft celebrated sacramental mysteries,
by which You instruct that we, walking amidst the things that are passing away,
would now in this very moment love heavenly things and cleave to the things that will endure.

I norsk messebok:
Herre, vi ber deg: La den hellige handling vi har feiret, bli oss til gavn.
Midt i en forgjengelig verden lærer du oss å elske det som hører himmelen til,
og bygge på det som varer evig.

Engelsk 1973:
Father, may our communion teach us to love heaven.
May its promise and hope guide our way on earth.

Engelsk 2011:
May these mysteries, O Lord, in which we have participated,
profit us, we pray, for even now, as we walk amid passing things,
you teach us by them to love the things of heaven and hold fast to what endures.

Uenigheten går på hvordan «them» i siste linje skal forstås; det refererer ikke til «passing things» i andre linje, men til «these mysteries» i første linje. Jeg er enig i at dette kan misforstås, og min erfaring er at slikt misforstås lettere på engelsk enn på norsk.

Men en videre debatt handler også om disse bønnene – som på latin ofte er ganske kompakte og kompliserte – egentlig bør forenkles så veldig. Kanskje man ikke skal forvente at de vil forstås umiddelbart når de høres sunget (eller sagt).

I siste del av «History of the Dominican Liturgy», som omhandler årene 1946-1969, skriver Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P. først om hva som skjedde rett etter konsilet med tidebønnene – i 1965:

Another petition to the Congregation asked that individual houses be given the right to adopt the Roman Office in the vernacular, should they wish to do so. Finally, the Liturgical Commission, now under the presidency of Fr. Vincent de Couesnongle, was to draw up plans to reform liturgy so that it «match the actual experience of worship and spirituality.» …

During the next two years, the Order and the provinces struggled to enact reforms in discipline, life, and worship. The traditional lay brothers’ habit was abolished so that all friars, priest or lay, would dress the same.[93] New prefaces were provided for the Mass following Roman models. A supplement to the Breviary was published, including rubrical changes and new saints. But perhaps the most revolutionary changes in this period involved the general introduction of the vernacular and the Romanization of the Dominican chant. In the wake of the council, the Congregation of Rites was barraged with questions and petitions from religious orders with choral obligation asking if they could institute a wholly vernacular Office and drop the use of Gregorian chant. Citing the conciliar decree preserving the use of Latin and chant in just such cases, the Congregation generally said no, but hedged this prohibition with so many exceptions that it ceased to apply in most cases. ….

Litt senere – i 1969 – kom den endelige avskjeden med den dominikanske ritusen:

Acting on the recommendation of the Liturgical Commission of the Order under the presidency of Fr. Alfonso d’Amato of the Lombard Province, the chapter commissioned the Master General, Fr. Aniceto Fernandez, to request permission from what was now called the «Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship» to allow the Order to adopt the Roman Rite. He was also asked to create a new commission to examine the old liturgical and musical books of the Order to see what elements might be suitable for use with the new liturgy. Fr. Fernandez convened an extraordinary session of his Council on 3 April 1969. At it, Fr. Ansgar Dirks, as representative of the Liturgical Commission, gave a report explaining what changes the adoption of the new Roman Rite then in preparation would entail, and the council voted to accept the commission’s recommendation to adopt that Rite as that of the Order.

The Master forwarded a petition to that effect to the Congregation. On 2 June 1969, permission was formally granted, to come into effect on 18 November 1969. Fr. Fernandez communicated this news by letter to the provincials of the Order. For the Roman Masses celebrated in Gregorian chant, the chants of the old Dominican Gradual might still be used, «until some other accommodation can be found.» The new Roman Missal then in preparation might replace the old one when it came into effect on 30 November 1969, and its celebration in vernacular might begin as soon as bishops’ conferences approved vernacular translations. Until those developments the older Roman Mass, as currently reformed, was to be celebrated, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Fr. Fernandez did especially emphasize that, according to the terms of the rescript, permission to use the old Dominican liturgy might be given by provincials to priests of their provinces and by the Master to priests of the whole Order. But, for the Order as a whole, the Liturgy of Humbert was now a thing of the past.

Mange artikler om historien til den dominikanske kiturgien kan leses her.