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. …