A Week of Liturgical Goodies

Two short posts from Fr Hunwicke (R+I+P) in 2022, discussing the Feasts that are in (or should be in) the Traditional Church Calendar this week.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

Part I

Goodies ... but, sometimes, competing and confusing goodies. We shall see this next week.

Take S Joseph. The Cultus of Saints in earlier days had a lot to do wth the possession of Relics and ... a little later ... the Dedications of Churches. S Joseph lost out there. The later fashion for a Universal Calendar based upon rational principles was to serve him rather better.

By the tenth century, he was observed in some places in the East on March 19. As such things do, this feast moved West and was accepted in Rome in 1479 ... and extended to the Universal (Latin) Church in 1621. My own unproved suspicion is that the medieval enthusiasm for S John Baptist had proved a bit of a blocker to S Joseph. Certainly, since the growth of the cultus of S Joseph, that of my own Patron the Baptist has tended to suffer something of an eclipse. 

In 1870, that inventive pontiff Pio Nono introduced a feast of S Joseph in Eastertide; newly declared to be Patron of the Universal Church, his (double of the First Class) Festival was fixed for the Wednesday in the second week after the Octave of Easter. The propers are biblical and attractive and 'typological'.

If Blessed Pius IX was inventive, Venerable Pius XII was ... let us say no more! in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, he had the brilliantly clever idea of stealing May Day from the lefties by restyling it as S Joseph the Worker. Like many brilliant ideas, it never made good. Right from the beginning, it was undermined by the American Bishops nagging for the right to observe it, instead, on their 'Labor Day'. It was such a flop that after the Council the coetus revising the calendar reduced it to an optional memoria. In other words, on May Day you could now find yourself in green vestments just celebrating the feria!

Now back a bit. In order to clear the way for S Joseph the Worker, Pius XII had to shift SS Philip and James off May 1 (observed in Rome after the Dedication in 570 of the Basilica of the XII Apostles).  They slipped down to May 11 before clawing their way after the Council back to May 3.

It seems to me perfectly clear what we need to do in order to follow Tradition and Auctoritas is to put SS Philip and James back onto May 1. 

I do not favour a fetichising of the Missal of 1962; and we have here a good example of why such fetichising is misguided. How can a Feast which was prescribed with high rank for May 1 but only existed thus for some fifteen years, be regarded as more sacrosanct than a Feast a millennium and a half old? 

I am not opposed to organic evolution. So I also favour going back to observing Pio Nono's Feast on Wednesday next. But ...

Yes; there is a knock-on-effect problem. To be continued.

Part II

(Continues) The problem is that the day fixed for S Joseph Patron of the Universal Church moves about because it is tied to the date of Easter. Such Feasts do tend to behave like rabid icebergs, galumphing around and crashing into festivals which were humbly prepared to stick to Days of Months.

Thus, this year, and just in England and Wales, S Joseph collides with the May 4 festival of the English Martyrs. This is fixed on May 4 because that was the day during the Tudor Regime when the primitiae of our English Martyrs were offered up in 1535 on the gallows at Tyburn. Does anyone know the date when this festival was granted? I have a feeling, based on the Collect of the Mass, that it might have been after the Beatification in 1886 of SS John Fisher and Thomas More and sixty one other Martyrs.

The festival has survived the carnage of the post-Conciliar years and even, in a slightly different form, features in the current Anglican calendar. 

All this gives it what I think of as auctoritas for us English Catholics. So, this year, I do rather think that I will keep this Festival rather than that of S Joseph. Whimsical? Unprincipled of me? I cannot deny the charge.

(May 2) S Athanasius. Perhaps a good day to remember the conclusions of S John Henry's study of the Arian heresy, which S Athanasius combatted by whizzing round the world irritating the Great and the Good through being orthodox. (In the words of Corporal Jones, they don't like it ...) I did a thing on Newman's 'Suspense', dealing with this subject, on March 16.

(May 3) Perhaps the most upsetting loss which the Pacelli/Bugnini alliance inflicted upon the Roman Calendar. The Festival of the Invention [Finding] of the Holy Cross is so valuable, not, principally, because of a particular episode in the history of the Relics of the True Cross, but because it is a festival of the Lord's Passion in Eastertide. We see His glorious Sufferings and Triumphant Wounds in the light of His glorious Resurrection. It is true that, in Holy Week and on the September Festival of the Exaltation of the Cross, we are indeed fully aware of the fact that He Who suffered is the One Who rose again. But the perspective is different on May 3. In this day's Easter celebration we look upon the Cross from an unambiguously joyous and (Yes! Yes!) triumphalist viewpoint. An important Festival to celebrate!

(May 5) S Pius V ... think Lepanto (and read G K Chesterton's poem) ... think 'Tridentine' Rite ... Don't forget that there is a magnificent statue of this great pontiff in the Brompton Oratory, just to the right of the Lady Altar. Is this the only one in England? Shame on us!

 (May 6) S John before the Latin Gate ... this festival, like the Invention of the Holy Cross, is still on the Calendar of the statutory Church of England Rite! As I have explained before (on this blog, May 5, 2021), we keep it in the Ordinariate because it marked the beginning of the secret plotting and scheming which led to the formation of the English Ordinariate. A most jolly celebration of the magnificent ecumenical initiative of the Unity Pope, Benedict XVI!

(May 8) On May 8 2020, I did a post which I was able interestingly to update and correct with the help of learned friends. The Apparition of S Michael at Gargano, unhappily, is not popular with post-Vatican II 'liturgists'; a shame, I think. All those hill-tops all over Latin Europe with their risk of lightning and their association with the military prowess of the great Archangel! The elimination of this festival is yet another example of a perverse determination to rupture the narrative continuities of Christendom.  

I wonder if S Michael was as active on Byzantine hill-tops as he was in Western Europe?