I am just old enough to remember when the midnight fast from solid food, before receiving Communion, was general. I made my First Holy Communion a year or two after the midnight fast was mitigated or relaxed, to three hours, for most people.

The question comes up from time to time, about fasting before the asteroid hit. Up until 1953, the midnight fast was the general rule, with very few exceptions. Pope Pius XII, in his 1953 Apostolic Constitution Christus Dominus, reduced the midnight fast in limited circumstances. The text of Christus Dominus details those circumstances.

By his 1957 motu proprio Sacram Communionem, Pope Pius XII extended the mitigation of the midnight fast to a three hour fast, so from that time, Catholics generally only had to fast from solid food and alcoholic drink for three hours, and one hour for other liquids. Natural water did not break the fast under the 1953 midnight and any water did not break the three hour fast under the 1957 rules.

Here is part of what His Eminence Alfred Cardinal Ottaviani said in his commentary on Sacram Communionem (emphasis supplied):

According to the august intention of the Holy Father, the laws governing the Eucharistic Fast, adapted to the demands of the times, are now made simple and understandable even to the mentality of children.

It is sufficient to abstain for three hours from solid foods and alcoholic liquids and for one hour from non-alcoholic liquids. There is no longer any problem of morning or evening, of distances to be traveled to get to church, nor of strenuous labor or late hours.

There is no longer an obligation to consult a confessor to see if one fulfills the conditions to use the permission. It is no longer a matter of concessions which apply to certain categories of persons, but a law which applies to all the faithful everywhere.

The exhortations made at the end of the Motu Proprio, precisely because they are only exhortations, leave people free to conform to the new law or to observe the full fast, as has been done until now, out of devotion or for spiritual mortification. It is a question of desiring to obtain greater merit, but no longer that of keeping an obligation.

The formula which confirms that water does not break the Eucharistic Fast (at first it was said to be aqua naturalis) leaves one to understand that it refers to water in general and in the common sense of the word even mineral water, carbonated or chemically purified water.

Years ago, on seeing the movie Lilies of the Field, Sidney Poitier's first major motion picture, when the nuns were walking along the road on Sunday morning to go to Mass, I thought 'they're fasting for three hours and walking to church in the desert.'

Along with the Gradual, the Catholic Music Association of America has made Dom Johner's Chants of the Vatican Gradual available as a .pdf file here. This is a commentary, 'a book descriptive and explanatory of the Gregorian Mass chants'. In the Foreword by the translators, Dom Johner is quoted:

The present work is intended chiefly to serve as an aid to the prayerful rendition of the variable chanted parts of the Mass. At the same time it aims to be a guide for the worthy and artistic rendition of those chants which have been handed down to us from an age of strong faith and noble taste.

The Introit, Gradual, Alleluia-verse, Tract, Sequence, Offertory, and Communion 'are studied in their historical and liturgical setting, and their sentiments of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, gratitude and penance, are pointed out and developed. In this sense also the intimate relationship existing between these various texts is indicated; all are integrated into a unified whole and referred to the life of Christ and His Church. Following this short meditation, the author analyses the musical score accompanying the text, and attempts to show how Gregorian Chant interprets these various sentiments and gives adequate expression to them— in short, how Gregorian Chant is the perfect yet simple medium of translating religious emotion into the language of music.' (Quoting the translators.)

And Dom Johner says this about his work:

Choral music, or chant, is here considered not as a mere historic relic of the past, nor is worthy rendition to be understood in the sense of an elaborate concert interpretation of these monodic church compositions of the Middle Ages. Chant is more than this. It is an integral part of the liturgy, as much alive and inspiring today as ever. It is the praise of the living God by his people in union with Christ. Anyone, therefore, wishing to render chant properly must participate in the Christ-life of the Church, must seek spiritual nourishment at the heart of the liturgy, which is the Eucharistic Sacrifice. He must desire, as Christ did, to honor the Father with due reverence. These few thoughts have formed the guiding principles of the present work.

I continue below the break with his commentary on today's chanted propers. It is edifying to use these meditations in listening to the chants which are available on the 'net in mp3 format audio files for listening, at Dominica XXIII. post Pentecosten.

All Souls Day reminded me of this post from the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society blog:

• Museum of the Souls in Purgatory

Located in the back of the Chiesa del Sacro Cuore del Suffragio in Rome, the tiny Museum of the Souls in Purgatory is a collection of bibles, prayer books, tabletops, and articles of clothing said to have been singed by the hands of souls in purgatory. According to Catholic belief, the soul is stranded in purgatory until it atones for its sins, but can hasten its ascent to heaven through the prayers of loved ones still on earth. The scorched handprints collected in this museum are believed to be the product of souls begging their earth-bound loved ones to pray harder.

At our parish when I was growing up, one of the side altars (to St Joseph, IIRC), showed the Poor Souls, the Church Suffering, for whom, the Bible reminds us, 'It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray . . . that they might be loosed from their sins.'

Images of the souls in Purgatory, from a 15th century chapel in France, below the break.

Another beautful work illustrating the the communion of saints is Jan and Hubert Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece (image below the break). This time, the Church Triumphant is depicted in the lower part of the polyptych panel painting. The outer wings, four panels on the right and the left in the image below, swing inward so that the central part can be concealed. There is a very large image of the central, lower part, 'The Adoration of the Lamb', here (2854x1653 pixels, 1.67 MB).

From left to right across the bottom, we see the Just Judges, the Knights of Christ, pagan writers and Jewish prophets (foreground), male martyrs (background), the Twelve Apostles and other male saint (foreground), female martyrs (background), then hermits and in the extreme right hand panel, pilgrims, lead by St Christopher.

Daniel Mitsui's post Reconstructing Ghent discusses the idea that this altarpiece's

various paintings were originally housed in a huge, tiered tabernacle that resembled a cathedral elevation commonly seen in numerous Late Gothic carved altarpieces. When opened, the central corpus in the upper register was thus encased as one unit within a golden shrine resembling a huge reliquary or church interior. The musical angels would then be seen as choirs against a blue sky in the open areas formed by the flying buttresses that reach from the outer walls to the vaults of the enclosed shrine. The tall figures of Adam and Eve, placed as they are in the shallow stone niches, appear as lesser figures decorating the outer wall buttressing far removed from the inner sanctuary, a much more appropriate position for them. Exactly how such an elaborate framework would operate within the confines of a small chapel is something of a problem - it presumably was hinged to allow the various panels to move - but such an imposing architectural setting would have displayed the paintings in a more meaningful context of the divine service, the cathedral being the earthly reflection of the City of God in Heaven. . . .

hinged wings would move back and forth to the accompaniment of music played by a mechanical organ within it.

Images of the altarpiece, in context with an actual altar, are below the break. Mr Mitsui scanned them from The Ghent Altarpiece, Lotte Brand Philip, Princeton University Press, 1971.

Raphael's fresco, Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (La Disputa), in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura, shows the Church Militant below and the Church Triumphant, the communion of saints, above, arranged in semicircles around the Blessed Trinity above, and Our Lord in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, below. Four images of the fresco are below the break. The first three show the fresco itself, the last, the fresco and its context in the room.

Some of the figures are identified by name, at the Web Gallery of Art page, and the Vatican Museums page, Disputation over the Most Holy Sacrament provides a list of all the figures. This room in the Stanze was originally Pope Julius II's library and a private office of his. One of his successors covered the frescoes with wainscoting (!), which paneling was destroyed after the A.D. 1527 Sack of Rome. Source: Room of the Segnatura (1508-1511) page, on the Vatican Museums site.

Below the break are line art images for All Saints, from the Line Art gallery on this site.

Fr Tim Finigan, kind and generous, pointed to the line art image gallery here in his post More great line art. Father also posted Catholic B/W image collection, which points to the flickr collection of "images for use in liturgy programs", put on flickr by Jeffrey Tucker of the New Liturgical Movement blog. These two collections are not only edifying, but serve a very practical purpose: to illustrate bulletins, copies of the Propers for Masses, newsletters and the like.

And, of course, Catholicism is an incarnational religion: matter and spirit are a unity, not two unrelated things.

Get over to WFMU's Beware of the Blog post 365 Days #300 - Arch Oboler - Drop Dead! (mp3s), grab the mp3s transferred from Arch Oboler's Drop Dead! long playing album, turn out the lights and enjoy. A favorite from my childhood.

On October 31, 1992, the first public demo of sunsite.unc.edu (now ibiblio.org) was given at Educom in Baltimore. Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com, Lulu.tv and Red Hat, gave a talk yesterday, October 30, 2007, and you can download it from this page in an mp3 format audio file. (No .ogg format, the fellow recording it filled his / and corrupted the original.)

sunsite, Metalab and ibiblio are well known to early, pre-Web, 'net adopters, and the organization has an history page guaranteed to stir up nostalgia. Learn how to [Join] the Global IP Internet, with easy to follow step-by-step instructions!

Seventy years ago yesterday, October 30, 20 or 25 miles from where I grew up, the Martians landed and began their conquest of Earth. The story most people hear is that Orson Welles broadcast an episode of Mercury Theatre On The Air, adapting H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, where the landing is in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, U.S.A., east of Princeton and south of New Brunswick. But, that's what they want us to believe.

Download Mr Welles's show here (mp3 format audio file).

Don't believe me? Then, why does the government of West Windsor, New Jersey, in which Grover's Mill is located, have the ominously titled links to 'Request for Government Records' and to 'Master Plan' on its War of the Worlds page?

Image of the monument in Grover's Mill to those who fell defending Earth, below the break.

In a comment to the post Duruflé's Requiem for All Souls' Day and searching for mp3 format audio files, paul pointed to mp3 files available from St Clement's Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. St Clement's 'is a historic Anglo-Catholic parish in Center City, Philadelphia, a parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, and a part of the global Anglican Communion.'

There are two music RSS feeds available from St Clement's:

• Saint Clement's Church: Music Highlights, and
• Saint Clement's Church: High Mass.

Clicking on those two links opens up a page listing the available mp3 format audio files. St Clement's podcasts page mistakenly limits visitors to using iTunes to grab the mp3s, by using the 'itpc' protocol in the URIs on the page. Simply subsituting http for itpc allows one to use that URI to grab the files without using iTunes.

The podcasts are free. Thank you, paul, and thank you, Saint Clement's.

Before non-academic, non-military and non-governmental folks were allowed access to the Internet, there were BBSes (Bulletin board systems), and most BBSes had message boards discussing various topics. Fidonet, RIME and ILink were widespread echomail conferencing networks. Echomail allowed 'post[ing] a message on one BBS, and that BBS system [would] automatically export your message to other . . . systems all over the world'.

Terrye Newkirk, whom I believe is now a secular Carmelite in Oklahoma and who used to run the anchoress.com site, had an interview (from 1997?) with Catholic Information Network's Sharon Mollerus at Ten Years of Online Faith which has some interesting tidbits of history and reminiscences from that time.