Jeffrey Tucker notes ( You MAY have lost touch with prayerful forms) that Today's Liturgy by the Oregon Catholic Press, ever avant-garde, now shows concern for

parishes that may have lost touch with the prayerful quality of chant forms.

The number of such parishes being an example of the Long Tail (the blog is here), no doubt, and OCP providing an illustration of the broken clock or blind pig.

I've recently been referred to some sites which offer free downloads of chant and polyphony mp3s, in addition to the one I was already aware of:

• Gregorian Sense, which requires registration with SoundClick,
• dovesong.com's mp3 library of Plainsong and library of Renaissance Sacred Music,
• Gregorian Chant Mp3s, including the Choir of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes conducted by Dom J. Gajard, O.S.B. in the 1950s, and the Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Saint Martin, Beuron (see mp3 of the Third Mass for the Nativity of Jesus Christ here on this blog), recorded in 1960
  at romancatholicism.org.
• All Masses of the Liturgical Year - Tridentine Rite, which has many Sunday and holy day Masses

He titles the post Historical Notes, but it's more typing about our family: the Church here in the United States, and his specific interest in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (I've read that the decrees of the Baltimore councils were never widely translated from Latin into English. Maybe he can confirm this and tell us why.)

You're right, Rocco, pity about the amnesia.

Though he mentions the Irish in Philadelphia, New York and Boston, the German and Polish influences in the American midwest are more interesting, to me, anyway.

She's spending the next week (actually until January 8th or 9th) in Poland, with four nights in a room at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Kraków, and maybe a night in Cz

12 29 05 06:52 || default, amusements || Permalink to this entry || fifteen comments, already

The Holy Face of Manoppello, the 500th anniversary

Today's Daily Telegraph has an article on the visit by Bruno Forte, the archbishop of Chieti-Vasto, to what is possibly Veronica's Veil (see the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Way of the Cross), the Holy Face of Manoppello (official site, in Italian; I haven't been able to access any English language version) (the Telegraph's article, and some other sites, spell the town's name as Manopello): Vatican intent on preserving veil of mystery over Veronica's silken icon. Five hundred years ago, the cloth, 'believed to be made of byssus, a super-fine silk made from the "beard" that mussels use to attach themselves to rocks' arrived in Manoppello.

Byssus was used in the ancient world to make the finest cloth for pharaohs and Jewish high priests, and Chiara Vigo, a Sardinian craftswoman who is one of the few people in the world who knows how to make the cloth, confirms that the "Holy Face" is made of a similar material.

The veil is kept by Capuchins in a small church, and it shows an innocent face without anger, sorrow, pain or despair, mouth slightly open, teeth partly visible. Some years ago, Father Heinrich Pfeiffer, S.J., a noted art historian at the Gregorian, advanced the claim that this is the prototype of all artistic depictions of Our Lord. L’immagine di Cristo nell’arte, 1986, Das ist Echte Christusbild, 1992 and Il volto santo di Manoppello, 2000.

In a review (The Holy Face of Manoppello, written by Francesco Barbesino and translated from the Italian by Raymond Frost) of Il Volto Santo di Manoppello, edited by Father and co-written by him and others, this story is related by Father Donato di Bomba.

One day in 1506 doctor Giacomo Antonio Leonelli was speaking with other noblemen in front of the church of St. Nicola in Manoppello when he was approached by a pilgrim "with an appearance which was pious and very venerable" (p. 76), who invited him to come with him into the church where he gave him a parcel, urging him to treat it with great care. Immediately unwrapping the parcel, there appeared the Holy Face, but the mysterious pilgrim had already disappeared and it was impossible to locate him. Thus the Cloth became the property of the Leonelli family and around 100 years later it formed the dowry for Marzia Leonelli, the bride of a "soldier and man of arms" (p.77). It seems that the brother of the bride was opposed to handing over the relic and that the man of arms took it by force, but that once he had the relic in his possession, he treated it with little care or respect. Later on, in 1618, Marzia in order to secure the release of her husband from prison at Chieti, sold the Cloth to Doctor Donato Antonio de Fabritiis at the cost of 4 scudi. After 1620 he gave the Cloth to the Capuchin Friars who had come to Manoppello at the urging of de Fabritiis himself.

Page references are to Il Volto Santo di Manoppello.

30 days has an interview with Fr Pfeiffer which has a short discussion of the Holy Face of Manoppello: Bernini or not, it’s a masterpiece.

Some images and more information below the break.

I have a good amount of bandwidth available between today and the end of the month, so I put up an mp3 of the Third Mass for the Nativity of Jesus Christ for download. It's by the Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Saint Martin, Beuron, Bavaria. On Beuron: Fr Kenneth Novak wrote an article on The Art of Beuron.

Father Cornelius, the Benedictine order’s expert for parament embroidery at Beuron monastery, designed the interior roof lining: the dove, for Pope Pius XI's Mercedes-Benz Nürburg 460.

The link to the mp3 is below the break (click on '[ read the rest of this post ]').

Prof Blosser points out a new blog, Rorate Cæli, mentioning, inter alia, the writer's posts A Glorious Centennial on the anniversary of Pope St Pius X's Sacra Tridentina Synodus (On Frequent and Daily Reception of Holy Communion) and The Discipline of Sacred Music - 50 years later - I, on the anniversary of Pope Pius XII's encyclical Musicae Sacrae Disciplina. Both were yesterday, December 20th.

The blog is visually appealing to me, with images of paintings, manuscripts and photos of Silvano Salvatte Zanon's ordination in the Campos, Brazil.

I previously blogged about Arnolfo di Cambio's Nativity sculptures at di Cambio's Nativity sculptures restored, will be on permanent view, and the Italian news agency ANSA is reporting that themissing figure of the Madonna may have been found: Oldest nativity scene now complete. '[When] the nativity scene was taken off the wall ... restorers found another statue at the back of the 16th-century piece. Experts believe this is the original Virgin Mary because it is similar to one of the wise men and to the style of Arnolfo's funeral monument for Cardinal de Braye at San Domenico church, Orvieto - considered his most significant existing sculpture.'

Today in medieval times, the Church commemorated St Dominic of Silos. The Medieval Saints list on Yahoo has an entry here.

Though a Benedictine (the famous monastery at Silos which he restored is now an abbey of the Congregation of Solesmes, and the monks there have recorded several popular editions of Gregorian chant), Dominic de Guzman was named after him, since his mother prayed to this St Dominic before she bore her son.

'[T]he [North American College] Music Chapel offers a celebration of Lessons and Carols at the beginning of Advent each year.' The mp3 files from 2003 and 2004 are available at The Music Chapel. Thanks go to Zadok's post Varia ....

The traditional (i.e., pre-conciliar, 1962 Missal, Tridentine, etc.) Latin Mass which usually is 4:00 p.m. every Sunday, will instead be at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, December 25, Christmas Day. It also will be sung, but won't be a Solemn High, with deacon and sub-deacon. Directions and information about the church, parish, priest, etc. can be found at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Dunn, NC.

Today's art for today entry reminds us that on this day in 1675, Jan Vermeer was laid to rest. Another excellent site worth a visit is Tom van Halteran's About Vermeer Art. My favorites are below the break. I saw The Geographer at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt back in 1972. That was really my only reason for visiting the city. The Astronomer is in the Louvre.

So said the American Institute of Architects in 1967, when Cumbernauld New Town, built in the late 1950s outside Glasgow, received the R S Reynolds Award for Community Architecture. Britain's Channel Four asked viewers to nominate the ugliest building in the United Kingdom for demolition, and the inhabitants of Cumbernauld responded, selecting the entire town.

Cumbernauld ... was 'designed for the millennium': 'the dreams of the 1920s and 1930s are being built on a hill near Glasgow'. And in a single typical week in the following year, the new town was visited by 18 French architect-planners, 13 Danish engineers, 23 Dutch members of the International Society of City and Regional Planners, the city architect and deputy city engineer of Auckland (New Zealand), and three delegations of architects and real-estate consultants from the United States. (AIA Journal, July 1967, 51-8; Building, 4 October 1968)

Source: What's it Called? - Cumbernauld!.

I've mentioned Biblical Art on the Web before. Tonight, in using that site to search for images to illustrate the previous post The Third Sunday of Advent, Excerpts from Dom Guéranger's Liturgical Year ..., I found a woodcuts collection at the Pitts Theology Library, the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection. That site has a page through which searching by Bible chapter is available. Not chapter and verse, unfortunately, but adequate for many purposes.

As mentioned earlier here, Boston's Holy Trinity parish is the location for the only Latin Mass using the 1962 Missal (a/k/a Tridentine, traditional, per-conciliar, etc.) in the Boston Archdiocese. See

• Holy Trinity parish, Archdiocese of Boston
• Boston Latin Mass ordered to move to St. James the Greater: "It will effectively destroy the Latin community."
• Reprieve for Boston indult Latin Mass? Archdiocese: Holy Trinity to remain open to Dec 15, 2005
• Holy Trinity, Boston closing December 15 ... or before?

According to a message on the Save Holy Trinity (German) Church group on yahoo, as of December 5, 2005, the Archdiocese of Boston had not issued a decree to close the parish. Since the decree would have to be read at Sunday (or other holyday of obligation) Mass and could not take effect until ten calendar days had passed, no decree on December 5 means the parish cannot be closed on December 15.

If the decree is read today (the Immaculate Conception, a day of obligation), then the parish could be closed on December 18. Maybe it will be open for Christmas .

On this day in 1598, in Naples, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini was born. I have to admit that I only stumbled upon his statue of David in the Gallery (formerly the Palazzo Borghese) of Scipione Cardinal Borghese, when I travelled to Rome in 1972. I wasn't prepared for its impact. More on the David, with images illustrating the points, below the break.

I was going to post the breviary.net readings for St Nick's Day, but I have to go in to work today (a change, since I was scheduled off today ad to work tomorrow). The Web Gallery of Art has two of the three paintings Fra Angelico did for the Perugia Triptych showing scenes from his life here and here, and Ambrogio Lorenzitti's paintings here and here.

Googling "Perugia Triptych" lead me to the Ecole Initiative, and it has a valuable Index of Images, arranged alphabetically.

Sark, one of the Channel Islands, will soon become a democracy, electing a governing legislature by universal suffrage. So reports London's Daily Telegraph, in Democracy comes to feudal isle of Sark. The owners of the Telegraph had petitioned Her Majesty in Council when a proposal for abolishing the current legislature (the Chief Pleas) was withdrawn. The petition was denied, since

" ... the Constitutional Steering Committee has undertaken to ensure that the island's electoral system complies with the European Convention on Human Rights, to put in place a new electoral system, based on universal suffrage during the course of 2006, and to hold an election under the new system by December 2006."

Sark is not part of the United Kingdom, nor is it part of Great Britain. It is held in fief in perpetuity by the Seigneur, of the monarch, with any sale by him only by royal permission. The Queen derives Her Sovereignty of the Channel Islands as successor to the Dukes of Normandy. More on Sark history, customs and society below the break.

Arnolfo di Cambio was a Gothic sculptor and architect, whose best known buildings are parts of the cathedrals in Orvieto and Florence, and Venice's Palazzo Vecchio. He created the earliest surviving Nativity scene, usually displayed from Christmas Eve to the Epiphany in Rome's Santa Maria Maggiore. Pope Benedict XVI will view the figures on the Immaculate Conception this Thursday after their restoration, reports London's Daily Telegraph at First nativity scene on show after 500 years.

My ScrapBook grab of the catholichaven.org site doesn't include his writing on today's Mass, so I looked and found that the google cache of its pages contains Dom Guéranger's commentary. Here is part.

Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded or listened to at Hebdomada secunda adventus Dominica.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action. I used to read his blog, but he posts so much that I couldn't devote the time required to absorb it.

Phil Windley interviewed Barnett for IT Conversations, and I listened to the podcast this morning. It runs around 50 minutes, and around the 40 minute mark, Barnett has some interesting things to say about creating a positive and valuable future, advantageous in his example 'to your country or ideology', but applicable generally to reorientations. Interestingly, Bill White, at Don't feel like praying? St. Gregory knows what's up, has some advice from the pope on the same subject, how to attract people to today's necessary sacrifices and encourage their perseverance: you give them a road map, a narrative that seems to be 'moving toward a happy ending' as he said, or to 'broad, sunlit uplands' as was said when the alternatives were 'the survival of Christian civilization ... [or] the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.'

As Barnett says, otherwise, people are not along for the effort or making the sacrifices, 'and bad actors can sap their morale and knock them off course with ease'.

The internet, and blogs, can embolden people, making them more confident, as opposed to scaring or angering them with the equivalent of the nightly network news. It's not about the yesterday's speech by the president of Iran (or the cardinal archbishop of Washington, D.C.), the latest fiscal quarter or the current adminstration (or papacy). It's a wider and deeper, long haul perspective.

Of what will the road map consist? Here is part of Pope St Gregory's sermon on a second Sunday of Pentecost, quoted by Bill White:

[S]piritual delights work in the opposite way [from earthly delights]. While we do not possess them we regard them with dislike and aversion; but once we partake of them we begin to desire them, and the more we partake of them, the more do we hunger for them. ... For spiritual delights, when they fill the soul, increase in us the desire for them; and the more we savor them, the more do we come to know what we should eagerly love.

And so we do not know these delights, because we have not come to savor them. For who can love what he does not know? Because of this the Psalmist speaks to us, and exhorts us, saying: O taste and see that the Lord is sweet! (Douay; Ps. 34:8 RSV) As though he were saying: You know not his sweetness if you have not tasted it. But try this Food on the palate of your heart, so that when you see how sweet it is then you will love it.

Lists of abuses and concentrating on defects and shortcomings are strategically inadequate. They may gain some people's attention, but how successful can they be, and with whom will they be successful?

The Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the Roman Church of St Andrew's at the Quirinal dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle, and it remains the church of the Jesuit noviciate.

It is said that Bernini did not charge a fee for designing this church, and his only payment was a daily donation of bread from the noviciate's oven. Bernini considered it as his only perfect work.

Images and more information below the break.