The International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant chain is offering a free short stack of pancakes today, between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. I assume that's local time. I won't be joining in, only because for one day back in college, I was a busboy at an IHOP, and from cleaning up those customers' messes, have lost any interest whatsoever in eating pancakes.

For Shrove Tuesday information, see Shrovetide (raw herring in oil?, now that sounds tasty), Shrove Tuesday traditions (which has two interesting images, one of penitents making their confessions and the other of a pancake race), Shrove Tuesday today! and Absolutely Perfect! Be careful which IHOP you show up at, because the Seething Midwest Explodes Over Lombardi Cartoons.

Someone visited this blog through the technorati search: Pristas and latin, which lead me to this blog in Dutch: Ad mentem Sancti Thomae Aquinatis. Using technorati search myself, I came across this one in Portuguese: A Casa de Sarto, which links to a number of fine blogs.

Salvador Miranda's site has a page: Consistories for the creation of Cardinals, XXI Century (2005-), and David M. Cheney's site has Consistory - 2006.

Last year's post on this day. I missed the first anniversary of this blog, January 31st.

From The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1941.
Translated and adapted from the Latin by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger.

Mark Keith has been teaching Latin at different Virginia high schools since 1987, and blogging at pro linguae Latinae magistris since Monday, February 13, 2006. Thanks to New Blog: pro lingua Latinae magistris at the Thoughts on Antiquity blog (which has an amusing domain name: neonostalgia.blogspot.com).

How do you do in identifying and defining the Classical literacy terms?

The Music Department of Ave Maria University will hold its third annual Advanced Gregorian Chant study week this coming July, at Solesmes. Susan Treacy has some details at Gregorian Chant Study Week in Solesmes, France on the Musica Sacra blog of the Catholic Music Association of America. There's a one page .pdf file on the blog here, with some more information and an application.

The Guardian reports on an 'exquisitely carved limestone figure of [the Archangel Gabriel from before the Norman Conquest] ... discovered under the nave of Lichfield Cathedral', and from the original church, predating the present cathedral. Much of the original surface painting is intact. See the article with an image at Archangel sculpture rises from Lichfield nave. Quoting from Maev Kennedy's article:

Britain's heritage of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical art and architecture was almost obliterated by the scale and splendour of the Norman rebuilding, and the firestorm of later iconoclasts. Much of what painted decoration survived then fell to the renovating Victorians, and the fallacy that historic churches should have pure bleached stone interiors ...

Most carvings that survived the changing fashions were destroyed during the waves of image smashing following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the many subsequent religious upheavals. Angels in particular were often targeted, and hands and heads destroyed if there was no time to smash the entire figure.

Thanks, one more time, to Christine's mirabilus.ca, this time for Archangel sculpture rises from Lichfield nave.

These are words near the end of Stephen Heiner's post The very latest about SSPX-Rome relations, directly from the Superior General, Part I of II, in which he paraphrases and discusses Bp Fellay's conference at St Isidore the Farmer Catholic Church, in Watkins, Colorado, U.S.A. It always was going to get down to that, wasn't it? I would like to be as sanguine about prospects for the liberation of the Traditional Latin Mass, but for long term prospects, a reinterpretation of the Council is a necessity. I don't expect to see such a reinterpretation in the time I have left on this earth. There is too much rot to be cleared away, and too few surgeons.

Domenico Bettinelli, in his post New Catholic blog search engine, points to CatholicBlogs.com, which claims to have more than 13,000 articles from 697 Catholic blogs. Curious, I searched for "bubble gum" and "synth-pope", with and without the double quotes, thinking that such search terms would pull up my post Catholic bubble gum music, a/k/a synth-pope. Nothing from this site. I also tried "neurotic nostalgics", with the double quotes, and Prof Blosser's post popped up, but not '[C]andid academic research is destroying the myth that Catholics who favor traditional liturgy [are] simply neurotic nostalgics'. Maybe I need to send them copies of my baptismal and confirmation certificates, or a letter from some of the diocesan priests who know me.

Today at Take One Museum, on MetaFilter there's a link to New York City's Museum of Modern Art podcasts, and Paul Rose's BBC Four's podcasts of other museums. The Edvard Munch retrospective at MoMA opens today, and there are mp3s available here for download.

dogpile.com search reults for 'museum podcasts'.

goolag's search reults for 'museum podcasts'.

... as Cdl McCarrick would say. The Internet Archive, compassionate folks that they are, today puts Hillaire Belloc's The Mercy of Allah up, for us to download here. This one is available in the .djvu format and .pdf, readable by Adobe Acrobat, xpdf, and other programs.

So ends Prof Philip Blosser's post Fr. James McLucas on the MOTIVES for restoring the Mass of Pius V.

The post discusses Fr James McLucas' editorial in the Winter 2006 issue of The Latin Mass magazine, which returns to the question 'why the traditional Latin Mass?''.

Fr McLucas refers to two essays by Dr Lauren Pristas, one in The Thomist, the other in Nova et Vetera.

Commenting on the first article, Fr McLucas suggests that the amnesia inflicted after the Council extends to the Latin texts. Prf Blosser quotes from The Latin Mass:

[I]it [sic] may be the case that all the texts of our missal [the Missal of paul VI] reflect the strengths and weaknesses the insights and biases, the achievements and the limitations of but one age, our own.... If this is indeed so, then Catholics of today, in spite of the access made possible by vernacular celebrations, have far less liturgical exposure to the wisdom of our past and the wondrous diversity of Catholic experience and tradition than did the Catholics of earlier generations.

The second article 'offers an analysis comparing the vocabulary and theological content of the original Latin texts of the 1970 Pauline Missal [for the Advent Sundays] with those of the 1962 Missal of Pius V' (emphasis supplied). Note that this is not an examination of the dreadful American English version heard by essentially every layman, but the approved, official Latin.

Prof Blosser provides these excerpts of Dr Pristas' conclusions:

[The Paul VI Missal] is not the revival of either a Roman or non-Roman Latin liturtical [sic] tradition that fell into disuse over the centuries, but something essentially new....

In these four [collects for Advent Sundays], however, we discern a markedly different presentation of our spiritual situation and the way in which God involves himself with us. If the 1970 collects bring to mind the psalmist's petition "give success to the work of our hands," the 1962 collects remind us of Augustine's graced realization that God is more intimate to each of us than we are to ourselves.

These are not inconsequential changes... [T]he anthropological shift that we see in the new Advent prayers toward what might be described as a more capable human person is not nearly so arresting as the corresponding theological shift according to which God's dealings with us are less direct and more extrinsic....

Prof Blosser rightly infers that the worship supported and encouraged by these prayers

is often more about the worshippers than the One Who is to be worshipped. For nearly fourty [sic] years, says McLucas, millions of the Church's children have protested that their Catholic sensibilities have felt violated by post-conciliar liturgical rites -- only to be told that their disquiet was a figment of their antiquated imaginations. However, candid academic research is destroying the myth that Catholics who favor traditional liturgy as [sic] simply neurotic nostalgics.

The entire post is worth examining.

It was inevitable. Just as traditional vestments become so popular that they have to go on back order, and small neo-Catholic family size destines them to extinction, now that the Donegal Express blog is a finalist for the Catholic Blog Awards, the awards site goes off line.

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

Apache/1.3.34 Server at www.catholicblogawards.com Port 80

The best reason to vote for him is not that the success of the SSPX talks hangs by a thread, it's because he can write a post with the title It’s a UNIX system! I know this! – Lex Murphy.

I started to write a post about language and frozen registers (see the .doc file five registers of language by Prof Cheryl Carter), after I listened to the Word Nerds' podcast of February 4, 2006, Rhythm and Meaning, but again, my work schedule interferes. Today's a day off, so I poked around for a few minutes at the Internet Archive, and recommend these works and searches:

• Benziger Brothers published works;
• History of the Papacy;
• Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600;
• Church history -- Middle Ages, 600-1500 (only one item is returned);
• Texts from St. Mary's College of California (more than 300);
• Liturgica historica : papers on the liturgy and religious life of the Western church;
• England's cardinals, biographical sketches of the men, from Cardinal Pullen, raised to the cardinalate around A.D. 1143, to Cardinal Vaughn, raised in A.D. 1892;
• volumes of 'The Formation of Christendom', by T. W. Allies;
• The cross and the flag, our church and country, with nice image depictions of the first Mass in the New World, and general absolution at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Below the break are copies of the First Mass and general absolution images.

The Una Voce America Northeastern Regional Conference 2005 blog announced on Monday, February 13, 2006, that audio tapes and a DVD of the Braga Rite Mass are now available: the blog post is Order Conference Tapes - DVDs. I see only the one DVD, of the Mass and Bp Rifan's talk, so maybe they're planning more. Maybe His Excellency playing the accordion? I assume Mr Maynard's jokes are on one of the audio tapes.

Tomorrow, Sunday, is Septuagesima. (I suppose you know you're a trad if you can type that out without looking up the spelling, like 'Praemonstratensians'.) Daniel Mitsui's post Burial of the Alleluia links to an on line version of Jesuit Fr Francis X. Weiser's 1958 Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, for which link I thank him. It is new to me.

I use 'modern' in a broader sense than typical. (On my first trip to London in 1972, I ignorantly decided not to visit the Tate, having read that it is the capitol's 'museum of modern art', which I took to mean post-Impressionist.)

Fr Weiser's sections on pre-Lent and Lent has interesting descriptions of practices, some of which developed only in modern times:

• '[In] the ninth century, however, ... less rigid laws of fasting were introduced. ... [T]he monks of the Benedictine order, who did much labor in the fields and on the farms, were allowed to take a little drink with a morsel of bread in the evening. ... Eventually the Church extended the new laws to the laity as well, and by the end of medieval times they had become universal practice; everybody ate a light evening meal in addition to the main meal at noon. The present custom of taking some breakfast on fasting days is of very recent origin (the beginning of the nineteenth century).' From Lent.


• 'An interesting symbol of penance, used from Ash Wednesday until Wednesday in Holy Week, was the "Lenten Cloth," a common tradition in England, France, and Germany from the eleventh century on. ... It was composed of an immense piece of cloth suspended in front of the sanctuary, and parted in the middle, ... was drawn back only for the main parts of the Mass, and remained suspended all through Lent until the words were read in the Passion Gospel of Wednesday before Easter (Holy Week). "And the curtain of the temple was torn in the middle" (Luke 23, 45).'

Now, it's been pointed out that Septuagesima Sunday also marks the day when violet or purple replaces green as the liturgical color. But Sundays only 'went green' early in the twentieth century, when Pope Pius X revised the ranking of feasts. For some time before Pius X, if a feast fell on Sunday, that feast's Mass was said, and the Sunday Mass only commemorated, so many more Sundays saw the priest and altar clothed in red or white fabric. The calendar, rankings and rubrical changes were implemented formally by the revised Missal of 1920, during Benedict XV's pontificate.

I don't know why the most recent comments are not displaying over on the left. Periodically, I delete spammers' comments, and after a recent spate of deletions, the comment to the post 'A missal for the laity, in English, from 1806' and to 'The Ghent Altarpiece boggles the mind', and earlier ones, no longer display. I've checked the comments via this blog's adminstration interface, and both look copasetic: neither has its IP address blocked and neither was deleted (the two options I use when dealing with comment spam). So, I post this to let the commenters know that they've not been mistreated or singled out, deliberately or otherwise.

Mr Fitzpatrick's post, Blessed Anna Catherine Emmerich, points to an e-text edition of The Dolorous Passion. Another place to obtain it is at manybooks.net, which has it in several formats, including .pdf, Doc and iPod Notes. Download it from manybooks.net here.

That's my attempt at translating 'Home Depot'. Well, Stephen C. Carlson noted that one of the manuscripts known as 'Codex Sangallensis' (the gospel harmony one), is on the 'net in a few places. (See Codex Sangallensis Online.) Poking around a few places about gospel harmonies, I came across the Skriptorium, which despite its name, has a catalog of interesting items: swords, helmets, shields, pavillions et alia.

In the Replica section we invite you to get to know other aspects of medieval life. You may for example chose from a wide range of armoury parts, swords and complete armours. You can even put together your own real suit of armour for yourself.

Moreover, you will find replicas of medieval jewellery. The jewellery does not only look authentic, it is also hand-made using the traditional and very labour intensive historic methods.

From the About Skriptorium page (visit it for the links I've excised).