A reproduction of the 1748 Nolli Map is for sale.

Last year, the Map Room blog posted Interactive Nolli Map, about the University of Oregon's Flash based 1748 Map of Rome, by Giambattista Nolli, 'regarded by scholars and cartographers as one of the most important historical documents of the city.' From the University's site:

Giambattista Nolli (1701-1756) was an architect and surveyor who lived in Rome and devoted his life to documenting the architectural and urban foundations of the city. The fruit of his labor, La Pianta Grande di Roma ("the great plan of Rome") is one of the most revealing and artistically designed urban plans of all time. The Nolli map is an ichnographic [ground plot] plan map of the city, as opposed to a bird’s eye perspective ...

The Nolli map is the first accurate map of Rome since antiquity and captures the city at the height of its cultural and artistic achievements. The historic center of Rome has changed little over the last 250 years; therefore, the Nolli map remains one of the best sources for understanding the contemporary city. ...

The map not only records the streets, squares and public urban spaces of Rome, but Nolli carefully renders hundreds of building interiors with detailed plans.

Click on the 'Launch Map Engine' bit on the upper right, then use your mouse to move north, south, etc, and to zoom in and out. Below the break are gimp window grab images of St Peter's and St Mary Major.

At Sources of Catholic Dogma. It's a work in progress, and I hope internal hyperlinks are coming. Ignore the 'motto'.

Hat tip to Mark Scott Abeln's Denzinger's Enchiridion is Online.

A representative of Sean Cardinal O'Malley met with Holy Trinity parishioners on Sunday afternoon, November 26, 2006, yesterday. Here is the press release from the Committee to Preserve Holy Trinity Parish:

Holy Trinity Parish To Merge with Cathedral of the Holy Cross

BOSTON November 26 Saying, "It is the Cardinal's view, and my personal view, that the mission of this beautiful church is over," Father Mark O'Connell announced this afternoon Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley's plan to merge Holy Trinity Parish in Boston's South End with the nearby Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

The merger means that the money and records "stay here," according to Father O'Connell, instead of becoming assets of the Archdiocese. The fate of the parishioners of Holy Trinity will be as follows:

The Latin Mass will be moved to Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Parish in Newton Upper Falls. Father O'Connell will inform parishioners there of the plan when he announces the Cardinal's proposal for reconfiguration in Newton tonight at 7:15 PM at St. Philip Neri Church on Beacon Street in Waban. According to a published report in the Newton Tab, St. Philip Neri and Mary Immaculate of Lourdes will merge, with the latter being the surviving church building. The Korean Catholic Community, which is part of St. Philip Neri, is also expected to join Mary Immaculate. Father O'Connell also announced to Holy Trinity parishioners that Father Charles J. Higgins will be named as pastor of Mary Immaculate of Lourdes. Currently stationed at St. Theresa of Avila Parish in West Roxbury, Father Higgins celebrates the Latin High Mass each month and, because of his personal interest in traditional liturgy and spirituality, is extremely popular with Latin Mass parishioners.

Father Harry Kaufman will become the chaplain of the German parishioners, replacing the church building as the anchor of the German Catholic community. Father Kauffman is popular with the German parishioners because he was a member of the community before his ordination to the priesthood in 2002. He is a Parochial Vicar at Sacred Heart Parish in Weymouth.

The two social service agencies hosted by Holy Trinity, the Cardinal Medeiros Center for homeless older adults and the Bridge Over Troubled Waters residence for at-risk youth, will still be expected to move. Bridge will "stay put" until they find a new home. The Archdiocese plans to assist the Cardinal Medeiros Center with a proposed move to Our Lady of Victories Church on Isabella Street in the South End.

The church building of Holy Trinity will return to the Cathedral; it will be the responsibility of the rector of the Cathedral to decide what to do with the church.

Father O'Connell noted that the plan is what Cardinal O'Malley wants to do but is not a final decision. While Father O'Connell gave no timeline for implementation of the plan, he noted that, if the plan goes forward as announced, the Latin Mass would be the first to leave Holy Trinity, early in 2007.

The hour-long presentation was followed by another hour of questions and commentary from parishioners, who, while calm and respectful, generally opposed the plan. A closing statement by George Krim, the 80-year-old Music Director Emeritus and a parishioner since the age of 4, may well summarize their thoughts. "Go back to the Cardinal and tweak his plan. There's a fervor here, unique in the Archdiocese, of two communities who work so well together. Do NOT
let him separate the communities. What advantage is it to the Archdiocese, or to the communities here, to close Holy Trinity?"

Founded in 1844 to meet the pastoral needs of German worshippers, Holy Trinity Church is the Archdiocese's oldest ethnic parish. For 161 years it has cherished and preserved German Catholic traditions
both for new immigrants and for their descendants. It is the only German Catholic parish in New England's eleven Catholic dioceses. In 1990 it expanded its role by embracing the Archdiocese's only authorized traditional Latin Mass. The combination of these two very compatible traditions has produced a faith community that is much stronger than the sum of its parts. The parish has also demonstrated its commitment to ongoing Christian charity by willingly sharing its facilities with two social service agencies: the Cardinal Medeiros
Center day shelter for the homeless and the Bridge Over Troubled Waters residence for at-risk youth.

Source, an email on the Yahoo group Save Holy Trinity (membership required to read the emails).

I thought it was next week, on the First Sunday of Advent, and not on the Last Sunday after Pentecost, but there are posts at The Inn at the End of the World and at Recta ratio about it on the Last Sunday after Pentecost.

The Collects for both Sundays begin Excita, quæsumus, Domine (Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord).

I found this quote about the Mass to be significant, at vine & branches:

This mysterious fabric of texts and actions ... bore the whole weight of history within itself ...

This is from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones, and he is writing about some things he learned from the German-Latin Missals of his youth, 'annotated with progressively detailed "age-appropriate" explanations of the Mass'.

It reminded me of an impression of mine from a little while after I returned to the Church: that a rapidly built product is frequently rickety. On the other hand, if we allow the creation to ripen, to develop slowly, there is a better likelihood it will be mature, fit, flourishing, solid and robust.

One sense of maturation, of course, is change from a more simple to a more complex state. Roots set down over fifteen hundred years will support a vigorous, healthy trunk and will sustain and cradle its boughs.

Diogenes uses imagery of the vinedresser and grafts at the end of his post. If the stock is weak, the yield will fail, the breed will be sterile, particularly if it is male-sterile.

My technorati feed for: Liturgical AND year AND Gueranger turned up a reference to Adventus MMVI on the Perfectæ Caritatis blog, at the bottom of which post are links to

• The History of Advent, and
• The Mystery of Advent, both from Book 1, Advent, of The Liturgical Year.

Today is the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of, among other things, female intellectuals or learned women, and of Balliol College. She disputed with the philosophers. From the linked Catholic Encyclopaedia article:

Of noble birth and learned in the sciences, when only eighteen years old, Catherine presented herself to the Emperor Maximinus [,] ... endeavoured to prove how iniquitous was the worship of false gods. Astounded at the young girl's audacity, but incompetent to vie with her in point of learning the tyrant ... summoned numerous scholars whom he commanded to use all their skill in specious reasoning that thereby Catherine might be led to apostatize. But she emerged from the debate victorious. Several of her adversaries, conquered by her eloquence, declared themselves Christians and were at once put to death. Furious at being baffled, Maximinus had Catherine scourged and then imprisoned. Meanwhile the empress, eager to see so extraordinary a young woman, went with Porphyry, the head of the troops, to visit her in her dungeon, when they in turn yielded to Catherine's exhortations, believed, were baptized, and immediately won the martyr's crown.

In art, she is often depicted arguing with pagan philosophers. (See Ted Hewitt's Medieval_Saints post at (+) Happy St. Catherine of Alexandria's Day, November 25, though this is a member's only read only list, so you'll have to subscribe in order to read it.)

An interesting contrast: there is a well known medieval tale, going back at least to the thirteenth century, wherein Aristotle convinced Alexander the Great to break off his romance of Phyllis. Phyllis then tempts Aristotle from outside his study.


Aristotle's Fall
tapestry, Augustiner Museum
Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
The incident is portrayed in Rouen and Auxerre Cathedrals.

On the other hand, St Catherine of Alexandria is represented studying, or exercising her knowledge in the defense of the Faith.


St Catherine of Alexandria: Scenes from Her Life
Donato D' and Gregorio D' Arezzo, about 1330


St Catherine, Balliol College, University of Oxford

From the College's site:

St Catherine has been associated with Balliol since its beginnings in the 13th century; even before the college had a chapel, Dervorguilla had the north aisle of St Mary Magdalen repaired and ‘fitted up as an oratory dedicated to St. Catherine.’ (Jones History 7) Oliver Sutton, Bishop of Lincoln, writing in 1284, notes the dedication of the college to St Catherine in his approval of Dervorguilla’s foundation. He later (1293) permits the college to have its own chapel, which was dedicated to St Catherine and probably finished by about 1330.

Below the break are breviary.net's Lessons iv. v. and vi. from the Divine Office readings for the Feast of St Catherine, as well as several images portraying this Saint employing her gifts.

That's a quote from James Franklin's The Renaissance Myth. A good read, along with his Myths About the Middle Ages.

Hat tip to Western Confucian's Iosue Andreas at Chalk Another One Up for the Mediævals.

Today is the feast of St Cecilia, about whom legends abound, and who is the patroness of musicians, at least since the fifteenth century. I believe that the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra is known as Orchestra di Santa Cecilia. The pagans tried first to suffocate her by locking her in the bath, hoping the steam would finish her off. When that was unsuccessful, they tried to chop off her head, but that, too, was unsuccessful, and she lived a further three days, and she used the time to give her things to the poor and her house to the Church. Chaucer's second Nun's Priest's tale has this:

And while the organs maden melodie
To God alone in hart thus sang she:
'O Lord, my soule and eek my body gye
Unwemmed, lest confounded be.'

From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv. v. and vi. from the Divine Office readings for the Feast of St Cecilia, with images from the her Church in Trastevere, one of the first parishes in ancient Rome.

In googling for "Sixth Sunday after Epiphany" "Gueranger", I came across Liturgy links, which is valuable resource for its large number of links to mp3 audio files in section eight, and on the traditional Latin Mass in its section eleven. The page sometimes loads slopwly, so practice patience.

A reverse dictionary is one by which you can find the word if you know the definition, or a by

describ[ing] a concept [you] get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. ...

[W]e search our references for words that have definitions conceptually similar to the words you search for.

Access the reverse dictionary here.

Hat tip to the Cool Tools post Reverse Dictionary.

A few days ago, a friend asked whether an English translation of L'Année liturgique by Dom Guéranger is available on the 'net, and I replied that I had not found one. There is the French, hosted by Abbaye Saint Benoît de Port-Valais, here.

So, I did the next best thing: set up searches in technorati and icerocket, to notify me of blog posts which reference 'Liturgical AND year AND Gueranger' (technorati), and, in icerocket, 'OR Gueranger "Liturgical Year"'.

The technorati and icerocket sites make it quite simple to create such searches, and then, once the search is created, you are able to subscribe to the searches and be notified of new blog posts, via RSS.

• This is the icerocket search, and by clicking on the 'Subscribe' button near the left hand margin, a menu drops down, and the bottom option is 'RSS'. Click there and add it to your RSS reader.
• This is the technorati search, and by right mouse button clicking on the orange Subscribe button near the right hand margin, you can copy that link address for pasting into your RSS reader's 'add subscription' or 'add new feed' feature.

'It probably won't work', says University of Washington physicist John Cramer, who will try to split photons. The next step will be to test for quantum 'retrocausality'. Going for a blast into the real past, If the experiment works, a signal could be received before it's sent.

This phenomenon was first described in The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline (1948), by I. Asimov, during his doctoral research. Thiotimoline is notable for the fact that when it is mixed with water, the chemical actually begins to break down before it contacts the water. This is explained by the fact that in the thiotimoline molecule, there is at least one carbon atom such that, while two of the carbon's four chemical bonds lie in normal space and time, one of the bonds projects into the future and another into the past.

Along with the Gradual, the Catholic Music Association of America recently 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.

Please note that this is a quick job at composing this post, so there will be typographical errors and improperly rendered symbols, such as for Versicle and Response.

Hunting for Dominican collects, I was poking around Archivum Liturgicum, and noticed on their Latest updates page, that they have a blog, archivum [La Liturgia Romana e il Rito Tridentino]. In Italian, of course.

it was by the calculations of Dionysius Exiguus ('Wee Dennis'). At Dionysius Exiguus and AD/BC, Roger Pearse describes finding that there is on the 'net a good chunk of the Latin and Latin-English translation, of Liber De Paschate, in which Dennis sets out the nineteen year cycle for calculating Easter. (The complete Latin text is here.)

Bede gave us B.C., by the way, or maybe he didn't. The concept of 'zero' as a number didn't come to the West until later.

Lars Brownworth's '12 Byzantine Rulers' lectures are hosted on anders.com, which is run by a fellow nearby, in Research Triangle Park. I mentioned the lectures in 12 Byzantine Rulers, more free audio. Now, Mr Brownworth's page makes available a podcast in mp3 format, on the Empress Irene (link is directly to the mp3 file):

When the weak, ineffectual emperor Leo IV died in 780, he left the empire divided and in the hands of an orphan from Athens; the beautiful and grasping Empress Irene. 17 years later she was crowned as sole ruler after murdering her own son to take his place. It was hardly an auspicious start, beset by enemies on every border, the empire was now facing its most serious internal threat; the terrible iconoclastic controversy. Successive emperors had neglected the frontiers to concentrate on the war against icons, and in the process had not only weakened the state, but had destroyed some of the finest works of art the Byzantine world ever produced. Even worse, an emperor had at last returned to the long vacant throne of the West, to challenge Byzantium's claim of universal temporal domination. If ever the empire had needed strong leadership, it was now. Join Lars Brownworth as he looks at the reign of Irene; the only woman to rule the empire, not as Queen or Regent, but as a King.

There's a small mp3 file providing additional commentary on 'Why [study] Irene?'

There have been many new books available for free downloading since the last time I posted noting some (Search results from books.google.com). I probably merely ought to mention newly available notable works, but instead, I wait until I have the time (hah) to read, or at least skim, them.

Today, in the RSS feed from archive.org, for texts (this is the URI for the feed, use it if you want to subscribe), comes notice of The Voices Of The Cathedral by Sartell Prentice, copyright 1938. From the preface, 'Ut gratias reddam':

The church is very slow in making friends -- in fact there are just four to whom she will really open up her heart and mind. She will speak to the Historian as she will speak to no one else; but so also will she speak, in turn, to the Architect, the Artist, and to the Archaeologist; to each a part, to none the whole. It is only when these four go down her aisles together, each receiving and interpreting, that the full, fine story of the cathedral is ever told.

In an earlier book, The Heritage of the Cathedral, we made our visit with the Historian, the Architect, the Archaeologist, and the Artist, although then the Artist dropped behind and asked few questions. Now the Architect will follow while the Artist takes the lead, with the Historian and the Archaeologist at his right hand and his left. But the artist whom we have chosen for our company will not, for the moment, be interested in the techniques of his art, nor would the cathedral answer his questions if he were; she is not interested in these things, being very human and only concerned with the sons of men.

The questions we shall ask begin with a "Whence?" or with a "Why?" Whence did the mediaeval artist draw his theme-, and why did he select it? Sometimes the Historian or the Archaeologist will understand the cathedral's answer better than the Artist, but to one of the three she will always give reply.

I've read chapter XIII, 'Tales and Legends' and ch. XI 'The Calendar in the Carving'. From the latter, Prentice relates the parallels between Old and New Testament scenes and times:

She [Holy Church] also wished her children to know that the Crucifixion, abolishing the Synagogue, had given authority and divine commission to the Church. It was on the very spot where God had fashioned Adam from the primeval clay that Mary was seated when the angel announced to her "a holy thing shall be born of thee which shall be called the Son of God."

The cross on which Jesus had died had not been made of ordinary wood; it had been hewn from that Tree of Knowledge whose tempting fruit had ruined the entire world; the fatal tree of Paradise now bore a new fruit whereof man might freely take and live, thus making the promise of the Serpent, "If ye eat thereof ye shall not die" once a lie from the Father of Lies a vital and eternal truth.

Moreover, that cross was raised above the grave of Adam so that the blood which streamed from the wounds of Jesus, filtering into the ground, touched with saving power the bones of him "in whose Fall we sinned all," as the old New England Primer reminded our grandparents. To complete the parallel the Crucifixion took place on Friday, the same day of the week whereon the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and Jesus died at three o'clock in the afternoon, the precise hour when Adam committed his mortal sin.

Finally the Church, standing at the right of the cross,, receives all power to loose or bind, in Heaven as on earth, with the mingled blood and water that flows into her chalice from the wound made by Longinus' spear; while the Synagogue on the left, her eyes bandaged, her staff broken, and her crown falling from her head, vanishes forever from the purposes of God.

Some interesting comments on the Good Samaritan, comments which I hadn't come across before: '... the traveller from Jerusalem to Jericho represents the whole human race which, because of Adam's sin, had forfeited Paradise often symbolized by Jerusalem and been compelled to take the road to Jericho whose name, in Hebrew, means "the Moon" which, now bright, now black, with its fadings and eclipses, aptly portrays the life of man stumbling and sinning along his earthly road. This man is attacked by robbers his sins who take away his garment of immortality.' (footnote correcting the derivation of 'Jericho' omitted)

And, on Judgment Day: 'At Bale the dead hurry into their attire, fastening their shoes, pulling up their long stockings, and putting on their garments that they may appear in decent and respectful garb before the great Assize.'



Yes, the cathedral is 'very human and only concerned with the sons of men' and, being so concerned, understands how humor makes for high spirits:

The Church is not always serious, however; she has a thousand sprightly tales to tell, and there are smiles or laughter mortared with her stones. She asks us to chuckle over embarrassed Aristotle saddled, bridled and ridden by the vengeful courtesan Campaspe, against whose morals he had warned the Emperor who now witnessed, by invitation, the philosopher's plight. Then, with a broad grin, she tells us of Virgil, raised in a basket by a lady strong of arm if frail in virtue, only to be left suspended halfway up to the window of her tower chamber for the mockery of the people when day should dawn. She delights in the sight of wives who dispute with flying fists the authority of their husbands; and in that of husbands trundling their scolding wives in wheelbarrows to the ducking pond as on a corbel of Mumby in Lincolnshire. At Bristol, England, the man, having ventured into the kitchen and meddled with the fire, has to dodge a plate which goes skimming past his ear, but he has less success in the protection of his beard which is being vigorously pulled by the hands of his helpmate. She shows us the lazy peasant sleeping between the rows of corn; the doctor treating his patient not always decorously; the water-carrier at the fountain, the candlemaker in his shop, the farmer, bearing home a lamb from market.

Apropos of this post's title, see also An Exhortation to Read Better, which links to the 1965 edition of Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book.

Father Demets, assistant pastor at the FSSP's St Francis de Sales parish, Mableton, Georgia, U.S.A. (Archdiocese of Atlanta), who blogs at De Fide Catholica has an entry pointing to a video of a Tridentine Mass in Fontainebleau, France, but the link doesn't work for me.

I did find
these references to "messe in latin" on the france3.fr site. There are videos (MS-Windows media player or Real player) on some of the linked articles, notably at

• Ite missa est ... le retour de la messe en latin ?,
• Corse: la messe en latin and
• Les traditionalites vont-ils sortir de l'ombre ? ('The traditionalists to leave the shadows?').

Apologies for the odd formatting of this post.

The MetaFilter post An 8.6 gigapixel stitched image of an Italian fresco links to a site with an image of Gaudenzio Ferrari's fresco of the life of Christ in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Varallo Sesia, Italy (population 7,000, according to the 1910-1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition. Displaying the image in your browser requires Macromedia Flash, and the image is zoomable and scrollable. Mozart's Lachrymosa from the Requiem plays in the background while the image displays in your browser.

The photographers shot 1,145 digital frames, and wrote software specifically for the tasks of stitching them together. See 8.6 gigapixel stitched photograph of Italian fresco revealed at Rob Galbraith's Digital Phtotgraphy insights.

So notes J.P. Sonnen at Update on Reggie: our Latin is back!, with an image of the former aula.