Rita Ferrone has an article in the August 17, 2007, issue of Commonweal, online at A Step Backward
The Latin Mass Is Back, and there's this bit I found interesting:

The liturgical reform of the council was intended as a true reform, addressing genuine problems of the old liturgy for the good of the church as a whole. Now, with the stroke of a pen, Pope Benedict has made that reform optional.

The Italian news agency ANSA today reports that Italian Premier Romano Prodi [is] keen to revive pilgrim routes, focusing on the Via Francigena.

Prodi, a devout Catholic, got the idea 13 years ago when he cycled along the pilgrimage route to Santiago di Compostela in Spain and realised that his own country had many pilgrim ways as well.

"Of course doing it on a bike is one thing, the real pilgrim goes on foot. But I did it like that and it was a wonderful experience," he recalled during a radio show this week.

Prodi is particularly keen on restoring the Via Francigena, the route which started in Canterbury, in southeast England, and meandered down through France, across the Alps near Aosta, down through Parma to Tuscany before reaching Rome.

This pilgrimage, covering a distance of 1,930 km, took about three months for most medieval Christians who walked it.

Below the break in the July 25, St James the Greater post here, I incuded links on the Via Francigena.

A post on today's Saint, the Mother of the Blessed Virgin, is at July 26, St Anne's Day, and I have a little discussion there of Georges de La Tour's painting, The Education of the Virgin, (post-Tridentine 17th century). St Anne also figures in pre-Tridentine piety, her cult spreading after Dominican Jacobus de Voragine included the story of St Anne, her husbands, daughters and grandchildren in his Golden Legend. You can see The Education of the Virgin below the break, along with a late 15th century south German altarpiece showing St Anne, her three husbands, three daughters and their husbands, and grandchildren, Our Lord and some of His disciples. There are also two images of Geertgen tot Sint Jans' The Holy Kinship from the late 15th century.

Catholic critics also sought to distance the Church from aspects of St. Anne's story that did not fit well with post-Tridentine views by claiming that earlier beliefs were the fault of the ignorant masses of the late Middle Ages. The astonishing rise of St. Anne to the position of Modeheilige (fashionable saint) across Northern Europe in the late fifteenth century was viewed as the last flowering of medieval piety, swept away by the coming of the Reformation.

Source: Jennifer L. Welsh's review of Virginia Nixon's Mary's Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe.

I chuckled when I read this in Ted Hewitt's 'Happy Sts. Joachim and Ann's Day, July 26' on the Medieval_Saints Yahoo mailing list:

The cultus of Anne became an object of bitter attack by Martin Luther, especially the images of her with Jesus and Mary--a favorite subject of Renaissance painters. In response, the Holy See extended her feast to the Universal Church in 1584.

The entries from A.D. 2005 on today's Saint are at St James the Greater, from The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa and at July 25, St James the Greater, Apostle. The second one contains Lessons iv. v. and vi. from the Breviary.

St James the Greater, Hieronymus Bosch

More on pilgrimages, with which this Saint is forever connected, below the break.

Many times, in email or in RSS feeds, I'll come across something of interest to me, but my mailreader (Sylpheed) and my RSS feed reader (Liferea), don't have convenient (to me) methods for noting, as in saving and commenting, those items or snippets of those items. I could use virtual folders in Sylpheed or Liferea, but then there'd be two places to look to find something. Also, while each article in Liferea is stored in a separate file, there is no 'print' (either to a printer or to a file) function.

Enter TreeLine, available for both Linux and MS-Windows.

my fvwm2 desktop
(based on Troy's "White Magic Desktop")
showing TreeLine and other programs
Right mouse click and 'view image' to see full size

There's a fine review of TreeLine at TreeLine: Outliner meets free-form database. Quoting from the article:

[U]sing TreeLine's outlining capabilities you can easily group and manage the mixed data inside the database.

By default, every new field's type is set to text, which works fine for fields like Title, Description, and Notes. However, TreeLine offers a few other field types, including Date, Time, Choice, URL, Email, and Picture. This gives you the ability to create flexible data types. For example, you can set the Priority field to the Choice type (press the Field Type button and select Choice from the Field Type drop-down list) and specify the available list items (e. g. Low/Medium/High) in the Output Format section.

A post on the medieval-religion mailing list alerted me to the interesting site Famous Religious Leaders and Their Spectacles, showing the Apostles Philip, James and Matthew wearing eyeglasses, in a triptych formerly at the high altar of St Angel in Montelparo, Italy. There also are images showing a reliquary of St Crispin of Viterbo with his eyeglasses, St Giuseppe Calasanzio (in his native Spanish, San Jose de Calasanz, sometimes called St Joseph Calasanctius) restoring sight to a blind child and reinserting in the head of a child an eye enucleated because of a game accident, and the spectacles St Philip Neri used while saying Mass.

It is clear that the Catholic Church, via its educated and industrious monks, played a significant part in the fabrication of vision aids and their dissemination throughout the world. Had it not been for missionaries, man might have waited several hundred more years for this marvelous invention which has helped man in intellectual pursuit and to better toil in trades requiring near vision.

From Vision Aids in History, Eric Muth.

Along with virtual medieval Byzantium buildings (What Byzantium looked like in A.D. 1200), the University of Virginia a little north of here has v1.0 of Rome Reborn (requires Flash). It is a three dimensional modeling project based on what Rome is thought to have looked like on June 21, A.D. 320, and is named after De Roma instaurata of Flavio Biondo (a Wikipedia article is here). De Roma instaurata was the first attempt at a topographical description of the city. An online facsimile version of De Roma instaurata is available here at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica site.

Now, the modeling used shows clear skies, bright colors, clean buildings, and quiet scenes. In Walk like an Egyptian -- or a Roman -- experience what the past really looked like, there's a description of some efforts by researchers from Warwick Manufacturing Group and the new Warwick Digital Laboratory, University of Warwick to show

the effects of smoke, dust, fog and interior lighting conditions (all of which would have impacted on the way that buildings were experienced by contemporaries) . . . very accurately, for the first time. New developments in display technology also mean it is possible to produce images that are many times brighter, more vivid in colour, incorporate better contrast between light and dark – and are therefore much more realistic – than those previously achievable. . . .

"We're trying to produce images that show more realistically the actual conditions of the time we're looking back at," says Professor Alan Chalmers, who is leading the project. "Achieving this involves taking up-to-date historical evidence and combining it with the very latest in 3-d computer technology."

Other sites discussing Rome Reborn:

• Ancient Rome brought back to life, at the BBC,
• Images: This virtual road leads to Rome, a gallery of images at CNET.

Naxos, the classical music label, has a podcast, which I found via the Internet Archive's Naxos files. The Archive's Classical Music Spotlight #7, is on the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who, since the mid-1970s, has written music frequently based on sacred texts. This twenty-minute or so podcast, which isn't available on the naxos.com site, is a nice introduction to his music.

Arvo Pärt

Some of the Naxos podcasts are listed only at the Internet Archive's Naxos files, some only at the Naxos podcast page.

Back on July 2, 2007, Motu proprio notes: Remembering Tito Casini "The Mass will rise again!" lead me to the Italian language site I Giorni del Ciliegio ('Cherry Tree Days'). The main site's name is La tunica stracciata ('The torn tunic'), and today I noticed something new there: the Summorum Pontificum podcast, Gregorian chants for the 1962 Missal.

The podcasts began on July 21, 2007, and the blogger already has posted mp3 audio files for the chants for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, and is busy with next Sunday's chants, for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost.

The post on today's Saint from the 1962 calendar is here. Go there to read the lesson's and some interesting bits about St Vincent's efforts in trainiing priests after the Council of Trent, and two nice images of the Sisters (and the Daughters, in the second) of Charity in their habit.

The post, from A.D. 2005, for today's Saint in the 1962 calendar is here.

Today is the feastday of St Camillus de Lellis, another post-Trent or Counter Reformation saint, founder of the Order of Clerks Regular Ministers of the Sick, the Camillans or Camillians, the Brothers of a Happy Death. From breviary.net, here are Lessons iv. v. and vi. from the Divine Office readings for the Feast of St Camillus de Lellis and some information about the Saint, ordained a priest in 1584 by the exiled Thomas Goldwell of St Asaph, the last English bishop of the old hierarchy.

Towards the end of the post, I mentioned a podcast by Fr Roderick Vonhögen of Holland about Holy Ghost Hospital in Rome. That podcast looks unavailable now.

Byzantium 1200 on the CAMPVS MAWRTIVS blog points to the Byzantium 1200 project, 'aimed at creating computer reconstructions of the Byzantine Monuments located in Istanbul, TURKEY as of year 1200 AD.'

If you've ever wondered what the Hippodrome looked like, or how the city walls, on the land and sea sides, held attackers at bay for centuries, take a look at the computer generated reconstructions. Many more reconstructions can be accessed via the contents page.

Today in the 1962 calendar the Church commemorates Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 'because on that date in 1251, according to Carmelite traditions, the scapular was given by the Blessed Virgin to St Simon Stock. . . . [T]he promise of the Sabbatine privilege was inserted into the lessons by Paul V about 1614.' Pope Benedict XIII extended the feast to the entire Latin Church and Pope Benedict XIV's projected reform included removing it.

The MetaFilter post The mother-load [sic] of BBC documentaries points to some 699 documentary episodes uploaded by one Usenet user: search for '-1725394736' in General Videos. Who needs cable?

ANSA (a press agency in Italy) reports that the Papal dungeons reopen for business. Hold on, though. Don't get your hopes up. It's only for guided 'spooky night tours':

Guides will recount the tales of famous inmates such as turbulent gold-working genius Benvenuti Cellini who spent months there in 1538 on charges of embezzling the papal tiara and tried a daring escape amid fears of the noose.

Heroes of the Risorgimento, the movement that eventually reunited Italy and ended the papal state, were also enclosed in the jail above Emperor Hadrian's ancient tomb - as recounted in Giacomo Puccini's famous opera Tosca.

Among the other notorious guests was Cagliostro, a Freemason and alleged occultist sent to the dungeons by the Inquisition.

John Paul II's motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, now abrogated, made reference to 'the liturgical books', but Summorum Pontificum mentions only the the Missal and Breviary. This raised a question about exactly which books were permitted or required, when the sacraments of baptism, confession, marriage, and extreme unction are administered, and whether the Ritual in effect in 1962, for example, is to be used for those faithful who seek those sacraments, and for blessings, sacramentals and the like.

The Vatican Press Office provided an information sheet Observations on the Use of the Roman Liturgy Prior to the 1970 Reform when Summorum Pontificum was issued. It contains the following (in unofficial translation from Italian to English):

9. The liturgical books needed for the extraordinary form of the Roman liturgy are:

The Roman Missal in the 1962 edition; previous editions differ in the rubrics on the status (level) of feasts. In the 1962 edition there is always the 'Ordo Hebdomadae Sanctae', previously renewed in 1955 by Pope Pius XII. Pope John XXIII reformulated the prayer 'Pro Judaeis' in the Good Friday liturgy, and inserted it in this edition of the Roman Missal. Thus, it is not licit to use the Holy Week liturgy prior to the 1962 edition.

The Roman Ritual, for the Sacraments of Baptism, Matrimony, Penance, Anointing of the Sick and other Blessings and Prayers contained in the Ritual.

The Roman Pontifical for the case in which the bishop decides to confer Confirmation on a group of faithful who wish it in the earlier rite. The use of the 1962 Roman Pontifical was permitted in 1988 for those communities who followed the entire earlier rite of conferring the Sacrament of Orders.

The Roman Breviary, for priests who wish to recite the Divine Office in consonance with the 1962 Missal.

All four of these liturgical books must be reprinted for practical use. Those publishing houses that specialize in such books must be charged with this, with the 'recognitio' of the competent Pontifical Commission.

Back in the summer of 1962, down the shore, I remember the launch on July 10, and the first live transatlantic television broadcast on July 23. With Telstar, you got 20 minutes of transmission time per orbit. The satellite took two and a half hours or so to orbit the earth. Before Telstar, film, say of news stories, had to be flown across the Atlantic Ocean.

Youtube has some Telstar videos, including a newsreel story, and the eponymous instrumental rock piece by the Tornados, later covered by the Venures.

On May 24 last, In our time, one of BBC Radio 4's programs, broadcasted The Siege of Orléans. It's another of their excellent discussions, and because it is no longer available for download in mp3 audio file format, I make it available here for download.

Vatican Radio's Chris Altieri reported on the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum on Sunday, July 8, 2007, in Pope Extends Use of 1962 Missal. Vatican Radio's podcast makes the mp3 audio file format available, but I don't yet see a direct link on the web site, perhaps because the motu proprio was signed and released on Saturday, July 7, 2007, and the site may not yet have been updated. Hence, I make the mp3 audio file format of the report available here. Left mouse button clicking on the link will probably launch your computer's mp3 player. Right mouse button clicking on the link should bring up a menu allowing you to save the link (i.e., the file), in which case you will have a copy on your computer of the mp3 audio file from Vatican Radio.

On the linked podcast page is this, which made me chuckle:

You can make your own palimpsest, select your favourite programmes, and enjoy a new flexibility in radio listening.

[Emphasis supplied.]

At her blog and on the Internet Archive, Maria Lectrix has completed reading G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and continues reading Europe and the Faith by Hilaire Belloc. Chapter 7, 'The Middle Ages' is the latest. The text of Europe and the Faith is available here, and The Everlasting Man is available here.

From The Hymn, in John Milton's poem Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity:

For if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled Vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous Sin will melt from earthly mould;
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Proinde Missae Sacrificium, iuxta editionem typicam Missalis Romani a B. Ioanne XXIII anno 1962 promulgatam et numquam abrogatam, uti formam extraordinariam Liturgiae Ecclesiae, celebrare licet.

It is, therefore, permissible to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal promulgated by Bl. John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Liturgy of the Church.