Distribution of Blessed Candles:
On Tuesday I celebrated the Extraordinary Form's Mass for the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary also known as Candlemas.
It was a sung Mass with two cantors and truly beautiful and without accompaniment.
I was like a cat on a hot tin roof about this Mass as I could find no resources in English to explain the rubrics of the rite of blessing the candles and subsequent procession.
Thus I went to my handy dandy 1965 Roman Missal which has the rubrics in English and I got a better sense of how to do the candle blessing. But the 1965 Missal allows the priest to pick one of the five candle blessing prayers whereas the 1962 missal prescribes all five. I found all five a bit much not only because it was a bit much, but also because I had injured my back and was in absolute agony and thus I untied my sufferings to the Sacrifice of Jesus Passion on the Cross celebrated at Mass. I got many souls out of purgatory and did penance for much innumerable sins. Jesus is a good untier of knots as is His Blessed Mother.
And the 1965 Roman Missal had the prayers translated into English and if I did all five in English, it would not have seemed so tedious.
3 comments:
untied your sufferings is as bad as my small screen typos not caught in comments elsewhere where I cannot spell discrimination. TWICE.
"I found all five a bit much not only because it was a bit much..." I can understand these may be problematic with a bad back, but you seem to be taking the same stance as the liturgical deformers following V2: seemingly useless repetitions. By seemingly I imply out of ignorance.
It is to be noted that there are 7 blessings in these prayers, as there are 7 blessings in the Roman Canon whenever the Sacrifice on Calvary is alluded to, and which Aquinas discussed in great detail. It is theologically and liturgically an important number.
But moreover as Prof Kwasniewski pointed out earlier this week, in the sequence of 5 prayers, there
"... is expressed a well-developed theology of candles as sacramentals; of how they relate to the order of creation and the order of redemption; of the liturgical reenactment and mystical participation in Christ’s own entrance into the temple; of Jesus Christ as the light of the world and His Spirit as the internal fire/light that guides us through the “perilous darkness of this life to the never-failing light” of heaven; of Simeon as a model of one so guided, whom we should imitate as we receive Jesus in the substance of our flesh; and of the connection between the oil Moses commanded to be prepared so that lamps might burn continuously in the Lord’s presence and the blessed candles we now burn as symbols of the “lumen Spiritus” in our inward minds. The prayers are particularly outstanding for their pneumatology."
http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2021/02/a-comparison-of-old-and-new-blessing-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNewLiturgicalMovement+%28New+Liturgical+Movement%29
It is far, far preferable to have all five prayers in English (with a suitably dignified translation such as that found in the St Andrew missal) rather than just one in Latin. I would go so far as to say that it is on occasions like this that the vernacular comes into its own.
The chants (Lumen, Adorna, Responsum, Obtulerunt) are part of the liturgy and are of course in Latin. The first accompanies the distribution of candles and the current practice in St Peter's of repeating it ad nauseam throughout the procession to the exclusion of everything else is simply lazy.
1965 was a significant milestone in the drive for liturgical minimalism and should on no account be revisited.
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