And I was a bit late getting out of the house for my morning walk. Let us see what the day does bring. It is the second day within the Octave of Our Lord's Ascension (Introibo; the Mass Viri Galilaei) but, in the calendars after the pontifical messing about in 1955, when the Octave was suppressed, it remains the Friday after Ascension with the Mass Viri Galilaei. The feast of the martyr Saint Boniface is commemorated at Holy Mass. Saint-Eugène is streaming the Mass in three hours or so, at the usual hour of 1000.
Today marks the beginning of the supplicatio novemdialis ante Pentecosten, the 'nine days of prayer before Pentecost' i.e. the 'novena' before the great feast-- this is the only 'novena' marked in the Roman Calendar and the origin, I suppose, of the devotional practice of 'making novenas'. While I can see the usefulness of 'em, am not myself a sedulous practitioner of the form. The liturgical seasons of preparation-- Advent and Lent-- and the sacred vigilia are enough for me.
Time for breakfast. The hanging device for my map of classical Greece (it's four by three feet, more or less, produced by Dr Michael Ditter, Tabulae Geographicae) arrived yesterday but since the map needs to be unrolled and weighted flat in order for me to stick it into the hanger (there is an upper 'rail' into which the map is fitted and a lower one for the bottom edge) this will have to keep until I have the house to myself on Sunday afternoon.
... (T)hey thought (and said out loud) that the Church was overloaded with excess baggage, myth, superstition, and nonsense. With him, they voted on all the important reforms of Vatican II, most of which tended to make the Church less Roman-- and more Catholic...
'They' being prelates at the Second Vatican Council who were friends and acquaintances of Mons Thomas Roberts SJ, sometime archbishop of Bombay and afterward bishop in partibus, evidently a darling of the liberal and modernist Catholic media in the 1960s. I had never heard of the gentleman but Wikipedia tells me he was rather famous in his lifetime and one of those sad, misguided fellows who contributed to the regrettable conciliar nonsense. Have been reading an emailed letter of Dr Robert Moynihan (Letter #26)-- it is more or less concerned with looking at the role of the Time Magazine journalist Robert Kaiser on the edges of the Council itself. I think Mons Roberts serves as an illustration of a type; I wonder what 'superstition' and 'myth' Mons Roberts worried himself with; he didn't 'like' Solemn High Mass'. In my experience such people use the plea for simplicity etc to conceal their own faithlessness; one must take care not to judge others' hearts, however.
Am enjoying the Requiem of André Campra, performed in this 2016 recording by Les Pages et Les Chantres of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles directed by Olivier Schneebeli. Ah, perhaps the Pages are the corps de ballet etc (not in the Campra Requiem!) and the Chantres do the singing.
Ante Nonam. Am reading Douthat's The Decadent Society, Apollonius with detours into 'the Trojan cycle' of epic fragments, and Juster's Horace today, trying to stay away from diversions online. That the Apollonius and the Greek and Latin lexicons I use are online doesn't help put temptation out of mind, tsk.
It is also the feast of Saint Theodora (19th century), of Saint Isidore (3rd century), and of Saint Maria Domenica (19th century).
V. Et álibi aliórum plurimórum sanctórum Mártyrum et Confessórum, atque sanctárum Vírginum. R. Deo grátias.
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