This morning I attended a beautiful Rorate Mass: a votive Mass in honor of Our Lady, lit only by candlelight, beginning before dawn. It also happens to be the feast day of Pope Saint Damasus I (in the old and new calendars!). Now I get this was a Mass in honor of the Blessed Mother, but there was no collect or even mention of the good Pope.
Why care? Well it turns out he proclaimed a canon of the New Testament, commissioned Saint Jerome to begin work on the Vulgate Bible, fought heavily against multiple heresies, especially the often triumphant Arianism, pushed the Roman Emperor to remove the altar of victory from the Senate, and dealt with clerics being corrupted by the Church’s sudden increase in wealth and political standing.
Hearing about this saint seems rather important if one wants to share the beauty of how the Church gave us the Scriptures with Protestant brethren and how to deal charitably but firmly with politicians and clerics tending toward heresy and corrupted by worldly concerns.
So why no mention of Saint Damasus today? I suspect it’s because of the limits placed on Collects in a Mass in 1955 and 1960. There were already two during our Mass: one for Our Lady and one for the Advent feria.
Before 1955, the limit to Collects in a Low Mass could be five or seven. By the 60s that was heavily reduced, and in the Novus Ordo it’s just one. This explains why none of these saints whose feast days (old calendar) fell on Sundays in the last year were commemorated: Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Mark, Saint James the Greater, Saint Anthony of Padua, the Passion of Saint John the Baptist, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Saint Therese of Lisieux.
These changes to the Collects coincided with chucking most of the Octaves in the liturgical calendar (such as Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart, Assumption, Holy Innocents). And trimming the number of Old Testament readings in Easter Vigil by about half. As well as losing Last Gospels, for example when a major feast (like the Assumption this year) overrides a Sunday, the Assumption Gospel is proclaimed, and the Last Gospel is the Gospel for the Sunday. The Communion Confiteor was also dropped, removing the communal confession of sins directly before receiving the Eucharist. And all of these changes were before the Second Vatican Council.
What’s the big deal?
First, I would flip the question. The changes are imposing mandatory limits to Collects per Mass, mandatory eliminations of centuries-old octaves and, for six decades, mandatory reductions in Scripture readings during Easter Vigil. Why is it necessary to mandate these things? Surely a pastoral approach at most allows rather than demands lightening of Collects, Octaves, and Vigil readings.
The bottom line is that Mass is the main setting where the faithful interact with the Church. Everything that happens or doesn’t happen at Mass matters. If prayers invoking the saints are removed, if Scripture readings are cut, if feasts are cut or removed, if a confessional rite is removed, it matters. It tells the faithful that those things are less important than making the liturgy go faster and reducing the need to contemplate what is proclaimed at Mass.
It is sobering to realize that there is no parish where Mass is said according to the centuries-old traditional rites of my British and German ancestors. The few traditional Masses available are by-the-book 1962 Missal Masses, a Missal which leaves behind all the richness I just mentioned and more besides.
I pray that as time and divine providence give us greater clarity, we move away from rigid legalism and toward the Church’s traditional understanding of handing down a received liturgy that grows organically through the centuries under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
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Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little." And he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."
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