December 2023 Newsletter & Readings
Greetings,
I hope this newsletter finds you well and anticipating the season of ultimate anticipation, Advent, that begins this Sunday. I am pleased to report that as the new liturgical year begins, we have a new beginning of sorts at Una Voce Maine in the form of a renovated website.
First and foremost, on behalf of the UVM team, I’d like to thank Adam Chamberland for lending his technical experience to our efforts. With Adam’s insights and aesthetic sensibilities, we focused on making our primary source of information about the TLM in Maine as accessible, useful, and attractive as possible.
We know we serve a diverse community, with many having years of experience with the Traditional Latin Mass but others who have only recently begun attending, so we’ve tried to offer a range of information while keeping the navigation clean and easily managed. Moving forward, we plan periodically to highlight different sections with excerpts from some of the linked sites and articles on activities and traditions in which our TLM community is involved.
I hope you will take some time to familiarize yourself with what the website has to offer. And, as always, please feel free to contact us with any comments or questions you may have.
In the meantime, on behalf of the UVM team, I wish you all a blessed and fruitful Advent.
O Emmanuel, our King and Giver of Law: come to save us, Lord our God!
In Domino,
Jeff Rowe
Readings
Excerpt: The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite
Fr. Michael Fiedrowicz. Angelico Press, pp.63-64
Merely entering into a House of God deserving of the name can communicate what it is about. Whoever enters such a place intuitively senses that this is a sacred place, separated from the restlessness and activity of the streets, withdrawn from the goals of commerce and consumption— a place sanctified, initially by its consecration but also by the many praying worshipers who have lingered here, asking, thanking, lamenting, praising. Sanctified by the countless baptisms, numberless confessions, marriages, confirmations, sanctified by missions, devotions, processions, private Masses, and solemn ceremonies. Whoever enters such a place senses how the stones and pictures have, as it were, absorbed all of these prayers over decades and centuries and likewise radiate forth an atmosphere of prayer. Whoever enters such a place senses: I do not stand alone before God; an immeasurable crowd of praying men before me has already stood and knelt before God; I am entering a place of prayer that has been built before my time, which encloses and surrounds me, supporting and accompanying my personal prayers. It is just the same with the traditional form of the Holy Mass. Whoever celebrates it enters into a spiritual space, in an atmosphere suffused with prayer, which receives and permeates his own personal prayers. . .
. . . In the same way, the traditional Mass possesses its own architectonics that differ from those of the revised form, and it is exactly in these differences that the particular “charism” of the classical rite emerges. The rite of entrance with the prayers at the foot of the altar and the double Confiteor of the priest and the acolyte, the direction of the prayer toward the altar, the richness of the diversely arranged gestures— signs of the Cross, genuflections, bows, and changing from the left to the right side— the silent Canon, the form of receiving Communion, the Last Gospel: all these are diverse elements that, like the architectonic form of the church building, lead the praying soul, prepare it, allow it to pause, to continue, and to rise up.
Excerpt: The Liturgical Year
Very Rev. Dom Prosper Guéranger, Abbot of Solesmes, 1833-1875
The History of Advent
The name Advent [from the Latin word Adventus, which signifies a coming] is applied, in the Latin Church, to that period of the year, during which the Church requires the faithful to prepare for the celebration of the feast of Christmas, the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ. The mystery of that great day had every right to the honour of being prepared for by prayer and works of penance; and, in fact, it is impossible to state, with any certainty, when this season of preparation [which had long been observed before receiving its present name of Advent] was first instituted. It would seem, however, that its observance first began in the west, since it is evident that Advent could not have been looked on as a preparation for the feast of Christmas, until that feast was definitively fixed to the twenty-fifth of December; which was done in the east only towards the close of the fourth century; whereas it is certain that the Church of Rome kept the feast on that day at a much earlier period.
We must look upon Advent in two different lights: first, as a time of preparation, properly so called, for the birth of our Saviour, by works of penance; and secondly, as a series of ecclesiastical Offices drawn up for the same purpose. We find, as far back as the fifth century, the custom of giving exhortations to the people in order to prepare them for the feast of Christmas. . . . The oldest document in which we find the length and exercises of Advent mentioned with anything like clearness, is a passage in the second book of the History of the Franks by St. Gregory of Tours, where he says that St. Perpetuus, one of his predecessors, who held that see about the year 480, had decreed a fast three times a week, from the feast of St. Martin until Christmas. It would be impossible to decide whether St. Perpetuus, by his regulations, established a new custom, or merely enforced an already existing law. Let us, however, note this interval of forty, or rather of forty-three days, so expressly mentioned, and consecrated to penance, as though it were a second Lent, though less strict and severe than that which precedes Easter.
The liturgical form of Advent as it now exists in the Roman Church, has gone through certain modifications. St. Gregory seems to have been the first to draw up the Office for this season, which originally included five Sundays, as is evident from the most ancient sacramentaries of this great Pope. It even appears probable . . . that St. Gregory originated the ecclesiastical precept of Advent, although the custom of devoting a longer or shorter period to a preparation for Christmas has been observed from time immemorial, and the abstinence and fast of this holy season first began in France. St. Gregory therefore fixed, for the Churches of the Latin rite, the form of the Office for this Lent-like season, and sanctioned the fast which had been established, granting a certain latitude to the several Churches as to the manner of its observance.
December 17 – The Commencement of the Great Antiphons
The Church enters today on the seven days which precede the Vigil of Christmas, and which are known in the Liturgy under the name of the Greater Ferias. The ordinary of the Advent Office becomes more solemn; the Antiphons of the Psalms both for Lauds and the Hours of the day are proper, and allude expressly to the great Coming. Every day at Vespers is sung a solemn Antiphon, which consists of a fervent prayer to the Messias, whom it addresses by one of the titles given him by the sacred Scriptures.
In the Roman Church, there are seven of these Antiphons, one for each of the Greater Ferias. They are commonly called the O’s of Advent because they all begin with that interjection. In other Churches, during the Middle Ages, two more were added to those seven: one to our Blessed Lady, O Virgo Virginum;, and the other to the Angel Gabriel, O Gabriel, or to St. Thomas the Apostle, whose feast comes during the Greater Ferias; it began O Thoma Didyme. There were even Churches where twelve Great Antiphons were sung; that is, besides the nine we have just mentioned, there was O Rex Pacifice to our Lord, O Mundi Domina to our Lady, and O Hierusalem to the city of the people of God.
The canonical Hour of Vespers has been selected as the most appropriate time for this solemn supplication to our Savior because, as the Church sings in one of her hymns, it was in the Evening of the world (vergente mundi vespere) that the Messiah came amongst us.