Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)The Answer: As I suspected would be the case, this proved to be a stumper. This vestment is a kind of stole which is used in the cathedral of Milan, but not at the Mass. On the ..read more

Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)Please leave your answers in the combox, and feel free to add any details or explanations you think pertinent. It has been a while since our last quiz, so as a reminder, to keep ..read more

It is reported that some merchants, having just arrived at Rome on a certain day, exposed many things for sale in the marketplace, and an abundance of people resorted thither to buy. Gregory himself went with the rest, and, among other things, some boys were set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beautiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them, he asked, as is said, from ..read more

For the feast of St. Gregory the Great, there’s more good news on the Gregorian chant front!Pope Saint Pius X’s reform of the Roman Office not only represented an upheaval in the psalter, it also unaccountably changed many of the antiphons of the ferial cursus, replacing them with novel compositions even when the traditional ones could have continued to be used. One laments, for instance, the ..read more

On Sunday, I illustrated an excerpt from Durandus with an image taken from a decorated Bible produced in the mid-ninth century, commonly known as the First Bible of Charles the Bald, who received it as a gift from one Vivien, count of Tours; it is also known as the Vivian Bible. (In French, ‘Vivien’, from Latin ‘Vivianus’ or ‘Bibianus’, is a men’s name, the female equivalent being ‘Vivienne ..read more

I just learned about an interesting documentary which was published two months ago on the YouTube channel of the French-language Catholic television outlet KTO TV, about the Benedictine monastery of the Roman Rite on Mt Athos. When the Athonite peninsula was first settled as a monastic community in the later 10th century, the Italian city of Amalfi, (located on the gulf of Salerno, to the ..read more

The original day for the feast of the Forty Martyrs, who were killed at Sebaste in Armenia under the Roman Emperor Licinius, around 320 AD, is March 9th. They were a group of soldiers of the Twelfth Legion who refused to renounce the Faith, and after various tortures, were condemned to die a particularly horrible death, stripped naked and left to freeze on the ice of a frozen lake. Their feast is ..read more

Saint Anthony Press, established with the mission of publishing rare or otherwise “lost” Catholic liturgical and devotional books, has reprinted the Ordo Hebdomadae Maioris (Order of Holy Week) containing the Holy Week liturgies and Order of Mass with seasonal Prefaces according to the 1920 typical edition of the Roman Missal (in use until 1955), restoring the ancient and venerable ..read more

The following excerpts are taken from the sixth book of William Durandus’ Ratione Divinorum Officiorum, chapter 32, 6-11. There are fewer ellipses than usual, but perhaps a bit more paraphrasing.This is the time of Christian warfare, in which the devil rises up against us more strongly. Therefore, lest anyone despair, the Church sings the introit as a way of offering comfort, “He will call upon ..read more

Many of the stories that form the corpus of Lenten Scriptural readings in the traditional Roman Rite are frequently depicted in frescoes in the catacombs, and on early Christian sarcophagi. We may safely assume that such readings were already part of the Roman Church’s lectionary before the end of the persecutions and the building of the earliest churches. When the tradition of the Roman station ..read more