Today is not only the glorious Solemnity of Corpus Christi; it is also the Anniversary of the Restoration of our late Sovereign Lord King Charles II. The 1662 Calendar orders it to kept as a Red Letter Day. (In normal years, I suppose an obvious EF liturgical celebration would be a Mass for our present de jure Monarch, Francis II.)  '... all things shall be well, When the King shall have his ..read more

I always explain this phrase when I use it, because it is so commonly misunderstood.So many folks think that it means the careful, critical examination of a text, so as to elucidate more and more of its meaning.It doesn't. It means trying to work out what "the original text" actually was.  It most commonly applies to texts which have been transmitted in manuscript form by copyists. Here ..read more

 Wise people who frequent the exquisite little Penlee Gallery in Penzance will be familiar with one of its prize exhibits: The rain it raineth every day (1889); by the Irish artist Norman Garstin (1847-1926). It shows the rain-swept Promenade at Penzance.  But in 2003, another of his pictures passed through the London Sale Rooms, and here is part of the Christie's Catalogue entry ..read more

May 21 is the anniversay of my Ordination to the Sacred Diaconate in 1967, in the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford. And the Birthday of ...?  So what are we to do but ... to Piddle (vide OED sub voce)? And where better to piddle than in the Thames-side Villa of Mr Alexander Pope. What greater pleasure than to disembark and walk up the steep lawn to his 'Palladian' yet humble abode ..read more

The text of the hymns in the post-conciliar breviary is a great deal better than in the 1962 breviary; many texts have been restored to what they were before Urban VIII classicised them in the 1620s. So the new texts are in line with the Sarum and Benedictine usages of the Roman Rite. They are, many of them, in their original forms. But the coetus which redacted them in 1968 did make some ..read more

The 747 Anglo-Saxon Council of Cloveshoe attempted to purify the Rogations from Vanitatibus and maioribus epulis. But a reading of Duffy [Stripping; hereinunder plundered by this post] makes one wonder whether the English peasantry ever  ... er ... quite internalised Cloveshoe canon 16! Some quotations: "and then they had there some ale or drinkings". "they [went] about the bounds of ..read more

 Readers may recall that, during the Rogation processions, 'stations' were made at crosses. My own suspicion is that the stone crosses which stand along the paths leading to churches, especially in the Penwith peninsular at the very end ... the loveliest part ... of Cornwall, were where such stations were made. And (even before the endowed drinking started) passages from the Holy Gospels ..read more

The Ordinariate uses the 'Athanasian Creed' on Ascension Day ... on Trinity Sunday ... S John Baptist ...This wonderful, luminous outpouringof love towards our One and Triune God made its final,disgraceful, exit from the worship of the mainstream church in the 1960s.You may wish to call me wild, or to pigeon-hole me as an extremist; but I feel that the suppression of this credal formula counts as ..read more

As medieval Cornish parishioners attended their local Pleyn a Gwary, they saw at one end of the circular site an elevated strucure called the pulpitum. Round the circular edge, were 'tents' where kings had their 'tents'; perhaps so that the spectators might be able to admire the the especially extravagant gear worn by such lofty individals when eventually they emerged. Here, God the Father ..read more

Of course he was.Surely, one of the signs of a truly great Liturgist is his ability to think up a truly profound reason for a liturgical phenomemon which to mere mortals appears counter-intuitive.So here is Gueranger on why the Mary Month of May has no Marian festivals:"Ever since our entrance upon the joys of the Paschal Season, ... of our Blessed Lady there has not been a single Feast to ..read more