Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

Initial Breviary Stats

Looking Back

When I set up the page code for the St Bede’s Breviary, I decided that it was important to track general—not individual—usage information. Thus, one of the tables gathers style, kalendar, and rite selections. Again—I don’t capture any user or computer data and am using this only to get a sense of what features are being used to better accommodate those who choose to use it.

I tapped into the table the other day and pulled down data that has been accumulating since December. Because I’m not tracking individual data, I can’t pull out the many times I’ve accessed it to test out various features. Too, due to the way the table is populated, there are some situations where data is not returned and blank fields are entered. I’ve not messed with these resulting in a margin of error equal to the blanks. That having been said, here are the breakdowns for various categories for the 6,376 visits logged:

Despite my preference for Rite I, breviary users are evenly split between Rites I and II. I’m pleased to see this as it indicates to my mind that advocates of both rites are well represented here.

I found at least two items in this data set of interest. First, the data seems to reflect my own difficulties. In trying to fit the offices into a full life with children, I find I’m more regular with Morning Prayer than Evening.  As over half of all offices prayed are Morning Prayer and Evening is roughly half of Morning, it seems I’m not alone… :-) Second, I note that the Little Offices (Noon Prayer and Compline) share an equal though low percentage (7%). I don’t know if this means that those who do Noon Prayer are also those who do Compline but it’s a likely conclusion.  At the end of the day it seems clear that the two principal offices—Morning and Evening—are indeed what people are coming to the site to pray.

This slide indicates that the breviary is serving its primary function. I specifically coded the breviary for flexibility—I wanted Anglicans of all stripes to be able to find a means of praying the office that fit their spirituality best and I consider this data set to be a vindication of that decision.

This data set indicates an almost filibuster proof preference for the BCP kalendar.

Going Forward

Ever since it’s been up the Breviary has had the tag “Beta test” which is entirely necessay. I’m trying to move it out of beta status though. There’ll be several sets of changes required to make that happen and given my schedule it won’t be complete anytime soon. However, I do have some concrete plans for next steps. These include:

  • finally getting around to implementing the BCP rubrics on the placement of the gospel readings—i.e., morning in Year 2 (thanks for the reminder, Bill)
  • inserting NRSV readings into Rite II
  • re-doing the guts in ways that (hopefully) no one will notice on the client-side but will streamline the server-side and under-the-hood functionality
    • chiefly this means moving from a table-based daily calculation system to a rule-based system
    • consolidating kalendar tables which will enable me to roll out the other kalendars that I’ve had on ice for a while
  • fixing innumerable design issues and irritants
  • providing music for the hymns (square-notation at first, modern notation perhaps later based on some promised assistance, sound files are but a hopeful dream at this point)
  • integrating the breviary into a more coherent web presence

I can say that one major undertaking on the horizon after these are incorporated includes provisions for sung offices. No ETA on that, however.

As always, I’m open to your suggestions and corrections. On that note, let me conclude with a big thank you to Richard and Ron, my faithful entirely voluntary proofreaders who mercilessly call to my attention every error they see in Rites I and II respectively. Thank you for your assistance and persistence!!

On Eves, Vigils, and First Vespers, II

On the Value of First Vespers

Having reviewed a bit of the pre-Reformation and pre-conciliar practice regarding First Vespers Offices, we move to the practical question of how to define and utilize a First Vespers within the prayer-book tradition.

The first question to be tackled, of course, is: who cares? And indeed, the ’79 BCP itself seems to be raising that question. To sketch briefly, the 1662 BCP allowed First Vespers, the American 1928 BCP recommend First Vespers, while the 1979 BCP permits and appoints them but then turns around and relegates them to a back-shelf.

Let me explain that a bit…

Going by strictly BCP materials, there are only two items at Evening Prayer that indicate the liturgical observance: the Collect and the Lessons. Since 1662, using the Collect of a Sunday or Feast on the evening before has been approved. The American 1928 goes a step farther and provides proper Lessons for Eves in the Fixed Holy Days table (pp. xliv-v). The American 1979 provides Eves for a few Feasts in its own table of Holy Days (pp. 996-1000) but places most of them after the table itself in a lump titled “Eves of Apostles & Evangelists”. Comparing the ’79 to the ’28 there is a clear minimization of proper Lessons for Eves and the logic behind this is probably correctly captured in Hatchett’s discussion of the Daily Office Lectionary rubrics:

One of the frequent criticisms of earlier lectionaries in the Prayer Book was that sequential readings were often interrupted by proper lections for saints’ days and their eves, lections which contributed little or nothing to the congregation’s knowledge of the saint being commemorated or of sainthood in general. The reading of John 11, the story of the raising of Lazarus, for example, was frequently interrupted by lessons for the feast day (and/or eve) of Saint Matthias; none of these lections mentioned Matthias. In the 1979 Book, a general permission is given, when a major feast interrupts the sequence of readings, to lengthen, combine, or omit some of the appointed readings in order to secure continuity or avoid repetition. (Hatchett, CotAPB, 592)

Or, to restate more simply, the Daily Office Lectionary should be as continuous as possible for it to achieve its catechetical function.

While I agree with the premise as restated above, I disagree with Hatchett and am disappointed in how the ’79 Lectionary has changed to make these charges more credible.

First, let’s consider the catechetical aspect. We must recognize that when we discuss the liturgy in general and the Office in particular, we’re never dealing with just one “goal”; instead, we’re operating within an economy of catechetical goods—some of which come into conflict with each other. I would identify some of the catechetical goods from daily recitation of the Offices as:

  • An increasing awareness of the presentation of the Gospel through the patterns of the liturgical year
  • An awareness of the Communion of the Saints through liturgical celebration of those who intercede on our behalf
  • Saturation in the Scriptures through yearly repetition
  • Saturation in the Psalter through monthly repetition
  • Formation into key evangelical principles in the daily repetition of the Gospel Canticles
  • Formation into key interpretive principles with twice-daily repetition of the Apostles’ Creed

Hatchett is identifying a conflict between two of these goods: repetition of the Scriptures and acknowledgment of the saints. There are three problems, however, with the way that he constructs this.

The first is the nature of the conflict. I don’t see this as being a conflict between the Scriptures and saints. Rather, we are dealing with two different means of encountering the Scriptures. All of the feasts that have readings appointed for First Vespers are either Principal Feasts, Feasts of our Lord, or Major Feasts—all of which are Scriptural in nature. All of these people and events celebrated are specifically called out in Scripture. Thus, I think that Hatchett is setting up a false dichotomy.

The second is scope. Yes, the lessons for St Matthias will impede part of John 11—-in some years. But not others. Hatchett’s criticism makes sense if we are going to go through the lectionary cycle once. But if it is to be repeated year after year, then this charge does not make sense. Christian formation is a process measured best in decades. In a similar fashion, if I miss the Daily Office for an entire day, I regret not having said those psalms but have confidence that I’ll get them the next month. Perhaps that’s lackadaisical, but I’ve found that my spiritual health is greatly improved when I balance scrupulosity with a long-view approach to my holy habits.

The third is that, when Hatchett mentions “avoid[ing] repetition” at the end of the passage, he refers to a problem of the ’79 BCP’s own making. Repetition for Holy Days is not a credible charge when the American ’28 lectionary is concerned; each Holy Day has its own distinct readings for the Eve and the Day. Six readings with no overlap in the table. Look at the ’79, though. There is no overlap in what is presented in the table, but all Eves of Apostles and Evangelists are grouped together with two readings provided for them all. Now there’s repetition!

Not only that, but due to this way of proceeding, feasts not in the ’28 table (and even some that are) are now Eve-less: St Joseph, Independence Day, St Mary Magdalene, St Mary the Virgin (!!), St Michael and All Angles (!!), St James of Jerusalem, and Thanksgiving Day. Yes, we can stretch the definition of “Apostle & Evangelist” for St Mary Magdalene and St James of Jerusalem, but no reading for the BVM or St Michael?! You’ve got to be kidding me!!  Oddly, four readings are presented for Evening Prayer on these days, providing enough readings for a First and Second Vespers but the sets are not specified for use at either.

In other words, in comparison to the ’28 BCP, the ’79 BCP has made a hash of the Eves of Holy Days under the guise of simplification.

I disagree with Hatchett and, presumably, whoever compiled the Daily Office Lectionary tables. There are two ways to celebrate a First Vespers in the Prayer Book tradition: with the Collect alone or with the Collect and Appointed Lessons. My sense is that the first is appropriate for Sundays, the second is appropriate for Principal Feasts and Holy Days. The interruption of the continuous reading of Scripture is unfortunate but it is occasional (31 days sprinkled throughout the year), and is not consistent over years. No Scripture will be permanently impeded due to these occasions.

The benefit is that a First Vespers puts emphasis on those days, those events, those concepts, and those individuals who truly are important as examples, intercessors, and signs of the Christian life. No, Matthias is not mentioned in the readings on his day as Hatchett notes. He’s only mentioned in one pericope of Scripture which is appointed for his Mass. But, like other of the apostles, his significance is in his life and witness. His importance in our faith rests not on how many times he appears in Scripture but that he was a called and consecrated apostle. Indeed, most of us will be far more like him than Peter and Paul, not large in the annals of the church but nonetheless the faithful workers through whom the Gospel also flourishes.

First Vespers play an important role in marking out liturgical time and structuring our year. They need to be observed because of the emphases and counter-point that they give to the liturgical seasons.

Sunday Morning Prayer in Parishes?

I usually receive an email a week or so from a reader or from someone who happened upon the blog concerning proper protocol for the Daily Office. Not infrequently, those who write are in parishes that can no longer financially sustain full-time clergy. As a result, Morning Prayer has once again become a regular Sunday service despite the best intentions of both prayer book and parish.  With the unintentional suppression of Morning Prayer with the advent of the ’79 BCP, though, not all of the lay leaders in this situation have a lived tradition to fall back upon, and the clergy who do assist them may not either.

Are there enough readers in this situation or enough interest in this topic to warrant setting up a Morning Prayer Q&A page?

If so, what sort of content would be most helpful to those in this position? What questions need to be answered?

On Eves, Vigils, and First Vespers, (Digression)

Some comments on the last post prompt me to say a little more about the pre- and non-Reformation systems for dealing with kalendars. Let me say right off the bat that this is not an area where I consider myself an expert; I’ll be grateful for additions here from more informed readers.

One of the reasons I start off that way is because of the situation in the time of my main focus. In the early medieval monastic period, there are few clear surviving written records concerning how rules of precedence and such were ordered (observe for a second the number of caveats there: “clear”, “surviving”, “written”!) If you go to the seminal piece on liturgical books in Anglo-Saxon England,* the only text for dealing with such issues is item U: Consuetudinary. When you go to the text itself, Gneuss gives only a brief note:

The ordinal contains instructions concerning the texts and performance of the liturgy of mass and Office, either for the whole church year or for certain parts of it. In the consuetudinary (or customary) such liturgical instructions or ordines are combined with rules relating to the life and customs of a monastic community or a collegiate church. Such ordinals and consuetudinaries may vary considerably, according to the time and place of their composition and use. I have chosen the heading ‘consuetudinary’ because the pertinent Anglo­-Saxon (and early Anglo‑Norman) texts whose editions are listed below do not deal exclusively with liturgical matters. As will be seen, all these texts were intended for use in English monasteries and cathedral priories in the tenth and eleventh centuries. No specific Old English term seems to exist; none of the texts is found as a separate volume.

Gneuss throws around a number of terms here that will become technical terms for writers dealing with later periods. The ones I’ll note are ordinals, customary, and consuetudinary. There is no real precision to their use here because, as Gneuss says, the distinctions haven’t evolved yet.

The Ordines Romani are an important factor here. While they don’t receive a category of their own—i.e., we don’t really have “ordinals” proper yet—these were the documents that told you how all of your different books were supposed to fit together. Remember, within the early medieval period we had liturgical books with contents grouped by function: the choir had their book, the cantor had his book, the priest had his book, etc. The ordines provided the structure for how they interrelated. I confess that I don’t know if ordines XX-XXXVIII address precedence issues or not. We do have some surviving continental manuscripts that are collections of ordines (like Cod. Sang. 349) but these are also not ordinals in the future sense.

In any case, Gneuss lists four customaries, two of which may be familiar to readers of these pages, the Concordia Regularis and Aelfric’s “Letter to the Monks at Eynsham” (LME). These texts tend to be instructions that fill out the sparse descriptions of common life in Benedict’s Rule with a more precise detailing of the day, season, and year and add in the extra liturgical services common within a Cluniac inspired monastic system.

As you read through the LME, therefore, you find lists of incipits and when they are supposed to begin and end. On the matter of festal days, Aelfric makes two comments, one in his discussion of the liturgies of the summer period, the other tucked into his discussion of the readings of the Night Office:

55. If the Nativity of John the Baptist should fall on a Sunday, we desire to retain all the readings and the responsaries about John himself. The same [rule applies] for [the feasts of] the Assumption and Nativity of St Mary and the Feast of St Michael: should [any of these] occur on a Sunday, we desire to retain [their liturgies] in full. Again, we do the same for the feast of All Saints and [the feasts] of all the apostles, except those which occur in Advent or [in the period] from Septuagesima to Easter. But as for other feasts not observed by the laity, if they fall on Sunday and have a full history [of their own], let us read about them in the first and third position, and about the Sunday in the second. (LME, 139)

Then later on the Night Office:

73. But on all feasts of the saints, throughout the entire year, we read lives or passions of the saints themselves, or sermons appropriate to the given solemnity, and [we sing] proper responsories, if these are to be had; if not, we sing other appropriate ones and adopt for the third position [readings] from a homily on the gospel as we do always and everywhere. (LME, 147)

Thus, there is very little here about the vexing issue of Vespers, notably because of Aelfric’s focus on the Night Office.

Going back to the issue of liturgical books, there was one other item used in conjunction with the customary and that was the computus/compotus (OE gerim). This is the book that would tell you how to calculate the movable feasts and get into fun topics like lunar epacts, Golden Numbers, and dominical letters. (Gneuss discusses these briefly under item X with Calendars).

So, there were three major items, the ordines, the customary, and the computus that could be used in conjunction to figure out what was done when. The overwhelming sense that I get from reading the customaries, though, is that these tended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive and that, practically, it would boil down to however the community decided to run things.

As things evolved within English liturgy and as we moved more to the sway of the Sarum Rite, there were, in theory, two major texts which are edited together (among other items) in the two volume Use of Sarum, the consuetudinary and the ordinal. Knowing the early medieval background, having two documents makes perfect sense: the consuetudinary discusses the ritual and tells how the various groups of people interact, while the ordinal describes the liturgical orders and what masses and offices are to be said when.

The “old Ordinal” and the succeeding “new Ordinal” didn’t answer all of the possible questions so in the late Sarum period we get documents like the Crede Michi that address controverted questions. These led one Clement Maydeston in the early 1450’s to create a master document called the Ordinale Sarum sive Directorium Sacerdotum that serves to solve these issues once and for all. (This was edited in two volumes for the Henry Bradshaw Society, vol. 20 and vol. 22.)

If you do the math, there are 35 ways that the liturgical year can be arranged based on the possibilities for the date of Easter and when Sundays fall. Accordingly, Maydeston laid out those 35 options from the period between the Sunday following the Octave of Epiphany through the first few Sundays after Trinity. These were then labeled according to the dominical letter  A through G, then the five possible options for each of these were laid out (e.g., primum A, secundum A, tercium A, etc.). Once the “Easter affected” portions of the year had been dealt with,  the rest of the year was gathered into a sixth section (e.g., sextum A).

Here’s a sample for Jan 19th through the 22nd for primum A:

sample from the Directorium

Thursday is of St Wulstan, bishop and confessor; nine lessons are read from the Common of Saints. The Little Chapter starts: “Behold a priest…” At First Vespers and the Night Office there are memorials of the BVM. Second Vespers is of Sts Fabian and Sebastian. Little Chapter starts: “The souls of the righteous…” and there are memorials of St Wulstan and the BVM.

Friday is of the martyrs Sts Fabian and Sebastian; nine lessons are read at the Night Office with no exposition of the Gospel of the Day and there is a memorial of the BVM. The Second Vespers is of St Agnes, virgin. The Little Chapter starts: “I will confess…”, and memorials are made of Sts Fabian and Sebastian and the BVM.

etc. . . .

Thus, it identifies First Vespers (primas vesperas) and Second (Secunde vespere) and lets you know what to do in each case.

Parts of this tool, then, were  cut up and inserted into the Sarum Breviary as the pica or directions on what to do.

Considering the level of detail to which the Directorium descends, Anglo-Catholics through the ages have wondered if Archbishop Cranmer had not exaggerated the difficulties facing clergy in understanding how to say their breviary. All they had to do was flip to the right section of the Directorium and they could tell what was to be done.

I’m not even going to touch that one…

Furthermore, the whole issue of precedence of Vespers has, in modern times, been reduced to a chart that offers a comparison of what is done when. Here’s one from the Marquis of Bute’s English edition of the Tridentine Breviary:

As long as you know the rankings of the various days, you can figure out what you’re supposed to be celebrating. It makes sense, but isn’t an intuitive process until you’ve used it for a little while.

So, these are some of the items referred to in the previous post that give more information on the pre- and non-Reformation ways of reckoning the Vespers issues. Back to the American 1979 BCP in the next post.

* Helmut Gneuss, “Liturgical Books in Anglo-Saxon England and their Old English terminology,” pages 91-141 in Learning and literature in Anglo-Saxon England : studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, edited by Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

Central Churchmanship: Was There an American Form?

Here’s an interesting post from a Continuing bishop discussing the revisionism of both the Left and the Right wings of Anglicanism, and calling for a return to the central position which he identifies as: “based on the Bible, the Early Fathers, the Articles of Religion and the Prayer Book.”

What strikes me as odd is his appeal to “Central Churchmanship.” I’ve only seen the term used by the Young Fogey before and I wonder if this is a particularly English party. That is, here in America I’ve only heard of Anglicanism described in three branches: Evangelical, Broad, and Anglo-Catholic. These are also the parties described by an impartial historical observer as found in the 1907 (biased yet still entertaining—to me, at least) Catholic Encyclopedia article on Anglicanism.

I can see an appeal in what is being described here, but has it ever existed as a discrete body on American soil?

RBOC: Low Week Edition

  • Took some time off to get away with M and the girls—back to the grind today, however…
  • M ran a great time in the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler on Sunday; I ran a local 5K and finished a minute slower than last time. I need to hit the pavement more seriously. The main goal at the moment is my first half-marathon at the Baltimore Running Festival.
  • Oddly, one of the things that keeps me motivating with regular running is scanning the news at the Oil Drum. The idea of declining medical facilities as I age suggests that the time to get serious about being healthy is now…
  • More on kalendars after other fires get sorted out—there were lots of good comments below I haven’t gotten around to addressing yet.

On Eves, Vigils, and First Vespers, I

I frequently mention various liturgical things in passing and, as a correspondent has noted, it never hurts to stop and define these every once in a while. A classic case is the term “First Vesper.” So, with that in mind, here are some definitions, explanations, and applications concerning the “First Vesper” and how it both appears in and impacts liturgies in the ’79 BCP.

Some Background

The Western Church has tended to sort days into one of two categories: feasts days and regular days (aka ferial days or simply ferias [Yes, that’s not a correct Latin plural—deal with it.]). A feria is reckoned the same way a secular day is; it starts and ends at midnight. Speaking litgurically according to the old canonical hours, therefore,  ferias begin with Matins at 3:30 AM or so and end with the conclusion of Compline at around 8:30 PM. Feast days work on a slightly different axis.

Following Jewish tradition and therefore the practice of the first generations of Christians, feast days begin at sundown on the day prior to the feast and end at sundown on the day of the feast. However, sundown is easier said than scheduled. As a result, there’s a de facto “liturgical sundown.” On regular feasts—Simple feasts to use the technical term—the feast began at the Little Chapter during Vespers then would run through the end of the None Office the next day. Thus, a Simple feast is actually a little bit shorter than a full day; if back-to-back Simple feasts show up in the kalendar, it actually creates a little gap.

Example: on February 13th in 1486, the Feast of St Valentine started at Vespers with the Little Chapter. February 14th continued the feast as it  ran through Compline, Matins, Lauds, and the Little Hours up to None. At that point, the feast of St Valentine ended. Vespers began as the Vespers for Tuesday, following the psalms appointed for Tuesday. After the opening and the psalms, though, the feast of Sts. Faustinus and Jovita starts and continues through the rest of the 14th and the 15th as far as None.

This looks confusing, but makes perfect sense if you recall one basic principle: the psalms for Lauds and the Little Hours were mostly static; to cover all of the psalms in a week (RB 18.22-25), 1-108 were covered at Matins and 109-147 were covered at Vespers (roughly). If proper psalms kept being appointed for feasts there’s no way they’d make it through the last third of the psalter!

Not all feasts are equal, though; not all feasts are Simple. The more important feasts were referred to as Doubles, presumably because at some point in the Early Church a regular Office of the day was said, then an additional Office was said for the saint or feast. By the time we have extant manuscripts and descriptions of Offices, though, this was not the case. Instead, a Double were lengthened according to their importance. A Double began at the beginning of Vespers on the Day before, continued through Compline into the feast day proper and did not end after None but continued on through a second Vespers and a second Compline. Thus, a Double had two Vespers, one on the evening before the feast and one on the feast itself. (It had two Complines as well, but Vespers is a much larger, more involved, and more variable Office than Compline, so a second Compline has little practical effect on the liturgy’s celebration.

In theory, you might expect that most feasts would be Simples and that the more important feasts would be Doubles. And perhaps that how it was at one point. By the modern period, however, it was not the case. Looking at the kalendar of Pius Xth from 1920, we see that of the 296 fixed festal days of the year, 256 were Doubles of some sort; only 27 were Simples. (And it may be alleged that the psalm issue had something to do with it—the festal psalm sequence used for Vespers on Doubles tended to be a bit shorter than the ferial sequences; messing with the psalms was sometimes the intention!)

So to recap, in the West through the reforms of Pius X there were three kinds of days reckoned differently in the church:

  • ferial days ran from midnight to midnight, starting at Matins and running to the end of Compline
  • Simple feasts ran from evening to evening in a shorter sense, starting from the Little Chapter at Vespers and running until the end of the  None Office
  • Double feasts ran from evening to the next night, starting at the beginning of Vespers the evening before and running through Compline on the day of the feast

This, then, is the origin of “First Vespers.” It designates the Vespers Office that begins a Double feast to differentiate it from Vespers on the next day. Furthermore, the liturgies of these days were often different, usually having different antiphons for the psalm and Gospel canticle and having different hymns.

The thing I need to point out now, though, is the implications of having a First Vespers.

In the example under Simples, I demonstrated how the system worked when two Simples were back to back. There was no problem since one Simple ended before the next Simple began and the ferial Office filled in the slack. Consider the Double, however—the longer day means that overlap between one feast and another is entirely possible. And if you have 296 of them, well, you do the math… And then you add in all of the Sundays which are semidoubles at the least…

Suddenly, figuring out which Vespers goes with which day and should be celebrated in which way becomes a lot more difficult.

As a result, the classification of Double feasts began quite an involved matter and there grew a range—from Semidouble to Double to Greater Double to Double of the Second Class and Double of the First Class—in order to properly arrange the feasts so that everything received its due ceremony. Sets of tables clarify the relation between them so that you can calculate what happens if two feasts fall on top of one another (quite common when you suddenly merge 52 Semidouble or greater Sundays into the pre-existing 296 Doubles) or, as happened almost daily, when adjudication had to be made between whether or how you ought to celebrate two feasts at the same time within one Vespers Office.

Example: Consider March 6th. The kalendar tells us that it is the feast of Perpetua and Felicity. This feast is a Double. So, Vespers on the 5th (and the 5th is a ferial day) is the First Vespers of the Perpetua and Felicity. The feast continues onto the 6th. However, March 7th is the feast of Thomas Aquinas—also a Double—which means that its First Vespers is abut to concur with the Second Vespers of the Perpetua and Felicity. What do you do? There are three options: division, commemoration, or suppression.  In this case, since both feasts are Doubles the answer according to Tridentine rules is division: it’s the Second Vespers of Perpetua and Felicity from the opening and through the psalms until the Little Chapter. At that point (liturgical sundown), it becomes the  First Vespers of  Thomas Aquinas. Right after the collect of Thomas, though, is included a commemoration of Perpetua and Felicity which is created by bundling the Magnificat antiphon with the versicle which would have followed their hymn and concluding it with their collect.

Don’t ask what happens if either of these days turns out to be a Sunday, because then things start getting complicated…

It’s precisely these sorts of issues that led reformers from at least the time of Wyclif to condemn what had happened to the Offices, charging that clergy had to spend far more time figuring out their breviaries than preaching the Gospel. We can see many things that Cranmer did to simplify the Offices (following in the footsteps of other reformers frequently) but this is one of the most invisible to modern Anglicans. In simplifying the kalendar he, with one stroke, removed one of the major objections to the Offices as they had been practiced at that time. By removing all antiphons and hymns, the liturgical elements to be calculated dropped dramatically; only the collects were proper to feasts. The Office became simple again—no calculations required (certainly in comparison to what it had been). However, the Office also lost the richness and depth that it had and the connections between Mass and Offices were reduced to a single point, the collect.

Where we are now and what this means for our BCP will come in another post.

Easter Even Update

Triduum has come and gone and we stand in the Great Fifty Days. As usual at this point, I’m quite tired from life around the house and now have 95% of Easter dinner cleaned up.

The girls and I spent the liturgical portion of the week at Church of the Advent which delivered tremendously. It’s a pleasure to see a community in the area that embraces a robust Anglo-Catholic sensibility within the Rite II idiom. It reminds me of Smokey Mary’s more than any parish I’ve been to recently. (And that’s always a good thing in my book.)

I’ve not been near the computer much except to dash off the previous installment on the kalendar; I still have yet to find the perfect Easter image for the breviary—I need to at least put up the adequate if not the perfect… If you’re late to the party like me, you need to get over and read Christopher’s piece at the Cafe. It’s a challenging item that ties together several different issues from a variety of angles. I’m still reflecting on it.

The girls received The Princess and the Frog as an Easter present from my in-laws and I watched it for them tonight. Suffice it to say that American Studies majors have a decade worth of dissertation topics dissecting Disney’s latest engagement with issues of race, class, and gender.

I’ll continue to be more off than on over the next several days as life continues to occur.

The Kalendar in Easter

Overview

Easter is the preeminent season of celebration in the Church Year. The “Great Fifty Days” are established by the dates given in Luke’s Gospel and Acts, and correspond with the forty days from the resurrection of Jesus until his Ascension, then the remaining ten days from the Ascension until Pentecost. Accordingly, Easter is a period always having 8 Sundays, the first being the Sunday of the Resurrection and the eighth being the Feast of Pentecost.

There are three distinct periods within the Easter Season identified by the Church: the Octave of Easter, the regular Easter time from the Second Sunday until the Ascension, then Ascension-tide consisting of the ten days from the Ascension to Pentecost.

The Easter season may begin as early as March 22nd or end as late as June 13th. Thus, there is an 83 day period within which the 50 days of Easter will fall. No matter when in this span it falls, the 15 days between April 25th and May 10 will always occur within the Easter season.

Historical Treatment

Under the early 20th century Pian rules, the Easter Sunday of the Resurrection received highest honors as both a privileged Sunday of the First Class and a Double of the First Class with a privileged Octave. The Monday and Tuesday were also Doubles of the First Class in their own right, the other days being Primary Greater Doubles by virtue of their octave status. As a result, no feasts aside from these could be kept until the second week of Easter. After this Octave, however, the ordinal Sundays of Easter receive no special treatment, being Lesser Sundays.

The days between the 7th Sunday of Easter and the Ascension, though, were the Rogation Days; the Monday and Wednesday (which is also the Vigil of the Ascension) were non-privileged Greater Feria meaning that a Double feast would take precedence but even then the ferias would be usually commemorated. These were solemn penitential days and, even in the midst of Easter, the liturgical color for these days was purple.

The Ascension which always falls on a Thursday is also a Double of the First Class with a non-privileged Octave.  The time from Ascension to the Vigil of Pentecost was its own mini-season with hymns proper to it. The Vigil of Pentecost only ranked as a Semi-double but was a privileged Vigil—no feast could be celebrated upon it. Pentecost received the same rank as Easter and therefore the week following was bound by the same rules: Monday and Tuesday in Pentecost week were Primary First Class Doubles, the rest of the weekdays were Primary Greater Doubles with the added twist that the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday were the Summer Ember Days. The Octave concluded on Saturday before the First Vespers of the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

Thus, there were three periods during the Pian Easter where the kalendar rules were in full play, first during the Octave of Easter itself, then in the days around the Ascension, and finally the Octave of Pentecost which effectively expanded the Easter season by an additional week.

Under the rules immediately before Vatican II, the ranks were altered but the effects were the same with one exception; the Octave of the Ascension was suppressed.

Thus the temporal days within Easter fell into the following categories; rank/order of precedence is per Ritual Notes:

Rank Class Days
1 Feasts/Sundays, 1st Class Easter day and Pentecost
3 Feast, 1st Class Ascension of Our Lord
6 Sunday, 1st Class Low Sunday (Easter 2)
9 Vigil, 1st Class Vigil of Pentecost
10 Octaves, 1st Class days in the Easter and Pentecost octaves
15 Sunday, 2nd Class Sundays of Easter (Easter 3-7)
21 Vigil, 2nd Class Vigil of the Ascension

Within the “Rules to Order the Service” in the English 1662 BCP, rules 1 through 3 address, among other things, occurrence with the octaves of Easter and Pentecost. Rule 1 states that:

When some other greater Holy Day falls on . . .  Palm Sunday or one of the fourteen days following, on Ascension Day, or on Whitsunday or one of the seven days following, it shall be transferred as appropriate to the . . . Tuesday after Easter 1 [Low Sunday], or the Friday after Ascension Day, or the Tuesday after Trinity Sunday: except that if Easter Day falls on April 22nd, 24th or 25th, the festival of St. Philip and St. James shall be observed on the Tuesday of the week following Easter 1, and the festival of St. Mark shall be observed on the Thursday of that week.

Thus, Holy Days are transferred after the Octave of Easter and special rules are in force when said transference might interfere with other Holy Days.

Rule 2 prohibits a greater Holy Day from superseding Easter day, Low Sunday or Pentecost. No other Sundays in the Easter season are protected in this way, however.

Rule 3 states, “A lesser Holy Day shall lapse if it falls on any Sunday, . . . on Palm Sunday or any of the fourteen days following, on Ascension Day, or on Whitsunday or any of the seven days following.”

Rule 4 concerns the Rogation Days and states that “a greater or lesser Holy Day” will supersede the feria but the collect of the Rogation Day should be said as a memorial.

Rule 5 states that the collect of the Ascension shall be used on the days following it until Sunday and also that the collect of the Ascension will be the only collect at Evening Prayer on that day (i.e., no memorials).

Rule 6 which gives permission for First Vesper services, explicitly forbids a First Vespers for Ascension day.

The Table of Precedence in the American 1928 BCP shows an expansion of protections to the Easter season. It gives precedence to “Easter Day and the seven following days [including Low Sunday (Easter 2)]; Rogation Sunday [Easter 6]; The Ascension Day and the Sunday after Ascension Day [Easter 7]; Whitsunday and the six following days.”

Current Status

The ‘79 BCP simplifies the Easter season. In following the greater tradition, it keeps the Octave of Easter as a privileged octave; feasts are transferred until after Easter 2  and every day is a named holy day with its own collect and propers. Ascension Day and the Day of Pentecost are Principal Feasts but they have no octaves. The days following Pentecost are explicitly those of the next numbered proper of Ordinary Time and thus the collect of Pentecost is only said on the Day of Pentecost itself.

The Sundays of Easter have received a promotion, though, and no feasts may replace them. Indeed, the Easter season as the great baptismal season of the church has received a boost in the ’79 BCP and the practices around it and many parishes again make reference to Canon XX of Nicaea which forbids kneeling “during the Days of Pentecost [Easter]” and on Sundays. I’ll take no hard position on this either way except to make note of three things: 1) An appeal to 4th century practice completely by-passes the next 16 hundred years within which it became the standard Western practice to kneel on Sundays and during Easter; 2) the 4th century insistence on not kneeling was a reference to and was set in the context of the usual daily practice of multiple prostrations—to enforce the “no kneeling” without reference to lots and lots of kneeling the rest of the time seems to throw the practice off-kilter; 3) The current trend in the Episcopal Church tends not to revere the other actions of the Council, perhaps I’d be more enthusiastic to follow this canon if the other were equally promoted.

One other point on Easter is that the ’79 BCP attempts to restore the Vigil of Pentecost, making it an evening baptismal service analogous to the Easter Vigil. Despite this intention, I have never seen or heard of this being put into practice.

The current Roman rules concur concerning the new prominence of Easter and likewise give Sundays of Easter precedence over other feasts and solemnities with one exception—the Ascension may be transferred to Easter 7 (GNLY 7.2). The Octave of Easter is observed, each of the days being a solemnity of the Lord (GNLY 24). The status of Ascension-tide seems rather ambiguous; the norms say only that “The weekdays after the Ascension of the Lord until the Saturday before Pentecost inclusive are a preparation for the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete” (GNLY 26) but fail to note whether this preparation has any liturgical implications.

The order of precedence established in the GNLY 59 is:

Rank Class Days
1 I Easter triduum of the Lordʼs passion and resurrection
2a I the Ascension of the Lord, and Pentecost
2b I Sundays of the season of Easter
2d I Days within the octave of Easter
13c III Weekdays of the season of Easter from Monday after the octave of Easter until the Saturday before Pentecost inclusive.

Liturgical Days within Easter

Holy Days

There are 5 Holy Days that may fall within the Easter season:

Date Class Feast DL Notes
Mar 25 Feast of our Lord (3a) The Annunciation g Always in the Easter Octave if in Easter
April 25 Major Feast (3b) St Mark the Evangelist c May fall in Easter Octave
May 1 Major Feast (3b) Sts Philip and James, Apostles b Rarely falls in Easter Octave
May 31 Feast of Our Lord (3a) Visitation of the BVM d
June 11 Major Feast (3b) St Barnabas the Apostle d

The Octave of Easter may fall any time between March 22nd and May 2nd. As a result, the first three feasts may fall within this span and require transference. In each case, the feast is transferred outside of the Octave of Easter as stated in the BCP: “Major Feasts falling in [this week] are transferred to the week following the Second Sunday of Easter, in the order of their occurrence” (p. 17).  Current Roman practice seems to be that transferred feasts are placed on the Monday of the week (GNLY 5), but Sarum and the example of the 1662 BCP suggest that transference to the next Tuesday is optimal allowing full celebration of the prayer book appointed Eves/First Vespers.

If the Annunciation falls within Easter, chronologically it must fall within the Octave and cannot be celebrated on the 25th.

St Mark the Evangelist will always fall within the Easter season and, when Easter is late, may fall within the Octave. As it precedes the feast of Sts Philip and James by six days, transferences around this time must adequately accommodate both occasions; the recommendation of the 1662 BCP seems solid, suggesting that when Easter is on April 22nd (and thus Philip and James naturally fall on the Tuesday after Easter 2) or when Easter falls on April 24th or 25th (and thus Philip and James also fall within the Octave), that Sts Philip and James be celebrated on the Tuesday and St Mark receives the Thursday.

Some uses have special material for feasts of apostles within Easter, however, not all have Commons for Evangelists (yes, English Office, I’m looking at you…). If such supplementary materials are used, St Mark should receive the honors as an apostle within Easter-tide.

As noted above, Sts Philip and James will only fall within the Octave of Easter if Easter lands on one of its two latest days. In most years, therefore, the feast may be celebrated on its appointed day.

Days of Optional Observance

The only Days of Optional Observance that are impacted by Easter are those that fall within the Octave and lapse. There are a few feasts that fall within the March 22nd to May 2nd window that may be feasts of title or patron. Too, the Rogation Days are explicitly classed and listed as Days of Optional Observance in the BCP. Here are the significant Easter-tide feasts that may need to be transferred or otherwise noted:

Date Feast DL Notes
Mar 22 Gregory the Illuminator e May fall on Easter
April 19th Alphege of Canterbury d May fall in Easter Octave
April 21 Anselm of Canterbury f May fall in Easter Octave
April 23 St George, Patron of England A May fall in Easter Octave; lately added to HWHM, though not in ’79 BCP
April 29 Catherine of Siena g But note that most “St Catherine’s” are named for the VM of Alexandria (Nov 25)
May 2 Athanasius c Falls on Easter 2 if Easter falls on Apr 25
varies Rogation Days n/a Fall on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Ascension

If any of these days fall in the Octave of Easter and would be feasts of patron or title, they should be transferred to the first open day in the week after Easter 2. They may not replace the Mass of the Sunday during Easter.

Seminaries in Jeopardy

Word has been coming to me through both public and private channels that things are in a very bad way at General Theological Seminary. As most readers know, I have a special place in my heart for General as M did her Anglican Year there; ever since then, I’ve hoped to some day return there to teach in some capacity. How long the seminary will be in operation, though, seems to be a live issue.

Between events at Seabury-Western, the unfolding events at General, and similar situations at other places, we can no longer pretend that the twentieth-century models for clergy education will remain stable and static through the twenty-first. Free-standing denominational seminaries are becoming endangered species.

The very real—and realistic—discussion that needs to happen throughout our church needs to center around clergy formation. This is related to, but is a different beast from, clergy education. There are certain academic competencies that clergy must have beyond a typical four year degree. However, I don’t believe that the core competencies that clergy require can be met solely through academic instruction. Formation rooted in our distinctive spiritual practices are essential for the production of clergy who are both effective and Episcopal.