tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post6672896248355292152..comments2024-03-27T15:47:46.091-05:00Comments on Pastoral Meanderings: We give You thanks. . . Pastor Petershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10653554256101480140noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post-35427427721866176732017-09-24T15:26:20.487-05:002017-09-24T15:26:20.487-05:00Here is another view (from the late English Anglic...Here is another view (from the late English Anglican liturgical historian Geoffrey Grimshaw Willis) on the matter raised in the previous comment:<br /><br />The Lord’s Prayer<br /><br /> Since the time of St. Gregory the Roman Canon has been immediately been followed by the Lord’s Prayer, with its introduction and embolism. It is well known that it was St. Gregory himself who made some change in the arrangement of the Roman Mass at this point. He himself says that he did so in his letter of October 598 to John of Syracuse, and this statement was copied by his ninth-century biographer, John the Deacon.<br /><br /> There is no doubt about the text of St. Gregory’s letter, but there has never been agreement about its precise meaning, nor is it agreed what St. Gregory found in the Mass at this point, and what exactly was the change that he made. We begin by citing the text of his letter:<br /><br /> <i> orationem vero dominicam idcirco mox post precem dicimus, quis mos apostolorum fuit ut ad ipsam solummodo orationem oblationis hostiam consecrarent, et valde mihi inconveniens visum est ut precem quam scholasticus composuerat super oblation diceremus, et ipsam traditionem quam Redemptor noster composuit super eius corpus et sanguine non diceremus </i><br /><br />In the first sentence of this passage scholars from Amalarius onwards have taken the words <i> oblationis hostiam </i> together, as meaning “the victim of the oblation”, and have therefore interpreted St. Gregory as meaning that it was the custom of the Apostles to consecrate the Eucharist to the accompaniment of (ad) the Lord’s Prayer (ipsam orationem) and of nothing else.<br /><br /> In the nineteenth century Probst perceived that it is much more natural to take the words <i> orationem oblationis </i> together, and hostiam separately. This would then mean that Gregory says that it was the custom of the apostles to consecrate the Host to the accompaniment of the “prayer of oblation” only. This view has been followed by Cabrol and Batiffol, among other modern scholars, and it is now probably the accepted view. It gives much better sense, and Brightman’s interpretation of the whole passage is by far the most satisfactory. St. Gregory says that we say the Lord’s Prayer immediately after the Canon, because it was the practice of the Apostles to consecrate the sacrament with the Canon, or eucharistic prayer, and therefore it appeared unseemly to St. Gregory that we should say over the oblation a prayer composed by some scholasticus and should not say over the Lord’s Body the prayer which the Lord himself taught. Brightman was the first to make the likely suggestion that the prayer of human composition said over the oblation was the oratio super oblata, the Roman title of the prayer which the Gallicans call Secreta. If this prayer, of human composition, was recited over the unconsecrated elements, St. Gregory might well think it unfitting that the Lord’s Prayer should not be said over the consecrated oblations. He therefore moved it to a position immediately following the Canon. Obviously St. Gregory knew no better than we do what text the Apostles used in consecrating the Eucharist: there is no record of this in the New Testament. But he may well have supposed that the Eucharistic Prayer in the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, or that in the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions, was of apostolic derivation, and in fact neither of these has an oratio super oblata or the Pater noster.<br /><br /> The oratio super oblata was certainly said at the Offertory at Rome from the pontificate of Xystus III (432-440) or from that of Leo the Great (440-461), so it would be familiar to St. Gregory …<br /><br /> --- from <i> A History of Early Roman Liturgy to the Death of Pope Gregory the Great by G. G. Willis, with a memoir of G. G. Willis by Michael Moreton </i> (London, 1994: The Henry Bradshaw Society), Subsidia I, pp. 53-55.<br />William Tighehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09043433059401608468noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6329600504016968888.post-62328327443564597702017-09-24T13:15:26.857-05:002017-09-24T13:15:26.857-05:00Gregory the Great, accused of “Easternizing,” famo...Gregory the Great, accused of “Easternizing,” famously said that the Apostles consecrated the sacrifice to the Lord’s Prayer alone, when he was accused of innovating by insisting that Rome include the Our Father in the Eucharist as other rites did. Chemnitz cites this as warrant for the Lutheran practice of consecrating with the Our Father and the Words of the Testament. It is an obscure passage in Gregory where he SEEMS to criticize the Canon as a prayer composed by some unknown “scholasticus” in comparison to the prayer which sets the Church’s lex orandi, “admonished by thy saving precepts and following thy divine institution, we dare to say: Our Father....”William Weedonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01383850332591975790noreply@blogger.com