Sunday, February 6, 2022

Brief Plinthos Response to Vatican Bucking of Tradition

As long as the Church continues to neglect and even reject our marvelous liturgical patrimony the traditional movements will continue to flourish to supply that gross and wrongful omission and opposition: e.g. the forbidding of ad orientem worship, kneeling for communion and directly on the tongue, gregorian chant, polyphony, use of Latin.

The extraordinary form of the roman liturgy is culturally far superior to the ordinary form which tends toward banality, whereas the extraordinary form in its solemn rituals is one of the highest, if not the highest, form of artistic expression achieved by man. And, at this historical moment, with the easy access to these treasures on the internet anywhere, anytime, containing this traditional explosion is impossible.

For example, here is the traditional marian antiphon proper to this post-Presentation/pre-Easter liturgical season (viz. Septuagesima/Lent), the Ave Regina Caelorum.

Below I give Palestrina's polyphonic setting, the solemn tone and the simple tone gregorian chant. At the end I also give another polyphonic version, one by des Prez.

What Catholic institutions (schools, colleges, seminaries, monasteries, parishes, cathedrals, etc.) even have any notion of any of these Catholic treasures? Most have never even heard of the Liber Usualis or the Graduale Romanum, both essential Catholic liturgical texts in any form of the liturgy! A Roman Rite which forbids Latin ceases to be the Roman Rite envisioned by all the liturgical books! The wrong-headed leadership of the Church seems to want to eliminate our liturgical patrimony by illegitimately forbidding its greatest fruit which continues to be, in the present liturgical dispensation, the typical and most standard form of the liturgy.

"And no man drinking old, hath presently a mind to new: for he saith, The old is better." Luke 5:39

Palestrina


Solemn tone (Liber)

Simple tone (Liber)

Josquin des Prez