Book in small chunks

Watch a book in progress.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
We’ll see about that.

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The bishop who lost his way: Tuscany in the 1780s

Pius X (1903-1914) is best known for promoting frequent communion, seen by some at the time as making a sacred thing unduly common and therefore less highly regarded.  This problem seems not to have risen until after Vatican 2, when communion became not only frequent but standard for mass-goers and everyone went -- as I noted in a National Catholic Reporter essay in the 1970s, calling attention to an unsung achievement of the council, namely that it had abolished mortal sin. In any case, this change of his and another, to teach catechism in the vernacular (!), are pretty tame stuff by today's standards. Let us, however, put a hold once more on this tenth Pius and his works, looking back a mere hundred or so years before him to the synod of Pistoia, a diocese in Tuscany, in 1786. Liturgy was dying on the vine. Jansenists had made worship barely approachable with hard-nose demands on worshipers. Quietists had made it irrelevant with their insistence on a God-to-individual hot...
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In worship, who comes first, God or the faithful? More than a conundrum.

In 1889 at a Eucharistic Congress in Lieges, Belgium, Dom Gerard van Caloen, a trailblazing Benedictine monk, presented a daring idea: reception of communion by worshipers at mass.   Dom Gerard had already published a Missal for the Faithful in Latin and French and la much appreciated Little Missal for the Laity and started a publication and a study group.  Participation was in the air. The new pope was to play catch-up. He would be  Pio Decimo , the tenth Pius, with a "Renew all things in Christ" motto --very much the parish priest from humble surroundings, a man of the people with a common touch but also a stern demeanor and willingness to take the battle to the enemy, in his case the moral (and cultural) evil as he saw it, of modernism. He was to push frequent communion also. As to worship in general, he was already highly supportive of participation and recognized the need for liturgy to match that goal of his, to bring the faithful to warm bel...
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Tale of several popes. Unfolding drama unfolds further . . .

Continuing with book in progress, working title "Dominus Vobiscum . . . The first modern-day papal liturgical reformer, Pius X, 1903 to 1914, is claimed by later reformers as one of their own. But it's truly an afterthought for them because his ideas and theirs were worlds apart. Or drifted that way, as we shall see. Indeed, this Pius was more in the mold of Pius V (1566-1572), who wound down a council, of Trent, or Tridentum, 1545-1563, and followed through on its edicts and findings with the mass called Tridentine. This 5th Pius curiously has this in common with his successor-reformer of four centuries later, Paul VI, who followed through on a council he also had not convened with a new mass, "Novus Ordo," with radically new script and stage directions. The two masses endure, the first as barely tolerated (by never-Tridentiners among higher clergy and arguably the pope) or lovingly cherished (by traditionalists, or "traddies" as some call themselv...
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