11 November 2017

Bishops: a "courage deficit"?

Those who use the Liturgia horarum found themselves today saying the very jolly hymn by S Odo, abbot of Cluny (d 943), 'Martine par apostolis', which notoriously moved Peter Abelard to call its opening hyperbole a 'praesumptio'.

S Odo's fourth stanza originally concluded:

monastico nunc ordini
iam paene lapso subveni.

The 1968 revising coetus, aka Dom Anselmo Lentini & Co. Ltd., commented that the first of these lines needed to be broadened and, as far as the second is concerned, 'evidenter mutandum' (Oh yeah?). So they came up with:

pontificum nunc ordini
pio favore subveni.

Isn't all this fun? I began by feeling that, given the collapse of the Religious life in the First World, perhaps the original would again now be apposite. Then I recalled all the Good News regarding the current vibrant revival of the Religious Life. So I started toying instead with the idea of adopting just one of Lentini's proposed changes, so that the text would read:

pontificum nunc ordini
iam paene lapso subveni.

But, given the unwillingness of ... shall we say, just a few? ... the Successors of the Apostles to speak clearly and frankly about the disfunctions in the current flow of the River Tiber, perhaps the following would, if you will forgive an uncharacteristic lapse into modish jargon, tick all the boxes:

pontificum nunc ordini
En! paene merso subveni.

No comments: