FRANCISCAN MISSAL ~12th or 13th CENTURY

ROCK CRYSTAL CROSIER HEAD



Walters Art Museum:

This rare and beautiful crosier represents the only known example made entirely of rock crystal, a hard stone that is very difficult to work. The skill of the carver can be seen in the smoothly arching leaves and the series of small hooks, called crockets, lining the outer edge. An abbess may have used a crystal crosier as a sign of her purity, a symbolic interpretation that dates back to the 9th century.

MASS MEDIA and the EUCHARIST

I have heard many times the claim that the Catholic Church should have great success in her New Evangelization, because Catholicism is a visual religion and contemporary society is also visual. But to call Catholicism a visual religion is a meager assertion; it is no more visual than any of a thousand kinds of paganism. It would be more accurate simply to say that human beings are visual animals. The visuality of Catholicism is only remarkable because the religion's most obvious alternatives in the West - Protestantism and Secularism - are rather inhuman.

And contemporary society, judging by (for one example of many) its reductive architecture, is not very visual at all. Its interest in visual things is almost entirely concentrated on its movie, television and computer screens; it is not any images, but specifically moving images, that interest contemporary man. Even the static pictures now ubiquitous - advertisements, posters, billboards - are meant to be looked at while walking or driving or rapidly flipping pages in a magazine; they may not move, but their frame of reference does, which gives the same subjective result. In contrast, a study taken in 1980 indicated that most visitors look at a painting hanging in an art museum for about ten seconds. The same study, taken in 1997, lowered the time to three seconds. Contemporary man does not love images; he loves motion.

I believe that much of the iconoclasm of recent decades can be blamed on the influence of television and (especially) cinema. Cinema is the most convincing false reality yet devised by technology. The intensity of the imagery, the sophistication of the editing and the ever-more impressive special effects fill the modern mind with an inventory of powerful, nearly unforgettable images. Regardless of his life experience, every man now knows what a cavalry charge looks like. He knows what a dinosaur in the flesh looks like. He knows what an exploding planet looks like, even though no man has ever seen a planet explode. These images become the references for his visual imagination; when he pictures death, judgment, heaven or hell, he pictures something resembling a cinematic special effect he has seen.

Traditional iconography and traditional liturgy are symbolic; to appreciate them, a man must recognize that his senses are unworthy of the greatest realities, and that hieratic and canonized types, arrangements and gestures are needed to suggest them. It is a logic entirely contrary to that of cinema, which attempts to show anything and everything "as it really looks".

A lifetime of moviegoing creates in a man a sense of spectatorial entitlement. He who pays ten dollars to see a movie feels that he is owed certain production values and conventions of direction and editing. Any important dialogue should be recorded audibly, and dubbed or subtitled if spoken in a foreign language. Any important actions should be filmed from unobstructed angles, close enough so that details may be seen. If the moviegoer is unable to see, hear or understand something, he feels cheated, and criticizes the movie. When he attends Mass, these same expectations come with him - and the very idea of a silent Canon, of untranslated Latin, of veils and screens, of a priest "with his back to the people" becomes offensive.

Marshall McLuhan perspicaciously blamed the loss of Latin liturgy on the introduction of the microphone. After resisting for five centuries the Reformational idea that Mass was "something to be heard", Catholics at last embraced the all-hearing principle as a result of expectations changed by technology. A century earlier, in his Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts, A.W.N. Pugin predicted the eventual end of traditional church architecture due to the rise of an all-seeing principle:

If religious ceremonies are to be regarded as spectacles they should be celebrated in regular theatres, which have been expressly intended for the purpose of accommodating great assemblages of persons to hear and see well. It has been most justly said, that there is no legitimate halting-place between Catholic doctrine and positive infidelity, and I am quite certain that there is none between a church built on Christian tradition and symbolism and Covent Garden Theatre with its pit, boxes and gallery.

Nothing has done more to entrench the all-hearing, all seeing, all-understanding principle in the modern mind that the media of mass entertainment. Watching movies and television shows also trains men to observe phenomena in a specific way; the important things to notice are those that move, and move within a defined, rectangular area; anything else is ignored. Minds so formed, when taken to Mass, do not see statues or icons as things themselves revelatory, but regard them like potted plants to the side of the television set. They are apart from the action, so they are unimportant. If they are noticed at all, they are distractions that ought to be removed.

The video camera thus has stripped the altars, torn down every veil, made visible everything that tradition saw fit to hide. I remember one time that EWTN broadcast a Latin Mass from my parish in Chicago; I did not attend, as I was housesitting for my mother that day. I did watch on television, and noticed that the consecration was filmed from the very front of the south transept loft; it was obvious that efforts were made to find an angle from which the cameraman could get an unobstructed, closely zoomed-in shot of the host on the high altar.

Several years ago, there was a controversy over the former Bishop of Birmingham's prohibition of broadcasting ad orientem Masses from his diocese on television. This was obvious anti-traditional petulance which angered many people. But I doubt that it really mattered much anyway. To show the consecration close-up from a privileged angle negates the entire purpose of ad orientem celebration, and I have yet to see any televised Mass at which this was not done.

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Personally, I believe that video cameras ought to be forbidden entirely at Mass, or at least turned off when the offertory begins - at the moment when, in ages past, the catechumens were expelled from the assembly. I am well aware that I am contra mundum on this point, and I can understand certain arguments to the contrary.

I can understand the desire to televise the Mass for the sake of the homebound and bedridden, but I wonder at times just how beneficial it really is. There is no virtual midpoint between attending Mass and not attending Mass. Watching television is not attending Mass. Mass is a sacrifice, and to participate in a sacrifice, one really needs to be present. The phenomenon of the "home-aloner" Catholic who does not attend Mass, but who religiously watches one on television is common enough (and not just among Sedevacantists; some of them watch EWTN) to suggest that the confusion that results from televising the Mass outweighs the benefits.

Those benefits are catechetical and aesthetic; a man may learn and be edified by listening to the homily, meditating on the words of the ordinary and propers, hearing the chants and watching the symbolic gestures of the ceremony. These, then, may move him to devotion, just as privately reading his Missal may move him to devotion. Catechesis and beauty are not the purpose of the Mass - indeed whenever liturgists make them paramount concerns, the liturgy is degraded. Catechesis and beauty are secondary benefits, but they are real benefits. As long as a man understands his watching a televised Mass as analogous to his privately reading his Missal, and not as analogous to his sitting in the pew at church, I do not begrudge him these benefits. Still, all the confusion would be avoided and the same benefits gotten were Vespers or Lauds or some other nonsacramental liturgy televised instead.

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Even more troubling than the televised Mass is the new - and yet rare - practice of "online adoration": a video camera is set up before a monstrance, and live images are streamed through the internet, allowing men to "adore" the Blessed Sacrament from their personal computers. I can think of few things more bizarre and horrifying.

The promoters of this devotion insist that it is not meant to take the place of actual adoration in a chapel, but the very name "online adoration" indicates that the devotion is intended to be analogous to actual adoration. So does the use of a live feed from a video camera instead of a still image; monstrances, generally speaking, do not move, so the use of a video camera ought to be unnecessary. Were the purpose simply to comfort the viewer with the knowledge that the Eucharist exists, and is being adored somewhere, a still photograph or a painting would suffice.

But the contemporary mind formed by the cinematic experience thinks of a video feed - even a video feed in which nothing happens - as somehow more real than a still image; its use gives the viewer the sense that he is participating in something that is really happening, right now; that he is actually adoring. Any doubts that this is the intention are dispelled when reading the suggestions on one website hosting this devotion, describing how to use it:

Be with Our Lord, centered on Him wholly and completely. Sit in silence with Him - the Sacred Doctor of human hearts.

When reflecting on the nature of adoration, the usual justification given for televising the Mass - making it accessible to the homebound, the bedridden, and those too busy or remote to attend conveniently in person - does not work. A televised Mass does not confer any sacramental benefit; it merely offers the secondary catechetical and aesthetic benefits of the Mass. With adoration, these secondary benefits do not exist; adoration has no content at all independent of the Real Presence. The only reason that a man goes to adoration is to adore.

I remember, several years ago, reading an article that called adoration the perfect antidote to television:

Another poignant use of Perpetual Adoration is as perhaps the premiere alternative to the mass media’s monopoly of our time and manipulation of our minds, especially through television and personal computers... Our mind is literally flooded with images until the shows practically overwhelm our senses and our ability to find any goodness or truth or beauty in what we are viewing. Similarly, browsing endless websites, entering random chat rooms, or spending hours on computer games can eventually lead us to deny the necessity to bear witness in the real world, if not the belief of His Real Presence in it.

Ironically, the above quote is attributed to the EWTN host Jeff Cavins - but it still makes all the sense in the world. Television is about visible fallacy, something that appears real but is not. Adoration is about invisible truth, something that cannot be seen but is present nonetheless. Worshipping the Holy Eucharist in silence is profoundly countercultural in an age filled with electronic sound and fury signifying nothing. But to present that presence as a digital image on a glowing box is to thrust it back into the realm of the unreal. To remove adoration from physical proximity to the Real Presence is to contradict it entirely.

A picture appearing on a computer screen is not the Holy Eucharist. I am not sure if it is even a picture of the Holy Eucharist. How can such a thing as "a picture of the Holy Eucharist" even exist; how can a device like a ruler or a scale or a video camera, capable only of describing accidental properties of length or mass or appearance, produce a description of anything but bread? This picture is electrons buzzing in a machine and nothing more. To adore it is to give the honor due to God to something that is not God. There is a word for that: "idolatry". And while most participants in "online adoration" lack the clear knowledge and intention to make them fully culpable, it remains true that idolatry, considered in itself, is the greatest of mortal sins.

A different justification might be attempted by arguing that this picture is analogous to an icon, and that the honor paid to it passes on to the prototype, the Holy Eucharist. But this formula of the Second Nicene Council does not here apply, because here God does not take on a visible form through which men's eyes might glimpse something of His divinity (as in an icon); rather, He hides entirely under the appearance of the host materials. We do not adore the Blessed Sacrament because it looks like God; we adore the Blessed Sacrament because it is God. To adore "a picture of the Holy Eucharist" is to adore something that neither looks like God, nor is God; in other words, to adore a thing unworthy of adoration.

It may be objected that iconography often employs symbolic forms (such as animals) that do not look like the incarnate forms of the prototypes honored - a pious pelican resembles Jesus Christ in appearance no more than a communion wafer. (The Lamb of God and the Evangelical Beasts are a somewhat different matter, as Christ and His gospel-writers were seen in such forms by human eyes.) Allegorical images of the Bread of Life may very well be part of this same imagery, as when false monstrances are incorporated into the decorative architecture of Baroque churches. But I am certain that the promoters of online adoration do not want the image seen on computer screens worldwide to be considered merely as an edifying symbol for Christ, akin to a painting of a pious pelican. For the adoration of an electronic image of the host not to be idolatrous, it must be qualified to the extent that its justifying purpose entirely disappears. For, after all, if it is just a symbol - to hell with it.

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In recent decades, churchmen have falsely assumed that that modern media are neutral, and can be expected to produce the same results as traditional media when employed in a comparable manner. They have ignored the basic principles of modern media (and of all media), and failed to discern their effect on human behavior and understanding; they have failed to discern whether they help or hinder a man to believe and live the Gospel. Marshall McLuhan was disappointed by the failure of the fathers of Vatican II to critically evaluate modern media; the entirety of his writings demonstrated the obvious truth that media have inherent properties, and that it is the nature of a medium, more than the message communicated by it, that determines its effect on society. As his most articulate disciple, Neil Postman, summarized:

Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.

Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a man with a television camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. I do not think we need to take these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments... The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television person values immediacy, not history. And computer people, what shall we say of them? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom. Indeed, in the computer age, the concept of wisdom may vanish altogether.

Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence: The medium is the message.

In his McLuhan's rôle advising the Pontifical Commission for Social Communications, he was able to advance this truth in a few documents, but these have been ignored. In the current efforts for a New Evangelization, Catholics are encouraged to use any available medium, whether television or Twitter, youth rallies or rock music, and assured that as long as they invest it with a Christian message, no harm will result.

Exactly what McLuhan would have thought of televised Masses and "online adoration" remains a matter of speculation; according to his biographer, he was preparing a lecture on Mass Media and the Eucharist but died before finishing it. However, when alive he wrote much that serves to warn those who would incautiously combine them:

When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer's moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer. Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favorable to Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be turned to a new Christ and mistake him for the Real Christ.

St. Louis de Montfort once wrote:

A counterfeiter usually makes coins only of gold and silver, rarely of other metals, because these latter would not be worth the trouble. Similarly, the devil leaves other devotions alone and counterfeits those mostly directed to Jesus and Mary, because these are to other devotions what gold and silver are to other metals.

Here is fools' gold; pious Catholics, desiring to pay homage to the Blessed Sacrament, are instead made to worship pixels on a screen. This is not the Real Christ.

ST. BRENDAN the NAVIGATOR



The Voyage of St. Brendan.

EARLY CATHOLIC AVIATORS, part VI: FAUST VRANCIC



Croatian Culture:

Faust Vrancic (1550-1617) was a notable scholar whose interest comprised mathematics, physics, phylosophy and technology. He spent some time at the court of the German emperor Rudolf II who was also the sovereign to the Croatians, Hungarians and Czechs... His most interesting invention was a parachute or homo volans. Faust Vrancic performed a jump with his parachute somewhere in Venice; this fact is explicitly stated in a book written by John Willkins (1614-1672), secretary of the Royal Society in London, only 30 years after the jump.

Hungarian Quarterly:

Several countries may claim Faustus Verancsics, who was born in Dalmatia, and educated in Hungary from childhood (in the Pozsony home of his uncle, Antal Verancsics, the Archbishop of Esztergom). After studying at the university in Padua, he returned to Pozsony to devote himself to the study of scientific problems. He was given the captainship of the castle of Veszprem, in western Hungary, before becoming the Emperor Rudolf's secretary for Hungarian affairs. Later he became a priest and ultimately the Bishop of Csanad. In the last one and a half decades of his life he went to Italy, where he became a monk. He lived in Rome and Venice and his writings were published there. He compiled a five-language dictionary in Latin, Italian, German, Croatian and Hungarian which was published in 1595. All his life he pursued solutions for technical problems, thus developing several new ideas and inventions. In 1616 he published Machinae Novae, which was a summary of his ideas and a significant work in the history of science. The book describes more than sixty inventions, forty-nine of them with detailed illustrations. His inventions cover a wide range: grinders, windmills, tide-mill, compacting machine, twelve variations of bridge structures, the suspension-bridge, the parachute (closer to the present paraglider), a dredger, a rope-weaving machine, a steel spring and friction brake for coaches.

See also:

Eilmer of Malmesbury
Kaspar Mohr
Bartolomeu de Gusmão
Francesco Lana de Terzi
Jan Wnek

ALTAR in HADSEL CHURCH



This altar was a gift from Princess Isabella of Burgundy. In 1515, she was travelling to Denmark to wed King Christian II of Denmark. A tempest arose that threatened to sink their ship. In gratitude to God and to the Norwegian Archbishop Erik Walkendorf (her escort on the journey) for her survival, she gave five altars to churches in Norway. These are currently in churches in Grip, Leka, Røst, Hadsel and Ørsta. Collectively, they are known as the Leka group. The photographs of the altar in Hadsel Church are from the Arkitekturguide for Nord-Norge og Svalbard.

ASCENSION of OUR LORD



The story, according to James of Voragine.

Sequence by Adam of St. Victor:

Postquam hostem et inferna
Spoliavit, ad superna
Christus redit gaudia;
Angelorum ascendenti
Sicut olim descendenti
Parantur obsequia.

Super astra sublimatur;
Non apparet, absentatur
Corporis praesentia;
Cuncta tamen moderatur,
Cujus Patri coaequatur
Honor et potentia.

Modo victor, modo tutus,
Est in coelo constitutus
Rector super omnia.
Non est rursum moriturus,
Nec per mortem mandaturus
Hominum contagia.

Semel enim incarnatus,
Semel passus, semel datus
Pro peccatis hostia,
Nullam feret ultra poenam,
Nam quietem habet plenam
Cum summa laetitia.

Cum recessit, ita dixit,
Intimavit et infixit
Talia discipulis:
"Ite, mundum circuite,
Universos erudite
Verbis et miraculis.

"Nam as Patrem meum ibo;
Sed sciatis quod redibo:
Veniet Paraclitus
Qui desertos et loquaces,
Et securos, et audaces
Faciet vos penitus.

"Super aegros et languentes
Manus vestras imponentes,
Sanitatem dabitis;
Universas res nocentes,
Inimicos et serpentes
Et morbos fugabitis.

"Qui fidelis est futurus
Et cum fide suscepturus
Baptismi remedium,
In peccatis erit purus
Et cum justis habiturus
Sempiternum gaudium." Amen.

Englished by Digby S. Wrangham:

Satan and the realms infernal
Having spoiled, to joys supernal
Christ returneth back once more:
As His upward way he wendeth,
As before, when he descendeth,
Angels set them to adore.

As above the stars He goeth,
Here no more Himself He showeth,
Bodily, to mortal sight;
But all rule to him is given,
Who is with His Sire in Heaven
One in majesty and might.

Victor now, from perils warded,
He in heaven hath been accorded
Empire over all therein:
Nevermore shall He be dying,
Nevermore through death supplying
Means to purify man's sin.

Once for all He took our nature,
Once He suffered, once, a creature,
Was for sin content to die:
Further pain shall He know never,
But, in perfect peace for ever,
Compass endless joys on high.

Thus he spake, as He ascended;
These things straitly He commanded,
And impressed upon His own:
"Go through all the world and preach ye,
Every nation therein teach ye
Both by word and wonder done.

"For I go unto my Father,
To return, as ye may gather,
Since shall come a Comforter,
Who shall make you bold and fearless,
Of all consequences careless,
Eloquent in speech and clear.

"Those laid low by sickness on them,
When ye lay your hands upon them,
Shall their former health regain:
All things hurtful and annoying,
With all deadly snakes, destroying,
Ye shall drive out plagues and pain.

"Whosoever but believeth,
And with simple faith receiveth
Baptism's sure remedy,
Shall be cleansed from all transgression,
And have with the saints possession
Of eternal joys on high!" Amen.

WEDGWOOD FAIRYLAND LUSTRE ~ DAISY MAKEIG-JONES



Wedgwood Museum:

In 1916, Susannah Margeretta (Daisy) Makeig-Jones, introduced an extensive range of some of the most extraordinary ware ever produced by Wedgwood. It was called Fairyland Lustre and adorned a large number of shapes, some of which were made especially for the purpose. Daisy’s fairies came from many cultural backgrounds and the articles they decorate often tell complex tales... Some [pieces of Fairyland Lustre] needed as many as six firings. Daisy’s Fairyland remained popular until well into the 1920s when the Wall Street crash and a change in taste saw that it was gradually discontinued. According to factory history, Daisy was asked to leave in 1930 but flatly refused to do so. She felt like a member of the family. Not long afterwards, she herself decided to leave, making the dramatic gesture of smashing her pots as she went.

Victoria & Albert Museum:

Daisy Makeig-Jones's fascination with fairies, following such illustrators as Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and the Danish artist, Kay Nielsen, proved very popular in the 1920s. Wedgwood have always produced a huge range of styles to capture different market tastes. The cosy drawing room and nursery atmosphere of the decoration of these works, and the monumental forms, contrast sharply with the modernist works being produced at Wedgwood's in the same period.

Targeting the luxury end of the market with these pieces, they represent one of Wedgwood's most extraordinary technical achievements in the ceramic industry. The richly coloured ornament of Fairyland Lustre was extremely popular throughout the 1920s as expensive collector's pieces. But by the 1930s the appeal of lustre was waning and the collapse of the American market had a noticable effect on the demand for ornamental wares. Fairyland was gradually phased out in the 1930s as Keith Murray and Norman Wilson were taken up. Fairyland was considered too expensive and old-fashioned.

Walters Art Museum:

The Wedgwood factory gave Susannah Margaretta (Daisy) Makeig-Jones (1881-1945) her own design studio in 1915. Drawing on her early love of fairy stories, she introduced an imaginative line of decorative wares that remained popular throughout the 1920s... Engravers transferred Makeig-Jones's designs to copper plates for printing onto paper sheets known as pottery tissues. While the ink was still wet on the pottery tissues, the images were rubbed onto the ceramic surfaces. Women painters then applied the colors to these designs on the ceramics, a process that necessitated several firings, and then added the colorful glazes. The gold details were added last.

Antique Marks:

The impact of Fairyland Lustre ware on the public was phenomenal and all the best shops clamoured to obtain pieces for sale. At first, decoration featured butterflies, dragons, fish, birds and other naturalistic designs in stunning, even garish, colour schemes that were such a welcome relief from the drab war years. However, these earlier pieces should not be confused with true Fairyland Lustre, which first appeared in 1915.

By this time Daisy's imagination was beginning to run riot. Rich blues, purple, orange (her favourite colour) yellow, green and gold, were all worked together with pixies, elves and sprites in ways reminiscent of book illustrations by Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham.

And, like all clever, well constructed pictures, the harder you look, the more you see: elves playing leapfrog; spiders spinning evil webs; gaudy rainbows over romantic castles; ghostly woods and apparitions in the Land of Illusion. Interestingly, rather than being figments of an over active imagination, many Fairyland Lustre designs have strong links with folklore, legend and tradition, though clearly, Daisy's fairy people did things their way.

The website of M.S. Rau Antiques has many good photographs of Wedgwood Fairyland Lustre. Click on the images to navigate to their source.

TREE of JESSE & LIVING CROSS ~ SCHERNBERG PSALTER

CHARLEMAGNE CHESSMEN



These ivory chessmen receive their name from a legend that they were a coronation present to Charles from the Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd. In the Middle Ages, they were owned by the Abbey of St. Denis.

More pictures here.