NOCIVUS ORDO CLERICORUM

... for we must never offend against grammar. Lord Chesterfield

Editor's Note: A hot new rumor from Europe has His Peripateticality visiting London, England, later this month. Accordingly, we felt it nessary to publish the following rather longish, technically detailed post before Yankee Doodle dandy comes to town a-begging without Tony. Just in case there's substance to the scuttlebutt, we want everyone, especially the English who should know better than to traffic with malformed American cult masters, to realize cult clergy are not the real thing. After today, our English brethren may disinvite this apostle to their most bitter future.

The bumbling clerical sad sacks at Cult Central, U.S.A., are at it again: laboring mightily without success to exceed the extremely limited grasp of their pitiful formation. They claw after unattainable prestige, yet always end up failing miserably, as you'll learn once more in today's post.

Last week we saw where the SGG cult is proudly offering for sale its own ordo (pl. ordines), the annual calendar in mostly abbreviated Latin with instructions for the daily recitation of the Breviary and the celebration of Mass. "One Hand" has made a big to-do about the effort: he's bursting with pride, as, indeed, is the whole clown crew. (You can read all about it here.)

You'd think they'd've made sure there were no howling errors on the pages they selected to preview (viz., the cover, the key to the abbreviations, and the first page of January 2016). After all, why give us demon rascals at Pistrina a chance to rip it apart and shame the "clergy" in front of a jeering Trad Nation?

But you see, they can't help it. Even when they've got  -- right in front of their foolish faces -- copies of old ordines from the '20s, '30s, '40s, and early '50s, they're so malformed they can't keep from making mammoth linguistic blunders. That's why, starting today, we're launching a recurring series of posts over the next year to expose all the errors we've found in the cult masters' latest embarrassing effort to pass themselves off as authentic successors to Catholic practice (and then hilariously prove to everyone that they're not).

For Pistrina's first installment, we'll focus on the cult masters' perennial problem: L-A-T-I-N.

On the cover, we read the following grand title:

ORDO 2016

Ecclesiæ Sanctæ Gertrudis Magnæ

Archidiœcesi (!!) Cincinnatensis.

We'll have more to say about the content of this imposture at the end, but for now we observe how these sede morons have used the groaningly wrong form for the genitive singular of the Latin word for "archdiocese." The Latin nominative archidiœcesis is (a) feminine and (b) third declension, so its genitive singular ends in -is, not -i. (Archidiœcesi is either dative or ablative singular.) That means Dannie's cover page should've read Archidiœcesis Cincinnatensis. The only reasonable conclusion we may draw is that the cult "clergy" must think the word is second declension, the genitive of which is -i. (We rule out the possibility of its being a simple typo because this is the cover page, for heaven's sake: they would have tried their level best to proof it. Don't you agree?)

The pinhead compiler(s) -- the Forlorn Finn (along with Checkie Cheeseball)? -- who surely had a copy of an old Cincinnati ordo to consult, must not have noticed (or understood)  the correct form printed thereon: "ORDO... IN USUM Archidioecesis Cincinnatensis." The pompous buffoon(s) who drafted this grammatical mess went to all the trouble to spell the word with the optional ligature œ (which an old Cinci ordo in our possession doesn't use), yet couldn't get the correct morpheme. Why be elegant when you can't deliver on the most important element, to wit, the grammar.

Are these unschooled jokers first-class losers, or what?!

Now when we turn from the cover to the text of the ordo proper, right there on the very first page, on the very first day of the new year, we find another ear-priercing howler in the note at the bottom of the Jan. 1 cell:

 ...in loco Missa (!!) votiva (!!)....

In standard rubrical Latin, the phrase "in loco" (or loco) meaning "in place" is followed by a genitive (i.e., "in place of the votive Mass etc."). Therefore, the forms should have been Missae votivae, not the nominative or ablative singular, as these Latin-less goof balls have printed.  The blunder is i n-e x-c u s-a b l e. Over hundreds of years, books and journal articles on the rubrics always have always used the genitive.* If these perennial fortune's-fools had been conversant with any of the classic Catholic rubrical works, the form of the idiom would've been so solidly fixed in their little, pointy noggins that the error never could have seen the light of day. But both you and we know these Bozos aren't the real thing, are they?

The next entry on the same page, that of January 2, isn't free from a screaming howler either. Right off the bat we read in the second line

...ad unicam (!!) N...

According to the grammatical number of its modifying adjective, the abbreviation N, despite what the carelessly constructed abbreviation key** tells us, signifies "Nocturn," a singular noun, thank you very much. The Latin equivalent is nocturnus, a second-declension masculine noun. But the SGG cult blunderers must not know the word's gender because the adjective they print, unicam, is feminine. Someone who knew elementary Latin would have printed "ad unicum N[octurnum]." But obviously Dannie's boy(s) mustn't know basic Latin.

Compounding the botch is the fact that an ordo compiler doesn't need very much Latin to begin with. (That's good for the cult clergy!). The actual text can be copied from old ordines published in the good ol' days. (They used boilerplate then, too.) Therefore, all you need is someone with rudimentary Latin so you can proof the copy for transcriptional errors like, say, typing unicam for unicum. (Maybe Tony Baloney was the proof reader here, which explains the lapse.)

There's no excusing this mistake either. Agreement of adjectives and nouns with respect to case, number, and gender is one of the earliest lessons in first-year Latin. But, of course, if you don't know the gender of the noun modified, then the erroneous unicam would look fine, wouldn't it? We mean, at least it's the right case after the preposition ad. In the malformed, sloppy sede cult masters' challenged minds, one out of two isn't bad at all and, in fact, is far above their customary performance.

Beyond the shockingly erroneous concord lurks another, more serious problem, a problem that impeaches the usefulness of  Dannie's ordo, especially for the cult's own "priests." Among the chief objectives of an ordo are (1) to make it easy, in as few words as possible, for the user to find what he must recite and (2) to minimize the possibility of reciting the wrong element.

Let's see how the Gertie ordo stacks up against those criteria. The entire instruction translates as follows: "At the sole Nocturn, the lessons and the responsories [are] proper." At first blush, we have to say that this is hardly better than many of the pre-Pius X ordines, which laconically advised that the Office was proper.

Twentieth century ordines seem to give a lot more guidance. For instance, the 1937 Columbus, Ohio, and the 1954 Cincinnati ordines were quite detailed, even more detailed than those of St. Paul, counseling that the first and second lessons with their own responsories were to be taken from the occurring Scriptural pericopes, but the third would come from St. Augustine's sermon on St. Stephen followed by the Te Deum. Such explicit direction made it almost impossible for an inexperienced, careless, or ignorant priest to read the wrong third lesson (viz., the one printed for an occurring Office of nine lessons). The contemporary 2010 ordo issued by the Saint Lawrence Press in England is similarly detailed in its direction.

In an age of virtually non-existent priestly formation -- so dark a time that one of Tradistan's "priests" in Michigan (the infamous MHT completer, Ozzie the Skipper) could forget the consecration at Mass -- a functional ordo must strive for exactness in order to prevent malformed sede clergy from erring. SGG's apparently cavalier inattention to modern circumstances bodes ill for what promises to be a very sloppy,  poorly curated, amateur effort. Why the cult masters, who pretend to be in the diocese of Cincinnati, didn't copy from the old -- and better executed -- Cinci ordines is a mystery.

That thought brings us back to the text of the cover page, which (after correcting the compiler's[s'] bad Latin) translates as 2016 Ordo of the Church of St. Gertrude the Great of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. O.K. Here we go again. We've said it before, but we guess it bears repeating:

The SGG cult center does not belong to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati because it was not erected as a moral personality in the Church: SGG was not built with the express written consent of the Ordinary, and the rectors of neighboring churches with an interest in the matter were never consulted. Since it was never erected in the archdiocese, SGG has no claim to any association with the Ecclesiastical Province of Cincinnati.

To be blunt, in spite of adopting the (rightly disputed***) label "Roman Catholic," SGG no more belongs to the archdiocese than do any of the heretic and schismatic "churches," the synagogues, the Mormon temples, and the mosques scattered throughout the Cincinnati Metropolitan Statistical Area. Therefore, the ordo's title is not only grossly misleading (and ungrammatical), but also it's a further proof that these bumblers are just "playing church."

If their marketing strategy demanded they reference the archdiocese to which they do not belong, they should have described their ordo as based upon the former calendar and liturgical practice of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. That, however, would require an entirely different Latin text, the composition of which certainly lies well beyond their patently limited competence in the Church's official language. (We would do it in five words, omitting the "Church of SGG" absurdity****.)

There's only one conclusion: No one can have any confidence at all in His Presumptuousness's ORDO 2016. Permit us to re-emphasize an earlier point:  ORDO 2016's Latin should be error free.  Every syllable of copy needed to produce an ordo can be found in editions printed before the 1955 changes to the liturgy (and, truth be told, after, too). Old ordines are available from libraries, online sources, private collections, and booksellers, so there's no claiming lack of availability. That the errors we exposed today were allowed to stand is a condemnation of the whole cult crew and a witness to its abysmal malformation: these clerical cretins haven't yet begun to start thinking in Latin, as truly traditional clerics would.

Priests and laity would be wise never to consult Deacon Dan's ORDO 2016. Coming from the clownish cult masters, it's just not trustworthy. If you bought it, demand a refund.

* A one-minute search in Google Books yields a whole slew of examples, of which here are only a handful: loco Missae votivae SS. Trinitatis, loco Missae de Sta. Maria, loco Missae de Ssmo Corde, loco Missae de requiem, loco Missae solemnis, loco Missae hebdomalis, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, (as Rodgers and Hammerstein's King of Siam might say).

** The first page of the abbreviation key (that's all the preview displayed) is the work of an unkempt mind deprived by stony-hearted Mother Nature of any sense of consistency or thoroughness. As an example: for N, which in our example above is singular, the key lists the masculine plural form ("Nocturni"), yet in the phrase we translated, the word lessons is abbreviated by "LL," although the key only shows one "L" against the singular "Lectio." (These guys are thoroughly confused, aren't they?)

Tidy intellects often follow the common abbreviation convention of using suspensions consisting of one letter for the singular, then doubling the single letter for the plural  (e.g., N = nocturn, NN = nocturns; L = lesson, LL = lessons). They also understand that abbreviations like this must be catalogued in the key for the user's convenience. Furthermore, the key must be complete; users shouldn't have to do the compiler's work for him.

But, as we said, that's what tidy intellects do; sloppy pea brains produce what you find on the SGG Resources page. Over the next year, we'll point out similar breaches of orderly ordo construction.

*** An urbane Italian observer once described SGG's practice with the attenuative cattolicastro, "Catholic-ish," as we might say.

****One day we'll share with you a real canonist's opinion of the liturgical title "St. Gertrude the Great."