DISORDERED ORDO I (part b)

One's own incompetence is a difficult fact to accept. Townsend

Editor's Note: Today's post continues last week's airing of the editorial incompetence of  Tradistani "primate" Dannie Dolan's CATastrophically botched attempt to publish a "litugical ordo." (That was how the cult characterized the mess on the SGGResources site before its speedy removal from sale. Oddly enough, their usually heavily promoted wall calendar has also mysteriously disappeared from view.)

We caution the audience that the content below is somewhat technical and perhaps chiefly of interest to traditional Catholics who pride themselves on their knowledge of the liturgy. Nonetheless, it's still accessible to anyone who enjoys seeing the cat let out of the bag with respect to the cult masters' highly dubious "expertise."

Let's pick up where we left off last week...

SIGN OF FORLORNNESS

The full-flowering of the cognitively impaired compiler's incompetence as an editor is on sorry display in the section immediately following the explanation of abbreviations. Captioned "II Signa pro Missa" (notations indicating whether certain Masses of the dead are permitted or prohibited on a given day), the first problem we noticed was there's no previous roman numeral I for the numeral II we see. (An effect of ADD perhaps?) Then a series of subject-verb agreement blunders follows along with a number of wrong morphemes for the adjective exsequialis, plus an error in case usage. These are small potatoes in comparison with this failure of rubrical understanding and punctuation opposite the signum "RD":

diebus III, VII, et XXX anniv.

Wow! This dumbo's just destitute of everything it takes to be a "priest" as well as a compiler. We want you to see what we mean, so we ask you to bear with the little excursus that follows. (Anyway, as traddies, we're certain you've got more than a passing interest in the liturgy. Yes or no?)

What the words in blue are supposed to mean, according to the 1944 edition of Matters Liturgical, is, "On the Third, Seventh, Thirtieth, and Anniversary Days...: one High Mass, or one Low Mass of Requiem may be said in any Church on all days on which it is not prohibited" (§294.1), emphasis ours. (N.B.: there are four permitted days.) 

But that's not what could be interpreted at face value as the meaning! Although the SGG compiler's phrase is really gibberish, the best we could say in charity is that it means "on the 3rd, 7th, and 30th anniversary days," i.e., three days, apparently. In other words, the little goofball doesn't understand what the "anniversary day" of death means. (We would refer him to Du Cange, but he probably couldn't read the Latin definitions.)

It's enough to make a cat laugh. This chucklehead needs lots of help for next year, so we'll give him two suggestions:

diebus III, VII, XXX et die anniv ─ or much, much better: die III, VII, XXX et anniv

Anybody willing to bet that the squirrel won't accept our kind assistance?

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OFF-KEY NOTE

If you were so unlucky as to buy a copy of Dannie's ORDO 2016, you may have been puzzled by the parenthesized abbreviations in the middle columns, such as:

(pdF-pd), (fff-ff), (fdf-pf), (ddd-dd), (ff²f⁴-ff), etc. 

Intriguing, huh? How would you crack the code, if you had to?

Why, you'd look for the key in the explanation of abbreviations, of course!

There, Dannie's ordo does tell you the letters refer to the psalms in the canonical Hours, although in the key to the letter F, the unlettered compiler used the wrong grammatical number for the verb. (It should read dicuntur Psalmi, not dicitur Psalmi). But, then, how do you interpret the cipher of three letters followed by two others joined to the foregoing three by a hyphen? More mysteriously, what do the superscripted numerals mean?

As hard as you might search for an answer, it's nowhere to be found in Dannie's incompetently edited ORDO 2016.  (The cat must have got the dumb compiler's tongue.) If you want to know, you'll either have to guess or, better still, consult the Saint Lawrence Press (SLP) edition's explanation of the letters. (N.B. The SLP ordo appears to be the unacknowledged source of Dannie's top-secret psalm codes.)

The only drawback is you have to be able to read Latin. The compiler's deficiency in that language may also explain why he failed to heed the SLP's assertion ─ printed on the title page ─ of copyright protection for proprietary content. (Niceties like intellectual property rights must not matter to the SGG blockhead.)

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"THOU BALD HEAD"[-ER]

Above all else, an ordo should make it easy for a priest (and even a dubious cult "priest") to locate what he needs quickly, especially when planning. But whoever uses Dannie's ORDO 2016 will be out of luck on that score, for the absented-minded compiler forgot to provide page headers with the names of the months. That means if a priest wants to check something, he can't just conveniently thumb the pages until he finds one with the month he's looking for and go quickly from there. He has to make a guess where the month might be, then leaf through the book until he finds the sole page that captions the month, and only then start hunting for the day he wants.

What a pain in the neck!

Why didn't the nincompoop compiler insert headers on every page so the month could be located much more efficiently? It's not as though page headers in ordines are a wicked Modernist innovation. We sampled old European ordines from 1756, 1770, 1846, 1886, 1899, 1902, 1907 as well as the Cincinnati editions of 1920 and 1954 in addition to all those published by St. Paul in the 1940s. On every page, we found the appropriate monthly headers.

When will Dannie's dimwit compiler stop snubbing Tradition? Do you think he'll ever learn to honor it? Perhaps he will -- when a cat can lick its ear.

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THE MOTHER OF ALL FLUBS

Of all the editorial failures in Dannie's ORDO 2016, the pièce de résistance is easily the conspicuously missing Martyrology letter needed to pronounce the day of the lunar month. In a rebellious departure from Tradition, Dannie's ORDO 2016 does not include any of the customary calendrical data available in ordines from the past. Why, on its title page, it doesn't even bother to tell us that Annus Domini MMXVI is a leap year! To be sure, we've no problem in general with the compiler's negligence. Cult "clergy" probably don't know the difference between a Golden Number and the Golden Arches or the epact and a fanny-pack. (It would have been of practical value, though, to have included a table of the 2016 movable feasts.)

However, our specific problem with the compiler's thumbing his nose at Tradition is that Dannie's ORDO 2016, in what appears to our eyes as an undisguised usurpation of  SLP practice and press style, reminds his users of the Martyrology's elogia for movable feasts and offices. The reminder can only imply, we think, a liturgical presumption of reciting in choir the Martyrology at Prime or, at the very least, encouragement of its fitting reading in private. Therefore, at the beginning Dannie's ORDO 2016 should have supplied the Martyrology letter for 2016 (viz., B)  and the new letter for 2017 (viz., b) at the end.

We call this apparently minor oversight the "mother of all flubs" because it represents the union of pretense and insouciance. The subliminal message behind Dannie's entire ordo effort is that SGG is TradWorld's omphalos of authentic Latin-rite praxis. It's the last place in Christendom that still does it right. Follow their leader, and you, too, can be fully Roman Catholic. Yet the SGG compiler can't be bothered to provide a necessary element for correct recitation. Cult affectation and mummery once again on parade.

A closely related example comes to mind. Seeing that Dannie's "copy cat" compiler adopted SLP's Martyrology reminders, if the SGG cult "clergy" were really the connoisseurs of ceremony they want you to believe they are, at December 24
how could the compiler have failed to remark upon the genuflection at the heralding of the Incarnation in the Martyrology? How nicely would the direction have paired with the fussy observation about the liturgical gesture in the Vespers' hymn "ob reverentiam divinæ Incarnationis"!* Ignorance and inconsistency cost Dannie an opportunity to reinforce his empty claim to ceremonial exquisité. Next year, "One Hand" should press into service a far less challenged bed-wetter to compile his ORDO 2017 (the publication of which we're eagerly anticipating).

You should agree by now that Dannie ought to get out of the liturgical publishing business altogether. It seems he's produced two big flops this year. Maybe he can add to Checkie's current amateur and uneasy performances on YouTube with some cat videos of his marauding familiars, the murderous Caravaggio and its fiendish pal. Those two hellish felines seem to be the only beasts at SGG that can do something right.

* From a purely theatrical standpoint, you might have thought His Staginess would've directed his out-of-sorts compiler to insert a note about the majestic Vigil-of-Christmas ceremony at Prime in preference ─ or in addition ─ to the note on a prayerful bow at the Vespers' hymn. The solemn chanting of the Roman Martyrology's synchronistic chronology, with its stately cadences, haunting tones, and inexorable textual and musical crescendo building to the choir's reverential genuflection en masse at the Christmas proclamation, is one of the signal dramatic moments in the normally reticent Roman rite.  But maybe the fact that the instruction for Vespers came from the ceremonial for bishops clouded Wee Dan's histrionic judgment: We're never to forget that this slimy maggot is a "bishop," are we? Well, at least we know the cult's priorities: personal (and unwarranted) prestige trumps ritual splendor. The cult masters can't even live up to their own hype.