DISORDERED ORDO VII

No one escapes talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it seriously. Montaigne

Pistrina is now in its eighth consecutive month of laying bare the idiocies and illiteracies of little Dannie Dolan's dreadfully executed ORDO 2016. (Remember we posted twice in December 2015 just after "One Hand" put his monstrosity on sale.) Throughout the remaining six months of this year-long, monthly series, we'll be featuring, in addition to the usual errors of language and failures of editorial competence, some liturgical blunders.

We're limiting our discussion of these blunders because liturgical details of this sort are highly complex and super technical. However, although they may not matter much to the average layman, they do matter to priests, who are obliged to say the divine office and celebrate Mass correctly. (They also hope the ordo they use is both accurate and not misleading.)

But before we get into this week's examples of ineptitude, we need to pause at mid-year to ask, Who really produced the Iliad of errors that the cult put out as its ORDO 2016? All along we've assigned the blame for all the boo-boos to "One-Hand Dan," and rightly so, because the embarrassing project was issued as $GG's ordo, and Wee Dan is MR. $GG.

But, let's all get real, shall we? Wee Dan hasn't the pluck, work ethic, or background to assemble and transcribe a full year's worth of text from old ordines. True, he's ignorant enough to commit all the blunders we've uncovered, but we can't see his sitting down and doing all the grunt work to grind out 110 word-processed pages of trash on his own. The guy doesn't drive a car, so how could we expect him to produce camera-ready copy for an error-infused ordo?

No way. Someone else has to be co-responsible for the mess. But who?

Checkie comes first to mind, primarily owing to all the bad Latin and all the editorial inconsistencies. But we can't envision the Cheeseball's knuckling down to compiling an ordo when he'd much prefer dabbling in his smarmy "Internet apostolate" on YouTube. (It's Tradistan's version of "Pee Wee's Playhouse.") So, more likely, we'll have to put the finger on one of the Young Fakers at $GG.  For obvious reasons, it could never be that hopeless yokel Lurch. However, it might be either Uneven-Steven or, with infinitely greater probability (considering Uneven's irregular "formation" [LOL]), the Forlorn Finn (unless the "principal" was drafted to do the job).

Isofar as we haven't yet confirmed the co-compiler's alter ego, we decided to invent a name so Dannie can share the blame with some concrete personage. Nothing apropos came to our minds until one of our learned commenters, the superb Tarquinius, reminded us of the late Umberto Eco's feral character Salvatore of Montferrat (appearing in the dazzling postmodern novel, The Name of the Rose). The narrator's description of this man-beast's speech fits the $GG co-compiler to a tee:

...I could never understand then, what language he spoke. It was not Latin, in which the lettered men of the monastery expressed themselves, it was not the vulgar tongue of those parts, or any other I had ever heard...I realized Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language. Or, rather, he had invented for himself a language...but [it was] precisely the Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion. Nor, for that matter, could I call Salvatore's speech a language, because in every human language there are rules and every term signifies ad placitum [= "by agreement"] a thing, according to a law that does not change...And yet, one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant...(pp. 46-47 of W. Weaver's 1983 translation).

Salvatore of Montferrat it is, then! Simply perfect for the blithering idiot who helped put together Dannie's disaster! For short, we'll call him "Silly Sal" from now own.

With the co-compiler's name settled, it's time for a quick look at Dim Dan's and Silly Sal's goofs for this month. We'll begin with what we think is a really easy-to-understand liturgical faux pas (at least on the part of these Tradistani fanatics): While examining Dannie's ORDO 2016, we Readers were struck by a note subjoined to four First Saturdays (Jan. 2, Feb. 6, Sep. 3, and Dec. 3), which allowed a votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Since we hadn't seen such a note in the pre-1955 American ordines in our collection, we were puzzled — until an authentic liturgical expert informed us that the practice originated in the 1960 (!!!) rubrics (cf. NR, #385 [c]).

Looks like someone got something confused.

Dumbo Dannie's and Silly Sal's liturgical confusion, as usual, extends to Latin usage.  Consider this garbled note for March 25 (p. 35):

Annuntiatio BMV die 4 Aprilis translatum

Although the text is sheer nonsense, here's one literal translation (if such a thing is possible here):

The Annunciation of the BVM from the 4th day of April a transferred thing*

Huh?????

H-E-L-L-O-O-O,  S-A-L-V-A-T-O-R-A-A-A-Y-Y-Y-Y...

O.K., O.K. O.K., you rabid, depraved cultlings!

We hear your guttural protests that Dannie's and Silly Sal's horrific Latin is still intelligible. Fine by us, then! We'll concede the Latin doesn't have to be grammatically or syntactically correct in order to figure out that the Feast of the Annunciation for the year 2016 is transferred to April 4 owing to Good Friday's falling on March 25.

HOWEVER, we do insist: if you're producing a Latin ordo, then the instructions shouldn't be written in dog Latin. We affirm they should be written in the Latin of the "lettered men of the monastery," and not in Salvatore of Montferrat's somehow decipherable gibberish.

Apparently what happened was that Silly Sal and Dimwit Dannie confused the verbal formulae for the starting- and end-points of a transferred feast. And since neither understands Latin, they used the wrong verb form — probably because their models were abbreviated, and our two sede clowns didn't have the requisite knowledge to expand them correctly. We'll explain s briefly as we can:

Translatum is a (neuter) perfect passive participle meaning "(having been) transferred," the neuter noun festum ("feast") — or even officium ("office") — being the understood antecedent. In the competently executed ordines of the past, it's used on the day to which (viz., Apr. 4) the feast is transferred, not on the day from which it's transferred (viz., Mar. 25). Silly Sal and Dannie, copying from a good model, get this right on April 4 with their Transl. ex 25 Mar. (= translatum ex 25 Martii, "transferred from March 25"). Inasmuch  as they were content to reproduce the abbreviated phrase of their original, they dodged a bullet there.

As for the gobbledegook they printed for March 25, we have no idea how they could have botched it so grotesquely. In a number of American ordines, we've seen a note something like the following: Fest(um) Annuntiat(ionis) B(eatae) M(ariae) V(irginis) transf(ertur) in  [arabic numeral] April(is) — "the Feast of the Annunciation of the BVM is transferred to the xth of April."

The question is: Why didn't these Bozos just reproduce, with the appropriate date change, that abbreviated text instead of trying to make up their own? Maybe they were trying to show off or to differentiate their edition from other editions. Who knows what goes on in these morons' minds? The better question, however, is How did they make such a galactic blunder if they had models in front of them?

One possibility is they might have confused the letter f in the abbreviation transf for the letter l in the abbreviation Transl, and as a result fell flat on their ignorant faces as they tried to spell the word out. To be sure, if either one of the idiots had studied first-year Latin, he would have sensed something was wrong since Annuntiatio is feminine and therefore couldn't be modified by the neuter translatum.

Their ignorance of basic Latin as well as their unfamiliarity with liturgical-Latin usage also caused another HUGE error — the word die in the ablative case (the "from" case in its true ablative function).  First off, these two knuckleheads didn't have enough sense to realize that in a liturgical note like this, you're pointing TO a future date, so the ablative is wrong. Furthermore, the blunder shows Dannie and Silly Sal aren't familiar with standard rubrical texts where the usual idiom "to transfer to" is transferre in + the accusative case.** Accordingly, if they had to insert the Latin word for "day" (as do some liturgical books), they should have written "in diem 4 Aprilis."

PL has said it a thousand times, but we'll say it again. Little Dannie Dolan and his whole cult crew are faking it. They're trying to trick you into believing they're the Church's last stand so you'll hand over your money to keep the crumbling cult center afloat. It's a sure bet that if he's wrong about the liturgy, he's wrong about theology. You can put an end to all Wee Dan's confounded babbling about stuff he knows nothing about:

JUST STARVE THE BEAST!

*Of course, you could argue that, by translating it as "the Annunciation of the BVM on the 4th day of April [is] a transferred thing," you get something that very distantly approaches sense. But that's a laughable stretch. Besides, no Catholic liturgist has ever written such a barbarity. The shades of Gavantus would shriek, no doubt.

** Here are only a few of many, many examples culled almost at random from the literature, which will illustrate how ignorant Dumb Dannie and Silly Sal are of liturgical Latin usage. In the Rubrics we find the following: transfertur in primam diem and transfertur in Feriam secundam sequentem. Among liturgical writers we find transferenda sunt in aliam diem (de Herdt), transferenda sunt in proximiorem insequentem diem (Wuest),  transferatur in aliam diem and transfertur in 25 junii (Callewaert), and in quam diem festa transferri debeant (Wapelhorst).  In the Roman Missal we find transferenda sit in Dominicam majorem. Some authors (v.g., Wuest and Bouvry) occasionally use ad instead of in, but the object of the preposition is always an accusative. It's as plain as the nose on your face (unless you're Salvatore of Montferrat, that is): Dannie and Co. don't really study the liturgy or else they would've correctly used this very common liturgical expression. All they really can do is put on dolly-dress-up shows, for which you don't need any Latin or professional rubrical knowledge.