DISORDERED ORDO XII

Editor's Note: Dannie's ORDO 2017 went on sale last week, so we hastily modified our posting schedule in order to inoculate decent Catholics against the effects of its unwholesome influence. Be aware that it's crucial to the true faith to keep this liturgical plague isolated from the rest of Traddielandia.

(N.B. To make the reading more accessible, we've assigned the most detailed, technical comments to the footnotes for those experts who enjoy that kind of stuff.)

Quarantine, the state of the persons who are restrained within the limits of a ship or lazaretto, or otherwise prevented from having a free communication with the inhabitants of any country till the expiration of an appointed time... Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine  (1769)

Fault find with the Dirtbag as we do, the Readers really admire Dannie's shameless impertinence. After PL's year-long series of posts exposing the cankered execution of SGG's error-infected ORDO 2016, "One-Hand Dan" still has the effrontery to offer for sale an ORDO 2017. Anyone else would've lain low hoping the world would forget last year's embarrassing liturgical mishap.

But not His Insolency. 

From the sample pages shown on SGGResources, we saw that he and his sidekick, Silly Sal, did fix at least one howlier uncovered by Pistrina: At the top of p. 87 (Sep. 13), it correctly reads ad unicum N[octurnum] and not the illiteracy he wrote last year, viz. ad unicam N (click here for the post.) For piety's sake, let's hope those two knuckleheads also corrected the bad grammar of the year-end doxological tag to the BVM.

But don't count on it, or on too many other corrections, for we see they still print the ungrammatical Archidiœcesi (!!) Cincinnatensis on one of their cover images of St. Pius X. (The genitive of that 3rd declension word is "Archidioecesis," or, if His Flagrancy had really wanted to show off, the Greek genitive form "Archidioeceos.")

At any rate, even if they had adopted our many posted corrections to their gross errors of Latin, there'd still be loads more in any new text they added. For instance, the caption at the top of p. 56 for May 12* (which in 2016 was the Octave of the Ascension) reads

SS Nereii, Achillei [ampersand presumably for et] Domitillæ V et Pancratii MM  [= "Of Saints Nereus, Achilleus and Domitilla, Virgin, and Pancras, Martyrs"]

As the Church's Kalendarium indicates, the Missal and Breviary print, and choice Latin demands, the conjunction before Pancras should be atque or ac (shorter form of atque), not et.

You see, in the Roman Martyrology's narration, St. Pancras wasn't martyred on the Ardeatine Way along with Ss. Nereus and Achilleus, whose remains were much later transferred with Flavia Domitilla's. His is an entirely separate entry in the Martyrology for the same day, where his place of martyrdom is specified as the Aurelian Way. Moreoever, these martyrs gained their heavenly crown, in different centuries according to the Martyrology's  accounts: Nereus and Achilleus refused to sacrifice to idols because they had been baptized by the Apostle Peter (hence, they would surely have been executed in the 1st century of the Christian era), whereas Pancras was beheaded under Diocletian (perhaps A.D. 304 according to Thurston's Butler). .

Now, the well-schooled Roman clergy who compiled the Kalendarium and the liturgical books were sticklers for precision, given that a detail-loving juridical spirit might fairly be said to inform every office of the Curia. Unlike the ill-educated Tradistani nosebleeds, these men knew how to use Latin to indicate that while Pancras is named in the feast's title along with the other three, the collocation is different from that which the others possess among themselves.

If we bear in mind Lewis and Short's careful distinction between atque/ac and et, we recognize that Pancras's connection to the three is a close, internal one, in virtue of the others' sharing the same liturgical day with him; it is not the external connection of the other three different individual martyrs with each other in the same Martyrology paragraph. Accordingly, the Roman compilers, who knew Latin as well or better than their native language, wrote ac/atque, not et.**

But all that's beyond Deficient Dan and Silly Sal. We can't figure out why he didn't just copy verbatim from the Kalendarium. What on earth persuaded those two foul-ups to go it on their own? It's a mystery. But what isn't a mystery, however, is that SGG's ORDO 2017 is sure to be as tainted as SGG's ORDO 2016.

Since shame won't stop Dannie from spreading liturgical pathogens, it's everybody else's job to make sure his ORDO 2017 remains contained within the SW Ohio-Brooksville cult, where only distempered cultists can be afflicted.  To that end, PL asks you to pass the word around never to buy His Inadequacy's contaminated garbage.  Should you have acquaintances who're looking for an ordo, refer them to England's Saint Lawrence Press (SLP) – click here. Remind them of all the festering deficiencies in "One Hand's" 2016 edition, which we clinically brought to light:

Virulent ignorance of Latin
Toxic editorial ineptitude and inconsistency***
Diseased contempt for traditiion
Morbid failure to acknowledge others' contributions
Ulcerated pretentiousness
Mephitic liturgical incompetence

If you assist at a trad chapel, stop by the sacristy to see whether your "priest" is using Dannie's ORDO 2017. If you find the septic volume, approach him immediately and demand he replace it with the SLP edition. Withhold all contributions until he removes the contagion forever to someplace where it cannot endanger traditional Catholics, viz. the trash heap.

*Incidentally, it appears that Dannie and Sal didn't insert page headers indicating the month, so once again users will have to suffer the same inconvenience as last year when trying to find an entry.

** For those of you Latin-language wonks out there in cyberspace, you can find a similar usage of ac in the Kalendarium for May 3, July 10, July 28, August 1, August 17, and October 7, where there's a separate entry in the Martyrology for each name or names joined by the conjunction. The use of ac on November 4 is slightly different, where the Commemoration of the Octave and Ss. Vitalis and Agricola are closely related internally since they're both commemorations in the day's Mass and Office. Here ac = "and also, and in addition." Likewise on January 18, where St. Prisca is also to be commemorated with St. Paul on the feast of the Chair of St. Peter at Rome.

Oct. 21 is altogether another case: there are different usages among several printers to the Holy See: some join Ursula and her companions with et, as in the Missal, Breviary, and Martyrology, and others unite them with ac. In the latter case, the editors must have felt a strong connection between the virgin and the unnamed maidens who accompanied her in martyrdom at Cologne. (Likewise the atque of June 15.)

*** Although PL hasn't to date fully inspected a hard copy of Dannie's ORDO 2017, his posted materials suggest this pervasive editing defect hasn't been ameliorated at all. As an example, for September 14 (Exaltation of the Holy Cross), he reprints the same flawed note he had in the 2016 edition:

N.B: [sic] In Epistola Missæ ad cantum Ut in nomine Jesu ... ad infernorum genuflectitur (= "N.B. In the Epistle of the Mass one genuflects at the chant That in the name of Jesus ... to under the earth")

We didn't tackle this mess in our posts this year – we didn't have space for all Dannie's goofs—so it's no surprise it reappears in the 2017 edition. We draw your attention to three major faults:

First, the sophomoric qualifying word Missæ ("of the Mass"). Where else, we ask, would the day's Epistle be found except in the Mass of the day?! Don't try to defend Dannie by arguing that pericopes from Philippians 2 are also found in the day's Office. Those of the Chapter at Vespers, Lauds, and Terce extend only to v. 7 and that of the Chapter at None only contains vv. 8-9, whereas the words requiring a genuflection in the Epistle occur at v. 10. The addition of the word was pure amateurism.

Second, there's the stupidity of instructing the celebrant to kneel when the words are chanted. Not all Masses in Traddielandia are sung, not even in the sere badlands of Tradistan. (We guess we're all supposed to be impressed with the hint that at SGG it's a Missa solemnis or cantata.) 

Third, and more significantly, there's the incompetent (and untraditional) press style with the ellipses and unneeded word. 

With respect to the last failure, in good academic style, ellipsis points within a sentence or clause indicate an omission between the first and last words. That means you don't have to add the preposition ad (= "to"): That's what suspension points mean, for cryin' out loud! Furthermore, if Dannie were conversant with liturgical Latin texts, he wouldn't have used ellipses at all. For instance, the General Rubrics of the Roman Missal (xvii. 1) enjoin the priest to genuflect 

ad illa verba in Epistola: In nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur, etc. (= "at the words in the Epistle: In the name of Jesus every knee should bow, etc.")

In the good ol' days, it wasn't necessary to cue the celebrant when to rise by giving the last word of the clause, because back then a Catholic priest understood the Latin he was reading. The reference in the Epistle's following clause to every tongue confessing was enough to signal a return to his feet.

But Tradistani "clergy" aren't too swift, so Dannie and Silly Sal felt obliged to prompt them as to when to stand up. Insofar as PL's acquainted with many of these numbskulls, we aren't opposed to Dannie's over-the-top explicitness:  if one of the pesthouse bedwetters can skip the consecration, then the whole clown crew needs all the help it can get. But at a minimum the Latin should reflect tradition and not sound ridiculous.

When you think about it in Roman terms, Dannie's note is far too long for a proper Catholic ordo. An ordo should be spare in its language, restrained in its directions, chary of notes.  Most old ordines the Readers have don't remark on the genuflection anyway because a rubric printed in the Mass text itself instructs the celebrant to genuflect! Why clutter the ordo with an instruction a properly trained priest is bound to notice, right?

Nevertheless, we understand Dannie wants to project the image that he's an exquisite liturgist, watchful that no reverence be neglected owing to poor "seminary" formation or native witlessness. To that end, if Deacon Dan must belabor the obvious, we suggest inserting into the Mass instructions, not at the bottom of the entry, the following abbreviated language characteristic of the terseness of traditional, pre-Vatican II ordines, when well-trained, real Catholics compiled them:

Ad Epist. verba: in nomine Jesu, etc. genuflect.