Mass by candlelight just before dawn.

“THE RORATE MASS”A beautiful custom arose in Germany and Eastern Europe of saying an Advent Votive Mass of our Lady in the darkness just before dawn, entirely by candlelight. As well as being very ancient and very suitable to the few days before Christmass, it also comes round about the time (in the Northern hemisphere) of our shortest day. It thus has pastoral potential just when the human frame and psyche need to be cheered up by the prospect of lengthening days and the return of Light.

Mass goers went without their missals, were caught up in what they knew was happening. A lesson here.

(Oh. “Rorate coeli” are the first words of the post-introductory mass. “Rain down” is mine.)

For instance, what ever happened to Ember Days?

The ancient tradition of Ember Days, like so many other traditions, was just wiped away in the 1960s, as part of the “extreme makeover” approach of a Vatican committee that suppressed or invented what they thought the world now needed. It’s completely contrary to the way the liturgy has always been treated: as an inheritance to be proudly maintained and jealously protected. How could such a thing have happened?

We were something new that had happened. Whoopee.

A purge of this magnitude arose from the belief that modern man is essentially different from his predecessors, to such an extent that what past generations possessed and made use of can no longer be assumed to be profitable to modern people. This belief, as false as the day is long, dovetailed with the mania for a system and method characteristic of modern times:…