24 January 2009

Celebrating S Paul on Sunday

A number have bloggers have reminded us of the indult to celebrate one Mass tomorrow of the Conversion of S Paul in observance of the Pauline Year proclaimed by the Sovereign Pontiff and the Ecumenical Patriarch; and observed, correctly, that the Office is still to be of the Sunday. However, not everybody may be aware that the Instructio generalis de Liturgia Horarum, paragraph 245, allows, on a Sunday per annum, the celebration of a Votive Office, either in total or in part, either for a public cause or even just for devotion. It gives some examples of why one might do this; certainly an Ecumenical Pauline Year is more pressing than any of those examples. If one said the whole Office of S Paul, at First Evensong (that's what we call Vespers in the C of E) one would presumably repeat the forms provided for Second Evensong.

Incidentally, although Rome expects us to take the second Mass reading from the Sunday, here at S Thomas's, in an exotic act of biritualism, at that point in the Mass we are going to abandon momentarily the Bugniniliturgie for the Stancliffeliturgie and use the Common Worship Epistle, Galatians 1: 11-16a. Not that I am urging such lawlessness on anybody else.

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