VIDEO: Holy Week Destroyed: Tenebrae of Holy Thursday (Anticipated on Wednesday) Suppressed
Behold the suppressed beauty of the
Office of Tenebrae for Holy Thursday (Anticipated late afternoon on Spy
Wednesday) courtesy of St. Gertrude the Great Roman Catholic Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
These (and all videos I will be posting)
have been recorded by SGG’s expert MC, Mr. Richard Vande Ryt, and are
(or will be) viewable on his YouTube Channel here.
Note that Part II of this three-part
upload is missing, but I am informed that Mr. Vande Ryt is recording
Tenebrae live again this year (as with all the Holy Week ceremonies, and
these will be available on his channel -and this blog- in due course).
Please also note that all the ceremonies
of the fully traditional Holy Week are streamed live from St. Gertrude
the Great Roman Catholic Church here.
From Wikipedia:
“In the Roman Catholic Church, “Tenebrae”
is the name given to the celebration, with special ceremonies, of Matins
and Lauds, the first two hours of the Divine Office, of the last three
days of Holy Week. The traditions regarding this service go back at
least to the ninth century. Originally celebrated after midnight, by the
late Middle Ages their celebration was anticipated on the afternoon or
evening of the preceding day.
The celebration of Matins and Lauds of
these days in the form referred to as Tenebrae in churches with a
sufficient number of clergy was universal in the Roman Rite until the
reform of the Holy Week ceremonies by Pope Pius XII in 1955. At that
time, the Easter Vigil was restored as a night office, moving that
Easter liturgy from Holy Saturday morning to the following night; the
principal liturgies of Holy Thursday and Good Friday were likewise moved
from morning to afternoon or evening, and thus Matins and Lauds were no
longer allowed to be anticipated on the preceding evening, except for
the Matins and Lauds of Holy Thursday in the case of cathedral churches
in which the Chrism Mass was held on Holy Thursday morning.”
Dr. Carol Byrne explains the pretext upon which Bugnini/Pius XII
suppressed Tenebrae, and the gravity of having done so, in her excellent
study (here):
“Before the 1955 reforms, Tenebrae was
widely celebrated in the Church and was well attended by lay people in
cathedrals, abbeys and large churches where there was an ample supply of
clergy. Nevertheless, the reformers arranged for its demise by an
astonishingly simple strategy: changing its time of celebration. The
Decree Maxima Redemptionis prohibited anticipating Matins and Lauds on
the previous evenings of the Triduum, (1) switching the time to the
morning hours. (2)
This effectively threw the proverbial
spanner into the work of centuries, for Tenebrae performed in the
morning not only destroys its coherence as a nocturnal Office, but also
the “atmospherics” of darkness on which its powerful symbolism relies in
order to create the right mood. Daylight Tenebrae is, of course, a
misnomer and has never been approved by the Church before the Bugnini
reform.
The self-contradictory nature of this
reform is also evident in the same Decree, which, in criticism of the
traditional Triduum, stated that “all these liturgical solemnities were
pushed back to the morning hours; certainly with detriment to the
liturgy’s meaning.” How could the reformers complain when that is
exactly what they did to the Office of Tenebrae?
False rivalry between the Mass & the Divine Office:The ostensible reason for displacing Tenebrae was that the Holy Thursday Mass should be celebrated in the evening to correspond with the time of the Last Supper. Yet, for many centuries prior to 1955, this Mass had been said in the morning – the progressivists scoffed that it was the “Mass of the Lord’s Breakfast” – and the Decree accused the traditional Holy Week schedule of creating “confusion between the Gospel accounts and the liturgical representations referring to them.
This was the first time in the History of the Church that an official document of the Holy See stood in judgement against its own approved tradition that had been hallowed by centuries of usage and condemned it as detrimental to a right understanding of the Holy Week liturgy. It was a barely concealed rallying cry for a liturgical revolution to usher in a “new understanding” of the Faith.”
