by Fred Moleck
Medieval Cyberspace
If you haven't explored LiturgyHelp.com, you really must. One literally has most of the liturgies of the Latin rite Church at one's fingertips with the capability to print nifty orders for worship, a.k.a. worship aids.
I know what you are thinking, and you are wrong.
"Latin rite" doesn't mean the language in which the liturgy is celebrated. "Latin rite" is the designated part of the universal church to which we belong. So, don't get excited about another retro move to days gone by.
In cahoots with Creative Ministry Resources, an Australian liturgical center, GIA is purveying a comprehensive liturgical preparation device.
It includes the NAB lectionary, homilies, catechetical material, and rite for home service of communion for the sick-just to cite some of the fifteen divisions.
It is everything you need to prepare any parish liturgy just short of having the Cathedral Singers illustrate each musical item.
We now have the capacity to make the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church Latin rite a GIA friendly parish. It gives new meaning to "universal."
I couldn't help but wonder what Charlemagne would have done if he had had LiturgyHelp.com.
Charlemagne in the 700s wanted to do in his royal chapel what he saw and heard in the papal chapel.
If you've ever had a history of music or a history of liturgical music, you would be familiar with the story of his visiting Rome and being surprised that what they were singing and celebrating was not exactly what his guys were singing and celebrating.
He wanted to be more "politically correct,'' so he imported a book and a singer and installed the Roman rite in all of Gaul.
Well, it took years for the sacramentary to find its way northward and even more years to establish the rite.
After a few suppressions and persuasions, the Roman rite melded into the Gallican rite and-before you knew it-a rite and a repertory were developing. We call the latter chant.
Another outcome in this liturgical campaign was the visibility of the newly established Holy Roman Empire, whose imperial chief was . . . Charlemagne.
The monks and clerics must have been aghast when he announced, "Guys, we're going Roman!"
Can you imagine his going to the imperial scriptorium and telling the monks, "Guys, . . . we have a crash program here in the kingdom. I need four sacramentaries, four antiphonaria, and a ritus ordinandus so I can really be seen and felt as the first Holy Roman Emperor."
A cold chill swept through the monkish scribes. The magister scriptoriae gasped.
"How soon?" the monk whispered.
"How about four years?" Charlemagne imperially replied.
Gasps again rippled through the damp and dank Carolingian room.
"Well, all right," said Charles the Great, somewhat munificently. "How about six? If you make the deadline, then the monks from M�nchen [Munich] will send up extra kegs of beer for our Oktoberfest."
The gasps were replaced by "All right!!"
I know of no record of their meeting that deadline or how soon the Munich beer made it to Aix-le-chapelle.
Just imagine if he were a subscriber to the Roman-Carolingian LiturgyHelp.com.
He would have established the Roman rite in days by a few clicks into the links. He could print out the Roman rite and distribute it to all churches and monasteries and convents instantly-or at least to those communities where they could read and write.
He could have suppressed recalcitrant monasteries who wouldn't give up their own liturgical rites in a week and banished the monks off to the communities in the upper Rhine Valley.
He could accomplish that coup by simply canceling their subscription to the Roman-Carolingian LiturgyHelp.com, known to his contemporaries as R/C/Lithelp.com.
He would be revered and honored by the Roman papacy and be seen as the savior of the western world.
He would be known as Charles the Great . . . Charlemagne!
And all it took all was setting up a subscription service that would benefit the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church with Big Chuck at the throne.
You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net