Cantate Domino

Serving any of the Extraordinary Form Masses, including our own Dominican Rite Mass cannot be learned by a book. Like many skills it requires an apprenticeship program—one where masters teach their students, who advance slowly year by year. As they advance they mentor those that follow them. So by the time the altar boys have reached their late teens, they have become masters in the own right.

So why do I have pictured a book on how to serve the Mass? Well, in general it is good to have a book. By having one you have the rubrics “codified” in a sense. This way, if someone accidentally added in a gesture, or a movement, or pretty much anything else, others can refer to the book to see if it was truly part of the original rite. Believe, me we Dominicans have a way of adding or subtracting things by accident (and sometimes just because). All it takes is a blink and we’re out of sync.

However, when we Dominicans adopted the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, we essentially put our Dominican Rite “on ice.” The trouble is, in any apprenticeship program, this is a death knell. Masters get old and die and there are no students to follow them. So it was a very good thing that we had the book lying around in our archives. Why? Because with the renewed interest in the Rite, there were no masters around to tell us how to do it. So we’ve had to reconstruct it through the book and also by inquiring with some of the elderly friars. Will we get it right? Perhaps so, but it’ll take an entire generation to kick start the apprenticeship program—assuming there’s enough interest for students or young men to become altar boys. We’ll see.

One of the projects I took on over the Thanksgiving weekend was to scan this book, clean it up and publish it using lulu.com. They do print on demand. Within hours of it being posted it sold 4 copies. Not bad for no advertisement; and it means there are some serious Dominican Rite lurkers out there. Since then Fr. Augustine made a posting of the book on his Dominican Liturgy Blog. Now that the word is out, we expect to print a whole lot more.