What is the significance of a chirograph?
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 860
    Why is the Bl. JPII's Chirograph on Sacred Music called a chirograph? The document is listed under his Letters on the webpage, but the document itself would seem to be an Apostolic Letter in character. I found only one other one, founding a charitable house in Rome, although I didn't go through all his Letters. Definitions on the web are not enlightening in the least..

    unless, you know, he wrote it twice longhand on one piece of paper, cut it in half along a zigzag line, and gave the other half to Cardinal Arinze, which I kind of doubt happened. (That's the original definition of chirograph...)
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 860
    Yes, if this is how it starts out, I intend to have a rocking Saturday night.
  • CHGiffenCHGiffen
    Posts: 5,192
    A chirograph (cyrograph) is the term given to a medieval document, which has been written in duplicate, triplicate or very occasionally quadruplicate on a single piece of parchment, where the Latin word "chirographum" (or equivalent) has been written across the middle, and then cut through. By this means both parties to an agreement could possess a copy of its written record, and each copy could be verified as genuine through introduction to, and comparison with, the other.

    But...

    A more restricted use of the term "chirograph" is to describe a papal decree whose circulation—unlike an encyclical—is limited to the Roman curia.
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,215
    The Vatican Archives used to say on their website somewhere (the page is gone, but NYU has a summary) that a chirograph is a letter, either in Latin or the vernacular, written on plain paper and lacking any solemn character (i.e., it is not of a binding legal or doctrinal character). It may not have been entirely written by the Pope himself, and may only have been signed by him.
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 860
    Thanks. That still leaves open the question why this is only one of two chirographs that JPII issued. It is very emphatically written. Perhaps he meant to lay it out before he was gone but not give it a character that a whole raft of documents about the Eucharist at about the same time were designed to address--let them sink in before this becomes an Apostolic Letter? Confusing.
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 860
    Not that it seems to interest people, but I think I got it. Statements on music did not fit into his teaching program for the audiences, and by that time he was well past having the time to fit in a statement on music to, say, an assembly of musicians. The only other option for saying something--letters--carry some weight. There is a "letter" to Joseph Ratzinger on pontifical supremacy, e.g. Rome does not legislate on music, technically, so the option left open was a non-legislative letter.

    Something to keep the canon lawyers busy, I guess. Of course, I am sure we all wish it had been ex cathedra.
  • benedictgal
    Posts: 798
    Having read it and re-read it, I think that it seems to bear the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's finger prints all over it. Much of the wording and the ideas are very similar to what he said as Cardinal and parallel what he wrote in "A New Song for the Lord" and "Spirit of the Liturgy." Whose to say that both men didn't collaborate on this document? Maybe Pope John Paul II started getting tired of all of the strange stuff he had been subjected to during his Apostolic Voyages.
  • amindthatsuits
    Posts: 860
    I think you are right: that was the clear message of the final movement on the Liturgy at the end of the pontificate. "There was no dialogue after Vatican II. I have now listened. The conversation is headed in a new direction."

    I think George Weigel has it completely right: JPII is the "interpretive key" that was missing to VII. Everything he did--the Theology of the Body, the Catechesis on the Creed, the new canonizations as an emphasis that the 20th Century has seen more Christian martyrs than all other centuries combined, but a reminder the "old" saints speak to the modern condition, rethinking the Stations of the Cross, personal devotions, and the Rosary, all oriented "ever more clearly," as he would say, to the Cross and the Resurrection, to the Person of Jesus--was to say that VII was in continuity with the entire tradition of the Church, that when the Council Fathers said that any change must be gradual so as not to scandalize the faithful, that was what they meant.

    As a JPII convert, I do not even understand the way the "left" saw VII. But that is a conversation perhaps for the "General Catholic" discussion category.(-:

    Now that you mention it, the clarity of the document has a Ratzingerian sound, less poetry than one would expect on music from JPII. And it takes a really well trained musician, even if he is a Mozart devotee, to make that very perceptive comment about "elitist" forms of music that do not sound holy to the non-specialist. I was clicking through albums entitled "Missa Brevis," and clicked on someone with an English name, thinking it was a student of Tallis or something, and the sanctus started out like polyphony, and then burst into this great bombastic 20th Century quasi-tonal BLARE, and I snapped it off saying "horrible music." My jazz guitarist housemate (we share the music room, made livable only by the fact that he goes to bed at 6 Am) happened to be there, and, knowing I like modern music in its place, was genuinely puzzled. I just spat, "Totally wrong for its purpose," which left him even more confused. But it would not sound holy to the non-specialist. I like that stuff sometimes, and it didn;t sound like a Sanctus to me.
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