Dear Mia,

I don't know if this will help you, but HERE is a practice mp3 of the Dies Irae (and Requiem Mass).

In Christ,
JMO

Thank you Jeff and Mary Jane for the great info. I'm very encouraged. Maybe I can do Dies in communion and In Paradisum and Chorus Angelorum at the end. This will be a big challenge for us. The recordings will also help my schola. They do really need them.
Thanks,
mia

Is there any sanctioned procedure for "cutting" this sequence, the way there is with Lauda Sion, for instance?
Not that I would be allowed to us it in any case, under any circumstances...

(Save the Liturgy, Save the World)

So, it's ok to cut some parts?
Mia

I think so, but you could use it somewhere else as alius cantus aptus.

Is there a FAQ statement somewhere explaining the current status of the Dies Irae? I still hear occasionally that it's "suppressed".

I must tell you that my attendance at the Byrd Festival really opened up my mind to many things, among which the need for liberality with regards to tradition. The propers for one Mass were take from older Missals. The Gospel was read from the nave, contrary to the statement in the GIRM. There were other liberties taken. The Sequence is always sung at the Colloq for ordinary form Requiem Mass. And so on. How can we justify these liberties taken with the letter of the law? I think it has to do with the spirit of the Motu Proprio. The idea isn't only to liberalize the 1962 rite but to open up all of history. What was sacred then is sacred now. I can't really make the argument here according to the letter of the law but would rather appeal to a normal sense of liberality, which is a welcome relief after 40 years in which the past has been artificially closed to us.

Well, in this case, you have a pretty clear prohibition that goes way back, as Fr. Ruff points out. That it was ignored is another matter. It really has to do with whether we take liberties in the direction of ideals or in the direction away from them.

Well, I don't have enough experience in the EF but in the OF, you certainly could.

Please forgive me Jeffrey, but I cringed when you said "spirit of the motu proprio". How far is this from the "spirit of Vatican II" that many of us deal with all the time? Just asking..

For me, I prefer to stick to what Church gives us. Traditional practice can be placed before the proper authorities and I am not one among them. You know I'd like go back to the medieval Office, but I don't have that authority.

Jeffrey, I think you’re treading a slippery slope when you advocate deviating from the norms of the Mass. It is not within the authority of an individual to change the Mass as given in the books in any way. We are supposed to be automatons in implementing the liturgy; to do otherwise is to bring our subjectivity into it at the expense of catholicity. (small c)

Dies iræ is not given in the OF books, and there is no freedom given for sequences to be sung that aren’t in those books.

As I say, this is a rather silly situation because (almost) the same text is required for the same celebration in the EF.

Jan: AFAIK, in the EF, Dies iræ is required for All Souls, not just “permitted”.

Well, there is a compromise that can be employed. For the 1962 Missal, one could sing one of the Byrd proper as a motet in the traditional place (Communion). I sympathize with your desire, but also think of the great Gabrieli works that don't fit because we don't use the old Venetian Rite. One might look to see if the texts Byrd employs were shifted to another day. But, as you say, we can sing the Byrd propers for the modern liturgy. Since we mostly all want to move that liturgy towards more Latin, it would be a wonderful way. OTOH if there was a good polyphonic setting of the proper Introit assigned by the 1962 Missal for Assumption, one couldn't do it for the modern OF. I guess I just prefer to let Rome decide these things and work within those parameters. I think I've read more than once at NLM and maybe here that by giving oneself up to the rigidity of the older Rite, one achieves a liberation. But, Jeffrey, I do understand. Some of the best music I've ever heard was at reconstructed liturgies.

Jeffrey, I sympathize with you! I am faced with this situation all the time at St Stephen's which of course is a parish exclusively dedicated to the EF in the diocese of Sacramento. The feast of the Assumption is a good case in point. I look longingly at the restored medieval propers in the Graduale Romanum (1974) realizing I am must sing the modern musical creations appointed to be sung in 1950. I see this as part of the problem of using a missal (1962) frozen in time, without any elasticity. At St Stephen's, the Byrd propers for the Assumption would not be allowed to be sung (nor would they ever allow a "straw" or lay sub-deacon), the FSSP liturgists and rubricists are clear, and I have to be obedient, though of course I thoroughly disagree. The Church dumped the 1950 propers in favor of the medieval ones, and yet, because we celebrate with the 1962 books, we have to continue using these texts. It is my belief that these questions will have to be addressed by the Ecclesia Dei commission at some point, along with questions of calendar, the horribly "restored" Holy Week of 1955, the use of english, etc. etc., but until then we can only wait and hope!

Well, Jeffrey, you have to follow authority and the FSSP is used to watching its Ps and Qs (hey, where did that expression come from?). But I must say that the atmosphere of liberality that I found in Portland was a great thing. There was no one around to wag fingers etc., like the Red Guard liturgy police. People actually use their brains to think reasonable thoughts about the spirit of the times.

This whole thing reminds me of the time we called Fr. Skeris about using the Dies Irae in the new rite, and we were seeking a justification for putting it before the Gospel rather than singing it for offertory or something. He explained and explained and finally just said: "Oh for goodness sake, this is ridiculous: it IS a Sequence!!!"

With this liturgy stuff, it is all too easy to get focused on the trees and forget the forest. St. Paul says something about the law and the spirit that would seem to apply here.

One more question about All Souls Day. In my 1952 St. Andrew's Missal it says if Nov 2nd falls on a Sunday, one celebrates the Feast on Nov 3rd. Is that still in effect for the 1962 Mass? It says nothing in my 1962 Missal nor in the 1962 Liber. (I need a 1962 'Ordo'...is there an online source?). Sorry all. This is my first
year with the EF.

Found the answer. www.sanctamissa.org has the ordo for 1962. November 2nd (All Souls Day) is on a Sunday this year but celebrated on November 3rd (Monday).

What we need is a fix on precisely what the error of the "Spirit of Vatican II" truly was. It was an excuse for mandatory heterodoxy, for undermining the true intent and contradicting the letter and the purpose of the reform. The great irony is that this liberalizing Council was used by people invoking its spirit as a means for closing off all history and tradition to us, banning the past -- a kind of autocratic and despotic censorship of all treasured things came into effect. It was NOT, however, the mere desire to follow the spirit of the Council that itself was the problem. The Council did have a spirit but it was one that opened up the Church, not shut it off from its source of life, as they attempted.

We don't want to react against their errors by becoming liturgical pharisees.

I don't see why there would be any problem at all in liberalizing all Sequences right now. There would be no meltdown, no disaster. It would provide fantastic new energy. By the way, there are some people who claim that this is precisely what V2 effectively did in making Sequences optional.

In answer to your question, Jeffrey, I would simply “say the black, do the red”. Yes, even if this means restricting oneself to settings of texts that may have been composed recently.

The Mass is what it is as a result of the competence of the designated authorities. We have no right to be changing it. If you make this change, there is ultimately little argument one can make against less benign changes.....ISTM.

Of course, this very situation is maybe one reason why the “alius cantus aptus” permission is in the OF rubrics for introits--allowance for texts that are part of the rite’s tradition without being part of the book itself.

In the EF Mass, until further change from Rome, 1950s proper texts it is...for now, at least. The proper course here, strictly speaking, if one disagrees with this is not to implement the changes oneself, but to push for change to allow some form of “alius cantus aptus”.

That’s just what the books say. Don’t shoot the messenger.

I appreciate Jeffrey Tucker's reading of the spirit of the motu proprio and the papal teaching which accompanied it. There was more depth to Summorum Pontificum than most people realize, including apparent restrictions on papal authority over the liturgy. But I would caution others against overexuberance.

Firstly, in the old days, a national Byrd Festival would have merited an episcopal or even papal indult for use of the older Propers.

Secondly, the radical liturgical changes issued from 1947 to 1962 were not universally implemented, and/or have not been universally followed by groups under the pastoral care of Ecclesia Dei. One well-known example is the Confiteor before Communion. Another is the Missa "Gaudeamus" for Assumption. However, these differences are already a real source of real strife in the lives of the EF communities, which is to be expected from the Scriptural institution of liturgical norms (I Cor 14.26-40). Some groups even use certain particular Missal editions simply to make the point that they don't recognize the validity of certain Popes.

All of the aforementioned older practices occurred within living memory, and so form a living tradition in living communities; there was no resurrection from dead text. And all of the practices had received explicit, longstanding papal approval--so we know that they are surely "what earlier generations held sacred", and not some abuse of which earlier generations were guilty. None of the practices was officially reprobated by Rome, just removed, which is a subtle distinction--the intent was still to forbid, but not because the original practice isn't salutary.

Pastorally, I think you would have a hard time at an existing EF community (or a new one which is trying to attract the faithful from, say, the SSPX) if you were to try to reintroduce, for example, a sequence at Christmas Midnight Mass. There are people who would be suspicious if the Pope himself reintroduced that sequence. They have hand missals which don't have a sequence. Many have been going to Midnight Mass for years and know what to expect. A sequence would be hard to miss, so you couldn't just slip it in. Perhaps it is something for the Novus Ordo.