A Tridentine Jewel Box

I recently was priveleged to pass my gaze over a wonderful parcel of photos from the dedication of St. Mary's Oratory in cozy little Wausau, Wisconsin, a glowing little jewelbox of the German immigrant neo-Gothic of the Midwest. The mother church of the town, sermons were given there in German well into the 1930s.

The church's restoration, which includes triptychs that would have made the van Eyck brothers proud, new altars crowned with gilded and crocketed canopies, and dark oaken choirstalls spiked with medieval filigree worthy of a Burgundian duke, was a pet project of the Institute of Christ the King, equal in splendor to its Italian seminary, housed in an ancient villa nestled in the hills north of Florence. The Institute is distinctly traditional in its piety, and, having the indult, consecrated the restored church with full billowing Tridentine pomp.

There is no word for church, really, in English, when it comes to talking about the physical fabric of the building. We make due with assigning the word church, more properly denoting the people, the assembly, the Ecclesia outside of space and time. In Latin, the word Templum is most fittingly applied to the church building, and indeed, in Rome, we often hear of the Tempietto up on the Janiculum, and, more importantly, the Templum Vaticanum. There is something solid, earthy and foreign to the word temple, and it makes you shiver a little to apply it to an ordinary little parish church, as if Catholicism had its own sacrificial priesthood, slaughtering lambs--

But it does, does it not? What's the Eucharist? Sunday brunch? It's a banquet, a wedding feast, but it's a sacrificial banquet. The sacrifice has been made unbloody, but a sacrifice it remains, returning always to the bloody sacrifice of Mount Calvary with which it is indelibly, mystically linked through space and time. The two are indistinguishable, the two are the same sacrifice. It, unbloody now, is still as solid and real as the sacrifices of the Jewish Temple--and more so, as St. Paul reminds us. To those of an anemic and disembodied spiritual turn, perhaps temple sounds too strange. Perhaps they'd prefer something airy and light: faith community, gathering, something luminous and Gnostic.

I'll take templum any day: it is a word one can grip, and the rites of Trent for its dedication have an equally solid, physical, real feel to them, full of oils and dust and water, sprinklings and daubings.

So, speaking of sprinkling, let's talk about Lustration.

Now, Lustration is one of those great Catholic words which sound sinful but really aren't, like lavation, or my favorite, occult compensation, which sounds like something Goths do on moonless nights, but really has to do with property rights. (There's also anamnesis, but, strictly speaking, that really sounds more like a mental disease than anything disordered.)

The Lustration was part of the antique rite of a church's dedication, a sprinkling of the church's exterior in solemn procession using a curious mixture known as Gregorian Water, in which water, ash, salt, and wine were mingled. They would circle the church three times. The Blessed Jacobus de Voragine in his thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea Sanctorum notes the procession's triune nature mirrors the "triple circuit that Christ made for the sanctification of the Church," from heaven to earth, from earth to limbo, and back to earth, where He again rose to Heaven. The church would then be entered through the principal door by the consecratory Bishop, who struck his crozier against the portals thrice and cried aloud three times:

"Lift up your gates, ye princes, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the king of glory shall come in." And from the inside a deacon answers “Who is this King of Glory?" The Pontiff and the clergy say "The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle." Then all shout "Open up!" The deacon opens the door and the pontiff, with the end of his crosier crosses the threshold, saying: "Behold the sign + of the Cross, flee, all ye phantoms." Then, all enter the church. Once The Pontiff [bishop] is in, the Pontiff says aloud: "Peace be to this house." And the deacon who was inside answers: "At thine incoming."

This fascinating little rite, which I am given to understand is kept in a slightly different form among the Jesuits at Gonzaga on Palm Sunday, is virtually identical in content to the description given by the Blessed Jacobus:

The thrice-repeated knocking at the door of the church signifies the threefold right that Christ has in the Church...by creation, redemption, and of the promise of glorification. The triple proclamation, "Lift up your gates, ye princes," denotes Christ's threefold power, namely, in heaven, on earth, and in hell.

The Church's dedication then proceeds in earnest, with the singing of litanies, an internal aspersion of the Church and a unique lustration of the altar with the Gregorian Water to set it apart from the world of the secular. Water is used in the aspersion, according to the Blessed Jacobus, "to remove every malediction [because from] the beginning, the earth was accursed with its fruit because its fruit was the means by which man was deceived, but water was not subject to any malediction. Hence it is that Jesus ate fish, but there is no written, explicit record of His eating meat, except perhaps the Paschal lamb..." Perhaps a somewhat fanciful scholastic gloss, but interesting nonetheless.

Then follows the actual taking possession of the Church by the Bishop in the name of God, which includes a very strange and evocative rite, whose exact meaning has always eluded me but nonetheless has a peculiar fascination for me. Vested in his violet cope, the Bishop moves to a place that has been prepared below the altar rail, where sand and ashes have been spread in the shape of a large X. He then scribes on the X the letters of the Latin and Greek tongues. There is always something numinous and elemental about alphabets; perhaps it's just a leftover fantasy of the Judaic obsession with letters and numbers that had full flower in the more heterodox branches of Hebrew mysticism, but nonetheless these signs still have significance to us today. Jacobus describes the rite in great detail:

...the alphabet is written on the floor, and this represents the joining of the two peoples, the Gentiles and the Jews...wrought by Christ by means of the Cross. Therefore, the cross is drawn...obliquely...to signify Hh who at first was on the right has gone over to the left, and that he who was at the head has been put at the tail... The cross is drawn obliquely because one Testament is contained within the other, and a wheel was in a wheel: Ezek. 1:16.

The Christian, I suppose, is philosophically the child of Jeremiah and Socrates, or, even more appropriately, David and the Sibyl. The Christian has a Greek head and a Hebrew heart, and here it is, enshrined in the very ritual to hallow God's home.

I spoke of the new Oratory as a little jewel box, and it truly is, considered in even the starkest architectural-crtical terms. But so is the rite that consecrated it; the old ceremony conducted here still has the power to fascinate, beguile, and most importantly, make holy the throne of God on earth. I examine the other parts of the rite. I see photographs from the deposition of those sacred spiritual gems, the Relics which adorn the altars. I see the marking of dedicatory crosses on the walls--which Jacobus compares to an Imperial banner of victory raised over a captured city. I see the Unctions (another one of those amusingly un-sinful words). I see the vestition of the altar and the Pontifical Mass with its Sacrifice and its Anamnesis (that recollection and memory which sound so amnesiac to our unknowing Anglo-Saxon ears), it seems an inexhaustible hoarde of tangible grace caged so wonderfully by this temple.

No words of mine could give the true sense of the sparkle of this solid, earthy rite, conducted in so obscure and normal a place as Wausau, Wisconsin, under the gilded shadow of a temple filled with open triptychs that bloom like so many gaudy and glorious Flemish enamels.

Thanks to Zadok for discovering these photographs. And a word to my friends: Wausau isn't so far away from ND. I have two words: road trip!