Guardi's image of the ducal Bucentoro state barge being rowed out to the blessing of the sea at Venice.

The 1964 Rituale Romanum

Due to a peculiar and wonderful series of events, I have become the proud owner of a much-loved and much-worn edition of the American version of the mid-Vatican II Roman Ritual. Confiteor: I borrowed the book from the parish library around two or three years ago and promptly forgot about it; I only recently returned it and the parish secretary, a good and deserving lady (and a reader of this blog), did a little bit of asking around the parish office, and then told me I could keep it, considering I would probably make better use of it myself than at the Co-Cathedral, considering many of the texts and rubrics included are now sadly defunct.

It's a fascinating text because of its somewhat transitional nature and the quality of the English translations of many of the benedictions, allocutions and orations. The only fly in the ointment is the persistent and slightly irritating use of "May He also be with you" for et cum spiritu tuo. Unlike the current Book of Blessings, with its more general prayers, it contains all sorts of formulas for the blessings of unusual (sometimes slightly bizarre) events and objects, including quite a few approved, yet un-codified, in the previous decade by Pius XII.

Paging through it, one can find an English translation of the old rites for exorcisms of people and places--including some finely baroque adjurations of the ancient serpent, every spectre from hell, every unclean spirit, liberally spangled with red signs of the cross--and also processions for averting tempests and on rogation days, a deprecatory blessing against pests, benedictions of radio stations, beer, bees, the sea, a bridal chamber (Christopher West take note!), lime-kilns, marble factories, lard, lillies (for St. Anthony's day), fire, cars, wheelchairs, "a more solemn blessing of a railway and its cars," seismographs, mountain-climbing tools, dynamos, and, most strangely, mobile film units for road safety, which are introduced with this surprisingly flippant--if appropriate--note: "On August 9, 1961, Good Pope John blessed forty mobile film units designed by the Italian government to inform the people, both pedestrians and motorists, about safety rules in the streets and highways. Anyone who knows Italy will know how opportune this business was" (!).

It gets even more wonderfully obscure: blessings of the ring of St. Joseph, a blessing of the sick with the sign of St. Maurus the Abbot, a blessing of water for the sick in honor of the Virgin and St. Torellus (by a Brief dated December 16, 1628), blessings for palm leaves on the feast of St. Peter Martyr, and to crown it all magnificently in this orgy of P.O.D.-ness, the famous Oath against Modernism. What's not to love?

In the next week, I'll be posting extracts from it, including a wonderful rite for solemnizing a betrothal and maybe a bit more about those film units.