Fr dear Fr: Excuse the added interest in the sphere of the liturgical quaesitum, but can you alleviate the siege of Orleans on this one - when is a liturgical furnishing not a liturgical furnishing, or is there a vacancy for a 3-drop spoonette still in some parishes of a more precise hue?

Actually, this is not a question to repent about entirely, even in the modern age of a slow return to tradition and traditions in the early christian liturgy achieving more maturity, since the question often pops up to vex the great, the large, and the good alike, as and when a certain empirical functionalism took over in many parish offices and attendant sacristies and vestries and objects formerly known as liturgical furnishings were suddenly trashed by vernacular tedious curates of the older middle aged kind in the 1990s and 2000s and 2010s. The humble liturgical bookstand for the altar is not just a non-liturgical functional addendum but a true liturgical furnishing with a decided purpose; the humble 3 drop spoonette is designed to achieve validity of empirica either way, not too much wine, not too much water; even if others on the other side had forgotten that the true and proper objet d’interet of the Eucharistic Transformation is the mixture itself or modicum - per huius aquae et vini mysterium says the Berakah prayer, of water and wine and not just the wine, since the resurrected body of Christ contains both, and also the Crucifixion revealed both when Christ’s body spilled forth water and blood to begin the sacramental Weg throughout history, unfortunately interrupted by Luther, then the mysterious sign is complete in the admixture not just one or other; or the humble gong and the humble bell, these too are liturgical furnishings; and for a long time the humble canonical tabernaculum clavis was thought to be a non-liturgical furnishing until it received an honorary mention in the new Codexes and the GIRM and so on, so too the silver communion spoon as used in the Eastern liturgicals and by some hospital chaplains - all these objects are liturgical furnishings and exist for a reason which base and boorish left wing empiricism, always in tune with a heathen state of course, does not understand or even respect on account of its denial of different forms of causation in the universe - a grave problem afflicting many parishes of the older liberal kind. One such gorgeousaurus used to trash the idea of the 3- drop silver spoonette mentioned by the reader above and said it belonged to a bygone age when scrupulosity was a problem in many Jansenist confessionals, behaving a bit boorishly about a sensitive conscience matter - apart from the outrageous practice of left wing clergy gossiping about confessionals and sensitive young people - one of a series of recurring problems we found at Oxford to our chagrin when Cardinal Avery and I arrived there one summer for a talk and then dinner at the Old Palace. Boorish Critters - Another left winger behaving badly - it could almost be a sofa on some modern GBnews studio set. But yes, there are liturgical objects that for a long time in an empiricist boorish universe were not considered true liturgical furnishings, not that those late-term denizens of that boorish movement considered anything as liturgical unless they were wearing them since the only liturgical doctrine they believed in was the idea that they were configured to Christ at their dubious ordinations - no sentire, but overall with the advance of more medieval philosophy in boorish faculties around the islands, especially noting the Talk on Aristotle and Causation given by a young Oxford Heythrop professor for the Sixth Form movement, and the wonderful Beginner’s Guide to Thomism produced by Sr Clare at Cambridge for some years in the 2000s and 2010s, then there may be some hope for an alleviation of the siege of the liturgical cities by boorish final cause deniers. Boorishness was allowed too long a leverage in liturgical circles throughout the 1990s. Roll on more liturgy.