Rubrics

Canon dear Canon: At the risk of introducing a discussion about the legal norms around the Eucharist called rubrica, might I humbly petition for some illumination on why, during some of my locale Zoom masses on my computer screen, there are some of the younger clergy who bless and consecrate the wine of the chalice with a cover or pall on top of it, even during the epiclesis of the Consecratory Prayer? As I mistaken to invoke the rubrica laws of the divine Mysteries?

The Eastern Codex would say you are perfectly within your rights as a spectator believe to pose informative questions about the particular things that go on during the Eucharistic Synaxis on your screens – yes there are debates about this from the time of the Second Vatican Council, according to which it was an almost majority opinion among the synodal patres that rubrics might be the stuff of history rather than appearing in the new mass for the various conferences, eventually published in 1969, und so weiter, as we say at the Germanicum collegium. Im jener Zeit, as we might go on to say, at that time, in the council chambers and aulas of the sacrosanct council of the church fathers, it was opined that the old Rite Eucharistic Synaxis would be the last missal to feature rubrical laws of the liturgy in its pages and according to its numbers. There was a huge debate about this, and many liturgists who campaigned for some laws in the new liturgy were quickly labelled as Rubricistae or rubricists, not a term of endearment in the new atmosphere of the heady charismatic days of the new come on down game show liturgies of the council years. Council patres argued this one back and forth with a very young very good looking able French Cardinal, rumoured to be a certain T for Tisserant, leading the charge against abolishing the old rubrics outright and replacing them with nothing. The votes and the heated arguments were split 50-50. 

But helas for those theologians and observers and commentators at the council, when the new missal came out in 1969, English version in 1970, it was clear from the original missal that there would be no annulment, no annihilation of the old rubrics, that indeed surprise surprise a whole new set of relaunched rubrics would appear in both the missal, numbered as well, and also in the GIRM, the general instruction that accompanies the missal. Shock, astonishment, horror – so complete was the surprise, despite all the assurances of the chief monsignor entrusted with the task of reforming the old missal, that many local cardinals back home in the various conferences simply had a mental block about it all, and not only refused to believe they had re-appeared and been re-invigorated, with some minor changes to the performance and conduct of the Sacred Rites, that they gave orders that the majority of the rubrics were not to be manifested in the new English missals for the New World and even for the Old World. Certainly, where they did appear, they were not to be numbered, since that would mean they would all have to go in. Added to this, some tinkering with minor words of the Consecration too. But, we can now reveal, that in fact it was the personal decision of that saintly pope of the time of the council, St Paul VI, to include a whole new and numbered set of new rubrical divine laws for the new missal of the new novus ordo Rite. In the new missal, where the old missal left it ambiguous as to what the consecratory hands of the priest were to do over the offertorial gifts at the epiclesis, the new novus ordo rubrics envisaged that the covers of the pall were to be removed for the epiclesis and then consecration, with the pall to be replaced over the chalice to be re-imposed on top after the Consecration with the genuflection and the intonation of the sung introduction Mysterium Fidei – The Mystery of the Faith. Another little infelicity there.