The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described

Description

Catholic Church has surrounded all the acts of Divine Worship with a definite ceremonial to ensure on the one hand their due accomplishment, and on the other to safeguard the external reverence that should accompany them. She never employs ceremonial for the sake of the ceremony itself. Each separate rite has grown out of the twofold object that we have enunciated, even though in the process of time the origin, and the history of the development, of such rite may long have been forgotten. The Church is the guardian of all these sacred rites. To her it belongs to sanction a further development of them, to curtail such as may have become purposeless, or to impose new conditions heretofore uncalled for. Thus there has grown up a great body of legislation, controlled and regulated by two of the Roman Congregations, those of the Rites and of Ceremonial. Numberless commentators have written on the history of the ceremonies, while many others have treated them from the purely practical point of view. AC eremonial in the latter sense calls for frequent revision if it is to be thoroughly in accord with the most recent legislation of the Holy See. Thus even the pages of the present work, as they issue from the press, call for modification in accordance with the new Codex I uris Canonici. For a long time past the Clergy in England have been without a Manual of Ceremonies, in their own tongue, possessing any claim to accuracy or completeness. They have been obliged to fall back upon excellent Latin or French treatises which often do not take account of local circumstances, and are in many cases almost useless to the devoted laymen upon whose zealous help the proper carrying out of our liturgical functions so greatly depends. This pressing want has now been fully supplied by the learned compiler of this manual of The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite, and by the publishers wh(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)