Postscripts From The Catholic Spitfire Grill

This is so cool. (Can you use that word with respect to fifth century history?...no matter what you answer, it's my blog and you can't stop me.) Perhaps you remember that quite recently I did some posts on the Liturgy of the Hours. If you missed them here they are: The Themes of the Liturgy of the Hours, I Stopped Reading the Breviary and Started Reading the Bible, The Divine Office, Liturgy of the Hours As a review, the first office of the day is to be preceded by the Invitatory Psalm which is Psalm 95, but can also be Psalm 100, Psalm 67, or Psalm 24. These psalms are wonderful invitations to come into the Lord's presence and open our hearts and minds in prayer, but what I have learned is that there is a very practical purpose for the invitatory psalms.

In fact, the monks didn't just admit people who happened by; they invited the laity to join in. By the turn of the fifth century St. Porphyrius of Gaza had already added an invitatorium to the psalmodic prayers of the monks in his diocese; he put Psalm 94*--Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord--at the beginning of the devotions, and there it has stayed ever since, across Christendom. The Mozarabic Rite still calls this psalm the sonus, becaue it's sung while the bells are being rung to summon people to prayer, and since at least the time of Charlemagne the rubrics in Europe have specified that is should be sun slowly, to give people enough time to get there. **

It is hard for us to imagine in our secularized world living in a time a place where the life and rhythm of a whole village or city was set by the church bells calling the people to prayer. And to this day, the opening Psalm of the day should remind those of us blessed with a knowledge of the history of our faith that we are joined in a very real way to those brothers and sisters in faith who went before us and left us this rich tradition of prayer for us to cherish, treasure, and build on. We should also be reminded of the Church's deep love of Sacred Scripure and her desire for ALL of the people to know the words of Sacred Scripture. To this day, we chant the psalm that allowed the laity the time to reach the church in time for the rest of the office so that they too, could have access to Sacred Scripture. So often we hear how Catholics don't read the Bible. Just tonight I read this "How do you have a debate with a Catholic who has all of the answers but never reads the Bible?" It's infuriating on one hand because so many of us DO read Sacred Scripture. We take seriously the Catholic Church's official teaching:

133 The Church "forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful. . . to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Catechism of the Catholic Church 

On the other hand, I have to admit it's true. Too many Catholics do not read the Bible. To which I say, someone who does not read Sacred Scripture is no better off than those who are not allowed to read or are unable to read. Would we be the kind of Catholics the came when the bells called us to prayer and the reading of Sacred Scripture? I suggest that if we are not doing so now in our own lives, we would not do so then either.

* Under modern numbering of the Psalms this is Psalm 95.

** Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads by Kevin Orlin Johnson. (page 11)