Kako je moglo teći sastavljanje molitava

Evo jednog pomalo smiješnog, pomalo tragičnog zamišljanja pater Z.-a (ja sam dodao linkove na objašnjenja nekih pojmova, naziva i izraza):

With all the gorgeous prayers from various ancient Latin sacramentaries at our disposal, was it really necessary to cobble a new one together like that? Wait! I am having a vision of the scene back in the 1960’s….

In a dark room lined with metal jammed bookshelves and cabinets stuffed with files of notes, an articulated lamp strains with its stingy 40 watts to produce a pool of light on a paper stacked table. The rolling chair supporting a bespectacled cleric, squeaks as he shifts. His scrambled gray hair is thinning and during the night he must have tugged the collar of his too-long worn cassock open around his skinny neck.

Monsignore is a professor at a Roman university and a prized consultant for Annibale Bugnini’s Consilium.

Monsignor has drunk the Kool-Aid.

He riffles the pages of good-ole Leo Cunibert Mohlberg’s edition of the Sacramentarium Veronense with rapt attention, occasionally jotting down phrases on slips of paper. His consultation complete, he squeaks forward to the table.

Uttering a prayer to the Holy Ghost, he begins to slide the slips around.

He rearranges them, and gazes, and tries again, substituting now this one and that one in practiced curves until, ... EUREKA! a new Super Oblata emerges ouija-like from out the depths of research and inspiration.

“Hmmm “heúreka”, perfect of heúrisko....”, he mumbles and drags closer the manual typewriter he scrimped to purchase, lo many decades ago, for his doctoral dissertation on the dative case in the Liber Sacramentorum Augustodunensis.

Clack, clackity, ding, zzzip… clack clack, he whacks together his new prayer footnoting the source references for a future edition of the fontes of the Missale Romanum.

One day WDTPRS readers will need them on a weekly basis.

“Grazie, O Signore!” he beams at the framed print of the Crucified Jesus on the wall over his little metal framed bed.

The tiny window suggests the approaching dawn, but zeal for the Council consumes him.

“Now, what to do with the Twenty-Eighth Sunday?” he muses.

Scanning a shelf, his red-rimmed eyes linger over yellowing notes on the Gregorian Sacramentary.