Hebdomada Sancta Study
In 3 volumes (1957)
Fr. Herman A.P. Schmidt, SJ
Introduction by Fr. Albert Marcello III, JCD/PhD
Renowned for his scholarship of the sacred liturgy in fidelity to the paradigms established by St. Pius X through Mediator Dei, Herman Schmidt, S.J. composed a rigorously scientific study of the rites, texts, and ceremonies of Holy Week as revised by Ven. Pius XII. In contradistinction to the conciliar revisions to the Roman Rite, which are sadly lacking in documentation as to the rationale and sources for their novelties and ambiguities, Schmidt provides a complete scholarly and critical apparatus to the 1955 Holy Week liturgies, as well as an ample bibliography with nearly a thousand entries! While it has become fashionable amongst priests and faithful attached to the traditional rites to treat these revisions as, at best, a bête noire, and, at worst, a modernist infiltration, this important scholarly work will considerably dispel such illusions.
The text gives a side-by-side juxtaposition of the Holy Week texts of the revised and unrevised rites, including the 1951 and 1952 revisions of the Easter Vigil. Most importantly, the second volume is dedicated to a critical analysis of the Holy Week texts from all of their ancient fontes. The scholastic clarity of Schmidt’s research alone, with its clear footing in the ancient texts, and his painstaking documentation of textual variants, should serve to dispel any revisionist history that the Ordo Hebdomadae Sanctae of 1956 was somehow part of a process to undo the actual Roman Rite itself. Every liturgical text of the 1955 Holy Week Reform can trace its roots to authentic sources of the Western rites. The same cannot be said for the poorly-documented and often contradictory post-conciliar revisions to the entirety of the Roman liturgical books.
While the expression “pastoral liturgy” often conjures up unpleasant thoughts of the worst of post-conciliar liturgical abuses, Schmidt’s analysis is motivated by a genuinely pastoral concern to educate Christ’s faithful in the liturgy by reference to many authentic sources. Like the learned scribe in St. Matthew’s Gospel, reading the volumes of this work brings forth treasures both old and new.
Any further scientific study of the Holy Week rites will find in Schmidt’s work a most valuable resource for further investigation and research. Along with his comprehensive textbook Introductio in Liturgiam Occidentalem (which was used as a textbook at the Pontifical Gregorian University well into the 1970’s), Hebdomada Sancta forms an essential monument of the study of the liturgy along the lines of the most faithful thinking of the authentic liturgical movement.
Pascha est cor liturgiae!
Hebdomada Sancta; Volume Primum: Contemporanei Textus Liturgici, Documenta Piana et Bibiliographia; PDF, 149mb
Hebdomada Sancta; Sectio I: Fontes Historici; PDF, 224mb
Hebdomada Sancta; Sectio II: Commentarius Historicus; PDF, 224mb
These texts are being offered pro bono as PDFs and each include a navigation menu (document outline) for their major sections. Donations are welcome for the lengthy time spent in preparing them for publication.
Dedicated to the blessed memory of Pope Pius XII.
Reviews
The Church’s liturgy not only commemorates but actually makes present the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ’s death and Resurrection, both in the celebration of the sacred rites and in the everyday lives of Christians. This mystery is with us the whole year round in the Eucharist but finds its most profound expression during Holy Week and especially the Sacred Triduum, when the liturgy recalls the saving events of Christ’s pascha or passover from death to life, from humiliation to glory. More than the climax of Holy Week, the Easter Vigil of Holy Saturday night is the concentration of all that week into one solemn celebration of the triumph of the Cross that changed apparent defeat into glorious victory. If it is true, as the learned Father Schmidt says in his introduction, that the Pasch of the Lord is the heart of the liturgy (“Pascha est cor liturgiae”), then Holy Week was the right place to begin the renovation of the liturgy set on foot by Pope St. Pius X.
Hebdomada Sancta is a comprehensive explanation of the changes made to the Holy Week rites under Pope Pius XII. No other part of the Liturgical Year has been subject to documentary history so thoroughly researched as this. Old and new liturgical texts and rubrics are juxtaposed for ease of comparison. Pertinent documents from the Sacred Congregation of Rites are presented in chronological order. Ancient sources, theological and historical commentary, and extensive bibliographies furnish the material for a seminary course in the liturgy of Holy Week.
Like the 20th-century Roman liturgical reform in general, Pius XII’s restored Ordo of Holy Week has its supporters and detractors. What some applaud as a return to primitive practice, others criticize as antiquarian restoration (an error condemned by Pius XII himself); and where some see a healthy means of promoting lay participation, others see innovation out of harmony with tradition. Whatever one may think of the Holy Week reform, he is not well positioned to opine who is ignorant of the information garnered in these volumes. Seven decades on, Hebdomada Sancta remains an invaluable resource and a landmark of scholarship on the holiest week of the Christian year.
Fr. Thomas Kocik
Tremunt Potestates Substack
