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Views from the Choir Loft

“Jesu Nostra Redemptio” • Ancient Hymn for the Ascension translated into English!

Jeff Ostrowski · May 21, 2020

NE MAJOR FLAW in too many Catholic hymnals has to do with editors who delete verses. They do it constantly—as if it’s a type of compulsion. 1 Verse expunction has a deleterious effect on the poetry and causes great inconvenience to choirmasters. We need all those verses! For example, we need them to fill up the time when the congregation is receiving Holy Communion. In 2018, the Saint Jean de Brébeuf Hymnal did something wonderful by restoring all the missing verses to the Roman Catholic treasury of hymns.

Many people believe the Antiphonale contains hymns, whereas the Graduale does not. They are wrong; the Graduale does contain hymns. An example would be “Jesu Nostra Redemptio” (the title was changed by Pope Urban VIII to “Salutis Humanæ Sator” in 1631AD). You can see that this hymn is also found in the 1908 Graduale. Page 256 of the Brébeuf Hymnal provides a marvelous English translation, courtesy of an FSSP priest who assisted with the project. The second verse will give you a taste of this hymn’s power and beauty:

What mercy conquered thee,
so as to bear our misdeeds,
suffering a cruel death,
so as to lift us from death?

The Brébeuf hymnal has many versions of this ancient hymn for the Ascension—and here’s one:

Rehearsal videos for each individual voice await you at #260.

The same melody is used in another place, at a higher key:


Which key do you like better? Higher or lower?

Every Mass Commemorates the Ascension

Immediately after the Consecration, the priest says:

Wherefore, O Lord, we, Thy servants, as also Thy holy people, calling to mind the blessed passion of the same Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, His resurrection from the grave, and His glorious ascension into heaven, offer up to Thy most excellent majesty of Thine own gifts bestowed upon us…etc.

Father Leslie Audoen Rumble (d. 1975) helps us understand the Ascension better in his famous “Radio Replies,” Question #1007:

1007. Christ ascended to heaven beyond the clouds. To the moon? Or did He continue beyond the sun and the stars? Or is heaven everywhere?

The ascension of Christ until a cloud received Him out of the sight of the Apostles was a phenomenon sufficiently clear to impress upon them some higher state of being. As a matter of fact He ascended only relatively to those who were watching Him. Our notions of ascent and descent are regulated by direction from the center of the earth. To the man on the opposite side of the earth the direction taken by Christ would be in the direction of descent. However, relatively to those watching Him, Christ ascended, and after a few moments they found themselves looking at a cloud. How far did Christ go? He merely allowed His supernatural qualities to assert themselves, and His body took upon itself a nature independent of all earthly conditions and limitations. He simply passed into another state of being, even as the thoughts incorporated in these words on paper are passing into another state of being within your mind as you read. And His new state at once renders useless all calculations based upon visible qualities as we know them. You might just as well try to measure abstract beauty with a wooden ruler. Christ’s glorified body is not subject to conditions of which we have experience.

One last time, here’s what the priest says at every Mass:



NOTES FROM THIS ARTICLE:

1   Even the good Catholic hymn editors mutilated and decimated hymns in a most inexplicable way. If you look through the Mediator Dei Hymnal (1955), you will see that J. Vincent Higginson (a.k.a. “Cyr de Brant”) deleted 70% of the verses for almost every hymn in his book. Achille P. Bragers had a very good reputation, and his harmonizations for certain hymns (such as “Holy God We Praise Thy Name”) are quite clever. Yet, look how Bragers eliminated most of the verses from “Jesu Nostra Redemptio” in English and Latin! That example comes from “The Monastery Hymnal,” published by Achille P. Bragers with a 1954 IMPRIMATUR by Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Jean de Brebeuf Hymnal, Jesu Nostra Redemptio Last Updated: May 21, 2020

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Jeff Ostrowski

About Jeff Ostrowski

Jeff Ostrowski holds his B.M. in Music Theory from the University of Kansas (2004). He resides with his wife and children in Los Angeles.—(Read full biography).

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Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

“You have thereby removed from the celebration of the Mass all superstitions, all greed for lucre, and all irreverence … removed its celebrations from private homes and profane places to holy and consecrated sanctuaries. You have banished from the temple of the Lord the more effeminate singing and musical compositions.”

— ‘Bishop Racozonus, speaking at the last session of the Council of Trent (1563)’

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