Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“Put this body anywhere. Do not let care about it disturb you. I ask only this: that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be.” [Confessions 9, 11, 27]
“I closed her eyelids, and sorrow beyond measure filled my heart and would have overflowed in tears. But by a strong effort of will I had no tears. It was not fitting that her funeral should be conducted with moaning and weeping, for such is normal when death is seen as only misery or as the complete end of existence. But she had not died in misery, and death was not her end. Of the one fact we were certain by reason of her character, of the other by our Faith.” [Confessions 9, 12, 1]
http://augnet.org/en/life-of-augustine/in-italy/1113-monicas-death/
A lovely tradition.
Beautiful. And what an honour to have a son dedicate his life as a priest for the Church.
It is a lovely custom indeed.
The use of the maniturgium was suppressed when the new rite of ordination came out after Vatican II.
As part of the old rite, the maniturgium was a linen strip that bound the ordinand’s hands together after they’d been anointed by the bishop. This served both a practical and a symbolic function: it kept the chrism from getting onto vestments, gave the oil a chance to soak into the hands, and symbolized the newly ordained priest being bound by his vows.
In the new rite, the bishop anoints the hands, and the ordinand simply steps over to a table where purificators are laid out and wipes his hands clean. Back in the late eighties and early nineties seminarians started saving those cloths and gifting them to their mothers, remembering the old custom. If I recall correctly, the Liturgy Committee of the USCCB actually issued a letter to all the bishops to remind them the maniturgium had been abolished. What a committee of wet blankets!
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But more and more bishops are allowing it. A mother of a priest in my diocese makes them and offers them for $10 complete with the embroidered name and date of the man’s ordination. Often they contain the words “Tu es sacerdos in aeternum…
If a bishop will not bind the hands after the anointing, server friends will hold the maniturgium in the sacristy for the newly ordained to wipe off the Sacred Chrism before washing their hands in the sacrarium.
At my own ordination in 1991 the maniturgium was seen as a “throw back.”
Still a pious lady made one for me and my classmates, before we went to the sacristy to wash our hands we used the maniturgium to wipe the Sacred Christ from our hands. I had a zip lock bag in my pocket to store it and then present it to my Mom after my first Mass. She was buried with it.