I'm very, very interested, but can't quite afford the £230 asking price at the moment... I shall have to start saving, or hope that someone tries to sell a discount version on ebay.
However, Baronius is not quite ready for pre-orders yet. They're actually asking for people to indicate interest in being given the pre-order date. Pre-ordering the pre-order, so to speak.
Twitch of the mantilla to Shawn Tribe for the heads-up!
9 comments:
I think they're very wise, commercially, to make sure they can shift a decent number of copies before going to print. The '62 office is the absolute nadir - a mutilated stump on legal life-support. I hope they'll get around instead to producing something more fulsomely representative of the traditional Roman office. I might even be tempted myself.
I worry about the price tag; perhaps the folks at baronius haven't noticed that there is a recession going on?
It also reinforces the perception that Traditional Catholocism is only something for the Rich.
exibit a) the cost to the seminarian of going to a Traditional Semminary (FSSP) is $7000 on top of the cost of books, travel etc (and that is if you can get past their pureblood mindset).
Exibit b) as I'm sure Mac and Fr. Finnegan will appreciate half decent vestments cost alot
Exibit c) this Roman Brevary costs almost double the OF liturgy of the hours which can be brought for £120 on Amozon.
As a working class lad who aspires to be a Traditional Priest I have problems seeing how the finances will work out.
JAMC
- It's "economy of scale": an enormous undertaking in a relatively small market. Believe me, it's far worse in Orthodoxy - horribly produced books at horrible prices. I'm sure Baronius would love to get the unit price down, but the sums almost certainly won't bear it. The choice, "legal" rather than genuinely liturgical, to resurrect this particular "revision" is a huge mistake IMHO.
Anagnostis
As a marketing graduate and someone who acheived stering grades in Business studies both at GCSE and A level I am asware of economies of scale; all I'm saying is that unless you come from an old Catholic family becoming a Traditional Priest is finacially impossible.
I'd like to have one of these sets too, thought the asking price in U.S. dollars of $350.00 is quite steep. I bet the translations of the Psalms and Canticles will be far superior to the plodding, pedestrian, mediocre ICEL ones in the official English translation of the current breviary.
JAMC: There is something to be said for prayer and abandoning oneself in trust to God's Providence, when we are at the end of our own resources. God does not give people vocations without also providing what they need to fulfill them. (This does not, however, rule out the need for elbow grease on our part.)
As for the popularity of the Breviarum Romanum, there are communities of religious dedicated entirely to the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy, which includes the BR. I believe the FSSP uses it; I know a priest who was brought up in the FSSP and recites it daily. But with the growing interest in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, I would be willing to bet interest in the Extraordinary Form of the Office will also take off among the laity, especially now that there will be a Latin and English breviary. My Baronius Press 1962 Missal also has Vespers and Compline for Sundays, so people may already be praying those offices in the EF.
Well, that wasn't all you were saying, but never mind. Don't the FSSP do scholarships for impecunious applicants? They did in my day. Have you been on one of their retreats? They might waive the fees if they like the cut of your jib.
Anita, the English translation of the Psalms in my second-hand US edition of the 1962 Office is, to be honest, pretty disappointing, being both a very loose translation and a very unpoetic one. It may be that the Baronius Press translation is different. Mediocre translations of sacred texts were, sadly, becoming the norm even before Vatican 2.
Anita - the '62 Office is NOT the traditional Breviarium Romanum, but a much-mutilated, clumsy redaction, conceived as a "transitional" stage to wholesale root-and-branch reform (like the '62 Missal, but much, much worse). It would have been far more sensible of Baronius to have produced a bilingual version of the full traditional office, perhaps with an appendix for the benefit of ultramontane legalists indicating how to use it according to the rubrics of '62.
What a beautiful and eye-pleasing layout this new edition of the Breviary is. Alas, this may not be the traditional, Council of Trent rendering which is what I would like to pray. I can understand a slight modernizing of the language although I would rather just have what has been prayed for centuries. However, if the new version contains any of the modernist, liberal "keener insights" and "new understandings" that were the precursors and then hallmark of Vatican II, then thanks but no thanks.
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