Summorum Pontificum and Dies iræ

Quick thought - now that the pre-V2 and the post-V2 forms of the Roman Rite are officially to be regarded as more or less “complementary”, a peculiar situation is created concerning Dies iræ.

As most of us know, this hymn is a sequence in the 1962 Missal. It is not found in the post-V2 Missal, though all four of the other sequences from the 1962 Missal are.

Jeffrey Tucker at TNLM (check the links on the right) asked a few weeks back about the potential for reintegrating parts of the 1962 Missal into the modern Mass. Jeff talked about offertory prayers and the Last Gospel - these, I would think, are something of a stretch because their being removed/replaced was a more decisive act, and introducing these into the modern Mass would be a bit “messy”, since nothing in the modern Missal envisions anything like Last Gospel, and (IIRC) the modern Missal has its own texts that take the place of the offertory prayers.

But the case is different with Dies iræ. Here is a removed text whose spot is indeed in place in the modern Mass. The rubrics account for texts of its genre in a specific location.

So, I will update my stance on DI in the modern Mass: I still would regard it as contrary to liturgical norms, but it is an absurdity for the norms not to permit the sequence in one form of the Mass but to forbid it (albeit implicitly) in the other.

(Of course, another absurdity comes into sight soon: the U.S. Lectionary has a responsorial psalm refrain on 18OT-c that comes from Ps. 95, with verses from Ps. 90. This is because the 1969 Ordo lectionum Missæ used Ps. 95 for both verses and refrain, while the 1981 OLM uses Ps. 90 - and the 1998 U.S. Lectionary botched the change.)