CTS New Daily Missal

CTS New Daily Missal published by CTS

This is a beautifully produced missal.  The cover is lovely to hold, it has plenty of ribbons to mark your place, and it contains everything you could reasonably expect in a Daily Missal, in both Latin and the new corrected English Translation.  It also has some lovely illustrations.

It is thick and heavy - of necessity, given the three-year Sunday cycle and two-year weekday cycle. It is printed on onion skin paper: very thin but (I hope) strong - I haven't put that to the test! It runs to almost three and a half thousand pages, and includes Blessed John Henry Newman's Stations of the Cross, and also meditations on the mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary.

I haven't read it all yet, so can't vouch for accuracy, but if the Sunday Missal is anything to go by, it will be pretty good (I have only found one typographical error in the Sunday Missal so far).

However, as with the Sunday Missal, the plainchant is riddled with erros; or more accurately, the same error repeatedly.  The dot which lengthens a note is frequently missing.  I first noticed this on the Sanctus, which, if sung as written here, would sound decidedly odd.  However, the mistake recurs frequently, though not consistently: some dots are there.

Apart from that, however, it is an excellent production, and invaluable for those who go to daily Mass.

I notice that Fr Z has also reviewed it (with photos) here. It costs £45 and apparently there is no margin for profit in that: which I can well believe.

Way of the Cross with Pope Benedict XVI

Way of the Cross with Pope Benedict XVI by Sr Maria Rita Piccione OSA Published by CTS

I was slightly wrong-footed by this one: I thought it was, at least in part, by the Holy Father. Indeed, the CTS blurb on their wwwsite says: 'Here, alongside simple yet moving illustrations, Pope Benedict XVI takes us with him to discover how, by observing and understanding these final pivotal moments of Jesus' life through prayer and meditation, we can answer more readily his call to follow him.'  It also says: 'The meditations at each station were written by Sr. Maria Rita Piccione, O.S.A., President of the Our Lady of Good Counsel Federation of Augustinian Monasteries in Italy.'

So it is 'with Pope Benedict' in the sense that these meditations were written by Sr. Maria for his annual Way of the Cross at the Colosseum in 2011.  I suppose it is good marketing to feature the Holy Father's name on the cover, but I did think it a little misleading.

Perhaps that got me off on the wrong foot, but my initial impressions of this set of Stations were not that enthusiastic.  Sr Maria's meditations are not in the Holy Father's style, but once I got used to her tone and style, they started to grow on me: not least as she quotes extensively from St Augustine.

Here is the end of her meditation on the Fourth Station (Jesus meets His Mother).  It is a passage that for me typifies both what I like and dislike about her style:

In authentic prayer, a personal encounter with Jesus makes each of us a mother and a beloved disciple, it begets life and it transmits love.  It expands our inner receptivity and weaves mystical bonds of communion, entrusting us to one another and opening the individual you to the common we of the Church.

What I dislike is the slightly disconcerting idea of me being made 'a mother', and the language of 'inner receptivity' and 'weaving mystical bonds' which is somewhat foreign to me: sounds a bit too modern for my taste.  And yet, that is also what I like, or to be more precise, what lodges in my mind and forces me to think anew and contemplate this familiar station in a different way.

The pictures have a similar effect on me: I am not sure that I like them, but they are, literally, stimulating.  They forced me, at least, to look at each mystery from a different perspective than my normal one.

And I do wish the CTS could proof read properly.  There are a few minor errors, but they do distract. The real howler is in the advertisements at the back, where one page is headed: Way of Clavery.

So do I recommend this booklet?  It is a really hard call, as I think devotions like Stations are intensely personal, and one person's preferred approach may jar with someone else.  But I do recommend it: because you may well find a lot to like in it; and even if you do not, I am sure you will find a lot to meditate on: and that, surely, is the point.