LOVE OF LEARNING:
The Novitiate Curriculum

When Fr. Michael first broached the subject with me in mid-2019 of a possible move from St. Louis to Portsmouth, a place I had already come to love through the Portsmouth Institute, I began to wonder about what sort of specific work he had in mind for me. I was curious about the labora that would parallel and balance my ora. While I had taught 9^th-grade English for a year at Priory School in St. Louis, close to 30 years of my pre-monastic academic career had been spent teaching design on the collegiate level at Webster University in St. Louis, both in the film and communication department and in the Sargent Conservatory of Theatre Arts. It turned out that Fr. Michael first needed a monk to resuscitate the Portsmouth Oblate program, which had been languishing since the death in 2016 of its director, Fr. Damian Kearney. I had served as Director of Oblates in St. Louis for some time, having myself been a lay oblate for over five years before asking to enter the monastery. But on August 14, 2019, while briefly back in St. Louis packing up a few things for what I felt was surely to be a temporary mission posting, I received a phone call from Fr. Michael informing me of the death of Br. Francis Crowley. As best as his failing health would allow, Brother Francis had been serving this community as Master of Ceremonies, Head Sacristan and Liturgist. The three titles suddenly also landed in my bailiwick. And sadly, one of the first things I had to do upon returning to Rhode Island was to help plan his funeral liturgy. 

Seating for Altar Servers in Blessed Sacrament Chapel

Within two years, with my transfer of vows firmly in place, the arrival of two novices necessitated the creation of an in-house novitiate curriculum. The various required courses were divided up among the monks, each according to his skills, talents and areas of expertise. And if one of the cantors leads a chant class, while the resident Latinist teaches the Latin class, then it follows that the monastic liturgist must formulate the course outline for liturgy. So, I now find myself the resident liturgical instructor, creating and teaching our novitiate liturgy class. My personal interest in, and exposure to, the liturgy of the Church does go back many years, long before I ever heard the word or really knew what it meant. As a 7-year-old altar boy at pre-Vatican II Latin Masses beginning in 1959, I learned to respect everything that my serving partner Billy (of blessed memory) and I were taught by the patient parish priests. This appreciation was further inculcated in us over the ten years that we served together, until our graduation from high school in 1970. Now I have been asked to help deepen our novices’ understanding of our Church’s liturgy.

The Current recently introduced a new series with the focus precisely on the topic of liturgy. The “Liturgy” column replaced a previous series on “Works,” to allow more space for one of our principal monastic activities, our liturgical life. Our editor Blake Billings began the series exactly as I began my first class, with the etymology of the word “liturgy.” As wide-ranging as the field of liturgy has become, it boils down to the basic idea of public works, stemming from two Greek words: ergos meaning “work” and laos meaning “people.” Together those became a composite word: leitourgia, or liturgy. As a liturgy professor in my seminary in Rome explained it, the church’s embrace of liturgy, in all its forms and derivations, grew out of Greek municipal services having to do with work benefiting the people, be it supplying water, repairing roads or providing sanitation, just like modern-day public works. Those who attend Mass experience, knowingly or otherwise, a two-part liturgy: the Liturgy of the Word followed by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Our Divine Office which is prayed at specified hours of the day, is appropriately called the Liturgy of the Hours. We are sometimes asked by visitors or by students and their parents if they are able to attend Vespers, or perhaps Compline with us a little later at night, imagining that the prayers might be private. Essentially, these prayers are never private (except for Compline in rare instances), and their very designation as the Liturgy of the Hours suggests that they are indeed public works, open to the public always. With a course bibliography of about 30 scholarly titles, the current liturgy class, which is now more a one-on-one tutorial, has touched on such topics as the significance of the furniture of our sanctuary, the “cult of relics,” the concept of early-Christian and mid-century modern round churches, inculturation, Vatican II (especially Sacrosanctum Concilium Chapter 7), Books of Hours, liturgical drama, and the Easter 1999 Letter to Artists by Pope Saint John Paul II.
 

Sacramentary in Chapel of Saint Benedict

Supplementing my research and reflection on liturgy has been editorial work I have taken on since becoming a monk, which has given me a hands-on, deep-dive into the study of liturgy. This work has included proofreading, editing, reviewing and compiling the extensive indices for a half-dozen books, two of which form part of a series on liturgy. Published by Saint Michael’s Abbey Press at Farnborough, England, in the series Liturgiam Aestimare: Appreciating the Liturgy, both editions were edited by my close friends, Fr. Daniel P. McCarthy O.S.B. of St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison, Kansas, and the recently deceased Fr. James G. Leachman O.S.B. of St. Benedict’s Abbey in Ealing, London. Both taught and wrote at the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy in Rome. Further, my two mission stints at the Monastery of Christ the Word in Zimbabwe have seeded a discussion of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church today in sub-Saharan Africa, a continent which is now a source and a pipeline for young African priests coming to the U.S. to fill the gap in decreasing priestly vocations, a serious turning of the tables. 

We find ourselves, my student and I, in a unique time and place in history. I think I speak for both of us when I say we have found in the study of liturgy a refuge of safety in the middle of our ongoing pandemic. Not looking to be insulated or isolated so as to be cut off from others nor kept in a bubble, we study the long-ago past as well as the ever-present “now-times,” looking for a key to the future, ours and the world’s. And as the Church’s new liturgical year begins with the season of Advent, we take solace in the words of one liturgist who said, “Every liturgical calendar is linked to situations of time and place.” (I. H. Dalmais) It has been a blessing to have the opportunity to renew my own reflection on liturgy, so as to better serve in these difficult times our novitiate, our monastic community, and God’s own people.

Br. Sixtus Roslevich