Mass for St Cecily's Day

After a lazy Saturday, including reading The Weekend Australian over coffee, on the spur of the moment I decided I really ought hear Mass...

As I'd slept in after a tiring week at work, I had perforce to motor over to the Redemptorist Monastery, as they have a Saturday Mass (not a Sunday Vigil, Deo gratias) after their afternoon Perpetual Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.  I entered their church at the very moment that Benediction was being given! - so I flopped to my knees literally on the doormat, and received that mysterious Eucharistic Blessing imparted by the priest.  While the congregation sang the concluding hymn to Our Mother of Perpetual Succour, I knelt at her altar before her sacred image (as the words suggest)...

Mass was to begin almost immediately: I hied myself over to the front pew, and buried my head in my St Andrew's Missal, from which I read to myself the whole text of the Traditional Mass - giving the occasional response in Latin sotto voce (so as to avoid giving scandal).  I did receive under both kinds, as this is indeed a great and most amazing blessing, and there can be no sin (as some silly Traddies seem oddly to imply) but rather great grace in what has been lawfully conceded by Holy Mother Church.

I had been struck earlier on, when looking at the proper of the Mass for St Cecilia, by the great number of chants - for example, to-day's Gradual and Offertory - taken from that great epithalamium, Psalm 44, which is read (like the Canticle of Canticles) as referring to the spiritual union between Christ and the Church, His mother, and each Christian soul.  More on that later...

St Cecily's Mass is made up, as often the case with early martyrs, from various chants and other pieces: the Introit, Gospel, Offertory and Communion are from the 1st Common Mass of a Virgin Martyr; the Epistle and Postcommunion from the 2nd Mass of a Virgin Martyr; the Alleluia (matching the Gospel) comes from the Mass of St Agnes (21st January); the Collect, from the Octave Mass of St Agnes (28th January), changing Agnetis to Cæciliæ, and strangely omitting quæsumus; only the Gradual and the Secret have I not so far tracked down.