An introit and a question

Why is an introit found precisely where we sing it? The question seems elementary, but it is less so when the chant comes from a celebration that the reform abolished. In that case one historically possible answer is also the most uncomfortable: it is there because it had to be put somewhere. I take this as a provocation, not as a verdict, and I test it against the sources.

In the Gradual, the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time opens with the introit Intret oratio mea in conspectu tuo: inclina aurem tuam ad precem meam, Domine (Ps 87:3, Vulgate numbering): “Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry, O Lord.” It is a supplication in the third mode, taken from one of the darkest psalms in the Psalter. The one who prays cries out day and night and already feels counted among those who go down into the pit.

In Year A, as in 2026, the Liturgy of the Word goes elsewhere. Wisdom lets herself be found by those who seek her (Wis 6:12-16), Paul consoles the Thessalonians about the fate of those who have fallen asleep (1 Thess 4:13-18), and the ten virgins go out to meet the Bridegroom (Mt 25:1-13). The Gospel has a musical history of its own, ancient and recognizable; and yet the Mass begins with the voice of another psalm and another season.

Those who sing on this Sunday know, however, that the virgins are not absent. In Year A the Ordo Cantus Missae assigns Quinque prudentes virgines both to the Alleluia and to the communion.¹ The question, then, is not whether the repertoire of Matthew 25 has been forgotten: the official order has taken it in. The question is a different one, and I find it more interesting. Why, within the same formulary, do the entrance and the communion speak different languages? And what are those who celebrate, and those who study, to make of it?

To answer, we need to look at where the introit comes from, at how the commission that reorganized the Gradual worked, and at what one of its protagonists said about it in 1972: Dom Jean Claire, choirmaster of Solesmes.

Before the reform: Ember Saturday in Lent

In the 1962 Missal, Intret oratio mea opens the Mass of Ember Saturday in Lent. It is a long celebration of a vigil type, with five Old Testament readings, each preceded by the Flectamus genua and followed by a chant; in the Roman tradition it is also the day of ordinations.³ It is worth seeing it whole, because the introit lives there alongside other texts.

The table clarifies a detail that is easily confused: after 2 Maccabees 1 the chant is Convertere, Domine, while Dirigatur follows the great invocation from Sirach. I would not conclude from this, however, that the gradual has nothing to do with Maccabees: an ancient formulary does not work only as a series of comments on the reading just proclaimed, and it must also be read as a whole. The pairing of introit and gradual has its own history too: in the Sextuplex, Dirigatur is the gradual of Tuesday in the first week of Lent; on Ember Saturday, next to Intret, only the gradual of Senlis records it, among the graduals to be chosen.⁴ The pairing Intret–Dirigatur is already attested in the formulary of Ember Saturday in Lent in the Vatican edition of 1908.

That said, the textual network of the received formulary is evident. The introit asks that the prayer enter into God’s presence; the gradual asks that it rise like incense; the epistle asks that it never cease; the offertory returns to the same Psalm 87, as if taking up again the voice of the entrance at the moment of the offering. Around them, the orations speak of a people to be spared, of a fast to be sanctified, of what is professed outwardly and must be fulfilled within.⁵

There is no need to imagine that every piece was chosen with the others in mind. The chants and the readings have different histories of formation. But in the order the Church celebrated, these texts were called to stand together, and those who sang them heard them together. The history of a formulary’s formation does not coincide with the history of its celebrative meaning: this distinction will prove useful.

After the Council: preserve, but where?

The starting point is well known. Sacrosanctum Concilium asks that the treasury of sacred music be preserved and fostered “with very great care” (no. 114) and gives Gregorian chant pride of place as the chant proper to the Roman liturgy (no. 116).⁶ The principle is clear; its application is less so, because the reform of the calendar and of the Lectionary removed precisely the celebrations that held part of the repertoire.

The Praenotanda of the Ordo Cantus Missae say so without beating about the bush. With Septuagesima, the octave of Pentecost and the Ember Days abolished, the corresponding Masses had to go as well. Their chants, however, were not to be lost: they would serve to form other Masses, to replace pieces repeated too often in the year, or to pass to the celebrations of the saints when their character allowed it.⁷

While the Ordo was awaited, the provisional norms of 11 November 1971 allowed, for the last Sundays per annum, the formulary of another Sunday of the same season to be adopted, or one to be composed from the chants of several Sundays.⁸

On 24 June 1972 the decree Thesaurum cantus gregoriani promulgated the Ordo Cantus Missae. Its declared aim was to adapt the Gradual to the new situation without losing any text of the authentic repertoire.⁹ The key word, in the decree as in the Praenotanda, is servare: to preserve. It remains to be seen what preserving meant when a chant had to move house.

The new formulary of the Thirty-Second Sunday

The Thirty-Second Sunday per annum did not exist before the reform: its Gregorian Proper was composed entirely from pieces taken from elsewhere. Set out in a row, the formulary clearly shows its two souls.¹⁰

Three observations.

The first: the stable part of the formulary is almost entirely Lenten and ferial. Introit, gradual, offertory and the communion for Years B and C come from Saturdays in Lent, that is, from days that the new Lectionary filled with other readings or, in the case of the Ember Days, abolished. Their transfer to the end of Ordinary Time corresponds exactly to the criterion stated in the Praenotanda: the chants of the vanished Masses serve to form new ones.

The second: the introit coincides with the entrance antiphon of the 1970 Missale Romanum, which proposes the same Psalm 87:3 for this Sunday; Dominus regit me, too, corresponds to the first of the Missal’s two communion antiphons.¹¹ This is no accident. According to the Praenotanda, the chief norm of the Ordo is to follow the arrangement of the Missal as far as possible, and for this reason some formularies turn out to have been transferred or modified.¹² The question “why precisely Intret on the Thirty-Second Sunday?” must therefore be moved upstream: to the working group that chose the antiphons of the Missal. That is where the papers will have to be sought.

The third: Year A breaks the symmetry. Alleluia and communion change in order to attach themselves to the Gospel of the virgins, while introit, gradual and offertory remain those of all three years. The Praenotanda foresee this: since the received chants cannot be changed, the same formulary is combined with different readings according to the cycle A, B, C; chants bound to the readings by a more or less close relationship must, however, follow them.¹³ The formulary of the Thirty-Second Sunday is therefore built in layers: a common base, movable only where the link with the Word is explicit.

The normative source tells us who built this second layer. The 1988 Ordo Cantus Missae fixes the basic formulary of the Thirty-Second Sunday at no. 129 and, among the chants to be used on certain Sundays and weekdays, assigns to Year A the Alleluia and the communion Quinque prudentes virgines, the latter with Psalm 33 (no. 136; see note 1). Giacomo Baroffio has written that the Ordo provides only Dominus regit me at communion and that the antiphon of the virgins is proposed by the Gradual alone: the 1988 edition does not confirm this, and it remains to be seen whether his remark reflects the edition of 1972. In any case the layered composition is not an editorial intervention by Solesmes. It is the logic of the official order, which the Praenotanda describe and regulate in nos. 19-21.

There is also a consequence for the gradual. As Jean Evenou has observed, the Ordo took over the series of graduals of the previous Gradual almost without changes of order; it is therefore hard for the gradual to work as a response to the first reading of the new Lectionary.¹⁴ Dirigatur does not take up the content of Wisdom 6:12-16: its presence answers first of all to the continuity of the repertoire. In the celebration it may acquire new relationships with the proclaimed Word, but these must be argued, not presupposed.

The score of the gradual Dirigatur oratio mea, with the verse Elevatio manuum mearum, is in the Graduale Romanum (1974), in the formulary of the Thirty-Second Sunday, pp. 363-365.

In dialogue with Jean Claire

In the same issue of Notitiae that publishes the decree and the Praenotanda, Dom Jean Claire presents the new book.¹⁵ His commentary should be read as the testimony of an idea, not only as a guide to use.

Claire begins with a comparison. The new Lectionary introduced so many new readings that the old epistolaries and evangeliaries became unusable; the Gradual, by contrast, did not need a new typical edition, because the repertoire remained the same and only the order in which it was presented changed, in part. The norm of the revision is the conciliar one, which he renders thus: “conservation et mise en valeur du répertoire authentique.” Preserving and enhancing are not the same thing: Claire speaks of preserving and enhancing the repertoire, not of preservation alone.

He then sets out the causes of the changes, insisting that none is gratuitous or arbitrary. The first and most frequent: a chant whose text is taken from a reading must follow that reading when it is moved, as happens with many communion antiphons drawn from the Gospel of the day. The second: the abolition of certain Masses, among them the Ember Days, made it necessary to relocate their pieces by composing new Masses; among the examples he cites precisely the end of the series of Sundays per annum.

Our formulary shows both criteria at work, on the same day. The communion of Year A obeys the first: it is a chant that follows the Gospel. The introit obeys the second: it is a chant that lost its Mass and received another. Claire also explains how the two levels fit together: after the Proper of the Season, the Ordo lists, year by year, the pieces taken from the Sunday readings or closely related to them in meaning, which in those years take the place of the corresponding pieces of the basic formulary.¹⁶ In the 1988 edition, for the Thirty-Second Sunday of Year A, those pieces include precisely the Alleluia and the communion Quinque prudentes virgines.

In his conclusion he takes up a question that bears closely on our case: why do the texts of the Missal and the Lectionary sometimes differ from those of the Ordo? He answers that the Ordo applies only to the Mass sung in Gregorian chant; for said Masses and for those in the vernacular, the texts of the Missal apply, chosen for pastoral reasons and meant to receive new music. The independence, he adds, is limited: for new needs the choices of the Missal were followed as far as possible. And he closes by stating that the Mass in Gregorian chant can now be sung with a noticeably greater internal coherence.¹⁷

It is on this promise of coherence that I would like to pose my question. On the Thirty-Second Sunday of Year A the coherence is undeniable at the communion, where the chant quotes the Gospel just proclaimed. At the entrance, by contrast, the introit is coherent with the Missal, which chose the same psalm, and with the history of the repertoire, which had to find it a place; with the Lectionary of Year A there is no declared link. Claire neither hides this nor discusses it: his text describes a method; it does not comment on individual formularies.

The “golden rule” of the Ordo, which allows a text of the day to be replaced by another of the same season, offers the cantor a practical solution.¹⁸ It does not, however, resolve the hermeneutical question: what does an introit mean, for those who celebrate, if it is there because it had to be somewhere?

The ten virgins: where the reform put them

The parable of Matthew 25 was not without a voice in the repertoire of the Mass. The previous Gradual sang it in the sanctoral: the Alleluia Quinque prudentes virgines belonged to the Mass of St Agnes, the communion of the same name to the Common of Virgins, and the latter is already attested in one witness of the Antiphonale Missarum Sextuplex, the gradual of Mont-Blandin.¹⁹ In medieval graduals the Alleluia occurs for Agnes, Cecilia, Lucy, Agatha and in the Common of a Virgin.²⁰ The Office too has its antiphon Quinque prudentes virgines, sung in the Common of Virgins.²¹

The Ordo Cantus Missae carried out a precise operation with these pieces. It brought them from the sanctoral into the temporal cycle and tied them to the Gospel pericope: the communion occurs in Year A of the Thirty-Second Sunday and, in the weekday cycle, on Friday of the Twenty-First Week, when Matthew 25:1-13 is read.¹⁹ Claire’s criterion, “the chant follows the reading,” is applied here consistently.

The text of the communion deserves a closer look. It takes up Matthew 25:4.6 almost word for word, but where the Gospel says exite obviam ei, the chant says exite obviam Christo Domino. The liturgy had already interpreted the parable: the Bridegroom has a name, and the midnight cry becomes an invitation to go out to meet Christ. This is an ancient resemanticization, written into the chant long before the reform of the calendar. At the communion of the Thirty-Second Sunday of Year A, however, it acquires a new evidence: the Gospel has just announced the coming of the Bridegroom, and the chant invites the faithful to go out to meet him as the assembly moves forward to receive the Body of Christ. The rite does not stage the parable; it makes recognizable the correspondence between the Gospel invitation and the sacramental encounter.

The melody rises to its highest note on exite, precisely on the word that calls one to set out, and lingers on Christo Domino in the most ornate passage of the antiphon. Juan Pablo Rubio Sadia links these choices to the movement of those who go forward to receive the Eucharist.²² On Christo one can also recognize a fifth-mode formula that the gradual Christus factus est sings on the second mortem and on autem: Katarina Koprek has already set the two chants side by side.²³ The opening is the same; then the notes are distributed differently over the syllables and the cadences diverge. Those who know this gradual, sung on Palm Sunday after the second reading, may thus hear, in the invitation to meet the Bridegroom, the memory of his Passion as well. Whether the composer meant to quote the gradual remains an open question; the echo, for those with ears to hear, is there.

This case shows what a resemanticization founded on recognizable relationships looks like. And for that very reason it makes the question about the introit more pressing: can we document for Intret a relationship with the Mass that receives it which is equally determinate, or is it up to us to construct one?

The score of the Alleluia Quinque prudentes virgines is in the Graduale Romanum (1974), p. 502: in Year A the parable thus sounds twice, before the Gospel and at communion.

By now the picture is clear. In Year A the Mass opens with the introit of Ember Saturday; at communion we hear an antiphon from the Common of Virgins. In between stands the Gospel of the virgins, which the communion takes up and the introit does not. The reform did not ignore the musical tradition of Matthew 25: it placed it where the criterion stated by Claire required, that is, where the chant can quote the pericope. The entrance, instead, it left to a different logic, that of preservation and of agreement with the Missal.

Reading a layered formulary

To avoid confusing the levels, it is helpful to distinguish three levels of meaning.

The first is historical-liturgical: what can be reconstructed from the sources, that is, where the chant stood, with which readings, next to which orations. For Intret this is documented, as we have seen.

The second is redactional: the reasons for the new assignment, when someone wrote them down. Here we know the general criterion (to preserve the chants of the abolished Masses) and the specific norm (to follow the Missal), but we do not know why the 1970 Missal chose Psalm 87:3 precisely for the Thirty-Second Sunday. Until the preparatory papers are read, every explanation remains a hypothesis.

The third is celebrative: what the chant can mean today, within the Mass that is actually celebrated. This level is legitimate, but it cannot be used to prove the second.

Let us then try to do what every cantor, every preacher and every commentator is tempted to do: read the introit in the light of the Gospel of Year A. Correspondences are not lacking. The verse of the introit says in die clamavi et nocte coram te; the parable says media autem nocte clamor factus est. The antiphon asks intret oratio mea; the Gospel tells how the virgins who were ready intraverunt cum eo ad nuptias, and the door was shut (Mt 25:10). The communion, finally, invites us to go out to meet Christ. The result is a suggestive arc: the Church enters asking that her prayer may enter; she hears that only those who are ready enter; she goes out to meet the Bridegroom as she receives the Body of the Lord.

It is a good reading. But it is a reading I am constructing.

Here lies the distinction I would like to propose. I call liturgical resemanticization the process by which a chant, in a new context, acquires recognizable and sufficiently determinate relationships. I call retrospective justification the explanation constructed to make a placement convincing, without being able to demonstrate either the intention behind it or an objective pertinence. The first is a normal phenomenon in the history of the liturgy: the communion Quinque prudentes, with its Christo Domino, is an ancient example of it. The second is a methodological risk, and it is the risk run by those who love texts and find connections everywhere.

To tell them apart I propose four tests.

1. Textual anchoring. Does the link rest on words present in the texts, rather than on generic themes? Clamavi/clamor, nocte/media nocte, intret/intraverunt pass the test, but remain weak: in the psalm it is the prayer that enters, in the parable it is people.
2. Coherence with the ritual function. Does the reading respect what the chant accompanies? The introit accompanies the entrance: an interpretation that speaks of entering is in tune with the rite, and this weighs more than the lexical coincidence.
3. Convergence within the formulary. Do other elements of the same Mass support the reading? In Year A they do, because the Alleluia and the communion quote the parable. In Years B and C the same reading falls away.
4. Respect for the proper sense. Does the reading leave the psalm its own voice? Psalm 87 is the lament of one who feels close to death; reading it as nuptial expectation is possible only if its darkness is not erased.

The third test leads to the crux of the whole question. The introit of the Thirty-Second Sunday is identical in Years A, B and C: it was conceived, or at least placed, to stand before three different Gospels. A reading that works only for Year A already shows that the chant does not belong to Year A. The formulary asks those who celebrate to reread the same chant three times, before the virgins, before the widow, before the seven brothers. This is a typical situation of the reformed Proper, and it is not necessarily a loss. But it must be recognized for what it is.

From this I draw a second distinction, concerning preservation. Material preservation safeguards text and melody: the Ordo guaranteed it without exception. Functional preservation safeguards the ritual role: Intret was an introit and remains an introit. Hermeneutical preservation, on the other hand, concerns the network of relationships through which the chant takes part in the meaning of the celebration. This is the preservation that the transfer could not guarantee, and that no book can guarantee on its own.

A question for liturgical research

The case of Intret oratio mea does not warrant a polemic against the reform. The sources show a declared method, consistent in its criteria, and even a certain finesse: where the chant could quote the Word, the Ordo did so, recovering from the sanctoral a repertoire that would otherwise have remained confined to a few feasts of virgins. To set a “coherent” ancient tradition against an “arbitrary” reform would simply be false.

The case shows something else, however. The Gregorian Proper of the reformed Mass is built according to two logics that coexist on the same day: a logic of preservation, which assigns a place to chants left homeless, and a logic of pertinence, which ties some chants to the readings. The first usually occupies the entrance and the gradual; the second finds expression above all at the communion. For those who celebrate, this means that the first chant of the Mass and the last may be answering different questions.

Hence the questions I would like to put to those who study the liturgy and its chant.

When the preservation of the repertoire requires a chant to be transferred, what criteria allow us to recognize the pertinence of its new placement? Is generic compatibility with the liturgical season enough, or is a determinate relationship needed with the readings, with the euchology, with the action the chant accompanies?

And further: should the pertinence of a chant be measured against the pericope of the day, or against the whole celebrative complex, that is, season, readings, orations, ritual function and interpretive tradition? The answer changes the verdict. Measured against the Gospel of Year A, Intret is weak. Measured against its function as an entrance chant and against the last stretch of the liturgical year, when the Church prays with her eyes on the end, it holds up better.

Finally: whose task is it to construct the meaning the book has not declared? The cantor who chooses, the presider who comments, the scholar who interprets? If the answer is “everyone,” then shared criteria are needed, because otherwise every connection becomes plausible and none becomes necessary. The four tests proposed above are meant as a first attempt in this direction, to be discussed and corrected.

Preserving the melodies mattered, and the Ordo Cantus Missae did so seriously. But a liturgical chant does not live in its melody alone: it also lives in the celebration that receives it. To ask which liturgical relationships were preserved, transformed or lost along with the chants is not nostalgia. It is the work that the repertoire, precisely because it has been preserved, still asks of us. An introit that moves house takes its melody with it. Its relationships it has to find again.