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Conrad Pepler's ‘Lent’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Aidan Nichols OP
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Fr. Conrad Pepler, sometime editor of Blackfriars and Life of the Spirit, the ancestral pair from which New Blackfriars springs, was an outstanding spiritual theologian among a uniquely gifted generation of the English Dominicans. In a period when ‘ascetical and mystical theology’ was generally separated from the theology of the Liturgy (to the disadvantage of both), he was keen to see the journey of the soul to God within the landscape of the Church’s worship. His exploration of the meaning of the Lenten season is a case in point.

Fr. Conrad’s Lent, his first published book, takes the form, as its subtitle tells us, of a ‘Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels’. Obviously, the Lectionary which Fr. Conrad used was that of the preConciliar Roman liturgy, more specifically the Lectionary of St. Pius V, the Dominican pope who, in the wake of the Council of Trent, had reformed the liturgical books of the Western rite. In 1969, in response to the appeal of the Council fathers of Vatican II that ‘a more representative portion of the Scriptures be read to the people over a set cycle of years’, Pope Paul VI replaced the Pian Lectionary with another of his own, or rather his experts’, devising. Although there are continuities between these two scriptural anthologies there are also discontinuities which, clearly enough, reduce the value of Fr. Conrad’s book as a Lenten companion. Really, it is only utilisable by those congregations of the faithful or religious communities which still cling to the earlier liturgical pattern, thanks to Pope John Paul II’s clement interventions to assist them.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 924 , February 1998 , pp. 77 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See my Dominican Gallery. Portrait of a Culture (Leominster Gracewing, 1997)Google Scholar.

2 Lent. A Liturgical Commentary on the Lessons and Gospels (St. Louis, Mo. and London, B. Herder Book Co., 1944)Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., p. iii

4 I follow here Jounel, P., ‘The Easter Cycle’ in Martimort, A. G., Dalmais, I.‐H., Jounel, P., The Church at Prayer, IV, The Liturgy and Time (Et London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), pp. 65‐72Google Scholar.

5 Strictly speaking, only the first half of Holy Week falls within Lent. The Easter Triduum begins on the evening of Holy Thursday.

6 Lent, op. tit., p. 1.

7 Ibid., p. 2.

8 Ibid.

9 Pepler, C. O.P., The Three Degrees. A Study in Christian Mysticism (London, Blackfriars Publications, 1957), p. 112Google Scholar.

10 ‘A Christian is a social contemplative’(Lent, op.cit., p. 223, is, in effect, the Peplerian summary of Arintero's position.

11 The Three Degrees, op.cit., p. 1 12.

12 ‘Creation theology’, in Mystics Quarterly XV. 2 (1989), p. 88Google Scholar. For Fr. Conrad's theology of re‐creation in Christ, see his ‘The Feast of Feasts’, in idem., Sacramental Prayer (London, Bloomsbury Publishing Co., 1959), pp. 52‐60Google Scholar.