Saint Andrew Daily Missal, Bruges, Wedding Inscribed, c. 1937–1949

The Piece

The Saint Andrew Daily Missal, Regular Edition, by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre of the Abbey of Saint Andre, published by the Liturgical Apostolate at Bruges in Belgium with the E. M. Lohmann Company of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Bound in soft black leather over flexible boards with blind ruled panel borders, raised bands across the spine, and DAILY MISSAL stamped in gilt. A Chi Rho monogram is blind stamped at the center of the front cover. Four silk ribbon markers in purple, blue and green remain attached, and the page edges carry their original red stain.

Inside is the full Latin Mass as it stood before the Second Vatican Council, Latin and English set in parallel columns, printed in red and black, with Vespers and Compline for Sundays and feasts and roughly two hundred wood engravings in a bold Arts and Crafts manner. The title page device shows two deer drinking beneath the words Omnis Honor et Gloria, flanked by Divine Office and Sacraments, over a line from Pius X calling the liturgy the first and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit.

The front free endpaper carries a pencil inscription in a fine copperplate hand. It reads: To Mickey on our Wedding. April 11, 194, with the final digit falling right at the curl of the leaf. Across the whole of the nineteen forties, April 11 landed on a Saturday exactly once, in 1942.

This book was carried. The leather is worn through at the corners and along the spine ends, the hinges have begun to open, and the text block has the soft loosened feel of a volume opened several hundred times. That is what an object looks like when it is used for its purpose rather than kept.

History & Provenance

Dom Gaspar Lefebvre was born at Lille on June 17, 1880 and died at Bruges on April 16, 1966. He studied at Maredsous Abbey, was ordained in 1904, and became prior of Saint Andrew's Abbey at Zevenkerken outside Bruges. From 1920 to 1959 he produced bilingual missals in English, French, Dutch and Italian, carrying forward the work Lambert Beauduin had begun in the Belgian liturgical movement, which argued that ordinary worshippers should follow and take part in the liturgy rather than watch it.

That argument is the reason this book exists in the form it does. Putting the Latin and the vernacular side by side on the page was a deliberate act, and the Saint Andrew became one of the most widely used hand missals in the English speaking Catholic world.

The approvals are printed in full and date this edition precisely. Imprimi potest, February 2, 1937, signed Theodorus, Abbot of the monastery of Saint Andrew. Imprimatur, Bruges, February 3, 1937, signed Jos. Van der Meersch, vicar general. The colophon records printing by Desclee De Brouwer and Company of Bruges, the liturgical press, with the plate number 11853 over 23, and the foot of the copyright page reads Made in Belgium, No. 1700-4.

So the edition is fixed to 1937, and the wedding inscription fixes the far end: this missal was a gift between two people in the nineteen forties, carried from Belgium to an American household. A later owner wrote a name and contact details on a following leaf, which are left unpublished here.

It is worth sitting with what the dating means. A Belgian liturgical press sent this book out in February 1937. Within three years the country printing it was occupied. Whoever gave it to Mickey gave it during the war, and the book outlived the marriage, the war, and the rite it was printed to serve.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is not a decorative book and it would be dishonest to sell it as one. It is a worn working missal whose interest lies in what it is and what happened to it.

What it is: a complete pre conciliar Latin Mass in parallel text, printed in Bruges by one of the great liturgical presses, illustrated with engravings that still look modern, produced by a monk who spent forty years trying to put the liturgy into the hands of people in the pews. For anyone drawn to the traditional rite, to liturgical history, or to Belgian fine printing between the wars, the content alone earns the shelf.

What happened to it: someone gave it to a person called Mickey on a wedding day in the nineteen forties, and that person carried it until the leather gave out. The ribbons are still in place where they were last left.

It belongs on a study shelf, in a collection of devotional or liturgical books, with wartime material, or with anyone who would rather own one object with a life in it than three in better condition without.