Venite ad me 90–94, glossed

On 22 October 2026 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Venite ad me, Considerations on handing on the faith. Its paragraphs 90 to 94 are about the liturgy. Read on their own they can be hard to take hold of: the claims are gentle, and the reasons are not on the page. Read against the texts they stand on, they have joints, and every joint is borrowed. This book shows the skeleton under the flesh.

It is laid out as the glossed books of the Middle Ages were, with the text that binds in the centre and the words about it in the margins. Each folio has three columns.

• The centre, in black, is the text that binds, given whole in public-domain translations: Scripture in the Douay-Rheims (Challoner), the Council of Trent in Waterworth’s English of 1848, Augustine’s Confessions in Pusey’s, and the Indiculus in its Latin.
• The gloss, on the left, in lapis, is the Considerations themselves, reported: it is said that.
• The commentary, on the right, in cinnabar, says what binds and what does not, with the reading of a deterministic checker of theological claims where it has something to say. The Considerations call themselves considerations and not a doctrinal note (n. 8), and the checker takes them at their word: they settle nothing, and nothing is owed to them by reference.

After each folio comes a leaf of auctoritates, set as a short article in the manner of the schools. Videtur quod gives the misreading the paragraph itself guards against. Sed contra reports the Second Vatican Council, Pius XII and the Code of Canon Law. Respondeo joins them back to the folio in a line or two.

The illumination

Nothing on these leaves is painted, and nothing is pictured. Each ornament is computed from a Latin word of its own leaf by a rule set down in the colophon on the last leaf, and the same word and the same seed give the same image. The rules come from the tracks that go with the essays on this site (the music). Down the inner margin the word runs in ASCII, eight bits a letter, a crossing or a waiting, as the gates do in Brother Electron. Along the head it runs in Morse, the telegraph of the cloud. At the corners are wheels in the middle of wheels, each holding its leaf’s key. The keys go up by fifths, as the family of tracks does, and then come home: G, D, A, E, B, and back to G. My end is my beginning.

Each leaf has a plate as well. There are nine:

• 1 Corinthians 11:24 as a memory that keeps its bits only by writing each row back before it fades, donec veniat.
• Rings within rings, every spoke running to the hub and from it: culmen et fons.
• The major scale carried up a fifth, so that six notes stay and one moves: salva substantia.
• One tile laid under four laws.
• Young’s two slits, supplicandi and credendi, lit by one source.
• Two buffers in a ring, each telling the other what it is.
• Tesserae laid by the golden angle, for Guardini at Monreale.
• Every rhythm of sixteen, from silence up.
• Plain Bob Minor on six bells: sixty changes, no row rung twice, and home to rounds.

The code that draws them is in two files, illum.py and auct_plates.py. Made by Claude + Richard.

On copyright

The texts at the centre are in the public domain, and they are given whole: Scripture in the Douay-Rheims, Waterworth’s Trent, Pusey’s Augustine, and the Latin of the Vulgate, of Trent and of the Indiculus.

The Considerations, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Mediator Dei and the English of the Code are under copyright: the Holy See’s texts through the Libreria Editrice Vaticana, and the Code’s English through its translators. They are not reproduced here. They are reported in my own words, as a gloss and as the sed contra of an article. A few words are quoted in marks, for criticism and review, with the source named each time (Copyright Act, s. 29.1). Read them whole at vatican.va, where they are freely given; the links are below.

Everything else is mine to give: the reports, the commentary, the articles, the plates, the colophon and the code. Like the other essays here, it is dedicated to the public domain.

A note on sources

At the centre, in the Douay-Rheims (Challoner): 1 Corinthians 11:23–26, 14:15–16 and 14:40; 1 Timothy 2:1–4; Psalm 26:4; Habacuc 2:20; Colossians 3:16; Numbers 6:24–26. Trent in Waterworth’s translation (1848): session VII, canon 13 on the sacraments; session XXI, chapter 2; session XXII, chapters 1, 5 and 8. Augustine, Confessions IX.6–7, in Pusey’s translation. The Indiculus, chapter 8 (DH 246), in Latin, with the commentator’s translation.

Reported: Venite ad me, nn. 8 and 90–94; Sacrosanctum Concilium 7, 10, 14, 21, 22, 30, 37, 38 and 47; Mediator Dei 48; the Code of Canon Law, cc. 838 §1 and 846 §1. Quoted in a word or two: Augustine, Tractates on John 26.13; the antiphon O sacrum convivium; Ezekiel 1:16 and Jude 3 in the Vulgate.

Sources Venite ad me · Sacrosanctum Concilium · Mediator Dei · Code of Canon Law