Polskie zwyczaje liturgiczne zachowane w graduałach piotrkowskich

Abstract

Liturgical traditions in Poland were formed over many centuries and were transmitted from one generation to another both in writing and orally. They were recorded in service books in a special way. After the Council of Trent quite a lot of liturgical practices were suppressed and replaced by the Roman liturgical rites. The graduals of Piotrków being edited after the Council of Trent, must in some way have been changed in this respect also. But as it turns out, these XVIIth century codexes printed in Kraków, luckily still contain a description of certain old Polish traditions. In the first place there is the Holy Week ceremony and the songs connected with it. The songs for Palm Sunday, Good Friday and the procession on Easter Sunday were handled in a special, traditional way. Many elements of these songs were drawn from the manuscript books used until that time, especially from the Kraków ones. The rites used on the above mentioned days hardly resemble the official rite of the Missale Romanum of 1570. Moreover, eight sequences were kept in the graduals of Piotrków along with the four ones accepted by post-Tridentine liturgy. Several distinguished Polish liturgists like H. Powodowski and S. Sokołowski interceded for the songs. Certain bishops, like H. Rozrażewski did the same, and bishop B. Maciejowski in his famous "Epistola Pastoralls" edited in 1601, even recommended that they continue to be performed. It seems that the books by Andrzej Piotrkowczyk reconciled in an unusually happy and balanced manner the requirements of Rome and the traditions of the Polish liturgy. It is thanks to the fact that these traditions were maintained and assimilated into the Polish liturgy that we can say today they are genuine Polish rites because they have not been known in other countries for a long time. In this respect the maintenance of these customs in Poland is an absolutely exceptional phenomenon, even on a world scale.