Pope Francis and the cuillère à sauce individuelle and grand liturgy

Last night I watched a movie I haven’t seen in years from a brand new blu-ray disk (thanks CEF!) on the big hi-def screen: Babette’s Feast.

Scruple Spoon

This movie has it all.

I can say “everything” now because it is the Pope’s favorite film and it features a cuillère à sauce individuelle, a source of true delight.  And since Pope Francis, with his low liturgical style is unlikely to use a scruple spoon, I surmise that the cuillère à sauce individuelle – which I saw in the movie – is the Pope’s favorite spoon.  (Okay.. maybe a wooden spoon, but that doesn’t work for this post.)

See it? Sorry, these are snaps from my phone of the screen.

Since everything in Babette’s Feast is symbolic, what do we make of the sauce spoon?

Not much?

Au contraire!

“But Father! But Father!, you will immediately object, “The great final meal of the film is set around 1885.  The cuillère à sauce individuelle was introduced in 1950.”

Yes. I wrote about that HERE.  I have featured the CASI in posts about food HERE and HERE.  So what?

Lessons.

Pope Francis has a lower liturgical style which has liberals taking victory laps.  They will say, “See? SEE?!? He is doing it just like the Apostles, in the pristine way before all the medieval accretions gummed up the works.  He’s so humbly wonderful, so wonderfully humble….”

I respond saying that his liturgical style may be just as much as an anachronism as the appearance of the French sauce spoon in the Pope’s favorite movie Babette’s Feast.

Thus, perhaps the Pope is really trying to signal some quite different.  He is actually saying “I might like ‘Ol-brot’, but Mass should be like what Babette made.  Use the sauce spoon!”

The anachronistic sauce spoon in the Pope favorite movie proves it.

The next step.   He might be turn Roman liturgy into Ol-brot, but what he really wants us to have is the final meal.  What’s better for Mass?  What she made or… “let it soak”.

BLECH.

Once the general uses it, during the last supper, and people see what it is for, they all use it too.

Okay… everyone… get out there are promote the older, traditional form of Holy Mass in that Latin Rite.

That’s what Francis would want!  The sauce spoon in Francis favorite movie proves it.  Go ahead and argue that it is anachronistic.  That makes it even better.

Now I need to look up recipes for Cailles en Sarcophage!  I might need serious donations to make that one, given the huge slices of black truffle.

By the way, at the end of the movie, the two sisters -like the disciples walking to Emmaus – recognize Christ (Babette is the self-emptying Christ-figure) not in the soaking of the ale-bread, but in the wreck of dirty dishes and the flotsam of the kitchen, and what they ate, and how their hearts burned within them … and through the use of the cuillère à sauce individuelle.

(Someday remind me to tell you about the meal during which we sucked the brains out of the heads of little birds.)