Feast of Saint Corbinian

#On the Recorded Observance

This dossier is a survey of A.S. 201, compiled in the year that the Bavarian Creed Adjustment remains in force and Munich remains Munich. Its subject is one recitation on the Feast of Saint Corbinian. At that recitation, fourteen thousand voices spoke the fourth line of the Triune Creed in the Munich manner while holding official Strasbourg cadence cards. The file under review does not record the year of that recitation, and I will not supply one. A clerk who invents a date to tidy a folio commits the same sin as the circular this dossier exists to correct. He has less excuse, because the folio is in front of him.

The scope is narrow by order and by preference. This is no life of the saint, no constitution of his feast and no programme of hymns for the devout to frame above the hearth. The feast is the setting. The evidence is the line.

The record holds three facts, and they must be kept apart like quarrelling canons in separate cells. The printed form was correct. The spoken form was Munich's. The administrative claim that the two had converged was false. Everything else here is commentary, and the commentary is mine.

#On the Approved Form

In A.S. 178 the Bureau of Doctrine required every public recitation of the Triune Creed in Munich to follow the approved Strasbourg cadence markers. The quarrel concerned three syllables in the fourth line. Munich habit lengthened and weighted them, and Strasbourg preferred them clipped. The words were the same words, and the meaning was the same meaning. Doctrine's complaint lay in the breath between them. Doctrine was within its rights. A Church that cannot govern how its Creed is spoken has conceded that it governs only what is printed, and the printers have never been the dangerous ones.

The Adjustment moved through parish, school, guild, barracks and municipal ceremony. Its instruments were paper. Teachers received cadence cards, priests received corrected altar copies and choir-masters received marked chant sheets. Each card carried the approved markers. Each could be issued, signed for, counted and entered in a column.

That convenience ruined the circulars. A card in a hand is visible from the back of any nave. A junior clerk with poor hearing and good penmanship can tally it. Cadence cannot be tallied that way. It exists only while it is being spoken, and it leaves no residue on vellum unless someone competent is listening and is willing to write down what he heard rather than what he was sent to find.

Munich has been administratively settled under the Concordat since A.S. 90. It has had ample time to learn exactly what an office counts.

#On Fourteen Thousand Voices

The record gives the scale as fourteen thousand voices, and I preserve the unit. A voice is what the record heard. It is not a registered soul, a household, a pilgrim or a tithe account. I will not let some later compiler convert the figure into a census of the faithful because it looks handsome in a table. The record counts fourteen thousand voices speaking together at the fourth line.

Consider the arrangement the record describes. Every hand that held a card held a correct card. The markers were printed where Doctrine had placed them. The ink did not wander, and no erratum lies against the typesetter, whoever he was. Above each card, at the fourth line, a Munich mouth delivered three syllables in the old Munich weight.

It happened fourteen thousand times.

I will not say what the record does not say. It names no officiant and no venue. It describes no banners, no arrests and no correction attempted on the spot. It assigns no common motive to the fourteen thousand, and neither will I. A crowd that large holds every disposition a city owns: the defiant, the devout, the half-deaf, the habitual and the many who never noticed there was a choice to make. Whatever passed in the private chapel of each skull, the sum of it at the fourth line was Munich.

In the parent file I argued that Bavarian obedience is a refusal wearing its Sunday coat. That is my reading. The record supports a narrower and more humiliating statement: the approved instrument was present in every hand and absent from the sound.

A gathering of that size makes a poor hiding place for a minority habit. One elder lengthening a syllable in a back pew is "residual older usage." Fourteen thousand voices doing it in unison are the usage.

#On the Circular and the Audit

In A.S. 193 Doctrine circulars declared that Munich had achieved "full cadence convergence." The phrase has the high polish of something composed in an office far from the sound it describes.

The file gives the feast recitation no year, and I will not lash it to 193 because the circular is conveniently dated. The record establishes a sequence of judgement. The claim was made, the recitation was set against it, and the claim was corrected by audit. The material before me does not name the auditor.

The audit found the printing sound, the text unaltered and the Strasbourg form without defect. Its finding lay elsewhere. Possession of correct instructions had been reported as performance of them. At some point in the chain of compliance, someone had counted cards and written down voices. This is the oldest fraud in the Ledger, and it is rarely committed on purpose. Paper is easy to see and sound is hard to hear, so the column fills itself with whatever can be seen.

The correction amended a claim. It left the mandate exactly where it stood. Local cadence received no licence, the feast acquired no special rule, and the three syllables gained no legal standing by being caught in such numbers. Doctrine retracted an adjective. It retracted nothing else.

The Bureau of Purity holds standing permission under the Adjustment to observe repeated failure. The file does not place Purity at this feast. I will not seat its officers in a side aisle for atmosphere, however naturally they would fit there.

#On the Continuing File

As of the A.S. 201 survey, the Bavarian Creed Adjustment remains in force. Every public recitation in Munich must use Strasbourg cadence. The Munich fourth line persists. The parent file records both conditions in the present tense, and this dossier has no later resolution to report.

The Feast of Saint Corbinian holds its place in the cadence dispute for one reason. It is the recorded occasion on which the three parts of the problem stood in the same room at once and could not be blurred together: the approved form in every hand, the local form in every mouth and an official sentence in a western file insisting that the two were one. Any Doctrine clerk drafting a future compliance report on Munich should be required to read the retraction above before he picks up his pen. I do not expect this requirement to be adopted.

Munich did not break the Adjustment at the feast. It held the Adjustment, correctly printed, at chest height, and said the line its own way over the top of it.

Doctrine may continue to print. It prints very well.