Bulletins

August 14, 2016

The development of the pax board over the last nine centuries seems eventually to have engendered some controversy over privilege and precedence in the exchange of the Kiss of Peace. Rev. Josef A. Jungmann describes this for us in The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development. He concludes that “For these and similar reasons, the kiss of peace even with the pax-board was impracticable and, except on certain extraordinary occasions and in a few areas here and there, could continue only in various religious groups”.

Fr. Jungmann mentions a report from 1927 that in “the Diocese of Valencia in Spain that the men still give each other the Kiss of Peace, imparted to them by two acolytes who receive it from the priest” and that Dominicans, Carthusians, Carmelites and Capuchins were still employing the pax board or pax tablet for the Kiss of Peace.

The famous early twentieth-century liturgist Rev. Pius Parsch of Canons Regular in Klosterneuburg Abbey includes in his 1939 work Das katholische Gotteshaus or “The Catholic House of God” the pacificale or pax board “as among the requirements for the furnishing of a church”.

May the peace of the Lord be with you always!

Fr. Christopher J. Pollard

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