I can’t see any reason for the fiddlebacks except that they were easier to maintain (if a priest sits on a bench, he need not sit on the chasuble at all) and cooler to wear. In fact, that’s the reason they were created.
While the back of a fiddleback looks nice, they look rather hideous from the front – or at least most do. I was thumbing through Henri Daniel-Rops’ This is the Mass earlier this evening. My copy was published in 1958 and has some gorgeous pictures of Archbishop Sheen celebrating the Mass. He is wearing a beautiful Gothic-style chasuble despite the date.
While the two concerns you list certainly seem like they could have played a role in the development of the fiddleback, I also thought a main reason for their evolution was to provide greater freedom of movement to the priest. As ever-more-fancy chasubles became stiffer and heavier, they slowly got cut back to help the priest move his arms. The popular opinion among liturgists seems to be to decry this as one of the worst excrescences of Baroque decadence, but for those of us whose main experience of Gothic chasubles has been the polyester poncho, it takes a lot of work to make Gothic look good. For instance, the chasuble you cite on Abp. Sheen reminds me way to much of bad vestments. When I first got the book I thought “I suppose that thing is made of nice materials and all, but the decorations are a real turn-off.”
Further, the revised General Instruction of the Roman Missal does not specify the maniple as being a vestment proper to the priest celebrant at Mass.
There was no “failing to mention it.” It’s clear from the GIRM that it’s no longer part of the vestments proper to the priest celebrant at Mass.
I am not so sure. If you look at the publications like the Ecclesiatical Review especially at the time of the 1960’s when there were major changes to the rubrics, or new ceremonial guides (like “The Celebration of the Mass"or Synopsis Variationem in editione typica Missalis Romani”) rubricists did hold that if an explicit reference formerly made in the body of rubrics was removed, then it was to be regarded as suppressed. For example, the obligation that the priest cover his head with a biretta, or the bow toward the crucifix. Or even which Masses were allowed as votives. Of course there is a bit of difficulty in applying this to the 1969 missal because it is completely different rubrics.
At the same time, someone once posted that Cardinal Arinze said it was alright and the CDW is entrusted with interpretations.
I’ve got to steer a middle position on the maniple. On the one hand, I don’t think an argument from silence suffices to prove its suppression. I say that for two reasons: 1) experience has shown that
sometimes silence simply means “We don’t feel the need to mention something that everyone should be able to assume,” as when the Vatican had to tell people after the publication of the 1983 CIC that yes, you are still excommunicated for being a Freemason even though we no longer make explicit reference to the group; 2) As the maniple is put on before Mass and its use does not interfere with anything whatsoever, it seems impossible to obrogate its use and thus I think supressing it should probably take some explicit form.
On the other hand, while silence alone doesn’t quite cut it for me, I believe there was a ruling made at the switch to the NO that certain practices no longer mentioned were, in fact, not allowed to be used in the new form of the rite, specifically the old manner of incensation. While I think this decision, though, was not an authentic interpretation of the law in general, I don’t think it can create any sort of binding precedent for ruling on the use of other elements.
Still, even if the maniple were indeed suppressed beyond a doubt, it seems to be an eminently tolerable custom if communities should choose to create and enforce it, so if a parish wants their priest to wear a maniple I think bishops should sanction it (as a custom
contra legem with force of law).
