SOURCE: Gingras, George E. “‘Et Fit Missa ad Tertia’: A Textual Problem in the Itinerarium Egeriae XLVI, 4.” In Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, Volume II, edited by Patrick Granfield and Josef A. Jungmann, pp. 596-603. Münster Westfalen, Germany: Verlag Aschendorff, 1970.

In the following essay, Gingras explicates a complicated passage of the Itinerarium Egeriae concerning daily catechistic instruction during Lent in fourth-century Jerusalem.

Chapter 46 of the Itinerarium Egeriae, which describes in detail the instruction of the competentes or Baptismal candidates at Jerusalem during the eight weeks of Lent observed there at the time of the author's visit¹, may offer the fortuitous conjunction in the same sentence of two different uses of missa. Terse, potentially ambiguous and possibly elliptical, the sentence in question occurs within a passage stressing both the duration of daily catechetics and the beneficent effects of such thorough teaching on the spiritual life of the people.

Following...