Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday is now the only occasion (unless one celebrates a Votive Mass of the Holy Trinity) for which the Preface of the Holy Trinity is prescribed. Not that long ago, of course, that preface was prescribed for more than half the Sundays of the year - the "Ordinary" Sundays (or, as they then were, the Sundays after Epiphany and after Pentecost). Pope Clement XIII so prescribed in 1759, although I suspect the tradition of celebrating Sunday as the day most especially associated with the external operations of the Trinity (the day of creation, the day of the resurrection, the day of the descent of the Holy Spirit) must have been much older, going back at least to the medieval origins of today's feast if not before.

I heard the Preface of the Holy Trinity so many times on so many Sundays growing up that I think I could still chant it in Latin - the only Latin preface I might make such a claim for! Serving so many funerals as an altar boy, I must have heard the Preface for the Dead almost as often, but somehow it never stuck the way the Sunday Preface did. It is a beautiful text which, when properly chanted, highlights the wonderful way the words are paired in praise of the Trinity. I tried to find a recording. Although the sound is not the greatest and it is, of course, in black-and-white, I did find this wonderful old video from a Sunday Mass at Ushaw College, Durham, in 1960 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WivtZGfrSk&t=1s. (The  Preface begins at about 48:00.)