Andrew L. Irving "A Burden of Such Great Weight": Restoring "Appropriate Formation" in the Catechumenate "The catechumenate for adults is to be restored and broken up into several steps, and put into practice at the discretion of the local ordinary. In this way the time of the catechumenate, which is intended for appropriate formation, can be sanctified through liturgical rites to be celebrated successively at different times/' 1 Restoration is a tricky business. When Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the architect responsible for restoring the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris after the vandalism it had suffered follow- ing the French Revolution, and, in particular, after the July Revolu- tion of 1830, later wrote in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française, that both the word and the activity it denotes are modern, 2 he conveyed something of this vexation. Restoration implies an ambiguous relationship with the past since, in the first place, it requires a certain adjudication as to which past is to be "restored." A hierarchy of pasts must be established according to which some particular past, a sort of "high past/' has some priority over the intervening past whose passage is interpreted variously as decay, misadventure, fall, ruin, disease, corruption or destruction: rarely Andrew L. Irving is a doctoral student in the Medieval Institute at the Univer- sity of Notre Dame. 1 Sacrosanctum Concilium 64. The English translation is that of Edward Yarnold in his "'The Catechumenate for Adults is to be Restored': Patristic Adpatation in the Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults/' in R. N. Swanson, ed., Continuity and Change in Christian Worship: Papers Read at the 1997 Summer Meeting and the 1998 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Studies in Church History 35 (Woodbridge, Suff.: The Boydell Press 1999) 478; the Latin text may be found in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2 (London & Wash- ington: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press 1990) 833. 2 "Ze mot et la chose sont modernes" s.v. "restauration" in M. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictio- naire raisonné de l'architecture française du Xle au XVIe siècle (Paris: A. Morel 1866) vol. 8,14; cited by Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkely: University of California Press 1998) 7. Andrew L. Irving 500