Wandering Rocks opens with the confusingly ambiguous phrase "The superior, the very reverend John Conmee," and quickly follows up with another play on words: "What was that boy's name again? Dignam. Yes. Vere dignum et iustum est." The Latin phrase, "It is truly fitting and right," comes from the Catholic Mass. Father Conmee here is simply allowing his mind to wander into a linguistic coincidence, but the effect must surely be to disorient most readers.

Conmee is beginning his walk to Artane to see if the O'Brien Institute for Destitute Children will admit Paddy Dignam's orphaned son Patsy. He pauses to remind himself of the family name––clearly these Dignam people are not quite so immediately available to his consciousness as "Brother Swan," "Mr Cunningham," and "the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P."––and then his thoughts drift off into a reverie about the Mass. "Vere dignum et justum est" opens the Preface that begins the central section of the ceremony. Gifford supplies a translation of the complete sentence: "It is indeed fitting and right, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Lord, Holy Father, Almighty and Eternal God."

Joyce's internal monologue here captures a perfectly ordinary occurrence in human cognition, the brain's tendency to seize on casual identities and similarities. But "Vere dignum" sounds enough like "very Dignam" to make readers of Wandering Rocks halt their progress and wonder what the priest may be thinking about the boy. The priest is not thinking about the boy at all, and the narrative is leading its readers down a blind alley. The confusion is entirely typical of this chapter.

For fans of Catholic arcana, however, the alley may not be entirely a dead end. While anyone familiar with the Latin Mass would immediately recognize the words Vere dignum, few would recognize their presence in the cruciform monogram in the 12th century manuscript shown here. The text to the right of the monogram begins "et iustum est" because the monogram, which appears in at least three different medieval manuscripts, implicitly contains the letters UEREDIGNUM. (Ancient Latin used the letter "U" to represent both the vowel "u" and the consonant "v.") Jeff Ostrowski explains how the cryptogram works, in a brief 1 June 2013 article on Corpus Christi Watershed (www.ccwatershed.org/2013/06/01/uere-dignum-truly-right-just-preface-vere).

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