A 6th-Century Ivory Episcopal Throne

A friend of mine recently visited the Italian city of Ravenna, a port city on the Adriatic coast, about 50 miles directly east of Bologna. In the 5th century, this city became the capital of the waning western Roman Empire, and from the later 6th century to the middle of the 8th, was the seat of the Byzantine imperial governor of Italy, known as the exarch. Several of the city’s churches famously preserve important mosaics from this period.

Here are my friend’s photographs of an interesting monument of the same period, a throne decorated with carved ivory panels, which belonged to an archbishop of Ravenna named Maximian (499-556), who held the see for the last ten years of his life. The throne was made in the first half of the sixth century in either Constantinople or Alexandria. The panels on the back depict episodes from the life of Christ, and those on the side show episodes from the life of the patriarch Joseph; between them are panels with decorative vines interspersed with animals. This is now kept in the archepiscopal museum of Ravenna, and, of course, behind protective glass, which makes for less than ideal photography.

On the front panel beneath the seat are shown St John the Baptist and the four evangelists, with the name archbishop’s name in Greek, Maximianos, arranged in a monogram above St John. 

A detail of the decorative motif in the panel beneath.

Episodes from the life of Christ on the back.

The Annunciation

The dream of St Joseph, and the journey to Bethlehem.

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The Embolism

Lost in Translation #165

After the Lord’s Prayer, the priest says:

Libera nos, quaesumus, Domine, ab omnibus malis, praeteritis, praesentibus et futuris: et intercedente beata et gloriosa semper Virgine Dei Genitrice María, cum beatis Apostolis tuis Petro et Paulo, atque Andrea, et omnibus Sanctis (signing himself with the paten), da propitius pacem in diebus nostris (kissing the paten): ut, ope misericordiæ tuæ adjuti, et a peccato simus semper liberi et ab omni perturbatione securi.

Which I translate as:

Deliver us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, from all evils, past, present, and future; and through the intercession of the Blessed and glorious ever Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, and Thy blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, as well as Andrew, and of all the Saints (signing himself with the paten), graciously grant us peace in our days (kissing the paten), so that aided by the assistance of Thy mercy we may always be free from sin, and safe from all disturbance.

The name for this prayer is the Embolism (from the Greek embolismos, an addition or interpolation). Most Eastern Rites and all Western ones (Roman, Ambrosian, Gallican, Mozarabic) have one. The exception is the Byzantine Rite, which instead “adds” a Trinitarian ending: “For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and forever and unto ages of ages.” In the Roman Rite, the Embolism is said in a low voice except on Good Friday, when it is said aloud, perhaps to add urgency to the petition on that sorrowful day.

All Evils

The Roman embolism develops the last petition of the Lord’s Prayer. As we saw last week, since Latin lacks a definite article, Sed libera nos a malo can be translated “But deliver us from evil” rather than “But deliver us from the Evil One.” The embolism expands upon the nature of evil, asking for deliverance from all evils, past, present, and future. As Fr. Nicholas Gihr explains:

Of past evils, sins especially often continue to abide in their painful consequences, in their unhappy results and fruits the latter, therefore, should be totally removed and obviated. In the present we are pressed down by evils from within and without, from all sides, and from these we wish to be delivered. The future is frequently enveloped in darkness, and in its bosom conceals a host of threatening evils and from these we would beg to be spared. [1]

Four Saints

The Embolism seeks the intercession of all the saints, but it singles out four: the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Apostles Peter, Paul, and Andrew. As with the Confiteor, the prayer follows the ancient usage of calling some of the saints “Blessed” (beati) rather than “Saint” (sancti): in the Confiteor, it is Michael the Archangel and John the Baptist. In the Embolism, the usage is particularly appropriate since in asking for peace, the Embolism is essentially asking for happiness, and Beatus literally means “made happy.” We seek happiness with the aid of those who have been made happy in the light of glory.

The Church naturally turns to the Mother of God (as she does throughout the Mass) as her chief saintly intercessor, and the Church of Rome naturally turns to her own two founders, Peter and Paul, as she does elsewhere (see the Confiteor and the Suscipe Sancta Trinitas and the Prayers after Low Mass). It is thought that Pope St. Gregory the Great is the one who added Saint Andrew’s name to the Embolism, and three reasons are typically given for his decision: first, that Gregory had a personal devotion to Andrew; second, that Andrew is the next ranking Apostle after Peter and Paul (see the Communicantes); and third, that Gregory was influenced by the Byzantine Rite, which praises Andrew as the founder of the Faith in Constantinople. [2]

Yet none of these reasons explains why Gregory added Andrew’s name to this prayer and not someplace else. I believe the answer lies in the role that Andrew plays in the Gospels. Andrew is the Apostle who brings others to Christ. It was he who introduced his brother Peter to Jesus, (John 1, 40-42) and it was he who, along with Philip, tried to introduce some Gentiles to Jesus. (see John 12, 20-22) Moreover, Andrew is the Apostle who helps make an encounter with the Eucharistic Lord happen, for it was he who introduced the boy with the five loaves and two fishes to Jesus. (see John 6, 8-9) Just as Andrew is instrumental in a foreshadowing of the Eucharist (a miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), so too do we ask him now to be instrumental in preparing us for Holy Communion.

And our author/editor could have written Petro, Paulo, et Andrea but instead he wrote Petro et Paulo, atque Andrea. Atque is a conjunction with “adversative force”: whereas et “designates an external connection of different objects with each other,” atque in general indicates “a close internal connection between single words or whole clauses.” [3] Here, however, it is possible that the word stresses Andrew’s importance vis-à-vis Holy Communion, in which case it could be translated “and especially Andrew.” [4]

Evil vs. Peace

The prayer follows the pattern of “out with the bad, in with the good.” The bad that we want out is evil; the good that we want in is peace. One may wonder why we do not petition for a more natural opposite of evil, such as goodness or holiness. I suspect that there are two reasons. First, peace is the opposite of evil insofar as evil robs us of our peace. And second, we ask for peace as a preparation for Holy Communion because peace, as Augustine famously defines it, is the tranquility of order. [5] A soul that is truly at peace is a soul that is well ordered and thus maximally receptive to the graces of the Eucharist.

But the prayer also has in mind our welfare outside of Holy Communion. The ultimate goal of being delivered from evil and granted peace is to be free from sin always (our spiritual welfare) and to be secure from all disturbance (our temporal welfare). The word perturbatio can refer to a political disturbance such as a riot or a tumult, [6] or to a personal disturbance, as in a state of mental agitation. (The English derivative “perturbation” retains both of these meanings, although the political meaning is now considered obsolete.) [7] In On Genesis against the Manicheans, St. Augustine writes about perturbations in such a way that the passage almost seems to be an embolism of the Embolism:

This is the happy and tranquil life for man: when all his emotions are in accord with reason and truth, and they are called joys and loves: holy and chaste and good. But if they are not in accord while they are being ruled negligently, they rip the mind to pieces and dissipate it and make life utterly miserable. Then they are called perturbations and lusts and evil desires. [8]

Gestures

The gestures of the priest as he recites the Embolism add further meaning to the prayer. At the words, “graciously grant us peace in our days,” the priest makes the sign of the cross with the paten over himself, and when he finishes, he kisses the top of the paten. St. Paul tells the Colossians that Christ reconciled all things to Himself, “making peace through the blood of His cross” (1, 20), and here the sign of the cross draws the blessing of peace purchased by the cross: we can almost picture the priest’s perturbations getting reordered and pacified as the sign is made over him. The priest then kisses the paten before he places it under the Host and moves the paten and Host to the right of the chalice. A kiss is a sign of peace (and indeed the kiss of peace is to be given shortly at a Solemn High Mass), and the paten will soon assume the significance of the Holy Sepulcher, holding the Body of Our Lord. The priest’s kiss is thus a tender tribute to our Lord in the tomb. Further underscoring this symbolism is the placement of the Host to the right of the chalice, as the last drops of Blood that flowed from Our Lord came from His right side.

The Novus Ordo

During the creation of the Novus Ordo Missae, Pope Paul VI expressed a wish to keep the Embolism intact, but Annibale Bugnini and his peers did not accept his suggestion on the grounds that “it did not seem appropriate to repeat intercessions made a few moments ago in the Eucharistic Prayer.” [9] Both the Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon) and the Embolism are from the Patristic era, which according to Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, was supposed to function as the gold standard for the ensuing liturgical reforms. [10]. Instead, Bugnini appealed to another principle from the same document, the elimination of “useless repetitions.” [11]. The only problem is that the intercessions in the Embolism are not a repetition of those in the Canon; they are distinctive.

And so, the 1970 Missal made several changes to the Embolism. First, it was to be said aloud always and not just on Good Friday. Second, a version of the Byzantine ending (also found in some Biblical manuscripts at Matthew 6, 13), “For the kingdom, the power and glory are yours, now and for ever,” was added, in part because of its “ecumenical value” – not, we speculate, in order to draw closer to the Byzantine Rite, but to be more aligned with Protestant services. [12] Third, the invocation of the four saints was removed, thus eliminating a “scandal of particularity” characteristic of all Apostolic liturgies. [13] Fourth, a reference to the Parousia was added in order to rescue “the embolism from a kind of ‘horizontalism.’ ” [14] Huh? And fifth, the tender gestures involving the paten were omitted.

Vernacular translations further flattened the Embolism. For the rich perturbatio, the first ICEL version used “protect us from all anxiety.” Anxiety is very much on the mind of modern man (fair enough), but the word is not a faithful transposition of what our spiritual ancestors meant by a perturbation. Fortunately, the 2011 ICEL fares much better with “safe from all distress,” which keeps both the personal and political connotations of the noun intact. For though we live in an age of psychological anxiety, we also live (and have always lived) in a time of political uncertainty. It would surely be a blessing and a great source of peace to be safe from all disturbances within and without.

Notes

[1] Gihr, 702.

[2] See Jungmann, 285-286.

[3] “Atque or ac,” Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary.

[4] See Ibid., I.B.b.

[5] City of God 19.13.

[6] See the Vulgate translation of 2 Machabees 13, 16.

[7] “Perturbation, noun,” OED, 1.a. and 1.b.

[8] De Genesi contra Manichaeos libri duo 1.31, trans. mine. Following Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 4, 5, 10, Augustine holds that perturbation is the Latin equivalent of the Greek pathos. (City of God 8.17) Augustine also follows the Stoics and Cicero in defining the four disturbances (perturbationes) of the mind as desire, joy, fear, and sadness (see Conf. 10.14.21; Cicero, De finibus 3.10.35; Disputationes Tusculanae 4.6.11).

[9] Bugnini, 380.

[10] Sacrosanctum Concilum, 50.

[11] Ibid., 34.

[12] Bugnini, 376.

[13] See Peter Kwasniewski, The Once and Future Roman Rite (TAN Books, 2023), p. 228, n. 15.

[14] Bugnini, 376.

The Votive Mass of St. Thomas More

Portrait of Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527

In the 1969 General Calendar, the celebration of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More is an optional memorial on June 22, whereas in England and Wales it has the rank of a feast. Neither appeared on the universal calendar prior to that date, but in England and Wales their combined feast was celebrated on July 9 after they were both canonized in 1935. (Yes, it took four hundred years for these heroic men to be raised to the altar). I suspect that the reason for the choice of July 9 was practical. St. John Fisher was martyred on June 22, 1535, but in the 1935 General Calendar late June was rather full: June 22 was the feast of St Paulinus of Nola, and the first available feria day was not until June 27. St Thomas More, on other hand, was martyred on July 6, 1535, the Octave of Saints Peter and Paul. (More himself considered it an honor to die on the same day as St Peter, to whose See he had remained loyal at all costs). Because July 7 is the feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius and July 8 that of St Elizabeth of Portugal, the first “free day” after July 6 was July 9.

In addition to a July 9 Mass for Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, which can be celebrated in the dioceses of England and Wales, there is a Votive Mass of St. Thomas More. Although it does not appear in the 1962 Roman Missal, it has been celebrated before outside of England without raising too many eyebrows (see here). Moreover, its propers are an excellent example of how the traditional liturgy tailors its petitions and lessons to the “genius” of a particular saint. [1]

The Introit is:

In Thy strength, O Lord, the just man shall joy: and in Thy salvation he shall rejoice exceedingly: Thou hast given him his heart’s desire. Ps. 20, 4 For Thou hast prevented him with blessings of sweetness: Thou hast set on his head a crown of precious stones.

These verses (Ps. 20, 1-4) are used as the generic Introit for a Martyr who is not a Pontiff, but the verse about coming before the martyr (the meaning of “preventing him”) with the blessings of sweetness holds special meaning in reference to the gentle St. Thomas More, and it anticipates a key theme of the Collect, which is:

Deus, qui beáto Thomæ Mártyri inter sǽculi illécebras et cárceris mortisque dolóres hílari fortíque ánimo crucem tuam amplecti tribuisti: concéde, quǽsumus, ejus intercessióne et exemplo, ut pro fide et justitia alácriter decertantes, ad æterna gaudia læti perveníre mereámur. Per Dóminum.

Which I translate as:

O God, who didst empower blessed Thomas Thy Martyr, amidst the allurements of the world and the pains of prison and death, to embrace Thy cross with a merry and courageous spirit: grant, we beseech, that by his intercession and example we may be quick to fight for faith and justice, and so, filled with cheer, deserve to attain eternal joys.

It is an excellent description of the witty and playful Saint. Erasmus famously called Thomas More a “man for all seasons” because he was the kind of man you wanted and could depend on in any circumstance or situation. He was a joy to be around. And his generous heart was quick to forgive, as he did when his judges condemned him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. (Henry VIII had the sentence reduced to a beheading the night before his execution). Rather than express outrage at the unjust verdict and recoil at the gruesome way he thought he was to die, More prayed that they would all meet “merrily together” one day in heaven. The adjective hilaris, which I have translated as “merry”, is the perfect word to describe More. It is the only time that it appears in the traditional liturgy. [2]

The choice of II Maccabees 6, 18-28 for the Epistle is also distinctive: the only other time it appears in the traditional liturgy is the combined feast of Fisher and More. The passage tells the story of an old and pious scribe named Eleazar who was told by the Hellenistic occupiers of Israel to eat swine’s flesh or be executed. Eleazar chose a “most glorious death” over a “hateful life,” but his friends, moved by a “wicked pity,” suggested a clever way out: he could eat something that only looked like pork and thereby not violate the Law of Moses. Without delay Eleazar replied that it was not becoming for a man his age to dissemble, and that he would be giving bad example to the youth. “And having spoken thus, he was forthwith carried to execution.”

The Martyrdom of Eleazar the Scribe, by Gustave Doré; public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. 

The reading is perfect for the two martyrs but especially for More. His most famous work, Utopia, is proof that he could be a master of dissembling when he wanted to. The ironic fantasy fiction is written in such a way that the bitter truth about political life is cleverly hidden by “honeyed” absurdities. (See his Letter to Peter Giles). And after his resignation from the Chancellorship of England, More could have remained quiet, but he continued to write veiled critiques of Henry VIII’s decision to marry Anne Boleyn and declare himself head of the Church of England. It is possible that a shrewd lawyer like More could have found a loophole in the Oath of Supremacy, but instead of using a casuistic approach, he followed the path of Eleazar, even though he was not an old man but at the height of his skills.

The Gospel reading, Matthew 10, 34-42, is equally appropriate, for among other things it contains the verses: “And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Thomas More truly and sincerely loved his country’s father, the King, but he did not love Henry more than God.

The Secret is:

Hoc sacrificium redemptiónis nostræ, quǽsumus, omnípotens Deus, clementer réspice: et intercedente beáto Thoma Mártyre tuo, pro hac familia tua placátus assúme. Per Dóminum.

Which I translate as:

Look mercifully, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, on this sacrifice of our redemption: and by the intercession of blessed Thomas, Thy Martyr, graciously accept it on behalf of this Thy household. Through our Lord.

The prayer uses language that is common in Secrets: “Graciously accept,” for example, appears thirty-one times in the Secrets of the 1962 Roman Missal either as benignus assume or, as here, placatus assume. Nor is it unusual to refer to the Church as God’s household or family (familia), but in the over hundred times that the word appears in the Roman orations, it is in the Collect or the Postcommunion rather than the Secret.

The Postcommunion is:

Sint tibi, omnípotens Deus, grata nostræ servitútis obsequia: ut hæc sancta quæ súmpsimus, intercedente beáto Thoma Mártyre tuo, nobis ad capessenda pérpetis vitæ prǽmia profícere sentiámus. Per Dóminum.

Which I translate as:

O Almighty God, may the homage of our service be pleasing unto Thee, with the result that, by the intercession of blessed Thomas, Thy Martyr, we may feel these holy things which we have received bring about a snatching up of the rewards of perpetual life. Through our Lord.

Again, the language is and is not familiar. Petitions to feel the effects of the Eucharist (sentiamus) are common in Postcommunion prayers, but the construction of this prayer is unusually elaborate, as is the use of the verb capesso (snatch up, seize eagerly), which is nowhere to be found in the 1962 Missal. I wonder--and this would take a much more extensive study to confirm--if the diction is an implicit homage to the Renaissance humanist Latin in which More excelled.

In 1929, G.K. Chesterton wrote that “Thomas More is more important at this moment than at any moment since his death, even perhaps the great moment of his dying; but he is not quite so important as he will be in about a hundred years’ time.” As we approach the centenary of GK’s prophecy, let us pray that an increased use of the well-crafted Votive Mass of Thomas More will duly reflect the Saint’s ever-growing importance in the world today.

Notes

[1] For instance, the new Missal takes all the propers of the feast from the Common of Martyrs, with the sole exception of the Collect. And the Collect, aside from mentioning Fisher and More by name, could easily be used for any martyr since it has nothing distinctive about their lives. The new Collect is: “O God, who in martyrdom have brought true faith to its highest expression, graciously grant that, strengthened through the intercession of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, we may confirm by the witness of our life the faith we profess with our lips. Through our Lord.”

[2] It appears once in the 2002 Missale Romanum, in the Oratio super Oblata for St. Philip Neri on May 26. The 2011 English edition translates the word as “cheerfully.”

Photos from the CMAA 2026 Sacred Music Colloquium

We are glad to share some photos from the liturgical celebrations held last week during the Church Music Association of America’s 36th Annual Sacred Music Colloquium at the St. John Newman Center at the University of Illinois in Champaign. The event took place from June 22 to 26, and drew over 200 participants, who gathered to learn more about the Church’s treasury of Sacred Music through chant, polyphony, and organ repertoire.

On Tuesday, June 23, a Votive Mass of the Holy Angels was celebrated in English and Latin, with a new English Mass Ordinary, the Missa Mystica, commissioned by the CMAA and composed by Christopher Mueller. The propers were sung in both English and Latin by the Men’s Schola, directed by Dr. David Hughes, and by the Women’s Schola, directed by Fr. Mark Bachmann, OSB. Our section-leader ensemble was directed by Paul French, who sang a motet by Guerrero, while Christopher Berry directed all the participants in singing a motet by Peñalosa. The organist for this Mass was Michael Olbash.

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Historian Breaks New Ground in Vatican II Research, with Special Attention to Liturgical Reform

People today often ask questions like: “What in the world happened at the time of Vatican II, that the Church seemed in such an unholy hurry to change? Why were the changes so drastic and so sudden? What were the causes, the motives, the expectations, the assumptions about reform and its expected fruits? Who were the main actors? Was it planned out or random? Who benefited (cui bono)? How responsible were the bishops for it, versus the middle managers, versus the laity?” and so forth. It can be very hard to disentangle so many threads.

This is why professional historians exist. Professor Hanael Bianchi has spent 10 years researching, at the nitty-gritty level, how Vatican II was received and implemented in a particular (and very important) diocese, using archival materials, period documents, and firsthand accounts. The resulting book, A Liberal Revolution: The Implementation of Vatican II in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, will leave a permanent mark henceforth on all studies of the period.

Bianchi answers the above questions, one after the next – and brings the receipts. In an era of endless podcasting and spitballing, the disciplined work of research is more necessary than ever if we wish to gain a well-documented and well-organized account of complex events, while overturning faulty theories and clumsy generalizations from (…yes…) every part of the ecclesiastical spectrum.

While the Second Vatican Council has generated a large scholarly corpus, A Liberal Revolution is the first close-up history to be written of a single diocese in the years immediately following it. Using the see of Baltimore as a case study and drawing exclusively on primary sources, Bianchi reconstructs how the decrees of the Council in faraway Rome – and, more tellingly, the new ideas and attitudes prompted by it – were implemented and experienced on the local level, in parishes, seminaries, religious communities, retreat centers, and chancery offices.

The claim that the Church “embraced the modern world” after Vatican II is well known; this book sharpens it by focusing specifically on liberalism as the framework through which implementation took place. The study begins by tracing the dismantling of inherited traditions, then turns to the rise of individualism within Catholic life and governance, before arriving at its most original contribution: an analysis of the emergence of a dense church bureaucracy that embodied and enforced a liberal worldview.

Although the story told in these pages is a tragedy, A Liberal Revolution is no polemic; rather, it is a work of careful historical analysis grounded in years of research. It will not only contribute to the scholarly understanding of Vatican II and its aftermath but also offer guidance to Catholics seeking a path toward genuine renewal, grounded in a thorough and accurate assessment of what actually happened. Understanding the whats, hows, and whys of postconciliar disruption – a topic that, so far from fading into the past, has grown to be a most urgent task for the present – finds in Bianchi a uniquely capable guide.

NLM readers will find especially valuable Part 1, “Attack on Tradition and the Rise of the New,” divided into “The Priesthood Revolts,” “Novelty in Music and Architecture,” and “Liturgical Confusion.” Among other topics, Bianchi's presentation of the data concerning how the different age groups reacted to new policies shows that radical change was in fact extremely popular with the younger set of seminarians and priests (at least, until they left the seminary or the priesthood, as many of them did), and, at the same time, that diocesan policies repeatedly found ways to empower these reformatory forces while marginalizing older priests who were skeptical of the changes or even wished to continue with the traditional Mass in Latin. There is also liturgically relevant material in Parts 2 and 3.

Famed sociologist Dr. Stephen Bullivant, Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion and Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St. Mary’s University in London, calls A Liberal Revolution “a richly detailed account... an impressive piece of scholarship, beautifully written, very compelling, and highly recommended.”

Dr. Anne Hendershott, Professor of Sociology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, concurs: “With historical precision and narrative force, this book shows how reforms reshaped Catholic life in unexpectedly negative ways, with consequences that still reverberate through the Church today.”

Veteran journalist and founder of the Catholic Culture site, Philip Lawler, finds in the book a crucial tool for understanding the bureaucratic mentality that has morphed into synodality: “[Bianchi documents how] the post-conciliar era saw a spectacular proliferation of offices, boards, and commissions at the diocesan level. This new bureaucracy developed its own interests in spurring change, regardless of either the formal directives of the Council or the wishes and needs of the faithful.”

Finally, poet and liturgist Barry Spurr sums up the effusive reactions of the book’s initial readers: “The importance and necessity of this book cannot be overstated. Bianchi reveals the destructive effects of the late 1960s mindset at the parochial level.”

A Liberal Revolution is available in paperback, hardcover with dust jacket (both pictured here), or ebook, either directly from the publisher Os Justi Press or from any Amazon site around the world. At both places, you can “look inside” to read the Introduction.

How Every Painting Is Built, Part 2 of 2: Line, Tone, Colour

Last week, we looked at the choice of medium in painting – why it matters, what the main options are, and how the properties of each shape the kind of image an artist can make. This week, we turn to the three elements that lie at the heart of the painted image: line, tone, and color. Together with the handling of detail and distance, these form the complete visual vocabulary that every artist draws on, whatever his tradition or period.

Using Line and Tone to Represent Form

When we look out of a window and take in a view, we distinguish one object from another through visual contrast in their shapes. A person standing in a beam of light against a dark background is clearly visible; the three-dimensional form of his face is legible because of the variations in light and shadow across its surface – a bulbous nose, sunken cheeks, the curve of the jaw, and so on. An artist can represent this contrast in two ways. The first is to represent the boundary between a light shape and a dark shape as a line.

In this portrayal of a knight by the English monk Matthew Paris, from the 13th-century Westminster Psalter, we see a skilled use of line to depict form. Paris controls his line with enough assurance to give it a graceful, flowing quality, a beauty comparable to fine calligraphy. Notice also how he varies the width and darkness of his lines. He does this for two purposes: first, to direct the viewer’s eye toward the parts of the composition he considers most important, since a thicker, darker line draws attention more strongly; and second, to indicate the degree of contrast between an object and its background. Where a light shape sits against a much darker one, the contrast is high, and a bold line is appropriate; where a pale shape sits against a slightly darker background, the contrast is low, and only a thin, pale line is used. Where there is effectively no contrast at all, the skilled artist will allow the line to disappear entirely, even though he knows the edge of an object is there. The less skilled artist tends to put the line in anyway, because he knows intellectually that the edge exists, and this will overrule what his eyes are actually telling him. Line drawing is easy to do poorly – it is how most children begin – but demands genuine subtlety to handle well.

Where line represents contrast by marking a boundary, the second approach represents it by painting tonal values directly, as the eye sees them. This is harder than it sounds. Most people must be trained to observe what the eye actually sees rather than what the mind constructs after processing visual information, and what the mind constructs is always conditioned by memory and prior knowledge of the object. Consider this self-portrait by Rembrandt:

Here, there are no lines at all. Everything is a tonal value, and any apparent edge is simply the junction of a lighter and a darker area. This allows Rembrandt to convey the shape of the face without an outline. He is also willing to let edges dissolve where the tonal contrast is low: the right side of the figure here is barely distinguishable from the background. This points to a deeper distinction between the two approaches. Line tends to show edges and discontinuities; tonal painting can express the gradually changing internal variations of a three-dimensional surface, which is why it lends itself more to high naturalism.

In practice, most artists combine the two approaches, with one playing a supporting role to the other. Matthew Paris is a good example: predominantly linear, but with enough internal tonal variation to suggest the three-dimensional character of the forms. Having considered line and tone, we can turn to the third element – color – which brings its own particular difficulties.

Color

Color can also be used to describe form, but it is the most difficult of the three elements to handle well, for reasons that are easy to overlook.

Consider a grayscale image of something colored in nature. Red and yellow can generally be distinguished, since red tends toward a darker tonal value in monochrome, but red and blue are much harder to tell apart. I can remember watching Liverpool and Everton soccer matches on a black-and-white television in the 1960s: Liverpool in deep red, Everton in deep blue, indistinguishable from the waist up. Fortunately, Everton wore white shorts and Liverpool red, which settled the question. (I am a Liverpool supporter, incidentally.)

The reason this matters to the painter lies in how the eye works. The human eye reads both monochrome and color simultaneously, using different receptor cells (rods and cones) in the retina, and the brain can assess three-dimensional form from tonal and color variation in combination. But while the mind processes this information with ease, it is extremely difficult for the artist to represent it faithfully. Colors do not simply become darker or lighter in shadow. They may shift toward blue in shade, or toward yellow and green in bright sunlight, even though the actual color of the object has not changed. This means that to paint color accurately, the artist must observe what his eye receives rather than what his intellect tells him the color ought to be.

There is a further complication: colors shift not only with light and shadow, but also with distance, through what is called color perspective. The green of leaves becomes progressively bluer the further away they are, which is why mountain ranges always appear blue on the horizon - hence the song about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Tonal contrast also decreases with distance, so that those blue mountains become not only bluer but lighter the further away they are. The skilled naturalistic artist must hold all of these variables in balance simultaneously, and few manage to do so well.

Here is one who did:

In Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c. 1666), notice the large draped curtain pulled to one side. We judge the actual color of its pattern by looking at the mid-tones, the areas neither bleached by direct light nor lost in deep shadow. Vermeer has shifted the colors so that what is blue in full light becomes reddish in the shadow, and vice versa; yet the eye reads the fabric as a consistently colored pattern, because the brain automatically compensates for exactly this kind of variation. To do this in paint, Vermeer had to observe the colors as his eye received them, rather than as his intellect classified them, suppressing the very interpretive process by which we normally make sense of what we see. This capacity is rare. Most Baroque masters simplified the problem by concentrating on tonal variation and applying Vermeer’s kind of color sensitivity only at the main focal points.

Closely related to the handling of color and tone is the question of how the artist represents distance itself - not just the color shift of distant objects, but the whole problem of conveying size and space on a flat surface.

Judging Distance and Size

If we see a figure in a painting, we may estimate his height by comparing him to familiar objects nearby - a door, a table, another figure. But we also judge distance by the resolution of detail: when something is far away, we cannot distinguish its finer features as clearly as when it is close. A good artist knows this and uses it. One of the most common errors of beginners is to paint distant objects with as much detail as near ones - every leaf on a distant tree painstakingly rendered. This creates an image that is somehow mentally exhausting, overloaded with information the eye would never actually receive at that distance. Both the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern photorealists can be guilty of this, and in different ways the results share a quality of incongruity: the painting is the product of technical accomplishment, but somehow we sense, even if we do not know why, that something is visually wrong.

Yet this same principle, once understood, can be turned to deliberate and powerful effect. Artists who consciously heighten detail at apparent distances and, in doing so, deliberately override natural perception can imbue their images with a symbolic or heavenly quality. In heaven, to behold something fully is to know it fully; heightened detail across an entire picture plane suggests a mode of seeing that is not bound by natural distance. Gothic painters such as Duccio and Van Eyck, and iconographic painters such as Andrei Rublev, understood this and used it consistently. Their images carry a sense of participation in a different order of reality - one where the ordinary limits of perception do not apply. There is a skill in using this as a visual tool: for the break from naturalism to work, everything else present in the painting must support the idea that we are looking at heaven, so that the heightened level of detail no longer strikes the viewer as incongruous.

The Last Supper by Duccio, Italian early 14th century, egg tempera on wooden panel

Putting It All Together

The artist composes his picture as a whole by weighing and combining these elements - line, tone, color, detail - in different proportions and with different emphases. The resulting balance between naturalism and abstraction, between depicting the visible world as it appears and representing realities that transcend it, characterizes the style of a given work and the tradition to which it belongs.

It is commonly said that a good artist knows the rules, and a great artist knows when to break them. I do not think this is quite right. These are not arbitrary rules but principles grounded in how images actually work, and the genuinely skilled artist does not break them - he applies them differently depending on what he is trying to represent. The same principle of detail and distance is applied one way when painting the natural world, where detail diminishes with distance, and another way when painting heavenly subjects, where it does not. What looks like rule-breaking is usually the consistent application of a different set of governing assumptions about the nature of the subject. The failure of the Pre-Raphaelites and photorealists is not that they broke the rules but that they applied naturalistic conventions to subject matter and compositions that would have been better served by something else, producing an incongruity they did not recognize and could not resolve. 

Perhaps a distinction in motivation should be made here between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Photorealists. The Pre-Raphaelites were generally Christian in motivation and sought to reestablish the late-Gothic style of artists such as Van Eyck, who preceded the Italian Renaissance exemplified by Raphael. This is was part of the broad Victorian neo-Gothic movement that was connected with Anglican and Catholic Christianity in England in the 19th century. What was a very successful movement architecturally was, in my opinion, less successful artistically for the reason I gave above. However, even with this handicap, many examples of their art can still be striking and beautiful and are redeemed in my eyes because the symbolism and choice of subject are handled well and otherwise in harmony with a Christian worldview. Certainly, it is preferable to much contemporary art! 

The Photorealists, however, are materialists who deliberately pack their images with detail in order to reflect their false assertion, from a Christian point of view, that what they represent has no meaning or significance, and they reject the idea that a man is anything more significant than a collection of atoms that we happen to call a man. For them, the collection of atoms we call a man has no more significance than the collection of atoms we recognize as a cigarette butt on the floor.

Our English Coasts or Strayed Sheep, William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite tradition, English, 19th century; oil on canvas

This framework - line, tone, color, medium, and the handling of detail and distance - is the vocabulary that all visual artists share. The three great traditions I will be exploring in subsequent posts, the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque, each represent a coherent and internally consistent way of deploying that vocabulary. An artist working within one of those traditions handles the elements in broadly the ways characteristic of that tradition, and this is what makes the tradition recognizable. At the same time, the greatest artists within a tradition are recognizable as individuals: Velázquez, for instance, is unmistakably a Baroque painter, yet equally unmistakably himself. Some elements of his handling - his way with tone, his restraint with line, his management of color perspective - are shared with other Baroque painters; others are distinctively his own. Understanding the vocabulary makes it possible to see both things at once.

The Spinners by Diego Velázquez, Spanish, 17th century, oil on canvas. Manages color and tone, and varies the focus and detail impeccably. My teacher in Florence, Charles Cecil, told me that he was the first to show the spokes of a turning wheel invisible to indicate its motion.

The Canonization of St Maria Goretti

From the archives of British Pathé, a brief report on the canonization of St Maria Goretti, which took place on the feast of St John the Baptist in 1950. Today is her feast day in the post-Conciliar Rite, the anniversary of her death in 1902. The report mentions the remarkable fact that her mother, who was then 84, was present for the ceremony, and shows her watching the ceremony from a window overlooking St Peter’s Square; four of her six siblings were in attendance. It does not mention that her assailant, Alessandro Serenetti, who underwent a very remarkable conversion through her direct intervention, was also present. The story of the rest of his life after his conversion is such that it would not be surprising if he himself were someday canonized, much like the Blessed Carino, the assassin of St Peter Martyr.

The Legend of Simon Magus

Until the year 1881 [note], the Roman Breviary included among the lessons during the octave of Ss Peter and Paul part of a sermon of St Maximus of Turin, a Church Father of the late 4th and early 5th, of whom very little is known. This sermon recounts a famous legend concerning the death of the Apostles as follows.

The Fall of Simon Magus, by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1461-62

“On this day, then, the blessed Apostles shed their blood; but let us look to the cause for which they suffered, namely, that among other miracles, they also by their prayers brought down the famous magician Simon in a headlong fall from the empty air. For when this Simon said that he was Christ, and claimed that as the Son he could ascend to the Father by flying, and, having been lifted up by his magical arts, had at once begun to fly; then Peter knelt down and prayed the Lord, and by his holy prayer, overcome the magician’s flight. For his prayer ascended to the Lord before the flight did, and his just petition came there before (Simon’s) wicked presumption did; Peter, being set upon the earth, obtained what he asked for before Simon could come to the heavens whither he was headed. Then did Peter set him down like a prisoner from the lofty heights, and dashing him down with a steep fall onto a stone, broke his legs; and this, as a reproach of what he had done, so that he who had just tried to fly could suddenly no longer walk, and he that had taken on wings lost the use of his feet.” (Sermo 72 de natali Ss Apostolorum Petri et Pauli)

Church Fathers even earlier than St Maximus, such as St Justin Martyr and Arnobius, knew of the tradition that Simon Magus, who sought to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from St Peter (Acts 8), was in Rome at the same time as the Eternal City’s founding Apostles. The apocryphal Acts of St Peter tell the story that Simon sought to win the Emperor Nero to his teachings, which he would prove to be true by flying off a tower built in the Forum specifically for this purpose. As he was lifted up into the air by the agency of demons, Peter and Paul knelt on the street and prayed to God, whereon Simon was dropped, and soon after died of his injuries.

In the unintentionally hilarious 1954 historical epic The Silver Chalice, Simon Magus is played by the great Jack Palance, wearing what is perhaps the very worst super-hero costume ever made. (Palance, by the way, was born Volodymyr Palahniuk, to a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic father and Polish mother, in Pennsylvania mining country. This movie saw the debut of another world-famous actor, Paul Newman, whose performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination; despite this, Newman himself once called it “the worst motion picture produced during the 1950s.”)

The legend goes on to say that the enraged Nero arrested Peter and Paul and threw them into the Mamertine prison before their execution. There they converted the two wardens, Processus and Martinian, in whose acts it is told that St Peter caused a well to spring up from the ground so that he could baptize them. The site has been venerated as the place of the Apostles’ imprisonment for many centuries, and pilgrims can still visit it to this day; a plaque near the door lists the famous Roman prisoners, such as King Jugurtha of Numidia, who were killed there, the Saints who suffered and died within its walls, and the later Saints who have come to venerate the site.

On the opposite end of the Via Sacra, the principal street of the Roman Forum, Pope St Paul I (757-67) built an oratory dedicated to Peter and Paul, nicknamed ‘ubi cecidit magus – where the magician fell.’ This oratory contained as its principal relic the stone upon which St Peter knelt to pray for the defeat of Simon Magus and the vindication of the Christian faith. It was later demolished, but the stone itself is preserved in the nearby church of Santa Maria Nuova.

Photo by JP Sonnen. The Italian inscription above says “On these rocks St Peter set his knees when the demons carried Simon Magus through the air.”

[note] In October of 1880, Pope Leo XIII added the feast of Ss Cyril and Methodius to the general calendar, and assigned their feast to July 5th. The day within the octave of the Apostles was chosen to express the hope for the reunion of the Orthodox Slavs, originally evangelized by Cyril and Methodius, with the See of Peter; this is also stated in the proper hymns of their Office, which were composed by the Pope himself. Their feast was celebrated on this day from 1881 to 1899. At the end of 1899, the feast of St Anthony Maria Zaccaria, founder of the Clerks Regular of St Paul (also known as the Barnabites, from the titular Saint of their mother church in Milan) was extended to the universal calendar, and placed on July 5th, the day of his death in 1539; Ss Cyril and Methodius were then moved to the 7th. In the post-Conciliar calendar, they were moved again, to the day of Cyril’s death, February 14th.

Kicking St Irenaeus Around

June 28 is traditionally the feast day of Pope St Leo II, who died on that day in 683, after a reign of less than 11 months. The Liber Pontificalis records that on the previous day he celebrated the ordination of nine priests, three deacons, and twenty-three bishops; it is not said that it was the ordination ceremony that killed him, but the heat of Rome in June and the inevitable length of such a ceremony make this seem likely more than coincidence. The principal achievement of his pontificate was the confirmation of the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the third of Constantinople, which condemned the Monothelite heresy; being fluent in Greek as well as Latin, he personally made the official Latin translation of the council’s acts. It is one of the oddities of hagiography that his predecessor St Agatho, in whose reign the council was held, and whose intervention (through his legates) in its deliberations was acclaimed with the words “Peter has spoken through Agatho!”, has never been honored with a general feast day in the West, but is kept on the Byzantine Calendar. Leo, on the other, was a Sicilian, and therefore born as a subject of the Byzantine Empire, but is not liturgically honored in the East.

In this altar in St Peter’s Basilica are kept the relics of three Sainted Popes named Leo, the Second (682-3), the Third (795-816) and the Fourth (847-55). The altar of Pope St Leo I (440-61) is right next to it, and Pope Leo XII (1823-29) is buried in the floor between them.

Even older than the feast of Pope Leo is the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. The vigils of the Saints originally consisted solely of a Mass, penitential in character, celebrated after None in violet vestments, without a Gloria, Alleluia or Creed; prior to the Tridentine reform, they had no presence in the Office in the Use of Rome. (Back when there were plenty of canonical and monastic churches, such foundations would have celebrated two Masses in choir, that of St Leo after Terce, and that of the vigil after None, just as was done with the feasts of Saints which occur in Lent.) In the Breviary of St Pius V, vigils were extended to the Office, following a custom of medieval German Uses, an unusual example of change in an otherwise very conservative reform. At Matins, a homily on the day’s Gospel is read, and the prayer of the vigil Mass is said at the Hours; everything else is done as on the feria until Vespers, which are the First Vespers of the feast. However, the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul, because it coincides with St Leo, was reduced in the Office to one lesson at Matins (the ninth) and a commemoration at Lauds.

At Lyon, the ancient primatial see of Gaul, the day was kept as the feast of St Irenaeus, and the vigil as a commemoration. In his book On Illustrious Men, St Jerome mentions the famous martyrdom of St Pothinus, who was Irenaeus’ predecessor in the See of Lyon, but says nothing about the latter’s death, the date and circumstances of which are unknown; it is a rather later tradition that he died a martyr. It may very well be that his feast found its way to the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul at Lyon because of the famous passage in his book Against the Heresies (3.3.2) in which he attests to the primacy of the Roman See as follows. “For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority – that is, the faithful everywhere – inasmuch as the Apostolic Tradition has been preserved continuously by those who are everywhere.” In 1921, Pope Benedict XV extended his feast to the general Calendar on his traditional Lyonese date, moving Pope Leo II to July 3rd, the next free day on the calendar, and the day of his burial according to the Liber Pontificalis.

The crypt of the church of St Irenaeus at Lyon. In 1562, the church was severely damaged by the Huguenots, who also destroyed the Saint’s relics, and played a game of soccer with his skull. After more destruction in the revolution, it was rebuilt in 1824, and the crypt renovated in 1863. Despite these vicissitudes, the crypt may still be regarded as one of the oldest religious buildings in France; relics of certain local martyrs were venerated there already in the later part of the 5th century. The church was originally dedicated to St John the Baptist. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Xavier Caré.)

In the Breviary Reform of 1960, St Irenaeus was moved to July 3rd, and Pope Leo II suppressed, in order to free June 28th up entirely for the Mass and Office of the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. This was fundamentally a rather odd thing to do, since so many of the vigils then on the general Calendar, (including all those of the other Apostles, and, inexcusably, those of the Epiphany and All Saints) were abolished by the same reform. Less than a decade later, however, with the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, vigils in the classic Roman sense, penitential days of preparation for the major feasts, were simply abolished altogether, “freeing” June 28th from the one observance which had hitherto been absolutely universal on that date, the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. St Irenaeus was therefore moved back to that date, freeing July 3rd for the transfer of the Apostle St Thomas from his historical Roman date, December 21st, to the date on which the Syrian church commemorates the transfer of his relics from India to Edessa.

This may seem to be just another case of what Fr Hunwicke once described as the freezing in pack ice of the Roman calendar, which keeps Irenaeus on a day which he held for ten years, while the post-Conciliar Rite has restored him to his historical Lyonese date. It should be noted, however, that Lyon itself moved his feast 4 times. After it had been kept on June 28th for centuries, Archbishop Camille de Neufville de Villeroy (1654-93) formally raised St Irenaeus to the title of Patron of the archdiocese, and moved his feast to November 23rd, displacing the very ancient feast of Pope St Clement. Patronal feasts were holy days of obligation in the Ancien Régime, and since adding another holiday to the end of June, right in the middle of harvest season, was judged excessive, his feast was transferred. (Thanks to Mr Gerhard Eger, one of the authors of Canticum Salomonis, for this information.) In the Neo-Gallican reform of Abp Antoine de Montazet (1758-88), which was a catastrophe for the Use of Lyon, it was fixed to the Sunday after the feast of Ss Peter and Paul. In the 1860s, the Missale Romano-Lugdunense was promulgated (basically the Missal of St Pius V, with a great many Lyonese customs added to it, including the rites of Holy Week), and St Irenaeus was fixed to July 3rd. Finally, in the 20th century, he was returned to his traditional date.

The Lord’s Prayer

Lost in Translation #164

After saying the Praeceptis salutaribus, the priest recites or intones the Lord’s Prayer:

Pater noster, qui es in cælis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cælo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.

℟. Sed libera nos a malo.

Which is traditionally translated as:

Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation.

℟. But deliver us from evil.

It is beyond the pale of this little study to examine the long and robust tradition of commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer by the Church Fathers and medieval Doctors. Here, we limit our concerns to two: The placement of the prayer after the Canon, and how that placement shapes our reception of it.

Post Canon

In defending his decision to follow the Eastern custom of reciting the Our Father after the Canon, Pope St. Gregory the Great argues that it would be inappropriate to have any other prayer besides the one composed by Our Lord Himself follow the [manmade] Canon. The pairing is also appropriate when one considers an alternative name for the Canon used in the Middle Ages: “The Dangerous Lord’s Prayer.”

The Lord’s Prayer is related to the Canon in other ways as well: just as the Preface is the prologue to the Canon, the Lord’s Prayer is its epilogue. One can see this in the similarities between the Preface and the Lord’s Prayer. Both are introduced after a period of silence with the priest saying or intoning aloud, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Both have beautiful chant settings that are sung by the priest alone, both have responses from the congregation (the Sanctus and Sed libera nos a malo), and both use the word salutare. One could say that the Preface is the pro-logos, the Lord’s Prayer is the epi-logos, and in between is the Logos, made flesh and now dwelling sacramentally among us on the altar. In the words of Fr. Pius Parsch:

According to the great Pope [Gregory the Great], the Our Father is not so much a preparation for the Holy Banquet, as a consecration prayer, in the ancient sense of a prayer for the offering of the sacrifice. For this reason, in the Roman liturgy, it is recited by the celebrant alone, whereas in the Greek liturgy it is considered the table prayer of the congregation, who therefore recite it in common as a family about to approach the sacred banquet. According to Gregory I, therefore, the Our Father should be considered the completion of the Canon, corresponding to the Preface, in such wise that the Preface and the Our Father mark the beginning and the end of the Canon, which is recited in mystical silence. [1]

Needless to say, this ancient arrangement in the Roman Rite is undermined when the entire congregation sings the Our Father, a practice that reduces the similarity between the prologue and the epilogue. The practice is also a violation of a tradition as old as the Our Father itself in the Roman Rite, for Gregory the Great states that in contradistinction to the Greeks, at Rome the Lord’s Prayer is said a solo sacerdote.

St Gregory the Great, 1626/7, by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán. 

Another indication, incidentally, that the Canon and the Lord’s Prayer are meant to function together is the placement of the Solemn Nuptial Blessing over the bride and groom at a nuptial Mass. The intention seems to have been to place the prayer close to the Consecration at the nearest possible liturgical juncture. That the blessing was placed after the Lord’s Prayer rather than after the Great Amen suggests that the Canon and the Lord’s Prayers were seen as a practically indivisible unit.

Contextual Meaning

The Lord’s Prayer is also, of course, the beginning of the Communion Rite, thus forming a bridge between the Consecration and the reception of the Eucharist. It is when we view the Lord’s Prayer as a preparation for Holy Communion that its petitions take on added meaning.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven.” When the priest says these words, he is supposed to be staring at the Host. There is something almost ironic addressing the Father while looking at the Son and saying that God is in Heaven when He is also right before your eyes. But in a way the Eucharist, albeit in a veiled manner, is the fulfillment of John 14, 9: “He that seeth Me seeth the Father also.”

“Hallowed by Thy name.” The prayer does not say “Holy is your name” (although it certainly is), but “May your name be made holy or sanctified” (sanctificetur nomen tuum), as if we could increase the holiness of God’s name. God is maximally holy, and nothing on earth can change that. But His name can be rendered less holy by being “profaned” insofar as His chosen people, who are in a sense His representatives on earth, give Him a “bad name” by their behavior. In Ezekiel 43, 8 we read: “And they profaned My holy name by the abominations which they committed: for which reason I consumed them in My wrath.” The key, then, is to “hallow” God’s name by good behavior, but how can we be good without God? We cannot, and so we pray for help. As St. Cyprian of Carthage notes, when we say, “Hallowed be Thy name,” we mean, “May Thy name be hallowed in us”—that is, may we be transformed by sanctifying grace or holiness in order not to besmirch God’s name. [2] And to become further transfomred by sanctifying grace, we partake of the Eucharist.

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” Both of these petitions can be seen in light of what has gone before and in light of what is about to happen. When the priest turned bread and wine into Body and Blood, there is a way in which he already brought the Kingdom of God to earth, and there is a way in which He already did God’s will—namely, he obeyed the command, “Do this in memory of Me.” But when he and we receive Holy Communion, we also do God’s will and we also strengthen the bond between Him and us and each other, the Mystical Body of Christ, perhaps contributing to the coming of the Kingdom.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Not surprisingly, this petition was interpreted by the Church Fathers to refer to the Eucharist, even when the Lord’s Prayer was said outside of Mass. The Eucharistic connection is even stronger in the version of the Our Father mentioned in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.” (6, 11). With Holy Communion God is about to grant this petition of ours.

“Forgive us our trespasses.” Before the days of the second Confiteor, reciting this line before receiving Holy Communion was thought to absolve venial sins. In a sermon St. Augustine says:

If perchance, in consequence of human frailty, our thought seized on something indecent, if our tongue spoke something unjust, if our eye was turned to something unseemly, if our ear listened complacently to something unnecessary, it is blotted out by the Lord’s Prayer in the passage: “Forgive us our trespasses,” so that we may approach in peace and so we may not eat or drink what we receive unto judgment. [3]

“Lead us not into temptation.” This is one of the most fascinating verses of the New Testament to ponder because it ties into so many other verses. Here, we ask the Father not to do the very thing He did to His Son, “who was led by the Spirit into the desert, to be tempted by the devil” (Mt. 4, 1) (Yes, it was the Spirit who led Jesus, but who sent the Spirit if not the Father?) And yet we also read that God “will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able” and will help you “be able to bear it.” (I Cor. 10, 13) “Lead us not into temptation” is surely one of the “hard sayings” of Scripture (see Jn. 6, 61), and rather than grimace at it, we should embrace the challenge of wrestling with it.

Alas, not everyone agrees. In 1969, the Consilium for Constitution on Liturgy published Comme le Prévoit On The Translation of Liturgical Texts for Celebrations with a Congregation, which contains the following statement:

The correct biblical or Christian meaning of certain words and ideas will always need explanation and instruction. Nevertheless, no special literary training should be required of the people; liturgical texts should normally be intelligible to all, even to the less educated. For example, temptation as a translation of tentatio in the Lord’s Prayer is inaccurate and can only be misleading to people who are not biblical scholars. [4]

The assumptions of the authors are debatable, namely, that “temptation” is inaccurate and that only biblical scholars can understand the Lord’s Prayer (we wonder if the Lord would agree: would He command all of His disciples to use this prayer forever, knowing that only an elite would ever understand it?). Perhaps it is for these reasons that none of the official “vernacular” translations followed the advice of this document—not, that is, until 2019, when Pope Francis approved a request from the Italian bishops to change e non ci indurre in tentazione to non abbandonarci alla tentazione or “do not abandon us to temptation.” The allegedly problematic word “temptation” remains, but the ne nos inducas (Mē eisenkēs hēmas in the Greek) has been altered, despite the fact that the Greek verb in question eispherói (eis+phero, to lead into) is unambiguous.

“But deliver us from evil.” One petition that does admit of valid different interpretations is this one. Since Latin lacks a definitive article, libera nos a malo can mean “deliver us from evil” or “deliver us from the Evil One.” The original Greek has the definitive article in this verse, which is why Eastern churches use the latter translation. The Eastern versions, therefore, have the advantage of being more faithful to the biblical text, more vivid, and more evocative of Christ’s temptation in the desert, when He overcame the Evil One. The Latin, on the other hand, is more expansive, asking for protection not only from the Evil One, but all evils: sin, misfortune, illness, etc.

The fact that “But deliver us from evil” is a response from the people (respondentibus omnibus, as John the Arch-chanter says in the eighth century) gives this moment a special meaning. The lay faithful, listening to the Our Father as they did to the Preface, now affirm all that they have heard. “Basically, therefore,” Josef Jungmann concludes, “the people say the Our Father along with the celebrant. It is the people’s Communion prayer.” [5]

Notes

[1] Parsch, The Liturgy of the Mass, trans. Frederic C. Eckhoff (St. Louis, Missouri: Herder, 1940), 284. See Michael Fiedrowicz, The Traditional Mass: History, Form, & Theology of the Classical Roman Rite, trans. Rose Pfeifer (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020), 107.

[2] Cyprian of Carthage, Treatise IV.12.

[3] Augustine, Sermo Denis 6 (229): Quia, sicut est humana fragilitas, si forte aliquid quod non decebat cogitatio nostra concepit, si aliquid lingua quod non oportebat effudit, si aliquid oculus sicut non decebat aspexit, si aliquid auris blandius quod non oportebat audiuit, si forte aliqua talia contracta sunt de huius mundi temptatione et uitae humanae fragilitate, tergitur dominica oratione, ubi dicitur dimitte nobis debita nostra; ut securi accedamus, ne quod accipimus in iudicium nobis manducemus et bibamus.

[4] [Comme le prevoit 15. a.

[5] Josef Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, vol. 2 (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1951), 288.

A Solemn High Glagolitic Mass Celebrated in Australia

Yesterday, the feast of the Most Precious Blood, saw an historic occasion for the preservation of the traditional Roman liturgy. Following a number of sung Slavonic Masses of the Melbourne Croatian chaplaincy in recent years, the Croatian Catholic community of Sydney was blessed with its first ever High Mass according to the traditional Slavonic Missal (i.e., the “Vajs” Missal of 1927). It is believed that this is the first of its kind for the Croatian diaspora of Australia since a High Mass celebrated in Adelaide prior to the Council. (The current owner of the Missal used, Fr Velimir Maglica, was present for this Mass as a child).

For readers unfamiliar with the Glagolitic (or more correctly, Slavonic) Mass, this liturgy traces its origins to the missionary work of Ss Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs. Following much controversy, the Slavic people were eventually afforded the peculiar privilege of celebrating a Western liturgy not in Latin, as was the norm throughout the West, but an adapted form of Slavonic, the historical ancestor of modern Slavic languages such as Croatian, Czech, Polish, and Bulgarian. This liturgy differs not only in language, but all in many aspects of its chant. Despite its origins in the work of the Moravian Mission, it would ultimately be on Croatian lands that this unique use would (until relatively recently) be best preserved.

Australia, though far from this liturgy’s native soil, is home to a sizeable Croatian diaspora, among whom the unique case of the “Glagolitic” Mass, its associated script, and musical heritage are well known and celebrated, though seldom experienced - even despite the fact that its regular celebration still remains a part of living memory (one parishioner, for instance, was able to recall serving Slavonic Masses in one parish and Latin Masses in another). Aside from the local Croatian-Australian contingency, the packed church for yesterday’s celebration included a handful of faithful from overseas, including those who had travelled from as far as Czechia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Italy.

The Mass was celebrated by Fr Mateusz Markiewicz IBP, who is no stranger to the traditional Slavonic liturgy, having previously offered it for the faithful of Zagreb; the deacon and subdeacon came in from Adelaide and Perth respectively to assist. The Mass featured an Ordinary and Propers fitted to Gregorian melodies and accompanied by organ. More characteristically “Glagolitic” melodies could be heard, for instance, in the Epistle, which was sung according to a traditional tone from the island of Hvar. Altar cards used previously in Melbourne returned to Sydney for the occasion. As for the missal, it was discovered in Zagreb before making its way to Melbourne, and eventually Sydney, where it will remain on loan for future Masses.

Where “nostalgia” remains among the most common charges against the Church’s traditional liturgy, this Mass for the Most Precious Blood testifies to the fact that the traditional rites touch the hearts of the faithful for far deeper reasons. Many if not most present at the liturgy were regulars not of traditional communities, but regular Croatian chaplaincies, and so experienced the traditional rite of Mass for the first time. While the (relative) familiarity of language surely facilitated, it is apparently that the beauty of the rites were a part of the overwhelmingly positive reception, for which reason future celebrations are already being planned. We are very grateful to Mr Danijel Uremović for sharing this account with us, and to New Ark Films for the photographs.

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