Súpplices te rogámus, omnípotens Deus, jube hæc perférri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublíme altáre tuum, in conspéctu divínæ majestátis tuæ: ut quotquot ex hac altáris participatióne sacrosánctum Fílii tui Corpus et Sánguinem sumpsérimus, omni benedictióne cælésti et grátia repleámur. Per eúndem Christum Dóminum nostrum. Amen.
Which I translate as:
Suppliant we ask Thee, almighty God: command these to be borne all the way up by the hands of Thy holy angel to Thine altar borne on high, in the sight of Thy divine Majesty, so that as many of us as shall have consumed the sacrosanct Body and Blood of Thy Son by this partaking of the altar may be filled with every heavenly blessing and grace. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
Most translations have “humbly” or “in humble prayer” (2011 ICEL) for supplices. Supplex does indeed betoken humility, but it also connotes prostration: sub-plico means to fold down or under. I suspect that this word was chosen over others like it because this connotation helps increase the distance in the prayer, so to speak, between us and God’s altar in Heaven. Folded over, we ask an Angel to go all the way up to Heaven on our behalf. This image is reinforced by the comportment of the celebrant, who is bowing down as he says these words, literally suppliant.
Two other words emphasize the distance between us and the heavenly altar. I have translated perferri as “to be borne all the way up” to reflect the fact that perfero, with its muscular prefix per, is more intense than fero, the verb to bear or carry. And I suspect that there is a subtle pairing of perfero and sublimis, the adjective used to describe God’s altar, for sublimis does not simply refer to being lofty or on high but especially has the meaning of being “borne aloft, uplifted, elevated, raised” (the word possibly comes from sub-limen, “up to the lintel”). [1] The sacrificial offerings must travel afar, being borne all the way up to something that is borne on high.
And the prayer asks that the carrier of these offerings be the hands of God’s Holy Angel. The inspiration for this petition may be Revelation 8, 3-4, which describes an angel offering with his hand the prayers of the saints to God on His altar:
And another angel came, and stood before the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given to him much incense, that he should offer of the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar, which is before the throne of God. And the smoke of the incense of the prayers of the saints ascended up before God from the hand of the angel.
A second possibility is that the Holy Angel is Christ Himself, whom St. Paul calls the Messenger of God (angelos Theou) in Galatians 4, 14. Although it is true that every Mass is offered to the Father through the Son (and with the Holy Spirit), I am of the opinion that the Angel referenced here is a celestial spirit and not the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, for the Son of God is mentioned in the second half of the prayer as being here on the altar and not journeying away from it to Heaven. The imagery would be confusing if we were asking Christ to be in two different places at the same time, even though He is, of course, present to all places at all times. Another consideration is that in the Book of Tobias the Archangel Raphael tells the elder Tobias that he himself offered all of Tobias’ prayers and good works to the Lord (see 12, 12). If that is true of all prayer, namely, that angels play a role in communicating our prayers to God, and if the Mass is the greatest prayer that can be offered to God, it stands to reason that a Holy Angel plays a role in that offering.
The first half of the Supplices te rogamus, as we have argued, increases the distance between us and God’s altar, but only so that the second half may close it. The main petition of the prayer is for every communicant at this Mass to be filled with every heavenly grace and blessing. Heavenly graces and blessings are not just in the Heaven borne on high; they are present here through a participation in this Mass. And the lynchpin is the sacro-sanct Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, now present on the altar. The adjective is significant: the Eucharist is both holy (sanctus) and sacred (sacer): holy because it is the living Christ, who is holy; and sacred because it is forever set apart from profane use. Just as the holy and sacred unite in the sacramental Body and Blood of Our Lord, so too Heaven and earth unite at this altar during this sacrifice.
Yet despite our reflections, we must in the end agree with the medieval deacon Florus of Lyons (d. 860) about the Supplices te rogamus: “These words of mystery are so profound, so wonderful and stupendous, who is able to comprehend them? Who would say anything worthy? They are more to be revered and feared than discussed.”
Note
[1] Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, “Sublimis,” I.B.
In the Roman Rite, the term “vigilia – vigil” traditionally means a penitential day of preparation for one of the more important feasts. The Mass of a Saint’s vigil is celebrated after None, as are the Masses of the ferias of Lent or the Ember Days, and in violet vestments; however, the deacon and subdeacon do not wear folded chasubles, as they do in Lent, but the dalmatic and tunicle. The Mass has neither the Gloria nor the Creed, the Alleluja is omitted before the Gospel, and not replaced with a Tract, and Benedicamus Domino is said at the end in place of Ite, missa est.
A folio of the Echternach Sacramentary, 895 AD, with the Mass of the vigil of All Saints, and the collect of the feast. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9433)
Before the Tridentine reform, the vigil of a Saint consisted solely of the Mass, and had no presence in either the Roman version of the Divine Office, or in that of most other Uses. A minority custom, which seems to have been predominantly German, gave an Office to the vigils of Saints, which consisted of a homily at Matins, and the use of the collect of the vigil as the principal collect of the day; the rest of the Office was that of the feria. The Breviary of St Pius V adopted this latter custom for the vigils of Saints, a rare example of change in an otherwise extremely conservative reform; but even for the Roman Rite, this was not an absolute novelty. Historically, the vigils of the major feasts of the Lord (Christmas, Epiphany etc.) did include the Office, and the change in 1568 simply extended the scope of a well-established custom.
The feast of All Saints was not definitively established as a major solemnity of the Roman Rite until the mid- to late 9th century, but in every book in which it is attested, it is accompanied by such a vigil. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that they were instituted at the same time. Because of the preeminent position of the martyrs in Christian devotion as the first and most widely venerated Saints after those who appear in the New Testament, the liturgical texts of All Saints are often borrowed or imitated from those of the feasts of martyrs, and the same is true of its vigil.
The Introit of the vigil is taken from the third chapter of the book of Wisdom, the source of many liturgical texts of all kinds for the feasts of martyrs. “Júdicant Sancti gentes et dominantur pópulis: et regnábit Dóminus, Deus illórum, in perpétuum. Ps. 32 Exsultáte, justi, in Dómino: rectos decet collaudatio. Gloria Patri. Judicant. – The Saints judge nations, and rule over peoples, and the Lord their God shall reign for ever. Ps. Rejoice in the Lord, O ye just: praise becometh the righteous. Glory be. The Saints.”
The Epistle is taken from the Apocalypse, chapter 5, 6-12; this part of the book, St John’s vision of God on His throne with the heavenly court and the Saints standing before Him, has long been a favorite source for artistic depictions of Heaven. This specific passage contains the first mention of Christ as “the Lamb that was slain”, and the book’s first occurrence of the word “Saints”.
“In those days, behold I, John, saw in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, a Lamb standing as it were slain, having seven horns and seven eyes: which are the seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth. And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat on the throne. And when he had opened the book, the four living creatures, and the four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints: And they sung a new canticle, saying: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; because thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God, in thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation. And hast made us to our God a kingdom and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the living creatures, and the ancients; and the number of them was thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, ‘The Lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and benediction.’ ”
As I described in an article eight years ago, the feast of All Saints was instituted in part as a response to the iconoclast heresy which the Byzantine Emperors invented, and enforced with a brutal persecution. Roughly a generation before iconoclasm began in 726, the Emperor Justinian II had called a synod now known as either “the Synod in Trullo” or “the Quinisext Council”, which among other things forbade any representation of Christ as an animal. In response, Pope St Sergius I (687-701) added the Agnus Dei to the Mass, and the church of Rome began regularly depicting Christ as a lamb in art. This Epistle, in which the Bible itself calls Him a lamb, was most likely chosen in reference to this; likewise the Epistle of the feast itself, chapter 7, 2-12, in which John sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, and in sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation to our God, who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb.’ ” In the same vein, the Magnificat antiphon for Second Vespers of the feast says “O how glorious is the kingdom where all the Saints rejoice with Christ; clothed in white robes, they follow the Lamb wheresoever he goeth!”
In the church of Ss Cosmas and Damian in Rome, Pope Sergius added the gold-background mosaic on the proscenium arch, filled with images from the book of the Apocalypse, including the Lamb of God on His throne. (Photo by Fr Lawrence Lew.)
The Gradual is taken from Psalm 149, “Exsultabunt sancti in gloria; laetabuntur in cubilibus suis. V. Cantate Domino canticum novum; laus ejus in ecclesia sanctorum. – The Saints shall rejoice in glory: they shall be joyful in their resting places. V. Sing ye to the Lord a new canticle: let his praise be in the church of the Saints.” The first part of this is frequently said in the Office of Several Martyrs, and was chosen in reference to the fact that the original focus of devotion to the Saints was always at the place of their burial. (There is no recording of it available on YouTube, but it is very similar to the Gradual Tecum principium of the First Mass of Christmas.)
The Gospel, Luke 6, 17-23, is taken from the beginning of the Sermon on the Plain; this is St Luke’s shorter version of the Beatitudes with which St Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount begins (chap. 5, 1-12), the latter being the Gospel of the feast. As St Ambrose explains in the breviary sermon on this Gospel, “Saint Luke sets out only four of the Lord’s Beatitudes, while Saint Matthew gives eight; but in those eight are contained these four, and in these four those eight. For the former in these four embraced the cardinal virtues, and the letter in those eight set forth a number full of mystery. … For as the eighth beatitude names the perfection of what we hope for (i.e., the kingdom of Heaven), so it is also the sum of the virtues.”
The Offertory is taken from the same Psalm as the Gradual, and includes a small variant from the Old Latin version, rather than the Vulgate version of St Jerome. “Exsultabunt sancti in gloria; lætabuntur in cubilibus suis. Exaltationes Dei in faucibus (“gutture” in the Vulgate) eorum. – The Saints shall rejoice in glory: they shall be joyful in their resting places. The high praises of God shall be in their mouth.”
Finally, the Communion also comes from Wisdom 3, and in fact has the same text as the Offertory of the feast, without the Alleluja at the end; the music, however, is completely different.
“Justórum ánimae in manu Dei sunt, et non tanget illos tormentum malitiae: visi sunt óculis insipientium mori: illi autem sunt in pace. – The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of malice shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: but they are in peace.”
In the Middle Ages, October 31 was also celebrated in England, France and the Low Countries as the feast of St Quintinus (“Quentin” in English), a Roman who came to Gaul, preached in the area of Amiens, and was martyred at a town which is now named for him. In many parts of Germany, it was the feast of St Wolfgang, bishop of Regensburg in Bavaria. Where one of these or some other feast was kept, two Masses would be celebrated on the day, one of the Saint after Terce, and the other of the vigil after None, with First Vespers of the feast normally following immediately after the second Mass. The vigil of All Saints receives little attention from medieval liturgical commentators such as Sicard of Cremona or William Durandus, but they do note that it was supposed to be kept with a fast, which was not to be broken until after None and Mass, and was not to be dispensed with because of the occurring feast.
The centenary of the institution of the feast of Christ the King by Pope Pius XI in his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas – a feast that therefore saw its one hundredth celebration in the Roman Rite last Sunday – is the happy occasion of the release of two new books whose content hinges on the kingship of Christ over peoples and nations.
Published in multiple bestselling Spanish editions and now at last in English, Fr. Javier Olivera Ravasi tells the harrowing tale of the Cristeros War as seen through the eyes of its immediate protagonists on both sides – a story of unbelievable wickedness, corruption, and brutality, opposed by unprecedented Catholic action, bravery, and sacrifice. A tale of simple men, women, and children who fought for their country, their faith, and their heavenly King. A tale of brilliant young intellectuals who debated just war theory with bishops and the pope. A tale of martyrs from all walks of life who died with “Long live Christ the King and the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe!” on their lips.
Quite apart from its value as a detail-rich account of an important but still too-little-known civil war, the parallels to our present situation are numerous and seem to be increasing day by day. The Cristero Counterrevolution thus possesses more than mere historical interest; it is a case study in political action, organized resistance, and Catholic reconquest, as well as a case study of the limits of political and ecclesiastical authority. Fr. Ravasi’s book is widely considered the finest one-volume treatment of the subject ever written.
Of particular interests to readers of NLM will be the discussions of the persecution of Catholic priests, the attempt to outlaw the Mass, and the many underground Masses that sprang up around the country, several photographs of which are included in the book. Some of the eyewitness accounts of what devotional and liturgical life was like between 1926 and 1929 (and at various other points too) make for simultaneously sobering and inspiring reading in our times.
The second is my latest book, His Reign Shall Have No End: Catholic Social Teaching for the Lionhearted. In recent decades, Catholic Social Teaching has often been reduced to a grab-bag of catechetical truisms and welfare policies driven by modern secular, egalitarian, and pluralist assumptions. His Reign Shall Have No End repristinates this noble branch of moral theology by tracing it back to the world-changing mystery of the Incarnation, whereby the Son of God became Head and Ruler of mankind in regard to natural and supernatural goods alike. The kingship of Jesus Christ – a revealed truth given consummate formulation by Pius XI in Quas Primas but expounded at length across the remarkable encyclicals of Leo XIII – is nothing less than the master key to Catholic Social Teaching’s coherence; it is, more to the point, the essential condition for the flourishing of nations no less than the beatitude of individuals. Where this kingship is ignored or denied, individuals, families, whole societies decompose like a body deprived of a soul; wherever it is welcomed in faith, Christian life revives and Christendom stirs from slumber.
The reaction of reviewers has been enthusiastic. For example, Dr. C.C. Pecknold, Associate Professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, writes: “This is the best book on Catholic Social Teaching I have ever read! Not only does Dr. Kwasniewski give a true account of the Church’s perennial teaching on a range of central questions, he helps readers identify and skewer counterfeit versions of the Faith.” Similar are the words of Dr. Sebastian Morello, Wolfgang Smith Chair in Philosophy, St Mary’s University, London: “Whether it is the issue of property rights, or freedom of speech, or democratic processes and the rule of law, or any other issue that plagues contemporary political discourse, Kwasniewski demonstrates that the Lord’s Kingship is the ultimate answer, and that outside His Kingdom there is only chaos and confusion.”
Again, the book contains chapters of special interest for NLM readers, particularly chapters 17 and 18, which concern the theology behind the feast of Christ the King and look closely at its liturgical celebration and the way this changed from Pius XI to Paul VI (a topic both Michael Foley and I have discussed here), and chapter 19, which examines the lex orandi of the old and new liturgies to assess the extent to which each one contains and presents a coherent doctrine of man’s life of self-conquest and world-conquest for Christ. The Cristero Counterrevolution and the Battle for the Soul of Mexico (6” x 9”, 316 pp.) is available in paperback, hardcover, or ebook directly from the publisher, Os Justi Press, or from Amazon sites around the world. His Reign Shall Have No End (5.5” x 8.5”, 348 pp.) is available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook from its publisher, Arouca Press, from Os Justi Press by special agreement with the publisher, or from Amazon sites around the world.
You can “look inside” either publication at its Os Justi or Amazon page.
May these books help deepen the faith of Catholics in the divinely-revealed mystery of the kingship of the God-Man Jesus Christ—a truth much neglected and even outright denied, yet one that stands at the foundation of the Church as Kingdom of God, about which we are told to pray every day: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
In the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, the entry on Relics states that “It has long been customary especially in churches which possessed large collections of relics, to keep one general feast in commemoration of all the saints whose memorials are there preserved. (As will be explained below, this is something of an overstatement.)
An Office and Mass for this purpose will be found in the Roman Missal and Breviary, and though they occur only in the supplement Pro aliquibus locis and are not obligatory upon the Church at large, still this celebration is now kept almost universally. The office is generally assigned to the fourth Sunday in October.” The author, Fr Herbert Thurston SJ, wrote “generally” because there was a variety of uses in regard to the date. I have seen the feast on October 26 in a 19th century breviary printed at Naples, while the Dominicans kept it on the 30th, and the Premonstratensians on November 14th. The Catholic Encyclopedia article was published just prior to the reform of St Pius X, which abolished the custom of fixing feasts to particular Sundays; after that reform, the most common date was November 5th.
The Divine Office for the feast is that of the common of Several Martyrs, with lessons in the second nocturn taken from St John Damascene’s Treatise on the Orthodox Faith, which perfectly summarize the Church’s theology of relics.
“Christ the Lord granted us the relics of the Saints as fonts of salvation, from which very many benefits come to us. … In the (old) law, whosoever touched a dead person was deemed unclean, but these (i.e. the Saints) are not to be reckoned among the dead. For from that time when He who is life itself, and the Author of life, was reckoned among the dead, we do not call them dead who have fallen asleep in Him with the hope and faith of the resurrection.”
This mid-11th century fresco in the lower basilica of St Clement in Rome shows the translation of the relics of St Clement, which Ss Cyril and Methodius discovered while they were evangelizing the Slavs in the region to which Clement had been deported, and where he had been martyred in the early 2nd century. The two Saints are depicted at left with Pope St Nicholas I, to whom they gave the relics; in the middle, St Clement is depicted as a living person, lying on a bier and covered with a red blanket, holding up his head, to indicate that the relics are his living presence among us. At the right, the Pope is celebrating Mass, with the Missal open to the “Per omnia saecula” and “Pax Domini” before Communion. (Public domainimage from Wikimedia Commons.)
He goes on to note various kinds of miracles that are worked by relics: “demons are expelled, illnesses driven away, the sick are healed, the blind regain sight, the leprous are cleansed, temptations and sorrows are scattered, and every best gift descendeth through them from the Father of lights (James 1, 17), unto those who ask with unwavering faith.”
As a theologian and Doctor of the Church, St John is best known for his defense of sacred images against the iconoclast heresy. “Iconoclasm” literally means “the breaking of images”, but in its Byzantine form, it also attacked the Church’s devotion to relics, just as the Protestant form would eight centuries later. Shortly after the Synod of the Hieria, which took place in the Emperor’s palace in Chalcedon in 753, and made iconoclasm the official policy of the Byzantine Empire, the altar of the nearby basilica of St Euphemia was dismantled, and her relics removed from it and cast into the sea. This was the first in a twenty-year long campaign of similar desecrations, and persecution of the iconodules. When the Second Council of Nicea was convoked in 787 to reestablish the orthodox faith, several accounts of miracles worked by both images and relics were adduced in their favor, and incorporated into the Council’s official acts, following the line set out by St John.
The Mass of the Holy Relics found in the supplement to the Missal is a fairly recent composition; its three prayers are all proper to the feast, but the Gregorian propers and Scriptural readings are selected from other Masses. The Introit is taken from the feast of Ss John and Paul, the first martyrs whose relics were buried inside a church within the city of Rome. “Many are the afflictions of the just; and out of them all will the Lord deliver them. The Lord keepeth all their bones, not one of them shall be broken.” The Epistle, Sirach 44, 10-15, is that of the octave day of Ss Peter and Paul, over whose tombs and relics the Emperor Constantine built two of Rome’s earliest public churches; it is here selected for the verse “Their bodies are buried in peace, and their name liveth unto generation and generation.” The Gradual Exsultabunt Sancti and the Gospel, Luke 6, 17-23, the beginning of the Sermon on the Plain, are both taken from the vigil of All Saints, since the feast of the Holy Relics is effectively celebrated as a part of All Saints’ Day. The remaining chants are taken from the Masses of various Martyrs.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of relics in the devotional life of the medieval Church, and a general commemoration “of the relics” is often found in medieval breviaries among the series of votive commemorations known as “suffrages.” However, a general feast of relics per se is actually quite rare in the Middle Ages; one of the few notable examples is found in the Use of Sarum, which kept such a feast on the Sunday after July 7th. This date was chosen because July 7th was the feast of the translation of perhaps the most important relics in pre-Reformation England, those of St Thomas of Canterbury. Translation feasts were also celebrated for St Martin of Tours and St Benedict, and indeed, all three were kept within a single week, with the former on the 4th and the latter on the 11th.
In point of fact, it was a much more common practice to celebrate the translation or reception of a specific relic or group of relics, rather than a feast of relics in general. In 1194, a feast of this kind was established at Paris, celebrated on December 4th under the title “Susceptio Reliquarum – The Receiving of the Relics.” The objects in question were believed to be several of the Virgin Mary’s hairs, three of St John the Baptist’s teeth, the arm of St Andrew the Apostle, some of the stones with which St Stephen was killed, and a large portion of the skull of St Denis. The pre-Tridentine Breviary of Paris has a special Office for the day, which mixes together parts of the Offices of these Saints with others from that of All Saints’ Day, and the hymns of Several Martyrs. Particular emphasis is laid on the Virgin, to whom the cathedral of Paris, where these relics were kept, is dedicated, and on local hero St Denis. This Office remained in use in the post-Tridentine period, with modifications that did not change its basic tenor.
(Many of the relics kept at Notre Dame de Paris were destroyed during the Revolution, one of the most famous ones that survived was the Crown of Thorns, which had its own feast on the Parisian calendar on August 11th. It was rescued from destruction when the church was severely damaged by a fire on April 15, 2019; the following video shows it being formally brought back to the restored cathedral at the end of last year, and installed in an absolutely hideous modern display... thing...)
I am sure that some of those who read this article will smile (or perhaps smirk) at the idea of relics of the Virgin Mary’s hair or the stones used to kill St Stephen. In this, they will not be alone. In the early decades of the 18th century, the church of Paris turned to a general and radical revision of its liturgical books, the reform which we now call “neo-Gallican.” This reform embraced many of the rationalist critiques brought against some of the Church’s traditional stories and legends; in the 19th century, Dom Prosper Guéranger, the great enemy of the neo-Gallicans, complained bitterly of their splitting up of both St Mary Magdalene and St Denis into different personages according to the various parts of their legends.
Likewise, suspicious (to say the least) of the authenticity of these relics, the neo-Gallican reform completely erased the original character of the “Susceptio Reliquiarum”, transforming it into a general feast of relics. Renamed as “the Veneration of the Holy Relics”, and transferred to November 8th, the octave day of All Saints, it was then given a completely new Office, which contains no references at all to the specific relics for which it was originally instituted, or the Saints whose relics they were.
The neo-Gallican liturgical reforms contain a great many lapses in taste and judgment which almost beggar belief; however, the new Office of the Holy Relics, whatever its history may be, is from a literary point of view one of the better efforts of its kind. Like most people who put their hand to changing historical liturgies, the Neo-Gallican revisers were painfully obsessed with making everything “more Scriptural,” and the new antiphons and responsories consist almost entirely of direct citations from the Bible. But they are very well chosen from a wide selection of books, and do demonstrate effectively that the Church’s veneration of relics is a tradition thoroughly grounded in Scripture. Just to give one example, the following responsory cites an Old Testament episode which was later used by Cardinal Newman in his Apologia to justify the veneration of relics.
R. They cast the body into the sepulcher of Elisha, and when it had touched the bones of Elisha, the man came back to life, and stood upon his feet. (4 Kings 13, 21) V. By faith they received their dead raised to life again. (Hebr. 11, 35) And when…
It is also, I believe, the only example of a neo-Gallican Office that was adopted for use outside France, and continued to be used, at least in part, even after the neo-Gallican liturgies were definitively suppressed in the 19th century. The Neapolitan breviary which I mentioned above contains it in almost exactly the same form as it appears in the 1714 edition of the Parisian Breviary. The one feature of the Office which the neo-Gallican reforms could not make into a chain of Scriptural citations is the corpus of hymns, to which a great many new compositions were added. The new Parisian Office of the Holy Relics includes a hymn written by a cleric of the diocese of Paris named Claude Santeul (1624-84) which was adopted by the Benedictines for their version of the feast, and is thus still part of the Antiphonale Monasticum for the Office to this very day. The meter is one used by the classical poet Horace called the Third Asclepiadean, not previously part of the traditional repertoire of Christian hymns. Some of Santeul’s odd vocabulary (e.g. “Christiadum” instead of “Christianorum”) is determined by the need to find words that fit the meter, but his complicated word order is a deliberate imitation of Horace’s style.
Reverence their poor and sadly dear remains!
Folded in peace their earthly vesture lies,
Dear pledges, left below, but thence to rise,
Pledges of heavenly bodies, free from pains!
And here ye may lift up your thankful strains,
Ye Christian companies. The spirit flies,
And hath its recompense in quiet skies,
And leaves with you below its broken chains:
Yet for their bones meek Piety shall plead,
Blest Piety, which honoureth the dead!
Though scatter’d far and wide, yet God’s own eye
Doth keep them that they perish not; and when
The promised hour shall come, their God again
Shall gather them, and as He builds on high
His habitation, each there, moulded by His grace,
Shall live and find a sure abiding place.
To us the places where your ashes be
Shall be as altars, whence shall steadier rise
Our prayers to Heav’n; and that blest Sacrifice,
Where God the Victim cometh down from high,
Shall consecrate to holier mystery;
He here accepts your deaths as join’d with His,
Here builds all in one body, and supplies
Our dying frames with immortality.
And hence your graves become a tower of aid,
A refuge from bad thoughts, a sacred shade;
Until, fresh clad with new and wondrous dowers,
Our flesh shall join the angelic choirs, and be
A living temple crowned with heavenly towers;
Where evermore the praises shall ascend
Of the great undivided One and Three,
And God be all in all, world without end. Amen.
(English translation by Isaac Williams from Hymns translated from the Parisian Breviary, Rivington, London, 1839)
The neo-Gallican use also has a different Gospel from the one named above for the feast of the Holy Relics, Luke 20, 27-38, in which Christ disputes with the Sadducees about the nature of the final Resurrection. The conclusion of this passage is particularly important as the foundation of what St John Damascene says, that the Saints are not truly dead. “Now that the dead rise again, Moses also showed, at the bush, when he called the Lord, The God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; for he is not the God of the dead, but of the living: for all live to him.” In the Parisian Breviary, the homily that accompanies it is taken from a treatise written by St Jerome against a priest from Gaul named Vigilantius, who had denied the value of praying to the Saints and venerating relics, a work in which we see the Saint at his wittiest and most acerbic.
“Vigilantius is vexed to see the relics of the martyrs covered with a costly veil, and not bound up with rags or hair-cloth, or thrown down the midden, so that Vigilantius alone in his drunken slumber may be worshipped. Are we, therefore guilty of sacrilege when we enter the basilicas of the Apostles? Was the Emperor Constantius guilty of sacrilege when he transferred the sacred relics of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy to Constantinople? In their presence the demons cry out, and those who dwell in Vigilantius (i.e. the devils) confess that they feel their influence. And at the present day, is the Emperor Arcadius guilty of sacrilege, who after so long a time has conveyed the bones of the blessed Samuel from Judea to Thrace? Are all the bishops to be considered not only sacrilegious, but fools as well, because they carried that most worthless thing, dust and ashes, wrapped in silk in golden vessel? Are the people of all the churches fools, because they went to meet the sacred relics, and welcomed them with as much joy as if they beheld a living prophet in their midst, so that there was one great swarm of people from Palestine to Chalcedon with one voice re-echoing the praises of Christ? They were forsooth adoring Samuel and not Christ, whose Levite and prophet Samuel was. You imagine he is dead, and therefore you blaspheme. Read the Gospel: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
St Jerome the Penitent, by Titian, 1575; when depicted in this fashion, he is traditionally shown holding a rock with which he is said to have beaten his breast as an act of penance. Given the ferocity of Jerome’s polemical writings, and a general apprehension of his character (he quarreled violently with several of his friends), Pope Benedict XIV is supposed to have remarked on seeing such a representation of the Saint, “If it is true, that would be the only way you got into heaven.”
We recently published Nicola de’ Grandi’s pictures of the abbey of St Gallen in Switzerland, which is home to one of the most important libraries in the world; among other things, it houses several of the oldest manuscripts of Gregorian chant. Much of the collection is now free to consult via the website https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en, which also includes links to the digital collections of numerous other Swiss libraries. Here is a selection of some of the liturgical books which are kept on regular display in the library (under glass, obviously, which makes for less-than-ideal conditions for photography.)
A collection of sequences by Notker Balbus, a.k.a. Blessed Notker the Stammerer (840 ca. - 912), a monk of Sankt Gallen who was traditionally credited with inventing the genre. Manuscript of the mid-11th century.
The oldest tropar, i.e. a collection of tropes of liturgical texts, copied out in the 2nd quarter of the 10th century.
By the middle of the 11th century, the number of these was greatly reduced at San Gallen; this manuscript contains the ones that were retained, generally the more elaborate ones.
A manuscript of the mid-13th century, brought to Sankt Gallen from the cathedral of Lausanne, with several examples of two-voiced harmony from the cathedral of Paris, where the choir masters were experimenting with this then-new technique.
A manuscript of instruction on how to chant from roughly the same period, which among other things, enjoins the monks not to “neigh like donkeys, or bleat like sheep, or sound like herdsmen”, with threats of sever penalties for doing so.
A 13th century collection of processional chants, with the original box made to protect it from the elements in case it should be raining during the procession.
Saint Jude, who shares a feast today with Saint Simon the Zealot on October 28, is also called “Thaddeus” (the Brave One) in the New Testament. Jude was one of the original twelve Apostles and probably the brother of St. James the Less. It is also speculated that he was the nephew of St. Joseph and hence the legal cousin of Our Lord, one of those blessed few who were considered the “brethren” of Jesus (Matthew 13, 55).
Jude is also the author of the fifth-shortest book in the Bible and one of the seven “Catholic Epistles,” so called because they address a general audience and not a specific person or congregation (like St. Paul’s letters). In his 461-word Epistle, Jude warns the faithful about false teachers who have infiltrated the Church and are spreading a loose morality that disregards the authority of apostolic tradition. This brief admonition is strongly worded and pulls no punches: it calls these false teachers “sensual men” and “grumbling murmurers” who are “clouds without water which are carried about by winds; trees of the autumn, unfruitful, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; [and] raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion” (Jude 12).
Jude also mentions in his Epistle the curious detail that St. Michael the Archangel and the Devil fought over the remains of Moses and that rather than risk blasphemy, Michael said to Satan, “May the Lord rebuke thee” (Jude 9). Some speculate that the Devil had wanted Moses’ body to be given a grand monument to tempt the Hebrews into idolatry, but Michael hid it instead.
St Michael and Satan Disputing about the Body of Moses, ca. 1782, by Nicolai Abraham Abildbaard
Little is known of what happened to Saint Jude after the first Pentecost. He is believed to have preached the Gospel first in Mesopotamia and then in Persia, where he teamed up with Saint Simon and “begot numerous children to Jesus Christ and spread the faith among the barbarous inhabitants of that vast region” before suffering martyrdom. According to an Armenian tradition, however, Saints Jude and Bartholomew introduced the faith to that nation; the ancient Monastery of Saint Thaddeus in northern Iran was once a part of Greater Armenia.
Understandably, Jude is a patron of Armenia, but he is most famous for being the patron saint of desperate or hopeless causes, possibly because his name was so similar to that of the traitor Judas Iscariot that people would not pray to the “forgotten apostle” unless all else had failed! The patronage itself is relatively recent, dating back to 1929 when a Father James Tort encouraged the devotion among his parishioners in southeast Chicago, most of whom were laid-off steelworkers. The devotion grew rapidly; on the final night of a solemn novena held on St. Jude’s feast, there was an overflow crowd outside the church. The next day, the stock market crashed, and soon more Americans were turning to St. Jude during the Great Depression and World War II.
Father Tort also organized the Police Branch of the League of St. Jude in 1932; to this day, Jude is the official patron of the Chicago Police Department. And because, it is conjectured, many a person feels desperate or hopeless when hospitalized, Jude is also the patron of hospital workers and the hospitalized. Either that, or because of another client of St. Jude, to whom we now turn.
Danny Thomas, 1957
Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz was a faithful Maronite Catholic, who is better known as the actor and entertainer Danny Thomas. Thomas was down on his luck when he remembered how a stagehand had praised St. Jude for miraculously curing his wife of cancer. A devout Catholic who went to Sunday 6:00 a.m. Mass on his way home from performing all night in a New York club on Saturday night, Thomas prayed to St. Jude and promised him that he would do “something big” if St. Jude helped him out. Jude kept his end of the bargain, and so did Thomas, founding the world-famous St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee in 1962. It was the first fully integrated hospital in the American South, and it has gone on to transform the treatment of child cancer around the world. Thanks in large part to the physicians and scientists of St. Jude, the overall survival rates for childhood cancers have gone from 20% when the hospital opened to 80% today. “Help me find my way in life,” Danny Thomas had prayed to St. Jude, “and I will build you a shrine.” Thanks to Thomas’ gratitude and the patronage of the forgotten Apostle, some hopeless causes are looking less hopeless.
An earlier version of this article appeared as “Who is St. Jude?” in the Messenger of St. Anthony 122:10, international edition (October 2020), p. 37. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its inclusion here.
Here are some photographs of one of the liturgical celebrations which took place in Rome this past weekend as part of the annual Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage. On Friday, October 24th, His Eminence Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna, presided over the celebration of Vespers of St Raphael the Archangel in the basilica of San Lorenzo in Lucina. His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke attended in choir; we will also have photos of the Pontifical Mass which he celebrated in St Peter’s basilica the next day. The church was, of course, quite full, I have seen a report that a number of the faithful had to stand out in the porch in front of the church. These pictures were taken by Don Elvir Tabaković, a former professional photographer from Croatia who is now in religious life, and putting his skills to excellent use in the service of the Church. Our thanks to Cardinal Zuppi for his paternal solicitude for the faithful who love the traditional liturgy - ad multos annos!
Worthy is the Lamb Who was slain to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honor. To Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Ps. 71 O God, give Thy judgment to the King, and Thy justice to the King’s son. Glory be... As it was... Worthy is the Lamb... (The Introit of the feast of Christ the King.)
The Crucifixion, and Christ in Majesty among the symbols of the Four Evangelists. From the Gotha Missal, so called after its owners in the 18th century, the Dukes of Gotha; originally made ca. 1375, most likely for the chapel of King Charles V of France (1364-80), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. (Image from Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0)
Introitus Dignus est Agnus, qui occísus est, accípere virtútem, et divinitátem, et sapiéntiam, et fortitúdinem, et honórem. Ipsi glória et impérium in sǽcula sæculórum. Ps. 71Deus, judícium tuum Regi da: et justítiam tuam Fílio Regis. Glória Patri... Sicut erat... Dignus est Agnus...
One several occasions, we have shared pictures by Mr John Ryan Debil, who does very impressive work in decorating the little chapel where he prays the Divine Office, as you can see on his Facebook page The Home Oratory, also on Instagram. He has recently put together a collection of prayers for the dead which he has composed; it can be ordered through Amazon at this link. We are very glad to share this presentation of the book with our readers; below you can see some examples of his oratory as he decorated it last year for the triduum of All Saints and All Souls.
In recent decades, many of the Church’s time-honoured devotions surrounding death, judgment, and the faithful departed have faded from daily life, even though November remains the month of the Holy Souls. In an age that has forgotten the Christian remembrance of death – the sober knowledge of judgment and the need for purification before entering Heaven – Prayers for the Octave of the Dead by John Ryan Debíl seeks to invite the faithful to recover an authentically Catholic vision of eternity, one that unites hope with repentance and mercy with truth.
Carrying the imprimatur of the Rt. Rev. Philip A. Egan, Bishop of Portsmouth, this devotional is designed especially for the laity, offering a structure of daily readings, meditations, and prayers. It opens with an introduction and a concise exposition on the Church’s teaching about Purgatory, grounding the practice of praying for the dead in its true doctrinal context. Drawing on Scripture, the prayers are written in a spirit of traditional devotion and reflections on the Four Last Things, contrasting the complacency of the present age with the purifying realism of those in Purgatory, who long for the vision of God. The mystery of death and judgment urge the faithful to resist the modern presumption that Heaven is assured, and renew the ancient charity of praying for the dead.
The book is enhanced with photographs taken by the author at Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini (FSSP) in Rome during the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed in November 2023, with permission of the parish priest, Fr Brice Meissonnier. Printed in a glossy, pocket-sized paperback format, Prayers for the Octave of the Dead is designed for both beauty and practicality. Inside, bold text marks the portions to be read by the leader, making it ideal for use in groups or parish devotions. The booklet includes clear preliminary instructions and several supplementary prayers. Compact and durable, it is easily carried to church, cemetery, or home oratory – an accessible companion for the faithful who wish to pray for the Holy Souls throughout November.
The Oratory of Ss Cyril and Methodius, the ICRSP’s Apostolate in Bridgeport, Connecticut, will celebrate a high Mass for the feast of Christ the King tomorrow with Hassler’s “Missa Ecce quam bonum,” accompanied by brass quintet. The Mass begins at 10:15 am; at 6 pm there will be solemn five-coped Choral Vespers. The church is located at 79 Church St. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the promulgation of the feast by Pope Pius XI, with his encyclical Quas Primas, issued on December 11, 1925.
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