Durandus on the Beheading of St John the Baptist

The Church celebrates the feast of the beheading of blessed John because he died for the truth, but not as solemnly as the feast of his birth, because (when he died) he went down to hell (i.e, the limbo of the Fathers), as Gregory says, commenting on the words, “Art thou the one who is to come, where do we await another?” (in his homily on the Gospel for the second Sunday of Advent, Matthew 11, 2-10.) John began to preach in the 30th year from the Lord’s birth, and was beheaded around Pascha by King Herod in the 32nd year, that is, the year before the Lord’s passion.

The Head of St John the Baptist Presented to Salome, by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, ca. 1640; now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. – Fabritius, born in 1622, studied with Rembrandt, and was considered one of his best pupils. In about 1650, he moved to Delft, where he was killed on Oct. 12, 1654, in the incident known as the ‘Delft Thunderclap’, the explosion of a gunpowder magazine which leveled about a quarter of the city. Fabritius’ studio was destroyed, along with most of his paintings; this is perhaps the earliest of his surviving works, which number only about a dozen.

When John was beheaded, his disciples buried his body in Sebaste, a city of Palestine, and his head was buried in Jerusalem near where Herod lived. In the place where the body lay buried, God worked many miracles, for which reason a multitude of Christians used to gather there. Seeing this, Julian the Apostate issued an order, and the gentiles broke up the mausoleum to dishonor Saint John, and they scattered his bones through the fields. But since the Christians continued to come there and the miracles did not cease, the gentiles gathered up the bones and burnt them, but the finger by which he pointed out the Lord as He was coming to the Jordan, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God”, etc., could not be burnt.

However, there were many Christian monks from Jerusalem mixed in among those gentiles, and as they were gathering up the bones, these men saved as many as they could hide, and brought them to Phillip, the bishop of Jerusalem. The latter, through his deacon Julian, send them to Anastasius, bishop of Alexandria, and afterwards Theophilus, bishop of that same city, laid them to rest in the temple of Serapis, and consecrated it as a basilica in his honor.

A painting of a medieval legend in which Julian the Apostate destroys the bones of St John the Baptist, ca. 1484, by the Netherlandish painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

(Our friend Durandus has received from his sources a great deal of confusion about this part of the story. The bishop of Jerusalem during Julian the Apostate’s brief reign (361-63) was St Cyril; the only bishop of that city named Phillip lived in the 120s. “Anastasius” is a mistake for “Athanasius,” in the reign of whose third successor, Theophilus (385-412), the temple of Serapis at Alexandria was indeed dismantled, and a monastery founded on the site, with a church named in honor of St John.)

For this reason, the Church celebrates this feast of the beheading and of the burning of the bones, as if for one who, although already dead, in some sense underwent a second martyrdom in his bones.

Others say that the blessed Thecla brought John’s finger, the one which could not be burnt, from the Outremer (‘ultramarinis – the lands beyond the sea’, the common term for the Holy Land in the age of the crusaders,) to a place called Moriana, and there founded a church in honor of blessed John which was dedicated on this day. Therefore, the lord pope decreed that this day should be kept in his honor through the whole world, and in accord with this, it seems that it should also be called the feast of this dedication. (This is also fairly confused; St Thecla lived about three centuries before the time of Julian.)

A reliquary of a finger of St John the Baptist, from the museum of the cathedral of Florence, where he is honored as Patron Saint of the city. Attributed to Matteo di Giovanni; first half of the 15th century.

Furthermore, the blessed John revealed the location of his head, which had been buried in Jerusalem, to two eastern monks who had come there to worship, and they found it near Herod’s dwelling place on February 23rd. But afterwards, it was brought by others to the city of Edessa (in Syria), and hidden away in obscurity in some cave, until it was revealed again to a priest named Marcellus, and to the bishop of the same city, This took place on August 29th, and from that time the beheading began to be celebrated in that city on the day on which the head was revealed; and thus, this feast can also be called the feast of the revelation.

(Excerpts from Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, VII, 26. The legend of the repeated loss and rediscovery of St John’s head is well known in the East; in the Byzantine Rite, a feast of both the first and second finding of it is kept on February 24th, and of the third finding on May 25th.)

The Numinous in the Roman Rite, Part II

In our last post, we described the importance of the numinous for Catholic worship. Here, we describe how that principle is instantiated in the traditional Roman Rite.

The Numinous in the 1962 Missal

To repurpose Yeats’ verse about the 1916 Easter Rebellion, at every Mass a terrible beauty is born; at every Mass a portal to the mysterium tremendens et fascinans is opened. The ceremonies of a Eucharistic liturgy and the comportment of its ministers should therefore reflect this basic fact. Different Apostolic Liturgies communicate the numinous in different ways. In the 1570/1962 Roman Missal does so, one can list the silent canon, the use of a sacred language, and the etiquette of the priest: his frequent kisses of the altar and genuflections, his not separating his canonical digits after touching the Host, etc. But in this post, we will focus on three other examples: the performance of or response to kairos, the liturgical stammer, and allusions to the Holy of Holies.

I. A Quiet but Tremendous Beginning

The traditional Latin Mass begins not with a greeting of the people but with a shudder before God. This shudder does not occur simply because the priest has physically entered the sanctuary or is about to approach the altar: it happens because Mass is beginning. Outside of Mass, lay men and women can enter into the sanctuary to act as sacristans, arranging flowers and linens and vessels. And when a Low Mass begins, the priest walks into the sanctuary, arranges the chalice, corporal, and burse on the altar, and returns to the foot of the altar.

But upon his return and after he makes the sign of the cross to begin the Mass, his attitude changes significantly. The same altar that he was touching almost nonchalantly a few moments ago he now quivers before as he repeatedly asks God for forgiveness. The difference is that he is aware that he has moved into a sacred time, kairos. In the New Testament, a distinction is made between chronos, which is ordinary, chronological time, and kairos, which means “the time when God acts.” The Byzantine Rite makes this distinction explicit, when its Divine Liturgy begins with Kairos tou poiesai to Kyrio: “It is time kairos for the Lord to act.”

St. Therese of Lisieux as a sacristan arranging the sacred vessels without gloves outside of kairos

The laconic Roman Rite, on the other hand, follows the adage: facta non verba, “deeds not words,” acting out rather than articulating an awareness of kairos (also, there is no Latin equivalent for this Greek word). After making the sign of the cross, the priest recites Psalm 42 (41), a cri de coeur that moves from despair to hope in the presence of Divine Majesty. He then recites the Confiteor, asking for a forgiveness of his sins, knowing that no one should approach the sacred unclean. And even after he asks for forgiveness, he continues to move with fear and trembling as he ascends the altar and recites the prayers the Aufer a nobis and Oramus te (more on the former later). And when the priest approaches the altar this time, he kisses it reverently, which he did not do before when he was setting up the chalice.

All of which is to say that this humbling, trepidatious attitude of the priest and his ministers betokens a special time and a special act. Sacred liturgy is more than an act of worship or the fulfilment of an obligation or a way of giving thanks or a memorial or even a sacrifice; it is a portal through which we enter into the “wholly other” dimension of the numinous.

II. The Liturgical Stammer

In the prayers at the foot of the altar, the priest confers absolution on the ministers and the congregation that have recited the Confiteor and then asks the same for himself. Next, after a short series of versicles, the priest prays two prayers (one when is he is approaching the altar and one when he arrives), both of which ask for a forgiveness of sins: the Aufer a nobis and the Oramus te, respectively. The worry among some is that because these prayers are said so soon after the absolution, they bespeak a despair that the absolution was not efficacious, that the priest thinks that he still has sins on his soul even after God has forgiven him. This repeated plea for forgiveness, so the charge goes, may indicate a despairing spirit of Jansenist scrupulosity.

But there is another interpretation for why the priest and his ministers hem and haw. Catherine Pickstock speaks of a “stammer” in traditional liturgies that instantiates “the ‘slow tongue’ of Moses, the ‘unclean lips’ of Isaiah, the demur of Jeremiah, and the mutism of Ezekiel.” [1] Rather than moving in a Cartesian, linear fashion from A to B to C (as the Novus Ordo does, or so Pickstock argues), the traditional Rome Rite often takes two steps forward, one step back. This stammer or dance reflects the proper attitude that one should have in the face of the numinous, namely, a mixture of hope, fear, awe, personal unworthiness, gratitude, hesitancy, and perseverance.

Seen in this light, the repeated requests for purification during and after the Prayers of the Foot of the Altar do not bespeak a lack of confidence in God’s power to forgive but the proper response to the prospect of participating in so great a numinous mystery. They are a perfect enactment of Psalm 5, 8 – “I will come into (introibo) Thy house, I will worship towards Thy holy temple in Thy fear” – where “God’s fear” can be taken to mean the correct reaction to being in the presence of the numinous.

III. The Holy of Holies

Another strange deficiency in Otto’s Idea of the Holy is that when covering the Old Testament, Otto focuses only on feelings of the numinous without also including places. [2]  But surely, the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple is the greatest physical nucleus of the numinous in the Hebrew Bible, surpassing even Mount Sinai.

For in the Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant, an object that brought death to anyone who touched it without divine authorization (as in the case of poor Uzzah: see 2 Samuel 6, 1-7 and 1 Chronicles 13, 9-12). In the Ark were some of the most sacred objects imaginable: the stone tablets of the Decalogue that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, manna from the time that the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness for forty years, and the staff of the first High Priest, Aaron. And above the Ark hovered the cloudlike Shekhinah, a mysterious manifestation of God’s presence.

The Ark and the Holy of Holies were separated from the rest of the Temple by a curtain that was sixty feet high, thirty feet wide, and four inches thick. Only the High Priest passed through that curtain, and only once a year, on the Feast of Atonement (Yom Kippur), when he sprinkled the blood of sacrificed animals on the Ark for the remission of the sins of the people. So great was the numinosity of the place that the Levites feared the High Priest would die of fright; and since they could not retrieve the body without entering the Holy of Holies and risk being struck down by God, they tied a rope around his waist so they could drag out his corpse if necessary.

As it turns out, the awesome and terrifying structure that was Solomon’s Temple was a mere symbol for the body of Jesus Christ (see John 2, 21). It is therefore appropriate to invoke this symbol when engaged in an activity that makes present the Body (not to mention Blood, Soul, and Divinity) of Jesus Christ.

The traditional Latin Mass does so once. When the priest ascends the altar as he prays the Aufer a nobis:

Take away from us our iniquities, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that we may be worthy to enter into the Holy of Holies with pure minds. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Here, the priest imagines the sanctuary as the Holy Place and the area immediately around the altar, which is traditionally separated from the rest of the sanctuary by one or more steps, as the Holy of Holies. And since the altar is a symbol of Jesus Christ, whose body the Temple foreshadows and who dwells in the heavenly Holy of Holies with His Father (see Heb. 9, 11-13), the priest is ritually approaching Jesus Christ and with the proper attitude.

But the greatest numinous moment is yet to come. Before the term “Canon” came to designate the prayer by which the priest confects the Eucharist, it was known by other names. Two in particular are relevant to our inquiry: the “dangerous Lord’s Prayer” (orationem dominicam quae dicitur periculosa) and “the Action” (actio). The former certainly attests to the numinosity of the Consecration, but so too does the latter, for it is a reminder that the Mass is an action, and that action puts us in formidable proximity to the numinous. As a character in John Henry Newman’s novel Loss and Gain eloquently puts it, the Mass

is not a mere form of words—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. [3]

The use of Actio to describe the Canon occurs once in the Mass, in the rubric Infra Actionem or “within the Action.” The instruction occurs immediately before the Communicantes, which has different versions depending on the occasion. Infra Actionem warns the priest of this variable; it essentially means, “Within this Action/Canon be prepared to make this or that insertion.”

Interestingly, Infra Actionem is in both forms of the Roman Rite (it is in Eucharistic Prayer I of the 1970 Missal). But there is another rubric that appears in neither yet is worthy of our consideration. In the liturgical books of the Carolingian era for a Pontifical High Mass, one reads: surgit solus pontifex et tacite intrat in canonem—“The pontiff rises alone and enters silently into the Canon.” [4]

The rubric draws from a medieval tradition that the Canon is a Holy of Holies into which only the celebrant can enter. As Fr. Josef Jungmann summarizes (disapprovingly): “The priest alone is to enter this inmost sanctum, while the people stand praying without, as once they did when Zachary burned incense in the Temple sanctuary.” [5] Fr. Daniel Cardo concurs but sees this imagery in a positive light:

It might be possible to recognize in the expression intrat in canonem a symbolic meaning indicating that the priest is, at that point, crossing the threshold of the holy of holies, where the veil of the true temple of Christ’s body was torn (cf. Matt. 27, 51): his side opened on the Cross, from where the Church receives the gift of the sacraments. [6]

Moreover, there is a fascinating metaphysics underlying this abandoned rubric. The Mass began with the priest declaring that he will enter into the altar of God (Introibo ad altare Dei) before he ascends the steps to the altar and prays the Aufer a nobis about entering the Holy of Holies. At this point of the Mass, the Holy of Holies is conceived of spatially, as one would expect of a temple; to enter into one part, one must physically move into it. But with this medieval rubric, the Holy of Holies is not conceived of spatially: the priest has already been standing at the altar for some time. Here, to enter into the Holy of Holies, he does not relocate from A to B but transitions from potency to act. The Holy of Holies is no longer the greatest place on earth but the greatest action that can be on earth.

Conclusion

Rudolf Otto’s ideas, we repeat, are not perfect, but they are useful, for they remind us of the important role that the numinous plays in our lives as believers. Moreover, they provide a reliable measuring stick for evaluating the vitality of sacred liturgy, which fails as liturgy to the degree to which it neglects the numinous. Those who reduce liturgy to a meal or a community gathering will never hear the words, “There is a mighty spirit in the room.”

This review appeared in The Latin Mass magazine 35:2 (Summer 2026), pp. 56-57. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its publication here.

Notes

[1] Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Blackwell, 1998), 215.

[2] See Otto’s chapter “The Numinous in the Old Testament,” 74-84.

[3] John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (Burns & Oates, 1962), 185.

[4] Ordo Romanus II.10.

[5] Josef Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, vol. 1 (Benzinger Brothers, 1951), 82-83.

[6] Daniel Cardó, The Cross and the Eucharist in Early Christianity: A Theological and Liturgical Investigation (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 110-11.

The Seven Joys of the Virgin Mary

For a fairly brief period, today was kept by the Franciscans as the feast of the Seven Joys of the Virgin Mary. As an expression of the Seraphic Order’s devotional life, it corresponds to the feast of the Holy Rosary, which began among the Dominicans, and the observance on September 15th of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, which was originally the Patronal feast of the Servites. The principal contribution of the Franciscans to the Church’s cycle of Marian feasts is, of course, the Immaculate Conception, whereas the liturgical celebration of the Seven Joys is very late, and short-lived. It was granted to them in 1906, and at first fixed to the Sunday after the Octave of the Assumption; when the reform of St Pius X abolished the practice of fixing feasts to Sundays, it was permanently assigned to August 27th. In the Calendar reform promulgated in 1961, which aimed at reducing the number of feasts, and especially the so-called “feasts of devotion” (as opposed to those of Our Lord and the Saints), it was suppressed.

The Altarpiece of the Seven Joys, by the anonymous painter known as the Master of the Holy Family, ca. 1480; now in the Louvre.

The devotion to the Seven Joys in and of itself, however, is much older; the story of its origin is told thus in the Manual for Franciscan Tertiaries.

About the year 1420, a young man, deeply devoted to Our Lady, took the habit of St Francis. Before joining the Order, he had, among other practices, been accustomed daily to make a chaplet of flowers, and with it to crown a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Having in his novitiate no longer an opportunity of making this crown for his Most Beloved Queen, he, in his simplicity, thought that she would withdraw her affection from him; this temptation of the devil disturbed his vocation, and he resolved to abandon the cloister. The merciful mother appeared to him, and gently rebuking him, strengthened him in his vocation by telling him to offer her instead of the chaplet of flowers, a crown much more pleasing to her, composed of seventy-two Ave Marias and a Pater after each decade of Ave Marias, and to meditate at each decade upon the seven joys she had experienced during the seventy-two years of her exile upon the earth. The novice immediately commenced reciting the new crown or rosary, and derived therefrom many spiritual and temporal graces. This pious practice spread quickly through the whole Order, and even throughout the world… St Bernardin of Siena used to say that it was by the Crown of the Seven Joys that he had obtained all the graces which Heaven has heaped upon him.

A traditional Franciscan Rosary of the Seven Joys, still worn as part of the Order’s habit.

The Seven Joys listed in the Manual are the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth of Christ, the Adoration of the Magi, the Finding of the Christ Child in the Temple, the Resurrection and the Assumption, but other version of the list may be found. Two more Aves are added to make the number seventy-two mentioned above, and another Pater and Ave for the intentions of the Pope. The recitation concludes with a versicle and response, and the Collect of the Immaculate Conception.

V. In thy Conception, o Virgin, thou wast immaculate.
R. Pray for us to the Father, whose Son thou didst bear.
Let us pray. O God, Who by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, prepared a worthy dwelling place for thy Son; we beseech thee, that, as by the foreseen death of Thy same Son, Thou preserved Her from every stain, so Thou may grant us also, through Her intercession, to come to thee with pure hearts. Through the same Christ our Lord. R. Amen.

V. In Conceptione tua, Virgo, immaculata fuisti.
R. Ora pro nobis Patrem, cujus Filium peperisti.
Oremus. Deus, qui per immaculátam Vírginis Conceptiónem dignum Filio tuo habitáculum praeparasti: quaesumus; ut qui ex morte ejusdem Filii tui praevisa, eam ab omni labe praeservasti, nos quoque mundos ejus intercessióne ad te perveníre concedas. Per eundem Christum, Dominum nostrum. R. Amen.

Complete Coetus XI Documentation on the New Lectionary Now Published in English

The Lectionary for Mass – drawn up by Group XI of the Consilium, the “super-committee” charged with carrying out Sacrosanctum Concilium – is often held up as one of the greatest achievements of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform. Yet until recently, the full details of the committee’s discussions and labors have remained unpublished, accessible only to archival researchers and specialist scholars.

Newly published, The Post-Vatican II Reform of the Lectionary: The Schemata of Group XI offers an English translation, by NLM contributor Matthew Hazell, of the Latin and French schemata of Group XI in their entirety – the first time, in fact, that the complete documentation for any of the Consilium study groups has been made available in translation. The process of the reform of the lectionary can thus be traced through the various draft orders of readings as well as the debates among the members and consultors.

As readers would expect from his writing at NLM and his posting online, Hazell equips the book with a robust, detailed, masterly introduction to the views on the lectionary entertained in the 20th-century Liturgical Movement, how these views animated (or not) the Council Fathers, the formulation accepted at the Second Vatican Council, and the complex mechanisms by which a few lines from the Council were extrapolated into a multi-year lectionary designed more or less ab ovo. This introduction alone is a major addition to the scholarly literature (it could have been published as a small book of its own), followed by a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources ranging over many languages.

By making the primary source documentation more accessible to all, this volume of 512 pages contributes to further critical study and exploration of the Novus Ordo lectionary and the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms more generally, as well as to ongoing discussion of how closely the Consilium’s work reflects the will of the Council Fathers.

It is surprising how much information is only now emerging about the enormous undertaking of liturgical reform at the Vatican in the 1960s and 1970s. Until recently we did not have ready access to eyewitness accounts of how things went “behind closed doors”; then the valuable memoirs of such participants as Louis Bouyer, Boniface Luykx, and Ferdinando Antonelli were published, shedding new light on the proceedings.

This new volume from Os Justi Press continues the work of historical investigation and analysis.

 

“The reader will find a treasure trove of information and insight into the mind and workings of Coetus XI. Hazell’s introduction is a refreshing summary, reporting different points of view without being limited to the common narrative. A comprehensive bibliography allows those interested to further their studies and the appendices provide additional pertinent historical documents. Hazell is to be commended for making the sources available. In this way, the reader has the necessary tools with which to make informed judgments about this important aspect of the life of the Church.” 

          —Dom Cassian Folsom, OSB, Professor of Liturgical Books, Pontifical Institute of Liturgy, Sant’ Anselmo, Rome

“With this volume, Matthew Hazell fills a conspicuous and long-standing gap in liturgical scholarship. The revision of the Mass lectionary, despite its enormous consequences for Catholic worship, has remained strangely obscure—its committee debates, drafts, and decisions known only in fragments. Hazell reconstructs that history in exhaustive detail and, crucially, supplies English translations of the schemas and official notes in their entirety. It is difficult to imagine future research on the three-year lectionary that does not begin here.”
          —Rev. Matthew S. C. Olver, Senior Lecturer in Liturgics, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

“A growing number of scholars have turned their attention to exactly what took place within the body charged to implement the Council’s constitution on the liturgy. Matthew Hazell is to be congratulated for this important contribution to that scholarship and to the ability to distinguish between the reform desired by the Council and that which was in fact promulgated in its name.”

          —Dom Alcuin Reid, Prior, Monastère Saint-Benoît, Brignoles, France

Available from Os Justi Press or any Amazon site. (At the Os Justi site you can “look inside” at the Table of Contents, part of the Introduction, and sample pages from the translations and charts.)

Some further thoughts on this book by our contributor Dr. Kwasniewski, who is also the director of Os Justi Press:

Some sample pages.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Eyewitness Accounts of Liturgical Life Before and After the Council

In his second memoir, Traddy Daddy: Memories and Thoughts of the Father of a Catholic Family, Joseph Bevan regales us again, as he did before in Two Families, with story after story of English life before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. I think personal testimonies like these are worth their weight in gold, particularly as fewer and fewer people are left who can pass on the tales of what things were like back then.

Indeed, I have noticed a disconcerting tendency among younger generations nowadays to deny or downplay how good things were in the 1950s in many places, and how bad things really were in the 1960s and thereafter. The partial restorations of tradition under John Paul II and Benedict XVI have, to some extent, been projected backwards so as to create the illusion of a mild squall rather than a tempestuous storm. Memoirs are a partial but crucial way to overcome such biases. (See “Not ‘the Silly Season’ but ‘the Satanic Season’” for more on this point.)

There’s also a lot of rich detail in this book about the history of the Society of St. Pius X, obviously of considerable interest given this summer’s events.

(The remainder of this post is direct quotation from Bevan’s Traddy Daddy.)

Solemn Pontifical Mass in Westminster Cathedral, ca. 1950

1966: Westminster Cathedral Choir School

The priest mutters his way through the Latin prayers during early morning Mass as we boys kneel in adoration in the dusty half-light of the crypt under Westminster Cathedral. The celebrant stands at the altar with his back to us as he performs the work of a master craftsman, and he whispers the prayers. I look up during the elevation of the host and watch the fishes in the mosaic depicted on the arch above the altar, as I have done hundreds of times before. There is Our Lord walking on the water and there’s the ship containing the apostles who are scared by the storm. Fish abound in the picture, and I try to count them. Having had nothing to eat I often feel faint at the priest’s recitation of the Agnus Dei, during which he bends slightly and taps his chest three times. Why I do so at that particular time of the Mass I have no idea and today I pass out momentarily.

Sister Immaculata frogmarches me out of the crypt and sends me on a trot around the car park outside. I find that attending Mass on a completely empty stomach is a bit of a trial, but, as it is Sunday, we do get a decent breakfast afterwards. Nevertheless, I am struck by the dual simplicity and dignity of the ceremony, with the priest in sparkling gold vestments on Saints’ days. To my young brain, the whole ceremony is rich with deep meaning which is beyond my comprehension, and represents the magnificence of the supreme orderliness which is the Catholic Church. Everything is in its place and the whole organisation reminds me of an ancient clock which ticks away over the centuries and never loses a beat. During the hush of the consecration of the host, I hear the low mumbling and tinkling bells of other Masses which are going on in the various crypt chapels. There is also the distant rumble of traffic in Victoria Street….

Every Sunday we wear our smartest uniforms as we file into the cathedral for High Mass and take our places in the front two rows facing the grand altar. The interior of the church is constructed out of miniature red bricks, reminding me of Legos and, for a little boy of my size, it’s vast. I cannot see the roof as it soars up above my head shrouded in darkness. Above the high altar is a decorative baldacchino which, to me, is as big as a railway bridge, and hanging over the sanctuary a massive crucifix keeps sentinel over the proceedings. The organ is growling in the background as the church begins to fill up.

Some people kneel whilst reciting their rosaries and knots of people cluster around the votive candle stations as they light candles and kneel in prayer. No one is talking and all I can hear is the shuffling of many feet and the creaking of chairs as they quietly take their places with the organ playing in the background. Sister Immaculata fusses over us like a mother hen and ensures that we have our missals open at the correct page. My own Mass book contains a section at the end of the service called “post communion” and I have concluded that it is for when the priest posts off holy communion to people who have been unable to attend. (1-3)

My favourite service in the cathedral is Sunday Vespers. Again, we probationers occupy the front two rows and follow the service in our missals. The psalms at Vespers move me to tears sometimes; even as a boy of eight my sensitivity is acute, and I am transported by the sight of five priests in gold copes among the clouds of incense. During the incensing, while the altar is prepared for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the organist plays thunderously and it is this part of the ceremony that I look forward to most of all, for the organist is Nicholas Kynaston who, we are told, is internationally famous. (6)

Quite often Sister Immaculata takes us to the cathedral during the week to visit the Blessed Sacrament in a special chapel set aside for devotions. We follow the nun quietly through the echoing cathedral where we see people praying, strolling around, or lighting votive candles. The Blessed Sacrament chapel is off a side aisle to the left of the high altar and when we enter, we see many people kneeling down. Some are holding rosaries and whispering the prayers. The centre of devotional attention is the gold tabernacle on the altar, surrounded by lighted candles and flowers. I smell the sweet odour of the incense of past ceremonies, and the attendant hush is in striking contrast to the noisiness of the London traffic outside in Victoria Street. I have no difficulty in saying prayers as I am transported by the beauty of the chapel and the fervour of the people around me. My childlike approach to prayer, which has never left me, was formed during those wonderful visits to the cathedral.

One Wednesday afternoon we are milling around in the playground and Father Veal is walking around the perimeter of the lawn in the distance, buried in his breviary. All the priests I meet at the choir school, and there are lots of them, seem to have their daily lives dominated by this mysterious black prayer book which they always carry around with them. (7-8)

We have religious instruction lessons with Father Veal, and he first distributes to each of us a little red booklet called the Penny Catechism. Over the next few terms, he makes us learn the whole thing parrot fashion and we recite sections of it back to him together in a singsong chorus. There is a lot of discussion, which Father leads and encourages, and in doing so he displays his own deep love of the Catholic Faith, which is infectious. (10)
 

How things were before: Bevan's father as director of the Downside Abbey choir

Changes in the liturgy

Our parish church in Shepton Mallet is a converted hall and every Sunday it is full. There is a choir gallery which our family inhabits so as to sing the Mass, and Pa plays the organ for us. We sing Gregorian chant and a few simple motets.

I detect trouble ahead as something Pa calls “Vatican Two” is casting a shadow over everything religious. Attending Mass, after the experience of Westminster in term time, comes as a surprise but I am thoroughly entertained by the upheavals.

Father Ryan is now facing us, having put in place a table which he uses as an altar. He is given to interrupting the service every so often to emit what Pa calls “sermonettes.” Worst of all, we are forced to join in with the server in a rather wordy and tedious translation of the Latin Mass. Jokes abound with the cack-handed words, such as, “mindful of our Saviour’s bidding, and for the prairie tortoise” (prayer he taught us).

Pa and my elder brothers, especially, are often angry after Mass. This is a massive alteration in our religious observance as respect for the parish priest, who is agitating for change, diminishes. I hear them mutter in annoyance when the priest gives an extra-long sermon about the “presidential chair,” whatever that is. The whole of Mass is, for me at least, an orgy of experimentation and I look forward to each Sunday in anticipation of new outrages.

Rather than being a servant of the liturgy, Father Ryan is behaving like a compère at a village dance, not resisting the odd joke or two either. Yet I am struck by the “do this or else” attitude of the priest, meaning that by taking our part in the changes we are being loyal subjects of the Holy Father. Nobody dares to object publicly, but privately people are either angry or mystified. Ma is convinced that the Pope has been kidnapped and is trussed up in a cellar in the Vatican. “Don’t worry,” she says, “he’ll restore things to what they were after he escapes.” This is how many people cling to hope.

St Michael's, Shepton Mallet

Changing church buildings

At about this time we abandon the old chapel of St Nicholas and take possession of our new gleaming concrete and glass building which is St Michael’s Church. As we enter the new building for the first time, I am immediately aware of that smell common to new buildings, it is the slightly sweet odour of floor polish. The altar is a slab of white bare stone and, unlike its predecessor at our last chapel, has no coverings. Also gone are the statues and the stations of the cross. The servers at Mass have abandoned their black cassocks and white cottas in favour of what look, to me at least, like long dresses which are coloured dark green.

With the new church comes a new parish priest, called Father Gerald Carrol, who has a string of drinkdriving convictions, so we are told. I am under the impression that Father Carrol is a “conservative” (the Catholic Church nowadays is reduced to political name-calling) and is resisting pressure from some of the more enlightened members of his congregation to get rid of our family choir which sings for him every Sunday. I can only describe the goings-on at the altar during Mass as chaotic. Father Carrol is often not particularly sober and keeps on breaking out into Latin. The servers bustle around like headless chickens and constantly trip up over their green dresses which are far too long for some or far too short for others. The master of ceremonies pushes and shoves to restore some kind of order. As I am at a delicate age, I find all this tremendous fun, but I catch the sighs, the groans and sharp intakes of breath from those around me.

During Mass of Low Sunday, we look up to see Father Carrol’s little white dog entering the church through the open vestry door and, neglecting to genuflect, waddling past the front row of pews, and then settling down in the corner by the little organ. Mass continues normally but during the hymn at the offertory the dog starts to howl, so a parishioner picks it up and returns it to the vestry. (11-13)
 

Chaos in 1969

1969 finds the Church in a maelstrom of chaos, upheaval, and experimentation. All Hallows, an unknown prep school in the middle of nowhere, is not immune to these revolutionary forces and Alistair Mortimer, our Headmaster, willingly carries the banner of progress. The school chapel, for example, a beautiful cruciform and ancient room with a remarkable reredos, is the first place to receive unwelcome attention from the reforming Headmaster. The altar is torn from its mountings and dragged out, leaving a space behind it from which the priest can face the congregation. The delicately carved wooden reredos is sold off, and a yellow curtain replaces it. The stations of the cross are removed along with the many statues of Our Lady, Saint Joseph, and the saints. A public address system is installed which often either breaks down or emits loud crackles which are extremely offensive to the ear.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Arranging the Breviary for the Rest of the Liturgical Year

This is our annual posting on one of the discrepancies between the traditional arrangement of the Roman Breviary and the new rubrics of 1960; this year, the first such discrepancy appears at Vespers on Saturday evening of this week. In some years, including this one, it also moves the September Ember Days one week forward from their traditional place.

One of the changes made to the Breviary in the revision of 1960 regards the arrangement of the months from August to November.

The first Sunday of each of these months is the day on which the Church begins to read a new set of Scriptural books at Matins, with their accompanying responsories, and Magnificat antiphons at Saturday Vespers. These readings are part of a system which goes back to the sixth century: in August, the books of Wisdom are read; in September, Job, Tobias, Judith and Esther; in October the books of the Maccabees; in November, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the twelve minor Prophets. (September is actually divided into two sets of readings, Job having a different set of responsories from the other three books.)

Folio 98v of the antiphonary of Compiègne, 860-77 AD. At the top of the page are three antiphons taken from the book of Job for Saturday Vespers, the first and second of which (Cum audisset Job and In omnibus his) are found in the Breviary of St Pius V and subsequent revisions thereof. These are followed by responsories and antiphons from the book of Tobias, and responsories from the book of Judith. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 17436)

The “first Sunday” of each of these months is traditionally that which occurs closest to the first calendar day of the month, even if that day occurs within the end of the previous month. This year, for example, the first Sunday “of September” is actually August 30th, the Sunday closest to the first day of September.

In the 1960 revision, however, the first Sunday of the months from August to November is always that which occurs first within the calendar month. According to this system, the first Sunday of September is the 6th this year.

The Ember days of September, (which are older than this system), are celebrated within the third week of that month. In the traditional arrangement, this means that they always begin with the Wednesday after the Exaltation of the Cross. However, in the 1960 rubrics, the third week of September is determined differently, and they can be therefore be pushed forward a week, as they are this year. So in the traditional arrangement, they are on Sept. 16, 18 and 19; according to the 1960 rubrics, on Sept. 23, 25 and 26.

This change also accounts for one of the many peculiarities of the 1960 Breviary, the fact that November has four weeks, which are called the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth. According to the older calculation, November has five weeks when the 5th of the month is a Sunday. (This is also the arrangement that has the shortest possible Advent of three weeks and one day.) According to the newer calculation, November may have three or four weeks, but never five. In order to accommodate the new system, one of the weeks had to be removed; the second week of November was chosen, to maintain the tradition that at least a bit of each of the Prophets would continue to be read in the Breviary. However, in some years, November only has three weeks, and the first one is also omitted, but this is not the case this year.

The Sundays of the rest of the liturgical year, according to the traditional system:

August 30 – the 1st Sunday of September (XIV Sunday after Pentecost)
September 6 – the 2nd Sunday of September (XV after Pentecost)
September 13 – the 3rd Sunday of September (XVI after Pentecost); Ember week
September 20 – the 4th Sunday of September (XVII after Pentecost)
September 27 – the 5th Sunday of September (XVIII after Pentecost)

October 4 – the 1st Sunday of October (XIX after Pentecost)
October 11 – the 2nd Sunday of October (XX after Pentecost; commemorated on the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary)
October 18 – the 3rd Sunday of October (XXI after Pentecost; commemorated on the feast of St Luke the Evangelist)
October 25 – the 4th Sunday of October (XXII after Pentecost, commemorated on the feast of Christ the King)

November 1 – the 1st Sunday of November (XXIII after Pentecost; commemorated on the feast of All Saints)
November 8 – the 3rd Sunday of November (V after Epiphany resumed)
November 15 – the 4th Sunday of November (VI after Epiphany resumed)
November 22 – the 5th Sunday of November (XXIV and last after Pentecost)

The Sundays of the rest of the liturgical year, according to the 1960 system:

August 30 – the 5th Sunday of August (XIV Sunday after Pentecost)

September 6 – the 1st Sunday of September (XV after Pentecost)
September 13 – the 2nd Sunday of September (XVI after Pentecost)
September 20 – the 3rd Sunday of September (XVII after Pentecost); Ember week
September 27 – the 4th Sunday of September (XVIII after Pentecost)

October 4 – the 1st Sunday of October (XIX after Pentecost)
October 11 – the 2nd Sunday of October (XX after Pentecost)
October 18 – the 3rd Sunday of October (XXI after Pentecost)

October 25 – the 4th Sunday of October (XXII after Pentecost, omitted on the feast of Christ the King)

November 1 – the 1st Sunday of November (XXIII after Pentecost, commemorated on the feast of All Saints)
November 8 – the 3rd Sunday of November (V after Epiphany resumed)
November 15 – the 4th Sunday of November (VI after Epiphany resumed)
November 22 – the 5th Sunday of November (XXIV and last after Pentecost)

The calculation of the Sundays after Pentecost also calls for a note here. (The discrepancies between the Missals of St Pius V and St John XXIII are very slight in this regard.)

The number of Sundays “after Pentecost” assigned to the Missal is 24, but the actual number varies between 23 and 28. The “24th” is always celebrated on the last Sunday before Advent. If there are more than 24, the gap between the 23rd and 24th is filled with the Sundays after Epiphany that had no place at the beginning of the year. The prayers and readings of those Sundays are inserted into the Mass of the 23rd Sunday (i.e., the set of Gregorian propers.) The Breviary homily on the Sunday Gospel and the concomitant antiphons of the Benedictus and Magnificat also carry over in the Office. This year, the Fifth and Sixth Sundays after Epiphany are celebrated between the 23rd and 24th after Pentecost.

If this all seems a little complicated, bear in mind that the oldest arrangement of the Mass lectionary that we know of was even more so. The oldest lectionary of the Roman Rite, a manuscript now in Wurzburg, Germany, dates to ca. 700, and represents the system used at Rome about 50 years earlier. It has a very disorganized and incomplete set of readings for the period after Pentecost; the Sundays are counted as 2 after Pentecost, 7 after Ss Peter and Paul, 5 after St Lawrence, and 6 after St Cyprian, a total of only 20. There are also ten Sundays after Epiphany, even though Septuagesima is also noted in the manuscript, and the largest number of Sundays that can occur between Epiphany and Septuagesima is only six.

On Sacred Art (Part 1): Revealing the Invisible through the Visible

How style communicates theological truth, and the three authentic traditions of liturgical art: iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque

This is the first of two related articles on the three authentic liturgical traditions of the Church – what makes them sacred, and how sacred art is the template for mundane or profane art. This first article asks what sacred art is for, how style communicates theological truth, and introduces the three traditions Benedict XVI identifies. The second will consider what governs the style of each, drawing on the anthropology of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and will explain why the High Renaissance is not among them.

What should the content of sacred art be?

Every time an artist paints, he asks three fundamental questions: What do I paint? How do I paint it? And why am I painting it? All three are interconnected, but his answer to the first question: ‘What?’ governs the content; and his answer to the second: ‘How?’ governs the style. The third question, ‘Why?’, establishes the purpose that both content and style must serve.

The content and style of sacred art must accordingly serve its sacred purpose. By tradition, that purpose is to show us what we could not otherwise see, in such a way that it deepens our participation in worship and prayer. An image of Christ on the Cross is vital to our worship, for example, because it tells us something about what is happening at the Mass. Paintings of saints and angels reveal to us that there is a heavenly host of that worships God alongside us. Paintings of the feasts and Gospel narratives connect these events to specific points in the liturgical year.

In this sense, sacred art makes the invisible visible. It does so in two ways: first, as one might expect, through its subject matter; second, through the style in which it is painted. So, in the case of sacred art, how the subject is painted is just as important in communicating theological truths as what is painted. This second point is less immediately obvious and warrants careful explanation.

Image: The Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God and the Christ Child by Gregory Kroug, 20th century, in the iconographic style. Egg tempera on panel. Three stars on her outer garment, on each shoulder (one is hidden) and her forehead are symbols of perpetual virginity, i.e., before, during and after the birth of the Savior.

What governs style in art?

Most people coming out of fine art departments in the West today would assume that style is a purely personal choice, needing no stronger justification than the artist’s own preference. The Christian artist, however, should approach things differently. Every artist makes personal choices, but a Christian artist makes those choices in light of an end that aligns with his faith, and, as a result, Christian art should be as recognizably Christian by virtue of its style alone.

If an artist wants to paint Our Lady, he will not only represent her visible appearance as faithfully as he can; drawing on tradition, he will also seek to communicate truths about her that would not be visible even if she were standing before us: that she is a saint in heaven, that she is the Mother of God, that she is a virgin in perpetuity, and that, in common with all humanity, she is a person with an invisible soul as well as a visible body. These truths are abstracted – literally ‘drawn out’ – and made visible through a controlled and partial modification of natural appearances, which creates a characteristic style. It takes great skill to do this, but when done well, the resulting stylization conveys a deeper reality than a strictly naturalistic representation could and communicates many of these aspects to people who intuit these truths, even though they are often unaware of precisely how the artist uses style to communicate them.

To describe this in more detail, it is worth establishing the meanings of the terms I will use here. When I want to describe conformity to natural appearances, I use the word ‘naturalism’. Some other commentators will use the word ‘realism’ here, but I generally prefer not to, since it implies that natural appearances constitute the whole of reality, which is not true.

The tendency to deviate from natural appearances, on the other hand, is called by other commentators and me variously and interchangeably ‘abstraction’, ‘symbolism’, or ‘idealism’.

Both tendencies – that is, heightened naturalism or heightened abstraction (symbolism or idealism) – taken to their extremes, mask reality rather than reveal it. Too much abstraction risks an ugly distortion that hides the truth. The artist risks distorting appearances to the point that the viewer cannot recognize what he is supposed to be looking at. Alternatively, the artist can misapply distortion to convey the wrong message. For example, an overly erotic representation of the female figure, as seen in advertising and superhero comics. This quality of heightened eroticism is communicated as much by the style of the painting as by the pose that the figure adopts.

Too much naturalism, as we see in the style known as ‘photorealism’ (which I consider a misnomer for the reason stated above), often produces a cold sterility that fails to convey the full Christian understanding of what it means to be a person, including the presence of an immortal soul.

Christian figurative art has always navigated a course between these two poles. Because doing so is genuinely difficult, the Christian artist is wise to conform to traditional, tried-and-tested styles and to depart from established stylistic conventions only when the needs of a particular community or time clearly require it. This principle is sometimes called the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’, and can be summarized simply: don’t change things unless you have to.

Pope Pius XII addressed this balance directly in his 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei. (In the passage below, Pius is using the word ‘realism’ to refer to what I would call naturalism, and ‘symbolism’ to refer to the degree of abstraction or idealization):

"Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, should not be universally despised and rejected through prejudice. Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive ‘symbolism,’ and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. (Mediator Dei, 195)"

Most of the recognizable artistic styles that have developed since the beginning of the 20th century depart radically, in my opinion, from the traditional balance of naturalism and idealism — but that should not surprise us, since most modern artists had no intention of conforming to Christian tradition, actually quite the reverse; and they have a different understanding of the human person and the world around us. To consider two examples: photorealist painting, at one extreme, reflects a denial of anything beyond surface appearances. By reproducing the visible world with photographic precision and deliberate emotional flatness, it presents the human figure as a mere object among objects, stripped of any evident interior life or soul and seen as having no greater value than a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Abstract Expressionism, at the other extreme, largely abandons the material world and the body as meaningful subjects. It instead seeks to convey pure inner states — emotions and feelings — through gesture, color, and non-representational form. For many of these artists, the essence of humanity lies in thoughts, feelings, and subjective experience rather than in the embodied person. Abstract Expressionist art, such as that of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, although it seeks to communicate essential aspects of human nature as they see it, does not convey any sense of the human body. There is no figure shown that we would recognize as having two arms, two legs, and so on. Each approach runs contrary to the Christian understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul.

The three authentic traditions of liturgical art

In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (p. 129), Pope Benedict XVI identifies three authentic traditions of liturgical art. Each in its own characteristic way strikes the balance between naturalism and abstraction that Pius XII called for. Here is an introduction to them and to what unites or distinguishes them from one another.

The first is the iconographic tradition. This style developed in the early centuries of the Church, reaching a distinctive form around the 4th century AD. It remained the dominant form of Christian sacred art, albeit in many different variations, until the 12th century, and continues to characterize the sacred art of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox churches to this day. When we speak of ‘icons’, the images of Orthodox churches naturally come to mind first – for example, the holy icons from the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai dating to the 6th century, or the works of Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, it is less well known that the iconographic style is also part of the Western, Roman tradition. In the West, after the style’s first development in the 4th century, all artistic styles up to and including the Romanesque remained fully consistent with the same iconographic prototype. The figurative art of the Book of Kells, made in Ireland in the 8th century, and the Celtic style, for instance, conform to the iconographic prototype. Though they may look very different from an icon, they share the same underlying principles that define iconographic art.

Image: An 8th-century illumination of St Mark in the Celtic style from the Gospel of St Gallen. It looks very different from a Russian icon, yet the two share the underlying principles of the iconographic tradition.

The second authentic tradition is the Gothic. This term is generally applied to a style that emerged in the Western Church around the 12th century, replacing the earlier Romanesque style, and died out by the 16th century. Duccio, the 13th-century Italian painter, is a representative example: his work is characterized by greater naturalism than the iconographic tradition, though it remains highly abstract in comparison with later Western styles. Over time, the degree of naturalization steadily increased, while maintaining the essential formal elements of this newly established Gothic style. I would include artists such as Fra Angelico and Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in this category, considering them late-Gothic.

Image: Crucifixion Diptych by Rogier van der Weyden, 1460.

One explanation for this transition from the iconographic Romanesque style is the influence of the ideas of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, whose works were rediscovered and incorporated into Christian thought by the medieval scholastics beginning around the 12th century and gathering pace thereafter – among them St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the 13th century. Through this renewed study of Aristotle, integrated into Christian thought by these great medieval figures, there was now greater confidence in the senses’ capacity to yield reliable knowledge and a deepened appreciation of the created world, which could be accurately observed and understood through the information they provide. It was not a wholesale reversal of earlier assumptions – Christians had always trusted the senses to some degree and believed in the reality of the world around us – but rather a significant shift of emphasis. As a result of this greater stress on the intelligibility of the natural world, there was a greater curiosity about it and a desire to understand the order that pervades it. An outcome of this is an increased naturalism in art. Artists studied and copied nature more rigorously than before. Many today associate high naturalism in Christian art with the Italian High Renaissance, with artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo, but the development of naturalistic art did not begin with them. Rather, it is the culmination of a process of systematic observation of nature that began much earlier, in the Gothic period. A second outcome of this movement toward a more intensive and systematic study of nature and the natural order, incidentally, was the emergence of what would eventually become modern natural science and the scientific method.

The third tradition considered authentically liturgical and sacred is the Baroque – or, as Benedict XVI puts it, the Baroque ‘at its best’. This is the strongly naturalistic style that developed in Italy as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and characterizes the art of 17th-century Western Europe. The artists who established it include Federico Barocci and Caravaggio; other well-known Baroque painters include Velázquez, Georges de La Tour, Zurbarán, Van Dyck, Rubens, Guido Reni, and Ribera. Though strongly naturalistic, the style employs a carefully worked-out, if subtly applied, abstraction. Later commentators, drawing on Platonic terminology, would call this partial abstraction ‘idealization’ in connection with Baroque art.

Image: St James the Greater, by the Italian artist Guido Reni; an example of 17th-century Baroque sacred art.

These, then, are the three traditions: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. We have seen what unites them: each strikes, in its own way, the balance between naturalism and abstraction proper to sacred art. What we have not yet seen is what accounts for the differences between them, and why these three, and not others, are the traditions Benedict identifies. In the next of these two articles, I will turn to that question, drawing on the anthropology of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and will explain why the High Renaissance, so often regarded as the summit of Catholic art, does not belong on the list.

The Centenary of Pius XI Declaring St John of the Cross a Doctor

On this day exactly 100 years ago, Pope Pius XI declared the Carmelite friar and priest St John of the Cross to be the 26th Doctor of the Church; this was just shy of 200 years after his canonization, which took place on December 27, 1726. As noted in the relevant decree, in 1891, the year which marked the 3rd centenary since St John’s death, a petition requesting that this be done was submitted to the Holy See by several Spanish cardinals and bishops.

St John in Ecstasy before the Cross, ca. 1705, by the French painter Antoine Ranc (1634-1716.)  

Here is an excerpt from a translation of said decree, the most important pertinent part; the full text can be read at the website of the Discalced Hermits of Our Lady of Mt Carmel.

“During his nine months of detention he wrote his “Spiritual Canticle” to celebrate the mystical union of the faithful soul with Christ, her Bridegroom, and to show forth the manifold effects as well as the sweet affections of prayer. He developed it later by considerations and explanations. Delivered miraculously from prison, he set to work, at first in the Convent of Calvary, then in other houses where he sojourned filling various offices, and composed other writings in which, as inspired by light from on high, he showed to souls, in a penetrating commentary on the divine gifts, the way of perfection. “The Ascent of Mt. Carmel,” “The Obscure Night,” “The Living Flame of Love,” and his numerous small treatises and letters, though treating of difficult and hidden matters, contain at the same time an elevated spiritual doctrine, which is nevertheless within the reach of his readers. His works may rightly be regarded as the manual and school of the faithful soul in the search for the most perfect life.

It is not astonishing that the Bull of Canonization should affirm, that St. John of the Cross wrote “upon Mystical Theology books full of a heavenly wisdom”; to this judgment of the highest importance, the greater number, if not all, will give their assent. After his death, which occurred in 1591, John became in the course of time such an authority in the mystical science, that the ascetical authors and saintly persons recognized in him a master in sanctity and piety. For their spiritual writings, they drew from his doctrine and works as from a limpid source of the Christian thought and the mind of the Church.”

An Altarpiece of St Bartholomew

For the feast of St Bartholomew the Apostle, here is a beautiful altarpiece dated to about 1440, which depicts a series of stories from his traditional legend, by an anonymous Spanish painter known as the Master of Torralba. It is now in the museum of the Château de Castelnau-Bretenoux in France. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons by Benjamin Smith. Click to enlarge.)  

In the central section, we see the Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John at the top, and the Apostle below, holding his traditional instrument, the knife with which he was flayed, and a chain which ends around the neck of a demon, whose hands are locked up in a stock. The last reflects the tradition that Bartholomew was especially powerful over demons, which is also referred to in the Gospel of his Mass, Luke 6, 12-19: “And they that were troubled with unclean spirits were cured.”

The eight panels surrounding it show stories from his apocryphal acts (running first down the left side, then the right), from which this tradition derives, in the version told by Bl. Jacopo di Voragine in the Golden Legend. When he arrives in India to preach the Gospel, a demon which had been wont to speak though an idol in a temple falls silent. (1 and 2) He heals the possessed daughter of a local king (3), after which, the king sends several camels laden with money and gems (4), which the apostle refuses.

On the right side, the Apostle appears to the king in a dram and preaches the faith to him. (5) When the pagan priests of the area attempt to sacrifice to an idol, the demon which inhabits it protests that now that Christ has won the redemption of man, it hurts him when they do so. (6) Bartholomew is then arrested (7) and killed (8). The varying accounts of his martyrdom have him either flayed alive (which will later become the most common way of representing him in art); here the artist shows both.

The predella show events from the Passion of Our Lord: the arrest in the garden, his appearance before Pilate, the flagellation, the deposition from the cross, and the entombment.  

Palestrina’s Canticle of Canticles

Before the Tridentine reform, very few feasts had Scriptural readings in the first nocturn of the Divine Office. On the feasts of the Saints, it was typical for readings of their lives to supply all the Matins lessons, while on those of Our Lord and Our Lady, the first two nocturns were usually a sermon about the feast, and those of the third a homily on the Gospel read at Mass. There were, however, certain exceptions to this, such as Christmas and Epiphany, which always had the same readings from Isaiah that they do today. Among the feasts of the Virgin Mary, only that of her Nativity had Scriptural readings; these were taken from the Song of Songs, or Canticle of Canticles, as it was traditionally known in the Latin West, from its title in the Vulgate, “Canticum Canticorum.”

Two pages of a breviary according to the Use of Prague, printed in 1502, with the Office of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary; the Canticle of Canticles is read in both the first and second nocturns. In many Bibles of this period, the Canticle also had notes added to the text to indicate who is speaking: “The voice of Christ, (speaking) to the Church”, “the Church (speaking) about its tribulations” etc. These were then often incorporated into breviaries, as seen here. (Click image to enlarge.)

On the Assumption and through its octave, the readings of the first two nocturns were taken from a sermon known from its opening words as “Cogitis me.” This purports to be a letter of St Jerome, written to his great friend Paula and her daughter Eustochium (who are both also Saints), in which he expounds his belief in the Assumption of the Virgin, and exhorts them to imitate Her as a model of consecrated life. In reality, it was written by St Paschasius Radbertus, a monk of the ninth century, when “forgeries” of this sort were not looked upon as frauds or acts of deception. Patristic scholar Jaroslav Pelikan notes that Paschasius “under the name of Saint Jerome made a far more substantial contribution to the history of Marian spirituality and devotion than any of the genuine works of Jerome, or for that matter than (his own) other principal work … on the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” (“The Odyssey of Dionysian Spirituality”, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Paulist Press, 1987.)

In the early 16th century, however, Erasmus had shown that “Cogitis me” was certainly not by St Jerome, although he did not know who the true author was. It was therefore removed from St Pius V’s breviary and replaced by writings of other Church Fathers. (Ironically, the readings from St Athanasius assigned to the feast in the first edition were also later determined to be not actually his, and were removed from the second edition published by Clement VIII in 1602.)

The upper half of a polyptych of the Assumption, with Ss Paul and Jerome, Catherine of Alexandria and Clare of Assisi, 1529-30, by Alessandro Bonvicino (1492/5 - 1554), known as “Moretto da Brescia.”

The Tridentine breviary also conformed all Matins of nine readings to the arrangement previously found only on major Sundays and a handful of feasts, with Scripture readings in the first nocturn. The Canticle of Canticles, previously assigned to the Virgin’s Nativity and its octave, was then transferred to the Assumption. (On the Nativity itself, they were retained for the feast and the octave day, but not the days between.) The working notes of the editors of this breviary have never been discovered, so we are often left to guess what motivated their changes. They may have thought it was better to emphasize the solemnity of the older and greater of the two feasts by giving it proper readings for every day. But this may also have been done because the readings of the Divine Office in August are, by a very ancient custom, given over to the Sapiential books. The Canticle is always treated as one of these, since it has the same putative author as the others, King Solomon; this is why when they are read at Mass, they all have the same title, “A reading from the book of Wisdom.”

The readings are arranged as follows:

August 15	chapter 1 (1-16)
August 16	chapter 2 (1-17)
August 18	chapter 4, 1-4 and 7-15
August 19	chapter 5, 8-12 chapter 6, 1-5 and 8-12
August 21	chapter 7 (1-13) chapter 8, 1-4
August 22	chapter 8, 5-14

Two days within the octave have no such readings: August 17th, the octave of St Lawrence, and the 20th, the feast of St Bernard. (The readings of the 16th, 19th and 21st were later removed as other Saints were added to the calendar on those days.)

Palestrina presents his first book of Masses to Pope Julius III; part of the frontispiece of the book itself, which was published in 1554. Julius (whose scandal-ridden papacy was such a profound embarrassment to the rising reform movement within the Church that his papal name has never been used again), had been bishop of the very ancient suburbicarian see of Palestrina, about 24 miles to the east of Rome. It was he who called the great musician from his position as organist in the cathedral of his native town to work in the choir of St Peter’s basilica. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In 1584, when this custom was still less than 20 years old, the great Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 ca. – 1594) published a collection of 29 motets of texts from the Canticle. There seems to be no information available about their intended use, and particularly, whether they were deliberately conceived to be sung during Mass.

However, of these 29 motets, the texts of all but one, the 18th, coincide with the readings for the Assumption and its octave, although they do not include all the verses that are in the breviary. (There are none from chapter 8, so the octave day is not included.) But more interestingly, the same verses that are omitted from the breviary are also not used by Palestrina. The motets taken from chapters 4 and 5 begin at the same verses as readings on August 18 and 19, and those from chapter 6 omit the same verses (8-9) which are omitted in the breviary. The two chapters which get the most thorough treatment, the first (motets 1-8) and second (motets 11-17), are also the ones used on other feast days of the Virgin, the former on Her Nativity, and the latter on the Visitation.

These motets are also quite short, averaging about 2 minutes and 45 seconds each. This would make them very appropriate for the sweltering Roman summer when these feasts are celebrated, a time of year in which we may reasonably guess that people would not want the liturgy to be excessively prolonged by lengthy musical pieces.

Palestrina came to Rome in 1551, and worked there for 43 years, at St Peter’s Basilica, St Mary Major and St John in the Lateran. Given the circles in which he moved, it seems quite possible that he knew the clerics who edited the Tridentine breviary. Taken all together, these things seem to make for at least the possibility that he deliberately selected his texts out of the breviary, and intended them to be used during the Masses of Our Lady’s major feasts in the summer. (This was also noted by Dr Jane Dahlenburg in her Ph.D dissertation The Motet c. 1580–1630: Sacred Music Based on the Song of Songs. (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2001), and further elaborated by Dr Jessie Ann Owens in her article Palestrina’s “Song” Cycle, published in Palestrina und seine Zeit – Traditionelle und digitale Forschungsperspektiven. (Musiconn, Dresden 2023) My thanks to Dr Owens for bringing this to my attention.)

Here is a very nice recording of the whole set by the Hilliard Ensemble.