Latin Mass Society Faith and Culture Conference in London, June 14

The Latin Mass Society, an association dedicated to the traditional Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church, has announced details of their upcoming Faith and Culture Conference. The conference, which forms part of the celebrations to mark The Society’s 60th anniversary, will bring together leading figures from the Church, the arts, and public life to explore how the timeless truths of Catholic tradition can shape and elevate the cultural landscape of our time.

The event will be taking place at the London Oratory on Saturday, June 14, and will feature the following speakers:

His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke, Cardinal Priest of Saint’Agata de’Goti. Cardinal Raymond Burke will join the conference via video link. His Eminence is known for his strong defense of Catholic tradition, canon law, and pro-life issues. He served as Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura between 2008 and 2014 and has been a vocal critic of modern doctrinal developments. He is a prominent advocate of the traditional Latin Mass and Catholic moral teaching.

The Rt Rev Dr Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan. Bishop Athanasius Schneider is a Kazakhstani auxiliary bishop known for his staunch defense of traditional Catholic liturgy and doctrine. A member of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross, he has written extensively on the Eucharist and Church tradition. He frequently speaks on the need for continuity in Catholic teaching and practice.

Dr Tim Stanley, Author and journalist. Tim Stanley is a British journalist, historian, and columnist for The Daily Telegraph. A Catholic convert, he frequently writes on politics, culture, and religion from a conservative perspective. He is known for his engaging commentary on faith and modern society.

Fr Christopher Basden, Priest of the Archdiocese of Southwark. Fr Christopher Basden is a Roman Catholic priest known for his dedication to the traditional Latin Mass. He has served in various parishes, promoting traditional Catholic catechesis and reverent liturgy. He is a well-known advocate of fidelity to Catholic teaching.

James Gillick, Painter. James Gillick is a British painter known for his classical realist style, specializing in religious, still life, and portrait painting. Deeply influenced by historical techniques, he uses traditional methods and materials in his work. His art is widely appreciated for its craftsmanship and connection to Catholic themes.

Dr Joseph Shaw, Academic and Chairman of the Latin Mass Society Joseph Shaw is a British academic and chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales. A philosophy lecturer at Oxford, he is a leading advocate for the traditional Latin Mass and Catholic tradition. He writes and speaks extensively on liturgical and philosophical matters.

Richard Pickett, General Manager of the Latin Mass Society, commented: “As the Catholic Church looks forward to a new chapter in its history with the election of Pope Leo XIV, we will bring together prominent clergymen, thinkers and public figures to explore the enduring relationship between faith and culture, and the continuing role of both in shaping contemporary society.”

Bookings for the conference are now open and can be made through The Latin Mass Society’s website.

The Ambrosian Feast of Mid-Pentecost

Even though it was called by a different name, the Ambrosian Rite originally had a feast which was the equivalent of the Byzantine Mid-Pentecost, which I wrote about yesterday, borrowed from that tradition. This article is mostly a translation of notes about it by Nicola de’ Grandi.

In the Ambrosian Rite, the Wednesday between the third and fourth weeks after Easter was a feast known as “In mediante die festo – in the middle day of the feast.” This custom is attested from the very earliest pertinent liturgical books of the rite until the Missal of 1560, the last edition before the post-Tridentine reform and the revised Missal of 1594. The name comes from its Gospel, John 7, 14-31, which begins with the words. “About the midst of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple, and taught.”

The Mass “in mediante die festo” in an Ambrosian Missal printed in 1548

Like the Byzantine feast from which it derives, and unlike the other celebrations of the temporal cycle, this feast has the particular characteristic that it does not commemorate a specific event in Christ’s life, or a particular deed of His. Rather, it underlines the unity of the Easter season, marking its middle point, and at the same time, giving a particular reading of its liturgical significance.

In the Gospel, Jesus compares Himself to Moses, reproving those who declare that they want to follow the law of Moses, while they attempt to kill Him who gives the Law. He does not cancel the Law, but fulfills it, bringing salvation to all of humanity, represented by the paralyzed man whom He heals on the Sabbath.

These words illuminate the authentic meaning of the Christian Pentecost as the replacement of the Jewish Pentecost. The latter celebrates the revelation of God on Mount Sinai, seven weeks after the Jewish Pascha, and the gift of the Law, (“was it not Moses who gave you the law?”); the Christian Pentecost, seven weeks and one day after the Christian Pascha, celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This parallelism between the Jewish and Christian Pentecosts is certainly very ancient, and is found in the West in a work entitled “Questions about the Old and New Testament” (95, 3), which can be dated to the pontificate of St Damasus (366-84), a contemporary of St Ambrose.

“Therefore, the law was given through Moses to the sons of Israel on the third day of the third month, as is written in the book of Exodus, which day, counting from the fourteenth day of the first month, on which the Pasch took place in Egypt, is the fiftieth, that is, Pentecost. And from this it happened that the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles on Pentecost to preach the law of Faith, so that the deeds of the elders might serve as images of those deeds that were to come, and this for the assurance of our faith, for that cannot seem false which was foretold from the beginning.”

Likewise in St Jerome, who was Damasus’ secretary (Epistle 22):

“Wherefore also the solemnity of Pentecost is celebrated, and afterwards, the mystery of the Gospel is fulfilled by the descent of the Holy Spirit; so that, just as the law was given to the former people, on the fiftieth day, in the true jubilee, and the true year of remission, and by the true fifty and five-hundred denarii, which were owed to the debtors: so also the Holy Spirit came down to the Apostles and those who were gathered together with them, unto the number of 120, (which is also the age of Moses), and the whole world was filled with the preaching of the Gospel by the sharing of the speech of those who believed.”

St Jerome Presents His Biblical Translations to Pope St Damasus I; from the ceiling of the Gaddi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko; CC BY 3.0)

Therefore, we can say with certainty that by at least the end of the fourth century, this parallelism was known in Rome. However, its solemn celebration in the liturgy is proper to the tradition of northern Italy.

We know in fact that this feast was celebrated in the same position on the liturgical calendar by all the churches of that region, as attested by the most ancient and important manuscripts: for the Ambrosian tradition, the capitulary and Gospel book of Busto Arsizio, and the Biasca Missal; for the broader province of Milan; the Codex Mediolanensis, Vercellensis, and Vat. Reg. Lat. 9; from the province of Aquileia, Codex Rehdigeranus and Forojuliensis.

Therefore, although it looks back to a reading of the Easter season already known in the area of Rome, the solemn liturgical celebration of Mid-Pentecost is a trait strongly distinctive of the liturgical tradition of northern Italy, led by the metropolitan sees of Milan and Aquileia.

The Ambrosian Missal of Biasca, dated between the end of the 9th century and the middle of the 10th.

The feast is first mentioned in the West in two homilies attributed to St Peter Chrysologus, the first metropolitan of the new ecclesiastical province of Ravenna, in the 2nd quarter of the fifth century.

“Even though some matters seem obscure for the very depth of their mystery, nevertheless, no solemnity of the Church’s worship is without fruit: the divine feast is not to kept holy in accordance with our wills, but ought rather to kept for the sake of its own virtues. The true Christian spirit has no notion of bringing those things which come from the tradition of the Fathers, and have been strengthened by the passage of time, to oblivion, but desires rather to venerate them with all the eloquence of its devotion.

Now in the middle of the feast, the Scripture says, the Lord went up to the temple. Which temple? You are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells within you. Today the Lord deigned to go up to the temple of our heart, who so mercifully came down into the form of our body.” (Serm. 85,1-2)

The Mass of this feast is the same as that of the preceding Sunday, but with its own proper prayers, Gospel and Preface. The “oratio super populum”, the Ambrosian equivalent of the Collect, is the only one of the prayers that refers specifically to the character of the feast, as it looks back to Easter and forward to Pentecost.

“Deus, per cujus providentiam nec praeteritorum momenta deficiunt, nec ulla superest expectatio futurorum: tribue permanentem peractae, quam recolimus, solemnitatis affectum; ut quod recordatione percurrimus, semper in opere teneamus. Per. – O God, through whose providence the remembrances of things past do not fail, nor does any hope of the things to come remain unfulfilled; grant us abiding affection for the solemnity which we have completed and now remember; so that what we pass through in remembrance, we may also keep hold of in deed. Through…”

The prayer “over the shroud” which closes the Mass of the Catechumens, is more oblique. “Populus tuus, quaesumus, Domine, renovata semper exultet animae juventute, ut qui antea in peccatorum veternosae mortis venerat senio, nunc laetetur in pristinam se gloriam restitutam. Per. – May Thy people, we ask, o Lord, always exult in renewed youth of the soul; so that, having formerly come to the old age of that languid death caused by sins, it may rejoice that it has been restored to its former glory. Through…”

The preface is first attested in the second half of the 9th century in sacramentaries of the Roman Rite, in which it is appointed to be said on the Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent, when the same Gospel is read. This is also indicated by the reference to “the devotion of the saving fast.” On the other hand, the references to Resurrection and Ascension certainly seem to fit more with its Ambrosian placement in Eastertide.

“VD: Per mediatorem Dei et hominum, Iesum Christum, Dominum nostrum: Qui mediante die festo ascendit in templum docere, qui de caelo descendit mundum ab ignorantiae tenebris liberare. Cuius descensus genus humanum doctrina salutari instruit, mors a perpetua morte redemit, ascensio ad caelestia regna perducit. Per quem te, summe Pater, poscimus, ut eius institutione edocti, salutaris parsimoniae devotione purificati, ad tua perveniamus promissa securi. Per quem maiestatem. – Truly it is worthy… through the mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ, our Lord: who when the feast was at its middle day, went up unto the temple to teach, even He who came down from heaven to free the world from the darkness of ignorance. Whose coming down instructs the human race with saving teaching, whose death redeems it from everlasting death, whose ascension bringeth it to the heavenly kingdoms. Through whom we ask Thee, Father most high, that we, being taught by his institution, and purified by the devotion of the saving fast, may safely come to Thy promises. Through whom the Angels praise Thy majesty…”

The Byzantine Feast of Mid-Pentecost

In the Byzantine Rite, today is the feast of Mid-Pentecost (Μεσοπεντηκοστή in Greek; Преполовенїе in Church Slavonic, literally, “mid-way”), the twenty-fifth day after Easter, and thus the half-way point between it and Pentecost. This feast is very ancient, older even than the great Marian feasts which the Roman Rite borrowed from the East at the end of the 7th century. It is also of such importance that, although it is not counted among the Twelve Great Feasts, it nevertheless has an eight-day long After-feast, the Byzantine equivalent of an octave, in the midst of the ongoing After-feast of Easter, which occupies the whole Paschal season until the Ascension.

A Greek icon for the feast of Mid-Pentecost, which represents not the discourse recounted in its Gospel, but the young Christ in the temple speaking with the Doctors of the Law, as narrated in Luke 2, 42-52. This shows Him as the giver of a greater Law which will displace that which governs the worship in the temple, a prominent theme of the Gospel of the feast, John 7, 14-30, and those of the second half of the Easter season. This is also indicated by the fact that although He is a child of twelve, He is physically bigger than the adults around Him. (There does also exist a type of icon for this feast which simply shows Him as an adult speaking in the temple.)

Mid-Pentecost represents an unusual, but by no means unique, Byzantine example of a “feast of devotion” or “Ideenfest.” The latter term was coined by German liturgical scholars to distinguish those feasts which have as their object a truth of the Faith from those which celebrate an event in the Lord’s life. It is highly misleading, both historically and theologically. It is typically applied to Western feasts like Trinity Sunday or Corpus Christi, which alone suffices to demonstrate its gross unsuitability, since the objects of these feasts are not “ideas”, but things that really exist.

Like the feasts of the Saints, feasts of devotion are intimately connected with the life of Christ, which does not end with the Ascension or Pentecost, but continues in His Mystical Body, the Church. For example, the feast of the Holy Trinity is placed on the octave of Pentecost, to indicate that at Pentecost, the Church began to preach the doctrine of the Trinity, which is also the doctrine that man’s salvation is achieved through the Incarnation of God. Corpus Christi celebrates Christ’s abiding presence in His Church in the Sacrament by which He continually renews His life within us, and of which He said, “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.”

It is sometimes alleged that the absence of such feasts in the East proves that they are “inauthentic.” This seems to rest on the unjustifiable assumption that the West is for some reason not allowed to develop anything on its own, but also certainly rests on a more basic factual error, since Mid-Pentecost is essentially Corpus Christi for Baptism. The feast of the Protection of the Mother of God on October 1st, which is very popular among the Slavs, is another feast of the same kind, while the version of the Midnight Office used on Sundays is conceptually no different from the western Office of the Holy Trinity.

Jesus and the Samaritan Woman, depicted in a 16th fresco in the Stavronikita Monastery on Mt Athos, by Theophanes the Cretan. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

As I explained on Sunday, the six Sundays of the Easter season are divided into two groups in the Byzantine Rite. The first three, Easter itself, and the Sundays of St Thomas and the Myrrh-bearing Women, are dedicated to the Resurrection. The three that follow are named for their Gospels, all taken from St John: of the Paralytic (5, 1-15), of the Samaritan Woman (4, 5-42) and the Blind Man (9, 1-38). All three refer prominently to water, and thus serve as a trait d’union between the two great baptismal feasts of Easter and Pentecost. They also all refer in various ways to the replacement of the Law of Moses by the Law of Christ. This looks back to the final verse of the Gospel of Easter, John 1, 17, “For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ”, and forward to Pentecost, which was instituted to commemorate the giving of the Old Law on Mt Sinai, but under the New Covenant, celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the preaching of the Gospel to the whole world.

At Vespers of Mid-Pentecost, there are read three lessons from the Old Testament, as on many other great feasts. The first is a cento of verses from chapters 4-6 of the Prophet Micah, which begins with the words, “The Law will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” “Go out” can also mean “depart”, and in a season when the Gospels are almost all taken from St John, “the word of the Lord” should certainly be understood to mean the Incarnate Word. The Word therefore departs from Jerusalem; this refers to the removal of the worship of God from the city where the healing of the paralytic takes place, made holy by the presence of the temple, which, however, is soon to be destroyed.

The second is a cento of verses from Isaiah 55 and 12, which speak about the waters of baptism; both passages are also read at the solemn blessing of the waters on Theophany, the feast of Christ’s Baptism. “Ye that thirst, come to the water… draw water with joy from the well-springs of salvation.” This refers to the Samaritan woman, who comes to the well to draw water; there she meets the Man whom the Samaritans, a people who keep the law of Moses, but do not worship at the Jerusalem temple, confess to be “truly the Savior of the world.” When the Word has departed from Jerusalem, then “the hour cometh, when neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem shall you adore the Father. … (but) the true adorers shall adore (Him) in spirit and in truth.” (John 4, 21 and 23)

A painting in the cathedral of Holy Wisdom in Kyiv, Ukraine, based on Proverbs 9, 1-11, the first words of which are written in Greek on the building’s cornice. God the Father, with the seven great archangels to either side sends the Holy Spirit down upon the Virgin Mary, who stands in the middle of Wisdom’s house, with the Christ Child in a halo on Her chest, the icon type known as the “Virgin of the Sign.” The steps ascending towards Her are labelled “Faith (cut off by the frame), Hope, Love, Purity, Humility, Grace, Glory”; to the left are shown David, Aaron and Moses, to the right, the four Major Prophets. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In the third passage, Proverbs 9, 1-11, the personified figure of Wisdom, whom the Church Fathers also understand to be the Eternal Word, [1] “built for herself a house”, which is the Church. She then “sent out her servants” to call the unwise and those who lack understanding (i.e. the pagans) to “come, eat my bread, and drink the wine which I have mixed for you”, an obvious symbol of the Eucharist. The word “sent – apesteile” is from the same root as “apostle”, and also of the word “apestalmenos – sent”, which St John gives as the translation of “Siloam”, the name of the pool in which the blind man is healed.

These three readings therefore mirror the three Gospels of the second part of the Easter season.

The Gospel of Mid-Pentecost, John 7, 14-30, is chosen in part for its opening words, “Now about the midst of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple, and taught.” Much more important, however, are Christ’s words about the Old Law: “Did Moses not give you the law? and yet none of you keepeth the law? … If a man receive circumcision on the sabbath day, that the law of Moses may not be broken; are you angry at me because I have healed the whole man on the sabbath day?” This man is the paralytic healed in the Gospel of the previous Sunday.

To this, some in the crowd say, “Have the rulers known for a truth, that this is the Christ? But we know this man, whence he is: but when the Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is.” This echoes the words of the Samaritan woman, “I know that the Messiah cometh, who is called Christ.”

Jesus Himself says, “You both know me, and you know whence I am: and I am not come of myself; but he that sent me is true, whom you know not. I know him, because I am from him, and he hath sent me.” This refers once again to the word “sent” both as the translation of the name of the pool of Siloam, and as the origin of the word “apostles”, those to whom Christ says on the day of the Resurrection, “as the Father hath sent me, I also send you.” (John 20, 21)

Perhaps it is not too much to posit that the ordering of the three Gospels given above, which places the story of the paralytic in chapter 5 before that of the Samaritan woman in chapter 4, may have been inspired by this very Gospel.

Every Byzantine liturgical day has an abundance of hymns [2] from which to choose to highlight its significance; those of Mid-Pentecost are particularly beautiful. The two which carry over into the Divine Liturgy, the troparion and kontakion, are as follows.

Troparion The feast being at its mid-point, give Thou my thirsting soul to drink of the streams of piety; for Thou, o Savior, didst cry out to all, “Let Him that is thirsty come to Me and drink. O well-spring of life, Christ our God, glory to Thee.

Kontakion At the coming of the mid-feast of the Law, o Maker and and Master of all, Thou didst say to those present, o Christ God, “Come ye, and draw forth the water of immortality.” Wherefore, we fall down before Thee and faithfully cry out, “Grant to us Thy mercies, for Thou art the Well-spring of our life.”

A very ancient poetic form which builds on the theme of the Kontakion, and almost always ends with the same words is called the Ikos.

With the streams of Thy Blood do Thou Water my soul, which is grown dry and barren with the iniquities of my offences, and show it forth to be fruitful in virtues. For Thou didst say to all to come unto Thee, all-holy Word of God, and to draw the water of incorruption, which is living, and purifieth the sins of those who praise Thy glorious and divine Resurrection, granting also, o Good One, to them that know Thee as God, the strength of the Spirit which truly was borne from on high to Thy disciples, for Thou art the Well-spring of our life.

Notes

[1] The liturgical texts of the feast itself also speak of Christ as the “wisdom of God” five times. Before the fall of Constantinople, Mid-Pentecost was celebrated as a patronal feast of Hagia Sophia, the church “of Holy Wisdom.”

[2] In the Byzantine Rite, “hymn” is the generic term for compositions which, from a literary point of view, are similar to Roman antiphons, although they tend to be rather longer. They are not at all like the compositions in regular stanzas which we call “hymns” in the West. Their specific names (kontakion, ikos, exapostilarion etc.) refer to their functions, which are now in many cases effectively obsolete.

Driving on Liturgical Interstate 80

Grand Teton, WY (source) - you won’t see this from Route 80

Metaphors are often the best way to grapple with that which is too large or too complex for pure conceptual analysis, or where a full account risks being tedious in its details. A well-chosen metaphor cuts to the heart of the matter. When I first read Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, I found his metaphors daring and dazzling.

Well, I am not Graham Greene (for good and for ill), so I don’t know if the metaphor I am about to use is well-chosen, let alone daring and dazzling, but it unquestionably captures my experience of the difference between the traditional cycle of pre-Lent / Lent / Passiontide / Holy Week / Easter Week / Eastertide / Ascensiontide, and the replacement cycle of Lent / Holy Week / Easter Week / Eastertide in the new calendar—that is, from a seven-part sacramental drama to a four-stroke engine.

Following the old calendar from Pre-Lent through Ascensiontide is like driving through northern Wyoming into Montana: breathtaking vistas at every turn, a continually changing and highly differentiated landscape of mountains, valleys, rivers, different colors of rock, a vast expanse of sky. Inspiring, humbling, contemplative, exultant, mesmerizing, unfathomable.

Following the new calendar from Lent to the end of Eastertide is like driving on Interstate 80 [*Note] through the center of Nebraska and southern Wyoming. It is mostly straight and dull, with almost nothing appealing to look at—endless cornfields or expanses of usually brown grass, unvarying, flat and uniform, monotonous. In fact, residents of these states have reason to be grateful that this asphalt gash on the face of the Earth was placed along such generally unremarkable terrain. I lived for twelve years in Wyoming and I can testify that if you want to experience the majestic beauty of the state, you have to get off the interstate and push northwards.

In an abstract world where liturgy had never been known and history had started from zero, the Novus Ordo prayers would be “fine”—that is, in the absence of anything else to compare them with. But when we look at them against the backdrop of a longstanding tradition, they are thin gruel; it is feeding husks to the swineherds, when the Father’s house offers all His children and servants comfortable room and board.

In truth, the parable of the Prodigal Son furnishes another powerful metaphor of the Church’s liturgical situation. Returning to ourselves after having squandered our substance on loose living, we should rush back to the Father’s house and grovel in the dust for our sins against His loving provision. He will embrace us and put on the finest robe, like the chasubles of yore, featured week after week at the Liturgical Arts Journal.

The full season from pre-Lent to Pentecost Octave is where you see the old Missal shine most brilliantly. Everything fits together so well, so tightly, made up of inevitable steps; one finds a profusion of variety, a strength of biblical fidelity, an intricate drama of mysteries fully plumbed but also subtly integrated one with another, so that all is well ordered and proportioned.

The reformers who dared to change all this (and, indeed, they left hardly a stone upon a stone) were acting from their extremely limited postwar academic perspective, and the result is, predictably, superficial—clean, obvious, and sterile; you get the sort of workmanlike coverage that might be expected in a diligently prepared government report. It is like a relationship from which romance has been sucked dry, or, more accurately, in which it never had a part.

A friend once wrote to me: “I had to explain to a Baptist friend who greatly admires St. Thomas Aquinas (he’s a philosophy professor) how they moved St. Thomas’s feast day from March 7, the day of his entrance into glory, in order to ‘restore the integrity of Lent,’ yet proceeded to gut Lent of all its ascetical significance, making of it a ghost-season and leaving nothing but a vacuous anticipation of Easter. Real Einsteins at the helm, we had.”

If you want to meet the genius of the once and future Roman Rite, there is only one way to do it: you must immerse yourself in a risky detour. People will look askance at you, but when you find that way, or better, when you peer through that door, you will find a beauty, a fullness, an integrity, that the reign of novelty hasn’t even conceived the possibility of.

[*Note: for non-American readers, the Interstate highways are the major automobile and truck arteries going north-south and east-west across the continent, comparable to the German Autobahnen, Italian Autostrade, and British Motorways.]

Interesting Saints on May 13th

May 13th is now occupied by two different feasts on the general calendar, one in the Ordinary Form, and one in the Extraordinary Form. For most of the history of the Roman Rite, it was not occupied by any feast of general observance at all, but an interesting collection of local feasts and observances is kept on this date.

St Robert Bellarmine, the second Jesuit to be made a cardinal, and one of the most famous scholars and controversialists of his era, spent much of his life in Rome as an adviser to a series of Popes in the later 16th and early 17th century. At his behest, Pope Paul V added the feast of the Stigmata of St Francis to the calendar on September 17th, the day on which it had long been kept by the Franciscans. By one of those particular acts of providence which seem to touch so many Saints, Robert himself then died on that day in 1621. When Pope Pius XI canonized him in 1930, and declared him a Doctor of the Church the following year, his feast was assigned to May 13th on the general calendar, the date of his beatification in 1923, since his death day was already occupied. September 17th was then freed by the suppression of the Stigmata of St Francis in 1960, and St Robert was moved to that date in the post-Conciliar reform.

A well-known photograph of Ss Francisco and Jacinta Martos (middle and right), together with their cousin Lúcia Santos, whose cause for canonization is in process. St Francisco died on April 9, 1919, at the age of 10, St Jacinta the following year on February 20, at the age of 9, both of them victims of the great influenza pandemic which raged though the years 1918-20, one of the greatest natural catastrophes in human history. (More deaths were caused by the so-called Spanish flu than by the First World War.) Sister Lúcia died on February 13, 2005, at the age of 97, almost 56 years after her profession as a Discalced Carmelite.

May 13th remained without any general feast until the promulgation of the revised Roman Missal of 2002, in which Pope St John Paul II assigned to it the feast of Our Lady of Fatima as an optional memorial. This was the date on which the three shepherd children had their first vision of the Virgin Mary in 1917; Ss Francisco and Jacinta Martos were canonized on this same date 8 years ago, the centenary of that first apparition. It is a well-known fact that it was also on this day in 1981 that John Paul II was shot in St Peter’s Square, while moving though the crowds at the weekly papal audience. His Holiness always ascribed the preservation of his life to the direct intervention of Our Lady of Fatima; as a sign of gratitude for his deliverance, the bullet which just missed his heart is now mounted in the crown of Her famous statue.

Less well known is the fact that in 1792, the same day saw the birth of Bl. Pius IX, the Pope who would later formally define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. As a young man, he had suffered from some kind of seizure disorder (it does not appear to be precisely known which one), of which he was cured at the most important Marian shrine in Italy, that of Loreto. Even more remarkably, Eugenio Pacelli, who as Pope Pius XII would formally define the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, was being ordained a bishop in the Sistine Chapel at the very same time that the first apparition of the Virgin was taking place at Fatima.

Before St Robert’s feast was put on the general calendar, the first entry in the Martyrology for May 13th was the dedication of the Pantheon in Rome as a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and All Martyrs, which took place in the year 609, in the reign of Pope St Boniface IV. As I have noted on more than one occasion, the name “Pantheon” means “building of all the gods”, but there is no evidence that there was any kind of collective worship of all the gods in the ancient Roman world, and no evidence that the building was a temple. The idea is probably a misunderstanding which arose in the Carolingian period, when much of ancient Rome lay in ruins; to an early medieval Christian’s eyes, the imposing mass of the structure, dominating the center of the city, could hardly have appeared as anything other than a religious building. Nevertheless, the legend persists that the building was dedicated to All Martyrs, and hence to All Saints, because it had previously been a temple of all the gods. On the basis of this tradition, when the Benedictines revised their calendar in 1915, they put the feast of All Relics on this same day.

Solemn Mass in the traditional rite celebrated in the Pantheon on May 13, 2009, the 14th centenary of its dedication as a church.

The entry that follows in the Martyrology is that of St Mucius (“Mokios” in Greek), a priest who was martyred at Byzantium in 304, during the persecution of Diocletian. His traditional legend is not considered historically reliable, but there is no doubt that he is an authentic martyr and that his cultus is very ancient. There was a church dedicated to him at Constantinople by the end of the 4th century, but it may have been built even earlier than that, by Constantine himself, as part of his first refounding of Byzantium as New Rome. In the Byzantine Rite, his feast is kept on May 11th, which is also celebrated liturgically as the anniversary of that refounding, while May 13th is the feast of another martyr of the same region, a virgin named Glyceria. Her acts are also historically unreliable, but she is also an authentic martyr, killed on that day at Heraclea in Propontis in the later part of the 2nd century. (As an episcopal see, Byzantium was originally suffragan to Heraclea.) There are actually quite a number of cases where martyrdoms took place in the same place on or around the same date, but at a distance of many years or decades, as is the case with these two. This is because the officials who were in charge of the courts that tried and sentenced capital crimes traveled from place to place, and the schedule by which they arrived on the same date in the same city each year was maintained for long spans of time.

In the Low Countries and many other parts of northern Europe, May 13th is traditionally the feast of St Servatius (“Servais” in French, “Servaas” in Dutch), bishop of Tongres in modern Belgium, who is said have come to that area from Armenia as a missionary, to have received St Athanasius during his exile to Trier, and defended the Catholic Faith against Arianism at various councils in the mid-4th century. The see of Tongres was later transferred to Maastricht, where a large and very beautiful church dedicated to him preserves the relics of his body, and several items said to be his.

In the Dominican Rite, his feast was kept on May 22nd, because of the story given as follows in the Order’s Breviary. “When Louis of Bavaria, who was very hostile to the Church and to the Order, learned that the friars had been summoned to hold a general chapter in his domain, he laid plans to put them to death. As historical records testify, St Servatius appeared in a dream to one of our brethren, and warned the friars to flee to another city; thus did he save them from certain slaughter. Wherefore, because the Order was delivered from such great peril, the fathers decreed that henceforth his feast should be forever observed.” In his History of the Dominican Liturgy, Fr William Bonniwell notes that this story rests on very shaky historical foundations, and the feast was suppressed from the Dominican calendar in 1962.

A reliquary bust of St Servatius, 1579; image from Wikimedia Commons by Kleon3, CC BY-SA 4.0

The last entry of the day in the traditional Martyrology is that of St John the Silent, an Armenian monk who was consecrated bishop, much against his will, in the year 482 AD, at the age of only 28. After serving for nine years, he determined to lay down his pastoral charge, partly out of a sense of his own unworthiness, partly from a desire to return to the monastic life. He did this, not by formally resigning, but by disappearing; making his way to Jerusalem, and led by a miraculous sign, he entered the famous Lavra of St Sabbas, then still governed by the founder for whom it is named. However, he told no one of his past, and was received as a layman, working as an ordinary laborer.

As has often been the case, it was impossible to hide the light of holiness under a bushel, and several years later, Sabbas deemed him worthy to be presented to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, St Elias, for priestly ordination. Before the ordination could take place, John insisted on having a private meeting with Elias, at which he revealed his past, and swore him to secrecy. Elias could not, of course, ordain him a priest, but also could not reveal the reason to John’s superior, who unsurprisingly feared the worst, but the true reason for the refusal was later made known to him by a revelation of God. St John lived for 56 years after this incident, to the age of 104, without ever resuming the function of the episcopal office.

Eastward Ho! How the Western Church Looked to Eastern Iconography For Inspiration in Sacred Art

If I had been writing about sacred art 100 years ago for a Catholic readership, I would have ignored entirely any reference to traditional Byzantine art. Until the middle of the last century, the Roman Catholic world was largely unaware of or, at the very least, uninterested in Byzantine iconography. Anyone who knew about this style was as likely as not a historian specialising in Byzantine studies, who considered it a throwback to a medieval past, anomalously preserved in Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic liturgies.

In recent decades, however, there has been a surge of scholarly and popular interest in the history and development of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox iconography. This renewed fascination crosses religious boundaries, with Roman Catholics and Protestants also incorporating these sacred images into their homes and places of worship. To fully appreciate this change, we must first establish a clear understanding of what exactly the term “icon” means.

The Lancaster Martyrs, by contemporary Catholic iconographer, Martin Earle

If you read a contemporary book on iconography or attend an icon painting workshop, you will likely encounter what is generally referred to today as a “theology of icons”, and will often get the impression that this explanation of iconography, along with the iconographic style itself, has not changed since it was first developed in the 5th century. But this is not so.

The theological justification for the stylistic elements of the iconographic tradition - the “theology of icons” - was developed relatively recently by Russian Orthodox intellectuals who were worried about the Westernisation of the traditional art being produced in Orthodox churches, and were seeking to re-establish a purer style of sacred art that corresponded to the ancient Russian tradition. The leading figure in this Russian “renaissance” was the Orthodox priest and polymath Pavel Florensky (1882–1937). Despite being an Orthodox Christian priest, Florensky never left Russia (and Stalin eventually executed him in 1937).

However, a prominent group of Russian theologians and painters, who were influential within the intellectual milieu of Orthodox Christian theology, left after the Bolshevik Revolution and ultimately settled in France. I am thinking here of the writers Leonid Ouspensky (who also painted icons), Vladimir Lossky, and Paul Evdokimov, as well as Gregory Kroug, the icon painter. Florensky’s writings were circulated amongst this group.

The goal of these expatriates was to re-establish traditional art forms of the Orthodox Church by creating a set of principles to guide contemporary artists. The result of this was that they took Florensky’s ideas and further developed them, leading to the emergence of a new theology of icons. This was a great achievement. The success of their work is evident in the surging number of people painting icons, which continues to this day, and has influenced other Orthodox churches, such as the Greek Orthodox Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the Byzantine Catholic churches. The best of these contemporary iconographers paint as well as any of the past masters. It is the beauty of these contemporary icons that stirred interest and made the iconographic style fashionable outside Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic circles today in the West.

The Harrowing of Hell (Anastasis), by Gregory Kroug

Painted by Ouspensky

Painted by Kroug

While the Russo-Byzantine style, as seen in Russian and Greek Orthodox churches, is perhaps the most well-known form of iconography, it is not the only variant. The Coptic, Armenian, and other Eastern Christian churches have all developed distinctive iconographic traditions, and the general picture is one of a renewal and flourishing of these associated iconographic traditions too.

By Isaac Fanous, Egyptian, the father of neo-Coptic iconography, who studied under Ouspensky in the 1960s.

The incredible beauty of these new icons caught the attention of Roman Catholics (and Protestants). Western churches were experiencing a crisis of beauty and seemed unable to produce sacred art that wasn’t either ugly modernist or cheesy kitsch. Consequently, there was a hunger for authentic liturgical art. French Catholics, in particular, became aware of the hub of this iconographic renewal first, which was centred in Paris, France. Soon, Catholics and Protestants began to create icons as well.

But this renewed enthusiasm for icons in the West has led to certain misconceptions, and iconography is often enshrouded in an artificial mystique.

As Catholics, while acknowledging the validity of iconography and the theories that underpin its resurgence as a style, we should be cautious not to adopt all that these Russian theorists wrote. They were strongly prejudiced against Western naturalistic styles of art and baked this into their ideas. Catholics should not feel bound to accept, for example, the assertion that the iconographic style is the only valid form of liturgical art. As Benedict XVI wrote in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, and as I explain in my book The Way of Beauty, the Gothic and Baroque styles, which are certainly not iconographic in form, can also be considered authentically liturgical forms. What the story of the successful reestablishment of the iconographic tradition in the East reveals is that the West can do something similar with its own artistic traditions. Following their method, we should choose a canon of great images and analyse them in such a way that we develop a set of defining principles that can guide artists today.

Furthermore, the notion that iconographers “write” rather than “paint” their works is a contemporary idiom with no basis in tradition. Most iconographers, including those within the Orthodox tradition, simply refer to their craft as painting without any sense of diminishing its spiritual significance. As my teacher (who is Orthodox) put it to me: “When I dip a paintbrush into paint and apply it to the surface, it is called a painting. It doesn’t demean my art to describe it as such.” Also, painting is not prayer, and prayer is not painting. They are two different activities... do I really need to explain that one?

Nevertheless, this resurgence of interest in icons has been an overwhelmingly positive development, challenging the historical marginalisation of Eastern Christian art and enriching Western art.

Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, by contemporary Catholic iconographer Martin Earle. 

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 1: Introduction, and St Leo I

The ancient Romans had a saying, “Nomen est omen – a name is a sign”, i.e., a presage about the person who bears it. Of course, this is not always or in all ways true; during my very sleepy teenage years, my mother used to joke that Gregory, which derives from the Greek word for “watchful”, was about as inappropriate a name as they come. But it is a tradition solidly grounded in the Sacred Scriptures, where there are many significant names, the greatest of all being, of course, the Holy Name of Jesus, which means “salvation”; and likewise, significant name changes, most notably that of St Peter.

Christ Consigning the Keys to St Peter, 1481/82, by Pietro Perugino, a fresco on the right wall of the Sistine Chapel.

It occurred to me, therefore, that it might be interesting to take a look at the histories of the Popes named Leo, especially since the new Pope himself has said that he chose his new name in reference to Leo XIII, who “in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” (If His Holiness declares a crusade against so-called “artificial intelligence”, he shall find no more enthusiastic supporter than myself; and if he decides to expropriate the term “Butlerian jihad” for it, I shall cheer for him all the more loudly.)

First, some statistics. As of last week’s election, Leo is tied with Clement as the fourth most common papal name, behind John, Gregory and Benedict. Five of these, the first through fourth and the ninth, are Saints. Leos V-VIII reigned within a span of about 62 years in the 10th century, the first century in which there is not a single canonized Pope, but three of them for less than a year, VIII for only 82 days. The first eight lived before it was the custom for popes to take a new name upon their election, so Leo was their baptismal name.

Since that custom took root in the mid-11th century, there have been at various points some clear trends in the choices of name. From 1046 to 1145, thirteen of the eighteen Popes were “second of his name”, followed by eight “thirds” out of eleven from 1145 to 1227. From 1644-1774, there were 14 popes, all of whom were called either Innocent, Alexander, Clement, or Benedict. (Three of those names have not been used again since that period.) Seven of the twelve Piuses reigned within the 183-year span from 1775 to 1958, occupying almost 128 of those years.

Leo, however, has never been a fashionable name in that sense. The reign of St Leo IX was a watershed in the history of the papacy, and very much for the good, despite its relative brevity (five years and two months), but his name was not taken again for over four and a half centuries. XI called himself Leo in honor of X, who was related to him, and it then went into abeyance again for almost 220 years.

Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903)

Almost every series I have ever planned for NLM has been revised along the way, but for now, the plan is to cover just Leo I, a titanically important figure, in this article, followed by the next three Sainted Leos, then the four who reigned in the 10th century, Leo IX, the two Medicis (X and XI), and the two in the 19th century, XII and XIII.

St Leo I was Pope from September of 440 to November of 461, the tenth longest reign in the Church’s history. He is one of three popes traditionally known as “the Great”, along with Ss Gregory I (590-604) and Nicholas I (858-67), and with the former, one of only two recognized as Doctors of the Church, although this honor was not accorded to him until 1754. He is the first pope of whose theological writings we possess a really substantial corpus, in the form of nearly 100 sermons and over 140 letters.

He was born in Rome ca. 400, and is said to have been of a Tuscan family, but we know nothing of his early life. As a deacon of the Roman church under the sainted Popes Celestine I (422-32) and Sixtus III (432-40), he was already a very prominent figure, and received letters from St Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, and the great monastic writer John Cassian. It has been speculated that he was the theological mind behind the mosaic program of the basilica of St Mary Major, built in the wake of the Council of Ephesus (431) as Pope Sixtus III’s response to the Nestorian heresy. He was elected to the papacy from the diaconate, a common event in those days, while on a mission as a peace envoy in Gaul.

The central section of the mosaic arch above the altar in the basilica of St Mary Major, ca. 432 AD, with the throne of Christ, (the motif known as an etimasia), Ss Peter and Paul, and the symbolic animals which represent the four evangelists. Below them, the inscription reads “Xystus (the original form of ‘Sixtus’) the bishop for the people of God.” The Apostles are dressed as Roman senators; paired with “the people of God” in the inscription, this makes for a Christian version of the formal name of the Roman state, “the Senate and the Roman people”, a declaration that the Christian polity will outlast the collapsing Roman polity. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by RightLeft Medieval Art, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Much of St Leo’s preaching and letter-writing was occupied with combatting the various heresies afflicting the Church in his time: not just the on-going Christological controversies, but also Pelagianism, and the Gnostic sects of the Priscillianists, who were growing in Spain, and the Manichaeans. (On discovering the existence of a group of the latter in Rome itself, he made the reception of the chalice at Mass mandatory as a way of chivying them out, since the Manichaeans abominated the consumption of wine.) Unsurprisingly, the authority of the chief of the Apostles, and of his successor, the bishop of Rome, is a frequent theme in his works, and the Roman Rite has traditionally read his sermons in the Divine Office on the various feasts of St Peter.

The Christological controversies entered a new phase during his pontificate with the invention of yet another new heresy in Constantinople. This was the creation of an abbot called Eutyches, which later came to be known as Monophysitism, the denial of the two natures, divine and human, in the one person of Christ. A second council was called together at Ephesus in 449, the infamous “latrocinium – robber-synod”, as Leo called it, in which Flavian, the orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, was subjected to such violence by the heretics that he died of his injuries not long afterwards. (He is venerated by the Church as a martyr.) Leo’s legates (one of whom, his archdeacon Hilarius, would succeed him as Pope) were forcibly prevented from reading his letter to the council, and barely escaped with their lives.

Leo himself immediately declared the council to be null and void, and wrote a letter to the emperor Theodosius II, demanding that he cease interfering with matters that fall under the authority of the Church and its bishops. Two years later, with the coming of a new emperor to the throne, and with the support of his wife, the Empress St Pulcheria, the orthodox faith was vindicated at the fourth ecumenical council, that of Chalcedon, at which Leo’s letter, known as the “Tome to Flavian”, was acclaimed with the words, “Peter has spoken through Leo.”

Contemplating the serene beauty of St Mary Major, it is difficult to imagine that when it was built, the Western Roman Empire was dangerously unstable, and close to its end. Rome had already been sacked by the Visigoths in 410, the first time it had been attacked by a foreign enemy in 800 years. In 452, just one year after the Council of Chalcedon, the Huns under Attila entered Italy, and after successfully plundering Aquileia, Milan and Pavia, turned their sights towards the capital. The military was powerless to oppose them, and it was the Pope to whom the emperor and senate turned to intervene. Leo headed north and encountered Attila near Mantua; the exact words of their meeting have not been recorded, but he was somehow able to persuade the Hun to leave Italy in exchange for a tribute. (A later tradition, repeated in the breviary, and often represented in art, but completely unhistorical, has it that the Apostles Peter and Paul appeared over Leo with swords in their hands as a way of warning Attila off.)

The Meeting of Pope St Leo I and Attila the Hun, 1514, by Raphael and students (more the latter than the former), a fresco within the rooms of Pope Julius II, now part of the Vatican Museums.

When the Vandals arrived at the gates of Rome three years later, Leo was unable to persuade them to leave off as he had Attila, but he did at least get them to refrain from massacring civilians and from burning the city. The remaining six years of his reign were much occupied with repairing the ensuing damage, especially to the churches, and to recovering the captives whom the Vandals had taken with them back to Africa. The Liber Pontificalis records that he donated new silver vessels to the churches of Rome after the sack, and renovated the “Constantinian basilica”, i.e., the cathedral of Rome, not yet called St John Lateran, as well as the basilicas of Ss Peter and Paul, establishing a monastery at the former.

The addition of the words “sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam” to the Canon is traditionally ascribed to him, but it must be said that the liturgical notices given in the Liber Pontificalis are quite unreliable. The oldest collection of Roman liturgical texts, a manuscript preserved in the capitular library of the cathedral of Verona, contains several prayers which are unmistakably based on his sermons. For this reason, its discoverer, a canon of Verona named Giuseppe Bianchini (1704-64), called it the “Leonine” sacramentary, but it is not a sacramentary, and was certainly compiled rather later than Leo’s time.

Pope St Leo I, by Francisco Herrera the Younger (1627-85)

Despite his importance, devotion to Pope Leo as a saint, both as formally expressed in the liturgy and on a popular level, has never been very prominent, especially in comparison with St Gregory. His feast day is missing from many of the earliest liturgical books of the Roman Rite, he is represented far less often in art, and, as noted above, he was not declared a Doctor of the Church until the mid-18th century. He is, however, one of the few Roman popes celebrated in the Byzantine Rite, on February 18th. In the West, the traditional day of his feast is April 11th, which is believed to be the date of one of the translations of his relics, although there is some uncertainty on this point. In the post-Conciliar Rite, his feast is kept on November 10th, the anniversary of his death. His relics are in an altar in the southwest corner of St Peter’s basilica; those of Ss Leo II, III and IV, who will be the subjects of the next article in this series, are together in the altar right next to it on the left.

The altar of Pope St Leo I in St Peter’s basilica. 

Byzantine Vespers for the 1,700th Anniversary of the Council of Nicea, May 31, in Philadelphia

The Durandus Institute for Sacred Liturgy & Music is pleased to announce its first collaboration on a liturgical event in the Byzantine Rite. On Saturday, May 31 – the eve of the seventh Sunday of Pascha and the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council – we will be praying a Great Vespers & Lytia at the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic church of St Nicholas in Philadelphia, in celebration of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. The music will be sung by a men’s ensemble of chanters led by Fr. Herman Majkrzak. The event will also include a sermon preached by Fr. Samuel Keyes, a priest of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter. Let both the eastern and western lungs of the Church join in celebration of this anniversary! The church is located at 871 N. 24th St in Philadelphia; the ceremony will begin at 5pm.

The Easter Gospels of the Byzantine Rite

At the Divine Liturgy of Easter Sunday, the Byzantine Rite does not read one of the various Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, but rather, the Prologue of the Gospel of St John, 1, 1-17. (This is three verses longer than the Roman version read at the day Mass of Christmas, and at the conclusion of almost every Mass.) There are several reasons for this choice, which may seem at first rather counter-intuitive.

Greek Evangeliary, date unspecified; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément grec 27, folio 1r. - St John the Evangelist is shown dictating his Gospel to his amanuensis St Prochoros, who was one of the first seven deacons. As can be seen from the folio number, this is at the very beginning of the manuscript; Byzantine Gospel books are traditionally arranged according to the order of their liturgical use, starting with Easter.

The most ancient Christian heresies, such as Docetism and Gnosticism, denied that the flesh of man could be saved, raised from corruption and glorified. The major Christological controversies which followed them, and which were very much more present to the East, all center on one fundamental point, namely, that it is God Himself who accomplishes the salvation of man, not a lesser being created by Him for that purpose, as heretics like Arius taught. A commonly used text in the cycle of hymns for Sunday Orthros expresses this very beautifully: “You came forth from a Virgin, not as an ambassador, nor as an Angel, but as the Lord Himself, incarnate, and saved the whole of me, a man.”

The Resurrection is the culmination of the salvation of the whole of our nature, body and soul together, which are both raised from the dead with Christ. In verse 16, St John says “we have all received of His fullness, and grace for grace”; this fullness is the totality of salvation accomplished in the Resurrection, including the flesh which the Word became, as stated earlier in the Prologue. The last verse, “For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” echoes St Paul’s teaching that “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law,” (Galatians 3, 13), a theme which becomes prominent later on in the Easter season in the Byzantine Rite.

On a practical level, so to speak, the Resurrection is also proclaimed at the Easter vigil, and at Vespers on Easter Sunday. The Gospel of the former is the whole of Matthew 28, where the Roman Rite reads only the first 7 verses. This Gospel begins with the words “But on the evening of the Sabbath”, as the vigil itself was originally celebrated on the evening of Holy Saturday. (In practice, it is often anticipated to the morning.) The first part tells of the women at the tomb meeting first the angel, then the risen Christ Himself (1-10), followed by the bribing of the soldiers who guarded the tomb (11-15). The final part, the meeting of Christ with the eleven disciples in Galilee, contains His commission to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”, a perfect choice for the baptismal ceremony par excellence.

At Vespers of Easter Sunday, St John 20, 19-25 is read; this is the first part of the Gospel which is read in full (verses 19-31) on the following Sunday, known in the East as the Sunday of St Thomas. There are several occasions on which the Eucharistic liturgy and Vespers are celebrated together in a single ceremony, the Easter vigil among them, and therefore a Gospel is read; Easter is the only feast on which a Gospel is read at Vespers apart from the Divine Liturgy. (We may also note here that the Byzantine Rite has a series of eleven Gospels of the Resurrection; these are read in rotation at Orthros of Sunday, and this rotation is hardly ever interrupted.)

The Gospel on Easter Sunday begins a semi-continuous reading of St John which goes on until Pentecost. I say “semi-continuous” because it is occasionally interrupted; the readings follow the order of the Gospel itself closely, but not exactly, and a few passages which figure prominently elsewhere are omitted. St Thomas Sunday is followed by that of the Myrrh-bearers, on which the Gospel is taken from St Mark, 15, 43 – 16, 8. (Mark 16, 1-7 is the traditional Roman Gospel of Easter Sunday itself; in the post-conciliar lectionary, it is assigned to year B.)

A 16th century icon of the Myrrh-bearers at the Tomb. A well-known hymn from Orthros of Holy Saturday says “The angel stood by the tomb and cried to the myrrh-bearing women, ‘Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ has been shown free from corruption.’ ” On the Sunday dedicated to them, this is expanded with the addition of the words, ‘But cry out, the Lord is risen, offering great mercy to the world.’

The period from the Ascension to Pentecost is not counted as part of the Easter season, as it is in the Roman Rite; there are therefore six Sundays of Easter, not seven. The first three being dedicated explicitly to the Resurrection, the three which follow are named for their Gospels, those of the Paralytic (John 5, 1-15), the Samaritan Woman (John 4, 5-42), and the Blind Man (John 9, 1-38). These three form an interesting trait d’union between the two great baptismal feasts, Easter and Pentecost. All three make prominent references to water: the paralytic is waiting to be healed in the pool of Bethsaida, while Christ speaks to the Samaritan woman of the “living water... springing up into life everlasting”, and sends the blind man to wash in the pool of Siloam.

All three also refer prominently to the Law of Moses, and the transition from it to the Law of Christ. The paralytic is told that he is violating the law of the Sabbath by carrying his bed, to which he replies, “He that made me whole said to me, ‘Take up thy bed, and walk.’ ” From ancient times, the Fathers understood this passage as proof that Christians are not required to observe the Law as the Jews did. The Samaritan woman belongs to a sect with which the Jews would not associate, because of their different interpretation of the Law; nevertheless, they receive the revelation of the prophet foretold by Moses. (In John’s Gospel, the Samaritan woman is the first person to whom Jesus says He is the Messiah, in verses 25-26.) The Pharisees claim that Jesus is “not of God” because He healed the blind man on the Sabbath, again, in violation of the Law of Moses; at the end of the Gospel, when Christ asks the blind man, “Do you believe in the son of God”, he confesses “ ‘I believe, Lord,’ and falling down adored him.” (In the Roman rite, a genuflexion is traditionally made at these words, just as it is made on Epiphany when the gentile Magi “falling down adored him.”)

A Christian sarcophagus of the 3rd century, in the Pio-Christian collection of the Vatican Museums. The healed paralytic is shown in the middle, carrying his bed. 

This transition is underscored by the order in which these Gospels are read, with the story of the paralytic in chapter 5 before that of the Samaritan woman from chapter 4.

The pool of Bethsaida is in Jerusalem, the city made holy by the presence of the temple, the center of the Jewish people’s worship under the Law of Moses. The story of the paralytic begins with Jesus going there for “a festival of the Jews”, which Ss John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria both believed was Pentecost, the feast that commemorates the giving of the Law. In the Synoptic Gospels, Christ foretells the destruction of both the Temple and the city; in St John, after the cleansing of the Temple, He proclaims “ ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … But He spoke of the temple of His body.” (chapter 2, 12-22. In Easter week, this passage is read out of order, on Bright Friday, between parts of chapter 3 on Thursday and Saturday. This is of course one week after Good Friday, the day on which the temple of His body was “destroyed.”)

In John’s Gospel, Christ’s prediction of the destruction of the temple is made to the Samaritan woman. “The woman saith to him, … ‘Our fathers adored on this mountain, and you (i.e. the Jews) say, that at Jerusalem is the place where men must adore.’ Jesus saith to her, … ‘the hour cometh, when you shall adore the Father neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem.’ ” The passage ends by saying that many Samaritans believed in Him, a declaration that, with the destruction of the temple, faith in the Jewish Messiah, and hence the worship of God, will pass to the gentile nations that enter the Church.

The blind man is told to wash in the pool of Siloam, which St John himself explains “is interpreted ‘sent’. ” The Greek word used here for “sent – apestalmenos,” is a participle of the verb whose root also makes the word “apostolos – one who is sent.” Although the blind man himself was a Jew, the Fathers understood his blindness to prefigure the blindness of the gentiles, who are illuminated when the Apostles come to them, fulfilling Christ’s commandment to “…teach all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” In both East and West, but more prominently in the East, “illuminate” and its cognates are very often used to refer to the Sacrament of Baptism.

Therefore, the three Gospels arranged in this particular sequence demonstrate the passage from the old worship in the Temple under the Law, through the Messiah to the Apostles, and hence to the Church.