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Remember Thy compassion, o Lord, and Thy mercy, that are from of old; lest ever our enemies be lord over us; deliver us, o God of Israel, from all our distress. Ps. 24. To Thee, o Lord, have I lifted up my soul; o my God, I trust in Thee, let me not be put to shame. Glory be ... As it was... Remember Thy compassion... (A very nice recording of the Introit of the Second Sunday of Lent, more moderno, i.e., without ‘Gloria Patri’.)
Reminíscere miseratiónum tuárum, Dómine, et misericordiae tuae, quae a sáeculo sunt: ne umquam dominentur nobis inimíci nostri: líbera nos, Deus Israël, ex ómnibus angustiis nostris. Ps. 24 Ad te, Dómine, levávi ánimam meam: Deus meus, in te confído, non erubescam. Gloria Patri. Sicut erat. Reminíscere.
Those who follow the traditional Divine Office and Mass closely will notice in them an unusual feature this weekend. In the Mass, the same Gospel, St Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration (17, 1-9), is read both today, the Ember Saturday, and tomorrow. In the Divine Office, there are only four antiphons taken from this Gospel, where the other Sundays have six; on Sunday, the antiphons of the Benedictus and Magnificat are repeated from Saturday, and the same antiphon is said at both Prime and Terce, which happens nowhere else. At the Sunday Mass, all of the Gregorian propers except for the Tract are repeated from the Mass of Ember Wednesday.
The traditional explanation for this given by Dom Guéranger (The Liturgical Year, vol. 4. p. 183 of the 1st English ed.), the Bl. Schuster (The Sacramentary, vol. 2, p. 73 of the English ed.) and others is as follows. In many ancient liturgical books, the Masses of the Ember Saturdays are titled “duodecim lectionum – of the twelve readings” or something similar. This was understood to mean that there were originally ten readings from the Old Testament, rather than the five which we have now, plus the Epistle and Gospel. (Mario Righetti, Manuale di Storia Liturgica, vol. 3, p. 232) According to a custom attested in several ancient sources, the readings at the papal Mass were each done twice, once in Latin, and again in Greek; a form of this custom is still to this day kept from time to time. (A friend of mine who is a priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church served as the Greek deacon at two Masses celebrated by St John Paul II.)
The chanting of a Gospel in Church Slavonic at a Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Croatia in June 2011.
This would mean an effective total of twenty-four readings. These were also the traditional days for ordinations in Rome, which were held at St Peter’s Basilica. The combination of twenty-four readings and seven ordination rites within a single Mass would have made for an extraordinarily long service that lasted through the length of the night. Therefore, the Mass of the Ember Saturday effectively became the Mass of Sunday morning.
What was taken to be further confirmation of this is found in several ancient liturgical books of various kinds, in which the Second Sunday of Lent is marked with the rubric “Dominica vacat – the Sunday is empty”, i.e., had no Mass of its own. The liturgical texts for this Sunday would therefore have their current arrangement because it was only given its own Mass and Office later. According to this theory, the custom of saying the Saturday Mass with so many readings and the ordinations was specifically Roman; when other places received the Roman Rite, they did not observe this same lengthy service through the night, and having confined the Ember Saturday to Saturday itself, could not leave the Sunday without a Mass.
This would also explain why in many Uses of the Roman Rite, the Mass of the Second Sunday of Lent differs in one detail or another from that of the Missal of St Pius V. To this very day, for example, the Dominican Missal has two Tracts on this Sunday, rather than a Gradual and Tract. Many medieval liturgical books also attest to a different Gospel on the Sunday; at Sarum, that of the Canaanite woman was read (Matthew 15, 21-28), preceded by a unique Tract taken from the Gospel itself, rather than from a Psalm. (This Gospel is read in the Roman Rite on the previous Thursday.)
Folio 29r of the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD., with the rubric “Dominica vacat”, followed immediately by the words “II Domi(nica) in Quadra(gesima) – the Second Sunday in Lent.” (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 12048)
For several reasons, I believe this explanation to be incorrect on every point.
First of all, there is a strong antecedent improbability (I do not say an absolute impossibility) to the very idea of doing such a lengthy service at all under any circumstances. The median date for the Ember Saturday of Lent is March 3rd; in Rome, the sun sets on that date just after 6 p.m., and rises the next morning at 6:40 a.m. Assuming the liturgy started after None, in accordance with the well-attested ancient custom of the Church, this would make for a ceremony about 17-18 hours long. (I do not grant the absurd and unattested possibility of a liturgy designed with breaks for food, sleep, and visits to the bathroom in mind.) This is made all the more improbable by the fact that the main celebrant, the Pope, would usually be elderly, and in the days of the Church’s more serious Lenten fasting discipline, would have to do this on an empty stomach.
Secondly, there is not a single liturgical source that attests to the supposed twelve different readings on any of the Ember Saturdays. The Wurzburg lectionary, the oldest of the Roman Rite (ca. 650 AD), has four Old Testament readings in Lent and after Pentecost (without the reading from Daniel 3 that is now common to all four Ember Saturdays), plus an Epistle and a Gospel; “twelve readings” would therefore refer to the custom of doing each of these six readings twice, in Latin and in Greek. This source also has six Old Testament readings at the Ember Saturday of September, and five in Advent, indicating that there was originally some flexibility to this rite. But in every subsequent lectionary, every Mass of an Ember Saturday has five Old Testament readings, plus an Epistle and a Gospel. The term “twelve readings” would therefore have been understood to refer to the six before the Gospel, each done twice.
Furthermore, all of the ancient lectionaries, including Wurzburg, also have the two different epistles for the Ember Saturday and the following Sunday (1 Thess. 5, 14-23 on the former, chapter 4, 1-7 of the same epistle on the later), in the same order, and in the same place. If the Mass of Ember Saturday was in fact the Mass of the following Sunday, celebrated in the early hours after the ceremony had lasted through the night, what need would there be of this second epistle?
Folios 27v and 28r of the 9th century Lectionary of Alcuin, with the Epistles of the Ember Saturday and Second Sunday of Lent. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 9452)
Third, even doing all seven of the readings twice would not have made the liturgy so inordinately long that it would last through the night. The Roman Rite is almost always more succinct in its presentation and use of Scripture than any other historical Christian rite, and the Ember Saturdays are no exception to this; the longest of them in terms of the Scriptural readings is that of September, in which they amount to 51 verses, just under 900 words. Likewise (and this is a far more significant point), the ordination rituals which are attested in the oldest liturgical books of the Roman Rite are very much shorter and less complicated than the ones we know today, which began to take something more like their current (EF) form in the mid-10th century. The Ember day Masses also have no Gloria and no Creed, and were instituted before either the Offertory prayers or the Agnus Dei were added to the Mass.
Fourth, and I think most decisively, the ancient sacramentaries of the Roman Rite ALL have separate Masses for the Second Sunday of Lent. The very oldest, the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, simply titles it “the Second Sunday in Lent”, but many others include the rubric “Dominica vacat” in the title. This is noteworthy because the Old Gelasian and certain other manuscripts like the Wurzburg lectionary attest to the very ancient arrangement by which the Thursdays of Lent had no Mass at all, but these Thursdays do not have a rubric “feria quinta vacat”; there is simply nothing at all between Wednesday and Friday. Clearly, there was a distinction between a day with NO Mass and a day that “vacat”.
To this it may be objected that these manuscripts are of the Roman Rite, but are not from Rome; they were all copied out in Merovingian or Carolingian Gaul. We may therefore legitimately surmise that what they attest to on the Ember Saturdays represents an adaptation of the Roman custom, dropping the liturgy that lasts through the night. To this I answer that all these manuscripts preserve many things that are Roman, but were clearly not of any use outside of Rome, or at any rate, not useful in Gaul. For example, the Wurzburg lectionary lists all the Roman stational churches, and the Old Gelasian Sacramentary gives the text of the Creed in Greek for the day when the catechumens had to show that they had learned it. In the absence of any source attesting the custom of twelve separate readings, and any source that specifically states that the liturgy was done over the night and into the morning, we have no reason to believe that these Gallic manuscripts have in fact changed the Roman custom in this regard. Quite the contrary, the general tendency in the history of the liturgy is the opposite; places which receive a liturgical tradition from somewhere else tend to be MORE conservative in maintaining its oldest forms, while it continues to evolve in its place of origin.
What, then, did the rubric “Dominica vacat” actually mean? It seems clear that originally, it must have simply meant a day without a Lenten station. Although the Mass of Ember Saturday was not as monstrously long as proposed by the scenario given above, it was still, of course, lengthy, and likely very taxing to the elderly celebrant, who would have had to travel with his court across the city from the ancient papal residence at the Lateran to get to the Ember Saturday station at St Peter’s Basilica, and then back. The Popes therefore gave themselves a well-deserved day of rest by staying home on the Second Sunday of Lent, before resuming the regular observance of the stations on the following afternoon.
A modern drawing of the old St Peter’s Basilica.
We know from certain features of the ancient liturgical books that there was not an absolute uniformity of practice even within Rome itself, and it can also hardly be supposed that every person in Rome would attend the Papal Mass at St Peter’s. Therefore, the parishes would have had their own separate Masses on Sunday morning, and this would explain why the Gospel (but again, not the Epistle) was repeated from the previous day. The people who attended Mass in the parishes on the Sunday would thus hear the important story of the Transfiguration, which did not get its own feast day until the 15th century, and was read nowhere else in the liturgy.
This would also explain the discrepancies between the Gregorian propers of the Mass of the Second Sunday as it appears in various Uses of the Roman Rite. In Rome, the cantors would know their own tradition well enough to know which Mass they sang on the day with no propers of its own. When people outside of Rome received their copies of the Roman liturgical books, the Second Sunday of Lent was marked as “Dominica vacat”, so they filled in the gaps in their chant book and lectionary as they saw fit. But even here, the variation is limited to a very narrow range; already by the 10th century, it had become the established custom to repeat the Mass of the previous Ember Wednesday.
If the repetition of the Gospel of the Transfiguration was instituted in Rome for the benefit of those who had not been present at the previous day’s station, it seems likely that the custom of repeating the chants of Ember Wednesday on the Second Sunday of Lent also originated in Rome. The two Masses are connected by the fact that the two Epistles of that Wednesday are about the forty day fasts of Moses and Elijah respectively, who appear in the Gospel of the Sunday as witnesses to the Transfiguration. This custom also does not fit at all with the idea that the Mass of Ember Saturday was said on Sunday morning; if this had ever been the case, one would reasonably expect that the Mass chants of the Saturday would be used on the Sunday.
Finally, in regards to the Divine Office, the oldest Roman Office antiphonary does in fact have on Ember Saturday six antiphons taken from the Gospel of the Transfiguration, three of which are repeated on Sunday. The current arrangement by which two of these have dropped out of use appears to be an historical accident of no significance.
In the Byzantine Rite, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated on the weekdays of Lent, but only on Saturdays and Sundays; an exception is made for the feast of the Annunciation. Therefore, at the Divine Liturgy on Sundays, extra loaves of bread are consecrated, and reserved for the rest of the week. On Wednesdays and Fridays, a service known as the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is held, in which Vespers is mixed with a Communion Rite. (It is also held on the first three days of Holy Week, and may be done on other occasions, but twice a week is the standard practice.)
The first part of this ceremony follows the regular order of Vespers fairly closely, and the second part imitates the Great Entrance and the Communion rite of the Divine Liturgy. After the opening Psalm (103) and the Litany of Peace, the Gradual Psalms are chanted by a reader in three blocks, while a portion of the Presanctified Gifts is removed from the tabernacle, incensed, and carried from the altar to the table of the preparation. This is followed by a general incensation of the church, as the hymns of the day are sung with the daily Psalms of Vespers (140, 141, 129 and 116), the entrance procession with the thurible, and the hymn Phos Hilaron. Two readings are given from the Old Testament (Genesis and Proverbs in Lent, Exodus and Job in Holy Week), after which, the priest stands in front of the altar and incenses it continually, while the choir sings verses of Psalm 140, with the refrain “Let my prayer rise before Thee like incense, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” (The first part of this refrain is also NLM’s motto.)
Here is a very nice version in Church Slavonic, a modern composition by Fr Ruslan Hrekh, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, sung by clergy of the eparchy of Lviv.
And a Greek version sung by monks of the Simonos Petra monastery on Mt Athos.
Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)
The Answer: As I suspected would be the case, this proved to be a stumper. This vestment is a kind of stole which is used in the cathedral of Milan, but not at the Mass. On the weekdays of Lent and Holy Week, there is a service after Terce, which consists of two readings from the Old Testament with a responsory after the first, and a prayer borrowed from the Rogation days after the second. The readings are done by deacons who don this long white fascia in the manner shown above, over the rochet, and then put the dalmatic on over it, whereas at the Mass, the deacon places the stole outside the dalmatic.
Originally, the deacons did not wear a dalmatic for this service, but a vestment which the ancient ordines of the Ambrosian Rite call an “alba rubea”, which little means a “red alb”. It has long since fallen out of use, and no pictures of one exist, but one may guess from the name that it was shaped like an alb, but red instead of white. The information in this post was provided, of course, by our expert in all things Ambrosian, Nicola de’ Grandi.
Congratulations to Fr Mateusz Kania, a priest of the diocese of Warsaw, who got this almost right, mentioning that it was used in Holy Week. (Father left his comment on Peter K’s Facebook page.) The Best Wildly Incorrect Answer goes to Mark for guessing that it is some kind of rationale, a vestment which is worn only by the bishops of four dioceses in the world. Special mention to a few people who guessed it was a Byzantine subdeacon’s stole, which it does indeed resemble, even though I specifically gave the hint that it was not from an Eastern Rite. The Best Humorous Answer goes to Mark Ingoglio, for his idea that it is a harness by which misbehaving clerics can be yanked out of the sanctuary with a rope - not a terrible idea, really...
Like the vestment, the readings at this service after Terce, which are done as part of the preparation rites of the catechumens for their baptism at Easter, are a very old part of the Ambrosian Rite. They were inherited from the ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, and are still preserved in other rites as well. In Lent, the first is taken from Genesis, and the second from Proverbs; in the same period, readings from these books are done at Vespers in the Byzantine Rite, while the Mozarabic Divine Office has readings from both of these books in the first two weeks of Lent. In Holy Week, the Ambrosian Rite has readings from Job and Tobias in their place, where the Byzantine Rite has Exodus and Job. Here is the rubric which mentions this service in the Ambrosian breviary.
And the special tones in which the readings were sung.
Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)
Please leave your answers in the combox, and feel free to add any details or explanations you think pertinent. It has been a while since our last quiz, so as a reminder, to keep it more interesting, please leave your answer before reading the other comments. Special awards are given for Best Wildly Incorrect Answer and Best Humorous Answer as well. Using Google image search is cheating – I may never know, but God will. (I tried it myself, and didn’t come up with anything pertinent. Grok also failed.) The answer will be given in a separate post tomorrow.
It is reported that some merchants, having just arrived at Rome on a certain day, exposed many things for sale in the marketplace, and an abundance of people resorted thither to buy. Gregory himself went with the rest, and, among other things, some boys were set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beautiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them, he asked, as is said, from what country or nation they were brought, and was told, from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were of such personal appearance. He again inquired whether those islanders were Christians, or still involved in the errors of paganism, and was informed that they were pagans. Then, with a deep sigh from the bottom of his heart, “Alas! what a pity,” said he, “that the author of darkness is possessed of men of such fair countenances; and that being remarkable for such graceful aspects, their minds should be void of inward grace.” He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation, and was answered that they were called Angles. “Right,” said he, “for they have an Angelic face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name,” he continued, “of the province from which they are brought?” It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. “Truly are they De ira,” said he, “withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?” They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, “Allelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts.”
An inlaid stone panel in the chapel of Ss Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury in Westminster Cathedral, London, depicting the story told here by St Bede.
Then repairing to the bishop of the Roman Apostolic see (for he was not himself then become Pope), he entreated him to send some ministers of the word into Britain to the nation of the English, by whom it might be converted to Christ; declaring himself ready to undertake that work, by the assistance of God, if the Apostolic Pope should think fit to have it so done. Which not being then able to perform, because, though the Pope was willing to grant his request, yet the citizens of Rome could not be brought to consent that so noble, so renowned, and so learned a man should depart the city; as soon as he was himself made Pope, he perfected the long-desired work, sending other preachers, but himself by his prayers and exhortations assisting the preaching, that it might be successful. This account, as we have received it from the ancients, we have thought fit to insert in our Ecclesiastical History. (From St Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, book 2, chapter 1)
Here are some pictures which I took of the same chapel in Westminster Cathedral which I took when visited London with the Schola Sainte-Cecile in August of 2019. On the wall facing the panel shown above, an image of the same workmanship, depicting the Judgment of Solomon. (It is not clear to me why this particular subject was chosen here; if any of our readers knows, perhaps he could leave a note in the combox.)
On the ceilings, mosaic of Saints important to the history of Catholic England: Ss Wilfrid, Archbishop of York (633 ca. - 710), St Benedict, and St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (634 ca. - 687). St Benedict was of course never in England, but is included because of the particular importance of monks in the evangelization of the country, and its religious life in general before the Reformation. At the time of the suppression of the monasteries, half of the cathedrals in the country were staffed by monks, rather than canons.
On the opposite side, St Oswald (604 ca. - 642), King of Northumbria from 634 to his death, an early promoter of Christianity in England; St Bede the Venerable (672-735); and St Edmund the Martyr (841ca. - 870), King of East Anglia from 855 until his death in one of the Danish invasions that plagued England in that era.
On the arch looking into the baptistery, which is right next to this chapel, St John the Baptist and St Augustine, a combination which refers to the role of the latter in evangelizing England, the famous mission on which he was sent by Pope Gregory. The Breviary lessons on his feast day, May 28th, state that “Once on Christmas, when he had imparted baptism to 10,000 persons and more in the river at York...”
This kneeler was carved by a furniture maker named Robert Thompson, who used to work a little mouse into almost every one of his pieces. This was made at Ampleforth Abbey and donated to this chapel, where is stands in front of the grave of Basil Cardinal Hume (1923-99), Archbishop of Westminster, who had previously been abbot of Ampleforth.
For the feast of St. Gregory the Great, there’s more good news on the Gregorian chant front!
Pope Saint Pius X’s reform of the Roman Office not only represented an upheaval in the psalter, it also unaccountably changed many of the antiphons of the ferial cursus, replacing them with novel compositions even when the traditional ones could have continued to be used. One laments, for instance, the disappearance of the antiphons Fidelia for psalm 110, In mandatis for psalm 111, and Nos qui vivimus for psalm 113 at Sunday Vespers, which was only allowed to keep two of its ancient antiphons, and of the antiphon Quoniam in aeternum which so excellently fits the recitation of psalm 135 at Thursday Vespers.
The joyful repetitions of the cry ‘alleluia’ at the minor hours on Sundays, and at Lauds during Eastertide—especially the exuberant nine-fold alleluia for the Laudate psalms—seem to have struck the reformers as unbearable, and those antiphons were replaced with new ones which incorporated psalm verses for which the alleluias serve as parentheses.
These mutations ensured that the Roman antiphonal produced by Solesmes and approved by the Vatican in 1912 cannot be used to sing the ancient Office, even if one were to disregard the new arrangement of the psalms.
The editors of Canticum Salomonisare glad therefore to announce the publication of the pars diurna of the traditional Psalterium Romanum, complete with musical notation for all the old antiphons, responsories, and pre-Urban VIII hymns.
This volume contains the entire ferial Office for Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, including the seasonal antiphons, responsories, and hymns for Advent, Lent, Passiontide, and Eastertide. It also includes the collects for Sundays per annum, making it a self-sufficient resource for singing the ferial office on most days. On the other hand, the proper antiphons for Saturdays and Sundays and for penitential ferias are not included, since they were untouched by Pius X’s reforms and recourse can thus be had to the Solesmes books.
Some particulars:
The musical notation has been taken principally from the second volume of the new Antiphonale monasticum, published in 2006, which follows better principles of restoration than earlier editions; the episemas, however, have been included, and some antiphon restitutions are new.
The hymns have been taken from the 1934 Antiphonale monasticum; they are musically identical to those printed in the 1983 Liber hymnarius.
A Toni communes section includes the ‘archaic’ C and D tones found in the 2006 antiphonal for those who wish to employ them, but the standard tones are also given for the antiphons assigned these rather paleontological ones.
Those who desire to follow the widespread medieval custom of singing mediants over Hebrew or monosyllabic words in a manner reflecting their oxytone pronunciation can also find the requisite instructions in that section.
The 1912 antiphonal suggests saying the ferial preces at Lauds and Vespers recto tono, but anyone who prefers to sing them will find the music for the Pater noster chanted by the hebdomadary in the Toni communes as well, taken from the 1934 Antiphonale monasticum.
Printed with red for the rubrics and black for the remaining text.
We pray that this unique volume will aid the devotion of Catholics who wish to pray the Roman ferial Psalter as it was known to centuries of saints, and contribute to the authentic and informed liturgical restoration so felicitously underway across the Catholic world.
On Sunday, I illustrated an excerpt from Durandus with an image taken from a decorated Bible produced in the mid-ninth century, commonly known as the First Bible of Charles the Bald, who received it as a gift from one Vivien, count of Tours; it is also known as the Vivian Bible. (In French, ‘Vivien’, from Latin ‘Vivianus’ or ‘Bibianus’, is a man’s name, the female equivalent being ‘Vivienne.’ There is a Second Bible named for Charles, which has almost no decoration in it.) It was produced in 845-46 in the scriptorium of the abbey of St Martin in Tours; Count Vivien was also the lay abbot of this famous institution, in keeping with an abuse which was very common in that era. The bible was presented to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald (born 823; reigned 843-77), partly as a way of thanking him for certain privileges which he conferred upon the abbey, as is mentioned in the last of the three dedication poems included within it. Here are pictures of all of the illustrated folios, and a sample of the other decorative elements, which are not very many. This is actually the very first item in the catalog of Latin manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
This folio decorated with gold letters on a purple background, which would have been incredibly expensive to produce, is the first dedicatory poem.
Only a handful of pages are illustrated like this one found near the beginning of the codex, in a style which is deliberately modeled after images found in ancient Roman manuscripts. The upper band shows St Jerome leaving Rome for the Holy Land on the left; on the right, he is sitting down with a rabbi whom he is paying to teach him Hebrew. In the middle band, Jerome works on his great project of translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin, in the company of his scribes; note the presence of several women on the left, among whom would be St Paula and her daughter Eustochium, friends from Rome who helped him a great deal. On the bottom, Jerome hands out copies of his translations.
Medieval Bibles normally include a fair amount of prefatory material of various kinds; here, two sheets are dedicated to one of Jerome’s letters, written to a priest friend named Paulinus, about his translation work.
The beginning of Jerome’s own preface to the book of Genesis, with the sun, the moon, and the signs of the zodiac worked into the large letter P.
The chapter and verse system which we currently use for Bibles was not invented until the 13th century; here we see a list of the chapters of Genesis according to a different system which has 82, rather than the modern 50. Genesis is the only book of the Old Testament for which the chapters are listed within an elaborate framework like this.
I just learned about an interesting documentary which was published two months ago on the YouTube channel of the French-language Catholic television outlet KTO TV, about a Benedictine monastery of the Roman Rite on Mt Athos. (Closed captions are available in English.) When the Athonite peninsula was first settled as a monastic community in the later 10th century, the Italian city of Amalfi, (located on the gulf of Salerno, to the south-east of Naples), was a powerful maritime republic, with merchant ships traveling all over the Mediterranean. The Latin monastery was founded out of Amalfi, and therefore called Amalphion by the Greeks. The investigation in this video begins with documents from the archives of Athos which were photographed in the later 19th century by the French military; the photographs are now kept at the Collège de France, a research institute in Paris. The earliest reference to Amalphion is a document which was approved and signed by the very founder of the Athos community, St Athanasius the Athonite (ca. 920-1005), which means that a Latin presence was was part of the life of the Holy Mountain from the beginning.
Scholars have long been aware of the fact that the Great Schism, the supposed definitive break between East and West in 1054, was not as abrupt or total as later historiography imagined, and Amalphion continued to exist well past it; as one of the Greek monks interviewed here says, the schism was “neither immediate nor absolute.” But the monastery did decline, in no small part because Amalfi (which is very small) declined before the growing power of Venice, the power which led to the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, the event which did bring about the definitive rupture between Byzantium and Rome. The last references to Amalphion in the Athos archives (also shown here) is in a document of 1287, by which time it was in ruins and abandoned, and its land had been turned over to the monastery known as the Great Lavra, the first on Athos. The documentary shows the only structure which remains, a tower which was turned into a defensive work against Ottoman incursions on the peninsula.
The researcher travels to the Georgian monastery on Athos, Iviron, to investigate its connection to the monks of the West. We also see a lot of really nice shots of daily life on Athos, including some (fairly brief) footage of the liturgy, and the natural beauty of the peninsula, which is impressive.
The original day for the feast of the Forty Martyrs, who were killed at Sebaste in Armenia under the Roman Emperor Licinius, around 320 AD, is March 9th. They were a group of soldiers of the Twelfth Legion who refused to renounce the Faith, and after various tortures, were condemned to die a particularly horrible death, stripped naked and left to freeze on the ice of a frozen lake. Their feast is still kept on this day, and with great solemnity, in the East, but in the West, they were moved forward to the 10th after the canonization of St Frances of Rome, who died on the same day in 1440.
A 10-century ivory relief icon of the Forty Martyrs, made in Constantinople, now in the Bodemuseum in Berlin. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)
In the sixth century, Italy was wracked by a series of devastating wars fought between the Byzantine Empire and the Ostrogothic kings for control of the peninsula. A series of new churches dedicated to Greek soldier Saints was then constructed in Rome, which was the focus of much of the fighting, on sites associated with the city’s political history, a way of presenting the Byzantine Emperor and his armies as both the liberators of the city and the preservers of its history and tradition. St George in Velabro, from which one could see the site on the Palatine Hill where Romulus founded Rome, is followed by St Theodore, barely an eighth of a mile away. An oratory dedicated to the Forty Martyrs was then made out of a building of the early 2nd century, less than a tenth of a mile from St Theodore. From there, it was a short walk across the Forum to the ancient senate house known as the Curia Julia (originally built by Julius Caesar, but reconstructed after a fire by Diocletian in the 280s), transformed into a church dedicated to St Adrian. Right next to it was built another small oratory, now demolished, dedicated to Ss Sergius and Bacchus; its bell-tower was perched on top of one of the Forum’s most prominent landmarks, the Arch of Septimius Severus.
In 847, a massive landslide off the Palatine, caused by an earthquake, buried the Oratory of the Forty Martyrs, along with the nearby church of Santa Maria Antiqua, and both structures were abandoned and forgotten about. The Oratory was not rediscovered until 1901 during an excavation campaign in the Forum, which lies well within the Tiber’s flood plain, and was deeply buried. A fair amount of fresco work remains within the building; although none of it is in particularly good condition, there is enough to get a sense of what it originally would have looked like.
The martyrdom of the Forty, depicted in the apse, which was added to the original structure to transform it into an oratory. On the right is seen a defector leaving their company, whose place was taken by one of their guards.
The Forty Martyrs glorified in heaven.
The remains of a band of decoration to the left of the apse.
Remains of the decorations to the right of the apse.
Saint Anthony Press, established with the mission of publishing rare or otherwise “lost” Catholic liturgical and devotional books, has reprinted the Ordo Hebdomadae Maioris (Order of Holy Week), containing the Holy Week liturgies and Order of Mass with seasonal Prefaces, according to the 1920 typical edition of the Roman Missal (in use until 1955), restoring the ancient and venerable liturgies replaced by the 1956 Ordo Hebdomadae Sanctae Instauratus (and later incorporated into the 1962 Roman Missal).
Sized for easy liturgical reading whether handheld or on the altar, its texts and chants are set in color and in a font and style based on historical printings of the Roman Missal since 1604.
Table of Contents The “Pre-55” Holy Week – Palm Sunday – Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of Holy Week – Thursday of the Lord’s Supper – Order of Mass with Prefaces – Good Passover – Holy Saturday Details Cost: $50 USD (plus shipping). Size: 8.5 x 11 in. Hardcover; 128 pages, color. Glued, not sewn, binding.
Sample pages (note: not all pairs are meant to be contiguous):
Saint Anthony Press has likewise released a reprint of the Memoriale Rituum which contains the instructions for certain more significant sacred functions to be performed in smaller churches according to the 1920 typical edition, revised in 1950 by the Sacred Congregation of Rites. Sized for easy liturgical reading whether handheld or on the altar, its texts and chants are set in color and in a font and style based on historical printings of the Roman Missal since 1604.
Table of Contents –The Blessing of Candles on the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary –The Blessing of Ashes at the Beginning of Lent –Palm Sunday –Holy Thursday –Good Friday –Holy Saturday
Details Cost: $40 USD (plus shipping). Size: 8.5 x 11 in. Hardcover; 64 pages, color. Glued, not sewn, binding.
Sample pages:
Saint Anthony Press has also published a reprint of the Missae Defunctorum, a liturgical book that contains the Order of Mass for the Dead with its Prefaces, Propers, and Prayers, plus the Rite of Absolution (excerpted from the Roman Ritual) according to the 1920 typical edition of the Roman Missal.
The following excerpts are taken from the sixth book of William Durandus’ Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, chapter 32, 6-11. There are fewer ellipses than usual, but perhaps a bit more paraphrasing.
This is the time of Christian warfare, in which the devil rises up against us more strongly. Therefore, lest anyone despair, the Church sings the introit as a way of offering comfort, “He will call upon me, etc.” Having heard this, a man becomes strong in hope, wherefore, the Apostle says (Rom. 12, 12), “Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation,” and Isaiah says (30, 15), “In silence and in hope will be your strength.” For indeed, in these two things consists all the spiritual strength of a man, namely, in silence from the tumult of this world, seeking nothing of those things which are of it, and desiring in eternal hope.
Introitus (Ps. 90) Invocábit me, et ego exaudiam eum: eripiam eum, et glorificábo eum: longitúdine diérum adimplébo eum. Ps. Qui hábitat in adjutorio Altíssimi, in protectióne Dei caeli commorábitur. Gloria Patri... Invocábit me...
Introit He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will deliver him and glorify him; with length of days I will fill him. Ps. He that dwelleth in the help of the Most High, shall abide in the protection of the God of heaven. Glory be... He shall call upon Me...
Through the Epistle (2 Cor. 6, 1-10)… the Church arms its soldiers with the four cardinal virtues: first, with fortitude, when it says, “Behold now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” These things are said of fortitude, and there follows, “In all things let us show ourselves forth as the ministers of God, with great patience.” Secondly, She arms them with temperance, where it says, “in fasting, in chastity”, and thirdly with prudence when it says, “in knowledge, in longsuffering”, for by these, both we know how to dwell in the midst of a wicked and perverse nation (Phil. 2, 15), “in sweetness, in the Holy Spirit”. There follows, “in charity unfeigned”, because all things must be done without feigning. Fourth, She arms them with justice, when it says, “by the armor of justice, on the right hand and on the left.”
King David with some of the other composers of the Psalms, and in the corners, representations of the cardinal virtues; an illustration from the Vivian Bible, produced at the abbey of St Martin of Tours ca. 845 AD. (Public domainimage from Wikimedia Commons.)
After the epistle is said the gradual, “He hath given His angels charge of thee”, etc., so that in this way a man may be able to fight securely, and then the tract which treats of temptation. Now the tract is spoken to God, because it is shows that this miserable life is drawn out by many griefs and laborers. (This is a folk etymology in Latin, in which the word “tractus”, the name of the chant, comes from the same verb root as “distrahitur – is drawn out.”)
Graduale (Ps. 90, 11-12) Angelis suis Deus mandávit de te, ut custodiant te in ómnibus viis tuis. V. In mánibus portábunt te, ne umquam offendas ad lápidem pedem tuum.
He hath given his angels charge over thee; to keep thee in all thy ways. V. In their hands they shall bear thee up: lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Now a man might complain about the inequality of this fight, because the tempter is very powerful, as is said in Job (41, 24), “there is no power upon the earth which may be compared to him,” and very intelligent, because he sees many things, and very cruel, as Jeremiah says (6, 23), “He is cruel and will show no mercy.” Man, on the other hand, is very weak and ignorant.
The resolution of this is found in the tract. God permits the enemy to tempt man, so that he may fear and flee to God, who knows all and is mighty, and wants to deliver him; and thus may man not hope in himself, but in God, who promises that He will deliver him if he flee unto Him. Therefore, God wants that a man should have fear of the mighty enemy, in hope of the promises of the things to come, and of God’s most ardent love. It follows, then, that He wants to protect him as a hen protects her chicks, out of her ardent love. Our hope of this comes from the guardianship of the angels.
If a man be ground between these two stones, namely hope and fear, he shall be made into the bread that pleases God, and thus he shall conquer all temptation, be it light and hidden, which is called (Psalm 90) “the night-time fear”, or light and open, which is called “the arrow that flieth by day”, or heavy and hidden, which is called, “the business that walketh about in the darkness”, or heavy and open, which is called “the noonday devil.” Whoever is thus armed will conquer these four kinds of temptations, as it is said.
The first of the three temptation of Christ, 1579-81, depicted by the Venetian artist Jacopo Robusti (1518-94), more commonly known as Tintoretto. (Public domainimage from Wikimedia Commons.)
(In the Gospel, Matthew 4, 1-11), the Lord was tempted by the devil with a threefold temptation; namely, with the temptation of gluttony, when he says to Him, “Command that these stones become bread”; with the temptation of greed, when he says to Him, “I will give Thee all these things, if Thou shalt fall down and worship me”; and of vainglory, when the devil wanted to cast him down from the pinnacle… But the Lord conquers him through the authority of the sacred Scripture, … teaching that we must be armed with the sword of the word of God, in addition to those arms which the Apostle gives us in the epistle, that we may thus be sufficiently armed for the fight.
It can also be said that from the beginning of Septuagesima, the Church, pressed down by so many tribulations, had cried out (in the introit), “The groans of death have surrounded me”, as if she could not escape them on any side. On Sexagesima… as if set between hope and despair, she cried out, “Arise, why dost thou sleep, o Lord.” On Quinquagesima, already despairing, she cried out, “Be my protector, my God”; nay rather, turning her prayer into a statement, she said “Thou wilt lead me, and nourish me.” But now, at the beginning of Lent, showing that she has been heard, she says, “He called upon me, and I will hear”, and in the epistle, “In the acceptable time I have heard thee.”
In the gradual is given to us the guardianship of angels, in the tract, divine protection, because we are surrounded by the shield of truth; in the Gospel, as an example to us, we see the Savior triumphing over the enemy, to whom we also say, “Go away, Satan.” In the offertory also, the divine protection is noted, when it says, “With his wings he shall overshadow thee”, and in the post communion, the subjection of the demons, as is said, “(Thou shalt trod) upon the serpent and the basilisk.”
The text of the Offertory and Communio, but not the music, are identical on the Mass of the first Sunday of Lent. ~ Ps. 90, 4-5 Scápulis suis obumbrábit tibi Dóminus, et sub pennis ejus sperábis: scuto circúmdabit te véritas ejus. (He will overshadow thee with his shoulders: and under his wings thou shalt trust. His truth shall compass thee with a shield.)
Many of the stories that form the corpus of Lenten Scriptural readings in the traditional Roman Rite are frequently depicted in frescoes in the catacombs, and on early Christian sarcophagi. We may safely assume that such readings were already part of the Roman Church’s lectionary before the end of the persecutions and the building of the earliest churches. When the tradition of the Roman station churches was formed, some of them were chosen in reference to those readings; an obvious example is the Saturday of the Third Week of Lent, when the Epistle is the story of Susanna, and the station is held at the church of a Roman martyr of the same name. In other cases, such as the octave of Easter, it is clear that the stations were fixed first, and many of the readings were chosen because of them.
There are also days on which it is impossible to determine whether the station church was chosen as an appropriate place for a particular reading, or vice versa, and indeed, it is quite possible that the liturgy was created all of a piece, including both the texts of the Mass and the station, which was considered an intrinsic part of the liturgy. Such a one is the station for today, which is held at the very ancient church of Ss John and Paul on the Caelian Hill.
The Saints to whom the church is dedicated are two Roman brothers martyred by the Emperor Julian the Apostate, who reigned from 361-63. The traditional account of their lives states that they had been military officers under Constantine, and later served in the household of his daughter, Constantia, who at her death left them a large fortune with which to take care of the poor. When Julian, the son of Constantine’s half-brother, came to the throne, they refused to attend him at the court because of his apostasy from the Faith. The emperor would have used this as a pretext to seize the money left by Constantia, but granted them ten days to reconsider; the two Saints therefore gave all the money away for its intended purpose. A captain of the imperial bodyguards named Terentian was then sent to their house, bearing a statue of Jove and the Emperor’s promise that they would be greatly honored if they would worship it; otherwise, they would be killed. The words of their response are sung as the second antiphon of Lauds on their feast day: “Paul and John said to Terentian, ‘If Julian is thy lord, have thou peace with him; we have no other than the Lord Jesus Christ.’ ” They were beheaded at once, and buried within their own house on the Caelian hill, directly across from the imperial residence on the Palatine.
The traditional account also states that Jovian, who succeeded Julian as Emperor, immediately converted their house into a church. In reality, this was done about 30 years later by a Roman senator named Byzas and his son Pammachius, and the basilica was at first known as “titulus Pammachii – the title of Pammachius”; this is the name with which the station is indicated in the oldest list of Gospel readings according to the Roman Rite, the Wurzburg Lectionary (ca. 650AD), and earlier than that, as the location of a synod held by Pope Symmachus in 499.
Pammachius was a friend of St Jerome, and several of the letters exchanged between them survive. His wife Paulina was the daughter of another friend of Jerome, St Paula, but when she died in childbirth in 397, after roughly 12 years of marriage, Pammachius became a monk, and devoted his life to study and the works of charity. At the great port city of Rome, known simply as “Portus Romanus”, he and St Fabiola (yet another friend of Jerome) constructed a large hospice for pilgrims and the poor and sick, called a “xenodochium – a place for receiving strangers”, the first such institution founded in the West. (The site of it has been identified and excavated in modern times) In a letter praising his friend and this initiative, St Jerome states that in its founding, all the poor, needy and helpless have now become the heirs of Pammachius and his deceased wife Paulina. “Other husbands scatter on the graves of their wives violets, roses, lilies, and purple flowers, and assuage the grief of their hearts by fulfilling this tender duty. Our dear Pammachius also waters the holy ashes and the revered bones of Paulina, but it is with the balm of almsgiving.” (Letter 66, cap. 5; PL XXII, col. 642). Pammachius died during the Gothic sack of Rome in 410, and is honored by the Church as a Saint.
Roughly a third of a mile to the east of Ss John and Paul, there now stands a large modern hospital complex known as San Giovanni Addolorata. Underneath it are the remains of a very large Roman house of the early imperial era, which belonged to the one of the city’s oldest families, the Valerii. In the early 5th century, a daughter of this family, St Melania the Younger, another friend of Jerome, inherited it as part of her father’s enormous fortune. In the year 406, she and her husband Pinianus decided to sell the bulk of their property and devote themselves to the poor, but in fact, the house was so large and luxurious that they were unable to find a buyer until after the sack of 410, when the building was severely damaged, and its value thus greatly reduced. By the year 575, when most of Rome had been reduced to a pitiable state, another xenodochium was founded within the ruins of the house, and named for the Valerii.
There can be no doubt that the traditional Epistle of today’s station, Isaiah 58, 1-9, particularly the last part of it, refers to the Christian charity which Saints like John and Paul, Pammachius and Melania exercised on behalf of the poor on or near the site of the church. “Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the needy and the homeless into thy house: when thou shalt see one naked, cover him, and despise not thy own flesh. Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy health shall speedily arise, and thy justice shall go before thy face, and the glory of the Lord shall gather thee up.” (vss. 7-8)
The Gradual of the Mass is taken from Psalm 26; as with so many chants of the Roman Rite, the text is taken from one of the Old Latin versions of the Bible which predate the Vulgate. “One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord. V. That I may see the delight of the Lord, and may be protected by his temple.” This is certainly a reference to the unique fact that Ss John and Paul were buried not in a catacomb, or at any rate, outside the city, as Roman law prescribed, but within their own house.
The Gospel, St Matthew 5, 43 – 6, 4, is part of the Sermon on the Mount, in which the Lord speaks of the spirit in which the works of charity are to be done, not only to our friends and neighbors, but also to our enemies. “Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.” (vs. 43) This may perhaps be taken as a reference to Julian, the last pagan Emperor, and a persecutor of the Church, by whom John and Paul were martyred. The basilica also sits next to a large temple dedicated to the divinized Emperor Claudius, who did not persecute the Church, but did expel the Jews from Rome, with many of the first Christians among them, as recounted in Acts 18, 2 and Suetonius’ Life of Claudius (cap. 25). More importantly, the Christians’ refusal to participate in the worship of the divinized Emperors was one of the principal reasons why they were persecuted by the Romans.
The white blocks of marble seen in the lower middle of this photo (also by Agnese, from the first post of the 2015 series), supporting the church’s bell-tower, are just a small part of the surviving section of the podium of the temple dedicated to the divinized Emperor Claudius. Much more of it can be seen when one goes through the door to the left, under the house of the Passionist Fathers, who were given charge of the church by Pope Clement XIV (1769-74).
Likewise, the words of verse 47, “And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this?” may also be understood in reference to Julian, who reverted to heathenism, and like so many pagans before and after him, thought to inspire men to do good solely by philosophy, while living without the grace of Christ. As part of his scheme to revive the largely moribund worship of the Greco-Roman gods, he hoped to institute a program of charitable endeavors to be run by pagan priests (which they greeted with apathy), in emulation of those of the Christians. In one of his letters, he famously complained that “… it is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar, and the impious Galileans support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our co-religionists are in want of aid from us.”
The Wurzburg Lectionary is not a lectionary in the proper sense of the term, in that it does not contain the actual readings, but merely lists them by their first and last words, together with their liturgical date, and the Roman station church whenever one is assigned. During the actual Mass, the reading was done out of a Bible, and many ancient Bibles have markings or marginal notes that indicate liturgical readings. The Gospel for today is therefore noted in the Wurzburg Lectionary as follows:
On Friday, at (the title) of Pammachius. A reading of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Canon 40. Jesus said to the disciples, “Ye have heard that it hath been said” (vs. 43) up to “and thy Father who seeth in secret will repay thee.” [Fer(ia) vi, in Pammachi, lec(tio) s(a)n(cti) ev(angelii) sec(undum) Mat(thaeum). k(anon) xl. D(i)x(it) Ihs discipulis suis audistis quia dictum ÷ usq(ue) Pater tuus qui videt in abscondito reddet tibi. – “Canon” refers to an ancient chapter system for the Gospels known as the Eusebian canons.]
Verse 4 and verse 6 of Matthew 6 both end with the words “and Thy Father etc.”, and per se, it is impossible to tell whether the Gospel was meant to end at the one or the other. (The numbered chapters and verses of the Bible are a much later invention.) In fact, already in the 9th century, there are lectionaries that end the reading at verse 4, and others that end it at verse 6. However, the antiphon at the Magnificat for Vespers is taken from verse 6, and is attested in almost all of the ancient antiphonaries, a fact which argues for the longer version of the reading. “Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio, ora Patrem tuum. – But thou when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father.”
Folio 25v of a late eighth-century lectionary produced in northern Italy (perhaps in Verona or Monza), with the Gospel of the Friday after Ash Wednesday in its longer form, Matthew 5, 43 – 6, 6; most of the final verse is on the following page. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 9451; image cropped)
If the Gospel was originally read in its longer form, including verses 5-6 of Matthew 6, this may also be an oblique reference to Ss John and Paul. The Latin word “cubiculum – chamber” literally means “sleeping place”; the Christians also used it to mean a burial chamber within the catacombs, an expression of the belief that death is really a sleep which will end at the final resurrection. Many of these chambers, though certainly not all, were created for wealthy persons, as evidenced by the beautiful decorations still preserved within them; had Ss John and Paul been buried in a catacomb, they most likely would have been laid in such a space. Instead, they were buried within their own house, which therefore became the “chamber” in which they await “the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
A painted cubiculum within the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla.
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