Baroque Sacred Art: Hope that Transcends Suffering, #1

The style that developed in 17th-century Italy: its origins, principles, and visual vocabulary

In this posts and a follow-up, I will examine the Baroque tradition of sacred art: where it came from, why it looks the way it does, and what makes it distinctively Christian. The second part will examine how the tradition spread across Europe and the two main tendencies that developed within it. Subsequent posts in this series will look at Baroque secular art, the portraiture, landscape, and still life that emerged as the same habits of perception flowed out from the liturgy into every corner of cultural life.

As regular NLM readers will know well, Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, identified three authentic traditions of Christian liturgical art: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. The iconographic tradition, which dominated Christian art in both East and West until the 12th century, portrays man as he will be in heaven, transfigured, luminous, outside ordinary space and time. The Gothic, which I examined in earlier posts, straddles the divide between heaven and earth, and is best understood, I argue, as the art of the Christian pilgrim, partially transformed by grace yet still journeying. The Baroque is the most naturalistic of the three. It portrays fallen, historical man, in this life, in the full drama of suffering and grace. That drama, and the Christian hope that transcends it, is what Baroque sacred art is fundamentally about.

The Baroque is also the most influential of the three traditions on art more broadly. As the naturalism of late Gothic painting increased, artists began applying the same visual principles to secular subjects, but the Baroque fully established this tendency, creating a tradition in which the habits of observation and perception formed by creating art for the altar extended naturally into wider contemporary culture. A painter skilled in depicting the light of Christ on the face of a saint would bring the same level of skill and insight to a landscape, a portrait, or a still life, not as an overtly religious act, but in the recognition that the beauty of Creation speaks of its Creator.

Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (c. 1595), by Caravaggio, one of the pioneers of the Baroque.

The Council of Trent and the Origins of the Style

The Baroque style in art emerged in the late 16th and 17th centuries as a powerful artistic response to the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation efforts, particularly the Council of Trent’s directives on sacred images issued at its closing session in 1563. Building on the precedent set by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which closed in 787 and which defended the veneration of religious images, Trent reaffirmed the importance of art as a vehicle for faith while addressing Protestant criticisms. Concerned that some religious imagery had grown overly complex, indecorous, or inaccessible to ordinary believers, the Council instructed artists to portray the mysteries of the Faith, the lives of saints, and the truths of redemption with clarity, emotional directness, and devotional effectiveness, avoiding lasciviousness (that is, the promotion of disordered sexual desire), doctrinal error, superstition, and anything that might confuse or mislead the uneducated, thereby fostering a more immediate and edifying visual language that helped define the Baroque aesthetic.

It took time for the artistic community to absorb and successfully manifest these general directives. By the end of the century, approximately thirty years later, a coherent tradition was emerging that built upon the finest stylistic achievements of the 16th century.

The origin of the name ‘Baroque’ is not known with certainty. Commentators speculate that it is a pejorative term derived from the Portuguese word for an imperfect pearl, barocco, which art historians later applied to the more extravagant examples of the style. I offer another suggestion below by connecting it to the work of one of the tradition’s pioneers, the Italian artist Federico Barocci.

While the primary impetus for this new style was the desire to create a form of sacred art, it very quickly became the standard for all secular art as part of the broader Catholic cultural response to the Reformation. On seeing the beauty of this style, even Protestants decided they wanted to paint in this Catholic manner, and they copied and adapted it to their own needs, developing parallel theological justifications for its use, as happened notably in Holland. The Protestant Dutch artists of the period, among them Rembrandt, painted portraiture, landscape, and still life in this new style.

The power of Baroque beauty was noticed in Protestant England too. Anthony Van Dyck, a Flemish Catholic and student of Rubens, was invited by the Protestant Charles I of England to serve as his court portrait painter and was elevated to the title of Sir Anthony. He was so successful and influential that the English school of portraiture was inspired by him and sustained itself for 250 years after his death. Figures such as Gainsborough and Reynolds were the most celebrated painters of this school. Americans will be familiar with the portraits of the founding fathers, particularly of George Washington by the American artist Gilbert Stuart, which were executed in the style of the English portrait school.

The Origins of the Baroque Style: Federico Barocci

The Italian artist Caravaggio is credited with popularizing the style at the end of the 16th century, but perhaps the clearest early articulation of what became the Baroque came slightly earlier, from another Italian, Federico Barocci. Consider this painting of St Jerome, which he completed in 1598.

Federico Barocci, St Jerome, 1598

I have never read a historical account that confirms this, but I have long wondered whether the term ‘Baroque’ is, in part, a play on his name. Barocci’s work from this period certainly bears all the hallmarks of the tradition he was pioneering.

Several features immediately direct the eye to the figure of St Jerome. He is painted with the most naturalistic coloration, is the most brightly lit, and is the most precisely rendered and sharply focused element of the composition. Barocci reinforces this by setting the figure against a background of deliberately restricted tonal range: a single color, sepia, varied only in its tonal values and given almost no detail. The brightest colors in the composition are concentrated in the cloth immediately surrounding the saint. The sharpest tonal contrast runs along the edge of his right elbow, tracing upward along his shoulder to a sharp point just below the right ear, leading the eye steadily toward the face. This contrast is further intensified by darkening the background immediately adjacent to that edge.

The sharpness and clarity of rendering also vary across the painting. The least precisely handled areas are on the periphery; the most detailed are the saint’s face and hands, the two elements through which expression and gesture communicate the person’s interior life. Through these, the artist portrays the man as a living being with a soul.

Compare Barocci’s painting with this work on the same subject, done nearly fifty years later, in 1646, by the Spanish artist José de Ribera, who spent most of his professional life in Italy.

We can see the same stylistic features at work, except that St Jerome’s face is no longer the primary focus. Ribera directs us instead toward the Word, as exemplified by the scroll. St Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, and Ribera draws our attention to it, perhaps underscoring that Catholics hold Scripture in the highest regard and directly countering Protestant accusations to the contrary.

The sharp contrast between light and dark throughout Baroque painting symbolizes both the darkness of evil and suffering in this fallen world and the Light that overcomes it. This visual device embodies Christian hope, which transcends suffering.

Within a few decades, this style of idealized naturalism had become the standard model for new sacred art across Catholic Europe. As with any living tradition, artists retained room for personal variation within its boundaries; some, for instance, incorporated lighter ochres or cool grays alongside sepia in their tonal work. Broadly speaking, however, the style remained remarkably consistent throughout the 17th century, before gradually and subtly declining in the 18th as the rising influences of Neoclassicism and Romanticism began to transform artistic priorities.

Why This Style Works

The stylistic vocabulary of the Baroque, its variation of tone, color, and focus, is not an arbitrary invention. It accounts for how we actually look at the world and process visual information in the mind. The image cast onto our retinas is not evenly colored or uniformly focused. It is sharply focused and richly colored at the center, where the cone cells respond to color; it is blurred and effectively monochrome at the periphery, where the rod cells respond only to tonal information. We are not ordinarily aware of seeing in this way, because the eye moves constantly across the scene before it, collecting information. The picture we are actually conscious of is an aggregate of this information, assembled from memory. As we observe the world, we tend to notice sharp tonal contrast and strong color first, and we spend the most time examining these and other points of greatest interest to gather more visual information.

A painting is a snapshot in time, but the mind naturally supplements it with information from memory, drawing on recollections of similar scenes encountered in the past. What we see in our mind’s eye at any moment when engaging with a Baroque painting is therefore more natural to us than what we would experience when looking at an image in which every detail, from border to center, is rendered with equal precision, as in photorealism or some 19th-century naturalism.

The effect on the viewer is to direct the imagination toward God by employing a dynamic similar to what we experience when we respond to Creation with awe and wonder. God made us to look at the world in a particular way so that we might see the Creator in his Creation and delight in both. By delivering visual information in a way that stimulates the same dynamic process of observation, the artist who paints well makes his painting speak of Christ as powerfully through its beauty and style, regardless of the content, just as the cosmos itself does.

Next week, in Part 2, I turn to how the Baroque tradition spread organically across Europe and examine the two great tendencies that developed within it: Baroque Classicism, which sought a more idealized, classical look, and Baroque Naturalism, which insisted on direct observation from life. I will also look at a question that matters practically for any artist working in sacred art today: how does sacred art differ from portraiture, and why does the distinction matter?

Upcoming Event for All Souls: New Bedford, MA

On Monday, November 2nd, for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts (diocese of Fall River), will celebrate a sung Requiem Mass (usus recentior, ad orientem) beginning at 7:00 PM. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem of 1605 will be performed by the Greater New Bedford Choral Society. The church is located at 230 Bonney Street, in the city’s south end. No tickets or admission is required.

St Demetrius the Great-Martyr

On October 26, Byzantine Christians celebrate with great solemnity the feast of St Demetrius of Thessalonica, a soldier and martyr of the early 4th century, whose popularity is almost as great as that of another warrior, St George. The traditional story of his life is that he succeeded his father as military commander at Thessalonica, but was imprisoned by the Emperor Maximian (286-305) for not only refusing his orders to persecute the Christians, but openly preaching the Gospel.

Maximian had a favorite gladiator, a very large German named Lyaeus, who, at his behest, challenged any Christian to wrestle him on a platform surrounded by spears. A Christian named Nestor, brave, but very small of stature, visited Demetrius in prison and received his blessing, after which he wrestled and beat Lyaeus, hurling him down onto the spears. In his anger at losing his favorite gladiator, Maximian sent his soldiers to the prison, where they speared Demetrius though the chest, while Nestor was killed the following day.

This story forms the tropar of St Demetrius’ feast day.

The world has found you to be a great defense against tribulation, and a vanquisher of heathens, O Passion-bearer. As you bolstered the courage of Nestor, who then humbled the arrogance of Lyaios in battle, Holy Demetrius, entreat Christ God to grant us great mercy.
Kontakion God, who has given you invincible might, has tinged the Church with streams of your blood, Demetrius! He preserves your city from harm, for you are its foundation!

Devotion to St Demetrius has always been very strong among the Slavs, particularly as a patron of soldiers, as witnessed by the popularity of the name Dmitry. Attempts have even been made to claim him as a Slav, since he was supposed to be originally from the city of Sirmium, now called Mitrovica, in Serbia; this is in fact in the area of the Balkan peninsula where the Slavs first settled in Europe, but only in the 6th century. His patronage of soldiers was reaffirmed in modern times during the First Balkan War (Oct. 1912 – May 1913), when Thessalonica was liberated from Ottoman control and united to Greece on his feast day in 1912. He is also honored with the titles “Great-Martyr”, as one who suffered much for the Faith, “Myrrh-gusher” from the tradition that streams of scented oil came forth from his relics, and “Wonderworker” for the many miracles attributed to him.

An icon of the Martyrdom of St Demetrius, painted by an unknown Cretan artist in the second half of the 15th century. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The Saint’s funeral, by the same artist. The church in the background is a representation of his basilica in Thessaloniki, with an image of him over the door. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Christ with Four Military Saints (Theedore of Amasea, Theodore Stratelates, Demetrius and George), by Michael Damaskinos (1530-93). - Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The Byzantine Synaxarion, the equivalent of the Martyrology, also still notes on this day a terrible earthquake which took place in Constantinople in the year 740, which killed thousands of people and did terrible damage to the city and its walls. This was the year before the death of the first iconoclast Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, and it was generally believed that the earthquake was a divine punishment for the iconoclast heresy. There are also liturgical texts for the day which refer to this event, which serve roughly as the equivalent of what we call a commemoration in the Roman Rite. As a matter of their deep respect for history and tradition, those who celebrate the Byzantine Rite may omit these texts, but they have never been removed from the liturgical books, a wise policy we would do well to emulate in the West.

Troparion Thou who lookest upon the earth, and cause it to tremble, deliver us from the fearful threat of the earthquake, and send upon us Thy rich mercies, by the prayers of the Mother of God, o Thou who lovest mankind.

The Feast of Christ the King 2026

Thine is the power, thine the kingdom, o Lord; Thou art above all nations. * Give peace, o Lord, in our days. ℣. God, creator of all things, fearful and mighty, just and merciful. Give peace in our time, O Lord. (The ninth responsory of the feast of Christ the King in the Benedictine Office.)

From the Great Hours of Anne of Brittany, 1503-8, illuminated by Jean Bourdichon. This image accompanies a suffrage of All Saints, and perfectly expresses Pius XI’s intention in placing the feast of Christ the King on the Sunday before All Saints’ day: Mystical Head before Mystical Body. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 9474)

℟. Tua est potentia, tuum regnum, Dómine: tu es super omnes gentes: * Da pacem, Dómine, in diébus nostris. ℣. Creátor omnium, Deus, terríbilis et fortis, justus et miséricors. Da pacem, Dómine, in diébus nostris.

By the time the feast of Christ the King was instituted in 1925, the hour of Matins was very rarely sung outside of a fairly small number of monasteries, and even then, only on major feasts, and this had been the case for quite a long time. To the degree that it was done in choir at all, it was usually done recto tono. (The common exceptions were Christmas Matins before Midnight Mass and Tenebrae.) As a result, there was little impetus to compose new responsories when new feasts were promulgated. For example, when Pope Clement XIII first granted permission for the feast of Sacred Heart to be celebrated in certain places, the Matins responsories of the Office which he promulgated for it were all borrowed from Tenebrae, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi. Likewise, this responsory is borrowed for Christ the King from the very ancient corpus of Gregorian chants for the month of October, accompanying the readings from the books of the Maccabees, which is why a recording of it is available at all.

This year, the feast happily coincides with the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, the Gospel of which, Matthew 22,15-21 is one of Our Lord’s best known and most fundamental teachings regarding how we, his followers, are to live in the world, and what our duties to the state are.

“At that time, the Pharisees went and consulted among themselves how to ensnare Jesus in his speech. And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, ‘Master, we know that thou art a true speaker, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. Tell us therefore what dost thou think, is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?’ But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said, ‘Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? Show me the coin of the tribute.’ And they offered him a penny. And Jesus said to them, ‘Whose image and inscription is this?’ They said to him, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then he saith to them, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.”

The Tribute Money, 1782 by the Anglo-American painter John Singleton Copley (1738-1815).

Pope Pius XI’s very purpose in instituting the feast of Christ the King was, of course, to respond to the ideologies of his era, which taught that man must render to Caesar that which was Caesar’s, and also render to Caesar that which is God’s. On this feast day, since we see these ideologies rising again in the world, let us remember to pray “for the liberty and exaltation of our Holy Mother the Church”, to which they pose no less of a threat now than they did a century ago.

Something Else Got Lost in Translation

On Thursday, the DDF issued a document called Venite ad me, (“Come unto me”, from Matt. 11, 28) subtitled “Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in the Change of Epoch.” Assuming the Italian text to be the original, the official English version slightly bungles this subtitle as “in an Epochal Change”; the French, Spanish, Portuguese and German versions all agree with the Italian. And there is another interesting translation error which was just brought to my attention.

The document refers three times to the Paschal candle, in paragraphs 27, 33 and 140-141, and compares the passing of “the light of Christ” from the candle to one person, and from him to another, and so on, to the transmission of the Faith from one person to another. But in the last of these, it speaks of “the lighting of the paschal candle and its placement on the altar, following the procession through the nave of the church...”

No, this is not the accidental leak of some strange new variant planned for the rite of the Easter vigil. The Italian original reads “...l’accensione del cero pasquale e della sua collocazione sull’ altare.” The preposition “su” (compounded with the definite article to make “sull’ ”) is used here in a broad sense to mean “in the sanctuary.” Likewise, one can and does say in Italian that a person “serve sull’ altare – serves at the altar”; this does not in any way suggest that he is climbing up and standing on top of the altar itself.

We make bold to suggest to the Dicastery that in the future, they avoid issuing translations made with the kind of program that also made this picture.

A Very Curious Legend of St Raphael

The revised version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, in the notes to the entry for the feast of St Raphael the Archangel, says that “In the Ethiopic Synaxarium... is a curious account of the dedication of a church to St Raphael in an island off Alexandria early in the fifth century.” A reference is given for an English translation of this Synaxarium, which is basically the Eastern version of the Martyrology, but no further information is given about the dedication or what makes it curious. In the marvelous age of the internet, I was able to track the text down at the following website, (https://stmichaeleoc.org/html/Pagumen_03.htm) where I discovered what a spectacular understatement “curious” is in describing this legend.

“On this day are commemorated the glorious angel Raphael the archangel, the third of the vigilant, holy and heavenly archangels; and the dedication of his church, which was built to him on an island outside the city of Alexandria in the days of Saint Theophilus the Archbishop (385-412, the predecessor of St Cyril); and the miracle which was made manifest therein, and took place thus.

A certain rich woman from the city of Rome came to Saint Theophilus the Archbishop, and with her were her son and a picture of the glorious Archangel Raphael, and much money, which she had inherited from her parents. ... And Saint Abba Theophilus built many churches, and among them was the church, which was on the island outside the city of Alexandria, and was dedicated in the name of the glorious Archangel Raphael; and Abba Theophilus the Archbishop finished the building thereof and consecrated it as it were this day.

And whilst the believers were praying in the church, behold the church trembled, and was rent asunder, and it moved about. And they found that the church had been built upon the back of a whale... on which a very large mass of sand had heaped itself. Now the whale lay firmly fixed in its place, and the treading of the feet of the people upon it cut it off from the mainland; and it was Satan who moved the whale so that he might throw down the church.

And the believers and the archbishop cried out together, and made supplication to the Lord Christ, and they asked for the intercession of the glorious Archangel Raphael. And God, the Most High, sent the glorious angel Raphael, and he had mercy on the children of men, and he drove his spear into the whale, saying unto him, ‘By the commandment of God stand still, and move not thyself from thy place’; and the whale stood in his place and moved not.

And many signs and wonders were made manifest, and great healings of sick folk took place in that church. And this church continued to exist until the time when the Muslims reigned, and then it was destroyed, and the whale moved, and the sea flowed back again and drowned many people who dwelt in that place.”

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has a mid-19th Ethiopian painting in tempera on canvas which represents this legend, in which we see the Archangel fixing his spear through the church building. Unfortunately, the lower part of it, which would have shown the whale, is missing.

Here is a more complete representation of the story, depicted in a mural in a monastery in Ethiopia. (This image is reproduced by the kind permission of Sara Genene.)

The Relics of St Boethius

The church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in the Italian city of Pavia, which houses the relics of St Augustine, also has those of another Saint, the philosopher and theologian Boethius, whose feast is kept today.

The first page of a later 14th-century manuscript of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, showing him as a teacher of philosophy above, and in prison below. 

His full name was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius; the gens Anicia were a very prominent family in ancient Rome, and there is reason to believe that St Gregory the Great was also descended from it. Boethius was born about 480 A.D., and orphaned in youth; his guardian was a member of another very ancient family, one Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, whose daughter Rusticiana he eventually married. (The Vesper hymn of Ss Peter and Paul was long falsely attributed to a non-existent second wife of his called Elpis.) His life was dedicated to the study of both philosophy and theology, and it was largely through his work as a translator that the early Middle Ages knew what it knew of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as Euclid, Archimedes and others. Several of his theological treatises also survive and there is also a famous letter to him from the writer Cassiodorus in which he asks Boethius to make a sundial and waterclock for the king of the Burgundians.

In the great tradition of the ancient families to which they belonged, Boethius, like his father and father-in-law before him, took an active part in the public life of Italy. By the end of the 5th century, the last Roman Emperor in the West had been removed, and the peninsula was nominally ruled by the Eastern Emperor in Byzantium, but in fact, by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Boethius served under Theodoric as the Roman consul in the year 510 A.D., and saw the same ancient honor vested upon his two sons twelve years later. (The fact that they were in their teens shows what the office had been reduced to in reality, but the prestige of it was still very great.) More importantly, he also held the position of the “magister officiorum – the master of the offices,” one of the greatest significance and responsibility.

Shortly thereafter, Theodoric had come to believe that members of the senate in Rome were plotting with the Emperor to overthrow his kingdom and restore direct control of Italy to Byzantium. When one of their number was charged with this conspiracy, Boethius defended him in court, for which he was also accused of the conspiracy, arrested, imprisoned at Pavia, and condemned to death. During his imprisonment of about nine months, he wrote his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, a lengthy dialogue between himself and Philosophy, in which she consoles him for his misfortunes, and teaches him to regard them with what, largely because of this work, we would now call a “philosophical approach.” This exhortation to regard all earthly things as transitory, to value the eternal things which only the mind can apprehend, and to see the world governed by divine wisdom which is always just, was one of the most popular books in the Middle Ages, and many vernacular translations were made of it.

Boethius was murdered in prison in 524, his death preceded by torture, according to the common tradition. His relics were at first buried in the cathedral of Pavia, but later moved to the crypt of St Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. Although his death was essentially a political matter and not inflicted for the Faith, he was popularly venerated as a martyr, since he was unjustly put to death by an Arian heretic. In this sense, he is very similar to the 11th century Princes of the Rus’ Saints Boris and Gleb, also killed for political reasons, but immediately venerated as Saints for their Christ-like acceptance of the injustice inflicted upon them.

The devotion to Boethius as a saint and martyr is still kept in the city of Pavia, and also in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Campitelli, which was founded by his sister-in-law, St Galla. This devotion was confirmed by Pope Leo XIII in 1883. These photos were taken by Nicola de’ Grandi.

The entrance to the crypt, under the main sanctuary.

“The body of St Severinus Boethius, Martyr.”

Next to his relics and altar in the crypt is this well, whose waters are said to have healing properties.

This poetic inscription reads as follows:

Hoc in sarcophago iacet ecce Boetius arto,
Magnus et omnimodo mirificandus homo.
Huncque Sophia suis prae cunctis compsit alumpnis.
Quam sibi grande decus contulit ipse Deus!
Consul enim factus cum natis ipse duobus,
Romae conspicuum et habitus speculum;
Sparsa per Europam vulgant sua dogmata totam.
Quam fuit et merito clarus et ingenio
Nam nobis logicen de graeco transtulit artem,
Commenti gemino quam reserat radio
Catholicae verum fidei dedit et documentum
Et nos informat musica quae resonat.
Qui Theodorico regi delatus iniquo
Papiae senium duxit in exilium
In quo se maestum solans dedit inde libellum
Post ictus gladio exiit e medio.

In this narrow sarcophagus lies Boethius,
A great man, in every way to be marvelled at.
Wisdom adorned him more than all her students;
How great a glory did God Himself bestow (upon him).
For he was made consol, along with his two sons,
Prominent in Rome, an example of decorum.
His teachings are shred through all of Europe;
How famous he was in merit and in genius
For he translated for us the art of logic from the Greek,
Which he clearly explained in two commentaries.
He also gave true proof of the Catholic Faith,
And teaches us how to play music.
Accused before the wicked King Theoderic
He passed his old age in exile at Pavia,
Where he consoled himself in his sadness by writing a book;
Afterwards, the blow of a sword took him away.

The Purification and Ablutions

Lost in Translation #172

After receiving (and distributing) Holy Communion, the priest purifies the sacred vessels and his canonical digits. As Fr. Nicholas Gihr notes, “the exterior act of cleansing the chalice and also his fingers” prompts a meditation on his interior, [1] and thus he prays:

Quod ore sumpsimus, Domine, pura mente capiamus: et de munere temporali fiat nobis remedium sempiternum.

Which I translate as:

Grant, O Lord, that what we have received with our mouth we may take hold of with a pure mind; and out of a temporal gift may it become for us an eternal remedy.

A transition from the physical to the spiritual is a common theme in traditional Catholic prayer. For example, the Postcommunion Prayer for Low Sunday (the Sunday after Easter) is:

Præsta, quaesumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui pascalia festa peregimus; haec, te largiente, moribus et vita teneamus. Per Dominum.

Which I translate as:

Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who have finished the Paschal feasts may, by Thy bounty, hold onto them in our practices and in our life. Through Our Lord.

The prayer also forms a contrast between the receptivity involved in Holy Communion and the activity involved in profiting from it. Capiamus, which we have translated as “take hold of,” is a vigorous verb, meaning to seize, grab, or capture. The contrast calls to mind St. Augustine’s interpretation of the myth of Proteus, the god who, once captured, turned into terrifying deceptive shapes. But if his assailant ignored these appearances and held on to him, Proteus would disclose the truth. For Augustine, the appearances are what the senses grasp and the truth is what the mind grasps. [2] Similarly, in Holy Communion, the mouth senses a wafer but the mind, illumined by Faith, grasps the Real Presence.

Finally, the prayer does not ask that a temporal gift may become an eternal remedy but that the Eucharist may become an eternal remedy from a temporal gift. I must confess that I am perplexed by this construction. If anyone has any ideas, please share in the commentary section.

The 2011 ICEL translation is:

What has passed our lips as food, O Lord,

may we possess in purity of heart,

that what has been given to us in time

may be our healing for eternity.

Next, the priest prays:

Corpus tuum, Domine, quod sumpsi, et Sanguis, quem potavi, adhaereat visceribus meis: et praesta; ut in me non remaneat scelerum macula, quem pura et sancta refecerunt Sacramenta: Qui vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Which I translate as:

May Thy Body, O Lord, which I have received, and Thy Blood which I have drunk, stick to my innards; and grant that no stain of sin may remain in me, I who have been fed with this pure and holy Sacrament; Who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen.

The prayer follows the same pattern of external to internal—although, ironically, the “external” here is the physically internal. As Jungmann notes,

In regard to its contents, this prayer goes a step beyond the preceding one. It does not feature the contrast between the outer sign and the inner efficacy; instead, the Sacrament Itself appears almost as the grace: through that which It contains, It is so pure and so holy that in a certain sense It need only remain in us in order to push aside and burn up all stain of sin.[3]

The prayer also contains a petition that is difficult to translate: adhaereat visceribus meis. Viscera in Latin designates the internal organs of an animal, though it can also be used metaphorically for the flesh. [4] The English equivalent is “bowels,” defined as “the interior or inside of the body.” [5] But unfortunately, “bowels” has been the victim of semantic narrowing in our own day and age: what once meant all the innards, both noble (such as the heart) and less noble, has been reduced to that part of the body which produces excrement. That’s quite a movement.

This migration of language presents a quandary to the modern translator, and yet the biblical use of viscera is unmistakable. Consider the following:

From the Benedictus:

Through the bowels of the mercy of our God, in which the Orient from on high hath visited us. (Luke 1, 78).

And Philippians 1, 8:

For God is my witness, how I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.

And Colossians 3, 12:

Put ye on therefore, as the elect of God, holy, and beloved, the bowels of mercy, benignity, humility, modesty, patience.

And this choice imperative from Philemon 1, 12, where St. Paul asks Philemon to welcome back the fugitive slave Onesimus:

Whom I have sent back to thee. And do thou receive him as my own bowels.

It is perfectly understandable that modern liturgists would wish to shy away from such gutsy language, for it is likely to induce a snicker rather than a pious response. (The 1970/2002 Roman Missal omits the entire prayer). And yet, to eliminate this language is to feed indirectly the heresy of Gnosticism, with its pronounced discomfort of the body. I am not suggesting that the architects of the Novus Ordo were dyed-in-the-wool Gnostics, but I do raise the question as to whether their genteel bowdlerizations divorce us from the earthy side of our Faith, which is, after all, deeply Incarnational. Paul exults when he speaks from the bowels of Jesus Christ, and perhaps so should we.

Notes

[1] Gihr, 744.

[2] Against the Academics 3.6.13.

[3] Jungmann, vol. 2, 402-403.

[4] “Viscum,” n., Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, 1.I and 1.I.B.

[5] “Bowel,” n., Oxford English Dictionary, II.2.c.

Saints Nunilo and Alodia, and Their Ivory Reliquary

October 22nd is the feast day of two Spanish virgin martyrs, sisters called Nunilo (or Nunilone) and Alodia, who died on this day in the year 851. Their martyrdom is described in book called the Memorialis Sanctorum, written by a priest of Córdoba named Eulogius, which gives an account of many of the martyrs killed by the Islamic emirs of Córdoba in a persecution that last for about ten years, from 849-59. Eulogius is sometimes referred to as “of Toledo”, because he was canonically elected to that see, but he was never consecrated, being first imprisoned and then martyred about eight years after the two sisters. His feast is kept on March 11.

An altar dedicated to Ss Nunilo and Alodia, in the monastery of Leyre which had their relics for many centuries.

Nunilo and Alodia were born in Huesca, close to the frontier of the lands still held by Christians in the north of Spain, known as the Spanish Marches. Their father was a Muslim, but allowed them to be raised in the faith of their Christian mother. However, when he died, their mother married another Muslim, who was not as tolerant as their father had been, and so they were sent away to live with a Christian aunt in Castile. The girls had decided to remain virgins, and dedicate themselves to the service of God, but the local governor, seeing their great devotion and holiness, decided to try to force them to apostatize. Like many of their illustrious predecessors in the days of the Roman persecutions, they were given over to the custody of women “endowed with knowledge of the profane rites”, as Eulogius delicately puts it. The two young women rejected all enticements to abandon their faith, and all possibility of marriage (presumably to Muslim husbands), and were therefore at last beheaded.

St Eulogius records that their bodies were left to rot in the public forum where they died, with soldiers posted to prevent the Christians from taking them and giving them a decent burial, but that they were nevertheless somehow recovered and kept in a place where “they shine forth with signs and miracles.” About 30 years later, they were translated to the monastery of the Most Holy Savior in the Christian kingdom of Navarre, about 75 miles to the northwest.

At some point during the Reconquista, an elaborately carved ivory casket made in Córdoba just after the turn of the millennium was taken by the Christians, and donated to this monastery, where it was used as a reliquary for the two martyrs. The monastery was suppressed in 1836, and the Saints’ relics were taken to a church in the Canary Islands; the casket is now kept at the Navarre Museum in Pamplona.

Another Admission Against Interest: “Loss of the Collective Memory of Rites”

In law, the term “admission against interest” refers to a statement made out of court by a party, which is regarded as true because it goes against that party’s own interest. Such a statement is regarded as truthful, and may be accepted as an exception to the hearsay rule, because the party would not have said it unless he believed it to be true. I recently highlighted an example of such a statement pertinent to matters liturgical, made by Abp Claudio Maniago, the president of the Centro Azione Liturgica (“Center for Liturgical Action”), an entity of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. In his closing discourse at the CAL’s annual “Liturgy Week” held at the end of August, His Excellency informed his listeners that “we still do not know how to celebrate in such a way as to bring forth the splendor of the liturgy.” (The closing Mass of the conference amply proved that how right he is about that.)

Today, another such statement, likewise pertinent to matters liturgical (and many other things, to be sure) has emanated from a much higher place, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. A new document entitled Venite ad me (“Come unto me”, from Matt. 11, 28) has just been published, with its explanatory subtitle “Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in the Change of Epoch.” (Assuming the Italian text to be the original, the official English version slightly bungles this as “in an Epochal Change”. The French, Spanish, Portuguese and German agree with the Italian.)

In paragraph 94, the last of five in the subsection on Liturgy, we read, “Especially in the West, there is a progressive loss of the collective memory of rites and ritual practices (my emphasis) in favor of a highly radical form of individualism; yet this does not eliminate the anthropological need for rituality, to which human beings have always responded in different ways. The Christian community grows and is built up through ritual practices, and in this regard, the Church’s rich spiritual heritage represents a precious and inexhaustible resource.”

This is an extraordinary admission, an acknowledgement that the post-Conciliar liturgical reform has completely failed to bring to the Church’s rites the “renewed vigor” which Sacrosanctum Concilium looked for, hoping that it would “meet the needs and circumstances of modern times.” Obviously, if it had succeeded in doing so, there would not be such a “progressive loss of the collective memory of rite and ritual practices.”

Even more extraordinary is the acknowledgement, not in complimentary terms, that this progressive loss of the collective memory of rites has been replaced by a highly radical individualism, since radical individualism is one of the foundational principles of the post-Conciliar liturgical reform. No prior historical Christian rite ever gave the individual priest and his chosen collaborators so much latitude to fill the liturgy with their individual ideas and creative choices, belying the very purpose of a rite. And of course, no prior reform of the liturgy ever canceled so many rites and ritual practices so long instilled in the life of the Christian community.

It is very encouraging, therefore, to read the last sentence of that paragraph, which states that “the Church’s rich spiritual heritage represents a precious and inexhaustible resource,” a statement which reminds us of some very wise and justly very famous words of Pope Benedict XVI: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.” Hopefully, this weekend’s Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage will inspire the Holy Father and his collaborators to recognize that that proper place is not in the dustbin of history.

A Catholic editorial cartoon from 1967, by which time, the fact had become too obvious to ignore that the Barque of the Church was shipping in some very rough seas. But since any and all course correction had been deemed unthinkable, the cartoonist therefore simply declared that “It’ll Make Port”; no need to ask difficult questions like “In what condition?” or “With how many of the passengers still on board?”

The Legend of Saint Ursula

The annals of Catholic hagiography contain many legends which are recorded in documents written long after the lifetimes of various Saints, but which per se present no particular challenge to the credulity of anyone who believes in a personal God and the reality of miracles. Many Saints have lived in such a way that we would not expect to find material proof of their doings, any more than we would expect to find a first-century shop with a sign over the door reading “Joseph son of Jacob, Carpenter.” For such as these, we must trust to Providence, the good faith of their biographers, and the Church’s tradition.

There are others, however, which even a very basic knowledge of history demonstrates cannot be accepted as reliable; such a one is the legend of St Ursula and Companions, Virgins and Martyrs at Cologne in Germany, whose feast is kept today. The vast collection of hagiographical learning known as the Acta Sanctorum devotes 230 pages of small type to parsing out how their legend developed from a single inscription in a church in that city into a famously extravagant story. Here we can give only a brief summary of the case; a fairly thorough account is given in the relevant article in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The Martyrdom of St Ursula, by Caravaggio, 1610, generally believed to be his last work. The Saint is shown at the very moment she is struck in the breast by an arrow, an example of the vivid realism for which Caravaggio was praised by many as the greatest painter of his times.

The inscription in question, made in the later fourth or early fifth century, states that a man of senatorial rank named Clematius restored a basilica in Cologne “in the place where the holy virgins shed their blood,” with no further details. The fact that it was “restored” should be taken as an indication that a martyrdom of some Christian virgins did take place before that period. Five centuries later, an anonymous sermon says that nothing was known of them for certain, but gives the local tradition that they were a large company, and their leader’s name was “Pinnosa.” They are absent from many early liturgical manuscripts where one would reasonably expect to find record of a martyrdom as spectacular as the later legend tells it, but an early martyrology mentions Saints Martha, Saula and companions at Cologne on October 20th. Other documents give a variety of names and numbers, including “Ursula”; it is not known how she came to be thought of as the foremost among them, nor how the number 11,000 was eventually settled on as the size of the group. It is possible that an abbreviation such as “XI M.V.” for “undecim martyrum virginum – eleven virgin martyrs” was misunderstood as “undecim millia virginum – eleven-thousand virgins.”

The Clematius inscription, now in the Basilica of St Ursula in Cologne, built in the 12th century over the site where the putative relics of the Virgin Martyrs were discovered.

Their passion as told in the later tenth century is summarized as follows in the revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints. “Ursula, the daughter of a Christian king in Britain, was asked in marriage by the son of a pagan king. She, desiring to remain unwed, got a delay of three years, which time she spent on shipboard, sailing about the seas; she had ten noble ladies-in-waiting, each of whom, and Ursula, had a thousand companions, and they were accommodated in eleven vessels. At the end of the period of grace, contrary winds drove them into the mouth of the Rhine, they sailed up to Cologne and then on to Bâle (Basle in Switzerland), where they disembarked and then went over the Alps to visit the tombs of the apostles at Rome. They returned by the same way to Cologne, where they were set upon and massacred for their Christianity by the heathen Huns, Ursula having refused to marry their chief. The barbarians were dispersed by angels, the citizens buried the martyrs and a church was built in their honor by Clematius.”

The inherent logistic improbabilities of assembling and moving such a company are obvious, especially given the chaos of the mid-5th century, to which the medieval legend assigns their martyrdom at the hands of the Huns. In the year 1155, a large cemetery was discovered at Cologne, and the remains therein were accepted as the relics of the 11,000, notwithstanding the presence of many men and children among them. A later elaboration identified both the epitaph and relics of “Pope Cyriacus”, who, after receiving the future martyrs in Rome, abdicated the papacy in order to accompany them back north, where he shared in their martyrdom. This version goes on to say that the cardinals, displeased at the abdication, later expunged his name from the catalog of the Popes, bringing the story down to the grotesque level of the Pope Joan legend; but this absurdity is even found in a breviary printed in 1529 for the use of the Franciscans.

Relics of the 11,000 displayed in the crypt of the Basilica of St Ursula at Cologne, known as the Golden Chamber.

Devotion to these Saints was very strong in the Middle Ages, despite the reservations of scholars who identified the incongruities and anachronisms in their legend. Among the Premonstratensians, who took their liturgical use from the area around Cologne, their feast was celebrated with an octave until the early 20th century. St Angela Merici gave the name “Ursulines” to the religious congregation she founded in 1535, the very first women’s teaching order, and before that, Christopher Columbus chose to honor them in the naming of the Virgin Islands. In the Tridentine liturgical books, however, they are treated with great reserve, kept only as a commemoration on October 21, the feast of the abbot St Hilarion; St Ursula is mentioned by name, but no number of her companions is given. It is supremely ironic that they should share their feast day with a Saint whose life is quite well documented, by no less a personage than St Jerome; however, neither feast was retained on the Calendar of the post-Conciliar reform.

St Ursula and Companions, depicted on the rood screen of the church of Ss Peter and Paul in Eye, Suffolk, England. Photo courtesy of Dr Simon Cotton. 

Numbering as they do in the thousands, their putative relics have been given to churches all over the world. In 1489, the Hospital of St John in the city of Bruges received a portion of them, and commissioned the painter Hans Memling to make a shrine in which to house them, one of his masterpieces. The Gothic shrine has six panels on the two sides showing the story of the Saints.

The Arrival of the 11,000 at Cologne (left), Basel (middle), and Rome (right), where they are greeted by Pope Cyriacus. (Click images to enlarge) In the background of the Cologne scene is depicted the cathedral with its unfinished bell-towers; work on the towers was broken off in 1473 and not resumed until 1842, and the bells installed in the 1870s. The crane on one of the towers remained a landmark of the city for hundreds of years.

The company departs from Basel (left); the group is martyred (center); the martyrdom of St Ursula (right).

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Back in Print: A Revealing Diary by Ferdinando Antonelli Documenting the Consilium’s Actual Operation

Based on the diaries and notes of Ferdinando Cardinal Antonelli, a pivotal figure in the Catholic Church’s liturgical reform movement for over twenty years, Nicola Giampietro’s The Development of the Liturgical Reform reveals many important details about the forceful personalities that drove the process from Pius XII to Paul VI, the systems and methods by which decisions were made, and the competing principles invoked, with at times chaotic results.
Like his collaborators Fr. Louis Bouyer and Fr. Boniface Luykx, Antonelli had an insider’s grasp of the personnel, dynamics, and designs. He witnessed firsthand the good, the bad, and the ugly. For example, here are some of his assessments of aspects of the reformers’ work: “[The Consilium] is merely an assembly of people, many of them incompetent, and others of them well advanced on the road to novelty. The discussions are extremely hurried. Discussions are based on impressions and the voting is chaotic. What is most displeasing is that the expositive Promemorias and the relative questions are drawn up in advanced terms and often in a very suggestive form. The direction is weak.” (166-67) “Many of those who have influenced the reform... have no love and no veneration of that which has been handed down to us. They begin by despising everything that is actually there. This negative mentality is unjust and pernicious, and unfortunately, Paul VI tends a little to this side. They have all the best intentions, but with this mentality they have only been able to demolish and not to restore.” (192) “While I would like to be mistaken, I can say that [Bugnini’s] greatest lacuna was his lack of any theological training or sensibility. This was a grave defect and lacuna because in the liturgy, every word and every gesture expresses a theological idea. I have the impression that much has been conceded to the Protestant mentality, especially in matters regarding the sacraments.” (196) It’s this kind of information that the defenders of the post-Conciliar reform don’t want you to see: the admissions, from within, of all that went wrong. No wonder we are still suffering the consequences decades later. In the interests of transparency, I should mention that this is not really a “sensationalistic” book. It’s pretty technical and detailed, a sort of blow-by-blow account of various stages of reform, and Antonelli in the end was not an outspoken critic of the Novus Ordo. But it does contain a lot of valuable information for those who are serious students of the liturgy. 
Originally published in 2009 by Roman Catholic Books and out of print for some time (it was first mentioned here at NLM in January 2010), Os Justi Press is pleased to add this new edition of Giampietro to its growing Studies in Liturgical History and Reform series, where it joins Le Brun des Marettes, Guéranger, and Hazell. Available in paperback and hardcover from the publisher or from any Amazon outlet. I talk about the book in this video: