On Sacred Art, part 2: What Governs the Style of the Traditions

How the anthropology of the Theology of the Body accounts for the iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque styles, and why the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo is not among them.

This is the second of two related articles on the three authentic liturgical traditions of the Church, as described by Benedict XVI. In the first, I asked what sacred art is for and introduced the three traditions Benedict XVI identifies: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Here I turn to what accounts for the differences between them – the understanding of the human person that each embodies – and explain why the High Renaissance, so often considered the summit of Catholic art, is not among them.

What governs the style of these traditions?

The most important factor governing the style of figurative art is its understanding of the human person, that is, anthropology. Those familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will know that he distinguishes different states of human existence; it is helpful to draw on his categories here.

First, there is Original Man: Adam and Eve before the Fall, ‘naked without shame’, marked by innocence and complete reliance on God.

Second, there is Historical Man: mankind after the Fall, bearing the consequences of a broken relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Though corrupted by sin, Historical Man is not utterly depraved; he retains the capacity for sanctity through cooperation with grace. This is the condition we all share in this life.

Third, there is Eschatological Man: man as he will be in heaven – immortal, partaking of the divine nature, adopted as a son or daughter of God, and united to Christ in a perfect exchange of love.

These second two of these states, as I see it, correspond broadly to the three liturgical traditions in different ways. (There is no tradition directly relating to Original Man, to my knowledge).

The iconographic tradition reveals Eschatological Man. One important inspiration for this style is the account of the glorified Christ in the Transfiguration; all the saints share in that glory through baptism, as members of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. The stylistic features of icons are shaped by the desire to communicate the reality of man in heaven. The gold disc – the halo – represents the uncreated light radiating from the glorified body. There are no cast shadows, since each figure is its own light source rather than being illuminated from outside. And because heaven lies outside space and time, the icon deliberately reduces the illusion of depth through devices such as reverse perspective, ensuring that the figures inhabit the plane of the painting as much as possible. This is also why oil paint is generally avoided in iconography: it creates too strong an illusion of depth and a quality of sensory richness that works against the image’s purpose. Egg tempera, mosaic, and fresco are better suited to the iconographic style.

Christ Enthroned, in the iconographic style

The Baroque tradition reveals Historical Man, and its distinctive style follows from that different subject. Where iconographic art flattens space and eliminates shadow, Baroque painting deliberately creates an illusion of depth through perspective and portrays deep cast shadows from external light sources. Shadow has been a symbol of evil and suffering throughout Christian tradition – the ancient Office of Tenebrae (named for the Latin word for darkness or shadows) uses precisely this symbolism within the Triduum, in the final days of Holy Week. In Baroque painting, those shadowy depths are deliberately exaggerated, but the Christian message is not one of despair. Just as Easter follows Good Friday, the darkness in a Baroque painting is always contrasted with light, representing the Light that is Christ, that overcomes darkness.

The Baroque style is far more naturalistic than the iconographic, but it is not a simple reproduction of appearances. The artist varies color, edge sharpness, and tonal contrast to direct the viewer’s eye toward what matters and to ensure that the figure is depicted with dignity worthy of a creature made in God’s image. While Baroque art is always the art of fallen, Historical Man, it insists on man’s capacity for sanctity and his need for God’s grace. It is the art of suffering and hope, a Christian hope that transcends suffering.

Image: St Jerome and the Angel of Judgment, by Jose Ribera, 

Spanish/Italian, 1626, in the Baroque style

Baroque art should be clearly distinguished from the academic painting of the 19th century, with figures such as Ingres or Bouguereau in France, and from the Pre-Raphaelites in England in the same period. While there were some good examples within each grouping, in my opinion, we can detect that, as a whole, there is a subtle drift away from the Christian balance of idealization and naturalism toward one extreme or the other, becoming either cold and sterile or sentimental to the point of being saccharine. Much of what became 20th-century modernism was an overreaction to this 19th-century academic art. Although the modernists believed they were reacting against Christian tradition, they were, aesthetically at least, reacting against an inferior distortion of it.

The Gothic tradition occupies the ground between the other two, which is fitting given its historical position as a transitional form derived from the Romanesque and anticipating the Baroque. In stylistic terms, it oscillates between the visual language of Eschatological Man, characterized by a highly abstracted iconographic style, and that of Historical Man, characterized by a highly naturalistic Baroque style. It might be called the art of pilgrimage: its imagery points simultaneously toward heaven and the fallen world, reflecting that although we cannot complete the transformation into Eschatological Man in this life, we can begin it. The sacramental life of the Church is precisely the means by which that transformation starts. Like the spires of Gothic churches, Gothic art reaches upward to the heavens while remaining rooted in the earth.

Image: The tympanum of the South portal of Notre-Dame de Strasbourg , ca 1230, The Dormition of the Virgin Mary, sandstone; in the Gothic style. CC BY-SA 2.0 Frédéric Châteaux

The late-Gothic painter Fra Angelico illustrates the point well. He uses elements of the increasing naturalism developing around him, such as single-point perspective and cast shadows, alongside the iconographic visual vocabulary of uncreated light and pictorial flatness. His depictions of the Annunciation (there are several) are examples of paintings that employ perspective and cast shadow; his heavenly scenes, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, revert to the iconographic prototype of flattened space and radiant light. His works are not inconsistent with each other: they reflect a coherent theological understanding of the difference between scenes set in this world and those set in the next.

Image: The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, painted around 1434.

A reasonable question arises here. If each tradition rests on a different understanding of man — fallen, glorified, or on pilgrimage between the two — how is it that within a single tradition we find figures in all three states? Baroque art reveals Historical Man, yet it gives us scenes set in heaven, such as the Coronation of the Virgin. The answer, I would argue, is that while a tradition may occasionally admit some slight variation – Fra Angelico is a rare and notable case – in general, once a style of representing the human figure is established within a tradition, it is applied across all situations. To ask an artist to be fluent in several styles and traditions at once, switching between them according to the subject, would be asking too much of him and would likely confuse those who see it; working consistently within one style is what gives a body of work its coherence. And in any case, there are other means of indicating heaven while remaining within the Baroque idiom – the presence of angels, the absence of any earthly setting, and so on.

Why not the High Renaissance?

Many Catholics will be surprised to find that Benedict XVI’s list of authentic liturgical artistic traditions does not include the High Renaissance – the period of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, c. 1480–1530, which is often considered the summit of Catholic artistic achievement. I follow Pope Benedict’s lead here, and it is worth explaining why.

All traditional art training involves, in varying degrees, copying the works of great masters and the direct observation of nature. The style in which an artist ultimately paints is shaped above all by the art with which he is most familiar, which in turn shapes his response to the nature he observes. Gothic artists looked to Romanesque models and to one another; for this reason, there was no sharp break between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and Gothic art can be understood as a progressively “naturalized” version of the iconographic style, the level of naturalism increasing gradually and without any clear dislocation from its roots.

The High Renaissance represents a different kind of transition: a clear break from that inherited tradition. Artists of this period no longer looked primarily to Romanesque or Gothic masters for inspiration, but to the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that surrounded them in Italy and were being excavated at the time. The sharp change in style between the Gothic and the Italian High Renaissance is not a reflection of increased naturalism – as we have explained, that process had already been going on for centuries. Rather, it is due to the incorporation into artists’ training of copying ancient Greek and Roman statues and plaster casts of them, which radically altered the form of the art. The main impetus for this was not theological or philosophical; rather, it was simply that the period was enamored of the magnificence of this ancient form and wished to emulate it.

The implications of this shift were far-reaching. Benedict XVI described what followed:

“The Renaissance did something quite new...its art speaks of the grandeur of man almost as if it were surprised by it; it needs no other beauty to seek...The tragic burden of antiquity is forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without the fear of sin...True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the other sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.”

The Spirit of the Liturgy, p129

The phrase “without fear of sin” is worth dwelling on. It was the art theorist Alberti who first proposed, in his influential treatise On Painting (1435), that the observation of the nude should also form part of every artist’s training, along with the copying of ancient statues. In doing so, he was knowingly departing from the practice of Christian tradition up to that point – attaching excessive importance to direct observation of the unclothed figure without sufficient regard, in my opinion, for human dignity or for concupiscence, the natural inclination of fallen man toward sin.

The 16th century, shaped by Alberti’s ideas, is characterized less by a coherent tradition than by a series of dominant, individualistic, and brilliantly gifted figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While there were undoubted individual high points, the period as a whole represented a departure from the sacred character of what preceded it, for the reasons Benedict identifies. The Baroque style was a deliberate response to this, inspired by the Council of Trent (which closed in 1563) and the spiritual energy of the Counter-Reformation. Gradually, the contributions of these and other artists were assessed and integrated, and by the end of the 16th century a coherent Christian tradition, properly grounded in theology, had developed from their work.

This, then, is why the High Renaissance, for all its brilliance, does not appear among the three authentic traditions. It is not a judgment on the gifts of its artists, but a recognition that the sacred character of an artistic tradition depends on the end it serves and the understanding of the human person it embodies. The iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque each, in their different ways, keep that end in view; and it is to a fuller account of each that I hope to turn in the articles that follow.

Michelangelo, the Creation of Adam, fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

Roman Discus Thrower, from the 1st century AD, Villa Arianna, Italy

A Few Notes on Readings from Job

In the Roman Divine Office, the Matins readings for the first two weeks of September are taken from the book of Job. The system of Scriptural readings assigned to the Office goes back to the 6th century; it originated in the ancient Roman basilicas, but we know nothing about how it was devised. When it was extensively revised in the Tridentine reform, the basic pattern of readings (Isaiah in Advent, St Paul after Christmas, Genesis in Septuagesima etc.) was not changed, but completed and expanded.

The readings of the first two chapters of Job contain a famously curious use of the expression “to bless God.” Job offers sacrifice daily for his children “Lest perhaps my children have sinned, and blessed God in their hearts.” (1, 5) When Satan challenges God by saying that Job only honors Him because of the material blessings he has received, he says “touch (i.e. destroy) all that he hath, and see if he blesseth Thee not to Thy face.” In the second chapter, Satan repeats this challenge in the same terms, after which he afflicts Job bodily “with a very grievous ulcer, from the sole of the foot even to the top of his head.” Job’s wife then says to him, “Dost thou still continue in thy simplicity? bless God and die.” (2, 9)

The Patient Job, by Gerard Seghers (1625-50)

Taken literally, the expression “bless God” makes no sense in this context, since when Job loses his children and all his possessions, he says “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: as it hath pleased the Lord so is it done: blessed be the name of the Lord.” The Biblical author praises Job for this, saying “In all these things Job sinned not by his lips, nor spoke he any foolish thing against God.” (1, 21-22)

In point of fact, the expression “bless God” is here written as a euphemism for “curse God”, which was apparently felt to be too offensive for public reading of the Scriptures. A similar case is found in 3 Kings 21, 10, when a man called Naboth is falsely accused of “blessing” God, that is, cursing Him, so that King Ahab and Queen Jezebel can have him killed and steal his property. In his commentary on the book of Job, St Thomas Aquinas notes this, saying, “The crime of blasphemy is so horrible that pious mouths shudder to call it by its proper name, but signify it though its opposite.” (chapter 1)

The Septuagint translation of Job paraphrases the Hebrew words of Job’s wife “bless God” with “speak a word against the Lord.” The Greek text of this verse (2, 9) also contains a long and quite beautiful interpolation; only the parts underlined here are in the original Hebrew.

“And when much time had passed, his wife said to him, ‘How long wilt thou hold out, saying, “Behold, I wait yet a little while, expecting the hope of my deliverance?” For, behold, thy memorial is abolished from the earth, (thy) sons and daughters, the pangs and pains of my womb which I bore in vain with sorrows. And thou thyself amid the corruption of worms sittest down to spend the nights in the open air, and I am a wanderer and a servant, beleaguered from place to place and house to house, waiting for the setting of the sun, that I may rest from my labors and my pangs which now beset me: but say some word against the Lord, and die.’ ”

In the Byzantine Rite, this passage (Job 2, 1-10) is read at the Vespers of the Presanctified Gifts on Spy Wednesday, the first chapter being read at the same ceremony on Monday and Tuesday. At the Divine Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, which is joined to Vespers, the Lord’s first speech to Job is read from chapter 38, along with the beginning of chapter 42, which concludes the story. At Vespers of Good Friday, the rest of chapter 42 is read, with another interpolation at the end. After the last words of the Biblical text, “and he died an old man, and full of days.”, are added the following.

“and it is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raises up. This man is described in the Syriac book as living in the land of Ausis (Hus), on the borders of Idumea (Edom) and Arabia, and his name was previously Jobab; and having taken an Arabian wife, he begot a son whose name was Enon. And he himself was (the son) of his father Zare, one of the sons of Esau, and of his mother Bosorrha, so that he was the fifth from Abraham.”

The reading of Job on Good Friday (preceded by a reading from Exodus 33, followed by Isaiah 53) from a Greek Triodion printed in 1586.

The liturgical reading on Good Friday ends here, but the Septuagint also adds the following to the end.

“And these were the kings who reigned in Edom, which country he also ruled over: first, Balac, the son of Beor, and the name of his city was Dennaba: but after Baac, Jobab, who is called Job, and after him Asom, who was governor out of the country of Thaeman: and after him Adad, the son of Barad, who destroyed Madiam in the plain of Moab; and the name of his city was Gethaim. And [his] friends who came to him were Eliphaz, of the children of Esau, king of the Thaemanites, Baldad son of the Sauchaeans, Sophar king of the Kinaeans.”

Lastly, we may note that in the Syriac Bible, to which the Greek text refers above, the book of Job is placed after the Pentateuch, according to a tradition that Moses himself was either its author, or translated it from Arabic into Hebrew.

Saint “Added-On”

Since well before the middle of the sixth century, August 30th has been the feast of two Roman martyrs of the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian (ca. 303), a priest named Felix, and a man who after his martyrdom was given the name “Adauctus”, meaning “added-on” or “increased.” The reason for this is explained in the Matins lessons for their feast; this version is taken from a Roman Breviary printed in 1529.

A fresco of the Virgin and Child with Ss Felix (right) and Adauctus (left), painted in the catacomb of Comodilla, close to the site of their burial off the Via Ostiense, ca. 530 A.D. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

“When by the emperors’ order Felix had been brought to the judge’s chamber next to the temple of Serapis, as they tried to force him to sacrifice, he breathed on the statue’s face, and it immediately fell down. Again being brought to a statue of Mercury in another temple, in the same way he breathed upon it, and it fell down at once. Again (he was brought) to an idol of Diana, which he cast down in the same way. Having been brought back to the prefect, put on the “little horse” (i.e. the rack, an instrument of torture) and asked by what sorceries (maleficiis) he had done this, the blessed Felix responded, “Not by the sorceries of the devil, but by the benefits (beneficiis) of my almighty God have I done this.”

Enraged by this, the prefect ordered him to be brought outside the city on the Ostian way, because in that place there stood a very tall tree consecrated to demons, next to which there was a temple, so that he might be forced to sacrifice there. When he was brought there, having prayed, he said to the tree, “I command you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to fall down from the roots, and smash the temple and its idol or altar, so that souls may long no longer be deceived by your worship.” And immediately at his word it was overturned, so that it smashed the temple and the idol. … and when this was announced to the prefect, he immediately ordered him to be beheaded.

When the sentence was handed down, a certain Christian man came to meet him, one who was hidden from men, but manifest to God, and when he had learned that the blessed Felix had been ordered to be lead (to his death), he began to cry out and say, “I am also of the same law, and I worship the very Lord Jesus Christ whom this holy priest confesses.” He was immediately seized by the prefect’s servants, and when they had exchanged a kiss, he was beheaded with the blessed Felix. Because the Christians did not learn his name, afterwards they called him Added-on (Adauctus), because he was added on to the holy martyr Felix for his crown, and his own crown was increased in accord with his confession of faith. Therefore the Christians, having found them, buried them in the same place where the tree had stood, and there in the time of peace their memory was worthily kept.”

The Glorification of Ss Felix and Adauctus, ca. 1759, by Carlo Innocenzo Carlone. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

For various reasons, this story is not considered historically reliable, but the phenomenon which it describes is very real. In the annals of Christian hagiography, there are many stories of people who were spontaneously converted to the Faith by seeing the constancy of the martyrs in the midst of their torments; it is not rare for such persons to become martyrs themselves, even joining the suffering Christians of their own will right on the spot. A well-known case in recent history is that of a Ghanaian named Matthew Ayariga, who in 2015 was seized in Libya by terrorists, along with a group of twenty Egyptian Copts. Although he was not a member of the Coptic Church, he refused to embrace Islam, even at the threat of being beheaded; seeing how the others prayed and called upon the Holy Name of Jesus as they died, he said of them, “Their God is my God,” and was slain in their company.

An Admission Against Interest: “We Still Do Not Know How to Celebrate the Liturgy.”

At his Wednesday audience this week, the Holy Father Pope Leo XIV delivered the last in a series of eight discourses on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the most recent ecumenical council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. This is part of an ongoing program which began in January, and intends to cover all the documents of Vatican II; His Holiness has previously spoken at length about Dei Verbum and Lumen gentium.

Until now, the series has been fairly anodyne, as such things are wont to be. This week’s discourse, however, contains a statement that has raised perhaps more than a few eyebrows. “The liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council is thus firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.” The Italian word “dunque”, translated here as “thus” in English (from the Vatican’s website) could also be rendered “therefore.”

Now one should always be cautious about making too much of such discourses. Popes say a great many things which turn out not to be very meaningful in the long run, or even in the short run. For example, speaking on this very topic in 1964, Paul VI assured a group of teachers of plain chant that there would be no general eclipse of Gregorian chant, precisely because Vatican II had specifically stated that it was to retain pride of place in the Roman liturgy. Only five-and-a-half years later, he admitted that the arrival of the new liturgy would indeed bring about the very eclipse that he had previously declared would not take place. “We (i.e. the Church) will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant.”

From the Catholic Transcript, an official publication of the Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, printed on April 6, 1964; originally brought to my attention by Sharon Kabel.

Nevertheless, prima facie, the pope has formally endorsed the view that the liturgical reform that came after Vatican II was promoted by Vatican II, and stands “firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church.” And of course, this view cannot be squared with the single most basic and obvious fact about the liturgical reform which came after Vatican II; namely, that its very essence is the rejection of what the Council Fathers asked for, and what they thought they were going to get, when they put their signatures to Sacrosanctum Concilium.

Fortunately, we can always turn for some wise and reassuring words on matters liturgical to Dom Alcuin Reid OSB. On the same day, he published a commentary on the text via the Substack of the Rome-based journalist Diane Montagna. Dom Alcuin is right to note that the text was almost certainly prepared for the pope by members of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, and that on a variety of scores, His Holiness has not been well-served by their work. E.g., it refers to “the need … to streamline (“rendere più lineare”, lit. “make more linear”) the order of the celebration” of the Mass, which is, of course, not stated anywhere in Sacrosanctum Concilium. As I have noted before more than once, someday, the Church will simply have to have an honest reckoning with the fact that most of its current liturgical practice derives from things which are not stated anywhere in Sacrosanctum Concilium.

As always, I encourage our readers to read the whole article; in the meantime, I make bold to note this statement from the pope’s discourse which follows the one cited above: “A correct understanding of (the reform) also enables us to reject the abuses that occurred in certain sectors of the Church (a polite circumlocution for ‘everywhere’) during the post-Conciliar period, and which, unfortunately, still occur from time to time (a polite circumlocution for ‘constantly’) today, where some of the principles underlying the reform itself have been taken to extremes or misunderstood.”

Enter Claudio Maniago, archbishop of Catanzaro and Squillace in the southern Italian region of Calabria, and president of the Centro Azione Liturgica (“Center for Liturgical Action”), an entity of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. The CAL’s annual “Liturgy Week” ended on Thursday, and in his closing discourse, delivered one day after the pope’s audience cited above, 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.”

This is what is known in law as an “admission against interest”, a statement which is accepted as true because the party who makes it has nothing to gain, and possibly something to lose, by making it. And His Excellency is right, as anyone who has suffered through the post-Conciliar Mass as it is practiced almost everywhere in Italy knows full well. With almost no exceptions, the peninsula is the liturgical equivalent of the surface of Mars: lots of dust, but very little light or air. The closing Mass of the conference itself is absolutely typical of what the liturgy has become there. And remember as you watch (if you can bear to) that this is a national conference which has been recurring annually since 1950, an event that by definition should showcase the liturgy at its best. 

“We” also still do not know how to manage a live-stream on YouTube, so this video begins with nearly 48 minutes of dead air. The Mass finally begins with a hymn, the singing of which is almost totally dominated by one man’s voice. When the camera pans around to the pews, we see a thin and aging congregation, clearly rather smaller than the crowd of concelebrants. The introductory rites are spoken, not sung, and followed by an exchange of pleasantries between Abp Maniago and the celebrant, an official of the above-mentioned dicastery, “as is necessary on such occasions.” The celebrant then makes some introductory remarks on the Saint of the day, Monica, as a lead-in to the penitential rite, after which the soloist leads the assembly in doing something very… unusual to the Kyrie. And so on.

Does it need to be said that none of this is “firmly rooted in the living tradition of the Church”? And can we ask if this is why “we” don’t know how to celebrate it, or care?

Durandus on the Beheading of St John the Baptist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Numinous in the Roman Rite, Part II

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

The Numinous in the 1962 Missal

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

I. A Quiet but Tremendous Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Liturgical Stammer

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

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

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

III. The Holy of Holies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[4] Ordo Romanus II.10.

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

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

The Seven Joys of the Virgin Mary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some sample pages.

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Eyewitness Accounts of Liturgical Life Before and After the Council

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

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

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

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

Solemn Pontifical Mass in Westminster Cathedral, ca. 1950

1966: Westminster Cathedral Choir School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changes in the liturgy

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

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

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

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

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

St Michael's, Shepton Mallet

Changing church buildings

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

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

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

Chaos in 1969

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

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