The Church of Ss Peter and Paul in Biasca, Switzerland (Part 2)

Last week, we published Nicola’s pictures of the interior of the church of Ss Peter and Paul in Biasca, a town in Canton Ticino, Switzerland, which has been part of the territory of the Ambrosian Rite since at least the 6th century. As a follow-up, here are some pictures of the exterior, very much in the Romanesque style of its period, the second half of the twelfth century. At the end are some pieces of sculpture which are, to be honest, nowhere near as impressive as the extensive surviving fresco work which we saw in the first part. 

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Uncomfortable Comparisons? Fr. Barthe on the Traditional and New Sacramental Rites

In 1969, A Short Critical Study of the Novus Ordo Missae was published with the signatures of two powerful cardinals, Bacci and Ottaviani. Nicknamed The Ottaviani Intervention, it quickly become a classic, and has never gone out of print. But... where was its companion volume? You know, the one about the other six sacraments?

For, indeed, the reform of the Mass was accompanied by a profound overhaul of all the other sacraments – baptism, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, penance, and extreme unction (the last two renamed reconciliation and the anointing of the sick). And the changes to these were no less profound, no less meaningful, no less consequential.

Understandably, debates about liturgical reform have coalesced around the new missal for decades, since the Eucharistic rite touches the lives of Catholics more than any other. Yet if the new rite of the Mass deserves criticism for its diminished signification of the Church’s faith, the same holds for the new rituals of the sacraments, which were produced according to the same assumptions and principles.

Esteemed liturgical theologian Fr. Claude Barthe confronts this question in his short but potent work, The Seven Sacraments, Past and Present: A Short Critical Study of the New Rituals. Fr. Barthe takes up particular points of comparison between the old and new rituals, looking to the matter and the form (the elements used, the words spoken) as well as the ceremonies surrounding them. Did the effort to “adapt the rites for modern man” end up diluting and dissipating the very faith they were supposed to express more effectively?

In this well-documented book, Fr. Barthe helps readers to see why a coherent defense and practice of tradition must reach beyond the Mass to embrace all of the Church’s rites – at a time when some are seeking to rule out the very possibility of doing so. The Roman Rite, he explains, is a unified world of prayer, and its components should not be arbitrarily divorced. If the traditional Mass deserves to be honored and prayed in our churches, the traditional form of each and every sacrament should be given no less honor and be no less readily available.

Perhaps in time, this book, too, will become famous, and people will start speaking of The Barthe Intervention!

Be that as it may, Os Justi Press is proud to present its English edition to the world. I encourage tradition-loving Catholics to take up this brisk and battling book. Find out why it caused a firestorm upon its 2025 publication in France. Consider gifting it to priests you know who love the Mass of the Ages but may not yet fully understand how it is integrated harmoniously into the larger whole of the Roman Rite.

Here’s what a few readers had to say about the manuscript:

“The rites for the administration of all the sacraments underwent substantial revisions following the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Barthe argues that these changes were by and large for the worse. The Seven Sacraments is a valuable resource that joins other works of ‘loyal dissent’ such as the ‘Ottaviani Intervention.’” – Dr. Michael P. Foley, Baylor University

“Wherever one looks in the older Roman liturgical rites, one finds a form of worship that embodies the fullness of Catholic doctrine more explicitly, more robustly, and more impressively than its ‘reformed’ counterpart. Instructive, yet accessible to non-specialists, this study is an important contribution to the growing body of critical literature concerning twentieth-century liturgical reform in the Western Catholic Church.” – Fr. Thomas M. Kocik, author of Reform of the Reform?: A Liturgical Debate

“Fr. Barthe has done the Church a great service by placing, side-by-side, ‘Before’ and ‘After’ snapshots of the seven sacraments (and funeral rites). The similarities and differences between the usus recentior and the usus antiquior are apparent.” – Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., host of The Catholic Current

Available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook, from the publisher or from any Amazon site.

Review of Cosima Clara Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy

In his book The Restoration of Christian Culture, John Senior writes:

Whatever we do in the political and social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian Culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of two thousand years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it.

Senior goes on to describe the Mass as emanating outwards to all aspects of life. What is done on a stone altar inspires the construction of a beautiful church. The church inspires a garden and clerics to tend the church and the people who flock to it. Next to the church and the garden a cemetery is made for those who died as faithful servants of what is done on that altar; and around the church-grounds people build their houses and sow their fields, until a community is formed. That community needs laws, and the laws cannot help but be influenced by the sense of justice that radiates from the center of its citizens’ lives. And before you know it, you have a Christian world built around the Mass.

The most recent attempt to uncover that world is Cosima Clara Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy. Gillhammer contends that the liturgy of the medieval Christian West exerted a greater impact on art and culture than is generally appreciated. “The liturgy forms the fabric of Western creative imagination,” she writes. “It provides the very images, words and concepts with which we think and tell stories” (253). To substantiate her claims, the author organizes her chapters based on different themes: Petition (the Psalms), Love (the Song of Solomon and the Blessed Virgin Mary), Hope (Advent), Suffering (Holy Week), Grief (the Stabat Mater), Joy (the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday), Death (the Dies Irae), Revelation (the Apocalypse), Time (liturgical seasons), and Space (Holy Week).

Light on Darkness does not presuppose any knowledge of the Catholic Faith: on the contrary, it sometimes reads like a Dummies’ Guide to Christianity. One chapter, for example, walks the reader through the Creed before proceeding further. Clearly, the intended audience is not limited to Catholics but seeks to persuade a broader demographic of the liturgy’s impact on Western culture.

Not all of Gillhammer’s genealogies are equally persuasive or relevant. It is true that (the Protestant) George Herbert’s poems communicate a “union with God in terms of a banquet,” but there is no evidence that he developed this idea thanks to Catholic liturgy rather than a direct reading of the Sacred Scriptures. And although I loved Gillhammer’s explanation of liturgical time as an example of Kairos (the time when God acts) rather than Chronos (mere sequential time), she does not explain in what ways the Kairos of the Roman rite changed the West or its culture.

The book also contains a few errors. A sentence on page 39 gives the impression that Psalm 51(50) was recited every day of the year during Lauds, but it was not said on feast days, which were many. The suppression of the Alleluia does not occur at the beginning of Lent (in the traditional calendar) but at the beginning of pre-Lent or Septuagesimatide. And in her discussion of liturgical time, Gillhammer conflates the idea that time is relative with the idea that time is subjective. What Einstein meant by his general and specific theories of relativity is not the same as my experiencing a one-hour department meeting as lasting an eternity.

Nevertheless, Light on Darkness abounds in fascinating facts. Did you know that:

The haunting sequence Dies Irae in the Requiem Mass is the “most frequently cited musical motif” in the history of Western music (187). In film alone, it has appeared in The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), Mad Max (1979), The Shining (1980), The Lion King (1994), Mulan (1998), X2 (2003), The Return of the King from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2005), and Watchmen (2009).

The liturgical application of (seemingly racy) passages from the Song of Songs to the Blessed Virgin Mary created a new way of thinking about love. “What engagement with the Song of Songs achieves is not so much an avoidance of erotic language and sexual subject matter,” Gillhammer writes, “as a deliberate and creative use of such language in engaging with religious matters” (53). The author goes on to describe the impact of this new approach from the secular poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the poems of Walt Whitman.

The Impropreria or Reproaches in the Good Friday service generated a new genre of English literature in which the fallen nature of man dialogues with the goodness of God.

The concept of felix culpa (O happy fault) in the Easter Vigil proclamation the Exsultet has found its way into artistic expression, from Middle English to James Joyce.

The beautiful sequence Stabat Mater for the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows went on to inspire artists to think of new ways of envisioning compassion, from Michelangelo’s Pieta to the Pieta of Kathe Kollwitz (d. 1945).

The celebration of the Resurrection in the liturgy led to the resurrection of the theatre in the Christian West, from biblical dramas on Easter (and Passion Plays on Good Friday) to Corpus Christi plays to “mystery plays” to the works of William Shakespeare. Hamlet is much more liturgical than you think.

Despite a few hiccups, Light on Darkness is an engaging and worthwhile read. Among its many virtues is its refutation of the myth that Catholic Christians were disconnected from the liturgical life of the Church because they were denied so-called “active participation.” The book convincingly demonstrates that liturgy was in the very air that our medieval and Renaissance forebears breathed and that the results of this insufflation are beautiful. John Senior would be pleased, I think, with Gilhammer’s explication of the central fact of two thousand years of history.

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.

Note

[1] The Restoration of Christian Culture (Ignatius Press, 1983; reprinted, Roman Catholic Books), 16-17.

Solar Horarium, Organ Improvisation, Homeschool Music Curriculum, Sarum Rite, Aesthetics - Find It All in Season 8 of Square Notes

As the summer winds down, catch up with the latest (eighth!) season of Square Notes: The Sacred Music Podcast! The show is on its annual summer hiatus because of the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music’s summer graduate program; season nine will launch in the fall with new episodes. The timeless topics of the past season are well worth the time, whether you’re a church musician, casual appreciator of sacred music, or a Catholic who just wants to know more about the Church’s perspective on sacred music. The podcast is distributed via all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, and Podbean.

Here’s a list of this past season’s topics and guests:

• Episode 1 – Building a Beautiful Homeschool Curriculum for Art and Music – with Elizabeth Lemme
• Episode 2 – From Puebla Cathedral to Today’s Spanish-Speaking Pews: The Legacy of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla – with Fernando Gil
• Episode 3 – The Art of Organ Improvisation: Insights from Martin Baker
• Episode 4 – From Chant to Counterpoint: How to Improvise Polyphony – with Dr. Charles Weaver
• Episode 5 – Lenten Reflection for Church Musicians – with Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone
• Episode 6 – What Did American Sacred Music Sound Like in the 19th & Early 20th Centuries? A Snapshot from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York – with Salvatore Basile
• Episode 7 – Developing Great Vocal Technique for Singing Chant – with Dr. Rosemary Heredos
• Episode 8 – Chant Accompaniment, Organ Building, & Fundraising for Organ Projects – with Chris Berry
• Episode 9 – Is Beauty a Transcendental, Why Beauty Matters, and Can We Be Wrong About Beauty? Philosophical Questions Every Church Musician Should Consider with Dr. Margaret Hughes
• Episode 10 – All About Sarum: Ceremonial, Chant, Sources, and Processions from Medieval England – with Dr. Christopher Hodkinson
• Episode 11 – Learning & Living Gregorian Chant as a Monk – with Fr. Mark Bachmann, OSB, Choirmaster of Clear Creek Abbey
• Episode 12 – Caring for Temples of the Holy Spirit: The Busy Church Musician’s Guide to Nutrition, Health, and the Immune System – with Dr. Lizbeth Alter
• Episode 13 – A Masterclass in the Magisterial Compositions and Style of Palestrina – with Thomas Neal
• Episode 14 – Conflict Resolution, Work-Life Balance, and Avoiding Burnout As a Church Musician – with Angela Rosson
• Episode 15 – The Solar Horarium & Monastic Fast According to the Rule of St. Benedict, Plus Praying the Chant & Making Beer – with Fr. Augustine Wilmeth, OSB, Prior at the Benedictine Abbey in Norcia

Raphael’s Transfiguration of Christ

When Raphael was commissioned to paint the Transfiguration of Christ in 1515, the feast commemorating this event in the Lord’s life was still a new one in much of Western Europe. Although it had been kept in some places much earlier, it was given to the universal Church only in the reign of Pope Callixtus III (1455-58), in thanksgiving for the Christian victory against the Turks at the siege of Belgrade on August 6th, 1456. Coming only three years after the fall of Constantinople, this victory signaled an important halt to the Turkish invasion of Europe; in fact, the common custom of ringing church bells at noon began as a reminder to pray for the defense of this bulwark of Christendom.

In the Byzantine tradition, on the other hand, the feast is much older, and one of the Twelve Great Feasts commemorating the principal events of the life of Our Lord and His Mother. It is kept forty days before another of the Great Feasts, the Exaltation of the Cross, a custom based on the teaching of the Church Fathers that the purpose of the Transfiguration was to strengthen the faith of the Apostles in preparation for the Our Lord’s Passion. Long before the adoption of the feast in the West, this aspect of the tradition was also known to the Roman Rite, which reads St. Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration on both the Ember Saturday of Lent and the following Sunday.

The Transfiguration, in the apse mosaic of the monastery church of St. Catherine on Mt Sinai, ca. 565.

The painting was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the cousin of Pope Leo X, who had just been made archbishop of the French city of Narbonne. In accordance with a common abuse of the era, the cardinal had no intention of taking possession of the see to govern it personally, being as he was also the chancellor of the church in Rome; instead, he would have paid a vicar to fulfill the duties of bishop, while drawing the revenues of the see. (In the 10 years between his cousin’s election as Pope in 1513 and his own election as Clement VII, Giulio de’ Medici held ten different sees under various titles, five of them before his priestly ordination.)

Within a few decades, this abuse was completely extirpated by the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation; one must not imagine, however, that all the beneficiaries of it were entirely neglectful of their sees and abbeys. Cardinal de’ Medici commissioned the painting for the high altar of Narbonne’s cathedral, and would certainly have paid the artist a handsome sum for it. In the reign of a Pope whose family had been leading patrons of the Renaissance for generations, in a city filled with every kind of artist, Raphael stood head and shoulders above all of his contemporaries. His only equal in prominence, Michelangelo, had left Rome in 1513 shortly after the election of Pope Leo; in 1516, Raphael was made superintendent of Pontifical works, a job in which he could command his own prices, choosing for himself a few outstanding commissions, and leaving the rest in the hands of an army of assistants and apprentices.

The cathedral of Narbonne, dedicated to Ss Justus and Pastor. Their feast day is August 6th, the same as that of the Transfiguration, which was kept on the following day in the city itself; Raphael’s painting shows the two on the upper left side as witnesses of the Lord’s Transfiguration.

As I have noted before, in an age in which imitation was considered the very essence of art, which is to say, the imitation of the classical past, no-one had a keener eye for seeing what was good about the styles of other artists, taking it into his own, and improving upon it. In this painting, the last work of Raphael, one sees not merely the mastery of technique, but the perfect union at every point of technique to story. While certainly concerned to demonstrate his skill and versatility, especially in light of Michelangelo’s very recent triumph in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, each technical feature of the painting serves to communicate the Biblical story and theological idea behind it.

In Lent and on the feast in August, the Roman Rite reads the story of the Transfiguration from chapter 17 of St Matthew. However, in the upper part of the painting, Raphael has taken account also the words of St Luke that “the appearance of (Christ’s) countenance was altered,” (chap. 9, 29), as it will also be after the Resurrection. (Mark 16, 12 and Luke 24, 16.) The Lord’s face is painted in a style very similar to that of one of Raphael’s early teachers, Perugino, a style greatly admired in the later 15th and early 16th centuries, and considered a kind of idealized facial type. Thus, as Christ reveals himself to be the perfect man, the man who is also God, he is represented with a “perfect” face. The rest of the figures are painted in a variety of styles, with a much more realistic range of facial types, reminiscent of various predecessors and contemporaries of Raphael, a great demonstration of his extraordinary versatility.

Christ in the Transfiguration of Raphael.

The upper part of the Oddi altarpiece, which Raphael painted 15 years earlier. Note the similarity in the faces, all of which are reminiscent of the idealized facial type typical of Perugino.

The painting is also marked by three different major lighting schemes. In the upper part, the light of the transfigured Christ shines onto the clouds behind him, and back at us, while also illuminating the figures around Him, the Prophets Moses and Elijah, and the Apostles Peter, James and John. Through them, the divinity of Christ is revealed to us; thus the light of His divinity coming out at the viewer is not merely a special effect for its own sake, but helps to convey the meaning of the Biblical narrative. The lower part represents the next episode in the Synoptic Gospels, the healing of a possessed child. The very ancient date of the Exaltation of the Cross determines not only the day of the Transfiguration, but also that of the Ember Wednesday of September, always the Wednesday after it, on which the Church reads this episode in the words of St Mark.

And one of the multitude, answering, said: Master, I have brought my son to thee, having a dumb spirit. Who, wheresoever he taketh him, dasheth him, and he foameth, and gnasheth with the teeth, and pineth away; and I spoke to thy disciples to cast him out, and they could not. … And He asked his father: How long time is it since this hath happened unto him? But he said: From his infancy: And oftentimes hath he cast him into the fire and into waters to destroy him. But if thou canst do anything, help us, having compassion on us. And Jesus saith to him: If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And immediately the father of the boy crying out, with tears said: I do believe, Lord: help my unbelief. And when Jesus saw the multitude running together, he threatened the unclean spirit, saying to him: Deaf and dumb spirit, I command thee, go out of him; and enter not any more into him. And crying out, and greatly tearing him, he went out of him, and he became as dead, so that many said: He is dead. But Jesus taking him by the hand, lifted him up; and he arose. (Mark 9, 16-17 and 20-26)

The light enters the scene from the left and above, brightly illuminating the figures on the right, but leaving those on the left wrapped up in a mysterious dark mist. The former lighting scheme is based on the style of portraits done by Florentines, the latter scheme is that of the Venetians, another demonstration of the artist’s mastery of a variety of styles.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Communion in the Hand: Ancient Norm, Humanist Myth, or Protestant Rebellion?

NLM is once again grateful to Zsolt Orbán for sharing the fruits of his extensive research with us.

Reflecting on the “evolution” of Eucharistic reverence, Pope Benedict XVI noted,

Here again we know that until the ninth century Communion was received in the hand, standing. That does not of course mean that it should always be so. For what is fine, sublime, about the Church is that she is growing, maturing, understanding the mystery more profoundly. In that sense the new development that began after the ninth century is quite justified, as an expression of reverence, and is well-founded. But, on the other hand, we have to say that the Church could not possibly have been celebrating the Eucharist unworthily for nine hundred years. [1]

This quotation condenses the fundamental theoretical issues surrounding the practice of Communion in the hand, the very problems this article addresses, among which the most vital question is: do we really know this for a fact? Was there truly no Communion on the tongue until the ninth century? Was its emergence merely the result of a new development, while the standard norm across the entire Church had been for lay faithful to receive the Blessed Sacrament in their hands?

I doubt that this was actually the case, for two primary reasons.

The first reason, the true argument, is one that proponents of Communion in the hand generally fail to grasp. Because they implicitly or explicitly assume that unfolding the essence of Church doctrine, and thus understanding the true nature of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, required time for a certain “development” to take place, during which entirely new elements emerged. In reality, they do not believe that the Church understood the meaning of the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Blessed Sacrament from the very first moment, and approached it accordingly from the very beginning.

Yet, because the Apostles understood the Mass from day one, they understood it to mean exactly what the Church would later teach about it. They also understood the priesthood itself. Consequently, from the very dawn of the Church, a distinction existed between the ordained and the laity, not only in the administration of the sacraments in general, but also in matters concerning the Most Holy, namely, the handling of the Blessed Sacrament. Therefore, I doubt that the touching of the Blessed Sacrament by unordained faithful could ever have been the norm, rather than a deviation from it; in other words, that it was a legally permitted default practice.

According to current scholarly consensus, the section of the Liber Pontificalis that attributes the prohibition of laymen touching the sacred vessels to Pope Sixtus I is a sixth-century compilation (dating to around 530). Even if this is true, the fact that such a decree could be compiled around 530 from earlier texts – and, moreover, that it carried authority – inherently proves that a widespread and normative practice of Communion in the hand is an impossibility. A regulation that ran directly counter to theological and liturgical evidence and practice could never have emerged at the very heart of the Holy Mother Church.

Furthermore, if in the first half of the sixth century a pope, or a decree circulated under papal authority, forbade the laity from even touching the sacred vessels, how reasonable is it to assume that this same prohibition did not apply to the contents of those vessels? Why would anyone consider the vessels holier than what they contained? This is especially true given the beautifully resonant reasoning the author of the decree attached to it:

It has been decreed by us, the other bishops, and the rest of the Lord’s priests, that the sacred vessels are not to be touched by anyone other than men consecrated and dedicated to the Lord. For it is exceedingly unworthy that the Lord’s sacred vessels, whatever they may be, should serve human use and be handled by anyone other than men who serve the Lord and are consecrated to Him; lest the Lord, being offended by such audacities, strike His people with a plague. [2]

And how far we still are at this point from the ninth century, when the “novelty” of Communion on the tongue supposedly appeared!

The second reason exposing the flaw in the narrative of a normative and universally permitted Communion in the hand is the surprising lack of sources supporting it. I call it surprising because, due to the sheer volume of repetitive arguments used by proponents of this narrative, the sheer number of their supposedly clear patristic references can seem convincing. However, this illusion lasts only until one takes the trouble to verify their citations. It then becomes clear that these quotations are not about what they claim, and fail to prove their vehement assertions. Despite the notion that has prevailed since the rise of Humanism and the Reformation, we have only a few sources, and those dubious in either authorship or meaning, which show that the Church permitted the taking of the Blessed Sacrament home exclusively in times of emergency. Yet, contrary to the presuppositions of the narrative, even these sources do not bear witness to the laity actually touching the Blessed Sacrament with their hands.

James Tissot’s envisioning of Communion being given at the first Mass to the kneeling apostles; note the suggestion of Peter and John serving as something like deacon and subdeacon.

When examining the patristic quotations used to ground the Communion-in-the-hand narrative, we encounter several highly typical errors.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Sequence of St Dominic

For the feast of St Dominic, here is a very nice recording of In caelesti hierarchia, the Sequence for his Mass in the Dominican Missal. Dominic was, of course, the very first Saint of his order to be canonized; this was done in 1234 by Pope Gregory IX (1227-41), who had known him personally, and declared that he no more doubted his sanctity than he did that of Saints Peter and Paul. The author of the Sequence is unknown; it is attested in Dominican liturgical sources that predate the codification of their Use which took place in the mid-1250s, and still forms the basis of it to this day. 

In caelesti hierarchia, nova sonet harmonia, novo ducta cantico: Cui concordet in hac via, nostri chori melodia, congaudens Dominico. Ex Aegypto vastitatis, virum suae voluntatis vocat Auctor saeculi, In fiscella paupertatis, flumen transit vanitatis, pro salute populi. In figura catuli, praedicator saeculi matri praemonstratur; Portans ore faculam, ad amoris regulam populos hortatur. Hic est novus legislator, hic Elias aemulator, et detestans crimina. Vulpes dissipat Samsonis, et in tuba Gedeonis, hostis fugat agmina. A defunctis revocatum, matri vivum reddit natum, vivens adhuc corpore: Signo crucis imber cedit; turba fratrum panem edit, missum Dei munere. Felix, per quem gaudia tota jam ecclesia sumens exaltatur. Orbem replet semine, in caelorum agmine tandem collocatur. Jacet granum occultatum, sidus latet obumbratum: sed Plasmator omnium, Ossa Joseph pullulare, sidus jubet radiare, in salutem gentium. O quam probat carnis florem, omnem superans odorem, tumuli fragrantia! Aegri currunt, et curantur, caeci, claudi reparantur, virtutum frequentia. Laudes ergo Dominico personemus mirifico, voce plena: Clama petens suffragia, ejus sequens vestigia plebs egena. Sed tu pater pie, bone, pastor gregis, et patrone, prece semper sedula, Apud curiam summi Regis, derelicti vices gregis commenda per saeculi. Amen.    Alleluia.

Now new canticles ascending, And new strains harmonious blending, ’Mid the hierarchies of heaven: With our earthly choirs according, Join this festival in lauding, To our holy father given. For the welfare of the nations, Called from Egypt’s desolations By their God and Maker, he Was the chosen one and glorious, Passing o’er the wave victorious, In the ark of poverty. Ere his birth, the preacher brother Is prefigured to his mother By a hound with torch of fire; So her son, his torch-light bearing, Midst the nations dark appearing, Leads them on with full desire. He, another Moses, teacheth, And Elias-like he preacheth, Sin denouncing with his might Samson-like his foxes sending, And the foe his trumpet rending, Gedeon-like he put to flight. From death’s sleep a child he waketh Whom alive his mother taketh: When the holy sign he makes, Cease the floods; and bread from heaven For his fainting sons is given Which into their hands he breaks. Happy he, whose elevation, Is our mother’s exa1tation, Is her joy and weal indeed. To his home by saints attended, Hath his soul for aye ascended, Having filled the earth with seed. Like the hidden grain he bideth Like the clouded star he hideth: But the Maker of the spheres, Joseph’s dry bones readorning, Will reveal the star of morning, Till earth’s darkness disappears. O surpassing fragrance, telling Of the virtues of that dwelling, Which within the tomb doth lie! Thither flock the sick for healing, Blind and lame the grace revealing That his body lives for aye. Wherefore now with jubilation Bless and praise him, every nation, Cry aloud, and crave his care: Sing Dominic the glorious, Sing Dominic victorious, Claim his help and promised prayer. And thou, father, kind and loving, Shepherd, patron, unreproving, Kneeling heaven’s high throne before, Lift for us thy voice prevailing, To our King with prayers availing Evermore and evermore. Amen.    Alleluia.

The Finding of St Stephen the First Martyr

Today is the feast of the Finding of St Stephen the First Martyr. This took place in the year 415, when the teacher of St Paul, Gamaliel, who is named twice in the Acts of the Apostles (5, 34-40 and 22, 3) appeared in a vision to a priest of Jerusalem named Lucian, on three successive Fridays, and named the location of the burial. Gamaliel further revealed that he himself had taken charge of Stephen’s body after his martyrdom, and buried him on his property near a village that bore his own name, Caphargamala; and that he himself was later buried in the same place, along with his son Abibas, and Nicodemus, who is mentioned in three places in the Gospel of John. (“Abibas” is the Hellenized form of the name “Habib”, which means “beloved” and is very common in Semitic languages.)

St Stephen Mourned by Gamaliel and Nicodemus. Attributed to the anonymous painter known as Pensionante del Saraceni (active 1610–1625), a follower of the Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni (1579–1620); ca. 1615. Public domain image from the website of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Gamaliel ordered Lucian to tell what he had seen in these visions to John, the bishop of Jerusalem, who then sent Lucian to investigate the site. In due course, the graves were discovered, with inscriptions to confirm the identity of the persons buried therein. John was then attending a synod at Lydda (the place of St George’s martyrdom); on receiving word of the discovery from Lucian, he hastened to the site, attended by two other bishops and a large multitude of people. When the coffin of St Stephen was opened, the ground shook, and “an odor of such sweetness and fragrance came forth therefrom, … that (those present) thought they were in the delight of Paradise”; seventy-three persons were healed of possession and a great variety of physical ailments. The relics were then translated to a church on Mt Sion, which Lucian’s letter, the first source for this story, anachronistically describes as the place “where Stephen was ordained as archdeacon.”

From there, portions of the relics were subsequently sent out to many other places, as attested inter alia by a sermon of St Augustine. “His body lay hidden from (the time of his martyrdom) until these days; but recently appeared, as the bodies of the holy martyrs are wont to appear, by the revelation of God, when it pleased the Creator. And indeed, it was revealed to him who showed these very things when they had been found; for the place was shown beforehand by signs, and the discovery made just as had been told by revelation. Many have received relics from there, because God willed it so, and these have come here.” (Sermon 318, 8) At the end of the 5th century, Gennadius, a priest of Marseille, wrote a continuation of St Jerome’s book On Illustrious Men, in which he states that “Lucian the priest, a holy man, to whom God revealed the place of the burial and the relics of St Stephen the First Martyr, in the time of the Emperors Honorius and Theodosius, wrote down (the story of) the revelation to all the churches, in Greek”, which a Spanish priest named Avitus then translated into Latin. (capp. 46-47; PL 58 1084B).

A reliquary for the hand of St Stephen from the cathedral of Genoa, Italy.

Prior to the Tridentine reform of the Breviary, it was far more common for the lessons of a Saint’s life to occupy all the lesson of Matins, and readings from Scripture on feast days were very rare. Therefore, in the Roman Breviary of 1529, the lessons of August 3rd tell the story as above, with a number of other less important details, in six lessons which occupy the first two nocturns of Matins. In the third nocturn, a homily of St Jerome on the Gospel of the day, Matthew 23, 34-39, is repeated from St Stephen’s main feast day.

In 1568, however, the lessons are reordered according to a pattern which was made universal by the Breviary of St Pius V, in which those of the first nocturn are always Biblical, those of the second are either a Patristic sermon or the life of a Saint, and those of the third a homily on the day’s Gospel. In the case of today’s feast, the lessons of the third nocturn remain the same, while those of the first are repeated from St Stephen’s octave day, Acts 7, 51 – 8, 2, the end of his speech and the account of his death and burial.

The story of the discovery of the relics by Lucian would normally then be compressed into the three lessons of the second nocturn, as was done for countless other Saints. However, they are actually reduced to two lessons, while the sixth is taken from the last book of St Augustine’s City of God.

“When the bishop Projectus was bringing the relics of the most glorious martyr Stephen to the waters of Tibilis, a great concourse of people came to meet him at the shrine. There a blind woman entreated that she might be led to the bishop who was carrying the relics. He gave her the flowers he was carrying. She took them, applied them to her eyes, and immediately saw. Those who were present were astounded, while she, with every expression of joy, preceded them, pursuing her way without further need of a guide. Lucillus (bishop of Sinita), in the neighborhood of the colony Hippo, was carrying in procession some relics of the same martyr, which had been deposited in the castle of Sinita. A fistula under which he had long suffered … was suddenly cured by the mere carrying of that sacred burden.” (De Civ. Dei 22, 8)

These are only two of the many miracles which St Augustine attributes to the relics of St Stephen in this chapter; he goes on to list several others, and more still which took place in the towns of Calama and Uzali, which also had relics of the Saint, miracles of which he had personal knowledge. “I cannot record all the miracles I know; and doubtless several of our adherents, when they read what I have narrated, will regret that I have omitted so many which they, as well as I, certainly know. … I beg these persons to excuse me, and to consider how long it would take me to relate all those miracles … For were I to be silent of all others, and to record exclusively the miracles of healing which were wrought in the district of Calama and of Hippo by … the most glorious Stephen, they would fill many volumes.”

St Augustine, by Giuseppe Antonio Pianca, ca. 1745

As is so often the case (see here, here, and here) the inclusion of this passage in the Breviary is part of the Church’s response to the Protestant reformation. The early reformers frequently claimed to find in the writings of the Church Fathers proof that their novelties were in fact the original teachings of Christ and the Apostles, long obscured by medieval corruptions, and happily restored by themselves. On this score, St Augustine was frequently appealed to especially in matters pertaining to the doctrine of grace; John Calvin famously stated about him “totus noster est – he belongs entirely to us” (a typically gross exaggeration), while Luther himself had been an Augustinian.

It hardly needs to be said that apologists on the Catholic side had an easy rejoinder to this, namely, that the same Church Fathers frequently and enthusiastically taught and practiced things which the reformers themselves rejected. St Jerome, for example, was the only authority to whom they could appeal in support of their rejection of the Deuterocanonical books of the Bible, but he was also a fierce defender of the Papacy, of asceticism, monasticism, celibacy and virginity, all of which made him particularly distasteful to Luther. Likewise, here we see St Augustine, the supposed Protestant doctor of grace, unreservedly promoting not just devotion to the Saints (which many Protestants could accept in some form), but also the importance of relics.

There were, of course, many dubious or manifestly false relics in circulation at the time of the Reformation; it also true that in some places, clerical avarice benefitted greatly from the laity’s devotion by charging them to see or touch the relics kept in churches, a frequent matter of Protestant complaints. True reformers rightly wished to see such abuses put to an end, and the problem was raised and effectively dealt with at the final session of the Council of Trent. But passages such as the one from St Augustine added to the Breviary show the complete rejection of relics on the part of the reformers for what it truly was, a radical break with a universally held tradition, one with roots in the Bible itself, and faithfully passed on by the Fathers.

Folio 113r of the Saint-Sever Apocalypse, a mid-11th century manuscript which contains inter alia the Commentary on the Apocalypse of St Beatus of Liébana (ca. 730-800). This page represents the words of Apocalypse 6, 9-11, “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘How long, O Lord (holy and true) dost thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ And white robes were given to every one of them one; and it was said to them, that they should rest for a little time, till their fellow servants, and their brethren, who are to be slain, even as they, should be filled up.” The golden T in the upper right corner of the picture is the altar (labelled ‘ara aurea - the golden altar’) and the birds beneath it are labelled ‘the souls of the slain.’ In the lower part, the caption reads ‘to these were given white stoles.’ (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Latin 8878)

In another example of its classic liturgical conservatism, the Roman church kept the feast of the Finding of St Stephen with almost the same liturgical texts as his principal feast on December 26th. The lessons of Matins described above are the only proper feature of the Office; the Mass is exactly the same, apart from the change of a single word in the Collect: “Grant us, we beseech thee, O Lord, so to imitate what we revere, that we may learn to love even our enemies; for we celebrate the birth/finding of him who knew how to pray for his very persecutors to our Lord.”

There was however, a completely proper Office for the feast, based on the text of Lucian’s letter, which was used in many other parts of Europe. Here are the three antiphons for the Gospel canticles.

Folio 312v of an antiphonary produced for the abbey of St Maur in France in the last quarter of the 11th century, with the first part of the proper Office of the Finding of St Stephen. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Latin 12584)

Ad Magn. Aña in I Vesp. Ostendit * sanctus Gamaliel per visum Luciano sacerdoti tres calathos aureos rosis refertos, et quartum argenteum croco plenum, et dixit: Hi sunt nostri loculi, et nostræ reliquiæ: hic autem sanguineas habens rosas, loculus est sancti Stephani, qui solus ex nobis martyrio meruit coronari. – The holy Gamaliel showed the priest Lucian in a vision three golden baskets filled with roses, and a fourth of silver, filled with saffron, and said, ‘These are our coffins, and our relics; and this one that hath roses the color of blood is the coffin of Saint Stephen, who alone among us merited to be crowned with martyrdom.” (In the letter, Gamaliel explains that the saffron represents the purity of his son Abibas, who died very young, and that they were buried together, hence there are only three coffins.)

Ad Bened. Ex odoris * mira fragrantia sanitas ægrotis emanavit maxima: septuaginta namque et tres tunc a variis languoribus curati sunt homines in Inventione corporis Stephani dilectissimi Martyris, Deum benedicentes. – From the wondrous fragrance of the smell, very great healing came forth unto the ill; for seventy-three persons were then healed of various ailments at the finding of the body of Stephen, the most beloved martyr, as they blessed God.

Ad Magn. in II Vesp. Hodie * Joannes Pontifex cum maximo cleri plebisque tripudio, pretiosas Protomartyris Stephani reliquias in sanctam transtulit ecclesiam Sion, ubi quondam Archidiaconi functus est officio: cujus pia apud Deum sit pro nobis, quæsumus, intercessio. – Today, bishop John, with very great rejoicing of the clergy and people, translated the precious relics of the First Martyr Stephen to the holy church of Zion, where once he fulfilled the office of archdeacon; and we ask that his holy intercession may stand for before God.

St Alphonsus on the Need for Reverence in the Liturgy

When he was appointed bishop of the small town of St Agata dei Goti in 1762, St Alphonsus de’ Liguori (OF feast day August 1, EF August 2) began his episcopal ministry by sending missioners out to every corner of diocese. He “recommended two things only to these missioners, simplicity in the pulpit, charity in the confessional, and after hearing one of the priests neglect his advice he said to him, ‘Your sermon kept me awake all night... If you wanted to preach only yourself, rather than Jesus Christ, why come all the way from Naples to Ariola to do it?’

At the same time he set about a reform of the seminary, and of the careless way that benefices were granted. Some priests were in the habit of saying Mass in fifteen minutes or less; these were suspended ipso facto until they amended their ways, and the bishop wrote a moving treatise on the subject: ‘ “The priest at the altar”, says St Cyprian, “represents the person of Jesus Christ.” But whom do so many priests today represent? They represent only mountebanks earning their livelihood by their antics. Most lamentable of all is it to see religious, and some even of reformed orders, say Mass with such haste and such mutilation of the rite as would scandalize even the heathen... Truly the sight of Mass celebrated in this way is enough to make one lose the faith.’ ” (Butler’s Lives of the Saints, revised by Herbert Thurston S.J. and Donald Attwater, 1956)

St Alphonsus Kneeling Before the Blessed Sacrament; stained glass window in Carlow Cathedral, Ireland. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0)