A Great Interview on Medieval Catholic England

Our readers will certainly enjoy this fascinating interview recently given by Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson of Cambridge University on the podcast of the Catholic Truth Society in England, hosted by the CTS’s CEO and publisher, Pierpaolo Finaldi. The interview ranges over a wide variety of topics, but the part that I found especially interesting is where Dr Johnson talks about the relationship between monasteries and their tenants farmers in medieval England, and how the medieval worldview affected all kinds of things, from cartography to the use of apple orchards. (This starts from her new book Vanishing Landscapes, which examines how our relationship to plants has disappeared over the centuries, and what we have lost as a result.) In the last 20 minutes, the topic turns to the Catholic literary revival of the interwar period, and the particularly important role of women in it.

Obrecht’s Mass of St Donatianus

The Martyrology notes today as the feast of a Saint called Donatianus (‘Donatien’ or ‘Donat’ in French, ‘Donatiaan’ or ‘Donaas’ in Dutch), who served as the seventh or eighth bishop of Reims in France from roughly 360-90. Alban Butler’s original Lives of the Saints has no information to offer about him, other than a mention of the translation of his relics to Bruges in 863. (In the revised modern edition, he is not included at all.) There he was adopted as the local patron Saint, and a large collegiate church was dedicated to him. When Bruges became the seat of a bishopric in 1562, this church was made the cathedral, but it was destroyed when the city was overrun by the French revolutionary army; in France itself, the church from which he was translated, the royal abbey of St Nicasius outside Reims, was also destroyed.

The Madonna with Ss Donatianus and George, and Canon Joris van der Paele, ca. 1435, by Jan van Eyck. (Joris is Dutch for George.) Donatianus’ instrument, in addition to his mitre and crozier, is a wheel with five candles on it; this comes from a legend that he was thrown into the Tiber while visiting Rome, but saved from drowning by the pope, who threw him a wooden carriage wheel which he was able to use as a flotation device. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons; click to see in high resolution. The painting has its own article on Wikipedia, which offers a lot of interesting detail about its history.)

The cathedral of St Donatianus in Bruges in 1641 (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The royal abbey of St Nicasius of Reims. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In the later 15th century, there lived in Bruges a very successful and wealthy fur merchant named Donaas de Moor, who was active in civic life, and, along with his wife Adriane de Vos, a magnificently generous benefactor to the poor; he was dean of the fur traders’ guild, and by turns alderman, mayor and treasurer of the city, as well as a guardian of a pilgrim hospice, and founder of an almshouse. The couple were equally generous to their parish, the church of St James the Apostle, to which they donated the altarpiece of the high altar and the choir stalls, and maintained a chantry chapel behind the high altar, dedicated to their name Saints.

Triptych of the Deposition from the Cross, ca. 1475, by the anonymous Netherlandish painter known as the Master of the St Lucy Legend. This was commissioned for the altar of the de Moors’ chantry; on the side panels, Donaas de Moor and Adriane de Vos are shown kneeling with their respective name Saints behind them. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The de Moor almshouses in Bruges. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Marc Ryckaert, CC BY-SA 4.0.

However, in May of 1483, Donaas de Moor was exiled from Bruges for political reasons; he retired to a country estate, and died only four months later. In his will, he left provision for the creation of a Mass in honor of his Patron Saint, which was then commissioned from the Flemish composer Jacob Obrecht (1457-1505), and sung for the first time in the church of St James on the Saint’s feast day in 1487.

Here is a splendid recording of a concert performance of the Mass done by the Tallis Scholars in that very same church in 2018; the video also gives a decent tour of the building.

There Was No “Original Liturgical War”: A Response to Dmitri Solzhenitsyn

Communion of the Apostles

The following article was published at Crisis Magazine on October 7, 2026, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor Eric Sammons.

In an article published at The Catholic Thing on September 18, 2026, Dmitri Solzhenitsyn endeavors to summarize for readers what he calls “The Original ‘Liturgy Wars’: Between East and West.” His basic argument is that wars over liturgy are nothing new—in fact, the first battlefield was between East and West, inasmuch as the Western church slowly drifted away from the original template still preserved to this day in the Eastern churches. The way he tells the story makes it almost sound plausible.

The argument he puts forth rests on an underlying double premise: first, there was a primitive common liturgical repository from which all the different traditions differently evolved; second, this repository was Greek or Byzantine.

However, no serious liturgical scholar holds either of these positions any more.

As to the first, Paul Bradshaw and others have demontrated that the opposite is true: at the beginning there seems to be considerable diversity, and over time there tends to be convergence and assimilation, as different rites either borrow from each other or replace one another. Ritual practice tends to assimilate itself to that of the great Sees (see Gregory DiPippo’s discussion of this trend in his lecture “Unity in Diversity”). In the West, that great See would, of course, be Rome; in the East, it would not be Byzantium initially, but Jerusalem and Antioch, with Constantinople acquiring dominance after the seventh century.

Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that we have a well-documented commonality between Old Rome and New Rome in liturgical matters, from which one of them (namely Old Rome) diverged; thus, he writes: “All of this established the Roman rite as distinct from the Byzantine,” as if they had begun aligned and then diverged. That is not the case; there is no evidence whatsoever for it. After all, if “by the end of the seventh century, East and West had diverging prayers, hymns, cadences, and even iconography,” what are we to make of the “diverging prayers” etc. within the East itself—since Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Byzantium all prayed differently? The notion that the Byzantine liturgy has a normative antiquity or a peculiar fidelity to apostolic origins is an assumption without foundation.

That brings me to the second premise. Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that “the East” means or is equivalent to Byzantine or Constantinopolitan. Not only does it not mean this, but in the earliest period of Christian liturgy Byzantium is very much less important than Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, whose traditions are older and were more influential for a time. Armenia and Georgia had already adopted the liturgy of Jerusalem at the time when Byzantium/Constantinople/New Rome was first declared a patriarchate. Those older rites already wielded considerable prestige. And yet, we see—as could be expected—a great diversity and vitality of different traditions. The paucity of information and the diversity of traditions in the early centuries make it singularly difficult to pin down where something first occurred, or who influenced whom.

Solzhenitsyn claims: “During the later 300s the Greek liturgy was uniquely refined: garments like the sticharion (a kind of long tunic), hymnography like the short troparia, and sophisticated vessels were a much more prominent feature of Byzantine rites than of the simpler Latin rites.”

By “the Greek liturgy,” presumably he means “the Byzantine.” The problem with such sweeping claims is that we know little to nothing about the Byzantine liturgy of the fourth century. There is precious little documentation of it or citation from it available. There is, for example, no equivalent to St. Ambrose of Milan’s citation of the Roman Canon in the De Sacramentis, written around 387, which strongly points to the Roman Canon already being a familiar anaphora by that time.

The claim about the sticharion cannot be substantiated and is anachronistic. It is well known that clerical attire in the early centuries had not yet evolved into a distinct type of clothing set apart from secular clothing; rather, the clergy wore the best garments available when performing the rites, and due to the innate conservatism of the religious instinct, the sacristy wardrobe remained fixed in style while secular clothing changed out in the world. In any case, it was not long before Western vestments displayed the same stunning beauty as their contemporaneous Eastern counterparts.

Hymns such as the troparia had indeed already emerged as a literary genre by the late 300s, when Byzantium was still a suffragan of Herakleia, not a patriarchate. The Latin hymns of St. Ambrose, long admired for their mellifluous poetry and lofty theological conceptions, were written at just the same time, and soon entered the Western liturgy.

As for “sophisticated vessels,” it is rather difficult to understand what the phrase even means. As soon as we have records of liturgical vessels in the West, we see they are ornate and valuable, which is why the pagan Romans tried to steal them. For example, the Gesta apud Zenophilum/Acta purgationis Felicis, centered on the church at Cirta in North Africa and dated to 303, records an inventory of items taken in a raid, including 2 gold chalices, 6 silver chalices, 6 silver cruets, a small silver basin, 2 large chandeliers, 7 small bronze lamps and their holders, 11 bronze lamps with chains, 38 curtains, substantial quantities of clothing, a silver chest, and a lamp that had been concealed in the library.

The gravest error in Solzhenitsyn’s article is his reporting, with approval, the opinion of some Eastern sources that the Roman liturgy originally had a “descending” epiklesis—that is, an invocation of the Holy Spirit to bring about the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ—that had somehow dropped out of or been removed from the Roman rite. He cites (approvingly?) Orthodox patriarchs who in 1848 accused the Roman Church of “rejecting” from the Canon “the very ancient and Apostolic invocation of the Consecrating Spirit” and thus “miserably mutilating the Sacrifice in its most essential part.” (A less extreme exponent of the view that the Roman Rite once had this kind of epiklesis would be Adrian Fortescue, the inaccuracy of whose views has been discussed elsewhere.)

In reality, the Roman rite never had such an epiklesis because its unique anaphora predates the Macedonian controversy over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which afflicted only the East and is the reason why the Byzantine rite inserted an epiklesis that the Roman rite never needed. The Roman theology of consecation is different, and, tellingly, older. If anything, it is the Byzantine epiklesis, as a later insertion, that requires explanation. (I will not enter here into the Roman rite’s “ascending” epiklesis, the Supplices te rogamus, which is not relevant to the point at hand, nor into the Veni, Sanctificator prayer of the Offertory, which alludes to the Holy Spirit but does not have the function of an epiklesis as we are now discussing it.)

Continuing his brief for Latin deviation from or corruption of a putatively pure and uniform “Greek” original, Solzhenitsyn claims that leavened bread was used by everyone from the beginning but the West drifted later on into the practice of unleavened bread, and, similarly, that the marriage of priests was normative but the West later enforced clerical celibacy. He seems unaware that a long history of scholarly debate exists on these questions.

On the topic of the type of bread used, our information is too scant to permit a determination of when unleavened bread began to be used in the West. The West may have used unleavened bread in imitation of what Christ did at the Passover; for all we know, both types may have been in use at the same time in different places. The fact that we know unleavened bread to be widespread by the Carolingian period does not mean it was invented in that period. On the topic of celibacy, Solzhenitsyn oversimplifies the historical record. For a different telling of the history, I recommend Alphonso Stickler’s The Case for Clerical Celibacy: Its Historical Development and Theological Foundations, Christian Cochini’s Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, and the first chapter of Gary Selin’s Priestly Celibacy: Theological Foundations.

Sadly, it would appear that Solzhenitsyn has permitted himself to be formed and persuaded by classic tropes of Eastern Orthodox apologetics, which tend to grant a fictitious primacy to the Byzantine East, instead of taking seriously the far more complex and diversified picture that scholarship paints of the early Christian centuries. Moreover, Eastern writers in general neglect to pay attention to the historical evidence of slow organic development within their own liturgical (and theological) tradition. The “Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,” whatever connections it had with the saint after whom it is named, took many centuries to develop to its present completed state; it did not descend fully formed from the heavenly Jerusalem.

I would not wish to be seen as solely negative. The article’s strongest point is its near-admission that the modern rite of Paul VI or Novus Ordo marks an unprecedented rupture from both the Roman tradition itself and from the entire world of historic apostolic rites, both Eastern and Western—a claim I defend at length in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite (2022), a portion of which is available in the article “The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo—Two Brothers and a Stranger.” The melancholy words of Cleenewerck would be difficult to dispute: “The liturgical metamorphosis of the Roman Catholic Church... widened the gulf” between East and West.

Latin for Musicians Class with Veterum Sapientia Institute - Starting Next Week!

Join me online starting next Tuesday for the first part of a course offered by Veterum Sapientia Institute called “Latin for Musicians”. This course is designed especially for those who want to deepen their knowledge and appreciation of the Catholic Church’s sacred music, and will introduce the Latin grammar and vocabulary needed to understand the texts of the our musical patrimony. Students will study texts from the Vulgate, the Mass, and the Divine Office, with examples drawn from Gregorian chant and polyphony. By the end of the three-part course, students will be equipped to understand a substantial portion of the chant and polyphonic repertoire with the help of a dictionary.

Apply and register here: https://veterumsapientia.org/courses/

PLEASE NOTE: VSI’s Latin for Musicians (part 1) is a 10-week course that will run in two 5 week installments, from October 20th - November 17th, and from January 12th - February 9th. The class will be held on Tuesdays at 7:00 PM Eastern time.

On Gothic Art, Part 2

Late Gothic masters, the threshold of the Renaissance, and the birth of secular art

Last week I introduced the Gothic tradition: its historical origins in the cultural shifts of the 12th century, its theological character as the art of those on pilgrimage between the fallen world and heaven, and its visual characteristics as illustrated in works by Duccio, Lorenzetti, and Matthew Paris. This week I turn to the later Gothic masters, the point at which the style begins its transition into something new, and the new art forms that the Gothic spirit made possible.

Late Gothic: Van der Weyden 

The Descent from the Cross by Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, 1435, is a late Gothic work in which the degree of naturalism is substantially higher.

Because the Italian Renaissance was already underway at this time, albeit in its early stages, some classify this style as ‘Northern Renaissance.’ To my eye, however, this remains an essentially Gothic painting. The figures still occupy the middle distance, giving us a sense of emotional distance between the observer and the scene and positioning us as detached witnesses. That quality of detachment, inherited from the iconographic tradition, is the mark of Gothic art even at its most naturalistic.

Fra Angelico

Annunciation, Cell 3, Convent of San Marco, Florence, c. 1440-45

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar from Fiesole, near Florence. He was aware of the changes in art occurring around him, but retained much of the Gothic spirit of his northern contemporaries, such as Van Eyck and Van der Weyden. He was willing to incorporate the new device of single-point perspective into his work, but used it sparingly and selectively, depending on the subject matter. I would still place him at the more naturalistic end of the Gothic spectrum rather than as a Renaissance artist, because his figures show no strong influence of classical Greek sculpture. For me, this is still the art of pilgrimage, of the baptized on their journey to heaven.

The Threshold of the Renaissance: Ghirlandaio

A Madonna and Child from around 1470-75 by Domenico Ghirlandaio illustrates precisely where Gothic art ends and something new begins.

Ghirlandaio has placed his figures within a flat architectural surrounding, as an iconographer or Gothic artist might, but the figures themselves are in a very different style. Their roundedness of form, so unlike Fra Angelico or Van der Weyden, is derived from his study of classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Suddenly, this is more connected and anticipates the styles of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, who followed him, than to the Gothic artists who preceded him. The figures seem ill at ease in the flat background he has given them. The medium, egg tempera, gives the image a natural flatness suited to iconography, but it sits at odds with the strongly three-dimensional character of the figures. This inherent tension between the flatness of the medium and the three-dimensional ambitions of the figures is precisely why it is so appropriate that artists of the period moved from egg tempera to oil, and began to place figures in settings that enhanced the illusion of depth. Leonardo, whose manner of representing the figure was not dissimilar to Ghirlandaio’s, used not egg tempera but multiple oil glazes that created a sense of plunging depth and space around the figure.

The Development of Sculpture

Sculpture is not forbidden in Eastern and Byzantine Rite churches, but it is rarely seen. This is because the iconographic style is essentially two-dimensional. The iconographer is deliberately seeking to eliminate as far as possible any strong sense of three-dimensional form or depth. Where carvings do appear, they are generally relief sculptures in which the artist cuts into the surface to create a shadow pattern, the form described by the contrast between lit portions and dark shadows. The result remains far closer to a flat image than to fully three-dimensional sculpture.

Anonymous artist, Byzantine Empire, pre-1453. Relief carving of the Nativity in the iconographic style

Because the Gothic style allows for greater depth and more rounded forms than the iconographic style, it was natural that sculptors began to push outward from the surface. What began as deeper relief carving gradually became, over time, figures that stand free in three-dimensional space. The sculptures shown below, from Reims Cathedral in France, date from the 13th century. They are fully three-dimensional but still attached to the architectural surface; they have not yet escaped entirely to become figures one can walk around, as one might with a 15th-century sculpture. They depict the Annunciation on the left and the Visitation on the right.

The New Secular Art: Portraits and Landscapes

The greater interest in the natural world and the desire to see God reflected in the ordinary things of Creation also led to the development of portraiture and, to a lesser extent, landscape as distinct art forms. Some of what drove this was undoubtedly the vanity of those who now had the means to commission art, but there is also a holy and legitimate interest in the human person as a unique creation of God. This portrait of a man in a turban by Jan van Eyck (believed by some to be a self-portrait) was painted in 1433.

Stylistically, this portrait draws on the same visual language as the sacred art of the time, demonstrating a principle that runs throughout my writing: great art movements begin on the altar. The traditions formed in the service of the liturgy do not stay there; they flow outward into every aspect of the culture.

There is a way of understanding this that goes beyond the merely stylistic. In an earlier post, I described the mandorla, the almond-shaped halo of light that surrounds Christ in icons of the Transfiguration. Its concentric rings represent, for me, the light of Christ reflected outward into the cosmos and human culture. A well-painted landscape, a sensitively observed portrait, a beautifully designed domestic object: all of these, when they participate in the tradition of beauty formed by the liturgy, become outer rings of that mandorla, reflecting something of the light of Christ into every corner of ordinary life. That is what Gothic art, at its best, achieved; and it is why the secular art that grew from it, for all that its subjects were not religious, remained in a deep sense sacred in spirit.

The Basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe

My thanks to a friend for sharing with us these pictures which he took during a recent visit to one of best preserved paleo-Christian churches in Italy, the basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe, the ancient port of the city Ravenna. (In antiquity, Classe was directly on the sea, and important center for both commerce and the navy, but due to the silting-up of the Adriatic coast, it is now more than 5½ miles inland.) From the mid-6th to mid-8th century, Ravenna was the seat of the Byzantine governors of Italy, known as the Exarchs of Ravenna; several Christian monuments survive from this period, including two churches dedicated to St Apollinaris, an early bishop of the city traditionally said to have been a disciple of St Peter. The one here in Classe is the older of these two, originally built by a bishop named Ursicinus, who ruled from 532-36, and destined to be the burial place for the city’s bishops.

The narthex was added to the original brick façade in the 9th century, contemporary with the bell-tower shown below.

As in many early Byzantine churches, there are two small sacristies, one on either side of the apse, called  “pastophoria”, a term which occurs in 1 Macc. 4, 38 and 57.

The circular bell-tower, which stands at over 124 feet, was also built in the 9th-century. Notice how the window space increases as it rises, which decreases the weight of each stage, making the structure seem even taller and lighter than it really is.  

The mosaic in the apse is one of the best preserved examples of early Byzantine work in Italy, dating to the same period as the founding of the church. St Apollinaris is represented in the lower middle, wearing a stole and with his hands raised in prayer. At the very top, Christ Himself is shown, as He is in many early Christian images, with six sheep to either side of Him, emerging from the holy cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. These represent the twelve Apostles, of course, and the representation of Apollinaris in similar company is probably intended to remind the viewer of his close connection to the Apostolic era, and therefore also of the antiquity of the see of Ravenna.

In the lower band are shown (left to right): the Archangel Michael and the Apostle Matthew; the Roman Emperor Constantine IV with the clergy of Ravenna; four bishops of Ravenna; Abel, Melchisedek and Abraham (in a single panel, a reference to the mention of them in the Supra quae propitio of the Canon); St Gabriel and another, unidentified Saint.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Prayers for Pope Leo

As I am sure all of our readers have heard by now, during the Angelus in St Peter’s square yesterday, Pope Leo stated that his doctors had discovered a nodule in one of his lungs, “localized, and detected at a very early stage”, and that he will shortly undergo a surgical procedure to remove it.

We encourage everyone to pray for the success of this operation, and a swift recovery for the Holy Father. Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Carlo Acutis, one of the two Saints canonized by Pope Leo at his first canonization, the other being Pier Giorgio Frassati. St Carlo died of cancer, and St Pier Giorgio of polio, which frequently afflicts the lungs; it would be especially appropriate to invoke their intercession on his behalf.

And once again, we share this image from Pax inter Spinas, the printing house of the Monastère Saint-Benoît in Brignole, France, which contains the traditional prayers for the Pope said at Benediction and other occasions, including the invocation, “May the Lord preserve him and grant him long life.”

The Feast of the Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council

In the Byzantine tradition, today is the commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second held in the city of Nicaea, at which the Iconoclast heresy was condemned, and the sacred images restored to their rightful places for the veneration of the Christian faithful. The definitive decree on the veneration of images was promulgated at the seventh session of Second Nicaea, on October 13, 787; the commemoration is fixed according to various traditions to a Sunday close to that date. Some years ago, I heard a sermon at a Byzantine liturgy on this day which recalled an important truth about this council, namely, that it did not decree that sacred images are merely good and useful, but that they are necessary!

The rejection of the sacred images, particularly those of Christ, is ultimately a denial of the Incarnation. The very choice of location for the council expressed this idea; at the time it was called, the two previous ecumenical councils and the important synod ‘in Trullo’ had all been held in Constantinople. The Empress Irene, who as regent of her young son Constantine VI, arranged for a council to condemn iconoclasm, had tried to hold it in the imperial capital, but it was broken up by soldiers friendly to the heresy. It was therefore moved to Nicaea, where the first ecumenical council had gathered 462 years earlier to condemn the Arian heresy that denied the true divinity of Christ. (To put this in chronological perspective, this is a greater distance in time than that between Trent and Vatican II.)

The refusal to depict Christ is a rejection of the fullness of His humanity, which is real, solid, and “circumscribed”, i.e., subject to limitations, and therefore capable of being expressed in an image. His humanity is the means of our redemption and salvation, as we confess in the Creed every Sunday, “For us men and for our salvation He came down from Heaven, etc.” In the eighth and final session, the Council therefore also anathematized all who do not confess that “Christ our God is circumscribed according to His humanity.” The Greek word used here, “perigrapton – circumscribed”, is related to the verb “graphein – to write”, the term which is often used in Greek to refer to the painting of icons. None of this is accidental.

The famous icon of Christ the Pantocrator from the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt Sinai, 6th century. The collection of icon at St. Catherine’s is particularly important, since it contains a large number of pieces that predate the iconoclast persecutions.

The liturgical texts proper to this commemoration make the point in a very interesting way. At Second Nicaea, the Patriarchs of Constantinople who had supported the iconoclast heresy were all condemned by name. However, they are not referred to in the liturgy, nor are the iconoclast emperors Leo the Isaurian, the real inventor and motivator of the heresy, and his two successors, Constantine V and Leo IV. (The traditional nickname of the second of these, “Copronymus”, means “dung-named” in Greek, a reference to what would now be called a diaper accident that occurred at his baptism; this was taken by those who honored the sacred images as a presage of his impiety. It occurs repeatedly in the Roman Martyrology, in reference to the many Saints killed or otherwise persecuted by him for the sake of the sacred images.)

It would be easy, but unjust, to see in this omission nothing more than an unwillingness to offend the offices of the Emperor and Patriarch. The greater truth taught by the Council, and by the Byzantine liturgy, is that the refusal of sacred images is a refusal of the Incarnation. To this point, therefore, the earlier Christological heretics are named repeatedly in the liturgy of the day, as in these texts from Vespers (bold texts are my emphases).

As true shepherds you bravely drove away those who are like Macedonius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Dioscorus, Apollinaris, Sabellius and Severus (of Antioch), exposed as dangerous wolves in sheepskins, far from the Savior’s flock, stripped of their fleeces, making them thrice-wretched; therefore we call you blessed.

Let us praise today the mystical trumpets of the Spirit, the God-bearing Fathers, who sang a harmonious melody of theology in the midst of the Church, to the one Trinity, unchanging Essence and Godhead; the overthrowers of Arius, the champions of the Orthodox, who intercede with the Lord that He may have mercy on our souls.

Holy Fathers, you have become sure guardians of the Apostolic traditions; for by teaching the orthodox doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity, you overthrew in council the blasphemy of Arius. With him you refuted Macedonius, the opponent of the Spirit, and condemned Nestorius, Eutyches and Dioscorus, Sabellius and Severus the Leaderless. We implore you: beg that we who have been delivered from their error may preserve our life spotless in the faith.

The following text, sung between the first and second parts of the doxology at the Aposticha, is particularly noteworthy. One might easily assume it was a part of the commemoration of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council on the Sunday after the Ascension, rather than that of today, again underlining the intrinsic connection between iconoclasm and Arianism, and between veneration of the images and the Incarnation. (A friend of mine who is a great scholar of the Byzantine liturgy tells me that this hymn may very well have been composed for the commemoration of the Fathers of First Nicaea, and later added to this feast.)

Let us with faith celebrate today the yearly commemoration of the God-bearing Fathers, who were assembled from the whole world in the radiant city of Nicaea, as we reverence the gatherings of the orthodox; for they, their minds attuned to true religion, overthrew the godless teaching of Arius, and in council banished him from the Catholic Church; and in the symbol of faith, which they precisely and devoutly laid down, they taught all to confess clearly the Son of God as consubstantial and co-eternal, and existing before the ages. And so we too, following their divine teachings and firm in our belief, worship the Son and the all-holy Spirit with the Father, in one Godhead, a consubstantial Trinity.

A 19th-century icon of the Fathers of the First Seven Ecumenical Councils. The Byzantine liturgy contains several such commemorations: of the fathers at First Nicaea, at Ephesus, at Second Nicaea, at the Seven Councils collectively.

Although Iconoclasm was definitively condemned at Second Nicaea, it was revived in the early 9th century for almost thirty years under the emperors Leo V (813-20), Michael II (820-29) and Theophilus (829-42). Shortly after Theophilus’ son Michael III, (the bearer of another unfortunate nickname, “the Drunkard”), came to the throne as a child of two, his mother and regent Theodora arranged for the definitive restoration of the icons at a synod in Constantinople. (Theodora is venerated as a saint in the Byzantine Rite.)

St. Theodora, Empress of Byzantium, in a 19th-century Greek icon.

The liturgical expression of this final victory is the celebration of the first Sunday of Lent as the “Feast of Orthodoxy.” On that day, the Byzantine liturgy reads a text known as the “Synodikon of Orthodoxy”, a collection of the anathemas of the first seven ecumenical councils. The text has been much altered and added to over the years, but the first rubric in one of the oldest manuscripts describes it thus: “A yearly thanksgiving is due to God on account of that day when we recovered the Church of God, with the demonstration of the dogmas of true religion and the overthrowing of the blasphemies of wickedness.”

The final eight anathemas are dedicated to the iconoclasts, (and the iconoclast patriarchs are named explicitly.) The first one says,

On those who accept with their reason the incarnate economy of God the Word, but will not allow that this can be beheld through images, and therefore affect to receive our salvation in words, but deny it in reality: Anathema!

And the second:

On those who wickedly make play with the word ‘uncircumscribed’ and therefore refuse to depict in images Christ, our true God, who likewise shared our flesh and blood, and therefore show themselves to be fantasiasts: Anathema!

Dr. Kwasniewski’s Lectures in Netherlands, Belgium, and England, Oct. 24-31

I will be giving the following four lectures in Europe between Oct. 24 and Oct. 31, and hope to meet NLM readers at the events. Please come up and introduce yourself!

“The Thomistic Virtue of Religion: From Sacred Order to Mystical Union”
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Nijmegen, Netherlands

Filosofie & Geloof (Philosophy & Faith) Study Day, 9:30am to 7pm
Symposium on Ethics and the Human Relationship with God
Location: Pelgrimshuis Casa Nova
Pastoor Rabouplein 5
6564 BP Heilig Landstichting

(Please register here by October 18; Holy Mass in the Vetus Ordo will be offered at the start of the day)

“Living the Liturgy as the Font and Apex of Catholic Life”
Sunday, October 25 (Feast of Christ the King)
Brussels, Belgium

Location: Het Oude Klooster Maleizen (Servi Jesu et Mariae)
Terhulpensesteenweg 708
3090 Overijse
Time: 3pm

(Free and open to the public; will be followed by Q&A and booksigning)

“Why Christ Is King of Family and Society – and How We Embrace His Reign”
Tuesday, October 27
Brussels

Location: Het Oude Klooster Maleizen
Terhulpensesteenweg 708
3090 Overijse, BE
Time: 7:30pm*

(*N.B.: Free, but open to men only, as it is being sponsored by and for a men’s group; register by contacting W.jambon@gmail.com)

“The Heavenly Model of the Earthly City”
Saturday, October 31
London, UK

Symposium on Catholic Social Teaching:
The Church’s Remedy for Modernity
Location: Cabrini Community Campus,
Honor Oak, London, SE23 3LE
Time: 2pm to 6pm

Featuring a second lecture by Dr. Sebastian Morello, a panel discussion with Os Justi Press authors, and a public Q&A followed by multi-author booksigning.

Free and open to the public, but the organizers ask you to RSVP here.

St John Henry Newman’s Church in Oxford

To celebrate the feast day of St John Henry Newman, here are some pictures I took of the famous university church of Oxford, St Mary’s, while I was there in August of 2019. St John Henry was appointed vicar of this church in 1828, and became very popular as a preacher; it was also here that John Keeble, on July 14, 1833, preached the famous sermon titled “National Apostasy”, an event which Newman himself considered to be the formal beginning of the Oxford Movement. There was a church on this site before the Norman Conquest, which became the university’s very first building, used for lectures, for the meeting of senior members known as “congregation”, and for the awarding of degrees; however, only one part of the building as we see it today dates from the 13th century, its very beautiful spire, constructed in 1270, with pinnacles added ca. 1320.

The side of the church on High Street has a Baroque porch added in 1637 by Nicholas Stone, the master-mason of King Charles I; the twisted columns to either side of the door were clearly designed in reference to the ancient columns of similar design at St Peter’s in Rome. Four years earlier, Gian Lorenzo Bernini had just finished the magnificent bronze canopy over the main altar of St Peter’s, which copies the same ancient model. During the trial of William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1641, which would lead to his execution under the Puritans, this portico with its statue of the Virgin Mary was adduced as evidence of his “Popish” leanings; bullet holes made by Cromwell’s soldiers can still be seen in the statue.

The nave of the church, seen here from the loft at the back of the building, was completely rebuilt in 1510. There was a rood screen that separated the chancel from the nave, which was taken out at the Reformation; the current one, which is much smaller, was installed in 1827. The organ mounted on it is modern, from 1986.

The chancel was completely remodeled in 1453, and is obviously now much less decorated than it would have been originally. The stalls, however, are originals of the late 15th century; the altarpiece of the Virgin and Child is by the Venetian painter Francesco Bassano the Younger.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Priest’s Final Prayers before Holy Communion, Part 3

Lost in Translation #171

After finishing the Perceptio Corporis tui, the priest prays:

Panem caelestem accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo.

Which I translate as:

I will take the heavenly Bread, and I will call upon the name of the Lord.

This declaration is an adaptation of Psalm 115, 13 (see below), with “heavenly Bread” replacing “the Chalice of salvation.” And “heavenly bread” (panis caelestis) is an adaptation of two biblical expressions for manna, “bread from heaven” (panis de caelo) [1] and “bread of heaven” (panis caeli). [2] In John 6, 23, our Lord calls Himself Panis de caelo. There is an affirmation of the doctrine of the Real Presence implied here.

Each time he receives the Eucharist under a different species, the priest calls upon the name of the Lord, which is a powerful biblical practice. The first person who explicitly “began to call upon the name of the Lord” is Seth’s son Enos. (Gen. 4, 26) God, we know, is more pleased with Seth and his line than with Cain and his, for God chooses a descendent of Seth to live (Noah), while all of Cain’s descendants are destroyed by the Flood. Calling upon the name of the Lord is a mark of genuine devotion: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God.” (Psalm 19, 8) The prophet Joel predicts: “And it shall come to pass, that every one that shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (2, 32), a prophecy that Saint Peter cites in his first sermon. (Acts 2, 21) The priest (and so we do we the faithful) align ourselves, albeit with fear and trembling, with the good guys rather than the spawn of Cain.

As in other parts of the Mass, the priest’s words and actions reflect each other. The priest has just said that he will take the Heavenly Bread, and now he takes the Host in his left hand as he looks at it devoutly and says three times:

Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.

Which I translate as:

Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.

The prayer is almost verbatim that of the Roman centurion who asks Jesus to cure His servant. When Jesus offers to go and heal the servant, the centurion – knowing that according to the Mosaic Law entering a gentile’s house would render Jesus ritually unclean – declares his faith in Jesus’ authority over sickness and health even from a safe and clean distance. But before that, the centurion confesses his own unworthiness:

And the centurion making answer, said: “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof: but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed.” (Matt. 8, 8)

The use of this prayer before Holy Communion is ingenious, for by placing the prayer here, the “roof” (tectum) changes meaning from the top of one’s house to the top of one’s mouth. Such is an example of what we have been calling “spiritual eructation.”

The prayer balances personal unworthiness and trust in God. No one, not even a priest, is worthy to put the living God beneath one’s palate, but we are also commanded to do this in memory of Him. The prayer thus continues the delicate and paradoxical dance in the Mass about our unworthiness to participate in it and yet our persistence in doing so.

The priest says each “Lord, I am not worthy” aloud, as if to emphasize the point with a public confession. He also strikes his breast with his right hand each time he says these words, the same gesture that the Publican makes in the Parable, at the words: “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” (Lk. 18, 13). The Domine non sum dignus can therefore be characterized as a combination of two important Gospel passages.

And a sidenote: While the Roman Rite thinks of the Roman centurion before communing with the Eucharistic Lord, the Byzantine Rite thinks of the Good Thief crucified along with Our Lord. Its Prayer before Holy Communion is:

Remember me, O Lord, when You shall come into Your kingdom. Remember me, O Master, when You shall come into Your kingdom. Remember me, O Holy One, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

It is meet and just that the faithful approach the consumption of the living God with fear and trembling, and it is appropriate that they do so by following a particular model of spirituality. The Roman Rite chooses one model, the Byzantine Rite another. Glory be to God for both.

Returning to the Roman Rite, immediately before consuming the Host, the priest says:

Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam. Amen.

Which I translate as:

May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ watch over my soul unto life everlasting. Amen.

The most common translation of custodiat in preconciliar hand Missals is “preserve,” which is also accurate. My only hesitation about this choice is that it may give the impression that the soul is being preserved in a static way, like jam in a hermetically sealed jar. Custodio means to guard or protect. Instead of wanting us to be like a preservative that has a “long life” because it does not develop or decay, the prayer asks for God to protect us from the bad so that we may grow in the good and live more fully. The 2011 ICEL translation, it seems to me, plays it safe and falls somewhere in between a static and a dynamic interpretation:

May the Body of Christ

keep me safe for eternal life.

The priest prepares to receive the Precious Blood by reciting Psalm 115, 12-13 and Psalm 17, 4:

Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quæ retribuit mihi? Calicem salutaris accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo.

Laudans invocabo Dominum, et ab inimicis meis salvus ero.

Which the Douay Rheims translates as:

What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things he hath rendered unto me? I will take the Chalice of salvation; and I will call upon the name of the Lord.

Praising I will call upon the Lord: and I shall be saved from my enemies.

It is possible that author is making a morning drink-offering in the Temple (see Numbers 28, 7) and that the author is therefore offering thanks for having been delivered from something. Hence Jungmann writes:

In the Psalm the singer speaks out his resolve to make a thank-offering for his delivery from a great peril and in so doing (as was probably part of the ritual of a thank-offering) to raise the cup to praise God. [3]

But since the present circumstances are quite different, we see in this repurposing of these Psalm verses another act of spiritual eructation:

Here, the cup which we intend to pick up itself contains the Welfare and therefore the reason for thanksgiving, and next to the cup lies the Bread from Heaven. At this moment both of them are not so much gifts we offer up to God but instead that sacred repast to which we are now invited. And since we eat of this meal, it behooves us, as it behooved the psalmist, to praise the Lord because, as His guests at table, we are delivered from every earthly peril. [4]

The Vulgate (and the Missal) use the Latin retribuo for the Hebrew (shub: to return, turn back, restore, repent) over other Latin options such as reddo or redeo. Retribuo can mean to hand back money duly owed or to recompense someone. It is not without reason that our term “retributive justice” comes from it, and it is not in vain that we consider this term here. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, retributive justice involves those who have committed wrongful acts who deserve a proportionate punishment. Retribution is especially necessary in the case of the Fall, for as St. Anselm argues, “nothing in the order of things is more intolerable than that a creature should take away honor owed to the Creator and not give back what he has taken away.” [5] And yet for postlapsarian man, retribution is impossible, since our crime outstrips our ability to offer recompense. Left in this impossible situation, it behooved the God-man to atone for our sins. The question that this prayer poses is thus: How can we ever pay back Our Lord Jesus Christ for all that He has done for us, He who bought us back (the literal meaning of re-deemed) from the auction block of death and damnation?

The Roman Rite subtly provides an answer to this question. Both in the Altar Missal and in preconciliar hand Missals, Psalm 115, 12-13 and Psalm 17, 4 are presented as a single uninterrupted block, as I have done here. But according to the rubrics, the priest pauses after he asks the question “What shall I render…?” and then spends several moments devotedly collecting the Particles of the Host from the paten and the corporal. Only after then does he say: “I will take…” The priest’s action is his answer. As Fr. Nicholas Gihr writes:

To the question, whether or how he might suitably thank the Lord for His boundless goodness, the priest remains for some moments in holy silence, whilst collecting the particles on the corporal, and then taking the chalice in his right hand, he breaks out into words which betoken his elevated sentiments of gratitude: “I will take the chalice of salvation and I will call upon the name of the Lord. Praising I will call upon the Lord and I shall be saved from my enemies.” Whilst considering what we may give to the Lord, we find nothing else than what He had previously given us. Thus, in the first place, the priest affirms his gratitude, in as much as he takes hold of the chalice with its infinitely precious and inestimable contents, to offer it for the glorification of the divine name and to drink it while gratefully magnifying the Lord. [6]

To Gihr’s insight we may add one more, namely, that the priest’s resolve to drink Christ’s Blood is an implicit promise to drink from whatever chalice God gives him, even if contains much that is bitter. What return can we ever make to Christ Jesus for all that He has done for us? We can start by being willing to suffer and die for Him as martyrs, or at the very least to accept gladly the dolors of daily life. “My Father,” cries Our Lord from the Garden of Gethsemane, “if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” (Matt. 26, 39) It was Jesus Christ who took the first “chalice of salvation” (our salvation) by embracing the Cross, and as Christians we are called to do the same; for “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matt. 16, 24) What’s in your chalice? Whatever the answer, we will drink it, and gratefully.

And finally, immediately before consuming the Precious Blood, the priest says:

Sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam. Amen.

Which I translate as:

May the Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ watch over my soul unto life everlasting. Amen.

By asking for protection of the soul, the priest also continues a theme from the Domine non sum dignus, where he asked for his soul to be healed. By asking now for his soul to be watched over, there is a hint that his soul has to some extent been healed enough to receive Holy Communion worthily.

The thematic continuity between the Domine non sum dignus, Corporis Domini nostri, and Sanguis Domini nostri was removed from the 1970 Missal. Annibale Bugnini explains why:

At his own communion the priest says: “May the body of Christ preserve me…” The Pope asked: “Would it not be better to retain the old formula, ‘May the body of Christ preserve my soul . . . ’?” In response, it was said that the suggested formula, which is already used in the Mass of ordination, seems more complete and accurate—not the soul alone but the entire human person is destined for eternal life. The new formula was kept.[7]

It is true that the entire human person receives eternal life (or eternal death), but in the Roman liturgical tradition, the way to draw attention to both body and soul is, wait for it, to mention both the body and the soul. By using “me” for the entire human person, the new prayer potentially feeds into the modern obsession with the self rather than corrects it. And as Chesterton quipped, “One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.” [8]

The new Missal, incidentally, also eliminates the prayers that call upon the name of the Lord and the Quid retribuam.

Notes

[1] Wis. 6, 20; 2 Esdras (Nehemiah) 9:15.

[2] Ps. 77, 24; 104, 40.

[3] Jungmann, vol. 2, 353.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Cur Deus Homo 1.13.

[6] Gihr, 740.

[7] Reform of the Liturgy, 380.

[8] GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius Press, 2005), 101.