St Maximus of Turin, A Forgotten Father of the Church

In the Martyrology, the next-to-last entry for today reads, “At Turin, the birth into heaven of St Maximus, bishop and confessor, most celebrated (or ‘renowned’ (celeberrimi)) for his learning and holiness.” With all due respect to the great Cardinal Caesare Baronio (1538-1607), who wrote this entry for his revision of the Martyrology in 1568, it is something of a rhetorical exaggeration to say that Maximus was “most celebrated.” There is almost no trace of devotion to him as a Saint outside his native city. The Usuarium catalog of liturgical books does not record that his feast was kept anywhere in the Middle Ages, and indeed, the previous editions of the Martyrology which Baronius used as the basis of his text do not mention him. The oldest known biography of him was not written until about 600 years after his death, and is not regarded as historically trustworthy.

A statue of St Maximus at the shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Turin. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Syrio, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

In one of his sermons, Maximus describes himself as an eyewitness to the martyrdom of Saints Sisinnius, Martyrius and Alexander, which happened in a place called Anaunia, in the valley of Trent in northern Italy, in the year 397. It is guessed that he was in his mid- to late teens at the time, and thus born around the year 380. He is named among the bishops who attended a synod in Milan in 451; the last notice we have of him is from the year 465, when he attended another synod in Rome. His name appears on the list of bishops who subscribed to the acts of the latter immediately after that of the pope, indicating that he was senior bishop present. He is the first bishop of Turin whose name is known to us, but it is not known when or how he came to that office. And these are the only details of his life which we can say are known for certain. There seem to be very few artistic representations of him, judging not only from the dearth of images on Wikipedia, but from the fact Nicola de’ Grandi, who has visited and photographed a huge number of churches in northern Italy, doesn’t have any.

No modern edition of his works was published until 1784, when the task was undertaken by an editor called Bruno Bruni, issued by the press of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, and then reproduced in Migne’s Patrologia Latina. Bruni divided these writings (rather arbitrary, in the estimation of the patrologist Fulbert Cayré; vol. 2, 13.2) into 118 homilies and 116 sermons, with both blocks subdivided according to subject: the seasons of the liturgical year and the feasts of the Lord; feasts of the Saints; various theological topics. But more modern research considers that a great many of these, more than half, are not authentic; in his series of Wednesday audience talks on the Church Fathers, Pope Benedict XVI stated that “we have inherited a collection of about 90 of (Maximus’) sermons.” (Oct. 31, 2007)

Since his feast falls between two of the greatest and most ancient among the Church’s feast days, the Nativity of St John the Baptist yesterday, and the feast of Ss Peter and Paul on the 29th, here are excerpts from one of his sermons for both of these days.

“In praise of the holy and most blessed John the Baptist, whose birth we celebrate today, I do not know what is the most important thing we should preach on – that he was wonderfully born or more wonderfully slain. For he was born in prophecy, and murdered for truth; by his birth he announced the coming of the Savior, and by his death he condemned the incest of Herod. For this holy and just man, who was begotten apart from the common way of men as the result of a promise, merited from God that he should not depart this world by a common death, but that he should lay aside his body, which he had received as a gift from the Lord, by confessing the Lord. Therefore John did everything by the will of God, since he was born and died for the sake of God’s work.” – Sermon 5

St Peter Enthroned, with Ss John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle, 1516, by Cima da Conegliano (ca. 1459-1517.

Though all the blessed apostles receive an equal share of grace from the Lord of holiness, nonetheless in some way Peter and Paul are seen to stand out from the others, and to excel by reason of a certain special virtue of faith in the Savior. Indeed, we can prove this by referring to the judgment of the Lord Himself; for to Peter, as to a good steward, He gave the key of the heavenly kingdom, and upon Paul, as one skilled in instruction, He enjoined the teaching office in the establishment of the Church. Thus, those whom the latter would educate to salvation, the former would receive into peace, and while Paul would enlighten their hearts with the teaching of his words, Peter would open to their souls the kingdom of heaven. Therefore Paul also received, so to speak, a key from Christ, that of knowledge; for whatever opens up the hard places of hearts to faith, lays bare the secrets of minds, and brings what is kept closed within out into the open by a reasonable manifestation ought to be called a key. That is a key, I say, which both opens the conscience to the confession of sin, and inserts grace for the eternal saving mystery. Both, therefore received keys from the Lord: the one of knowledge, and the other of power. The one dispenses the riches of immortality, the other distributes the treasures of knowledge. For there are in fact treasures of knowledge, as it is written, “In whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden (Col. 2, 3). Therefore do the blessed Peter and Paul stand out among all the Apostles and excel by a certain special prerogative. – Sermon 1

St Basil the Great on the Value of Tradition

St Basil the Great died on January 1st, 379, after serving the Church as bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia for about 8½ years. The structure of the Byzantine Rite permits the joining of two feasts much more readily than the Roman Rite does, and so it keeps his feast on the day of his death together with that of the Circumcision. In the West, his feast was hardly kept at all before the later 15th century; once it began to spread, the date most commonly chosen for it was that of his episcopal consecration, June 14th, since his death day was already occupied. This choice was then consolidated by the Tridentine Reform, which raised him to what was then the highest of three grades of feast, together with three other Easterners, Ss Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, and granted them all the title of Doctor of the Church.

An icon of St Basil the great, 1764, by the Greek painter Spyridon Romas (1730-86). Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0. 

Some years ago, I happened across this very interesting passage from his treatise on the Holy Spirit, which is well worth considering. (chapter 27)

“Of the beliefs and practices, whether generally accepted or publicly enjoined, which are preserved in the Church, some we possess derived from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us in a mystery by the tradition of the Apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force. And these no one will gainsay – no one, at all events, who is even moderately versed in the institutions of the Church. For were we to attempt to reject such customs as have no written authority, on the ground that the importance they possess is small, we should unintentionally injure the Gospel in its very vitals; or, rather, should make our public definition a mere phrase and nothing more.

For instance, to take the first and most general example, who is thence who has taught us in writing to sign with the sign of the cross those who have trusted in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ? (This means the ritual of signing the catechumens with the sign of the cross on their foreheads before baptism.) What writing has taught us to turn to the East at the prayer? Which of the saints has left us in writing the words of the invocation at the displaying of the bread of the Eucharist and the cup of blessing? For we are not, as is well known, content with what the Apostle or the Gospel has recorded, but both in preface and conclusion we add other words as being of great importance to the validity of the ministry, and these we derive from unwritten teaching. Moreover we bless the water of baptism and the oil of the chrism, and besides this the catechumen who is being baptized.

On what written authority do we do this? Is not our authority silent and mystical tradition? Nay, by what written word is the anointing of oil itself taught? And whence comes the custom of baptizing thrice? And as to the other customs of baptism, from what Scripture do we derive the renunciation of Satan and his angels? Does not this come from that unpublished and secret teaching which our fathers guarded in a silence out of the reach of curious meddling and inquisitive investigation? Well had they learned the lesson that the awful dignity of the mysteries is best preserved by silence. What the uninitiated are not even allowed to look at was hardly likely to be publicly paraded about in written documents.”

This translation is taken from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, published between 1886 and 1900, as a companion to the earlier Ante-Nicene Fathers series (1867-73), both originally put out by T&T Clark, which still exists as an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. The founder, Thomas Clark, was a member of a break-away Presbyterian sect called the Free Church of Scotland, and the two series were conceived as a response to a similar series begun in 1836 by the founders of the Oxford Movement, The Library of the Fathers, which was seen as too sympathetic to Roman Catholicism. (Given that one of the founders and most active contributors to the latter, St John Henry Newman, ended his days as a Roman Catholic cardinal and religious, this view was, from a Presbyterian point of view, perfectly reasonable.) The anti-Catholic tenor of the notes in both of Clark’s series is very pronounced, but personally, I find it almost touching to read their fierce defense of points of doctrine which the majority of the churches born at the Reformation would not touch with a barge pole today.

The authors of the series recognized (how could they not?) how damning this passage is to the logical contradiction that is sola Scriptura, and certainly deserve credit for their honesty in noting that the slippery Erasmus tried to remove it as inauthentic, but that this cannot be justified. They therefore introduced certain other passages of St Basil in the same note, which purportedly show that he “is, however, strong on the supremacy of Holy Scripture.” But even if such passages did prove what they imagined they proved, and that St Basil therefore essentially contradicted himself, what this really proves is what the Roman Catholic Church has always taught, namely, that since the Fathers themselves do not agree on every point, it is necessary that there be an authority which can pronounce definitively on the meaning and value of what they say.

Learned Blunders: The Impact of Flawed Scholarship on the Liturgical Reforms of the Twentieth Century

Most of the debates about the liturgical reforms of the twentieth century are understandably concerned with theological or ideological elements. Critics of the 1962 Missal worry that the old Mass is too hierarchical and too aligned with an outdated political ideology, a relic of the days of the Ancien Régime. Critics of the 1969 Missal, on other hand, wonder if the new Mass is too egalitarian, modernist, Protestant, Masonic, etc. My goal in this essay, however, is to focus on the role that honest mistakes about historical facts may have played in the formation and implementation of the 1969 Missal.

Honest mistakes about history are different from theological and ideological convictions, although there can be a thin line between the two, and they often influence each other. It is one thing to believe that Mass facing the people is a better way to worship because it is less alienating and more inclusive; it is another thing to believe that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people. One is a theological opinion that may or may not be true and may be contingent on circumstances; the other is a historical claim that either did or did not happen – period.

But if I believe that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people, then I might be more inclined to conclude that the Church today should do so as well: in this case, my grasp of the facts shapes my opinion. On the other hand, if I fervently believe that the Church today should have Mass facing the people, I may become predisposed to interpret some archeological data as evidence that the early Church celebrated Mass facing the people; in that case, my opinion shapes my grasp of the facts.

Granted, the adjective “honest” makes my task more complicated, for it presumes to assess the purity of another person’s intention. To avoid any cynical presumption, I will simply assume that the scholars involved in the following blunders acted in good faith.

1. A Patristic Golden Age

A common feature of twentieth-century liturgical scholarship is the conviction that the liturgies of the Patristic era, from the second to the fifth centuries A.D., constitute a Golden Age of sacred worship. I do not know if this belief is an honest historical mistake or a theological conviction or both, but either way it must be mentioned because it influenced and gave great weight to the other mistakes that I will discuss: indeed, it influenced the Council itself. Paragraph 50 of Sacrosanctum Concilium states:

The rite of the Mass is to be revised in such a way that the intrinsic nature and purpose of its several parts, as also the connection between them, may be more clearly manifested, and that devout and active participation by the faithful may be more easily achieved. For this purpose the rites are to be simplified, due care being taken to preserve their substance; elements which, with the passage of time, came to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are now to be discarded; other elements which have suffered injury through accidents of history are now to be restored to the vigor which they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary.

The Latin is even stronger: instead of the “vigor” of the holy Fathers, the document states that certain liturgical elements are to be restored to the “pristine norm” (pristina norma) of the holy Fathers.

While this passage does not explicitly state that the Patristic era, i.e., the time of the Church Fathers, was a Golden Age, it can easily be used to support such a belief, and as such it stands in tension with Pope Pius XII’s 1947 Mediator Dei, which warns precisely against this lens of interpretation:

The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man (61).

Pope Pius XII lists examples of decisions that would be wrong-headed: the return of the altar to a primitive table form as well as the suppression of black vestments, sacred images, statues, crucifixes of Christus passus, and polyphony (see 62).

The Holy Father offers a theological reason for rejecting Golden Ageism, namely, that it discounts or even denies the ongoing inspiration of the Holy Spirit on liturgical development—that is, it discounts a providentially guided organic development. Golden Ageism is, at the end of the day, an arbitrary attachment, not a historical fact. Objectively and dispassionately speaking, how do we know that one age is better than another, liturgically or otherwise? I had a wise liturgical studies professor who once said that the difference between Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic fundamentalists is that fundamentalist Protestants try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the first century while Catholic traditionalists try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the thirteenth century. Fair enough, yet did not so many twentieth-century liturgical reformers try in vain to leapfrog over history and return to the third or fourth century? Perhaps we all need to stop leapfrogging and recognize that we are the beneficiaries of an ongoing and inspired sacred history.

The tug to the Patristic era was strong. The general consensus in the early- to mid-twentieth century was that the early Church was more communitarian, more egalitarian, and more participatory, and that later developments were misguided and alienating “barnacles” on the Barque that obscured the liturgy’s original vision and purpose. Although there are still stalwart proponents of this view (even in the highest echelons of Church leadership), few dispassionate and serious scholars hold it today. In the understated assessment of Albert Gerhards and Benedikt Kranemann:

This idea was often based on the hypothesis of a degeneration in which the “golden age” of patristics was followed by the “dark Middle Ages” leading to a “rigid standard liturgy” in the period between Trent and Vatican II. This way of looking at the history of liturgy is being radically called into question today. [1]

2. Liturgical Orientation

Because of Golden-Ageism, with its myth of a pristine Patristic norm, any mistake made about how the early Church worshiped was given undue weight by scholars in their reconstruction of the past and in their recommendations for the present.

That is certainly true of the orientation of the priest at Mass. The consensus of scholars in the 1930s was that the Church originally had Mass “facing the people”. This consensus was no doubt influenced by ideology, some of it egalitarian and some of it anti-sacrificial – the idea being that “when” the Church thought of the Eucharist as a meal, it had Mass facing the people, and when it came to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, it had Mass facing the apse. [2]

But at least two archeological data also shaped opinion: the existence of free-standing altars in ancient churches, and the fact that some of these churches were built on a west-east axis, with the entrance and façade on the east and the sanctuary on the west. In the latter churches, if the priest were to face East to confect the Eucharist, he would have to “face the people” to do so. What they did not consider (which later scholarship discovered) was the possibility that during the Consecration, the people turned around and faced the East, with the Sacrifice taking place behind them. At that moment the priest and congregation resembled sailors on a ship, with the captain at the helm in the rear as they sailed to meet their Lord, who is to come again from the East. Perhaps that is why a church nave takes its name from the Latin word for ship, navis.

The Second Vatican Council only states that future churches should be built with free-standing altars, and the General Instructions for the (new) Roman Missal presupposes that the priest is turned towards the Lord and not the people during the Consecration. Nevertheless, “Mass facing the people” has been treated as a cornerstone of liturgical renewal, with bishops forbidding priests from celebrating in the traditional manner.

Scholarly doubt about the versus populum position began to emerge shortly after Vatican II. The prominent liturgist Fr. Josef Jungmann dismissed it as “a legend” in 1966. That same year, a member of the Concilium that created the Novus Ordo, Fr. Louis Bouyer, rejected the meal vs. sacrifice dichotomy, pointing out that in antiquity “the communal character of a meal was emphasized…[by] the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.” [3] Moroever, Monsignor Klaus Gamber’s Die Reform der römischen Liturgie (The Reform of the Roman Rite) includes a scathing critique of both the theological and historical arguments favoring versus populum. But the definitive treatment of the subject came in 2009 with Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s Turning towards the Lord, which demonstrates that there has always been a tradition of facing East during liturgical prayer and never a tradition of priest and people facing each other. The book received the approval of Pope Benedict XVI. More recently, Luisella Scrosati has a series on the orientation of Christian worship in Italian that was translated last year into English for the New Liturgical Movement website (see here).

3. Concelebration

Twentieth-century liturgists were so convinced that the early Church has Masses regularly concelebrated by two or more priests that the Second Vatican Council was moved to make the following changes:

Concelebration, whereby the unity of the priesthood is appropriately manifested, has remained in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west. For this reason it has seemed good to the Council to extend permission for concelebration to the following cases (Sacrosanctum Concilium 57.1).

The Council goes on to allow concelebration for both the Chrism Mass and evening Mass on Holy Thursday, for Masses during Bishops’ meetings, and for Masses for the blessing of an abbot. It also gives Bishops the authority to allow concelebration at parish Masses, and it calls for a new rite for concelebration to be drawn up and inserted into the Missal and the Pontifical (58). The Council Fathers declare that “each priest shall always retain his right to celebrate Mass individually” (57.2), but many priests today feel pressure to concelebrate every Mass they attend.

There was no definitive or extensive study of concelebration prior to the Second Vatican Council; one wonders how everyone was so confident about a conviction based on so little research. Finally, in 1982, Carmelite Father Joseph de Sainte-Marie published an almost 600 page book entitled L’eucharistie salut du monde, which in 2015 appeared as The Holy Eucharist – The World’s Salvation: Studies on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, its Celebration and its Concelebration (Leominster: Gracewing, 2015). The magnum opus covers a range of topics, such as the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, but it is especially concerned with separating fact from fiction regarding concelebration.

Sainte-Marie’s conclusion, as the back-cover puts it, is that the “present practice of daily concelebration, especially among simple priests without their Ordinary presiding, far from being a return to an ancient norm, is in fact a new development.” Earlier liturgists made a crucial mistake, failing to distinguish between ceremonial concelebration and sacramental concelebration, when two or more ministers confect the same sacrament. Sacramental concelebration happened on occasion, especially with a Mass led by a bishop, but in both the East and the West, the preference was for ceremonial concelebrations and for individually celebrated Masses, which multiplied graces flowing into the world.

Sainte-Marie researched the debates the Council Fathers had about concelebration, and he shows how the Council Fathers were unaware of this distinction. If concelebration remains “in use to this day in the Church both in the east and in the west” as the Council claims, then why do most Orthodox churches refuse sacramental concelebration on principle, and why are the only Eastern Churches that practice sacramental concelebration the ones that are in union with Rome, and even then only beginning in the eighteenth century and only under Western influence?

The World’s Salvation did not come out in time to stop the campaign to make concelebrated the Masses norm, especially in religious communities, but it was able to stop further damage. I am told that plans were being made to make it a requirement of Canon Law that all members of a religious community concelebrate the same Mass, but Sainte-Marie’s scholarship changed their minds.

Unfortunately, the Vatican has recently doubled down on this flawed scholarship by forcing the Anglican Ordinariate to adopt concelebration. For recent treatments on the subject, see here.

4. Ordinary Time

Contrary to a popular misconception, Ordinary Time in the new calendar is not “Ordinal” Time but an Ordinary of Times. [4] Ordinary Time was designed to be a generic season in contrast to the special seasons of Christmas and Easter. The architect of this new schema was Fr. Pierre Jounel, who believed that the Masses of the early Church outside the Christmas and Easter cycles had no special “theme” and that the modern Church should return to that model. Each of the new Sundays in Ordinary Time, he writes, “is a Lord’s Day in its pure state as presented to us in the Church’s tradition,” that is, the state in which the primitive Church celebrated it.

The problem with this thesis is that we do not know for certain what the primitive Church did. Second, Jounel linked indistinction with purity and purity with the early Church, but both assumptions are questionable. Third, he is guilty of archeologism or Golden Age-ism, for Jounel wanted to return to a third-century practice and ignore seventeen hundred years of valid development. Fourth, Jounel is also guilty of novelty (ironically), for the way he endeavored to return to “the Lord’s Day in its pure state” was to invent an entirely new season that not a single soul in the Patristic era would have recognized, for no liturgical calendar prior to that of the Novus Ordo had a single-block season that is “interrupted” by the Easter cycle and that then picks up where it left off. Fifth, despite Jounel’s claim that the new season is indistinct, the final Sundays of Ordinary Time retain the distinctive theme that they had in the previous calendar, that of the End Times.

The 1962 Missal

My criticisms have centered on the scholarship that shaped the 1969 Missal, but that does not mean that the 1962 Missal is flawless. I will mention three, though no doubt there are more.

First, the feast day of Pope St. Felix I (269-274) was mistakenly assigned to May 30 instead of December 30 (the day of his martyrdom) because a medieval scribe wrote “III Kal. Jun.” (third day to the calends of June) instead of “III Kal. Jan.” (third day to the calends of January).

Second, according to tradition, September 14, 326 is the date that St. Helen discovered the True Cross during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and September 14, 335 is the anniversary of the consecration of her son Constantine’s basilicas of the Holy Sepulchre and Calvary in Jerusalem. September 14 was thus celebrated as the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross. May 3, on the other hand, was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrating the return of the Cross to Jerusalem in 629 after the Persians had stolen it. Over time, however, the two dates were confused and May 3 became the Feast of the Finding of the Cross and September 14 the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. The May 3 feast was dropped in 1960, and both the 1962 and 1969 calendars still have September 14 as the Feast of the Exaltation or Triumph of the Cross.

Third, the Tridentine Missal’s use of the Vulgate for its biblical readings is not without controversy, for although we have it on the authority of the Council of Trent that the Vulgate is “authentic,” we also know that “authentic” does not mean “infallible,” nor did Trent tell us which edition of the Vulgate was authentic, and there were several competing versions at the time. In the 1962 Missal, the Epistle reading for Low Sunday (1 John 5, 4-10) is different than what are considered the most reliable Greek manuscripts of that passage, particularly verse 7, which does not exist in the oldest manuscripts. [5]

What I find interesting about the errors in the 1962 Missal is that they seem to be mostly the result of failed efforts to retain, while the aforementioned mistakes from the twentieth century are the result of failed efforts to rediscover. The latter is by its nature more fraught with risk and uncertainty, and so it is not surprising that the failures, when they happen, are more egregious.

Conclusions

Two final clarifications are in order.

First, in and of themselves scholarly mistakes do not disqualify a liturgical practice. It is entirely possible that even if something was done in error, it could turn out to be providential, a sort of felix culpa. That said, when new discoveries expose old mistakes, they should be used to consider – with a grain of salt, of course, lest we keep the same slavish mentality to the “experts” – how to move forward. At any rate, since the cure always begins with an accurate diagnosis of the disease, we need to admit that we live in a world of liturgical upheaval, as Peter Jeffrey puts it, “with its own excesses of competing and fanciful historical claims.” [6]

Second, we should not banish scholarship from liturgical decision-making simply because of these mistakes. Scholarship may have been the rope with which we used to hang ourselves, but it is also the same rope that can pull us out of the ditch. Every example of flawed scholarship that we have mentioned has been brought to light by good scholarship, so scholarship per se is not the problem. Scholarship is simply a form of human inquiry, and like any other temporal good, it is subject to abuse, especially in the hands of the proud. And even if it does succeed in creating an accurate view of the past, that does not necessarily mean that it should be used to overthrow later developments or practices. Let the Holy Spirit and not the absent-minded professor have the final say on what goes on in Christ’s Church.

We will look at more learned blunders at a later time.

This article originally appeared in The Latin Mass magazine 35:1 (Spring 2025), pp. 38-42. Many thanks to its editors for allowing its republication here.

Notes

[1] Albert Gerhards and Benedikt Kranemann, Introduction to the Study of Liturgy (Liturgical Press, 2017), pp. 81-82. Gerhards and Kranemann argue that Vatican II avoided “Golden Age-ism” by quoting SC 21, that the liturgy “is made up of unchangeable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change.” One can hold this view, however, and still believe that the Patristic era was the high watermark of liturgy. Moreover, the authors ignore the implications of SC 50’s language of the pristine norm of the Church Fathers.

[2] Such is the contention of Otto Nußbaum, but it is false. The earliest references to the Eucharist, from the second century, refer to it as a sacrifice.

[3] Louis Bouyer, Eucharistie: Theologie et spiritualite de la priere eucharistique (Tournai, 1966) [trans. Charles Underhill Quinn as Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968)], p.55-56, quoted in Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy.

[4] See my “The Origins and Meaning of Ordinary Time,” Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal 23:1 (2019), pp. 43-77. A revised version in two parts also appears on this website, here and here.

[5] Quoniam tres sunt, qui testimonium dant in caelo : Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus : et hi tres unum sunt. “And there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one.”

[6] Peter Jeffrey, “Eastern and Western Elements in the Irish Monastic Prayer of the Hours,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, eds. Margot A. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford University Press, 2000), 134.

The Feast of St John at the Latin Gate

John was an Apostle, an Evangelist, and a Prophet: an Apostle, because he wrote to the churches as a teacher; an Evangelist, because he wrote a book of the Gospels, which the other twelve Apostles did not do, apart from Matthew; and a Prophet, for on the island of Patmos, whither he had been banished by Domitian because of his testimony to the Lord, he beheld the Apocalypse, which contains such infinite mysteries of the future. And Tertullian says (De praescript. 36, ca. 200 A.D.) that at Rome, he was put into a vessel of boiling oil, but he came out cleaner and healthier than he went in.” (St Jerome in his treatise against Jovinian, the fifth lesson of Matins of the feast. In the homily on the day’s Gospel, St Matthew 20, 20-23, St Jerome explains the Lord’s prophecy to the sons of Zebedee that they will drink the cup of His Passion.)

The Martyrdom of St John the Evangelist, by Charles le Brun, 1641-42, from the church of St Nicholas du Chardonnet in Paris.

“The question arises how the sons of Zebedee, namely, James and John, drank the cup of martyrdom, since Scripture tells that only that James the Apostle was beheaded by Herod, but John died a natural death. But if we read the history of the Church, in which it is told that he also for the sake of his witness (to Christ) was cast into a vessel of boiling oil, and thence went forth as a champion of Christ to receive his crown, and was at once exiled to the island of Patmos, we see that his spirit did not fail at the prospect of martyrdom, and that John did drink the cup of confession that the three children in the fiery furnace also drank, although the persecutor did not shed their blood.” (Commentary on Matthew, book 3, chap. 20)

The right wing of the St John Altarpiece, by Hans Memling, ca. 1479, showing the Apostle John and his vision of the Trinity.

From the lessons at Matins cited above, one would reasonably assume that the principle object of today’s feast is the Apostle’s martyrdom. However, in the Pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary, different lessons were read which make no mention of it, although it is spoken of in the Magnificat antiphon, which carried over into the Breviary of St Pius V: “In ferventis olei dolium missus beatus Joannes Apostolus, divina se protegente gratia, illaesus exivit, alleluia. - Cast into a pot of boiling oil, the blessed Apostle John, protected by divine grace, came out unharmed, alleluia.” From its first appearance in the late 8th-century, it is known as the feast of St John “before the Latin Gate”, even though the walls of which the Latin Gate are a part were built 200 years after St John’s time. The feast therefore most likely originated, like many secondary feasts, as the dedication feast of the small church built in St John’s honor near the Latin Gate, and was only later associated with the episode of the pot of oil.

The church of St John at the Latin Gate is the station church of the Saturday before Palm Sunday, here photographed by our Roman pilgrim friend Agnese on that occasion in 2014. (interior below)

Next door to the main church is the small oratory known as “Saint John in oleo”, said to be on the very spot where the pot of oil was set up; it is attributed to Donatello Bramante, the original architect in charge of rebuilding St Peter’s Basilica in the early 16th-century.

It is also unlikely a mere coincidence that the Byzantine Rite also keeps a secondary feast of St John only two days later. His principal feast is on September 26; since the Byzantine liturgical year begins on September 1st, he is the first in the year among the Twelve Apostles. On May 8th, a commemoration is made of a miracle whereby a manna-like substance came forth from his tomb in the city of Ephesus, which healed the faithful both physically and spiritually. This day was already occupied in the West, from very ancient times, by the feast of the Apparition of St Michael, and this might explain the slight discrepancy in the dates.

St John the Evangelist writing his Gospel on a scroll, ca. 1450, by the Cretan icon painter Andreas Ritzos (1421-92)  

Bel and the Dragon in the Liturgy of Lent

On the Tuesday of Passion week, the Epistle of the Mass is the episode of the book of Daniel known as “Bel and the Dragon”, the fourteenth and final chapter in the Vulgate. This is one of the deuterocanonical parts of the book, along with the story of Susanna (chapter 13), which is read earlier in Lent, and the long section of chapter 3 known as “the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Children.” Of the latter two, a portion of the Prayer is read as the Epistle on Thursday of this week; the Song is one of the most commonly used canticles in all historical Christian liturgies, known from its opening word in Latin as the Benedicite.

This episode is the second time Daniel is thrown into a den of lions, the first being in the protocanonical sixth chapter. In the Patrologia Latina, more citations of chapter 6 are listed than of chapter 14, but in point of fact, the two stories are very similar, and many of the citations are vague enough that they could really refer to either one. The first verses in the Missal paraphrase the Biblical text, and summarize that the Babylonians rose up against Daniel because he destroyed two of their idols: a statue called Bel, which he unmasked as a fraud that didn’t really eat the food laid out for it every night, and a “dragon” (or “serpent”) which he killed by stuffing a lump of pitch, fat and hair down its throat. (“Bel” derives from the name “Baal”, a very nasty character who is often mentioned in the books of Kings) They therefore force King Cyrus to throw Daniel to the lions, which (as in the earlier episode) have been deliberately starved, but nevertheless do not touch the prophet; after a week he is discovered safe and sound, and his persecutors are themselves then thrown into the pit and devoured. I suspect that the version from chapter 14 was the one chosen for liturgical use because of the picturesque episode of the angel (verses 32-38), who carries the prophet Habakkuk by his hair over 500 miles from Judaea to Babylon, in order to bring food to Daniel.

Habakkuk and the Angel, by Gian Lorenso Bernini. ca. 1656-61; in the Chigi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Bede735)

In ancient Christian frescoes and sarcophagi, Daniel is often shown in the lions’ den nude. His emergence from the den or “pit” represents the Resurrection of Christ, which is the general theme behind so many early Christian artworks; his nudity therefore demonstrates the reality of the human nature and human body in which Christ rose, against the many early heretics who denied them. (The prophet Jonah, who represents Christ’s body in his own, according to the Lord’s own explanation, is also frequently shown nude for the same reason.) However, this theme does not appear in early Christian writings.

Daniel in the Lions’ Den; fresco of the 3rd century in the Catacomb of Ss Peter and Marcellinus

As is so often the case, the Church Fathers’ interpretation of the episode indicates why it was chosen to be read in Lent. Already in the third century, St Cyprian of Carthage explains that “Daniel, when he was compelled to adore the idol Bel that the people and king then worshipped, to assert the honor of his God with full faith and liberty, cried out, saying, ‘I worship nothing but the Lord my God, who made heaven and earth.’ ” (Epistle 61, known as “The Exhortation to Martyrdom”, PL IV 354A) These words, so similar to the opening of the baptismal Creed, reminded the ancient catechumens not only of the Faith which they wished to profess, but also that they might very well have been called to bear witness to it as martyrs, as indeed Cyprian himself did. In his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer (the first such commentary among the works of the Fathers), the story is read as an exhortation to trust in God. “To those who seek the kingdom and the justice of God, He promises that all things will be added; for, since all things belong to God, nothing can be lacking to him that has God, if he himself is not lacking to God. Thus a meal was arranged divinely for Daniel, when he was closed in the lions’ den by the king’s order; and among the hungry beasts, who did yet spare him, the man of God was fed.” (PL 4, 534A)

Once the era of persecution had passed, Daniel was frequently represented by the Fathers as a moral model. For St Zeno of Verona, a contemporary of St Ambrose, Daniel shows us the power of fasting as a spiritual discipline, an important theme for Lent. “Daniel, unarmed, killed a dragon that was terrible to the peoples, and being thrown to the lions, ate in the middle of his danger, he who was wont to fast (Dan. 9, 3) when he was out of danger. (Tractatus 2.8.3 de Timore, PL XI 324A) For Ambrose himself, this also makes him a model of the virtue of courage. “Daniel … was so wise that, in the midst of lions irritated by hunger, he was not weakened (or ‘disheartened’) by any dread of the beasts’ savagery; so courageous, that he could eat without fear of provoking them by his example to eat him.” (De Officiis, 2.4.11, PL XVI 106C)

In his treatise “On God’s Promises and Predictions” St Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage in the mid-5th century, sums up these various traditions. Daniel by his actions “teaches and shows that only the one true God is to be worshipped, abandoning vain superstitions, by which the prophet saw that not only the Babylonians, but indeed the whole world was held captive under the power of demons. (God) also showed to his herald that in the future it would be freed from their dominion by the grace of Christ the Lord. But because, as someone once said ‘Truth begets hatred’ (the Roman playwright Terence, in Andria, 1.1.68) … the Babylonians put him into the lions’ den to be devoured. … Therefore, when Daniel was brought out … his enemies were given to the lions as food, that they might perish. These things were done as a symbol of Daniel’s Lord, who prayed for His own, saying ‘Hand not over to the beasts the soul that confesseth Thee (Psalm 73, 19).’ For that roaring lion, the devil, who wandereth about seeking whom he may devour, (1 Peter 5, 8), consumes the enemies of our prophet, Christ the Lord, when he finds them, having received power over them.”

Daniel in the Lion’s Den; sculpted capital in the Abbey of Sant’Antimo in Montalcino, Italy, by the anonymous Romanesque sculptor known as the Master of Cabestany, active in the second half of the 12th century. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko.) Daniel in the center, surrounded by lions, raises his hands in a gesture very similar to that of the priest at Mass during the Our Father; the angel, immediately to the right, is the deacon, and Habakkuk holds his basket of food under a veil, as the subdeacon holds the paten. – The Master of Cabestany is named for a small town near Perpignan, France, where he did a particularly beautiful sculpted tympanum over the door of one of the churches. Well over 100 pieces have been attributed to him and his workshop, in a wide range of places throughout southern France and northern Spain. The presence of three of his pieces in Tuscany suggests that he may have traveled as a pilgrim to Rome, and financed the trip by doing sculptures at various stops along the way. In his time, Sant’Antimo was a very rich and important territorial abbey which governed a large tract of Tuscany, fully able to pay him a good price for his work, as well as a popular stop for pilgrims on the via Francigena.

The Woman Caught in Adultery in the Liturgy of Lent

In the Roman Rite, the Gospel of the woman caught in adultery, John 8, 1-11, is joined at today’s Mass with the story of Susanna, who is rescued from an accusation of adultery by the prophet Daniel. Whether by coincidence or design, these two stories are united not just by a textual theme, but also by a text-critical one; both stories were known in antiquity to be later additions to their respective books, but nevertheless accepted as authentic and canonical by the Church.

Christ and the Adulteress, 1620s, by the French painter Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632), an unabashed plagiarist of Caravaggio. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. 

Susanna is one of two Greek additions to the book of the prophet Daniel, the other being the episode known as Bel and the Dragon. In the Septuagint, it is placed at the beginning of the book, since it describes Daniel as a youth, and Bel and the Dragon at the end. St Jerome placed them both at the end of his Latin translation of Daniel, and they therefore appear in the Vulgate as chapters 13 and 14 respectively. Since the time of the Protestant reformation, they have been included in many non-Catholic English Bibles with the group of books improperly known as the Apocrypha.

But as with the other so-called Apocrypha, the early Church had no serious doubts about the canonicity of either episode. The earliest Patristic commentary on Daniel, written by Hippolytus of Rome in the first half of the 3rd century, accepts Susanna as a part of the book without distinction, and the hugely influential Biblical scholar Origen, his contemporary, explicitly defended its canonicity. It was frequently depicted in art in the Roman catacombs, and both episodes form part of the Roman Mass lectionary.

Susanna as a lamb between two wolves, from the Arcosolium of Celerina in the Catacomb of Praetextatus, mid-4th century.

The pericope of the adulteress, on the other hand, was a bit slower to find acceptance. It is missing completely from a considerable number of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, including several of the earliest and most important ones, such as the Codexes Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus. Other early manuscripts have it marked in such a way that indicates doubt as to its authenticity, and a few place it at the end of Luke 21, which is why it is sometimes known as “the wandering pericope.” It is not mentioned in some important early commentaries on the Gospel of John, such as those by Ss John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria. To this day, the Byzantine Rite’s Gospel for the Divine Liturgy of Pentecost goes from the last verse of John 7 directly to verse 8, 12, and the passage is not included in the semi-continuous reading of St John that runs from Easter to Pentecost. (It is included in the lectionary for the feasts of female penitents.)

In the West, the question of its authority was settled by its acceptance on the part of three of the first four Doctors of the Church. St Jerome included it in the correction of the Latin text of the Gospels which he made at the behest of Pope St Damasus I. St Ambrose refers to it as part of the liturgy in his Second Apology for David, and it is still used to this day in the Ambrosian Rite in the same place in which he attests it. St Augustine includes it in his commentary on the Gospel of John, which is by far the most important and widely read such commentary in the West. In his book “On Adulterous Marriages”, he also gives the following explanation of the passage’s absence from some manuscripts, words which have become, alas, all too relevant to our own age.

“But now, after Christ said to the adulteress, ‘Neither shall I condemn thee; go, sin no more henceforth,’ who could not understand that the husband must forgive since he sees that the Lord of them both has forgiven (her)? Nor should she any longer call herself an adulteress, whose crime was wiped away by God’s mercy when she repented.

But clearly the sense of the faithless abhors this, such that some of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, I believe, fearing that free license to sin was being given to their wives, took out of their copies (of the Gospel) that which the Lord did regarding the forgiveness of the adulteress, as if He granted permission to sin when He said, ‘Now sin no longer …’ (De conjugiis adulterinis II, 7.)

The Four Doctors of the Church, by Pier Francesco Sacchi, ca. 1516.

For Hippolytus, Susanna is a figure of the Church beset by her persecutors, but vindicated and saved by the just judgment of God in the person of the prophet Daniel, whose name means “God is my judge.” For St Ambrose, the adulteress is also a figure of the Church, in the broader sense of God’s people, in both the Old and New Testaments, that seeks the Word of God in many places until she finds it in Christ, and is absolved and purified by Him. “And therefore she was waiting about, and everywhere sought the Word of God, because she was wounded, because she was naked, because she was an adulteress in all things, although without blemish in Christ, as she sought a redeemer in her wretched body. Christ joined her to Himself, in order to make her immaculate; He united Himself to her, in order to take away her adultery.” Where Susanna is the symbol of the Church in her fidelity to Christ, and the adulteress is the Church redeemed by Christ when she has been unfaithful to him.

Roughly nine centuries later, William Durandus neatly sums up this union of the two readings as follows: “On Saturday (of the third week of Lent) it is shown that the Lord saves by justice and mercy, whence the Epistle speaks of Susanna, who was saved by justice. The Gospel is that of the woman caught in adultery, whom the Lord delivered through mercy. Therefore, because (she) is saved through mercy, the Church, seeing the weakness of her children, asks to be delivered through mercy in the Introit, saying, ‘Give ear, O Lord, to my words, understand my cry. Hearken to the voice of my prayer, (my king and my God.)’ ” (Rat. Div. Off. 7, 52, 1)

Three further things we may note about this Introit. Psalm 5, from which it is taken, is titled in Greek and Latin “for her that obtaineth the inheritance”, which the Church Fathers naturally took as a reference to the Church. A 4th-century commentary on the Psalms called “Breviarium in Psalmos”, which was long mistakenly attributed to St Jerome, says, “This Psalm is written about the Church, which at the end of the world will obtain the inheritance in all the nations that believe in Christ.” (PL XXVI, 828D-829A)

Secondly, the same commentary explains the words “my king and my God” as follows. “He truly dared to say ‘my king and my God’, even he over whom sin does not reign in his mortal body. ‘My king and my God’, because Thou reignest in me, and sin reigneth not, wherefore Thou art my God. Thou art my God, because my belly is not my God (Phil. 3, 19), because money is not my God, because lust is not my God.” This represents the condition of the Church as symbolized by the adulteress, whose adultery is taken away, and thus lust is no longer her god.

Third, the verse of the Introit continues in the fourth verse of the Psalm, “For to thee will I pray, o Lord; in the morning thou shalt hear my voice.” The story of the adulteress begins when “early in the morning (Jesus) came again into the temple.” This is also a symbol of the adulteress’ conversion, as the Breviarium says: “As long as I am in the darkness of error, He does not hear me, but when the sun of justice (i.e. Christ) shall come into my heart, then He heareth me.”

The Gradual of this Mass is taken from Psalm 22: “If I shall walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils; since Thou art with me, o Lord.” This refers to the fact that both Susanna and the adulteress faced the possibility of being killed, but were saved by the Lord. In many medieval Uses of the Roman Rite, this same gradual was used at the Requiem Mass.

The Offertory is from Psalm 118, verse 133: “Direct my steps according to thy word, that no injustice may have dominion over me, o Lord.” Of this, the Breviarium says simply “and not according to bodily desires, because I am given over to Thy service.” St Hilary of Poitiers comments in a similar vein, “…not according to the ways of the world, not according to the glory of men, not according to the pleasures of the body.” (Tractatus super Psalmos; PL IX, 617D-618A) Thus the Church, freed from the dominion of sin like the adulteress, is able to proceed to the offering of the Holy Sacrifice. And since this Psalm was sung daily for centuries at the hours from Prime to None, those who heard and sang this Offertory would certainly have thought of the first part of the following verse, “Redeem me from the calumnies of men” as a reference to the calumnies made against Susanna, and the second part, “that I may keep thy commandments,” as a reference to the Lord’s command to the adulteress, “Go and sin no more.”

On the ferias of Lent, the Communion antiphons are taken each one from a different Psalm in sequential order, starting on Ash Wednesday with Psalm 1. The days which were formerly aliturgical do not form part of this series, namely, the six Thursdays, and also the first and last Saturday; the ferias of Holy Week are also not included. (See the table below; click for larger view.)

The series is also interrupted on six days when particularly important passages of the Gospels are read, and the Communion is taken from them instead. Here is a magnificent polyphonic setting of the one for today, by the Portuguese composer Frei Manuel Cardoso (1566-1650), a Carmelite friar who worked principally at his order’s house in Lisbon.

The Samaritan Woman in the Liturgy of Lent

In the lectionaries of the various Latin rites, one of the most prominent Gospels of the Lenten season is that of the Samaritan woman who spoke to Christ at the well of Jacob (St John 4, 5-42). Although the Roman, Ambrosian and Byzantine Rites each read this Gospel on a different day, it appears in all three as a lesson of particular importance for the preparation of those who will be baptized at Easter or Pentecost.

In the Roman Rite, it is read on the Friday of the third week, joined with one of the most important epistles of Lent, Numbers 20, 1-13, in which Moses makes water run from the rock in the desert. This story was understood by the early Christians as a prefiguration of the sacrament of baptism, starting with St Paul himself, who tells us that “our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea. And all in Moses were baptized, in the cloud, and in the sea: and did all eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” (1 Cor. 10, 1-4) Moses striking the rock to make the water run from it is one of the most frequently depicted Biblical scenes in early Christian art; just in the paintings of the Roman catacombs, it appears over 70 times, along with numerous other representations on ancient sarcophagi.

Moses making the water run from the rock in a fourth-century fresco in the Catacomb of St Callixtus.

On the previous Sunday, the Lenten station is kept at the church of St Lawrence Outside-the-Walls, where anciently the catechumens underwent a formal examination of their Christian faith, the ritual known as the scrutiny. The Gelasian Sacramentary contains a beautiful prayer for them to be said on that day, “that they may worthily and wisely come to the confession of Thy praise; so that through Thy glory they may be reformed to the former dignity which they had lost in the original transgression.” At the same Mass, the Memento of the living has an interpolation to pray for their future godparents, and during the Hanc igitur, the names of the catechumens were read out loud. On the following Friday, the station is kept at another church of Rome’s most venerated martyr, St Lawrence ‘in Lucina’, nicknamed, like so many sacred places in the city, for the woman upon whose property it was originally built. Here, they would hear Christ speaking to the Samaritan woman of the “living water … springing up unto life everlasting”, and understand His words as a clear reference to baptism.

A piece of the gridiron of St Lawrence’s martyrdom, preserved in a reliquary in a side-altar of San Lorenzo in Lucina. Photo courtesy of Orbis Catholicus.

In his treatise on the Gospel of St John (Tract 15, 10), St Augustine explains the woman as a type of the Church, “not yet justified, but waiting to be justified”, like the catechumens themselves. He also reminds us that the Samaritans were not part of the Jewish people; indeed, the Bible itself says that they were a mixed nation of Jews and pagans, observing the customs of both. (4 Kings 17, 24-41) So too, the early Church was a mixture of Jews and pagans, now united in Christ in whom “there is neither Jew nor Greek … for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3, 28) Augustine continues by saying, “Therefore, in her, let us hear ourselves (spoken of), and in her, let us recognize ourselves, and in her, let us give thanks to God for ourselves.” (i.e. for what He has done for us.)

The dedicatory inscription on the counter-façade of Santa Sabina in Rome, the only part of the church’s original mosaic decoration which survives, ca. 425 A.D. The two figures on the sides are “the church from the circumcision” on the left, and “the church from the gentiles” on the right. Photo courtesy of Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.

In the Ambrosian Rite, the first Sunday of Lent is called “in capite jejunii – at the beginning of the fast”, a title also used for Ash Wednesday in medieval liturgical books of the Roman Rite. The remaining Sundays are named for their Gospels, all taken from St John, the second Sunday being that of the Samaritan woman, the third ‘of Abraham’ (chap. 8, 31-59), the fourth ‘of the man born blind,’ (9, 1-38), the fifth of Lazarus (11, 1-45) and the sixth ‘of the Palms’ (11, 55 – 12, 11). On the second Sunday, the following antiphon is sung after the Gospel, while the deacon spreads the corporal on the altar in preparation for the Offertory. (As in the Roman Rite, most of the Mass propers use the Old Latin version of the Scriptures.)

For I will take you from among the gentiles, and I will pour upon you clean water; you shall be cleansed from all your iniquities. I will give you a new heart, and renew a righteous spirit within you. (Ezechiel 36, 24, 25 and 26.)

In the Roman Rite, the same prophecy of Ezechiel (though not exactly the same words) provides both the introit and the first epistle of the Mass of the Wednesday of the fourth week of Lent, on which day the catechumens were exorcized and blessed at the tomb of St Paul, the great Apostle of the gentiles.

The Ambrosian Missal contains proper prefaces for nearly every Mass of the temporal cycle, generally rather longer than those of the Roman Rite. The Lenten prefaces of the Sundays are each based on the Gospel of the day, and that of the Samaritan woman reads as follows:

Truly it is worthy and just…through Christ our Lord. Who, to instill (in us) the mystery of His humility, being tired, sat at the well, and * asked of the Samaritan woman that a drink of water be given Him, even He that had created the gift of faith in her; and so He deigned to thirst for her faith, so that, as He asked water of her, He might enkindle in her the fire of divine love. * We therefore beseech Thy boundless compassion, that defying the dark depths of vice, and leaving behind the vessel of harmful desires, we may ever thirst for Thee, that art the fountain of life, and source of all goodness, and may please Thee by the observance of our fast. Through the same etc.

The words here noted between the stars form the basis of a Preface used in the post-Conciliar Rite in the first year of the three-year lectionary cycle, when the story of the Samaritan woman is read on the third Sunday of Lent. Since this crucial passage is not included among the readings of the second and third years, a rubric provides that it may be read on Sunday in place of the Gospels assigned to those years, or it may displace one of the ferial Gospels; a similar provision is made for the blind man and Lazarus.

The Orthodox church of Jacob’s Well, also known as St Photini’s, in the city of Nablus on the West Bank. The current church is the fifth structure to stand over the site, which has been venerated by Christians as the Well of Jacob since the fourth century.

In the Byzantine tradition, the story of the Samaritan woman is read in Eastertide rather than Lent, as is that of the man born blind; however, the association of it with the sacrament of baptism is just as clear as in the Latin rites. On the fifth Sunday of Easter, the following three exapostilaria are sung at the end of Matins; the first is that of the Easter season, the second relates to the Gospel of the day’s Divine Liturgy, and the third to the feast of Mid-Pentecost.

Exapostilarion of Easter  Having fallen asleep in the flesh as a mortal, O King and Lord, You rose again on the third day, raising up Adam from corruption, and abolishing death. O Pascha of incorruption, O salvation of the world!
of the Samaritan Woman  You reached Samaria, and talking with a woman, sought water to drink, my all-powerful Savior, who poured out water for the Hebrews from a sharp rock, and led her to belief in you: and now she enjoys life eternally in heaven.
of Mid-Pentecost  At the mid-point of the feast, Lover of mankind, you came to the temple and said: You who are full of thirst, come to me and draw living water welling up, through which you will all revel in delight and grace and immortal life.

Note how the exapostilarion of the Samaritan woman makes the same association between the Lord’s revelations to her and the episode of the water running from the rock that is made in the Roman Rite by the readings of the Mass. This reference to the waters of baptism continues in the third text, which quotes Christ’s second reference to the “living waters” in the Gospel of John, when He speaks in the temple during the feast of Tabernacles. (chapter 7, 37-39.)

The text of this second Gospel of the “living waters” is deferred by the Byzantine Rite to Pentecost itself, a custom which it shares with the Ambrosian and Roman Rites in different ways. The church of Milan preserves to this very day an ancient custom of celebrating two Masses on both Easter and Pentecost, the traditional days for the administration of baptism; one is the Mass “of the solemnity” itself, and another “for the (newly) baptized.” On Easter Sunday, the Gospel at the Mass for the baptized is John 7, 37-39, with the second part of the last verse omitted.

On great day of the festivity, the Lord Jesus stood and cried, saying: If any man thirst, let him come to me, and drink. He that believeth in me, as the scripture saith, Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. Now this he said of the Spirit which they should receive, who believed in him.

At the Mass for the baptized on Pentecost, this Gospel is repeated, adding the final words of verse 39 which are not said on Easter, “for as yet the Spirit was not given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” In the Roman Rite, the same text provides the Communion antiphon for the Mass of the vigil of Pentecost, although the Gospel itself is read on the Monday of Passion Week.

The Byzantine Rite has traditionally honored the Samaritan woman as a Saint, and she was often called both an Apostle and Evangelist. Her legend states that she, her five sisters and two sons were among those baptized by St Peter and the other Apostles on the first Pentecost, and afterwards traveled to preach in many places; after evangelizing Carthage, they came to Rome, where they were martyred under Nero. Her given name is Photeine (or “Photini” in the modern pronunciation), the Greek word for “bright”; the cognate “photistes – illuminator” is used in the Byzantine tradition as a title for the saint who first evangelizes a people, the best-known example of this being perhaps St Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia. With the latinized form of her name, Photina, she was added to the Tridentine edition of the Roman Martyrology by Cardinal Baronius, along with her family members, on March 20th, the day of her feast in the Byzantine Rite. Her troparion makes the same association between the waters of baptism and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost indicated by the placement of her Gospel on the Sunday after Mid-Pentecost.

Wholly illuminated by the divine Spirit, and sated of your thirst by the springs, you drank deeply of the water of salvation from Christ the Savior, all praiseworthy one, and shared it abundantly with them that thirst; o Great Martyr and Equal to the Apostles, Photini, entreat Christ our God to save our souls.

The Dedication of the Basilicas of Ss Peter and Paul

The basilicas which house the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul are among the six which the Emperor Constantine built in Rome in the first years of the peace of the Church. Already by the later 4th century, a hymn of St Ambrose speaks of a procession to visit them both on the Apostles’ feast day, June 29th. However, the most ancient liturgical books of the Roman Rite do not attest to a celebration of the anniversary of their dedication, nor indeed of any such anniversary; the annual commemoration of the dedication of a church is one of the many happy inventions by which the Carolingians enriched the Roman Rite. It is reasonable to assume that once this custom had taken root, the joint celebration of the dedication of the two basilicas was inspired by the joint celebration of the two Apostles to whom they are dedicated, which is one of the universal and most ancient customs of all Christian liturgy. As far as I have been able to ascertain, this is the only pre-Tridentine example of the dedication of two separate churches being kept as a single feast.

Pope Urban VIII draws the letters of the Latin alphabet in ashes spread over the floor, during the consecration of St. Peter’s Basilica on November 18, 1626, the 1300th anniversary of the original church’s consecration by Pope St Sylvester I. (Roman tapestry, ca. 1660)

Prior to the Tridentine reform, however, this feast and the dedication of the Lateran basilica on November 9th were kept almost nowhere outside of Rome itself. Even the Franciscans, who adopted the liturgy of the Roman Curia from their very beginning, did not keep either one. Most of Europe celebrated November 9th as the feast of the martyr Theodore, who is still commemorated on that day, and the 18th as the octave of St Martin.

The breviary of St Pius V, issued in 1568, and the missal which followed it in 1570, were the first liturgical books of their kind deliberately designed to be used outside their place of origin, since they came with the Pope’s permission (not requirement) to adopt them anywhere the Roman Rite was used, in place of the local liturgical use which had hitherto prevailed. However, the liturgy of November 18th contains an interesting anomaly which is found on no other occasion; although the feast commemorates the dedication of two different churches, the Collect of the Mass, which is also said six times in the Office, remains in the singular.

“Deus, qui nobis per síngulos annos hujus sancti templi tui consecratiónis réparas diem … præsta, ut quisquis hoc templum beneficia petitúrus ingréditur, cuncta se impetrasse laetétur.

O God, who each year renewest for us the day of the consecration of this Thy holy temple … grant that whoever entereth this temple to ask for (Thy) favors, may rejoice in having obtained all (that he sought).”

The prayers for the Mass of the anniversary of the dedication of a church in the Echternach Sacramentary, 895 A.D. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9433)

Likewise, none of the other references to “church” in the singular are changed in either the Office or the Mass. Since most places in Europe only began to keep these feasts when (and if) they adopted the Roman liturgical books, they would have encountered this anomaly for the first time in the celebration of this feast.

Some might find it tempting to dismiss this as no more than an example of the habitual, and some might say lazy, liturgical conservatism of the Roman church. I do not believe this to be the case, since the Tridentine books are in so many ways a carefully thought-out response to the novelties of the Protestant reformation.

It is well known that the Reformation, starting with Luther himself, pretended to find justification for its novelties in some of St Paul’s letters, which became for them “the canon within the canon”, the yardstick against which everything else in Scripture, tradition and history was to be measured. This includes not just everything taught by the papacy and the Church in communion with it, but the papacy itself, and thus would the so-called reformers pit Peter and Paul against each other. The Roman liturgy (more precisely, the specifically Roman iteration of it then spreading out to other parts of the world), therefore treats the two churches and the two tombs of the two Apostles as if they were one, to lay emphasis on their real and ancient unity, always faithfully maintained and fostered by the Roman church.

The chancel arch, apse and high altar of the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, seen from the nave. Each image of St Paul is accompanied by one of St Peter, on the chancel arch, in the apsidal mosaic, and with the two statues seen here at the lower corners. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0)

As noted above, the joint feast of Ss Peter and Paul is extremely ancient, while that of the dedication of their basilicas is a product of the early Middle Ages. The Protestant reformers believed that they could restore the original ancient Christian faith by liberating it from the supposed accretions of the medieval period, although they often disagreed amongst themselves, and often quite violently, as to what exactly those accretions were. The Tridentine reform was essentially the Catholic Church’s answer to the question of what to do with all that it had inherited from the Middle Ages, in response to the Protestant repudiation of that inheritance. The Tridentine liturgy therefore reasserts the unity between Peter and Paul with two feasts, one ancient and one medieval, in which they are jointly commemorated, as an assertion of continuity between Christian antiquity and the Middle Ages. [1]

Furthermore, the Protestants often accused the Catholic Church of emphasizing the Saints so much as to eclipse Christ Himself. Many of them believed, and still believe, that devotion to the Saints was no more than a shallow Christianization of ancient polytheism. But this idea is refuted specifically by St Augustine, the same author to whom they turned for proof of their doctrine of grace. In The City of God, 8, 27, he writes, “But who ever heard a priest of the faithful, standing at an altar built for the honor and worship of God over the holy body of some martyr, say in the prayers, ‘I offer to you a sacrifice, Peter, or Paul, or Cyprian?’ For it is to God that sacrifices are offered at their tombs – the God who made them both men and martyrs, and associated them with holy angels in celestial honor; and the reason why we pay such honors to their memory is that by so doing, we may both give thanks to the true God for their victories, and, by recalling them afresh to remembrance, may stir ourselves up to imitate them by seeking to obtain like crowns and palms, calling to our help that same God on whom they called. Therefore, whatever honors the religious may pay in the places of the martyrs, they are but honors rendered to their memory, not sacred rites or sacrifices offered to dead men as to gods.” [2]

(The Communio of the Mass of a church dedication: “My house shall be called a house of prayer, sayeth the Lord; in it, everyone who asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and it is open to him that knocketh.” Matthew 21, 13)

The choice of Matins readings for a dedication and its octave reinforces this. On the feast itself and the following five days, those of the second nocturn are taken from Augustine. On the seventh day, St John Chrysostom is brought in as a witness that the Eastern churches have always held the same ancient Faith as the West; on the octave itself, the reading is from an early medieval Pope, St Felix IV, as quoted in a medieval collection of canon law. (Canon law was especially hated by the early Protestants as one of the worst medieval “corruptions.”) Likewise, in the third nocturn, the readings begin with St Ambrose, then pass to St Gregory the Great, and finally to the Venerable Bede, a symbol of the faithful transmission of the Church’s teaching from one generation to another. [3]

The very first such reading (on the second day of the feast) shows how carefully this was all thought out, a passage from St Augustine’s Treatise on Psalm 121, which quotes both Peter and Paul.

“ ‘Jerusalem that is being built as a city.’ Brethren, when David was saying these things, that city had been finished; it was not still being built. He speaks therefore of some city, I know not which, that is now being built, unto which living stones run in faith, of whom Peter says, ‘And you are built up together as living stones into a spiritual house’ (1 Pet. 2, 5) that is, as the holy temple of God. What does it mean, ‘You are built up together as living stones?’ You live, if you believe, but if you believe, you will be made a temple of God; for the Apostle Paul says, ‘For the temple of God is holy, which temple are you.’ ” (1 Cor. 3, 17)

Ss Ambrose and Augustine, ca. 1495, by the Spanish painter Pedro Berruguete (1450-1504.) Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

NOTES: [1] The creators of St Pius V’s reformed books may not have understood when exactly the feast of a church dedication came into existence, but they would certainly have noted its absence from the ancient sacramentaries kept in the Vatican library.

[2] Likewise, in his treatise against Faustus the Manichaean (20, 21): “For which of the bishops, while officiating at the altar in the places where the saints’ bodies lie, has ever said ‘We bring thee an offering, Peter, or Paul, or Cyprian’? But what is offered is offered to God, who crowned the martyrs, in the places of memorial of those whom He crowned, so that great affection might arise from the association with those very places, and charity kindled towards those whom we can imitate, and to Him by whose help we can imitate them.”

[3] The reading attributed to Pope Felix is not authentically his, but this fact was unknown in the 16th century. The breviary of St Pius V reads the homily of St Gregory that begins with the words “Si veraciter sapientes” on the 4th day within the octave; in the reform of St Pius X, it was moved to the octave day.