Prior to the 1960 reform of the Missal and Breviary, July 17 was kept in the Roman Rite as the feast of a confessor named Alexius. The single proper Matins lesson for his feast states that he was of a noble family, and that on the night of his wedding, “by a particular command of God”, he left his bride untouched, and went abroad as a pilgrim for seventeen years. After spending much time in the Syrian city of Edessa (once a very important center of Christianity), he returned to Rome. There he was welcomed, wholly unrecognized, into the house of his own parents, and died after another seventeen years; when his body was discovered, he had with him a written account of his whole life. The martyrology adds that at his death, he was recognized not only by the writing he had left behind, but also “by a voice heard throughout the churches of the City.” The common tradition, attested in many other versions of his legend, states that after he came back to Rome, he lived under the staircase of the house like Harry Potter; the purported stairs can still be seen to this day in the Roman basilica dedicated to him on the Aventine Hill.
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| The chapel with the basilica of Ss Boniface and Alexius, which contains the relics of the latter; the stairs under which he lived are mounted on the reredos. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Kent Wang, CC BY-SA 2.0.) |
It hardly needs to be stated that no aspect of this
prima facie improbable story can be taken as true. Among many other things, it is said to have happened during the papacy of St Innocent I, who reigned from 401-17, and yet there is no trace of it in any Western source before the later 10th century. That includes the many writings of Pope Innocent’s contemporaries such as Ss Jerome, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola, all of whom had regular contact with Rome.
And indeed, the church of Rome was long very chary of including this legend in its liturgy. Before the breviary of St Pius V was published in 1568, St Alexius had regularly appeared in Roman liturgical calendars for over 350 years, and likewise, on the calendars of many other medieval Uses. However, the feast was otherwise not mentioned in the Roman liturgical books; no Mass was indicated in the proper of the Saints in the missal, and no lesson or collect was given in the breviary.
It is now generally recognized that the story of Alexius is based on that of a saint from Edessa known only as “the man of God”, who lived there as a homeless beggar in the early 5th century. He is said to have given most of the money which he received to those in even worse condition than himself, and to have confided to someone in the hospice where he died that he was the son of a Roman nobleman. By the later 10th century, the legend had expanded to give this man the name Alexius (or Alexis in Greek), and when a metropolitan of Damascus called Sergius, exiled to Rome from Syria, was given charge of a basilica dedicated to an equally legendary martyr called Boniface, he added Alexius as its co-titular Saint. (The breviary lessons for St Benedict Joseph Labré (1748-83), a Frenchman who lived by begging his way from shrine to shrine as a pilgrim, describe him as one who “followed in the arduous steps of St Alexius.”)
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| This icon, known as “the Madonna of Saint Alexius” or “of Edessa”, is traditionally said to have been in Edessa in the time of St Alexius, and greatly venerated by him when he lived in that city, then brought to his Roman basilica by the bishop Sergius mentioned above. It is now generally thought to have been made in Byzantium in the 12th or 13th century. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, by Beloved Olga.) |
On the same day, the martyrology notes the death of the Scillitan Martyrs, a group of twelve Christians, seven men and five women, from a town called Scilla in North Africa, who were martyred for the Faith at Carthage in 180 AD. (Scilla was a suffragan of Carthage, about 172 miles to the southwest of it.) Their written acts are universally recognized as historically accurate, and are also the first account of a martyrdom preserved to us from that region, which gave the Church many martyrs in the early centuries. A basilica was dedicated to them at Carthage, and three sermons which St Augustine preached in it on their feast day are preserved. In the first of these, he refers to the ancient custom by which the acts of the martyrs were read during the Mass, the custom which led to their preservation.
“The holy martyrs, the witnesses of God, preferred by dying to live, lest by living they should die; they disdained life by loving life, lest by fearing death they should deny life. The enemy promised life, so that Christ might be denied, but not life such as Christ promised it. Believing, therefore, that which was promised by the Savior, they laughed at the threat of the persecutor. Brethren, when we celebrate the solemnities of the martyrs, we know that examples have been set forth for us, which we can obtain by imitating them. For we do not increase the glory of the martyrs by keeping this assembly; their crown is known to the companies of the angels. We could hear what they suffered when it was being read, but that which they received, ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.’ (1 Cor. 2, 9)” (Sermo 299/D in init.)
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| The cathedral of St John the Baptist in Lyon, France. Amid the violence of the ninth century, described below in reference to Pope St Leo IV, the relics of St Cyprian and the Scillitan Martyrs were brought here from Africa for safe keeping; some of the latter were later brought to the basilica of Ss John and Paul on the Caelian hill in Rome. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Otourly, CC BY-SA 3.0) |
In the Ambrosian Rite, July 17 is the feast of
St Marcellina, the older sister of St Ambrose, who helped her mother to raise him and their brother Satyrus after the death of their father. From her youth, she wished to dedicate herself entirely to God, and was consecrated as a virgin and veiled by Pope Liberius on Christmas of 353 in St Peter’s Basilica. (This event is an early attestation of
the Roman system of station churches.) St Ambrose addressed his treatise
On Virginity to her, and at the beginning of the third book, preserves the address which Liberius gave at the time, beginning as follows:
“You… my daughter, have desired a good espousal. You see how great a crowd has come together for the birthday of your Spouse, and none has gone away without food. This is He, Who, when invited to the marriage feast, changed water into wine. He, too, will confer the pure sacrament of virginity on you who before were subject to the vile elements of material nature.”
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| The monument and relics of Saint Marcellina, in the Milanese basilica dedicated to her brother. Photo by Nicola de’ Grandi. |
After her brother’s election as bishop of Milan, Marcellina visited him there many times, and advised him on the pastoral care of consecrated women, but continued to make her home in Rome,
living, as aristocratic woman often did, in a private home, but very austerely. She outlived Ambrose, who died on April 4, 397, but the exact date of her death is unknown.
July 17 is also the anniversary of the death of Pope St Leo IV in 855, after a reign of just over eight years and two months. In his time, Saracen pirates were wreaking havoc throughout the western Mediterranean; the year before his election, they had sailed up the Tiber and sacked the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, destroying at least a large portion of the Apostle’s relics. His papacy began with the construction of major works to defend Rome, including a new set of walls around the Vatican, which are still called the Leonine walls to this day, and the complex as a whole was known as the Leonine city. (This used to be the name of the bus stop in front of Cardinal Ratzinger’s old apartment building, ‘Città Leonina’ in Italian.)
In the year of his election, 847, he put out a fire which had broken out in the Borgo, the neighborhood in front of the Vatican, by giving his blessing from the balcony of St Peter’s. Two years later, he formed a league with the maritime states of Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi; at the battle of Ostia, their combined naval forces destroyed a massive Saracen invasion force which had set out from Sardinia. Both of these events are depicted in one of the rooms now within the Vatican Museums known as the Stanze of Raphael, but these specific paintings are really the works of his students.
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| The Fire in the Borgo, by the workshop of Raphael, 1514-17. The three male figures on the left are a nod to the story of Aeneas escaping from the burning of Troy; their exaggerated musculature, and that of the man next to them hanging from the wall, reflects the exaggerated influence of the recently discovered statue of Laocoön, which also greatly influenced the work of Michelangelo. This painting was much admired for the cleverly designed figure on the far right, the woman with a water-jar on her head, who has just turned the corner, and opens her mouth in astonishment at the scene. ~ A few years prior to the commissioning of this painting, Pope Julius II and his architect Donatello Bramante had begun the process of replacing the ancient basilica of St Peter, then almost on the point of collapse. This image is an important historical record of what its façade looked like at the time. |
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| The Battle of Ostia, also by the workshop of Raphael, 1514-15. Pope St Leo IV presides over the battle from the far left in cope and papal tiara, as one does; his face is that of the contemporary Pope, Leo X Medici. |
The collection of papal biographies known as the Liber Pontificalis contains an enormous list of his works in and benefactions to Roman churches, and he translated the relics of many Saints from the catacombs outside the city to churches within it. He is also traditionally, but erroneously, credited with the invention of the Asperges rite, and the sermon on the duties of priests which the Pontificale appoints to be read by the bishop at their ordination.
The revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints also includes on this day St Clement of Okhrida, who is reckoned as one of the seven Apostles of the Bulgarians. His feast is kept on July 27, but this was apparently the day of his burial, ten days after his death.
Clement was born ca. 835; his ethnic origins and place of birth are not quite certain, but he is generally thought to have been a Slav, born in the Balkan territories of the Byzantine Empire. It is disputed whether he was a Bulgar himself. (The Bulgars were not originally Slavs, but of the same Turkic stock as the Huns and the modern Turks, later Slavicized when they settled in the Balkans.) He became a disciple and collaborator of Ss Cyril and Methodius in their mission to Great Moravia, and led it after Methodius’ death, but was soon expelled from the area, and came down to Bulgaria. The king at that time, Boris I, was to Bulgaria what Constantine had been to Rome, and what Saints
Vladimir and Olga would later be to Kyivan Rus’. But Boris was much concerned to keep his kingdom politically free of his Byzantine neighbors, and therefore wished the Church in his domain to use Slavonic, rather than Greek.
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| An icon of St Clement of Okhrida, with his teachers Ss Cyril and Methodius above him, the former (on the right) holding a scroll with some of the letters of the Glagolitic alphabet. From the Bulgarian monastery on Mt Athos, Zographou, founded in the later 10th century by monks from Okrida. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Yane Bakreski, CC BY-SA 4.0) |
The invention of Church Slavonic as a literary idiom, created specifically to translate the Bible and the Byzantine liturgy, was the work of Cyril and Methodius. They also created an alphabet to write it with, since there are many sounds in the Slavic languages for which the Greek and Latin alphabets have no letter. This alphabet, however, was not the one which bears Cyril’s name, and which is still used to write Church Slavonic in modern liturgical books, and (with variations) its many daughter languages. It was rather a very different kind of script known as Glagolitic, from an old Slavic word for “word”.
The so-called Cyrillic alphabet was actually invented about 30 years after Cyril’s death at one of the two literary schools which Clement and his collaborators founded in Bulgaria. Ironically, although this was done to favor Bulgaria’s cultural and political independence from the Greek-speaking Byzantines, it is effectively the Greek alphabet with several letters added for Slav-specific sounds, and some of the Greek letters relegated to use only in Greek loan-words. After the controversies which brought the mission of Ss Cyril and Methodius to naught, it was the work of these schools which definitively established Church Slavonic’s place as a liturgical language.
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| The early Cyrillic alphabet. |
