The Church of Ss Peter and Paul in Biasca, Switzerland (Part 1)

Our Ambrosian expert Nicola de’ Grandi recently visited the town of Biasca, about 79 miles to the north of Milan in the Swiss canton of Ticino. There are three valleys in the area known as the Ambrosian valleys, which were under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishop of Milan since at least the sixth century, and consequently celebrated the Ambrosian Rite. Many churches in the area still use the rite to this day, even though they are now part of the diocese of Lugano, which was founded in 1888, and is coterminous with the canton. Biasca was the seat of the principal parish and mother church of the region, originally dedicated to just St Peter, later also to St Paul. The current building is the second church to be built on the site, the result of a reconstruction project begun in the second half of the 12th century.

Modern restorations have removed most of the additions made to the building in later periods, especially the Baroque, and revealed a great amount of fresco work is preserved in fairly good condition, and a very nice wooden ceiling with decorations of the Gothic period. This post of Nicola’s photos will focus on the frescos; a second post will show the Romanesque exterior. 

The apse is dominated by a fresco of Christ in majesty with the four Evangelists, each accompanied by his traditional symbol. The images of the two bishops on the sides have been deliberately damaged with an awl to make the surface rougher; a second layer of fresco which was placed on top of them has subsequently been removed.  

To the right of this window is the meeting of St Peter with Christ as he flees from Rome, part of a traditional legend about the Apostle’s career in Rome and eventual martyrdom.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Cold and Hot Media: The Mass as a Medium

“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”

Paweł Jarnicki

Part 3

(See Part 1 | Part 2)

The difficulties in understanding McLuhan’s views on microphones may also stem from the fact that he assumes that the reader is familiar with his concepts presented in other texts. It is obvious that a microphone is a transmitter, that it is a medium. There is the one who speaks, there is the one who listens, and there is the message transmitted through the microphone.

But a casual reader may be surprised that McLuhan seems to suggest that the use of what he considers a “cold” microphone could “warm up” the Latin Mass (which he considers “cold”). What does it mean for media to be “cold” or “hot”?

In the simplest terms, a hot medium delivers information in “high definition”, in a form that minimizes the cognitive activity of the recipient. Take, for example, a contemporary entertainment film with surround sound and special effects. The recipient does not have to conjecture the details, does not have to imagine how something explodes, what someone is wearing, what a given interior looks like, what the background of a scene is, etc. (to stick to the realm of appearances). The recipient simply sees it, and is cognitively passive, because everything is “served on a plate.”

Cold media, on the other hand, provide information in “low definition”, in a form that requires cognitive activity on the part of the recipient; in order to assimilate the message, the recipient must “warm it up”. Someone who reads a novel has to conjecture a lot, has to imagine what the scene described in words looks like, has to complete a lot of details, construe a lot, and can do it in many ways to a certain extent. [1] So, although on the surface, just like a movie viewer, they do nothing (they do not move or speak), we understand that a book reader is more active than a viewer who simply surrenders to impressions.

Hot media make the audience cognitively passive, while cold media force cognitive activity, which is why, among other things, “the medium is the message,” because in the long run it changes the level of knowledge of a larger group of recipients. Continuing with our book-film example, let us note that the knowledge of students who have watched the film adaptation of a school reading is different from the knowledge of students who have carefully read the book.

In this sense, the type of medium has a greater impact on culture and society than the content of the message being conveyed. Regardless of whether it is Pan Tadeusz [the Polish national epic] or another story, more is “gained” from the reception of a cold medium. This is because a cold medium requires cognitive activity on the part of the recipient, an act that de facto creates a community.

After all, it is not state-issued ID cards or church baptism certificates that make us a community, but rather socialization into similar ways of “warming up” – completing, conjecturing, construing. If this seems too abstract, try to recall a social gathering. Jokes are often told at such gatherings, especially at the beginning, to build a shared mood. Jokes often involve some kind of understatement or mistake; the audience has to make a mental effort to “get it,” and shared laughter is proof that despite the ambiguity of the message, we “get it,” meaning we understand each other better and think alike. A momentary community is created. [2]

Another device that requires completion is... the parable. We usually think that their ambiguity served to ensure that only the chosen few understood them, so as not to cast pearls before swine, and we do not notice the other – or perhaps the first – side of the coin, that the ambiguity of certain statements, by forcing similar cognitive activity, builds a community.

Pius XII offering Mass at an altar with four microphones (only three visible). Photo courtesy of Nico Fassino

McLuhan writes about the microphone, but he also seems to think of the Mass as a medium, although he does not make this distinction explicitly. [3] If the Mass is a medium, then the speaker is the Church, the listener is the people of God, and what is communicated through the Mass is the deposit of Faith. Viewing the Mass as a medium helps us understand why the “cold” microphone “warmed up” the Holy Mass, because in the new Mass – with sound amplification, in vernacular, with the priest facing the people – everything is to be “high definition”: visible, audible, and understandable.

The traditional Mass was “low definition” – cold (“demanding”), like reading a book: the faithful had to complete for themselves what the priest was doing. They had dogmas as their guideposts. The new Mass is hot (“easy”), like watching a movie. However, even though the priest says everything loudly and in understandable language, it does not help at all to feel that he is addressing God and re-presenting the Sacrifice of Christ in an unbloody manner on behalf of the faithful. Continuing our analogy, the “plot” is supposedly the same (the deposit of Faith has not changed), but the level of “knowledge” of the faithful is radically different.

It is possible that illiterate people of past eras (raised on the old Mass) had a deeper faith than those among contemporary intellectuals (raised on the new Mass) who have remained in the Church and so “actively” participate in the new Masses. They read the readings, carry the gifts, and above all, they do not pray the rosary during Mass (a very common example!). “Traditionalists” often mock this “activism.” However, no one can explain what is wrong with it.

The paradox is that although the theoretical goal of the Mass reform was to increase the participation of the faithful (participatio actuosa), in practice the effects are the opposite of what was intended. The changes introduced (which were intended to increase clarity and comprehensibility, i.e., to “warm up” the Mass) have only increased external activity and suppressed internal activity, which is truly community-building. Contemporary Catholic communities that shake hands after meetings and say, “It’s good to have you here,” may in fact be superficial communities. Only internal, cognitive activity creates a deeper community, creates the Church.

If during the new Mass, where everything is seemingly clear, obvious, and understandable, the faithful do not have to complete anything themselves or conjecture anything (which is very difficult anyway, because they are flooded with many more stimuli), then they absorb the content of the reading to a much lesser extent, and their membership in the Community becomes increasingly formal. They cease to feel unity with other members of the Mystical Body. This is the first, painful consequence of introducing the microphone into the Church, concerning the Community. The second concerns the Word.

The church of St Matthäus in Düsseldorf, Germany. Notice the obligatory centrality of the mic, with the processional cross and candles to the side. The overhead crucifix only partly cancels out the effect.

Omnimediatization

After my conversion, I saw and heard many Masses. Very different ones. I quickly turned to traditional Masses, although I never rejected the new ones. I read about the reform, about non-believers and Protestants who once converted, enchanted by the beauty of the Latin Mass. And then they experienced the reform and the pentecostalization of Catholicism. And I began to wonder if today’s Mass could “captivate” someone enough to convert them. If I bring a non-believing friend to Mass in my parish, is there anything here that might delight them? It’s a difficult question...

The vast majority of new Masses are chaotic, and at times even noisy and cacophonous. The new Mass is not appealing at all. I have often wondered whether it is inertia or a miracle that people still come here. In today’s churches, too many things are shoddy, kitschy, and inconsistent. Plastic chasubles and hubbub stand in stark contrast to the thoughtful design and ornamentation of old churches.

Among the more “difficult” experiences, I include the contemporary new Masses known as “children’s,” “for children,” or “family” Masses. Much could be written about them, but I will focus here on one way in which the microphone is used during them. The moment of the homily arrives. The priest does not approach the pulpit or climb into the ambo, but takes a portable microphone, leaves the presbytery and goes into the nave (in front of the balustrade, which is not there) and calls the children to him. They crowd around him. Instead of a sermon, he gives a catechesis and asks the children questions. The children answer. The priest is happy, the parents are happy, because the children are “actively participating” and the content is good and pious. What’s wrong with that?

We already know that the content is actually secondary, because the primary message is the medium. And no one at this Mass is surprised that the priest speaks through a microphone to the children who are within arm’s reach. No one is surprised that they answer him through the same microphone, even though they are standing right next to him. And once during such a Mass, the priest, who after his sermon-catechesis had already asked all the children about their Mass intentions, turned – of course through that portable microphone, of course – to the adults remaining in the pews with the question: “Perhaps the floor has some intentions?”

This servant of the Lord’s constantly devasted vineyard, whose piety and good faith I am firmly convinced of, simply picked up the message from the microphone. He called the faithful who participate in the Sacrifice “the floor.” But it’s really not his fault. He was about 40 years old, so he was raised on Mass with a microphone.

It was only while writing this article that I realized how mediatized our world is, how it is mediated by the means of communication. [4] I tried to find contemporary social events that are not mediatized, and the only things that came to mind were school classes and some funerals of “insignificant people.” It was a shocking discovery for me that there are basically no more social events that are not mediatized. We have to see and hear everything.

Nothing should be left unbroadcast.

And yet, a hundred years ago in Fatima, over 70,000 people came, even though they couldn’t see. They came because they heard that something was occurring. But there was no sound system or zoom on site. They had no guarantee that they would see or hear anything, even if they were right in the center of events. The photos from Fatima in 1917 are, of course, a means of communication, but they are only documents; the events in Fatima themselves were not mediatized for their participants. That is, the means of communication were there, but they were... children, flesh-and-blood children.

Our world has changed significantly over the past hundred years. This would not have been possible without microphones and sound systems. The first such systems were developed around 1915, and two years later, during Christmas 1917 in San Francisco, the Magnavox sound system was publicly presented. In the same year, Our Lady of the Rosary appeared in Fatima. The carbon microphone was invented forty years earlier, in 1876. In 1877, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception appeared in Gietrzwałd. And seven years later, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII had a truly Job-like vision, or rather “hearing,” because the revelation was (indeed!) acoustic in nature. Jesus spoke with Satan, who, wanting to attempt to destroy the Church (the deposit of Faith!), demanded [5] time (from 75 to 100 years) and greater power over those who would devote themselves to his service. Jesus was to allow this, and Satan chose the “coming” century (usually interpreted, but on what basis is unknown, as the 20th century).

Terrified by this revelation, Leo XIII decided that all priests would recite a set of prayers after low Masses (during the week), kneeling at the foot of the altar (the old one, i.e., together with the people, versus Deum), which were later called “the Leonine Prayers.” These prayers are no longer recited today except at the old Mass (though sometimes their echo can still be heard when, after a parish Mass, the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel is recited). The obligation to recite the Leonine Prayers as an “add-on” was abolished by the Consilium led by Bugnini in 1964.

I must admit that when I heard that the new pope had chosen the name Leo, I felt hopeful that this was not a random choice. Although the content of Leo XIII’s revelations is known to many believers, and many believers are familiar with other predictions of a crisis in the Church, priests today do not explain this to the faithful in a convincing manner. For believers, can such temporal coincidences as those mentioned above be purely accidental? Is the intensification of Marian apparitions accidental? Has Jesus really allowed Satan to destroy the Church? When? When will it end? Has it already begun? What would it consist of? Is it a coincidence that God’s people are lost in conjectures and conspiracy theories when the voice of the shepherds has become a processed voice?

Although succession in the Church must still be accomplished through the direct laying on of hands, the Word that priests proclaim today is transmitted. This may seem insignificant to us, but the sound that comes from the speakers is, contrary to appearances, heavily processed, so that the sound does not overlap with the echo of what was said a moment ago. [6] In addition, the priest’s voice today reaches the faithful from all directions (the nearest speaker may even be behind them); it is a “dis-placed” voice. In the past, it had one natural source in the priest’s body. This causes confusion, which is not visible in adults today because they are already accustomed to it, but it can be seen in some of the youngest children (who enter the space of a mass event with a transmitted human voice, not only in church). The microphone created, as McLuhan put it, a “sound bubble.”

This led to the actual elimination of the age-old division of the Temple into three zones (tabernacle – Holy of Holies; presbytery – Holy Place; nave – vestibule), which, in short, does not help the faithful understand that the most important part of the Mass takes place there, in the presbytery, in a slightly different space behind the balustrades. In fact, today the balustrade is often no longer there, because the sound bubble has made the space of churches a homogeneous space of encounter around the Table-Altar.

The voice also sounds at a similar volume all the time (in the old Mass, the priest sometimes spoke loudly, sometimes moderately, sometimes in a whisper). The microphone not only dis-placed the Word proclaimed during Mass, but also, as McLuhan puts it, discarnated it. It is precisely this second, painful consequence of the introduction of the microphone into the Church that concerns the Word.

TLM, Rome (Italy), Church of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims. A medium-sized church during a traditional Mass does not require a sound system; the cross is the axis of the celebration.

TLM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Church of St. Anne. A church without a single microphone, neither at the altar nor at the ambo.

Discarnation of the Word

The lord of death is unable to be born of a virgin like God. The lord of death cannot have his own body. At most, he can enter the bodies of those born naturally. The Church has developed methods to combat possession. But it has not noticed the new trick of the lord of death – a trick with a much greater destructive power than possession: the trick of the discarnation of the Word, which distorts the transmission of the deposit of Faith. That is why I say: Let’s throw the microphone out of the Church!

“Even then Cassandra, who, by the god’s decree, is never / to be believed by Trojans, reveals our future fate with her lips.”

I saw that on most of the new altars, the microphone had taken the place of the cross. The cross stood to the side or behind and became an ornament. Priests today move around the microphone.

But whatever happens, as the Church says, the Lord will come. He was born at night, he comes in silence, he will rise from the heights and illuminate the darkness.

Christmas Day, 2025

NOTES

^[1] Let us note in the margin that after a film with special effects, it is more difficult to have a meaningful conversation with other viewers (often these conversations do not go beyond “did you see that” or “that was great”), it is more difficult to talk about such films because we saw the same thing and everything was obvious. When, on the other hand, someone has read the same novel (I don’t mean a crime novel) at the same time, it is often easier to talk about it because we understand many issues and imagine them slightly differently.

^[2] Of course, it happens that a narcissistic character dominates a party that consists only of jokes, or that jokes quickly reveal that we will not understand each other, that there will be no community, because completing them would mean repeating stereotypes that offend us. Metaphors are a community-building device similar to jokes, although not as easy to notice. Due to their ambiguity, they also force the listener to make cognitive effort and create a community. In the presence of those who use metaphors that do not offend us, but are close to us, ones that we understand almost instinctively, we feel better.

^[3] This is how, by the way, Ashil D. Manohar develops McLuhan’s idea in his thesis entitled The Mass is the Medium: Marshall McLuhan and Roman Catholic Liturgical Change (2021). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/8817. Such an approach may seem strange at first, but it is not foreign to official church documents. Cf. e.g. p. 11 of the pastoral instruction on social communications Communio et progressio: “Communication is more than the expression of ideas and the indication of emotion. At its most profound level it is the giving of self in love. Christ’s communication was, in fact, spirit and life (Jn 6:53). In the institution of the Holy Eucharist, Christ gave us the most perfect and most intimate form of communion between God and man possible in this life, and, out of this, the deepest possible unity between men.”

^[4] I also realized that this world is coming to an end because of “Artificial Intelligence,” because it is beginning to eat its own tail. Trust in the media began to crumble earlier (because we began to realize that “the press lies” and “television lies” also today, and not just “during communism” behind the Iron Curtain), but AI will complete this process — once we realize that with its help, our and foreign intelligence services, criminals, and enlightened minds are able to generate hyper-realistic fake news, we will completely lose trust in our “extended senses.” In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before zones free from all kinds of technology begin to emerge. Churches could be at the forefront of this!

^[5] I do not have access to the relevant sources, but in reports that can be found on the Internet, Satan’s voice is described as “guttural” or “harsh” , and Artificial Intelligence confirms that early microphones caused such sound distortion and that the human voice transmitted through them was often described as “harsh,” “distorted,” or “raspy.”

^[6] This is necessary due to the “outdated” architecture of churches, which was designed for natural voices. Traditional methods of amplifying sound, apart from architecture, were based on the construction of the ambo — raised above the people. A canopy was installed above the pulpit, whose function was not only decorative — the canopy reflected the sound and directed it downwards towards the people, and in addition, a soundboard was often placed in it. However, all these measures amplified the priest’s live and unprocessed voice.

The Microphone as a Social Actor

“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”

Paweł Jarnicki

Part 2

(See Part 1 | Part 3)

McLuhan coined two well-known phrases, the first being “global village” and the second “medium is the message.” While it is easy to understand that, due to the rapid circulation of information, we all live in a “global village” today, it is more difficult to comprehend that the medium itself is also a message. McLuhan meant that the medium itself has a strong influence on the audience. It is not that, for example, the type of telephone affects the content of everyday conversations, because intuitively this influence seems minimal, but that the telephone (especially in the form of a “smartphone”) has changed the nature of interpersonal relationships in the long term and even influences our personality and perception. The impact of landline telephones was not as easily noticeable as the impact of instant messaging on the peer relationships and state of mind of young people is today, as seen from the perspective of people in their forties and fifties.

Some inventions profoundly change life in the world, in ways we cannot predict at the time of their implementation. This was obvious to McLuhan in the 1970s. A decade later, Bruno Latour popularized this idea by developing the “actor-network theory.” In this theory, society is not just people, but a network of “actors” that influence it, including material objects and... abstract concepts.

When society adopts a new technology, it does not usually discuss the possible long-term consequences of the actions of such an inhuman actor. We have imposed a series of tests on the production of new drugs, but we did not discuss the possible effects of social media before its introduction. Only after some time do we begin to realize the consequences of including them in our network: serious analyses appear that show that these new actors have a destructive effect on democratic systems, and artists also begin to explore the topic of their negative impact on young people (let us mention the recent success of the difficult mini-series Adolescence).

In the actor-network theory, the concept of bacteria is also such a social actor. It is not that bacteria did not exist before this concept. The point is that the organization of the human world did not take this concept into account. And when this concept became an actor in our societies, our behaviors and habits in terms of hygiene changed fundamentally.

The Church had always been very cautious about introducing technical innovations, especially in churches, so the influence of such worldly, soulless actors on the liturgy was relatively small. And sometimes the Church was able to harness technical innovations to achieve its own goals. When it came to “media” inventions, this was certainly the case with the invention of printing.

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy. At the new Mass, everyone must hear and see everything.

The Church’s reactions to the inventions of printing and the microphone

For McLuhan, as a media theorist, two inventions were revolutionary for our civilization: the printing press and the microphone. He realized that these (from today’s perspective) simple creations radically changed the world we live in, and changed it in ways that the people who witnessed the introduction of these inventions could not have predicted. These two inventions have twice reinforced the position of vernacular languages, i.e., the languages we speak every day.

The first reinforcement was visual, because printing completed the process initiated by the invention of the phonetic alphabet and caused us to move from an oral-acoustic culture to a visual-linear culture. It sounds complicated, but the point is that sight became the dominant sense in our perception of the world and in our culture. Earlier culture was more “auditory,” centered around hearing, and in fact multisensory with a slight advantage for hearing. According to McLuhan, printing has led us to a visual culture, one in which sight clearly dominates. What is the difference?

Hearing does not “see” contours [1] and works more synthetically. It integrates our experience of the world into a whole; we also hear from many sides at once. Sight sees contours, analyzes and divides our experience of the world into pieces – it has made our perception more sequential and abstract; we also focus our sight in one direction. Thus, our perception of the world and our culture have changed, which, thanks to printing – thanks to the shift in emphasis to visuality – has gained unprecedented momentum. But at the same time, all contours have become more important: divisions, segmentations, specializations, and in the longer term... nationalisms.

These cultural changes also had an impact on liturgy. As McLuhan writes, it might seem that “the demand for a vernacular liturgy arose spontaneously in the sixteenth century, but it isn’t so. In fact, that demand was linked to the invention of print, an invention that accentuated people’s need to push towards individualism and nationalism. Add to that the fact that printed texts gave rise to textual exegesis from the pulpit. And finally, the new accent on the visual favored placing the celebrant face to face with the congregation: we needed to see him and he wanted to be seen.” [2] According to McLuhan, the fact that greater emphasis was placed on preaching in the 16th century and that Protestant priests turned to face the people was a consequence of the invention of printing. According to him, “Medieval liturgy was mostly acoustic,” and in Reformed churches it became more visual.

In response to the invention of printing, the Council of Trent developed the Decretum de edendis sanctis litteris et facultate utendi iis, and Pius V issued the apostolic constitution Quo primum tempore, thus defining the rules for the use of the new invention and regulating its use during ceremonies. Thanks to this, Catholics living in the world after the invention of printing, in the (as McLuhan describes it) “Gutenberg Galaxy,” that is, those who already had the need to see everything, accepted that there are certain things that cannot be seen in the sacred liturgy of the Church. This is important because we use our sight to construct the world as a set of static, permanent objects that have contours (for the ear, everything is more “fluid”), so making everything visible, to put it mildly, did not facilitate belief in the transubstantiation and Real Presence of God in the sacrament of the Altar. When you see the contours, it is more difficult to believe that the host is transformed into the Body of Christ. The effects of shifting the emphasis to visuality are clearly visible among Protestants, who have lost their belief in the Real Presence.

In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church not only resisted the worldly impact of the invention of printing, but also harnessed the new technology to standardize and consolidate existing liturgical practices and centralize the one and only Church. And how the Church transformed the worldly emphasis on visuality, i.e., the need to see that was created among the laity living in the world, can still be seen today in Baroque churches.

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Catholic church; I don’t remember which one. This beautiful high altar surmounted by a crucifix became simply a decorative background.

The second historical reinforcement – auditory – was given to vernacular languages by the microphone.

First, new mass media appeared, thanks to the microphone, radio and television developed. The circulation of information, this time also in the form of sounds, accelerated even more. In public spaces, we began to hear different sounds from all sides at the same time. Television began to use sight like hearing, and we began to perceive images as sound, with our eyes focused on a single point, we could begin to see and hear the entire scene.

Secondly, the nature of mass events changed: without the microphone, there would be no numerous competitions and championships, popular concerts, or demonstrations.

Thirdly, thanks to the microphone, new figures emerged. As McLuhan significantly notes, without the microphone there would have been no Gandhi or Hitler. The vernacular began to reign supreme in the public sphere, in a version increasingly close to colloquial language.

According to McLuhan, the overall impact of the microphone on culture is the opposite of that of print; because of the microphone, we have begun to return to an acoustic culture. Today’s culture is in some ways more reminiscent of that of the pre-literate era; we are returning from individualism to tribalism (we are more empathetic today, but only towards people from our own “tribe”); our perception has become non-sequential (non-linear), but immediate and holistic (rather than abstract, because it is difficult to “hear” contours).

So how could a microphone, which reversed the “visual” effects of printing on culture, cause the same “visual” changes in Catholic liturgy that printing caused among Protestants? Although the overall impact of the microphone on culture seems to be the opposite, both inventions have intensified the mediatization of our experience of the world. Today, we have a deeply rooted need to see and hear everything through the media, which are like extensions of our senses. If we cannot see and hear something through the media, we find it difficult to believe in it. [3] And since, with the microphone, we introduced into the Church the worldly need to hear everything, its older sister – the need to see everything – came along with it. And that is why, in the liturgical dimension, thanks to the microphone, the Church quickly “made up” for what it had previously “neglected” during the first visual reinforcement of vernacular languages. Priests who turn to the people and speak in their vernacular often behave as if they do not believe in the Real Presence.

The Church did not notice that the microphone was a new “actor.” Although the Second Vatican Council issued the decree Inter mirifica in 1963, it concerns social media, i.e., those used in the world. [4] The last council did not issue any document that would harness the microphone for the Church’s own purposes. And since the Church did not consider the issue of the microphone, this new worldly “actor” has been influencing the liturgy for almost a hundred years in the same way that it influences the world. And Catholics born into servitude should know who rules this world.

This approach sheds light on the contemporary crisis of the Church without attributing ill will to anybody, and explains the reason for the pentecostalization described in contemporary academic literature, i.e., the similarities between contemporary Catholic liturgical practices and Protestant practices. Some “traditionalists” (I believe in good faith) suggest that the new Masses imitate Protestants. This superficial observation often rightly outrages “new Catholics.”

In fact, these are deeper processes. “New Catholics” do not imitate Martin Luther, but succumb to the worldly influences of printing technology and microphones; they enter God’s temples with the same expectations there as they have in the world. Moreover, even many Church documents from the second half of the 20th century say that the faithful should “hear without difficulty.” [5] However, no one has considered whether it is really necessary for the faithful to hear everything during Mass. Isn’t it enough for them to assist at Mass, as they have done for eons?

By placing microphones on altars – in the place where God appears – we have introduced a Trojan horse into the Church: the microphone, and in it, the worldly need to hear and see everything. However, just as it is not necessary to see everything during Mass, it is also not necessary to hear everything. It is enough to look, listen, and... believe.

Against appearances, these are not subtle but fundamental differences, because the need to see and hear everything introduced into the Church by microphones has serious consequences. In Part 3, I will discuss two of them: those concerning the Community and those concerning the Word. [6] 

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn. If the altar can’t be turned around, the speaker will ensure that everyone can hear everything

NOTES

^[1] The piano keyboard is an artificial creation.

^[2] Pierre Babin, Liturgy and Media: (Marshall McLuhan’s) Third Conversation with Pierre Babin, in: Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds.), The medium and the light: Reflections on Religion, Toronto: Stoddart 1999, p. 142.

^[3] This trend will most likely be reversed by artificial intelligence; see footnote 22.

^[4] Subsequently, based on Inter mirifica, a very enthusiastic pastoral instruction on the means of social communication, Communio et progressio, was developed in 1971 (“So, ‘among the wonderful technical inventions’ (Inter mirifica) which foster communication among human beings, Christians find means that have been devised under God’s Providence for the encouragement of social relations during their pilgrimage on earth”). On its twentieth anniversary, another instruction was published, entitled Aetatis Novae, which is no longer so enthusiastic (“the application of communications technology has been a mixed blessing”), but fails to identify the cause of the problem. These documents are about the press, radio, and television, and do not recognize the inventions from which they originated. It is like considering the impact of various computer programs without noticing the invention of the computer.

^[5]General Introduction to the Roman Missal (2010), point 311: “Care should be taken to ensure that the faithful be able not only to see the Priest, the Deacon, and the readers but also, with the aid of modern technical means, to hear them without difficulty.” See also no. 34 in the General Introduction to the Lectionary (1981): “Provision must also be made for the readers to have enough light to read the text and, as required, to have modern sound equipment enabling the faithful to hear them without difficulty.”

^[6] I will present more arguments against microphones in churches in a separate text, which will be included in an anthology that I will publish in Polish.

St Frances of Rome and the Counter-Reformation

This Thursday, the feast of Pope St Gregory the Great, is the anniversary of one of the most important events of the Counter-Reformation. On that day in the year 1622, Pope Gregory XV canonized four Saints who had played particularly important roles in the reformation of the Church after the terrible shock of the Protestant rebellion: Philip Neri, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Theresa of Avila. This was not, however, the first canonization of Counter-Reformation Saints; that honor fell to Gregory XV’s predecessor, Paul V, when he canonized Charles Borromeo in 1610. (St Charles’ was the first fast-track canonization of the modern era, with his process completed only 26 years after his death.) The ceremony was held on All Saints’ day of 1610, the closest major solemnity to the day of Charles’ death, November 3rd; a statement, in response to the Reformation, that sanctity still thrived within the Church, and that its hierarchy, the source of so much scandal and corruption in the years leading up to Luther’s revolt, had truly been reformed.

St Frances of Rome, by the Italian painter Fabrizio Boschi (1572-1642). She is traditionally depicted in the company of her guardian angel, whom she could regular see and converse with. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Francesco Bini, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

About a year-and-a-half earlier, Pope Paul had canonized the Saint whose feast we keep today, Frances of Rome (1384-1440). This was also in a very important sense a canonization of the Counter-Reformation, even though Frances died well before the Reformation itself began. The protestants rejected the idea of marriage as a sacrament, and completely abolished religious life for both men and women. Taken together, these two things meant that women could no longer choose a life in community dedicated wholly and solely to the service of God, while the only way of life left open to them, marriage, was reduced to an arrangement which brought with it many duties, but no sense that the fulfillment of those duties is a means of sanctification. In response, the Church presented Frances as a woman who became a Saint both as a wife and mother, and as the foundress of a community of Benedictine oblates.

St Charles’ life was a sign that the Church had successfully effected necessary reforms of the abuses and corruption that had helped to spark the Reformation. During much of St Frances’ life, the Church labored under the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), an event which brought much difficulty and suffering directly upon her and her family, precisely because they were faithful to the true popes, despite the great unworthiness of the latter. But she also lived to see the healing of the schism, and therefore serves as a sign of fidelity to the Church, even when it was at its worst, and of sanctity flourishing in the church of Rome specifically, when its head was not the holy father that our Holy Mother deserves.

An engraving of the early 17th century, showing the temporary sanctuary constructed around the altar of St Peter’s basilica for the canonization of St Charles in 1610. At that point, the basilica’s exterior walls had been finished, but the project to build the great baldachin over the high altar would not begin for another 13 years.

Not long after his election in 1605, Paul V commissioned an architect named Flaminio Ponzio (1560 – 1618) to design and build the great chapel attached to the basilica of St Maria Maggiore which now bears his family name, Borghese. Its most important feature is one of the most famous icons in the world, the Madonna ‘Salus Populi Romani’ (salvation of the people of Rome), which is kept in the reredos of the main altar. Many of the finest artists of the era were brought in to execute the decorations, among them, Pietro Bernini, the father of the famous sculptor Gian Lorenzo. The latter was discovered by the cardinal supervising the project, Paul V’s nephew Scipione, and it was the pope himself who rightly predicted that he would become the Michelangelo of his times.

This chapel became one of the most important models for architectural decoration in the Counter-Reformation period. The lower part is made with darker materials, which represent the world; the upper is dominated by gold, white, and light-filled windows, representing heaven. The gold, a symbol of God’s grace, comes down into the lower part in the reredos, surrounding the icon. This serves as a response to the protestant idea that grace merely covers over the corrupt nature of sinful man, but does not truly change it for the better; as Luther described it, with his typical crudity, it is like snow covering over a dungheap. The Borghese chapel shows us God’s grace coming into and enlightening the world, effecting the true sanctification, the “making holy”, of man, a process which began with the Incarnation in the womb of the holy Virgin.

The Borghese chapel seen from outside, and about as good an illustration of what the light coming in from the dome is supposed to convey as one could hope for. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons by Karelj.)

The main altar of the chapel, which houses the icon of the Virgin Mary, honored with the title Salus Populi Romani. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is therefore a deliberate part of the program that as soon as one enters the space, there are placed to either side small chapels dedicated to St Frances of Rome (on the left), and St Charles Borromeo (on the right). These chapels remind us that God came into the world through the Virgin, and, as He promised (John 14, 18), did not leave us orphans, as the protestants would have it. In the life of a great cardinal and bishop, and no less in the life of a wife, mother and religious, we see His grace always working for the authentic reformation of our own lives, and of the life of the Church.

Photos of the two chapels, just inside the Borghese, courtesy of Mr Jacob Stein, author of the blog Crux Stationalis: the chapel of St Francis...

and of St Charles.

The Feast of St Timothy

Today is the feast of St Timothy, bishop of Ephesus and martyr, the disciple to whom St Paul addressed two of his letters; he is also mentioned four times in the Acts of the Apostles, and eleven times in other letters of Paul. Apart from the information recorded about him in the Bible, there is an ancient tradition that he was martyred in his episcopal city in the year 97, beaten to death by a mob after publicly protesting at an idolatrous religious festival. In the reign of the Emperor Constantius (337-361), his relics were translated to Constantinople, and placed in the church of the Holy Apostles, alongside those of Ss Andrew and Luke. In his treatise Against Vigilantius, who had written against the devotion and honor shown to the relics of the Saints, St Jerome sarcastically asks, “Was the Emperor Constantius guilty of sacrilege, when he transferred the sacred relics of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy to Constantinople? In their presence the demons cry out, and those who dwell in Vigilantius confess that they feel the presence (of the saints).”

St Timothy as a child, with his grandmother Lois, by the Dutch painter Willem Drost (1650s), now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. St Paul writes to Timothy in the second letter (1, 5) of “that faith which is in thee unfeigned, which also dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and in thy mother Eunice, and I am certain that in thee also.” (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Prior to the Tridentine liturgical reform, St Timothy’s feast was kept in several parts of northern and eastern Europe, (Germany, the Low Countries, followed by the Premonstratensian Order, Bohemia and Poland), and in some dioceses in Spain (followed by the Carmelites), but not at Rome itself. He is consistently assigned to January 24th, but there is an interesting discrepancy between the northern European and Spanish liturgical books; in the former, he is generally termed an Apostle, in the latter, a Bishop and Martyr. Of course, the term “apostle” is not used exclusively of the Twelve, but also applied to other early witnesses of the Apostolic preaching and teaching, St Paul first among them. The church of Rome traditionally honors another of his disciples, St Barnabas, as an Apostle, and the Byzantine Rite keeps a “Synaxis of the 70 Apostles” on January 4th, commemorating by name most of the people mentioned in passing in the Pauline letters.

St Timothy’s inclusion in the very first liturgical book of the Tridentine reform, the Roman Breviary issued by St Pius V in 1568, was therefore a novelty for Rome, but not an absolute novelty. It is noteworthy, however, that he was added to the Roman books as a Bishop and Martyr, even though at the time, the majority of places that kept his feast had it as that of an Apostle. As with the retention of St Catherine of Alexandria, and the completely ex novo addition of St Gregory the Wonderworker, this feature of the Tridentine calendar should be understood as part of the Catholic Church’s answer to the ideas of the Protestant reformation.

The story is told that at the end of his life, Luther lamented the fact that, having endeavored to rid the world of one Pope, he had ended up creating a thousand more of them, and if this story is not true, it is certainly indicative of the truth. The chaos which inevitably arose (and still arises to this day) from the concept of private interpretation of the Scriptures led almost immediately to violent disputes between the various groups of reformers; one of the most important such disputes was that between the Calvinists and Anabaptists. Calvin’s work was to a large degree a matter of both systematizing and radicalizing Luther’s very scattered ideas, but he was not at all willing or prepared to accept the much more radical teaching of the Anabaptists; namely, that if Scripture is indeed sufficient as the only rule of the Christian faith, any kind of clerical ministry is superfluous, and should be done away with.

In reaction to the logical conclusion of his own ideas, Calvin largely recreated the authority of the Church that he had rejected. As stated in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Calvinism, “The Reformers felt that they must restore creeds and enforce the power of the Church over dissidents. Calvin … built his presbytery on a democratic foundation — the people were to choose, but the ministers chosen were to rule. Christian freedom consisted in throwing off the yoke of the Papacy, it did not allow the individual to stand aloof from the congregation. He must sign formulas, submit to discipline, be governed by a committee of elders. A new sort of Catholic Church came into view, professing that the Bible was its teacher and judge, but never letting its members think otherwise than the articles drawn up should enjoin. … the great iconoclast … makes the visible Church supreme over Christians, assigns to it the prerogatives claimed by Rome, enlarges on the guilt of schism, and upholds the principle Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.”

The words “presbytery” and “committee of elders” are particularly significant here, for it was in the Swiss theocratic republics like Calvin’s Geneva that episcopal governance of the Church was replaced by presbyterian government, “presbyteros” being a Greek word for “elder.” From there, it was copied by John Knox and brought to Scotland, where the new religion came to be known as Presbyterianism, to distinguish it from that of the Anglican Church, which retains the office of the bishop.

In the figure of St Timothy, therefore, who is received into the liturgical tradition of the Roman Church not as an Apostle, but as a Bishop and Martyr, we have a clear statement that the episcopacy as an institution rests on Scriptural foundations. St Paul, in whose letters the reformers claim to find their teaching, writes to him as follows: “A faithful saying: if a man (singular) desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.”, and then lays down the qualities necessary for such a man “who will have care of the Church.” (1 Tim. 3, 1-5). At the very beginning of this letter (1, 3), Paul writes that he had commanded Timothy to remain at Ephesus, the city to whose church Paul himself had previously addressed a letter, whose angel St John addresses in the Apocalypse (2, 1-7), and where the latter is traditionally said to have died.

The Martyrdom of St Timothy, depicted in a Byzantine Menologion of the second quarter of the 11th century; now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, cropped.)

Shortly after Timothy’s martyrdom, St Ignatius of Antioch, while passing through Asia Minor on the way to his death in Rome, wrote a letter to the church of Ephesus, in which he refers to the “presbytery” of the city three times, but always in connection with the bishop. “For your justly renowned presbytery, worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp.” (chapter 4) His other letters speak in similar terms of the importance of the bishop’s role in the Church, except, significantly, the one addressed to the Church of Rome, which “presides in charity”; they repeatedly extol the importance of peace, harmony and a real, visible unity within the Church, all of which are conspicuously lacking among the early reformers. Therefore, if episcopal governance of the Church is a yet another corruption, it is one that rests on the foundation of the Bible, and was built by the Apostles themselves and their immediate successors.

St Paul speaks of his disciple Titus less often than Timothy, four times in 2 Corinthians, and once each in Galatians and 2 Timothy, but also addressed an epistle to him, “my beloved son according to the common faith.” (1, 4) In the latter, before enumerating the qualities of the good bishop, he says that he left him on the island of Crete “to establish elders (presbyterous) from city to city”; it is the bishop who establishes the “elders”, not the other way around. (1, 5-10) There does not appear to be any tradition of devotion to St Titus in any Western liturgy before 1854, when Blessed Pius IX added his feast to the universal calendar, while raising the ranks of Ss Timothy and Ignatius of Antioch. This would seem to be a liturgical answer to some of the Biblical and Patristic scholarship of that age, which often claimed quite openly that the Apostles themselves and their immediate successors did indeed corrupt Christ’s teaching, with Paul the first and worst among them.

In the post-Conciliar calendar reform, Ss Timothy and Titus were consolidated into a single feast, and moved to January 26th. St Timothy’s former day is now occupied by St Francis de Sales, who died on the feast of the Holy Innocents in 1622. As a priest of the diocese of Geneva, then as its bishop for 20 years (1602-22), he helped to bring over 70,000 persons, the majority of them Calvinists, back to the Catholic Church.

St Robert Bellarmine’s Hymn for the Guardian Angels

St Robert Bellarmine was born in 1542, and in his youth, received a classical education typical of his era, showing himself to be a particular bright pupil at a very early age. It was an essential part of education in those days that people were trained not only to read and comment intelligently upon the Latin classics, but also to write their own Latin in both prose and verse, and Robert was already skilled at this as a boy. In his early years in the Society of Jesus, which he entered at age 18, he taught the classics in the order’s school in Florence. When he was transferred to Mondovi in Piedmont, he discovered that he was supposed to teach Cicero and Demosthenes, although he knew hardly any Greek at all; he therefore taught himself in one night the grammar lesson he was supposed to deliver the next day. In the midst of his vast output of theological writings, for which he was named a Doctor of the Church in 1931, and his many other scholarly achievements, he also continued to write poetry in both Latin and Italian throughout his life.

St Robert Bellarmine (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Formal liturgical devotion to the Guardian Angels is found sporadically in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but really began to establish itself in the Counter-Reformation period, of which St Robert was such an important protagonist. Pope Paul V (1605-21), who kept him as one of his most valued counselors, was also the first post-Tridentine Pope to formally approve a feast of the Guardian Angels, which he granted to the Holy Roman Empire at the request of Ferdinand II of Austria. When the feast was extended to the universal church by Pope Clement X in 1670, it was given a proper Office, which includes two hymns composed by St Robert: Custodes hominum, which is sung at Matins and both Vespers, and Aeterne rector siderum for Lauds.

Ancient Greek and Latin poetry was not based on rhyme, which was considered a blemish on verse in antiquity, but on alternations of long and short syllables, according to various established patterns. The oldest Christian hymns, such as those of St Ambrose or Venantius Fortunatus, were similarly constructed, although often rather more loosely than in the classical period. In the Middle Ages, when Latin vowel quantities were mostly not heard or pronounced, rhyme established itself as the norm for new liturgical composition, and even extended itself beyond the various types of hymns into non-metrical forms like responsories. The Renaissance, however, which sought to imitate the classical world in all the arts, rejected rhyme and returned to metrical composition based on vowel quantity; this classicizing spirit in the use of Latin lasted much longer than the Renaissance itself did, and is found in new liturgical compositions of every period, up to and including the most recent texts of the post-Conciliar rite. In the same spirit, Pope Urban VIII (1623-44) had the whole corpus of hymns in the Roman Breviary revised and classicized, giving rise to the famous remark “Accessit Latinitas, recessit pietas - Latinity came in, piety went out.”

To judge by St Robert’s compositions for the Guardian Angels, it is a pity that he did not live to contribute to Pope Urban’s project, which might have been more successful with his input. His vocabulary is almost entirely within the established usage of Christian Latinity. The metrical form is one used by Horace in his odes, called the Third Asclepiadean, but he mostly avoids the contorted word order which the classical poets and their later imitators often employed. Here is a splendid recording by the Ensemble Venance Fortunat, in alternating chant and polyphony; a pure Gregorian version sung by the Gloriae Dei Cantores, alternating women’s and men’s voices, is given below. The English translation is that of Alan Gordon McDougall (1896-1965).

Custodes hominum, psallimus Angelos, Naturae fragili quos Pater addi- dit, Caelestis comites, insidianti- bus, Ne succumberet hostibus.	Angel guardians of men, spirits and powers we sing, Whom our Father hath sent, aids to our weakly frame, Heavenly friends and guides, help from on high to bring, Lest we fail through the foeman’s wile.
Nam, quod corruerit proditor angelus, Concessis merito pulsus hono- ribus Ardens invidia pellere nititur Quos caelo Deus advocat.	He, the spoiler of souls, angel-traitor of old, Cast in merited wrath out of his honoured place, Burns with envy and hate, seeking their souls to gain Whom God’s mercy invites to heaven.
Huc, custos, igitur pervigil ad- vola, Avertens patria de tibi credita Tam morbis animi quam requi- scere Quidquid non sinit incolas.	Therefore come to our help, watchful ward of our lives: Turn aside from the land, God to thy care confides Sickness and woe of soul, yea, and what else of ill Peace of heart to its folk denies.
Sanctae sit Triadi laus pia jugi- ter Cujus perpetuo numine machi- na Triplex haec regitur, cujus in omnia Regnat gloria saecula. Amen.	Now to the Holy Three praise evermore resound: Under whose hand divine resteth the triple world Governed in wondrous wise: glory be theirs and might While the ages unending run.

A different and somewhat looser English version, by Fr Edward Caswall. (Fr Caswall, born in 1814, was an Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholicism in 1847. After the sudden death of his wife in 1849, he entered the Birmingham Oratory in 1850; he was ordained priest two years later, and died in 1878. He was a talented poet, and many of his English translations of the traditional Latin hymns were incorporated by John Crighton-Stuart, the Third Marquess of Bute, into his monumental English version of the Roman Breviary, including this one.)

Praise we those ministers celestial
Whom the dread Father chose
To be defenders of our nature frail,
Against our scheming foes.

For, since that from his glory in the skies
Th’ Apostate Angel fell,
Burning with envy, evermore he tries
To drown our souls in Hell.

Then hither, watchful Spirit, bend thy wing,
Our country’s Guardian blest!
Avert her threatening ills; expel each thing
That hindereth her rest.

Praise to the trinal Majesty, whose strength
This mighty fabric sways;
Whose glory reigns beyond the utmost length
Of everlasting days. Amen.

The Stigmata of St Francis

Today, the Church marks the 800th anniversary of one of the most thoroughly well-attested miracles in its history, St Francis’ reception of the Stigmata in the year 1224, a bit more than two years before his death. The Stigmata were of course seen by many people during those two years; the revised Butler’s Live of the Saints quotes one of the very earliest documents to speak of them, the letter which Brother Elias, whom Francis personally chose to run his Order, sent to his brethren in France to announce the death of their founder. “From the beginning of ages there has not been heard so great a wonder, save only in the Son of God who is Christ our God. For a long while before his death, our father and brother appeared crucified, bearing in his body the five wounds which are verily the Stigmata of Christ; for his hands and feet had as it were piercings made by nails fixed in from above and below, which laid open the scars and had the black appearance of nails; while his side appeared to have been lanced, and blood often trickled therefrom.”

St Francis Receives the Stigmata, by Giotto, 1295-1300; originally painted for the church of St Francis in Pisa, now in the Louvre. The predella panels show the vision of Pope Innocent III, who in a dream beheld St Francis holding up the collapsing Lateran Basilica, followed by the approval of the Franciscan Rule, and St Francis preaching to the birds. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

One of the very few acts of the brief pontificate of the Dominican Pope Benedict XI (October 1303 – July 1304) was to grant to his fellow mendicants of the Franciscan Order permission to keep a special feast of the Stigmata of St Francis. St Bonaventure’s Legenda Major, which the Order recognized as the official biography of its founder, and read at Matins on his feast day, states that Francis received the Stigmata “around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross”, which is on September 14th. Since the 15th was at the time the octave of Our Lady’s Nativity, and the 16th the very ancient feast of Ss Cornelius and Cyprian, the feast of the Stigmata was assigned to the 17th, where it is still kept to this day.

Before the Tridentine reform, the Franciscans repeated the introit of the Exaltation, Nos autem gloriari oportet, at the Mass of the Stigmata, emphasizing not only the merely historical connection between the two events, but also the uniqueness of their founder, whom St Bonaventure describes as one “marked with a privilege not granted to any age before his own.” The modern Missal cites this introit to Galatians, 6, 14, but it is really an ecclesiastical composition, and hardly even a paraphrase of any verse of Scripture. It is also the introit of Holy Thursday, and in the post-Tridentine period, this use was apparently felt to be a little hubristic; it was therefore replaced with a new one, Mihi autem, which quotes that same verse exactly. “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.”

The verse with which it is sung is the first of Psalm 141, “I cried to the Lord with my voice: with my voice I made supplication to the Lord,” the Psalm which St Francis was in the midst of reciting at the moment of his death. The music of this later introit is copied almost identically from another which also begins with the words Mihi autem, and is sung on the feasts of various Apostles, underscoring the point that St Francis was, as one of the antiphons of his proper Office says, a “vir catholicus et totus apostolicus – a Catholic man, wholly like the Apostles.”

This feast has the distinction of being the very first one added to the general calendar after the Tridentine reform not as the principal feast of a Saint, but one instituted to commemorate a miracle. [1] This was originally done by Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who, like St Bonaventure, had been Minister General of the Franciscans, and showed a great deal of liturgical favoritism to his order. (He also added the feasts of Ss Anthony of Padua and Francis di Paola, the founder of the Minim Friars, to the calendar, and made Bonaventure a Doctor of the Church.) When Pope Clement VIII issued the first revision of the Pian Breviary in 1602, the feast was suppressed, only to be restored 13 years later by Pope Paul V [2], at the behest of one of his most trusted councilors, St Robert Bellarmine.

St Robert had a great devotion to St Francis, on whose feast day he was born in 1542. His native city, Montepulciano, is in the southeastern part of Tuscany, fairly close to both Assisi and Bagnoreggio, the home of St Bonaventure, and very much in the original Franciscan heartland. Not long after he entered the Jesuits, the master general, St Francis Borgia, commissioned a new chapel dedicated to his name-saint, with a painting of him receiving the Stigmata as the main altarpiece. It was built within what was then the Order’s only church in Rome, dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus, devotion to which was a Franciscan creation, and heavily promoted by another of their Saints, Bernardin of Siena, who was also Tuscan. This chapel was clearly intended to underline the similarities between the Jesuits and Franciscans as orders promoting reform within the Church, while remaining wholly obedient to it, zealous evangelizers, strictly orthodox, and spiritually grounded in an intensely personal devotion to and union with Christ.

The chapel of the Sacred Heart, originally dedicated to St Francis of Assisi, at the Jesuit church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome, popularly known as ‘il Gesù.’ In 1920, the original altarpiece of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata by Durante Alberti was replaced by the painting of the Sacred Heart seen here, a work of Pompeo Battoni done in oil on slate in 1767. Previously displayed on the altar of St Francis Xavier, which is right outside this chapel, it was the very first image of the Sacred Heart to be exposed for veneration in Italy after the visions of St Margaret Mary Alacoque. The other images of St Francis, all part of the chapel’s original decoration, remain in place. (Photo courtesy of Mr Jacob Stein, author of the blog Passio Xpi.)

But the extension of the feast to the general calendar also touches on a much larger issue, one which colors the Tridentine reform, and especially that of the Breviary, in several ways, namely, the response to the Protestant reformation.

St Francis is today held in admiration so broadly by Catholics, non-Catholics and even non-Christians alike, that it is perhaps hard for us to appreciate today how he was seen by the original Protestant reformers. Even within Luther’s lifetime, it was hardly possible to get two of them together to agree on any point; broadly speaking, however, they generally accepted that things had really gone wrong in the Church with the coming of the mendicants, especially the Franciscans, and the flourishing of their teachings in the universities. Luther himself once said “If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house, I would set fire to it”, and more generally, “a friar is evil every way, whether in the monastery or out of it.” Most Protestants had no patience for the ascetic ideals embodied by Saints like Francis and the other mendicants, an attitude sadly shared by supercilious humanists within the Church like Erasmus.

Of course, the mendicants were not immune to the widespread decadence of religious and clerical life justly decried by the true reformers of that age, and which sadly provided much grist for the Protestant mill. And yet, while Ignatius of Loyola was still the equivalent of a freshman in college, the great Franciscan reform of the Capuchins had already begun; where the Jesuits would soon prove the most effective of the new orders in combatting the heresies of the 16th century, the Capuchins would take that role among the older ones. This may be what moved Luther to say, “If the emperor would merit immortal praise, he would utterly root out the order of the Capuchins, and, for an everlasting remembrance of their abominations, cause their books to remain in safe custody. ’Tis the worst and most poisonous sect; the (other orders of) friars are in no way comparable with these confounded lice.” [3]

Fra Matteo Bassi, founder of the Capuchins, and quite possibly the only founder of a Franciscan order who was never canonized; 17th century, author unknown. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The Tridentine reform was in its essence the Catholic Church’s answer to the question of what to do with what it had developed over the course of the Middle Ages, in response to the Protestant rejection of such developments, and putative return to the most ancient roots of the Christian Faith. It sought to determine which parts of the Church’s medieval inheritance were of perennial or continued value, which needed to be rejected, and which needed to be modified and reformed. This included all aspects of its life: its many institutional forms, its intellectual tradition, its art and architecture, and of course, its liturgy.

St Francis was both a product of the Middle Ages, and a creator of one of its most important and characteristic institutions; he was no more a creation of Luther and Calvin’s imaginary “primitive” church than he was a modern environmentalist. The placement of his feast on the general calendar serves as a very useful reminder that it was a man of that era who was the first conformed to Christ so entirely that he merited to bear His wounds upon his own body.

On April 16, 1959, Pope St John XXIII addressed the following words to a gathering of Franciscans in the Lateran Basilica, where Pope Innocent III had once met the Poor Man of Assisi himself, the occasion being the 750th anniversary of the approval of the Franciscan Rule. “Beloved sons! Permit us to add a special word from the heart, to all those present who belong to the peaceable army of the Lay Tertiaries of St Francis. ‘Ego sum Ioseph, frater vester.’ (‘I am Joseph, your brother’, citing Genesis 45, 4, Joseph being his middle name), … This we ourselves have been since our youth, when, having just turned fourteen, on March 1, 1896, we were regularly inscribed through the ministry of Canon Luigi Isacchi, our spiritual father, who was then the director of the seminary of Bergamo.” He went on to recall the Franciscan house of Baccanello, near the place where he grew up, as the first religious house he ever knew, and that four days earlier, he had canonized his first Saint, the Franciscan Carlo of Sezze.

The following year, Pope John approved the decree for the reform of the Breviary and Missal which reduced the feast of St Francis’ Stigmata to a commemoration. As such, the Mass can still be celebrated ad libitum, but is no longer mandatory, and the story of the Stigmata is no longer told in the Breviary. In the post-Conciliar reform, it was removed from the general calendar entirely, and replaced by the feast of St Robert Bellarmine, who died in 1621 on the very feast day he had promoted. It is still kept by the Franciscan Orders.

[1] Before the Tridentine reform, there were many feasts and Saints who were celebrated everywhere the Roman Rite was used, and many of these feasts did originate in Rome itself, but there was no such thing as a “general” calendar of feasts that had to be kept ubique et ab omnibus. When the first general calendar was created in 1568, which is to say, a calendar created with the specific intention that it would also be used outside its diocese of origin, a number of miracle feasts were included; all of these were present in pre-Tridentine editions of the Roman liturgical books, and celebrated in many other places as well.

[2] The feast was added to the calendar by Pope Paul V as a semidouble ad libitum in 1615, made mandatory by Pope Clement IX (1667-69), and raised to the rank of double by Clement XIV, the last Franciscan Pope.

[3] Thanks to Dr Donald Prudlo for this quote from Luther, and the one that precedes it.