On this day in the year 1220, the relics of St Thomas Becket were translated from the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral to a splendid new shrine in the main body of the church. This was one of the major religious events of the era, celebrated in the presence of King Henry III and many leading churchmen; in the Use of Sarum, it was commemorated by its own feast on July 7th, with the feast of the Holy Relics assigned to the following Sunday. It was of course the presence of St Thomas’ relics that made Canterbury such an important place of pilgrimage in medieval England, famously noted in the prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (verses 15-18): “And specially from every shire’s ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende (went), / The hooly blisful martir for to seke (seek), / That (t)hem hath holpen (helped) whan that they were seeke (sick).”
Because Thomas had given his life to defend the independence of the Church from undue interference by the civil power, King Henry VIII had the shrine destroyed in 1538, and forbade all devotion to him, even requiring that every church and chapel named for him be rededicated to the Apostle Thomas. The place within Canterbury Cathedral where the shrine formerly stood has been empty ever since; this video offers us a very nice digital recreation. Like the nearly contemporary shrine of St Peter Martyr and several others, the casket with the relics rests on top of an open arched structure, so that pilgrims can reach up and touch or kiss it from beneath, without damaging the metal reliquary itself.
The same source provides another video which shows sick persons praying at the original burial site in the crypt, which continued to attract pilgrims even after the relics themselves had been moved to the upper church. (The same is true of the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia, where the original sarcophagus which held the relics of St Augustine is kept, although the relics were long ago moved to the main sanctuary.)
In England, today is the collective feast of all the martyrs of the English College, a seminary located in the town of Douay in France, which trained men to for the priesthood, and sent them to minister to the few remaining Catholics in their native land. Our friend Mr Sean Pilcher has very kindly shared with us this article he wrote about one of this holy company, numbering one-hundred and fifty-eight, St John Southworth, who was martyred at Tyburn in 1654. It was previously published in a slightly different version at The Lamp, and is here reproduced by the kind permission of the editors. Mr Pilcher is the director of Sacra: Relics of the Saints (sacrarelics.org), an apostolate that promotes education about relics, and works to repair, research, and document relics for religious houses and dioceses.
The relics of the saints have a kind of long-sightedness, a way of hanging on in times of difficulty, and of resurfacing when they are needed again. There are, unfortunately, horror stories of the mistreatment or disposal of relics in the last century, but here is one of triumph, the kind of humble, unassuming victory of the saints, worked out in centuries of grace-filled struggle.
The crystal urn which contains the relics of St John Southworth, now regularly kept in one of the side chapels of Westminster Cathedral. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Gryffindor, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Long Parliament of 1640-60 afforded the clandestine Catholic clergy of England an unexpected breath of fresh air, more than it had known in recent memory. The previous century saw Edmund Campion brought to the scaffold and the fortunes of noble Catholic families drained by heavy recusancy fines. Even a generation earlier, hysteria from the Gunpowder Plot drew the knot tighter on England’s Catholics. Hurried trials made honest protestant juries blush. Every family was required by law to attend and commune at the Protestant service. England had no bishops. Priests made due, saying Mass and hearing confessions. Simply being a priest was an act of high treason, and harbouring or aiding clergy was also a criminal offence.
The political tensions provoked by the reign of Charles I saw a nation in civil war, and favourable public opinion of Catholics waned. Charles married a Catholic and was rumoured to be sympathetic to the Roman Church. Parliament pressed harder for mandatory oaths that would exclude Catholics from political offices, impose restrictions on travel, and Catholics could not even own a horse valued above £5 – all while Charles secretly sought French aid against his own opposing ministers. The yet nascent Established Church had spent much time fighting against an increasing Puritan minority with even more force.
Men who enter at Douay, the English seminary established in France to educate priests to be sent back to England, knew that they were being prepared for a lonely ministry, and one very often fraught with difficulties, whose only real reprieve would be martyrdom. One such man was John Southworth, a Lancashireman who had been instructed in the Faith at home in secret. Being from the north, a kind of heartland of recusancy, he would have felt very keenly the greater restrictions on Catholics, and valued the faith of the Apostles more than anything. He knew that labourers were needed in the vineyard; resolving to enter Douay, he left home for France at age twenty-one.
The English College was one of several colleges within the university which King Philip II founded in 1559 at Douay, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1886, it was merged with two other universities to form the University of Lille. This image made between 1590 and 1611 shows three of the colleges; the Royal College, the Jesuit, and the college of the nearby town of Marchiennes.
After at least one return to England because of poor health, he was ordained priest six years later by the Archbishop of Cambrai and sent back to England. The Diary at Douay read: ‘John Southworth (here known as Lee), alumnus and priest of this College, with the usual faculties for the winning of souls, was chosen for the vineyard of England.’ Southworth operated in London for a time and later in his native Lancashire. There is record of his being arrested and imprisoned, and being narrowly rescued from a death-sentence at the insistence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who arranged for him and others to be deported to France.
Southworth made little of this upset and returned to his work in England. He was arrested another four times, spending three years in the London prison auspiciously named The Clink. On three occasions his release was negotiated by the Secretary of State, Windebank, at the Queen’s direction. At his fourth arrest, he managed his own escape. Here was a man undaunted by the threat of imprisonment, whose resolve was little disturbed by discomforts and failures which his work necessarily included. His mission was to attend to souls, and this he did wherever he found himself. When there was an outbreak of plague in London, he visited those who had lapsed from the Faith out of convenience or fear of the new regime. He was by all accounts a likeable and agreeable man, even among those who did not share his religion or cause. It was during this time also that he earned the nickname ‘Parish Priest of Westminster.
A portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria of England (1609-69), the Catholic wife of King Charles I of England; 1636-68, by the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), or his workshop. (Public domainimage from Wikimedia Commons.)
By the end of 1640, King Charles had lost the governance of the country in all but name. Sympathy with the rising Puritan faction had grown immensely. Secretary Windebank was summoned to Parliament to be reprimanded for his friendly actions toward Catholics, and he was forced to flee to France where he was received into the Church. There too went the Queen, who feared for her safety, leaving Catholics without allies in any position of great authority. The regicide of Charles I and the seizure of power by Cromwell in 1649 put Catholics definitively on the losing side of the Civil War. Parliament directed the expulsion of all recusant families, but these directives could hardly occupy the attention of anyone with executive authority. The country was everywhere divided. England did not yet have a standing army, and Parliament found it difficult to enforce its laws; the legitimacy of the Established Church was questioned because of its popish trappings and monarchical support, while Cromwell’s officers lived in domineering, if irreproachable, austerity. Nevertheless, house priests enjoyed relative freedom to continue their work for souls, if they kept out of sight. Southworth carried on, but was caught while lodging in Westminster. He was found with ‘all the requisites for the celebration of Mass,’ and taken prisoner. The arresting officer was one of Cromwell’s more zealous followers, which led to harsh treatment and an unusually fast indictment.
Despite this, Southworth’s good nature won the pity of his judges. He openly confessed that he was a priest, but the judge cut him off, and his testimony was delayed. The judges wanted Southworth to plead ‘not guilty,’ since his only crime was being a priest, and for this there was no proof. He had only been found near the Mass kit, but was not caught administering the sacraments. This suggestion, it seems, was even made in court while the magistrate implored him to deny his charges. Southworth was unmoved, and the magistrate was ‘so drowned in tears,’ that he could barely pass the sentence.
John Southworth was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn, beheaded, and quartered on 28 June 1654. The other men executed with him were charged with forging currency; Southworth’s only crime was being a priest. He was the last to face the executioner, and after a brief address to the crowd there gathered, he prayed in silence and went to his reward. An onlooking royalist found his vocation, and entered the Society of Jesus in Rome the same year. As was the custom of the house when it was graced with a new martyrdom, the English College at Douay sang the Te Deum and a Mass of thanksgiving when they received the news of his death.
This marker in a traffic island in central London, at one of the corners of Hyde Park, marks the site of the Tyburn Tree, as it was called, the public gallows on which many of the Catholic martyrs of England met their deaths. Photo by the author.
Now we pick up the story of Southworth’s relics, one no less full of false starts, and no less unrelenting. The sentence prescribed that the four quarters of the body be placed at the four corners of London, but the Spanish Ambassador, Alonzo de Cardenas, bribed the gaoler with forty shillings, and took the body to be embalmed. The man ‘who embalmed ye body,’ was ‘Chirugeon James Clark,’ who removed a bone from the spine to be kept as a relic by the English clergy. The body was kept by the Ambassador until it could be safely returned to France in 1655. Bishop Challoner records in 1741 that it was interred at Douay in the church near St Augustine’s altar. The faithful gathered there to pray and venerate the body of the martyr, and the miraculous healing of a boy was recorded. A fever deemed incurable subsided after the sufferer’s family lay his head upon the cushion that supported Southworth’s head.
The French Revolution brought with it the destruction of countless sacred relics, precious works of precious art and church plate. The English clergy who had long had refuge and acceptance at Douay were now viewed with double suspicion. King Louis XVI was killed on 21 January 1793, and war declared on England. The Catholics of France had sided with the king, and the clergy who refused to swear the so-called Constitutional Oath were seen as enemies of the State. Fearing imprisonment, the residents of the College buried their plate and relics, carefully hidden and noted. Fr Thomas Stout, one of the priests involved in the burial, made a rough diagram, noting that Southworth was buried exactly six feet deep. Soon after, their fears were confirmed, and the clergy were taken prisoners by the National Guard. They were held in captivity in France until their return to Dover was negotiated in 1795.
Readers will be aware that France and England have long behaved like feuding siblings, now making war upon one another, now peace, here rallying together against a greater enemy. Some more crazed English minds saw potential in the French Revolution, but most saw another way forward. French nobility fled the country and devout commoners were forced into much the same conditions under which the English Catholic faithful had long suffered: Mass was offered in secret and the authorities rounded up priests for the guillotines. The fathers of Douay earnestly desired to return to their home of more than two hundred years, but the circumstances of neither country allowed for this a possibility.
Catholic Emancipation came to England in 1829, but the popular view of Catholics was little affected by these reforms. Clerics were no longer treated as capital offenders, but England’s Catholic hierarchy was not restored until 1850. Immigration from Ireland and an increasingly Catholicising wing of the Church of England gradually pushed the trappings of the Roman Church further into the public eye. Slowly the new hierarchy began to take stock of what could be done. Cardinal Manning acquired land for a cathedral in the City of Westminster (also the newly-created seat of the primate of England), where the first Catholic cathedral since the English Reformation would be built. This project would not see its beginning until Manning’s successor, Cardinal Vaughan, broke ground in 1895, but as soon as the land was bought in 1856, permissions were obtained to go and make a search of the grounds at Douay, in the hope of recovering what had been buried there for safe-keeping.
The buildings of the College at Douay had been made into barracks, and their layout significantly altered, so that when the search party arrived, the sketch they had to follow made very little sense. Some of the church plate was found, but no Southworth; it was thought that after some seventy-five years, the coffin and its contents were likely to have disintegrated. The diocese of Westminster continued its recovery of hidden church furnishings which had survived the Reformation, but her martyred parish priest lay yet hidden in France.
In 1923, plans were made for the demolition of the barracks where the buildings of the College had stood, in order to level the ground for a new road. In 1927, as workmen were digging a cellar for a new building in the area, they uncovered a lead coffin, which was brought first to the local morgue for inspection, and then to the Institut Médico-Légal in Lille for detailed examination of the remains.
The investigation found a body whose form had been mostly preserved, though some water had entered through a hole in the coffin, presumably made by digging of the earlier search party, which had come painfully close to finding it. The physical description of the man fit that of Southworth, and x-rays of the body confirmed his identity by his sentence: beheading and quartering. After the body was recovered, the precise location could be again compared to Fr Stout’s sketch made in the eighteenth century, and now that the barracks were gone, other landmarks could be used to show that the location of the body corresponded exactly to the sketch.
On 1 May 1930 Westminster’s parish priest was brought in triumphant procession to the great cathedral. His return brought with it the whole weight of the restoration of England’s hierarchy, and was a turning point for the English faithful. Led by a papal legate, religious from the entire country turned up to greet their saint, flanked by a multitude of faithful carrying candles, banners, and singing hymns. Girls wearing their Easter best strew flowers in front of the ornate feretory which bore Southworth’s restored relics, vested in his priestly vestments and Canterbury cap behind the crystal.
Footage of the event (without soundtrack) from the archives of the newsreel company British Pathé.
He now keeps watch over the English Church from her capitol. Every year when the chosen men of Westminster lay on the pavement of the cathedral to receive priestly ordination, St John’s feretory is moved to the main aisle to lay next to them as they hear his name sung in the Litany.
The story of St John Southworth’s relics is a story of the triumph of the English martyrs, and of the unconquerable resolve of England’s Catholics, which continues to this day. It also reflects our sensibility toward the relics of the saints, one little shaken by chaos of these centuries past: to guard them with everything in us, to protect them in times of distress and to lean on their intercession, and to bring them out with all the pomp we can muster when a better day comes. “May their bones spring up out of their place: for they strengthened Jacob, and redeemed themselves by strong faith.” (Ecclesiasticus 49, 12).
The narratives, teachings, and poetry of Holy Scripture are
occasionally enriched with a technique known as the envelope structure (often
called inclusio in Biblical studies). The “envelope” is created by a
phrase that is repeated at the beginning and end of a literary unit, as in the
following example from Psalm 103, which opens and closes with the speaker
exhorting himself to praise God:
O my soul, bless thou the Lord:
thou, my God, hast shown thy
glory,
clothed thyself in splendor and majesty:
radiance is thy garment.
...
Let sinners vanish from the earth,
and the wicked be no more.
O my soul,
bless thou the Lord.
Envelope structures create a sense of unity and closure,
with emotional effects similar to those of a decrescendo in music, and they may
also accentuate an important theme or precept in the enclosed text. They are
used throughout the Bible – in the New Testament and the Old, in verse and in
prose. And if we think of sacred liturgy as a dramatic celebration and continuation
of the events, heroes, teachings, and poetic meditations of Holy Scripture, we
will expect to find envelope structures in the Church’s public worship.
Indeed, we are now in the midst of one: the Litany of Saints
that signaled the beginning of the Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday will soon
be repeated on the three Rogation Days that precede Ascension Thursday. What a
memorable way this is to emphasize the spiritual and liturgical unity of the
forty joyful days when the risen Christ walked the earth and conversed with
men. It also draws our minds to the essential fruit of Our Lord’s Resurrection:
the Saints in heaven, who were once mortals like us, burdened by sin and doomed
to die, and are now gloriously alive, shining on high with God and His angels.
“What I saw seemed to me to be a smile / the universe had smiled; my rapture had / entered by way of hearing and of sight. / / O joy! O gladness words can never speak! / O life perfected by both love and peace! / O richness so assured, that knows no longing!” (Dante, Paradiso, 27; Mandelbaum translation)
Litanic prayer originated in the East, where it formed part
of both the Eucharistic liturgy and the Divine Office, and it soon migrated to
the Roman church. These texts were shorter and less elaborate than the prayers that
we now call litanies, and their defining characteristic was supplication (for
the sick, the dead, the bishop, etc.) intensified by a communal response such
as Kyrie eleison or Domine exaudi et miserere. (The word “litany”
derives from Greek litaneia, which simply means “petition” or “entreaty.”)
The Kyrie eleison as it currently exists in the Roman Mass is actually a
vestigial form of litanic prayers recited during the Eucharistic liturgy in the
early Church.
The beginning of the Litany of the Saints in the eleventh-century breviary known as St. Wulfstan’s Portiforium (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 391, p. 221). Note the legibility of the text (compared to some manuscripts produced much later) and the visual prominence given to the names of Our Lady and St. Peter.
Other occasions on which the Church employed litanies were
solemn processions. This practice is of venerable antiquity, dating at least to
the fifth century, and has endured to the present in the Church’s traditional
Rogation Day ceremonies. A homily composed by St. Avitus, a sixth-century
bishop of Vienne in southern Gaul, is a striking example of historical
continuity in Catholic liturgy. He refers to Rogation fasts, which included processions
and litany chants, occurring on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension
Thursday—precisely as they do in the Roman liturgy of our own day. [1]
Jules Breton, La Bénédiction des blés en Artois (oil on canvas). The artist is portraying the blessing of agricultural fields that occurred during the Rogation processions.
Latin-language Saint litanies are relatively abundant in
manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon period of English Catholicism. The earliest records
take us all the way back to the seventh century, but most of what has survived
dates to the tenth century or later. These litanies vary in form and content, but exhibit a common structure that is remarkably similar to what we pray and
sing today in the Roman rite.
A story recounted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History
of the English People (see book I, chapter 25) reveals that the combination
of litany and procession has an illustrious role in the history of Anglo-Saxon
Christianity. When St. Augustine and his evangelizing companions reached the
Isle of Thanet in Kent, King Ethelbert, who knew of Christianity but was still
a pagan at the time, was “sitting in the open air” and
ordered Augustine and his companions to be brought into his
presence. For he had taken precaution that they should not come to him in any
house, lest, according to an ancient superstition, if they practiced any
magical arts, they might impose upon him.
Thus, the missionaries came to the king—himself later venerated as a
saint—in procession,
bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of
our Lord and Savior painted on a board; and singing the litany, they offered up
their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of
those to whom they were come.
Stained-glass depiction of King Ethelbert (d. 616), from All Souls College Chapel, Oxford.
Anglo-Saxon Saint litanies were prayed both publicly and privately, and many of the surviving litanies appear in manuscripts that are primarily psalters. This suggests that they served as a supplement to the psalms, which were the principal fount of prayer for laity and clergy alike during the Ages of Faith.
One thing that stands out in the litanies of Old England is
the multitude of English saints. Names such as Æthelthryth, Cuthberht, Botwulf,
Wihtburg, Mildthryth, and Switthun are well represented in these texts. How
exactly liturgical singers integrated these names into the Latin pronunciation
system is an open question, but in any case, I feel some nostalgia for a time
when the Church’s litanies were inhabited by a more equal distribution of local
and universal saints.
Litany of the Saints in the late-ninth-century Psalter of Count Achadeus (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 272, folio 151r). This litany invokes 160 saints.
Scholars do not know when exactly the Western churches began
incorporating individual saints into their litanies. In other words, the
history of litanic prayer in general is well established, but the origin
of what we now call the Litany of the Saints has proved elusive. The eminent medievalist
Dr. Michael Lapidge, whose research inspired me to write this article, believes
that Saint litanies first achieved widespread usage in eighth-century England.
What an extraordinary thought, that Anglo-Saxon England—a recently converted,
far-flung outpost of Western Christianity—may have been the birthplace of the
Latin Litany of the Saints, which would soon spread to continental Europe and
eventually occupy a place of great honor and distinction in the liturgy of the
universal Church.
NOTES
1. These three days are currently known as the
Minor Rogations. A Major Rogation takes place every year on April 25th.
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St Edward the Confessor, king of England, died on January 5, 1066, after a reign of over 23 years. He is called “the Confessor” to distinguish him from King Edward the Martyr (died 978), another Saint who was very popular in pre-Reformation England. He is the last monarch of England honored as a Saint; Henry VI (1422-71) was the subject of a strong popular devotion, with many miracles attributed to him, but his cause for canonization was broken off at the Reformation, and subsequent attempts to revive it have failed. (This was a favorite subject of the great Mons. Ronald Knox.) The numeration of the English monarchs begins with the Norman Conquest, which took place shortly after, and largely because of, Edward’s death, and therefore neither he nor the Martyr is included in it. (Edward I reigned in the later 13th and early 14th centuries.)
Ss Edmund the Martyr (a 9th century King of East Anglia, also very popular before the Reformation), Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist present King Richard II to the Virgin and Child (The Wilton Diptych, 1395.) TheConfessor holds a ring in his hand, in reference to the story recounted below.
He was canonized in 1161 by Pope Alexander III, who had a remarkably long reign (one week shy of 22 years), and lived to canonize another very important Englishman, St Thomas Becket. Since he died on the vigil of the Epiphany, which was considered far too important to displace, his feast was assigned to October 13, the day on which St Thomas himself translated his relics from their original place in Westminster Abbey to a shrine in the choir. (It is also the anniversary of the abbey’s rededication in 1269, after the rebuilding begun by Henry III in 1245, and of the coronation of Henry IV in 1399.) They were later moved to a different shrine within the abbey behind the altar, where they remain to this day, one of two such shrines in all of England not destroyed by the impiety of Henry VIII and his successors. (The other is of a Saint called Wite of whom nothing is known.) In 1689, the year after the last Catholic monarch of England was dethroned, Bl. Pope Innocent XI extended his feast to the general calendar.
The Sarum Breviary tells a charming story of St Edward and his devotion to St John the Evangelist. While attending the consecration of a church, Edward was approached by an elderly man who asked him for alms in the name of God and of St John. The royal almoner was not present, and having nothing else on him, Edward gave him his ring. Many years later, two English pilgrims in Jerusalem met an elderly man who, on learning where they were from, said to them, “I ask you brothers, return to your king, and give him the message which I shall send by you. I am John, the Apostle and Evangelist, and I love the holy king Edward for his chastity, for I know him to be near to God.” He then explained to them how he received the ring from Edward, “which I have kept unto this day for love and reverence for the man of God; I now send it back to him with glory, and within a short time, shall render even more pleasing gifts. For within half a year’s time, he will be clothed as I am in the robe of immortality…”
The pilgrims, cleverly described in the breviary as “apostolic legates”, returned to the king, delivering both the message and the ring. And indeed, St Edward took ill on Christmas night of that year, and by Childermas, was too sick to attend the consecration ceremony of the abbey of St Peter, which he himself had founded and built. The original Romanesque building was replaced by the famous Gothic church now known as Westminster Abbey in the mid-13th century. The only surviving representation of the original church is in the section of the Bayeux Tapestry which shows the body of King Edward being brought into it for burial.
“Here the body of King Edward is brought to the church of St Peter the Apostle.”
Readers of NLM may be aware that last year, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) promulgated a new translation of the lectionary for the Ordinary Form, using the English Standard Version: Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) except for the Psalms, which are from the Abbey Psalms and Canticles(APC).
The ESV was first published in 2001, and is fundamentally a revision of the Revised Standard Version (1971). It describes itself as an “essentially literal” translation, and “seeks to be transparent to the original text, letting the reader see as directly as possible the structure and exact force of the original”. [1] The translation was carried out by a group of more than one hundred Evangelical Protestant scholars and advisors, and has undergone a number of small revisions over the last two decades (2007, 2011, 2016).
In 2017, after a small group of Catholic scholars in India had been commissioned by the CBCI to examine the ESV and make any necessary changes to the text to ensure fidelity to the teaching of the Church, the ESV-CE was approved by the Indian Bishops as the first step towards the new OF lectionary translation. The ESV-CE Bible was published in India in 2018, and in the United States in late 2019 by The Augustine Institute; in the United Kingdom, it is scheduled for publication later this year. The Indian ESV-CE lectionary text was confirmed by the CDWDS in December 2019, and came into force in India on 5th April 2020 (Palm Sunday).
Following the hard work of the CBCI, the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland (BCS) voted last July to also adopt the ESV-CE (with APC) for a new translation of the OF lectionary, replacing the Jerusalem Bible (with the Grail Psalter). And just last month, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) announced that they had decided to do the same. At the time of writing, the Irish, Australian, and New Zealand Bishops’ Conferences have yet to announce any replacement, but it looks as though that the ESV-CE is likely to be the de facto English-language Catholic Bible version outside of North America. [2]
So, as a result, I thought that NLM readers would appreciate a quick look at the Indian ESV-CE lectionary itself - especially as there seems very little in the way of information online about these volumes at the moment other than that they exist! I have been fortunate enough to acquire a copy, so here are some pictures, along with my observations, both positive and negative.
The CBCI decided on a three-volume layout:
Sundays and Solemnities (xxxiv + 966 pp) - this contains Years A, B and C of the Sunday cycle of readings, plus Solemnities.
Weekdays (xxviii + 1106 pp) - this contains Years I and II of the weekday cycle of readings.
Proper of Saints, Commons, Ritual Masses, Masses for Various Needs and Occasions, Votive Masses, Masses for the Dead (xxx + 1152 pp) - basically, everything else!
This layout, like any other, has a number of things to recommend it, but also contains compromises. First, it means that the cost for parishes, currently ₹7,500 for all three volumes (about $103/£73), is lower than it would be for other possible publishing arrangements. There is a certain logic to having the Sunday readings in one volume and the weekday readings in another. However, in the medium-term this may come at the cost of longevity: for example, the Sundays and Solemnities volume is going to get three times as much use compared to if each year of the Sunday cycle were its own individual volume. Similarly, the fact that the Funeral Mass readings are at the back of Volume 3 is perhaps not ideal for longevity, though the quality of the binding is fair. (Please bear in mind that my copies have travelled halfway across the world!)
The BCS and CBCEW, in consultation with publishers, [3] may decide on other layouts, such as having three volumes for each year of the Sunday cycle, or separate volumes for Nuptial Masses, Funeral Masses, etc.
Volumes 1 and 2 have two ribbons, with Volume 3 having three ribbons. This is appreciated, but the third volume really could have done with just one more ribbon; I will explain why below.
Use is made of the reference numbers of the 1981 Ordo lectionum Missae, editio typica altera (OLM), with the 2015 additiones, which is good. The celebrations proper to India have also been added in without disturbing these reference numbers. However, the lack of small headings at the top of each page does make sections more difficult to find than they could have been otherwise - this is not really a problem in Volumes 1 or 2, but is much more so in Volume 3 due to the variety of material contained in that volume.
Two days ago was the 800th anniversary of the translation of the relics of St Thomas Becket from the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral to a splendid new shrine in the main body of the church. This was one of the major religious events of the era, celebrated in the presence of King Henry III and many leading churchmen; in the Use of Sarum, it was commemorated by its own feast on July 7th, with the feast of the Holy Relics assigned to the following Sunday. It was of course the presence of St Thomas’ relics that made Canterbury such an important place of pilgrimage in medieval England, famously noted in the prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (verses 15-18): “And specially from every shire’s ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende (went), / The hooly blisful martir for to seke (seek), / That (t)hem hath holpen (helped) whan that they were seeke (sick).”
Because Thomas had given his life to defend the independence of the Church from undue interference by the civil power, King Henry VIII had the shrine destroyed in 1538, and forbade all devotion to him, even requiring that every church and chapel named for him be rededicated to the Apostle Thomas. The place within Canterbury Cathedral where the shrine formerly stood has been empty ever since. In the last couple of days, a number of articles have popped up noting this very nice digital recreation of the shrine, which was originally posted to YouTube in February. Like the nearly contemporary shrine of St Peter Martyr and several others, the casket with the relics rests on top of an open arched structure, so that pilgrims can reach up and touch or kiss it from beneath, without damaging the metal reliquary itself.
The same source provides another video which shows sick persons praying at the original burial site in the crypt, which continued to attract pilgrims even after the relics themselves had been moved to the upper church. (The same is true of the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia, where the original sarcophagus which held the relics of St Augustine is kept, although the relics were long ago moved to the main sanctuary.)
Our thanks to Sharon Kabel for sharing with us this account of the 1846 dedication of an English church, in the early years of the English Catholic revival. This article includes some photos of the church’s stained glass windows of an unusual subject, as well as a complete transcription of an article about the consecration from a contemporary Catholic newspaper. Sharon also put togother a playlist, which is linked below, of the music or the ceremony. Last October, we shared some of her research on the brief-lived Bible vigils mentioned in Sacrosanctum Concilium; you can find more of her work on her website: https://sharonkabel.com/.
In the fall of 1846, construction finished for Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Spinkhill, Derbyshire, England. The event merited a nearly 2,500 word, 4-column write-up in the Catholic Telegraph.
Spinkhill, almost exactly in the middle of England, is a not-insignificant region for students of English Catholic history. It was a Jesuit mission, and a hotbed of resistance during the country’s anti-Catholic attacks. Some of the land was owned by the Pole family (of the great Cardinal Reginald Pole), and one of the teachers at the nearby Mount St. Mary’s College was Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A magnificently detailed history of Immaculate Conception Church has fortunately already been written by Paul D. Walker (Church of the Immaculate Conception, Spinkhill; 1990), and there are numerousshorterhistories of the church. It will suffice here to concentrate on a few details of Immaculate Conception’s opening (September 21) and consecration (September 22), that survive because of a thorough 19th century journalist.
In attendance were at least two bishops: Nicholas Wiseman (later Cardinal), and Thomas Walsh. Wiseman, who was to fill Walsh’s episcopal sandals in a few short years, needs little introduction. Walsh lived a fascinating span of years, being jailed as a college student in 1793 during the French Revolution, witnessing Pope Pius VII’s restoration of the Jesuits in 1814 (a particularly important event for Spinkhill), and dying 1 year after the 1848 Revolutions.
Image from Wikimedia Commons by Neil Theasby: CC BY-SA 2.0
The Catholic Telegraph article provided a sumptuous level of detail, including an extensive program of the music. I have imperfectly and incompletely reconstructed the music of the consecration Mass at YouTube and Spotify, which give a taste of what must have been a gloriously triumphant day for Derbyshire Catholics.
St Edward the Confessor, king of England, died on January 5, 1066, after a reign of over 23 years. He is called “the Confessor” to distinguish him from King Edward the Martyr (died 978), another Saint who was very popular in pre-Reformation England. He is the last monarch of England honored as a Saint; Henry VI (1422-71) was the subject of a strong popular devotion, with many miracles attributed to him, but his cause for canonization was broken off at the Reformation, and subsequent attempts to revive it have failed. (This was a favorite subject of the great Mons. Ronald Knox.) The numeration of the English monarchs begins with the Norman Conquest, which took place shortly after, and largely because of, Edward’s death, and therefore neither he nor the Martyr is included in it. (Edward I reigned in the later 13th and early 14th centuries.)
Ss Edmund the Martyr (a 9th century King of East Anglia, also very popular before the Reformation), Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist present King Richard II to the Virgin and Child (The Wilton Diptych, 1395.) The Confessor holds a ring in his hand, in reference to the story recounted below.
He was canonized in 1161 by Pope Alexander III, who had a remarkably long reign (one week shy of 22 years), and lived to canonize another very important Englishman, St Thomas Becket. Since he died on the vigil of the Epiphany, which was considered far too important to displace, his feast was assigned to October 13, the day on which St Thomas himself translated his relics from their original place in Westminster Abbey to a shrine in the choir. They were later moved to a different shrine within the abbey behind the altar, where they remain to this day, one of two such shrines in all of England not destroyed by the impiety of Henry VIII and his successors. (The other is of a Saint called Wite of whom nothing is known.) In 1689, the year after the last Catholic monarch of England was dethroned, Bl. Pope Innocent XI extended his feast to the general calendar.
The Sarum Breviary tells a charming story of St Edward and his devotion to St John the Evangelist. While attending the consecration of a church, Edward was approached by an elderly man who asked him for alms in the name of God and of St John. The royal almoner was not present, and having nothing else on him, Edward gave him his ring. Many years later, two English pilgrims in Jerusalem met an elderly man who, on learning where they were from, said to them, “I ask you brothers, return to your king, and give him the message which I shall send by you. I am John, the Apostle and Evangelist, and I love the holy king Edward for his chastity, for I know him to be near to God.” He then explained to them how he received the ring from Edward, “which I have kept unto this day for love and reverence for the man of God; I now send it back to him with glory, and within a short time, shall render even more pleasing gifts. For within half a year’s time, he will be clothed as I am in the robe of immortality…”
The pilgrims, cleverly described in the breviary as “apostolic legates”, returned to the king, delivering both the message and the ring. And indeed, St Edward took ill on Christmas night of that year, and by Childermas, was too sick to attend the consecration ceremony of the abbey of St Peter, which he himself had founded and built. The original Romanesque building was replaced by the famous Gothic church now known as Westminster Abbey in the mid-13th century. The only surviving representation of the original church is in the section of the Bayeux Tapestry which shows the body of King Edward being brought into it for burial.
“Here the body of King Edward is brought to the church of St Peter the Apostle.”
Yesterday, the pilgrimage group of the Schola Sainte-Cécile visited the library of Christ Church, Oxford; among the items on display were a couple of particularly interesting liturgical books. The first is the only extant printed copy of the Antiphonary for the Divine Office according to the Use of Sarum, printed in Paris in 1519.
Christmas Eve (photo by Henri de Villiers)
The second, perhaps even more interesting from an historical point of view, is this late 15th century Epistolary, with letters in the classicizing style preferred by the Italian humanists, rather than the Fraktur types seen above. This is the Epistle for St Thomas of Canterbury; note that the words “sancti Thome Martyris” in the rubric have been partly effaced. After breaking with Rome, King Henry VIII ordered a complete damnatio memoriae of St Thomas; all churches and chapels titled to him had to be renamed for the Apostle Thomas, and every trace of his feast suppressed. In this case, as in many others, the effacement of the rubric was clearly not done in a very thorough way, since many people in England believed that the storm would eventually pass, and all things would be restored to their rightful place.
Christ Church was originally founded as Cardinal College in 1525 by Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England. (The latter position was also once held by St Thomas of Canterbury.) This galero of his was stored for many years in the royal wardrobe, where it was found by Gilbert Burnet, the Anglican bishop of Salisbury, who gave it to his son, who gave it to his own housekeeper, who gave it to the butler of a countess, who gave it to his mistress, who gave it to the writer Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford. When items from Walpole’s estate were sold off, it was bought by a famous Shakespearean actor named Charles Kean (1811-68), who wore it when he played Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII. It was acquired by Christ Church in 1898.
Other items of religious interest: a very small Vulgate of the “Parisian” recension, a mass-produced (so to speak) edition made on cheaper paper and written in a very small and highly abbreviated script for the use of students at the Sorbonne and the other great medieval universities (13th century. The braided rope is used so that people can keep the book open without touching it, since there is always oil on the fingers, which is very bad for paper and parchment.)
