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.

Baroque Vespers of St Ignatius of Loyola

For the feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, here is a very Baroque musical setting of the psalms and hymn of his Second Vespers, composed by Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726), an Italian Jesuit missionary in South America. The Magnificat is done here in Gregorian chant, followed by an instrumental sonata and an orchestral Te Deum.

A few interesting things to note here. Unlike basically all other religious orders, the Jesuits did not have a proper Office for their founder; these texts are all taken from the Common Office of a Simple Confessor, which can be found in any edition of the Roman Breviary.

Fr Samuel Conedera SJ recently shared with me part of the text of a letter written by Fr Claudio Acquaviva, the fifth Master General of the Order, in 1609, which is pertinent to this. Writing to another Jesuit, Fr Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Fr Acquaviva shortly before St Ignatius’ beatification (which took place on July 27 of that year), says that he thinks that the order’s petition to be granted a proper office for their founder will likely be denied, since it had been denied in many similar cases. Therefore, in his estimation, there was no point in hurrying up to draw a proper office, and in the end, this was never done. (In early 2021, we published a series by Fr Conedera on the liturgical work of one of the early Jesuits, Fr Alfonso Salmerón (Part 1; Part 2, Part 3)

The first psalm is done in Gregorian chant, the others in polyphony with orchestral accompaniment, a deliberate gesture of respect, I imagine, to the older musical traditional. I don’t know why Zipoli did not include the Magnificat in his setting; perhaps the church for which he wrote this already had a setting which they did not wish to change.

St Ignatius and the Jesuits have taken a lot of criticism, much of it fair, and much of it unfair, for their approach to the liturgy, and especially the Divine Office, which they have never done in choir as an order. It should always been be borne in mind that the liturgical situation of the Society and the whole Catholic Church was very different before the Age of Revolutions began in the later 18th century. (I outlined this in my series on the reforms of the Breviary several years ago, specifically in reference to the Jesuits: see parts 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3.) And yet, here we have a very elaborate setting (which I admit is not entirely to my own personal tastes), not of a Mass, but of Vespers, written by a Jesuit, in an era when the solemn celebration of Vespers was still regarded as a very important part of any major feast. I have also read more than once that particularly in South America, the Jesuit missionaries quickly discovered that many of the native populations were incredibly talented at music, and put those talents to good use in the reducciones.

Domenico Zipoli was born in Prato in Tuscany, and after his early training, which included a brief stint with Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples, he became the organist of the main Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, at the age of only 23. A year later, he went to Seville in Spain to join the Society; as a novice, he was sent to Buenos Aires, and from there to Córdoba in what is now Argentina, where he completed his studies, but was never ordained, since there was no bishop available at the time to ordain him. He died of tuberculosis in 1726, at the age of only 38, but his fame as a composer had spread thoughout South America; the Spanish Viceroy in Lima wrote to Córdoba, which is over 2,000 miles away, to request copies of his works, which are also found in the musical archives of many of the reducciones. (For a sense of perspective, Zipoli himself had less distance to travel to get from Rome to Seville.)

A Rare Example of Modern Venetian Gothic Architecture with a Moorish Flair

Today I will share the final batch of photos from my trip to Louisiana this past July. I have saved these pictures for last because it seemed fitting to talk about a church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception in the week in which we will celebrate the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity.

Immaculate Conception Church, completed and dedicated in 1930, is located in the downtown of New Orleans, at 130 Baronne Street, and run by the Society of Jesus. Immediately from the façade, one can tell that its style is different from those one usually encounters; its Wikipedia article describes it as the Neo-Venetian style of Gothic Revival architecture, with Moorish Revival and Byzantine Revival elements.

Yet the façade, as unusual as it is, does not prepare the visitor for the impact made by the height of the nave, which is all the more unexpected in a church sandwiched between (and somewhat dwarfed by) high-rises.

Note the small decorated columns of the middle level.

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The Feast of St Aloysius Gonzaga in Rome

Each year on June 21st, the Jesuit church of St Ignatius in Rome opens the rooms where St Aloysius Gonzaga lived and studied while he was at the Roman College up to the public. (These rooms can be visited throughout the year, and priests can say Mass in them, but an appointment must be made first.) The church of St Ignatius was the first to be named for the Jesuit founder, and begun shortly after his canonization in 1622; the project was financed by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew to one of the College’s more prominent alumni, Pope Gregory XV. Although he reigned for only two years and five months, Pope Gregory had the honor of canonizing, at a single ceremony, Ss Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Theresa of Avila, Philip Neri, and Isidore of Madrid, generally known as Isidore the Farmer. (The Romans joked at the time that the Pope had canonized four Spaniards and a Saint.) The church was not intended to receive the relics of its titular Saint, which still repose in the Order’s mother church, the Gesù, but rather to serve as the chapel for the 2,000 students enrolled in the Roman College by the beginning of the 17th century. Of the sixteen Popes who reigned from the accession of Gregory XV in 1622 to the suppression of the Society in 1773, half were alumni of the College.

St Aloysius died on June 21, 1591 at the age of 23, after receiving the Last Rites from his spiritual director, St Robert Bellarmine. He had come to the Roman College to begin his studies for the priesthood after completing the novitiate at the church of St Andrew on the Quirinal Hill. With the permission of his superiors, he was allowed to attend to those who had already recovered from the plague in one of the Roman hospitals, but wound up contracting it himself, and although he did not die immediately, was fatally weakened. Among the still-extant rooms of the Roman College which he knew were a common room with a chapel next to it, the very chapel in which he made his first vows in the Order after the novitiate, on November 25, 1587. Over time, the rooms have been decorated, and two more chapels built; collectively, the three are known as the “Cappellette (Little Chapels) di San Luigi.” His relics were formerly kept in one of them, but now repose in the magnificent Lancellotti chapel in the south transept of St Ignatius. Another of the cappellette formerly housed the relics of another youthful Jesuit saint, John Berchmans (1599-1621), but he has also been moved into the main church, opposite St Aloysius in the north transept.

The altar of the Lancellotti Chapel, which contains the relics of St Aloysius; in the reredos, St Aloysius in Glory, by Pierre le Gros.

The altar of St John Berchmans, in the transept directly opposite; he was a Jesuit seminarian from Flanders, and like Aloysius, was seen by his superiors as one of the most promising seminarians in the order, but died in Rome when he was only 22, before he could be ordained. He was canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1888.

In 1923, the relics of St Robert Bellarmine were placed in this altar, which is dedicated to St Joachim, immediately next to St Aloysius’.

The courtyard of the Roman College, seen from the roof of the church of St Ignatius. The rooms of St Aloysius and the cappellette are within the lighter-colored part of the building in the upper right of this photograph. With the fall of the Papal State in 1870, the Roman College was seized from the Jesuits by the Italian government and transformed into a public high school.

The Jesuit Fr Angelo Secchi, one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, and the discoverer of astronomic spectroscopy, worked in and ran this observatory tower during his long and illustrious career; craters on both the Moon and Mars are named after him.

The entrance to the Saint’s room, now transformed into a chapel. (Kudos to the celebrant for ignoring the table.)

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The Stigmata of St Francis

The Stigmata of St Francis are one of the most thoroughly well-attested miracles in the history of the Church; they were of course seen by many people in the two-year period from when he first received them to his death. 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.

Baroque Vespers of St Ignatius of Loyola

For the feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, here is a very Baroque musical setting of the psalms and hymn of his Second Vespers, composed by Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726), an Italian Jesuit missionary in South America. The Magnificat is done here in Gregorian chant, followed by an instrumental sonata and an orchestral Te Deum.

A few interesting things to note here. Unlike basically all other religious orders, the Jesuits did not have a proper Office for their founder; these texts are all taken from the Common Office of a Simple Confessor, which can be found in any edition of the Roman Breviary. The first psalm is done in Gregorian chant, the others in polyphony with orchestral accompaniment, a deliberate gesture of respect, I imagine, to the older musical traditional. I don’t know why Zipoli did not include the Magnificat in his setting; perhaps the church for which he wrote this already had a setting which they did not wish to change.

St Ignatius and the Jesuits have taken a lot of criticism, much of it fair, and much of it unfair, for their approach to the liturgy, and especially the Divine Office, which they have never done in choir as an order. It should always been be borne in mind that the liturgical situation of the Society and the whole Catholic Church was very different before the Age of Revolutions began in the later 18th century. (I outlined this in my series on the reforms of the Breviary several years ago, specifically in reference to the Jesuits: see parts 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3.) And yet, here we have a very elaborate setting (which I admit is not entirely to my own personal tastes), not of a Mass, but of Vespers, written by a Jesuit, in an era when the solemn celebration of Vespers was still regarded as a very important part of any major feast. I have also read more than once that particularly in South America, the Jesuit missionaries quickly discovered that many of the native populations were incredibly talented at music, and put those talents to good use in the reducciones.

Domenico Zipoli was born in Prato in Tuscany, and after his early training, which included a brief stint with Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples, he became the organist of the main Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, at the age of only 23. A year later, he went to Seville in Spain to join the Society; as a novice, he was sent to Buenos Aires, and from there to Córdoba in what is now Argentina, where he completed his studies, but was never ordained, since there was no bishop available at the time to ordain him. He died of tuberculosis in 1726, at the age of only 38, but his fame as a composer had spread thoughout South America; the Spanish Viceroy in Lima wrote to Córdoba, which is over 2,000 miles away, to request copies of his works, which are also found in the musical archives of many of the reducciones. (For a sense of perspective, Zipoli himself had less distance to travel to get from Rome to Seville.)

The “Solomon of Naples” - A Jesuit Founder on the Sacred Liturgy: Guest Article by Fr Sam Conedera, SJ (Part 3)

This is the third part of an article by Fr Sam Conedera, a priest of the Society of Jesus and professor at St Louis University, on the liturgical theology of one of the founders of his order, Fr Alfonso Salmerón (1515-85). Click there links to the first part and the second; our thanks once again to Fr Conedera for sharing this with us.

“Father Alphonse Salmerón of the Society of Jesus, a Spaniard, one of the first companions of St Ignatius, having accomplished the greatest labors for the salvation of souls through nearly all of Europe, died at Naples on February 13th, 1595, at the age of 69.” Book engraving of the 17th century.

The third and final installment of this series on Alfonso Salmerón’s Commentaries deals with his defense of the Latin language. For the Jesuit theologian, this was no minor issue, but rather went to the heart of the Church’s unity and respect for tradition. Although he mentions the issue in passing many times, the primary locus is his commentary on 1 Corinthians 14 and the gift of tongues, where he discusses the controversial proposal of his age: replacing the Latin liturgy with vernacular translations. Although this idea was considered at the Council of Trent, it had little appeal for the Spaniards and Italians who made up the majority of the conciliar fathers; in the end, the proposition that the Mass ought only to be celebrated in the vernacular was anathematized. (Session 22, Chapter IX, Canon IX.) Although Salmerón cites Trent’s decision, he goes beyond appeals to authority to a historical and theological examination of the issue.

Salmerón’s defense of Latin takes its point of departure from a respect for tradition as well as a historical consciousness:

The Church has observed, and still observes, the things that her ancestors handed down for observance. For indeed the holy mystery of the Mass and the Divine Office were celebrated only in Hebrew among the Hebrews, in Greek among the Greeks, and in Latin among the Latins, but never in the vernacular or the mother tongue at all.

He then traces the origin of using these “three universal languages” for the Scriptures, worship, and intellectual disciplines. After the Babylonian captivity, he says, the Jews stopped speaking Hebrew, but retained it for worship. Although the Apostles used many languages, they never wrote Scripture in anything other than Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Paul wrote to the Romans in Greek, which Salmerón says was not their mother tongue, and in fact always used a literary register of this language. When Spain was invaded by Goths and Vandals, their languages were not adopted for worship, nor did the English, French, or Germans ever use anything besides Latin. Salmerón cites copiously from late antique and early medieval sources, including commentaries on the liturgy, to demonstrate that Latin was not the vernacular tongue of the regions that adopted it for worship.

This historical argument goes hand-in-hand with the appeal to the usage and custom of the whole Church. “For saying anything against what the universal Church thinks and observes is most insolent madness, as Augustine amply testifies in his Letter to Januarius. And the whole Church for a thousand years has used those languages that were sanctified on the Cross.” The custom of the Church finds an echo even among the Gentiles, who sometimes used a non-vernacular language for sacrificing: the Romans used Etruscan, and according to Julius Caesar, the Druids who lived in Gaul used the tongue of their native Britain.

In his defense of Latin, Salmerón also appeals to the need for mystery in divine worship, citing the works of Basil the Great, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Gregory Nazianzen, who all say that holy things are not to be divulged to all. In a like manner, the Council of Trent defended the whispered Canon, “which we call the secret within the secret” (secreta in secretis). This need for mystery is why the catechumens were sent away prior to the consecration, as Dionysius and Chrysostom testify. Salmerón observes that when divine mysteries are divulged everywhere, they cease to be mysteries, and since there is nothing more sacrosanct than the mystery of the Eucharist, it should never be celebrated in the vernacular.

Examples from both the Old and New Testaments are brought forth to support this notion of mystery. The Jews did not allow people to read certain passages of Scripture, like the Canticle of Canticles, before they had reached the age of thirty. The Passover lamb was eaten at night in silence within the walls of each household; Moses ascended the mountain alone, and the people were forbidden to approach it on punishment of death; the Bread of the Presence was placed within the tabernacle, and only the priests were allowed to eat of it. “Also the unutterable name Jehovah was spoken only by the high priest within the Holy of Holies.” Jesus closes the book of Isaiah after reading it and returns it to the minister (Luke 4, 20) to show that few of the divine things should be divulged to the people. The Incarnation took place only in the presence of the angel and the Virgin, and the Nativity was shown only to the shepherds and the Magi. The Lord remained hidden at home from age twelve to thirty; he celebrated the Eucharist only in the presence of the Twelve; he appeared to the disciples after the resurrection behind closed doors, and not to all of them, but only to those chosen by God.

Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law, 1560-62, by Tintoretto; in the church of the Madonna dell’Orto in Venice.

The emphasis on mystery, however, does not mean that the faithful are ignorant of what takes place at Mass. It is more important, Salmerón says, to have knowledge of the things signified by the words than the words themselves. Even the unlearned know that the priest publicly entreats God for things on behalf of the people: “like the remission of sin, peace, health of mind and body, grace, and life eternal, and all these things through Christ the mediator.” Thus he does not take a dismissive attitude toward the simple faithful, but rather stresses the different roles of clergy and laity in public prayer.

Latin is closely connected in Salmerón’s mind to the unity of the Church, which is expressed in faith, worship, charity, and customs, “and what is greater, in the very sacrament of charity, which is the Eucharist.” He believes that all these manifestations of unity would be lost with a move from Latin to the vernacular. The different languages in the Mass and Divine Office among various regions would lead to ignorance between them about their faith, so that “he who moved from one province to another, would be going to a people of another faith and worship, and they would be like barbarians to each other.” This in turn, Salmerón predicts, would soon lead to the change of the rites and ceremonies themselves, as has already happened among Protestants, and would open the window to errors and heresies. Salmerón claims that where vernacular translations have appeared, ignorance, heresy, and schism have soon followed. Experience shows also that a common language promotes love and mutual benevolence among people; changing the language of worship would take away its unity, and thereby dissolve the community itself. Take away Latin, he asks, and who will be able to read the Fathers, councils, and canons of the Church? When the urgent necessity of something is removed, its usefulness goes away with it.

The move toward the vernacular, according to Salmerón, would not only dissolve the unity between various provinces and kingdoms, but also create problems within them. He observes that in his native land, there exist mutually unintelligible languages like Spanish and Basque, as well as differences between the speech of town and countryside. According to (unnamed) learned persons, languages changes about every three hundred years, although this process may be accelerated by other factors. Salmerón cites as an example the fact that the Spanish of three hundred years earlier can barely be understood in his own time. If the Church moved to the vernacular, these realities would have to be accommodated and translations updated accordingly, resulting in “Babylonian confusion.”

The Tower of Babel, by the Flemish painter Hans Bol (1534-93); public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Salmerón’s habitual concern for the defense of the faith against heresy is also evident in his discussion of Latin, for he opposes the arguments of John Calvin and his accomplice Augustin Marlorat: the Church in Europe has erred in using Latin ever since it ceased to be the common tongue, and the faithful fruitlessly attend church to hear Scripture and prayers that they do not understand. Rejecting this way of thinking, Salmerón claims that the root of demands for vernacular worship is heresy and the desire to cause division in the Church, meaning that any concessions would only serve to confirm Protestants in their errors. He says that the Fathers, general councils, and the Church as a whole have never conceded anything that smacked of heresy, but instead issued constitutions and decrees to heal heretics of their disease. The Jesuit theologian fears that allowing the vernacular in worship would lead to even worse things, “like the marriage of priests and monks, Communion under both species, and religious liberty, which they call neutrality.”

It is evident from the Commentaries that Alfonso Salmerón saw the use of the Latin language in worship as a matter of principle that could not be compromised. Although he recognized the importance of tradition and ecclesiastical authority in supporting it, he did not stop there, but sought to explain Latin’s place in the unfolding of Church history and its intrinsic value and fittingness. The abandonment of Latin, Salmerón believed, would mean the destruction of unity and faith, which is why he regarded this language as truly “a gift of tongues” that God had bestowed on his Church.

The “Solomon of Naples” - A Jesuit Founder on the Sacred Liturgy: Guest Article by Fr Sam Conedera, SJ (Part 2)

This is the second part of an article by Fr Sam Conedera, a priest of the Society of Jesus and professor at St Louis University, on the liturgical theology of one of the founders of his order, Fr Alfonso Salmerón (1515-85). Click here to see the first part; our thanks once again to Fr Conedera for sharing this with us.

Fr Alfonso Salmerón SJ; engraving by Luis Fernández Noseret. 

The second installment of this series on the Jesuit founder Alfonso Salmerón deals with his treatment of the Holy Eucharist, which drew more of his attention than any other mystery of faith. Whereas the Commentaries treat general liturgical questions fairly briefly or in passing, the Eucharist receives about four hundred fifty pages of sustained discussion. Salmerón treats the Eucharist as a mystery on par with the Trinity and the Incarnation, calling it the sign of God’s greatest power. The Eucharist fulfills prophecies and types of the Old Testament, such as the great banquet of Isaiah 25, the angels’ praise and worship of God of Isaiah 9, and the sacrifice offered from the rising of the sun to its setting of Malachi 1. Comparing the Lord’s relationship with the Church to human courtship, he says that

Christ, planning to unite himself to the Church, drove forth the negotiations of the marriage that was to take place in the Incarnation by sending angels and prophets, first to the patriarchs and priests, and then to elders of Abraham’s family, as if to the parents of the human race. When he had obtained consent, he sent to her most magnificent and precious gifts, by which he could effectively win her love and incline her heart toward him. Among these, the most divine gift of the Holy Eucharist has the first place, as a sign that he has already given himself by the taking on of flesh, and then by the suffering of death, and as a most certain pledge, that he will give himself to his bride to enjoy fully in glory.

One consequence of the Eucharist’s greatness is that no sacrament is celebrated with more internal reverence or adornment of splendor. Salmerón attends to the details of these adornments and brings out their symbolic significance. Church bells summon the people to the sacrifice and the Word of God, “as once silver trumpets in the hands of the priests roused up the faithful to war” (cf. Num. 10). He comments on each of the priest’s vestments, which serve to commemorate the reproach Christ suffered in his passion, and encourage the people’s devotion. The amice renews the memory of faith and prepares the mind for sacrifice; the alb recalls purity of life; the cincture, chastity; the stole, patience; the maniple, obedience; the chasuble, the operation of charity on behalf of all sins.

The Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1615-20. in the Jesuit church in Genoa, Italy.

When he treats of the fruits and benefits of assisting at Mass, Salmerón lays emphasis on both hearing its teaching and prayers, and seeing the sacrifice and its ceremonies. This leads to a condensed commentary on the Mass, which offers literal and allegorical explanations of each of the parts. To take one example, the Canon, he says that the sacred silence before the consecration corresponds to the Lord’s five days in Jerusalem before the passion; the consecration and elevation, to His being lifted upon the cross; the silence after the consecration, to His words “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Salmerón’s opposition to heresy reaches new levels where the Eucharist is concerned. He announces, at the beginning of his treatise on the Lord’s Supper, his intent to “slaughter” the opinions of heretics, and calls them out by name: Luther’s denial of transubstantiation opened the way for Karlstadt, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and others, whom Salmerón likens to “Judas and (his fellow) traitors.” Aside from issuing condemnations, he has a good grasp of the various Eucharistic teachings of different Protestant sects and how they developed. He highlights the failed attempt at the Colloquy of Regensberg (1541) to arrive at a settlement of the disputed questions. In his view, the only possibility of reconciliation lies in the profession of Catholic teaching, and he dedicates his energy to expounding this and refuting the various Protestant positions.

The Eucharist was a contested issue not only between Protestants, and between Protestants and Catholics, but among Catholics as well. Disagreements on this subject were a problem at the Council of Trent, which identified three ways of receiving the Eucharist: sacramentally only (without benefit to the soul), spiritually only (in desire, without consumption of the species), and sacramentally and spiritually together. During the conciliar debates, however, Salmerón objected to the idea of spiritual reception alone, claiming that what Christ clearly commanded in John 6 was spiritual and sacramental reception together. As he later explained in the Commentaries, his concern was that the consensus position among “all the more recent heretics” was a purely spiritual reception that excluded the sacrament.

Salmerón traces this view back to certain Catholic authors, “who are few and new,” who in response to the Hussite controversy in Bohemia had begun to advocate purely spiritual eating of the Eucharist. Salmerón saw this allegedly novel position as a potential threat to the Real Presence, as well as a basis for reception under both species. Although he did not succeed in getting the conciliar text changed, he gives long and careful attention to John 6 in the Commentaries, explaining the different kinds of reception of the Eucharist, and promoting the “spiritual and sacramental” reception commanded by Jesus. He brings forth in support of his position extraordinarily rich and lengthy catenas of the Fathers and Doctors, as well as the Church’s custom (consuetudo) of reading John 6 on the feast of Corpus Christi.

Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred, sculptural group by Pierre le Gros the Younger (1695-99); part of the tomb of St Ignatius in the church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome.

The sustained attention he gives to reception under both species is perhaps a surprising aspect of Salmerón’s Eucharistic thought. The Commentaries contain three distinct treatises on the topic, which all together run to nearly thirty pages and explore the historical evidence for the practice. Although he concedes that in previous times, the chalice was licitly granted to the laity, and that this remains a legitimate practice among the Greeks, he nevertheless maintains that it is no longer fitting in the Latin Church. In addition to the danger of spillage, granting the chalice would harm ecclesial unity. It would be left to the people to decide which rite they wanted, and many Catholics would choose the older rite, leading to confusion and civil disturbances. But the argument that Salmerón emphasizes most is that the Church does not change her rites or relax her discipline to accommodate those who do not wish to observe them. Since the request for the chalice has come from northern provinces where there is schism, rebellion, and ignorance, he says it has become a marker among Catholics for friendliness to heretics and opposition to one’s fathers, superiors, and brothers.

In view of his reverence for the Eucharist, it is not surprising that Salmerón castigates unworthy reception in the strongest terms, calling it the gravest of sins, and comparing perpetrators to Uzzah, who died from touching the Ark of the Covenant (2 Sam. 6). The Jesuit theologian dedicates about seventeen pages to how one should prepare to receive Communion, which includes contrition and sacramental Confession; “for it is shameful to place the virginal and most pure flesh and body in a heart dirtier than the Augean stables.” He observes approvingly that during the Octave of Corpus Christi, the Church reads 1 Cor. 11, which contains Paul’s warnings against unworthy reception. Communion must be preceded by the words “Domine non sum dignus”, and reception should be attended by joyful leaping in one’s heart, like David before the Ark.

King David Dances before the Ark, by Peter van Lint, ca. 1650

One might reasonably ask if Salmerón’s fellow founders of the Society of Jesus shared his zeal for the Eucharist. One difficulty in answering this question is that none of them left behind a source quite like the Commentaries. It does seem that Salmerón was generally more attentive to liturgical details than his companions. At the same time, Diego Lainez, St Ignatius’s successor as superior general, worked closely with Salmerón at the Council of Trent, where the two were of one mind about the Eucharist; Ignatius was known to weep uncontrollably when he celebrated Mass and the Divine Office; and Peter Faber saw the renewal of liturgical life, especially the Mass and processions, as crucial for the cause of the faith in Germany. It seems, therefore, that the Jesuit founders largely shared the wisdom of “the Solomon of Naples.”

The “Solomon of Naples” - A Jesuit Founder on the Sacred Liturgy: Guest Article by Fr Sam Conedera, SJ (Part 1)

We are very grateful to Fr Sam Conedera, a priest of the Society of Jesus and professor at St Louis University, for sharing with NLM this very interesting article about one of the founders of his order, Fr Alfsonso Salmerón (1515-85), and his theological work on the sacred liturgy. The article will be presented in three parts.

For a variety of reasons, Jesuit sources are not prominent on the pages of NLM. The founding members of the Society of Jesus, however, did see a connection between “the defense and propagation of the faith” to which they had committed themselves, and care for the sacred liturgy. The most abundant and eloquent testimony to this connection comes from Alfonso Salmerón, the youngest of the original ten Jesuits. Born in 1515 on the outskirts of Toledo, Salmerón attended the University of Alcalà before moving on to Paris, where almost immediately he was drawn into the circle of Ignatius of Loyola. His prodigious memory enabled his mastery of Scripture and the humanistic learning of his day, as well as the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, especially St. Thomas. Appointed papal theologian for all three convocations of the Council of Trent, he and his fellow Jesuit Diego Lainez exercised a strong influence over the conciliar proceedings, whilst simultaneously winning renown for their new order. Salmerón gave an electrifying homily to the council fathers on the feast of St. John the Evangelist in 1546, which in the following year became the first original text ever published by a Jesuit author. He spent most of his later life in Naples, where he served as provincial for eighteen years, overseeing the order’s growth, and preaching regularly in the city’s churches. Salmerón’s erudition won him the sobriquet “the Solomon of Naples” among the townsfolk, who upon his death in 1585 treated him as a saint, cutting off pieces of his clothing and hair to keep as relics.

In 1569, Salmerón was instructed by his superior general to assemble his preaching notes for publication. The aging theologian obeyed, assembling a massive commentary on the New Testament that was not printed until the turn of the seventeenth century. It is comprised of twelve volumes entitled Commentaries on the Gospel History and the Acts of the Apostles, and four volumes of Commentaries on the Letters of Blessed Paul and the Canonical Letters, which run to a total of nearly eight thousand folio pages. Despite representing the only major theological work published by a Jesuit founder, the Commentaries have never been seriously studied. They provide a wealth of information about the theological mindset of one of the earliest Jesuits, including his love of the sacred liturgy, the Eucharist, and the Latin language.

In his commentary on the Lord’s words “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men” (Matt. 6, 5), Salmerón makes the following observation about the posture of prayer:

The publican and the Pharisee prayed standing. Therefore, wherever this custom is maintained, as among the Greeks, it is not an offense. The Latin Church’s custom of kneeling, however, seems more commendable and more universal, and more consonant with devotion. This is the manner of prayer that Christ observed in the garden, where first he prayed on his knees, and then prostrate on the ground. Hence laziness or lack of devotion makes us often sit or stand during the sacrifice of the Mass (except at the Gospel). But the way to correct these practices or the scandal that results from them is uncertain.

These words exhibit several characteristic features of the Jesuit theologian’s approach to the sacred liturgy: the understanding of Scripture, tradition, and custom as a coherent unity, a recognition of legitimate plurality that gives preference to the Latin rite, insistence on upholding, rather than relaxing, ecclesiastical discipline, and attentiveness to man as a union of soul and body. As he says elsewhere, “Man indeed is not an angel, or a pure spirit, but a spirit joined to a body; therefore God, who gave both of these, demands fruit from both, as of a tree.” Salmerón occasionally theorizes about worship, saying that religious ceremonial has three aims: to bring Christians into one people and “into the house of one custom” (Ps. 67, 7), to adorn and protect divine worship, and to recall the Lord’s teaching.

Salmerón also sought to counter the Protestant attacks on the Catholic faith that had arisen in the sixteenth century, which gives his discussion of the liturgy a polemical cast. In his exegesis of “worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4, 23), he rejects the claim that Christians have no need of churches or temples, or external cult, rites, and chant. “When the Lord said that true adorers would offer worship to God in spirit and truth, he in no way removed exterior and corporeal worship, but rather the shadowy and lying cult of the Law, and the superstitious Samaritan worship.” Christ, he says, would not make a promise to his true adorers and then take away the means of their adoration; “therefore spirit and truth must be joined to our worship with rites and ceremonies.” The Eucharist has its own cult, and the Jesuit theologian explains the significance of such gestures as the bowing of the head, the joining of hands, prostration, the striking of the breast, and the sign of the cross. The physical building of the church declares that Christians are temples of the Holy Spirit; the altar of immolation for the Eucharist reminds them to offer themselves as victims; images place the examples of the saints before their eyes; holy water is a reminder of what flowed from Christ’s side. The weak especially need the Church’s ceremonies, images, and songs to ascend the mountain of God.

The high altar of the Jesuit order’s first church in Naples, known as the “Gesù Vecchio” (literally, “the old (church of) Jesus”; this is the church where Salmerón served during his years in the city, although its appearance is very different from what it would have been in his time. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Max_2010, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Salmerón’s historical consciousness is on display throughout the Commentaries, not least in his treatment of the liturgy, particularly the contested issue of stability and change. An inability to agree on the apostolic origin of particular Church practices, including liturgical ones, resulted in a rather general statement about tradition in Trent’s decree on the canonical Scriptures. This ambivalence is also evident in the Commentaries. On the one hand, Salmerón is wont to treat certain practices of his day as reaching back to the beginnings of Christianity. He attributes to apostolic tradition the Greek custom of the priest elevating his eyes and showing the chalice to the people, and the Latin practice of making the sign of cross over the chalice. He cites Thomas, Innocent III, and the Council of Florence for the view that all the Roman Church’s words of consecration pertain to the substance of the sacrament, for they have been received from apostolic tradition. Paul and Barnabas, he claims, were ordained during the celebration of Mass, as the custom of the Church and apostolic tradition teaches. He thinks that the “lineaments” of the Mass can be found already in Paul’s letters, and claims the status of apostolic tradition for the practice of holding funeral banquets in memory of the dead.

On the other hand, he shows awareness of liturgical development over time, saying that ceremonies are subject to variation, as seen in the customs of particular religious orders. He observes that the Roman Canon was formed as apostles and apostolic men gradually added to it. In commenting on Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians concerning Church discipline, he says that at this early date, public worship did not yet include such things as antiphonal chanting in choir, nor specific ministers assigned to the Gospel and the Epistle. The appearance of the angels to the shepherds at Christ’s birth (Luke 2, 9 sqq.) leads to a treatment of the historical origins of the Gloria. Although Erasmus claims that Pope Telesphorus (d. ca. 137) interpolated the angels’ hymn, what in fact happened, according to Salmerón, was that this same pontiff took the hymn from the Liturgy of St. James and from Book VII of the Apostolic Constitutions. The Jesuit theologian also draws on his knowledge of the changing customs at Rome, where he resided for several years. The church of St. Mark, he says, was originally dedicated to Pope Mark, but over time it became associated with Mark the Evangelist. Formerly the Chair of Peter at Antioch was celebrated in Rome, and then it was changed to the Chair of Peter at Rome, until Paul IV separated these celebrations. Salmeron speaks approvingly of how Gregory VII and Pius V restored the Divine Office to its pristine form, indicating his awareness that public worship may sometimes need renewal.

Salmerón’s liturgical interest is particularly evident in his Mariology. He was a vehement advocate of the Immaculate Conception, and drew on the evidence of worship to make his case. He notes that the Roman Church celebrates the feast under the name “Sanctae Conceptionis”, as do the bishops and nearly all the religious orders, and appeals to the Council of Trent’s renewal of Grave nimis, which granted annual celebration and indulgences for the feast. The praise of Mary found in the liturgies of Basil and Chrysostom is cited in support of the Immaculate Conception. The Church’s worship is key to understanding her doctrine, even prior to the definitions of ecclesiastical authority; it would be a kind of idolatry, he thinks, to erect altars and found confraternities in honor of the Immaculate Conception if the teaching were false.

A monumental column erected in Naples in honor of the Immaculate Conception in 1746, and next to it, the incomplete façade of the second Jesuit church of Naples, known as the “Gesù Nuovo” (literally, “the new Jesus”), in contrast to the “Gesù Vecchio” shown above. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In his commentary on Gabriel’s greeting to Mary, Salmerón cites liturgical sources that begin with the word ave, such as Ave maris stella, Ave Regina coelorum, and Ave Domina angelorum. He likes the idea, taken from the text of the Regina pacis (Funda nos in pace / Mutans Evae nomen), that the name Eva has been turned around into the greeting Ave, which articulates how the Blessed Virgin reversed the course of events that Eve had set in motion. He sees a parallel between the angel’s greeting to Mary and the priest’s greeting to the people at Mass (in re divina). Salmerón observes that the Syrians have a liturgical greeting to Mary, and that the Liturgy of St. Basil includes a prayer to Mary after the offering of the sacrifice, which shows that this custom of greeting the Blessed Virgin is very ancient. In a similar vein, the Jesuit theologian correlates the words of the Hail Mary to her feasts. “Ave” corresponds to her Immaculate Conception, “Maria” to her Nativity, “gratia plena” to her Presentation, “Dominus tecum” to the Annunciation, “Benedicta tu in mulieribus” to the Visitation, “Et benedictus fructus ventris tui” to Christmas, “Sancta Maria virgo Mater Dei” to the Purification, “Ora pro nobis peccatoribus” to her Assumption, and “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae” to Christ’s passion. There is something almost childlike in this otherwise grave and learned man’s delight in making these associations.

Salmerón is attentive to the importance of musical forms in the liturgy. Observing that music is used to arouse various emotions, he says that the Church can use it to arouse piety and devotion, and increase prayer in the spirit. Aware that music moves the hearer in different ways, he distinguishes the movement of the Holy Spirit from the “pythonic” movement people experience in their gut (venter). He defends the Church’s music not only against Protestants, but also against Cajetan (Tommaso de Vio), who said that it would be better for the Church to celebrate the Mass and Office without music, so that the words could be better understood. He retorts that this strategy works when it comes to teaching doctrine to the people, but does not apply to the Divine Office and public prayers. He accepts the use of the organ in church, apparently on the grounds that the verb psallere means singing together with musical instruments.

This is but a sampling of Alfonso Salmerón’s discussion of liturgy in his Commentaries, which may offer an unexpected picture of Jesuit thought. Future installments of this series will explore his views on the Holy Eucharist and the Latin language.

The Altar of St Francis Xavier in Rome

St Francis Xavier, whose feast is kept today, died on December 2, 1556, on the island of Shangchuan off the south-eastern coast of China. His body was taken to the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, and now rests in a silver casket in the Jesuit church there, the Bom Jesus Basilica. However, the main Jesuit church in Rome, which is dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus, and popularly known as the “il Gesù” in Italian, (literally “the Jesus”), possesses a very notable relic of the Saint, namely, his lower right arm and hand, which are displayed on the altar dedicated to him in the church’s right transept. This is the arm with which he personally baptized somewhere around 300,000 people in the course of the years he spent as a missionary in Asia.

The chapel, which dominates the church’s right transept, was built in the 1660s according to a design by one of the most prominent artists of the Roman High Baroque period, Pietro da Cortona. The main altarpiece by Carlo Maratta depicts St Francis’ death; the darker lower part of the chapel with the colored marbles represents this world, and the brighter upper part, heaven. Within the “broken” cornice above the painting, St Francis is represented just as he leaves the world and ascends into the glory of heaven. (Unfortunately, the glory of heaven was just too bright for effective photography this morning.)

The stucco figure of St Francis in the cornice is oriented in such a way that it rises towards this painting of the Holy Trinity in the ceiling above it, a work by Giovanni Andrea Carlone. The interaction of the various artistic forms, painting, sculpture and architecture, in such a dramatic setting was one of the most admired and widely imitated aspects of Rome’s Baroque churches, serving as a model and inspiration for countless other works throughout the Catholic world.

To either side of the central painting, Carlone depicted some of the Saint’s missionary activity: here, he baptizes an Indian princess,

and here, he is shipwrecked during his travels.

The altar seen from the opposite side of the church, where a restoration project for the altar of St Ignatius of Loyola is just beginning.