On Sacred Art, part 2: What Governs the Style of the Traditions

How the anthropology of the Theology of the Body accounts for the iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque styles, and why the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo is not among them.

This is the second of two related articles on the three authentic liturgical traditions of the Church, as described by Benedict XVI. In the first, I asked what sacred art is for and introduced the three traditions Benedict XVI identifies: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Here I turn to what accounts for the differences between them – the understanding of the human person that each embodies – and explain why the High Renaissance, so often considered the summit of Catholic art, is not among them.

What governs the style of these traditions?

The most important factor governing the style of figurative art is its understanding of the human person, that is, anthropology. Those familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will know that he distinguishes different states of human existence; it is helpful to draw on his categories here.

First, there is Original Man: Adam and Eve before the Fall, ‘naked without shame’, marked by innocence and complete reliance on God.

Second, there is Historical Man: mankind after the Fall, bearing the consequences of a broken relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Though corrupted by sin, Historical Man is not utterly depraved; he retains the capacity for sanctity through cooperation with grace. This is the condition we all share in this life.

Third, there is Eschatological Man: man as he will be in heaven – immortal, partaking of the divine nature, adopted as a son or daughter of God, and united to Christ in a perfect exchange of love.

These second two of these states, as I see it, correspond broadly to the three liturgical traditions in different ways. (There is no tradition directly relating to Original Man, to my knowledge).

The iconographic tradition reveals Eschatological Man. One important inspiration for this style is the account of the glorified Christ in the Transfiguration; all the saints share in that glory through baptism, as members of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. The stylistic features of icons are shaped by the desire to communicate the reality of man in heaven. The gold disc – the halo – represents the uncreated light radiating from the glorified body. There are no cast shadows, since each figure is its own light source rather than being illuminated from outside. And because heaven lies outside space and time, the icon deliberately reduces the illusion of depth through devices such as reverse perspective, ensuring that the figures inhabit the plane of the painting as much as possible. This is also why oil paint is generally avoided in iconography: it creates too strong an illusion of depth and a quality of sensory richness that works against the image’s purpose. Egg tempera, mosaic, and fresco are better suited to the iconographic style.

Christ Enthroned, in the iconographic style

The Baroque tradition reveals Historical Man, and its distinctive style follows from that different subject. Where iconographic art flattens space and eliminates shadow, Baroque painting deliberately creates an illusion of depth through perspective and portrays deep cast shadows from external light sources. Shadow has been a symbol of evil and suffering throughout Christian tradition – the ancient Office of Tenebrae (named for the Latin word for darkness or shadows) uses precisely this symbolism within the Triduum, in the final days of Holy Week. In Baroque painting, those shadowy depths are deliberately exaggerated, but the Christian message is not one of despair. Just as Easter follows Good Friday, the darkness in a Baroque painting is always contrasted with light, representing the Light that is Christ, that overcomes darkness.

The Baroque style is far more naturalistic than the iconographic, but it is not a simple reproduction of appearances. The artist varies color, edge sharpness, and tonal contrast to direct the viewer’s eye toward what matters and to ensure that the figure is depicted with dignity worthy of a creature made in God’s image. While Baroque art is always the art of fallen, Historical Man, it insists on man’s capacity for sanctity and his need for God’s grace. It is the art of suffering and hope, a Christian hope that transcends suffering.

Image: St Jerome and the Angel of Judgment, by Jose Ribera, 

Spanish/Italian, 1626, in the Baroque style

Baroque art should be clearly distinguished from the academic painting of the 19th century, with figures such as Ingres or Bouguereau in France, and from the Pre-Raphaelites in England in the same period. While there were some good examples within each grouping, in my opinion, we can detect that, as a whole, there is a subtle drift away from the Christian balance of idealization and naturalism toward one extreme or the other, becoming either cold and sterile or sentimental to the point of being saccharine. Much of what became 20th-century modernism was an overreaction to this 19th-century academic art. Although the modernists believed they were reacting against Christian tradition, they were, aesthetically at least, reacting against an inferior distortion of it.

The Gothic tradition occupies the ground between the other two, which is fitting given its historical position as a transitional form derived from the Romanesque and anticipating the Baroque. In stylistic terms, it oscillates between the visual language of Eschatological Man, characterized by a highly abstracted iconographic style, and that of Historical Man, characterized by a highly naturalistic Baroque style. It might be called the art of pilgrimage: its imagery points simultaneously toward heaven and the fallen world, reflecting that although we cannot complete the transformation into Eschatological Man in this life, we can begin it. The sacramental life of the Church is precisely the means by which that transformation starts. Like the spires of Gothic churches, Gothic art reaches upward to the heavens while remaining rooted in the earth.

Image: The tympanum of the South portal of Notre-Dame de Strasbourg , ca 1230, The Dormition of the Virgin Mary, sandstone; in the Gothic style. CC BY-SA 2.0 Frédéric Châteaux

The late-Gothic painter Fra Angelico illustrates the point well. He uses elements of the increasing naturalism developing around him, such as single-point perspective and cast shadows, alongside the iconographic visual vocabulary of uncreated light and pictorial flatness. His depictions of the Annunciation (there are several) are examples of paintings that employ perspective and cast shadow; his heavenly scenes, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, revert to the iconographic prototype of flattened space and radiant light. His works are not inconsistent with each other: they reflect a coherent theological understanding of the difference between scenes set in this world and those set in the next.

Image: The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, painted around 1434.

A reasonable question arises here. If each tradition rests on a different understanding of man — fallen, glorified, or on pilgrimage between the two — how is it that within a single tradition we find figures in all three states? Baroque art reveals Historical Man, yet it gives us scenes set in heaven, such as the Coronation of the Virgin. The answer, I would argue, is that while a tradition may occasionally admit some slight variation – Fra Angelico is a rare and notable case – in general, once a style of representing the human figure is established within a tradition, it is applied across all situations. To ask an artist to be fluent in several styles and traditions at once, switching between them according to the subject, would be asking too much of him and would likely confuse those who see it; working consistently within one style is what gives a body of work its coherence. And in any case, there are other means of indicating heaven while remaining within the Baroque idiom – the presence of angels, the absence of any earthly setting, and so on.

Why not the High Renaissance?

Many Catholics will be surprised to find that Benedict XVI’s list of authentic liturgical artistic traditions does not include the High Renaissance – the period of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, c. 1480–1530, which is often considered the summit of Catholic artistic achievement. I follow Pope Benedict’s lead here, and it is worth explaining why.

All traditional art training involves, in varying degrees, copying the works of great masters and the direct observation of nature. The style in which an artist ultimately paints is shaped above all by the art with which he is most familiar, which in turn shapes his response to the nature he observes. Gothic artists looked to Romanesque models and to one another; for this reason, there was no sharp break between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and Gothic art can be understood as a progressively “naturalized” version of the iconographic style, the level of naturalism increasing gradually and without any clear dislocation from its roots.

The High Renaissance represents a different kind of transition: a clear break from that inherited tradition. Artists of this period no longer looked primarily to Romanesque or Gothic masters for inspiration, but to the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that surrounded them in Italy and were being excavated at the time. The sharp change in style between the Gothic and the Italian High Renaissance is not a reflection of increased naturalism – as we have explained, that process had already been going on for centuries. Rather, it is due to the incorporation into artists’ training of copying ancient Greek and Roman statues and plaster casts of them, which radically altered the form of the art. The main impetus for this was not theological or philosophical; rather, it was simply that the period was enamored of the magnificence of this ancient form and wished to emulate it.

The implications of this shift were far-reaching. Benedict XVI described what followed:

“The Renaissance did something quite new...its art speaks of the grandeur of man almost as if it were surprised by it; it needs no other beauty to seek...The tragic burden of antiquity is forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without the fear of sin...True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the other sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.”

The Spirit of the Liturgy, p129

The phrase “without fear of sin” is worth dwelling on. It was the art theorist Alberti who first proposed, in his influential treatise On Painting (1435), that the observation of the nude should also form part of every artist’s training, along with the copying of ancient statues. In doing so, he was knowingly departing from the practice of Christian tradition up to that point – attaching excessive importance to direct observation of the unclothed figure without sufficient regard, in my opinion, for human dignity or for concupiscence, the natural inclination of fallen man toward sin.

The 16th century, shaped by Alberti’s ideas, is characterized less by a coherent tradition than by a series of dominant, individualistic, and brilliantly gifted figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While there were undoubted individual high points, the period as a whole represented a departure from the sacred character of what preceded it, for the reasons Benedict identifies. The Baroque style was a deliberate response to this, inspired by the Council of Trent (which closed in 1563) and the spiritual energy of the Counter-Reformation. Gradually, the contributions of these and other artists were assessed and integrated, and by the end of the 16th century a coherent Christian tradition, properly grounded in theology, had developed from their work.

This, then, is why the High Renaissance, for all its brilliance, does not appear among the three authentic traditions. It is not a judgment on the gifts of its artists, but a recognition that the sacred character of an artistic tradition depends on the end it serves and the understanding of the human person it embodies. The iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque each, in their different ways, keep that end in view; and it is to a fuller account of each that I hope to turn in the articles that follow.

Michelangelo, the Creation of Adam, fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

Roman Discus Thrower, from the 1st century AD, Villa Arianna, Italy

The Maternity of the Virgin Mary

The traditional observance of October as the month of the Holy Rosary begins, of course, with the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the institution of the feast of the Holy Rosary, also called the feast of Our Lady of Victory. Two years later, at the request of the Dominican Order, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) granted the feast to all churches which had an altar of the Rosary. After another important victory against the Ottoman Turks, the Battle of Peterwardein in 1716, Clement XI (1700-21) extended the feast to the entire Roman Rite. In accordance with the common custom of the time, it was originally fixed to the first Sunday of October, regardless of the date; partly because the victory at Lepanto was on the first Sunday of October, partly because, with the continual reduction of the number of holy days of obligation, feasts were often fixed to Sunday so that they might be kept with greater solemnity by the people. The custom of permanently fixing feasts to particular Sundays was abolished by Pope St Pius X as part of the breviary reform of 1911, and the feast of the Holy Rosary then assigned to the calendar date of Lepanto, October 7.

The Battle of Lepanto, by an unknown artist, late 16th century, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.

Once October had been thus established as a Marian month, two other feasts were then created for the second and third Sundays of October, called the feasts of the Maternity and of the Purity of the Virgin Mary. Of these two, the former gradually grew in popularity, to the point where the 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia says, “At present the feast is not found in the universal calendar of the Church, but nearly all diocesan calendars have adopted it.” The latter was at least popular enough to be routinely found in the appendix “for certain places” of most editions of the Roman Missal and Breviary printed in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI extended the feast of the Virgin’s Maternity to the universal calendar, assigning it to October 11th, which was then the first free day of the month. A breviary lesson was added to the feast, which explains that the Pope intended it to serve as a liturgical commemoration of the 15th centenary of the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus. The third Ecumenical council was held in that city in 431 to refute the heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, by which he rejected the liturgical use of the title “Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary. Shortly thereafter, Pope Sixtus III (432-40) built the basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome, the oldest church in the world dedicated to the Mother of God, which still preserves a famous mosaic with episodes of Her life on the arch over the altar. Pope Pius XI also notes in this lesson that he had arranged for extensive restorations of the basilica, “a noble monument of the proclamation of Ephesus,” and particularly of the mosaic.

The upper left section of the mosaic on the triumphal arch of Saint Mary Major, with the Annunciation above and the Adoration of the Magi below. To the right of the Annunciation, the angel comes to reassure St Joseph. In the Adoration of the Magi, Christ is shown as a young child, but not as an infant, since the Gospel of St Matthew does not say how long after the Birth of Christ the Magi came to Him.

October 11 was then set by Pope St John XXIII as the opening day of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Pope John had a great devotion to Pope Pius IX, who was not yet a Blessed in his time, and whom he very much wished to canonize. Pius IX had proclaimed the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and fifteen years later, set the feast of the Immaculate Conception as the day for the opening of Vatican I. As Bl. Pius had placed his council under the protection of the Mother of God by opening it on one of her feast days, so did St John, the feast in question being also a commemoration of yet another ecumenical Council, and one especially associated with the Church’s devotion to the Virgin.

The crest of Pope St John XXIII, in the atrium of St Peter’s Basilica; the opening date of Vatican II is written beneath it, without reference to the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary.

In the post-Conciliar liturgical reform, the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary was suppressed, on the grounds that the newly-created Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, on January 1st made it superfluous, another fine example of the law of unintended consequences. The offical account of the changes made to the calendar, published by the Vatican Polyglot Press in 1969, explains this new feast in reference to the “Synaxis of the Mother of God” which the Byzantine Rite keeps on December 26th.

But in point of the fact, the latter observance arises from a particular Byzantine custom, by which several major feasts are followed by the commemoration of a sacred person who figures prominently in the feast, but who is, so to speak, overshadowed by another. These are usually, but not invariably, called “σύναξις (synaxis)” in Greek, “собóръ (sobor)” in Church Slavonic; that of St John the Baptist is kept on January 7th, the day after the Baptism of the Lord, that of St Gabriel the day after the Annunciation, that of the Twelve Apostles after Ss Peter and Paul, and that of Ss Joachim and Anne, the Virgin’s parents, on the day after Her Nativity. These are not the principal feasts of the persons honored by these “synaxes”, and one also finds in the Byzantine Calendar the feasts of St John on June 24 and August 29, of St Gabriel on June 11, the Apostles each on their own day (rarely the same as in the Roman Rite), and St Anne on July 26.

September 9th is also kept by the Byzantines as the commemoration of the “Fathers of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus”; a most appropriate choice, since the liturgical New Year of the Byzantine Rite is on September 1st, and the Nativity of the Virgin is therefore the first Marian feast of the year. And indeed, the Maternity of the Virgin Mary would be better described, despite its title, as a Roman version of this Byzantine feast of the Fathers at Ephesus. The Byzantine Rite also has similar commemorations of the Fathers of the other ecumenical councils, as well as a joint commemoration of those of the first six, and another of Second Nicea.

An icon of the “Synod of the Holy Fathers”, in which the Emperor Constantine holds a scroll with the opening words of the Nicene Creed in Greek.

Pope St John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, a day which at the time had no feast on the General Calendar, but in the Novus Ordo was made the feast of the Ugandan Martyrs canonized in 1964. Despite the oft-stated modern preference for keeping Saints’ feasts on the anniversary of their death, or as near to it as possible, his feast day was assigned at the time of his beatification, for those places which kept it, to the anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. His feast and that of St John Paul II were extended to the general calendar as optional memorials in 2014; the latter is assigned to October 22, the day of his inauguration as Pope in 1978, since the day of his death, April 2, is very often impeded by Holy Week or Easter week.

Minutes from the Commission of Cardinals That Advised John Paul II to Lift Restrictions on the Old Missal

Most people who have read about the liturgical reform and the revival of the traditional Roman Rite have stumbled across references to the commission of cardinals set up by Pope John Paul II in 1986 to evaluate several questions—among them whether Paul VI had abrogated the preconciliar Missale Romanum in promulgating his own missal in 1969.

Since there is a lot of misinformation circulating nowadays about the old and new missals, some of it sadly disseminated from the Vatican, I consider it important to publish here at NLM a translation of an Italian text by Cardinal Dario Castrillón-Hoyos and retrieved from the “clerus.org” website, that is, the Congregation for the Clergy’s site before it transitioned to “clerus.va.” This Italian text is still there, albeit only discoverable if you have the URL (here), dated to October 2008. Below is a screenshot to show where I found it, in case it is taken down after the appearance of the present article. (I have also copied into a file the complete Italian text for the same reason. We would not want to lose this precious historical evidence.)

His Eminence discusses not only Summorum Pontificum but also the work of the 1986 commission that prepared the way for Summorum Pontificum; he quotes at length from the minutes of this commission. It is truly remarkable just how much of that momentous motu proprio of 2007 was already present in nuce as far back as 1986. As far as I can tell, very few know about this text, which is not only a precious historical document but a witness to principles that will someday be vindicated anew under better leadership.
 

Responses of the Cardinal President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei to Certain Questions

Since the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei has received frequent questions on the reasons for the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, some of which are based on the prescriptions of the Document Quattuor Abhinc Annos sent by the Congregation for Divine Worship to the Presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences on October 3, 1984, the President of the same Commission, His Eminence Card. Dario Castrillon Hoyos, saw fit to give the following answers:

Question: Is it licit to refer to the Letter Quattuor Abhinc Annos to regulate matters pertaining to the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, that is, according to the 1962 Roman Missal?

Answer: Evidently not. For, with the publication of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, the prescriptions for the use of the 1962 Missal, previously issued by the Quattuor Abhinc Annos and, subsequently, by the Motu Proprio of the Servant of God John Paul II Ecclesia Dei Adflicta, come to an end. In fact, the same Summorum Pontificum, from Article 1, explicitly states that “the conditions for the use of this Missal established by the earlier documents Quattuor Abhinc Annos and Ecclesia Dei are replaced.” The Motu Proprio enumerates the new conditions. Therefore, one can no longer refer to the restrictions established by those two documents, for the celebration according to the 1962 Missal.

Question: What are the substantial differences between the latest Motu Proprio and the two previous documents pertaining to this matter?

Answer: The first substantial difference is certainly that it is now licit to celebrate Mass according to the Extraordinary Rite without the need for a special permission, called an “indult.” The Holy Father Benedict XVI established, once and for all, that the Roman Rite consists of two Forms, to which he wished to give the names “Ordinary Form” (the celebration of the Novus Ordo, according to the Missal of Paul VI of 1970) and “Extraordinary Form” (the celebration of the Gregorian Rite, according to the Missal of B. John XXIII of 1962), and confirmed that this Missal of 1962 has never been abrogated. Another difference is that in Masses celebrated without the people, any Catholic priest of the Latin Rite, whether secular or religious, may use either Missal (Art. 2). Furthermore, in Masses without the people or with the people, it is upon the pastor or rector of the church, where it is intended to celebrate, to give permission to all those priests who present the “Celebret” given by their Ordinary. If they deny permission, the Bishop, according to the Motu Proprio, must see to it that permission is granted (see Article 7).

It is important to know that already an ad hoc Cardinal’s Commission of December 12, 1986, formed by the Eminent Cardinals Paul Augustin Mayer, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Agostino Casaroli, Bernardin Gantin, Joseph Ratzinger, William W. Baum, Edouard Gagnon, Alfons Stickler, and Antonio Innocenti, had been created by the Holy Father’s will, for the purpose of examining the possible measures to be taken to remedy the established ineffectiveness of the pontifical indult Quattuor Abhinc Annos about the restoration of the so-called Tridentine Mass in the Latin Church with the Roman Missal of the Typical Edition of 1962, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship with Prot. No. 686/84 of October 3, 1984. This Commission had proposed to the Holy Father John Paul II, even then, for this purpose, some substantial elements that were [only] taken up in the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum.

Allow me to make a summary of the minutes presenting the interventions of the Eminent Cardinals in order to understand how the later documents substantially reflect the vision achieved by such an important Commission of Cardinals shortly after Quattuor Abhinc Annos. Indeed, in the minutes it was stated that:

“The concern, desire and mind of the Holy Father [John Paul II] is the promotion of internal concord in the Church and the edification of the brethren within it.

“This is to be accomplished also through the primary rebuilding of communion in the practice of the lex orandi, such as the sound implementation of the liturgical reform, while dutifully respecting the legitimate needs of minority groups that are often distinguished not only for full theoretical orthodoxy but also for authentic exemplarity in the practice of intensely lived Christian life and of sincere and devoted attachment to the Apostolic See.

“Therefore, there must be a commitment of conscience on the part of all—bishops, priests, and faithful—to remove the scandalous arbitrariness that a misunderstood ‘creativity’ has produced, giving rise to the so-called ‘wild Masses’ and other desecrations that have wounded many of the aforementioned faithful by alienating them from the easy acceptance of the liturgical reform and the new ritual books, including the Missal, which erroneously appeared, unfortunately and precisely because of such unedifying desacralization, almost as the cause of it.”

In the same Commission it was proposed that:

“It shall be reiterated, on the part of the competent Dicastery, that the Pope desires internal pacification among all the faithful of the local Churches through the concrete implementation of the concession he made with the indult.

“The bishops shall carry out the will of the Supreme Pontiff by placing themselves spiritually in harmony with His intentions [for granting the indult generously].

“An adequate response is to be given, from the bishops, to those who wanted to discourage the implementation of the indult by presenting it as a reason for division instead of rebuilding. The response was to be not polemical but pastoral, explaining, with delicacy and patience, the letter and spirit of the indult.”

Furthermore, it was stated with authority that:

“The real problem at issue does not seem to be so much the artificial conflict that the indult is intended to resolve, but rather the one that lies upstream of it and was its real cause—that is, the conflict between the rightful implementation of the liturgical reform and the tolerated abuses produced by uncontrolled fantasy. Therefore, in addition to the indult, a far more general level of intervention is required on the part of the Holy See to eliminate the aforementioned habitual abuse that deforms the conciliar liturgical reform.

“The indult, as it stands, on the one hand, gives the impression that the Latin Mass, so-called ‘Tridentine,’ was an inferior and second-rate reality, which was restored only out of tolerant commiseration with those who requested it, and, on the other hand, gives the impression, precisely with all the heavy conditions it contains, that the Holy See itself considers it as such and would not have granted it unless it was forced to do so.

“It is necessary to reiterate and clarify to the bishops the true will of the Holy Father, which consists, not negatively in a concession of tolerance, but positively in a real pastoral initiative taken not to quiet the reaction to the abuses but to recompose the disagreement into reconciliation.

“It is necessary to remove all the conditions contained in the Indult, in order to eliminate the impression bishops have that the Holy See does not want it and the impression on the part of the faithful that they are asking for something almost barely tolerated by the Holy See.”

In the interventions of the assembled Eminences, it emerged that:

“One was in favor of granting the indult to all the faithful and priests who wished to make use of it in aedificationem [for edification] and without anti-Conciliar instrumentalization.

“It is necessary to make it clear to the Bishops that the indult corresponds to a will of the Pope meant to be observed, and it is necessary to make it clear to the faithful that they should respectfully request the implementation of the Pope’s will, so that the Bishops, when faced with respectful requests, will no longer have reason to refuse.

“It should be asked whether, in order to foster reconciliation, it is really necessary to ask the bishop’s consent at all to celebrate Holy Mass in Latin.

“As a general mentality, it would be opportune to tone down the strictness of the limiting conditions of the indult and to eliminate the additional conditions on the Bishops.

“As far as any restriction to particular groups is concerned, since the indult was conceived for them, it should be maintained—but iuxta modum, that is, on the one hand, not meaning by ‘groups’ just three or four persons and, on the other hand, not prohibiting that other persons [not part of the original group] may join the groups that took the initiative in the practice of the concession obtained.”

In the same Commission it was pointed out that:

“There is no difficulty in allowing readings in the vernacular.

“As to the optional use of the [new] Lectionary, there were reservations, fearing some confusion may arise because of the imperfect correspondence between the calendars of the two Missals, while no difficulty was seen in allowing the use of the Prefaces of the new Missal.

“The conditions added by the Bishops and also conditions regarding [the use of] non-parish churches and groups contained in the Indult would have to be removed.

“Under the premise that Latin, as an expression of unity, cannot and must not disappear from the Church, and desiring the Bishops to be ‘helped’ more than to be too ‘respected’ in their prerogatives, it is necessary to come to their aid by reducing the complex conditioning casuistry of the indult to criteria of greater simplicity; it could also thus eliminate the impression that, with those conditions, the Holy See wanted to make it clear that it had granted the indult only obtorto collo [having been seized by the neck]. Moreover, in doing so, the evolutionary coherence of the corrective pontifical measures could be highlighted by obviating their contradictory contrasts.

Citing then No. 23 of Sacrosanctum Concilium “concerning the criteria to be observed in reconciling tradition and progress in liturgical reform, and No. 26 of the same conciliar document, on the subject of the norms that must preside over such reform, as deriving from the hierarchical and communal nature of the liturgy, it was proposed (a) to insist, in the eventual document revising the indult, on the objectivity and not the arbitrariness of the implementation of liturgical reform; (b) to make it equally clear how both the use of the Latin language and the use of one or another edition of the Roman Missal should be considered within the framework of that logic; (c) to grant, at least in large cities, that on feast days there be a Holy Mass in Latin with free choice of one or the other typical edition (1962 or 1980) of the Roman Missal.

“It was proposed, likewise, to extend the granting of the Indult also to Ordinaries, religious Superiors General, Provincials, and others.

“About the necessity or otherwise of the Bishop’s assent for the celebration of the Holy Mass in Latin, it was recalled that Paul VI had said that, per se, the Priest, privately, should celebrate in Latin, since the concession made for the use of vernacular languages is only of a pastoral order, to enable the faithful to understand the contents of the rite and, thus, to participate better.

“The need to leave free the option of the use of either Missal for the celebration of the Holy Mass in Latin was reiterated.

“About the type of intervention [to be desired—i.e., what eventually became Summorum Pontificum], one would opt for a new papal document in which, taking stock of the current real situation of liturgical reform, the aforementioned freedom of choice between the two Missals in Latin would be clearly established, presenting one as a development and not as a juxtaposition of the other and eliminating the impression that each Missal is the temporary product of each historical epoch.

“Referring to the previous concerns expressed, the need was reiterated to ensure the [presentation of] evidence of the logical developmental linearity of the documents of the Church and the free option between the two Missals for the celebration of the Holy Mass, and it was proposed to emphasize that they cannot be considered except insofar as one is a development of the other, since liturgical norms, not being true ‘laws,’ cannot be abrogated but only surrogated—the preceding in the following.”

A report of all this was made to the Holy Father [John Paul II].

The Maternity of the Virgin Mary

The traditional observance of October as the month of the Holy Rosary begins, of course, with the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the institution of the feast of the Holy Rosary, also called the feast of Our Lady of Victory. Two years later, at the request of the Dominican Order, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) granted the feast to all churches which had an altar of the Rosary. After another important victory against the Ottoman Turks, the Battle of Peterwardein in 1716, Clement XI (1700-21) extended the feast to the entire Roman Rite. In accordance with the common custom of the time, it was originally fixed to the first Sunday of October, regardless of the date; partly because the victory at Lepanto was on the first Sunday of October, partly because, with the continual reduction of the number of holy days of obligation, feasts were often fixed to Sunday so that they might be kept with greater solemnity by the people. The custom of permanently fixing feasts to particular Sundays was abolished by Pope St Pius X as part of the breviary reform of 1911, and the feast of the Holy Rosary then assigned to the calendar date of Lepanto, October 7.

The Battle of Lepanto, by an unknown artist, late 16th century, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.

Once October had been thus established as a Marian month, two other feasts were then created for the second and third Sundays of October, called the feasts of the Maternity and of the Purity of the Virgin Mary. Of these two, the former gradually grew in popularity, to the point where the 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia says, “At present the feast is not found in the universal calendar of the Church, but nearly all diocesan calendars have adopted it.” The latter was at least popular enough to be routinely found in the appendix “for certain places” of most editions of the Roman Missal and Breviary printed in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI extended the feast of the Virgin’s Maternity to the universal calendar, assigning it to October 11th, which was then the first free day of the month. A breviary lesson was added to the feast, which explains that the Pope intended it to serve as a liturgical commemoration of the 15th centenary of the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus. The third Ecumenical council was held in that city in 431 to refute the heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, by which he rejected the liturgical use of the title “Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary. Shortly thereafter, Pope Sixtus III (432-40) built the basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome, the oldest church in the world dedicated to the Mother of God, which still preserves a famous mosaic with episodes of Her life on the arch over the altar. Pope Pius XI also notes in this lesson that he had arranged for extensive restorations of the basilica, “a noble monument of the proclamation of Ephesus,” and particularly of the mosaic.

The upper left section of the mosaic on the triumphal arch of Saint Mary Major, with the Annunciation above and the Adoration of the Magi below. To the right of the Annunciation, the angel comes to reassure St Joseph. In the Adoration of the Magi, Christ is shown as a young child, but not as an infant, since the Gospel of St Matthew does not say how long after the Birth of Christ the Magi came to Him.

October 11 was then set by Pope St John XXIII as the opening day of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Pope John had a great devotion to Pope Pius IX, who was not yet a Blessed in his time, and whom he very much wished to canonize. Pius IX had proclaimed the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and fifteen years later, set the feast of the Immaculate Conception as the day for the opening of Vatican I. As Bl. Pius had placed his council under the protection of the Mother of God by opening it on one of her feast days, so did St John, the feast in question being also a commemoration of yet another ecumenical Council, and one especially associated with the Church’s devotion to the Virgin.

The crest of Pope St John XXIII, in the atrium of St Peter’s Basilica; the opening date of Vatican II is written beneath it, without reference to the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary.

In the post-Conciliar liturgical reform, the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary was suppressed, on the grounds that the newly-created Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, on January 1st made it superfluous, another fine example of the law of unintended consequences. The offical account of the changes made to the calendar, published by the Vatican Polyglot Press in 1969, explains this new feast in reference to the “Synaxis of the Mother of God” which the Byzantine Rite keeps on December 26th.

But in point of the fact, the latter observance arises from a particular Byzantine custom, by which several major feasts are followed by the commemoration of a sacred person who figures prominently in the feast, but who is, so to speak, overshadowed by another. These are usually, but not invariably, called “σύναξις (synaxis)” in Greek, “собóръ (sobor)” in Church Slavonic; that of St John the Baptist is kept on January 7th, the day after the Baptism of the Lord, that of St Gabriel the day after the Annunciation, that of the Twelve Apostles after Ss Peter and Paul, and that of Ss Joachim and Anne, the Virgin’s parents, on the day after Her Nativity. These are not the principal feasts of the persons honored by these “synaxes”, and one also finds in the Byzantine Calendar the feasts of St John on June 24 and August 29, of St Gabriel on June 11, the Apostles each on their own day (rarely the same as in the Roman Rite), and St Anne on July 26.

September 9th is also kept by the Byzantines as the commemoration of the “Fathers of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus”; a most appropriate choice, since the liturgical New Year of the Byzantine Rite is on September 1st, and the Nativity of the Virgin is therefore the first Marian feast of the year. And indeed, the Maternity of the Virgin Mary would be better described, despite its title, as a Roman version of this Byzantine feast of the Fathers at Ephesus. The Byzantine Rite also has similar commemorations of the Fathers of the other ecumenical councils, as well as a joint commemoration of those of the first six, and another of Second Nicea.

An icon of the “Synod of the Holy Fathers”, in which the Emperor Constantine holds a scroll with the opening words of the Nicene Creed in Greek.

Pope St John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, a day which at the time had no feast on the General Calendar, but in the Novus Ordo was made the feast of the Ugandan Martyrs canonized in 1964. Despite the oft-stated modern preference for keeping Saints’ feasts on the anniversary of their death, or as near to it as possible, his feast day was assigned at the time of his beatification, for those places which kept it, to the anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. His feast and that of St John Paul II were extended to the general calendar as optional memorials in 2014; the latter is assigned to October 22, the day of his inauguration as Pope in 1978, since the day of his death, April 2, is very often impeded by Holy Week or Easter week.

Three Nostalgia Trips: Audio Albums from 1957, 1975 (?), and 1979

It seems as if advocates of eliminating the Catholic Church’s liturgical tradition often try to explain away the surprisingly dogged adherence to older forms as a matter of “nostalgia”—even today, when the average age of many Latin Mass congregations cannot be much higher than about 18 thanks to the enormous number of babies. It is hard for them to understand that the older forms have a holy eloquence of their own, an effiacious communicative capacity, that has almost nothing to do with the age or past experiences of the ones who attend.

But one might feel a bit of genuine nostalgia looking at these three LPs that have come my way in recent times.

The first was discovered by a priest when cleaning out his parents’ house. Today there are websites on which one can practice making the responses at Mass, but back in the day, in 1957 to be precise, you could pick up an old 45 called The Mass: Serving and Responses: Latin Responses for Altar Boys and for First Level Participation in Dialogue Mass, with an imprimatur from Cardinal Stritch. Quite the time capsule of 1957.
 

The second is a rather revealing slice of history: Latin High Mass for Nostalgic Catholics, which was produced by World Library of Sacred Music in Cincinnati. There is no date, but I’m guessing, on the basis of the description on the back, that it would have come out around 1975. The cover shows scenes taken from Fr. Lasance. It features a recording of the traditional Nuptial Mass, with Casali’s Mass in G, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Franck’s Panis Angelicus, and Widor’s Toccata from the 5^th organ symphony. The celebrant is a certain Rev. Cronan Kline, OFM, and the director of the choir is, interestingly, Omar Westendorf, whose hymns show up in many a hymnal.
 

What I find especially noteworthy, and rather sad, is the justification the record offers for itself:
 

The third exhibit is something of an oddity from 1979: Lieder des Papstes Johannes Paul II in Polen. The pinkish halo surrounding the Polish pope seems already to anticipate his accelerated canonization—that seems a better interpretation than radioactivity or phosphorescence.
 

The music is all sung in Polish, of course, but the album is designed for Germans, so it offers (according to a tiny note) a word-for-word literal translation of the various folksongs and specially composed offerings for the Polish pope on his momentous return trip to his homeland, from which many date the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe.
 

 

If I were to say “Ah, those were the days!,” I would be telling a lie, since I was exactly –14, 4, and 8 years old at the time these discs were manufactured. No, they hold no nostalgic value for me, but they do prompt some thoughts. Lots of little boys are still learning and making the responses at Mass, in spite of the attempt, some twelve years after the 45’s release, to cancel out the Latin Mass forever. Second, chant, choral music, and organ music of a far higher caliber than that which is found on the Westendorf record can be heard today at actual High Masses and Solemn High Masses around the world, in spite of renewed barbarian aggression against the Latin Mass. Third, whatever one might say about John Paul II’s weaker moments, he is in fact glowing in comparison with what Providence has allowed us to suffer in the past decade.

Liturgy as Labor versus Liturgy as Leisure

(Part 2 of a two-part series, “Exorcising the Demon of Activism.” For Part 1, see here.)

Last week I spoke of the tendency of modern Christians to prioritize activity, good works, social work — in short, the “horizontal” dimension — over the “vertical” dimension of the individual and corporate relationship with God and His kingdom that we find in, and cultivate through, personal and liturgical prayer. It is no secret that a pragmatic and utilitarian attitude dominates our world and, regrettably, our Church. Rare is the pastor of souls who takes seriously himself, and then teaches others by example and word, that seeking contemplative union with God is absolutely the first priority in the life of every man who has ever lived and who will ever live, and that this means giving Him the best of our time and resources. I sometimes have a mental picture of our final judgment being initially about why we gave God so little of our time, attention, and love when He was present in our midst in symbols and in His Real Presence; and, only after that fundamental defect has been thoroughly examined, launching into the terrifying review of our particular sins, offenses, and negligences.

The heroic Jesuit Fr. Willie Doyle, S.J. (1873–1917), who expended his life for his men on the battlefield of World War I as a much-loved and courageous army chaplain, and therefore cannot be accused of pious daydreaming, once observed: “Did it ever strike you that when our Lord pointed out the ‘fields white for the harvest,’ he did not urge his Apostles to go and reap it, but to pray?” (Recall Matthew 9, 37-38: “Then he saith to his disciples, The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth labourers into his harvest.”)

Pope St John Paul II’s critique of the impoverishment of personal relations in a materialistic society suggests a striking parallel with the confusion of primary and secondary in the life of the Church:

The criterion of personal dignity — which demands respect, generosity, and service — is replaced by the criterion of efficiency, functionality, and usefulness: others are considered not for what they “are,” but for what they “have, do, and produce.” (Evangelium Vitae, §23)

The liturgical reformers committed an analogous blunder. The criterion of liturgical dignity — which demands profound respect for tradition (a prerequisite to internalizing its wisdom), generous self-surrender to its ascetical and rubrical demands, and sincere service to the faithful in offering them ongoing formation — was replaced by the activist criteria of efficiency, functionality, and usefulness ad extra. Liturgy was to be judged not by what it is in its innermost essence, but by its externals, its facilitation of us, its meeting of our untutored needs, its satisfaction of our desires, and (in a best-case scenario) its stimulation of our apostolic activities. It became a Mutual Aid Society for Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, with a decorative Catholic touch.

A contemplative ritual such as the Church had offered to God prior to the mid-1960s will never be able to withstand the relentless demands of the pragmatist for instant results or continual production of “output.” This is due to a fundamental error: work is taken as the paradigm of actuality, rather than rest. We would do well to dwell on this point.

Aristotle introduced into philosophy one of the most useful distinctions ever made, the difference between “first act” and “second act” (or, as some translations have it, first actuality and second actuality). We understand this distinction, which is not logical but metaphysical, by considering a lot of examples from common experience and intuiting what they have in common: being able to see versus actually seeing; being alive but asleep vs. being awake; being equipped with intellect or habitual knowledge vs. actually understanding an essence, which is when knower and known, subject and object, are one and the same. This latter state is being “fully-at-work” (in the Heidegger-influenced language of Joe Sachs), but paradoxically, it is not working at something laboriously; it is actively resting in the possession of a form or a perfection. Capacity for work is ordered to working (attaining actuality), but working is ordered to a certain “rest” (actuality fully achieved). What Abraham Maslow called “a flow state” or, colloquially, “being in the zone,” is just this second act/actuality of which Aristotle speaks, at its peak.

The solemn public liturgy of the Church, though it involves the combined efforts of various people, is essentially the latter kind of work: being fully-at-work in Christ’s actuality, which He now shares with us as an overflow, a redundantia, from heaven, and to which we unite ourselves more as twigs or leaves floating downstream than as trucks carrying gravel or streamrollers flattening asphalt. We are not making a better world by the work of our hands; we are being remade in the image of God, who is pure act.

Josef Pieper’s best-known book is called Leisure, the Basis of Culture. By “leisure” Pieper means what we do for its own sake when all our other practical needs are met. Leisure is not relaxation, which is an interval of inaction before resuming exertions. Nor is leisure exactly the same as recreation, when we entertain ourselves or one another in a more or less dignified manner. Leisure is the reflective and contemplative activity of rejoicing in what is real, with a full mind and heart, with no other business pressing on us and pulling us away; it is resting with wonder and gratitude in the goodness of creation and its Creator; it is what the virtuous man labors to make room for, because it is the best human activity and, in fact, something more than human.

Seeing “Liturgy as Labor” and seeing “Liturgy as Leisure” are, then, the two basic ways of seeing it. The former is activist, the latter contemplative; the one is based on a paradigm of involvement and production, the other on a paradigm of receptivity, surrender, and rest. The partisans of the first conception think of themselves as doing the right thing, bringing the right state of affairs into being, and thus feel that their opponents are “passive” and “mute observers”; the partisans of the second conception think of themselves primarily as beholding and loving what is beautiful or noble in itself, and therefore consider a certain kind of passivity a virtue, and quiet observation a form of opening one’s soul to the power of another who acts to conform the soul to Himself. As Andrew Louth remarks, “To participate by beholding seems a shortcoming only to the busy Western mind.” (The Study of Spirituality, p. 187)

Monastic professions: everyone in this photo is receptive in stance and action

Monastic private Masses (see here for more recent photos)

Fr. Ray Blake asks the question “Why are contemplatives problematic?” and answers:

It is presumably something about the ‘otherness’ of their lives. . . . their values are not those of the contemporary world: they tend to stand still rather than go out to the peripheries of contemporary thought, stat crux dum volvitur orbis, which means they don’t get “with the program.” There is something about the transcendence and otherness of their lives that says some important things about God; that he is above and beyond us, that he is unknowable, ineffable, which means he is beyond the control of Kings and governments, or even Churchmen. The war on Liturgy that speaks of the transcendent of the post-conciliar period uses the same arguments, or lack of argument, as those who have difficulty with the contemplative life. Liturgy that is pure worship, that does not seek to teach, or build community or to “celebrate” in the contemporary sense of the word, is equally incomprehensible; it is about esse [to be] rather than agere [to act]. 

In his fine work Love and Truth: The Christian Path of Charity, Jean Borella brilliantly analyzes the mentality behind suppressing prayer and liturgy because of “social needs”:

Being universal, this commandment [of love] is by definition and a priori applied to every man, but its realization does not require, for it to be accomplished in perfection and for us to be perfect, that we apply it successively to all men. A similar interpretation is implied, however, in the manner in which our contemporaries have become intoxicated with a quantitatively unlimited charity. Besides, why limit the import of this commandment to humanity? Does not the cosmic order concern the whole of creation, and has not Christ ordained the teaching of the Gospel to every creature and not to man alone? And on the other hand, imperfection, misery, and injustice being by definition inexhaustible, the work of justice claims the totality of my time and therefore the totality of my life.
          Consequently, everything not directly an individual or social work of justice is [regard as] mortal sin. Prayer and liturgy, momentarily requiring the whole man and the cessation of every action for the sake of the collectivity, become mortal sins themselves. For to pray, we must withdraw from the world. It is not we ourselves but Christ who is saying this, and we only need state that the commandment on prayer comes immediately after the just-quoted passage, as if the Gospel wished to forestall the modern errors of interpretation: “For yourself when you wish to pray enter into your chamber, close the door and pray to your Father who dwells in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matt 6:6).
          The hic and nunc of our existential situation implies a unicity of acting. We cannot do several things at once. The act of prayer and the liturgy concretely exclude the social act and vice versa. If active charity is to absorb the totality of the charitable power, everything opposing it should be eliminated. And this is why we think the modern conception leads directly and logically to the elimination of liturgical worship and the spiritual life, that is to say ultimately of the Church and theism, for their opposition, in concreto, is strictly inevitable. (225–26)

Now, what Borella describes may well be considered a “limit case” that will never be reached on earth, regardless of the combined effects of activism, indifference, and wickedness in high places as in low; nevertheless, the logic driving toward it leaves a path of carnage behind itself, along which are strewn the lost or never-awakened vocations of tens of thousands of contemplative religious after the Council — a gaping hole in the Mystical Body on earth that no campaign of charity, no pastoral programs, no liturgical reform, could ever fill. Precisely when and where the primacy of contemplation and the true leisure of liturgy are rediscovered and embraced will there be a restoration of the Church’s missionary dynamism and her once-unparalleled charitable work in the world. Delightfully, the way to reach that longed-for goal is the same as the goal itself: prayer and worship. The means and the end coincide, even as our “daily bread” par excellence is the Maker of bread and the Life it imparts.

Liturgical Notes on the Maternity of the Virgin Mary

The traditional observance of October as the month of the Holy Rosary begins, of course, with the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the institution of the feast of the Holy Rosary, also called the feast of Our Lady of Victory. Two years later, at the request of the Dominican Order, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) granted the feast to all churches which had an altar of the Rosary. After another important victory against the Ottoman Turks, the Battle of Peterwardein in 1716, Clement XI (1700-21) extended the feast to the entire Roman Rite. In accordance with the common custom of the time, it was originally fixed to the first Sunday of October, regardless of the date; partly because the victory at Lepanto was on the first Sunday of October, partly because, with the continual reduction of the number of holy days of obligation, feasts were often fixed to Sunday so that they might be kept with greater solemnity by the people. The custom of permanently fixing feasts to particular Sundays was abolished by Pope St Pius X as part of the breviary reform of 1911, and the feast of the Holy Rosary then assigned to the calendar date of Lepanto, October 7.

The Battle of Lepanto, by an unknown artist, late 16th century, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.

Once October had been well established as a Marian month, two other feasts were then created for the second and third Sundays of October, called the feasts of the Maternity and of the Purity of the Virgin Mary. Of these two, the former gradually grew in popularity, to the point where the 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia says, “At present the feast is not found in the universal calendar of the Church, but nearly all diocesan calendars have adopted it.” The latter was at least popular enough to be routinely found in the appendix “for certain places” of most editions of the Roman Missal and Breviary printed in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1931, Pope Pius XI extended the feast of the Virgin’s Maternity to the universal calendar, assigning it to October 11th, which was then the first free day of the month. A breviary lesson was added to the feast, which explains that the Pope intended it to serve as a liturgical commemoration of the 15th centenary of the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus. The third Ecumenical council was held in that city in 431 to refute the heresy of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, by which he rejected the liturgical use of the title “Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary. Shortly thereafter, Pope Sixtus III (432-40) built the basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome, the oldest church in the world dedicated to the Mother of God, which still preserves a famous mosaic with episodes of Her life on the arch over the altar. Pope Pius XI also notes in this lesson that had arranged for extensive restorations of the basilica, “a noble monument of the proclamation of Ephesus,” and particularly the mosaic.

The upper left section of the mosaic on the triumphal arch of Saint Mary Major, with the Annunciation above and the Adoration of the Magi below. To the right of the Annunciation, the angel comes to reassure St Joseph. In the Adoration of the Magi, Christ is shown as a young child, but not as an infant, since the Gospel of St Matthew does not say how long after the Birth of Christ the Magi came to Him.

October 11 was then set by Pope St John XXIII as the opening day of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Pope John had a great devotion to Pope Pius IX, who was not yet a Blessed in his time, and whom he very much wished to canonize. Pius IX had proclaimed the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and fifteen years later, set the feast of the Immaculate Conception as the day for the opening of Vatican I. As Bl. Pius had placed his council under the protection of the Mother of God by opening it on one of her feast days, so did St John, the feast in question being also a commemoration of yet another ecumenical Council, and one especially associated with the Church’s devotion to the Virgin.

The crest of Pope St John XXIII, in the atrium of St Peter’s Basilica; the opening date of Vatican II is written beneath it, without reference to the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary.

In the post-Conciliar liturgical reform, the feast of the Maternity of the Virgin Mary was suppressed, on the grounds that the newly-created Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, on January 1st made it superfluous, another fine example of the law of unintended consequences. The offical account of the changes made to the calendar, published by the Vatican Polyglot Press in 1969, explains this new feast in reference to the “Synaxis of the Mother of God” which the Byzantine Rite keeps on December 26th.

But in point of the fact, the latter observance arises from a particular Byzantine custom, by which several major feasts are followed by the commemoration of a sacred person who figures prominently in the feast, but who is, so to speak, overshadowed by another. These are usually, but not invariably, called “σύναξις (synaxis)” in Greek, “собóръ (sobor)” in Church Slavonic; that of St John the Baptist is kept on January 7th, the day after the Baptism of the Lord, that of St Gabriel the day after the Annunciation, that of the Twelve Apostles after Ss Peter and Paul, and that of Ss Joachim and Anne, the Virgin’s parents, on the day after Her Nativity. These are not the principal feasts of the persons honored by these “synaxes”, and one also finds in the Byzantine Calendar the feasts of St John on June 24 and August 29, of St Gabriel on June 11, the Apostles each on their own day (rarely the same as in the Roman Rite), and St Anne on July 26.

September 9th is also kept by the Byzantines as the commemoration of the “Fathers of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus”; a most appropriate choice, since the liturgical New Year of the Byzantine Rite is on September 1st, and the Nativity of the Virgin is therefore the first Marian feast of the year. And indeed, the Maternity of the Virgin Mary would be better described, despite its title, as a Roman version of this Byzantine feast of the Fathers at Ephesus. The Byzantine Rite also has similar commemorations of the Fathers of the other ecumenical councils, as well as a joint commemoration of those of the first six, and another of Second Nicea.

An icon of the “Synod of the Holy Fathers”, in which the Emperor Constantine holds a scroll with the opening words of the Nicene Creed in Greek.

Pope St John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, a day which at the time had no feast on the General Calendar, but in the Novus Ordo was made the feast of the Ugandan Martyrs canonized in 1964. Despite the oft-stated modern preference for keeping Saints’ feasts on the anniversary of their death, or as near to it as possible, his feast day was assigned at the time of his beatification, for those places which kept it, to the anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. His feast and that of St John Paul II were extended to the general calendar as optional memorials in 2014; the latter is assigned to October 22, the day of his inauguration as Pope in 1978, since the day of his death, April 2, is very often impeded by Holy Week or Easter week.