Today is the anniversary of the death of St Gregory Barbarigo, cardinal and Patriarch of Venice, in 1697. When he was canonized in 1960, June 18th was occupied by the feast of St Ephraem the Syrian, and so he was assigned to the previous day. His cause had stalled for over a century and a half after his beatification in 1751; it was revived and brought to a successful conclusion by Pope St John XXIII, who was a native of St Gregory’s first diocese, Bergamo, and also patriarch of Venice.
Here is some footage of the canonization ceremony (unfortunately rather grainy, and without soundtrack), which was held in the Lateran basilica in Rome on May 26, 1960. This comes from the always interesting YouTube channel of the website Caerimoniale Romanum, which is dedicated to preserving historical records of this sort - feliciter!Thursday, June 18, 2026
Saturday, October 11, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The Battle of Lepanto, by an unknown artist, late 16th century, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.
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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.
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| 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. |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Do Priests or Religious Need Special Permission to Pray a Pre-55 Breviary?
On occasion, I receive an email like the following (in this case, from a seminarian): “Do you happen to know of any sources/authoritative references which you could point me to that explain why praying the Pre-55 Breviary definitely satisfies the canonical obligation for clerics or religious? As I am strongly desirous of the Pre-55 Liturgy, I wanted to check all my p’s and q’s.” (The same question could be asked, mutatis mutandis, about taking up a pre-Pius X breviary as well.)
My Initial View
In the past, my standard line has been: There is no official statement that you can do this. If one can do it, it is because “what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.” It can be done because it is the Church’s venerable and immemorial lex orandi. If you are confident that this is true, then you have sufficient certainty that by fulfilling the obligation as it was fulfilled by countless saints before you, you too are fulfilling it today, in a way that is supererogatory inasmuch as it goes above and beyond the minimum that is required by current law.
However, I thought it best to solicit a variety of opinions from experts. I will now share their responses. As you’ll see, opinions differ, but a certain majority consensus emerges.
Expert Opinion #1 (a secular priest from an Ecclesia Dei institute)
“I am a bit more cautious when it comes to using an older version of the Office than an older version of the Missal, because I see a distinction between, on the one hand, something being the public prayer of the Church and, on the other, something fulfilling a positive obligation imposed by the Church through the power of the keys.
“I would say that if one were to pray the Office using an older version, it would still be the public prayer of the Church. But because the obligation to recite the Divine Office and its binding under the pain of mortal sin is something produced by positive ecclesiastical law, if the requirements as set forth by the law are not fulfilled, then the penalty is incurred. This is different from the Missal as there is, in general, no obligation under penalty to celebrate Mass—an exception being if it is required for the faithful to fulfill an obligation of attendance. For example, I would say that if Pius X had decided that secular clergy or clergy with pastoral responsibilities were bound to recite only Lauds and Vespers, they would fulfill their obligation and avoid sin by doing so, while if they went beyond this, it would still be part of the public prayer of the Church.
“Touching on this topic, ‘Art. 9 §3 of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum gives clerics the faculty to use the Breviarium Romanum in effect in 1962, which is to be prayed entirely and in the Latin language’ (Universae ecclesiae, 32). This expresses that the obligation can be fulfilled using the ’62 Breviary. This does not really answer the question definitively, but it might help shape the direction the discussion might go and the points which need to be considered in answer the question.”
Expert Opinion #2 (a Benedictine monk)
“Would the praying of the pre-55 Breviary constitute a mortal sin if ecclesiastical discipline established that one must pray the 1962 Breviary? Frankly, I think this is the sort of positivist nonsense that got us into trouble in the first place.
“The promise at ordination is to pray the Divine Office. Period. The Paul VI Liturgy of the Hours is so edited and short that I do not know how someone could possibly incur sin by saying the John XXIII breviary instead, as it is much longer and more demanding. (Imaginary confession: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have prayed 150 psalms in the Office this week rather than 62.25!’) So too, the older versions are still more demanding. (‘Bless me, Father, I have prayed the Octave of All Saints and enjoyed it! Can this really be a sin?’) Give me a break!
“In the early days of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, Cardinal Mayer was asked by a priest for permission to say the old breviary. His response was that no permission was needed because it is longer than the Breviary of Paul VI. Enough said. So too, the policy of positivism falls, for now Summorum Pontificum is abrogated. The Missal of 1962 is mandated by Summorum; yet it and all its predecessors are forbidden by Traditionis Custodes. Et cetera. Are we supposed to change our liturgical and devotional life with each new pontificate? Come on!
“If a seminarian wishes to pray more, let us thank God and concern ourselves with those who don’t pray the breviary at all.”
My response to the monk:
I am in full agreement. Thank you for your rant. Really, we should say this: The obligation of the cleric or religious is to honor God by praying the Divine Office, consisting of the psalms and other texts. As long as he is doing this in a manner “received and approved,” he is fulfilling that task.
However, it must be recognized that the stranglehold of legal positivism is very powerful, and St. Pius X mightily contributed to it with his over-the-top language when promulgating his own new breviary:
Expert Opinion #3 (diocesan priest and canon lawyer)
“At first glance, it would seem that the command to pray the office must be fulfilled by the use of an edition that has been promulgated and proposed for its fulfilment. From this perspective, only the Paul VI office or the John XXIII office would fulfil the obligation, especially from the vantage of ‘public prayer of the Church,’ i.e., not something done out of personal devotion.[i]
“However, while it is true that the legislation (in Summorum Pontificum Art. 9 n. 3) only specifically mentions the 1962, I still think there is room for the pre-conciliar breviary. Two aspects argue in favor of this: antinomy and lacuna legis.
“Some would argue that this matter falls into an issue of antinomy—two laws or norms belonging to the same juridical ordering, which take place in the same space and attribute incompatible legal consequences to a certain factual situation, which prevents their simultaneous application; in other words, a factual situation with two or more legal consequences that are incompatible because of two rules. So, one might look for a ‘legislative silence’ that would speak in favor of the freedom to use an older breviary. Silence is of far greater canonical value than most people realize.
“Moreover, a failure to specifically proscribe the recitation of the pre-55 breviary would lend support to its use based on the well-established canonical practice of respecting custom; indeed, the elucidation of this issue should be based on analogous situations, e.g., what happens with the missal. Even in this iconoclastic period we are living in, the Church has allowed the use of pre-’62 ceremonies, and even though there is no obligation to celebrate Holy Mass, nevertheless, one could say that the (at times) explicit and (at other times) implicit approval of pre-’62 ceremonies suggests that the breviary could also fall into this approval, even with silence on the subject.
“I would also argue that odious and dishonest things are not to be presumed in law, and since the prayer of an older, at one time normative breviary is certainly not odious, and the use of it in no way bespeaks a desire to contravene the mens legislatoris, one could in good conscience pray the pre-55 breviary.
“Furthermore, I would add that in the modern legislation for the preconciliar liturgy—Summorum Pontificum, Traditionis Custodes, etc.—there is no explicit prohibition of the use of the earlier breviaries, and one could argue that this falls into the well-established legal principle of ‘odiosa sunt restringenda, favores sunt amplianda’: odious laws—in other words, those that restrict a right or freedom—must be interpreted strictly, in favor of those who are subject to them; while favorable laws must be interpreted broadly.
“Finally, we should take into consideration the actual state of affairs in the mess of the postconciliar world. After Vatican II, monastic communities were allowed to experiment and make up their own divine office. You can find this out by visiting almost any community at random: they are all doing different things. There is a principle in the Church: ‘office for office.’ I was visiting an abbey in another country and I noticed that their monastic office was different. I wondered aloud to the prior if praying it would suffice to fulfill my obligation, and he said: ‘office for office,’ meaning, I could substitute the office prayed in common in the abbey for the office I would have prayed from the breviary (so, their morning prayer for my morning prayer, etc.). I do not know how far this notion of ‘office for office’ could be taken, but it seems to suggest that the Church regards it as sufficient if a priest or religious offers the daily round of prayers and praises in any accepted (or even tolerated) form.”
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Expert Opinion #4 (another Benedictine)
“I was not convinced by the Benedictine’s first opinion. When he calls the priest’s opinion ‘legal positivism,’ is he denying that this is a matter of positive law? Or is he saying that even though it is a matter of positive law, it should be obvious that this particular law (requiring the Pius X office or the ’62 office) is beyond the authority of the legislator?
As far as I can see, the only real argument he gives (in his first response) is that the old office is much longer than that of Paul VI. To me, this is not convincing. If I am bound by a lawful superior to go to Texas, I don’t fulfill my duty by going to China on the grounds that it is a harder trip. The comparison is not simply ‘more’ in the sense that option 2 includes everything option 1 includes, plus some. That would be different. For the question is not, can a priest pray the whole Paul VI office and then pray the pre-’55 in addition, but rather, can he replace the one with the other? If the Church is a visible body with a visible head who has a real legislative authority, one must allow that positive laws can exist and should be obeyed, even when they are bad laws (I don’t mean sinful, but just mistaken or dumb, or otherwise flawed).
“The monk’s second reply (to your implied objection from Pius X) is more to the point. As far as I can see, the moral certainty that we can stick to the old stuff arises predominantly from the evidence that the new stuff is not simply ‘less,’ or that it does away with a 1,000-year-old tradition, but that it is really somehow against the faith. I don’t mean that the breviary itself of Paul VI contains heresies. Rather, I think one can look at the whole shebang since Vatican II, look at the current pontificate, and reasonably conclude that there is an evil and anti-Catholic trend which encompasses, more or less clearly, all the reforms in the past several decades. The result would be a strong doubt about the obligation to comply, and at least a reasonable guess that sticking to pre-reform prayer is safe, despite what the pope says.
“I don’t want to downplay the importance of tradition, but the fact stands that there is no clear teaching (as far as I know) about the limits of papal authority. For instance, we have no council that says ‘if anyone says a pope can change a tricentennial liturgical custom, let him be anathema.’ And, in fact, the texts we do have tend in the opposite direction.
“As far as I can see, there is no way to know with certainty that Pius X overstepped his authority and that his decree was null. And, as a side note, I am not convinced that this is a purely post-Vatican I problem either. Gregory VII tried aggressively to replace the Mozarabic liturgy with the Roman Liturgy, invoking his papal right to do so. At the same time, I think there is a good deal of evidence to reasonably conclude—notice, I do not say conclude with certainty—that the traditions prior to Vatican II can be safely used, based on the overwhelming evidence that the Church has tended in an anti-Catholic direction since that time.
“The diocesan canonist’s opinion is more convincing to me as well, but for different reasons. It acknowledges that this is a matter of positive law but seeks to answer the question within the framework of positive law. I am not qualified to assess the argument canonically but it seems reasonable. As the aforementioned moral argument is sufficient (in my mind at least), I don’t really bother with trying to find solutions within the letter of the law.”
My response to the last (and in general):
I think the logically possible approaches are well summarized in the expert opinions 1, 2, and 3.
Does a pope have authority to require a certain form of prayer? I think the question is ambiguous. If the form he requires represents a radical break with the form required for centuries and centuries, then we might have a problem on our hands—one that could result in a true crisis of conscience. This is where the fateful combination of legal positivism and ever-expanding ultramontanism presses comes in, for the question is rendered easy if you say the pope has absolute authority over everything liturgical (except for a highly distilled “form and matter” of sacraments), and that the only duty of the subordinate to obey his will (or his whims).
But since this is not the way the Church has behaved throughout her history—in fact, it is the opposite of the way she has behaved—and there are sound theological, anthropological, and moral reasons to think that this cannot be right, one may arrive at the position of the Benedictine monk who says it is absurd to believe that praying a traditional “received and approved” form of the liturgy could be wrong, or ruled out as sinful.
The Texas/China analogy fails because, in fact, we are talking about different forms or versions of the same thing, namely, the divine office by which the hours of the day are to be sanctified through the recitation of psalms and prayers. A form that is both more ancient and more extensive would satisfy a requirement that one must do something of the same kind that is more recent and more restricted. The only way it could be maintained that a later form must replace an earlier form is if there was something wrong with the earlier form.
Indeed, this is why, when Urban VIII changed all the breviary hymn language, the religious communities (Benedictines, Cistercians, Dominicans, some others too) simply begged off and said they were content with the language of the hymns as they existed in their own offices. The new language and the old could exist side-by-side. Nor did that pope, or any other, dare to force the matter. That’s because there once was respect for autonomy and diversity, as opposed to now, when everyone talks about these things but no one actually respects them.
The fact that there is no explicit statement that the pope cannot cancel out “received and approved rites” of venerable standing is because it would have seemed ridiculous to our forebears to think that he could. You might remember the episode at Vatican I:
Now, if it could be shown that anything demanded by a pope was contrary to the faith or to sound morals, that in itself would be a reason to say no to it and to stick with what was there before. This, evidently, is what we must do with something like Amoris Laetitia. But it seems also true to say that if something demanded by a pope is followed by a period of uninterrupted institutional chaos or decline, it becomes suspect by that very fact; or (perhaps this is to say the same thing) that in a period of institutional chaos or decline, it is legitimate to maintain the “status quo ante,” much as Lefebvre maintained that he realized he had to stick with the missal prior to the deformations of the 1960s that led to the Novus Ordo of 1969. (Sadly, neither he nor the Society has ever quite figured out that the changes in the 1950s were part of the same process of deformation, and therefore should have been rejected for exactly the same reason. It was the same people with the same principles who were behind both phases, before and after the Council.)
This is really all the light I have, and it may not be much. It seems to me that at this time in particular, when the postconciliar autodemolition of the Church is plain for all to see, there is no reason to doubt anymore that the liturgical revolution—which had its ill-starred conception in Pius X’s hyperpapalist revamp of the breviary, its ominous childhood in Pius XII’s rewriting of Holy Week, and its monstrous adulthood in the ruptures of Paul VI—is something that cannot be of God, cannot be truly “of the Church,” and cannot be for the good of souls.
Granted, each stage is worse than the one before, such that, as I argue in chapter 12 of Once and Future Roman Rite, there are fewer objections one can make to earlier stages and more to later ones, which also implies that adhering to the earlier is less problematic than adhering to the latter (e.g., praying the breviary of Pius X is not as bad as using the Holy Week of Pius XII, and using the Holy Week of Pius XII is not as bad as using the missal of Paul VI). But since there is a real continuity of principles, one is fully justified in taking the whole series as a single process, and saying, as a matter of coherent traditionalism: I will pray the breviary and the missal as they existed prior to this revolutionary process.
Benedictines are fortunate in this regard, as they have the unchanged cursus psalmorum of St. Benedict, nice editions of their choir books, and an altar missal from the first half of the 20th century. All this is “ready to go” in a way that makes the Roman situation look terribly messy by comparison. That’s why I’m not surprised that a number of secular clergy have become or seek to become Benedictine oblates: it gives them a direct channel to a full set of traditional liturgical books still in use in a fair number of abbeys in communion with the Holy See.
NOTE
[i] A clause in Rubricarum instructum of Pope John XXIII seems intended to close the lid on the issue (mind you, only for those with an obligation to the Divine Office): no. 3, “Item statuta, privilegia, indulta et consuetudines cuiuscumque generis, etiam saecularia et immemorabilia, immo specialissima atque individua mentione digna, quae his rubricis obstant, revocantur.” However, the pope left an exclusion clause in no. 3: “quae his rubricis obstant.” What exactly this amounts to would need further investigation.
My Initial View
In the past, my standard line has been: There is no official statement that you can do this. If one can do it, it is because “what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.” It can be done because it is the Church’s venerable and immemorial lex orandi. If you are confident that this is true, then you have sufficient certainty that by fulfilling the obligation as it was fulfilled by countless saints before you, you too are fulfilling it today, in a way that is supererogatory inasmuch as it goes above and beyond the minimum that is required by current law.
However, I thought it best to solicit a variety of opinions from experts. I will now share their responses. As you’ll see, opinions differ, but a certain majority consensus emerges.
Expert Opinion #1 (a secular priest from an Ecclesia Dei institute)
“I am a bit more cautious when it comes to using an older version of the Office than an older version of the Missal, because I see a distinction between, on the one hand, something being the public prayer of the Church and, on the other, something fulfilling a positive obligation imposed by the Church through the power of the keys.
“I would say that if one were to pray the Office using an older version, it would still be the public prayer of the Church. But because the obligation to recite the Divine Office and its binding under the pain of mortal sin is something produced by positive ecclesiastical law, if the requirements as set forth by the law are not fulfilled, then the penalty is incurred. This is different from the Missal as there is, in general, no obligation under penalty to celebrate Mass—an exception being if it is required for the faithful to fulfill an obligation of attendance. For example, I would say that if Pius X had decided that secular clergy or clergy with pastoral responsibilities were bound to recite only Lauds and Vespers, they would fulfill their obligation and avoid sin by doing so, while if they went beyond this, it would still be part of the public prayer of the Church.
“Touching on this topic, ‘Art. 9 §3 of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum gives clerics the faculty to use the Breviarium Romanum in effect in 1962, which is to be prayed entirely and in the Latin language’ (Universae ecclesiae, 32). This expresses that the obligation can be fulfilled using the ’62 Breviary. This does not really answer the question definitively, but it might help shape the direction the discussion might go and the points which need to be considered in answer the question.”
Expert Opinion #2 (a Benedictine monk)
“Would the praying of the pre-55 Breviary constitute a mortal sin if ecclesiastical discipline established that one must pray the 1962 Breviary? Frankly, I think this is the sort of positivist nonsense that got us into trouble in the first place.
“The promise at ordination is to pray the Divine Office. Period. The Paul VI Liturgy of the Hours is so edited and short that I do not know how someone could possibly incur sin by saying the John XXIII breviary instead, as it is much longer and more demanding. (Imaginary confession: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have prayed 150 psalms in the Office this week rather than 62.25!’) So too, the older versions are still more demanding. (‘Bless me, Father, I have prayed the Octave of All Saints and enjoyed it! Can this really be a sin?’) Give me a break!
“In the early days of the Ecclesia Dei Commission, Cardinal Mayer was asked by a priest for permission to say the old breviary. His response was that no permission was needed because it is longer than the Breviary of Paul VI. Enough said. So too, the policy of positivism falls, for now Summorum Pontificum is abrogated. The Missal of 1962 is mandated by Summorum; yet it and all its predecessors are forbidden by Traditionis Custodes. Et cetera. Are we supposed to change our liturgical and devotional life with each new pontificate? Come on!
“If a seminarian wishes to pray more, let us thank God and concern ourselves with those who don’t pray the breviary at all.”
My response to the monk:
I am in full agreement. Thank you for your rant. Really, we should say this: The obligation of the cleric or religious is to honor God by praying the Divine Office, consisting of the psalms and other texts. As long as he is doing this in a manner “received and approved,” he is fulfilling that task.
However, it must be recognized that the stranglehold of legal positivism is very powerful, and St. Pius X mightily contributed to it with his over-the-top language when promulgating his own new breviary:
Therefore, by the authority of these letters, We first of all abolish the order of the Psaltery as it is at present in the Roman Breviary, and We absolutely forbid the use of it after the 1st day of January of the year 1913. From that day in all the churches of secular and regular clergy, in the monasteries, orders, congregations and institutes of religious, by all and several who by office or custom recite the Canonical Hours according to the Roman Breviary issued by St. Pius V and revised by Clement VIII, Urban VIII and Leo XIII, We order the religious observance of the new arrangement of the Psaltery in the form in which We have approved it and decreed its publication by the Vatican Printing Press. At the same time, We proclaim the penalties prescribed in law against all who fail in their office of reciting the Canonical Hours every day; all such are to know that they will not be satisfying this grave duty unless they use this Our disposition of the Psaltery.
We command, therefore, all the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots and other Prelates of the Church, not excepting even the Cardinal Archpriests of the Patriarchal Basilicas of the City, to take care to introduce at the appointed time into their respective dioceses, churches or monasteries, the Psaltery with the Rules and Rubrics as arranged by Us; and the Psaltery and these Rules and Rubrics We order to be also inviolately used and observed by all others who are under the obligation of reciting or chanting the Canonical Hours. In the meanwhile, it shall be lawful for everybody and for the chapters themselves, provided the majority of the chapter be in favor, to use duly the new order of the Psaltery immediately after its publication.
This We publish, declare, sanction, decreeing that these Our letters always are and shall be valid and effective, notwithstanding apostolic constitutions and ordinances, general and special, and everything else whatsoever to the contrary. Wherefore, let nobody infringe or temerariously oppose this page of Our abolition, revocation, permission, ordinance, precept, statue, indult, mandate and will. But if anybody shall presume to attempt this, let him know that he will incur the indignation of Almighty God, and of His Apostles, Sts Peter and Paul.
Given at Rome at St. Peter’s in the year of the Incarnation of the Lord 1911, on November 1st, the Feast of All Saints, in the ninth year of Our Pontificate.
So, it seems to me, there must be a theological rationale for maintaining that something like this decree is null and void from the get-go. Not that Pius X’s breviary is thereby invalidated or rendered illegal, but his attempt to prohibit all contrary customs no matter how venerable seems like it would have to be null and void, if we take serious the concept of tradition and do not think it is totally subject to the will of the reigning pontiff (cf. Benedict XVI’s comments about the limits of the pope’s authority: “The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law.... The Pope knows that in his important decisions, he is bound to the great community of faith of all times...,” etc.). If Benedict XVI is right, then the “sacred and great” principle takes precedence over attempts to thwart it.
One may sympathize with the hesitation of clergy or religious to take the line: “I am expressly disobeying the dictate of Pope N. in doing what I’m doing, because it rests on deeper and better principles than his.” One would, at very least, need moral certainty that one had properly understood the nature of the obligation owed to tradition in contrast with that owed to papal legislation. I am reminded here of an exchange at the trial of St. Thomas More: “What, More, you wish to be considered wiser and of better conscience than all the bishops and nobles of the realm?” To which More replied, “My lord, for one bishop of your opinion I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the General Councils for 1,000 years, and for one kingdom I have France and all the kingdoms of Christendom.”
The monk’s reply:
“Yes, moral certainty is what one needs. But that comes easily enough when positive law twists and turns back on itself every few years. Pius X was a little over-the-top on authority, perhaps understandably so. Today, when authority changes the teaching of the Church on the definitive revelation of God in Christ, on marriage, on Holy Communion, on the death penalty, on the “blessability” of same-sex unions, etc., it is hard to say that using a fuller, older breviary can be considered grave matter, let alone mortal sin. Trads often lack ecclesial, historical and theological perspective, alas. Following rules—even stupid ones—is often easier than thinking.”
Expert Opinion #3 (diocesan priest and canon lawyer)
“At first glance, it would seem that the command to pray the office must be fulfilled by the use of an edition that has been promulgated and proposed for its fulfilment. From this perspective, only the Paul VI office or the John XXIII office would fulfil the obligation, especially from the vantage of ‘public prayer of the Church,’ i.e., not something done out of personal devotion.[i]
“However, while it is true that the legislation (in Summorum Pontificum Art. 9 n. 3) only specifically mentions the 1962, I still think there is room for the pre-conciliar breviary. Two aspects argue in favor of this: antinomy and lacuna legis.
“Some would argue that this matter falls into an issue of antinomy—two laws or norms belonging to the same juridical ordering, which take place in the same space and attribute incompatible legal consequences to a certain factual situation, which prevents their simultaneous application; in other words, a factual situation with two or more legal consequences that are incompatible because of two rules. So, one might look for a ‘legislative silence’ that would speak in favor of the freedom to use an older breviary. Silence is of far greater canonical value than most people realize.
“Moreover, a failure to specifically proscribe the recitation of the pre-55 breviary would lend support to its use based on the well-established canonical practice of respecting custom; indeed, the elucidation of this issue should be based on analogous situations, e.g., what happens with the missal. Even in this iconoclastic period we are living in, the Church has allowed the use of pre-’62 ceremonies, and even though there is no obligation to celebrate Holy Mass, nevertheless, one could say that the (at times) explicit and (at other times) implicit approval of pre-’62 ceremonies suggests that the breviary could also fall into this approval, even with silence on the subject.
“I would also argue that odious and dishonest things are not to be presumed in law, and since the prayer of an older, at one time normative breviary is certainly not odious, and the use of it in no way bespeaks a desire to contravene the mens legislatoris, one could in good conscience pray the pre-55 breviary.
“Furthermore, I would add that in the modern legislation for the preconciliar liturgy—Summorum Pontificum, Traditionis Custodes, etc.—there is no explicit prohibition of the use of the earlier breviaries, and one could argue that this falls into the well-established legal principle of ‘odiosa sunt restringenda, favores sunt amplianda’: odious laws—in other words, those that restrict a right or freedom—must be interpreted strictly, in favor of those who are subject to them; while favorable laws must be interpreted broadly.
“Finally, we should take into consideration the actual state of affairs in the mess of the postconciliar world. After Vatican II, monastic communities were allowed to experiment and make up their own divine office. You can find this out by visiting almost any community at random: they are all doing different things. There is a principle in the Church: ‘office for office.’ I was visiting an abbey in another country and I noticed that their monastic office was different. I wondered aloud to the prior if praying it would suffice to fulfill my obligation, and he said: ‘office for office,’ meaning, I could substitute the office prayed in common in the abbey for the office I would have prayed from the breviary (so, their morning prayer for my morning prayer, etc.). I do not know how far this notion of ‘office for office’ could be taken, but it seems to suggest that the Church regards it as sufficient if a priest or religious offers the daily round of prayers and praises in any accepted (or even tolerated) form.”
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Expert Opinion #4 (another Benedictine)
“I was not convinced by the Benedictine’s first opinion. When he calls the priest’s opinion ‘legal positivism,’ is he denying that this is a matter of positive law? Or is he saying that even though it is a matter of positive law, it should be obvious that this particular law (requiring the Pius X office or the ’62 office) is beyond the authority of the legislator?
As far as I can see, the only real argument he gives (in his first response) is that the old office is much longer than that of Paul VI. To me, this is not convincing. If I am bound by a lawful superior to go to Texas, I don’t fulfill my duty by going to China on the grounds that it is a harder trip. The comparison is not simply ‘more’ in the sense that option 2 includes everything option 1 includes, plus some. That would be different. For the question is not, can a priest pray the whole Paul VI office and then pray the pre-’55 in addition, but rather, can he replace the one with the other? If the Church is a visible body with a visible head who has a real legislative authority, one must allow that positive laws can exist and should be obeyed, even when they are bad laws (I don’t mean sinful, but just mistaken or dumb, or otherwise flawed).
“The monk’s second reply (to your implied objection from Pius X) is more to the point. As far as I can see, the moral certainty that we can stick to the old stuff arises predominantly from the evidence that the new stuff is not simply ‘less,’ or that it does away with a 1,000-year-old tradition, but that it is really somehow against the faith. I don’t mean that the breviary itself of Paul VI contains heresies. Rather, I think one can look at the whole shebang since Vatican II, look at the current pontificate, and reasonably conclude that there is an evil and anti-Catholic trend which encompasses, more or less clearly, all the reforms in the past several decades. The result would be a strong doubt about the obligation to comply, and at least a reasonable guess that sticking to pre-reform prayer is safe, despite what the pope says.
“I don’t want to downplay the importance of tradition, but the fact stands that there is no clear teaching (as far as I know) about the limits of papal authority. For instance, we have no council that says ‘if anyone says a pope can change a tricentennial liturgical custom, let him be anathema.’ And, in fact, the texts we do have tend in the opposite direction.
“As far as I can see, there is no way to know with certainty that Pius X overstepped his authority and that his decree was null. And, as a side note, I am not convinced that this is a purely post-Vatican I problem either. Gregory VII tried aggressively to replace the Mozarabic liturgy with the Roman Liturgy, invoking his papal right to do so. At the same time, I think there is a good deal of evidence to reasonably conclude—notice, I do not say conclude with certainty—that the traditions prior to Vatican II can be safely used, based on the overwhelming evidence that the Church has tended in an anti-Catholic direction since that time.
“The diocesan canonist’s opinion is more convincing to me as well, but for different reasons. It acknowledges that this is a matter of positive law but seeks to answer the question within the framework of positive law. I am not qualified to assess the argument canonically but it seems reasonable. As the aforementioned moral argument is sufficient (in my mind at least), I don’t really bother with trying to find solutions within the letter of the law.”
My response to the last (and in general):
I think the logically possible approaches are well summarized in the expert opinions 1, 2, and 3.
Does a pope have authority to require a certain form of prayer? I think the question is ambiguous. If the form he requires represents a radical break with the form required for centuries and centuries, then we might have a problem on our hands—one that could result in a true crisis of conscience. This is where the fateful combination of legal positivism and ever-expanding ultramontanism presses comes in, for the question is rendered easy if you say the pope has absolute authority over everything liturgical (except for a highly distilled “form and matter” of sacraments), and that the only duty of the subordinate to obey his will (or his whims).
But since this is not the way the Church has behaved throughout her history—in fact, it is the opposite of the way she has behaved—and there are sound theological, anthropological, and moral reasons to think that this cannot be right, one may arrive at the position of the Benedictine monk who says it is absurd to believe that praying a traditional “received and approved” form of the liturgy could be wrong, or ruled out as sinful.
The Texas/China analogy fails because, in fact, we are talking about different forms or versions of the same thing, namely, the divine office by which the hours of the day are to be sanctified through the recitation of psalms and prayers. A form that is both more ancient and more extensive would satisfy a requirement that one must do something of the same kind that is more recent and more restricted. The only way it could be maintained that a later form must replace an earlier form is if there was something wrong with the earlier form.
Indeed, this is why, when Urban VIII changed all the breviary hymn language, the religious communities (Benedictines, Cistercians, Dominicans, some others too) simply begged off and said they were content with the language of the hymns as they existed in their own offices. The new language and the old could exist side-by-side. Nor did that pope, or any other, dare to force the matter. That’s because there once was respect for autonomy and diversity, as opposed to now, when everyone talks about these things but no one actually respects them.
The fact that there is no explicit statement that the pope cannot cancel out “received and approved rites” of venerable standing is because it would have seemed ridiculous to our forebears to think that he could. You might remember the episode at Vatican I:
Now before the final vote on Pastor Aeternus at Vatican I, several Council Fathers were concerned that they would be voting for a doctrine that would give the pope absolute and unqualified jurisdictional authority. Various (documented) discussions were given by members of the Deputation of the Faith assuring the Council Fathers that this was not a correct understanding of the doctrine. That is, they (the Relators of the Deputation) stated that the pope, in his jurisdictional authority, does not have absolute and unqualified jurisdictional authority. One Council Father, however, an American named Bishop Verot of Savannah, apparently was not convinced, and requested that specific qualifying statements (to the effect that the pope’s jurisdictional authority is qualified) be inserted into the texts of the schemas. He was told that the Council Fathers had not come to Rome “to hear buffooneries.” In other words, if this bishop had understood the theological context of the schema, he would not have put himself in such an embarrassing situation. (Brill, Great Sacred Music Reform, 47n25)I rather regret that it seemed so obvious to the fathers of Vatican I, because I think the qualifying language that Bishop Verot wanted would have been exceedingly useful at present. Of course, when the German bishops got around to explaining Vatican I to Prussia, they did add a number of valuable clarifications, though again, their document suffers from vagueness (just what does “human arbitrariness” amount to? What does it look like? How do we know it when we see it?—assuredly, it seems that today we know it when we see it, because popes have gone so far off the deep end in this or that instance). I tried to bring some clarity to this topic in my lecture “The Pope’s Boundedness to Tradition as a Legislative Limit: Replying to Ultramontanist Apologetics.” Fr. Réginald-Marie Rivoire also discusses this point in his tract Does “Traditionis Custodes” Pass the Juridical Rationality Test? (to which the answer is, no).
Now, if it could be shown that anything demanded by a pope was contrary to the faith or to sound morals, that in itself would be a reason to say no to it and to stick with what was there before. This, evidently, is what we must do with something like Amoris Laetitia. But it seems also true to say that if something demanded by a pope is followed by a period of uninterrupted institutional chaos or decline, it becomes suspect by that very fact; or (perhaps this is to say the same thing) that in a period of institutional chaos or decline, it is legitimate to maintain the “status quo ante,” much as Lefebvre maintained that he realized he had to stick with the missal prior to the deformations of the 1960s that led to the Novus Ordo of 1969. (Sadly, neither he nor the Society has ever quite figured out that the changes in the 1950s were part of the same process of deformation, and therefore should have been rejected for exactly the same reason. It was the same people with the same principles who were behind both phases, before and after the Council.)
This is really all the light I have, and it may not be much. It seems to me that at this time in particular, when the postconciliar autodemolition of the Church is plain for all to see, there is no reason to doubt anymore that the liturgical revolution—which had its ill-starred conception in Pius X’s hyperpapalist revamp of the breviary, its ominous childhood in Pius XII’s rewriting of Holy Week, and its monstrous adulthood in the ruptures of Paul VI—is something that cannot be of God, cannot be truly “of the Church,” and cannot be for the good of souls.
Granted, each stage is worse than the one before, such that, as I argue in chapter 12 of Once and Future Roman Rite, there are fewer objections one can make to earlier stages and more to later ones, which also implies that adhering to the earlier is less problematic than adhering to the latter (e.g., praying the breviary of Pius X is not as bad as using the Holy Week of Pius XII, and using the Holy Week of Pius XII is not as bad as using the missal of Paul VI). But since there is a real continuity of principles, one is fully justified in taking the whole series as a single process, and saying, as a matter of coherent traditionalism: I will pray the breviary and the missal as they existed prior to this revolutionary process.
Benedictines are fortunate in this regard, as they have the unchanged cursus psalmorum of St. Benedict, nice editions of their choir books, and an altar missal from the first half of the 20th century. All this is “ready to go” in a way that makes the Roman situation look terribly messy by comparison. That’s why I’m not surprised that a number of secular clergy have become or seek to become Benedictine oblates: it gives them a direct channel to a full set of traditional liturgical books still in use in a fair number of abbeys in communion with the Holy See.
[i] A clause in Rubricarum instructum of Pope John XXIII seems intended to close the lid on the issue (mind you, only for those with an obligation to the Divine Office): no. 3, “Item statuta, privilegia, indulta et consuetudines cuiuscumque generis, etiam saecularia et immemorabilia, immo specialissima atque individua mentione digna, quae his rubricis obstant, revocantur.” However, the pope left an exclusion clause in no. 3: “quae his rubricis obstant.” What exactly this amounts to would need further investigation.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Newsreels of the Lourdes Centennial Celebrations in 1958
From the always-interesting archive of the old newsreel channel British Pathé, here is their piece on the celebrations for the centennial of the first Apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, February 11, 1958. It is remarkable to see how respectful this coverage is, from what we would now call a mainstream media outlet in a country with such long-standing and deep rooted prejudice against the Catholic Church.
And here is raw footage, without sound track, of the consecration of the atrociously ugly lower basilica, built especially to accommodate the large crowds expected for the centenary. This consecration was performed by the His Eminence Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope St John XXIII, who had served as nuncio to France from 1944 until his appointment as Patriarch of Venice in 1953.Also without soundtrack, footage of pilgrimage groups of gypsies at Lourdes during the centennial...
and another of an international military pilgrimage.
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
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.”
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| 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.) |
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.
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| 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.) |
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]
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| 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.) |
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.
Sunday, July 21, 2024
St John XXIII on St Lawrence of Brindisi
Today is the feast of St Lawrence of Brindisi, who was born on the feast of St Mary Magdalene in 1559, and died on the same day at the age of sixty in 1619. Although his family was Venetian, he was born in the major port city of Brindisi, then in the Kingdom of Naples, far down Italy’s Adriatic coast. After entering the Capuchins at the age of 16, he studied at the University of Padua, then the major university of the Venetian Republic, and showed a remarkable facility for languages, learning several modern ones in addition to the languages of the Bible. He was instrumental in establishing the Capuchin Order, then still a fairly new branch of the Franciscans, in Germany as a bulwark against the further spread of Protestantism, but also in rallying the German princes against the Ottoman Turks. He was chaplain to the army, which he helped to organize, stirred to attack with a rousing address, and led in battle armed only with a crucifix in his hand.Despite these and many other activities, including a period as the head of his Order, and despite the extreme austerity of Capuchin life and the full round of liturgical and devotional prayer, St Lawrence also found time to write hundreds of sermons, almost all in Latin, covering a very wide variety of topics, as well as a commentary on Genesis and some writings against Lutheranism. As is noted in the revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints, when these writings were examined during his canonization process, it was said that “Indeed, he is fit to be included among the holy doctors of the Church.” This honor was bestowed upon him by Pope St John XXIII in 1959, the fourth centennial year of his birth, making him the 30th Doctor of the Church.
Here are a few interesting excerpts from the Apostolic letter Celsitudo ex humilitate, promulgated by Pope St John March 19th of that year, the feast of St Joseph, in which he expounds some of the reasons for making St Lawrence a Doctor. (Image courtesy of Toma Blizanac, via his blog, from the Monte dei Capuccini church in Turin, Italy.)
Oh, the inestimable affection of the love of Christ, Who never has never allowed Himself to be lacking to the Church, His Bride, and finds present remedies for the evils that are hurled against her. When the insane daring of the innovators rose up, and the Catholic name was attacked by hostile assaults, when the Faith was languishing in many places among the Christian people, and morals were in steep decline, He raised up Lawrence to defend what was under attack, to avenge what had been destroyed, and to promote that which was conducive to the salvation of all. And since wicked plagues are again being introduced, and men are being ensnared by the inventions of false beliefs and other corruptions, it is useful that this many be placed in a brighter light, so that the Christian faithful may be confirmed towards what is right by the glory of his virtues, and nourished by the precepts of his salutary teaching. Therefore, just as Rome boasts of Lawrence, Christ’s unconquered champion, who by the most dire torments which he suffered, increased the strength of the Church as She was rent by persecution, so Brindisi is held in honor for begetting another Lawrence, who strengthened Her by his zeal for religion and the abundance of his talents as she was afflicted by evil from within and from without. …
In this noble and excellent two things are especially outstanding: his apostolic zeal, and his mastery of doctrine. He taught with his word, he instructed with his pen, he fought with both. Not deeming it enough to withdraw into himself, and dedicate himself to prayer and study in the refuge of his monastery, and occupy himself only with domestic matters, he leaped forth as if he could not contain the force of his spirit, wounded with the love of Christ and his brothers. Speaking from many pulpits about Christian dogma, about morals, the divine writings, and the virtues of the denizens of heaven, he spurred Catholics on to devotion, and moved those who had been swallowed up by the filth of their sins to wash away their crimes, and undertake the emendation of their lives. … outside the sacred precincts, when preaching to those who those who lacked the true religion, he defended it wisely and fearlessly; in meetings with Jews and heretics, he stood as the standard-bearer of the Roman church, and persuaded many to renounce and foreswear the opinions of false teaching. …
In the three volumes called “A Sketch of Lutheranism” (Lutheranismi hypotyposis), this defender of the Catholic law, mighty in his great learning, seeks to disabuse the people of the errors which the heretical teachers had spread. Therefore, those who treat of the sacred disciples, and especially those who seek to expound and defend the catholic faith, have in him the means to nourish their minds, to instruct themselves for the defense and persuasion of the truth, and to prepare themselves to work for the salvation of others. If they follow this author who eradicate errors, who made clear what was obscure or doubtful, they may know they walk upon a sure path. (Pope St John continues, in the traditional manner of such documents, with a lengthy list of the praises other Popes before him have heaped upon St Lawrence.)
In this noble and excellent two things are especially outstanding: his apostolic zeal, and his mastery of doctrine. He taught with his word, he instructed with his pen, he fought with both. Not deeming it enough to withdraw into himself, and dedicate himself to prayer and study in the refuge of his monastery, and occupy himself only with domestic matters, he leaped forth as if he could not contain the force of his spirit, wounded with the love of Christ and his brothers. Speaking from many pulpits about Christian dogma, about morals, the divine writings, and the virtues of the denizens of heaven, he spurred Catholics on to devotion, and moved those who had been swallowed up by the filth of their sins to wash away their crimes, and undertake the emendation of their lives. … outside the sacred precincts, when preaching to those who those who lacked the true religion, he defended it wisely and fearlessly; in meetings with Jews and heretics, he stood as the standard-bearer of the Roman church, and persuaded many to renounce and foreswear the opinions of false teaching. …
In the three volumes called “A Sketch of Lutheranism” (Lutheranismi hypotyposis), this defender of the Catholic law, mighty in his great learning, seeks to disabuse the people of the errors which the heretical teachers had spread. Therefore, those who treat of the sacred disciples, and especially those who seek to expound and defend the catholic faith, have in him the means to nourish their minds, to instruct themselves for the defense and persuasion of the truth, and to prepare themselves to work for the salvation of others. If they follow this author who eradicate errors, who made clear what was obscure or doubtful, they may know they walk upon a sure path. (Pope St John continues, in the traditional manner of such documents, with a lengthy list of the praises other Popes before him have heaped upon St Lawrence.)
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
St Gregory Barbarigo, One of John XXIII’s Favorite Saints
In various dioceses in northern Italy, today is the feast of St Gregory Barbarigo, a cardinal, bishop and confessor, who died on this day in 1697, at the age of 71.
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| Portrait of Cardinal Gregory Barbarigo by an unknown artist, ca. 1687. |
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| A portrait of Abp Fabio Chigi, the future Pope Alexander VII, made when he was papal nuncio to the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia; ca. 1646, by the Flemish painter Anselm van Hulle (1601-74.) Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. |
After obtaining the prestigious laurea utriusque (a degree in both civil and canon law), Barbarigo was ordained to the priesthood in his native city, but soon called to Rome by Chigi, who had been elected Pope with the name Alexander VII in 1655. After two years of distinguished service to the papacy, noteworthy especially for his charity to the poor and distressed, he was appointed bishop of Bergamo in Lombardy, which was then a territory of the Republic of Venice. There also he distinguished himself in his office, personally visiting all of the nearly 280 parishes in his diocese. In 1660, he was elevated to the cardinalate, and four years later, transferred to the diocese of Padua, far closer to his native place. Continuing as a model bishop, he visited all 320 of his parishes, and exercised the same pastoral charity for the poor that he had in Rome, even, on one occasion, selling his own bed. For these reason, he was routinely referred to as a second St Charles Borromeo.
Popular devotion to the holy bishop led to a process for his canonization, which was formally introduced at Rome almost exactly 25 years after his death. In 1725, his remains were exhumed, and found to be in a remarkably good state of preservation, though not miraculously so. He was beatified in 1751 by one of the great experts on the subject of canonizations, Pope Benedict XIV, after which his cause stalled for over a century and a half.
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| St Gregory Barbarigo’s tomb in the cathedral of Padua. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Harvey Kneeslapper, CC BY-SA 4.0.) |
Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope St John XXIII, was ordained a priest in 1904 for St Gregory’s first diocese, Bergamo. Both as priest and bishop, he had a great admiration for and devotion to the holy cardinal, and in 1911, he signed a petition to Pope St Pius X (an alumnus of the diocesan seminary of Padua, and former patriarch of Venice), asking that Barbarigo’s cause be renewed. A decree to that effect was issued the following year, and the cause resumed. Roncalli himself became patriarch of Venice in 1953, from which see he was elected to the papacy in 1958; as Pope, he would bring the cause to completion by canonizing St Gregory in May of 1960. Of the ten Saints whom he canonized, Gregory is the only one whom he added to the general calendar, but since his dies natalis was then occupied by St Ephrem the Syrian, he was assigned to the previous day, June 17th.
John XXIII, patron saint of unintended consequences, proved to be particularly unfortunate in his relations with the liturgical calendar. The feast which he specifically chose as the opening day of Vatican II was suppressed by the liturgical reform enacted in the wake and despite of that Council, while his favorite saintly bishop was deemed one Charles Borromeo too many, and relegated to the local calendars as a Saint “not of truly universal importance.” Gregory Barbarigo thus became the single most rapidly degraded canonized Saint in history, removed from the general calendar less than nine years after he was added to it.
Monday, December 26, 2022
Why 1962 Must Eventually Perish: The Case of St. John
Each year after Christmas comes the wonderful sequence of companion feasts. This week at NLM, I should like to make a brief reflection on St. John the Divine.
December 27th is the feast of the virgin disciple who rested his head on the breast of Jesus and who alone remained faithful in the hour of His Passion; the one who merited to receive the Mother of God as his mother, with whom he dwelt in Patmos; the author of the loftiest of the four Gospels, the Epistles of Agape, and the Apocalypse; the Theologian par excellence, model and measure of all mystics; the last living Apostle with the cessation of whose breath public revelation ceased.
St. John’s feast on December 27th is older than the octave of Christmas. In every missal known to Christendom, his feast would have been celebrated on this date, no matter what. Dignum et justum.
But in the 1960 code of rubrics that governs the 1962 Missale Romanum, whenever December 27th falls on a Sunday, the beloved disciple simply vanishes from Mass and receives a measly commemoration at Lauds and Vespers, as if we were suddenly catapulted into the middle of Lent.
The same thing happens, believe it or not, to St. Stephen and the Holy Innocents: all of them can be bumped off, liturgically speaking.
To make it even sillier, there’s always at least one universal feria, the 30th, to which the Sunday gets bumped when the Comites Christi or even St. Thomas of Canterbury takes precedence. Indeed, apostolic devaluation is infectious: all of the Apostles other than Saints Peter and Paul get shabby treatment in the 1960 rubrics. Needless to say, Peter and Paul were shorn of their octave some years earlier.
Such topsy-turvy rubrics and grave omissions point up the feebleness of the editio typica of 1962, the “missal of Bd. John XXIII” in the short-lived nomenclature of Summorum Pontificum, as well as the importance of restoring the Tridentine rite to its own proper principles. 1962 is a half-dismantled building waiting for the demolition crew called the Consilium. Such is the burden of the argument of chapter 12 in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite.
I should note that by the time the Novus Ordo Ambrosianus was designed, the folly of these feasts being impeded had been recognized, and the neo-Ambrosian rite does not allow it to occur. So, even though the Ambrosian rite normally does not allow any feast to impede a Sunday, even things like All Saints, Assumption, St Charles Borromeo, yet there is an exception during the octave of Christmas, when Stephen, John, the Holy Innocents, and even Thomas of Canterbury do take precedence over the Sunday after Christmas. Meanwhile, neither the 1962 and 1969 missals has rectified this egregious defect.
Pope Francis has made it clear that the Tradition is unwelcome and unwanted. If there is a place for the Tradition, it cannot rest on the shifting grounds of papal approval; it must be a matter of inherent worth and dignity. 1920 is the safe editio typica from which to begin the restoration; any editio post typicam until about 1948 will present no great difficulties.
The most urgent practical need right now in the new liturgical movement is the republication of all of the liturgical books before their post-War deformations.
December 27th is the feast of the virgin disciple who rested his head on the breast of Jesus and who alone remained faithful in the hour of His Passion; the one who merited to receive the Mother of God as his mother, with whom he dwelt in Patmos; the author of the loftiest of the four Gospels, the Epistles of Agape, and the Apocalypse; the Theologian par excellence, model and measure of all mystics; the last living Apostle with the cessation of whose breath public revelation ceased.
St. John’s feast on December 27th is older than the octave of Christmas. In every missal known to Christendom, his feast would have been celebrated on this date, no matter what. Dignum et justum.
But in the 1960 code of rubrics that governs the 1962 Missale Romanum, whenever December 27th falls on a Sunday, the beloved disciple simply vanishes from Mass and receives a measly commemoration at Lauds and Vespers, as if we were suddenly catapulted into the middle of Lent.
The same thing happens, believe it or not, to St. Stephen and the Holy Innocents: all of them can be bumped off, liturgically speaking.
To make it even sillier, there’s always at least one universal feria, the 30th, to which the Sunday gets bumped when the Comites Christi or even St. Thomas of Canterbury takes precedence. Indeed, apostolic devaluation is infectious: all of the Apostles other than Saints Peter and Paul get shabby treatment in the 1960 rubrics. Needless to say, Peter and Paul were shorn of their octave some years earlier.
Such topsy-turvy rubrics and grave omissions point up the feebleness of the editio typica of 1962, the “missal of Bd. John XXIII” in the short-lived nomenclature of Summorum Pontificum, as well as the importance of restoring the Tridentine rite to its own proper principles. 1962 is a half-dismantled building waiting for the demolition crew called the Consilium. Such is the burden of the argument of chapter 12 in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite.
I should note that by the time the Novus Ordo Ambrosianus was designed, the folly of these feasts being impeded had been recognized, and the neo-Ambrosian rite does not allow it to occur. So, even though the Ambrosian rite normally does not allow any feast to impede a Sunday, even things like All Saints, Assumption, St Charles Borromeo, yet there is an exception during the octave of Christmas, when Stephen, John, the Holy Innocents, and even Thomas of Canterbury do take precedence over the Sunday after Christmas. Meanwhile, neither the 1962 and 1969 missals has rectified this egregious defect.
Pope Francis has made it clear that the Tradition is unwelcome and unwanted. If there is a place for the Tradition, it cannot rest on the shifting grounds of papal approval; it must be a matter of inherent worth and dignity. 1920 is the safe editio typica from which to begin the restoration; any editio post typicam until about 1948 will present no great difficulties.
The most urgent practical need right now in the new liturgical movement is the republication of all of the liturgical books before their post-War deformations.
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| Don't let the rigged rubrics of this John take away the homage owed to that John |
The images below are taken from my 1951 Monastic Diurnal, reflecting preconciliar Benedictine usage (which is virtually identical to the pre-Pacellian Roman use):
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The images of St. John and John XXIII are from Fr. Lawrence Lew's Flickr account.
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The Battle of Lepanto, by an unknown artist, late 16th century, now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.
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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.
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| 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. |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Saturday, September 17, 2022
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.”
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.”
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.
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]
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.
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| 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.) |
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.
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| 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.) |
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]
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| 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.) |
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.
