The Vigil of Ss Simon and Jude

In the Roman Rite, the term “vigilia – vigil” traditionally means a penitential day of preparation for a major feast. The Mass of a Saint’s vigil is celebrated after None, as are the Masses of the ferias of Lent or the Ember Days, and in violet vestments; however, the deacon and subdeacon do not wear folded chasubles, as they do in Lent, but the dalmatic and tunicle. The Mass has neither the Gloria nor the Creed, the Alleluja is simply omitted before the Gospel, not replaced with a Tract, and Benedicamus Domino is said at the end in place of Ite, missa est.

Folio 116v of the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD, with the Mass of the vigil of Ss Simon and Jude, and the beginning of the Mass of their feast. (Bibliothèque National de France, Département des Manuscrits, Latin 12048)

The joint celebration of the Apostles Simon and Jude in a single feast originated as a proper custom of the Roman Rite, which was then copied by both the Ambrosian and Mozarabic Rites. (In the Byzantine Rite, St Simon’s feast is kept on May 10th, and St Jude’s on June 19th.) As with the feast of Ss Philip and James, this custom seems to have arisen from the presence of their relics in a Roman church; they have been venerated in St Peter’s Basilica since the 7th or 8th century. Neither the vigil nor the feast appears in the very oldest liturgical books of the Roman Rite such as the Old Gelasian Sacramentary and the Wurzburg lectionary, ca. 750 AD. However, both are found only about 30 years later in the Gellone Sacramentary, and their place in the liturgy is certainly well established by the mid-9th century.

In the common Mass for the vigil of an Apostle, all of the proper texts except for the Gospel refer to a single person, as for example the Epistle, which begins with the words “The blessing of the Lord is upon the head of the just man.” The vigil of Ss Simon and Jude therefore has a different Mass, the texts of which all refer to more than one person, in keeping with their joint celebration. The three orations of the Mass in the Missal of St Pius V are the same as those found in the Gellone Sacramentary, and originated with this vigil, but the Gregorian propers and Scriptural readings are all also used in other Masses.

The altar of the left transept of St Peter's Basilica, in which are kept the relics of Ss Simon and Jude; the altar itself is now also dedicated to St Joseph.

The Introit, Gradual and Communion all take their text from Psalm 78, which the Church Fathers often associated with those who, like the Apostles, had given their lives for the Faith. An anonymous “Exposition of the Psalms” previously attributed to St Jerome says e.g., in regard to the words which begin the Introit, “Why should I not understand this to be simply said about the martyrs who were shut up in prisons? … And I say that God does truly hear the voice of those prisoners.” (PL 26, 1289B)

“Intret in conspectu tuo, Dómine, gémitus compeditórum: redde vicínis nostris séptuplum in sinu eórum: víndica sánguinem Sanctórum tuórum, qui effúsus est. Ps. 78 Deus, venérunt gentes in hereditátem tuam: polluérunt templum sanctum tuum: posuérunt Jerúsalem in pomórum custodiam. Gloria Patri. Intret. – Let the sighing of the prisoners come in before Thee, O Lord; render to our neighbors sevenfold in their bosom: repay our neighbors sevenfold into their bosoms; revenge the blood of thy servants, which hath been shed. Ps. 78 O God, the heathens are come into thy inheritance, they have defiled thy holy temple: they have made Jerusalem as a place to keep fruit. Glory be… Let the sighing…”

Likewise, in his Exposition of the Psalms, St Augustine says of the psalm verse, “I believe the words ‘as a place to keep fruit’ should be understood to mean the laying-to-waste caused by the devastation of persecution: … And certainly, when the Church seemed to be laid waste because the heathen were persecuting it, the spirits of the martyrs passed to the heavenly banquet, as if they were many of the sweetest fruits from the Lord’s garden.” (Enarratio in Ps. 78)

This choice may also reflect a long-standing hagiographical confusion, by which the Apostle Simon was thought to be the same person as a kinsman of the Lord named Symeon, who became bishop of Jerusalem after the death of St James the Less, and was martyred at the age of 120 in the reign of the Emperor Trajan.

St Simon the Apostle; statue by Francesco Moratti, 1704-9, in the Lateran Basilica. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

The Epistle is taken from the fourth chapter of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (verses 9-14), in which he describes the duties of an Apostle. “We are made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men.” A commentary on the Epistles of St Paul which was traditionally (but incorrectly) attributed to St Ambrose says about this, “the Apostles became a spectacle, because they were publically mocked, and set to the injury and the death which they suffered. By ‘the world’, he means both angels and men, because there are also evil angels, … (and) the injuries done to the Apostles delighted them.” (PL 17 205A)

This reading first appeared in the Roman Rite in the mid-8th century on the feast of two martyrs named Abdon and Sennen, Persians who were killed at Rome in the 3rd century; they are still commemorated in the Extraordinary Form on July 30th. Their bodies were left to lie “before the image of the sun god,” a colossal statue of the Emperor Nero which stood next to the Colosseum, one of the places where gladiatorial “spectacles” were held and Christians were martyred. It makes for an interesting coincidence, but no more than that, that their native land, Persia, is traditionally said to be the place where St Jude died for the faith.

The Gospel, John 15, 1-7, is one of two traditionally read on the feasts of Martyrs in Eastertide, the other being verses 5-11 of the same chapter. This is the only place where this passage is read outside that season, but the reason for doing so is not readily discernible. The concluding words “you shall ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you” may seem to reflect the devotion to St Jude as the patron of lost causes, but this devotion is extremely recent, no earlier than the 19th century, and its origin obscure.

The Offertory is taken from an Old Latin version of Psalm 149, and includes a small variant from the Vulgate version of St Jerome. “Exsultabunt sancti in gloria; lætabuntur in cubilibus suis. Exaltationes Dei in faucibus (“gutture” in the Vulgate) eorum. – The Saints shall rejoice in glory: they shall be joyful in their resting places. The high praises of God shall be in their mouth.”

The first part of this is frequently said in the Office of Several Martyrs, and was chosen in reference to the fact that the original focus of devotion to the Saints was always at the place of their burial. This same chant is sung on the feasts of Ss Processus and Martinian, whose relics are also kept at St Peter’s; in the modern basilica, they are in the main altar of the right transept, directly opposite that of Ss Simon and Jude in the left transept. It is also sung on the octave day of Ss Peter and Paul, and on the feast of the Holy Maccabees, whose relics are in another church dedicated to St Peter, the basilica which houses his chains.

Like most Masses in the ancient sacramentaries, this vigil originally had its own proper preface, which refers to the ancient character of such days as preparation for a major feast.

VD: Quia tu es mirabilis in omnibus sanctis tuis, quos et nominis tui confessione praeclaros, et suscepta pro te fecisti passione gloriosos. Unde, sicut illi ieiunando orandoque certaverunt, ut hanc possent obtinere victoriam, ita nos potius quae exercuere sectantes, convenientius eorum natalicia celebremus. Per Christum. – Truly it is worthy … because Thou are wondrous in all Thy Saints, whom Thou has made honorable by the confession of Thy name, and glorious by the passion which they accepted for Thee. Wherefore, just as they strove by fasting and praying, that they might be able to obtain this victory, so may we also, by follow their practices, more fittingly celebrate their birth into heaven.

The Basilica of St Vitalis in Ravenna

Following up on Monday’s post of the basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe, the ancient port city of Ravenna, here are pictures taken by the same friend of the church of St Vitalis in Ravenna itself. The titular Saint, the father of the Milanese martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, and said to have suffered martyrdom there; he and Apollinaris, the city’s first bishop and its patron Saint, are named together in the Communicantes of the Ambrosian Canon. This is one of the most important early Christian churches in Italy, particularly because of the magnificent mosaics in the main sanctuary, which are not only very well-preserved, but also contain a very precious testimony to the early history of the Roman liturgy. Founded by a man named Julianus Argentarius, who was both a banker and an architect, the building was begun in 526 under the bishop of Ravenna Ecclesius, and consecrated in 548 by his third successor, Maximian. The main body of the church is octagonal (a shape normally used in that era for baptisteries), surmounted by a cupola.

In the main apse, a young and beardless Christ is accompanied by two angels, and on the left, St Vitalis, on the right, bishop Ecclesius, who offers the church to Christ. The naturalistic representation of the ground, with greenery, rocks and flowers, is typical of the older tradition of Roman mosaics, while the gold background, which represents heaven, and gives the viewer the sense of looking into the sacred place where Christ dwells with his Saints, is more in keeping with the then-emergent conventions of Byzantine art.

On the left side of the sanctuary, the mosaic under the arch represents (left and center) the Biblical episodes of the Hospitality of Abraham (Genesis 18, 1-10), in which the three men who come to Abraham and Sarah are also referred to as “the Lord” in the singular, and were thus of course understood as an appearance of the Holy Trinity. In the right side is the Sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22, 1-18.) Outside the arch on the left are the prophet Jeremiah; in the middle, angels holding a shield with the Cross in it; on the right; Moses receives the Law on Mt Sinai as the people look on from below (Exodus 19 sqq.)

On the right wall, the sacrifices of Abel and Melchizedek; the pairing of these with Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac on the opposite wall is one of the earliest artistic representations of the words of the Supra quae propitio of the Roman Canon, “Upon which do Thou vouchsafe to look with favorable and gracious countenance, and accept them, as Thou didst vouchsafe to accept the gifts of Thy just servant Abel, and the sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham, and that which Thy high priest Melchizedek offered unto Thee, a holy Sacrifice, an unspotted Victim.” Above the arch, we see the same motif of the angels bearing the Cross within a shield.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

There Was No “Original Liturgical War”: A Response to Dmitri Solzhenitsyn

Communion of the Apostles

The following article was published at Crisis Magazine on October 7, 2026, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor Eric Sammons.

In an article published at The Catholic Thing on September 18, 2026, Dmitri Solzhenitsyn endeavors to summarize for readers what he calls “The Original ‘Liturgy Wars’: Between East and West.” His basic argument is that wars over liturgy are nothing new—in fact, the first battlefield was between East and West, inasmuch as the Western church slowly drifted away from the original template still preserved to this day in the Eastern churches. The way he tells the story makes it almost sound plausible.

The argument he puts forth rests on an underlying double premise: first, there was a primitive common liturgical repository from which all the different traditions differently evolved; second, this repository was Greek or Byzantine.

However, no serious liturgical scholar holds either of these positions any more.

As to the first, Paul Bradshaw and others have demontrated that the opposite is true: at the beginning there seems to be considerable diversity, and over time there tends to be convergence and assimilation, as different rites either borrow from each other or replace one another. Ritual practice tends to assimilate itself to that of the great Sees (see Gregory DiPippo’s discussion of this trend in his lecture “Unity in Diversity”). In the West, that great See would, of course, be Rome; in the East, it would not be Byzantium initially, but Jerusalem and Antioch, with Constantinople acquiring dominance after the seventh century.

Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that we have a well-documented commonality between Old Rome and New Rome in liturgical matters, from which one of them (namely Old Rome) diverged; thus, he writes: “All of this established the Roman rite as distinct from the Byzantine,” as if they had begun aligned and then diverged. That is not the case; there is no evidence whatsoever for it. After all, if “by the end of the seventh century, East and West had diverging prayers, hymns, cadences, and even iconography,” what are we to make of the “diverging prayers” etc. within the East itself—since Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Byzantium all prayed differently? The notion that the Byzantine liturgy has a normative antiquity or a peculiar fidelity to apostolic origins is an assumption without foundation.

That brings me to the second premise. Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that “the East” means or is equivalent to Byzantine or Constantinopolitan. Not only does it not mean this, but in the earliest period of Christian liturgy Byzantium is very much less important than Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, whose traditions are older and were more influential for a time. Armenia and Georgia had already adopted the liturgy of Jerusalem at the time when Byzantium/Constantinople/New Rome was first declared a patriarchate. Those older rites already wielded considerable prestige. And yet, we see—as could be expected—a great diversity and vitality of different traditions. The paucity of information and the diversity of traditions in the early centuries make it singularly difficult to pin down where something first occurred, or who influenced whom.

Solzhenitsyn claims: “During the later 300s the Greek liturgy was uniquely refined: garments like the sticharion (a kind of long tunic), hymnography like the short troparia, and sophisticated vessels were a much more prominent feature of Byzantine rites than of the simpler Latin rites.”

By “the Greek liturgy,” presumably he means “the Byzantine.” The problem with such sweeping claims is that we know little to nothing about the Byzantine liturgy of the fourth century. There is precious little documentation of it or citation from it available. There is, for example, no equivalent to St. Ambrose of Milan’s citation of the Roman Canon in the De Sacramentis, written around 387, which strongly points to the Roman Canon already being a familiar anaphora by that time.

The claim about the sticharion cannot be substantiated and is anachronistic. It is well known that clerical attire in the early centuries had not yet evolved into a distinct type of clothing set apart from secular clothing; rather, the clergy wore the best garments available when performing the rites, and due to the innate conservatism of the religious instinct, the sacristy wardrobe remained fixed in style while secular clothing changed out in the world. In any case, it was not long before Western vestments displayed the same stunning beauty as their contemporaneous Eastern counterparts.

Hymns such as the troparia had indeed already emerged as a literary genre by the late 300s, when Byzantium was still a suffragan of Herakleia, not a patriarchate. The Latin hymns of St. Ambrose, long admired for their mellifluous poetry and lofty theological conceptions, were written at just the same time, and soon entered the Western liturgy.

As for “sophisticated vessels,” it is rather difficult to understand what the phrase even means. As soon as we have records of liturgical vessels in the West, we see they are ornate and valuable, which is why the pagan Romans tried to steal them. For example, the Gesta apud Zenophilum/Acta purgationis Felicis, centered on the church at Cirta in North Africa and dated to 303, records an inventory of items taken in a raid, including 2 gold chalices, 6 silver chalices, 6 silver cruets, a small silver basin, 2 large chandeliers, 7 small bronze lamps and their holders, 11 bronze lamps with chains, 38 curtains, substantial quantities of clothing, a silver chest, and a lamp that had been concealed in the library.

The gravest error in Solzhenitsyn’s article is his reporting, with approval, the opinion of some Eastern sources that the Roman liturgy originally had a “descending” epiklesis—that is, an invocation of the Holy Spirit to bring about the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ—that had somehow dropped out of or been removed from the Roman rite. He cites (approvingly?) Orthodox patriarchs who in 1848 accused the Roman Church of “rejecting” from the Canon “the very ancient and Apostolic invocation of the Consecrating Spirit” and thus “miserably mutilating the Sacrifice in its most essential part.” (A less extreme exponent of the view that the Roman Rite once had this kind of epiklesis would be Adrian Fortescue, the inaccuracy of whose views has been discussed elsewhere.)

In reality, the Roman rite never had such an epiklesis because its unique anaphora predates the Macedonian controversy over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which afflicted only the East and is the reason why the Byzantine rite inserted an epiklesis that the Roman rite never needed. The Roman theology of consecation is different, and, tellingly, older. If anything, it is the Byzantine epiklesis, as a later insertion, that requires explanation. (I will not enter here into the Roman rite’s “ascending” epiklesis, the Supplices te rogamus, which is not relevant to the point at hand, nor into the Veni, Sanctificator prayer of the Offertory, which alludes to the Holy Spirit but does not have the function of an epiklesis as we are now discussing it.)

Continuing his brief for Latin deviation from or corruption of a putatively pure and uniform “Greek” original, Solzhenitsyn claims that leavened bread was used by everyone from the beginning but the West drifted later on into the practice of unleavened bread, and, similarly, that the marriage of priests was normative but the West later enforced clerical celibacy. He seems unaware that a long history of scholarly debate exists on these questions.

On the topic of the type of bread used, our information is too scant to permit a determination of when unleavened bread began to be used in the West. The West may have used unleavened bread in imitation of what Christ did at the Passover; for all we know, both types may have been in use at the same time in different places. The fact that we know unleavened bread to be widespread by the Carolingian period does not mean it was invented in that period. On the topic of celibacy, Solzhenitsyn oversimplifies the historical record. For a different telling of the history, I recommend Alphonso Stickler’s The Case for Clerical Celibacy: Its Historical Development and Theological Foundations, Christian Cochini’s Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, and the first chapter of Gary Selin’s Priestly Celibacy: Theological Foundations.

Sadly, it would appear that Solzhenitsyn has permitted himself to be formed and persuaded by classic tropes of Eastern Orthodox apologetics, which tend to grant a fictitious primacy to the Byzantine East, instead of taking seriously the far more complex and diversified picture that scholarship paints of the early Christian centuries. Moreover, Eastern writers in general neglect to pay attention to the historical evidence of slow organic development within their own liturgical (and theological) tradition. The “Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,” whatever connections it had with the saint after whom it is named, took many centuries to develop to its present completed state; it did not descend fully formed from the heavenly Jerusalem.

I would not wish to be seen as solely negative. The article’s strongest point is its near-admission that the modern rite of Paul VI or Novus Ordo marks an unprecedented rupture from both the Roman tradition itself and from the entire world of historic apostolic rites, both Eastern and Western—a claim I defend at length in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite (2022), a portion of which is available in the article “The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo—Two Brothers and a Stranger.” The melancholy words of Cleenewerck would be difficult to dispute: “The liturgical metamorphosis of the Roman Catholic Church... widened the gulf” between East and West.

The Vigil of the Nativity of the Virgin

The origin of the feast of the Virgin Mary’s Nativity is a matter of speculation, and the reason for the choice of date is unknown. It was celebrated at Constantinople by the 530s, when St Romanus the Melodist composed a hymn for it; by the seventh century, it had passed to the West, and Pope St Sergius I (687-701) decreed that it be should celebrated with a procession from the church of St Adrian (who shares his feast day with the Birth of the Virgin) to St Mary Major. It would seem, however, that it was rather slower to be accepted than the other early Marian feasts, the Purification, Annunciation and Assumption, since it is not mentioned in some important early liturgical books. Thus we find it included in the oldest manuscript of the Gelasian Sacramentary in roughly 750 A.D., but missing from the calendar in some later books. The liturgical commentators of the High Middle Ages such as Sicard of Cremona and William Durandus were aware that it was of later institution.

The Nativity of the Virgin, by Pietro Lorenzetti, 1335-42; originally painted for one of the side-altars of the Cathedral of Siena, now in the Cathedral Museum.

By the time the feast was universally accepted, the Roman Rite had mostly ceased to institute vigils for “new” celebrations; this holds true even for the medieval feast par excellence, Corpus Christi. Thus, the Nativity of the Virgin was only kept with a vigil in a limited number of places, and never at Rome itself. This vigil would have consisted of a fast on the day before the feast, accompanied by a Mass in violet after None, and without the Gloria in excelsis, Alleluia or Creed. As it generally the case with later additions, there is not a complete uniformity in the liturgical texts of these Masses from one church to another, but in most places, they were taken from the daily votive Mass of the Virgin or the vigil of the Assumption.

In the Ambrosian Rite, however, the feast is kept with such a vigil, as a feast of particular importance, the titular feast of the cathedral of Milan. On the façade over the central door is a large plaque with the two words “Mariae Nascenti - To Mary as She is born.”

On both the vigil and feast, the Ambrosian Mass reads a lesson which very cleverly links two Biblical passages traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, the sixth chapter of the Song of Songs, and the twenty-fourth of Ecclesiasticus.

“Thus sayeth Wisdom: Song 6, 8-9 She is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her. The daughters saw her, and declared her most blessed: the queens and concubines, and they praised her. Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array? Sir. 24, 24-28 I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue. Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be filled with my fruits. For my spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb. My memory is unto everlasting generations.”

At the Mass of the vigil, the following Confractorium is sung; this is the antiphon that accompanies the Fraction rite, which is done immediately after the Canon, before the Lord’s Prayer.

Beatus ille venter qui te portavit, Christe, et beata ubera quæ te lactaverunt Dominum, et Salvatorem mundi, qui pro salute generis humani carnem assumere dignatus es. ~ Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, o Christ, and blessed are the breasts that nursed Thee, the Lord and Savior of the world, Who for the salvation of the human race deigned to take on the flesh. (In the video below, this is the third piece, beginning at 1:10.)

In the same Mass, the Transitorium (the equivalent of the Roman Communio) was borrowed from the repertoire of processional chants used on the feast of the Purification, the first Marian feast to be accepted by the Ambrosian Rite in the post-Carolingian period. In this video, we hear it sung as part of that procession in the cathedral itself, starting at 1:22.

Magnificamus te, Dei Genitrix; quia ex te natus est Christus salvans omnes, qui te glorificant. Sancta Domina, Dei Genitrix, sanctificationes tuas transmitte nobis. ~ We magnify Thee, Mother of God, because from Thee was born Christ, who saveth all that glory Thee. Holy Lady, Mother of God, impart Thy sanctity to us.

The Byzantine tradition distinguishes twelve feasts, eight of Our Lord and four of Our Lady, as “Great Feasts”, with Easter in a category of its own as the Feast of Feasts. Whether by design or coincidence, the first of these in the liturgical year, which begins on September 1st, is the Birth of the Virgin, which is also the first historically. The Twelve Feasts also each have a Fore-feast, the Roman equivalent of a vigil, and an Afterfeast; the latter are like the octaves of the Roman Rite, but vary in length, and that of the Virgin’s Nativity is only 4 days long, ending on September 12th. A Fore-feast is a full liturgical day, and so unlike Roman vigils, which run from Matins to None, it begins at Vespers of the day which precedes it, in this case, on the evening of September 6th. Here is a selection of some of the hymns sung at that Vespers, followed by the proper hymns of the Divine Liturgy of the Forefeast on September 7th.

An icon of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, painted by Adrianoupolitis Konstantinos in the middle of the 18th century, now in the Benaki Museum in Athens. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

In Thy nativity, o Immaculate one, rays of joy dawned upon the minds of the whole world, foretelling to all the sun of Glory, Christ our God; for Thou were shown to be the mediatrix of true gladness and grace.

The glory of this Thy forefeast, o Immaculate one, foretells to all peoples the good deeds wrought by Thy favor; for Thou art the source of their present gladness, and the cause of the joy that shall come to us, the delight of divine happiness.

The maiden in whom God dwelt and pure Mother of God, the glory of prophets, the daughter of David, today is born of Joachim and the prudent Anne, and in Her birth, overthrows the curse of Adam that was against us.

Theotokion The multitudes of the Angels in heaven and the race of men upon the earth bless Thy all-venerable Nativity, a all-holy and pure Virgin, since Thou became the Mother of the Creator of all things, Christ our God. Ceasa Thou not, we pray, to supplicate Him for us, who after God, place our hopes in Thee, all-praised and undefiled Mother of God.

At the Divine Liturgy, the Troparion From the root of Jesse and from the loins of David, the godly child Mary is born to us today. Therefore, all creation rejoices and is renewed, together with heaven and earth rejoice. Praise Her, ye families of the nations; Joachim is gladdened, and Anna cries out in celebration: The barren woman gives birth to the Mother of God and the Sustainer of our Life.

The Kontakion Today, the Virgin and Mother of God Mary, the inviolate bridal chamber of the heavenly bridegroom, is born from a barren woman according to the divine plan to be made ready as the chariot of God’s Word; even for this was she predestined, the gateway of God, and truly the Mother of Life.

Palestrina’s Canticle of Canticles

Before the Tridentine reform, very few feasts had Scriptural readings in the first nocturn of the Divine Office. On the feasts of the Saints, it was typical for readings of their lives to supply all the Matins lessons, while on those of Our Lord and Our Lady, the first two nocturns were usually a sermon about the feast, and those of the third a homily on the Gospel read at Mass. There were, however, certain exceptions to this, such as Christmas and Epiphany, which always had the same readings from Isaiah that they do today. Among the feasts of the Virgin Mary, only that of her Nativity had Scriptural readings; these were taken from the Song of Songs, or Canticle of Canticles, as it was traditionally known in the Latin West, from its title in the Vulgate, “Canticum Canticorum.”

Two pages of a breviary according to the Use of Prague, printed in 1502, with the Office of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary; the Canticle of Canticles is read in both the first and second nocturns. In many Bibles of this period, the Canticle also had notes added to the text to indicate who is speaking: “The voice of Christ, (speaking) to the Church”, “the Church (speaking) about its tribulations” etc. These were then often incorporated into breviaries, as seen here. (Click image to enlarge.)

On the Assumption and through its octave, the readings of the first two nocturns were taken from a sermon known from its opening words as “Cogitis me.” This purports to be a letter of St Jerome, written to his great friend Paula and her daughter Eustochium (who are both also Saints), in which he expounds his belief in the Assumption of the Virgin, and exhorts them to imitate Her as a model of consecrated life. In reality, it was written by St Paschasius Radbertus, a monk of the ninth century, when “forgeries” of this sort were not looked upon as frauds or acts of deception. Patristic scholar Jaroslav Pelikan notes that Paschasius “under the name of Saint Jerome made a far more substantial contribution to the history of Marian spirituality and devotion than any of the genuine works of Jerome, or for that matter than (his own) other principal work … on the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” (“The Odyssey of Dionysian Spirituality”, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Paulist Press, 1987.)

In the early 16th century, however, Erasmus had shown that “Cogitis me” was certainly not by St Jerome, although he did not know who the true author was. It was therefore removed from St Pius V’s breviary and replaced by writings of other Church Fathers. (Ironically, the readings from St Athanasius assigned to the feast in the first edition were also later determined to be not actually his, and were removed from the second edition published by Clement VIII in 1602.)

The upper half of a polyptych of the Assumption, with Ss Paul and Jerome, Catherine of Alexandria and Clare of Assisi, 1529-30, by Alessandro Bonvicino (1492/5 - 1554), known as “Moretto da Brescia.”

The Tridentine breviary also conformed all Matins of nine readings to the arrangement previously found only on major Sundays and a handful of feasts, with Scripture readings in the first nocturn. The Canticle of Canticles, previously assigned to the Virgin’s Nativity and its octave, was then transferred to the Assumption. (On the Nativity itself, they were retained for the feast and the octave day, but not the days between.) The working notes of the editors of this breviary have never been discovered, so we are often left to guess what motivated their changes. They may have thought it was better to emphasize the solemnity of the older and greater of the two feasts by giving it proper readings for every day. But this may also have been done because the readings of the Divine Office in August are, by a very ancient custom, given over to the Sapiential books. The Canticle is always treated as one of these, since it has the same putative author as the others, King Solomon; this is why when they are read at Mass, they all have the same title, “A reading from the book of Wisdom.”

The readings are arranged as follows:

August 15	chapter 1 (1-16)
August 16	chapter 2 (1-17)
August 18	chapter 4, 1-4 and 7-15
August 19	chapter 5, 8-12 chapter 6, 1-5 and 8-12
August 21	chapter 7 (1-13) chapter 8, 1-4
August 22	chapter 8, 5-14

Two days within the octave have no such readings: August 17th, the octave of St Lawrence, and the 20th, the feast of St Bernard. (The readings of the 16th, 19th and 21st were later removed as other Saints were added to the calendar on those days.)

Palestrina presents his first book of Masses to Pope Julius III; part of the frontispiece of the book itself, which was published in 1554. Julius (whose scandal-ridden papacy was such a profound embarrassment to the rising reform movement within the Church that his papal name has never been used again), had been bishop of the very ancient suburbicarian see of Palestrina, about 24 miles to the east of Rome. It was he who called the great musician from his position as organist in the cathedral of his native town to work in the choir of St Peter’s basilica. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In 1584, when this custom was still less than 20 years old, the great Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 ca. – 1594) published a collection of 29 motets of texts from the Canticle. There seems to be no information available about their intended use, and particularly, whether they were deliberately conceived to be sung during Mass.

However, of these 29 motets, the texts of all but one, the 18th, coincide with the readings for the Assumption and its octave, although they do not include all the verses that are in the breviary. (There are none from chapter 8, so the octave day is not included.) But more interestingly, the same verses that are omitted from the breviary are also not used by Palestrina. The motets taken from chapters 4 and 5 begin at the same verses as readings on August 18 and 19, and those from chapter 6 omit the same verses (8-9) which are omitted in the breviary. The two chapters which get the most thorough treatment, the first (motets 1-8) and second (motets 11-17), are also the ones used on other feast days of the Virgin, the former on Her Nativity, and the latter on the Visitation.

These motets are also quite short, averaging about 2 minutes and 45 seconds each. This would make them very appropriate for the sweltering Roman summer when these feasts are celebrated, a time of year in which we may reasonably guess that people would not want the liturgy to be excessively prolonged by lengthy musical pieces.

Palestrina came to Rome in 1551, and worked there for 43 years, at St Peter’s Basilica, St Mary Major and St John in the Lateran. Given the circles in which he moved, it seems quite possible that he knew the clerics who edited the Tridentine breviary. Taken all together, these things seem to make for at least the possibility that he deliberately selected his texts out of the breviary, and intended them to be used during the Masses of Our Lady’s major feasts in the summer. (This was also noted by Dr Jane Dahlenburg in her Ph.D dissertation The Motet c. 1580–1630: Sacred Music Based on the Song of Songs. (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2001), and further elaborated by Dr Jessie Ann Owens in her article Palestrina’s “Song” Cycle, published in Palestrina und seine Zeit – Traditionelle und digitale Forschungsperspektiven. (Musiconn, Dresden 2023) My thanks to Dr Owens for bringing this to my attention.)

Here is a very nice recording of the whole set by the Hilliard Ensemble.

A Medieval Hymn of St Bernard

Here is a very nice medieval hymn for the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux, which is used in the Cistercian Divine Office at both Vespers of his feast. According to the Analecta hymnica, the great catalog of medieval liturgical hymns, both the author and the date of composition are unknown, but it appears in several Cistercian sources in the 13th century, and has been in continual use within the order ever since. (It does not seem that any of the great translators like Neale or Caswell ever put their pens to this, so we must be content with my poor English prose translation.) This recording from the abbey of Marienstatt in Germany also includes the versicle that follows the hymn, “Ora pro nobis, sancte Bernarde”, in a more solemn tone which is different from the Roman one.

Bernardus Doctor inclytus, Caelos conscendit hodie, Quem attraxit divinitus Splendor paternae gloriae.	Bernard, the renowned doctor ascends the heavens today Whom the splendor of the Father’s glory drew from on high.
Exsultet caelum laudibus De Bernardi consortio, Quem conjungis caelestibus, Jesu, nostra redemptio.	Let heaven exult in praises for Bernard’s company, Whom You join to the citizens of heaven, Jesus, our redemption.
Rufum dorso per catulum Praefigurasti puerum Fore Doctorem sedulum, Conditor alme siderum.	By the figure of a dog with a red back, you showed that the boy would be a zealous teacher, O maker of the stars.
Nascentis ei claruit Clara Christi nativitas, Hoc a te donum habuit, O lux, beata Trinitas.	For him shined most brightly The glorious birth of Christ; This gift he had from you, o light, o blessed Trinity.
Arcana sacrae paginae Declarat, et mysterium Quod effecit in Virgine Deus, creator omnium.	He set forth the mysteries of the holy book, which God, the creator of all things, wrought in the Virgin.
Rore perfusum gratiae Monstrat dulcor eloquii; Per te fons sapientiae, Summi largitor praemii.	The sweetness of his speech showed him to be filled with grace, though Thee, o font of wisdom, giver of the highest reward.
Detentos a daemonibus Sanat, morbos languentium Curat, confert doloribus Magnum salutis gaudium.	He heals those held by devils, he cures the ailments of the sick, and gives the great joy of salvation to their griefs.
Vita vivit feliciter Cum Maria Christifera Cum qua degustat dulciter Aeterna Christi munera.	Happily he lives (eternal) life with Mary, the bearer of Christ, with whom he sweetly tastes the eternal gifts of Christ.
Summae Deus potentiae, Tibi sit laus et gloria: Da post cursum miseriae Beata nobis gaudia. Amen.	God of highest power, to thee be praise and glory: after the way of wretchedness give us blessed joys. Amen.

There are some interesting things to note. The hymn is an acrostic, the first letters of each stanza spelling his name BERNARDVS. The meter is the iambic dimeter, that of the original hymns of St Ambrose and other early Christian poets, short and long syllables alternating four times for a total of eight. (Substitutions are very common, especially since vowel quantities were already weakened in the 5th century, and hardly perceived as such in the High Middle Ages.) As such, it could in theory be sung in any one of a great many melodies, and other common hymns in this meter were often sung with different music from one church to another. However, it was an essential characteristic of the medieval Cistercians to keep a strict uniformity of observance in all their houses, and it is almost certain that they would have all used the same music.

The words of the third stanza “By the figure of a dog with a red back” refer to an episode recorded in the life of St Bernard. When his mother Aleth was pregnant with him (the third of her seven children, of whom four others are Blesseds), she dreamt that she was carrying a barking white dog with some red hair on its back. A religious man whom she consulted explained this dream to mean that the child she bore would be like the dogs mentioned in Psalm 67, “The tongues of your dogs lick the blood of their enemies”, guarding the house of God against its enemies, a preacher, and a healer of souls. This latter idea derives from St Gregory the Great’s symbolic interpretation of the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus (hom. 40 in Evang.), in a passage which is read in the Roman Breviary on Thursday of the second week of Lent. “A dog’s tongue heals the sore which it licks; and so do holy teachers, when they instruct is in the confession of our sins, touch the sores of our souls by their tongues (i.e. their speech).” The following stanza refers to a vision of the Child Jesus which Bernard himself had when he was a boy, and fell asleep while waiting with his family to go out to Matins and the Midnight Mass of Christmas.

Christ Embracing St Bernard, ca. 1625, by Francisco Riablta (1565-1628). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Medieval hymnographers loved the trick performed by the author of this hymn, in which the last line of each stanza is the title (i.e. first line) of another hymn. (A similarly constructed piece is sung in the proper Office of St Anthony the Abbot.)

Splendor paternae gloriae – an original hymn of St Ambrose himself, which the
      Cistercians sing at Sunday Lauds, the Roman Office at Monday Lauds.
Jesu, nostra redemptio – from the feast of the Ascension, pre-Urban VIII
Conditor alme siderum – from Vespers of Advent, pre-Urban VIII
O lux, beata Trinitas – Saturday Vespers, pre-Urban VIII
Deus, creator omnium – the Ambrosian hymn for Sunday Vespers
Summi largitor praemii – a hymn for Lent sung by the Cistercians at Matins;
      also used at Sarum, but not in the Roman Office.
Magnum salutis gaudium – processional hymn for Palm Sunday
Aeterna Christi munera – Matins hymn of the Apostles.
Beata nobis gaudia – Lauds hymn of Pentecost.

In addition, the first line of the second stanza, “Exsultet caelum laudibus”, is the title of the pre-Urban VIII version of the Vespers hymn of the Apostles. (Like all the religious orders that retained their own Uses of the Divine Office, the Cistercians never adopted Pope Urban VIII’s reform of the hymns.)

The difficulty of this trick is to integrate the titles into the words of a new composition in a new sense. Some of the expressions in the vocative case, such as “Jesu, nostra redemptio,” could be interchanged with any of the others, (I do not say this as a critique of the author; medievals valued originality far less than we do,) but the last three are particularly well chosen.

The Cistercians were founded at the very end of the 11th century as “strict constructionalists” of the original Rule of St Benedict, which they felt had been unhappily compromised by later developments and customs that emerged within the Cluniac monastic empire. The term which St Benedict uses for “hymn” in the Rule (capp. 9, 12, 13 and 17) is “ambrosianum”, since it was St Ambrose who first introduced the use of hymns into the West. This led the Cistercians to the believe that St Benedict’s original intention was not merely that monks should sing “a hymn” at certain Hours, but that they should use the specific corpus of hymns used by Ambrose himself. This corpus would be found, as they thought, in the Ambrosian Divine Office; they therefore sent people to Milan to copy out the Ambrosian hymnal then in use, and bring it back to Citeaux. It was incorporated into their Office to the despite of many hymns which at that point had long been in general use within the broad liturgical family of the Roman Rite. This was very controversial, even for an age in which there was a great deal of liturgical variation, and the Order was eventually pressured into adopting the traditional corpus of hymns, with some variations. This is why some of the original Ambrosian hymns such as “Splendor paternae gloriae” are given a more prominent place within the Cistercian Office than they were elsewhere.

Ss Hippolytus and Cassian: One Confusion... and Another

The thirteenth of August is the feast of St Hippolytus, an officer of the guards in the prison where St Lawrence was held, whom the latter converted to Christianity. He is said to have taken the body of Lawrence for burial; reproved for this by the Emperor Decius, and threatened with torture and death, he answered “May I merit to be a likeness of the blessed martyr Lawrence, whom you have dared to name with your polluted mouth.” After torture, he was killed by being torn apart by wild horses.

The Saint Hippolytus triptych by Dietric Bouts the Elder, ca. 1470.

Roman Breviaries printed in the period immediately before the Tridentine reform add to the Matins lessons of his feast the story of St Concordia, an elderly member of his household who had been his nurse. When threatened with punishment alongside Hippolytus for her Christian faith, she replied on behalf of the household, “We much prefer to die virtuously with our Lord than to live without virtue.” At this, the man in charge of arresting them said, “Slaves as a class cannot be corrected without torture”, and had her beaten to death with lead weights.

The story of Hippolytus is normally dismissed as a fabrication by modern scholars on the grounds that his manner of death, reported by the poet Prudentius (348 - 405/13 ca.), is the same as that of the Greek mythological character Hippolytus, the son of Theseus who was dragged to death by the horses of his chariot. It seems not to have occurred to any of the modern skeptics that the persecutors might very well have been inspired by his name to choose this manner of killing him, in imitation of the mythological story.

However, it is certainly true that there is much confusion about his history; when Pope St Damasus I (366-84) placed an epitaph upon his tomb recounting his martyrdom, he stated that he himself “relied on purely oral tradition, which he does not guarantee: ‘Damasus tells these things which he has heard; it is Christ who maketh proof of them.’ ” (Loeb Classical Library, The Poems of Prudentius, p. 304, footnote) The editors of the Tridentine breviary, aware of this difficulty, reduced his feast to a commemoration on the day within the octave of St Lawrence, greatly simplifying the nine lessons given for him and Concordia in earlier editions.

The cathedral of St Cassian in Imola, Italy. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Vanni Lazzari, CC BY-SA 4.0)

At the same time, they joined to his feast another Saint who was not traditionally venerated at Rome, but who, like Lawrence and Hippolytus, is celebrated by Prudentius in his collection of poems about famous martyrs, “On the Crowns.” St Cassian was a school-teacher in the town of Imola in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, about 175 miles to the north of Rome. He was arrested as a Christian, and on refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, was sentenced to be stabbed to death by the pens of his own students. (These would be the sharp metallic instruments called “stylus” by the Romans, commonly used by school-boys to cut lines in tablets of wax.) Prudentius visited his tomb while passing through Imola on the way to Rome, and describes a picture of the martyrdom which was painted over it.

The article on St Cassian in the revised Butler’s Live of the Saints contains the following statement. “The stylus-prodding by schoolboys is probably a reminiscence of an incident in Apuleius (see P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Hagiographica, p. 131) and bears a more than suspicious resemblance to the torture of St Mark of Arethusa.” But Fr de’ Cavalieri’s book contains no such reference to Apuleius or his novel The Golden Ass, and explicitly states that there is no meaningful parallel between the martyrdoms of Cassian and Mark of Arethusa. He does, however, consider the story as told to Prudentius untrustworthy, on the grounds that a Roman magistrate would not likely order a death sentence to be carried out by someone other than an official executioner, much less by school-age boys.

More recent scholarship, however, has argued in favor of the truth of Prudentius’ account. A paper by Filippo Briguglio of the University of Bologna finds several things in the poet’s account that argue in favor of its historicity, and forensic analysis of Cassian’s cranium shows that the wounds are consistent with the size of a typical stylus of the era. So we may very well have yet another example of the hagiographical skeptics hoisted by their own petard.

On the other hand, it is true that a Passion of St Cassian written in the ninth century unhistorically makes him the evangelizer and first bishop of Sabiona in the Alto Adige region of northern Italy, exiled to Imola and constrained to work as a school-teacher. This is why this 17th-century statue of him in the diocesan museum of Bressanone, to which the see of Sabiona was transferred ca. 1000 AD, shows him wearing a mitre. (Photo by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

On the calendar of the post-Conciliar Rite, the Hippolytus of the St Lawrence legend has been replaced by another martyr of the same name, celebrated jointly with Pope St Pontian, who reigned from 230-35. This change was made on the basis of a very ancient list (354 AD) of the places where various martyrs are buried, called the “Depositio Martyrum – the laying-to-rest of the martyrs”, which has the following entry for August 13: “Ypoliti in Tiburtina, et Pontiani in Callisti – Hippolytus, on the via Tiburtina, and Pontian in (the cemetery) of Callixtus.”

This Hippolytus is the Roman priest who is said to have rebelled against Pope St Callixtus I for his moral laxity in readmitting to Communion those who had committed serious sins after baptism. After setting himself up as an anti-Pope, he was reconciled with Callixtus’ successor-but-one Pontian, and exiled together with him to Sardinia, where they both died; the manner of their death is uncertain. The entry in the Depositio Martyrum refers to when Pontian’s successor-but-one, Fabian, brought their bodies back from the island and interred them in two different Roman cemeteries.

This is the same Hippolytus to whom the so-called Apostolic Tradition is erroneously attributed, the document which distantly forms the basis of the post-Conciliar Rite’s Second Eucharistic prayer, and the drastic revision of the rites of ordination. When the post-Conciliar rite was created, it was believed (mostly in good faith) that Hippolytus had written the Apostolic Tradition to preserve the older, and to his view, more authentic liturgical traditions of the Roman Church, against the innovations introduced by his theological opponents, especially Callixtus. Of course, it is now known (indeed, it has been known for over fifty years) that this story is completely untrue, and that the so-called Apostolic Tradition has nothing to do with the historical Hippolytus, and is not a record of the earliest liturgical customs of the Church of Rome. (See “Hippolytus and the Apostolic Tradition: Recent Research and Commentary” by Fr John F. Baldovin, SJ, in Theological Studies 64 (2003))

There is more than a little irony here. The creators of the post-Conciliar calendar, eager and over-eager to remove anything that smacks of the legendary from the Church’s prayer, replaced the Hippolytus to whom there was an authentic tradition of devotion, going back to Damasus and Prudentius, with another to whom there was no such tradition. At the same time, they relegated Cassian of Imola to local calendars as a Saint whose “cultus does not belong to the Roman tradition.” Meanwhile, their cohorts on some of the other subcommittees replaced the authentic tradition of some of the Roman Church’s oldest and most important prayers with novelties based on legends, and texts that do not belong to the Roman tradition.

Raphael’s Transfiguration of Christ

When Raphael was commissioned to paint the Transfiguration of Christ in 1515, the feast commemorating this event in the Lord’s life was still a new one in much of Western Europe. Although it had been kept in some places much earlier, it was given to the universal Church only in the reign of Pope Callixtus III (1455-58), in thanksgiving for the Christian victory against the Turks at the siege of Belgrade on August 6th, 1456. Coming only three years after the fall of Constantinople, this victory signaled an important halt to the Turkish invasion of Europe; in fact, the common custom of ringing church bells at noon began as a reminder to pray for the defense of this bulwark of Christendom.

In the Byzantine tradition, on the other hand, the feast is much older, and one of the Twelve Great Feasts commemorating the principal events of the life of Our Lord and His Mother. It is kept forty days before another of the Great Feasts, the Exaltation of the Cross, a custom based on the teaching of the Church Fathers that the purpose of the Transfiguration was to strengthen the faith of the Apostles in preparation for the Our Lord’s Passion. Long before the adoption of the feast in the West, this aspect of the tradition was also known to the Roman Rite, which reads St. Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration on both the Ember Saturday of Lent and the following Sunday.

The Transfiguration, in the apse mosaic of the monastery church of St. Catherine on Mt Sinai, ca. 565.

The painting was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the cousin of Pope Leo X, who had just been made archbishop of the French city of Narbonne. In accordance with a common abuse of the era, the cardinal had no intention of taking possession of the see to govern it personally, being as he was also the chancellor of the church in Rome; instead, he would have paid a vicar to fulfill the duties of bishop, while drawing the revenues of the see. (In the 10 years between his cousin’s election as Pope in 1513 and his own election as Clement VII, Giulio de’ Medici held ten different sees under various titles, five of them before his priestly ordination.)

Within a few decades, this abuse was completely extirpated by the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation; one must not imagine, however, that all the beneficiaries of it were entirely neglectful of their sees and abbeys. Cardinal de’ Medici commissioned the painting for the high altar of Narbonne’s cathedral, and would certainly have paid the artist a handsome sum for it. In the reign of a Pope whose family had been leading patrons of the Renaissance for generations, in a city filled with every kind of artist, Raphael stood head and shoulders above all of his contemporaries. His only equal in prominence, Michelangelo, had left Rome in 1513 shortly after the election of Pope Leo; in 1516, Raphael was made superintendent of Pontifical works, a job in which he could command his own prices, choosing for himself a few outstanding commissions, and leaving the rest in the hands of an army of assistants and apprentices.

The cathedral of Narbonne, dedicated to Ss Justus and Pastor. Their feast day is August 6th, the same as that of the Transfiguration, which was kept on the following day in the city itself; Raphael’s painting shows the two on the upper left side as witnesses of the Lord’s Transfiguration.

As I have noted before, in an age in which imitation was considered the very essence of art, which is to say, the imitation of the classical past, no-one had a keener eye for seeing what was good about the styles of other artists, taking it into his own, and improving upon it. In this painting, the last work of Raphael, one sees not merely the mastery of technique, but the perfect union at every point of technique to story. While certainly concerned to demonstrate his skill and versatility, especially in light of Michelangelo’s very recent triumph in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, each technical feature of the painting serves to communicate the Biblical story and theological idea behind it.

In Lent and on the feast in August, the Roman Rite reads the story of the Transfiguration from chapter 17 of St Matthew. However, in the upper part of the painting, Raphael has taken account also the words of St Luke that “the appearance of (Christ’s) countenance was altered,” (chap. 9, 29), as it will also be after the Resurrection. (Mark 16, 12 and Luke 24, 16.) The Lord’s face is painted in a style very similar to that of one of Raphael’s early teachers, Perugino, a style greatly admired in the later 15th and early 16th centuries, and considered a kind of idealized facial type. Thus, as Christ reveals himself to be the perfect man, the man who is also God, he is represented with a “perfect” face. The rest of the figures are painted in a variety of styles, with a much more realistic range of facial types, reminiscent of various predecessors and contemporaries of Raphael, a great demonstration of his extraordinary versatility.

Christ in the Transfiguration of Raphael.

The upper part of the Oddi altarpiece, which Raphael painted 15 years earlier. Note the similarity in the faces, all of which are reminiscent of the idealized facial type typical of Perugino.

The painting is also marked by three different major lighting schemes. In the upper part, the light of the transfigured Christ shines onto the clouds behind him, and back at us, while also illuminating the figures around Him, the Prophets Moses and Elijah, and the Apostles Peter, James and John. Through them, the divinity of Christ is revealed to us; thus the light of His divinity coming out at the viewer is not merely a special effect for its own sake, but helps to convey the meaning of the Biblical narrative. The lower part represents the next episode in the Synoptic Gospels, the healing of a possessed child. The very ancient date of the Exaltation of the Cross determines not only the day of the Transfiguration, but also that of the Ember Wednesday of September, always the Wednesday after it, on which the Church reads this episode in the words of St Mark.

And one of the multitude, answering, said: Master, I have brought my son to thee, having a dumb spirit. Who, wheresoever he taketh him, dasheth him, and he foameth, and gnasheth with the teeth, and pineth away; and I spoke to thy disciples to cast him out, and they could not. … And He asked his father: How long time is it since this hath happened unto him? But he said: From his infancy: And oftentimes hath he cast him into the fire and into waters to destroy him. But if thou canst do anything, help us, having compassion on us. And Jesus saith to him: If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. And immediately the father of the boy crying out, with tears said: I do believe, Lord: help my unbelief. And when Jesus saw the multitude running together, he threatened the unclean spirit, saying to him: Deaf and dumb spirit, I command thee, go out of him; and enter not any more into him. And crying out, and greatly tearing him, he went out of him, and he became as dead, so that many said: He is dead. But Jesus taking him by the hand, lifted him up; and he arose. (Mark 9, 16-17 and 20-26)

The light enters the scene from the left and above, brightly illuminating the figures on the right, but leaving those on the left wrapped up in a mysterious dark mist. The former lighting scheme is based on the style of portraits done by Florentines, the latter scheme is that of the Venetians, another demonstration of the artist’s mastery of a variety of styles.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Finding of St Stephen the First Martyr

Today is the feast of the Finding of St Stephen the First Martyr. This took place in the year 415, when the teacher of St Paul, Gamaliel, who is named twice in the Acts of the Apostles (5, 34-40 and 22, 3) appeared in a vision to a priest of Jerusalem named Lucian, on three successive Fridays, and named the location of the burial. Gamaliel further revealed that he himself had taken charge of Stephen’s body after his martyrdom, and buried him on his property near a village that bore his own name, Caphargamala; and that he himself was later buried in the same place, along with his son Abibas, and Nicodemus, who is mentioned in three places in the Gospel of John. (“Abibas” is the Hellenized form of the name “Habib”, which means “beloved” and is very common in Semitic languages.)

St Stephen Mourned by Gamaliel and Nicodemus. Attributed to the anonymous painter known as Pensionante del Saraceni (active 1610–1625), a follower of the Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni (1579–1620); ca. 1615. Public domain image from the website of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Gamaliel ordered Lucian to tell what he had seen in these visions to John, the bishop of Jerusalem, who then sent Lucian to investigate the site. In due course, the graves were discovered, with inscriptions to confirm the identity of the persons buried therein. John was then attending a synod at Lydda (the place of St George’s martyrdom); on receiving word of the discovery from Lucian, he hastened to the site, attended by two other bishops and a large multitude of people. When the coffin of St Stephen was opened, the ground shook, and “an odor of such sweetness and fragrance came forth therefrom, … that (those present) thought they were in the delight of Paradise”; seventy-three persons were healed of possession and a great variety of physical ailments. The relics were then translated to a church on Mt Sion, which Lucian’s letter, the first source for this story, anachronistically describes as the place “where Stephen was ordained as archdeacon.”

From there, portions of the relics were subsequently sent out to many other places, as attested inter alia by a sermon of St Augustine. “His body lay hidden from (the time of his martyrdom) until these days; but recently appeared, as the bodies of the holy martyrs are wont to appear, by the revelation of God, when it pleased the Creator. And indeed, it was revealed to him who showed these very things when they had been found; for the place was shown beforehand by signs, and the discovery made just as had been told by revelation. Many have received relics from there, because God willed it so, and these have come here.” (Sermon 318, 8) At the end of the 5th century, Gennadius, a priest of Marseille, wrote a continuation of St Jerome’s book On Illustrious Men, in which he states that “Lucian the priest, a holy man, to whom God revealed the place of the burial and the relics of St Stephen the First Martyr, in the time of the Emperors Honorius and Theodosius, wrote down (the story of) the revelation to all the churches, in Greek”, which a Spanish priest named Avitus then translated into Latin. (capp. 46-47; PL 58 1084B).

A reliquary for the hand of St Stephen from the cathedral of Genoa, Italy.

Prior to the Tridentine reform of the Breviary, it was far more common for the lessons of a Saint’s life to occupy all the lesson of Matins, and readings from Scripture on feast days were very rare. Therefore, in the Roman Breviary of 1529, the lessons of August 3rd tell the story as above, with a number of other less important details, in six lessons which occupy the first two nocturns of Matins. In the third nocturn, a homily of St Jerome on the Gospel of the day, Matthew 23, 34-39, is repeated from St Stephen’s main feast day.

In 1568, however, the lessons are reordered according to a pattern which was made universal by the Breviary of St Pius V, in which those of the first nocturn are always Biblical, those of the second are either a Patristic sermon or the life of a Saint, and those of the third a homily on the day’s Gospel. In the case of today’s feast, the lessons of the third nocturn remain the same, while those of the first are repeated from St Stephen’s octave day, Acts 7, 51 – 8, 2, the end of his speech and the account of his death and burial.

The story of the discovery of the relics by Lucian would normally then be compressed into the three lessons of the second nocturn, as was done for countless other Saints. However, they are actually reduced to two lessons, while the sixth is taken from the last book of St Augustine’s City of God.

“When the bishop Projectus was bringing the relics of the most glorious martyr Stephen to the waters of Tibilis, a great concourse of people came to meet him at the shrine. There a blind woman entreated that she might be led to the bishop who was carrying the relics. He gave her the flowers he was carrying. She took them, applied them to her eyes, and immediately saw. Those who were present were astounded, while she, with every expression of joy, preceded them, pursuing her way without further need of a guide. Lucillus (bishop of Sinita), in the neighborhood of the colony Hippo, was carrying in procession some relics of the same martyr, which had been deposited in the castle of Sinita. A fistula under which he had long suffered … was suddenly cured by the mere carrying of that sacred burden.” (De Civ. Dei 22, 8)

These are only two of the many miracles which St Augustine attributes to the relics of St Stephen in this chapter; he goes on to list several others, and more still which took place in the towns of Calama and Uzali, which also had relics of the Saint, miracles of which he had personal knowledge. “I cannot record all the miracles I know; and doubtless several of our adherents, when they read what I have narrated, will regret that I have omitted so many which they, as well as I, certainly know. … I beg these persons to excuse me, and to consider how long it would take me to relate all those miracles … For were I to be silent of all others, and to record exclusively the miracles of healing which were wrought in the district of Calama and of Hippo by … the most glorious Stephen, they would fill many volumes.”

St Augustine, by Giuseppe Antonio Pianca, ca. 1745

As is so often the case (see here, here, and here) the inclusion of this passage in the Breviary is part of the Church’s response to the Protestant reformation. The early reformers frequently claimed to find in the writings of the Church Fathers proof that their novelties were in fact the original teachings of Christ and the Apostles, long obscured by medieval corruptions, and happily restored by themselves. On this score, St Augustine was frequently appealed to especially in matters pertaining to the doctrine of grace; John Calvin famously stated about him “totus noster est – he belongs entirely to us” (a typically gross exaggeration), while Luther himself had been an Augustinian.

It hardly needs to be said that apologists on the Catholic side had an easy rejoinder to this, namely, that the same Church Fathers frequently and enthusiastically taught and practiced things which the reformers themselves rejected. St Jerome, for example, was the only authority to whom they could appeal in support of their rejection of the Deuterocanonical books of the Bible, but he was also a fierce defender of the Papacy, of asceticism, monasticism, celibacy and virginity, all of which made him particularly distasteful to Luther. Likewise, here we see St Augustine, the supposed Protestant doctor of grace, unreservedly promoting not just devotion to the Saints (which many Protestants could accept in some form), but also the importance of relics.

There were, of course, many dubious or manifestly false relics in circulation at the time of the Reformation; it also true that in some places, clerical avarice benefitted greatly from the laity’s devotion by charging them to see or touch the relics kept in churches, a frequent matter of Protestant complaints. True reformers rightly wished to see such abuses put to an end, and the problem was raised and effectively dealt with at the final session of the Council of Trent. But passages such as the one from St Augustine added to the Breviary show the complete rejection of relics on the part of the reformers for what it truly was, a radical break with a universally held tradition, one with roots in the Bible itself, and faithfully passed on by the Fathers.

Folio 113r of the Saint-Sever Apocalypse, a mid-11th century manuscript which contains inter alia the Commentary on the Apocalypse of St Beatus of Liébana (ca. 730-800). This page represents the words of Apocalypse 6, 9-11, “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘How long, O Lord (holy and true) dost thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ And white robes were given to every one of them one; and it was said to them, that they should rest for a little time, till their fellow servants, and their brethren, who are to be slain, even as they, should be filled up.” The golden T in the upper right corner of the picture is the altar (labelled ‘ara aurea - the golden altar’) and the birds beneath it are labelled ‘the souls of the slain.’ In the lower part, the caption reads ‘to these were given white stoles.’ (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Latin 8878)

In another example of its classic liturgical conservatism, the Roman church kept the feast of the Finding of St Stephen with almost the same liturgical texts as his principal feast on December 26th. The lessons of Matins described above are the only proper feature of the Office; the Mass is exactly the same, apart from the change of a single word in the Collect: “Grant us, we beseech thee, O Lord, so to imitate what we revere, that we may learn to love even our enemies; for we celebrate the birth/finding of him who knew how to pray for his very persecutors to our Lord.”

There was however, a completely proper Office for the feast, based on the text of Lucian’s letter, which was used in many other parts of Europe. Here are the three antiphons for the Gospel canticles.

Folio 312v of an antiphonary produced for the abbey of St Maur in France in the last quarter of the 11th century, with the first part of the proper Office of the Finding of St Stephen. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Latin 12584)

Ad Magn. Aña in I Vesp. Ostendit * sanctus Gamaliel per visum Luciano sacerdoti tres calathos aureos rosis refertos, et quartum argenteum croco plenum, et dixit: Hi sunt nostri loculi, et nostræ reliquiæ: hic autem sanguineas habens rosas, loculus est sancti Stephani, qui solus ex nobis martyrio meruit coronari. – The holy Gamaliel showed the priest Lucian in a vision three golden baskets filled with roses, and a fourth of silver, filled with saffron, and said, ‘These are our coffins, and our relics; and this one that hath roses the color of blood is the coffin of Saint Stephen, who alone among us merited to be crowned with martyrdom.” (In the letter, Gamaliel explains that the saffron represents the purity of his son Abibas, who died very young, and that they were buried together, hence there are only three coffins.)

Ad Bened. Ex odoris * mira fragrantia sanitas ægrotis emanavit maxima: septuaginta namque et tres tunc a variis languoribus curati sunt homines in Inventione corporis Stephani dilectissimi Martyris, Deum benedicentes. – From the wondrous fragrance of the smell, very great healing came forth unto the ill; for seventy-three persons were then healed of various ailments at the finding of the body of Stephen, the most beloved martyr, as they blessed God.

Ad Magn. in II Vesp. Hodie * Joannes Pontifex cum maximo cleri plebisque tripudio, pretiosas Protomartyris Stephani reliquias in sanctam transtulit ecclesiam Sion, ubi quondam Archidiaconi functus est officio: cujus pia apud Deum sit pro nobis, quæsumus, intercessio. – Today, bishop John, with very great rejoicing of the clergy and people, translated the precious relics of the First Martyr Stephen to the holy church of Zion, where once he fulfilled the office of archdeacon; and we ask that his holy intercession may stand for before God.