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.

What Were the Rites “Older Than 200 Years” for Which Pius V Made Exception?

The following letter exchange is published here for the interest of NLM readers.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I found my way into saying the Traditional Latin Mass a year after my ordination in 2018. Saying the TLM has changed my life and drawn me closer into our Lord’s sacrifice. I have suggested your book Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright and the documentary Mass of the Ages as resources to educate others about the significance of the TLM. The motu proprio Traditionis Custodes has certainly shown people’s true colors when it comes to the liturgical life of the Church.

In an interview you did with Cameron O’Hearn, you mentioned that there were liturgical rites older than 200 years that Quo Primum did not suppress, but that most of them died out over time. Do you have a list of these liturgical rites that were not suppressed by Quo Primum but which eventually dissolved anyway? Is there also a comprehensive list of liturgical rites that Quo Primum actually did effectively suppress because they were younger than the two-century span he posited?

I would also love to read any academic sources on this subject to educate others on what a liturgical rite actually is. Most people do not realize how many liturgical rites exist or have existed. My hope is that the Traditional Latin Mass will not have to compete for the title “Roman Rite” and will someday simply be acknowledged as the Roman Rite bequeathed to us from across the centuries. Indeed, I have pondered the idea of the Novus Ordo just dissolving over time, as apparently did some of these local liturgical rites, instead of a Pope someday strictly banning it. Most Catholics start scratching their heads when I suggest that the Novus Ordo is likely to lose its hold and dissolve over time, but I really believe this is true.

Yours in Christ,
Father Fiddleback

Dear Father,

You are one of many priests I know who have been so seized with “Eucharistic amazement” through the traditional Latin Mass that they seek to join a fully traditional society of apostolic life or religious order. You may have seen the article I wrote about a priest’s crisis of conscience; many are they who have experienced similar awakenings.

I’m not aware of a simple list of suppressed or defunct rites (or, in most cases, more accurately “uses”), but we can say that there were many in England alone that the Reformation tragically swept away. Sarum was only the most famous. Similarly, the Mozarabic rite was nearly extinguished throughout Spain, surviving eventually only in Toledo, so in a way it can be considered a rite that died away and would have disappeared had not Cardinal Cisneros personally intervened. The rites of Lyons and of Braga were once quite prominent yet barely survive today, with just a handful of clergy who know how to do them.

It would have been ideal had Pope Francis left alone the “Pax Benedictina” of the two “forms.” Yes, one can object to the coherence of the idea, but on the ground it was working as a modus operandi. The “market forces,” so to speak, would have slowly but surely increased the share of the TLM, and the NOM would eventually have peacefully given up the ghost—especially because younger clergy would keep nudging it closer and closer to the TLM until a smooth adoption of the old rite would, in fact, be the logical and pastorally appropriate step. But the late pope allowed himself to be persuaded (or maybe he really believed it) that an all-out war against the TLM was necessary to rid the Church of the last impediment to the glorious revolution marked by Vatican II and its (putative) reforms, and so, now, we will be in the trenches for a while, and the stakes will be higher. Somehow this too is in God’s plan.

I posed your question to another learned fellow, who wrote this interesting reply:

“Basically, every diocese in Latin Christendom had its own use, plus independent monasteries and monastic congregations, plus religious orders, plus some important collegiate churches. Look at the list of uses at Usuarium: it’s huge! Of course, often several dioceses would share the same use, differing only in patronal feasts, and some of the newer dioceses such as in Finland and the Baltic just copied the Dominican use (also adding patronal feasts), so one would have to determine what constitutes an independent “use” and by what standards one may differentiate between uses—a question that exercises many a fine mind. Another difficulty is that a large number of pre-Tridentine books have not survived the ravages of time, especially in smaller dioceses, so we have precious little information about how the liturgy was celebrated there. Generally, no diocese outside of Italy imported their books from Rome, prior to Quo Primum; smaller and poorer dioceses imported them from bigger neighboring dioceses, almost always the metropolitan See.

“To carry out the project, one would have to determine when and why each diocese adopted the Roman rite, and what it means concretely to adopt the Roman rite—as many French dioceses at least amended their books ad Romani formam or ex decreto concilii Tridentini without actually outright adopting the Breviarium Romanum. But at any rate, any diocese that was itself older than 200 years would have been free to keep its own use. St Pius V’s bull was probably aimed at novelties such as the Quiñones breviary and the Ferrari hymnal (both of which, nota bene, had received papal approbation from his predecessors!) rather than against any local use as such.

“The only scholar I know who has even attempted an overview of this transition to the Roman rite is Dom Guéranger in his Institutions liturgiques: he not only gives detailed information about the French dioceses but also discusses, in more general terms, dioceses in the rest of Christendom. (Happily, Os Justi Press has published the meatiest parts of Gueranger’s Liturgical Institutions.)

“Based on Guéranger’s research, I’d say one of the most important reasons many dioceses changed to the Roman rite was financial considerations; it was cheaper to buy the Tridentine books than to publish their own, although it is surprising how many non-French dioceses did not adopt the Roman books until as late as the 19th century, such as the city and region of Cologne. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that many dioceses and religious orders experienced pressure to adopt the Roman books, despite what St Pius V actually said. (The ‘Spirit of the Trent,’ if you will!)

“An attempt to list all the proper uses would therefore be almost impossible without a lot of research, and in any case it would end up being mostly a list of all the dioceses that existed in the late Middle Ages.

“A final note about the term ‘uses’: liturgical uses are probably comparable to languages, in the sense that before the erection of firm borders between European nation-states there were seldom strict boundaries between languages, but rather a continuum existed that makes it difficult to mark where exactly one language stops and another one begins. And like languages, there were several ‘dialects’ of what one might classify as a single liturgical use. But no one has yet ventured to identify and classify all the liturgical dialects of Latin Christendom.”

With my very best regards,
Dr. Kwasniewski

From a Sarum Rite Mass in Illinois, 2025, done with local episcopal permission

Dear Dr. K,

Your colleague has provided much insight about the defunct liturgical rites. I realize that finding a complete list of former rites would be difficult considering that Latin Christendom had many dioceses and religious orders. Taking a look at Dom Gueranger’s Institutions liturgiques should provide some insight into what content these former rites contained. I’m delighted to hear that a translation has finally been published. It sounds like a keeper for my liturgical library.

I do believe St. Pius V was correct in promulgating his bull Quo Primum, considering how many local rites or uses there were. The Protestant Revolution was wreaking havoc in Europe and there was a need to make sure the liturgy was teaching Catholics what the Church actually believed. Making possible the adoption of a unified way of worship was crucial for handing down the Faith in the midst of this religious revolution spreading across Europe. Studying the content of the defunct liturgical rites might give us insight into why certain parts of Europe were better able to, or more eager to, accept the Missal of St. Pius V than others. Did these rites already look similar to the TLM? Were there unworthy novelties that needed to be rooted out? Were certain regions able to adapt quicker than others?

The late Msgr. Klaus Gamber hints in his book The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background that the Novus Ordo essentially fosters a creation of multiple rites due to the vast amount of options in the missal: “As we all know, we now have an abundance of individual ‘rites,’ since so many priests now design their own liturgy, just as they please. In this environment, can we really talk about a unity of a liturgical rite?” (p. 95).

I believe that studying the vast number of defunct liturgical rites can teach us about how to promote the TLM amidst a myriad of local “rites” that the Novus Ordo has de facto created. The options of the Novus Ordo create multiple variations of the sacred liturgy that Catholics deal with on a regular basis; this, added to linguistic differences, yields a confusing and chaotic map. Perhaps studying how the TLM conquered (as it were) a plethora of local rites would yield strategies beneficial to us today.

Yours in Christ,
Father Fiddleback

(I must say, Father raises here a very interesting parallel I hadn’t thought of before: how today’s situation of plurality might be compared to that of the late medieval period, suggesting the desirability of a new imposition of the once and future Roman Rite. May God someday bestow this immense gift on us by the hands of a future St. Pius V!)

The Microphone as a Social Actor

“Let’s Throw the Microphone Out of the Church!”

Paweł Jarnicki

Part 2

(See Part 1 | Part 3)

McLuhan coined two well-known phrases, the first being “global village” and the second “medium is the message.” While it is easy to understand that, due to the rapid circulation of information, we all live in a “global village” today, it is more difficult to comprehend that the medium itself is also a message. McLuhan meant that the medium itself has a strong influence on the audience. It is not that, for example, the type of telephone affects the content of everyday conversations, because intuitively this influence seems minimal, but that the telephone (especially in the form of a “smartphone”) has changed the nature of interpersonal relationships in the long term and even influences our personality and perception. The impact of landline telephones was not as easily noticeable as the impact of instant messaging on the peer relationships and state of mind of young people is today, as seen from the perspective of people in their forties and fifties.

Some inventions profoundly change life in the world, in ways we cannot predict at the time of their implementation. This was obvious to McLuhan in the 1970s. A decade later, Bruno Latour popularized this idea by developing the “actor-network theory.” In this theory, society is not just people, but a network of “actors” that influence it, including material objects and... abstract concepts.

When society adopts a new technology, it does not usually discuss the possible long-term consequences of the actions of such an inhuman actor. We have imposed a series of tests on the production of new drugs, but we did not discuss the possible effects of social media before its introduction. Only after some time do we begin to realize the consequences of including them in our network: serious analyses appear that show that these new actors have a destructive effect on democratic systems, and artists also begin to explore the topic of their negative impact on young people (let us mention the recent success of the difficult mini-series Adolescence).

In the actor-network theory, the concept of bacteria is also such a social actor. It is not that bacteria did not exist before this concept. The point is that the organization of the human world did not take this concept into account. And when this concept became an actor in our societies, our behaviors and habits in terms of hygiene changed fundamentally.

The Church had always been very cautious about introducing technical innovations, especially in churches, so the influence of such worldly, soulless actors on the liturgy was relatively small. And sometimes the Church was able to harness technical innovations to achieve its own goals. When it came to “media” inventions, this was certainly the case with the invention of printing.

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy. At the new Mass, everyone must hear and see everything.

The Church’s reactions to the inventions of printing and the microphone

For McLuhan, as a media theorist, two inventions were revolutionary for our civilization: the printing press and the microphone. He realized that these (from today’s perspective) simple creations radically changed the world we live in, and changed it in ways that the people who witnessed the introduction of these inventions could not have predicted. These two inventions have twice reinforced the position of vernacular languages, i.e., the languages we speak every day.

The first reinforcement was visual, because printing completed the process initiated by the invention of the phonetic alphabet and caused us to move from an oral-acoustic culture to a visual-linear culture. It sounds complicated, but the point is that sight became the dominant sense in our perception of the world and in our culture. Earlier culture was more “auditory,” centered around hearing, and in fact multisensory with a slight advantage for hearing. According to McLuhan, printing has led us to a visual culture, one in which sight clearly dominates. What is the difference?

Hearing does not “see” contours [1] and works more synthetically. It integrates our experience of the world into a whole; we also hear from many sides at once. Sight sees contours, analyzes and divides our experience of the world into pieces – it has made our perception more sequential and abstract; we also focus our sight in one direction. Thus, our perception of the world and our culture have changed, which, thanks to printing – thanks to the shift in emphasis to visuality – has gained unprecedented momentum. But at the same time, all contours have become more important: divisions, segmentations, specializations, and in the longer term... nationalisms.

These cultural changes also had an impact on liturgy. As McLuhan writes, it might seem that “the demand for a vernacular liturgy arose spontaneously in the sixteenth century, but it isn’t so. In fact, that demand was linked to the invention of print, an invention that accentuated people’s need to push towards individualism and nationalism. Add to that the fact that printed texts gave rise to textual exegesis from the pulpit. And finally, the new accent on the visual favored placing the celebrant face to face with the congregation: we needed to see him and he wanted to be seen.” [2] According to McLuhan, the fact that greater emphasis was placed on preaching in the 16th century and that Protestant priests turned to face the people was a consequence of the invention of printing. According to him, “Medieval liturgy was mostly acoustic,” and in Reformed churches it became more visual.

In response to the invention of printing, the Council of Trent developed the Decretum de edendis sanctis litteris et facultate utendi iis, and Pius V issued the apostolic constitution Quo primum tempore, thus defining the rules for the use of the new invention and regulating its use during ceremonies. Thanks to this, Catholics living in the world after the invention of printing, in the (as McLuhan describes it) “Gutenberg Galaxy,” that is, those who already had the need to see everything, accepted that there are certain things that cannot be seen in the sacred liturgy of the Church. This is important because we use our sight to construct the world as a set of static, permanent objects that have contours (for the ear, everything is more “fluid”), so making everything visible, to put it mildly, did not facilitate belief in the transubstantiation and Real Presence of God in the sacrament of the Altar. When you see the contours, it is more difficult to believe that the host is transformed into the Body of Christ. The effects of shifting the emphasis to visuality are clearly visible among Protestants, who have lost their belief in the Real Presence.

In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church not only resisted the worldly impact of the invention of printing, but also harnessed the new technology to standardize and consolidate existing liturgical practices and centralize the one and only Church. And how the Church transformed the worldly emphasis on visuality, i.e., the need to see that was created among the laity living in the world, can still be seen today in Baroque churches.

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Catholic church; I don’t remember which one. This beautiful high altar surmounted by a crucifix became simply a decorative background.

The second historical reinforcement – auditory – was given to vernacular languages by the microphone.

First, new mass media appeared, thanks to the microphone, radio and television developed. The circulation of information, this time also in the form of sounds, accelerated even more. In public spaces, we began to hear different sounds from all sides at the same time. Television began to use sight like hearing, and we began to perceive images as sound, with our eyes focused on a single point, we could begin to see and hear the entire scene.

Secondly, the nature of mass events changed: without the microphone, there would be no numerous competitions and championships, popular concerts, or demonstrations.

Thirdly, thanks to the microphone, new figures emerged. As McLuhan significantly notes, without the microphone there would have been no Gandhi or Hitler. The vernacular began to reign supreme in the public sphere, in a version increasingly close to colloquial language.

According to McLuhan, the overall impact of the microphone on culture is the opposite of that of print; because of the microphone, we have begun to return to an acoustic culture. Today’s culture is in some ways more reminiscent of that of the pre-literate era; we are returning from individualism to tribalism (we are more empathetic today, but only towards people from our own “tribe”); our perception has become non-sequential (non-linear), but immediate and holistic (rather than abstract, because it is difficult to “hear” contours).

So how could a microphone, which reversed the “visual” effects of printing on culture, cause the same “visual” changes in Catholic liturgy that printing caused among Protestants? Although the overall impact of the microphone on culture seems to be the opposite, both inventions have intensified the mediatization of our experience of the world. Today, we have a deeply rooted need to see and hear everything through the media, which are like extensions of our senses. If we cannot see and hear something through the media, we find it difficult to believe in it. [3] And since, with the microphone, we introduced into the Church the worldly need to hear everything, its older sister – the need to see everything – came along with it. And that is why, in the liturgical dimension, thanks to the microphone, the Church quickly “made up” for what it had previously “neglected” during the first visual reinforcement of vernacular languages. Priests who turn to the people and speak in their vernacular often behave as if they do not believe in the Real Presence.

The Church did not notice that the microphone was a new “actor.” Although the Second Vatican Council issued the decree Inter mirifica in 1963, it concerns social media, i.e., those used in the world. [4] The last council did not issue any document that would harness the microphone for the Church’s own purposes. And since the Church did not consider the issue of the microphone, this new worldly “actor” has been influencing the liturgy for almost a hundred years in the same way that it influences the world. And Catholics born into servitude should know who rules this world.

This approach sheds light on the contemporary crisis of the Church without attributing ill will to anybody, and explains the reason for the pentecostalization described in contemporary academic literature, i.e., the similarities between contemporary Catholic liturgical practices and Protestant practices. Some “traditionalists” (I believe in good faith) suggest that the new Masses imitate Protestants. This superficial observation often rightly outrages “new Catholics.”

In fact, these are deeper processes. “New Catholics” do not imitate Martin Luther, but succumb to the worldly influences of printing technology and microphones; they enter God’s temples with the same expectations there as they have in the world. Moreover, even many Church documents from the second half of the 20th century say that the faithful should “hear without difficulty.” [5] However, no one has considered whether it is really necessary for the faithful to hear everything during Mass. Isn’t it enough for them to assist at Mass, as they have done for eons?

By placing microphones on altars – in the place where God appears – we have introduced a Trojan horse into the Church: the microphone, and in it, the worldly need to hear and see everything. However, just as it is not necessary to see everything during Mass, it is also not necessary to hear everything. It is enough to look, listen, and... believe.

Against appearances, these are not subtle but fundamental differences, because the need to see and hear everything introduced into the Church by microphones has serious consequences. In Part 3, I will discuss two of them: those concerning the Community and those concerning the Word. [6] 

NOM, Vilnius (Lithuania), Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn. If the altar can’t be turned around, the speaker will ensure that everyone can hear everything

NOTES

^[1] The piano keyboard is an artificial creation.

^[2] Pierre Babin, Liturgy and Media: (Marshall McLuhan’s) Third Conversation with Pierre Babin, in: Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds.), The medium and the light: Reflections on Religion, Toronto: Stoddart 1999, p. 142.

^[3] This trend will most likely be reversed by artificial intelligence; see footnote 22.

^[4] Subsequently, based on Inter mirifica, a very enthusiastic pastoral instruction on the means of social communication, Communio et progressio, was developed in 1971 (“So, ‘among the wonderful technical inventions’ (Inter mirifica) which foster communication among human beings, Christians find means that have been devised under God’s Providence for the encouragement of social relations during their pilgrimage on earth”). On its twentieth anniversary, another instruction was published, entitled Aetatis Novae, which is no longer so enthusiastic (“the application of communications technology has been a mixed blessing”), but fails to identify the cause of the problem. These documents are about the press, radio, and television, and do not recognize the inventions from which they originated. It is like considering the impact of various computer programs without noticing the invention of the computer.

^[5]General Introduction to the Roman Missal (2010), point 311: “Care should be taken to ensure that the faithful be able not only to see the Priest, the Deacon, and the readers but also, with the aid of modern technical means, to hear them without difficulty.” See also no. 34 in the General Introduction to the Lectionary (1981): “Provision must also be made for the readers to have enough light to read the text and, as required, to have modern sound equipment enabling the faithful to hear them without difficulty.”

^[6] I will present more arguments against microphones in churches in a separate text, which will be included in an anthology that I will publish in Polish.

The Stigmata of St Francis

Today, the Church marks the 800th anniversary of one of the most thoroughly well-attested miracles in its history, St Francis’ reception of the Stigmata in the year 1224, a bit more than two years before his death. The Stigmata were of course seen by many people during those two years; the revised Butler’s Live of the Saints quotes one of the very earliest documents to speak of them, the letter which Brother Elias, whom Francis personally chose to run his Order, sent to his brethren in France to announce the death of their founder. “From the beginning of ages there has not been heard so great a wonder, save only in the Son of God who is Christ our God. For a long while before his death, our father and brother appeared crucified, bearing in his body the five wounds which are verily the Stigmata of Christ; for his hands and feet had as it were piercings made by nails fixed in from above and below, which laid open the scars and had the black appearance of nails; while his side appeared to have been lanced, and blood often trickled therefrom.”

St Francis Receives the Stigmata, by Giotto, 1295-1300; originally painted for the church of St Francis in Pisa, now in the Louvre. The predella panels show the vision of Pope Innocent III, who in a dream beheld St Francis holding up the collapsing Lateran Basilica, followed by the approval of the Franciscan Rule, and St Francis preaching to the birds. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

One of the very few acts of the brief pontificate of the Dominican Pope Benedict XI (October 1303 – July 1304) was to grant to his fellow mendicants of the Franciscan Order permission to keep a special feast of the Stigmata of St Francis. St Bonaventure’s Legenda Major, which the Order recognized as the official biography of its founder, and read at Matins on his feast day, states that Francis received the Stigmata “around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross”, which is on September 14th. Since the 15th was at the time the octave of Our Lady’s Nativity, and the 16th the very ancient feast of Ss Cornelius and Cyprian, the feast of the Stigmata was assigned to the 17th, where it is still kept to this day.

Before the Tridentine reform, the Franciscans repeated the introit of the Exaltation, Nos autem gloriari oportet, at the Mass of the Stigmata, emphasizing not only the merely historical connection between the two events, but also the uniqueness of their founder, whom St Bonaventure describes as one “marked with a privilege not granted to any age before his own.” The modern Missal cites this introit to Galatians, 6, 14, but it is really an ecclesiastical composition, and hardly even a paraphrase of any verse of Scripture. It is also the introit of Holy Thursday, and in the post-Tridentine period, this use was apparently felt to be a little hubristic; it was therefore replaced with a new one, Mihi autem, which quotes that same verse exactly. “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.”

The verse with which it is sung is the first of Psalm 141, “I cried to the Lord with my voice: with my voice I made supplication to the Lord,” the Psalm which St Francis was in the midst of reciting at the moment of his death. The music of this later introit is copied almost identically from another which also begins with the words Mihi autem, and is sung on the feasts of various Apostles, underscoring the point that St Francis was, as one of the antiphons of his proper Office says, a “vir catholicus et totus apostolicus – a Catholic man, wholly like the Apostles.”

This feast has the distinction of being the very first one added to the general calendar after the Tridentine reform not as the principal feast of a Saint, but one instituted to commemorate a miracle. [1] This was originally done by Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who, like St Bonaventure, had been Minister General of the Franciscans, and showed a great deal of liturgical favoritism to his order. (He also added the feasts of Ss Anthony of Padua and Francis di Paola, the founder of the Minim Friars, to the calendar, and made Bonaventure a Doctor of the Church.) When Pope Clement VIII issued the first revision of the Pian Breviary in 1602, the feast was suppressed, only to be restored 13 years later by Pope Paul V [2], at the behest of one of his most trusted councilors, St Robert Bellarmine.

St Robert had a great devotion to St Francis, on whose feast day he was born in 1542. His native city, Montepulciano, is in the southeastern part of Tuscany, fairly close to both Assisi and Bagnoreggio, the home of St Bonaventure, and very much in the original Franciscan heartland. Not long after he entered the Jesuits, the master general, St Francis Borgia, commissioned a new chapel dedicated to his name-saint, with a painting of him receiving the Stigmata as the main altarpiece. It was built within what was then the Order’s only church in Rome, dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus, devotion to which was a Franciscan creation, and heavily promoted by another of their Saints, Bernardin of Siena, who was also Tuscan. This chapel was clearly intended to underline the similarities between the Jesuits and Franciscans as orders promoting reform within the Church, while remaining wholly obedient to it, zealous evangelizers, strictly orthodox, and spiritually grounded in an intensely personal devotion to and union with Christ.

The chapel of the Sacred Heart, originally dedicated to St Francis of Assisi, at the Jesuit church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome, popularly known as ‘il Gesù.’ In 1920, the original altarpiece of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata by Durante Alberti was replaced by the painting of the Sacred Heart seen here, a work of Pompeo Battoni done in oil on slate in 1767. Previously displayed on the altar of St Francis Xavier, which is right outside this chapel, it was the very first image of the Sacred Heart to be exposed for veneration in Italy after the visions of St Margaret Mary Alacoque. The other images of St Francis, all part of the chapel’s original decoration, remain in place. (Photo courtesy of Mr Jacob Stein, author of the blog Passio Xpi.)

But the extension of the feast to the general calendar also touches on a much larger issue, one which colors the Tridentine reform, and especially that of the Breviary, in several ways, namely, the response to the Protestant reformation.

St Francis is today held in admiration so broadly by Catholics, non-Catholics and even non-Christians alike, that it is perhaps hard for us to appreciate today how he was seen by the original Protestant reformers. Even within Luther’s lifetime, it was hardly possible to get two of them together to agree on any point; broadly speaking, however, they generally accepted that things had really gone wrong in the Church with the coming of the mendicants, especially the Franciscans, and the flourishing of their teachings in the universities. Luther himself once said “If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house, I would set fire to it”, and more generally, “a friar is evil every way, whether in the monastery or out of it.” Most Protestants had no patience for the ascetic ideals embodied by Saints like Francis and the other mendicants, an attitude sadly shared by supercilious humanists within the Church like Erasmus.

Of course, the mendicants were not immune to the widespread decadence of religious and clerical life justly decried by the true reformers of that age, and which sadly provided much grist for the Protestant mill. And yet, while Ignatius of Loyola was still the equivalent of a freshman in college, the great Franciscan reform of the Capuchins had already begun; where the Jesuits would soon prove the most effective of the new orders in combatting the heresies of the 16th century, the Capuchins would take that role among the older ones. This may be what moved Luther to say, “If the emperor would merit immortal praise, he would utterly root out the order of the Capuchins, and, for an everlasting remembrance of their abominations, cause their books to remain in safe custody. ’Tis the worst and most poisonous sect; the (other orders of) friars are in no way comparable with these confounded lice.” [3]

Fra Matteo Bassi, founder of the Capuchins, and quite possibly the only founder of a Franciscan order who was never canonized; 17th century, author unknown. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The Tridentine reform was in its essence the Catholic Church’s answer to the question of what to do with what it had developed over the course of the Middle Ages, in response to the Protestant rejection of such developments, and putative return to the most ancient roots of the Christian Faith. It sought to determine which parts of the Church’s medieval inheritance were of perennial or continued value, which needed to be rejected, and which needed to be modified and reformed. This included all aspects of its life: its many institutional forms, its intellectual tradition, its art and architecture, and of course, its liturgy.

St Francis was both a product of the Middle Ages, and a creator of one of its most important and characteristic institutions; he was no more a creation of Luther and Calvin’s imaginary “primitive” church than he was a modern environmentalist. The placement of his feast on the general calendar serves as a very useful reminder that it was a man of that era who was the first conformed to Christ so entirely that he merited to bear His wounds upon his own body.

On April 16, 1959, Pope St John XXIII addressed the following words to a gathering of Franciscans in the Lateran Basilica, where Pope Innocent III had once met the Poor Man of Assisi himself, the occasion being the 750th anniversary of the approval of the Franciscan Rule. “Beloved sons! Permit us to add a special word from the heart, to all those present who belong to the peaceable army of the Lay Tertiaries of St Francis. ‘Ego sum Ioseph, frater vester.’ (‘I am Joseph, your brother’, citing Genesis 45, 4, Joseph being his middle name), … This we ourselves have been since our youth, when, having just turned fourteen, on March 1, 1896, we were regularly inscribed through the ministry of Canon Luigi Isacchi, our spiritual father, who was then the director of the seminary of Bergamo.” He went on to recall the Franciscan house of Baccanello, near the place where he grew up, as the first religious house he ever knew, and that four days earlier, he had canonized his first Saint, the Franciscan Carlo of Sezze.

The following year, Pope John approved the decree for the reform of the Breviary and Missal which reduced the feast of St Francis’ Stigmata to a commemoration. As such, the Mass can still be celebrated ad libitum, but is no longer mandatory, and the story of the Stigmata is no longer told in the Breviary. In the post-Conciliar reform, it was removed from the general calendar entirely, and replaced by the feast of St Robert Bellarmine, who died in 1621 on the very feast day he had promoted. It is still kept by the Franciscan Orders.

[1] Before the Tridentine reform, there were many feasts and Saints who were celebrated everywhere the Roman Rite was used, and many of these feasts did originate in Rome itself, but there was no such thing as a “general” calendar of feasts that had to be kept ubique et ab omnibus. When the first general calendar was created in 1568, which is to say, a calendar created with the specific intention that it would also be used outside its diocese of origin, a number of miracle feasts were included; all of these were present in pre-Tridentine editions of the Roman liturgical books, and celebrated in many other places as well.

[2] The feast was added to the calendar by Pope Paul V as a semidouble ad libitum in 1615, made mandatory by Pope Clement IX (1667-69), and raised to the rank of double by Clement XIV, the last Franciscan Pope.

[3] Thanks to Dr Donald Prudlo for this quote from Luther, and the one that precedes it.

False Antiquarianism and Liturgical Reform

Origin of Corpus Christi procession? Charles Walter Stetson’s “A Pagan Procession” (1892)

Lately my wife and I are reading aloud Ronald Knox’s masterpiece Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, first published in 1950, and not a whit less marvelous today than it was then. The parallels one can see with the Charismatic movement and (to be rigorously fair) among some traditionalists give pause, to say the least.

At one point (p. 60) Knox quotes an author named Monceaux:

It is a common trait among the heretics and schismatics of all ages; schism and heresy have almost always, for their point of departure, a regret for the past, the claim or the dream of going back to the fountain-source of a religious idea, to the discipline or faith of an apostolic age.

As all are well aware, the current leadership in Rome frequently chides tradition-loving Catholics as “backwardists” in the grip of a hopeless nostalgia, etc. The same Catholics find it very tempting to reply that their opponents are themselves quite stuck in the 1960s/70s, and show the keenest signs of nostalgia for those halcyon days after “The Council,” when the first winds of the “new Pentecost” were howling. This is a game easy enough to play; except that the charge of nostalgia really sticks where the average age is in the 80s, and sticks less easily where the average age is about 14, if you look at any typical trad congregation.

Back to Monceaux: it does indeed seem true that all wild-eyed reformers in Church history cry out that they are bringing the Church back to its original purity, to the primitive apostolic faith and practice, discarding centuries of man-made superstitious accretions. We can see this especially among the Protestants, whose entire view of and approach to liturgy is permeated with that assumption, and whose vastly different, indeed contradictory liturgical practices effectively indicate the impossibility of coherently acting on it.

In an article at NLM back in 2019, I quoted a passage from a popular Protestant homeschooling textbook, World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective, published by Abeka:

The pagans who flooded the imperial church [after the Edict of Milan] inundated it with heathen beliefs, practices, and traditions. Public worship was described by Justin Martyr in the second century as a simple meeting of believers on the Lord’s Day to hear the Scriptures read and explained along with the singing of hymns, the offering of prayers, the celebrating of the Lord’s Supper, and the receiving of gifts.
            The influence of paganism began to change the worship service into elaborate rites and ceremonies with all the trappings of heathen temple worship. The presbyters now became sacerdotes who offered up the Lord’s body and blood as a sacrifice for the living and dead. Little by little, these errors and distortions grew and developed into the false teachings and practices of the medieval church. … Some devout followers even purchased and worshipped relics.…
            The demands of their religion led the people to regard Christ as a stern and merciless Judge rather than a compassionate and loving Savior. They sought to placate the Son’s wrath against their sins by praying to His mother, the Virgin Mary, and seeking her intercession. Because even Mary sometimes seemed unapproachable, they also prayed to the long-departed apostles and other saints (deceased Christians officially recognized by the Church as holy because of martyrdom, miracles, or other merits). But the Bible clearly teaches that there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5).

Surely, a caricature of this magnitude will not be found in reputable Catholic authors; yet one will find passages that are too close for comfort. A book entitled Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth, published by St. Mary’s Press in 2008, is a case in point. Here is how it describes the changes in the liturgy:

The liturgy we experience today is quite different from that of fifty or sixty years ago. Over the ages, what began as a gather of friends and followers of Jesus sharing a meal and remembering his teachings became an increasingly elaborate ceremony of sacrifice. The celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, held in secret in people’s homes during the times of persecution, gave way to highly ritualized ceremonies held in beautiful churches. By the Middle Ages, the priest was saying Mass while the people watched in silence. The focus was primarily on Jesus’ sacrifice, which diminished the symbol of a shared meal. Those attending were not participants as much as watchers. In the 1960s the bishop from around the world gathered at the Second Vatican Council. They called for important reforms to renew the liturgy. The language of the liturgy changed from Latin to the vernacular, so that for the first time in hundreds of years, the people could hear and understand the prayers being said. People were also encouraged to receive Communion, in the hand, and from the cup. The idea of a shared meal around a table was reclaimed from the early years of Christianity.

This book comes equipped with nihil obstat and imprimatur.

Traditionally, a more typical line of thought: Gustave Doré, “Le triomphe de Christianisme sur le paganisme” (1868)

Self-consciously modern liturgists follow this line of thought completely. A case in point is an interview with Sr. Marie-Aimée Manchon, a professor at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, conducted by La Croix’s Clémence Houdaille (the full article may be viewed here). Sr. Manchon’s initial move is to warn again confusing beauty with aestheticism—a convenient way of signaling that one is actually not all that interested in the serious pursuit of beauty in worship. Sister then launches into her main exposition:

When coming to Mass, some people are looking for a friendly, relaxing time with Jesus. Others want a solemn moment, a break from the ordinary. Aspirations differ, and the liturgy will not be able to respond perfectly to them. In his apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi, the pope reminds us that the liturgy is there to help us enter into the great aspiration of God, which is much greater than our small aspirations of the moment. It is not just about the rite, about worship. It is about entering into a gaze, that of God upon us, says Romano Guardini, the major theologian of the Liturgical Movement, who inspired Vatican II.

(Pause: it is highly doubtful that Guardini would have been able to recognize his thought in the “plumber’s work” of the Consilium. Resuming with Sister:)

God’s great desire is to make us his sons and daughters, saints, and that all be saved. There is a filial, eschatological, and missionary dimension to the liturgy that flows from the Paschal Mystery. We do not celebrate it for ourselves. When we understand this, it does not matter if it does not correspond to our sensibility. The pope reminds us that the liturgy guarantees us the possibility of an encounter with Christ. Isn’t the key to getting out of the divide to remember that? The liturgical celebration must allow this encounter with Christ in the sacraments and in the brothers and sisters. For this, the rubrics and rituals are necessary, the pope tells us again. It is not a question of military discipline, but of allowing it to flow from the source and that we find ourselves there.... There is a good habit of the rite which allows us to inhabit the actions we make. But this habit must not become a routine, otherwise we fall into the trap denounced by Charles Péguy, that of being a “habitual Christian,” “impervious to grace.”

As before with “aestheticism,” so too with the attack on routine, habit, discipline: all this is code language for an anti-ritual mentality, the justification for changing things up to avoid “ossification.” It is not habit that is the problem, but a lack of spiritual or interior life, and this lack will not be met by liturgical experiments. On the contrary, the stability of traditional rites, their silence, their contemplative nature, is more likely to encourage higher levels of prayer. In any case, Sr. Manchon does not leave us guessing about her fundamentally anti-liturgical stance:

Some people are convinced that they are great liturgists because they know the form, whereas they do not seek the spirit. But form must be erased, and returned to the presence of Christ, because it is at the service of this encounter…. Liturgy in the Church differs from the sacred, which exists in all religions and can remain very pagan. The sacred is important for people, but it can also be a vector of separation and domination, of power, through prohibitions (do not touch, etc.). Through the Incarnation, we pass from the sacred to the holy.

This tidy formulation suggests that the history of liturgy after Constantine is a passing from the holy to the sacred, that is, from informal spontaneity and improvisation to formal rigidity and fixity, from humble homes of hospitality to grand worldly churches rife with sacerdotalism, from the post-religious breakthrough represented by Christ the New Man to the reasserted paganism of regimented rituality. And so forth. In short, “the pagans flooded the imperial church”, and the early Christian “breaking of bread” was swept away.

If you dig, dig, dig, you will always find this antiquarianism at the root of all the arguments in favor of the liturgical reform. It is the essential premise, the unquestioned axiom, the point of departure. It is not a Catholic premise and cannot yield anything worthwhile. In fact, it will yield interminable disagreements because there is no way to arrive at a definite, knowable, actionable truth; everything is lost in the mists of speculation and imagination, subject to the agenda of a given sect of antiquarians.

Károly Ferenczy, “Archeology” (1896)

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

The Stigmata of St Francis

The Stigmata of St Francis are one of the most thoroughly well-attested miracles in the history of the Church; they were of course seen by many people in the two-year period from when he first received them to his death. The revised Butler’s Live of the Saints quotes one of the very earliest documents to speak of them, the letter which Brother Elias, whom Francis personally chose to run his Order, sent to his brethren in France to announce the death of their founder. “From the beginning of ages there has not been heard so great a wonder, save only in the Son of God who is Christ our God. For a long while before his death, our father and brother appeared crucified, bearing in his body the five wounds which are verily the Stigmata of Christ; for his hands and feet had as it were piercings made by nails fixed in from above and below, which laid open the scars and had the black appearance of nails; while his side appeared to have been lanced, and blood often trickled therefrom.”

St Francis Receives the Stigmata, by Giotto, 1295-1300; originally painted for the church of St Francis in Pisa, now in the Louvre. The predella panels show the vision of Pope Innocent III, who in a dream beheld St Francis holding up the collapsing Lateran Basilica, followed by the approval of the Franciscan Rule, and St Francis preaching to the birds. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

One of the very few acts of the brief pontificate of the Dominican Pope Benedict XI (October 1303 – July 1304) was to grant to his fellow mendicants of the Franciscan Order permission to keep a special feast of the Stigmata of St Francis. St Bonaventure’s Legenda Major, which the Order recognized as the official biography of its founder, and read at Matins on his feast day, states that Francis received the Stigmata “around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross”, which is on September 14th. Since the 15th was at the time the octave of Our Lady’s Nativity, and the 16th the very ancient feast of Ss Cornelius and Cyprian, the feast of the Stigmata was assigned to the 17th, where it is still kept to this day.

Before the Tridentine reform, the Franciscans repeated the introit of the Exaltation, Nos autem gloriari oportet, at the Mass of the Stigmata, emphasizing not only the merely historical connection between the two events, but also the uniqueness of their founder, whom St Bonaventure describes as one “marked with a privilege not granted to any age before his own.” The modern Missal cites this introit to Galatians, 6, 14, but it is really an ecclesiastical composition, and hardly even a paraphrase of any verse of Scripture. It is also the introit of Holy Thursday, and in the post-Tridentine period, this use was apparently felt to be a little hubristic; it was therefore replaced with a new one, Mihi autem, which quotes that same verse exactly. “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.” The verse with which it is sung is the first of Psalm 141, “I cried to the Lord with my voice: with my voice I made supplication to the Lord,” the Psalm which St Francis was in the midst of reciting at the moment of his death. The music of this later introit is copied almost identically from another which also begins with the words Mihi autem, and is sung on the feasts of various Apostles, underscoring the point that St Francis was, as one of the antiphons of his proper Office says, a “vir catholicus et totus apostolicus – a Catholic man, wholly like the Apostles.”

This feast has the distinction of being the very first one added to the general calendar after the Tridentine reform not as the principal feast of a Saint, but one instituted to commemorate a miracle. [1] This was originally done by Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who, like St Bonaventure, had been Minister General of the Franciscans, and showed a great deal of liturgical favoritism to his order. (He also added the feasts of Ss Anthony of Padua and Francis di Paola, the founder of the Minim Friars, to the calendar, and made Bonaventure a Doctor of the Church.) When Pope Clement VIII issued the first revision of the Pian Breviary in 1602, the feast was suppressed, only to be restored 13 years later by Pope Paul V [2], at the behest of one of his most trusted councilors, St Robert Bellarmine.

St Robert had a great devotion to St Francis, on whose feast day he was born in 1542. His native city, Montepulciano, is in the southeastern part of Tuscany, fairly close to both Assisi and Bagnoreggio, the home of St Bonaventure, and very much in the original Franciscan heartland. Not long after he entered the Jesuits, the master general, St Francis Borgia, commissioned a new chapel dedicated to his name-saint, with a painting of him receiving the Stigmata as the main altarpiece. It was built within what was then the Order’s only church in Rome, dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus, devotion to which was a Franciscan creation, and heavily promoted by another of their Saints, Bernardin of Siena, who was also Tuscan. This chapel was clearly intended to underline the similarities between the Jesuits and Franciscans as orders promoting reform within the Church, while remaining wholly obedient to it, zealous evangelizers, strictly orthodox, and spiritually grounded in an intensely personal devotion to and union with Christ.

The chapel of the Sacred Heart, originally dedicated to St Francis of Assisi, at the Jesuit church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome, popularly known as ‘il Gesù.’ In 1920, the original altarpiece of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata by Durante Alberti was replaced by the painting of the Sacred Heart seen here, a work of Pompeo Battoni done in oil on slate in 1767. Previously displayed on the altar of St Francis Xavier, which is right outside this chapel, it was the very first image of the Sacred Heart to be exposed for veneration in Italy after the visions of St Margaret Mary Alacoque. The other images of St Francis, all part of the chapel’s original decoration, remain in place. (Photo courtesy of Mr Jacob Stein, author of the blog Passio Xpi.)

But the extension of the feast to the general calendar also touches on a much larger issue, one which colors the Tridentine reform, and especially that of the Breviary, in several ways, namely, the response to the Protestant reformation.

St Francis is today held in admiration so broadly by Catholics, non-Catholics and even non-Christians alike, that it is perhaps hard for us to appreciate today how he was seen by the original Protestant reformers. Even within Luther’s lifetime, it was hardly possible to get two of them together to agree on any point; broadly speaking, however, they generally accepted that things had really gone wrong in the Church with the coming of the mendicants, especially the Franciscans, and the flourishing of their teachings in the universities. Luther himself once said “If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house, I would set fire to it”, and more generally, “a friar is evil every way, whether in the monastery or out of it.” Most Protestants had no patience for the ascetic ideals embodied by Saints like Francis and the other mendicants, an attitude sadly shared by supercilious humanists within the Church like Erasmus.

Of course, the mendicants were not immune to the widespread decadence of religious and clerical life justly decried by the true reformers of that age, and which sadly provided much grist for the Protestant mill. And yet, while Ignatius of Loyola was still the equivalent of a freshman in college, the great Franciscan reform of the Capuchins had already begun; where the Jesuits would soon prove the most effective of the new orders in combatting the heresies of the 16th century, the Capuchins would take that role among the older ones. This may be what moved Luther to say, “If the emperor would merit immortal praise, he would utterly root out the order of the Capuchins, and, for an everlasting remembrance of their abominations, cause their books to remain in safe custody. ’Tis the worst and most poisonous sect; the (other orders of) friars are in no way comparable with these confounded lice.” [3]

Fra Matteo Bassi, founder of the Capuchins, and quite possibly the only founder of a Franciscan order who was never canonized; 17th century, author unknown. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The Tridentine reform was in its essence the Catholic Church’s answer to the question of what to do with what it had developed over the course of the Middle Ages, in response to the Protestant rejection of such developments, and putative return to the most ancient roots of the Christian Faith. It sought to determine which parts of the Church’s medieval inheritance were of perennial or continued value, which needed to be rejected, and which needed to be modified and reformed. This included all aspects of its life: its many institutional forms, its intellectual tradition, its art and architecture, and of course, its liturgy.

St Francis was both a product of the Middle Ages, and a creator of one of its most important and characteristic institutions; he was no more a creation of Luther and Calvin’s imaginary “primitive” church than he was a modern environmentalist. The placement of his feast on the general calendar serves as a very useful reminder that it was a man of that era who was the first conformed to Christ so entirely that he merited to bear His wounds upon his own body.

On April 16, 1959, Pope St John XXIII addressed the following words to a gathering of Franciscans in the Lateran Basilica, where Pope Innocent III had once met the Poor Man of Assisi himself, the occasion being the 750th anniversary of the approval of the Franciscan Rule. “Beloved sons! Permit us to add a special word from the heart, to all those present who belong to the peaceable army of the Lay Tertiaries of St Francis. ‘Ego sum Ioseph, frater vester.’ (‘I am Joseph, your brother’, citing Genesis 45, 4, Joseph being his middle name), … This we ourselves have been since our youth, when, having just turned fourteen, on March 1, 1896, we were regularly inscribed through the ministry of Canon Luigi Isacchi, our spiritual father, who was then the director of the seminary of Bergamo.” He went on to recall the Franciscan house of Baccanello, near the place where he grew up, as the first religious house he ever knew, and that four days earlier, he had canonized his first Saint, the Franciscan Carlo of Sezze.

The following year, Pope John approved the decree for the reform of the Breviary and Missal which reduced the feast of St Francis’ Stigmata to a commemoration. As such, the Mass can still be celebrated ad libitum, but is no longer mandatory, and the story of the Stigmata is no longer told in the Breviary. In the post-Conciliar reform, it was removed from the general calendar entirely, and replaced by the feast of St Robert Bellarmine, who died in 1621 on the very feast day he had promoted. It is still kept by the Franciscan Orders.

[1] Before the Tridentine reform, there were many feasts and Saints who were celebrated everywhere the Roman Rite was used, and many of these feasts did originate in Rome itself, but there was no such thing as a “general” calendar of feasts that had to be kept ubique et ab omnibus. When the first general calendar was created in 1568, which is to say, a calendar created with the specific intention that it would also be used outside its diocese of origin, a number of miracle feasts were included; all of these were present in pre-Tridentine editions of the Roman liturgical books, and celebrated in many other places as well.

[2] The feast was added to the calendar by Pope Paul V as a semidouble ad libitum in 1615, made mandatory by Pope Clement IX (1667-69), and raised to the rank of double by Clement XIV, the last Franciscan Pope.

[3] Thanks to Dr Donald Prudlo for this quote from Luther, and the one that precedes it.