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.

Pius XI’s First Visit to the Lateran in 1933

In yesterday’s post about Saints Catherine of Siena and Francis of Assisi being made the patron Saints of Italy, I explained a bit about the state of cold war that existed between the Papacy and the kingdom of Italy in the period of the so-called Risorgimento, and how the Popes from 1870 until 1929 were confined to the Vatican. A friend then brought to my attention this video from the always-interesting YouTube channel Caeremoniale Romanum, a British Pathé newsreel, which shows Pius XI going to the Lateran basilica for the first time in his papacy, to celebrate the feast of the Ascension in 1933.

Our friend Fr Joseph Koczera, SJ, also shared with us this picture of an inscription (written in a very elevated and formal style of classical Latin) in the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which commemorates the visit of Pope Pius XII during which he solemnly proclaimed Ss Catherine and Francis to be the patrons of Italy. (The church is called “sopra Minerva – over Minerva” because it was built on the site of a Roman temple.)

“On May 5 in the year 1940, Pius XII, shining forth in the majesty of the papacy, entered this church, was present for a solemn Mass, commended the Italian people to the heavenly patrons Francis and Catherine, and paid outstanding tributes to them both from the pulpit; going into the neighboring buildings (i.e. the Dominican house), together with the leaders of the city, he gladdened the Dominican and Franciscan families with his appearance and speech; in the piazza of the Minerva, he graced the celebrating crowd with an auspicious prayer. The Dominican friars set up (this inscription) for the memory of posterity.”

Ss Catherine of Siena and Francis of Assisi, Patron Saints of Italy

When an American pilgrim visits the ancient cities of Italy today, he may easily fail to realize that his own country is older than the modern state of Italy by nearly a century. From the fall of the Roman Empire until the mid-19th century, the Italian peninsula was divided into many countries, of varying size and importance, and the Pope himself ruled a fairly large one, with Rome as its capital. This country, variously called the Papal State or States of the Church, was the last to be conquered, in 1870, by the north Italian kingdom of Savoy, the consummation of the movement known as the “Risorgimento.” Perhaps even less well known today are the fiercely anticlerical character of the Savoyard government, and the long state of cold war that existed between it and the Church after the fall of the Papal State. For nearly 60 years, in fact, neither would officially recognize the other, and for much of that period, Catholics were forbidden under pain of excommunication from participating in the public life of Italy.

This unhappy situation was ended by the Lateran Pacts of 1929, whereby the Church formally recognized the Kingdom of Italy, which in turn recognized the sovereignty of the Pope over a tiny fraction of his former domains, the modern State of Vatican City. It was not however Pius XI, the Pope then reigning, who gave to modern Italy Saints Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena as her Patron Saints, but rather his successor, Pius XII. His decree to that effect was issued less than 3 months before the war that came after the War to End All Wars; prescient perhaps of the new catastrophe awaiting the peoples of Europe, including the Italians, Pope Pius writes of his choices:

Francis, poor and humble, truly the image of Jesus Christ, gave unlimited examples of the life of the Gospel to the very turbulent men of his age, and by establishing his three orders, opened to them a swift way towards the correction of morals both private and public, and to the true sense of the Catholic faith. In the same way did the most vigorous and devout virgin Catherine effectively work to encourage and establish harmony between the cities and towns of her land … (Licet commissa nobis, June 18, 1939.)

In this video, we see Pope Pius’ visit to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where the body of St Catherine rests under the high altar, shortly after the proclamation of the new Patron Saints. It is very much in the style of its times, and sadly rather blurry, but documents a truly moving display of popular devotion. In the second half, we hear the music of the Capella Sistina, directed by Lorenzo Perosi, (again, very much in the style of its times), followed by the voice of the Pope himself, as he calls Saint Catherine “Mother of her people, Angel of Peace,” and prays that she and Francis will protect Italy and lead her to God.

I have long thought that the choice of Francis and Catherine as joint Patrons of Italy was a particularly inspired one on the part of Pius XII, not only for their individual importance as Saints, but also as representatives of two religious orders whose impact on the fortunes of nearly every Italian city can hardly be overstated. A great part of the history of the Renaissance in particular is the history of the Franciscans and Dominicans, and of their patrons and parishioners, commissioning art works for their innumerable churches. Today, the Renaissance is too frequently spoken of as it were solely a Florentine affair, and the vital role of the Franciscans within it too easily forgotten. Much of the inspiration for the art of that period comes from St Francis and his love of creation, not for its own sake, but inasmuch as he saw every part of it as an expression of God’s love and mercy.

It was this that lead Franciscans scientists and others associated with the Order, (Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon are the most famous examples), to investigate how light, the beginning of creation, enables us to see and know the rest of it; and this in turn lead to the rediscovery of perspective in painting. Likewise, St Francis’ love for and interest in the created order also inspired the search for a more realistic depiction of it, leading Italian painting away from the hieratic styles of the low Middle Ages. It is not a coincidence that so much of the great Italian art of the 14th and 15th centuries is found in churches built by Franciscans, from the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi to the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Nor is it mere chance that one of the greatest Italian painters of all time, Fra Angelico, was a Dominican friar.

Of the innumerable images of St Francis in the basilica in Assisi, surely one of the most beautiful is the so-called Sunset Madonna, by Pietro Lorenzetti. This is a fresco on a west-facing wall in the left transept of the lower church; it is called “the Sunset Madonna” because there is a window directly opposite it, through which the rays of the setting sun illuminate it for about an hour at the end of each day. The fresco was painted around 1320 above an altar (now removed) dedicated to St John the Evangelist, who is seen on the right side. One of the donors is depicted beneath him, in prayer before a Crucifix, and his wife was probably in the part now missing on the left side; the donor may very well have been named John, which was also St Francis’ baptismal name.

The traditional story about the arrangement of the remaining figures is that the Christ Child is asking his Mother, “Which of My Saints loves Me the most?”, to which the Madonna answers by pointing at St Francis, as if to say “He does.”

A 14th-Century Italo-Byzantine St Francis of Assisi, And a Relic of His Habit

Plus a Puzzling Piece of Bad Modern Art

In the final posting of this short series of art in the exhibition of works connected with St Francis of Assisi at the National Gallery in London, here is a 14th-century painting, a Western variant of the iconographic style. It shows the Saint with the sunken cheeks of an ascetic, and narrative scenes from his life.

It normally resides in Assisi. The painting is heavily stylised and has a beauty derived from the decorative effect of the strong color and gold, the abstract patterns in the borders, and the parabolic grace of the lines that describe form, especially in the robe of St Francis.

This iconographic stylization persisted in Italy in some regions for different reasons. One reason is that some parts of Italy remained under Byzantine rule until as late as the 11th century, and the painting style continued in those areas, passed down by tradition. Another is that contact with Byzantium on the part of Italians who were not under Byzantine rule was later renewed, and occurred regularly due to trade, and to the conquest of Byzantine lands out of Italy. This contact refreshed the iconic influence, but in ways that reflected development in the iconographic style that had occurred in Byzantium itself, especially in the 9-11th century, that were not necessarily reflected in all the Byzantine provinces. To my eye, this has look of the influence of one of the older, provincial Italo-Byzantine styles.

Finally, here is a relic - the actual habit of St Francis.

It is not unattractively presented, but as such it is not sacred art. It contributes to the faith of Catholics as a focus for prayer, which is derived more by the knowledge of what it is, rather than specifically what it looks like.

This makes art that is based on the fabric of the habit a pointless exercise, it seems to me, as it has neither artistic merit and very likely no influence over the prayer of the faithful over what it is. Nevertheless this is what we see in a contemporary piece on show, see below. I am not convinced, as the pseudo-spiritual language of the description that accompanied the piece, that this represents the ‘heights of artistic expression’.

Visual art is as good as it looks, and this in my opinion has no beauty, no authentic meaning other than what is arbitrarily imposed on it, and no authentic religious connection. It does serve to highlight, by contrast with other works in the show, the terrible impoverishment of contemporary art in comparison with tradition! It is however, perhaps more appropriately termed a crock than a sack!

I would reiterate the point I made earlier about the inclusion of such pieces in an exhibition at an art gallery, however. In criticising the art, I would add that I am nevertheless in favour of such pieces appearing in the exhibition. The National Gallery is not a church. Provided that the Christian art is properly represented, which it most certainly is in this wonderful exhibition. I feel that these modern, anti-traditional works of art, help us to focus on what a Christian ought to do and appreciate tradition even more.

Four More Images of St Francis From the National Gallery London: Three Good and One Bad!

Here are three more pieces that from the exhibition of art relating to St Francis of Assisi, following on from my post a couple of weeks ago of work by Matthew Paris at the same show. First, an excellent example of Spanish Baroque naturalism, by Murillo.

This painting is, at a guess, 10ft long. Baroque artists painted so that the pictures pop into focus when viewed from the distance of approximately 3 times the distance of the greater dimension, so this one is meant to be viewed from approximately 30 feet away. At such a distance, the viewer can see the whole painting without having to scan the eyes over different parts of it, because the angle of vision is approximately 15 degrees (i.e. the arc of the central vision in the eye that is in focus). If the viewer moves any closer, he has to move his eyes or his head to different part of the painting to take in every detail. Given all this, we can assume that it was meant to be viewed from within the congregation of a large church.

When viewed from this distance, the edges of shapes in the composition which are blurred in the actual painting itself appear sharper. Conversely, when you approach the painting it surprises you by how loosely and out of focus so much of the composition is, as these details reveal.

The areas that are intended to be the main focus of interest, and which communicate the interaction between St Francis and Our Lord, will always be made slightly sharper, so that from a distance it is very sharp and clear. This loving interaction is communicated primarily through the gesture of each figure.

Notice also how muted the color palette is. Again, this is typical of Baroque art, which emphasizes tonal rather than color variation in order to show a high contrast of light and dark. Through this high tonal contrast, the artists, by another visual means, draw our attention to the primary focus in the composition - the eye is always naturally drawn to those part in which the contrast between light and dark is greatest. This has the effect of making the lights brighter. The contrast of light and dark tone is meant to symbolize the Light of the World that overcomes the darkness of evil, suffering and sin.

The second painting is also a work of the Spanish Baroque, a famous image of St Francis by Zurburán. This has the same visual vocabulary as described in the Murillo above - the use of light and dark, muted color, and a controlled variation in focus, again, to great effect.

Contrast these two with a 20th century sculpture by the British artist Anthony Gormley. This work is typical of the modern approach, in which artists imbue the figure with their own interpretation in such a way that if were not told what it was, or what the symbolism was, we would not be able to discern it. 

This piece is actually a cast of the artist himself, adopting a posture of a famous painting of St Francis by Bellini, which also shown at the exhibition. So while there is, admittedly, some connection to a traditional portrayal of St Francis (see below), nothing else that I see speaks of the historical figure, of his sanctity or his spirituality. In fact, the androgenous nature of the figure, which is unclad, seems instead to dehumanise him and desanctify him. I would argue that rather than inspiring people to emulate the sanctity of St Francis, it actually prevents anyone from recognizing the figure as St Francis. By forcing the association through the naming of the piece, it serves to undermine our grasp of the greatness of the saint. In this sense it is anti-sacred; it conveys to me no sense of virtue, no life details, or anything else that inspires me to emulate his life. I am happy to believe that it may well be there for the artist, but this is such a highly personal approach that it is more likely to distract those who see it from knowing who Francis was and what he was like. I cannot speak for the artist in this particular case, but this drive to undermine the Faith is consistent with the goals of contemporary art.

In criticising the art, I would add that I am nevertheless in favour of such pieces appearing in the exhibition. The National Gallery is not a church. Provided that the Christian art is properly represented, which it most certainly is in this wonderful exhibition. I feel that these modern, anti-traditional works of art, help us to focus on what a Christian ought to do and appreciate tradition even more. I would not want to see Anthony Gormley's work in a church. 

Doesn’t it Cost Too Much To Make Things Beautiful?

Why a culture of beauty pays off both economically and spiritually

On the whole, the beauty of artifacts is a function of design rather than materials. This means that, contrary to what many believe, mass production and industrialization are not processes that automatically create ugly products. It is as easy to mass produce something beautiful as it is something ugly. The ugliness of today’s culture is not driven by economics, but rather by poor design, because artists and designers are no longer aware of how traditional values are manifested in design, or else because they deliberately reject those values. A large basilica built in modern design is typically more expensive than one built in, say, a traditional Romanesque design, as evidenced by the recent building of the Neo-Romanesque church of St Mary in Kansas, which compares favorably with say, Los Angeles cathedral. 

The Immaculata church at St Mary’s Kansas. This is still under construction.

Sometimes the cost can be greater but not because designing beautifully is intrinsically more costly, but rather because, particularly for lower priced housing which might ordinarily rely on mass produced units, the current templates of mass productions, e.g., for window dimensions, are not reflective of traditional harmony and proportion.  But this could change in time if the demand for better proportioned units increases . Furthermore, even if greater cost is incurred before we reach that point, it is an investment that pays off economically. Houses that are now being built in traditional proportions typically have a higher price on the open market that more than offsets any additional costs in their building. This was the experience of building the experimental village in Dorset, Poundbury, which is an urban extension of the larger town of Dorchester.

I would argue that if we wish also to consider the souls of those who use what we create, then we must endeavor to make beautiful objects, and to do so in a cost effective manner. An ‘investment’ in the souls of men will always pay off. For example, when faced with the dilemma about whether or not money should be spent on beautiful churches and sacred art, some object and say that it would be better given to the poor.

This is an old but false argument that I would counter as follows: consider the Gospel account of Martha, Mary and Judas (John 12, 1-9). The two women acted as hostesses, Mary washed Jesus’s feet with expensive nard, while Martha attended to the other guests’ need. Judas, who was the keeper of the funds for the apostle, also complained that the money spent on expensive nard would be better given to the poor.

Tintoretto, Italian 16th century: Martha and Mary with Christ in Bethany, with Judas looking on,

Here is a lesson about allocation of resources: Mary made the right choice, we were told, in choosing Christ even before giving to the poor. There is an equivalent choice facing us today every time we have to decide about having beautiful churches and art, intricate vestments, ornate jewel-studded chalices and so on. Is it right to direct money to these things when there is poverty? The answer is yes, when these things, through the liturgy, elevate the souls of the faithful to Christ. This is greater than giving these resources to the poor directly. Why would we say this?

First, all of us, rich or poor, can go to church and we all need our souls saved. So in church the poor benefit from this spiritually as much as the rich do. Beauty is a common-good equally available, and equally beneficial, to all who encounter it, rich and poor alike.

But second, the poor will benefit materially as well. Faith inspires charity and so it will inspire the rich to give to the poor directly. Furthermore , it will allow for the creation of greater wealth for the benefit of the poor in such a way that their dignity is elevated. This is the principle of superabundance at work. Superabundance is the creation of something out of nothing, or of more from less. The Christian life, lived according to the principle of love is always fruitful in so many ways – and when it is it invokes the principle of superabundance.

Benedict XVI speaks of this principle of superabundance through charity in the economic sphere in his encyclical, Caritas in veritate (CV). He tells us how love might be present even in the ordinary economic transaction. When it is, it not only creates wealth, as all economic transactions do, but also builds up the dignity of all concerned, for even economic transactions suffused with love are raised to a level that goes beyond the material. A community is created which through every interaction, including the economic, builds up the dignity of those involved and in turn generates greater material wealth by encouraging more economic activity.   

Benedict writes:  

“Because it is a gift received by everyone, charity in truth is a force that builds community, it brings all people together without imposing barriers or limits. The human community that we build by ourselves can never, purely by its own strength, be a fully fraternal community, nor can it overcome every division and become a truly universal community. The unity of the human race, a fraternal communion transcending every barrier, is called into being by the word of God-who-is-Love. In addressing this key question, we must make it clear, on the one hand, that the logic of gift does not exclude justice, nor does it merely sit alongside it as a second element added from without; on the other hand, economic, social and political development, if it is to be authentically human, needs to make room for the principle of gratuitousness as an expression of fraternity.

“35. In a climate of mutual trust, the market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires. The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates. In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well.” (CV, 34)

A Church whose liturgy inspires holiness will inspire an atmosphere of mutual trust that Benedict speaks of.

During his papacy, Pope Francis has made headlines with regular calls to charity towards the poor, citing St Francis of Assisi as a model. To this day, the Franciscan order is characterized by a mission of charity for the poor. But it should not be forgotten that St Francis was commissioned by God to rebuild Christ’s Church, and he did both lovingly and beautifully, for both missions, ministering to the poor and building up the Church, are connected. We must not forget that the regeneration of the Church that St Francis of Assisi inspired involved a powerful cultural renewal too. This was the Church that inspired Franciscans to help the poor. So many of the great artists from the time of Francis were third order Franciscans or were commissioned by Franciscans to work on their churches – Giotto, Cimabue, Simone Martini, Raphael, Michelangelo. There is no austerity in the Franciscan churches of the past - the basilica at Assisi is richly decorated from floor to ceiling.  

The interior of the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi. The Franciscan order felt that there is no contradiction between spending money on such decoration, and care for the poor.

If we are to help the poor of America, we must begin as the Franciscans did in medieval Italy, by transforming the Church into one that has beautiful liturgy and beautiful art and architecture. This will in turn evangelize the culture and change all men’s hearts so that they are more inclined to help the poor  as part of their own community. It will also create a national culture that will foster the rise in mutual trust by which the economy will grow in such a way that the poor will have jobs and greater dignity; in other words, they will cease to be poor.

A Proper Hymn of St Francis of Assisi

Here is a nice recording of the hymn for 2nd Vespers of St Francis, taken from the proper Office composed for him shortly after his canonization, and used ever since then by the Franciscan Order.

Decus morum, dux Minorum, Franciscus tenens bravium, In te vite datur vitae, Christe, redemptor omnium.	The glory of our way, the leader of the Friars Minor, / Francis, holding his prize, is given to life in Thee, the Vine, O Christ, Redeemer of all.
Plaudat frater, regnat pater Concivis caeli civibus; Cedat fletus, psallat coetus, Exsultet caelum laudibus.	Our brother hails, our father reigns a fellow with heaven’s citizens; Let weeping end, let the chorus sing, Let heaven exult in praise.
Demptum solo, datum polo Signorum probant opera; Ergo vivit, nam adivit Aeterna Christi munera.	His works of wonder prove that he is Taken from earth, given to heaven; Therefore he lives, for he entered The eternal gifts of Christ.
Pro terrenis votis plenis Reportat dona gloriae; Quem decoras, quem honoras, Summae Deus clementiae.	For the fullness of his prayers on earth He receives the gifts of glory, Whom Thou grace and honor, O God greatest mercy.
Hunc sequantur, huic iungantur Qui ex Aegypto exeunt, In quo duce, clara luce, Vexilla Regis prodeunt.	Let them follow him, and be joined to him / Who march out of Egypt; With him as leader, in bright light The standards of the King go forth.
Regis signum ducem dignum Insignit manu, latere; Lux accedit, nox recedit, Iam lucis orto sidere.	The sign of the king marks him on his Side and hand as a worthy guide; The light comes, the night departs, When the star of day has risen.
Est dux fidus, clarum sidus, Ducit, relucet, devia Devitando, demonstrando Beata nobis gaudia.	He is a trusty guide, a bright star He leads, he shines, avoiding The wrong path, showing Blessed joys to us.
Mina gregem dux ad regem Collisor hostis callidi, Nos conducas et inducas, Ad cœnam Agni providi. Amen.	Bring the flock to the king, our leader, Who dash down the clever enemy; May thou lead and bring us To the banquet of the Lamb. Amen.

The Franciscan Office of their Holy Founder was composed by a German member of the order, Julian of Speyer, roughly ten years after the Saint’s death, and is one of the best known examples of a later type of Office known as a “rhymed office.” This particular hymn, however, was apparently added to it by Cardinal Thomas of Capua (1185-1239), Archbishop of Naples and a notary in the Papal court at the time St Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX. (The highly compressed rhyme scheme puts an accurate and poetic translation far beyond my literary skills.)

Rhyme itself was not used by the ancient Greeks or Romans, and where it occurred it was considered a blemish on poetry. Verse was formed by the alternation of long and short syllables in regular patterns; the iambic pentameter used so much by Shakespeare is broadly similar. (His type of English poetry is however much freer than Latin verse.) An example of this type of poetry in the liturgy is an antiphon found in the Office of St Peter in Chains on August 1st.

Aña Solve, jubente Deo, terrarum, Petre, catenas,
Qui facis ut pateant caelestia regna beatis.

Release at God’s order, o Peter, the earthly chains
Who make the kingdom of heaven open to the blessed.

These two lines are written in dactylic hexameters, the same metrical form used in the epic poetry of Homer and Virgil; they were composed by Pope St Leo I, (440-61) and inscribed on a wall of the ancient church of St Peter.

As the Latin language evolved into the modern Romance languages, the vowel quantities on which ancient poetry was based came to be less and less perceptible, leading over the centuries to the emergence of rhyme as we understand it today. (The older forms, on the hand, never ceased to be used.) By the High Middle Ages, this new type of poetry had become extremely popular in the liturgy. Four of the five sequences in the Roman Missal (Lauda Sion on Corpus Christi, Veni Sancte Spiritus on Pentecost, Stabat Mater on the feast of the Seven Sorrows, and the Dies irae of the Requiem Mass) are in rhyme. Likewise, whole Offices were routinely composed in which all of the proper musical parts, (antiphons, hymns and responsories), are rhymed.

Julian of Speyer is considered one of the great masters of this type of liturgical composition, and the rhymed offices which he wrote for St Francis and St Anthony of Padua were widely imitated from his own time (he died in about 1250) until the Tridentine liturgical reform, when rhymed offices fell out of favor. Many continued to be used by the older religious orders, and churches which maintained their own proper Offices, but the newer orders, in the spirit of the Tridentine reform, preferred to base their proper Offices on Scriptural quotations. Thus, for example, the five antiphons used by the Oratorians at Lauds of St Philip Neri are all quotations from the Bible, while the proper hymns are all written in thoroughly classical meter. (The Jesuits, unsurprisingly, do not even have a proper Office for St Ignatius.)

The disfavor into which rhymed offices fell is also a by-product of the increasingly common habit in the Tridentine period of reciting the Office in choir recto tono, i.e. singing everything on a single note, rather than with its longer, proper notation. This manner of saying the Office makes the sing-song quality of the medieval rhyme schemes far more obvious; most people would agree that the Dies irae, for example, sounds much better when sung then when read. The recording of the hymn above shows very nicely how the proper musical notation transcends the rhyme scheme.

Medieval hymnographers also loved the trick used in 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 Cistercian Office of St Bernard.) The hymns thus quoted are all from the repertoire generally found in all medieval Uses of the Office.

Christe redemptor omnium - from Vespers of Christmas, pre-Urban VIII
Exultet caelum laudibus - from the Common of Apostles
Aeterna Christi munera - from the Common of Apostles
Summae Deus clementiae - from ferial Matins of Saturday, pre-Urban VIII
Vexilla Regis - from Vespers of Passiontide
Iam lucis orto sidere - the hymn of Prime
Beata nobis gaudia - from Lauds of Pentecost
Ad cœnam Agni providi - from Vespers of Eastertide, pre-Urban VIII

The difficulty of this trick is to integrate the titles into the words of a new composition in a new sense, and the results here are quite good. Some of the expressions in the vocative case, such as “Lucis creator optime,” could be interchanged with any of the others, but I do not say this as a critique of the author; medievals valued originality far less than we do. “Aeterna Christi munera,” however, works very cleverly with the third stanza, as do “Vexilla Regis prodeunt” with the fifth and “Beata nobis gaudia” with the seventh.

The citation of the Easter hymn in its original text, “Ad coenam Agni providi,” is the only real flaw, since in the original, the word “providi” does not modify “Agni”, but the main subject of the stanza, which appears in the fourth line. (“Ad coenam Agni providi, et stolis albis candidi, post transitum maris Rubri Christo canamus principi. - Looking forward to the banquet of the Lamb, and shining in white stoles, after the passing of the Red Sea, let us sing to Christ the prince.”) Here, “providi” is left marooned to modify “the Lamb”, who is now “looking forward” to no stated object; I have left it untranslated above. The exact same flaw occurs in a hymn to St Anthony the Abbot constructed in the same way, which I have written about previously.

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.

“Moments of Liturgical Action”: Recovering the Sacramentality of Biblical Lections

In his work Philosophy of Cult — published, so far, only in Russian and in an Italian translation La Filosofia del Culto, from the latter of which the following translation was made by Zachary Thomas — Pavel Florensky articulates the orthodox understanding of Scripture, in contrast to the Protestant one:

The apostolic letters and the Holy Gospel are often considered books. The Holy Gospel and the holy apostolic letters are not “books,” but rather moments of liturgical action, deriving from the liturgy, where they do not have a simply narrative or purely edifying meaning, but one even more important — precisely an active, sacramental meaning.
          In short, even to read the Holy Scriptures is something that acquires its full significance only liturgically, in prayer, and not outside of the liturgy…. To remove it from this context, even if it is very pleasing to do so, would mean to secularize it. Just as it is impossible to walk down the street wearing a chasuble just because it is a beautiful garment; the moment one did so it would be equal to desecrating the holy vestments.
          It is good to reflect on rules of conduct in the same way. The holy fasts, for example, do not have an autonomy or moral order to themselves. They are rather tied to the liturgy; they play a part in the liturgical order akin to the preparation for Holy Communion, the ritual organization of life. They are therefore an ordo, or rather a liturgical moment, a moment of the ecclesiastical function.
          The instruction in our seminaries and in our ecclesiastical schools is mistaken from the start, from the moment that it is characterized by a certain autonomy of theology and even of diverse theologies — “dogmatic,” “moral,” and so on. In this entirely formal program a Protestant mode of thinking is already embedded, because Protestantism is in its essence the negation of the centrality of cult and the substitution of the center of religion with thought that, of its nature, cannot but be autonomous.
          Personally I have not the slightest doubt that orthodox instruction centers itself on cult — not on teaching about cult, but on life in cult — and thus the diverse “subjects” are only moments in the study of cult. But as soon as they become autonomous and forgetful of cult, in spite of their contents they end up in the orbit of Protestantism. In fact, even if they are orthodox in respect to the content delivered, nevertheless by not being centered on cult they are eccentric in respect to orthodoxy — which is to say they are Protestant.

Never have I found so well stated the basic difference between the traditional conception and practice of readings found in the usus antiquior and the modern conception and practice found in the Novus Ordo. The former is orthodox in the broad but precise sense; the latter is Protestant in Florensky’s sense. The observation that the postconciliar liturgical reform emerged from and resulted in protestantization is commonplace, but generally the focus is on something like the reduction and removal of sacrificial language from the Offertory and the Eucharistic Prayer; seldom is it seen how protestantized is the novel approach to the Scriptures.

The Roman tradition shows us attitudes that match Florensky’s account. In his superb biography of the saint, Fr. Augustine Thompson describes St. Francis of Assisi’s attitude towards scraps of parchment that had the words of Scripture or the name of God written on them, which he insisted should be collected and kept in suitable places, because they were a form of divine presence. This would strike many moderns as superstitious only because we live in a world denuded of sacrality, deaf to the transcendent vibration of symbolism:

For Christians of his age, the words of scripture were not merely didactic reminders of past events or moral norms. As divine words, they were a locus of power. Merely pronouncing them, as when the bishop read the beginning of the four Gospels toward the city gates facing the four points of the compass during springtime Rogation processions, put demonic powers to flight. When used by Brother Silvester over the city of Arezzo, the divine words could, by their very power, end civil strife.
          Now, when Francis began to chant from the book of Gospels as a deacon, he himself proclaimed and enacted the words of power. A perplexed brother once asked Francis about his practice of collecting such scraps of parchment, and he replied: “Son, I do this because they have the letters that compose the glorious name of the Lord God, and the good that is found there does not belong to the pagans nor to any human being, but to God alone, to whom every good thing belongs.”....
          Before, as a simple cleric singing the Office, he had chanted the psalms of David; now, as a deacon, he read the very words of Christ. At Solemn Mass, he did so facing north — the direction of darkness and, for medieval minds, paganism, and thus putting both to flight. That certain clerics treated these powerful and holy texts with disrespect outraged Francis’s acute spiritual sense. To leave sacred books on the floor or in dishonorable places was, in its own way, as sacrilegious as the desecration of the Host. Ever more intensely, Francis associated his own experience before the Cross, his transforming encounter with the lepers, and the divine commission to live the Gospel perfectly with the immediate, unmediated presence of Christ given to each Christian in Word and Sacrament.

In the traditional liturgy, the readings are given “eccentrically,” that is, directed away from the people in a different direction (either eastward or northward). This shows that the Word is first of all a glorification of and an exultation in the truth God has spoken, done on behalf of the worshiping congregation, and only secondarily an illumination of the ones present. A sign that this must be right is that the readings are still read even if no congregation is present to be instructed. (Certainly, the priest may be instructed himself, qua baptized Christian, but the scenario seems absurd from an excessively didactic point of view; one would think, on the didactic model, that readings should be skipped when there is no congregation.) Put differently, the Word of God is greater than and exceeds every gathering of the Church; it convokes but also transcends the Church.

Hence the least proper direction for chanting is directly at the faithful, as if the Word is subordinate to them, rather than they to it. Chanting, or speaking, the readings at the faithful betrays precisely that anti-cultic Protestant conception Florensky critiques. In today’s context the directing of readings towards the people has one and only one meaning: this action is enclosed within the present gathering, having its finality in the reception and comprehension (such as it is) of the listeners. This contributes to the “closed circle” phenomenon that Joseph Ratzinger diagnosed as the primary disease of postconciliar worship.

No one denies that the Scripture lessons have an instructional element. They are intelligible words meant to be grasped by intellect. But the most important element of the instruction imparted is not textual biblical knowledge but fear and reverence towards the infallible, inspired, awesome Word of God, such that we intuitively feel that this book is qualitatively different from any other book, that it measures us (our minds are subordinate to its wisdom) rather than being measured by us (the arrogant error of modern biblical criticism).

That I personally should venerate the Word of God as inerrant and infallible, the purest, highest, and most reliable testimony to divine truth available to me in this life, is an attitude and a mentality I learned from the solemnly chanted readings of the traditional Mass, not from the wearisome wordiness of the Novus Ordo that turns the church into a classroom. It is even enough to see the readings devoutly read at a low Mass by the priest facing the altar to acquire a sense that there is something special about these words, since they are being placed on the altar, as it were, as a verbal homage to God.
 

In words reminiscent of Florensky, Martin Mosebach in The Heresy of Formlessness writes about how the liturgical announcing of the readings in general, and of the Gospel in particular, are not mere declarations of texts, but are ways of making Christ present in the church:

The reading of the Gospel is far more than “proclamation”: it is one of the ways in which Christ becomes present. The Church has always understood it to be a blessing, a sacramental, effecting the remission of sins, as is affirmed by the “Per evangelica dicta deleantur nostra delicta” [by these evangelical words may our sins be blotted out] that recalls the Misereatur after the Confiteor. The Gospel’s sacramental character, effectively remitting sins, is surely the decisive argument for its being read in the sacred language. The liturgical signs of the procession make this character particularly clear…. The liturgy had taken over from the court ceremonial of the pagan emperors the symbolic language for the presence of the supreme sovereign: candles, which preceded the emperor, and the thurible. Whenever candles and incense appear in the liturgy, they indicate a new culmination of the divine presence. At the reading of the Gospel the candles of the Gospel procession and the incensing of the Gospel book as well as of the celebrating priest once more indicate the presence of the teaching Christ. The readings are not simply a “proclamation” but above all the creation of a presence.

It is, needless to say, a minority view that the chanting of the readings at Mass is an act of worship directed to God as well as an instruction for the people. In fact, there is something counterintuitive about this idea. After all, it would seem obvious that the reason Scripture is read in the Mass is to educate the faithful. But it is not so simple as a binary “either/or.” The traditional Roman liturgy tends, over the centuries, to turn everything into a prayer directed to God, as if there should be no place in the liturgy for something that is exclusively “for the people.” A great example of this is how the Creed is recited or sung in the usus antiquior. We all know that the Creed is a confession of faith, that it is basically a list of dogmas held by Christians. It has no obvious characteristics of being a prayer directed to God; rather, it looks like a badge of orthodoxy by which we signify our orthodoxy in the sight of the Church. And yet, in the usus antiquior the priest recites the Creed ad orientem at the high altar, bowing the head at the name of Jesus, genuflecting at the Et incarnatus est, and making the sign of the cross at the Et vitam venturi saeculi, concluding with an “Amen.” In this way the profession of orthodoxy has been turned into a prayer to the Triune God, a manner of communing with the One who has graciously revealed His mysteries to man.

What we see with the Credo is what we see with every element in the Mass, Office, and other sacramental rites. The whole liturgy is for God, and in fact its highest educational value consists precisely in communicating to the people the primacy and ultimacy of God, that He is the Alpha and Omega of all our exterior and interior acts, including the act of listening to readings and comprehending them. In a sense, the readings are offered up to God so that we may be offered up to Him in our understanding of the Word and the affections stirred up by it. This is why it does not matter so much whether or not every word is intelligible; what matters far more is to see that this Word is divine, holy, heavenly, that we are standing on holy ground. The verbal comprehension can follow in due time, but we will never grasp the Word rightly if we do not first venerate it as divine and worship the God from whom it emanates and in whose presence it comes alive.

The traditional Roman Rite indicates again and again its fundamental orthodoxy by not treating “the apostolic letters and the Holy Gospel” as mere “books,” but by treating them as “moments of liturgical action, deriving from the liturgy, where they do not have a simply narrative or purely edifying meaning, but one even more important — precisely an active, sacramental meaning.” Once more we see how the true meeting of East and West must take place not by means of papal visits to Cyprus or other staged events fueled by hot air, but by means of recovering our common catholic liturgical heritage and purging forever its protestantized simulacrum.

I would be remiss if I did not close with the following ironic observation. Catholic clergy and academics for decades have tended to align themselves with liberal Protestant biblical critics who end up undermining the inerrancy of Scripture. “Traditional” Protestants (if I may indulge an oxymoron) hold much more closely to the authentic Catholic position than today's Catholics often do. We can therefore say that a Protestant who really understood the implications of his own claims about Scripture (the journey of Scott Hahn from evangelical to Latin Mass attendee comes to mind) would necessarily gravitate toward the orthodox understanding of the primacy of the liturgical presencing of the Word, that is, what we see in the classical Roman Rite. In this way, traditional Catholics and “traditional” Protestants have much more in common than either of them has with the mainstream of Catholic academia or the mentality of the liturgical reformers.

Eastward reading in an oriental liturgy