The Man Born Blind in the Liturgy of Lent

From very ancient times, the Church has read the Gospel of the Man Born Blind, John 9, 1-38, as a symbol of the rituals of baptism. Christ anointed the blind man’s eyes with mud made of His saliva, and then told him to wash in the pool of Siloam; this was naturally associated with the ritual by which the catechumens were anointed before the washing of their sins in the baptismal font. St Augustine makes this comparison in the Breviary sermon on this Gospel, from his Treatises on the Gospel of John:

He was anointed, and he did not yet see. (Christ) sent him to the Pool, which is called Siloam. It was the Evangelist’s duty to commend to us the name of this pool, and he said ‘which means Sent.’ … (The blind man) therefore washed his eyes in that pool, whose name means Sent; he was baptized in Christ. If therefore, (Christ) illuminated him, when in some way He baptized him in Himself, when He anointed him, He made him perhaps a catechumen.

The Healing of the Blind Man, represented on a Christian sarcophagus known as the Sarcophagus of the Two Brothers, ca. 335; Vatican Museums, Pio-Christian Collection.

In the Roman Rite, this Gospel is traditionally read on the Wednesday after the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the day on which the catechumens were once prepared for baptism by various rituals, such as the sign of the cross made upon their foreheads, the placing of blessed salt on their tongues, and various prayers said with the imposition of the clergy’s hands upon their heads. The whole of the Mass, one of the most beautiful of the Lenten season, refers to this baptismal preparation.

The Introit is taken from the first of the two prophetic readings, Ezechiel 36, 23-28: “When I shall be sanctified in you, I will gather you together out of all the lands, and I will pour upon you clean water, and you shall be cleansed from all your filthiness, and I will give you a new spirit.” The last part of this, “I will give you a new spirit”, refers to the conferral of Confirmation along with Baptism, according to the ancient custom. (This same Introit was later added the private Masses of the Vigil of Pentecost, a reminder of the true, baptismal character of the day.)

The first gradual, “Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Come ye to him and be enlightened…”, the second prophetic reading, Isaiah 1, 16-19, “Wash yourselves, be clean, … if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow”, and the second gradual, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord: the people whom he hath chosen for his inheritance”, all continue this baptismal theme.

The station church for this Mass is the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, where the tomb of the Apostle of the Gentiles rests under the main altar; this was chosen as the place to read this Gospel, of course, because Paul was blinded by the vision on the road to Damascus, and healed at the time of his baptism, by an imposition of hands. In ancient times, Rome was a city populated by every nation of the Empire; the neighborhood closest to the basilica of St Paul, now called “Trastevere” in Italian, “the region across the Tiber”, was the foreigners’ quarter in antiquity. From the very beginning, the Church had always been concerned to assert that Christ came to the Jewish people, to whom the promises of mankind’s redemption were made, but as the Saviour and Redeemer of all nations; St Paul’s tomb was therefore the ideal place to prepare the catechumens for baptism, in which He gathers His people from all nations, as the prophets foretold.

The Paschal candlestick of Saint Paul’s Outside-the-Walls, carved in the 13th century, and still used today. Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Church Fathers also understood the blind man more generally as a figure who represents the condition of Man before the coming of Christ. The same passage of the Breviary from St Augustine cited above says earlier on, “If therefore we consider the meaning of what was done, this blind man is the human race. For this blindness happened in the first man through sin, from which we all draw the origin not only of death, but also of iniquity.” Likewise, in Sermon 135 against the Arians, Augustine says, “… the whole world is blind. Therefore Christ came to illuminate, since the devil had blinded us. He who deceived the first man caused all men to be born blind.”

This broader interpretation is implied in the Roman Rite’s association of the story with the Sacrament of Baptism, which the Fathers often refer to as “illumination”. It is made more explicit, however, in the Ambrosian Rite, in which the Fourth Sunday of Lent is “the Sunday of the Man Born Blind.” The Ingressa of this Mass has the same text as the Introit of Septuagesima in the Roman Rite: “The groans of death have surrounded me, the pains of death have surrounded me, and in my tribulation I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice from His holy temple.” The groans and pains of death here represent the condition of the fallen human race, whose condition is that of the blind man, but the prayers of man longing for redemption are heard by God “from His holy temple”, referring to the very last words of the preceding chapter, “But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.” The second half of this chapter, John 8, 31-59, is read on the previous Sunday, called the Sunday of Abraham; the Mozarabic liturgy reads this Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent, with the opening words “At that time, when our Lord Jesus Christ went out from the temple, He saw a man that was blind from birth.”

The two readings before the Gospel (Exodus 34, 23 – 35, 1, and 1 Thessalonians 4, 1-11) have no obvious connection to it, but the Psalmellus and Cantus (Gradual and Tract) certainly do. The first is taken from Psalm 40, “I said: O Lord, be Thou merciful to me: heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee,” the second from Psalm 120, “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence help shall come to me. My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” The Antiphon after the Gospel declares the mission of the Messiah in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (61, 1), words of which Christ declared Himself the fulfilment at the synagogue of Capharnaum (Luke 4, 14-22): “I was sent to heal the contrite of heart, to preach release to the captives, and restore light to the blind”. These two ideas are then admirably summed up by the preface of this Mass.

Truly it is fitting and just, right and profitable to salvation, that we should render Thee thanks, o Lord, that abidest in the height of Heaven, and confess Thee with all our senses. For through Thee, the blindness of the world being wiped away, hath shined upon the feeble the true light; which, among the miracles of Thy many wondrous deeds, Thou didst command one blind from birth to see. In him the human race, stained by original darkness, was represented by the form of what would come thereafter. For that pool of Siloam, to which the blind man was sent, was marked as none other than the sacred font; where not only the lights of the body, but the whole man was saved. Through Christ our Lord.

In this video, the preface is sung in Latin according to the traditional melody, but with the text modified for the new rite.

In the Ambrosian Rite, on each Saturday of Lent the Gospel refers to a part of the ritual preparation of the catechumens for baptism. The Gospel of the Saturday preceding the blind man is Mark 6, 6-13, which ends with the words “And they (the Apostles) cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them.” The following Saturday, the Gospel is Matthew 19, 13-15, which refers to the impositions of hands upon the catechumens, “Then were little children presented to Him, that He should impose hands upon them and pray. And the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such. And when He had imposed hands upon them, he departed from thence.” The seventh Ordo Romanus describes the ritual in detail as it was done in the sixth-century, including the preparation of infants for baptism, a practice to which the liturgical tradition of both the Roman and Ambrosian Rites bear witness.

The Mozarabic Liturgy, on the other hand, reads this Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent, but eliminates the references to baptism and baptismal preparation almost completely; blindness and illumination are presented much more as symbols of sin and repentance. So for example, one of the prayers of the Mass reads:

Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, restorer of eternal light, grant to us Thy servants, that just as we were washed from original sin in the waters of baptism, which was signified by that pool which gave light to blind eyes, so also may Thou purify us from (our) sins in the second baptism of tears. And so may we merit to become heralds of Thy praise, as that blind man became one that announced Thy grace. And just as he was filled with faith to confess Thee as true God, so also may we be filled with the confession of good works.

A Roman Pilgrim at the Station Churches 2023 (Part 8)

Before we continue with our Holy Week and Easter photoposts, today we finish off our annual series on the Roman stational churches of Lent. Thanks once again to our Roman pilgrim friends, Jacob Stein (the major contributor this year) and Agnese Bazzucchi - tanti auguri di buona Pascua, carissimi! Be sure to check out Jacob’s YouTube channel Crux Stationalis for more videos, including some of the exemplary Holy Week services at the FSSP church in Rome, Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini.

Passion Friday – St Stephen on the Caelian Hill 

This basilica has the distinction of being the only round church built in Rome in antiquity, and is therefore often called “Santo Stefano Rotondo” in Italian, “round St Stephen’s.” The central rotunda was originally surrounded by two rings, but after many centuries of damage and neglect, the outer ring was demolished in the 1140s. (The Pantheon was dedicated as a church to the Virgin Mary at the beginning of the 7th century, and was often called “Santa Maria Rotonda”, but was not, of course, originally built as a church.) 

In the 1580s, the painter Niccolò Circignani, generally known by the nickname Pomarancio, was commissioned to decorate the inside of the exterior wall with frescoes of early martyrdoms. These were intended as a response to the conceits of the so-called reformers of the age that the Church had abandoned and corrupted the Faith, a statement that all the martyrs witnessed to the same beliefs within the same Church established by Christ, an image of whose Crucifixion begins the series. It has to be said that many of the depictions are disturbingly violent, and the work as a whole has been the object of much criticism.

This weirdly enormous wooden tabernacle was placed on the altar in 1613, but later removed during one of the church’s innumerable restorations. 

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Station Churches of Holy Week (Part 2)

The icon of the Virgin Mary, known as the “Salus Populi Romani”, in the reredos of the Borghese chapel of the basilica of St Mary Major. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The station of Spy Wednesday is held at St. Mary Major, also the station church of the four Ember Wednesdays; as in the Embertides, and the Wednesday of the fourth week of Lent, there are two readings before the Gospel. The first of these is Isaiah 63, 1-7, preceded by a part of verse 62, 11. [1]

Thus sayeth the Lord God: Tell the daughter of Sion: Behold thy Savior cometh: behold his reward is with him. Who is this that comes from Edom, with dyed garments from Bosra, this beautiful one in his robe, walking in the greatness of his strength? I, that speak justice, and am a defender to save. Why then is your apparel red, and your garments like theirs that tread in the winepress? I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the gentiles there is not a man with me: I have trampled on them in my indignation, and have trodden them down in my wrath, and their blood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my apparel. etc.

The Fathers of the Church understood this passage as a prophecy of the Passion of Christ, starting in the West with Tertullian.

The prophetic Spirit contemplates the Lord as if He were already on His way to His passion, clad in His fleshly nature; and as He was to suffer therein, He represents the bleeding condition of His flesh under the metaphor of garments dyed in red, as if reddened in the treading and crushing process of the wine-press, from which the laborers descend reddened with the wine-juice, like men stained in blood. (adv. Marcionem 4, 40 ad fin.)

This connection of these words with the Lord’s Passion is repeated in very similar terms by St. Cyprian (Ep. ad Caecilium 62), who always referred to Tertullian as “the Master”, despite his lapse into the Montanist heresy; and likewise, by Saints Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechesis 13, 27) and Gregory of Nazianzus (Oration 45, 25.)

The necessary premise of the Passion is, of course, the Incarnation, for Christ could not suffer without a human body. Indeed, ancient heretics who denied the Incarnation often did so in rejection of the idea that God Himself can suffer, which they held to be incompatible with the perfect and incorruptible nature of the divine. St. Ambrose was elected bishop of Milan in the year 374, after the see had been held by one such heretic, the Arian Auxentius, for twenty years. We therefore find him referring this same prophecy to the whole economy of salvation, culminating in the Ascension of Christ’s body into heaven, thus, in the treatise on the Mysteries (7, 36):

The angels, too, were in doubt when Christ arose; the powers of heaven were in doubt when they saw that flesh was ascending into heaven. Then they said: “Who is this King of glory?” And while some said “Lift up your gates, O princes, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.” In Isaiah, too, we find that the powers of heaven doubted and said: “Who is this that comes up from Edom, the redness of His garments is from Bosor, He who is glorious in white apparel?”

In the next generation, St. Eucherius of Lyon (ca. 380-450) is even more explicit: “The garment of the Son of God is sometimes understood to be His flesh, which is assumed by the divinity; of which garment of the flesh Isaiah prophesying says, “Who is this etc.” (Formulas of Spiritual Understanding, chapter 1) Therefore, like the Mass of Ember Wednesday, this Mass begins with a prophecy of the Incarnation as the church of Rome visits its principal sanctuary of the Mother of God, in whose sacred womb began the salvation of man.

The Risen Christ and the Mystical Winepress, by Marco dal Pino, often called Marco da Siena, 1525-1588 ca. Both of the figures of Christ in this painting show very markedly the influence of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

This is also the day on which the church reads the Passion according to St Luke, who has a special association with the Virgin Mary. Most of what the New Testament tell us about Her was recorded in his writings, including almost all of the words actually spoken by the Her; this fact lies behind the tradition that St. Luke painted a picture of the Virgin, which is figuratively true even if it were not literally so. It is his account of the Passion that tells of the meeting between Christ and a group of women on the way to Mount Calvary, (chapter 23, 27-30); although he does not say that Mary was among them, art and piety have long accepted that it was so. The special devotion of the Servite Order to the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin has both a proper rosary (as the Franciscans have a rosary of the Seven Joys) and a special form of the Via Crucis, called by them the Via Matris; in both, the fourth sorrow is the encounter between Christ and His Mother as He bears the Cross.

The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary, by Albrecht Durer, ca. 1496. The lower middle panel show the Virgin fainting as Her Son passes by Her on the street on the way to Mount Calvary.

For the ceremonies of Holy Thursday, the station was of course kept at the cathedral of Rome. On this day, in addition to celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the Pope would preside over the reconciliation of the public penitents, and bless the holy oils, both rituals proper to the office of a bishop. Likewise, the washing of the feet (known as the Mandatum from the first antiphon sung during the rite) is done on this day, a ritual not exclusive to bishops, but traditionally performed by religious superiors upon their subjects, as Christ Himself did. The gospel sung at both the Mass and the Mandatum is taken from St. John (chapter 13, 1-15), since the three Synoptic accounts of the Lord’s Supper have been read earlier in the week. In a later period, the church came to be dedicated also to him along with St. John the Baptist, and it is he whose account of the Passion will also be read on the following day, on which the Church refrains from the celebration of Mass in mourning for the death of the Savior.

Finally, the station of Good Friday is kept at the basilica of the Holy Cross ‘in Jerusalem.’ This denomination comes from the tradition that when St. Helena, Constantine’s mother, built the church to house the relics of the True Cross discovered by herself in the Holy Land, the ground first was covered with earth brought from the city of the Lord’s Passion. As the Bl. Ildefonse Schuster writes in his book on the liturgical traditions of Rome, The Sacramentary, the choice of station fulfills the words of Christ Himself, “it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.”

A reliquary with pieces of the True Cross from the relic chapel of Holy Cross in Jerusalem.

Holy Saturday will be included in an article to be published next week on the stations of the Easter Octave.

[1] As noted by my colleague, the indefatigable Matthew Hazell, the Consilium removed this reading completely from the post-Conciliar lectionary, since, as they said, “it smacks of anger and revenge.” (Apparently, they were too tired to read it all the way to the end, “I will remember the tender mercies of the Lord, the praise of the Lord for all the things that the Lord our God hath bestowed upon us.”) Because we can only restore the liturgy to the vigor which it had in the days of the Holy Fathers by abolishing their teachings...

The Station Churches of Holy Week (Part 1)

As the Church reaches the culmination of the liturgical year in the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter, the tenor of the lectionary shifts; where the first four weeks of Lent focus on lessons for the catechumens who will be baptized at Easter, Passiontide, and especially Holy Week, closely follows the events of the Lord’s death and Resurrection. As in the earlier part of Lent, and indeed the other seasons when stations are kept, the choice of Roman stational churches in Holy Week is closely tied to the Scriptural readings of the Masses. A notable difference is that where the earlier part of Lent took the Pope and his court to every corner of the city’s historical center, the stations of Holy Week are all quite close to the ancient papal residence at the Lateran. The furthest away is Santa Prisca, just a little over a mile distant, with the rest being much closer; the Pope and his court would thus keep their travel to a minimum in a period of lengthy and taxing ceremonies.

On Palm Sunday, the triumphal entry of the Savior into Jerusalem is quite rightly celebrated at the cathedral of Rome dedicated in His name. In the early Middle Ages, a large number of chapels and oratories were constructed by various Popes around the Lateran basilica; one of these was dedicated to Pope St. Sylvester I, and large enough that at least one medieval source refers to it as a basilica. The palms for the procession were blessed there by the cardinal archpriest of St. Lawrence outside-the-Walls, and then brought to the large dining hall known as the triclinium of St. Leo III; there, the Pope distributed them to the clergy and faithful, before the procession made its way through the complex into the cathedral itself. In the later Middle Ages, the Popes often preferred to reside at the Vatican, and so Palm Sunday also has a station informally assigned at St. Peter’s; on these occasions, the palms were blessed in an oratory known as S. Maria in Turri (St. Mary in-the-Tower), directly underneath the bell-tower within the large courtyard that stood before the ancient basilica. During the extensive renovations of the Lateran and Vatican complexes in the 16th and 17th centuries, S. Sylvester in Laterano and S. Maria in Turri were both demolished; and nowadays, the Pope routinely celebrates Palm Sunday at St. Peter’s.

The Basilica of St. Peter as it stood ca. 1450, by H.W. Brewer.

Ss. Sylvester I and Leo III both sat upon the chair of St. Peter during events of the greatest importance for the history of relations between Church and State. Sylvester was the first Pope to be elected under the peace granted by the Emperor Constantine, and received the property of the Lateran as a gift from him; he was later held to be the recipient of the temporal state of the Church as part of the so-called Donation of Constantine. While this document has long been known to be a fiction, it did not create the Papal State, but rather a legal sanction for the long-standing de facto possession of central Italy by the Papacy after the collapse of the Roman Empire. St. Leo III was the Pope who crowned Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor, after his predecessor had effectively made the Papal State a protectorate of the Frankish empire. The blessing and distribution of the palms in parts of the Lateran complex associated with these Popes is probably behind the text of the preface which forms part of the blessing of the palms in the Missal of St. Pius V; as many liturgical writers have noted, it is unusual as a preface in that it makes no specific reference to the occasion on which it is used.

Truly it is worthy and just etc. … Who gloriest in the counsel of Thy Saints. For Thy creatures serve Thee, because they know Thee to be their only author and God, and all Thou hast made praiseth Thee, and Thy saints bless Thee. Because with free voice they confess the great name of Thy Only-Begotten Son before the kings and powers of this age. Before Whom stand the Angels and Archangels, Thrones and Dominations, and with all the army of the heavenly host, they sing the hymn of Thy glory, saying without end. Holy, Holy, Holy etc.

On Monday of Holy Week, the station was originally kept at the church known as the “titulus fasciolae – the title of the bandage,” to the south of the Caelian Hill near the Baths of Carcalla. Several explanations have been proposed for this odd name; an ancient tradition states that when St. Peter had been released from prison by his jailers, and was fleeing Rome, he stopped on the site of this church to change the binding on the wound where his fetters had been. The church was also associated with two of the most venerated Roman martyrs of the early centuries, Ss. Nereus and Achilleus; nothing is now known of them for certain beyond their martyrdom and that they were soldiers who renounced their military service to follow Christ. Their unreliable legend states that they were baptized by St. Peter himself, and in the years after the Apostle’s death, made many converts among the Roman nobility, among them, Flavia Domitilla, a relative of the Emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Being close by the Lateran, their church (now much smaller after extensive restorations in the mid-15th and late 16th centuries) would have made a convenient station after the lengthy ceremony of the previous day.

The interior of Ss. Nereus and Achilleus. Photograph by Fr. Lawrence Lew O.P.

By the High Middle Ages, it had fallen into ruins, and the station was transferred to the church of St. Praxedes on the Esquiline hill, a few steps away from the basilica of St. Mary Major. Her legend says that during the persecutions, she and her sister Pudentiana expended their patrimony in tending to the saints, providing for their material needs, sheltering them, visiting them in prison, and burying them after they had received the crown of martyrdom. After many years spent in helping the Christians, she prayed God to release her from the sight of such cruelties as were inflicted upon them, and so died a peaceful death. Her feast day is kept on July 21, the day before that of St. Mary Magdalene, who appears in the Gospel of Holy Monday (John 12, 1-9) anointing the feet of Christ. Just as Praxedes and her sister tended to the needs of the martyrs before and after their suffering and death, Mary and her sister Martha tended to Christ before and after His Passion. Today He is received as a guest in their home, and His feet are anointed by Mary Magdalene, who will later come with several other women to His tomb to anoint His body.

Ss. Praxedes and Pudentiana, together with the Virgin Mary, from the mausoleum of Theodora, (portrayed on the left) the mother of Pope St. Paschal I, (817-24). Paschal rebuilt the church and added this funeral chapel on the north side of it; it is also called the Chapel of St. Zeno, but in the Middle Ages was often referred to as the Garden of Paradise. Theodora was still alive when the image was made, hence the square blue halo.

On Tuesday, the station is kept at the church of St. Prisca on the Aventine Hill. This church is built on the site of a very ancient title and house-church, long believed on good evidence to be one of the places where St. Peter stayed during his years in Rome. The titular saint shares the day of her martyrdom, January 18, with the feast of St. Peter’s Chair in Rome, and the anniversary of the church’s dedication is kept on the feast of St. Peter’s Chair in Antioch. It has been proposed that her association with St. Peter derives from presence of the relic venerated as the Apostle’s chair at the place of her burial, and perhaps later at her church, before it was moved to its present location at the Vatican.

The Gospel read at this Mass was originally John 13, 1-32, a longer version of the gospel of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. In this first chapter of the five which St. John devotes to the events of the Last Supper, St. Peter himself figures very prominently, first as the only disciple to speak when Christ washes the feet of the Twelve, and then as he asks John to ask the Lord which of the disciples is the traitor among them. Later on, it was replaced by the Passion according to St. Mark, the longest of the four Passions in proportion to its Gospel as a whole. St. Jerome, who lived for a time in Rome on the Aventine hill, records the tradition (also attested in much earlier sources) that Mark was the disciple and interpreter of Peter, who calls him “my son” in his first epistle, (5, 13) and composed his gospel in Rome before going to evangelize Egypt. It is therefore possible that St. Prisca stands on the very place where Mark wrote the Gospel, having learned of the life of Christ from one of the most important eyewitnesses.

The modern interior of the basilica of St Prisca. Image from Wikimedia Commons by WikiRomaWiki, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Man Born Blind in the Liturgy of Lent

From very ancient times, the Church has read the Gospel of the Man Born Blind, John 9, 1-38, as a symbol of the rituals of baptism. Christ anointed the blind man’s eyes with mud made of His saliva, and then told him to wash in the pool of Siloam; this was naturally associated with the ritual by which the catechumens were anointed before the washing of their sins in the baptismal font. St Augustine makes this comparison in the Breviary sermon on this Gospel, from his Treatises on the Gospel of John:

He was anointed, and he did not yet see. (Christ) sent him to the Pool, which is called Siloam. It was the Evangelist’s duty to commend to us the name of this pool, and he said ‘which means Sent.’ … (The blind man) therefore washed his eyes in that pool, whose name means Sent; he was baptized in Christ. If therefore, (Christ) illuminated him, when in some way He baptized him in Himself, when He anointed him, He made him perhaps a catechumen.

The Healing of the Blind Man, represented on a Christian sarcophagus known as the Sarcophagus of the Two Brothers, ca. 335; Vatican Museums, Pio-Christian Collection.

In the Roman Rite, this Gospel is traditionally read on the Wednesday after the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the day on which the catechumens were once prepared for baptism by various rituals, such as the sign of the cross made upon their foreheads, the placing of blessed salt on their tongues, and various prayers said with the imposition of the clergy’s hands upon their heads. The whole of the Mass, one of the most beautiful of the Lenten season, refers to this baptismal preparation.

The Introit is taken from the first of the two prophetic readings, Ezechiel 36, 23-28: “When I shall be sanctified in you, I will gather you together out of all the lands, and I will pour upon you clean water, and you shall be cleansed from all your filthiness, and I will give you a new spirit.” The last part of this, “I will give you a new spirit”, refers to the conferral of Confirmation along with Baptism, according to the ancient custom. (This same Introit was later added the private Masses of the Vigil of Pentecost, a reminder of the true, baptismal character of the day.)

The first gradual, “Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Come ye to him and be enlightened…”, the second prophetic reading, Isaiah 1, 16-19, “Wash yourselves, be clean, … if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow”, and the second gradual, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord: the people whom he hath chosen for his inheritance”, all continue this baptismal theme.

The station church for this Mass is the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, where the tomb of the Apostle of the Gentiles rests under the main altar; this was chosen as the place to read this Gospel, of course, because Paul was blinded by the vision on the road to Damascus, and healed at the time of his baptism, by an imposition of hands. In ancient times, Rome was a city populated by every nation of the Empire; the neighborhood closest to the basilica of St Paul, now called “Trastevere” in Italian, “the region across the Tiber”, was the foreigners’ quarter in antiquity. From the very beginning, the Church had always been concerned to assert that Christ came to the Jewish people, to whom the promises of mankind’s redemption were made, but as the Saviour and Redeemer of all nations; St Paul’s tomb was therefore the ideal place to prepare the catechumens for baptism, in which He gathers His people from all nations, as the prophets foretold.

The Paschal candlestick of Saint Paul’s Outside-the-Walls, carved in the 13th century, and still used today. Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Church Fathers also understood the blind man more generally as a figure who represents the condition of Man before the coming of Christ. The same passage of the Breviary from St Augustine cited above says earlier on, “If therefore we consider the meaning of what was done, this blind man is the human race. For this blindness happened in the first man through sin, from which we all draw the origin not only of death, but also of iniquity.” Likewise, in Sermon 135 against the Arians, Augustine says, “… the whole world is blind. Therefore Christ came to illuminate, since the devil had blinded us. He who deceived the first man caused all men to be born blind.”

This broader interpretation is implied in the Roman Rite’s association of the story with the Sacrament of Baptism, which the Fathers often refer to as “illumination”. It is made more explicit, however, in the Ambrosian Rite, in which the Fourth Sunday of Lent is “the Sunday of the Man Born Blind.” The Ingressa of this Mass has the same text as the Introit of Septuagesima in the Roman Rite: “The groans of death have surrounded me, the pains of death have surrounded me, and in my tribulation I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice from His holy temple.” The groans and pains of death here represent the condition of the fallen human race, whose condition is that of the blind man, but the prayers of man longing for redemption are heard by God “from His holy temple”, referring to the very last words of the preceding chapter, “But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.” The second half of this chapter, John 8, 31-59, is read on the previous Sunday, called the Sunday of Abraham; the Mozarabic liturgy reads this Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent, with the opening words “At that time, when our Lord Jesus Christ went out from the temple, He saw a man that was blind from birth.”

The two readings before the Gospel (Exodus 34, 23 – 35, 1, and 1 Thessalonians 4, 1-11) have no obvious connection to it, but the Psalmellus and Cantus (Gradual and Tract) certainly do. The first is taken from Psalm 40, “I said: O Lord, be Thou merciful to me: heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee,” the second from Psalm 120, “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence help shall come to me. My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” The Antiphon after the Gospel declares the mission of the Messiah in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (61, 1), words of which Christ declared Himself the fulfilment at the synagogue of Capharnaum (Luke 4, 14-22): “I was sent to heal the contrite of heart, to preach release to the captives, and restore light to the blind”. These two ideas are then admirably summed up by the preface of this Mass.

Truly it is fitting and just, right and profitable to salvation, that we should render Thee thanks, o Lord, that abidest in the height of Heaven, and confess Thee with all our senses. For through Thee, the blindness of the world being wiped away, hath shined upon the feeble the true light; which, among the miracles of Thy many wondrous deeds, Thou didst command one blind from birth to see. In him the human race, stained by original darkness, was represented by the form of what would come thereafter. For that pool of Siloam, to which the blind man was sent, was marked as none other than the sacred font; where not only the lights of the body, but the whole man was saved. Through Christ our Lord.

In this video, the preface is sung in Latin according to the traditional melody, but with the text modified for the new rite.

In the Ambrosian Rite, on each Saturday of Lent the Gospel refers to a part of the ritual preparation of the catechumens for baptism. The Gospel of the Saturday preceding the blind man is Mark 6, 6-13, which ends with the words “And they (the Apostles) cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them.” The following Saturday, the Gospel is Matthew 19, 13-15, which refers to the impositions of hands upon the catechumens, “Then were little children presented to Him, that He should impose hands upon them and pray. And the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such. And when He had imposed hands upon them, he departed from thence.” The seventh Ordo Romanus describes the ritual in detail as it was done in the sixth-century, including the preparation of infants for baptism, a practice to which the liturgical tradition of both the Roman and Ambrosian Rites bear witness.

The Mozarabic Liturgy, on the other hand, reads this Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent, but eliminates the references to baptism and baptismal preparation almost completely; blindness and illumination are presented much more as symbols of sin and repentance. So for example, one of the prayers of the Mass reads:

Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, restorer of eternal light, grant to us Thy servants, that just as we were washed from original sin in the waters of baptism, which was signified by that pool which gave light to blind eyes, so also may Thou purify us from (our) sins in the second baptism of tears. And so may we merit to become heralds of Thy praise, as that blind man became one that announced Thy grace. And just as he was filled with faith to confess Thee as true God, so also may we be filled with the confession of good works.

Roman Pilgrims at the Station Churches 2018 (Part 9)

As we enter Holy Week, we finish up our series of the pictures of the Lenten station churches in Rome from our Roman pilgrims, Agnese Bazzuchi and Fr Alek Shrenck. There will be one more in the series covering a bit of Holy Week.

Tuesday of Passion Week - Santa Maria in via Lata

The church where today’s station was originally kept, and which is still listed in the Roman Missal, dedicated to an early Roman martyr named Cyriacus, was demolished in 1491 to make way for the construction of Santa Maria in Via Lata, to which the station was then transferrred.

The crypt is partly the remains of an ancient house, traditionally said to be one of the places where St Paul stayed when he was in Rome.

From Fr Alek: the 13th century icon of the Virgin Mary in the reredos.

The apsidal fresco of the Assumption, (which is the church’s titular feast), interacts very cleverly with the ceiling.

Wednesday of Passion Week - San Marcello al Corso

“Via Lata - Broad Street” is the Latin name for the via del Corso, and the station church for this day sits on it almost directly across from yesterday’s station. The church is dedicated to a Pope who was martyred in the early 4th century, Marcellus, built over the filthy stables where he was condemned to labor by the Emperor Maxentius; his relics are under the high altar. The church burned down in 1519, and was rebuilt in the opposite orientation from that of the original structure.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Man Born Blind in the Liturgy of Lent

From very ancient times, the Church has read the Gospel of the Man Born Blind, John 9, 1-38, as a symbol of the rituals of baptism. Christ anointed the blind man’s eyes with mud made of His saliva, and then told him to wash in the pool of Siloam; this was naturally associated with the ritual by which the catechumens were anointed before the washing of their sins in the baptismal font. St Augustine makes this comparison in the Breviary sermon on this Gospel, from his Treatises on the Gospel of John:

He was anointed, and he did not yet see. (Christ) sent him to the Pool, which is called Siloam. It was the Evangelist’s duty to commend to us the name of this pool, and he said ‘which means Sent.’ … (The blind man) therefore washed his eyes in that pool, whose name means Sent; he was baptized in Christ. If therefore, (Christ) illuminated him, when in some way He baptized him in Himself, when He anointed him, He made him perhaps a catechumen.

The Healing of the Blind Man, represented on a Christian sarcophagus known as the Sarcophagus of the Two Brothers, ca. 335; Vatican Museums, Pio-Christian Collection.

In the Roman Rite, this Gospel is traditionally read on the Wednesday after the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the day on which the catechumens were once prepared for baptism by various rituals, such as the sign of the cross made upon their foreheads, the placing of blessed salt on their tongues, and various prayers said with the imposition of the clergy’s hands upon their heads. The whole of the Mass, one of the most beautiful of the Lenten season, refers to this baptismal preparation.

The Introit is taken from the first of the two prophetic readings, Ezechiel 36, 23-28: “When I shall be sanctified in you, I will gather you together out of all the lands, and I will pour upon you clean water, and you shall be cleansed from all your filthiness, and I will give you a new spirit.” The last part of this, “I will give you a new spirit”, refers to the conferral of Confirmation along with Baptism, according to the ancient custom. (This same Introit was later added the private Masses of the Vigil of Pentecost, a reminder of the true, baptismal character of the day.)

The first gradual, “Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Come ye to him and be enlightened…”, the second prophetic reading, Isaiah 1, 16-19, “Wash yourselves, be clean, … if your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow”, and the second gradual, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord: the people whom he hath chosen for his inheritance”, all continue this baptismal theme.

The station church for this Mass is the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, where the tomb of the Apostle of the Gentiles rests under the main altar; this was chosen as the place to read this Gospel, of course, because Paul was blinded by the vision on the road to Damascus, and healed at the time of his baptism, by an imposition of hands. In ancient times, Rome was a city populated by every nation of the Empire; the neighborhood closest to the basilica of St Paul, now called “Trastevere” in Italian, “the region across the Tiber”, was the foreigners’ quarter in antiquity. From the very beginning, the Church had always been concerned to assert that Christ came to the Jewish people, to whom the promises of mankind’s redemption were made, but as the Saviour and Redeemer of all nations; St Paul’s tomb was therefore the ideal place to prepare the catechumens for baptism, in which He gathers His people from all nations, as the prophets foretold.

The Paschal candlestick of Saint Paul’s Outside-the-Walls, carved in the 13th century, and still used today. Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Church Fathers also understood the blind man more generally as a figure who represents the condition of Man before the coming of Christ. The same passage of the Breviary from St Augustine cited above says earlier on, “If therefore we consider the meaning of what was done, this blind man is the human race. For this blindness happened in the first man through sin, from which we all draw the origin not only of death, but also of iniquity.” Likewise, in Sermon 135 against the Arians, Augustine says, “… the whole world is blind. Therefore Christ came to illuminate, since the devil had blinded us. He who deceived the first man caused all men to be born blind.”

This broader interpretation is implied in the Roman Rite’s association of the story with the Sacrament of Baptism, which the Fathers often refer to as “illumination”. It is made more explicit, however, in the Ambrosian Rite, in which the Fourth Sunday of Lent is “the Sunday of the Man Born Blind.” The Ingressa of this Mass has the same text as the Introit of Septuagesima in the Roman Rite: “The groans of death have surrounded me, the pains of death have surrounded me, and in my tribulation I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice from His holy temple.” The groans and pains of death here represent the condition of the fallen human race, whose condition is that of the blind man, but the prayers of man longing for redemption are heard by God “from His holy temple”, referring to the very last words of the preceding chapter, “But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.” The second half of this chapter, John 8, 31-59, is read on the previous Sunday, called the Sunday of Abraham; the Mozarabic liturgy reads this Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent, with the opening words “At that time, when our Lord Jesus Christ went out from the temple, He saw a man that was blind from birth.”

The two readings before the Gospel (Exodus 34, 23 – 35, 1, and 1 Thessalonians 4, 1-11) have no obvious connection to it, but the Psalmellus and Cantus (Gradual and Tract) certainly do. The first is taken from Psalm 40, “I said: O Lord, be Thou merciful to me: heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee,” the second from Psalm 120, “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence help shall come to me. My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” The Antiphon after the Gospel declares the mission of the Messiah in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (61, 1), words of which Christ declared Himself the fulfilment at the synagogue of Capharnaum (Luke 4, 14-22): “I was sent to heal the contrite of heart, to preach release to the captives, and restore light to the blind”. These two ideas are then admirably summed up by the preface of this Mass.

Truly it is fitting and just, right and profitable to salvation, that we should render Thee thanks, o Lord, that abidest in the height of Heaven, and confess Thee with all our senses. For through Thee, the blindness of the world being wiped away, hath shined upon the feeble the true light; which, among the miracles of Thy many wondrous deeds, Thou didst command one blind from birth to see. In him the human race, stained by original darkness, was represented by the form of what would come thereafter. For that pool of Siloam, to which the blind man was sent, was marked as none other than the sacred font; where not only the lights of the body, but the whole man was saved. Through Christ our Lord.

In this video, the preface is sung in Latin according to the traditional melody, but with the text modified for the new rite.
In the Ambrosian Rite, on each Saturday of Lent the Gospel refers to a part of the ritual preparation of the catechumens for baptism. The Gospel of the Saturday preceding the blind man is Mark 6, 6-13, which ends with the words “And they (the Apostles) cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them.” The following Saturday, the Gospel is Matthew 19, 13-15, which refers to the impositions of hands upon the catechumens, “Then were little children presented to Him, that He should impose hands upon them and pray. And the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such. And when He had imposed hands upon them, he departed from thence.” The seventh Ordo Romanus describes the ritual in detail as it was done in the sixth-century, including the preparation of infants for baptism, a practice to which the liturgical tradition of both the Roman and Ambrosian Rites bear witness.

The Mozarabic Liturgy, on the other hand, reads this Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent, but eliminates the references to baptism and baptismal preparation almost completely; blindness and illumination are presented much more as symbols of sin and repentance. So for example, one of the prayers of the Mass reads:

Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, restorer of eternal light, grant to us Thy servants, that just as we were washed from original sin in the waters of baptism, which was signified by that pool which gave light to blind eyes, so also may Thou purify us from (our) sins in the second baptism of tears. And so may we merit to become heralds of Thy praise, as that blind man became one that announced Thy grace. And just as he was filled with faith to confess Thee as true God, so also may we be filled with the confession of good works.

In the Byzantine Liturgy, the Gospel of the Blind man is read on the last Sunday of Eastertide before the Ascension. The liturgical texts of the day are more focused on the Resurrection, but not to the exclusion of the Blind Man.

At Little Vespers Christ our God, spiritual Sun of justice, by your pure touch you enlightened the one who had been deprived of light from his mother’s womb; by shedding your rays on the eyes of our souls, show us to be sons of the day, that we may cry to you with faith, ‘Great and ineffable is your compassion for us. Lover of humankind, glory to you!’

At Great Vespers, Idiomel Stichera The man born blind reasoned with himself, ‘Was it through my parents’ sin that I was born blind? Or was I born because of the unbelief of the nations as an accusation? I am not competent to ask when it is day, when night. My feet cannot detect the stumbling blocks of the stones. I have not seen the sun shining, nor him who fashioned me in his image. But I beg you, Christ God: Look on me and have mercy on me.

At Matins The Master and maker of all things, as he passed along found a Blind Man sitting by the way, lamenting and saying: ‘Never in my life have I seen the sun shining or the moon shedding its light; therefore I cry out to you, born of a Virgin to enlighten the universe: Enlighten me, as you are compassionate, that falling down I may cry to you: Master Christ God, grant me forgiveness of my offences through the multitude of your mercy, only lover of mankind’.

The Station Churches of Holy Week

As the Church reaches the culmination of the liturgical year in the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter, the tenor of the lectionary shifts; where the first four weeks of Lent focus on lessons for the catechumens who will be baptized at Easter, Passiontide, and especially Holy Week, closely follows the events of the Lord’s death and Resurrection. As in the earlier part of Lent, and indeed the other seasons when stations are kept, the choice of Roman stational churches in Holy Week is closely tied to the scriptural readings of the Masses. A notable difference is that where the earlier part of Lent took the Pope and his court to every corner of the city’s historical center, the stations of Holy Week are all quite close to the ancient papal residence at the Lateran. The furthest away is Santa Prisca, just a little over a mile distant, with the rest being much closer; the Pope and his court would thus keep their travel to a minimum in a period of lengthy and taxing ceremonies.

On Palm Sunday, the triumphal entry of the Savior into Jerusalem is quite rightly celebrated at the cathedral of Rome dedicated in His name. In the early Middle Ages, a large number of chapels and oratories were constructed by various Popes around the Lateran basilica; one of these was dedicated to Pope St. Sylvester I, and large enough that at least one medieval source refers to it as a basilica. The palms for the procession were blessed there by the cardinal archpriest of St. Lawrence outside-the-Walls, and then brought to the large dining hall known as the triclinium of St. Leo III; there, the Pope distributed them to the clergy and faithful, before the procession made its way through the complex into the cathedral itself. In the later Middle Ages, the Popes often preferred to reside at the Vatican, and so Palm Sunday also has a station informally assigned at St. Peter’s; on these occasions, the palms were blessed in an oratory known as S. Maria in Turri (St. Mary in-the-Tower), directly underneath the bell-tower within the large courtyard that stood before the ancient basilica. During the extensive renovations of the Lateran and Vatican complexes in the 16th and 17th centuries, S. Sylvester in Laterano and S. Maria in Turri were both demolished; and nowadays, the Pope routinely celebrates Palm Sunday at St. Peter’s.

The Basilica of St. Peter as it stood ca. 1450, by H.W. Brewer.

Ss. Sylvester I and Leo III both sat upon the chair of St. Peter during events of the greatest importance for the history of relations between Church and State. Sylvester was the first Pope to be elected under the peace granted by the Emperor Constantine, and received the property of the Lateran as a gift from him; he was later held to be the recipient of the temporal state of the Church as part of the so-called Donation of Constantine. While this document has long been known to be a fiction, it did not create the Papal State, but rather a legal sanction for the long-standing de facto possession of central Italy by the Papacy after the collapse of the Roman Empire. St. Leo III was the Pope who crowned Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor, after his predecessor had effectively made the Papal State a protectorate of the Frankish empire. The blessing and distribution of the palms in parts of the Lateran complex associated with these Popes is probably behind the text of the preface which forms part of the blessing of the palms in the Missal of St. Pius V; as many liturgical writers have noted, it is unusual as a preface in that it makes no specific reference to the occasion on which it is used.

Truly it is worthy and just etc. … Who gloriest in the counsel of Thy Saints. For Thy creatures serve Thee, because they know Thee to be their only author and God, and all Thou hast made praiseth Thee, and Thy saints bless Thee. Because with free voice they confess the great name of Thy Only-Begotten Son before the kings and powers of this age. Before Whom stand the Angels and Archangels, Thrones and Dominations, and with all the army of the heavenly host, they sing the hymn of Thy glory, saying without end. Holy, Holy, Holy etc.

On Monday of Holy Week, the station was originally kept at the church known as the “titulus fasciolae – the title of the bandage,” to the south of the Caelian Hill near the Baths of Carcalla. Several explanations have been proposed for this odd name; an ancient tradition states that when St. Peter had been released from prison by his jailers, and was fleeing Rome, he stopped on the site of this church to change the binding on the wound where his fetters had been. The church was also associated with two of the most venerated Roman martyrs of the early centuries, Ss. Nereus and Achilleus; nothing is now known of them for certain beyond their martyrdom and that they were soldiers who renounced their military service to follow Christ. Their unreliable legend states that they were baptized by St. Peter himself, and in the years after the Apostle’s death, made many converts among the Roman nobility, among them, Flavia Domitilla, a relative of the Emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Being close by the Lateran, their church (now much smaller after extensive restorations in the mid-15th and late 16th centuries) would have made a convenient station after the lengthy ceremony of the previous day.

The interior of Ss. Nereus and Achilleus. Photograph by Fr. Lawrence Lew O.P.

By the High Middle Ages, it had fallen into ruins, and the station was transferred to the church of St. Praxedes on the Esquiline hill, a few steps away from the basilica of St. Mary Major. Her legend says that during the persecutions, she and her sister Pudentiana expended their patrimony in tending to the saints, providing for their material needs, sheltering them, visiting them in prison, and burying them after they had received the crown of martyrdom. After many years spent in helping the Christians, she prayed God to release her from the sight of such cruelties as were inflicted upon them, and so died a peaceful death. Her feast day is kept on July 21, the day before that of St. Mary Magdalene, who appears in the Gospel of Holy Monday (John 12, 1-9) anointing the feet of Christ. Just as Praxedes and her sister tended to the needs of the martyrs before and after their suffering and death, Mary and her sister Martha tended to Christ before and after His Passion. Today He is received as a guest in their home, and His feet are anointed by Mary Magdalene, who will later come with several other women to His tomb to anoint His body.

Ss. Praxedes and Pudentiana, together with the Virgin Mary, from the mausoleum of Theodora, (portrayed on the left) the mother of Pope St. Paschal I, (817-24). Paschal rebuilt the church and added this funeral chapel on the north side of it; it is also called the Chapel of St. Zeno, but in the Middle Ages was often referred to as the Garden of Paradise. Theodora was still alive when the image was made, hence the square blue halo, as recently noted by David Clayton.

On Tuesday, the station is kept at the church of St. Prisca on the Aventine Hill. This church is built on the site of a very ancient title and house-church, long believed on good evidence to be one of the places where St. Peter stayed during his years in Rome. The titular saint shares the day of her martyrdom, January 18, with the feast of St. Peter’s Chair in Rome, and the anniversary of the church’s dedication is kept on the feast of St. Peter’s Chair in Antioch. It has been proposed that her association with St. Peter derives from presence of the relic venerated as the Apostle’s chair at the place of her burial, and perhaps later at her church, before it was moved to its present location at the Vatican.

The gospel read at this Mass was originally John 13, 1-32, a longer version of the gospel of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. In this first chapter of the five which St. John devotes to the events of the Last Supper, St. Peter himself figures very prominently, first as the only disciple to speak when Christ washes the feet of the Twelve, and then as he asks John to ask the Lord which of the disciples is the traitor among them. Later on, it was replaced by the Passion according to St. Mark, the longest of the four Passions in proportion to its Gospel as a whole. St. Jerome, who lived for a time in Rome on the Aventine hill, records the tradition (also attested in much earlier sources) that Mark was the disciple and interpreter of Peter, who calls him “my son” in his first epistle, (5, 13) and composed his gospel in Rome before going to evangelize Egypt. It is therefore possible that St. Prisca stands on the very place where Mark wrote the Gospel, having learned of the life of Christ from one of the most important eyewitnesses.

St. Peter preaching in the presence of St. Mark, by Fra Angelico, ca. 1433, part of the predella of the Linaioli altarpiece.

The station of Spy Wednesday is held at St. Mary Major, also the station church of the four Ember Wednesdays; as in the Embertides, and the Wednesday of the fourth week of Lent, there are two readings before the gospel. The first of these is Isaiah 63, 1-7, preceded by a part of verse 62, 11.

Thus sayeth the Lord God: Tell the daughter of Sion: Behold thy Savior cometh: behold his reward is with him. Who is this that comes from Edom, with dyed garments from Bosra, this beautiful one in his robe, walking in the greatness of his strength? I, that speak justice, and am a defender to save. Why then is your apparel red, and your garments like theirs that tread in the winepress? I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the gentiles there is not a man with me: I have trampled on them in my indignation, and have trodden them down in my wrath, and their blood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my apparel. etc.

The Fathers of the Church understood this passage as a prophecy of the Passion of Christ, starting in the West with Tertullian.

The prophetic Spirit contemplates the Lord as if He were already on His way to His passion, clad in His fleshly nature; and as He was to suffer therein, He represents the bleeding condition of His flesh under the metaphor of garments dyed in red, as if reddened in the treading and crushing process of the wine-press, from which the laborers descend reddened with the wine-juice, like men stained in blood. (adv. Marcionem 4, 40 ad fin.)

This connection of these words with the Lord’s Passion is repeated in very similar terms by St. Cyprian (Ep. ad Caecilium 62), who always referred to Tertullian as “the Master”, despite his lapse into the Montanist heresy; and likewise, by Saints Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechesis 13, 27) and Gregory of Nazianzus (Oration 45, 25.)

The necessary premise of the Passion is, of course, the Incarnation, for Christ could not suffer without a human body. Indeed, ancient heretics who denied the Incarnation often did so in rejection of the idea that God Himself can suffer, which they held to be incompatible with the perfect and incorruptible nature of the divine. St. Ambrose was elected bishop of Milan in the year 374, after the see had been held by one such heretic, the Arian Auxentius, for twenty years. We therefore find him referring this same prophecy to the whole economy of salvation, culminating in the Ascension of Christ’s body into heaven, thus, in the treatise on the Mysteries (7, 36):

The angels, too, were in doubt when Christ arose; the powers of heaven were in doubt when they saw that flesh was ascending into heaven. Then they said: “Who is this King of glory?” And while some said “Lift up your gates, O princes, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.” In Isaiah, too, we find that the powers of heaven doubted and said: “Who is this that comes up from Edom, the redness of His garments is from Bosor, He who is glorious in white apparel?”

In the next generation, St. Eucherius of Lyon (ca. 380-450) is even more explicit: “The garment of the Son of God is sometimes understood to be His flesh, which is assumed by the divinity; of which garment of the flesh Isaiah prophesying says, “Who is this etc.” (Formulas of Spiritual Understanding, chapter 1) Therefore, like the Mass of Ember Wednesday, this Mass begins with a prophecy of the Incarnation as the church of Rome visits its principle sanctuary of the Mother of God, in whose sacred womb began the salvation of man.

The Risen Christ and the Mystical Winepress, by Marco dal Pino, often called Marco da Siena, 1525-1588 ca. Both of the figures of Christ in this painting show very markedly the influence of Michelangelo's Last Judgment.

This is also the day on which the church reads the Passion according to St Luke, who has a special association with the Virgin Mary. Most of what the New Testament tell us about Her was recorded in his writings, including almost all of the words actually spoken by the Her; this fact lies behind the tradition that St. Luke painted a picture of the Virgin, which is figuratively true even if it were not literally so. It is his account of the Passion that tells of the meeting between Christ and a group of women on the way to Mount Calvary, (chapter 23, 27-30); although he does not say that Mary was among them, art and piety have long accepted that it was so. The special devotion of the Servite Order to the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin has both a proper rosary (as the Franciscans have a rosary of the Seven Joys) and a special form of the Via Crucis, called by them the Via Matris; in both, the fourth sorrow is the encounter between Christ and His Mother as He bears the Cross.

The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary, by Albrecht Durer, ca. 1496. The lower middle panel show the Virgin fainting as Her Son passes by Her on the street on the way to Mount Calvary.

For the ceremonies of Holy Thursday, the station was of course kept at the cathedral of Rome. On this day, in addition to celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the Pope would preside over the reconciliation of the public penitents, and bless the holy oils, both rituals proper to the office of a bishop. Likewise, the washing of the feet (known as the Mandatum from the first antiphon sung during the rite) is done on this day, a ritual not exclusive to bishops, but traditionally performed by religious superiors upon their subjects, as Christ Himself did. The gospel sung at both the Mass and the Mandatum is taken from St. John (chapter 13, 1-15), since the three Synoptic accounts of the Lord’s Supper have been read earlier in the week. In a later period, the church came to be dedicated also to him and to St. John the Baptist; and it is he whose account of the Passion will also be read on the following day, on which the Church refrains from the celebration of Mass in mourning for the death of the Savior. (This year, the Pope will celebrate the Chrism Mass at St. Peter's, and the Mass of the Lord's Supper at St. John in the Lateran.)

Finally, the station of Good Friday is kept at the basilica of the Holy Cross ‘in Jerusalem’. This denomination comes from the tradition that when St. Helena, Constantine’s mother, built the church to house the relics of the True Cross discovered by herself in the Holy Land, the ground first was covered with earth brought from the city of the Lord’s Passion. As the Bl. Ildefonse Schuster writes in his book on the liturgical traditions of Rome, The Sacramentary, the choice of station fulfills the words of Christ Himself, “it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.”

A reliquary with pieces of the True Cross from the relic chapel of Holy Cross in Jerusalem.

Holy Saturday will be included in an article to be published next week on the stations of the Easter Octave.

Stational Churches of Holy Week: Holy Saturday

Collecta at St. John Lateran



Today, we consider the historical occurrences in Rome which surround Holy Saturday and the catechumens, taken from Blessed Ildefonso Schuster's The Sacramentary:

...Mass was not celebrated on this day, as the whole Church was watching in devout expectation until the night should come in which the mystery of Christ's resurrection should be celebrated.

Early in the morning of Holy Saturday at the Lateran, the archdeacon, having melted some wax, mixed it with chrism, blessed it and poured it into various small oval moulds, on which was impressed the figure of the mystical Lamb of God. These Agnus Dei were afterwards distributed to the faithful at the Mass on Saturday in Albis, as tokens and mementos of the paschal solemnity.

[...]

According to the Ordines Romani, at the hour of Terce on Holy Saturday the catechumens assembled once more at the Lateran in the Basilica of the Saviour, the men standing in a line on the right-hand side and the women on the left. The priest began by tracing the sign of the cross on their foreheads, then, laying his hands on the head of each, he recited the exorcism, Nec te lateat, Satana, which still forms part of the baptismal ritual for adults. After commanding Satan to depart... touched the ears and the nostrils of the catechumens with saliva...

The moment in which the catechumens went down into the baptismal font was the decisive point of the fight, and, in imitation of the athletes of the stadium, who anointed themselves with oil before the contest, the Church also anointed her heroes with the blessed oil of the catechumens in order to prepare them for the struggle.

The solemn hour had now come. In reply to the question of the Pontiff, "Dost thou renounce Satan?" each of the candidates, with his forefinger, pointing towards the West, the region of sunset, of shadows, and nocturnal darkness, said: "I renounce thee, O Satan, with all thy pomps and with all thy works." Then, turning to the East, the neophyte uttered the sacred formula of his consecration: "To thee do I dedicate myself, O Light uncreated."

After the priest had again laid his hand on the catechumens and pronounced another exorcism, there followed the solemn ceremony of the redditio symboli, in which the candidates made their profession of the Christian faith according to the form previously explained to them by the Pope at the station in aperitione aurium at St. Paul on the Wednesday before Passion Sunday.