Kicking St Irenaeus Around

June 28 is traditionally the feast day of Pope St Leo II, who died on that day in 683, after a reign of less than 11 months. The Liber Pontificalis records that on the previous day he celebrated the ordination of nine priests, three deacons, and twenty-three bishops; it is not said that it was the ordination ceremony that killed him, but the heat of Rome in June and the inevitable length of such a ceremony make this seem likely more than coincidence. The principal achievement of his pontificate was the confirmation of the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the third of Constantinople, which condemned the Monothelite heresy; being fluent in Greek as well as Latin, he personally made the official Latin translation of the council’s acts. It is one of the oddities of hagiography that his predecessor St Agatho, in whose reign the council was held, and whose intervention (through his legates) in its deliberations was acclaimed with the words “Peter has spoken through Agatho!”, has never been honored with a general feast day in the West, but is kept on the Byzantine Calendar. Leo, on the other, was a Sicilian, and therefore born as a subject of the Byzantine Empire, but is not liturgically honored in the East.

In this altar in St Peter’s Basilica are kept the relics of three Sainted Popes named Leo, the Second (682-3), the Third (795-816) and the Fourth (847-55). The altar of Pope St Leo I (440-61) is right next to it, and Pope Leo XII (1823-29) is buried in the floor between them.

Even older than the feast of Pope Leo is the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. The vigils of the Saints originally consisted solely of a Mass, penitential in character, celebrated after None in violet vestments, without a Gloria, Alleluia or Creed; prior to the Tridentine reform, they had no presence in the Office in the Use of Rome. (Back when there were plenty of canonical and monastic churches, such foundations would have celebrated two Masses in choir, that of St Leo after Terce, and that of the vigil after None, just as was done with the feasts of Saints which occur in Lent.) In the Breviary of St Pius V, vigils were extended to the Office, following a custom of medieval German Uses, an unusual example of change in an otherwise very conservative reform. At Matins, a homily on the day’s Gospel is read, and the prayer of the vigil Mass is said at the Hours; everything else is done as on the feria until Vespers, which are the First Vespers of the feast. However, the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul, because it coincides with St Leo, was reduced in the Office to one lesson at Matins (the ninth) and a commemoration at Lauds.

At Lyon, the ancient primatial see of Gaul, the day was kept as the feast of St Irenaeus, and the vigil as a commemoration. In his book On Illustrious Men, St Jerome mentions the famous martyrdom of St Pothinus, who was Irenaeus’ predecessor in the See of Lyon, but says nothing about the latter’s death, the date and circumstances of which are unknown; it is a rather later tradition that he died a martyr. It may very well be that his feast found its way to the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul at Lyon because of the famous passage in his book Against the Heresies (3.3.2) in which he attests to the primacy of the Roman See as follows. “For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority – that is, the faithful everywhere – inasmuch as the Apostolic Tradition has been preserved continuously by those who are everywhere.” In 1921, Pope Benedict XV extended his feast to the general Calendar on his traditional Lyonese date, moving Pope Leo II to July 3rd, the next free day on the calendar, and the day of his burial according to the Liber Pontificalis.

The crypt of the church of St Irenaeus at Lyon. In 1562, the church was severely damaged by the Huguenots, who also destroyed the Saint’s relics, and played a game of soccer with his skull. After more destruction in the revolution, it was rebuilt in 1824, and the crypt renovated in 1863. Despite these vicissitudes, the crypt may still be regarded as one of the oldest religious buildings in France; relics of certain local martyrs were venerated there already in the later part of the 5th century. The church was originally dedicated to St John the Baptist. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Xavier Caré.)

In the Breviary Reform of 1960, St Irenaeus was moved to July 3rd, and Pope Leo II suppressed, in order to free June 28th up entirely for the Mass and Office of the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. This was fundamentally a rather odd thing to do, since so many of the vigils then on the general Calendar, (including all those of the other Apostles, and, inexcusably, those of the Epiphany and All Saints) were abolished by the same reform. Less than a decade later, however, with the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, vigils in the classic Roman sense, penitential days of preparation for the major feasts, were simply abolished altogether, “freeing” June 28th from the one observance which had hitherto been absolutely universal on that date, the vigil of Ss Peter and Paul. St Irenaeus was therefore moved back to that date, freeing July 3rd for the transfer of the Apostle St Thomas from his historical Roman date, December 21st, to the date on which the Syrian church commemorates the transfer of his relics from India to Edessa.

This may seem to be just another case of what Fr Hunwicke once described as the freezing in pack ice of the Roman calendar, which keeps Irenaeus on a day which he held for ten years, while the post-Conciliar Rite has restored him to his historical Lyonese date. It should be noted, however, that Lyon itself moved his feast 4 times. After it had been kept on June 28th for centuries, Archbishop Camille de Neufville de Villeroy (1654-93) formally raised St Irenaeus to the title of Patron of the archdiocese, and moved his feast to November 23rd, displacing the very ancient feast of Pope St Clement. Patronal feasts were holy days of obligation in the Ancien Régime, and since adding another holiday to the end of June, right in the middle of harvest season, was judged excessive, his feast was transferred. (Thanks to Mr Gerhard Eger, one of the authors of Canticum Salomonis, for this information.) In the Neo-Gallican reform of Abp Antoine de Montazet (1758-88), which was a catastrophe for the Use of Lyon, it was fixed to the Sunday after the feast of Ss Peter and Paul. In the 1860s, the Missale Romano-Lugdunense was promulgated (basically the Missal of St Pius V, with a great many Lyonese customs added to it, including the rites of Holy Week), and St Irenaeus was fixed to July 3rd. Finally, in the 20th century, he was returned to his traditional date.

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 2: Saints Leo II, III and IV

This is the second installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click here to read part 1.

St Leo II reigned for less than 11 months, from August of 682 to June of 683. The most important deed of his pontificate was the confirmation of the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the third to be held in Constantinople, which condemned the Monothelite heresy; being fluent in Greek as well as Latin, Leo personally made the official Latin translation of the council’s acts. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, St Leo I’s letter was acclaimed with the words, “Peter has spoken through Leo,” and likewise at Third Constantinople, the intervention of Leo II’s predecessor St Agatho (through his legates) was acclaimed with the words “Peter has spoken through Agatho!” It is one of the oddities of hagiography that the latter has never been honored with a general feast day in the West, but is kept on the calendar of the Byzantine Rite. Leo II, on the other hand, was a Sicilian, and therefore born as a subject of the Byzantine Empire, but is not liturgically honored in the East.

The collection of papal biographies known as the Liber Pontificalis is practically the only source of information about him, and gives few other details of real interest. He was highly skilled in rhetoric and music, and noted for his love and care for the poor. He built a church in the area of Rome now known as the Velabro, dedicated to St Sebastian, and later also to St George, whence its common title “San Giorgio in Velabro.” (Because George is the patron of England, Leo XIII gave it to St John Henry Newman as his cardinalitial title.)

San Giorgio in Velabro (seen though the nearby Arch of Janus), 1820, by the Dutch painter Antonie Sminck Pitloo (1790-1837).

On the Saturday before the feast of Ss Peter and Paul, June 27, 683, he celebrated the ordination of nine priests, three deacons, and twenty-three bishops, and then died the next day. The Liber Pontificalis does not say that it was the ordination ceremony that killed him, but the heat of Rome in June and the inevitable length of such a ceremony make this seem likely more than coincidence. June 28th is his traditional feast day, but he was moved in 1921 to July 3rd to make room for St Irenaeus of Lyon, and then suppressed altogether in 1960.

St Leo III (795-816), a native of Rome, possibly of either Greek or Arab descent, was appointed as the cardinal priest of the church of St Susanna by St Adrian I, who reigned for 23 years and almost 11 months, and held the title of longest-reigning Pope (after St Peter) for over a millennium. Adrian died on Christmas of 795; the very next day, after his funeral and burial, Leo was elected by a unanimous vote to succeed him, and would reign for nearly 20 years and a half, the 12th-longest papal reign.

In 799, there occurred a very shocking incident which, although it was resolved for the good, was nevertheless a harbinger of the terrible state to which Rome and the papacy would devolve in the 10th century, the first in which there is no canonized or blessed Pope. A group of nobles disaffected with Leo’s reign, led by some of Adrian’s family, attacked the Pope during the Great Rogation procession, and attempted to render him incapable of performing the duties of his office by blinding him and cutting out his tongue. The attempt failed, and although Leo was injured, he recovered very quickly, but very naturally decided to flee to the court of Charlemagne, who as king of the Franks, had long been the protector of the papacy.

The Oath of Pope St Leo III, 1516-17; fresco by the workshop of Raphael within the apartments of Pope Julius II, known as the Stanze of Raphael, now part of the Vatican Museums.  

The following year, Leo returned to Rome, escorted by Charlemagne’s troops, and a commission was appointed to investigate the attack. The pope’s enemies retaliated by bringing charges of such gravity against him, involving perjury and adultery, that the matter was referred back to Charlemagne, who soon came to Rome in person. A synod was called together in St Peter’s basilica, with the king himself being present. The pope’s accusers did not dare to appear, and the assembled bishops declared that they had no right to sit in judgment of him; nevertheless, Leo solemnly swore to his innocence before the synod on December 23rd.

Two days later, on Christmas Day, Leo crowned Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans in St Peter’s, the event traditionally recognized as the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire. This alliance of Church and State brought many benefits to both, and it would be foolishly cynical to represent it, as has often been done, as no more than Leo’s attempt to strengthen his own position by strengthening that of his protector. But it also revealed a growing problem, that the position of the papacy was dependent on that of the empire, and as the latter grew progressively weaker after Charlemagne’s death, so did the former; whence also the unedifying spectacle of Rome in the 10th century, which includes the reigns of Leos V-VIII.

The Coronation of Charlemagne, 1514-15, also by the workshop of Raphael; this fresco is on the wall next to the one shown above.

As a final matter of note, pertaining to the Filioque controversy, Leo accepted what had by his time become the common understanding in the West, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But he advised against adding the word “Filioque” to the Nicene Creed, which had become the custom in various places, including Charlemagne’s court, and did not allow it to be said in Rome itself.

St Leo IV, also a native of Rome, was raised in one of the monasteries attached to St Peter’s basilica, and made cardinal-priest of the title of the Four Crowned Martyrs on the Caelian Hill by Pope Sergius II, whom he succeeded in April of 847.

In his time, Saracen pirates were wreaking havoc throughout the western Mediterranean; the year before his election, they had sailed up the Tiber and sacked the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, destroying at least a large portion of the Apostle’s relics. His papacy began with the construction of major works to defend Rome, including a new set of walls around the Vatican, which are still called the Leonine walls to this day, and the complex as a whole was known as the Leonine city. (This used to be the name of the bus stop in front of Cardinal Ratzinger’s old apartment building, ‘Città Leonina’ in Italian.)

In the year of his election, he put out a fire which had broken out in the Borgo, the neighborhood in front of the Vatican, by giving his blessing from the balcony of St Peter’s. Two years later, he formed a league with the maritime states of Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi; at the battle of Ostia, their combined naval forces destroyed a massive Saracen invasion force which had set out from Sardinia. Both of these events are depicted in one of the rooms now within the Vatican Museums known as the Stanze of Raphael, but these specific paintings are really the works of his students.

The Fire in the Borgo, by the workshop of Raphael, 1514-17. The three male figures on the left are a nod to the story of Aeneas escaping from the burning of Troy; their exaggerated musculature, and that of the man next to them hanging from the wall, reflects the exaggerated influence of the recently discovered statue of Laocoön, which also greatly influenced the work of Michelangelo. This painting was much admired for the cleverly designed figure on the far right, the woman with a water-jar on her head, who has just turned the corner, and opens her mouth in astonishment at the scene. ~ A few years prior to the commissioning of this painting, Pope Julius II and his architect Donatello Bramante had begun the process of replacing the ancient basilica of St Peter, then almost on the point of collapse. This image is an important historical record of what its façade looked like at the time.

The Battle of Ostia, also by the workshop of Raphael, 1514-15. Pope St Leo IV presides over the battle from the far left in cope and papal tiara, as one does; his face is that of the contemporary Pope, Leo X Medici.

The Liber Pontificalis contains an enormous list of his works in and benefactions to Roman churches, and he translated the relics of many Saints from the catacombs outside the city to churches within it. He is also traditionally, but erroneously, credited with the invention of the Asperges rite, and the sermon on the duties of priests which the Pontificale appoints to be read by the bishop at their ordination. He died on July 17, 855.

In the southwest corner of St Peter’s basilica, immediately to the left of the altar of Pope St Leo I, stands the altar of the Madonna of the Column, a votive image painted on one of the columns of the Constantinian Basilica of St Peter. In the process of tearing down the ancient church and rebuilding it, the section of the column with the fresco of the Virgin and Child was saved, and later mounted within this reredos; the relics of Popes Leo II, III and IV are in the altar, which is also dedicated to them.

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 1: Introduction, and St Leo I

The ancient Romans had a saying, “Nomen est omen – a name is a sign”, i.e., a presage about the person who bears it. Of course, this is not always or in all ways true; during my very sleepy teenage years, my mother used to joke that Gregory, which derives from the Greek word for “watchful”, was about as inappropriate a name as they come. But it is a tradition solidly grounded in the Sacred Scriptures, where there are many significant names, the greatest of all being, of course, the Holy Name of Jesus, which means “salvation”; and likewise, significant name changes, most notably that of St Peter.

Christ Consigning the Keys to St Peter, 1481/82, by Pietro Perugino, a fresco on the right wall of the Sistine Chapel.

It occurred to me, therefore, that it might be interesting to take a look at the histories of the Popes named Leo, especially since the new Pope himself has said that he chose his new name in reference to Leo XIII, who “in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” (If His Holiness declares a crusade against so-called “artificial intelligence”, he shall find no more enthusiastic supporter than myself; and if he decides to expropriate the term “Butlerian jihad” for it, I shall cheer for him all the more loudly.)

First, some statistics. As of last week’s election, Leo is tied with Clement as the fourth most common papal name, behind John, Gregory and Benedict. Five of these, the first through fourth and the ninth, are Saints. Leos V-VIII reigned within a span of about 62 years in the 10th century, the first century in which there is not a single canonized Pope, but three of them for less than a year. The first eight lived before it was the custom for popes to take a new name upon their election, so Leo was their baptismal name.

Since that custom took root in the mid-11th century, there have been at various points some clear trends in the choices of name. From 1046 to 1145, thirteen of the eighteen Popes were “second of his name”, followed by eight “thirds” out of eleven from 1145 to 1227. From 1644-1774, there were 14 popes, all of whom were called either Innocent, Alexander, Clement, or Benedict. (Three of those names have not been used again since that period.) Seven of the twelve Piuses reigned within the 183-year span from 1775 to 1958, occupying almost 128 of those years.

Leo, however, has never been a fashionable name in that sense. The reign of St Leo IX was a watershed in the history of the papacy, and very much for the good, despite its relative brevity (five years and two months), but his name was not taken again for over four and a half centuries. XI called himself Leo in honor of X, who was related to him, and it then went into abeyance again for almost 220 years.

Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903)

Almost every series I have ever planned for NLM has been revised along the way, but for now, the plan is to cover just Leo I, a titanically important figure, in this article, followed by the next three Sainted Leos, then the four who reigned in the 10th century, Leo IX, the two Medicis (X and XI), and the two in the 19th century, XII and XIII.

St Leo I was Pope from September of 440 to November of 461, the tenth longest reign in the Church’s history. He is one of three popes traditionally known as “the Great”, along with Ss Gregory I (590-604) and Nicholas I (858-67), and with the former, one of only two recognized as Doctors of the Church, although this honor was not accorded to him until 1754. He is the first pope of whose theological writings we possess a really substantial corpus, in the form of nearly 100 sermons and over 140 letters.

He was born in Rome ca. 400, and is said to have been of a Tuscan family, but we know nothing of his early life. As a deacon of the Roman church under the sainted Popes Celestine I (422-32) and Sixtus III (432-40), he was already a very prominent figure, and received letters from St Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, and the great monastic writer John Cassian. It has been speculated that he was the theological mind behind the mosaic program of the basilica of St Mary Major, built in the wake of the Council of Ephesus (431) as Pope Sixtus III’s response to the Nestorian heresy. He was elected to the papacy from the diaconate, a common event in those days, while on a mission as a peace envoy in Gaul.

The central section of the mosaic arch above the altar in the basilica of St Mary Major, ca. 432 AD, with the throne of Christ, (the motif known as an etimasia), Ss Peter and Paul, and the symbolic animals which represent the four evangelists. Below them, the inscription reads “Xystus (the original form of ‘Sixtus’) the bishop for the people of God.” The Apostles are dressed as Roman senators; paired with “the people of God” in the inscription, this makes for a Christian version of the formal name of the Roman state, “the Senate and the Roman people”, a declaration that the Christian polity will outlast the collapsing Roman polity. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by RightLeft Medieval Art, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Much of St Leo’s preaching and letter-writing was occupied with combatting the various heresies afflicting the Church in his time: not just the on-going Christological controversies, but also Pelagianism, and the Gnostic sects of the Priscillianists, who were growing in Spain, and the Manichaeans. (On discovering the existence of a group of the latter in Rome itself, he made the reception of the chalice at Mass mandatory as a way of chivying them out, since the Manichaeans abominated the consumption of wine.) Unsurprisingly, the authority of the chief of the Apostles, and of his successor, the bishop of Rome, is a frequent theme in his works, and the Roman Rite has traditionally read his sermons in the Divine Office on the various feasts of St Peter.

The Christological controversies entered a new phase during his pontificate with the invention of yet another new heresy in Constantinople. This was the creation of an abbot called Eutyches, which later came to be known as Monophysitism, the denial of the two natures, divine and human, in the one person of Christ. A second council was called together at Ephesus in 449, the infamous “latrocinium – robber-synod”, as Leo called it, in which Flavian, the orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, was subjected to such violence by the heretics that he died of his injuries not long afterwards. (He is venerated by the Church as a martyr.) Leo’s legates (one of whom, his archdeacon Hilarius, would succeed him as Pope) were forcibly prevented from reading his letter to the council, and barely escaped with their lives.

Leo himself immediately declared the council to be null and void, and wrote a letter to the emperor Theodosius II, demanding that he cease interfering with matters that fall under the authority of the Church and its bishops. Two years later, with the coming of a new emperor to the throne, and with the support of his wife, the Empress St Pulcheria, the orthodox faith was vindicated at the fourth ecumenical council, that of Chalcedon, at which Leo’s letter, known as the “Tome to Flavian”, was acclaimed with the words, “Peter has spoken through Leo.”

Contemplating the serene beauty of St Mary Major, it is difficult to imagine that when it was built, the Western Roman Empire was dangerously unstable, and close to its end. Rome had already been sacked by the Visigoths in 410, the first time it had been attacked by a foreign enemy in 800 years. In 452, just one year after the Council of Chalcedon, the Huns under Attila entered Italy, and after successfully plundering Aquileia, Milan and Pavia, turned their sights towards the capital. The military was powerless to oppose them, and it was the Pope to whom the emperor and senate turned to intervene. Leo headed north and encountered Attila near Mantua; the exact words of their meeting have not been recorded, but he was somehow able to persuade the Hun to leave Italy in exchange for a tribute. (A later tradition, repeated in the breviary, and often represented in art, but completely unhistorical, has it that the Apostles Peter and Paul appeared over Leo with swords in their hands as a way of warning Attila off.)

The Meeting of Pope St Leo I and Attila the Hun, 1514, by Raphael and students (more the latter than the former), a fresco within the rooms of Pope Julius II, now part of the Vatican Museums.

When the Vandals arrived at the gates of Rome three years later, Leo was unable to persuade them to leave off as he had Attila, but he did at least get them to refrain from massacring civilians and burning the city. The remaining six years of his reign were much occupied with repairing the ensuing damage, especially to the churches, and to recovering the captives whom the Vandals had taken with them back to Africa. The Liber Pontificalis records that he donated new silver vessels to the churches of Rome after the sack, and renovated the “Constantinian basilica”, i.e., the cathedral of Rome, not yet called St John Lateran, as well as the basilicas of Ss Peter and Paul, establishing a monastery at the former.

The addition of the words “sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam” to the Canon is traditionally ascribed to him, but it must be said that the liturgical notices given in the Liber Pontificalis are quite unreliable. The oldest collection of Roman liturgical texts, a manuscript preserved in the capitular library of the cathedral of Verona, contains several prayers which are unmistakably based on his sermons. For this reason, its discoverer, a canon of Verona named Giuseppe Bianchini (1704-64), called it the “Leonine” sacramentary, but it is not a sacramentary, and was certainly compiled rather later than Leo’s time.

Pope St Leo I, by Francisco Herrera the Younger (1627-85)

Despite his importance, devotion to Pope Leo as a saint, both as formally expressed in the liturgy and on a popular level, has never been very prominent, especially in comparison with St Gregory. His feast day is missing from many of the earliest liturgical books of the Roman Rite, he is represented far less often in art, and, as noted above, he was not declared a Doctor of the Church until the mid-18th century. He is, however, one of the few Roman popes celebrated in the Byzantine Rite, on February 18th. In the West, the traditional day of his feast is April 11th, which is believed to be the date of one of the translations of his relics, although there is some uncertainty on this point. In the post-Conciliar Rite, his feast is kept on November 10th, the anniversary of his death. His relics are in an altar in the southwest corner of St Peter’s basilica; those of Ss Leo II, III and IV, who will be the subjects of the next article in this series, are together in the altar immediately next to it on the left.

The altar of Pope St Leo I in St Peter’s basilica. 

The Pope Elected by a Bird

In his Ecclesiastical History 6.29.2-4, Eusebius of Caesarea recounts the following story about the election in A.D. 236 of Pope St Fabian, whose feast is today.

Pope St Fabian and St Sebastian, who shares his feast day in the Roman Rite. ca. 1475 by the Italian painter Giovanni di Paolo. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) 

“They say that Fabian … was chosen to the office (of the Papacy) through a most wonderful manifestation of divine and heavenly grace. For when all the brethren had assembled to select by vote him who should succeed to the episcopate of the church, several renowned and honorable men were in the minds of many, but Fabian, although present, was in the mind of none. But they relate that suddenly a dove flying down lighted on his head, resembling the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Savior in the form of a dove. Thereupon all the people, as if moved by one Divine Spirit, with all eagerness and unanimity cried out that he was worthy, and without delay they took him and placed him upon the episcopal seat.”

St Fabian was martyred on this day in A.D. 250, during the persecution of the Emperor Decius, and buried in a crypt in the catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way. In 1854, the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi (whom the Italians like to call “the Columbus of the Catacombs”) rediscovered this catacomb; the funerary inscriptions of several Popes, including Fabian, were preserved in the crypt. “ΦΑΒΙΑΝΟϹ ΕΠΙ[CΚΟΠΟC] Μ[ΑΡΤΥ]Ρ – Fabian, bishop and martyr.”

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Dnalor 01, CC BY-SA 3.0

A Litany for the Holy Father

With the upcoming Synod, so many needs and crises in the Church, and, in general, out of our piety as Catholics towards the Holy Father, we should be praying for Pope Francis more than ever these days.

I was therefore delighted when Dom Benedict Andersen, a monk of Silverstream Priory in Ireland, sent me this beautiful "Litany for the Holy Father," which invokes every canonized or beatified pope in the history of the Church. The Litany is divided up according to days, with repeated opening and closing sections.

According to Dom Benedict, readers should feel free to print this on their own, but Silverstream does have nicely printed copies available (suggested donation, 1 dollar or 1 euro each).