Dear Friends of the Church Music Association of America and The New Liturgical Movement,
We know that, along with those of us on staff and on the board of directors, you have been mourning the recent death of our beloved president, William P. Mahrt. Thank you all for your messages of condolence and remembrances that have been shared.
In striving to move forward in the leadership of the organization Dr. Mahrt loved so much, the Board of Directors has elected Rev. Robert Pasley as our new President of the Board of Directors to lead the organization as we move forward.
Fr. Pasley has acted as an officer of the board for many years. After first becoming introduced to the beauty of sacred music in the liturgy by Fr. Richard Schuler, of St. Agnes Parish (St. Paul, Minnesota), editor of Sacred Music, he became a loyal member and was identified early on as a leader. As Vice President many years ago, when Fr. Robert Skeris was the Association’s President, he was there, signing the documents for the CMAA’s incorporation in Virginia. He attended the very first Sacred Music Colloquium and has attended nearly all of them in the years since. Eighteen years ago, when Dr. William Mahrt was elected as CMAA board President and Dr. Horst Buchholz as Vice President, Fr. Pasley took the position of Chaplain. He has served faithfully as a spiritual guide and officer ever since.
As many of you know from your attendance at the Colloquia, both in-person and online, Fr. Pasley has been a leader and source of encouragement to all of us in our work to promote sacred music, through his input on the planning of all our events, the management of all our liturgies, and his sharing of his experience with us through breakouts, talks at our events, and online spiritual reflections. We are so grateful he was willing to accept this new leadership role. He will also continue to serve as Chaplain.
After eighteen years of service to the Church Music Association of America, Dr. Horst Buchholz has decided to retire from his position as Vice President. The entire board of directors is so grateful for his generous gift of his time, valuable guidance and experience during these many years.
The board has elected Dr. Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka to take on the job of Vice President of the Board of Directors, and she has also been assigned the position of Director of Publications by Fr. Pasley, as one of his first actions as our new president. In these new roles, she will continue to assist the president in the management of the organization and will also continue her work in creating and promoting new publications for the benefit of church musicians.
Dr. Donelson-Nowicka has been a “member-at-large” of the Board of Directors since 2014. Since 2012, she has served as managing editor of the Sacred Music journal, working closely with editor William Mahrt to faithfully publish the journal in the years since. She has also worked on all our recent publications and new projects (such as The Parish Book of Motets and the Parish Book of Chant recording project, as well as our upcoming new publication, a collection of three-part motets). She has long been a member of the faculty at our events and has been a member of the event planning committee for several years. Known for her ability to accomplish more in less time than seems humanly possible, the board is very appreciative for her willingness to accept these new roles.
We ask for your prayers and support of our new officers as they take on the leadership of the organization in this new year.
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 domainimage 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.”
In the season after Epiphany, the texts of the Matins responsories are all taken from the book of Psalms, rather than from the Epistles of St Paul with which they are read. This group of responsories is unusual in that there are separate ones for each day of the week (a total of 24 originally), where normally, there are between 8-12, enough to occupy Sunday, often Monday, and sometimes Tuesday, after which they simply are repeated in order through the rest of the week.
The responsories given below in the winter volume of the Codex Hartker, a monastic antiphonary copied out at the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland, in or around the last decade of the 10th century. (St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 390, p. 84-85, cropped and joined; CC BY-NC 4.0)
When they were adopted into the monastic Office, a gap was left on Sunday, since the Roman Office has nine readings at Sunday Matins, but the monastic Office has twelve. Rather than reshuffle them, the monks composed three new ones for the third nocturn of Sunday, two of which are still used to this day in the Benedictine and Cistercian breviaries, but not that of the Carthusians. The first of these is entirely an ecclesiastical composition, meaning that the text is not taken from Scripture.
R. Afflicti pro peccatis nostris, quotidie cum lacrimis exspectemus finem nostrum; dolor cordis nostri ascendat ad te, Domine, * ut eruas nos a malis quae innovantur in nobis. V. Domine Deus Israel, exaudi preces nostras, auribus percipe dolorem cordis nostri. Ut eruas...
R. Afflicted for our sins, daily with tears let us await our end; let the grief of our heart ascend to Thee, o Lord, that thou mayest deliver us from the evil which are renewed in us. V. O Lord, God of Israel, hear our prayers, hearken unto the grief of our heart. That thou mayest deliver us…
This text was also set in polyphony by William Byrd; here it is performed by British vocal ensemble The Gesualdo Six.
The second responsory is also an ecclesiastical composition, but the verse is taken from an Old Latin version of Psalm 50.
R. Peccata mea, Domine, sicut sagittae infixa sunt in me; sed antequam vulnera generent in me; * sana me, Domine, medicamento paenitentiae, Deus. V. Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco, et delictum meum coram me est semper, quia tibi soli peccavi. Sed…
There are no Gregorian recordings of this one available on YouTube, but three very nice polyphonic ones. The first, by the Franco-Flemish composer Nicholas Gombert (1495 ca. - 1560 ca.) is here sung by an Austrian group called Beauty Farm, whose name and graphics both look like they were nicked from an ’80s alternative band, but they sing splendidly well.
R. My sins, o Lord, like arrows are fixed in me; but before they beget wounds within me, * heal me, o Lord God, with the medicine of penance. V. For I know my iniquity, and my crime is always before me, because to thee only have I sinned. But heal…
The second is by a contemporary of Gombert, Adrian Willaert (1490 ca. - 1562), who after working in various parts of Italy, spent the last 35 years of his life directing the music at the basilica of St Mark in Venice (then the “private” chapel of the doges, not the cathedral.) A story is told that when he arrived in Rome as a young man of about 25, he found that the choir of the Sistine Chapel was using one of his works, in the belief that it was by Josquin des Prez. It speaks very well indeed of his talent that his music could be mistaken for that of so great a composer as Josquin, but the members of the choir refused to perform it any more once they learned who the real author was.
The third setting is by the Neapolitan Giovanni Domenico Montella (1570 ca. - before July of 1607), a prolific composer who also worked as a lutenist in the court of the Spanish viceroy in his native city.
The third responsory was apparently never as widely used as the first two; it is not included in any of the currently used monastic offices, and no recording seems to be available.
R. Abscondi tamquam aurum peccata mea, et celavi in sinu meo iniquitatem meam. * Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. V. Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco, et delictum meum coram me est semper, quia tibi soli peccavi. Miserere…
R. I have hidden my sins like gold, and concealed my iniquity in my bosom; * Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. V. For I know my iniquity, and my crime is always before me, because to thee only have I sinned. Have mercy…
This is the third part of my response to a video by Dr Brant Pitre of the Augustine Institute on the subject of popular participation in the Mass. In the previous part, I explained the errors of his claims about the nature of the Roman stational Masses, and of an ancient document which describes them, and then, the erroneous contrast which he draws between them and the Masses celebrated in the papal chapel. By repeatedly calling the latter “private Masses”, without further qualification, he gives the false impression that these were exclusively low Masses, which had no place for the participation of the lay faithful. In this telling, such low Masses were then adopted by the Franciscans when they took on the specific form of the Roman liturgy used in the papal chapel.
At 26:10, Dr Pitre says about this liturgical form that it doesn’t have “any clear directive for how the people are supposed to be engaged, because the people by and large were not present at private Masses in the papal chapel.” Therefore, when the Franciscans spread this specific form of the liturgy throughout Europe, they effectively injected into the Church’s bloodstream a habit of lay non-participation in the Mass. (This is my metaphor, not his.)
As noted by Fr Uwe Michael Lang in the very book of his which Dr Pitre cites, liturgical books properly so-called (the ancient sacramentaries, the missals which derive from them, chant books, lectionaries etc.), have never contained directives for the people’s participation. The document to which Dr Pitre hitherto referred as a witness to popular participation, the Ordo Romanus Primus, is not a liturgical book properly so-called, but an early form of ceremonial manual, and the contrast which he draws between it and the liturgical books of the papal court (adopted by the Franciscans) is a category error. (As I noted in the previous article, he also greatly exaggerates the degree to which it is concerned with the people’s participation.)
Secondly, we must stop for a moment to contemplate the manifest absurdity of these claims about the Franciscans; above all, the claim that as a “missionary order”, they set out to evangelize the people by giving them a liturgy which excluded them from the active participation in the liturgy to which they had hitherto been habituated for centuries. I do not ascribe to Dr Pitre any deliberate falsehood; I am certain that he has been led astray by the bad scholarship on the liturgy and its history which has reigned supreme for centuries. Objectively, however, this is an atrocious calumny against one of the Church’s greatest religious orders.
Part of a fresco by Cimabue, painted between 1285 and 1288 in the lower basilica of St Francis in Assisi; this is one of the oldest likenesses of Francis that exists, and is held by many to be the closest known representation of what he actually looked like.
And this in turn leads to a greater question: if this were really how things developed, how did the Franciscans and their liturgy come to be so popular in the first place, “spread(ing) like wildfire throughout Europe”? (26:20) Like the other mendicant orders, they were established almost entirely in large cities. This means that their congregations had plenty of other churches they could attend, churches where (even if this fictitious history were true) the high degree of popular participation which they had known hitherto would have remained.
In reality, the papal liturgy was already beginning to spread before the Franciscans were founded. As noted by Dr Donald Prudlo in a forthcoming publication (A Companion to the History of the Roman Curia, chapter 7), permission to use it was granted to two orders before them, the Hospitaler Order of the Holy Spirit and the Augustinian hermits, and it was imposed upon the canons of Genoa cathedral. In 1204, it was adopted by the bishop of Assisi for his whole diocese, which is how St Francis himself had come to know it, long before he ever laid the foundation of what would become his order.
Dr Pitre says very little about the Franciscans’ supposed motives for doing as he claims they did, a point which he certainly ought to have explicated further, given its central importance to his narrative. But he does say, immediately after mentioning their adoption of the papal liturgy (25:44), that they were “a missionary order, they don’t stay in one place.” Said thus, without further qualification, this is a grotesque exaggeration. It is true that the mendicant orders did not formally keep the Benedictine rule of stability, but nevertheless, the great majority of their members spent their whole lives in their order’s house in or near their native place. Only the cream of their crops, great scholars like St Thomas Aquinas or great preachers like St Bernardine of Siena, traveled widely, and even then, most itinerant preachers were limited to their own province.
Dr Pitre then goes on to claim that “the Mass which most people are going to experience and become familiar with after the great missionary efforts of the Franciscans is a private (his verbal emphasis) Mass in which the priest and server (note the singular) would be able to celebrate anywhere at any chapel as they are traveling throughout Europe spreading the Gospel.” Of course, the Franciscans’ liturgical practice certainly exercised some influence on the liturgical culture of the Roman Rite in general outside their own churches. But to claim that it became what “most people experienced” is a gross oversimplification. However large and widespread the mendicant orders may have been, they were always vastly outnumbered by secular clergy and monks.
The upper basilica of St Francis in Assisi. Also not designed for low Mass.
Note also how the emphasis on the term “private” gives the impression that what the Franciscans were doing was mostly low Mass, a false impression, reinforced in its falsehood by the reduction, within a minute, of “just the priest and whatever servers or ministers (plural) might be assisting” (26:02) to “the priest and server (singular).” (27:05)
Of course, no anti-history of the liturgy would be complete without a substantial misrepresentation of the role of the Council of Trent. (27:22) “And it’s going to be that private form of the Mass that will be ultimately adopted by the Council of Trent in 1570, whenever (sic) it publishes its official Missal of Pope St Pius V.” The Council of Trent ended in 1563, having left as its sole directive on the reform of the liturgy that this was a matter to be left to the Holy See. Dr Pitre claims that this explains why all the editions of the Missal between Trent and Vatican II contain rubrics for the clergy and “server” (again, in the singular), but contains no mention of the people. This is also false. The so-called Tridentine Missal makes no mention of the people’s role in the liturgy because, as noted above, the liturgical books never mentioned it.
Starting at 28:10, Dr Pitre lays the parts of the Mass out in a chart, and notes how the Missal of St Pius V and subsequent editions assign them to the priest and the “server”, again in the singular, reinforcing the false impression that this Missal is concerned only with low Mass. No mention is made of the many rubrics that pertain to the solemn or sung Mass, which was still the daily norm in thousands of churches of the Roman Rite when that Missal was published.
A page of the rite of Mass in the rubrics of the Missal of St Pius V; the section in italics at the lower right describes the beginning of the solemn Mass.
This error in genere is compounded with several other errors in specie. Dr Pitre notes that the Confiteor is said by the priest and server, without mentioning that it had never been an audible part of the normative, i.e. sung form of Mass. He draws particular attention to the fact the readings were said facing the altar because there were no people present to read them to in the papal chapel. “It’s a private Mass.” But the readings were never done facing the people per se, and while there may not have been laypeople present for the services in the papal chapel, there were still plenty of members of the papal household present.
He claims that there is no sermon in the Missal, because there is no one to preach to. This is also wrong; then as now, the papal household had its own full-time preacher, and often hosted guest preachers. But even as he says this, a citation appears on the screen from Fr Joseph Jungmann’s Mass of the Roman Rite that a rubric was added in the first revised edition (issued by Clement VIII in 1604) which specified the place of the sermon. Again, the liturgical books never specified the place of the sermon before this; even his putative model of popular participation, the Ordo Romanus Primus, makes no mention of it at all.
The simple truth is this: the notion that the sermon is an intrinsic part of the Mass is a conceit of the post-Conciliar reform. One can debate whether it has been a fruitful conceit or not, but any claim that it has a solid tradition behind it is false.
The nave of the church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Rome, commonly known as ‘il Gesù’, the principle Jesuit church in the city. Note the position of the preaching pulpit, which is nowhere near the sanctuary. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Finoskov, CC BY-SA 4.0.)
Just as Dr Pitre previously claimed that the readings were anciently done facing the people, without, apparently, looking at the placement of the ambos in the ancient Roman basilicas, he seems to have made a claim about sermons in the Counter-Reformation period without looking at the placement of the pulpits in the churches of that era. Many Counter-Reformation churches have pulpits out in the nave because the sermons were often quite long and delivered with great rhetorical energy, such that on a practical level, the preacher could really only do them once. The church would therefore have two Masses, with the sermon between them, so that the faithful could come for Mass and stay for the sermon, or come for the sermon and stay for Mass. (Perhaps we should ask the harried priests today who say five Masses in three churches on a weekend, and have to deliver the same sermon five times, whether this custom might have had some merit to it.)
This goes on for a couple of more minutes, but what it all amounts to is that the Missal of St Pius V does not do a thing which no liturgical book of the Roman Rite had ever done, namely, to formally define the role of the faithful in liturgical participation. This long series of errors culminates in the claim that this form of the Mass, which he has thus far mispresented on almost every count, was “spread throughout Europe by the Council of Trent.”
As an aside, this contradicts his earlier claim that it has already been spread throughout Europe by the Franciscans: “the Mass which most people are going to experience and become familiar with after the great missionary efforts of the Franciscans…” More importantly, the Missal which was produced by St Pius V (not the Council of Trent) was not imposed on any church (be it a cathedral, a canonry, a monastery, etc.) which could demonstrate that its own liturgical usage was at least 200 years old. As the wise Fr Hunwicke beatae memoriae explained many times, all such institutions were permitted to pass over to the use of the new Roman books, but only with the unanimous consent of the bishop and chapter. They were not required to do so, and many did not, including the other most influential mendicant order, the Dominicans. So I will simply add that in regard to popular participation, the Missal of St Pius V is just as silent as the local Missals which it did replace were (e.g. that of Sarum), and had always been.
In any defense of the post-Conciliar reform, it is of course necessary to mispresent the history of the liturgy in the Tridentine period, and on this score, Dr Pitre continues to disappoint. His remaining false claims will be addressed in the next part of this series.
The feast of St Peter’s Chair was originally kept on one of two dates. Some sources, going back to the fourth century, attest to it on January 18th, among them, an ancient Martyrology formerly attributed to St. Jerome. Others place it on February 22nd, such as the Philocalian Calendar, which contains an equally ancient list of liturgical celebrations. It is not at all clear why exactly the same feast is found on two different dates, and even less clear why a surprising number of early Roman sacramentaries and lectionaries make no reference to it at all. However, in the later Middle Ages, the January 18th observance had been almost completely forgotten, and the liturgical books of the period before the Council of Trent, even those of the Ambrosian and Mozarabic Rites, are nearly unanimous in keeping the feast on February 22.
In 1558, Pope Paul IV (pictured right), a strong promoter of the Counter-Reformation, added a second feast of St Peter’s Chair to the calendar, on January 18: a response, of course, to the early Protestant Reformers’ rejection of the governing authority of the See of Peter and the bishop of Rome. The newly restored feast was assigned to the day given in the ancient manuscripts, particularly the Martyrology “of St. Jerome,” which the scholars of the era regarded as an especially important witness to the traditions of the Roman Church, where Jerome had once live and served as secretary to the Pope.
Although it was then a very new custom to keep two feasts of St Peter’s Chair, both were included in the revised Breviary called for by the Council of Trent, and issued at Rome in 1568 under the authority of Pope St Pius V. January 18th was now qualified, in accordance with the evidence of certain manuscripts, as the feast of St. Peter’s Chair in Rome, while February 22 was renamed St Peter’s Chair at Antioch, where the Prince of the Apostles was also the first bishop, and where “the disciples were first given the name Christian.” (Acts 11, 25) It should be noted that although the January feast was the more recent in terms of the liturgical practice of not just Rome, but the entire Latin Rite, the more important of the two titles is assigned to it, rather than to the better-established feast in February.
January 18th falls eight days before the Conversion of St Paul; the restoration of a feast of St Peter to this day was also certainly intended to reinforce the traditional liturgical association of the two Apostolic founders of the church in Rome. The early Protestants claimed justification for their teachings in the writings of St. Paul, several of which became for Luther a “canon within the canon” of the Bible. The two feasts, therefore, form a unit by which overemphasis on Paul is corrected by a renewed emphasis on the ministry of Peter. In accordance with the same tradition, the Use of Rome has long added to each feast of either Apostle a commemoration of the other; thus, the eight day period from January 18 to 25 begins with a feast of Peter and commemoration of Paul, and ends with a feast of Paul and commemoration of Peter.
The same day is also the feast of St Prisca, who remains in the Tridentine Breviary as a commemoration. It is possible, though by no means certain, that an ancient relic believed to be the actual chair of St Peter was first kept at or near the same catacomb where this obscure Roman martyr was buried, and later moved to the church on the Aventine hill dedicated to her. This basilica keeps its dedication feast on February 22; it is probably more than chance that both the feast and the dedication of St Prisca should be on days associated with St Peter’s Chair.
The former cathedral of Venice, San Pietro in Castello, also claims to possess a chair of St Peter, that of Antioch. Laying aside the question its authenticity, the writing on it is certainly Arabic, and of the 13th century.
The Breviary of St Pius V also added on January 24th a feast found in many medieval liturgical calendars, which, however, had not previously been kept at Rome itself, that of St Paul’s disciple Timothy. The addressee of two of the Pastoral Epistles, and the Apostle’s companion in so much of his missionary work, St Timothy is very often called an Apostle himself in medieval liturgical books, as is St Barnabas. In the Tridentine Breviary and Missal, he is given the titles Bishop and Martyr, since he was beaten to death by a mob in his episcopal city of Ephesus, many years after St Paul’s death. His feast forms a kind of vigil to the Conversion of St Paul; by this addition, each of the two great Apostles is accompanied, so to speak, by another Saint prominently associated with him.
Whether by coincidence or design, an interesting group of feasts occurs between that Ss Peter and Prisca on the one end, and Timothy and Paul on the other. January 19th is the feast of a group of Persian martyrs, Ss Marius and Martha, and their sons Audifax and Abacum. They were said to have come to Rome in the reign of the Emperor Claudius II (268-70), and after ministering to the martyrs in various ways, were themselves martyred on the Via Cornelia by decapitation.
January 20th is traditionally kept as the feast of two Saints who died in Rome on the same day, but many years apart. The first is Pope Fabian, who was elected in 236, although a laymen and a stranger to the city. According to Eusebius (Church History 6, 29), he entered the place where the election was being held, and a dove landed on his head; this was taken as a sign that he was the choice of the Holy Spirit, and he was forthwith made Pope. Fourteen years later, at the beginning of the first general persecution under the Emperor Decius, he was one of the first to be martyred. He shares his feast with St Sebastian, said to be a soldier of Milanese origin, as attested by St. Ambrose himself, but martyred in Rome in 286. The relics of St Fabian are kept in one of the chapels of the Roman basilica of St Sebastian, built over the latter’s grave in the mid-fourth century.
On the following day, the Church has kept since the fourth century the feast of one of Rome’s greatest martyrs, St Agnes, who was killed in the persecution of Diocletian at the age of twelve or thirteen. She is named in the Canon of the Mass, and a basilica built near her grave was one of the very first public churches in Rome, a project of the Emperor Constantine himself, along with those of Ss Peter and Paul, the Holy Cross, and St Lawrence.
St Vincent of Saragossa, another martyr of the last general persecution, has long been held in a special place of honor by the Church, along with his fellow deacons Ss Stephen and Lawrence, all three of them having been killed in particularly painful ways. The church of Rome added to his feast on January 22 a martyr from three centuries later, St Anastasius; he was a Persian who converted to Christianity after seeing the relics of the True Cross, which had been stolen from Jerusalem by the Persian king. This is a proper custom of the city of Rome itself, imitated by only in a handful of churches before the Tridentine reform. A church was built in his honor by the middle of the 10th century, directly across from the future site of one of the city’s most impressive monuments, the Trevi Fountain.
The 23rd of January was long dedicated to St Emerentiana, the foster-sister of St Agnes, whose murderers she bravely rebuked. While praying at her sister’s tomb two days after the latter’s martyrdom, she was spotted by a gang of pagan thugs, who stoned her to death. She was still a catechumen, but the Roman Breviary of 1529 states, “There is no doubt that she was baptized by her own blood, because she steadfastly accepted death for the defense of justice, while she confessed the Lord.” The mortal remains of both women are currently kept in a silver urn underneath the main altar of the church of St Agnes outside-the-Walls on the via Nomentana, and thus, on the very site of Emerentiana’s martyrdom. (Her feast is now a commemoration on the feast of St. Raymond of Penyafort.)
The Martyrdom of St. Emerentiana, shown on a late 14th century cup in the British Museum.
To sum up, therefore, Peter is accompanied by a Roman martyr, Paul by a martyr of one of the oldest Greek churches, that of Ephesus, where both he and St John the Evangelist had lived and preached. Between their two feasts are celebrated martyrs from the two extremes of the Christian world in antiquity, Persia and Spain; native Romans, one the highest authority in the Catholic Church, and one the least and last of its members; a Roman soldier from the venerable see of Milan, representing the might of the Empire, subjected to Christ; and a young woman who in the pagan world was a person of no standing at all, but in the Church is honored as one of its greatest and most heroic figures. The eight day period from January 18-25, then, becomes a celebration not just of the two Apostles who founded the church in the Eternal City, but of the universality of that church’s mission to “preside in charity” over the whole Church, as St Ignatius of Antioch says, and bring every person of whatever condition to salvation in Christ.
One of the most famous late medieval depictions of the Crucifixion is the central panel of the Isenheim altarpiece, painted by the German artist Matthias Grünewald (1470 ca. - 1528) between 1512-16. I call this work “late medieval” despite its date, because Grünewald completely ignores the elegant stylizations of his Italian Renaissance contemporaries, and shows us the reality of Our Lord’s sufferings very starkly indeed: the dislocation of His shoulders, the twisting of his Hands, the contortion of His face, the discoloration of His skin, etc. Marks of the flagellation cover His whole body, and the artist seems to have imagined that the scourging was done with briars, rather than a corded whip, leaving several pieces of wood still lodged in His flesh.
The altarpiece was commissioned for a monastery and hospital in Isenheim, a town about 57 miles to the south south-east of Strasbourg (now part of France, and generally spelled Issenheim). This institution belonged to an order of hospitalers founded in Vienne, France, at the end of the 11th century, and named after St Anthony the Abbot, whose feast is today. The order’s special duty was to care for those who suffered from the painful condition which in that era was called St Anthony’s fire, which is now called ergotism, since it results from long term ingestion of a fungus called ergot which was commonly found in rye and other cereals. As my colleague David Clayton has previously noted, Christ’s disfigurement here reflects those of the patients in the hospital, and is intended to encourage them to bear with their sufferings with patience and fortitude.
In the museum where it is now kept, the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, the altarpiece has been dismantled so that all of its sections can be seen. In its original placement in the monastery, this is how it was displayed most of the time.
St Anthony is depicted on the right wing, with a demon raging at him through the window next to his head, since Anthony spent a lot of time in combat with demonic forces. Notice how he is depicted standing on a pedestal, almost as if he were a colored statue.
On the opposite side is Saint Sebastian, who is generally invoked as a patron against contagious diseases such as the black plague. Ergotism is not contagious, but it can do horrible things to the skin, very much as the plague can.
At the bottom is the Deposition and Burial of Christ; patients with advanced ergotism rarely recovered, and with the reality of impending death upon them, this image would, of course, encourage them to think of their own sufferings in union with Christ, leading to the Resurrection.
On major feast days, the panels of the front would be pulled back to reveal this second set of images.
On the left, the Annunciation, with the prophet Isaiah at the upper left; the words of his prophecy of the Virgin that shall conceive are written on the book which Mary is reading. (By the early 16th century, the Italian convention had long been to have the angel Gabriel kneel before the Virgin so that his head would lower than Mary’s, to indicate Her higher dignity.)
The central panels, which in the original arrangement could be pulled open to reveal the sculptures seen below, show the Virgin holding the infant Christ as they are serenaded by a group of angels with musical instruments. (In German, the left section bears the charming name of “Engelskonzert - the angelic concert.”) On the building above the angels are small images of Moses and the four major prophets.
To the right side, the Resurrection. Christ displays His wounds as a sign of hope to the patients in the hospital that their sufferings will also lead to their transfiguration in the final resurrection. (It may be a fair gauge of how little this style is to modern tastes that when this slide was shown in my college freshman art history class, many of the students laughed out loud, to the deep annoyance of our German art history teacher.)
The panels shown above could then be opened to show this configuration. It is generally assumed that this was done for the feast days of the Saints depicted here: St Anthony, his friend St Paul the First Hermit, St Augustine and St Jerome. There may well have been various other such occasions.
The two painted panels on the side show the assaults made upon St Anthony by various demons, and his meeting with St Paul the First Hermit. The former are described at length in St Athanasius’ biography of Anthony, and have given many artists an opportunity to indulge their strangest conceits, among them, Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dalí, but also the young Michelangelo, in very first painting. The latter episode occupies the largest part of St Jerome’s biography of St Paul.
The sculptures in the center of the altarpiece are the work of an artist named Nicholas from the town of Hagenau, a town about 19 miles to the north of Strasbourg.
In the middle, St Anthony is depicted as an abbot with a crook. Pigs belonging to the Order of St Anthony were generally allowed to graze on common land, which is why they are often shown in his company. On the right is St Jerome, who wrote the biography of St Paul the First Hermit; on the left, with the donor kneeling in front of him, St Augustine, by whose rule the Order lived.
At the bottom, a stylized representation of Christ with the Apostles at the Last Supper.
After offering the host, the priest prepares the next gift by pouring wine into the chalice, and water into the wine. In addition to remaining faithful to the customs of the Jews in the Holy Land at the time of the Last Supper (not to mention the Romans and Greeks), the admixture of water and wine symbolizes the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ. A backhanded confirmation of this interpretation of the custom is that the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is Monophysite (or, if you prefer, Miaphysite), refuses to do it: to them, at least, adding water to wine is a confession of the Chalcedonian formulation of Jesus Christ having two natures in one Divine Person. I once heard that the only liturgical change the Armenian Catholic Church was required to make when it reunited with Rome was to add water to its wine as a disavowal of monophysitism.
More specifically, the wine represents Christ and the water represents us, His disciples. As St. Cyprian of Carthage explains:
For because Christ bore us all in that He also bore our sins, we see that in the water is the people, but in the wine is showed the blood of Christ. But when the water is mingled in the cup with wine, the people is made one with Christ, and the assembly of believers is associated and conjoined with Him in whom it believes. [1]
Cyprian’s interpretation—which implies that we, like a few drops of water, are absorbed into the vast divinity of Jesus Christ—finds an interesting corroboration in the forensic science on miracles and sacred relics. The same blood type has been found in all Eucharistic miracles, as well as on the Shroud of Turin, the Sudarium (Head Shroud) of Oviedo, and the Holy Tunic (Jesus’ seamless garment). That blood type is AB, which is for universal receivers (O negative is for universal donors). It might appear counterintuitive that Christ would have the blood type for universal receivers since He gave or donated His blood for all, but it affirms the paradox that when we receive Christ in Holy Communion, He receives us into His Body and we become a part of His Body. Every Holy Communion is a heart transfer and a blood transfusion, but we are entering into Christ’s Blood and enfolded into His Heart, as well as vice versa.
Further confirming this symbolic interpretation of the admixture is what the priest says as he blesses the water and pours a few drops of it into the wine:
Deus, qui humánae substantiae dignitátem mirabíliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti: da nobis per hujus aquæ et vini mysterium, ejus divinitátis esse consortes, qui humanitátis nostrae fíeri dignátus est párticeps, Jesus Christus Filius tuus Dóminus noster: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus: per omnia saecula sæculórum. Amen.
Which I translate as:
O God, Who didst wonderfully create the dignity of human nature and didst more wonderfully reform it: grant to us that, through the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made sharers of the divinity of Him Who deigned to be made a partaker of our humanity, Jesus Christ our Lord, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, forever and ever. Amen.
This ancient and beautiful prayer was first used as a Collect for Christmas in the so-called Leonine Sacramentary (mid-sixth to early seventh century), and it may have been inspired by a line from Pope Leo the Great’s Sermon 27:
Expergiscere, o homo, et dignitatem tuae agnosce naturae. Recordare te factum ad imaginem Dei, quae, etsi in Adam corrupta, in Christo tamen est reformata.
Wake up then, O man, and acknowledge the dignity of your nature. Recall that you have been made according to the image of God. This nature, even though it has been corrupted in Adam, has nevertheless been reformed in Christ.
The prayer, which existed in four different forms in different sacramentaries, was added to the Offertory of the Gallican Rite during the eighth-century Carolingian Renaissance and entered the Missal of the Roman Curia in the thirteenth century. It remained a fixture of the Roman Offertory until the promulgation of the Novus Ordo in 1969, when it was uncoupled from the mixing of water and wine and moved to Christmas as a Collect.
The prayer’s petition is unusual—namely, that we participate in the Godhead, not through the mystery of the Incarnation or the Holy Eucharist, but through the mystery of this water and (unconsecrated) wine. The use of “mystery” rather than “admixture” can be explained in one of two ways. First, it is another example of what Adrian Fortescue calls “dramatic misplacement,” a keen anticipation of the consecration. Even while he is adding water to unconsecrated wine, the priest is mindful of the Precious Blood that it will soon be. And connecting the two events (the mixing and the consecration) is the word “mystery”—the hujus aquæ et vini mysterium of this prayer and the mysterium fidei of the Words of Institution over the chalice.
Or second, the mixing is itself a mystery insofar as it expresses a reality beyond our grasp, the union of Christ and His Church, which St. Paul calls not only a mystery but a “great mystery” (mustērion mega).[2] Moreover, the prayer refers to the mystery of this water and wine, yoking this Eucharistic liturgy to the prayer’s theology of dignity and divinization, to which we now turn.
Rather than cut to the chase and simply ask for participation in the divine, the petition reminds us of the marvelous trade-off that took place at the Incarnation. When God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, human nature was allowed to participate in the Godhead. Eastern Christian thought goes so far as to call this the theosis or the divinization of the believer. As St. Athanasius famously put it, “God became man so that man might become god.” Although the West has a tradition of talking about divinization as well, it tends to prefer either the language of divine adoption or, as we see here, the language of participation. “O wondrous exchange!” proclaims the first Antiphon during Vespers for the Feast of the Circumcision:
The Creator of the human race, assuming a living body, hath deigned to be born of a Virgin: and becoming man, from no human seed, hath bestowed upon us His divinity.
In the Deus qui humanae substantiae, the wording is: “may we be made sharers of the divinity of Him Who deigned to be made a partaker of our humanity.” It is noteworthy that different nouns are used for our participation in Christ’s divinity and for Christ’s participation in our humanity—consortes (sharers) for the former and particeps (partaker) for the latter. The prayer would arguably have been more eloquent if the same word had been used in both cases, which is perhaps why many translations ignore the extra diction and use the same word both times. [3] But I suspect that the author wishes to draw attention to the fact that the way in which Christ participates in our humanity is not the way in which we participate in His divinity. We do not enter in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we are not a Divine Person who assumes a different nature, etc. Rather, we are divinely adopted and “divinized” through our incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ and through our reception of the sacraments.
The description of God as wonderfully creating and even more wonderfully reforming alludes to the three-act metanarrative of creation, fall, and redemption, for God would not have to reform us if we had somehow not become deformed. And deformed we are, thanks to the Fall of Adam and our own sins. Et placuit in conspectu tuo reformare deformia mea, writes Augustine in the Confessions: “And it was pleasing in Thy sight to reform my deformities.” [4]
Moreover, the prayer does not speak simply of human nature (or more literally, human substance) but of its dignity. God did a wonderful thing when He endowed mankind with its dignity, and He did an even more wonderful thing after that dignity was marred by sin, namely, He elevated it even more, deigning to be made a partaker of it. It is impossible here to capture the original connection in Latin between “deigned” (dignatus) and “dignity” (dignitas). In English, when something is beneath criticism, we say that we will not dignify that statement with a response. When God chose to become man, He did dignify our cry for help with a most dramatic response.
The dignity of the human person, which nowadays is a well-known concept , was rarely acknowledged prior to the birth of Our Lord. Although Cicero had pioneered a theory of the dignity of the human race, it was Christianity that spread the idea that all humans have a unique and equal dignity, and it had this idea because it was able to see human nature in light of the Incarnation.
And one of the chief ways that Christianity developed its concept of human dignity was through this prayer. Fr. James McEvoy and Dr. Mette Lebech argue that the Deus qui humanae substantiae made a significant contribution to the conceptualization of human dignity even before its use at the Offertory, and that after it was included in the Offertory, it created an association between human dignity and the holy exchange of gifts. “In this way,” McEvoy and Lebech conclude, “the prayer significantly shaped the Christian concept of human dignity as the holy ‘place’ of commerce with God.” [5] The authors (neither of whom, as far as I can tell, is a traditionalist) also expressed astonishment that
The liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council should have blurred that reference, given the rise to prominence of the concept of human dignity with the human rights tradition after the Second World War. An explanation for this seems not to be at hand, for example in the explanatory text by Antoine Dumas, who headed the study group that revised the sanctoral. [6]
They conclude:
Given the inconclusive reasons for uncoupling human dignity from the mystery at the heart of the liturgy, it may be hoped that the prayer will be restored in its Tridentine integrity to the liturgy at some point in the future. This would seem to be in accordance with the stated purposes of Sacrosanctum Concilium.[7]
Finally, we note that the Deus qui humanae substantiae is a celebrant’s private prayer said in a low voice, and yet an entire civilization’s concept of human dignity was shaped by it. Not everything needs to be said aloud at Mass in order for it to have an impact.
Notes
[1] Epistle 62.13.
[2] Ephesians 5, 32. Marriage, of course, is another symbol or sacramentum of this union.
[3] For example, see the Baronius Missal, p. 925: “...we may become partakers of His divine nature, who deigned to become partaker of our human nature...”
[4] Conf. 7.8.12.
[5] James McEvoy and Mette Lebech, “Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem: A Latin Liturgical Source Contributing to the Conceptualization History of Human Dignity,” Maynooth Philosophical Papers 10 (2020), 117-33, 117.
Our thanks to reader Gian Marco Talluto for sharing with us these pictures of the ordination of a bishop in the Byzantine Rite, which took place in Sicily on this day in 1938.
Giuseppe Perniciaro was born in Mezzojuso, in the province of Palermo, Sicily, on January 11, 1907. After studying at the Greek-Albanian Seminary in Palermo, he was a student at the Pontifical Greek College in Rome, where he attended the best Pontifical Universities; in 1928, finished his theology courses, and the following year, began his specialization in Oriental Ecclesiastical Sciences at the Pontifical Oriental Institute. On July 7, 1929, at the Church of Sant’ Atanasio in Rome, he was ordained a priest by Mons. Isaia Papadopoulos, Assessor of the Oriental Congregation. In 1932, he was called to take up the office of Rector of the Greek Albanian Seminary in Palermo, founded by Father Giorgio Guzzetta in 1734.
On October 26, 1937, following the creation of the Eparchy of Piana dei Greci by Pope Pius XI, Papas Giuseppe Perniciaro was elected, at only 30 years of age, Titular Bishop of Arbano, and auxiliary of the Archbishop of Palermo.
The following January 16, in the cathedral of St Demetrius, he was consecrated Bishop in the presence of Cardinal Luigi Lavitrano, archbishop of Palermo and apostolic administrator of Piana dei Greci, by Giovanni Mele, bishop of Lungro, assisted by Paolo Schirò, titular bishop of Bende (the last ordaining bishop of the Greek Rite in Sicily), and by Alessandro Evreinoff, titular bishop of Pario and ordaining bishop of the Greek Rite in Rome. During the same Liturgy, Monsignor Perniciaro conferred his first priestly ordination on deacon Matteo Sciambra from Contessa Entellina.
On July 12, 1967, after the death of Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, Monsignor Perniciaro was appointed residential bishop of the Eparchy of Piana degli Albanesi. (The eparchy’s name was changed from Piana dei Greci to Albanesi for political reasons in 1941).
Monsignor Perniciaro actively participated as a Father of the Second Vatican Council as a member of both the Italian and Sicilian episcopal conferences. During his long episcopate he accompanied with prayer, work, and also with physical and spiritual suffering, the birth and development of the diocese of Piana, concluded his earthly mission on June 5, 1981.
Thanks to the site https://www.visitpiana.com/eparchia and the Facebook page of the parish of San Nicola di Mezzojuso for the biography and photos of the ordination of Mons. Perniciaro.
A contemporary newsreel report of this ceremony.
Initial procession
The prelates in the procession were in order: Fr Flaviano La Piana, Papas Lorenzo Perniciaro, Fr Isidoro Croce, Papas Giuseppe Perniciaro, Fr Odilone de Golenvau (rector of the Greek College) with Mons. Evreinoff, behind Mons. Schiró and Mons. Mele, and finally, Cardinal Lavitrano.
Cardinal Lavitrano
Consecration prayer, in the foreground Mons. Schirò and Mons. Evreinoff, Mons. Giovanni Mele can be seen.
Blessing performed by the new bishop
Final procession with the new bishop in the foreground
Abbot Suger was one of those monumental men whose lives and personalities would seem almost incredible had they not lived in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Well known today as a pivotal figure in the development of Gothic architecture, he was in fact of such diverse and admirable abilities as to merit a term like “Renaissance man”—which of course raises the question of why this term even exists, when so many to whom it applies predated the Renaissance. Let us say quite simply, then, that Suger was a “medieval man.”
Part of the choir of the abbey of St Denys. Around the year 1135, the abbot Suger began the process of enlarging the original Carolingian church, during which the choir was rebuilt from 1140-44. Suger created the idea of having huge walls of windows which flood the church’s interior with light, the foundation of the architecture style which we now call Gothic, and this choir is the first example of it. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0)
Born in 1081 to a relatively humble family, the young Suger showed enough intellectual promise to be sent to the abbey of Saint-Denis for a monastic education. He rose through the ranks, eventually becoming secretary to the abbot and a trusted adviser to the king of France. A devout and cultured but not particularly ascetic man, Suger worked as a successful diplomat, was elected abbot, reformed his monks, wrote prolifically on various subjects, led the king toward victory against the emperor Henry V (who retreated without a fight), collaborated with Bernard of Clairvaux (another one of those monumental “medieval men”), rebuilt the church of Saint-Denis, and as the capstone of an already extraordinary life, ruled France as regent—and very capably—while the king was away on Crusade. A lesser Christian might have felt that ruinous itch for power after two years on the throne, but when the king returned in 1149, Suger handed him the crown and went back to his abbatial life, which ended, after an illness, in 1151.
One thing that Abbot Suger never adequately understood—and in his defense, few understood this until the mid-twentieth century—was the spiritual benefit to be gained by employing pedestrian, mundane, materially impoverished, or aesthetically bizarre vessels in the worship of the Most High God. Indeed, his thoughts on the matter were decidedly pre-modern:
Every costlier or costliest thing should serve, first and
foremost, for the administration of the Holy Eucharist. If golden pouring
vessels, golden vials, golden little mortars used to serve, by the word of God
or the command of the Prophet, to collect the blood of goats or the red heifer,
how much more must golden vessels, precious stones, and whatever is most valued
among all created things, be laid out, with continual reverence and full
devotion, for the reception of the blood of Christ!
He also shows himself woefully ignorant of the immense dignity of man, who ought not kneel or otherwise abase himself—frankly, ought not inconvenience himself in any way—when approaching the sacramental Flesh, and with it the true and infinitely sacred presence, of his divine Savior:
Surely neither we nor our possessions suffice for this service. If, by a new creation, our substance were re-formed from that of the holy Cherubim and Seraphim, it would still offer an insufficient and unworthy service for so great and so ineffable a victim.
It turns out, though, that his society was not completely devoid of the minimalistic, primitivistic impulses that would reach such a vigorous state of fruition eight centuries after his death. Some, apparently, were so concerned that the soul be rich and radiant with virtue as to neglect the gleaming, golden objects whose visible perfections exist so that we might contemplate, through them, the invisible glories of the all-perfect God. To these forerunners of the modern spirit the abbot responded with wisdom that one would have thought perennial in the Church, but which succumbed—for a time—to the unusually harsh winter of a vain and discontented age:
The detractors also object that a saintly mind, a pure heart, a faithful intention ought to suffice for this sacred function; and we, too, explicitly and especially affirm that it is these that principally matter. [But] we profess that we must do homage also through the outward ornaments of sacred vessels, and to nothing in the world in an equal degree as to the service of the Holy Sacrifice, with all inner purity and with all outward splendor. [1]
Around the time of Abbot Suger’s death, a few days’ ride from the city where he lived, liturgical artisans were crafting some of the most charming and symbolically rich sacred vessels in the history of the western Church. Here is an example:
An object such as this is called a peristerium, from the Greek word for pigeon or dove. The more homegrown name is simply “Eucharistic dove.” This particular specimen, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is made of gilded copper, with the surface engraved and enameled so as to resemble feathers, though visual naturalism was clearly not the guiding principle in the choice of colors. If chains are attached to the plate underneath the dove, as shown here, it can be suspended near or even directly above the altar. As indicated by the letters “IHS,” the dove’s body includes a cavity, covered by a hinged lid, in which the Blessed Sacrament was reserved.
Below is another fine example, from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Here the supporting plate has holes instead of thin extensions, and the shape of the chest and head is particularly dove-like and graceful.
The copper surface of this next piece, also from the Walters, is wonderfully vivid and golden, with etchings that appear simple yet are skillfully wrought and surprisingly reminiscent of a bird’s feathers. The artisan also created lovely and pleasantly subdued coloration on the wing.
The history of Eucharistic doves is not well understood. They are mentioned in passages from the Liber Pontificalis that date to the sixth or late fifth century [2], and we may presume that they were relatively common, at least in some regions of the western Church, during the early Middle Ages. But certainty here eludes us, because the artifactual record is highly restricted in both time and space: almost all of the surviving Eucharistic doves were produced in Limoges, France, in the first half of the thirteenth century.
More important for our purposes than their history is what they tell us about our Faith, and about the symbolical modes of belief and prayer that informed the entire Christian experience during the Age of Faith. To have a beautiful, golden dove suspended over one’s altar is to signify, with the sophisticated simplicity so characteristic of medieval culture, the presence and action of the Holy Spirit during the divine Sacrifice. It is also to suggest a world cleansed by the waters of the Flood, poured out in overwhelming abundance like the grace of God or like the Blood of Christ: “And the dove came to him in the eventide, and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf that she had plucked, whereby Noah did know that the waters were abated upon the earth.” It is, furthermore, an allusion to the mystical continuity that joins the liturgical sacrifice of the New Covenant to the animal sacrifices of the Old: “He answered unto [Abram]: Take an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a three year old ram, a turtle dove also, and a young pigeon. He took therefore all these unto him, and divided them in the midst, and laid every piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.” It is even, perhaps, to evoke the Holy Virgin, most blessed and beautiful above all women, and prefigured by the bride of whom Solomon sings in his Song of Songs: “Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair: thine eyes are as doves.”
And finally, when the Body of the Savior was placed within these winged tabernacles of the Middle Ages, symbolic realities converged in an artistic retelling of the Incarnation: the cavity within the dove signified the Virgin’s womb, such that the dove itself signified both the Virgin and her divine Spouse, whose union produced the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ and has now received it, to honor and protect, from the hands of the priest—whose labor at the altar is itself a sacramental incarnation. How profound, the unsounded depths of our Catholic Tradition; how sublime, the holy and poetic rites of our fathers. Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair, O liturgy ever ancient, ever new.
NOTES
1. These three quotations are from Erwin Panofsky (ed., trans.), Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, Princeton University Press (1946), pp. 65, 67.
2. See the entries for Popes Sylvester (314–335) and Innocent (401–417).
For twice-weekly discussions of art, history, language, literature, Christian spirituality, and traditional Western liturgy, all seen through the lens of medieval culture, you can subscribe to my Substack publication: Via Mediaevalis.
Fr. Pasley has acted as an officer of the board for many years. After first becoming introduced to the beauty of sacred music in the liturgy by Fr. Richard Schuler, of St. Agnes Parish (St. Paul, Minnesota), editor of Sacred Music, he became a loyal member and was identified early on as a leader. As Vice President many years ago, when Fr. Robert Skeris was the Association’s President, he was there, signing the documents for the CMAA’s incorporation in Virginia. He attended the very first Sacred Music Colloquium and has attended nearly all of them in the years since. Eighteen years ago, when Dr. William Mahrt was elected as CMAA board President and Dr. Horst Buchholz as Vice President, Fr. Pasley took the position of Chaplain. He has served faithfully as a spiritual guide and officer ever since.
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