Of Litanies and Rogations in Old England

The narratives, teachings, and poetry of Holy Scripture are occasionally enriched with a technique known as the envelope structure (often called inclusio in Biblical studies). The “envelope” is created by a phrase that is repeated at the beginning and end of a literary unit, as in the following example from Psalm 103, which opens and closes with the speaker exhorting himself to praise God:

O my soul, bless thou the Lord:
       thou, my God, hast shown thy glory,
clothed thyself in splendor and majesty:
       radiance is thy garment.
...
Let sinners vanish from the earth,
       and the wicked be no more.
O my soul,
       bless thou the Lord.

Envelope structures create a sense of unity and closure, with emotional effects similar to those of a decrescendo in music, and they may also accentuate an important theme or precept in the enclosed text. They are used throughout the Bible – in the New Testament and the Old, in verse and in prose. And if we think of sacred liturgy as a dramatic celebration and continuation of the events, heroes, teachings, and poetic meditations of Holy Scripture, we will expect to find envelope structures in the Church’s public worship.

Indeed, we are now in the midst of one: the Litany of Saints that signaled the beginning of the Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday will soon be repeated on the three Rogation Days that precede Ascension Thursday. What a memorable way this is to emphasize the spiritual and liturgical unity of the forty joyful days when the risen Christ walked the earth and conversed with men. It also draws our minds to the essential fruit of Our Lord’s Resurrection: the Saints in heaven, who were once mortals like us, burdened by sin and doomed to die, and are now gloriously alive, shining on high with God and His angels.

“What I saw seemed to me to be a smile / the universe had smiled; my rapture had / entered by way of hearing and of sight. / / O joy! O gladness words can never speak! / O life perfected by both love and peace! / O richness so assured, that knows no longing!” (Dante, Paradiso, 27; Mandelbaum translation)

Litanic prayer originated in the East, where it formed part of both the Eucharistic liturgy and the Divine Office, and it soon migrated to the Roman church. These texts were shorter and less elaborate than the prayers that we now call litanies, and their defining characteristic was supplication (for the sick, the dead, the bishop, etc.) intensified by a communal response such as Kyrie eleison or Domine exaudi et miserere. (The word “litany” derives from Greek litaneia, which simply means “petition” or “entreaty.”) The Kyrie eleison as it currently exists in the Roman Mass is actually a vestigial form of litanic prayers recited during the Eucharistic liturgy in the early Church.

The beginning of the Litany of the Saints in the eleventh-century breviary known as St. Wulfstan’s Portiforium (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 391, p. 221). Note the legibility of the text (compared to some manuscripts produced much later) and the visual prominence given to the names of Our Lady and St. Peter.

Other occasions on which the Church employed litanies were solemn processions. This practice is of venerable antiquity, dating at least to the fifth century, and has endured to the present in the Church’s traditional Rogation Day ceremonies. A homily composed by St. Avitus, a sixth-century bishop of Vienne in southern Gaul, is a striking example of historical continuity in Catholic liturgy. He refers to Rogation fasts, which included processions and litany chants, occurring on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday—precisely as they do in the Roman liturgy of our own day. [1]

Jules Breton, La Bénédiction des blés en Artois (oil on canvas). The artist is portraying the blessing of agricultural fields that occurred during the Rogation processions.

Latin-language Saint litanies are relatively abundant in manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon period of English Catholicism. The earliest records take us all the way back to the seventh century, but most of what has survived dates to the tenth century or later. These litanies vary in form and content, but exhibit a common structure that is remarkably similar to what we pray and sing today in the Roman rite.

A story recounted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (see book I, chapter 25) reveals that the combination of litany and procession has an illustrious role in the history of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. When St. Augustine and his evangelizing companions reached the Isle of Thanet in Kent, King Ethelbert, who knew of Christianity but was still a pagan at the time, was “sitting in the open air” and

ordered Augustine and his companions to be brought into his presence. For he had taken precaution that they should not come to him in any house, lest, according to an ancient superstition, if they practiced any magical arts, they might impose upon him.

Thus, the missionaries came to the king—himself later venerated as a saint—in procession,

bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Savior painted on a board; and singing the litany, they offered up their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of those to whom they were come.

Stained-glass depiction of King Ethelbert (d. 616), from All Souls College Chapel, Oxford.

Anglo-Saxon Saint litanies were prayed both publicly and privately, and many of the surviving litanies appear in manuscripts that are primarily psalters. This suggests that they served as a supplement to the psalms, which were the principal fount of prayer for laity and clergy alike during the Ages of Faith.

One thing that stands out in the litanies of Old England is the multitude of English saints. Names such as Æthelthryth, Cuthberht, Botwulf, Wihtburg, Mildthryth, and Switthun are well represented in these texts. How exactly liturgical singers integrated these names into the Latin pronunciation system is an open question, but in any case, I feel some nostalgia for a time when the Church’s litanies were inhabited by a more equal distribution of local and universal saints.

Litany of the Saints in the late-ninth-century Psalter of Count Achadeus (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 272, folio 151r). This litany invokes 160 saints.

Scholars do not know when exactly the Western churches began incorporating individual saints into their litanies. In other words, the history of litanic prayer in general is well established, but the origin of what we now call the Litany of the Saints has proved elusive. The eminent medievalist Dr. Michael Lapidge, whose research inspired me to write this article, believes that Saint litanies first achieved widespread usage in eighth-century England. What an extraordinary thought, that Anglo-Saxon England—a recently converted, far-flung outpost of Western Christianity—may have been the birthplace of the Latin Litany of the Saints, which would soon spread to continental Europe and eventually occupy a place of great honor and distinction in the liturgy of the universal Church.

---

[1]. These three days are currently known as the Minor Rogations. A Major Rogation takes place every year on April 25th.

Welcome to a New Writer: Robert W. Keim

We are very glad to welcome a new contributor to our writing staff, Mr Robert W. Keim, a secular brother of the London Oratory of St Philip Neri, a linguist, and a literary scholar specializing in the poetic and dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. A longtime student of the arts and spirituality of sacred liturgy, Robert teaches university courses in rhetoric, recently completed a new verse translation of the Psalms, and has worked in traditional and online publishing for over ten years. He is writing his doctoral dissertation on martyrdom and martyrial characters in Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and he is also pursuing research into the devotional, scriptural, and liturgical culture of medieval England.

We have already shared some lovely pieces by him, one about the Exsultet and another (in two parts: one and two) about bells. His first piece as a staff writer will appear shortly - feliciter tibi, optime!

Reliquary Busts of the Chapel of St Januarius in Naples

The Italian city of Naples keeps three feasts in honor of its Patron St Januarius, the relics of whose blood famously liquify on all three occasions. His principal feast, the anniversary of his martyrdom, is on September 19, but today, the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, there is a commemoration of the translation of his relics (one of several) from Pozzuoli, about 9 miles to the west, the place where he died during the persecution of Diocletian, ca. 305 AD. The third feast, on December 16th, commemorates a miracle which took place in 1631, when he stopped an especially powerful lava flow from Mt Vesuvius that threatened to destroy the city’s winter grain supply.

The Martyrdom of St Januarius in the Amphiteater at Pozzuoli, 1636, by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Januarius was in point of fact bishop of neither Naples nor Pozzuoli, but of Benevento, about 33 miles to the north-east of Naples. In the Middle Ages, a large part of his relics were transferred to the important monastery of Monte Vergine, and from there to the cathedral of Naples only at the very end of the 15th century. In the wake of a horrific plague that devastated the city between 1526 and 1529 (worsened by the events of a series of major military conflicts), the Neapolitans made a vow to build a new chapel to house them; in classic southern Italian fashion, the project was not even begun until 80 years later, and not completed until 1646. The result, however, is one of the most splendid Baroque chapels in all of Europe.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by ErwinMeier, CC BY-SA 4.0

The chapel also boasts a collection of 54 extremely fine silver reliquary busts of the city’s various patrons and other popular Saints, all made by artisans from the city and environs in an era when the art of silversmithing was at its height. At the December feast, the blood relic and several of these busts are carried in procession from the cathedral down to the nearby church of St Clare. The streets of central Naples are very narrow; I once went there for this feast (generally the least crowded of the three), and got to see the liquified blood moving around in its reliquary only a few feet away from me as it passed by on the way back to the cathedral.

Our friend Mr John Ryan Debil of The Home Oratory just visited Naples, and kindly agreed to share with us these pictures which he took of the busts (not all of them) – gratias tibi quam maximas, optime! (I don’t know who the last two Saints are; if you can identify them, please be so good as to leave a note in the combox. UPDATE: thanks to reader SMJ for identifying one of them, and correcting my mistake on another Saint.) 

St Joachim holding the Virgin Mary

St Anne

St Augustine

St Joseph

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Story of the True Cross, by Piero della Francesca

In the mid-15th century, the Italian painter Piero della Francesca (1416-92) did a remarkable series of frescoes in the choir of the Basilica of St Francis in Arezzo, known as The History of the True Cross. Although a few sections of the paintings are completely lost, most of it is in very good condition; the entire cycle was beautifully restored in the 1990s. Arezzo is a lovely city, but it would be worth a visit even if there were nothing else to see there besides these works.

The cycle includes not only St Helena’s discovery of the Cross, which is celebrated today, and its recovery in the 7th-century, which is celebrated on September 14th, but also some of the popular stories collectively known as the Legend of the Cross, as recounted in Bl. Jacopo de Voragine’s Golden Legend and elsewhere. It has to be said that some of these stories stretch the bounds of credibility well past the breaking point, a fact of which Bl. Jacopo was quite aware. In his account of today’s feast, he refers several times to conflicting accounts in the histories to which he had access. The stories are not depicted in order within the choir itself; I will give them here in the chronological order of the legend. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

The first panel (right wall at the top) depicts the death of Adam, the elderly man lying on the ground on the right, with Eve supporting him from behind. His son Seth receives from the Archangel Michael a branch from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Paradise, which he plants in his dead father’s mouth (at the bottom, to the left of the tree.) From this branch grows the tree which will become the wood of the Cross. (The depiction of a skull at the base of Christ’s Cross derives from this legend.)

Second panel, below the first - The tree lives until the time of Solomon, when it is cut down and part of it used to make a bridge. When the Queen of Sheba comes to visit Solomon, she recognizes it as coming from the Tree of Life, and kneels before it. On the right, she meets Solomon and his court, and bows before him. One version of the story adds that she had webbed feet, which were made normal by touching the wood. (Piero della Francesca’s mastery of the art of perspective is seen very nicely in the horse on the far left. His habit of depicting people in unusual hats, which he shares with a number of his Tuscan contemporaries, comes from seeing the delegates of the Eastern churches to the Council of Florence, which concluded shortly before he began this project.)

The third panel is to the left of the one above, on the back wall; Solomon has the wood from the bridge buried. (Piero does not depict the story of how the wood was then recovered and used to make the Cross of Christ.)

In the fourth panel just below it, the story moves forward to Constantine; an angel appears to him in a dream as he sleeps in his tent, the night before the great battle which will make him master of the Roman Empire, leading to his conversion. The angel bears a small Cross in his hand, a very subtle depiction of the In hoc signo vinces episode. (Piero has here done a very skillful depiction of a night scene, which most artists of the Renaissance shy away from.)

Returning to the right wall, to the right of the panel above, Constantine defeats Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, another tour-de-force of perspective, but sadly also the most damaged of the frescoes.

After the death of Christ, the wood of His Cross is buried again. According to the legend, when St Helena went to find it, some of the Jewish leaders knew where it was, but refused to tell her, so she threatened to have them burned alive. They therefore handed over to her one of their number, a man named Judas, whom she had lowered into a well and left for several days, until he agreed to reveal its location. This scene, to the left of the window at the back wall, shows him being lifted out of the well; his foot on the edge of the well is another example of Piero’s clever mastery of perspective. (This distasteful episode furnished the antiphons for Lauds, Vespers and the minor Hours of the Finding of the Cross in the pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary; the second, for example, reads “Then she ordered them all to be burned, but they, being fearful, handed over Judas, alleluja.” These were removed in Clement VIII’s revision of the Tridentine Breviary, and replaced with the antiphons of the Exaltation.)

St Helena finds the crosses of both Christ and the two thieves by digging up Mt Calvary. The Lord’s is identified by touching all three to a dead man whose funeral procession happens to be passing by; the third one raises the man back to life, at which all present adore it. (Piero is really showing off on the right with the perspective of the Cross. This panel is in the middle of the left wall.)

The Cross is stolen from the church of the Holy Sepulcher by the Persians when they take the city of Jerusalem in 614 AD. This spectacularly chaotic battle scene shows the defeat of the Persian Emperor Chosroes at the hand of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, which took place in 627 at Nineveh. Chosroes returns in defeat to his capital, where he is murdered by his elder son and successor Siroes. The latter will sue for peace with Heraclius, who makes the return of the relics of the Cross one of the conditions for the treaty. (This panel is located lowest on the left wall, to mirror the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the right wall.)

At the top of the left wall, Heraclius, simply dressed and barefooted, brings the relics of the Cross back into Jerusalem. As described in the Matins lessons for the Exaltation of the Cross, on approaching the city, Heraclius found himself unable to pass the gate, held back by a mysterious force. The bishop of Jerusalem then told him to imitate the poverty and humility of the King of kings by laying aside his royal robes, at which he was able to continue his way to the Holy Sepulcher. It may be guessed that this story was particularly appealing to the Franciscans who sang Mass and Office in this choir every day, and was therefore put at the top as the most “exalted” of the scenes. (Here Piero really goes to town with the funny hats!)

To the left of the window in the back wall, below the scene of Judas being lifted out of the well, is depicted the Annunciation. More than one art historian has failed to realize that this is also, obliquely, part of the Holy Cross cycle, in accord with the ancient tradition, very widely accepted in the Middle Ages and beyond, that the earthly life of Christ was a perfectly circle of years, and that the day of His Incarnation was the same as the day of His death.

The Feasts of Saint Monica and a New Conjecture about Her Dies Obitus

The feast of Saint Monica is celebrated in the traditional calendar on May 4 and in the new calendar on August 27. As the Calendarium Romanum, promulgated in 1969, explains:

In the fifteenth century, the Augustinian Order celebrated May 5 as the feast of St. Augustine’s conversion. Since the birthday of Monica was unknown, the Order celebrated it on May 4. About 1550, the feast was assigned to the same date in the Roman calendar. [1]

As we pointed out in an earlier article, the Order of Saint Augustine (formerly known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine) celebrated May 5 as the anniversary of Augustine’s reception into the Catholic Church by St. Ambrose during the Easter Vigil of 387. It was only natural, then, to assign Saint Monica’s feast to May 4. Monica not only lived to see her wayward son cleansed of his sins in the saving waters of baptism (along with her illegitimate grandson Adeodatus); she was more instrumental in his conversion than any other human agent. Augustine writes that it is through Monica’s merit that he is all that he is,[2] and that “from the blood of my mother’s heart, sacrifice for me was offered Thee day and night by her tears, and Thou didst act with me in marvellous ways.” [3] After his conversion, Augustine and his fellow neophyte friends and son lived together in community. He recalls that Monica “took as much care as if she had been the mother of us all, and served us as if she had been the daughter of us all.” [4]

Augustine’s Baptism

As far as I can tell, no one knows whether May 5 was chosen for the celebration of Augustine’s conversion out of a belief that it was the actual anniversary of his baptism or for some other reason. In any event, in the twentieth century, scholars determined that the night of April 24/morning of April 25 were the dates on which the Easter Vigil was celebrated in Milan in 387. Accordingly, the Augustinians have celebrated the feast of St. Augustine’s Conversion on April 24 since at least 1953. 

The transfer of the this feast left that of St Monica somewhat orphaned, and so in 1969 the decision was made to move her to August 27, the day before the main feast of her son, the anniversary of his death on August 28, 430. I suspect that the liturgical reformers did not leave Monica’s feast on May 4 because of the transfer of the feast of Augustine’s conversion, and they did not consider moving it to the day before the new date of April 24, since this Augustinian feast was not on the universal calendar.

Still, it seems wiser to me to have left Monica’s feast on May 4. Whether or not Augustine was received into the Church on May 5, the month of May is always in Paschaltide and thus a reminder of his Holy Saturday conversion. The Church could have also added the May 5 feast to the universal calendar as a commemoration or optional memorial, for after that of Saint Paul, Augustine’s conversion is the most important in the history of the Church and therefore worthy of liturgical recognition. And even if April 24 is the more accurate date for Augustine’s conversion, one could have kept the May 4 date for the sake of historic continuity and tradition. It would not be the first time that the Church calendar and historical accuracy do not align perfectly, but so what.

The Vision at Ostia

Further, there is an affective consideration. When one thinks of Saint Monica, one thinks of her influencing her son in the springtime of his youth and then of his faith, raising him, interceding for him, joyfully assisting at his baptism, and finally, experiencing the Vision at Ostia with him. But when one thinks of Saint Augustine’s final days, one thinks of a vastly different scene. Monica has been dead for forty-three years, and during those four decades Augustine has gone from being a chaste, Catholic intellectual layman, eager to seclude himself from the world in an irenic, semi-monastic community (as she knew him), to a priest and bishop polemically embroiled in some of the greatest theological and political controversies of his age. And as he laying dying in Hippo Regius, the barbarians were literally at the gates, an army of 80,000 Vandals laying siege to the city and poised to destroy the Roman civilization in North Africa that Augustine and Monica knew so well.

The Death of St. Augustine

Dating Saint Monica’s Death

But there is a third possibility, which I do not necessarily recommend but nonetheless find intriguing: arriving at a reasonable estimate of Monica’s dies obitus. We know that Monica passed away some time after Augustine’s reception into the Church, which she witnessed on April 24-25, 387, and some time before his thirty-third birthday on November 13, 387. [5] We also know that she passed away at least fourteen days after her arrival in the port town of Ostia. [6] The earliest that Augustine and his companions could have left Milan after his baptism was Easter Monday, April 26. But it is more likely that they stayed for the “Octave of the Infants,” when neophytes received further instruction in the Faith during the Easter Octave. An early departure date of Monday, May 3, then, is a more reasonable assumption. But they could have also lingered in Milan for weeks after Easter Sunday and still be in Ostia in time for the high point of the sailing season in the ancient Mediterranean, which was from May to October.

The distance between Milan and Ostia Antica is approximately 378 miles on land. The group could have journeyed by land to Genoa and then sailed to Ostia, or they could have journeyed entirely on land. Augustine’s word choice may suggest the former since he describes their journey to Ostia as a longum iter (which can also mean a long march), and he seems to contrast this journey with the forthcoming navigatio by sea (9.10.23). A Roman legion could cover twenty miles a day, but Augustine and his companions were in no such hurry, and at fifty-six-years old, Monica was considered an old woman. If the group did travel by foot, it is not unreasonable to speculate that they averaged ten miles a day and that their journey therefore took thirty-eight days.

Putting all these suppositions together: if the group left Milan on Monday, May 3, they may have arrived in Ostia around June 11. The Vision at Ostia would have taken place within the next few days (June 12-15?), Monica’s fever would have begun around June 18, and her death would have occurred around June 27. Her family--her sons Augustine and Navigius and grandson Adeodatus--would have buried her soon after and then tearfully departed Ostia for their North African home during the height of the Mediterranean sailing season.

This article is dedicated to my dear sister-in-law Hilary Ryan Tucker, whose birthday falls on the traditional feast day of St. Monica.

Notes

[1] The Roman Calendar: Text and Commentary (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1976), 50.

[2] De beata vita 1.6.

[3] Confessions 5.7.13, trans. Frank Sheed (Hackett, 2005).

[4] Confessions 9.9.22.

[5] Augustine states that his mother was present at his baptism, and he states that she passed away when he was 32, that is, before his 33rd birthday on November 13, 387.

[6] She and her son Augustine experienced their famous “Vision at Ostia” while they were recovering from their “long journey” from Milan and preparing to set sail (the day after their arrival? Two days after?). Five days later she fell into a fever (possibly malaria), and nine days after that, her “devout and holy soul was released from the body.” (Conf. 9.11.28)

Fr John Hunwicke, RIP

I am very saddened to report (via the Facebook page of the Oxford Oratory) that the great Fr John Hunwicke died on Tuesday, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. As many of our readers know, he was a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham; his blog, Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment, has long been an incomparably valuable repository of wisdom, wit and erudition, and we have very often highlighted his articles here on NLM over the years. Many of his posts have been devoted to the defense of the authentic liturgical tradition of the Roman Rite, and the exposure of the scholarly impostures that underpinned its would-be replacement. This series which touched on the historical question of the epiclesis was a particularly fine achievement, one among many:

https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2015/04/reforming-canon-of-mass-some.html

Fr Hunwicke and I corresponded a few times; he was very generous in allowing us to reproduce what he had written, and in his gratitude for some assistance I was able to provide him on some points of liturgical history. He is survived by his wife, children and grandchildren; let us pray for their consolation, and, of course, for his eternal repose.

Deus, qui inter apostolicos sacerdotes famulum tuum Joannem sacerdotali fecisti dignitate vigere: praesta quaesumus: ut eorum quoque perpetuo aggregetur consortio. Per Christum, Dominum nostrum. Amen.

God, who among the apostolic priests made Thy servant John to flourish with priestly dignity: grant, we beseech Thee: that he may also be joined unto their perpetual society. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

A Very Unusual Popular Festival in Italy

The little town of Cocullo in the Abruzzi region of Italy, with a population of less than 250, has a very particular way of celebrating the feast of its Patron Saint, Dominic of Sora. Dominic was one of the great monastic reformers of the later 10th and early 11th century, as active in central and southern Italy (Lazio, Abruzzi and Campagna) as his contemporaries Ss Romuald and Peter Damian were in the north. He lived in Cocullo for seven years, and the main church there has two relics of him, one of his teeth, and a shoe of his mule. As part of the celebration of his feast on May 1st, people use their teeth to pull the bell-rope of a chapel dedicated to him, a gesture which is believed to protect them from disease.

He is also honored as a Patron Saint against snake-bites and rabid animals, the aspect of his cultus which makes it especially noteworthy. Towards the end of March, the inhabitants of the region begin collecting snakes from the countryside (non-poisonous, of course), and keeping them in boxes at home. On the feast day, they bring them to the church, and drape them over a statue of the Saint, which is then carried through the town in procession. The snakes are then returned to their natural habitat.

(A friend of mine who has attended the festival at Cocullo informs me that poisonous snakes were used until the 1950s, when this practice was forbidden by the civil authorities.)

It would be easy to dismiss this custom and others like it as nothing more than holdovers from paganism, and it is true that this one in particular seems to have some antecedents in the ancient pagan cults of the region (of which, however, very little is known for certain.) I dare say that this is a feature, not a bug. In the modern world, it is very difficult for us to appreciate what a very serious problem a rotten tooth or a rabid animal could be for peasants living a hard-scrabble life in these mountainous regions, even as little as a century ago. A religion which does not afford some sense that the spiritual powers, whatever they may be, are genuinely concerned with the human race’s welfare, spiritual and physical, and can help us through such problems, is simply not worth its salt. It was precisely the death of this idea, the transition from the ancient gods of hearth and field to the distant One of Plato or the even-more-distant Prime Mover of Aristotle, that drove people towards the many mystery cults that flourished in the early centuries of the Roman Empire. In Christianity, they found the mystery of a God who is not merely concerned with the human race’s welfare, but so concerned that He joined it, and then entrusted the care and cure of its many problems to His beloved friends, the Saints.

The Legend of St Philip the Apostle

The feast of the Apostle St Philip is traditionally kept on this day, together with St James the Younger, a custom which derives from the presence of their relics in the Roman basilica of the Twelve Apostles, which was originally dedicated only to the two of them. In the Synoptic Gospels, he is not mentioned apart from the list of the twelve disciples whom Jesus called his Apostles (Matthew 10, 1-4 and parallels). However, St Clement of Alexandria, writing ca. 200 AD, knew a tradition that Philip was the man who asked leave to go bury his father, to whom Christ replied, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.” (Stromata 3, 4, 25, citing Matthew 8, 22.)

Reliquaries of Ss Philip and James displayed in the crypt of the church of the Twelve Apostles. Photo by Agnese, from part 3 of the very first Roman Pilgrim series, in 2014. 

In the Gospel of St John, on the other hand, Philip is a very prominent figure. After Christ “finds” him, and calls him, saying no more than “Follow me!”, Philip brings to Him Nathanael, who confesses “Thou art the Son of God, Thou are the king of Israel.” (1, 43-49.) At the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, it is Philip to whom Christ says “Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?”, and who replies “Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may take a little.” (6, 5 and 7). Later on, Philip and Andrew together introduce some gentiles to Jesus. (12, 20-22) Finally, during the Last Supper, Philip says to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”, to which Jesus replies, “Have I been so long a time with you; and have you not known me? Philip, he that seeth me seeth also the Father. How sayest thou, show us the Father? Do you not believe, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?” (14, 8-10) A fuller version of this passage, John 14, 1-13, is listed as the Gospel for the feast of Ss Philip and James in the very oldest lectionary of the Roman Rite, ca. 650 AD, and provides most of the proper antiphons for the Office, as well as the second Alleluia and the Communion antiphon of their Mass.

A motet based on the Communion of the Mass of Ss Philip and James, in a polyphonic setting by the Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621).

At the beginning of the Acts, he is named in the company of the Apostles in the upper room. (1, 13). When the first seven deacons were chosen, one of them is also called Philip, and there was already in antiquity some confusion between the two. Eusebius of Caesarea, for example, in his Ecclesiastical History (3, 31), takes it for granted that they are the same person, referring to his four daughters, even though in Acts 21, 9, it is stated that it was Philip the deacon who had four daughters. He quotes a letter from Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, to Pope Victor I (189-99), which refers to Philip’s burial at Hierapolis in Phrygia, (now called Pammukale, in southwest Turkey), where he had preached the Gospel for many years. He also cites from one of the very first Church historians, Papias, bishop of Hierapolis and a contemporary of Pope Victor, the story that Philip had raised a man from the dead, a story which Papias had heard from one of Philip’s daughters.

Like several other Apostles, Philip also has an apocryphal set of Acts written about him; his is a compilation of fifteen different episodes which vary in their degree of absurdity. One of these episodes, the ninth, is a brief account of the slaying of a dragon, which he does on his missionary travels in the company of his fellow Apostle Bartholomew, and his sister, whose name is given as Mariamne.

In the Golden Legend of Bl. Jacopo de Voragine, the account of St Philip is quite short, far shorter, in fact, than that of St James, and also contains a dragon-slaying episode. However, the story is told in a completely different manner from that of his fictitious Acts. In the Golden Legend version, Philip is in Scythia, where he is brought by the pagans before a statue of Mars, and ordered to sacrifice to it. A dragon emerges from the statue’s base, killing the son of the priest in charge of the sacrifice, and the two local officials who were keeping the Apostle in chains, while making everyone else present sick with its breath. Philip promises to remedy these ills if the pagans break the statue and replace it with a Cross; when they do, he heals the sick, raises the three dead persons, and banishes the dragon to an uninhabited desert. He then comes to Hierapolis, where he successfully combats the heresy of the Ebionites, establishes the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and is finally crucified by the infidels.

In the year 1487, a wealthy Florentine merchant named Filippo Strozzi commissioned the painter Filippino Lippi to fresco a chapel dedicated to the name Saint whom he shared with the artist. The complex and agitated style which Lippi learned from his teacher, Sandro Botticelli, perfectly suits the complex and agitated scenes of the dragon’s defeat and the Apostle’s crucifixion. The dragon is clearly too small to really pose a threat, representing that his power is vanquished by that of Christ’s minister. The statue of Mars is shown as a colored figure like the living persons in the lower part of the scene, and not as a white stone figure like the statues below him; this is often understood to represent the fact that the conflict between paganism and Christianity was very much alive in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Savanarola.

St Philip Banishing the Dragon, by Filippino Lippi, in the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1487-1502

The Crucifixion of St Philip

In the pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary, this story is told in terms very similar to those of the Golden Legend, even so late as the editions published in the 1520s. The scholars charged with revising the legends of the Saints for the Breviary of St Pius V were very concerned to remove anything that might bring discredit on the Church, and were particularly severe with episodes of dragon-slaying; there is no hint of the story whatsoever in the revised legend of St Philip, the version which is still read to this day in the Breviary of the Extraordinary Form. (Ss George, Martha and Margaret of Antioch are treated in similar fashion.)

Nevertheless, in the 18th century, when statutes of the 12 Apostles were put up in the Lateran Basilica, the Pope’s own cathedral, a reference to the old legend was kept. This work by Giuseppe Mazzuoli, executed between 1703 and 1712, shows St Philip stepping on a dragon, albeit also a very small one.

Pius XI’s First Visit to the Lateran in 1933

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

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

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

Good Friday 2024 Photopost (Part 2)

Once again, we are very grateful to all those who contributed to this series, which is close to ending. Don’t forget that next week we have the Rogations and the Ascension, and we will be glad to include photos of both of those celebrations in our Pentecost photopost series, so you can send yours in to photopost@newliturgicalmovement.org. Keep up the good work of evangelizing through beauty!

Epiphany of Our Lord – St Petersburg, Florida (Ukrainian Greek-Catholic)

Procession with the shroud at Vespers of Good Friday

Continue Reading this Article. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Altarpiece of St Peter Martyr

For the feast of St Peter Martyr, here are some pictures of a particularly elaborate altarpiece dedicated to him. This was originally painted for the church of St Dominic in the Italian city of Modena by the workshop of the brothers Agnolo and Bartolomeo degli Erri, the third generation of painters in their family. They also did altarpieces for the same church dedicated to Ss Dominic, Thomas Aquinas and Vincent Ferrer. As has happened to so many works of its kind, this one was later removed from its original frame; it is now in the museum of the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma. (All images from this page of Wikimedia Commons, by Sailko, CC BY-SA 4.0; unfortunately, close up photos are available for only some of the panals.  

The scenes are as follows:

top left: St Peter as a child, disputing with his uncle and other Cathar heretics; his vesting as a Dominican; praying before an image of the Virgin Mary.

top center: portrait of the Saint

top right: his corporal penances and fasting; at Cesena, he heals a young man who had cut off his own foot to punish himself for striking his mother; the healing of a nun.

middle left: he puts the devil to flight by showing it a consecrated Host; the raising of a dead child; the healing of a dying man

middle center: St Peter praying before a Cross

middle right: he heals a baby that had fallen into a fire; while preaching, he tames a crazed horse, and restores speech to a mute boy; at Milan, he heals a paralyzed woman.

lower left: Pope Innocent IV makes him an inquisitor against the Cathar heresy; he receives a message from the Pope, and causes a very hot sun to dim while he was preaching outdoors, so the faithful would not be discomforted while listening to him; he departs for his mission. 

lower right: his martyrdom; his funeral cortege; miracles at his tomb.

The center middle panel of St Peter and members of the faithful praying before a Crucifix.

First panel, center right: St Peter heals a small child that had fallen into a fire.

Second panel, middle right: he heals a mute boy, and stops a crazed horse.

Third panel, middle right: at Milan, he heals a paralyzed woman. In the background is the church of St Eustorgius in Milan, where his relics have reposed since shortly after his martyrdom in 1252.

First panel, lower right: St Peter is ambushed and assassinated.

Second panel, lower right: his body is taken to Milan for his funeral.

Third panel, lower right: miracles at his tomb.