Traditional Austrian Passiontide veils in Carinthia

Today, being the eve of Passion Sunday, is the day for veiling statues and images in churches as we move into Passiontide and draw closer to Holy Week and the Triduum.

Since the 1960s veiling is less universal than it once was in both Catholic and Anglo-Catholic parishes. A friend once opined that it tended to follow diocesan liturgical cultures in the Catholic Church in England. When I was churchwarden at St Thomas’ in Oxford I pushed a little at the envelope of Anglican Canon Law

( there’s a joke in there somewhere I think) by reintroducing the practice during the vacancy in the living. This meant a morning of clambering around the church and fixing the purple cloths. My vertigo meant I was unable to veil the reredos, which had to wait for the assistant priest on the Sunday morning. We carried on with the restored practice and I even went back to help the new acting priest, the late, great Fr John Hunwicke, after I had left the C of E, to keep the tradition going.

This came back to my mind when I saw an article yesterday on the Liturgical Arts Journal about the nineteenth century decorated veils which have been rediscovered and brought back into use at the church at Kaning in Carinthia. These are not plain cloth but painted boards that depict the Passion against a sombre background.

The illustrated article can be viewed at Rediscovered and Revived Lenten Veils in Austria

There is a short discussion of the history of such veiling on the Zenit website which can be found at Questions about liturgy: Should the cross be veiled during Lent

I would add to What the author of the article says that practice does very from one country to another and that veiling the altar and processional crosses and their crucifixes appears quite common in England.

I heard the point this week that such veiling was a northern European tradition deriving apparently from the German hungertuch. Such a veil for the whole altar as certainly known in medieval England, and images were veiled for all of Lent. Some statues, of which original examples survive as well as modern versions, occupied wooden housings with doors gat could be closed in Lent. In 1471 one such pair of doors sprang open during Mass to reveal St Anne to King Edward IV on his journey to reclaim the crown, and was seen as an augury.

Medieval Roman practice was different, and it was the publication of the 1570 Missal, officially only for that diocese, which only veiled from Passion Sunday came to be copied across the wider Church. This seems also to have been the way in which rose coloured vestments spread from the specific rite of blessing the Golden Rose to the city and diocese of Rome, and thence though St Pius’ Missal to the Universal Church.