A timely reflection upon Pope St Sylvester

In my previous post I said that the death of Pope Benedict XVI on the feast of a confessor Pope seemed very apposite. Here, courtesy of the wonderful Divinum Officium online Breviary, are the Mattins readings about St Sylvester. What strikes me is his concern with the sacramental life of the Church, its regulation and dignity, and with creating beautiful and noble churches, as well as approving sound doctrine. Is it not right and fitting to think of 

a Pope Benedict as being faithful to that tradition?

Sylvester was a Roman by birth, and his father's name was Rufinus. He was brought up from a very early age under a Priest named Cyrinus, of whose teaching and example he was a diligent learner. In his thirtieth year he was ordained Priest of the Holy Roman Church by Pope Marcellinus. In the discharge of his duties he became a model for all the clergy, and, after the death of Melchiades, he succeeded him on the Papal throne, in the year of our Lord 314, during the reign of Constantine, who had already by public decree proclaimed peace to the Church of Christ. Hardly had he undertaken the government of the Church when he betook himself to stir up the Emperor to protect and propagate the religion of Christ. Constantine was fresh from his victory over his enemy Maxentius, on the Eve whereof the sign of the Cross had been revealed to him limned in light upon the sky; and there was an old story in the Church of Rome that it was Sylvester who caused him to recognise the images of the Apostles, administered to him holy Baptism, and cleansed him from the leprosy of misbelief.

The godly Emperor had already granted to Christ's faithful people permission to build public churches, and by the advice of Sylvester he himself set them the example. He built many Basilicas, and magnificently adorned them with holy images, and gifted them with gifts and endowments. Among these there were, besides others, the Church of Christ the Saviour, hard by the Lateran Palace; that of St. Peter, upon the Vatican Mount; that of St. Paul, upon the road to Ostia; that of St. Lawrence, in Verus' field; that of the Holy Cross at the Sessorian hall; that of St. Peter and St. Marcellinus, upon the Lavican Way; and that of St. Agnes, upon the road to Mentana. Under this Pope was held the first Council of Nicea, presided over by the Papal Legates, and in the Presence of Constantine, and three hundred and eighteen Bishops, where the holy and Catholic Faith was declared, and Arius and his followers condemned; which Council was finally confirmed by the Pope, at the request of all the assembled Fathers, in a synod held at Rome, where Arius was again condemned. This Pope issued many useful ordinances for the Church of God. He reserved to Bishops the right of consecrating the Holy Chrism; ordered Priests to anoint with Chrism the heads of the newly baptised; settled the officiating dress of Deacons as a dalmatic and a linen maniple; and forbade the consecration of the Sacrament of the Altar on anything but a linen corporal.

This Sylvester is likewise said to have ordained that all persons taking Holy Orders should remain awhile in each grade before being promoted to a higher; that laymen should not go to law against the clergy; and that the clergy themselves were not to plead before civil tribunals. He decreed that the first and seventh days of the week should be called respectively the Lord's Day and the Sabbath, and the others, Second Day, Third Day, and so on. In this he confirmed the use of the word Feria for the weekdays, the which use had already begun in the Church. This word signifieth an holiday, and pointeth to the duty of the clergy ever to lay aside all worldly labour, and leave themselves free to do continually the work of the Lord. The heavenly wisdom with which he ruled the Church of God, was joined in him to a singular holiness of life, and an inexhaustible tenderness towards the poor; in which matter he ordained that the wealthy clergy should each relieve a certain number of needy persons; and he also made arrangements for supplying the consecrated virgins with the necessaries of life. He lived as Pope twenty-one years, ten months and one day, and was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Salarian Way, in the year 335. He held seven Advent ordinations, and made forty-two Priests, twenty-five Deacons, and sixty-five Bishops of various sees.

Pope Benedict XVI

The announcement this morning of the death of Pope Benedict XVI was no surprise after the indications given this week about his health but there is still the sense of diminishment. In that way it is very similar to the feelings one felt at the death of the late Queen last September. The inevitable has finally happened. There is still a sense of real loss, but also immense gratitude for a life well lived in the service of high ideals. In a sense too we mourned his passing in 2013, but still appreciating the fact that he could enjoy a prayerful retirement as we prayed for his continued influence in the life of the Church.

There is something apposite in the fact that he has died on the feast of a canonised Pope - St Sylvester so important to the Constantinian Peace of the Church.

Pope Benedict had a remarkable life that encapsulates that of the Church since 1945, and most of it at the centre as a participant at Vatican II - and for his concern as to the direction the Church appeared to be taking in its wake. Against that background as an academic theologian, as Cardinal, both in Munich and then at the CDF, and finally as Pope here wasa first class mind and a man of great personal kindness. 

The first German born Pope since the mid-eleventh century and the beginning of what became the Hidebrandine reform, and the first Pope to abdicate since 1415, or, in so much as it was a personal rather than a political choice, arguably since 1294 his Pontificate is a reminder of the antiquity and centrality of the Papacy in our culture. Amongst so many intellectual gifts he had a deep sense of history in terms of his own life and that of the Church.

He bequeaths a great legacy as an erudite, elegant and eloquent theologian. That is a very rich inheritance for the Church and the faithful. 

Cardinal Nichols, with his usual clarity expresses all that in his statement on the news.

Pope Benedict was elected just after my reception into full peace and communion in 2005. In that, and in so much more, I am very much a “Benedict XVI Catholic” - and proud to be one. I saw him on his visit to this country both as he was conveyed from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey and then again at the Birmingham Mass where he beatified John Henry Newman 

In particular he touched my life and practice with his two moto propriu decrees on the liturgy and on Anglican converts. 

I rejoiced at the freedom accorded by Summorum Pontificum to the celebration of the traditional Roman rite, to which I am ever more drawn. This was also an elegant and pragmatic solution to the liturgical problems facing the Church.

Anglicanorum Cœtibus was also elegant and pragmatic, seeking the ideal of unity and respectful of cultural history. Although I was already a fully practising Catholic it was an initiative that I was anxious to support as a former Anglican. It is a great pity that more people have not - so far - responded positively to it.

On his election as Pope he described himself as a humble labourer in the vineyard. I think that is how he truly saw himself, even if so many others saw him as a giant.

 

He is indeed one of those to whom the Dominical words “Well done thou good and faithful servant” can be applied.

May he rest in peace

The Glastonbury Thorn

As we come in this Christmas season towards the Octave Day of Christmas and the celebration of the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, on which the Circumcision of Out Lord took place, it seems appropriate to share a good piece from the Catholic World Report about the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury. The article can be seen at The Glastonbury Thorn: a resurrected symbol of Christmas

I have always known the story of the Holy Thorn and its Christmas flowering, long before I appreciated its incarnational imagery or visited and came to know Glastonbury. On one of my visits I did walk up to the thorn on Wearyall Hill which was subsequently vandalised as the article describes. I am very glad it has now been replaced. 

In 1996 I spent Christmas in Glastonbury and did see the thorn trees at the historic St John’s Church in flower.

There is one comment in the article which I would query. Although the first literary reference to the Thorn may be from anout 1535 I think it featured in the rich fabric of Glastonbury devotions well before that. The fourteenth century third great seal of the abbey has on one side the Blessed Virgin and Child flanked by those ever popular virgin saints in medieval devotion Catherine and Margaret and on the other side St Dunstan flanked by SS Patrick and Benignus. In this work Our Lady does not hold a fleur de lys as in earlier abbey seals but rather a tree eradicated - that is with its roots displayed - and the tree bears flowers. Though assumed by some to be roses, a flower so often associated with Our Lady, but at Glastonbury this is surely meant to signify the blossoming Holy Thorn. Thus new life is linked to the Passion, with the thorns amidst the red berries symbolic of the shedding of Christ’s blood.

This seal, of which there is a drawing at Image: Glastonbury Abbey, was the basis for the twentieth century statue of Our Lady of Glastonbury

The modern statue of Our Lady of Glastonbury

Image: paulwestonglastonbury.com 

There is an interesting travelogue, printed in an early Yorkshire Archaeological Journal ( if my memory serves me aright ), written by aYorkshireman who, after the calendar change of 1752, journeyed all the way from the West Riding in his home county to Glastonbury, to see if the Holy Thorn had adjusted itself to the new date of Christmas and was flowering when it should ….

Our Lady of Glastonbury Pray for us

Medieval vestments at Canterbury

Today being the feast of the martyrdom of St Thomas of Canterbury is a suitable day on which to write about the vestments of one of St Thomas’ immediate successors, Hubert Walter, who died in 1205. When his tomb was opened in the nineteenth century his vestments were found to be largely intact and they have been preserved in the cathedral collection. The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral have now had one of the probably Iberian iridescent silk textiles recreated to provide new copes for the Canons.

There is a short online article about this at Medieval fabric is proudly displayed in Refectory Restaurant

From what the article says the vestments are yet another reminder of the splendour of medieval textiles and their use in the liturgy. The new copes can complement the copy of the set of vestments at Sens that are traditionally said to have been used by St Thomas during his exile there in the 1160s.

Christmas Mummers and Wren Day

The BBC News website has a piece about Boxing Day traditions such as Wren Day - not for bird lovers I think - and Mummers, especially in the western parts of these islands.  It is good to see traditional customs being enacted and recorded, however odd they may appear. The Mummers play with its theme of death and rebirth features in Ngaio Marsh’s detective story “Off with his Head”.

The BBC article can be seen at The Boxing Day hunt, but not as you know it

Writing of traditional Boxing Day customs my inbox was polluted the other day by a petition to stop the Ledbury Hunt meeting in Ledbury town centre, as is their established wont, on Boxing Day from an anti-hunt fanatic. I did NOT sign it ….

St Stephen the Protomartyr

Today is the Feast of St Stephen, the first chosen amongst the first deacons of the Church and, of course, the first martyr.

Here, courtesy of the Divinum Officium website, from the readings for the traditional Office of Mattins, are part of a sermon for the day by St Fulgentius of Ruspe (462/7- 527/33):

Yesterday we were celebrating the birth in time of our Eternal King; today we celebrate the victory, through suffering, of one of His soldiers. Yesterday our King was pleased to come forth from His royal palace of the Virgin's womb, clothed in a robe of flesh, to visit the world; today His soldier, laying aside the tabernacle of the body, entereth in triumph into the heavenly palaces. The One, preserving unchanged that glory of the Godhead which He had before the world was, girded Himself with the form of a servant, and entered the arena of this world to fight sin; the other taketh off the garments of this corruptible body, and entereth into the heavenly mansions, where he will reign for ever. The One cometh down, veiled in flesh; the other goeth up, clothed in a robe of glory, red with blood.

The One cometh down amid the jubilation of angels; the other goeth up amid the stoning of the Jews. Yesterday the holy angels were singing, Glory to God in the highest; today there is joy among them, for they receive Stephen into their company. Yesterday the Lord came forth from the Virgin's womb; today His soldier is delivered from the prison of the body. Yesterday Christ was for our sakes wrapped in swaddling bands; today He girdeth Stephen with a robe of immortality. Yesterday the new-born Christ lay in a narrow manger; today Stephen entereth victorious into the boundless heavens. The Lord came down alone that He might raise many up; our King humbled Himself that He might set His soldiers in high places.

Why brethren, it behoveth us to consider with what arms Stephen was able, amid all the cruelty of the Jews, to remain more than conqueror, and worthily to attain to so blessed a triumph. Stephen, in that struggle which brought him to the crown whereof his name is a prophecy, had for armour the love of God and man, and by it he remained victorious on all hands. The love of God strengthened him against the cruelty of the Jews; and the love of his neighbour made him pray even for his murderers. Through love he rebuked the wandering, that they might be corrected; through love he prayed for them that stoned him, that they might not be punished. By the might of his love he overcame Saul his cruel persecutor; and earned for a comrade in heaven, the very man who had done him to death upon earth.

The rich symbolism of the life and death of St Stephen and in its commemoration is amply displayed by this eloquent Church Father, as it is also, in a visual form by this painting, now in Edinburgh:

The Martyrdom of St StephenAdam Elsheimer (1578-1610) painted 1603-4National Gallery of Scotland

Papal theological teaching about Christmas

From the lections at Mattins in the traditional form for Christmas Day: 

Lections 4,5 and 6:

From the Sermons of Pope St. Leo the Great 440-461

1st for Christmas 
Dearly beloved brethren, Unto us is born this day a Saviour, (Luke ii. 11). Let us rejoice. It would be unlawful to be sad to day, for today is Life's Birthday; the Birthday of that Life, Which, for us dying creatures, taketh away the sting of death, and bringeth the bright promise of the eternal gladness hereafter. It would be unlawful for any man to refuse to partake in our rejoicing. All men have an equal share in the great cause of our joy, for, since our Lord, Who is the destroyer of sin and of death, findeth that all are bound under the condemnation, He is come to make all free. Rejoice, O thou that art holy, thou drawest nearer to thy crown! Rejoice, O thou that art sinful, thy Saviour offereth thee pardon! Rejoice also, O thou Gentile, God calleth thee to life! For the Son of God, when the fulness of the time was come, which had been fixed by the unsearchable counsel of God, took upon Him the nature of man, that He might reconcile that nature to Him Who made it, and so the devil, the inventor of death, is met and beaten in that very flesh which hath been the field of his victory.

When our Lord entered the field of battle against the devil, He did so with a great and wonderful fairness. Being Himself the Almighty, He laid aside His uncreated Majesty to fight with our cruel enemy in our weak flesh. He brought against him the very shape, the very nature of our mortality, yet without sin. (Heb. iv. 15).His birth however was not a birth like other births for no other is born pure, nay, not the little child whose life endureth but a day on the earth. To His birth alone the throes of human passion had not contributed, in His alone no consequence of sin had had part. For His Mother was chosen a Virgin of the kingly lineage of David, and when she was to grow heavy with the sacred Child, her soul had already conceived Him before her body. She knew the counsel of God announced to her by the Angel, lest the unwonted events should alarm her. The future Mother of God knew what was to be wrought in her by the Holy Ghost, and that her modesty was absolutely safe.

Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us give thanks to God the Father, through His Son, in the Holy Ghost: Who, for His great love wherewith He loved us, hath had mercy on us and, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, ( Eph. ii. 4, 5), that in Him we might be a new creature, and a new workmanship. Let us then put off the old man with his deeds (Col. iii. 9); and, having obtained a share in the Sonship of Christ, let us renounce the deeds of the flesh. Learn, O Christian, how great thou art, who hast been made partaker of the Divine nature, (2 Pet. i. 4), and fall not again by corrupt conversation into the beggarly elements above which thou art lifted. Remember Whose Body it is Whereof thou art made a member, and Who is its Head, (1 Cor. vi. 15). Remember that it is He That hath delivered thee from the power of darkness and hath translated thee into God's light, and God's kingdom, (Col. i. 13.)

Lection 7:

Homily by Pope St. Gregory the Great 590-604.

8th on the Gospels 

 
By God's mercy we are to say three Masses today, so that there is not much time left for preaching; but at the same time the occasion of the Lord's Birthday itself obliges me to speak a few words. I will first ask why, when the Lord was to be born, the world was enrolled? Was it not to herald the appearing of Him by Whom the elect are enrolled in the book of life? Whereas the Prophet saith of the m reprobate: Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be written with the righteous. (Ps. lxviii. 29). Then, the Lord is born in Bethlehem. Now the name Bethlehem signifieth the House of Bread, and thus it is the birth-place of Him Who hath said: I am the Living Bread, Which came down from heaven. (John vi. 51).  We see then that this name of Bethlehem was prophetically given to the place where Christ was born, because it was there that He was to appear in the flesh by Whom the souls of the faithful are fed unto life eternal. He was born, not in His Mother's house, but away from home. And this is a mystery, showing that this our mortality into which He was born was not the home of Him Who is begotten of the Father before the worlds.

 

Reproduced from Divinium Officium

What is so striking is not just the eloquence of St Leo and the rather endearing matter of factness of St Gregory but also the breadth and profundity of what they are saying - ideas which were to flourish in the later centuries of the life of the Church but which are formed, rooted and formulated in the post-Apostolic age. This is the true development of doctrine as discussed by St John Henry Newman in action.

The Nativity

Piero della Francesca The Nativity, dated to 1470–75, 

National Gallery, London

For something about the picture see my recent blogpost The restoration of Piero della Francesca’s “Nativity” and also an article from The Spectator from 2018 at Birth of a masterpiece

An online piece by Ian Visits makes the following two points about the painting which are m, I think, worth sharing.

The two shepherds and St Joseph are relegated to the background whilst the Virgin and Childand the Angels are to the fore, and the clothes and appearance of the figures emphasises the point. This coincides I realise with the fact that in the 1470s devotion to St Joseph had not really developed let alone become an established part of Catholic piety. For that one must look a century later to one of the legacies of St Teresa of Avila. Thus Piero indicates the difference by rendering the mortals sunburnt and drab, whilst the Virgin and Angels have pale skin and bright clothing. 

Secondly in the foreground Piero has depicted a common Tuscan landscape with sandy soil thathas plants growing and the plain areas are paths to the stable and down the hill. Originally the dark plants were a lighter green but the paint has darkened with age which short of extensive overpainting cannot be undone.

A joyful celebration of the Nativity to you all.