{"id":2007,"date":"2020-05-08T20:33:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T19:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chavagnes.org\/?p=2007"},"modified":"2021-08-12T18:15:11","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:15:11","slug":"devotion-to-mary-and-the-liturgy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/devotion-to-mary-and-the-liturgy\/","title":{"rendered":"Devotion to Mary and the Liturgy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a paper delivered at the 2016 Chavagnes Summer conference, Gerhard Eger reveals that for centuries Catholics\u2019 devotion to Our Lady, now associated with private devotions, was expressed much more frequently throught public liturgical acts.<\/em><\/p>\n

+ JMJ +<\/p>\n

Your Excellency, Reverend Fathers, dear brethren in Christ,<\/p>\n

Let us, for a while at least, leave our liturgically troubled times and imagine ourselves back several hundred centuries in Rome. On the 14th<\/sup> of August of the year of Our Lord 971, to be more exact. Our sovereign, both spiritual and temporal, is the Lord Pope John XIII, a nobleman who had spent his entire life in the service of the Church. He was brought up in the Lateran palace and served for several years in the renowned schola cantorum<\/em>, which faithfully preserved and propagated the corpus of ecclesiastical chant associated with the memory of the illustrious Pope Gregory the Great. With the support of the pious Emperor of the Romans, Otto the Great, he had been unanimously elected to the Chair of Peter by the senatus populusque Romanus, a term not yet considered anachronistic. The first years of his reign were troubled, however, by the unruly Roman nobility, who managed to imprison him for several months before the emperor Otto was able to cross the Alps and free him.<\/p>\n

But now several years had passed since those unhappy events and the Lord John, a man of reverence and piety, was finally able to devote himself to spiritual and ecclesiastical matters. He was an early advocate of what would one day be called the Gregorian Reform movement, and worked closely with the Emperor to promote such causes as clerical celibacy. But this Monday 14 August, the pontiff would set aside even those concerns and dedicate himself entirely to celebrating the greatest of all Marian feasts, the Assumption. From his days as a member of the schola<\/em> he had loved the liturgy, and now, if only for two days, he could forget his earthly concerns and, together with the clergy and people, prefigure the happiness of heaven through magnificent liturgical celebration.<\/p>\n

On the morrow of 14 August, then, the Lord John, who lived in the papal apartments of the Lateran palace, awoke before dawn and donned penitential garb. Together with his cardinals he betook himself barefoot to his private chapel, the Sancta sanctorum, the Holy of Holies. There was kept an icon of Our Lord called the acheropita<\/em>, not made by human hands. It was, rather, painted by angels upon cedar-wood, although some versions of the story hold that St Luke also contributed to its creation. Whatever the case, the image, which had been rescued from the iconoclasts in Constantinople, was held in great veneration by the Romans, and kept inside a tabernacle. As they approached the hallowed picture, the Lord Pope and his cardinals genuflected seven times, whereupon the pontiff opened the tabernacle and the cardinals intoned the Te Deum<\/em>. Meanwhile, the pope humbly kissed Our Lord\u2019s feet and put the image atop the altar.<\/p>\n

Thus began the day of strict fasting that ensured the faithful were properly disposed to begin the eight-day celebration of the glorious Assumption of the Lady they called salus populi Romani<\/em>, salvation of the Roman people, and Romanae portus securitatis<\/em>, port of safety of Rome. In the evening, the bells of the Ara coeli<\/em> rang atop the Capitoline hill, signalling the beginning of the feast itself. The Lord John and his cardinals betook themselves on horseback to the basilica of St Mary Major, possibly the oldest church in Rome dedicated to Our Lady, but certainly the grandest. Once he and his court had arranged themselves in quire, the Pope intoned that old antiphon he had learned as a child in the schola<\/em>, Assumpta est Maria in caelum, gaudent angeli, laudantes benedicunt Dominum<\/em>. Mary was assumed into heaven, the angels rejoice, exulting they bless the Lord. Thus he began First Vespers of the feast.<\/p>\n

Having concluded the first liturgical hour of the Assumption, the pope and his cardinals returned to the Lateran palace to share a frugal meal; First Vespers did not mean the end of the fast. Then they went to their chambers to catch a brief rest.<\/p>\n

And it was certainly brief. They awoke before cockcrow and returned to St Mary Major, now adorned as a bride LATIN with innumerable torches and drapery. They were met by thousands of Romans eager to begin the festivities in honour of their beloved Lady. And so the Pope, the clergy, and the people began to sing the glories of Mary: this is the night hour of Mattins, with 12 psalms and 9 lessons.<\/p>\n

As they sing, another crowd began to gather on the piazza of the Lateran, awaiting the return of the Pope and his court. The people organize themselves according to their guilds, each with its own special attire, its own positions, and its own leader. Within the Sancta sanctorum, the venerable icon of Our Saviour is guarded by twelve bearers chosen from Rome\u2019s most prominent families. Accompanying them are representatives of the senatus populusque Romanus.<\/p>\n

As soon as they hear the signal that the Pope and his retinue are descending the Esquiline hill, thousands of torches are lit, and the Cardinals, assisted by the deacons, lift up the image on their shoulders and advance forward under a canopy, escorted by the multitude. Trumpets sound and psalms are heard as the magnificent procession walks through the old Triumphal Way, next to the Colosseum, under the arches of Constantine and Titus, and reach the first station on the Via Sacra, the church of St Mary Minor. There the Cardinals sing Mattins of three lessons, while some priests take a silver basin filled with perfumed water and sprinkle the feet of Our Lord on the icon, and then sprinkle the people with the water thus sanctified.<\/p>\n

Then the procession sets out anew, and with more singing, cheering, and trumpets they move to the church of St Adrian where the feet of Our Lord are again bathed with new perfumes. The procession then went up the Esquiline passing the churches of St Peter in Chains, St Lucy, St Martin on the Hill, St Praxedes, until at least at daybreak they reach the piazza of St Mary Major. There they enter the basilica, which houses an icon of Our Lady painted by St Luke. Thus the Romans symbolized the meeting of Our Lord and Our Lady in heaven and their eternal union. There the Pope led the clergy and people of Rome in the singing of Lauds.<\/p>\n

But the divine harmonies did not stop there. It was now time for the greatest liturgical ceremony. The schola besought the tired multitude for one last effort, singing, Gaudeamus omnes in Domino <\/em>&c. Thus the stational Mass began, celebrated by the Lord John, who finished by giving the plebs santa Dei <\/em>his pontifical blessing. Thus concluded the liturgical ceremonies of the day. Second Vespers were not celebrated publically outside of the monasteries; after such admirable pomp and ceremony, it was time for a well-deserved rest. The feast would, however, last for an entire octave; for the old Romans, one day was not enough to praise Our Lady\u2019s glorious Assumption. Moreover, in the year 847, when St Leo IV was pope, as the procession passed the church of St Lucy, it scared off a monstrous serpent which had been terrorising the neighbourhood; and in thanksgiving that saintly pope gave the feast its octave.<\/p>\n

This is how the ninth Ordo Romanus depicts the celebration of the Vigil and Feast of the Assumption in 10th<\/sup> century Rome. The particulars of the procession varied, certainly, but the general ceremonies remained until at least the 16th<\/sup> century. Similar ceremonies greeted the feast of the Assumption all over Europe. In fact, as we shall see, processions were an important part of the four ancient Marian feasts of the Roman kalendar, viz. the Purification, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Nativity.<\/p>\n

The piety of our forefathers was eminently communal and liturgical, and their devotion to Mary was certainly no exception. The culmination of their worship of Mary were the grand liturgical celebrations of these four feasts. But this did not merely mean that they attended Mass that day, but that they also participated in midnight processions and the singing of the great hours of First Vespers, Mattins, and Lauds.<\/p>\n

The picture of Marian devotion to-day is much changed. No longer is it primarily liturgical, but instead it is relegated to the realm of private devotions: the Rosary, the chaplet of the Seven Sorrows, month of Mary devotions, Holy Saturday meditations, prayers found in sundry collections of orisons and reflections, various methods of uniting oneself closer to our Lady. It is nobody\u2019s argument that all of these devotions are anything but pious and laudable, and private prayer to Our Lady has been as aspect of Christian life since time immemorial. But as Dom Gu\u00e9ranger says about private devotions in his prologue to L\u2019ann\u00e9e liturgique, \u2018Such nourishment cannot satisfy the soul, for it does not initiate her into the prayer of the Church. Instead of uniting her with the prayer of the Church, it isolates her.\u2019 His term, prayer of the Church, has a specific meaning: it refers to the liturgy. Following Gu\u00e9ranger, let us explore the importance of liturgical prayer.<\/p>\n

\u2018Prayer,\u2019 he says, \u2018is man\u2019s richest boon. It is his light, his nourishment, and his very life, for it brings him into communication with God, who is light, nourishment, and life.\u2019 But of course, we do not know how to pray as we ought, and together with the disciples we beseech Him to teach us how to pray. He does this through His spirit of grade and prayers; this Spirit dwells in the holy Church. Ever since His descent in Pentecost, he has \u2018prompted her prayers, her desires, her canticles of praise, her enthusiasm, and even her mourning. Hence her prayer is as uninterrupted as her existence.\u2019 As St Paul tells us the Church is the mystical Body of Christ, and all of us are members of thus body. Does it not behove us then, to unite with the other members of this Body and pray as one with it? To limit oneself purely or even mainly to mere private prayer, like a Protestant, is in effect to refuse to be a member of this one Body that is the Church. Gu\u00e9ranger adds that, \u2018it is for this reason that our blessed Saviour taught us to say our Father, and not my Father; give us, forgive us, deliver us, and not give me, forgive me, deliver me.\u2019 And thus for a thousand years the spiritual lives of the faithful was principally liturgical, getting together on specific days to communally celebrate the great events of Our Lord\u2019s life, and the glories of Our Lady and the saints, but also to mourn and do penance.<\/p>\n

In his document Mysterium fidei<\/em>, Pope Paul VI explained that Christ is really present in several senses in the liturgy. The fullest and most perfect way is His substantial presence in the Eucharist, of course, but He is present in the liturgy in other ways as well. Speaking only about the Divine Office, for instance, St Benedict wrote in his Rule that, \u2018We believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and evil in every place. But we should believe this especially without any doubt when we are assisting at the Work of God [i.e., the Divine Office].\u2019 Hence, as Fr Aidan Kavanagh explains in his book On Liturgical Theology<\/em>, the liturgy is not about God but of God. Its primary purpose is not paedagogical: to teach us how to live godly lives outside of the church. On the contrary, it is itself a way of life, the fons et culmen EXPAND. The end of our lives is the worship of God and contemplation of his mysteries, and this, during the course of our earthly existence, we can most perfectly do in the context of liturgical worship.<\/p>\n

The liturgy, then, is much more than a source of moral teaching. In its full expression, like a sublime piece of music, it elevates the mind to a contemplative state. This prayerful contemplation of God produces charity, the highest of the virtues. But let us fully understand what this contemplation is. At its best, the liturgy does not merely propose intellectual positions or concepts for us to think about; it shows us the reality signified by that concept. To fully participate in the liturgy, we must heed its call, expressed through song, incense, colour, and ritual, to be present at each of the events it commemorates. Dom Gu\u00e9ranger explains that the liturgical year \u2018is neither more nor less than the manifestation of Jesus Christ and His mysteries, in the Church and in the faithful soul.\u2019 And Laszlo Dobszay adds, that the liturgy is \u2018an action of mystery where, under the veil of an outward act, the facts of our redemption come true in the present.\u2019 Through the liturgy we can encounter God as Moses did in the burning bush. What is more, the liturgy allows us to be really present at each of the events in the history of redemption.<\/p>\n

This was well understood even by laymen in the Age of Faith. King Henry III of England had a habit of going to three sung Masses every Sunday. Having heard this, King Louis IX of France, St Louis, once advised Henry to go to some sermons instead of all three Masses; remember that sermons in the Middle Ages were generally given outside of Mass. Henry replied that he would rather see God than merely hear about him. Now that is not to say that St Louis\u2019s advice was bad, but it does show that Henry did appreciate the heights of contemplation the liturgy could provide.<\/p>\n

OUR LADY\u2019s ROLE IN SALVATION.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hence the most powerful way to encounter Our Lady and her participation in our redemption is through the liturgy.<\/p>\n

The liturgical kalendar celebrates all the main events in Our Lady\u2019s life. As was said before, the most ancient Marian feasts in the Roman kalendar are the Purification, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Nativity. The origins of all of these are impossible to define with certainty. Certainly the Purification has traditionally been considered the most ancient, with such authorities as the learned Pope Benedict XIV arguing that it is of apostolic origin. These four feasts exist on the same dates on both the Roman and Byzantine kalendars, and often in the kalendars of the lesser eastern churches as well. It is generally supposed by liturgists such as Dom Gu\u00e9ranger and Bishop Schuster that these Marian feasts were first celebrated in the East, which of course had closer contact with the traditions of those places where Our Lady lived her earthly life. They were quickly adopted by the West, however, and by the reign of Pope St Sergius I (DATES), they were a fixed part of the Roman kalendar.<\/p>\n

St Sergius adorned all these four feasts with nightime penitential processions, as we have earlier described in the case of the Assumption. Through these processions he sought to excite the Roman people\u2019s piety and facilitate the recognitions that the events being celebrated were not mere commemorated but made really present. The meeting between the icons of Our Lord and Our Lady in front of St Mary Major, for instance, allowed the Roman people to witness the meeting of Our Lord and Our Lady in heaven after her assumption, and the chronicles describes the outpouring of genuine piety and joy during this part of the ceremonies.<\/p>\n

The feast of the Purification, Candlemas, is the only one which has kept its ancient procession up to the present day. In mediaeval Rome, before dawn parish processions set out towards the church of St Hadrian in the Roman Forum, with the people holding candles to light the way. The clergy sang antiphons and psalms to which the people replied Kyrie eleison. The Pope and his deacons also made there way to his church and, entering the sacristy, donned a black or violet cope in sign of penance, as did his assistants. Then the clergy and the scholae cantorum came into the presence of the pontiff and received from his hand a candle. Once the distribution was finished, they sang the introit antiphon Exsurge Domine<\/em>, still part of the rite to-day, as the Pope made a solemn entrance into the temple. As if this were the opening of a Mass, the choir then sang the Kyrie eleison, and then the Pope sang the collect, the text of which is preserved in the Gregorian Sacramentary but is not part of the Tridentine rite. Then the grand procession began: in the 9th<\/sup> century the people divided themselves into seven choirs each singing the litany and prceded by their own processional cross. By the later Middle Ages they substited the crosses for the eighteen most venerable icons of Our Lord and Our Lady in the city. The Pope himself walked barefoot, preceded by two candle-bearing acolytes and flanked by a subdeacon swinging a thurible bellowing fragrant smoke. The procession crossed the Forums of Nerva and Trajan, heading towards the Esquiline. The schola sang antiphons of Greek origin which had been translated into Latin, and the clergy seconded them with psalms and responsories. As St Mary Major drew closer, they began to sing the ternary litany, called thus because each invocation was repeated thrice. Once they reached the basilica, the Pope celebrated Mass.<\/p>\n

According to Cardinal Schuster, although candles are especially associated with this feast, they were originally part of all the four Marian processions of the year. By the 12th<\/sup> century, however, they had become especially associated with the feast of the Purification, and several special blessings for the candles had been developed. He thus discards the theory held by many older authorities, including Baronius, Thomassin, and Benedict XIV, that the blessing of candles was an attempt to Christianize a pagan feast, either Lupercalia or Amburbalia. But more interesting and valuable than the historical origins of the Candlemas blessings and procession is the mystical meaning thereof. St Ivo of Chartres explained in a sermon he delivered on this day that the wax, formed from the juice of flowers by bees, which represent virginity, symbolizes the virginal flesh of the Divine infant, who did not diminish either by His conception or His birth the spotless purity of his Blessed Mother. The flame of the candle, St Ivo adds, represents Jesus Christ, who enlightened us in our darkness: Lumen ad revelationem gentium. St Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, states that the candle is composed of three parts, viz. the wax, the wick, and the flame. The wax, produced by virginal bees, is the flesh of Our Lord. The wick within it represents Our Lord\u2019s soul, and the flame which burns above it symbolises His Divinity. Thus, mystically, the faithful are able to be really present as the Lord is carried by Our Lady into the Temple where she is purified and He is presented to old St Simeon.<\/p>\n

The feast of the Annunciation is also of great antiquity. Already by the time of St Sergius it was a traditional and universal feast. Several councils at this time, especially in the East, attempted to prune Lent of the feasts of martyrs in order to focus more exclusively on that time\u2019s penitencial practices. They never dared supress the feast of the Annunciation on the 25 March, however, and even to-day the Greeks only suspend their Lenten fast on Saturday, Sunday, and the 25 March. Only the Mozarabic Church in Spain ended up transferring the feast about a week before Christmas. From the time of Sergius I Rome celebrated this feast with a procession almost identical to the one that had been held for the feast of the Purification.<\/p>\n

The feast of the Nativity of Our Lady seems to be somewhat more recent than the other four feasts, but Sergius I granted it the same sort of procession enjoyed by the feasts of the Purification and the Annunication. Again the procession began in the church of St Hadrian with the antiphon Exsurge Domine, the Kyrie eleison, and a special collect, and then the people and clergy walked to St Mary Major to celebrate the Mass. As soon as the Pope entered the basilica, his feet were washed with warm water while the schola sang the Te Deum<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Other feasts soon arose. The most notable is of course the feast of the Immaculate Conception. It arose around the sixth or seventh cetnruy among the Greeks under the name Conception of St Anne, for they took Conceptio<\/em> in the active sense. It migrated first to the Gothic Church of Spain in the 8th<\/sup> century, then to Naples by the 9th<\/sup> century, and finally to England, France, and Germany in about the 11th<\/sup> century. Rome, however, did not adopt the feast until the Franciscan Pope Xystus IV promulgated as the feast of the Conception of Our Lady in 1476, and Innocent XII granted it an octave in the 17th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

It would take to long to give the history of the other Marian feasts that began to show up on the Roman kalendar, but suffice it to say that by the dawn of the 20th<\/sup> century, there were thirteen specifically Marian feasts on the universal kalendar\u2014the Immaculate Conception, the Purification, the two feasts of the seven Dolours or Compassion of Our Lady, the Visitation, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Assumption, the Nativity, the Holy Name of Mary, the Holy Rosary, the Presentation, Our Lady Help of Christians, and the Maternity of Our Lady, plus the feasts of Christmas, the Circumcision, and Epiphany, which are both of Our Lord and Our Lady. Four Marian feasts, the Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Nativity, had octaves. Local diocesan kalendars enriched this with their own special Marian feasts.<\/p>\n

Despite this multitude of feasts, however, liturgical veneration of Mary had diminished considerably since the age of Faith. All the old processions had disppeared by the 17th<\/sup> century with the notable exception of the Candlemas procession. The public singing of the Hours of the Divine Office became rarer and rarer, and it ceased to be a notable part of the spiritual lives of the faithful. One exception to this is the case of France, where the singing of Vespers during Sundays and feasts endured for much longer than in the rest of Western Christendom. In the 17th<\/sup> century, in thanksgiving for the birth of the future Louis XIV, a procession was added to the feast of the Assumption after Vespers. Elsewhere however liturgical Marian processions were almost extinct. In the Novus Ordo Missae, the feast of the Purification has been renamed the feast of the Presentation of Our Lord and the Marian element has been considerably diminished; and so no liturgical Marian processions have really survived into the New Order of Mass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a paper delivered at the 2016 Chavagnes Summer conference, Gerhard Eger reveals that for centuries Catholics\u2019 devotion to Our Lady, now associated with private devotions, was expressed much more frequently throught public liturgical acts. + JMJ + Your Excellency, Reverend Fathers, dear brethren in Christ, Let us, for a while at least, leave our…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chavagnes.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}