The Counts of Jesu Christo, Part II

The Massacre of the Holy Innocents by Fra Angelico
By Michael P. Foley

This article is a companion to an article of the same name in the christmas 2008 issue of the Latin Mass.

It might seem odd to think of anyone else besides the Infant Jesus or the Holy Family during the octave of Our Lord’s Nativity, but the Church in her wisdom does precisely that. Immediately following Christmas Day are the feasts of several holy men and boys known as the comites Christi, “the comrades of Christ.” Comes not only means “companion” but it is also the Latin word for the noble title of count. As this would suggest, the comites Christi are somehow close to their Lord in the way that a royal entourage is close to its king. The Church acknowledges a spiritual intimacy by placing the feasts of certain saints close to that of the birthday of their Sovereign: the Byzantine rite, for example, pays special honor to the Princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, by celebrating their feast on December 28.

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It might seem odd to think of anyone else besides the Infant Jesus or the Holy Family during the octave of Our Lord’s Nativity, but the Church in her wisdom does precisely that.

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During the same week, the Western Church honors St. Stephen (December 26), the first martyr in both act and desire and hence the first to be honored after Christmas; St. John the Evangelist (December 27), the disciple closest to Christ during the Last Supper; the Holy Innocents (December 28), close to the Infant Jesus by their martyrdom; St. Thomas Becket (December 29), whose death at the hands of a Christian king on this day in 1170 so shocked Christendom that his feast day was given the privilege of remaining within the Christmas octave; and St. Sylvester (December 31), the Pope who lived to see the civic peace that followed the Roman persecutions and whose feast thus aptly gives voice to our prayers for the new civic year.

Three years ago, we looked at the feasts of two such counts, Saints Stephen the Proto-Martyr and John the Apostle.¹ This year we turn our attention to the rest of the Roman rite’s Christmas Camelot: the Holy Infants, St. Thomas Becket, and Pope St. Sylvester.

The Holy Innocents (December 28)

Herod, perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry; and sending killed all the men children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying: “A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Mt. 2:16-18).

St. Matthew’s chilling description of the massacre of Bethlehem’s baby boys does not indicate how many were killed in Herod’s effort to murder the Infant Jesus. The Byzantine liturgy mentions 14,000, the Syrian churches speak of 64,000, and some medieval authors, inspired by Revelation 14:3, speak of a staggering 144,000. Based on fertility rates and the size of the population of Bethlehem and its environs at the time, however, a more realistic estimate places the number of the slain somewhere between ten and twenty.

Matthew’s account is also silent about the date of the massacre, except for hinting that it happened within two years of the apparition of the Magis’ star. The Armenian feast day honoring the Holy Innocents falls on Monday after the Second Sunday after Pentecost in accordance with a belief that they were killed fifteen weeks after the nativity of our Lord. The Byzantine calendar has the feast on December 29, while the Syrian and Chaldean calendars have it on December 27.

The Church of Rome, from what we can tell, has always kept the feast of “Childermas” (Children’s Mass) on December 28, ever since it first began being celebrated there in the fifth century. In so doing, the Western Church presents an interesting array of Christly counts on December 26, 27, and 28: first St. Stephen, the Proto-Martyr who is martyr by will, love, and blood; then St. John the Evangelist, who is martyr by will and love (John is considered a martyr because of the attempts made on his life even though he died a natural death); and lastly, the Holy Innocents, who are martyrs by blood alone.

But if they are not martyrs by blood alone, how can they be martyrs at all? Isn’t a martyr someone who dies because he consciously professes faith in Christ? The very fact that the Church acknowledges the murder of these little ones as holy martyrdom is itself significant, as it tells us something about the nature of salvation and childhood. A child normally does not attain the use of reason until the age of seven, and even then he is under the care of his parents, who act as a kind of “surrogate reason,” helping him develop his rational faculties. Yet an infant, under the supervision of another surrogate (his godparents), may be baptized long before he has the ability to believe in the creed for the simple reason that just as he did not personally choose the curse of original sin with which he was born, so too need he not choose the cure of baptismal grace in order to be saved.

Similarly, the Holy Innocents did not choose martyrdom or even Christ, but this is not due to any failure on their part but to the undeveloped state of their minds. What matters here, as with baptism, is the action done to them. The fact that they died not only for Christ but instead of Him makes them flores martyrum, the “flowers of the martyrs.” As St. Augustine eloquently puts it: “They are the first buds of the Church killed by the frost of persecution.”² The Breviary Hymn for the feast, Salvete Flores Martyrum, alludes to this botanical epithet, along with a touching portrayal of the Innocents playing with their symbols of martyrdom before the altar of God:

You, tender flock of lambs, we sing,
First victims slain for Christ your King:
Beside the very altar, gay
With palms and crowns, ye seem to play.

The Mass of Childermas

As this bittersweet image attests, even though martyrdom is a glorious event in which the Church rejoices, it is difficult not to be moved by the thought of helpless toddlers being cut down in the streets. The Church, therefore, taking heed of Matthew’s citation of “Rachel weeping for her children” from the prophet Jeremiah, assumed the role of a second Rachel and mourned for these little ones. Except for when the feast fell on a Sunday, violet was the liturgical color, and the Gloria and Alleluia were suppressed. In the early centuries, Roman Christians also abstained from meat on Holy Innocents’ Day. It was on the octave day of the feast (January 4) that the Church turned her thoughts to the young martyrs’ glory, the Mass being celebrated in red with the Gloria and Alleluia. In the 1950s, however, the octave was eliminated, and so currently in the 1962 calendar red is the color of Childermas, and the Gloria and Alleluia are used. The station church of the day, St. Paul Outside the Walls, was chosen because it is believed that it contains the bodies of several of the Holy Innocents.³


Massacred of the Holy Innocents (detail) by Reni Guido
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But if they are not martyrs by blood alone, how can they be martyrs at all? Isn’t a martyr someone who dies because he consciously professes faith in Christ? The very fact that the Church acknowledges the murder of these little ones as holy martyrdom is itself significant.

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Childermas Customs

The twelve days of Christmas are a time of “topsy-turvy” customs, where social ranks and pecking orders are inverted in giddy imitation of the grandest inversion of all, the fact that Almighty God humbled Himself to be born a man in a chilly and foul-smelling stable. Childermas is no exception. In many religious communities, the novices had the privilege of sitting at the head of the table at meals and meetings, while the last person who had taken vows in the monastery or convent got to be superior for a day. Young monks and nuns would received congratulations and have “baby food,” such as hot cereal, served to them for dinner.⁴

A similar flip-flop occurred in the family. Customs like decorating the crib or blessing the baby were standard ways of observing the feast, and the youngest child was allowed special privileges and honors, even becoming master of the household. Not all customs, however, bode well for the young ’uns. In some places, children awoke to a spanking from their parents “to remind them of the sufferings of the Innocents!”⁵ Lover of tradition though I be, I do not recommend resuscitating this particular observance. It does, however, serve as a useful reminder to spoiled children when they complain about not being treated as royally on this day as they would wish.

In the Philippines and Spanish-speaking countries, Childermas is the equivalent of April’s Fools Day, a time of pranks and practical jokes called inocentadas. And, of course, all of Christendom once abstained from servile work on this day—along with the other twelve days of Christmas.

St. Thomas Becket (December 29)

Thomas Becket was born on December 21, the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, in either 1118 or 1120. He became a trusted subordinate of Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who appointed him Archdeacon of Canterbury and eventually recommended to King Henry II that he be appointed Chancellor of England. Thomas and Henry became fast friends, sharing a commitment to hard work but also behaving in occasion “like two schoolboys at play.”⁶ Thomas acted vigorously in the interests of his monarch to the full extent of his conscience, but he disdained the licentious ways of his peers, hating “foul conduct or foul speech, lying or unchastity.”⁷ He also mentored the King’s son. The future Henry III later said that Becket showed him more love on the first day at his home than his father had in his entire life.

Becket became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162 on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Some believe that his consecration is what eventually led to the placement of Trinity Sunday on the universal Roman calendar, since Becket procured permission for England to observe this feast as the anniversary of his archbishopric.⁸ The new Archbishop soon began defending the rights of the Church against the encroachment of the royal government. The most galvanizing issue was whether English clergymen were subject to ecclesiastical courts or the King’s. (In those days, as with our current practice of military courts, different segments of society were subject to different laws and magistracies.) Becket refused to budge, and the King eventually had him convicted of charges of malfeasance during his chancellorship. Thomas stormed out of the trial and fled to France, where he was protected by King Louis VII.


Death of Saint Thomas Becket by Meister Frnacke

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Some believe that his consecration is what eventually led to the placement of Trinity Sunday on the universal Roman calendar, since Becket procured permission for England to observe this feast as the anniversary of his archbishopric.

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Through the mediation of papal diplomacy, Becket returned to England in 1170. But the truce was not to last. Becket excommunicated three bishops when at the will of the King they crowned young Henry III at York, usurping a privilege reserved to Canterbury. Henry II, at the end of his wits, is then said to have retorted, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” There are several versions of what exactly he said, but whatever it was, it was interpreted by four of his knights as a command to kill the archbishop. The men left their weapons outside the cathedral, confronted Becket within and, after he refused to absolve the bishops, returned with their weapons.

They met up with Becket as he was approaching the sanctuary for Solemn Vespers and this time drew their swords. Unlike the stylized movie version, the assassination was gruesome. The eyewitness account from his faithful cross-bearer reports that the knights’ blows opened his skull, spilling his brains onto the pavement. The killers then exulted, saying, “Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more.” Thus, as a hymn in his honor puts it, St. Thomas became “both priest and sacrifice in the church of Canterbury for the sake of the laws of justice.”⁹

It did not take long for all of Europe to venerate Becket as a martyr, and within three years he was canonized a saint by the Pope. A year later, the King himself did penance and was scourged at Becket’s tomb. The shrine was the most popular pilgrimage site in the British Isles until Henry VIII’s thugs destroyed it and the saint’s bones in 1538. St. Thomas’ four murderers fled England and eventually sought forgiveness from Pope Alexander in Rome, who had excommunicated them. The Pope made their penance a term of fourteen years of service as crusaders in the Holy Land.

Legends and Customs

There are several colorful legends about St. Thomas Becket, most of which pay homage to his lovable gruffness. Becket purportedly gave tails to the inhabitants of Strood, Kent, after they sided with the King and cut off the tail of the archbishop’s horse as he rode through town.¹⁰ In Otford, Kent, the saint did not like the taste of the drinking water and struck his crosier on the ground to form what is now called “Becket’s Well.” Otford is also said to lack nightingales because one of them made a racket while Becket was trying to pray, prompting him to banish them from the town. But this does not mean that the saint hated the fowls of the air. On one occasion, a little bird that had been taught to speak escaped from its cage and flew into a field. A hawk swooped in for the kill, and as it was about to strike, the panicked bird cried out what it had heard others say in times of distress, “Saint Thomas, help!” The hawk was struck dead, and the bird escaped unharmed.¹¹

There are no universal customs on St. Thomas’ feast day, but it is not difficult to find ways of paying tribute to “England’s most vibrant flower,” as he has been called.¹² English food and ale are a good start, along with the 1964 film Becket starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. Based on a play by Jean Anouilh, the movie takes considerable liberties with the biographical details, starting with the fact that it portrays Becket, who was a descendant of the Normans, as a Saxon underdog. Nor was Becket a carousing and opportunistic nihilist prior to his elevation to the See of Canterbury, although he did become much more ascetical at that point, changing, as he once said, from being “a patron of actors and a follower of hounds to a shepherd of souls.” One sign of his transformation was a hair shirt that he wore under his archbishop’s garments (as was discovered by the monks who prepared his body for burial.) Still, the movie is a dramatic and psychological masterpiece, and it accurately portrays some of the challenges St. Thomas faced in his life.

Pope Saint Sylvester (December 31)

Saint Sylvester was Supreme Pontiff during the reign of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who ended the persecution of the Church and made Christianity the official religion of the Empire. There are several legends connecting the Pope and the Emperor, though their historical value is dubious. According to one, Constantine was baptized on his death bed by Sylvester; according to another, the baptism took place earlier in his life, when he allegedly contracted leprosy. One memorable version of the legend states that Constantine was told that the only cure for leprosy was to bathe in the blood of 3,000 newborn infants. As the infants were being gathered, Constantine recoiled at this barbarity as incompatible with Roman dignity. That night, Sts. Peter and Paul appeared to him in a dream and told him to go to Pope Sylvester, who baptized and thus cured him in the basilica of St. John Lateran.¹³ Today, an inscription at the base of the obelisk outside the basilica records this legend.


Pope Saint Sylvester I photo by Nick Exsillo

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Saint Sylvester was Supreme Pontiff during the reign of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who ended the persecution of the Church and made Christianity the official religion of the Empire.

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What we do know is that during Sylvester’s pontificate Constantine built several of the great churches of Rome, not only the Lateran but Santa Croce, the original St. Peter’s, and a number of cemeterial churches over the graves of martyrs. The Pope no doubt collaborated with this effort, and he also sent legates to the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council in Church history. The first Roman martyrology was compiled during Sylvester’s papacy, and his name is associated with the “Roman school” of chant.

As mentioned above, there is something appropriate about issuing in the new civic year with the first Bishop of Rome to enjoy civic peace, when our hearts are filled with hope for “peace on earth.” But the reason for the feast day is more literal: after twenty one years of service to God as Pope, Sylvester was buried on December 31, 335.

Silvesterabend

Sylvester’s feast is so closely tied to December 31 that in many countries New Year’s Eve is simply known as “Silvester” or “Silvester Night” (silvesterabend or silvesternacht in German). In France and French Canada it was traditional for the father to bless the members of his family and for the children to thank their parents for all of their love and care.¹⁴ In central Europe, a pre-Christian ritual of scaring away demons with loud noises was retained; from this is derived our custom of fireworks and artillery salutes in welcome of the new year. In Austria, December 31 was sometimes called Rauchnacht or “Incense night,” when the paterfamilias of the family went through the house and barn purifying them with incense and holy water.¹⁵

And speaking of luck, Sylvester Night was a favorite occasion for attempts to peer into the upcoming year. The reading of tea leaves was once popular, as was pouring spoonfuls of molten lead into water and interpreting the future from the shapes it took. Young maidens prayed to St. Sylvester in traditional rhymes, asking him for a good husband and hoping through his intercession to catch a glimpse of Mr. Right in their dreams or in the reflection of a mirror.¹⁶

On the more pious side of things were vigil services of various kinds thanking God for the gifts of the year and seeking blessings for the new. To this day, Holy Mother Church grants a plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions, to a public recitation of the great Latin hymn of thanksgiving, the Te Deum, on the last day of the year. A partial indulgence, on the other hand, “is granted to those who recite the Te Deum in thanksgiving.”¹⁷

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All of these ancient feasts speak in different ways to the Church today and the contemporary world. On Childermas, for example, some have begun to remember in their prayers the victims of abortion.

* * * * * * *
The Feast of St. Sylvester was also considered a good time to feed the body as well as the soul. In Spain and other Spanish-speaking areas it was considered good luck to eat twelve grapes at the twelve strokes of midnight. In Austria, krapfen, apricot-jam doughnuts, are traditionally eaten when the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve. In Poland, Poncz Sylwestrowy (“Sylvester’s Punch”), a strong rum mixture, was similarly imbibed.¹⁸

Conclusion

December 28, 29, and 31 celebrate a range of saints, from those who died thirty three years before the Crucifixion to those who died over 1,100 years after. Yet all of these ancient feasts speak in different ways to the Church today and the contemporary world. On Childermas, for example, some have begun to remember in their prayers the victims of abortion. Like their Bethlehem counterparts, the unborn now are innocents being slain by cruel Herods, but unlike the Holy Innocents they are bereft of the privilege of dying explicitly for Christ. Interestingly, there were once folk beliefs in German-speaking countries about some unbaptized babies going to Heaven on Childermas Day.¹⁹

Similarly, it would not be inappropriate to pray on St. Thomas’ Day for the return of the Church of England, and indeed of the entire English nation, to the Catholic Faith. Thomas gave his life to protect the Church from subordination to the Crown, as would another Thomas, St. Thomas More, four centuries later. In fact, More drew great consolation from knowing that he was to be executed on July 6, the day before another feast day honoring the brave Archbishop, the Feast of the Translation of the Relics of St. Thomas Becket. Let us pray that “Our Lady’s Dowry” re-embrace its ancient Faith and that Pope Benedict XVI’s generous provisions in his 2009 Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus be accepted.

Lastly, when St. Sylvester died he looked out on a world that no longer butchered Christians and was beginning to appropriate Christian morality in its laws and mores. Today we look at the photographic negative of that picture, as persecutions of Christians increase worldwide and Western society increasingly abandons its sacred heritage. As we celebrate in the octave of Christmas the Light that came into the world, let us pray that It dispel the shadows of our age and its global godlessness. St. Sylvester, help!

[Michael P. Foley, an associate professor of Patristics at Baylor University, is the author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites (Eerdmans, 2008).]

Notes

1. “The Counts of Jesu Christo,” TLM 17:5 (Advent/Christmas 2008), pp. 44-47. [back]


2. Augustine, Sermon 10 on the Saints. [back]


3. For more on station days, see my article, “Making the Stations: Stational Churches and the Spiritual Geography of the Roman Patrimony,” TLM 18:1 (Winter 2009), pp. 38-41. [back]


4. Francis X. Weiser, Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs (Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1958), 133. [back]


5. Joanna Bogle, A Book of Feasts and Seasons (Gracewing, 1992), 59. [back]


6. Herbert Thurston, “St. Thomas Becket,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), , retrieved October 3, 2011. [back]


7. Thurston, ibid. [back]


8. Thurston, ibid. [back]


9. In templo Cantuariae/ Pro legibus justitiae/ Fit sacerdos et hostia, from the hymn, Pia Mater Plangat Ecclesia. [back]


10. “Thomas Becket,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket, retrieved October 3, 2011. [back]


11. From “The Translation of Saint Thomas of Canterbury,” in Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. [back]


12. Thomas totius Angliae/ Flos vernans, from the hymn, Pia Mater Plangat Ecclesia. [back]


13. From “The Life of Saint Silvester,” in Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. [back]


14. Weiser, Religious Customs in the Family (Liturgical Press, 1956), 62. [back]


15. Katherine Burton and Helmut Ripperger, Feast Day Cookbook (Catholic Authors Press, 1951/2005), 170. [back]


16. Weiser, Handbook, 139. [back]


17. Enchiridion of Indulgences, 60. [back]


18. For the recipes, see Evelyn Vitz, A Continual Feast (Ignatius Press, 1985), 158-59. [back]


19. See Weiser, Handbook, 133-34. [back]

[Michael P. Foley is associate professor of patristics at Baylor University. He is author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services(Eerdmans, 2008). Dr. Foley's article, "The Counts of Jesu Christo -- Part 2,” Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 2011), pp. 44-48, is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

Showing the Tree to the Acorn: Feasts About the Resurrection of the Body

The Ascension by John Singleton Copley
By Michael P. Foley

“Glory be to God for dappled things!” exults the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. And among those dappled things, shaded with their various spots and hues, we must count not just “skies of couple-colour” and “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,” but the traditional liturgical year, that great annual pageant of all things “counter, original, spare, and strange.”

And one of the strangest things found in the liturgical year and in Christian dogma (strange in that it is a surprise to common sense) is belief in the resurrection of the dead. In an age where victories over sin, ignorance, and doubt seem to be increasingly rare, it is easy for Catholics to forget that their ultimate hope is not simply in avoiding Hell and reaching Heaven but in enjoying God with their souls reunited to their bodies. Spiritual masters such as Saint Augustine have even gone so far as to suggest that until that reunion takes place, the blessed in Heaven experience a restlessness or “patient longing.”¹ The Beatific Vision just won’t be the same without new bodies in a new Heaven and a new earth.

Our Glorified Bodies

Belief in bodily resurrection is no easy matter. The difficulty begins with answering a seemingly simple question, “what is the body?” Shakespeare plays upon this when Prince Hamlet describes how a king may go “through the guts of a beggar.” A king dies, his body is eaten by worms, a beggar goes fishing with one of the worms, and then he eats the fish that ate the worm.² Whose body is whose?

And yet this ambiguity also belies a great potential. If we can’t pin down the nature of the body, then who can naysay what it is capable of becoming? Saint Paul chides doubters who ask, “How do the dead rise again?” by comparing the body to a seed that must die before it truly lives.³ It is a metaphor worth dwelling on. The human body, which is a magnificent creation, is a mere acorn in comparison to the oak tree it is destined to become. Acorns retain their substance when they grow into trees (they don’t become butterflies), yet the difference between an acorn and an oak could not be more profound; the former is virtually nothing in comparison to the latter. If our bodies, impressive as they are, are mere acorns now, imagine what they will be as trees on the Last Day.

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As excellent as the Beatific Vision is, the human soul is naturally designed to rule a body, and thus there remains some unfinished business even
for a saint in Heaven.

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To give an example of what may await us, consider the four properties of a glorified body as singled out in Catholic theology: agility, subtlety, impassibility, and clarity. Agility is the perfect responsiveness of the body to the soul, which will allow it to move at the speed of thought. Subtlety is the power of penetrating solid matter, while impassibility is the impossibility of suffering or dying. Lastly, clarity is the total absence of bodily deformity and a “resplendent radiance and beauty.”⁴

The astonishing excellence of a resurrected body was cleverly expressed by a young colonial printer named Benjamin Franklin, who at the age of 22 wrote his own epitaph:

The body of B. Franklin, Printer
(Like the Cover of an Old Book
Its Contents torn Out
And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)
Lies Here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be Lost;
For it will (as he Believ’d) Appear once More
In a New and More Elegant Edition
Revised and Corrected
By the Author.⁵

God’s Path to Being All in All

The general resurrection of the body is also a most fitting consummation of Christ’s Paschal victory over death. The Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Our Lord open the gates of Heaven to our souls but do not immediately end our vulnerability to the effects of original sin. Those effects include a degradation of the body: every bodily deformity or disease, every violent injury or accident, every misuse or abuse, is a sad reminder that we still live east of Eden. And death remains what it always was, a literal humiliation for one and all, a return of the body to the ground (humus).

As excellent as the Beatific Vision is, the human soul is naturally designed to rule a body, and thus there remains some unfinished business even for a saint in Heaven. This body of ours, this temple of the Holy Spirit that is mocked and exploited by the world, the flesh, and the devil, is also in need of redemption. How splendid, then, that the Elect are not only promised eternal life in Heaven but a “reform” of “the body of our lowness” into a body like that of our risen Lord,⁶ a body that Saint Paul refers to as “glorified” and even “spiritual.”⁷ The body, which this side of the grave can be a handful to deal with, will become a luminous reflection of the soul’s divinely-given excellence once it is glorified. In Saint Augustine’s words, “what was once [the soul’s] burden will be its glory.”⁸ And how fitting that this glory is part of God’s ongoing transformation of creation until He becomes “all in all.”⁹

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Our Lord assumed a human body in the Virgin’s womb, and the Feast of the Ascension celebrates the fact that that same body now sits at the right of the Father; therefore, our human bodies are included in the divine plan of salvation. For the first time in history, there is a human body in Heaven!

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Easter Sunday

The extraordinary form of the Roman rite excels in the re-presentation of these eschatological realities, and it does so gradually. Easter, for instance, celebrates not only Christ’s victory over the grave but the first full-fledged instance of a glorified body. The New Testament makes it clear that Jesus’ body on that first Easter morning was not a resuscitated corpse like that of Lazarus, for although it was indeed the selfsame body that was born of the Virgin Mary, it had undergone a significant transformation. That is why His closest friends did and did not recognize Him,¹⁰ and it is why the risen Lord was able to pass through locked doors¹¹ as well as appear and disappear.¹² In other words, His body now possessed the properties of glorification. The implication for the rest of us is clear. As Saint Paul explains, our Savior will take “the body of our lowness” and make it like “the body of His glory.”¹³ Consequently, during the Easter Octave we pray that we may be transformed into a “new creature”¹⁴ and pass on to “heavenly glory.”¹⁵

Ascension

As a whole, however, the theme of our bodily glorification remains rather muted during the Easter season. This is true for the Feast of the Ascension as well, since the Church understandably focuses more on Christ’s completion of His earthly ministry and His promise to send the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the Collect for the Ascension prays that we learn to “dwell in mind amidst heavenly things,” not in body. Still, there are hints about the future of God’s Elect. To paraphrase Saint Gregory Nazianzus, “What is not assumed is not saved.”¹⁶ Our Lord assumed a human body in the Virgin’s womb, and the Feast of the Ascension celebrates the fact that that same body now sits at the right of the Father; therefore, our human bodies are included in the divine plan of salvation. For the first time in history, there is a human body in Heaven!

In fact, by the end of the first Ascension Day, there may have been three bodies: Our Lord’s, Elijah’s—who was finally allowed into the Empyrean Heaven (see below)—and Enoch, the figure in the Old Testament who was mysteriously “taken” by God after his death but who could not have been allowed to experience the Beatific Vision prior to the resurrection of our Lord.¹⁷ What we do know is that our Lord did not enter into the true Holy of Holies empty-handed: besides His own glorified body and body, he brought the souls He had rescued from limbo on Good Friday, when “He descended into Hell.” The Breviary hymn for the Divine Office speaks of our ascended Lord at the head of a “triumph,” a Roman parade in which a victorious general showcased all of the slaves he had captured in battle.¹⁸ The hymn artfully inverts this image, showing Christ as the liberator of souls from limbo now parading them into Heaven after having completed his earthy campaign, as it were.

Corpus Christi

Shortly after Paschaltide, the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi. Again the main focus is on the meaning of the feast at hand (in this case, the miracle of transubstantiation), but not without reference to our promised glorification. In the Divine Office for Corpus Christi, the Eucharist is called the “pledge of our future glory.”¹⁹ Jesus Himself says as much when He links Holy Communion to the Four Last Things: “He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up on the last day.”²⁰ The Eucharist is not only essential to our earthly pilgrimage as spiritual food and medicine, it is preparing us, by what it is and what it does, for our final transformation into a glorified creature of God. For the Eucharist is not just the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, but His glorified Body and Blood.²¹ When we receive Holy Communion, we are therefore receiving a token of what we, God willing, will one day become.



The Poem of the Soul - Memory of Heaven by Anne Francois Louis Janmot
And it is not just our bodies that are being glorified by the Eucharist. Pope Benedict XVI writes eloquently of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass transforming the entire landscape of being:

The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of “nuclear fission,” to use an image familiar to us today, which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28).²²

The Transfiguration (August 6)

The Pope’s reference to the transfiguration of the world brings us to our next feast. On the Second Sunday of Lent, the Transfiguration of our Lord is commemorated in order to arouse the faithfuls’ desire for the glory of Easter; and on August 6, we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration to reflect more properly on the significance of this event. Part of that reflection involves meditating on the refulgence and majesty that our own glorified bodies will one day have.²³ The Breviary hymn for the feast speaks of the event in terms similar to the praise of the Eucharist we have just seen, as a “sign of perennial glory.”²⁴ Moreover, the little chapter used during the Divine Office is Philippians 3:20-21, the passage about reforming our body of lowness. Just as the historical Transfiguration prefigured the Resurrection of Our Lord, so too does the liturgical celebration of the Transfiguration prefigure the general resurrection of the body.

* * * * * * *

The assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul, is therefore a beautiful thing not only in its own right (for who was more worthy than she of such an honor?) but with respect to all of the Elect, as it brings to the fore the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

* * * * * * *
How interesting that both of Jesus’ spiritual companions on Mount Tabor that day had bodies missing in action. Elijah was taken up into heaven in a fiery chariot, while according to Jude 1:9, Saint Michael the Archangel and the devil fought over Moses’ body after he died. Some have interpreted Saint Jude’s cryptic statement to refer to the struggle between Michael and Satan through their earthly agents in Egypt, Moses being an emissary of God and the angels while Pharaoh and his magicians being minions of the devil. Others interpret the verse in reference to a fight over Moses’ remains, with Satan wanting the body buried in such a way that would seduce the Hebrews into idolatrizing it.²⁵ But Saint Michael prevailed, and to this day the location of Moses’ grave is unknown.

A third interpretation is that both Moses and Elijah represent different states of the afterlife, Moses’ soul having come from limbo to witness the Transfiguration and Elijah’s body and soul (for they were never separated by death) coming from Heaven—albeit not the “Empyrean Heaven,” according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, for that is only accessible to man through Christ’s Paschal mystery.²⁶ The Transfiguration on Mount Tabor thus discloses a fascinating spectrum of human existence: the living “acorn” bodies of Saints Peter, James, and John; the disembodied soul of Moses; the departed yet unglorified body of Elijah, and the transfigured body of Jesus as the foreshadowing of total glorification on the Last Day. In particular, our Lord’s Transfiguration foreshadows the gift of clarity, when “His face did shine as the sun, and His garments became white as snow.”²⁷

The Assumption (August 15)

If bodily resurrection is promised to every faithful Christian disciple, then it is eminently fitting that Christ’s first and most faithful disciple should receive this gift before anyone else save Christ Himself. The assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul, is therefore a beautiful thing not only in its own right (for who was more worthy than she of such an honor?) but with respect to all of the Elect, as it brings to the fore the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.



The Assumption of the Virgin by Nicolas Poussin
The Mass for the Feast of the Assumption makes this connection explicit. The Collect prays that we “may deserve to be partakers of her glory,” while the Postcommunion beseeches God that through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, “we may be brought to the glory of the resurrection.” This teaching emanates outward from the Mass to various private devotions. A novena to the Blessed Virgin on the occasion of the Assumption prays: “Teach me how small earth becomes when viewed from Heaven. Make me realize that death is the triumphant gate through which I shall pass to your Son, and that someday my body shall rejoin my soul in the unending bliss of Heaven.”

* * * * * * *

By defining the Assumption only five years after the close of WWII, it was as if the Pope were saying: Yet again, the Nazis and all such racists and eugenicists are wrong. Mary’s body, Mary’s Semitic body, is in Heaven, loved by God.

* * * * * * *
Even the timing of the proclamation of the dogma on the Assumption seems attuned to highlight God’s regard for our bodily existence, now and in the future. I once heard an outstanding sermon from an FSSP priest who speculated that Pope Pius XII’s infallible definition of the doctrine in 1950 was in part (intentionally or not) a corrective to World War II, the bloodiest war in human history. Specifically, the Third Reich, which the Pope so valiantly resisted, harbored an unprecedented hatred of not simply the Jewish religion but Jewish “embodiment,” the DNA of Abraham and his descendents, which is why they tried to exterminate that DNA entirely in their death camps. By defining the Assumption only five years after the close of WWII, it was as if the Pope were saying: Yet again, the Nazis and all such racists and eugenicists are wrong. Mary’s body, Mary’s Semitic body, is in Heaven, loved by God.

Time After Pentecost

These festal reminders of the resurrection from the dead elide nicely with the Time after Pentecost, that portion of the liturgical year which commemorates the pilgrimage of the Church from its birthday to the end of days—in other words, the period in which we are currently living. Because the Time after Pentecost symbolizes the time of the Church on earth, it is also a profoundly eschatological season, a season that looks ahead to the “Eschaton,” the Last Day, just as Christians facing east when they pray or assist at Mass do so as a sign of their anticipation of the Second Coming, when Christ shall come in glory from the East.



The Poem of the Soul - Up the Mountain by Anne Francois Louis Janmot
The eschatological note of the Time after Pentecost becomes noticeable around the Eighteenth Sunday, at which point the readings and prayers grow increasingly apocalyptic in tone. Verses from the prophets become much more common and references to the final manifestation of Christ more insistent. This sense of anticipation grows each week until it crescendos with the last Sunday after Pentecost (the last Sunday of the liturgical year), when the Gospel recalls Christ’s ominous double prophecy concerning the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the terrifying end of the world.

* * * * * * *

The Lord’s Bride escorts us through a patchwork of feasts that teach us bit by bit about the immutable beauty that, God willing, will not only be ours but will render us, in the twinkling of an eye and at the sound of the trumpet, perfect icons of His brilliant glory.

* * * * * * *
But the eschatological theme is present earlier as well, and it includes a meditation on the future of our bodies. On the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, for example, the Gospel reading is of our Lord’s raising from the dead the only son of the widow of Naim (Luke 7:11-16), while the Postcommunion prays: “In soul and in body, O Lord, may we be ruled by the operation of this heavenly gift; that its effect, and not our own impulses, may ever prevail over us.” And the bodily theme is central on the Twenty Third Sunday, when the Epistle lesson returns to Philippians 3:21 and the Gospel reading proclaims the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus, a prominent official of the Capharnaum synagogue (Mt. 9:18-26).

The Temporal and Sanctoral cycles of the Church calendar thus reinforce each other in marvelously conveying to us the meaning of the article in the Creed we pray every Sunday: “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

Conclusion

Hopkins ends his poem “Pied Beauty,” which began this essay, with the verses, “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.” The Lord God, Hopkins tells us, is past change, and yet the way He brings us to His changeless beauty is through a revolving and dynamic symphony of patchy or “pied” beauty. In a similar way, the Lord’s Bride escorts us through a patchwork of feasts that teach us bit by bit about the immutable beauty that, God willing, will not only be ours but will render us, in the twinkling of an eye and at the sound of the trumpet, perfect icons of His brilliant glory.+

Notes

1. City of God 13.20. [back]


2. Hamlet IV.iii.27-31. [back]


3. I Cor. 15:35ff. [back]


4. John A. Hardon, S.J. Pocket Catholic Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 79. [back]


5. The epitaph was not used when Franklin died at the age of 84. [back]


6. Phil. 3:21. [back]


7. See Phil. 3:21; I Cor. 15:44. [back]


8. Literal Meaning of Genesis 12.35.68 [back]


9. I Cor. 15:28. [back]


10. See Lk. 24:13-32; Jn. 20:1-16, 21:1-7. [back]


11. See Jn. 20:19, 26. [back]


12. See Lk. 24:36, 24:31. [back]


13. Phil. 3:21. [back]


14. Postcommunion for Easter Wednesday. [back]


15. Secret for Easter Tuesday. [back]


16. Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter (101) to Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius. [back]


17. See Genesis 5:24. [back]


18. See the hymn Jeus nostra redemptio: “Breaking through the gates of Hell/ Redeeming Those of yours held captive/ A Victor in a noble triumph/ You now reside at the Father’s right hand.” [back]


19. Magnificat antiphon for II Vespers. [back]


20. John 6:55. [back]


21. In fact, this is one of the reasons that Holy Communion is not act of cannibalism, even though it involves consuming the flesh and drinking the blood of our Lord. No cannibal has ever come close to receiving a living and glorified body. [back]


22. Sacramentum Caritatis, 11; see also 71. [back]


23. For more on this topic, see Michael P. Foley, “Divine Do-Overs: The Secret of Recapitulation in the Traditional Calendar,” The Latin Mass 19:2 (Spring 2010), pp. 46-49. [back]


24. The hymn is Quicumque Christum quaeritis, and the verse is Signum perennis gloriae. [back]


25. A divergent theory posits that Satan argued that Moses was unworthy of burial at all since he had murdered an Egyptian as a young man. [back]


26. See Summa Theologiae III.45.3.ad 2. [back]


27. Mt. 17:2; see Mk. 9:1; Lk. 9:29. [back]

[Michael P. Foley is associate professor of patristics at Baylor University. He is author of Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services(Eerdmans, 2008) and Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Dr. Foley's article, "Showing the Tree to the Acorn: Feasts About the Resurrection of the Body,” Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 38-42, is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

Septuagesima: The Time that Land Forgot

By Michael P. Foley

When we go to Mass, be it in the new form or the old, we generally react to what is immediately transpiring before us, be it for the better or for the worse. We respond to the reverence or irreverence, piety or impiety, beauty or ugliness of the words and deeds we see and hear. These reactions are what remain fixed in our memories and go on to inform our liturgical opinions.

Harder to discern is the effect that a calendar has on our souls, since not every feast or Sunday comes with vivid memories in the making. A case in point is the liturgical season of pre-Lent or Septuagesima, an easily overlooked interlude between the Time after Epiphany and Lent. While the liturgies of Septuagesima are fairly low key, the impact that this small season has had on individuals and even on Western civilization is entirely disproportionate to its size. Septuagesima consists of three of some of the most interesting and influential weeks of the liturgical year.

Pre-Lent

Septuagesimatide, or pre-Lent, is the name given to the three consecutive Sundays preceding Ash Wednesday. It is named after the first of these, Septuagesima Sunday, which occurs roughly seventy days before Easter (septuagesima is Latin for “seventieth”). Sexagesima (“sixtieth”) Sunday comes next, followed by Quinquagesima (“fiftieth”) Sunday on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. In order to effect a gradual transition between the joy of Christmastide and the stringency of Lent, the season of Septuagesima takes on some of the sobriety of the latter but without its harshness. In the Roman Breviary, the penitential circuit of psalms is used (“Lauds II”), and at Mass the Gloria in excelsis is suppressed and the Gradual replaced with a Tract. Flowers on the altar are forbidden, and violet is the liturgical color of the vestments.

Each Sunday of Septuagesimatide also focuses on a different Old Testament figure as a way of leading us up to the Paschal mystery of Good Friday and Easter. Septuagesima Sunday—and this is particularly obvious in the Breviary—recalls Adam, Sexagesima Sunday Noah, and Quinquagesima Sunday Abraham. (This pattern is continued into Lent: the Second Sunday of Lent recalls Jacob, the Third Sunday Joseph, and the Fourth Sunday Moses.) The purpose of this instruction is to help the faithful see the reasons for the scandal of the Cross, the culmination of Lent. The Matin readings on Adam give us the doctrine of original sin, the passages on the Flood highlight the wickedness of mankind, and the sacrifices of Abraham and Melchisedech foreshadow the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

The Sundays of Septuagesima were also shaped by a series of calamities besieging the city of Rome in the sixth century. The theme of misery and desolation in the Introit of Septuagesima Sunday, for instance, comes from these troubled times. Such historical influences on the liturgical year are an excellent example of what Pope Benedict XVI meant when he referred to the Extraordinary Form as bearing “the whole weight of history within itself, and yet, at the same time, [being] much more than the product of human history.”¹ In any event, Septuagesima was a well-established liturgical season in the Roman rite by 541 A.D.

Laying to Rest the Alleluia

Perhaps the most peculiar mark of Septuagesima’s liturgies is the suppression of the word “Alleluia,” which in the Novus Ordo does not occur until Ash Wednesday. Why deprive ourselves of this glorious word for an extra two and a half weeks, especially when it is so powerful? St. Paul of the Cross, for instance, advised members of his order to cry out “Alleluia” when assaulted by the devil, for “the devil is afraid of the Alleluia; it is a word that comes from Paradise.”²

St. Paul’s reasoning about Paradise gives us a clue into the answer we seek. “Alleluia,” which in Hebrew means “Praise be to the Lord,” is traditionally known as the “song of the Lord.” It is what St. John heard in Heaven during his vision of the Apocalypse. It is the joyous cry of those who are truly home.

But Septuagesima and Lent are periods not of homecoming but of pilgrimage and exile. Indeed, just as the forty days of Lent commemorate the forty years of the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness and the forty days of Jesus fasting in the desert, Septuagesima recalls the roughly seventy years of the Babylonian Exile (605-538 BC), that period, second in importance only to the Exodus out of Egypt, when the people of Judah were deported to Babylon.³ As the haunting Psalm 136(137) attests, God’s Chosen People did not deem it fit to sing their joyous songs on foreign soil:

Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, when we remembered Sion.
On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our [musical] instruments.
For there, they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs. And they that carried us away, said: “Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion.”
How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.
Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee (verses 1-6).

The Jews would not sing their native song of joy during their exile, and neither do Catholics during theirs. As Bishop William Durandus (1237-1296) puts it: “We part from the Alleluia as from a beloved friend, whom we embrace many times and kiss on mouth, head, and hand, before we leave him.”⁴ The jubilant “Alleluia” is thus laid to rest for seventy days in the traditional Roman rite until it rises again in the Easter Vigil, and in so doing Catholics recapitulate for their spiritual benefit a cardinal moment in sacred history.

And when I say “laid to rest,” I mean that literally. Perhaps the most charming para-liturgical custom to come from Septuagesima is the depositio, or setting aside, of the Alleluia. On the Saturday afternoon before Septuagesima Sunday, medieval communities would stage an elaborate procession with a plaque or banner, often in the shape of a coffin, bearing the word “Alleluia.” The coffin would then be solemnly buried somewhere on church grounds. In parts of France, a straw man inscribed with the word “Alleluia” in gold letters was burned in effigy in the churchyard! Thanks to the liturgical movement of the 20th century, several of these customs were revived by some American parishes prior to the Second Vatican Council.

A standard part of these sacred send-offs was the singing of a song entitled Alleluia, Dulce Carmen, which artfully links the suppression of the Alleluia with the Babylonian Exile and Psalm 136. Here is J.M. Neale’s translation of the tenth-century hymn:

Alleluia! song of gladness,
Voice of joy that cannot die;
Alleluia is the anthem
Ever dear to choirs on high;
In the house of God abiding
Thus they sing eternally.

Alleluia thou resoundest,
True Jerusalem and free;
Alleluia joyful mother,
All thy children sing with thee;
But by Babylon’s sad waters
Mourning exiles now are we.

Alleluia cannot always
Be our song while here below;
Alleluia our transgressions
Make us for a while forego;
For the solemn time is coming
When our tears for sin must flow.

Therefore in our hymns we pray Thee,
Grant us blessed Trinity,
At the last to keep Thine Easter
In our home beyond the sky;
There to Thee for ever singing
Alleluia joyfully.

As the lyrics make clear, Septuagesima can teach us many valuable lessons: that Lent should not be begun abruptly or thoughtlessly but preceded by a period of adjustment; that uttering sacred words is a privilege which should not be taken for granted; that sin puts us in exile from our True Home; and that the Old Testament, with its many significant events, is perpetually relevant to the lives of Christians. Lastly, suppressing the Alleluia seventy days before Easter, and singling this fact out in a special way, heightens our joy when Alleluia triumphantly returns to our lips with the Risen Lord on Easter Sunday.

Sexagesima and Quinquagesima

The second Sunday of Septuagesimatide, Sexagesima, continues to sound the exilic note of Babylon, but with a touch of joy. Both the Collect and the Epistle commemorate the apostolate of St. Paul, the feast of whose conversion on January 25 occurs around this time.⁵ Quinquagesima, on the other hand, is preoccupied with the impending Great Fast of Lent. Its Epistle from 1 Corinthians 13 on charity is the perfect preface to a season of mortification and almsgiving, for without charity, these noble acts profit us nothing (1 Cor. 13:3). Indeed, all of Septuagesimatide is an ideal primer on how to approach the purgative period of Lent in the right spirit.

Ciao to Chow

Septuagesima season also marks the time when the faithful begin to fast voluntarily, in anticipation of the mandatory fast of Lent. As early as 465 A.D., St. Maximus, Bishop of Turin, was recommending a fast of devotion before Lent. In the Byzantine rite, the faithful would begin abstaining from meat on the penultimate Sunday before Lent and from dairy products on the Sunday immediately before Lent: hence the Byzantine name for Sexagesima is “Meatfare” Sunday and their name for Quinquagesima “Cheesefare” Sunday.⁶ In the Roman rite, the Sunday to begin abstaining from meat was Quinquagesima, and so it also came to be known as Dominica Carnevala, carnevala coming from the Latin for “removal” (levare) of “meat” (caro/carnis). It is from this name that our word “carnival” originates.

And Septuagesimatide is not just behind the word carnival: it is also behind the activity. Prior to the age of refrigeration, Christians needed to get rid of all the foods they would not be allowed to consume during Lent, which centuries ago was quite a long list; as we mentioned above, not only flesh meat but all dairy products were forbidden. And the closer Lent approached, the more urgently they needed to be consumed. Ironically, the pre-Lenten excesses and glittering pageantry we associate with Mardi Gras in New Orleans or the carnevales in Brazil and Venice, Italy can be traced to the voluntary increase of pious asceticism.

These sybaritic celebrations, in turn, have had a notable impact on Western culture. “Carnival music,” which is a colorful combination of Spanish, Portuguese, Native American, African, and even Chinese musical strains, is generally associated with Trinidad and Barbados, as well as other parts of the Caribbean and Brazil. Though it varies from country to country, Carnival music has a common origin in bidding a fond farewell to fun before the forty-day fast of Lent. And it has gone on to shape other genres of music, such as Latin jazz, the Conga and Conjunto, and the Samba.⁷

Septuagesima Foods

Pre-Lenten observances also led to the invention or promotion of several food dishes. There are many culinary candidates worthy of mention. Where would Cajun cooking be without Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday”? Northern England traditionally observes Collop Monday two days before Ash Wednesday (a collop is made of sliced meat and eggs fried in butter), while the rest of the country enjoys Shrove Tuesday pancakes the day before Ash Wednesday. In the U.S. before Vatican II, pancake breakfasts sponsored by American parishes on Quinquagesima Sunday were not uncommon.

Thanks to its Polish immigrants, America is also able to hear its arteries harden each year with pączki, a rich pastry similar to a jelly donut that is traditionally eaten during Septuagesimatide. Pączki (pronounced paunch-key) is a particularly interesting food because it has a vocal and zealous group of devotees, including its own lobby, the National Pączki Promotional Board.⁸

Regardless of their country of origin, all of these foods are the product of the same basic logic, to make good use of all perishable comestibles in one’s home before the beginning of Lent.

Shrovetide

Not all Christian customs of Septuagesima, however, revel in merriment and feasting. While the Latin countries had Carnival, the countries of northern Europe had Shrovetide. The verb “to shrive” is old English for a priest’s hearing confession; hence, Shrovetide was a time for the faithful to go to confession and be “shriven” in preparation for Lent. While this period originally encompassed the entire week preceding Lent, it is more common to hear reference to Shrove Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the three days prior to Ash Wednesday. Needless to say, this remains an excellent way to prepare for Lent.

Of course, not even the sternest of northern believers could resist every impulse to blow off a little steam. While “to shrive” might refer to sacramental absolution, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “to shrove” as “to keep Shrove-tide; to make merry.”⁹ Large sporting events were popular during Shrovetide (according to legend, the world’s first soccer match took place on a Shrove Tuesday between the Britons and the Romans), and in Ireland getting married during Shrovetide was considered good luck, perhaps because weddings during Lent were forbidden.

As for the southern countries, not everyone was pleased with the rising tide of carnival celebrations that began in the fourteenth century. In 1747 Pope Benedict XIV issued the aptly named Super Bacchanalibus in which a plenary indulgence was granted to those who participated in the “Forty Hours of Carnival.” This devotion, which was held in those areas prone to indulgence of a different kind, consisted of Exposition and Benediction on Shrove Monday and Tuesday. The purpose of the devotion was to draw the faithful away from “dangerous occasions of sin” and to atone for excesses committed.¹⁰

Modern Times

Septuagesima was dropped from the calendar in 1970, replaced by “Ordinary Time.” According to Fr. Pierre Jounel, a professor of liturgy at the Catholic Institute of Paris and one of the architects of the new calendar, it was excised because “Nobody knew what it meant or where it came from.”¹¹

That’s funny: the literal meaning of septuagesima is as close as the nearest Latin dictionary, and most Catholics, because of the greater cultural impact of Septuagesima we have just described, had a passable idea of what the season meant. There are beautiful explanations of it in the St. Andrew’s Missal and in Fr. Francis X. Weiser’s popular Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, both of which were available ten years before Fr. Jounel’s pronouncement. The Von Trapp family describes Septuagesima as a “most necessary time for the individual as well as for families and communities”:¹² their chapter on the season the meaning of which they weren’t supposed to know is entitled, “A Time to Dance.”

Millions of Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic believers also understand it, as they have a similar season based on the same principles. (Having dropped Septuagesima, we Catholics now have one less thing in common with what Pope John Paul II called the other lung of Christendom.) Even some Anglicans and Lutherans continue to keep Septuagesima. More importantly, with the loss of Septuagesima we have no liturgical preparation for the holy season of Lent, no transition between the glow of Epiphany and the gloom of Ash Wednesday. In the meantime, the cultural observances of Mardi Gras and so forth continue unabated, loosed from their religious moorings.

Conclusion

In his magnificent Confessions, St. Augustine allegorically interprets the creation of the dry land in Genesis 1 as the gathering of the redeemed souls that thirst for God and are plucked from the bitter sea of the infidels.¹³ The “land” that Augustine espied was a Church zealous for the nourishment of grace so “that they might bring forth works of mercy unto You, distributing their earthly goods to the poor to acquire heavenly.”¹⁴ How fitting, then, that the terra firma that is the Church should not only use Lent as a preparation for Easter, but that she should prepare herself for Lent as well, the season in which she increases her corporal works of mercy.¹⁵ Because of the 1970 calendar, Septuagesima is a time that the Land has lamentably forgotten, but let us who keep to the calendar of our ancestors wisely use this season to remember and attune ourselves to the awesome trial that is Lent.

And maybe to shrove it up a bit while we still can.

Notes

1. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977,trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), p. 20. [back]


2. Quoted by Gueranger in The Liturgical Year, vol. 8, p. 366. [back]


3. See Jeremiah 25:9-12; 29:10. Some Biblical historians calculate the Babylonian Exile or Captivity to be exactly seventy years by beginning with the defeat of the Assyrian Empire in 609 BC and ending with the defeat of the Babylonian Empire in 539 BC; others set the dates at 586 and 516, the destruction of Jerusalem and the dedication of the rebuilt Temple, respectively. [back]


4. Rationale Divinorum Officiorum 6.24.18, translated by Francis X. Weiser. [back]


5. One of the charms of the traditional calendar is that it allows its Temporal Cycle, its rotation of seasons, to be colored by its Sanctoral Cycle, its saints’ feast days. [back]


6. Similarly, in Russia and other Slavic countries the week before Lent is called “Butter Week”; in Poland it is called “Fat Days.” [back]


7. See Michael P. Foley, Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 59. [back]


8. Bryan Gruley, “Who Put the Paunch In Paczki and Droves In Shrove Tuesday?” Wall Street Journal - Eastern Edition, 3/01/2000, vol. 235, issue 43, p. A1. [back]


9. “Shrove, v.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989. [back]


10. Herbert Thurston, “Shrovetide,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13 (Robert Appleton Company, 1912). [back]


11. Alfred Friendly, Jr., “200 Catholic Saints Lose Their Feast Days,” NYT, May 10, 1969, p. 10. [back]


12. Maria Augusta Trapp, Around the Year with the Trapp Family (NY: Pantheon Books, 1955), p. 86. [back]


13. Confessions 13.17.20. [back]


14. Confessions 13.34.49, translated by F.J. Sheed. [back]


15. See the Collect for the First Sunday of Lent: “O God, who by the yearly Lenten observance dost purify Thy Church, grant to Thy household that what they strive to obtain from Thee by abstinence, they may achieve by good works.” [back]

Michael P. Foley, an associate professor of Patristics at Baylor University, is author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services(Eerdmans, 2008). Dr. Foley's article, "Septuagesima: The Time that Land Forgot," Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 2011), is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060, and the author.

Of related interest

I highly recommend Dr. Michael P. Foley's annotated edition of the Confessions of Augustine, in the surpassingly elegant translation by Frank J. Sheed (Hackett Publishing Co., 2007). The notes by Dr. Foley shed light on all sorts of delightful details of Augustine's Confessions that quite often pass unnoticed by readers in any translation, and at the price of $6.25 (brand new) with free shipping from Amazon Prime, it's a steal! I use this edition with my students at Sacred Heart Major Seminary, and it is consistently one of their favorite texts in the historical sequence of courses.

Fish on Friday: The One That God Away

Still Life with Fish by Edouard Manet

By Michael P. Foley

One of the most recognizable markers of Catholic identity used to be the practice of abstaining from meat on Friday. A Protestant colleague of mine speaks admiringly of how in his youth he would hang out, Happy Days style, at a burger joint on Friday night. When the clock struck twelve, the Catholic teens who were there would let loose a cry that echoed through the parking lot: “Ham-burger!”

What those teenagers didn’t know was that they were honoring a discipline probably as old as Christianity itself. Abstaining on Friday from “flesh meat,” the meat of a warm-blooded animal, is potentially older than some books of the New Testament.¹ Be it with fasting (having little or no food) or abstaining (refraining from food of a particular kind), the Church has always observed Friday with some sort of restriction on comestibles.

Broader Impact

Friday abstinence has also had a ripple effect going far beyond its primary aim of personal sanctification. Contrary to wild theories about medieval fishermen lobbying the Church to create Friday abstinence, it was Friday abstinence that helped create the medieval fishing industry.² Professor Brian Fagan claims that the Church’s Friday discipline may have even led to the discovery of the New World, spurring Atlantic fishermen to push further westward in search of better waters and providing navigational precedents for Christopher Columbus.³ By pushing the borders of the known world, Friday abstinence not only put fishing on the map, it helped make the map itself. Friday and Lenten abstinence prompted medieval monasteries to pioneer new techniques in pisciculture, including artificial fish ponds and artificial fertilization.⁴ It was a Catholic nun who wrote the first fishing manual in English and a Catholic priest who invented the first spinning reel.⁵

Nor has only distant history been affected by this ancient custom. Restaurants typically have a Friday seafood special of the day or a soup du jour such as clam chowder because of the power that Catholics once wielded as a united front. Even titans of global uniformity like McDonald’s were forced to take notice. The Filet-o-Fish sandwich was added to its menus in 1962 after Louis Groen, owner of the chain’s Cincinnati franchises, noticed that his restaurants experienced a sharp drop in sales every Friday. Even today, of the 300 million Filets-o-Fish sold annually, 25% of those sales come from the forty days of Lent.



* * * * * * *

So strong was the American association of Catholics with fish on Friday that “mackerel snapper” was once a common
epithet for papists.

* * * * * * *

Everyday language has been affected as well. So strong was the American association of Catholics with fish on Friday that “mackerel snapper” was once a common epithet for papists. “Meager” refers to something that has little flesh, and so the word came to be applied to days of total or partial abstinence in the Church calendar. A soup-maigre or “meager soup” was one that was not made from flesh meat or meat broth and was consequently suitable for “meager days,” while to “make meager” meant eating food appropriate for meager days.⁶

Of course, one of the curious things about all of these effects is that Catholics don’t have to eat fish on Fridays. This is a point impishly brought home in an essay by Fr. Leonard Feeney.⁷ “I am one of those moderately good Catholics,” Feeney writes, “in whom the persuasive power of Canon Law has not developed a taste for fish either on Friday or any other day, and stands no chance of doing so.”⁸ For Feeney, the reputation of Catholics as a queer sort of “Sixth Day Adventists” is a badge of honor to be worn in cheerful defiance of Protestant America.

Another mackerel snapper, renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas, agrees. Douglas sees in the rule of Friday abstinence “allegiance to a humble home in Ireland and to a glorious tradition in Rome.”⁹ These allegiances, she continues, are particularly important for a humiliated class. “At its lowest,” Douglas writes, Friday abstinence for a “bog Irishman” meant “what haggis and the pipes mean to Scots,” and at its most, “it means what abstaining from pork meant to the venerable Eleazar as narrated in 2 Maccabees.”¹⁰ One wonders if the Church in Ireland and America today, which in both countries is being humiliated by the savagery of the press and the corruption of some of its clergy, is not in need of a similar morale-boosting sign of allegiance.

Exceptions Curious and Quaint

Fr. Feeney also remarks: “if we dared tell non-Catholics the number of reasons which will legitimately permit us to eat meat on Friday, they would be scandalized.”¹¹ There were numerous variations of the Friday rule based on local usage and the judgment of “intelligent and conscientious Christians.”¹² Holy days such as Christmas trumped Friday abstinence, and Pope Pius XII, in order to relieve their overburdened refrigerators, allowed U.S. Catholics to eat meat the day after Thanksgiving. Special groups, such as travelers and soldiers, were occasionally exempted, and so were areas that either already had a seafood-rich diet or were smitten by epidemic or famine.

And sometimes whole peoples got a free pass. In 1089 Spanish counts were granted a dispensation from the Friday rule by Pope Urban II for their role in the Crusades; after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Pope St. Pius V extended the dispensation to the entire Spanish dominion, including her colonies in the New World. Mexico, for example, was not instructed by the Holy See to observe Friday abstinence until 1950, and the following year bishops in New Mexico and Texas informed their flock that this applied to them as well.¹³

And then there are the curious local substitutes. During Lent the people of Venezuela can eat capybaras, the world’s largest rodent, a fact that has inspired the following doggerel:

You’ll enjoy capybaras to eat;
Venezuelans proclaim them a treat.
Those of Catholic bent
May consume them for Lent
If a fine rodent burger’s their meat.

Writing about the year 1188, Giraldus Cambrensis remarks that in “Germany and the arctic regions,” beavers’ tails are eaten during times of fast by “great and religious persons” because of their resemblance to fish meat.¹⁴ This practice was carried to parts of the New World, especially Canada. Jesuit missionaries wrote to Rome to verify that the custom was permissible. Rome replied that not only were beavers allowable but so were most amphibious animals and even some species of wild duck.¹⁵

* * * * * * *

... some Michiganders have the dubious privilege of dining on muskrat for their Friday and Lenten observances. ... the bishop added: “Anyone who could eat muskrat was doing penance worthy of the greatest of the saints.”

* * * * * * *
In the United States, some Michiganders have the dubious privilege of dining on muskrat for their Friday and Lenten observances. Several Catholic communities in the Wolverine State have claimed a dispensation to eat the aquatic rodent since the days of the French trappers. In 1987, Bishop Kenneth Povish of Lansing wrote that although such a permission could not be found in the Church’s records, the practice had been around for so long that it could continue as an “immemorial custom.” And there was another reason to allow it, the bishop added: “Anyone who could eat muskrat was doing penance worthy of the greatest of the saints.”¹⁶

The Law No One Knows

After Vatican II Pope Paul VI took up the question of Friday abstinence in his 1966 Apostolic Constitution Paenitimini. The document masterfully reaffirms the traditional theology of penance and abstinence, and it resolves a longstanding inconsistency about which feast days should supersede Friday abstinence.¹⁷ But Paenitimini also announces the Pope’s goal of reorganizing “penitential discipline with practices more suited to our times.”¹⁸ Even so, Friday abstinence was explicitly reaffirmed.¹⁹

In November of the same year, the U.S. bishops responded to the call for reorganization with a “Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence.”²⁰ Whereas American Catholics were hereby released from a strict obligation under pain of sin to keep Friday abstinence, the bishops emphasized that Friday was still a mandatory day of penance: indeed, they wrote eloquently of Friday as a mini-Lent in the same way that Sunday is a “weekly Easter.”²¹ And they made it clear: “We give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law.”²² The 1983 Code of Canon Law would later codify this teaching by stating that: Friday is an obligatory day of penance and abstinence is the standard form of Friday penance, although other forms may be done instead.²³



Clam Chowder Bread Bowl

* * * * * * *

Restaurants typically have a Friday seafood special of the day or a soupdu jour such as clam chowder because of the power that Catholics once wielded as a united front.

* * * * * * *
If this is the position of the Magisterium, then why has it failed so miserably, with the majority of the world’s Catholics ignorant of any obligation to do anything special on Friday? Certainly, the media’s mishandling of the 1966 news (which made glib remarks like “you won’t go to hell anymore for eating a hamburger on Friday” instead of reporting all the facts), the minimalist mindset of the faithful who were happy to be free of one less duty, and the failure of the clergy to catechize on the subject all played a part in the overnight disappearance of Friday abstinence.

But there may also be a more fundamental reason. The removal of a symbol, or in this case the removal of a law protecting a symbol, can give the impression that the reality to which the symbol points is likewise being rejected. “To take away one symbol that meant something,” notes Mary Douglas,

is no guarantee that the spirit of charity will flow in its place….We have seen that those who are responsible for ecclesiastical decisions are only too likely to have been made, by the manner of their education, insensitive to non-verbal signals and dull to their meaning. This is central to the difficulties of Christianity today. It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by colour-blind signalmen.²⁴

And there are other complications. Paenitimini and Canon 1253, which allow an episcopal conference to designate other forms of penance such as works of charity for Friday, divorce for the first time in Church history Friday penance from food abstinence. Yet even this latitude is honored more in the breach than in the observance, for few episcopal conferences have made any decision about what form of Friday penance its flock may follow. The signalmen, it appears, have fallen asleep at the switch.

Confusion reigns even in the capitol of Christendom. When my father-in-law, who is a member of a pontifical academy, was invited to dine at the Vatican’s Casina Pio IV on a Friday night several years ago, he and the other guests were served horse meat!



* * * * * * *

Pope Pius XII, in order to relieve their overburdened refrigerators, allowed U.S. Catholics to eat meat the day after Thanksgiving.

* * * * * * *
Abstaining from the Alternatives

Regardless of the available options, there are at least seven reasons to keep the traditional sixth-day penance:

1. It is corporate. Having everyone do his own form of penance lacks the marvelous unity of almost the entire Catholic world performing the same act on the same day. This is not only spiritually constructive, it is socially edifying, building up solidarity and deepening our awareness of joint membership in the mystical Body of Christ.
   
   
2. It is ancient. A single practice unites all the living, but when it is ancient it also unites them to their forebears. If tradition is, as Chesterton put it, the democracy of the dead, then Friday abstinence is the veritable apple pie of Catholic life. In the words of the American bishops in 1966: We show “out of love for Christ Crucified…our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity to Christ and His Church.”²⁵
   
   
3. It is testimonial. Friday abstinence bears powerful witness to the distinctiveness of the Church. My Protestant friend whom I mentioned earlier knew little about Catholics when he was young, but he knew they stood for something when he watched his papist peers exercise self-discipline even away from the watchful eyes of their parents.
   
   
4. Abstinence is efficacious. Ancient authors taught that abstinence from food and drink was useful in dampening “the ardor of lust.”²⁶ Bodily passions are not bad per se, but left untrained they can become the occasion of sin. Trimming the body’s food intake, as modern studies have confirmed, can lower lustful proclivities.²⁷
   
   
5. Abstinence is appropriate. The Church still teaches that every human being is required to do penance by virtue of divine law (Can. 1249), and Friday abstinence is an especially appropriate way to do this. It was on a Friday in Eden that Adam and Eve transgressed the first law of abstinence.²⁸ And, of course, it was on a Friday that our Lord was crucified in order to undo the effects of that transgression. It is therefore appropriate to make abstinence our Friday penance, in sober memory of the Fall and “in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.”²⁹
   
   
6. Abstinence from meat is particularly appropriate. Catholicism ingeniously teaches both through presence and through absence. Usually, the Church employs physical signs to convey invisible realities; but sometimes, she temporarily withdraws something as a way of arresting our attention and heightening our awareness of what is missing.
   
   Hence, the suppression of the Alleluia during Septuagesima and Lent effectively demonstrates that we are in exile from our true Home, where the angels sing Alleluia without ceasing. Veiling sacred images in church during Passiontide — when we would most expect to gaze upon a crucifix — paradoxically heightens our awe of Christ’s Passion. And prohibiting the sacrifice of the altar on Good Friday draws us in an inverted way to the sacrifice of the cross made that day.
   
   Similarly, when we “make meager,” we withdraw from our table the flesh of an animal whose blood was shed for us on the day in which the Blood of the God-man was shed for us.³⁰ The absence of the former paradoxically reminds us of the latter; not having a bloody victual backhandedly alerts us to the Bloody Victim.
   
   
7. It is Christ-like. Jesus Christ consumed nothing on Good Friday except the gall He tasted shortly before His death. With fasting or abstinence on the day of the Crucifixion, Catholics in some small way “suffer with Christ that they may one day be glorified with Him. This is the heart of the tradition of abstinence from meat on Friday.”³¹

Conclusion

How the Church can best recover its former Friday integrity remains an open question.³² In the meantime, there is ample reason to fulfill Paul VI’s and the American bishops’ 1966 wish that what was once done in obedience be now done by free choice. The weekly abstinence from flesh meat is rich in history and meaning, bringing us closer to God and to each other. Living the Catholic tradition, even on days of deprivation, is anything but a meager existence.

Postscript: Since Ireland has been a leitmotif in this article, it is fitting to add that in response to the horrific abuse scandals decimating the Catholic Church in that country, Pope Benedict XVI has asked its faithful to offer their Friday penance from now until Good Friday 2011 for God’s mercy.³³ Those of us who owe our blood or our faith to the sons and daughters of St. Patrick might wish to do the same.

Notes

1. The custom of fasting on Friday is mentioned in Didache 9, a book believed to have been written around A.D. 75. [back]


2. Brian Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 25ff. [back]


3. Ibid. [back]


4. Michael P. Foley, Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 111. [back]


5. See Foley, pp. 46, 69, and 109, resp. [back]


6. Meagre/Meager, adj. and n.," Oxford English Dictionary, A.3. and B.2. [back]


7. Leonard Feeney, S.J. "Fish on Friday," in Fish on Friday and Other Sketches (Sheed & Ward, 1934), pp. 3-16. [back]


8. Ibid., p. 3. [back]


9. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Routledge, 1996), p. 37. [back]


10. Ibid., pp. 37-38. [back]


11. Feeney, p. 6. [back]


12. J.D. O'Neill, "Abstinence," Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907. [back]


13. See "Friday Abstinence," in the Religion section of Time Magazine, June 18, 1951. [back]


14. The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, 2.3. [back]


15. Daniel Wilson, "Early Notices of the Beaver in Europe and North America," in the Canadian Journal of Industry, Science, and Art (1849-1914), Vol. 4, p. 386. The scoter, for example, was consumed on Friday in parts of France (see Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte, American Ornithology, Vol. 3 [Constable and Col, 1831], pp. 212-13). [back]


16. Kristin Lukowski, "Muskrat love: A Lenten Friday delight for some Michiganders," CNS News, March 8, 2007. [back]


17. Prior to Vatican II, only holy days of obligation suspended abstinence from flesh meat on Friday. The problem with this arrangement was that different nations had different days of obligation. The difficulty was resolved by giving all [first class] solemnities in the universal calendar priority over Friday penance. [back]


18. III.C. [back]


19. Chapter 3, II.2. [back]


20. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence," November 18, 1966. This is an outstanding document. [back]


21. Ibid., 23. [back]


22. Ibid., 24. [back]


23. See Canons 1251-1253. [back]


24. Douglas, p. 42. [back]


25. "Pastoral Statement," 24a. [back]


26. See Saint Jerome, Against Jovinian 2.6; Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II.147.1. [back]


27. Flesh meat, for instance, is high in zinc, which raises testosterone levels. For a summary of modern dietary research, see Theresa M. Shaw, Burden of the Flesh (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998), pp. 126-27. [back]


28. Adam and Eve sinned on the same day they were created when they ate the fruit from which they were commanded to abstain. Dante gives the First Couple about six hours in Paradise before they were expelled. [back]


29. "Pastoral Statement," 23. [back]


30. Cold-blooded animals such as fish and amphibians also "shed their blood for us" when we use them as food, but because of the similarity of our physiology to that of other warm-blooded animals, our symbolic association with the latter is greater. [back]


31. "Pastoral Statement," 18. [back]


32. For an interesting discussion on this, see Father John Zuhlsdorf's blog for April 23, 2009, at http://wdtprs.com/blog/2009/04/kicking-it-up-a-notch-our-catholic-identity-fr-z-rants/. [back]


33. Pope Benedict XVI, "Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland," no. 14, March 19, 2010. [back]

Michael P. Foley, an associate professor of Patristics at Baylor University, is author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services(Eerdmans, 2008). Dr. Foley's article, "Fish on Friday: The One That Got Away," Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer/Fall 2010), pp. 42-46, is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060, and the author.