Cecilia

Today the Church celebrates the memorial of Saint Cecilia, virgin and martyr. Cecilia is one of the most famous and most venerated of Roman martyrs, even though the facts of her martrydom are a little vague. Legend has it that she, her husband Valerian, and her brother-in-law Tiburtius were martyred during the reign of Emperor Alexander Severus, about the year 230.

Her name appears in the First Eucharistic Prayer (the Roman Canon) among Rome’s other beloved martyrs, and when Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, a church was built where her house had stood. This little church survives to this day as Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.

Her body was discovered in 822 and transferred to this church. In 1599 her grave was opened and her body found in a coffin of cypress wood. It lay incorrupt, as if she had just fallen asleep. The sculptor Stefano Maderno was allowed to see the body, and he sculpted her as she appeared, cut throat, tied hands, and all.

Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music, and often times you will find a small statue or stained glass of her in the choir loft of older churches.

With the publication of the Third Edition of the Missale Romanum, the Church is once again placing an emphasis on music. Looking at the English versions of the Missal, you will see that the musical notation of the Ordinary of the Mass is included with the text, instead of in an appendix at the back as in former editions.

The Mass is meant to be sung. That we don’t sing it – or rarely sing it – is a tragedy, and completely at odds with the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium promulgated by the Second Vatican Council.

Today, however, the Church may be about to take another large step in the restoration of the Sacred Liturgy. Andrea Tornielli of Vatican Insider reports that a new commission will be established shortly, as part of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship. It will be in charge of music and singing in the liturgy, as well as church architecture.

As usual, Fr. Z has the scoop.

I should also like to draw your attention to a talk given by Monsignor Andrew Wadsworth last year, entitled Towards the Future – Singing the Mass. Msgr. Wadsworth is the head of ICEL, the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. These are the guys responsible for the early drafts of the new English Roman Missal, and they shepherded the project along to its glorious completion.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Maybe the greatest challenge that lies before us is the invitation once again to sing the Mass rather than merely to sing at Mass. … This means not only the congregational acclamations of the Order of Mass, but also the orations, the chants in response to the readings, the Eucharistic prayer and the antiphons which accompany the Entrance, the Offertory and the Communion processions. These proper texts are usually replaced by hymns or songs that have little relationship to the texts proposed by the Missal or the Graduale Romanum and as such a whole element of the liturgy of the day is lost or consigned to oblivion. …

We are much the poorer for this, as these texts (which are often either Scriptural or a gloss on the Biblical text) represent the Church’s own reading and meditation on the Scriptures.

So as we enter into the beginnings of a new liturgical era in Church history, let us invoke the prayers of Saint Cecilia.