1618 years ago today was the beginning of the end for Rome. The Germanic tribes crossed the frozen Rhine beginning the "Barbarian Invasions" or the Völkerwanderung.
Today is his Feast Day. He was the first occupant of St Peter's Chair not to face the threat of Martyrdom since St Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge totally changed the situation.
By Nicholas Senz
He took Peter’s Throne in the year 314, just a year after Constantine famously conquered under the sign of the Cross, and changed the Empire’s view of Christianity.There’s a tradition within Catholic theology of making arguments from fittingness. It’s not a strict logical connection, but an almost poetic one, a beautiful thread tying together two seemingly unrelated items. For a faith that believes in a Divine Providence that works in all things, this should not be surprising.
For example, Pope St. Gregory the Great notes the fittingness of Christ being born in Bethlehem. The town’s name means “House of Bread,” and he who was born there was the bread come down from heaven, the bread of life given for the life of the world. In short, with God, there are no coincidences.
With the feast of Pope St. Sylvester today, we see another bit of seeming serendipity that communicates something profound to us.
Very little is known about this holy pontiff. Early sources record his parents’ names, Rufinus and Justa, but nothing else about his early life. Even the content of his pontificate is fairly obscure. But what is known is momentous.
Sylvester became pope in 314, a time of intense turmoil in the Roman Empire. The tetrarachy set up by Diocletian decades before had descended into squabbling and then civil war, with each man seeking the imperial title solely for himself. In 312, two of the chief contenders, Constantine and Maxentius, met in battle at the Milvian Bridge. Inspired by a vision, Constantine had his soldiers fight beneath Christian symbols, the cross and the chi-rho, while Maxentius was a firm persecutor of the Church. Constantine emerged victorious. Maxentius drowned while trying to escape.
The way was clear for a new Roman stance toward Christianity. The previous three centuries had seen periodic persecutions both locally and empire-wide. Now, both of the remaining emperors were friendly toward the faith. Thus, in 313, Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, which officially tolerated Christianity and forbade any further persecution. Not only that, the edict ordered all property stolen from Christians to be returned. (Contrary to popular misconception, the edict did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire. That would not happen until 380, when Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica.)
Thus when Pope Sylvester was elected as the Successor of St. Peter in 314, he found himself in a very different set of circumstances. Whereas formerly Christians had met secretly in homes, during Sylvester’s pontificate the emperor himself would construct several massive churches in the style of the Roman bureaucratic palace, the basilica. St. John Lateran and the original St. Peter’s were built at this time.
Another monumental event would take place a few years later. In the wake of the Arian crisis, Constantine called together all the bishops of the world, not to his new eponymous capital, Constantinople, but the hot springs resort just across the Bosporus, Nicaea. It was the first ecumenical council of the Church. Yet the pope, the bishop of Rome and head of the apostolic college, did not himself attend, sending two legates instead, one of whom presided over the council in Sylvester’s stead.
Pope Sylvester reigned over a Church that was transitioning from hidden liturgies and secret meetings to a publicly supported role in civic life. His ministry came right at the time when the light was dawning and the page was turning (to mix a few metaphors). Likewise, his feast day falls on the last day of the calendar when we anticipate a new year, and the time of the seasons when the darkest days are behind and the light is increasing. Fitting! Though not intentional.
As with many saints, Pope Sylvester’s feast day was assigned to the day of his death. The confluence of events was not intended by anyone—save Providence itself, perhaps.
Well, duh! He wasn't going to appoint a Catholic after getting rid of Strickland!
ST. SILVESTER IS IMPRISONED BY TARQUINIUS
It was so that the prefect Tarquinius supposed that Timothy had had great plenty of riches, which he demanded of Silvester, threatening him to the death but if he delivered them to him. And when he found certainly that Timothy had no great riches, he commanded to St. Silvester to make sacrifice to the idols, and if he did not he would make him suffer divers torments.HE IS CHOSEN BISHOP OF ROME
He was so gracious that all Christian men and paynims loved him, for he was fair like an angel to look on, a fair speaker, whole of body, holy in work, good in counsel, patient and charitable, and firmly established in the faith. He had in writing the names of all the widows and orphans that were poor, and to them he administered their necessity. He had a custom to fast all Fridays and Saturdays. And it was so that Melchiades, the bishop of Rome, died, and all the people chose St. Silvester for to be the high Bishop of Rome, which sore against his will was made pope. He instituted for to be fasted Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, and the Thursday for to be hallowed as Sunday.THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE ESTABLISHES CHRISTIANITY IN ROME
Now it happed that the Emperor Constantine did do slay all the Christian men over all where he could find them, and for this cause St. Silvester fled out of the town with his clerks and hid him in a mountain. And for the cruelty of Constantine God sent him such a sickness that he became lazar and measel, and by the counsel of his physicians he got three thousand young children for to have cut their throats, for to have their blood in a bath all hot, and thereby he might be healed of his measelry.THE DEBATE BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH SCHOLARS
When Helen, the mother of Constantine, dwelling in Bethany, heard say that the emperor was become Christian, she sent to him a letter, in which she praised much her son of this that he had renounced the false idols, but she blamed him much that he had renounced the law of the Jews, and worshipped a man crucified. Then Constantine remanded to his mother that she should assemble the greatest masters of the Jews, and he should assemble the greatest masters of the Christian men, to the end that they might dispute and know which was the truest law.ST. SILVESTER BINDS THE DRAGON
In this time it happed that there was at Rome a dragon in a pit, which every day slew with his breath more than three hundred men. Then came the bishops of the idols unto the emperor and said unto him: O thou most holy emperor, sith the time that thou hast received Christian faith the dragon which is in yonder fosse or pit slayeth every day with his breath more than three hundred men.
JRRT so despised the vernacular Mass that, according to his grandson, Simon, he "made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English".
By Robert Lazu Kmita, PhD
Many of these trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nuts and acorns; many had voices of their own that are lost forever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where there were singing groves. ― Treebeard
Dom Alcuin Reid’s monograph, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2005), represents a significant contribution to the rediscovery of the liturgical Tradition that had been obscured by the “mutation” following the replacement of the Liturgy of the Ages with the liturgy of Pope Paul VI. A careful reading of this volume, including the preface by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, highlighted for me from the very beginning the importance of the “organic development” of the Holy Liturgy. Without being a committed traditionalist thinker, Joseph Ratzinger had the courage to speak about the devastating consequences of replacing a liturgy developed organically under the guidance of the Holy Spirit with a manufactured liturgy.
Among the vast works of Pope Benedict XVI, perhaps the most significant reflections related to this theme can be found in Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977 (Ignatius Press, 1988, pp. 146–149). Here, the author first recalls the shock he experienced upon hearing about the prohibition of the Liturgy of the Ages. In his diplomatic style, he makes this assertion somewhat indirectly, referring to the missal:
I was dismayed by the prohibition of the old missal, since nothing of the sort had ever happened in the entire history of the liturgy.
What matters here is the categorical nature of this statement: it is declared unequivocally that such a thing had never occurred in the entire history of the Church. This characterization of an unprecedented event must be for us an extremely important clue. We should take note of it, especially since it seems we are living in an era of unprecedented events. (How frequently in history do we find pontiffs who not only altered Church discipline—related to divorced people—but even changed the prayer Pater Noster?).
The next step taken by Ratzinger is to recognize a grave error committed against the organic growth of the Apostolic Holy Liturgy, transmitted to us in the form known through the missal of Saint Pope Pius V and its faithful editions. What is this error? Creating the impression that each era or council “fabricated” its own missal, its own liturgy. Evidently, this was in line with the constructivist-reformist vision of the architect of the great mutation, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini:
The impression was given that what was happening was quite normal. The previous missal had been created by Pius V in 1570 in connection with the Council of Trent; and so it was quite normal that, after four hundred years and a new council, a new pope would present us with a new missal.
Unmasking the anomalies of this profoundly erroneous perspective, which he clearly rejects, Ratzinger bases his argument on the idea of continuity and organic growth:
There is no such thing as a ‘Missal of Pius V,’ created by Pius V himself. There is only the reworking done by Pius V as one phase in a long history of growth.
Growth throughout history is the most characteristic mark of the environment—Holy Tradition—in which the perennial Liturgy of the Church has developed organically. Just as the Christian is invited to grow from the state of spiritual childhood, granted through Holy Baptism, to that of the perfect man, made possible by the gifts of the Holy Spirit received at Confirmation, so too the Church’s Liturgy has grown from its embryonic form in the Apostolic age to its fullness in the time of Saint Pope Gregory the Great. The devastating reforms during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI created an unprecedented rupture in the history of the Catholic Church:
The prohibition of the missal that was now decreed, a missal that had known continuous growth over the centuries, starting with the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, introduced a breach into the history of the liturgy whose consequences could only be tragic.
How did this rupture happen? And what exactly was destroyed? Here is a description, in architectural terms, of both the “mutation” and its tragic consequences:
The old building was demolished, and another was built, to be sure, largely using materials from the previous one and even using the old building plans. There is no doubt that this new missal in many respects brought with it a real improvement and enrichment; but setting it as a new construction over and against what had grown historically, forbidding the results of this historical growth, thereby makes the liturgy to appear to be no longer a living development but the product of erudite work and juridical authority; this has caused us enormous harm. For then the impression had to emerge that liturgy is something ‘made,’ not something given in advance but something lying within our own power of decision. From this it also follows that we are not to recognize the scholars and central authority alone as decision makers, but that in the end each and every ‘community’ must provide itself with its own liturgy. When liturgy is self-made, however, then it can no longer give us what its proper gift should be: the encounter with the mystery that is not our own product but rather our origin and the source of our life.
Once the impression mentioned by Ratzinger became dominant, not only liturgical theology but all fields of sacred science—especially moral theology—became, as postmodern doctrines put it, “fluid.” Today, the expression “anything goes” by the Austrian epistemologist Paul Karl Feyerabend applies even (or especially?) to the ideas spread in certain pontifical “Catholic” universities and theological books.
Of course, Cardinal Ratzinger’s explanations lack some crucial elements needed for a full understanding of the attempt to eliminate the Traditional Roman Catholic Liturgy. For example, still under the spell of the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger never mentions the gravest aspect detectable in numerous places within the council’s documents: the repeated assertion that what was “before” is often outdated (and implicitly even erroneous), while what comes “after”—that is, following the reform demanded by the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium—will undoubtedly be superior.[1]
This way of thinking, directed against Tradition and its Spirit, reveals a mentality that is difficult to excuse from charges of hubris.[2] The result of this mentality was unequivocally described by Joseph Ratzinger: after the old edifice was destroyed, a new one was built from the pieces of the old. Clearly, this was his genuine view, rather than the diplomatic but wrong position expressed in Summorum Pontificum, which presented the two liturgies as “two expressions of the Church’s lex orandi” or “two usages of the one Roman rite.” How could one speak of the equal beauty and importance of two buildings when the second was constructed from the ruins of the first after it was demolished?
Alongside Joseph Ratzinger, another author who makes extensive use of the metaphor of organic growth, characteristic of living organisms, is Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. On the one hand, his literary works are deeply marked by the conflict between the mechanistic-technocratic paradigm of the modern world and the organic-cosmic paradigm characteristic of most ancient and medieval civilizations. On the other hand, Tolkien’s preserved letters contain arguments rooted in precisely this metaphor, often articulated around the living species he so deeply loved: trees.
Both Tolkien’s novels and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations capture his immense passion for majestic trees in the most striking terms. Who can forget a character as picturesque as Treebeard? Surpassed in age only by Tom Bombadil, he even dares to jest with the great Maia by calling him “young Gandalf.” Indeed, hardly anyone can rival Treebeard in age. For he—like the magnificent White Tree of Gondor—is a symbol of Tradition, of the organic continuity of all that grows under the loving and gentle care of Divine Providence.
We might even surmise that this is the “name like a story” that Treebeard says he cannot reveal to Merry and Pippin:
‘I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate’. A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say.’
“Tradition” is the profound and mysterious name of Treebeard. And this Tradition is animated, just like his bearer, by the ancient spirit of Wisdom that sustains and keeps him alive as he journeys through all the vicissitudes of the troubled history of Arda—Tolkien’s world. There is no more fitting symbolic image for Holy Tradition than that of Treebeard. Wise and a lover of beauty, a master of ancient words (true echoes of the supreme Logos), he cherishes life and all that grows under the sun.
This is why, when Saruman—the head of the council of the wise—betrays his vocation (as signified by the change of the white color of his pontifical robe to the sophisticated color of the rainbow), Treebeard becomes his untamed enemy. The destruction wrought by the heretic Saruman upon living beings is the result of his embrace of the spirit of technical revolution, through which he hopes to become a leader of Sauron’s globalist administration. Yet between Treebeard—the protector of continuity and organic life—and the prince of destruction, there can be no reconciliation.
Like his own creation, professor Tolkien himself was a staunch opponent of technical modernization. His friends often heard him muttering, irritated by the noise of motorcycles and loud cars, a single dismissive term: “Orcs!” However, nothing upset him more than the changes already looming on the horizon during and immediately after the Second Vatican Council. With great sensitivity, he perceived the ongoing Protestantization rapidly affecting the Church itself (and, of course, the Holy Liturgy). A substantial excerpt from a 1967 letter to his son Michael clearly illustrates this point:
The protestant search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness––which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is, and was in great a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian liturgical behaviour from the beginning as now. (Saint Paul’s strictures on Eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!) Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history––the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree.[3]
Both the chosen metaphor—the growth of a tree—and the way it is presented are used to counter the most terrible illusion of the reformers who destroyed the Liturgy of the Ages: the notion of returning the tree to the stage of an acorn. In the reformers’ terms, this would be a recovery of the genuine purity of apostolic times. According to Tolkien’s image, that of a majestic tree going back to a tiny acorn, the idea is absurd. In his view, no one has direct access to another era (time machines exist only in science fiction, not reality!), only to the latest stage—present day—of what has been built throughout history through natural, uninterrupted growth.
What would we think of someone who starts chopping down a grown tree to carve something resembling the acorn from which it grew? Clearly, we would say he has lost his mind.
On the other hand, growth is natural. Life must follow its course, a process willed and perpetually supported by God Himself. That is why the desire to return to a childhood stage is simply absurd. Even though our Lord said that only those who become like children will enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 18:2), this was not to condemn us to perpetual infantilism but to emphasize the value of purity and innocence. Otherwise, the Holy Scriptures call us to be “perfect men”—mature, complete in our growth. Similarly, the Church’s worship grew under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, transforming from the “acorn” of its origins—the Holy Liturgy celebrated on the night of the Last Supper by God Incarnate Himself, Our Lord Jesus Christ—into the Gregorian (i.e., Tridentine) Liturgy of the Holy Roman Catholic Tradition.
Unfortunately, the deeper attitude of those who sought at all costs to exclude the Church of Rome’s ancient liturgy was not merely animated by a desire to return to the origins. As Treebeard insightfully observed, they were driven by a desire to destroy what they detested as backward, outdated, and obsolete. The spirit that still governs them today is the same one that seeks to convince us that everything old is inferior, corrupted, and fit only to be replaced by what is recent, new, and supposedly superior. Even in such a difficult situation, we should remember that Saint Pope Pius X, with a single word, identified and named the fundamental error shared by both Saruman and the zealous “reformers” who wish to see the Liturgy of the Ages banned forever. If that is so—and indeed it is—rest assured that Treebeard, as ancient as time itself, is ready to step in.
Photo credit to the Tolkien estate.
[1] For example, there are a lot of places where we can find the following statements which imply that the Traditional Mass is not adequate to modern times and what the new Mass will be better (my emphasis): “In this restoration, both texts and rites should be drawn up so that they express more clearly the holy things which they signify; the Christian people, so far as possible, should be enabled to understand them with ease and to take part in them fully, actively, and as befits a community (Sacrosanctum Concilium,21).” “The liturgical books are to be revised as soon as possible; experts are to be employed on the task, and bishops are to be consulted, from various parts of the world (25).” “The rites should be distinguished by a noble simplicity; they should be short, clear, and unencumbered by useless repetitions; they should be within the people’s powers of comprehension, and normally should not require much explanation (34).”
[2] It shoud be noted that this mentality was also present in the reform of Holy Week by Pius XII as well as the breviary reform of Pius X. It is also true that a modest reform of the liturgy for present pastoral necessities is legitimate in theory and is not per se against Tradition, since Tradition is always making present here and now what has been passed down from the past. Nevertheless, no objective analysis can fail to note the overwhelming embrace of liturgical novelty over and against Tradition (and organic development) at and after Vatican II. The Fathers of Vatican II who overwhelmingly approved Sacroscantum Concilium were themselves divided as to how much reform was necessary.
[3] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, eds. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Harper Collins, 1981), 394.
