ST. CECILIA’s DAY IN ROME.
St. Cecilia is one of the few figures among the representative throng of virgin-martyrs that strike us at once as the most familiar, the most lovable, and the most to be exalted. Every one knows the legend of her life, and the conversion of her husband and his brother, brought about by her prayers, as also by the miracles she obtained for their further confirmation in the faith. Her death, in itself a miracle, needs no retelling, neither does the history of her wondrously preserved remains, that are now laid in the shrine beneath the altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a church erected, by her own wish and behest, on the spot where her palace stood. This church is a basilica, and has its altar raised many steps above the level of the mosaic floor of the nave, and the front of the altar turned away from the people so that the celebrant at Mass stands facing the congregation, as in many other ancient Roman churches. Under the altar, on the lower level of the nave, is the shrine of the saint, and there lies her marble image, small and frail, though it is said to be life-sized, and reverently and truly copied from the sleeping body, whose form remained entire and uncorrupted, at least until the last time it was solemnly uncovered. To the right of the church is a dark side-chapel, floored with rare mosaic, once the bath-room of the young and wealthy patrician, and the consecrated spot where heathen cruelty twice endeavored to put an end to the sweet singer’s life. The actual bath is said to be within the railings that divide a narrow portion of the chapel from
the rest. There was the first miracle performed, of her preservation from the boiling water; there also the second, of the prolongation of her life after the three deadly yet ineffectual strokes of the unskilful executioner’s sword. One can fancy the young matron, so childlike in years, so experienced in holiness, lying in meek and chaste expectation of the embraces of her heavenly Bridegroom, and of the purified reunion with her earthly and virgin spouse—while, all the time the wondrous, angel-sustained life lasted, the Christians, her brethren in the faith, her children through charity, would be coming and going, silently as to an altar, rejoicingly as to a saint, and learning, from lips on whom the kiss of peace of the glorified Jesus was already laid, lessons of fortitude and love most precious to their faithful souls. We are told, also, that Urban, the pope, visited her on her glorious death-bed, and, no doubt, he learnt from her entranced soul more than he could teach it in its passing hour; learnt, perhaps, things whose sweetness became strength to him in the hour of his own not far distant martyrdom.
Cecilia, in her short and heavenly life, seems a fitting model for all women, and especially for young maidens and wives. She was of those who know well how to put religion before men in its most beautiful garb and most enthralling form; purity with her was no ice-cold stream and repellent rocky fastness: it was beauty, it was reward, it was glory. Crowns of lilies and roses, heavenly perfume, and angelic companionship
were to be its lovely guerdon; and not otherwise should it ever be preached, nor otherwise surrounded, when its precepts are presented to man. Had we more Cecilias among our Christian women of to-day, there would be more Valeriani and Tiburtii among our men, and virtue would be more readily deemed an honor than a yoke; home would be more of a temple, rather than a mere resting-place; home-life more of a prayer, rather than a simple idyl. For blamelessness is not Christian purity; righteousness is not Christian faith. We want the visible blessings of the church on our daily lives, even as Cecilia brought into the circle of home the visible, angelic gifts of flowers; and we know that to those who seek them where Valerian and his brother sought the heavenly apparition—that is, through faith and prayer—these blessings, these gifts, these blossoms, these safeguards, are never denied.
And to pass from these aspirations after a more Christian ideal of home to the impressions made on an eye-witness by the feast of St. Cecilia in Rome, we will merely say that this feast had been eagerly looked forward to, and had always held a special charm over the mind of the writer of these pages.
On this day, the 22d of November, Mass is said from dawn till noon in the catacomb chapel, where the martyr was first buried. This chapel is one of the largest and most interesting in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus. The distance from the Eternal City to this shrine is not long, but the old Appian Way that leads from the one to the other is crowded with memories and monuments, each a history in itself.
The most noticeable of these is very near the catacomb, and is none other than the mausoleum of Cecilia
Metella, the mysterious and oft-sung pile that Byron has made strangely familiar to us. One cannot help being struck by the familiarity of the two names, and the proximity of the two shrines, of the Cecilias of Rome. The proud mausoleum, stately as a palace, strong as a fortress, built by some ostentatious patrician, or by some sorrowing husband, for the merely worldly end of perpetuating the memory of an illustrious house, or of the domestic virtues of a spouse a little above the common run of licentious Roman matrons, stands now deserted and unvisited, its real history lost and forgotten, and a fictitious one attached to it through the imaginative efforts of a foreign poet. The lonely sepulchre in an earthen wall, the hidden recess in an underground chapel—dug out by silent, persecuted men for the proscribed body of a so-called criminal—remains to this day the pilgrimage of thousands, the well-remembered and well-loved spot where devout followers of the faith Cecilia followed come to beg her intercession as they kneel before the same sacrament, and assist at the same sacrifice, whose blessings were Cecilia’s only strength. Cecilia Metella, the rich Roman lady, is unknown save to antiquaries; Cecilia, the virgin-martyr, is honored all over the world, by all races and all nations. The wealth of the first has rusted away and is heard of no more, because its last emblem was a palatial tomb; the riches of the second have increased a hundred-fold, and have been sown broadcast over the earth, because their abiding symbol lies in a church built over her former dwelling; and the harvest her prayers have reaped is gathered year after year in the riches untold, of virgins crowned with miraculous flowers, of wives laden with the conversions of those dear to them, of women
of all ages, all ranks, all nations, bearing in their hands the charity born of Cecilia’s death-bed generosity, and in their hearts the faith of her death-bed professions.
And so, past the stately tomb worthy of Egypt’s solemn magnificence, the road leads to a small door in a wall, which opens on to a field. A path fringed with red and purple flowers, the last-born children of a southern autumn, winds through the field, to the head of a steep but wide flight of stairs, at the foot of which is the entrance to St. Callixtus’ Catacomb. The pure air, just mist-veiled in the morning coolness, shows the landscape around to its utmost advantage; the omnipresent dome of St. Peter’s basilica clears the line of the blue horizon; the wide purple plain is crossed here and there by dust-whitened roads and arched aqueducts, as by the gigantic bones of a decayed and now powerless monster; the distant hills, darkened at their base by chestnut woods, and dotted with white villas, as with the loosened beads of a string of pearls, throw bluer shadows on the dusky, olive-spotted expanse: and we pause, and wonder whether, after all, things looked so very unlike this on the dawning day when the Christians bore the happy Cecilia to her first resting-place. Their hearts surely must have felt as ours do now, full of joy and thanksgiving, and, above all, full of peace. There would have been a silent throng, a quiet gradual gathering of the future martyrs around the narrow grave of their blessed-forerunner; for in those days no one knew how soon he or she might be called from the altar to the stake, and summoned to carry the unconsumed sacrament within his bosom to the tribunal of an unjust and ignorant judge.
The avenues of the perplexing labyrinth
of the catacomb are all guarded by the government on this day of St. Cecilia’s, so that no one may stray from the one chapel where service is going on. Close to the entrance is the small recess where the saint was laid in her first sleep. It is low and reaches far back into the damp earth-wall; myrtle and bay-leaves are strewn over its floor, and flowers and little oil-lamps are spread about like stars. As each person leaves the chapel, he takes away a leaf or flower as a holy remembrance. Two altars are erected, one close to the martyr’s grave, just beneath a Byzantine fresco head of our divine Lord, the other on the opposite side of the chapel. The space, small enough for a modern congregation, though large for a catacomb chapel, is so crowded that it is difficult for the priests to pass in and out from the altars to the temporary sacristy, and the worshippers almost lean upon them when they stand to say the “Judica me, Deus.” No noise is heard, save the murmured words of the Mass and the tinkling of the elevation-bell. Foreigners are there with fair-haired boys serving the Mass of some favorite friend and accompanying chaplain; Romans are there with their intense, if not deep, southern devotion; rich and poor, prince and beggar, student and peasant, are alike crowding the virgin-martyr’s shrine. A few hundred years ago, this was the church’s cradle, and patrician and slave came to be baptized together and wear for one day the white robes that to-morrow twilight would see red with blood on the deserted sand of the gladiator’s amphitheatre. The priest who said Mass in those days hardly knew, when he came to the consecration, whether the hand of the pagan soldiery might not be upon him before
the communion; the mother who knelt in tears, half of natural sorrow, half of heavenly joy, and thought of the fair young boy she had but yesterday given back to God on the scaffold, did not know whether tomorrow’s dawn might not find her herself prostrate and headless on the same place of execution. Partings then were seldom for long, and, even when the Christians parted with our Lord on the hidden altars, they knew they would meet him soon again at the right hand of his Father. Not unfrequently, the Blessed Sacrament was kept in a silver vessel made in the shape of a dove, and one cannot help thinking how sweet a union must have existed between this custom and the idea of the protection and the teaching the Holy Spirit was to afford to his spouse, the church. “When the Spirit of truth cometh,” Jesus had said, “he shall teach you all things.” And so the Dove of heaven taught the church the hidden beauties of the ineffable sacrament, and protected this greatest treasure of the Bride in its integrity of doctrine and its continuity of love. May we not so interpret, lovingly and reverentially, the olden custom of the dove-shaped tabernacle?
Beautiful as the day was, it was a sore trial to leave the darksome, silent chapel, where generations of older and braver Christians than ourselves had spent their triumphant vigils and been brought back to sleep their peaceful hero-slumbers—it was a trial, I say, to return to the carelessly beautiful earth, the unheeding theatre of such wondrous mysteries. To leave the catacombs in Cecilia’s times was to go forth to almost certain death; to leave prayer and solitude, the catacombs of the heart in our day, is to encounter certain sorrow and possible sin. It is hard to leave God’s temple and mingle with
the chattering throng; it is hard to lift the curtain of silence and mix with the wrangling world. Yet it is our duty. Few are privileged to be hermits, and those few not until the privilege is turned into a trial, and the apparent retreat is no other than a hard-won stronghold. In the battle, we must fight, and fight manfully, in the foremost rank; it is only the generals and the chiefs among us that watch from afar, and feel, like wearied Moses, the weight of victory or defeat hanging on the issue of their prayers. Our part seems the harder, but it is only because our nature is so little that dissatisfaction with our present lot is the very air we breathe. After all, if we could look around us, we should see many beautiful things; if we are bound in fetters of duty, they are golden fetters, with the word of God carved all over their sunlike sheen; if we are led in one way and forced to wear the harness of unalterable circumstances, the reins are broidered with fair work that tells the story of how the angel led the ass of Balaam, and how palms were strewn on the path of Jesus; the way is emblazoned with rarest flowers and sweetest fruits, the heraldry of grace; if we bear a yoke and a burden, they are but spices and ointments, wine and oil, and milk and honey, all fair and gracious merchandise from the great mart of heaven, to be borne over the world, as the clouds bear the rain, in fertilizing charity and fruit-bearing meekness. So let us leave the dear catacomb, where even Music hushed her sighs, and come forth across the Roman Campagna, with the mist-veils rolled off it, and the noonday sun, with its reminiscences of summer, gilding its fringe of distant mountains, and its strange rifts of sudden, unsuspected valleys. Here and there, an aqueduct or a
proud stone pyre, a mound of stones, each of which bears an imperial inscription, a rude shepherd’s fence, or irregular stone wall, that is all you see. Not far from here, in a cornfield whose waves of brown and gold a few months ago kissed the foot of an ilex-crowned hillock, is the fountain of Egeria, a grotto, fern-clothed, with a broken goddess of mouldering stone. The water and the “maiden-hair” fern are there still, as beautiful as when the king of Rome is said to have wandered here in search of wisdom; the sage himself and the problematic nymph of tradition are dead and gone, forgotten by the owner of the corn-field, ignored by the peasant who drinks at the fountain, unknown to the brown, barefooted child who gathers the feathery fern.
Of what use is it to say any more? Facts are more cruel commentaries on the past than any words.
Yet we have just seen children and peasants, women from northern lands, men from eastern climes, bearing away as a relic a leaf of bay or a starry flower from the once filled recess where Cecilia lay in peace-sealed slumber.
Where is the difference, and why?
A little child can tell, but the philosopher will not listen.
The feast of St. Cecilia, though to the writer of these pages it ended on the threshold of the catacomb, is not completed here.
At her church in the Trastevere, the church already mentioned, takes place the ceremony of solemn vespers, in which the artists of Rome assist and take part gratuitously, out of homage to the queen of music. The antiphon “Cantantibus Organis” is magnificent in art, but unresponsive in devotion. The phantom of the unhappy Renaissance breathes in these strains, religious only in so far as they are a fabric built on sacred words. The simple solemnity of the church’s service dwells not in them, and the touching silence of the catacomb recalls the saint to our mind far more sweetly than these outbursts of paganized minstrelsy within the halls she once called her own. Still, if honor to God be meant by this concourse of the artist fraternity, let us be simple of intention, and see in it, as God does, the first-fruits of what they have offered to the God of all.
Reader, if you ever pray before the early shrine of the virgin-martyr in St. Callixtus’ chapel, remember the writer of these few words, and let our prayers go up to God together, “as a morning sacrifice” and “as incense in his sight.”