Of the enduring “popularity”—to use a commonplace expression—of S. Cecilia, the fact of Cecilia being one of the few chosen female saints daily commemorated in the canon of the Mass, may be fairly adduced. She is classed with Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Anastasia, and Agnes.
It is often asked why she is looked on as the patroness of music. Nothing but pure tradition can be alleged here, but the tradition is a very ancient one. Wordsworth writes of her as
“rapt Cecilia, seraph-haunted queen of harmony.”
Compare too references in Dryden, “Alexander’s Feast,” and Pope, “Ode on S. Cecilia.” Raffaelle paints her as wrapped in ecstasy and surrounded by instruments of music.
The tradition is that when Valerian, her husband, returned from baptism, he found her singing hymns of thanksgiving for his conversion. Angels, it is said, descended from heaven to listen to her sweet voice.
No allusion, however, to her musical power is made in the Antiphone sung at her Festival. A verse of the appointed anthem runs thus:
“While the instruments of music were playing, Cecilia sang unto the Lord and said, ‘Let my heart be undefiled, that I may never be confounded.’”
In one of the chapels of the great Church of the Oratory in London there is a beautiful replica of the dead Cecilia of Maderno.
There is another replica of Maderno’s figure now placed in the niche of the recently-discovered crypt of S. Cecilia, where the sarcophagus which contains the body of the saint originally was placed.
[135] A “luminare” (plural “luminaria”) was a shaft communicating with the surface of the ground which admitted light and air. Many of these were constructed by Pope Damasus in the fourth century for the sake of pilgrims visiting the historic crypts.