Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

So they opened the door—and Cecilia, radiant and fresh as a rose washed in dew, knelt there in prayer, her lovely face raised to Heaven, her pure hands clasped in love and thanksgiving. Terrified, the men rushed to tell Almachius of the portent.

“Let a Lictor go and behead her!” was all he said. Some man was found to do it—though unwillingly, since even the most brutal and ignorant felt that here was one mysteriously protected by Heaven—and might not Heaven—even the Heaven of Jupiter and Apollo—smite him who should raise his hand against her? Still, orders were orders. In the soft May morning a heavy tread sounded over the mosaic pavements of the palace. The sweet lady’s friends and dependents cried out as they saw a man stride along towards the “calidarium”—where, in obedience to the Prefect’s commands, she had remained—swinging a heavy two-handled axe. The Christians who were the trophies of her conquests for Christ besought her, between their sobs, to pray for them in Heaven. She bade them be comforted—smiling radiantly and mysteriously—and knelt down on the still wet marble to receive the blow.

But the Lictor’s hands were trembling so that he could scarcely grasp his weapon. Three times he struck, and each time the steel sank deep into the meek white neck, and the blood crimsoned the golden robe and the marble floor. Then he fled in terror. The Roman law forbade a fourth stroke. Cecilia was lying on the reddened marble, on her side, Urban and the rest kneeling around her. And it was she who broke the silence, bidding them pray to God and then listen to her, since she still had somewhat to say to them. Some among them were yet in need of instruction, many in need of comfort and encouragement; so she taught and prayed, and comforted them for three long days, never moving from the spot where she had sunk down under the strokes of the axe; and they were left in peace, since cold fear had fallen on the city and none dared approach Cecilia’s house to ask how it fared with her.

During all this time her face showed that she was suffering the agonies of death, though she found her old sweet smile for each and all of her spiritual children and her beloved poor, as they crowded round her to kiss her garments and try to staunch her wounds, and to dip their linen cloths in the treasure of her blood. Her last endearments were for the poor, and whatever remained of her own properties in the house she now commanded to be given to them. Each word she spoke seemed as if it must be the last, yet still she lived—and smiled, and blessed them.

On the third day, a great wonder being on all that assemblage, she bade them leave her for a while, and the holy Pope Urban came and prayed with her and blessed her. And he begged her to tell him how it was that she had survived those cruel strokes so long. And Cecilia, looking up at him most lovingly, replied: “I asked the Lord to give me these three days, that I might give to your Beatitude my last treasure, the poor whom I nourished, and who will miss me; and I also give you this my house that you may consecrate it to be a Church to the Lord for ever and ever.” Then she thanked her Saviour for all His love, and especially for having “deigned to give her a part in the glory of the athletes, for having crowned her with the lilies of virginity and the roses of martyrdom.” A little faintness came over her then. She had never moved from the attitude in which she had fallen, and was lying on her right side, but her hands had been raised in prayer. Now they fell, still clasped, on the folds of the golden robe so rosy with blood; she turned her lovely face to the ground, that only God might see the ecstasy of her reunion with Him, and thus she died.

Pope Urban attended personally to every detail of her burial. A cypress-wood coffin was prepared, and in this she was laid by the priests in attendance. Urban would not permit any change from the attitude of virginal modesty in which she had expired, so with tender care the consecrated hands raised her and laid her body in the coffin, just as it was, on the right side, with the face turned to the ground. The cloths dipped in her blood were rolled up and placed at her feet, a profusion of rich ointments and perfumes was shed around her, and then the fragrant casket was closed. Under cover of night the Pontiff had it carried out to the cemetery of Saint Calixtus on the Appian Way, wishing to honour her zealous apostleship for Christ by burying her close to the tomb where he had laid his predecessor, the martyr Pope, St. Zephyrinus. The cemetery of Pretextatus, where Valerianus and Tiburtius had been buried, was close at hand, and Urban, to commemorate the pure love that had united them on earth, made Cecilia’s tomb at the extreme confine of the Calixtus catacomb, where its direction turned towards the older one. Fearing desecration, perhaps prophetically foreseeing that which threatened the resting-places of martyrs in the invasion of the Arian heretics some two hundred years later, he closed the tomb with one large slab of stone and left it for the moment bare of all inscription; doubtless he intended to place one there immediately, but had no time to do so before his own death.[16] Those who had loved her needed not to see her name; they came day after day to weep there and ask for her prayers; but God had inspired His servant to protect and hide her blessed remains from all the enemies of the Church.

It seems as if St. Urban’s own life had been prolonged thus far that he might not only carry out this pious task, but also fulfil Cecilia’s last commands by giving the remainder of her goods to the poor and by consecrating as a Church the house in which she died. A short month later he was taken and brought, with some of his Deacons, before Almachius, to answer to two charges, that of being a Christian, and that of having seized Cecilia’s property, which the covetous Prefect had counted on securing for himself. The usual farce of a trial ensued; the confessors were dragged out to the Pagus Triopius and, on their refusing to sacrifice to Jupiter, savagely scourged. One of them, Lucian, died under the lash; Urban and the others were beheaded, in another spot, three days later.

Valerianus and his brother had suffered on the 18th of April, Cecilia a week or more after them, and St. Urban and his companions on the twenty-fifth day of May. St. Cecilia’s name was inserted at once in the Canon of the Mass, where only those of six out of the thirty martyr Popes were admitted. Agnes precedes her; Anastasia, burnt alive on Christmas Day, under Diocletian, follows; and three hundred years later St. Gregory inserted those of the two Sicilian martyrs, Agatha and Lucy; but none inscribed on that sacred list which the priest repeats every morning at Mass eclipses the name of Cecilia. Her house has never ceased to be “A Church of the Lord,” as she ordained; every year on her feast, the most glorious music resounds there, and many a time have I been one of the crowd gathered on the 22d of November to listen to the finest singers in Rome gathered to do her honour, because she loved to praise the Lord in song and psalm. The anniversary of her death often coincides with the great feasts of the Ascension and of Pentecost, and, for some reason, of which we have lost the clue, the 22d of November was fixed for the celebration of it. On that day not only in her Church is she glorified, but also in the cemetery where her body lay for some five hundred years and which is brilliantly illuminated and a grand musical Mass sung there in her honour.

Yet, for centuries that blessed tomb was lost and none could pray beside it. Every word, almost every look and gesture of Cecilia’s last days on earth, was written in the “Acts of the Martyrs,” that enormous collection of archives instituted by St. Clement, who appointed seven holy and learned notaries to take down at once even the smallest details connected with the trial and sufferings of the Christian victims, a work zealously continued by all the succeeding Pontiffs, one of whom, Anterus, was put to death solely on this charge. The “Acts of the Martyrs,” as we possess them to-day, were finally compiled in the Fourth or early part of the Fifth Century. The Latin, though vivid and powerful, is already notably defective, ungrammatical, but not as debased as it became at the beginning of the Sixth Century. The great masters of language in the Fourth Century—St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and St. Jerome—were eager to preserve the purity of the Latin tongue, but their contemporaries all over the Empire, either through ignorance or carelessness, spoke and wrote an idiom as far removed from that of the Golden Age of Augustus as is fashionable English to-day from that of Addison and Pope. Is our misuse of our own noble tongue the cause, or the effect, of political degeneration? One thing is certain, the slaughter of its language has invariably accompanied the downfall of a State.

When the Goths invaded Rome in the Fifth Century their Arian fury was especially directed at all that Catholics held sacred, barring only the Tombs of the Apostles, which they feared to profane. They raged through the Catacombs in the hope of finding plunder, or else some secret ingress to the city; the Christians, warned of their approach, had time to fill up and close the entrance of a few of the cemeteries, among others of that where Cecilia’s body lay. As a result, the pilgrims were unable to visit these underground sanctuaries for many years, and when peace was restored to the Church, and the bodies of many martyrs brought back to the city, all but the vaguest clue to her resting-place was lost, though it was sought for eagerly and persistently. Her Church—the “House where Cecilia prayed”[17]—was ever protected from destruction and continually resounded with prayer and praise, but it was empty of the treasure of her remains. As time went on, almost all the bones of the martyrs had been restored to the piety of the Faithful in the different Churches and Basilicas of Rome; the sanctuaries ruined and desecrated by the Goths and Lombards had been rebuilt; the Catacombs reopened and partially restored; so that, although they would never again inspire quite the veneration with which they had been regarded before the Barbarians defaced and defiled them, yet pilgrims, with their strange old guidebooks to direct their steps, would visit the places which had been hallowed by those noble presences in past ages.