Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

In 817 Pope Paschal ascended the throne, and made it his especial duty to rescue from the Catacombs any holy relics that still remained there. Great was his desire to find the tomb of St. Cecilia; he sought for it long and patiently, and seems to have passed it more than once, owing to its lack of inscription. He had already rebuilt her Church, which had suffered much from time, and decorated it magnificently, but it seemed destined to be deprived of the honour of sheltering all that earth still held of her. In great depression he, with many others, came to the conclusion that her body must have been carried away by the Lombards when Charlemagne drove them out of Italy.

And then Cecilia herself re-animated him to the search. He has left us an enchanting description of her visit. On a certain Sunday morning, very, very early, Pope Paschal was sitting in St. Peter’s, near the Tomb of the Apostles, listening entranced to the sweet voices of the Canons, who were singing Lauds, the office with which the Church opens her day before the first gleam of light has come into the East. It was not the St. Peter’s that we know, but the ancient Basilica founded by Constantine and consecrated in the year 326, vast and dark, with heavy Byzantine arches and windows closed by panes of thin Oriental alabaster. The good Pope speaks regretfully of a slight weariness which was creeping over him after the long night’s vigil, and says that, just as the eastern windows became visible squares in the first faint flush of dawn, he was overcome with drowsiness and closed his eyes, so that the soaring music became the music of dreams.

Then a luminous vision appeared: a young virgin, adorned as a bride, stood before Paschal, and, after reproaching him with his too easy abandonment of the task he had undertaken, said: “Nevertheless, thou wast so near me that we could have spoken mouth to mouth!”

Amazed and agitated, Paschal asked her who she was. She replied, “Cecilia, the servant of Christ.” But the prudent Pontiff, knowing that all visions are not of Heaven, and fearing a snare of the Evil One, said: “How can I believe thee? All men say that the body of the holy Cecilia was carried away by the Lombards.”

Very gently she replied that the Lombards had indeed sought for her, but that the Blessed Virgin had protected her sepulchre, so that they had not found it. She bade him persevere in his search, which she promised should soon be rewarded, and commanded him to bring her body and those of “other Saints near her” to her own Church. Then she disappeared, and Paschal, greatly rejoiced, went forth, and straightway returned to the ground over which he had gone so many times in vain. In the cemetery of St. Calixtus he now noticed a nameless tomb, which he had never connected in his mind with that of the Saint, because of its extreme bareness and apparent obscurity. He now realised that this must be what he had been seeking. The slab was at once removed from the wall, disclosing a marble-lined recess, in which a little chest of cypress-wood, just over four feet long, reposed without a trace of age or decay.

Very carefully it was lifted down and placed at Paschal’s feet. The opening of it presented some difficulty, but when the cover was removed, a strong fragrance of roses and lilies came welling up from the interior. Then the Pope and his assistants beheld Cecilia, lying like a child asleep, her head turned down, her hands folded, her robe, tinged with blood, outlining the modest grace of her young body. That was whole and sweet as on the day when Urban laid it away hundreds of years before; no decay or corruption had been suffered to approach it. All was as on the day of her death, from the great wounds in her neck to the gold embroidery on her dress, and at her feet were the rolls of linen steeped in her blood.

They brought her, with great and reverent rejoicing, back to her own house, now the Lord’s; they brought, too, the bodies of her beloved husband and his brother, and that of Maximus, the brave officer who had been charged with their execution, but who chose to follow them to glory. For greater honour Paschal brought there the body of St. Urban and placed it with that of Cecilia and her comrade martyrs under the High Altar.

For Cecilia he prepared a white marble sarcophagus, and in this the little cypress-wood coffin[18] was placed. Paschal would not have her body touched, and left her as she had lain ever since that sad and glorious May morning six hundred years before; but he lined the sides of the coffin with a rich damask silk with fringed edges, and spread over her a great veil of silk also, but diaphanously thin, and this too was delicately fringed. All these details so carefully set down at the time were destined to be of great value, not only as aids to identification in after years, but as testimonies to the immeasurable reverence with which the Church regarded the bodies of the martyrs in the early ages.

After gazing for the last time at her pure loveliness, Paschal closed the sarcophagus with a marble slab, and then, with no less love and reverence, placed the bodies of her three heroes—Valerianus, Tiburtius, and Maximus—in another sarcophagus, “all together, but each wrapped in a separate winding sheet.” For St. Urban a third marble coffin was made, but—a little touch of human nature that brings a smile and a tear—Paschal feared he “might be lonely” in it, and brought the body of one of his martyred successors, Lucius, to lie beside him, though he is careful to tell us that they too had each “a separate winding sheet!”

The three sarcophagi were placed below the High Altar in the Church now called St. Cecilia in Trastevere; a marble tablet, inscribed with a cross, the martyrs’ names, and the account of their sepulture in this spot, was duly placed near them, and then a strong circular wall was built all around and closed up, so that none could enter the tomb. But just above it, in the pavement of the Church, a small grating opened on a long funnel-like aperture through which, according to ancient custom, the Faithful could lower strips of linen to rest for a moment on the marble coffins, and then be withdrawn and carried away as precious souvenirs of the holy ones lying therein.