Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

The Church is one of the most interesting in Rome to the Catholic Pilgrim; as a well-known Protestant writer[19] says: “The traveller who tries to overlook Catholicity in his sightseeing in Rome, misses all that is most interesting to see.” Paschal lavished splendid gifts on the Church he so dearly loved. The chroniclers have left us minute descriptions of the gold and the silver, the marvellously embroidered vestments and hangings that he provided for it, and his successors adorned it with lovely paintings and mosaics as time went on, but the best offering of all was Paschal’s own. That Cecilia’s last wish might be carried out and “the praises of the Lord sound there forever,” he built and endowed a monastery close by and established there a choir of monks, who sang those praises night and day from that time forth.

Then he passed away, to be greeted in Heaven by those whom he had so loved to honour upon earth. There had been many martyrs—so many that only the Angels could count them—but none greater, more glorious, more dear to God and beloved of men, than Cecilia.

The devotion to her spread rapidly over Europe; Britain, France, and Germany emulated Italy in honours paid to her, and many churches boasted, in perfect good faith, that they possessed some of her relics. We know, not only from Paschal’s account, but from the eye-testimony of witnesses quite near to our own times, that only one tiny fragment of her blessed human frame—and that by accident—was ever parted from the rest; but we know, too, that the Church counts three other Cecilias, two of them Roman, among the known martyrs. Their relics were borne away for veneration, and time caused their origin to be so far forgotten that they were for centuries regarded as belonging to the Roman heroine of the Third Century.

Pope Paschal died in 824. The monastery which he had founded passed away from the Benedictines, was made into a Collegiate Church, was restored to the Benedictines—and had to be abandoned during the stirring years of the first part of the Sixteenth Century, because the zealous sons of St. Benedict had so many institutions to attend to that their numbers no longer sufficed for the work to be done. The Church of St. Cecilia, in 1532, had fallen into such decay that it was barely possible to celebrate her feast there any longer, and this in spite of the fact that it was still considered the most honourable “Titular Church” in Rome.[20] On the 19th of December, 1590, Gregory XIV, who had been made Pope on the fifth day of that month, conferred the cardinal’s hat on the son of his brother, the young Paul Emilius Sfondrato, with the “Titular” of St. Cecilia, which the Pontiff had himself held before his election to the Papacy. The Sfondrati were a Milanese family, but Paul had already spent much time in Rome under the spiritual tutorship of St. Philip Nerim, and he joyfully hastened thither in response to his uncle’s summons. The young Cardinal was already famous for his wisdom and learning, but still more so for his goodness and his tender charity to the poor. His two leading motives in life were the honouring of God and the Saints, and the relief of suffering. We read that he built and decorated church after church, recking nothing of spending a great part of his large fortune on the House of God and the dwellers therein, at the same time denying himself every sort of luxury and living like a poor man in order that the poor might not be defrauded of their share of the goods which he considered he only held in trust for the Lord.

One of his first resolves on coming to Rome in 1591 was to rebuild the almost ruinous Church of St. Cecilia, and, while doing so, to find her tomb, of which the exact location had been lost in the eight hundred years that had elapsed since Paschal closed it. Other traces of her presence had also disappeared, and it was reserved for Sfondrato to rediscover the bathroom where she had expired. At first a chapel had been built over it, but with succeeding modifications this had been pulled down and the space incorporated in the Church, and, although there were old men then alive who remembered having prayed there in their childhood, it was only after much study of the ancient and actual topography that Sfondrato was led to the correct spot. There, however, all doubts were set at rest. He found the “calidarium,” of the small size adapted to a private dwelling, with its marble floor, its great boiler, and the remains of the leaden and earthenware pipes through which the steam percolated into the bathroom. When the rubbish was cleared away it was easy to call up the touching scenes it had witnessed in those May days fourteen hundred years earlier.

The pious Cardinal, wishing to place under the High Altar of the restored basilica some precious relics of other saints, commanded the workmen to take up the pavement, so that the supposed space below could be utilised for this purpose. They found, however, that there was only a very small recess there, and that all further excavation was arrested by a thick rounded wall of exceedingly solid material. Sfondrato at once realised that this must be the barrier mentioned in Paschal’s account of the burial of St. Cecilia by himself, and directed the masons to make some aperture in the wall, through which a glimpse might be obtained of that which it protected. At the same time he was so scrupulous as to the respect to be shown to the martyr that he forbade the men to strike a blow of any kind except in his own presence.

At last, on the twentieth day of October, 1599, an opening was effected, and Paul Sfondrato, looking through it with beating heart and straining eyes, beheld by the light of a taper that for which he had sought so eagerly—two large white marble sarcophagi, standing side by side immediately below the High Altar. St. Cecilia and her companions were undoubtedly there, just as Paschal had placed them, but the prudent Cardinal would not open their tombs except in the presence of eminent and reliable witnesses. Curbing his impatience, he sent for four learned and holy men—the Bishop who was acting as Vicegerent of the Cardinal Vicar, a Canon of St. John Lateran, and two Fathers of the Society of Jesus. Many others came with them, but a palpitating silence reigned in the vault while the workmen removed the marble slab from the coffin nearest the entrance and disclosed, to eyes already misty with tears, the little cypress casket, so touchingly small, in which Urban had laid the dear saint on her “Natal Day.”

With extreme precaution this was lifted out, but the perfumed wood proved to be perfectly solid, as if put together the day before, only the cover showing some slight marks of the flight of time. At first this cover baffled all efforts to remove it; it held tightly, but with no visible fastening. Finally Sfondrato himself found out the secret—it had been contrived to slip along two perfectly fitted lateral grooves—and with his own hands drew it off and looked at last on the body of St. Cecilia, perfect, untouched, lovely, and at rest like that of a sleeping child. Every detail of Paschal’s description was verified. The gold embroidery of her dress showed a little dulled through the airy veil he had thrown over her, and his fringed damask lining was slightly faded; otherwise no change had been suffered to approach her whom the Lord so loved. From the last few moments before her death no one had ever looked on her face, so pathetically turned to the ground, and none could see now more than the soft outline of the rounded cheek and the indication of the temple. Her little hands lay together, and now for the first time it was noticed that her very last movement must have been a confession of faith, for of one hand three fingers were distended, of the other, one—to symbolise the Trinity in Unity. And the last crowning sweetness was not wanting. As soon as the small coffin was opened a heavenly fragrance as of freshly gathered lilies and roses welled out from it and filled all the place.

With joy too great and tender to find words, Sfondrato and his companions carried the precious casket up to the light of day, and deposited it for safety in the small chapel with grated windows where the nuns of the contiguous convent were accustomd to assist at Mass. Raised on a daïs hung with rich silk, surrounded with lighted tapers that shed a soft glow all around, half smothered in flowers, Cecilia lay there while all Rome, beside itself with joy, came to gaze upon her and entreat her prayers. No perfumes were permitted to be used, since the heavenly fragrance of roses and lilies still emanated from the coffin. The nuns knelt round her for a guard of honour, and soon the great Pope Clement VIII, who had barely recovered from a severe illness, travelled in from Frascati to pray beside her.

The times were very evil just then for him and for the Church; Calvinism was devastating France and threatening to give her a sovereign dyed in its abominable impieties; England, Holland, Scandinavia, and a great part both of Germany and Switzerland were altogether lost to the faith and had become the bitterest enemies of the Church, and impious hands were scattering the bones of the saints on the public highways. Only two months had elapsed since the ghastly tragedy of the Cenci had thrown a pall of gloom over Rome itself; but everything was forgotten in the joy of having the beloved Cecilia’s remains restored to the veneration of her people. Clement himself, the “hard, stern” old man, was completely overcome when he beheld her; his tears choked his speech. The Romans of every class thronged to the place in such numbers that Sfondrato himself was almost crushed to death in the crowd and the Pontifical Swiss Guards had to be stationed there to keep order. Such was still the enthusiastic love with which our forbears regarded all that was dear to God!