Benedictine Fasces

BENEDICTINE FASCES. - This is the name given to the swaddling clothes for infants that the popes were accustomed to send to the newborn sons and daughters of kings, after having blessed them.

They were normally made of precious fabrics, embroidered in gold and illuminated with ornamentation of lace and gems.

The custom was introduced under Clement VIII, but not in 1592, as Moroni would have it (G. Moroni, op. cit. in bibl., p. 224), but a few years later.

It is in fact in the instructions sent to the nuncio of France on the occasion of the birth of the firstborn of Henry IV (1601) that mention is made for the first time of the f. b. sent as a gift by the Pope to the king, by means of the extraordinary nuncio Maffeo Barberini (later Urban VIII). Thus at least concluded the vice-prefect of the Vatican Secret Archive, Giovanni Bissiga, in two of his letters of 1678 and 1698, after accurate investigations carried out in the same Archive (cod. Vat. lat. 12431, ff. 62-64). The custom was continued under Urban VIII, Alexander VII, Innocent XI, Alexander VIII, Clement XI, Benedict XIII, Clement XII, Benedict XIV, Clement XIV and Pius VI.

The f. were blessed with solemn ceremonial personally by the pontiff in the chapels of the Apostolic Palaces or in the consistorial hall or even in some church of Rome, and were sent by special apostolic ablegates, or even presented by the nuncio, specially commissioned. They were accompanied by a pontifical brief and, at the moment of presentation, by an address from the nuncio or ablegate.

The growing rarity of reigning houses or their political stance, little loyal to the Church, ended up causing this graceful custom to disappear.