Pastoral Staff

PASTORAL STAFF (Baculus, understood as Pastoralis; Cambuta, Ferula). - A liturgical insignia proper to the bishop and to abbots in pontifical functions, except those of Good Friday and of the dead. To use it outside one's own territory, the permission of the Ordinary is required. It consists of a shaft the height of a man, provided at the top with a spiral curve; it is handed over on the day of consecration and is carried in the left hand, with the curve turned toward the people in one's own territory. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, at the knop, that is, below the curve, a more or less small piece of cloth was placed, sometimes adorned with embroidery, also called a sudarium; nowadays it is no longer used except at times to distinguish the pastoral staff of an abbot (Decr. auth., 1113 ad 8).

Already in the 5th century it is found in use by abbots in Ireland; it is mentioned as an insignia of the bishop in decree 28 of the Fourth Synod of Toledo of 633 and described by St. Isidore of Seville (De off. ecl., II, 5, 12); also in Gaul, under the name "cambuta," "baculus" or "virga," it is used by bishops in the 8th century (Synod of Aachen of 816, can. 134). But until the 10th century it was not considered a liturgical insignia, either by liturgists or in the liturgical books. Perhaps at the time of the investiture struggle in the 11th century it was introduced as a symbol of spiritual power. In Rome it was never used by the popes, nor even by the cardinals, as the Ordinarium S. Romanae Ecclesiae proves (= Ordo Romanus XIV, n. 45), written by Gaetano Stefaneschi (early 14th century). Even at present the pope never uses it; in certain functions, for example, at the opening and closing of the Holy Door or at the consecration of a church, the pope uses the rod surmounted by a Cross, called the ferula (v.), mentioned in Pseudo Constantine, Constitutum 14, with the expression "imperialia sceptra" (ed. P. Fedele, Fonti per la storia delle origini del dominio temporale della Chiesa di Roma, ibid. 1920, p. 104), and in the Ordo Romanus XII, n. 79 (prior basilicae Sancti Laurentii de Palatio dat ei ferulam quae est signum regiminis et correctionis et claves ipsius basilicae et sacri Lateranensis palatii: PL 78, 1097; the same thing is repeated in the Ordo Romanus XVI, ibid., col. 1144). The cardinals, now, like all bishops, use the pastoral staff in pontifical functions.

The origin of the pastoral staff is not yet clear; perhaps it derives from the use of investiture with a golden virga in the ceremonial of the Byzantine imperial court, also used in the 6th and 7th centuries by the Visigoths in Spain, where the first mention of the episcopal pastoral staff is found. It is probable that the ceremonial of the Visigothic court, in imitation of the Byzantine one, also introduced for bishops the use of a virga, with this difference, that it was handed over not by the king, but by the bishops at the altar (Klausner).

The form of the pastoral staff varied according to the times. At first a wooden shaft, surmounted either by a ball or by a Cross or by a horizontal crossbar in the shape of the Greek T. From the 11th century it was curved slightly into a spiral: a form still in use. The three parts of which the pastoral staff consists, the shaft, the joint, the spiral, received an allegorical interpretation: the curve turned toward the people becomes a symbol of pastoral care (attrahe), the shaft that of firm administration (rege, sustenta) and the lower tip that of the goad (punge, stimula).

Pietro Siffrin

ART

In the Romanesque period many pastoral staffs came out of the workshops of Limoges (13th century) and were of copper with light-green and blue enamels, with the head of a serpent or of another animal at the end of the volute and, within this, statuettes with various representations (in Paris, Ascoli Piceno, Cathedral; in Catania, Museo civico, etc.). In the Gothic period, the knop took the form of a pinnacled little temple with statues in the round; at the end of the volute there was the representation of the Annunciation or of the Coronation, and between the shaft and the volute there projected winged corners. The decoration with translucent enamels, according to the custom of the time, adorned both the shaft (at other times covered with polylobed tracery) and the volutes: some examples indicate the beauty achieved with this skillful grafting of the plastic element onto the vividly enameled surfaces: the pastoral staff of Ciccarello di Francesco in the cathedral of Sulmona, the other in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Siena; the other in Città di Castello and in the cathedral of Treviso; the others, so similar among themselves as to seem to have come from the same Sicilian workshop, such as the pastoral staff of the cathedral of Reggio Calabria and that of the cathedral of Tropea, that of Agira with a quadrilobed enamel within the volute, etc.

In the 15th and 16th centuries the enamel decoration disappears; pilasters and columns and round arches replace the Gothic forms in the knop, while the statuettes at the end of the volute have a more naturalistic modeling.

Motifs of little cherub heads in relief, curled leaves on the volute are found in the pastoral staffs of this period (for example, in the cathedral of S. Severina at Nicotera; at Orvieto in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, etc.). In the Baroque period the line of the volute, which had always remained firm even while being enriched with decorative elements, becomes undulating and is formed by curled shapes (Monreale, S. Martino delle Scale; Crotone, Cathedral) or else by crumpled volutes, such as the one that Michele Cruer composed in 1718 in chased and partly gilded silver for the grand prior of the Constantinopolitan Order (Parma, S. Maria della Steccata), or else more delicately formed by openwork filigree (Monreale, Cathedral).

In the 18th century pastoral staffs were also made of bone and ivory with a shaft adorned with engravings; in general, among the most beautiful were always those pastoral staffs in which the motif of leaves, flowers, and garlands composed an elegant volute around the central statuettes. Even when neoclassical motifs penetrated the goldsmiths' workshops, and hand working was replaced by mechanical working, the 18th-century model - in which the rich Gothic or Renaissance decoration of the knop had been suppressed in favor of greater ease for the grip - remained persistent, nor can it be said that modern production has introduced many stylistic variants to this liturgical furnishing. - See pl. LXXI.

Maria Accascina