Purification (Candlemas), Feast of the

PURIFICATION (Candlemas), Feast of the. - A Marian solemnity, celebrated on 2 February as a double of the second class, to which is added the blessing of the candles with the subsequent solemn procession. However, in the case of an occurrence with one of the Sundays of Pre-Lent, the feast of the P. is transferred to 3 February, while the blessing of the candles and the procession remain on the second day.

1. Origin of the feast

Like the other great Marian feasts, this one too is of Eastern origin, and specifically Jerusalemite. Its foundation is found in the biblical narrative (Lk. 2:22 ff.), that the Most Holy Mary brought Jesus, 40 days after his birth, to the Temple of Jerusalem, to redeem him according to the Law (Lev. 12:2 ff., and Num. 18:15 ff.), meeting on this occasion the old Simeon, who foretold the glory of the Son and the sorrows of the Mother. This account gave rise, as did other biblical episodes, to a liturgical commemoration first in the holy city. This is described by Egeria (end of the 4th century), and took place on 14 February, for which reason it was called "quadragesimae de Epiphania," since the Nativity was solemnized in the feast of the Epiphany, on 6 January; after the usual solemn processions there followed the sermon on the Gospel episode of Luke and the great Mass. The feast was celebrated "cum summa laetitia ac si per Pascha" (ed. Gamurrini, ch. 28, p. 84). The sermon "De occursu Domini" of St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) attests that the feast was celebrated also outside Palestine (PG 46, 1151-82). Shortly afterward St. Cyril of Alexandria also delivered a festal sermon for the P. (Hom., 12: PG 77, 1039-50); there followed then the sacred Eastern orators of the succeeding centuries.

In Constantinople the feast became official or obligatory in 534 under Justinian I (Theophanes, Chronographia, ad ann. mundi 6034 ann. Chr. 434: PG 108, 487-88; and Nicephorus Callistus, Ecclesiastica historia, XVII, 28: PG 147, 289): after an epidemic, which appeared in Oct. 533, the Emperor established the celebration, from Feb. 534 onward, "in toto orbe terrarum" of the "Ypapante, sive Occursus Domini." The feast became universal throughout the whole East. Its principal object, in full conformity with the sacred text, is the ὑπαπάντη, that is to say the meeting of the Savior with Simeon, but evidently not separated from the Mother of Jesus. This character of the feast is recognizable also in the Roman liturgy.

2. The feast of the P. in the West

Among the various mosaic scenes of the triumphal arch of the basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome there is also that of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple. But in the West there still did not exist a liturgical celebration. In the liturgical and extra-liturgical sources of the times of St. Gregory the Great there is no trace whatsoever of the Marian feasts of the P., Annunciation (v.), Assumption (v.) and Nativity of Mary (v.). A hundred years later, on the other hand, Pope Sergius I (681-701) established that the celebration of these four Marian feasts be made more solemn with a particular procession. These feasts therefore were imported from the East during the 7th century and, as everything leads one to believe, through the work of Eastern monks, who flocked in great numbers to the City, bringing there also not a few other liturgical celebrations (v. Lib. Pont., I, 376). Indeed the Roman liturgical books that contain the feast of the P. for the first time, such as the Sacramentaries of the Gregorian type, the Capitularies of the epistles and Gospels of the Roman type, bear the Greek name of the feast: "Ypapante"; in the additions to the Hieronymian Martyrology (since in the archetype the feast is missing) it appears often as "S. Symeonis"; in the later Sacramentaries, of the Gelasian type, and in various corrections and additions to the earlier liturgical books, on the other hand, there is the Latin name that afterward prevailed: "Purificatio s. Mariae," of rather Gallican provenance.

3. The "litania" of the feast of the P.; the "Candelora." - Characteristic of the feast of the P. are the blessing of the candles and the solemn procession that precede the Mass. The popular name of the feast is derived precisely from this particularity: candelora, or candelaria (Italian), chandeleur (French), candlemas (English), Lichtmess (German).

Sergius I, as was said, added a procession to the celebration of the four Marian feasts; that for the Assumption was maintained in Rome until the Avignon period, whereas that of the P. entered into the use of the universal Church. According to the current rite, a series of five orations prepares the blessing of the candles, which is carried out with the aspersion and incensation; these are then distributed to the clergy and the people by the celebrant, while the antiphon "Lumen ad revelationem gentium" is sung, intercalated with the verses of the "Nunc dimittis." Once the distribution is finished, the oremus "Exaudi" follows, preceded, after Septuagesima, by the "Flectamus genua." During the procession, opened with the usual "Procedamus in pace," three antiphons of Greek origin are sung. It closes with the solemn Mass. The color of the vestments is violet until the Mass, in which white is used instead. The primitive core of the whole rite is the "litania," that is, the penitential procession that in Rome set out from St. Adrian's, at the Roman Forum, the ancient Curia. The oldest description is found in the so-called Ordo of St-Amand (ed. Duchesne, Origines, 499-500, according to the new arrangement of Andrieu, Ordo XX: Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen âge, III, Louvain 1951, pp. 231-36), which dates back to the end of the 8th century. The vestments were black, the Pope distributed unlit and unblessed candles, then recited the Collect (the current "Exaudi"), and carried out the procession as far as St. Mary Major, singing antiphons, and, near the Basilica, the "litania," repeating it three times; in the Mass the Gloria in excelsis was omitted. The text of the Sacramentarium Hadrianum (Gregorian of the time of Adrian I, end of the 8th century) corresponds perfectly to it, both in time and in form, where the text of the collecta "Exaudi" is also found, often with a variant at the beginning, "Erude." Amalarius (d. ca. 850) speaks at length about the procession, adopting a passage of St. Bede, in which this litania is traced back to Pope Gelasius (v. below), a citation that later became customary for all medieval liturgists. But even Amalarius knows no blessing of the candles (cf. Liber officialis, III, ch. 43, ed. Hanssens, II, Vatican City 1949, p. 380).

A complete rite of the blessing is found instead in the so-called Pontifical of the 12th century (M. Andrieu, Le Pontifical Romain au moyen âge, I, Vatican City 1938 [*Studi e testi, 86], pp. 206-209), with orations partly identical to the current ones, or greater in number. The singing of the antiphon "Lumen" already exists, as do the final antiphons, during the procession. The blessing of the candles, like that of the ashes and the palms, is a Franco-Germanic invention of the 9th-10th centuries. E. Martène (De antiquis Ecclesiae ritibus, III, ch. 15) reports seven different Ordines, with a quantity of oremus and particularities that were regulated only with the Missal of St. Pius V, in 1570. All the grandeur of the Roman "litania" of the P. is revealed by the Ordines Romani XI, XII, XIV and XV (ed. Mabillon), which range from 1140 to about 1400. In Rome the "litania" had remained the essential thing; the blessing of the candles, already mentioned in the Ordo XI, was imparted beforehand, without solemnity, by a cardinal deacon, then (Ordo XII and following) by the two youngest cardinal deacons. The Pope, seated in front of the church of St. Adrian, distributed the candles to the clergy and the people; in the procession he went first, with all the others, barefoot, in black vestments. In the Ordo XIV it is declared for the first time that, when it coincided with Septuagesima or Sexagesima, the "litania" had to remain on the date of the second, a prescription that remained definitive in the rubrics of St. Pius V. In the Ordo XV, after the Avignon period, the litanic and penitential procession disappears; the distribution of the candles takes place directly in St. Mary Major. It is worth noting that outside Rome the procession of the candles did not have an explicit penitential character, and much less so with the development of the solemn blessing. The "litania," according to St. Bede the Venerable (De temporum ratione [PL 90, 351-52]), would have been introduced by Gelasius I (492-96) in substitution for the lustratory processions of February, the lupercalia or other amburbalia, as all the medieval liturgists would later affirm, as well as Baronius (Annales, ad ann. 544) and some moderns (G. Wissowa in the reworking of vol. III of J. Marquardt, Röm. Stnotsrecht, Leipzig 1878, p. 446). But according to the most authoritative authors such a derivation does not hold. In the times of Gelasius the aforementioned pagan processions were no longer held and their date does not correspond to Feb. 2; but above all the notice of the Liber Pontificalis concerning the institution of the four Marian processions under Sergius I is clear: it is a matter of something ex novo. That the one of the P. then remained alive and took on such developments and transformations has its foundation in the biblical texts of the "Lumen ad revelationem gentium" (cf. H. Grisar, Roma alla fine del mondo antico, Italian trans., II, Rome 1930, p. 911, or D. De Bruyne, L'origine des processions de la Chandeleur et les Rogations, in Revue bénédictine*, 30 [1922], p. 15 ff.). In Rome, after the Avignon period, the "litania" of the P. was never resumed; indeed, the blessing of the candles and the procession, on the part of the Supreme Pontiff, took place in one of the internal chapels of the Palace and from 1839 until 1870 in the Vatican Basilica; afterward it was entirely omitted. The custom had been introduced that the pope in person, after the procession, threw the blessed candles from the window of the Palace among the crowd, but because of the various inconveniences that resulted from it, Gregory XIII abolished it in 1573. Instead, on an unspecified date, but already in the 18th century (v. the "Chracas"), the custom was introduced that after the liturgical ceremonies, once the pope had returned to his rooms, artistic candles were presented to him by personages of the pontifical Court, representatives of the Chapters and of the Roman clergy, of the government and of the city. Later, deputations of religious Orders resident in Rome took part in this ceremony, and so it continues still.

Today the presentation of the candles takes place in the Hall of the Consistory. The pope sends some artistic candle to illustrious personages, sovereigns, nobles, etc., distributing the others to poor churches.

4. Historical notices concerning the feast of the P

On the morning of Feb. 2, 1703, a very violent earthquake devastated a large part of the Papal States, but in Rome the damage turned out to be relatively slight. Pope Clement XI therefore intoned the Te Deum after the solemn Mass of the P., a practice that continued until 1870. Moreover he promised, in the name of the City, as a vow, to keep Feb. 1 for a hundred years as a vigil with fasting and abstinence, a vow renewed in 1802 by Pius VII for another 100 years and immortalized on a plaque on the Capitoline.

From the second Vespers of Feb. 2, whether or not the P. was celebrated there, the final antiphon of the Office "Ave, regina caelorum" is recited, which then continues until Holy Week. The Office of the feast of the P., as regards psalmody and hymns, is Marian; the antiphons of the first Vespers are from the Circumcision (Jan. 1); the rest, and the whole Mass, clearly reveal that the feast was originally a feast of Christ.

FOLKLORE

Closely linked to the forms and norms of the liturgy is the people's participation in the blessing and distribution of candles for the feast of the Purification of Mary. Reflections of popular taste are to be seen in the various ways adopted in different regions for adorning the blessed candles, with multicolored decorations, with ribbons or with the parish seals, and so on. In times past the ceremony took place with a greater wealth of festive and picturesque expressions. In Rome, down to the pontificate of Gregory XVI, a procession took place around the basilica of St. Peter. After the ceremonial customary for all functions presided over by the Pontiff, on the table of the altar were placed some candles with a bow of red and silver silk and the papal coat of arms. Three of them were chosen by the master of ceremonies, and the smallest was given to the Pope, the other two to the officiating deacon and subdeacon. Once the candles were blessed, the Pope gave his own candle to the master of ceremonies, together with the white silk maniple embroidered in gold that had served to protect his fingers from the dripping wax, and proceeded to the blessing of the candles, while the prelates intoned the "Lumen ad revelationem gentium". High personages of the court, ambassadors, etc., took part in the ceremony. In Naples there was a display of torches, candles and flares adorned in colors with the insignia of the church and of the gentlemen who sent them as a tribute to honorable or friendly persons, so that a sixteenth-century poet, G. B. Del Tufo, could write: "...This is in every street, in every road - wherever you may happen to go - my ladies, a gentle thing to see - as in a sacred and glorious April". In Trapani, until the early nineteenth century, the episode of the Purification of Mary was dramatically re-enacted in a kind of popular sacred representation whose characters were the Madonna with the Child, St. Joseph and St. Simeon. Something similar also took place at Vicari (Palermo); while at Chiaromonte the peasant women, on the eve of the feast, rise to climb in procession up a mountain overlooking the town, and there purify themselves by means of ablution with the dew: they sang in chorus a lauda alluding to the purificatory rite they were performing.

At present the most vivid expression of popular devotion consists in the fact that the blessed candles, especially in the countryside, but also among the common people of the city, are jealously kept, often quite prominently displayed in bedrooms, because particular powers are attributed to them against the evil forces of nature and against evil spirits. For this reason the people light them at the bedside of a dying person, convinced that the light of the candle puts death to flight; likewise also during storms and against lightning and hail, to placate enraged nature and ward off destruction from the fields. In many places it is customary to place the lighted candle outside the window while the storm rages. In the Abruzzi, on the day of the Candlemas, everyone abstains from work, but especially the millers, because it is told that once a miller refused to keep this feast holy and saw the flour come out of the mill in the form of a candle.

In the traditional calendar the Candlemas marks the end of winter: hence a quantity of weather proverbs, beliefs and forecasts, which take their cue from the weather on that day. In the majority of cases it is held that the Candlemas indicates the end of the winter season ("by the Candlemas - we are out of winter"), but if the weather is fine on that day, winter will continue for another month or more. Interesting in this regard is the belief, widely diffused in Europe, that on that day the bear would come out to see what the weather was like: if it was cloudy, with three leaps it announced that winter was over; if it was clear, it withdrew, showing that there would still be 40 days of cold. Perhaps in relation to this belief is to be placed the custom, still widespread in some Piedmontese valleys, according to which the young people, on the evening of the vigil, by some trick try to make some authoritative or foreign person come out of the house, and, as soon as he is outside, they surround him, making an uproar around him and shouting that they have succeeded in making the bear come out. Something similar also happens in the Valtellina. The custom, certainly very ancient and to be connected with ancient agrarian rites of the end of the year, is considered by some ethnographers as a probable survival of a prehistoric cult of the bear (or she-bear) as a divinity. In many regions, for example of France and Italy, the bear is replaced by the wolf, or even by the lion. In Calabria the periphrastic term "u lanutu" (the woolly one) designates an old man who, dressed in a wolf's skin, goes about pretending to want to seize with his long arms the children in order to swallow them. He is everywhere welcomed with the cry: "Fora, fora, lu viernu fora"; to which he replies: "O fora o non fora, quaranta journi ci hadi ancora". Always as an indication of the end of a season and the beginning of a new year, the Candlemas presents some old customs of a rural character, which find a counterpart in analogous ceremonies and feasts of New Year's Day. In Schleswig-Holstein a great bonfire is made, lights are placed in the windows and children are carried in procession to drive away harmful insects, mice, snakes. Elsewhere in Germany lights are placed on the plants and the children carry them in procession or dance in the open air around a fire. In Flanders and in some regions of France the peasants are accustomed to wave torches of straw (brandons) around the fruit trees, a custom which, with far wider diffusion, belongs to the cycle of rural carnival ceremonies, for purificatory and propitiatory purposes for the beginning of the new season. Again in France, families used to prepare special sweet pastries called mariottes or marionnettes, which were believed to represent the fairies that once appeared, according to the legend, to the washerwomen of the fountain of Douix. With these human-shaped cakes (five beans, or broad beans or peas stuck into the head served to represent the diadem, the nose and the eyes) young and old would go to the fountain, behead the mariottes and throw them into the water, which they then stirred with ladles and rods; if the fairies were favourable, young men and girls would find someone to marry within the year. To this background of ancient propitiatory rites are traced the motifs of Perrault's Tale of the Candlemas. And, as at New Year's Day, in many regions the girls draw marriage forecasts on the eve of the Candlemas.

Connected with the feast of the P. is the custom that new mothers have of going to church on the fortieth day after the birth of a child. The custom has a very vast area of diffusion and notable local varieties, with greater or lesser richness of detail in the performance of the ceremony. One example may suffice. In Venezia Giulia the woman in childbed must stay shut in the house for forty days and the first time she goes out she must be accompanied by the midwife. She goes first of all to church to purify herself, and to thank God, St. Anne and the patron saint of the village for the childbirth successfully undergone. During the journey from the house to the church she speaks to no one, does not even respond to people's greetings: the midwife attends to this. The mother carries with her some bread, symbol of "providence", so that evil influences may not take away her milk, the nourishment of her child. Having reached the church, she kneels at the door, holding a lighted candle in her hand. The priest then goes to meet her and raises her from that position, sprinkling her with holy water and placing his white stole on her arm. The woman remains gathered in prayer for some time and sometimes attends Holy Mass. After this ceremony, the mother may resume her relations with the world; indeed, before returning home, she must visit relatives and friends. - See pl. X.

Trad. Pop., 5 (1924), pp. 225-45; G. C. Pola Falletti di Villa Falletto, Associazioni giovanili e feste antiche. Loro origini, III, Turin 1942 (with many bibliographical notes); P. Toschi, La Candelora, in Ecclesia, 5 (1946), pp. 97-99.

Paolo Toschi