Today, we celebrate the feast day of St. Cecilia. She was a second or third-century virgin and martyr who became one of the most well-known early Roman saints, one of seven female martyrs named in the Roman Canon. According to the popular stories written a couple of centuries after her death, she was a Roman woman who had taken a vow of virginity. In spite of this vow, her family had her marry a pagan man, although he was soon baptized and respected her vow. Soon after, both of them, along with her husband’s brother, were martyred. She was supposed to be executed by beheading. However, the executioner botched his three swings, and it took three days for her to bleed out. In the fourth century, the house she lived in was made into a Church.
She was initially buried in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus along the Appian Way. In the ninth century, Pope Paschal I took her relics to a newly rebuilt Church on the same site as the fourth-century Church. When they removed her body from the tomb, they found that her body was miraculously incorrupt. In 1599, about 1,380 years after her death, her body was exhumed again, and, again, found to be incorrupt. A statue was commissioned showing her body as they had found it: lying peacefully, with the head at an unusual angle, perhaps due to the botched execution. This statue, located on the tomb where she is now buried, is in the crypt of the Basilica of Santa Cecilia, in Trastevere, the area of Rome just south of Vatican City, near the western bank of the Tiber, where there is also a convent of Benedictine nuns.
Since ancient times, she has also been known as the Patroness of music, and her feast gives us an opportunity to meditate on the importance and centrality of music to the liturgical life of the Church. Music is a uniquely powerful way to tap into our emotions and help us to enter into the Spirit of the Liturgy: to help us enter into this uniquely sacred space where heaven and earth are joined, and the eternal High Priest, Jesus Christ, offers himself as a sacrificial offering for our sins and rises from the dead, so that we may live eternally with Him, joined to the Choirs of Angels and Saints. This is why the Church has repeatedly reiterated the essential place of Gregorian Chant, and the polyphony derived from it, as the greatest exemplars of active participation: music that moves us to actively participate in the liturgical action: the re-presentation of the Paschal mystery: the death and resurrection of Christ.
Saint Cecilia, pray for us.
Fr. Edward Mazuski currently serves the community as novice master, junior master, secretary of the monastic council, and teaches in the mathematics department in Portsmouth Abbey School.
To learn more about Fr. Edward, please click on his picture to the left or click here.