A Liturgical Treasure beyond belief
The unfathomably ancient Collect prayer of the Martyrs John and Paul
VI Nonas Iulii (2 July) Anno Incarnationis MMXXIV
The Feast of the Visitation
Day IV of the Octave of Saints Peter and Paul
The Commemoration of the Blessed Martyrs Processus and Martinianus
Introduction
Imagine if I told you the following: if you attended Mass a week ago on June 26 or recited the Divine Office that you would have heard (or recited) a prayer that had been word for word faithfully uttered each year on this day by the Church of Rome going back year by year, decade by decade, century by century, for at least a millennium and a half at the very latest to a time when the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western Emperors, was still within living memory. Might you think that this was a custom worth preserving?
I would think that most sane people would answer ‘yes,’ but unfortunately since the liturgical so called ‘reformers’ operating1 out of Rome during the second half of the 1960s didn’t fall into that category very many Catholics alive today have never heard of the two ancient Christian heroes whose prayer I just referred to.
![File:Augustins - Martirio di San Giovanni e San Paolo - Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino - 2004 1 53.jpg File:Augustins - Martirio di San Giovanni e San Paolo - Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino - 2004 1 53.jpg](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F142f21c0-a7bc-4059-8dbd-8c523affc660_386x600.jpeg)
Their names are Ioannes and Paulus: John and Paul. They were martyred during the reign of Julian the apostate (361-363 AD) and the Collect prayer of their Mass which also serves at the Oratio of the Feast in the Divine Office is the ancient treasure of which I speak.
So let us here begin with the text of the prayer:
Quaesumus omnipotens Deus ut nos geminata laetitia hodiernae festivitatis excipiat quae de beatorum martyrum Ioannis et Pauli glorificatione procedit quos eadem fides et passio vere fecit esse germanos. Per Dominum.
We beg Almighty God to be caught up by the doubled joy of today’s feast that marches forth from the glorification of the the blessed martyrs John and Paul whom an identical faith and endurance truly made brothers. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ.
But how to tell the history of this thing? Going backwards in time seems best. All of the sources from the second millennium all have this as the Collect on this day. But that is no great thing in the Western Liturgy. The various oraciones of the ancient feasts seem for the most part to have been stabilized by the early second millennium and would largely remain intact until the twentieth century. So to understand what makes this prayer truly unique it is necessary to go back further into the more shadowed country of the first millennium.
Gelasian and Gregorian
Going back into the eighth century we arrive at a dividing line in the liturgy of the Western Church or rather in this case the Church of Rome. The information is somewhat sketchy from this period and over the last century and a half far too many have drawn far too sweeping conclusions out of what we do have but there do seem to have been two versions of the Roman Rite of saying Mass that were widely circulated during this epoch.
They have been commonly referred to since the 18th century as the ‘Gregorian’ and the ‘Gelasian’. These terms originate from our two primary sources for the texts. What we call the ‘Gregorian’ Rite derives from a Sacramentary that is still in existence which according to its inscription is a copy of what was sent north from Rome during the last quarter of the eighth century at the request of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne who desired that his priests come to knowledge of the Roman way of saying Mass as arranged by Saint Gregory probably 175 years before.
The ‘Gelasian’ however comes from a Sacramentary produced in Merovingian Gaul maybe 75 years, maybe a century before that truthfully makes no mention of Gelasius. It simply calls itself the Sacramentae Romanae Ecclesiae. But its contents are starkly different from that attributed to Saint Gregory.
It isn’t in the form of the Mass nor what is now called the ‘Ordinary’ such as the Roman Canon where the differences are found. These are either extremely similar or exactly the same. But the content of what are called the ‘Propers’ i.e. those prayers whose language is particular to the Feast of the day is entirely different.
On the whole the ‘Gregorian’ is very similar to what is found in the second millennium missals right up to the middle of the 20th century. In the ‘Gelasian’ however these prayers are all worded differently. Even for Feast Days that are found in both Sacramentaries for example the Collect (like all the others) is completely different.
For example on the Feasts of Gervasius and Protasius on June 19 the Collect in the eighth/ninth century Gregorian Sacramentary, just as in the 1962 Missal and Breviary, reads as follows:
Deus qui nos annua sanctorum martyrum tuorum Gervasii et Protasii sollemnitate laetificas concede propitius ut quorum gaudemus meritis accendamus exemplis. Per Dominum.2
O God who doth gladden us by the annual solemnity of your martyrs Gervasius and Protasius mercifully grant that we be roused by their example whose merits we rejoice in. Through Our Lord.
In the Gelasian however it reads thus:
Sanctorum martyrum nos Domine Gerbasi et Protasi confessio beata communiat et fragilitatis nostrae subsidium dignanter exoret. Per Dominum.3
May the blessed confession of the holy martyrs Gerbasus and Protasus fortify us O Lord and worthily obtain protection for our frailty. Through Our Lord.
This sort of thing is encountered almost universally when one sets the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries side by side. Same Feast of the same saint on the same day with the same types of prayers - yet the words are different. It is a complicated subject but this difference is generally attributed to the persistent tradition of the Western Church that at the turn of the seventh century Pope Gregory the Great did something to reorganize or, to use that massively overused and almost always misapplied word, ‘reform’ the liturgy of the Church of Rome.
Yet every great once in a while one comes across some prayer that wasn’t changed and is found in both Sacramentaries. A prayer that was for reasons unknown to us left alone when the great revision took place. The number of these is small and can probably be counted on one hand or maybe two, but one of them is our subject today: the Collect4 of the Blessed Martyrs John and Paul Quaesumus omnipotens Deus…
The Gregorian ‘reform’
Obviously there is know way of knowing why some of these were preserved and others not. For all of the talk of the ‘Gregorian reform’ of the liturgy in recent times very little is actually known about it. There are no minutes of any liturgical commission established by Gregory the Great nor were any tell all books written in the decades after the great Pontiff’s death, at least none that have come down to us.
We base this notion on the persistent tradition in the West that during the papacy of Gregory I that lasted from 590 until 604 some sort of fairly wide scale revision of the Roman Liturgy took place. This is supported by scattered mentions throughout Pope Gregory’s own letters and references contained in later works. And our chief knowledge of its contents comes from these sacramentaries from the Carolingian empire whose inscriptions reveal themselves to be the product of the manuscript of the Roman Mass celebrated as by Saint Gregory sent by Pope Hadrian IV to Charlemagne during the latter part of the eighth century and their comparison against this other manuscript, the so called ‘Gelasian’ that comes from maybe a century earlier in Merovingian Gaul.
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But what the motivation for this revision was we do not know. Who was involved in it we do not know, nor their criteria. It is not however unreasonable to suspect that the Church of Rome in that epoch felt that this small number of prayers that did not change were very dear to her heart for whatever reason and that she did not wish to see them fall out of use. And a quite plausible reason for this is that by the turn of the seventh century they may very well have already been viewed as quite ancient.
Whether this was the reason or not, and I suspect it had a great deal to do with it, if we go further back in time from these sacramentaries through the chaotic centuries that elapsed between the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire and the rise off the Carolingian we do find this very same Collect prayer of the holy martyrs John and Paul already in use in a manuscript of Mass prayers that was produced far earlier than the two previous examples which was stumbled upon in a cathedral library during the early 18th century and upon further examination discovered to be a priceless relic of the Roman Church’s ancient liturgical past.
The Verona Sacramentary
It is a partial book of the prayers of the Mass whose date of composition is not entirely certain but is far older than any other that we posses. It was first called the ‘Leonine’ Sacramentary because initially it was thought to date from the era of Leo the Great in the mid fifth century or perhaps even to have been composed at his command. But the truth is that there is nothing in the text itself that suggests this to have been the case and some later commentators ended up going so far as to push the composition date forward to the early seventh century or roughly the papacy of Gregory the Great for reasons that had no more foundation that those who dated it to the time of Leo.
The Abbe Louis Duschesne’s study of the text of this Sacramentary during the late nineteenth century however may shed some clearer light on when it may have been produced. Before starting it must be made clear that Duschesne, God rest his soul, was a rather notorious proto modernist of the late 19th and early 20th century and it would be unwise to ever take anything he wrote at face value without investigating it further. Still, he was a learned man and his observations here are quite interesting - and since even a broken clock is right twice a day I though it worthwhile to share them.
His basic thesis5 was that due to the composition of certain prayers and their placement at a certain time of the year there was a very strong likelihood that this Sacramentary was put together during the siege of Rome by the Gothic king Vitiges that was lifted just before Easter of the year 538. Since the evidence for any other date ranges from unconvincing to nonexistent and since Duschesne due to his ideological predilections could not exactly be accused of having an excessive desire to give an excessively early date to any liturgical artifact it probably makes good sense to estimate the date of the Veronese Sacramentary to roughly this period of the Gothic wars launched by Justinian to reconquer Italy from its barbarian kings; that is roughly the period from 538 until the 550s.
That puts us more or less a lifetime after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus and the dissolution of the Western Empire. And if it was indeed written down in 538 then we are 175 years or maybe two long lifetimes of 88 years each out from the reign of Julian the Apostate during which John and Paul were martyred. Why do I bring all of this up?
Because in one6 of the Masses for the Feast of John and Paul on June 26 in this unfathomably ancient sacramentary we find the following Collect prayer, an almost word for word replica of what is found in the later Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries and continued to be recited each year on June 26 for fourteen centuries all the way until the last third of the twentieth century when it was unceremoniously dropped by the dingbats who ran Paul VI’s consilium:
Quaesumus omnipotens Deus ut nos geminata laetitia hodiernae festivitatis excipiat quae beatorum Iohannis et Pauli glorificatione procedit quos eadem fides et passio fecit esse germanos. Per.7
So we find this prayer already in use very likely within two centuries of the martyrdom of John and Paul – a prayer that the Church in the West would choose to preserve in every epoch even down to our own day. Why did she do this? What was so special about this particular prayer that when all others were cast aside this alone was retained? The truth is that a millennium and a half later in the year 2024 it is impossible to know; but that shouldn’t be any barrier to informed speculation.
Where did this prayer come from?
So lets look at the language of the Collect itself and see what it reveals. First like almost all of the truly ancient martyr’s prayers it does not follow the qui/ut clause formula that would go on to become so common and then universal in later centuries which alone and without the manuscript evidence should have told everybody something. But beyond that there are a couple of word choices which seem very revelatory about who John and Paul were and what the environment in which this prayer was composed might have been.
First geminata. This is very closely related to the word from which the word for ‘twins’ comes from in the Romance languages. The Lewis and Short Latin definition is ‘doubled’ or ‘paired’. Its past participle used here also has the connotation of ‘identical’. Could this reflect a memory that they were twins? Or is it simply that they were twins at heart and in faith and in service to Christ? Or both? A legitimate translation of the first line might be “We beseech thee Almighty God that we be taken up in the twinned joys of the Feast of blessed John and Paul…” This would be reinforced the eadem fides et passio fecit esse germanos or ‘whom an identical faith and endurance made brothers’ of the second part then too. There is the sense of this doubling then here too. An identical faith and endurance.
Then there is the word procedit. While it definitely is used in other contexts this verb procedo does have a very strong military flavor to it of armies marching forth or advancing. Lewis and Short cites a number examples of it found used for exactly that purpose in the writings of Julius Caesar. Could then this reflect the tradition recorded in their Acts8 that these were military men?
Lastly the rather curious use of the word germanus here for ‘brother’. While it is by no means unheard of in Christian Latin the word frater (which even non Latin speakers are familiar with) is far more common. Moreover germanus when used as an adjective in Latin also has the other meaning of ‘true’ or ‘genuine’.
So maybe there was no vere ‘truly’ in the original prayer. Maybe germanus served some untranslatable dual purpose to the original hearers of the prayer to say that they were both brothers and ‘genuine’. Maybe the double meaning of the word became lost over time9 and it was felt necessary to add vere to make the point. But in so doing those who did so may have missed the point entirely because the original could have been understood as either ‘who identical faith and endurance made brothers’ or ‘who identical faith and endurance made genuine.’ Or by far the most likely is that both meanings would have been taken together. Or maybe vere was there in the beginning and it meant ‘truly genuine’?
But why would this particular point about genuiness need to have been made? I will say at the outset that my own personal opinion based on some of the above cited evidence is that this prayer was composed some considerable time before the Gothic wars of the sixth century. It may very well have been composed within living memory of the reign of the apostate emperor Julian.
For this Caesar had outwardly feigned being a Christian until he came to power even though he had long given up on it and had become a pagan at heart and in personal practice. And his propaganda machine portrayed him as some sort of military hero because of some successes his army had had in the Rhineland, which unfortunately for him he actually seemed to believe when he marched his legions off into an unwinnable war against Persia and in the process got himself killed within the borders of modern day Iraq.
But our Collect says no. This lying propaganda is false. John and Paul are the genuine heroes10 because they did not apostasize. Both in terms of their warlike prowess in not renouncing Christ in the face of certain death and the fact that their Christianity was no outward show but something that cut them to the heart. They endured the torment when they could just as easily have walked away as Julian had done and they were crowned by Christ in reward - and their names have been remembered ever since.
And so this prayer has been recited each year on June 26 year after year, decade after decade, lifetime after lifetime through all of the waves and billows of the ocean of time that stretches between at the latest the reign of Justinian and our own day.
(Added later: curiously enough I have just discovered that Julian the Apostate actually died on June 26 - the very anniversary of the martyrdom of John and Paul)
This is the kind of thing we possess in our liturgical heritage and control over that heritage needs to be removed forthwith from those who neither have love for it nor for us.
This Feast that there are records of going back to the reign of the Emperor Justinian was dropped in 1969 for no good reason.
The Gregorian Sacramentary under Charles the Great - Primary Source Edition, H.A. Wilson, 1915, p. 83
The Gelasian Sacramentary: Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae, Henry Austin Wilson, 1894, p. 176
Wilson, Gregorian, pp. 85-86. Wilson, Gelasian, p. 180. Curiously enough one of the very few other prayers that are identical in both Sacramentaries and was still being recited in the 1962 Missal and Breviary (only as a Commemoration) is the beautiful Collect Da ecclesiae tuae of the oft ridiculed as supposedly ‘ahistorical’ Feast of the Martyr Saint Vitus.
Origines du Culte Chretien pp. 130-31
There are prayers for eight ‘Masses’ here to be said for John and Paul but some of them are very incomplete and of all of the eight Masses this Collect is the only one where Iohannes and Paulus are mentioned by name and in the Preface some detail is given concerning their martyrdom. The rest may well be just generic or some sort of ancient Common for a martyr.
https://archive.org/details/mohlberg1966sacramentariumveronense/page/n149/mode/2up
Sacramentarium Veronese, Mohlberg, 1966, p. 35 (can be found at the above web address) Weirdly there is no footnote nor anything else either in this or the 1896 Sacramentarium Leonianum that takes any note of the fact that this prayer was still being said in their own day.
Far too often we have let the proto-modernist masquerading as ‘good catholics’ so called scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries get away with labelling the Acts of Martyrs as ‘without historical foundation’ ‘purely legendary’ or ‘historically worthless’. Watch for these phrases or their equivalents when you are reading works of the period and you will know who you are dealing with.
As an example I cite the Catholic Encyclopedia article on John and Paul from 1911: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08443a.htm
Lewis and Short cites the use of germanus as genuine as being a favorite of the rhetorician Cicero who lived during the first century B.C.
Their story is remarkable but the needs of space did not permit me to go into it here. In many ways their Acts do seem to contain a very strong record of an actual historical event. Especially since it is well known that Julian didn’t want any public martyrdoms of Christians and in their Acts their executioner Terentianus goes to great lengths to convince everyone that they had not been killed but exiled.