This day is honoured in the Liturgy by what is called Saint Mark’s Procession. The term, however,is not a correct one, inasmuch as a Procession was a privilege peculiar to the twenty-fifth of April previously to the institution of our Evangelist’s feast, which, even so late as the sixth century, had no fixed day in the Roman Church. The real name of this Procession is The Greater Litanies. The word Litany means Supplication, and is applied to the religious rite of singing certain chants while proceeding from place to place, and this in order to propitiate Heaven. The two Greek words Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy on us) were also called Litany, as likewise were the invocations which were afterwards added to that cry for mercy, and which now form a Liturgical prayer used by the Church on certain solemn occasions.
The Greater Litanies (or Processions) are so called to distinguish them from the Minor Litanies, that is, Processions of less importance as far as the solemnity and concourse of the faithful were concerned. We gather from an expression of Saint Gregory the Great that it was an ancient custom in the Roman Church to celebrate, once each year, a Greater Litany at which all the Clergy and people assisted. This holy Pontiff chose the twenty-fifth of April as the fixed day for this Procession and appointed the Basilica of Saint Peter as the Station.
Several writers on the Liturgy have erroneously confounded this institution with the Processions prescribed by Saint Gregory for times of public calamity. It existed long before his time, and all that he had to do with it was the fixing it to the twenty-fifth of April. It is quite independent of the feast of Saint Mark which was instituted at a much later period. If the twenty-fifth of April occur during Easter Week, the Procession takes place on that day (unless it be Easter Sunday) but the feast of the Evangelist is not kept till after the Octave.
The question naturally presents itself — why did Saint Gregory choose the twenty-fifth of April for a Procession and Station in which everything reminds us of compunction and penance, and which would seem so out of keeping with the joyous Season of Easter? The first to give a satisfactory answer to this difficulty was Canon Moretti, a learned Liturgiologist of [the eighteenth] century. In a dissertation of great erudition he proves that in the fifth, and probably even in the fourth, century, the twenty-fifth of April was observed at Rome as a day of great solemnity. The faithful went on that day to the Basilica of Saint Peter in order to celebrate the anniversary of the first entrance of the Prince of the Apostles into Rome, upon which he thus conferred the inalienable privilege of being the Capital of Christendom. It is from that day that we count the twenty-five years, two months and some days that Saint Peter reigned as Bishop of Rome. The Sacramentary of Saint Leo gives us the Mass of this Solemnity, which afterwards ceased to be kept. Saint Gregory, to whom we are mainly indebted for the arrangement of the Roman Liturgy, was anxious to perpetuate the memory of a day which gave to Rome her grandest glory. He, therefore, ordained that the Church of Saint Peter should be the Station of the Great Litany, which was always to be celebrated on that auspicious day. The twenty-fifth of April comes so frequently during the Octave of Easter that it could not be kept as a feast, properly so called, in honour of Saint Peter’s entrance into Rome. Saint Gregory, therefore, adopted the only means left of commemorating the great event.
But there was a striking contrast resulting from this institution, of which the holy Pontiff was fully aware, but which he could not avoid: it was the contrast between the joys of Paschal Time, and the penitential sentiments with which the faithful should assist at the Procession and Station of the Great Litany. Laden as we are with the manifold graces of this holy Season and elated with our Paschal joys, we must sober our gladness by reflecting on the motives which led the Church to cast this hour of shadow over our Easter sunshine. After all, we are sinners, with much to be sorry for, and much to fear. We have to avert those scourges which are due to the crimes of mankind. We have, by humbling ourselves and invoking the intercession of the Mother of God and the Saints, to obtain the health of our bodies and the preservation of the fruits of the Earth. We have to offer atonement to Divine justice for our own and the world’s pride, sinful indulgences and insubordination. Let us enter into ourselves, and humbly confess that our own share in exciting God’s indignation is great. And our poor prayers, united with those of our holy Mother the Church, will obtain mercy for the guilty, and for ourselves who are of the number.
A day, then, like this, of reparation to God’s offended Majesty, would naturally suggest the necessity of joining some exterior penance to the interior dispositions of contrition which filled the hearts of Christians. Abstinence from flesh meat has always been observed on this day at Rome, and when the Roman Liturgy was established in France by Pepin and Charlemagne, the Great Litany of the twenty-fifth of April was, of course, celebrated and the abstinence kept by the faithful of that country. A Council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 836 enjoined the additional obligation of resting from servile work on this day: the same enactment is found in the Capitularia of Charles the Bald. As regards Fasting — properly so called — being contrary to the spirit of Paschal Time, it would seem never to have been observed on this day, at least not generally. Amalarius, who lived in the ninth cntury, asserts that it was not then practised even in Rome.
During the Procession, the Litany of the Saints is sung, followed by several Versicles and Prayers. The Mass of the Station is celebrated in the Lenten Rite, that is, without the Gloria in excelsis, and in purple vestments. We have inserted the Litany of the Saints in the following volume, for the Rogation Days.
We take this opportunity of protesting against the negligence of Christians on this subject. Even persons who have the reputation of being spiritual, think nothing of being absent from the Litanies said on Saint Mark’s and the Rogation Days. One would have thought that when the Holy See took from these Days the obligation of Abstinence, the faithful would be so much the more earnest to join in the duty still left — the duty of Prayer. The people’s presence at the Litanies is taken for granted and it is simply absurd that a religious rite of public reparation should be one from which almost all should keep away. We suppose that these Christians will acknowledge the importance of the petitions made in the Litanies, but God is not obliged to hear them in favour of such as ought to make them and yet do not. This is one of the many instances which might be brought forward of the strange delusions into which private and isolated devotion are apt to degenerate. When Saint Charles Borromeo first took possession of his See of Milan, he found this negligence among his people, and that they left the clergy to go through the Litanies of the twenty-fifth of April by themselves. He assisted at them himself, and walked bare-footed in the Procession. The people soon followed the sainted Pastor’s example.
Also on this day according to the ROMAN
MARTYROLOGY:
At Syracuse, the holy martyrs Evodius, Hermogenes
and Callistus.
At Antioch, St. Stephen, bishop and martyr, who
suffered much from the heretics opposed to the Council of Chalcedon
and was precipitated into the river Orontes in the time of the
emperor Zeno.
In the same city, the Saints Philo and
Agathopodes, deacons.
At Alexandria, the bishop St. Anian, a disciple of
the Evangelist St. Mark, and his successor in the episcopate. With a
great renown for virtue, he rested in the Lord.
At Lobbes, the birthday of St. Erminus, bishop and
confessor.
And in other places, many other holy martyrs,
confessors and virgins.
Thanks be to God.
