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 PASSION

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PASSION

Fridays; the feasts. <>f the Holy Winding Sheet, the Five Wounds, and the Precious Blood of Christ (cf. appendix to Roman Brev.). These feasts were, at least in part, readily adopted by many dioceses and religious orders. Most of them are found in the -pro- prium of Salerno (a. 1798), as also is the feast of the Passion (a double of the first class with an octave). This latter feast is celebrated with an octave in all the dioceses of the former Kingdom of Naples. On 30 Aug., 1809, the privilege of the feast (double major) was granted to the Diocese of Leghorn for the Friday before Passion Sunday. In the old St. Louis Ordo (1824) it was assigned to Friday after Ash- Wednesday, which day it still retains in the Baltimore Ordo. The seven Offices of the Mysteries of the Passion of Christ were adopted by the City of Rome in 1831 (Corresp. de Rome, 1S48, p. 30) and since then all the dioceses that have the feast of the Passion of Christ in their calendar keep it on the Tuesday after Sexagesima. By permission of Leo XIII (8 May, 1884) the octave in the calendar of the Passionists is privileged and admits only feasts of the first and second class. By a decree of 5 July, 1883, the votive Office of the Pas- sion of Christ may be said every Friday which is not taken up by a semi-double or a double Office, except during the period from Passion Sunday to Low Sun- day and from 18 December to 13 January. The Office composed by Struzzieri is very rich and full of pious sentiment; the hymns, however, are rather modern. NiLLEs. Kal. man. (2nded., Innsbruck. 1897): Kirchmlez.. a. v. Ilymnus; Schulte, Die Hymnen des Breviers (2nd ed., Paderborn, 1906).

Frederick G. Holweck.

Passion Offices. — The recitation of these offices, called also Of the Instruments of the Passion, was first granted collectively to the Congregatio Clericorum Passionis D.N.J.C., or the Passionist Fathers, whose special aim is to spread the devotion to the Sacred Passion of Our Lord. Soon other religious commu- nities and dioceses obtained a similar concession. They were granted to the United States 12 December, 1840, on petition of the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore. The offices are affixed to the days speci- fied and cannot be transferred. In case of special in- dult, as in the United States, they may be transferred, but not beyond Lent; they have the rank of a sec- ondary double major and give place to feasts of higher rank and to primary ones of the same rank. The offices are (1) For Tue.sday after Septuagesima: Of the Prayer of Our Lord on Mount Olivet; (2) For Tuesday after Sexagesima: Of the Passion; (3) First Friday of Lent: Of the Crown of Thorns, first cele- brated on the occasion of the solemn introduction of the sacred crown into Paris, under Louis IX in 1241 and thence spread into Germany and France (Nilles, 11,95); (4) Second Friday: Of the Spear and Nails, permitted by Innocent VI, 13 February, 1353 for Germany and Bohemia at the request of Charles IV (Nilles, II, 122); granted to some places for Friday after Low Sunday; (5) Third Friday: Of the Winding- sheet, first allowed 1606 to the church of Chambcryin Savoy by Julius II, and soon extended to the entire -kingdom (Nilles, II, 126); (6) Fourth Friday: Of the Five Holy Wounds; (7) Fifth Friday: Of the Most Precious Blood. Besides these a special second feast of the Precious Blood was granted to the world for the first Sunday of July by Pius IX, 10 Augu.st, 1849. Moreover, by Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites of 6 July, 1883, Leo XIII permitted the reci- tation of a votive Office of the Passion for every Fri- day not impeded according to rules there laid down. The Greeks have no special offices of the Passion, but on the night between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday they hold a very elaborate series of exercises in its honour.

Nilles, Kalendarium manunle uiriusque ecclesice, II (Innsbruck. 1897); Moroni, Dizionario (Venice, 1840-61), XXXVII, 91-2.

LXVI. 188-95. LXVIII, 91-2; Kerker in Kirchenlex., s. v. Dor- nenkrone; Schrod, ibid., s. w. Lame, Sindoti.

Francis Mershman.

Passion of Jesus Christ, Devotion to the.— The sufferings of Our Lord, which culminated in His death upon the cross, seem to have been conceived of as one inseparable whole from a very early period. Even in the Acts of the Apostles (i, 3) St. Luke speaks of those to whom Christ "shewed himself alive after his pas- sion" (liera rb TraBdv avToxi). In the Vulgate this has been rendered posl passioncm suam, and not only the Reims Testament but the Anglican Authorized and Revised Versions, as well as the medieval English translation attributed to Wyclif, have retained the word "passion" in English. Passio also meets us in the same sense in other early writings (e. g. TertuUian, "Adv. Marcion.", IV, 40) and the word was clearly in common use in the middle of the third century, as in Cyprian, Novatian, and Commodian. The last named writes:

"Hoc Deus hortatur, hoc lex, hoc passio Christi Ut resurrecturos nos credamus in novo sseclo."

St. Paul declared, and we require no further evidence to convince us that he spoke truly, that Christ cruci- fied was "unto the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness" (I Cor., i, 23). The shock to Pagan feeling, caused by the ignominy of Christ's Passion and the seeming incompatibility of the Divine nature with a felon's death, seems not to have been without its effect upon the thought of Chris- tians themselves. Hence, no doubt, arose that prolific growth of heretical Gnostic or Docetic sects, which denied the reality of the man Jesus Christ or of His sufferings. Hence also came the tendency in the early Christian centuries to depict the countenance of the Saviour as youthful, fair, and radiant, the very an- tithesis of the vir dolorum. familiar to a later age (cf. Weis Libersdorf, "Christus- und Apostel-bilder", 31 sq.) and to dwell by preference not upon His sufferings but upon His works of mercifulness, as in the Good Shepherd motive, or upon His works of power, as in the raising of Lazarus or in the resurrection figured by the history of Jonas.

But while the existence of such a tendency to draw a veil over the physical side of the Passion may readily be admitted, it would be easy to exaggerate the effect produced upon Christian feeling in the early centuries by Pagan ways of thought. Harnack goes too far when he declares that the Death and Passion of Christ were regarded by the majority of the Greeks as too sacred a mystery to be made the subject of contempla- tion or speculation, and when he declares that the feel- ing of the early Greek Church is accurately repre- sented in the following passage of Goethe: "We draw a veil over the sufferings of Christ, simply because we revere them so deeply. We hold it to be reprehensible presumption to play, and trifle with, and embellish those profound mysteries in which the Divine depths of suffering lie hidden, never to rest until even the noblest seems mean and tasteless" (Harnack, "His- tory of Dogma", tr.. Ill, 30G; cf. J. Reil, "Die friih- christlichen Darstellungen der Kreuzigung Christi", 5). On the other hand, while Harnack speaks with caution and restraint, other more popular writers give themselves to reckless generalizations such as may be illustrated by the following passage from Archdeacon Farrar: "The aspect", he says, "in which the early Christians viewed the cross was that of triumph and exultation, never that of moaning and misery. It was the emblem of victory and of rapture, not of blood or of anguish." (See "The Month", May, 1895, 89.) Of course it is true that down to the fifth century the specimens of Christian art that have been preserved to us in the catacombs and elsewhere, exhibit no traces of any sort of representation of the crucifixion. Even