Formation of liturgical rites (4th century)
sarcophagus from
Belalcázar,
Córdoba depicting the prophet
Daniel Ritual worship surrounding the
Eucharist in the early Church was not scripted with precise rubrics as is the norm today. One of the earliest known documents setting down the nature of Eucharistic celebration is the
Didache, dating from 70–140 (see
historical roots of Catholic Eucharistic theology). Few details are known of early forms of the liturgy, or worship, in the first three centuries, but there was some diversity of practice;
Justin Martyr, however gave one example of early Christian liturgical practice in his
First Apology (
AD 155–157). As Christianity gained dominance in the wake of the conversion of
Constantine I early in the fourth century, there was a period of liturgical development as the communities emerged from smaller gatherings to large assemblies in public halls and new churches. This time of development saw the combination of embellishment of existing practices with the exchange of ideas and practices from other communities. These mutual processes resulted both in greater diversity and in certain unifying factors within the liturgy from the merging of forms throughout major cities and regions. The liturgies of the patriarchal cities in particular had greater influence on their regions so that by the 5th century it becomes possible to distinguish among several families of liturgies, in particular the
Armenian,
Alexandrian,
Antiochene,
Byzantine,
West Syriac Rite and
East Syriac Rite families in the East, and in the Latin West, the
African (completely lost),
Gallican,
Celtic,
Ambrosian,
Roman, and Hispanic (Mozarabic) families. These settled into fairly stable forms that continued to evolve, but none without some influence from outside. In the West, the liturgy in Roman Africa was lost as the Church there was weakened by internal division and then the
Vandal invasion, and then was extinguished in the wake of the Islamic ascendancy. In
Gaul, the fascination of the
Franks with Roman liturgy led them to begin adopting the Roman Rite, a process that was confirmed and promoted by
Charlemagne as an aid to imperial unity.
The emergence of the Hispanic Rite from the
Villa Fortunatus in
Huesca,
Aragon (6th century) From 507, the
Visigoths, who were
Arian Christians, maintained their kingdom at
Toledo. That there was already a distinct liturgical tradition in Hispania prior to their arrival is evidenced by the fact that the Hispanic liturgy lacks any Arian influence. Indeed, certain elements of this rite (e.g. the distinctive emphasis on "
Trinity" as a title of address in many prayers, the recitation of the
Creed in the liturgy) have been interpreted as a reaction to Visigothic Arianism. Though reasonably tolerant, the Visigoths controlled episcopal appointments, which may have provoked the first extant expression of papal concern in
Pope Vigilius's letter to the bishop of
Braga in 538, dealing with
baptism,
penance and reconsecration of churches. Among those sympathetic to Rome was
Leander, archbishop of
Seville, who had formed a friendship with
Pope Gregory the Great while in
Constantinople. Leander presided over the
Third Council of Toledo in 589, during which King
Reccared I formally brought the Visigoths into Catholicism. The same council also formally introduced the controversial
Filioque clause into the
Nicene Creed, which would later prove to be an impetus for the
Great Schism of 1054.
Isidore, Leander's brother and successor, presided over the
Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, which established uniform
chants for the
Divine Office and the Eucharistic liturgy. Concerns over ritual practices were reflected in his
De ecclesiasticis officiis. Further development occurred under the
archbishops of Toledo during the mid to late 7th century:
Eugenius II (646–657), his nephew and successor
Ildefonsus (657–667), and
Julian (680–690). This concluded the creative development of the Hispanic liturgy before the
Umayyad conquest of 711. As the Christian kingdoms of the north reconquered Hispania, the kings sought to re-establish connections with the rest of Christian Europe and the
Papacy.
Charlemagne's efforts to impose the
Roman liturgy as the standard in the
Frankish realms at the 8th century made headway into the
Catalan regions first during the 9th century, then eventually in the 11th century to the other reconquered northern realms. Unity in liturgical practice was strongly encouraged by Rome and after reconquest typically the Roman Rite was installed. '' and the symbols of the
Four Evangelists from the
León Bible of 960 One factor for the spread of the Roman liturgy into Iberia was the alliances the Christian kings made with Frankish rulers and monks.
King Sancho III of Navarre (1000–1035) and his son
Ferdinand I of León (1035–1065) for instance were connected with the
monastery of Cluny and developed the
pilgrimage route to
Santiago de Compostela, which brought in thousands of French and northern European pilgrims and with them, their influences. Another factor was the suspicion that the Hispanic liturgy might be unorthodox or heretical. Certain Mozarab Christian theologians such as Archbishop
Elipandus of Toledo (754/783–808?), during the course of their attempt to explain
Christology in a way easily understood by Muslim authorities, have been accused of falling into
Adoptionism (i.e. that
Jesus was adopted by the
Father as the
Son of God). Though the other Mozarab bishops agreed with the consensus and condemned Elipandus' Christology, the specter of Adoptionism contributed to the assessment that the Hispanic Rite was of dubious orthodoxy, especially due to Elipandus' use of quotations from the liturgical tradition in support of his teachings. It was due to these suspicions that in 924,
Pope John X sent a
papal legate named Zanello to investigate the Rite. Zanello spoke favorably of the Rite, and the Pope gave a new approbation to it, requiring only to change the
Words of Institution to that of the Roman one. Spanish clergy gradually started to use the Roman formula, though there is no evidence whether it was done consistently. While the Council of Mantua in 1067 declared the Hispanic Rite to be free of heresy, King
Sancho Ramírez of Aragon was in favor of the change. Despite the outcome of these ordeals, the king insisted on the introduction of the Roman Rite; a council convened by Alfonso at
Burgos in 1080 led to the official abandonment of the Hispanic Rite. As part of his program to systematically replace the Old Hispanic liturgy with the Roman one in his domain, Alfonso installed Cluniac monks in the monasteries of
Silos and
San Millán de la Cogolla and French prelates such as
Bernard of Sédirac in Toledo and other cities of his realm. While the king made concessions to the Mozarab community of Toledo by allowing the Rite to continue in six parishes of the city (
San Sebastián, San Torcuato,
Santas Justa y Rufina,
San Lucas, San Marcos, and Santa Eulalia), Mozarabic church officials could not become
canons of
the cathedral or take on roles of authority (such as the episcopacy) unless they began to celebrate the Roman Rite exclusively. This led to a diminishment in the ranks of Mozarabic clergy, so that by the mid-15th century there were few priests to minister to the community and fewer still who could read the
Visigothic script used in the ancient liturgical books. Lay Mozarabs themselves increasingly began to integrate with the "Latins" (i.e. adherents of the Roman Rite) and started leaving Toledo for other areas, so that the number of Mozarabs remaining in the city from the 11th century on were numerically too small to sustain the six parishes allowed to continue the performance of the old rite.
Preservation, decline, and revival in Toledo, one of the historical Mozarabic parishes within the city Despite the factors that threatened the Hispanic Rite's survival, there were also overriding factors that contributed to its preservation, which are linked to the same factors working against the rite. • The Moorish conquest contributed to a conservative stance on the part of those who remained Christian, with efforts being made to preserve the liturgy as authentically as possible. Manuscripts written in the
Visigothic script were copied and recopied by trained scribes in the Mozarab community; indeed, the oldest extant manuscripts for the rite come from the period just before the end of the Islamic era in Toledo. • Efforts at imposing the Roman Rite in the reconquered areas led Mozarabs to compile their manuscripts in a form that would be acceptable to Roman authorities. When Hugh Candidus raised the issue of the rite's orthodoxy to Ferdinand I, a compilation of Mozarabic manuscripts were sent along with a commission of bishops to Alexander II, who approved of the rite, thus granting it a brief reprieve until the Council of Burgos in 1080. • Alfonso VI's desire to impose the Roman Rite in his realms was mitigated by the agreement (
fuero) he made with the Mozarabs of Toledo, in which the Mozarabs, in exchange for cooperating with the king in the reconquest of other territories, apparently asserted their privileges and extended these to the continued celebration of their ancestral liturgy, which was seen as an integral part of Mozarabic identity. Although there is evidence of Mozarabic communities outside Toledo that continued to preserve Hispanic liturgical practices well into the 13th century, in Toledo itself both the community and the rite underwent a period of slow decay. The Roman Rite became so widespread that it was introduced even into the Mozarabic parishes (partly in response to the influx of Roman parishioners in these churches), so that the old rite was only used for certain special days, and even then in a corrupted form based on old and imperfectly understood manuscripts. While Mozarabic clergy were obligated to abandon the Hispanic liturgy in order to receive ecclesiastical appointments, such clerics who shifted from Hispanic to Roman soon began to leave their mark on the Roman liturgy as performed in the cathedral of Toledo, leading to the creation of the
Missale Mixtum Toletanum, which shows Mozarabic influences (such as the inclusion of local saints in the calendar), in the 15th century. In 1436, Juan Vázquez de Cepeda,
Bishop of Segovia, left in his will benefices for the creation of a chapel and center of Mozarabic studies in his villa at Aniago near
Valladolid. He claimed that the Hispanic Rite was suffering from neglect and that those charged with its celebration in Toledo had forgotten how to correctly perform the chants and liturgy. Unfortunately, due to insufficient funds as well as a lack of connection to any living Mozarab community, the foundation lasted for only five years before passing into the hands of the
Carthusian Order. The continued deterioration of the rite was also a matter of concern for Archbishop of Toledo
Alonso Carrillo (1446–1482). Calling together a synod at
Alcalá de Henares in 1480, Carillo decried the decadence that had befallen the Rite due to the fact that the benefices destined for its celebration had been assigned to clerics with no real knowledge of or interest in the rite. He attempted to rectify the situation by withholding benefices from ignorant clergy, and insisting that Rite be celebrated by knowledgeable ones. These actions, among others, laid the groundwork for
Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros's reform in 1500–1502. The first printed Mozarabic
missal, the
Missale Mixtum secundum regulam beati Isidori, appeared in 1500, followed two years later by a
breviary (the
Breviarium secundum regulam beati Isidori). The preparation of the missal's text was the work of canon Alfonso Ortiz, who had already begun work on Mozarabic codices under Cisneros' predecessor Cardinal Mendoza, and three Mozarabic priests: Alfonso Martínez Yepes (Santa Eulalia), Antonio Rodrigues (Santas Justa y Rufina), and Jerónimo Gutiérrez (San Lucas). In the missal's preface, Ortiz lays out the five general norms underlying the reform: the identification of extant manuscript; the license to edit and rewrite according to the original style; the excision of material deemed late or inauthentic; the formatting of the text in a logical manner; and the printing of the books in a readable form. The resulting missal and breviary were not
critical editions in the modern sense. Rather than being authentic representatives of the Hispanic tradition, later liturgists have found the books to be more of a combination of material found in different Mozarabic manuscripts, with gaps being filled in by invented services based on precedent set by earlier services, and borrowings from the Roman liturgy (e.g. preliminary prayers for the
Mass, Roman feasts such as
Trinity Sunday and
Corpus Christi). The content of the printed missal and breviary is so inconsistent that Eugene de Robles, who wrote on the Mozarabic liturgy during the 17th century, considered the label
Mixtum to be a reference to the mixed-up content. In between the publication of the missal and the breviary, Cisneros instituted a
chapel in the cathedral's cloister with a college of thirteen priests who were to conduct daily celebration of the Mozarabic liturgy. The chaplains of the
Capilla Mozárabe (also known as the Corpus Christi Chapel) were to be of good character, well-versed in the recitation and singing of the Mozarabic liturgy. In addition to these thirteen chaplains, a
sacristan (also required to be a priest), joined by two
altar boys (
mozos,
monaguillos, or
clerizones), were to assist in the liturgy. The foundation of the chapel was approved by
Pope Julius II on 20 September 1508, and the first Mozarabic Mass was held therein on 15 July 1511. Similar institutions dedicated to the preservation of the Hispanic liturgy were founded in other cities during the same century such as the
Capilla de San Salvador (a.k.a. the
Capilla de Talavera) in the
Old Cathedral of Salamanca, or a church in Valladolid dedicated to
Saint Mary Magdalene, but these later fell into decline or became extinct.
Andrés Marcos Burriel The form of the Mozarabic liturgy as contained in the missal and breviary edited by Ortiz under Cardinal Cisneros's patronage soon became the predominant version of the rite and provided the basis for new editions published in the 18th century. Because of the prevailing assumption that Ortiz had simply printed the contents of the ancient liturgical books, the existence of his editions caused scholars to neglect the actual manuscripts of the rite. The first scholar to attempt a thorough analysis of the Mozarabic liturgical codices was the Jesuit polymath
Andrés Marcos Burriel (1719–1762) in the mid-18th century, who had noticed discrepancies between the printed editions and the manuscripts. After being appointed as the director of the short-lived Royal Commission on the Archives by
Ferdinand VI in 1749, formed by the government to obtain evidence for the royal patronage of church benefices in Spain, Burriel took advantage of his position to research the ancient manuscripts of the Hispanic Rite in Toledo's cathedral library with the help of
paleographer Francisco Xavier de Santiago Palomares (1728–1796), who made copies of the texts. The abrupt end of the Commission in 1755 and the rise of the anti-Jesuit
Ricardo Wall as prime minister eventually put a stop to Burriel's study. As he never published the results of his liturgical research during his lifetime, they went unnoticed until the 20th century; even today, most of his papers on the Hispanic liturgy remain largely unexplored.
Minor reforms under Cardinal Lorenzana Cardinal Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana became Archbishop of Toledo in 1772 after serving as the
Archbishop of Mexico City (1766–1770). During his time in
Mexico, Lorenzana showed an interest in the rite, which led to the publication of the
Missale Omnium Offerentium in 1770. After his return to Spain, he published a new edition of the breviary under the title of
Breviarium Gothicum in 1775 and made improvements to the cathedral's
Capilla Mozárabe. After Lorenzana went to Rome at the request of
Pope Pius II, he then began a new edition of the missal (the
Missale Gothicum secundum regulam beati Isidori Hispalensis episcopi) that was completed and published at his expense in 1804, the year of his death. Due to his death and various political difficulties of the time, the
Missale Gothicum did not reach the chapel in Toledo until around 1898, and even then only after much effort by the chaplains. Parts of the original 1804 edition were lost after 1936, only to be rediscovered in a cabinet in 1975. Lorenzana's motivation was apparently to assert the Hispanic cultural heritage as encased in the Mozarabic liturgy, as well as to replace the then-antiquated Latin-Gothic
typeset of the Cisneros edition. He was influenced in this endeavor by the scholarly edition of the
Missale Mixtum published by
Jesuit Alexander Lesley (1694–1758) in 1755, which both revealed grammatical and orthographic errors in the Latin and put the authenticity of some of the prayers therein into question. Using Lesley's work as a base, Lorenzana assigned
Faustino Arévalo the task of re-editing the breviary and missal, using various texts and codices available in order to make corrections to the text, resulting in some of the material identified as Ortiz's original creations being relegated to an appendix. While Lorenzana's reforms were not extensive, the publication of new books facilitated an updated celebration of the liturgy in the Mozarabic Chapel and parishes.
Later history In 1553,
Pope Julius III regulated
mixed marriages between Mozarabic and Roman Christians, with the ruling that children were to follow the rite of the father, but if the eldest daughter of a Mozarab married a Roman, she and her husband might choose which rite she and her children belong to, and if she became a widow she might return to the Mozarabic Rite had she left it at her marriage. This rule remained in force up until the early 20th century. The revision consisted in eliminating extraneous elements and distortions which had been introduced in the 1500 edition and the integration of all the contributions of ancient sources from both Hispanic traditions. The new edition of Mozarabic liturgical books facilitated the occasional or relatively regular celebration of the rite. Additionally, all the churches of Toledo annually celebrate this rite on the Mozarabic
Feast of the Incarnation on 18 December, and on the feast day of
Saint Ildefonsus of Toledo on 23 January. The two surviving Mozarabic parishes in the city now have about two hundred families in an association of those claiming historical observance of the rite. The rite is also used on certain days each year in the
Capilla de Talavera in Salamanca, and every Tuesday at 19:00 in the
Basílica de la Concepción de Nuestra Señora in
Madrid. Outside of Spain, the rite has also been celebrated in the
Vatican four times to date. In October 1963, Mass according to the rite was celebrated in
Saint Peter's Basilica during the Second Vatican Council in front of all participants.
Pope John Paul II celebrated the Hispanic liturgy in May 1992 (the
Feast of the Ascension) on occasion of the promulgation of the revised missal and Lectionary and again in December 2000, during the end of the
Great Jubilee. The Mozarabic Mass was once again said in St. Peter's in 2015 by Archbishop of Toledo
Braulio Rodríguez Plaza. == Origins and connections to other rites ==