Ritual of Marriage by Vincent McNabb (Catholic Times, May 1st, 1931) We must come to the famous letters which Nicholas I. wrote in 866, as a result of a conference with the Bulgarians. From this letter it appears that the Sacrament of Matrimony, according to the Roman rite of that time, included the following ceremonies :- (a) First of all took place the "BETROTHAL, consisting of the mutual promise of the intended marriage. ...Upon this followed the SUBARRHATIO or GIVING OF THE RING." (b) The day being fixed, the marriage took place in facie ecclesiae, in the atrium of the Church.... (d) "With the NUPTIAL BLESSING, called in the Leonine Sacramentary the VELATIO NUPTIALIS, from the Veil which was stretched over the heads of the wedded during the blessing..." (e) "The old Sacramentaries prescribe that the bride and bridegroom shall receive Holy Communion, and that on coming out of church they should be CROWNED WITH FLOWERS." (f) "It is a real liturgical loss that during the later Middle Ages the greater part of this grand marriage Ritual should have disappeared and that marriages are now celebrated with such grave and dull severity." (g) "This loss which we have suffered in the West should render all the more valued and precious in our estimation the nuptial rites of the Greeks and of the Eastern people generally, amongst whom the ancient Roman tradition has undergone but slight modification." [1] (h) 'SI QUAE PROVINCIAE ALIIS ULTRA PRAEDICTAS LAUDABILIBUS CONSUETUDINIBUS ET COEREMONIS HAC IN RE UTATUR EAS OMNIO RETINERI SANCTA SYNODUS VEHEMENTER OPTAT {Concilium Tridentinum Sess. xxiv. de Reform c.i.]. If any Provinces have, in this matter beyond the aforesaid, any laudable customs and ceremonies, the Holy Synod sincerely wishes them to be kept." * * * * * THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE BETROTHAL The Holy Father's Encyclical on Christian Marriage has given an unusual, and perhaps vital, interest to the quotations we have put at the head of this article. Cardinal Schuster's monumental work on the liturgy of the Sacraments, though published in Rome, expressed a fearless regret that the old Roman ritual of marriage had been cut down to a dull severity. Indeed, with a boldness which has been justified by his subsequent elevation to the Cardinalate, he congratulated the East on being more happily conservative than the West. (a) The betrothal has, in Cardinal Schuster's phrase, disappeared more effectively than has any other part of the "Grand Marriage Ritual." Indeed it has disappeared so completely that we have known priests with the cure of souls, who have refused to celebrate it. Some justification for this attitude of opposition may be found in the fact that though the Ritual they use contains, thank God, an amount of blessings, including blessings for electric generation stations, and for men-of-war, it does not yet contain a blessing for betrothal. This is all the more regrettable because betrothal is a statutory, though not an obligatory act legislated for in Can. 1017, § 1,2,3 of the Codex Juris Canonici. [2] (b) and (c) Our modern ritual. "of dull severity," gives no direction for the ceremonial reception of bride or bridegroom, or both. It seems the custom for the bridegroom to arrive first in church : and to await the bride. Sometimes he awaits in the sacristy, where he finds the priest and the registrar. Sometimes he awaits his bride in church. But there is little or no dignity, or even simplicity, but only something like liturgical indifference to the arrival of the two chief actors in the liturgical drama of the Great Sacrament. The MASS is in more ways than one the centre of the solemn ritual of marriage. By its consecration of unselfish human love, indeed by its tansubstantiation of the human love of husband and wife into the self-sacrificial love of father and mother, marriage is, amongst the Sacraments, the most perfect symbol of the self-sacrifice of the Cross. A Catholic marriage shorn of the Mass is not dead; like the man who fell among thieves it is wounded and stripped bare. * * * * * * FROM DOUAI A pathetic supplement to the regrets of Cardinal Schuster is to be found in a small quarto book published by the English exiled clergy at Douai in A.D. 1604. It bore on the title page the following : - Sacra Institvtio Baptizandi : Matrimonivm Celebrandi: Infirmos Vngendi: Mortvos Sepeliendi: Ac Alii Nunnulli Ritvs Ecclesiastici juxta vsum insignis Ecclesiae Sarisbuiensis. _ Dvaci Excudebat Lavrentivs Kellam. Typog. Iurat. M.DC.IIII. Permissu Superiorum. _ It ended with the simple words : - Finis. Laus Deo, Virginique matri & S. Osmundo   * * * * * THE ROMAN RITUAL This last flicker of the Sarum Rite was some ten years before the modern Roman "Rituale" published in 1614 by Paul V. [3] Though it came from a little group of exiled priests, these Douai scholars had such a European reputation for scholarship that to detect an influence of their work on the Roman Ritual would not be fantastic.Of great interest is the ritual of marriage, which with the exception of the final rite of Crowning with Flowers, follows the old Roman Ritual described by Pope Nicholas I. in 866. (a) the BETROTHAL and SVARRHATIO or GIVING OF THE RING takes place "before the Church Door in the presence of God, the Priest and the People." The third proclamation of the banns having taken place, the marriage contract is made. The present ritual used in this country has incorporated some fragments of the old Sarum rite, viz. : - 1. The declaration of bridegroom and bride : "I, N_, take thee, N," etc. 2. The giving of gold and silver to the bride. 3. The placing of the ring on the fourth finger by the bridegroom, who says : "In the name of the Father," etc. But the Sarum rite closes this ceremony in the church porch with the noble prayer : May God the Father bless you. May Jesus Christ safeguard you. May the Holy Ghost enlighten you. May the Lord show his face unto you, and have mercy on you. May the Lord turn unto you His countenance and give you His peace; and may He fill you with every spiritual blessing, unto the cleansing of all your sins that you may have eternal life, and live forever and ever. Amen. (b) After the saying of this noble prayer, the wedding procession enters the church. During the procession the priest and his ministers say the Psalm 127 :- Blessed are all that fear the Lord : that walk in His ways. For thou shalt eat the labours of thy hands : blessed art thou, and it shall be with thee. Thy wife as a fruitful vine, on the sides of thy house, thy children as olive plants round about thy table. Behold, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the lord. May the Lord bless thee out of Sion. And mayest thou see the good things of Jerusalem all the days of thy life. And mayest thou see thy children's children, peace upon Israel. When the bride and bridegroom have reached "ante gradum altaris," they prostrate themselves. Over them the priest reads six prayers and blessings of singular beauty. After this the bridegroom and bride are led into the presbytery between the choir and the High Altar. They kneel on the south side, as in choirs, the bride being nearest the altar. At the Sanctus the bridegroom and bride rise from their places on the south side and prostrate themselves before the altar, until the Agnus Dei. During this time four servers hold a canopy over them, if neither of them has been married before. This is the striking VELATIO NUPTIALIS of the old Roman Rite. THE KISS OF PEACE Immediately before the Agnus Dei, the priest gives the NUPTIAL BLESSING. At the end of the Blessing the canopy is taken away, and the Bridegroom and Bride return to their places. The priest sends the PAX to the bridegroom. The ensuing ceremony must be set down in its charming Latin original. "Accipiat Sponsus pacem a Sacerdote et ferat Sponsae osculans eam et neminem aliam nec ipse nec ipsa." (Let the Bridegroom receive the Pax from the priest, and let him take it to the Bride; kissing her and no one else, neither he nor she.) [4] Immediately after the bridal pair have kissed they receive Holy Communion. In few rites of the Church is to be found so much of the spirit of Cana as in this bridal kiss so quickly followed the mystic kiss of Holy Communion. It is a symbol of human love sanctified by the divine. After the Mass the priest blesses Bread and Wine - or as the rubrics say, with a fatherly care for the national beverages of the poor - aliud quid potabile in vasculo (anything else drinkable in a vessel). Cardinal Schuster mentions that in the modern Byzantine Ritual before the end of the ceremony of the Crowning "the common cup is now blessed to which the married pair approach their lips : then they kiss each other. The ceremony of the common wine-cup which the priest presents to the Bride and Bridegroom is found, too, in some Western liturgies, and it was also usual in some parts of France to bless the bridal bed on the evening of the wedding." (p. 195) Both these ceremonies are in the Sarum Rite as published by the exiled clergy in 1604. The blessing of the Bread has had the echo of a survival in the modern ceremony of cutting the Bride Cake. * * * * * THE CALL FOR EXTERNAL DIGNITY The "sincere wish" of the Council of Trent for the retention of all laudable customs and ceremonies was the justification of this last flicker of the noble and ancient Sarum use. Some ten years passed before Paul V. published the Roman Ritual. Though it standardized those abbreviations which Cardinal Schuster calls a "real liturgical loss," yet with true Roman breadth it allowed and even suggested the maintenance of local liturgical customs. [5] But there were amongst the exiled priests those who were more Roman than Rome itself. To them it became imperative to supersede the Sarum Ritual of 1604 by a new Ritual first published at Antwerp (in quarto) and at Paris (in duo decimo) in 1626, which we still use in these islands. But these liturgical regrets which have found authoritative expression in Cardinal Schuster's words may lead to our spiritual leaders reconstructing the matter in the light of modern tendencies. Now that Marriage as an institution is almost in collapse and discredit outside the Church, Our Holy Father's Encyclical on Marriage is a call to give the Sacramental Marriage of Catholics something of external dignity. When that call is felt there may be a return to the old, dignified Roman Ritual of Marriage which was preserved intact by the clergy of this country, indeed of these islands, even after persecution had scattered them abroad. * * * * * Notes [1] The Sacramentary, Historical, and Liturgical Notes on the Roman Missal, by (now Cardinal) Ildefonso Schuster, O.S.B., Abbot of St. Paul's Outside the Walls; translated by A. Levelis-Marke, M.A. Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1924. Vol. I., pp. 193-195 [2] Prummer says of the complete absence of any rule or form of the betrothal contract: "Praestat autem, ut ahibeamur formularia in qualibet diocesi vel parocobia approbata." (Manuale, Vol. III., 723.) [3] A further and later edition was published by Kellam in 1610 [4] Cardinal Schuster writes: The Fathers frequently allude to the joining of hands....The ceremony of the kiss is more rarely mentioned." (p. 194) [5] When Cardinal Vaughan was beginning work of building Westminster Cathedral the Roman authorities suggested that he should restore the Sarum Rite!