Liturgical Notes on the Purification of the Virgin Mary

In the later 4th century, the pilgrim Egeria wrote, in her famous account of her visit to the Holy Land, that the Meeting of the Lord with Simeon in the Temple was celebrated there with particular solemnity, “just as at Easter”, forty days after Epiphany. In her time, the Epiphany commemorated all the events of the Lord’s birth, and the Meeting was therefore originally kept on February 14th; this arrangement is still observed to this day in the Armenian Rite. When the feast of Christmas was adopted in the East shortly after (and in some places, even before), the eastern Epiphany was made to focus on the Lord’s Baptism; the Meeting, as an event of His infancy, was then moved back to February 2nd, counting the forty days from December 25th.

A 15th-century Russian icon of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple

It is often stated that when it was introduced to the West in the mid-to-late 7th-century, the Meeting became a Marian feast, whereas the East continued to observe it as a feast of the Lord. (See, for example, the relevant entries in the old Catholic Encyclopedia, the revised Butler’s Lives, and Bl. Schuster’s The Sacramentary; the last refers quite incorrectly to its “predominantly Marian character.”) This arises from a rather superficial analysis of its liturgical title and texts. It is true that its Latin name appears very early as “the Purification of the Virgin Mary”, as, for example, in the Gelasian Sacramentary and the Murbach lectionary, both of the mid-8th century. It is also true that it was considered a Marian feast in the Middle Ages. But its character as a “double feast”, and one of Greek origin, was never forgotten; about a century before Durandus, Sicard of Cremona wrote, “Today’s is therefore a double solemnity, of Her that gives birth, and of Him that is born, that is of the Mother and the Son; in regards to the Mother, it is called ‘the Purification’, in regard to the Son, ‘Hypapante’, which is interpreted ‘the Meeting.’ ” (Mitrale 5.11)

The traditional Roman Mass of the Purification refers to the Virgin only where She is mentioned in the Gospel, and almost parenthetically in the Postcommunion. Likewise, the rites that precede the Mass refer to Her once in the first prayer for the blessing of candles, (again, almost parenthetically), and twice in the processional antiphons. The double character of the feast noted by Sicard and Durandus is more clearly expressed in the Office, many parts of which are taken from the common for feasts of the Virgin. However, even here, the invitatory, lessons and responsories of Matins, and the Lauds antiphons, (also used at remaining Hours), all refer to the Meeting of Christ with Simeon.

According to the Liber Pontificalis, Pope St Sergius I (687-701) established that a procession from the church of St Adrian in the Roman Forum to Saint Mary Major, on the Annunciation, the Dormition and Nativity of the Virgin, and the “feast of St Simeon”. Born in Sicily, but of Syrian origin, this Pope was certainly familiar from his youth with the liturgies of both the Byzantine and Latin tradition. There is good evidence that a procession with candles was associated with the feast from an early date, as Butler’s Lives also notes, but it died out entirely in the East; where it is done today in a few Eastern churches, it is a fairly recent Latinization. There is no mention of candles in the Liber Pontificalis’ words about Pope Sergius, nor in the early Roman liturgical books; the first reference to a blessing of candles on February 2nd is found in the late 10th century.

The church of Saint Adrian in the Roman Forum, shown here on the right in a 16th century print. The church was built in the 7th century inside the long abandoned Roman senate house known as the Curia Julia, but almost every trace of the building’s history as a church was removed in the 1920s and ’30s.

The Roman blessing is characteristically simple, following a pattern similar to that of the blessing of Palms. Five prayers are said over the candles, after which they are sprinkled with holy water and incensed, and then distributed, as the canticle of Simeon Nunc dimittis is sung with the antiphon after every verse, “A light to the revelation of the gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” After a second antiphon and a brief collect comes a procession, accompanied by the singing of two long antiphons. The first of these is borrowed from the Byzantine Liturgy; the second is from the day’s Gospel.

Many improbable attempts have been made to connect the Candlemas blessing and procession with the ancient Roman purification rite of the Lupercalia. The Venerable Bede says that the Roman King Numa dedicated February to the god Februus, another name for Pluto, “who was believed to have power over rites of purification,” and established it as a month of various rites to religiously purifie the city. (The name of both the month and the god derive from “februare – to purify.”) Bede then says that the Christian religion changed “this custom” for the better (without mentioning the Lupercalia specifically) by instituting a procession with candles in its place “in the same month, on the day of St Mary”. (De temporum ratione XII, PL XC col. 351)

The Lupercalia are mentioned repeatedly by other Church Fathers, and even at the end of the fifth century, Pope St Gelasius I felt the need to combat some vestiges of its celebration. A race though the city that formed part of the festival was still being run, and the Pope sarcastically suggests in a letter to a Roman senator who defended the practice that the runners should return to the more ancient practice, and go naked. Bede’s idea becomes more tempting as an explanation for the procession’s origins when one considers that the Lupercalia were celebrated from February 13th to the 15th, coinciding with the Purification’s original Eastern date; and further, that the name of the Christian feast that begins the ancient Roman month of purification was changed to “the Purification” in Rome.

For all this, however, it is extremely unlikely that any vestiges of the pagan rite remained in the time of Pope Sergius, who instituted the procession almost two centuries after Gelasius, and not for the Purification alone, but for all the Marian feasts. Rome had suffered in the meantime a significant depopulation during the plagues and wars of the 6th century, which dealt a massive blow to the city’s ancient customs and institutions. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the feast was never kept in the West on any date other than February 2nd.