There’s Something About Candlemas (Photos)

There’s something about the feast of the Presentation—formerly known as the Purification of Our Lady, or simply “Candlemas”—that seizes the Anglo-Catholic imagination like few other feasts can. Most Catholic cathedrals today allow this feast to pass without ceremony, while high Anglican or Episcopal parishes will often mark Candlemas with a full array of processions and pageantry. Curiously, the most-watched celebrations of Candlemas by Catholics in recent decades have been those involving the pre-Reformation English church’s Use of Sarum; particularly the Oxford Newman Society’s two celebrations of the Sarum Mass at Merton College on Candlemas 1997 and 1998, and the Durandus Institute’s inaugural Sarum Vespers on Candlemas Eve 2020.

The procession re-entering the church as the schola chants the responsory Obtulerunt: “They offered for him unto the Lord a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons: as it is written in the law of the Lord. V. When the days of Mary’s purification according to the Law of Moses were accomplished, they brought Jesus to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord: as it is written in the law of the Lord.” (Credit: Peter Tulay)

Does the attraction to this feast endure in Anglo-Catholic circles because England’s colder climes and longer wintry nights made candles a tool for survival? Or is it because of the Purification’s more obvious Biblical connections and pre-Reformation roots, making it a more accessible Marian feast for people from Protestant backgrounds than those feasts elevated in recent centuries like the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption? I’m tempted to say “yes” to all of the above, yet when my Ordinariate parish celebrated a Solemn Mass with the full blessing of candles and procession on Candlemas Eve, I couldn’t help but notice that we welcomed a great many cradle Catholic visitors through our doors!

The Celebrant, Father William Cantrell, chanting the Collect of the Day. (Credit: Peter Tulay)

The practice of blessing and processing with candles on the Presentation/Purification developed, as so many things do, in the city of Rome, around the 7^th century. There it was a penitential act, hence why the Roman rite called for violet vestments for the procession until 1960.

But it was in the northern regions of Europe where the feast flourished into one of the most striking religious observances of the year. In England, Candlemas guilds abounded, ensuring their feast of patronage was celebrated with the highest solemnity. The Use of Sarum, as in Rome, had the priest say five prayers of blessing over the candles; though Sarum went further by giving the blessing of candles its own preface, similar to the preface for the “Mass of the Palm” before the Mass of Palm Sunday. The Mass of the Purification itself had its own sequence (as Sarum had for nearly all other feasts). The great choral composers of the English church prior to the Reformation left us with a sizable body of truly magnificent compositions for the various musical texts of the Mass and Office on this feast, such as Thomas Tallis’s Videte miraculum for First Vespers of the Purification (which was sung for the Durandus Institute’s Sarum Vespers in 2020).

Participants hold their candles, illuminating the darkened interior of the church throughout the liturgy. (Credit: Peter Tulay)

The act of carrying candles on February 2 was among the first ritual acts abolished by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the Church of England after the death of Henry VIII and the accession of the boy-king Edward VI, even before the first Book of Common Prayer was introduced. Nevertheless, the Prayer Book retained February 2’s medieval designation as a Marian feast—the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin—even into the 1662 and 1928 editions. Only in 1979 did the Episcopal Church in the U.S. finally retire “the Purification” in favor of the more Christological “Presentation of Christ in the Temple”; in that case, following the example of the Catholic Church’s reformed calendar following the Second Vatican Council.

The Deacon chants the Gospel (Luke 2:22-40): “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses…” (Credit: Peter Tulay)

Cranmer grew to hate the attachment that the people of England had for sacramentals, for in the same act he did away not only with candles on Candlemas, but also ashes on Ash Wednesday and palms on Palm Sunday. Nevertheless, while Cranmer had no use for sacramentals, he saw fit to retain the ceremony of churching women after childbirth in the Prayer Book. Thus, he must have seen the value of retaining the feast of the Purification for its essential theme: the faithful observance of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the law of Moses, submitting herself to the rite of purification in the Temple though she had no need of it, just as the Lord submitted Himself to be baptized even though He was without sin.

Saint John’s welcomed Father Armando Alejandro, Jr. (Administrator of Saint Timothy’s Ordinariate Church in Sykesville, Maryland) as guest homilist. (Credit: Peter Tulay)

The Collect of the Day focuses on the Presentation. For the Book of Common Prayer’s collect on this feast (which is retained in the Ordinariate’s Divine Worship Missal), Cranmer translated the Latin collect from the Sarum Missal without modification:

      Almyghtye and everlastyng God, we humbly beseche thy Majestie, that as thy onelye begotten sonne was this day presented in the Temple in the substaunce of our fleshe; so graunte that we maie bee presented unto thee with pure and cleare myndes; By Jesus Christ our Lorde.

For reference, the collect in Sarum (identical to the pre-conciliar Missale Romanum):

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, majestatem tuam supplices exoramus : ut, sicut unigenitus Filius tuus hodierna die cum nostræ carnis substantia in templo est præsentatus; ita nos facias purificatis tibi mentibus præsentari. Per eundem Dominum…

The phrase “substance of our flesh”—curiously omitted in the 1979 edition of the Prayer Book—hammers home the reality of Christ’s incarnation, which has been celebrated for the past forty days. Candlemas is truly a feast that brings a fitting close to the greater season of Christmas. Through the use of an earthy sacramental; the candle made of the labor of bees; we honor two equally earthy mysteries in the life of the Lord and His virgin mother. Thankfully, Anglicans after the Oxford Movement began to rediscover the joy of the traditions of Candlemas that had been set aside by their Reformation-era forebears, and these ceremonies began to make their way back into Anglican churches of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion through manuals such as Ritual Notes. By the 20^th century, the carrying of candles on the Purification was to be seen even at Westminster Abbey.
 

At the end of Mass, the Subdeacon holds the altar card inscribed with the Last Gospel (John 1:1-14) for the Celebrant: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (Credit: Peter Tulay)

The liturgy finds one more way to mark Candlemas as the end of a season. On this day, the Marian anthem Alma Redemptoris Mater is sung in the Divine Office, at the end of Compline, for the last time. From the day after Candlemas until Easter, the Marian anthem becomes Ave Regina Caelorum. To mark this in a special way, my parish sang the Alma Redemptoris at the end of our Candlemas liturgy, after the Last Gospel, as a farewell to greater Christmas. With this done, we now turn our minds toward the season of Lent, which approaches ever near.

For members of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, Candlemas now takes on yet another significance: on this day six years ago, we received our first bishop—the Most Reverend Steven J. Lopes—who was raised to the episcopate on February 2, 2016 at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston, Texas. It was a sign of the Ordinariate’s growth and the Church’s readiness to meet our needs. Today, I believe it’s time to consider how the Ordinariate can meet the needs of others, both within the Church and without. Our robust traditions around the celebration of Candlemas are just one of the many ways we can draw from our patrimony “to be a light to lighten the Gentiles: and to be the glory of thy people Israel.”

James Thomas More Griffin is the founder and executive director of the Durandus Institute for Liturgy & Music, and an instituted acolyte for St John the Baptist Catholic Church in Bridgeport, Pa., the Ordinariate community for the Philadelphia region.