Looking for Medina

"She spoke not a word, but I understood all."

--Alphonse Ratisbonne, on his vision of the Virgin

It seems to be the latest fad among the Cardinals of the Sacred College to go off and celebrate a Tridentine Mass in some high-profile Roman basilica, and for once it looks like a trend I can throw my support behind. First, there's Cardinal Castrillon-Hoyos over at Santa Maria Maggiore, and then today there's Cardinal Medina. I discovered this morning it was going to be at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Appropriately enough since it's Party Central at the moment, celebrating its titular martyr's feast. My guess is this whole delightful spate of smells and bells is the result of clerical peer pressure. I'm not sure who's next but I imagine they're going to gang up on Mahoney in the locker room and give him an ecclesiastical wedgie before this thing is over.

I thought St. Cecilia's day was yesterday, which proves further my thesis that architects can't count. With what my friend Andy calls the Academic Eschaton winding down, we're all a bit frazzled at studio, so I have a decent excuse.

Nonetheless, when I dashed over to Sant' Andrea delle Fratte off the Corso which I had assumed was to be the site of the Cardinal's mass (it's a long story), I fully expected to be greeted with a wealth of incense and pontifical ceremony. Instead, it was just the FSSP pastor of San Gregorio and a lone server, and they had just reached the Gospel. I had garbled my schedule, and this was just an ordinary Low Mass. No cardinal, and more disconcertingly, I was late.

I fumbled around, looking for an English-Latin misalette and there weren't any to be seen. I felt peculiarly out of place, still flustered from getting lost and worried that I would be too distracted to receive Communion in the proper spirit. I stood there, in a daze, and tried to situate myself mentally in the dim nave of the church.

Sant' Andrea delle Fratte was once the site of a miracle. It is a small, perhaps forgettable Baroque church standing off a Corso sidestreet halfway up the slope of the Quirinale. The name means St. Andrew of the Thickets, hinting perhaps at the country obscurity of the little parish before it was swallowed up in the Roman civic explosion of the last two centuries. Borromini contributed the apse, cupola and campanile. Bernini's original angels from Ponte Sant' Angelo flank the apse, their milky marble skin a pale violet in the darkness. Hardly anyone remembers them.

Then, one day in January of 1842, that strange Marian year when St. Louis's lost book on the Virgin was unearthed and an obscure French priest named Sorin started a school at Notre-Dame-du-Lac in the frozen Old Northwest, a young Jewish agnostic named Alfonse Ratisbonne visited the church. He had long ago ceased to take his religion seriously, and was a scoffer at all things Catholic. He was with an aquaintence, the fervently Catholic Baron de Bussieres, who left him behind for a few moments to pray and consult with the friars concerning the funeral of a close friend. When he returned, young Alphonse was on his knees, and weeping.

He had just seen the Virgin, the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal he had openly mocked a few days earlier.

It was a dazzling story, a story out of the Golden Legend, and the full tale is even wilder, full of visions, a hovering cross and a sinister disappearing black dog, but it happened in the depths of the rationalist nineteenth century.

It makes up for the missing Cardinal to an immesurable, incompassible degree.

The old chapel of the Archangels where he saw this majestic woman, "tall, brilliant, full of sweetness and majesty," is now the chapel of the Miracle. A luminous canvas of Our Lady hangs above the altar flanked by gleaming green marble columns and sprays of fresh white flowers. Dozens of ex-votos hang on the walls. Alfonse, bearded and venerable, is commemorated in a bust on one side, while another, more familiar face, flanks him on the other. Sharp, chiseled and coweled features.

It is St. Maximilian Kolbe, who celebrated his first mass here. April 29, 1918. The saint whose name I took at Confirmation, this Knight of the Immaculate. Alphonse became a knight as well, a priest of an order like Maximilian. He soon passed into the Jesuits, the shock troops of the Holy Name, just as St. Maximilian became a Franciscan, one of those troubador-knights of Mary.

And so I sit and kneel in the silence, trying my best to follow the gestures of the priest as he silently recites the Canon. I simultaneously lose my place in the Italian translation in the misalette and give up on trying to mentally translate the Latin. I feel lost. I try not to write future blogs in my head or gawk at the rich baroque of the church. I am just silent, overwhealmed by this simple, cardinal-less low mass and the remarkable grace of God that healed the soul of Alphonse Ratisbonne.

It's strange, though. While I tried not to be distracted, I tried to apply myself and not play web journalist as I am sometimes tempted to do, I still can remember so many moments from that half-missed mass. Perhaps my mind wandered some. The altar blazing with light, the gleam of candle-flame on marble, the kiss of the priest on the paten, reflected and distorted in the tabernacle's silver sheathing, and, if I strain, the face of the image of that Woman who appeared so long ago atop this forgotten altar.

My mind was quiet as I lingered after mass. But it was a beautiful quiet, and I have only God and His Mother to thank for it.