Our Lady of the Snows
Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #41, February 2004
I was baptised in my home town of Masson (for now part of Gatineau, but I trust not for long) in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows at the age of two days because I was premature and not expected to live. The chapel had been built in 11 days as a temporary and very cheap replacement of the parish church which burned down in 1930 along with half of the village. The parish priest, Fr. Routhier, on that occasion, had telegraphed the bishop, “Church and rectory destroyed by fire, Blessed Sacrament rescued.”
There was over the altar a large painting of Our Lady of the Snows made in 1930 by Miss Routhier, the niece of the parish priest to replace an earlier painting commissioned ca 1890 for the first church which burned with the second church in 1930. The painting represented Our Lady breast-feeding the Holy Child – Bp. Duhamel of Ottawa had promised to bless it, if the “Virgin was beautiful and decent”. The name “Notre-Dame-des-Neiges” was part of a series of designations for parishes along the Lièvre River which included Notre-Dame-du-Laus, Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense (Val-des-Bois) and Notre-Dame-de-Pontmain, all founded by émigré French priests, particularly Father Michel, with great Marian devotions. There is also a shrine to Our Lady of Knock in Mayo, but that is from the Irish tradition.
The vocable “Our Lady of the Snows” refers to the foundation of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome also known as the “Sacrosancta Patriarchalis Basilica Liberiana” from the name of its founder Pope Liberius. While the good pope pondered on the location of a future church to be dedicated to Our Lady, the first in Christendom, he saw in a dream during the night of the nones of August (our 4-5th of August) in 358 the Virgin asking him to build a chapel on the site she would designate by snowfall. On the morning, they found snow on the Esquiline Hill, the highest of the Hills of Rome, and the pope traced the limits of the future church in the snow. In 431, the Council of Ephesus would proclaim Mary the Mother of God and acknowledge her cult.
So to this day, the dedication of the basilica is remembered on August the 5th, which is therefore the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows. By a happy coincidence, I found myself two summers ago in Rome on that day. In Italy, dedication feasts for great churches and cathedrals are celebrated in a grand manner. There are generally three days of special events in preparation for the day, and the dedication itself is marked by three solemn services, the First Vespers on the eve, a Solemn Mass in the morning, and the Second Vespers in the evening. St. Mary Major is no exception.
I first went to visit the Church and to reconnoitre the terrain. It is a vast building built on the basilican plan. The apse is semicircular and two great side chapels form a transept of a sort. The chapel to the North is the Borghese Chapel which serves as the Sacrament chapel and its riches are beyond imagining. Precious marbles everywhere .
As I walked around the church, I noticed a number of confessionals in operation; a surprising large number of people were going to confession, but others just knelt in front of the priest sitting behind his half-door. The priest then took a small rod, about six inches long, and held it to their head, while reciting some blessing. I found a confessional with a multilingual priest and knelt to ask about the rod. The priest was a good blackfriar (they are in charge of the basilica) who happened to have lived in Montreal and I finally got my touch of the rod after a very long conversation kneeling at his feet. The priest assured me that he felt the time spent in the box was a very useful way to spend his retirement years and that I would be surprised how many distressed people came up to him.
On the eve of the feast, I attended the First Vespers. Casing the joint, I sat up front on the right next to a small group of Roman women who appeared to me to be church-wise and to have chosen the best seats – I also benefited from the hand fans which they used throughout the service. The attendance was poor and the service was taken by a Roman auxiliary bishop of some sort (he carried a crozier), attended by half a dozen canons in purple cassock with red sleeves. The bishop and two of the canons wore Baroque white and gold copes; the servers were in grey habit and I thought they were Theatine seminarians. There were two masters of ceremony, both in purple cassock, the major who directed everything and the minor whose main job appeared to deal with the prelate’s reading glasses.
The procession came from the back, singing the Magnificat; it turned south into the Borghese Chapel to reverence the Sacrament. The service was then taken from the high altar. One of my lady companions sang the first two psalms in Latin with great gusto, but then shut up as a clam when they imposed Ephesians 1:3-10 in lieu of the third psalm. The others chatted throughout. A group of some two dozen seminarians in black cassocks came in late and sat north of the altar; half them participated in the service, but the other half just sat through looking bored, neither singing, nor even standing for the Magnificat; future bishops, I thought. The service ended with an interminable sermon in Italian.
The next morning, I arrived early for High Mass, and again sat with the ladies who had this time moved to the north side of the nave just behind the rows of chairs reserved for the Diplomatic Corps. Only one person was escorted to these reserved seats, so the place was eventually taken over by elderly nuns, which my lady friends repeatedly tried to shoo away, as the good self-appointed guardians of the temple they are, but to no avail; nothing this side of heaven, I learned, will budge an elderly nun. The nave was filled to the rafters, a good percentage of the congregation being nuns of all stripes and colours of habit and skin and varying hemlines (all decent and proper).
The Mass was the high point of the festival, and it was celebrated by the Cardinal Archpriest of the Basilica, assisted by two bishops and a deacon. This was Carlo Cardinal Furno, a short pudgy man who appeared not to lack any self-confidence, whatever else he might lack. A retired Curia diplomat and erstwhile nuncio to Peru, Lebanon, Brazil and Italy, he is since 1995 the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. He did, as they do in Rome, a very credible mass (which they cannot seem to export into the rest of Christendom), facing East, which in these old churches means also facing the people.
But the crowd had really gathered for the Gloria when, after the opening bars, all the eyes went to the ceiling; slowly one of the coffers of the great gold panelled ceiling opened and a few white flower petals drifted down. Then to the applause of the congregation, the flowers came down by the bushel-full in a magnificent “snowstorm in August”.