Independent history project by @NicoFassino. Exploring Catholic history through the untold and forgotten experiences of the laity across the centuries.
Joined July 2020
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I’m back with a new research project!
It's a study of vernacular congregational participation at Mass between 1861 and 1961.
Everything you think you know about liturgy before the Second Vatican Council is probably wrong 🧵⤵️
ALT Announcing a new research feature by Nico Fassino and the Hand Missal History Project: https://handmissalhistory.com/dialog/
The practice of the congregation reciting the Our Father with the priest was, strictly speaking, foreign to the Roman Rite... on the level of what was prescribed in the official liturgical books
But it was indeed a local custom in many places, long before Vatican II
🧵
This post is ostensibly about the ancient and famous frescos of Santa Maria Antiqua
Yet the image shown is a meaningless, fake, AI-generated frankenstein mishmash which does NOT represent either the Antiqua frescos or other real Byzantine iconography
what is the point of this?
The earliest known depiction of the Virgin Mary as a queen (Santa Maria Regina) is a 6th-century palimpsest wall painting located in the ancient church of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, Italy. Here the word “palimpsest” means incomplete.
That church is in the Roman Forum and beneath the slopes of the Palatine Hill. It is something of a time capsule in that it was ruined and covered over by an earthquake in AD 847, and was more or less been left untouched and buried for over a millennium. It has once been the papal church of Rome (under Pope John VII). Because Santa Maria Antiqua was never redecorated by the baroque aesthetic in later years, it reveals the paleo-Christian aesthetic of the earlier ages of our history. Now excavated, this gives us a glimpse of what Roman churches would have looked like in the first millennium.
In looking at these palimpsest frescos therein, one is sometimes looking at multiple frescos at once, as sometimes the outer layer of the latest fresco is seen, and sometimes one or more of the older frescos that are earlier are seen partially beneath, depending upon how many layers of plaster were chipped away. So, it can be a little like looking at three partially completed puzzles one a top another.
This church is fifth century, and the fresco of the enthroned Virgin Mary is from the sixth century, and is considered to be the oldest extant image of Mary as a Queen in the world.
