Septuagesima, Babylonian Captivity, and the end of the crisis
Could the post-conciliar crisis nearly be over?
Could the post-conciliar crisis nearly be over?
In this article…
The name Septuagesima is linked to the Babylonian Captivity, symbolising exile and penance.
Just as Israel suffered in Babylon, traditional Catholics endure an ecclesiastical exile today.
What all this might indicate about when the crisis in the Church could end.
Septuagesima reminds us that exile is temporary, and that restoration will come in God’s time.
What does ‘Septuagesima’ mean?
The real reason why the period before Lent is called “Septuagesima” is disputed. The word means “seventieth”, but Septuagesima is not seventy days (nor seven weeks) before Easter. However, if we treat Passiontide as a discrete period, then there are seven weeks between Septuagesima Sunday and Laetare Sunday (the fourth and last Sunday of Lent).
Some writers also suggest that the name refers to the 70 years of “The Babylonian Captivity.” In The Catholic Encyclopaedia, Francis Mershman writes:
“Amularius [in De Eccl. Off., I.I] would make the Septuagesima mystically represent the Babylonian Captivity of seventy years.”1
Fr Leonard Goffine makes a similar point:
“Alcuin and Amalarius say that the captivity of the Jews in Babylon first suggested [these seventy days]; for as the Jews were obliged to do penance seventy years, that they might thereby merit to return into the promised land, so Christians sought to regain the grace of God by fasting for seventy days.”2
Similarly, in discussing “The Mystery of Septuagesima”, Dom Prosper Guéranger expresses a similar idea, and then comments:
“We are sojourners upon this earth; we are exiles and captives in Babylon, that city which plots our ruin. If we love our country, if we long to return to it, we must be proof against the lying allurements of this strange land, and refuse the cup she proffers us, and with which she maddens so many of our fellow captives.”3
Of the singing of the Alleluia, he says:
“[The Church] bids us close our lips to this word of joy, because we are in Babylon.”4
As mentioned in the previous piece, the Church reads the book of Genesis throughout Septuagesima, and thus casts us back to the state of our first parents, and of man enslaved by sin and awaiting his Redeemer. Babylon represents a period of exile and captivity in sin, from which only Christ can save us. Dom Guéranger continues:
“The Church, the interpreter of the Sacred Scriptures, often speaks to us of two places, which correspond with these two times of St. Augustine. These two places are Babylon and Jerusalem.
“Babylon is the image of this world of sin, in the midst whereof the Christian has to spend his years of probation; Jerusalem is the heavenly country, where he is to repose after all his trials. The people of Israel, whose whole history is but one great type of the human race, was banished from Jerusalem and kept in bondage in Babylon.”5
But what was the historical “Babylonian Captivity”, and what else can it tell us about Septuagesima and our own period of history?
The history of the Babylonian Captivity
Following a period of idolatry and religious syncretism, in the face of warnings from the prophets, the Kingdom of Judah was overrun and Jerusalem was taken by Nabuchodonosor II. The Catholic Encyclopaedia tells us:
“The princes and leading men, the rank and file of the army, the citizens of wealth, and the artificers, numbering in all 10,000, were carried captive to Chaldea. The Temple and palace were rifled of their treasures.”6
A few years later, Jerusalem was again besieged, leading to a dreadful famine and an eventual frenzy of destruction, including that of Solomon’s Temple.
Thousands of the Jews who survived were exiled, and forced to live away from the Promised Land and their altar of sacrifice.
There can be no doubt that being deprived of the true religion was the worst result of that persecution – as it is of every persecution.
All this resonates with the liturgical texts of Septuagesima which we have already seen. It also resonates with Fr Johannes Pinsk’s speculations on the process by which these liturgical propers and the consciousness of the Exile may have arisen in the Roman Church:
“Whenever and however the texts of this Mass may have come into being, they were certainly not invented in the conference rooms of a Liturgical Commission; rather they grew out of terrible affliction, such as men have themselves experienced in nightly bombings and in the horrors of the encounter with a brutal soldiery.
“Perhaps it was the restless age of the barbarian invasions, of the irruption of the barbarian hordes into the approaches to Rome and into the Roman Christian community itself, which first brought priest and congregation together in such a cry to God. This should not be forgotten today. Even today, priest and congregation should unite with all their hearts in this Introit.”7
In the last part, we considered how the propers give voice to the state of fallen man awaiting redemption. As Pinsk suggests, these propers can also be seen as giving voice to the Catholic faithful living today in this valley of tears: we are all in exile until we reach our heavenly homeland.
This concept of “exile” and “captivity” in Babylon may be instructive ways of looking at the current crisis in the Church.
This is a members-only post for those who support us with monthly or annual subscriptions. It’s a part of our series The Roman Liturgy on the liturgy, and reasons for hope amidst the crisis in the Church.
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