Pope Clement VIII sends a cardinal to examine St. Cecilia's tomb

ROME, October 1599 AD — Saint Cecilia was a Roman virgin put to death for her faith. Rome has kept her feast since the fourth century; the Church celebrates it on November 22, and her name stands in the Canon of the Mass. What is known about her life is another matter. All of it comes from one book, the Passio sanctae Caeciliae (the passion of Saint Cecilia), commonly called the Acts of her martyrdom. That book tells of the marriage St. Cecilia did not want and of the angel who guarded her. It gives the conversion of her husband and his brother, and her trial before the prefect. It ends with the fire in her own bath and the sword. It was written about the middle of the fifth century, two hundred years and more after the events it describes. St. Cecilia left no writings, and every word attributed to her comes through that book.

This month that book has been checked against the bodies.

Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati holds the title of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and has been making considerable alterations to his church. The church stands across the Tiber on ground that tradition gives as St. Cecilia’s own house. Digging in the sanctuary, he broke into a wide vault under the altar with two marble coffins in it. Witnesses were called. One of the two was opened in front of them on October 20, and inside it was a coffin of cypress wood. Pope Clement VIII was too ill at Frascati, in the hills outside the city, to come. He deputed Venerable Cesare Baronius, a cardinal of the Roman Church, to make a careful examination of the remains in his place.

Cardinal Baronius is sixty-one, a priest of the Oratory formed by St. Philip Neri. He has given his working life to setting what the Church says about her own past against the documents. The first volume of his Annales Ecclesiastici (Church annals) appeared in 1588 AD. Pope Gregory XIII handed him the revision of the Roman Martyrology, the Church’s official register of her martyrs and their days, after the calendar reform of 1582 AD threw the feasts into confusion. He spent two years on it and printed his corrections in 1586 AD. Pope Clement VIII, whose confessor he is, made him a cardinal in 1596 AD and Librarian of the Vatican the year after.

Cardinal Baronius was at the coffin when it was opened. With him were Cardinal Sfondrati, the bishop of Isernia, a canon of the Lateran congregation named James Buzzi, and two Jesuit priests, Peter Alabona and Peter Morra. Antonio Bosio, a doctor of both laws, civil and canon, was there too. He has written that he set down what he saw with his own eyes and what he learned from Cardinal Sfondrati, who presided over the examination.

Cardinal Sfondrati drew back the lid with his own hands. Under it was the silk lining and gauze in which Pope Paschal I had wrapped the body when he brought it into the city from the cemeteries of the Via Appia in 821 AD. The silk had lost its colour, but the fabric was whole, and the gold of the robes showed through it. The body was found incorrupt. St. Cecilia lay on her right side, her arms stretched out in front of her, her head turned toward the foot of the coffin, her knees slightly bent and drawn together. Her robes were of golden tissue, and the stains of her blood were still on them. At her feet lay the linen cloths named in the record of Pope Paschal’s own pontificate, rolled up and full of the blood of the executioner’s three strokes. The sword wounds in her neck were seen and reported. The Acts say she died in that posture and was buried in it. Pope Paschal, finding her so eight centuries later, laid her in the marble without changing it.

The Acts are detailed about the stroke that killed her, and about why there were only three. The Golden Legend, in the English William Caxton printed in 1483 AD, has it: “Then the tormentor smote at her three strokes, and could not smite off her head, and the fourth stroke he might not by the law smite, and so left her there lying half alive and half dead.” Roman law allowed the executioner no fourth stroke. He went away leaving her alive in her own blood, and she lived three days. A portion of the relic has been given to Cardinal Sfondrati, and a fragment of the skull came away with it. The men who examined that fragment judged that the head had been almost severed from the neck by the threefold stroke.

The second coffin was opened as well. By the record of this church it should hold three martyrs Pope Paschal brought in from the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Via Appia and laid beside her. They are Saint Valerian, her husband; his brother Saint Tiburtius; and Saint Maximus, an officer of the prefect. In the Acts, St. Maximus becomes a Christian at the brothers’ execution and is killed for it.

The Acts do not give the three of them the same death. St. Valerian and St. Tiburtius are led four miles out along the Via Appia, refuse to sacrifice before the image of Jupiter, kneel down and are beheaded. St. Maximus is beaten to death. The Golden Legend names the instrument: the prefect had him struck “with plummets of lead so long till he gave up his spirit and died”. The Roman Martyrology says the same, that he was “scourged with leaded whips until he expired”. The Latin word is plumbatae (leaded scourges).

The second coffin held the remains of three bodies. Two of them, apparently of the same age and the same size, had manifestly been beheaded. The skull of the third was broken, and the abundant hair on it was thickly matted with blood, as of a man beaten to death with the leaded scourges.

The examination does not settle everything the Acts say, and it does not settle when St. Cecilia died. The Roman Martyrology puts her under the emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander. The Golden Legend dates her passion to about the year 223 AD, and adds that another account places it under Marcus Aurelius, about the year 170 AD. Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers and the earliest writer known to name her at all, says she died in Sicily.

The body is now on view in the church, raised on a decorated stand behind an iron grating. People have been coming in to see it.