Images smashed in Bohemia, a new day for Our Lady

COLOGNE, 1413 AD — Somebody is breaking the images of Christ and the saints. It is happening in Bohemia, far to the east of Cologne and out of the bishops’ reach. The men doing it are called Hussites.

So the bishops of the province of Cologne met this year. What they can order is what is prayed and sung in their own churches. And that is what they ordered: a day, kept every year, in honour of the Mother of God standing under the Cross.

They put the new day into the calendars of their dioceses. It is a feast of the Compassion of the Blessed Virgin Mary, kept on the Friday after the third Sunday after Easter. It is about one thing only: her sorrow during the Crucifixion and Death of her Son.

The men who broke the images

The Hussites are the followers of Jan Hus, the preacher of the Bethlehem chapel in the city of Prague. A sentence of excommunication was pronounced against him in February 1411 AD. On March 15 it was published in every church in the city. The sentence was repeated after he attacked a papal indulgence preached there. His home was placed under interdict, a ban on the sacraments. At the end of 1412 AD he left Prague for Austi in the south.

One province, and nowhere else

The bishops who ordered the new day were not making a rule for everyone. Whatever such a meeting decides, it decides for the dioceses of its own province and no others. It could not give the new day to the whole Latin Church. Only a pope could do that.

The archbishop of Cologne is Frederick III of Saarwerden, and he has been archbishop there since 1370 AD. His cathedral isn’t finished. The first stone was laid in 1248 AD. The nave was made ready for services in 1388 AD, twenty-five years ago.

Three hundred years later

For the next hundred years the new day went no further than the north. Before the sixteenth century it was kept in the dioceses of North Germany, Scandinavia and Scotland and nowhere else. Different places kept it on different days. Merseburg kept it on July 18, Halberstadt on July 19, Naumburg on July 20.

Then it started to travel. From the end of the fifteenth century it widened in several dioceses to five sorrows, or to seven. Towards the end of the sixteenth century it spread into the south of Europe. In 1674 AD it was given to the whole German Empire.

Three hundred and fourteen years after the bishops met at Cologne, a pope did what they could not. On April 22, 1727 AD, Pope Benedict XIII gave the day to the entire Latin Church. The Mass kept what the bishops at Cologne had given it. It was still about her sorrow at the foot of the Cross.

The day the Church keeps now as the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows is September 15.