Some months ago, Lizette Larson Miller raised the question of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church based upon pastoral-liturgical suggestions that communities might celebrate it as such with balloons and the like. Like Larson Miller, I doubt that balloons and party hats would enhance my own celebration of the feast, though a cake surely wouldn’t hurt. In the months after reading her piece on Pray Tell, this question of the Church’s birthday came up multiple times in the course of teaching two different liturgy classes.
I encountered the Church’s birthday first in a student’s paper examining the euchology of Pentecost. And then again, as I was rereading some sermons of Leo the Great I had assigned for a course on the liturgical year. In both instances I had the experience of seeing something entirely new in something I thought was familiar. I was unable to escape this idea of the Church’s birthday, so I want to offer a few thoughts in response to Larson Miller’s initial wonderings of where this idea comes from.
My student who examined the euchology, Andrew Clark,[1] traced the history of the Pentecost formulary through the tradition, noting that the Roman Missal of Paul VI drew on a broader set of theological themes than had been present in the pre-Vatican II Missal. Patrick Regan, quoting Anthony Ward, noted that the formulary of the 1962 Missal, inherited from the Hadrianum, was essentially a nice votive Mass of the Holy Spirit without much concern for the dramatic action of the day.[2] Building on Regan’s study, Clark argues that the current Missal gives renewed attention to the ecclesiological elements of the feast and situates it fully within the Paschal event by more fully utilizing the euchological tradition.
One aspect of the tradition that has been returned to prominence is the birth of the Church at Pentecost. Traces of this appear in the formulas of the Verona Sacramentary, but it is explicit in the Gelasian Sacramentary (GeV = BAV Reg. lat. 316). The renewed Missal returned to the GeV (no. 641) for the preface of Pentecost. Both prefaces, GeV and MR 2002, situate the Spirit’s activity of enlightenment and unification on Pentecost “at the beginning of the birth of the Church” (my translation: principio nascentis Ecclesiae [MR 2002]). The current English translation has “as the Church came to birth” (RM 2011).
| GeV 641[3] Uere dignum: quia hodie sancti spiritus caelebramus aduentum. Qui principiis nascentis aecclesiae cunctis gentibus inbuendis et deitatis scientiam indedit et loquellam, in diuersitate donorum mirabelis operatur unitatis, uariarumque graciarum tri- butor id est et unus effector, et praedicancium dispensator ipselinguarum. | Truly it is right: because today we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit. Who, at the beginnings of the Church’ birth, imparted knowledge of the divinity to the entire people to be instructed and produced speech of miraculous unity in the diversity of gifts, he is the one author and giver of varied graces, and the very steward of the tongues of preachers. |
| MR 2002 … Tu enim, sacraméntum paschále consúmmans, quibus, per Unigéniti tui consórtium, fílios adoptiónis esse tribuísti, hódie Spíritum Sanctum es largítus; qui, princípio nascéntis Ecclésiæ, et cunctis géntibus sciéntiam índidit deitátis, et linguárum diversitátem in uníus fídei confessióne sociávit… | RM 2011 … For, bringing your Paschal Mystery to completion, you bestowed the Holy Spirit today on those you made your adopted children by uniting them to your Only Begotten Son. This same Spirit, as the Church came to birth, opened to all peoples the knowledge of God and brought together the many languages of the earth in profession of the one faith… |
The Roman euchological tradition does contain a “birthday of the Church” at Pentecost. Of course, that was lost in much of the tradition as the formulary of the Hadrianum came to dominate and was codified in the post-Tridentine Missals. And Anglican euchology lacks this theme as well. So why exactly certain Anglicans are eager for a Pentecost birthday is a bit mysterious. Perhaps it lies dormant in our liturgical memory?
Larson Miller drew attention to another candidate for a birthday of the Church: Good Friday. She provides a robust pedigree for this ecclesiology. However, it’s not a great a time for balloons. In rereading those sermons of Leo that I assigned, I noticed he provides yet more options for a birthday of the Church, neither of which is Pentecost nor Good Friday.
The first is Christmas. Leo’s sermons on the Nativity are among his finest and I love them. As he nearly always does in his preaching, Leo emphasizes the “nowness” of the events of salvation celebrated in the church. Hodie! Sermon 26 for 25 December in the year 450 is no exception:
“But no day suggests to us more than today that this Nativity should be worshipped in heaven and on earth. With a new light radiating even in the atoms themselves, no day more than today impresses the entire splendor of this amazing mystery upon our senses. We recall not only to mind, but even – in a way – to sight [the mysteries of the Incarnation] …”[4]
Leo goes on to connect the birth of Christ with the fullness of the paschal mystery and the birth of the Church’s members who also share in the fullness of those salvific acts through baptism. The feast of the Nativity, moreover, is the very birth of the Church: Generatio enim christi origo est populi christiani, et natalis capitis natalis est corporis. “For the birth of Christ is the beginning of the Christian people, and so the birthday of the Head is the birthday of the Body.”[5]
The fullness of the body of Christ is contained in Christ himself, and so his birthday is that of the Church too.
But there’s more! In a sermon for the Feast of the Maccabean Martyrs, Leo begins by acknowledging the twin causes for rejoicing on this day. Duplex enim causa laetitiae est, in qua et natalem ecclesiae colimus, et martyrum passione gaudemus. “For the cause of our joy is twofold, in that we both celebrate the birthday of the church, and we rejoice in the suffering of the martyrs.”[6] I don’t think Leo is referring specifically to the feast of the Maccabees as the Church’s birthday, but rather to martyrdom generally as giving birth to the Church. One hears echoes of Tertullian’s “the blood of the Christians is the seed” (often glossed to “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” Apology 50).
To recap: we now have Christmas, Good Friday, Pentecost, and the feasts of martyrs as candidates for the Church’s birthday. A more thorough search might turn up even more (take note, students in search of a paper topic!). Returning briefly to the Pentecost preface, it is interesting to note that while the MR 2002 has principio nascentis Ecclesiae, the GeV has principiis nascentis Ecclesiae. That is, the 8th-century Gelasian preface indicates plural beginnings of the Church, suggesting that there is no singular birthday but a sort of coming into being throughout salvation history.
I’ll leave the merits of balloons and streamers to others, except to say that I would counsel against them on Good Friday. The multiplicity of birthdays of the Church gets to the very core of the liturgy. The liturgical year doesn’t celebrate simply a series of discrete salvific events as past occurrences, it brings us to the very heart of salvation in Christ Jesus in its totality here and now. The Spirit is active in the Church today. Christ is born and incarnate now. Martyrs witness to the faith in our own time. Today. Today. Today. So too the Church, as the Body of Christ, is instantiated in all these times and in every time we gather to remember the mighty deeds of our salvation.
As Advent draws near(!), I’m going to ponder what it might be to celebrate Christmas not only as the birth of Christ, but to celebrate it also as the Birthday of the Body – a day that makes the Church. Here’s Leo, one last time:
“Yet all of us, the whole sum of believers who have sprung from the baptismal font, just as we have been crucified with Christ in his Passion, been raised with him in his Resurrection, and been set at the right hand of the Father in his Ascension, so too have we been born along with him in his Nativity.”[7]
[1] I wish to thank Fr. Andrew for allowing me to reference his work and for bringing this to my attention.
[2] Patrick Regan, Advent to Pentecost: Comparing the Seasons in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 300.
[3] Liber sacramentorum Romanae aeclesiae ordinis anni circuli (Cod. Vat. Reg. lat. 316/Paris Bibl. Nat. 7193, 41-56) (Sacramentarium Gelasianum), ed. Leo Cunibert Mohlberg, 2nd ed., Rerum Ecclesiasticarum Documenta, Series Maior: Fontes 4 (Rome: Herder, 1968), 100.
[4] St. Leo the Great: Sermons, trans. Jane Freeland and Agnes Conway, Fathers of the Church 93 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 104.
[5] Tractatus 26, ed. A. Chavasse, Sancti Leonis Magni romani pontificis tractatus septem et nonaginta, CCSL 138 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1973), 126. My translation.
[7] Sermon 26, FC 93, 105.
[6] Tractatus 84 bis, CCSL 138A, 529. My translation.
Tyler Sampson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He received his PhD in liturgical studies/sacramental theology from The Catholic University of America in 2023. His research tends to focus on the history and theology of Christian liturgy in the first millennium, particularly the developments and adaptations of the liturgy of the city of Rome. Tyler is a member of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music of The Episcopal Church.