Published posts numbers one and two were on January 31, 2005, Landscapes by Thomas Ender [watercolors at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences], and Siberian Digital Photo Collection at UC Berkeley's Slavic and East European collections.

Now that G.K. Chesterton's works are in the public domain (he's in the 'life +70 universe'), Maureen at maria lectix has begun podcasting The Everlasting Man. So far, she's got two readings up, the Prefatory Note; Introduction — The Plan of This Book, and the Bk. 1, Chapter 1: The Man in the Cave.

Via J. P. Sonnen's post New F.S.S.P. Rome blog..., a new blog to keep you informed of the liturgical happenings of the Rome apostolate of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter.

Fr Nicholas Schofield viewed Die Grosse Stille, and afterwards

A rather strange thing happened on my journey home. As I waited for a bus just outside the Barbican Underground station, I noticed the street sign behind me: Carthusian Street. I suddenly remembered that the site of the pre-Reformation London Charterhouse was a stone's throw from the Barbican. So, I made a quick pilgrimage to Charterhouse Square and the monastery buildings, many of which still survive (including the gatehouse).

Today, the Internet Archive made available Charterhouse in London : monastery, mansion, hospital, school by Gerald S. Davies (1921). The history of the Carthusian monastery is detailed up to Henry VIII's suppression, and from then, of the buildings, grounds and families which owned them, along with the hospital and school, to the Great War. Some information about other Carthusian monasteries is also given: I didn't know that there was one in the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, until it, too, was suppressed.

Due to conditions peculiar to the time and place, women were not excluded at first from London's Charterhouse. Davies writes:

The London Charterhouse took shape at the hour of a great crisis in the history of the country. The Black Death, with its sequence of lesser plagues, had left behind it much misery and that demoralisation which has always gone with and after such visitations. And the long French wars, perpetually calling away the picked manhood of the country, had filled up the cup of bitterness for the working classes. The entire absorption of the King and his nobles in these wars, to the neglect of the social condition of the country, had led to over-taxation, to misgovernment, to anarchy. The condition of London was hardly better than that of the country. . . . It was all over England, but especially in London and in the counties lying nearest to it, a period of seething unrest. The populace, both in town and country, looked with growing hatred and suspicion at the religious orders, whom they regarded as in some sort locked up with the interests of the wealthier classes. The influence of Wiclif and his followers accentuated the feeling. The teaching of John Ball was typical of the growing spirit. And at such a moment the attempted closing of a large area of ground which the commonalty had come to believe was theirs by right prescriptive was bound to create a threatening attitude towards the new Charterhouse in Smithfield, regarded as the playground of the London prentice. . . . [T]he Prior, fearless man as he was, dared not carry out the complete exclusion which the rules of the order required. For twenty-three years after the Black Death, before the little church which stood in that mournful God's acre, had become a Carthusian church, the people, men and women, mothers, wives, sisters, had resorted to the little building day and night to pray for the souls of their lost ones. And the people were in no mood to be shut out from a use that had grown so dear to them. Luscote did not dare to excite a mob that from time to time showed itself ready for deeds so dangerous.

Davies quotes from a manuscript:

In the year of our Lord, 1405, were hallowed the altars of the Holy Cross and St. Anne in the chapel of St. Anne at the west end of the church, and this was done of a purpose that women could there hear masses and so by degrees be shut out of the church. For from the beginning of the first foundation women were always wont to enter the church, and the brethren for fear of the common folk did not dare to forbid them. But the untamed people of the commonalty of London conspired in many injuries and terrors on them and other religious. . . .

The House avoided destruction during Wat Tyler's rebellion in 1381, but (in 1405?), a mob of Londoners attacked the Charterhouse. From the manuscript:

... while they were going, as it had been agreed between them, to that House of the Salutation of the Mother of God to destroy not only the enclosures, but all the cells, as they declared, affirming that before the laying out of the cells themselves, and within many years in the place where the cells have been built, and all around as if in a public place belonging to the said commonalty, they had races and practised divers games ; which was true, but only by permission and not of right or any other title of law. But by the will of God it happened that two or three of them fearing God withstood the multitude with great difficulty and with supplication turned them from their wicked purpose, but only for that day. For there were in those days many followers of the damnable sect of the Lollards. And on other occasions they came in greater numbers . . . and on their third and fourth coming they surrounded the whole House and its bounds in a ring, spying out as the sons of Israel the city of Jericho, and went inside and placed new bounds and limits according to their will for a long distance within the former bounds and limits and caused the old walls and the buildings within to be destroyed and removed and threatened to destroy the whole House. For such reasons the Prior and brethren feared to offend the said commonalty.

Fr Tim Finigan posts some images of graves and the like at St Mary's, Chislehurst, England, at his blog post Chislehurst graves and tombs. The last one is shows the grave of Michael Davies (March 13, 1936 - September 25, 2004). The Times's obituary is here. Father was the subdeacon at Davies's Requiem Mass at St Mary's.

Chislehurst is a village in the Borough of Bromley, Greater London, England. There is an image of St Mary's in 1873, on the Local History and Photos page on the Chislehurst Guide web site. The image is about one-third of the way down the page. The Local History page also has images of Napoleon III's funeral at St Mary's church, in 1873 as well. Wikipedia's Chislehurst entry says that 'the local telephone code, 467 in its earlier format, corresponded to the letters IMP (for imperial)', due to the area's association with the Emperor and his family.

Guido Reni was an Italian painter of the high-Baroque style, writes Wikipedia. One of his works hangs in Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini: St Michael the Archangel. A mosaic copy of the painting, executed some 125 years later, is in St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, above the Altar of St Michael the Archangel.

Guido Reni and the Politics of Art at the idle speculations blog, gives this account of the painting:

It shows the archangel trampling a Satan with the vividly recognizable features of Giovanni Battista Pamphilj (or Pamphili), later elected as Pope Innocent X. It was commissioned by Antonio Cardinal Barberini, a Capuchin and twin brother of Pope Urban VIII, and a fierce rival of the then Giovanni Battista Cardinal Pamphilj.

After Pamphilj was made Pope, Cardinal Barberini left Rome. Reni moved to Bologna and stayed there.

Catholic Encyclopedia articles: Pope Innocent X (1644 - 1655), Pope Urban VII (reigned for only twelve days in 1590). As to Antonio Cardinal Barberini, quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini, 'what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did', though that quote may have been incited by Pope Urban VIII's (1623 - 1644) behavior. As to Giovanni Battista Cardinal Pamphili, later Pope Innocent X, that Cardinal Pamphili was not Alessandro Scarlatti's and George Friderich Handel's patron, that was a different Cardinal Pamphili.

Archangel Michael, Guido Reni
Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, Rome, 1630


Altar of St Michael the Archangel
St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican
1757

While Pope Urban VII reigned for only twelve days, here is what the Catholic Encyclopedia article lists as his acts during that fortnight:

• made a list of all the poor in Rome that he might alleviate their needs,
• gave liberal alms to those cardinals whose income was insufficient,
• paid the debts of all the monts-de-piété (charitable institutions of credit that lent money at low rates of interest, or without interest at all, upon the security of objects left in pawn, with a view to protecting persons in want from usurers) in the Ecclesiastical State,
• ordered the bakers of Rome to make larger loaves of bread and sell them cheaper, indemnifying their losses out of his own purse,
• forbade his chamberlains to wear silk garments,
• in order to give occupation to the poor, he ordered the completion of the public works that had been commenced by his predecessor, and
• appointed a committee of cardinals for the reform of the Apostolic Datary.

Today is the Third Sunday after the Epiphany. From my ScrapBook grab of the old catholichaven.org site, here is part of Dom Guéranger's commentary.

Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded or listened to at Dominica III. post Epiphaniam.

Liam Quin maintains From Old Books, a site I mentioned in Public domain scanned images (including abbeys and churches in England and Wales) from old books, and whose image I used in The Song of Bethlehem.

This image is from The Antiquities of England and Wales, by Francis Grose, published in 1783.

[B]eginning with the nun on the left, and reckoning towards the right: the same order is observed with respect to the sitting figures. A Benedictine nun; a monk of the same order; a Cluniac; a Cistertian [sic] and a Carthusian; a nun of St. Gilbert; a regular canon of the same; a Trinitarian; a knight templar; knight hospitallar; a secular canon; a canon regular of the Præmonstratensians. The sitting figures are, a regular canon of St. Augustine; a regular canon of the holy Sepulche (sic); a canon of the Hospital of St John at Coventry; chaplain of the order of St. John of Jerusalem.

This image is a slightly scaled down version of the original, which is 1024 pixels by 807 pixels. There's a larger version available, 1522 pixels by 1200 pixels, at Religious Orders 1522x1200.

Poking around the Project Canterbury site (which isn't easily navigable), I came across the Percy Dearmer page, which links to the introduction he wrote for The Warham Guild's pamphlet Some English Altars. In the introduction, Dearmer deplores the 19th century deformation of English church interiors.

The altar in the chancel was almost invariably spoilt. This is why the improvement of altars is at the present time still mainly in the side-chapels, which are generally not encumbered with bad reredoses. . . .

People call these altars 'English altars,' because they must have some name; but they are really Catholic altars--the type which, in more than one form, persisted from early times over the whole Church, and only succumbed, two centuries after the Renaissance had begun, to the Baroque influence of the counter-Reformation. There are many Flemish pictures in the National Gallery to show this; and all over Italy from Giotto to Ghirlandaio and the painters of the sixteenth century, the pictures show no other form of altar.

The same is true even of fifteenth and sixteen century Spain (where the sunlight was excluded by the retablo); and the miniatures of France and Germany tell the same story as those of England. What that story is our illustrations show. . . .

Indeed there is a general agreement nowadays among architects, artists and ecclesiologists. Not in one restricted model (for riddel-posts are not of course necessary, beautiful as they are--and even riddels can be dispensed with--and altar-crosses also), but in the general principle, the type of altar illustrated in these pages is now agreed to be, with the ciborium type of basilican churches, that required by our architecture, and by the traditions and requirements of Catholic worship.

(When Dearmer uses the term 'Catholic', he refers not to the Roman Catholic Church, but to the idea that the Anglicans are Catholics.)

I've included some of the images from the page below the break. Go to the introduction for all of them.

See the previous post Tridentine reform of confessionals and churches, updated for some more information on the changes which developed after the Council of Trent.

From the above-linked page on The Warham Guild:

[T]he Warham Guild's work - rich frontals, altars with riddels and dossals, apparelled vestments, flowing surplices, chasubles and tunicles, embroidered banners, rood screens and rood beams, carved and gilded altar crosses and candlesticks, aumbries, fonts and lecterns, chalices and ciboria, censers, sanctuary lamps, double pyxes and sick-communion vessels, stained glass, episcopal appointments, copes, and much else - is synonymous with outstanding design, high-quality workmanship, and good taste.

Riddels, roods, aumbries, and many other terms, are defined at Richard's Church Albums - Glossary Of Terms. Look up dossal here.

A 'good deuoute Boke . . . profytable to all good Catholyke persones to knowe howe they shall deuoutly here Masse.'

I don't know how I came upon this page (I think it was via finding Origines Liturgicæ, or Antiquities of the English Ritual, and A Dissertation on Primitive Liturgies), but the images on Project Canterbury's page from the 1532 English edition of Dat Boexken van der Missen show the curtains I mentioned in Fifty Gothic Altars, and Consecranda ..., and the explanation to one of the images mentions them as well:

The .xiii. Artycle of the masse.

Howe after the Sanctus the preest begynneth wt scylence secretly the Canon hauynge the curteynes drawen: to the entêt that he be not troubled and doth inclyne hym selfe very lowe.

The book's description is:

The interpretacyon and syngyfycacyon of the Masse.

Here begynneth a good deuoute Boke to the honoure of god of our lady his mother & of all sayntes and ryght profytable to all good Catholyke persones to knowe howe they shall deuoutly here Masse. And how salutaryly they shall Confess them. And how reuerently and honourably they shall go to the holy Sacrament or table of our sauyour Jhesu chryste[.] With dyverse other profytable documents and oraysons or prayers here conteyned[.] Composed and ordeyned by frere Gararde frere mynoure of the ordre of the Obseruauntes.

The Rev A.J. Schulte has another work at the Internet Archive, Benedicenda, rites and ceremonies to be observed in some of the principal functions of the Roman Pontifical and the Roman Ritual, published by Benziger in 1907. H.T. Henry's Introduction contains these words:

The ceremonial of the Church, surrounding and interpreting and emphasizing all of her countless ministrations in behalf of the souls of her children, is the most obvious fact in their spiritual lives. It is also their teacher in reverence for the things of God, and is properly esteemed by them. And yet in their secular reading, possibly in conversations held with their non-Catholic friends, the motives lying behind that ceremonial, the value it possesses in symbolizing the spiritual facts it seeks to bring home to them, may be questioned and denied.

We shall not attempt here, however, any new defense of that flowering of the Christian life which is found in the ceremonies. This twentieth century of the Christian era would prove to be a very late day for undertaking a vindication of the wisdom of the Catholic Church in the creation and jealous conservation of her marvellously beautiful liturgy and her impressive and instructive ceremonial. For the Catholic heart, also, such a vindication was surely never anything but superfluous; and the declaration of St. Teresa, that she would gladly lay down her life in defense of the least of the Church's ceremonies, only emphasizes the sentiment of veneration for those ceremonies which, consciously or unconsciously, shapes the attitude of mind and heart of the true Catholic for every detail of the external worship of the Church. . . .

[W]hat philosophic analysis of the constitution of human nature fails to justify -- say, rather, fails to prescribe, as it were by a necessity of the case a resort to that ceremonial . . . which can address certain energetic faculties of the man to which speech has no access; which can stir depths of emotion, of reverence for divine things, of pathos and love and hope and fear, such as no ably reasoned argument could ever hope to reach? . . .

[T]he ceremonial of the Church was found to possess a wondrous power in preparing men for the reception of divine grace, since it could raise up the minds of the faithful to a contemplation of the highest verities of religion and could inflame their hearts with a compelling ardor of devotion to the service of God (Sixtus V., Constit. Immensa, 22 Januarii, 1588). Cardinal Bona expresses the same thought more fully when, in granting that the ceremonies possess of themselves no perfection or sanctity, he still points to the obvious fact that by their means the soul is aroused to a veneration of sacred things, the mind is raised up to heavenly concerns, piety is nourished, charity is inflamed, faith increases, devotion is strengthened, religion is conserved, and the true faithful are contra-distinguished from the pseudo-Christians and from the heterodox bodies and societies (De Divina Psalmodia, c. 19, sec. 3, n. i).

Searching the Internet Archive's texts for altars, I came across two items of interest:

• Fifty pictures of Gothic altars, by Percy Dearmer, published in 1910, and
• Consecranda : rites and ceremonies observed at the consecration of churches, altars, altarstones, chalices and patens, by the Rev A.J. Schulte, copyright 1907.

Dearmer was an Anglican. Schulte's work was published by Benziger, and he ws Professor of Liturgy at St Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Dearmer points out that the altar would be enclosed by curtains at different times during the Mass, either on the right and left sides, or on all sides, and I reproduce some of his comments on this feature below the break.

The Consecranda is divided into chapters on the consecration of a church, the consecration of altars, of an altar the sepulchre of which is below the table, of an altar-stone, and of a chalice and paten. One of the book's appendicies contains the Decrees of the Council of Trent which were formerly read by the archdeacon at the consecration of a church, from Sess. XXIL, Chap. XL, On Reformation and Sess. XXV., Chap. XII., On Reformation.

Today is the Second Sunday after the Epiphany. From my ScrapBook grab of the old catholichaven.org site, here is part of Dom Guéranger's commentary.

Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded or listened to at Dominica II. post Epiphaniam.

What a story, what dialogue, and what acting. Cyrano DeBergerac (1950). Ignore the 'ipod' in the directory name, this is fine for viewing on your computer's monitor, as you can see in this image of the mp4 playing in gxine.

José Ferrer, the opening scene

In January 7, the Feast of the Holy Family ..., I quoted from the Web Gallery of Art's description of The Holy Kinship triptych: 'All Christ's relatives are gathered together, following a description in the Golden Legend of 1263-73 by Jacopo da Voragine.' Below the break is the part of The Golden Legend relating Our Lord's kin.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Family, which wasn't a universal feast in the Latin Church until 1921, when Benedict XV extended it. Hence, no excerpts from The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger. The Gospel is St Luke, ch ii, verses 42 through 52, and Father Nadal's illustration for the First Sunday after Epiphany, below the break, depicts part of this reading. I've included some images of the Holy Kinship, Christ's extended earthly family.

Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded or listened to at Sanctæ Familiæ Iesu, Mariæ et Ioseph.

Daniel Mitsui's post The Cherry Tree Carol has this intriguing comment about St Joseph:

How strange the carol's description of St. Joseph must sound to Tridentine Catholics devoted to the handsome young man from the Holy Family of Murillo. This St. Joseph is old, conflicted, suspicious of having been cuckolded. Yet that was the only St. Joseph known for the first three quarters of Christian history; it was the St. Joseph of the Church Fathers, of the monks who civilized Europe, of the scholastic schoolmen.

The complete re-imagination of the saint was a success of Counter-Reformational marketing; no more wrinkles, no more gray beard. The man burning diapers far in the background of the Flemish paintings, or accosted by Satan outside the cave at Bethlehem in the Byzantine icons was remade, according to Francis de Sales's conception of the Holy Family, as nothing less than the terrestrial image of God the Father.

More pre-Tridentine piety below the break.

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany (except in the United States). From my ScrapBook grab of the old catholichaven.org site, here is Dom Guéranger's commentary. He has some interesting things to say about a custom of the English monarch, blessings of the laity's gold, frankincense and myrrh during the Middle Ages and until the nineteenth century in Germany and about King's Feast.

Today's Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion in mp3 format, chanted, can be downloaded or listened to at In Epiphania Domini.

Just as I've started reading The Sacred Shrine, A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church, along comes Terry at the idle speculations blog with the post Bologna: Saint Dominic and the Basilica of San Domenico with lovely images of the shrines to St Dominic at the homonymous basilica, illustrating Yrjö Hirn's thesis:

What the following chapters attempt to prove can, however, be put forward here only as a proposition. Catholic art . . . ornaments a shrine. Chests, cases, or small boxes in a word, closed coverings which conceal valuable contents are the most holy, and therefore the most beautifully formed and most expensively decorated of all the objects met with in ritualistic art. So dominating is the place which the shrine occupies among religious objects, that the idea of a shrine is continually meeting us even in the art which is not formative. A sealed case is the centre of Catholic poetry, as it is the centre of Catholic ceremonial.

Serendipity, from Walpole: 'making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things . . . not in quest of.'

Lars Brownworth has a new podcast up. This one is about Basil II, who lived 958 – December 15, 1025 and reigned from January 10, 976 to December 15, 1025. Download it from the 12 Byzantine Rulers, The History of The Byzantine Empire page or directly as an mp3 audio file here. The description of the podcast:

By the time Basil II was crowned at age two, the Macedonian Dynasty had led the Byzantine Empire to seemingly endless military victories and unprecedented heights of glory. However it was not the emperors who had accomplished so much, but their powerful generals. In fact Basil's dynasty seemed to be in danger of becoming purely ceremonial or disappearing completely. The young emperor, dominated completely by his regents, seemed unlikely to change things. There was no trace of the heroic about him, no charisma or sparkling personality, and yet he was to emerge as the greatest emperor of his dynasty- bending the army, the empire, and foreign princes alike to the force of his will. Join Lars Brownworth as he looks at the reign of Basil II, the last great conqueror Byzantium ever produced.

Previous '12 Byzantine Rulers' posts here:

• New '12 Byzantine Rulers' lecture released (about Basil I),
• New '12 Byzantine Rulers' lecture: the Empress Irene,
• 12 Byzantine Rulers, more free audio.

Every Thursday, the BBC's Radio Four program In Our Time airs at 9.00-9.45 a.m., repeated 9.30 p.m. (all times GMT). Each week's show discusses a topic in history, science, religion, philosophy or culture, and is available for free download in mp3 audio file format, until Thursday comes around again and the next show airs. Last Thursday, December 28, 2006, presenter Melvyn Bragg and contributors Roger Crowley, author and historian, Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London and Colin Imber, formerly Reader in Turkish at Manchester University discussed the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Second in 1453.

“The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm”. It was the end of the classical world and the crowning of an Ottoman Empire that would last until 1922.

Constantinople was a city worth fighting for – its position as a bridge between Europe and Asia and its triangular shape with a deep water port made it ideal both for trade and defence. It was also rumoured to harbour great wealth. Whoever conquered it would reap rewards both material and political.

Earlier attempts to capture the city had largely failed – so why did the Ottomans succeed this time? What difference did the advances in weaponry such as cannons make in the outcome of the battle? And what effect did the fall of Constantinople have on the rest of the Christian world?

This is one mp3 I might put up here for download, just as I've put up Vatican Radio's The Dream of the Rood and Brian Hayes's article, 'Clock of Ages' from AssistiveMedia, originally published in the November/December 1999 issue of The Sciences. See The Dream of the Rood for that mp3 format audio file, and The comput ecclesiastique (ecclesiastical computer) of the Strasbourg Cathedral clock: images, audio and .pdf files for the Clock of Ages mp3. I have an mp3 of In Our Time's The Carolingian Renaissance - the revival of early medieval Western Europe which should be available from this site later this week.

The In Our Time archives are here, where you can listen live to older shows, but those shows are not available for download.

The Feast of the Holy Name has been celebrated on various dates since its inception, and the Catholic Encyclopaedia article, written before the calendar revisions by Pope St Pius X, says it occurs on the second Sunday after Epiphany. The saintly Pope moved it to the Sunday immediately after the first of January, if there was a Sunday between that date and the Epiphany. In years when there was no no such Sunday, such as A.D. 2007, the celebration is on the second of January in the pre-1969 calendar.

Below the break are breviary.net's Lessons iv. v. and vi. from the Divine Office readings for the Most Holy Name of Jesus. The Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion of today's Mass are not yet available at Sanctissimum Nomem Iesu.

Jump to update.

Most folks know that the Council of Trent defined many doctrines and clarified many questions. The Council also reformed the discipline of the clergy and curia. But it also seems to have caused interesting changes in some sacraments. Back in December, 2006, Fr Tim Finigan's post Poor Clares at Krakow included a photo of a confessional in the Church of the Poor Clares, in Kraków, Poland, with this comment:

As with several other Churches we visited, the confessional seemed to speak of the immediate post-Tridentine reform with a basic arrangement for the anonymity of the penitent, the public placing of the confessional and the liturgical nature of the celebration.

I searched the Documents of the Council of Trent references to confession or penance and could find nothing which heralded a change in how the sacrament was to be administered. If things changed, they weren't because of something specific in the documents of the Council.

Likewise, from time to time, I've come across staements that Catholic church interiors changed after Trent, and that, paradoxically, the Jesuits were in the forefront of the changes, with the Church of the Gesù in Rome. (The full name of which is the Chiesa del Sacro Nome di Gesù, Church of the Holy Name of Jesus. The feast of the Holy Name is on January 2 in Church's pre-1969 calendar).

No narthex, no choir or rood screen, the chancel disappearing, aisles and side chapels limited or eliminated, Latin cross truncated transepts, semicircular apse, a centralized plan, perspective and mindset, there was now little to draw attention to anything except the high altar and pulpit, from which the laity were educated by the Society's priests. The artistic appointments, 'stimulating the senses to promote memory, intellect, and will', started a generation later. (The quote is from a review by Larry Silver of Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany.)

Update: Fr Finigan's post St Charles Borromeo and Church Architecture credits the saintly cardinal-priest and archbishop of Milan with

apply[ing] the teaching of the council of Trent to Church architecture [by his Instructiones Fabricae Et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, the text of which does not seem to be available on the 'net] . . . [and] the directives in the Roman Missal on "The Church and its furnishings" and the "Instructions for Consecrating a Church" in the Roman Pontifical.

That an archbishop of Milan, home to the Ambrosian rite, would have such an influence on Latin rite architecture, is a pleasant irony. Of course, Borromeo received the tonsure shortly after his ninth birthday (the Catholic Encyclopaedia says the twelfth), was called to the Papal court early in 1560, created cardinal deacon in the consistory of January 31, 1560, made administrator of the archdiocese of Milan, February 7, 1560, received the subdiaconate and the diaconate, December 21, 1560, ordained a priest, September 4, 1563 and consecrated, December 7, 1563. He was the first resident archbishop of Milan for eighty years, and on two occasions, rebellious clergy made murderous assaults on him. See BORROMEO, Carlo (1538-1584).

Father also links to Michael Gallegos's article Charles Borromeo and Catholic tradition regarding the design of Catholic Churches for a summary of the Instructiones.

From my ScrapBook grab of the former catholichaven.org site, below the break is part of Dom Guéranger's commentary on the Feast of the Circumcision and some images of the station church, Santa Maria in Trastevere.