Mozarabic Rite

As Christianity gained dominance in the wake of the conversion of Constantine I early in the fourth century, there was a period of liturgical development as the communities emerged from smaller gatherings to large assemblies in public halls and new churches.

In the West, the liturgy in Roman Africa was lost as the Church there was weakened by internal division and then the Vandal invasion, and then was extinguished in the wake of the Islamic ascendancy.

Indeed, certain elements of this rite (e.g. the distinctive emphasis on "Trinity" as a title of address in many prayers, the recitation of the Creed in the liturgy) have been interpreted as a reaction to Visigothic Arianism.

[7] Though reasonably tolerant, the Visigoths controlled episcopal appointments, which may have provoked the first extant expression of papal concern in Pope Vigilius's letter to the bishop of Braga in 538, dealing with baptism, penance and reconsecration of churches.

It was under Visigothic aegis that the Hispanic liturgy reached its point of greatest development; new rituals, euchology, and hymns were added to the liturgical rites, and efforts were made to standardize Christian religious practices throughout the peninsula.

[8] Isidore, Leander's brother and successor, presided over the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, which established uniform chants for the Divine Office and the Eucharistic liturgy.

While the Islamic authorities accorded the Mozarabs dhimmi status (thus allowing them to practice their religion with certain restrictions), public displays of faith and the construction of new churches were prohibited, which limited the ability of the rite to develop naturally and perhaps even contributed to an attitude of conservatism.

King Sancho III of Navarre (1000–1035) and his son Ferdinand I of León (1035–1065) for instance were connected with the monastery of Cluny and developed the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, which brought in thousands of French and northern European pilgrims and with them, their influences.

), during the course of their attempt to explain Christology in a way easily understood by Muslim authorities, have been accused of falling into Adoptionism (i.e. that Jesus was adopted by the Father as the Son of God).

Alexander II, for instance, effected the establishment of the Roman liturgy in Aragon through the papal legate Hugh Candidus, whose work also resulted in its spread to Navarre.

As part of his program to systematically replace the Old Hispanic liturgy with the Roman one in his domain, Alfonso installed Cluniac monks in the monasteries of Silos and San Millán de la Cogolla and French prelates such as Bernard of Sédirac in Toledo and other cities of his realm.

This led to a diminishment in the ranks of Mozarabic clergy, so that by the mid-15th century there were few priests to minister to the community and fewer still who could read the Visigothic script used in the ancient liturgical books.

[21] In 1436, Juan Vázquez de Cepeda, bishop of Segovia, left in his will benefices for the creation of a chapel and center of Mozarabic studies in his villa at Aniago near Valladolid.

Unfortunately, due to insufficient funds as well as a lack of connection to any living Mozarab community, the foundation lasted for only five years before passing into the hands of the Carthusian Order.

The Mozarabic clergy sought papal confirmation of Mendoza's decree and obtained it from Pope Innocent VII in the bull Fiat ut petitur.

[13][24][25] In the missal's preface, Ortiz lays out the five general norms underlying the reform: the identification of extant manuscripts, the license to edit and rewrite according to the original style, the excision of material deemed late or inauthentic, the formatting of the text in a logical manner, and the printing of the books in a readable form.

[27] In between the publication of the missal and the breviary, Cisneros instituted a chapel in the cathedral's cloister with a college of thirteen priests who were to conduct a daily celebration of the Mozarabic liturgy.

[13] The resulting liturgical books reflected Cisneros's plan of reform including the selection of the texts and order of worship of Tradition B, which came to be attributed to Isidore of Seville.

It seems this choice was made based on Isidore's status in the Catholic Church as a whole as well as the interests of Cisneros and Ortiz to stress the antiquity of Spanish literary works.

Because of the prevailing assumption that Ortiz had simply printed the contents of the ancient liturgical books, the existence of his editions caused scholars to neglect the actual manuscripts of the rite.

[30] The first scholar to attempt a thorough analysis of the Mozarabic liturgical codices was the Jesuit polymath Andrés Marcos Burriel (1719–1762) in the mid-18th century, who had noticed discrepancies between the printed editions and the manuscripts.

After being appointed as the director of the short-lived Royal Commission on the Archives by Ferdinand VI in 1749, formed by the government to obtain evidence for the royal patronage of church benefices in Spain, Burriel took advantage of his position to research the ancient manuscripts of the Hispanic Rite in Toledo's cathedral library with the help of paleographer Francisco Xavier de Santiago Palomares (1728–1796), who made copies of the texts.

Lorenzana's motivation was apparently to assert the Hispanic cultural heritage as encased in the Mozarabic liturgy, as well as to replace the then-antiquated Latin-Gothic typeset of the Cisneros edition.

He was influenced in this endeavor by the scholarly edition of the Missale Mixtum published by Jesuit Alexander Lesley (1694–1758) in 1755, which both revealed grammatical and orthographic errors in the Latin and put the authenticity of some of the prayers therein into question.

Between 1988 and 1995, the two-volume Missale Hispano-Mozarabicum, followed by the lectionary (the Liber Commicus, also in two volumes) and a vernacular (Castilian) version of the Ordinary of the Mass appeared, with the required approval of the Spanish Episcopal Conference and confirmation by the Holy See.

[38] Pope John Paul II performed the Hispanic liturgy in May 1992 (the Feast of the Ascension) on occasion of the promulgation of the revised missal and Lectionary[39] and again in December 2000, during the end of the Great Jubilee.

Indeed, an anecdote about Charles the Bald relates that he had priests sent from Hispania so that he could experience the ancient Gallican liturgy[42] and an edict of the Fourth Council of Toledo (633) prescribes a single order of worship for all of Iberia and Gaul.

[52] Hornby and Maloy (2013) cautions that due to the influx of refugees from Muslim Iberia to Toledo, "it cannot be automatically assumed that the surviving manuscripts are witnesses to a long tradition of Toledan practice.

Extensive use is made of responsories between the celebrant (priest) and faithful during the Mozarabic Mass, including during the Confiteor (prayer of confession of guilt for sin), which is quite different from that in the Roman Rite.

For example, in the 1880s the Anglican Communion examined the Mozarabic rite for ideas about making their own liturgy more inspiring, and at present the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church employs it for the celebration of all sacraments.