By JAMES MONTI
In His loving plan for mankind God has willed to endow us not merely with one means of physically perceiving what He has created, but rather with an array of five different senses, five different ways to experience the beauty of His handiwork — five different invitations to love Him all the more.
So too, the Church, in summoning her children to the worship of God in the sacred liturgy, has not contented herself with employing only one or two of the senses, but rather has found the means of engaging all five of these “portals” in raising the heart and mind to God.
Of course the sacraments are the prime examples of this, but the various physical objects that the Church has employed over the centuries to furnish and adorn the House of God also speak compellingly to the senses in communicating invisible truths. Among the most precious of these is the wax candle — an object that speaks to three of man’s senses: sight, smell, and touch.
The sight of a flickering candle can be a powerful experience for the soul, whether it be the solitary light of a red sanctuary lamp shimmering in the night, keeping watch over the tabernacle of a quiet church, or the blaze of over a hundred candles illuminating the golden urn of the repository on Holy Thursday, filling the chapel with the fragrance of wax.
In processions candles also speak to the sense of touch, for there is something uniquely moving about bearing a candle with its quivering flame in one’s own hand.
The importance of candles in the sacred liturgy is attested by the requirement that for the licit celebration of Mass there must be at least two lit candles, as specified in the rubrics of the Roman Missal (Missale Romanum, Amended Third Latin Typical Edition, 2008, GIRM, n. 117).
Candles or torches were already in use at Christian funeral rites by the third century. And it is at the apex of the liturgical year, the Easter vigil, that the grandest of candles, the Paschal candle, is borne into the church as the supreme visual expression of the glory, majesty, and divine sovereignty of the Risen Christ.
Sadly the use of real candles in Catholic worship has become a rarity in all too many places. This started years ago when the traditional votive candle stands that used to grace the side altars, shrines, and side chapels of most churches were either eliminated entirely or replaced with utterly artificial push-button, coin-operated electric votive light stands.
More recently, an even more troubling trend has set in: The wax altar candles required for celebrating Mass have been replaced with hollowed-out white plastic sheaths made to resemble wax candles but which in reality are little more than mountings for little jars of liquid paraffin concealed within, supplying the flame.
And if of late you’ve come to notice that your parish’s Paschal candle never seems to grow any shorter no matter how many months have passed since Easter and no matter how many times it has been lit for funerals, chances are that it too is nothing more than a tubed paraffin substitute. Even some sanctuary lamps for the tabernacle are now nothing more than electric lights.
While these substitutes may seem like attractive ways to save money in parishes with tight budgets, what has gone seemingly unnoticed is that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has voiced its firm disapproval of all these fake candles (USCC, Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy Newsletter, November 1984).
Apart from oil being an approved alternative for sanctuary lamps, wax, real wax, is the only approved substance for altar candles in the United States (albeit it can be mixed with other substances such as paraffin wax).
Why do real candles matter so much in the sacred liturgy? Because real candles are laden with rich symbolism. A candle’s gradual consumption by its flame is an expression of the oblation of our prayers and sacrifices offered to God. Its wax is produced by the labor of the bee, a creature traditionally seen as a symbol of our Lady. Reflecting upon the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the 14th-century Carthusian monk Ludolph of Saxony (+1377) tells us more:
“Christ the Son of Mary is a lit candle, by reason of the three things that are found in it, namely the wick, the fire, and the wax; and in Christ there are three things, namely the flesh, the soul, and the true divinity. This candle has been offered to the Lord for mankind, by which the night of our darkness has been illuminated” (Vita Jesu Christ, part 1, chapter 12, translated in James Monti, A Sense of the Sacred, Ignatius Press, 2012, p. 291).
The association of candles with the liturgical commemoration of Our Lord’s Presentation in the Temple, which we celebrate each year on February 2, is traceable to fifth-century Jerusalem, when a pious Roman matron named Ikalia introduced the practice of carrying candles in procession on this feast (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Saint Theodosius, chapter 1).
This celebration, also known for many centuries as the feast of the Purification of Our Lady and by the popular name “Candlemas,” serves as a key moment of transition in the liturgical year. For it points back and brings to completion the Church’s annual contemplation of the Christmas mystery as we celebrate the day on which the joy of the Nativity reaches the ears of Simeon and Anna. This is aptly illustrated by the antiphon with which the rite of blessing candles begins in a 1567 missal for the Diocese of Palencia, Spain:
“O blessed Infancy, by which the life of our race has been restored. O most pleasing and delightful infant cries, by which we have escaped eternal weeping. O happy swaddling clothes, by which we have wiped away the defilement of our sins. O most splendid manger, wherein lay not merely the hay of animals, but the Bread of angels was found” (Missale Pallantinum, Palencia, 1567, fol. 251r).
At the same time, the haunting prophecy that Simeon utters to our Lady, that her divine Son was to be a Sign of Contradiction, “a sign that is spoken against” (Luke 2:34) and that a sword would pierce her own soul (Luke 2:35), looks ahead to the coming commemoration of the Passion of Our Lord in Holy Week and the penitential season of Lent that prepares us for it.
Candles are also associated with our Lord’s parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:1-13), a parable that speaks both to the particular moment when Christ will call each of us out of this world and to the coming of Christ at the end of time.
In the Candlemas rite of the 1567 Palencia missal, after the celebrant has blessed the candles facing ad orientem (“to the east”) and has both sprinkled them with holy water and incensed them, the distribution of the candles follows, accompanied by a responsory recalling this parable:
“Come, and light; prepare your lamps. Behold, the bridegroom comes; go out to meet Him. [Verse:] Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. [Repeat:] Behold the bridegroom comes. . . . [Verse:] Glory be to the Father. . . . Amen” (Missale Pallantinum, fols. 253v-254r).
The prayers for the preceding blessing of the candles in the Palencia missal include the following oration:
“Hearken to our supplications, O God omnipotent, and pour forth Thy bene + diction upon these candles, that Thy faithful people carrying them in their hands may rejoice not only in external light, but with blindness of heart expelled, perceive thus the light that shines in the darkness, that they may never go astray from the way of truth” (Missale Pallantinum, fol. 251v).
God’s True Light
At our Baptism, a lit candle was presented to us, and at the Easter vigil we hold a lit candle in our hands as we verbally renew what we promised at our Baptism — the promises of renouncing Satan, the father of lies and hence the father of heresies and heterodoxy, and the promises of adhering in word and deed to the teachings of Christ, to His Commandments, to what the Church has taught unerringly and irrevocably.
These promises constitute a burning candle in our souls, in our consciences, that we are duty-bound not to quench. Hence in the face of strange new ideas about marriage and divorce, all of us remain irrevocably bound by our baptismal promises to continue upholding and living by the Church’s irreformable teachings on the indissolubility of marriage, the objective sinfulness of adultery and fornication, and the need of being in a state of grace for the worthy reception of Holy Communion.
May we all persevere in the candlelight of our Baptism, burning with the love of Christ, and humbly beseeching God the Father Almighty, “that bathed in the rays of Thy true light, there on the day of just judgment, joyful with the hymns of the choir of angels, we may be worthy to see the face of the everlasting Sun” (Missale Pallantinum, fol. 253v).
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