In calendariis propriis Ordinum Franciscalium et pro aliquibus locis. Extra Calendarium Generale anni 1962, in quo hac die colitur S. Alphonsus Maria de Ligorio, Episcopus, Confessor et Ecclesiae Doctor, cum commemoratione S. Stephani I, Papae et Martyris.
I. Identitas et Origines
The feast kept on the second of August by the whole Franciscan family does not celebrate a saint but a sanctuary: the small chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, called the Portiuncula — the “little portion” — standing in the plain below Assisi. It is a dedication feast, the anniversary of a consecrated place, and in this it belongs to one of the most ancient instincts of Catholic worship: that God, who fills heaven and earth, deigns to fasten His grace to particular stones.
The origins of the chapel are veiled. A pious tradition, transmitted in later Franciscan sources, holds that it was raised in the fourth century by hermits come from the valley of Josaphat, and that it passed in time to the monks of St. Benedict. This ancient foundation cannot be established historically and is retained here as traditio pia: venerable, edifying, and unverifiable. What stands on firmer ground is that by the twelfth century the chapel belonged to the Benedictine abbey of San Benedetto on Monte Subasio, and that it lay abandoned and half-ruined in the wooded plain, its name — the Portiuncula — apparently derived from the small parcel of land on which it stood.
The title “St. Mary of the Angels” is likewise anciently attested but diversely explained. The early Franciscan biographers report the tradition that angelic voices were often heard in that place, and that the chapel bore its name from of old for this reason. St. Bonaventure, in his Legenda maior, records that Francis remained there out of reverence for the angels and love for the Mother of Christ. The angelic visitations are traditio pia; the antiquity of the title, and Francis’s motive of Marian and angelic devotion, rest on the earliest lives and may be received as historically attested tradition.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The chapel’s greatness is inseparable from the conversion of St. Francis. Commanded from the crucifix of San Damiano to rebuild the church of God, Francis — understanding the word first in its plainest sense — restored three ruined chapels about Assisi: San Damiano itself, San Pietro, and last the Portiuncula. It was in this third and least of them, according to the constant testimony of the early sources, that the Franciscan vocation was born in its explicit form. Hearing at Mass the Gospel of the sending of the apostles — that they should possess neither gold nor silver, neither scrip nor staff, but preach the kingdom of God (cf. Matth. 10:7–10: Euntes autem praedicate, dicentes: Quia appropinquavit regnum caelorum… Nolite possidere aurum, neque argentum) — Francis cried out that this was what he sought with his whole heart, cast off shoes and staff, and clothed himself in the rough habit of the poor. The Portiuncula is thus the cradle of the Order of Friars Minor: the place where the Rule of the holy Gospel was first embraced as a form of life.
Here too the virtues proper to the place shine forth. The Benedictines, moved by the sanctity of the friars, wished to give the chapel outright; Francis, jealous for Lady Poverty, would own nothing, and accepted it only in use, sending the monks each year a basket of fish from the Tescio in acknowledgment that the friars were tenants and pilgrims, not proprietors. The gesture is a whole theology of religious poverty in miniature: the sons of Francis would hold even their motherhouse as a loan.
At the Portiuncula, on the night following Palm Sunday in the year 1212, the noble maiden Clare of Assisi fled the world, received the tonsure at the hands of Francis before the altar of the Virgin, and so began the Order of Poor Ladies. Here the friars gathered in their general chapters, including the famous Chapter of Mats, when thousands of brothers encamped in huts of wattle about the little church. And here, on the third of October 1226, having asked to be carried back to the place he loved above every other, Francis died — laid on the bare earth, in sight of the chapel of the Angels, singing the psalm Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi. The Portiuncula thus encloses the whole arc of the Franciscan mystery: vocation, foundation, fraternity, and holy death, all under the mantle of the Mother of God.
III. Ratio Cultus
Why is the Virgin honored here as Sancta Maria Angelorum — St. Mary of the Angels? The title gathers two truths of the faith into one image. First, the Church confesses Mary as Queen of Angels — Regina Angelorum, as the Litany of Loreto sings — because, exalted above every creature by her divine maternity, she is set over the angelic hierarchies themselves; the seraphim minister to her whom the Word made His mother. Second, the angels are the servants and companions of the mysteries of Christ, and where Mary is honored, the courtiers of her Son attend. The tradition of angelic song at the Portiuncula, whatever its historical standing, expresses this doctrinal instinct with perfect fitness: a chapel of the Virgin is a threshold of the angelic world.
The feast itself is a dedication feast — the anniversary of the consecration of the chapel — and was extended from the Order’s own use to many places. Its observance on the second of August stands in the Franciscan proper calendar and in local calendars, not in the General Calendar of the Roman Rite; the universal Church keeps this day the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori. This coexistence is itself instructive. The Roman tradition has always allowed religious orders and particular churches their proper feasts alongside the universal sanctoral: unity of faith and rite, diversity of legitimate inheritance. The little chapel’s cult, radiating outward from Assisi, has marked even the map of the world — the Spanish Franciscans named their foundation on the Porciúncula river in California El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, whence the city called Los Angeles bears, in truncated form, the name of this feast.
IV. Cultus et Indulgentia
The glory of the Portiuncula among the faithful is the Pardon of Assisi. The tradition of the Order recounts that in 1216, as Francis prayed in the chapel by night, Our Lord appeared to him with His Blessed Mother amid a multitude of angels, and bade him ask what he would for the salvation of souls. Francis asked that all who should enter that chapel, confessed and contrite, might receive a plenary remission of the punishment due to their sins; and Christ granted it, sending him to His vicar for confirmation. Pope Honorius III, the account continues, confirmed the grace by word of mouth, and the Pardon was fixed to the day of the chapel’s dedication, from first Vespers of the first of August through the second.
The historian must speak carefully here. No contemporary bull of Honorius III survives, and the earliest written testimonies to the indulgence and its origin belong to the later thirteenth century, above all the Tractatus de indulgentia S. Mariae de Portiuncula of Francesco Bartholi, which gathers the sworn depositions of aged witnesses. The vision of Christ and Our Lady is therefore traditio pia; the existence and antiquity of the indulgence itself, its attachment to the second of August, and the Church’s continuous approbation of it are certain. Whatever the documentary silence of 1216, the Popes made the Pardon their own. Sixtus IV extended it to all the churches of the Order in 1481, and successive pontiffs enlarged it until the faithful could gain it, under the usual conditions, in Franciscan and in many parish churches throughout the world. In the traditional discipline the Portiuncula indulgence was celebrated for its toties quoties character — gained as often as the visit and prayers were repeated within the appointed hours, and applicable to the souls in Purgatory — a liberality that drew, and draws still, great multitudes to confession and Communion at the beginning of August. Here as always the doctrine must be stated exactly: an indulgence remits not sin but the temporal punishment remaining after sin has been forgiven, and the old numerical measures attached to partial indulgences referred to the canonical penances of the ancient Church, never to a term of days in Purgatory. The Pardon of Assisi is thus no magic but the Church dispensing, from the treasury of Christ and the saints, the medicine of satisfaction to her contrite children.
The chapel itself, too precious to be left to the weather, was enclosed within the great basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, begun in 1569 under St. Pius V, so that the pilgrim now passes through the vast church to find, standing whole beneath the dome, the little stone chapel of the Angels — the Church universal built, as it were, around her littlest portion.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Thomas of Celano records that Francis, though he knew the kingdom of heaven is established in every place, had learned that the church of St. Mary of the Portiuncula was filled with more abundant grace and frequented by heavenly visitants, and that he therefore charged his sons never to abandon it, bidding them, if driven out by one door, to return by another, for the place was truly holy and the dwelling of God (Celano, Vita prima, cap. 106; cf. Bonaventura, Legenda maior, cap. 2). Dying, he commended the Portiuncula to the friars above all other places, as most dear to the Blessed Virgin.
The spiritual doctrine of the feast lies in its very name. God’s greatest works begin in a portiuncula — a little portion. A ruined chapel the size of a cottage became the motherhouse of an Order that renewed Christendom; a handful of beggars became an army of apostles; and the Virgin who called herself the handmaid of the Lord was made Queen of the very angels. The soul that would be a dwelling of grace must consent to be small: poor in spirit, hidden, held in use and not in ownership, paying its basket of fish in daily acknowledgment that all is loan and gift. And the Pardon teaches the complement of littleness, which is confidence: that the mercy of God, dispensed through His Church, is larger than every debt, and that the contrite have only to enter, confess, and ask.
VI. Oratio
The Mass of the feast is proper to the Seraphic use: the formulary of the Dedication of St. Mary of the Angels in the Missale Romano-Seraphicum, joining the theology of a church’s consecration to the praise of the Virgin, Queen of Angels — begging through her intercession that the faithful who venerate her in the temple made with hands may themselves be built into a holy temple of God. Until the proper Collect can be given from the printed Seraphic missal itself, let the most ancient of all the Church’s prayers to the Mother of God, sung beneath her protection since the age of the martyrs, stand at the head of this feast:
Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, sancta Dei Genetrix: nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus nostris, sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta.
We fly to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God: despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.
VII. Aspiratio
O Mary, Queen of Angels, who didst choose the least portion for the cradle of great mercies: obtain for me a little heart, that the Lord of heaven may make it His dwelling; and when I have wasted His gifts, lead me back through the door of pardon, that I may stand debtless before thy Son. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Tier 1 — Primary and magisterial sources. Matth. 10:7–10 (the apostolic sending, the Gospel of the Franciscan vocation); Sixtus IV, bull extending the indulgence to the churches of the Order (1481; Bullarium Franciscanum); Paul VI, Const. Ap. Indulgentiarum Doctrina (1967; AAS 59), with the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, in which the Portiuncula indulgence stands confirmed in the Church’s present discipline.
Tier 2 — Early witnesses and attested tradition. Thomas of Celano, Vita prima S. Francisci (Fontes Franciscani; Analecta Franciscana X); St. Bonaventure, Legenda maior (Opera omnia, ed. Quaracchi, t. VIII); Francesco Bartholi, Tractatus de indulgentia S. Mariae de Portiunculae, ed. P. Sabatier (Paris, 1900) — the principal medieval dossier of the Pardon; St. Ambrose of the place’s Benedictine tenure and the early charters of San Benedetto on Subasio as treated in the Franciscan historiography.
Tier 3 — Traditio pia. The fourth-century foundation by hermits of the valley of Josaphat; the angelic songs heard at the chapel; the nocturnal vision of Christ and Our Lady granting the Pardon at St. Francis’s petition.
Learning paths. This feast opens directly onto the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path, where the doctrine of indulgences — the treasury of merits, the remission of temporal punishment, and the reform of the numerical designations — is treated in full; onto Church History, in the rise of the mendicant orders and the renewal of the thirteenth century; and onto Sacred Liturgy, in the theology of church dedication and the coexistence of proper calendars with the universal Roman rite.