Salvete Christi Vulnera

Salvete Christi Vulnera

The Roman Breviary hymn at Lauds of the feast of the Most Precious Blood, is found in the Appendix to Pars Verna of the Roman Breviary (Venice, 1798). The office, added since 1735, was in some dioceses a commemorative Lenten feast, and is still thus found assigned to Friday after the fourth Sunday of Lent, with rite of major double. Pius IX (Aug 10, 1849) added it to the regular feasts of the Breviary and assigned it to the first Sunday of July (double of the second class). In the fact that the feast was thus established generally after the pope's return from Gæta, Faber sees "an historical monument of a vicissitude of the Holy See, a perpetual Te Deum for a deliverance of the Vicar of Christ" (The Precious Blood, p. 334, Amer. ed.). The hymn comprises eight Ambrosian stanzas in classical iambic dimeter verse together with a proper doxology:

Summa ad Parentis dexteram
Sedenti habenda est gratia
Qui nos redemit sanguine,
Sanctoque firmat Spiritu. Amen.

A cento, comprising stanzas i, ii, iv, viii, forms the hymn at Lauds in the office of the Pillar of the Scourging (Columna Flagellationis D.N.J.C.), a feast celebrated in some places on the Tuesday after Quinquagesima Sunday; but the hymn in this case has its proper doxology:

Cæso flagellis gloria,
Jesu, tibi sit jugiter,
Cum patre et almo Spiritu
Nunc et per sæculum. Amen.

To the translations of Caswall, Oxenham, and Wallace, listed in Julian's "Dictionary of Hymnology", should be added those of Archbishop Bagshawe (Breviary Hymns and Missal Sequences, p. 101: "All hail! ye Holy Wounds of Christ"), Donahoe (Early Christian Hymns, p. 252: "All hail, ye wounds of Jesus"), "S.", in Shipley's "Annus Sanctus", Part II (p. 59: "All hail, ye wounds of Christ").

The Vesper hymn of the feast, "Festivis resonent compita vocibus", comprising seven Asclepiadic stanzas, and the Matins hymn, "Ira justa conditoris imbre aquarum vindice", comprising six stanzas, have been translated by Caswall (Lyra Catholica, pp. 83, 85), Bagshawe (loc. cit., Nos. 95-6), Donahoe (loc. cit., pp. 249-52). The Vesper hymn was also translated by Potter (Annus Sanctus, Part I, p. 85), and the Matins hymn by O'Connor (Arundel Hymns, etc., 1902, No. 80), and by Henry (Sursum Corda, 1907, p. 5).

H.T. Henry