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Confessors

The worship of confessors - of those, that is, who died peacefully after a life of heroic virtue - is not as ancient as that of the martyrs. The word itself takes on a different meaning after the early Christian periods. In the beginning it was given to those who confessed Christ when examined in the presence of enemies of the Faith (Baronius, in his notes to Ro. Mart., 2 January, D), or, as Benedict XIV explains (op. cit., II, ?. il, n. 6), to those who died peacefully after having confessed the Faith before tyrants or other enemies of the Christian religion, and undergone tortures or suffered other punishments of whatever nature. Later on. confessors were those who had lived a holy life and closed it by a holy death in Christian peace. It is in this sense that we now treat of the worship paid to confessors.

Bellarmine thinks it uncertain when confessors began to be objects of cultus, and asserts that it was not before 800, when the feasts of Sts. Martin and Remigius are found in the catalogue of feasts drawn up by the Council of Mainz. This opinion of Innocent III and Benedict XIV is confirmed by the implicit approval of St. Gregory the Great (Dial., I, xiv, and III, xv) and by well attested facts: in the East, for example, Hilarión (Sozomen, III, xiv, and VIII, xix), Ephrem (Greg. Nyss., Orat. in laud. S. Ephrem), ana other confessors were publicly honoured in the fourth century; and, in the West, St. Martin of Tours, as is gathered plainly from the oldest Breviaries and the Mozarabic Missal (Bona, Rer. Lit., II, xii, n° 3), and St. Hilary of Poitiers, as can be shown from the very ancient Mass-book known as "Missale Francorum" (Thomassin, "Traité des fêtes de l'église", in thé second volume of his "Traités historiques et dogmatiques", Paris, 1683), were objects of a like cultus in the same century (Martigny, Dictionnaire des antiquités chrétiennes, s. v. Confesseurs).

The reason of this veneration lies, doubtless, in the resemblance of the confessors' self-denying and heroically virtuous lives to the sufferings of the martyrs; such lives could truly be called prolonged martyrdoms. Naturally, therefore, such honour was first paid to ascetics (Duchesne, op. cit., 284) and only afterwards to those who resembled in their lives the very penitential and extraordinary existence of the ascetics. So true is this that the confessors themselves are frequently called martyrs.

In the cultus rendered to confessors, the authorization of the Church had long been merely implicit. But when an express decision was given, it was the bishop who gave it. In modern practice, as definitively settled by the decrees of Pope Urban VIII (1625 and 1634), the acts of beatification and canonization are totally distinct. Canonization is the solemn and definitive act by which the pope decrees the plenitude of public honours. Beatification consists in permitting a cultus, the manifestations of which are restricted, and is merely a step towards canonization.