The Ambrosian Rite

The Archdiocese of Milan keeps to this day its own distinct Latin liturgy, the Ambrosian Rite — the principal surviving non-Roman Latin rite, named for Ambrose and still in living use across the Milanese church. This file sets out what the rite is, its distinctive features (the Ingressa in place of the Roman Introit, its own lectionary and calendar, the six-Sunday Advent), and the central scholarly caveat: that despite its name very little of the present rite traces directly to Ambrose himself, the attribution being honorific and the rite the cumulative work of many centuries.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

A Surviving Non-Roman Latin Rite

When people speak of “the Latin Rite” they usually mean the Roman; but the Latin West was never liturgically uniform, and Milan preserved its own usage when most local Western rites were absorbed into the Roman. The Ambrosian Rite (Rito Ambrosiano) is the proper liturgy of the Archdiocese of Milan and of some neighboring areas, and it is the principal non-Roman Latin rite still in living use — celebrated, with its own Mass, office, calendar, and chant, by millions of the faithful of the Milanese church (King, Liturgies of the Primatial Sees; Alzati, Ambrosianum Mysterium). It is a genuine and ancient liturgical tradition, not a museum piece, and its survival is one of the visible reminders that Western Christianity was once a family of usages rather than a single rite.

Distinctive Features

The Ambrosian Rite differs from the Roman at many points, of which the most characteristic include:

  • The Ingressa. In place of the Roman Introit, the Ambrosian Mass opens with the Ingressa, an entrance chant of its own form and repertory.
  • A distinct lectionary and structure of the Mass. The arrangement of readings (including, in the older usage, an Old Testament lesson), chants, and prayers follows its own pattern, with features such as the placement of the offertory and the rites of peace differing from the Roman.
  • A distinct calendar. The Ambrosian liturgical year has its own shape — most famously an Advent of six Sundays, beginning earlier than the Roman four, conventionally from the Sunday after the feast of St. Martin (11 November) — and its own observances of Lent and Holy Week.
  • Its own chant. “Ambrosian chant” is a distinct body of liturgical melody, parallel to but independent of Gregorian chant.

These features, taken together, make the Ambrosian Rite a self-standing liturgical family with deep roots in the church of Milan (King, Liturgies of the Primatial Sees; Catholic Encyclopedia, Ambrosian Liturgy and Rite).

How Much Is Actually Ambrose’s?

Here the honest scholarly caveat must be entered plainly. [Disputed: despite the rite’s name, there is no direct evidence that the Ambrosian Rite as it now exists was composed by Ambrose; the present rite is the cumulative product of many centuries, and Ambrose’s name appears to have been attached to it only from about the eighth century. The Catholic Encyclopedia states flatly that there is “no direct evidence that the rite was the composition of St. Ambrose,” and modern liturgists (King; Alzati) treat the attribution as honorific and traditional rather than historical (Catholic Encyclopedia, Ambrosian Liturgy and Rite; King, Liturgies of the Primatial Sees; Alzati, Ambrosianum Mysterium).]

What can plausibly be linked to Ambrose’s own period is modest but real:

  • the introduction of antiphonal psalmody and metrical hymnody into the Milanese liturgy, which Augustine attests as Ambrose’s doing in 386 (Augustine, Confessions 9.7.15; see Father of Latin Hymnody);
  • the practice of vigils, attributed to him by Paulinus’s Vita;
  • and the shape of the Milanese baptismal and eucharistic rites of his day, which we know directly from his own De Mysteriis and De Sacramentis (see The Mysteries and the Hexameron) — a precious fixed point, since these works let us see the actual fourth-century liturgy of Milan as Ambrose celebrated it, whatever later centuries added.

So the relationship of Ambrose to “his” rite is like that of many founders to traditions named for them: he gave it some of its earliest and most characteristic elements and lent it his authority and his name, but the developed rite that bears his name is the work of the Milanese church across the centuries, not a composition of his pen. The name honors a real and formative connection without claiming that Ambrose wrote the missal.

The Structure of the Mass and Office

Beyond the headline differences, the Ambrosian Mass has a shape recognizably its own at almost every joint. In its older and fuller form the Liturgy of the Word carried three readings — a prophecy from the Old Testament, an epistle, and the Gospel — where the classical Roman Mass had settled on two, preserving an older Western and Eastern fullness that Rome had let fall away. The chants between them keep their own names and forms — the Psalmellus answering to the Roman Gradual, the Cantus (or Canto) in penitential seasons answering to the Tract — and the dismissal of the catechumens is still marked in the rite’s memory. The offertory has its own distinctive ceremonies, including the ancient procession in which, in some usages, the elder men and women of the parish (the vecchioni) presented the bread and wine, a living survival of the early Church’s offering by the people. The Ambrosian Mass also keeps the rite of peace before the offertory rather than before communion as in the Roman Mass — the older arrangement, agreeing with the Eastern and earlier Western practice and with the Lord’s own word that the gift be left at the altar until the worshipper is reconciled (Matthew 5:23–24; King, Liturgies of the Primatial Sees; Alzati, Ambrosianum Mysterium). The Divine Office likewise diverges: the Milanese cursus has its own arrangement of the psalter and its own hours, with the solemn vigils that Paulinus connects to Ambrose, and a distinctive lucernarium or lamp-lighting at the beginning of Vespers — the very setting of Ambrose’s evening hymn Deus creator omnium (see Father of Latin Hymnody). Throughout, the proper body of Ambrosian chant, older in some of its forms than the Gregorian and never wholly assimilated to it, gives the rite its own musical voice.

The Footwashing in Milanese Baptism

The most striking divergence, and the one most securely anchored in Ambrose’s own witness, is in the rite of baptism. In the Milanese rite of his day, immediately after the candidate was raised from the font and before the chrismation, the bishop washed the feet of the newly baptized — the pedilavium, a ceremony Rome did not have. Ambrose defends the practice explicitly, knowing it differed from Rome, and gives it a theology drawn from John 13: by the footwashing the hereditary poison of the serpent, the inheritance of Adam’s sin clinging as it were to the heel, is washed away. “We are not unaware that the Roman Church does not have this custom,” he says, “yet we follow the type and example” of Christ who washed the feet of His disciples; “in baptism all guilt is washed away… here, that the hereditary sins may be done away; for our personal sins are remitted by baptism” (Ambrose, De Sacramentis 3.1.4–7 [CSEL 73, ed. Faller]; trans. FOTC 44). The passage is doubly valuable: it both attests a genuine ancient peculiarity of the Milanese rite and shows Ambrose consciously asserting a local usage against the practice of Rome while professing communion with her — a precious early instance of legitimate liturgical diversity within the one faith. This footwashing survives, in attenuated form, in the Ambrosian baptismal rite still, and it is among the few present-day features that can be traced with confidence to the church of Ambrose himself.

Survival Against Romanization

The Ambrosian Rite survived a long history of pressure toward uniformity, and its survival is itself remarkable. The great solvent of Western liturgical diversity was the Carolingian liturgical reform, the deliberate effort under Charlemagne and his successors to impose the Roman rite throughout the Frankish empire as an instrument of unity and order; under that pressure the old Gallican and most other local Western rites were absorbed and disappeared, and the Spanish (Mozarabic) usage was reduced to a few churches. A persistent later legend, preserved in the chronicles, held that the Milanese rite was nearly suppressed in the Carolingian period and was saved only by a kind of ordeal or by the personal intervention that let Milan keep its own books (King, Liturgies of the Primatial Sees; Alzati, Ambrosianum Mysterium). However that tale is judged, the fact is that Milan alone among the great Western churches held its proper rite through the Carolingian centuries and beyond, protected by the prestige of Ambrose’s name and the tenacity of the Milanese church. The rite was again pressed at the time of the post-Tridentine reform, when the universalizing of the Roman missal under Pius V might have swept it away; but the Council of Trent’s decree of 1570 expressly exempted rites of more than two centuries’ standing, and the Ambrosian Rite, far older, was secure.

Borromeo and the Modern Status

The decisive figure in the rite’s later defense and codification was St. Charles Borromeo (Carlo Borromeo, 1538–1584), the great reforming archbishop of Milan and a leading spirit of the Counter-Reformation, who — far from abandoning the local usage for the Roman — vigorously upheld the Ambrosian Rite as the patrimony of his church and saw to the revision and printing of its liturgical books, fixing the form in which it largely came down to the modern period (King, Liturgies of the Primatial Sees; Alzati, Ambrosianum Mysterium). His successors, including a later archbishop of Milan who became Pope Pius XI and who retained an affection for the rite of his home church, continued to guard it. After the Second Vatican Council, the Ambrosian Rite was reformed in parallel with the Roman — a revised Ambrosian Missal was promulgated in the 1970s and a revised lectionary later — so that it now exists in both a reformed post-conciliar form and, since the liberalizing of the older liturgy, in its pre-conciliar form as well. It remains the living rite of the Archdiocese of Milan and a few neighboring areas, celebrated for several million faithful: not a relic but a continuing tradition, the principal surviving non-Roman Latin rite and a standing witness that the unity of the Western Church never required the uniformity of its worship.

Why It Matters Here

For an Orthodox reader the Ambrosian Rite is of particular interest as a surviving witness to liturgical diversity within the one pre-schism Western Church. Like the other ancient local usages, it shows that uniformity of rite was never the test of unity of faith — that the undivided Church of the first millennium held the same faith in a variety of liturgical forms (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Pre-Schism Church). And in the catecheses of Ambrose himself it preserves, in De Mysteriis and De Sacramentis, one of the clearest windows we have onto how a great fourth-century Western church actually baptized, chrismated, and communicated its people — a liturgy recognizably continuous, in its essentials, with that of the Christian East of the same age.

See Also

References

  • Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 9.7.15; trans. Chadwick (Oxford, 1991). On the antiphonal singing genuinely introduced by Ambrose.
  • Ambrose of Milan. De Mysteriis and De Sacramentis [CSEL 73, ed. Faller]; trans. FOTC 44. The direct witness to the fourth-century Milanese rite.
  • King, Archdale A. Liturgies of the Primatial Sees. London: Longmans, Green, 1957. The standard English account of the Ambrosian Rite.
  • Alzati, Cesare. Ambrosianum Mysterium: The Church of Milan and Its Liturgical Tradition. Trans. G. Guiver. Cambridge: Grove Books, 1999–2000. On the rite and its development.
  • Catholic Encyclopedia. “Ambrosian Liturgy and Rite.” New York: Robert Appleton, 1907. On the honorific character of the attribution to Ambrose.
  • Paulinus of Milan. Vita Sancti Ambrosii, c. 422 (PL 14). On the vigils attributed to Ambrose.
  • Dudden, F. Homes. The Life and Times of St. Ambrose. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, 1:288–298.