The Roman Titular Church

The ancient basilica of Sant’Anastasia al Palatino — the titulus Anastasiae, one of the oldest titular churches of Rome, attested in the fourth–fifth century and named in the acts of the Roman synod of 499 — and the cult’s deep Roman roots. It treats the disputed question of whether “Anastasia” was originally the church’s founder and patroness, later identified with the martyr, and the saint’s historic commemoration at the second (dawn) Mass of Christmas Day, the statio at Sant’Anastasia, embedded in the oldest stratum of the Roman Christmas liturgy in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

One of the Oldest Titular Churches of Rome

At the foot of the Palatine, between the hill and the Circus Maximus, stands the basilica of Sant’Anastasia, the titulus Anastasiae — one of the most ancient of the Roman titular churches and the firmest evidence, alongside the Sirmium martyrology notice, that a cult of Anastasia existed at Rome long before the connected Passio took shape (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). The tituli were the parish-churches of the Christian city, the centers of presbyteral ministry from which Rome’s clergy took their title; the oldest of them go back to the fourth century, to the generation after the peace of the Church, and several preserve in their names the memory of the persons — founders, donors, householders — on whose property or by whose benefaction they were established (for the Roman tituli as an institution, see the world sketched in Rome and the Great Persecution and The Pre-Schism Church).

That Sant’Anastasia belongs to this oldest stratum is not in serious doubt. Its position — a low church in the public heart of the ancient city, beneath the imperial residences of the Palatine, hard by the Circus — marks it as a foundation of the early Christian centuries, when such central sites were still available; and it functioned through late antiquity as a church of the highest standing, closely tied to the Byzantine and papal administration of Rome (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Liber Pontificalis, ed. Duchesne, for the papal interest in the church). The antiquity of the titulus is, with the Sirmium notice, one of the two documentary anchors of the whole Anastasia tradition.

The Synod of 499 and the Attested Name

The titulus Anastasiae is named explicitly in the surviving acts of the Roman synod held under Pope Symmachus in 499, which lists the priests of the Roman tituli who subscribed to its decrees on papal elections. In that subscription-list the presbyters attached to the titulus Anastasiae appear by name, fixing the existence and the title of the church securely at the very end of the fifth century (the acta of the synod of 499, in the Acta synhodorum habitarum Romae, ed. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 12; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). This is the kind of hard documentary attestation that the Passio itself can never supply: a dated, official Roman record naming the church. It establishes that the titulus Anastasiae was a functioning, named titular church of Rome by 499 — and, since such churches were typically already old by then, that its foundation reaches back into the fourth or earlier fifth century, comfortably before or contemporary with the composition of the connected legend (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936).

The earlier history is harder to fix. Lists and notices of the Roman tituli from the late fourth and fifth centuries are incomplete and not always consistent in their naming, and the precise moment of Sant’Anastasia’s foundation cannot be documented; but the convergence of the synodal attestation, the church’s central and ancient site, and its prominence in the Christmas liturgy (below) places its origin firmly in the early Christian period (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Liber Pontificalis, ed. Duchesne).

Founder or Martyr? The Origin of the Name

The central source-critical question the church poses is the same one that governs the whole dossier: was the titulus Anastasiae named for a martyr Anastasia, or for a woman named Anastasia who founded or endowed it? The institution of the titulus makes the question live. In its original Roman sense a titulus was a church named for the person — often a layperson, often a woman — whose property or benefaction established it; the eponym was the founder, and only in some cases was that founder also a venerated saint. Several Roman tituli are named for such founders, and in a number of cases the founder’s name was, over time, read as a saint’s name and the church understood as dedicated to a martyr of that name (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

Applied to Sant’Anastasia, the founder-hypothesis runs: a fourth-century Roman lady named Anastasia founded or endowed the church on the Palatine; it was called, in the proprietary sense, titulus Anastasiae, “the church of Anastasia”; and only later was this founder-name identified with the martyr Anastasia of Sirmium known from the martyrology, so that the church came to be honored as dedicated to the saint and the saint’s relics and commemoration drawn to it. On this account the conflation is older even than the Passio — it is built into the very identity of the Roman Anastasia, who would be from the start a fusion of a Roman benefactress and a Pannonian martyr (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). The competing view holds that the church honored a martyr Anastasia from its foundation, the titulus taking its name directly from the saint whose cult it served.

[Disputed: whether the titulus Anastasiae was named for a founder or for a martyr. One reconstruction holds that the church was named, in the proprietary sense of titulus, for a fourth-century Roman benefactress Anastasia, only later identified with the Sirmium martyr (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”); another that it honored a martyr Anastasia from the first. The founder-hypothesis is a reconstruction consistent with the known pattern of the Roman tituli, not a documented fact; the documents attest the name and its antiquity, not its original referent.]

The Christmas-Dawn Mass: The Statio at Sant’Anastasia

The most remarkable witness to the depth of the Roman cult is liturgical. In the historic Roman Rite, Christmas Day was celebrated with three Masses — the Mass of the night (ad galli cantum), the Mass of the dawn (in aurora), and the Mass of the day — and the second, the dawn Mass, had its statio at the church of Sant’Anastasia and carried a commemoration of St. Anastasia herself (the Roman Sacramentaries; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). The statio was the stational church at which the Pope or his representative celebrated on a given day; that the dawn Mass of Christmas was stationed at Sant’Anastasia means the saint’s own church held the liturgy of the second Mass, and the saint received commemoration within it on the very feast of the Nativity.

This commemoration is no late accretion. It is embedded in the oldest stratum of the Roman Christmas liturgy, present in the early sacramentaries: the Gelasian Sacramentary and the Gregorian Sacramentary, the foundational Roman mass-books, both transmit the dawn Mass of Christmas with its commemoration of Anastasia, witnessing a usage already fixed when those books were compiled (the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). That Anastasia’s memory was woven into the liturgy of Christmas Day itself — one of only a handful of saints to receive commemoration within the Nativity Masses — is extraordinary testimony to the standing of her Roman cult, and it survived in the Roman Missal for many centuries thereafter as the commemoration “et beatae Anastasiae martyris” at the second Mass (the Roman Missal; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

Why the Dawn Mass: Convenience and Cult

How a martyr came to be commemorated within the Christmas liturgy admits of a plain explanation that is itself a piece of the cult’s history. The dawn Mass fell, in the natural order of the day, at the hour after the night Mass; the Pope, having celebrated the night Mass, would proceed to a nearby church for the second; and Sant’Anastasia, central and ancient, was the convenient station. The saint whose feast fell on 22 December, only days before Christmas, and whose church hosted the dawn Mass, naturally received commemoration within it — so that the liturgical honoring of Anastasia at Christmas grew from the conjunction of her feast-day, her church’s station, and the structure of the three Masses (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). What began perhaps as the commemoration proper to the statio church became a fixed and venerable feature of the Roman Christmas, carried in the sacramentaries and the Missal for over a thousand years.

The result is that Anastasia, almost uniquely among the martyrs, is liturgically bound to the Nativity in the Roman tradition — a binding that the Eastern placement of her feast on 22 December, within the Nativity fore-feast, parallels and that gives her, East and West, the character of a saint of the Christmas cycle (see The Cult East and West, Feast and Cult, and the place of the Nativity in The Great Feasts and The Church Calendar).

The Church and the Cult Through Time

Sant’Anastasia remained a church of high standing through the Byzantine and medieval centuries — restored and adorned by successive popes as the Liber Pontificalis records, retaining its title and its place in the stational liturgy (Liber Pontificalis, ed. Duchesne; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). Its very survival and prominence are part of the argument of this section: the cult of Anastasia at Rome was not a literary by-product of the Passio but a living, institutionally rooted veneration with its own church, its own clergy, its own station in the calendar of the city, attested in hard documents — the synod of 499, the sacramentaries, the papal records — that owe nothing to the legend. The Passio gave the saint a biography; the titulus and the Christmas Mass gave her, far earlier, a home in the worship of Rome. The source-critical lesson is the one this collection keeps returning to: the cult is ancient and securely documented; the connected life is later and legendary; and the church on the Palatine is among the surest proofs of the first half of that statement.

References

Acta synhodorum habitarum Romae (the acts of the Roman synods, including the synod of 499 under Symmachus). Ed. Th. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 12. Berlin, 1894. (The titulus Anastasiae in the subscription-list of 499.)
The Roman Sacramentaries: the Gelasian Sacramentary and the Gregorian Sacramentary. (The dawn Mass of Christmas with the commemoration of Anastasia and the statio at Sant’Anastasia.)
The Roman Missal (the commemoration “et beatae Anastasiae martyris” at the second Mass of Christmas Day). Cited for the persistence of the historic commemoration.
Liber Pontificalis. Ed. L. Duchesne. Paris, 1886–1892. (Papal works at and interest in Sant’Anastasia.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936. (The titulus, the founder-versus-martyr question, the Roman cult.)
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961. (Sant’Anastasia, the Christmas-dawn commemoration, and the source-critical state of the question.)