Journal articles on the topic 'Church of St. John the Evangelist (Hanley)'

AbstractThis paper presents and discusses four Latin tombstones relating to Italian residents of medieval Ephesus that have been recovered from properties on the terrace of Ayasuluk (Selçuk), near the Byzantine Church of St John the Evangelist. Two of them, dating from the late 14th century, were originally published in 1937, while the other two, from the mid- 15th century, came to light more recently in January 2017.

Abstract The Community Church of St John the Evangelist, situated on a relatively remote island off the east coast of New Zealand, is a unique ecumenical venture supported by the Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches. This paper describes and situates this venture and discusses its development and modus vivendi in light of the paradigm of receptive ecumenism. This paradigm did not feature in the thinking of those who established this ecumenical community church; nevertheless it is argued that the paradigm aptly applies, so yielding the phenomenon of an unintentional receptive ecumenism at work.

It has come to our knowledge, not without grievous amazement and displeasure of heart [Bishop Grandisson wrote to the clergy of Exeter Cathedral and of other collegiate churches in his diocese before Christmas 1360] that for these past years and some years preceding, at the most holy solemnities of Christ’s Nativity, and the feasts of St Stephen, St John the Apostle and Evangelist, and the Innocents, when all faithful Christians are bound to busy themselves the more devoutly and quietly in praise of God and in Church Services, certain Ministers of our aforesaid Church, together with the boys, not only at Matins and Vespers and other hours, but also (which is more detestable) during the solemnity of the Mass have rashly presumed, putting the fear of God behind them, after the pernicious example of certain Churches, to associate together within the Church itself and play certain foolish and noxious games, unbecoming to clerical honesty.

Lublin, a city that is the seat of the Crown Tribunal, was one of the centers where St. Stanislaus Kostka was especially venerated. The main center of worship was the former Jesuit church of the St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist (the present cathedral), where the miraculous image of the young man was kept.The discovery of the note in the hand-written chronicle of the Romanum Societatis Jesu Archives reminds us of the occasional decoration of the Jesuit church during ceremonies connected with the announcement of the canonization of Stanislaus Kostka in 1715. The expanded multifaceted picture-verbal decoration focused primarily on the facade, main altar and chapel, bringing together the national aspect (Polish king), the papal aspect (Pope Clement XI) and the prophetic sign, for which the coat of arms of the Albani family from which the Pope came. The Polish nobleman-priest was created from the beginning of the cult to become one of the main supporters of the triumphs of the Polish State. The canonization of Stanislaus became a symbolic guarantee of the expected peace and stability of the country. That is why the decoration revealed a great historical message and a mystery given to the Poles through the young Jesuit, raising the importance of Poland in connection with the papacy and Catholic faith.

The motet Summus secretarius remains an enigma in the polyphonic output of the south Netherlandish composer Johannes Brassart (ca. 1400/5–1455). While extant sources (I-Bc Q15 and GB-Ob 213) attest to Brassart’s authorship, the message and function of this motet have long perplexed musicologists seeking to identify the work’s elusive subject and understand its cryptic language. Who is the “highest secretary” hailed at the outset, and what is this figure’s relationship to the biblical and cosmological references in the ensuing lines? Summus secretarius reveals its secrets when examined within the context of the medieval cult of St. John the Evangelist. Taking cues from Brassart’s careful musical treatment of words quoted from the Gospel of John (1:1), we can decipher the motet’s language and symbolism using a diverse array of exegetical writings, images, and liturgical music that illuminate the unique status of John as Christ’s most intimate confidant, the seer and evangelist privy to his secrets. Brassart would have experienced the evangelist’s cult most vividly through his service as singer, chaplain, priest, and canon at the collegiate church of Saint-Jean l’Evangéliste in Liège—the most likely place for the motet’s composition and performance. Summus secretarius demonstrates to an exceptional degree the hermeneutic richness of enigmatic language in the unique texts of freely composed fifteenth-century motets.

‭Southern California’s hidden treasures include two church interiors containing elements designed by Alfredo Ramos Martinez (1871–1946). This Mexican-born artist trained in France, returned to take an activist role in Mexican revolutionary culture, and migrated to the United States in 1929. For sixteen years, his talents were in demand among members of the Hollywood elite. In 1934, he produced the fresco murals at the Santa Barbara Cemetery Chapel, a jewel of Spanish Revival architecture. His images crossed over traditional boundaries between the sacred and the profane. He created odes to human rights and suffering humanity, depicting Christ and his mother as indigenous peasants with dark-skinned New World ethnicity. A decade later in 1946, Ramos sketched designs for his final projects at St. John the Evangelist Church in Los Angeles: a series of stained glass windows representing fourteen multiethnic saints as well as incomplete oil painted Stations of the Cross that recall his earlier pictures of suffering humanity. The architectural setting—a modernist church with stripped-down forms and materials of concrete, steel, and neon—announces a radically transformed post-war industrial culture. The contrast of these two aesthetics, the Spanish Revival and the modernist, demonstrates an evolution in liturgical forms as Californians came to grips with global migrations and an evolving modernist identity.‬

ABSTRACTThe Christmas octave in the Sarum rite included the singing of prosae on Christmas Day and on the three days following Christmas – the feasts of St Stephen, St John the Evangelist and the Holy Innocents. After the Vespers preceding each of these three days, a procession was made to an appropriate altar in the church, during which a responsory was sung with its prosa and wordless melismas after each prosa verse, with two responsory prosae based upon the melody from Christmas. These processions featured, in turn, the deacons, the priests and the choirboys, vested in silken copes and carrying lighted candles, going to the altar of St Stephen, of St Peter and All Apostles, and of Trinity and All Saints (the Lady Chapel). Rubrics indicate their special character, especially for St Stephen, described as solemnitas diaconorum, but also for all three, described as being for the sake of deacons, priests and choirboys in turn. Processions to altars in Salisbury Cathedral were strictly limited to one each year; these processions took up those three altars, which then had no further processions on their proper days. The processions had been established during the initial building-phases of the cathedral, when only these three altars existed. This exceptional series of processions emphasised the distinct importance of the Christmas octave and honoured the hierarchy of the choir, who served the liturgy throughout the year.

Confessions of faith in the New Testament are the Early Church’s reply to the apostolic kerygma, which centre was Jesus and His saving work. The John’s Tradition includes many texts, which in their literature structure and theological content unmistakably indicate the confession of faith. In the Fourth Gospel and John’s Epistels, Prosper Grech has distinguished thirty-two text groups, which can be called formulae of faith in strict sense. The author has classified the formulae according to the following criteria:– verbs that introduce confessions,– Christological titles,– Jesus’ work,– Sitz im Leben of formulae.The Johannine Tradition does not include the formulae on Jesus’ Passion and Death which are so frequent in St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles because the fourth evangelist represents the high Christology. His ideas are focusing on Incarnation, Revelation and Salvation with a universal dimension. Presence of so many homologies in the Writings of John proves that in the Early Christian era the Christological ideas were developing. In the future, the formulae of faith will contribute to the Credo of the Church.

The relief depicting John the Evangelist which was once embedded in the Church of St. Jerome on Marjan is a palimpsest of a Roman funerary monument. Since the removal, it has been visible from all sides, and this paper first presents their description. The upper side is particularly interesting as it bears the remains of an insertion groove. In the author's opinion, the figure of the saint was made by reworking a portrait of a woman in the Eumachia-Fundilia statue type. This means that the hair was also re-carved from some characteristic female coiffure and that the object in the left hand (etui with a pen or a pen?) was made of drapery or some typical female attribute. Considering the manufacturing process and shaping of the front with two joint niches, the relief from Split could have been formed only from a monumental stele or a relief incorporated into a larger funerary object. There are no comparable examples in Salona and its close hinterland meaning that it was a monument of peculiar rendering, i.e. a previously unknown typological variant. Since several elements contradict the thesis on attribution to the embedded relief (presence of an inscription, portrait format), the author supports an opinion that it was a monumental stele made after a northern Italic model.

The influence of the Gospel lectionary (evangelistarion) on the iconography of medieval wall painting was rather sporadic. One of the rare testimonies that it did exist, nevertheless, is the specific iconographic formula for the scene of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary, preserved in a number of King Milutin's foundations - Gracanica (ca. 1320), Chilandar katholikon (1321) and St. Nicetas near Skopje (ca. 1324). In all three churches, the iconographic formula corresponds for the most part to the description in the Gospel (Lk 10, 38-42). A large number of figures were painted against an architectural background, intimating that the action in the event was taking place indoors (draw. 1, figs. 1, 2). Among the figures, only Christ is marked by a halo. He is sitting on a small wooden bench, and addressing a woman, who is standing in front of him. This is certainly Martha. Her sister Mary is sitting at the feet of Christ. Next to Christ is Peter, and one or two more disciples, while numerous onlookers, men and women, are depicted behind Martha. There is no mention of either them or the apostles in the Gospel of Luke. The appearance of the disciples' figures, however, is easy to explain because they appear usually in greater or lesser numbers with Christ, in the scenes from the cycle of Christ's Public Ministry. In addition to this, this passage from the Gospel intimates that Christ entered the village in the company of his disciples. As for the figures behind Martha, at a first glimpse, one would assume that they are Judeans, the same ones that sometimes, according to the Gospel of John (11:19-31), appear in the house of Martha and Mary in the episodes painted next to the Raising of Lazarus. Still, such an assumption is not plausible because among the mentioned figures in the depictions in Gracanica, Chilandar and St. Nicetas, one can distinguish a woman above the other figures, her right arm raised, addressing Christ. This figure enables an explanation for the unusual iconographic formula and indicates its connection with the evangelistarion. The section of the Gospel that speaks of Christ's visit to Martha and Mary (Lk 10:38-42) is read out during the liturgy of the feasts of the Birth and the Dormition of the Virgin and, in the lectionary, these five verses are accompanied by a reading of two another verses the Gospel of Luke (Lk 11:27-28). The two verses recount the conversation of Christ and a woman during the Saviour's address to the assembled crowd who tempted him, demanding a sign from Heaven. Recognizing the Lord, the woman raised her voice so as to be heard above the crowd and said: 'Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you'. Two different events and two separated passages from Luke are joined in the lectionary in such a way that from the combination of the readings, it proceeds that the mentioned woman is addressing Christ while he is speaking to Martha. As a result, an iconographic formula emerged that was applied in Gracanica, the Chilandar katholikon and in St. Nicetas near Skopje. Judging by the preserved examples, this formula was characteristic only of the painting in the foundations of King Milutin. None of the other known depictions of Christ's visit to Martha and Mary, Byzantine or Serbian included the figure of a third woman, singled out from the mass of onlookers speaking to Christ. With minor variations, the text of the closing verses of Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke was, in the main, almost literally illustrated. The origin of this unique iconographic formula in several of King Milutin's foundations remains unknown. The most logical thing would be that the combined illustration of the two separate passages from Luke's Gospel came from an illuminated lectionary of Byzantine origin. However, the quests for such a manuscript so far have not confirmed this assumption. In the only lectionary, known to us, which depicts Christ in the house of Martha and Mary - the Dionysiou cod. 587 - the iconographic formula is the pictorial expression of the last verses of Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke. The two verses of Chapter 11 in Luke's Gospel, which are also included in the text of the lection, read out during the liturgy of the Birth and of the Dormition of the Virgin, had no effect on the iconography of the scene of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary in the famous Dionysiou lectionary, even though in it, the mentioned scene illustrate this very lection. The scene is located in the place where the said lection appears for the first time in the lectionary, within the framework of the readings envisaged for the feast of the Birth of the Virgin (September 8). The second part of the lectionary which refers to the same lection, i.e. to its reading for the feast of the Dormition (August 15), is illuminated with the representation of the death of the Virgin. The Dormition of the Virgin is painted in the corresponding place in several more lectionaries, while beside the pericope that is read during the liturgy of the feast of the Birth of the Theotokos, sometimes there was an appropriate depiction of the Birth of the Virgin, or simply a single figure of the Virgin. Most often, however, that part of the lectionary was left without an illustration, which can be explained by the fact that the vast majority of illuminated Byzantine lectionaries either did not have any figural ornamentation or merely contained the portraits of the evangelists. The absence of narrative illustrations is particularly characteristic of the Byzantine lectionaries that originate from the Palaeologan era. The illumination of Serbian lectionaries from that epoch is also reduced to ornamental headpieces, initials, and, in some cases, the evangelist portraits. Nevertheless, one should not altogether exclude the possibility that in some unknown or unpublished Byzantine or Serbian manuscripts of the evangelistarion, there was an iconographic formula that was applied in the painting of King Milutin's foundations. In any case, it does not seem plausible that this unusual iconographic formula may have arrived from the West. The scene of Christ's visit to Martha and Mary was also presented in the Latin lectionaries based on the five Gospel verses in which it was described (Lk 10:38-42) even though, in the appropriate pericope of the lectionaries of the Roman Church, these five verses are also accompanied by a reading of two another verses the Gospel of Luke (Lk 11:27-28). The influence of the lectionaries is not visible even in the presentations of Christ's visit to Martha and Mary that are preserved in the medieval wall painting of the western European countries.

New scholarly insights about the sculptor and altar builder Antonio Michelazzi (Gradisca d’Isonzo, 1707 – Rijeka, 1771) have revealed him as a far more complex creative personality than it has been known so far. In this paper, the authors have attributed to him the marble statues of St John the Baptist and St Mark on the high altar of the parish church of San Biagio in Cinto Caomaggiore. Michelazzi’s authorship of the marble altar of the Holy Cross in the parish church of the Assumption of Mary in Rijeka has also been confirmed, based on a certificate from 1740 on the receipt of 150 gold coins for work on this altar. Besides Michelazzi’s statues in Cinto, there is a statue of Faith on the high altar, identified as work of the Venetian sculptor Francesco Cabianca (Venice, 1666-1737). A number of other sculptures have been attributed to him, including two marble angels in the parish church of Preganziol, which have been dated in 1697 and were originally located in the church of San Cristoforo in Udine. Cabianca is the author of four marble statues of the Evangelists (auction house), as well as of sculptural decoration on the high altar of the parish church of Sant’Andrea in Cereda. His catalogue of private commissions has been enriched with five newly attributed marble busts from the second decade of the 18th century. These include the busts of Flora and Apollo in the Winter Garden of Saint Petersburg, a bust of a girl (auction house) and two busts of girls from the convent of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice. The marble relief of Ecce Homo in the church of Il Redentore in Venice and the angels on the altar of the Blessed Sacrament in the church of St Simeon in Zadar have also been attributed to Cabianca. Finally, a terracotta sculpture of St John the Evangelist (auction house) has been identified as the first model for a large marble statue of the same saint at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice.