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COME CREATOR SPIRIT, COME
Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap, the papal preacher, explains the background of the Veni Creator prayer to the Holy Spirit, which has played such an important role in Church history.
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In the Christian churches of the West the year 2000 began with the solemn chanting of the hymn Veni Creator. Ever since the early decades of the second millennium, every new year, every century, every conclave, every ecumenical council, every synod, every meeting of any importance in the life of the Church, every priestly ordination, every consecration of a bishop, and in years gone by, every coronation of a monarch, began in exactly the same way. This hymn was composed in the 9th century, and it has resounded unceasingly ever since then, wherever Christianity has used Latin as its spoken language. It has been especially the hymn of Pentecost, like a most solemn and extended invocation of the Holy Spirit over the whole of humanity and over the whole of the Church. As with everything that comes from the Holy Spirit, the Veni Creator is not “worn out”, but enriched with use. If Holy Scripture, as Gregory the Great said, “grows by the fact of its being read,” the Veni Creator has grown through the centuries by virtue of the fact that it has been sung. It has become charged with all the faith, the devotion, the ardent desire for the Spirit of all the generations that have sung it before our time. And now, thanks to the communion of saints, when even the most modest of little choirs of believers sing it, God hears it in the whole of that majestic orchestration. Today it is held most probably that the author was Rhabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and later Archbishop of Mainz, who was born about 780 and lived until 856. He was one of the greatest theologians of his day, and had a profound knowledge of the writings of the Fathers of the Church. The fi rst evidence of an offi cial use of the hymn is found in the Acts of the Council of Rheims (held in 1049), in which we read, “as the Pope entered the aula, the clergy with deep devotion sang the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. But it must already have been in use for some time in certain local churches and monasteries. The hymn had gained, and from that time onward, held a fi xed place in the liturgy of the whole Church. The Veni Creator is an eminently ecumenical text, and this too helps to make it particularly suitable for the epoch in which we are living. It is the only ancient Latin hymn that has been adopted by all the major churches born of the Reformation. Luther himself undertook a German translation of it. From the very beginning of the Anglican Church, the hymn was included in the rite of ordination of a bishop. In the churches that have developed in the Calvinist tradition it occupies an honoured place in the collection of hymns for Pentecost. Hence it is that the Veni Creator makes it possible for all Christians to be united in their invocation of the Holy Spirit, who is the one who will lead us to full unity, as the Spirit is the one who leads us to the fullness of truth. On the one hand the words of the Veni Creator condense the very essence of biblical revelation and patristic tradition concerning the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, precisely because they are derived from the Scriptures, the words of the hymn provide us with an “open structure” capable of receiving each new awareness the Church has discovered and experienced concerning the Spirit. It is theology at prayer, sung in the key of praise, the only way in which we can adequately speak of the Holy Spirit. Edited extract from “Come Creator Spirit” by Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap published by The Liturgical Press price £14.99 + p&p Available from Goodnews Books 01582 571011
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