Franciscan Custody of the Holy Sepulcher

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I. Holy Sepulcher: Heart of Christianity

For a Christian, the heart of Jerusalem is the Holy Sepulcher: in this place the saving presence of God is manifested, his love for men. It is the place of the paschal mystery of the passion, death and resurrection of Christ the Lord, our Savior. The Holy Sepulcher is like a magnet that draws believers to "the roots of their faith and of the Church" (John Paul II).

Without a doubt, it was the objective that guided Saint Francis to meet the Sultan and thus obtain permission for himself and his children to visit and serve forever on Calvary and in the Sepulcher of the Lord. In the history that goes from the Crusades to the total Muslim domination of Jerusalem, another "history" is placed: the Franciscan presence in the Holy Land. John Paul II, in the Letter announcing his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, presents the meaning of the mission of the Franciscans:

«And Providence wanted that, together with the brothers of the Eastern Churches, were above all the children of Francis of Assisi, saint of poverty, meekness and peace, who, on behalf of Western Christianity, would interpret as in a genuinely evangelical way, the legitimate Christian desire to protect the places where our Christian roots are ».

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While the crossed arms had shown themselves powerless, the sons of Saint Francis peacefully took possession of the Holy Places, and for long centuries, at the cost of unspeakable suffering, stood guard over them, to this day, on behalf of the Catholic world.

a) Francis wants direct contact with Christ. Jesus Christ is not only the Son of God, but also the model that men must imitate: knowing him, man knows who he is and how to behave in life. Now, Jesus is not an abstract being; he is a living and concrete person. Francisco de Asis is in love with that Person. All his writings exude infinite love and immense tenderness towards Jesus Christ, whom he wants to know and imitate to the fullest in his life. The Saint had “Jesus in his heart, Jesus on his lips, Jesus in his ears, Jesus in his eyes, Jesus in his hands; Jesus always present in all his members "(1 Cel 115). 

Celano himself affirms that" the humility of the incarnation and the love of passion were so present in his memory that he hardly wanted to think of anything else "(1 Cel 84 According to Saint Bonaventure, his prayer was the "Our Father" and also "We adore you, Christ, in all the churches throughout the world, and we bless you because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world" (LM 4,3) Francis always preached "the cross of Christ."

b) The Holy Land, center of Francis' spirituality. Although we do not know for sure, it is probable that Saint Francis visited the Holy Sepulcher, as recounted in ancient Franciscan chronicles, according to which, in his meeting with the Sultan in 1219, the latter gave him all the facilities to be able to visit the Holy Sepulcher. : "The Sultan ... gave order that he and all his friars could go freely to visit the Holy Sepulcher, without paying any tribute." They also say that Francis returns to Italy after having been in Jerusalem: "Having visited the Tomb of Christ, he hurriedly returned to the land of the Christians" (Ángel Clareno, Chronicle of the Seven Tribulations, II, 1). Not visiting the Holy Sepulcher would be in contradiction with the spirit of the Holy. Francis needed to feel in his heart the same emotions and vibrations that Christ had felt and experienced. It is not unimaginable to suspect that Francis, in his desire to radically imitate Christ to the point of martyrdom, wanted to end his life on the very earth where the Son of God had consummated his sacrifice of love.

It is also understood in this way that the memories of the Holy Land were imprinted in his heart and became an experience of life. The impression of the wounds in La Verna is the imitation of the crucifixion of Christ on Calvary, and the Canticle of the Creatures is the hymn to the world renewed by the resurrection of Christ and which has now been reconciled to God thanks to the Redemption of Christ. Greccio and La Verna, Bethlehem and Jerusalem form an inseparable unity in Francis: the radical imitation of Christ. The life of Saint Francis is not understood outside of Christ and the Holy Land, as Benedict XVI affirms:

«His tender embrace of the divine Child in Greccio, his contemplation of the Passion in La Verna, his living, according to the form of the holy Gospel, his option for poverty and his search for Christ in the face of the poor, all are based on a total love for Jesus ».

c) Open to all men the way to Christ. And, as a consequence of the foregoing, all the missionary action of Francis and his friars will consist of other men, even Muslims, being able to also see Christ who has become man through our love, and they can find him by going through the "memories "that testify to their passage through this Earth that, therefore, is Holy. The purpose of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land is, therefore, to meet Christ and his Gospel in the places where it has been manifested. How was all this possible? Perhaps Francis, in Jerusalem, asked the Lord, before the doors of the Holy Sepulcher -one closed and the other bricked up-, the same thing that he had asked the Christ of Saint Damien in Assisi a few years before: «Lord, what do you want me to do? ? ». And the Lord would have given him the same answer: "Repair my Church which, as you see, threatens ruin" (2 Cel 10s). It was about the Church of Christ. This is what happened in the Holy Land: the People of God that the Lord redeemed with his Blood, here on Calvary, has disappeared; Sanctuaries, memories of the presence of Christ and roots of the Christian faith, do not exist; Even the bells of the Holy Sepulcher are missing, "that voice of God" that enlivens the stones. The mission of the Franciscans of the Holy Land will be to recover and repair what was in ruins.

II Custody of the Holy Sepulcher

John Paul II, remembering the 650th anniversary of the Bull Gratias agimus, by which Pope Clement VI entrusted the custody of the Places that remember the mysteries of the Redemption, to the children of Saint Francis, who had already been there since the times of his Founder and Father, he sums up his mission in the Holy Land thus: «Since then the Franciscans have not interrupted their beneficent presence, despite many difficulties, generously endeavoring to preserve old memories, erecting new Shrines, animating liturgical and the reception of pilgrims ”. "The children of Saint Francis - Paul VI had said earlier - have remained in the Land of Jesus to guard, restore and protect the Holy Christian Places" (Nobis in animo). "They have thus done a service to all Christendom, by safeguarding that inestimable heritage, common to all Christians," recalled John XXIII. It has been a long and difficult story, with a happy ending. At the end of the 13th century the crusade adventure ended, which wanted to conquer, by force, the Holy Sepulcher. The missionary work of the Franciscans begins there, supported by their charism of "Peace and Good."

1. The Franciscans receive the mission to custody the Holy Sepulcher. The first step will consist of recovering the Holy Places, the "memories" of the Lord's passage through this Earth. This was consolidated around 1350, when the sons of Saint Francis were already present in these four Holy Places and the only ones that existed: the Holy Sepulcher, the Cenacle, the Nativity of Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Virgin. This was possible thanks to the help, political and economic, of the Kings of Naples and Aragon. The first Shrine served by the Franciscans on behalf of the Catholic Church is the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. They were already there before, but they will be established in 1327 by the intervention of Jaime II of Aragon. Their situation in the Holy Sepulcher was strengthened thanks to the efforts of the Kings of Naples, in 1333, who, paying huge sums of money, obtained from the Sultan to Malik not only the Cenacle -and they give them to the Franciscans in perpetuum-, but above all, they obtain for the friars the faculty to dwell continuously in the Holy Sepulcher and to celebrate the masses and the divine offices. The bulls Gratias Agimus and Nuper carissimae of Pope Clement VI, from 1342, by which he entrusted the custody of the Holy Places to the Franciscans, give legal and institutional value to the Custody of the Holy Land.

At the beginning of the 14th century, the Franciscans officiated only in the current Chapel of the Apparition. At the end of that century they celebrate the Eucharist at the Tomb of the Lord and on Calvary. For centuries, the Franciscans were not only the guardians of the Holy Sepulcher, but also the only ones who could celebrate inside the Empty Tomb of our Lord. This situation changed radically after the fire and subsequent repair of the Holy Sepulcher carried out by the Greeks in the early years of the 19th century: the Orthodox Greeks will get the power to celebrate the Eucharist at the Lord's Tomb on January 9, 1818-December 28 of the Julian calendar - and the Armenians only in 1821, with two signatures of the Sultan.

The incontestable ownership of the Holy Sepulcher by the Franciscans can be seen in the repairs they make to the Basilica. Let us remember, due to its symbolic value, the one made by the Custodian P. Bonifacio de Ragusa: in 1555 he restored some parts of the Basilica and completely renewed the Edicule. On December 9, 1554, as he says, the bedrock on which the body of Our Lord lay was discovered. He tells it like this in the Liber de perenni cultu Terrae Sanctae (1577):

«Extracting the existing structure, the tomb of the Lord clearly carved out of the rock appeared before our eyes ..., that ineffable place where the Son of Man lay for three days ... We contemplated it, we kissed it and we venerated it with groans of devotion, with spiritual joy and with tears with those who were present (there were actually quite a few Christians, both from the West and the East), who filled with heavenly devotion, some shed tears, others were deeply excited, all were astonished and were prey of a kind of ecstasy. '

The object of his love was before his eyes and his heart: the stone where the lifeless Body of Christ rested. It was not a dominion over the Sepulcher: it was an act of love and devotion.

2. Preserving the Holy Grave: A difficult mission. Preserving the Places of our Redemption, especially the Holy Sepulcher, was not an easy mission for the Franciscans. They had to fight on many fronts and draw on many supporters. On the one hand there were the Muslims, Mamluks first and Ottomans later, who wanted to take advantage of the situation to get money and whose voracity was never satisfied with the flows from the Catholics, especially those who came from Spain and its Empire. They also had many legal difficulties. Yes, the owners of the Sanctuaries were the Franciscans, as they had bought them, cared for them and officiated in them; but the masters were always the venal Muslim governments, who used the Shrines to extract money from the Christians. The Sanctuaries are of the Sultan, who grants them to whom he pleases.

Political support plays an important role in this dispute of the Churches. If until well into the sixteenth century Naples, Aragon, Castile help the Franciscans a lot, after the Battle of Lepanto (1573), Spain is practically on the fringes of politics in the Middle East and its influence in the Holy Land will be nil. France and Venice will be more active, but that relationship that had existed in previous centuries between the Franciscans and the Christian kings will be lacking. The children of St. Francis find themselves without international support. To this must be added - as a reaction to the above - the closer rapprochement between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, with which the interests of Catholics were far from the margin. There are difficulties for Franciscans coming from the same Church, when other Catholic institutions try to break that favorable treatment that the Holy See had given to the Franciscan Custody on the Holy Places; it all ended with the so-called "Sentencia de Mantua" (1420), in which the Church agrees with the Franciscans. Finally, there are the other Christian churches, especially the Greek-Orthodox, who, especially from 1757, managed to eliminate the almost monopoly that the Franciscans had on the Holy Sepulcher and change it in their favor.

Everything that the children of Saint Francis had managed to recover and preserve for centuries was lost in one night. The catastrophe took place on the eve of Palm Sunday, April 2, 1757. Things were complicated by the "mysterious" fire of the Holy Sepulcher on October 12, 1808 that destroyed almost the entire Holy Sepulcher. The dome of the Basilica collapsed, although the interior of the Tomb of Christ prevailed (which was considered by all a miracle). On Calvary the altar of the Crucifixion and the altar of the Dolorosa were burned; the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows was saved thanks to the courage of the Franciscan sacristan Fr. Manuel Sabater, who kept hugging her amid the flames. After the expulsion from the Cenacle in 1551, the loss of a large part of the Sepulcher, of Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Virgin, was the hardest blow in the history, always difficult, of the conservation of the Holy Places by the children from San Francisco. The situation was crystallized in what is called "Status quo", with the signing of Sultan Abdul Majid of 1852, in which all the requests of the Franciscans are blocked and things must be "in the state in which they are", is say, as they are at the time, without changing. The Catholic Church lost much of the Holy Sepulcher for which the children of St. Francis had served and suffered so much in recent centuries.

3. Franciscans' generous service in the Holy Sepulcher. The Pope, in 1342, insisted the General of the Order to send to the Holy Sepulcher "suitable and devout friars taken from the entire Order." The friars did not come on vacation. It was a difficult mission. They did not have many economic possibilities and they also gave free accommodation to the pilgrims. And, above all, they had to pay the Muslims, even though they received great benefits for the service provided by the sons of St. Francis. Despite the economic collaboration of the Christian Monarchs, the aid has never been enough.

a) The life of the Franciscans in the Holy Sepulcher. Many times in history the Franciscan has limited himself to "being here" and "not leaving" the marvelous place illuminated by the presence of Christ, "to be witnesses" of the history of revelation, "to render a service" to God. and to the Church, to fulfill "with vigilance the mission that had been entrusted to them", as John XXIII recalled. Chateaubriand, on his pilgrimage in 1806, describes the life of the Franciscans:

«Among the ruins of Jerusalem ... live some Christian religious, and nothing has been able to force them to leave the Sepulcher of Jesus Christ, neither robbery, nor mistreatment, nor death threats. Their songs resound night and day in front of the Holy Sepulcher ... Turks, Arabs, Greeks and schismatic Christians, all seek the shelter of some poor religious who cannot defend themselves, and here we must recognize with Bossuet, "that the raised hands to heaven, they overthrow more battalions than hands armed with spears "»

The service to the Holy Sepulcher has meant for the friars who live there - day and night - to be "voluntarily buried" in a narrow and unhealthy place. They lived in the cold and damp cellars of the Patriarchate, lived and slept under the houses of Muslim families and were subjected to the clamor of the mosque. For centuries, the friars, locked inside the Basilica, have not had a cloister where they can walk, nor a window through which to see the city, nor a garden or a terrace where they can breathe a little air. Life in the Holy Sepulcher was so difficult that the superiors had to change the friars who were inside the Basilica every four months to avoid their deaths. In 1869, Francisco José, Emperor of Austria, obtained from the Sultan a small piece of land to be able to enlarge the space of the Franciscan convent and make a terrace, from which the friars could finally see the sky and breathe a little fresh air . The Emperor replied: "My condemned to the harshest jail are better off than the Franciscans in the Holy Sepulcher!"

Francesco Suriano, a franciscan chronicler, considers that the privilege of being at the service of the Holy Sepulcher is a gift of Divine Providence and a grace that the Holy Spirit has granted to the Franciscans, through the intercession and through the merits of Father Saint Francis, for having been so in love with the Passion of Christ that happened in this place. Hence the duty of the friars to be worthy of such immense grace granted by the Lord.

b) Serve the Holy Sepulcher with the other Christian communities. The Franciscans have lived and live with the separated brothers in the Holy Sepulcher and in other places subject to the Status quo, where not only do they live together, but they also share the same places and even the same altars. Knowing how to live is a Christian witness. The coexistence between the Franciscans and the separated brothers, especially the Greek-Orthodox, is marked daily by gestures of friendship and good neighborliness, which are a clear sign of trust. What greater unity than sharing everything you have, even the altar of the Sepulcher?

The presence of so many communities brings many limitations for everyone, including the Franciscans, and more than once tensions that are not easy to overcome. Until the end of the 16th century there was harmony between the communities present in the Holy Sepulcher, which found a way to live together and in peace. The strongest tensions will come from 1630, and will reach their peak in 1757, with the storming of the Basilica by the Orthodox Greeks and the burning of the Holy Sepulcher, which occurred in 1808. Thanks be to God, and the collaboration of all, today the situation is much more fraternal. Evident proof of this is the restoration of the Holy Sepulcher by the three major communities, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate.

III. Holy Sepulcher and Liturgy

In addition to the Liturgy, the Franciscans have created other popular pious activities: the daily procession at the Holy Sepulcher, the Stations of the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, pilgrimages to the Shrines of the Holy Land. The Stations of the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, held every Friday at three in the afternoon and ending at the Holy Sepulcher. The Way of the Cross is nothing other than the path of following Jesus, of the God who shares the sufferings of men. In the Holy City it is done in the same places where He passed. The Way of the Cross is a path of hope, because "from this Sepulcher" the Lord rose again.

IV. Finding Christ, dead and risen, in the Holy Sepulcher

The work of the Franciscans in the Holy Land and, especially, in the Holy Sepulcher, in addition to preserving the property and use of the Basilica, has been to celebrate Christian worship in the Sanctuaries, to give a biblical-archaeological foundation to the Holy Places through the illustration of the Holy Land, archaeological excavations, carried out by the Franciscan Biblical Study, and to serve local Christians with the creation of parishes, schools, social centers. To this must be added the welcoming of pilgrims so that Christians, of all nations, can find here the roots of their faith. Pope John XXIII said it in 1960:

"We know well to what extent should be attributed to the vigilance of your religious if the faithful, who go on a pious pilgrimage to the Holy Places, can still kiss the sacrosanct vestiges of Our Lord with mercy and love."

For John Paul II, the work well done by the Franciscans is also manifested in the "welcoming of pilgrims", "giving the faithful of these places, and those who go to them on a devout pilgrimage, a testimony of love and adherence to Christ , Redeemer of man ».

Franciscans and pilgrims. The difficulties to make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land have been immense. The pilgrim who went to Jerusalem, unarmed, practically entered a war zone. But the faith of the pilgrims was such that nothing and no one prevented them from reaching the heart of Jerusalem, overcoming the obstacles set by the authorities and the difficulties of the Muslim environment. The Franciscans illustrated to the pilgrims respect for the Muslim religion, insisting on the need for the pilgrim to be a man of peace, because here they do not come to wage war, but to meet Christ. They asked them to be respectful to others, but careful with their things, and not to be naive. Above all, the friars give the pilgrims practical advice to make a good pilgrimage: it is not the time for controversy, but silence and prayer. The pilgrim comes to imitate Jesus, that is why he has to behave with the humility of the Master. The pious pilgrim, after his long and difficult journey, wants to "touch" the footprints of Christ, embodied in Calvary and in the Empty Tomb of the Savior; He wants to adore God who has given himself for us, who has shed his last drop of blood in his Passion and who shows himself glorious in his Resurrection: for us, for our salvation.

V. Holy Sepulcher: Source of Divine Grace

The Holy Places are not only stones, vestiges of the past. Above all, they are the footprints of God's passage through this world. The work of the children of Saint Francis in the Holy Land has consisted of enlivening these stones, making them speak to the hearts of all, making them "beloved stones", because each one of them are witnesses of Christ. Without the presence of the Franciscans, their heroic effort and the price of their blood, the Catholic Church would be excluded from almost all the Holy Places. Some would have been turned into stables or mosques; others, the exclusive property of separate churches. A Catholic would find himself unable to celebrate the divine mysteries in the places where God has manifested himself, he would be a stranger in the house of Christ.

"Pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher" was first published in Tabor magazine for the consecrated life, no. 7. April 2009, by Fr. Artemio Vitores, OFM vicar of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.