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Saint CeciliaPart III: Churches and Church MusicHer church in the Trastevere quarter of Rome was rebuilt by Paschal I (817-824), on which occasion the pope wished to transfer thither her relics; at first, however, he could not find them and believed that they had been stolen by the Lombards. In a vision he saw St. Cecilia, who exhorted him to continue his search, as he had already been very near to her, i.e. near her grave. He therefore renewed his quest; and soon the body of the martyr, draped in costly stuffs of gold brocade and with the cloths soaked in her blood at her feet, was actually found in the Catacomb of Prætextatus. They may have been transported thither from the Catacomb of Callistus to save them from earlier depredations of the Lombards in the vicinity of Rome. The relics of St. Cecilia with those of Valerianus, Tiburtius, and Maximus, also those of Popes Urbanus and Lucius, were taken up by Pope Paschal, and reburied under the high altar of St Cecilia in Trastevere. The monks of a convent founded in the neighbourhood by the same pope were charged with the duty of singing the daily Office in this basilica. From this time the veneration of the holy martyr continued to spread, and numerous churches were dedicated to her. During the restoration of the church in the year 1599 Cardinal Sfondrato had the high altar examined and found under it the sarcophagi, with the relics of the saints, that Pope Paschal had transported thither.Recent excavations beneath the church, executed at the instigation and expense of Cardinal Rampolla, disclosed remains of Roman buildings, which have remained accessible. A richly adorned underground chapel was built beneath the middle aisle, and in it a latticed window, opening over the altar, allows a view of the receptacles in which the bones of the saints repose. In a side chapel of the church there have long been shown the remains of the bath in which, according to the Acts, Cecilia was put to death. The oldest representations of St. Cecilia show her in the attitude usual for martyrs in the Christian art of the earlier centuries, either with the crown of martyrdom in her hand (e.g. at S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, in a sixth-century mosaic) or in the attitude of prayer, as an Orans (e.g. the two sixth and seventh-century pictures in her crypt). In the apse of her church in Trastevere is still preserved the mosaic made under Pope Paschal, wherein she is represented in rich garments as patroness of the pope. Medieval pictures of the saint are very frequent; since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries she is given the organ as an attribute, or is represented as playing on the organ, evidently to express what was often attributed to her in panegyrics and poems based on the Acts, viz., that while the musicians played at her nuptials she sang in her heart to God only ("cantantibus organis illa in corde suo soi domino decantabat"); possibly the cantantibus organis was erroneously interpreted of Cecilia herself as the organist. In this way the saint was brought into closer relation with music. When the Academy of Music was founded at Rome (1584) she was made patroness of the institute, whereupon her veneration as patroness of church music in general became still more universal; today Cecilian societies (musical associations) exist everywhere. The organ is now her ordinary attribute; with it Cecilia was represented by Raphael in a famous picture preserved at Bologna. In another magnificent masterpiece, the marble statute beneath the high altar of the above-mentioned church of St. Cecilia at Rome, Carlo Maderna represented her lying prostrate, just as she had received the death-blow from the executioner's hand. Her feast is celebrated in the Latin and the Greek Church on 22 November. In the Martyrologium Hieronymainum are commemorated other martyrs of this name, but of none of them is there any exact historical information. One suffered martyrdom in Carthage with Dativus in 304. MOMBRITIUS, Sanctuarium, I, 186 sqq.; BOSIO, Atti di S. Cecilia (Rome, 1600); SURIUS, De vitis Sanctorum (Venice, 1581), VI, 161 sqq.; LADERCHI, S. Caciliae virg. et mart. acta ac transtiberina basilica (Rome, 1722); BOLLANDISTS ed., Bibliotheca hagiographica latina (Brussels, 1898-99), I, 224; SIMEON METAPHRASTES, in P.G., CXVI; BARONIUS, Annales, ad an. 821, 15 xv (the spurious document of Pope Paschal I); BOLLANDISTS ed., Synaxarium Constatinopolitanum (Brussels, 1902), 243; Liber Pontificalis, ed. DUCHESNE, I, xciii sq., 143, and II, 55-57, 65; TILLEMONT, Hist. eccles., III, 259 sqq.; De Rossi, Roma Sotterranea, II, xxxii sq.; GUERANGER, Histoire de Ste Cecile (Paris 1849; 2nd ed., 1852); IDEM, Ste Cecile et la societe romaine (Paris, 1878); MORSE, BIRKS, and HOLE, in Dict. of Christian Biog., s.v.; AUBE, Les chrétiens dans l'empire romain (2nd ed., Paris, 1881), 352 sqq.; ALLARD, Histoire des persecutions, I, 427 sqq.; ERBES, Die heilige Cacilia im Zusammenhang mit der Papstcrypta sowie der altesten Kirche Roms, in Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, IX, 1888, 1 sqq.; P.A. KIRSCH, Die heilge Cacilia, Jungfrau und Martyrin (Ratisbon, 1901); IDEM, Das Todesjahr der heiligen Cacilia, in Stromation Archaiologikon (Rome, 1900), 42-77; KELLNER, Das wahre Zeitalter der heil. Cacilia, in Theologische Quartalschrift (Tubingen, 1902), 237 sqq.; (1903), 321 sqq.; (1905), 258 sqq.; DUFOURCQ, Les Gesta martyrum romains (Paris, 1900), 116 sqq., 293 sqq.; MARUCCHI, Basiliques et eglises de Rome (Rome, 1902), 438 sqq.; BIANCHI-CAGLIESI, S. Cecilia e sua basilica (Rome, 1902); DETZEL, Christl. Ikonographie (Freiburg im Br., 1896), 220 sqq.; ROHAULT DE FLEURY, Les saints de la Messe, I, pl, 16-17; P. SIXTUS, Elucubrationes historico-liturgicae de recenti quadem sententia circa aetatem S. Caeciliae martyris, in Ephemerides liturgicae (Rome, Sept.-Oct. 1907). See also the accounts in BUTLER, Lives of the Saints, 22 November. J.P. KIRSCH
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