A tradition in evolution: Pallium signifies authority, loyalty

By John Norton
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In keeping with a 1,700-year-old church tradition, Pope John Paul II solemnly slipped a circular band of lambs' wool over the bowed heads of new archbishops in late June.

Known as a ``pallium,'' the strip of cloth has historical roots in the attire of Roman emperors and symbolizes the pope's concession of authority and communion to heads of major local churches.

As with most church traditions, the pallium's look and use have gradually evolved over the centuries, including several fairly radical changes introduced by Pope John Paul.

Starting in 1984, the Polish pontiff was the first to personally consign the pallium annually to all new archbishops -- a task his predecessors since the fourth century regularly had delegated.

He also fixed the date for bestowing palliums to June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and, for the first time in church history, incorporated the ceremony into the celebration of the Mass.

He enacted the changes to increase the pallium's impact as a physical sign of the ties among the pope, St. Peter and the local churches, according to a Vatican official.

And though very few people noticed, the pope recently experimented with -- but quickly abandoned -- a different style of pallium, one based loosely on those worn by popes in the Middle Ages and still employed in Eastern churches.

In its present Western form, dating back several hundred years, the pallium is a circular strip of hand-woven white wool nearly three inches wide, with two 14-inch ``tails'' hanging front and back. It is decorated with six black silk crosses, four of which have loops to hold long pins that often are topped with a precious stone.

But on Christmas Eve 1999, the opening of the jubilee year, the pope appeared in St. Peter's Basilica with a custom-made pallium that was wider, much longer and decorated with red crosses.

After the liturgy, the pallium was stored away and never used again. Informed sources say it failed to pass aesthetic and safety tests: With the pope's back curved with age, the extra lengths of wool doubled up in an ungainly way on his chest; and, more dangerously, they dangled precariously close to his uncertain footsteps.

``We've been told to keep making them the way we always have,'' said Sister Rosaria, 60, a member of the cloistered Benedictine community at Rome's Basilica of St. Cecilia that has been entrusted for more than a century with preparing the palliums.

The nuns once produced the palliums from scratch, hand-weaving pure-white lambs' wool into bands that they would then sew together and decorate. But these days, with their numbers reduced, the nuns commission a textile company outside of Rome to supply the unfinished wool strips.

Despite that concession to modernity, a host of traditions still surrounds the preparation of the palliums.

To this day, some of the wool comes from two lambs blessed by the pope around Jan. 21, the feast of St. Agnes, a Roman martyr who is often depicted with a lamb.

The lambs are raised by Trappist monks who live near Rome's Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. After being decorated with red and white flowers and blessed in a formal ceremony at the Basilica of St. Agnes and by the pope at the Vatican, the lambs are delivered to the Benedictine nuns and shorn as Holy Week approaches.

Underscoring the lamb's traditional symbolism for Christ, the nuns slaughter the animals in Holy Week, using the meat for their Easter Sunday banquet.

This year, the community delivered 50 carefully folded palliums to the Vatican in the week before the pope's Mass.

The day prior to the celebration, the pope blessed them and gave them to an aide to place overnight under the main altar of St. Peter's Basilica in a 350-year-old silver chest which tourists often mistakenly think contains St. Peter's bones.

The June 29 Vatican Mass is the only time archbishops wear the palliums together. Once bestowed, liturgical rules require that the pallium be worn only in the metropolitan's own see, and then only during solemn liturgies like ordinations.

Because of the cloth's territorial character, an archbishop who is transferred to another metropolitan see receives a second pallium. Among them this year, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, who already has a pallium from his tenure as head of the Newark Archdiocese, donned a new pallium for the Washington Archdiocese.

According to tradition, an archbishop with two palliums is buried with the most recent one around his neck; the other is rolled up and placed under his head.

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