TheCityWorships 259
phant hymns like the ‘‘Vexilli Regis’’ of Passiontide.^155 When Bona of Pisa
went to Sunday Mass at the collegiate church of San Giacomo in Podio, she
heard a choir of seven Pisan clerics. The music was so exquisite that she
was certain she could hear Christ and his apostles singing with the choir.^156
Laywomen were also connoisseurs of good chant.
Execution of the cult with elegance, solemnity, and attention was always
a crowd pleaser. Collegiate churches, with their larger staffs and resources,
were magnets. So was the duomo, the Mother Church of the city, where one
might even find the bishop himself ‘‘pontificating’’ when he was in town.^157
Secular priests went complaining to Pope Innocent IV about the laity’s de-
serting their proper chapels to go to the churches of the mendicants: ‘‘these
two orders celebrate Mass so well that the people turn to them.’’ Fra Salim-
bene of Parma, who reported this incident, could not resist suggesting that
the secular clergy’s real complaint was loss of money rather than people.^158
That the laity’s taste for finer and more edifying liturgy led them to the friars
may reflect Salimbene’s Franciscan ego more than the reality, but synods of
diocesan clergy inveighed against laypeople’s going from church to church
in search of more spiritually satisfying Masses.^159 They responded in more
constructive ways, too, requiring that candles be properly lit during parish
services and, in particular, that the Host be properly illuminated at the eleva-
tion.^160 If parish priests could not outsing the friars, they could at least show
greater reverence for the Blessed Sacrament.
Churches did not attract the laity merely by the quality of their music, the
devotion of their ministers, or the splendor of their ceremonies. The worship
of a small cappella, with its intimate community of friends, had an immedi-
acy that monastic churches and cathedrals lacked. In small churches, clerics
bent the rules and even invited the laity to come within the choir screen for
the Consecration.^161 This not only permitted closer visual contact with the
consecrated Host but even allowed the people to hear the whispering of that
most sacred of prayers, the Canon, by which Christ’s body and divinity were
made present under the forms of bread and wine. The canons of the cathe-
dral at Siena surely understood the lay desire for immediacy when they
allowed the great solemn Mass to be moved from the high altar in the choir
to altars in the nave on the feasts of the saints to whom the altars were
dedicated.^162 But there always remained reasons for keeping the laity out of
the choir and at a reverential distance. Fra Nicola of Tolentino celebrated
155 .Ordo Senensis, 1. 11 ,p. 12 ; 1. 126 ,p. 112.
156 .Vita [Sanctae Bonae Virginis Pisanae], 3. 28 ,p. 150.
157. As at Bologna, where an earthquake struck in 1222 during the bishop’s Mass:CCB, 85 – 87.
158. Salimbene,Cronica( 1250 ), 607 – 8 , 610 – 11 , Baird trans., 425 , 427.
159. See, e.g., Piacenza Stat. Cler. ( 1297 ), p. 532 ;( 1337 ), 22 ,p. 542.
160. Lucca Synod ( 1308 ), 7 ,p. 215 ; 4 ,p. 177.
161. Trexler,Christian at Prayer, 125 n. 28 ; on the popularity of viewing, see Kennedy, ‘‘Moment of
Consecration,’’ 125 – 42.
162 .Ordo Senensis, 1. 58 ,p. 55.