SUBTER QUERCUM, QUAE ERAT IN SANCTUARIO DOMINI

Quasi terebinthus extendi ramos meos,

et rami mei honoris et gratiæ.

Eccli 24,22

Ecce lapis iste erit vobis in testimonium,

quod audierit omnia verba Domini.

Jos 24,27

Beloved brothers and sisters,

Dearest Claudio, Mauro, and Antonio,

Dearest Silvio and Francesco,

When Joshua, having reached the end of his days, gathered the tribes of Israel at Shechem to renew the Covenant, he did not lead them into a palace, nor within the walls of a fortress. He led them beneath an oak tree. And there, after the people had cried out Domino Deo nostro serviemus, et obedientes erimus præceptis ejus, he took a large stone and placed it subter quercum, quae erat in sanctuario Domini, and said: «Behold, this stone shall be a witness for you, for it has heard all the words of the Lord.»

A covenant, a people, an oak tree. Scripture shows us these things happening together three thousand years before it came to pass here in Viterbo, on the Campo Graziano, in September 1467. For in that month, after being delivered from the plague after a week of prayer and penance, Viterbo, too, bound itself to its Lady with a covenant of love – as our forebears called it, and as we call it still – and Viterbo, too, sealed that bond beneath an oak tree. Yet it was not stone that bore witness, but rather a humble terracotta roof tile, painted by an artist named Monetto and hung from a branch by a craftsman named Battista. That tile heard the City’s vow; for five and a half centuries, that tile has borne witness to it.

And it is of this covenant that we must speak today, on this patronal feast: for a covenant involves two parties, and it is fitting to ask ourselves whether both have kept it.

Providence has ordained that this feast should also be the day on which five young men personally subscribe to that covenant. Last night, at First Vespers for the vigil of this feast, Silvio and Francesco were invested with the cappa and officially began the preparatory year leading to the Seminary; in a few moments, Mauro and Antonio will receive the ministry of Porter, and Claudio that of Lector. Five more names, then, beneath the Oak. I shall speak of them later; but bear in mind from this moment on that everything I say about Our Lady of the Oak applies, in an eminent way, to those who today consecrate themselves to her service.

I. The Madonna Who Refuses to Be Moved

Allow me, first of all, to recall a detail from the history of The Oak, one too often left unspoken, yet which seems to me the most relevant to us at this moment.

Before the famous miracles of 1467, there were others that were quieter and of a singular nature. Around 1450, a hermit named Pier Domenico Alberti felt that the image was too exposed, too humble, and too neglected; he removed it from the tree to take it to his hermitage, where he intended to ensure it received more fitting veneration. The next morning, the tile was back on the oak tree. A few years later, a pious woman named Bartolomea did the same, with the same good intentions, and more than once the image returned on its own to the branch from which it had been taken.

Reflect on this, dear friends. Neither of them wished to desecrate the sacred image; both wanted to improve its placement. They were devout people who believed they were acting quite reasonably. Why leave the image of the Mother of God in a field, exposed to wind and rain, when one could provide a roof and a votive lamp? Yet the Virgin, with both gentleness and firmness, answered by returning to where she had been – not to the place that seemed most comfortable to her, but to the place where God had placed her.

There is a lesson here that I dare call prophetic. For sixty years, attempts have been made to move the Church from the place where Our Lord placed her: from her immutable doctrine, her Sacrifice, her discipline, and her hierarchical constitution. And this has been done, almost always, using the arguments of the hermit and Bartolomea: to make the Faith more accessible, closer to man, and better suited to the times. What was actually a relocation was termed aggiornamento. Yet the Church – like the image of the Madonna of the Oak – does not belong to those who would wish to place her elsewhere; and whenever she is severed from her tree – that is, from Tradition – she returns to where she was originally planted: into the hands of humble faithful who have not altered by a single iota what they received. Look at where vocations, large families, and young people kneeling in prayer are flourishing today: not in conference halls where synodality is debated, but beneath the old oak tree.

The tile returning to the branch is a sign that God does not ratify the shifts made by men, however pious they may deem themselves to be. Ne transgrediaris terminos antiquos, quos posuerunt patres tui (Prov 22,28) — do not cross the ancient boundaries set by your fathers. She who conservabat omnia verba hæc could not have given us a clearer lesson.

II. Gideon Underneath the Oak

There is another oak in Holy Scripture, and beneath it sits a man who resembles us. Venit Angelus Domini, et sedit sub quercu quæ erat in Ephra – the Angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak at Ophrah – while Gideon, the youngest of the humblest family of Manasseh, was secretly threshing wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites, who had invaded and devastated Israel. And the Angel said to him: Dominus tecum, virorum fortissimo. The Lord is with you, O mighty warrior.

These are the same words that the Angel will say, thirteen centuries later, to a Virgin of Nazareth: Dominus tecum. The Church did not unite them in its liturgy by chance. Under the oak of Ophrah, God salutes his own strength in the weakest man; in Nazareth, he greets his own strength in the humblest creature. And in both cases the strength does not lie in the greeting, but in the One who pronounces it: Dominus tecum.

What did Gideon do, having been greeted in this way? Three things—things that constitute the program for every Catholic during a time of occupation. First: by night, accompanied by ten servants, Gideon tore down the altar to Baal that his father had erected and cut down the sacred pole. He did not engage in dialogue with Baal, nor did he seek to appreciate its positive elements or find a common path with it; instead, he tore it down and offered a burnt offering to the Lord upon its ruins. Second: Gideon asked God for a sign, and God granted it through the fleece – the fleece remaining dry while the ground was wet, and then the fleece becoming wet while the ground was dry. The Church Fathers saw the Virgin in that fleece, upon whom the dew of the Word descended while the world remained parched. Third: Gideon arrived for battle with thirty-two thousand men, yet the Lord left him with only three hundred. Ne glorietur contra me Israël, et dicat: Meis viribus liberatus sum (Jdc 7,2) – so that Israel might not boast, saying: «I have delivered myself by my own strength.»

Dearest brethren, the Midianites of our time do not arrive on camels. They occupy university chairs, government ministries, editorial offices, and parliaments; they occupy the Vatican, universities, seminaries, and episcopal curias. And the people of God thresh the wheat in secret, within the winepress: they celebrate the Traditional Mass in makeshift chapels, teach the Catechism at home, and baptize their children in a Faith that official shepherds declare obsolete. It is not the first time; and perhaps it will not be the last. Yet to the one who, in this situation, feels like the least of the least family, the oak of Ophrah replies: Dominus tecum. And as for numbers, God has already made clear through Gideon what He thinks of numerical superiority.

III. The Mainmast of Lepanto

Upon entering the Basilica della Quercia and looking up, one sees, among its most remarkable relics, a ship’s mast: the mainmast of a Turkish galley captured at Lepanto on October 7, 1571, and gifted to our Sanctuary by Saint Pius V. A saintly Pope desired that this trophy of Christian victory stand here, beside Our Lady of the Oak, and the reason is not hard to fathom: that broken timber, placed next to the wood supporting the image of the Virgin, silently declares which mast triumphs and which one sinks.

Saint Pius V did not triumph at Lepanto through diplomacy; he triumphed through the Rosary. While the galleys clashed in the Gulf of Patras, Rome was praying, and the Pope – as his biographers recount – rose from his desk, opened the window, and said to those present: «This is no time for business; go and thank God, for our fleet has won.» He instituted the Feast of Saint Mary of Victory and added the invocation Auxilium Christianorum to the Litany. And it is the same Saint Pius V who, a year earlier, through the Bull Quo Primum, had established in perpetuity the Rite of the Holy Mass celebrated at this altar today, a Rite that none of his successors had the right to proscribe.

Thus, dearly beloved, this feast unites what men would seek to separate: Our Lady, the Rosary, the Mass of all time, and the victory over the enemies of Christendom. Saint Pius V held all these things together, and for this reason, he was a saint and he triumphed. Those who separate them today – those who recite the Rosary yet tolerate the abolition of the Mass, those who desire the Mass yet are ashamed to speak of the enemies of the Faith, those who speak of the enemies yet do not pray – will achieve nothing. The Turkish mainmast reminds us that Christendom was saved, on a day in October, by a Pope who still knew who the enemy was and Who the Source of aid was.

I said «a Pope». For the Papacy has for centuries been the katéchon, that which holds back the Mystery of iniquity. And we live in a time when the one who ought to hold back the Mystery of iniquity has chosen to abet it; a time when the See of Peter engages in dialogue with those who oppose and desecrate the Faith, yet remains silent toward those who ask to be confirmed in the Faith. I say this not with satisfaction, but with the sorrow of a Bishop. Meanwhile, we do what Rome did in 1571: we pray the Rosary, we offer the Holy Sacrifice, and we do not abandon the ship.

IV. The Ten Servants of Gideon

I now turn to you, dearest Claudio, Mauro, and Antonio, and to you, Silvio and Francesco.

When Gideon tore down the altar of Baal by night, Scripture notes a detail that seems secondary: assumptis decem viris de servis suis – he took ten of his servants with him. Not the notables of Ophrah, not the priests, not the tribal leaders: ten servants, men whose names we do not know, who, in the darkness, carried the axe, the rope, and the wood for the burnt offering. Without them, Gideon could have done nothing; and without Gideon, they would not have known what to do. This is the ministry that the Holy Church confers upon you today: to be the servants of the Sacrifice of the altar, those who carry the instruments of worship beneath the oak tree, at a time when the worship of the true God is celebrated almost in secret, while idols are worshipped in His place.

To you, Mauro and Antonio, I shall soon entrust the keys, saying: Sic agite, quasi reddituri Deo rationem pro iis rebus quae his clavibus recluduntur – conduct yourselves as those who must render an account to God for what is opened and closed by these keys. Joshua placed the stone of the covenant subter quercum, quae erat in sanctuario Domini (Jos 24,26): beneath the oak that stood in the sanctuary of the Lord. A sanctuary has a threshold, and the threshold has a guardian. You shall be guardians of the threshold of this Church, which is the threshold of the covenant: you will open the door to anyone who comes to renew it, to repent, or to worship – and there is no sinner in the world for whom that door is too narrow – but you will not open it to those who come to rewrite its terms. The ostiarius – as ancient discipline dictates – percutit cymbalum et campanam; he rings the bells. See to it that your bells are like those that summoned the thirty thousand in 1467, gathered in Viterbo to implore an end to the plague, and not like those that fall silent so as not to disturb the world. And remember the hermit and Bartolomea: Our Lady will not be moved, nor will the Church. Your office is the humblest, and for that very reason, the most exposed: the doorkeeper is the first whom the enemy encounters, and the first who might betray. But you shall not betray.

To you, Claudio, I shall entrust the book: Accipe, et esto verbi Dei relator. And I shall tell you to proclaim the divine readings distincte et aperte, absque omni mendacio falsitatis – clearly, openly, without any falsehood or deceit. Consider what Joshua said of the stone: audivit omnia verba Domini – the stone heard all the words of the Lord. All of them: not just the pleasing ones, not the pastorally correct ones, not those the audience is willing to accept. The reader is a stone that has heard all the words and gives them all back, intact, without subtracting or adding anything. Today, the Word of God is often treated merely as a journey, an ideal, or a matter of discernment; you, however, shall do with it what the Virgin did: conservabat omnia verba hæc – she treasured all these words, and lived by them all the way to Calvary. One does not negotiate with the Word; one proclaims it and obeys it. Quod ore legis, corde credas, atque opere compleas. And since the Church entrusts the Lector with the task of benedicere panem et fructus novos, remember that the first fruit of the earth you bless is the one hanging from a tree in the Campo Graziano.

And to you, Silvio and Francesco, who last night at First Vespers, donned the cappa, I say but a single word, for at the start of the journey, words must be few. The cappa you wear is not ceremonial attire; it is a mantle, and the first sign that you place yourselves sub tuum præsidium, under the protection of the One we venerate here. Yesterday, the world saw you enter the church dressed like everyone else; today, it sees you dressed differently, and it is already passing judgment on you. Very well: begin to get used to it. The propaedeutic year is not for learning Latin – that will come later – but for learning to be terracotta tiles: that is, allowing the face of Christ to be painted upon you without insisting on choosing the brush. Gideon asked for a sign, and God gave it to him in the fleece; ask for your sign, too, with humility, and Our Lady will grant it. But do not ask for numbers. Three hundred sufficed, and there are two of you.

Five more servants beneath the oak tree. It is no small thing; it is precisely how God has always begun.

V. The Covenant: Who Broke It?

Let us return, then, to the covenant of love and to the question I posed at the beginning: have the parties to the covenant kept it?

Our Lady certainly has. From 1467 to the present day, there has not been a single generation of Viterbo’s people unable to bear witness to her protection: the Spiriti knight, who in 1506, pursued by enemies, leapt his horse across a precipice no horse could cross; young Barbara Moscaroli, who in 1625 remained afloat for an hour in the deep well into which she had fallen; the thousand graces that line the walls of the Sanctuary of the Quercia. The Lady of the Quercia has kept her pledge with a faithfulness that ought to make us blush for shame.

And what of us? I speak not only of Viterbo, but of all Christendom, of which Viterbo is both a fragment and a mirror. Any covenant with the Mother of God is also a covenant with her Son, and a covenant with her Son contains clauses that cannot be rewritten: Domino Deo nostro serviemus, et obedientes erimus præceptis ejus (Jos 24,24). We shall serve the Lord; we shall obey His commandments. Not the commandments of this or that agenda, not the rewritten morality of synods, not the universal religion of brotherhood without Christ: but His Commandments – all of them, always.

Now, dearly beloved, let us look honestly at what has come to pass. The covenant of love has been broken not by the people, who have continued to make their way up to the Oak, but by the Shepherds who ought to have guarded it on the people’s behalf. It has been taught that the commandments are merely an ideal, that sin is merely a frailty, and that Truth is a journey; the City of God has been surrendered to the city of man, and this capitulation has been renamed as «openness». It is not those who have resisted this betrayal who have broken the covenant; it is those who carried it out and those who, for the sake of a quiet life, have submitted to it. And today, those who remain faithful are struck with censures that no one dares apply to those who openly deny the Faith. Yet the stone beneath the oak of Shechem heard the words of the Lord, and the roof tile beneath the oak of Viterbo heard the words of Viterbo. Both are witnesses, and on the Day of Judgment, they shall speak.

VI. Nisi Dominus Custodierit Civitatem

For the past few years, this City has chosen to officially proclaim the Virgin of the Oak as its Guardian. It is a title that deserves to be taken seriously, for the Psalm admonishes us: Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam (Ps 126,1) – If the Lord does not guard the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil. In vain do the security systems, insurance policies, health plans, and digital surveillance networks, which global power spreads over our lives in the name of our protection, keep watch. In vain: because the city that has entrusted itself to itself has already lost what it sought to guard.

In 1467, Viterbo did not seek help from an agency, nor did it rush to get vaccinated; instead, it came crawling on its knees in prayer and gathered under an oak tree. And the plague ceased. There is a certain political wisdom in the simplicity of that gesture – a wisdom that our rulers, and sadly our shepherds too, have lost: public salvation is attained through public penance. It is not I who say this; it is the history of this Diocese that says it. A City that has a Guardian in Heaven can afford not to fear men; a City that is ashamed of its Guardian will fall prey to the first Midianite who comes along.

VII. Let Us Renew the Covenant

Let us, then, renew the covenant of love today, but let us renew it fully, with all its stipulations, and not merely as a civic ceremony. Let us renew it like the image returning to the branch: promising not to let ourselves be swayed, no matter how compelling the reasons, from the Faith of our Fathers. Let us renew it like Gideon beneath the oak of Ophrah: tearing down by night, if need be, the altars to Baal that our dioceses and parishes have allowed to be erected. Let us renew it by asking for the sign of the fleece – that is, the Virgin – and by accepting the call to be only three hundred. Let us renew it like Saint Pius V: with the Rosary in hand and the traditional Mass at the altar, unashamed to recognize who the enemy is and who the Auxilium Christianorum is. Let us renew it like Gideon’s ten servants: you, Mauro and Antonio, at the threshold with the keys; you, Claudio, with the book that has heard every word; you, Silvio and Francesco, beneath the mantle of the cope; and each of us in the place Providence has assigned, without asking for a better one.

And let us renew it, finally, just as the thirty thousand did in 1467: on our knees. For it is not we who write the covenant; it is written by the Virgin Mother in Her Immaculate Heart: She who has promised to triumph, and who will triumph over this plague too, just as She did over the other, once the children of this City and this Church have once again learned to take the path to the Campo Graziano.

Quasi terebinthus extendi ramos meos, et rami mei honoris et gratiæ. May there be refuge beneath those branches; may the witness to your vow be found beneath those branches; and beneath those branches, dearly beloved, may Our Lady of the Oak, Guardian of Viterbo and Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, always find you there beneath those branches. And so may it be.