Lauda Sion



"Lauda Sion" is a sequence prescribed for the Roman Catholic Mass for the feast of Corpus Christi. It was written by St. Thomas Aquinas around 1264, at the request of Pope Urban IV for the new Mass of this feast, along with Pange lingua, Sacris solemniis, and Verbum supernum prodiens, which are used in the Divine Office.

Overview
The Gregorian melody of the Lauda Sion is borrowed from the eleventh-century sequence Laetabundi iubilemus attributed to Adam of Saint Victor.

The hymn tells of the institution of the Eucharist and clearly expresses the belief of the Roman Catholic Church in transubstantiation and in Real presence, that is, that the bread and wine truly become permanently and irreversibly the Body and Blood of Christ when consecrated by a validly-ordained priest or bishop during the Mass. The fact that the hymn had been composed for the Holy Mass is testified by the sixth stanza: Dies enim solemnis agitur / In qua mensæ prima recolitur / Hujus institutio.

Lauda Sion is one of only four medieval sequences which were preserved in the Roman Missal published in 1570 following the Council of Trent (1545–1563) by Will of Saint Pius V—the others being Victimae paschali laudes (Easter), Veni Sancte Spiritus (Pentecost), and Dies irae (requiem masses). (A fifth, Stabat Mater, would later be added in 1727.) Before Trent, many feasts had their own sequences. The existing versions were unified in the Roman Missal promulgated in 1570. The Lauda Sion is still sung today as a solemn Eucharistic hymn, though its use as a sequence is optional in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. Before the reform of 1970, it was sung on Corpus Christi as a sequence between the gradual Oculi omnium and the Gospel of the day, after the verse of the Alleluia.

The sequence's English title is Sing forth, O Zion, sweetly sing or, as below, Sion, lift up thy voice and sing.

As with Aquinas's other three Eucharistic hymns, the last few stanzas of the Lauda Sion are often used alone, in this case, to form the Ecce panis Angelorum.

Text
Another translation is used in the 1981 Lectionary approved for Australia and New Zealand (Volume 1, pages 601-603). It is by James Ambrose Dominic Aylward OP (1813-1872) and was published in Annus Sanctus in 1884, pages 194-196.

A 1773 translation into German, "Deinem Heiland, deinem Lehrer", by Franz Xaver Riedel is a procession hymn for the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Reception
According to Dom Guéranger, Lauda Sion: "it is here that the utmost power of a Scholasticism, not crude and truncated, like that of today, but juicy and complete, like that of the Middle Ages, was able to bend the rhythm of the Latin language to the clear exposition and demand a dogma, as abstract for the theologian as it is sweet and consoling for the heart of the faithful."