There is one famous Christian song from the Middle Ages, which was formerly part of each Requiem Mass.
It is called Dies Irae (“Day of wrath”) and is an essential part of the Requiem Mass (Mass for the Dead) in the Traditional Latin Mass. It was most likely written by Thomas of Celano (1200?-1260), an Italian Franciscan friar. He was also a friend and biographer of St. Francis of Assisi.
Its first appearance in a missal was in 1491. After the Council of Trent, when the Mass was standardized, it was introduced into the new Missal of the Latin Rite.
In the Traditional Latin Mass, it is one of the five “sequences” and is either prayed or sung during the Requiem Mass. The other four are: “Victimae paschali laudes” on Easter; “Veni sancte spiritus” on Pentecost, “Lauda sion” on Corpus Christi, and “Stabat Mater” on the Seven Dolors BVM.
The Dies Irae is made up of 19 stanzas, of which the last two are later additions. The poem describes the Last Judgment.
I’m not going to quote the entire poem, only a few lines. The first stanza reads:
Dies iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla.
The day of wrath,
the day when the world dissolves into ashes,
David testified with Sybil.
The following stanzas expand on this idea. The ninth one reads:
Recordare, Iesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuæ viæ:
Ne me perdas illa die.
Remember, merciful Jesus,
that I am the cause of Your journey:
don’t lose me on that day.
The last two stanzas, which are a later addition, ask God to spare the deceased person from Hell:
Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favílla
Iudicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce, Deus:
Pie Iesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem. Amen.
Tearful that day,
on which from the ashes will rise
the guilty man who is to be judged:
Then spare him, O God.
Merciful Lord Jesus,
grant them rest. Amen.
The “Sybil” seems to refer to the Erythraean Sibyl, who was a Greek prophetess claimed to have prophesied the coming of Jesus Christ. Saint Augustine in his book “De Civitate Dei”, writes that there was “a Greek manuscript, saying that it was the prophecies of the Erythraean sibyl, in which he pointed out a certain passage which had the initial letters of the lines so arranged that these words could be read in them: ‘Iesous Christos Theou uios soter’, which means, ‘Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour.’” In this prophecy, the “sybil” was talking about the end of the world.
Unfortunately, the Dies Irae has been removed from the Requiem Mass in the New Mass introduced in 1969. The leader of the group developing the “New Mass”, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, claimed that the Dies Irae, and similar songs “overemphasized judgment, fear, and despair”. In the new liturgy, the Dies Irae is an optional song in the Liturgy of the Hours on All Soul’s Day (November 2), but isn’t prayed in the Requiem.
A few years ago, Louie Verrechio made an interesting comparison between the Old and the New Masses for the Dead, showing that the prayers of the New Mass are deliberately written to exclude mention of sin or Hell and to give the impression that the deceased person is probably already in Heaven. In a world which we have today, where few people believe in Hell, the Dies Irae can remind us of this reality.
Christ executing Judgment. Stained-glass window in the chapel of the St Albert’s Priory in Oakland, California. Image by Lawrence Lew OP in 2016, CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0, here.