The Rite of the Church of Milan

Milan received its liturgical stamp in the age of Ambrose, when the city was the effective capital of the Western empire and its bishop one of the most powerful men in it. Ambrose himself is credited by Augustine with introducing antiphonal hymn singing to the West during the basilica crisis of 386, and genuine hymns of his composition are still sung in the rite that bears his name.

The Ambrosian liturgy differs from the Roman in ways a visitor notices at once and in ways only a scholar would. Its Advent runs six weeks rather than four, beginning after the feast of St Martin. Its Lent begins on the Sunday after the Roman Ash Wednesday, so that ashes are given at the start of the following week. The order of Mass keeps distinctive features, among them the placing of the creed after the offertory and a litany-form dismissal of the catechumens on Lenten Sundays, and the rite preserves a body of Ambrosian chant that is its own musical dialect, older in some of its layers than the Gregorian repertory and never absorbed by it. The lectionary distributes the scriptures on its own scheme, and the calendar honours a Milanese company of saints headed by Ambrose himself. None of this is antiquarianism: the rite is the ordinary Sunday worship of one of the largest dioceses in the world, and its books have been revised and reprinted for contemporary use like any living liturgy.