Augustine's Baptism and the Ambrosian Rite

Augustine arrived in Milan in 384 as a professor of rhetoric and a former follower of Mani, having concluded that the Christian scriptures were crudely written and morally embarrassing. He went to hear Ambrose preach for the style and found the content unpicking his objection: read as figure rather than as chronicle, the passages he had mocked ceased to be absurd. Reading the Platonists gave him a way of thinking about evil as absence rather than substance, and the crisis broke in a Milanese garden, with a child's voice chanting take up and read and a book of Paul opened at random. He was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter vigil of 387. His mother Monica died at Ostia on the journey home, and the Confessions were written a decade later.

Milan kept its own liturgy. The Ambrosian rite has an Advent of six weeks rather than four, its own lectionary, its own chant repertory and a Lent that begins on a different day from the Roman one. It survived the standardisation of the sixteenth century because Charles Borromeo, archbishop and a principal figure of the Catholic reformation, defended it while reorganising everything else, founding seminaries, holding provincial councils, and staying in the city through the plague of 1576. The rite is still used across the archdiocese, which makes it the largest non Roman Latin rite in the Catholic Church.