Christmastide liturgical celebrations by the Order of St John

The Order of St John, that ruled over Malta from 1530 till 1798, was a religious order and, befittingly, its member knights celebrated in a solemn manner all the main feasts found in the Catholic Church’s religious calendar including, naturally, Christmastide consisting of Christmas Day and its Eve (December 24 and 25), The New Year (January 1) and the Epiphany (January 6). Such festivities were mostly concentrated in their Conventual Church that, from the last decades of the 16th century, was the presently named St John’s Co-Cathedral at Valletta. All the ceremonies closely followed what was ordained in the Order’s Ceremoniale Ordinis Sancti Joannis Baptistae Hierosolymitani, still extant in the Archives of the Order preserved at The National Library of Malta. At three o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, there was the recitation of the Nonas (Ninth Hour) and the church, altars and chapels were, by now, highly decorated for the occasion. The evening prayers preceded a procession headed by the Vice-Prior of St John’s to the main altar where there was exhibited a relic of the manger where Christ was born. The gold and silver reliquary of this relic, donated by the Prior of...