Album of the Deceased Marian Fathers and Brothers

A lbum of the D eAD In the t rADItIon of the m ArIAn C ommunIty Probably, the custom of commemorating the deceased Marians was intro- duced in our monasteries as early as the first half of the 18 th century. It used to be done for each local community at the conclusion of lunch or supper, a day before the anniversary of each one’s death, and consisted in reading a “memen- to” in which only basic information was contained: names of those who died on that day, the place and the year of their death, their nationality and the office (or the offices) they had held in the Order. The local community then prayed for the repose of the deceased mentioned on that day. Thus, a collection of such mem- entos, called “Liber Mortuorum” came into being, with constant additions for the most recently deceased Marians. It seems that with time the role of “Liber Mortuorum” was taken over in the Marian Order by another book – the so called “Album Patrum ac Fratrum Marianorum Defunctorum,” in which a brief description of the lives of the deceased members was given. From that time on this description began to be read as a memento on the anniversary of their death. Each monastery had its own Album (with the title abbreviated to “Album Mortuorum”), but with the suppression of the Marian monasteries in the 19 th cen- tury, many of those Albums were lost. As a result, out of the once existing numer- ous Albums of the deceased “White Marians,” today – besides two original frag- mentary Albums, – we have only three complete Albums that contain mementos of the deceased Marians from the beginning of the 18 th century to the final decades of the 19 th century. However, of those three only one is original, written in Latin. Of the remaining two, one is a Polish translation from the Latin original that has been lost, the so called “Album of Skórzec.” The other is a copy of the lost original Latin text, the so called “Album of Marijampolė,” of which a copy was brought to Rome about 60 years ago. The other two Albums are now in the Archives of the Polish Province. Based on the said three Albums, in this century more updated Albums were developed, both in Poland and in Rome. They included not only new mementos, but also certain textual modifications of the previous ones. While certain differ- ences were evident in the Skórzec and Marijampolė versions of the Albums, especially regarding dates of death and spelling of names of the deceased, even more differences are apparent in the more contemporary versions, as a result of independent work undertaken by their authors.