The Birthday of Blessed Charlemagne the Great

Edit: the following's a brief translation in honor of the birthday of Blessed Charlemagne the Great by Father Gero Weishaupt.

On January 28th 814, Blessed Charlemagne the Great died in his beloved Aachen Palace.  In 2014, Aachen and Europe will hold his 1,200th birthday.  Charlemagne was, according to Einhard, his biographer, interred in the palace chapel which still is located in today's Cathedral.  Bl. Charles the Great is the founder of the Christian West on the foundations of Greco-Roman antiquity.  He made Aachen his main residence, the "Rome of the North".

Einhard, in his famous Vita Karoli Magni which is stylistically written after the style of Suetonius', reported over the death and burial of Bl. Charlemagne:

"Septimo, postquam decubuit, die, sacra communione percepta decessit anno aetatis suae septuagesimo secundo et ex quo regnare coeperat quadragesimo septimo, V. Kal. Februarii, hora diei tertia. Corpus more sollemni lotum et curatum et maximo totius populi luctu ecclesiae inlatum atque humatum est. Dubitatum est primo, ubi reponi deberet, eo quod ipse vivus de hoc nihil praecepisset. Tandem omnium animis sedit nusquam eum honestius tumulari posse quam in ea basilica, quam ipse propter amorem Dei et domini nostri Iesu Christi et ob honorem sanctae et aeternae virginis, genetricis eius, proprio sumptu in eodem vico construxit. in hac sepultus est eadem die, qua defunctus est, arcusque surpa tumulum deauratus cum imagine et titulo exstructus" (Einhard, Vita Karoli, 30 f).

In the Middle Ages, Aache was the place of coronation of the German kings for centuries.

The Cathedral is, for Father Gero Weishaupt, the place where he experienced as an acolyte, the beauty of the Latin Liturgy and the rich and deep historical connection between his city, the Church and posterity.

In the following selection, you can hear the burial of an Emperor of the Franks and the Romans, sung by the Aachen Cathedral Choir, the oldest German boy's choir, whose founding goes back to Bl. Charles the Great.  In the relief, one sees among others, the throne (of the Holy Roman Empire [German Nation]) as well as the Charlemagne Shrine with the bones of the beatified on the 29th of December, in any case, in Aachen.



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