Pallium

The pallium is made from a specific set of animals in a specific year, which is unusual for a vestment. Two lambs are blessed each 21 January, the feast of Saint Agnes, at the basilica of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, the saint whose name recalls the Latin for lamb. Their wool is taken and woven into the bands by religious sisters in Rome, and the finished pallia are laid up in a niche at the confessio of Saint Peter's, over the tomb, until they are conferred.

The conferral has been on 29 June, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, when new metropolitan archbishops of the year come to Rome. In 2015 Francis changed the rite while keeping the calendar: the pope blesses the pallia at Rome on that day and hands them to the archbishops privately, and each then receives his pallium formally in his own cathedral from the apostolic nuncio, in the presence of the bishops of his province and of his own people. The stated reason was that the people most affected by the office should see it given.

The band itself is narrow, white, circular, with a short pendant hanging in front and behind, and it carries six black crosses. It is worn over the chasuble. It is not inherited, not lent and not transferred: an archbishop translated to another metropolitan see receives a new one, and a pallium is buried with the man it was given to.

The pallium is the rare vestment that says something about jurisdiction rather than about order. A metropolitan wears it only within his own province and only at certain liturgies, and canon law requires him to request it of the pope within three months of his appointment and forbids him to exercise certain metropolitan functions until he has it. What it signifies, in the standard Latin reading, is a share in the pastoral office of the bishop of Rome, not the archbishop's own dignity, which is why it must be asked for and why the pope alone gives it.

Its beginnings are less clear than its present rules. The band appears in the late antique west without an explanation attached, and its ancestry has been traced to imperial or civil insignia by some writers and to an ecclesiastical honour by others; the sources do not settle the question. Early popes granted it to individual bishops as a personal privilege, and only from the ninth century onward does it settle into the metropolitan requirement it now is.

Compared with the East the difference is instructive. The omophorion, its Byzantine counterpart, is worn by every bishop as a mark of the episcopal order itself and is not granted by anybody. The two garments began close together and have ended saying different things: one about being a bishop, the other about a relationship with Rome.