Feria Tertia infra Hebdomadam III post Octavam Paschæ — In Festo S. Pauli a Cruce Confessoris
There is a striking providence in the placement of today’s feast. We stand still within the radiance of Eastertide, in the Third Week after the Octave, when the Church’s heart yet sings Resurrexit, sicut dixit. And into this season of the empty tomb steps a saint whose entire vocation, whose very religious habit, whose very name is the Cross — Saint Paul of the Cross, Paolo Danei, founder of the Passionists, mystic of the Passion of Jesus Christ.
The Mass propers given us today are no accident of choice. The Epistle is from Saint Paul to the Corinthians, the great hymn to the verbum crucis. The Gospel is the sending of the seventy-two from Saint Luke. Together they form a single doctrine: the message and its messengers, the Cross and those sent to preach it.
Stultum Dei sapientius est hominibus
Verbum enim crucis pereuntibus quidem stultitia est: iis autem qui salvi fiunt, id est nobis, Dei virtus est.
“For the word of the Cross, to them indeed that perish, is foolishness; but to them that are saved, that is, to us, it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18)
Saint John Chrysostom, in his fourth homily on First Corinthians, marvels at the divine paradox. The thing the world esteems weakness becomes the very engine of salvation; the thing the world counts folly overthrows the wisdom of philosophers. The Apostle does not say that the interpretation of the Cross is the power of God, nor that the consequence of the Cross is the power of God, but that the Cross itself — the verbum crucis — is that power. The instrument of shame becomes the instrument of glory; the gibbet of slaves becomes the throne of the King.
Saint Augustine returns to this thought again and again. In his Tractates on the Gospel of John he calls the Cross not a scaffold of punishment but the master’s teaching chair — cathedra magistri docentis. From that chair our Lord delivered the deepest lesson the world has ever heard: that love unto death is stronger than death itself. The schoolroom is Calvary; the syllabus is the seven last words; the diploma is conformity to Christ Crucified.
This was the whole burden of Saint Paul of the Cross’s preaching. He insisted that meditation on the Passion is the shortest road to sanctity, the surest school of charity, the most efficacious medicine for the soul. He once wrote that the Passion of Jesus is the most overwhelming work of the love of God. He understood, with the Apostle, that the Cross is not a chapter of the Gospel but its whole content; that to know Christ is to know Him crucified; and that every other devotion, every other doctrine, finds its meaning in this central mystery.
The Greeks sought wisdom and the Jews sought signs. They sought, that is, in their own measure, with rulers fashioned by fallen reason and frustrated hope. To both, God answered with a wisdom and a sign no man would have invented: a corpse upon a tree, and the Resurrection at dawn.
Messis quidem multa, operarii autem pauci
Messis quidem multa, operarii autem pauci. Rogate ergo Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem suam.
“The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send labourers into his harvest.” (Luke 10:2)
Pope Saint Gregory the Great preached one of his most affecting homilies on this very Gospel — the seventeenth in his collection on the Evangelists. He could not read these words without being pierced by them. He confesses to his hearers that he speaks of this matter only with great sorrow, for there are crowds eager to hear the good word, but few willing to preach it. The harvest groans for reapers; the world is white unto harvest; the labourers stand idle. He calls his Roman flock to weep over the laziness of preachers in their own day.
Were Saint Gregory to look down upon the Church in our age, would he say less?
Saint Paul of the Cross was raised up by Providence as one such labourer, and he was given the grace to raise up many more. The Passionist Congregation was founded precisely to be a band of seventy-two, sent two by two. For, as Saint Ambrose observes in his commentary on Luke, the Lord sends them in pairs because charity is no solitary thing, and the Gospel is preached in fellowship before it is preached in words.
Saint Bede the Venerable sees in the number seventy-two an echo of the seventy nations listed in Genesis: the harvest is the world. The seventy elders whom Moses anointed, the seventy palms at Elim, the seventy years of Babylon — all the seventies of Scripture converge in this commission. The Lord casts the seed of His Word over every nation under heaven, and He calls labourers from every age to gather the sheaves in.
The Confessor of the Cross
A Confessor in the ancient sense is one who confesses Christ — who proclaims Him by the witness of his life. What did Saint Paul of the Cross confess, if not Christ Crucified? He preached missions across the Italian states with a small black crucifix held aloft over his heart and the white letters JESU XPI PASSIO emblazoned upon his breast. His mission was simple: Memoriam Passionis Domini Nostri Jesu Christi — to keep alive in the world the memory of the Passion. He confessed by his preaching, by his fasts, by the long nights of prayer, by his hidden tears, that the Cross is everything.
And so the wisdom of today’s Mass dawns upon us. In the Easter season — when the Church has just chanted Christus resurgens ex mortuis iam non moritur — we are not permitted to forget the price. The risen Wounds remain. The glorified Body still bears the marks of the nails. There is no Resurrection apart from Calvary, and no Calvary that does not flower into Resurrection. To preach the one is to preach the other. The seventy-two are sent precisely to announce that the Kingdom of God is at hand — and the Kingdom comes through the Cross.
Saint Leo the Great taught that the Cross of Christ is the fountain of every blessing and the source of every grace. From this fountain Saint Paul of the Cross drank deeply, and from it he gave others to drink.
Pax huic domui
The Lord instructs the seventy-two: when you enter a house, say first, Pax huic domui — peace to this house. The peace that Christ gives is not the world’s peace. It is the peace purchased in blood, the peace that flows from the pierced Side, the peace that the Risen One breathes upon His Apostles in the Cenacle along with the Holy Spirit. It is the peace that the Cross alone can give, because it is the peace that only the Cross has bought.
May Saint Paul of the Cross, on this his feast, obtain for us a measure of his love for the Passion. May he beg of the Lord of the harvest many labourers for his vineyard in our day. And may we, who hear the word of the Cross, be found among those who are saved — qui salvi fiunt, id est nobis, Dei virtus est.
Sancte Paule a Cruce, ora pro nobis.