A reflection for the feast of S. Petri Martyris (III. classis), kept on Wednesday within the Third Week after the Octave of Easter.
The Paschal candle still burns. The alleluias of Easter have not yet quieted. And into this season of light and risen flesh the Church places the red of a martyr — Peter of Verona, the Dominican preacher who, on the road from Como to Milan in April of 1252, was struck down by an assassin’s blade and, with his finger, traced into the dust at his side a single word: Credo.
The juxtaposition is not accidental. The liturgy knows what it is doing. To set the feast of a martyr within the white-and-gold of Paschaltide is to confess that the martyr is the proof of the Resurrection — that the blood poured out by Peter and his brethren is not the death of a defeated cause but the visible flowering of a vine whose root cannot be killed. The three readings the Office sets before us this day — two from the second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, and the great parable of the Vine in St. John — bring this paradox to its sharpest point.
Verbum Dei non est alligatum
St. Paul, writing from his Roman chains, tells his beloved disciple to remember Iesum Christum resurrexisse a mortuis — that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, of the seed of David, “according to my gospel” (2 Tim 2:8). And then, at once, he sets his own bondage beside that risen freedom: in quo laboro usque ad vincula quasi male operans; sed verbum Dei non est alligatum — “wherein I labour even unto bonds, as an evildoer; but the word of God is not bound” (v. 9).
St. John Chrysostom seizes upon this verse, in his homilies on the Epistle, with the joy of a man who recognizes a banner held aloft. The herald, he says in effect, may be bound; the preaching is not. The Apostle’s very chains become the pulpit from which he preaches the louder, for the Word he carries is not contained in him as in a vessel that can be sealed up — it runs everywhere through the world, faster than the empire’s couriers, lighter than its locks.
This is the secret the martyrs know. When the Cathar assassin’s sword fell on St. Peter Martyr’s head outside Barlassina, the murderer believed himself silencing the Inquisitor of Lombardy. But the Word the friar had preached was not in him as a treasure that could be stolen by killing the bearer. It was in him as sap is in the branch — flowing from a root the assassin could not reach.
The branch that cannot live alone
For this is the truth which the Lord Himself sets forth in the Gospel of the day: Ego sum vitis vera, et Pater meus agricola est — “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (Jn 15:1). And then, with terrible tenderness: Manete in me, et ego in vobis. Sicut palmes non potest ferre fructum a semetipso, nisi manserit in vite, sic nec vos, nisi in me manseritis — “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in me” (v. 4).
St. Augustine, in his Tractates on this passage, draws out the asymmetry that lies at the heart of the image. The vine, he observes, has no need of the branches as the branches have need of the vine; the branch severed from the wood is fit for nothing whatever — except the fire. And he calls our attention, with his usual exactness, to a small word that contains the whole Gospel: our Lord does not say without me you can do little. He says sine me nihil potestis facere — “without me you can do nothing” (v. 5). Whatever good a man supposes to draw from his own root, severed from Christ, is not even small. It is not at all. It is the empty motion of a stick already withering.
The Christian life, then, is not the heroism of the branch. It is the abiding of the branch. Manete. Stay where you have been grafted. The fruit is not yours to manufacture; it is the vine’s to produce through you, if only you will not tear yourself away.
The pruning knife of persecution
But the husbandman does not leave even the fruit-bearing branch untouched. Omnem palmitem in me ferentem fructum, purgabit eum, ut fructum plus afferat — “every branch that beareth fruit, He will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit” (Jn 15:2). And here the second reading from St. Paul presses in upon us: persecutiones, passiones… et omnes, qui pie volunt vivere in Christo Iesu, persecutionem patientur — “persecutions, sufferings… and all who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Tim 3:11–12).
St. Cyprian, who knew the meaning of those words in his own flesh and would soon seal them with his neck, taught his flock that the trials which fall upon the faithful are not the husbandman’s wrath but his husbandry. The just man is exercised by tribulation as the wheat is winnowed from the chaff: what is shaken away was never the grain. The pruning hook is not the enemy of the vine but the friend of its fruitfulness. What the world calls catastrophe, the Father calls cultivation.
And it was Tertullian who long before had given the truth its most lapidary form: semen est sanguis Christianorum — “the blood of Christians is seed” (Apologeticus 50). On this Paschal Wednesday, with the Easter Sequence still ringing in the ear, we see the seed planted in the dust of a Lombard road by a friar who had strength left only to write Credo.
Credo
What St. Peter Martyr traced with his finger was not a private ejaculation. It was the whole faith of the Church compressed into a syllable — I believe — and beneath that single word lay every article: Credo in unum Deum… Et resurrexit tertia die… Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi sæculi. The very faith which his persecutors had risen up to extinguish, the faith for which he was struck, became in the moment of his striking a public preaching more eloquent than any sermon he had ever given from the pulpit. The Word he could no longer speak with his lips, he wrote with his blood. Verbum Dei non est alligatum.
The vine is not severed when one of its branches falls. The falling branch only reveals that the sap was real, that the wood was alive, that the husbandman’s pruning has done its work. Si manseritis in me, et verba mea in vobis manserint, quodcumque volueritis petetis, et fiet vobis — “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you” (Jn 15:7).
Peter abode. The Word abode in him. And what he asked — that he might give for Christ what Christ had given for him — was done unto him on the road to Milan, on a day in April, while somewhere in every Catholic country the Easter candle was still burning.
May the same Word, unbound and abiding, abide also in us.
S. Petre Martyr, ora pro nobis.