Feria Quinta infra Hebdomadam III post Octavam Paschæ S. Catharinæ Senensis Virginis ~ III. classis
The Church, in her unfailing wisdom, sets her feasts and her readings as jewels in a single crown. On this Thursday within the Third Week after the Octave of Easter, while the Paschal candle still casts its glow over the sanctuary and the Regina Caeli yet rings at the hours, she places before us the Seraphic Virgin of Siena, Catherine, daughter of Giacomo Benincasa, Mantellata of St. Dominic, mystical spouse of the Crucified, and Doctor of Holy Church. The propers chosen for her feast are no accident: the burning words of the Apostle to the Corinthians and Our Lord’s parable of the ten virgins compose, as it were, a sacred diptych in which we may behold the figure of Catherine herself, lamp in hand, going forth to meet the Bridegroom.
Let us, then, walk slowly through these texts as the Fathers walked, passibus Patrum, and learn what the Holy Ghost would teach us through them.
I. Qui gloriatur, in Domino glorietur
The Epistle opens with a sentence that might serve as the motto of every saint who ever lived: “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. For not he who commendeth himself, is approved, but he, whom God commendeth” (2 Cor 10:17–18, Douay-Rheims). St. Paul, beset by false apostles in Corinth who paraded their credentials, cuts beneath their pretensions to the root of all sanctity: that the soul has nothing of which to boast save the mercy that has been poured into her.
St. Augustine returns again and again to this verse as to a refrain. In his treatise De Sancta Virginitate, he warns the consecrated virgin that her gift, though precious above gold, is precisely a gift—and that the moment she begins to glory in it as her own, she has already lost what she sought to keep. “Holy virginity,” he writes, “is preserved by humility, not by virginity itself.” The Bishop of Hippo would have us understand that the substance of holiness is never the deed, however high, but the whom of the deed: from Whom it proceeds, to Whom it returns.
Here we touch already upon the spirit of Catherine. From the cell of self-knowledge that she made within her own soul—that interior cloister to which she would withdraw amidst the tumult of streets, papal courts, and battlefields of schism—she beheld two truths inseparably joined: “Thou art she who is not; I am He who is.” This was not the despair of a soul that hates itself but the joy of a soul that has found her ground in God. Whoever knows this knows everything; whoever has not learned it has not yet begun. Qui gloriatur, in Domino glorietur.
II. Despondi enim vos uni viro
The Apostle continues, and now his voice softens into the tone of a father who has labored at the cradle of souls: “For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God. For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Cor 11:2).
The whole of Catholic mysticism trembles in that verse. The Fathers heard in it the great theme that Origen first set forth in his commentaries on the Canticle: that every baptized soul is a bride, and that the whole movement of the spiritual life is the soul’s progress toward the nuptial chamber. St. Ambrose, in De Virginibus written for his sister Marcellina, draws out this teaching with the splendor proper to the See of Milan: the consecrated virgin is the icon of the Church herself, who is Una, Casta, Virgo—one, chaste, and a virgin—because she has been espoused to one Lord and to no other.
St. Jerome, in his celebrated letter to Eustochium (Ep. 22), addresses the virgin not as a renunciant of love but as one whose love has found its true and only object. “Always let the Bridegroom sport with you within,” he counsels her—warning, in the same breath, that this is no easy enchantment but a vigilance kept at sword’s point against every rival affection.
When, then, on the feast of St. Agnes in 1366, the Lord espoused Catherine to Himself in mystical marriage—placing on her finger a ring visible to her alone—He was not granting her something foreign to the Christian vocation but bringing to its full flower a betrothal already begun in her at the font of Baptism. What the Apostle had written to the Corinthians as the goal of his apostolic labor had become, in this Sienese maiden, a living reality: a chaste virgin presented to the one Husband, Christ.
III. Tunc simile erit regnum cælorum decem virginibus
So we come to the Holy Gospel: the parable of the ten virgins, five wise and five foolish, who took their lamps and went forth to meet the Bridegroom (Mt 25:1–13). The Fathers did not read this parable as a tale of bridesmaids only, but as a portrait of every Christian soul standing before the night of this world.
Why ten? St. Augustine gives the answer in his Sermon 93: because the number signifies the soul as bound by the fivefold senses; multiplied by faith in the Holy Trinity and in the unity of God, it makes ten. All Christians, in this sense, are virgins—called to bring their senses unspotted before the Lord. But not all are wise.
What separates the wise from the foolish? Not the lamp, for all bore lamps. Not the going forth, for all went forth. Oleum. The oil. The wise had taken oil in their vessels with their lamps; the foolish had not.
Here the Fathers speak with one voice. The lamp, says St. Gregory the Great in his Homiliae in Evangelia (Hom. 12), is the outward show of good works, but the oil is the hidden charity within—the love of God for His own sake, not for the praise of men. “The foolish virgins carry lamps but bring no oil,” he says, “because they have the appearance of holiness in the eyes of others but lack the substance of love before God.” St. Augustine, treating the same parable, identifies the oil with that very thing the Apostle named in the Epistle: the praise that proceeds from God and not from oneself. The foolish virgin lights her lamp at the fire of human approval; when the eye of man is closed in the night of judgment, her lamp goes out.
St. John Chrysostom, with his customary rigor, presses the warning further. Almsgiving without charity, fasting without mercy, virginity without humility—these are lamps without oil. “Mercy is the oil,” he writes; “without it, the virgins fail.” And St. Cyprian, in De Habitu Virginum, warns that consecration of the body is empty if the heart is conformed to the world.
The hour comes—and the Lord notes it precisely: media nocte—at midnight, when the soul least expects, when she is most secure. The cry goes up: Ecce sponsus venit, exite obviam ei. Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go ye forth to meet Him. The wise rise and trim their lamps; the foolish find their lamps gone out and run to buy oil—but oil cannot be borrowed at the last hour, and the door is shut. Amen dico vobis, nescio vos. I know you not.
IV. The Witness of Catherine
If we ask what it looks like for a soul to keep her lamp burning through the long night of this world, the Church gives us Catherine. She kept her lamp by ceaseless prayer; she filled her vessel with the oil of charity until it overflowed into letters that admonished popes, into journeys undertaken in the name of peace, into a Dialogue dictated in ecstasy that the Church reads to this day, into the stigmata received in secret at the church of Santa Cristina in Pisa.
Yet the most striking thing about her is precisely what the Apostle commands: she gloried in nothing of her own. The maiden who could speak with sovereign authority to Gregory XI, urging him to return to Rome from Avignon—“Be a man, Father, and not a coward!”—was the same who called herself, in her own voice and without affectation, non-being, holding all her gifts as alms received from the wounded Heart of Christ. She drank, in her own image, from the fountain of the Side of the Lord; and from that fountain alone she filled the lamp she carried through her thirty-three years.
She is, in the eyes of the Church, the wise virgin of the parable made flesh. She did not sleep when the Bridegroom delayed; or rather, she slept that holy sleep of which the Canticle says, Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat—I sleep, but my heart watcheth. When the cry came, at the midnight of her own life, she rose with her lamp burning, and the door was opened, and the Bridegroom said, not nescio vos, but Veni, sponsa mea—Come, my bride.
V. Vigilate itaque
What then shall we take from this triple word—Apostle, Gospel, and Saint—on this Thursday in Eastertide?
First, that all our glory must be returned to its true source. Whatever the Lord has wrought in us—our prayers, our fasts, our works of mercy, our very faith—is His, and we hold it as the wise virgin holds the oil: with gratitude, in trembling, as a trust to be guarded and not paraded. Let us examine, in the cell of self-knowledge, where we have built lamps without oil—where the praise of men has been our fuel rather than the love of God.
Second, that the spousal vocation belongs to us all. Marriage, religious life, priesthood, the simple state of a baptized Christian in the world—each is a particular form of that one espousal which the Apostle proclaims. Let us, then, be jealous for our hearts as God is jealous for them. Let no rival affection unseat the Lord from the throne of the soul.
Third, that the hour is hidden, and the only preparation is to begin now. The Fathers are unanimous on this point. Vigilate itaque, quia nescitis diem neque horam. Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour.
Let us close, then, with a prayer borrowed from the Saint herself, that her own lamp might intercede for ours:
O eternal Trinity, Thou art a deep sea, into which the more I enter the more I find, and the more I find the more I seek. The soul ever hungers in Thine abyss, longing to see Thee, in Thy light, in Thy true light. Holy Catherine, Virgin of Siena, Doctor of the Church, espoused to the Crucified, pray for us. Obtain for us oil for our lamps, that when the cry goes up at midnight, we may rise with thee and enter in.
Amen.
If you wish to go deeper into the spiritual landscape of this feast, the Lives of the Saints path will lead you through the writings of St. Catherine herself—particularly her Dialogue and her Letters—while the Sacred Liturgy path will open the riches of the traditional propers of the saints throughout the Paschaltide. May the Risen Lord, Bridegroom of every faithful soul, find your lamp burning when He comes.