Feria quarta infra Hebdomadam III post Octavam Pentecostes S. Gregorii Barbadici, Episcopi et Confessoris ~ III. classis 17 June
Liturgical Context
The seventeenth of June falls, in the 1962 calendar, upon a Wednesday within the third week after the Octave of Pentecost, deep in the long green expanse of the tempus per annum that follows the descent of the Holy Ghost. The feast keeps the memory of St. Gregory Barbarigo (1625–1697), the Venetian nobleman who became Bishop of Bergamo and then of Padua, cardinal, diplomat at the negotiations that closed the Thirty Years’ War, and tireless executor of the Tridentine reform. He was canonized by John XXIII in 1960; because his dies natalis, the eighteenth, was already held by St. Ephrem the Syrian, his feast was assigned to the day before, and so he keeps watch at the threshold of the great Doctor of the Syrians.
The Mass is taken from the Common of a Confessor Bishop (Statuit), and it is the Introit of that Common which sets the key for the whole celebration: Statuit ei Dominus testamentum pacis, et principem fecit eum — “The Lord made to him a covenant of peace, and made him a prince, that the dignity of the priesthood should be his forever” (Ecclus. 45:30). The lessons appointed for this commemoration draw from the great praise of the fathers in Ecclesiasticus and from the parable of the talents in St. Matthew. Together they frame the bishop not as a self-made eminence but as a steward, entrusted with goods that are not his own and answerable for their increase.
A note on sources: the Latin propers and the chapter-and-verse divisions of Ecclesiasticus follow the Vulgate and the printed 1962 Missal; numbering should be verified against a printed copy before liturgical use, as the versification of Sirach varies between editions.
The Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 44:16–27; 45:3–20
The Wisdom of Ben Sira opens here the famous canticle that begins Laudemus viros gloriosos — “Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation.” It is one of the most theologically dense passages in all the sapiential books, for it does something the ancient world rarely did: it locates true glory not in conquest or in the founding of cities but in fidelity to a covenant. The chapter moves in stately procession through Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and then turns, in the verses appointed, to Moses and at length to Aaron.
Of Aaron the text says that the Lord statuit illi testamentum aeternum, et dedit illi sacerdotium gentis — He gave him an everlasting covenant, and the priesthood of the nation (cf. 45:8). The sacred author lingers upon the vestments: the robe, the ephod, the bells of gold, the plate of gold engraved Sanctitas Domino upon the forehead. This is not antiquarian fascination. The vesting of Aaron is the Old Testament’s way of saying that the priesthood is a gift clothed in glory, that the man who bears it is set apart not for his own honor but to bear the people before God and God before the people.
And here the lesson speaks with peculiar aptness to St. Gregory. For Aaron was chosen: elegit eum ex omni vivente (45:20). The dignity was conferred, not seized. The same Ben Sira who praises the glory of the high priest insists that the glory is a deposit, an officium, a charge laid upon a man who must render account. The vestments are heavy. They are meant to be.
The Gospel: St. Matthew 25:14–23
The Gospel of the Common gives us the parable of the talents, in which a man going into a far country entrusts his goods to his servants — five talents, two, one — unicuique secundum propriam virtutem, to each according to his own ability. Two of the servants trade and double what they were given; the third, fearing, buries his lord’s money in the earth. To the faithful two the master speaks the words the liturgy places upon the lips of every confessor who has rendered his account well: Euge, serve bone et fidelis, quia super pauca fuisti fidelis, super multa te constituam — “Well done, good and faithful servant; because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord” (25:21).
The Fathers read this parable with one voice as a parable of stewardship under judgment. St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Matthew, presses the point that the talents are not merely money but every gift of grace, office, knowledge, and opportunity, and that the sin of the third servant is not embezzlement but sloth — the refusal to let the gift bear fruit (cf. In Matthaeum, Hom. 78; PG 58). The buried talent is the gift hoarded out of fear rather than spent in love. The locus is given for verification against the critical edition of the Greek homilies.
St. Gregory the Great, in the Homiliae in Evangelia, develops the moral with characteristic pastoral weight: the talents differ in number because the gifts of God differ in measure, but the fidelity required is the same in the man given much and the man given little; the master praises both faithful servants in identical words, for he weighs not the size of the increase but the integrity of the labor (cf. Hom. in Evang. 9; PL 76). Loci indicated for verification against CCSL 141. This is a consoling doctrine: the bishop entrusted with two great dioceses and the lay penitent entrusted with a single talent of patience under suffering hear, if faithful, the very same Euge.
Thomistic Synthesis: The Talent as Exitus, the Euge as Reditus
The two lessons, set side by side, trace the whole arc of the Christian life under the figure of stewardship, and that arc is best read through the Thomistic exitus–reditus. All things proceed from God as from their first principle and return to Him as to their last end; and grace, in St. Thomas’s account, is precisely this divine motion writ within the soul — the procession of gifts from God and the soul’s return to God through their right use.
The talent is the exitus: a good that flows out from the Lord and is placed in the servant’s hands. It is unmerited, conferred secundum propriam virtutem yet still wholly gift. Aaron did not seize the priesthood; the servant did not earn the talents; St. Gregory Barbarigo did not make himself a prince of the Church. The reditus is the rendering of account — the day the lord returns and the servant brings back what was given, increased. And here St. Thomas is precise: the increase itself is God’s work in us, for Deus operatur in nobis sine nobis, God works in us without us in the infusion of grace, but in the meritorious use of grace He works nobiscum, with us, through our free cooperation (cf. Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, a. 2; q. 114). The servant who trades truly merits the Euge; yet what he trades with was never his own capital.
This is why the third servant is condemned not for losing the talent but for returning exactly what he received. He treated a gift meant for motion as a thing to be preserved in stasis. He arrested the reditus. The buried talent is grace refused its proper end — the exitus without the return, the river that will not flow back to the sea. In the order of charity, which for St. Thomas is the form and mover of all the virtues (cf. S.T. II-II, q. 23, a. 8), the faithful servant’s trading is charity in act: the gift received is the gift given, and in the giving it is multiplied.
St. Gregory Barbarigo is canonized precisely as one who let the gifts move. His princely revenues he poured out upon the poor; his learning he poured into the seminaries of Bergamo and Padua, into a library and a printing press; his diplomatic gifts he spent in the labor of reconciling the Latin and Eastern Churches. He buried nothing. The testamentum pacis the Lord had established with him he traded back, increased, into the hands of his Lord.
Devotional Application
The danger the parable names is not the spectacular sin but the quiet one: the talent buried out of fear. There is a piety that is fundamentally a burying — that receives the gifts of faith, of vocation, of opportunity to do good, and then wraps them carefully in the napkin of self-protection, of “I am not worthy,” of “let someone more gifted do it.” The third servant’s excuse sounds almost like humility. It is in fact the refusal of the reditus, the refusal to let grace cost anything.
St. Gregory’s life puts the question to every state of life, not only to bishops. To the one given much: are you trading, or hoarding? To the one given little: have you believed the lie that little is not worth investing? The master’s praise falls on the man with two talents in the same words as on the man with five. What is asked is not magnitude but motion — that the gift be spent in charity and so returned, alive, to its Giver.
Examine, then, the talents actually in your hand this day: a particular grace, a duty of state, a person God has placed near you. Have you put it to work, or buried it against the fear of loss?
Collect
Deus, qui beátum Gregórium Confessórem tuum atque Pontíficem pastoráli sollicitúdine et páuperum miseratióne claréscere voluísti: concéde propítius; ut, cujus mérita celebrámus, caritátis imitémur exémpla. Per Dóminum.
O God, who didst will that blessed Gregory, Thy Confessor and Bishop, should be renowned for his pastoral care and his compassion for the poor: mercifully grant that we who celebrate his merits may imitate the example of his charity. Through our Lord.
This Collect is the authentic proper of the feast as given in the 1962 Missal; the Latin should nonetheless be checked against a printed copy for orthography before publication.
Aspiration
Euge, serve bone et fidelis: intra in gaudium Domini tui. Lord, let me not bury what Thou hast given, but trade it in charity, that I may hear at the last Thy “Well done.”
For Further Study
The reader who wishes to go deeper may take up this feast along the platform’s Theology and Doctrine path, following the Thomistic treatment of grace and merit in the Prima Secundae (qq. 109–114), where the architecture of exitus and reditus underlying the parable is set out with full precision. Those drawn to the pastoral figure of the saint himself will find his life a natural entry into the Lives of the Saints path under the theme of the Tridentine reforming bishops — Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, and Gregory Barbarigo — who embodied the Council of Trent not as legislation but as sanctity. And the lesson from Ecclesiasticus opens directly onto the Sacred Liturgy path’s treatment of the priesthood, where the vesting of Aaron is read as the figure of the Catholic priesthood that the Statuit Introit places upon every holy bishop.
Editorial note: Patristic citations above (Chrysostom, Gregory the Great) are paraphrased, not quoted, with loci indicated for verification against PG 58 and CCSL 141 / PL 76 respectively. The biographical details of St. Gregory Barbarigo are securely attested; the report of his incorrupt remains (exhumed 1725) belongs to the well-attested but devotional layer of the cultus and is presented as such.