S. Paulini Episcopi et Confessoris ~ III. classis Scriptura: 2 Corinthians 8:9–15; Luke 12:32–34 Color: White | Missa “Sacerdótes Tui”
I. Liturgical Context
This twenty-second day of June the Church keeps the feast of St. Paulinus, Bishop and Confessor — S. Paulini Episcopi et Confessoris, a feast of the third class (III classis) celebrated in white vestments, with Gloria and the Common Preface. In the 1962 Missale Romanum the Mass is drawn from the Common of a Confessor Bishop, the formulary Sacerdótes Tui, Dómine, whose Introit takes up the sixteenth verse of Psalm 131: Sacerdótes tui, Dómine, índuant justítiam, et sancti tui exsúltent — “Let Thy priests, O Lord, be clothed with justice, and let Thy saints rejoice.” The feast falls within the temporal cycle after the Octave of Pentecost, the long green Sundays in which the Church meditates upon the life of grace lived out under the Holy Ghost; on this feria secunda the green of the season yields to the white of a bishop who put on Christ.
It is fitting beyond the ordinary that the Scriptures chosen for reflection here — the Apostle’s teaching on the gratia of liberality (2 Cor. 8:9–15) and Our Lord’s command to lay up treasure in heaven (Luke 12:32–34) — should be read against the figure of Paulinus of Nola. For no saint in the Latin calendar more literally enacted these texts. Born about 354 at Bordeaux into the senatorial aristocracy, tutored by the poet Ausonius, consul and governor of Campania while still young, Paulinus possessed precisely the wealth and station that the Gospel asks a man to loose his grip upon. And he loosed it. Together with his wife Therasia, after the death of their only child, he sold vast estates in Gaul, Spain, and Italy, distributed the price to the poor, and withdrew to Nola to live in voluntary poverty beside the tomb of St. Felix. The propers of his Mass and the readings of this reflection are therefore not abstract counsels but the very pattern of a life.
II. The Epistle: The Grace of the Lord’s Self-Emptying (2 Cor. 8:9–15)
St. Paul writes to the Corinthians not to command but to test the sincerity of their charity by the example of the Macedonians, and he grounds the whole exhortation in a single sentence of staggering theological weight: Scitis enim gratiam Dómini nostri Jesu Christi, quóniam propter vos egénus factus est, cum esset dives, ut illíus inópia vos dívites essétis — “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that being rich He became poor for your sakes, that through His poverty you might be rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).
Here the Apostle makes almsgiving a participation in the mystery of the Incarnation itself. The exchange he describes is not merely moral but Christological: the riches of the Son’s divinity were not laid aside — for the divine nature suffers no diminishment — but veiled beneath the inopia, the destitution, of our flesh, that the destitute might be enriched with the wealth of adoption and grace. St. John Chrysostom, expounding this verse, presses the paradox that the poverty of which Paul speaks is no loss in God but a condescension: the Lord did not cease to be rich, yet truly became poor, so that the exchange might be wholly to our profit and nothing to His (cf. Homiliae in II Corinthios, hom. 17, PG 61:516 ff. — paraphrase; verify against the critical edition). The whole logic of Christian liberality follows from this: the believer who gives to his needy brother does not impoverish himself but imitates the descent of Christ, and is thereby drawn upward into the very movement of the divine generosity.
St. Paul is careful, however, to guard against two errors. He does not ask that the giver be brought to ruin while others are eased — non enim ut áliis sit remíssio, vobis autem tribulátio (v. 13) — but that there be an aequalitas, an equality, whereby the present abundance of one supplies the want of another, and the cycle may one day turn (vv. 13–14). To seal this he reaches back to the manna in the wilderness: Qui multum, non abundávit: et qui módicum, non minorávit — “He that had much had nothing over; and he that had little had no want” (v. 15; cf. Exodus 16:18). St. Ambrose, who catechized Paulinus at Milan, made this very principle the heart of his teaching on the use of goods: what the rich hold in superfluity is owed by justice to the poor, for the earth was given in common, and the man who keeps back his surplus does not give of his own but renders what is due (cf. De Nabuthae, esp. cc. 1, 12, PL 14 — paraphrase; locus to be confirmed against CSEL). Paulinus would have heard this doctrine from the lips of Ambrose himself, and his renunciation is best read as Ambrose’s De Nabuthae made flesh.
III. The Gospel: Treasure in the Heavens (Luke 12:32–34)
Our Lord’s words in the Gospel of St. Luke begin with tenderness and end with the heart: Nolíte timére, pusíllus grex, quia complácuit Patri vestro dare vobis regnum — “Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom” (Luke 12:32). The dispossession He then commands is not the bleak self-stripping of the Stoic but the glad release of those to whom a kingdom is already promised. Véndite quæ possidétis, et date eleemósynam — “Sell what you possess and give alms” — and so *make to yourselves bags which grow not old, a treasure in heaven which faileth not, where no thief approacheth, nor moth corrupteth” (vv. 33).
The sentence on which the whole passage turns is the last: Ubi enim thesáurus vester est, ibi et cor vestrum erit — “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (v. 34). St. Augustine, the dear friend whom Paulinus never met in the flesh yet loved across the breadth of the Mediterranean, fastened upon this verse repeatedly: the heart follows its treasure as surely as the eye follows the light, and therefore the disposition of one’s goods is in truth the disposition of one’s love. To send one’s wealth ahead into heaven by the hands of the poor is to send one’s heart ahead, that it may dwell already where Christ is seated (cf. Sermones, e.g. Sermo 60 on this text, PL 38 — paraphrase; sermon number and locus to be confirmed). St. Bede, gathering the Latin tradition, adds that the treasure laid up in heaven is laid up nowhere else than in Christ Himself, who is the inexhaustible riches of His saints (cf. In Lucae Evangelium Expositio, ad loc., CCSL 120 — paraphrase; verify).
It is precisely here that the figure of Paulinus passes from edification into testimony. St. Gregory the Great, in the third book of his Dialogi, records how the bishop, having spent all in ransoming captives during the barbarian invasions, at last gave his own person into slavery to redeem a widow’s son — “Such as I have I give thee.” And St. Augustine in the City of God (Book I) preserves the prayer Paulinus told him he murmured when Nola was sacked and he himself taken: “O Lord, let me not be troubled for gold and silver, for where all my treasure is, Thou knowest” (cf. De Civitate Dei I.10, CCSL 47 — paraphrase of the substance; verify the exact wording against the critical edition). The man who had read ubi thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum could be robbed of everything and lose nothing, because his heart had long since departed for the place where his treasure already lay.
IV. The Thomistic Synthesis: Exitus and Reditus
These two readings, set side by side, disclose the great rhythm that St. Thomas places at the foundation of the Summa: all things proceed from God as from their source (exitus) and return to Him as to their end (reditus). The Epistle gives the exitus: the Son, cum esset dives, goes forth from the riches of the Godhead into the poverty of our flesh, that the divine generosity might overflow into creatures. The Gospel gives the reditus: the soul, enriched by that descent, sends its treasure — and therewith its heart — back up to the Father from whom the kingdom comes.
St. Thomas teaches that almsgiving is an act of the virtue of charity by way of mercy, and that voluntary poverty is not a good in itself but an instrument, removing the impediments by which the love of riches binds the heart and so freeing the soul for the perfection of charity (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 32, a. 1; q. 188, a. 7 — loci to be confirmed). This is exactly the distinction Paulinus himself drew: poverty is not the prize but the discipline, as the athlete strips not in order to win but in order to contend. The exitus of Christ’s self-emptying is therefore answered in the saint not by a Manichean contempt for the world’s goods but by their right ordering — every possession referred past itself to the finis ultimus who is God. To give alms, on this reading, is to enact in miniature the whole metaphysical drama of the Summa: what came forth from the divine bounty is turned back, through the poor, toward its Author.
V. Devotional Application
The temptation of the comfortable soul is to read these texts at arm’s length, admiring Paulinus as one admires a cliff one has no intention of scaling. But Our Lord’s command is not addressed only to bishops of Nola. The principle ubi thesaurus, ibi cor is a diagnostic instrument the believer may turn upon his own life this very day: to discover where the heart truly rests, one need only ask where the treasure is kept — in what the imagination lingers over, in what the calendar and the purse are actually spent upon. The examination is merciless and clarifying.
Paulinus does not ask every Christian to sell every field. He asks the prior and more searching thing: that goods be held with an open hand, referred beyond themselves, and parted with freely when charity requires. The aequalitas of which St. Paul speaks — your abundance supplying another’s want — remains the ordinary vocation of every household that has more than it needs while a neighbor has less. To lay up treasure in heaven is, very concretely, to let some portion of what one has pass through the hands of the poor, who are the bankers of eternity, and so to send the heart on ahead.
VI. Collect
Deus, qui nos beáti Paulíni Confessóris tui atque Pontíficis ánnua solemnitáte lætíficas: concéde propítius; ut, cujus natalícia cólimus, étiam actiónes imitémur. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum…
O God, who dost gladden us by the yearly solemnity of blessed Paulinus, Thy Confessor and Bishop: mercifully grant that we who keep his heavenly birthday may also imitate his deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…
Authentication caveat: The Latin Collect above reflects the standard form of the Common of a Confessor Bishop (Deus qui nos… Confessoris tui atque Pontificis) as customarily assigned to this feast, but it has not been collated against a printed 1962 Missale Romanum for this composition. It is not to be used liturgically or published as authoritative without verification against the typical edition. The proper Collect, antiphons, and any feast-specific variants for S. Paulini should be confirmed directly in the Missal or a reliable facsimile before any liturgical or editorial use.
VII. Aspiration
Dómine, ubi thesáurus meus, ibi sit et cor meum — apud te. “Lord, where my treasure is, there let my heart be also — with Thee.”
VIII. For Further Study
Lives of the Saints. St. Paulinus’s circle of holy friends offers a rich field: companion studies of St. Ambrose (his catechist at Milan), St. Martin of Tours (who restored his sight), and St. Felix of Nola (the martyr at whose tomb he settled) would set his sanctity in its living context. The natalicia — the annual hymns Paulinus composed for St. Felix — repay attention as documents of fifth-century devotion.
Sacred Liturgy. This feast invites study of the Common of a Confessor Bishop (Missa Sacerdótes Tui) and the structure of the green Sundays after the Octave of Pentecost, when feasts of confessors stud the temporal season.
Theology and Doctrine. The Epistle’s propter vos egénus factus est opens directly onto the theology of the Incarnation as self-emptying (the kenosis of Phil. 2 read in a Latin key), and onto the Thomistic treatment of almsgiving and voluntary poverty (S.T. II-II, qq. 32, 185, 188). A capstone reflection might join St. Ambrose’s De Nabuthae to St. Thomas on the universal destination of goods.
Church History. Paulinus stands at the hinge where the late-antique senatorial aristocracy turned from imperial service to the episcopate — a study in the Christianization of the Roman elite, alongside Ambrose and Sidonius Apollinaris.
IX. Source Transparency Note
All patristic and scholastic material above is given as paraphrase with locus, not as direct quotation, and the loci are provisional: the Chrysostom (PG 61), Ambrose De Nabuthae (PL 14 / CSEL), Augustine Sermones and De Civitate Dei I.10 (CCSL 47), Bede (CCSL 120), and Aquinas (S.T. II-II) references should all be verified against critical editions before publication. The weakest-anchored attribution in this piece is the specific Augustine Sermo number (here given tentatively as Sermo 60) on Luke 12:34: Augustine treats the ubi thesaurus theme in several sermons and in the Enarrationes and De Sermone Domini in Monte, and the precise locus must be pinned down before the citation is asserted. The narrative of Paulinus’s self-ransoming derives from St. Gregory the Great, Dialogi III and is, as Benedict XVI noted, of disputed historicity (Tier 3 / hagiographical), though the prayer at the sack of Nola, preserved by Augustine in De Civitate Dei I.10, rests on firmer ground (Tier 1–2). The Collect requires collation as noted in §VI.