II. classis — 24 August Feria Secunda infra Hebdomadam XIII post Octavam Pentecostes
I. Liturgical Setting
The thirteenth week after Pentecost opens not with its own ferial Mass but with the voice of an Apostle. St. Bartholomew, whose feast the Roman Church has kept on this day since at least the ninth century, displaces the feria entirely, and the Church sings for him the Mass Mihi autem nimis, the Introit common to the Apostles:
Mihi autem nimis honoráti sunt amíci tui, Deus: nimis confortátus est principátus eórum.
“To me Thy friends, O God, are made exceedingly honourable; their principality is exceedingly strengthened.” (Ps. 138:17)
The whole Mass turns on that word principátus. The Apostles are not merely revered men; they are principes, foundations and governors of the Church which Christ built upon them. The Gradual will say it outright: Constítues eos príncipes super omnem terram — “Thou shalt make them princes over all the earth” (Ps. 44:17). The Alleluia lifts the same thought into the language of the Te Deum: Te gloriósus Apostolórum chorus laudat, Dómine — “The glorious choir of the Apostles praises Thee, O Lord.”
Yet the Mass sets against this exalted language two lessons that press in the opposite direction. The Epistle insists that no member of the Body is the whole Body, that the Apostle is one gift among many, and that a more excellent way lies beyond all gifts. The Gospel shows the Twelve being chosen only after their Master has spent the night in prayer, and then descending with Him into a crowd of the sick, the troubled, and the possessed. The princes of the earth, it turns out, are servants of a Body, and the Body is very poor.
St. Bartholomew is the perfect patron of this tension. Of all the Twelve he is among the least documented; the Gospels give him a name in the lists and nothing more. He is an Apostle without a recorded word, a princeps whose whole visible glory is that he was called and that he went. On his feast the Church contemplates not the Apostle as orator or wonder-worker but the Apostle as member — membrum de membro — set in the Body by God’s own hand.
II. The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 12:27–31
Fratres: Vos estis corpus Christi, et membra de membro. Et quosdam quidem pósuit Deus in Ecclésia primum apóstolos, secúndo prophétas, tértio doctóres, deínde virtútes, exínde grátias curatiónum, opitulatiónes, gubernatiónes, génera linguárum, interpretatiónes sermónum. Numquid omnes apóstoli? numquid omnes prophétæ? numquid omnes doctóres? numquid omnes virtútes? numquid omnes grátiam habent curatiónum? numquid omnes linguis loquúntur? numquid omnes interpretántur? Æmulámini autem charísmata melióra.
“Brethren: You are the body of Christ, and members of member. And God indeed hath set some in the church; first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly doctors; after that miracles; then the graces of healings, helps, governments, kinds of tongues, interpretations of speeches. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all doctors? Are all workers of miracles? Have all the grace of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? But be zealous for the better gifts.”
The Church has cut the passage with great care. It begins with the declaration Vos estis corpus Christi and ends just before the words that follow in the Apostle’s text — et adhuc excellentiórem viam vobis demónstro, “and I show unto you yet a more excellent way,” the door into the hymn to charity of chapter thirteen. The reading stops on the threshold. On an Apostle’s feast we are meant to feel the weight of primum apóstolos and also to notice that Paul does not stop there.
Members of member. The Latin membra de membro has puzzled translators; the Greek is mélē ek mérous, “members in part,” members each with a portion. St. Augustine, preaching to the newly baptized on the Eucharist, presses the phrase toward its sacramental meaning: if you are the Body of Christ and His members, then it is your own mystery that lies upon the altar; you receive what you are (Sermo 272). Bartholomew is not first an individual who happened to be enrolled among the Twelve. He is a member — one who has his very being as a Christian by incorporation into a Body whose Head is Christ.
The order of gifts. St. John Chrysostom, expounding this passage in his homilies on First Corinthians (Hom. 31–32 in 1 Cor.), observes that Paul introduces an order — first, second, third — where earlier in the chapter he had listed the gifts without ranking. The Golden-Mouthed sees a pastoral purpose. The Corinthians were dazzled by tongues, the most spectacular of the gifts and the one Paul places last. By ranking apostleship first and tongues last, Paul deflates the vanity of the showy and reveals that the highest gifts are those which most directly build the Body: the apostle who founds churches, the prophet who instructs, the teacher who forms. Chrysostom also notes that Paul’s rhetorical questions — Are all apostles? Are all prophets? — are not laments but consolations. That not all are apostles is not a deprivation; it is the very condition of there being a Body at all.
God hath set. The verb is pósuit, He placed. No one takes an apostleship; it is assigned. This is the point of contact with the Gospel, where the Twelve are named by Christ and not by themselves. Theodoret of Cyrus, commenting on the Pauline epistles, reads the passage as an argument against envy: the foot does not envy the hand, because the same craftsman shaped both and set each in its place. What God has placed, no member may reposition.
Be zealous for the better gifts. The closing imperative — æmulámini — is the hinge of the whole passage. Paul has just finished explaining that the gifts are distributed by God’s will and cannot be chosen; now he tells his readers to desire them. St. Augustine resolves the apparent contradiction in his treatment of charity: the “better gifts” toward which we are told to strive are not, in the end, apostleship or prophecy, which God gives to few, but the excellentior via of the next chapter, which God offers to all. One may not make oneself an apostle. One may, by grace, love. And the one who loves possesses in root what every gift exists to serve.
III. The Gospel: Luke 6:12–19
In illo témpore: Éxiit Jesus in montem oráre, et erat pernóctans in oratióne Dei. Et cum dies factus esset, vocávit discípulos suos, et elégit duódecim ex ipsis (quos et Apóstolos nominávit): Simónem, quem cognominávit Petrum, et Andréam fratrem ejus, Jacóbum et Joánnem, Philíppum et Bartholomǽum, Matthǽum et Thomam, Jacóbum Alphǽi et Simónem, qui vocátur Zelótes, et Judam Jacóbi, et Judam Iscariótem, qui fuit próditor. Et descéndens cum illis, stetit in loco campéstri, et turba discipulórum ejus, et multitúdo copiósa plebis ab omni Judǽa, et Jerúsalem, et marítima, et Tyri, et Sidónis, qui vénerant, ut audírent eum, et sanaréntur a languóribus suis. Et qui vexabántur a spirítibus immúndis, curabántur. Et omnis turba quærébat eum tángere: quia virtus de illo exíbat, et sanábat omnes.
“At that time, Jesus went out into a mountain to pray, and He passed the whole night in the prayer of God. And when day was come, He called unto Him His disciples; and He chose twelve of them (whom also He named Apostles): Simon, whom He surnamed Peter, and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alpheus and Simon who is called Zelotes, and Jude the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, who was the traitor. And coming down with them, He stood in a plain place, and the company of His disciples, and a very great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and the sea coast both of Tyre and Sidon, who were come to hear Him, and to be healed of their diseases. And they that were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the multitude sought to touch Him, for virtue went out from Him, and healed all.”
The Gospel moves in three scenes: the mountain and the night of prayer; the dawn and the naming of the Twelve; the descent and the healing of the multitude. St. Bartholomew appears only as a name in the second scene, paired with Philip, as he is in every Synoptic list.
The night of prayer. St. Ambrose, in his commentary on Luke (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, Book V), is careful about what this prayer means. The Son of God does not pray from need; He prays for our instruction. If the Lord spends a whole night in prayer before choosing the Apostles, Ambrose argues, then no Christian ought to undertake any work of moment — least of all the choosing of ministers — without prayer. And the phrase in oratióne Dei, “in the prayer of God,” Ambrose takes as a hint of the mystery: this is not the prayer of a man among men but of the Son to the Father, into which the Church’s own prayer is afterward drawn. St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his homilies on Luke, adds that Christ prays as Head of the Body, so that the whole Body might learn to pray in Him; His night on the mountain is a pattern given to the Church.
Whom also He named Apostles. The choosing is elégit: not an election by the disciples but a selection by the Lord from among them. St. Bede the Venerable, following Ambrose, observes in his commentary on Luke that the Evangelist is deliberate in saying that the Twelve were chosen out of the disciples — the wider body already existed, and the Twelve are set within it, not above it in isolation. Bede also draws out the significance of the name: apóstolus means “one sent,” and the title is given at the moment of choice so that the Apostles may know from the first that their dignity is a commission and not a possession.
The Fathers do not pass over the last name in the list. St. Augustine, in his tractates on John, reflects more than once on the mystery that Judas was chosen with the rest — that Christ, who knew what was in man, nevertheless numbered the traitor among the Twelve, so that the Church might learn that the office is holy even when its holder is not, and that the sacraments do not depend upon the worthiness of the minister. Bartholomew and Judas were named in the same breath, on the same morning, after the same night of prayer. What separated them was not the call but the response.
Coming down with them. Ambrose and Bede both note the movement: Christ goes up alone to pray, and comes down with the Twelve to heal. The Apostles are chosen on the height and immediately brought to the plain, where the crowd is. Cyril of Alexandria sees in the multitude gathered from Judea, Jerusalem, and the Gentile coast of Tyre and Sidon a figure of the Church to come, Jew and Gentile together, drawn by two desires — to hear Him and to be healed. The Apostles will spend their lives in exactly this posture: descending with Christ into the crowd, carrying His word and His virtus.
Virtue went out from Him. The final verse is the theological center of the passage. Virtus de illo exíbat: power went forth from Him. Cyril insists that this is the power of God working through the flesh of the Word — the sacred humanity is the instrument of divine healing, and the crowd’s instinct to touch Him is not superstition but faith reaching for the source. The Apostles, standing beside Him on the plain, are witnesses of the first act of that sacramental economy which they will afterward administer: God healing through what can be touched.
IV. The Synthesis: Apostleship as Gift and as Office
Read together, the Epistle and Gospel give a complete theology of the apostolate in miniature.
St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between grace that makes its recipient pleasing to God (gratia gratum faciens) and grace given freely for the benefit of others (gratia gratis data). The charisms Paul lists in the Epistle — prophecy, the working of miracles, healings, tongues — belong to the second kind (ST I-II, q. 111). They are not given for the sanctification of the one who receives them but for the building up of the Body; a man may work miracles and be lost, as the Lord Himself warns (Matt. 7:22–23). This is why the Epistle ranks them and then points beyond them, and why the Gospel can number Judas among the chosen without contradiction. The apostolic office is a gratia gratis data of the highest order; it does not by itself make its bearer holy.
Aquinas treats the particular charisms in the Secunda Secundae: prophecy (ST II-II, q. 171 and following), the grace of speech (q. 177), and the grace of miracles (q. 178). Running through his treatment is a single principle drawn straight from this Epistle: these gifts are ordered to the common good of the Church and are distributed according to God’s providence, not according to merit. The same principle governs his account of the Church as a Body whose Head is Christ (ST III, q. 8): the members are diverse in function so that the whole may be one in life.
The Gospel supplies what the Epistle presupposes. Before there can be a Body with ordered members, there must be a Head who orders them, and the Head must act. Christ’s night of prayer and morning of choosing is the founding act of the hierarchical Church. The Twelve are not a committee that formed around a teacher; they are a college constituted by a divine act, as the Council of Trent teaches that the sacrament of Order was instituted by Christ and confers a power that no community can bestow upon itself (Sess. XXIII). Paul’s pósuit Deus — God hath set — is the Epistle’s echo of Luke’s elégit — He chose.
But both readings also refuse to let the office stand alone. The Epistle ends by turning toward the “better gifts,” toward charity; the Gospel ends by turning toward the crowd, toward healing. The Apostle exists for the Body, and the Body exists for the multitude on the plain. Apostleship is a principátus, as the Introit sings — but it is a princedom exercised in descent. St. Gregory the Great, in the Regula Pastoralis, draws the lesson that anyone raised to authority in the Church must, like Christ on this mountain, climb up in contemplation only in order to come down in service; the prelate who remains on the height has abandoned his office.
Bartholomew embodies all of this by embodying almost nothing. He has no sermon in Acts, no epistle, no recorded miracle. The Church cannot praise his eloquence or his wonders. What she can say is that on a certain morning, after a certain night, Christ named him — and that he went down the mountain and did not come back up until he was carried to his reward. The gratia gratis data of apostleship he certainly received; whether he received the greater gift of charity, the Church has never doubted, since she has counted him among the saints from the beginning. His feast is a kind of proof that the office and the holiness, though distinct, can be perfectly joined in one silent member.
V. St. Bartholomew: The Apostle without a Word
What the Church can say of St. Bartholomew with historical confidence is sober. The name — Bar-Talmai, son of Talmai or Tolmai — is a patronymic, not a given name. He appears in all three Synoptic lists of the Twelve and in Acts 1:13, always beside Philip in the Synoptics, and nowhere else in the New Testament.
From at least the ninth century the Western Church has widely identified him with the Nathanael of St. John’s Gospel — the Israelite “in whom there is no guile” (John 1:47), brought to Jesus by Philip and greeted with the promise that he would see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. The identification rests on the pairing with Philip, on the fact that John never mentions a Bartholomew nor the Synoptics a Nathanael, and on the plausibility that a man called by his father’s name would also have had a name of his own. The Fathers of the first millennium do not make the connection explicitly; St. Augustine, in fact, treats Nathanael as a learned man who was for that reason not chosen among the Twelve. The identification is a well-founded ecclesiastical tradition, not a datum of revelation, and the liturgy itself does not depend upon it.
The earliest historical notice of Bartholomew’s mission comes from Eusebius of Caesarea, who records that when Pantaenus of Alexandria travelled east in the late second century, he found among the Christians there a Hebrew copy of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which local tradition said Bartholomew had left behind when he preached to them (Historia Ecclesiastica V.10). The “India” of Eusebius may mean Ethiopia, Arabia Felix, or the Indian subcontinent proper; but the testimony is early, sober, and attached to a named witness. Later tradition, both Greek and Latin, assigns the Apostle’s final labors to Armenia, and the Armenian Church honors him with St. Jude Thaddeus as one of its two founding Apostles.
Of his death the Roman Martyrology says that he was flayed alive and beheaded, by order of a local king, at Albanopolis in Armenia. This is the tradition the whole Christian world has received and which the Church retains for its devotional weight, but it rests on late apocryphal Acta and cannot be pressed as history. The image of the flayed Apostle holding his own skin — familiar from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, where the face on the skin is the painter’s own — is the tradition’s iconographic afterlife, not its historical foundation.
The cultus is firmer than the biography. His relics were venerated at Lipari off Sicily, translated to Benevento in the ninth century, and thence — in the tradition of the Romans — to the church built by the Emperor Otto III on the Tiber Island at the close of the tenth century, where San Bartolomeo all’Isola still claims them. Whatever the movements of the bones, the feast of 24 August has stood in the Roman calendar for eleven centuries.
The Byzantine Church keeps St. Bartholomew on 11 June, together with St. Barnabas, and commemorates the translation of his relics on 25 August — one day after the Roman feast, a small witness that East and West are reading the same page of the same ancient calendar. In the East, as in the West, he is honored above all as one of the Twelve: Apostle, before any other title.
Bartholomew’s silence in Scripture is, on this feast, his eloquence. The Epistle asks, Are all apostles? No — only twelve, and of those twelve, one is remembered almost entirely by his being remembered. God set him in the Church. That is the whole of his story, and it is enough.
VI. Application: The Silent Member
There is a particular grace available to the soul that reads this feast rightly, and it is the grace of contentment with one’s place in the Body.
Most of the baptized are Bartholomews. They have no recorded word, no public gift, no charism that draws a crowd. They are named — in baptism, in confirmation, in the state of life to which God has called them — and then they are expected simply to go down the mountain with Christ and stand beside Him in the crowd. The Epistle’s rhetorical questions are for them: Are all apostles? Are all prophets? No; and the no is not a demotion but an assignment. St. Paul’s word is pósuit: God has set you where you are.
The temptation of the ordinary member is not usually rebellion but a low, corrosive envy — the sense that others have the better part, the visible gifts, the fruitful ministry, while one’s own life is a name in a list. The Fathers’ answer is unanimous: the Body has no unnecessary members, and the gift that matters most is offered to all. Æmulámini charísmata melióra — desire the better gifts — and the better gift is charity.
Three practices follow from the readings:
Pray before you choose. Christ spent a night on the mountain before He named the Twelve. No decision of consequence — a state of life, a marriage, a change of work, the direction of a child — should be made without a deliberate season of prayer, and preferably in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. The Church follows this pattern in her Ember Days, keeping vigil before ordinations; the household may keep its own small vigils.
Descend with Him. The Apostles were chosen on the height and immediately brought down to the plain. Whatever consolation is received in prayer is meant to be carried into the crowd — into the sickroom, the difficult household, the unlovely neighbor. A spirituality that stays on the mountain is not the spirituality of this Gospel.
Touch the source. Virtus de illo exíbat. The crowd sought to touch Christ, and power went out from His sacred flesh. That flesh is on the altar. The most direct application of this Gospel is a more reverent and more frequent approach to the Holy Eucharist, the place where the virtus that healed the multitude is still going forth from the Body of the Lord to the members of His Body.
VII. The Orations of the Mass
Collect
Omnípotens sempitérne Deus, qui hujus diéi venerándam sanctámque lætítiam in beáti Apóstoli tui Bartholomǽi festivitáte tribuísti: da Ecclésiæ tuæ, quǽsumus; et amáre quod crédidit, et prædicáre quod dócuit. Per Dóminum.
“Almighty and everlasting God, who hast bestowed upon us the venerable and holy joy of this day in the festival of Thy blessed Apostle Bartholomew: grant to Thy Church, we beseech Thee, both to love what he believed and to preach what he taught. Through our Lord.”
The Collect asks for two things, and the pairing is exact: amáre quod crédidit, prædicáre quod dócuit — to love what he believed, to preach what he taught. Faith and charity, doctrine and mission, the mountain and the plain. It is the Epistle and the Gospel compressed into a single petition. And it asks these things for the Church, not for the individual: the Apostle’s faith and teaching are the Body’s inheritance.
Secret
Beáti Apóstoli tui Bartholomǽi sollémnia recenséntes, quǽsumus, Dómine: ut ejus auxílio tua benefícia capiámus, pro quo tibi laudis hóstias immolámus. Per Dóminum.
“Celebrating the solemnities of Thy blessed Apostle Bartholomew, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that by his help we may receive Thy benefits, for whom we offer to Thee sacrifices of praise. Through our Lord.”
Postcommunion
Sumptum, Dómine, pignus redemptiónis ætérnæ: sit nobis, quǽsumus; interveniénte beáto Bartholomǽo Apóstolo tuo, vitæ præséntis auxílium páriter et futúræ. Per Dóminum.
“May the pledge of eternal redemption which we have received, O Lord, be to us, we beseech Thee, through the intercession of blessed Bartholomew Thy Apostle, a help alike for this present life and for that which is to come. Through our Lord.”
The Postcommunion names the Eucharist pignus redemptiónis ætérnæ, the pledge of eternal redemption — the same virtus that went out from Christ on the plain, now received as sacrament.
VIII. Aspiration
Sancte Bartholomǽe, Apóstole silens, qui vocátus es et ivísti: ora pro nobis, ut in córpore Christi membra fidélia simus, et charitátem, quæ est via excelléntior, super ómnia dona quærámus.
Saint Bartholomew, silent Apostle, who wast called and didst go: pray for us, that we may be faithful members in the Body of Christ, and seek charity, the more excellent way, above every gift.
IX. For Further Study
Those who wish to go deeper may follow these threads.
Lives of the Saints. The hagiography of St. Bartholomew in this series treats the question of the Nathanael identification, the Eusebian witness, and the Armenian tradition in fuller detail, with the source tiers laid out. The Feast of St. Matthew (21 September), whose Hebrew Gospel Bartholomew is said to have carried east, is the natural next station.
Sacred Liturgy. The Common of Apostles — its Introit Mihi autem, its Gradual Constítues eos, its Communion Vos qui secúti estis me — is the liturgical grammar of every Apostle’s feast; a study of the Common as a whole would illuminate not only this Mass but those of Sts. Matthew, Simon and Jude, and Andrew in the months ahead.
Theology and Doctrine. St. Thomas on the gratiae gratis datae (ST I-II, q. 111) and on the charisms of prophecy, speech, and miracles (ST II-II, qq. 171–178) is the systematic foundation for the Epistle. For the Church as Body with Christ as Head, ST III, q. 8; and for the divine institution of the apostolic ministry, Trent, Session XXIII.
Church History. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica V.10, on Pantaenus and the Hebrew Matthew, opens the whole question of the apostolic missions beyond the Roman world.
East-West Comparative. The Byzantine commemorations of 11 June and 25 August, and the Armenian Church’s veneration of Bartholomew and Thaddeus as her founding Apostles, offer a comparative case in which the same Apostle is honored on different days, with different emphases, from the same apostolic root.
Spiritual Practices. The night of prayer before the choosing of the Twelve is the scriptural pattern behind the Ember Day vigils and behind every serious discernment; those preparing for a decision may take Luke 6:12 as the text of a holy hour.
Sancte Bartholomǽe, ora pro nobis.