A reflection for Thursday within the Thirteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Josephi Calasanctii Confessoris, III classis (27 August)
The Introit of today’s Mass does not begin with praise but with a summons to the classroom: Venite, filii, audite me: timorem Domini docebo vos — “Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Ps. 33:12). The Church, on the feast of a schoolmaster, opens her mouth as a teacher and calls her people children. Everything that follows in this Mass — the Epistle from the Book of Wisdom, the Gospel of the child set in the midst of the Apostles, the Communion antiphon Sinite parvulos venire ad me — unfolds from that first word. Today the faithful are asked to sit down and be taught, and to be taught first of all what a child is.
I. The just man led by right ways
The Epistle (Wis. 10:10-14) is the Church’s compressed account of the patriarchs, in which Wisdom herself is the protagonist. She conducts the just man fleeing his brother’s wrath “through the right ways,” shows him “the kingdom of God,” and makes him “honourable in his labours.” And then the passage turns to Joseph, sold by his brethren, and the language becomes almost scandalous in its intimacy:
“She forsook not the just when he was sold, but delivered him from sinners: she went down with him into the pit. And in bands she left him not, till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom… and shewed them to be liars that had accused him, and gave him everlasting glory.”
Descenditque cum illo in foveam. The Fathers do not permit us to read this as a poetic abstraction. Following St. Paul, who names Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), they read the Sapientia of this book as the eternal Son. St. Ambrose, treating the patriarch in his De Ioseph, sees in the sold and imprisoned Joseph a figure of Christ Himself — betrayed by his brethren for silver, stripped of his garment, numbered among criminals, and raised at last to sit at the right hand of the king to feed a starving world. The Epistle therefore tells us something more than that virtue is eventually rewarded. It tells us that Wisdom does not hover over the pit issuing counsel from a safe height. She climbs down into it.
This is worth pausing over, because it governs everything the Gospel is about to say. The humility that Our Lord commands in Matthew 18 is not an arbitrary entrance requirement. It is conformity to the way Wisdom Herself acts. He who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7) descended into our pit before He ever asked us to descend from our ambitions.
II. Who thinkest thou is the greater?
The Gospel (Matt. 18:1-5) begins with a question that is embarrassing in its candor: Quis putas maior est in regno cælorum? Who is the greatest?
St. John Chrysostom, in his fifty-eighth homily on St. Matthew, will not excuse the Apostles. They had, he says, suffered something human; they had seen Peter honoured before the rest and were troubled by it, and their question betrays a passion not yet mortified. And note the mercy of the Lord’s response. He does not rebuke them with a sermon. He calls a little child, sets him in medio eorum — in the midst, in the very place where the argument was going on — and lets the child answer the question by standing there.
What does the child teach? Not ignorance. St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, is careful here: the Lord does not command the Apostles to have the age of children but the innocence which children have by their years, so that they may possess by virtue what little ones possess by nature. And St. Paul had already fixed the sense for us: “in malice be children, but in sense be perfect” (1 Cor. 14:20). Chrysostom draws out the portrait: the child is free from vainglory and the love of precedence; he does not envy his betters; he is not consumed by the desire to be first, and he does not remember an injury for long. Set beside a company of grown men disputing over rank, the child is an argument that requires no words.
St. Hilary of Poitiers reads the scene with the wider eye of prophecy: the child set in the midst is a figure of the Gentiles who were to believe, following the Father without contradiction, and the Apostles are being taught to receive as brethren those they were tempted to count as least.
Then comes the sentence that gives the day its whole weight: Quicumque ergo humiliaverit se sicut parvulus iste, hic est maior in regno cælorum. The Lord does not abolish the category of greatness. He relocates it. Greatness is real, and it is measured downward.
St. Augustine puts it with his usual force: “Do you wish to be great? Then begin from the least. Are you planning to build some great and lofty structure? Then first think of the foundation of humility” (Sermo 69). And St. Gregory the Great warns that he who gathers virtues without humility is like a man carrying dust in the wind (Homiliae in Evangelia). St. Thomas gives the reason in the order of grace: humility is that virtue by which a man, considering rightly what he is, does not stretch himself beyond his measure; and because pride is the obstacle that keeps grace from entering, humility is the disposition that opens the soul to God (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 161). It is not the greatest of the virtues — charity is — but it is the excavation without which nothing else can be built.
III. And he that shall receive one such little child
The last verse turns the teaching outward, and here the feast comes into focus: “And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.”
St. Joseph Calasanctius (1557-1648), a Spanish priest of Aragon, came to Rome expecting a benefice and found instead the ragged boys of Trastevere, unlettered and uncatechized. In 1597, near the church of Santa Dorotea, he opened a school and refused to charge for it — the first free public school in Europe — and from that work grew the Clerks Regular of the Pious Schools. He was a man of enormous learning who spent his life teaching the alphabet to the poor, on the conviction that a child taught to read and taught to pray is a child not lost.
And then the Epistle came true in him. In his last years his own subjects turned against him; he was denounced to the Holy Office and, an old man of eighty-five, led through the streets of Rome under guard; he was deposed from the government of the order he had founded; and in 1646 Innocent X reduced his congregation to a shadow of itself. He died in 1648 with his life’s work apparently dismantled, having neither cursed his accusers nor abandoned his sons. The order was restored after his death; he was canonized by Clement XIII in 1767, and Pius XII named him the heavenly patron of all Christian popular schools.
Non dereliquit iustum venumdatum… descendit cum illo in foveam. Wisdom did not leave him in the pit. She had gone down into it with him, and in due time “shewed them to be liars that had accused him.” The Collect asks precisely for the grace his life displayed: that by his example and intercession we may so act and so teach that we may attain the eternal reward — ita agamus et doceamus, ut praemia consequamur aeterna. Act first, then teach. He taught children because he had first consented to become one.
IV. A word for practice
Most of us are given no religious order to found and none to lose. But the two halves of this Mass make a demand that reaches any state of life. There is a parvulus somewhere near you — a child of your own, a slow learner, a person of no consequence to your advancement, someone whose need is inconvenient — and Our Lord has said that receiving him is receiving Christ. And there is some pit into which you are unwilling to descend, some humiliation you are managing carefully so as not to lose your standing. Wisdom is already at the bottom of it.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, examine yourself today on a single point: where do I want to be thought greater? Not “am I proud” in the abstract, which is too easy to admit and too easy to forget, but the concrete place — the room, the conversation, the family, the parish — where precedence still matters to me.
Second, teach someone something they need and cannot repay. Catechism to a child, a Hail Mary to a grandchild, patience with a person who learns slowly. St. Joseph Calasanctius held that this is not lesser work than governing dioceses.
Third, pray the Litany of Humility, or, more simply, make the short act of St. Augustine’s principle your own: begin from the least.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, or this brief petition — Domine Iesu, mitis et humilis corde, fac cor meum secundum cor tuum. “Lord Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto Thine.”
Suggested devotion: the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, attending particularly to the Finding in the Temple, where the Eternal Wisdom sits among the doctors as a child of twelve.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens naturally onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path treats humility in the Thomistic order of the virtues — why it is the foundation and not the summit, and how it stands under charity. The Lives of the Saints path takes up men like Calasanctius whose vindication came only after death, and what their patience teaches about Providence. Either would be a fitting next step.
Sancte Ioseph Calasanctii, ora pro nobis.