A reflection for Wednesday within the Fourteenth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — S. Stephani Hungariæ Regis Confessoris, III classis (2 September)
The Church has two Masses for a confessor who was not a bishop, and for the kings among her saints she reaches almost always for the same one: Os iusti — “The mouth of the just man shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart” (Ps. 36:30-31). It is a curious choice for a man who ruled with the sword. The Introit says nothing of victory, of crowns, of the founding of a nation; it speaks of a mouth and a tongue and a heart, and it says that the just man’s rule begins inside him. The Epistle and Gospel that follow take up the same theme from the two directions in which a king is most tempted — what he possesses, and what he has been entrusted with — and today the Church holds up Stephen of Hungary, who held a great deal of both and was found, at the end, to have kept nothing for himself.
I. Liturgical Context
The feast of St. Stephen, first Christian king of Hungary (c. 975–1038), is kept in the 1962 Missale Romanum on 2 September as a feast of the third class, with the Mass Os iusti from the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop and a proper Collect. The date is not that of his death. Stephen died on the Assumption, 15 August 1038, and the Hungarians long kept his memory on the twentieth of that month, the day of his elevation in 1083; but when Innocent XI extended the feast to the universal Church he assigned it to 2 September, the anniversary of the day in 1686 on which the armies of Christendom retook Buda from the Turks. The Roman calendar thus remembers Stephen on the day his kingdom was given back to the Faith he had planted in it, which is a liturgical judgment on his life more eloquent than any panegyric. (The post-1969 calendar moves the memorial to 16 August, next to the Assumption; that placement is noted here for orientation only.)
Falling on a Wednesday within the Fourteenth Week after the Octave of Pentecost, the feast displaces the ferial Mass, and the Sunday’s own lesson — Nemo potest duobus dominis servire, no man can serve two masters, from the Gospel of the Fourteenth Sunday — hangs over the week like an epigraph. The Mass of St. Stephen is, in a sense, the Church’s answer to that Gospel: here is a man who served one.
II. The Epistle: Beatus dives (Ecclus. 31:8-11)
Beatus dives, qui inventus est sine macula, et qui post aurum non abiit, nec speravit in pecunia et thesauris. Quis est hic, et laudabimus eum? fecit enim mirabilia in vita sua. Qui probatus est in illo, et perfectus est, erit illi gloria æterna: qui potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus; facere mala, et non fecit: ideo stabilita sunt bona illius in Domino, et eleemosynas illius enarrabit omnis ecclesia sanctorum.
“Blessed is the rich man that is found without blemish: and that hath not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money nor in treasures. Who is he, and we will praise him? for he hath done wonderful things in his life. Who hath been tried thereby, and made perfect, he shall have glory everlasting. He that could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed: and could do evil things, and hath not done them: therefore are his goods established in the Lord, and all the church of the saints shall declare his alms.”
The first word is a surprise. Beatus dives — blessed is the rich man. Scripture is not in the habit of pronouncing the rich blessed, and Our Lord’s own beatitude runs the other way. But the son of Sirach is not contradicting the Gospel; he is asking a harder question than the Gospel’s, which is whether a man can be rich and not be what riches ordinarily make of a man. His answer is yes, but rarely, and the rarity is written into the text: Quis est hic, et laudabimus eum? Who is he? Find him for us, and we will praise him. The question is almost sceptical. It is the tone of a man who has looked for such a person and not often found him.
What is the mark of the man when he is found? Sirach gives three. He has not gone after gold — the Latin post aurum non abiit is the language of discipleship turned upside down: he has not followed gold as a disciple follows a master. He has not put his trust in money — the sin is not possession but spes, hope, the resting of the heart on a thing that cannot hold it. And, the decisive clause, qui potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus — he could have transgressed, and did not. The praise is for a man who had the power to do evil and let the power lie idle.
The Fathers read this as the whole moral difference between wealth as a curse and wealth as a trust. St. Ambrose, in his treatise on Naboth’s vineyard, insists that the earth was given in common and that the rich man is not condemned for having but for having as though nothing were owed; what he holds beyond his need he holds on behalf of the poor, and to withhold it is not a failure of generosity but a species of theft (De Nabuthae). St. Augustine, preaching on the Psalms, is careful to distinguish the thing from the desire: riches are not the enemy, cupiditas is; a poor man may burn with the avarice he cannot indulge, and a rich man may hold his goods with an open hand, and God judges the hand and not the purse (cf. Enarrationes in Psalmos, on Ps. 51). St. Gregory the Great, in the Pastoral Rule, gives the preacher two different sermons for the rich and the poor: the rich are to be warned against pride and the poor against despair, but the rich are to be reminded above all that they are stewards who will render an account, and that the surest security for what they have is to have given it away (Regula Pastoralis, III).
St. Thomas gathers the tradition under the virtue of liberality, which he defines as the right use of exterior goods according to reason — not their contempt, and not their hoarding, but their ordering to an end higher than themselves (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 117). And he adds, for the great, a further virtue: magnificence, the doing of great things at great cost for the honour of God (II-II, q. 134). It is the virtue of builders of churches. It is the virtue of Stephen.
Sirach’s final clause is the one to remember: eleemosynas illius enarrabit omnis ecclesia sanctorum — the whole church of the saints shall tell of his alms. Not his conquests. Not his laws. His alms. The Church, on his feast day, is doing exactly what the text foretold.
III. The Gospel: Negotiamini dum venio (Luke 19:12-26)
The Gospel is the parable of the pounds. A nobleman goes into a far country to receive a kingdom and return; he leaves ten servants ten pounds, one each, and the command Negotiamini dum venio — “Trade till I come.” His citizens send after him a message of hatred: Nolumus hunc regnare super nos, we will not have this man reign over us. He returns as king, calls the servants, and finds that one pound has become ten, another five, and a third has been wrapped in a napkin and buried by a servant who was afraid.
The Fathers are unanimous about the nobleman. He is Christ. St. Ambrose, in his commentary on St. Luke, reads the far country as heaven and the going as the Ascension: the Lord went to receive from the Father the kingdom that is His by right, and He will return to take it up in its fullness (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, VIII). St. Cyril of Alexandria, as the Catena Aurea transmits him, sees in the citizens who refuse Him the men of Jerusalem, and in their message the Non habemus regem nisi Cæsarem of the Passion; but he does not let the Gentile reader off, since the parable is told to all who are tempted, having once received a King, to unmake the reception. St. Bede takes the pounds: in Matthew the servants receive different sums, five talents and two and one, but in Luke every servant receives the same, and the difference is instructive. Matthew, says Bede, speaks of the diversity of gifts; Luke speaks of the one gift common to all the baptized — the grace of faith, the Word entrusted to every Christian alike — and the diversity in Luke is not in what was given but in what was done with it (In Lucae Evangelium Expositio, V). St. Augustine makes the same point more briefly: the same grace, the same law, the same Gospel are set before all, and the tenfold and fivefold return are the difference of labour, not of endowment (cf. Quaestiones Evangeliorum, II). Theophylact adds that the reward is proportioned to the return and is itself a form of rule — have thou power over ten cities — because he who has governed a little well is fitted to govern more.
Three things stand out for the feast.
First, negotiamini dum venio. The Latin is commercial and unembarrassed. The servant is not told to admire the pound or to guard it; he is told to trade with it, to put it at risk, to make it more. St. Gregory the Great, expounding the parallel in Matthew, says that the one who hides the talent is the man who possesses some gift and will not employ it for others, whether from sloth or from a false humility, and that his sin is not that he lost the master’s money but that he returned it unused (Homiliae in Evangelia, I, 9). A king’s pound is a kingdom. Stephen was not told to keep Hungary. He was told to trade with it.
Second, the fear. Timui enim te, quia homo austerus es. The third servant’s excuse is that his master is hard. The Fathers observe that the excuse condemns him out of his own mouth — if the master is exacting, all the more reason to have laboured — but they also observe that the fear is real, and is the ordinary reason men bury what they were given. It is safer to do nothing. A buried pound cannot be lost. Stephen, converting a pagan nation at the edge of Christendom, had every reason to be afraid, and the history of his reign is the history of rebellions that showed the fear was well-founded. He traded anyway.
Third, the return. The parable is set in the frame of a king going away and coming back, and it ends with an accounting. Sirach’s qui potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus is the Epistle’s version of the same accounting: the master returns, and the question is what was done with what was given, and with the power that came with it. The Mass sets the two texts side by side so that we cannot miss the point. The rich man of Sirach and the servant of Luke are the same person seen twice: once as a possessor, once as a steward — and blessed only if he is the second.
IV. Synthesis
All things go out from God and are meant to return to Him, and a creature’s goodness is measured by how faithfully it carries what it has been given back to its Source. That is the great arc of exitus and reditus on which St. Thomas hangs the Summa, and it is the arc on which this Mass is built. The pound goes out from the master and must come back with increase. Riches go out from God’s hand into the rich man’s, and are “established in the Lord” only if they are returned to Him — in alms, in churches, in the poor. A kingdom goes out from Providence to a king, and the king holds it dum venio, until the Master comes.
The two readings together define the confessor-king. He is a man who has been given more than others — more goods, more power, more room to transgress — and whose sanctity consists not in the renunciation of the gift, which was not his to renounce, but in its faithful trading. He could have gone after gold; he built cathedrals. He could have put his hope in treasures; he endowed monasteries and fed the poor with his own hands. He could have transgressed, being a king and answerable to no one on earth; and he did not, because he knew that he was answerable.
Stephen, son of the pagan chieftain Géza, baptized as a boy and crowned at the turn of the millennium — with a crown, the constant tradition says, sent to him by Pope Sylvester II — received the pound of a whole people. In four decades of rule he traded it into ten: two archbishoprics and eight bishoprics, the great monasteries of Pannonhalma and Pécsvárad, a code of laws that bound the nation to the observance of the Faith, and a Church that survived two centuries of turbulence because it had been founded on stone. He made his kingdom a house for pilgrims to the Holy Land and a refuge for the missionaries the older Christian nations sent him. And in the book of Admonitions composed at his court for his son Emeric — a small mirror of princes that is among the earliest documents of Hungarian literature — the first counsel given to the heir is not about arms or treasure but about the Catholic Faith, which the young man is to hold, defend, and honour above every other possession of the crown.
The end of his life is the end of the parable. His son and heir died before him. His last years were spent in illness and among factions contending for a succession he could not settle. And on the Vigil of the Assumption in 1038, the tradition of his people relates, he raised his right hand — the hand that is still venerated incorrupt at Budapest — and offered his crown and his kingdom to the Blessed Virgin Mary, placing under her patronage what he could no longer govern. It is the last and greatest act of trading. He did not bury Hungary in a napkin against an uncertain future. He gave it back, with interest, to the Queen of the Master who had lent it. Hungary has called itself Regnum Marianum ever since.
V. Devotional Application
Few of us are given kingdoms. All of us are given pounds, and most of us are frightened of the Master.
Consider first what you have — the plain material fact of your possessions, whatever their size. Sirach’s question is not “are you rich” but “have you gone after gold”: is there anything you own on which your hope is quietly resting? The test is simple. Imagine it taken from you, and observe what moves in the heart.
Consider next what you have been entrusted with — an office, a family, a competence, a position of influence however small, a reputation that could be used for the good of others. The Gospel does not ask whether you have kept it safe. It asks what you have made of it. The buried pound is the sin of the respectable: the ability unused, the word of truth unsaid because it might cost something, the good work not begun because it might fail. Negotiamini. Trade.
Consider last the power to transgress. Where in your life do you have room to do wrong without consequence — an authority no one checks, a private hour no one sees, a subordinate who cannot answer back? Qui potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus. That is the whole of Stephen’s praise, and it is available to anyone who has power over anything.
Three practical steps for the feast:
First, make one act of almsgiving today that is proportioned to your means and not to your habit — enough that you feel the pound leave your hand.
Second, take the one gift you have most consistently buried and put it to work in a single concrete way before the week is out.
Third, at the end of the day, imitate the king: place under the Blessed Virgin’s patronage the thing you are most anxious to hold on to, and say the Sub tuum præsidium over it.
VI. Collect
Concede, quæsumus, Ecclesiæ tuæ, omnipotens Deus: ut beatum Stephanum Confessorem tuum, quem regnantem in terris propagatorem habuit, propugnatorem habere mereatur gloriosum in cælis. Per Dominum nostrum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, O almighty God, to Thy Church, that as she had blessed Stephen Thy Confessor for her propagator while he reigned on earth, so she may deserve to have him for her glorious defender in heaven. Through our Lord.”
The Collect is built on a single antithesis, propagator and propugnator: the one who extends the Church and the one who defends her. On earth Stephen spread the Faith; in heaven he is asked to guard it. The prayer does not ask that we may be like him but that he may continue to do for us what he did for Hungary — which is the Church’s ordinary way of saying that a saint’s work does not end at his death but changes its mode.
VII. Aspiration
Rex Stephane, qui regnum tuum Reginæ cæli tradidisti, doce me omnia quæ habeo Domino reddere.
King Stephen, who gave thy kingdom into the hands of the Queen of Heaven, teach me to render to the Lord all that I have.
VIII. For Further Study
The confessor-king is a distinct liturgical type, and this feast belongs to a small company: St. Henry the Emperor (15 July), St. Louis of France (25 August), St. Edward the Confessor (13 October), St. Wenceslaus (28 September), St. Canute, St. Olaf, St. Edmund. The Lives of the Saints path takes them together — what the Church means by sanctity in a man who could not lay down the sword, and why the Mass Os iusti fits them so exactly. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the virtues of the great — liberality, magnificence, and their counterfeits — in the order St. Thomas gives them, and St. Thomas’s own short treatise on kingship, De Regno, is the natural companion to this feast. Those drawn to Hungary itself may take up the Admonitions of St. Stephen to his son, which survive in Latin and are brief enough to read in an evening.
For a fuller life of the saint, see the companion hagiography for this date in the Lives of the Saints sequence.
IX. Source Transparency
The Mass texts (Introit, Epistle, Gospel, Collect) are those of the 1962 Missale Romanum for 2 September; Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims with the Clementine Vulgate. The patristic material is reported from the Fathers’ own works by locus — Ambrose’s De Nabuthae and Expositio in Lucam, Augustine’s Enarrationes and Quaestiones Evangeliorum, Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis and Homiliae in Evangelia, Bede’s commentary on Luke — and, for St. Cyril of Alexandria and Theophylact, from the Catena Aurea of St. Thomas; the readings are given in paraphrase rather than in direct quotation. The historical facts of Stephen’s reign (his baptism, coronation, foundations, laws, and the Admonitions) rest on the medieval Hungarian Lives and on the modern historical consensus; the sending of the crown by Sylvester II and the offering of the kingdom to Our Lady are strongly attested tradition rather than contemporary documentary witness, and are presented here as such. The dating of the feast to 2 September under Innocent XI follows the standard liturgical histories.
Sancte Stephane, Rex et Confessor, ora pro nobis.