A reflection for Monday within the Eighteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Wenceslai Ducis et Martyris, III classis (28 September)
The Introit of today’s Mass is a coronation psalm: In virtute tua, Domine, lætabitur iustus: et super salutare tuum exsultabit vehementer — “In Thy strength, O Lord, the just man shall joy: and in Thy salvation he shall rejoice exceedingly” (Ps. 20:2). Its verse goes further: posuisti in capite eius coronam de lapide pretioso — “Thou hast set on his head a crown of precious stones.” David sang it of a king. The Church sings it today of a duke who wore a crown on earth and was murdered for the way he wore it, and the Collect tells us plainly which crown the psalm now means: God, it says, per martyrii palmam a terreno principatu ad cælestem gloriam transtulisti — “through the palm of martyrdom didst transfer blessed Wenceslaus from an earthly principality to heavenly glory.” The whole Mass is about that transfer, and about the price at which it was bought. The price was paid at a church door, by the hand of a brother.
I. The wrath of a brother
The Epistle (Wis. 10:10-14) is the same passage the Church read a month ago for St. Joseph Calasanctius, but it does not say the same thing today. Read over a schoolmaster, it spoke of Wisdom’s humility. Read over Wenceslaus, one notices what the passage is actually made of.
In the Book of Wisdom this chapter is a litany of the just, and the verses on either side of today’s reading form a single thread. Just before it, Wisdom recalls Cain: “the unjust went away from her in his anger, he perished by the fury wherewith he murdered his brother” (Wis. 10:3). The reading proper, in the sacred author’s text, opens on Jacob, profugum iræ fratris — “the just, when he fled from his brother’s wrath” (10:10). And it closes on Joseph: “She forsook not the just when he was sold, but delivered him from sinners: she went down with him into the pit” (10:13). Three just men; and in all three the danger comes not from the stranger or the pagan king but from the man who shares his blood.
The Church knew what she was doing when she assigned this text to Wenceslaus. The Fathers had long since taught her to read these patriarchs as figures of Christ. St. Ambrose, in his treatise On Joseph, sees in the son sold by his brethren for silver the Son betrayed by His own nation and by one of the Twelve — “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not” (John 1:11). And following St. Paul, who names Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), they read the Sapientia who “went down with him into the pit” as the eternal Word, who does not watch the just man’s betrayal from a safe height but enters it.
Two phrases of the Epistle deserve to be kept for the rest of the day. The first: certamen forte dedit illi, ut vinceret — “He gave him a strong conflict, that he might overcome, and know that wisdom is mightier than all” (10:12). The victory promised here is not military. Wenceslaus lost the only fight he was ever in, and the Church calls it a triumph. The second: Wisdom stayed with the just man donec afferret illi sceptrum regni — “till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom” (10:14). The sceptre Joseph received was Pharaoh’s. The one Wenceslaus received was not of this world.
II. Not peace, but the sword
The Gospel (Matt. 10:34-42) is among the hardest sayings the Lord ever spoke: Nolite arbitrari quia pacem venerim mittere in terram: non veni pacem mittere, sed gladium — “Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.” And then, citing the prophet Micah (7:6), He names where the sword will fall: “a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household.”
St. John Chrysostom, in his thirty-fifth homily on St. Matthew, will not let us soften this, but he will not let us misread it either. The division, he says, is not Christ’s aim but the effect of His coming upon men who will not receive Him; and there is a peace that is worse than war, namely concord in evil. A physician who cuts away the diseased limb to save the body does not hate the body. So the Word divides the household in order that at least some of it may be saved, rather than all of it lost together in a false harmony. Chrysostom notes also that the Lord quotes the prophet precisely so that the disciples will not be scandalized when it happens: it was foretold, and it is part of the plan, not a failure of it.
St. Hilary of Poitiers, commenting on the same verse, reads the sword as the word of God itself, “sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12), which by its very nature separates what is of the Spirit from what is of the flesh, even when both live under one roof.
Then comes the sentence that governs the rest: “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me” (10:37). St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, reaches here for a verse of the Canticle as the Vulgate renders it: ordinavit in me caritatem — “he set in order charity in me” (Cant. 2:4). The Lord does not abolish the love of parents, Jerome says; He orders it. Love God, love your father and mother, love your children; but if a choice is forced between the love of parents and the love of God, then hatred toward one’s own becomes a kind of piety toward God. St. Gregory the Great makes the same point with characteristic precision in his thirty-seventh homily on the Gospels: we are to love our kindred and yet, as the Lord says elsewhere, to “hate” them — which means that when they would draw us away from God, we refuse to hear them. We hate them, Gregory says, by loving them rightly. And St. Augustine, preaching on this very text in a martyr’s commemoration (Sermo 344), draws out the order in its sharpest form: a father who would call his son back from confessing Christ is, in that moment, not a father but an obstacle, and must be treated as the Lord treated Peter when Peter would have kept Him from the Cross.
III. The household of Bohemia
Wenceslaus lived that Gospel literally, and not as metaphor.
He was born around 907 into the ruling house of the Přemyslids, in a Bohemia only one generation Christian. His paternal grandmother, St. Ludmila, had been baptized with her husband Bořivoj, by tradition at the hands of St. Methodius himself, and it was she who formed the boy in the faith. His mother, Drahomíra, belonged to the party that resented the new religion and the German and Slavonic clergy who served it. When Wenceslaus’s father died and the regency came to be disputed, Ludmila was strangled at Tetín in 921, by men acting — so the earliest legends say — at Drahomíra’s instigation. Inimici hominis domestici eius. The first martyr in Wenceslaus’s life was killed on his own mother’s orders.
When he came to rule in his own right, he governed as a Christian prince: he brought back Ludmila’s relics to Prague, recalled the priests, built the rotunda of St. Vitus on the castle hill, and — the old Slavonic narrative of his life is explicit — fed the hungry, clothed the naked, received pilgrims, defended widows, and ransomed captives. He sought peace with the German king rather than war. The same narratives add devotions that later piety cherished: that he sowed with his own hands the wheat and pressed the grapes for the bread and wine of the altar, and that he went out at night, barefoot, to pray in the churches and to carry alms. Some of this is pious tradition rather than record; the pattern of it is not.
His younger brother Boleslav watched all this and conspired with the party his mother had led. In September of 929 — some sources say 935 — Boleslav invited Wenceslaus to Stará Boleslav for the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian. The duke was warned and went anyway. On the morning after the feast, the twenty-eighth, he was on his way to Matins when Boleslav met him at the door of the church and struck him; Wenceslaus overpowered his brother, and Boleslav’s companions came up and cut him down on the threshold. The tradition that he died saying, “Brother, may God forgive you,” cannot be verified, but it was believed from the beginning because it was so like him.
Read the Gospel again with that church door in view. “A man’s enemies shall be they of his own household.” “He that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me.” “He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it” (10:36, 38-39). Wenceslaus did not die for want of prudence. He died because he would not let the claims of blood, of mother or brother or the dynastic party, overrule the order of charity that his grandmother had taught him and that the Gospel requires. He loved his household; he did not love it more than Christ.
The last verses of the Gospel belong to him too. “He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive the reward of a prophet” (10:41): he was the prince who received the priests his mother’s faction had driven out. “And whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only… he shall not lose his reward” (10:42). St. Jerome observes that the Lord says cold water deliberately, so that no man may plead his poverty: he who cannot afford fuel to warm it may still give it cold. Nine centuries later an English hymn-writer would make a Christmas carol out of the legend of this duke carrying firewood to a poor man through the snow. The carol is a Victorian invention; the man it remembers had already given the cup of cold water, and then his blood.
IV. Wisdom did not leave him
The Epistle ends: “and shewed them to be liars that had accused him, and gave him everlasting glory” (Wis. 10:14). It happened almost at once. Within a few years Boleslav himself, whether from remorse or from policy, had his brother’s body translated to the church of St. Vitus in Prague, and the tomb became the heart of the nation. The tradition is that a son born to Boleslav on the very day of the murder was vowed to the clergy in expiation. The cult spread across Bohemia, into Poland and Germany and among the Slavs of the East; the Czechs came to call him their “eternal prince,” and sang to him, from the twelfth century, the chorale Svatý Václave in which they ask him not to let them or their children perish.
And the Introit came true in a way that David could not have foreseen. When the Emperor Charles IV had the royal crown of Bohemia made in 1347, he dedicated it to St. Wenceslaus and ordained that it should rest upon the saint’s own relics in the cathedral, lent to each king of Bohemia only for the day of his coronation, and then returned. The crown of precious stones sits on the martyr’s head. The kings borrow it.
That is the Epistle’s argument made visible. Omnium potentior est sapientia — “wisdom is mightier than all.” Boleslav gained a duchy by fratricide. The brother he killed has worn the crown for a thousand years.
V. A word for practice
Few of us will be struck down at a church door. But the Gospel’s order of charity reaches every household, and so does the Epistle’s promise.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, examine yourself on the order of your loves. Not whether you love your family — you do, and you should — but whether there is any point at which the approval of your household, your friends, or your own party quietly governs what you will say or do for God. Human respect is the ordinary form of the sword that divides houses; most of us meet it not at a church door but at a dinner table.
Second, give a cup of cold water. Some act of charity this week that costs you little in money and something in convenience, done without announcement: a visit, an errand, a meal, an hour. St. Jerome’s point stands — no one is too poor for this.
Third, let Wenceslaus’s last journey shape one habit. He was killed on his way to the Office, having been warned, because he would not miss it. Choose one fixed time of prayer — morning prayers, the Angelus, a weekday Mass — and keep it this week as though it were not optional.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day —
Deus, qui beatum Wenceslaum per martyrii palmam a terreno principatu ad cælestem gloriam transtulisti: eius precibus nos ab omni adversitate custodi, et eiusdem tribue gaudere consortio.
“O God, who through the palm of martyrdom didst transfer blessed Wenceslaus from an earthly principality to heavenly glory: by his prayers keep us from all adversity, and grant us to rejoice in his fellowship.”
Or, for anyone who carries a wound from within his own family, the petition the saint is remembered to have made for his brother: Domine, ne statuas illi hoc peccatum — “Lord, lay not this sin to his charge” (Acts 7:59).
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, dwelling on the First, where the Lord’s own betrayal begins with one who had shared His table, and on the Fifth, where He prays for those who crucify Him.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto three of our paths. The Lives of the Saints path continues with St. Ludmila, Wenceslaus’s grandmother and first teacher, and with the royal martyrs and renunciants of the early medieval Church. The Church History path takes up the conversion of the Slavs, from the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to the rise of Christian Bohemia, and the long quarrel between the Slavonic and Latin rites in which Wenceslaus’s household was caught. And the Theology and Doctrine path treats the ordo caritatis in St. Thomas — why charity has an order at all, and how love of God and love of kindred stand to one another.
Sancte Venceslae, dux et martyr, ora pro nobis.