A reflection for Feria Secunda infra Hebdomadam XIX post Octavam Pentecostes — IV classis (5 October), with the Commemoration of Ss. Placidi et Sociorum Martyrum
Induite novum hominem. “Put on the new man.” — Ephesians 4:24
Amice, quomodo huc intrasti non habens vestem nuptialem? “Friend, how camest thou in hither not having on a wedding garment?” — Matthew 22:12
I. The Liturgical Day
On a Monday of the season after Pentecost with no feast of higher rank, the Church does not leave the altar silent. She returns to the Mass of the preceding Sunday, so that the priest offers again today the Mass of the Nineteenth Sunday, Salus populi, and the faithful are given a second hearing of what they heard yesterday. A feria is not an empty day; it is a day on which the Church asks us to let Sunday’s word settle.
The Introit sets the key: Salus populi ego sum, dicit Dominus — “I am the salvation of the people, saith the Lord: from whatever tribulation they shall cry to Me, I will hear them, and I will be their Lord for ever.” Everything that follows is spoken by a God who has already declared Himself our salvation before He asks anything of us. The Collect then names the condition of the soul that would answer Him: that, all adversity being mercifully removed, we may be mente et corpore pariter expediti — unencumbered alike in mind and body — and so carry out freely the things that are His.
To this Mass is joined the commemoration of St. Placid and his companions. Placid was a boy when his father, the patrician Tertullus, gave him to St. Benedict at Subiaco, and it is St. Gregory the Great who tells us so in the second book of his Dialogues. That same Gregory preached the homily on today’s Gospel which the Church reads at Matins of this Sunday. The Pope who explained the wedding garment also wrote down the life of the child who was pulled from the lake. We shall see that the two belong together.
II. The Epistle: Putting Off and Putting On (Eph. 4:23-28)
St. Paul writes to the Ephesians in the vocabulary of the vesting room. The old man, “corrupted according to the desire of error” (4:22), is to be put off; the new man, “who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth” (4:24), is to be put on. And this exchange of garments does not begin at the surface. Renovamini spiritu mentis vestrae — “be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (4:23). The change of clothing is a change of mind before it is a change of conduct.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage in his homilies on Ephesians, presses the word created. The new man is not repaired; he is made, as Adam was made, by God’s act. Paul could have said “reformed,” and he said creatus, because the life of grace is not an improvement on nature but a new beginning given from above. St. Thomas will give the doctrine its precise form: grace is a quality infused into the essence of the soul, from which the virtues flow as from a root (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110). The new man is put on, not grown.
Then the Apostle descends at once from the heights to the household, and this is characteristic of him. The new man has particular habits, and Paul names four.
He speaks truth. “Wherefore putting away lying, speak ye the truth every man with his neighbour; for we are members one of another” (4:25). The reason given is not merely that lying is forbidden but that it is self-wounding. Chrysostom draws out the image: the eye does not deceive the foot, nor the hand the mouth; a body whose members lie to one another is a body at war with itself. The lie is a sin against the Body of Christ before it is a sin against an individual.
He is angry without sin. Irascimini, et nolite peccare (4:26, from Ps. 4:5). The Apostle does not command apathy. St. Thomas teaches that anger, as a movement of the passions, is not evil in itself; it becomes sin when it desires vengeance beyond what justice allows, or when it rises beyond the measure of reason (II-II, q. 158). There is a zeal for justice that the saints have known. But the next words set a limit of time upon even righteous anger: sol non occidat super iracundiam vestram — “let not the sun go down upon your anger.” St. Jerome, in his commentary on Ephesians, records an interpretation that he does not disdain: that the Sun here may be understood as Christ, the Sun of Justice, who withdraws His light from the mind that harbours wrath. The literal counsel and the spiritual sense meet. Anger kept overnight darkens the soul.
He gives the devil no ground. Nolite locum dare diabolo (4:27). The word is locum — place, foothold. The devil cannot take by force what we do not yield; he waits for a door left ajar, and nursed anger is the commonest door. The Fathers return to this verse whenever they treat of resentment, because resentment is the vice that feels most like justice.
He works in order to give. “He that stole, let him now steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have something to give to him that suffereth need” (4:28). Here the shape of the whole passage becomes visible. Chrysostom observes that Paul is not content that the thief should merely stop stealing. That would be the old man idle, not the new man clothed. The hands that took are to become hands that labour, and the labour is to end in a gift. Sin is not cured by subtraction alone; it is cured by its contrary. Where the thief took from his neighbour’s need, the new man works to supply it.
This is the first interpretive claim of the day: the new man is not the old man with his vices removed, but a creature of God whose every faculty has been turned toward its opposite end — the tongue from deceit to truth, the passions from vengeance to justice, the hands from taking to giving.
III. The Gospel: The Feast and the Garment (Matt. 22:1-14)
A king makes a marriage feast for his son. The invited guests will not come; some go to their farms and their merchandise, and others seize the servants and kill them. The king sends his armies, destroys the murderers, burns their city, and sends his servants into the highways to gather “both bad and good.” The hall is filled. And then the king comes in to see the guests, finds a man without a wedding garment, and has him bound hand and foot and cast into the exterior darkness. Multi enim sunt vocati, pauci vero electi. “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
St. Gregory the Great, in his thirty-eighth homily on the Gospels, gives the parable its classical reading. The king is the Father; the son is Christ; the marriage is the union of the Word with human nature in the womb of the Virgin, and through that union, the union of Christ with His Church. The first guests are Israel, called through the prophets and the Apostles, and the burning of their city is the destruction of Jerusalem. The guests gathered from the roads are the Gentiles. The hall is the Church in this present age, in which the good and the bad sit together until the King comes in to look.
The Fathers agree that the parable’s sharpest edge is not turned against those who refused the invitation, but against one who accepted it. He came; he sat down; he was within the hall. He was a guest of the Church, and still he was cast out. What, then, was the garment he lacked?
It cannot be faith, says St. Augustine in his ninetieth sermon, for the man was already at the feast, and no one comes to the feast of the Church except by faith. It cannot be the sacraments simply received, for baptism and the Eucharist are given to good and bad alike. Augustine goes looking for something the good have and the bad lack, and finds it in St. Paul: “the end of the commandment is charity, from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith” (1 Tim. 1:5). The wedding garment is charity. St. Gregory reaches the same conclusion in the same homily, and adds the reason it is fitting: the marriage feast is held for love of the Son, and the garment proper to a marriage is love. The guest who enters the Church without charity has come to a wedding dressed for something else.
St. Jerome, commenting on St. Matthew, gives the garment a description that should make us look back at once to the Epistle. The wedding garment, he says in substance, is the Lord’s commandments and the works fulfilled according to the law and the Gospel, which together make up the clothing of the new man. The clothing of the new man. Jerome’s gloss is the hinge on which the whole Mass turns.
Note also the King’s first word to the man: Amice, “Friend.” Gregory and Chrysostom both remark on it. The King does not open with sentence but with address; He gives the man a question and the space to answer. And the man obmutuit — he was silent. He had no garment and no defence, and he knew it. Chrysostom draws the lesson that the man was not condemned for lack of opportunity, for the garment had been offered. He was condemned for having refused to put it on while it was still within his reach.
The second interpretive claim: admission to the Church is the beginning of the wedding, not its end; the King still comes in to see, and the only garment He recognizes is charity, which is the life of the new man.
IV. Synthesis: From the Font to the Feast
Read together, the Epistle and the Gospel describe a single movement, and it is the movement that St. Thomas places at the centre of all theology: everything goes out from God, and everything is called back to Him. The exitus is the King’s invitation: unprovoked, generous, extended first to the chosen people and then flung open to the highways and the hedges, to “both bad and good.” The reditus is the return of the guest to the King, and the Gospel makes clear that this return has a condition. One does not come back to God unaltered. One comes back clothed.
The Epistle tells us what the clothing is and how it is put on. It is the new man, created according to God, received at the font. The ancient rite of baptism makes the connection explicit: when the newly baptized is clothed in the white garment, the priest charges him to receive it and carry it without stain before the judgment seat of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The wedding garment is not something we weave; it is given. But it can be laid aside, soiled, or worn over a life that contradicts it, and Paul’s four habits are the ordinary daily means by which it is kept: speaking truth, setting a limit to anger, refusing the devil his foothold, and turning our labour into gifts for the needy.
The garment is charity; charity is the form of the virtues (II-II, q. 23); and the virtues are the shape the new man takes in a tongue, a temper, and a pair of hands. The guest without the garment, therefore, was not a man who had failed to perform some outward ceremony. He was a man who had entered the Church and remained the old man there.
And here St. Placid comes into view. Gregory tells (Dialogues II, 7) how the boy, going down to the lake to draw water, fell in and was carried out from the shore. Benedict, in his cell, knew it, and sent Maurus running. Maurus, obeying without reflection, ran out upon the water, seized Placid by the hair, and drew him back to land, and only on reaching the shore realized that he had been walking on the lake. Benedict attributed the miracle to the obedience of Maurus; Maurus attributed it to the command of Benedict; and the boy Placid settled the matter by saying that while he was being pulled from the water he saw over his head the abbot’s cloak, and believed that it was the abbot who drew him out.
The Fathers did not need to labour the figure. A child is drawn out of the water and covered with a garment that is not his own. This is baptism in a picture. Placid belongs in the company of the parvuli who are carried to the feast by another’s charity before they are able to choose it, and then must spend their lives keeping the garment they were given. The Church commemorates him today among the martyrs, and whatever is to be said of the later traditions concerning his death in Sicily (about which more must be said soberly below), the earliest and surest thing we know of him is this: he was a child who was rescued, and who saw the cloak above him.
V. Devotional Application
The parable is not addressed to unbelievers. It is addressed to those already seated at the table. That is what makes it uncomfortable and useful.
Examine the four habits of the new man as a short examination of conscience for this week. Is there a lie, even a small and convenient one, that I keep alive in my household or my work? Is there an anger I took to bed last night, or the night before, or for a year? Where have I left the devil a foothold, some grievance I return to and enjoy? And what do my hands produce that is given away, rather than kept?
Do one thing with your labour today that ends in a gift. St. Paul does not say “give from your surplus”; he says work so that you may have something to give. Let some portion of today’s work be done with a named recipient in mind.
Make peace before sundown. If there is a quarrel open, the Apostle has set the deadline. Use the words sol non occidat as a short rule, and before the sun sets, take one step toward the person with whom you are angry: a message, a prayer for him by name, or at least a decision not to rehearse the injury again tonight.
Remember your baptism. Renew your baptismal promises tonight, slowly, renouncing Satan and all his works and all his pomps, and asking that the white garment given at the font be carried without stain to the feast.
VI. The Collects
Collect of the Mass (Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost):
Omnipotens et misericors Deus, universa nobis adversantia propitiatus exclude: ut mente et corpore pariter expediti, quae tua sunt, liberis mentibus exsequamur.
“Almighty and merciful God, in Thy loving kindness keep far from us all that may hurt us: that being unhindered alike in mind and body, we may with free hearts accomplish those things which are Thine.”
Commemoration of St. Placid and Companions:
Deus, qui nos concedis sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Placidi et Sociorum eius natalitia colere: da nobis in aeterna beatitudine de eorum societate gaudere.
“O God, who grantest us to keep the birthday of Thy holy Martyrs Placid and his Companions: grant us to rejoice in their fellowship in everlasting bliss.”
The two prayers form one petition. The first asks to be expediti, freed from whatever encumbers us; the second asks for societas, fellowship at the eternal feast. The garment the Gospel requires is precisely the freedom the Collect asks for: a soul unencumbered by the old man, so that it may sit down in the company of the martyrs.
VII. Aspiration
Induc me, Domine, veste nuptiali caritatis. “Clothe me, O Lord, in the wedding garment of charity.”
VIII. For Further Study
The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the rites of baptism in the Rituale Romanum — the exsufflation, the salt, the anointings, the white garment and the lighted candle — and shows how each ceremony enacts the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new.
The Theology and Doctrine path treats charity as the form of the virtues in the Thomistic order, and why the Fathers could identify the wedding garment with charity without contradicting St. Jerome’s reading of it as works: works without charity are dead, and charity without works is not yet clothed.
The Lives of the Saints path continues with the first disciples of St. Benedict — Maurus, Placid, and Scholastica — as St. Gregory records them in the second book of the Dialogues.
For readers following the East–West thread: the Byzantine Church reads this same parable on one of the Sundays of the Matthean cycle, and in the services of Holy Week she places on the lips of the faithful a lament of the guest who sees the bridal chamber adorned and has no garment fit to enter it. East and West hear the same warning in the same Gospel.
IX. Sources and Their Weight
The Scripture readings follow the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate cited inline. The Proper of the Mass is that of the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost in the 1962 Missale Romanum, resumed on the ferial Monday.
The patristic readings are given here in faithful paraphrase with their places: St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 38 (on the marriage feast, read at Matins of the Nineteenth Sunday); St. Augustine, Sermo 90 (on the wedding garment as charity); St. Jerome, Commentarius in Matthaeum on Matthew 22, and Commentarius in Epistulam ad Ephesios on Ephesians 4:26; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Epistulam ad Ephesios on chapter 4 and Homiliae in Matthaeum on chapter 22. St. Thomas is cited to the question: Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110; II-II, qq. 23 and 158.
The account of the boy Placid’s rescue from the lake rests on St. Gregory’s Dialogues, Book II, and is the firm historical ground for his memory. The later tradition of his martyrdom at Messina with his brothers Eutychius and Victorinus, his sister Flavia, and many companions at the hands of pirates rests on Acts that historians have long regarded as a medieval composition, and is retained here as pious tradition rather than asserted as history. The Church’s commemoration honours the martyrs; the details of the narrative are not of faith.
Sancte Placide, cum sociis tuis, ora pro nobis.