A reflection for Thursday within the Nineteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Birgittæ Viduæ, III classis (8 October)
Commemoratio ad Laudes tantum: Ss. Sergii, Bacchi, Marcelli et Apuleji Martyrum
I. The day in the calendar
The Introit of today’s Mass is not the cry of a triumphant soul but the confession of a chastened one: Cognovi, Domine, quia æquitas iudicia tua, et in veritate tua humiliasti me — “I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are equity: and in thy truth thou hast humbled me” (Ps. 118:75). The Church places these words on the lips of a holy woman who was neither virgin nor martyr, and in doing so she tells us how such a woman is made holy. Not by escaping the ordinary conditions of life, but by passing through them — marriage, childbearing, the management of a household, bereavement — and finding in each the hand of a just God who humbles in order to exalt.
Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) passed through all of these. Daughter of a powerful lawman of Uppland, she was married at thirteen to Ulf Gudmarsson, bore him eight children, and served for a time as mistress of the household to the Queen of Sweden. After her husband’s death in 1344 she gave herself wholly to prayer and penance, received the revelations to which the Collect of this Mass alludes, founded the Order of the Most Holy Saviour, and in 1349 went to Rome, from which she never returned. She spent the last quarter-century of her life on pilgrimage, in prayer, and in the unwelcome work of telling popes, kings, and bishops what she believed God required of them — above all, that the Vicar of Christ return from Avignon to the see of Peter. She died in Rome in July of 1373, and Boniface IX raised her to the altars in October of 1391. The traditional calendar keeps her feast on this day, near the anniversary of her canonization.
At Lauds the Church also remembers four martyrs. Sergius and Bacchus, officers of the imperial army, were put to death in Syria in the great persecution for refusing to sacrifice to the gods; their shrine at Resafa, later called Sergiopolis, became one of the great pilgrim sanctuaries of the East, and the Byzantine Church honours them still. With them are joined Marcellus and Apuleius, Roman martyrs of the early centuries. Soldiers who would not purchase their lives with a grain of incense, and a widow who sold everything for a pearl: the commemoration is not an interruption of the feast but a commentary upon it.
II. The widow indeed
The Epistle (1 Tim. 5:3-10) is St. Paul’s instruction to Timothy on the order of widows in the Church at Ephesus, and it opens with a command that sounds almost like a definition: Viduas honora, quæ vere viduæ sunt — “Honour widows, that are widows indeed.”
What, then, is a widow indeed? The Apostle answers in a single sentence that contains the whole spiritual life:
“But she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, let her trust in God, and continue in supplications and prayers night and day. For she that liveth in pleasures, is dead while she is living.” (1 Tim. 5:5-6)
Quæ autem vere vidua est, et desolata, speret in Deum. St. John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage in his homilies on the First Epistle to Timothy, observes that the Apostle does not honour the widow for the mere loss of a husband, which is a misfortune and not a virtue, but for what she makes of that loss. Widowhood, he says, is not constituted by bereavement alone; it is completed by choice — by the free decision to remain in the desolation and fill it with God. And with equal severity he turns to the woman “that liveth in pleasures”: she may walk and eat and talk, but her soul is a corpse carried about by a living body.
St. Augustine reads the same verse with a wider eye. Writing to the Roman widow Proba, who had asked him how she ought to pray (Ep. 130), he takes the Apostle’s “desolate widow” and makes her the figure of every Christian soul. Whoever understands that in this world he is a pilgrim, without any lasting consolation, separated from the One he loves, is in this sense a widow; and the widow’s work — to hope in God and to persevere in supplication night and day — is the work of the whole Church until the Bridegroom returns. The literal widow is thus a living sermon to the rest of us. She shows in her state what every soul must become in its desire.
St. Ambrose, in his treatise De viduis, gathers the widows of the Old Testament around this text: the widow of Sarepta, who gave her last handful of meal to the prophet and found the barrel did not fail (3 Kgs. 17); Naomi, who returned empty to Bethlehem; and, above all, Anna the prophetess, who “departed not from the temple, by fastings and prayers serving night and day” (Luke 2:37), and was rewarded by holding the Christ in her arms. For Ambrose, widowhood is a school of the virtues, ranked below virginity but above the married state in the order of chastity, and it is a school precisely because it is a state of emptiness that waits to be filled. St. Augustine’s treatise De bono viduitatis keeps the same order and adds a necessary warning: the widow who rises to continence must not therefore despise the marriage from which she came, for the gift that God gives to one state does not condemn the gift He gave to another.
And here the Epistle becomes something more than an exhortation to devout old women. Look at the qualifications St. Paul lays down for enrolment among the widows: she must have been “the wife of one husband,” she must “have brought up children,” “received to harbour,” “washed the saints’ feet,” “ministered to them that suffer tribulation,” and “diligently followed every good work” (1 Tim. 5:9-10). Before that, the Apostle insists that a widow with children and grandchildren must “learn first to govern her own house” (5:4). The widow indeed is not a woman who fled her duties to find God. She is a woman who found God in the faithful performance of her duties, and who, when those duties were taken from her, was already prepared to give Him the whole of what remained.
That is the life of St. Bridget almost to the letter. She had governed a great household and raised eight children, not all of whom gave her consolation; tradition preserves her long anguish over her son Karl, whose life at the court of Naples was a scandal, and whose death there in 1372 she bore with the hope recorded in her revelations. She had received pilgrims and ministered to the poor while still a wife. And when Ulf died at the Cistercian abbey of Alvastra, she did not reinvent herself. She simply continued, now desolata, to do what she had already learned to do, with nothing left between her soul and God.
III. The treasure, the pearl, and the net
The Gospel (Matt. 13:44-52) gives three parables in quick succession, and then a question.
“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field. Which a man having found, hid it, and for joy thereof goeth, and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again the kingdom of heaven is like to a merchant seeking good pearls. Who when he had found one pearl of great price, went his way, and sold all that he had, and bought it.” (Matt. 13:44-46)
St. Gregory the Great, whose homily on this Gospel the Church has long read in the night office (Homiliae in Evangelia, Hom. 11), interprets the treasure as the desire of heaven and the field as the discipline by which that desire is cultivated. The man who finds it hides it, says Gregory, because it is not enough to guard our heavenly longing against the malice of evil spirits if we do not also guard it against the praise of men; the good that is displayed for applause is already being spent. And he sells all that he has, which is to say that he renounces the desires of the flesh, because the one who has tasted the sweetness of the heavenly life gladly leaves behind everything he once loved on earth. When the pearl of great price has been found, Gregory adds, everything else is seen for what it is, and its value falls away.
The decisive phrase in the first parable is easy to read past: præ gaudio illius — “for joy thereof.” St. John Chrysostom, in his forty-seventh homily on St. Matthew, will not let us miss it. The Lord, he says, is teaching not merely that we must give up everything for the Gospel, but that we must do so with gladness, as a man does who knows that what he is gaining is beyond comparison with what he is losing. The renunciation of the saints is not a grim exchange. It is the conduct of a man who has seen the treasure and can no longer take seriously the price.
St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, offers the other great patristic reading. The treasure hidden in the field is the Word of God, hidden in the flesh of Christ, or hidden in the field of the Scriptures where the knowledge of the Saviour lies buried for those who dig. And the merchant’s many “good pearls” are the Law and the Prophets, which are truly precious; but the one pearl of great price is the knowledge of Christ Himself, in whose possession the seeker gladly lets the others go — not because they were false, but because they were fulfilled.
Then the scene darkens. The kingdom is like a net cast into the sea, gathering “all kind of fishes,” and drawn to shore at the end of the world, where the angels “separate the wicked from among the just” (13:47-49). Chrysostom draws the hard lesson here as well: to be in the net is not the same as to be kept. The Church gathers good and bad together in this age, and membership is not salvation. Only the end reveals who has truly sold all for the pearl and who merely stood in the market admiring it.
And at last the Lord asks His disciples, Intellexistis hæc omnia? — “Have ye understood all these things?” When they say yes, He gives them a final image: “every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven, is like to a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure new things and old” (13:51-52). St. Jerome and St. Augustine alike read the “new things and old” as the two Testaments, held together in the one treasury of the Church, so that the instructed disciple neither rejects the Old as the heretics did nor fails to see the New hidden within it.
IV. Going forth and returning
The Epistle and Gospel meet in a single truth, and the life of St. Bridget is its illustration: the goods of this world come forth from God, and the soul returns to God not by despising them but by recognizing in them, and beyond them, the one Good for which they were given.
This is the great movement that St. Thomas Aquinas places at the heart of theology — the exitus of all creatures from God and their reditus to Him as their final end. Bridget’s life passes visibly through both. In her exitus, God gave her everything: noble birth, a good husband, many children, wealth, standing at court. None of it was evil; all of it was His gift, and St. Paul’s Epistle insists that the duties attached to such gifts — governing a house, raising children, returning duty to one’s parents — are “acceptable before God” (1 Tim. 5:4). But gifts are not the Giver. In her reditus, one by one, the gifts were taken or surrendered — her husband to death, her possessions to her children and the poor, her homeland to her vocation in Rome — and she found that she had lost nothing. She had been, all along, a merchant seeking good pearls. When she found the one of great price, she went and sold the rest.
This is what Augustine meant by making the “desolate widow” the figure of every soul. Every one of us is in the field, surrounded by created goods, and every one of us is moving, whether we know it or not, toward the shore where the net will be drawn. The widow indeed is simply the soul that has understood this before the end and has begun already to live from it — hoping in God, persevering in prayer, and holding the things of earth with an open hand.
And the householder who brings forth “new things and old” belongs to this feast as well. St. Bridget is remembered in the Collect as one to whom God revealed secreta cælestia — heavenly secrets. The Church has always been careful about such things, and her care is part of her wisdom. Private revelations, however venerable, add nothing to the deposit of faith, which was closed with the Apostles; St. Thomas teaches that prophecy continues in the Church not to deliver new doctrine but to direct human action (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 174). Benedict XIV, writing on the canonization of saints, explained that when the Church approves a private revelation she declares only that it contains nothing contrary to faith or morals and may prudently be believed with human faith. Bridget’s revelations are thus “new things” brought forth from an old treasury. Their entire substance is the Passion of Christ, the sorrows of His Mother, the reform of the clergy, the conversion of sinners — the old Gospel, pressed upon a corrupt age with a new urgency. A scribe instructed in the kingdom does not invent a new treasure. She opens the old one and shows what has been lying there all along.
The martyrs commemorated at Lauds make the same point in another key. Sergius and Bacchus were officers with careers, rank, and the confidence of the emperor; they were stripped of their insignia and paraded in women’s clothing to mock them before they were put to death. They, too, found the pearl and sold all they had. Whether the price is paid in blood in a single hour or in the slow surrender of a widowed lifetime, the transaction is the same, and so is the joy.
V. A word for practice
Few of us are called to found an order or to admonish popes. But the Epistle and Gospel of this feast press on every state of life.
First, examine where you are “living in pleasures.” St. Paul’s phrase is not limited to the sins of the flesh. It means any comfort in which the soul has settled down and ceased to hope in God because it no longer feels the need to. Ask today, concretely: what is the thing I would be most unwilling to lose? That is the place where I am least a pilgrim.
Second, do the duty of your state first. Bridget’s sanctity did not begin when she was widowed. It began when she ruled a household justly, raised her children in the faith, and received the poor at her door. “If any man have not care of his own, and especially of those of his house, he hath denied the faith” (1 Tim. 5:8). Before any heroic resolution, fulfil the ordinary obligation you have been neglecting.
Third, perform one work from the Apostle’s list. Receive someone into your home, serve someone who cannot repay you, visit someone who is suffering. These are the credentials of the widow indeed, and they are within reach of everyone.
Fourth, meditate on the Passion. The whole of St. Bridget’s interior life was centred on the sufferings of Our Lord. Take fifteen minutes today before a crucifix and consider one wound, one word from the Cross, or one sorrow of Our Lady at its foot. This is the field in which the treasure lies hidden.
Fifth, pray for the Holy Father. Bridget spent her last years begging the Vicar of Christ to return to his proper see and to reform the Church. Her love for the Papacy was not flattery but fidelity — the fidelity that tells the truth because it wants the good. Offer a decade today for the Pope and for the purification of the Church.
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, attending particularly to the Crucifixion and to Our Lady standing beneath the Cross — the Mother of Sorrows who, in the hour of her Son’s death, became in a certain sense the first widow of the New Covenant.
VI. The Collects
The Collect of the feast:
Domine, Deus noster, qui beatæ Birgittæ per Filium tuum unigenitum secreta cælestia revelasti: ipsius pia intercessione da nobis famulis tuis; in revelatione sempiternæ gloriæ tuæ gaudere lætantes.
“O Lord our God, who through Thine only-begotten Son didst reveal heavenly secrets to blessed Bridget: grant us Thy servants, through her loving intercession, to rejoice and be glad in the revelation of Thine everlasting glory.”
The prayer turns her privilege into our hope. What was shown to her in part, under the veil of vision, is asked for us in full, at the end — the revelatio of glory, when the treasure is no longer hidden in the field.
And the Collect of the commemorated martyrs:
Sanctorum Martyrum tuorum nos, Domine, Sergii, Bacchi, Marcelli et Apuleji beata merita prosequantur: et tuo semper faciant amore ferventes.
“May the blessed merits of Thy holy martyrs Sergius, Bacchus, Marcellus and Apuleius accompany us, O Lord, and make us ever fervent in Thy love.”
VII. Aspiration
Dominus pars hereditatis meæ et calicis mei. “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup.” (Ps. 15:5)
Say it slowly when you are tempted to cling to something; it is the merchant’s sentence when he has found the pearl.
VIII. For further study
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto several of our paths. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the holy widows of the traditional calendar — Monica, Frances of Rome, Elizabeth of Hungary, Jane Frances de Chantal — and with Bridget’s daughter, St. Catherine of Sweden, as well as with St. Catherine of Siena, who completed the work Bridget began in calling the Pope home from Avignon. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the Church’s teaching on private revelation: what it can and cannot add to the faith, how it is judged, and why St. Thomas places prophecy in the service of action rather than doctrine. The Church History path takes up the Avignon papacy and the Great Western Schism that followed it, the crisis in which Bridget’s voice was raised. And for those following the East–West thread, the cult of Sergius and Bacchus, still flourishing in the Byzantine Church, is a living reminder of the martyrs East and West venerated together before the Schism.
IX. A note on sources
Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims version, with the Latin of the Vulgate. The teaching of the Fathers is given in faithful paraphrase with the place of each reference: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Timothy and Homilies on St. Matthew (Hom. 47); St. Augustine, Epistle 130 to Proba and De bono viduitatis; St. Ambrose, De viduis; St. Jerome, Commentary on St. Matthew; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia (Hom. 11). Matters drawn from devotional tradition rather than the documentary record are presented as such.
Sancta Birgitta, ora pro nobis. Sancti Sergi, Bacche, Marcelle et Apuleji, orate pro nobis.