On the morning of the tenth of November 1608, in the Theatine church of St. Paul in Naples, an old priest came out in his vestments to say Mass. He was eighty-seven years old. He made the sign of the Cross at the foot of the altar and began the psalm with which every priest of the Roman rite begins the Holy Sacrifice: Introibo ad altare Dei, “I will go in to the altar of God.” He said the words once, and again, and a third time, and could go no further. A stroke had taken him. His brethren carried him to his room, where he received the last sacraments and died that same day. His name was Andrew Avellino, and the Church keeps his feast on the day he went in to the altar of God by another door than the one he had expected.
The Mass of the day is the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop, the Mass Os justi. Its Introit is from Psalm 36: Os justi meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua eius loquetur iudicium: lex Dei eius in corde ipsius. “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment. The law of his God is in his heart” (Ps. 36:30-31). Those words, the mouth of the just, will turn out to be the hinge of St. Andrew’s whole life. The Alleluia gives the confessor’s beatitude from St. James: Beatus vir, qui suffert tentationem, “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation” (Jas. 1:12). And the Communion takes up the very Gospel of the day: Beatus servus, quem, cum venerit dominus, invenerit vigilantem, “Blessed is that servant, whom when his lord shall come he shall find watching.”
It is also Tuesday in the twenty-fourth week after Pentecost, in the days when the Sundays left over from the Epiphany season are being kept before the last Sunday of the year. The Church is reading the end of all things. Advent is less than three weeks away. The Gospel of servants waiting with burning lamps for their master’s return is read on many confessors’ feasts throughout the year, but in November it sounds with its full weight.
At Lauds the Church also remembers three martyrs whose relics have long been venerated together in Rome: St. Tryphon and St. Respicius, who suffered at Nicaea in the persecution of Decius, and St. Nympha, a virgin of Palermo. They will close this reflection.
I. Beatus vir, qui inventus est sine macula: the Epistle
“Blessed is the 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.” (Ecclus. 31:8-11)
A rich man, and a blessed one. In its own place in Ecclesiasticus, the lesson begins Beatus dives, “Blessed is the rich man that is found without blemish.” The Missal, setting the passage on the lips of the Church for every confessor, softens the word to Beatus vir, “Blessed is the man.” But the original sense stays underneath. The wise man is speaking of someone who had money within reach and was not owned by it. He asks with real astonishment, “Who is he, and we will praise him?” because such a man is rare. “For he hath done wonderful things in his life,” fecit enim mirabilia in vita sua. To hold wealth and keep a clean heart is, in the wise man’s eyes, a kind of miracle.
The Fathers did not read this as a condemnation of riches as such. Clement of Alexandria wrote an entire treatise on the question Who is the rich man that shall be saved? (Quis dives salvetur 11-14). His answer, in substance, is that Our Lord does not ask us to fling our goods away as though they were evil, but to banish from the soul the passion for them. Possessions are instruments; they serve the man who knows how to use them and enslave the man who does not. St. Augustine says the same in his preaching on St. Paul’s charge to the rich (Sermo 61, on 1 Tim. 6:17). He tells the wealthy of Hippo, in substance, that the danger is not in having but in trusting, sperare in incerto divitiarum: in putting one’s hope in what cannot hold it. Ecclesiasticus says exactly this: the blessed man has not “put his trust in money nor in treasures.”
He that could have transgressed. The heart of the lesson is the tenth verse: Qui potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus; facere mala, et non fecit. “He that could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed: and could do evil things, and hath not done them.” This is the virtue of a man who was free. He had the opportunity, the means, and perhaps the excuse. Nobody would have known. And he did not. St. Gregory the Great returns again and again in the Moralia to the same teaching: God permits His servants to stand where sin is easy precisely so that their fidelity may be proved and crowned, and the one who has never been tried has not yet shown what is in him. “Who hath been tried thereby, and made perfect, he shall have glory everlasting.”
The mouth that lies. Andrew Avellino was born Lancelotto Avellino in 1521 at Castronuovo, in the Basilicata, in the kingdom of Naples. He was ordained a priest and studied law, and became an advocate in the ecclesiastical courts of Naples. He was clever, and the work paid well. It was the kind of career in which a man with a good mind could do well for himself, and he did.
Then one day, pleading a case, he told a lie. The traditional accounts call it a small one, the sort of shading of the truth that lawyers then and now are tempted to think part of the profession. That evening, reading the Scriptures, he came upon a verse of the Book of Wisdom: Os autem quod mentitur occidit animam, “The mouth that belieth killeth the soul” (Wis. 1:11). The words went into him like a blade. He saw that a priest who would lie for a fee had already begun to bury his soul in the earth. He gave up the practice of law and never returned to it.
Here is the lesson of the Epistle in a living man. He could have transgressed, and for a moment he did. But the grace of God caught him at the edge, and he turned back. He walked away from gold rather than go after it. And the Introit of his Mass, chosen centuries before he was born, sings the reversal: no longer the mouth that lies and kills the soul, but os justi, the mouth of the just that meditates wisdom.
Tried, and made perfect. His trial was not over. The Archbishop of Naples soon asked him to reform a convent of nuns, Sant’Arcangelo a Baiano, which had fallen into grave disorder. Andrew undertook the work with firmness. He stopped the visits of the men who were frequenting the house, and those men did not forgive him. He was attacked in the street and wounded in the face. He bore it without bitterness, and the reform held. The Epistle’s word probatus, tried, was written over his life in his own blood.
II. Sint lumbi vestri præcincti: the Gospel
“At that time, Jesus said to his disciples: Let your loins be girt, and lamps burning in your hands. And you yourselves like to men who wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he cometh, shall find watching. Amen I say to you, that he will gird himself, and make them sit down to meat, and passing will minister unto them. And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants. But this know ye, that if the householder did know at what hour the thief would come, he would surely watch, and would not suffer his house to be broken open. Be you then also ready: for at what hour you think not, the Son of man will come.” (Luke 12:35-40)
St. Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel in a homily the Church reads at Matins in the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop (Homiliæ in Evangelia 13). Nearly every Father who comments on the passage after him follows his lines. We shall follow them too.
Girt loins and burning lamps. Gregory begins with the two commands. To gird the loins, he says, is to restrain the desires of the flesh by continence; the loins in Scripture stand for the appetite, and the belt for the discipline that binds it. To hold burning lamps is to show good works to our neighbour, so that they give light; and he cites the Lord’s word in the Sermon on the Mount, “So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). Then he draws the conclusion that matters. Neither is enough alone. Chastity without good works is a girded man sitting in darkness. Good works without chastity are a lamp held by a man who cannot run. The servant must have both: his loins girt and his lamp lit.
This is the twofold life of St. Andrew after his conversion. In 1556 he entered the Clerics Regular founded by St. Cajetan, the Theatines, and took the name Andrew, out of love for the Apostle of the Cross. The Theatines were bound by a strict poverty: they owned no revenues and were forbidden even to beg, living on what Providence sent unasked. That was the girding. And his lamp burned for half a century in Naples and beyond: preaching, hearing confessions for long hours, directing souls by letter, founding houses of his order in Milan and Piacenza at the request of his friend St. Charles Borromeo, and caring for the sick and dying of the city.
When he shall return from the wedding. Gregory reads the wedding as the union of Christ with His Church, celebrated when the Word took flesh and completed when He ascended into heaven with our nature. St. Ambrose, in his Exposition of the Gospel according to Luke, adds that the Lord goes to the wedding and returns from it, so that the servants who wait for Him are those who have already been joined to Him and now long for Him to come back (Expositio in Lucam VII, on 12:35-36). The waiting of the Christian is not the anxious waiting of a stranger. It is the waiting of a household for its own master.
When he cometh and knocketh. Here Gregory says something every Christian should know by heart. The Lord comes, he says, at the judgment. But He knocks before He comes: He knocks when, by sickness or the weakness of age, He tells us that death is near. We open to Him at once if we receive Him with love. The man who dreads the knock is the man who has not prepared for the visitor. The man who loves the Lord is glad to hear Him at the door, and opens immediately, confestim, without needing time to set the house in order. It is already in order.
In the second watch, or in the third. The Roman night was divided into watches. Gregory reads them as the ages of a man’s life. The first watch is childhood; the second is youth and strength; the third is old age. The Lord may come in any of them. Gregory’s warning is plain: whoever has not watched in the first watch should not neglect the second; and whoever has let the second pass should not throw away the third. No one may say the night is over and the master is not coming.
St. Andrew was called in the third watch. He lived to be eighty-seven. He had watched through the second watch, and he did not let old age make him lax. That is the meaning of the vow for which the Church specially honours him, which is named in his Collect. As a Theatine he bound himself by a further private vow, which few saints have dared: to strive every day to make progress in virtue, and to resist his own will at every turn. He did not permit himself to coast. The third watch found him as he had been in the second, with his loins girt and his lamp burning.
He will gird himself, and minister unto them. Then comes the most astonishing promise in the Gospel. The master, finding his servants awake, “will gird himself, and make them sit down to meat, and passing will minister unto them.” The Lord takes the servant’s place. St. Gregory says this is the feast of the heavenly country, where the Lord will fill us with the sight of His glory; to “pass” and serve is to come before His elect and give them Himself. He who is served by angels promises to serve men. It is not a reversal the servants earn by watching. It is the overflowing goodness of a master who was always more generous than they deserved, and who once before girded Himself with a towel and knelt to wash their feet (John 13:4-5).
At what hour you think not. Finally the thief. If the householder had known the hour, he would have watched. Gregory says the thief stands for death, which comes unannounced to break into the house of the body and carry off the soul. Because we do not know the hour, he says, we must be ready at every hour. “Be you then also ready.”
St. Andrew died exactly as this verse describes: at an hour he did not think, on an ordinary morning, as he began an ordinary Mass. And for that reason the faithful of southern Italy took him as their patron against sudden death, and invoke him still in apoplexy and stroke. But there is a distinction here that the Church has always made, and that his life illustrates perfectly. In the Litany of the Saints we pray, A subitanea et improvisa morte, libera nos, Domine: “From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us, O Lord.” The two words are not the same. A death can be sudden without being unprovided. What the Church fears for us is not the speed of death but coming to it unready, without the sacraments, with the lamp gone out. St. Andrew’s death was sudden. It was not unprovided. He had been providing for it every day for fifty years, by his vow, and the Lord who knocked found him already at the altar, vested, with the words Introibo ad altare Dei on his lips. Even so, the Lord gave him the last sacraments before He took him. He opened immediately.
III. The Mass as a whole: the ascent of the heart
St. Thomas builds the Summa Theologiæ on the movement of all things from God and back to God (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue). Today’s two readings show the two halves of that movement in a single human life.
The Epistle is about what comes from God and how it can be misused. Gold, money, treasure, talent, a legal mind, a good position: these are gifts that go out from the Creator into the world. The man who “goes after gold” makes them his end. He follows the gifts away from the Giver, outward and downward. The blessed man is the one who, holding the same gifts, does not follow them away. “He that could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed.” His goods are not lost; they “are established in the Lord,” stabilita sunt bona illius in Domino, because he has turned them back toward their source in alms and justice.
The Gospel is about the return. The servants are already turned toward their master; their whole posture is expectation. And the return, when it comes, is not merely theirs to Him but His to them. He comes back from the wedding, and He seats them at His table. The reditus of the creature to God is crowned by God’s coming down to meet it and give Himself.
The Collect of St. Andrew gathers both halves into a single phrase from the Psalms. It speaks of the admirabiles ascensiones, the wonderful ascents, that God arranged in the saint’s heart. The words come from Psalm 83, the psalm of the pilgrim going up to the house of God: Beatus vir, cuius est auxilium abs te: ascensiones in corde suo disposuit, “Blessed is the man whose help is from thee: in his heart he hath disposed to ascend by steps” (Ps. 83:6). The return to God is not a single leap. It is a stair, climbed a step a day. St. Andrew’s vow to make progress every day was simply his resolution to keep climbing.
And the stair ends at the altar. Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui lætificat iuventutem meam: “I will go in to the altar of God, to God who giveth joy to my youth” (Ps. 42:4). The psalm of the prayers at the foot of the altar is itself a psalm of ascent: “Send forth thy light and thy truth: they have conducted me, and brought me unto thy holy hill, and into thy tabernacles” (Ps. 42:3). Every Mass is a going-up to the altar of God, and every Mass, through the Sacrifice of Christ, brings God down to meet us. St. Andrew had made that ascent tens of thousands of times. On the last morning he began it again, and the Lord finished it for him. The old man of eighty-seven went in to the God who gives joy to youth.
IV. The Collects
Deus, qui in corde beati Andreæ Confessoris tui, per arduum quotidie in virtutibus proficiendi votum, admirabiles ascensiones disposuisti: concede nobis, ipsius meritis et intercessione, ita eiusdem gratiæ participes fieri; ut, perfectiora semper exsequentes, ad gloriæ tuæ fastigium feliciter perducamur.
“O God, who by the arduous vow of daily advancing in virtue didst dispose wonderful ascents in the heart of blessed Andrew, Thy Confessor: grant us, through his merits and intercession, so to become sharers in the same grace, that ever performing what is more perfect, we may be happily brought to the summit of Thy glory.”
The Collect is unusual. Most confessors’ Collects name a virtue; this one names a vow. It calls the vow arduum, steep and hard, and it is honest to do so. A vow of daily progress is not a vow one keeps once and is finished with. It must be kept again every morning. The prayer does not ask that we take the same vow; that would be rash for most of us without a director’s counsel. It asks that we share eiusdem gratiæ, the same grace: the grace to keep climbing, perfectiora semper exsequentes, always doing what is a little more perfect, until we reach the fastigium, the summit, the very top of the stair.
Fac nos, quæsumus, Domine, sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Tryphonis, Respicii et Nymphæ semper festa sectari: quorum suffragiis protectionis tuæ dona sentiamus.
“Grant us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, ever to keep the feasts of Thy holy Martyrs Tryphon, Respicius, and Nympha: that by their prayers we may feel the gifts of Thy protection.”
V. Saints Tryphon, Respicius, and Nympha: the watchers in the first watch
The commemoration at Lauds joins three saints whose stories reached Rome by different roads.
St. Tryphon is one of the great martyrs of the undivided Church. According to his ancient acts, he was a young man of Phrygia, a keeper of geese, who was arrested in the persecution of Decius around the year 250 and taken to Nicaea, where he was tortured and beheaded. The Byzantine Church still honours him with great devotion on the first of February, and in many Eastern lands he is the patron of vineyards and gardens. His cult is one of the threads that bind East and West from before the Schism: the same martyr, invoked by Greeks and Latins alike for more than a thousand years. St. Respicius is joined to him in the Roman tradition as a companion in his sufferings at Nicaea.
St. Nympha belongs to a different story. The Sicilian tradition remembers her as a virgin of Palermo who fled to Italy in a time of persecution and invasion. Her history is uncertain, and what is told of her is pious tradition rather than documented record. The three became one feast because their relics were venerated together in Rome, in the old church of St. Tryphon, whose memory the Romans later transferred to the nearby church of St. Augustine.
The martyrs set a last light beside the Gospel. St. Gregory said the Lord may come in the first watch, in youth. St. Tryphon was called in the first watch. He was young; he had not had fifty years of daily progress like St. Andrew. But when the knock came, in the form of a magistrate’s summons, he opened immediately. The lamp can be filled in a single night, if a soul gives everything at once. Whether God asks of us the long climb of an old confessor or the swift gift of a young martyr, the servant He blesses is the one He finds awake.
VI. A word for practice
Examine. Is there a small, habitual dishonesty in my work, the kind everyone in my field excuses, that I have stopped noticing? Have I “gone after gold,” measuring my decisions chiefly by what they will earn? Where could I transgress unseen this week, and what will I do there? Are my loins girt: do I keep my appetites under discipline, or do they keep me? Is my lamp burning: does anyone see good works in me that lead them to glorify God? If the Lord knocked tonight, would I open at once, or would I need time to set my house in order?
Do. Choose one step of “ascent” for this week, one small thing more perfect than what you usually do, and do it every day: rising at a fixed hour for prayer, a decade of the Rosary at a fixed time, one act of honesty where a shading of the truth would have been easier. If you are a lawyer, a salesman, a manager, or anyone whose work rewards a clever tongue, read Wisdom 1:11 today and ask St. Andrew to make your mouth os justi. Make a good confession soon; the Church’s remedy against an unprovided death is a soul kept in the state of grace. Pray for those who will die suddenly today, that their deaths may not be unprovided.
Pray. The Collect of the day. Then, at the start of the next Mass you attend, pray the Introibo and the psalm Iudica me with attention, as though it might be the last time you go up to the altar of God.
Aspiration. A subitanea et improvisa morte, libera nos, Domine. “From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us, O Lord.”
Devote. Ask St. Andrew Avellino for the grace of a happy death, and commend to him those you love who are elderly, ill, or at risk of stroke. In this month of the holy souls, pray for those who died without warning, that God may have found them watching. Ask St. Tryphon, beloved of East and West, for the grace to stand firm in the faith while you are young, or to begin again now, whatever your watch of the night.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path tells the full life of St. Andrew Avellino, from the courts of Naples to the altar of St. Paul’s, and his place among the Theatines with St. Cajetan and the circle of St. Charles Borromeo. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the preparation for death, the ars moriendi, and the meaning of the Litany’s prayer against an unprovided death. The Sacred Liturgy path examines the prayers at the foot of the altar and Psalm 42 as the psalm of ascent. The Church History path treats the Catholic Reformation in the Kingdom of Naples and the reform of religious life after Trent. The East-West Comparative path follows the cult of St. Tryphon from Nicaea and Constantinople to Rome.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia 13 and Moralia in Iob; St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VII; St. Augustine, Sermo 61; Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salvetur 11-14. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue. The Litany of the Saints. Hagiographical details of St. Andrew’s life follow the traditional accounts and the Roman Breviary lessons for 10 November; the acts of St. Tryphon follow the ancient passion, and the tradition of St. Nympha is pious tradition.
Beatus servus, quem, cum venerit dominus, invenerit vigilantem.