A reflection for the Feast of St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr — S. Iosaphat Episcopi et Martyris, III classis (14 November), Sabbato infra Hebdomadam V quæ superfuit post Epiphaniam
On the morning of the twelfth of November, 1623, a mob broke into the archbishop’s residence at Vitebsk, on the river Dvina. They had been stirred up for days. The servants of the house had been beaten, and the archbishop’s deacon had been seized. The archbishop came out to them himself. He asked them, in effect, why they were striking his household, and told them that if they had anything against him, here he was. They struck him on the head with a halberd and an axe, and when he had fallen they shot him. Then they dragged his body through the streets, stripped it, and threw it into the river, weighted down with stones.
He was Josaphat Kuntsevych, Archbishop of Polotsk, a monk of the Order of St. Basil, a bishop of the Byzantine rite in communion with the Apostolic See. He was about forty-three years old. He had been born Ivan, around 1580, in the town of Volodymyr in Volhynia, a son of the Ruthenian people who are the ancestors of the Ukrainians and Belarusians of today. He grew up in the years when the bishops of the Kievan Church, at the Union of Brest in 1595-1596, renewed their communion with Rome while keeping their own liturgy, their own discipline, and their own Eastern heritage whole. The union divided the Ruthenian people bitterly. Josaphat gave his life to it, and in the end he gave his life for it.
The Church keeps his feast today. Pius IX raised him to the altars in 1867, the first saint of the Eastern Churches canonized by the formal process of the Roman Curia, and Leo XIII extended his feast to the universal Church in 1882. His body, after long wanderings, rests today in the Basilica of St. Peter, near the Chair of the Apostle for whose communion he died.
The Mass is proper, Gaudeamus omnes, and the vestments are red. The Introit sings of the joy of the Angels at the passion of the martyr. The Epistle is the great passage of the Letter to the Hebrews on the high priest “taken from among men,” and the Gospel is the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep and promises that there shall be “one fold and one shepherd.” The Offertory takes Our Lord’s words from the Last Supper, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13), and the Communion returns to the shepherd: “I am the good shepherd, and I know mine, and mine know me” (John 10:14). The whole Mass is drawn tight around a single image, the shepherd who dies, and the unity his death gathers.
It is Saturday, the day the Church gives to Our Lady, though today the feast of the martyr takes her place at the altar. It is also the last day of the week that began with the parable of the wheat and the cockle, where the servants of the householder ask whether they should go and gather up the cockle, and he answers, “No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it” (Matt. 13:29). We will need that parable before the day is out.
I. Ex hominibus assumptus: the Epistle
“For every high priest taken from among men, is ordained for men in the things that appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sins: who can have compassion on them that are ignorant and that err: because he himself also is compassed with infirmity. And therefore he ought, as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for sins. Neither doth any man take the honour to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was. So Christ also did not glorify himself, that he might be made a high priest: but he that said unto him: Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. As he saith also in another place: Thou art a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech.” (Heb. 5:1-6)
Taken from among men, ordained for men. The Apostle gives in one sentence the whole theology of the priesthood, and he gives it in prepositions. The priest is taken from men, ex hominibus assumptus; he is appointed for men, pro hominibus constituitur; and he stands for them in the things that appertain to God, in iis quæ sunt ad Deum. He comes out of the people, he acts on behalf of the people, and he faces God. St. Thomas, commenting on this verse, draws out the reason the priest must be a man: he is a mediator, and a mediator must share the nature of those for whom he mediates. That is why the angels, for all their dignity, are not our priests (Super Epistolam ad Hebræos, cap. 5, lect. 1). The priest is one of us, lifted up from among us, and turned toward the altar on our behalf.
That he may offer up gifts and sacrifices. The priest exists to offer. The Letter to the Hebrews never lets us forget that the priesthood is ordered to sacrifice, and that the first purpose of the sacrifice is sins. St. John Chrysostom, who wrote the most searching book the Fathers have left us on the priesthood, sets the priest before the altar at the moment of the Sacrifice and asks his reader to consider what he sees: the Lord sacrificed and lying there, the priest standing over the Victim and praying, and all the people reddened with that precious Blood. Can you think, he asks, that you are still among men, still standing upon earth? (De sacerdotio III.4). The man taken from among men is, at the altar, standing in heaven.
Who can have compassion on them that are ignorant and that err. The Greek word is metriopathein, which means something like “to feel in due measure,” to bear with others gently, neither crushing them nor excusing them. The Vulgate gives condolere, to suffer with. The reason the Apostle gives is very simple: the priest can bear with the weak because he is weak himself. “He himself also is compassed with infirmity.” St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this verse, says that the priest was taken from among men precisely so that he would not be harsh, so that he would remember, every time he must deal with a sinner, that he has his own sins to offer for (Homiliæ in epistulam ad Hebræos 8). Theodoret of Cyrus reads it the same way: the law required the high priest to offer first for himself, so that he would learn from his own weakness to be gentle with the people (Interpretatio in epistulam ad Hebræos, on 5:2-3).
Here we must speak plainly about St. Josaphat, because the Church does not ask us to make her saints simpler than they were. Josaphat was a man of tremendous zeal, and there were those in his own lifetime, Catholics among them, who thought his zeal outran this verse. In 1622 the chancellor of Lithuania, Lew Sapieha, himself a Catholic and a supporter of the union, wrote to the archbishop a sharp letter rebuking him for severity: for closing the churches of those who refused the union, for pressing the civil power into the service of the faith, and for driving the dissenters to the brink of revolt. Josaphat’s defenders have answered that he was carrying out what he believed the law and his office required, that the bitterness against him was stirred up by others, and that he himself never raised his hand against anyone. Both things belong to the record. The Church canonized Josaphat not because every judgment he made was wise, but because he loved the unity of Christ’s flock with his whole life and finally with his death, and because, when the hour came, he went out to the mob unarmed and offered them nothing but himself.
And this is what the Epistle teaches us to see. The priest is “compassed with infirmity,” and his infirmity is not only the weakness that makes him gentle; it is also the weakness that sometimes makes him err. Josaphat offered “as for the people, so also for himself.” The man who had perhaps been hard on others was, at the end, the one struck down, and the tradition remembers that he went to his death praying for those who killed him. The Church’s own memory of the aftermath bears it out: many of those condemned for his murder were reconciled to the Church before their execution, and Meletius Smotrytsky, the rival archbishop whose consecration had divided Josaphat’s own see, himself entered the union a few years later. The compassion the Epistle asks of the priest was learned by Josaphat on the Dvina, and it bore fruit after he was gone.
Neither doth any man take the honour to himself. The priesthood is not seized; it is received. “He that is called by God, as Aaron was.” St. Gregory of Nazianzen, newly ordained against his will, fled from Nazianzus to the solitude of Pontus, and when he came back he wrote his great apology for his flight. He had fled, he explained, because he was afraid of the priesthood: afraid to take up the office of healing souls when his own soul was not yet healed, afraid of the account he would have to give (Oratio 2, Apologetica). His fear was not the opposite of a vocation; it was the sign of one. The man who grasps the office has not understood it.
Josaphat did not grasp it. He had been a merchant’s apprentice in Vilnius, and he entered the poor and dwindling monastery of the Holy Trinity there in 1604 to pray, not to rule. With Joseph Velamin Rutsky, later Metropolitan of Kiev, he gave his strength to restoring the Basilian monastic life among the Ruthenians, and he was made an archbishop because the Church needed him, not because he sought it. He lived in his palace as he had lived in his cell: in fasting, in long vigils, in the Byzantine Office sung in its fullness, with a hair shirt under his vestments.
Thou art a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech. The Apostle sets two psalms side by side. “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee” (Ps. 2:7) is the Father’s word about the Son’s eternal origin; “Thou art a priest for ever” (Ps. 109:4) is His word about the Son’s office. Christ did not make Himself a priest. He is priest because He is Son, sent by the Father and anointed by the Father in the Incarnation. And His priesthood is “according to the order of Melchisedech,” the mysterious king of Salem who came out to Abraham bearing bread and wine (Gen. 14:18). St. Cyprian saw in that offering the figure of the Lord’s own Sacrifice: Christ offered to the Father the very same thing Melchisedech had offered, bread and wine, which is to say His Body and His Blood (Epistula 63.4). St. Augustine says that in Melchisedech there first appeared the sacrifice which Christians now offer to God throughout the whole world (De civitate Dei XVI.22). And St. Ambrose, teaching the newly baptized, asks them to consider which is older, the sacraments of the Jews or those of the Christians, and answers that Melchisedech came before Moses and even before the circumcision of Abraham (De sacramentis IV.10-12).
The priesthood of Melchisedech is older than the division of Israel from the nations. It belongs to no tribe and to no single people. That is part of its meaning. The priesthood Christ holds “for ever” is the priesthood of the whole human race, and the Sacrifice He offers is offered, as the Prophet said, “in every place” (Mal. 1:11). Josaphat stood at that one altar in the Byzantine rite, and the Pope stood at it in the Roman. The Sacrifice was the same. That was the whole meaning of the union for which he died.
II. Ego sum pastor bonus: the Gospel
“At that time, Jesus said to the Pharisees: I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep. But the hireling, and he that is not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and flieth: and the wolf catcheth, and scattereth the sheep: and the hireling flieth, because he is a hireling: and he hath no care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; and I know mine, and mine know me. As the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father: and I lay down my life for my sheep. And other sheep I have, that are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.” (John 10:11-16)
The good shepherd giveth his life. St. Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel to the people of Rome in the basilica of St. Peter, and his homily became the reading of the Church’s night Office on Good Shepherd Sunday. He begins with the measure of a pastor’s love. The Lord, he says, did what He commanded: He gave His life for His sheep, and turned His Body and Blood into our Sacrament, so that the sheep He had redeemed might be fed with His own flesh. He showed us the way of contempt for death, and set before us the form we must follow. But Gregory is a realist. If a man will not give his goods to his sheep, how will he give his life for them? The shepherd first learns to give his substance, and only so learns to give himself (Homiliæ in Evangelia 14.1).
Josaphat learned it in that order. The tradition remembers his poverty as archbishop: that he pawned his own omophorion to feed the poor, and that his residence was full of the destitute. When the hour came to give the rest, he was ready.
The hireling flieth. Who is the hireling? Gregory answers that he is the man who holds the place of the shepherd but does not seek the profit of souls; he loves the earthly advantages of his office, delights in the honour of his rank, and feeds on temporal gain. And how does he flee? Not always with his feet. The hireling flees, says Gregory, when he sees injustice and is silent; he flees when he hides himself in silence (Homiliæ in Evangelia 14.2-3). St. Augustine says the same thing, in his own sharp way, to the clergy of Hippo: you fled because you were silent, and you were silent because you were afraid. Fear is the flight of the soul (In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus 46.8).
This is the hireling of every age, and he is most dangerous precisely when he stays at his post. The wolf need not drive him away. It is enough that he should say nothing. Josaphat’s whole life was a refusal of that silence. He preached constantly, wrote catechisms in the language of his people, visited the remotest parishes of a vast and poor diocese, and told his flock the truth about the communion of the Church whether they welcomed it or not. Augustine, in the same sermon, makes a merciful concession: even hirelings may be useful, for they too can preach the truth, and the sheep may hear the voice of Christ from them though they seek their own (Tractatus 46.5-6). But the Church needs shepherds, and a shepherd is known by what he does when the wolf comes.
I know mine, and mine know me. Our Lord’s knowledge of His sheep is not information. It is love, and it is modelled on the knowledge that passes between the Father and the Son: “As the Father knoweth Me, and I know the Father.” Gregory dwells on this. The sheep know the Shepherd, he says, not by faith alone but by love; whoever says he knows God and does not keep His commandments is a liar (Homiliæ 14.4, cf. 1 John 2:4). St. John Chrysostom notes that the Lord gives this mutual knowledge as the mark that distinguishes the shepherd from the hireling: the hireling does not know the sheep, because he does not care for them (Homiliæ in Iohannem 60). The shepherd knows them by name because he has carried them.
And other sheep I have, that are not of this fold. Here the Gospel opens out. Our Lord is speaking to the Pharisees, and the fold He means is Israel. The other sheep are the Gentiles, who will hear His voice through the Apostles. St. Augustine says that the Lord was speaking of us, the nations, who were not of the fold of Israel and yet would be brought in; and he remarks that the Lord says He must bring them, oportet, for this is the will of the Father and the purpose of the Cross (Tractatus 47.4). St. Cyril of Alexandria saw in the verse the gathering of Jew and Gentile into one body, under the one Christ, so that the wall of partition is broken down and those who were far off are brought near (Commentarius in Iohannem, on 10:16; cf. Eph. 2:14).
One fold and one shepherd. The Vulgate gives unum ovile, “one fold,” and the Church has sung it so for fifteen centuries. The Greek has mia poimnē, “one flock,” which is the better rendering and says something important: the unity of the flock is not first of all the unity of a sheepfold, a fence, a structure built by men. It is the unity of sheep who hear one voice and follow one Shepherd. And yet the two meanings are not opposed. The Shepherd who gathers the flock gave it, before He ascended, a visible shepherd in His own place: “Feed My lambs, feed My sheep” (John 21:15-17). The flock that hears the voice of Christ will gather, in the end, around the one whom Christ set to keep it.
The Fathers knew that the unity of the Church is visible, or it is not unity at all. St. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to the beasts at Rome, told the Smyrnæans that where the bishop is, there the people must be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church (Ad Smyrnæos 8.2). St. Cyprian taught that the Church is one as the sun has many rays but one light, and the tree many branches but one root, and that no one can have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his mother (De catholicæ Ecclesiæ unitate 5-6). And the greatest of the Eastern Fathers whose rule Josaphat followed, St. Basil the Great, grieved over the divisions of the Christian East in his own day as over a naval battle in a storm, where ships of the same fleet ram one another in the darkness and the confusion of the waves (De Spiritu Sancto 30.76). Basil wrote again and again to the Bishop of Rome, begging him to come to the help of the divided Churches of the East.
This is the Gospel Josaphat lived. He believed with his whole soul that the Ruthenian Church, whose faith had come from Constantinople and whose Baptism went back to Kiev in the year 988, belonged in communion with the See of Peter, as the Church of Constantinople itself had belonged in the days of the undivided councils. He did not believe that union meant ceasing to be Eastern. He kept the Byzantine liturgy with jealous care and resisted every attempt to Latinize it. He believed that the other sheep could be brought into one flock without being made into some other kind of sheep. When he prayed, he prayed, the tradition says, that he might be found worthy to shed his blood for the union and for obedience to the Apostolic See. The prayer was heard.
III. The Mass as a whole: the Shepherd who goes forth and gathers
St. Thomas built the Summa Theologiæ on the great circle of exitus and reditus: all things come forth from God, and all things return to Him through Christ, who as man is our way to God (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue). Today’s Epistle and Gospel trace that circle through the priesthood and the flock.
The going-forth begins in the eternal Father. “Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten thee.” Before anything else, there is the Son’s eternal generation, and from it His mission: the Son is sent, and in being sent He is made priest. “Christ also did not glorify Himself, that He might be made a high priest.” The Shepherd does not appoint Himself. He comes forth from the Father, takes our flesh, is “taken from among men,” and goes out after the sheep. And every true priest after Him comes forth the same way: “called by God, as Aaron was.”
The return is through the Sacrifice. The high priest is ordained “that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sins,” and the Good Shepherd says, “I lay down My life for My sheep.” These are the same act seen from two sides. The priest offers the victim; the Shepherd is the victim. St. Augustine marvels that in Christ the priest and the sacrifice are one, that He is at once the one who offers and the thing that is offered (De civitate Dei X.20). And in the verses that follow today’s Gospel, Our Lord completes the circle: “I lay down My life, that I may take it again” (John 10:17). The life laid down is taken up again in the Resurrection and carried back to the Father in the Ascension. The Shepherd returns, and He does not return alone. “Them also I must bring.”
The gathering of the flock is the return itself. Sin scattered the human race; Babel divided its tongues; schism and heresy have divided the Church. “The wolf catcheth, and scattereth the sheep.” The whole work of the Shepherd is to gather again what was scattered, and to bring it back, one flock, to the Father. That is why the unity of the Church is not an administrative convenience. It is the shape of salvation. The flock divided is the flock not yet fully returned.
St. Josaphat stood in the middle of that circle. He was taken from among his own people, called and anointed, and he went out after the sheep across the marshes and forests of Polotsk. He laboured to bring a scattered flock back into one fold. And at the last he was made like his Master: he laid down his life for his sheep, at the hands of some of the very sheep for whom he laid it down. At every Mass, the Sacrifice of the one eternal Priest according to the order of Melchisedech is offered again, in Rome and in Kiev, in Latin and in Slavonic, in every place, and the scattered children of God are gathered at the one altar. Josaphat’s blood was mingled with that Sacrifice. It is still crying out for the unity it was shed for.
IV. The Collects
Excita, quæsumus, Domine, in Ecclesia tua Spiritum, quo repletus beatus Iosaphat Martyr et Pontifex tuus animam suam pro ovibus posuit: ut, eo intercedente, nos quoque eodem Spiritu moti ac roborati, animam nostram pro fratribus ponere non vereamur.
“Stir up in Thy Church, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the Spirit with which blessed Josaphat, Thy Martyr and Bishop, was filled when he laid down his life for his sheep: that, through his intercession, we too, moved and strengthened by the same Spirit, may not fear to lay down our life for our brethren.”
The Collect takes the very words of the Gospel, animam suam pro ovibus posuit, and turns them into a petition for us. It does not ask that we admire Josaphat, or even that we imitate him by our own effort. It asks that the same Spirit who filled him be stirred up, excita, in the Church. The verb is the one the Church uses in the Advent Collects, when she begs the Lord to stir up His power and come. Martyrdom is not a human achievement. It is the work of the Holy Ghost in a man who has let himself be filled.
And the petition at the end is startling in its directness: that we may not be afraid to lay down our life pro fratribus, for our brethren. Not for the sheep, as a bishop does, but for our brothers. The prayer echoes St. John: “In this we have known the charity of God, because He hath laid down His life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16). Every Christian is asked to be ready for what Josaphat did. Most of us will be asked to lay down our lives slowly, in small sacrifices, over many years. The Spirit who strengthens the martyr is the same.
Clementissime Deus, munera hæc tua benedictione perfunde, et nos in fide confirma, quam sanctus Iosaphat Martyr et Pontifex tuus, effuso sanguine, asseruit.
“Most merciful God, pour forth Thy blessing upon these gifts, and confirm us in the faith which holy Josaphat, Thy Martyr and Bishop, upheld by the shedding of his blood.”
The Secret asks that the faith Josaphat defended be confirmed in us. Asseruit is a strong word: to assert, to lay claim to, to vindicate in law. Josaphat did not merely hold the faith; he claimed it publicly, as a man claims what is his by right, and he paid for the claim with his blood.
The Postcommunion asks that this heavenly table may give us the spirit of fortitude which constantly nourished the life of St. Josaphat, unto victory for the honour of the Church. The Eucharist is the food of martyrs. The bread of the order of Melchisedech is the bread that makes men strong enough to die.
V. A word for practice
Examine. Have I been a hireling in some part of my life, holding a place of responsibility, in my family, my work, my parish, and fleeing by silence when the wolf came? Is there a truth I owe to someone in my care that I have not spoken because I was afraid? And, from the other side of the Epistle: am I compassed with infirmity and yet hard on the infirmities of others? When I am zealous for the truth, is my zeal tempered by the compassion of a man who knows he has his own sins to offer for? Do I want the cockle rooted up so badly that I would trample the wheat?
Do. Pray today for the unity of Christians, in the traditional sense the Church has always given it: that all who bear the name of Christ may be gathered into the one flock under the one Shepherd. Pray especially for the Eastern Catholic Churches, and above all for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the heirs of St. Josaphat, who have suffered so much for their communion with Rome, in the catacombs of the Soviet years and in the war of our own day. Pray for the Orthodox, whose faith, liturgy, and holiness are so close to our own, with the charity Pius XI asked of the whole Church on the three-hundredth anniversary of Josaphat’s martyrdom (Ecclesiam Dei, 1923). If there is a quarrel in your own family or parish, take one concrete step today to heal it.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, with its last words taken to heart: animam nostram pro fratribus ponere non vereamur. Then the prayer of the Shepherd for His flock, the night before He died: “That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, in Me, and I in Thee” (John 17:21).
Aspiration. Ego sum pastor bonus. “I am the good shepherd.”
Devote. Saturday belongs to Our Lady, and today she yields her altar to a martyr who loved her. The Christian East calls her the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and the Byzantine Church Josaphat served sings her praise in the Akathist hymn, standing, as the Ruthenian faithful have sung it for centuries. Say her Rosary today, or the Sub tuum præsidium, the oldest prayer to Our Lady that East and West have always shared, and ask her, the Mother of the one Shepherd, to gather her scattered children into one flock. Ask St. Josaphat to obtain for you a love of the Church’s unity that is fearless and gentle at once.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path tells the full story of St. Josaphat, from the Holy Trinity monastery at Vilnius and the restoration of the Basilian life with Metropolitan Joseph Rutsky to the archbishopric of Polotsk, the rival hierarchy of 1620, the martyrdom at Vitebsk, and the long journey of his relics to St. Peter’s. The Church History path takes up the Union of Brest of 1595-1596 and its background in the Council of Florence, and the history of the Eastern Catholic Churches down to the suppression of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1946. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the priesthood according to the order of Melchisedech in the Letter to the Hebrews, the Fathers, and St. Thomas, and the visible unity of the Church in Cyprian and the First Vatican Council. The East-West thread considers what the union of a Church to the Apostolic See without the surrender of its rite meant for Josaphat, and what Pius XI’s Ecclesiam Dei asked of Catholics toward the separated East.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. John Chrysostom, De sacerdotio III.4, Homiliæ in epistulam ad Hebræos 8, Homiliæ in Iohannem 60; Theodoret of Cyrus, Interpretatio in epistulam ad Hebræos (on 5:2-3); St. Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 2; St. Cyprian, Epistula 63.4, De catholicæ Ecclesiæ unitate 5-6; St. Augustine, De civitate Dei X.20 and XVI.22, In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus 46-47; St. Ambrose, De sacramentis IV.10-12; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia 14; St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarius in Iohannem (on 10:16); St. Ignatius of Antioch, Ad Smyrnæos 8.2; St. Basil the Great, De Spiritu Sancto 30.76. St. Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Hebræos, cap. 5, and Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue. Pius XI, Ecclesiam Dei (12 November 1923). For St. Josaphat: the acts of his beatification (1643) and canonization (1867); the Roman Martyrology; Butler’s Lives of the Saints.
Fiet unum ovile et unus pastor.