A reflection for Saturday within the Nineteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Francisci Borgiæ Confessoris, III classis (10 October)
The Mass of St. Francis Borgia sets before us two men who were raised among princes and walked away from them. The Epistle gives us Moses, brought up in the house of Pharaoh’s daughter; the Gospel gives us Peter, who had only nets to leave but asks the question every renunciant eventually asks: Ecce nos reliquimus omnia, et secuti sumus te: quid ergo erit nobis? — “Behold we have left all things, and have followed thee: what therefore shall we have?” (Matt. 19:27). Between them stands a Duke of Gandía, grandson of a pope and great-grandson of a king, who became a Jesuit novice and died the third General of the Society of Jesus. The Church asks us today to consider what he left, why he left it, and what he received in exchange.
I. Beloved of God and men
The Epistle (Ecclus. 45:1-6) is a portrait of Moses in a few strokes:
“Moses was beloved of God, and men: whose memory is in benediction. He made him like the saints in glory, and magnified him in the fear of his enemies… He glorified him in the sight of kings, and gave him commandments in the sight of his people, and shewed him his glory. He sanctified him in his faith, and meekness, and chose him out of all flesh. For he heard him and his voice, and brought him into a cloud.”
Dilectus Deo et hominibus Moyses. The order of the phrase matters. Moses is first beloved of God, and only then of men; and the love of men that follows is of a strange kind, for it is the love a people bears to the one who led them out of a palace and into a desert.
The Epistle to the Hebrews supplies what Ecclesiasticus leaves implicit: “By faith Moses, when he was grown up, denied himself to be the son of Pharao’s daughter; rather choosing to be afflicted with the people of God, than to have the pleasure of sin for a time, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasure of the Egyptians” (Heb. 11:24-26). St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage (In Epistolam ad Hebraeos, Hom. 26), marvels that Moses chose not merely to be poor but to be afflicted, and that the Apostle calls his choice “the reproach of Christ” — as though the Cross were already casting its shadow backward over the court of Egypt. Moses did not leave the palace for comfort elsewhere. He left it for the people of God and for their sufferings.
Mark too the virtue the Epistle names: Sanctum fecit illum in fide et lenitate ipsius — “He sanctified him in his faith, and meekness.” Scripture elsewhere says that “Moses was a man exceeding meek above all men that dwelt upon earth” (Num. 12:3). The man who confronted Pharaoh, broke the tables of the Law, and ground the golden calf to powder is praised above all for meekness. The Fathers do not find this contradictory. Meekness is not weakness of will; it is the government of anger by charity, so that a man may be terrible against sin and gentle toward the sinner.
Finally, induxit illum in nubem — “He brought him into a cloud.” St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Life of Moses, makes this cloud the summit of the spiritual ascent: the soul that has left Egypt and crossed the sea does not arrive at last in brightness but in a luminous darkness, where it learns that God surpasses everything it can grasp, and where its whole perfection consists in being drawn ever further on. Moses’ glory, in other words, is not that he arrived somewhere but that he never stopped following.
II. Behold, we have left all things
The Gospel (Matt. 19:27-29) follows directly upon the rich young man, who “went away sad: for he had great possessions” (Matt. 19:22). Into the silence left by his departure Peter speaks.
St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, notices how little Peter had to leave — a boat and nets — and yet how confidently he says omnia. And Jerome adds the decisive observation: it is not enough to have left. Crates the Theban philosopher, he recalls, threw his gold into the sea; but he did not follow Christ. Peter adds what the philosopher lacked: et secuti sumus te. Renunciation is not the goal; it is the clearing of the road.
St. Gregory the Great says the same with his characteristic tenderness. Preaching on the calling of Peter and Andrew (Homiliae in Evangelia, Hom. 5), he answers anyone who would belittle what the fishermen gave up: he leaves much who keeps nothing for himself, however little he had; for the kingdom of heaven has no fixed price, and is worth exactly as much as you possess. The duke and the fisherman pay the same: everything.
St. John Chrysostom (In Matthaeum, Hom. 64) notes that the Lord does not rebuke Peter’s question, though it sounds like a merchant’s. He answers it, and answers it lavishly, in two promises.
The first concerns the end: “you, who have followed me, in the regeneration… shall sit on twelve seats judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” St. Augustine (De civitate Dei XX, 5) refuses to restrict this to twelve men, since Judas fell from his throne and Paul, who labored more than all, was not among the Twelve. The number signifies the whole company of those who have left all and followed; they will be associated with Christ in judgment because they have been associated with Him in poverty.
The second promise concerns this life as well as the next: “every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting.” Chrysostom draws the hundredfold out concretely. The man who leaves one house finds the houses of all the faithful opened to him; he who leaves one family gains brothers and fathers in every place. St. Jerome reads it of spiritual goods, which exceed the material as a hundred exceeds one. Both readings are true, and the life of today’s saint fulfils both.
St. Thomas, treating the religious state (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 186), explains why the counsel of poverty belongs to perfection: not because possessions are evil, but because the care of them divides the heart, and the soul that would cleave wholly to God removes, so far as it can, whatever draws its affection elsewhere. The rich young man’s possessions were not sinful. They were simply his, and that was enough to keep him from following.
III. The duke who became a novice
Francis Borgia was born in 1510 at Gandía in the kingdom of Valencia, heir to a dukedom, great-grandson on his mother’s side of Ferdinand the Catholic, and on his father’s side of a family whose name in Rome was a byword for worldliness. He was raised at the court of Charles V, married Eleanor de Castro, fathered eight children, and served the Emperor as Marquis of Lombay and Viceroy of Catalonia. Like Moses, he was brought up in the house of a king.
The tradition fixes his conversion at a single moment. In 1539 the Empress Isabella died, and Francis was charged with escorting her body to the royal chapel at Granada. When the coffin was opened for the formal identification, the beautiful face he had served at court was so changed by corruption that he could not swear to it. The story is told that he resolved then never again to serve a master who could die. Whether or not the words are exactly his, the turning was real: from that time his life bent steadily toward God.
He did not, however, flee at once. He governed Catalonia justly, succeeded his father as Duke in 1543, and fulfilled the obligations of his state. Only after his wife’s death in 1546 did he make his vows, secretly, in the Society of Jesus, with St. Ignatius’s permission to settle his children and his estates first. In 1551 he renounced the dukedom to his eldest son, was ordained priest, and began to preach in the villages of Spain — a grandee in a patched cassock, ringing a bell in the streets to call children to catechism. When the Pope wished to make him a cardinal, he fled the honour.
The hundredfold came to him exactly as Chrysostom described it. He left one duchy and was given the houses of the Society across the world. Elected third General in 1565, he governed the Jesuits through years of extraordinary growth, sent missionaries to the Indies and to the New World, supported the Roman College, and gave the Society much of its interior form. Like Moses, too, he was “glorified in the sight of kings”: in the last year of his life, St. Pius V sent him with the papal legation to the courts of Spain, Portugal, and France. The man who had left the court returned to it as an envoy of the Church, and the kings received him with a reverence the Duke of Gandía had never commanded.
And he was sanctified in lenitate, in meekness. He signed himself, in his own hand, as a sinner. His penances were severe, and his humility was the subject of many stories among his brethren; it is related that a companion who coughed through the night beside him on a journey apologized in the morning, and Francis assured him that nothing in the room was more fit to receive it than himself. He died in Rome on the night of 30 September to 1 October 1572, returning broken from the legation, and was canonized by Clement X in 1671.
The Collect of the day sums up the whole Mass in a single line. It addresses Christ as verae humilitatis et exemplar et praemium — “both the pattern and the reward of true humility” — and asks that as He made blessed Francis His glorious imitator in terreni honoris contemptu, in contempt of earthly honour, so He would make us sharers in the same imitation and the same glory. Christ is the exemplar: He left His Father’s glory first. Christ is also the praemium: what the renunciant receives is not a reward distinct from Christ but Christ Himself. That is the answer to Peter’s question. Quid ergo erit nobis? He will be.
IV. A word for practice
Few of us have a dukedom to resign. But every state of life has its court, its honours, and its master who can die: a reputation, a position, a standard of comfort, the good opinion of a particular circle. The Gospel does not demand that every Christian leave all things materially; it demands that every Christian follow, and that whatever divides the heart be set down.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, name your Empress Isabella. What do you serve as though it could not die — whose approval, what possession, which ambition? Look at it, as Francis looked into that coffin, in the light of its end.
Second, practise the meekness of Moses in one concrete encounter today. When someone wrongs or inconveniences you, receive it as Francis received his companion’s apology: as something you are fit to bear.
Third, give away one thing you are attached to, not because you do not need it but because you notice you hold it too tightly. Gregory’s word applies: he leaves much who keeps nothing back.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, or this short act drawn from it — Iesu, exemplar et praemium humilitatis, tu solus sufficis mihi. “Jesus, pattern and reward of humility, Thou alone art enough for me.”
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, attending particularly to the Crowning with Thorns, where the King of kings receives the mockery of earthly honour; or the Suscipe of St. Ignatius, which Francis made his own: “Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty…”
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up St. Thomas on the religious state and the evangelical counsels — why poverty belongs to perfection without condemning possession. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the great renunciants of noble birth, from Moses in Pharaoh’s house to the princes and dukes who left their thrones for the cloister, and with the first generations of the Society of Jesus: Ignatius, Xavier, and Borgia.
Sancte Francisce Borgia, ora pro nobis.