A reflection for Friday within the Fifteenth Week after Pentecost — Feria VI infra Hebdomadam XV post Octavam Pentecostes, IV classis (11 September) — with the commemoration of Ss. Protus and Hyacinth, Martyrs
On a feria of the fourth class the Church has nothing new to say to us, and that is the point. She sends us back to Sunday’s Mass and makes us read it again, more slowly, on the day of the week the Cross is remembered. The Introit is still Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad me — “Bow down Thine ear, O Lord, to me, for I am needy and poor” (Ps. 85:1). The Epistle is still St. Paul writing to the Galatians about how a community of the baptized ought to carry one another. And the Gospel is still the widow at the gate of Naim, following her only son to the grave, and the Lord walking in the opposite direction.
If Sunday’s reading left us with an impression, Friday is for turning the impression into an obligation.
I. If we live in the Spirit
The Epistle (Gal. 5:25-26; 6:1-10) opens with a conditional that the Apostle plainly expects his readers to satisfy: Si Spiritu vivimus, Spiritu et ambulemus — “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” St. Jerome, in his commentary on the letter, notices the two verbs. To live in the Spirit is the gift received at Baptism; to walk in the Spirit is the daily labour of a man who has received it. One can possess the life and refuse the walk. The Galatians had been doing exactly that.
What follows is not a treatise but a list of the ways a congregation destroys itself: vainglory, provoking one another, envying one another. St. John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage, observes that the Apostle names the disease before he names the cure, because these three are the vices of people who are comparing themselves with each other rather than measuring themselves against God. Then comes the cure, and it is startlingly practical.
“Brethren, and if a man be overtaken in any fault, you who are spiritual, instruct such a one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” St. Augustine, in his Expositio on Galatians, dwells on the word overtaken — praeoccupatus, seized beforehand, caught off guard. The Apostle is not speaking of the hardened sinner but of the brother who stumbled, and he addresses himself to the spirituales, to those who consider themselves strong. Augustine’s rule for correction, which he draws from this verse, is that no one is fit to correct a fault who has not first felt fear for himself. The man who rebukes without trembling is not spiritual at all; he is simply the next one to fall.
Then the sentence that gives the whole passage its shape: Alter alterius onera portate, et sic adimplebitis legem Christi — “Bear ye one another’s burdens: and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ.” Chrysostom hears in this an appeal to shame. You cannot be perfect, the Apostle concedes; very well, then at least do this — carry what your brother cannot carry alone. And the law of Christ, Augustine adds, is the law of charity, which Christ Himself called “a new commandment”; it is fulfilled not by keeping a code but by bending one’s back.
Notice that St. Paul is not sentimental about it. Four verses later he says the opposite thing: “every one shall bear his own burden” (unusquisque enim onus suum portabit). The Fathers do not think this a contradiction. Augustine distinguishes the two burdens: the burden of another’s weakness, which charity shares in this life, and the burden of one’s own account, which each man carries alone to the judgment. We help one another carry the first precisely so that the second will be lighter.
The passage closes with the law of the harvest: “God is not mocked. For what things a man shall sow, those also shall he reap.” And then a word against discouragement — bonum autem facientes, non deficiamus — “in doing good, let us not fail: for in due time we shall reap, not failing.” St. Jerome reads the tempore suo strictly: the harvest is at God’s time, not ours, and the man who stops sowing in July because nothing has come up has not understood agriculture.
II. The widow at the gate
The Gospel (Luke 7:11-16) sets this teaching in front of a coffin.
Our Lord comes to the city of Naim with His disciples and a great multitude. As He reaches the gate, another multitude is coming out — a funeral, and not an ordinary one: “a dead man was carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow.” Two crowds, two processions, meeting at the threshold of a city: the procession of life going in, the procession of death going out. St. Ambrose, in his Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, sees the whole of the Church’s situation in that collision.
For Ambrose the widow is the Church herself, who weeps over her sons dead in sin and follows them out toward the tomb, and who, because she has no husband on earth, has no help but the Lord who meets her at the gate. The Evangelist says that Christ, “seeing her, being moved with mercy towards her, said to her: Weep not.” Misericordia motus. He is not asked. No one in the procession has faith enough to ask. Bede, following Ambrose, remarks that the miracle at Naim is unique among the Lord’s raisings in this respect: Jairus pleaded for his daughter and Martha and Mary sent for their brother, but at Naim the mercy comes first and the request never comes at all.
Then the gesture: “And he came near and touched the bier. And they that carried it, stood still.” St. Ambrose points out that the touch is enough to halt the bearers before a word is spoken. Whatever is carrying a soul toward corruption stops when Christ lays His hand on it. And the word: Adolescens, tibi dico, surge — “Young man, I say to thee, arise.” St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his homilies on Luke, insists on the tibi dico: Elias stretched himself three times upon the widow’s son at Sarephta and cried to God; Eliseus prayed; but this One commands in His own name, because He is Himself the Life. The young man sits up and begins to speak, “and he gave him to his mother.”
St. Augustine, in his ninety-eighth sermon, reads the three raisings in the Gospels as three kinds of dead souls. The daughter of Jairus is dead in the house — she has consented to sin in her heart but not yet acted. The young man of Naim is dead at the gate — the sin has gone out into deed and is being carried toward the grave in public view. Lazarus is dead four days in the tomb — the sin has become a habit and stinks. All three the Lord raises, Augustine says, so that no one who is dead in any of these ways should despair; but he notes that the one at the gate was raised in the midst of a crowd, and given back to a mother, because sin that has become public must be repaired in public and restored to the Church that mourned it.
And here the Epistle and the Gospel close on one another like two hands. The Church at Naim did not stone the dead boy or leave him outside the wall. She followed him. She carried his burden as far as she could carry it — to the gate — and there she met the One who could carry it further. This is what St. Paul means. To bear one another’s burdens is to be the widow in the procession: not to be able to raise the dead, but to refuse to abandon them, and to keep walking until Christ comes the other way.
III. Two brothers who carried each other
The commemoration today is of Ss. Protus and Hyacinth, martyred at Rome in the third century, under Valerian or Gallienus. The old Acts make them servants and instructors in the faith of the virgin St. Eugenia; they were arrested together, beaten, and beheaded together, and buried together in the cemetery of Basilla on the Via Salaria. Pope St. Damasus, who honoured their tomb in the fourth century, calls them fratres in the epigram he set over it. In 1845 the crypt was rediscovered, and in it the sealed tomb of Hyacinth, his bones charred by the fire that had consumed his body — an unexpected witness, after sixteen centuries, that the Acts had not exaggerated the ferocity of their end.
The Church keeps them on the same day and in the same Collect because they are the Epistle made flesh: Beatorum Martyrum tuorum Proti et Hyacinthi nos, Domine, foveat pretiosa confessio — “may the precious confession of Thy blessed Martyrs Protus and Hyacinth cherish us, O Lord.” Two men who taught the faith to one household, who were overtaken by the same persecution, who bore one another’s burden to the block, and who sowed in the Spirit what they reaped on the Via Salaria. They did not fail in doing good, and in due time they reaped.
IV. A word for practice
The Sunday Collect asks that “continual mercy” may cleanse and defend the Church — Ecclesiam tuam, Domine, miseratio continuata mundet et muniat. Continual, because the widow’s procession never stops going out through the gate, and Our Lord never stops coming in.
First, take St. Augustine’s test for correction seriously. If there is someone you have been meaning to rebuke, ask whether you have yet been afraid for yourself on the same point. If not, you are not ready; pray first. If so, speak — in spiritu lenitatis, in the spirit of meekness — and do not delay, because the Apostle gives no permission to leave a brother in his fault.
Second, find the funeral you have stopped following. There is someone — a lapsed child, a friend who has walked away from the sacraments, a relative whose sin has become public — whom you have quietly written off. Ambrose’s widow did not write off her son. Walk with him again, at least in prayer, at least as far as the gate.
Third, on this Friday, offer a small act of penance for the soul you named in the second step. Bear a little of the burden literally. The harvest is at God’s time; your business is the sowing.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the Sunday, or this petition drawn from the Introit — Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad me, et exaudi me: salvum fac servum tuum, Deus meus, sperantem in te. “Bow down Thine ear, O Lord, and hear me: save Thy servant, O my God, that trusteth in Thee.”
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, proper to Friday, with the fourth mystery — the Carrying of the Cross — offered for the one whose burden you have undertaken to share; Simon of Cyrene is the Epistle’s verse with a face.
If you wish to go deeper, the Theology and Doctrine path takes up fraternal correction as St. Thomas treats it in the Summa — when it binds, when it does not, and why it is an act of charity and not of justice. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the Roman martyrs of the third century, Protus and Hyacinth among them, and with the recovery of their tombs in the catacombs. Either would be a fitting next step.
Sancti Prote et Hyacinthe, orate pro nobis.