Commemoratio: Ss. Abdon et Sennen, Martyrum ~ IV. classis
I. Liturgical Context
Thursday of the ninth week after Pentecost is a IV class feria. The Church, having no feast of higher rank to celebrate, returns to the Mass of the preceding Sunday: the priest vests in green, and the propers of the ninth Sunday after Pentecost are said again in their entirety — the Introit Ecce Deus adjuvat me, the Epistle from the tenth chapter of First Corinthians, and the Gospel of Our Lord weeping over Jerusalem. This repetition is not liturgical poverty but liturgical pedagogy. The green ferias of the season after Pentecost are the Church’s long schooling in perseverance: what the Sunday proclaimed once, the feria makes us hear again, until the warning sinks from the ear into the heart.
To this ferial Mass the 1962 calendar joins the commemoration of Saints Abdon and Sennen, Persian martyrs who suffered at Rome under the persecution of Decius, around the year 250. Their cult is among the most ancient attested in the Roman Church: the Depositio Martyrum of the year 354 already records their burial on this day in the cemetery of Pontian on the Via Portuensis, and a fresco of the sixth or seventh century in that same catacomb still shows the two martyrs crowned. The details of their passion, as handed down in the later acts — that they were Persian noblemen or subregali who, brought to Rome, refused to sacrifice and were exposed to beasts and slain by the sword — belong to pious tradition rather than to documented history; but the fact of their martyrdom, the antiquity of their veneration, and the place of their burial stand on the firmest early evidence Rome possesses. Two foreigners, sons of a distant empire, lie among the martyrs of the Roman Church: strangers who recognized the day of their visitation while the city of the Temple had not.
The conjunction is providential. The Epistle warns the baptized by the figures of the Exodus; the Gospel shows Jerusalem weeping-worthy because she knew not the time of her visitation; and the commemorated martyrs show what it looks like when grace is not received in vain — when men “take heed lest they fall,” stand fast in the trial, and find that God has indeed made with the temptation issue, though the issue be the sword.
II. The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 10:6–13
Haec autem in figura facta sunt nostri, ut non simus concupiscentes malorum, sicut et illi concupierunt. — “Now these things were done in a figure of us, that we should not covet evil things as they also coveted.”
The Apostle has just recalled the whole drama of the Exodus: all were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all ate the same spiritual food and drank of the spiritual rock that followed them — “and the rock was Christ” — and yet with most of them God was not well pleased, for they were overthrown in the desert. From this he draws the terrible principle that governs the pericope: sacramental privilege is not a guarantee of salvation. The generation that saw the sea divided perished within sight of the promise.
Four sins of the desert are set before the Corinthians — and before us — as warning figures: idolatry (“The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play,” the feast of the golden calf); fornication, for which three and twenty thousand fell in one day; the tempting of Christ, punished by the serpents; and murmuring, destroyed by the destroyer. St. John Chrysostom, expounding this chapter to his own sacramentally privileged congregation, presses exactly the Apostle’s point: the Corinthians gloried in their baptism and their partaking of the mysteries, and Paul answers that the fathers in the desert had their own baptism in the sea and their own spiritual table, and it profited them nothing when they turned to lust — the greatness of the gift makes the fall heavier, not lighter (cf. Chrysostom, In Epistolam I ad Corinthios, Hom. 23, PG 61). St. Augustine, defending the unity of the two Testaments against the Manichees, finds in this verse the very charter of Catholic typology: the events of the Old Law were true history and at the same time divinely intended figures, written down for our correction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come (cf. Augustine, Contra Faustum, lib. 4 and 6, on the figurative economy of the Old Testament).
Then the sentence that the Church sets like a blade at the center of this Mass: Itaque qui se existimat stare, videat ne cadat — “Wherefore he that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall.” Presumption is the special temptation of the religious man. The Corinthians presumed on knowledge and sacrament; the desert generation presumed on election and miracle. The Apostle strips both bare.
Yet the pericope does not end in terror but in one of the most consoling promises of the whole New Testament: “Let no temptation take hold on you, but such as is human. And God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able: but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it” (fidelis autem Deus est, qui non patietur vos tentari supra id quod potestis). The Fathers read this promise with sober precision: it is not that the trial will be light, but that the grace will be sufficient. The measure of the temptation permitted is taken by the fidelity of God, not by the confidence of man. The same God who let Israel be tried in the desert opened the way through it; the exitus — the “issue,” the way out — is His work, prepared before the trial begins.
III. The Gospel: Luke 19:41–47
Et ut appropinquavit, videns civitatem flevit super illam. — “And when he drew near, seeing the city, he wept over it.”
It is Palm Sunday. The crowds are crying Hosanna, the garments are spread on the road — and at the bend of the Mount of Olives where Jerusalem breaks suddenly into view, the King stops and weeps. Not the silent tears of Lazarus’s tomb (lacrimatus est), but, as the Fathers noted from the stronger verb, an open weeping (flevit) — the Heart of the Incarnate Word breaking over the city that is about to kill Him.
“If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy day, the things that are to thy peace: but now they are hidden from thy eyes.” Then the prophecy, fulfilled to the letter forty years later under Titus: the trench cast about her, the encompassing on every side, the beating flat of city and children, not a stone left upon a stone — eo quod non cognoveris tempus visitationis tuae, “because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.”
St. Gregory the Great preached on this very pericope — his thirty-ninth homily on the Gospels, and it is his exposition that the Roman Breviary itself appoints to be read at Matins of this ninth Sunday, so that the Church has bound Gregory’s reading to this Gospel for over a millennium. Gregory first confirms the literal fulfillment: the Roman siege verified every clause of the prophecy, the encircling rampart, the famine, the leveling. But he will not let his hearers stand outside the text as spectators of Jewish ruin. Jerusalem, he teaches, is also the soul: Our Lord still weeps, through His members, over the soul that after sinning does not know that it is besieged — the evil spirits surround it like an army, hemming in its exits, and the “not leaving a stone upon a stone” is the final dissolution of a soul that has lost even the memory of its former order. The tears of Christ over the city are the pattern of the Church’s tears over every impenitent (cf. Gregorius Magnus, Homiliae in Evangelia, Hom. 39). St. Ambrose, commenting on Luke, had already drawn the same double sense: the city wept over is at once the historical Jerusalem and the human soul that Christ approaches, longing to be received, and finding the gates barred by sins (cf. Ambrosius, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, lib. IX).
Then, without pause, the Gospel moves from the tears to the whip: “And entering into the temple, he began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought. Saying to them: It is written: My house is the house of prayer. But you have made it a den of thieves.” The Fathers saw no contradiction between the weeping Christ and the scourging Christ; they are one zeal. The same love that weeps over the city purges the temple — because the profanation of the sanctuary is the inner cause of the city’s blindness. Where the house of prayer becomes a house of traffic, the time of visitation passes unrecognized. And the pericope closes with a quiet, luminous line that is the whole remedy: Et erat docens quotidie in templo — “And he was teaching daily in the temple.” The temple He has just cleansed, He immediately fills with His doctrine. Purgation is for the sake of presence.
IV. Synthesis: The Time of Visitation in the Order of Exitus and Reditus
Read together in the Thomistic frame, the two lessons of this Mass describe the one drama of the creature’s return to God.
All things go forth from God — exitus — and are ordered back to Him — reditus; and for the rational creature this return is not automatic but historical: it happens, or fails to happen, in time, in concrete moments of grace. The Exodus is the great Old Testament sacrament of the reditus: a people led out of Egypt, through the waters, fed with bread from heaven and drink from the rock, toward the land of promise. That is why the Apostle can say haec in figura facta sunt nostri — the desert journey is the figure of the Church’s pilgrimage, and of every soul’s. But the Epistle records the terrible possibility inscribed in that figure: the return can miscarry. A whole generation, sacramentally initiated, divinely fed, fell in the wilderness because at the moments of trial — the calf, the lusting, the murmuring — it turned back toward Egypt in its heart. The reditus was refused from within.
The Gospel shows the same refusal at its consummation. The whole reditus of Israel converged on one Person and one week: God Himself came to His own city, to His own temple — the Visitation in the strictest sense, tempus visitationis tuae. Jerusalem, presuming on her election, her Temple, her sacrifices (precisely the presumption the Epistle unmasks: qui se existimat stare), did not recognize the moment, and the city that refused its return was itself returned to dust. St. Thomas teaches that God’s providence permits such blindness only within a larger order in which no grace is lacking to those who do not resist it; the hiddenness “from thy eyes” follows the refusal, it does not precede it (cf. S. Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 79, on God and the blindness of sin).
But the Mass does not leave us between two ruins. The Epistle’s closing promise — God is faithful, He will make with the temptation issue — is the Gospel’s tears turned into doctrine. The God who weeps over Jerusalem is the God who does not will the death of the sinner; the way of escape He fashions within every trial is nothing other than the open gate of the reditus, held open from His side even when barred from ours. And the commemorated martyrs are the Mass’s living proof. Abdon and Sennen were, in the flesh, everything Jerusalem was not: foreigners, Persians, with no covenantal presumption to stand on — and they knew the time of their visitation. Brought to Rome in chains, tried above what nature can bear, they found the promise true: God made with the temptation an issue, and the issue was the palm. Their bodies, buried in the cemetery of Pontian while the Temple of Jerusalem lay already half two centuries in ruins, preach the Pauline reversal: the last called may stand, and the first, presuming to stand, may fall. In them the reditus is complete: a Patre the grace of their calling went forth, per Filium whose passion their martyrdom conformed them to, in Spiritu by whose strength flesh endured what flesh cannot — and so back to the Father, crowned.
V. Devotional Application
The feria asks of us three things, in ascending order of interiority.
First, an examination against presumption. The sentence qui se existimat stare, videat ne cadat should be allowed to search the exact places where we feel most secure: the devotion we have kept longest, the sin we believe we have conquered, the orthodoxy we are proudest of. The desert generation fell not at its weak points but at its privileges. A sober evening examen this week might take the Apostle’s four figures in turn — idolatry (what do I in fact serve?), impurity, the tempting of God (demanding signs and terms from Providence), and murmuring (against superiors, against circumstances, against the crosses of one’s state in life) — and ask where each still has a foothold.
Second, reverence for the house of prayer. Our Lord’s cleansing of the temple is not a museum piece. Every genuflection made carelessly, every conversation carried into the nave, every Mass attended with a trafficking heart — bargaining attention against distraction — repeats in miniature the speluncam latronum. The practical resolution is small and concrete: arrive early enough to kneel in silence before Mass; let the church building be, for us, only ever a house of prayer.
Third, and highest: to learn the tears of Christ. Devotion to the weeping Heart of Our Lord on Olivet is an old and solid school of intercession. To grieve over sin — one’s own first, then the world’s — without bitterness, without the secret pleasure of indignation, but with the love that would still gather the city under its wings: this is to be conformed to the Heart of the Redeemer. Those who pray for the conversion of family members, of nations, of the enemies of the Church, may take this Gospel as their charter: they weep in the Body what the Head wept on the road.
And through the day, the martyrs’ lesson: whatever trial this Thursday actually brings — the ordinary desert of fidelity — God has already made the way through it. It remains only not to sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to play.
VI. Oratio
Collecta (Dominica IX post Pentecosten):
Pateant aures misericordiae tuae, Domine, precibus supplicantium: et, ut petentibus desiderata concedas; fac eos quae tibi sunt placita postulare. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Let the ears of Thy mercy, O Lord, be open to the prayers of Thy suppliants: and, that Thou mayest grant them their desires, make them to ask such things as please Thee. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
Commemoratio (Ss. Abdon et Sennen Martyrum):
Deus, qui sanctis tuis Abdon et Sennen ad hanc gloriam veniendi copiosum munus gratiae contulisti: da famulis tuis suorum veniam peccatorum; ut, sanctorum tuorum intercedentibus meritis, ab omnibus mereantur adversitatibus liberari. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum. Amen.
O God, who didst bestow on Thy saints Abdon and Sennen an abundant gift of grace to attain to this glory: grant to Thy servants the pardon of their sins; that, by the interceding merits of Thy saints, they may deserve to be delivered from all adversities. Through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
How exactly the Sunday collect answers the day’s readings: Jerusalem asked for what pleased herself and missed her peace; the Church teaches us to ask first that our very asking be conformed to God. And the martyrs’ collect names precisely what the Epistle promised — the copiosum munus gratiae, the abundant gift by which the tempted are able to bear it.
VII. Aspiratio
Lord Jesus, who didst weep over the city that knew not the day of her visitation: give me eyes to know Thee in this day’s grace, a heart that presumes nothing, and Thy faithful strength in the hour of trial; that with Thy martyrs Abdon and Sennen I may stand, not in myself, but in Thee. Amen.
VIII. For Further Study
Tier 1 — Scripture and Liturgy
- 1 Corinthians 10 entire, with Exodus 32 (the calf), Numbers 21 (the serpents), and Numbers 14 and 16 (the murmurings) as the figures behind the Epistle
- Luke 19:28–48 in full; parallels in Matthew 21 and Mark 11; Psalm 78 (Vulgate) on the desert generation
Tier 2 — Fathers and Doctors
- St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Homily 39 (on Luke 19:41–47) — the Church’s own Matins commentary for this Mass
- St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 23 (on 1 Cor 10)
- St. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, Book IX
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Luke 19:41–47, gathering the patristic tradition on the pericope
Tier 3 — History and Devotion
- The Depositio Martyrum (A.D. 354) and the cemetery of Pontian, for the early cult of Ss. Abdon and Sennen
- Josephus, The Jewish War, Books V–VI, on the destruction of Jerusalem — the historical fulfillment the Fathers constantly invoke
- Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, the ninth Sunday after Pentecost and 30 July
Learning path: this feria belongs to the Sacred Liturgy path (the theology of the green season and the ferial repetition of Sunday Masses), and the commemoration opens into Lives of the Saints — the Persian martyrs of Rome and the universality of the Church’s crown.
IX. Source Transparency
The liturgical identification of this day (IV class feria of the ninth week after Pentecost, with the commemoration of Ss. Abdon and Sennen, Martyrs) follows the 1962 Missale Romanum and its calendar as promulgated under Rubricarum instructum (1960). Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims version with the Clementine Vulgate Latin. The historical material on Ss. Abdon and Sennen distinguishes throughout between the earliest documentary witnesses (the Depositio Martyrum of 354 and the archaeology of the cemetery of Pontian), which are firm, and the later Passion narrative (Persian nobility, the manner of their deaths), which is reported as pious tradition and not asserted as established history. Patristic references are given by paraphrase with locus (Gregory, Hom. in Evang. 39; Chrysostom, In I Cor. Hom. 23; Ambrose, In Lucam IX; Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 79) and have not been collated against critical editions for this reflection; readers citing them onward should verify against CCSL, PG, and the Leonine edition respectively. The Latin texts of the Collect and the commemoration are supplied according to the received tradition of the Roman Missal but await collation against a physically printed 1962 Missale Romanum before being treated as authenticated.