Feria tertia infra Hebdomadam XI post Octavam Pentecostes ~ IV. classis Commemoratio: Ss. Tiburtii et Susannæ Virginis, Martyrum 11 Augusti
I. Liturgical Context
On this fourth-class feria the Church returns to the Mass of the preceding Sunday, Deus in loco sancto suo, the Mass of the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost. The vestments are green; the Gloria and Credo are not said; the Common Preface is used. The ferial repetition of the Sunday Mass is not a liturgical afterthought but a pedagogy: the Church holds the same lections before us across the week, insisting that a single Epistle and a single Gospel are not exhausted in one hearing. What the Sunday proclaimed in solemnity, the feria ruminates in quiet.
Yet the day is not without its martyrs. Under a single Collect the Roman rite commemorates Saint Tiburtius, martyr of the Via Labicana whose resting place inter duas lauros was venerated from antiquity, and Saint Susanna, virgin and martyr, whose name is fixed to one of the ancient titular churches of Rome, the titulus near the Baths of Diocletian. The historical dossiers of both saints rest largely on legendary Acta — Tiburtius appears within the Passio Sancti Sebastiani, Susanna within a romance of the Diocletianic persecution — but their cults are ancient, Roman, and continuous, attested in the early itineraries and sacramentaries. The 1962 books present them as the Church has long received them: martyrs whose blood belongs to the patrimony of the City. Their commemoration, added by way of a second Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion, threads the witness of the martyrs through the green quiet of the feria — fittingly, as we shall see, for a Gospel about a tongue loosed to speak rightly.
II. The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:1–10
Notum autem vobis facio, fratres, Evangelium quod prædicavi vobis, quod et accepistis… “Now I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you have received, and wherein you stand.”
Saint Paul here delivers what the ancients would recognize as the primitive kerygma in its most compressed form: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen — by Cephas, by the Eleven, by more than five hundred brethren at once, by James, by all the Apostles, and last of all by Paul himself, tamquam abortivo, as by one born out of due time.
Saint John Chrysostom, commenting on this passage, observes that Paul deliberately grounds the Resurrection not in argument but in testimony: the Apostle appeals to living witnesses, most of whom, Paul notes, remained alive at the time of writing, so that the Corinthians might interrogate the fact rather than merely admire the doctrine (cf. Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Epistolam I ad Corinthios, hom. 38, PG 61). The faith is not a philosophy first conceived and then decorated with history; it is history first — tradidi enim vobis in primis quod et accepi — and theology follows upon the fact.
Notice the double verb of tradition: tradidi… accepi. Paul hands on what he received. Here, in the middle of the first Christian generation, is the whole grammar of Catholic Tradition already operative: the Gospel is not invented, not adjusted, not renegotiated by each age, but received and transmitted whole. Saint Thomas Aquinas, treating this lection, notes that Paul lists himself last among the witnesses precisely to bind his own apostolic authority into the received deposit rather than above it (cf. Super I Epistolam ad Corinthios, cap. 15, lect. 1).
And then the sentence upon which the whole passage — indeed the whole Pauline theology of grace — pivots: Gratia autem Dei sum id quod sum. “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace in me hath not been void.” Saint Augustine returned to this verse repeatedly in his controversies with the Pelagians, drawing out its exact balance: Paul labored more abundantly than all, yet not I, but the grace of God with me — so that neither is grace without our labor, nor our labor anything except by grace (cf. Augustine, De gratia et libero arbitrio, cap. 5, PL 44). The persecutor made Apostle is himself the argument: what Saul could not effect in himself, grace effected in Paul.
III. The Gospel: Mark 7:31–37
The Lord departs from Tyre and comes through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, through the midst of the Decapolis — Gentile country, the borderlands. There they bring to Him one deaf and dumb, surdum et mutum, and beseech Him to lay His hand upon him.
What follows is among the most physically detailed of all the Lord’s healings. He takes the man aside from the multitude. He puts His fingers into the man’s ears. He spits, and touches the man’s tongue. He looks up to heaven, and groans, and says: Ephphetha — “Be thou opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke rightly — loquebatur recte.
The Venerable Bede, whose commentary on Saint Mark gathers the patristic reading of this scene, sees in the deaf-mute the whole of fallen humanity: deaf, because closed to the word of God; mute, because incapable of confessing Him. The fingers placed in the ears Bede reads as the gifts of the Holy Ghost, by whom the interior hearing is opened; the spittle, proceeding from the Lord’s own head, as the wisdom that flows from Christ’s own divine person to heal the tongue of man; the upward glance and the groan as the Lord teaching us whence healing comes and with what compassion He bears our miseries (cf. Bede, In Marci Evangelium Expositio, lib. II, CCSL 120). Every gesture is sacramental in structure: an outward, bodily sign wrought upon the senses, effecting an inward opening.
The Church took this Gospel with utter seriousness — so seriously that she wrote it into her own rites. In the traditional order of Baptism, the priest touches the ears and nostrils of the one to be baptized and pronounces the very word of this Gospel: Ephpheta, quod est, Adaperire. Saint Ambrose, instructing the newly baptized of Milan, appeals directly to this mystery of the apertio, the “opening,” performed upon them at the font: as the Lord opened the ears of the deaf man, so the Church opens the senses of her catechumens, that they may hear the word of faith and confess it (cf. Ambrose, De sacramentis, lib. I, SC 25). The Gospel of this Mass is thus not merely a record of a miracle in the Decapolis; it is the charter of a rite by which every traditionally baptized Catholic has personally passed through this very scene.
And the crowd’s confession — Bene omnia fecit: et surdos fecit audire, et mutos loqui — “He hath done all things well” — echoes, as the Fathers loved to note, the verdict of Genesis upon creation: vidit Deus cuncta quæ fecerat, et erant valde bona. The healing of the deaf-mute is a work of the same hand that made the ear and the tongue in the beginning. Redemption is creation’s repair by creation’s own Author.
IV. Synthesis
Set the Epistle and the Gospel side by side and a single movement emerges, the movement the Thomistic tradition names exitus–reditus: all things go forth from God, and by grace all things are led back to Him.
The deaf-mute of the Decapolis is man in his exitus gone wrong — gone forth from God not as creature merely, which is good, but as sinner, which is deafness. He cannot hear the word; therefore he cannot speak it. The return begins not with his own effort but with the Lord’s initiative: Christ takes him aside, touches him, opens him. Only then does he speak, and speak rightly.
This is exactly the anatomy of Saint Paul in the Epistle. Saul of Tarsus was deaf to the Gospel and his tongue was worse than mute — it blasphemed. Grace took him aside on the Damascus road, opened his ears, loosed his tongue; and thereafter loquebatur recte with a vengeance: he labored more abundantly than they all. Yet the loosed tongue never forgets its former binding: “I am the least of the apostles… but by the grace of God I am what I am.” Right speech about God begins with right speech about oneself, and right speech about oneself is the confession of grace.
Faith comes by hearing, the same Apostle teaches elsewhere; and hearing is itself God’s gift. The whole order of salvation runs: grace opens the ear; the opened ear receives the tradition (accepistis); the received tradition looses the tongue; the loosed tongue hands on what it received (tradidi) and confesses what it believes. The martyrs commemorated today, Tiburtius and Susanna, stand at the far end of that sequence: theirs were tongues so thoroughly loosed by grace that neither prefect nor sword could bind them again. The martyr is the Ephphetha carried to its final consequence — a mouth opened by God that no earthly power can shut.
V. Devotional Application
The feria asks little of us outwardly and therefore much inwardly. Three applications suggest themselves.
First, examine the ears. To be baptized is to have been told Ephphetha; but the opened ear can be stopped again by habit — by the noise we choose, the reading we prefer, the voices we allow to crowd out the voice of God. A practical resolution: ten minutes of silence before the day’s noise begins, or a slow, attentive reading of this week’s Epistle and Gospel, which the Church deliberately keeps before us all week.
Second, examine the tongue. The healed man spoke rightly. Right speech is not merely the avoidance of sin — detraction, murmuring, irreverence — but the positive confession of the faith: grace before meals in public, an unembarrassed word about the things of God, the correction of error given gently and without human respect. Ask this evening: did my tongue today sound like a tongue Christ has touched?
Third, imitate Paul’s self-knowledge. Gratia Dei sum id quod sum is a sentence worth carrying through the day. Every temptation to vanity dissolves in it; so does every temptation to despair. What is good in us is grace, and grace has not been void — it works, and it will go on working if we labor with it.
VI. Oratio
Collect of the Mass (Dominica XI post Pentecosten):
Omnípotens sempitérne Deus, qui abundántia pietátis tuæ et mérita súpplicum excédis et vota: effúnde super nos misericórdiam tuam; ut dimíttas quæ consciéntia métuit, et adjícias quod orátio non præsúmit. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum…
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the abundance of Thy loving-kindness dost exceed both the merits and the desires of Thy suppliants: pour forth upon us Thy mercy, that Thou mayest forgive those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and grant those things which our prayer dares not ask. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…
Collect of the Commemoration (Ss. Tiburtii et Susannæ):
Sanctórum Martyrum tuórum Tibúrtii et Susánnæ nos, Dómine, fóveant continuáta præsídia: quia non désinis propítius intuéri; quos tálibus auxíliis concésseris adjuvári. Per Dóminum nostrum…
May the unfailing protection of Thy holy Martyrs Tiburtius and Susanna cherish us, O Lord: for Thou dost not cease to look with favor upon those whom Thou hast granted the help of such assistance. Through our Lord…
The Latin texts above await collation against a printed 1962 Missale Romanum before liturgical citation.
VII. Aspiratio
Lord Jesus, who saidst to the deaf man, Ephphetha: open Thou my ears to Thy word, loose Thou my tongue to Thy praise, and let me confess with Paul that by Thy grace I am what I am. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Sacred Liturgy path: The Ephphetha rite in the traditional order of Baptism (Rituale Romanum, tit. II) — a study of how the Gospels are written into the sacramental rites themselves; the structure of ferial Masses and the repetition of Sunday propers; the commemoration system of the 1962 rubrics (one Mass, two Collects).
Theology and Doctrine path: Grace and free will in 1 Corinthians 15:10 — Saint Augustine’s anti-Pelagian reading and its reception in the Second Council of Orange and Trent, Session VI; the primitive kerygma and the theology of Tradition (tradidi… accepi) as the pattern of the depositum fidei.
Lives of the Saints path: The Roman martyrs of the Diocletianic persecution; the titular churches of Rome and the origins of the sanctoral cycle; how the Church weighs legendary Acta against ancient and continuous cultus — Ss. Tiburtius and Susanna as a case study.
Church History path: The tituli of Rome and the archaeology of the early Roman church; the cemeteries of the Via Labicana.
Spiritual Practices path: Custody of the tongue in the ascetical tradition; lectio of the week’s proper as a ferial discipline.
IX. Source Transparency
Tier 1 (primary documentary): The scriptural texts of the Epistle and Gospel (1 Cor. 15:1–10; Mark 7:31–37), cited from the Vulgate with Douay-Rheims rendering. The existence and antiquity of the Roman cults of Tiburtius and Susanna, attested by the titular church of S. Susanna and the early Roman liturgical books and itineraries.
Tier 2 (strongly attested tradition): The patristic loci — Chrysostom on 1 Corinthians (hom. 38, PG 61); Augustine, De gratia et libero arbitrio (PL 44); Bede on Mark (CCSL 120); Ambrose, De sacramentis (SC 25); Aquinas, Super I Cor., cap. 15 — all given as paraphrase-with-locus, pending verification against the named critical editions. The Ephphetha rite in the traditional baptismal ordo.
Tier 3 (traditio pia): The narrative details of the martyrdoms of Tiburtius and Susanna, which derive from legendary Acta (the Passio S. Sebastiani complex and the Susanna romance respectively). These are received devotionally, not asserted historically.
Weakest-anchored claim: The specific attribution of the homily number (38) for Chrysostom’s treatment of 1 Cor. 15:1–10, and the chapter-level locus in Augustine’s De gratia et libero arbitrio, are the least secure references in this piece and stand first in the verification queue. Both Collect texts remain non-authenticated pending collation with a printed 1962 Missale Romanum.