Feria Secunda infra Hebdomadam I post Octavam Pentecostes
Introitus
Dilexísti justítiam, et odísti iniquitátem: proptérea unxit te Deus, Deus tuus, óleo lætítiæ præ consórtibus tuis. (Ps. 44:8) Eructávit cor meum verbum bonum: dico ego ópera mea Regi.
Thou hast loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. (Ps. 44:2) My heart hath uttered a good word: I speak my works to the King.
The Mass of holy virgins opens upon the forty-fourth psalm, the great epithalamium that the Church has never ceased to read of Christ the Bridegroom and of the soul espoused to Him. The verse the liturgy places upon Angela’s lips — dilexísti justítiam — is spoken first of the Incarnate Word, anointed præ consórtibus suis, and only then of the virgin who, having loved what He loved and hated what He hated, is drawn into the participation of that same anointing. St. Augustine, expounding this psalm, observes that the oil of gladness is the Holy Ghost, and that Christ receives it not by measure but in fulness, so that from His fulness the members might receive (Enarratio in Psalmum XLIV, 19). The whole logic of the virgin’s sanctity is thus established before a word of the lessons is read: she shines not by a light of her own but by oil received from the Anointed One.
Lectio
The Epistle is taken from the second letter to the Corinthians (10:17-18; 11:1-2), and it sets the boundary within which all the glory of the consecrated life must be confined.
Fratres: Qui gloriátur, in Dómino gloriétur. Non enim qui seípsum comméndat, ille probátus est; sed quem Deus comméndat.
Brethren: He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. For not he who commendeth himself, is approved, but he whom God commendeth.
The Apostle has just finished defending his ministry against those who measured themselves by themselves, and he closes the matter with a sentence borrowed from Jeremias: let him that glorieth glory in the Lord (Jer. 9:23-24). St. John Chrysostom, preaching upon this passage, marks the force of the distinction: the self-commended man stands upon a testimony that proves nothing, for the witness and the accused are one person; only the verdict of God, who searches the heart, is a true approbation (Homiliæ in II Cor., Hom. XXII). This is the first lesson the Church draws for the feast of a foundress whose works were many and whose renown reached even to the Sovereign Pontiff: that the magnitude of the work is no measure of the worker, and that Angela’s true commendation lay not in the twenty-four communities that stood at her death but in the hidden testimony of God to a soul that had loved Him.
Then follows the Apostle’s tender jealousy:
Æmulor enim vos Dei æmulatióne. Despóndi enim vos uni viro vírginem castam exhibére Christo.
For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God. For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.
Here is the very charter of consecrated virginity. The Church, and within her every soul that gives itself wholly to God, is betrothed to one Husband; the office of the apostle — and after his manner, of every spiritual father and mother — is to guard that betrothal until the soul be presented spotless to Christ. St. Augustine teaches that this espousal belongs first to the whole Church, who is virgo in the integrity of her faith even where her members are many and married (De Sancta Virginitate, II): bodily virginity is honoured precisely because it images visibly what the whole Church must be invisibly — undivided in her cleaving to Christ. Angela understood her own vocation in exactly these terms, gathering a collegium virginum not as a withdrawal from the world’s corruption alone but as a presentation to Christ of souls kept chaste in faith and love.
Evangelium
The Gospel is the parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:1-13), than which no passage of Scripture is more proper to the day.
In illo témpore: Dixit Jesus discípulis suis parábolam hanc: Símile erit regnum cælórum decem virgínibus: quæ accipiéntes lámpades suas, exiérunt óbviam sponso et sponsæ.
At that time: Jesus spoke to His disciples this parable: Then shall the kingdom of heaven be like to ten virgins, who taking their lamps went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride.
All ten are virgins; all ten carry lamps; all ten, even the foolish, go forth to meet the Bridegroom. The whole weight of the parable rests upon what the eye does not at first see — the oil, or its absence, in the vessels. St. Augustine, in his sermon on this Gospel, asks what the five wise have that the five foolish lack, since both kept their virginity, and answers that the difference is charity: the lamp is the work that shines before men, but the oil is the inward intention by which one seeks to please God rather than the praise of men (Sermo XCIII). The foolish carry their light into the sight of others but have nothing laid up within; and when the cry sounds at midnight, they cannot borrow, because no man can be saved by another’s conscience. St. Gregory the Great, treating the same place, identifies the oil as the inward glory and joy of a good conscience, which the foolish soul has spent abroad in seeking human applause and so finds nothing to bring before the Judge (Homiliæ in Evangelia, Hom. XII).
Médiæ autem nocte clamor factus est: Ecce sponsus venit, exíte óbviam ei.
And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye forth to meet him.
The cry comes at the hour no man expects, and it finds the lamps of the foolish guttering. They go to buy oil; while they are gone, the door is shut. St. Gregory observes that the closing of the door is the final discrimination of the hidden judgment, when the manifest works of the reprobate can no longer purchase what the secret intention failed to lay up (Hom. in Ev. XII). And the Bridegroom’s answer — Amen dico vobis, néscio vos, I know you not — is read by the Fathers not as ignorance in God, who knows all, but as the rejection of those whom He does not approve; for, as the Epistle has already declared, it is not he who commends himself that is approved, but he whom God owns as His own. The two readings of the Mass are thus one teaching under two figures: the only commendation that avails at midnight is the testimony of God to the oil hidden in the vessel.
Vigiláte ítaque, quia nescítis diem neque horam.
Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour.
Synthesis
The propers of this Mass weave a single doctrine. The Introit sets the soul’s whole sanctity within the anointing of Christ: she loves justice because she has first been anointed with the oil of gladness that flows from His fulness. The Epistle forbids her to glory in herself and binds her glory to the Lord alone, presenting her as a chaste virgin to one Husband. The Gospel discloses the hidden hinge upon which her presentation turns: not the lamp that all ten carry, but the oil that only five possess — the inward charity, the conscience that has sought God and not men. Wherein the Fathers speak with one voice: Augustine names the oil charity and right intention; Gregory names it the joy of a good conscience hoarded for God’s sight and not squandered in human praise. The virgin who is approved is she whose lamp burns with borrowed oil — borrowed, that is, from the Anointed One, and kept burning by a love that does not seek its own glory.
This is precisely the sanctity the Church celebrates in Angela of Merici. She loved justice and hated iniquity, subjecting her body to austerity that she might atone for the disorders of an age; she refused the outward adornments on which the world sets its heart, that she might find favour with the Spouse of souls alone; and she gathered a company of virgins not to be seen of men but to be presented chaste to Christ, kept burning until the midnight cry. Her work was great, yet her commendation was not in its greatness but in the oil laid up within — the very lesson the Epistle commands and the Gospel dramatizes.
Applicatio
The parable is severe because the danger it describes is so easily overlooked. The foolish virgins are not the dissolute or the faithless; they are consecrated souls who carry lamps and go forth to meet the Bridegroom, and who fail at the last for want of the one thing that could not be seen. The peril, then, is not the absence of works but the hollowing-out of works by the search for human regard — the lamp lit for the eyes of men while the vessel stands empty before God. The remedy is the oil the wise virgins kept: a love of God that does not advertise itself, an intention referred wholly to Him, a conscience that lays up its joy where the Bridegroom alone will look. Let the faithful, then, examine not the lamp but the vessel: not what is seen of their devotion, but the hidden purpose that fuels it. For the door will be shut at an hour no one knows, and at that hour no oil can be borrowed and no light kindled in haste. Vigilate itaque.
Oratio
Deus, qui novum per beátam Angelam sacrárum vírginum collégium in Ecclésia tua floréscere voluísti: da nobis, ejus intercessióne, angélicis móribus vívere; ut, terrénis ómnibus abdicátis, gáudiis pérfrui mereámur ætérnis. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum…
O God, who through blessed Angela didst will a new company of holy virgins to flourish in Thy Church: grant us, by her intercession, to live after the manner of angels; that, renouncing all earthly things, we may be made worthy to enjoy those that are eternal. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…