1 August — Commemoration (1962 Missale Romanum)
I. Identitas et Origines
The Holy Machabees occupy a place in the Roman calendar that no other saints share: they are the only saints of the Old Covenant to whom the universal Church of the Roman rite assigns a liturgical commemoration. On the first day of August, the Church honors under this single title a company of nine: Eleazar, an aged scribe and teacher of the Law; seven brothers, unnamed in the sacred text; and their mother, likewise unnamed in Scripture, whom later tradition has called Salomone in the East. They suffered at the hands of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, in the persecution that fell upon Israel around the year 167 before Christ, when the king sought to extinguish the religion of the true God and to compel the Jews to abandon the Law of Moses for the customs of the Gentiles.
The name “Machabees” is, strictly speaking, borrowed. It belongs properly to Judas Machabeus and his brothers, the sons of Mathathias, who took up arms against the persecutor; the martyrs of August 1 were not of that family, so far as the record shows. But because their passion is recounted in the Second Book of Machabees, and because they died in the same confession for which the sons of Mathathias fought, the name passed to them in Christian usage from the earliest centuries, and the Church has never seen fit to disturb it. The sacred narrative of their martyrdom stands in the sixth and seventh chapters of Second Machabees, a book which the Catholic Church, against every later denial, holds as canonical and divinely inspired Scripture.
Their sufferings took place under the direct gaze of the king — the tradition of the Church, followed by the ancient cult at Antioch, placed the martyrdom in that city, where their tomb was venerated from early Christian times.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
Of the lives of these martyrs before their passion, Scripture tells us little directly; but what it tells us is enough to disclose the shape of their souls.
Eleazar was “one of the chief of the scribes, a man advanced in years, and of a comely countenance” (2 Mach. 6:18). Commanded to eat swine’s flesh in violation of the Law, he “choosing rather a most glorious death than a hateful life, went forward voluntarily to the torment.” What follows is one of the most piercing moral scenes in the Old Testament: the officers, who had known him long, privately offered to substitute lawful meat, that he might merely pretend to eat what the king commanded and so save his life. Eleazar refused, and his reason is the reason of a teacher: “For it doth not become our age, said he, to dissemble: whereby many young persons might think that Eleazar, at the age of fourscore and ten years, was gone over to the life of the heathens: and so they, through my dissimulation, and for a little time of a corruptible life, should be deceived” (2 Mach. 6:24–25). Here is the virtue of religion joined to the charity of a shepherd of souls: he would not purchase his own life at the price of scandal to the young. He died under the blows, saying that though he might have escaped death, he suffered gladly in soul for the fear of God.
The seven brothers and their mother were then seized. Each in turn was tortured with fire, with the wheel, with mutilations that the sacred author does not soften — and each in turn confessed. Their words, preserved by the Holy Ghost, are a catechism of the theology of martyrdom. The second brother, at the point of death, declared: “Thou indeed, O most wicked man, destroyest us out of this present life: but the King of the world will raise us up, who die for his laws, in the resurrection of eternal life” (2 Mach. 7:9). The fourth: “It is better, being put to death by men, to look for hope from God, to be raised up again by him: for, as to thee, thou shalt have no resurrection unto life” (2 Mach. 7:14).
The mother stands above them all, “to be admired above measure, and worthy to be remembered by good men” (2 Mach. 7:20). She watched her seven sons perish in the space of one day and bore it with good courage “for the hope that she had in God.” In the Hebrew tongue she exhorted each of them, “being filled with wisdom; and joining a man’s heart to a woman’s thought.” Her words to them contain, in seed, the doctrine of creation from nothing: “I beseech thee, my son, look upon heaven and earth, and all that is in them: and consider that God made them out of nothing, and mankind also” (2 Mach. 7:28). Last of all, after her sons, the mother was consumed.
The virtues here displayed are fortitude in its supreme act, which is martyrdom; the virtue of religion, which renders to God the worship that is His due even at the cost of life; hope, fixed explicitly upon the resurrection of the body; and in the mother, a charity that preferred the eternal life of her children to their temporal life and to her own natural consolation. St. Thomas teaches that martyrdom is the greatest proof of the perfection of charity, since a man’s love is proved by what he is willing to surrender for it, and life is the most beloved of natural goods (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 124). The Machabees surrendered it seven times over before a mother’s eyes, and then an eighth time in her.
III. Testimonium et Prophetia
Because these martyrs died a century and a half before the Incarnation, their place in the Christian calendar posed a question the Fathers did not evade: how can those who died before Christ be honored as martyrs of Christ? The answer the Fathers gave is itself a lesson in the unity of the two Testaments.
St. Augustine, preaching on their feast, taught that the Machabees were in truth martyrs of Christ, though Christ was still hidden: they died for the Law, and Christ was veiled within the Law as its author and its end; what the Christian martyrs confessed openly, the Machabees confessed under the veil, so that their death for the Law of God was a death for the Word of God who gave it (cf. Augustine, Sermones 300–301, on the Solemnity of the Machabees). He observed further that the Church would not have gathered their memory into her worship had she not recognized in them her own martyrs before her own time. St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his oration in their praise, made the same point for the East: though they suffered before the Passion of Christ, they suffered in conformity with it, and none who died before Christ came were made perfect apart from faith in Him (cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 15, In Machabaeorum laudem). St. Cyprian, two generations before either, had already set the seven brothers before the confessors of the Decian persecution as the very pattern of constancy — seven, he noted, being the number of fullness and perfection (cf. Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, ch. 11).
Their testimony is also doctrinal, and this is the second dimension of their witness. The seventh chapter of Second Machabees is among the clearest Old Testament professions of the resurrection of the body — not a shadowy survival, but the restoration by God of tongues, hands, and members surrendered under torture (2 Mach. 7:11). The mother’s words at verse 28 give the Church one of her principal scriptural loci for creation ex nihilo, a truth later defined at the Fourth Lateran Council and the Vatican Council. And the same book, a few chapters on, grounds the Church’s constant practice of prayer for the dead: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins” (2 Mach. 12:46). It is no accident that the deniers of Purgatory found it necessary to deny the canonicity of the very book in which these martyrs stand. Their feast is thus a standing rebuke to that denial: the Church does not celebrate the saints of apocrypha.
IV. Mors et Cultus
The martyrs died at the persecutor’s hands about the year 167 before Christ, and their memory was kept first among the Jews and then, without interruption, among the Christians. Their cult is among the most ancient in the entire calendar. At Antioch, Christian tradition venerated their tomb, and a basilica in their honor stood in that city — a fact remarkable in itself, since the ancient Church did not otherwise raise churches over the saints of the Old Law. St. Augustine drew attention to precisely this: that at Antioch, where the martyrs suffered, Christians kept a basilica of the Machabees (cf. Augustine, Sermo 300). Both St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. John Chrysostom preached panegyrics for their feast in the fourth century, Chrysostom’s homilies on the Machabees dwelling with particular tenderness on the mother (cf. Chrysostom, Homiliae de Maccabeis, in PG 50). The feast appears on August 1 in the ancient martyrologies of both East and West.
Their relics, venerated at Antioch, were in later centuries translated to Rome, where they were placed in the basilica of St. Peter ad Vincula on the Esquiline — so that the two observances of August 1, St. Peter’s Chains and the Holy Machabees, were joined not only in the calendar but under one altar. A portion of relics attributed to the Machabees was also venerated at Cologne, where a celebrated shrine of the Machabees was kept, making that city, with Rome, an heir of the Antiochene cult in the West.
In the Roman calendar as it stood for centuries, August 1 was the feast of St. Peter’s Chains, with the Holy Machabees as a commemoration within that Mass. The Code of Rubrics of 1960, incorporated into the 1962 Missale Romanum, removed the feast of St. Peter’s Chains from the general calendar; the Machabees, however, were retained, so that in the 1962 books August 1 is a fourth-class feria on which the Holy Machabees are commemorated — the sole observance of the day, and the sole remaining liturgical veneration of Old Testament saints in the general calendar of the Roman rite.
In the East their veneration has never dimmed. The Byzantine calendar keeps August 1 as the feast of the Seven Holy Maccabee Martyrs, their mother — called Solomone or Salomonia in that tradition, which also supplies names for the seven brothers — and their teacher Eleazar. The day opens the Dormition fast, so that the Eastern faithful enter their preparation for the Assumption of the Mother of God under the patronage of a mother who gave seven sons to God in one day. The naming of the mother and brothers belongs to traditio pia: it carries the devotional weight of long usage in the East, but rests on no scriptural or early documentary foundation, and the Roman books have never adopted it.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The spiritual doctrine of the Machabees may be gathered under three heads.
The refusal of dissimulation. Eleazar’s refusal to eat lawful meat while seeming to eat unlawful meat cuts to the root of every accommodation with error. He was offered a path that preserved both his life and, technically, his obedience to the Law; he rejected it because the faith is confessed not only in the substance of acts but in their public meaning. An old man’s example belongs to the young who watch him. In an age fluent in the arts of plausible compromise, Eleazar teaches that there are moments when the appearance of apostasy is itself apostasy, because scandal is a sin against the souls of others.
The maternal oblation. The mother of the Machabees is the Old Testament’s nearest figure to the Mother of Sorrows. She did not merely endure the deaths of her sons; she exhorted them to die well, preferring their fidelity to their survival. The Fathers saw in her the image of Holy Church, who begets her children unto eternal life and counts their temporal death a small price. Christian parents may take from her the hard truth that the first duty of a father or mother is not to keep children alive and comfortable but to deliver them to God.
Hope of the resurrection. The brothers did not die stoically, out of contempt for the body; they died counting on getting their bodies back. “These I have from heaven… and from him I hope to receive them again” (2 Mach. 7:11). Christian mortification and Christian martyrdom alike are unintelligible without this hope. The body surrendered is not despised but entrusted.
VI. Oratio
Collecta (Commemoratio Ss. Martyrum Machabæorum):
Fraterna nos, Dómine, Mártyrum tuórum coróna lætíficet: quæ et fídei nostræ prǽbeat increménta virtútum; et multíplici nos suffrágio consolétur. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum, Fílium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
English:
May the brotherly crown of Thy Martyrs gladden us, O Lord: may it both afford to our faith an increase of virtues, and console us by their manifold intercession. 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.
The Collect’s opening image — fraterna corona, the “brotherly crown” — is itself a small theology of the feast: one crown, woven of seven martyrdoms and a mother’s, as the Church honors one witness given by many mouths.
VII. Aspiratio
O God of our fathers, who didst strengthen seven brothers and their mother to prefer Thy Law to their lives: grant me, through their prayers, a faith that will not dissemble, a hope fixed on the resurrection of the body, and a heart that counts nothing dear beside Thee. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Tier 1 — Scripture and primary witnesses:
- 2 Machabees 6:18–31 (the martyrdom of Eleazar) and 7:1–41 (the seven brothers and their mother), Douay-Rheims. The indispensable text; nothing substitutes for reading the seventh chapter whole.
- 2 Machabees 12:43–46, for the doctrinal weight the Church attaches to this book.
Tier 2 — Patristic and historical tradition:
- St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 15, In Machabaeorum laudem (PG 35).
- St. John Chrysostom, homilies on the Machabees (PG 50).
- St. Augustine, Sermones 300–301 (PL 38), on the solemnity of the Machabees.
- St. Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, ch. 11, on the seven brothers as pattern for confessors.
- St. Ambrose, De Jacob et vita beata, Book II, which draws the Maccabean martyrs into his account of the blessed life.
- The Fourth Book of Machabees — non-canonical, but an ancient Jewish philosophical meditation on these same martyrs, known to and used by the Fathers; to be read as a literary witness to the antiquity of their cult, not as Scripture.
Tier 3 — Devotional and later tradition:
- The Byzantine synaxarion accounts for August 1, including the names given to the mother and brothers in Eastern usage.
- Butler’s Lives of the Saints, August 1.
Learning-path continuations: The Machabees open directly onto the Church History path (the persecution of Antiochus as prefigurement of the Roman persecutions, and of every persecution since), and onto Theology and Doctrine, where the resurrection of the body, creation ex nihilo, and prayer for the dead — all anchored in Second Machabees — form a natural unit. Their standing in both calendars also feeds the East–West comparative thread: no saints better embody a cult held in common before the division.