A reflection for Tuesday within the Seventeenth Week after Pentecost — S. Thomæ de Villanova Episcopi et Confessoris, III classis (22 September), with a commemoration at Lauds of Ss. Mauritii et Sociorum Martyrum
The Introit of this Mass is not a prayer but an announcement: Statuit ei Dominus testamentum pacis, et principem fecit eum: ut sit illi sacerdotii dignitas in æternum — “The Lord made to him a covenant of peace, and made him a prince: that the dignity of priesthood should be to him for ever” (Ecclus. 45:30). Every verb has God for its subject. The Lord established, the Lord made, the Lord gave. Nothing here is achieved; everything is received.
That is the key to the whole day. For the Epistle is a catalogue of men who were given something, and the Gospel is the scene in which the accounting is taken. Between them stands a bishop of Valencia who owned nothing when he died, not even the bed he died in.
I. Ecce sacerdos magnus
The Lesson (Ecclus. 44:16-27; 45:3-20) begins with a man lifted out of sight: “Behold a great priest, who in his days pleased God, and was found just.” It is a compressed procession of the fathers — Henoch, who pleased God and was translated; Noe, found perfect and just, made a reconciliation in the time of wrath; Abraham, the great father of a multitude of nations, with whom God established the covenant; Isaac and Jacob, who received the blessing in their hands. Then Moses, made like to the saints in glory, terrible to his enemies, to whom God gave commandments before His face. And then Aaron: clothed in the robe of glory, girded with the girdle of justice, crowned with the golden crown upon the mitre, that he might minister and have the priesthood for ever.
Read the passage with an eye to its grammar and a whole theology of the priesthood falls out of it. The vesture is given. The office is conferred. The oil is poured upon a man who did not press it out for himself. St. Paul states the principle flatly: “Neither doth any man take the honour to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was” (Heb. 5:4).
The Fathers press the consequence hard, and always in the same direction: what is given is given for others. St. Ambrose, who had the pastoral care of a great city and knew what the Church’s goods were for, laid down in the De officiis ministrorum that the Church possesses gold not to hoard but to lay out, and that it is better to preserve living souls for the Lord than to preserve metal; he broke up the consecrated vessels to ransom captives and defended the act without apology. St. Gregory the Great, in the Regula pastoralis, calls the office of governing souls the art of arts, and warns the pastor that he stands in his place not as an owner but as one who must render an account for every soul in his charge. St. John Chrysostom, in the De sacerdotio, confesses that what terrified him about the priesthood was not its dignity but its reckoning.
So the Epistle sets the terms. A deposit has been made. And the moment a deposit is made, a question is born which will not go away: what did you do with it?
II. Unicuique secundum propriam virtutem
The Gospel (Matt. 25:14-23) answers with a story about money. A man going into a far country calls his servants and delivers to them his goods, “to every one according to his proper ability” — five talents, two, one — and goes his way.
St. Gregory the Great, preaching on this very parable in his ninth homily on the Gospels, says the man who travels into a far country is our Redeemer, who in the flesh went into heaven; and the talents are the gifts of grace distributed to His household in the meantime. He then closes every escape: he who has received understanding must take care not to be silent; he who has abundance must watch that he does not grow slack in mercy; he who has skill in a craft must share its use with his neighbour; he who has the opportunity of speech must plead with the rich for the poor. No man, Gregory insists, may say that he received nothing and therefore owes nothing. Everyone has been given something, and the smallness of the gift is not a defence but an assignment.
St. Jerome, in his commentary on St. Matthew, fixes on the phrase secundum propriam virtutem, according to each man’s own ability. The distribution is unequal, he says, lest God should seem unjust in demanding of a man what he has no power to render. The Lord measures the gift to the shoulders that must bear it. And then Jerome notices the thing that makes this Gospel a consolation rather than a terror: the servant who traded two talents for four hears precisely the same words as the servant who traded five for ten — Euge, serve bone et fidelis — and enters the same joy. The reward is not calculated on the yield. It is given for the fidelity.
St. John Chrysostom, in his seventy-eighth homily on St. Matthew, draws out what the trading actually is. The talent, he says, is whatever each one has the power to do for his neighbour: if it is the word, then teaching; if it is money, then almsgiving; if it is protection or influence or skill, then the use of it for those who have none. To bury the talent is not to squander it but merely to keep it — to hold a gift intact and private, as though it were a possession rather than a trust. And Chrysostom drives it home in his characteristic way: no severity of life, no fasting, no lying on the ground will excuse a man who has neglected his neighbour. The parable is not about productivity. It is about whether the grace given to you ever reached anybody else.
Notice that the Church cuts the reading at the twenty-third verse. She will not read over a confessor’s relics the account of the servant who hid his lord’s money in the earth and was cast into exterior darkness. On this day she reads only the reward. But the buried talent stands just outside the edge of the page, and every hearer knows it is there.
III. Fidelis servus et prudens
The Communion antiphon names the man whose feast this is: “The faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath set over his family: to give them their measure of wheat in due season” (Luke 12:42). Ut det illis in tempore tritici mensuram. The Church could hardly have chosen a phrase more exactly fitted to St. Thomas of Villanova, who was the son of a miller and who spent his episcopate handing out bread.
He was born in 1488 at Fuenllana in La Mancha and raised at Villanueva de los Infantes, whose name he took. His father ground corn and was in the habit of giving away a portion of what passed through his hands; his mother did the same at the door. The son, it is said, gave away his clothes so regularly as a boy that he had to be dressed again. He went up to Alcalá at sixteen, took his degrees, and taught the arts there with such reputation that Salamanca offered him a chair. He declined it, and in 1516 entered the Augustinian friars at Salamanca instead, professing the following year and being ordained in 1518.
Thirty years of competence followed: prior at Salamanca, Burgos and Valladolid, provincial of Andalusia and of Castile, the man who in 1533 sent the first Augustinian missionaries to Mexico, court preacher and councillor to the Emperor Charles V. He refused the archbishopric of Granada outright. When Valencia was pressed on him in 1544 he refused that too, and accepted only when his religious superior commanded him under obedience — which is the one argument a friar cannot answer.
He came into a see that had not had a resident archbishop in roughly a hundred years. The chapter, according to custom, presented him with a large sum to furnish his palace. He thanked them, sent the whole of it to the hospital, and observed that the poor were in greater need of furniture than he was. He kept the habit he had received as a novice and mended it himself; when visitors were scandalised he answered that it covered him as well as a new one would. He fed four and five hundred poor at his gate daily. He paid for every foundling brought to him and pressed the nurses’ wages himself. He dowered poor girls so that poverty should not drive them elsewhere, ransomed captives out of Barbary, and sent alms so quietly that much of it was only discovered afterwards.
The objection that is always made to such a man was made to him: that many of his beggars were impostors, and that indiscriminate giving rewards idleness. His reply is worth memorising, because it is a piece of moral theology and not a sentiment. If there are those among them who come by fraud, he said in substance, let the fault be theirs and not mine; I am to answer for what I gave, not for what they deserved — and inquiry may follow the relief, but it must not precede it. He did not deny that abuses existed. He denied that the examination of a man’s worthiness is the condition of feeding him.
St. Augustine, whose Rule he professed, had taught him the ground of it: call nothing your own, but let everything be common among you. St. Basil had said that the bread you are holding belongs to the hungry man, and the cloak in your chest to the naked. St. Cyprian, in the De opere et eleemosynis, had reminded the rich that they are stewards and not proprietors, and that the alms given to the poor is a loan made to Christ. Thomas of Villanova read all of this literally, which is what distinguishes a saint from a well-instructed man.
He died on the eighth of September, 1555, the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity, having ordered that whatever money remained be distributed at once. The bed he lay on was no longer his; he had given it away, and it was lent back to him for the few days he would still need it. He was beatified by Paul V in 1618 and canonised by Alexander VII in 1658. Spain called him simply el limosnero — the almsgiver.
He received five talents — a first-class mind, a famous eloquence, the confidence of an emperor — and he traded the whole of it for bread and catechism in the streets of Valencia. The Gospel of his Mass says such a man is not impoverished by the exchange. He enters into the joy of his lord.
IV. The commemoration: those who kept back nothing
At Lauds today the Church adds a single collect for St. Maurice and his companions, the Theban Legion. It is a small commemoration for a very large matter.
The account comes to us from St. Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, who in the fifth century wrote down the Passio as he had received it through the bishops of Geneva and Octodurum. A legion recruited in the Thebaid, Christian to a man, was marched into the Alps under Maximian and ordered at Agaunum — the place now called Saint-Maurice in the Valais — to join in the sacrifices and in the hunting down of Christians. They refused. They sent word that they were the emperor’s soldiers and would fight his enemies, but that they were first the servants of God, and that hands which had been given to Him would not be turned against the innocent. The legion was decimated; they held; it was decimated a second time; they held again. Maurice the primicerius, Exuperius and Candidus encouraged them, and in the end they laid down their arms and were cut to pieces where they stood, offering no resistance at all.
Historians will tell you, rightly, that the numbers in Eucherius are impossible to verify and that the details of the Passio were written down a century and a half after the event. What is not in doubt is that the cult at Agaunum is ancient and continuous, that an abbey was raised over their grave in 515 which has never ceased to pray, and that the Church has kept their names in her calendar for fifteen hundred years.
Set them beside the archbishop and the day acquires its shape. Thomas of Villanova was given wealth and station and gave them away by handfuls over thirty years. Maurice and his soldiers were given nothing but their own lives and returned the whole deposit in a single afternoon. Both are the good and faithful servant; neither buried what he had; and the same sentence is spoken over both — super pauca fuisti fidelis, super multa te constituam.
V. A word for practice
The September Ember Days fall this week under the rubrics we follow — the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, the twenty-third, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. That is not an accident of the calendar you should waste. St. Leo the Great, preaching year after year on the fast of the seventh month, taught his people that the fast is only half of the observance: what is withheld from the body is to be transferred to the poor, and a fast without almsgiving is an affliction of the flesh rather than a purification of the soul. The feast of the almsgiver stands on the eve of the fast, which is a piece of liturgical arrangement worth obeying.
First, examine. Not “am I generous,” which everyone concedes in the abstract, but: what have I been given that has never yet reached another person? Name the thing. Competence, money, time, patience, a skill, a knowledge of the faith, a position from which you could speak for someone who has no voice. Gregory’s list is uncomfortably concrete for a reason.
Second, do. Take the Embertide seriously this week, and let the fast have a destination. Reckon what the meals would have cost and give it away, and give it to someone who cannot repay you and will not thank you properly. If an objection rises in you about whether they deserve it, remember the archbishop’s answer: the inquiry may follow the relief; it must not precede it.
Third, pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui beatum Thomam Pontificem insignis in pauperes misericordiæ virtute decorasti: quæsumus; ut, eius intercessione, in omnes, qui te deprecantur, divitias misericordiæ tuæ benignus effundas.
“O God, who didst adorn blessed Thomas the Bishop with the virtue of signal mercy toward the poor: grant, we beseech Thee, that by his intercession Thou mayest bountifully pour forth the riches of Thy mercy upon all who call upon Thee.”
And for the martyrs, at Lauds: Annue, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut sanctorum Martyrum tuorum Mauritii et Sociorum eius nos lætificet festiva solemnitas; ut, quorum suffragiis nitimur, eorum natalitiis gloriemur.
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the Crowning with Thorns, where the King who owned nothing is vested in a soldier’s cloak by soldiers — and remember at that decade the legion that would not draw the sword.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up fasting and almsgiving together as the Fathers taught them, and would be timely with Embertide beginning tomorrow. The Theology and Doctrine path treats mercy and almsgiving in their proper place among the virtues — why St. Thomas Aquinas ranks almsgiving as an act of charity commanded under precept and not merely counselled, and what the obligation of superfluous goods actually binds a man to.
Sancte Thoma de Villanova, ora pro nobis. Sancti Mauriti et Socii, orate pro nobis.