A Reflection on the Propers of S. Apollinaris, Bishop and Martyr
23 July · III. classis · Commemoratio ad Laudes tantum: S. Liborii Episcopi et Confessoris
I. Liturgical Context
The twenty-third of July stands within the long green stretch of Tempus per Annum after Pentecost, and the Church sets before us Apollinaris of Ravenna, reckoned by the tradition of that see as its first bishop and a disciple of the Prince of the Apostles himself. The rank is third class; the Mass is proper rather than merely drawn from the Common of a Martyr Bishop, which is itself a mark of the antiquity and weight of his cultus. Ravenna, once the seat of the Western emperors and afterwards of the exarchs, honoured him as father and founder, and the great basilica at Classe still bears his name.
At Lauds only, a commemoration is made of Liborius, Bishop of Le Mans and Confessor, whose relics were translated to Paderborn in the ninth century and whose feast binds Gaul and Saxony together in a single memory. The pairing is quietly instructive: a martyr and a confessor, one who bore witness by blood and one who bore witness by the long patience of office. Both are bishops. The propers accordingly speak of the episcopal charge from two sides — the burden as the First Epistle of Peter describes it, and the temptation to which that burden is subject as the Gospel of Luke exposes it.
It should be said plainly at the outset that the historical anchoring of Apollinaris is uneven. That Ravenna venerated him from a very early period is beyond dispute; the details of his passion as they come down to us belong rather to the order of traditio pia than to documented history, and are received here for their devotional and catechetical weight, not asserted as verified fact.
II. The Epistle — 1 Peter 5:1–11
Seniores ergo, qui in vobis sunt, obsecro, consenior et testis Christi passionum, qui et ejus, quæ in futuro revelanda est, gloriæ communicator: pascite qui in vobis est gregem Dei…
The Apostle does not command; he entreats. And he entreats as one of them — consenior, a fellow-elder. This is the first thing to notice and the thing most easily passed over. Peter, to whom the flock was committed by the lakeside in the words Pasce agnos meos… pasce oves meas, does not stand above the elders of the churches and issue a decree. He places himself beside them and appeals. Authority in the Church is real, and Peter’s is supreme; but its exercise here is the exercise of a shepherd among shepherds, and the manner is as much a part of the instruction as the matter.
Three antitheses govern the charge. Feed the flock not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but voluntarily; neither as lording it over the clergy, but being made a pattern of the flock from the heart. Each names a real corruption of pastoral office: the man who serves because he cannot escape, the man who serves for what he can extract, and the man who serves in order to rule. The remedy in each case is not the abolition of office but its interior conversion. The bishop does not cease to govern; he ceases to govern for himself.
St. Augustine, preaching on the pastors of Israel in his exposition of Ezechiel, distinguishes with great care between him who loves the office and him who loves the sheep, and observes that a man may hold the place of a shepherd and yet be seeking his own milk and his own wool — the sustenance and the honour that the flock affords — rather than the flock’s salvation (Sermo 46, on Ezechiel 34). He does not deny that the shepherd may lawfully live of the altar; he asks what the shepherd is for. The question is one of finality, and it is asked of every man in orders.
St. Gregory the Great, whose Regula Pastoralis is the West’s enduring commentary on this very Epistle, sets down the governing principle at the outset: the government of souls is the art of arts, and no man should undertake it lightly, since he who is unskilled in the care of wounds fears to be called a physician of them (Reg. Past. I.1). Gregory’s whole treatise unfolds Peter’s forma facti gregis — the pastor is not merely to speak the pattern but to be it. What he teaches by word he must first have become, or his word will be a sound without substance.
The Apostle then turns from the pastor to the whole body: Adolescentes, subditi estote senioribus. And then, to all alike, the great counsel — omnes autem invicem humilitatem insinuate, quia Deus superbis resistit, humilibus autem dat gratiam. Humility is not one virtue among the pastoral virtues; it is the condition on which grace is given at all. St. Augustine returns to this again and again, and nowhere more sharply than in his letter to Dioscorus, where he answers the question of what is first in the Christian religion with the single word humilitas, and again for the second and the third (Ep. 118.22).
There follows the sobering image: adversarius vester diabolus tanquam leo rugiens circuit, quærens quem devoret. The lion does not roar at random. He circles, and he seeks. St. Peter Chrysologus — himself a bishop of Ravenna, and so a successor in the very see Apollinaris is honoured as founding — preached constantly on vigilance and on the mercy that meets it, and it is not fanciful to hear in this Epistle, read at Ravenna’s founder’s Mass, the voice of that whole episcopal line. Cui resistite fortes in fide. The resistance is not solitary: it is made fortes in fide, in the strength of the faith held with the whole Church.
And the conclusion is pure consolation: Deus autem omnis gratiæ… modicum passos ipse perficiet, confirmabit solidabitque. The suffering is modicum — a little while. The perfecting, confirming, and establishing is God’s own work.
III. The Gospel — Luke 22:24–30
Facta est autem et contentio inter eos, quis eorum videretur esse major.
The placing is what appalls. This dispute breaks out in the Cenacle, after the institution of the Holy Eucharist, with the words of the covenant in His Blood still hanging in the air. The Apostles have just received the Body and Blood of the Lord, and they fall to arguing about precedence. St. Bede, commenting on the passage, observes that the contention arose from a carnal understanding of the kingdom, the Apostles still measuring greatness by the standards of the world they had been called out of.
Our Lord does not scold. He redefines. Reges gentium dominantur eorum: et qui potestatem habent super eos, benefici vocantur. The rulers of the nations exercise dominion, and — this is the sting — those who hold power over them are called benefactors. The title is conferred, often enough, by the very power it flatters. Vos autem non sic. The Christian order is not a gentler version of the pagan one; it is constituted differently at the root.
Sed qui major est in vobis, fiat sicut minor: et qui præcessor est, sicut ministrator. Note that Christ does not deny that there is a greater among them, nor that one goes before. Hierarchy is not abolished — He is at that moment establishing it, and will within hours confirm Peter’s place with ego autem rogavi pro te, ut non deficiat fides tua. What is transformed is the mode. The greater is to become as the younger; the one who leads, as the one who waits at table.
And the ground of it is Christological: ego autem in medio vestrum sum, sicut qui ministrat. St. Augustine draws out what this means — that the Lord who is served by angels made Himself the servant of men, and that the humility of the Head is the pattern and the source of the humility of the members. The Apostle’s forma gregis in the Epistle has its origin here: the pattern the pastor is to be, Christ has first been.
Then, without transition, the promise: Vos autem estis, qui permansistis mecum in tentationibus meis: et ego dispono vobis sicut disposuit mihi Pater meus regnum, ut edatis et bibatis super mensam meam in regno meo: et sedeatis super thronos.The thrones are given — but they are given to those who permansistis, who remained. Not to those who claimed precedence, but to those who stayed. St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his homilies on Luke, presses this point: the dignity is real and the reward is royal, but it is the fruit of perseverance in the Master’s trials, not of contention over rank.
The thrones are promised in the same breath as the towel.
IV. Synthesis
Set the two readings side by side and the structure of the day emerges with great clarity. The Epistle gives the pastoral charge in its positive form: feed, willingly, freely, as a pattern. The Gospel gives the diagnosis of what corrupts it: the appetite for precedence, arising even at the altar, even among the Twelve, even after the Eucharist. And it gives the cure, which is not a technique but a Person — ego in medio vestrum sum sicut qui ministrat.
The Thomistic frame illuminates the movement. All things proceed from God and return to Him, and the return is made through Christ, who is via precisely in His humility. St. Thomas treats of humility as annexed to the virtue of temperance, restraining the inordinate appetite for one’s own excellence (ST II-II q. 161), and he is careful to insist that it does not require a man to deny the goods he has received, but to attribute them to God and to subject himself accordingly. This is why humility and episcopal authority are not in tension. The bishop who knows that his office is wholly received can wield it without appropriating it. The one who forgets this becomes what Augustine’s shepherds became — a man feeding himself.
Apollinaris stands at the meeting point of the two readings. Sent, as Ravenna’s tradition holds, by Peter himself, he received the charge Peter here writes down; and he crowned it in the manner Christ here describes, having remained with his Master in temptations. The martyr’s death is the final form of the servant’s posture: it is the last and complete refusal to be a benefactor on the world’s terms.
Liborius, commemorated at Lauds, completes the picture from the other side. He did not die by the sword. He governed Le Mans for many years and died in peace, and the Church honours him as Confessor. His witness is the long obedience — the willing feeding of the flock through decades in which nothing dramatic occurs and the leo rugiens circles all the same. Between the martyr and the confessor the whole range of the pastoral vocation is covered, and the Church, in setting them on one day, declines to let us imagine that only the spectacular counts.
V. Devotional Application
The Epistle addresses bishops and priests directly, and it would be an evasion to pretend otherwise. But the Gospel dispute was not among bishops; it was among men who had just received Communion and immediately began to compare themselves with one another. That is not an ecclesiastical failing. That is a human one, and it is ours.
Examine, then, where the contentio lives. In the parish, in the family, in the workplace, in the very circles most devoted to the restoration of tradition — for the love of good things is no protection against the appetite for standing among those who love them. Ask, with Augustine, whether it is the sheep that are loved or the milk and the wool.
Ask further whether the service rendered is spontanee — freely, from the heart — or grudgingly, from constraint. Peter names the willing spirit as the mark that distinguishes the shepherd from the hireling. Duty performed unwillingly is still duty, and is not to be despised; but it is not yet what the Apostle asks.
And take the last counsel as it is given: omnem sollicitudinem vestram projicientes in eum, quoniam ipsi cura est de vobis. Cast the whole of it. The anxiety that so often accompanies responsibility is frequently the residue of the belief that the work is one’s own.
VI. The Collects
Missa — S. Apollinaris
Deus, fidélium remunerátor animárum: præsta; ut beáti Apollináris Mártyris tui atque Pontíficis, cujus venerándam celebrámus festivitátem, précibus indulgéntiam consequámur. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum…
O God, the rewarder of faithful souls: grant that by the prayers of blessed Apollinaris, Thy Martyr and Bishop, whose venerable feast we celebrate, we may obtain pardon. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…
Commemoratio ad Laudes — S. Liborii
Deus, qui nos beáti Libórii Confessóris tui atque Pontíficis ánnua solemnitáte lætíficas: concéde propítius; ut cujus natalítia cólimus, étiam actiónes imitémur. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum…
O God, who dost gladden us by the yearly solemnity of blessed Liborius, Thy Confessor and Bishop: mercifully grant that we who keep his heavenly birthday may also imitate his deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ…
VII. Aspiration
Domine Jesu, qui in medio discipulorum sicut minister stetisti: aufer a corde meo contentionem de primatu, et da mihi in loco meo servire libenter. Amen.
Lord Jesus, who stood among Thy disciples as one that serveth: take from my heart all contention over precedence, and grant me to serve willingly in the place appointed me. Amen.
VIII. For Further Study
Primary and patristic
- St. Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis, Part I and Part II — the sustained commentary on the pastoral office presupposed by this Epistle.
- St. Augustine, Sermo 46 (De pastoribus) — on shepherds who feed themselves; and Epistula 118, on humility as first, second, and third in the Christian religion.
- St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentarii in Lucam, on Luke 22 — the dignity of the Apostles as fruit of perseverance.
- St. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium Expositio, ad loc.
Scholastic
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ II-II q. 161 (humility) and q. 185 (the episcopal state).
Hagiographical
- Acta Sanctorum, July, under 23 July, for the dossier on Apollinaris; the passion narrative is to be read as devotional tradition rather than documentary history.
Forward links within the project
- The Tu es Petrus dossier on Petrine primacy — Peter’s consenior here bears directly on how supreme authority is exercised.
- The Sacred Liturgy path, on the theology of the episcopate and the Mass of a Martyr Bishop.
- Lives of the Saints: Peter Chrysologus (4 December), Ravenna’s other great pastoral voice.
IX. Source Transparency
Scripture is given in the Vulgate with Douay-Rheims rendering. Patristic references are rendered as paraphrase with locus rather than direct quotation; they await collation against critical editions (CCSL, CSEL, SC, PL) before any of the summarised positions is presented as verbatim testimony. Aquinas is secured to question level; article-level citation remains outstanding.
The Collects above are NON-AUTHENTICATED and must be collated against a physically printed 1962 Missale Romanum prior to publication.
The historical claims concerning Apollinaris — his mission from St. Peter, his episcopate at Ravenna, and the circumstances of his martyrdom — belong to Tier 3, traditio pia, and are presented for devotional and catechetical weight rather than as established fact. The antiquity of his cultus at Ravenna is Tier 2. The weakest-anchored claim in this reflection is the direct Petrine commissioning of Apollinaris; this is the priority verification item.