On the night of the third of November 1584, the Archbishop of Milan lay dying in his palace. He was forty-six years old. He had asked to be laid on sackcloth and ashes, and he died with the words Ecce venio, “Behold, I come.” The Church keeps his feast the next day. It is the first saint’s feast after the two great days of All Saints and All Souls, and the Mass she gives it is the Common of a Confessor Bishop, the Mass Statuit. The Introit is taken from the praise of the priest Phinees in Ecclesiasticus: 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). The psalm verse that follows is Memento, Domine, David, et omnis mansuetudinis eius: “O Lord, remember David, and all his meekness” (Ps. 131:1).
The rest of the chants say the same thing in other words. The Gradual repeats the opening of the Epistle: Ecce sacerdos magnus, “Behold a great priest.” The Alleluia is the oath of Psalm 109: Tu es sacerdos in æternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech, “Thou art a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech.” The Offertory is God’s own word about His shepherd-king: Inveni David servum meum, “I have found David My servant” (Ps. 88:21). And the Communion is a beatitude from the lips of Christ: Beatus servus, quem, cum venerit dominus, invenerit vigilantem, “Blessed is that servant, whom when his lord shall come he shall find watching” (Matt. 24:46). This Mass is said for many bishops. It fits few of them as closely as it fits St. Charles.
It is also Wednesday within the twenty-third week after Pentecost, and the end of the liturgical year is near. The Gospel of the talents belongs to the long discourse in which Our Lord speaks of His return in judgment (Matt. 24-25). In November the Church reads it with that return in view.
At Lauds today the Church also commemorates two martyrs of Bologna, St. Vitalis and St. Agricola, who suffered under Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century. Agricola was a Christian master and Vitalis was his slave. They will appear again at the end of this reflection, because their story is a commentary on the Gospel of master and servants. They also have a link with St. Charles: it was St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who found their bodies, and St. Charles was Ambrose’s successor in that see.
I. Ecce sacerdos magnus: the Epistle
“Behold a great priest, who in his days pleased God, and was found just: and in the time of wrath he was made a reconciliation. There was not found the like to him, who kept the law of the most High. Therefore by an oath the Lord made him to increase among his people. He gave him the blessing of all nations, and confirmed his covenant upon his head. He acknowledged him in his blessings: he preserved for him his mercy: and he found grace before the eyes of the Lord. He glorified him in the sight of kings, and gave him a crown of glory. He made an everlasting covenant with him, and gave him a great priesthood: and made him blessed in glory. To execute the office of the priesthood, and to have praise in his name, and to offer him a worthy incense for an odour of sweetness.” (Ecclus. 44:16-27; 45:3-20)
A portrait made of many faces. This lesson is not one continuous passage of Scripture. The Church has gathered verses from the great hymn in praise of the fathers of Israel (Ecclus. 44-50) and joined them into one portrait. In their own place the lines praise several men. Enoch “pleased God.” Noah “was found just: and in the time of wrath he was made a reconciliation.” Abraham received “the blessing of all nations.” Moses was glorified “in the sight of kings.” Aaron was given “a great priesthood” and the office of offering incense. The Church takes the holiness of all of them and lays it on one head, the head of the bishop she honours today.
She can do this because every one of those men pointed to Christ. The Epistle to the Hebrews calls Him the true High Priest: “holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens” (Heb. 7:26). He is the one who truly “in the time of wrath was made a reconciliation,” for “God indeed was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). A bishop is called sacerdos magnus because he shares the fulness of Christ’s priesthood. The praise of Ecclesiasticus is first Christ’s, and then it belongs to those who carry His priesthood faithfully.
Who in his days pleased God. St. Charles did not begin as a likely candidate for this praise. He was born in 1538 into one of the great families of Lombardy. When he was twenty-one his uncle was elected Pope as Pius IV, and within weeks the young man was a cardinal, administrator of the Archdiocese of Milan, and in practice the Pope’s secretary of state. He had wealth, rank and every opportunity to enjoy them. Then in 1562 his elder brother Federico died suddenly. Charles took it as a summons. He turned to prayer and penance, was ordained priest and consecrated bishop in 1563, and set his face toward Milan.
In those Roman years he did the Church a service that this blog, of all places, should remember. He worked to reconvene the Council of Trent for its last period and to bring it to a close in 1563. Afterward he oversaw the commission that produced the Council’s catechism for parish priests, the Catechismus Romanus, published in 1566. Four and a half centuries of catechesis rest on that book.
In the time of wrath he was made a reconciliation. The line was written of Noah, who stood between God’s judgment and a sinful world. Its fullest image in the Old Testament comes from Aaron. When a plague broke out among the people in the desert, Moses told him to take his censer. Aaron “ran into the midst of the multitude which the burning fire was now destroying, and he offered the incense: and standing between the dead and the living, he prayed for the people, and the plague ceased” (Num. 16:47-48).
Milan saw that scene repeated. In 1576 plague struck the city. The civil governor and many of the nobility fled. The Archbishop stayed. He organized care for the sick, visited the plague-houses himself, and brought the sacraments to the dying. He sold or gave away what he owned, and tradition records that the hangings of his palace were cut up to clothe the poor. He led processions of penance through the streets barefoot, a rope about his neck, carrying the relic of the Holy Nail venerated in Milan’s cathedral, and offering himself to God for his people. The Milanese still call that epidemic la peste di San Carlo, the plague of St. Charles. He stood between the dead and the living with the censer of his prayer, and he did not leave his post.
To offer him a worthy incense. The lesson ends with the priest’s proper work: “to execute the office of the priesthood… and to offer him a worthy incense for an odour of sweetness.” The incense of the old Law was a figure of prayer (Ps. 140:2; Apoc. 8:3-4) and of the Sacrifice which the prophet foresaw offered “in every place” (Mal. 1:11). St. Charles understood that the reform of the Church begins at the altar. He wrote detailed instructions on how churches should be built and furnished (Instructiones fabricæ et supellectilis ecclesiasticæ, 1577) so that every sanctuary in his diocese would be worthy of the Mass. He defended the ancient Ambrosian rite of Milan, which Rome left to that Church. He wanted the worship of God done carefully, because he believed it is the first thing a bishop owes.
St. Augustine, preaching on the anniversary of his own consecration, put the bishop’s position in a sentence (Sermo 340.1). He says, in substance, that he is a bishop for his people and a Christian with them. The first is a burden and a danger; the second is a grace and a salvation. The “great priest” of today’s Epistle is great in the office he carries for others. He is saved, like everyone else, by what he shares with them.
II. Euge, serve bone et fidelis: the Gospel
“At that time, Jesus spoke to his disciples this parable: A man going into a far country, called his servants, and delivered to them his goods; and to one he gave five talents, and to another two, and to another one, to every one according to his proper ability: and immediately he took his journey. And he that had received the five talents, went his way, and traded with the same, and gained other five. And in like manner he that had received the two, gained other two. But he that had received the one, going his way digged into the earth, and hid his lord’s money. But after a long time the lord of those servants came, and reckoned with them. And he that had received the five talents coming, brought other five talents, saying: Lord, thou didst deliver to me five talents, behold I have gained other five over and above. His lord said to him: Well done, good and faithful servant, because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. And he also that had received the two talents came and said: Lord, thou deliveredst two talents to me: behold I have gained other two. His lord said to him: Well done, good and faithful servant: because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matt. 25:14-23)
A man going into a far country. St. Jerome, commenting on this parable (Commentarii in Matthæum IV, on 25:14), has no doubt who the man is. He is Christ, who after His resurrection went up victorious to the Father, and who before He went called His Apostles and entrusted to them the teaching of the Gospel. The “far country” is heaven, far from us though not from Him. The “long time” is the age of the Church, in which we now live. The return is His coming in judgment.
To every one according to his proper ability. A talent was not a coin. It was a weight of silver equal to many years’ wages for a labourer. Even the servant who received one talent was entrusted with a fortune. That is the first thing to see in the parable. Nobody is given nothing.
St. Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel in the homily the Church reads at Matins in the Common of a Confessor Bishop (Homiliæ in Evangelia 9). He reads the three gifts in a well-known way. The five talents, he says, stand for the five senses, the gift of knowing the outward world. The two stand for understanding joined to action. The one stands for understanding alone. The details of the allegory matter less than the conclusion he draws from it: no one can truthfully say, “I have received no talent.” Every one of us has been given something to trade with, and every one of us will be asked what he did with it.
He digged into the earth. Gregory then explains the third servant. To hide the talent in the earth, he says, is to bury the gift one has received in earthly business. It is to take a mind that was given for God and spend it entirely on the concerns of this world. The servant did not lose the money and did not steal it. He simply kept it safe and useless.
Gregory turns this into a warning for pastors and for everyone with a gift to share. Whoever has understanding, he says, must take care not to keep silent. Whoever has wealth must not let mercy grow cold in him. Whoever has skill in the affairs of life must share its use with his neighbour. Whoever has the ear of the powerful must use it to speak for the poor. A gift is given to us, but never only for us.
Today’s Gospel stops before the third servant gives his account. The Church leaves out his excuses and his sentence. She wants us to look at the two faithful servants, who are the pattern she holds up on a confessor’s feast. But she does not let us forget that the third servant exists. Gregory’s homily, read at Matins, keeps him before our eyes.
Five talents, traded to the last. St. Charles received five talents and more. He had birth, intelligence, wealth, influence at the papal court, and from 1563 the fulness of the priesthood. He could easily have buried them, not in idleness, but in the comfortable round of a Renaissance cardinal’s life in Rome. Many bishops of his time did exactly that. Milan had gone for about eighty years without an archbishop living among his people.
The Council of Trent had just commanded bishops to reside in their dioceses and feed their flocks in person (Session XXIII, Decretum de reformatione, canon 1). It had also commanded that every diocese found a seminary for the training of its priests (Session XXIII, canon 18). Charles took these decrees as orders. He went to Milan, and after his uncle’s death in 1565 he made it his home for good. He held provincial councils and diocesan synods, whose acts became a handbook of reform for bishops all over the Catholic world. He founded seminaries. He visited every parish of his vast diocese, including villages high in the Alps. He organized the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine so that children and the unlettered would be taught the catechism every Sunday. He founded the Oblates of St. Ambrose, secular priests who placed themselves at the bishop’s disposal. He reformed religious houses that had grown lax, at real cost to himself: in 1569 a member of the Humiliati, an order he was trying to reform, fired an arquebus at him while he knelt at evening prayer in his chapel. Tradition holds that the ball struck him and fell harmlessly to the floor, and that he went on praying.
This is what trading with the talents looks like. Charles did not keep the Church’s reform safe in a book of decrees. He spent it in the streets and parishes of Milan until he had nothing left. He wore himself out and died at forty-six. “Behold I have gained other five over and above.”
Preach first by your life. St. Charles once told his priests at a synod how a pastor keeps his own talent from being buried while he spends himself on others (Acta Ecclesiæ Mediolanensis, address to his last synod). His counsel, in substance, was this. If a spark of God’s love has been lit in you, do not let it be blown out. Do not neglect your own soul while you care for others. Pray before you preach, and prepare before you celebrate the sacraments. Above all, preach first by the way you live. A priest who does all the Church’s work and lets his own prayer die has buried a talent too.
Faithful over a few things. One more detail of the parable deserves attention. The servant who gained two talents receives exactly the same praise as the servant who gained five, word for word. St. John Chrysostom notices this (Homiliæ in Matthæum 78). The second servant is honoured equally, he says, because his diligence was equal, even though his gain was smaller. God does not measure our work by its size. He measures it by our faithfulness with what we were given.
This is a consolation for the rest of us. Very few people are given five talents in the way St. Charles was. Most of us are given two, or one, and a life that no historian will record. The Lord says the same words to all of His faithful servants: Euge, serve bone et fidelis… intra in gaudium domini tui. “Well done, good and faithful servant… enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” He also says that what we were given is “a few things,” pauca, even when it is a fortune. Everything we receive on earth is little beside what He means to give.
III. The Mass as a whole: the gift goes out and returns with increase
St. Thomas built the whole of the Summa Theologiæ on the pattern of exitus and reditus: all things come forth from God and return to Him (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue). Today’s Gospel tells that story in the shape of a trade.
Everything begins with the master’s going out. He “delivered to them his goods.” The talents do not belong to the servants. They come from his house, and they are lent, not given away. Then the master leaves, and the servants go out too: abiit, “he went his way, and traded.” The gift goes out into the world and is put to work. Finally the master returns and “reckoned with them,” and the gift comes back to its source, doubled. The servants do not keep their gain. They bring it to him: “Behold I have gained other five.” And he gives them more than they brought: “I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
The Epistle shows the same pattern in the priest. Everything the “great priest” has is received: God “made him to increase,” “gave him the blessing,” “confirmed his covenant,” “gave him a great priesthood.” And all of it goes back to God in worship, “to offer him a worthy incense for an odour of sweetness.” The incense rises to God. Then God, in turn, “made him blessed in glory.”
The Mass itself is the place where this happens every day. At the Offertory we give back to God bread and wine, which are already His gifts, “fruit of the earth and work of human hands,” as the old Jewish blessing put it. He returns them to us changed into the Body and Blood of His Son. That is the pattern of the parable: what is given, worked with, and returned comes back infinitely greater. St. Charles spent his life making sure this exchange was carried out worthily in every church of his diocese. On his feast the Church asks that he now see the final return, the joy of his Lord.
IV. The Collect
Ecclesiam tuam, Domine, sancti Caroli Confessoris tui atque Pontificis continua protectione custodi: ut, sicut illum pastoralis sollicitudo gloriosum reddidit; ita nos eius intercessio in tuo semper faciat amore ferventes.
“Keep Thy Church, O Lord, under the continual protection of Saint Charles, Thy Confessor and Bishop: that as his pastoral solicitude made him glorious, so his intercession may make us ever fervent in Thy love.”
The Collect names the talent St. Charles traded with: pastoralis sollicitudo, pastoral care, the anxious watchfulness of a shepherd. It says that this is what made him glorious. Not his birth, nor his cardinal’s hat, nor even his learning, but the care he spent on souls.
Then the Collect asks for something different for us. It does not ask that we be given his gifts. It asks that his intercession make us ferventes, burning, in the love of God. That is the spark he begged his priests not to let go out. The talents differ from servant to servant. The love that makes a servant faithful is the same in all.
V. Saints Vitalis and Agricola: the servant who went first
The Lauds commemoration gives us a last image of the parable, and it comes from St. Ambrose. In 393, while visiting Bologna, Ambrose found the bodies of two martyrs buried among the graves of the Jews there. He wrote an account of them in a sermon given soon afterward in Florence, where he placed some of their relics in a new church (Exhortatio virginitatis 1-2; see also Paulinus, Vita Ambrosii 29).
Agricola, Ambrose tells us, was a Christian master, and Vitalis was his slave. Agricola had taught Vitalis the faith. When persecution came, the persecutors put Vitalis to death first, hoping that the sight of his sufferings would frighten his master into denying Christ. It had the opposite effect. Agricola followed his servant to martyrdom, and was nailed to a cross. Ambrose says that many of the nails were found in the tomb with his body.
In the parable the master goes away and the servants follow him later. In Bologna the order was reversed: the servant went first into “the joy of his lord,” and the master followed. Ambrose dwells on this. Agricola had given Vitalis the one talent that mattered. Vitalis traded it with his blood and went ahead to prepare the way. On earth one was master and the other servant. Before Christ both were servants, and both were found faithful.
VI. A word for practice
Examine. What talents have I been given: time, health, intelligence, money, skill, influence, the faith itself? Which of them am I trading with, and which have I buried? Have I buried any gift in “earthly business,” so that a mind made for God is spent entirely on the concerns of this world? If I have any responsibility for others, as a parent, an employer, a teacher or a godparent, do I care for their souls with something like pastoralis sollicitudo? While I do my duties, have I let my own prayer grow cold?
Do. Choose one gift you have been keeping safe and useless, and put it to work this week for God or your neighbour. Spend an hour with the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the book St. Charles laboured to produce, or teach something of it to a child. Pray for your bishop by name, and for the priests of your diocese, that they may imitate St. Charles in caring for souls. In this month of the holy souls, offer a prayer for the bishops and priests among the faithful departed, who will give the strictest account of their talents.
Pray. The Collect of the day. Then the prayer St. Charles’s Gospel suggests: Domine, quinque talenta tradidisti mihi, “Lord, Thou didst deliver to me five talents,” followed by a frank account to God of what you have done with them.
Aspiration. Euge, serve bone et fidelis: intra in gaudium domini tui. “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
Devote. On this Wednesday, the day traditionally kept in honour of St. Joseph, ask the help of the man of whom the Church sings Fidelis servus et prudens, quem constituit Dominus super familiam suam, “the faithful and wise servant, whom the Lord set over His household” (cf. Luke 12:42). Ask St. Charles to obtain for you the grace to spend your life usefully and to die, as he did, ready to say Ecce venio. Ask Saints Vitalis and Agricola for the courage to stand by the faith, and to hand it on to those who depend on you.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path tells the full life of St. Charles Borromeo, from the papal court to the plague-houses of Milan, and the story of the martyrs of Bologna and their discovery by St. Ambrose. The Church History path treats the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation, the decrees on episcopal residence and seminaries, and the making of the Roman Catechism. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Common of Confessor Bishops, the Ambrosian rite, and the theology of incense and the Offertory. The Theology and Doctrine path examines the priesthood of Christ and the fulness of the priesthood in the episcopate.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia 9; St. Jerome, Commentarii in Matthæum IV (on 25:14); St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Matthæum 78; St. Augustine, Sermo 340.1; St. Ambrose, Exhortatio virginitatis 1-2; Paulinus of Milan, Vita Ambrosii 29. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue. Magisterial texts: Council of Trent, Session XXIII, Decretum de reformatione, canons 1 and 18; Catechismus Romanus (1566). St. Charles Borromeo: Acta Ecclesiæ Mediolanensis; Instructiones fabricæ et supellectilis ecclesiasticæ (1577). Hagiographical details of his life follow the traditional accounts and the Roman Breviary lessons for 4 November.
Ecce sacerdos magnus, qui in diebus suis placuit Deo.