A reflection for Thursday within the Fifteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Nicolai de Tolentino Confessoris, III classis (10 September)
The Introit of today’s Mass promises a tree: Iustus ut palma florebit: sicut cedrus Libani multiplicabitur — “The just shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow up like the cedar of Libanus” (Ps. 91:13). It is an image of height, permanence, and shade. And then the Church, having promised the cedar, reads an Epistle about men who are “the offscouring of all,” and a Gospel addressed to a “little flock.” The Mass Iustus ut palma is built on that reversal. The palm flourishes because its roots are in the ground the world walks over. Today the faithful are asked to hold two things together that the world keeps apart: the humiliation of the Apostle and the tenderness of the Lord, and to find in a thirteenth-century friar of the Marches the place where they meet.
I. The last in the arena
The Epistle (1 Cor. 4:9-14) opens with an image St. Paul borrowed from the amphitheatre: Puto enim quod Deus nos Apostolos novissimos ostendit, tamquam morti destinatos: quia spectaculum facti sumus mundo, et Angelis, et hominibus — “I think that God hath set forth us apostles, the last, as it were men appointed to death: we are made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men.”
St. John Chrysostom, in his thirteenth homily on this Epistle, will not let the word novissimos pass as a mere modesty. In the games of the day, he observes, the men condemned to the beasts were brought out last, after the other entertainments, as the climax of the afternoon. The Apostle says that God has arranged the order of the show, and has placed His own ambassadors in the slot reserved for the doomed. But the audience is larger than Corinth supposed. Et Angelis. Chrysostom is struck that the heavens lean over the rail to watch: the contest is not only ridiculous to men but glorious to angels, and the same stripes are read two ways by two audiences at once.
Then the Apostle turns on his readers with an irony the Fathers admired and were careful not to soften. Nos stulti propter Christum, vos autem prudentes in Christo — “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ: we are weak, but you are strong: you are honourable, but we without honour.” Chrysostom notes that Paul does not accuse the Corinthians of anything directly; he simply sets the two columns side by side and lets them read. Hungry and thirsty, naked, buffeted, without a fixed abode, working with his hands — and the church he founded is comfortable, articulate, and quarrelling about which preacher is more distinguished.
The centre of the passage is verse twelve, and it is where the Fathers spend their strength. Maledicimur, et benedicimus: persecutionem patimur, et sustinemus: blasphemamur, et obsecramus. “We are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer it; we are blasphemed, and we entreat.” Chrysostom draws out the grammar: the Apostle does not say merely that he endures the reviling, which a Stoic might do, but that he answers it with its opposite. Each blow is met not with silence but with a gift. This is the point at which the spectacle becomes something the angels have reason to watch. A man who is struck and does not strike back is patient; a man who is struck and blesses has begun to resemble the One who was struck for him.
Tamquam purgamenta huius mundi facti sumus, omnium peripsema usque adhuc — “We are made as the refuse of this world, the offscouring of all, even until now.” The Greek peripsema is the scraping off a dirty vessel, the thing thrown out so that the vessel may be clean. The Fathers read it, following the Apostle’s own logic, as a kind of sacrificial figure: the Apostles were treated as the world’s refuse so that the world might be cleansed. And Ambrosiaster, commenting on the same verse, presses the contrast to its conclusion — the Corinthians were rich precisely because the Apostles had made themselves poor for them.
And then, having said all this, Paul stops. Non ut confundam vos, haec scribo, sed ut filios meos carissimos moneo. “I write not these things to confound you; but I admonish you as my dearest children.” The irony was never cruelty. It was a father’s method for reaching sons who had stopped listening to plain speech. The catalogue of humiliations ends in tenderness, because that is the direction in which the whole Mass is travelling.
II. Fear not, little flock
The Gospel (Luke 12:32-34) is short enough to be prayed in a breath, and the Fathers treat every clause of it as weight-bearing.
Nolite timere, pusillus grex: quia complacuit Patri vestro dare vobis regnum. “Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom.”
St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his homilies on St. Luke, asks why the flock is called little. Partly, he says, because of its number: the disciples were few, and the Church would always be few beside the world. But chiefly because of its temper. The flock is little in its own estimation — humble, unassuming, gentle — and it is exactly to such that the kingdom is promised. St. Ambrose, in the seventh book of his commentary on Luke, reads it the same way: the flock is small not so much by count as by humility, and its littleness is not a defect to be overcome but the very condition of the gift. The Corinthians in today’s Epistle wished to be great; the sheep of this Gospel are told that the Father has already decided in favour of the small.
And note the ground of the command. Nolite timere does not rest on the disciples’ strength. It rests on complacuit Patri — on a thing that has already pleased the Father to do. St. Bede, who follows Cyril and Ambrose here, observes that the Lord first promises the kingdom and only afterward asks for alms. The order is deliberate. He does not say, sell what you have and I will give you a kingdom. He says, the kingdom is yours; therefore you may afford to sell what you have. Fear is not argued away; it is displaced by a gift.
Vendite quae possidetis, et date eleemosynam. Facite vobis sacculos, qui non veterascunt, thesaurum non deficientem in caelis. “Sell what you possess and give alms. Make to yourselves bags which grow not old, a treasure in heaven which faileth not.”
St. Augustine, preaching on the parallel text in St. Matthew (Sermo 60), meets the obvious objection with his usual candour. A man says: I would gladly keep my treasure in heaven, but how am I to get it there? Augustine answers that the Lord Himself has provided the porters. The poor carry what you give them, and they carry it up, and it arrives before you do. Augustine’s whole sermon turns on a single distinction: what you keep, you will lose, because the moth, the thief, and death are in the house; what you give, you keep, because you have entrusted it to the one Hand that cannot be robbed. He puts the matter almost commercially, because he is preaching to people who understood commerce. Christ says, in effect, give it to Me and I will hold it for you. The sacculus that does not grow old is not a metaphor for detachment in general; it is an actual purse, filled by actual alms, kept in an actual place.
Ubi enim thesaurus vester est, ibi et cor vestrum erit. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Here the Fathers are unanimous and brief. Bede: the heart follows the treasure as the body follows the head, and a man who has laid up his goods on earth will find that his prayers stay there with them. Augustine: lift your treasure up where it cannot rot, so that your heart may go up after it — and he hears in the sentence the very words the priest says at the altar, Sursum corda. The Gospel does not first ask us to change our hearts and then our treasures. It observes, with a physician’s detachment, that the heart cannot be moved except by moving what it loves.
III. The fool of Tolentino
St. Nicholas of Tolentino (c. 1245-1305) was born at Sant’Angelo in Pontano in the March of Ancona, to parents who had been childless until they made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Nicholas at Bari and received him as an answer to it; they gave him the saint’s name. He heard an Augustinian friar preach on the text Nolite diligere mundum — “Love not the world” — and asked to be received into the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine while still a boy. He was ordained about 1270. For a time he was moved from house to house through the Marches, until, praying one night, he heard a voice repeating Ad Tolentinum, ad Tolentinum. He went there in 1275 and did not leave for thirty years.
What he did at Tolentino was, by the world’s reckoning, very little. He preached nearly every day. He heard confessions. He visited the sick and the prisoners, and went into the poorest quarters of a town that was, in those years, torn between Guelf and Ghibelline and full of the wreckage of both. He kept a fast so severe that his superiors ordered him to eat meat. The story is told that a dish of roasted partridges was set before him under obedience, and that he made the sign of the Cross over it, and the birds rose from the plate and flew out of the window. Whether or not the partridges flew, the man plainly did not eat them, and the Marches remembered him as a friar who lived on bread dipped in water. When he was ill and refused even that, Our Lady and St. Augustine appeared to him and told him to ask for a small loaf, mark it with a cross, and eat it. He recovered, and spent the rest of his life blessing such loaves and giving them to the sick — the panini di San Nicola, the bread of St. Nicholas, which the Augustinians distribute to this day. He was, in the strict sense of the Epistle, a spectacle to a town: a learned priest of good family who chose to be a fool, and who was watched, and mocked, and finally loved, for it.
But the deepest thing in his life belongs to the Gospel. A friar of his acquaintance, Pellegrino of Osimo, appeared to him after death and asked for Masses, and showed him a multitude of souls in Purgatory begging the same. Nicholas obtained leave to say Mass for them for a week, and at the end of it saw them freed. From that time the Holy Souls were his particular care, and the Church has made him their heavenly patron. Consider what that devotion is in the light of Facite vobis sacculos qui non veterascunt. The souls in Purgatory are the littlest flock of all: they can do nothing for themselves, they cannot repay, they are invisible to the world and forgotten by most of their own families. To give them the alms of prayer and sacrifice is to fill a purse that no moth will reach, on behalf of persons who cannot even say thank you until the next life. Nicholas laid up his treasure in the one place from which nothing is ever withdrawn, and his heart went there after it.
He died at Tolentino on the tenth of September, 1305. A star had gone before him from Sant’Angelo to Tolentino when he first came, the people said, and a star was seen over the friary when he died. He was canonized by Eugene IV in 1446 — the first of his Order to be raised to the altars. He is invoked against fire and plague, and above all for the dead.
Iustus ut palma florebit. The palm tree flourished at Tolentino in the person of a man who had made himself the offscouring of it.
IV. A word for practice
Most of us will neither be scourged for the Gospel nor live on bread and water. But the Epistle and the Gospel of this Mass reach every state of life, because they concern two things everyone has: a reputation and a purse.
First, on the reputation. Find today the one place where you are being reviled, or slighted, or simply not honoured as you think you deserve, and answer it as the Apostle did — not with silence, which is only patience, but with a blessing. Say a prayer for the person by name. Chrysostom’s point stands: it is the blessing, not the endurance, that makes the spectacle worth the angels’ attention.
Second, on the purse. Give something this week that cannot come back to you. Alms to a stranger; a Mass offered for a soul no one else remembers; money to a cause that will never know your name. Augustine’s porters are waiting. Do not wait until you feel detached from what you own; the Gospel says the heart follows the treasure, not the other way round.
Third, for the Holy Souls, whom St. Nicholas served: pray the De profundis tonight for the dead of your own family, and add the Requiem aeternam for one soul who has no one else to pray for him.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, which asks precisely for what the little flock needs — Adesto, Domine, supplicationibus nostris, quas in beati Nicolai Confessoris tui solemnitate deferimus: ut, qui nostrae iustitiae fiduciam non habemus, eius, qui tibi placuit, precibus adiuvemur. “Attend, O Lord, to the prayers we offer on the feast of blessed Nicholas Thy Confessor; that we who have no confidence in our own justice may be helped by the prayers of him who was pleasing to Thee.”
Suggested devotion: the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, offered for the souls in Purgatory, attending particularly to the Crowning with Thorns — the King made a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens naturally onto two of our paths. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats fasting and penance in the tradition of the hermit orders, and the doctrine and practice of devotion to the Holy Souls. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the mendicants of the thirteenth century — Dominic, Francis, Anthony, and the Augustinian hermits among whom Nicholas was formed — and with what their poverty teaches about the purse that does not grow old.
Sancte Nicolae de Tolentino, animarum in Purgatorio patrone, ora pro nobis.