A reflection for Friday within the Nineteenth Week after Pentecost — S. Ioannis Leonardi Confessoris, III classis (9 October)
Commemoratio ad Laudes tantum: S. Dionysii Episcopi, Rustici et Eleutherii Martyrum
The Gospel of today’s Mass begins with a verb that has fallen out of ordinary speech: designavit. “After these things the Lord appointed also other seventy-two: and he sent them two and two before his face into every city and place whither he himself was to come” (Luke 10:1). The Lord designates, and then He sends. The men who go out are not volunteers commissioning themselves; they are marked, chosen, and dispatched ahead of Someone greater who is coming behind them. Everything they carry, and everything they refuse to carry, follows from that order of things.
The Epistle supplies the inner side of the same mission. St. Paul, writing to a Church that had been tempted by more impressive preachers, sets down in a single line what an apostle is and is not: Non enim nosmetipsos praedicamus, sed Iesum Christum Dominum nostrum — “For we preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ our Lord; and ourselves your servants through Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:5). The Church places these two readings over the feast of St. John Leonardi, an apothecary of Lucca who became a priest, a founder, and a reformer, and who spent most of his life being driven out of the places he had come to heal.
I. The ministry that does not faint
The Epistle opens with an admission that is easy to read past: “Therefore, seeing we have this ministration, according as we have obtained mercy, we faint not” (2 Cor. 4:1). The ministry is not Paul’s achievement. He holds it according as he has obtained mercy — as a man who was himself once a persecutor and was pardoned. The courage that follows, non deficimus, is therefore not temperament. It is the steadiness of a man who knows the work was never his to begin with.
From that root Paul draws the whole ethic of the preacher. “We renounce the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor adulterating the word of God; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience, in the sight of God” (4:2). St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on this Epistle, presses hard on the image behind adulterantes: the dishonest preacher is like a merchant who waters his wine, mixing the word of God with his own interests so that it will sell better and cost him less. The true minister hands the wine over undiluted and lets the conscience of the hearer be the judge, in conspectu Dei.
Then Paul reaches back to the first day of creation: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus” (4:6). The same Fiat lux that divided the light from the darkness in Genesis is spoken again inside the soul of the believer, and what it illumines is a face. St. Thomas, commenting on the passage, notes the order here: the light is first kindled in our hearts, and only then given to others; the preacher must be enlightened before he enlightens. Reform that does not begin there is merely management.
II. Lambs among wolves
The Gospel is the charter of that mission in its outward form, and St. Gregory the Great preached on it to the bishops of Rome in his seventeenth homily on the Gospels. Three of his readings govern everything else.
First, the Lord sends them binos — two by two. Gregory observes that charity cannot exist with fewer than two, since no one is properly said to have charity toward himself; love must reach out to another. The Lord therefore sends His preachers in pairs to teach silently, before they say a word, that the man who has no charity toward his neighbour ought not to take up the office of preaching at all.
Second, the lament: “The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few.” Gregory, preaching to the clergy of his own city, does not spare them. The world, he says, is full of priests, and yet in the harvest of God a labourer is rarely found; men receive the office and do not do its work. The remedy the Lord gives is not first organization but prayer: Rogate ergo Dominum messis. Labourers are sent; they are not manufactured.
Third, the condition of the sending: Ecce ego mitto vos sicut agnos inter lupos. St. Ambrose, in his exposition of St. Luke, draws out what the Lord does not say. He does not send wolves among wolves, nor shepherds armed against them, but lambs — creatures with no defence but their innocence and the Shepherd who sent them. The prohibitions that follow, “carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes,” are the same lesson in another key. The preacher who goes out provisioned against every contingency has quietly ceased to depend on the One who sent him. Ambrose and Gregory alike read the command to “salute no man by the way” not as a rule against courtesy but as a rule against distraction: the messenger of the Kingdom has somewhere to be.
St. Bede, in his commentary on St. Luke, notes the number itself. As the Twelve answer to the twelve patriarchs, the seventy-two answer to the nations listed in the tenth chapter of Genesis, from whom the whole earth was peopled. The first mission was to Israel; this second mission already points beyond her, to every city and place where the Lord intends to come.
And the message the seventy-two carry is surprisingly brief: peace upon the house, healing for the sick, and one sentence — Appropinquavit in vos regnum Dei, “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you” (Luke 10:9). They do not announce themselves. They announce that Someone is near.
III. The apothecary of Lucca
St. John Leonardi was born around 1541 at Diecimo, in the territory of the Republic of Lucca, and trained as an apothecary — a speziale, a compounder of medicines. In his twenties he left the shop for the altar; he was ordained in 1572 and, with a handful of young laymen he had been catechizing, began the community that became the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God. Their work was the work of the Gospel in plain terms: catechism for children, the frequent reception of the sacraments, preaching, and the reform of clerical life in the wake of the Council of Trent.
Lucca did not want it. The work provoked the opposition of powerful men in the Republic, and Leonardi spent much of the rest of his life effectively barred from his own city, working from Rome. There he found a friend and protector in St. Philip Neri, and there the Holy See, recognizing what it had in him, sent him repeatedly to reform others: Clement VIII entrusted him with the visitation and renewal of the monks of Vallombrosa and of Montevergine. He had the reformer’s gift of being trusted with every house but his own.
His concern did not stop at Italy. He labored for the training of priests for the foreign missions, and the tradition of the Church counts him among those whose efforts prepared the way for the seminary that later became the Urban College of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The Collect of his Mass remembers him precisely for this: that God stirred him up ad propagandam in gentibus fidem — to spread the faith among the nations — the seventy-two sent to every city once again.
Readers of this blog will recognize a familiar hand in one episode. In 1614 Paul V united Leonardi’s congregation with the Pious Schools of St. Joseph Calasanctius; the union proved unworkable and was dissolved in 1617, and the two founders’ families went on separately. Two reformers of the same city and the same decade, both of whom spent their lives on children and the poor, and both of whom Providence humbled through the very institutions they had built.
He died in Rome on the ninth of October, 1609, of an illness contracted while caring for the sick — the apothecary to the end, obeying the last command of his Gospel: curate infirmos. He was canonized by Pius XI in 1938, and his body rests in the church of Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli.
What is most striking in Leonardi is how completely he fits St. Paul’s sentence. His counsels for the reform of the Church, set down in a memorial to Paul V, insist that renewal must begin with those who govern and must proceed by holiness of life rather than by decree, and that those who would reform others must first be reformed themselves. It is 2 Corinthians 4:6 turned into a program: the light shines in the heart before it is handed on. Non nosmetipsos praedicamus. He preached Christ and was content to be exiled for it.
IV. The momentary and the eternal — and the martyrs of Paris
The second half of the Epistle explains how such a man does not lose heart. “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation, worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:16-17).
Chrysostom delights in Paul’s arithmetic here. Against momentary is set eternal; against light is set weight; and against the mere tribulation is set glory heaped up supra modum in sublimitate, beyond measure upon measure. Paul, the Apostle who was scourged, stoned, and shipwrecked, calls all of it light — not because it did not hurt, but because he has seen what it weighs against. And the secret of that vision is the last verse: “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen, are temporal; but the things which are not seen, are eternal” (4:18).
This is the hinge on which the commemoration of the day turns. At Lauds the Church remembers St. Denis, first bishop of Paris, with the priest Rusticus and the deacon Eleutherius. St. Gregory of Tours, our earliest substantial witness, records that Denis was one of seven bishops sent into Gaul in the third century, and that he was put to death for the faith. Later piety embroidered his story richly — identifying him with the Areopagite converted by St. Paul at Athens, and telling how he carried his severed head from the place of his martyrdom — and those legends have their devotional place. But the plain record is enough. A bishop, a priest, and a deacon, sent from Rome as lambs among wolves into a pagan land, preached Christ and not themselves, and found the outward man destroyed while the inward man was made new.
Denis and John Leonardi, thirteen centuries apart, are the two halves of the same Gospel. One was sent and martyred; the other was sent and exiled. Both looked at the things which are not seen. Here, too, is the shape of the whole Christian life as the Church has always read it: all things go out from God, sent into every city and place, and all things are meant to return to Him bearing an eternal weight of glory. The mission is the going-out; the momentary tribulation is the road; the glory is the homecoming.
V. A word for practice
Most of us are not sent to Gaul or to Vallombrosa. But every baptized soul carries something of the seventy-two: a household, a workplace, a parish, a circle of friends, into which the Lord intends to come and before whose face He has sent us. And every one of us is tempted to the two faults Paul names — to water down the word so that it costs less, and to preach ourselves.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, examine yourself on St. Paul’s sentence. In the places where I speak of the faith — to my children, my colleagues, my friends — whom am I actually presenting: Jesus Christ, or my own competence, piety, or correctness? Where have I diluted the wine so that it would go down easier?
Second, pray for labourers. The Lord’s first instruction to the seventy-two was not to go but to pray: Rogate ergo Dominum messis. Offer today a decade of the Rosary — this is, after all, the month of the Holy Rosary — for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and for the reform of the clergy.
Third, carry less. Choose one “purse or scrip” — some comfort, some reserve, some safeguard of your reputation — that you have been carrying so as not to depend on God, and lay it down for a day.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day —
Deus, qui beatum Ioannem Confessorem tuum ad propagandam in gentibus fidem mirifice excitasti, et per eum in instituenda Clericorum nova familia fidelium educationi prospexisti: da nobis famulis tuis; ita eius institutis proficere, ut praemia consequamur aeterna.
“O God, who didst wondrously raise up blessed John, Thy Confessor, to spread the faith among the nations, and through him didst provide for the instruction of the faithful by founding a new family of clerics: grant to us Thy servants so to profit by his teaching that we may attain the everlasting reward.”
Or, more briefly, the aspiration of the Epistle: Non nobis, Domine, sed Iesum Christum. “Not ourselves, O Lord, but Jesus Christ.”
Suggested devotion: the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, attending particularly to Pentecost, where the Apostles, made lambs among wolves, were first sent out into every nation under heaven.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Church History path takes up the Catholic Reform after Trent — Leonardi, Philip Neri, Calasanctius, and the founding of the Propaganda — and the long work of renewing a clergy from within. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the martyrs of the Gallic Church, and with the question of how the Church sifts the history of St. Denis from the legend that grew around him.
Sancte Ioannes Leonardi, ora pro nobis. Sancti Dionysi, Rustice et Eleutheri, orate pro nobis.