A reflection for Thursday within the Twenty-Second Week after the Octave of Pentecost — Feria Quinta infra Hebdomadam XXII post Octavam Pentecostes, IV classis (29 October)
This Mass arrives a few days late, and the delay suits it. Last Sunday, the twenty-fifth of October, was the last Sunday of the month, and the Church kept the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King, which Pius XI fixed to that Sunday in Quas primas (1925). The twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost gave way to it. On the free weekdays that follow, the Church sets this displaced Sunday Mass before us, so many of the faithful hear it for the first time on a Thursday, four days after they sang Oportet illum regnare, “He must reign” (1 Cor. 15:25).
That sequence helps us read today’s Gospel. We hear Christ say “Render to Caesar” only after we have crowned Him King of kings, so we cannot easily mistake His words for a division of the world into two equal sovereignties. Caesar has things that belong to him. Caesar himself belongs to Christ.
The Mass opens from the depths: Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine: Domine, quis sustinebit? quia apud te propitiatio est, Deus Israel — “If Thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities, Lord, who shall stand it? For with Thee is merciful forgiveness, O God of Israel” (Ps. 129:3-4). This is the De profundis, the psalm the Church prays for the dead. Its place here in the last days of October is fitting, because All Souls is less than a week away. The Gradual sings of brothers dwelling together in unity (Ps. 132:1). The Alleluia tells those who fear the Lord to hope in Him (Ps. 113:11). At the Offertory the Church speaks with the voice of Queen Esther as she prepares to go in to the king: Recordare mei, Domine, omni potentatui dominans: et da sermonem rectum in os meum, ut placeant verba mea in conspectu principis — “Remember me, O Lord, Thou who rulest above all power: and give a right speech in my mouth, that my words may be pleasing in the sight of the prince” (Esther 14:12-13).
Esther is a woman of God standing before an earthly throne and asking for the right word. In the Gospel the Lord is in the same position, and the trap set for Him is built entirely out of words.
I. Qui cœpit in vobis opus bonum: the Epistle
“Being confident of this very thing, that he who hath begun a good work in you, will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus. As it is meet for me to think this for you all, for that I have you in my heart; and that in my bands, and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of my joy. For God is my witness, how I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your charity may more and more abound in knowledge, and in all understanding: that you may approve the better things, that you may be sincere and without offence unto the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of justice, through Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.” (Phil. 1:6-11)
St. Paul is in chains, probably at Rome, writing to the church at Philippi. It was the first church he founded on European soil, and it never stopped supporting him. The letter is the warmest he wrote, and these opening verses set its tone. Notice that the prisoner is not anxious about his own fate. He is confident about theirs.
He who hath begun will perfect. The ground of that confidence is not the Philippians’ strength. It is God’s fidelity to His own work. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage (Hom. in Epist. ad Philippenses 2), notes the balance in the Apostle’s words. Paul attributes the beginning and the completion to God, yet he praises the Philippians for their partnership in the Gospel. God does not perfect the work without us, but He is its author from start to finish, and our cooperation is itself His gift.
The Church took this verse into her dogmatic teaching. In the struggle against the Semi-Pelagians, the Second Council of Orange (529) cited it in its fifth canon. The council taught that even the beginning of faith, the first movement of the will toward God, is not ours by nature but comes from grace. Qui cœpit: He began it. St. Augustine had argued the same point at length in his last anti-Pelagian works, De prædestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiæ. A man cannot boast even of the first step, and he cannot guarantee the last one. Perseverance to the end is a distinct gift, to be asked for daily.
The Council of Trent then gave the verse its permanent place. In the Decree on Justification (Session VI, chapter 13), on the gift of perseverance, Trent teaches that all should place their firmest hope in God’s help. It adds that unless men themselves fail His grace, God will perfect the good work as He began it. Each half of that teaching guards the other. One forbids despair, because God finishes what He starts. The other forbids presumption, because a man can still walk away. The day of Christ Jesus is the horizon of both.
Charity abounding in knowledge. Paul’s prayer is precise. He does not pray simply that their love may grow. He prays that it may grow in knowledge and all understanding (in scientia et in omni sensu), so that they may approve the better things (ut probetis potiora). Chrysostom draws out the point: love without discernment can attach itself to the wrong things and the wrong people. Charity that is not instructed can be led astray by flattery. St. Thomas, commenting on this verse (Super Epistolam ad Philippenses, cap. 1), reads it as a petition for the right ordering of love. Charity must be informed by knowledge of what is truly better so that it loves first what deserves to be loved first.
Keep that phrase, approve the better things, in mind for the Gospel. There we will meet men whose words are full of praise but whose hearts are full of malice. The only defence against them is a love that has learned to see.
II. Cuius est imago hæc?: the Gospel
“Then the Pharisees going, consulted among themselves how to insnare him in his speech. And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying: Master, we know that thou art a true speaker, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. Tell us therefore what dost thou think, is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar, or not? But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny. And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and superscription is this? They say to him: Cæsar’s. Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:15-21)
The alliance. The coalition was a strange one. The Pharisees resented the Roman tribute as a humiliation of God’s people. The Herodians depended on Roman favour and supported it. St. Jerome, in his commentary on Matthew at this passage, explains the design. If the Lord said the tribute should not be paid, the Herodians would denounce Him to the governor as a rebel. If He said it should be paid, the Pharisees would denounce Him to the people as a collaborator with the pagan occupier. Two parties who agreed on nothing else agreed on this: He had to be caught.
The flattery. Their opening words are true. Christ is a true speaker, He does teach the way of God in truth, and He does not regard the person of men. But they say these things in order to deceive. Jerome observes that the praise was meant to make Him speak recklessly, as though He would have to prove His fearlessness by defying Caesar. Chrysostom (Hom. in Matthæum 70) sees the same trap and notes how the Lord answers it. He does not take their praise. He names it: hypocrites. Here the Epistle’s prayer becomes concrete. Charity that abounds in knowledge is not disarmed by compliments. It sees what the compliment is for.
The coin. The Lord does not carry the money; they produce it. The tribute coin was a Roman silver denarius. It was most likely a coin of Tiberius, as most scholars hold, though the identification cannot be certain. If so, it bore the emperor’s portrait and an inscription naming him the son of the divine Augustus. So the Pharisees, so scrupulous about the Law, carried in their purses an image of a man with a claim to divinity stamped beside it. The Lord’s question exposes them before He says a word about taxes. Whose image is this? They are already trading in Caesar’s coin. They have already accepted his order, his roads, his peace. Let them pay for it.
Render to God. Here the Fathers find the centre of the passage. St. Hilary of Poitiers, whose commentary the Church reads at Matins for this Sunday (In Matthæum, canon 23), turns the question back on the hearer. If Caesar’s image on the coin makes the coin owed to Caesar, then God’s image on man makes man owed to God. We are to give God what is His, Hilary says in substance: our body, our soul, our will. Tertullian, writing earlier (De idololatria 15; Adversus Marcionem IV.38), had put it in a phrase the later tradition kept repeating. Give Caesar his image, which is on the coin, and God His image, which is on man.
St. Augustine develops this most tenderly. Preaching on the fourth psalm, Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine (“The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us”), he applies this very Gospel (Enarrationes in Psalmos 4.8). Caesar looks for his image on his coin, and God looks for His image in the soul. In the Tractates on John (40.9) he presses the point: as Caesar requires from you the stamp of his image, so God requires the stamp of His. Sin has defaced the coin and rubbed it nearly smooth, but it has not erased the stamp. The work of grace is to restore what was minted at the creation, so that when the King asks whose image is this? the answer can still be given.
The limit of Caesar. Chrysostom adds the necessary qualification (Hom. in Matthæum 70). When you hear “render to Caesar,” he says in substance, understand that the Lord means only what does no harm to godliness. Whatever is demanded against God is not a tribute owed to Caesar but a tribute to the devil. St. Thomas states the principle plainly in treating obedience (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 104). Christians are bound to obey secular powers insofar as the order of justice requires. Their authority comes from God, and so it cannot bind against God.
That is why it matters that we hear this Gospel just after Christ the King. Pius XI taught in Quas primas that Christ’s kingship extends over civil society and its rulers as truly as over individual souls. The things that are Caesar’s are real, and Christians owe them honestly: taxes, civil obedience, prayer for those in authority (1 Tim. 2:1-2). But they are owed because God wills an ordered society, and so they are already part of what is rendered to God. Caesar’s coin carries Caesar’s face. Caesar’s own soul carries God’s.
III. The Mass as a whole: minted and returned
The Thomistic pattern of exitus and reditus — all things going out from God and returning to Him — fits this Mass almost too neatly, because its central image is a coin. A coin goes out from the mint stamped with the image of its sovereign, and it circulates in order to come back to him in tribute.
So with man. He goes out from God stamped with the Divine image, ad imaginem Dei (Gen. 1:27). He circulates in the world: in Caesar’s markets, under Caesar’s laws, paying Caesar’s taxes. All of this is lawful and none of it is final. The return is the rendering of the image to the One whose image it is.
The Epistle tells us how that return is accomplished. God began the good work; He minted the coin and, in Baptism, restamped it. God will perfect it unto the day of Christ, if we do not fail His grace. In between, our charity is to grow in knowledge, learning to approve the better things and to tell the coin that is owed to Caesar from the soul that is owed to God. The Pharisees could do neither. They paid Caesar with resentment and God with hypocrisy, and so they rendered rightly to no one.
The Introit has already told us the cost of that failure, and the remedy for it. If Thou wilt mark iniquities, who shall stand? None of us could give God back His image undamaged. Each of us brings Him a worn and clipped coin. But apud te propitiatio est: with Him is propitiation. The One who asks for His image back is the same One who restores it, on the altar, in the Sacrifice about to be offered.
IV. The Collect
Deus, refugium nostrum et virtus: adesto piis Ecclesiæ tuæ precibus, auctor ipse pietatis, et præsta; ut, quod fideliter petimus, efficaciter consequamur.
“O God, our refuge and strength, Thou who art the author of all godliness, give ear to the devout prayers of Thy Church; and grant that what we ask in faith we may effectually obtain.”
The Collect reads like a prayer written for St. Paul’s Philippians. It calls God auctor ipse pietatis, the author of godliness itself. That is the qui cœpit of the Epistle in liturgical form: the devotion with which we pray is already His work in us. Because He began it, we can ask Him with confidence to make it effective. Quod fideliter petimus, efficaciter consequamur: what is asked in faith, may it be obtained in fact. The prayer asks God to finish what He began.
The Postcommunion, said today, adds something proper to a Thursday, the day the Church has long given to the memory of the Last Supper and to devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Sumpsimus, Domine, sacri dona mysterii, humiliter deprecantes: ut, quæ in tui commemorationem nos facere præcepisti, in nostræ proficiant infirmitatis auxilium — “We have received, O Lord, the gifts of this sacred mystery, humbly beseeching Thee that what Thou hast commanded us to do in remembrance of Thee may avail to the help of our infirmity.” The words point straight to the Cenacle: hoc facite in meam commemorationem. There the image of God in us is restored by contact with the One who is Himself the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15).
V. A word for practice
Examine. Whose image do I show the world: in how I spend my money, my hours, my attention, my speech? Have I been rendering to Caesar what belongs to God, giving to work, opinion, or comfort the allegiance that is owed only to Him? Where has flattery, given or received, dulled the discernment St. Paul prays for?
Do. Pay what is honestly owed: a debt, an obligation, a duty to lawful authority you have been putting off. Do it as an act rendered to God. Then give God something that is unmistakably His: a visit to the Blessed Sacrament this Thursday, even a brief one.
Pray. The Collect of the day, resting on the words auctor ipse pietatis. Ask God to finish in you the work He began at your Baptism.
Aspiration. Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine. “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us” (Ps. 4:7).
Devote. As October and the month of the Holy Rosary close and November and the Holy Souls approach, pray the De profundis (Ps. 129), today’s Introit psalm, for the faithful departed. They are coins already returned to the treasury and waiting to be made perfectly clean.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the doctrine of grace and perseverance, from Orange II to Trent’s Decree on Justification, and the image of God in man as the Fathers and St. Thomas understood it. The Church History path treats the relation of the Church and civil power, from the tribute coin through Pius XI’s Quas primas. The Sacred Liturgy path explains how the 1962 calendar handles a Sunday displaced by the Feast of Christ the King, and why the ferias take up its Mass.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthæum, canon 23; St. Jerome, Commentarius in Matthæum, on 22:15-21; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Matthæum 70 and Homiliæ in Epistolam ad Philippenses 2; St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 4.8, Tractatus in Ioannem 40.9, De prædestinatione sanctorum, and De dono perseverantiæ; and Tertullian, De idololatria 15 and Adversus Marcionem IV.38. Magisterial texts: Second Council ofWhose Image Is This?
A reflection for Thursday within the Twenty-Second Week after the Octave of Pentecost — Feria Quinta infra Hebdomadam XXII post Octavam Pentecostes, IV classis (29 October)
This Mass arrives a few days late, and the delay suits it. Last Sunday, the twenty-fifth of October, was the last Sunday of the month, and the Church kept the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King, which Pius XI fixed to that Sunday in Quas primas (1925). The twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost gave way to it. On the free weekdays that follow, the Church sets this displaced Sunday Mass before us, so many of the faithful hear it for the first time on a Thursday, four days after they sang Oportet illum regnare, “He must reign” (1 Cor. 15:25).
That sequence helps us read today’s Gospel. We hear Christ say “Render to Caesar” only after we have crowned Him King of kings, so we cannot easily mistake His words for a division of the world into two equal sovereignties. Caesar has things that belong to him. Caesar himself belongs to Christ.
The Mass opens from the depths: Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine: Domine, quis sustinebit? quia apud te propitiatio est, Deus Israel — “If Thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities, Lord, who shall stand it? For with Thee is merciful forgiveness, O God of Israel” (Ps. 129:3-4). This is the De profundis, the psalm the Church prays for the dead. Its place here in the last days of October is fitting, because All Souls is less than a week away. The Gradual sings of brothers dwelling together in unity (Ps. 132:1). The Alleluia tells those who fear the Lord to hope in Him (Ps. 113:11). At the Offertory the Church speaks with the voice of Queen Esther as she prepares to go in to the king: Recordare mei, Domine, omni potentatui dominans: et da sermonem rectum in os meum, ut placeant verba mea in conspectu principis — “Remember me, O Lord, Thou who rulest above all power: and give a right speech in my mouth, that my words may be pleasing in the sight of the prince” (Esther 14:12-13).
Esther is a woman of God standing before an earthly throne and asking for the right word. In the Gospel the Lord is in the same position, and the trap set for Him is built entirely out of words.
I. Qui cœpit in vobis opus bonum: the Epistle
“Being confident of this very thing, that he who hath begun a good work in you, will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus. As it is meet for me to think this for you all, for that I have you in my heart; and that in my bands, and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of my joy. For God is my witness, how I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your charity may more and more abound in knowledge, and in all understanding: that you may approve the better things, that you may be sincere and without offence unto the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of justice, through Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.” (Phil. 1:6-11)
St. Paul is in chains, probably at Rome, writing to the church at Philippi. It was the first church he founded on European soil, and it never stopped supporting him. The letter is the warmest he wrote, and these opening verses set its tone. Notice that the prisoner is not anxious about his own fate. He is confident about theirs.
He who hath begun will perfect. The ground of that confidence is not the Philippians’ strength. It is God’s fidelity to His own work. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage (Hom. in Epist. ad Philippenses 2), notes the balance in the Apostle’s words. Paul attributes the beginning and the completion to God, yet he praises the Philippians for their partnership in the Gospel. God does not perfect the work without us, but He is its author from start to finish, and our cooperation is itself His gift.
The Church took this verse into her dogmatic teaching. In the struggle against the Semi-Pelagians, the Second Council of Orange (529) cited it in its fifth canon. The council taught that even the beginning of faith, the first movement of the will toward God, is not ours by nature but comes from grace. Qui cœpit: He began it. St. Augustine had argued the same point at length in his last anti-Pelagian works, De prædestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiæ. A man cannot boast even of the first step, and he cannot guarantee the last one. Perseverance to the end is a distinct gift, to be asked for daily.
The Council of Trent then gave the verse its permanent place. In the Decree on Justification (Session VI, chapter 13), on the gift of perseverance, Trent teaches that all should place their firmest hope in God’s help. It adds that unless men themselves fail His grace, God will perfect the good work as He began it. Each half of that teaching guards the other. One forbids despair, because God finishes what He starts. The other forbids presumption, because a man can still walk away. The day of Christ Jesus is the horizon of both.
Charity abounding in knowledge. Paul’s prayer is precise. He does not pray simply that their love may grow. He prays that it may grow in knowledge and all understanding (in scientia et in omni sensu), so that they may approve the better things (ut probetis potiora). Chrysostom draws out the point: love without discernment can attach itself to the wrong things and the wrong people. Charity that is not instructed can be led astray by flattery. St. Thomas, commenting on this verse (Super Epistolam ad Philippenses, cap. 1), reads it as a petition for the right ordering of love. Charity must be informed by knowledge of what is truly better so that it loves first what deserves to be loved first.
Keep that phrase, approve the better things, in mind for the Gospel. There we will meet men whose words are full of praise but whose hearts are full of malice. The only defence against them is a love that has learned to see.
II. Cuius est imago hæc?: the Gospel
“Then the Pharisees going, consulted among themselves how to insnare him in his speech. And they sent to him their disciples with the Herodians, saying: Master, we know that thou art a true speaker, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou dost not regard the person of men. Tell us therefore what dost thou think, is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar, or not? But Jesus knowing their wickedness, said: Why do you tempt me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the coin of the tribute. And they offered him a penny. And Jesus saith to them: Whose image and superscription is this? They say to him: Cæsar’s. Then he saith to them: Render therefore to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s; and to God, the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:15-21)
The alliance. The coalition was a strange one. The Pharisees resented the Roman tribute as a humiliation of God’s people. The Herodians depended on Roman favour and supported it. St. Jerome, in his commentary on Matthew at this passage, explains the design. If the Lord said the tribute should not be paid, the Herodians would denounce Him to the governor as a rebel. If He said it should be paid, the Pharisees would denounce Him to the people as a collaborator with the pagan occupier. Two parties who agreed on nothing else agreed on this: He had to be caught.
The flattery. Their opening words are true. Christ is a true speaker, He does teach the way of God in truth, and He does not regard the person of men. But they say these things in order to deceive. Jerome observes that the praise was meant to make Him speak recklessly, as though He would have to prove His fearlessness by defying Caesar. Chrysostom (Hom. in Matthæum 70) sees the same trap and notes how the Lord answers it. He does not take their praise. He names it: hypocrites. Here the Epistle’s prayer becomes concrete. Charity that abounds in knowledge is not disarmed by compliments. It sees what the compliment is for.
The coin. The Lord does not carry the money; they produce it. The tribute coin was a Roman silver denarius. It was most likely a coin of Tiberius, as most scholars hold, though the identification cannot be certain. If so, it bore the emperor’s portrait and an inscription naming him the son of the divine Augustus. So the Pharisees, so scrupulous about the Law, carried in their purses an image of a man with a claim to divinity stamped beside it. The Lord’s question exposes them before He says a word about taxes. Whose image is this? They are already trading in Caesar’s coin. They have already accepted his order, his roads, his peace. Let them pay for it.
Render to God. Here the Fathers find the centre of the passage. St. Hilary of Poitiers, whose commentary the Church reads at Matins for this Sunday (In Matthæum, canon 23), turns the question back on the hearer. If Caesar’s image on the coin makes the coin owed to Caesar, then God’s image on man makes man owed to God. We are to give God what is His, Hilary says in substance: our body, our soul, our will. Tertullian, writing earlier (De idololatria 15; Adversus Marcionem IV.38), had put it in a phrase the later tradition kept repeating. Give Caesar his image, which is on the coin, and God His image, which is on man.
St. Augustine develops this most tenderly. Preaching on the fourth psalm, Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine (“The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us”), he applies this very Gospel (Enarrationes in Psalmos 4.8). Caesar looks for his image on his coin, and God looks for His image in the soul. In the Tractates on John (40.9) he presses the point: as Caesar requires from you the stamp of his image, so God requires the stamp of His. Sin has defaced the coin and rubbed it nearly smooth, but it has not erased the stamp. The work of grace is to restore what was minted at the creation, so that when the King asks whose image is this? the answer can still be given.
The limit of Caesar. Chrysostom adds the necessary qualification (Hom. in Matthæum 70). When you hear “render to Caesar,” he says in substance, understand that the Lord means only what does no harm to godliness. Whatever is demanded against God is not a tribute owed to Caesar but a tribute to the devil. St. Thomas states the principle plainly in treating obedience (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 104). Christians are bound to obey secular powers insofar as the order of justice requires. Their authority comes from God, and so it cannot bind against God.
That is why it matters that we hear this Gospel just after Christ the King. Pius XI taught in Quas primas that Christ’s kingship extends over civil society and its rulers as truly as over individual souls. The things that are Caesar’s are real, and Christians owe them honestly: taxes, civil obedience, prayer for those in authority (1 Tim. 2:1-2). But they are owed because God wills an ordered society, and so they are already part of what is rendered to God. Caesar’s coin carries Caesar’s face. Caesar’s own soul carries God’s.
III. The Mass as a whole: minted and returned
The Thomistic pattern of exitus and reditus — all things going out from God and returning to Him — fits this Mass almost too neatly, because its central image is a coin. A coin goes out from the mint stamped with the image of its sovereign, and it circulates in order to come back to him in tribute.
So with man. He goes out from God stamped with the Divine image, ad imaginem Dei (Gen. 1:27). He circulates in the world: in Caesar’s markets, under Caesar’s laws, paying Caesar’s taxes. All of this is lawful and none of it is final. The return is the rendering of the image to the One whose image it is.
The Epistle tells us how that return is accomplished. God began the good work; He minted the coin and, in Baptism, restamped it. God will perfect it unto the day of Christ, if we do not fail His grace. In between, our charity is to grow in knowledge, learning to approve the better things and to tell the coin that is owed to Caesar from the soul that is owed to God. The Pharisees could do neither. They paid Caesar with resentment and God with hypocrisy, and so they rendered rightly to no one.
The Introit has already told us the cost of that failure, and the remedy for it. If Thou wilt mark iniquities, who shall stand? None of us could give God back His image undamaged. Each of us brings Him a worn and clipped coin. But apud te propitiatio est: with Him is propitiation. The One who asks for His image back is the same One who restores it, on the altar, in the Sacrifice about to be offered.
IV. The Collect
Deus, refugium nostrum et virtus: adesto piis Ecclesiæ tuæ precibus, auctor ipse pietatis, et præsta; ut, quod fideliter petimus, efficaciter consequamur.
“O God, our refuge and strength, Thou who art the author of all godliness, give ear to the devout prayers of Thy Church; and grant that what we ask in faith we may effectually obtain.”
The Collect reads like a prayer written for St. Paul’s Philippians. It calls God auctor ipse pietatis, the author of godliness itself. That is the qui cœpit of the Epistle in liturgical form: the devotion with which we pray is already His work in us. Because He began it, we can ask Him with confidence to make it effective. Quod fideliter petimus, efficaciter consequamur: what is asked in faith, may it be obtained in fact. The prayer asks God to finish what He began.
The Postcommunion, said today, adds something proper to a Thursday, the day the Church has long given to the memory of the Last Supper and to devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Sumpsimus, Domine, sacri dona mysterii, humiliter deprecantes: ut, quæ in tui commemorationem nos facere præcepisti, in nostræ proficiant infirmitatis auxilium — “We have received, O Lord, the gifts of this sacred mystery, humbly beseeching Thee that what Thou hast commanded us to do in remembrance of Thee may avail to the help of our infirmity.” The words point straight to the Cenacle: hoc facite in meam commemorationem. There the image of God in us is restored by contact with the One who is Himself the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15).
V. A word for practice
Examine. Whose image do I show the world: in how I spend my money, my hours, my attention, my speech? Have I been rendering to Caesar what belongs to God, giving to work, opinion, or comfort the allegiance that is owed only to Him? Where has flattery, given or received, dulled the discernment St. Paul prays for?
Do. Pay what is honestly owed: a debt, an obligation, a duty to lawful authority you have been putting off. Do it as an act rendered to God. Then give God something that is unmistakably His: a visit to the Blessed Sacrament this Thursday, even a brief one.
Pray. The Collect of the day, resting on the words auctor ipse pietatis. Ask God to finish in you the work He began at your Baptism.
Aspiration. Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine. “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us” (Ps. 4:7).
Devote. As October and the month of the Holy Rosary close and November and the Holy Souls approach, pray the De profundis (Ps. 129), today’s Introit psalm, for the faithful departed. They are coins already returned to the treasury and waiting to be made perfectly clean.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the doctrine of grace and perseverance, from Orange II to Trent’s Decree on Justification, and the image of God in man as the Fathers and St. Thomas understood it. The Church History path treats the relation of the Church and civil power, from the tribute coin through Pius XI’s Quas primas. The Sacred Liturgy path explains how the 1962 calendar handles a Sunday displaced by the Feast of Christ the King, and why the ferias take up its Mass.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthæum, canon 23; St. Jerome, Commentarius in Matthæum, on 22:15-21; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliæ in Matthæum 70 and Homiliæ in Epistolam ad Philippenses 2; St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 4.8, Tractatus in Ioannem 40.9, De prædestinatione sanctorum, and De dono perseverantiæ; and Tertullian, De idololatria 15 and Adversus Marcionem IV.38. Magisterial texts: Second Council of Orange (529), canon 5; Council of Trent, Session VI, Decretum de iustificatione, chapter 13; Pius XI, Quas primas (1925). St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 104, and Super Epistolam ad Philippenses, cap. 1.
Recordare mei, Domine, omni potentatui dominans. Orange (529), canon 5; Council of Trent, Session VI, Decretum de iustificatione, chapter 13; Pius XI, Quas primas (1925). St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 104, and Super Epistolam ad Philippenses, cap. 1.
Recordare mei, Domine, omni potentatui dominans.