Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: 1962 Roman Missal Proper Guide (Full Edition)

Full source-first companion to the 1962 Roman Missal propers, including complete appointed texts, per-element reception, source-grounded and exploratory synthesis, and documented cultural afterlives

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Dominica Decima Tertia post Pentecosten · II classis · Green

1962 Missale Romanum, editio typica, pp. 393–394 · Credo · Preface of the Most Holy Trinity

The Propers: Map

The four senses

Scriptural Date and Location

Six passages are directly appointed. Each has one dossier: a four-field summary, the narrated event where there is one, then a short explanation. Composed orations are not listed; their biblical echoes are not quotations. Psalm citations give the missal’s Vulgate number with the English-Bible equivalent; the appendix adds the Masoretic series.

The Propers: Themes and Movement

This formulary is built on one word said in two testaments. The chants plead testaméntum — look upon thy covenant, do not forsake thy poor — and the Epistle answers with the same noun: the covenant God confirmed to Abraham stands, and no law given four hundred and thirty years later can void it. Between the plea and the answer the day inserts a prayer for the only capacities that can receive a covenant — faith, hope and charity, asked as one increase — and a Gospel in which ten are cleansed but one act of returning faith is what hears salvum fecit. What began as a cry from ruins ends as bread of every sweetness and a second asking of the same increase.

Read in the order the book prints them, the ten texts fall into four stages:

1. A covenant pleaded from the ruins, twice, and a refuge confessed. (Int.), (Grad.), (All.)

2. The covenant answered: promise before law, and the virtues that receive it. (Ep.), (Coll.)

3. Ten cleansed on the way; one comes back, and faith is named. (Gosp.)

4. Times handed over, God appeased, the bread of every taste, increase asked again. (Off.), (Sec.), (Comm.), (Postcomm.)

English quoted in this section is the Douay–Rheims (Challoner) for scriptural propers and the 1861 Cummiskey hand missal for orations, as throughout; the sources are identified in the detailed commentary and in the references.

1. A covenant pleaded from the ruins

The Introit is the prayer of a devastated people: “Have regard to thy covenant … forget not to the end the souls of thy poor … Arise, O God, judge thy own cause.” Its psalm verse does not soften the situation; it sharpens it into the question the whole day must answer: “O God, why hast thou cast us off unto the end?” The Gradual then sings the same two verses over again — the one chant of the day that repeats the other — so that the plea is made twice before the Epistle is allowed to speak. That repetition was noticed: the continuation of Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year (Dom Lucien Fromage), citing Abbot Rupert, reads the Gradual’s Réspice … in testaméntum tuum as “the cry of the ancient people, who, sighing at the weakness of the powerless Law of Sinai, besought God to fulfil the covenant He had promised to Abraham’s faith.”

The Alleluia answers the fear of being forsaken in finem with the one psalm in the Psalter that bears Moses’ name: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge from generation to generation.” The lawgiver’s own prayer confesses a refuge older and steadier than anything the day will say about the law he gave.

2. Promise before law

The Epistle takes up the pleaded word and answers it as an argument. The promises were spoken to Abraham “and to his seed … which is Christ”; the testaméntum God confirmed cannot be disannulled by “the law which was made after four hundred and thirty years.” The law was set “because of transgressions, until the seed should come”; it could not give life; Scripture “hath concluded all under sin, that the promise, by the faith of Jesus Christ, might be given to them that believe.” The chants pleaded a covenant as if it might be forgotten; Paul answers that it cannot even be amended.

The Collect stands between plea and argument as the day’s act of receiving. It asks “an increase of faith, hope, and charity” — the promise is given credéntibus, so the first thing to ask is more of the believing — and then binds attaining to loving: “that we may deserve what thou promisest, make us love what thou commandest.” The prayer is older than any Sunday number it has carried, and the Church has quoted it back: the Council of Trent, teaching on the increase of justification, wrote that “this increase of justification holy Church begs, when she prays, ‘Give unto us, O Lord, increase of faith, hope, and charity’” — this Collect, cited by this Sunday, the decree’s one liturgical quotation in that chapter.

What that pleaded word means was not settled by the men who expounded the psalm. Augustine and Cassiodorus make this verse the hinge of the whole psalm and read its testaméntum as the new covenant, both proving it from Jeremiah; Rupert and Schuster refer it to the covenant promised to Abraham; Bellarmine reads it as the old covenant made with the fathers about a land; and Theodoret, who might have been expected to carry the argument, does not gloss the word at all. The Introit sings one noun that its commentators answer four ways.

3. Ten cleansed, one saved

The Gospel narrates the covenant’s grammar as an event. Ten lepers cry “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”; all ten obey the command to show themselves to the priests; all ten are cleansed “as they went.” One — “and this was a Samaritan” — turns back, glorifying God, and falls on his face giving thanks. To him alone is it said: “Arise, go thy way; for thy faith hath made thee whole.” The Venerable Bede drew the line that the formulary’s placement makes audible: the cleansing ran through the Law’s priests and reached all ten, but what the returning one receives is named with the Epistle’s own word — faith — and Bede concludes that faith’s working, not its bare knowledge, is what saves. Nine were cleansed under the Law’s form; the stranger outside it went home saved.

The oldest reading of the scene is Augustine’s, and it is not about ingratitude in general. Leprosy, he says, is a defect of colour rather than of health — which is why Luke writes that the ten were cleansed and not healed — so the ten stand for those who profess doctrines with truth and error mixed together, and the one who comes back is named by a word the tradition heard as “keeper.” Bruno of Segni guards the reading from the opposite error: many are cleansed of the leprosy of sin, he writes, who will not be counted among the elect. And the cure happens on the road. They were made clean dum irent, while they were going, before they reached the priests they had been sent to — two words on which the Latin Middle Ages built the doctrine that contrition precedes the keys.

4. Times handed over, and the increase asked again

What the Church sings at the offering is trust with time itself inside it: “I have put my trust in thee, O Lord: I said: Thou art my God. My times are in thy hands” — the missal’s old psalter singing témpora mea, “my times,” where the Clementine reads “my lots.” A people that has just heard the four-hundred-thirty-year argument hands its own chronology over at the altar.

The Secret says propitiáre twice — “Be thou propitious, O Lord, to thy people: and mercifully receive their offerings” — and asks pardon and petitions granted through the one oblation. The Communion then sets the oldest food in the day’s mouth: “thou didst … give them bread from heaven … having in it all that is delicious, and the sweetness of every taste” — Wisdom’s memory of the manna, recast by the liturgy as a first-person address, dedísti nobis, Dómine, at the moment of Communion. A ninth-century witness already attaches this antiphon to this Sunday’s Mass. And the Postcommunion closes the bracket the Collect opened, asking the day’s noun one last time: having received the heavenly mysteries, that we may advance toward the increase — augméntum — of eternal redemption. The day asked an increase of the three virtues before the covenant was argued; having eaten, it asks the increase of the covenant’s whole content.

The Appointed Formulary in Full

Everything the 1962 Missale Romanum prints for this Mass, in the order it prints it: the Latin of the Vatican editio typica exactly as the controlling facsimile has it, each element under its own printed heading, scriptural reference and marginal number, and beneath it the English of an identified public-domain witness. Here the texts stand complete, for a reader who came for them.

Formulary. DOMINICA DECIMA TERTIA post Pentecosten, II classis, printed pp. 393–394, marginal nos. 1562–1571. Green follows the general rubrics for Sundays after Pentecost and is not printed on those pages. The formulary begins immediately after the Postcommunion of the Twelfth Sunday (no. 1561) and ends immediately before the heading DOMINICA DECIMA QUARTA post Pentecosten (no. 1572). Everything between those boundaries follows below. It appoints no Tract, Sequence, second oration, blessing or ritual text, and no second Collect, Secret or Postcommunion.

The Latin. Received liturgical text of the Roman Rite, older than the edition that prints it. No public-domain conclusion is claimed for the 1962 typical edition itself; what permits the Latin here is 17 U.S.C. §103(b), under which a revised edition’s copyright reaches only that edition’s own contribution and not the preexisting material it reprints. All ten appointed elements of this formulary are printed in the Pustet Missal of Ratisbon, 1862, a public-domain witness — down to the very chant readings tabulated in the detailed commentary — and the basis and its bounds are set out in full in the terminal appendix. No rights are claimed in this text, and none of it has been composed, translated, modernised, conflated or adapted. Every form below was visually collated against the CMAA facsimile of the Vatican typical edition, and independently against page images of the 1962 Benziger editio iuxta typicam. Where the two editions differ, the Vatican typical reading is what appears here and the difference is tabulated in the detailed commentary.

The English. Scriptural elements are the Douay–Rheims as revised by Bishop Challoner (1749–1752) — the English of the Clementine Vulgate the missal prints — in the Project Gutenberg e-text of that revision. The three orations are the anonymous English of The Roman Missal translated into the English language for the use of the laity, first revised edition (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861), from the three lines that book supplies for this formulary, reproduced with its own nineteenth-century spelling and its abbreviated conclusion “Thro’.” Both are public domain in the United States. Neither is an official liturgical translation, and neither is the text of the 1962 books: this English is for study, not for use as an altar book or hand missal, and none of it was composed, translated, adapted or paraphrased for this edition. This Sunday’s chants preserve an older Latin psalter at several points where the Clementine — and therefore the Douay — reads otherwise; wherever the registered English does not answer the missal’s Latin, the gap stands at its element, unfilled.

1. Introit (Int.)

Antiphona ad Introitum — Ps. 73, 20, 19 et 23 — marginal no. 1562

Réspice, Dómine, in testaméntum tuum, et ánimas páuperum tuórum ne derelínquas in finem: exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam, et ne obliviscáris voces quæréntium te. Ps. ibid., 1 Ut quid, Deus, repulísti in finem: irátus est furor tuus super oves páscuæ tuæ? ℣. Glória Patri.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps. 73:20, 19, 22–23 printed whole, with the fragments the antiphon takes in bold, and Ps. 73:1

v. 20 Have regard to thy covenant: for they that are the obscure of the earth have been filled with dwellings of iniquity. v. 19 Deliver not up to beasts the souls that confess to thee: and forget not to the end the souls of thy poor. v. 22 Arise, O God, judge thy own cause: remember thy reproaches with which the foolish man hath reproached thee all the day. v. 23 Forget not the voices of thy enemies: the pride of them that hate thee ascendeth continually. Ps. O God, why hast thou cast us off unto the end: why is thy wrath enkindled against the sheep of thy pasture? ℣. Glória Patri.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The antiphon is a centonisation whose wording departs from the Clementine — and therefore from the Douay — at four points, so the Douay verses are printed whole with the corresponding fragments marked; stitched together, the fragments would make a newly composed English antiphon. The antiphon addresses Dómine where v. 20 names no addressee; it sings ne derelínquas, “forsake not,” where v. 19 and the Douay have “forget not”; it sings exsúrge, Dómine where v. 22 and the Douay have “Arise, O God” — a clause the printed reference does not even name, citing only vv. 20, 19 and 23; and it closes with voces quæréntium te, “the voices of them that seek thee,” where v. 23 and the Douay have “the voices of thy enemies.” The Douay answers none of these. The psalm verse matches the Clementine exactly; in the Douay’s numbering v. 1 opens with the inscription “Understanding for Asaph,” which the chant does not sing. The doxology cue Glória Patri belongs to the Ordinary and is not translated here.

2. Collect (Coll.)

Oratio — marginal no. 1563

Omnípotens sempitérne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei et caritátis augméntum: et, ut mereámur ássequi quod promíttis, fac nos amáre quod prǽcipis. Per Dóminum.

English: Cummiskey (Philadelphia, 1861), Collect of this formulary, printed p. 423

O Almighty and eternal God, grant us an increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may deserve what thou promisest, make us love what thou commandest. Thro’.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. One verb is bent rather than missing. Ut mereámur ássequi quod promíttis asks that we may deserve to attain what God promises; the 1861 English collapses ássequi into “deserve what thou promisest,” so the attaining disappears. The rendering is the registered public-domain witness for this formulary, and the prayer’s grammar stands only in the Latin.

3. Epistle (Ep.)

Léctio Epístolæ beáti Pauli Apóstoli ad Gálatas — Gal. 3, 16-22 — marginal no. 1564

Fratres: Abrahæ dictæ sunt promissiónes, et sémini eius. Non dicit: Et semínibus, quasi in multis; sed quasi in uno: Et sémini tuo, qui est Christus. Hoc autem dico: testaméntum confirmátum a Deo, quæ post quadringéntos et trigínta annos facta est lex, non írritum facit ad evacuándam promissiónem. Nam si ex lege heréditas, iam non ex promissióne. Abrahæ autem per repromissiónem donávit Deus. Quid ígitur lex? Propter transgressiónes pósita est, donec veníret semen, cui promíserat, ordináta per Angelos in manu mediatóris. Mediátor autem uníus non est: Deus autem unus est. Lex ergo advérsus promíssa Dei? Absit. Si enim data esset lex, quæ posset vivificáre, vere ex lege esset iustítia. Sed conclúsit Scriptúra ómnia sub peccáto, ut promíssio ex fide Iesu Christi darétur credéntibus.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Gal. 3:16–22

To Abraham were the promises made and to his seed. He saith not: And to his seeds as of many. But as of one: And to thy seed, which is Christ. Now this I say: that the testament which was confirmed by God, the law which was made after four hundred and thirty years doth not disannul, to make the promise of no effect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise. But God gave it to Abraham by promise. Why then was the law? It was set because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom he made the promise, being ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not of one: but God is one. Was the law then against the promises of God: God forbid! For if there had been a law given which could give life, verily justice should have been by the law. But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise, by the faith of Jesus Christ, might be given to them that believe.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The lesson’s opening address Fratres: is the missal’s own: v. 16 begins directly Abrahæ dictæ sunt promissiónes, and Paul’s “Brethren” belongs to v. 15, which is outside the lesson. It is not translated here. The lesson also ends at v. 22: the image of the law as pedagogue, pædagógus noster in Christo, begins at v. 24 and is outside the appointed Epistle.

4. Gradual (Grad.)

Graduale — Ps. 73, 20, 19 et 22 — marginal no. 1565

Réspice, Dómine, in testaméntum tuum: et ánimas páuperum tuórum ne obliviscáris in finem. ℣. Exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam: memor esto oppróbrii servórum tuórum.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps. 73:20a and 19b as the Introit’s dossier prints them whole, and v. 22

Have regard to thy covenant … and forget not to the end the souls of thy poor. ℣. Arise, O God, judge thy own cause: remember thy reproaches with which the foolish man hath reproached thee all the day.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. Here the Gradual’s ne obliviscáris is the Clementine’s own verb, so the Douay’s “forget not” answers it exactly — the one clause where this chant and the Bible text agree against the Introit. But the verse’s second clause, memor esto oppróbrii servórum tuórum, “remember the reproach of thy servants,” is not the Clementine’s v. 22b at all, which the Douay renders as printed above. The Douay wording that answers the chant’s clause stands at Ps. 88:51, “Be mindful, O Lord, of the reproach of thy servants”; the missal’s printed reference nonetheless says Ps. 73. Exsúrge, Dómine again stands where the Clementine and Douay have “Arise, O God.” At the cited verse the Douay answers neither clause.

5. Alleluia (All.)

Alleluia, no separate heading — Ps. 89, 1 — marginal no. 1566

Allelúia, allelúia. ℣. Ps. 89, 1 Dómine, refúgium factus es nobis a generatióne et progénie. Allelúia.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps. 89:1, between the chant’s own acclamations

Alleluia, alleluia. ℣. Lord, thou hast been our refuge from generation to generation. Alleluia.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The chant ends a generatióne et progénie, “from generation and progeny,” where the Clementine reads a generatióne in generatiónem and the Douay accordingly “from generation to generation.” The sense is near, the wording is not, and no registered English renders the chant’s form. In the Douay’s numbering v. 1 opens with the inscription “A prayer of Moses the man of God,” which the chant does not sing; this is the one psalm in the Psalter that carries Moses’ name.

6. Gospel (Gosp.)

✠ Sequéntia sancti Evangélii secúndum Lucam — Luc. 17, 11-19 — marginal no. 1567

In illo témpore: Dum iret Iesus in Ierúsalem, transíbat per médiam Samaríam et Galilǽam. Et cum ingrederétur quoddam castéllum, occurrérunt ei decem viri leprósi, qui stetérunt a longe; et levavérunt vocem dicéntes: Iesu præcéptor, miserére nostri. Quos ut vidit, dixit: Ite, osténdite vos sacerdótibus. Et factum est, dum irent, mundáti sunt. Unus autem ex illis, ut vidit quia mundátus est, regréssus est, cum magna voce magníficans Deum, et cécidit in fáciem ante pedes eius, grátias agens: et hic erat Samaritánus. Respóndens autem Iesus, dixit: Nonne decem mundáti sunt? et novem ubi sunt? Non est invéntus qui redíret, et daret glóriam Deo, nisi hic alienígena. Et ait illi: Surge, vade; quia fides tua te salvum fecit.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Lk. 17:11–19

And it came to pass, as he was going to Jerusalem, he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered into a certain town, there met him ten men that were lepers, who stood afar off. And lifted up their voice, saying: Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. Whom when he saw, he said: Go, shew yourselves to the priests. And it came to pass, as they went, they were made clean. And one of them, when he saw that he was made clean, went back, with a loud voice glorifying God. And he fell on his face before his feet, giving thanks. And this was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering, said: Were not ten made clean? And where are the nine? There is no one found to return and give glory to God, but this stranger. And he said to him: Arise, go thy way; for thy faith hath made thee whole.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The missal’s In illo témpore: Dum iret Iesus in Ierúsalem supplies a subject the evangelist’s sentence carries over from the preceding narrative; the Clementine reads Et factum est, dum iret in Ierúsalem and the Douay accordingly “And it came to pass, as he was going to Jerusalem.” The liturgical incipit is the missal’s own and is not translated here. The reading ends at v. 19; the question about when the kingdom of God comes, v. 20, is outside the appointed Gospel.

Rubric as printed: Credo. Printed at the end of the Gospel’s last line. A direction, not a text: the Creed itself is in the Ordinary.

7. Offertory (Off.)

Ant. ad Offertorium — Ps. 30, 15-16 — marginal no. 1568

In te sperávi, Dómine; dixi: Tu es Deus meus, in mánibus tuis témpora mea.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps. 30:15–16 in full, with the fragments the antiphon takes in bold

v. 15 But I have put my trust in thee, O Lord: I said: Thou art my God. v. 16 My lots are in thy hands. Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies; and from them that persecute me.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The antiphon’s last two words are the reason this element carries a gap. The Clementine reads in mánibus tuis sortes meæ, “my lots are in thy hands,” and that is what the Douay translates. The missal sings témpora mea — “my times are in thy hands” — an older Latin reading that here agrees with the Hebrew against the Clementine. No registered English renders the chant’s form. The antiphon also drops the psalm’s opening Ego autem (the Douay’s “But”) and inverts Deus meus es tu to Tu es Deus meus; the English is “Thou art my God” either way.

8. Secret (Sec.)

Secreta — marginal no. 1569

Propitiáre, Dómine, pópulo tuo, propitiáre munéribus: ut, hac oblatióne placátus, et indulgéntiam nobis tríbuas, et postuláta concédas. Per Dóminum nostrum.

English: Cummiskey (Philadelphia, 1861), Secret of this formulary, printed p. 424

Be thou propitious, O Lord, to thy people: and mercifully receive their offerings: that being appeased thereby, thou mayest grant us pardon, and hear our requests. Thro’.

The Latin says propitiáre twice — once over the people, once over the gifts — and the 1861 English keeps only the first, paraphrasing the second as “mercifully receive.” The doubling is the prayer’s argument, and it stands only in the Latin. The 1861 book prints no incipit for this Secret; its identification rests on the clause-for-clause correspondence alone.

Rubric as printed: Præfatio de Ssma Trinitate. Printed immediately after the Secret, with Ssma under a tilde abbreviation for Sanctissima: the Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, which is in the Ordinary. Expanded here from the same book’s own abbreviation practice.

9. Communion (Comm.)

Ant. ad Communionem — Sap. 16, 20 — marginal no. 1570

Panem de cælo dedísti nobis, Dómine, habéntem omne delectaméntum, et omnem sapórem suavitátis.

English: Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Wis. 16:20 in full, with the phrases the antiphon reworks in bold

Instead of which things, thou didst feed thy people with the food of angels, and gavest them bread from heaven, prepared without labour; having in it all that is delicious, and the sweetness of every taste.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The antiphon is an adaptation, not a quotation. The Clementine’s third-person clause, parátum panem de cælo præstitísti illis sine labóre — “thou gavest them bread from heaven” — becomes a first-person address, dedísti nobis, Dómine, “thou hast given us,” with a vocative the verse does not have and the verb of Ps. 77:24, panem cæli dedit eis, in place of the verse’s præstitísti. The two closing phrases are recast: omne delectaméntum in se habéntem loses its in se, and omnis sapóris suavitátem is inverted to omnem sapórem suavitátis. The Douay verse is therefore printed whole with the reworked phrases marked, since no registered English renders the antiphon’s own form.

10. Postcommunion (Postcomm.)

Postcommunio — marginal no. 1571

Sumptis, Dómine, cæléstibus sacraméntis: ad redemptiónis ætérnæ, quæsumus, proficiámus augméntum. Per Dóminum.

English: Cummiskey (Philadelphia, 1861), Postcommunion of this formulary, printed p. 425

May these heavenly mysteries, O Lord, which we have received, advance our eternal redemption. Thro’.

Where the registered English does not answer the Latin. The Latin asks that we may advance — proficiámus — toward the increase of eternal redemption; the 1861 English asks that the mysteries advance the redemption, moving the verb from the communicants to the sacrament. And augméntum, the “increase” this prayer shares word-for-word with the Collect, disappears from the English entirely. Both points stand only in the Latin.

The Propers: Detailed Commentary

Each element below stands under its Latin incipit, its printed heading and reference, and the missal’s marginal number. Its complete text, Latin and English together, stands just above in The Appointed Formulary in Full; below stands the evidence. The Latin returns only where an argument turns on the wording, and each Scripture comes first in its whole literary context, before any witness speaks about it.

Where the English comes from. Scriptural elements take the Douay–Rheims as revised by Bishop Challoner (1749–1752), the English of the Clementine Vulgate the missal prints, in the Project Gutenberg e-text of that revision. The three orations take the anonymous English of The Roman Missal translated into the English language for the use of the laity, first revised edition (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861), from the three lines that book supplies for this formulary. Both are public domain in the United States; neither is an official liturgical translation. A checked witness with no public-domain English at the locus used appears in summary, not in quotation.

The text: what two 1962 books actually print

The Latin was collated against the CMAA facsimile of the Vatican editio typica (printed pp. 393–394, marginal nos. 1562–1571), and independently against page images of the Benziger editio iuxta typicam of the same year (printed pp. 388–389). These are two editions of the 1962 revision, not two photographs of one page, and they differ. The typical edition governs every form printed here.

Two of these carry more weight than the rest. Benziger’s misirére at Luke 17:13 has an i for its first vowel; it is an apparent misprint in that edition, and the typical edition’s miserére is the Vulgate’s own word. And the Secret’s conclusion runs the other way from the Twelfth Sunday’s: here it is Benziger that prints the long form and the typical edition that breaks off at Per Dóminum nostrum. Neither is a different prayer. Both show that “the 1962 Latin” is not one artefact, and that a reading cited without its witness does not say what was checked. Three words of the Gospel’s left column are touched by ink loss in the CMAA scan — the m of magna, the first c of cécidit, the ti of grátias — and all three were confirmed letter for letter against the Benziger images. The damage is in the scan, not in the text.

Twelve places where the appointed text is not the Bible’s text

The more consequential collation is against the Clementine Vulgate, the Bible whose English is quoted here. Twelve divergences were verified directly against both texts. Five of them fall in the two chants drawn from Psalm 73, which is why this Sunday’s Introit and Gradual cannot be read out of an English Bible without misquoting the missal.

Three negative results complete the table. The Epistle matches the Clementine word for word; the Gospel matches it word for word after the liturgical incipit; and the Introit’s psalm verse, Psalm 73:1, matches it exactly, question mark included. The Gradual’s memor esto oppróbrii servórum tuórum is the one divergence that the checked evidence leaves unexplained: the clause is not the Clementine’s Psalm 73:22b, and the wording that answers it stands at Psalm 88:51, but the missal’s printed reference says Psalm 73. No Psalterium Romanum witness was collated here, so no derivation from any particular older psalter is established for any of these readings. The Pustet Missal of Ratisbon of 1862, a public-domain witness, shows something narrower and firmer: five of them — derelinquas, quaerentium te, opprobrii servorum tuorum, et progenie, tempora mea — are already in print there.

Three facts about the transmission of the witnesses

Each is a fact about how a source was transmitted, and each changes what that source can be cited for; each belongs to the element named beside it.

Introit (Int.)

Réspice, Dómine, in testaméntum tuum Antiphona ad Introitum — Ps. 73, 20, 19 et 23, with Ps. ibid., 1 marginal no. 1562

The whole psalm, first. Psalm 73 is a communal lament of unusual violence. Its inscription is Intellectus Asaph; its opening line is the question the Mass will spend the rest of the morning answering — Ut quid, Deus, repulisti in finem?, “why hast thou cast us off unto the end?”; and its body is a description of a sanctuary already sacked. Enemies have roared in the midst of God’s solemnity, set up their ensigns for signs, cut down the carved work with axe and hatchet, burned the sanctuary to the ground and defiled the dwelling place of God’s name (vv. 4–7). There is no prophet any more, and no one who knows how long (v. 9). Only then, from v. 12, does the psalm turn to recital: God is king before the ages, he divided the sea, he broke the heads of the dragons, he made the springs and the rivers, the day and the night, summer and spring. The petition the Introit sings comes after that recital and rests on it. Respice in testamentum tuum — look upon thy covenant — is a plea addressed to a God whose past acts are being cited against his present silence.

What the antiphon does to the psalm. It is a centonisation, and the missal’s own printed reference does not fully describe it. Verses 20, 19 and 23 are named; the clause exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam is v. 22a and is not named at all. The antiphon adds the vocative Dómine to v. 20, which has no addressee in the psalter. It drops the first half of v. 19, where the soul that confesses is not to be delivered up to beasts, and keeps only the second half. It sings ne derelínquas, forsake not, where the psalter has ne obliviscaris, forget not — and the Gradual, singing the same verse a few minutes later, will sing the psalter’s verb. And at the close it turns the psalm’s voces inimicorum tuorum, the voices of thy enemies, into voces quæréntium te, the voices of them that seek thee. That last change is the largest. In the psalter God is asked to remember what his enemies are shouting, so that he will act against them; in the chant he is asked not to forget what his seekers are saying, so that he will act for them. The prayer has changed its grammatical direction while keeping its words.

And what it leaves standing. The psalm verse is the Clementine’s v. 1 exactly, question mark included. The Church does not soften the accusation before singing it. The Mass of this Sunday opens with a congregation asking God why he has cast them off and why his anger smokes against the sheep of his own pasture, and the answer, when it comes, will come from Paul rather than from the psalm.

Whose psalm the Fathers thought this was, and which army sacked the temple

The tension in the psalm itself — an Asaph title on a psalm that mourns a sanctuary already destroyed — is not a modern discovery. Every checked witness had to decide what the psalm is about, and they did not agree.

Four of the six read the psalm of the Roman destruction, and three of those four read it as prophecy. This is the one place in this formulary where a chant’s own reception carries a heavy supersessionist charge: Theodoret adds that after that ruin the people obtained no restoration, “paying the penalty of impiety against the Saviour,” and Augustine’s exposition has sentences in the same key. Equally true is where each ends. Augustine’s Enarratio closes on Romans 9:27, reliquiae salvae fiant — let the remnant be saved.

And the dissent at the far end of the series is the most interesting thing in it, because of the ground on which it is made. Bellarmine rejects the reading of Augustine and Theodoret partly because the Roman Rite sings this psalm: a church that put these words in her own mouth cannot have understood them as the voice of unbelievers, since the psalm calls its speakers the sheep of God’s pasture and the souls that confess to him. A Counter-Reformation cardinal is arguing from the liturgy against a patristic consensus, about the psalm of this Sunday’s own Introit. He is honest about the cost: at v. 7 he concedes that the burning of the sanctuary “seems to be the only passage forbidding the application of this Psalm to the persecution of Antiochus,” since the temple was burnt by Nebuchadnezzar and by Titus and not by Antiochus, “still the gates of the temple were burned by him.”

St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 73 — and the Epistle quoted at the Introit Augustine’s first move is to decide whose voice sings. Asaph, he says, “latine Congregatio, graece Synagoga dicitur”: this is the voice of the Synagogue come to understanding — intellectus Asaph — the believing remnant rather than the Church simply. And the verse he grounds that on is this Sunday’s own Epistle, four verses past where the lesson stops: “quia et nos semen Abrahae sumus; Gentibus quippe loquebatur Apostolus, cum diceret: Ergo semen Abrahae estis, secundum promissionem haeredes” (Gal. 3:29). The exposition of the Introit’s psalm opens by quoting the sentence that closes the Epistle’s chapter: the man who wrote most about both already read them together.

On v. 1 his lemma differs twice from the chant — animus for furor, oves gregis tui for oves pascuae tuae — and his gloss turns the accusation into a question with an answer: “Non reprehendit, sed quaerit … Quid est, in finem? Forte usque in finem saeculi. An repulisti nos in Christum, qui finis est omni credenti?” (Rom 10:4). On v. 19 the beasts are the devil and his angels, the confession is Pentecost’s, and the poverty is the poverty of grace against merit: “Divites eramus, fortes eramus … iam modo non constituimus iustitiam nostram, sed agnoscimus gratiam tuam; pauperes sumus, exaudi mendicos tuos.”

Testamentum is the word the whole formulary turns on, and the two Latin Fathers who expound this psalm read it the same way. It is the noun the Introit pleads, the noun the Gradual pleads again, and the noun the Epistle will take up and argue about. Jerome, commenting on the Epistle, supplies the philology: where the Latin Bible writes testamentum, anyone who compares the Hebrew volumes “inveniet ubi testamentum scriptum est, non testamentum sonare, sed pactum, quod Hebraeo sermone dicitur BERITH” — the word does not sound will but pact. And at the psalm itself, Augustine and Cassiodorus independently make v. 20 the hinge of the whole psalm and identify the covenant as the new one, both citing Jeremiah 31:31.

Augustine at Ps. 73:20, and Cassiodorus after him Augustine: “Respice in testamentum tuum. Redde quod promisisti: tabulas tenemus, haereditatem exspectamus. Respice in testamentum tuum; non illud vetus: non propter terram Chanaan rogo; non propter inimicorum temporalem subiectionem … Respice in testamentum tuum, quo promisisti regnum coelorum.” The public-domain English of the Oxford translators renders it: “Fulfil that which You have promised: the tables we have, for the inheritance we are looking. Have regard unto Your Testament, not that old one … wherein You have promised the kingdom of Heaven.” He then quotes Jeremiah’s new covenant in full, and closes the verse on Romans 9:27.

Cassiodorus repeats the structure and adds the sentence that best explains why this psalm opens this Mass: “Respice, dixit, ut digneris implere quae cognosceris ante promisisse,” citing the same Jeremiah verse, and then — “quia non erant bona, quae delinquentis populi commemorare potuisset, meminit promissionis Dominicae quae semper impletur.” Having no merits to plead, the psalmist pleads the promise. That is exactly what the day is about to ask the Collect for and exactly what the Epistle is about to argue cannot be revoked.

The Glossa ordinaria hardens that reading into the schoolroom gloss. Its interlinear note on Respice in testamentum tuum reads “non vetus de terrenis sed tuum quod promisisti regnum celorum,” and its marginal note, under Cassiodorus’s name, compresses his argument to eight words that are worth the whole verse: “Imple que promisisti ut testamentum novum quod est de eternis constituas. Meminit promissionis quia merita deficiunt” — he remembers the promise because the merits fail. A medieval reader met the covenant plea already answered.

And the greatest of the later commentators reverses it Bellarmine reads the same clause and gives the opposite answer. God is asked to regard “pactum, siue testamentum quod fecisti cum Patribus nostris, vt esses nobis in Deum, nosque protegeres, atque defenderes in terra, quam nobis dedisti” — and the public-domain English of O’Sullivan renders it: “If you will not regard us, regard, at least, thy covenant or testament which you made with our fathers, that you would be a God to us, and that you would protect and defend us in the land you gave us.” He makes no connection at this verse to Christ, to the New Covenant, or to the kingdom of heaven, and he does not name Abraham here. The covenant pleaded is the old one, and what it promised is territorial.

That is a flat contradiction of Augustine, Cassiodorus and the Glossa at the same clause. It is also of a piece with his reading of the psalm’s occasion: a Maccabean lament pleads a Sinai covenant about a land, and a psalm about AD 70 pleads the covenant that replaced it.

And the witness who says nothing Theodoret does not gloss the word at all. His printed lemma at v. 20 is not epiblepson eis ten diatheken sou but epiblepson eis ten diatheken ton doulon sou — “look upon the covenant of thy servants” — and Migne’s own Variae Lectiones flag the intruded words as absent from both his codices, from the Hebrew and from the Septuagint. His entire note expounds the verse’s second half, about those who loved the darkness of ignorance. He says nothing whatever about what the covenant is: no Abraham, no Sinai, no new covenant. Migne’s facing Latin does not even render the word with the Introit’s noun; it prints foedus. The sharpest single contrast among the checked witnesses is therefore that the two Latin Fathers make v. 20 the hinge of the psalm and the Antiochene passes it without comment — with Bellarmine, a thousand years later, making it the hinge again and turning it the other way.

One divergence turns out not to be a divergence of the chant’s making. The Introit closes et ne obliviscáris voces quæréntium te, the voices of them that seek thee, where the Clementine has voces inimicorum tuorum, the voices of thy enemies. That looks like the boldest liberty in the formulary — the prayer changing direction while keeping its words — and the psalm commentaries show that it is not a liberty at all. Augustine’s lemma reads Ne obliviscaris vocem deprecantium te, the voices of them that beseech thee, and he glosses them as those “ingemiscentium, et exspectantium iam quod promisisti de Novo Testamento.” Cassiodorus’s lemma is the chant’s exactly — Ne obliviscaris voces quaerentium te — glossed “ut inveniant quem quaerunt, et mereantur cernere quem expetunt.” And Theodoret’s Greek lemma is “the voice of thy suppliants,” with Migne’s apparatus setting out the whole textual situation in one line: the Hebrew has thy enemies, Aquila and Symmachus follow it, and the Septuagint has the suppliants. The Clementine’s reading is the Hebrew; the chant’s is the Septuagint, and it is what the Old Latin, Augustine, Cassiodorus and Theodoret all had in front of them. The electronic edition of the Glossa ordinaria on the Psalter states the same thing in the terms a chant historian would use: it records inimicorum as the Gallican reading and querentium as the Roman, citing Jerome’s letter to Sunnia and Fretela. That record is the Glossa’s apparatus, and no Psalterium Romanum witness was collated to confirm it; but it is the nearest thing among the checked witnesses to an identification of the psalter the Roman chant sings.

And the one commentator who knew all this voted against the chant Bellarmine’s Latin note on the verse — one of the passages his nineteenth-century English translator deliberately omitted — records the whole situation and then decides: “Illud, inimicorum, in graecis libris est, seruorum, siue supplicum tuorum; & sic etiam legit S. Augustinus. Sed in hebraeo est, inimicorum … proinde necesse est in textibus graecis irrepsisse errorem.” He knows the reading this Introit sings, attributes it to Augustine and to the Greek books, and judges it a corruption — of echthron, enemies, into oiketon, servants. Migne’s apparatus at Theodoret independently records oiketon as the variant of one codex against hiketon, suppliants. So the Roman Rite goes on singing, in this Introit, a reading its own greatest controversialist thought secondary.

The reading is accordingly no alteration of the chant’s making; that is also the controlling limit of the proposal in Interpretive Possibilities that builds on it.

Dom Lucien Fromage, continuing Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year and reporting Abbot Rupert, hears the chant as a question and the Epistle as its answer: he reads the repetition of Réspice … in testaméntum tuum at the Gradual as “the cry of the ancient people, who, sighing at the weakness of the powerless Law of Sinai, besought God to fulfil the covenant He had promised to Abraham’s faith,” and he gives the locus: De divinis officiis xii.13. Rupert’s own text was not opened; his words here are Fromage’s excerpt. Fromage also reads the Introit’s three petitions in order — the poor, the beasts, the cause — as the situation of “the just men of the old law,” and binds the Introit to the Gospel by a single word: “Ingratitude is the necessary outcome of forgetfulness, and to-day’s Gospel justly condemns it.”

Collect (Coll.)

Omnípotens sempitérne Deus, da nobis fidei, spei et caritátis augméntum Oratio marginal no. 1563

The oldest prayer in the formulary, and one of the oldest in the book. It stands already in the Verona (“Leonine”) sacramentary, in the July series, under the heading Item alia, in the compressed scribal abbreviations that collection uses: Omp semp Ds da nobis fidei spei et caritatis augmentum et ut mereamur adsequi quod promittis fac nos amare quod praecipis per (Feltoe’s edition, printed p. 76). Two things about that witness matter. The spelling is adsequi, which the Gregorian supplement will still have and the 1962 book will not. And it carries no Sunday assignment at all: the Verona collection is a series of votive and daily Mass formularies, not a temporal cycle, so the prayer entered the Roman books before there was a Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost to put it on.

Where it travelled. In the Vatican Gelasian it appears twice. In Book III, among the sixteen unnumbered Sunday Masses, it opens the ninth of them (Wilson’s edition, printed p. 229) — and that same Mass carries this Sunday’s Postcommunion, so the Collect and the Postcommunion have travelled together since long before either was attached to a numbered Sunday. In Book III again, among the Orationes pro Caritate (p. 247), a variant recension gives it a different opening: Deus, qui iustitiam tuae legis in cordibus credentium digito tuo scribis, da nobis fidei et spei caritatisque augmentum. Wilson’s apparatus records that Pamelius, Gerbert and the Leofric Missal read the received opening; the Deus qui form is the Vatican manuscript’s own. In the Gregorian supplement preserved in Vat. Reg. 337 the prayer heads a numbered section — CXXII. DOMINICA .XIIII. POST PENTECOSTEN — and is followed there by this Sunday’s Secret and this Sunday’s Postcommunion (Wilson’s 1915 edition, printed p. 173). That these numbered Sunday sections belong to the supplement rather than to the Hadrianum proper is explicit in Wilson’s introduction; Wilson’s attribution of the supplement was later revised in scholarship that, not being public-domain, was not consulted.

The Sunday number is the least stable thing about it.

The formulary is stable and its number is not. To speak of “the Collect of the Thirteenth Sunday” as though the ordinal were part of the prayer’s identity is to describe a filing decision of the sixteenth century.

The Church has quoted this prayer back at herself, once, decisively. The Council of Trent, in the sixth session, chapter 10, teaching on the increase of received justification, argues that justification grows and cites the Church’s own praying as evidence: Hoc vero iustitiae incrementum petit sancta ecclesia, quum orat: Da nobis, Domine, fidei, spei et caritatis augmentum. The 1863 Tauchnitz edition footnotes the quotation Dominica XIII. post Pentecosten. Waterworth’s public-domain English of 1848 renders it: “And this increase of justification holy Church begs, when she prays, ‘Give unto us, O Lord, increase of faith, hope, and charity.’ ” Precisely: this Sunday’s Collect is the decree’s one liturgical citation in its chapter on increase. The council alters the address — Domine for the prayer’s Omnipotens sempiterne Deus — and takes the three virtues and the noun augmentum exactly.

What Trent does not cite Chapter XI of the same session quotes Augustine, but not the sentence usually attached to this prayer in devotional literature. What Trent cites is De natura et gratia 43, Deus impossibilia non iubet; the da quod iubes of the Confessions is nowhere in the decree, in either language. The two prayers are cousins in logic and are not connected in this text.

The grammar of the second half is the prayer’s argument. The punctuation of the typical edition is load-bearing: the purpose clause ut mereámur ássequi quod promíttis is suspended between et and the imperative fac nos amáre quod prǽcipis, so that the attaining of what God promises is made to hang on the loving of what he commands. The prayer does not ask to obey; it asks to love what is commanded, and it asks God to do the making. That is the petitionary logic Augustine canonised against the Pelagians. In De dono perseverantiae he argues from the Church’s prayers to the doctrine — “the Church would not pray that faith should be given to unbelievers, unless it believed that God converts to Himself both the averse and adverse wills of men” — but he does not quote this collect, and he could not have: he died in 430 and the collect’s earliest witness is later. The relation is one of logic, not of citation.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II q. 24 aa. 4, 6, 7; I–II q. 114 a. 8 Aquinas supplies the theology of the noun without quoting the prayer in any locus searched. Charity in this life can increase, and increases by the soul’s approach to God (q. 24 a. 4); not every act of charity increases charity in act, but every act of charity disposes to its increase (a. 6); and there is no fixed terminus of the increase in this life (a. 7). In I–II q. 114 a. 8 the increase of grace is said to fall under condign merit, and the term of grace’s movement is eternal life — which is, in different words, what the Postcommunion of this same Mass will ask for. The phrase fac nos amare quod praecipis occurs in neither of those questions, and the Corpus Thomisticum returns no page for it on an exact-phrase search. Yet at I–II q. 113 a. 9 Aquinas quotes the Tenth Sunday’s collect, Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserando manifestas. He demonstrably quotes this series of collects. In every place searched, he does not quote this one.

The Anglican afterlife. The prayer crossed into English in 1549 as the collect of “The xiiii Sonday” after Trinity: “ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, geve unto us the increase of faythe, hope, and charitie; and that we may obteine that whiche thou doest promise; make us to love that whiche thou doest commaunde.” It kept its Roman company: the same Sunday carried the Sarum epistle and this Sunday’s Roman Gospel, Luke 17:11–19. The 1877 Oxford parallel edition records the text as unchanged through 1552, 1559, 1604, 1637 (which adds “Amen”) and 1662, and Procter and Frere print the Latin original under “Fourteenth.” Pearson’s edition prints the Sarum antecedent at the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity. The misidentification is easy to make and common: the derived collect is Trinity fourteen, not thirteen. The Prayer Book’s Trinity 13 collect translates the Roman Twelfth Sunday’s Omnipotens et misericors Deus, de cuius munere.

Epistle (Ep.)

Abrahæ dictæ sunt promissiónes Léctio Epístolæ beáti Pauli Apóstoli ad Gálatas — Gal. 3, 16-22 marginal no. 1564

The complete argument the lesson is cut from

Galatians is a letter of alarm. Paul has heard that converts from paganism are being pressed by other missionaries to add circumcision and the observance of the law to the faith they received, and the letter’s whole third chapter is one sustained proof that the addition would undo the thing added to. The chapter opens by appealing to the Galatians’ own experience (v. 2: did they receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?), then turns to Abraham, who “believed God, and it was reputed to him unto justice” (v. 6, quoting Gen 15:6), and to the promise that in him all nations should be blessed (v. 8, Gen 12:3). Verses 10–14 argue that the law brings a curse and that Christ became a curse to redeem from it. Then, at v. 15, Paul introduces the human comparison the appointed lesson depends on: secundum hominem dico — I speak after the manner of men — a man’s ratified will is not annulled or added to. The lesson begins at v. 16 and runs to v. 22.

The lesson has two boundaries, and both matter. The opening address Fratres: is the missal’s, not Paul’s: v. 16 begins directly Abrahæ dictæ sunt promissiónes, and Paul’s own “Brethren” belongs to v. 15, outside the lesson — so the liturgical incipit borrows the address without borrowing the verse that carries the will-comparison. And the lesson stops at v. 22. The famous image of the law as pædagógus noster in Christo, the tutor leading to Christ, begins at v. 24 and is outside the appointed Epistle. Almost every ancient commentator on this passage runs straight on into it — all but Ambrosiaster and Augustine — and their pedagogue material, read as exegesis of this Sunday’s lesson, would quietly extend the lesson.

The seed

Paul’s argument turns on a singular noun: the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed, et sémini eius; God did not say and to thy seeds, as of many, but as of one, et sémini tuo, qui est Christus. The move is grammatical and has always looked vulnerable, since the Hebrew collective noun for seed is ordinarily singular in form whatever its reference. The Fathers who defend it defend it in two different ways, and the difference is not cosmetic.

St. Jerome, Commentarii in Epistulam ad Galatas, lib. II Jerome concedes the character of the argument and then defends its substance. Paul argues with the Galatians, he says, not with the reasoning he used to the Romans but with simpler arguments, “et pene de trivio” — almost off the street — which is why he prefaces secundum hominem dico. But the claim is materially true, and Jerome stakes his own reading on it: “Omnes Scripturas sensu ac memoria peragrans, numquam plurali numero semina scripta reperi.” Traversing all the Scriptures in sense and memory, he never found semina written in the plural. The nations were blessed not in Isaac or in the patriarchs but in Christo Jesu.

St. Augustine, Expositio epistulae ad Galatas §§23–25 Augustine’s seed is not quite Jerome’s. “Et ideo semen Abraham … Christum dicit Apostolus, hoc est omnes Christianos fide imitantes Abraham; quod ad singularitatem redigit commendando, quod non dictum est: Et seminibus, sed: Semini tuo, quia et una est fides.” The seed is Christ with his members, and the reason the singular holds is that the faith is one — an early instance of the totus Christus reading. Two sections later the same seed “populum significat.” Jerome’s seed is Christ singly; Augustine’s is Christ and all who imitate Abraham’s believing. Both are Christological readings, and they are not the same reading.

Theodoret of Cyrus holds the two together with a distinction: Christ is the seed properly, and Moses, Samuel and Elijah are Abraham’s seed by nature, but they are not the thing that brought the fountain of blessing to the nations. Ambrosiaster puts the same point forensically — the promise is firm in Christo … non in multis, sed in uno, and the judaizers are quasi reos falsati testamenti, defendants charged with forging the testament. Chrysostom simply accepts the singular without philological defence and hurries on to the consequence. Aquinas, characteristically, grounds the singular in what Christ alone can do: quasi in uno, quod est Christus, quia ipse solus est per quem et in quo omnes poterunt benedici.

The testament, and the four hundred and thirty years

Testamentum confirmátum a Deo: the noun is the same one the Introit and the Gradual have already sung four times between them, and the Latin commentators press its legal sense hard. Ambrosiaster makes the will-image into a theology of inheritance: “Testimonium ergo promissionis Abrahae testamentum appellatur; ut post mortem ejus haeredes essent … ut post mortem Christi credentes, haeredes essent fidei Abrahae per testamentum sanguinis Christi.” Aquinas states the underlying principle in a sentence worth the whole lesson: “nihil humanum tantam firmitatem habet sicut ultima voluntas hominis” — nothing human has such firmness as a man’s last will — and calls the promises “quasi testamentum Dei, quia est quaedam ordinatio de haereditate danda,” confirmed by oath. Theodoret adds the observation that matters most for this Sunday’s chants: the ancient Scripture itself calls the promise made to Abraham God’s diatheke. The Introit is not importing a word into the psalm; the covenant vocabulary is native to both texts, and Jerome’s berith note explains why one Latin noun serves for both.

The four hundred and thirty years are a different matter, and here the tradition divides between those who use the number and those who cannot account for it.

That Aquinas answers, in the thirteenth century, the question Jerome had left open in the fourth is one of the small pleasures of reading this lesson’s reception in order. He does not say he is answering Jerome. He simply does the sum.

Marius Victorinus, In Epistulam Pauli ad Galatas — the lacuna The earliest surviving Latin commentary on Galatians has no recoverable comment on the heart of this lesson. In the transmitted text, book I jumps from the exposition of 3:10 directly to the lemma VERS. 20: the comments on 3:11–19, which would have contained both the seed argument and the four hundred and thirty years, are lost in a lacuna. No VERS. lemma in the text falls between the two, and the tail of the v. 10 section already discusses the mediator, which places the disturbance exactly there. What survives of him on this passage is his comment on v. 20, which is emphatic — “solus enim Christus mediator, qui jungit illa inter quae mediator est” — and distinctively Neoplatonic, the mediator recalling the earthly members ad superiorem Ecclesiam. And at v. 22, four decades before Augustine’s Expositio, he writes that through Moses all is shut under sin “ut fides sola Jesu Christi sufficiat ad justificationem liberationemque nostram.”

The mediator: a disagreement the witnesses leave open

Ordináta per Angelos in manu mediatóris. Mediátor autem uníus non est: Deus autem unus est. Two questions sit in those two sentences — who the angels are, and who the mediator is — and the checked witnesses answer the second in two incompatible ways. This is the one place in the formulary where the tradition genuinely splits, and it stays split.

The Latin tradition solidified on Christ. The Antiochene reading is Moses, and Theodoret is its clearest witness. What Aquinas does is not a compromise but a bridge he builds deliberately: he keeps the mediator Christ, in whose power the law stands, and makes Moses — in whose literal hand the law was given — the figure that signifies him. He offers Ambrosiaster’s human-messenger reading and the literal angelic reading side by side as alternatives, and he gives three expositions of mediator unius non est, the third of which absorbs Ambrosiaster’s two-peoples arbitration through Ephesians 2:14. He knows the tradition disagrees, and he writes so as to keep both sides usable.

Liturgical reception, when it arrives, sides with the Antiochenes without appearing to notice that it is taking a side. Fromage describes the law as “made known to its subjects through the mediation of Moses and the angels” and contrasts it with “the covenant made by Abraham directly with God.” The medieval Glossa ordinaria had already handed the disagreement on unresolved: at v. 19 its marginal gloss reads “id est Moysen et alios ministros Dei, vel ministerio angelorum” — exactly the pair Aquinas inherits — while its interlinear gloss on in manu mediatoris says flatly “qui Deus et homo inter Deum et hominem.”

Why the law, then

Paul’s own answer is two words long: propter transgressiónes. The witnesses expand it in five directions, and the differences between them are real.

There is no contradiction in that column, but there is a real difference of temperature. Jerome’s law guards; Augustine’s law humiliates; Chrysostom’s law restrains; Theodoret’s law nurses a people along; Aquinas’s law does four things at once. Only Augustine makes pride the occasion, and only Augustine makes the answer to it a pun that the Epistle itself supplies.

Conclúsit Scriptúra ómnia sub peccáto

The lesson ends on a verb of imprisonment, and every checked witness takes care that it should not be heard as making Scripture the author of the imprisonment. Jerome’s image is judicial: Scripture shuts up the guilty as a judge does, so that the sovereign may afterwards pardon. Theodoret’s is lexical and blunt — the word “shut up” stands in place of “convicted” — and he offers faith’s salvation as an alexipharmakon, an antidote. Chrysostom’s is medical: the law was given “to probe their wounds, that they might long for a physician,” and “the word shut up means convinced.” Ambrosiaster reads it against Romans 11:32 — “Manifestatis enim peccatis suis, conclusi sunt, ut se excusare non possent, sed quaererent misericordiam” — and seals it with Isaiah 59:20–21, where the promise is itself called testamentum, which brings the lesson back to the word the Introit sang. Aquinas turns the medical image into a syllogism: as knowledge of one’s disease and awareness of one’s helplessness together drive a man to look for a doctor, so knowledge of sin and of one’s own impotence drive him to look for Christ. And Augustine had already fixed the destination of the whole movement in the phrase this lesson’s last clause supplies: credéntibus, to them that believe — which is precisely what the Collect asked an increase of, an hour earlier in the same Mass.

The Glossa ordinaria — what the middle ages inherited Checked in the electronic edition of the Glossae Scripturae Sacrae, keyed to the Rusch facsimile. It offers no fresh exegesis: it is a mosaic of Augustine and Ambrosiaster with Chrysostomic matter, a reuse witness, not a direct one. But it shows what a thirteenth-century reader met on the page. On v. 17 the marginal gloss records that the law “post multum tempus a promissione facta Abrahe … data est” and the interlinear draws the consequence sharply: if blessing were by the law, “frustra semini promisit et frustra semen ipsum venit … et Deus mendax.” On v. 22, “lex data est ut gratia quereretur” — Augustine almost verbatim — and “Data est ut egrum de morbo convincet qui sibi sanus videbatur.”

Where the lesson’s commentators stop, and one dispute that is not this one Every ancient witness above except Ambrosiaster and Augustine runs on past v. 22 into the pedagogue; Ambrosiaster begins a fresh lemma at v. 23 and Augustine’s treatment is essentially self-contained within the lesson’s bounds. Separately: the celebrated Jerome–Augustine controversy over Galatians concerns Gal 2:11–14, Paul’s rebuke of Peter at Antioch, and nothing in that correspondence engages 3:16–22. It is background on how differently the two men read the letter, and no more.

Where the supersessionist sentences actually are Several witnesses on this lesson write sentences about Israel that are harsher than Paul’s argument requires, and each belongs to its author, not to “the Fathers.” Jerome allegorises the twins of Genesis 38 and speaks of Israel’s hand polluted with the blood of the prophets and the Saviour. Ambrosiaster writes that the blessing “transitum fecit ad gentes” and that the Jews were blinded aemulatione quadam. Fromage, writing in the nineteenth century, is harsher than any of them — “his now dead Law,” “the superannuated … pretensions of the Synagogue.” None of these is the appointed lesson’s own claim. Paul’s conclusion in this pericope is that the law was not against the promises of God, absit, and that Scripture shut up all — ómnia, not one people — under sin.

Gradual (Grad.)

Réspice, Dómine, in testaméntum tuum Graduale — Ps. 73, 20, 19 et 22 marginal no. 1565

The one chant of the day that repeats another. The Gradual sings the Introit’s two opening verses over again. That is unusual enough to have been noticed in the liturgical commentary tradition, and Fromage, citing Abbot Rupert, gives it a reason: the repetition is “the cry of the ancient people, who, sighing at the weakness of the powerless Law of Sinai, besought God to fulfil the covenant He had promised to Abraham’s faith.” On that reading the Gradual is not a reprise but a second asking, made after the Epistle has been read — the covenant plea renewed in the light of the argument that the covenant cannot be annulled.

One verb changes, and it changes toward the Bible. Where the Introit sang ne derelínquas, forsake not, the Gradual sings ne obliviscáris, forget not — which is the Clementine’s own verb at Psalm 73:19, and therefore the one clause in either chant where the missal and the Douay agree exactly. The pair stands in both 1962 witnesses and was already in print in 1862 and 1570. No checked witness comments on it; nothing in the corpus searched notices that the two chants differ, and the likeliest explanation remains ordinary psalter transmission. The proposal built on the pair stands in Interpretive Possibilities.

The verse the missal cites and the wording it sings. The Gradual’s ℣ is Exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam: memor esto oppróbrii servórum tuórum, and the printed reference is Ps. 73:22. The first clause corresponds to Psalm 73:22a with Dómine for Deus and an added et. The second clause does not correspond to Psalm 73:22b at all. The Clementine’s v. 22b is memor esto improperiorum tuorum, eorum quae ab insipiente sunt tota die — remember the reproaches with which the foolish man reproaches thee — whereas the chant’s clause is verbally identical, minus the vocative, with Psalm 88:51, Memor esto, Domine, opprobrii servorum tuorum. The reproach has changed owner: in the psalm God is asked to remember the insults offered to him, and in the chant he is asked to remember the reproach borne by his servants. The missal’s reference nonetheless reads Ps. 73:22; the Douay wording that answers the chant’s clause belongs to Ps. 88:51, not to the verse the missal cites.

The divine title has a history. Both chants sing exsúrge, Dómine where the Clementine and the Douay have “Arise, O God.” That liturgical form, not the Bible’s, is the one that appears at the head of the most famous document ever to quote this verse (see Notable and Quotable), and the verified divergence is what makes the identification possible. Cassiodorus’s lemma at this verse is the chant’s on both counts — Exsurge, Domine, iudica causam tuam — so the wording the bull opens with is the wording a sixth-century commentator had in front of him.

Theodoret defends the chant’s pronoun, and Augustine did not have it The Gradual’s clause is iúdica causam tuam, judge thy cause, and one witness makes that pronoun the point of his whole note. Theodoret: very aptly, he says, the psalmist changed the pronoun — he did not say my case but thy case; “for I,” says the speaker, “suffered these things justly, but they dared many blasphemies against thee.” The suppliant concedes that his own punishment is deserved and re-founds the plea on God’s injured honour, which is why the petition can be pressed at all after a psalm that has just admitted the sanctuary is in ashes. Cassiodorus makes the complementary move on the same words: God “iudicat enim causam suam, dum errantes facit manifesta cognoscere, ut conversi praedicent quod stultis cogitationibus abnuebant” — he judges his own cause by converting, not by destroying.

Augustine’s lemma is not the chant’s. He reads Exsurge, Domine; iudica causam meam, and the Oxford translators render it “Arise, O Lord, judge my cause” — so his exposition, which turns on the speaker being mocked for believing what he cannot show and answers with the Resurrection (“Non enim venturus est ad iudicium, nisi qui exsurrexit a mortuis”), is an exposition of a possessive this Sunday does not sing.

Bellarmine noticed the same thing eleven centuries later and settled it. The Hebrew, he says, reads literally Litiga litem tuam; since God cannot plead before any tribunal but his own, the Septuagint and the Vulgate rightly have iudica causam tuam; “S. Augustinus legit, Iudica causam meam: sed nescio quid secutus sit: nam hebraeus, & graecus codex habet secundam personam, & sic inuenitur in latinis libris.” A Greek of the fifth century and a Latin of the seventeenth independently defend the pronoun this Gradual sings, and the second names Augustine’s variant and rejects it.

And the plainest statement of the covenant reading is the most recent. Schuster, on this Gradual, writes that it “recalls to God the promises made to the Patriarchs, and draws his attention to their merits,” and puts the prayer into direct speech: “O Lord, we have not deserved thy grace, but grant it to us, as an inheritance due to us because of thy promises to our Fathers the Patriarchs of old … We have no personal merits which can avail us, but their merits are also ours … Our cause is their cause, therefore it is thine.” That is the same move Cassiodorus made thirteen centuries earlier at v. 20 — having no goods of the people’s to recall, plead the promise — and it is the Epistle’s argument arriving at the chant from the other side. Schuster also records that this Gradual is shared with the Thursday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent.

Alleluia (All.)

Dómine, refúgium factus es nobis Alleluia, no separate heading — Ps. 89, 1 marginal no. 1566

The one psalm in the Psalter that bears Moses’ name. The inscription is Oratio Moysi, hominis Dei, and the placement is pointed: on the Sunday whose Epistle argues that the law given through Moses cannot annul a covenant older than it, the Alleluia sings the prayer the Psalter attributes to Moses himself, and the clause it takes is not about law at all. It is about refuge. The title ascribes the prayer to Moses without demonstrating his authorship, as Augustine himself says below; what is not in doubt is that the Psalter presents this prayer as Moses’ and that the missal takes its one line from it.

The clause and its whole psalm. Psalm 89’s burden is the contrast between God’s eternity and human brevity — a thousand years in his sight are as yesterday which is past, men are as grass which in the morning shall grow up and in the evening fall and wither — and the psalm ends by asking that the work of our hands be directed upon us. The Alleluia takes only the opening line, and it takes exactly the clause that carries the contrast: God has been our refuge a generatióne et progénie, from generation and progeny. The Clementine reads a generatione in generationem and the Douay accordingly “from generation to generation.” The sense is near and the wording is not, and no registered English renders the chant’s form.

What it answers. The Introit had asked God not to forsake his poor in finem and had demanded to know why he had cast them off in finem. The Alleluia’s answer is not an argument but a fact claimed about the past: across every generation there has ever been, the refuge held. It is placed between the Epistle’s proof that a covenant survives the interval and the Gospel’s story of what happens in one.

Two generations, or all of them

The chant’s phrase is the verse’s crux, and the checked witnesses divide over whether it counts generations or names two of them.

St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 89 Augustine begins by taking the title seriously and then denying its plain sense. Moses “minister Testamenti Veteris, et propheta Testamenti Novi”; but “non enim credendum est ab ipso omnino Moyse istum psalmum fuisse conscriptum, qui ullis eius litteris inditus non est … sed alicuius significationis gratia tam magni meriti servi Dei nomen adhibitum est.” The Oxford English: “it is not to be believed that this Psalm was entirely the composition of that Moses … but the name of the great servant of God is used for the sake of some intimation.” A fifth-century bishop states, in public, the distinction between traditional ascription and authorship that still governs the dating of this psalm.

Then the reading that makes this chant belong to this Sunday. His lemma is in generatione et generatione, and he offers two senses: “sive in omni generatione, sive in duabus generationibus, vetere et nova; quia … minister fuit ille Testamenti pertinentis ad generationem veterem, et Propheta Testamenti pertinentis ad generationem novam. Cuius Testamenti sponsor, sponsusque coniugii … ait ipse Iesus: Si crederetis Moysi, crederetis et mihi” (Jn. 5:46). On the second reading the Alleluia is not a general comfort at all: it says that the refuge held across both covenants — which is the Epistle’s thesis sung in one line, on the Sunday that argues it.

He also supplies the reason a refuge can be “made” without God changing: “Tu ergo qui semper es … Ecce quae aeternitas facta est nobis refugium, ut in ea mansuri, ad eam de hac temporis mutabilitate fugiamus.” The refuge is God’s eternity, and what one flees to it from is temporis mutabilitas — the mutability of time. That is the axis the Offertory will turn on twenty minutes later.

Cassiodorus’s lemma is the chant’s exactly — refugium factus es nobis, a generatione et progenie, against the Clementine’s a generatione in generationem — and he is the one witness who glosses the two nouns separately: “A generatione, significat ex quo generari coeptum est genus humanum. Progeniem vero dixit usque ad finem saeculi, cum progenies sibi humani generis per aetates singulas reparata succedit; ac si diceret, semper.” From the first begetting to the end of the world: as if he had said, always. He reads the psalm first through Moses’ own biography — the ark among the Hebrew children, Pharaoh, the Red Sea, the murmuring people — and then insists on the grammar: “nobis posuit, non mihi,” so that the refuge is the whole Church’s and not one man’s. On the title he takes over Augustine’s sentence and adds a point of his own: Moses is named because the psalm joins both covenants, “quod duo sacramenta vi sui nominis indicaret.”

St. Jerome, Tractatus de psalmo LXXXVIIII — and the Introit quoted at the Alleluia Jerome asks what a refuge is for, and answers by naming three pursuers: “aut ab aestu nimio quaerit et calore, aut bestia illum persequitur, aut hostes illum persequuntur, ut interficiant.” Then he applies all three — and the verse he reaches for to prove the second is Psalm 73:19, the verse the Introit has already sung: “et nos bestia persequitur, de qua dicimus Ne tradas bestiis animam confitentem tibi.” Morin’s apparatus identifies the citation. The Alleluia’s psalm and the Introit’s psalm are joined, in a fourth-century homily, at exactly the verse the Introit takes; it is the closest thing among the checked witnesses to a witness reading the day’s chants together.

On the phrase itself he gives both of Augustine’s senses: “In generatione et generatione: et in praeterito, et in praesenti, et in futuro. Aliter … et in vetere populo Iudaeorum, et in nostro Xpistianorum.” In his second homily on the same psalm he adds that the Hebrews ascribe this psalm and the ten following to Moses because they carry no title, that hominis Dei is a title of dignity rather than of servitude, and that a refuge presupposes persecution: “Refugium numquam dicitur, nisi fuerit persecutio.” The Introit’s plea is made under exactly such a persecution. No public-domain English exists for these homilies, so they are quoted in Latin.

Theodoret reads the title differently again, and the difference is grammatical: his lemma is a dative — a prayer for Moses, not of Moses — which is what allows him to report two views without deciding, some writers ascribing the prayer to Moses and some to David, who fitted it to Moses. He then finds the psalm to carry a double oracle, one about the calamities of the Jews and one about the corruptibility of human nature at large. And when he expands “in generation and generation” he does it twice, first as a list of rescues in Israel’s history and then as a list for the whole race: Enoch translated, Noah preserved as a spark for the race when all had embraced a bestial life, and then — the one place at any of these three psalms where he reaches for the covenant — God “choosing the patriarch Abraham, promised the blessing to all the nations.” It is polemical in purpose, against those who said the Lord came to the Gentiles from a change of mind. Its interest for this Sunday is that the Abrahamic promise-to-the-nations from which this Sunday’s Epistle argues turns up in the Greek tradition at the Alleluia’s verse, and not at the Introit’s.

The medieval Psalter gloss transmits Augustine’s reading whole: the title’s interlinear note says Moses “fuit minister Veteris Testamenti et propheta Novi Testamenti … non quod Moyses eum conscripserit,” and at v. 1 the gloss under Augustine’s name is his alternative verbatim — “id est in omni generatione vel veteri cuius ille minister et nova cuius ille propheta.”

Bellarmine denies the Mosaic authorship on a new ground, and gives the Alleluia the Collect’s three virtues His Latin argues the authorship out. Jerome’s letter to Cyprian held that Moses wrote this psalm and the ten following; Augustine denied it because it is not in the Pentateuch with his other canticles; and Bellarmine adds a reason of his own — “quoniam in hoc Psalmo definitur vita hominis, vt plurimum, annis septuaginta, & in robustioribus, annis octoginta: at Mosis tempore plurimi centesimum annum transcendebant.” Moses died at a hundred and twenty and was eighty at his call; a psalm that fixes a man’s span at seventy is not his arithmetic. The title stands, he concludes, because David brings Moses on to speak. None of that is in the public-domain English, which prints only the Douay heading and calls the author David throughout.

What the English does carry is the note on the verse itself: he that seeks new favours “can make use of no argument so convincing as the shewing himself grateful for the past” — which is the Gospel’s argument arriving at the Alleluia — and then the Hebrew: the word for refuge “signifies a well-fortified house, placed on an eminence, the tenants of which are quite secure from their enemies, from beasts, from flood, and from storms.” Those who take refuge in God, he says, “dwell as they would in a city fortified by faith, hope, and charity.” The Collect of this Mass asked for an increase of exactly those three, an hour earlier; Bellarmine is not citing it.

Two commentators, no covenant. Fromage prints this Alleluia and passes on without a word of comment on it. Schuster comments, and his comment is about the psalm’s constancy rather than its covenants: “The help of man fails either from inconstancy or from incapability. God, on the contrary, is always constant in his friendship.”

Gospel (Gosp.)

Dum iret Iesus in Ierúsalem ✠ Sequéntia sancti Evangélii secúndum Lucam — Luc. 17, 11-19 marginal no. 1567

The complete episode and where it stands

The pericope is a whole episode, opened by v. 11 and closed by v. 19; the question about when the kingdom of God comes, at v. 20, is outside it. Luke places the episode on the long journey to Jerusalem that structures the middle of his Gospel, and locates it with a phrase that has puzzled readers since antiquity: Jesus passed per médiam Samaríam et Galilǽam, through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. Someone travelling south from Galilee to Jerusalem would meet Galilee first; Luke names Samaria first. Immediately before, at 17:5–10, stand the apostles’ request “increase our faith” and the parable of the unprofitable servant; this Sunday’s Collect has already asked for an increase of faith, and this Gospel will end by naming faith as what saved.

The liturgical incipit is the missal’s own: In illo témpore: Dum iret Iesus in Ierúsalem supplies the subject that Luke’s sentence carries over from the preceding narrative, where the Clementine reads Et factum est, dum iret in Ierúsalem. After that clause the appointed Latin matches the Clementine word for word.

What Augustine made of it, and what the Middle Ages did with what he made

Augustine is the origin of nearly everything the Latin West said about this pericope for eight hundred years, and his reading turns on a medical observation. Leprosy, he says, is a defect of colour, not of health or limb — which is why Luke says the ten were mundati, cleansed, rather than sanati, healed. The lepers therefore signify not sinners in general but those who lack the knowledge of the true faith and profess variegated doctrines of error: “Leprosi ergo non absurde intellegi possunt qui scientiam verae fidei non habentes varias doctrinas profitentur erroris … Nulla porro falsa doctrina est quae non aliqua vera intermisceat.” No false doctrine is without some truth mixed in: that is the streaked skin.

St. Augustine, Quaestiones Evangeliorum II.40 Three further moves, each of which the tradition kept. Why the priests: the Jewish priesthood prefigures the royal priesthood of the Church, and doctrine and the sacraments are the Church’s province — Paul is sent to Ananias, Cornelius to Peter; and Cornelius’s household, receiving the Spirit before baptism, is cleansed while going, which is the seed of the whole later reading of dum irent. The number: nine is imperfection, standing outside the unity that ten signifies. The Samaritan: the name is interpreted custos, keeper, and this leper keeps the unity of the kingdom by giving back to God what he had received (Ps 58:10, Fortitudinem meam ad te custodiam). Augustine also writes here the sentence that its later transmission had to decide what to do with: “Et quia illi erant Iudaei, amisisse per superbiam declarati sunt regnum caelorum, ubi maxime unitas custoditur.”

St. Augustine, Sermo 176 — preached on this pericope The same pericope in the pulpit, and the register changes completely: the sermon is anti-Pelagian. None in Adam’s mass is un-sick and none is healed without Christ’s grace; infants are carried to the physician on other people’s feet. “Doctrina inconstans, non habens unum colorem, mentis lepram significat” — but the application is now to the hearer’s own account of his amendment: “Noli tibi tribuere, ne sis inter novem qui gratias non egerunt.” Do not attribute it to yourself, lest you be among the nine who gave no thanks. The thankful one is the alienigena who signifies the Gentiles; “numerus ille Christo decimas dedit”; and the sermon’s hardest sentence is about the preacher and his congregation, not about anyone else: “Nostrum nihil, nisi peccatum quod habemus.” No public-domain English exists at this sermon — the standard modern translation is in copyright — so it is quoted here in Latin only.

St. Bede, In Lucae Evangelium Expositio V (PL 92, 542B–544D) Bede’s chapter on this pericope is a proven mosaic, which is what a Latin commentator of the eighth century understood himself to be making. The leprosy-as-false-doctrine blocks, the Paul–Ananias and Cornelius material, the custos etymology and the nine-and-ten number theology are Augustine’s Quaestiones II.40, matched line for line. “Et bene, ut salventur, Iesum praeceptorem nominant…” is verbatim Gregory, Moralia V.11 n. 28, and the gloss on true thanksgiving reworks Moralia II.52 n. 82.

Two things are Bede’s own. The first is an editorial mercy: he drops Augustine’s sentence about the Jews having lost the kingdom by pride. The second is the closing paragraph, which ties this lection back to the parable of the unprofitable servant at 17:5–10 and draws the distinction the whole Sunday turns on — the ten were cleansed and the one was saved: “Si autem fides salvum fecit eum … ergo perfidia perdidit eos qui de acceptis beneficiis Deo gloriam dare neglexerunt.” What saves is faith’s working, not its bare acknowledgement. On the route clause: Bede abbreviates the lemma and has no comment at all on the route clause.

Five centuries later, Aquinas’s Catena aurea compiles Bede under his own name — and restores Augustine’s dropped sentence, silently, from the Quaestiones. The Catena transmits Augustine unsoftened. Whether that was a decision or an accident of compiling from two exemplars, the effect is that the harshest sentence in the pericope’s Latin reception disappears in the eighth century and returns in the thirteenth, and “Bede and Aquinas,” cited as one voice on this passage, flattens the one place where they demonstrably differ.

The Greek witnesses, and the one ancient comment on the route

St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke — fragments only In the Syriac, Sermons 113–116 are lost, and what survives for this pericope is catena fragments, printed at pp. 539–541 of Payne Smith’s 1859 Oxford translation under the lemmata 17:12 and 17:14. No integral “Sermon 113 on the ten lepers” survives to be cited. The fragments carry two readings. On the priests: they are “ever envious of His glory,” and are made witnesses of the cure precisely because they knew the marks of leprosy and of its healing — “He sent them to the priests, and with them He sent also the healing.” And on the route clause, Cyril is the one ancient witness who comments on it at all: the thankful man was “of foreign race, having been brought thither from Assyria: for the phrase is not without meaning, ‘in the middle of Samaria and Galilee.’ ” Payne Smith’s translation is public domain and is quoted here. Cyril’s supersessionist edge is his own: “It shows therefore that the Samaritans were grateful, but that the Jews, even when benefited, were ungrateful.”

Theophylact of Ohrid’s Luke commentary occupies PG 123; of it only the Latin of the excerpts in the Catena aurea is verified, and they preserve the most generous reading among all the checked witnesses. The lepers stood afar off “quasi verecundantes de immunditia” — as if ashamed of their uncleanness — “yet were made near by praying”; going to the priests carried an implied promise of cure; and, on the Samaritan: “nihil impedit quemquam placere Deo, etsi de genere profano processerit … Nullus etiam natus ex sanctis superbiat.” Nothing prevents anyone from pleasing God even if he came of profane stock, and let no one born of holy people be proud. The modern English translation of Theophylact is in copyright and is not quoted; the public-domain access is the 1843 Oxford Catena.

Titus of Bostra, who survives only in catena fragments not checked against an independent edition, turns the route into the pericope’s most generous theology: Christ crosses between the two estranged peoples “quasi pacificans … ut utrosque compingat in unum novum hominem,” applying Ephesians 2:15 to Luke’s geography — a reading that rests on the fragment alone.

Dum irent: the two words that carried a doctrine

The most consequential thing in this pericope’s reception is not an interpretation of the Samaritan but of a subordinate clause. Et factum est, dum irent, mundáti sunt: they were cleansed while they were going, before they reached the priests they had been sent to. Augustine had already seen the pattern in Cornelius, who received the Spirit before baptism. What the Latin Middle Ages did with it was build the theology of contrition on it.

Pseudo-Augustine, De vera et falsa poenitentia c. 10 n. 25 An eleventh-century anonymous treatise transmitted among Augustine’s works and printed under Auctor incertus — the attribution matters because the text’s influence is enormous and its author is not Augustine. Two moves, in tension with each other and both retained by the tradition that inherited them. First, oral and personal confession is grounded on v. 14: “Praecepit enim Dominus mundandis, ut ostenderent ora sacerdotibus: docens corporali praesentia confitenda peccata, non per nuntium, non per scriptum manifestanda,” with the shame of confessing itself “partem habens remissionis.” Second, contrition precedes the keys: “Mundati enim sunt leprosi, dum ibant ostendere ora sacerdotibus, antequam ad eos pervenirent … Unde patet Deum ad cor respicere.” This treatise fed Gratian and Peter Lombard, and is the hinge by which this Sunday’s Gospel entered scholastic penance theology.

Bruno of Segni, Commentaria in Lucam II, cap. XVII, and Homilia C (PL 165) Bruno reads the pericope twice, and states the dum irent theology at its sharpest. The ten are not heretics but all sinners — “Quid enim sunt decem viri leprosi, nisi omnes peccatores?” — ten being the number of totality; excommunication is the Church’s casting of lepers outside the camp. On the priests his reading is juridical, and it is the reading Trent’s theology of the sacrament would later need: they are sent “non ut sacerdotes eos mundarent, sed ut mundos eos esse judicarent” — not that the priests should cleanse them but that they should judge them clean. And then: “Facile est Domino peccata dimittere. Prius enim multoties peccatori debita remittuntur, quam veniat ad sacerdotem … quia cor contritum et humiliatum Deus non spernit.” God often remits before the penitent reaches the priest at all. Bruno also guards the reading against presumption in the other direction: cleansing is not election — “Multi enim sunt baptizati, multi a peccatorum lepra mundati, qui … in electorum numero non computabuntur.” His homily gives the fullest medieval engagement with the route: “Sed quid per Galilaeam, nisi Judaeos? Et quid per Samariam, nisi gentiles intelligamus? … Per medium autem illorum transibat Jesus, quia hos et illos vocabat,” and the castellum is the Church. He ends where Bede ended: “Fides igitur salvat, fides justificat, fides et interius et exterius hominem sanat.”

Fromage carries the same chain into the nineteenth century and states its sacramental conclusion outright: “The lepers are made clean only while on their way to show themselves to the priests … That Law gave to the sons of Aaron the power, not of curing, but of discerning leprosy,” whereas the new priesthood’s judgments, “by pronouncing the sentence of absolution, are to effectually remove the leprosy of souls.” The chain is therefore continuous: Augustine’s Cornelius, Bede, the pseudo-Augustinian treatise, Bruno, the scholastic penance tradition, Fromage. This Sunday’s Gospel carries, in its reception, the doctrine of contrition and the keys.

Where Ambrose and Gregory left no exposition, and what that shows

St. Ambrose has no exposition of this pericope What exists is one transitional clause in Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VIII n. 32: “Post haec reprehenduntur ingrati: atque ita demum ad tractatum futuri venitur judicii.” After this the ungrateful are rebuked, and so at last one comes to the treatment of the coming judgment. That is all: books VIII–IX hold nothing else under the stems lepr-, samari-, mundat-, alienigen-, decem, gratias and ingrat-, and the Catena aurea’s single one-clause Ambrose excerpt shows that its compilers found no more.

St. Gregory the Great preached no homily on it — but is in its bloodstream In all forty Homiliae in Evangelia and their preface the pericope appears only incidentally. Yet Gregory supplies, through the Moralia in Iob V.11 n. 28, the reading Bede transcribed and the Catena transmits under Bede’s name. There Job’s friends, who “mingle right things with perverse,” typify heretics reconciled by the Church’s preaching: “Quos bene in Evangelio illa decem leprosorum mundatio designat … Leprosi itaque haereticos exprimunt, quia dum rectis prava permiscent, colorem sanum maculis aspergunt. Unde et bene ut salventur, clamant, Iesu praeceptor.” A father who never preached on a pericope can still be one of its principal voices, by way of a commentator who read him.

Chrysostom is absent too, and one of Bede’s sentences has no located source. No genuine or pseudonymous Chrysostom homily on the ten lepers was found in Latin, English or Greek-keyed searches, and the Catena aurea’s total silence on Chrysostom at this lection corroborates the absence. And Bede’s sentence “electi in faciem et reprobi retrorsum cadunt” was not found verbatim anywhere in the Moralia, though the doctrinally parallel exposition of Genesis 49:17 was; the sentence is Gregorian in doctrine and unlocated in wording.

What the Catena aurea shows about the shape of the tradition

Read as a map rather than as an authority, Aquinas’s compilation on this lection tells us which voices a thirteenth-century reader could actually reach: Ambrose’s one clause, the Greek catena tradition (Titus, Cyril), Augustine’s Quaestiones, Bede — and Theophylact. No Chrysostom, and no Gregory under his own name, though Gregory is present inside the Bede excerpts. That is a remarkably thin canon for a famous pericope, and it explains why Augustine’s reading dominated: for most of the Latin Middle Ages there was very little else.

The two Samaritan Sundays — and who actually connects them

The Sunday before this one carries the Good Samaritan. Two consecutive Sundays with a Samaritan at the centre of the Gospel is the kind of pattern that invites building on, and no patristic witness links them. The pericope of the ten lepers floated between Sundays in the medieval homiliaries — Bruno’s homily on it is headed Dominica XII post Pentecosten in the arrangement printed in Migne, with an editorial note that Haymo carries the exposition at Dominica XIV. The one commentator who binds the two Samaritans is Fromage, and he does it through Rupert of Deutz. Fromage reports that the Good Samaritan Gospel “formerly was assigned to this present Sunday,” and quotes the abbot: “Every portion of the Office of the thirteenth Sunday … bears on the history of that Samaritan, whose name signifies keeper; it is our Lord Jesus Christ who, by His Incarnation, comes to the rescue of man, whom the old Law was not able to keep from harm.” Rupert reads the whole office — the Introit and Gradual included — through Samaritanus as custos, which is Augustine’s etymology transferred from this leper to the Good Samaritan and thence to Christ. Rupert’s own De divinis officiis was not opened; his words here are Fromage’s excerpt.

The last clause

Surge, vade; quia fides tua te salvum fecit. The nine were cleansed and went home clean; nothing in the text takes their cleansing back. What the tenth receives is named with a different verb, and it is named with the word the Epistle has spent the morning arguing about: faith. Bede’s distinction — cleansing is not salvation, and what saves is faith’s working rather than its bare acknowledgement — is the pericope’s own, drawn from its own last sentence. Fromage, whose treatment of the nine is frankly supersessionist in texture, nonetheless ends the chapter in a Romans 11 key, praying that the time come “which will be so glorious for the two peoples.” Schuster’s sentence is blunter: “This story prefigures the future mission of the apostles, who, driven out by the faithless people of Judea, turned away and preached with immense success to the Samaritans and the Gentiles.” The appointed text says something narrower and harder than any of them. It says that one man came back.

Offertory (Off.)

In te sperávi, Dómine Ant. ad Offertorium — Ps. 30, 15-16 marginal no. 1568

The psalm. Psalm 30 is inscribed In finem. Psalmus David, pro extasi, and is a lament with an unusually strong strand of trust running through it: the singer is besieged by fear on every side, his life is wasted with grief, he is forgotten as one dead from the heart, and in the middle of that he says the two lines the missal takes. The psalm’s sixth verse is In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum — the verse Christ dies with at Luke 23:46, and the verse the Church says every night at Compline. The antiphon appointed at the offering of the gifts is therefore taken from the psalm of the commendation of the spirit, ten verses further down.

Three divergences, one of which matters. The antiphon drops the psalm’s opening Ego autem, so that the trust is stated rather than contrasted; it inverts Deus meus es tu to Tu es Deus meus, which the English cannot show; and it sings in mánibus tuis témpora mea where the Clementine reads sortes meæ. My times where the Bible of the missal’s own English has my lots. This is the most consequential single divergence in the formulary for a reader working in English, and it runs toward the Hebrew: the antiphon here agrees with the Hebrew, whose word at this point means times, against the Clementine. The Douay cannot be quoted for it, and no other registered public-domain English carries the chant’s form, so it stands without English. The 1862 Pustet printing already has tempora mea, so the reading is not a modern artefact of the 1962 book.

What the antiphon does at the offering. The Mass has just heard an argument conducted in units of four hundred and thirty years and a Gospel in which a cure happened somewhere along a road. At the moment the gifts are brought, the Church sings a line that hands time itself over: not my safety, not my cause, but my times, in thy hands. The Introit’s question had been about duration — why hast thou cast us off in finem, unto the end — and the Offertory does not answer it. It surrenders the terms of it.

Sortes or témpora: the one divergence with a patristic exposition on both sides

This is the place where the reception pays for itself. Because the Clementine reads sortes, one would expect every Latin expositor to have expounded lots and the chant’s times to stand alone. That is very nearly true, and the exception is decisive.

St. Augustine expounds sortes, and expounds them famously He treats this psalm four times, not three — the pieces printed as enarratio I and the three sermons of enarratio II — and vv. 15–16 fall in the first and the third only. All four read In manibus tuis sortes meae. In the first, which the Oxford translators carry: “In Thy hands are my lots. In Thy power are my lots. For I see no desert for which out of the universal ungodliness of the human race You have elected me particularly to salvation … yet I, from whom this is hid, have attained by lot unto my Lord’s vesture” — the seamless tunic of Jn. 19:24, won by casting lots.

The third sermon, which has no public-domain English and is therefore quoted here in Latin, is the fullest patristic exegesis of the clause, and it is an exegesis of lots: “Audito nomine sortium, non debemus sortilegos quaerere. Sors enim non aliquid mali est: sed res est in dubitatione humana divinam indicans voluntatem” — the apostles casting for Matthias — and then: “Sortes dixit, quantum ego existimo, gratiam qua salvi facti sumus. Quare sortis nomine appellat gratiam Dei? Quia in sorte non est electio, sed voluntas Dei … sorte voluntatis suae nos salvos fecit, quia voluit, non quia digni fuimus.” Grace is called a lot because in a lot there is no choosing, only God’s will. It is a magnificent reading, and this Sunday does not sing the word it depends on.

One smaller thing his lemma does share with the chant: he reads dixi: Tu es Deus meus, in the antiphon’s word order, not the Clementine’s Deus meus es tu.

Cassiodorus’s lemma is the antiphon, and his exposition turns on its word “Dixi, tu es Deus meus; in manibus tuis tempora mea.” The Offertory’s reading, word for word, including the word order. And the exposition cannot be transposed to sortes, because it hangs on time: for Cassiodorus the whole psalm is the voice of Christ — “per universum psalmum verba sunt Domini Salvatoris” — and here he speaks “a parte scilicet humanitatis assumptae, quae, sicut ait inferius, et tempori subiacebat et morti. Non enim, quemadmodum inimici putabant, eorum persecutione vitam suam finiendam esse commemorat, sed in potestate ponit Domini tempora vitae suae.” The assumed humanity was subject to time and to death; the times of his life are placed in the Father’s power, not in his enemies’. Nine verses earlier in the same psalm, on In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum, Cassiodorus had already noted that these are the words the Gospel text speaks from the cross. The hands into which the Church puts its times at the Offertory are, on his reading, the hands into which the dying Christ commends his spirit.

And a cardinal cites the missal itself as the witness for the word The decisive note is Bellarmine’s, and it is one of the passages his English translator cut. On this verse he writes that sortes means the lots of life and death, which hang not on chance but on God’s hand; and then: “In hebraeo habetur, in manibus tuis tempora mea; & fortasse quod nunc legimus in graeco, kleroi, quod significat sortes, legendum esset, kairoi, quod significat tempora. nam non desunt antiquae versiones ex graeco, quae habeant, tempora mea. Sic certè legitur in officio Missae non semel, & in Psalterio Ecclesiae S. Petri Romae.” The Hebrew reads my times; the Greek word for lots should perhaps be read as the Greek word for times; ancient Latin versions made from the Greek have tempora mea; and — this is the sentence — it is certainly so read more than once in the Office of the Mass, and in the Psalter of the Church of St Peter at Rome. A seventeenth-century cardinal, asked where the reading comes from, points at the Mass propers themselves and at the psalter of the Vatican basilica. He adds that the sense is the same either way: “non viuam, nisi quamdiu tu volueris, neque moriar, nisi quando tu volueris.”

The published English of this commentary says none of it. At the same verse O’Sullivan gives only “My life does not depend on lot or chance, but depends on your will and power … The meaning is quite plain, and needs no explanation” — which is faithful to the exposition and silent about the text, because his translation announces that it omits “those portions which are purely philological, or which relate to the discrepancy and reconciliation of the texts and versions.” The one commentator who names this Sunday’s Offertory as a textual witness is a commentator whose only public-domain English removed the passage where he does it.

Two further witnesses close the question. Jerome’s Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, his translation from the Hebrew, reads in manu tua tempora mea — singular hand, but times — so the appointed antiphon is a hybrid of the two traditions: the Septuagint’s plural in mánibus tuis with the Hebrew’s témpora, which is exactly Cassiodorus’s text and not exactly Jerome’s. The medieval Psalter gloss keeps both readings on the page at once, and attributes the alternative to the right man: “SORTES. CASSIODORUS. Vel tempora vite. AUGUSTINUS. quia quando vis vivimus vel morimur ideo eripe.” And Theodoret, reading in Greek, names the variant and refuses to choose between them: “in thy hands are my lots,” he quotes, “or, as the rest of the translators have it, in thy hands are my times” — the rest being Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion against the Septuagint — and he then expounds the verse on both at once. Times, or lots, he says, means the changes of circumstance: wealth and poverty, slavery and mastery, peace and war, and the rest of such things, which God allots to each as he wills and changes again as he sees fit. He is the earliest of three witnesses — with the Glossa and Bellarmine — who hold both of the Offertory’s readings in view, and together they support two conclusions: that the chant’s témpora mea is a real reading with real ancestry, and that Augustine’s sortes is not thereby wrong. Only Augustine is committed to sortes alone, and only Cassiodorus to témpora alone.

Jerome’s silence, and one cross-reference to the Gospel. Jerome wrote no homily and no commentariolus on this psalm at all — the psalm is absent from the headings of both series in all three volumes — so his iuxta Hebraeos rendering is a translation and not an exposition. Fromage prints this Offertory without comment; Schuster comments briefly and records that the antiphon is shared with the Tuesday after the First Sunday of Lent. And one contact with the day’s Gospel occurs inside this psalm at a verse the antiphon does not sing: expounding v. 3, esto mihi … in domum refugii, Augustine brings in the Good Samaritan and writes “Samarites enim custos interpretatur … sic intellegi volens nostrum se esse custodem.” The etymology on which this Sunday’s Gospel reception rests occurs in Augustine’s exposition of the Offertory’s own psalm, attached to the word refugium, which is the Alleluia’s word. It is v. 3, not vv. 15–16: the etymology touches the antiphon’s psalm, not its verse.

No checked witness joins the psalms to the lepers No checked witness connects any of the three appointed psalms to the Gospel’s ten lepers or to its thanksgiving. In the Latin of Augustine’s six relevant expositions and Cassiodorus’s three, the stems lepr-, samarit- and gratias ag- never reach the lepers: the leprosy passages are the Moses’-hand typology at Ps. 73:11 in both authors — where Augustine writes “Albor enim in cute, lepra est, non candor” and Cassiodorus turns the hand restored to the bosom into a Romans 11 hope — and the Samaritan passages are the Good Samaritan at Ps. 30:3 and John 8:48. Decem leprosi occurs nowhere in any of the nine texts. On the Greek side the result is cleaner still: the stem for leprosy occurs zero times in the whole of Theodoret’s commentary on all hundred and fifty psalms. The chants and the Gospel share a Sunday and, in the checked reception, nothing else.

Secret (Sec.)

Propitiáre, Dómine, pópulo tuo, propitiáre munéribus Secreta marginal no. 1569

The doubled imperative is the prayer, and it is a textual fact with a history. In the Vatican Gelasian the prayer stands in Book III, in a penitential Mass beginning Parce, Domine, parce peccatis nostris (Wilson’s edition, printed p. 249), and the Vatican manuscript reads Propitiare, Domine, populi tui propitiatus muneribus — one imperative and a participle. Wilson’s apparatus records that populo tuo, propitiare is the reading of the Rheinau and S. Gallen manuscripts at first hand and of Pamelius. The received doubled-imperative form is therefore the eighth-century Frankish reading, and it is the form the Gregorian supplement carries at Reg. 337 (printed p. 173) and the form the 1962 book prints. The prayer says propitiáre twice — once over the people, once over the gifts — and what the doubling does is refuse to let the offering stand as a transaction: God is asked to be appeased toward the offerers before he is asked to be appeased by what they offer.

Not in the Verona collection. The prayer is not in the Verona collection. Of the thirteen occurrences of propitiare in Feltoe’s edition, the nearest verbal parallel, collatis in me per gratiam tuam propitiare muneribus, is a different prayer in a bishop’s own Mass and is not this one. So the Secret, unlike the Collect and the Postcommunion, has no Veronese ancestry in the books searched.

What it asks for, and where the English falls short. Ut, hac oblatióne placátus, et indulgéntiam nobis tríbuas, et postuláta concédas: appeased by this oblation, grant both pardon and the things asked. The two et clauses are parallel and the second is open — postuláta, the things that have been asked, without saying which. On this Sunday the things that have been asked are on record: an increase of faith, hope and charity. The 1861 English keeps the first propitiáre and turns the second into “mercifully receive,” so the doubling disappears; the Latin therefore carries the argument above. Fromage reads the Secret’s two petitions as continuing the Collect’s promise-theme, and Schuster analyses its order — “First comes the prayer of propitiation … Next we pray for the fruits of the Eucharist.” Both are later commentary on a prayer neither wrote.

Communion (Comm.)

Panem de cælo dedísti nobis Ant. ad Communionem — Sap. 16, 20 marginal no. 1570

The verse in its book. Wisdom 16 belongs to the long meditation on the Exodus with which the book closes, in which each plague on Egypt is set against a corresponding mercy to Israel. Verse 20 is the mercy that answers the Egyptian plague of vermin: instead of those things, God fed his people with the food of angels and gave them bread from heaven prepared without labour, having in it all delight and the sweetness of every taste. The next verse explains the last clause: the substance “deserviens uniuscujusque voluntati, ad quod quisque volebat, convertebatur” — it turned to whatever each one wished. That is the image the antiphon takes to the altar rail: not merely bread, but bread that becomes what each person needs it to be.

The antiphon is an adaptation, and exactly how matters. The Clementine’s clause is third-person and past: parátum panem de cælo præstitísti illis sine labóre, thou gavest them bread from heaven. The antiphon makes it a first-person-plural address — dedísti nobis, Dómine — adding a vocative the verse does not have, and replacing the verse’s verb præstitísti with dedísti, which is the verb of Psalm 77:24, panem cæli dedit eis: the manna psalm that the Wisdom verse is itself reworking. The two closing phrases are recast as well: omne delectaméntum in se habéntem loses its in se, and omnis sapóris suavitátem is inverted to omnem sapórem suavitátis. Wisdom’s memory of what God did for another generation has been turned into a statement about what he has just done for this one.

This antiphon has been attached to this Mass since the ninth century. The Gregorian supplement manuscript Vat. Reg. 337 carries, in its margins at Dominica XIIII post Pentecosten, a set of antiphonary cues written by a different scribe at the same time and place as the text, in the first half of the ninth century: Ant. Respice domine in testamentum. Resp. Respice domine. Off. In te speraui domine. Com. Panem de caelo. Introit, Gradual, Offertory and Communion — the whole chant-set of the 1962 formulary, on the same Mass as the Collect, Secret and Postcommunion, eleven hundred years ago. The Sunday’s number has moved twice since; its texts have not.

Rabanus Maurus, Commentaria in librum Sapientiae III.9 (PL 109, coll. 748–749) The direct Eucharistic reading of the verse, from the ninth century, under a chapter heading that keeps the literal sense first: Praedicat Deum dedisse populo Israeli timenti se escam delectamenti. Rabanus expounds the manna literally — “cibum manna coelitus datum suavissimum ac saluberrimum” — and then turns: “Mystice autem … in coelesti cibo consolatio superna … significatur. Aliter manna significat panem illum, qui in Evangelio ait: Ego sum panis vitae qui de coelo descendi … Quicunque ergo ad hujus panis participationem veraciter pervenit, procul dubio vitam aeternam sine fine possidebit.” The verse the missal sings at Communion was being read as John 6 by a commentator writing in the same generation as the manuscript that first attaches it to this Sunday.

The versicle’s other life. This verse is not only a Communion antiphon. In the Rituale Romanum it is the versicle and response of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament — ℣. Panem de coelo praestitisti eis. ℟. Omne delectamentum in se habentem — followed by Deus qui nobis sub Sacramento mirabili; it is used, with the singular praestitisti ei, at the Communion of the sick; and the Corpus Christi procession carries the same versicle after the Tantum ergo, extended by rubric to all processions with the Sacrament. The Corpus Christi office takes Wisdom 16:20 verbatim as an antiphon at Terce. The consequence is practical: the words a modern Catholic is likeliest to have heard are the Benediction form, and the Benediction form is not the Communion antiphon’s form. Both descend from the same verse; the missal’s Communion has adapted it and the Rituale’s versicle has not.

Ambrose, and a different verse De mysteriis 8.44–49 is the classic patristic manna-and-Eucharist passage, and it is built on Psalm 77:24–25, not on this verse: “all those who ate that food died in the wilderness, but that food which you receive … is the Body of Christ.” The wording of Wisdom 16:20, omne delectamentum, does not occur in it. Ambrose belongs to this antiphon’s theological background and is not a witness to its text.

Later commentary takes the every-taste clause exactly where the antiphon points it. Schuster: the Eucharist is bread with the sweetness of every taste “because in it we receive not just one particular grace alone, but the author of all grace himself, and because, since it produces its effects according to the dispositions of those who receive it, it is wonderfully adapted to all their needs and desires.” Fromage, on this Sunday, asks that we “sing all the more fervently in our Communion-anthem the divine sweetness of this true Bread of heaven.”

Postcommunion (Postcomm.)

Sumptis, Dómine, cæléstibus sacraméntis Postcommunio marginal no. 1571

It has travelled with the Collect since before either had a Sunday. In the Vatican Gelasian this prayer closes the very Mass whose Collect opens the day — Book III, the ninth of the sixteen unnumbered Sunday Masses, Wilson’s printed p. 229 — and in the Gregorian supplement the two stand together again at Dominica XIIII. The pairing is therefore not a Tridentine arrangement; it is a fact about the prayers older than the number attached to them.

One word of the text is a real variant. Wilson prints proficiant at Book III.ix from the Rheinau manuscript, notes that the Vatican manuscript and one S. Gallen hand read proficiat, and records that a second S. Gallen hand, Gerbert and Pamelius read proficiamus — “which gives a clearer sense.” The Vatican manuscript itself has proficiamus at the prayer’s two reuses in Book II. The difference is the difference the 1861 English also lost: proficiat or proficiant makes the sacrament advance the redemption; proficiamus makes us advance toward the increase. The 1962 book prints proficiámus, and the Gregorian supplement prints it too. The prayer as the missal has it asks the communicants to move, not the mysteries.

Two reuses that show what the prayer was thought to be for. The Gelasian’s Book II fits it out with intercession clauses on two feasts: at St Hippolytus, Sumptis, Domine, sacramentis … intercedente beato martyre tuo Ypolito ad redemptionis aeternae proficiamus augmentum; and at the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, similarly. A prayer general enough to take an intercession clause and remain itself is a prayer about the ordinary effect of communion, which is what it is being asked to do here. Schuster reports a further cross-reference — that this Postcommunion is also that of the Monday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent — which rests on his word alone. Like the Secret, the prayer is absent from Feltoe’s Verona collection in every variant form searched.

Augméntum, again. The day’s first prayer asked for an augméntum of faith, hope and charity. Its last prayer asks that, having received the heavenly mysteries, we may advance ad redemptiónis ætérnæ … augméntum. The genitive phrase is split around quæsumus in the printed text, which throws weight onto the noun at the end of the line. What was asked at the beginning for the three capacities is asked at the end for their whole object. The 1861 English drops the noun entirely — “advance our eternal redemption” — so the bracket is invisible to a reader working from the registered translation, and only the Latin shows it. The two prayers were already a pair in the Gelasian, centuries before this Gospel was fixed to this Sunday, so the bracket is a fact of the received formulary.

Source-Grounded Synthesis Across the Propers

The appointed texts, their documented history and the witnesses checked in the commentary support the conclusions that follow; the exploratory proposals of the next section go further, under their own notice.

The formulary is held together by a noun that carries two senses at once. Testamentum is what the Introit and the Gradual beg God to look at and what the Epistle proves cannot be revoked, and the double sense lies in the Latin itself: Jerome records that behind it stands berith, which means pact and not will, and Theodoret notes that Scripture itself calls the promise to Abraham God’s covenant. The chants ask God not to forget; the lesson answers that the question is not memory but instrument. Rupert of Deutz, as Guéranger’s continuator Dom Lucien Fromage reports him, heard them in that order, and Schuster states it outright at the Gradual: the chant “recalls to God the promises made to the Patriarchs.”

The psalm commentaries make that reading older than the liturgical commentators — and they do not agree with each other. The checked witnesses hold four positions on the pleaded word, and they do not reduce to one. Augustine and Cassiodorus each make Psalm 73:20 the hinge of the whole psalm and identify its testamentum as the new covenant, both proving it from Jeremiah 31:31, and the Glossa ordinaria hardens that into the schoolroom gloss; Augustine’s exposition of the psalm opens by quoting Galatians 3:29, four verses past where this Sunday’s lesson stops. Rupert, as Fromage reports him, and Schuster refer the plea instead to the covenant promised to Abraham and the patriarchs. Bellarmine reverses the Fathers outright: the covenant pleaded is the old one made with the fathers, and what it promised was protection in terra, quam nobis dedisti. And Theodoret says nothing at all — his lemma at the verse is corrupt, his note expounds only the verse’s second half, and Migne’s facing Latin does not even use the Introit’s noun. The hinge of the psalm for the Latin tradition is a clause the Antiochene passes in silence, and the greatest of the later Latins reads it against them.

The day asks twice for one thing, and it asks for growth rather than for a first gift. Augméntum opens the Mass in the Collect and closes it in the Postcommunion, and the two prayers had already travelled together in the Gelasian and Gregorian books before any Sunday number was attached to them. The Council of Trent then took the Collect — and, in that chapter, only the Collect — as the Church’s own evidence that received justification increases. Between those two petitions stands a Gospel about ten men who receive a grace entire and one who goes further, and Bede draws from its last sentence the distinction the whole day turns on: cleansing is not salvation, and what saves is faith’s working rather than its bare acknowledgement.

Where the tradition genuinely disagrees, this formulary sits on the fault line. Paul’s in manu mediatóris produced two readings that both survived — the Latin answer, Christ, in five distinct forms, and the Antiochene answer, Moses — and Aquinas declines to choose, keeping Christ as mediator and Moses as the figure in whose hand the law was given. Liturgical reception took the Antiochene side without appearing to notice. The Latin answer is a majority, not a consensus.

Two further facts carry practical weight. The appointed chants are not the Bible text beside them at twelve verified points, five of them in the two Psalm 73 chants; a reader working from an English Bible is not reading this Sunday’s chants. What the psalm commentaries add is that several of those readings are not chant liberties but older text. Cassiodorus’s lemmata agree with the appointed chants at four of them, including a generatióne et progénie at the Alleluia and in manibus tuis témpora mea at the Offertory, and his exposition of the Offertory turns on the very word the Clementine does not have. Theodoret names times as the reading of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion and declines to choose between it and lots; the medieval Psalter gloss keeps both on the page and credits the alternative to Cassiodorus. Bellarmine goes further than any of them: he reports the Hebrew as tempora mea, conjectures that the Greek word for lots should be read as the word for times, and names as his witnesses “the Office of the Mass, more than once, and the Psalter of the Church of St Peter at Rome.” The Introit’s voces quæréntium te, meanwhile, which looks like the boldest liberty in the formulary, is the Septuagint against the Hebrew, as Migne’s apparatus sets out and the Glossa’s psalter apparatus confirms — though Bellarmine, who knew that, judged the Greek reading a corruption and voted for the Hebrew. No derivation from a particular psalter is established, because none was collated; what the witnesses do show is that these readings stood in front of named commentators centuries before the missal printed them, and that one commentator pointed at the Mass itself when asked where the Offertory’s word came from.

The Gospel’s most consequential reception, meanwhile, hangs on a subordinate clause: dum irent, mundáti sunt became, through Augustine’s Cornelius, an eleventh-century treatise passing under Augustine’s name, Bruno of Segni and the scholastic penance tradition, one of the load-bearing texts of the Latin doctrine of contrition and the keys.

What the formulary does not say matters too. It does not oppose law to promise — Paul’s own answer is absit, and every checked account of the law’s purpose is positive. It does not identify the nine with a people: Luke does not, and the sentence that does is Augustine’s own, dropped by Bede and restored by the Catena aurea, while the harshest formulations among the checked witnesses are nineteenth- and twentieth-century. And it never answers the Introit’s question on the Introit’s terms. What it offers instead is a refuge attested across every generation, an instrument that cannot be revoked, and a pair of hands to put one’s times into.

The Propers: Notable and Quotable

Four verified afterlives of wording from the scriptural propers, each a use that moves the phrase into a register its psalmist or sage did not occupy. Straight exegesis, devotional reuse and bare quotation keep the phrase in its own register, and the exegesis and reuse stand in the commentary above. Two of the four rise from the same chant clause, and the pairing is telling: of everything these propers contain, it is the plea exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam that history armed — on both sides of the same war.

Introit and Gradual, Ps. 73:22 — the bull that opened Luther’s excommunication, its satire, and its bonfire, 1520

Appointed phrase. Exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam, with the Gradual’s continuation memor esto … The chant sings the liturgical Old-Latin form — Dómine where the Clementine reads Deus — and it is exactly the liturgical form the bull opens with.

Later use and locus. Three scenes. (1) Leo X’s condemnation of Martin Luther opens: Exsurge, Domine, et judica causam tuam, memor esto improperiorum tuorum, eorum, quae ab insipientibus fiunt tota die, dated 15 June 1520 — the bull is universally known by the chant’s own incipit, Exsurge Domine. (2) Ulrich von Hutten republished the bull with mocking marginal annotations, writing to Luther, “I send the bull of [Leo] the Tenth flouted by me in some places.” (3) Luther to Spalatin, 10 December 1520: “at nine o’clock, at the eastern gate … were burned all the papal books … and the last bull of Leo X.” Both letters in Preserved Smith’s translation, Luther’s Correspondence, vol. 1 (1913), pp. 414–415.

The turn. A congregation’s sung plea that God arise and defend his own cause becomes the juridical opening of an excommunication process — a human tribunal speaking the psalm in God’s stead — and its target answers the appropriation twice over, first with satire in the margins, then with fire. The verse the Church sings this Sunday as supplication spent the Reformation as a weapon, and the weapon was contested property.

Rights and limit. The bull’s Latin, Hutten’s title, and Smith’s 1913 English are public domain. The bull quotes the psalm, not the missal chant as such; what binds it to this Sunday is that chant and bull carry the same liturgical wording, Dómine against the Clementine’s Deus.

The same verse — the standard of the Spanish Inquisition

Appointed phrase. As above, Exsúrge, Dómine, et iúdica causam tuam.

Later use and locus. The banner of the Spanish Inquisition — a cross of rough logs flanked by a sword and an olive branch — bears the inscription exurge domine et judica causam tuam psalm 73. Verified in Bernard Picart’s engraving “Standards and Condemned of the Inquisition,” in the Histoire générale des cérémonies … de tous les peuples du monde, vol. 2 (Paris: Rollin fils, 1741), held and digitised by the Pitts Theology Library.

The turn. The plea becomes a processional ensign carried at autos-da-fé, the sword of the sentence on one side of the cross and the olive of reconciliation on the other — the psalm’s cry for God to judge his own cause redeployed as an institution’s warrant for judging on his behalf. Set beside the bull above, the same appointed verse armed the tribunal and named the tribunal’s most famous target: prosecution’s verse, on both sides of the divide.

Rights and limit. Engraving and inscription are public domain. The witness is Picart’s 1741 engraving — a Protestant-published ethnography — not a surviving banner; the engraving is nonetheless the standard citable witness for the standard.

Communion source-verse, Wis. 16:20 — Joyce scores a beach scene to the bread of heaven, 1922

Appointed phrase. Panem de cælo with the every-delight clause; the Communion sings omne delectaméntum, “all that is delicious.”

Later use and locus. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), the “Nausicaa” episode: while Gerty MacDowell poses on Sandymount strand and Bloom watches, the men’s retreat at the Star of the Sea church reaches Benediction — “he read out Panem de coelo praestitisti eis and Edy and Cissy were talking about the time all the time” — a page after the choir’s Tantum ergo has become “the Tantumer gosa cramen tum” against the price of Gerty’s stockings. Verified in the Project Gutenberg text of the 1922 edition.

The turn. The versicle drawn from this Sunday’s Communion verse — bread from heaven, having in it every delight — is run as liturgical soundtrack to profane appetite: Joyce lets the manna of every taste and the window-shopping of every taste interleave sentence by sentence, and the irony cuts both ways at once.

Rights and limit. Ulysses (1922) is public domain in the United States. Joyce quotes the Benediction versicle form (præstitísti eis), not the missal Communion’s adapted dedísti nobis; the dependence route is the Benediction rite, which takes the same Wisdom verse this antiphon takes.

Offertory, Ps. 30:15–16 — Browning turns the surrendered times into Victorian optimism, 1864

Appointed phrase. In mánibus tuis témpora mea — “my times are in thy hands.”

Later use and locus. Robert Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (Dramatis Personæ, 1864), stanza 1: “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made: / Our times are in His hand / Who saith ‘A whole I planned, / Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!’”

The turn. In the psalm the clause is a hunted man’s surrender of his fate to the God he trusts against enemies and persecutors; in Browning it becomes the signature of Victorian meliorism about aging — the surrendered times now underwrite “the best is yet to be.” The verbal point is finer than it looks: the missal’s old psalter sings témpora mea, “times,” with the Hebrew, where the Clementine and Douay read “lots” — so the Offertory carries precisely the wording English poetry knows.

Rights and limit. Browning (1864) is public domain. His route is the English Bible’s “My times are in thy hand,” not the Latin antiphon; the agreement of missal and King James against the Clementine is a textual convergence, not a chain of dependence.

The Propers: Interpretive Possibilities

What this section is

Everything below is exploratory editorial and AI proposal. None of it is sourced historical intent, attributed teaching, or documented reception, and none of it should be quoted as any of those. Each proposal was tested against the corpus checked for this guide and against a targeted search for its own distinctive conjunction; the results of those searches, and each proposal’s controlling limit, are recorded in research/scope.md. Evidence, doctrine, and the literal sense of the appointed texts govern; where a proposal and a checked witness conflict, the witness wins.

Editorial proposal — The Gradual corrects the Introit’s verb, and the Epistle explains why it can

Anchors: Introit (Int.), ne derelínquas in finem; Gradual (Grad.), ne obliviscáris in finem; Epistle (Ep.), testaméntum confirmátum a Deo … non írritum facit.

Mechanism: The two chants sing the same verse with different verbs: the Introit pleads against being forsaken, the Gradual against being forgotten — and the Gradual’s verb is the psalter’s own. Between them stands a lesson about a testaméntum: a covenant reduced to an instrument, confirmed, and therefore — as Ambrosiaster and Aquinas develop the image — as unforgettable as a will in probate. The day’s movement runs from the fear of abandonment to the fear of oblivion to the answer that covers both: what is confirmed in writing can be neither dropped nor forgotten.

Fruit: The two petitions stop being synonyms. Abandonment is answered by presence, oblivion by the covenant’s permanence; the formulary supplies a different consolation for each fear.

What the ordinary reading misses: Element by element, the verbal variation between Introit and Gradual reads as chant-transmission noise, and most hand missals translate the two verbs identically.

Strongest limit: The variation almost certainly is Old-Latin psalter transmission — no checked witness comments on it, and nothing documents a compiler choosing one verb against the other. The proposal reads the printed page, not any intention behind it.

Editorial proposal — The voices God is asked not to forget are the ten that cried and the one that came back

Anchors: Introit (Int.), ne obliviscáris voces quæréntium te; Gospel (Gosp.), levavérunt vocem … cum magna voce magníficans Deum.

Mechanism: Where the Clementine asks God to remember the voices of his enemies, the chant sings the voices of his seekers. The Gospel then stages exactly two voices of seekers: ten lifted up together for mercy, one returned loudly in thanks — and the nine’s cleansing stands while their voice never comes back. Read together, the chant’s plea and the narrative divide one prayer into its two halves, petition and return, and show which half goes missing.

Fruit: Thanksgiving stops being politeness after the fact and becomes the second half of the voice that asked — the half by which a seeker stays a seeker after being answered.

What the ordinary reading misses: The chant’s “seekers” is invisible in every English a reader will hold, since the Douay renders the Clementine’s “enemies”; without it the chant has no voice-vocabulary to share with the Gospel.

Strongest limit: The proposal must not be built on a supposed chant liberty, because there is none: the commentary shows that the seekers are the Septuagint’s reading and the enemies the Hebrew’s, that Augustine, Cassiodorus and Theodoret all had the seekers in front of them, and that Migne’s apparatus sets the whole textual situation out. So the wording carries no compiler’s intention at all — it is simply the psalter the Roman chant inherited. Beyond that, vox is among the commonest words in the psalter and the Gospels, and no checked witness joins these two texts.

Editorial proposal — Three clocks: the generations, the four hundred thirty years, and my times

Anchors: Alleluia (All.), refúgium … a generatióne et progénie; Epistle (Ep.), post quadringéntos et trigínta annos; Offertory (Off.), in mánibus tuis témpora mea.

Mechanism: The formulary counts time three ways. The Alleluia counts in generations, and finds the refuge constant across all of them — in the one psalm bearing Moses’ name, whose burden is the contrast between God’s eternity and our brevity. The Epistle counts in years, and finds that four hundred and thirty of them change nothing that God has confirmed. The Offertory stops counting and hands the clock over: témpora mea — the old psalter’s “times” where the Clementine has “lots,” time standing where chance stood. Three scales, one claim: duration cannot erode what God holds.

Fruit: The Introit’s anguished Ut quid … in finem? — how long, why to the end — receives an answer about time itself rather than about the crisis of the moment: delay is not abandonment, because the interval belongs to the same hands as the promise.

What the ordinary reading misses: Taken singly, the Alleluia is a generic comfort, the 430 years a Pauline technicality, and the Offertory an ejaculation of trust; the day’s preoccupation with measured time only appears when the three are read as one series.

Strongest limit: No checked witness connects any two of these three texts through time-vocabulary, and the nearest thing to an analogue cuts only one way: Augustine, expounding the Alleluia’s verse, makes the refuge God’s aeternitas and what one flees to it from temporis mutabilitas, and Theodoret glosses the Offertory’s variant as the changes of circumstance — but neither joins the two chants, and neither mentions the four hundred and thirty years. Témpora, anni and generatióne share no root; the Offertory’s reading predates any pairing with this Epistle; and chant assignments are commonly musical and cyclical, not thematic.

Editorial proposal — The keeper the chants pray for appears in the Gospel as the man who came back

Anchors: Introit and Gradual (Int., Grad.), the pleas réspice … ne derelínquas … ne obliviscáris; Gospel (Gosp.), et hic erat Samaritánus, with Augustine’s documented etymology Samaritanus = custos, “keeper.”

Mechanism: The chants beg God to keep — to look upon, not forsake, not forget. The Gospel’s one returning figure is named by a word the tradition heard as “keeper”: Augustine derives it so and lets the leper keep the unity of the kingdom by giving back what he received; Rupert of Deutz, as Guéranger’s continuator Dom Lucien Fromage reports him, read this whole Sunday’s office through Samaritanus as custos. One further fact tightens the join: Augustine makes the same etymology a second time, in his exposition of the Offertory’s psalm, at the verse that asks God to be a house of refuge — “Samarites enim custos interpretatur … sic intellegi volens nostrum se esse custodem.” The proposal is the join: the day that pleads for keeping is given, as its narrative center, a keeper — covenant faithfulness answered not only from God’s side but modeled from the creature’s, in the single act of returning thanks.

Fruit: Gratitude is reclassified: not an ornament after grace but the creature’s half of covenant-keeping, the act by which what was given is held rather than merely received.

What the ordinary reading misses: The etymology is invisible in translation, and the office-wide custos reading rode on the Good Samaritan Gospel that this Sunday carried in an older arrangement — so the modern page shows no trace of either.

Strongest limit: Augustine applies custos to this leper, but Rupert applied it to the Good Samaritan as Christ, a different pericope assigned to this Sunday only in a pre-Tridentine ordering; the transfer of that office-wide reading onto the 1962 chants is this proposal’s own act. Hebrew etymology of Samaritanus as “keeper” is itself a patristic reception, not a modern lexical judgment.

Editorial proposal — The two askings of augméntum bracket the nine who stopped

Anchors: Collect (Coll.), fidei, spei et caritátis augméntum; Postcommunion (Postcomm.), redemptiónis ætérnæ … augméntum; Gospel (Gosp.), nonne decem mundáti sunt? et novem ubi sunt?

Mechanism: The day’s first prayer and its last share one noun: increase. Between them stands a Gospel in which ten receive a grace entire — they are cleansed, nothing lacking — and nine go no further, while the one who returns is moved from cleansing to salvation. Bede states the distinction: faith’s working, not its bare knowledge, saves; Trent quotes this very Collect for the increase of justification. The proposal reads the bracket as the formulary’s own diagnosis of the nine: what they lacked was not the gift but the increase — the movement that turns a grace received into a grace grown.

Fruit: The frightening arithmetic of the Gospel (one in ten) becomes usable: the difference between the nine and the one is presented as something the day teaches you to pray for, twice.

What the ordinary reading misses: The bracket is invisible in the registered English, which renders the first augméntum “increase” but drops the second entirely — only the Latin shows the day ending with the word it began with.

Strongest limit: The Collect and Postcommunion were not composed for this Gospel — the pair already travels together in the Gelasian sacramentary’s unnumbered Sunday masses, centuries before any fixed pericope — so the bracket is a fact of the printed formulary, not of anyone’s design; and Bede’s distinction concerns the Gospel alone, not the orations.

Appendix: Scope and Qualifications

As of 20 August 2026. Everything below states the boundaries of this guide at that date. Retrieval mechanics, checksums, query detail, discarded leads, the complete passage-by-passage reception matrix, and the notable-and-quotable and interpretive-proposal audits are in propers/verified.md, research/scope.md and research/source-bindings.toml beside this document’s source; they are not repeated here.

Which edition this is. This is the canonical full edition. After the map, the dossier sheet and the thematic movement it prints the complete appointed formulary — the Latin of the 1962 Vatican editio typica beside the English of the registered public-domain witnesses — and then the element-by-element commentary, the synthesis sections, and this apparatus, all from one source leaf. A mechanical synthesis companion is compiled from the same source at the same identity with a -synthesis suffix; it omits the appointed texts and the element-by-element sweep and adds nothing this edition does not contain.

Edition and formulary identity. The work is the temporal formulary printed DOMINICA DECIMA TERTIA post Pentecosten, II classis, on pp. 393–394 of the 1962 editio typica of the Missale Romanum (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis), with marginal numbers 1562–1571. Green follows the general rubrics for Sundays after Pentecost and is not printed on those pages; it is recorded here as an inference from the Rubricae generales of 1960, not as a reading of the formulary. The formulary appoints the Credo and the Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, and appoints no Tract, Sequence, second oration, blessing or ritual text, and no second Collect, Secret or Postcommunion. Its boundaries are the Postcommunion of the Twelfth Sunday (no. 1561) and the heading of the Fourteenth Sunday (no. 1572); nothing between them is omitted.

The Sunday number is not part of the prayers’ identity. The Collect and Postcommunion stand together in the Vatican Gelasian among unnumbered Sunday Masses and in the Gregorian supplement at Dominica XIIII; the Rheinau and S. Gallen Gelasians place the Collect’s Mass at Hebd. XV; Sarum has the set at the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity. This guide describes the 1962 formulary and its number, and treats the earlier assignments as history rather than as alternative identities.

Text verification. All ten elements, their headings, references, wording, accents, punctuation, rank, both rubrics and both formulary boundaries were visually collated on 19 August 2026 against the CMAA facsimile of the Vatican typical edition at 300 and 600 dpi, and independently against page images of the 1962 Benziger editio iuxta typicam. The two editions differ at the points tabulated in the commentary; those are edition differences, not doubtful readings, and nothing was blended or substituted. Three words of the Gospel touched by ink loss in the CMAA scan were resolved letter by letter against the Benziger images and are printed without brackets because the readings are secure. The appointed text was separately collated against the Clementine Vulgate, and the twelve places where it diverges are tabulated in the commentary as verified textual observations. The Internet Archive OCR was used only to locate the formulary and controls no published wording. No Psalterium Romanum or other older psalter witness was collated, so no derivation of any chant reading from a particular psalter is asserted anywhere in this guide.

What this guide is not. It is a hand-missal companion, not a liturgical book, a critical edition, a homily, an assembly sheet for one civil date, or a substitute for the sources cited. It does not treat occurrence, commemorations, particular calendars, or celebration-mode branches for any year; those belong to the edition-specific assembly workflow and need their own evidence.

Translation and received text. The project has composed, translated, paraphrased, modernised and adapted nothing. English for the scriptural propers is the Douay–Rheims as revised by Bishop Challoner (1749–1752), the English of the Clementine Vulgate the missal prints, quoted from the Project Gutenberg e-text of that revision. English for the three orations is the anonymous rendering in The Roman Missal translated into the English language for the use of the laity, first revised edition (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861), taken from the three lines that book supplies for this formulary and reproduced with its own nineteenth-century spelling and its abbreviated conclusion. Both are public domain in the United States; neither is an official liturgical translation and neither was made for the 1962 books.

Eight places where the registered English does not answer the Latin, and is not made to. The Introit’s ne derelínquas, where the Douay renders the Clementine’s ne obliviscaris; the Introit’s voces quæréntium te, where the Douay has “the voices of thy enemies”; the Introit’s and Gradual’s exsúrge, Dómine, where the Douay has “Arise, O God”; the Gradual verse’s memor esto oppróbrii servórum tuórum, whose Douay wording stands at Ps. 88:51 and is quoted in the appointed-text apparatus only as apparatus, never as the verse the missal cites; the Alleluia’s a generatióne et progénie; the Offertory’s témpora mea, where the Douay reads “My lots are in thy hands”; the Communion, which is an adapted centonisation and is therefore shown against the Douay verse printed whole with its reused phrases marked; and the liturgical incipits Fratres: and In illo témpore: Dum iret Iesus in Ierúsalem, which are the missal’s own. Two further gaps fall inside the orations rather than Scripture: the 1861 English collapses ássequi in the Collect and drops augméntum and the verb proficiámus from the Postcommunion, so both arguments are conducted on the Latin. In every case the gap is stated where it falls and no rendering of the project’s own is supplied.

Search bounds. Reception was searched in Latin, in Greek, and in English, across the major reasonably accessible patristic, medieval and later corpora relevant to each appointed passage: Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrosiaster, Theodoret, Marius Victorinus, Aquinas and the Glossa ordinaria on Galatians; Augustine’s Quaestiones Evangeliorum and Sermo 176, Bede, Cyril of Alexandria, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Bruno of Segni, Theophylact, the pseudo-Augustinian De vera et falsa poenitentia and the Catena aurea on Luke 17; Augustine’s Enarrationes, Cassiodorus’s Expositio Psalmorum, Jerome’s Commentarioli and both series of his Tractatus, Theodoret’s Interpretatio in Psalmos, the Glossa ordinaria on the Psalter, and Bellarmine’s Explanatio in Psalmos on the three appointed psalms, at the appointed verses; Rabanus Maurus on Wisdom; the Verona, Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries in their public-domain critical editions; the decrees of Trent; and the liturgical commentary of Guéranger’s continuator Dom Lucien Fromage and of Schuster. Consequential negative results are reported in the commentary rather than concealed — among them that Ambrose has no exposition of the appointed Gospel beyond one transitional clause, that Gregory preached no homily on it although his Moralia supplies the reading Bede transcribed, that no Chrysostom homily on it was found at all, that Augustine’s Expositio on Galatians never treats the four hundred and thirty years, that Marius Victorinus’s comment on Galatians 3:11–19 is lost in a lacuna, that the Secret and Postcommunion are not in Feltoe’s Verona collection, that Wisdom 16:20’s wording does not occur in Ambrose’s De mysteriis, that fac nos amare quod praecipis was not found in the Thomistic corpus by the method used, that Jerome wrote no homily and no commentariolus on the Offertory’s psalm at all and nothing on the Introit’s beyond its title and one verse, that Fromage prints both the Alleluia and the Offertory without a word of comment, that no witness read for this guide connects any of the three appointed psalms to the ten lepers or to the Gospel’s thanksgiving, and that the word for leprosy does not occur anywhere in Theodoret’s commentary on the hundred and fifty psalms. No exhaustive search of Syriac originals, chant manuscripts, untranslated homiliaries, subscription databases or current specialist monographs is claimed, and no negative here is offered as a claim about literature outside the corpora named.

Bounds carried by particular claims. Theodoret’s modern English translation is in copyright, so he is summarised and never quoted throughout, and the typesetting of this guide carries no Greek, so his terms appear transliterated where they appear at all. On Galatians he was read in the Greek column of a Migne scan whose parallel Latin column is destroyed in the available optical transcription, and the columns given for him there are approximate and flagged. On the Psalms the reverse problem holds — that volume was optically read by a Latin engine, so its Greek columns are destroyed and its Latin columns and running heads are legible — and the columns printed here are the markers embedded in two independent digitisations of the Greek, four of which were matched against the running heads of the page images in a parallel pass. Cassiodorus was read in an electronic transmission that states no underlying edition and carries no PL column marker, so no PL 70 column is asserted for him. Bellarmine’s public-domain English states that it omits whatever is “purely philological, or which relate[s] to the discrepancy and reconciliation of the texts and versions” and replaces his prefaces with the Douay headings, so every textual point taken from him — including his defence of the Gradual’s pronoun, his judgment on the Introit’s close, and his note naming the Mass propers as a witness for the Offertory’s word — is quoted from the 1611 Latin, read on page images because the optical text of that folio is unusable. The Glossa ordinaria was read in a modern electronic edition; its Rusch facsimile was not opened and its psalter-family apparatus is reported as that edition’s, not as this guide’s finding. Augustine’s psalm expositions were read in Latin at a text site and in the public-domain Oxford English where it exists, and their PL columns are likewise not asserted. Column numbers for Bede come from a transcription’s embedded markers, not from a facsimile; scan-grade column evidence exists for Bede, for Ambrose’s one clause and for Bruno’s commentary, and for the other Latin witnesses the texts were verified in reliable electronic transmissions without a column-bearing scan being opened. Cyril’s material for this pericope survives only as catena fragments — the Syriac of the relevant sermons is lost — so no integral sermon on the ten lepers is cited. Titus of Bostra is fragment-level and unaudited against an independent edition. Theophylact was verified only in the Latin excerpts of the Catena aurea; the columns of PG 123 could not be opened. Rupert of Deutz is quoted only as Fromage excerpts him; De divinis officiis was not opened. The attribution of the Gregorian supplement is not settled here, because the scholarship that revised the older attribution is not public domain. Schuster’s cross-reference of the Postcommunion to a Lenten weekday is reported as his statement and was not independently collated. Schuster (1927) is public domain in the United States and may remain protected in life-plus-70 jurisdictions; he is quoted in short compass with attribution.

Psalm numbering. Three series are in use and two of them are commonly both called “modern.” Vulg. is the Vulgate/Septuagint number, which the missal cites and which the Douay–Rheims carries. Eng. is the convention of the King James and Revised Standard versions, which leave the inscription unnumbered and so run a verse or two behind; the page-2 dossiers print it beside the Vulgate number. Heb. is the Masoretic number used by the Nova Vulgata and the New American Bible, which renumbers the psalm but keeps the Vulgate’s verse division: Ps. 30:15–16 Vulg. is Heb. 31:15–16; Ps. 73:1, 19–20, 22–23 is Heb. 74:1, 19–20, 22–23; Ps. 89:1 is Heb. 90:1; and Ps. 88:51, cited once as apparatus, is Heb. 89:51. The conversions were taken from the concordance registered with the Douay–Rheims edition used here, not computed by this guide.

Historical bounds. Dates and places in the page-2 dossiers distinguish traditional attribution from current historical judgment and are orienting rather than probative. This guide does not settle the year of the Passion, the date or place of Luke’s composition, the North- or South-Galatian destination of the Epistle, or the historical authorship of any psalm. Psalm 73’s superscription names Asaph while its content laments a sanctuary already destroyed; the tension is reported and not resolved.

Rights. No public-domain conclusion is claimed for the 1962 typical edition. This repository’s rights record for the facsimile finds that edition’s own status unresolved, and more likely than not restored in the United States under 17 U.S.C. §104A to the end of 2057 (that record is missale-romanum-1962-facsimile-rights-v1.toml, under src/sources/inventories/). What permits the Latin quoted here is 17 U.S.C. §103(b): the copyright in a revised edition extends only to what that edition itself contributed and “does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of” any copyright in the preexisting material. This formulary is preexisting material. All ten appointed elements — and, unusually, the five chant readings that diverge from the Clementine — are printed in the Pustet printing of Ratisbon, 1862, which this repository tracks as public-domain text, and all ten were identified by incipit and order in the tracked Venice Missal of 1570 besides; the element-by-element check and its bounds are recorded in propers/verified.md. That is this project’s own reading of the statute and of the evidence, not a clearance anyone granted, and it is not legal advice. No page image of either digitisation is reproduced here, and none of the 1962 edition’s own new matter is published in this guide; the edition’s rank, pagination and marginal numbers are cited as facts about the book. The project claims no rights in the received liturgical text. Both digitisations used to verify it are third-party artifacts whose own rights status the repository’s source records list as unresolved, and neither is redistributed here. Quotations from sources still in copyright are avoided or kept to short compass with attribution, as noted at each point of use. The common reuse notice on the final page states the outbound boundary and does not relicense any of this material.

Review state. This document has had internal production review only: source collation, build, and page-by-page visual inspection by the agents that produced it. It has received no independent liturgical, theological, specialist, rights or ecclesiastical review, and carries no imprimatur, nihil obstat or ecclesiastical approval. The exact published PDF snapshots have distribution authorization under the release record; that authorization does not relicense the incorporated liturgical text for independent extraction and does not constitute any of the outstanding reviews.

References

Only sources actually used above, with loci sufficient to check the claims made from them.

Liturgical witnesses

• Missale Romanum, editio typica (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1962), pp. 393–394, marginal nos. 1562–1571. Facsimile: https://media.churchmusicassociation.org/pdf/missale62.pdf, PDF pp. 474–475. Controlling text for every Latin form printed above.

• Missale Romanum, editio iuxta typicam (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1962), pp. 388–389. Page images in Internet Archive item MissaleRomanum1962RomanMissalColorLatin, leaves n464–n465: https://archive.org/details/MissaleRomanum1962RomanMissalColorLatin. Second 1962 edition, collated for the discrepancy table and for three scan-damaged words.

• Missale Romanum (Ratisbon: Friedrich Pustet, 1862), Dominica XIII. post Pentecosten, printed pp. 335–337; and Missale Romanum (Venice, 1570), the same formulary in the Sunday series. Read as finding aids for the preexisting-material check recorded in propers/verified.md; nothing is quoted from either.

• The Roman Missal translated into the English language for the use of the laity, first revised edition (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861), Collect, Secret and Postcommunion of the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, printed pp. 423–425. Anonymous translation; public domain in the United States. Source of the English of all three orations. Registered in the repository’s source library as edition.eugene-cummiskey.roman-missal-english-laity.philadelphia-1861.

• C. L. Feltoe (ed.), Sacramentarium Leonianum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), printed p. 76 (Mense Iulio, Item alia). Earliest witness to the Collect; also the bounded negative for the Secret and Postcommunion.

• H. A. Wilson (ed.), The Gelasian Sacramentary: Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), printed pp. 229 (Book III.ix, Collect and Postcommunion in one Mass), 247 (Book III.xxvi, the Deus qui recension), 249 (Book III.xxx, the Secret), 354 (appendix, Hebd. xv post Pentecosten), with Wilson’s apparatus at each. https://archive.org/details/gelasiansacrame00wilsgoog

• H. A. Wilson (ed.), The Gregorian Sacramentary under Charles the Great, Henry Bradshaw Society 49 (London, 1915), printed p. 173 (CXXII. Dominica .XIIII. post Pentecosten, with the ninth-century marginal antiphonary cues), and Introduction pp. xxx–xxxi, xli–xliii.

• Rituale Romanum, editio Ratisbonensis prima (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1872), pp. 75–76 (after-Communion devotion), p. 81 (Communion of the sick), pp. 261–262 (Corpus Christi procession). Cited for the Benediction versicle drawn from Wisdom 16:20.

• The Book of Common Prayer (1549), the collect of the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity; The First Prayer-Book of Edward VI, compared with the successive revisions (Oxford: Parker, 1877), pp. 174–175; Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Macmillan, 1901), pp. 553–554; and A. Harford Pearson (tr.), The Sarum Missal in English (London, 1884), pp. 241–242.

• The continuation of Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year … Time after Pentecost (Dom Lucien Fromage), vol. II (vol. 11 of the English set), tr. Laurence Shepherd, 2nd ed. (Stanbrook Abbey; London: Burns & Oates, 1909), pp. 307–326; and vol. I (vol. 10 of the English set), 2nd ed. (Stanbrook Abbey; London: Burns & Oates; Dublin: James Duffy & Co., 1901), pp. 272 and 303. https://archive.org/details/V11TheLiturgicalYear. Cited as a witness to devotional and liturgical reception, including its own supersessionist framings, which are attributed to Fromage and not endorsed; it supplies no English printed in this guide.

• Ildefonso Schuster, The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum), vol. III (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1927), pp. 132–135. Public domain in the United States; quoted in short compass.

Scripture

• The Holy Bible, Douay–Rheims, the Challoner revision (1749–1752), in the Project Gutenberg e-text of that revision (eBook 1581). Quoted for Ps. 30:15–16; 73:1, 19–20, 22–23; 89:1; Sap. 16:20; Gal. 3:16–22; Lk. 17:11–19; with Ps. 88:51 quoted once as apparatus. Source of the English of every scriptural proper. The repository’s source library holds this edition with its book index, its Vulgate/Hebrew/English psalm-numbering concordance, its deuterocanonical numbering table, its verse-alias table, and its collation against the 1899 American edition, under the identity edition.english-college-of-douay.douay-rheims-bible.challoner-gutenberg-1581.

• Clementine Vulgate, consulted for the whole of Pss. 30, 73 and 89, for Wis. 16, Gal. 3 and Lk. 17, and for Ps. 77:24 and Ps. 88:51. https://www.drbo.org/lvb/

Patristic, medieval and later reception

• Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam VIII n. 32 (PL 15, embedded column marker 1478) — the single transitional clause that is his whole treatment of the appointed Gospel; De mysteriis 8.44–49, NPNF second series, vol. 10 (1896), cited for the manna typology and for the bounded negative on Wisdom 16:20’s wording.

• Ambrosiaster, Commentarius in Epistulam ad Galatas, ad 3:16–22 (PL 17, coll. 337–372D). https://la.wikisource.org/

• Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 73, 89, and 30 (enarratio I §§15–16 and enarratio II sermo 2 §§12–13), with Enarr. in Ps. 67 §16 cited once and expressly not as a comment on Ps. 30. Latin at https://www.augustinus.it/latino/esposizioni_salmi/; public-domain English, where it exists, in NPNF first series, vol. 8, which titles the expositions by the Hebrew psalm number: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801.htm. The third sermon on Ps. 30 is not in that English collection and was read in Latin. PL columns were not read from a scan and are not asserted.

• Augustine, Expositio epistulae ad Galatas §§23–25 (PL 35, 2105–2148), Latin at https://www.augustinus.it/latino/; Quaestiones Evangeliorum II.40 (PL 35), Latin at the same site; Sermo 176 (PL 38), Maurist text, Latin only — no public-domain English exists at this sermon; De dono perseverantiae 23.63–65, NPNF first series, vol. 5, cited as context for the collect’s petitionary logic and expressly not as a citation of the collect.

• Robert Bellarmine, Explanatio in Psalmos, at Pss. 30, 73 and 89. Latin from the Rome first edition (Apud Bartholomaeum Zannettum, 1611), printed pp. 180, 529–530, 538–539 and 665–666, read on the page images of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze copy in Internet Archive item ita-bnc-mag-00002877-001; the optical text of that folio is unusable and every Latin sentence quoted here was transcribed from the image. English, where it exists, from A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, tr. Archdeacon John O’Sullivan (Dublin and London: James Duffy, 1866), printed pp. 78, 223–226 and 277–279, in Internet Archive item commentaryonpsal0000bell. That translation states that it omits “those portions which are purely philological, or which relate to the discrepancy and reconciliation of the texts and versions,” and substitutes the Douay headings for Bellarmine’s prefaces to each psalm — so every textual point taken from him here is quoted from the 1611 Latin, and the fact of the omission is stated where it bears on a claim.

• Bede, In Lucae Evangelium Expositio V (PL 92, 542B–544D), in the repository’s registered witness of the Migne text, re-retrieved and hash-matched 19 August 2026. Source of the cleansing-is-not-salvation distinction, and of the omitted Augustinian sentence discussed above.

• Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum, at Pss. 73, 89 and 30 (PL 70). Latin read complete at https://www.monumenta.ch/. No PL column marker was read and no underlying edition is stated on those pages, so this is content verified in an electronic transmission and not at a column-bearing scan. No public-domain English exists; the modern translation is in copyright and was not consulted, so Cassiodorus is quoted in Latin only.

• Bruno of Segni, Commentaria in Lucam, pars II, cap. XVII, sectt. XL–XLI (PL 165, approximately coll. 425–428), and Homilia C (PL 165), headed Dominica XII post Pentecosten in the Migne arrangement with the editor’s note that Haymo carries the exposition at Dominica XIV.

• John Chrysostom, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, cap. 3 (PG 61, 611–682), in the public-domain NPNF first series, vol. 13. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/23103.htm

• Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke, the surviving catena fragments on Lk. 17:12 and 17:14, tr. R. Payne Smith (Oxford, 1859), pp. 539–541. https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ The Syriac of the sermons covering this pericope is lost; no integral sermon on the ten lepers is cited.

• Glossa ordinaria, Ad Galatas cap. 3 (liber 63) and on the Psalter at Pss. 30, 73 and 89 (liber 26), in the Glossae Scripturae Sacrae electronicae (IRHT-CNRS), keyed to the Erfurt witness and the Rusch facsimile. https://gloss-e.irht.cnrs.fr/ Cited as medieval reuse, not as fresh exegesis. The Rusch facsimile itself was not opened, and the markers are reported as that edition’s own references; the Psalter apparatus’s assignment of querentium to the Roman psalter and inimicorum to the Gallican is likewise reported as its apparatus, no Roman-Psalter witness having been collated for this guide.

• Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob V.11 (rec.) n. 28 and II.52 n. 82 (PL 75). The source of material Bede transcribed and the Catena aurea transmits under Bede’s name; the Homiliae in Evangelia were searched complete and contain no homily on this pericope.

• Jerome, Commentarioli in Psalmos (Ps. 73 title and v. 5; Ps. 89 vv. 9 and 12) and Tractatus sive homiliae in Psalmos, de psalmo LXXXVIIII in both series, in G. Morin (ed.), Anecdota Maredsolana, vol. III parts i–iii (1895, 1897, 1903), read complete from the Internet Archive. The archive identifiers for these three volumes are mislabelled; the correct correspondences are recorded in research/psalmody.md. No public-domain English exists at these loci, so they are quoted in Latin.

• Jerome, Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos, Ps. 30:16, in P. de Lagarde (ed.), Psalterium iuxta Hebraeos Hieronymi (Leipzig, 1874). https://archive.org/details/psalteriumiuxta00lagagoog

• Jerome, Commentarii in Epistulam ad Galatas, lib. II (PL 26; the transcription’s inline markers read 439–443 where Documenta Catholica Omnia bounds the work at 307–438D, two printings’ numberings, reported and not reconciled). https://la.wikisource.org/

• Pseudo-Augustine (Auctor incertus), De vera et falsa poenitentia c. 10 n. 25 (PL 40) — an eleventh-century anonymous treatise transmitted among Augustine’s works, cited under that attribution.

• Rabanus Maurus, Commentaria in librum Sapientiae III.9 (PL 109, coll. 748–749). https://la.wikisource.org/

• Theodoret of Cyrus, Interpretatio in Psalmos (PG 80): Ps. 73 at coll. 1453–1465, Ps. 89 at coll. 1597–1601, Ps. 30 at coll. 1081–1084, read in the Greek in two independent electronic transmissions of the Migne text, with the running heads of the corresponding page images checked against the embedded column markers at four anchors. His English translation is in copyright, so he is summarised and never quoted; the typesetting of this guide carries no Greek, so his terms appear transliterated where they appear at all.

• Theodoret of Cyrus, Interpretatio Epistulae ad Galatas (PG 82, approximately coll. 477–482, the marker 479 legible beside vv. 19–21), read in the Greek column; the modern English translation is in copyright and he is summarised, never quoted.

• Theophylact of Ohrid, Enarratio in Evangelium Lucae (PG 123, 683–1126), reached only through the Latin excerpts of the Catena aurea; the columns themselves could not be opened. Titus of Bostra is cited from the same compilation at fragment level.

• Thomas Aquinas, Super epistolam ad Galatas lectura, cap. 3 lect. 6–8; Catena aurea in Lucam, cap. 17 lect. 5; Summa theologiae II–II q. 24 aa. 4, 6, 7 and I–II q. 113 a. 9, q. 114 a. 8, the last two including a checked negative result. https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/

• Marius Victorinus, In Epistulam Pauli ad Galatas (PL 8), ad 3:20 and 3:22. https://la.wikisource.org/ The comments on 3:11–19 are lost in a lacuna; the loss is a finding and is reported as such.

Magisterial and official texts

• Council of Trent, Session VI, chapters 10 and 11, in Canones et Decreta Sacrosancti Oecumenici Concilii Tridentini (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1863), with that edition’s own footnote Dominica XIII. post Pentecosten at the chapter-10 quotation; English from J. Waterworth (tr.), The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London, 1848). The chapter-11 citation is Augustine, De natura et gratia 43, and not the Confessions’ “da quod iubes,” which is nowhere in the decree.

Historical orientation and cultural afterlives

• The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907–1913), articles “Psalms” (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12533a.htm), “Book of Wisdom” (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15666a.htm), “Epistle to the Galatians” (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06336a.htm), “Gospel of Saint Luke” (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09420a.htm) and “Chronology of the Life of Jesus Christ” (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08377a.htm).

• New American Bible, introductions and footnotes to Psalms 31, 74 and 90, to Wisdom, to Galatians and to Luke, at https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/. Summarised; protected text is not reproduced beyond the short phrases quoted in the dossiers.

• Leo X, Exsurge Domine, 15 June 1520, opening lines, Latin at https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Exsurge_Domine; Ulrich von Hutten’s annotated republication and Luther’s letter to Spalatin of 10 December 1520, both in Preserved Smith (tr.), Luther’s Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, 1913), pp. 414–415. https://archive.org/details/lutherscorrespon01luthuoft

• Bernard Picart, “Standards and Condemned of the Inquisition,” in Histoire générale des cérémonies, mœurs et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, vol. 2 (Paris: Rollin fils, 1741), digitised by the Pitts Theology Library, Emory University.

• James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922), episode 13 (“Nausicaa”), in the Project Gutenberg text of the 1922 edition (eBook 4300). Public domain in the United States.

• Robert Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” stanza 1, in Dramatis Personæ (London: Chapman & Hall, 1864).

Last revised (UTC): 2026-09-24T17:00:16Z

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