Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: A Study of the Proper in the 1962 Roman Missal

Expansive study of the 1962 Missale Romanum proper for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: appointed texts, each element in its setting, three readings of the whole formulary with their four senses, and a comparison

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Dominica decima nona post Pentecosten

Missale Romanum 1962 · Proper of Time

The wedding garment, the call to the highways, and the evening sacrifice:
a study of the proper in three readings

A Wedding, a Garment, and an Evening Prayer

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Dominica decima nona post Pentecosten, is a Sunday of the second class in the Proper of Time of the 1962 Missale Romanum. Its Mass begins in the lower left-hand column of p. 411 of the typical edition, directly beneath the Postcommunion of the Eighteenth Sunday, and ends near the head of p. 412, where the Twentieth Sunday begins; its ten elements carry the marginal numbers 1679–1688. In 2026 it falls on 4 October, the first Sunday of the month. The calendar’s feast of that day, St Francis, is a feast of the third class and gives way entirely, since a Sunday of the second class admits no commemoration except that of a feast of the second class (Rubricae generales 111 b; Rubricae generales Missalis 434 b). The Mass therefore has one Collect, one Secret and one Postcommunion. It is said in green (RG 127 b), with Gloria, with the Credo that the rubrics require on every Sunday (RGMR 475 a), and with the Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, which the Missal prints as a direction after the Secret and which the general rubrics appoint for the Sundays of the second class outside the Christmas and Easter seasons (RGMR 494 b).

The first Sunday of October also carries by law the external solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary (RGMR 358 b). A church that keeps it may say one sung and one low Mass, or two low Masses, of the Rosary as votive Masses of the second class (RGMR 360), and in those Masses this Sunday’s Collect, Secret and Postcommunion are said as a commemoration. Every other Mass of the day is the Mass studied here.

That Mass opens with God speaking in the first person. Salus populi ego sum, dicit Dominus; in the English of the 1861 Philadelphia hand missal, “I am the Saviour of my people, saith the Lord: in whatever distress they call on me, I will hear them: and will be their Lord for ever.” The psalm verse that follows is the opening of a long psalm in which Israel is told its own history: “Attend, O my people, to my law.” The Collect asks that everything adverse, universa nobis adversantia, be shut out, so that those who pray it, mente et corpore pariter expediti, may carry out quae tua sunt, the things that are God’s. The Epistle, from the fourth chapter of Ephesians, commands the renewal of the mind and the putting on of “the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth”, and then names what that looks like in four plain acts: truth to the neighbour, anger ended before the sun goes down, no foothold for the devil, and work that has something to give. The Gradual is an evening prayer: “Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight; the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice.” The Alleluia calls for praise, for invocation, and for the Lord’s deeds to be declared among the Gentiles.

The Gospel is the parable of the king who made a marriage for his son (Mt 22:1–14). The invited guests will not come; invited a second time, they go off to farm and merchandise, and the rest seize the servants and kill them. The king sends his armies and burns their city, and his servants go out into the highways and bring in everyone they find, “both bad and good”. Then the king comes in to see the guests, and finds one man without a wedding garment. He calls him “Friend”, the man has nothing to say, and he is bound and cast out: “For many are called, but few are chosen.” The Offertory takes up the Introit’s word tribulatio: “If I shall walk in the midst of tribulation, thou wilt quicken me.” The Secret offers the gifts oculis tuae maiestatis, before the eyes of God’s majesty, and asks that they be salutaria, saving. The Communion sets a command beside a wish, “Thou hast commanded thy commandments to be kept most diligently. O! that my ways may be directed to keep thy justifications”, and the Postcommunion asks two things of God’s medicinalis operatio, his healing work: that it free us from our perversitates, and that it make us inhaerere mandatis, cleave to his commandments.

The Gospel ends with a man who has come in and is found wanting, and the rest of the formulary is full of calling, hearing and keeping. Three questions arise from it, and each gives one of the readings that follow. The first asks what the guest who has come in must be wearing. It is heard from the end of the Gospel and from the Epistle’s new man. St Gregory the Great and St Augustine answer that the garment is charity; St Jerome, that it is the garment of the new man, made of the Lord’s precepts kept, and that the new man is Christ; and the reading finds that garment shown in the Epistle’s plain acts and asked for in the Communion’s wish. The second asks who was called, by whom, and what became of the call when it was refused. It is heard from the beginning of the Gospel, from the Introit’s psalm of Israel’s history and from the Alleluia’s command to the nations, and St John Chrysostom, St Irenaeus and St Hilary of Poitiers read the parable as the call passing from the first invited to the nations. The third asks where the feast is now and how the assembly at this Mass takes its place at it. It is heard from the Gospel’s crowded hall and from the chants and prayers of the Mass itself, the evening prayer of the Gradual, the Offertory’s walk through tribulation, the gifts of the Secret and the Communion’s wish. St Augustine and St Gregory say that the feast is the Church now, for Augustine the Lord’s Table and for Gregory the banquet of the Word, and St John Chrysostom addresses its guests as having partaken of the mysteries. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, commenting on this Mass, reads its Gradual as the evening oblation of the Christian life and its Secret and Postcommunion of the Eucharist. Every element of the formulary has a place in each reading, and each closes with four senses of its own, literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. The three readings answer different questions about the same texts and do not contradict one another, though the witnesses within each do not always agree.

The appointed elements at a glance

The Appointed Texts

The Latin below is that of the 1962 typical edition, Missale Romanum (Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis), pp. 411–412, nos. 1679–1688, read on the page images of the CMAA facsimile. Every element’s wording already stands in the Pustet Missale Romanum of Ratisbon, 1862 (pp. 351–352); the two books differ only in spelling, pointing, capitalisation, the form of the citations, the length of one printed conclusion, and the additional orations that the 1862 book prints under the rubrics of its day and the 1962 book no longer carries. The English of the scriptural elements is the Douay–Rheims Bible in Bishop Challoner’s revision, which translates the Clementine Vulgate at the Missal’s own Vulgate numbering. It is given at the canonical verses, so that wherever a chant departs from its verse the English and the Latin part company; each such place is named beneath the text. The English of the Introit’s antiphon and of the three orations is the anonymous translation printed in The Roman Missal, Translated into the English Language for the Use of the Laity (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861). Neither English is an approved liturgical translation of the 1962 Missal. Psalms are cited in the Missal’s numbering; the Hebrew numbering follows in parentheses at each psalm’s first citation and in the loci below.

Introit

Antiphon without printed citation; verse Ps 77:1 (Heb. 78). Missal p. 411, no. 1679.

Salus pópuli ego sum, dicit Dóminus: de quacúmque tribulatióne clamáverint ad me, exáudiam eos: et ero illórum Dóminus in perpétuum. Ps. 77, 1 Atténdite, pópule meus, legem meam: inclináte aurem vestram in verba oris mei. ℣. Glória Patri.

Cummiskey, The Roman Missal (1861), XIX Sunday after Pentecost, Introit

I am the Saviour of my people, saith the Lord: in whatever distress they call on me, I will hear them: and will be their Lord for ever.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 77:1, the verse

Attend, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

The antiphon is not a verse of the Vulgate, and the Missal cites no source for it; the Ps. 77, 1 it prints stands before the verse alone. Its phrases have the sound of the psalter’s promises of salvation and hearing: Ps 34:3 (35:3), “say to my soul: I am thy salvation”, and Ps 90:15 (91:15), “He shall cry to me, and I will hear him: I am with him in tribulation”. None of them is its source. The 1861 English renders Salus as “Saviour” and adds “my” to populi; the Latin says “the salvation of the people”. The Vulgate counts the psalm’s title, Intellectus Asaph, “Understanding for Asaph”, inside its first verse; the Missal’s verse begins after it, and so does the English printed here. After the Gloria Patri the antiphon is repeated, as the general rubrics direct (RGMR 427).

Collect

Oratio. Missal p. 411, no. 1680.

Omnípotens et miséricors Deus, univérsa nobis adversántia propitiátus exclúde: ut mente et córpore páriter expedíti, quæ tua sunt, líberis méntibus exsequámur. Per Dóminum.

Cummiskey, The Roman Missal (1861), XIX Sunday after Pentecost, Collect

O Almighty and merciful God, favourably defend us from all adversity: that being free both in soul and body, we may with security of mind perform thy service. Thro’.

The Collect is said alone, with no other oration added to it. The 1861 English is free at three points. It has God “defend us from” what the Latin asks him, propitiatus, to shut out, exclude; its “security of mind” stands for liberis mentibus, with free minds; and its “thy service” stands for quae tua sunt, the things that are thine. The participle expediti, disencumbered, set free for action, is the word the Postcommunion takes up at the end of the Mass. The conclusion is printed short and is said in the full form of the general rubrics (RG 115 a).

Epistle

Lectio Epistolae beati Pauli Apostoli ad Ephesios. Eph 4:23–28. Missal p. 411, no. 1681.

Fratres: Renovámini spíritu mentis vestræ, et indúite novum hóminem, qui secúndum Deum creátus est in iustítia et sanctitáte veritátis. Propter quod deponéntes mendácium, loquímini veritátem unusquísque cum próximo suo: quóniam sumus ínvicem membra. Irascímini, et nolíte peccáre: sol non óccidat super iracúndiam vestram. Nolíte locum dare diábolo: qui furabátur, iam non furétur; magis autem labóret, operándo mánibus suis, quod bonum est, ut hábeat unde tríbuat necessitátem patiénti.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Eph 4:23–28

And be renewed in the spirit of your mind: And put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth. Wherefore, putting away lying, speak ye the truth, every man with his neighbour. For we are members one of another. Be angry: and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger. Give not place to the devil. He that stole, let him now steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have something to give to him that suffereth need.

The Missal opens the lesson with the address Fratres and leaves out the connective with which the Vulgate joins verse 23 to the verse before it (Renovamini autem); the English begins with that connective, “And”. Otherwise the Latin agrees with the Vulgate word for word.

Gradual

Ps 140:2 (Heb. 141), respond and verse. Missal p. 411, no. 1682.

Dirigátur orátio mea sicut incénsum in conspéctu tuo, Dómine. ℣. Elevátio mánuum meárum sacrifícium vespertínum.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 140:2

Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight; the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice.

Both halves of the chant are the one verse. The Missal adds the vocative Domine after in conspectu tuo, which the Vulgate’s verse does not have and the English therefore does not render.

Alleluia

Ps 104:1 (Heb. 105). Missal p. 411, no. 1683.

Allelúia, allelúia. ℣. Ps. 104, 1 Confitémini Dómino, et invocáte nomen eius: annuntiáte inter gentes ópera eius. Allelúia.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 104:1

Give glory to the Lord, and call upon his name: declare his deeds among the Gentiles.

The Vulgate counts the psalm’s title, Alleluia, inside its first verse; the Missal’s verse begins after it. There is no Tract and no Sequence.

Gospel

Sequentia sancti Evangelii secundum Matthaeum. Mt 22:1–14. Missal pp. 411–412, no. 1684.

In illo témpore: Loquebátur Iesus princípibus sacerdótum et pharisǽis in parábolis, dicens: Símile factum est regnum cælórum hómini regi, qui fecit núptias fílio suo. Et misit servos suos vocáre invitátos ad núptias, et nolébant veníre. Iterum misit álios servos, dicens: Dícite invitátis: Ecce prándium meum parávi, tauri mei et altília occísa sunt, et ómnia paráta: veníte ad núptias. Illi autem neglexérunt: et abiérunt, álius in villam suam, álius vero ad negotiatiónem suam: réliqui vero tenuérunt servos eius, et contuméliis afféctos occidérunt. Rex autem cum audísset, irátus est: et missis exercítibus suis, pérdidit homicídas illos, et civitátem illórum succéndit. Tunc ait servis suis: Núptiæ quidem parátæ sunt, sed qui invitáti erant, non fuérunt digni. Ite ergo ad éxitus viárum, et quoscúmque invenéritis, vocáte ad núptias. Et egréssi servi eius in vias, congregavérunt omnes, quos invenérunt, malos et bonos: et implétæ sunt núptiæ discumbéntium. Intrávit autem rex, ut vidéret discumbéntes, et vidit ibi hóminem non vestítum veste nuptiáli. Et ait illi: Amíce, quómodo huc intrásti non habens vestem nuptiálem? At ille obmútuit. Tunc dixit rex minístris: Ligátis mánibus et pédibus eius, míttite eum in ténebras exterióres: ibi erit fletus et stridor déntium. Multi enim sunt vocáti, pauci vero elécti.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Mt 22:2–14

The kingdom of heaven is likened to a king who made a marriage for his son. And he sent his servants to call them that were invited to the marriage: and they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying: Tell them that were invited, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my beeves and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready. Come ye to the marriage. But they neglected and went their ways, one to his farm and another to his merchandise. And the rest laid hands on his servants and, having treated them contumeliously, put them to death. But when the king had heard of it, he was angry: and sending his armies, he destroyed those murderers and burnt their city. Then he saith to his servants: The marriage indeed is ready; but they that were invited were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways; and as many as you shall find, call to the marriage. And his servants going forth into the ways, gathered together all that they found, both bad and good: and the marriage was filled with guests. And the king went in to see the guests: and he saw there a man who had not on a wedding garment. And he saith to him: Friend, how camest thou in hither not having on a wedding garment? But he was silent. Then the king said to the waiters: Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the exterior darkness. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.

The Missal’s opening, In illo tempore: Loquebatur Iesus principibus sacerdotum et pharisaeis in parabolis, dicens, stands in place of the Gospel’s first verse, “And Jesus answering, spoke again in parables to them, saying”. It names those to whom the parable is spoken, “the chief priests and Pharisees” who, at the close of the preceding parable, knew that Jesus spoke of them (21:45); for that reason the English above begins at verse 2. At verse 13 the Missal reads Tunc dixit rex, “Then the king said”, where the Clementine Vulgate reads the present dicit; the English has the past. Every other word agrees with the Vulgate. The printed cue Credo follows the last line.

Offertory

Ps 137:7 (Heb. 138). Missal p. 412, no. 1685.

Si ambulávero in médio tribulatiónis, vivificábis me, Dómine: et super iram inimicórum meórum exténdes manum tuam, et salvum me fáciet déxtera tua.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 137:7

If I shall walk in the midst of tribulation, thou wilt quicken me: and thou hast stretched forth thy hand against the wrath of my enemies: and thy right hand hath saved me.

The English carries the first clause and not the rest of the chant. The Missal adds Domine after vivificabis me, and it sets the last two verbs in the future, extendes and faciet, where the Vulgate has the perfect, extendisti and fecit, and the Douay the past, “thou hast stretched forth” and “hath saved”. In the chant, therefore, the psalmist’s confidence in God’s hand and right hand looks forward, as his confidence that he will be kept alive already does in the Vulgate.

Secret

Secreta. Missal p. 412, no. 1686.

Hæc múnera, quǽsumus, Dómine, quæ óculis tuæ maiestátis offérimus, salutária nobis esse concéde. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum, Fílium tuum: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte.

Cummiskey, The Roman Missal (1861), XIX Sunday after Pentecost, Secret

Grant, we beseech thee, O Lord, that the offerings we bring before thy divine Majesty may avail to our salvation. Thro’.

Where the English has “before thy divine Majesty”, the Latin offers the gifts oculis tuae maiestatis, to the eyes of God’s majesty. The Missal prints a longer conclusion here than on the Collect and Postcommunion, and follows the Secret with the direction Praefatio de Ss.ma Trinitate.

Communion

Ps 118:4–5 (Heb. 119). Missal p. 412, no. 1687.

Tu mandásti mandáta tua custodíri nimis: útinam dirigántur viæ meæ, ad custodiéndas iustificatiónes tuas.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 118:4–5

Thou hast commanded thy commandments to be kept most diligently. O! that my ways may be directed to keep thy justifications.

The chant agrees with the Vulgate word for word.

Postcommunion

Postcommunio. Missal p. 412, no. 1688.

Tua nos, Dómine, medicinális operátio, et a nostris perversitátibus cleménter expédiat, et tuis semper fáciat inhærére mandátis. Per Dóminum.

Cummiskey, The Roman Missal (1861), XIX Sunday after Pentecost, Postcommunion

May the healing efficacy of these thy mysteries, O Lord, mercifully free us from our perverseness, and make us always obedient to thy commandments. Thro’.

“These thy mysteries” is the translator’s addition: the Latin names only tua medicinalis operatio, thy healing working. “Obedient” stands for inhaerere, to cleave or cling. The verb expediat is the Collect’s expediti again, so that the Mass asks at its end for the freedom it asked for at its beginning.

Each Element in Its Setting

Six of the ten elements are Scripture, and the three orations are the Church’s own composition. The Introit sets a psalm verse after an antiphon that stands in no verse of the Vulgate and whose source is unidentified. The chants come from five psalms: the Introit’s verse, the Gradual, the Alleluia, the Offertory and the Communion each take a verse or two from a different psalm. The lessons are St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and St Matthew’s Gospel. The elements are set out below one by one, each in its own setting, before the three readings of the whole.

Introit: the Lord who speaks, and the psalm of Israel’s history

The antiphon puts its words in the Lord’s mouth, dicit Dominus, and every clause of it is a promise: salvation for the people, a hearing for those who cry de quacumque tribulatione, from any tribulation whatever, and lordship in perpetuum. The words stand in no single verse of the Vulgate. The continuation of Dom Prosper Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year by Dom Lucien Fromage, in its English of 1883, says of the antiphon that it “is made up of several passages of Holy Writ, without being exactly that of any one of them”. The psalter’s promises lie close to it, God’s “I am thy salvation” to the soul (Ps 34:3) and “He shall cry to me, and I will hear him: I am with him in tribulation” (Ps 90:15), and the Offertory’s own psalm has the same prayer in the psalmist’s voice, “In what day soever I shall call upon thee, hear me” (Ps 137:3). The antiphon’s word tribulatio comes back once, in the Offertory, and nowhere else in the formulary.

The verse is the first of Ps 77, titled in the Vulgate Intellectus Asaph. It is one of the longest psalms of the psalter, and it tells Israel its own history: the fathers have told their children what the Lord did, “That another generation might know them” and “may not become like their fathers, a perverse and exasperating generation” (vv. 3–8). The psalm then recounts the wonders in Egypt, the dividing of the sea, the wilderness and the entry into the land, and ends with the Lord’s choice of Juda, of Mount Sion and of his servant David, taken “from the flocks of sheep … To feed Jacob his servant” (vv. 12–13, 52–54, 67–72). The verse that follows the one the Introit sings is “I will open my mouth in parables” (v. 2), which St Matthew cites as fulfilled in Jesus’s speaking in parables (Mt 13:35). The Gospel of this Mass opens with Jesus speaking in parabolis.

St Augustine asks of the psalm’s first words, “Whom may we suppose to be here speaking, but God?” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 77, 2). The antiphon has already named the speaker, dicit Dominus. The medieval liturgical commentators Honorius Augustodunensis (Gemma animae IV.86) and Sicard of Cremona (Mitrale VIII.19) set the antiphon in the return from the Babylonian exile: after Cyrus let the captive people go, Zorobabel and the priests proclaimed to them the Lord’s word that he was their salvation. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, the Benedictine liturgist and Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, reads it as the Lord’s own assurance against every human helper: “It is useless, therefore, to put one’s trust in the arm of man which must perish and turn to dust, whereas no one has ever called upon the Lord for help and been disappointed” (The Sacramentary III, p. 171).

Collect: freedom for the things that are God’s

The Collect is built on a single contrast between what hinders and what is set free. It asks God, propitiatus, to shut out universa nobis adversantia, all that is adverse, and it gives the purpose in a clause that names freedom twice over, mente et corpore pariter expediti and liberis mentibus. The participle expediti means disencumbered, set loose for action, and it is said of mind and body together; the second phrase means with free minds. What the freed are to carry out is named only as quae tua sunt, the things that are God’s. The freedom asked for is a freedom for action, and its object is God’s.

Schuster reads the prayer as a petition for the order God set between body and soul: “The body, when healthy and strong, must act obediently under the rule of the soul, which on its part is raised up on high by grace, to God”, so that “the whole man is directed gently and without difficulty or hindrance towards God as his final end”. “Glorious and beautiful indeed is this liberty of the sons of God, for it is the result of order, harmony, and the due subjection of the creature to the Creator” (pp. 171–172). Honorius, reading the same Collect of the people released from captivity, has them ask that everything adverse to them be shut out.

Two words of the Collect return in the Postcommunion. Expediti comes back as expediat, and the things that are God’s, quae tua sunt, come back as tuis … mandatis, God’s commandments, to which the Mass at its end asks to cleave.

Epistle: the new man, and four acts

The lesson begins in the middle of a sentence. Paul has just told the Ephesians “To put off, according to former conversation, the old man, who is corrupted according to the desire of error” (Eph 4:22), and the verses the Missal reads complete it: be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, created according to God “in justice and holiness of truth” (4:23–24). The chapter from which the lesson is taken begins with Paul, “a prisoner in the Lord”, beseeching his readers “that you walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called” (4:1), ut digne ambuletis vocatione, qua vocati estis.

After the general command come four particular ones, and each names an act of the old man to be put off and an act of the new to be put on. Lying gives way to truth spoken to the neighbour, with a reason: “For we are members one of another” (4:25). Anger is allowed its first motion and refused its duration: “Be angry: and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger” (4:26). The devil is to be given no place (4:27). And the thief is to become a worker who gives: “let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have something to give to him that suffereth need” (4:28). The verses after the lesson forbid evil speech, warn “grieve not the holy Spirit of God: whereby you are sealed unto the day of redemption”, and end with forgiveness, “even as God hath forgiven you in Christ” (4:29–32).

The chief commentators on the Epistle did not all read its words as the Missal prints them. St Jerome’s text of verse 23 had spiritu sensus vestri where the Missal has mentis, and his verse 28 ended ut habeat communicare ei qui indiget, that he may have something to share with one who is in want. St Thomas Aquinas’s printed text divides the verses differently from the Clementine, so that his twenty-seventh verse is the Missal’s twenty-eighth. Neither difference touches the sense of the lesson.

Schuster reads the lesson in one sentence: “St Paul sets before us Christian sanctity under the symbol of a new garment, which we are to put on. This garment is Jesus Christ himself, with his divine qualities and feelings”; the faithful, “being members of one and the same mystical body”, owe one another “charity, sincerity, trustfulness, and compassion” (p. 172). Honorius reads the new man as the condition of the exiles’ return: they are warned to put on the new man through justice so that, God leading them, they may go back to their homeland. Sicard, too, says that the new man must be put on.

Gradual: prayer as incense, hands lifted at evening

Ps 140 is titled in the Vulgate Psalmus David, and it is an evening prayer. It begins with a cry, “I have cried to thee, O Lord, hear me” (v. 1), and the Gradual’s verse compares the prayer to the incense and the evening sacrifice of Israel’s worship: “Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight; the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice” (v. 2). The next verses ask for a guard on the mouth and a heart kept from “evil words; to make excuses in sins” (vv. 3–4). The Missal adds Domine to the verse, and its verb dirigatur, may it be directed or set straight, comes back in the Communion’s dirigantur.

The same verse returns in the Order of Mass. When the Mass is celebrated with incense, the priest incenses the altar at the Offertory saying Ps 140:2–4, Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea, sicut incensum, in conspectu tuo: elevatio manuum mearum sacrificium vespertinum (1962 Ordo Missae, no. 1037). At a low Mass there is no incense and the verse is not said a second time.

Honorius has the people released from exile, already on the road, invoke the Lord with this verse. Schuster reads it of every Christian offering in this life, which is always an evening sacrifice for him because it is made in the twilight of faith (p. 172). St Augustine reads the verse’s evening sacrifice of the Lord’s Passion, and St Hilary of the works of mercy.

Alleluia: praise, invocation and proclamation

Ps 104, St Augustine observes, “is the first of those to which is prefixed the word Allelujah” (Enarrationes 104, 1). Its first verse holds three commands in a row: give glory, call upon his name, declare his deeds among the Gentiles. The psalm then recounts the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the story of Joseph, the plagues of Egypt, the Exodus and the gift of the land, and it gives the reason for all of it in its last verse: “That they might observe his justifications, and seek after his law” (v. 45). The Communion of this Mass asks that the ways of the one who prays be directed ad custodiendas iustificationes tuas, to keep those same justifications. The psalm’s first verses stand also in the First Book of Paralipomenon, in the praise that David appointed Asaph and his brethren to sing on the day the ark was set in the tent he had pitched for it (1 Par 16:1, 7–8).

Augustine also noticed that other Latin copies had another verb for the last clause: Annuntiate inter gentes opera ejus; vel potius, ut de graeco ad verbum exprimatur, quod et alii latini codices habent, Evangelizate in gentibus opera ejus, in the English of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, “or rather, to translate literally from the Greek, as other Latin copies too have it, ‘Preach the Gospel of His works among the Gentiles’ ” (Enarrationes 104, 1). He heard in the verse a command given in prophecy to the evangelists. St Robert Bellarmine reads the verse as the voice of a lover: “The true lover does not wish the praise and knowledge of his beloved should be confined to himself, but wishes that many, nay even all, should know her perfections and praise them”, so that the Gentiles, too, “from a knowledge of his works, may begin to know, praise, and invoke their Creator” (Commentary on the Psalms, on Ps 104:1). Schuster names those who carry out the command: “The apostles, and after them the bishops and pastors of souls, have always looked upon this duty of preaching the Gospel as the most important of all” (p. 172).

Gospel: the king’s marriage feast

The Missal’s opening names the parable’s hearers, principibus sacerdotum et pharisaeis, and so sets it where St Matthew sets it, in the temple at Jerusalem after the entry into the city. There the chief priests and ancients of the people have asked Jesus by what authority he acts (Mt 21:23). He has answered with two parables, the two sons and the wicked husbandmen, has quoted the stone the builders rejected, and has said, “the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and shall be given to a nation yielding the fruits thereof” (21:43). “And when the chief priests and Pharisees had heard his parables, they knew that he spoke of them” (21:45). The parable of the marriage feast is his third answer, and after it the Pharisees go out to take counsel “how to insnare him in his speech” (22:15).

The parable moves in two halves. In the first (vv. 2–10) a king sends his servants twice to those invited to his son’s wedding. The first time “they would not come”. The second time the servants announce that the dinner is prepared, “my beeves and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready”, and the invited make light of it and go off, “one to his farm and another to his merchandise”, while the rest seize the servants, treat them shamefully and kill them. The king is angry, sends his armies, destroys the murderers and burns their city. Then he declares the invited unworthy and sends his servants ad exitus viarum, to the partings or ends of the roads, to call everyone they find; they gather “both bad and good”, and the hall is filled. In the second half (vv. 11–14) the king comes in to see those at table and finds one man not clothed in a wedding garment. He calls him Amice, friend, asks how he came in, and receives no answer, At ille obmutuit. The man is bound hand and foot and cast into the exterior darkness, and the parable ends with a saying that reaches beyond the story: “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

St Luke has a parable of a great supper whose invited guests all excuse themselves and whose host fills the house from the streets and lanes, the highways and hedges (Lk 14:16–24). St Gregory the Great opens his homily on Matthew’s parable by asking whether the two are one lesson, and answers that Luke’s supper signifies the eternal and last banquet and Matthew’s wedding the present Church, because at Matthew’s wedding one guest who came in is put out again, and at the eternal banquet no one who has once come in goes out (Homiliae in Evangelia 38, 1). He preached that homily to the people in the basilica of the martyr St Clement at Rome, as its heading records; Schuster adds that the occasion is not known (p. 172).

The Missal’s Tunc dixit rex, where the Clementine Vulgate has dicit, is the reading of St Gregory’s and St Jerome’s texts of the verse. The continuation of The Liturgical Year reports that this Gospel “has given to the present Sunday the name of the Sunday of the invited to the marriage”.

Offertory: walking in tribulation

Ps 137, titled Ipsi David, is a thanksgiving. The psalmist praises God with his whole heart, “for thou hast heard the words of my mouth”, sings “in the sight of the angels” and worships “towards thy holy temple” (vv. 1–2), asks to be heard on whatever day he calls (v. 3), and prays that “all the kings of the earth give glory to thee” (v. 4). The Offertory’s verse turns from past deliverance to trust in what is to come. Where the Vulgate says that God has stretched forth his hand and that his right hand has saved, the Missal’s chant sets both verbs in the future, and the future already stood in the Pustet Missal of 1862. St Augustine and St Hilary read the verse with the Vulgate’s past, and St John Chrysostom’s Greek text of the verse has the past as well, though Chrysostom reports two other Greek versions that read the future. The chant accompanies the offering of the gifts.

Schuster finds in it the hour at which God acts: “As long as man continues to act, the Lord would seem to withhold his assistance, but when all human hope is vain, then it is that God most often begins his work of salvation”, so that “the hour in which God hears our prayer is the darkest and saddest of our trial” (p. 173). Honorius has the people returned from exile give thanks in this chant for their return.

Secret: gifts before the eyes of God’s majesty

The Secret is short and asks one thing, that the gifts offered oculis tuae maiestatis be salutaria nobis, saving to us. The image of offering before God’s eyes runs through this part of the Mass. The Gradual prayed that the psalmist’s prayer rise in conspectu tuo, in God’s sight. At the offering of the chalice the priest asks that it rise in conspectu divinae maiestatis tuae with an odour of sweetness (Ordo Missae, no. 1032). And at the end of every Mass, low or solemn, in the prayer Placeat, he asks that the sacrifice quod oculis tuae maiestatis indignus obtuli, which he unworthy has offered before the eyes of God’s majesty, may be acceptable to God and propitiabile for himself and all for whom he offered it (no. 1137). The Secret and the Placeat share the three words oculis tuae maiestatis.

Schuster reads the Secret of the Eucharist and of those who share in it, as a prayer that the oblation be a pledge of salvation to them and that they bring it the dispositions its effect in each of them requires (p. 173).

Communion: a command and a wish

The Communion’s two verses open the long psalm of the law, Ps 118, in its first strophe, which the Vulgate heads with the Hebrew letter Aleph. The psalm begins with a beatitude, “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord” (v. 1). Its fourth verse states a command and its fifth answers with a wish: Tu mandasti mandata tua custodiri nimis: utinam dirigantur viae meae, ad custodiendas iustificationes tuas. The word nimis does not mean “too much”, as St Augustine explains, but “very much” (Enarrationes 118, Aleph 4). St Robert Bellarmine hears the first verse as a statement of the lawgiver’s authority: God has commanded “not by way of advice, but by strict precept” (on Ps 118:4). The second verse turns the command into a prayer. Its dirigantur answers the Gradual’s dirigatur: the evening prayer asked to be set straight like incense, and the Communion asks that the ways of the one who prays be set straight towards what God commands.

Schuster hears joy in the wish: “by the exclamation utinam, he signifies his joy and delight in the service of God” (p. 173). Honorius has the returning people profess in the Communion that they keep the law of God, and ask for the power to fulfil it.

Postcommunion: the healing work

The Postcommunion names God’s work by one phrase, tua … medicinalis operatio, thy healing working, and asks two things of it. The first is the Collect’s freedom again, now as freedom from something inside us rather than from adversities without: a nostris perversitatibus clementer expediat, in the 1861 English “mercifully free us from our perverseness”. The second is the Communion’s keeping again: tuis semper faciat inhaerere mandatis, where the 1861 English has “make us always obedient to thy commandments” and the Latin’s verb, inhaerere, means to cleave or cling. The Mass that began with God promising to be his people’s Lord in perpetuum ends with a prayer to hold to his commandments semper.

Schuster reads the prayer of the Eucharist, whose healing grace it asks to free us from our perversity, and he names the sickness that needs the medicine: “our infirmity is caused by the poisoning of our nature through the fatal apple of Eden” (p. 174).

The Garment the King Looks For: the New Man Put On in Charity

Heard from its end, the Gospel is about a man who is already inside. He was called, he came, he sat down at the king’s table, and he is found without the one thing the king looks for. The Epistle of the same Mass has already named that thing in its own language. “Put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth”: the command is to clothe oneself, and the Gospel’s guest is condemned for not being clothed. Read together, the two lessons are one demand seen from two sides. The Church is the wedding, entry into it is by the king’s call, and what the king looks for in those who have come in is the new man put on, which is Christ, and the charity by which Christ is put on. The Epistle shows that garment in four plain acts: truth to the neighbour, anger ended before sunset, no place given to the devil, and work that has something to give. And the Communion and Postcommunion pray for what all this demands, that the one who has been commanded may be directed to keep the commandments and made to cleave to them. St Gregory the Great and St Augustine say what the garment is, and St Jerome says what it is made of; each of them comments on the parable, and Jerome on the Epistle as well.

Not baptism, not faith, not the altar: St Gregory and St Augustine

St Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel to the people of Rome, and when he reaches the man without a garment he begins by setting aside two answers that lie close to hand. “Si enim vestem nuptialem baptisma vel fidem dicimus, quis sine baptismate et fide has nuptias intravit?” If we call the wedding garment baptism or faith, who has entered this wedding without baptism and faith? The unclothed guest is inside; whatever he lacks, it is not what brought him in. “Quid ergo debemus intelligere nuptialem vestem, nisi charitatem?” What then should we understand by the wedding garment, if not charity? And he gives a reason that turns from the guest to the bridegroom: “Recte enim charitas nuptialis vestis vocatur, quia hanc in se conditor noster habuit, dum ad sociandae sibi Ecclesiae nuptias venit”: charity is rightly called the wedding garment, because our Maker himself had it when he came to the wedding at which he joined the Church to himself (Homiliae in Evangelia 38, 9). The garment is the bridegroom’s own dress. Whoever honours him at his wedding wears what he wore to it.

Gregory then gives the garment a shape. It is woven, as cloth is woven, on two beams, an upper and a lower, and so charity is held in two commandments, the love of God and the love of neighbour (38, 10). It is tested by the hardest case: Charitas autem vera est cum et in Deo diligitur amicus, et propter Deum diligitur inimicus, charity is true when the friend is loved in God and the enemy is loved for God’s sake (38, 11). Charity also explains the king’s greeting. The king calls the man Amice and condemns him, and Gregory reads the word as if the king had said more plainly: “Amice, et non amice; amice per fidem, sed non amice per operationem”, friend and not friend, friend by faith but no friend by what he has done (38, 12). The man’s silence follows from it. In that last rebuke, Gregory says, every argument of excuse ceases, because the one who rebukes without is the witness of the conscience that accuses within. To anyone who has the garment and has it imperfectly he offers the hope of Ps 138:16 (139:16), “Thy eyes did see my imperfect being”, and he turns his warning to the one who has none of it at all.

St Augustine makes the same elimination at greater length, in a sermon whose heading calls it a sermon against the Donatists, on charity. The occasion shapes the argument: the wedding hall holds good and bad together, and the rite that brings them in is common to both, so that what separates them cannot be a rite. “Is it Baptism? Without Baptism it is true no one attaineth to God; but not every one that hath Baptism attaineth to Him. I cannot therefore understand Baptism, the Sacrament itself that is, to be ‘the wedding garment;’ for this garment I see in the good, I see in the bad. Peradventure it is the Altar, or That which is received at the Altar. But no; we see that many eat, and ‘eat and drink judgment to themselves’.” Not fasting, not coming to church, not miracles, since the wicked do all these too (Sermo 90, 5). The garment is what the good have and the bad have not, and Augustine finds it in St Paul: “This is the wedding garment: ‘Now the end of the commandment,’ says the Apostle, ‘is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned’ ” (90, 6; 1 Tim 1:5). Not charity of any kind, he adds, since thieves and the partisans of the chariot races love one another too; this charity, from a pure heart.

Two further points in the sermon matter for the Mass. The first is where the garment is worn. “The garment that was looked for is in the heart, not on the body; for had it been put on externally, it could not have been concealed even from the servants” (90, 4). The king sees what the servants who brought the guests in did not see. The second is how it grows. “Let charity be born in thee, if it be yet unborn, and if it be born, be it nourished, fostered, increased” (90, 6). The garment is not received once and then possessed; it is put on as charity advances, and Augustine ends the sermon by saying what that advance restores: “so be ‘the wedding garment’ put on; so be the image of God, after which we were created, by this our advancing, engraven anew in us” (90, 10). The Epistle of the Mass describes the new man as the one who is created secundum Deum, after God. Augustine does not cite the Epistle there, but his last sentence is the Epistle’s command seen from the inside: the garment put on is the image of the Creator renewed.

The garment of the new man: St Jerome and the Epistle

St Jerome names the garment differently, and in doing so he joins the parable to the Epistle’s language himself. On the king’s question he writes: “Vestis autem nuptialis, praecepta sunt Domini, et opera quae complentur ex lege et Evangelio, novique hominis efficiunt vestimentum”, the wedding garment is the Lord’s precepts and the works fulfilled from the law and the Gospel, which make the garment of the new man. The guest who is found on the day of judgement sub nomine Christiano, under the Christian name, without the wedding garment, has not the garment of the heavenly man but a soiled one, id est, veteris hominis exuvias, the cast skin of the old man (Commentarii in Matthaeum III, on Mt 22:11–12; PL 26, cols. 160–161). The old man that the Epistle’s readers were to put off (Eph 4:22) is still on him.

Commenting on the Epistle itself, Jerome says who the new man is. He hears in the command to put on the new man the same thing that Paul says elsewhere in other words, Induite vos Christum Jesum (Rom 13:14): “Iste quippe est novus homo, quo universi credentes debemus indui atque vestiri”, this indeed is the new man, with whom all believers ought to be clothed and dressed; and whoever imitates Christ’s way of life, his meekness and his humility, has put on the new man (Commentarii in Epistolam ad Ephesios II, on 4:24; PL 26, col. 508). The two comments meet in one image. The garment the king looks for is made of the Lord’s precepts kept, and the one who keeps them is clothed with Christ.

St Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the Epistle centuries later, reaches the same identification by another road. As Adam was the first principle of oldness in every thing, through whom sin entered into all, so, he writes, “principium primum novitatis et renovationis Christus est”, Christ is the first principle of newness and renewal, and he at once adds Paul’s Induimini ergo Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum. The Spirit of the mind in which the Ephesians are to be renewed he takes first of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the mind, the cause of renewal; the words qui creatus est he refers, in one of his readings, to Christ himself, formed in the Virgin’s womb by the Holy Spirit; and he ends his exposition of the verse with a division that the rest of the lesson fills out, Vel ut sanctitas sit in corde, veritas in ore, justitia in opere, holiness in the heart, truth in the mouth, justice in the deed (In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 4, lect. 7). Aquinas does the same with the parable. In his lectures on St Matthew he asks what the garment is and answers, Christ. Some put Christ on in the sacrament, some are in him by charity; and to have the wedding garment is to put on Christ by good work, by a holy way of life and by true charity, so that if one of these is wanting, it is evil (Super Matthaeum c. 22). The one Doctor thus names Christ the new man of the Epistle and Christ the garment of the Gospel, in two separate commentaries.

St John Chrysostom, preaching on the same verses of Ephesians, fixes what the putting on changes: “Seest thou that the subject is one, but the clothing is twofold, that which is put off, and that which is put on?” The man is the same man; his clothing is exchanged, and the new man is created “to be a son: for this takes place from Baptism” (Homilies on Ephesians 13, on 4:23–24). Schuster, reading this Mass’s Epistle, says it in one sentence: “This garment is Jesus Christ himself” (p. 172). And the chapter from which the Epistle is cut opens with a sentence that joins the call to the life it asks for: “I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called” (Eph 4:1). The call has been given. The Epistle and the Gospel both ask what the called are wearing.

What the new man does: truth, anger, and hands that give

The Epistle does not leave the new man abstract. It names four acts, and the commentators on the Epistle read them as the garment’s visible side. St John Chrysostom takes the first from the image Paul gives it, “for we are members one of another”: “Let not the eye, saith he, lie to the foot, nor the foot to the eye,” since a body whose members deceive one another destroys itself. On the second, “Wouldest thou have thy fill of anger? One hour, or two, or three, is enough for thee; let not the sun depart, and leave you both at enmity. It was of God’s goodness that he rose: let him not depart, having shone on unworthy men.” “The blessed Paul dreads the night,” he adds, lest anger left burning in solitude be kindled again before morning. On the third: “to be at war with one another, is ‘to give place to the devil’ ”. And on the last he sums up what the four have in common: “Seest thou what are the members of the old man? Falsehood, revenge, theft.” The thief is not told merely to stop. “If they labor, and charitably communicate to others, thus will they do away the sin” (Homilies on Ephesians 14). Aquinas reads the same verses with the same point. The truth owed to the neighbour follows from membership, Membra enim se invicem diligunt, et se juvant mutuo in veritate, for members love one another and help one another in truth; the first motion of anger is allowed to human frailty, non permittitur mora, its delay is not; and labour is not only necessary but good, ut laborans possit vivere, et Ut habeat unde tribuat necessitatem patienti, that the labourer may live and may have something to give (In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 4, lect. 8–9). Jerome is sharper still. “Qui igitur ad hoc tantum laborat, ut ipse non egeat, et a caeteris contrahit manum: quamvis applaudat sibi, tamen Apostoli praeceptum non fecit”: whoever works only so as not to be in want himself, and draws back his hand from others, has not kept the Apostle’s precept, however he may applaud himself (on Eph 4:28, PL 26, col. 512).

The hand that works in order to give is the Epistle’s last image, and St Gregory turns the Gospel’s last image on the same hands. The king orders the man bound hand and foot, and Gregory reads the binding as already begun in this life: “Pedes enim qui visitare aegrum negligunt, manus quae nihil indigentibus tribuunt a bono opere jam ex voluntate ligatae sunt”, feet that neglect to visit the sick, and hands that give nothing to the needy, are already bound from good work by their own will (Homiliae in Evangelia 38, 13). What the king does at the end, the guest has done to himself beforehand. St Augustine, preaching on the parable in another sermon, gives the same demand its positive form, and ties it back to the garment: “Do not say; ‘we are too poor to have that garment.’ Clothe others, and ye are clothed yourselves. It is winter, clothe the naked. Christ is naked; and He will give you that ‘wedding garment’ whosoever have it not. Run to Him, beseech Him; He knoweth how to sanctify His faithful ones, He knoweth how to clothe His naked ones.” And then, with the binding in view: “let not your works fail. If they fail, with hands bound what canst thou do? with feet bound, whither wilt thou fly?” (Sermo 95, 7). The thief of the Epistle who works with his hands so as to have something to give is weaving the wedding garment; the guest whose hands gave nothing arrives at the feast without it.

Hands lifted at evening: St Hilary on the Gradual

Between the Epistle and the Gospel the Mass sings, “the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice”. St Hilary of Poitiers, expounding this verse, distinguishes two positions of the hands. To spread the hands out is the posture of prayer; to lift them up is something more. When Moses was told to stand with his hands raised over the battle, the lifting showed excelsi operis officium, the office of a lofty work. And when St Paul bids men pray “lifting up pure hands, without anger and contention” (1 Tim 2:8), Hilary observes, non habitum orandi constituit, sed praescriptum divinae operationis adjecit: he did not fix a posture of prayer but added a prescription for divine work. Isaiah’s God rejects those who spread out their hands, not those who lift them, quia habitus orandi in manibus extendendis est, perfecti autem operis efficientia est in elevandis, because the posture of praying lies in spreading the hands, but the doing of a finished work lies in lifting them (Tractatus super Psalmos 140, 3).

Which evening sacrifice, then, pleases God? Hilary answers from the Gospel of the last judgement: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you … For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat: I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in” (Mt 25:34–35). Manuum ergo elevatio, sacrificium vespertinum est. Non enim sanguine et holocaustis nos, in quos consummatio saeculorum devenit, sacrificamus Deo: the lifting up of the hands, then, is the evening sacrifice, for we upon whom the end of the ages has come do not sacrifice to God with blood and holocausts (140, 4). The hands the Gradual lifts are hands that feed, clothe, welcome and visit Christ in the least of his brethren.

St John Chrysostom, expounding the psalm’s first verse in Greek before he reaches its second, lays down the other condition Paul’s sentence names. He forbids prayer against enemies, after the example of the apostles and of Stephen, and requires that the hands raised in prayer be raised without anger, citing the same verse of the letter to Timothy (Expositio in Psalmum 140). St Robert Bellarmine cites it again on the Gradual’s verse: “the Apostle, ‘Lifting up pure hands, without anger and strife’ ” (on Ps 140:2). Hilary’s lifted hands are the Epistle’s working hands, raised in prayer without the anger the Epistle forbids to outlast the day; and they are the opposite of the hands Gregory finds already bound, because they have given.

What God commands is asked of God: the other elements

The Communion states a command and answers it with a wish: “Thou hast commanded thy commandments to be kept most diligently. O! that my ways may be directed to keep thy justifications.” St Jerome said that the wedding garment is praecepta Domini, and the Communion’s mandata are those precepts. Three expositors of the psalm read its wish as a prayer for grace. St Augustine: “When thou hearest, ‘O that,’ recognise the words of one wishing; and having recognised the expression of a wish, lay aside the pride of presumption. … Therefore if man desireth what God chargeth, God must be prayed to grant Himself what He enjoineth” (Enarrationes 118, Aleph 5). St Hilary, on the same verse, says that the justifications are many and that nisi a Deo dirigamur, infirmes per naturam nostram erimus. Adjuvandi igitur per gratiam ejus, dirigendique sumus: unless we are directed by God we shall be weak by our nature; we must therefore be helped and directed by his grace (Tractatus super Psalmos 118, Aleph 12). And the Greek Expositiones in Psalmos printed under the name of St Athanasius say of the same verses that the psalmist, knowing that no one can keep the law without help from above, secures its keeping for himself by prayer. The Postcommunion then asks for exactly that help, that God’s healing work tuis semper faciat inhaerere mandatis. Put together, the wedding garment is made of the commandments kept, and the commandments are kept by the grace that the Mass, at its end, asks for.

The other elements take their place around this centre. The Introit’s Lord bids his people attend legem meam, and St Augustine, expounding the psalm from which the verse comes, draws the distinction on which the question of the garment turns: “although all the Sacraments were common, grace, which is the virtue of the Sacraments, was not common to all. … For even heretics have the same Baptism, and false brethren too, in the communion of the Catholic name” (Enarrationes 77, 2). The guest without the garment is such a brother. The Collect asks to be set free, in mind and body alike, to carry out quae tua sunt; the garment is put on by doing what is God’s, and Schuster calls the freedom the Collect asks for the liberty of the sons of God. The Alleluia’s praise is answered, in Augustine’s reading of its verse, by a God who hears those who love him: Exaudit quippe invocantem, quem laudantem videt: laudantem videt, quem probat amantem, he hears the one who calls upon him whom he sees praising, and he sees praising the one whom he proves to be loving (Enarrationes 104, 1). The one who is heard is the one who loves, the guest in the garment of charity. The Offertory’s walk “in the midst of tribulation” is the road on which the garment is kept. St Augustine reads the verse as the condition of being revived at all: “otherwise Thou wilt not revive me, unless I walk in the midst of tribulation” (Enarrationes 137, 10). And Chrysostom, in his homily on the parable, says what the called must do once they are clothed: “although to be called and to be cleansed was of grace, yet, when called and clothed in clean garments, to continue keeping them so, this is of the diligence of them that are called” (Homilies on Matthew 69). The Secret asks that the gifts be salutaria nobis, and Schuster reads the prayer as a request for the dispositions that let the oblation work its full effect in the soul (p. 173); the garment is that disposition, brought to the altar.

Gift or work: the strongest difficulty

If entry into the wedding is the king’s free call, and the guest is condemned for lacking a garment, the call seems to demand what it did not give. The witnesses answer the difficulty in different ways, and the differences are real.

St Hilary makes the garment a gift. Vestitus autem nuptialis est gloria Spiritus sancti, et candor habitus coelestis: the wedding garment is the glory of the Holy Spirit and the brightness of a heavenly dress, received in the confession of a good answer at baptism and to be kept usque in coetum regni coelorum immaculatus et integer, spotless and whole until the assembly of the kingdom of heaven (Commentarius in Matthaeum 22, 7; PL 9, col. 1044). St Irenaeus, arguing against those who divided the God who calls from the God who judges, says that “we ought, after our calling, to be also adorned with works of righteousness, so that the Spirit of God may rest upon us; for this is the wedding garment”, and that those who were called to God’s supper but “have not received the Holy Spirit, because of their wicked conduct” are cast out (Against Heresies IV.36.6). St Gregory and St Augustine, as above, deny that the garment is baptism, because the unworthy guest is baptized too. St John Chrysostom holds both sides in one sentence: calling and cleansing are of grace; keeping the garment clean is the diligence of the called.

The positions are narrower than they look. Hilary’s garment is received in baptism but must be kept spotless; Augustine’s and Gregory’s is charity, which a baptized man may fail ever to put on. They agree that the guest is baptized and that what he lacks is something a baptized man can lose or never wear, and they differ over what to call it and where it comes from. Here the Communion’s verse gives the answer. The three expositors of that verse agree that what God commands must be asked of him; and Hilary, who makes the garment a gift of the Spirit on the Gospel, says on the psalm that the commandments are kept only as God’s grace directs. The garment is God’s gift, and it must be put on and kept; it is kept by praying for what is commanded. Augustine’s sermon puts the two sides into one exhortation: “Christ is naked; and He will give you that ‘wedding garment’ … Run to Him, beseech Him.” The continuation of The Liturgical Year says the same in its own voice: the king “has given them abundant time to lay aside their tatters; and knowing, that they could not get ready of themselves, he has placed at their disposal, for the marriage-feast, the richest garments of his grace and virtues.”

A second difficulty is the one Hilary himself raises. How could a man swept in from the highways be expected to have a garment? Numquid invitandorum habitum designaverat? … quomodo unus omnibus poterat esse vestitus? Had the king prescribed a dress for those he invited? How could everyone have been clothed alike? His answer is that the garment is inward, that human simplicity hardly perceives a counterfeit mind, and that therefore God alone found the unworthy guest (Commentarius in Matthaeum 22, 7). Augustine answers in the same way, from the servants who did not notice: “had it been put on externally, it could not have been concealed even from the servants”. The difficulty confirms that the garment is neither a piece of clothing nor a rite.

The four senses of this reading

Literal.

Paul tells the Ephesians to be renewed in the spirit of their mind and to put on the new man created according to God in justice and holiness of truth, and he names what that means: truth spoken to the neighbour, because they are members one of another; anger ended before the sun sets; no place given to the devil; and work that can give to the needy. In the parable a man who has come into the king’s wedding without a wedding garment is questioned, falls silent, and is bound and cast out; many are called, few chosen.

Allegorical.

The garment is Christ put on, the new and heavenly man (Jerome; Aquinas, for whom Christ is the first principle of all newness as Adam was of all oldness; Schuster), and the charity that the Bridegroom himself wore when he came to join the Church to himself (Gregory). Its lack is the cast skin of the old man (Jerome). The guest is a friend by faith and no friend by his works (Gregory), and in putting on the garment the image of God after which man was created is engraved anew (Augustine).

Moral.

Charity toward God and neighbour, woven on both beams and proved toward the enemy (Gregory; Augustine); truth among the members of one body, anger settled the same day, and work done so as to give (the Epistle, with Chrysostom, Aquinas and Jerome); hands lifted in the works of mercy and not only spread in prayer (Hilary on the Gradual), since hands that give nothing are already bound (Gregory); and what God commands, asked of God (Augustine and Hilary on the Communion’s verse).

Anagogical.

The king’s entry is the judgement, when the guest found under the Christian name without the garment is rebuked (Jerome); what is sought at the vineyard, at the building of the house and at the wedding feast is non initia, sed finis, not the beginning but the end (Jerome, on Mt 22:14); no guest knows whether he is chosen, Quia vocati sumus, novimus; si sumus electi, nescimus (Gregory, Homiliae 38, 14); and the garment received is to be kept spotless until the assembly of the kingdom of heaven (Hilary).

The Invitation Refused and Carried to the Highways

Heard from its beginning, the Gospel is the story of an invitation: who sent it, to whom, how often, what the invited did with it, and where it went when they would not come. The Mass surrounds that story with the Church’s memory of God’s dealings with his people. The Lord who speaks in the Introit, who promises to hear whoever cries to him and says Attendite, popule meus, legem meam, is the king of the parable, who called the first invited through his servants, the prophets and after them the apostles, and who, when the invited made light of the call and killed his messengers, sent his servants to the highways. The Alleluia gives that last command in the psalm’s own words, annuntiate inter gentes opera eius, declare his deeds among the Gentiles. The assembly that hears this Mass is the hall filled from the highways, and the call comes to it as a warning taken from the history it has just been told. St John Chrysostom, St Irenaeus and St Hilary of Poitiers each read the parable as the call passing from the first invited to the nations, with St Jerome beside them; St Augustine reads the highways in a form of his own; and St Gregory the Great reads them otherwise.

The sequel to the vineyard: St John Chrysostom

St John Chrysostom reads the parable where St Matthew places it, as the answer that follows the vineyard. At the end of the parable of the husbandmen Christ had said that the kingdom “shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof”, and the marriage feast, Chrysostom says, “declares next to what kind of nation”. It “proclaims beforehand both the casting out of the Jews, and the calling of the Gentiles; and it indicates together with this also the strictness of the life required” (Homilies on Matthew 69).

His reading is historical and pastoral at once. The difference between the two parables is the difference between the times. “For there He appears before His crucifixion bidding them; but here even after He is slain, He still urges them, striving to win them over.” The invitation had come many times. “And when were they bidden? By all the prophets; by John again … by the Son Himself again”, and after the Ascension not only by words but by actions, “by Peter, and those with him”. The excuses of farm and merchandise are meant to sound reasonable, and that is their lesson: “though the things which hinder us be necessary, to set the things spiritual at a higher price than all”. The burning of the city looks ahead to “the things that took place under Vespasian and Titus”, and Chrysostom adds that the capture came “not straightway after Christ was slain … but after forty years, that He might show His long suffering, when they had slain Stephen, when they had put James to death, when they had spitefully entreated the apostles”.

Chrysostom is careful about the order of the call. Christ sent his apostles to the Jews first, both before the crucifixion and after it, and they went to the Gentiles only when they had been driven out; “hear Paul interpreting this parable, and saying thus, ‘It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you, but since ye judge yourselves unworthy, lo, we turn to the Gentiles’ ” (Acts 13:46). Then, having told the story of the refusal, he turns it on those who have come in: “in order that not even these should put confidence in their faith alone, He discourses unto them also concerning the judgment to be passed upon wicked actions”, and the garment “is life and practice”. The call that passed from the first invited to the highways is not a privilege for those it reached. It carries the same judgement with it.

One King who calls and judges: St Irenaeus

St Irenaeus used the parable in the second century against teachers who divided the God of the prophets from the Father of Jesus Christ. For him the parable shows “that there is one King and Lord, the Father of all”, and “that He had from the beginning prepared the marriage for His Son, and used, with the utmost kindness, to call, by the instrumentality of His servants, the men of the former dispensation to the wedding feast”. When they would not come he sent others, and they killed the messengers; he destroyed them and burned their city, “but He called together from all the highways, that is, from all nations, [guests] to the marriage feast of His Son”. From this Irenaeus draws his conclusion: “The Lord, therefore, who has called us everywhere by the apostles, is He who called those of old by the prophets” (Against Heresies IV.36.5).

The same argument governs his reading of the parable’s end. The God who calls the unworthy is the God who examines those he has called, “because nothing unbecoming or evil pleases Him”, and the judgement falls on the new people as it fell on the old: “For as in the former covenant, ‘with many of them was He not well pleased;’ so also is it the case here, that ‘many are called, but few chosen’ ” (IV.36.6, citing 1 Cor 10:5). Irenaeus alone among the witnesses makes the parable a proof that the covenant with Israel and the call of the nations are the work of one God. That proof is what lets the Introit’s Lord, who speaks to “my people” in the psalm of Israel’s history, be heard as the same Lord who calls the Gentiles in the Alleluia and the Gospel.

The nations at the end of the way: St Hilary

St Hilary of Poitiers reads the parable in two movements, and the second lifts the first. The wedding itself is vitae coelestis et in resurrectione suscipiendae aeternae gloriae sacramentum, the mystery of the heavenly life and of the eternal glory to be received in the resurrection (Commentarius in Matthaeum 22, 3). Then he names the persons. Invitati antea populus Israel est: in gloriam enim aeternitatis per legem est advocatus: the first invited are the people of Israel, called through the law to the glory of eternity. The servants sent to call them are the apostles, and those sent a second time cum praeceptorum conditione are apostolic men, the apostles’ successors. The fatted bulls are the glorious company of the martyrs, and the fatlings are spiritual men; and when all these are ready and gathered into the number of the multitude pleasing to God, regni coelestis gloria tamquam nuptiae nuntiantur, the glory of the heavenly kingdom is announced as a wedding (22, 4). The farm and the merchandise are the ambition of the world and the love of money, and the armies that burn the city are the armies of heaven, which will burn the murderers’ whole assembly with eternal fire (22, 5).

The second movement begins with the highways. Quoniam vero de judicii tempore et resurrectionis ista loquitur, sermonem eumdem ad congregationem gentium retulit: because the parable speaks of the time of judgement and resurrection, the king turns the same word to the gathering of the nations. The first invited were found unworthy, and the servants are sent ad exitus viarum, and Hilary reads the phrase twice over. The way, he says, is often the time of this world, and its outlets are its end; the servants are sent to the ends of the roads quia omnibus retroacta donantur, because at that end everything past is forgiven to all, by the gift of grace. The call then goes out sine aliqua exceptione, without any exception, and the bad come with the good. Vocatio quidem bonos efficere debuerat, quia sancta est: the call ought to have made them good, because it is holy; sed per vitium inemendatae voluntatis discrimen est vocatorum, but by the fault of an unamended will there is a difference among the called (22, 6). And he ends the parable with a sentence that turns its last saying: Non est igitur paucitas in invitatis, sed raritas in electis, the few are not few among the invited but rare among the chosen (22, 7).

Peoples and teachings: St Jerome and St Augustine

St Jerome agrees with the three and adds his own details. The king who made the marriage is almighty God, and Facit autem nuptias Domino nostro Jesu Christo et Ecclesiae, quae tam ex Judaeis, quam ex gentibus, congregata est: he makes the wedding for our Lord Jesus Christ and the Church, which is gathered as much from the Jews as from the Gentiles. The first servant is Moses, or, if one reads the plural, the prophets; the second sending is the prophets or the apostles. Those who went off to farm and merchandise are guilty of a lesser crime than those who turned humanity into cruelty. Jerome notices that the parable calls the king homo, a man, while he invites and does works of clemency, and only rex when he comes to punish. His armies are either avenging angels, de quibus in Psalmis scribitur: Immissiones per angelos pessimos, as it is written in the Psalms, “which he sent by evil angels”, or the Romans under Vespasian and Titus, who burned the faithless city; and the psalm he cites for the angels is Ps 77, the Introit’s psalm, at its forty-ninth verse. Of the highways he writes, Gentilium populus non erat in viis, sed in exitibus viarum: the people of the Gentiles was not in the ways, but at the ends of the ways; and he asks how any good could be found among them, and answers with St Paul that the Gentiles who by nature do the things of the law condemn the Jews (Rom 2:14; In Matthaeum III, PL 26, cols. 159–160).

St Augustine answers the question of the highways in a short note of his Quaestiones evangeliorum, and his answer takes a form of its own. The wedding is the Word incarnate, quia in ipso homine suscepto Ecclesia Deo copulata est, because in the humanity he assumed the Church is joined to God; the bulls are principes plebium, the leaders of the peoples; and of the command to go to the ends of the roads he writes, viæ intelliguntur dogmata Gentium; quia ex omnibus illis ad nuptias venerunt, id est, Christo crediderunt: the ways are understood as the teachings of the Gentiles, because out of all of them they came to the wedding, that is, they believed in Christ (Quaestiones evangeliorum I.31; PL 35, col. 1329). For Augustine the roads are not the peoples themselves but what they held; the call reaches men in the doctrines they lived by and brings them out of all of them to Christ. His answer points where Irenaeus’s, Hilary’s, Jerome’s and Chrysostom’s does, to the Gentiles, and it says nothing of who were first invited or why they refused, where the other four begin.

The Introit’s psalm and the Alleluia’s command

The Introit’s verse opens the psalm in which Asaph tells Israel its history, “That another generation might know them” and “may not become like their fathers” (Ps 77:6, 8). St Augustine reads the psalm’s purpose as a warning to those who hear it later: it contains “the things which are said to have been done among the old people: but the new and latter people is being admonished, to beware that it be not ungrateful regarding the blessings of God” (Enarrationes 77, 1). The Greek Expositiones in Psalmos printed under the name of St Athanasius go further on the verse the Introit sings. They ask to which people the command “Attend, O my people” is given, and answer that it is the people gathered from the nations, and that the law it is to attend to is the law of the Gospel. And the psalm’s second verse, “I will open my mouth in parables”, is the verse St Matthew cites as fulfilled when Jesus spoke in parables (Mt 13:35); the Gospel of this Mass opens with Jesus speaking in parabolis to the chief priests and Pharisees.

The Alleluia’s verse ends with a command to declare God’s deeds among the Gentiles, and St Augustine hears in it the voice of prophecy addressing the preachers of the Gospel. Having noted the other Latin copies’ Evangelizate, preach the Gospel, he asks, “Unto whom is this addressed, save unto the Evangelists in prophecy?” (Enarrationes 104, 1). Later in the same exposition he says who the psalm’s “seed of Abraham” are: non de sola gente Hebraeorum, sed quotquot istam gratiam suscipiunt in omni terra, not of the Hebrew nation alone, but all who receive this grace in every land (104, 36). The Greek Expositiones read the same verse as the Holy Spirit’s command to the apostles to make known to the people from the nations all the wonders the Lord worked at his coming. Schuster names the apostles, and the bishops and pastors of souls after them, as those who have always held this duty of preaching the most important of all (p. 172), and St Robert Bellarmine reads the verse as the psalmist’s call to God’s people to “speak in all directions among the gentiles of the wonderful works of God”.

Set before the Gospel, the Alleluia’s command and the king’s Ite ergo ad exitus viarum are one command in two forms, the psalm’s prophecy and the parable’s story. St Augustine takes both steps, though in two separate works, reading the Alleluia’s verse of the evangelists in one and the Gospel’s highways of the Gentiles in the other. In this Mass the one follows the other within a few lines, and the assembly hears the command before it hears the story of its fulfilment.

The Alleluia’s psalm also gives the reason for all the history it recites. Its last verse is “That they might observe his justifications, and seek after his law” (Ps 104:45), and St Augustine takes that verse as the key to the whole psalm: the goods of the land were given so that God’s servants might be free for what is eternal, Ut custodiant justificationes ejus (Enarrationes 104, 34). The Communion of this Mass asks for the same thing, that the ways of the one who prays be directed ad custodiendas iustificationes tuas. The history ends in keeping, and so does the Mass.

The other elements on the way

The Collect’s prayer to be expediti, disencumbered, in mind and body, answers the excuse of the first invited. They went off alius in villam suam, alius vero ad negotiationem suam, and the witnesses name what held them. For Hilary the farm is the ambition of the world and the merchandise the love of money; for St Gregory the Great, In villam quippe ire est labori terreno immoderate incumbere, in negotiationem vero ire est actionum saecularium lucris inhiare, to go to the farm is to lie immoderately upon earthly labour, and to go to the merchandise is to gape after the profits of worldly business (Homiliae in Evangelia 38, 5). The Collect asks to be free of exactly that weight. The Epistle’s “for we are members one of another” is the rule of a body gathered from both peoples, and Jerome gives the neighbour to whom truth is owed the widest possible extent: omnem hominem, qui ex eodem nobiscum parente generatus est, every man born of the same first parent as we (on Eph 4:25, PL 26, col. 509).

The Gradual is the prayer of a people still on the road. St Augustine hears in the psalm the voice of the whole Christ, head and members, which must go on crying to God for as long as tribulation remains for the Church, even to the end of the world (Enarrationes 140, 2). Hilary, on the Gradual’s verse, gives the evening sacrifice to us upon whom the end of the ages has come, the people of the last age after the blood sacrifices have ceased (Tractatus super Psalmos 140, 4). The Offertory’s walk “in the midst of tribulation” is the road the servants took and the Church still takes. Augustine hears the verse’s confidence in the face of every enemy: “Let mine enemies rage: what can they do? … For mine enemies cannot separate me from Thee” (Enarrationes 137, 11). The Secret brings the gifts of those who have come in from the highways before the eyes of God’s majesty, and the Postcommunion asks that they cleave to the commandments semper. The call ends not in having been called, but in keeping what the caller commands.

Two difficulties: the burned city, and St Gregory’s highways

The first difficulty is the burned city. St John Chrysostom reads it of Jerusalem under Vespasian and Titus, and St Jerome keeps the Romans as one of two possibilities beside the avenging angels of the Introit’s psalm. St Gregory reads it otherwise: the city burned is the flesh of the persecutors, which suffers with their souls in the eternal fire, and the armies are the angels, by whom every judgement is carried out; and he points his hearers to what they can see for themselves, the vengeance that their fathers heard of and that nos autem jam cernimus, we now behold, since the proud persecutors of the martyrs are forgotten while the martyrs’ death flowers in the faith of the living (Homiliae 38, 5). St Hilary, too, reads the armies as the armies of heaven and the fire as eternal, and St Irenaeus says only that the king burned their city, without naming it. The historical and the eschatological readings stand side by side, and neither is the only answer. The parable’s hearers are those the Missal names, the chief priests and Pharisees who knew he spoke of them (Mt 21:45). St Augustine sets the limit to any wider judgement inside the psalm of Israel’s history itself: “there were even in that people they that understood, having the faith which was afterwards revealed” (Enarrationes 77, 2). And Chrysostom supplies the counterweight in his own homily, since he requires the garment of the Gentiles who came in as strictly as he blames the first invited for refusing.

The second difficulty is St Gregory the Great’s reading of the highways, which gives the question a different answer. Gregory preached this Gospel to the people of Rome in the basilica of St Clement, and in the whole homily he names neither Israel nor the nations. His invited are amici, friends, called first by the prophets and then by the apostles (38, 3); his refusers are those who give themselves beyond measure to earthly labour and worldly gain, and the worse of them persecute the grace of the one who calls (38, 5). And the ends of the roads are not the Gentiles. Si in Scriptura sacra vias actiones accipimus, exitus viarum intelligimus defectus actionum, quia illi plerumque facile ad Deum veniunt, quos in terrenis actibus prospera nulla comitantur: if in Holy Scripture we take the ways as our doings, we understand the ends of the ways as the failure of our doings, because those whom no prosperity attends in their earthly affairs often come readily to God (38, 6). This is a different answer, not a detail: for Gregory the highways are the places where worldly undertakings run out, and the guests found there are those whose affairs have failed. The two answers were already read side by side in the ninth century. Rabanus Maurus’s catena on St Matthew gives Augustine’s sentence on the teachings of the Gentiles first and Gregory’s after it, and heads Gregory’s as the moral sense. Gregory’s answer makes of the highways a moral sense of the call, and it stands beside the answer of Irenaeus, Hilary, Jerome and Chrysostom, for whom the highways are the nations, and beside Augustine’s own, for whom they are the teachings of the Gentiles.

The four senses of this reading

Literal.

In the temple, answering the chief priests and Pharisees who knew that his parables were about them, Jesus tells of a king whose invited guests refuse his son’s wedding, maltreat and kill his servants, and see their city burned, while the hall is filled from the highways with bad and good. Ps 77 recites God’s deeds so that the coming generation may not be like its fathers, and Ps 104 bids Israel praise God and declare his deeds among the Gentiles.

Allegorical.

The king is the Father, and the wedding is the Son’s union with the Church through the Incarnation (Gregory; Augustine, for whom the wedding is the Word incarnate, in whose assumed humanity the Church is joined to God), a Church gathered from Jews and Gentiles (Jerome). The servants are the prophets and then the apostles (Gregory; Chrysostom, who names John and the Son between them), sent by the one God who called those of old by the prophets and calls us by the apostles (Irenaeus); for Hilary they are the apostles and then apostolic men, their successors. The highways are the nations (Irenaeus, Hilary, Jerome, Chrysostom), or the teachings of the Gentiles, from all of which those who believed came to Christ (Augustine). The Alleluia’s command is addressed to the evangelists in prophecy (Augustine) and to the apostles for the people of the nations (the Greek Expositiones).

Moral.

Not to make light of the call for farm or trade, which are immoderate labour and worldly gain (Gregory) or ambition and the love of money (Hilary), but to set the things of the spirit above even necessary things (Chrysostom); not to be ungrateful as a people that has been told the story of those before it (Augustine on Ps 77); not to trust in faith alone once inside (Chrysostom); and, in Gregory’s own form of the highways, to hear the call when worldly undertakings fail, since those whom no prosperity attends often come readily to God.

Anagogical.

The wedding is the mystery of the eternal glory to be received in the resurrection, and when all is ready and the multitude pleasing to God is gathered into its number, the glory of the heavenly kingdom is announced as a wedding (Hilary). The hall filled from the highways is the Church of the nations awaiting that announcement. Of those gathered the few are not few among the invited but rare among the chosen, non est … paucitas in invitatis, sed raritas in electis (Hilary), as it was in the former covenant (Irenaeus).

The Feast That Now Is: the Church at the Lord’s Table and Its Evening Sacrifice

Heard from its middle, the Gospel is about a hall that is full. The servants have brought in everyone they found, bad and good, the guests are at table, and the king comes in to see them. St Augustine and St Gregory the Great both say that this wedding is the Church now, with good and bad at one table, and both say so to congregations gathered in church: Augustine calls the feast the Lord’s Table and the Feast of the Holy Scriptures, Gregory the banquet of the Scriptures and of the divine Word, and St John Chrysostom addresses its guests as those who have partaken of the mysteries. Read from there, the chants and prayers of this Mass are the voice of that assembly at that table. It cries in its tribulation and is heard; its prayer rises like incense and the lifting up of its hands joins the evening sacrifice, which St Augustine reads as the Lord’s Passion; it offers its gifts before the eyes of God’s majesty and asks that they be saving; and at the Communion it asks to keep what it is commanded, and to be freed by God’s healing work, which Schuster reads of the Eucharist. The garment is the question put to every guest before he approaches. St Augustine, St Gregory and St John Chrysostom carry this reading from their preaching on the Gospel and the psalms. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, commenting on this Mass as a Mass, reads its Gradual, Secret and Postcommunion in the same direction, though the banquet of its Gospel is for him the heavenly one.

Two feasts: St Augustine and St Gregory on the present Church

St Augustine begins his sermon on the parable with the table. “All the faithful know the marriage of the king’s son, and his feast, and the spreading of the Lord’s Table is open to them all who will. But it is of importance to each one to see how he approaches, even when he is not forbidden to approach It. For the Holy Scriptures teach us that there are two feasts of the Lord; one to which the good and evil come, the other to which the evil come not” (Sermo 90, 1). The feast of the Gospel just read is the first of these, and Augustine addresses those at it in two directions at once: “that ye look not for the good without, that ye bear with the evil within”. Its guests are already at the Lord’s Table “which is in this life” (90, 5), and the whole purpose of the sermon is gathered into one sentence: “Be that feast which now is, received worthily, that we may attain to the other” (90, 4).

St Gregory says the same of the time of the wedding. Luke’s supper, he says, is the eternal and last banquet; Matthew’s wedding is the present Church, because from it some who have come in go out again (Homiliae in Evangelia 38, 1). The hall full of bad and good shows it: per has regis nuptias praesens Ecclesia designatur, in qua cum bonis et mali conveniunt, by this king’s wedding the present Church is signified, in which the bad come together with the good. The good are not to leave the bad behind while the feast lasts. Si ergo boni estis, quandiu in hac vita subsistitis, aequanimiter tolerate malos: if you are good, bear the bad with an even mind for as long as you remain in this life, for the grain is threshed under the chaff and the rose grows with the thorn (38, 7). Then Gregory turns to the people in front of him. Sed quia jam, largiente Domino, nuptiarum domum, id est sanctam Ecclesiam intrastis, solerter, fratres, aspicite, ne aliquid de mentis vestrae habitu rex ingrediens reprehendat: since by the Lord’s gift you have already entered the house of the wedding, that is, holy Church, look carefully, brethren, lest the king coming in find fault with anything in the dress of your mind (38, 9). And he names the feast at which they sit. Nos sumus, fratres charissimi, qui in nuptiis Verbi discumbimus, qui jam fidem in Ecclesia habemus, qui Scripturae sacrae epulis pascimur: we are those who recline at the wedding of the Word, who already have faith in the Church, who are fed with the banquet of Holy Scripture; let each weigh his heart, whether he holds hatred against anyone, whether envy of another’s happiness burns in him (38, 11). In a later sentence he says it in four words, divini Verbi epulas sumimus, we take the banquet of the divine Word (38, 14).

St John Chrysostom, closing his homily on the parable, speaks to his hearers as guests at the same wedding, and he names what they have received: “Hear ye, as many as having partaken of the mysteries, and having been present at the marriage, clothe your souls with filthy deeds. Hear whence ye were called. From the highway. Being what? Lame and halt in soul … Reverence the love of Him, who called you, and let no one continue to have filthy garments” (Homilies on Matthew 69). Augustine, in his other sermon on the parable, speaks of the call in the same present tense, and puts himself in the servants’ place: “seeing ye have been invited through me; for though He invited you, He invited you by my ministry. Ye are all at the feast, have the wedding garment” (Sermo 95, 5). The Bridegroom, he adds in the same sermon, is the one “who calleth together to the feast, and quickeneth whom He calleth” (95, 6).

The three preachers do not name the feast alike. Augustine’s is the Lord’s Table and the feast of the Scriptures, Gregory’s the banquet of the Word and of Holy Scripture, Chrysostom’s the marriage at which his hearers have received the mysteries. What they share is the time: the feast is now, its guests are in the Church, and the king has not yet come in.

Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, who hears in this Mass’s Gradual the Christian’s evening oblation and in its Secret and Postcommunion the Eucharist, places the Gospel’s feast elsewhere. “The primary aim of the predestination of souls to the heavenly banquet”, he writes of the parable, “is the supreme glorification of Christ as first-born of the human family and head of the Church”; and of the guest without the garment, “God calls our souls, but they must be in accord with their calling, so that the grace of eternal happiness may also be their due reward” (p. 173). His banquet is the one to come, the feast that St Augustine sets beside the present one as the other, to which the evil do not come. It is Augustine and Gregory, not Schuster, who find the Church now in this Gospel’s wedding.

The evening sacrifice: St Augustine on the Gradual

The Gradual is the assembly’s evening prayer: “Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight; the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice.” St Augustine hears in the psalm the voice of the whole Christ. “This not I alone say: whole Christ saith it. But it is said rather in the name of the Body”, and the Body must go on praying as long as its trouble lasts: “if tribulation remain for the Church, for the Body of Christ, even to the end of the world, let it not only say, ‘I have cried unto Thee,’ but also, ‘Listen unto the voice of my prayer’ ” (Enarrationes 140, 2).

On the verse the Gradual sings, Augustine turns from the Body to the Head. “That this is wont to be understood of the Head Himself, every Christian acknowledgeth. For when the day was now sinking towards evening, the Lord upon the Cross ‘laid down His life to take it again’ ”. The members are not left out: “Still we too are figured there. For what of Him hung upon the tree, save what He took of us?”, and on the Cross “our old man is crucified with Him”. Then he names the sacrifice: “That then is the ‘evening sacrifice,’ the Passion of the Lord, the Cross of the Lord, the offering of a salutary Victim, the whole burnt offering acceptable to God. That ‘evening sacrifice’ produced, in His Resurrection, a morning offering. Prayer then, purely directed from a faithful heart, riseth like incense from a hallowed altar” (140, 3). The evening sacrifice is Christ’s; the prayer that rises with it is the Church’s; and the altar from which it rises is the hallowed altar of a faithful heart.

St Robert Bellarmine, expounding the same verse, finds the high priest of that prayer: “Christ is the high priest, for it is through him, as being our advocate, that we must always pray; and it is for that reason that we conclude every prayer with ‘through our Lord Jesus Christ’ ”. The prayer rises straight only when the intention is pure and the attention constant, since distractions “blow away, and dissipate the incense of their prayer”. And he offers, as one possibility among others, the figure Augustine states outright: the psalmist asked that his prayer be like the evening sacrifice “perhaps, because the evening sacrifice was of more value as being a figure of the sacrifice on the cross, that occurred in the evening” (on Ps 140:2). St John Chrysostom, expounding the psalm in Greek, adds why the Church sings it: the Fathers appointed it to be said every evening not for its one phrase about the evening sacrifice, but as a saving medicine and a cleansing of the sins of the day (Expositio in Psalmum 140). Schuster, reading this Mass’s Gradual, calls every Christian offering evening: “In this present life our oblation to God is always an evening sacrifice, for it is enveloped in the twilight of faith”, and “before attaining to the morning joy of the beatific vision, it is fitting that we should endure with Christ the labour and the sorrow of the evening hours of the preceding Parasceve” (p. 172).

In a Mass celebrated with incense the Gradual’s verse is heard again: at the Offertory the priest says it, with the two verses that follow, as he incenses the altar (Ordo Missae, no. 1037). At such a Mass the evening prayer that the assembly sang between the lessons is said again by the priest over the altar of the sacrifice, and the incense of the psalm rises in fact.

St Hilary of Poitiers answers the question of the evening sacrifice otherwise. For him the evening is the last age of the world, and the sacrifice that pleases God is the works of mercy of the last judgement, done with lifted hands. The two answers are not opposed in doctrine: Augustine reads the verse first of the Head, and Hilary of the hands of the members. But they are two answers to what the verse’s sacrifice is, and the feast that now is takes its evening sacrifice from Augustine’s.

Tribulation and gifts: the Offertory and the Secret

The Offertory opens the offering of the gifts, and it takes up the Introit’s word: Si ambulavero in medio tribulationis, vivificabis me. St Augustine’s exposition of the verse reads like a gloss on the Introit’s promise: “whatsoever tribulation thou art in, confess, call on Him; He freeth thee, He reviveth thee”, and he widens the tribulation to the whole of this life: “Love the other life, and thou shalt see that this life is tribulation, whatever prosperity it shine with, whatever delights it abound and overflow with” (Enarrationes 137, 10). The antiphon at the Mass’s entrance promised that the Lord would hear de quacumque tribulatione; the chant at the offering is sung by those who are still walking in it. St John Chrysostom notices that the psalmist does not say that God will drive the tribulation away, but that he will keep him alive while he remains in the midst of its dangers, and that this is the wonder (Expositio in Psalmum 137). St Robert Bellarmine names the right hand that saves: “your strength and power, Christ, hath saved me” (on Ps 137:7).

The Secret then offers the gifts oculis tuae maiestatis, to the eyes of God’s majesty, the same eyes before which the Gradual asked the prayer to rise in conspectu tuo. It asks one thing, that they be salutaria nobis. Schuster reads the prayer of the Eucharist and of those who share it: “we pray that the holy oblation may not only bring glory to God, but may also be a pledge of eternal salvation to all those that share therein”, and since the sacrament’s effect in each person answers to his dispositions, “we here ask for such dispositions as may enable the mystical sacramental oblation to exert without hindrance its full power in our souls” (p. 173). The Placeat at the end of every Mass asks in the same words that the sacrifice offered oculis tuae maiestatis be propitiable for all for whom it was offered (Ordo Missae, no. 1137). The Secret’s salutaria nobis is Augustine’s “received worthily” turned into petition: the gifts are saving to those who come to the table in the garment.

Commanded and asked, healed and held: the Communion and the Postcommunion

The Communion is sung after the Communion itself, and its two verses are a command and a wish: “Thou hast commanded thy commandments to be kept most diligently. O! that my ways may be directed to keep thy justifications.” Its dirigantur answers the Gradual’s dirigatur. The prayer that was to rise straight as incense before the sacrifice becomes, after the Communion, the prayer that the ways of those who have eaten be set straight. St Augustine reads the wish as the words of one who knows that he cannot do what he is commanded without help, and must pray God to grant what he enjoins (Enarrationes 118, Aleph 5), and St Hilary says on the same verse that we must be helped and directed by God’s grace. Schuster hears joy in the wish. Those who have been at the table do not take the direction of their ways for granted; they ask for it.

The Postcommunion names God’s work, tua … medicinalis operatio, in the language of medicine, and asks that it free us a nostris perversitatibus and make us cleave to God’s commandments. Schuster reads it of the Eucharist: “we make our petition that the healing grace of the Eucharist may mercifully deliver us from our perversity and make us ever to be devoted to the divine will” (p. 174). The Mass that began in tribulation ends with a prayer for healing, and the healing asked is the power to keep what is commanded.

The other elements at the table

The Introit’s promise, de quacumque tribulatione clamaverint ad me, exaudiam eos, is the promise on which the assembly’s cry rests, and Schuster reads it as the Lord’s assurance that no one who calls on him is disappointed (p. 171). The Collect asks that body and soul be set free together, mente et corpore pariter, for the service of God; Schuster reads the prayer as a petition for the order in which the whole man is directed to God as his final end without hindrance (pp. 171–172). At the table that freedom is the freedom to approach.

The Epistle’s commands are the manners of the table. “For we are members one of another”: Chrysostom’s image of the body whose eye will not lie to its foot, and Aquinas’s Membra enim se invicem diligunt, describe guests who belong to one body. “Let not the sun go down upon your anger”: St Augustine tells his hearers what not to say as they come to the table, “as thou art about to approach the Table of the Lord, the Feast of the Holy Scriptures, do not say, ‘O that mine enemy might die! Lord, if I have deserved ought of Thee, slay mine enemy’ ”, and he sets before them the Bridegroom “hanging upon the Cross for thee, and praying to His Father for His enemies” (Sermo 90, 9). Chrysostom, expounding the Gradual’s psalm, will not let hands be lifted in prayer with anger in them. And “Give not place to the devil”: St Jerome and St Thomas Aquinas, each commenting on that verse, recall the one guest at the Lord’s own supper to whom the devil was given a place. Jerome places it in convivio Salvatoris, at the Saviour’s banquet (on Eph 4:27, PL 26, col. 512), and Aquinas cites the Gospel’s post buccellam introivit in eum satanas, after the morsel Satan entered into him (In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 4, lect. 8; Jn 13:27).

The Alleluia gives the order of the assembly’s prayer. St Augustine observes on its verse that the psalm begins with praise and then calls upon God: “For after commencing with praise, calling upon God is wont to follow, whereunto he that prayeth doth next add his longings: whence the Lord’s Prayer itself hath at the commencement a very brief praise, in these words, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ ” (Enarrationes 104, 1). Confitemini … et invocate: the Alleluia, sung before the Gospel, gives the order that the prayers of the Mass keep.

The table is not the garment

St Augustine, who calls the present feast the Lord’s Table, denies in the same sermon that the garment is the Altar or what is received at it, since many eat and drink judgement to themselves (Sermo 90, 5). In another sermon he says it again: “The Sacraments of the Altar the good and bad receive together” (Sermo 95, 7). Receiving at the table does not clothe the guest. The feast now includes the table, and the garment is what the guest brings to it; that is why St Gregory warns those who are already inside to look carefully lest the king, coming in, find fault with the dress of their minds (38, 9).

The witnesses are also exact about what they call the feast. Augustine names the Lord’s Table and the Scriptures, Gregory the Word and the Scriptures, and Chrysostom the mysteries of which his hearers have partaken. None of them says in so many words that the wedding feast of this Gospel is the Eucharist, and Gregory, whose feast is the banquet of the Word and of Scripture, does not name the altar at all. The table at which the assembly sits is the Church’s whole feast of Word and sacrament, of which those three preachers each name a part.

Finally, the incense. The Gradual’s verse returns in the Order of Mass only where the Mass is celebrated with incense. At a low Mass the psalm’s incense is the prayer itself, as Augustine reads it, rising “from a hallowed altar” of a faithful heart. St Hilary, for his part, places the wedding in the resurrection and the king’s entry in the assembly of the risen, and the present feast looks toward that one.

The four senses of this reading

Literal.

The king’s hall is filled with guests good and bad, and the king comes in to see them. The psalmist asks that his evening prayer rise before God like incense and that the lifting up of his hands be accepted as the evening sacrifice; walking in the midst of tribulation, he trusts to be kept alive by God’s hand and saved by his right hand.

Allegorical.

The feast is the Church now (Augustine; Gregory), at the Lord’s Table and the feast of the Scriptures (Augustine), the banquet of the Word and of Scripture (Gregory), whose guests have partaken of the mysteries (Chrysostom). The evening sacrifice is the Lord’s Passion, the offering of a salutary Victim, in which the members too are figured (Augustine), perhaps prefigured in the evening offering of the temple (Bellarmine); the prayer of the whole Christ rises with it, offered through Christ the high priest (Bellarmine).

Moral.

To examine the dress of the mind before the king comes in (Gregory), and to come to the table without hatred or envy (Gregory) and without praying for an enemy’s death (Augustine); to bear the bad within the one Church with an even mind (Gregory; Augustine); to lift hands in prayer without anger (Chrysostom on Ps 140) and to pray with a pure intention that lets the incense rise straight (Bellarmine); and in every tribulation to confess and call upon God (Augustine on Ps 137).

Anagogical.

The other feast, to which the evil do not come, is the one the feast that now is prepares, received worthily so that the guests may attain to it (Augustine, Sermo 90). The evening sacrifice of the Passion produced in the Resurrection a morning offering (Augustine on Ps 140), and the evening in which every present oblation is made gives way to the morning of the beatific vision (Schuster).

The Three Readings Compared

The three readings share their ground. In each, one King calls by grace and judges those he has called; the Church is a mixed company until he comes in, and the man without the garment has come in under the call. Each hears the Epistle’s commands as the life the called are to lead, and each ends with the Communion’s wish, utinam dirigantur viae meae, which St Augustine, St Hilary and the Greek Expositiones in Psalmos printed under St Athanasius’s name all read as a prayer for the grace to do what is commanded. The witnesses are shared too. St Augustine and St John Chrysostom speak in all three, Augustine for different loci in each; St Gregory the Great carries the first and the third and gives the second its principal alternative; and St Hilary’s exposition of the Gradual stands in all three, as part of the first reading’s moral sense, as the second’s prayer of the last age, and as the third’s other answer to what the evening sacrifice is.

They differ in the question they put to the texts, and so in which part of the Gospel and which chants weigh most in each.

No doctrine of one reading is denied by another. The differences inside the readings are real: whether the garment was given in baptism or is the charity the baptized may lack, whether the city is Jerusalem or the persecutors’ flesh in eternal fire, whether the highways are the nations, the teachings of the Gentiles or the failure of worldly undertakings, and whether the evening sacrifice is the Passion or the works of mercy. But between the three readings the relation is one of place and time rather than of contradiction. The second supplies the history in which the other two take place: the guests examined for the garment and the assembly at the table are the ones gathered from the highways. The first asks of each of those guests what the king will look for when he comes in, and the third sets the same guests at the table now, before he comes.

Each accounts for something the others leave aside. The first alone gives full weight to the Epistle, reading its four acts as the garment’s visible side and its new man as Christ put on; with St Jerome and St Thomas Aquinas it hears Christ named in both lessons. The second alone gives the Introit’s psalm and the Alleluia’s command their own voice, the psalm of a people told its history and the command to tell it to the Gentiles, and alone takes up the first half of the parable, where most of its words are spent. The third alone reads the Mass’s own prayers as prayers of the assembly at the altar: the Gradual that the priest says again over the altar at a Mass with incense, the Offertory that opens the offering, the Secret whose words the Placeat repeats, and the Postcommunion’s healing.

The Gospel’s last sentence shows how they meet. “For many are called, but few are chosen.” In the first reading the saying falls on the guest who came in: St Gregory’s Quia vocati sumus, novimus; si sumus electi, nescimus, we know that we are called, we do not know whether we are chosen. In the second it falls on the whole history of the call: St Irenaeus’s “as in the former covenant, ‘with many of them was He not well pleased;’ so also is it the case here”, and St Hilary’s non … paucitas in invitatis, sed raritas in electis. In the third it falls on the feast that now is, which St Augustine tells his hearers to receive worthily so that they may attain to the other, “where no bad men shall come”. One sentence, one judgement, three times: the guest’s, the history’s, and the table’s.

Scriptural Date and Location

Each passage the Mass takes from Scripture, once, in canonical order, with its setting, attribution and dating evidence.

Titled in the Vulgate Intellectus Asaph, “Understanding for Asaph”, which the Missal’s verse leaves out; the title gives no occasion or date. The displayed date is the bound that the New American Bible, Revised Edition sets for the whole Psalter: its introduction to the Psalms holds that no psalm is as late as the Maccabean period and that none can be dated securely. The antiphon, printed without a citation and standing in no verse of the Vulgate, has no dossier of its own.

Titled Alleluia in the Vulgate, which the Missal’s verse leaves out. Paralipomenon sets these words in the praise Asaph sang on the day the ark was set in David’s tent (1 Par 16:1, 7); the displayed date is the Psalter’s bound, not that day’s.

Titled Alleluia, with no author named; the Communion’s verses stand in its first alphabetic strophe, Aleph. The displayed date is the Psalter’s bound.

Titled Ipsi David, “For David himself”, without an occasion. The reign shown with the attribution is David’s in the “usual chronology” that the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “David, King” (vol. 4, 1908) reports, adding that recent writers date it thirty to fifty years later: the title’s reference point, not the psalm’s date. The composition date is the Psalter’s bound.

Titled Psalmus David, “A psalm of David”, again without an occasion; the reign shown is the same reference point, not the psalm’s date, and the composition date is the Psalter’s bound.

Narrated event: the third parable Jesus speaks in the temple, on the day after his entry into Jerusalem (21:1–18), when the chief priests and ancients have questioned his authority (21:23), to the chief priests and Pharisees (21:45); St Matthew gives it no date beyond that day.

The event’s year is derived. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s “Jesus Christ” (vol. 8, 1910), by A. J. Maas, sets the parable in the last days before the Passion, within a journey it dates from February to the Passover of a year counted from the founding of Rome; the article equates that year elsewhere with A.D. 29, and the displayed year applies the equation to the journey. Traditional attribution: St Matthew the Apostle, whom the Missal’s heading names (secundum Matthaeum). The Catholic Encyclopedia’s “Gospel of St. Matthew” (vol. 10, 1911) reports Eusebius’s tradition that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew when he left Palestine. Its five composition dates, shown after the event’s year, reckon from the Ascension, the Apostles’ dispersal and St Irenaeus, or give the Catholic critics’ preference, and it settles on none, the ancient writers being “at variance”. The sixth, c. A.D. 50, is Durand’s in “The New Testament” (vol. 14, 1912) for the lost Aramaic original, of which he adds, “We know nothing definite of the date of its being rendered into Greek.” The comparison shown last is the modern critical horizon: the New American Bible, Revised Edition’s introduction to Matthew places the Greek Gospel after A.D. 70. That is a lower bound on the Greek Gospel, not an exact date, and it dates neither the Aramaic original nor the parable’s occasion.

Traditional attribution: St Paul, as the Missal’s heading names him, who names himself (1:1) and writes in chains (3:1; 6:20). The first range shown is Ladeuze’s in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “Epistle to the Ephesians” (vol. 5, 1909), where of the letters of the captivity “whether they were produced in Caesarea or in Rome … is still a much mooted question”. The year is from the table in Prat’s “St. Paul” (vol. 11, 1911), which sets the letter in the Roman captivity with Philemon, Colossians and Philippians; the articles date that captivity differently, and neither answer is settled. The comparison shown last is the modern critical horizon: the New American Bible, Revised Edition’s introduction to Ephesians offers, as one possible explanation of the letter’s style and teaching, a later disciple developing Paul’s thought around A.D. 80–100. That is a conditional hypothesis, not a consensus. The same introduction keeps the traditional account of the captivity and allows a secretary working at Paul’s direction, to whom it gives no later date, and it names no place for the later writing.

Appendix: Scope and Qualifications

Edition, formulary and occurrence. The study treats the Mass Dominica decima nona post Pentecosten, II classis, of the Missale Romanum, editio typica, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis 1962, pp. 411–412, nos. 1679–1688, in the universal 1962 calendar and no particular calendar. Its occurrence on 4 October 2026, the omission of the feast of St Francis, the single oration of each kind, the colour, the Credo and the Trinity Preface rest on the Missal’s own calendar and general rubrics (RG 12, 16, 91, 111 b, 127 b; RGMR 433, 434 b, 475 a, 494 b), read on the page images of the typical edition. The general rubrics tie the Gloria to the Te Deum of the Office (RGMR 431 a), and the Breviary rubric behind it, which the typical edition of the Missal does not print, was not read. The optional external solemnity of the Holy Rosary on the first Sunday of October rests on RGMR 358 b and 360; the Rosary formulary it brings into up to two Masses is not studied here. No diocesan, titular, dedication or institute calendar is applied.

Text control. Every Latin form of the ten proper elements was read on page images of the CMAA facsimile of the typical edition and collated with the Pustet Missal of 1862, in which every element’s wording already stands; the collation, the conclusion forms and the comparison with the Clementine Vulgate are recorded in propers/verified.md. The Introit’s antiphon was not traced to a scriptural or liturgical source, and the Latin source of the Gradual’s and Offertory’s added Domine and of the Offertory’s future tenses was not identified: the Vulgate does not account for them, and no Roman or Old Latin psalter and no chant manuscript was consulted.

English. The scriptural English is the Douay–Rheims in Challoner’s revision at the canonical verses. Where the Missal departs from the Vulgate (the Epistle’s opening, the Gradual’s Domine, the titles left out of the Introit’s verse and the Alleluia, the Gospel’s opening, and the Offertory’s Domine and future tenses) that English does not render the Missal’s Latin, and no English has been supplied in its place. The English of the Introit’s antiphon and of the three orations is the anonymous translation printed by Cummiskey in Philadelphia in 1861, read in the library’s tracked transcription of those pages, which was checked against the page images when it was registered. Neither English is an approved liturgical translation of the 1962 Missal. The Trinity Preface is cited and not reproduced. The English of St Augustine’s sermons and of his expositions of Pss 77, 104, 118, 137 and 140, of St John Chrysostom on St Matthew and on Ephesians, and of St Irenaeus is that of the nineteenth-century Nicene and Post-Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers. English renderings of the Latin of St Gregory, St Jerome, St Hilary, St Thomas Aquinas, and St Augustine’s Quaestiones evangeliorum and exposition of Ps 104 that are not drawn from a named translation are glosses of the Latin printed beside them.

Reception. Each appointed passage was searched in the Latin and Greek Fathers and the later Doctors, saints and liturgical commentators available to this production, and the witnesses read are those named in the References at their exact loci. St Jerome’s commentaries on St Matthew and on Ephesians, St Hilary’s on St Matthew and on Pss 118 and 140, and St Augustine’s Quaestiones evangeliorum were read on page images of Migne’s Patrologia Latina; St Gregory’s homily in the Latin Wikisource transcription of Migne’s text, which was not collated with the printed columns; St Thomas Aquinas on Ephesians on the page images of the Liège edition of 1857, and on St Matthew only in the text layer of the Venice edition of 1745, from which he is summarised and not quoted. The Greek of St John Chrysostom on Pss 137 and 140 and of the Expositiones in Psalmos printed under St Athanasius’s name was read in the text layers of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and is described, not quoted. The medieval liturgical commentators Honorius Augustodunensis and Sicard of Cremona, and with them Rupert of Deutz, William Durandus and Berno of Reichenau, expounded a Mass that shared this formulary’s Epistle and some of its chants but read another Gospel, and Honorius and Sicard are cited only for the elements that Mass shares with this one. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster and the continuation of The Liturgical Year comment on this formulary as the 1962 Missal gives it. Among the witnesses not reached are St Ambrose on Ps 118, Cassiodorus and Theodoret on the psalms, the book of Origen’s commentary on St Matthew that treats this parable, the Catena aurea on St Matthew, St Anthony of Padua’s sermon on this Gospel, and St Alphonsus Liguori’s Sunday sermons.

Chronology. The Date cells in Scriptural Date and Location come from the Scripture chronology corpus, through the record generated for this formulary: its default profile’s answer for every element and, for the Gospel and the Epistle, a declared comparison under its critical profile. That record gives the five psalms the modern critical boundary for the Psalter, which it takes from the introduction to the Psalms in the New American Bible, Revised Edition (summarised, not quoted). For Pss 137 and 140, which the Vulgate titles for David, it also carries David’s reign in the usual chronology of the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “David, King”, disputed because the article reports a later dating beside it, as the reference point of the attribution and not as a date of either psalm; for Pss 77, 104 and 118 it holds no traditional date or era. For the Gospel it holds five composition dates from the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on St Matthew, which reports Eusebius’s tradition that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew when he left Palestine, and Durand’s date in “The New Testament” for the Aramaic original, of whose rendering into Greek Durand says that nothing definite is known. For the Epistle it holds Ladeuze’s range, with the place of the captivity, Caesarea or Rome, left open as a much mooted question, and the year of Prat’s table, which sets the letter in the Roman captivity. The encyclopedia’s articles do not agree on these dates, and the record marks every one disputed. For the Gospel’s narrated event it holds one year, marked derived: A. J. Maas’s “Jesus Christ” in the encyclopedia sets the parable in a journey it dates by A.U.C. 782, and the year shown converts that reckoning by the article’s own equation of A.U.C. 782 with A.D. 29. Beside these default answers the record carries two comparisons requested under its critical profile, both from the New American Bible, Revised Edition: for the Greek Gospel of Matthew a lower bound after A.D. 70, and for Ephesians around A.D. 80–100, a conditional date for the hypothesis of a later disciple; neither enters the default answer. The record and its sources are audited in research/scope.md.

Rights. The Latin of the formulary is published on the basis of its public-domain antecedent, the Pustet Missal of 1862 (17 U.S.C. 103(b)). The Douay–Rheims, the 1861 Cummiskey English, Migne’s Latin and Greek texts, the Nicene and Post-Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers, the Venice 1745 and Liège 1857 Aquinas, O’Sullivan’s 1866 English of Bellarmine, the 1883 English of the continuation of The Liturgical Year and the 1927 English of Schuster’s Sacramentary are in the public domain in the United States. St Gregory’s Latin is quoted from the Latin Wikisource transcription of the Homiliarum in Evangelia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, with attribution to its contributors at https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Homiliarum_in_Evangelia. The New American Bible introductions are summarised, not reproduced.

Records. The appointed-text collation is in propers/verified.md; the search, loci, disagreements and negative results in research/scope.md; and the reasoning behind the three readings in research/interpretations.md. The research records were reviewed independently before this study was written.

References

Liturgical books and Bibles

• Missale Romanum ex decreto Sacrosancti Concilii Tridentini restitutum, Summorum Pontificum cura recognitum, editio typica (Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1962), CMAA facsimile, https://media.churchmusicassociation.org/pdf/missale62.pdf: Rubricae generales 12, 16, 91, 111, 115, 127; Rubricae generales Missalis 358, 360, 427, 431, 433, 434, 475, 494; Ordo Missae nos. 1032, 1037, 1137; pp. 411–412 (nos. 1679–1688).

• Missale Romanum (Ratisbon: Pustet, 1862), pp. 351–352, Dominica XIX. post Pentecosten.

• The Roman Missal, Translated into the English Language for the Use of the Laity (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861), pp. 445–448 (XIX Sunday after Pentecost, Introit, Collect, Secret, Postcommunion).

• The Holy Bible, Douay–Rheims version, revised by Bishop Richard Challoner (Project Gutenberg text): 1 Par 15:3; 16:1, 7–8; Ps 34:3; 77:1–8, 12–13, 49, 52–54, 67–72; 90:15; 104:1, 45; 118:1, 4–5, 19, 54; 137:1–4, 7; 138:16; 140:1–4; Mt 13:35; 21:1–18, 23, 43, 45; 22:1–15; 25:34–35; Rom 13:14; Eph 1:1; 3:1; 4:1, 22–32; 6:20; 1 Tim 1:5; 2:8.

• Biblia Sacra Vulgatae editionis (Clementine Vulgate), eBible.org text: Ps 77:1; 104:1; 118:1, 4–5; 137:1, 7; 140:1–2; Mt 22:1–14; Eph 4:1, 23–28.

Fathers, Doctors and saints

• St Augustine, Sermones 90 and 95 (Sermons XL and XLV), trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 6 (CCEL text): Sermo 90, 1, 4–6, 9–10; Sermo 95, 4–7.

• St Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 8 (CCEL text): on Ps 77, 1–2; 104, 1; 118, Aleph 4–5; 137, 10–11; 140, 2–3. Latin on Ps 104, 1 and 34–36 in Migne’s text (Latin Wikisource transcription).

• St Augustine, Quaestiones evangeliorum I.31, in Migne, PL 35 (Paris, 1845), col. 1329.

• St Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 38, 1, 3–7, 9–14, Latin Wikisource transcription of Migne’s text, CC BY-SA 3.0.

• St Jerome, Commentarii in Matthaeum III, on Mt 22:1–14, and Commentarii in Epistolam ad Ephesios II, on Eph 4:23–28, in Migne, PL 26 (Paris, 1845), cols. 159–161 and 507–512.

• St Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthaeum 22, 3–7, and Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 118, Aleph 11–12, and in Ps. 140, 3–4, in Migne, PL 9 (Paris, 1844), cols. 1042–1044, 508–509 and 825–826; Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 137, 15, ed. A. Zingerle, CSEL 22 (Vienna, 1891), pp. 742–743.

• St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 69, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 10 (CCEL text); Homilies on Ephesians 13–14, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 13 (CCEL text); Expositio in Psalmos, in Ps. 137 and 140, Migne, PG 55 (text layer; described, not quoted).

• St Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV.36.5–6, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Buffalo, 1887), pp. 516–517.

• Expositiones in Psalmos printed under the name of St Athanasius, in Ps. 77, 104 and 118, Migne, PG 27 (text layer; described, not quoted).

• St Thomas Aquinas, In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 4, lect. 7–9, in In omnes D. Pauli Apostoli epistolas commentaria, vol. 2 (Liège: H. Dessain, 1857), pp. 327–333.

• St Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura c. 22, in Opera, editio altera Veneta, vol. 3 (Venice, 1745), pp. 279–282; summarised only.

• St Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. J. O’Sullivan (1866), read in the eCatholic2000 transcription of that translation: on Pss 104:1; 118:4; 137:7; 140:2.

• St Rabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Matthaeum libri VIII, on Mt 22:8–10, in Migne, PL 107 (text layer).

Liturgical commentators

• Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum), vol. 3 (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1927), pp. 171–174.

• The continuation of Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year (Dom Lucien Fromage), The Time after Pentecost, vol. 2 (series vol. 11), trans. Laurence Shepherd (Dublin: James Duffy and Sons, 1883), pp. 425–433.

• Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma animae IV.86, in Migne, PL 172 (text layer).

• Sicard of Cremona, Mitrale VIII.19, in Migne, PL 213 (text layer).

• Rupert of Deutz, De divinis officiis XII.19–20, in Migne, PL 170 (text layer).

• William Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum VI.136, vol. 2 (Lyon, 1612; text layer).

• Berno of Reichenau, Libellus de quibusdam rebus ad Missae officium pertinentibus, on the Sunday of Salus populi and the Sunday after it, in Migne, PL 142 (text layer).

Chronology sources

• The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907–1912): “David, King” (vol. 4, 1908), p. 642; “Epistle to the Ephesians” (vol. 5, 1909); “Jesus Christ” (vol. 8, 1910), pp. 378, 380–381; “Gospel of St. Matthew” (vol. 10, 1911); “St. Paul” (vol. 11, 1911); “The New Testament” (vol. 14, 1912).

• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, New American Bible, Revised Edition, introductions to the Psalms, to Matthew and to Ephesians, on their dating; summarised, not reproduced.

Last revised (UTC): 2026-10-01T22:22:17Z

Reuse and rights. To the extent Triptych holds the rights, project-created content and design are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Scripture, liturgical or official texts, received prayers or hymns, quotations, fonts, and other third-party material retain their own status; public-domain material remains public domain. Identify changes. Attribution implies neither Triptych nor ecclesiastical approval. See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY.md in the source.