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

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

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Dominica vigesima post Pentecosten

Missale Romanum 1962 · Proper of Time

The word that heals from afar, the song of the exiles, and the two peoples:
a study of the proper in three readings

Asking for Life, and Given a Word

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Dominica vigesima post Pentecosten, is a Sunday of the second class in the Proper of Time of the 1962 Missale Romanum. Its Mass begins in the right-hand column of p. 412 of the typical edition, directly beneath the Postcommunion of the Nineteenth Sunday, and ends in the right-hand column of p. 413, where the Twenty-first Sunday begins; its ten elements carry the marginal numbers 1689–1698. In 2026 it falls on 11 October, the second Sunday of the month, a day the calendar gives to the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a feast of the second class. A Sunday of the second class is preferred to a feast of the same class that is not a feast of the Lord (Rubricae generales 16), and the feast is commemorated wherever the rubrics admit an ordinary commemoration: in every low Mass and in a conventual Mass (RG 108, 111 b; Rubricae generales Missalis 434 b). There its Collect, Secret and Postcommunion follow the Sunday’s, each under its own conclusion (RGMR 437 a), and nothing else of its formulary comes with them, not even its Preface (RGMR 483). A sung Mass that is not conventual, such as a parish Missa cantata, has the Sunday’s three orations alone (RG 111 a; RGMR 434 a). The Mass is said in green (RG 127 b), with Gloria, with the Credo 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 the general rubrics appoint for the Sundays of the second class outside the Christmas and Easter seasons (RGMR 494 b).

The Mass opens with a confession. Its Introit is cut from the prayer that Azarias prayed in the furnace at Babylon (Dan 3:24–45): “Whatever thou hast done to us, O Lord, thou hast done by a just judgment: for we have sinned and disobeyed thy commandments: but glorify thy name, and deal with us according to thy great mercy,” in the English of the 1861 Philadelphia hand missal. Its verse is the first of the longest psalm, “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.” The Collect asks pardon and peace of a God who is appeased, placatus, so that the faithful may be cleansed from every offence and serve him secura mente, with a mind at rest. The Epistle, from the fifth chapter of Ephesians, tells them to walk carefully in evil days, “redeeming the time”, to be filled not with wine but with the Holy Spirit, and to sing and make melody in their hearts, giving thanks always for all things. The Gradual lifts the eyes of all creatures to the God who gives them food “in due season”; the Alleluia answers with a heart that is ready to sing.

The Gospel is the healing of the ruler’s son (Jn 4:46–53). A royal official whose son lies dying at Capharnaum comes to Jesus and asks him to come down before the boy dies. Jesus answers, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not,” and then, to the father’s second plea, gives him not his presence but a word: “Go thy way. Thy son liveth.” “The man believed the word which Jesus said to him and went his way.” On the road his servants meet him with the news, he asks the hour, and it was the hour at which the word was spoken; “and himself believed, and his whole house.” The Offertory then sings the first verse of the exiles’ psalm, “Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion,” in the Missal’s form, which addresses the city as “thee”. The Secret asks that the mysteries be heavenly medicine, caelestem medicinam, and purge the vices of the heart. The Communion reminds God of his word, “in which thou hast given me hope”, the hope that “hath comforted me in my humiliation”; and the Postcommunion asks that those who have received the sacred gifts may always obey the commandments that the Introit confessed broken.

A father asks for his son’s life and is given a word; captives sing by foreign rivers; a people confesses its sin and asks mercy. Three questions rise from these texts, and each gives one of the readings that follow. The first asks what faith Christ asks of the father, and why he heals by a word without going down. St Gregory the Great answers that the father sought the bodily presence of one who was absent nowhere, and that the Lord healed by command alone; St John Chrysostom, that Christ healed the father’s mind together with the son’s body, teaching him to attend not to signs but to his word. The second asks how a people that has sinned and lives in exile is to pray, sing and spend its time, and it is heard from the Introit, the Offertory and the Epistle. St Augustine reads the rivers of Babylon as all that is loved here and passes, by which the citizens of Jerusalem are to sit and weep and not plunge in; St Hilary of Poitiers reads the psalm as the soul’s exile from the heavenly Jerusalem, its mother, since Adam’s sin. The third asks whose story the healing at Capharnaum tells. St Augustine reads the episode as a figure of the people of the Jews, who saw signs and scarcely believed, and of the nations, who believe having seen none; St Thomas Aquinas, as a figure of the Fathers of the Old Testament praying for a sick people. 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 appointed elements at a glance

The Appointed Texts

The Latin below is that of the 1962 typical edition, Missale Romanum (Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis), pp. 412–413, nos. 1689–1698, read on the page images of the CMAA facsimile. Every element’s wording already stands in the Pustet Missale Romanum of Ratisbon, 1862 (pp. 352–354); the two books differ only in spelling, pointing, 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, printed citation Dan. 3, 31, 29 et 35; verse Ps 118:1 (Heb. 119). Missal p. 412, no. 1689.

Omnia, quæ fecísti nobis, Dómine, in vero iudício fecísti, quia peccávimus tibi, et mandátis tuis non obœdívimus: sed da glóriam nómini tuo, et fac nobíscum secúndum multitúdinem misericórdiæ tuæ. Ps. 118, 1 Beáti immaculáti in via: qui ámbulant in lege Dómini. ℣. Glória Patri.

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

Whatever thou hast done to us, O Lord, thou hast done by a just judgment: for we have sinned and disobeyed thy commandments: but glorify thy name, and deal with us according to thy great mercy.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 118:1, the verse

Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.

The antiphon is not a continuous text of the Vulgate, and its words do not stand at all the verses the Missal cites. Its first clause shares its words with Dan 3:31, “all that thou hast brought upon us, and every thing that thou hast done to us, thou hast done in true judgment”; peccavimus stands at verse 29, “For we have sinned, and committed iniquity”; mandatis tuis non oboedivimus has no word-for-word counterpart, verse 30 reading “we have not hearkened to thy commandments, nor have we observed”; and the closing petition gathers words of verses 43 and 42, “give glory to thy name, O Lord” and “deal with us according to thy meekness, and according to the multitude of thy mercies”. Verse 35, which the Missal cites, asks God not to take away his mercy “for the sake of Abraham, thy beloved, and Isaac, thy servant, and Israel, thy holy one”. The Douay–Rheims therefore cannot carry the antiphon, and the 1861 English is that book’s own rendering of the Missal’s Latin. It leaves out tibi, “against thee”, after “we have sinned”, and it renders da gloriam nomini tuo as “glorify thy name” and secundum multitudinem misericordiae tuae as “according to thy great mercy”. The Vulgate counts the psalm’s title, Alleluia, and the letter Aleph inside its first verse; the Missal’s verse begins after them. After the Gloria Patri the antiphon is repeated (RGMR 427).

Collect

Oratio. Missal p. 412, no. 1690.

Largíre, quǽsumus, Dómine, fidélibus tuis indulgéntiam placátus et pacem: ut páriter ab ómnibus mundéntur offénsis, et secúra tibi mente desérviant. Per Dóminum.

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

Favourably grant, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy servants both pardon and peace; that, being cleansed from the guilt of all their offences, they may serve thee with secure minds. Thro’.

“Favourably” stands for placatus, which says that God grants as one appeased. “Thy servants” stands for fidelibus tuis, thy faithful. The English does not render pariter, alike or together, and “the guilt of” is the translator’s addition. The printed conclusion is short and is said in the full form of the general rubrics (RG 115 a). In a low or conventual Mass on 11 October 2026 the Collect of the Maternity follows under its own conclusion (below).

Epistle

Lectio Epistolae beati Pauli Apostoli ad Ephesios. Eph 5:15–21. Missal pp. 412–413, no. 1691.

Fratres: Vidéte quómodo caute ambulétis: non quasi insipiéntes, sed ut sapiéntes, rediméntes tempus, quóniam dies mali sunt. Proptérea nolíte fíeri imprudéntes, sed intellegéntes quæ sit volúntas Dei. Et nolíte inebriári vino, in quo est luxúria: sed implémini Spíritu Sancto, loquéntes vobismetípsis in psalmis, et hymnis, et cánticis spirituálibus, cantántes, et psalléntes in córdibus vestris Dómino: grátias agéntes semper pro ómnibus, in nómine Dómini nostri Iesu Christi, Deo et Patri. Subiécti ínvicem in timóre Christi.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Eph 5:15–21

See therefore, brethren, how you walk circumspectly: not as unwise, But as wise: redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore, become not unwise: but understanding what is the will of God. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is luxury: but be ye filled with the Holy Spirit, Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual canticles, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord: Giving thanks always for all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God and the Father: Being subject one to another, in the fear of Christ.

The Missal opens the lesson with the address Fratres and leaves out the Vulgate’s connective and vocative, Videte itaque, fratres, which the English renders “See therefore, brethren”. It spells intellegentes where the Clementine has intelligentes. Otherwise the Latin agrees with the Vulgate word for word.

Gradual

Ps 144:15–16 (Heb. 145), respond and verse. Missal p. 413, no. 1692.

Oculi ómnium in te sperant, Dómine: et tu das illis escam in témpore opportúno. ℣. Aperis tu manum tuam: et imples omne ánimal benedictióne.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 144:15–16

The eyes of all hope in thee, O Lord: and thou givest them meat in due season. Thou openest thy hand, and fillest with blessing every living creature.

The Missal reads et tu das illis escam, “and thou givest them food”, where the Clementine reads et tu das escam illorum, “their food”; the English renders either. The verse agrees with the Vulgate.

Alleluia

Ps 107:2 (Heb. 108:2; English versions 108:1). Missal p. 413, no. 1693.

Allelúia, allelúia. ℣. Ps. 107, 2 Parátum cor meum, Deus, parátum cor meum: cantábo, et psallam tibi, glória mea. Allelúia.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 107:2

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready: I will sing, and will give praise, with my glory.

The English carries the first half of the verse and not the Missal’s close. The Clementine reads cantabo, et psallam in gloria mea, which the Douay renders; the Missal reads cantabo, et psallam tibi, gloria mea. It addresses the praise to God, tibi, and sets gloria mea without its preposition, so that God himself is named the singer’s glory. The words psallam tibi and gloria mea both stand in the psalm, at verses 4 and 3, but not together in a single verse. There is no Tract and no Sequence.

Gospel

Sequentia sancti Evangelii secundum Ioannem. Jn 4:46–53. Missal p. 413, no. 1694.

In illo témpore: Erat quidam régulus, cuius fílius infirmabátur Caphárnaum. Hic cum audísset, quia Iesus adveníret a Iudǽa in Galilǽam, ábiit ad eum, et rogábat eum ut descénderet, et sanáret fílium eius: incipiébat enim mori. Dixit ergo Iesus ad eum: Nisi signa et prodígia vidéritis, non créditis. Dicit ad eum régulus: Dómine, descénde priúsquam moriátur fílius meus. Dicit ei Iesus: Vade, fílius tuus vivit. Crédidit homo sermóni, quem dixit ei Iesus, et ibat. Iam autem eo descendénte, servi occurrérunt ei, et nuntiavérunt dicéntes, quia fílius eius víveret. Interrogábat ergo horam ab eis, in qua mélius habúerit. Et dixérunt ei: Quia heri hora séptima relíquit eum febris. Cognóvit ergo pater quia illa hora erat, in qua dixit ei Iesus: Fílius tuus vivit: et crédidit ipse, et domus eius tota.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Jn 4:46–53, from the middle of verse 46

And there was a certain ruler, whose son was sick at Capharnaum. He having heard that Jesus was come from Judea into Galilee, went to him and prayed him to come down and heal his son: for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said to him: Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not. The ruler saith to him: Lord, come down before that my son die. Jesus saith to him: Go thy way. Thy son liveth. The man believed the word which Jesus said to him and went his way. And as he was going down, his servants met him: and they brought word, saying, that his son lived. He asked therefore of them the hour wherein he grew better. And they said to him: Yesterday at the seventh hour, the fever left him. The father therefore knew that it was at the same hour that Jesus said to him: Thy son liveth. And himself believed, and his whole house.

The Missal’s opening, In illo tempore: Erat quidam regulus, stands in place of the first half of verse 46, “He came again therefore into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine”, so that the lesson begins inside the verse it cites and does not name Cana; the English above begins where the Missal’s words rejoin the Vulgate. Every other word agrees with the Vulgate. The printed cue Credo follows the last line.

Offertory

Ps 136:1 (Heb. 137). Missal p. 413, no. 1695.

Super flúmina Babylónis illic sédimus, et flévimus: dum recordarémur tui, Sion.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 136:1

Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion:

The Missal leaves out the psalm’s Vulgate title, Psalmus David, Ieremiae, reads dum for the Clementine’s cum, and adds tui: the captives remember Sion by speaking to her, “thee, Sion”, where the Vulgate and the English name her in the third person. The same words, dum recordaremur tui, Sion, stand in the psalm text that Cassiodorus expounds.

Secret

Secreta. Missal p. 413, no. 1696.

Cæléstem nobis prǽbeant hæc mystéria, quǽsumus, Dómine, medicínam: et vítia nostri cordis expúrgent. Per Dóminum.

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

May these mysteries, O Lord, we beseech thee, procure us a heavenly remedy, and cleanse away the vices of our hearts. Thro’.

“Remedy” stands for medicinam, medicine; the mysteries are the subject of both verbs, so that what is asked is that the gifts themselves heal and purge. The Missal follows the Secret with the direction Praefatio de Ss.ma Trinitate.

Communion

Ps 118:49–50 (Heb. 119). Missal p. 413, no. 1697.

Meménto verbi tui servo tuo, Dómine, in quo mihi spem dedísti: hæc me consoláta est in humilitáte mea.

Douay–Rheims (Challoner), Ps 118:49–50, to the Missal’s close

Be thou mindful of thy word to thy servant, in which thou hast given me hope. This hath comforted me in my humiliation:

The Missal reads Memento for the Vulgate’s Memor esto, adds the vocative Domine after servo tuo, and stops before the end of verse 50, which in the Vulgate gives the reason for the comfort, quia eloquium tuum vivificavit me, “because thy word hath enlivened me”. The Vulgate counts the letter Zain inside verse 49; the Missal leaves it out.

Postcommunion

Postcommunio. Missal p. 413, no. 1698.

Ut sacris, Dómine, reddámur digni munéribus: fac nos, quǽsumus, tuis semper obœdíre mandátis. Per Dóminum nostrum.

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

That we may be worthy of thy sacred gifts, O Lord: grant, we beseech thee, we may always obey thy commandments. Thro’.

Reddamur is passive, “that we may be made worthy”; the English’s “that we may be worthy” leaves the making unnamed. The noun and verb of the petition, mandatis and oboedire, are those of the Introit’s confession, mandatis tuis non oboedivimus. The Missal prints the conclusion Per Dominum nostrum, longer than the cue on the Collect and Secret.

The commemoration in a low Mass on 11 October 2026

These three orations belong to the formulary of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Die 11 octobris, Missal pp. 685–686, nos. 3847, 3855 and 3857), not to the Sunday. In a low Mass, and in a conventual Mass, each follows the Sunday’s oration of the same kind under its own conclusion; a sung Mass that is not conventual omits them. Their wording, too, stands in the 1862 Pustet Missal, among its Masses for certain places (appendix pp. [171]–[172]). The English is that of F. X. Lasance’s The New Roman Missal, in the Benziger revision of 1945.

Deus, qui de beátæ Maríæ Vírginis útero Verbum tuum, Angelo nuntiánte, carnem suscípere voluísti: præsta supplícibus tuis; ut, qui vere eam Genetrícem Dei crédimus, eius apud te intercessiónibus adiuvémur. Per eúndem Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum Fílium tuum: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte.

Lasance, The New Roman Missal (1945), Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Collect

O God, Who wast pleased that at the angel’s message Thy Word should take flesh in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, grant to Thy suppliants that, believing her to be truly the mother of God, we may be assisted by her intercessions with Thee. Through the same.

Tua, Dómine, propitiatióne, et beátæ Maríæ semper Vírginis, Unigéniti tui Matris, intercessióne, ad perpétuam atque præséntem hæc oblátio nobis profíciat prosperitátem et pacem. Per eúndem Dóminum.

Lasance, The New Roman Missal (1945), Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Secret

Through Thy mercy, O Lord, and the intercession of blessed Mary, ever a virgin, the Mother of Thine only-begotten Son, may our oblation profit us for eternal and for present prosperity and peace. Through the same.

Hæc nos commúnio, Dómine, purget a crímine: et, intercedénte beáta Vírgine Dei Genetríce María, cæléstis remédii fáciat esse consórtes. Per eúndem Dóminum.

Lasance, The New Roman Missal (1945), Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Postcommunion

May this communion, O Lord, purge away our guilt and, by the intercession of blessed Mary the Mother of God, make us companions of Him, Who is our heavenly healing. Through the same.

The Postcommunion’s Latin asks that the communion make us consortes, sharers, caelestis remedii, of the heavenly remedy; the 1945 translators read that remedy as Christ himself. In a low Mass the two Secrets therefore stand side by side, the Sunday’s asking the mysteries to be heavenly medicine and the Maternity’s asking prosperity and peace, and the two Postcommunions ask, the one obedience to the commandments, the other cleansing from guilt and a share in the heavenly remedy.

Each Element in Its Setting

Seven of the ten elements are Scripture and three are the Church’s own orations. The Introit joins a prayer from the Book of Daniel to the first verse of Ps 118; the Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion each take one or two verses from a psalm, the Communion returning to Ps 118; the lessons are St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and St John’s Gospel. Each element is set out below in its own context, with what its words say and what the liturgical commentators who expound it say of it, before the three readings of the whole.

Introit: the confession of the furnace, and the blessed way

The antiphon comes from the third chapter of Daniel. Nabuchodonosor has cast the three young men into the furnace for refusing to worship his golden statue, “And they walked in the midst of the flame, praising God, and blessing the Lord” (Dan 3:24). Then Azarias, standing in the fire, prays (3:25–45). He blesses the God of the fathers and declares him just: “thou art just in all that thou hast done to us, and all thy works are true, and thy ways right, and all thy judgments true” (3:27). He confesses for the people, “we have sinned, and committed iniquity” (3:29), and asks God not to deliver them up for ever, for his name’s sake and for the sake of Abraham, Isaac and Israel (3:34–35). He names what exile has taken from them, “Neither is there at this time prince, or leader, or prophet, or holocaust, or sacrifice, or oblation, or incense, or place of first fruits before thee” (3:38), and offers in their place a contrite heart: “nevertheless, in a contrite heart and humble spirit let us be accepted … so let our sacrifice be made in thy sight this day, that it may please thee” (3:39–40). Then the angel of the Lord goes down into the furnace and drives out the flame (3:49), and the three sing the long canticle of all creation (3:51–90). St Jerome notes in his commentary that the Hebrew text breaks off at the youths’ fall into the fire (3:23) and that the prayer and canticle are not in the Hebrew, and he records that the Churches read Daniel in the version of Theodotion (Commentarii in Danielem, on 3:23, and the preface).

The Missal’s antiphon takes from this prayer its confession of God’s just judgment, of sin and of disobeyed commandments, and its plea for glory and mercy, and sets them in a new order (see the note beneath the text). The prayer it is cut from is said in part at every Mass. When the priest has offered the chalice he bows and says Azarias’s words, In spiritu humilitatis et in animo contrito suscipiamur a te, Domine: et sic fiat sacrificium nostrum in conspectu tuo hodie, ut placeat tibi, Domine Deus (1962 Ordo Missae, no. 1033).

The verse is the first of Ps 118, whose twenty-two strophes of eight verses follow the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and praise the law of God. Its first word is a beatitude. The verse sets the way, in via, beside the law, in lege Domini, and calls blessed those who walk in it undefiled.

The medieval liturgical commentators Sicard of Cremona (Mitrale VIII.20) and William Durandus (Rationale VI.137) hear in the Introit the voice of Daniel recalling the captivity and ascribing it to the people’s deserts by God’s just judgment. Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, the Benedictine liturgist and Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, observes that the verses are from Daniel “but the actual words of the text are not quoted”, and he reads the antiphon as “the sorrowful confession of guilt which leads back the sinner to the way of reconciliation”; in its last clause he finds “the hope which underlies the act of contrition” (The Sacramentary III, pp. 174–175).

Collect: pardon and peace, for a mind at rest

The Collect asks two gifts and names two effects. Indulgentiam and pacem, pardon and peace, are asked of God placatus, as one appeased; and they are asked so that the faithful may be cleansed from every offence, ab omnibus mundentur offensis, and serve God secura mente, with a mind free of care. The order is pardon first, then peace; and the service it ends with is the service of minds at rest. Schuster expounds that order: “Peace comes after mercy, for as long as grace has not blotted out the sin, the heart, torn by remorse, weakened by its own passions and at war with itself, cannot find peace.” He sets beside it Non est pax impio, St Paul’s name for Christ, Pax nostra, and the beatitude of the clean of heart, and he sees the fruit of the twofold gift in “a great ease and facility in the performing of good actions” (p. 175).

Epistle: walking wisely in evil days

The lesson comes in the middle of St Paul’s call to the Ephesians to live as light. “For you were heretofore darkness, but now light in the Lord. Walk then as children of the light” (Eph 5:8); and just before the lesson, “Rise, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead: and Christ shall enlighten thee” (5:14). The verses the Missal reads draw the consequence, “See therefore”: walk carefully, as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil; do not be unwise but understand the will of God; be filled not with wine but with the Spirit, speaking in psalms, hymns and spiritual canticles, singing in the heart, giving thanks always for all things, and subject one to another in the fear of Christ (5:15–21). The last of these turns the letter to the household, to husbands and wives as Christ and the Church, “This is a great sacrament: but I speak in Christ and in the church” (5:22–33).

St Thomas Aquinas gives two expositions of “redeeming the time”. In the first, which he judges the better, a man buys back his time as one buys off a vexation, by giving up something of his own right, because since Adam snares lie ready on every side; in the second, he makes up the time lost in sin by doing more good works now (In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 5, lect. 6). Schuster hears the lesson in its season: “The season is already advanced, the vintage is now over, it is necessary to redeem the time which has been spent unprofitably to the soul, and instead of wasting it on feasting … we should prepare for evil days—that is, for old age and death by adding to our good works while yet we have time, through the grace of the Holy Ghost” (p. 175).

Gradual: the eyes of all, and food in due season

Ps 144, titled Laudatio ipsi David, is an alphabetic hymn of God’s kingship, and its second half praises his care for every creature: “The Lord lifteth up all that fall: and setteth up all that are cast down” (v. 14); then the Gradual’s two verses; then “The Lord is just in all his ways” (v. 17) and “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him” (v. 18). The Gradual sings of food given to all, at the right time, from an open hand.

St John Chrysostom expounds the verses of God’s providence over all things (Expositio in Psalmos, on Ps 144:15–16). It is not rain, earth or air that brings the fruits to ripeness but God’s command, as the sun rises on the evil and the good; “in due season” means either that each thing is given in its own season of the year, so that the farmer may rest and the produce not spoil, or that God gives food to those who need it; and the open hand is his working power, set against those who worshipped the air and the sun as the givers of fruit. St Hilary of Poitiers, on the same verses, says that those who are cast down look to God with all their eyes, since every support of life is his, both the food of the body in its season and the filling of souls with spiritual gifts (Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 144). Cassiodorus reads in tempore opportuno as a warning that what is asked is not always given at once: many who ask are happily deferred, and the one who prays should ask God to give what he knows to be expedient (Expositio Psalmorum 144.15). Schuster finds in the verse “a marked eucharistic significance”: “Holy Communion is the true universal bread which God prepares for his children in every region of the earth” (pp. 175–176).

Alleluia: a heart that is ready

Ps 107, titled Canticum Psalmi ipsi David, is made of the ends of two other psalms: its verses 2–6 repeat Ps 56:8–12, and its verses 7–14 repeat Ps 59:7–14. The Alleluia’s verse is therefore also the verse in which the psalmist of Ps 56, whose title sets it in David’s flight from Saul into the cave and who has been delivered “from the midst of the young lions” (56:1, 5), turns to praise: “My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready: I will sing, and rehearse a psalm. Arise, O my glory, arise psaltery and harp: I will arise early” (56:8–9). St Augustine gives Ps 107 no exposition of its own, since it repeats two psalms already expounded, and reads its title as pointing to prophecy. Cassiodorus hears Christ the King speaking throughout: the readiness of heart is the holiness of the Incarnation, in which no discord of sin hindered his praise of the Father, and the faithful say the verse rightly when they trust that their sins are forgiven by his gift; the dawn at which the singer will rise is the Resurrection (Expositio Psalmorum 107.2–3). St Robert Bellarmine, on the same words in Ps 56, makes them a soul’s whole surrender: “ready to live, ready to die, ready to rule, ready to be trampled on, ready to take anything cheerfully from your hand” (A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Ps 56:8). Schuster reads the Missal’s gloria mea of God: “God is called the glory of the soul”, as author of its glory and as “the just judge of our merits” (p. 176).

Gospel: the second sign at Cana

The healing of the ruler’s son closes the fourth chapter of St John. It follows the two days that Jesus spent among the Samaritans, of whom “many more believed in him, because of his own word” and who confessed him “indeed the Saviour of the world” (Jn 4:41–42). He goes on into Galilee, “For Jesus himself gave testimony that a prophet hath no honour in his own country” (4:44); the Galileans receive him, “having seen all the things he had done at Jerusalem on the festival day” (4:45). He comes to Cana, “where he made the water wine” (4:46), and there the ruler from Capharnaum finds him. The evangelist closes the episode, “This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee” (4:54). The Missal’s lesson begins after the mention of Cana and ends before the count of signs, so that it reads the healing alone.

The ruler, regulus, is a man of rank. St John Chrysostom takes him to be “of royal race, or possessed some dignity from his office”, and St Thomas Aquinas an official of Herod’s household or an officer of the Emperor (Super Ioannem c. 4, lect. 7). Both deny that he is the centurion of St Matthew’s eighth chapter; Aquinas counts four differences, in the sickness (a palsy, here a fever), the sufferer (a servant, here a son), the petition (the centurion begged Christ not to come, the ruler begged him to come down) and the place. The servants’ answer, “Yesterday at the seventh hour”, marks the hour of the word, and the evangelist’s last words reach the whole household.

St Gregory the Great preached on this Gospel at the basilica of the martyrs Nereus and Achilleus on their feast (Homiliae in Evangelia 28, heading), and the readings below take up his homily. Among the medieval commentators, Rupert of Deutz reads the fever that had all but extinguished the boy as the shaking of a noble and fighting soul in temptation, as Job’s was (De divinis officiis XII.21). William Durandus makes the ruler a figure of kings and prelates, who ought to be humble, and says that he believed the Lord could heal his son but not that he was God, since he believed that he could not heal unless he were present (Rationale VI.138). St Anthony of Padua, in his Sunday sermon on this Gospel, makes every faithful person a ruler over himself and his son the soul, which falls sick in Capharnaum, a name he interprets as a field of fatness or of consolation.

Offertory: by the rivers of Babylon

Ps 136 is the song of the Babylonian exile, titled in the Vulgate Psalmus David, Ieremiae; St Hilary notes that among “the Hebrew elders” it has no title. Its nine verses move from lament to refusal to oath to imprecation. The captives sit by the rivers and weep, remembering Sion (v. 1); they hang their instruments on the willows (v. 2); their captors demand “a hymn of the songs of Sion”, and they answer, “How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?” (vv. 3–4). Then one voice swears: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten” (vv. 5–6). The psalm ends by asking God to remember the children of Edom who cried “Rase it, rase it”, and by blessing whoever repays the daughter of Babylon and dashes her little ones against the rock (vv. 7–9). The Offertory sings the first verse only, in a form that speaks to Sion, tui, Sion; the next readings take up the rest of the psalm in the Fathers’ expositions. St Robert Bellarmine places the scene in the country around the city, where the captives were set to labour along the many rivers of the province, “for it is well known that the Euphrates was the only river that ran through it”. Schuster takes the waters as “the passions in which the unhappy sinner quenches his thirst, whilst the faithful disciple sits sadly beside that tainted stream” (p. 177).

Secret: heavenly medicine for the heart

The Secret is a prayer for healing. It asks that haec mysteria, these mysteries, furnish heavenly medicine and purge the vices of the heart. Its vocabulary meets the Gospel’s: the son infirmabatur, was sick; he incipiebat mori, was beginning to die; the fever, febris, left him. Schuster reads the prayer of the Eucharist, asking “that the holy Sacrament may be to us a spiritual medicine and antidote, to protect us from the virus of sin which poisons our blood” (p. 177). The Missal follows it with the direction for the Preface of the Most Holy Trinity.

Communion: remember thy word

The Communion takes the first two verses of the seventh strophe of Ps 118, Zain. The psalmist asks God to remember the word in which he gave hope, and says that this hope has comforted him in his humiliation; the verse goes on, in the Vulgate, “because thy word hath enlivened me” (v. 50), and the strophe continues, “The proud did iniquitously altogether: but I declined not from thy law. I remembered, O Lord, thy judgments of old: and I was comforted” (vv. 51–52). Every witness read on this verse takes “remember” as a prayer that God fulfil a promise and not as a reminder to one who could forget: St Augustine, St Hilary, Cassiodorus, St Robert Bellarmine and Durandus. Hilary sharpens it: the prophet does not remind God, but asks to be found worthy that God should remember his word in him (Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 118, Zain). Schuster, at the moment of Communion, turns the word into the Word: “let us offer to the eternal Father this Word, in whom he is well-pleased, and who is the cause of all our hope” (p. 177).

Postcommunion: made worthy by obedience

The Postcommunion asks that those who have received may be made worthy of the sacred gifts, and it names the way: fac nos … tuis semper oboedire mandatis, make us always obey thy commandments. Its noun and verb are those of the Introit, which confessed mandatis tuis non oboedivimus, so that the Mass ends by asking for the obedience it began by confessing it had not given. The continuation of Dom Prosper Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year, written by Dom Lucien Fromage and published in English in 1883, reads it so: “A persevering fidelity in observing God’s commandments is the best preparation a christian can make for approaching to the holy Table”; Schuster asks of it “our habitual docility to the inspirations of the Holy Ghost” (pp. 177–178).

The Word That Heals from Afar: Faith Taught to Rest on Christ’s Word

Heard from its centre, the Gospel turns on one exchange. A father asks Christ to come down before his son dies. Christ answers with a rebuke to a faith that waits on signs, and then gives him, in place of his presence, a word: Vade, filius tuus vivit. The father believes the word and goes, and on the road he finds it true at the very hour it was spoken. St Gregory the Great and St John Chrysostom read the exchange as Christ teaching faith to rest on his word. Gregory finds the reason in the one who speaks: the father sought the bodily presence of one who is absent nowhere, and the Lord healed by command what he had made by his will. Chrysostom finds it in what the word does: it heals the father’s mind together with the son’s body, so that he learns to attend to Christ’s teaching rather than to his miracles. Read with that Gospel, the whole formulary becomes a school of the same faith. The Introit confesses that God’s judgments are true before it asks his mercy; the Collect asks a mind at rest; the Epistle asks understanding of God’s will, and the Alleluia sings a heart made ready to accept it; the Gradual and the Communion pray as men who hope in a word and wait for its due time; the Secret asks the healing of mysteries in which Christ acts unseen; and the Postcommunion asks the obedience that the Introit confessed it had not given. The Mass places those who pray it where the father stood: asking for life, given a word, and sent away to find it true.

Presence sought, majesty forgotten: St Gregory the Great

Gregory begins his homily by saying that the Gospel needs exhortation more than exposition, and that only one thing in it needs explaining: why a man who came to ask his son’s salvation should hear, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not.” The man plainly believed, for neque enim ab eo quaereret salutem quem non crederet salvatorem: he would not have asked salvation of one he did not believe a saviour. Gregory’s answer is that the request itself shows where the faith failed. Poposcit namque ut descenderet, et sanaret filium ejus. Corporalem ergo praesentiam Domini quaerebat, qui per spiritum nusquam deerat. He asked the Lord to come down; so he was seeking the bodily presence of one who, per spiritum, was nowhere absent. Si enim perfecte credidisset, procul dubio sciret quia non esset locus ubi non esset Deus: had he believed perfectly, he would have known that there is no place where God is not. He gave honour, Gregory says, not to majesty but to bodily presence, and so he believed the Lord able to heal and yet thought him absent from a dying son. The Lord’s answer corrects that faith by what it does: solo jussu salutem reddidit qui voluntate omnia creavit, he who created all things by his will gave health by his command alone (Homiliae in Evangelia 28, 1).

Gregory’s reason is theological, and it governs the reading. The word is enough because of who speaks it. A healing by command is the creating will acting at a distance that is no distance to God; the father is asked to believe not a report about a cure but the speaker of the word. Gregory then turns the episode against his hearers. The same Lord who would not go in body to the ruler’s son offered to go to the centurion’s slave (Mt 8:7), and Gregory reads the contrast as a rebuke to pride, which honours in men their wealth and rank and not the nature in which they were made to God’s image: Ecce de coelo venit qui servo in terra occurrere non despicit, he who came from heaven does not disdain to go to meet a slave on earth (28, 2). He ends among the martyrs at whose tomb he is preaching. Death and grief are everywhere, and the world that once held men by delight is now so full of blows ut ipse nos jam mundus mittat ad Deum, that the world itself now sends us to God; therefore, Nolite … in vobismetipsis pensare quod habetis, sed quid estis, weigh in yourselves not what you have but what you are (28, 3).

The father healed with the son: St John Chrysostom

Chrysostom grants the ruler a faith, and finds it unsound. “Yet the very coming and beseeching Him was a mark of faith”; but “if this ruler also believed, yet he believed not entirely or soundly, as is clear from his enquiring ‘at what hour the fever left him,’ since he desired to know whether it did so of its own accord, or at the bidding of Christ.” The rebuke is therefore aimed at the man’s state of mind, and it is a kindness: “It is for this that Christ rebuketh him and toucheth his conscience, to show that His miracles were wrought principally for the sake of the soul. For here He healeth the father, sick in mind, no less than the son, in order to persuade us to give heed to Him, not by reason of His miracles, but of His teaching. For miracles are not for the faithful, but for the unbelieving and the grosser sort” (Homilies on St John 35, 2).

Chrysostom also explains why Christ offered to go to the centurion and would not go to the ruler. “Because in the former case faith had been perfected, and therefore He undertook to go, that we might learn the rightmindedness of the man; but here the nobleman was imperfect.” The ruler “knew not yet clearly that even when absent He could heal”, and Christ, by not going, taught him what the centurion had known of himself. His conclusion is the moral of the reading: “What now are we taught by these things? Not to wait for miracles, nor to seek pledges of the Power of God.” And he draws it into a household’s daily life. Many give thanks when a child recovers; they ought to give thanks “even if they obtain it not”, since “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth” (35, 3).

Gregory and Chrysostom agree on the healing by word and differ on its reasons. For Gregory, Christ declines the ruler’s house to humble the pride that honours rank; for Chrysostom, because the ruler’s faith, unlike the centurion’s, was not yet perfected. Gregory teaches who it is that heals at a distance; Chrysostom, what that healing does to the one who receives the word. The reading needs both: the object of faith, and its growth.

Faith that grows on the road: St Augustine, St Cyril and St Thomas

The Fathers do not agree on how much the ruler believed when he came, and the difference matters. St Augustine reads the rebuke at its full weight: Christ “shows us a man lukewarm, or cold in faith, or of no faith at all”, and the evangelist confirms it, since “himself believed” comes only after the hour is known: “it follows that when he was making the request he did not yet believe” (Tractates on John 16, 3). St Cyril of Alexandria sees a faith real but childish: the ruler “cometh as to One able to heal, but he understandeth not yet that He is by Nature God”; “Feeble indeed unto understanding is the nobleman, for he is a child in his petition for grace”. Yet Christ “doth not reject our lack of apprehension; but benefiteth even the stumbling”, and “in Go thy way is Faith”: “The one command of the Saviour healeth two souls. For in the nobleman it worketh unwonted faith, the child it rescueth from bodily death” (Commentary on John II.5). Gregory, as above, says that the ruler believed and doubted, and does not speak of his faith’s completion. Schuster, commenting on this Mass, says that the ruler “had faith in Jesus”, which Christ desired “first of all to purify … from any material element and from all idea of self-interest”, requiring him “to believe in his word without actually beholding the cure” (p. 176).

St Thomas Aquinas gathers these answers into a sequence. The ruler’s faith had two defects: he did not believe in Christ’s divine power, since God is present everywhere (Jer 23:24) and could heal from afar, and, as Chrysostom says, he doubted. Christ’s Vade is a command to dispose himself for grace by the movement of his free will toward God. The evangelist’s et ibat means that he went on growing in faith, because on the way of God not to go forward is to go back. And Aquinas traces the stages: weak when he first interceded, firmer when he called Jesus Lord, more perfect when he believed the word and went, perfected when he knew the hour and believed with his house, as the path of the just “goeth forwards, and increaseth even to perfect day” (Prov 4:18; Super Ioannem c. 4, lect. 7). St Anthony of Padua, preaching on the same Gospel, draws his lesson from the order of the two verbs: the believing comes before the going, as the heart’s assent comes before the deed.

On the ruler’s first faith, then, Augustine and Gregory answer differently, and Chrysostom, Cyril, Aquinas and Schuster stand between them. On what follows the word, Augustine, Chrysostom, Cyril and Aquinas place a fuller faith after it, and the Gospel’s last clause bears them out: et credidit ipse, et domus eius tota. The reading’s moral sense rests on that growth: faith is given a word, acts on it, and is made whole by finding it true.

The way, the will of God, and a heart made ready

The Introit begins where the father’s faith had to begin, with God and not with the sign. Before it asks mercy it confesses that all God has done was done in vero iudicio, and St Augustine teaches that this is the order of the saints’ prayer: “all His saints, when set in the midst of tribulation, have first praised His righteousness, and so sought His blessings” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 144, on v. 17). Its verse blesses those “who walk in the law of the Lord”. St Hilary of Poitiers reads the way of that verse as Christ, who said Ego sum via, and insists that it is not enough to enter it: it is non solum ineunda … sed etiam pergenda, a way to be walked to its end, since no one on the road yet holds what it leads to (Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 118, Aleph 2). Cassiodorus likewise takes the way to be the Lord Saviour, walked not with the body’s feet but with the steps of good action (Expositio Psalmorum 118.1). Neither speaks of the Gospel; but the father of the Gospel walks such a road. Credidit homo sermoni … et ibat: he believed the word and set out on it, before he knew what he would find at the end.

The Epistle names what such walking needs: intellegentes quae sit voluntas Dei, understanding what the will of God is. Aquinas makes God’s will the first principle of the prudence the Apostle asks, as the Lord’s Prayer asks Fiat voluntas tua (In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 5, lect. 6). The father’s going was such prudence: he acted on a will declared to him in a word.

The Alleluia sings the heart that takes such a will: Paratum cor meum, Deus, paratum cor meum. On the same words in Ps 56, St Augustine says that “the patience of good men with preparation of heart accepteth the will of God”, and he makes the readiness an answer to what others prepare: “He hath prepared pit to deceive, shall I not prepare heart to suffer? He hath prepared pit to oppress, shall I not prepare heart to endure?” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 56, on v. 8). St Robert Bellarmine, quoted above, lets the readiness reach to everything, “ready to take anything cheerfully from your hand”. Neither speaks of the Gospel, and the join is the editor’s; but the father came with a heart not yet ready in that sense. He had fixed the means of his son’s healing, that Christ should come down, and Christ gave him another: a word in place of a presence. He took it and went, and on the road his heart was the one the Alleluia sings, ready to take from God’s hand what God gives. Chrysostom’s counsel that thanks are owed “even if they obtain it not” asks the same readiness of every household. The verse ends gloria mea, and Schuster reads it of God, called the glory of the soul not only as the author of its glory but “also because he alone is the just judge of our merits” (p. 176). Here too the join to the Gospel is the editor’s: the honour that Gregory says pride pays to rank, and that Christ would not pay to the ruler’s, is not the glory the Alleluia sings.

And the Collect asks for the mind he went home with, secura mente, a mind at rest before the proof arrives. It asks that mind through pardon, and Cassiodorus, expounding the Alleluia’s verse, says that the faithful say it rightly when they trust that their sins are forgiven by his gift (Expositio Psalmorum 107.2). On the editor’s reading the ready heart and the mind at rest are one disposition, and the Collect asks the gift that makes it.

Hope in a word, and medicine unseen

The Gradual sets the eyes of all creatures on God, who gives them food in tempore opportuno. St Augustine reads the due time as a physician’s care: “Just as when thou refreshest a sick man in due season, when he ought to receive, then Thou givest”; and he adds for anyone who has asked and not yet received, “let his eyes wait for the food, which He giveth in due season … Thou delayest, not deniest” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 144, on vv. 15–16). The father waited a night, heri hora septima, between the word and the news, and the food came in its season.

The Communion is a prayer from the same posture. It asks God to remember his word, in quo mihi spem dedisti. St Augustine explains that God forgets nothing: “When therefore it is said unto Him, ‘O remember,’ the desire of him who prayeth is displayed, because he asketh for what was promised … that is, fulfil Thy promise to Thy servant” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 118, sermo 15, on v. 49). St Robert Bellarmine adds why the promise must be asked: God “still wishes his faithful servants to ask him to carry them out; and thus, prayer becomes one of the means through which God decreed to fulfill his promises”. The father’s double petition was such a prayer, and it was answered with a word to be believed. The verse the Communion leaves unsung completes the thought, quia eloquium tuum vivificavit me, because thy word has given me life, and the Gospel’s word is Filius tuus vivit.

Between them the Offertory and the Secret carry the father’s situation into the Mass. The Offertory weeps for a Sion that is remembered and not seen; faith of this kind lives on a word held in absence. The Secret asks that the mysteries furnish heavenly medicine and purge the heart. Dom Lucien Fromage, in the continuation of The Liturgical Year, joins it to this Gospel: “The whole power of the God, who, with a word, cures both soul and body, resides in the Mysteries which are about to be celebrated on our Altar here”; and he draws the reading’s moral: “our Jesus has no need to come down from heaven to earth, in order to give efficiency to the commands of his gracious will” (The Liturgical Year XI, p. 451). Schuster, too, reads the Secret of the Eucharist as medicine, and the Gradual of the bread God prepares “in every region of the earth” under “the veil of faith, in order that we may have all the merit of believing in the pure and single word of the Son of God” (pp. 175–177). The Postcommunion closes the school: fac nos … tuis semper oboedire mandatis. The word received becomes the word obeyed, and the disobedience confessed at the Introit is asked away at the end.

The rebuke and the signs: the strongest difficulty

The rebuke seems hard. A father whose son is dying asks for help and is told, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not.” Chrysostom, Cyril and Aquinas answer that the rebuke served him: it “toucheth his conscience” (Chrysostom), Christ “benefiteth even the stumbling” (Cyril), and the reproach falls on a man instructed in the law who sought to believe by signs rather than by the authority of Scripture, since signs are given to unbelievers and the faithful are led by the Scriptures (Aquinas, after 1 Cor 14:22). Augustine does not soften it: the rebuke exposes the man and, beyond him, a country that needed signs, and Augustine sets him beside Thomas, to whom it was said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (16, 4). The reading keeps the rebuke at its weight and keeps also what followed it: the same Christ who rebuked the man gave him the word.

Nor does the reading make signs worthless. The healing is itself a sign, the second at Cana. Gregory says elsewhere that visible miracles were given ut corda videntium ad fidem invisibilium pertrahant, to draw the hearts of those who saw them to faith in what is unseen, and that linguae in signum sunt non fidelibus, sed infidelibus (Homiliae in Evangelia 4, 3); Chrysostom, that miracles are “for the unbelieving”. The claim of the reading concerns what faith rests on, not whether God gives signs. The father was given both, and the order matters: the word first, believed; the sign after, found true at the hour of the word.

The four senses of this reading

Literal.

A royal official of Capharnaum comes to Jesus at Cana and asks him to come down and heal his dying son. He is rebuked for a faith that waits on signs, receives instead the word “Thy son liveth”, believes it and goes; on the way he learns that the fever left the boy at the hour the word was spoken, and he believes with his whole house. The Fathers read the rebuke as addressed to a faith that wanted presence and proof (Augustine; Gregory; Chrysostom).

Allegorical.

Christ, absent nowhere and healing by command what he created by his will (Gregory), heals by his word without coming down, as he now acts in his Church through word and mysteries without being seen (Fromage, of the Secret; Schuster, of the Gradual). The seventh hour at which the fever left the boy signifies the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit, by whom sins are forgiven (Aquinas).

Moral.

Believe the word before you see, and set out on it; let faith grow from need to trust to the faith of a whole house (Aquinas; Cyril); do not wait for miracles, and give thanks whether a child is spared or not (Chrysostom); take from God’s hand whatever he gives, with the heart the Alleluia calls ready (Augustine; Bellarmine); weigh not what you have but what you are, and honour in every person the image of God rather than rank, as the Lord would go to a slave and not to a ruler’s son (Gregory).

Anagogical.

The father’s road home, between the word and the sight of its fulfilment, is the life of faith, which ends when the promise is kept and seen: the Communion asks God to fulfil his promise (Augustine), and “the blessed enjoy that same truth which sustains us here on earth; but they enjoy it without any veil, face to face” (Schuster, p. 176); and the glory the Alleluia sings is God himself, author of the glory that will make the soul happy for all eternity (Schuster, on the Alleluia). The word that said vivit points to the life that the word of God gives without end.

The Song of the Exiles: Confession, Humility and Hope by the Rivers of Babylon

Two of the formulary’s chants are songs of exile. The Introit is cut from the prayer Azarias prayed in the Babylonian furnace; the Offertory is the first verse of the captives’ lament by Babylon’s rivers. The Fathers read both of the present condition of God’s people. St Augustine teaches that the citizens of Jerusalem are captives in a world that flows past like Babylon’s rivers, and that they are to sit by those rivers in humility, not plunge into them, and to weep in the memory of Sion; St Hilary of Poitiers, that the psalm speaks of a spiritual captivity, the soul’s exile since Adam from the heavenly Jerusalem, its mother. St Jerome teaches the exiles’ first word, to confess in any distress that whatever befalls is borne justly, and St Augustine places that confession first in the order of prayer, before any petition. The Introit’s verse names the road home, the law of the Lord, and the Communion names the exiles’ hope, God’s word, which comforts in humiliation. Read with these, the formulary sets an exiled people’s confession and lament beside an Epistle that tells the same people, in evil days, to redeem the time and to sing in their hearts, cantantes, et psallentes, and an Alleluia whose ready heart answers in the same two verbs, cantabo, et psallam. The captives of the psalm ask, Quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena? The Mass answers with a song of the heart that confesses God’s justice, gives thanks in adversity, and waits for the city it remembers.

The confession in the furnace: St Jerome and St Augustine

Azarias’s prayer begins with praise of God’s justice and goes on to confession: “For thou art just in all that thou hast done to us … For we have sinned, and committed iniquity” (Dan 3:27, 29). St Jerome reads the opening verse as a rule for every Christian in trouble: Quando diversis premimur angustiis, ex toto cordis hoc loquamur affectu, et quidquid nobis acciderit, juste nos sustinere fateamur, when we are pressed by distresses of every kind, let us say this with the whole affection of the heart and confess that whatever has befallen us we bear justly. On the confession of sin he makes a harder point. Et certe tres pueri non peccaverant: the three youths had not sinned, and were not of an age to be punished for their own faults when they were carried to Babylon; ergo … ex persona populi loquuntur, they speak in the person of the people. And on the verse that mourns the loss of prince, prophet and sacrifice (3:37–38), Jerome gives the Church leave to pray it as her own: these verses are to be used si quando Ecclesiae propter peccata populi … sustinent penuriam, et quando in persecutionibus non offertur sacrificium et oblatio, whenever the Churches, for the sins of the people, suffer want of holy teachers, and when in persecution the sacrifice is not offered. Of the angel who goes down into the furnace (3:49) he says that it is the divine word, sermo divinus, which comes to the soul that has despaired of human help and turned wholly to the Lord (Commentarii in Danielem, on 3:26, 29, 37, 49).

St Augustine finds the same confession at the head of all the saints’ prayer. Expounding the Gradual’s own psalm, he comes to “The Lord is just in all his ways” (Ps 144:17), and says: omnes sancti in tribulationibus constituti, prius justitiam ejus laudaverunt, et sic beneficia petiverunt. Prius dixerunt: Justum est quod facis. Sic rogavit Daniel, all the saints, set in tribulation, first praised his justice and so asked his benefits; first they said, What you do is just; so Daniel asked (Enarrationes in Psalmos 144, on v. 17). “First they praised Him scourging,” the English renders his close, “and so they felt Him feeding.” The Introit’s order is that order: the confession that God’s judgments are true, then the plea, sed da gloriam nomini tuo.

The road home: the Introit’s verse

The verse after the antiphon, “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord”, names the way back. St Augustine opens his long exposition of Ps 118 by observing that the psalm begins with blessedness, which no one does not want: Scio quid velis, beatitudinem quaeris; si ergo vis esse beatus, esto immaculatus. Illud enim omnes, hoc autem pauci volunt, sine quo non pervenitur ad illud quod omnes volunt. Sed ubi erit quisque immaculatus, nisi in via? In qua via, nisi in lege Domini? I know what you want, he makes the psalm say, you seek blessedness; if then you would be blessed, be undefiled; all want the one, few the other, without which the one all want is not reached; and where will anyone be undefiled but in the way, and in what way but in the law of the Lord? The lustful, the avaricious, the cruel and the ambitious all seek blessedness, by evil roads, and the verse is the divine voice calling them back: Quo itis? Peritis, et nescitis, where are you going? You are perishing and do not know it (Enarrationes in Psalmos 118, sermo 1, 1).

St Hilary reads the same verse as the first stage of an ascent. The order of the sayings matters: first “Blessed are the undefiled in the way”, then “Blessed are they that search his testimonies”, because a man first enters the way of truth with his morals made firm, and only then searches God’s testimonies with a cleansed mind. The undefiled are those who curb the flesh, tame the mind’s wantonness, conquer the hunger of avarice and shun the glory of earthly honours; and the words in lege Domini are not idle, for there is another law, the law of sin in the members (Rom 7:23; Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 118, Aleph 1–3). St Robert Bellarmine joins them: the law of the Lord is a straight and clear path, “opposed to the law of the flesh, which the Apostle designates as ‘the way of concupiscence,’ full of the dust of pride, the mud of luxury, and the dirty water of avarice”; and “Christ himself informs us that the straight road to eternal happiness is the observance of his law”. For the exiles of the Introit, then, the verse names the road out of Babylon: not a journey on foot but the keeping of the commandments they confess they broke. The Postcommunion asks for that keeping, tuis semper oboedire mandatis, and the Epistle begins with the same verb as the verse, Videte quomodo caute ambuletis, walk carefully, non quasi insipientes, sed ut sapientes, as Augustine’s undefiled walk the way and not the evil roads.

By the waters, not in them: St Augustine and St Hilary on the Offertory

St Augustine preached on the Offertory’s psalm on a day when it had been sung, and his sermon is a programme for the exiled Church. “The waters of Babylon are all things which here are loved, and pass away.” One man loves farming, another soldiering, another office; let each see “that what he hath loved is not a foundation of Jerusalem, but a stream of Babylon”. The citizens of the holy Jerusalem, “understanding their captivity”, see these waters dragging men down to the sea, and “they throw not themselves into the waters of Babylon, but ‘sit down and weep,’ … sitting, that is, humbling themselves”. “Sit ‘by’ the waters, not ‘in’ the waters, not ‘under’ the waters; but yet sit, in humble fashion.” Their weeping is not Babylon’s: “Thou oughtest to weep, but in the remembrance of Sion. If thou weepest in the remembrance of Sion, thou oughtest to weep even when it is well with thee in Babylon.” Their instruments are “God’s Scriptures, God’s commands, God’s promises, meditation on the life to come”, and they hang them on the willows, barren trees watered by Babylon, because such men are unfit to carry them (Enarrationes in Psalmos 136, on vv. 1–2). He begins the sermon by saying that the song must be done as well as sung, oportet ut non tantum ista decantemus, sed et faciamus, and he ends it, Fratres, organa in operando non cessent; vobis invicem cantate cantica Sion: brothers, let not your instruments rest in your work; sing to one another the songs of Sion.

St Hilary reads the same psalm more inwardly still. Its captivity is spiritual, not bodily; Sion is the seat of eternal blessedness and mater coelestis nobis Jerusalem, our heavenly mother Jerusalem; and man has been an exile from her since Adam’s sin. He asks those who read every psalm literally which rivers and which willows could be meant, and he answers that the rivers are the works of the age and of the body, which flow past. The willows, which revive in water, are the saints and faithful, revived by the word of God and the water of baptism (Isa 44:4); the instruments are our bodies, by whose honest movements we sing what pleases God, hung up in continence; and the saint will not share the songs of Sion with the powers that hold him captive (Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 136). Here Augustine and Hilary disagree in a shared reading. For Augustine and Bellarmine the willows are barren men; for Hilary, and Cassiodorus after him, they are the saints. For Augustine the instruments are the Scriptures, for Hilary our bodies; Cassiodorus takes Augustine’s instruments and Hilary’s willows, and has the Scriptures hung on holy men when grace is shared. Cassiodorus draws a posture from the psalm’s first words, super flumina: those already freed sit on the banks, not in the rivers, and sit in humility; and he calls the singing of psalms the consolation of those who weep, the care of those who grieve and the health of the sick, a remedy of the soul (Expositio Psalmorum 136.1).

St John Chrysostom reads the psalm of the historical captives, and draws from them a warning for the Church (Expositio in Psalmos, on Ps 136). While they held the city they scorned it, and God cast them out to teach them by loss to desire it; those who had mocked the weeping prophets now wept unbidden and kept the law among their captors. So, he says, many will seek the Jerusalem above on the last day and find no return; the present life must be ordered now, so as not to become strangers to that city.

Singing in evil days: the Epistle and the Alleluia

The Epistle speaks to the same people in the same condition. “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil”: St Jerome explains that the wise man buys back the time that human malice had sold, dies malos in bonos vertimus, we turn evil days into good, as Joseph and Job were changed by no change of times. “Singing and making melody in your hearts”: Audiant haec adolescentuli: audiant hi quibus psallendi in ecclesia officium est, Deo non voce, sed corde cantandum, let the young men hear it, let those whose office it is to sing in church hear it, that God is to be sung to not with the voice but with the heart; a singer of poor voice whose works are good dulcis apud Deum cantor est, is a sweet singer before God. “Giving thanks always for all things”: if a house falls, if a beloved wife and children are taken into captivity, the Christian’s word is Benedictus Deus, minora me scio sustinere quam mereor, blessed be God, I know that I suffer less than I deserve (Commentarii in Epistolam ad Ephesios III, on 5:16, 19, 20). St John Chrysostom gives the same verses the exile’s turn: “The time is not yours. At present ye are strangers, and sojourners, and foreigners, and aliens”; redeem it by giving up whatever is demanded, “only preserve the principal thing, I mean the faith”. Against drunkenness he sets the psalms: “Learn to sing psalms, and thou shalt see the delightfulness of the employment. For they who sing psalms are filled with the Holy Spirit”; and “with your hearts” means “with close attention and understanding”. Thanks are owed in everything, “be it even disease, be it even penury” (Homilies on Ephesians 19). Jerome subordinates the voice to the heart and Chrysostom asks for the voice with attention; both oppose singing that seeks only to please, and Bellarmine, expounding the Offertory’s psalm, makes the same complaint of those who “sing the song of the Lord in a strange land” when they sing sacred hymns only to please the ear.

The Alleluia answers in the Epistle’s own two verbs: cantantes, et psallentes there, cantabo, et psallam here. Its verse is also Ps 56:8, and St Augustine reads it of a heart made ready by tribulation: “the patience of good men with preparation of heart accepteth the will of God: and glorieth in tribulations”. His example is St Paul, in chains, in prisons and in hunger, “saying, ‘We glory in tribulations.’ Whence, but that prepared was his heart? Therefore he was singing and playing” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 56, on v. 8). The captives of the Offertory could not sing the Lord’s song in a strange land; the prepared heart of the Alleluia sings it, not to the captors but to God, psallam tibi.

Fed in due season, comforted in humiliation

The other elements belong to the same exile. The Gradual lifts the eyes of all to the God who gives food in due season, and Augustine reads the delay as a physician’s care; the exiles are fed, and they wait. The Communion asks God to remember the word in which he gave hope, haec me consolata est in humilitate mea. Augustine reads the humiliation as tribulation, whether pride deserved it or patience proves it, and says: “This hope was given to Christ’s Body, that is, to the Church, that it might be a comfort to Her in her humiliation” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 118, sermo 15, on v. 50). St Hilary hears in the verse the consolation that God’s every word gives in sickness, persecution, loss and bereavement, since every word of God calls us to the hope of heavenly goods (Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 118, Zain). Azarias’s prayer has the same word: sumusque humiles in universa terra hodie propter peccata nostra, we are brought low in all the earth this day for our sins (Dan 3:37).

The orations pray as exiles who have confessed. The Collect asks pardon and peace. Sicard of Cremona and William Durandus, expounding these chants of captivity, say that the bodily captivity signifies our spiritual one, and that the return from captivity is the remission of sins (Mitrale VIII.20; Rationale VI.137). The Secret asks heavenly medicine for the heart’s vices, as Cassiodorus called the psalmody of the exiles the soul’s remedy. And the Postcommunion asks the obedience by which, as the Introit’s verse taught, the exiles walk home. At the offertory of every Mass, too, the priest prays in Azarias’s words, In spiritu humilitatis et in animo contrito suscipiamur a te, Domine: the furnace prayer offers the sacrifice of a people that has no other.

The Gospel enters the reading as one exile’s crisis. A son lies dying in a world that passes. St Gregory preached it at a martyrs’ tomb in a time when, he says, Ubique mors, ubique luctus, ubique desolatio, death, grief and desolation were everywhere; the world that once held men by delight now tantis plagis plenus est, ut ipse nos jam mundus mittat ad Deum, is so full of blows that it sends us to God itself (Homiliae in Evangelia 28, 3). The father’s journey to Christ is that sending, and the word that reaches his son is the word Jerome finds in the furnace, the angel who is sermo divinus.

Two hard sayings

The first is in the Introit. Read of every suffering, “all that thou hast done to us … thou hast done in true judgment … for we have sinned” could be taken to say that all suffering is punishment for the sufferer’s own sin. St Jerome closes that reading: the youths who prayed it had not sinned, and spoke ex persona populi. Augustine places the confession in the order of prayer, praise of God’s justice before petition, and not in an account of the causes of every pain. The confession belongs to the people praying, and it may be prayed by the innocent for them.

The second is the close of the Offertory’s psalm, which the Mass does not sing: “Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock” (Ps 136:9). Five witnesses read it. St Augustine asks, “What are the little ones of Babylon? Evil desires at their birth”: “when lust is little, … dash it. But thou fearest, lest though dashed it die not; ‘Dash it against the Rock; and that Rock is Christ’.” St Hilary reads the daughter of Babylon as the flesh and her little ones as tenera adhuc corporis vitia, the body’s vices while still tender, to be crushed against the rock, since Petra autem, secundum Apostolum, Christus est (Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 136, 14). Cassiodorus takes the little ones as the flesh’s errors while they are small, to be dashed at once on the rock, the Lord Saviour. St Robert Bellarmine gives first the literal prophecy, that the Medes and Persians would dash Babylon’s children, and then a spiritual sense in which the little ones are persons: Babylon’s young, converted and brought “to the rock, Christ, to get a fortunate dash against it, and die the death of the old man, to rise a new man”, and, morally, those not yet deeply stained by sin, for “blessed is he, who, by a happy dash on the rock, kills sin”. St John Chrysostom reads no figure in the verse at all: the words are the captives’ own anger, which the prophet reports and does not make his own, and the New Covenant commands otherwise, that we feed our enemies and pray for those who abuse us (Expositio in Psalmos, on Ps 136:8–9). Augustine, Hilary and Cassiodorus make the little ones the beginnings of sin; Bellarmine makes them persons brought to Christ to die to sin; all four make the rock Christ. Chrysostom alone leaves the verse as the captives’ passion, and answers it with the Gospel.

The four senses of this reading

Literal.

In the Babylonian furnace Azarias confesses that God’s judgments on his people were just and asks mercy for his name’s sake (Dan 3:26–45); captives by Babylon’s rivers weep in the memory of Sion and refuse to sing its songs for their captors (Ps 136); St Paul tells the Ephesians to walk wisely, to redeem the time in evil days, to be filled with the Spirit and to sing in their hearts, giving thanks always (Eph 5:15–21).

Allegorical.

Babylon is the world whose loves flow past, Sion–Jerusalem the heavenly city and mother of the faithful, and the captives are the Church’s citizens on pilgrimage (Augustine; Hilary); the instruments hung up are the Scriptures (Augustine) or the body kept in continence (Hilary); the rock against which Babylon’s little ones are dashed is Christ (Augustine; Hilary); the angel in the furnace is the divine word (Jerome).

Moral.

Confess God’s justice before asking his gifts (Jerome; Augustine); walk the way of the Lord’s law and not the roads to a false blessedness (Augustine; Hilary); sit by the rivers and not in them, and weep in the memory of Sion even when it is well with you here (Augustine); kill sin while it is small, against Christ (Augustine; Hilary); redeem the time by good works, sing with the heart and give thanks in loss (Jerome; Chrysostom).

Anagogical.

The memory of Sion is longing for the heavenly Jerusalem: “whither your hope goeth before, let your life follow … Your captivity will pass away, your happiness will come; the last enemy shall be destroyed, and we shall triumph with our King, without death” (Augustine, on Ps 136); the hope of the Communion is for the promises kept in glory, to which God’s every word calls (Hilary).

The Dying Son and the Two Peoples: Israel’s Confession and the Nations’ Hope

The Fathers read the healing at Capharnaum not only as one man’s faith but as a figure of peoples. St Augustine reads it in its sequence. The Samaritans believed Christ’s word without a sign; his own country, where he was brought up, saw signs and scarcely believed; and in the order of these events Augustine reads the order of salvation, the people of the Jews, among whom Christ was born and worked his signs, and the nations, who have believed his word having seen none. Yet the root, he insists, remains in honour: the patriarchs, from whom Christ came. St Thomas Aquinas reads the ruler himself allegorically, as Abraham or one of the Fathers of the Old Testament, and the sick son as the people of Israel, for whom the Fathers prayed. St Cyril of Alexandria reads the same sequence as the readiness of the nations to obey, and ends with St Paul’s hope that when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, all Israel will be saved. Read with that Gospel, the formulary’s chants let both peoples be heard. Israel’s own confession in exile opens the Mass, from Azarias’s prayer, and Israel’s lament by Babylon’s rivers opens the offering; beside them stand the universal hope of the Gradual, in which the eyes of all look to God for food, and the Communion’s hope in a promised word. The Church prays Israel’s confession as her own, as Azarias prayed for a people’s sin he had not committed; she gives thanks as one of the nations fed; and with Aquinas’s Fathers she prays for the healing of the whole house.

Samaria, Galilee and the prophet’s country: St Augustine

Augustine’s sixteenth Tractate on John begins from a puzzle in the text. After two days among the Samaritans Jesus went into Galilee, “For Jesus himself gave testimony that a prophet hath no honour in his own country” (Jn 4:44). Why say this of a journey from Samaria, where he was honoured, to Galilee, where he was brought up? Augustine’s answer reads the whole sequence. “In Samaria He spent two days, and the Samaritans believed on Him; many were the days He spent in Galilee, and yet the Galileans did not believe on Him.” At Cana, even after the water was made wine, only his disciples believed; now the ruler comes, and Christ answers him, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye believe not”; and after the healing, “there did not believe but ‘himself and his house’.” “At His discourse alone many of the Samaritans believed; at that miracle, in the place where it was wrought, only that house believed” (16, 3).

Then Augustine reads the events as signs. The word for a wonder, prodigium, is so called “as if it were porrodicium, quod porro dicat, what betokens something to come”, and these circumstances portended something. “Let us, I say, assume the Lord’s own country to mean the people of the Jews,” among whom he walked and worked, and “after all that scarcely a few believed”. Then he turns to his own hearers: “I am speaking to God’s people; so many of us have believed, what signs have we seen? … We have heard the gospel, have given it our consent, have believed on Christ through the gospel; we have seen no signs, none do we demand” (16, 3). St Thomas the Apostle, “an Israelite, of the Lord’s nation”, was rebuked as the ruler was, and the blessing went to others: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. We are the persons here foretold” (16, 4).

The centurion completes the figure. He “declared himself unworthy of His presence”; the ruler “sought His presence by force”. “Here is a ceding to loftiness; there, a conceding to humility.” “The centurion, an alien, believed me able to work by a word, and believed before I did it.” From this Augustine draws St Paul’s image of the olive: the proud branches broken off, the humble wild olive grafted in; “nevertheless let the root remain, while those are cut off and these received in their place. Where does the root remain? In the patriarchs. For the people Israel is Christ’s own country, since it is of them that He came according to the flesh; but the root of this tree is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the holy patriarchs. And where are they? In rest with God, in great honor” (16, 5). He ends with the country Christ founded: “My mother is Sion, shall a man say” (Ps 86:5, as Augustine reads it), for from Sion he took flesh, of the Virgin Mary; “He had no honor in His country, wherein He was formed; let Him have honor in the country which He has formed” (16, 7).

The Fathers praying for a sick people: St Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas, after the literal exposition, gives an allegory that sets the ruler on the other side. The ruler is Abraham, or one of the Fathers of the Old Testament, so called because he adheres by faith to the great King, Christ; his son is the people of the Jews, the seed of Abraham. The son is sick with depraved pleasures and teachings, and he lies sick in Capharnaum, whose name Aquinas renders “abundance”, the abundance that led Israel away from God, as Moses sang, “The beloved grew fat, and kicked … he forsook God who made him” (Deut 32:15). The ruler’s prayer is the Fathers’ intercession: so too the Fathers of the Old Testament prayed for the people of Israel, as Jeremias is called “a lover of his brethren, and of the people of Israel: this is he that prayeth much for the people” (2 Mac 15:14). The cure comes by the word at the seventh hour, and the seventh hour signifies the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, through whom sins are forgiven. And Aquinas reads the Galileans’ slowness beside the Samaritans’ readiness as the slowness with which, for their hardness, the Jews came to the faith little by little, paulatim, like the last grapes gleaned after the vintage (Mic 7:1; Super Ioannem c. 4, lect. 7).

Augustine and Aquinas agree that the episode figures the relation of Israel and the nations to Christ’s word, and that Israel’s patriarchs keep their honour. They differ on what the ruler figures. For Augustine he belongs to the country that needed signs; for Aquinas he figures the patriarch who intercedes for that country. Both stand, each at its own place: Augustine’s figure in the sequence of the chapter, Aquinas’s in the person of the father.

The readiness of the aliens, and the hope for Israel: St Cyril

St Cyril of Alexandria reads the same sequence forward into the next chapter, where the healing at the pool in Jerusalem brings persecution. The evangelist’s aim was “to shew how superior in obedience were the aliens to the Jews”, and from the contrast of the chapters, “thus and in no other way could we learn, that by the just judgment of God … Israel with reason falleth from the hope, and the fulness of the Gentiles is brought in in his place”. “He had by one miracle saved the city of the Samaritans, by one likewise the nobleman”; “the one believed with his whole house, and confessed that Jesus is God”. But Cyril does not end there. Those set in the first rank “because of the election of the fathers, will come last and after the calling of the Gentiles. For when the fulness of the Gentiles is come in, then shall all Israel be saved” (Commentary on John II.5; Rom 11:25–26). Augustine’s tractate does not say this; it is Cyril’s hope.

Israel’s voice in the Church’s mouth: the Introit and the Offertory

The two chants of exile are, in their first sense, Israel’s. The Introit is Azarias’s confession for a people taken captive for its sins; the Offertory is the lament of that people by Babylon’s rivers. St Jerome hears in Azarias’s peccavimus the innocent speaking ex persona populi, in the person of the people, and he gives the Church leave to pray the same prayer when, for the people’s sins, she suffers want (Commentarii in Danielem, on 3:29, 37). The Church therefore prays Israel’s confession as her own, and prays it as Azarias did, for a people. St John Chrysostom, expounding the Offertory’s psalm of the historical captives, describes what the exile taught them: they had scorned the city while they held it and mocked the prophets who wept for it, and in Babylon they wept unbidden, kept the law among their captors, and refused their songs to profane ears (Expositio in Psalmos, on Ps 136).

The medieval commentators on these chants hear the same voices. Rupert of Deutz calls the Introit the voice of the prophets and reads the Offertory’s harps, hung on the willows, as preachers fallen silent before barren hearers (De divinis officiis XII.20). Honorius Augustodunensis expounds the chants sub lege, as the song of the exiles who returned from Babylon (Gemma animae IV.88–89). Dom Lucien Fromage, in the continuation of The Liturgical Year, gives the chants to two choirs: “The Gentile-Choir takes the Gradual and Communion-Anthem; the Choir of the Jews, the Introit and Offertory”. “In the Introit, the Jewish people sang its repentance and humble confidence”; in the Offertory Israel, grown repentant, “joins our Mother the Church” in singing the psalm of exile (vol. XI, pp. 439, 447, 451). The Introit’s verse gives one further voice. Cassiodorus hears the whole of Ps 118 spoken by the single chorus of the saints, from the world’s beginning to its end, set forth as one speaker for the unity of the Church (Expositio Psalmorum 118, preface); the blessing of those who walk in the law of the Lord is then spoken by the saints of both peoples together.

All eyes and every living thing: the nations’ chants and the orations

The Gradual is universal in its words: Oculi omnium, the eyes of all, and omne animal, every living creature, filled with blessing. Fromage gives it to the Gentiles. The Alleluia’s verse continues, in the psalm, to the nations: “I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: and I will sing unto thee among the nations” (Ps 107:4). Cassiodorus reads that confession among the peoples and that song among the nations as the Church gathered first from the Jews and then from the Gentiles (Expositio Psalmorum 107.4). The Communion’s hope rests on a promise, and St Robert Bellarmine names it: “thy promise ‘in which thou hast given me hope,’ when you said to Abraham, and through him to all his children, ‘Walk before me, and be perfect;’ I will be ‘thy reward exceedingly great’.” St Augustine reads the Communion’s comfort as the hope given “to Christ’s Body, that is, to the Church”. The Church of the nations hopes in the word first given to Abraham.

The Epistle is the nations’ new life, spoken to Gentile Ephesians who were “heretofore darkness, but now light in the Lord” (Eph 5:8): walk as wise, redeem the time, be filled with the Spirit, give thanks. The Collect asks pardon and peace for fidelibus tuis, the faithful of every people grafted in. The Secret asks heavenly medicine for the heart’s vices, the cure Aquinas’s sick son needed for the depraved pleasures that abundance bred. And the Postcommunion asks obedience to the commandments, the law given to Israel and confessed broken in the Introit, now asked of all who receive the sacred gifts.

Whose story? The difficulties of the reading

The reading can be heard as setting Israel against the Church. Its witnesses say both more and less than that. Augustine insists that the root, the patriarchs, remains in honour, and that Christ took flesh from Sion, which he calls his mother; Aquinas’s ruler is Abraham interceding for his people; Cyril ends in the salvation of all Israel; Jerome makes Israel’s confession the prayer of the innocent and the Church’s own. The figure the Fathers read is a figure of the history of salvation, told in their own terms, and the honour Augustine gives the root and the hope with which Cyril ends belong to it as much as the broken branches. Augustine’s own conclusion is humility for the grafted branch, since it stands by faith and not by birth; Aquinas’s, the intercession of the Fathers for their people; Cyril’s, hope.

The identifications do not agree. Augustine’s ruler belongs to the people that needed signs; Aquinas’s figures the patriarch who intercedes for it; Cyril sets him beside the Samaritans among the obedient aliens. What the three share is the controlling claim: that the healing by the word figures the relation of Israel and the nations to that word.

The chants raise a last difficulty. Fromage’s two choirs give the Introit and Offertory to Israel; St Augustine, expounding the Offertory’s psalm, hears in it the Church’s own captivity, the voice the second reading hears. Both are traditional answers, and they differ on whose exile the chant first voices. Israel’s voice in the chants is Fromage’s answer and the commentators’; the figure in the Gospel is Augustine’s own; and Jerome’s ex persona populi joins the two, since the Church, praying Israel’s confession, prays as Azarias did, for and with a people.

The four senses of this reading

Literal.

A royal official asks for his son’s life at Cana after the Samaritans have believed Jesus’s word without a sign and the Galileans have received him for what they saw at Jerusalem (Jn 4:39–54); in the Introit Azarias confesses for exiled Israel (Dan 3:26–45), and in the Offertory the captives lament by Babylon’s rivers (Ps 136:1).

Allegorical.

Christ’s own country figures the people of the Jews, who saw signs and scarcely believed, and the Samaritans the nations, who believed the word without signs (Augustine); the ruler figures the Fathers of the Old Testament interceding, and the son their people, healed by the word at the hour of the sevenfold Spirit (Aquinas); the nations’ psalm among the peoples is the Church of the Jews first and then of the Gentiles (Cassiodorus).

Moral.

The Church of the nations is the grafted branch, and must be humble before the root, the patriarchs in great honour (Augustine); she prays Israel’s confession as her own, as the innocent prayed it for the people (Jerome), and intercedes as the Fathers interceded (Aquinas).

Anagogical.

“When the fulness of the Gentiles is come in, then shall all Israel be saved” (Cyril, after Rom 11:25–26): the healing of the whole house at Capharnaum looks to the healing of both peoples in the one house of God.

The Three Readings Compared

The three readings hold less in common than their shared Gospel suggests, and what they share can be said exactly. All three read the Postcommunion’s oboedire mandatis as the answer to the Introit’s non oboedivimus: in the first the word received becomes the word obeyed, in the second obedience is the exiles’ road home, and in the third the law given to Israel is asked of all who receive the gifts. All three begin from the Introit’s confession, though each hears it differently, as the table below shows; and all three give the Communion’s hope in God’s word a place: in the first it is the prayer of one who hopes in a promised word, as the father did; in the second, the Church’s comfort in her humiliation; in the third, the nations’ hope in the word first given to Abraham.

Beyond that the common ground is partial. The first and the third take the Gospel’s word, Filius tuus vivit, as the formulary’s hinge, and both rest on the Fathers’ agreement that the healing at Capharnaum was done by a word, without the bodily presence the father asked for: the first as the object of one man’s faith, the third as a figure of the two peoples’ relation to that word. The second is not built on the Gospel. It centres on the Introit, the Offertory and the Epistle, and gives the Gospel a supporting place, as one exile’s crisis in a world that St Gregory says now sends us to God. The first and the second hear the Introit’s confession in the order St Augustine finds in the saints, God’s justice praised first and his gifts asked after; the third hears it instead as Israel’s confession, prayed by the Church as her own. The witnesses overlap in the same uneven way. St Augustine speaks in all three, for the order of prayer, the prepared heart and the physician’s due time in the first, for the rivers of Babylon and the road of the law in the second, for the figure of the two peoples in the third; St Jerome’s innocent youths, who confess ex persona populi, stand in the second and third; and St Thomas Aquinas gives the first its stages of faith and the third its interceding Fathers.

They differ in the question they put to the texts, and so in which elements weigh most in each.

No doctrine of one reading is denied by another, and the differences inside the readings are real: whether the ruler believed before the word (Augustine says not; Gregory says he believed and doubted), why Christ would go to the centurion and not to the ruler (Gregory, to humble the pride that honours rank; Chrysostom, because the centurion’s faith was already perfect), whether the willows of Babylon are barren men or saints, whether the little ones of Ps 136 are sins at their birth or persons brought to Christ, and whether the ruler figures the people that needed signs or the patriarch who prays for it. Between the three readings the relation is one of level and scope. Aquinas himself holds the first and the third together, the literal and moral growth of one man’s faith and the allegory of the Fathers and their people, at different senses of the same text. The second makes no claim about the other two, but read beside them it gives them a setting: the father who walks home on a word and the nations who believe without signs are both on the road of exiles who remember Sion.

The readings meet one real tension in the chants. Fromage’s two choirs give the Introit and Offertory to Israel; Augustine’s sermon on Ps 136 gives the Offertory to the Church in her own captivity. The third reading hears Israel’s voice first and the second hears the Church’s, and Jerome’s youths, who confess for a people they belong to, show how one voice can carry both: the Church prays Israel’s confession as her own because she prays it, as Azarias did, for and with a people.

Each reading accounts for something the others leave aside. The first alone takes the Gospel’s dialogue phrase by phrase, and it alone reads the Secret’s medicine and the Gradual’s due time as the father’s situation carried into the Mass. The second alone gives full weight to the two verbs of singing that the Epistle commands and the Alleluia performs, and it alone faces the end of the Offertory’s psalm. The third alone hears the Gospel’s place in its chapter, between the believing Samaritans and the Galileans who wanted signs, and alone gives the nations’ universality in the Gradual and the Alleluia’s unsung “among the nations” a voice.

The Gospel’s last words, et credidit ipse, et domus eius tota, show where the first and third meet and where the second stands apart. In the first they are the end of one man’s growth in faith, from need, through trust in a word, to belief with his house. In the third they are a figure of the whole house, the people whose Fathers prayed for it and the nations grafted beside it, for whom St Cyril hopes the end of the story: “then shall all Israel be saved”. The second does not take up those words. Its use of the Gospel goes no further than the father’s journey: the world full of death and grief, which St Gregory says now sends us to God, sends him to Christ, and the word that reaches his son is the divine word St Jerome finds in the furnace. That reading’s answer is not a household’s faith but the exiles’ song, sung to God in a strange land by a heart that waits for the city it remembers.

Scriptural Date and Location

Each passage the Mass reads or sings from Scripture, once, in canonical order; beneath each, its setting, attribution and dating evidence.

Titled in the Vulgate Canticum Psalmi ipsi David, “A canticle of a psalm for David himself”, which names no occasion. Its verses repeat Ps 56:8–12 and 59:7–14, whose titles set them in David’s flight from Saul into the cave and in the war in which Joab slew of Edom in the vale of the saltpits; those occasions belong to the two source psalms, and the chronology record holds none for Ps 107. The reign shown with the attribution is David’s in the “usual chronology” that the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “David” (vol. 4, 1908) reports, adding that recent writers date it thirty to fifty years later: it is the attribution’s reference point, not the psalm’s date. The composition date is the bound that the introduction to the Psalms in the New American Bible, Revised Edition sets for the whole Psalter, within which, it says, no individual psalm can be dated securely.

Titled Alleluia in the Vulgate, with no author named. The Davidic attribution shown is the tradition’s for the whole psalm, marked disputed, and its reign is again the attribution’s reference point; the record holds no occasion, and the composition date is the Psalter’s bound. The Introit’s verse, Ps 118:1, stands in the same psalm and is dated with the Introit below.

Titled Psalmus David, Ieremiae, a title the Missal leaves out; St Hilary notes that among the Hebrew elders the psalm has none. The record gives it a setting rather than an author: the lament of the Babylonian captives, “For the time of Jeremias, and the captivity of Babylon” (Haydock), and the seventy years of servitude to Babylon (Jer 25:11–12), which are a length of time and not a date. The dates under “Historical background” belong to the destruction of Jerusalem under Sedecias, which the lament follows, and not to the psalm or its writing; the year given in the reckoning from the creation of the world is Haydock’s report of Ussher, left unconverted. The composition date is the Psalter’s bound.

Titled Laudatio ipsi David, “Praise, for David himself”, without an occasion. The reign shown is the attribution’s reference point, not the psalm’s date, and the composition date is the Psalter’s bound.

Narrated event: the three young men, cast into the burning furnace for refusing to adore the king’s golden statue set up in the plain of Dura, walk in the flame praising God, and Azarias prays (Dan 3:1–25); the narrative gives the scene no year.

The antiphon’s Daniel and its psalm verse are dated differently, so no single date stands in the cell. For the prayer, the record holds a judgment of composition without a year: the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “Book of Daniel” (vol. 4, 1908) ascribes the Prayer of Azarias and the Song of the Three Children (Dan 3:24–90) to an unknown Jewish author, “most likely long after the Exile”, and the record sets the prayer’s world within the seventy years of servitude to Babylon, a length of time and not a date. St Jerome reports that these verses are not in the Hebrew and that the Churches read Daniel in Theodotion’s version. For the verse, the record gives the Psalter’s composition bound, Ps 118:1: before c. 165 B.C.; and, as the reference point of the disputed traditional attribution to David, his reign in the usual chronology, Ps 118:1: 1055–1015 B.C.

Narrated event: the healing of the ruler’s son, “the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee” (4:54), after two days among the Samaritans (4:40–43); the word is spoken at Cana and the fever leaves the boy at Capharnaum at the same hour, the seventh hour of the day before the servants’ report (4:52).

The event’s year is derived. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s “Jesus Christ” (vol. 8, 1910), by A. J. Maas, places the return to Cana in a period it reckons from the Passover of one year to about Pentecost of the next, counted from the founding of Rome, and the displayed years convert that reckoning. Traditional attribution: St John the Apostle, whom the Missal’s heading names. The two composition dates shown are the encyclopedia’s, both marked disputed: the first, approximate, from “The New Testament” (vol. 14, 1912), and the second from “The Gospel of Saint John” (vol. 8, 1910).

Traditional attribution: St Paul, as the Missal’s heading names him, who names himself (1:1) and writes as a prisoner (3:1; 4:1) and “an ambassador in a chain” (6:20). The first range shown is that of 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 its “St. Paul” (vol. 11, 1911), which sets the letter in the Roman captivity with Philemon, Colossians and Philippians; both are marked disputed. 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 and not the default answer.

Appendix: Scope and Qualifications

Edition, formulary and occurrence. The study treats the Mass Dominica vigesima post Pentecosten, II classis, of the Missale Romanum, editio typica, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis 1962, pp. 412–413, nos. 1689–1698, in the universal 1962 calendar and no particular calendar. Its occurrence on 11 October 2026, its precedence over the feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the commemoration of that feast in low and conventual Masses and its omission in a sung Mass that is not conventual, the colour, the Credo and the Trinity Preface rest on the Missal’s own calendar and general rubrics (RG 16, 91, 108, 111, 115, 127 b; RGMR 434, 437 a, 475 a, 483, 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); the Breviary rubric behind it, which the typical edition of the Missal does not print, was not read. The commemorated orations are given from the Maternity’s formulary, pp. 685–686; nothing else of that formulary enters the Sunday Mass. No diocesan, titular, dedication or institute calendar, and no local external solemnity, is applied.

Text control. Every Latin form of the ten proper elements and of the three commemorated orations 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 is a cento of words from Dan 3:29–43 that no witness read carries in the Missal’s form, and the Latin source of the Gradual’s illis escam, the Alleluia’s psallam tibi, gloria mea and the Communion’s added Domine was not found in the psalter texts of the Vulgate, the Greek Psalter and the Latin Fathers read; the Offertory’s dum recordaremur tui, Sion stands in Cassiodorus’s psalm text. 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 Introit’s antiphon, the Epistle’s opening, the Gradual’s illis, the Alleluia’s close, the Gospel’s opening, the Offertory’s tui, and the Communion’s Memento, Domine and shortened close) 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 Sunday’s three orations is the anonymous translation printed by Cummiskey in Philadelphia in 1861: the orations in the library’s tracked transcription, checked against the scan’s page images, and the antiphon read on the page image of printed p. 448. The English of the commemorated orations is the 1945 Benziger revision of Lasance’s The New Roman Missal. None of these is an approved liturgical translation of the 1962 Missal. The Trinity Preface is cited and not reproduced. The English of St Augustine’s tractate on St John and his expositions of the psalms, of St John Chrysostom on St John and on Ephesians, and of St Cyril of Alexandria is that of the nineteenth-century Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers and Library of the Fathers. Where the Latin of St Gregory, St Jerome, St Hilary and St Augustine is printed, the English beside it is a gloss of that Latin and not a translation from a named edition.

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 Augustine’s expositions of Pss 118, 136 and 144 were read in English and, where the Latin is quoted, on the page images of Migne’s Patrologia Latina; St Hilary’s tractates on Pss 118 and 136 and St Jerome’s commentary on Ephesians on Migne’s page images; St Gregory’s homily in the Latin Wikisource transcription of Migne’s text, read beside the page images of the printed columns. St Thomas Aquinas, the medieval liturgical commentators and Cassiodorus were read in text layers or in a restricted scan and are described, not quoted; so is St John Chrysostom’s Greek exposition of Pss 136 and 144, and St Anthony of Padua’s sermon, read only in a copyrighted English translation. Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, Sicard of Cremona and William Durandus are cited for what they say of the Introit, Epistle, Gradual, Offertory and Communion, which the Mass they expounded shared with this formulary although it read another Gospel; Rupert and Durandus are also cited on this formulary’s Gospel at the chapters where their books expound it. 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 Origen’s commentary on St John, St Ambrose on Ps 118, Theodoret and St Athanasius on the psalms, Theophylact on Ephesians, the Old Latin and Roman psalters, the Breviary’s homily for this Sunday, 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 Epistle, a declared comparison under its critical profile. For the four psalm elements it gives the modern critical bound for the whole Psalter, from the introduction to the Psalms in the New American Bible, Revised Edition (summarised, not quoted), and, for Pss 107, 118 and 144, David’s reign in the usual chronology of the Catholic Encyclopedia’s “David”, disputed because the article reports a later dating beside it, as the reference point of the attribution and not as a date of any psalm. For Ps 136 it gives a setting, the Babylonian captivity, with the seventy years as a duration and the destruction of Jerusalem as historical background. For the Introit it holds no date common to Daniel and the psalm verse; its explanatory row gives each passage its own answer. For the Gospel it holds a derived event year, from A. J. Maas’s “Jesus Christ” in the encyclopedia, and two composition dates, both disputed; for the Epistle, two traditional dates, both disputed, and the comparison with the hypothesis of a later disciple, which does not enter the default answer. The record and its sources are audited in research/scope.md.

Rights. The Latin of the formulary and of the commemorated orations 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 Fathers, the Library of the Fathers’ Cyril, the Venice 1745 and Liège 1857 Aquinas, O’Sullivan’s 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; the 1945 Lasance English rests on the nonrenewal recorded in the source library. 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. Cassiodorus in the Corpus Christianorum edition and St Anthony in Spilsbury’s English are described, not reproduced; the New American Bible introductions are summarised, not reproduced.

Records. The collation of the appointed texts is recorded in propers/verified.md, and the occurrence and rubrics in research/context.md. The search, loci, disagreements and negative results are 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 16, 91, 108, 111, 115, 127; Rubricae generales Missalis 427, 431, 434, 437, 475, 483, 494; Ordo Missae no. 1033; pp. 412–413 (nos. 1689–1698); pp. 685–686 (nos. 3847, 3855, 3857).

• Missale Romanum (Ratisbon: Pustet, 1862), pp. 352–354, Dominica XX. post Pentecosten; appendix pp. [171]–[172], Festum Maternitatis B. Mariae Virginis.

• The Roman Missal, Translated into the English Language for the Use of the Laity (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1861), pp. 448–450 (XX Sunday after Pentecost, Introit, Collect, Secret, Postcommunion).

• F. X. Lasance, The New Roman Missal, revised edition (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1945), pp. 1233, 1235–1236 (Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Collect, Secret, Postcommunion).

• The Holy Bible, Douay–Rheims version, revised by Bishop Richard Challoner (Project Gutenberg text): Deut 32:15; 2 Mac 15:14; Ps 56:1, 5, 8–9; 59:1–2; 107:1–4; 118:1–3, 19, 49–52; 136:1–9; 144:1, 13–18; Prov 4:18; Dan 3:1, 20, 24–51; Jn 4:39–54; Eph 1:1; 3:1; 4:1; 5:8–33; 6:20.

• Biblia Sacra Vulgatae editionis (Clementine Vulgate), eBible.org text: Ps 107:2–4; 118:1, 49–50; 136:1; 144:15–16; Dan 3:29–43; Jn 4:46–53; Eph 5:15–21.

Fathers, Doctors and saints

• St Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 16, 3–7, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 7 (CCEL text).

• St Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 8 (CCEL text): on Ps 56:8; 118, sermons 1 and 15 (on vv. 1–3, 49–50); 136, on vv. 1–9; 144, on vv. 14–17. Latin in Migne, PL 37 (Paris, 1845), cols. 1502 (118, sermo 1, 1), 1761 and 1774 (136), 1882 (144).

• St Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 4, 3 and 28, 1–3, Latin Wikisource transcription of Migne’s text, CC BY-SA 3.0; Migne, PL 76, cols. 1210–1213.

• St Jerome, Commentarii in Danielem, preface and on Dan 3:23–49, in Migne, PL 25 (Latin Wikisource transcription), cols. 639–642; Commentarii in Epistolam ad Ephesios III, on Eph 5:16–20, in Migne, PL 26 (Paris, 1845), cols. 527–530.

• St Hilary of Poitiers, Tractatus super Psalmos, in Ps. 118, Aleph 1–3 and Zain; in Ps. 136; in Ps. 144, in Migne, PL 9 (Paris, 1844), cols. 503–505, 548–550, 777–784, 863–864.

• St John Chrysostom, Homilies on St John 35, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 14 (New York, 1889), pp. 123–125; Homilies on Ephesians 19, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 13 (CCEL text); Expositio in Psalmos, in Ps. 136 and 144, Migne, PG 55, cols. 405–407 and 470–471 (text layer; described, not quoted).

• St Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel according to S. John II.5, trans. P. E. Pusey, Library of the Fathers (Oxford, 1874), pp. 232–236.

• St Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Ioannis lectura c. 4, lect. 7, in Opera, editio altera Veneta, vol. 3 (Venice, 1745), pp. 521–524; In Epistolam ad Ephesios c. 5, lect. 6, in In omnes D. Pauli Apostoli epistolas commentaria, vol. 2 (Liège: H. Dessain, 1857), pp. 344–345 (text layers; described, not quoted).

• St Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. J. O’Sullivan, read in the eCatholic2000 transcription of that translation: on Pss 56:7–8; 118:1–3, 49; 136; 144:15–16.

• St Anthony of Padua, Sunday sermon on Jn 4:46–53, in Sermons for Sundays and Festivals, trans. S. R. P. Spilsbury (described, not quoted).

• Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum, on Pss 107:2–4; 118, preface and vv. 1, 49–50; 136; 144:15–16, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 98 (Turnhout, 1958), and in Migne, PL 70 (described, not quoted).

Liturgical commentators

• Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum), vol. 3 (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1927), pp. 174–178.

• 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. 439, 447, 451–452.

• Rupert of Deutz, De divinis officiis XII.20–21, in Migne, PL 170 (text layer).

• Honorius Augustodunensis, Gemma animae IV.88–89, in Migne, PL 172 (text layer).

• Sicard of Cremona, Mitrale VIII.20, in Migne, PL 213 (text layer).

• William Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum VI.137–138, vol. 2 (Lyon, 1612; text layer).

Chronology sources

• The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907–1912): “Captivities of the Israelites” (vol. 3, 1908); “Book of Daniel” and “David” (vol. 4, 1908); “Epistle to the Ephesians” (vol. 5, 1909); “Jesus Christ”, “The Gospel of Saint John”, “Third and Fourth Books of Kings” and “Chronology of the Kings” (vol. 8, 1910); “St. Paul” (vol. 11, 1911); “The New Testament” and “Temple of Jerusalem” (vol. 14, 1912).

• G. L. Haydock, The Douay–Rheims Bible with Haydock’s Commentary, notes on Pss 70 and 136.

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

Last revised (UTC): 2026-10-07T20:03:52Z

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