Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Source-first guide to the textual variable parts of PC-S40-A in the Roman Missal, Third Edition, for the dioceses of the United States of America, with the Lectionary 106 readings, their reception, and the rights limits of the record

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Year A

Formula PC-S40-A ⋅ Lectionary 106

Scriptural Date and Location

The Propers: Themes and Movement

This Sunday’s formulary is not a composition with a single subject. Two of its layers were made for each other, one was not, and the Missal texts are shared with Years B and C. What the layers have in common is a question about power and time: what may be done now, by whom, and what must be left to the end. The Liturgy of the Word states the question twice, from opposite ends—God’s restraint in Wisdom, human incapacity in Romans—and the Gospel puts it into a field where somebody has already done damage.

Officially correlated: might that shows itself by sparing

Wisdom argues that God’s leniency is a demonstration of strength, not a concession of weakness: because he is master of all, he can afford to judge with tranquillity, and he teaches his people from that fact that the just must be kind (Wis 12:16–19). Matthew’s householder refuses the servants’ proposal for a reason of the same shape—uprooting now would cost the wheat (Mt 13:29). Neither text says that the weeds are harmless or that the harvest is cancelled. Both say that a certain kind of action is refused for a season, and that the refusal is intelligible only if the end is certain.

Responsorial: the doctrine turned into address

Psalm 86 does not restate Wisdom’s argument; it asks for the thing Wisdom describes. Its appointed verses move from God’s readiness to forgive (86:5–6), through the coming of all nations to worship (86:9–10), to the divine self-description of Exodus 34:6—merciful, gracious, slow to anger—and a request for strength (86:15–16). The refrain fixes the psalm’s first claim as the assembly’s own sentence. Between the first reading and the psalm, then, a doctrine of divine patience becomes a petition made by people who need it applied to themselves.

Semi-continuous and independent: prayer in the dark

Romans 8:26–27 is read because Romans is being read, not because Paul was chosen to explain the weeds. The General Introduction to the Lectionary is explicit that on Sundays in Ordinary Time the apostolic and Gospel courses run semi-continuously while only the Old Testament reading is harmonized with the Gospel (nn. 66–68, 107). The passage nevertheless meets the day’s question from the human side: the petitioner does not know what to ask, and the Spirit’s intercession supplies what the petition lacks. Any connection drawn between this and the servants’ request is the reader’s synthesis, and this guide keeps it labelled as such.

Shared and older: the Missal texts around the readings

The three orations and both Communion antiphons belong to Week XVI of Ordinary Time and are used in all three cycles. They may be heard with Matthew 13, but they were not composed for it, and no evidence in the books before this guide shows a deliberate pairing. Their own movement is coherent without the Gospel: grace multiplied and guarded (Collect); the many sacrifices of the law perfected in one, with Abel named and the gift of each ordered to the salvation of all (Prayer over the Offerings); and the passage from oldness to newness asked after Communion.

Optional strands: the units the day does not fix

Four of the inventoried units belong to no functional grouping at all, because the books leave them open. They are named here so that the account above is not mistaken for a description of any actual celebration.

• Entrance, preparation, and Communion music. Four options are in force for the dioceses of the United States at the entrance and at Communion, and the printed antiphon is only the first of them; for the preparation of the gifts this Missal supplies no antiphon at all. Whether the assembly heard Psalm 54 or Psalm 111 in any form is not recoverable from the books.

• Preface and Eucharistic Prayer. No Preface is proper to Week XVI. One of the Prefaces of the Sundays in Ordinary Time is used unless the Eucharistic Prayer chosen supplies its own, so the two choices are coupled by rubric and can never be resolved separately.

• The two Communion antiphons. The rubric that ordinarily settles such pairs prefers the antiphon agreeing with the Gospel of the Mass. Here the second antiphon comes from the Apocalypse and neither is drawn from Matthew, so the rubric decides nothing and both remain open.

• The sprinkling rite. On Sundays the blessing and sprinkling of water may replace the Penitential Act. That is a ritual substitution, not a proper text, and nothing in the day’s formulary triggers it.

Branch-dependent: two Gospels of different lengths

The shorter form ends at the harvest instruction. An assembly that hears it receives the prohibition and the promise of a sorting, but not the mustard seed, the leaven, Matthew’s fulfilment citation, the move indoors, the identification of the sower and the field, the angels, the furnace, or the just shining like the sun. The Alleluia’s promise—revelation to the little ones—is answered inside the longer form, where the disciples ask for the explanation and receive it. This guide treats both forms and narrates neither as the enacted proclamation of 19 July 2026.

The Propers: Detailed Commentary

What was collated, and in which book

The Latin formulary was read in the third typical edition of the Missale Romanum (Typis Vaticanis, 2002) under the heading Dominica XVI “per annum”, printed pages 465–466, at pages 280–281 of the exact digital reproduction registered in this repository’s source library. The heading, the two Communion alternatives, the Latin incipits, and the element boundaries reported below were read there. The 2008 emended reprint is the Latin base of the United States English edition; the Congregation’s official list of variations for that reprint names, under Tempus per annum, only pages 457 and 471, so no listed change falls on this formulary—but the reprint’s own pages were not inspected, and purely typographic differences remain outside this check.

The English of the Roman Missal, Third Edition, for the dioceses of the United States is under copyright and is not reproduced here. No named United States altar book was collated. Every statement below about an oration is a statement about the Latin identity and structure of the prayer, or an original summary of it, and never a substitute translation. The same limit governs the readings: the Lectionary’s English is protected, so scriptural wording quoted in this guide is taken from the public-domain Douay–Rheims (Challoner) version and is named as such wherever it appears. Douay–Rheims numbers the psalms with the Vulgate; the Lectionary numbers them with the Hebrew. Both numbers are given at each first use.

Entrance Antiphon: Psalm 54:6, 8

The Missal prints the antiphon as Ps 53, 6.8—Vulgate numbering for what the Lectionary would call Psalm 54—and gives it in two movements: Ecce Deus adiuvat me, et Dominus susceptor est animae meae, then Voluntarie sacrificabo tibi, et confitebor nomini tuo, Domine, quoniam bonum est. In Douay–Rheims: “For behold God is my helper: and the Lord is the protector of my soul … I will freely sacrifice to thee, and will give praise, O God, to thy name: because it is good.”

The antiphon is a cut, and the cut is the point. Psalm 54 is a plea from hiding: its superscription places it when the Ziphites betrayed David’s position to Saul, and verse 7 asks that the evils be turned back on the enemies. The Missal keeps the confidence and the vow and leaves the enemies out. What enters the church, therefore, is not a complaint but the two sentences in which a hunted man says that he is upheld and that he will sacrifice willingly.

Augustine fastens on exactly that adverb. Expounding the psalm at Enarratio in Psalmum 53.10 he asks what a man could possibly offer, runs through the flock, the ram, the bull, and the Sabaean frankincense, and answers with the sacrifice of praise: “Wherefore then voluntarily? Because truly I love that which I praise” (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation). The willingness is not an extra virtue attached to the offering; it is what makes praise a sacrifice rather than a payment.

Whether the assembly on any given Sunday hears this text at all is not determined by the Missal. In the dioceses of the United States the entrance chant may be the Missal antiphon, the Gradual psalm, a Simple Gradual antiphon, or an approved song (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 48); if there is no singing, the printed antiphon is recited. The antiphon is appointed; its audibility is a local decision.

The Collect

Propitiare, Domine, famulis tuis, et clementer gratiae tuae super eos dona multiplica, ut, spe, fide et caritate ferventes, semper in mandatis tuis vigili custodia perseverent.

Four observations, all from the Latin structure rather than from any translation. First, the prayer has no anamnesis: it opens directly with an imperative of mercy and never states a motive drawn from salvation history. Second, its request is for multiplication of gifts already given (gratiae tuae … dona multiplica), not for a new benefit; the theological virtues are presumed present and asked to burn (ferventes). Third, the virtues appear in the order hope, faith, charity—not the Pauline order of 1 Corinthians 13:13, and not the order in which they are ordinarily catalogued. Fourth, the purpose clause ends in a military or custodial image: perseverance in the commandments under vigili custodia, a watchful guard.

That last phrase is worth holding beside the Gospel, where the trouble begins cum dormirent homines—while men were sleeping. The Collect is shared with Years B and C and cannot be shown to have been written for Matthew 13; the resonance is a textual observation, not a compositional claim. But the observation is precise: the Collect asks for the wakefulness whose absence opens the parable, and it aims that wakefulness at the petitioner’s own obedience rather than at the field.

First Reading: Wisdom 12:13, 16–19

The passage in its book

Wisdom 11:15–12:27 is a long digression defending God’s way of punishing. Its thesis is stated at 11:26: “But thou sparest all: because they are thine, O Lord, who lovest souls” (Douay–Rheims). The argument then works through the Canaanites: God could have destroyed them at a stroke, “with one rough word” (12:9), but sent wasps ahead of the army so that they perished “by little and little,” and “executing thy judgments by degrees thou gavest them place of repentance” (12:8, 10). The author knows the objection—these were a hopeless people (12:10–11)—and does not withdraw the principle.

The appointed boundary and what it removes

The Lectionary appoints 12:13 and then 12:16–19, omitting two verses. Verse 14 denies that any king or tyrant may confront God about those he has destroyed; verse 15 states the premise the following verses build on: “For so much then as thou art just, thou orderest all things justly: thinking it not agreeable to thy power, to condemn him who deserveth not to be punished” (Douay–Rheims). The omission is not neutral. It removes the polemical contrast with human rulers and the explicit statement that God’s justice, not merely his strength, is what governs the sparing. What is left is the cleaner and more startling sequence: sovereignty (12:13), power as the source of justice and lordship as the ground of leniency (12:16), power shown precisely where it is doubted (12:17), judgment cum tranquillitate—“with tranquillity”—and government “with great favour” (12:18), and the pedagogy of 12:19: the just must be kind, and God’s children are given good hope because he grants place for repentance.

The claim being made

The reading is not saying that God is lenient because judgment would be difficult, nor that leniency is indifference. It says the opposite of both: leniency is what omnipotence looks like when it has nothing to prove, and it is teaching. The verse that follows the appointed boundary makes the pedagogy explicit—God’s slowness with enemies is an argument a fortiori for his care with his own (12:20–22)—and the same passage warns that the Israelites themselves are judged more circumspectly, not less.

Reception, and where it was not found

The clearest liturgical reception of this chapter is inside the Missal itself. The Collect of the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time opens Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserando manifestas, multiplica super nos gratiam tuam—God, who manifests his almighty power above all by sparing and showing mercy. That is Wisdom 12:16–18 turned into an address, and it shares with this Sunday’s Collect the rare verb-and-preposition pair multiplica super nos / super eos … multiplica. Both prayers were read in the same registered reproduction of the 2002 Latin edition, this Sunday’s at its pages 280–281 and the Twenty-sixth Sunday’s at its page 289. This is a verbal and thematic observation about two prayers in one book; it is not a claim that either prayer was composed with the other, or with Wisdom 12, in view.

A bounded search of the reception recorded in the research scope did not locate a continuous patristic commentary on the discontinuous Lectionary unit 12:13+16–19, which is a liturgical construction rather than an ancient one. A targeted check of Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of clemency and meekness (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 157) found no citation of Wisdom 12:18 there: his clemency is built from Seneca’s De clementia and Aristotle, not from this text. That is a bounded negative result about one question in one checked place, not a claim that Aquinas nowhere uses the verse.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 86:5–6, 9–10, 15–16

Psalm 86 (Vulgate 85) is unusual among the psalms in being made largely of other psalms. Its appointed verses run: God’s readiness to forgive and the plea for a hearing (5–6); the coming of all the nations to worship and the confession that God alone is God (9–10); and the divine self-description “And thou, O Lord, art a God of compassion, and merciful, patient, and of much mercy, and true”—a quotation of Exodus 34:6—followed by the request that God turn and give strength to his servant (15–16, Douay–Rheims). The response is drawn from the psalm’s own verse 5a, so the assembly repeats as its refrain the sentence on which the first reading’s whole argument depends.

Two omissions deserve notice, because they run parallel to the Entrance Antiphon’s. The appointed selection passes over verse 14, where a violent band seeks the psalmist’s life, and over verse 17, where the psalmist asks that those who hate him may see and be confounded. Twice on this Sunday the liturgy takes a psalm in which enemies are present and gives the assembly the verses without them—while the Gospel it is preparing keeps an enemy in the field and forbids doing anything about him. The contrast is a textual observation about the selections actually made.

Augustine’s exposition of this psalm opens with the sentence for which it is best known, and which is directly useful here: God gave men no greater gift than to make his Word their Head, so that “it is one Saviour of His Body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who both prays for us, and prays in us, and is prayed to by us” (Enarratio in Psalmum 85.1, NPNF translation). He prays for us as our priest, prays in us as our head, and is prayed to by us as our God. Whatever one makes of the whole-Christ reading, it supplies the category the second reading will need an hour later: a prayer that is at once the assembly’s own and not merely the assembly’s own.

Second Reading: Romans 8:26–27

Position in the letter

Romans 8:18–30 is built on three groanings: creation groans in travail (8:22), we ourselves groan awaiting the redemption of the body (8:23), and the Spirit intercedes “with unspeakable groanings” (8:26, Douay–Rheims). The two appointed verses are the third of these, and they are read because Romans is being read: the General Introduction to the Lectionary establishes that on Sundays in Ordinary Time the apostolic and Gospel courses are semi-continuous while only the Old Testament reading is harmonized with the Gospel (nn. 66–68). The same Introduction, at no. 68, expressly declines to impose “an organic harmony of themes designed to aid homiletic instruction” on Sundays.

The difficulty in the text

Paul says two things that have to be held together: that we do not know what to pray for as we ought, and that the Spirit’s intercession is heard by “he that searcheth the hearts.” The first is an admission of ignorance about the content or manner of prayer; the second locates the remedy inside the petitioner, where only God reads. Three witnesses solve this differently, and the differences are instructive.

Aquinas then adds a control the other two do not: since “to ask” belongs to an inferior, and “to groan” belongs to one who suffers, the verse cannot mean that the Spirit himself petitions or grieves—a reading he says would concede the Arian and Macedonian position. He therefore glosses postulat as postulantes nos facit, “he makes us ask,” on the model of Genesis 22:12, where “now I know” means “I have made known”; the Spirit causes right desires by pouring out charity, and the groans are the ones he causes in our hearts, “the groaning of the dove.” The same gloss appears twice in the Summa theologiae: at II-II, q. 83, a. 5, where Romans 8:26 is the first objection against asking for anything definite, and is answered by the Spirit’s inspiring of holy desires; and at II-II, q. 83, a. 10, ad 1, where “the Holy Ghost is said to ask, because He makes us ask” (English Dominican translation).

The three readings are not interchangeable. Chrysostom locates the intercession in an office of the assembly; Augustine locates it in the interior of the sufferer; Aquinas locates it in the causality of desire and defends the Spirit’s divinity while doing so. All three agree on the negative point that the day’s Gospel will also need: the petitioner’s confidence about what should happen is not itself evidence.

The Gospel Acclamation

The Lectionary prints the verse with Cf., marking adaptation rather than quotation. Matthew 11:25 in Douay–Rheims reads: “I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones.” The acclamation supplies the phrase “mysteries of the kingdom,” which in Matthew belongs to 13:11 rather than to 11:25; the adapted verse thus reaches across two chapters and hands the assembly the interpretive key just before the parables begin.

Chrysostom’s comment on the source verse is direct and unsentimental. By “the wise” Jesus means the scribes and Pharisees, and not true wisdom but “this which they seemed to have through natural shrewdness”; and he does not say “you have revealed it to fools, but to babes; to unsophisticated, that is, to simple-minded men” (Homily 38 on Matthew, NPNF translation). The acclamation is an act in itself, by which the assembly greets the Lord about to speak (General Instruction, no. 62); on this Sunday what it greets is a discourse whose whole structure is that some hear and do not understand.

The Gospel: Matthew 13:24–43, or 13:24–30

The literary unit

Matthew 13 is the third of the Gospel’s five discourses. It is built on a movement in space: Jesus sits by the sea and speaks to crowds (13:1–35), then leaves the crowds and goes into the house, where the disciples ask questions and receive explanations (13:36–52). The longer form of today’s Gospel crosses that boundary; the shorter form does not. Both forms open the second half of the seed material: after the sower and its explanation, three more parables follow—weeds, mustard seed, leaven—and then, indoors, the explanation of the weeds.

The parable of the weeds, 13:24–30

The Greek zizania is darnel, Lolium temulentum, a grass that closely resembles wheat until it heads. Douay–Rheims renders it “cockle.” The parable’s sequence is precise: good seed sown; an enemy oversowing “while men were asleep”; the mimicry exposed only when the blade bears fruit; the servants’ question about the seed’s provenance; the diagnosis “An enemy hath done this”; the servants’ offer to go and gather; the refusal, with its reason—“lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it”; and the harvest order, in which the weeds are gathered first, bound for burning, and the wheat gathered into the barn (Douay–Rheims).

Three cruxes have carried the passage’s reception, and the witnesses divide at each.

Augustine takes the same verses in a fourth direction, and his is the reading that shaped Latin ecclesiology. In The City of God XX.9 he argues from the wording of the explanation itself: the angels “shall gather out of His kingdom all offences”—and since there are no offences in the kingdom where there are none, the gathering must be out of the present kingdom, which is the Church. Hence his conclusion, in the Latin of the critical edition, Ergo et nunc ecclesia regnum Christi est regnumque caelorum … nec tamen cum illo regnant zizania, quamuis in ecclesia cum tritico crescant: the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ, and yet the weeds do not reign with him, though they grow in the Church along with the wheat. Earlier, at XX.5, he had used the same parable as one of the Lord’s proofs that a day of judgment is coming, noting that Jesus there “did not name the judgment or the day of judgment, but indicated it much more clearly by describing the circumstances” (Dods translation).

Origen’s field and Augustine’s field are not the same field, and the difference is doctrinally live. Origen keeps the sorting cosmic and interior; Augustine makes it ecclesial, and used it against the Donatists, who held that a church containing traitors was no church. Against Petilian he presses the geography of the verse: do not separate yourself “because of the mixture of the tares, from the society of that good wheat … that grows together throughout the world until the harvest. For the field is the world,—not only Africa; and the harvest is the end of the world,—not the era of Donatus” (Answer to the Letters of Petilian III.2, NPNF translation). Irenaeus, much earlier, had read the sowing at the level of origins: the enemy is the apostate angel who “was envious of God’s workmanship,” and God turned the enmity back upon its author, sparing the man who fell into disobedience through want of care (Against Heresies IV.40.3, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation).

Aquinas’s four reasons, and the argument they answer

Aquinas asks why the wicked are not to be rooted out for the good’s sake and answers with four causes. First, the good are exercised by the wicked; he cites 1 Corinthians 11:19 and observes that without heretics the learning of the saints, Augustine’s among them, would never have been made plain. Second, one who is wicked now may become good later, as Paul did—“if Paul had been killed, we would lack the teaching of so great a master.” Third, some seem wicked and are not, so the uprooting would take the good with it: nolite ante tempus iudicare. Fourth, a person of great power drags many down with him if he is cut off, and therefore, he says, a whole congregation is not excommunicated, nor the prince of a people, lest with one many fall.

He then states the objection honestly—Isaiah 1:16 and 1 Corinthians 5:7 command the removal of evil—and records a disagreement rather than smoothing it. Chrysostom, he says, understands the prohibition to concern killing; Augustine “in a certain letter” says that he once thought heretics should not be coerced, but learned by experience that many are converted through compulsion. Aquinas’s own resolution follows Chrysostom conditionally: where it cannot be done without danger it must not be done; where the greater danger is that the Gospel perish in others through them, the case alters. He adds the qualification that a prince is not to be excommunicated when the scandal of excommunicating him would exceed the offence—unless the offence endangers the faith, “whatever loss may follow.”

The Summa carries the same material in its own idiom, and the loci are exact. At II-II, q. 10, a. 8, the first objection against compelling unbelievers is Matthew 13:28–29, quoted with Chrysostom’s Homily 46 attached by name; the reply distinguishes killing from excommunication and cites Augustine’s letter to Vincentius and Contra epistolam Parmeniani III.2 for the criterion—restraint slackens only where a man’s crime is so public and so hateful that he has no defenders capable of causing a schism. At II-II, q. 11, a. 3, ad 3, the tares objection returns and is met with a canonical maxim: “to be excommunicated is not to be uprooted.” At II-II, q. 64, a. 2, ad 1, the parable is the first objection against killing sinners at all, and the reply concedes its force in every case where the wicked lie hidden among the good or have followers enough that their death would endanger the good, “wherefore our Lord teaches that we should rather allow the wicked to live, and that vengeance is to be delayed until the last judgment.”

This reception history has to be stated plainly rather than curated. The same verse was cited on both sides of the coercion question for more than a millennium, and Aquinas is a witness to that, not an escape from it. The controlling teaching is now explicit, and it reads the same passage in the other direction: the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis humanae 11 grounds religious freedom partly in this very parable—Christ, “noting that the cockle had been sown amid the wheat, gave orders that both should be allowed to grow until the harvest time, which will come at the end of the world”—and declares at n. 2 that all are “to be immune from coercion … in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.” Article 12 of the same declaration acknowledges that in the life of the People of God “there has at times appeared a way of acting that was hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel or even opposed to it,” while maintaining that the doctrine against coerced faith “has always stood firm.” Nothing in the parable or its reception bears on the protection of the vulnerable, criminal justice, safeguarding, the removal of dangerous persons from access, or proportionate ecclesiastical discipline; those questions are governed by other texts and by law, and the servants’ prohibition is about final sorting, not about ordinary responsibility.

Mustard seed and leaven, 13:31–33 (longer form only)

The second and third parables answer a different anxiety: not why is there evil in the field but will anything come of so small a beginning. Chrysostom reads them as a single reassurance addressed to twelve men: the mustard shows that the Gospel will spread despite the losses of the sower parable, and the leaven that a small quantity transforms a large one—“as the leaven, though it be buried, yet is not destroyed, but little by little transmutes all into its own condition” (Homily 46.2). He presses the verb: the woman did not put the leaven but hid it, so the apostles must not merely stand near the multitude but be mixed with it.

Aquinas reports a spread of interpretations rather than choosing one. Jerome takes the mustard seed as evangelical teaching, hot to the taste and a repellent of poisons; Chrysostom takes it as the apostles, small and despised; Hilary takes it as Christ himself, sown in death in the field of the people. On the leaven Aquinas pauses over a rule of reading: the same image may signify opposites—leaven is corruption at 1 Corinthians 5:7 and fervour and expansive power here—just as the rock is Christ in one place and hardness in another. The rule is Augustine’s, set out in On Christian Doctrine III.25, where the worked example is this same leaven—bad in “the leaven of the Pharisees,” good in the parable, which Augustine quotes there in Luke’s form (Luke 13:21)—and where the lion likewise stands for Christ in one text and for the devil in another. Its use here is a small but real instance of a Father’s hermeneutics governing a Doctor’s exegesis eight centuries later.

Two details of the mustard parable are easy to miss. Its final clause, that the birds of the air come and dwell in its branches, is drawn from the imperial-tree imagery of Daniel 4 and Ezekiel 17:23, where the birds are the nations sheltering in a kingdom; the tree is a political image before it is a horticultural one. And the parable does not say that the seed is the smallest seed there is, but that it is least “of all seeds” in the sower’s field—a comparison within an agricultural repertoire, not a botanical claim.

The fulfilment citation, 13:34–35

Matthew closes the public half of the discourse by quoting Psalm 78:2 (Vulgate 77:2), on opening the mouth in parables and uttering what has been hidden from the foundation of the world. Chrysostom takes the citation as proof that the manner of teaching is not an innovation and that its purpose was “not that they might be ignorant, but that He might lead them to inquiry” (Homily 47). The quotation is part of Matthew’s argument; it is not a separately appointed reading.

The explanation, 13:36–43 (longer form only)

Origen makes the change of scene carry the meaning: Jesus is not in his house when he is with the multitudes, and to receive the explanation one must follow him in, so that “as His disciples we may come to Him when He goes into the house” (Commentary on Matthew X.1). He then warns that the explanation is not self-evident either: the closing words “he that hath ears to hear, let him hear” teach “those who think that in the exposition, the parable has been set forth with such perfect clearness that it can be understood by the vulgar, that even the things connected with the interpretation of the parable stand in need of explanation” (X.2).

The explanation gives seven identifications—sower, field, good seed, weeds, enemy, harvest, reapers—and then two terms: the furnace with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the just shining as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Origen reads the gnashing as remorse turned inward, “angry against themselves,” and devotes a whole section to a difficulty in the second term: Daniel 12:3 and 1 Corinthians 15:41 teach that the righteous differ in glory like stars, but Matthew says they shine as one sun. His solution is temporal—differences belong to the beginning of blessedness, and the single solar brightness to its consummation (X.3). Whether or not one follows him, the example shows what patristic exegesis of this passage actually looks like: a comparison of texts, with the difficulty stated before the answer.

What the shorter form does not contain

An assembly hearing Matthew 13:24–30 receives the sowing, the sleeping, the enemy, the servants’ zeal, the prohibition, and the harvest order. It does not receive the mustard seed, the leaven, the fulfilment citation, the move into the house, the identification of the field as the world, the naming of the enemy as the devil, the angels, the furnace, or the shining of the just. Every patristic and Thomistic reading summarized above that depends on the explanation depends on the longer form. The prohibition, notably, is fully present in both.

Prayer over the Offerings

Deus, qui legalium differentiam hostiarum unius sacrificii perfectione sanxisti, accipe sacrificium a devotis tibi famulis, et pari benedictione, sicut munera Abel, sanctifica, ut, quod singuli obtulerunt ad maiestatis tuae honorem, cunctis proficiat ad salutem.

The prayer’s first clause is a compressed theology of the Letter to the Hebrews: the differentiam—the sheer multiplicity and diversity—of the sacrifices of the Law has been ratified, given legal force, in the perfection of one sacrifice. Its second clause asks that this offering be sanctified with a blessing equal to that given to the gifts of Abel, and its third asks that what individuals have offered for the honour of God’s majesty should profit all for salvation.

Two facts about that Abel clause are worth recording, and both were read in the same Latin book. First, the Roman Canon uses the identical formula at Supra quae, asking God to accept these gifts as he accepted munera pueri tui iusti Abel, with Abraham’s sacrifice and Melchizedek’s. If Eucharistic Prayer I is used on this Sunday, Abel’s gifts are therefore named twice in the same Mass, once in the Sunday’s own offering prayer and once in the Canon. Second, Abel’s gifts are the first offering in Scripture and the occasion of the first fratricide (Genesis 4:4–8); the formulary names them on a day whose Gospel begins with an enemy at work in a field. Both observations concern the printed texts of one edition; neither asserts a compositional intention.

The movement from singuli to cunctis—from what each offered to what profits all—is the prayer’s own logic, and it is the exact inverse of the servants’ proposal in the Gospel, which would have subtracted some from the field for the sake of the rest. That relation is a source-grounded synthesis of two texts printed for the same Mass, not a claim about how either was written.

Preface and Eucharistic Prayer: a coupled selection

Week XVI has no proper Preface. The Missal’s Ordinary Time rubric 5 provides that, unless a Eucharistic Prayer with its own Preface is used, one of the Prefaces of the Sundays in Ordinary Time is said (the Latin edition points to its pages 537–544). The General Instruction adds the governing detail for the one Prayer that cannot be recombined: “Eucharistic Prayer IV has an invariable Preface … It may be used when a Mass has no Preface of its own and on Sundays in Ordinary Time” (no. 365). The two selections are therefore coupled, not independent, and this guide records them as a coupled branch. No evidence identifies which Preface or Prayer was used at any celebration on 19 July 2026.

The two Communion antiphons, and a rubric that does not fit

The Missal prints two Communion antiphons for Week XVI: Psalm 111:4–5 (Vulgate 110:4–5) and Revelation 3:20. The Ordinary Time rubric 6 states the principle behind such pairs—at Communion two antiphons are set down, the first from the psalms, the other usually from the Gospel; either may be chosen, with preference for the one that happens to accord with the Gospel of the Mass. On this Sunday that preference has no straightforward application, because the second antiphon is drawn not from a Gospel but from the Apocalypse, and neither antiphon comes from Matthew 13. The rubric’s ordinary criterion is thus unavailable here; the choice falls back on the general norms for the Communion chant (General Instruction, no. 87). This is an observation about what the book prints, verified in the 2002 Latin edition.

The first antiphon—“He hath made a remembrance of his wonderful works, being a merciful and gracious Lord: He hath given food to them that fear him” (Douay–Rheims)—is read Eucharistically by Augustine with unusual directness. Miracles, he says, are reserved for their season so that human weakness, “intent upon novelty,” will remember them; but what would fear profit, “unless the gracious and merciful Lord gave meat unto them that fear Him? … meat that does not spoil, bread that comes down from heaven, which He gave to no deservings of ours”; and he ends on the pledge: “Nor has He who has given a pledge, given the whole” (Enarratio in Psalmum 110.4, NPNF translation). Augustine’s reading is reception, not the psalm’s own literal referent, which is covenant provision.

The second antiphon carries its context with it whether or not the context is heard. Revelation 3:20 stands in the message to Laodicea, a church told that it is lukewarm and that its sense of needing nothing is precisely its poverty (3:14–19). The knock is offered to a community after a reproof, and the supper is the terms on which the reproof may be answered. Its liturgical suitability at Communion is obvious; the point worth preserving is that its original address is corporate and critical, and that using it at Communion does not convert it into a purely individual invitation.

Prayer after Communion

Populo tuo, quaesumus, Domine, adesto propitius, et, quem mysteriis caelestibus imbuisti, fac ad novitatem vitae de vetustate transire.

The verb imbuere means to steep, to saturate, and also to instruct: the people have been soaked in the heavenly mysteries and taught by them at once. The petition then asks for a passage—transire—out of oldness into newness of life, the Pauline pair of Romans 6:4 and Ephesians 4:22–24. Read after the longer Gospel, the prayer asks for exactly the change that the parable says cannot be enforced from outside: the weeds are not converted by uprooting, and the Church’s own request at the end of the Mass is that its people be moved from old to new by God. That connection is a synthesis proposed here, not a documented feature of the prayer’s composition, and it holds equally under either Gospel form.

How the layers meet

The Propers: Notable and Quotable

Four documented afterlives of wording from this Sunday’s appointed Scripture. Each pairs a phrase from the Gospel—present in both the longer and the shorter form—with a later use that redirects it. Straight exegesis and devotional reception are excluded; those belong to the commentary above. Every later text was read in a public-domain edition or transcription at the locus given.

“Patiently bear with the wheat and the tares” becomes a rule of manners

Proper and branch: Matthew 13:30, both Gospel forms. Later use: Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd edition (1771), preface.

Priestley—Dissenting minister, and the chemist who would isolate oxygen—spends the preface attacking the constitution of church establishments. Then he turns on his own side: whatever is said against the abuses, “let us be particularly careful how we give offence to any serious and well-disposed minds, and patiently bear with the wheat and the tares growing together till the harvest.” He goes straight on to a doctrine of providence in which “every thing, even the grossest abuses in the civil or ecclesiastical constitutions of particular states, is subservient to the wise and gracious designs” of God.

The turn is double. First, a command about not uprooting persons becomes a rule about tone in controversy—patience with the prejudices of those educated inside an institution one is trying to dismantle. Second, the parable diagnoses the mixture as the work of an enemy, whereas Priestley’s providence absorbs even gross abuse into design; the borrowed sentence and the argument it introduces pull in opposite directions. Limits: Priestley does not cite chapter and verse, and the phrase governs his manner, not his programme; he continued to press for disestablishment. The 1771 work is public domain and was read in the Wikisource transcription of the second edition.

The harvest order reversed

Proper and branch: Matthew 13:29–30, both Gospel forms. Later use: Doctrine and Covenants 86:6–7, a revelation dated Kirtland, Ohio, 6 December 1832.

The passage rewrites the parable as an interpretation of church history—the field “was the world,” the apostles were the sowers, the tares were sown “after they have fallen asleep”—and then changes two things in the Lord’s own words. The reason for delay is transferred from the danger to the wheat to the weakness of the reapers: “pluck not up the tares while the blade is yet tender (for verily your faith is weak), lest you destroy the wheat also.” And the order of the harvest is inverted: “let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest is fully ripe; then ye shall first gather out the wheat from among the tares, and after the gathering of the wheat, behold and lo, the tares are bound in bundles, and the field remaineth to be burned.” Matthew has the weeds gathered first (13:30), a detail Chrysostom thought was included so that the wheat would not be alarmed.

The turn is that a restraint grounded in the servants’ ignorance becomes a restraint grounded in their immaturity, and a sorting that begins with removal becomes one that begins with rescue. Limits: this is a scriptural claim inside another religious body’s canon, and naming a documented reuse is neither an evaluation of it nor an ecumenical judgment. Text read in the Wikisource transcription; the 1832 revelation and its nineteenth-century printings are public domain.

“An enemy hath done this” applied to a sunk boat

Proper and branch: Matthew 13:28, both Gospel forms (King James wording). Later use: P. G. Wodehouse, The White Feather (1907), chapter 12.

Two schoolboys return from tea to find their hired boat gone from its mooring. They haul on the rope, the nose of the boat breaks the surface, and Dunstable delivers judgment: “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth—’ said Dunstable, wiping his hands. ‘If you ask me, I should say an enemy hath done this. A boat doesn’t sink of its own accord.’ ” The culprit is a rival schoolboy named Albert.

The joke works only because the borrowed sentence is grave. In Matthew the householder’s answer explains the origin of evil in the field; in Wodehouse it explains a scuttled dinghy, and it arrives immediately after a half-finished line of Hamlet, so that the schoolboy’s whole rhetorical inheritance is being spent on vandalism. Limits: the wording is the King James version’s, not the Lectionary’s, and Wodehouse signals no source; the verbal match is exact and the sentence is distinctive enough to make dependence plain, but this is allusion, not quotation with attribution. The 1907 novel is public domain in the United States and was read in the Wikisource transcription.

From parable to plant name

Proper and branch: the weeds of Matthew 13:25–30, both Gospel forms. Later use: Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897), s.v. “Tares”; Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary (1908), s.v. “Darnel.”

Easton: “Tares. The bearded darnel, mentioned only in Matt. 13:25–30. It is the Lolium temulentum, a species of rye-grass, the seeds of which are a strong soporific poison. It bears the closest resemblance to wheat till the ear appears, and only then the difference is discovered.” Chambers, a general English dictionary with no religious purpose, defines the plant by the parable: “Darnel … an annual of the rye-grass genus, the tares of Scripture,” with an etymology from Old French darne, stupid, “from its supposed narcotic properties.”

The turn is a migration of register. A word that entered English through a parable becomes the settled common name of a species, and the parable’s moral observation—that the counterfeit cannot be told from the wheat until it fruits—is restated as a field diagnostic. In Chambers the direction of definition is fully reversed: the plant is explained by Scripture rather than Scripture by the plant. That the identified species is a soporific is a coincidence the lexicographers do not exploit, and this guide notes it as an observation rather than as their claim. Limits: the identification of zizania with Lolium temulentum is the standard lexical judgment, not a demonstrated botanical fact of first-century Galilee; both reference works are public domain and were read in Wikisource transcriptions.

The Propers: Interpretive Possibilities

The six proposals below are original editorial syntheses produced with AI assistance for this guide. They are not the teaching of any authority cited, and no compositional intention is claimed for any Missal or Lectionary text. Each joins named appointed elements, states its mechanism and its use, and ends with the condition that would defeat it. A targeted precedent search for each distinctive conjunction is recorded, with its boundary and result, in research/scope.md.

1. The Collect reassigns the watch

Anchors: the Collect’s vigili custodia perseverent; Matthew 13:25, cum dormirent homines; and the ancient dispute over whose sleep is meant—Origen’s failure to watch and pray, Chrysostom’s negligent rulers and subjects, Aquinas’s death of the apostles.

Mechanism. The three witnesses argue about the identity of the sleepers, and each answer assigns responsibility to somebody else: to the careless soul, to the prelates, to a past generation. The Collect prayed a few minutes earlier contains the only imperative about watchfulness in the whole formulary, and it points in none of those directions: it asks that these servants persevere in God’s commandments under a watchful guard. The liturgical order thus answers an exegetical dispute about blame with a petition about the petitioner’s own obedience, before the dispute is even raised by the reading.

Use. It supplies a practical rule for hearing the parable: the question “who let this happen” is real but is not the question the assembly has just asked God to help it with. It also disciplines the homiletic temptation to distribute the parable’s blame among absent parties.

Limit. The Collect is shared with Years B and C and cannot be shown to have been written with Matthew 13 in view; vigilance language is common in Roman collects; and Matthew’s sleeping is at least arguably a neutral marker of night rather than a fault—Chrysostom himself grants that natural sleep is unavoidable. If the sleep is not culpable, the proposal weakens to a resonance.

2. The same gap is used by the enemy and inhabited by the Spirit

Anchors: Matthew 13:25, where the sowing occurs while men sleep; Romans 8:26, where the petitioner does not know what to ask; and the Alleluia’s adapted Matthew 11:25, where the mysteries are revealed to little ones.

Mechanism. Both readings locate decisive action precisely where the human subject is not in command of himself. The Gospel makes that unguarded interval the entry point of malice; Paul makes the corresponding interval in prayer—the not-knowing—the room in which the Spirit intercedes; the acclamation adds that the relevant knowledge is given rather than achieved. The three elements together describe non-mastery as a contested space rather than as either innocence or guilt.

Use. It yields a usable discernment rule: the fact that something happened while no one was in control settles nothing about its origin. Institutions and individuals may stop treating unconsciousness as an alibi without treating it as a verdict.

Limit. Romans is read semi-continuously and was not selected to comment on the Gospel; the General Introduction to the Lectionary (n. 68) expressly rejects an imposed thematic harmony on Sundays in Ordinary Time. Paul’s not-knowing concerns the content and manner of petition, not vigilance, and Aquinas’s reading of the verse turns on the causality of desire rather than on any lapse of attention. The proposal is a synthesis across an independent strand and must be labelled as such wherever it is used.

3. Abel is named twice, and the second naming tests the first

Anchors: the Prayer over the Offerings, sicut munera Abel; the Roman Canon’s munera pueri tui iusti Abel at Supra quae, under the branch in which Eucharistic Prayer I is chosen; and the Gospel’s enemy who sows in another man’s field.

Mechanism. Both prayers were read in the same Latin edition, and if Eucharistic Prayer I is used, this Sunday’s Mass names Abel’s gifts twice. Abel’s offering is the first in Scripture to be accepted—and the acceptance is what provokes his brother to kill him (Genesis 4:4–8). The Sunday’s own offering prayer asks that what individuals offer for God’s honour (singuli) may profit all for salvation (cunctis). Set beside the Gospel, where servants propose to improve the field by subtraction, the doubled invocation of Abel marks the exact point at which an accepted offering can become a motive for removing a rival.

Use. It gives a concrete test for religious rivalry inside a congregation, an institution, or a movement: when acceptance in worship starts to license the elimination of a competitor, the Mass’s own petition—each one’s gift for everyone’s salvation—has been reversed.

Limit. Eucharistic Prayer I is one option among several, and no evidence records which was used at any celebration of this Sunday; the offering prayer never mentions Cain, and Genesis 4 is not appointed. The Abel formula in the Canon is ancient and general, invoking accepted sacrifice rather than fratricide. Where another Eucharistic Prayer is chosen, only one naming occurs and the proposal’s doubling disappears.

4. The liturgy disarms the psalms it gives the assembly

Anchors: the Entrance Antiphon, which takes Psalm 54:6 and 8 and passes over verse 7, where the evils are turned back on the enemies; the Responsorial Psalm, which takes Psalm 86:5–6, 9–10, 15–16 and passes over verse 14, the violent band, and verse 17, where those who hate are confounded; and Matthew 13:29, where the servants are forbidden to act.

Mechanism. Three separate editorial acts converge. Two of them are modern selections in the Missal and the Lectionary, and one is inside the parable. Each removes from the assembly’s mouth or hands the power to act against an adversary—while the Gospel simultaneously insists that an adversary exists and has already acted. The assembly is therefore given the enemy as a fact and denied him as an object of petition.

Use. It answers, at the level of what is actually printed, the charge that eschatological patience is merely deferred vengeance: on this Sunday the books do not hand the congregation even the psalmist’s imprecations.

Limit. Pericope selection is often governed by length, singability, and the avoidance of difficult verses across many Sundays; no policy statement in the governing books ties these three omissions together, and other Sundays do appoint psalm verses about enemies. The convergence is real in this formulary and may not be generalized into a claim about the Lectionary as a whole.

5. When the parable is not explained, food is given instead

Anchors: the shorter Gospel form, Matthew 13:24–30, which stops before the disciples ask for the explanation; the first Communion Antiphon, Psalm 111:4–5, with its memorial of wonders and its food given to those who fear the Lord; and the Prayer after Communion’s petition to pass de vetustate into novitatem vitae.

Mechanism. Under the shorter form the assembly is dismissed without the identification of sower, field, enemy, and harvest, and without the answer the Alleluia had promised to the little ones. What the rite then supplies at Communion is not information but memory and food, and what it asks at the end is not clarity but a change of life. The liturgy’s response to an unexplained parable is thus structurally different in kind from the disciples’ request in the house.

Use. It offers a rule for preaching and for catechesis on hard texts: the incomprehension of an assembly is not necessarily a deficit to be closed by more explanation, and the rite already provides another kind of answer.

Limit. The shorter form is one of two appointed alternatives and no evidence records which was proclaimed; the first Communion Antiphon is likewise one of two, and the sung chant may be neither. A homily may supply exactly the explanation the shorter form omits. Under the longer form the explanation is given, and the proposal reduces to an observation about what Communion adds to it.

6. The psalm names the birds the Gospel leaves unnamed

Anchors: the Responsorial Psalm, Psalm 86:9–10, where all the nations God has made shall come and worship; the mustard parable’s closing clause at Matthew 13:32, where the birds of the air dwell in the branches (longer form only); and Wisdom 12:13, the God who has care of all.

Mechanism. Matthew’s final clause is borrowed imagery: in Daniel 4 and Ezekiel 17:23 the birds sheltering in a great tree are peoples sheltering in a kingdom. Matthew does not gloss them, and the Gospel of the day never says who they are. The psalm does—and it is the one element in the formulary that does. Officially the psalm answers the first reading, not the Gospel; but its universal verse is the only printed text of the day that states what the mustard tree is for. The correlation runs backwards by appointment and forwards by content.

Use. It shows that the day’s universalism is printed rather than preached in: an assembly that sings verse 9 has already been told what the sheltering branches mean, and a homily need not import the theme from elsewhere.

Limit. This is the weakest of the six, and one checked witness runs against it: expounding this very clause, Aquinas takes the birds as omnes qui habent animum in caelis—those whose minds are in heaven, not the nations—while Chrysostom applies the parable to the spread of the Gospel without identifying the birds at all. The mustard parable belongs to the longer form only, and the psalm’s own horizon is an individual petition. If the birds are souls rather than peoples, the proposal fails and only the general theme of extension survives.

Appendix: Liturgical Resolution

Rubric 6 of Tempus per annum directs that, of the two Communion antiphons, preference be given to the one that accords with the Gospel of the Mass. Neither Week XVI antiphon is drawn from Matthew 13, so that preference supplies no resolution here; the two remain open alternatives under the general norm.

Appendix: Scope and Qualifications

As of. Every source named in this guide was consulted, and every statement in it was checked, on 25 July 2026. Liturgical books, calendars, and official web texts change; nothing here is warranted beyond that date.

What this guide covers, and what it does not

It covers one Mass: the appointed textual variable parts of the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A, in the edition-locale named in the resolution appendix, together with both Gospel forms and both Communion antiphons. It does not cover Years B and C, the Ordinary Time weekdays of Week XVI, the Liturgy of the Hours, chant repertories, translations other than those named, or any diocesan, religious, parish, or church-proper overlay. Local selections listed as unresolved in the branch table were not established by any evidence available here and are not narrated as though they had been.

Rights ceilings—stated plainly

These are limits on what this guide may lawfully contain, and they are also limits on what it can therefore prove. They are not incidental.

Source and verification scope

Verification here means that the wording or fact was read by the authoring agent at the identified witness on 25 July 2026. It does not mean collation against a printed critical edition, a page-image facsimile, or an official delivery artifact, except where the record says so. The occurrence, colour, Lectionary number, Psalter week, and reading citations were read in the official 2026 liturgical calendar of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; the complete Lectionary 106 structure, including the response locus and both Gospel forms, was read in an archived capture of the conference’s own daily-readings page for the date, because the live page was not retrievable. The Latin formulary was read in the registered reproduction identified above, whose bytes matched the hash recorded in this repository’s source library. Patristic and scholastic loci, and every later work in the notable-and-quotable gallery, were read in the public transcriptions named in the references.

Search method and its boundary

Reception was sought first in direct commentaries and homilies on each appointed passage, then in the major Greek and Latin Fathers reachable in public English transcriptions, then in Thomas Aquinas’s scriptural commentaries and the Summa, and only then in later doctrinal or liturgical illumination. Searches were run over public transcription corpora and over the repository’s own tracked text of The City of God in both Dods’s English and the CSEL Latin. Negative results recorded in research/scope.md are bounded by that corpus, those languages, and this date; they are correctable and are never claims that no witness exists. No exhaustive patristic, manuscript, critical, musical, canonical, or local-calendar survey is claimed.

Registry, records, and unresolved global questions

This leaf adopts the stable postconciliar proper registry’s parent, formula key, slug, ordering, and ownership rules without modification and asserts no edition-specific delta. Its disposition and its dated occurrence are entered in this edition-locale’s registry directory, which evaluates only the targets it lists: every other target of the stable registry remains unassessed there, and no disposition for any of them is implied by this leaf’s existence. The identity and resolution record is instance/manifest.md; the composition audit is propers/verified.md; the reusable Missal audit is the Week XVI owner named in the resolution appendix; the operational research audit, reception matrix, precedent searches, and negative results are in research/scope.md and research/source-audit.md.

Review state

Completed: source research and same-day verification of every witness quoted; classification of every cross-element relation; multi-pass build with clean logs; the generation-metadata gate; and page-by-page visual review of the rendered document. Outstanding: collation of a named United States altar book; inspection of the 2008 reprint’s own pages; independent scriptural, patristic, Thomistic, liturgical, and theological review; and any ecclesiastical approval. Internal checking is not independent review, and production quality is not ecclesiastical approval. This guide is a study aid. It is not an official liturgical book, a translation, a critical edition, or a substitute for the approved books.

References

Liturgical books, norms, and calendars

• Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia (Typis Vaticanis, 2002), Tempus per annum, introductory rubrics 1–6 and Dominica XVI “per annum” (printed pp. 465–466), with the Dominica XXVI Collect and the Roman Canon’s Supra quae. Read in the exact digital reproduction registered in this repository’s source library, SHA-256 0b458944…5523d7, https://media.musicasacra.com/books/latin_missal2002.pdf.

• Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, “Variationes et additiones in reimpressione emendata ‘Missalis Romani’, editionis typicae tertiae,” Notitiae 44 (2008), pp. 368–387, https://www.cultodivino.va/content/dam/cultodivino/rivista-notitiae/2000/notitiae-44-(2008)/Notitiae-503-504-2008.pdf.

• General Instruction of the Roman Missal, nn. 48, 51, 61–62, 74, 87, 363, 365, 367, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20030317_ordinamento-messale_en.html.

• Lectionary: General Introduction, nn. 66–69, 103–107, https://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Resources/GIRM/Documents/Lectionary.pdf.

• Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, nn. 43–44 and the Table of Liturgical Days, https://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Resources/GIRM/Documents/GNLY.pdf.

• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2026 Liturgical Calendar, entry for 19 July 2026, https://www.usccb.org/resources/2026cal.pdf.

• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, daily readings for 19 July 2026 (Lectionary 106), archived capture of bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071926.cfm, https://web.archive.org/web/20260720132519/https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071926.cfm.

• Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis humanae, nn. 2, 11–12, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html.

Scripture

• The Holy Bible, Douay–Rheims (Challoner revision), public domain, read at https://drbo.org/: Psalms 53, 85, 110 (Vulgate numbering); Wisdom 12; Matthew 11 and 13; Romans 8; Apocalypse 3.

Patristic and scholastic witnesses

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.40.3, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103440.htm.

• Origen, Commentary on Matthew X.1–3, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/101610.htm.

• John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 38, 46, and 47, and Homily 14 on Romans, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200138.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200146.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200147.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210214.htm.

• Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 53, 85, and 110 (Vulgate numbering), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801054.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801086.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801111.htm.

• Augustine, Letter 130 to Proba, nn. 25–28, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102130.htm.

• Augustine, The City of God XX.5 and XX.9, in the Dods (1871) translation and the Hoffmann CSEL 40 Latin, both read in this repository’s tracked source-library artifacts.

• Augustine, Answer to the Letters of Petilian the Donatist III.2, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, read at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_IV/Donatist_Controversy/Answer_to_the_Letters_of_Petilian,_the_Donatist/Book_III/Chapter_2.

• Augustine, On Christian Doctrine III.25, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12023.htm.

• Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura, cap. 13, lect. 2–4 (Latin), https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/cml13.html.

• Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Romanos lectura, cap. 8, lect. 5 (Latin), https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/cro05.html.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 10, a. 8; q. 11, a. 3; q. 64, a. 2; q. 83, aa. 5 and 10; q. 157 (checked for Wisdom 12:18 with a negative result), English Dominican translation, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3010.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3011.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3064.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3083.htm, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3157.htm.

Later uses cited in the notable-and-quotable gallery

• Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd ed. (1771), preface, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essay_on_the_First_Principles_of_Government,_2nd_Edition_(1771)/preface.

• Doctrine and Covenants 86:6–7 (revelation dated 6 December 1832), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Doctrine_and_Covenants_(unsourced)/Section_86.

• P. G. Wodehouse, The White Feather (1907), ch. 12, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_White_Feather/Chapter_12.

• Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897), s.v. “Tares,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Easton%27s_Bible_Dictionary_(1897)/R-Z; Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary (1908), s.v. “Darnel,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Chambers%27s_Twentieth_Century_Dictionary_1908/D_Defect.

Last revised (UTC): 2026-07-26T02:03:00Z

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