Trinity Sunday
On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Apostles received, as we have seen, the grace of the Holy Ghost. In accordance with the injunction of their divine Master, they will soon start on their mission of teaching all nations and baptizing men in the name of the Holy Trinity. It was but right, then, that the solemnity which is intended to honor the mystery of One God in Three Persons should immediately follow that of Pentecost, with which it has a mysterious connection. And yet it was not till after many centuries that it was inserted in the Cycle of the Liturgical Year, whose completion is the work of successive ages. Every homage paid to God by the Church’s Liturgy has the Holy Trinity as its object. Time, as well as eternity, belongs to the Trinity. The Trinity is the scope of all Religion. Every day, every hour, belongs to It. The Feasts instituted in memory of the mysteries of our Redemption center in It. The Feasts of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints are but so many means for leading us to the praise of the God who is One in essence, and Three in Persons. The Sunday’s Office, in a very special way, gives us, each week, a most explicit expression of adoration and worship of this mystery, which is the foundation of all others and the source of all grace. This explains to us how it was that the Church was so long in instituting a special Feast in honor of the Holy Trinity. The ordinary motive for the institution of Feasts did not exist in this instance. A Feast is the memorial of some fact which took place at some certain time, and of which it is well to perpetuate the remembrance and influence. How could this be applied to the mystery of the Trinity? It was from all eternity, it was before any created being existed, that God liveth and reigneth, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If a Feast in honor of that Mystery were to be instituted, it could only be by the fixing some one day in the Year whereon the Faithful would assemble for the offering a more than usually solemn tribute of worship to the Mystery of Unity and Trinity in the one same divine Nature. The idea of such a Feast was first conceived by some of those pious and recollected souls, who are favored from on high with a sort of presentiment of the things which the Holy Ghost will achieve, at a future period, in the Church. So far back as the 8th Century, the learned monk Alcuin had had the happy thought of composing a Mass in honor of the mystery of the blessed Trinity. It would seem that he was prompted to this by the Apostle of Germany, Saint Boniface. That this composition is a beautiful one, no one will doubt that knows, from Alcuin’s writings, how full its author was of the spirit of sacred Liturgy; but after all, it was only a votive Mass, a mere help to private devotion, which no one ever thought would lead to the institution of a Feast. This Mass, however, became a great favorite, and was gradually circulated through the several Churches; for instance, it was approved of for Germany by the Council of Selingenstadt, held in 1022. In that 11th Century, however, a Feast properly so called of Holy Trinity had been introduced into one of the Churches of Belgium,—the very same that was to have the honor, later on, of procuring to the Church’s Calendar one of the richest of its Solemnities. Stephen, Bishop of Liége solemnly instituted the Feast of Holy Trinity for his Church, in 920, and had an entire Office composed in honor of the mystery. The Church’s law, which now reserves to the Holy See the institution of any new Feast was not then in existence; and Riquier, Stephen’s successor in the See of Liège, kept up what his predecessor had begun. The Feast became gradually adopted. The Benedictine Order took it up from the very first. We find, for instance, in the early part of the 11th Century, that Berno, the Abbot of Reichnaw, was doing all he could to propagate it. At Cluny, also, the Feast was established at the commencement of the same Century, as we learn from the Ordinarium of that celebrated Monastery, drawn up in 1091, and where we find mention of Holy Trinity day as having been instituted long before. Under the pontificate of Alexander the Second, who reigned from 1061 to 1073, the Church of Rome, which has frequently sanctioned the usages of particular Churches, by herself adopting them, was led to pass judgment upon this new institution. In one of his Decretals, the Pontiff mentions that the Feast was then kept in many places; but that the Church at Rome had not adopted it; and for this reason—that the adorable Trinity is, every day of the year, unceasingly invoked by the repetition of the words: Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto; as, likewise, by several other formulas expressive of praise. Meanwhile, the Feast went on gaining ground, as we gather from the Micrologus; and in the early part of the 12th Century, we have the learned Abbot Rupert, who may just be styled a Doctor in liturgical science, explaining the appropriateness of that Feast’s institution in these words: “Having celebrated the solemnity of the coming of the Holy Ghost we, at once, on the Sunday next following, sing the glory of the Holy Trinity; and rightly is this arrangement ordained, for after the coming of that same Holy Spirit, the faith in and confession of the name of Father Son and Holy Ghost immediately began to be preached, and believed, and celebrated, in Baptism.” In England, it was the glorious Martyr, St. Thomas of Canterbury, that established the Feast of Holy Trinity. He introduced it in his Archdiocese in the year 1162, in memory of his having been consecrated Bishop on the first Sunday after Pentecost. As regards France, we find a Council of Arles, held in 1260, under the presidency of Archbishop Florentinus, solemnly decreeing, in its sixth canon, the Feast of Holy Trinity to be observed with an Octave. The Cistercian Order, which was spread throughout Europe, had ordered it to be celebrated in all its Houses, as far back as the year 1230. Durandus, in his Rationale, gives us grounds for concluding that, during the 13th Century, the majority of the Latin Churches kept this Feast. Of these Churches, there were some that celebrated it not on the first, but on the last Sunday after Pentecost; others kept it twice—once on the Sunday next following the Pentecost Solemnity, and a second time on the Sunday immediately preceding Advent. It was evident from all this that the Apostolic See would finally give its sanction to a practice whose universal adoption was being prompted by Christian instinct. John the Twenty-second, who sat in the Chair of St. Peter as early as the year 1334, completed the work by a Decree wherein the Church of Rome accepted the Feast of Holy Trinity, and extended its observance to all Churches. As to the motive which induced the Church, led, as she is in all things, by the Holy Ghost, to fix one special day in the Year for the offering a solemn homage to the blessed Trinity, whereas all our adorations all our acts of thanksgiving, all our petitions, are ever being presented to It—such motive is to be found in the change which was being introduced at that period into the liturgical Calendar. Up to about the year 1000. the Feasts of Saints marked on the general Calendar and universally kept were very few. From that time, they began to be more numerous; and there was evidence that their number would go on increasing. The time would come when the Sunday’s Office, which is specially consecrated to the blessed Trinity, must make way for that of the Saints, as often as one of their Feasts occurred on a Sunday. As a sort of compensation for this celebration of the memory of God’s Servants on the very day which was sacred to the Holy Trinity, it was considered right that once, at least, in the course of the Year a Sunday should be set apart for the exclusive and direct expression of the worship which the Church pays to the great God, who has vouchsafed to reveal himself to mankind in his ineffable Unity and in his eternal Trinity. The very essence of the Christian Faith consists in the knowledge and adoration of One God in Three Persons. This is the Mystery whence all others flow. Our Faith centers in this as in the master-truth of all it knows in this life, and as the infinite object whose vision is to form our eternal happiness; and yet, we only know it because it has pleased God to reveal himself thus to our lowly intelligence, which, after all, can never fathom the infinite perfections of that God who necessarily inhabiteth light inaccessible. Human reason may of itself come to the knowledge of the existence of God as Creator of all beings; it may, by its own innate power, form to itself an idea of his perfections by the study of his works; but the knowledge of God’s intimate being can only come to us by means of his own gracious revelation. It was God’s good pleasure to make known to us his essence, in order to bring us into closer union with himself, and to prepare us, in some way, for that face-to-face vision of himself which he intends giving us in eternity: but his revelation is gradual; he takes mankind from brightness unto brightness, fitting it for the full knowledge and adoration of Unity in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. During the period preceding the Incarnation of the eternal Word, God seems intent on inculcating the idea of his Unity, for polytheism was the infectious error of mankind; and every notion of there being a spiritual and sole cause of all things would have been effaced on earth, had not the infinite goodness of that God watched over its preservation. Not that the Old Testament Books were altogether silent on the Three Divine Persons, whose ineffable relations are eternal; only, the mysterious passages which spoke of them were not understood by the people at large; whereas, in the Christian Church, a child of seven will answer them that ask him, that in God the Three Divine Persons have but one and the same nature, but one and the same Divinity. When the Book of Genesis tells us that God spoke in the plural, and said: Let Us make man to our image and likeness, the Jew bows down and believes, but he understands not the sacred text; the Christian, on the contrary, who has been enlightened by the complete revelation of God, sees under this expression the Three Persons acting together in the formation of Man; the light of Faith develops the great truth to him and tells him that within himself there is a likeness to the blessed Three in One. Power, Understanding, and Will, are three faculties within him, and yet he himself is but one being. In the Books of Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus, Solomon speaks in sublime language of him who is eternal Wisdom; he tells us, and he uses every variety of grandest expression to tell us, of the divine essence of this Wisdom and of his being a distinct Person in the Godhead;—but how few among the people of Israel could see through the veil? Isaias heard the voice of the Seraphim as they stood around God’s throne; he heard them singing, in alternate choirs, and with a joy intense because eternal, this hymn: Holy! Holy! Holy! is the Lord! but who will explain to men this triple Sanctus, of which the echo is heard here below, when we mortals give praise to our Creator? So again, in the Psalms and the prophetic Books, a flash of light will break suddenly upon us; a brightness of some mysterious Three will dazzle us; but it passes away, and obscurity returns seemingly all the more palpable; we have but the sentiment of the divine Unity deeply impressed on our inmost soul, and we adore the Incomprehensible the Sovereign Being. The world had to wait for the fullness of time to be completed; and then, God would send into this world his only Son, Begotten of him from all eternity. This his most merciful purpose has been carried out, and the Word made Flesh hath dwelt among us. By seeing his glory, the glory of the Only Begotten Son of the Father, we have come to know that in God, there is Father and Son. The Son’s Mission to our earth, by the very revelation it gave us of himself, taught us that God is eternally Father, for whatsoever is in God is eternal. But for this merciful revelation. which is an anticipation of the light awaiting us in the next life, our knowledge of God would have been too imperfect. It was fitting that there should be some proportion between the light of Faith and that of the Vision reserved for the future; it was not enough for man to know that God is One. So that we now know the Father, from whom comes, as the Apostle tells us, all paternity, even on earth. We know him not only as the creative power, which has produced every being outside himself; but guided as it is by Faith, our soul’s eye respectfully penetrates into the very essence of the Godhead, and there beholds the Father begetting a Son like unto himself. But in order to teach us the Mystery, that Son came down upon our earth. Himself has told us expressly that no one knoweth the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him. Glory, then be to the Son, who has vouchsafed to show us the Father! and glory to the Father, whom the Son hath revealed unto us! The intimate knowledge of God has come to us by the Son, whom the Father, in his love, has given to us. And this Son of God, who in order to raise up our minds even to his own Divine Nature, has clad himself, by his Incarnation, with our Human Nature, has taught us that he and his Father are one;—that they are one and the same Essence, in distinction of Persons. One begets; the other is begotten; the One is named Power; the Other, Wisdom, or Intelligence. The Power cannot be without the Intelligence, nor the Intelligence without the Power, in the sovereignly perfect Being: but both the One and the Other produce a Third term. The Son, who had been sent by the Father, had ascended into heaven, with the Human Nature which he had united to himself for all future eternity; and lo! the Father and the Son send into this world the Spirit who proceeds from them both. It was a new Gift, and it taught man that the Lord God was in Three Persons. The Spirit, the eternal link of the first Two, is Will, he is Love, in the divine Essence. In God, then, is the fullness of Being, without beginning, without succession, without increase—for there is nothing which he has not. In these Three eternal terms of his uncreated Substance is the Act. pure and infinite. The sacred Liturgy, whose object is the glorification of God and the commemoration of his works, follows, each year, the sublime phases of these manifestations, whereby the Sovereign Lord has made known his whole self to mortals. Under the somber colors of Advent, we commemorated the period of expectation, during which the radiant Triangle sent forth but few of its rays to mankind. The world, during those four thousand years, was praying heaven for a Liberator, a Messiah; and it was God’s own Son that was to be this Liberator, this Messiah. That we might have the full knowledge of the prophecies which foretold him, it was necessary that he himself should actually come:—a Child was born unto us, and then we had the key to the Scriptures. When we adored that Son. we adored also the Father who sent him to us in the Flesh. and to whom he is consubstantial. This Word of Life, whom we have seen, whom we have heard, whom our hands have handled in the Humanity which he deigned to assume, has proved himself to be truly a Person, a Person distinct from the Father, for One sends, and the Other is sent. In this second Divine Person, we have found our Mediator, who has reunited the creation to its Creator; we have found the Redeemer of our sins, the Light of our souls, the Spouse we had so long desired. Having passed through the mysteries which he himself wrought, we next celebrated the descent of the Holy Spirit, who had been announced as coming to perfect the work of the Son of God. We adored him and acknowledged him to be distinct from the Father and the Son, who had sent him to us with the mission of abiding with us. He manifested himself by divine operations which are especially his own, and were the object of his coming. He is the soul of the Church; he keeps her in the truth taught her by the Son. He is the source, the principle, of the sanctification of our souls; and in them he wishes to make his dwelling. In a word, the mystery of the Trinity has become to us not only a dogma made known to our mind by Revelation, but moreover a practical truth given to us by the unheard-of munificence of the Three Divine Persons; the Father, who has adopted us; the Son, whose brethren and joint-heirs we are; and the Holy Ghost, who governs us and dwells within us. Although the Sacrifice of the Mass is always celebrated in honor of the blessed Trinity, yet for this day the Church, in her chants, prayers, and lessons, honors in a more express manner the great Mystery, which is the foundation of our christian faith. A commemoration is, however, made of the first Sunday after Pentecost, in order not to interrupt the arrangement of the Liturgy. The color used by the Church, on this feast of Trinity, is white, as a sign of joy, as also to express the simplicity and purity of the divine essence. The Introit is not taken from holy Scripture. It is a formula of glorification in keeping with the Feast, and speaks of the blessed Trinity as the divine source of the mercies bestowed on mankind. Blessed be the holy Trinity, and undivided Unity: we will praise it, because it hath shown its mercy unto us. Ps. O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is thy Name in the whole earth. _℣. Gloria Patri... Blessed... In the Collect, holy Church asks for us firmness in the faith, whereby we confess Unity and Trinity in God. Faith is the first condition required for salvation; it is the first link in our union with God. It is with this Faith that we shall conquer our enemies, and overcome all obstacles. O almighty and everlasting God, who has granted Thy servants, in the confession of the truth faith, to acknowledge the glory of an eternal Trinity, and, in the power of majesty, to adore a Unity: we beseech thee that, by the strength of this faith, we may be defended from all adversity. Through... O God, the strength of such as hope in Thee: mercifully hear us calling on Thee: and since mortal weakness can do nothing without Thee, grant us the assistance of Thy grace; that, in observing Thy commandments, we may please Thee, both in will and action. Through... Lesson of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans, chap. 11. We cannot fix our thoughts upon the divine judgments and ways without feeling a sort of bewilderment. The eternal and infinite dazzle our weak reason; and yet this same reason of ours acknowledges and confesses them. Now, if even the ways of God with his creatures surpass our understanding, how can we pretend to discover of ourselves the inmost nature of this sovereign Being? And yet in this in-created essence, we do distinguish the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, from each other, and we glorify them. This comes from the Father’s having revealed himself by sending us his Son, the object of his eternal delight; it comes from the Son’s showing us his own Personality by taking our Flesh, which the Father and the Holy Ghost did not; it comes from the Holy Ghost’s being sent by the Father and the Son, and his fulfilling the Mission he received from them. Our mortal eye respectfully gazes upon these divine depths of truth, and our heart is touched at the thought that it is through his benefits to us that he has given us to know him, and that our knowledge of what he is came through what he gave us. Let us lovingly prize this Faith, and confidently wait for that happy moment when it will make way for the eternal vision of that which we have believed here below. The Gradual and Alleluia-Verse are full of joy and admiration, at the presence of that sovereign majesty who has vouchsafed to send forth his rays into the darkness of our minds. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who beholdest the deep, and sittest on the Cherubim. Sequel of the holy Gospel according to Matthew. Ch. XXVII. The mystery of the blessed Trinity, which was taught us by the mission of the Son of God into this world, and by the promise of a speedy sending the Holy Spirit, is announced to men by these solemn words, uttered by Jesus just before his ascension into heaven. He had said: He that shall believe, and shall be baptized shall be saved; but he adds that Baptism is to be given in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Henceforward man must not only confess the unity of God by abjuring a plurality of gods, but he must also adore a Trinity of Persons in Unity of Essence. The great secret of heaven is now a truth which is published through the whole world. But while humbly confessing the God whom we have been taught to know as he is in himself, we must likewise pay a tribute of eternal gratitude to the ever glorious Trinity. Not only has It vouchsafed to impress Its divine image on our soul by making her to Its own likeness; but in the supernatural order, It has taken possession of our being and raised it to an incalculable pitch of greatness. The Father has adopted us in his Son become Incarnate; the Word illumines our minds with his light; the Holy Ghost has chosen us for his dwelling; and this it is that is expressed by the form of holy Baptism. By those words pronounced over us, together with the pouring out of the water, the whole Trinity took possession of Its creature. We call this sublime marvel to mind as often as we invoke the Three divine Persons, making upon ourselves at the same time the sign of the Cross. When our mortal remains are carried into the house of God, there to receive the last blessings and farewell of the Church on earth, the Priest will beseech the Lord “not to enter into judgment with his servant;” and in order to draw down the divine mercy upon this Christian, who has gone to his eternity, he will say to the Sovereign Judge that this member of the human family was marked while in this life with the sign of the Holy Trinity. Let us respect this divine impress which we bear upon us; it is to be eternal; hell itself will not be able to blot it out. Let it, then, be our hope, our dearest title; and let us live for the glory of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen! (The Liturgical Year ~ Dom Prosper Gueranger)
Table of Contents
Considerations
Liturgy of the Mass
Introit
Collect
Commemoration of the First Sunday After Pentecost
Epistle
O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are his judgments, and how unsearchable his ways! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counselor? Or who hath first given to him, and recompense shall be made him? For of him, and by him, and in him, are all things: to him be glory for ever. Amen.Reflection on the Epistle
Gradual
℣. Blessed art thou, O Lord, in the firmament of heaven, and worthy of praise for ever. Alleluia, alleluia. ℣. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the God of our Fathers, and worthy of praise for ever. Alleluia.Gospel
At that time: Jesus said to His disciples: All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.Reflection on the Gospel