Daily Offering · 24 September 2026 · Feria
Daily Offering: September 24, 2026 | So Great a Work
Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Thursday, September 24, 2026. Today is a feria of the seventeenth week after Pentecost, fourth class, and for the most part it is Sunday’s Mass said over again. One thing on it is new. The Church commemorates Our…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
The Word
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Thursday, September 24, 2026. Today is a feria of the seventeenth week after Pentecost, fourth class, and for the most part it is Sunday’s Mass said over again. One thing on it is new. The Church commemorates Our Lady of Ransom this morning, and that commemoration brings three prayers this ministry has never printed, one of which looks at people going into captivity to fetch other people out and calls it so great a work.
Wherever you are, you are welcome here. If you came into this Thursday with nothing to offer anybody, stay anyway, because the prayer we are adding today does not ask you to perform so great a work. It asks to be delivered by somebody who already has.
II
A Word on Today’s Propers
Today’s Mass is last Sunday’s Mass. The Introit, the Collect, the Epistle, the Gradual, the Gospel, the Secret and the Communion are the texts of the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, carried forward without a word altered. That is what a ferial day is. The Church does not write a new Mass for every weekday, and she lets the Sunday go on speaking until something interrupts it.
This week she has been interrupted three times already, so today is not the fourth copy of anything. Monday was St. Matthew and Tuesday was St. Thomas of Villanova, each with a full Mass of its own. Yesterday was Ember Wednesday, which has two lessons and two graduals and belongs to no other day. Today is the first time since Sunday that these texts have come round again, and tomorrow is Ember Friday, so this is the one ordinary Thursday sitting in the middle.
Because this is the second printing, the Epistle and the Gospel stand here as citations rather than as text. They were given whole on Sunday and the links go there and to the Douay. The Introit, the Collect and the Gradual are printed in full, because a second hearing of an antiphon is not padding and the day still has to be prayed.
What is genuinely new is the commemoration, and it is where the whole morning is going. Our Lady of Ransom carries its own Collect, its own Secret and its own Postcommunion, none of which has appeared on this site before. The Collect is the one that matters, and it contains the phrase we are going to stay with: so great a work.
III
Introit
Ps. 118:137; Ps. 118:124; Ps. 118:1.
Thou art just, O Lord: and thy judgment is right. Deal with thy servant according to thy mercy. Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. The antiphon is repeated.
IV
Collect
Let us pray.
Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that Thy people may avoid the temptations of the devil, and with pure minds follow Thee, the only God. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
V
The Commemoration
O God, Who for the deliverance of Christians from the power of the pagans, didst graciously will to enrich Thy Church by a new religious offspring through the most glorious Mother of Thy Son: grant, we beseech Thee, that by the merits and intercession of her whom we piously venerate as the founder of so great a work, we may be delivered from all our sins and from the captivity of the devil. Through the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
VI
Epistle
Paul on one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, read in full on Sunday.
VII
Gradual
Ps. 32:12; Ps. 32:6; Ps. 101:2.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord: the people whom he hath chosen for his inheritance. ℣. By the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth. Alleluia, alleluia. ℣. Hear, O Lord, my prayer: and let my cry come to thee. Alleluia.
The same two verses in the same order as on Sunday, the twelfth before the sixth.
VIII
Gospel
The two great commandments and the question about David’s son, read in full on Sunday.
The Offering
Daily Homily | So Great a Work
Three days running this week the Church has handed us a Mass with a name on it. Today she hands us Sunday’s again and pins one short prayer to the side of it, and…
The one new prayer on the calendar
Three days running this week the Church has handed us a Mass with a name on it. Today she hands us Sunday’s again and pins one short prayer to the side of it, and that prayer, the one that names so great a work, is the only sentence on the calendar this morning that has never been said here before.
Read it for what it actually claims. God enriched the Church with a new religious offspring, and the reason given is a practical one: the deliverance of Christians from the power of the pagans. Then the prayer turns to Mary and calls her the founder of so great a work, and asks that by her merits and intercession we be delivered from our sins and from the captivity of the devil.
The feast keeps the foundation of the Mercedarians, the Order of Our Lady of Mercy, begun at Barcelona in the early thirteenth century and legally constituted there in 1223 under King James of Aragon. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on slavery names St. Peter Nolasco as its founder. So great a work, in the prayer’s own accounting, has a date and an address.
What it does not have is a hero in the singular. It hands the title of foundress to Mary, resting on the tradition, which the encyclopedia records as belief, that she showed Peter Nolasco the order’s white habit. It calls the whole eight-hundred-year business so great a work without crediting the obvious human candidate.
What makes so great a work great
The prayer never says the work was great because it was large.
It was large. The Catholic Encyclopedia puts the order’s redemptions between 1218 and 1632 at just under half a million. But the Collect does not reach for a number. It says the work was so great a work because of what the people doing it agreed to.
Go and look at what they agreed to. Alongside the three ordinary vows, the founder added a fourth: to become a hostage in the hands of the infidels, if that is necessary for the deliverance of Christ’s faithful. That is a written undertaking to stay in the cell if the money runs out, and it is what makes so great a work great.
Most of what gets called great in religious life is measured the other way. We count the rescued. We publish the totals. So great a work, in this prayer, is measured by what the rescuer was prepared to lose.
There is a plain version of that for anyone who wants nothing to do with the theology. The test of a promise to help is what happens when helping turns expensive. Anybody will drive you to the station in good weather. So great a work begins at the hour the helper has to give something up.
A word Christians used, printed whole
Now the hard part.
The prayer says from the power of the pagans. The fourth vow says in the hands of the infidels. Those are the words as the Church wrote them and as this ministry prints them, unaltered, because a prayer edited to be comfortable is a prayer no one can check.
They are also words Christians used to sort the world into people worth going after and people who were the weather. Bloom does not use them and will not, and I am not going to turn and name anybody else’s faith with them, which is the move those words were built for. The test we run here we run on our own house: by their fruits you shall know them.
So run it. In the same centuries that produced so great a work, the same Mediterranean Christendom held captives of its own. The Catholic Encyclopedia says it outright: Spain and Italy once more had slaves, Turkish prisoners and people imported by conscienceless traders.
It grants that they were generally well treated, and in the same sentence still calls this revival of slavery, lasting until the seventeenth century, a blot on Christian civilization. Then, in the very next sentence, it reaches for the comparison that their number was very small beside the Christians held in Barbary. The finding stands; the softening arrives straight after it.
Hold both halves. The tradition that wrote so great a work into a prayer was also running the other trade, and then wrote itself a note explaining that its version was not so bad. That record does not argue the prayer away; it is why the prayer has to be read with the Gospel it sits underneath.
Who the ransom was not for
Today’s Gospel is the one about the two commandments, and the second is that thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Christ is asked for the greatest single commandment in the law and answers with two, saying of the second that it is like to the first, and that on the pair of them the whole law and the prophets depend.
Put that beside a Collect that specifies which captives are being fetched. The deliverance of Christians, it says. So great a work had a scope, and the scope had an edge, and on the far side of the edge were people the same prayer calls pagans and the same vow calls infidels.
I am not going to pretend the thirteenth century could have written it differently. The Gospel does something to it anyway, and has done the same to every sentence like it since. Your neighbour is whoever is in front of you. So great a work, tested by the second commandment, is great in what it did and unfinished in who it stopped at.
People coming out of prison are the captives the modern church has largely decided are not its captives. The money goes to the innocent, the letters go to the wrongly convicted, and the man who did the thing he was convicted of finds that no one has a fourth vow about him.
We named this group on Saturday, on whether a church will let itself be seen standing next to someone. This is a different question: not who we will be seen beside, but who so great a work sends the rescue party out to find.
Let me be exact about how that differs from what we said on Tuesday. Tuesday’s claim was about mercy’s supply, that there is no ledger and no running short. Today’s claim is narrower and more uncomfortable: it is about who the rescue party was briefed to look for, and a church can believe in unlimited mercy while keeping a very short list of addresses. So great a work is a question about the list.
Captivity in this Collect is not a description of anybody’s body, or anybody’s record, or anybody’s need for help. No one here is the captivity. The prayer asks deliverance from sin and from the devil for every person saying it, in the plural, with no one standing outside the group holding the keys.
Staying behind is so great a work
There is a story sometimes told of a woman who has slept on a folding bed in her mother’s front room since March. Everyone said six weeks. It is September.
She took it because the only other person who could have done it would have lost a job, her mother would have lost the flat, and somebody had to be in the building at night. She has a bus timetable on the chair beside the bed and knows the last one from memory. Ask her what she is doing and she will say she is helping out for a bit, which is what she said in March.
No one has ever called that so great a work, and she would be embarrassed if anybody did. But look at the shape of it against the fourth vow. She did not send money. She did not organise a rota and go home. She put her own body in the room so that somebody else could leave it, which is the entire mechanism the Mercedarians wrote down, minus the boat.
There is no rescue in her story. Her mother is not better, the job was kept, and the folding bed is still there. So great a work does not always end with anyone getting out, and the prayer does not promise that it will.
That is the half of this the world is worst at seeing. We are fluent in the language of rescue and almost mute about the language of staying. A rescue has a photograph at the end of it. So great a work, most of the time, looks like a bus timetable on a kitchen chair.
If none of the theology is yours, the argument survives the loss of it intact. The people who have actually changed your life stayed past the point where staying cost them something, and did not require you to be the deserving kind of person first. That is so great a work in the only terms that can be checked from outside.
There is a warning here for anyone who hears all this as an instruction to go and be heroic. The fourth vow was taken by a small number of professionals who had arranged their whole lives around one task. It is not a standard held over ordinary people. So great a work is being done on your behalf in this Collect, not demanded of you by it.
Which leaves the honest question for a Thursday. Where has the edge of your own list quietly settled, whose name is on the far side of it, and what would it take this week to move the line by one person? So great a work started, historically, with somebody deciding that a particular stranger was his to go and get.
↑ The order resumes below.
X
Secret
O Lord, we humbly pray Thy Majesty that the holy rite which we are celebrating may free us from past and future sins. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
Of the commemoration.
Through Thy mercy, O Lord, and by the intercession of blessed Mary, ever Virgin, the Mother of Thine only-begotten Son, may this offering profit us for prosperity and peace, now and forevermore. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
XI
The Holding
May God deliver you this Thursday from everything that has you held, and may the ones who come and get you out arrive earlier than you expect. You are not required to be anybody’s rescue party today, and nothing is being asked of you that you do not already have. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
And if that language is not yours, take the plain version and keep it. Somebody is on the far side of your own short list this week, and moving the line by one name is so great a work cut down to the size of one afternoon. You do not have to feel anything about it first.
XII
Frequently Asked Questions
Because it is a ferial day, the fifth day of the week following the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. In the 1962 Roman Rite most weekdays carry no propers of their own and the preceding Sunday’s Mass is said again unchanged. This is the first time this week those texts have returned, since Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday each had a Mass of their own.
Because they were given in full on Sunday, four days ago, and the citations are linked both to that Mass and to the Douay-Rheims text. This is the second printing, so a full second copy of the Epistle and Gospel inside four days would add length and nothing else. The Introit, the Collect and the Gradual do appear in full, along with the commemoration’s own prayers.
No. Only seven vigils survived the reforms of 1955 into the 1962 Missal and today is not one of them, so this is not the eve of anything. Only three octaves survived, and none of them falls in September. Tomorrow is Ember Friday, which is a fast day of the September Ember week rather than a vigil.
It is the phrase the commemoration’s Collect uses for the founding of the Order of Our Lady of Mercy, whose members went into North Africa to ransom Christian captives. The prayer calls Mary the founder of so great a work rather than crediting the men who organised it. The greatness it names is in what the ransomers risked, not in the size of the rescue.
Because editing a liturgical text to make it comfortable makes it uncheckable, and because the honest thing is to print the word and then say what we think of it. Christians used that word to divide the world into people worth fetching and people who were not. Bloom does not use it. We test the harm against our own tradition’s record and against no one else’s faith.
The prayer asks for deliverance rather than ordering you to achieve it, which is a statement about who carries the weight and not a claim that your own choices are irrelevant. Nothing here says that what you do makes no difference. It says you are not required to be your own rescue party, and that the request is made for the whole room at once rather than for the deserving part of it.
It is the title under which the Mercedarians, the Order of Our Lady of Mercy, honour the Blessed Virgin as their foundress. The order was legally constituted at Barcelona on 10 August 1223 by King James of Aragon, and the Catholic Encyclopedia names St. Peter Nolasco as its founder. The feast keeps the foundation itself, and was extended to the whole Latin Church in 1696 and moved to 24 September.
No. The argument holds with no theology attached. A promise to help is only worth what it is worth at the hour helping turns expensive, and every group draws a line around whom it will go and get. In one plain sentence: find the edge of your own short list, and move it by one name.
Faith in Bloom is the daily liturgical work of Bloom Ministries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and it is free to read and always will be. If it has been worth something to you and you are able, you can give once or give monthly below. Sending a post to one person who needs it does real work too.
Propers for the feria of the seventeenth week after Pentecost and for the commemoration of Our Lady of Ransom are taken from the 1962 Roman Missal. Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims Bible. Historical details of the Order of Our Lady of Mercy are taken from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
The liturgical spine of Faith in Bloom is The New Marian Missal for Daily Mass by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M., S.T.D., Regina Press, Imprimatur 1961. Faith in Bloom is offered by Bloom Ministries in the Independent Catholic tradition and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
