Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Ps. 33:12.<\/em> Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps. 33:2.<\/em> I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise shall be always in my mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Come, children, hearken to me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole of Psalm 33 is at drbo.org<\/a>, and the antiphon is the only line in it addressed to a room rather than to God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who through St. Joseph, Thy Confessor, didst graciously will to provide Thy Church with a new help for the training of youth in the spirit of understanding and holiness: grant, we beseech Thee, that, following his example and through his intercession, we may live and teach so as to acquire an everlasting reward. Through our Lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lesson from the Book of Wisdom.<\/strong> Wisdom 10:10-14<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n She conducted the just, when he fled from his brother’s wrath, through the right ways, and shewed him the kingdom of God, and gave him the knowledge of the holy things, made him honourable in his labours, and accomplished his labours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the deceit of them that overreached him, she stood by him, and made him honourable. She kept him safe from his enemies, and she defended him from seducers, and gave him a strong conflict, that he might overcome, and know that wisdom is mightier than all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She forsook not the just when he was sold, but delivered him from sinners: she went down with him into the pit. And in bands she left him not, till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom, and power against those that oppressed him: and shewed them to be liars that had accused him, and gave him everlasting glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps. 36:30-31.<\/em> The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment. The law of his God is in his heart, and his steps shall not be supplanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alleluia, alleluia. James 1:12.<\/em> Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been proved, he shall receive a crown of life. Alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Gradual is drawn from Psalm 36<\/a> and the Alleluia verse from the first chapter of James<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continuation of the holy Gospel according to St. Matthew.<\/strong> Matthew 18:1-5<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that hour the disciples came to Jesus, saying: Who thinkest thou is the greater in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them, and said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven. And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Begin with the question, because the question is the thing being corrected. Who thinkest thou is the greater in the kingdom of heaven?<\/em> They are not asking how to be good. They are asking for the ordering, and they assume there is one, and they assume they are in it somewhere worth knowing about. Christ’s answer does not adjust their position in that order; it walks in a person who is not in the order at all, and tells them to become as little children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at what he actually does. He calls a child and sets him in the midst of them, which in that gathering is the place a teacher stands. The child is given the floor and asked to say nothing. Nobody in the room can rank him, because a child in that society had no vote, no property, no standing to bring a case, and no way to win the argument they were having. To become as little children is to accept the position of the person who cannot win it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is a harder saying than the greeting-card version, and it is the only version the sentence will carry. Christ is not describing a temperament. He is describing a location, and the people told to become as little children are the ones with somewhere to fall from. Read in that room, to become as little children is a demand made of the powerful, and the whole force of it depends on who is being asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is why the common misreading has to be named and refused. Become as little children<\/em> has been preached as a demand for docility, as though the point were that adults should hand over their judgment and consent to be managed. Preached that way it tells people their questions are pride and their reasoning is rebellion. Test it the way this ministry tests everything, by what it grows in a real life. It grows rooms where grown adults have no say in their own formation, and that is not what it is to become as little children; that is rank speaking in a gentler vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also grows one particular habit worth naming outright, the habit of discussing a person in the third person while that person is sitting there. Disabled adults meet it constantly: the question addressed to whoever came with them, the voice pitched a register higher, the decision about their own body explained to a companion. The instrument is the very word Christ uses here, childlike bent into childish, so the verse is made to license the thing it forbids. Verse 4 settles it on grammar alone, whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child<\/em>, because to become as little children is something a person does to himself and never once in this passage something done to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I named disabled and chronically ill people three days ago on a different claim, when the ranking of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 was the text<\/a>. That argument was about worth, about a Church that grades its members and calls the grading order. This one is about standing, which is a separate injury and often arrives from people who mean well. You can believe someone is precious and still never let them answer for themselves, and to become as little children cannot possibly mean being kept as one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing here is an argument against being taught. The Introit is a teacher’s line and the Collect asks outright that we may live and teach, so this Mass plainly thinks instruction is a good. The difference is who is treated as a person while it happens. A teacher who says come, children, hearken to me is addressing people he expects to answer him one day, and a room arranged so that certain adults are never consulted has not learned to become as little children; it has only learned to sound like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one more move in the misreading worth stopping, because it hides inside a rule. Make this verse a law about submission and you have turned a sentence about descent into an instrument of rank, which is precisely the ordering the disciples were asking for. The letter killeth<\/a> was the text a few Sundays back, and this is the same mechanism working on a different verse. A saying can be quoted accurately and used backwards, and the command to become as little children is the saying that suffers it most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the Gospel turns, and it turns from being to receiving. And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.<\/em> Having asked the strong to become as little children, Christ immediately asks them to take in the person who already is one. The two halves are one instruction: go down, and while you are down there, notice who is beside you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Communion antiphon of this Mass drives it further, and it is the line everyone knows. Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God<\/em>, from the tenth chapter of Mark<\/a>. Forbid them not is the operative clause. Somebody in that scene was hindering, and they were not villains, they were disciples managing access to a busy teacher for reasons they took to be good ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is usually how hindering works. Nobody stands at the door announcing that certain people are unwelcome; the rule is about order, or about resources, and the effect is a room with a particular set of people missing from it. Most of those rooms were arranged by somebody who had been told to become as little children and heard it as a duty to keep things tidy. To become as little children and then to guard the door against them is the contradiction this Mass exists to catch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the Epistle, and I will say plainly that this is the same lesson the Church read on Tuesday for St. Louis IX<\/a>. Wisdom 10 is used across a range of confessors’ Masses and it comes round quickly. What changes today is what stands next to it, and read beside a command to become as little children the same verses do something else entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Against the parable of the pounds, Wisdom 10 was about a man handed a very little and told to trade. Against Matthew 18 the first verse is where you can see the difference: wisdom conducted the just, and shewed him the kingdom of God, and gave him the knowledge of the holy things<\/em>. Conducted, shewed, gave the knowledge. Wisdom in this passage is a teacher, and she is the first figure in the whole Mass to become as little children, though nobody made her do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Follow her method, because it is unusual. She goes down with him into the pit. She stays with him in his bands. She does not wait at the top of the hole for his character to improve and she does not send instructions down on a rope. She chose to become as little children in the exact sense the Gospel means, taking the position of the one with no standing, and only then did she teach him anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why the Church puts this reading on a schoolmaster’s feast, and it is a better theory of teaching than most of what gets published on the subject. Authority that will not descend cannot instruct; it can only issue. To become as little children is, among other things, the only teaching method that has ever worked on a frightened person. Anyone can test that without believing a word of the theology: think of the one person who actually taught you something difficult, and ask whether they explained it from above or sat down beside you in the mess of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a man who had taught scripture in the same parish for twenty years and then, over a long winter, stopped believing any of it. He did not announce it. He simply stopped teaching, and a year later he went to a Wednesday-night beginners’ class in a church across the city where nobody knew his face. The people at the table were learning which books came in what order, and he sat there certain he was about to be recognised and asked why on earth he was in this room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened instead was that a woman slid a printed handout across the table to him, the one with the books listed down the side, and said the first weeks are the worst. He took it and said thank you. He said afterwards that being a beginner had not been the humiliation he expected. The humiliation he had braced for was somebody telling him he should already know this, and nobody did, and that was the whole mercy of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I keep that story near this Gospel because it shows what the verse asks and what it does not. Nobody made him small. He had put himself at the table, which is what it is to become as little children, and the room’s only part was to receive him without a comment about his standing. To become as little children is a door you walk through, and the sin is standing in it. For anyone reading this who has lost their certainty and cannot say so out loud yet, that handout is the model, and nothing in this Gospel requires you to have your belief back before you are allowed to sit down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings us to the man whose feast this is. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s account of St. Joseph Calasanctius<\/a> has him born in 1556 at the castle of Calasanza in Aragon, the youngest of five, a doctor of laws from Lerida, ordained in 1583, and settled in Rome from 1592. Then the sentence the day is built on: in November 1597 he opened the first public free school in Europe, and within a short time about a thousand children were attending it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sit with the arithmetic. He was forty-one, foreign, and qualified in law, and what he did with that was gather street children who could not pay and teach them. A doctor of laws who does that has already chosen to become as little children in the plainest available way, and he did it before any order existed to make it respectable. In 1602 he set up community life at S. Andrea della Valle and laid the foundation of the Piarists, becoming the archive’s second founder of a new religious family<\/a> inside a month. He lived to ninety-one and died in Rome on the twenty-fifth of August, 1648, the same calendar day the offering for St. Louis fell on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The encyclopedia gives the opposition against him a single sentence: much envy and opposition arose against him and his new institute, but all were overcome in time. That is a short line for fifty years of work, and short lines like it are usually covering something. I will not fill it in with what I cannot show you. I will only point out that a man who spent half a century teaching poor children for nothing plainly did not have an easy time of it, and the Church’s own record admits the envy without explaining it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the Collect asks for is worth hearing against all of that, because it does not ask for schools. It asks that we may live and teach, in that order and joined in one clause, so as to acquire an everlasting reward. Live and teach. That is the same order the Epistle keeps when wisdom goes down into the pit before she opens her mouth, and the same order the Gospel keeps when it says become as little children before it says anything at all about greatness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the disciples’ question comes back to us unanswered, and it should. Who is the greater in the kingdom of heaven is still the question people carry into churches, wearing better clothes. Christ’s reply is to put a person with no standing in the middle of the room, tell everybody else to become as little children, and then to receive the one who already is. Nobody ranked the child, and to become as little children is still the only form that answer takes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Upon Thy altar we heap our offerings, O Lord, that they may win mercy for us through the prayer of him whom Thou hast given to help us. Through our Lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May God, who set a child in the midst and asked nothing of him but that he stand there, give you the grace to become as little children where you have power, and the safety of being received where you have none. May the wisdom that goes down into the pit find you in yours, and teach you there, and not wait for you to climb out first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you hold no faith at all, take the plain version. There is no version of learning anything that does not begin with being a beginner in front of other people, and the fear that keeps you out of the room is not modesty, it is rank protecting itself. Put yourself at the table, which is the whole of what it is to become as little children. Then hold the door for the next person, and say nothing at all about what they should already know.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCollect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n