Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Tuesday, September 22, 2026, the feast of St. Thomas of Villanova, Bishop and Confessor, third class, with a commemoration of Ss. Maurice and his Companions, Martyrs. Nothing is displaced, and the day’s one new prayer asks God to pour out the riches of Thy mercy on everybody who asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every reading appointed for this morning has been read here before. That request is stranger than it sounds. It uses the vocabulary of wealth for the thing being handed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not a portion of mercy, not sufficient mercy, but the riches of Thy mercy, which is the word you would use about a treasury. And it is said on the feast of a man whose whole public reputation was for giving money away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wherever you are this morning, you are welcome here. There is no means test anywhere in today’s prayer. Whatever you brought with you, the riches of Thy mercy are being asked for on your behalf, and no one is going to check your paperwork at the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the Common of a Confessor Bishop, and this ministry has been here before. Every one of the four read propers has stood in this space already, though not all of them on the same days, and the honest thing is to say which.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Introit, the Lesson and the Gradual go back to St. Charles Borromeo<\/a> last November, and they returned on St. Martin of Tours<\/a>, on St. Gregory the Wonderworker<\/a>, and on St. Lawrence Justinian<\/a> seventeen days ago. That makes this the fifth outing here for those three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Gospel has a shorter list. Borromeo printed it, St. Nicholas<\/a> printed it in December, and Lawrence Justinian printed it this month. Martin and Gregory each had a Gospel of their own, so the two lists are not the same list, and a run that cleared this day on the Introit alone would have got the Gospel wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I am not going to print them all again. Another full copy of the same Lesson and the same parable inside eleven months would be length pretending to be reverence. The citations stand where the propers would, each carrying its own reference, and then the prayers in full, because a day still has to be prayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is genuinely new is the Collect, which belongs to Thomas of Villanova and to no other day in the year, and the commemoration of Ss. Maurice and his Companions, which this ministry has never handled at all. One prayer no one here has said, asking for the riches of Thy mercy, and one company of martyrs we have never once mentioned. Everything after this runs on those two, and the riches of Thy mercy is where it starts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecclus. 45:30;<\/a> Ps. 131:1.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Statuit antiphon, on the covenant of peace and the dignity of priesthood, printed in full last November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us pray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who didst endow blessed Thomas, Thy Bishop, with the virtue of a special pity for the poor: we beseech Thee, through his intercession, generously to pour forth the riches of Thy mercy upon all those who pray to Thee. 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Ss. Maurice and his Companions, Martyrs.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that the solemn feast of Thy Martyrs Mauritius and his Companions may gladden us, so that we who rely on their intercession may joyfully celebrate the anniversary of their martyrdom. 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Ecclus 44:16-27; 45:3-20<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lesson for a great priest, which the Missal draws together out of two chapters rather than reading either straight through. Given whole in November and not reprinted here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecclus. 44:16; Ecclus. 44:20; Ps. 109:4.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Behold a great priest, with the Alleluia verse on the order of Melchisedech, printed in full seventeen days ago.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Matt 25:14-23<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The parable of the talents, cut deliberately at the second commendation and printed in full last November<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the Collect once more and see how little of the man it keeps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who didst endow blessed Thomas, Thy Bishop, with the virtue of a special pity for the poor.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n One virtue. That is the whole of the biography the Church is willing to put in the prayer, and on the strength of that one line she asks for the riches of Thy mercy for everybody else in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a great deal more available to her. The Catholic Encyclopedia<\/a> records that he entered the University of Alcal\u00e1 at sixteen, that he filled the chair of arts, logic and philosophy there from 1514, that he joined the Augustinians in 1516 and said his first Mass at Christmas 1518. He declined the See of Granada, was nominated to Valencia in 1544 and accepted only under obedience, and governed there eleven years until his death in 1555.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of that is in the Collect. Not the chair, not the refusal, not the eleven years. The Church looked at a professor, a friar and an archbishop, picked out the one thing he did with money, and built the request for the riches of Thy mercy on top of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to mark the difference from yesterday carefully, because we were on adjacent ground and the claim is not the same one. Yesterday’s<\/a> argument was about what people do with a text they already hold. Today’s is not about knowledge at all. A man who taught logic for years is commemorated this morning for none of it, and what the prayer asks to have poured out is the riches of Thy mercy, which is not a thing anybody can be taught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The request itself runs on a metaphor that should not work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We beseech Thee, through his intercession, generously to pour forth the riches of Thy mercy upon all those who pray to Thee.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Riches. On the feast of a man who emptied his accounts by policy. The prayer takes the vocabulary of accumulation and spends it on the one commodity that cannot be hoarded, and the riches of Thy mercy turn out to be the only wealth in the sentence that does not shrink when it is handed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then see what happens to the recipients. The Collect does not ask for mercy on the worthy, or on the ones who have got themselves straight, or on the ones who have been coming a while. It asks for the riches of Thy mercy upon all those who pray to Thee, and that is the entire qualification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You ask. That is the test. There is no second clause, and the riches of Thy mercy are not held back pending one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which means the prayer has quietly refused to do the sorting that almost every charitable institution in history has done. No deserving and undeserving, no separate queue, no file to be reviewed first. The riches of Thy mercy go out on the same terms to the person with a clean record and the person who has made the same mistake eleven times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if none of the theology is yours, the shape still holds. Help that must be earned is a wage with a nicer name. Help that arrives because you asked for it is the only kind that reaches people whose lives are too disordered to qualify for anything, and the riches of Thy mercy are the religious name for help handed over without the audit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a word in this Collect that needs handling, and I would rather do it directly than hope no one minds it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A special pity for the poor.<\/em> In current English, pity is a word that looks down. It is what you feel about somebody when you have already settled that you are not them, and a prayer about the poor running on that feeling would be worth refusing outright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Latin underneath it is misericordia<\/em>, which is the same word the prayer uses two lines later for the riches of Thy mercy. One word, not two, and the whole difficulty goes out with that fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So whatever the Church is asking God to pour out on all of us this morning is the identical thing she says Thomas had toward the poor. That makes the poor of that sentence not a separate class being looked down on, but the model for how everybody in the room is about to be treated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That matters for anybody who has been on the receiving end of a kindness with a posture attached. You are inside this prayer, in the same clause as everyone else, and the riches of Thy mercy are not being handed down to you from a height.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Say it plainly. No one praying this Collect is being asked to feel sorry for anybody. They are being asked to want for other people exactly what they are asking for themselves, which is the riches of Thy mercy and nothing smaller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the part of his record I cannot stop thinking about, and it is documented rather than devotional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The encyclopedia says his palace gate was always open, and that as many as four to five hundred people a day got their meals at his hands. That is the famous part, and it is the part that gets painted. The better part is what he did about the people who never came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In every district of the city he had almoners appointed, with orders especially to search out the respectable persons who shrank from asking alms. Not to wait for them. To go and find the ones whose shame was stronger than their hunger, and to get money, food and clothing to them before they had to perform their need for anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For workmen, farmers and mechanics he did something different again. He replenished their stock and brought them tools, which is not a meal; it is the means of never needing one from him again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read that back as a definition. The riches of Thy mercy, worked out in a city budget, look like a gate no one is screened at, a staff whose whole job is to find the people too proud to queue, and a box of tools so the arrangement can end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And see which of those three is the expensive one. Bread is cheap and a gate costs nothing to leave open, so neither of those is where the riches of Thy mercy get expensive. Paying people to walk a city looking for those who are actively hiding from you is a real line in a budget, and it buys no gratitude at all, because the ones it reaches never had to come and be seen. He did it anyway, and that is what the riches of Thy mercy cost when somebody actually has to fund them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story people who do re-entry work will tell you, in one version or another, about the first week out. A man leaves with a bus ticket and whatever the state calls gate money, and the first office he walks into wants the account: what he did, how long, whether he has really changed. He gives it, because he has to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then he walks into a second office, and the woman behind the desk asks him what size boots he takes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the whole story and it does not resolve. He got boots. But he will tell you it was the second question that undid him, because it was the first one all week that assumed he was going to work rather than asking him to prove he intended to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One desk wanted the narrative first. The other behaved as though the riches of Thy mercy had already been settled and the only outstanding issue was footwear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will not stretch it further than it goes. Boots are not absolution and a kind clerk is not a theology, and the man in that story would be the first to say the week was still the week. What that second desk had, and the first one did not, is the thing this Collect asks for on everybody at once, and it is the reason the almoners were sent out walking instead of waiting at the gate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the commemoration, and it asks more honesty of us than a calendar usually does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ss. Maurice and his Companions are kept today for a martyrdom at Agaunum, which the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Agaunum<\/a> places in the diocese of Sion, in Switzerland. The account handed down says a legion called from Africa was ordered to sacrifice and refused; every tenth man was killed; a second order and a second refusal brought a second decimation, and then a general massacre.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIntroit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Commemoration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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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
A bishop remembered for one virtue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The riches of Thy mercy, and who qualifies<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Pity is not the same as contempt<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What the almoners were told to find<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A company we cannot count<\/h3>\n\n\n\n