Today’s homily: St Hermenegild of Seville

The Crown Refused, the Crown Bestowed: The Martyrdom of St Hermenegild

MASS Protexísti me, Deus,
LESSON Wisdom 5:1-5
GOSPEL St Luke 14:26-33
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV

Beloved in Christ,

On this feast of St Hermenegild, martyr, still, of course, within Eastertide—Alleluia has only just returned to our lips—yet here Holy Mother Church sets before us a martyr. Not a martyr of pagan Rome, but of a Christian kingdom disfigured by error. Not a victim of ignorance, but a witness to truth in the very heart of a divided Church.

The Introit speaks in his voice: “Thou hast protected me, O God, from the assembly of the malignant.” And we must understand this rightly. The assembly was not foreign, but familiar. It was the court, the kingdom, even the household into which our saint was born.

Hermenegild lived in the sixth century in the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania, a realm outwardly Christian yet inwardly torn by the Arian heresy. His father, Leovigild, ruled a land where Christ was named but not truly confessed. For Arianism does not deny Christ outright, but it diminishes Him. And in diminishing Him, it destroys the very possibility of salvation. For if the Son is not true God, He cannot restore man to God.

Yet grace entered quietly, as it so often does—not by force, but by fidelity. Through the witness of his Catholic wife, and under the guidance of Leander of Seville, Hermenegild was brought to the fullness of the faith. Here is the beginning of all true reform: not in structures, but in souls.

But truth demands a price.

When his conversion became known, the king did not rejoice. He condemned. What should have been recognized as fidelity was judged as rebellion. His father being an Arian. And so the father became persecutor. The prince became prisoner. And the palace gave way to chains.

For two years, Hermenegild resisted, not merely with arms, but with conviction. And when at last he surrendered under promise of pardon, that promise was betrayed. He was cast into a foul dungeon in Seville, there to be broken—if not by torture, then by persuasion.

The Epistle that we heard reminds us that God will confound His enemies in those who appear to the world to be weak. And Hermenegild, imprisoned by his father, did to all intents and purposes appear weak. Stripped of all his titles, stripped of all his finery, stripped of all his privileges and rights as a prince of the realm, left to rot in a dungeon—he might indeed, of course, appear weak.

And yet, while the Church kept vigil during Easter night in the year of our Lord 585, awaiting the proclamation of the Resurrection, his father sent an Arian bishop to Hermenegild’s dungeon. He came not with chains, but with a subtler weapon: compromise disguised as mercy. “Receive communion from my hands,” the Arian bishop said, “and you shall live. Accept a diminished Christ, and you may keep your life.”

Here we must speak with theological precision. The sacrament cannot be separated from the faith it expresses. The unity of the Eucharist is the unity of the Church, and the unity of the Church is the unity of truth. To receive from one who denies the divinity of Christ is not merely an irregularity. It is a rupture. For the sign is severed from the reality it signifies. As Augustine of Hippo teaches, “No man eats that flesh unless he first adore. We should sin were we not to adore.” And how can one adore what one does not truly confess?

Thus Hermenegild refused. He refused not out of defiance, but out of reverence; not out of pride, but out of fidelity. He would not unite himself to a sacrament emptied of truth, nor receive peace at the cost of Christ.

He chose instead to kneel for the sword. And in that moment, the Gospel was fulfilled in him. The heir to a temporal kingdom becomes the witness to an eternal one.

The Alleluia proclaims, “Thou hast set on his head a crown of precious stones.” The world stripped him of one crown; Christ bestowed another. And behold the mystery of Easter: while the blade fell in the darkness of a prison cell, a light shone forth—seen by the faithful keeping vigil nearby—signifying that the martyr had already entered into the glory of the Resurrection. For martyrdom is not defeat. It is participation in the Paschal mystery, the Paschal victory.

As Gregory the Great testifies, the merits of the martyr do not end with his death, but bear fruit in the conversion of many. Even the hardened heart of King Leovigild was shaken. On his deathbed, he urged his other son, Reccared, to seek out the Catholic faith. And within a few short years, in the great turning of the nation, the Visigothic kingdom itself would be reconciled to the Church, and Arianism cast out of Spain.

One martyr, one act of fidelity, one refusal to compromise—and a nation is converted.

Dear faithful, this is no distant history. It is a mirror held up to our own age.

For we too are offered a false peace. We too are told, “Soften the doctrine, diminish the truth, accept a Christ remade in the image of the world, and you may keep your place, your comfort, your approval.” But it is a lie.

A diminished Christ cannot save.
A compromised truth cannot sanctify.
A divided faith cannot endure.

The martyr answers across the centuries: “Better the dungeon with Christ than the palace without Him. Better the loss of all things than the loss of truth. Better death in fidelity than life in falsehood.”

The Communion antiphon declares, “The just shall rejoice in the Lord”—not because they are spared suffering, but because their suffering is united to Him who by dying destroyed our death and by rising restored our life.

And so the choice remains before us—not once, but daily; not always in blood, but always in truth.

You know, the great shame of our age is that despite the fact that we have two thousand years’ worth of Christian history, scholarship, edification, and study, that in our own age the same heresies that abounded in the past are still here. Arianism is still here, together with Gnosticism and dualism and various other forms of heresy that, in various ways, diminish either Christ and our understanding of Him, or His divine revelation.

You hear this all the time, sadly, amongst so many Christians who say daft things—probably in ignorance. But many—those who are vocal, those who preach in pulpits and publish volumes—are not ignorant. Those who put words into our Lord’s mouth, those who extrapolate from His teachings things that cannot be made to reconcile with His obvious intentions.

Our Lord is the revelation of God’s will, and this is made plain in the Scriptures. Contrary to these heretical popular beliefs, the Bible is not a book of contradictions. It is a library of cross-references and affirmations—cross-references not just within texts, but across periods of history, of time and place, of different people.

A recent study discovered thousands of cross-references within the Scriptures, which surely betray that such writings, over such an extended period of time, and yet so consistent—especially in those cross-references with each other, despite different authors, despite different scribes’ lives—can only be of, and only reflect, one mind. And that mind, of course, is Christ. That mind is the revelation of God’s will in Him, through Him, with Him, by Him.

There is another world religion that espouses this heresy of Arianism, that diminishes the Son of God, that says He is not divine, says He is not the Son of God, and thus, of course, consequentially denies the salvation that Christ offers.

But there are so many in the Church today who will say, “Oh, Jesus was a great teacher. He was the Mahatma Gandhi of His time. He was the Buddha of His age.” And for sure, you can find all sorts of cross-references between some aspects of our Lord’s teachings and other recognized spiritual masters of other faiths and religions.

You will have heard of the Golden Rule—“do unto others as you would be done by”—which so many Christians today interpret as the social gospel, and claim is the second of the two commandments that our Lord gives in the great summary of the law. The first, of course, the first and greatest commandment: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And the second is namely this: to love your neighbor as yourself.

But the problem is that second commandment—people forget that our Lord says it is like unto the first. Meaning the true way to love oneself and one’s neighbor is only in, and with, and through God. We are to love one another as God loves us.

Which means being all merciful, being forgiving, being all charitable, all love ourselves. It does not mean being nice to others so that others are nice to you. That is not what is meant when our Lord says, “love your neighbor as yourself.”

To love ourselves means to desire the greatest good for ourselves. And the greatest good for ourselves is to live in love and in union with God. So the whole purpose of the second commandment reflects the first.

We are to love as God loves.

Elsewhere, in St John’s Gospel, our Lord says to His disciples, “Love one another as I have loved you. For by this will the world know that you are My disciples, if you have love one for another.” And elsewhere, our Lord explains how that love works: how we are to turn the other cheek when we are offended; how we are to forgive seventy times seven; how we are to give the cloak from our back; how we are to share what we have with those who have need.

But to do so remembering God’s love.

They love much who have been forgiven much.

And remember, the whole purpose of the Gospel is redemption. It is about salvation. Christ comes that we might live for eternity with Him, with God, having been reconciled to the Father.

It is not just about being nice.

It is about sacrificial living, sacrificial loving, sacrificial giving. Just as Christ offered Himself upon the Cross for our redemption, so are we to love one another as He loves.

But so many diminish the Gospel, diminish Christ, diminish His teaching. They say, “Oh, it’s just about being nice. To be a Christian is to be nice. Jesus was nice. The Gospel is nice.” Anything we do not like, anything we deem unpleasant or inconvenient, we ignore—because “love is love.”

And yet the Gospel tells us: God is love. The Gospel tells us Jesus is the manifestation of God’s love. And God’s love in Christ was made manifest upon the Cross.

That is how we are called to love: to the annihilation, to the detriment, to the humiliation of ourselves.

There is, my brothers and sisters, a heresy abroad in the Church today—and when I say the Church, I mean all of Christendom, certainly all the major denominations. Heresy abounds. Heterodox beliefs abound. And they go unchecked.

Amongst the faithful, they occur largely from ignorance, such as the poverty of catechesis today. But in the hierarchy, they are advanced by those who call themselves progressives.

Be vigilant. Be sober. Be watchful.

As St Paul says to Timothy, as indeed all the New Testament authors advise the faithful, there is no opportunity for us as true Christians to relax.

Look for orthodoxy.
Remain steadfast in the faith—
the faith for which martyrs like Hermenegild gave their lives.

The world crowns those who conform to it.
Christ crowns those who refuse.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

---

Homilies Archive

Mass Propers

DAILY MASS ONLINE

One of the earliest online apostolates dedicated to the Traditional Latin Mass, Old Roman TV began broadcasting the Holy Sacrifice on the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 2008. During the COVID-19 pandemic, additional programming — devotions, catechesis, and conferences — was added to support the faithful in prayer and formation.

Support the daily Holy Mass on Old Roman TV by offering a Mass intention — for loved ones, thanksgiving, or the repose of souls. Your intention helps sustain the sacred liturgy and brings grace to those you remember before God’s altar.

Devotional Articles