On 21 September the traditional Roman Rite celebrates St Matthew not simply as the converted publican of Capharnaum, but as Apostle, Evangelist and, according to the received Roman tradition, martyr. The older liturgy surrounds his feast with an apostolic Office, a proper Vigil and a Mass whose texts move from the wisdom of the just man to the four living creatures of Ezechiel, from Christ’s call at the custom-house to the healing medicine of the Sacrament. Matthew’s story is therefore more than an example of dramatic conversion. It is a study in grace: Christ sees, calls and transforms; Matthew, truly free under that grace, gets up and follows.
The feast of St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, on 21 September is a Double of the Second Class in the traditional Roman calendar, with red vestments, First Vespers, the festal Office, Gloria, Creed and the Preface of the Apostles. In the older Roman books it is preceded on 20 September by the Vigil of St Matthew, whose Mass begins Ego autem sicut oliva — “But I, as a fruitful olive tree in the house of God, have hoped in the mercy of my God.” The Vigil disappeared from ordinary Catholic experience with the twentieth-century simplifications of the calendar, but its presence in the older rite is significant. The Church did not arrive at the apostolic feast without preparation: the liturgical day before it was already turned towards the Apostle whose conversion had itself begun in mercy.¹
At Matins the feast draws upon the Common of Apostles, with the hagiographical lessons proper to St Matthew and, in the third nocturn, the traditional commentary upon the Gospel of his calling. The Mass, Os justi, takes its name from Psalm 36: “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart.” The Church has chosen those words for a man whose mouth and pen became instruments of the inspired Gospel. His feast is therefore not primarily the commemoration of an interesting biblical personality. The liturgy honours one of the Twelve, a foundation stone of the apostolic Church, an Evangelist through whom the Church received the written word of God, and a witness whom Roman tradition honours in the red of martyrdom.¹
Nuntiatoria’s treatment of St Matthew last year concentrated chiefly upon the promptness of his response to Christ.² That remains essential, but the older liturgy permits the feast to be seen more deeply. Matthew’s rising from the place of toll is not merely an attractive moral example of decisiveness. It reveals the character of grace, the Church’s understanding of apostolic vocation, the relation of mercy to sacrifice, and the transformation by which a sinner is not merely pardoned but made useful to the Kingdom of God.
The historical information that can be securely recovered about Matthew is limited. Benedict XVI began his own catechesis on the Apostle by admitting that the evidence is “scarce and fragmentary”. The Synoptic Gospels nevertheless give us the decisive facts. Matthew appears among the Twelve. The first Gospel identifies him specifically as “Matthew the publican”; Mark and Luke relate the closely corresponding calling of a tax collector named Levi. The longstanding Christian tradition identifies the two men, and Benedict XVI followed that identification.³
The setting appears to have been Capharnaum, where Matthew or Levi was engaged in the collection of tolls. The office carried more than the modern associations of tax administration. Such collectors belonged to a fiscal system regarded with resentment, could profit from the exactions they administered, and were socially grouped in the Gospel with those regarded as public sinners. Benedict XVI notes both the impurity associated with the money they handled and their collaboration with an alien political authority. This does not prove that Matthew personally committed every abuse associated with his profession, but it explains why the Gospel’s designation of him as a publican was morally and socially charged.³
It was while he was still sitting at that table that Christ called him. St Matthew records the event with extraordinary economy: “And when Jesus passed on from thence, he saw a man sitting in the custom house, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he rose up and followed him.” Matthew 9:9–13 — Douay-Rheims St Luke adds the detail which exposes the cost of the response: “And leaving all things, he rose up and followed him.” Luke 5 — Douay-Rheims
The brevity matters. The Evangelists do not give us an interior monologue in which Matthew weighs the advantages of discipleship against the securities of his present life. Nor do they suggest that following Christ required no cost. St John Chrysostom sees in the episode both the discernment of Christ, who knew the moment at which Matthew would answer, and the obedience of Matthew once that call was made. Christ knew the heart of the man whom He summoned; Matthew did not turn the summons into an indefinite process of negotiation.⁴
St Jerome finds another lesson in the way Matthew speaks about himself. Mark and Luke can spare him the title which recalled his former occupation; Matthew himself does not. In his own list of the Apostles he writes “Matthew the publican”. The Catena Aurea preserves Jerome’s explanation: the Evangelist recalls what he had been so that the reader may understand what grace has done. No sinner should conclude that his former life has placed sanctity beyond reach when a publican has become an Apostle.⁵
There is nothing sentimental about this humility. Matthew does not make his sin or former condition the centre of his identity, but neither does he rewrite his past once he has acquired apostolic dignity. Christian repentance permits memory without bondage. The forgiven man can tell the truth about what he was because the mercy of Christ has made that truth no longer the final truth about him.
The banquet which follows the call deserves equal attention. St Luke tells us that Levi made a great feast for Christ, at which many publicans were present. Conversion immediately acquires an apostolic direction. The newly called disciple brings the people he already knows into the company of Jesus. The Pharisees object, and Christ replies: “They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. For I am not come to call the just, but sinners.” Matthew 9:12–13 — Douay-Rheims
The traditional Mass of St Matthew prevents a familiar misreading of those words. On the very feast in which the Church proclaims Misericordiam volo, et non sacrificium — “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” — she proceeds to offer the Holy Sacrifice. Christ cannot therefore be opposing mercy to sacrifice as such, still less abolishing divine worship in favour of a vague humanitarian kindness. He is citing Osee against the hypocrisy which performs religious observance while resisting the God to whom the observance is directed. Worship without conversion is condemned; sacrifice itself is not.
This is particularly apt on Matthew’s feast. Christ sits among sinners not because sin is unimportant, but because He has come as physician. Mercy is medicinal because something actually needs to be healed. Matthew is not confirmed in the life in which Christ finds him. He is called out of it. The same Gospel which exposes Pharisaical self-righteousness also records a publican leaving everything incompatible with his new discipleship.
Here the feast meets the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. In treating operating and co-operating grace, Aquinas refuses to choose between divine initiative and genuine human freedom. God moves the will towards the good; the will, moved by God according to its nature as a rational will, truly consents and acts. In the justification of the sinner, the movement of free will is real, but it is the effect of grace rather than the independent cause by which grace is produced.⁶
Matthew gives that doctrine a visible form. Christ’s Sequere me comes first. Matthew’s rising is a real human act. There is no Pelagian self-creation in which Levi discovers sufficient moral strength to manufacture Matthew the Apostle out of himself, but neither is there a fictitious obedience in which Matthew’s freedom counts for nothing. The Lord calls; grace moves; the man consents and follows. Aquinas’s language of operating and co-operating grace is more precise than either extreme because it preserves what the Gospel itself preserves.
The Catena Aurea goes further. The ancient Gloss treats Matthew’s conversion as itself a kind of miracle: a publican has become an Apostle. Rabanus Maurus reads the names mystically, seeing Matthew as one “given” and Levi as one “taken”: the penitent is taken from those who are perishing and, by grace, given to the Church. He also notices that the Gospel begins with Christ seeing Matthew. Jesus sees the sinner, in Rabanus’s phrase, when He looks upon him “with the eyes of mercy”.⁵ The initiative is again Christ’s, but mercy does not leave its recipient where it found him.
Matthew became not only an Apostle but the Evangelist whose name stands first in the canonical order of the four Gospels. The ancient testimony concerning his authorship deserves both respect and precision. Papias, as preserved by Eusebius, associated Matthew with the composition of the logia in the Hebrew dialect. Irenaeus, Origen, Jerome and other early writers likewise transmit a tradition of a Matthean composition addressed particularly to Hebrew believers. The canonical Gospel preserved by the Church is Greek, and the exact literary relationship between that text and the Hebrew or Aramaic work described by the Fathers cannot now be demonstrated from a surviving Semitic manuscript. To acknowledge the limits of the surviving evidence is not the same thing as pretending that the early ecclesiastical testimony does not exist.⁷
The character of the Gospel accords strikingly with the vocation of an Apostle sent first within Israel and then, with the others, to the nations. It begins: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Matthew 1 — Douay-Rheims Again and again the Evangelist directs the reader towards fulfilment: what God promised, Christ accomplishes. Jesus is presented within Israel’s history and as its fulfilment, yet the Gospel ends with the risen Lord commanding the Apostles to teach and baptise all nations.
Matthew is also the Evangelist whose Gospel gives us in concentrated form some of the most explicitly ecclesial passages of the New Testament. At Caesarea Philippi Christ says to Simon: “Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church” and gives him the keys of the Kingdom. Matthew 16 — Douay-Rheims The authority of binding and loosing appears again in the discourse concerning the Church. At the conclusion of the Gospel the apostolic mandate is universal: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Matthew 28 — Douay-Rheims Matthew’s Christ does not gather a loose association of private spiritual seekers. He constitutes an apostolic mission, teaches with divine authority and speaks of His Church.
The Mass of 21 September places that Evangelist within Ezechiel’s vision of the four living creatures. The Lesson is Ezechiel 1:10–14, with its mysterious faces of man, lion, ox and eagle. Ezechiel 1 — Douay-Rheims Christian tradition associated these figures with the four Evangelists, and St Matthew came to be represented by the man, often rendered in later art as a winged man or angel, because his Gospel opens with the human genealogy of Christ. Dom Prosper Guéranger therefore greets the appearance of “the Man” in the liturgical year as the figure proper to Matthew.⁸
The symbolism belongs ultimately to Christ before it belongs to the Evangelist. Matthew begins with real human descent: Abraham, David, exile, generation and birth. The Gospel which most insistently demonstrates fulfilment of prophecy also insists upon the historical entry of the Son of God into the family of Israel. The winged man is therefore not simply the Evangelist’s badge. It directs us towards the Incarnation proclaimed in his book.
The Introit, Os justi, then gives the feast its voice: “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart.” The choice is exact. Matthew’s apostolic dignity is not celebrated merely because he once experienced a remarkable conversion. The man called from the place of toll now teaches the Church. His sanctity bears fruit in doctrine.
The Collect makes the theology of the feast even clearer: “May we be aided, O Lord, by the prayers of blessed Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, that what our own power cannot obtain may be granted us by his intercession.” This is a remarkably compact statement of Catholic supernaturalism. Human power does not suffice. The Church asks God for what she cannot obtain by that power and does so through the intercession of the Apostle whose own life is evidence of what grace can accomplish. The Collect does not invite admiration of Matthew from a safe distance; it asks that the same divine generosity which raised him should supply what is lacking in us.⁹
The Secret joins his Evangelical preaching directly to the Eucharistic oblation: “By the apostolic prayers of blessed Matthew the Evangelist, we beseech Thee, O Lord, may the oblation of Thy Church be commended, who is instructed by his magnificent preaching.” The juxtaposition is thoroughly Catholic. The Church instructed by the Apostle’s Gospel is the Church standing at the altar. Apostolic doctrine and sacrificial worship do not belong to competing Christianities; one Church receives both.
The Postcommunion completes the movement by asking that the mysteries received on Matthew’s feast may profit us ad medelam — unto healing.⁹ The physician of the Gospel has not vanished once the reading is finished. The Christ who entered the company of publicans and sinners gives Himself sacramentally to His Church. The Gospel’s image of sickness and healing thus reaches its liturgical completion after Communion.
The older Office adds the hagiographical tradition of Matthew’s later apostolate. The Roman lessons send him to Ethiopia, where he preaches the Gospel, converts the royal household and becomes associated with Iphigenia, the king’s daughter, who consecrates herself to God. According to this tradition, the ruler Hirtacus, angered by Matthew’s defence of her vow of virginity, causes the Apostle to be killed while he is celebrating the sacred mysteries. Guéranger reproduces this Roman account and draws from it the traditional picture of Matthew crowning his apostolate with martyrdom.⁸
Historical method requires some discrimination here. The post-biblical traditions concerning the regions evangelised by Matthew and the exact circumstances of his death are not uniform. Ancient writers associate his later ministry with different territories, and a modern reconstruction of his final years cannot be made with certainty. The Roman account of Ethiopia, Iphigenia and death at the altar should therefore be presented for what it is: the received hagiographical tradition embodied in the Western liturgy, not a first-century dossier whose every detail can now be independently verified.¹⁰
That distinction need not impoverish the feast. Traditional hagiography was composed for ecclesial memory and worship, not according to the conventions of modern critical biography. Its purpose is neither served by credulously confusing every received detail with demonstrable history nor by treating whatever modern documentation cannot prove as therefore worthless. The Roman tradition remembers Matthew as one whose apostolic witness reached its completion in the shedding of blood, and the Church has long celebrated him accordingly.
His Western cult acquired a particularly powerful centre at Salerno. The Cathedral’s own liturgical and historical material records the translation of St Matthew’s relics from Lucania to Salerno in 954, under the Lombard prince Gisulf I, and their deposition in the cathedral crypt in 1081 under Archbishop Alfano I. The Archdiocese of Salerno continues to commemorate the translation on 6 May, while the city celebrates its patron with particular solemnity on 21 September.¹¹
This is not a merely archaeological devotion. The 2026 celebrations in Salerno include the traditional procession, a stop at the Guardia di Finanza, and the blessing of the sea. The connexion with the Guardia di Finanza and with accountants and financial professions is an obvious development from Matthew’s former occupation. Yet there is a useful Christian irony in his patronage of those who deal with money: the Church invokes as their patron not a man who made wealth his identity, but one who knew precisely when an occupation, income and established position had to yield to a higher claim.¹²
The mystical commentators do not permit the Gospel scene to remain safely in Capharnaum. Rabanus turns Matthew into a type of every soul preoccupied with temporal gain until Christ looks upon it with mercy. The interpretation need not be restricted to money. The “custom-house” can stand for any settled arrangement of life within which a man has become spiritually seated: an ambition he will not surrender, a habitual sin he has learnt to manage rather than renounce, a grievance he has made part of himself, a respectability which matters more than truth, or even religious habits which no longer expose him to conversion.
There is an uncomfortable point here for those already familiar with the things of God. Matthew had little religious prestige to protect. The Pharisees possessed much. Yet in the Gospel it is the publican who moves when Christ calls while the religious critics remain outside questioning why the Physician is treating the sick. Knowledge of Catholic doctrine, attachment to Catholic worship and reverence for Tradition are genuine goods; precisely because they are goods, they become dangerous when used to shield us from the demand which gave them life. A man may defend the right doctrine about conversion while indefinitely postponing his own.
The old Mass will not allow that evasion. Its Collect declares the inadequacy of our unaided power. Its Gospel shows the sinner summoned. Its Secret places the Church beneath apostolic preaching. Its Communion brings the remedy. The feast is not a celebration of human will-power, but neither does it permit grace to become an excuse for immobility.
Matthew’s sanctity begins with an act which the Evangelist himself does not embellish. Christ saw him, called him, and the man who had been sitting stood up. He did not yet know all that his obedience would entail. He could not have foreseen the Apostolate, the Gospel, the mission of the Church to the nations, the centuries in which Christians would read his words, the figure of the winged man in mosaics and manuscripts, or a cathedral at Salerno built around the veneration of his relics. None of that was visible from the place of toll.
What was visible was Christ, and what was audible was the command.
That is enough to explain why the Roman Church has kept Matthew’s feast with such solemnity. The publican is not merely forgiven and sent home improved. Grace gives him a new work, a place among the Apostles and a voice through which the Church will hear the Gospel until the end of time. The feast therefore asks a more exacting question than whether we believe that Christ can forgive sinners. It asks whether His mercy has the right to change what we do once He has forgiven us.
St Matthew’s answer was not a theory of discipleship. The Gospel records it in five words: “He rose up and followed him.”
¹ St Matthew Apostle and Evangelist — traditional Roman Office and feast, The Saint Lawrence Press Blog; Vigilia Sancti Matthaei Apostoli et Evangelistae — historical Roman Mass texts, Cantus Network.
² The Feast of St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist – September 21, Nuntiatoria, 19 September 2025.
³ Benedict XVI, General Audience: Matthew, the tax collector, 30 August 2006.
⁴ St John Chrysostom, Homily XXX on the Gospel according to St Matthew.
⁵ St Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Matthew 9:9–13; Catena Aurea — Gospel of Matthew.
⁶ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q.111: The Division of Grace; Summa Theologiae I-II, q.113: The Effects of Grace.
⁷ Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History III.24 — Matthew and the Gospel; St Matthew, Catholic Encyclopedia.
⁸ Dom Prosper Guéranger OSB, The Liturgical Year: September 21 — St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist.
⁹ Historical Mass texts for St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, Usuarium: A Digital Library and Database for the Study of Latin Liturgical History.
¹⁰ St Matthew, Catholic Encyclopedia; San Matteo Apostolo ed Evangelista, Cattedrale di Salerno.
¹¹ Proprio dei Santi della Chiesa Salernitana — Translation of St Matthew, Cattedrale di Salerno; Saints of the Archdiocese — St Matthew, Archdiocese of Salerno-Campagna-Acerno.
¹² San Matteo 2026: Triduum, Solemnity and Liturgical Programme, Archdiocese of Salerno-Campagna-Acerno.
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