Pope John Paul II reads Saint Martin's cloak against the Last Judgment

TOURS, France, September 21, 1996 AD — Pope John Paul II said Mass today on the military airfield outside Tours for the sixteenth centenary of the death of Saint Martin of Tours. He gave the centre of his homily to a single moment from the saint’s life: a winter day at the gate of Amiens, and a soldier who met a beggar there. In what St. Martin did at that gate, the Pope said, he carried out the words Jesus speaks at the Last Judgment.

St. Martin had not yet been baptised when he came to the gate, and was serving as a soldier in the Roman army. The winter was harder than usual and the cold was killing people. The man at the gate was naked, and was asking everyone who passed him for help. St. Martin had already given his other clothes away, so the cloak on his back was all he had left. He drew the sword he was wearing, cut the cloak into two equal halves and handed one over. Some of the people standing there laughed at him for going about half dressed.

Tours is the city St. Martin was afterwards bishop of, and he is buried in the basilica here. Archbishop Jean Honoré of Tours welcomed the Pope to the airfield and was thanked from the altar as the successor of St. Martin.

From the gate at Amiens the Pope turned to the Gospel just read, the judgment scene from the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. In it the Son of Man tells the people he sets on his right that they fed him, clothed him and came to see him. What St. Martin did at Amiens is exactly what that Gospel says, the Pope told them: “J’étais nu et vous m’avez habillé” (I was naked and you clothed me).

Then the Pope put the gesture and the text into one sentence. “En donnant au pauvre d’Amiens la moitié de son manteau, Martin traduisit par un geste concret les paroles de Jésus annonçant le Jugement dernier” (In giving the poor man of Amiens half his cloak, Martin translated into a concrete gesture the words of Jesus announcing the Last Judgment).

He read on to the words spoken to those set on the right: come, you blessed of my Father, take the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. Then he drew his conclusion. Looking at St. Martin’s life, he said, and above all at how eagerly he loved his neighbour, the Church was convinced from the start that the bishop of Tours was among the elect.

St. Martin was born hundreds of kilometres from here, in Pannonia — “that is to say in Hungary, where I have just been,” the Pope said. He did not want to be made a bishop, and after he was made one he went on living as the monk he had decided to be as a teenager, with a community of monks beside him near Tours. He was one of the founders of monasticism in the West. He took the Gospel to the villages and the countryside, the Pope said.

Sulpicius Severus knew St. Martin, questioned him, and wrote his life while he was still alive. He ends the Amiens chapter with the night that followed. St. Martin saw Christ wearing the half cloak he had given away, and heard Christ tell the angels standing round him, “Martin, who is still but a catechumen, clothed me with this robe.” Sulpicius then quotes Jesus: whatever you did to one of the least of these, you did to me.

That afternoon the Pope came to the Basilica of Saint-Martin, where the sick and the suffering were gathered at the tomb for a service of readings and prayers. In this second homily, on the Beatitudes, the Pope came back to Amiens by reading a line out of the Life of Saint Martin. The poor man at the gate, the Pope read, “begged the passers-by to have pity on his misery, and they all went on their way.” Those passers-by did not recognise a brother in the beggar, the Pope said. Not one of them saw the Christ who was dying of cold in that man. Each person, he added, will one day have to answer for his words and his actions towards the people nobody looks at and everyone turns away from.

For sixteen hundred years, he told the sick around the tomb, St. Martin has been interceding with the Father for those who turn to him. Before he gave the Apostolic Blessing he came back to the cloak once more: “À la porte d’Amiens, Martin donna la moitié de son manteau. Qu’il demeure notre modèle de charité réelle et vraie” (At the gate of Amiens, Martin gave half his cloak. May he remain our model of real and true charity).