He was seven, and a chapel paid him every year

VALENCIA, Crown of Aragon, 1357 AD — One lamp, kept burning at an altar. One Mass, said at that same altar once a year. That’s the whole job the money comes with.

The boy the money is coming to is Saint Vincent Ferrer, and he’s seven. He lives in Valencia, in the Crown of Aragon. His father, William Ferrer, is a notary of the city. That work means drawing up other people’s legal papers.

This year the boy’s hair was cut short and a linen gown with wide sleeves was put on him. That gown is a surplice, and all clergy wear it. By those two acts St. Vincent Ferrer was received into the clerical order. William Ferrer arranged the whole thing for his son.

The haircut is the door

The rite is called tonsure, from a Latin word meaning to shear. It doesn’t make a boy a priest. It gives him a cleric’s rights and a cleric’s duties. It gets him ready to take holy orders later on.

Church law fixes no smallest age for it. It asks two other things of the boy. He has to have learnt the basics of the Faith, and he has to be able to read and write. In the Latin Church the tonsure became a rite of its own near the end of the 600s AD. That’s when parents began offering their young sons to the service of God.

Where the money comes from

A benefice is a right. The Church gives it to a cleric and doesn’t take it back. It lets him take the money that comes in from certain church property, in return for a spiritual service. He never owns the property. He gets what it earns each year, and he gets it for the rest of his life.

Pope Innocent III said benefices were founded for one reason. It was to give the Church clergy who were free to spend all their time on the work of religion.

The smallest sort is called a simple benefice. It carries only one kind of duty: saying the Divine Office, or saying Mass. The Divine Office is the set of prayers clergy say through the day. Under the Church law of this century a boy can hold one from his seventh year. He has to be tonsured first.

The chapel of Saint Anne

St. Vincent Ferrer’s money comes from one very small chapel, and it isn’t in his own parish. He was baptised at San Esteban. The chapel is the chapel of Saint Anne, inside a different parish church, Santo Tomás. That church is far older than he is. Valencia’s own record says it had been a church since before 1245 AD, more than a hundred years earlier.

Whoever draws the chapel’s money owes it two things. A lamp kept alight at St. Anne’s altar. And one Mass said at that altar every year.

The lamp and the yearly Mass become his to answer for. He is paid by a chapel he does not run. And he is seven.

At twelve he starts on philosophy — thinking hard about what is true and why. And when he leaves home to join the Dominicans, the chapel money goes to his older brother Boniface.