Catholic Saints & Feasts: Recent Episodes

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October 2: The Holy Guardian Angels
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

A personal spiritual bodyguard watches your back

Intuition is a fully formed way of thinking. It is more than just the occasional hunch or subtle perception. Native instinct, or “gut,” is used to calculate, discern, and decide on matters big and small throughout daily life. We think we are dryly logical about a decision to trust one accountant and not another, to frequent this store over that, or to confide in this new friend rather than that old one. But in reality it may just be a small mustard stain on the accountant’s shirt collar that convinces us that he is not the right man for the job. Squinty eyes, a weak handshake, a laugh, or just the way someone holds open the door or sips their coffee. We pay very close attention to the slightest nuances of facial gestures, body language, and tone of voice to draw immediate conclusions about people. We are not as coldly rational as we like to think.

So when an atheist, for example, walks alone down a remote country road in the dark of night and hears a long lost voice in the whistling wind, or sees tree branches twist themselves into a bony finger, he grows frightened. If he were to feel the breathy presence of someone hovering just over his shoulder at that same moment, the atheist’s sober rationality would be worth nothing. His valves of feeling and intuition would be fully open, the pores of his mind would be absorbing every ounce of strange reality, and a shiver of fright would run up his spine like an electrical charge. He would be in full contact with a reality as elusive to describe, yet as normal to experience, as intuition itself.

The holy guardian angels are created spirits, whereas God is an uncreated spirit. A man, however, is more than a spirit. He is an enfleshed soul procreated by parents who participate in God’s creative act. Though we are part spirit and part matter, we can nonetheless imagine what it would be like to be a pure spirit, like an angel. We close our eyes and imagine standing at the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and suddenly we are there, gazing over the City of Lights. The mind travels, the imagination soars, the soul

reflects. It’s our body that keeps our feet planted in one place and time. But if mind, soul, and imagination were not so tethered, then we would zip around the universe like an angel, a spirit unleashed, held back by nothing. God created the angels like He created us, out of nothing. God’s will is creative in the strict sense of that word. “Let there be light,” He said, and there was light. His will brings worlds into creation and maintains them there. God willed the angels into creation to communicate His messages, to protect mankind, and to engage in spiritual battle with fallen demon angels.

The age-old tradition of the Church is that every Christian, and perhaps every human being, has an angel guardian protecting him from physical and spiritual harm. Christ warned, “Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven” (Mt 18:10). An angel was at Christ’s side in the Garden of Gethsemane, and an angel delivered Saint Peter from prison. The Fathers of the early Church wrote prolifically about the dense realm of the spirit inhabited by angels. The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that the angels belong to Christ. “They are his angels” (CCC #331). The Catechism also quotes Saint Basil, “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life” (CCC #336).

We intuit that the world was made for more than just us, whether those “others” are lit with holiness or obscured by darkness. Some people scan the skies for alien ships in Low-Earth Orbit. Others listen for strange patterns of speech transmitted like radio signals through the cosmos. Is there life on Mars? Are there colonies behind the sun? There is no need to search so far, to seek life in the cold blackness of space. There are spirits all around us. Some need to walk down a dark country road to finally touch the realm of the spirit. Others are more fortunate and know from childhood that our guardian angels are present and accounted for, standing right over our shoulder, at God’s constant command to serve and protect.

Holy Guardian Angels, we implore your continued vigilance over our lives. Keep us from physical and spiritual harm, increase our trust in your presence, and remind us to turn to you when our well-being is threatened in any way.

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May 21: Saint Christopher Magallanes, Priest and Martyr, and Companions, Martyrs
Fr. Magallanes: 1869–1927; 22 priests and 3 laymen: 1915-1937, the majority killed between 1926-1929
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

A Mexican bloodletting

The governor of Mexico’s Tabasco state in the 1920s, Garrido Canabal, was so insanely anti-Catholic that he named his three sons Lenin, Satan, and Lucifer. He was also a farmer and named one of his bulls “God,” a hog “Pope,” a cow “Mary,” and a donkey “Christ.” He ordered the removal and destruction of all crucifixes from public buildings and graveyards in Tabasco. Painful photographs of the destruction prove that it happened. For his vicious persecution of the Church, he was elevated to a national cabinet position in the 1930s. Canabal was a political protégé of the Mexican president, and later strongman, Plutarco Calles. Calles was an illegitimate child, born to unmarried parents. Calles hated being called an illegitimate child and especially resented the Roman Catholic Church for this title of illegitimacy. In time, Calles became a devout believer in the religion of atheism, eagerly shared his beliefs with others, and put great energy into evangelizing others to his side. As governor of the state of Sonora, he expelled all Catholic priests. As president of Mexico, he carried out an overtly violent, ferocious, scorched-earth attack on Catholicism without par in the twentieth century. Priests were killed for no other reason than for being priests. This led to a popular counterreaction known as the Cristero War, a slow burn of assassinations, pitched battles, skirmishes, and reprisals. Central Mexico was in a full-blown meltdown in the 1920s.

For a visitor to Mexico today, or to anyone familiar with its culture, such events are difficult to imagine or comprehend. Mexico harbors one of the most vibrant Catholic cultures in the entire world, thick with devotions, processions, Masses, feast day celebrations, and religious song and dress. Yet the Cristero War did happen, and not a thousand years ago.

The militant, anti-religious mentality of Anglo-Saxon secular humanism is familiar to many believers today. It is the air we breath. This educated secularism opposes the very idea of God, exalts a narrow understanding of freedom, denigrates the concept of belief, and transposes science as an object of faith rather than a formal creed. The militant anti-religious mentality of 1920s Mexico, and of other culturally Catholic nations, was and is different from Anglo-Saxon secularism. Anti-Catholicism in Catholic nations expresses itself in anticlericalism. Hatred is unleashed against bishops and priests and their instruments of ministry—altars, crucifixes, vestments, rosaries, statues, etc.—not so much against creeds or ideas. You don’t need to read Nietzsche or to master the Enlightenment canon to hate the Church. Whereas Anglo Saxon secularism wages its battles in the higher echelons of university classrooms and the courts, Latino anticlericalism is not too complex. Just kidnap a priest, blindfold him, tie his hands tightly behind his back, and shoot him in the head. Anticlericalism liquidates its enemies against the dirty brick wall behind the local police station. No courtrooms are needed.

Today’s saint, and the others canonized with him, were caught in the storm that was Plutarco Calles. Father Magallanes was a priest of humble origins similar to those of Calles, but Magallanes walked a different path than the strongman. After working the land as a youth for his poor family, he entered the seminary and was ordained a priest in 1899. He then served faithfully as a chaplain and as a pastor to the Huichole Indians for many years. By middle age, he was a priest of some stature. But the otherwise ordinary arc of his life took an extraordinary turn when, on May 21, 1927, he was on his way to celebrate the Feast of St. Rita of Cascia (May 22) in a small village. A shootout between Cristeros and Federal forces near the village led to Father Magallanes’ arrest, along with a brother priest, Father Caloca. There were no accusations and no trial. There was neither the presentation of evidence nor the right of defense, since priests had no civil rights in Mexico at the time. On May 25, 1927, the two priests were led to the courtyard of a municipal building for what always happened next. Father Magallanes stated: “I am innocent and die innocent. I absolve with all my heart those who seek my death and ask God that my blood bring peace to a divided Mexico.” The priests absolved each other, spoke some few words of comfort, and then were shot to death by a firing squad of fellow Mexicans in soldiers’ uniforms. Father Caloca’s last words were: “For God we lived and for Him we die.”

Twenty-five martyrs are commemorated today. All were diocesan priests, except for three laymen who died with their parish priest. They died in eight different Mexican states under circumstances similar to those of Frs. Magallanes and Caloca. One was hung from a mango tree in a town square, another from an oak in the country; one was shot for not revealing the confessions of his co-prisoners, one was bayoneted and beaten to death; one was shot and his body placed on railroad tracks to be mutilated by a train. The executioner of one priest refused to fire his rifle. He was shot right after the priest. Pope Saint John Paul II beatified the group in 1992 and canonized them in 2000. In addition to Frs. Magallanes (Cristóbal Magallanes Jara) and Caloca (Agustín Caloca Cortés), these martyrs were: Román Adame Rosales, Rodrigo Aguilar Alemán, Julio Álvarez Mendoza, Luis Batis Sáinz, Mateo Correa Magallanes, Atilano Cruz Alvarado, Miguel De La Mora, Pedro Esqueda Ramírez, Margarito Flores Garcia, José Isabel Flores Varela, David Galván Bermúdez, Salvador Lara Puente (layman), Pedro de Jesús Maldonado Lucero, Jesús Méndez Montoya, Manuel Morales (layman), Justino Orona Madrigal, Sabás Reyes Salazar, José María Robles Hurtado, David Roldán Lara (layman),Toribio Romo González, Jenaro Sánchez Delgadillo, David Uribe Velasco, and Tranquilino Ubiarco Robles.

Father Magallanes, your quiet witness and noble death are an inspiration to all who suffer physical violence for the faith in unknown ways and in unknown places. May your intercession and courage be an inspiration for all priests, laymen, and religious who are tempted to bend in the winds of persecution.

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July 18: Saint Camillus de Lellis, Priest
1550–1614
In the U.S.A. this Optional Memorial is transferred to July 18
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of hospitals, nurses, and the sick

A one-man Red Cross who burned with love for the sick

Like so many saints, Camillus de Lellis ran hard in whatever direction he was heading. When he was a soldier, he ran hard toward the noise of battle. When he was a gambler, he ran hard toward the betting tables. When he was a sinner, he ran hard toward his taste of the day. And when he had a conversion, he ran hard toward the tabernacle. And there, finally, he stopped running. Once he found God, he stayed with Him. Today’s saint spent long hours with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Silent contemplation fueled his soul, and he motored through each day with a high-octane love for the sick and the dying, which attracted numerous followers, led to the founding of a religious order, and eventually made Camillus a saint.

As a physically large teenager, Camillus became a soldier, alongside his soldier father, to fight the Turks. In the army he learned to gamble, an addiction that matured with him and which ultimately reduced him to abject poverty. At a low point in his life, he volunteered to work at a Franciscan monastery that was under construction and became inspired by a monk to seek admission to the order. But they wouldn’t take him. Camillus had a serious leg wound that refused to heal. He would have been more burden than blessing, so he moved on. He went to Rome to care for the sick in a hospital where he had previously been a patient. But he was repelled by the inadequate medical care, the moral deprivation of the nurses, and the lack of spiritual attention given to the patients. Camillus decided something better was needed for the sick and found the solution when he looked in the mirror.

Camillus was inspired by his saintly spiritual director, Saint Philip Neri, to establish a company of consecrated men who would serve the sick purely out of love for God. They served in the hospital of the Holy Spirit, still found today on the Tiber River close to the Vatican. Camillus and his co-workers earned a reputation for providing excellent medical care, for indefatigable service, and for doing their work with an intense spirit of prayer. While carrying out this demanding apostolate, Camillus also attended seminary and was ordained a priest in 1584. As the years passed, more men joined, new houses were established in other cities, and the rule for the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm (M.I.), simply known as the Camillians, was approved by the Pope in 1591.

Father Camillus instituted medical reforms that were rare for his time in regard to cleanliness, diet, infectious diseases, the search for cures, and the separation of healthcare administration from healthcare itself. When his order expanded to other countries, they even staffed a medical field unit accompanying soldiers in battle, an important innovation. This, together with his order’s habit bearing a large, simple, red cross on the front, made Camillus a precursor of the modern Red Cross.

Saint Camillus was practical as well as mystical. He wanted the best, physically, spiritually, and morally, for all those he cared for. Every patient was his Lord and Master. No patient, no matter how diseased, foul, dirty, or rude, was beyond his care. Along with his religious brothers, he even took a special fourth vow to care for those with the plague who might infect him. Two Camillians died of the plague in Camillus’ own lifetime. “More love in those hands brother” was his constant refrain to his confreres. His example resonated, and the work of the Camillians continues today in various countries.

After his order was firmly established, Saint Camillus succumbed to various diseases in 1614 in Rome. Soon after his death, two doctors from Holy Spirit Hospital came to examine the body, as Camillus was already considered a saint. They cut open his chest wall and removed his heart. An eyewitness wrote that his heart was huge, and as red as a ruby. Camillus was canonized in 1746, and a large statue of him adorns a niche in the central nave of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Along with Saint John of God, who was also a soldier, Saint Camillus is the patron saint of hospitals and the sick. Just a few hundred feet from the tourist hordes crushing to enter the Pantheon in the heart of Rome, the modestly sized but luxurious baroque church of Saint Mary Magdalene fronts a small piazza. Inside, usually alone, and resting in peace, are the remains of Saint Camillus de Lellis.

Saint Camillus, you knew the rough life of the soldier, gambler, and wanderer. Because of your experiences, you practiced great empathy for the outcast, the sick, and the dying. Help us to be like you, to translate our empathy into action, and to be motivated primarily by love of God.

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June 30: First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
64
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red or White

A madman burns Christians like human torches

Wave after wave of huge British and American bombers, pregnant with ordnance, opened their bays over Dresden, Germany, on February 13 and 14, 1945. Fire joined fire until the city itself was a raging, screaming bonfire. A tornado of flames hungered for oxygen, sucked all air from the atmosphere, and suffocated to death anyone caught in its vortex. The center of Dresden melted. Only some stone walls remained erect. Human skeletons were mixed into the rubble of a skeletal city. In the old town of Dresden today, a modest memorial marks a mass grave, the location where an unknown number of civilians’ scant remains were cremated shortly after the fire. It’s easy to walk by without noticing it. Any number of countries have similar memorials marking the mass graves of the victims of plane crashes, sunken ships, war atrocities, or natural disasters.

Many countries also have a memorial to an unknown soldier. That unknown fighter represents all those drowned at sea, lost in the jungle canopy, eviscerated by enemy fire, or simply never recovered in the heat and sweat of battle. On civic feast days, presidents, governors, and mayors lay wreaths and flowers at the graves of the unknown. In honoring him, they honor all. A nation’s official remembering—in stone, statue, speech, or ceremony—preserves the past. A nation’s common memory is preserved by its government, which guards against national forgetting through official acts of national remembering.

The Church’s liturgical calendar is a continual, public remembering of saints, feasts, and theology, by mankind’s most ancient source and carrier of institutional memory—the Catholic Church. Today’s feast day commemorating the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome did not exist prior to the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Instead, the sanctoral calendar was crowded with various feast days to particular martyrs from this early Roman persecution. Apart from their centuries on the calendar, however, little else supported these particular martyrs’ existence.

Today’s feast is a liturgical expression of the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the flowers left at a mass grave marker. This feast commemorates those unknown and unnamed men and women who were cruelly tortured and executed in the city of Rome in 64 A.D. But instead of meeting in a park to sing a patriotic hymn and to see an official lay a wreath, we do what Christians do to remember these martyrs. We meet as the faithful in a church, in front of an altar, to participate in the sacrifice of the Mass and to remember our remote ancestors in the faith who died so that the true faith would not.

In 64 A.D. a huge fire of suspicious origins consumed large sections of Rome. A deranged emperor named The Black (Nero) blamed Christians for the conflagration and executed large numbers of them in retribution for their supposed treachery. A vivid description of the persecution survives from a Roman historian named Tacitus, who relates that some Christians were sewn into the skins of animals to be attacked and consumed by beasts. Other Christians were slathered with wax, tied to posts, and then burned alive, human torches whose glow illuminated Nero’s garden parties. Still others were crucified. This was not the barbarous hacking off of limbs and splitting of skulls later suffered by missionaries in the forests of Northern Europe. Nero’s madness was highly refined evil. Today, we commemorate these Christians in the same fashion in which they would have commemorated the Lord’s own death—by prayer and sacrifice. We are separated from 64 A.D. by many centuries, but we are united to 64 A.D. by our common faith. We remember because the Church remembers.

Anonymous first martyrs of Rome, your blood is still wet, and your sufferings still felt, in the same Church of Christ to which you belonged through baptism. Through your intercession, help the baptized of today be as courageous as you in all things.

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June 29: Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
First Century 
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of the city of Rome

Like the sun, Peter and Paul rose in the East but set in the West

Jesus Christ is the head of the Church. The Pope is the head of the churches. The invisible, heavenly Church, mystically depicted by the Book of Revelation and described by Saint Paul as “our mother,” is the “Jerusalem above” (Ga 4:26). This perfect, inner, Church of God has theological priority over all earthly churches, which are its shadow. The first Christian congregation, in Jerusalem, anticipated and grew into the universal Church. For a short period, the Jerusalem Church was the universal church. And from this original whole, smaller parts formed, until the one Church became present throughout the world. Unity exists, then spreads. The children do not create the parents. The many dioceses throughout the world are not stitched together into a patchwork quilt called the universal Church. Catholicism is not an international federation of dioceses or the end result of its own geographic stretch. The one Church precedes the many churches. It gives them birth. The progression is from God outward, from spirit to flesh, from ontological to historical, from Jerusalem to Rome, and from Rome to the world.

All dioceses are sisters to one another. So Manila, Philippines, is a sister diocese to that of Vilnius, Lithuania; and Lagos, Nigeria, is a sister diocese to that of La Paz, Bolivia. But the universal Church is not herself a diocese. She has no sisters, lest her oneness be compromised by having a mirror church. The universal Church is a mother, not a sister. And the Mother Church was established in Rome by Saints Peter and Paul, whose feast  we celebrate today. This feast also implicitly commemorates Rome’s position as head of all the churches. Rome’s particular vocation is to preserve the unity of God’s Church on earth. This vocation is not an accidental historical addition to the Church’s original nature. Unity is intrinsic to the Church’s theology, and so there must be a practical force or power, internal to the Church, to preserve her unity. God’s Son, after all, has only one bride, with whom he celebrates only one heavenly banquet for only one eternal, mystical wedding. 

In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ states in unmistakably clear language that He will build His Church on Saint Peter (Mt 16:17–19). This was not a claim from Peter but a statement of fact from Christ. For many centuries, this text has been cited in support of both Roman primacy and papal infallibility. Yet an even more fundamental historical, not biblical, fact originally supported Roman primacy. The great Saint Irenaeus in the late second century clarifies that Rome is “the greatest and most ancient Church, founded by the two glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul.” No other city could claim to be the seat of two martyred Apostles. Not Jerusalem, not Antioch, and not Alexandria. Constantinople, the “New Rome,” could not claim to have been built over the bones of even one Apostle. Rome’s headship over all the churches is rooted most deeply in the martyrdoms in the eternal city of Saints Peter and Paul, the Christian counterparts of Rome’s twin pagan founders Romulus and Remus.

Rome, the two-Apostle city, continues to draw pilgrims. If a plumb line were dropped hundreds of feet from the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, it would come to rest directly over the tomb of the Apostle himself in the necropolis below the Basilica’s main altar. A few miles away, under the main altar of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, lies the mortal remains of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. The inscription naming Saint Paul on an ancient marble cover for his tomb leaves no doubt whose bones were placed there. The cover even has small holes through which pilgrims could lower ribbons to touch Saint Paul’s bones and thus complete their pilgrimage to Rome with a third class relic. It is a recent phenomenon to go to Rome to see the reigning pope. Traditionally, pilgrims went specifically to pray at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul.

Our beautiful Church is a miracle. Theologically perfect but humanly flawed. Mystical and historical. All soul and all body. The Church reflects mankind—capable of so much, yet limited by her imperfections. The Church is founded upon a perfect God and two very different, great, and imperfect men whom God chose—Peter and Paul.

Saints Peter and Paul, deepen our filial devotion to our Mother the Church, who gives us life through the sacraments and who preserves our hope of attending the eternal banquet of God in heaven. Protect our Mother from corruption to be a more perfect spouse of Christ.

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June 27: Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop and Doctor
376–444
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Alexandria, Egypt

He was the ultimate adversary

What appears from a modern perspective to be theological hairsplitting and intellectual contortionism was, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the stuff of intense, erudite, and sometimes violent debate. Today’s saint was of that heroic age when the Church, just legalized, came bursting out of her cage like a lion. She had been locked up, roaming her cramped space, half starved and small muscled when, all of a sudden, the door was lifted and the world was hers. There followed two centuries of aggressive debate, sharp criticism, harsh reactions, rough counter reactions, and prolific letter writing until several Church Councils standardized the Church’s basic theology. Saint Cyril was a key actor in this theodrama. He was educated, irascible, strong willed, politically astute, brilliant, and utterly convinced that his theology of Christ was correct. It was. What mattered in the fifth century still matters today.

Saint Cyril was the Patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt, from 412–444 A.D, when it was a major city in the late Roman Empire. The Patriarch of Constantinople as of 428 was a monk from Antioch named Nestorius. He taught that Saint Mary was the Christ-bearer but not the God-bearer. Nestorius is also associated with the related false teaching that there are two hypostatic unions in Jesus Christ, one divine and one human, a theory which locates two persons in the one body of Jesus. Various critics immediately identified the errors in Nestorius’ teachings, but Cyril of Alexandria was the most tenacious in denouncing him. Cyril wrote to the Pope and demanded that the Patriarch of Constantinople either retract his false teaching or be excommunicated.

A church council was called in Ephesus in 431 to settle the matter. The forceful Cyril took total command of the Council’s proceedings, and, after numerous machinations as political as they were theological, the council declared Mary the Mother of God—and Nestorius a heretic. With explicit papal support, Nestorius was removed from his see. Recriminations and counter-recriminations followed, damaging the reputations of all involved. Some regions of Syria followed Nestorius’ teachings and separated from the Church over the question of Christ’s natures. Certain divisions remain even until today. But the teachings of the Council of Ephesus, and the related Council of Chalcedon in 451, dogmatically defined the Church’s Christology for posterity. Cyril and his followers saved the day.

The theological issue at stake was theoretical, but not merely theoretical. How could one person, Jesus of Nazareth, be both fully human and fully divine? Wouldn’t the superior divine nature crowd out His human nature like light crowds out darkness? Some theologians before Cyril taught that the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, was a replacement for Jesus’ human soul. This idea was condemned. Others, like Nestorius, claimed that behind the mask of Jesus, a Logos and a human soul lurked side by side. This created problems too. Most obviously, when Jesus said “I thirst” from the cross, was He speaking as God or man? What about when He said “Before Abraham was, I am”? Who wept over the death of Lazarus? Who raised him from the dead? Who lifted the chalice and spoke at the Last Supper? Who, precisely, was the “I” of Jesus of Nazareth? The Christ riddle needed to be solved. By the early fifth century, many had tried and failed. Saint Cyril solved this perennial riddle by teaching that the subject behind the “I” of Jesus was one, not two. Jesus was a complex God-man of two natures, united in one person, and these two natures continually exchanged their respective theological and human attributes.

Despite Cyril’s theological accomplishments, the tensions inherent to understanding a God-man still perdure. There are images of a tan Jesus with sandy blond hair and radiant white teeth tossing a frisbee: California Jesus. There is stained glass of a crowned Christ on His throne, scepter in hand, robed in majesty: Christ the King. And there is the wounded, naked, forlorn Jesus, hungry for air on the cross: The Suffering Servant Jesus. The Church’s theology places guardrails on the road to make sure we don’t veer off into heresy. Yet much is still left to the realm of prayer, spirituality, and mystery. Saint Cyril placed those guardrails. Don’t go beyond here. Be careful there. Stay on the well-trod path. One person. Two natures. Indivisible. Without confusion. Perfect in Godhead. Perfect in manhood. Truly God. Truly man. Born of the Virgin Mother of God. Every heresy conquered is not a gravestone but a brick in the huge theological cathedral of the Church. Saint Cyril laid many of the bricks in the lower courses of our theological home.

Saint Cyril of Alexandria, assist and inspire all teachers, preachers, writers, and thinkers to follow your example of rigorous analysis, of fidelity to Church councils, and of understanding tradition not as an anchor but as a dynamic force.

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June 26: Saint Josemaria Escriva, Priest
1902–1975
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Saint Josemaria is not on the Church’s universal calendar but is included here)
Patron Saint of diabetics

Work is our sacrifice and the earth is our altar

When today’s saint was a young priest, he was a rather well-known speaker in Madrid, Spain. Besides being an excellent homilist, he also preached retreats, gave parish missions, and taught classes. A young woman heard that Father Josemaria was scheduled to give some lectures nearby and, in light of his reputation, was eager to hear him. But first she went to one of his Masses. After that, the woman had no interest in hearing him lecture; instead she wanted to discover God’s will for her life. Saint Josemaria’s example of intense devotion and prayerfulness in saying Mass made her rethink her entire vocation. A good priest disappears into his vocation, submerges himself in Christ, and communicates a divine, not a personal, message. He makes people think of God, not him. At Mass the priest is not himself, yet is fully himself. He performs a sacrament because he is a sacrament. The Sacrament of Holy Orders is hidden behind the aspects of a man, similar to how the Holy Eucharist is hidden behind the aspects of bread and wine.

It is the theology of the Church that every sacrament validly performed is efficacious, that it transmits sanctifying grace to the soul. But the fruitfulness of a sacrament for its recipient, either psychologically or spiritually, fluctuates. It can hinge on any number of factors, from the beauty of a Church, the quality of a homily, the sacredness of the music, or the intellectual preparation and ardor of the one receiving the sacrament. A holy, charitable, and educated priest infuses every sacrament he celebrates with a theological meaning that yields spiritual fruit that goes beyond efficaciousness. Saint Josemaria’s writings, preaching, lectures, and talks were so rich, so chock-full of practical purpose and high meaning, that a great international family gathered around him, harvesting from his sustained example and insights an abundant banquet for their spiritual table.

Josemaria Escriva was born in a small town in rural Spain. He attended diocesan seminaries in the nearby city of Zaragoza and was ordained a priest in 1925. In 1928 he experienced a vision which spurred him to found Opus Dei, an institution that quickly spread to all the major Christian countries. Opus Dei consists primarily of married lay men and women, while some members are unmarried and consecrated celibates. A few members are priests.  After two thousand years of Catholic spirituality, it might be asked what new insight warranted the foundation of a new Church institution? It is a sign of the Church’s theological and spiritual fecundity that Saint Josemaria did offer a new, innovative approach to living as a disciple of Christ nineteen hundred years after Christ returned to the Father.

In a homily from 1967, Josemaria states his spirituality in clear terms: "...God is calling you to serve Him ‘in and from’ the ordinary, material, and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day in the laboratory, in the operating room, in the army barracks, in the university, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it."

In other words, there is no need for a serious lay Catholic to abandon his work and routine, his family life, or his everyday relationships to fulfill God’s will. God is found in and through ordinary life. Cardinal Albino Luciani, later Pope John Paul I, perceptively noted that Saint Josemaria was not teaching a ‘spirituality for lay people,’ as Francis de Sales taught, but a 'lay spirituality.' It is not a question of praying the rosary while sweeping the floor, or contemplating scripture while driving. It is about “materializing” holiness by converting ordinary, well-done work into a sacrifice and prayer to God. Ordinary work, then, is not just the context, but the raw material, for lay holiness. All jobs are important. Daily life is not a distraction from God’s will for us. Daily life is God’s will for us. When we get to work, we get to God.

Saint Josemaria, may your intercession help us to follow your teachings in making our daily labors divine labors. May our work, well done, mingle with Christ’s work and sacrifice to form one perfect offering of praise and thanksgiving to God the Father.

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June 28: Saint Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr
c. 125–c. 200
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of apologists and catechists

The Church was explicitly Catholic from the start

The iconic opening words of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War are “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” The chieftains of these three regions of Roman Gaul (France) met yearly in the southern city of Lugdunum, known today as Lyon. These rough noblemen and their large retinues trekked to Lyon in 12 B.C. for the dedication of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls on the slope of Lyon’s hill of the Croix Rousse. The inauguration ceremony was an elaborate reinforcement of Rome’s military, religious, and commercial dominance. Pagan priests performed pagan rites on pagan altars to pagan gods, asking those gods to favor the new sanctuary, the tribes present, and the city. This important sanctuary remained a focal point of Lyon’s civic and religious life for centuries. And in the sand and dirt of this Sanctuary of the Three Gauls, in 177 A.D., the blood of the first Christian martyrs of Gaul was spilled. Here they were abused, tortured, and executed. Killed for their faith were about fifty Christians, including the Bishop of Lyon, Pothinus, and a slave woman named Blandine. While they were imprisoned and awaiting their fate, these future martyrs wrote a letter to the Pope and gave it to a priest of Lyon to carry to Rome. That priest was today’s saint, Irenaeus.

With the dead bishop Pothinus’ mutilated remains tossed into the river, Irenaeus was chosen as his replacement. He would remain the Bishop of Lyon until his death. It was in this way that the tragic end of some raised others to prominence. As the first generation of Christians in Gaul retreated from history, the great Saint Irenaeus, the most important theologian of the late second century, emerged. Copies of Saint Irenaeus’ most important works survived through the ages, likely due to their fame and importance, and are now irreplaceable texts for understanding the mind of an early Church thinker on a number of matters.

Irenaeus was from Asia Minor and a disciple of Saint Polycarp, a martyr-bishop of Smyrna, who was himself a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist. The voice of Saint Irenaeus is, then, the very last, remote echo of the age of the Apostles. Similar to those of Saint Justin Martyr, Irenaeus’ writings astonish in proving just how early the Church developed a fully Catholic theology.

In keeping with other theologians of the patristic era, Irenaeus focused more on the mystery of the Incarnation, and Christ as the “New Adam,” than on a theology of the Cross. He also called Mary the “New Eve” whose obedience undoes Eve’s disobedience. Irenaeus’ writings primarily critique Gnosticism, which held that Christianity’s truths were a form of secret knowledge confined to a select few. The only true knowledge is knowledge of Christ, Irenaeus argued, and this knowledge is accessible, public, and communicated by the broader Church, not secret societies. Irenaeus fought schismatics and heretics, showing just how early the connection between correct theology and Church unity was understood. His main work is even entitled “Against Heresies.”

He promoted apostolic authority as the only true guide to the correct interpretation of Scripture and, in a classic statement of theology, Irenaeus explicitly cited the Bishop of Rome as the primary example of unbroken Church authority. Like Saint Cyprian fifty years after him, Irenaeus described the Church as the mother of all Christians: “...one must cling to the Church, be brought up within her womb and feed there on the Lord’s Scripture.” This theology notes a beautiful paradox. While in the physical order, a child leaves his mother’s womb and grows ever more apart from her as he matures, the Church’s motherhood exercises an opposite pull on her children. Once she gives us new life through baptism, our bonds with Mother Church grow ever stronger and tighter as we mature. We become more dependent on her sacraments, more intimate with her life and knowledge, as we grow into adulthood. The Church becomes more our mother, not less, as we age.

On Pope Saint John Paul II’s third pastoral visit to France, in October 1986, his very first stop was the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls in Lyon. Excavated and opened to the public in the mid-twentieth century, it rests largely unknown, a ruin, in a residential neighborhood. Before dignitaries and a large crowd, the Pope prostrated himself and kissed the site where the many martyrs of Lyon died so many centuries before. Saint Irenaeus may have been looking on from the stone benches that fateful day in 177 A.D. when his co-religionists were murdered. The blood of those forgotten martyrs watered the seed that later flowered into the great saint we commemorate today.

Saint Irenaeus, may your intercession strengthen our wills, enlighten our minds, and deepen our trust. Like you, we want to be loyal sons and daughters of God, and loyal, educated, and faithful members of His Church. Help us to fulfill our loftiest and our most noble goals.

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June 24: Birth of Saint John the Baptist
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White or Gold
Patron Saint of converts and epileptics

A rugged forerunner cuts a path for his cousin

“Dies natalis” means “birthday” or “anniversary” in Latin. But for early Christians, “dies natalis” referred to a martyr’s date of death and its subsequent commemoration in the Church’s liturgy, most typically through the assigning of a feast day. Most saints, martyrs or otherwise, are commemorated on, or near, the date of their death, the date their body was transferred to its final resting place, or on another significant date in their lives—date of ordination, coronation as pope, consecration as nun, etc. Besides Christ Himself, only two saints’ birthdays are commemorated liturgically: The Virgin Mary’s on September 8, exactly nine months after the Feast of her Immaculate Conception; and Saint John the Baptist’s on June 24, today’s feast. Saint Mary and Saint John were both sanctified, or made holy, before they first opened their eyes to the light or ever gulped a mouthful of fresh air. A long span of years did not turn them into saints. God made them holy from the start. So we commemorate their lives from the start, from their birthdays.

Only the Gospel of Saint Luke tells us the details of John’s birth. John’s mother and father were Elizabeth and Zechariah. They were beyond the age for having children. But Zechariah, a priest who served in the Temple in Jerusalem, was told one night by the Archangel Gabriel that Elizabeth would give birth to a boy they must name John. Zechariah was dumbfounded. Literally, when he disbelieved this annunciation, he was rendered speechless until the child’s birth. When his speech was finally restored, a torrent of praise gushed out in the canticle known as the Benedictus. It is prayed as part of the Breviary every single day at morning prayer by hundreds of thousands of priests and nuns the world over. Zechariah’s prayer of praise lives on.

The celebration of the nativity of John the Baptist is perhaps the oldest liturgical feast day in all Christendom, much older than the Feast of Christmas itself. It was at one time celebrated with three distinct Masses—vigil, dawn, and daytime—just like Christmas still is. The beheading of John, celebrated on August 29, is of equally ancient origin. The oldest liturgical books even, incredibly, indicate that there was once a liturgical commemoration of the conception of John the Baptist celebrated nine months prior to his birth, on September 24.

Today’s feast is placed three months after the Annunciation, on March 25, because that gospel scene tells us that Elizabeth, John’s mother, was pregnant for six months at the time. Three more months take us to June 24. (The one-day discrepancy between March 25 and June 24 is an accident of counting. If December and June each had thirty-one days, there would be no discrepancy.) Three related feast days line up beautifully: March 25, the Annunciation; June 24, the birth of John the Baptist; December 25, the birth of Christ. John’s birth foretells Christ’s birth. Although the historical chronology may not be exact, the dates show the theological interconnection among the three feasts.

All parents are naturally curious to discover the sex of their child in utero. Some allow themselves to be told the sex. Others wait in high suspense. Elizabeth and her spouse Zechariah were told by a winged messenger of God Himself that they would have a boy. That little boy grew to be a man, a great man among men who accepted death rather than swallow his words criticizing the powerful Herod Antipas. John ran ahead of Christ, clearing the ground so that the Lord’s pathway would be clear. This forerunner baptized the Christ, preached and prophesied like the Christ, fasted and prayed like the Christ, and died for the truth like the Christ. But he did not rise from the dead like the Christ. There is only one Easter. We rejoice at Saint John the Baptist’s birth, because what followed merits rejoicing. We rejoice at his birth, because of the generous God who intervenes in our lives, who discovers us before we discover Him.

May the birth of Saint John the Baptist deepen our love for all unborn babies, who must be given the chance to grow, to live, and to become the great men and women God invites them to be. God respected the laws of human biology when intervening in history. May we follow His example of seeing every child, every life, as a gift.

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June 22: Saint Paulinus of Nola, Bishop
c. 354–431
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of bell makers

The best of Rome—the best of the Church

Saint Paulinus was to the manor born. And it was a very nice manor. He was raised on an aristocratic estate near Bordeaux, France, in an elite Roman family replete with senators and other high officials of empire. Paulinus received a superior education from a well-known tutor and served, while still in his twenties, as Consul of Rome and Governor of Campania in Southern Italy. He was humble, sage, gentle, well read, and intellectually curious. Paulinus represented, in short, the very best of Rome. He would, in time, represent the very best of the Church.

While serving as Governor of Campania, Paulinus witnessed the simple but sincere piety of the common people who went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Felix of Nola, who had suffered for the faith around 250 A.D. The people’s faith moved Paulinus to his core and planted a seed in the soil of his soul. Paulinus suffered personal setbacks due to the political machinations inherent to empires, which awakened him to the fleeting nature of power and prestige. He moved to Milan and studied in the school of Saint Ambrose. When Paulinus returned to Bordeaux, he was baptized by the Bishop. The seed of faith planted in Campania had germinated in Milan and flowered in Bordeaux. It would bear fruit for decades to come.

Paulinus married a holy Christian woman from Barcelona, and the two soon became three. But their son died after only a few days. Paulinus and his wife were thunderstruck. Another turning point. Face to face with the mystery of suffering in its crudest form, they threw their lives at God’s feet. They abandoned their considerable material wealth and began to lead lives of continual prayer and asceticism. Paulinus rightly noted that poverty was not the goal, but the means to a closer bond with Christ: “...the athlete does not win because he strips himself, for he undresses precisely in order to begin the contest, whereas he only deserves to be crowned as victorious when he has fought properly."

Paulinus, though married, was ordained a priest around 394 and then returned to the land that had first nourished his faith—Nola, in Compania. He would never leave it. After his wife’s death around 410, Paulinus received episcopal ordination and served as Bishop of Nola until his death. He was part of a broader tradition of educated Roman men of the fourth and fifth centuries who served the Church as bishops rather than the empire as governors. As Bishop, Paulinus’ greatness revealed itself. Although he never wrote theological or scholarly works like Saint Jerome, he maintained a steady correspondence with this great biblical scholar and many others, including Saint Martin of Tours. Paulinus wrote to a North African bishop whose close friend had just had a powerful conversion. Paulinus was curious and asked the bishop for more information. The friend’s name was Augustine, and his response to Paulinus was the “Confessions.” History has Paulinus of Nola to thank for the world’s first autobiography, the groundbreaking work of the great Saint Augustine. Paulinus and Augustine became close friends, although they probably never met. Saint Augustine even wrote: “Go to Campania...there study Paulinus, that choice servant of God.” If a man is known by the caliber of his friends, Paulinus’ many impressive friends speak powerfully to his sterling character.

Saint Paulinus was a master of the art of friendship, particularly spiritual friendship. He understood the Church, the Body of Christ, as a forum where true friendship flourishes. He wrote to Saint Augustine: "It is not surprising if, despite being far apart, we are present to each other and, without being acquainted, know each other, because we are members of one body, we have one head, we are steeped in one grace, we live on one loaf, we walk on one road and we dwell in the same house." Beautiful! The Church is a communion of souls, a theological and sacramental family where deeper relationships take root and flower. Saint Paulinus is still venerated in Nola and its environs, where on his Feast Day the faithful carry in procession enormous lily-adorned towers in which stand large statues of Saint Paulinus.

Saint Paulinus of Nola, may your humility, education, and serenity be an example to all who are searching for God. May they imitate you in finding Him, in loving Him, and in dedicating their lives to Him amidst a large circle of like-minded friends.

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June 22: Saints John Fisher, Bishop and Martyr,
and Thomas More, Martyr
John Fisher: 1469–1535; Thomas More: 1478–1535
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of the Diocese of Rochester (Fisher)
and of lawyers and politicians (More) 

They would not bend to the marriage 

In 1526 a German painter named Hans Holbein could not find work in Basel, Switzerland. The Reformation had come to town. It shattered the stained glass, burned the wooden statues, and sliced up the oil paintings. Protestants don’t “do” great art. There were no more commissions. So Holbein went north, to Catholic England, in search of wealthy patrons for his craft. On his way, he passed through the Netherlands to procure letters of introduction from the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was a friend of Sir Thomas More, an English humanist of the highest caliber. And thus it came to pass that one fine day, in England in 1527, Thomas More sat patiently while Holbein’s brush worked its magic.

Holbein’s extraordinary portrait of Thomas More captures the man for all seasons, as one contemporary called More, at the pinnacle of his powers. More’s head and torso fill the frame. There is no need for context, landscape, or a complex backdrop. More’s mind is what matters. He is what matters. Nothing else. The shimmering velvet of his robes, the weighty gold chain of office resting on his shoulders, the detailed rose badge of the House of Tudor lying on his chest, all tell the viewer something important—this is not a frivolous man. He serves the King. His work is consequential. He also wears a ring. He is married and has children. He dons a cap. It is England, and he is cold. His stubble is visible. He is tired from overwork and did not have time to shave. He holds a small slip of paper—perhaps a bribe he rejected. His gaze, slightly off center, is earnest, serious, and calm. It is almost as if he is searching the room, attentive to any threat lurking behind the painter. He is watchful. The entirety of the work conveys that elusive quality that denotes great art—interior movement. The gears of More’s brain are rotating. His personality has force. The viewer feels it.

Saint Thomas More was the greatest Englishman of his generation. In a land with a highly educated aristocratic class, his erudition was unequalled. He was a devoted family man who carried out an extensive correspondence with his children and ensured that his daughters were as well educated as his sons. He served the English crown faithfully both at home and abroad. He charmed his many friends with a rich and engaging personality. He published scholarly works and communicated with other humanists of his era. Yet despite all of these accomplishments, the fraught times he lived in eventually overwhelmed him. He could not save his own head.

More was a thoughtful and serious Catholic. He refused to bend to the will of King Henry VIII regarding divorce and Henry’s self-appointment as head of the Church in England. For his silence, or lack of explicit support for Henry, More was brought to court, where a perjurer’s words knifed him in the heart. More was condemned to death by beheading. This was a favor from the King, who admired More but could not brook his dissent. More had originally been sentenced to a far crueler form of capital punishment, but Henry decreed that his life end with one blow of the axe. So the unconquered Thomas More climbed a shaky scaffold on July 6, 1535, and had his head lopped off. His head was stuck on a pole on London bridge for one month afterward, a trophy to barbarity. More died a martyr to the indissolubility of marriage.

Saint John Fisher was an academic who held various high positions at the University of Cambridge, one of the two universities in all of England, eventually becoming its Chancellor for life. He was a Renaissance humanist, like Thomas More, who encouraged the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Fisher was the personal tutor of Henry VIII when Henry was a boy, and he preached the funeral homily of Henry’s father, Henry VII. John Fisher lived a life of extreme personal austerity and even placed a human skull on the table during meals to remind himself of his eventual end. He had many of the same qualities as More—great learning, personal uprightness, and academic accomplishments.

But easy times don’t make martyrs. When King Henry wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Fisher became her most ardent supporter. He openly stated in court that he would die for the indissolubility of marriage, thus incurring the lasting wrath of his former pupil Henry. All the bishops of England, save Fisher and two others, lost their courage and acquiesced, without a fight, to Henry VIII’s takeover of the Catholic Church in England. Their weakness brought to a sudden, crashing end a thousand years of Catholicism in England. The faith endured in some form, of course, but would never be the culture-forming force it had been for so many centuries. It is an embarrassment of Catholic history that almost all the bishops of England fell like dominoes, one after another, at one slight puff of the breath of King Henry VIII on their cheeks.

After various nefarious machinations, John Fisher was imprisoned in the harshest of conditions for over a year, even being deprived access to a priest. During this time, the Pope named him a cardinal, although Henry refused him the ceremonial placing of the red hat on his head. After a brief trial with the usual perjury, Cardinal John Fisher was beheaded on June 22, 1535. In order to avoid inevitable comparisons between Cardinal Fisher and John the Baptist, King Henry moved the cardinal’s execution to avoid any connection to June 24th’s Feast of Saint John the Baptist. Both Johns were martyrs to marriage. But there was no silver platter for John Fisher. His head was placed on a pole on London bridge for two weeks, only to be replaced by Thomas More’s head. Saints John Fisher and Thomas More were beatified in 1886 along with fifty-four other English martyrs. The two were canonized together in 1935.

Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, through your intercession, give all Catholics courage to resist the pressure to conform to falsehood, to the broad way, to popular opinion. You were both thoughtful and granite-like in your resistance. Help us to be likewise when times call for such.

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June 21: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious
1568–1591
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Catholic youth and plague victims

Though he had many possessions, he did not go away sad

The Jesuit Order, from its very founding, had a sharp sense of its educational superiority, its fidelity to the Holy Father, and its mission to educate and spiritually guide the elites among the courts and aristocracies of Europe. The Order did not, however, develop a strong community identity. There were, and are, common houses. But Jesuit communities built on common prayer, meals, and apostolates were rare. Much more common was the Jesuit alone, trekking under the canopy of a Canadian forest, riding the waves like a cork in a boat off the coast of India, or hiking the narrow mountain pathways in the mists of the high Andes. Where there was one Jesuit, there were all Jesuits. Each man embodied his entire Order. It was a community of many ones. Jesuits were united by their vows, their long education, and their common mission.  Actually living, praying, eating, relaxing, and working together, so crucial to the common life of other Orders, did not play an equivalent role among the Jesuits.

Jesuit superiors were aware of the dangers that isolation might pose to unity. So they encouraged, and even mandated, a means to sew into one fabric the patches of a thousand lives being lived across the globe. Letters! Jesuits were required to write letters to their superiors, giving regular accounts of their work. These letters had to be detailed, instructive, and inspiring. After they were reviewed, the most edifying were published and distributed to Jesuit houses. Through these letters, the Order was made one. Every Jesuit knew what at least some of his brothers were doing for God and the Church. These collections of letters, known as the Jesuit Relations, were eventually distributed beyond the confines of the Order. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Relations were often exciting best sellers recounting the apostolic exploits of isolated Jesuits walking along the rim of Christendom.

It was just such an inspiring letter, or relation, from India that inspired today’s saint, Aloysius Gonzaga, to become a Jesuit. Saint Aloysius was known to his family as Luigi, Aloysius being the Latinized version of his baptismal name. He was the eldest of seven children born into an aristocratic family from Northern Italy. Kings and Queens and Cardinals and Princes ate at the family table, were family themselves, or were at least friends or acquaintances. Young Luigi knew, and detested, the frivolous existence lived by so many in his aristocratic milieux. He also suffered from various physical infirmities, which produced that vulnerability and perspective which leads so clearly and directly to a deep dependence on God.

After receiving his First Communion at about the age of twelve, he came to personally know the great future saint Cardinal Charles Borromeo, who would later be his confessor and spiritual director. Borromeo was a Jesuit. His example, together with Aloysius’ reading about the works of Jesuit missionaries, convinced him to enter the Jesuit Novitiate, against his family’s wishes. So Aloysius went to Rome to begin his studies. And there he grew to embrace those of lesser education and refinement than himself. He volunteered to work bringing victims of a plague to a Jesuit hospital, despite his personal revulsion at the patients’ decrepit physical conditions. After his own physical limitations restricted his participation in this corporal work of mercy, he still persevered and insisted on returning to the hospital over his superiors’ objections.

While working in the hospital, Aloysius contracted the plague from a patient he personally cared for, was incapacitated shortly thereafter, and, a few months later, died on June 21, 1591. He was twenty-three. His reputation for purity, prayerfulness, and suffering led many to consider him a saint soon after his death. Aloysius was beatified just fourteen years later, in 1605, and canonized in 1726. He is buried in the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Rome. His contribution to the Jesuit canon was not a pagan tribe converted, a new ocean crossed, or an unknown language catalogued. His letter was his life, and it was to die young and to die holy.

Saint Aloysius, you laid all your treasures, including your youth, on an altar to God. May your example of generosity, and your service to the sick and dying, inspire all Catholic youth to give God the gold of their early years, not just the silver of middle age or the bronze of their retirement.

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June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot
951–c. 1025
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Founder of the Camaldolese Benedictine Order

To be alone with God is not to be alone

It is easy today to slip down a technological hole into a cave piled high with televisions, video games, and the toys of virtual reality. Many technological “hermits” disappear from meaningful contact with society, and instead marinate, perpetually, in the blue glow of their screens. Retreating from sustained contact with everyday life has always been attractive for a very small number of people. These people are called monks. But a religious monk’s motivation is not isolation for isolation’s sake. Nor is it flight from overwhelming adult responsibilities. Today’s technological monks separate themselves from society for different reasons than a religious monk does. Religious monks were not, and are not, merely recluses with antisocial or introverted personalities. They do not become monks because they are more comfortable playing war on a digital battlefield or retreating into sci-fi universes.

Although they may have an innate disposition toward the interior life, religious monks do not enter a monastery primarily to flee, or hide from, something. Instead, they run toward someone—God. A monastery is not a cave. It is an oasis. Monks seek a Christ-centered community where mortification and self-discipline are easier to practice, where a chapel and the Sacraments are always available, and where spiritual direction, Church approval, and the reinforcement of fellow monks assure the community that they are doing the will of God.

Since the time of Saint Benedict in the sixth century, there had essentially been only one monastic order in the Latin Rite Church, the Benedictines. Benedictine monasteries shone like stars in a broad constellation, blinking throughout Europe from east to west and north to south. Each monastery and school was like a vertebra strengthening the intellectual and spiritual skeleton of Europe. Over the centuries, however, and inevitably, the Benedictines atrophied, cracked from dryness, and needed new wine poured into their old wineskins. The saint who reformed Benedictine life and who founded the Cistercian Order was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. But he was not born until 1090. It was today’s saint, Romuald, much less well-known, who cleared the path for Saint Bernard and for the reform of monasticism, ensuring its survival in the middle ages.

Saint Romuald was born in the middle of the tenth century in Northern Italy. After his father killed a relative in a duel, Romuald entered a local monastery for a few weeks of penance. But the weeks turned into months and the months into years. He stayed. Unfortunately, the monks were as lukewarm as old bathwater, and Saint Romuald told them so. He had to leave. He put himself under the tutelage of a wise hermit, then traveled to Spain to live as a hermit on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery. He subsequently spent about thirty years walking the length and breadth of Italy. He had acquired a great reputation as an ascetic and master of prayer and so founded, or reformed, various monasteries which sought his assistance.

Finally, in 1012, he settled down in Tuscany and established a reformed branch of the Benedictines. The Order was named after the man who granted Saint Romuald the beautiful land on which he first built. The donor’s name was Maldolus, and the new community was thus called the Camaldolese Order. The Order still exists in several countries and continues to attract those few men and women inclined to the radical isolation, prayer, asceticism, and deep hunger for God, which only a hermit’s life can satisfy.

Saint Romuald planted the seed of his Order in the Benedictine garden. But Camaldolese monks emphasize solitude more than their monastic cousins. In a typical Benedictine monastery, every single monk places his oar in the water to pull the monastery’s school, or orchard, or farm, forward. The Camaldolese tradition is more hermit based (eremitical) while allowing some community based (cenobitical) life. Camaldolese monks generally live in individual structures but pray the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours together daily in the Church. They live simplicity, penance, and contemplation more intensely due to their total focus on these goals to the exclusion of all outside apostolates. Unlike modernity’s reclusive technological monks enraptured by their screens, the Camaldolese choose to live without phones, the internet, or television. The tabernacle is their screen, and the scene stays the same. With this intense focus on solitude and prayer, Camaldolese monks perpetuate, in their narrow, unique, and faithful way, the vision of their pioneering founder.

Saint Romuald, by your intense example of prayer, penance, and solitude, assist all the faithful to put God above all things, to conquer themselves before any other mountain, and so come to know themselves, and their Maker, more deeply.

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Immaculate Heart of Mary
Saturday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Wing to wing, oar to oar, heart to heart

The images by which the Church describes Herself are primarily feminine—Bride, Mother, Virgin, Spouse—while masculine terms are used for the Church’s ministry— the Office of Saint Peter, Office of Bishop, Holy Orders, etc. The fatherly labor and paternal structure of the Church are an outgrowth of her essentially maternal nature. Ecclesia Mater, Mother Church, loves with a huge heart, while Apostles, bishops, priests, and deacons hold souls together in their common mother’s embrace. In the thinking of Pope Saint John Paul II, the “Marian Church,” the Church of discipleship, precedes and makes possible the “Petrine Church,” the Church of office and authority. So authority serves discipleship, and discipleship has preeminence over, and makes sense of, authority. Even the fatherly and authoritative Saint Paul speaks with maternal concern, calling new Christians his “children,” saying he is like a “nurse” to them, and bragging that he has “begotten” them through the Gospel.

On today’s Feast of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, the maternal warmth radiating from the core of Mary bakes the faithful soul. Our hearts glow when we look upon the seven-pierced heart of the mother of Jesus and commiserate with the holy longing in her tender eyes. Our love for Mary also softens our love for our mother the Church. Our minds know that the Church loves us and nourishes us with sanctifying grace. But intellectual convictions need to be felt. In the same way that Christ concretely and historically images the Father, so too Mary images, concretely and historically, the Church. Mary is not a mere symbol of the Church but anticipates and embodies what she gave birth to. Absent Mary, the Church would be just a little bit too hard, too distant, and too austere. It would be like a camping site or a large, cold, house, providing shelter but lacking a woman’s touch. Mary converts the dry household of faith into a cozy family home. Without her heartfelt love, the house would simply not be the same.

The prophecy of Simeon in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel is the first biblical indication of Mary’s interior suffering. Simeon tells Mary that Jesus will be a sign that will be contradicted and that a sword shall pierce her own heart. Years later, Mary and Joseph panic when Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem while they return to Nazareth. When they recover him in the temple and return home, Luke tells us that Mary “treasured all these things in her heart” (Lk 2:51). At the foot of the cross, Mary’s pondering heart is crushed and bewildered when sin closes in on her Son. But just when Christ’s life appears to be stillborn, Mary’s heart is vivified by the resurrection, and she becomes the first-century Church’s indipensable witness and most sturdy anchor.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary is not a closed garden. We don’t peek in through the window of the family home in Nazareth to spy Mary standing in the kitchen. Mary’s life was not as public as her Son’s, but it was not as private as her contemporaries. And in the Book of Revelation, her mystical significance is exposed for all to see. She straddles heaven and earth in a duel with the devil. Mary’s wounded maternal heart beats strong and fast for the faithful and for the world, then, on a cosmic stage. Her heart is sinless but bruised, slit by seven swords of sorrow and dripping red for love of man. Vatican II’s description of Mary as the Temple of the Holy Spirit (Lumen Gentium 52-53) implies that her heart is the red-hot tabernacle of that Temple. Today’s feast was first referred to as Mary’s “Admirable Heart” or “Most Pure Heart.” Yet all the titles reflect the same truth; just like the love of Jesus’s Sacred Heart, Mary’s love for Christ and us is a tangible, human love. The Queen and King of Hearts are united in their love of all that is worth loving.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, your bruised but beating heart softens our love for you and the Church. Your love is maternal, warm, docile, and concerned. Infuse our hearts with love like yours so we can live like you in this world and the next.

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Sacred Heart of Jesus
Friday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

Behold the heart which drips red for love of man

It’s always the tissue of male heart muscle when the molecular structure of a Eucharistic miracle is examined under a microscope. Jesus had “heart” but, more importantly, He had a heart. The word “heart” is synonymous with grit, soul, intuition, love, strength, generosity, and, in its most total sense, the very center of man. Today’s feast embraces all of those meanings. Christ’s Sacred Heart teaches us that God loves us as a friend loves a friend, as a parent loves a child, or as a sibling loves his closest brother or sister. That is, Christ loves us in the same way as a person loves us, only more intensely. Our God doesn’t shift the planetary order, redirect the rays of the sun, or create a parallel gravitational field to magnetize His love for mankind. Science fiction requires a fluid imagination. Understanding God’s love should not, and does not, demand such mental contortionism. Understanding God’s love should be as simple as recalling your little hand in your father’s big hand as you walked next to him at night as a little girl. It requires remembering running into your mother’s soft embrace, cheek to cheek, after skinning your knee. Jesus Christ’s love for man is as human and as clear as a beating heart. Simply put, Jesus loves us from just above His solar plexus, where His heart pulsates with emotion for every sacred creature who harbors a human soul.

The widely loved devotion to the Sacred Heart is not rooted in a feast of ancient pedigree similar to those of Holy Week. No Christian of the first millenium ever gazed into the haunting eyes of Christ as He stared out from a Sacred Heart image enthroned on the family-room wall. It was only in 1856 that Pope Pius IX placed this feast on the Church’s universal calendar. The Pope acted after almost two centuries of devotion to the Sacred Heart, which had grown out of the thinking, preaching, and prayer of the indefatigable Saint John Eudes and out of the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Both of these saints were indebted, in turn, to the medieval revelations of the Sacred Heart granted to Saint Gertrude the Great.

We love the Heart of Christ because His heart loved us first. We adore the adorer, love the lover, and worship the worshiper. Because God comes first, all of our love for Him is the repayment of a debt. We are not doing God a favor by loving him any more than a hammer does a carpenter a favor by slamming nails into wood. Religion is about raw justice, not doing God favors. That God loves us is not readily apparent from creation itself or from the history of mankind. The gods were many things to many races throughout the ages, but love was not one of them. Christianity had to tell the world that God was love. And Jesus had to attach His arms to a cross and die for that message to be convincing. The visions of Saint Margaret Mary made God’s love concrete and comprehensible, while the visions of Saint Faustina Kowolska deepened the meaning of this feast still more. In these challenging visions, Christ rips open His heart to Sister Faustina and shows her a calm and deep ocean of mercy waiting to bathe repentant sinners in its saving waters. Three strands—the Sacred Heart, love, and mercy—are now braided in a tight belt of spiritual truth.

True heart is not proven by waving to the crowds from a car in a victory parade or by luxuriating on the beach with friends. Real heart is in the last stretch of the neck over the finish line, in climbing the stage to receive a diploma after years of academic struggle, or in pulling yourself out of bed to go to nocturnal adoration. True heart is synonymous with long suffering, perseverance, and conquering through adversity. True heart is dying on the cross when you didn’t deserve it. A true heart is a Sacred Heart. That’s the heart of our God. No athlete goes to the Olympics to compete for the silver. Jesus reached for the gold from the dais of the cross, slick with his own blood. There’s no need for us to keep on searching for a heart of gold in this world. We know in exactly whose body that heart beats. It’s all gold, it’s all sacredness, and it loves us like Himself.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, You told us to ask and we shall receive, to seek and we shall find, to knock and the door shall be opened. Today, we ask, we seek, and we knock, in the sure and certain hope that you will hear us and answer us.

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June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua
1195–1231
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of lost articles

He mastered the Word of God

Saint Anthony of Padua is a famous Franciscan saint especially honored at an impressive shrine in Padua, in Northern Italy. But he was not born as Anthony, was an Augustinian priest before he became a Franciscan, and was from Lisbon, Portugal, not Italy. Saint Anthony, along with Saint Bonaventure, another early Franciscan, lent theological heft to the somewhat esoteric movement founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis was uniquely sensitive and eccentric, unsuited to leadership, and vexed by the need to exercise authority. It was Saints Anthony and Bonaventure who gave the Franciscan Order credibility, who anchored it in sound theology, and who assured its survival and continued growth.

Today’s saint was baptized Fernando and grew up in a privileged environment in Lisbon. He received a superior education and entered the Augustinian Order as an adolescent. While living in the city of Coimbra, he met some Franciscan brothers who had established a poor hermitage outside of the city named in honor of Saint Anthony of the Desert. Young Father Fernando was very attracted to their simple way of life. From these friars, he also heard about the martyrdom of five Franciscan brothers at the hands of Muslims in North Africa. These martyrs’ bodies were ransomed and returned for burial in Fr. Fernando’s own abbey in Coimbra. Their deaths and burials were a life-changing moment for him. The Augustinian Fr. Fernando asked, and received, permission to leave and join the Franciscans. At that point he adopted a new religious name, Anthony, from the patron saint of the hermitage where he had first come to know the Franciscan Order.

The newly christened Father Anthony then set out to emulate his martyr heroes. He sailed for North Africa to die for the faith or to ransom himself for Christians held captive by Muslims. But it was not to be. Anthony became gravely ill, and, on the return voyage, his ship was providentially blown off course to Sicily. From there he made his way to Central Italy, where his education, mastery of Scripture, compelling preaching skills, and holiness brought him deserving renown. Paradoxically, it was because Anthony received excellent training as an Augustinian that he became a great Franciscan. Saint Francis himself soon came to know Father Anthony, a man whose learning legitimized the under-educated Franciscans. Saint Francis had been skeptical of scholarship, even prohibiting his illiterate followers from learning how to read. Francis feared they would become too prideful and then abandon their radical simplicity and poverty.  Saint Francis only reluctantly, several years after founding his Order, allowed some of his brothers to be ordained priests. He had originally relied exclusively on diocesan priests to minister to his non-ordained brothers, and he distrusted his followers who aspired to the honor of the Priesthood. The presence of Anthony, and later Bonaventure, changed all that.

In time, Father Anthony became a famous preacher and teacher to Franciscan communities in Northern Italy and Southern France. His knowledge of Scripture was so formidable that Pope Gregory IX titled him the “Ark of the Testament.” In Anthony’s Shrine in Padua, a reliquary holding his tongue and larynx recall his fame as a preacher. These organs had not disintegrated even long after the rest of his body had returned to dust. Saint Anthony is most often shown either holding the Child Jesus in his arms or holding a book, a lily, or all three. His intercession is invoked throughout the world for the recovery of lost items and for assistance in finding a spouse.

Anthony died at the age of just thirty-five in 1231, about five years after Saint Francis had died. He was canonized less than one year later. In 1946 Saint Anthony was declared a Doctor of the Church due to the richness of his sermons and writings. He was conscious as he succumbed to death. In his last moments, the brothers surrounding his bed asked him if he saw anything. Saint Anthony said simply, “I see the Lord.”

Saint Anthony of Padua, we seek your powerful intercession to have the right words on our lips to inspire the faithful and to correct and guide the ignorant. Through your example, may our words also be buttressed by our powerful witness to Christ.

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June 11: Saint Barnabas, Apostle
Early First Century–c. 62
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Cyprus

A multi-talented disciple recruits Saint Paul

Today’s saint was an Apostle in the exact same sense in which St. Paul was an Apostle. Saint Barnabas was not one of the Twelve original followers of Christ nor a replacement for one of the Twelve, like Saint Matthias. But the term “The Twelve” quickly disappeared after the Gospel events, because “The Twelve” themselves propagated into dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of successor Apostles, known alternatively as Episcopoi or Prebyteroi: Overseers or Elders. Saint Barnabas is among that generation of Christian leaders whose name first surfaces immediately after the Resurrection. So although he was not in the circle of “The Twelve,” he stood in the next outer ring.

The earliest name for the movement initiated by Jesus of Nazareth was “The Way.” This term is used in the Acts of the Apostles and in the ancient catechetical document known as the Didache. But “The Way” was replaced early on by another term. The Acts of the Apostles explains: “Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. So it was that for an entire year they met with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians’” (Ac 11:25–26). We owe Saint Barnabas, then, the credit for the word “Christian” as the standard description of the followers of Jesus Christ.

The persecution and martyrdom of Saint Stephen forced many Christian leaders to flee Jerusalem. The unforeseen effect of Stephen’s assassination and the subsequent persecution of Christians was the spread of the Gospel into greater Syria, the Greek Islands, and North Africa. This expansion led to contact with Greek and Roman Gentiles, or non-Jews, a growth presaging the transformation of Christianity from a localized Jewish sect into a multiethnic worldwide Church. When some converts from North Africa and Cyprus went to Antioch, the capital of the Roman province of Syria, they converted a great number of Greek speakers. And when “news of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem...they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast devotion; for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (Ac 11: 22–24a).

Saint Barnabas played a crucial role in the first unfurling of the Gospel message beyond Palestine. Acting as a kind of talent scout, he lassoed Saul from his hometown of Tarsus to begin the extraordinary missionary efforts which would forever change the Church and the world. Saint Paul and Saint Barnabas are repeatedly mentioned together in the Acts of the Apostles as they traverse the port cities, the waters, and the dusty highways of the Eastern Mediterranean world. Together, they call down the Holy Spirit, commission new Apostles, confront Jews and Roman citizens alike, challenge a magician, speak to governors, and, of utmost consequence for the Church’s future, convince the other Apostles not to force new converts to become Jews first and Christians later.

Saint Barnabas was a dynamic force of nature who spun like a tornado from town to town in the early Church. He was a giant of that first generation of risk-taking, manly, apostolic leaders. The citizens of Lystra in Asia Minor compared him to the Greek God Zeus. They were so impressed that they tried to crown him with garlands and to sacrifice the blood of oxen to both him and Saint Paul (Ac 14:12–18). After numerous adventures in tandem, Paul, the better preacher, writer, and organizer, ultimately sails off on his own. The last we hear of Barnabas, he is returning to the Island of Cyprus, his native land.  When Saint Paul writes from his Roman prison in about 62 A.D., he mentions that Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, is with him (Col 4:10). Barnabas’ absence at Paul’s side in his hour of need is a clue that Barnabas is likely dead by the year 62. Tradition tells us that Barnabas was martyred on Cyprus, perhaps by a Jewish mob angered at his successful preaching in the synagogue of Salamis. His relics and memory are particularly honored on Cyprus to this day.

Saint Barnabas, you gathered infant Christianity from its cradle and carried it into the world beyond. You poured the message of salvation into new wineskins without any guile. May all Christians be so confident, so convincing, and so successful through your intercession.

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The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
Thursday after Holy Trinity unless otherwise indicated.
In the U.S, the solemnity is transferred to the Sunday after the Holy Trinity
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

The gift of all gifts

Standing at the crowded table in the dim candle light of the Upper Room during the Last Supper, Jesus Christ did not hand out Bibles to the Twelve Apostles and solemnly tell them, “Take this, all of you, and read it. This is my book, written for you.” Jesus gives us Himself, not a book. On today’s Feast, we commemorate God’s greatest gift to mankind, the person of Jesus Christ. God gives us His Son, and then Christ gives us Himself, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the accidents of bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist.  Gift, gift-giver, and receiver meld into one in this sacrament of sacraments.

In the era of the early Church, it was customary for an excess of bread to be consecrated at Mass so that the Eucharist could be carried to the sick who had been unable to attend the Holy Sacrifice. This practice led to the adoption of the pyx as the first sacred vessel for reservation of the Eucharist. Some modern churches pay homage to these Eucharistic origins by hanging an oversized pyx on their wall to use as a tabernacle, imitating the early Church custom. Permanent reservation of the Eucharist led, over the centuries, to enthroning the Lord amidst the greatest splendor in churches. By the early medieval period, the time had long passed when the Eucharist was reserved merely to be brought to the sick. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, street processions, chants, confraternities, songs, flowers, and all the splendid trappings of a feast day covered this dogma in glory by the High Middle Ages, and continue to wrap it in honor today.

Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that the most necessary sacrament was Baptism but that the most excellent was the Holy Eucharist. This most excellent sacrament has been, for some, too excellent. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus tells His disciples that they must eat His body and drink His blood, many are incredulous and walk away. But Jesus does not compromise or say He was misunderstood. He lets them keep on walking. This initially hard teaching for the few was destined, over time, to be lovingly welcomed by the many.

The Old Covenant of the Old Testament was gory. In a kind of primitive liturgy, Moses had goats and sheep slaughtered on an altar and their blood gathered into buckets. He then splashed this blood over the people, sealing their acceptance of the written law. Flying droplets of animal blood splattered against people’s skin to remind them of their promise to God. No such bloody drama breaks out at Sunday Mass. We each bless our head and torso with holy water and receive a pure white host on the tongue. The New Covenant is based not on the blood of goats, bull calves, or on the ashes of a heifer. It is rooted in the generosity of the Son of God, who “offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit.” Christ’s Covenant with his people is established verbally and liturgically at the Last Supper and physically on the cross the following day. The consecration of the Sacred Species at Mass continues Christ’s physical presence among us, while adoration of the Blessed Sacrament suspends the consecration of the Mass, stretching it out into hours, days, months, and years.

We naturally desire to leave a part of ourselves to our loved ones. We send photos, solemnly pass on a cherished memento, or give a baby a family name. Soldiers used to carry a locket holding a few strands of their wife’s or girlfriend’s hair. We need to be close, physically close, to those we love in concrete, tangible ways. Jesus desired the same, and, not being constrained by the limitations of human nature, He did the same, and more. He has left us Himself! That dogma processing down the street is a person! And that dogma behind the golden doors of the parish’s tabernacle is the same person! So bend that body low and set that heart on fire, for the Saving Victim opens wide the gate of heaven to all below. We stand as close to Christ in the Holy Eucharist as the Apostles ever did on Mount Tabor.

Lord of the Eucharist, we venerate You with heads bowed, as the old form of worship gives way to the new. With faith providing for what fails the senses, we honor the Begetter and the Begotten, loving back at what loved us first, apprentices in the school of love.

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June 9: Saint Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor
Early Fourth Century–373
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of spiritual directors

The Harp of the Holy Spirit

The Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 ended a centuries-long scorpion dance. Bishops, theologians, and scholars from Egypt to Syria had long circled one another with suspicion, stinging their enemies with sharp words and pointed tongues. Did Jesus Christ have one or two natures? If two natures, were they joined in His will or in His person? If united in His person, at conception? Was He one person or was He two? Smart, educated men defended every shade of every subtlety of every complex question with all of their considerable skill. The answers hacked out at Ephesus and Chalcedon, whose hurly-burly political intrigues were less than inspiring, answered the relevant questions definitively, establishing orthodox teaching for all time. The theological language coined during those fifth century debates is still familiar to the Church today: hypostatic union, monophysitism, Theotokos, etc.

Today’s saint, Ephrem, was active a century prior to the great conclusions and clarifications of the fifth-century Councils. Although Ephrem did not deviate from what later Councils would explicitly teach, he used far different language to communicate the same truths, anticipating later teachings through poetry. Saint Ephrem was a poet and a musician first and foremost. His language is more beautiful, compelling, and memorable because it is metaphorical. Exactness in words risks dryness. You can say that the average density of the air in the ship’s hull eventually equaled the average density of the surrounding water. Or you can say that the ship sank like a stone to the ocean floor. You can write that a day’s high dew point caused the air’s water vapor content to slow evaporation. Or you can write that it was so hot and humid that people melted like candles. The Church can teach that we eat Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist. Or we can speak directly to Christ with the poet Ephrem and say, “In your bread hides the Spirit who cannot be consumed; in your wine is the fire that cannot be swallowed. The Spirit in your bread, fire in your wine: behold a wonder heard from our lips.”

The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon taught that the one person of Jesus Christ united in Himself a fully divine nature and a fully human nature from the moment of His conception. Saint Ephrem wrote “The Lord entered (Mary) and became a servant; the Word entered her, and became silent within her; thunder entered her and his voice was still; the Shepherd of all entered her and became a Lamb…” Poetry, metaphor, paradox, images, song, and symbols. These were tools in Saint Ephrem’s nimble hands. Theology for him was liturgy, music, and prayer. He was called the Harp of the Holy Spirit, the Sun of the Syrians, and the Column of the Church by his admirers, who included luminaries such as Saints Jerome and Basil.

Saint Ephrem was a deacon who declined ordination to the priesthood. He lived radical poverty, wearing a patched and dirty tunic. He had a cave for his home and a rock for his pillow. Ephrem founded a theological school and was deeply involved in catechesis through preaching, liturgy, and music. He died after contracting a disease from a patient he was caring for. Saint Ephrem is the Church’s greatest Syriac language writer, proof that Christianity is not synonymous with the West or European culture. Ephrem’s world thrived for centuries with its own unique Semitic identity in today’s Syria, Iraq, Iran, and India. Saint Ephrem’s Syria was not the “Near East,” as Europeans later called the region. To him, it was just home, the deep cradle of the new way of loving God that was, and is, Christianity. Saint Ephrem was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

Saint Ephrem, you wrote tenderly and lovingly about the truths of our faith. Help all Christian artists to stay true to the Truth and to communicate Jesus Christ to the world through beauty, music, and images that raise the mind and lift the heart to God Himself.

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June 6: Saint Norbert, Bishop
c. 1080–1134
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Bohemia and of expectant mothers

Thrown down like Saint Paul, he stood up a changed man

Today’s saint was born into an elite Central European family with connections to imperial dynasties and the nobility of his time. He received an excellent sacred and secular education in keeping with his high status. And as a young man he received tonsure, the particular shaving of the hair on the scalp denoting one a cleric. He was then appointed a canon, a member of a bishop’s inner circle who prayed the liturgical hours in common with other canons. As a young adult, Saint Norbert was well on his way to a career as an ecclesiastic typical of his era: well connected, intelligent, politically aware, committed to the Church, an adviser to princes and bishops, and materially comfortable. His life was almost indistinguishable from those of the laymen whose company he mostly kept. Norbert avoided priestly ordination and turned down a chance to become a bishop. In a one-Church world where civil power and church power were intertwined, canons lived comfortably and held a quasi-civil office which dispensed prayers, graces, and spiritual favors for which the populace paid handsomely.

If not for a near-death experience when he was thirty-five years old, Saint Norbert would be known as just Norbert, and he would be resting, forgotten, under the stone floor of a German cathedral. But one day in 1115, Norbert was riding his horse when a lightning bolt struck nearby. He was thrown hard to the ground and was unconscious for a long time but survived. It was jarring, both physically and spiritually. Norbert was changed. He was penitent. He would abandon his life of frivolity. He would take his religious commitment seriously. This powerful experience of the fleetingness of life and its pleasures compelled Norbert to deviate from the wide, crowded road he was traveling, in order to walk, instead, a narrower, stonier, less-traveled path. And as Norbert walked, he shed his past step by step until over many years Saint Norbert emerged, miter on his head, bishop’s crozier in one hand, and a monstrance in the other. One moment changed his life. It ceased to be just a moment, in fact, but was converted into a permanent event. God broke through, touched his deepest core, and created a new man.

Soon after this near-death experience, Norbert was ordained a priest, went on a month-long retreat, founded a monastery with his own wealth, and began to preach about the transitory nature of the world. He had the fervor of a convert, the ardor of one for whom all things were new. Life was a permanent Spring day. He sold all that he had except what was necessary to say Mass, divested himself of all his properties, and gave everything to the poor. He wore a simple habit, went barefoot, and begged for food.

He started to preach throughout France and Germany and became well known. At the instigation of the Pope, he founded a religious Order, which quickly expanded. He was so well respected in Germany that, despite being the founder of an Order, he was named bishop of a large see. Saint Norbert became involved in various ecclesiastical arguments of his day of both a political and theological nature.

Saint Norbert’s efforts to reform the clergy of his day were not always well received. He was spat upon and rejected. But he persevered. No one outdid him in devotion to the Holy Eucharist, which he preached about constantly. Centuries after his death his body was transferred to near Prague after the German city where he had been buried turned Lutheran. Saint Norbert is most often depicted as a bishop holding either a monstrance or a ciborium, both of which hold the Holy Eucharist. The Norbertine Order continues to thrive, nine hundred years after it was founded. Would that anyone would speak just our name nine hundred years after we die! The Church remembers her saints, preserves their memories, and ensures that the heroes of our faith are held up for emulation long after their earthly work is done.

Saint Norbert, your conversion led to your life of total dedication to Christ and the Church. This change was nourished by reception of and devotion to the Holy Eucharist. May we be continually nourished with and converted by the same food from heaven.

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June 5: Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr
c. 675–754
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Germany

Pagans cut down a man of action in his grey hairs

In the treasury of the Cathedral of Fulda, Germany, there is a medieval Codex, a large, bound book of prayers and theological documents, which very likely belonged to Saint Boniface. The rough cover of the Codex is deeply sliced with cuts from a sword. A tradition dating back to the generations just after Saint Boniface’s own time attests that he wielded this very book like a shield to ward off the blows of robbers who attacked him and a large band of missionaries in Northern Germany in 754. Our saint tried to protect himself, both metaphorically and literally, with the written truths of our faith. It was to no avail. Saint Boniface and fifty-two of his companions were slaughtered. Ransacking the baggage of the missionaries for treasure, the band of thieves found no gold vessels or silver plates but only sacred texts the unlettered men couldn’t read. Thinking them worthless, they left these books on the forest floor, to be recovered later by local Christians. The Codex eventually made it into the Treasury at Fulda where it is found today. One of the earliest images of Saint Boniface, from a Sacramentary dating to 975, depicts the saint deflecting the blows of a sword with a large, thick book. The Codex is a second-class relic, giving silent witness to the final moments of a martyr.

Saint Boniface is known as the “Apostle of the Germans” and is buried in the crypt of Fulda Cathedral. However, his baptismal name was Winfrid, and he was born and raised in Anglo-Saxon England. He was from an educated family, entered a local monastery as a youth, and was ordained a priest at the age of thirty. In 716 Winfrid sailed to the continent to become a missionary to the peoples on the Baltic coast of today’s Northern Germany. He was able to communicate with them because his Anglo-Saxon tongue was similar to the languages of the native Saxon and Teutonic tribes. Winfrid was among the first waves of those many Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks who saved what could be saved of Roman and Christian culture in Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed. Large migrations of Gothic peoples, mostly Arian Christians, pagans, or a confusing mix of the two, filled the vacuum created after Roman order disintegrated, and they needed to be inculcated in the faith to rebuild a superior version of the culture they had helped decimate.

Winfrid traveled to Rome the year after first arriving on the continent, where the pope renamed him Boniface and appointed him missionary Bishop of Germany. After this, he never returned to his home country. He set out to the north and proceeded to dig and lay the foundations of Europe as we know it. He organized dioceses, helped found monasteries, baptized thousands, pacified tribes, challenged tree-worshipping pagans, taught, preached, held at least one large Church Council, convinced more Anglo-Saxon monks to follow his lead, ordained priests, appointed bishops, stayed in regular contact with his superiors in Rome, and pushed the boundaries of Christianity to their northernmost limit. Boniface was indefatigable. He was in his late seventies, and still pushing to convert the unconverted, when he was surprised and slain in a remote wilderness.

Saint Boniface was well educated, and many of his letters and related correspondence survive. But he was, above all, a man of action. He was daring and fearless. He was a pathbreaker. His faith moved mountains and tossed them into the sea. His labors, combined with his great faith, are the stuff of legend. More incredibly, though, they are the stuff of truth.

Saint Boniface, through your powerful intercession, help all those who labor for the faith to be as intrepid as you were in challenging those who reject Christ. May your example of tireless witness inspire all missionaries, both at home and abroad, to persevere.

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First Sunday after Pentecost: The Most Holy Trinity
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

God is more like a family than a monk

We pray in the “name” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in their “names.” God must logically be only one. To hold that there is a vast government of gods is to hold that two mountains are the tallest in the world, that three oceans are the deepest, and that on four days the sun shone the brightest. Another way to say “God” is to say “the best.” God is the best. And there can only be one “best,” “tallest,” “deepest,” and “brightest.” God is the ultimate superlative adjective whose nature admits of no competing god. Christian monotheism stops us from approaching different gods for different things. We believe in one God with one will, one mind, and one plan for mankind.

The Holy Trinity, the God of Christianity, is complex. Clear language must be used and clear thinking deployed to grasp the Christian God. There are no backyard garden statues of the Holy Trinity like there are of Saint Francis of Assisi, because the Trinity is cerebral in a way that Saint Francis is not. On this solemnity, we celebrate the dogma of all dogmas because dogma matters. We sing songs to dogma, put flowers on the altar to dogma, and wear our best clothes for dogma. The Church’s thinking about God is not child’s play. Once we accept thoughts, they own us. At some point we no longer choose our thoughts, they choose us. So we must get God right so that we get everything else right—marriage, family, work, love, war, money, philosophy, humor, religion, fun, sports, etc. Bad people can be forgiven, but bad ideas less so. And bad ideas about God are dangerous. They caused skyscrapers to crumble to the ground.

The Church believes that God is one in His nature and three in His persons. This means that if you were in a pitch-black room and sensed a presence nearby, your first question would be “What is that?” “Is it the dog or the cat, my spouse, or the wind?” If it were God in the darkness, He would answer the question of “what” by saying “I am God.” Satisfied that the presence was a person and not an animal or the wind, the next question would be “Who are you?” And to that question, God would reply in three successive voices: “I am the Father. I am the Son. I am the Holy Spirit.” A nature is the source of operations, but a person does them. A statue has eyes but it is not its nature to see. It is not man’s nature to lay eggs or to breathe under water, but it is the nature of a bird or of a fish to do so. Our nature sets the parameters for what actions are possible for us. The daughter of a lion is a lioness and does what lions do. The son of a man is a man and does what men do. And the Son of God is God and knows, loves, and acts as God does, perfectly.

Our Trinitarian supernova is both a unity and a plurality, both one and many at the same time. This means that God does not exist alone but in a community of love. God is not narcissistic, admiring his own beauty and perfection. Instead, the love of the Father is directed toward the Son for all eternity. And the love of the Holy Spirit animates, and passes between, the Father and the Son. The Trinity’s three persons do not share portions of the divine nature, they each possess it totally. This theology means, by extension, that because man is made in the image and likeness of God, every person is created in order to model the Trinity by living with, and for, another, just as God does in His inner life. Because God is a Trinity of persons, His perfection is more fully embodied by an earthly community, such as a family, rather than by a lone monk.

The Trinity is not just scaffolding which obscures the true face of God. Nor are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit three masks which conceal the one face of God. The one God exists as a Trinity. The Church’s belief in God and the Church’s belief in the Trinity stand and fall together. The Trinity is not just the summit of our faith, something we work toward understanding, but also our faith’s foundation. The truth of the Holy Trinity is learned early and often. Our God, distinct in His persons, one in His essence, and equal in His majesty, is solemnly invoked as the water spills on our heads at Baptism and as the oil is traced on our palms at our anointing. God, in all of His complexity and in all of His simplicity, is with us always in this world and, hopefully, in the world to come.

Most Holy Trinity, we look to Your three persons as a model of true love, knowledge, and community life. Help all marriages and families strive for the high ideal of perfection You set before the world, no matter the discouragement resulting from our sins and imperfections.

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June 3: Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs
1860–1886
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of African youth

Young African Christians die like the martyrs of old

Many of the faces of the saints in heaven that shine with the light of God are dark faces. North Africa was one of the first regions to be evangelized and was home to a vibrant, diverse, and orthodox Church for over six hundred years. North Africa had over four hundred bishoprics and enriched the universal Church with a wealth of theologians, martyrs, and saints. That Catholic culture drowned under the crushing waves of Arab Muslim armies that inundated North Africa in the seventh century, altering its cultural and religious landscape. Small pockets of Christianity continued to exist in isolation for a few centuries more. But by 1830, when French colonists and missionaries settled in Tunisia and Algeria, local Christianity had totally disappeared. The Christian light had gone out in North Africa centuries before.

Yet today’s saints are nineteenth-century African martyrs. While North Africa has remained in the tight grip of Islam, sub-Saharan Africa has lived a contrary reality. It has embraced Christianity. Throughout the nineteenth century, daring missionary priests and religious from various European countries penetrated deep into the towns, savannas, jungles, and river deltas of the “dark continent,” carrying the light of Christ. For the most part, they were well received and initiated the long and complex process of evangelization, inculturation, and education that has turned today’s sub-Saharan Africa into a largely Christian region.

Charles Lwanga and his companions were all very young men, in their teens and twenties, when they were martyred. They ran afoul of their local ruler for one reason and one reason only—they were Christians and adhered to Christian morality. The ruler did not otherwise question their loyalty, devotion, or service to him. He was suspicious of the European priests who had brought the faith, wary of outside interference in his kingdom, and also eager to impress his subjects with a display of ruthlessness and power. He was also a sodomite who wanted these young men to engage in unholy sexual acts with him. For refusing to satisfy his disordered and abusive lust, they became victims of homsexual violence.

The ruler and his court questioned the young males who served as their pages and assistants to discover if they were catechumens, had been baptized, or knew how to pray. Those who answered “Yes” were killed for it. One was stabbed through the neck with a spear and another’s arm was cut off before he was beheaded. But most were marched miles to an execution site, cruelly treated for a week, then wrapped in reed matts and placed over a fire until their feet were singed. They were then given one last chance to abjure their faith. None did. These tightly wrapped human candles were then thrown onto a huge pyre and reverted to the dust from whence they came. One of the executioners even killed his own son. The executioners and onlookers knew their victims had succumbed to the flames when they no longer heard them praying.

The site where these Ugandan martyrs died is now a popular shrine and a source of pride dear to the heart of African Catholics. Charles Lwanga and his companions, though new to the faith, acted with the maturity of the wise and the aged, choosing to sacrifice lives full of promise rather than surrender the pearl of greatest price—their Catholic faith.

Saint Charles Lwanga and companions, help us to be courageous in the face of threats, to stand tall for our beliefs, and to suffer ridicule and hatred rather than renounce or minimize our relationship with Christ and His truth.

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June 2: Saints Marcellinus and Peter, Martyrs
Mid-third Century–c. 304
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

Their memory was preserved by their very executioner

Saint Helen went to the Holy Land and returned to Rome with remnants of the true cross of Christ. This same Helen was the mother of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who legalized Christianity in 313 and who called the Council of Nicea in 325. When Saint Helen died around 328, her Emperor-Son placed her body in a monumental, sumptuous sarcophagus of rare, porphyry marble from Egypt. The deeply carved red stone shows Roman soldiers on horseback conquering barbarians. These are not scenes likely to adorn a pious woman’s tomb. It was probably meant to be Constantine’s own sarcophagus, but when his mother died, he used it for her. And Constantine did one more thing for his mother. He built a large church on the outskirts of Rome over the catacombs, or burial place, of today’s saints, Marcellinus and Peter, and placed his mother and her giant tomb inside of the church.

That one so famous and powerful as Constantine would build a church over the catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, and honor this church still more with his mother’s tomb, testifies to these martyrs’ importance to the early Christians of Rome. And since they were martyred in approximately 304, only a decade before Constantine conquered the eternal city, their memory must still have been fresh when Christianity was legalized. Until this time, Christians worshipped in dark, hidden places. As they first stepped into the public light to build the ancient churches whose walls, pillars, and foundations are still visible today, these Christians honored those who came before them. They honored those whose deaths were all the sadder because they perished so close to the day of Christian liberation. They honored Saints Marcellinus and Peter.

Little is known with certainty about Saint Marcellinus and Saint Peter. Tradition tells us that Marcellinus was a priest and Peter an exorcist and that they were beheaded on the outskirts of Rome. A few years after the bloody event, a little boy from Rome heard about their deaths from the mouth of their very executioner, who later became a Christian. That little boy was named Damasus, and he went on to became Pope from 366–384. Decades later, remembering the story he had heard as a child, Pope Damasus honored Marcellinus and Peter by adorning their tomb with a marble inscription recounting the details of their martyrdom as he had heard them so long ago. Unfortunately, the inscription is lost.

The circumstances of Marcellinus’ and Peter’s deaths were likely similar to those of other, better-documented martyrdoms: some public declaration of faith, arrest, perfunctory trial, a chance to offer sacrifice to a Roman god, a refusal, a last chance to be an idolater, a last refusal, and then a swift, businesslike beheading. It was over quickly. Then came the calm. Then came the night. And out of that darkness emerged a candle-lit procession of humble Christians, walking slowly and silently toward the place of execution. The headless corpses were placed on white sheets and carried solemnly to an underground burial niche. A small marble plaque etched with the martyrs’ names was placed nearby. An oil lamp was lit and left burning. Thus the veneration began. Thus it continues today.

Marcellinus and Peter were important enough to be included in the official list of Roman martyrs and to have their names remembered in the liturgy of Rome. As the Mass celebrated in Rome became standard throughout the Catholic world, the names of Marcellinus and Peter were embedded into the Roman Canon, the First Eucharistic Prayer. And there they are read at Mass until today, more than one thousand seven hundred years after they died. The Body of Christ forgets nothing, retains everything, and purifies its memory to honor those who deserve honoring.

The catacombs and the first Basilica of Marcellinus and Peter fell into ruins at the hands of two enemies—time and the Goths. A “new” church was built nearby to replace it and is still a parish. Saint Helen’s bones were removed from her imperial tomb in the twelfth century and swapped with the body of a Pope. The tomb was later emptied again and, in 1777, moved to the Vatican museums. Hundreds of thousands of tourists walk right by the tomb every year, seeing perhaps just a huge chunk of marble, oblivious to the rich history connecting the monumental tomb to ancient Christianity and the martyrs we commemorate today.

Saints Marcellinus and Peter, help all those who seek your intercession to face persecution and intimidation of any kind, via words, or arms, or threats, with bravery and heroic resistance.

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June 1: Saint Justin Martyr
c. 100–c. 165
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of philosophers

The cut and thrust of philosophical debate led him to Truth

On one of his first missionary journeys, Saint Paul found himself in Syria. He was at a crossroads and needed to decide where he would travel to preach the Gospel. Do I head east and bring the Gospel to the gentiles of Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and China? Or do I travel west, to the Greeks, Romans, Franks, and the people on the rim of the Roman Sea (the Mediterranean)? The Acts of the Apostles relates the mystical event that happened next: “During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them” (Ac 16: 9–10). Macedonia is in Greece. So Saint Paul’s sails opened and he tacked west. The rest is history.

In the person of Saint Paul, the Church herself turned toward Greece and her philosophical tradition. It was the plan of God that His Church would decisively encounter philosophical truth, not myth and custom, as its partner in dialogue. This intellectual engagement began the long process of melding philosophical truth with theological revelation, which transformed early, Jewish-based Christianity into something new—the powerful synthesis of theology, philosophy, spirituality, and structure known as Catholicism.

Today’s saint was a philosopher in the Greek tradition, born around 100 A.D. in Samaria to Greek parents. Saint Justin wrapped himself in the white, toga-style cloak of a Greek philosopher even after his conversion. He is the most well-known apologist of the second century, the only true Christian thinker known between the time of Saint John the Evangelist and Origen in the first half of the third century. Justin mercilessly criticized the intellectual dead end of the ancient paganism in which he was raised, seeing it as not merely neutral but as an obstacle to discovering the truth.

Justin loved the idea that Christ the Logos was the same in substance but different in person from the Father. Theological truth expressed in the concepts of Greek philosophy was very satisfying to him, because it was very true. Justin also provided some of the very first words on the Holy Eucharist outside of the New Testament itself: “And this food is called among us the Eucharist...we (have) been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” What a clear and remarkable testament to Christianity’s early belief in the Eucharist!

Justin moved to Rome to teach philosophy and spent decades there writing and interacting with the higher echelons of Roman society. But even a thoughtful intellectual was not immune from persecution for being a Christian. Sometime between 162 and 168 A.D., Justin and six companions were called to answer for their beliefs before the Prefect of Rome. The record of the trial has been preserved and shows the Prefect demanding that Justin sacrifice to the gods of Rome. Justin and his friends refuse and are threatened with torture and death. They respond: “Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols.” What bravado! They sternly refused to be idolaters. They were duly led away, scourged, and beheaded.

Justin chose, as the Church chose, the God of the philosophers over the false gods of paganism. This was a choice for truth over illusion. As Tertullian would later write: “Christ has said that he is truth, not custom" (De Virgin. Vel. 1, 1). The Christian God is both Father and the Prime Mover; the God of Jesus Christ and the Uncaused Causer; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and thought thinking itself. He is Father and He is Almighty. He is everywhere, because He is nowhere. He is paternal and close at hand but forever mysterious and inaccessible. He gives a name, “I am Who am,” which is a riddle. We take this complex understanding of God for granted today. But the labor of early Christians like Saint Justin Martyr dug the deep intellectual foundations into which were later driven the piers of sound doctrine. It takes very smart people to make simple points.

Saint Justin, you surrendered your life rather than worship an idol. Your refusal to abjure your faith gives an example to all Christian intellectuals and teachers that the deepest truths are not found only on a page but must be lived, and sacrificed for, even unto death.

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May 31: Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Feast; Liturgical Color: White

Two young mothers and their treasures meet

Only in the Catholic Church would a Feast Day first celebrated in the thirteenth century be considered “new.” But that is when the Visitation first appeared in some liturgical calendars. Our oldest liturgical feasts date from the apostolic period. That is, they were likely celebrated by the Apostles themselves in the years immediately following the earthly life of Christ. The original historical events of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday transformed into liturgical events so rapidly and so naturally that the earliest Christian writings are of a liturgical nature. Other Feast Days, such as Christmas, Mary the Mother of God, and the Birth of John the Baptist had to wait their turn. They are ancient but cede pride of place to the foundational events of Holy Week, just as America’s Presidents’ Day must cede to the more essential Independence Day. Without a country, there would no presidents, and without a death and resurrection, there would be no Christianity or Christian calendar in the first place.

The Visitation falls, liturgically, when it happened historically. Mary conceived Jesus Christ in late March. Saint John the Baptist was born in late June. And it was between these two bookends that pregnant Mary visited her pregnant cousin Elizabeth. Perhaps it was in late May. We may be surprised in heaven to discover that many of our biblically based feast days are commemorated on the exact historical dates they occurred. Would God deceive us otherwise? After all, no good father would tell the family to celebrate his son’s birthday on a date other than when he was born.

It is the Gospel of Saint Luke that recounts for us so many details of Mary’s life that otherwise remain untold. Saint John writes at the end of his Gospel that Jesus did and said many other things which are not written down. Perhaps the same could be said of Mary. Many words were spoken, gestures made, and events transpired, yet so much remains a mystery. Yet if we knew all there was to know about God and the things of God, then heaven would be a bore and not be heaven at all.

The Visitation is the first time that Mary publicly exercises her role as Mediator of the Son of God. God chose not only to become a man but to become such in the same way that all men do, through gestation and birth, with His virginal conception the sole miracle. Catholicism is a religion that believes in secondary causality. God directly intervenes in creation only rarely, instead inviting His creatures to perfect His raw creation by using their God-given talents. God did not cure the cancer. The skilled surgeon removed the tumor. He used the gifts God gave him. It was not a direct intervention. It was not a miracle. It was the doctor’s mind and hands being put to their highest use. Mary generously mediated the Incarnation, placing her body at God’s disposition. She, the Mother of the Church, carries the entire Church in her womb. She, the Ark of the Covenant, houses a treasure more precious than Moses’ stone tablets of old. And she, the Morning Star, shines in the blackness before the blazing sun rises in the east, dawning a new day.

Christ’s presence in Mary’s womb radiates outward with x-ray power and reverberates in the words of faith which arise from Elizabeth and her child, John. Jesus’ cousin leaps for joy inside his mother. And Elizabeth reacts by speaking those graceful words, which countless voices will go on to pray, in countless languages, many billions of times in the centuries since and in the ages to come: “Blessed are you among women, and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” The Visitation is one of the sources of the Hail Mary.

Elizabeth is a prophet. We are her hearers. For a prophecy to be a prophecy, it has to become true. Elizabeth’s words were true and are true. Mary is indeed blessed among women, and her fruit has indeed changed the world. Mary’s humility instinctively deflects. She praises the source of all goodness, God, rather than the goodness of her own generosity. All things, save evil, can be traced back to God. Mary is at the head of the trail in clearing the tangled path overgrown since the sin of Eve. With mankind close behind, Mary leads us back to discover anew the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty.

Mary and Elizabeth, your generosity in cooperating with God’s will initiated the events of the New Testament. May we be equally generous in cooperating with God’s plans for our lives, knowing the beginning but not the end, lighting a fire that warms the lives of unknown others.

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Monday after Pentecost: The Blessed Virgin Mary,
Mother of the Church
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

One Mother, two motherhoods

Mary mothered Jesus, Jesus then gave life to the Church with water and blood from His side, and the Church then mothers us into existence through baptism. Devotion to Mary goes hand in hand with devotion to the Church because both are mothers. Mother Mary gives the world Christ. Mother Church gives the world Christians.

The metaphorical parallels between Mother Mary and Mother Church are spiritually rich and deeply biblical. Mary was understood by many early theologians as both the mother of the Head of the Church, Jesus, and also the symbol of the Church par excellence. Mother Mary is a virgin who conceived the physical body of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation. In a parallel way, Mother Church is the Mystical Body of Christ who gives every Christian rebirth through the power of the Holy Spirit received at Pentecost. Both Mary and the Church conceived through the same Spirit, without the aid of human seed. Mother Mary makes Christ’s body physically present in Palestine in the first century. Mother Church, in turn, makes Christ’s body mystically present through baptism and sacramentally present in the Eucharist, in every time and place. It was common for a baptismal font in early Christianity to be described as a sacred womb in which Mother Church gave her children life.

The theological cross-pollination between Mother Mary and Mother Church has produced a field ripe for spiritual and theological cultivation. Christ is from Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee. But He is most deeply from the Father. He is one Son but lives two sonships. Similarly, all Christians are born from one Mother expressed in two motherhoods: Mary’s and the Church’s. Mary and the Church, understood most profoundly, form one mother.  Both are the mother of Christ, but each mutually assists the other to bring Christ physically, sacramentally, and mystically into the world in all His fullness. Neither Mary nor the Church can exercise their motherhoods alone.

Today’s feast, formally integrated into the Church’s calendar by the authority of Pope Francis in 2018, specifically commemorates Mary’s motherhood of the Church rather than her motherhood of God, a feast celebrated on January 1. Mary likely showed as much tender concern for Christ’s mystical body as it slowly matured in its native Palestine as she did for His physical body in Nazareth. Pope Pius XII perceptively noted Mary’s dual maternity in his encyclical on the Church: “It was she who was there to tend the mystical body of Christ, born of the Savior’s pierced heart, with the same motherly care that she spent on the child Jesus in the crib.” It is possible the Apostles held their first Council in about 49 A.D. in Jerusalem precisely because Mary still dwelled in the holy city. She was likely the young religion’s greatest living witness and pillar of unity. We can imagine her presiding over early Christian gatherings with reserved solemnity, nursing primitive Christianity just as she had Christ.

Ancient pagans spoke of imperial Rome as a Domina, a divine female master. Rome was praised as a conquering mother who brought vanquished peoples close to her own heart, incorporating them as citizens into her vast, multicultural, polyglot realm. Other empires executed prisoners of war, exiled peoples, imposed a foreign culture, or displaced populations. Not Rome. Rome absorbed them all. The early fathers understood Mother Church as the successor to this Domina. In baptism this Mother does not release her children from her body but absorbs them, making them fully her own unto death. Since the early Middle Ages, feast days and devotions to the Virgin Mary have proliferated in Catholicism. Now Pope Francis has given the Church a feast to compliment that of January 1. The two motherhoods of Mary reflect one profound truth, that Christ approaches us in time and in space, in history and in sacrament, in mysterious and beautiful ways. In the words of Saint Augustine: “What (God) has bestowed on Mary in the flesh, He has bestowed on the Church in the spirit; Mary gave birth to the One, and the Church gives birth to the many, who through the One become one.” This is all cause for deep reflection.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, God prepared you to be the sacred vessel to replace Mother Synagogue with Mother Church. Eve approaches you like mother to daughter, old Eve to New Eve, two mothers of the living. Help all Chritians to see both the Church and you Mary, as their mother.

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May 29: Saint Paul VI, Pope
1897–1978
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

An erudite introvert helms the Church in stormy waters

Over the two millennia of its storied existence, the papacy has piled prestige upon power upon privilege like so many bricks in a high, impregnable, theological fortress. The Bishop of Rome is without doubt the world’s greatest institutional defender of tradition. There is simply no other office which telescopes into one man all that is meant by the compressed phrase “Western Civilization.” Giovanni Baptista Montini, today’s saint’s baptismal name, was as perfectly prepared by education and experience as any man before him to carry the torch of tradition handed to him by his predecessor Pope John XXIII. Yet for all of his erudition and decades of practice walking along the high ridges of church life, the mid-1960s suddenly demanded of the Pope a mix of lace-like delicacy and raw political power alien to his sensitive character. The unity of the Church after the Council was quickly unwinding under potent centrifugal forces. In order to keep the core intact, it was no longer enough for the Pope to be just the bearer of the great tradition. Paul VI had to be Peter, a man of office and authority, yes, but also a tireless missionary like Saint Paul, and a silently courageous disciple and sign of contradiction like Saint Mary.

The future Pope Paul VI was born in the last years of the nineteenth century in Northern Italy to an educated and dignified family that was deeply committed to the Church. Giovanni was ordained a priest at the tender age of twenty-two and entered the service of the Vatican a few years later. He spent approximately thirty years serving in the central administration of the Holy See in roles placing him in close contact with three popes. He was appointed Archbishop of Milan in 1954 and a Cardinal in 1958. “Habemus Papam” could have been announced before the Cardinals ever mustered in the Sistine Chapel for the papal conclave of 1963, as few doubted whose experience best prepared him to be pope or who Pope Saint John XXIII wanted to succeed him. Cardinal Baptista took the name Paul, the first Pope of that name in over three hundred years. The new Pope very consciously united the stability and authority represented by Saint Peter with the zealous evangelical outreach represented by Saint Paul. 

Paul VI became the first pope ever to travel to other continents, going on apostolic pilgrimages to the Holy Land, India, Colombia, the United States, Portugal, and Uganda. Paul also continued the Second Vatican Council and shepherded it to its conclusion in 1965. After the Council, Paul VI promulgated a new liturgical calendar, missal, breviary, and simplified rites for all the sacraments, thus impacting the lives of Catholics the world over in a personal way that few popes had ever done before. Paul VI was also deeply immersed in the theological and moral deliberations over the Church’s response to new technologies making artificial means of contraception accessible and affordable to the masses. Paul’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, heroically restated the Church’s perennial teaching on the immorality of using artificial means of contraception.

Although Humana Vitae was not as compelling and humanistic a presentation of the Church’s rich teachings on married love as would later be advanced by Pope Saint John Paul II, it was replete with prophecies. Paul VI’s predictions about the far-reaching and negative repercussions of the widespread use of contraceptives have all come true! No other individual or institution at the time foresaw, or anticipated in any way, even one of the ticking time bombs whose cultural shrapnel Paul inventoried with such accuracy. The intense storms that blew over Humanae Vitae in Northern Europe and North America lashed the aging Pope, and he never issued another encyclical. At times in the late 1960s and 1970s, it seemed as if chunks of Catholicism, Christianity’s mighty rock of Gibraltar, might fall away and drop into the sea. But Paul VI’s steady, if undynamic, hand avoided fissures in the Church’s facade. Though no schisms surfaced during his pontificate, the Pope did publicly warn about the smoke of satan entering the temple of God. 

Our saint was in many ways a tragic figure, tasked with leading a huge, complex Church in a confusing time. Paul’s confessor, a holy and faithful Jesuit, said, after the Pope’s death, that "if Paul VI was not a saint when he was elected Pope, he became one during his pontificate." The Church was Paul VI’s perennial love and undying concern. He died on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, and was buried, per his request, in a simple casket placed directly in the earth in the grottoes under St. Peter’s Basilica, near so many of his predecessors who sat on the same Chair of Peter. 

Pope Saint Paul VI, you resisted a swell of voices to uphold the Church’s teachings on authentic human love. May all bishops and popes be as courageous as you in their fidelity to the Church’s undying tradition.

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Pentecost Sunday
c. 33 A.D.
Sunday after the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: Red

Happy Birthday, Church!

All living things have a birthday. The Church is a living organism and Pentecost is her birthday. Pentecost was a Jewish Feast Day. The author of the Acts of the Apostles identifies the day before the Holy Spirit ever descended. But Semitic Pentecost immediately acquired a new and perennial Christian meaning when the wind swirled and wisps of flame descended upon the heads of the Apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem. In a frightening display of God’s raw and awesome power, the Lord and Giver of Life, as the Nicene Creed defines the Holy Spirit, vivified the nascent Church with fire. The Church is still vivified by that same Spirit which has never left the room. Every living thing has an esprit de corps: there is team spirit, company culture, a platoon’s bravado, an orchestra’s élan, or the country spirit known as patriotism. As a living thing, the Catholic Church has a Spirit too, one which indwells in her more fully than in any other Church. The Holy Spirit stamps Catholicism with a trademark of authenticity. It guarantees the Church’s fidelity to the God who gave her life.

The dramatic events of the first Christian Pentecost have linked, not illogically, the Holy Spirit with spontaneity, impetuosity, miracle working, supernatural gifts, and high octane evangelization. When a throng of Christians thunders praise and makes the ground tremble, no one attributes the heaving to God the Father. When a tumor disappears and a first-class sinner publicly weeps in repentance, or when upraised hands wave to and fro, heads jut toward the sky above, bodies sway, and pores drip sweat in the heat of the night, all agree that the Holy Spirit is pulsating in sync with the mighty deeds of God. And yet…there is also the still, small voice of the Prophet Elijah. There is also the Monday morning and the Thursday afternoon. Not every day is a rollicking God party. Few days, in fact, involve rollicking God parties. Everyday life is not a crashing wave. It’s more like a constant tide, rising and receding at regular intervals. The Church is often as mundane as everyday life because she is part and parcel of everyday life, as a real religion should be. And so the Church’s Holy Spirit is vitally present in the tide of everydayness just as she is present in the racket of a Saturday night bash.

The Holy Spirit is a spirit of unity, drawing all people toward the flame of truth. The Holy Spirit is not an alternate third column creating ‘churches of one’ who speak only for themselves. Christ truly desires that His followers be one, “as we are one” (Jn 17:11). The Church’s unity is forged out of human diversity through a visible structure which channels the Holy Spirit through the Sacraments and their sanctifying graces. Structure and Spirit indwell. The Church’s visible nature embodies the Holy Spirit in the same fashion that an Independence Day parade with its well-known leaders and predictable route embodies a country’s patriotism. The tightly choreographed pattern walked by the smartly uniformed soldier at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier causes citizens to stand in respectful silence and their hearts to swell with pride for their nation because the ceremony makes visible what is otherwise only vaguely felt. Public rituals express communally what otherwise remains emotionally elusive and difficult for individuals to verbalize. The same applies for the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Watching the incense slowly rise over the altar at a solemn Mass, whispering on our knees in the deep quiet of the confessional, lighting a candle at the Grotto of Lourdes, or walking and praying as the Corpus Christi procession moves slowly forward are tangible experiences of a living Church. It is in moments such as these that we feel intensely the presence of the Holy Spirit. If we didn’t feel the Spirit in these events, we would not feel His presence at all, or we would not be sure it was not, instead, just powerful auto-suggestion at work. The Church protects us from such illusions.

At Pentecost the Holy Spirit did not descend as a communal bonfire. The one Spirit of God parted and came to rest on each of the Apostles individually. The lesson? We each receive our share of God. God is the answer to the question that is every human soul. And God comes to us through a Church, not willy nilly in sweat and song. A tongue of fire is lit in every soul at baptism. We each house an eternal flame burning deep within. That flame will never be extinguished, even at death. Our personal flame of the Spirit, lit in our soul by the Church at baptism, will never die, because the Lord and Giver of Life is eternal. He waits patiently to gather together again every spark and flame that ever parted from Him into the one great conflagration of love that is the never-ending Pentecost of heaven.

Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest, fill the soul of every guest with that fire of love searing Father to Son. Hovering over the Apostles in flames of grace, You made a new high summit, the upper room, the source of unity for the human race. Holy Spirit come.

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May 27: Saint Augustine of Canterbury, Bishop
Early Sixth Century–604
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of England

The Church’s Augustus conquered by example

Gaius Octavius Thurinus was a noble Roman. Julius Caesar became his stepfather when he adopted Octavius, posthumously, in his will. Octavius then added his dead stepfather’s name to his own, becoming Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. He defeated his political enemies in 31 B.C. and thus became the first Emperor of Rome. To recognize his status, the Roman Senate added another link to his long chain of names—Augustus. And it is as Augustus that he is known to history. This very Augustus called for the census forcing Mary and Joseph to transfer to Bethlehem: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered” (Lk 2:1). Augustus reigned well and lived long, until 14 A.D. He is considered the iconic Emperor of the “Pax Romana,” a tranquil, vast, expanding, organized, rich, united, and unconquerable realm, an enormous map of which Augustus pondered from his throne in Rome. The eighth month was renamed to honor Augustus during his own lifetime.

But greatness is not limited to the Roman Emperor or his Empire. The best of Rome was absorbed, filtered, purified, and reborn in the Catholic Church. As Rome declined, popes and bishops did not pickpocket the corpse of Rome or rifle through the drawers of its abandoned dressers. The transformation from Empire to Church was organic, slow, and unrelenting, like all true cultural change. It happened imperceptibly, year by year, person by person, family by family, town by town, until one day everything was different. The arc of cultural change doesn’t have a right angle. It is fitting and poetic, then, that the Church has her own great Augustus, indirectly evoking the laurel-crowned Emperor. In fact, the Church has two Augustines: Saint Augustine of Hippo, in North Africa, a Doctor of the Church; and Saint Augustine of Canterbury, today’s saint. But their marble statues are not in museums. They are in churches. Saint Augustine of Canterbury was born in an unknown year about a century after his Christian namesake’s death in 430 A.D. in North Africa. He also conquered a king, like his secular namesake, but not for his own glory.

Saint Augustine of Canterbury is called the Apostle to the English (not to the British.) The history is complex. Christianity was deeply rooted in Roman Britain. British bishops attended Church Councils in France in the fourth century, and two famous Roman British Catholics well known to history lived centuries before Saint Augustine—Pelagius and Saint Patrick. But after the Romans abandoned Britain around 410 A.D., invasions of the pagan Saxons from Northern Europe mixed with native tribes to alter the cultural and religious landscape. Old Roman Britain faded as Anglo-Saxon England dawned. Christianity was relegated to the margins of the British Isles, surviving in remote regions and in an extensive network of monasteries, not parishes or dioceses, under the wise tutelage of Irish monks.

This two-hundred-year British-Irish hibernation of Catholicism was aroused from its sleep when, in 595 A.D., Pope Saint Gregory the Great had a plan. The goal? Convert King Ethelbert. Why? Because he was an Anglo-Saxon pagan. The hope? His wife was Catholic. The means? A large missionary train. The man for the job? Saint Augustine. Our saint, an educated Benedictine monk from Rome, headed a large team that struggled through France on horseback, crossed the English Channel in simple boats, and finally walked to Ethelbert’s seat of power in Canterbury. The King of all Kent heard the missionaries and…converted to Catholicism! And then all his subjects converted as well. The plan worked. Mission accomplished!

More missionaries followed. Schools were established. Monasteries were founded. Bishops were appointed. Priests were ordained. Parishes were opened. Rough Anglo-Saxon England put on the yoke of Christ and the lovely, rolling, deep green countryside of England became Mary’s dowry. Nothing is known of the life of Saint Augustine before 595 A.D. He is famous because he was a missionary monk and later bishop. His life and his mission are indistinguishable. He accepted a dare from the Pope and did the impossible. He was himself the foundation stone upon which a Catholic nation built its house of faith for almost a millennium.

Saint Augustine, your long years of prayer, asceticism, and reading as a monk prepared you for greater things. May all who seek your intercession prepare themselves in times of quiet for future challenges. May all missionaries be as daring as you in fulfilling what is asked of them.

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May 26: Saint Philip Neri, Priest
1515–1595
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Rome, humor and joy

Everyone saw the halo

Saint Philip Neri often begged alms from his wealthy friends and acquaintances to redistribute to needy children. On one occasion, he approached a friend, held out his hand, and asked him, once again, for a few coins: “How about some help for the children.” The man slapped him hard across the face. Saint Philip quickly recovered from the shock, extended his cupped hand again, and said, “That was for me, now how about something for the children?”
Saint Philip was born into a well-educated, Catholic, middle-class home. He carried himself all his life with the bearing of an amiable, well-read, finely dressed, shrewd individual who knew no enemies. After growing up in Florence, he moved to Rome and spent many years as a layman studying theology and helping the poor in practical ways. While still a layman, Philip founded a group to care for the many impoverished pilgrims who came to Rome. He befriended the great reformer Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who wanted Philip to become a Jesuit. But after encouragement from his confessor, Philip was ordained a secular priest in 1551. Soon afterward, he had to formalize the large following he generated that wanted to live more fully the life he preached and modeled.

Saint Philip was so well loved and so well known in Rome that he is sometimes called its “Third Apostle” after Saints Peter and Paul. His personality radiated a natural warmth and cordiality. His priestly ministry could be fairly characterized as “evangelization by walking around.” He walked the streets of Rome from end to end continually throughout his long life. His life was a long conversation with a thousand characters on street corners, in shops, factories, churches, parks—wherever. He reached out to the destitute, prostitutes, poor children, and the uneducated. Saint Philip would often gather a group to visit seven churches in a row. As they went from one church to another, the group would picnic and listen to the musicians whom Saint Philip brought along for entertainment. These outings, understandably, became hugely popular.

Leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and scholars were also drawn to him, in addition to common folk, and formed the impressive circle of committed Catholics who first joined his apostolic efforts. Saint Philip and his companions were given charge of a parish where they held evening sessions filled with song, readings from the lives of the martyrs, the praying of the psalms, and rich conversation. Saint Philip called these gatherings the “oratory,” in part because the participants also listened to musical pieces called “oratorios.” So when it came time to formalize his newly founded community in Church law, the name “Oratory” was chosen. The Congregation of the Oratory, which is still thriving today, was recognized by the Holy Father in 1575 and given the magnificent, new parish of Santa Maria in Varicella, known as Chiesa Nuova (The New Church), in the heart of Rome. Oratorians are mostly diocesan priests and some laymen who live together in a loose brotherhood, taking no vows, while pursuing various individual ministries. The many dozens of oratories around the world are joined in an informal confederation, whereas canonical bonds tie the many houses of a religious order together in a far tighter union.

Saint Philip is one of the bright lights of the Counter-Reformation. He blazed a new path, like other reformers. But the new path he blazed was really just the old path, walked differently. Saint Philip was the silent observer, the cheerful listener, the priest always there, who spoke hard truths but always bent on the non-essentials. He mortified himself but never talked about it. He was poor but wore nice clothes. He looked like everyone else, yet…there was that intangible something: the sparkle in his eye, his polish, his lively concern, his clever wit, his courtesy, his wide education, his humor, and his constant turning of the conversation back to God. He was like everyone else, but he wasn’t, really. He radiated what twentieth-century psychologists would call the “halo effect.” Everyone saw the invisible halo casting a glow over Saint Philip, and people crowded around to stand in his mellow light.

Saint Philip did not start a university, reform an institution, write a classic, or formulate a new rule. He changed the world the only way it can truly be changed—one soul at a time. This army of one was canonized in 1622. His body rests in a glass coffin in Chiesa Nuova, the sumptuous Mother Church of the Oratory, where pilgrims come in faith, kneel before him, and seek his powerful intercession.

Saint Philip Neri, your good nature and charm, united with your theological orthodoxy and life of deep prayer, made you a powerful apostle for the people of Rome. May all evangelists, especially priests, see in your openness to others a pathway of changing the world.

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May 25: Saint Gregory VII, Pope, Religious
c. 1015–1085
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

A pope dies on the run

The last words spoken by Pope Saint Gregory VII were “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, that is why I die in exile.” His enemies would have claimed that they loved justice equally as much but understood it differently, which is why the pope had to die on the run. No one really wins epic battles for power, though one side may prevail in the short run. Everyone loses something in a fight: some their dignity, others their property, their position, or maybe their teeth. There is no such thing as a win-win outcome. Pope Gregory VII was a scrappy fighter who boxed his powerful opponents for years. Yet he didn’t fight for his own honor, wealth, or position, but because he believed that “the blessed Peter is father of all Christians, their chief shepherd under Christ, (and) that the holy Roman Church is the mother and mistress of all the churches.” He battled for the right of the Bishop of Rome to govern the Church’s internal life free of interference from worldly powers. Pope Gregory’s victories and losses colored all of medieval history and established key precedents for the perennial tensions between Church and State which continue until today.

Gregory VII was baptized as Hildebrand in the Tuscany region of Italy. He received an excellent education from Roman tutors, including one who later became Pope Gregory VI.  Most of his adult life was dedicated to serving various popes in important diplomatic and administrative roles. He was one of the most essential papal advisers of his era, even helping to craft the Church law limiting papal conclaves to cardinals alone. While still a deacon, Cardinal Hildebrand was chosen Pope in 1073 by popular acclamation. He refused to be seated on the papal throne as the result of such an outlaw election and went into hiding. Not until a proper vote of the cardinals took place did Hildebrand accept his election as canonically legitimate. He was shortly thereafter ordained a priest and bishop and then crowned Pope Gregory VII on the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, June 29, 1073.

When Pope Gregory VII first sat on the throne of Saint Peter and gazed out at the universal church, he did not peer through rose-colored glasses. Long firsthand experience of the world made him no novice, so he set about with great determination to implement needed reforms. His twelve-year papacy would be one of the most consequential in history. Gregory first sought to carve out a space for the papacy to operate free from German meddling in its internal affairs. It was common at the time for princes, kings, and other powerful laymen to appoint clerics to their positions and to “invest,” or clothe, new bishops at their Ordination Masses with the symbols of office, such as their pastoral staff, miter, and ring. Gregory decreed an end to this practice, not least because of the confusion it engendered about who was the source of the bishop’s authority. But the “lay investiture” battle would continue for centuries, leading to recriminations on all sides, including Gregory’s dramatic excommunication of Emperor Henry IV and Henry’s deposition—and driving into exile—of the pope. Incredibly, as late as 1903, the Holy Roman Emperor still directly intervened in a papal conclave, exercising his ancient right of veto to block a cardinal from being elected pope.

Pope Gregory VII pulled every lever at his disposal to make priestly celibacy compulsory, sought to heal the Schism of 1054 with the Orthodox, railed against simony (the purchasing of church offices), and encouraged the recovery of the holy sites in Jerusalem, a harbinger of the Crusades which commenced soon after his death. Gregory also memorialized in the clearest of terms the Church’s theology of the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, a statement of faith that presaged the deep devotion to the Blessed Sacrament so characteristic of the High Middle Ages. Long before the popes were known as “Vicar of Christ,” they were called “Vicar of Peter.” Pope Gregory VII was a model medieval pope above personal reproach, ambitious only for the health and freedom of the Church. He represented both Christ and Saint Peter well.

Pope Saint Gregory VII, may your earthly example and heavenly intercession sustain and inspire the leaders of the Church to act impetuously, to fight ceaselessly, and to forgive generously when confronted by forces inimical to the well-being of the Church.

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May 25: Saint Bede the Venerable, Priest and Doctor
c. 672–735
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of scholars

Life’s drama is found in going deeper, not wider

There is no world bigger than a monk’s cell. Those four, high walls shape thought like hard, steep banks contain the flow of a river. Rock curtains hanging on both sides force the raging river to carve a path through the landscape, always forward, always deeper. Here the tall banks stop the pounding river from pouring over into the plains. There the low banks allow the gentle current to run low and straight. A river without banks is a lake. And a mind without borders is a puddle—no forward movement and too shallow to sustain life. Borders, limits, and guardrails have expansive effects, paradoxically. A frame makes a painting burst to life; orderly lanes push traffic forward; and the edge of a canvas focuses the artist’s skill. Big thoughts start with boundaries. That’s why big thoughts happen in small spaces. Many thousands of monks’ minds were molded by the limits of the four, cold walls of their cells. And these scholar monks and saint monks gave birth to what we now call Europe.

Today’s saint was a model monk who lived his whole life in an English monastery, although he occasionally traveled to neighboring communities to teach young scholars. Venerable Bede’s cell and monastery were nothing like those impressive stone structures with soaring arches and large courtyards, which still stand as icons of medieval Europe. Bede lived long, long before that golden age of monasticism. He died less than two hundred years after Saint Benedict, the founder of monasticism. The monasteries of Bede’s era were more like farms, where the monks lived in a dormitory above a large chapter room or perhaps even in crude huts huddled around a squat stone church. These first simple efforts to plant religious life into English soil matured, over centuries, into a network of enormous English monasteries. And these monasteries, in their fullest flower, grew into the universities, towns, schools, hospitals, lodges, cathedrals, and trade centers of England itself, a rich garden of Catholicism known in medieval times as Mary’s Dowry. Venerable Bede and his monastic brothers planted. Later generations harvested. And King Henry VIII then confiscated the garden and handed it over to his friends, who uprooted its most beautiful plants. Ironically and sadly, the tombs of many English saints, including Venerable Bede, lie today in Protestant churches.

From his cell in remote England, Bede was enmeshed in the Church matters of his day. He was involved in the long simmering dispute over the date of Easter, promoted the practice of using Christ’s birth as the starting date for calendars, translated Christian works from Latin or Greek into Anglo-Saxon (to the immense good of the growth of the Church in England), and authored numerous works, the most famous of which is a history of the Church in England until his days. He was, in short, a prolific and wide-ranging scholar. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII honored that reputation by naming him a Doctor of the Church, the only native of England to be so honored.

Thomas à Kempis, in his classic The Imitation of Christ, writes that every time a monk leaves his cell he comes back less a man. In his cell the monk learns everything he needs to know about himself, the world, and God. It is inside of our vocations that we find God’s will and our own fulfillment. A deep and abiding commitment to a specific person, religion, home, job, school, parish, spouse, and family is the stuff of life. Wandering is fun for a while. Commitment, though, is more exciting in the long run. The banks of the river must be built up. The edges and borders stacked high. The rails set in place. Then, and only then, life starts to be lived. To go deeper, not wider. To run those roots down deep into the moist soil. When we leave the four corners of our commitments and vocation, it may be liberating for a while, but time rectifies the deception. Our vocation is our home, and in that home we find happiness, make others happy, and satisfy the divine plan of the God who made us.

Bede the Venerable, we see in your life a model of commitment to one place, one idea, one love, and one Church. We ask your intercession to aid all scholars, all monks, and all who waver, to stay at their desk, their kneeler, or their work bench to fulfill the task at hand.

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May 25: Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, Virgin
1566-1607
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the sick
Life’s true drama is on the inside

Today’s Carmelite saint was the Italian counterpart to Spain’s famous Carmelite, Teresa of Ávila, although Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi is less well known than her Spanish contemporary. Teresa was a well-traveled and extroverted reformer and founder of a large and vital branch of the Carmelite Order. Mary Magdalene, on the other other hand, was not even a Mother Superior, much less a founder, and followed the ancient observance of Carmel, not its “Teresian,” or discalced, offshoot.

Named Caterina at her baptism, today’s saint was from a wealthy, pious, and respected Florentine family who expected their only daughter to marry young and marry well. But young Caterina was well trained in the things of God from the start and destined for a higher calling. While Caterina was still a girl, her spiritual director taught her the benefit and discipline of meditating half an hour a day. At the tender age of twelve, she experienced her first ecstasy. She gazed transfixed at the gorgeous sun setting over the rolling countryside and shook at the awesome beauty of God’s creation. Her mother was there, but little Caterina was speechless, unable to describe what hidden forces caused her body to tremble so.

When she was sixteen, she entered a Carmelite convent, over her family’s initial objections. Taking the religious name of Mary Magdalene, she experienced a number of shocking spiritual events, which were documented and witnessed by her fellow Carmelites and by priest confessors. The young nun was rapt in God for weeks and months on end. She shook violently and showed signs of the stigmata. In her ecstasies, she received a crown of thorns from Jesus to share in His sufferings and a ring to symbolize her mystical marriage to Him. She lived on only bread and water for years, in reparation for the sins of mankind. When a priest ordered her to eat the simple fare of the convent, she became ill and had to return to her more meager nourishment. After one ecstatic vision, a near-death experience, Mary Magdalene described how she had given her heart to Jesus and how He had returned it to her with the purity of the Virgin Mary’s own heart. Jesus Christ had even hidden Saint Mary Magdalene in His side, subjugating her will and desires to His own.

These many years of intense fireworks in her soul were followed by dark years of dryness and isolation. She felt a painful separation from Jesus her Spouse. During this time, Saint Mary Magdalene struggled with prideful self-love, distaste for God, and the all too common temptations of the flesh and the devil. But she persevered and became novice mistress of the Carmel, recommending poverty, obedience, and abandonment to the will of God as the surest forms of holiness. Mary Magdalene died young, exhausted from her spiritual contests, fasts, and demanding life of prayer. Behind her spectacular displays of spirituality was the day in and day out austerity of Carmelite convent life: the longing for a nice piece of meat, going to bed on an empty stomach, knees and hips aching from scrubbing the floor for endless hours, no dessert to satisfy the sweet tooth, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and almost falling forward due to eyes burning with lack of sleep. Only by long practice do actions mature into habits and habits into the highest virtues.

The proving ground of a strict convent proves a soul, and only then might spiritual flowers bloom. Only then might bright ecstasies sparkle against the dark curtain of night, to the wonder and awe of all around. For Mary Magdalene, Christ was not all rod and lash. She was a happy nun who played her part in keeping her convent running. She kept her personality, like all stigmatists and elite spiritual warriors, yet became one with Christ in a mysterious manner best described in poetic rather than theological terms. Her renown was widespread and her cult immediate. She was canonized in 1669. Her body lies in peace in her native Florence and is still incorrupt.

Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, we ask your divine intercession before your Mystical Spouse to give all Religious the gift of perseverance, obedience, and poverty. Your spiritual ecstasies were unique—and destined for few. Grant those gifts that are common—and destined for many.

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The Ascension of the Lord
c. 33 A.D.
Depending on ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the Thursday which falls forty days after Easter, or the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

Ecce Homo...in all His glory

The heart-piercing flash of a second when the wife’s eyes lock with her husband’s as she steps into the lifeboat, but he stays on board the listing ship. The wailing and crying as mothers and children are ripped apart on the platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The well-loved cousin who leaves his far-flung relatives’ home after a visit, everyone knowing he will never pass that way again. The emotional farewell. The final, bittersweet call. The last hug and tender kiss on the teary cheek. History, literature, and everyday reality are thick with dramatic goodbyes.

Departures can be painful, none more than the mysterious finality of a soul’s departure from this life. For those without faith, confusion deepens the pain. Without God there is, after life, just the void. The real absence. Emptiness, chaos, and guesswork about what frightening reality awaits behind the curtain. Today’s Feast of the Ascension is a peek behind that curtain and what the believer sees is life, fulfillment, and hope. In the Ascension, we have a preview of coming attractions and much, much more. Forty days after His Resurrection from the dead, the disciples witness the Lord go away. But they are not sad. Saint Luke relates that the disciples were full of joy upon returning to Jerusalem after witnessing Jesus’ Ascension on the Mount of Olives. Jesus had gone away but had not died. He had departed but was fully alive. Christ showed that there was an alternative path, a different way to “do” leaving time and space.

Most memory is happy memory. We naturally forget what causes us pain and embarrassment and more easily retain what brings smiles and light. Our Catholic religion serves us well when it remembers truths on our behalf. The Church tells us year in and year out where we came from—God. It reads to us at Mass the stories of our salvation. It reminds us that death and suffering are painful but not the end. And in the Ascension the Church preserves the very positive memory of man’s greatness. The Ascension reinforces our dignity. It is a shot of vitamin B right into the spine. We stand taller and straighter when we know that we are meant to live forever in the Father’s house in heaven.

Many modern biologists point to a pile of wet clay and say, “Look, here is man.” Modern visual artists often show bloody, suffering, degraded man and say, “Look, here is man.” Sensualists sell the unclothed body to the lustful and say, “Look, here is man.” Pontius Pilate stood the broken and bloody body of Jesus before the rabble and said the same, “Ecce Homo.” Today the Church asks its believers to gaze up at the Ascension and to say, “Here is man too. Here is the body restored, in all of man’s resplendent power.” It is not enough for us to guess about our origins. We must reflect upon our destination. Where we are going says more about us than where we came from. Man is not a small pile of dirt. He is not his broken jaw, his foreclosed home, his failed marriage, or his carnal desires. He is these things, but he is more. Man is great because God is great.

At Mass the priest says, “Lift up your hearts,” and the people respond, “We lift them up to the Lord.” Indeed. Today we marvel at the spectacle of the God-Man Jesus Christ ascending to heaven and to home. From that high place, and only from there, can we properly gauge our dignity. The Ascension should not invite speculation about the number of rooms in the Father’s mansion, or how exactly the Lord zoomed up into the clouds. The Ascension is about what comes next. It’s about our dignity. It teaches us that self importance is nothing. It is union with God that makes us great and makes us happy.

Lord Jesus, You were from Mary biologically but from the Father theologically. On this Feast of the Ascension, You return to the Father’s house. Help all who believe in You and who belong to You in the Church to one day join You in that heavenly home forever and ever. Amen.

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May 22: Saint Rita of Cascia, Religious
c. 1386–1457
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of abuse victims, sterility, and difficult marriages

She suffered for two spouses

Rita Lotti gave birth to her first son at the age of twelve. Fortunately the child was not born out of wedlock. Rita’s husband had been chosen for her by her parents, and they married when she was twelve. Throughout eighteen years of marriage, Rita endured her husband’s insults, physical abuse, and infidelity until the loathful man was stabbed to death by one of his many enemies. Rita pardoned her husband’s killers and impeded her two sons from avenging their father’s death. Marriage ends with death, so Rita was free after her husband’s passing to satisfy a holy desire of her youth and entered an Augustinian convent. The leadership of the local Augustinians was reluctant to admit Rita, however, because she was not a virgin. Despite wide precedence for widows entering religious life, Rita was compelled to wait a number of years before receiving the habit.

Rita was a model nun who lived to the fullest the spiritual requirements of her age. She was obedient, generously served the sick of the convent, and shared her wisdom of human nature, especially regarding marital distress, with the lay women who sought her out. Sister Rita was also devoted to prayer and meditated so deeply on the Passion of our Lord that she experienced a mini-stigmata. Instead of open wounds in her hands oozing blood, as Saint Francis and Saint Padre Pio displayed, a small wound appeared on Rita’s forehead. It was as if a thorn from Christ’s crown had penetrated the tightly wrapped flesh on her skull. There was no thorn visible, of course, just as no nails or spears pierced the bodies of other stigmatists. Rita’s wound refused to heal for a number of years. The unique statue, or image, showing a nun with a thorn stuck in her forehead is Saint Rita, making her one of the most easily identifiable people on the calendar of Catholic saints.

After Saint Rita died of natural causes, her body did not deteriorate. She was placed in an ornate tomb, her extraordinary holiness was attested to in writing, and healing miracles were petitioned for and soon granted through her intercession. These many cures led to Rita’s beatification in 1626 and her canonization in 1900. Leathery black skin still covers Saint Rita‘s habited body as she peacefully reposes in a glass coffin in her shrine in Cascia, Italy. She is invoked as a kind of female Saint Jude, a patroness of impossible causes, particularly those related to the difficult vocation of marriage.

Saint Rita was both a physical and a spiritual mother. She was a spouse of Christ—a perfect man, and of her husband—a flawed man. She knew intimately the vocation both to religious and to married life, giving her a certain status, or credibility, with both consecrated and married women, which few others saints enjoy. Rita’s dual vocation has given her a dual attraction, which is likely the cause of her fame and the continued devotion to her so many centuries after her death. In many ways, her life in the convent was not remarkable, except for the stigmata. There were surely many other nuns in Rita’s era and region whose virtue and prayerfulness stood out. Yet for reasons known to God alone and which are therefore sufficient, this nun, among so many others who brimmed with holiness, is still visited in her shrine, still invoked, and still thanked for the favors that she continues to rain down from her place in heaven.

Saint Rita, through your intercession, aid all women in difficult marriages and abusive situations. Help women in distress to think rationally, to be faithful to their husbands if possible, to be devoted to their vows if they are able, and yet to flee if they are in danger.

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May 20: Saint Bernardine of Siena, Priest
1380–1444
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of advertising and gambling

A sensational preacher popularizes the Holy Name devotion

Saint Bernardine of Siena was the Billy Graham of his day. Graham was a well-known American evangelist who traveled ceaselessly from city to city preaching the good news of the Gospel over many decades. Yet while today’s saint was certainly a roving evangelist, he was also much more. He was first and foremost vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Franciscan Friar. Saint Bernardine was also ordained into the one Priesthood of Jesus Christ by a successor of the Apostles. And he had received a long and complete theological and humanistic education before he ever opened his mouth in front of a crowd. He was even a doctor of canon law.

Fifteenth-century Italy was hot with reform of the Church. Ever since 1417 and the end of the Great Schism (an era of two and even three competing popes), talk of Church reform was on the lips of anyone who believed enough to care. Unfortunately, every effort to compel a bishop to live in his diocese, to form better educated priests, to purify indulgence selling, to streamline Church courts, to appoint holy bishops, to stop commerce in relics, and so on, was ignored or resisted. The roots of some weeds are tangled and ferocious. They cannot be pulled from the ground. The 1400s were a lost century for efforts to reform the Church. The popes tightened their grip on Church power so that no council would ever pry their fingers from the levers of ecclesial governance. The needed reforms would have to wait until the immensely successful Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. But it was too late by then. Father Martin Luther and others had been tired of waiting. The Reformation began in 1517, one hundred years after the Great Schism ended. Vast populations of Northern Europe were cleaved from the true Faith because the needed reforms came too late.

Saint Bernardine was one of the many bright lights of fifteenth-century Italy who did everything in his power to create a holier Church through his preaching. He was such a compelling and entertaining speaker that enormous crowds turned out to hear him, normally first thing in the morning. He encouraged devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus and often held the IHS monogram in his hand when preaching. This devotion was later incorporated as a feast day into the universal calendar of the Church. Bernardine dramatically exhorted his congregations to melt their mirrors, playing cards, perfumes, dice, wigs, and other worldly distractions in a “bonfire of the vanities” roaring near his pulpit. This was true drama.

In the Franciscan tradition, Bernardine of Siena walked everywhere. No horse or mule or carriage for the journey. He excoriated usury, superstition, and the deplorable scourge of homosexual acts, in the starkest terms. Compared to the modern penchant for market research, polling, and tailoring a message to audience expectations, Saint Bernardine was fearless. He spoke the unvarnished truths of his religion to the adherents of the same. Preaching, he understood, was an essential charism of the Priesthood of Christ, not an add-on. Saint Bernardine also published, far ahead of his time, works on entrepreneurship, business practices, a just wage, and the determining of just values for a product or service. Saint Bernardine was a sophisticated thinker with a common touch.

The fact that Saint Bernardine lived almost into the age of the printed book meant that many of his sermons were accurately preserved. It also meant that images of his likeness were uniform and accurate. A famous painting by El Greco shows the emaciated friar in a worn Franciscan habit, the three knots on his white cincture visible, representing poverty, chastity, and obedience. His right hand holds a standard bearing the monogram of the name of Jesus—IHS. In his left hand is a book, perhaps the Bible. And at his feet are three bishops’ miters. Saint Bernardine was three times offered to be made a bishop and three times he said, “No.” Thus, in addition to all of his other considerable virtues, our saint also possessed the queen of the virtues — humility. Bernardine of Siena was the Saint Paul of his era and was canonized in 1450, just six years after he died, numerous miracles having already been attributed to his intercession. 

Saint Bernardine of Siena, inspire all preachers to not count the personal cost of stating uncomfortable truths but instead to suffer the repercussions of honest talk. Help priests to fortify their preaching with impeccable lives of prayer, fasting, devotion, and virtue, just as you did.

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May 18: Saint John I, Pope and Martyr
c. Late Fifth Century–526
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

The pope is crushed in a secular vice by two worldly masters

The early Popes were Roman citizens who retained their birth or baptismal names upon being elected to the See of Peter. Their names perfectly reflect a flourishing Roman culture rather than the Christian subculture which was gradually budding and flowering in its midst. So there are Popes Clement, Linus, Anacletus, Sixtus, Victor, Callixtus, Urban, and Fabian. It sounds like a roll call of Roman senators in white togas seated on the marble benches of the Forum. It is not until 254 that Pope Stephen bears a name from the New Testament and not until 336 does Pope Mark honor an Evangelist.

Considering the centrality of Saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist to the Christian story, it is surprising that five hundred years transpired before today’s saint, Pope John I, so honored their memory. A pope is only called the “First” once there’s a “Second.” In 533 a man named Mercurius succeeded today’s John as Bishop of Rome. Mercurius’ birth name was so overtly pagan—honoring the Roman God Mercury—that he chose to honor his martyred predecessor John by adopting his same name. Mercurius thus initiated the venerable tradition of a pope adopting a new name upon his election. At the same time he also retroactively turned Pope John into Pope John I.

The flow of the early martyrs’ blood had long since ceased by John I’s election in 523. There was no emperor or court even left in Rome by 523 for barbarians to attack. The traditional date of the fall of the Western Roman Empire is 476. John I was, then, the pope of a declining, far western outpost of an empire whose central government had been in Constantinople for almost two hundred years by John I’s election. Rome was fading.

The Empire’s long, slow decline in Italy had created a vacuum. Rugged tribes of the North, including the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths), poured south into the warm valleys and cultured towns of the Italian countryside and saturated Rome itself. The Ostrogoths had called the Italian peninsula home for so long that, by the sixth century, they were part Roman, part barbarian, and part Christian. Borderlands are always a mix. For complex historical reasons, the Ostrogoths and their Italian ruler, Theodoric, were Arians. Their prior isolation in Northern Europe had prohibited them from absorbing the teachings of the fourth-century Councils of Nicea and Constantinople. So the Ostrogoths were unaware that the Church had decisively rejected the Arian heresy, which held that Christ was a god, but not the God.

It was amidst these tense political and religious circumstances that poor Pope John I was placed in an impossible situation. John was caught between the Emperor Justin in remote Constantinople, who exercised significant control over Church discipline, and Theodoric, who was standing right at his side, breathing down his neck. Justin had issued an edict ordering the Arians, including the Ostrogoths in Italy, to surrender their churches to the Catholics. Theodoric would have none of it. He was as angry as a hornet. To him, it was the first step toward Constantinople reasserting its control over Italy, something the Ostrogoths would resist to the death. So Theodoric sent Pope John at the head of a large embassy of Roman dignitaries to Constantinople to demand that Justin withdraw the edict. Pope John obediently went. He was greeted in the capital with elaborate ceremony and honored as head of the Church. But he could not, and did not, secure what Theodoric so desired. It was impossible. The edict was binding.

When Pope John and his party crossed the Adriatic Sea to return to Rome, they landed at Ravenna. Theodoric, who had heard of Pope John’s failure to have the edict rescinded, imprisoned him. And there the Pope died, in Ravenna, perhaps of shock, perhaps of mistreatment. His blood did not run red like the martyrs of old, but he died a victim for Christ nonetheless, unable to simultaneously satisfy two powerful secular masters. John I’s mortal remains were returned to Rome. In keeping with the custom for all popes since Pope Leo the Great (440–461), Pope John I was interred in the nave of the Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter. When the new St. Peter’s was built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, John’s tomb did not surface nor did any epitaph. But Pope Saint John I is still there, somewhere, under the floor of St. Peter’s, arms crossed, facing up, ring on his bony finger, vested in gold, miter crowning his head, as waves of tourists walk on the marble floor above him. He rests in peace, forgotten to but a few.

Pope Saint John I, your fidelity to your vocation as Pope led to your death. You were faithful in the face of threats from civil power but did not bend to its will. May all popes look to your example for inspiration in leading the Church.

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May 15: Saint Isidore
c. 1080–1130
Optional Memorial (U.S.A.); Liturgical Color: White

Patron Saint of farmers and brick layers

Our daily duties are not a distraction from God’s will
It would be wonderful to see in a church a marble statue of a nurse taking a patient’s blood pressure. It would be edifying to see in a Basilica’s bright stained glass a housewife standing fatigued at the ironing board, running the iron over her kids’ shirts. And it would be marvelous to gaze in admiration at a well-executed painting of a factory worker pounding a piece of metal into shape with a hammer. Imagine if Catholic art presented these mundane scenes for contemplation in our churches, chapels, and shrines. Imagine kneeling before a bank of glowing candles and reflecting upon the everyday heroism of the lay vocation. We could light a small candle, step back, cross our hands, pause in silence, look at the layman in a suit at his desk in the mosaic before us, and whisper a prayer asking for his divine intercession to help us be a more charitable nurse, a more dedicated housewife, or a more honest worker.

There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. So our churches inspire us, ideally, with their statues, stained glass, paintings, mosaics, floors, and tapestries. The images of the holy men and women of our long Catholic tradition typically show popes, bishops, priests, nuns, abbots, monks, friars, brothers, missionaries, and others, dressed in their religious habit and armed with the symbols of their office and their life. All of this is good. All of this is necessary. All of this is inspiring. Yet today’s saint, Isidore, offers us a different pathway of holiness to consider—the broad and well-traveled pathway crowded with the Catholic laity on their way to work in the morning.

Saint Isidore was from Spain and was named in honor of Saint Isidore of Seville, a scholar, bishop, and Father of the Church who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries. The two Isidores could not be more different. Today’s Saint Isidore is known in Spanish as “Labrador” or “the farm worker.” He was not a scholar and probably had trouble reading. He was not ordained to Holy Orders but married and a father. He surely had calluses on his hands, a red, leathery neck burned by the sun, and a sore and twisted back for most of his life. He earned what little he had. No one gave it to him. He did not put food on his family’s table by generating great thoughts or publishing profound books. And due to exhaustion he probably had no trouble sleeping at night.

Numerous legends of miracle working and holiness attest to Saint Isidore’s influence on Spanish culture. In 1947 his partially incorrupt body was even put on public display to provoke prayers to bring a terrible Spanish drought to an end.  Saint Isidore is the patron saint of Madrid and of numerous other towns, cities, and regions throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Processions, Masses, fireworks, and public devotions render him homage on his feast day. Yet besides his dedication to working the land, few details of Saint Isidore’s life are known with certainty.

Our religious faith cannot occupy only one sphere of our life, as if it were a hobby akin to building a ship in a bottle, flying a kite, or cultivating a garden. A real religion impacts everything. Even work. Especially work. We fulfill God’s will in our daily lives—which are packed full of work—by doing our work well. We should do our work diligently and at a high professional level, because it is an offering to God first and foremost. In other words, bad work equals a bad offering. Work is the practical use and expression of the skills God has loaned us for our earthly pilgrimage. To misuse those skills, to let them lie fallow, or to put them to ill use, is to bury a treasure in the ground. “Ora et Labora” is the Benedictine maxim. Prayer and Work. Yet work is prayer for the vast majority of the baptized.

Saint Isidore’s life teaches us, indirectly, that God can convert an entire nation without ink or paper. A book might help, of course, but a religion of the Word is not the same as a religion of the Book, and Catholics are a people of the Word. Saint Isidore is the patron saint of farmers, day laborers, and brick layers. He is often shown wearing rough clothes, oxen leading him as he plows a furrow, with an angel at his side and a golden halo shining over him. A farmer saint. Why not?

Saint Isidore, your witness of dedicated and holy work is a model for all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. May your quiet and humble dedication to your lay vocation inspire all the baptized to see in “work well done” a source of dignity through which man participates in God’s creative act.

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May 14: Saint Matthias, Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of alcoholics and tailors

The Twelve were deeply biblical—Judas had to be replaced

Conservative Muslims believe that any territory that was once settled and governed by the adherents of Mohammed pertains forever and always to the Caliphate. Once Islamic, always Islamic. To illustrate, it took many generations for the Islamic fist to finally loosen its grip on Spain. Yet despite the Muslim armies being pushed back into the waters of the Mediterranean in 1492, some strict modern followers of Mohammed still harbor dreams of former glories and hope that Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) will one day re-emerge.

Catholicism harbors no such illusions of glory for formerly Catholic lands, but it does practice a theological form of “Once Catholic, Always Catholic.” Many Bishops who serve in the Roman Curia exercise no authority over a diocese. Auxiliary bishops likewise lack a territory. These two categories of bishops are thus given a “titular” episcopal see. It is a see in name, or title, only. The see is normally that of an ancient diocese whose existence ceased due to, typically, Muslim invasion. The custom of assigning “titular” sees to some bishops not only preserves the memory of lost peoples and dioceses, it also has some theological support. A bishop and his diocese are united, like spouses, in a marriage arranged in Rome. That’s why a bishop wears a ring. And a diocese, once created, cannot remain a widow. A new bishop is always appointed to be wedded to it. A diocese must have a spouse, even if he is a long way from home in distance and time. Titular bishops succeed in the present, if only in name, the past bishops of now defunct dioceses.

The tradition that all bishops, beginning with the Apostles, must have successors is rooted not just in the early Church but in Judaism. The Twelve Apostles are more often referred to in the New Testament by their number than their names. They are, simply,  “The Twelve.” This custom is rooted in the twelve tribes who settled the land of Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt. These tribes were founded by the twelve sons of the Patriarch Jacob, later renamed Israel. It was inside of this Old Testament Jewish tradition that Jesus Christ acted when He chose twelve men upon whom to found His Church. Jesus specifically states that His followers will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Mt 19:28, Lk 22:30). And the Book of Revelation states that the names of the twelve tribes of Israel will be written on the gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rv 21:12 ff).

It was fitting, then, when “The Twelve” were reduced to “The Eleven” after Judas’ self murder, that the fullness of the biblical number had to be restored. And this is where today’s saint steps out from the shadows to play his role in Christian history. The first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the great history book of the early Church, tells us that, after the Ascension, the eleven Apostles returned to Jerusalem. There, Peter “stood up among the believers” to tell them that someone who had “accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us… must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” Two names were proposed to replace Judas: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas. Then the Eleven prayed to the Lord to show them the way. They cast lots. Matthias was chosen. An Apostle, for the first time, had a successor. And, of equal significance, the appointment came from the group, or college, of Apostles, led by Peter. Thus was established, just days after Christ left the earth, a form of Church preservation and growth which would be repeated, and is still repeated, tens of thousand of times in Christian history.

The Church has placed the Feast of St. Matthias purposefully close to the Feast of the Ascension, just as his election in Acts occurred so soon after that event in the Bible. The Holy Spirit had yet to descend at Pentecost, and still the Church performed the will of God with authority in selecting Matthias. It was all there in the beginning. It is still here all around us. The miracle of the Church and her Apostles continues. It will always continue.

Saint Matthias, we beg your intercession from your powerful throne in the Heavenly Jerusalem, that you fortify all who govern your Church to emulate “The Twelve” in their wisdom, trust, prudence, and daring in leading and spreading the Faith.

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May 13: Our Lady of Fatima
1917
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Like the moon’s mellow glow, Mary reflects a greater light

The ancient Greco-Roman world that Christianity replaced was deeply devoted to the gods, not God. Its landscape was dotted with a thousand shrines, oracles, sacred caves, and holy mountains where the god of this and the goddess of that lived or lurked. And the pagan faithful—and they were faithful—trusted that someone among this government of gods could be petitioned for this need or lobbied for that favor: so that the battle would be won, the harvest plentiful, the illness brief, the baby a boy, or the sea calm for the voyage. This all made sense. Just as human nature was expressed in countless persons, so too would the divine nature be manifested in myriad gods and goddesses. Countless stars populated the blackness between earth and sun. So too did gods thicken the reality between the realm of the flesh and the realm of the spirit in ancient paganism.

Over a span of centuries, Christianity methodically and inexorably displaced this ancient worldview. The Church rolled slowly on, like a colossal glacier, from east to west and south to north, gathering, pushing, and budging everyone and everything to the margins as it carved a new landscape for a new people. Yet the old worldview, while theologically childish, had deeply human elements. It is natural to think that between man and god there would be sub-gods or something of the like. It is natural to imagine that a local god would have local concerns and give a local answer to local people. It is natural to presume that a high summit is holier than a flat prairie and that to visit it, to make a petition, and to leave an offering would merit more than to do nothing at all. Greco-Roman paganism expressed the deep, universal, religious impulse found in every culture.

Christianity built on the same human foundations as paganism, and it responded to the same human longings. But Christianity built on that sound foundation a solid house of revealed theological truth. And that truth revealed that the one God—omniscient, omnipresent, all powerful—expresses Himself through the tool of creation, though He Himself is not creation. Christian truth also revealed that God not only acts through secondary causes but is also approached through them. So bread and water become Christ’s Body and Blood, water is blessed by a holy man and wets our foreheads when we mark ourselves with the cross, and certain men and women live so heroically the mystery of God in their lives that we call them saints. This constellation of saints has long replaced the confused, but understandable, pagan pantheon of old. Instead of a god of the sea, a god of war, and a god of rain, we have patron saints for sailors, soldiers, and farmers. We have saint intercessors for the mentally ill, for pregnant women, for impossible causes, and for a happy death. Catholicism has a saint for everything and for everyone, forming a more theologically satisfying worldview that nonetheless responds to the innate religious impulse of all men.

Today’s Memorial celebration commemorates the greatest saint of all, Saint Mary, as she manifested herself to three humble children in the Portuguese village of Fatima in 1917. Our Lady, the only mother ever chosen by her son, appeared in a particular place, at a particular time, to a particular people, to satisfy a particular need. She spoke to the children deep theological truths about heaven, hell, and purgatory. She performed a publicly witnessed miracle that made the sun dance, asked for increased devotion to her Son Jesus Christ, and pleaded for reparation for the many sins committed against Him. A shrine was built in the Blessed Mother’s honor at the site of her apparitions, which has welcomed millions and millions of pilgrims, including popes, over the decades. Our Lady is for the whole Church, of course, but she is closer to the faithful when she comes to them on their own terms—in their own tongue, skin, and dress, hovering over their own soil. There is one Mary, historically and theologically. There are many Marys, culturally and symbolically.

Pope Saint John Paul II was shot on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. He was grievously injured but survived. He later said that one hand pulled the trigger, but another hand guided the bullet. He went on pilgrimage to Fatima to give thanks for that saving hand. The bullet that penetrated his torso, and was removed by doctors, was placed into the silver crown of Our Lady of Fatima. It rests there today. We honor Mary for many graces, we petition her for many favors, and we thank her for many gifts—for the battle won, for the plentiful harvest, for the healthy baby, for the calm sea, and for the lives saved, dramatically, from an assassin, or mundanely, from everything else.

Our Lady of Fatima, your miraculous apparitions fill us with hope that you follow our concerns, intervene in our lives, and demand of us greater fidelity. May we heed your words and your warnings and carry out God’s will with your own life as our example.

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May 12: Saint Pancras, Martyr
Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of children, jobs, and health

A fatherless teen discovers a treasure worth life itself

In the late 500s, Pope Saint Gregory the Great appointed monks to staff a small church in Rome, already almost three hundred years old, which was dedicated to Saint Pancras. In 597 the same Pope Gregory sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury on a missionary journey to England, and Augustine copied his Roman mentor and established a church in honor of Saint Pancras. About sixty years after Augustine, a different pope sent relics of Saint Pancras to England. This further spread devotion to this boy martyr, until a total of six ancient churches were dedicated to Saint Pancras in England alone, including the oldest church still used for Christian worship in that old country.

Little is known with certainty about the life of Saint Pancras, but the essential facts are sufficient cause for admiration. Pancras was an orphan who traveled to Rome from the east in the company of his uncle. The pair converted to Christianity and then died for that conversion during the reign of Diocletian. Pancras was perhaps fourteen years old when he traded his earthly life for a better one in heaven. He likely became well known owing to his rare combination of youth and heroic witness. Our martyr was buried near a major Roman road, and a modest basilica was constructed over his tomb. The shrine and its catacombs became a popular pilgrimage destination, partly due to its healing bath, which was famous for its curative powers.  The ravages of time and foreign armies degraded the shrine, but it was rebuilt several times over the centuries. In the seventeenth century, the Basilica of Saint Pancras was entrusted to the Discalced Carmelite Order, whose members still reside there today. Under the Basilica are extensive Roman catacombs, and a reliquary in the church contains the head of Saint Pancras. The rest of the saint’s relics were scattered to the four winds by anti-Catholic armies who occupied the church and despoiled many of its treasures.

Moments of great danger for the Church are also moments of great grace. In her long history, the Church has passed through, and continues to live, many such dangerous, grace-filled times. Saint Pancras’ times were precisely such. If he had stayed in his native land, he would likely have died of natural causes. But he went in search of something, perhaps wealth, fame, or family, in Rome, the big city, just as so many people search for the same in big cities today. But young Pancras found what he probably wasn’t looking for—God. And his decision to become a Christian, perhaps through the influence of a friend or priest or aunt, quickly took a very serious turn. He was threatened with death if he did not burn incense to a false god. The boy stood fast. Like other more famous young martyrs, such as Saint Agnes, the idealism of youth provoked both admiration and fury in his persecutors, and he was taken beyond the walls of Rome to be decapitated.

Our culture and its pressures are not from God. They are human constructs. But our Church, which is an object of faith, is from God. The friction caused by the collision of culture and church damages individuals, parishes, and governments. Sparks fly. Heat is generated. Objects melt. At times, wars ensue. Today’s martyr was an early victim to something far bigger than himself—the culture clash between a dying empire and a dawning religion. If he had gone to Rome just ten years later, Pancras would have lived in peace. Instead, Pancras and many others were executed, because they refused to bend to a leader who might die tomorrow in favor of a God who rose to life from a cold tomb.

Saint Pancras, you gave away your young life rather than offer worship to a false god. May your example inspire, and your intercession strengthen, all young people to put love of God above all else.

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May 12: Saints Nereus and Achilleus, Martyrs
c. Early Second Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

Roman soldiers made good martyrs

The earliest manuscript proving the existence of Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, a copy of one of his works, dates from the ninth century A.D.  Caesar was stabbed to death in 44 B.C. So approximately nine hundred years separate the life of Caesar from the first tangible, physical, paper copy of one of his written works. The earliest manuscript describing Caesar, but not written by him, dates from after the ninth century, and so is even more removed from the man it describes. None of this means that Julius Caesar did not exist or that he did not compose the works attributed to him. First century B.C. Roman coins prove, unequivocally, that Julius Caesar existed.

No Roman coins prove the existence of today’s martyrs. Instead, something thousands of times larger than a coin proves they existed. There’s a church. In fact, there are two churches in Rome dedicated to Saints Nereus and Achilleus. These churches are not hard to find. You can touch their walls, open their doors, and sit in their pews. There is not one structure, much less two, in Rome or in any other city, dedicated to Julius Cesar. Even the exact location of his assassination is a matter of conjecture.

Almost nothing can be said with certainty regarding the lives and deaths of Nereus and Achilleus. There are conflicting traditions of when they lived, where they lived, and how they died. But…there are those churches. Two of them. In Rome. One is a fourth-century Basilica inside the Catacombs of Domitilla. The other, from the sixth century, was built on the site where an early Christian tradition says Saint Peter encountered Christ as Peter was abandoning Rome.

A stone is a valuable form of testimony. It is more permanent than paper. A stone doesn’t easily deteriorate. A stone is heavy and remains where its builder placed it. Its location itself provides important clues. The stones of the two Roman churches dedicated to today’s saints give powerful, if silent, testimony. The churches are planted in the earth like giant gravestones telling who can be found in or beneath them. Who would assume that the words etched into a gravestone were a lie? Who would think that a name carved into granite described no one? Who would imagine that the ground under a memorial was empty, holding no grave, no casket, no body? Only a fool would believe such things. But Christians are no fools.

An enormous death memorial, in the form of a church, was built by dedicated Christians in the fourth century in honor of today’s saints. Nereus and Achilleus were likely soldiers who were executed for their belief in Jesus Christ. An official list of Roman martyrs from the fifth-century names, specifically, Nereus and Achilleus, and states, specifically, that they are buried in the Catacombs of St. Domitilla. Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590–604, gave a homily, duly recorded and preserved, at the very tomb of Saints Nereus and Achilleus: “These saints before whose tomb we are assembled, despised the world and trampled it under their feet…” And more than one medieval manuscript records an ancient dedication to Nereus and Achilleus by Pope Damasus (366–384) attesting to their martyrdom for refusing to carry out military orders to kill Christians.

The relics of today’s saints were transferred from their ancient underground Basilica in the catacombs to their “new” Church sometime in the sixth century. By the ninth century, the Basilica had been forgotten as wave after wave of invasion and plague and sack and turmoil decimated the Eternal City until it was a shadow of its imperial glory. But in 1874, a pioneering archaeologist named Giovanni de Rossi began excavating the Catacombs of Domitilla.  In the ruins of a subterranean Basilica there, he found two pillars, one of which had the name “Achilleus” carved into it. De Rossi also discovered chunks of the very marble slab bearing the dedication of Pope Damasus to Nereus and Achilleus! This discovery proved the medieval manuscripts describing the dedication were accurate. The stones spoke. The faithful listened. The traditions are true. The Church preserved its sacred history, and today the great tradition of honoring those who shed their blood for Christ perdures.

Saints Nereus and Achilleus, we know little about you, except the most important things—that you lived, that you converted, and that you chose to not continue living rather than to deny your belief in Christ. We know these things, and they are enough. Pray for us.

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May 10: Saint Damien de Veuster of Moloka’i, Priest (U.S.A.)
1840–1889
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of those suffering leprosy

A joyful celibate brings hope and dignity to the walking dead

It is often just one decision that releases the bolt, opening the door to a new life. The first step down a new road of a thousand smaller steps begins with one choice—to board the ship or to stand on the dock, to accept the marriage proposal or to wait for another, to sign the document or to leave it blank. Without that first choice, a different life would have been lived. Everyone, at some point, stands at this crossroad. But an impulse must be obeyed or rejected for untold other events, decisions, and influences to begin to unwind. This is one of the mysteries of life, how so much depends on one brief moment.

Young Jozef De Veuster (Damien was his religious name), growing up in a large family in rural Belgium, could never have imagined where and how his life would end. He was most likely going to follow the path of most other young men of his time and place—get married, have a family, go to Mass on Sunday, and take over the family farm. But an older brother was a priest, and two sisters were nuns, so a religious vocation was always a possibility. Damien eventually responded to the Lord’s call and his own impulse toward religious life and entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, just as his brother did before him. But just as his brother, Father Pamphile, was slated to leave for Hawaiʻi as a missionary, he had to abandon his voyage for health reasons. And thus a decision had to be made. A pivot point had arrived. Was Damien to replace his brother and go to Hawaiʻi or not? Leave family forever or stay home? Be a foreign missionary or stay among his own? Brother Damien walked the long plank upward and boarded the ship. He arrived in Honolulu in March 1864 and was ordained a priest in May. He would live his entire priestly life in Hawaiʻi. He never left the Hawaiʻian islands again.

Father Damien served in parishes for several years, learning to love his parishioners and being loved by them in return. Then, in 1873, the bishop asked for volunteers to go to an isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka’i. Father Damien volunteered. For the next sixteen years, he dedicated himself without reserve to this exiled community. He carried out more than a “ministry of accompaniment.” He accompanied, yes, but he also led, taught, inspired, and died to self. Father Damien’s robust health and farm background made hard work natural. He enlarged a chapel and built a rectory, a road, a dock, and numerous cottages for the lepers. He showed the people how to farm, to raise cattle, and to sing (despite his diseased vocal cords), and to play instruments (despite his missing fingers).

He was a vital force walking in a living graveyard. Life on an isolated leper colony was psychologically difficult for everyone, even the priest. But Father Damien brought faith and human dignity to a depressed population alienated from family and society. He treated the sick and the dying—and everyone was sick and dying—with the dignity of children of God. A proper cemetery was organized, funeral Masses were said with the accompaniment of a choir, and solemn processions bore everyone to their final resting place. This was a far cry from the inhuman chaos that preceded his arrival.
Father Damien carried out all of his pastoral work with fatherly concern. He was there, after all, because he was a celibate priest. No married Protestant minister would have dared to place himself, his wife, and his children in such a dangerous situation, and none ever did. Like all good fathers, Father Damien was both joyful and demanding. He was open. He smiled. He cared. He scolded. His source of strength was not merely his solid foundation in human virtue but primarily his Catholic faith. Father Damien’s love for the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary deepened through the years. His greatest non-physical sufferings were the lack of a priest companion with whom he could converse and to whom he could confess his sins.

Father Damien contracted leprosy after eleven years in the colony. He personally never wrote to his mother with the news. But when the old widow in Belgium learned of her son’s illness, she died of a broken heart. Father Damien lived five years with leprosy, continuing his priestly work, and died in 1889 at the age of forty-nine. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 after two medical miracles were attributed to his divine intervention.

Saint Damien of Moloka’i, intercede on behalf of all fathers to make them ever more generous in serving without reserve the families they head, making your life not only a source of inspiration, but also of emulation, to all who know of your heroic generosity.

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May 10: Saint John of Ávila, Priest and Doctor
1499-1569
Optional Memorial: Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Andalusia Spain and Spanish clergy

His humble epitaph reads “I was a sower”

Some of the most passionate and daring missionaries stayed close to home. They never sailed the high seas or crossed a snow-capped mountain. Today’s saint was one of them. He was an only child, and after his parents died, Fr. John sold his family property, travelled to Seville, cut all ties, and prepared to sail to New Spain (Mexico), one more wave in that surging missionary tide which crashed on Mexico’s shores throughout the 1500s. But it was not to be. St. John of Ávila never walked up the ship’s plank. He never crossed the ocean. While waiting for his ship in Seville, his skills as a preacher and catechist, and his obvious holiness, were noticed by the local bishop, who convinced him to preach, teach, and evangelize in Andalusia, in Spain’s rugged south.

Saint John then spent himself crisscrossing a region that had only recently been conquered by the Spanish crown, and so was still populated by Spanish Muslims and Jews whose conversions to Catholicism were often more matters of expedience than religious conviction. In this newly opened mission field, our saint’s broad, humanistic education perfectly matched the pastoral need. Father John harmonized orthodox theology, renaissance humanism, rigorous morality, and an insightful spirituality into a powerful synthesis which, when conveyed through his compelling preaching, moved his congregations to their very cores. As John migrated through the great cities of southern Spain - Seville, Córdoba, Granada – large numbers of the faithful followed him everywhere, eager to absorb every word that flowed from his mouth or pen.

People of every class, educational level, and depth of religious commitment found St. John fascinating. In his own lifetime he came to be known as “Master Ávila” for his dominance of the sacred sciences and his vigorous pastoral efforts. He converted, or led to deeper conversion, Saint John of God, founder of the Hospitaller Order, and Saint Francis Borgia, a future Master General of the Jesuits. He was a friend of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and advised Saint Teresa of Ávila, foundress of the Discalced Carmelites. Despite these, and many other, personal connections to famous religious orders and their founders, St. John always remained a diocesan priest, not a religious order priest, something unusual for a priest of his era with such wide influence.

Saint John’s erudition and solid virtues were further buttressed by his life of abject poverty and physical suffering. He was also part of that loud, pan-European cry for church reform that preceded the Council of Trent by decades. Saint John established several seminaries and colleges, provided spiritual direction to multitudes of laity, religious and seminarians, wrote a long spiritual treatise called Audi filia (“Listen daughter”) and was invited by a bishop to attend the Council of Trent as his theological adviser, though illness prevented Saint John from making the journey.

John was declared Venerable in 1759, Blessed in 1893, and Saint in 1970. Proving that saints are always contemporary, he was declared a doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 after a petition from the Spanish episcopacy for such an honor was duly studied and approved by the Vatican. The Papal Bull declaring him a Doctor of the Church states: “The teaching of John of Ávila is outstanding for its quality and precision, and its breadth and depth, which were the fruit of methodical study and contemplation together with a profound experience of supernatural realities.”

In his last few years, Saint John suffered acute physical pain and was largely confined to his humble home. Confinement allowed him to finally perfect his theological and spiritual writings and to correspond with those seeking his wise counsel. The esteemed Master Ávila, a true Man of La Mancha, died clutching a crucifix, surrounded by many disciples, on May 10, 1569.

Saint John of Ávila, your refined education, broad mind, and ardent love of God and Mary showed itself in all you did and said. May our lives likewise reflect our deepest Christian beliefs, inspiring our friends and families to live saintly perfection.

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May 3: Saints Philip and James, Apostles
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of hatmakers and pastry chefs (Philip) and pharmacists (James)

The smaller the town the bigger the man

The popes follow one another chronologically just like the presidents of the United States. One after another, after another, each inheriting the powers and responsibilities of his office. President John F. Kennedy followed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, just as Pope Saint John Paul II followed The Venerable Pope John Paul I. But there is a difference. Jesus’ placing of Saint Peter as the symbolic and jurisdictional head of the universal Church is, of course, more significant than the popular election of a political leader. The papacy is also different in that every pope is, theologically speaking, the “direct successor” of Saint Peter, the first pope. From this perspective, every pope after Saint Peter is a second pope. So, for example, the two hundredth pope, chronologically, was still the second pope, theologically.  No president would claim he is the direct successor of George Washington. He is the successor of his predecessor. Theological truths transcend space and time, since their source, God, exists outside of space and time.

The Office of St. Peter is theologically guaranteed by the easy-to-find, on-the-surface-of-the-text words of Christ telling Saint Peter that he is the rock upon which He will build His Church. Today’s Pope, and every pope, occupies that same office, is protected by that same divine guarantee, and immediately succeeds Saint Peter when he is chosen by the Holy Spirit to occupy his chair.
What pertains to the Office of the Bishop of Rome also pertains to the Office of the Twelve Apostles. Today’s saints, Philip and James, were called by name by Christ Himself. And after being called, they took the step that many who are called never take. They followed! The Twelve walked at Christ’s side on dusty trails during His years of public ministry. They ate and drank with Him by the fire. They slept under the cold desert sky with Him. And Jesus looked right into their eyes, and only their eyes, and spoke directly to their faces, and only their faces, when He said on a Thursday night that was deeply holy, “Do this in memory of me.” And then they did that, and many other things besides, in memory of Him, for the rest of their lives.

The four marks of the true Church are proof of its authenticity. “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic” are the trademark stamp of the true Church, proving it is the Church  founded by Jesus Christ. No other ecclesial community bears this trademark, and none except the Orthodox even claims to bear it. The mark of “One” means the Church is visibly one in spite of its many tongues, nations, classes, and races. The Church is one in her doctrine, her Sacraments, and her hierarchy. This oneness is not theoretical. It is tangible, real, and identifiable even to those without a doctorate in theology. This one, Christ-founded Church began with twelve followers who gathered as one around Jesus. These Twelve eventually appointed their own successors, who then, in turn, appointed successors, and so on through the centuries down to the present.

The universal college of bishops, the successor body to the Twelve Apostles, is the means by which the Oneness, or unity, of the Church is expressed, protected, and guaranteed. Bishops are not a secondary attribute or development of Christianity. They are embedded into and conjoined with the Word of God in one complex reality. They are not an outside source of authority external to Scripture. There simply would be no Scripture without that pre-existing authority which nurtured and developed it. The Church was the incubator of the New Testament.

Not much is known with certainty about the Apostles Philip and James, apart from their names and some few references in the New Testament. Saint James, commonly called the “Less” due perhaps to his short stature, was probably the cousin of Jesus. Saint Philip was from tiny Bethsaida in Galilee. After he received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, he descended the stairs of the Upper Room and just kept walking into the darkness, his later life and labors unknown to history. More than having specific details about their later Christian exploits, it is more critical to know that Philip and James, and all the Apostles, are the sheet of bedrock into which the nascent Church sunk her deepest pillars and upon whose sturdy foundation the Church’s great weight still rests. Philip and James’ theological legacy continues today in every Bishop who teaches, sanctifies, and governs the baptized people of God.

Saints Philip and James, your hidden witness to Christ is less well-known than that of other Apostles, but is eloquent testimony to your quiet fidelity to building the Church after the Ascension. From your exalted place in Heaven, intercede for all who seek your assistance.

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May 2: Saint Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor
c. 295–373
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of theologians

A fiery Egyptian saves the Trinity 

The First Sunday of Advent of 2011 introduced to the faithful a new liturgical translation of the Mass in many English-speaking countries. The new translation had been many years in the making and had gone through numerous drafts and revisions.  Of the many noticeable changes, some of the most extensive were made to the Nicene Creed. The phrase “one in being with the Father” was changed to “consubstantial with the Father.” This caused confusion and discomfort for some, as “consubstantial” was not a familiar English word and sounded more appropriate to the realm of mathematics. But “consubstantial” had a long historical and theological pedigree supporting it. Its noticeable use in the newly translated Creed, and the curiosity it provoked, was also a distant homage to today’s saint, Athanasius. He fought for, and suffered for, this one word.

Saint Athanasius was the sturdiest pillar of orthodoxy in the Patristic age. He was born to Christian parents in Egypt, raised in the faith, and mentored in his youth by the Bishop of Alexandria, whom he accompanied to the Council of Nicea. He later became the Bishop of Alexandria for forty-five contentious years and was exiled five times, some of them difficult, dangerous, and prolonged absences. He lived a colorful life at the very heart of the theological controversies of the fourth century. Athanasius, while still young, played an important role at the Council of Nicea in promoting the non-biblical, Greek word, homoousion, to describe Christ’s relationship with God the Father. The Western Church then translated homoousion as consubstantialis for its Latin Creed. Hence the English word “consubstantial.”

To say that Christ is “consubstantial” with the Father is to say that He is not one in person, one in mind, or one in will with the Father. He is distinct from the Father in His personhood, His mind, and His will. But Christ is entirely united to the Father in His substance, or nature. That is, Christ is God from God in the same way that light is from light or, to use the probable original analogy from that pre-electrified era, Christ is God from God and flame from flame. A wick carries a new flame away from its source, to burn the same or hotter somewhere else, without diminishing its “parent” fire. One source, two flames, generating heat and light in different places for different people.

Christ did not become God sometime after He was born of the Virgin Mary. He did not develop into God as a teenager. Nor was He bestowed with divine powers in some pivotal event. He was a baby God, a teen God, and an adult God because He was always God. Nor was His God nature a mere cloak under which was hidden a human self. Jesus Christ was fully human, of course, but also fully divine, and these two natures were united in one complex person. Most of the Church’s finer Christological definitions were destined to be clarified at later Councils. The first two Councils, Nicea (325 A.D) and Constantinople (381 A.D.) were concerned with understanding and defining the Trinity first. Once Trinitarian definitions were worked out, later fifth-century Councils would address more fully the nature of Christ Himself.

Before delving into what Christ did, it was necessary to establish who He was. His being preceded His doing. Saint Athanasius’ theological contributions to defining, for ever and all time, the metaphysical significance of the Incarnation is now taken for granted. But without this correct understanding, Christmas would be just a historic anniversary of an important birth, like that of Julius Caesar or other greats of history. But Christmas is Christmas because Christ was God from the start. Theology is not just a pillow on which the Church rests, of course, so the theology of the Trinity and of Christ has been greatly enriched since the Patristic age, most notably by an emphasis on the Cross as the fullness of the self-emptying that began with the Incarnation. Saint Athanasius was without equal in defining and defending the Church’s dogma on the true nature of the Trinity. And for that immeasurable contribution he is owed an immense debt of gratitude by all the Church.

Saint Athanasius, your perseverance in combating false teaching cost you comfort and security. May your example and intercession assist all teachers to lead others to reflect more fruitfully on the truths and mysteries of our Faith.

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May 1: Saint Joseph the Worker
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of workers

God wanted a working man to father Jesus

Besides the Virgin Mary, there are just two saints who have more than one feast day dedicated to their honor on the Church’s universal calendar: Saint John the Baptist and Saint Joseph. Pope Pius XII instituted today’s feast in 1955 in direct response to the surge of atheistic communism in the decades after World War II. Communism at that time was not so clearly understood as the dehumanizing, anti-man, politically corrupt, and economically anemic system that it later revealed itself to be. Communism, after all, had helped defeat fascism in Germany and Italy, so it was understood as a liberating force, not an oppressive one, in some countries. May 1, or May Day, was the day of the worker in communist lands: a day of rest, of triumphant militaristic parades, and of pride in all that communism had accomplished, supposedly, for the proletariat.

Keen observers, including many Catholic intellectuals, Pope Pius XII, and one future Pope then serving as a priest in Poland, knew better. They had already, intellectually, torn the mask from the true face of communism. Part of the Church’s response to the communist appeal to workers was to exalt Saint Joseph the Worker on May 1 as a Catholic alternative to May Day. Not only was Saint Joseph to be understood, then, as the husband of Mary and the foster father of Jesus, but also as the patron of labor. He was the carpenter, the working man, who taught his God-Son how to swing a hammer and run a planer over a rugged plank.

Pius XII’s exaltation of Saint Joseph the Worker was an attractive idea. Saint Joseph was a true icon of human labor in contrast to the rough factory worker in an industrial plant in Leningrad or the tanned farm hand threshing hay under the Ukrainian sun. Saint Joseph did not have his fist raised in anger at the capitalist oppressors of Nazareth. He was not leading a mob to burn down his boss’s house. Saint Joseph worked like a normal person worked. He was quiet about it. He did his duty. He provided his family with food and shelter. He didn’t see injustice lurking behind every corner. He most likely made excellent furniture and received a fair wage for his handiwork.

Work, from a Catholic perspective, is a source of dignity. It has to be done. A life of pure leisure is no life at all. Work and want and trying times are required ingredients in the recipe for a mature, responsible adult. No work, no adult. Work itself is not pure punishment. The onerous nature of work is one of the effects of original sin, though it was not so in the beginning. Work became a burden due to the sin of our first parents. What is the theology behind this? God the Father worked and God the Son worked. When man works, then, he is participating in God’s own work. Subduing the earth is one of God’s original commandments to man. And subduing the earth cannot come about except through work of one kind or another.

It has been observed that the dash (–) on a tombstone is far more important than the years that are on each side of it. What happened in the time of that dash is more important than one’s date of birth or death. For most people that dash denotes work. Mankind works. All the time. And the will of God for us cannot be found outside of what we spend most of our life doing. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have much of a religion. God is found in our work. So if we do it well, we give him glory, and if we do it poorly, we offer him a shoddy sacrifice. The earth becomes our altar when our daily work is our daily offering. Constant, daily work was good enough for Saint Joseph and for the Son of God. So it is good enough for all of God’s children as well. Work is a pathway to holiness, and Saint Joseph the Worker stands by our side to encourage us toward the reward that our daily sweat and labor will earn.

Saint Joseph the Worker, inspire all laborers of mind or body to work for their daily bread as much as for your glorification. May we work well to both perfect us and to make us participants in completing the creation begun in Genesis

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April 30: Saint Pius V, Pope
1504–1572
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

One Shepherd, one flock, one Lord, one Church

Saint Pius V is buried in the Sistine Chapel, but not “that” Sistine Chapel. His body lies in a glass coffin in the stunning, baroque Sistine Chapel of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome. He is not far from other luminaries: the master artist Gianlorenzo Bernini is buried unassumingly in the floor nearby, and Saint Jerome’s remains can be found in a porphyry tomb under the main altar. Saint Pius V was not born a pope, of course. He was from a poor but noble family in Northern Italy and baptized Antonio Ghislieri. He entered the Dominican Order as a teenager and quickly rose to positions of authority and responsibility due to his intelligence, discipline, unassailable purity of life, and defense of the Church.

He was elected Pope in 1566. The Council of Trent had just concluded. The Counter-Reformation was so new it did not even have a name. The Muslim Turks were invading Europe from the East. Protestants occupied chunks of Northern Europe and were cracking the unity of the Church in France. In a truncated papacy of six years and four months, Saint Pius V rose to all of these challenges and more, leaving an enduring legacy disproportionate to his brief reign.

Our saint marshalled the coalition of Catholic princes and monarchs who defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. A loss would have opened the front door of Europe for Muslims to walk right in and make it their home. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England for heresy and schism, called her a pretender to the throne, and forbade Catholics to obey her. This led the Queen to seek the blood of English Catholics for treason. As momentous as these events were, and they each cast long and dark historical shadows, it was specifically as a churchman that Saint Pius V did his best work. He personally lived the reforms he expected of the Church as a whole, and he implemented those reforms first in the city of Rome itself, among his own ecclesial court and among his own people.
A fire place sitting in front of a fireplace

The Council of Trent met intermittently between 1545–1563. It was arguably the most successful Council in the history of the Church. Trent introduced numerous reforms that have long since been accepted as normative Church practice: a bishop must live in his diocese, priestly formation must occur in a seminary, the Mass must be said using a uniform language and ritual, a catechism must be published and its teachings learned by all, and religious and priests cannot easily skip from one diocese to another. The Council also clarified technical, and not so technical, questions of Catholic theology in the face of Protestant challenges. The Council’s documents were not put on a shelf to gather dust. Trent’s immense treasure house of doctrinal, liturgical, and disciplinary reforms were implemented, fully and forcefully, over many succeeding decades. This was due to the perseverance and vision of many Counter-Reformation bishops, priests, nuns, and scholars, beginning with Pope Saint Pius V himself.

Pope Saint Pius V is viewed historically as a true icon of orthodoxy (correct doctrine) and also of orthopraxy (correct practice). It is an unfortunate truism of modernity that religious faith, submission to religious truth, or trust in a prior intellectual inheritance (as opposed to personal discovery of “truth”) are limiting forces which stunt personal growth, shield the believer from reality, or block more daring inquiry. A more honest perspective disproves these snide conclusions. Doubt, refusal, or negation are not necessarily open-minded pathways to discovery. It is acceptance, affirmation, and faith that open the mind to the widest horizons. It is “Yes,” not “No,” that leads to more complex and demanding relationships, including with God Himself. The orthodox believer makes no a priori decision to shut his eyes to the fullness of reality, in contrast to the atheist. The believer is open, truly open, to diverse arguments and to diverse experiences.

Defenders of orthodoxy, like Saint Pius V, have far more complex understandings of human anthropology and religion than commonly acknowledged. Conservatives are more intuitive anthropologists than liberals. They know how fragile truth can be when under pressure, and they take their job to protect it with utmost seriousness. Saint Pius V was the Pope, or Father, of a universal family. He protected the family’s unity with all his considerable skills and virtues, and left a highly united, disciplined Church as his legacy.

Saint Pius V, your dedication to the truth showed itself in your pristine holiness, unity of life, and defense of doctrine. From your home in heaven, assist all theologians and leaders of the Church to be as concerned as you were for the unity of God’s family on earth.

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April 29: Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin and Doctor
1347–1380
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Italy, Europe, and fire prevention

Her frightening intensity prayed the popes back to Rome

Saint Peter was not martyred in Frankfurt, Germany; Alexandria, Egypt; or Jerusalem. He could have been. God, in His Providence, wanted Saint Peter’s blood to spill on Roman soil, so that His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church would drive its roots into the ground of the then capital of the world. This does not mean that Catholicism is bound to St. Peter’s Basilica and Rome in the same way that Judaism was bound to the temple and Jerusalem. Rome does not have the same theological significance for Catholics as Jerusalem does for Jews, nor is Rome the successor of Jerusalem. Rome is not a holy city like Mecca is for the Muslims. The primacy of the Pope over the universal Church is based on his being the successor of Saint Peter. This is an indisputable historical fact. However, the Petrine ministry is one thing, and where it is exercised is another. The location of the Petrine ministry has never had the same theological weight as the ministry itself. Peter, yes. Always. Rome, yes. So far. Mostly.

Today’s saint was a Third Order Dominican, a mystic, a contemplative, and an ascetic who used secretaries to compose her letters, because she could not read or write until the last few years of her life. Yet for all of her interior distance from the world and its concerns, Saint Catherine of Siena threw herself at the feet of the Pope, then reigning in Avignon, and begged him to return to Rome. The “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy in Avignon had gone on for almost seven decades and caused grave scandal. The move to Avignon was not due to an irreversible cultural shift such as a Muslim conquest or a decimating plague. The popes did not abandon Rome because it was a carcass. The transfer of the papal court to Avignon, a city within the Papal States, was the result of politics.

It is not often that a single person can effect the course of history as much as a battle, a treaty, or a Council does. Incredibly, though, Saint Catherine of Siena’s efforts to return the papacy to Rome were successful. She wrote so powerfully, spoke so passionately, and exuded such intense holiness that the Pope was overwhelmed. She also seemed to have prophetic powers, even knowing what the Pope was thinking or had previously thought. She was frighteningly intense and could not be ignored. Thus, sixty-seven years of seven French Popes ruling far from Rome ended. In 1376, Pope Gregory XI finally abandoned Avignon and followed in the footsteps of so many medievals—he went on pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter. And he stayed. The eternal city was a widow no longer.

Saint Catherine was born the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children in a pious family imbued with the love of God. She eagerly drank in all that her parents poured out. She went for true “gold” early in life. She practiced extreme penances, eating only bread and raw vegetables and drinking only water for her entire adult life. She conversed with God, experienced ecstasies and visions, and dictated hundreds of letters, books and reflections filled with the most profound spiritual and theological insights. In 1970 she was the first layperson, and first woman, to be made a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of her profound mystical theology. Catherine died at the age of thirty-three, worn out by penances, travel, and the burden of her involvement in so many pressing ecclesial affairs. She was canonized in 1461. Her body lies under the main altar of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Her mummified head is found in her native Siena.

Saint Catherine of Siena, your love of God was expressed in so many vibrant ways and in a fervent love of His Church. We seek your powerful intercession from your exalted place in heaven to make all Catholics more ardent in their love of the Trinity, of the Passion, and of the Papacy.

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April 28: Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, Priest
1673–1716
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of preachers

Intensely in love with God, his flame burned hot but not long

The English writer Graham Greene grew up Anglican with the typical anti-Catholic biases of his twentieth-century generation. One of those biases firmly held that Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary and thus deflected toward Christ’s mother the glory due to Him alone. But when Greene started dating an educated Catholic girl, she taught him that Catholics rendered latria (worship) to God, dulia (praise) to the saints, and hyperdulia (an abundance of praise) to Mary. It made sense. Worship is given to God alone. Praise is given to the saints. And Mary is rendered a unique intensity of praise in recognition of her unique role in salvation history. Graham was convinced. For these and other reasons, he entered the Church. He went on to become a well-known novelist on Catholic themes, in part because a teenage girl he once dated knew some basic theology.

Throughout the centuries since the Reformation, Catholics have been accused of granting to Mary what is due only to God. This false accusation is more apparent than real. But its appearance sometimes even bothers Catholics. As a young man, the future Pope Saint John Paul II wondered whether he gave Mary too central a role in his devotions, prayer, and reading. But the writings of today’s saint, Louis de Montfort, helped the young Pole place Marian devotion in its wider theological context. Pope Saint John Paul II routinely gave thanks to Saint Louis de Montfort’s book, True Devotion to Mary, for helping him develop a more mature Marian spirituality. The Pope even borrowed from de Montfort the Latin Totus Tuus as his papal motto. De Montfort had written to the Virgin, “I am all yours, and all that is mine belongs to you.” When we honor Mary, Mary honors God along with us.

Louis Grignion de Montfort was never not in love with God. He was one of eighteen children born to his parents. Eleven of them are saints—Louis and ten of his siblings who died as babies shortly after their baptisms. Even as a child, Louis was devoted to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. He studied under the Jesuits as a teen and then attended theology courses at St. Sulpice in Paris. He was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-seven. He at first wanted to become a missionary, like so many ardent French priests of his time. But a spiritual director advised against it, and Louis became a hospital chaplain, preached missions, and served as a confessor. Father Louis was interpersonally awkward and ardent to the point of making others uncomfortable, all of which confined his priestly ministry to non-traditional forums. He also lived radical poverty, owning nothing, carrying no money, and even abandoning his family name, Grignion, to be known only by his town, Montfort.

Louis de Montfort’s intense devotional life, theatrical preaching style, moral uprightness, and visions of Mary, the angels and satan, were interpreted as holy foolishness by many in the Church who wished him ill. The Jansenists, an ultra-rigorist branch of the French Church, particularly despised his preaching on God’s love and mercy. Saint Louis’ itinerant life ended due to physical exhaustion at the young age of forty-three. He practiced such extreme physical penances that his body was well prepared for the grave when he died. He was a priest only sixteen years. It is possible that his life and writings did more good for future ages than they did for his own. His writings on Mary, in particular, were rediscovered and published in the nineteenth century, leading to his canonization in 1947 and to his wide fame in the Church. Our saint died with a statue of the Virgin Mary in one arm and a crucifix given him by the Pope in the other arm. He felt attacked by the devil in his last agony and yelled at him, “You attack me in vain. I stand between Jesus and Mary. I have finished my course. I shall sin no more.” He was buried, per his request, under an altar dedicated to his Lady…to Our Lady.

Saint Louis de Montfort, we ask your intercession before God in Heaven to inflame in all hearts a fire that burns like yours with love for the Holy Trinity. Help all who read your works to profit from their wisdom and so grow closer to God’s mother.

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April 28: Saint Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr
1803–1841
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Oceania

Musumusu axed him to death for no reason at all

In Paris, just a few blocks down the Rue du Bac from the shrine of the Miraculous Medal, is a fine, imposing stone building. There are a lot of fine, imposing stone buildings in Paris, so from the outside this one is not exceptional. But once the visitor passes inside the complex of chapel, museum, dormitories, and garden, he understands what a venerable institution he is visiting—The Paris Foreign Mission Society. Approximately 4,500 missionaries went forth from this unique Society, mostly to Southeast Asia, to build the Church and preach the Gospel. From its beginnings in the seventeenth century until today, but most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, hundreds of priests and bishops from the Society were martyred, died violent deaths, or fell victim to tropical diseases. Of these, twenty-three Paris Foreign Missionaries are canonized saints.  Other non-martyr French saints of the same era—Saint John Vianney, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint Catherine Laboure—together with the missionary martyrs, sparkle as the jewels in the crown of the vibrant Church of nineteenth-century France.

Today’s saint, Peter Chanel, was just one such Frenchman who left the comfort and familiarity of home to become a daring and rugged missionary priest. Peter Chanel grew up in rural France working as a shepherd. While in school, he loved to read about French foreign missionaries and wanted to emulate them. So he decided, “I will become a missionary priest!” After seminary studies, Peter was ordained a diocesan priest and served in parishes. But a few years later, he became one of the founding members of the Society of Mary, the Marists. And as a Marist father, he voyaged on the high seas to at last fulfill his missionary dreams. He sailed to one of the most tiny, remote, and unknown islands in the South Pacific. In 1837 Father Peter Chanel stepped ashore the speck of volcanic rock called Futuna to preach there, for the very first time, the name of Jesus Christ.

On unknown Futuna, Father Chanel gave his all, at first drip by drip and then all at once. A lay brother who was with him later said of Father Chanel, “Because of his labors, he was often burned by the heat of the sun and famished with hunger, and he would return home wet with perspiration and completely exhausted. Yet he always remained in good spirits, courageous and energetic…” His apostolic labors generated few converts, but there was some progress nonetheless. Like so many missionaries, Peter had to overcome the counter-witness given by fellow European Christians trading in the area who cared little about their religion. In 1841 when the local Chieftain’s son asked to be baptized, the Chieftain sent his son-in-law, Musumusu, to stop the conversion. A fight within the family ensued. Musumusu then went to Father Chanel’s home and clubbed the priest with an axe until his blood puddled in the dirt. Father Peter was not yet forty years old when his missionary dream was fulfilled in martyrdom, giving Oceania its patron saint.

The island of Futuna, in which our saint had such mixed success, converted completely and totally a few years after Saint Peter’s martyrdom. Musumusu himself repented of his crime and was baptized. The island is, even in modern times, almost one hundred percent Catholic. An impressive church is the heart and center of every small town. Saint Peter Chanel’s body now rests in a large Basilica in the city of Poi. The beauty and smell of tropical flowers always adorn the church. And on the night of April 27, the vigil of his Feast Day, hundreds of Futunians sleep outside the Basilica waiting for the festivities of their saint’s feast day to begin the next morning. The brief life and sudden death of Saint Peter Chanel is powerful proof of how the blood of the martyrs waters the seeds of the Church. One sows, another reaps, and still another enjoys the harvest.

Saint Peter Chanel, by your suffering and death, you converted a people. You were fearless in adventuring far from home to preach the Gospel. May your blood, spilled so long ago, continue to infuse all missionaries with courage and perseverance in their labors.

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April 25: Saint Mark, Evangelist
c. First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of lions, lawyers, Venice, interpreters, and prisoners

He chronicled what the first Pope witnessed

John’s Gospel offers the reader this brief post-Resurrection scene: “Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat…” (Jn 21:3). The flock followed where Peter led. How easily Saint Peter moves to the fore in the Acts of the Apostles. How effortlessly he speaks for the entire Community of Faith. Saint Peter even leaves the running of the Church in Jerusalem to Saint James to show that he is not bound to one city or community. Instead, Peter walks toward the widest horizon of evangelization, the capital of the world—Rome. Traitor Peter becomes Pope Peter.

Peter was, of course, a simple fisherman. It is more interesting to note that he did not remain a simple fisherman. He grew. He matured. He led. And leaders don’t have followers as much as joiners. Saint Mark, whom we commemorate today, was one of the most significant of the many joiners who uprooted themselves to join Peter in his dangerous adventure of founding the Church. Nothing is known for certain of Mark’s origins or his youth. He is not mentioned in the Gospel that bears his name and only the faintest biographical sketch is possible. What is known is that Mark left his homeland in Palestine to follow first Saint Paul, and later, Saint Peter. Mark sailed dangerous seas in primitive boats. He walked long stretches through desolate lands. He tried to convince hardened pagans and skeptical Romans that the Gospel message was true. The words of the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Saint Paul, and the First Letter of Saint Peter all put dots on the large map of Mark’s life. Many blank spaces, however, still lay in between. Mark is traveling with Paul in Asia Minor, then he’s with Barnabas on a boat over here, then he’s with someone else over there, and then he disappears for a number of years. The scattered evidence ends, however, with clear testimony that Mark joined Peter in Rome. In Peter’s first letter, written from the city of his death to the Church in Asia Minor, Pope Peter sends greetings on Mark’s behalf and refers to him as “my son”(1 Pt 5:13).

Saint Mark is, of course, best known as the author of a Gospel. Like Saint Luke and Saint Paul, he was not one of the Twelve Apostles and so likely never met Jesus Christ in person. Scholars believe that the Gospel of Saint Mark relates the experiences of Saint Peter, Mark’s mentor. Each Gospel has its own unique sources, emphases, and audiences. Mark writes for non-Jews who would be impressed by Christ’s miracles more than His fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. So in Mark’s Gospel are found certain colorful details that suggest the writer was relating the words of an eye-witness. For example, in Mark 5:41 Jesus enters the home of Jairus, a synagogue leader whose daughter lay dead. Christ says to her, “Talitha koum.” Mark then tells the reader what “Talitha koum” means, presumably because his readers did not speak Aramaic. No other Gospel includes this touching detail of the untranslated words coming from the mouth of Christ that day. Mark also places other Aramaic words on Christ’s lips: “Ephphatha,” “Abba,” and “Hosanna.”

Peter was there when it happened. Peter heard the Lord speak. And Peter was getting old, in prison, or threatened with death. The Gospel he had repeated verbally so many thousands of times had to be written down to send to others, to preserve its accuracy, or to contradict counterfeit versions. And so the natural progression from oral to written history slowly occurred. The Gospel was spoken before it was a book, and the word has primacy over the book. Saint Mark the Evangelist preserved for all time the Word of God, Jesus Christ, by committing Peter’s words to writing, thus ensuring that the eye-witness accounts of Christ’s life did not just float away in the breeze. Once the Word was enshrined on papyrus, Saint Mark had accomplished his mission forever and always.

Saint Mark, you were a friend of the Apostles and shared their commitment to spreading the faith. From your home in Heaven, may you strengthen all those who lack the courage to live the Gospel message in their own lives so they can witness it to others.

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April 24: Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr
1577–1622
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of lawyers & the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples

His murderers cut a leg off his dead body in retaliation for his many journeys

To understand the historical and religious context for today’s saint, consider an event that took place fifty years before he was born. On January 5, 1527, in Zurich, Switzerland, a young man named Felix Mantz was taken hold of by local officials, had his hands and feet bound to a pole, and was rowed out in a boat to the deepest part of the local river. With a large crowd watching from the shores, he was tossed overboard into the dark water and immediately drowned to death. Felix Mantz’s crime? He believed only adults should be baptized, not children. Mantz was not killed by the Inquisition, the Pope, the local Bishop, or a Catholic mob. His cruel drowning, which mocked his views on baptism, was perpetrated by dissenting Protestants.

The Protestants of Zurich believed in infant baptism while rejecting all other Catholic beliefs. And they allowed absolutely no dissenting from their own dissenting from Catholicism. Felix Mantz was the first Protestant martyred by other Protestants. Heretics killing other heretics for not conforming to their heresy captures the chaos, intellectual dissonance, and cultural confusion in some regions of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. This total meltdown is known as the Reformation. Today’s saint, Fidelis of Sigmaringen, walked right into this still-raging storm of violence in the early seventeenth century, suffering a fate essentially similar to the Protestant martyr Felix Mantz, though for exactly contrary reasons.

Its very existence challenged by Protestantism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism swelled like a great ocean, lifting up a sea of scholars, monks, abbots, nuns, priests, and bishops who overwhelmed Europe with their teaching and witness to the perennial truths of Jesus Christ. Saint Fidelis was just one priest-monk among that great tide of the Counter-Reformation, but he was one who became a martyr. He was born as Mark Roy in the town of Sigmaringen in Prussia, in Northern Germany, and raised in the Faith. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1603 and degrees in civil and canon law in 1611, yet he became disillusioned with his career in law. He had always been an exceptionally ardent Catholic, so he entered the Capuchin Order and was ordained a priest in his thirties. He took the religious name of “faithful”—in Latin, “Fidelis.” Fidelis was intelligent, disciplined, and ascetic. His abundant human and spiritual gifts were amplified and sharpened when put in the service of the King of Kings, and he rose to important positions of leadership within the Capuchin Order.

Having become locally well known for his fervor and holiness, Father Fidelis was appointed by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome to preach, teach, and write in present day Switzerland, with the goal of exhorting the people to return to the embrace of the Mother Church which had given them birth. Father Fidelis desired martyrdom, and it came for him soon enough. In Switzerland, his zeal and example brought some prominent Calvinists back to the true Faith. This made him an official enemy of the Calvinists who controlled much of that land.

One day, when traveling between two towns where he was preaching and saying Mass, Fidelis was confronted along the road by Calvinist soldiers led by a minister. Fidelis had recently caused an uproar in a nearby town and had barely escaped with his life. The soldiers knew exactly who was before them. They demanded that he abandon his Faith. Fidelis answered, "I was sent to rebuke you, not to embrace your heresy. The Catholic religion is the faith of all ages, I do not fear death." His skull was then cracked open with the butt of a sword, his body punctured with stabs, and his left leg hacked off in retribution for the numerous journeys he had made into Protestant territory. Saint Fidelis died at the age of forty-five, ten years after entering religious life. He was canonized in 1746. Over three hundred miracles were attributed to his intercession during his canonization process. Saint Fidelis was faithful in life and continues to intercede faithfully in death.

Saint Fidelis, through your intercession before the throne of God, we ask you to fortify all teachers and preachers of the faith to remain faithful to the truth, even to the point of embarrassment, inconvenience, suffering, and death to self.

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April 23: Saint George, Martyr
c. Late Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of England, the nation of Georgia, and scouting

Widely venerated, historically elusive, his legacy is massive

Saint George suffered martyrdom in Palestine before the reign of Constantine. And that is all that can be said with certainty about Saint George. Yet where the documentary record is lacking, other traditions suffice. No one, after all, can document why we blow out candles on a birthday cake, where this nearly universal custom originated, or in what century it even began. Someone, somewhere, for some reason, thought it was a lovely thing to do, and started doing it, otherwise it would not be done today. But questions of where, when, and why fade when friends and family gather around their loved one in the dark, the simple joy on their faces captured in the flickering of the candlelight. Knowing the origin of a tradition matters, since it may reveal unappreciated depths to a common practice. But that a healthy tradition continues is more significant than knowing, or explaining, where it came from. Few Christians can explain the hypostatic union, but everyone loves to unwrap a gift on Christmas morning. No one can determine where and when Saint Valentine lived and died, but our lips broaden into a smile when we open a card on Saint Valentine’s Day. A good tradition conveys meaning implicitly whether its origin is obscure or not.

If traditions age like wine, then the traditions surrounding Saint George are of the rarest vintage. Devotion to Saint George is so ancient, so deeply rooted, and so cross cultural that to argue that it rose like a chimera from the hot desert sands would be ridiculous. In the remote valleys of the Judean Desert east of Jerusalem, clinging to the copper-colored cliffs shooting straight up from a wadi, is an ancient monastery named Saint George. It was founded in the fifth century. And amid the stately Roman ruins of Jerash, in Jordan, are the remaining stone walls and mosaic floors of the Church of Saint George, built around 530 A.D. Official devotion to Saint George manifests itself, then, in some of the oldest Christian structures in the Holy Land.

The murky origins of these early buildings merged with written traditions from centuries after George’s death until, over time, Saint George was known as a chivalrous knight who died for his faith under the Emperor Diocletian. The lore of a mounted warrior for Christ was immensely appealing to the Crusaders who populated the Holy Land in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They transported the hagiography of Saint George back to Europe with them. Oral tradition and popular custom then did its slow work until the ancient Palestinian devotion to Saint George was revived in a new age for new people in new lands. From the Byzantine East to the Latin West, from the Mediterranean South to the Saxon North, few saints became as popular as Saint George. He was named the patron of an enormous number of castles, kingdoms, churches, abbeys, cities, and orders, and even of England itself, where his dragon-slaying exploits still resonate in that country’s national mythology.

Traditions hold that Saint George was among the many soldier-martyrs of early Christianity who, instead of dying to protect the Emperor, were killed on the Emperor’s orders for refusing to deny Christ. A loyal soldier obeys his master and is prepared to offer his life for a higher good. Roman soldiers were naturally prepared to die for the faith, and many did, killed by their fellows perhaps with some regret. Though the legends swirling around Saint George cannot be verified, they have been accepted by the faithful of many nations for many centuries. Acceptance of traditions is a cultural sieve straining chunks of absurdity from the liquid truth. Saint George has passed through that filter all the stronger. He died for the faith when many of his contemporaries did not—and only the greatest of men did that.

Saint George, you were a loyal soldier and humble Christian who gave your life for Christ. Inspire us to have your same loyalty, your same courage, and your same nobility to die for a mighty cause, whether all at once or bit by bit over time.

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April 23: Saint Adalbert, Bishop and Martyr
956–997
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of the Czech Republic and Poland

Pagans cut down a courageous bishop in the frozen North

Old, stodgy, traditional Catholic Europe in tension with new, liberal, flexible Europe is not a new dichotomy. A millennium ago the roles were reversed. It was old, stodgy, traditional pagan Europe in tension with new, groundbreaking, and progressive Catholic Europe. As the missionary monks, abbots, and bishops of Europe fanned out, ever northward and ever eastward, into upper Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, and the Baltics, they met the warrior tribes and painted chieftains of old Europe, men with skin like bark. These forest clans gathered in sacred groves to offer sacrifice to their pagan idols under the broad canopies of large oaks. In these open- air temples, they butchered prisoners of war and cattle in offerings to their dark powers, sprinkling the blood of the slain on their bodies. Yet from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, missionaries poured into these remote lands, shining the light of the Gospel into its darkest corners. Teutonic and Norse paganism, for all of its unwritten creeds of courage and manliness, was doomed. It was strong, but the Church was stronger. Paganism could not stop vital, solid, well-organized Catholicism with its coherent monotheism, sacred worship, Ten Commandments, self-sacrificing missionaries, and its Gospel of love and respect for all.

The Catholic Church does not arrive to a mission territory, however, as a full-fledged institution. The Church arrives in a person who embodies all that the Church teaches and symbolizes. This person is the Church to those he encounters. Today’s saint was one of the first missionary bishops to penetrate into the lands of Prussia, in Northeastern Germany. And for daring to preach the Gospel to coarse men, he was murdered on the frigid coast of the Baltic Sea. The Prussians thought he was a Polish spy, and a pagan priest upset at the disruptions Adalbert was causing in Prussian society commanded his death. Saint Adalbert’s lifeless body was ransomed for its weight in gold by a Polish king and returned to Poland. He was eventually canonized as Saint Adalbert of Prague, since he was born and raised in Bohemia. He remains a saint equally claimed by both the Polish and Czech people and a seminal figure in early medieval Europe.

Courageous men like Saint Adalbert don’t just happen. They are forged over time in red hot fires. Adalbert had a long, difficult, and interesting ecclesiastical career before giving his life for the faith. He was baptized as Vojtěch. But he was so impressed with the saintly German Bishop named Adalbert who taught him, that he took his tutor’s name at Confirmation. Adalbert was then named Bishop of Prague at a young age, a consecration whose responsibilities turned him into a far more serious Christian. He quickly matured into his exalted vocation. Bishop Adalbert started aggressively challenging the people of his diocese to shed their pre-Christian customs and to learn what it meant to be true children of God. But Adalbert had a strong temperament and came from a noble family with serious enemies, all of which led him to abandon his diocese twice and flee to Rome. In the Eternal City, he came to know the Benedictines and lived as a monk for several months. Later he would establish Benedictine monasteries in the North in the hope of holding the Christian ground he gained. And to the North he always returned: to Bohemia, to Germany, to Hungary, and to Poland. He was a multilingual and multicultural Pan Slavic Bishop fully equipped to evangelize throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

The rough Prussian people who murdered Adalbert were not fully conquered and converted until 1239, when the Teutonic Knights planted themselves in that land more than two hundred years after Saint Adalbert’s death. Yet somebody had to take the first step on the long journey of converting the Prussians. Someone first had to hear “No” a thousand times before someone unknown, much later, ever heard “Yes.” Adalbert heard “No” first and died for it. His body absorbed the blows so that other bodies could walk safely. His suffering and death proved that he, an educated man, was just as sturdy as the rugged men he sought to convert, and so was worthy of adding the title of martyr to that of bishop and monk.

Saint Adalbert, we ask that you intercede before God to make all missionaries as courageous as you were, willing to place themselves in difficult situations for the good of the Church. By your example, may we be brave witnesses to the fact that death is sometimes preferable to life.

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Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday)
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

True power pardons

In the Nicene Creed, we say that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father. When a judge walks into a courtroom, the bailiff announces, “All rise,” and the judge sits in judgment. In his see city, a bishop rests in his cathedra, and in his palace, a king reigns from his throne. A president signs legislation while seated at his desk. The chair is a locus of power. The power that emanates from such seats of authority judges, condemns, and sentences. Today’s feast reminds us, though, that authority also exercises power by granting mercy. When a judge pronounces innocence, the sentence is no less binding than one of guilt. The absolved exits the court into a new day, ready to begin again. And when the priest’s voice whispers through the screen, “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” guilt evaporates into thin air. The purest and truest expression of power is the granting of mercy.

Mercy is a superabundance of justice, not an exception to it. When faced with a wound to the common good, those responsible for repairing the damage do not have two contrary options: justice or mercy. Justice and mercy are not mutually exclusive. Mercy is a form of justice. Mercy does not ignore the tears to the fabric of the common good slashed by crime and sin. Rightful authority notes the torn fabric, weighs the personal responsibility of the accused, and distributes justice precisely by granting mercy. Mercy does not turn a blind eye to justice but fulfills its obligations to justice by going beyond them. After all, one cannot be absolved of having done nothing. Similarly, where there is no guilt there is no need of mercy. When justice calls out, two words echo back off the hard walls: “condemnation” and “mercy.” Mercy runs parallel to, and beyond, the path of condemnation. This is the mercy we celebrate today, the mercy whose greatest practitioner is God Himself. Because He is the seat of all authority, God is also the seat of all mercy.

God plays many roles in the life of the Christian—Creator, Savior, Sanctifier, and Judge. Our Creed teaches us that God the Son, seated at the Father’s right hand, “will come in glory to judge the living and the dead,” both at the particular and at the final judgment. At that moment, it will serve us nothing to state, in excusing our sins, that “God understands.” Of course God understands. To state “God understands” is just another way to say that God is omniscient and all powerful. “God understands” implies that because God knows the powerful temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that He could not possibly judge man harshly. Yet “God understands” is a lazy manner of exculpating sinful behavior. When nose to nose with God one second after death, the repentant Christian should plead, instead, “Lord, have mercy.” Faced with the scandalous behavior of a friend or relative, the response should again be “Lord, have mercy.” Appealing to God’s mercy will melt His heart. Appealing to His knowledge will not.

The private revelations of Jesus Christ to Saint Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun and intense mystic who died in 1938, are the source of the profound spirituality of today’s feast. Sister Faustina was a kind of Saint Catherine of Siena of the twentieth century. She lived a regimen of fasting, meditation, liturgical prayer, and close community life that would have crushed a less resilient soul. But Faustina persevered, amidst debilitating illnesses, sisterly jealousy, and respectful but questioning superiors. Her diaries are replete with the starkest of language from the mouth of Christ, showing that moral clarity precedes the call for mercy. Sister Faustina faithfully recorded Christ’s manly commands in her diary. One of these commands expressly desired that the Divine Mercy be celebrated on the Sunday after Easter. In an age-old pattern familiar to an ancient Church, Saint Faustina’s private revelations were challenged, filtered for theological truth, sifted for spiritual depth, and granted universal approbation by the only Christian religion which even claims to grant such. In the soundest proof of their authenticity, the profound simplicity of the Divine Mercy revelations and of their related devotions were intuitively grasped and adopted by the Catholic faithful the world over.

Pope Saint John Paul II first inserted today’s feast into the Roman calendar on April 30, 2000, the canonization day of Saint Faustina. John Paul II was also canonized on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2014. And so the Church’s third millennium was launched with a new devotion that quickly eclipsed many older ones, a new piety rooted in the most ancient truths, a fresh appeal to a side of God that had not been fully understood in prior ages. Divine Mercy is the new face of God for the third millennium, a postmodern Sacred Heart. This is the God who leans in and waits with bated breath for us to whisper through the screen, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” This is the God who at the end of time, whether our own time or all time, waits to hear from our lips those few prized words “Lord, have mercy.” Having heard that, He need not hear anything more. And having received that, we need not receive anything more.

Divine Mercy, do not hold our sins against us. Be a merciful Father who judges us in the fullness of Your power, punishing when needed, but granting mercy when we need it more, most especially when we are too saturated with pride to request it.

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April 13: Saint Martin I, Pope and Martyr
c. 590–655
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

Exiled, abandoned, starving, a Pope dies for sound theology

After being elected the Bishop of Rome in 649, today’s saint called a local Council which established the correct theology of the Church regarding the two wills of Christ. For this teaching and its broad dissemination, Martin was abducted in Rome by emissaries of the Byzantine Emperor Constans II, brought to Constantinople, and humiliated. Martin refused to retract or bend to the Emperor’s incorrect theology, which denied that Christ had a human will. Martin was imprisoned, publicly flogged, maltreated, condemned for treason, and exiled from Constantinople to the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. And there the Pope died—naked, starving, forgotten, and alone—far from Rome, in the year 655, a victim of bad theology and the last pope, so far, venerated as a martyr.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had synthesized centuries of theological debate by teaching, authoritatively, that the divine nature of the Second Person of the Trinity and the human nature of Jesus were distinct but united in the one person of Jesus Christ. This merging of natures in one person is called the hypostatic union. The Son of God, then, truly took flesh and experienced all things, save sin, that a man experiences. So when Jesus said, “I am thirsty” (Jn 19:28), He didn’t mean to say, “Just my human nature is thirsty.” And when His majestic voice echoed off the stone walls of Bethany calling, “Lazarus, come out!” (Jn 11:43), He didn’t mean to say, “The divine nature inside of me, and only the divine nature, says ‘Lazarus, Come Out!’”

Yet Eastern Christians, primarily in Egypt and Syria, clung to a Monophysite, or one nature, theology of Jesus Christ long after Chalcedon had settled the matter. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 attempted, unsuccessfully, to pull the Monophysites back into the orbit of Chalcedon. By the 600s, tensions between Chalcedonians and Monophysites were a political problem for the Byzantine empire. So some Eastern theologians, supported by the Emperor, looked for common ground and proposed a one-willed Christ, instead of a one-natured Christ. This one-will heresy is called Monothelitism (monos = one; thelos = will). The issue of Christ’s will(s) had never been formally resolved, so the Emperor hoped a one-willed, instead of a one-natured, Christ would placate the Monophysites and unite his theologically diverse subjects.

Chalcedon’s teaching on Christ’s two natures was ontological, or just logical, and did not explain how a person operates with dual intellects and wills. Monothelitists argued that if Christ’s two natures could seamlessly unite in one person, then so could His two wills. There was no human will in Christ, the argument went, because it was totally subsumed into the mightier divine will. But Pope Martin and others knew that this was theologically impossible, since a Christ without a functioning human will would have been a zombie, a ghost of a man. Nor could one argue that Jesus had one will divided into a divine and a human sphere, as Jesus was not a schizophrenic with a split identity.

Martin’s theology of the two wills was vindicated after his death when it was explicitly defined by the Third Council of Constantinople in 681. This Council taught Christ’s human will was “in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will.” That is, Christ’s two wills were separate in their natures but freely united in their object. How do two wills inside of one person enter into communion? In the same way that two wills in two different persons enter into communion. Each will gives free and independent assent to a principle, idea, or truth shared with the other will. The two wills retain their independence but freely unite in their assent to a common value. Thus Jesus’ human will, in total freedom, submitted to the will of the Son of God.

During his captivity, Martin was hurt by the indifference which the Church of Saint Peter in Rome paid to one of their own. Martin was also deeply pained when a new Pope was elected though he was still alive. It is every pope’s duty to preserve the unity and integrity of the Church by preserving the unity and integrity of Christ. Martin did just that. The fruits of Martin’s martyrdom advanced theology toward its correct conclusion on Christ’s two wills in the decades after he died, even though poor Martin himself has been largely forgotten. His remains were returned to the Eternal City after his death and he now rests in peace somewhere under the marble floor of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Pope Saint Martin I, through your intercession before the Father in Heaven, fortify all teachers and leaders of the Church to remain steadfast in the truth, to advocate for the truth, and to suffer for the truth, no matter the personal cost.

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April 11: Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
1030–1079
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Poland

Royal fury fells a bishop

For many centuries, the coronation ritual of a king was considered to be a Sacrament of the Church. Such was the importance of the king’s role in protecting and promoting the faith in his realm that his enthronement was embellished with a liturgical pomp and splendor similar to the ordination rite of a bishop. The sacramental character of a king’s coronation was not reflected, however, in the ritual by which a woman became a queen. Only a man could be crowned, in the same way that only a man could receive Holy Orders. The parallel duties which kings and bishops owed to both Church and Kingdom sometimes led to irresolvable conflicts. Bishops resented kings infringing upon ecclesiastical affairs, while kings resented bishops meddling in civil matters. Since civil and religious life was, until very modern times, utterly intermingled in most cultures, the high tensions generated by the nearly co-equal powers and responsibilities of kings and bishops inevitably led to bloodshed.

The blood of today’s saint was spilled precisely due to such high tension. Saint Stanislaus was the Bishop of Krakow, Poland, in the century just after that nation’s baptism after the conversion of its king. Saint Stanislaus had various and serious disputes with Poland’s King Bolesław II: over property, over a war, and over the King’s moral failings. This led to Stanislaus excommunicating Bolesław, in seeming support of the King’s enemies. Although the precise details of this King-Bishop conflict have been lost to history, it is clear that Bolesław was outraged by Stanislaus’ sanction and labelled him a traitor. When the King entered Krakow’s Cathedral for Mass, the service was immediately halted due to his excommunication. Bolesław went into a fury and actively sought Stanislaus’ blood. The henchmen the King sent to assassinate Bishop Stanislaus, however, refused to carry out the deed. So King Bolesław entered through the doors of the chapel outside the city where the Bishop was saying Mass and cut Stanislaus down himself. Bishop Stanislaus was immediately venerated as a martyr, his relics were transferred to the Cathedral, and he was canonized a saint a century and a half after his death. For centuries, Polish kings were crowned at the splendid tomb of the martyr in the central nave of Krakow’s Cathedral.  Saint Stanislaus is one of the patron saints of Poland, being especially venerated in the Archdiocese of Krakow.

On November 1, 1946, a young Polish man named Karol Wojtyła, in love with God and country, was ordained a priest and celebrated his first Masses in Krakow’s Cathedral of Saint Stanislaus. Father Wojtyła went on to become the seventy-sixth Archbishop of Krakow. He later became a Cardinal and then Pope John Paul II. He is now a saint. Pope Saint John Paul II had a great devotion to Saint Stanislaus and often prayed at his tomb. The Pope even planned his first pastoral visit to Poland to coincide exactly with the nine-hundredth anniversary of the saint’s martyrdom. John Paul II’s trip missed the exact anniversary, due to a lack of cooperation from the communist government, but the pope didn’t miss the year. 1979 turned out to be a pivotal year for Poland. The papal pilgrimage unleashed social movements that brought communism to its knees a decade later. The memory of long-ago Saint Stanislaus, then, played a remote role in conquering an unjust modern government.

Many details about the life of Saint Stanislaus are lost in the fog of the past. Only a basic outline of his life is possible. But his heroic example, precisely as a bishop, gave Karol Wojtyła a model to follow in his own life as a Polish bishop and Pope in far different circumstances of civil and ecclesiastical tension than those of the eleventh century. We can speculate that on May 13, 1981, when Pope John Paul II was shot and almost killed by a state-sponsored assassin, he thought of the state-sponsored attack which ended Saint Stanislaus’ life so many centuries before. Civil and Church power still clash, even in modern times, as the 1980 murder of the El Salvadoran Archbishop Saint Oscar Romero also proves. Pope John Paul II survived, thank God, perhaps through the intercession of the great patron of Poland we celebrate today.

Saint Stanislaus, you fearlessly confronted those who threatened the well-being of the Church, and so gave a heroic example of martyrdom to an entire nation. Help all who seek your intercession to be as brave and forthright as you in the face of threats and adversity.

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Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
c. 33 A.D.
The first Sunday after the first full moon that falls on, or after, March 21
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White or Gold

Checkmate!

If you want to discover what’s really going on in a story, follow the women. Curious about how the plot of a book, movie, or show is going to resolve itself? Follow the female characters, because the men...and the rest of the story...will soon catch up with them. It is a female disciple, Mary Magdalen, who takes our hand and walks us quickly onto the stage of Easter Sunday. Mary doesn’t go to the tomb on Saturday, because no work can be done on the Sabbath. So early Sunday, while it is still dark, Mary walks alone to the burial garden and sees something, or, more precisely, doesn’t see something, that changes world history. The dead body of Jesus is not on the slab! The stone is rolled away! The tomb is empty! Mary Magdalen is witness one, the first of billions to know that Jesus rose from the dead. Witness one then quickly runs to tell the good news to witness two and three, the Apostles Peter and John. Thus the first links in the endless chain of believers were forged, a strong, enduring chain that has wended its way through history until today.

Relegating Jesus’ miracles to the bin of apocryphal but consoling stories, many moderns argue Christ’s most enduring legacy is the verifiable good He did for His fellow men. Yet the Gospels don’t tell us that Jesus went around doing good. They tell us He went around doing miracles. Jesus doesn’t help an old woman carry a load up a hill. He doesn’t dig His hand deep into His pocket and spare some change. Jesus doesn’t offer words of comfort to the sick; He heals the sick. Jesus doesn’t jump into the sea to save the drowning Peter; He walks on the water. Jesus didn’t volunteer in a soup kitchen; He miraculously multiplied bread and fish and distributed food to the masses. And Jesus didn’t save people from the danger of death; He raised them from the dead. Jesus temporarily resuscitated three people, all of whom later died, before He resurrected Himself forever. There was nothing dreamy about the Resurrection. Real people with real names in a real place saw the Resurrected Jesus with real eyes. Easter celebrates the miracle of all miracles, the greatest unexpected result of all time, the indispensable genesis event of Western Civilization.

So today we raise a toast to a fresh spring morning two thousand years ago. In a garden moist with dew, with small birds chirping and flowers’ bending toward the dawning sun, in a small, darkened hollow cut into the rock, a dead man, icy cold to the touch, zapped to life. He achingly rose from His stone slab and walked slowly toward the low entrance. He rolled away a heavy stone and stepped out into a new world where death was no longer the master. The ageless, see-saw battle between life and death was resolved in favor of the more powerful. Checkmate! The mind wanders at the beauty of it all.

The story is told of the conception of twins. In their first weeks of life they stretch and groan and grow. They are happy to be alive, to be together. They squirm and jostle and explore their cramped watery world. They are curious. They see a life cord tethering them to someone greater and are overjoyed. “How great is our mother’s love that she shares her life with us.” Weeks turn into months in their warm amniotic bath. The twins shift and change. “What does this mean?” Twin One asks. “It means that our life in the womb is ending,” Twin Two responds. “But I don’t want to leave the womb! I am happy here. I want to stay here forever, close to our mother!” “But we have no choice,” Twin Two responds again. “Besides, maybe...just maybe, there is life after birth.” Twin One: “But how can that be? The sac will break, the cord will be severed, and we’ll be cut off from our source of life. And besides, there’s evidence that others were here before us, and none has ever come back to tell us that there is life after birth. No, this is the end.” Twin Two begins to despair, “If life in the womb ends in death, what’s its purpose? It’s meaningless! Maybe...maybe we don’t even have a mother...maybe we just made her up.” Twin One: “But we must have a mother. How else did we get here? How else do we stay alive?”

And so the last days in the womb were filled with questioning and deep fear about the future. The moment of birth came at an hour they did not expect. The twins were emotional, wondering about the unknown, uncertain if they would ever see each other, or their mother, again. The transition was painful. They struggled. They heard screams. All that they knew disappeared. And then… light! Shocking bright whiteness. Their eyelids slowly peeled from their skin, and they gazed in confused wonder at a new world around them. Their life-source, their great mother, wept when they were placed in her arms. They could feel her love radiating into them. The twins were in an unknown world that calmed every fear, that exceeded their wildest dreams. Their eyes had not seen and their ears had not heard anything like this before. Their end was just their beginning. They were overcome and could do only one thing—cry out for joy.

Risen Lord, strengthen our faith so that we overcome all doubt, and place our trust in Your gift of life beyond the grave. May Your resurrection from the dead inflame in us an ardent desire to be holy in this life so that we can live with You, Mary, and all the saints in the next.

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April 7: Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, Priest
1651–1719
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Christian teachers

Great faith, charm, and skill opened school doors to millions

A cowboy mounts a horse and lassos a calf to show the next cowboy how to wrangle. A fisherman tosses a net into the ocean so that his son learns to put food on the table for dinner. And a good teacher teaches an apprentice how to teach. The passing on of professional knowledge doesn’t happen by accident. Those who are skilled teach those who are less so. Today’s saint, John Baptiste de la Salle, was a lifelong educator, an excellent teacher who had innovative and effective ideas on how to educate youth. Most importantly, he also had faith, perseverance, and the administrative skills to bring his educational vision to fulfillment in the face of stiff resistance.

A good teacher must do much more than master content. He must do much more than manage his classroom. A good teacher is an artist who combines mastery of the material with psychological insights, discipline, charm, preparedness, and love, all in careful equilibrium. At the time Saint Jean Baptiste began to teach teachers, the custom in France was to teach children Latin. And once they had learned Latin sufficiently, the custom was to teach the students every other subject in Latin. Lower class, poorer children, were often not taught at all or only for a few brief years. Jean Baptiste wanted all children to have access to a good education, for their schooling to be free of charge, and for classes to be in French. These ideals, combined with his own charm, holiness, and refined savoir faire, drew many idealistic young men to his side. They wanted to be teachers too, and to dedicate themselves to the Lord. Originally, Jean Baptiste was reluctant to live with, and train, men who belonged to a social class far below his own. He remarked that his first teacher trainees ranked below his own servants. In the end, though, Jean overcame his reluctance and innate prejudice and threw himself wholeheartedly into the educational work that would make him famous.

So many young men gathered around him that Jean Baptiste founded an Order which was, after his death, officially recognized by the Church—the Christian Brothers. Just when his educational apostolates needed funds to expand, Jean Baptiste inherited a fortune from his parents. He was tempted to use the money to open new schools but instead donated it to the poor, deciding to rely only upon providence for the support of his schools. The members of his Order were intentionally not ordained to the Priesthood so that sacramental responsibilities would not distract them from teaching. His Christian Brothers also had no obligation to pray the Divine Office (the Breviary) and were prohibited from physical mortifications beyond the Church’s norms on fasting. Jean felt that teaching well was itself a mortification which required heroic self discipline. Jean wanted nothing less than ambassadors of Christ to the young, not just teachers. All of this was novel for its time—a body of men with no ordained members dedicated exclusively to education was unheard of.

For all his successes in opening new schools, however, Jean Baptiste had numerous setbacks. Over many years he was verbally attacked, sued in court, and vilified by some religious Orders and clerics.  They saw his free schools and universal educational goals as a threat to their own local monopolies on education. Jean Baptiste dealt with all of this with admirable courage, humility, and magnanimity. It’s not easy times that make one great. It’s hardship, adversity, and persecution. Jean Baptiste’s trials made a good man into a great man, and a great man into a saint. He fasted continually, mortified himself harshly, and traded his early life of comfort for hard scrabble poverty. After relinquishing the heavy burden of his Order’s leadership and administration, Jean was so obedient to his successor that the new superior joked that Jean would not die unless he was given permission to do so. The Counter-Reformation fervor behind so many great saints of sixteenth-century Italy and Spain arrived late to France, but it arrived no less ardent. Jean Baptiste was one of its greatest exemplars. The Christians Brothers peaked at over sixteen thousand members in the 1950s and are still active today in numerous countries, operating over a thousand educational institutions. The legacy of their dynamic, innovative, and indefatigable founder continues to thrive.

Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, through your intercession, give all teachers of the Faith the perseverance, grace, and love they need to teach the uneducated, especially the poor and those who struggle to learn. Your determination inspires. Your heavenly assistance guarantees fruitfulness.

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Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)
c. 33 A.D.
Triduum; Liturgical Color: Red

No one knew love looked like this

One of the most famous Greek sculptures in the world, a larger-than-life marble statue of a female, reigns over a monumental staircase in the Louvre. A soft, unfelt breeze ripples through the thin, flowing sheets that wrap her frame. Two expansive, articulated wings sweep elegantly back from her torso, giving the impression that she has just floated down from on high and landed softly on the prow of an invisible ship. Though now headless, the statue’s sense of movement is so vivid that one can still “see” her neck craning, her jaw jutting, and her eyes looking carefully downward as she settles to ground. She moves and yet she is still. She is “Winged Victory,” Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

Victory in battle, conquest in war, and success in sport are typically celebrated with a blast of trumpets, gold medals hung around the neck, ticker-tape parades, a crowning with laurels, or the placing of an elegant statue like “Winged Victory” to serenely personify triumph over one’s enemies. Jesus Christ changed all that. He changed what victory looked like. Jesus climbed a different podium to win a different type of victory over man’s greatest enemy.

On Good Friday, the God of the Living descended into the depths of human experience to conquer death. His victory parade was the carrying of the Cross on His tender shoulders up the hill of Calvary, where His hands were nailed to a splintery timber. He was raised on high by centurions for mockery, not exaltation. He then died a slow, agonizing death as His thorax sunk lower and lower and His diaphragm sucked less and less air into His lungs. It was not fast and clean. It took three hours. No one knew it at the time, but this was the new look of love in the Christian age, this was the new victory pose. Not laurels, but thorns. Not trumpets, but screams. Not medals, but scars. On Good Friday, Christ redefined victory. The victor is not prideful or strong, but humble, meek, wrecked, injured, and dead. Pain in the non-Christian world, whether in the past or today, has no redemptive power or reward. It is just mindless and arbitrary suffering. At best, it is stoicism.

In the person of Jesus Christ, God does not explain human suffering. Instead, He gives it meaning. And giving meaning to something is a type of answer, although not a solution. We do not go to a funeral to solve a problem. We go simply to be present, to share the family’s sorrow. Sharing is a powerful response. It is more satisfying and profound to give something meaning than to make it disappear. The answer of Jesus Christ to human suffering is to share it. His answer is empathy. He suffers, dies, and is buried. No one can point a finger at God and say, “You don’t know what it’s like!” He certainly does know what it’s like! Jesus could have saved the world by cutting Himself shaving. But He didn’t. He experienced more than was necessary, because it was more fitting that God share every single human experience except sin. God drinks the common cup of human suffering to the dregs.

Jesus did not die full of years. He died young, like many tragic heroes. Christ’s death gives hope to all who are preyed upon by loneliness, depression, fear, illness, anxiety, confusion, sin, and shame. In His death, Jesus does not just tell us but shows us that all these things can be conquered when united to Him. Jesus did not leave us a book but a life. And that life continues to be shared with us in word and sacrament, in its fullness, in the Catholic Church.

God did not die on the Cross so that artists could sculpt Him. God died for a higher reason. He died for us. In Christ, the gift and the giver, the priest and the sacrifice, merge, and the result is life. As in marriage, so also in the Trinity, self-gift merges in generative love and creates life. So we etch that powerful reminder of Christ’s life-generating gift of self—the Crucifix—into our tombstones and place it high in our churches. This universal symbol of redemptive love even hangs from fine chains on our necks. In hoc signo vinces. Christ is our new winged Victory, not with two glorious wings spreading out in a proud gesture of triumph, but with His two thin bloody arms pinned to the Cross. He hangs there in agony, gasping for air, and heroically waits for Sunday to come.

Crucified Lord, in Your passion and death, You walked for us the hard path to new life. You exited life through the door of death and so give us hope that the end is the beginning, that loss is gain, that defeat is victory, and that death is life.

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Thursday of Holy Week (Holy Thursday)
c. 33 A.D.
Triduum; Liturgical Color: White

No last will and testament has been as heeded as Christ’s

From the moment Christ first uttered the words at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday evening, the Church has never ceased to be faithful to them: “Do this in memory of me.” These words of a man about to die, if not a dying man, were a commandment more than a request, marching orders more than a mission statement. And everyone in that upper room understood exactly what He meant. No last will and testament of any man has ever been as faithfully fulfilled as these last words of Christ. What Christ ordered to be done has been done, and continues to be done, every day, throughout the world, by every single priest who stands at an altar and recites the words of consecration in persona Christi.

The world has never moved on from Christ and never will. He is not in the world’s rear-view mirror. He is here, He is present, He is alive. And in every tight corner of the globe, from a tidy Polish village to a rambling Filipino city, from a Palestinian monastery hugging a sun-baked cliff to an Argentinian parish in a sprawling suburb, the Mass makes Him real because it is done in memory of Him. Literally every minute of every day, Mass is celebrated across the globe in a ceaseless offering to God the Father. “From the rising of the sun to its setting,” in a thousand tongues, priests bend slightly over their chalices and the white linens covering their altars and carefully repeat a chain of words in a cadence known to all the faithful: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it…Take this all of you, and drink from it…This is my Body…This is my Blood.” No words are more familiar. None! Not Shakespeare’s, not Caesar’s, not Lincoln’s. The everlasting words of the cross-cultural and cross-generational Christ simply have no equal.

If we expect from the Church the sacraments, we will never be disappointed. If we receive from the Church more than the sacraments, we should rejoice. The Last Supper fulfills and completes the Jewish Passover sacrifice ordered by God of Moses and the Jews in Egypt. The Last Supper, at the same time, prefigures in an unbloody way the physical sacrifice Christ would make on the morrow on the hill of Calvary. In the Last Supper, Christ also gives priests the perennial form for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Last Supper, then, is a composite act of Jewish and Christian ritual, of Old and New Testament theology, of historical and spiritual realities all packed into one dense liturgical act which the Church presents anew at every Mass. The Mass is the Christian work of art par excellence. It is the public act which never stops showing. It is the magnet which pulls mankind through the doors of thousands of churches every morning, noon, and night.

We do this in memory of Him because God deserves worship as a matter of justice, not charity. We do this in memory of Him because He ordered us to do so. We do this in memory of Him because it prefigures what we will hopefully do in heaven for eternity. And we do this in memory of Him for a thousand million reasons locked in the quiet places of a thousand million hearts: For Jill to come back home. So that Robert survives the war. In thanksgiving for a good husband. So that a pain in the gut not be what it might be. In gratitude for the rain that saved the crops. At a king’s crowning, a convict’s death, or the bond of marriage. For the shocked just after the martyrs’ mangled bodies were dragged out of the arena over the blood-stained sand. In thanksgiving because my father did not die of cancer, and in remembrance of my cousin who did. For the fireman who couldn’t find his way out of the building, for the barren woman, for the anniversary of an aged couple, or for the nation on its birthday. There is no end of reasons.

Month after month, year after year, century after century, until the sands of time run out, the voice of the Lord on Holy Thursday echoes over the waters and down the halls of time: “Do this in memory of me.” *

Lord Jesus Christ, Your total physical gift of self on Good Friday began internally at the Last Supper. May the faithful often profit from Your priestly ministry by receiving Your body and blood consecrated on Your sacred altars by those who share in Your one priesthood.

*See “The Shape of the Liturgy” by Dom Gregory Dix for a similar reflection on the Holy Eucharist.

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April 5: Saint Vincent Ferrer, Priest
c. 1350–1419
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of builders

He slept on the floor, fasted endlessly, performed miracles, and converted thousands

Saint Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest, founded the Order of Preachers in the early thirteenth century. He wanted to establish an Order of priests who were well educated in theology, adept at preaching the truths they lived, and who had more flexibility than a monastery-bound priest to travel and evangelize. Over a century later, today’s saint was born in Saint Dominic’s own country, joined the Dominican Order, and carried out in the most dynamic and complete way the essential vision of Saint Dominic. Saint Vincent Ferrer was well educated and a powerfully effective preacher. He travelled almost without cease throughout Western Europe, impacting the lives of untold thousands of people through his example of holiness, his supernatural gifts, and his preaching. Saint Vincent was the ideal Dominican.

Vincent was born in Valencia, on the southern coast of Spain, to an English father and a Spanish mother. He was named in honor of Saint Vincent Martyr, who met his death in the same city in the fourth century. Vincent received an excellent education and earned a doctorate in theology at a young age. It was said that he read exclusively Scripture for three full years and had committed much of it to memory. He taught philosophy and then took up advanced studies, in Barcelona, of Islam and Judaism. Spain had a sizeable minority of Jews, and Muslims still controlled large portions of Southern Spain in Saint Vincent’s day. So these studies were not merely theoretical. Saint Vincent converted a large number of Spanish Jews and interacted with Spanish Muslims on a regular basis.

The ecclesial event which most marked our saint’s life was the Western Schism of 1378–1418. This painful episode saw two, and eventually three, cardinals claim to be the validly elected pope. This open wound pained the Church for two generations. Some Europeans lived their whole lives knowing only a bitterly divided papacy. The Western Schism proved so intractable a problem, and caused such scandal, that it can be argued that it was the remote spark of the Reformation which caught fire through Northern Europe about one hundred years later. Such were the complexities of the Schism that Saint Vincent found himself on opposite sides of the issue from Saint Catherine of Siena and various other deeply committed Catholics.

Our saint spent the better part of his life as a tireless itinerant preacher traveling along the highways and the byways of Spain, France, and Italy, drawing enormous crowds, inviting and inspiring them to a deeper life in Christ. Near the end of his life, Vincent’s effective preaching played a decisive role at the Council of Constance in 1414. He convinced the Spanish King to cease supporting the very pope who Vincent had previously backed in the Schism. Vincent was man enough to see that his candidate had become an obstacle to Church unity. Vincent thus lived a hard lesson in humility when his man was abandoned, excommunicated, and judged by history to have been an antipope. Saint Vincent fittingly died on one of his incessant missionary journeys, far from home in Northern France, at the age of sixty-nine. His reputation for holiness was such that he was canonized a saint in 1455, within the lifetime of many who had heard him preach.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, you lived a life of fervor and dedication to the truths of the Catholic faith, imparting the education you received to others through your witness and preaching. Come to the aid of all teachers and preachers to emulate your virtues with your same zeal for the house of the Lord.

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April 4: Saint Isidore, Bishop and Doctor
c. 560–636
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the internet

There was little he did not know

The vast colonial ambitions of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went hand in hand with equally epic Catholic missionary efforts. This unity of purpose, these shared goals, with civil and ecclesiastical resources and powers working in concert, was the natural consequence of a country with a total unity of identity. Today’s saint was a singularly important, if remote, source for that powerful concurrence of Iberian theology, culture, art, and language which, after centuries of gestation, became the Spanish juggernaut that conquered and evangelized a hemisphere in the 1500s.

As a youth, Isidore received an excellent classical education in the Roman tradition, similar to the classical learning Saint Augustine imbibed two centuries before him and utilized to such great effect. Yet Isidore not only learned a great deal, he also remembered it and was uncommonly dedicated to his intellectual pursuits, writing numerous weighty tomes. The breadth and depth of his learning were without equal in his time. It was simply said that Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, knew everything. He is considered by many to be the last of the Latin Fathers of the Church, those early Christian theologians whose writings are the gold standard for all subsequent theologians.

His knowledge was put to good use. As the Roman world, which had dominated Spain for so many centuries, slowly crumbled away in the fifth and sixth centuries, Visigothic (Western Goths) tribes overran Spain. Like their Gothic cousins in Central Europe, the Visigoths were Arians, and Arians were heretics. They denied that Christ was consubstantial with the Father and accepted all that flowed from that erroneous starting point. Saint Isidore played an important role in the assimilation of the Visigoths to Nicene Catholicism after one of their Kings abandoned Arianism. Theological unity having been achieved, the old Roman culture of Iberia slowly blended with Visigothic culture to form something new—Spain. Saint Isidore was, then, a nation builder, because he was first a Church builder. And he built the Church not just through his massive erudition but also through effective headship in calling and guiding Church synods, by establishing liturgical unity through the Mozarabic Rite, and by encouraging scholarship and learning through the Cathedral schools he mandated in every diocese.

Saint Isidore’s most enduring work is his Etymologies (or Origins), an enormous compendium of universal knowledge. It was the standard encyclopedia in Medieval libraries and continued to be utilized as late as the Renaissance. No author’s manuscripts were more widely copied in the Middle Ages than Isidore’s. Although Saint Isidore was not a creative thinker in the same class as Saint Augustine or the Eastern Fathers of the Church, his mind was such a vast storehouse of knowledge that Pope Saint John Paul II named him the Patron Saint of the Internet.

After a long reign as Archbishop of Seville, in his last days Saint Isidore prepared for death by wearing sackcloth and ashes, confessing his faults to his people in church, and asking their forgiveness. He died in his late seventies in 636, just four years after Mohammed, the founder of Islam, died in Saudi Arabia. About seventy-five years after their deaths, Muslim armies crossed the strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and began the long conquest which obliterated the Visigoths. The Spanish reconquest of their nation would take centuries until, in 1492, the last Muslim stronghold, Granada, fell. Both sides were inspired by faith more than patriotism. Both sides fought. Both sides thought they were right. In the end, the nation Isidore created was the stronger and drove Mohammed’s heirs back over the waters to Africa. Isidore’s enormous legacy was a Catholic nation, and it prevailed.

Saint Isidore, you used your education and knowledge to great effect to evangelize a people. Help all who seek your intercession to unite their learning with zeal for the good of the Church and the many peoples it serves.

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April 2: Saint Francis of Paola, Hermit
1416–1507
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Calabria, mariners, and naval officers

He lived a perpetual Lent

The first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi were known as the “Mendicants from Assisi.” Yet as the group attracted men and women from all over Italy and beyond, a new name, not specific to Assisi, was needed. Saint Francis named his brotherhood the Ordo Fratrum Minorum (O.F.M.). This is typically translated from the Latin as the Order of Friars Minor, implying that there is an Order of Friars Major. A better translation might be the Order of Lesser Brothers. Saint Francis wanted himself, and all of his brothers, to be less in everything—less prideful, less well known, less wealthy, and less well nourished than anyone else.

Today’s saint, the Padre Pio of his era, was a holy priest from the town of Paola in Southern Italy. He was baptized as Francis by his parents when, after several years of going childless, they made a vow to name any son that might be born to them in the great saint’s honor. Francis of Paola was worthy of his namesake from a young age. His parents took special care with his religious upbringing and brought him to live for a year in a Franciscan monastery when Francis was just twelve. The young Francis developed a reputation for holiness even when just a teen. By the age of twenty, he was living as a hermit in a cave near Paola when local men began to gather around him. The fledgling group adopted the name “the Hermits of Brother Francis of Assisi,” a name later changed to the “Friars Minims,” or just “Minims,” meaning  “less” or “least,” in the spirit of the “Lesser Brothers” that Saint Francis of Assisi had founded centuries before.

Francis of Paola desired humility, nothingness, and total self-abnegation. He and his followers lived a perpetual Lent. All Minims took the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But they also took a special fourth vow to abstain, all year long and all life long, from meat, eggs, butter, cheese, milk, and all dairy products. The fast never ended. This was mortification on a heroic scale. Vegetarianism, much less veganism, was a step beyond what Saint Francis of Assisi himself had lived. Saint Francis of Assisi ate what was set before him, including meat. He even criticized vegetarian brothers who refused meat, saying such an attitude questioned God’s providence and presumed the future, when a brother should instead gratefully accept whatever dish was placed on the table before him.

Francis of Paola’s veganism was united to a strict moral code, a community life built around the Sacraments, and a deep spirituality centered on Jesus Christ. To be “one with nature” does not mean to be morally ambiguous or to break with religious traditions. A diet should not be a creed. Saint Francis was organic in that he lived one with God, with nature, with his religious brothers, and with the Church. Francis was perennially concerned with the moral laxity of the Church of his era, and purposefully fasted and did penance in reparation for its sins. While Francis of Assisi lived austerely and suffered debilitating illnesses, he was nevertheless cheerful and animated in his dealings with others. No one ever accused Francis of Paola of being ebullient. He was a fully armed spiritual warrior of the most serious kind. He went barefoot. He slept on a board. He was a desert father without the sand.

After a very long life of fasting, prayer, miracle working, and wide fame for his holiness even outside of Italy, Saint Francis of Paola died in France. His order had by then spread throughout Europe. His reputation for sanctity was such that he was canonized in 1519, only twelve years after his death. In 1562 Protestant Calvinists in France unsealed his tomb and found his body incorrupt. They then desecrated the saint, scattering his remains. Saint Francis of Paola, after sacrificing everything in life, was not allowed to rest in peace. He was strewn about like trash, ensuring that only trace relics of him remained. Saint Francis wanted to be treated as the least of all. His desire was fulfilled both in life and in death.

Saint Francis of Paola, you lived an integrated life deeply united to God, nature, and your fellow man. Intercede before the Trinity in heaven on our behalf, assisting us to grow closer to God through death to self, through prayer, and through a deep attachment to Christ.

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Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
c. 33 A.D.
The Sunday before Easter
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: Red

Beginning with the end we understand His greatness

One way to understand a book, or to watch a movie, is to begin at the end. To read, or watch, backwards allows every character and plot twist to be interpreted in light of their conclusions. Working backwards removes much of the drama and tension from a story, of course, but it also makes the story perfectly intelligible. No slow unwinding of the plot, no “whodunit,” no surprise around the corner, and no unexpected deaths. Skipping to the end makes the entire narrative clear, with prior knowledge infusing prior meaning into the story as it unfolds.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are essentially Passion narratives with extended introductions. There is plenty of evidence that the end of Christ’s life, particularly his last seventy-two hours, were well remembered by His disciples, the events being repeated in great detail until they were ultimately written down. The Evangelists eventually supplemented these often-repeated Passion narratives with further details about Christ’s life which had occurred long before Holy Week. These prior narratives are often inconsistent across the Gospels, emphasize diverse aspects of Christ’s life, and omit or add details in a seemingly arbitrary manner. What are very consistent, however, are the Passion narratives. Their vivid details are, without doubt, the heart and soul of the story of Jesus Christ.

On Palm Sunday we begin with the end. We read our way backwards. It is not possible for any Christian to think of Jesus Christ divorced from how His earthly life ended. Even the earliest Christian writings were composed from a post-Resurrection perspective. The “real” Jesus of history did not have miracles placed on Him like ornaments on a Christmas tree. His miracles were not later adornments hung on His human frame to lend Him credibility. The “real” Jesus is not the simple carpenter lurking in the shadows behind the Christ of Faith created by later generations. There are scant biblical references to Jesus’ occupation as a carpenter, or to His simple and humble existence in a provincial town. There is a massive amount of biblical evidence, on the contrary, that Jesus suffered, died, and rose from the dead. And this biblical evidence is buttressed by an abundance of postbiblical testimony and the universal witness of an army of Apostles, saints, and martyrs.

All of this means that the “real” Jesus is the Christ of faith! The “real” Jesus did suffer, die, and rise from the dead! The “real” Jesus is not found in the subtext of the Gospels—He is found in the text of the Gospels! And those texts are indisputably ancient. In other words, the narrative read at Mass on Palm Sunday is the oldest, truest, and most well-remembered portion of one of the most fully preserved and extraordinary documents from the ancient world—the New Testament.

Our faith is rooted in history, a miraculous history. The Passion of Jesus Christ is not a parable, analogy, or metaphor. It is not a story meant to teach us a lesson apart from its facts. It is not a morality play whose actors mean to teach a lesson. The Passion of Christ is theologically significant because it is historically true. If it were not historically true, it would have no significance beyond its power to inspire as a story. But every culture already has myths to inspire its people, or at least mythical figures whose superhuman qualities model greatness. The story of Christ is so much more. It is the true story of a God-man who was betrayed by a friend, suffered calumny from His enemies, was publicly humiliated, made to carry the instrument of His own execution, and then was left to die, naked on a rough-hewn tree.

This story is not sad by analogy to another story. It is sad in and of itself. This is the story we hear every Palm Sunday. This is how a great man’s life came to an end. It is also the story of how the Son of God conquered death and opened the gates of heaven to all who not only believe in Him but who belong to Him through the Catholic Church.

Lord of the Passion, You suffered calumny and humiliation, You bore the Cross and did not complain. Intercede before Your heavenly Father that we may bear whatever crosses we must with fortitude. Without Your grace, we are no better than Godless pagans, in search of frivolous signs to lend meaning to life.

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March 25: Annunciation of the Lord
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

The flutter of a wing, a rustling in the air, a voice, and the future began to begin

The Feast of the Annunciation is the reason why we celebrate Christmas on December 25. Christmas comes exactly nine months after the Archangel Gabriel invited the Virgin Mary to be the Mother of God, an event we commemorate on March 25. The dating of these Feast Days, although interesting, is of minor importance compared to their theological significance. It is fruitful to reflect upon the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary as the antecedent to the explosion of joy, caroling, gift giving, eating, drinking, love and family unity that surrounds the birth of the Savior. Perhaps Mary had a sort of private and internal Christmas at the moment of the Annunciation. Maybe she felt the fullness of the world’s Christmas joy inside of her own heart when she realized she had been chosen to be the Mother of God.

God could have become man in any number of creative ways. He could have incarnated Himself just as Adam was in the book of Genesis, by being formed from the clay and having the divine breath blown into his nostrils. Or God could have slowly backed down to earth on a tall golden ladder as a twenty-five-year-old man, ready to walk the highways and byways of Palestine. Or maybe God could have taken flesh in an unknown way and just been found, like Moses, floating in a basket by a childless young couple from Nazareth as they enjoyed a Sunday picnic along the Jordan River.

The Second Person of the Trinity chose, however, to become man like we all become man. In the same way that He would exit the world through the door of death before His Resurrection, as we all have to do, He also entered the world through the door of human birth. In the words of the early Church, Christ could not redeem what He did not assume. He redeemed everything because He took on human nature in all of its breadth, depth, complexity and mystery. He was like us in all things save sin.

The incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity was a self-emptying. It was God becoming small. Imagine a man becoming an ant while retaining his human mind and will. The man-turned-ant would appear to be like all the ants around him, and would participate in all of their ant activities, yet still think at a level far above them. There was no other way to do it. The man had to learn through becoming, not because insect life was superior to his own, but because it was inferior. Only through descending, only through experience, could the man learn what was below him. All analogies limp, but, in a similar way, the Second Person of the Trinity retained His infused divine knowledge while reducing Himself to a man and learning man life, doing man work, and dying a man death. By such a self-emptying, He dignified all men and opened to them the possibility of entering into His higher life in Heaven.

The Church’s tradition speculates that one reason the bad angels may have rebelled against God was the besetting sin of envy. They may have discovered that God chose to become man instead of the higher form of an angel. This envy would have been directed at the Virgin Mary as well, that Vessel of Honor and Ark of the Covenant who bore the divine choice. God not only became man, we must remember, but did so through a human being, one prepared from her conception to be perfect. March 25 is one of only two days of the year when we kneel at the recitation of the Creed at Mass. At the words “...by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man” all heads bow and all knees bend at the wonder of it. If the story of Christ is the greatest story ever told, today is its first page.

O Holy Virgin Mary, we ask your intercession to make us as generous as you in accepting the will of God in our lives, especially when that will is expressed in mysterious ways. May you be our example of a generous response to what God desires of us.

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March 23: Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo, Bishop
1538–1606
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Latin American Bishops and native people’s rights

He died in the field six thousand miles from home

Today’s saint was the second Archbishop of the second most important city in Spain’s Latin American empire in the 1500s. Lima, Peru, stood only behind Mexico City in importance to the Spanish Crown during the pinnacle of its colonial ambitions. So when Lima’s first Archbishop died in 1575, the King of Spain, not the Pope, searched for a suitable candidate to send over sea and land to replace him. The King found his man close at hand, and he was more than suitable to the task.

Turibius of Mogrovejo was a learned scholar of the law who held teaching and other posts in Spain’s complex of Church and civil courts. Yet for all his learning, piety, faith, and energy, there was one huge obstacle to him being a bishop. Turibius was not a priest. He was not even a deacon. He was a very good, albeit unmarried, layman. The arrangement for centuries between Spain and the Holy See was that the Spanish Crown chose bishops while the Pope approved, or rejected, them. So after the Pope approved the appointment, over the candidate’s fierce objections, Turibius received the four minor orders on four successive weeks, was ordained a deacon and then ordained a priest. He said his first Mass when he was over forty years old. About two years later, Turibius was consecrated as the new archbishop, and then sailed the ocean blue, arriving in Lima in May 1581.

Archbishop Turibius was extraordinarily dedicated to his episcopal responsibilities. He exhausted himself on years-long visits to the parishes of his vast territory, which included present day Peru and beyond. He acquainted himself with the priests and people under his care. He convoked synods (large Church meetings) to standardize sacramental, pastoral, and liturgical practice. He produced an important trilingual catechism in Spanish and two native dialects, learned to preach in these indigenous dialects himself, and encouraged his priests to be able to hear confessions and preach in them as well. Archbishop Turibius’ life also providentially intersected with the lives of other saints active in Peru at the same time, including Martin de Porres, Francisco Solano, and Isabel Flores de Oliva, to whom Turibius gave the name Rose when he confirmed her. She was later canonized as Saint Rose of Lima, the first saint born in the New World. Saints know saints.

Archbishop Turibius was a fine example of a counter-reformation bishop, except that he did not serve in a counter-reformation place. That is, Peru was not split by the Catholic versus Protestant theological divisions wreaking such havoc in the Europe of that era. Saint Turibius implemented the reforms of the Council of Trent, not to combat heretics, but to simply make the Church healthier and holier, Protestants or no Protestants. From this perspective, the reforms of Trent were not a cure but an antidote. If Turibius’ energy and holiness were motivated by any one thing besides evangelical fervor, it was his desire to make the Spanish colonists of Peru recover the integrity of their own baptisms. The indigenous population needed authentic examples of Christian living to respect and emulate, and few Spanish colonialists provided such models of right living. Saint Turibius’ greatest enemy, then, was simply original sin, which returns to the battlefield every time a baby is born.

After exhausting himself through total dedication to his responsibilities, Saint Turibius fell ill on the road and died at age sixty-seven in a small town far from home. His twenty-four years as Archbishop were a trial of strength. He had baptized and confirmed half a million souls, had trekked thousands of miles on narrow paths made for goats, had never neglected to say Mass, and did not accept any gifts in return for what he gave. Turibius was canonized in 1726 and named the Patron Saint of Latin American Bishops by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1983. Perhaps his unforeseen ordination explains his sustained fervor and drive. What came late was valued for having come at all. He bloomed late and bloomed beautifully, becoming the Spanish equivalent of his great contemporary, the Italian Saint Charles Borromeo.

If a visitor searches for the tomb of the saintly Archbishop in the Cathedral of Lima today, he will not find it. There are only fragments of bones in a reliquary. His reputation for holiness was immediate and his relics were distributed far and wide after his death. He is in death as widely shared as he was in life, all the faithful wanting just a piece of the great man. In January 2018, Pope Francis prayed before the relics of Saint Turibius in Lima and invoked his memory in a talk to Peru’s bishops. Saint Turibius did not, Pope Francis said, shepherd his diocese from behind a desk but was “a bishop with shoes worn out by walking, by constant travel, by setting out to preach the Gospel to all: to all places, on all occasions, without hesitation, reluctance, and fear.”

Saint Turibius, we invoke your intercession to inspire all who share the gospel, in whatever form, to do so with ardor, skill, and charity, using all the means at their disposal, as you so powerfully did in your own life and ministry.

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March 19: Saint Joseph, Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Universal Church, fathers, and a happy death

Jesus and Mary lived under his gentle, fatherly authority

The husband of Mary had a perfect spouse, untouched by original sin. He was also the foster father to a boy who was the Son of God and the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Yet Saint Joseph, the least perfect member of his household, was still the head of the family. Authority does not always flow from moral or intellectual superiority. Authority in the Church, in particular, is God given. Because God chooses a certain person to fulfill a task in His household of faith, that person acts with a divine mandate to teach, sanctify, and govern the people and things entrusted to him. Saint Joseph is a model for how God uses imperfect instruments to exercise His perfect will. God does not want robots, machines, or zombies to mindlessly implement His plan for mankind. The history of the Church is replete with imperfect tools who have caused scandal and division. Wayward leaders have cost the Church entire countries. Yet despite all these unworthy instruments in the hands of the Divine Master, truth and shelter and grace continue to be provided to those baptised into the Church, the Master’s family.

God wants personality. God wants us to have character. God’s angels, created spirits, lack the restrictions imposed by a human body. But in not having a body, the angels also lack what makes us unique. They lack the spit, vinegar, and spark that make a man a man. Every man is an enfleshed soul, the coming together of a body and a spirit. This coming together is not half soul and half body, like the mythical centaur with the body of a horse but the torso and head of a man. When copper and zinc are welded together, they are superficially united into one larger piece of metal. But the union is not total and does not create something new. The copper is still copper, and the zinc is still zinc. But when copper and zinc are each melted down and then mixed together, they form brass. Brass is not just the joining of copper to zinc but an entirely new material with unique properties. In a similar way, the union of a body and a soul together composes a human person with unique properties, a child of God unlike any other. The saints, in particular, were unique people often possessing hot tempers, forceful personalities, and unbending wills. They placed their uniqueness at the service of God and His Church and helped to change the world. God did not make, and does not want, just vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes vanilla. But no one likes only vanilla. God wants flavor.

Saint Joseph was, like all the saints, unique. He probably had personal traits which were less than perfect. These imperfections were absolutely no obstacle to Mary and Jesus obeying him, loving him, and ceding to his authority in the Holy Family of Nazareth. Mary and Jesus would have happily bent to the will of their God-given guide, despite their metaphysical, moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority.

Ancient traditions hold that Saint Joseph was considerably older than the Virgin Mary. Other traditions tell that he was married previously and that the “brothers” of Jesus were half-brothers from Saint Joseph’s previous marriage. Scripture tells us Jesus was a carpenter and was known as the “carpenter’s son” (Mt 13:55). Joseph may have been more precisely a builder who worked with the native stone so common to Palestinian construction. A Jewish ritual bath made of stone discovered beneath the church of Saint Joseph in Nazareth, a church which long tradition says was built over the Holy Family’s home, may be Joseph’s very own handiwork. A firm tradition teaches that Saint Joseph died long before his Son’s death. This is based not on biblical evidence but on the lack of it. It can be reasonably presumed that Saint Joseph would have been present at his Son’s crucifixion, as was Mary. Yet no mention is made of him being there. From this absence, biblical scholars have, from the beginning of the Church, surmised that Saint Joseph was by then dead. Thus, Saint Joseph is the Patron Saint of a Happy Death, because he presumably died with Jesus and the Virgin Mary at his side. This is how all of us want to die, with Christ holding our hand on one side of the bed and the Virgin Mary seated beside us on the other side. Saint Joseph died in the best of company. May we do so as well.

Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, guide all those under the care of their pastors to see not their imperfections but their God-given obligation to fulfill God’s plan. May your humble and faithful service inspire all fathers to lead their flocks with tenderness, wisdom, and strength.

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March 18: Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop and Doctor
c. 315–386
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday)

A wise and persevering bishop teaches his flock

It is the Christ-given obligation of every Catholic bishop, and the priests and deacons who share in his ministry, to teach, sanctify, and govern all people under their spiritual care. Regarding teaching, the letters of Saint Paul, as well as the writings of early Christian theologians, abundantly attest to the duty of the Apostles and their appointed successors to ensure that false doctrine never infects their flocks. The episcopal duty to teach was not a charism or gift of the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues, performing miracles, or healing the infirm. Teaching correct doctrine might be aided by the Holy Spirit, but it was first a mandate from the Lord Himself. To not teach, to teach incompletely, or to teach falsely, was for the shepherd to ignore, neglect, or scatter the sheep entrusted to his care and protection.

Today’s saint, Cyril, the Bishop of Jerusalem in the late fourth century, was a model teacher of right doctrine. He did not just teach teachers what to teach. He did not deputize or delegate others to teach on his behalf. He was the local Father, and, concerned for Christian formation in the household of faith, he personally taught the faith. How do we know this? Two reasons: First, because a holy woman named Egeria went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 380s. She documented her travels in a journal identifying the bishop, known to be Cyril, as the catechist in the domed mausoleum covering the tomb of Christ (part of today’s church of the Holy Sepulchre). Second, we know of Bishop Cyril’s talks because many of them were dutifully recorded and preserved, presumably because of their high caliber. The talks are rich, early testimony to the perennial, consistent doctrines of the Catholic Church.

Egeria states that the bishop of Jerusalem taught about Lent and Easter to catechumens and neophytes (the newly baptized) by going through the entire Bible and the Creed, article by article. He taught for three hours each day, every one of the forty days of Lent and during Easter week. In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote, “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” (Rm 10:14). Bishop Cyril admirably fulfilled his apostolic duty to teach and to proclaim so that others would know the Lord.

Among the profound teachings of Saint Cyril on the Mass, Baptism, and the Sacraments are his extended reflections on the nature of the Holy Eucharist. He is explicit: "Since He Himself has declared and said of the bread: This is My Body, who shall dare to doubt any more? And when He asserts and says: This is My Blood, who shall ever hesitate and say it is not His Blood?...Do not think it mere bread and wine, for it is the Body and Blood of Christ, according to the Lord's declaration" (St. Cyril Catechetical Lecture XXII). Cyril notes that if Christ could change water into wine, why could He not change wine into His own Blood? Reading these words of Cyril, it is perplexing that any modern Christian could doubt the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. As Saint John Henry Newman wrote: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Introduction, Ch. 5).

Bishop Cyril was deeply involved in various consequential theological controversies of his day, was banished from Jerusalem, and participated in the First Council of Constantinople. He lived a long, complicated, and impactful life in the heart of the Church. He is in many ways a model to all bishops for his zealous yet tender care of souls, especially those preparing to be washed in the saving waters of baptism at Easter. Saint Cyril fortified the content of the Church’s teaching with his personal presence, and by extension, the presence of the Sacrament of Holy Orders in his very person. He is a bishop remote in time, yet near in doctrine. Far removed from us historically, he is still close at our side when we stand to recite the same Creed he recited at every Sunday Mass.

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, through your generous dedication to teaching the faith, come to the assistance of all catechists, ordained and lay, to be equally committed to teaching those under their care, in season and out of season, knowing that fidelity to the Lord and His Church is what counts the most.

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March 17: Saint Patrick, Bishop
Fifth Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Ireland

The black arts of pagandom bowed to this one-man fortress

Today’s saint, the Patron of Ireland, was English. He was born in an unknown year to Catholic parents in an educated home in Roman Britain. His father was a deacon and his grandfather a married priest. When he first went to Ireland, he did not go willingly. He was kidnapped by pirates at the age of sixteen and enslaved. He went from the warm embrace of his home to herding pigs, exposed to sleet and cold, starving on the rain-soaked coast of rural Ireland. Times of great danger and deprivation are often times of great grace. In young Patrick’s years of isolation, cold, hunger, and loss, prayer was his only nourishment and comfort. His captivity turned a boy into a man and transformed a tepid Christian into an ardent soul burning with love for the Holy Trinity.

After six years of torturous enslavement, Patrick escaped his captors and made the difficult voyage back to his own nation, family, and language. But the Irish were never far from his mind. One night, he had a dream. Patrick sees a man he knew in Ireland named Victoricus approaching from the west. Victoricus holds countless letters and hands one to Patrick. It is titled “The Voice of the Irish.” As he begins to read the letter, Patrick hears a multitude of voices rising, as if one, from a forest near the Western Sea: “We beg you, holy youth, to come and walk among us once more.” Patrick is deeply moved. Unable to read any more, he wakes up.

Patrick decides to be a slave of Christ and to return as a missionary to Ireland. Feeling himself unprepared, he first studies for many years at monasteries in France. After receiving an excellent education in the faith, he receives priestly and episcopal ordination. He then embarks as a fully equipped missionary for his adopted homeland. There he finds a rustic people steeped in paganism. It is not today’s paganism—well read, superior, and too sophisticated to believe in religious “mythology.” Real paganism, the paganism of remote Ireland, called upon dark forces to conquer the white spirits and angels of God. Real paganism casts spells, calls down lightning from the night sky, mixes potions to poison its enemies, and forms flames into swords for battle. Real paganism invokes the devil because it knows Satan keeps his appointments. This is the dark paganism Patrick finds lurking in the foggy hills and bogs of his new land. Fifth-century Ireland had a deeply entrenched, richly layered culture of pagan worship. And Bishop Patrick used his crozier, like a dagger, to stab it right in the heart.

Saint Patrick converted the Irish, one tribe after another. He matched the tribes’ preternatural forces with supernatural powers. There are numerous anecdotes, of dubious historicity, describing how Patrick turned an enemy into a fox, converted his walking staff into a tree, or drove all the snakes out of Ireland. These tales illustrate a deeper point—Saint Patrick had command over creation itself and used that power to communicate the truth of the Christian God who created creation. There is no doubt that Saint Patrick harvested an immense number of souls.

For the Church to send a bishop to Ireland in the fifth century was to land a man on the moon. Beyond Ireland there was no one and nothing. Patrick evangelized a rugged, clever people in a rugged, clever way. He conquered their witches, wizards, and warlocks with the Holy Spirit. He vanquished their incantations, potions, demons, and sorcery with a powerful brew, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Son of God in the Mystery of the Altar we call the Blessed Sacrament. He overcame the “black laws of pagandom” with a protecting God who walks always and lovingly at our side. Many centuries of saints, abbots, missionaries, scholars, and monks set sail from tiny Ireland to traverse the globe in service of the Gospel. They owe the rich Catholic culture of their homeland to that mighty pillar of faith known as Saint Patrick.

Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland, assist us through your intercession to trust in the raw power of God to conquer evil. Give us confidence to confront evil spirits, however they may show themselves, so that the peace of true religion may reign where it does not reign now.

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March 9: Saint Frances of Rome, Religious
1384–1440
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of motorists and widows

Just to be near her was thought a blessing

Today’s saint, born into a wealthy noble family in the Eternal City, was married to a man from a similarly privileged family when she was just thirteen. Saint Frances earnestly sought to do the will of God in serving her husband, her children, and her home while also attempting to live a high level of holiness modeled on the life of a nun. She had desired to enter religious life from a young age, but her father refused to break his promise to give Frances in marriage to a fellow nobleman. Frances struggled with an internal conflict between her married state and the religious state to which she had originally felt called. This was not a choice between a good and a bad option. It was a natural tension in the soul of a holy woman who saw two paths open before her, both of which led to God. After her husband died and her children were grown, Saint Frances did live the ordered life of a religious, albeit outside of a convent.

The divine pull that Saint Frances felt in the direction of two callings was not unusual. Other saints before her had been wives and mothers before becoming religious. The theology of the Church in the twentieth century, ratified by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, now offers a vision of holiness which resolves much of this tension in trying to discern a vocation. The primary calling of all Christians is imparted through Baptism, fortified in Confirmation, and nourished in reception of Holy Communion. These Sacraments are sufficient armor to fit one for holiness in any and all circumstances. The married life and its natural domestic concerns are, then, as much a theater for holiness as a cloister.

The Church wants all Catholics to understand daily life as its own drama in fulfilling, or rejecting, God’s will. It is not that one is distracted with the details of work, family, domestic chores, and children while the real action takes place in the parish, the monastery, the retreat center, or the convent. The real action is at home, in the domestic church. It is precisely at home where Christians spend most of their time, raise their children, engage with their spouses, and accomplish the multitude of tasks that make life happen. Home and work are not spheres of life. They are life. And it would be absurd to argue that the will of God lies outside of life itself. To say that holiness is for everyone is to say that all of creation is a forum to pursue it, and that no vocation limits the opportunity to accomplish God’s will.

Saint Frances of Rome was a model wife and mother for forty years, often in violent and difficult circumstances provoked by skirmishes related to the Western Schism, the era of more than one pope which divided Rome’s elites into warring factions. Frances’ husband loved and revered her, her servants admired her, and her children adored her. In addition to performing her domestic duties so faithfully, Frances also fasted, prayed, had a vibrant mystical spirituality, and was generous with the poor. Her charity toward the destitute was not the modern charity of making charitable donations. She did the work, not someone else. She herself made personal contact with the homeless, the hungry, and beggars. Her sterling example of piety and service led her to found a group of like-minded women who lived in the world but who bound themselves to a life of prayer and service. The group was later recognized as an Order in the Church under the title the Oblates of Saint Frances of Rome. So, in addition to fulfilling her own duties, Frances also helped similarly high-placed women to avoid lives of frivolousness and mundanity.

Saint Frances of Rome was generous in all things, saw her guardian angel at her side for many years, ate little more than dry bread, and had a provable gift of healing. As her reputation for holiness spread in her later years, to be in her mere presence was considered a blessing by the people of Rome. As wife, mother, and later Oblate, she stretched herself to the limit in seeking out and doing God’s will, precisely as that will was transmitted to her by the Church she loved with such fervor.

Saint Frances of Rome, through your intercession, aid all wives and mothers to live lives of generous service to their families. Help them to serve the domestic Church by creating, and fortifying, that cradle of holiness and culture the Church so needs to flourish.

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March 8: Saint John of God, Religious
1495–1550
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of hospitals, printers, the sick, and alcoholics

He walked the fine line between madness and holiness

There are many “Johns” who are saints, beginning with those found in Scripture itself: Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint John of the Cross, Saint John Fisher, etc. The name John has also been taken by many popes. Today’s John has the title “of God.” It is a simple and direct title. The word “God” conveys everything under God and everything that is God, without distinctions such as “of the Cross,” “of the Holy Name,” or “of the Infant Jesus.” Neither does it carry any hint of a homeland such as “of Assisi,” “of Calcutta,” or “of Padua.” All saints are “of God,” of course, but the plain title “of God” fits the personality, outlook, education, and simplicity of today’s John very well. The name was not given to him posthumously. John said that the Infant Jesus gave him the name in a dream. A Spanish Bishop who personally knew John and his work ordered him to bear this appellation once he knew its divine origins.

Saint John of God did not have the advantage of an excellent education. But what his mind lacked his heart supplied. He left his Portuguese home as a child in the care of a priest and went to neighboring Spain. From there he lived an itinerant life as a farmer, shepherd, adventurer, and then soldier. He travelled the length and breadth of Europe fighting in the service of kings and princes, mostly against Muslim Turks. Many years later he found his way back home and went to see if his parents were still alive. But he had been gone so long, and had left so young, that he could not even remember their names. An uncle told him that they had died. At this point, the wandering John decided to ransom his own freedom to North African Muslims in exchange for Christian hostages. The plan came to nothing and he returned to Southern Spain.

At this, the lowest point of his aimless life, John had a breakthrough, or perhaps a breakdown. He was selling religious books from town to town when he fell under the influence of a saint, John of Ávila. Saints know saints. Upon hearing John of Ávila preach about the martyr Saint Sebastian, and upon receiving his advice in spiritual direction, the wandering John stopped in his tracks. He fasted, he prayed, and he went on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain. So total was his repentance for his past sins that he was placed for a time in a hospital for the mentally ill. But his repentance was real. He changed forever and always and started caring for the kind of person that he used to be.

John somehow raised enough money to start a small hospital and thus began, in an orderly and professional manner, to care for the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, convert the sinner, and shelter the homeless and orphans. He had no equal in giving of himself to his patients, and his reputation for holiness spread across Spain. He gave away his cloaks so often that his Bishop had a habit made, ordered John to put it on, and told him not to give it away. John’s total dedication to the poor and sick drew many followers. They emulated his generosity, and soon an Order was born. The group was eventually approved by the Holy See in 1572 under the title The Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God. The Order spread quickly throughout the world, often with the support of the Spanish Crown. Its work on behalf of the poor continues today in numerous countries through hundreds of institutions.

Saint John of God practiced a type of Ignatian spirituality in evaluating his own life. But he was not just a spectator of his life, observing it from the outside. He became a student of himself, evaluated his own errors, listened to advice, stopped what he was doing, changed direction, and charted a new course in middle age. He was, in modern terms, a “late vocation.” He cared little for his own physical health and died on his fifty-fifth birthday while kneeling in prayer before an altar in his room. In some saints there is a fine line between sanctity and madness. Saint John of God straddled that fine line. He became mad for the Lord and was canonized by the Church for his holy madness in serving the poor and the God who loves them.

Saint John of God, help us to follow your example of service to the poor through gift of self. You did not just ask for charitable donations but for charity itself. You did not ask others to do what you did not do yourself. Through your intercession, may all those in need encounter a servant as generous as yourself to satisfy their basic needs.

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March 7: Saints Perpetua and Felicity, Martyrs
c. Late Second Century–203
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saints of expectant mothers, widows, and butchers

They bled to death as pagan eyes drank in the spectacle

Many centuries ago in the desert lands of North Africa, now populated by millions of the adherents of Islam, there was once a thriving Catholic Church. Dioceses, bishops, theologians, shrines, schools, monasteries, convents, and saints filled the towns hugging the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This vibrant Catholicism generated, and was inspired by, the witness of numerous martyrs. Many of their names are known, among them today’s saints, Felicity and Perpetua. Few documents in Church history can match the raw power of the first-person, eye-witness narrative of the passion of Perpetua and Felicity. It is a gripping account filled with breathtaking dramatic detail. The reader can almost feel the hot sand of the arena warming his feet, a gentle sea breeze caressing his cheeks, and the sweaty crowd pressing against him, their roar for blood echoing through the dry air.

Vivia Perpetua, twenty-two years old, was married, a noblewoman, and a new mother whose baby was still nursing. Her pagan father begged his favorite daughter to renounce her Christian faith, but to no avail. Felicity was a slave and pregnant when jailed. She gave birth a few days before her martyrdom. Her child would be raised by Christian women in Carthage. Perpetua, in her own hand, recorded the events leading up to her martyrdom, while an eyewitness to her death completed the text later.

When they were first thrown into the arena, Perpetua and Felicity were attacked by a rabid heifer, which was chosen because it shared the same sex as its victims. The young women were grievously injured by the mad cow and then momentarily removed from the arena until gladiators were brought in to conclude the day’s spectacle. The executioners carried out their duties quickly, though Perpetua had to guide the gladiator’s sword to her throat after he first painfully struck a bone instead of a vein. As the narration states, “Perhaps such a woman...could not die unless she herself had willed it.” Saints Perpetua and Felicity were imprisoned together, suffered together, and died together in 203 A.D. in Carthage, North Africa, along with other noble martyrs whose names are preserved in the same account.

The vivid description of their deaths was so moving that it was faithfully preserved down through the centuries and has come to us largely intact. Apart from the New Testament writings themselves, only a few documents from the early Church pre-date the passion narrative of Perpetua and Felicity. It invites tantalizing reflection on how many similar firsthand testimonies of famous martyrdoms from the early Church have been lost! What could have been known about the final moments of Saints Paul, Cecilia, Agatha, and so many apostles and popes! The accounts of Perpetua, Felicity, and Polycarp must fire our imagination for all the rest. The Church in North Africa so often read the account of Perpetua and Felicity in its public liturgies that Saint Augustine, a North African bishop living two hundred years after their martyrdoms, had to remind his faithful that the narrative was not on a par with Scripture itself.

The fact that women and slaves, both mothers who loved their children, were willing to die rather than renounce their faith, testifies to the revolutionary message of Jesus Christ. He gave us a true religion. But He also gave us a true anthropology. He has revealed to man his true origins, his high dignity, and his ultimate purpose. Jesus reveals man to himself. So when early Christians, or present-day Christians, understand that they are made in God’s image and likeness, and that His Son died for them as much as He died for anyone else, they stand a little taller. If a Christian is told he is garbage, property, a slave, old, a prisoner, or a foreigner, he shouldn’t flinch at the insult, because under such denigrations is a deeper identity: “child of God,” “made in God’s image and likeness,” and “worthy of the blood of the Lamb.” These are the titles of a citizen of the Kingdom of God, whose shadow covers the earth and comforts all those who live in its shade. Felicity and Perpetua clung to their identity as Christians in the face of imprisonment, ridicule, torture, and pain. The newness of the faith, and the dignity it imparted, fortified them to accept death rather than a return to rough paganism. May our faith be as fresh to us.

Saints Felicity and Perpetua, your martyrdom was an act of bravery, which moved the Christians of your age and continues to move us today. Give all who invoke your names similar courage, fortitude, and faith to overcome timidity in witnessing to Christ in difficult circumstances.

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March 4: Saint Casimir
1458–1484
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Poland and Lithuania

A prince crowned with humility lives well but not long

Ever since the Three Kings left their gifts at the altar of the crib in Bethlehem, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, has drawn generations of nobles, kings, and emperors to Himself. Today we commemorate a young man named Casimir, Prince of Poland, who died at the age of twenty-five. Casimir was the third child in a family of thirteen siblings who had everything that life could offer. But it was still not enough, and Casimir knew it. Unlike many wealthy, powerful, educated people, Casimir knew that life did not offer, and could not offer, what the soul most deeply yearned for. He had his head screwed on straight and tight. Casimir never lost sight of the higher things that truly mattered, even though his life was full of the intrigues and cares of war and state.

Any true search is open to finding. A search that begins with the premise that it will never find, or never end, is not really a search. It’s just wandering. A true searcher must be a finder. How many people claim to be searching for the truth, for God, for meaning! Yet when they unearth the elusive treasure, open it up, and see its contents, they are disappointed and move along to search for something else. Why? Perhaps because the treasure made moral demands on them or required that prior life decisions be repudiated or modified. If a searcher sets personal conditions on what he will find, his search will never end. The search will just become a reflection of the searcher’s own personality and desires, not a true quest for something objective outside of himself.

Saint Casimir searched for God as a child, as all youth do. But his search unearthed a treasure early on. What Casimir sought, Poland provided. Casimir imbued so totally what his Catholic birthplace offered that he is considered an emblematic Polish prince: pious, just, chaste, poor, and strong. A country, similar to a religion, is a carrier of meaning. It absorbs and refines, over time, millions of individual searches until it responds to its people’s searches in the form of heroes, flags, hymns, holidays, and statues. A patriot loves his country in the same way that a religious man loves his religion and God. His love is specific. He loves a country, a religion, and a God—and Casimir was no exception.

It is said that behind every great man is a great woman. Saint Casimir never married and preserved his chastity until death, despite offers of marriage. What was behind him was not a great woman but a great nation. Poland was his mistress. The faith and thick traditions of Poland developed over many centuries in response to man’s search for meaning in that great nation. The Polish nation did not understand Poland’s past as an anchor, an imposition, or a burden. Poles understood their nation’s cultural riches as a common inheritance of their ancestors. And Poles were eager to honor their forefathers by faithfully accepting, with gratitude, what they handed down.

The fullness of these traditions was imparted to today’s saint from a young age by his teachers, especially by learned priests who were like second fathers to him. Casimir learned to love the Lord’s Passion, the Sacraments, the Virgin, and the Church. These loves deepened as he matured and personally experienced the harshness and venality of life at court and on the march. He did not need to become a priest or religious in order to live his faith. He remained a layman his entire brief life. In this he presaged the emphasis on lay vocations the Church would promote in the twentieth century. He was a layman, a prince, and a saint. Anything is possible in the Church for those who love God first and foremost.

Saint Casimir, we ask your intercession to aid all leaders of governments, churches, and families to emulate your virtues; to be poor in spirit, just, pure, and faithful. With your aid, may leaders guide those under their authority to love and serve their country and their God with greater fervor.

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March 3: Saint Katharine Drexel, Virgin (U.S.A.)
1858–1955
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of racial justice and philanthropists

From riches to rags, she lived the Catholic dream

Today’s saint wove in and out of oncoming traffic. She travelled north while everyone else was zooming south. Friends and acquaintances in her refined, educated, upper-class milieu glided past her in search of marriage, children, wealth, travel, security, and leisure. Katharine deftly avoided them and moved forward at her own deliberate pace, looking for poverty, chastity, obedience, solitude, and God. She turned down a marriage proposal, rejected a life of luxury, and resisted the expectations of her status. Katharine was deeply rooted in all things Catholic from her youth. She went from riches to rags, starting out immensely wealthy yet becoming progressively poorer with age. The classic American story is to begin with little, work hard, identify opportunity, live frugally, and ultimately attain success through sheer dint of effort. Saint Katharine Drexel’s father was immensely wealthy and powerful. He lived, even embodied, the American dream. His daughter lived the Catholic dream.

One of the reasons why Saint Katharine ever became a nun in the first place was because a Pope did his job. In 1887, Katharine and her two sisters went to Rome and were received in audience by Pope Leo XIII. Having come into enormous inheritances upon their father’s recent death, the young ladies were financially supporting some Indian missions in the American West. Katharine asked the Holy Father if he could send some missionaries to staff these missions. The Pope responded like a wise and zealous priest. He asked Katharine to send herself. That is, he asked her to consider consecrating her own life to Christ as a missionary sister. The Pope’s words were a turning point. She sought spiritual counsel from trusted priests and saw the path forward. In 1889, her local newspaper ran the headline: “Miss Drexel Enters a Catholic Convent—Gives Up Seven Million."

From that point on, Sister Katharine Drexel never stopped giving. Saint Teresa of Ávila said that one man and God make an army. With Saint Katharine Drexel, one woman and a fortune made an army. She founded an order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, with the counsel and encouragement of Saint Mother Cabrini. Her order began over a hundred missions and schools for American Indians and African Americans in the American South and West, including one of the first universities to admit racial minorities. Katharine was decades ahead of the civil rights movement which caught fire in the U.S. in the decade after her death. Sister Katharine spent a good part of her life on trains, travelling at least six months every year to visit her apostolates and the sisters who staffed them. Yet amid all this activity, she maintained an intense life of prayer. In this she emulated the balance typical of the greatest saints. Their concern for justice, not social justice, was rooted in a deep love of God present in the Blessed Sacrament. There was no duality in this. It wasn’t social work on one side and the sacraments and devotion on the other side. It was contemplation in action, love of God overflowing naturally into love of neighbor.

After a life of generous self-gift, Saint Katharine suffered a major heart attack and spent the last twenty years of her life largely immobile, in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. She had always retained the desire to become a contemplative, and it was granted, in a sense, in her last two decades. She died at a venerable age and was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000. Saint John Neumann, the Bishop of Philadelphia who died just two years after Katharine was born in his diocese, was a poor immigrant who embodied the best of the first wave of immigrant Catholicism in the U.S. Katharine embodied a succeeding generation of homegrown Catholicism. She was an icon of a new era of Catholic Americans who would power the incredibly organized and vibrant early and mid-twentieth century Church in the U.S: Catholic educated, socially conscious, pope-friendly, sacramentally focused, wealthy, and very generous. Saint Katharine lived and died a model nun.

Saint Katharine Drexel, intercede for all who love inordinately the things of this world. Your holy detachment from wealth and comfort freed you for a life dedicated to prayer and service. May we have that same detachment and that same commitment to God.

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February 27: St. Gregory of Narek, Abbot and Doctor
950–c. 1003
Optional Memorial: Liturgical Color: White
Widely venerated in Armenia

A mystical eastern monk praises God like a troubadour

A crowning glory of the Armenian people is that their nation was the first to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Approximately twelve years before the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, an Armenian King converted to Christianity. Following the universal custom of mankind, the King’s religion then became his people’s. Though the actual conversion of individual souls required decades of subsequent evangelical effort, this early baptism of an entire nation has granted the Armenian Apostolic Church unique status as the custodian of Armenian national identity. Living proof of Armenia’s ancient Christian pedigree is found in the old city of Jerusalem. An Armenian patriarch, cathedral, and seminary anchor the peaceful Armenian Quarter, one of the four neighborhoods packed behind the walls of the city where it all began.

Today’s saint, Gregory of Narek, was a medieval Armenian monk who wrote mystical poetry, hymns, and biblical commentaries. He is one of Armenia’s greatest literary figures and poets. His principal work, the “Book of Lamentations” consists of ninety-five prayers he composed as an encyclopedia of prayer for all people. The twentieth-century Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that while Western Medieval piety developed the rosary as a lay substitute for praying the Psalms, the Armenian tradition developed hymns and songs to Mary as the primary expression of popular piety, as seen in the works of St. Gregory of Narek (CCC #2678). Pope Saint John Paull II also referenced St. Gregory in his encyclical on Mary, Redemptoris Mater: “…with powerful poetic inspiration (St. Gregory) ponders the…mystery of the Incarnation, …an occasion to sing and extol the extraordinary dignity and magnificent beauty of the Virgin Mary, Mother of the Word made flesh.”

Like St. Ephrem, a centuries-earlier Syrian archetype of Eastern monasticism, St. Gregory uses metaphor, songs, litanies, and poetry to communicate Christian truth. The Western tradition, especially since the time of St. Augustine, tends to communicate the truths of Christianity in less artistic ways - through close reasoning, apologetics, the synthesis of Greek philosophy with Christian doctrine, and by showing the internal harmony of Scriptural texts.

The Armenian Christian tradition, like related ancient churches born near the cradle of mankind, has not sharpened its sword of thought by constant clashing with enemy metal, as has occurred in the West. The benefits of a monoculture - of a people who all speak the same language, kneel before the same God, profess the same faith, and sing the same songs – is deep unity. A monoculture has no need to hone arguments. When everyone agrees on the fundamentals, when the tapestry of a culture is not torn or frayed, the writer, priest, poet, composer, or monk can sing, whistle, ruminate, and dream like a madman or a troubadour. When he describes a rainbow as God’s bow in the sky, hears the sweet voice of Mary in a lark, imagines a devilish monster lurking in the wine-dark sea, or is convinced that the blood dripping from the side of Christ soaks and sanctifies the earth itself, the faithful quietly nod in agreement and humbly whisper: “Thus it is. Thus it shall always be.”

Little is known of the life of St. Gregory of Narek other than that he was a dedicated monk who lived his entire adult life in a monastery situated in todays’ eastern Turkey, in the Armenian homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas. St. Gregory’s essence is truly to be found in the spaces between his words. He is his writings. St. Gregory was never formally canonized, a not uncommon fact for holy men and women of his era. During a Mass in 2015 commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, Pope Francis declared St. Gregory of Narek a Doctor of the Church, the thirty-sixth person so honored and only the second from the churches of the East.

Surprisingly, St. Gregory was not a Catholic, though he did pertain to an apostolic church with legitimate sacraments and a hierarchical structure which, however, is not in formal communion with Rome. The narrow theological arteries that run east from Constantinople become thinner as they spread ever eastward, often terminating in ecclesiastical cardiac arrest – in churches without people, in thrones without bishops, in altars without sacrifices, and in monasteries without monks. It is one of the holy obligations of the still robust Roman Church to exalt those whom others cannot, to witness to beauty wherever it may be found, and to call Christian leaders to gather in the immensity of St. Peter’s Basilica to anoint the memory of a gifted Christian of long ago with the noble title of doctor.

St. Gregory of Narek, your quiet, humble, and hidden life produced a rich garden of poems and prayers. May your redolent words and rich images fire our imaginations and inflame our hearts so that our flame of faith burns as hot as yours in its love for Christ and Mary.

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February 23: Saint Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr
c. 69–c. 155
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saint of earache sufferers

A venerable bishop’s martyrdom ends the sub-apostolic age

A Catholic bishop is brutally executed in Turkey. His assassin yells “Allahu Akbar,” stabs his victim repeatedly in the heart, and then cuts his head off. There are witnesses to the act. The few local priests and faithful fear for their lives. The Pope in Rome is shocked and prays for the deceased. Five thousand people attend the solemn funeral Mass. An event from long ago? No.

The murdered bishop was an Italian Franciscan named Luigi Padovese, the mourning Pope was Benedict XVI, and the year was 2010. Turkey is dangerous territory for a Catholic bishop, whether he is Bishop Padovese or today’s saint, Bishop Polycarp. For over a millennium, the Anatolian Peninsula was the cradle of Eastern Christianity. That era has long since come to a close. A few hundred miles and one thousand eight hundred years separate, or perhaps unite, Bishop Padovese with Bishop Polycarp. Whether shed by the sharp knife of a modern Muslim fanatic or spilled by a sword swung by a pagan Roman soldier, the blood still ran red from the neck of a Christian leader, puddling in the dirt of a hostile land.

The news of the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, spread far and wide in his own time, making him as famous in the early Church as he is now. He was martyred around 155 A.D., one of the few early martyrs whose death is verified by documentation so precise that it even proves that he was executed on the exact day of his present feast—February 23. Polycarp was eighty-six years old when a rash of persecution broke out against the local Church. He waited patiently at a farm outside of town for his executioners to come and knock on his door. He was then brought before a Roman magistrate and ordered to reject his atheism. Imagine that. What an interesting twist! The Christian is accused of atheism by the pagan “believer.” Such was the Roman perspective. Christians were atheists because they rejected the ancient civic religion which had been believed by everyone, everywhere, and always.

The Roman gods were more patriotic symbols than objects of belief. No one was martyred for believing in them. No one fought over their creeds, because there were no creeds. These gods did for Rome what flags, national hymns, and civic holidays do for a modern nation. They united it. They were universal symbols of national pride. Just as everyone stands for the national anthem, faces the flag, puts their hand over their heart, and sings the familiar words, so too did Roman citizens walk up the wide marble steps of their many-columned temples, make a petition, and then burn incense on the altar of their favorite god.

It required heroic courage for Polycarp, and thousands of other early Christians, to not drop some grains of incense into a flame burning before a pagan god. For the Romans, to not burn such incense was akin to spitting on a flag. But Polycarp simply refused to renounce the truth of what he had heard as a young man from the mouth of Saint John: that a carpenter named Jesus, who had lived a few weeks to the south of Smyrna, had risen from the dead after His cold, linen-wrapped body had been placed in a guarded tomb. And this had happened recently, in the time of Polycarp’s own grandparents!

Polycarp was proud to die for a faith he had adopted through hard-earned thought. His pedigree as a Christian leader was impeccable. He had learned the faith from one of the Lord’s very own Apostles. He had met the famous Bishop of Antioch, Saint Ignatius, when Ignatius passed through Smyrna on the way to his execution in Rome. One of Saint Ignatius’ famous seven letters is even addressed to Polycarp. Polycarp, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon tells us, even travelled to Rome to meet with the Pope over the question of the dating of Easter. Irenaeus had known and had learned from Polycarp when Irenaeus was a child in Asia Minor. Polycarp’s own letter to the Philippians was read in churches in Asia as if it were part of Scripture, at least until the fourth century.

It was this venerable, grey-haired man, the last living witness to the apostolic age, whose hands were bound behind him to a stake, and who stood “like a mighty ram” as thousands screamed for his blood. Bishop Polycarp nobly accepted what he had not actively sought. He was stabbed to death after the flames licking his aged skin failed to consume him. His body was burned after his death, and the faithful preserved his bones, the first instance of relics being so honored. A few years after Polycarp’s death, a man from Smyrna named Pionius was martyred for observing the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp. In just this fashion links are added, one after another, to the chain of faith which stretches down the centuries to the present, where we honor Saint Polycarp as if we were seated within earshot of the action in the stadium that fateful day.

Great martyr Saint Polycarp, make us steadfast witnesses to the truth in word and deed, just as you witnessed to the truth in your own life and death. Through your intercession, make our commitment to our religion a life project, enduring until our life of faith concludes with a death of faith.

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February 22: Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle
Feast; Liturgical Color: White

The gift of authority serves order and truth in the Church

It’s unusual to have a feast day for a chair. When we think of a chair, perhaps we think of a soft recliner into which our body sinks as if into a warm bath. Or our mind turns to a classroom chair, a chair in a waiting room, or one at a restaurant. But the chair the Church commemorates today is more like the heroic-sized marble chair which holds the giant body of President Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. We commemorate today a chair like the judge’s in a courtroom or that unique high-backed chair called a throne. These are not ordinary chairs. They are seats of authority and judgment. They hold power more than people. We stand before them while their occupants sit. Judges and kings retire or die, but chairs and thrones remain to hold their successors. The Nicene Creed even describes Jesus as “seated” at God’s right hand. The fuller, symbolic meaning of the word “chair” is what today’s feast commemorates.

Against the farthest wall of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome is not a statue of Saint Peter, as one might imagine, but a heroic-sized sculpture framing a chair. To celebrate the Chair of St. Peter is to celebrate the unity of the Church. The chair is a symbol of Saint Peter’s authority, and that authority is not meant for conquest like military power. Ecclesiastical authority is directed toward unity.

Jesus Christ could have gathered an unorganized group of disciples united only by their common love of Him. He didn’t. He could have written the Bible Himself, handed it to His followers, and said, “Obey this text.” He didn’t. Jesus called to Himself, by name, twelve men. He endowed them with the same powers He possessed and left this organized band of brothers as an identifiable, priestly fraternity specifically commissioned to baptize and to preach. In North Africa at the time of Saint Augustine, twelve co-consecrating bishops were canonically required at the ordination of a bishop, mirroring “The Twelve” called by Christ. What a profound liturgical custom! Today the Church requires only three co-consecrators.

What is even more striking about Christ’s establishment of an orderly Church structure is its double organizing principle. The Twelve’s headship over the many is itself subjected to the headship of Saint Peter. He is the keeper of the keys, the rock upon which the Lord built His Church. This all makes sense. What good would a constitution be without a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes over its interpretation? Any authoritative text needs a living body to stand over it to arbitrate, interpret, and define, with authority equal to the text itself, any and all misinterpretations, confusions, or honest disputes. Just as a constitution needs a court, the Bible needs a Magisterium. And that Magisterium, in turn, needs a head as well.

The authority of the papal office, doctrinally, is a negative charism preserving the Church from teaching error. It is not a guarantee that the pope will teach, explain, or live the faith perfectly. Christ guaranteed that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. That’s a negative promise. But this promise also prophesies that the Office of Peter will be a lightning rod absorbing strikes from the forces of evil, that this Church, and no other, will be the target of the darkest of powers. A real Church has real enemies.

The Church has never had an Office of Saint Paul. When the person of Paul disappeared, so did his specific role. But the Office of Peter continues, as does the Office of all the Apostles. In other words, the Church has both a foundation and a structure built on that foundation. And authority in that structure is not transmitted personally, from father to son or from one family to the next. Authority attaches to the Office of St. Peter and endows its occupant with the charisms promised by Christ to Saint Peter. And this charism will endure until the sun sets for the last time. As long as there is a Church, it will teach objective truth guaranteed by objective leadership. And that leadership, symbolized in the Chair of St. Peter, is directed toward unity. One Lord. One faith. One Shepherd. One flock. The united fabric of the Church, so fought for, so torn, so necessary, is what we honor today.

God in Heaven, we thank You for the ordered community of faith we enjoy in the Church. Saint Peter guided the early Church and guides Her still, ensuring that we remain one, holy, catholic, and apostolic until the end of time. Continue to grace Your Church with the unity so necessary to accomplish Her mission on earth.

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Ash Wednesday
Forty-six days before Easter
Liturgical Color: Violet

Without God we are a tiny pile of crumbs

The marauding pirates of the high seas had their tough skin inked with tattoos. Roman soldiers smothered their bodies in oil before a battle. Primitive peoples ritually paint a warrior’s face before a fight, stretch earlobes with hoops, or pierce noses with large rings. When American Indians wanted to emulate the ferocity or speed of an animal, a sharp bone fragment was used to carve that creature’s outline into their skin, where it was stained with dye or soot. Traditionally, when a simple man wanted to announce what tribe he ran with, what nation he would die for, or what woman he would defend, he didn’t need to say a word. He just lifted up his shirt a bit, rolled up his sleeve, or pointed to a mark on his neck. Clothes, hairstyle, and cosmetics communicate status, origin, belonging, and commitment well. But they can all be removed or changed. Tattoos, scalpings, piercings, brands, paints, and scars use the body as their canvas to permanently convey what words cannot.

On Ash Wednesday, Catholics receive a temporary ash “tattoo” of a cross just above their eyes and nose. This primal gesture evokes the raw, uncomplicated, religious devotion at the core of our otherwise sophisticated theology. The Church consecrates the body externally with water and oil in Baptism, Confirmation, and Anointing of the Sick. The Church reads Saint Thomas Aquinas, sings refined Latin chant, and prays before luminous stained glass. And it also smudges black ashes on our faces. Real religions do things like this. A real religion has priests who smear your face with dirty ash as they whisper, “You’re gonna die.”

Man’s earthly end, the separation of soul and body, could have come about in many ways. But due to original sin, this end always comes through death. Death is a punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin of pride in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. This sin is not original in the sense of being authentic or unrepeatable, but in that it occurred at our common origin. As a permanent repercussion of His punishment, God made work burdensome and instituted death as the mysterious doorway through which all must walk to exit earthly life. God told this to our common parents in Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The last of these words are repeated to the faithful as the ashes are placed on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

But as these words of death and destruction, of returning to the ground, are spoken, the priest does not trace an ash circle or a black question mark on our foreheads. He traces a cross. In this sign we shall conquer. In no other sign will we conquer. So with death comes a promise. With the old Adam there comes a new Adam—Jesus Christ. This is how Jesus was first understood in the early Church. Mary was the New Eve. Christ was the New Adam. They untied the knot our remote ancestors had tied. They were faithful where Adam and Eve were unfaithful. They kept the promise Adam and Eve had broken.

The start of the forty days of Lent is a practice run. One day, we will all have to give an accounting of our lives. The balance sheet will have to be settled, the good and the bad weighed in their columns. Ash Wednesday is a reminder of something we know but don’t call to mind often enough. Without God all that remains of our greatness is a little pile of dust. We are, in a sense, marked with ourselves today. The tiny black crumbs of ash will fall away in a matter of hours, to be forgotten for another year. And life will go on. Such is our destiny. With God, everything. Without God, nothing.

God of all, we ask that we live a fruitful Lent starting on this Ash Wednesday. Help us to be faithful to our promises of penance, sacrifice, and repentance for past sins. May we see in the ashes of today our true nature without You. May we see in the cross our true destiny with You.

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February 21: Saint Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor
1007–1072
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Faenza and Font-Avellana, Italy

A wise monk becomes a Cardinal and thunders for reform

Every Catholic knows that the Pope is elected by, and from, the Cardinals of the Church gathered in the Sistine Chapel. Every Catholic knows that the Pope then goes to a large balcony perched high in the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica to greet the faithful and receive their acceptance. This is simply the way things are done in the Church. But it’s not the way things were always done. A Catholic in the early Middle Ages would have described a papal election as something like a bar room brawl, a knife fight, or a political horse race replete with bribes, connivings, and promises made just to be broken. Everyone—far-off emperors, the nobility of Rome, military generals, influential laity—tried to steer the rudder of the Church in one direction or another. Papal elections were deeply divisive and caused lasting damage to the Body of Christ. Then along came Saint Peter Damian to save the day.

Saint Peter headed a group of reform-minded Cardinals and others who decided in 1059 that only Cardinal Bishops could elect the Pope. No nobles. No crowds. No emperors. Saint Peter wrote that the Cardinal Bishops do the electing, the other clergy give their assent, and the people give their applause. This is exactly the program the Church has followed for almost a thousand years.

Today’s saint sought to reform himself first, and then to pull every weed that choked life from the healthy plants in the garden of the Church. After a difficult upbringing of poverty and neglect, Peter was saved from destitution by an older brother named Damian. Out of gratitude, he added his older brother’s name to his own. He was given an excellent education, in which his natural gifts became apparent, and then entered a strict monastery to live as a monk. Peter’s extreme mortifications, learning, wisdom, uninterrupted life of prayer, and desire to right the ship of the Church put him into contact with many other Church leaders who desired the same. Peter eventually was called to Rome and became a counselor to a succession of popes. Against his will, he was ordained a Bishop, made a Cardinal, and headed a diocese. He fought against simony (the purchasing of church offices), against clerical marriage, and for the reform of papal elections. He also thundered, in the strongest language, against the scourge of homosexuality in the priesthood.

After being personally involved in various ecclesiastical battles for reform, he requested leave to return to his monastery. His request was repeatedly denied until finally the Holy Father let him return to a life of prayer and penance, where his primary distraction was
carving wooden spoons. After fulfilling a few more sensitive missions to France and Italy, Peter Damian died of fever in 1072. Pope Benedict XVI has described him as "one of the most significant figures of the eleventh century...a lover of solitude and at the same time a fearless man of the Church, committed personally to the task of reform." He died about one hundred years before Saint Francis of Assisi was born, yet some have referred to him as the Saint Francis of his age.

More than two hundred years after our saint’s death, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy. The author is guided through paradise and sees a golden ladder, lit by a sunbeam, stretching into the clouds above. Dante begins to climb and meets a soul radiating the pure love of God. Dante is in awe that the heavenly choirs have fallen silent to listen to this soul speak: "The mind is light here, on earth it is smoke. Consider, then, how it can do down there what it cannot do up here with heaven’s help." God is unknowable even in heaven itself, so how much more unfathomable must He be on earth. Dante drinks in this wisdom and, transfixed, asks this soul its name. The soul then describes its prior earthly life: “In that cloister I became so steadfast in the service of our God that with food seasoned just with olive-juice lightheartedly I bore both heat and cold, content with thoughtful prayers of contemplation. I was, in that place, Peter Damian.” Dante is among refined company in the loftiest ranks of heaven with today’s saint.

Saint Peter Damian, you never asked of others what you did not demand of yourself. You even endured the detraction and calumny of your peers. Help us to reform others by our example, learning, perseverance, mortifications, and prayers.

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February 17: Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order
Thirteenth Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
Invoked to aid in imitating the charity of Our Lady of Sorrows

Groups buttress fidelity to individual good intentions

There are many reasons to join a group. To quilt, play soccer, learn chess, or travel. We accomplish personal goals in a group that we would never accomplish alone. Groups create positive peer pressure to show up on time, read the book, do the exercise, or complete the task assigned. When we join a group, we freely create obligations for ourselves, because we know, deep down, that accountability to others encourages fidelity to our own obligations.
The groups of the medieval world were called guilds. Craftsmen of similar skills organized in guilds to learn, promote, and protect their trade. Guilds offered mutual assistance that no individual could replicate. There was power in numbers. Today we commemorate seven young men who belonged to a merchant guild in Florence, Italy, in the 1200s. These seven men were serious Christians. They loved God and the Church. And in addition to protecting their commercial interests by joining a guild, they also protected their souls by joining a local spiritual guild called the Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin, where their spiritual exercises were guided by a wise and educated priest who encouraged their devotion.

After the members of the Confraternity experienced mystical visions of the Virgin Mary, there was nothing left to do except abandon the world, set aside money for their families, and flee the busy city for a solitary life in the nearby mountains. The Seven fasted, prayed, and lived lives of such extreme austerity that a visiting cardinal admonished them to stop living like dogs. Over time they adopted a rule, accepted new recruits, elected leaders, and spread throughout Italy and beyond. They eventually took the name of the Order of Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as the Servants of Mary, or Servites.

The Seven Holy Founders were especially devoted to the Seven Sorrows of Mary, and the Servites were instrumental in the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows becoming part of the Church’s calendar on September 15. The sword that pierced Mary’s heart, the tears she shed when witnessing Our Lord’s passion, indeed all the Sorrows of Mary motivated the Seven Holy Founders to promote devotion to Mary under this title. Mary was strong and stood at the foot of the cross. But she was also a mom who loved her boy. So she had a heavy heart that continually pondered what His suffering meant. We unite in joy at Christ’s resurrection on Easter and join with Mary’s sorrow just days before. The emotions of Scripture become the emotions of those who read it and those who live it in the liturgy and devotions of the Church.

The names of the Seven Holy Founders are known. But the Church celebrates them as a group, with their individuality ceding to their group identity. Together they accomplished more than seven men working separately could ever have accomplished. Their confraternity became an Order, and that Order still exists for the mutual spiritual benefit of all, a theological guild holding its members to high standards of spiritual perfection. Servite priests and brothers are still active in various countries around the world, hundreds of years after the Order’s founding. This is a testament to the immovable, rock-solid foundation on which its Seven Holy Founders constructed their spiritual and theological home.

Our prayers turn to you, Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order. Help us to find mutual support in loving God and Mary through a holy alliance with like-minded Christians. Through your example, may our love for God burn hotter than a single flame.

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February 14: Saints Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop
St. Cyril: 827–869; St. Methodius: 815–884
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Co-Patrons of Europe and Apostles to the Slavs

Two makers of Europe light the flame of Eastern Christianity

The Cyrillic alphabet, used by hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Russia, is named after today’s Cyril. Numerous proofs could be advanced for why a certain person is historically significant. Few proofs, however, can eclipse an alphabet being named after you. The evangelical labors of Cyril and Methodius were so path breaking, long lasting, and culture forming that these brothers stand in the very first rank of the Church’s greatest missionaries. Shoulder to shoulder with brave men such as Patrick, Augustine of Canterbury, Boniface, Ansgar, and others, they baptized nations, mustered clans from the forests, codified laws, transcribed alphabets, and transformed the crude pagan gropings for the divine into the transcendent worship of the one true God at Mass. Saints Cyril and Methodius helped form the religiously undivided reality of Christendom long before it was ever called Europe.

Cyril was baptized as Constantine and was known by that name until late in his life. He and Methodius were from Thessalonica, in Northern Greece, where they spoke not only Greek but also Slavonic, a critical linguistic advantage for their later missionary adventures. Cyril and Methodius received excellent educations in their youth and, as they matured, were given important educational, religious, and political appointments in an age when those disciplines were braided into one sturdy cord. The people, the state, and the Church were an undivided whole. Cyril and Methodius served the imperial court, the one true Church, and their native land as professors, governors, abbots, deacons, priests, and bishops.

Sometime after 860, the brothers were commissioned by the Emperor in Constantinople to lead a missionary crew heading into Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. They walked straight into a tangled web of political, religious, linguistic, and liturgical controversies which have vexed Eastern and Central Europe until today. The Church of Rome allowed only three languages to be used in its liturgical and scriptural texts—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—the three languages inscribed above Christ’s head on the cross. The Church in the East, juridically under Rome but culturally spinning off into its own orbit over the centuries, was a patchwork of peoples where local vernaculars were used in the liturgy. Languages are always spoken long before they are written, and the spoken Slavonic of Moravia had unique sounds demanding new letters populating a new alphabet. Cyril created that new alphabet, and then he and Methodius translated Scripture, various liturgical books, and the Mass into written Slavonic. This led to some serious tensions.

The newly Christianized German bishops were suspicious of missionaries in their own neighborhood who came from Greece, spoke Slavonic, and who celebrated the sacred mysteries in a quasi-Byzantine style. Moravia and the greater Slavic homeland were under German ecclesiastical jurisdiction, not Greek. How could the Mass be said in Slavonic, or the Gospels translated into that new language? How could a Byzantine liturgy co-exist with the Latin rite? Cyril and Methodius went to Rome to resolve these various issues with the Pope and his advisers.

The brothers were treated respectfully in Rome as well-educated and heroic missionaries. Cyril died and was buried in the Eternal City. Methodius returned to the land of the Slavs and to ongoing tensions with German ecclesiastics and princes. He translated virtually the entire Bible into Slavonic, assembled a code of Byzantine church and civil law, and firmly established, with the Pope’s permission, the use of Slavonic in the liturgy. After Methodius’ death, however, German and Latin Rite influences prevailed. The Byzantine Rite, the use of Slavonic in the liturgy, and the Cyrillic alphabet were all forced from Central to Eastern Europe, particularly into Bulgaria, shortly after Methodius died.

While they were always honored in the East, the Feast of SS. Cyril and Methodius was extended to the entire Catholic Church only in 1880. Pope Saint John Paul II named Saints Cyril and Methodius Co-Patrons of Europe. Their massive legacy inspires the two lungs of the Church, both East and West, to breathe more deeply the enriched oxygen of the entire Christian tradition.

Saints Cyril and Methodius, you prepared yourselves for brave and generous service to Christ and His Church through long years of preparation and, when the time came, you served heroically. May we so prepare, and so serve, until we can serve no more.

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February 11: Our Lady of Lourdes
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
Patroness of bodily ills

A heavenly lady appears to a country girl, and miracles follow

In 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous told her friends that a beautiful young lady was appearing to her in a rock formation on the outskirts of her small town of Lourdes. A friend asked Bernadette to do her a favor—to hold the friend’s rosary in her hands the next time Bernadette knelt before the beautiful young lady. Bernadette obliged. Later, Bernadette told her friend how the lady had reacted. The lady had noticed that Bernadette was not holding her own rosary but someone else’s. The lady further said she was not there to make relics and told Bernadette to return next time with her own rosary instead of another’s.

Bernadette’s unvarnished recounting of the lady’s reaction was blunt but reasonable and, more importantly, authentic. This plainspokenness fit a pattern. Over and over again, whenever little, uneducated Bernadette was asked about the beautiful young lady she saw in the grotto, her answers never changed and included startling but authentic details. Bernadette reported that when she and the lady prayed the rosary together, the lady only said the Our Father and the Glory Be. Mary didn’t pray the Hail Mary. How could she pray to herself? Would she say “Hail Me?” Bernadette reported that the lady spoke to her in the Lourdes’ dialect which Bernadette herself grew up with, slightly different from standard French. Bernadette stated that a golden rose rested on each of the lady’s feet. Of course! And when Bernadette respectfully asked the lady her name, she didn’t understand the big words in the response: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

In addition to the miraculous cures associated with the healing waters of Lourdes, the very character of Bernadette, as well as the tone and content of her accounts, removed all doubt that the beautiful young lady she saw was indeed the Virgin Mary. Our Lady of Lourdes is perhaps the most powerful and prolific physical healer in the history of the Church after Christ himself. Through her intercession, and through the waters that flow in her magnificent shrine, many thousands have been cured of their infirmities, as medical records prove beyond any doubt. Holy Mary has appeared at various times and in various places, mostly to the simple and mostly in the country. She loves the faith of the simple and speaks to them in simple language. In this, Mary reflects the words of her Son Jesus. He speaks plainly. His message is clear. And Mary’s simple words always point to the simple words of her own Son.

God is like the sun whose fiery brilliance scorches the eyes of all who look right at Him. Get too close and you’ll be burned. Like the sun, the Creator of the world can be distant, mysterious, and intimidating. But Mary is like the moon, bathed in a soft, pleasant glow. She’s close to us, and easy on the eyes. The sun’s heat and light may make life possible, but the sun itself is dangerous and remote. But Mary can be approached by man. And like the moon, she doesn’t produce her own light but just reflects in a softer tone the powerful rays of the enormous star whose light generates life itself.

Our Lady of Lourdes, give physical healing to all who invoke your intercession. The saving waters at your shrine have healed thousands of pilgrims. May all the prayers and supplications directed to you be immersed in the waters of your holy baths, so that what is asked may be granted through your intercession and according to God’s will.

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February 10: Saint Scholastica, Virgin
c. Early Sixth Century–547
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saint of nuns, convulsive children, education, and books

A mysterious woman co-founds Western monasticism

Saint Scholastica was born in the decades after the last Western Emperor was forced to abandon the crumbling city of Rome in 476. Power was concentrated in the East, in Constantinople, where the real action was. Many centuries would pass until the Renaissance would cover Rome again in its classical glory. But what happened in Western Europe between the end of the Roman era in the fifth century and the dawn of the Renaissance in the fifteenth? Monasticism happened. Armies of monks founded innumerable monasteries crisscrossing the length and breadth of Europe like the beads of a rosary. These monasteries drove their roots deep into the native soil. They became centers of learning, agriculture, and culture that naturally gave birth to the dependent towns, schools, and universities which created medieval society. Monks transformed the farthest northwestern geographic protrusion of the Asian landmass into, well, Europe.

Saint Benedict and his twin sister, Saint Scholastica, are the male and female sources for that wide river of monasticism which has carved its way so deeply into the landscape of the Western world. Yet very little is known with certainty about her life. Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590–604, wrote about these famous twins about a half century after they died. He based his account on the testimony of abbots who personally knew Scholastica and her brother.

Gregory’s biographical commentary emphasizes the warm and faith-filled closeness between the siblings. Scholastica and Benedict visited each other as often as their cloistered lives allowed. And when they met, they spoke about the things of God and the Heaven that awaited them. Their mutual affection grew out of their common love of God, showing that a correct understanding and love of God is the only source of true unity in any community, whether it be the micro-community of a family or the mega-community of an entire country. When a unified God is understood and worshipped, a unified community results.

The Benedictine monastic family tried to replicate the common knowledge and love of God which Scholastica and Benedict lived in their own family. Through common schedules, prayer, meals, singing, recreation, and work, the communities of monks who lived according to the Benedictine Rule, and who live it still, sought to replicate the well-ordered and fruitful life of a large, faith-filled family. Like a well-trained orchestra, all the monks meld their talents into an overwhelming harmony under the wand of the abbot, until their common effort swells over into the beautiful churches and music and schools that carry on today.

The gravestones in monastery cemeteries often have no names engraved on them. The polished marble may say, simply, “A holy monk.” The anonymity is itself a sign of holiness. What matters is the body of the larger religious community, not the individual who was just one of that body’s cells. Saint Scholastica died in 547. Her grave is known, marked, and celebrated. She is buried in a luxurious sepulchre in an underground chapel of the monastery of Monte Casino in the mountains south of Rome. She is not anonymous in her resting place, like so many monks and nuns. But she is anonymous in that so few details illustrate her character. Perhaps that was by design. Perhaps it was humility. She and her brother are major religious figures whose stamp is still impressed into Western culture. Yet she is a mystery. She is known by her legacy, and sometimes a legacy is enough. In her case, it is definitely enough.

Saint Scholastica, you established the women’s branch of the Benedictine Religious Order and so gave Christian women their own communities to govern and rule. Help all who invoke your intercession to remain anonymous and humble even when developing great plans for God and His Church. You are great, and you are unknown. Help us to desire the same.

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February 8: Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin
1869–1947
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Sudan and human-trafficking survivors

Out of Africa comes a slave, to freely serve the Master of all

Black-on-black or Arab-on-black slavery normally preceded and made possible the white-on-black slavery practiced by the colonial powers. These powers—England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy—were not slave societies, but their colonies were. The complex, pancultural reality of the slave trade and of slavery itself was on full display in the dramatic early life of today’s saint.

The future Josephine was born in Western Sudan, centuries after the Church and most Catholic nations had long since outlawed slavery. Enforcing such teachings and laws was infinitely more difficult, however, than promulgating them. And so it happened that a little African girl was kidnapped by Arab slave traders, forced to walk six hundred miles barefoot, and was then sold and resold over a twelve-year period. She was forcibly converted from her native religion to Islam, was cruelly treated by one master after another, was whipped, tattooed, and scarred. After experiencing all the humiliations inherent to captivity, she was bought by an Italian diplomat. She had been too young, and it had been too long, so she did not even know her own name when the diplomat bought her, and she had unclear recollections of where her family would be. She, essentially, had no people. The slave traders had given her the Arabic name Bakhita, “The Fortunate,” and the name stuck.

Living with limited freedom as a maid with her new family, Bakhita first learned what it meant to be treated like a child of God. No chains, no lashes, no threats, no hunger. She was surrounded by the love and warmth of normal family life. When her new family was returning to Italy, she asked to accompany them, thus beginning the long second half of her life’s story. Bakhita eventually settled with a different family near Venice and became the nanny for their daughter. When the parents had to tend to overseas business, Bakhita and the daughter were put in the care of local nuns. Bakhita was so edified by the sisters’ prayer and charity that when her family returned to take her home, she refused to leave the convent, a decision reaffirmed by an Italian court which determined she had never legally been a slave in the first place. Bakhita was now absolutely free. “Freedom from” exists to make “freedom for” possible, and once free from obligations to her family, Bakhita chose to be free for service to God and her religious order. She freely chose poverty, chastity, and obedience. She freely chose not to be free. That is the opposite of slavery.

Bakhita took the name Josephine and was baptized, confirmed, and received First Holy Communion on the very same day from the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, Giuseppe Sarto, the future Pope Saint Pius X. The same future saint received her religious vows a few years later. Saints know saints. The trajectory of Sister Josephine’s life was now settled. She would remain a nun until her death. Throughout her life, Sister Josephine would often kiss the baptismal font, grateful that in its holy water she became a child of God. Her duties were humble—cooking, sewing, and greeting visitors. For a few years she travelled to other communities of her Order to share her remarkable story and to prepare younger sisters for service in Africa. One nun commented that “her mind was always on God, but her heart in Africa.” Her humility, joy, and sweetness were infectious, and she became well known for her closeness to God. After heroically enduring a painful illness, she died with the words “Our Lady, Our Lady” on her lips. Her process began in 1959, and she was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000.

Saint Josephine, you lost your freedom when young and gave it away when an adult, showing that freedom is not the goal but the pathway to serving the Master of all. From your place in heaven, give hope to those enduring the indignity of slavery and to those bound tightly by other chains.

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February 8: Saint Jerome Emiliani, Priest
1481–1537
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of orphans and abandoned children

He was forever grateful after a near-death experience

In the year 1202, a wealthy young Italian man joined the cavalry of his town’s militia. The inexperienced soldiers went into battle against a neighboring town’s larger force and were obliterated. Most of the retreating soldiers were run through with lances and left for dead in the mud. But at least one was spared. He was an aristocrat wearing fine clothes and new, expensive armor. He was worth taking hostage for ransom. The captive suffered in a dark, miserable prison for a full year before his father made the payment for his release. He returned to his hometown a changed man. That town was Assisi. That man was Francis.

Today’s saint, Jerome Emiliani, endured much the same. He was a soldier in the city state of Venice and was appointed the commander of a fortress. In a battle against a league of city-states, the fortress fell and Jerome was imprisoned. A heavy chain was wrapped around his neck, hands, and feet, and fastened to a huge chunk of marble in an underground prison. Jerome was forgotten, alone, and treated like an animal in the gloom of a dungeon. This was the pivot point. He repented of his godless life. He prayed. He dedicated himself to the Madonna. And then, somehow, he escaped, chains in hand, and fled to a nearby city. He walked through the doors of the local church and headed to the front to fulfill a fresh vow. He slowly approached a much-venerated Virgin and placed his chains on the altar before her. He knelt, bowed his head, and prayed. His life was about to begin again.

Some pivot points can turn a life’s straight line into a right angle. Other lives change slowly, bending like an arc over a long span of years. The deprivations endured by Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Jerome Emiliani occurred suddenly. These men were healthy, had money, and were supported by family and friends. Then, shockingly, they were naked, alone, and chained. Saint Jerome could have despaired in his imprisonment. Many people do. He could have rejected God, understood his sufferings as a sign of God’s disfavor, become bitter, and given up. Instead, he persevered. His imprisonment was a purification. He gave his suffering purpose.

Once free, he was like a man born anew, grateful that the heavy prison chains no longer weighed down his body to the floor. Once he started sprinting away from that prison fortress, it was like Saint Jerome never stopped running. He studied, was ordained a priest, and travelled throughout Northern Italy founding orphanages, hospitals, and homes for abandoned children, fallen women, and outcasts of all kinds. Exercising his priestly ministry in a Europe newly split by Protestant heresies, Jerome also wrote perhaps the first question-and-answer catechism in order to inculcate Catholic doctrine in his charges. Like so many saints, he seemed to be everywhere at once, caring for everyone except himself. While tending to the sick, he became infected and died in 1537, a martyr to generosity. He was, naturally, the kind of man who attracted followers. They eventually formed into a religious Congregation and received ecclesiastical approbation in 1540. Saint Jerome was canonized in 1767 and named the Patron Saint of orphans and abandoned children in 1928.

Jerome’s life hinged on one pivot. It is a lesson. Emotional, physical, or even psychological suffering, when conquered or controlled, can be a prelude to intense gratitude and generosity. No one walks down the street more free than a former hostage. No one rests more peacefully in a warm, comfortable bed than someone who once slept on the ground. No one gulps a breath of fresh morning air quite like someone who has just heard from the doctor that the cancer is gone. Saint Jerome never lost the wonder and gratitude that flooded his heart at the moment of his liberation. All was new. All was young. The World was his. And he would place all his power and energy in God’s service because he…was…a…survivor.

Saint Jerome Emiliani, you overcame confinement to live a fruitful life dedicated to God and man. Help all who are confined in any way—physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically—to overcome whatever binds them and to live a life without bitterness.

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February 6: Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
St. Paul Miki: c. 1562–1597; Late Sixteenth Century
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saints of Japan

Native Japanese die to gain the pearl of great price

The words of the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier capture the pathos of today’s memorial: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” The swift rise, and sudden fall, of Catholicism in Japan is one of the great “might-have-beens” in human history. Portuguese and Spanish priests, mostly Jesuits and Franciscans, brought the Catholic religion to the highly cultured island of Japan in the late 1500s with great success. Tens of thousands of people converted, two seminaries were opened, native Japanese were ordained as priests, and Japan ceased to be mission territory, being elevated to a diocese. But the rising arc of missionary success just as quickly curved downward. In waves of persecutions from the 1590s through the 1640s, thousands of Catholics were persecuted, tortured, and executed until the Catholic religion, and indeed any outward expression of Christianity, was totally eradicated.

Japan almost became a Catholic nation, coming close to joining the Philippines as the only thoroughly Catholic society in Asia. Japan might have done for Asia in the 1600s what Ireland did for Europe in the early Middle Ages. It could have sent scholars, monks, and missionary priests to convert nations far larger than itself, including China. It was not to be.
Paul Miki was a native Japanese who became a Jesuit. The Jesuits would not accept into their seminary men from India or other nations who they felt were of inferior education. But the Jesuits had immense respect for the Japanese, whose culture was equal to, or even exceeded, that of Western Europe. Paul Miki was among those who, after being educated in the faith, evangelized their own people in their own language. He and others blazed a new pathway forward, allowing the Japanese to not only understand but to see, in flesh and blood, that they could retain the best of their native culture while being faithful to the newfound God of Jesus Christ.

Paul, a Jesuit brother, and his companions were the first group to suffer mass martyrdom in Japan. A military leader and adviser to the Emperor feared Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the island and ordered the arrest of six Franciscan priests and brothers, three Japanese Jesuits, sixteen other Japanese, and one Korean. The captured had their left ears mutilated and were then forced to march, bloodied, hundreds of miles to Nagasaki. On February 5, 1597, Paul and his companions were bound to crosses on a hill, like Christ, and pierced with lances. An eyewitness described the scene: “Our brother, Paul Miki, saw himself standing in the noblest pulpit he had ever filled. To his “congregation” he began by proclaiming himself a Japanese and a Jesuit... ‘My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves.’ Then he looked at his comrades and began to encourage them in their final struggle...Then, according to Japanese custom, the four executioners began to unsheathe their spears…The executioners killed them one by one. One thrust of the spear, then a second blow. It was over in a short time.”

The executions did nothing to stop the Church. Persecution only fanned the flames of faith. By 1614 about 300,000 Japanese were Catholics. More intense persecutions followed until Japan’s leaders sealed off their ports and borders from virtually all foreign penetration, a policy that lasted until the nineteenth century. Only in 1854 was Japan forcibly opened to foreign trade and Western visitors. Then, thousands of Japanese Catholics suddenly came out of hiding, mostly near Nagasaki. They bore the names of the Japanese martyrs, spoke some Latin and Portuguese, asked their new guests for statues of Jesus and Mary, and sought to verify if a French priest was legitimate with two questions: 1) Are you celibate?; and 2) Do you come from the Pope in Rome? These hidden Christians also opened their fists to show the priest something else—relics of the martyrs who their remote ancestors had honored centuries before. Their memory had never died.

Saint Paul Miki, you accepted martyrdom rather than abandon your faith. You chose to serve those closest to you rather than to flee. May we too know, love, and serve God in the heroic fashion that made you so brave and composed in the face of intense suffering.

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February 5: Saint Agatha, Virgin and Martyr
c. Third Century
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saint of Sicily, breast cancer, rape victims, and bellfounders

Of all the men drawn to her, she desired only one

Pope Saint Gregory the Great reigned as the Supreme Pontiff of the Church from 590–604. His family loved Sicily and had property there, so the young Gregory was familiar with that beautiful island’s saints and traditions. When he became Pope, Saint Gregory inserted the names of two of Sicily’s most revered martyrs, Agatha and Lucy, into the heart of the Mass, the Roman Canon. Saint Gregory even placed these two Sicilians just before the city of Rome’s own two female martyrs, Agnes and Cecilia, who had been part of the Roman Canon for many centuries prior. It was this papal decision that has preserved Saint Agatha’s memory more effectively than anything else. Liturgy is inherently conservative and protects the Church’s oldest memories. So on the lips of thousands of priests every day are the names of some of the Church’s most revered female martyrs: “Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and all the saints.”

Not much is known for certain about the life and death of Saint Agatha, but long tradition supplies what primary documents lack. Pope Damasus (366–384) may have composed a poem in her honor, indicating how widespread her reputation was by that early date. Agatha was from a well-off family in Roman Sicily, probably in the third century. After dedicating her life to Christ, her beauty drew powerful men to her like a magnet. But she refused all suitors in favor of the Lord. Perhaps during the persecution of the Emperor Decius around 250, she was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and martyred. She refused to renounce her faith or to give in to the powerful men who desired her. An ancient homily relates: “A true virgin, she wore the glow of a pure conscience and the crimson of the lamb’s blood for her cosmetics.”

It is also the constant tradition that her torture included sexual mutilation. Saint Lucy is shown in art with her eyeballs on a platter. Saint Agatha is normally shown holding a plate on which rest her own breasts, as they were cut off by her pagan tormentors before her execution. This peculiar image is, in fact, carved into the entrance of Rome’s sixth-century church of Saint Agatha, a church re-dedicated by Pope Saint Gregory himself so long ago.

Men commit most of the physical violence in the world. And when their victims are women, that violence can be particularly vicious because their victims are so defenseless. The stories of the early male martyrs of the Church relate tales of extreme torture by
their Roman captors. But the stories of the women martyrs often relate something more—sexual humiliation. Few male martyrs suffered similar indignities. Saint Agatha and others were not only physically tough to endure the pain they did but also mentally and spiritually powerful to have resisted, to the death, the public embarrassment and degradation particular to them as women. They were the strong ones. Their male captors looked weak.

It was Christianity’s exaltation of women, children, slaves, prisoners, the old, the sick, the foreigner, and the outcast that caused the vast leaven of the Church to slowly rise in the Mediterranean world. The Church did not create a victim class who complained about a privileged class. The Church preached the dignity of persons. The Church did not even preach equality of individuals or teach that governments must enact laws protecting the unprotected. That is all so modern. The Church spoke in theological language and taught that every man, woman, and child was made in God’s image and likeness and so deserved respect. It taught that Jesus Christ died on the Cross for every person. The Church gave, and gives, total answers to total questions, and those answers were, and are, compelling. The Feast of St. Agatha is still massively celebrated on February 5 in Catania, Sicily. Hundreds of thousands of faithful process through the streets in honor of that island’s patron saint. The ancient traditions carry on.

Saint Agatha, you were a virgin espoused to Christ Himself, a bride of the Lord who preserved herself for Him alone. Your vow to love God above all else hardened you to endure temptation, torture, and degradation. May we be as resolute as you when any type of persecution, however mild, seeks us out.

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February 3: Saint Ansgar, Bishop
801–865
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Scandinavia, Denmark, and Sweden

He sowed the frozen turf of the North, though little bloomed

Today’s saint walked the forests of Northern Europe during that stretch of history later known, prejudicially, as the “Dark Ages.” He lived three hundred years after the fall of Rome and yet three hundred years before the soaring gothic spires of the High Middle Ages pierced the blue sky. “Ansgar” is a grunt or a mere sound to modern ears. It seems fit for a remote, cold, and brutal age. It is difficult to imagine a child running into the warm embrace of a sunny Ansgar. But the real Saint Ansgar broke bread with Northern Vikings and rough warriors of the forest with names just like his own: Horik, Drogo, Gudmund, and Vedast. Ansgar was one of them, with one big difference—he was a Catholic.

The one thing, a very big thing, that links such long-ago saints, priests, and bishops to us moderns is the Catholic faith. We share the exact same faith as Saint Ansgar! If Saint Ansgar were to step out of the pages of a book today, in his bear fur pelt and deerskin boots, and walk through the doors of a twenty-first-century Catholic church, he would be at home. His eyes would search for the burning flame of the sanctuary lamp, and upon spotting it, he would know. He would bend his knee before a tabernacle housing the Blessed Sacrament, just as he did thousands of times in the past. He would walk past statues of Mary and the saints and know their stories. He would hear the same Gospel, make the same sign of the cross, and feel the same drops of blessed water on his forehead. Nothing would be unusual. Our faith unites what time and culture divide. The Church is the world’s only multicultural, transnational, timeless family. There is nothing else like Her.

Saint Ansgar left his native region in Northern France, after receiving a good Christian education, to become an apostle monk to Northern Germany. He was named by the Pope as Archbishop of Hamburg and, from that post, organized the first systematic evangelization of Scandinavia. These regions were far, far away from the more developed civilizations of Italy, Spain, and France. Yet Saint Ansgar and his helpers traveled that far, and risked that much, to plant the Catholic faith in the frozen ground of what is today Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Yet nearly all the seeds of faith that Saint Ansgar planted were to die in the ground shortly after his own death. Sadly, his missionary efforts produced no long-lasting fruit. The age of the Vikings dawned, and it would be two centuries before Christianity would again flourish and spread across the northern arc of Europe. Yet even that second evangelization would come to a bitter end! In the sixteenth century, Scandinavia abandoned Catholicism for its shadow under the influence of Father Luther and his followers.

What a lesson to be learned! As Saint Paul wrote, one plants, one waters, and God gives the growth: “The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each” (1 Co 3:8). Saint Ansgar carried out God’s will. He labored for the Lord and for the faith. What happened after that was up to God in His providence. Carrying out God’s will should be enough for us, as it was for our saint today. We must plant and till, even though harvest time may never come.

Saint Ansgar, you persevered in difficult times to bring the faith to a pagan land. You saw success and then failure, glory and then disappointment. Your work did not outlast you but pleased God nonetheless. May we see our work as our duty, even when the fruit of our labor is harvested by someone else, or not at all.

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February 3: Saint Blaise, Bishop and Martyr
c. Early Fourth Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of wool combers and sufferers of throat diseases

The memory of an obscure bishop-martyr endures

A secularist does not evaluate religion on its own terms but on its practical benefits. Is a religion true? It doesn’t matter. But if you can prove that empty stomachs are now full, that malarial fevers are cooled, and that formerly dusty roads are now paved due to religion, then religion is indeed useful and good, all truth claims aside. Religion’s role in physical healing would be another proof of its great good, if not its truth. For all the incontestable progress of medicine, cancers still spread, tumors still grow, and infections still poison. Even the most modern of moderns, in a state of total vulnerability, understands in his deepest of deeps that physical healings surge from sources other than modern science. PhDs wash in the River Ganges, rocket scientists lower their bodies into the cool baths of Lourdes, and surgeons spread sacred oil on their skin hoping against hope for a cure that has eluded medicine.

The memory of Saint Blaise, a man of obscure origins, stands behind one of the most enduring healing traditions in all of Christendom. In the holy name of Blaise, two candles are crossed, X-shaped, and pressed against the neck to ward off and cure diseases of the throat. Oils and relics, candles and flames, bread and wine, words and blessings. God’s face does not appear in the ash cloud rising from a volcanic eruption or in a golden pile at the end of a rainbow. The Christian believes that God’s salvation and healing power come through His Holy Mother, through His saints, and through the creation He molded in His own hands.

A believer doesn’t believe in belief, any more than a soldier loves patriotism. A soldier loves his country, and a believer loves God. And because the believer loves God, he loves a someone, not a something, and waits in line and shuffles forward, step by step, to the priest holding those X-shaped candles on today’s feast. Because it is usually winter, the believer adjusts his jacket collar, feels the milky wax candle against his tender throat, closes his eyes, and prays that the cough disappear, that his voice remain strong, or that the faintest lump turn out to be nothing at all. Saint Blaise is primarily a “Northern” saint invoked to remedy mostly cold-climate ills.

Details of Saint Blaise’s life are difficult to verify. Some traditions, dating from centuries after he lived, state that he was a bishop in Armenia, east of modern-day Turkey. His reputation for holiness drew people to him in search of a cure for their infirmities. It is said that Blaise was tortured and murdered in an anti-Christian persecution. Every saint, no matter how remote his life or obscure his story, casts some light on the truths of our faith. The life of Saint Blaise and the tradition of throat healing that still surrounds him tell us that holy lives have power. His life tells us that holy people intercede for less holy people, and that the less powerful, the less wise, and the less good depend on the strong, the intelligent, and the virtuous in order to leave their state of dependence, ignorance, and sin.

In the same way that salvation is mediated, healing is as well. Whether through the skilled hands of a surgeon, the chemicals of a drug, or the intercession of a saint, healing comes. The many channels branch out from the one source who is God. We, the faithful, when fragile and afraid, patiently sit in the doctor’s office for our name to be called, wait at the pharmacy counter for the prescription to be filled, or line up in church for the candles to rest softly on our clavicles. Healing is on offer, we are ripe to be cured, and any sacred intervention is welcome, no matter whence it comes.

Saint Blaise, many centuries ago you suffered for the same faith we now share with you. May we be ever united to you in our common Church, and may we be healed of all infirmities of the throat through your heavenly intercession.

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February 2: The Presentation of the Lord
Feast; Liturgical Color: White

God goes to Church

The various names, meanings, and traditions overlapping in today’s Feast churn like the crystals in a kaleidoscope, revealing one image and then another with every slight rotation of the tube. The Presentation of the Lord in the Temple is, rotate, also the Purification of Mary. But, rotate, it’s also known as the “Meeting of the Lord” in the Christian East. And, rotate, it’s also the Feast of Candlemas, marking forty days after Christmas. The multiple names and meanings of today’s Feast have given birth to surprisingly broad and varied cultural expressions. The biblical account of the Presentation is the source for the “two turtle doves” in the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” for the sword piercing Mary’s Immaculate Heart in Catholic iconography, for the Fourth Joyful Mystery of the rosary, and for the Canticle prayed by all the world’s priests and nuns every single night of their lives. The Presentation is even the remote source of the frivolous American folkloric tradition of Groundhog Day.

Behind all of these names and meanings are, however, a few fundamental theological facts worthy of reflection. The Lord Jesus Christ, forty days after His birth, in keeping with both the biblical significance of the number forty and with Jewish custom, was presented in the temple in Jerusalem by His parents, Mary and Joseph. Saint Luke’s Gospel recounts the story. After the Presentation, Jesus was to enter the temple again as a boy and later as an adult. He would even refer to His own body as a temple which He would raise up in three days. Jesus’s life was a continual self-gift to God the Father from the very beginning to the very end. His parents did not carry their infant Son to a holy mountain, a sacred spring, or a magical forest. It was in His temple that the God of Israel was most present, so they brought their Son to God Himself, not just to a reflection of Him in nature.

The extraordinarily beautiful temple in Jerusalem, the building where Jesus was presented by His parents, was burned to ashes by a powerful Roman army under the future Emperor Titus in 70 A.D. It was never rebuilt. A tourist in Rome can, even today, gaze up at the marble depictions of the sack of the Jerusalem Temple carved on the inside vaults of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. Christianity has never had just one sacred place equivalent to the Jewish Temple or the Muslims’ Kaaba in Mecca. Christianity is historical, yes, but it has a global reach rising above any one culture or region.

Christ is destined for all cultures and all times. Every Catholic church with the Blessed Sacrament is a Holy of Holies, which fully expresses the deepest mysteries of our faith. There is no strict need to go on pilgrimage to Rome or to Jerusalem once in your life. But you do have to go on pilgrimage to your local parish once a week for Mass. Every Catholic church in every place, not just one building in one place, encompasses and transmits the entirety of our faith. God’s hand must have been involved in the headship of the Church migrating from Jerusalem to Rome in the first century. Our Pope does not live in the historical cradle of the faith he represents, because Saint Peter saw no need to remain in Jerusalem in order to be faithful to his Master. The Church is where Christ is, Christ is in the Holy Eucharist, and the Holy Eucharist is everywhere.

We go to church, as the Jews went to their one temple or to their many synagogues, because God is more God in a church. And when we experience the true God, we experience our true selves. That is, we are more us when God is more God. God is interpreted according to the mode of the interpreter when He is sought in a glowing sunset, a rushing waterfall, or a stunning mountain. In nature, God is whoever the seeker wants Him to be. In a church, however, God is protected from misinterpretation. He is surrounded and protected by His priests, saints, sacraments, music, art, and worship. In a church, God is fully clothed, equipped, and armored. He is less likely to be misunderstood. So we go to find Him there, to dedicate ourselves to Him there, and to receive Him there in His Body and in His Blood.

Lord Jesus, as an infant You were brought to the temple by Your parents out of religious duty. Help all parents to take their duties to God seriously, to inculcate their faith in the next generation by their words and actions, so that the faith will be handed on where the faith is first learned—in the family and in the home.

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January 31: Saint John Bosco, Priest
1815–1888
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of editors, publishers, schoolchildren, and juvenile delinquents

His fatherly heart radiated the warm love of God

Some saints attract the faithful by the raw power of their minds and the sheer force of their arguments. Think of Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine. Other saints write so eloquently, with such grace and sweetness, that their words draw people to God like bees to honey. Think of Saint John Henry Newman or Saint Francis de Sales. Still other saints say and write almost nothing, but lead lives of such generous and sacrificial witness that their holiness is obvious. Think of Saint Francis of Assisi or Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Today’s saint was not a first-class thinker, eloquent writer, bloody martyr, or path-breaking Church reformer. Yet his abundant gifts drew people to God in their own unique way.

Saint John Bosco was, to put it in the simplest terms, a winner. His heart was like a furnace radiating immense warmth, fraternal concern, and affectionate love of God. His personality seemed to operate like a powerful magnet that pulled everyone closer and closer in toward his overflowing, priestly, and fatherly love. His country-boy simplicity, street smarts, genuine concern for the poor, and love of God, Mary, and the Church made him irresistible. Don Bosco (‘Don’ being a title of honor for priests, teachers, etc.) had charm. What he asked for, he received. From everyone. He built, during his own lifetime, an international empire of charity and education so massive and so successful that it is impossible to explain his accomplishments in merely human terms.

Like many great saints, Don Bosco’s external, observable charisms were not the whole story. Behind his engaging personality was a will like a rod of iron. He exercised strict self-discipline and firmness of purpose in driving toward his goals. His gift of self, or self-dedication, was remarkable. Morning, noon, and night. Weekday or weekend. Rain or shine. He was always there. Unhurried. Available. Ready to talk. His life was one big generous act from beginning to end.

Saint John grew up dirt poor in the country working as a shepherd. His father died when he was an infant. After studies and priestly ordination, he went to the big city, Turin, and saw first-hand how the urban poor lived. It changed his life. He began a ministry to poor boys which was not particularly innovative. He said Mass, heard confessions, taught the Gospel, went on walks, cooked meals, and taught practical skills like book binding. There was no secret to Don Bosco’s success. But no one else was doing it, and no one else did it so well. Followers flocked to assist him, and he founded the Salesians, a Congregation named after his own hero, Saint Francis de Sales. The Salesian empire of charity and education spread around the globe. By the time of its founder’s death in 1888, the Salesians had 250 houses the world over, caring for 130,000 children. Their work continues today.

Don Bosco was not concerned with the remote causes of poverty. He did not challenge class structures or economic systems. He saw what was in front of him and went “straight to the poor,” as he put it. He did his work from the inside out. It was for others to figure out long-term solutions, not for him. Don Bosco did not know what rest was and wore himself out by being all things to all men. His reputation for holiness endured well beyond his death. A young priest who had met him in Northern Italy in 1883, Father Achille Ratti, later became Pope Pius XI. On Easter Sunday 1934, this same pope canonized the great Don Bosco whom he had known so many years before.

Saint John Bosco, you dedicated your life to the education and care of poor youth. Aid us in reaching out to those who need our assistance today, not tomorrow, and here, not somewhere else. Through your intercession, may we carry out a fraction of the good that you achieved in your life.

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January 28: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor
1225–1274
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of universities and students

A theological Grand Master, he positioned every piece exquisitely on the chessboard

The silhouette of Saint Thomas Aquinas hovers like a giant on the highest summit of human thought, casting so wide and deep a shadow over the landscape that all subsequent thinkers labor on the shady slopes below him. It is fair to say that Thomism, the thinking method and intellectual conclusions of Saint Thomas, has been the Catholic Church’s standard theology since he lived in the thirteenth century.

Saint Thomas understood that all thinking about God is done from inside original sin and within the parameters of human intellectual capacity. The uncreated, timeless, mysterious God, then, is by definition incomprehensible to creatures trapped in time, space, matter, sin, distraction, and confusion. God is outside of the universe, rather than being just one important ingredient in the recipe of reality. This essential “otherness” of God means that His presence is not completely accessible to the senses. It is not just a question of seeing farther, understanding more deeply, hearing more acutely, or feeling more intensely. Twenty senses instead of five would still not be enough to capture God, because He transcends all other forms of being known to us. In the 1950s, a Russian cosmonaut looked out over space from his orbit miles above the earth and declared "I have found no God." He was looking for something that wasn’t there and answering a question that was poorly posed.

Sometimes God is described as the highest being in an immense hierarchy of beings. From this perspective, the tiniest specks of organic or inorganic life, up and onward through plant and animal life, mankind, the planets and the solar system itself, are all beneath and owe their creation to the super being of God Himself. In this “ladder-of-existence” understanding, every being is a rung leading to higher and higher rungs at the top of which stands God.

Such an understanding of God is inaccurate, Aquinas would hold. God is not the highest of all beings but Being itself. Every person at one time did not exist. Creation itself, including mankind, is created, meaning at some point it was not. But God cannot not be. For Saint Thomas, God’s essential action is to exist. It is intrinsic to His nature as God. God, then, is not something in the air but the air itself. He is not the biggest whale in the ocean. He is the water. This means that there is no strict need to provide scientific evidence for God, because even asking the question presumes the reality all around us. Science, for example, can explain the chemical composition of ink, but it has nothing to say about the meaning of words printed in ink. Science clearly has limits.

Thomism’s understanding of God as non-contingent being, which makes all dependent existence possible, is intellectually sophisticated and also deeply attractive. This understanding of God meshes nicely with an appreciation for the natural beauty of the earth, love of art, and charity for our fellow man, while also allowing space for God to reveal Himself more fully, and gratuitously, in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. Importantly, it also avoids confusing God’s creation with God Himself.

Saint Thomas’s encyclopedic knowledge and massive erudition existed harmoniously with a humble nature and a simple, traditional Catholic piety. He was a well-balanced man and a dedicated Dominican priest. This synthesis of childlike wonder and deep inquiry marked his life. After having a mystical vision of Jesus Christ on the cross while praying after Mass one day, Saint Thomas abandoned any further writing. He died on his way to the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, not yet fifty years old. He is buried in Toulouse, France, retaining his status as the Church’s most eminent theologian.

Saint Thomas, your life of the mind co-existed with a deep piety. Your writings defend the faith of those who have neither the time nor the gift for higher study. Help all those who teach in the Church to follow your example of humble and faithful inquiry into the highest truths.

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January 27: Saint Angela Merici, Virgin
1474–1540
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of disabled and physically challenged people and illnesses

A holy woman tries to change the world one girl at a time

Although not common, some older images and statues of Saint Francis of Assisi show him balancing three orbs on his shoulders. They appear to be globes, heavenly realms, or the earth, the moon, and the sun. But the three orbs actually represent the three orders in the Franciscan family: the first order for men, the second order for women, and the third order for the laity who desire to live by the Franciscan Rule. Today’s saint, Angela Merici, was a Third Order Franciscan, a lay woman who followed a strict rule of Franciscan life outside of a convent.

Angela’s holiness, mystical experiences, and leadership skills ultimately led her beyond her Franciscan commitment to found her own community of “virgins in the world” dedicated to the education of vulnerable girls or, in modern parlance, at-risk youths. She placed the community under the patronage of Saint Ursula. The community, after Angela’s death, was formally recognized as the Ursulines and gained such renown for their schools that they came to be known as the female Jesuits.

Saint Angela saw the risk that uneducated girls in her native region of Northern Italy would end up being abused sexually or financially and sought to counter these possible outcomes through education. She gathered a like-minded group of virgins around her into a “company,” a military word also used by Saint Ignatius in founding his “Company of Jesus” around the same time. Saint Angela organized her city into districts which reported to “colonels” who oversaw the education and general welfare of the poor girls under their care. Saint Angela’s cooperators did not understand their dedicated virginity as a failure to find a husband or a rejection of religious life in a convent. They emulated the early Christian orders of virgins as spouses of Christ who served the children of their Beloved in the world.

Living in the first part of the sixteenth century, Saint Angela was far ahead of her time. Teaching orders of nuns became normative in the Church in later centuries, staffing Catholic schools throughout the world. But nuns did not always do this. This practice had to start with someone, and that someone was today’s saint. Bonds of faith, love of God, and a common purpose knitted her followers together into a religious family that served the spiritual and physical welfare of those who no one else cared about. Women make a house a home, and Saint Angela sought to change society one woman at a time by infusing every home with Christian virtue emanating from the heart of the woman who ran it. She trained future wives, mothers, and educators in their youth, when they were still able to be formed.

The Papal Bull of Pope Paul III in 1544, which canonically recognized her community, stated of Saint Angela Merici: “She had such a thirst and hunger for the salvation and good of her neighbor that she was disposed and most ready to give not one, but a thousand lives, if she had had so many, for the salvation even of the least…with maternal love, she embraced all creatures...Her words...were spoken with such unheard of effectiveness that everyone felt compelled to say: ‘Here is God.’”

Saint Angela Merici, infuse in our hearts that same love for which you left worldly joys to seek out the vulnerable and the forgotten. Help us to educate the ignorant and to share with the less fortunate, not only for their spiritual and material benefit but for our everlasting salvation.

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January 26: Saints Timothy and Titus, Bishops
First Century
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of stomach disorders

Saint Paul could not do it alone

Today’s saints were two bishops from the apostolic period of the Church, those decades immediately following the death and resurrection of Our Lord. In this grace-filled time, the Apostles and Saint Paul were carving the first deep furrows into the pagan soil they traveled, planting in the earth the rich seeds of Christian faith which succeeding bishops would later water, tend, and harvest.

Little is certainly known about today’s saints apart from references to them in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles of Saint Paul. But these numerous references are enough. The generations of theologians, bishops, martyrs, and saints who lived in the post-apostolic period give universal and consistent witness to the veracity of Paul’s letters and the events they recount. There are theological, more than historical, lessons to be taken from the lives and ministry of today’s saints.

Saints Timothy and Titus were apostles of an Apostle. They shared in the ministry of Saint Paul, who had a direct connection to Christ through a miraculous occurrence on the road to Damascus, a feast commemorated, not coincidentally, the day prior to today’s memorial. Timothy, Titus, and many others, known and unknown, carried out on a local level a priestly ministry which Paul engaged in on a more regional level. It was Saint Paul’s practice, and probably that of the other surviving Apostles, to appoint assistants wherever they went who acted with the authority of the Apostle who appointed them. These assistants were variously called priests or bishops, terms that were often interchangeable. Deacons, of course, shared in the priestly ministry too, but more as assistants to bishops.

A direct connection to an Apostle, either through his personal ministry or through a group or delegate he appointed (through an ordination rite), was fundamental to establishing a church. Accredited leaders were needed. This is a constant theme in the writings of Saint Paul. No Apostle—no Church. The body could not be separated from the head and still survive. In other words, the faithful proclamation of the Gospel always—always—occurred contemporaneously with the foundation of a solidly structured local Church. The modern tendency to emphasize the internal, personal, and spiritual message of Christ over the external, public, hierarchical Church which carries His message is a dichotomy unknown to early Christianity. For early Christians and faithful Christians still today, the Church carries a message and is itself a message. The content of the Gospel and the form of the Gospel community go hand in hand. The constant, amoeba-like splitting of Protestant communities attests to the inevitable divisions which result when the Church and its message are separated.

A later tradition holds that Saint Timothy was the first Bishop of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey. Equally ancient traditions state that Saint John the Evangelist retreated to Ephesus before dying on the island of Patmos, and that Mary followed John to Ephesus, living in a house above the town. It is possible, then, that Saint Timothy drank from the deepest wells of the Christian tradition. Sitting around the warm glow of a fire at night, he may have heard about the life of Christ from the very lips of the most important witnesses—Mary and John. We can imagine that Timothy heard about many of the unwritten events of Christ’s life from Saint John. It is this same John who ends his Gospel by writing that “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21:25). Timothy and Titus were bearers of the very oldest Christian traditions.

Saints Timothy and Titus, through your lives dedicated to the missions, you helped lay the foundations of Christianity, and carried on the priestly ministry of Jesus by preaching, teaching, and governing His flock. Help us to be as bold now as you were then.

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January 25: The Conversion of Saint Paul
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of missionaries, evangelists, and writers

One man can change the world

In the long history of the Church, no conversion has been more consequential than Saint Paul’s. Paul had not been ambivalent toward the Church before he converted. He had actively persecuted it, even throwing rocks at the head of Saint Stephen, in all likelihood. But he changed, or God changed him, on one particular night. And on that night, Christianity changed too. And when the course of Christianity changed, the world changed. It is difficult to overemphasize the import of Saint Paul’s conversion.

One way to think about the significance of an event, whether big or small, is to consider what things would have been like if the event had never occurred. This is the premise behind the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You compare actual life with a hypothetical “what if” alternative scenario. What if Saint Paul had remained a zealous Jew? What if he had never converted? Never wrote one letter? Never travelled the high seas on missionary voyages? It can safely be assumed that the world itself, not just the Church, would look different than it does today. Perhaps Christianity would have remained confined to Palestine for many more centuries before breaking out into wider Europe. Maybe Christianity would have taken a right turn instead of a left, and all of China and India would be as culturally Catholic as Europe is today. It’s impossible to say. But the global scale of the effects of Paul’s ministry speak to the significance of his conversion.

Some conversions are dramatic, some boring. Some are instantaneous, some gradual. Augustine heard a boy in a garden repeating, “Take and Read,” and knew the time had come. Saint Francis heard Christ say from the cross, “Rebuild My Church,” and responded with his life. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the father of abortion in the United States, repudiated and repented of his life’s work and searched for a real Church to forgive his real sins. He ultimately bowed his head to receive the waters of baptism.

The details of Paul’s conversion are well known. He was, perhaps, thrown from his horse on the road to Damascus (except that Acts makes no mention of a horse). Maybe he just fell down while walking. While stunned on the ground, Paul heard the voice of Jesus ask: “Why are you persecuting me?”—not “Why are you persecuting my followers.” Jesus and the Church are clearly one. To persecute the Church is to persecute Christ. Jesus is the head, and the Church is His body. Paul did not convert to loving Jesus while saying that the Church was just an accidental human construct that blocked him from the Lord. No, of course not! He believed what right-minded Catholics have believed for centuries and still believe today. To love Jesus is to love the Church, and vice versa. It is impossible to love the Lord while disregarding the historical reality of how the Lord is communicated to us. The Church is not just a vehicle to carry God’s revelation. The Church is as much a part of God’s revelation as Scripture.

Paul’s conversion teaches us that when Jesus comes to us, He doesn’t come alone. He comes with His angels, saints, priests, and bishops. He comes with Mary, the sacraments, doctrine, and devotions. He comes with the Church, because He and the Church are one. And when we go to the Lord, we don’t go alone either. We go as members of a Church into whose mystical body we were baptized. Thus Saint Paul heard from God Himself, and thus we believe today.

Saint Paul, we ask your openness to conversion when we hear the Lord speak to us as He spoke to you. Assist us in responding with great faith to every invitation we receive to love the Lord more fully, to know Him more deeply, and to spread His word more broadly to those who need it.

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1567–1622
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of writers and journalists

A talented gentleman of sterling character embodies holiness

It is almost an act of rudeness to limit the life of today’s saint to a page or two. Saint Francis de Sales was a religious celebrity in his own day and age. He was an erudite, humble, tough, and zealous priest and bishop. He was holy and known to be holy by everyone, especially those closest to him. He mingled easily with princes, kings, and popes, who enjoyed his charming and educated company. He incessantly crisscrossed his diocese on foot and horseback, destroying his own health, to visit the poor and humble faithful who were drawn to him as much as the high born. He embodied to the fullest that extraordinary pastoral and intellectual productivity, characteristic of the greatest saints, which makes one wonder if he ever rested a single minute or slept a single night.

Saint Francis de Sales was born and lived most of his life in what is today Southeast France. His father ensured that he received an excellent education from a young age, and his son excelled in every subject. His intellectual gifts, holiness, and engaging personality made him, almost inevitably, an ideal candidate for the priesthood and eventually the episcopacy. He was duly appointed the Bishop of Geneva, a generation after John Calvin, a former future priest, had turned that deeply Catholic city into the Protestant Rome. Saint Francis was Bishop of Geneva primarily in name, not fact.

In carrying out his ministry, Francis’ weapon of choice was the pen. His apologetic and spiritual works brought back to the faith tens of thousands of former Catholics after they had dabbled in Calvinism. Saint Francis’s works were so profound and creative, and his love of God so straightforward and understandable, that he would be declared a Doctor of the Church in 1877. In his most well-known book, Introduction to the Devout Life, he addressed himself to “people who live in towns, within families, or at court.” His sage spiritual advice encouraged the faithful to seek perfection in the mechanic’s shop, the soldier’s regiment, or on the wharf. God’s will was to be found everywhere, not just in monasteries and convents.

Many arduous pastoral trips through the mountains of his native region eventually wore him out. Saint Francis never insisted on preferential treatment despite his status. He slept, ate, and traveled as a common man would. When he lay dying, mute after a terrible stroke, a nun asked him if he had any final words of wisdom to impart. He asked for some paper and wrote three words on it: “Humility, Humility, Humility.” Saint Francis is buried in a beautiful bronze sepulchre displaying his likeness in the Visitation Basilica and Convent in Annecy, France.

Saint Francis de Sales, we ask your intercession to aid us in leading a balanced life of study, prayer, virtue, and service. You were a model bishop who never expected special privilege. Help all those who teach the faith to convey doctrine with the same force, clarity, and depth that you did.

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January 23: Saint Marianne Cope, Virgin (U.S.A.)
1838–1918
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Hawaiʻi, lepers, outcasts, and sufferers of HIV/AIDS

She learned generosity at home and lived it her whole life

Today’s saint was a model female Franciscan who emulated Saint Francis’ heroic example of personally caring for the outcasts of all outcasts—lepers. Saints are not born, of course; they are made. And Saint Marianne Cope came from a specific time, place, and family. She could have developed her abundant talents in many directions and used them for many purposes, but she re-directed what God loaned her to serve Him, His Church, and mankind. The Church, the Franciscans, and Hawaiʻi were the arenas in which this elite spiritual athlete exercised her skills. She was asked for much and gave even more. She became a great woman.

Marianne Cope was born in Germany and was brought to New York state by her parents when she was still a baby. She was the oldest of ten children. Her parents lived, struggled, and worked for their kids. She saw generosity in action at home every day. She quit school after eighth grade to work in a factory to financially support her ailing father, her mother, and her many siblings. The challenges inherent to immigration, a new culture, illness, a large family, and poverty turned Marianne into a serious, mature woman when she was just a teen.

Marianne fulfilled her long-delayed desire to enter religious life in 1862. Once professed, she moved quickly into leadership positions. She taught in German-speaking Catholic grade schools, became a school principal, and was elected by her fellow Franciscans to positions of governance in her Order. She opened the first hospitals in her region of Central New York, dedicating herself and her Order to the time-honored religious vocation of caring for the sick, regardless of their ability to pay for medical services. She was eventually elected Superior General. In her early forties, she was already a woman of wide experience: serious, administratively gifted, spiritually grounded, and of great human virtues. But this was all mere preparation. She now began the second great act of her drama. She went to Hawaiʻi.

In 1883 she received a letter from the Bishop of Honolulu begging her, as Superior General, to send sisters to care for lepers in Hawaiʻi. He had written to various other religious Orders without success. Sister Marianne was elated. She responded like the prophet Isaiah, saying, “Here am I; send me!” (Is 6:8). She not only sent six sisters, she sent herself! She planned to one day return to New York but never did. For the next thirty-five years, Sister Marianne Cope became a type of recluse on remote Hawaiʻi, giving herself completely to the will of God.

Sister Marianne and her fellow Franciscans managed one hospital, founded another, opened a home for the daughters of lepers, and, after a few years of proving themselves, opened a home for women and girls on the virtually inaccessible island of Molokai. Here her life coincided with the final months of Saint Damien de Veuster. Sister Marianne nursed the future saint in his dying days, assuring him that she and her sisters would continue his work among the lepers. After Father Damien died, the Franciscans, in addition to caring for the leprous girls, now cared for the boys too. A male Congregation eventually relieved them of this apostolate.

Sister Marianne Cope lived the last thirty years of her life on Molokai until her death in 1918. She was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 and canonized by him in 2012. She loved the Holy Eucharist, the Virgin Mary, and the Church. And because she loved God first, she loved those whom God loves, her brothers and sisters in Christ. She sacrificed for them, left home and family for them, put her health at risk for them, and became a saint through them.

Saint Marianne Cope, help us to be as generous as you were in serving those on the margins, those who need our help, and those who have no one else to assist them. You were a model Franciscan in dying to self. Help us to likewise die so that we might likewise live.

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January 22: Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children (U.S.A.)
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White or Violet
Unborn Children (U.S.A.)

Abortion is a black eye on the handsome face of America

At 3:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964, a young woman parked her car next to her apartment building in Queens, New York. She got out and started walking toward the door when, in the darkness, she spotted someone in her path. She changed direction and ran toward a police call box. The man caught up and tackled her to the ground. He stabbed her in the back. She screamed for help. Lights blinked on; windows opened. She screamed repeatedly, “I’m dying! Help me!” The attack continued. Forty-five minutes later, a neighbor called the police. Officers arrived and identified the victim as twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese. At least thirty-eight neighbors heard or witnessed the attack. Not one of them came to her aid. Only one called the police, belatedly.

The response to Kitty Genovese’s murder was widely studied and became known as the “Genovese Syndrome” or the “Bystander Effect.” As the number of bystanders to a crime or accident increases, the likelihood of anyone doing anything about it decreases. Because everyone thinks someone else is going to intervene, no one does anything. Ironically, if Kitty’s attack had been witnessed by just one person, instead of thirty-eight, her chances of survival would have increased.

Moral outrage is stifled, duty is diminished, and the desire to blend in predominates in groups. Even if a group is witnessing something awful, many individuals keep quiet. January 22, 1973, marks the dark anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, which blew the moral lights out for the protection of the unborn in the United States. All right-thinking people have an obligation to name abortion for what it is, regardless of what others may say. A country is like a big group, and we tend to conform to group norms. But scientific and technological advances have erased all doubt about whether pre-born life is human life. It’s a baby. When a woman is expecting, no one goes to a “fetus shower,” they go to a “baby shower.” It’s not a potential human life. It’s a human life with potential.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Jewish by blood and atheist by faith, was a Canadian American doctor who not only advocated for the legalization of abortion, but who also, with his own hands, aborted two of his own children. He is considered the “father” of the legalization of abortion in America, which culminated in the judicial decisions remembered today. One day in the mid-1970s, a doctor friend invited Nathanson to hold the ultrasound imaging paddle on a woman’s belly as the doctor aborted her child. Nathanson was horrified at what was displayed on the ultrasound screen. The baby was vigorously flailing, trying to avoid the doctor’s instruments, pushing against the sharp objects jabbing his body. And then the baby’s mouth opened in a silent scream for help. Soon after, Dr. Nathanson gave up his lucrative abortion practice. And years later, after long and painful soul searching, Dr. Nathanson bowed his head to receive the waters of baptism in the Catholic Church, a real religion that forgives real sins.

Abortion corrupts all that it touches: family life, relationships between men and women, politicians, courts, doctors and nurses, and public life in general, which has become more hardened to the sufferings and vulnerabilities of those on the margins. But most of all, abortion has harmed every woman who has had one. There are psychological repercussions to the unnatural end of any pregnancy, but most especially when that end is violent, willful, and paid for by the one it harms. When the natural maternal instinct to nurture and protect is so violated, mom may never recover. The wound remains open. The healing is long and partial.

In this liturgical memorial, we commemorate an anniversary. So…Happy Anniversary, Abortion. You deceive, you divide, you destroy. You are darkness, and you are death. You are the bloody nose on the beautiful face of America. We pray that someday people will only speak about you in hushed tones, behind closed doors, whispering “abortion” like a dirty word. Happy Anniversary, Abortion; you are the pride in the devil’s grin.

Heavenly Father and Mother Mary, today we storm heaven with our prayers, fasting, and almsgiving in the hope that all unborn children will be protected in law so that they can grow into the men and women you planned them to be.

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January 22: Saint Vincent, Deacon and Martyr
Late Third Century–c. 304
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of vintners, brickmakers, and sailors

A Deacon’s bloody witness impresses the Christian world

There are a few famous saints who bear the name Vincent. Today’s saint is the first Vincent. He was a deacon from the town of Zaragoza, Spain. Zaragoza hosts a famous shrine to Our Lady of the Pillar based on an appearance of the Virgin Mary there so ancient that it is more precisely described as a bilocation. Saint Vincent certainly knew of this devotion in his hometown. So although Saint Vincent is an early saint, he was from a city that, in 300 A.D., already boasted of a mature Christian tradition.

As with so many martyrs whose names are known to us, Vincent died in the persecution of Diocletian, the last gasps of a dying paganism. Vincent and his bishop were imprisoned around 303 and taken in chains to Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. The bishop was exiled, but Vincent was subjected to such cruel and varied tortures that he died of his wounds. Tradition says that the faithful came to his cell during his sufferings seeking relics, even dipping cloths into his bloody wounds.

Although pious oral traditions led medieval authors to embroider some of the details of the Church’s early saints and martyrs, the core facts of these narratives almost always have support. In Vincent’s case, no less an authority than Saint Augustine gave homilies on Saint Vincent which have been preserved. In these, Augustine states that he has the official acts recounting Vincent’s martyrdom right in front of him as he is speaking. That interesting anecdote, a kind of live shot of Augustine preaching, is a wonderful proof of how widespread devotion to Vincent was in the early Church, even far from where he died.

Ordained permanent deacons disappeared from the life of the church for many centuries, only to be reintroduced in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. Yet deacons’ key roles in preaching, serving the poor, evangelizing, and acting as delegates of their bishops are clear from the Acts of the Apostles and Saint Paul’s letters. As early as the second century after Christ, the three Orders constituting the Sacrament of Holy Orders were already clearly identified and theologically developed, especially in the letters of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius saw each Order as participating, in a different way, in the one priesthood of the High Priest Jesus Christ.

It must be remembered that Vincent was a deacon and was imprisoned along with the bishop who ordained him. He must have understood the harmony and interdependence that God intended to exist among deacons, priests, and bishops. This emphasis on Sacramental Orders underlines the fact that, although early Christians may have experienced more astounding gifts of the Holy Spirit than later Christians, it was still a living connection to an Apostle, not a personal charism, that authenticated and guaranteed one’s participation in the true body of Christ. Gifts were personal and private. They came and went. They could not be verified or even shared. But each bishop was linked to an Apostolic See, and bishops publicly ordained priests and deacons to share the duty to teach, govern, and sanctify the baptized. There was nothing private about any of that.

Early Christianity was not a haphazard grouping of people who loved Jesus. It received a hierarchical structure from Christ Himself and immediately perpetuated, and built upon, Jewish forms of religious community life. The Church’s hierarchical community life continues today. Saint Vincent undoubtedly saw his ordination as a form of service, not power. He was undoubtedly a man of great importance to his bishop. He likely gave generous witness to the Faith before he offered up his earthly life for a richer life beyond the grave.

Saint Vincent, help all deacons to know, love, and serve God with all their heart, soul, and mind. Few people are called to be tortured for the faith as you were, but suffering may come in more subtle ways. Help us to persevere in the face of all challenges so that we deepen our trust in God.

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January 21: Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
c. 291–c. 304
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red or White
Patron Saint of young girls, rape victims, and chastity

A child knows that God is a person who deserves to be loved

The names of only the earliest saints and martyrs are embedded in the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I. Saint Agnes is among those listed (Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, etc.). Devotion to Agnes as both Virgin and Martyr is of ancient origin and is specifically mentioned by fourth-century writers, including Pope Damasus. A basilica was built as early as the reign of Constantine over the catacombs where Saint Agnes’ relics were deposited. A later structure, with an ancient mosaic showing Saint Agnes, is still an active church on that exact same site today. The mobs of tourists and pilgrims who crowd the eternal city, and who shuffle through Piazza Navona today, may not realize that they are walking by the very site where Agnes was martyred. The beautiful Baroque Church of Saint Agnes on Piazza Navona reminds the discerning pilgrim that our saint met her death at that exact spot.

Agnes was of a tender age when she was killed. She was just a girl. Tradition says that she was beautiful and wanted to dedicate her virginity to the Lord, despite numerous suitors desirous of her beauty. She was killed, then, both for her faith and for her steadfastness in refusing to violate her vow of chastity. It was a double martyrdom, made all the sweeter because of her youth. With poetic license and rhetorical power, Saint Ambrose imagines Saint Agnes’ final moments: “You could see fear in the eyes of the executioner, as if he were the one condemned; his right hand trembled; his face grew pale as he saw the girl’s peril; while she had no fear for herself. One victim but a twin martyrdom to modesty and to religion. Agnes preserved her virginity and gained a martyr’s crown.”

When making solemn vows at his ordination, a man marries the Church so that he can make her fruitful. But a woman’s religious vows make her a spouse of Christ Himself. A man marries the Church; a woman marries Christ. This beautiful bridal imagery speaks the human language of love and commitment. God is a person, not just a prime mover or a higher power. So He loves us like a person, and we love Him back like a person. Part of this love is jealousy. God is a jealous spouse. He wants total commitment from those who have dedicated their lives to Him. He demands total fidelity. In extreme cases, even to the point of death. Little Saint Agnes understood all of this with girlish simplicity united to a will of iron. Innocence alongside maturity. Chastity alongside toughness. Beauty holding hands with death.

Saint Agnes, help all young people commit themselves to Christ when young, giving Him the most fruitful years of their lives. Inspire them to say “Yes” to God and not just “No” to the world. Help all to see that although life is a gift, there are greater things than life, such as God in His glory.

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January 20: Saint Sebastian, Martyr
Late Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of athletes, soldiers, and victims of the plague

A Roman soldier makes a rugged convert and stoic martyr

The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary are the most universally depicted scenes in Christian art. There is perhaps not a Catholic church the world over which does not house one or the other image, and often both. But today’s saint, Sebastian, follows close behind in terms of popularity and ubiquity. The iconic presentation of the wounded Sebastian shows his hands and arms bound to a post, his head tilted, and his almost naked body filled with arrows.

It is a powerfully evocative image. It suggests that the archers took their time. They were not rushed. They did not act in the heat of anger. Criminal psychologists have observed that killers only cover the faces of victims who they know. Otherwise, killers don’t mind watching their victims suffer and die. It seems that with Sebastian there was no hooded executioner. No anonymous hangman. The men in Sebastian’s firing squad must have gazed right into his eyes before they unleashed the tension in their bows. And when their arrows buried themselves in Sebastian’s torso, the archers must have heard his low moans. Perhaps there was an element of recrimination in all of this. Perhaps it was personal.

Sebastian was a soldier in the higher echelons of the Roman army. After his conversion to Catholicism, he went to Rome, around the year 300, likely seeking martyrdom. We can imagine that his fellow soldiers understood his conversion as betrayal or disloyalty to the empire and that this explains the unique manner of the assassination attempt. But, in the end, the attempt was a failure. Saint Sebastian, a rugged soldier, survived the arrows, was nursed back to health by Saint Irene, and later earned the martyr’s crown after being clubbed to death.

By the year 300 A.D., the Roman Emperors’ attempts to eradicate Christianity were too little too late. Nobles, senators, slaves, cobblers, carpenters, men, women, foreigners, and natives had all converted. They were men and women of every class and occupation. By 300 A.D., Christians comprised a significant portion of people at every level of society, up and down and around every Roman road. When high-placed soldiers such as Saint Sebastian were willing to die for Christ, it was a sign there was no going back to Rome’s pagan roots. All that was needed was a Christian Emperor to solidify the change. That would come soon enough in the person of Constantine. Sebastian’s heroic death was a harbinger of a world about to change. Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom was so widely known that he was honored through the construction of a Church on the Appian Way just outside of Rome. The church is still visited by pilgrims today, along with the Christian catacombs beneath it. His legacy carries on!

Saint Sebastian, we ask your intercession to fortify all those who are weak in their faith. You gave heroic witness in leaving a high station to accept a near martyrdom and then returned to suffer and die once and for all. Give us the grace to face our enemies when our weak nature wants to run the other way.

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January 20: Saint Fabian, Pope and Martyr
c. 200–250
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Rome

The popes of the third century knew how to die

In the present-day suburbs of Rome, tour buses navigate winding, narrow, tree-lined roads to carry modern pilgrims to the Catacombs of St. Callixtus. The pilgrims descend a steep staircase until they find themselves in a vast, dark, underground space. The pilgrims slowly walk by early Christian graffiti blanketing the walls to their right and to their left. Marble scraps of early Christian tombstones have etched upon them Greek and Latin epigraphs briefly describing whom they honor. In 1850 an archaeologist working in the St. Callixtus Catacombs discovered, incredibly, just such a small chunk of marble with the following simple epitaph: “Fabian, Bishop, Martyr.” The epitaph confirmed the tradition that Fabian’s lifeless body was carried in procession to these Catacombs shortly after his death in 250 A.D. In the early 1700s, Pope Fabian’s relics were transferred to the nearby Church of Saint Sebastian, where they can be found today.

According to Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote a detailed history of the Church about fifty years after Pope Fabian’s time, Fabian was a layman who went to Rome after the death of the previous pope. He was elected Bishop of Rome due to a miraculous sign. In other words, Fabian did not strive to his high office. He did not seek to be important. He accepted his role in the full knowledge that it could lead to big trouble for him. And that trouble eventually found him.

A third-century letter of Saint Cyprian to the deacons and priests of Rome confirms the virtuous life and courageous death of Pope Fabian. Fabian reigned as Pope for fourteen years before being martyred in 250 A.D. The Roman Emperor Decius was his killer. Decius’ persecution was vicious but not universal. He tried to kill the body of the Church by cutting off the head, and so sought the Pope’s blood. But Decius’ ambitious project was never realized. About sixty-five years later, one of Decius’ successors, Constantine, would legalize Christianity, bringing to an end almost three hundred years of on-again, off-again persecution.

We can only imagine what it would be like today if the Pope were to be imprisoned and killed by the Prime Minister of Italy. Imagine the outcry! A secular power actively persecuting a religious leader! Yet perhaps such events are not so unimaginable. Pope Saint John Paul II was shot, and almost killed, in 1981, probably due to dark communist forces rooted in Eastern Europe. Assassins still exist, and popes are still their targets.

Pope Fabian’s martyrdom shows why the Church survived its early and vicious persecutions—it had leaders who knew how to die. Great deaths don’t follow shallow lives. The early popes didn’t give up or give in. They didn’t renounce the faith. They were fearless. They felt the cold, sharp metal of a knife against their neck and stood firm. A religious society with such models of courage in its highest ranks had to survive. And it did survive. We are living proof of that.

Saint Fabian, your papal death proved to the faithful that their leaders personally accepted what they demanded of others. Slaves, prisoners, women, outcasts, and popes all died for the faith. Help us, Fabian, to be further links in the Church’s long chain of Christian witnesses.

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January 17: Saint Anthony of the Desert, Abbot
251–356
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of butchers, skin diseases, gravediggers, and swine

A solitary monk trades the world for the desert sands

Many extraordinary people who live heroic, path-breaking lives remain unknown to posterity for one simple reason—no one writes their biography. How many other saints, heroes, and martyrs would be known to mankind if just one witness to their actions had put pen to paper! Just one author is needed to introduce a great man to subsequent generations. Today’s saint may have been forgotten forever—and may have wanted to remain unknown. But a talented and famous contemporary of his wrote what he knew. Saint Athanasius, the provocative champion of orthodoxy at the Council of Nicea, wrote a short biography of his fellow Egyptian, The Life of Saint Anthony the Great. Saint Athanasius’ work was so widely shared, and so often translated, that it was never lost to history. It has preserved Saint Anthony’s memory down to the present.

The first three centuries of the Church saw sporadic persecutions of Christianity, which at times turned vicious. These spasms of violence against Christians produced a large class of martyrs, many of whose last words and sufferings were recorded in official Roman judicial documents or in the written testimonies of witnesses. As Christianity was legalized at the start of the fourth century, martyrdom ceased to be the primary form of Christian witness. A new form of radical Christian discipleship emerged—the witness of total isolation, fasting, prayer, and penance of the desert fathers. These monks retreated into remote places to lead solitary lives of dedication to Christ. Foremost among these desert fathers was Saint Anthony of the Desert. He was not the first ascetic, but he was one of the first to take the radical decision to retreat into the desert.

Saint Anthony had money and property as a young man. But upon hearing at Mass the words of Christ to the rich young man to “...go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasures in heaven," Anthony decided to seek not silver or bronze but pure gold. He sold his goods, he removed himself from all temptation except those intrinsic to human nature, he battled the devil, he fasted, he prayed, and he even actively sought martyrdom. He became famous for being holy. Saint Anthony preceded Saint Benedict by two hundred years. He offers us an example of being a monk outside of a community of fellow monks in a monastery. He sought Christ alone while living alone. Alone in the desert, without family, community, or money, listening to the howling winds at night. Alone to the world, he clung to the only person who truly mattered—God Himself.

Saint Anthony’s path of holiness is both radical and refined. It is for few people to walk. But he was the first to walk it so well. Anthony shows us that being alone, stripped of all worldly concerns, is a sort of rehearsal for death, where we will meet God alone, every last thread tying us to the world having been cut.

Saint Anthony, we ask your intercession to help us cling to God alone. Help us to strip ourselves of those needs and concerns which stuff our lives from morning to night. Help us not to be distracted from the one thing, the only thing, the last thing—God Himself.

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January 13: Saint Hilary, Bishop and Doctor
c. 310–c. 367
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of lawyers

A pagan discovers Christ, converts, and then suffers for Him

Today’s saint was born a pagan, to pagans, in a pagan city. But his broad and deep education brought him into contact with Holy Scripture, where he found the truth he did not know he was seeking. He became a Catholic through reading. He was to then spend his adult life defending Catholic truth with his pen. The convert converted others and preserved the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed against the Arian heresy. Saint Athanasius called Saint Hilary a “trumpet” of orthodoxy against theological error.

Saint Hilary was elected the Bishop of Poitiers, France, about 350. His learning and intelligence placed him at the center of the violent theological battles of the fourth century. The Council of Nicea in 325 had left some theological definitions open to incorrect interpretation. A man named Arius caused immense confusion by just such misinterpretation. Arius argued that the words of the Nicene Creed meant that Jesus was less than God the Father, that Jesus had a beginning in time, and that Jesus was of like substance to the Father, not of the same substance. Saint Hilary was the first theologian from the West, as opposed to the more theologically mature theologians from Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, to see what a grave threat Arianism was.

Saint Hilary spent the better part of his adult life studying, writing, and arguing to ensure that the Nicene Creed was understood and adhered to throughout the Church. He was even sent into exile by the Emperor for not conforming his views to Arian teachings. But he used his time in exile to read and write extensively, eventually becoming such a thorn in the side of the Emperor that he restored Hilary to his diocese. Saint Hilary went on to attend various synods of bishops in an effort to maintain the truth of the Nicene Creed against determined opposition at the highest levels.

Hilary’s life proves that good theology matters. Bad theology easily leads to bad worship, bad morality, and the decline of true Christian community. To disrupt or correct bad theology is to disrupt or correct bad community. And it is sometimes the obligation of the Church to break up false ideas of the church, of marriage, of family, of government, etc. When certain things are built up, their opposites inevitably are broken up. Saint Hilary knew all of this. He knew that bad theology was not just bad in and of itself but that it also had negative repercussions in the lived reality of the Church. When Saint Hilary defended theological truth, he defended many other truths as well.

Saint Hilary, through reading and study, you came to love the truths of the Catholic faith. Your love then showed itself in your willingness to suffer for that truth. Help us to know, love, and serve God by knowing, loving, and serving the instrument of His truth on earth—the Catholic Church.

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Sunday after January 6: The Baptism of the Lord
First Century Sunday after January 6 or the Monday after the Epiphany
Feast; Liturgical Color: White/Gold

He humbly bowed His head as an example, not because He was imperfect Who would not want a doctor who, before he cuts, lifts his shirt a little, shows his own scar, and says to the patient, “I had the same. It’s going to be alright!” What soldier would not be just a little braver, stand a little taller, seeing medals for valor on his commander’s uniform? We want our heroes, our leaders, and our guides to lead through personal example. To have been there. To have done that. And we want our Savior to do the same. To empathize. To participate. To identify. To accompany. Actions resonate more than words.

Our sinless God “became” sin, in the words of Saint Paul. Jesus identifies with sin but never sinned. Jesus carries sin but is not a sinner. Why? Because to become sin is to become man. In order for God to enter into human reality, He had to identify with all that sin entails. God wanted to stand with us shoulder to shoulder. He did not fake becoming man but really became man. And if God came to forgive sins and sinners, and to shed His blood for them on the cross, He had to bear the burden they bore yet retain His perfection.
This is why our sinless God was baptized on today’s feast. God lays to the side His perfection and dignity and bows His head in the dirty waters of the Jordan River. He lined up with sinners to receive in humility what He did not need, to attend a school whose subjects He had mastered. Our God knew the value of empathy. He knew the power of example. And He knew that His ministry to mankind had to start not on a golden throne but in the mud with other men just trying to start again and again and again.

The fullness of the Holy Trinity, first revealed subtly at the Annunciation, is present and spoken for at the Lord’s baptism. The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovers. The voice of God the Father intones His favor over His Son. And the Son enters into the essential Christian pact with man—I will become like you so that you can become like me. Sins will be taken away through water and blood. I will suffer for your benefit. This is the promise. And the Church’s priests will carry on the baptizing, forgiving, and consecrating until the sun sets for the last time. God comes to us most intensely through the Sacraments. Jesus’ actions prove this.

O Lord, You are not remote. You know sin but are not a sinner. Help us to renew our baptism through a frequent reception of confession and the Holy Eucharist. By receiving one, we strengthen the others. By receiving You, we receive God Himself.

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January 7: Saint Raymond of Peñafort, Priest
c. 1175–1275
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of canon lawyers and medical record librarians

He wove scripture and the law into a harmonious tapestry

Today’s saint lived numerous lives inside of his one hundred years on earth. He was an intellectual prodigy who was teaching university-level philosophy by the age of twenty and who took degrees in civil and canon law from the premier law university of the time—Bologna. While in Bologna, he likely came to know the founder of a new religious Order who had also moved there and who would later die there—Saint Dominic de Guzman. The example of the Dominicans led Father Raymond to exchange the diocesan priesthood for the Dominicans.

Saint Raymond’s abilities and holiness were such that everyone seemed to want him in their service. Kings and Popes and Bishops and Orders all had plans on how to utilize him best. He was called to the Pope’s service to make the great contribution for which he is still known today, the organization of a huge compendium of Church law which served as the basic reference for canon lawyers until the early twentieth century. Exhausted by his three years of effort on this project, he returned in middle age to his native Barcelona.

But his life of quiet and prayer did not last long. He was shocked to learn from Dominicans sent to him from Bologna that he had been elected the second successor to Saint Dominic as the Master General of the Dominican Order. He served his Order well and dutifully as Master General but not long. He resigned due to old age when he was 65. But there was still a lot of life left to live. Saint Raymond’s activities in his old age included efforts to try to convert the Muslims then occupying Spain, his rejection of an episcopal appointment, the establishment of theology and language schools dedicated to converting Muslims, and his probable personal encouragement of the young Thomas Aquinas to write an apologetic work directed at non-Catholics, the Summa contra Gentiles.

Saint Raymond’s life shows an admirable synthesis of traditional piety and devotion, service to the Church, obedience to his superiors, love of theology, dedication to his Order, and respect and love for the law.

To know, love, and follow the law is not contrary to charity. When kept, the law promotes charity and protects the weak, the poor, and the ignorant from being taken advantage of. It takes very smart and holy people to protect simple people and bad people from themselves. Saint Raymond was smart and holy. He laid his gifts at the altar of God, and God used those gifts splendidly.

Saint Raymond, teach us to see the law of God and the law of the Church as one harmonious law meant to foster true communion among men and true communion between God and men. May God’s law be our law. And may the law never be an obstacle to true love and devotion.

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January 6: The Epiphany of the Lord
January 6 or the first Sunday after January 1 where this feast is not a Holy Day of Obligation
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White/Gold

Catholicism did multiculturalism before anyone else

The Feast of the Epiphany has traditionally been considered more theologically important than almost any other Feast Day, including Christmas. The early Christians had only Scripture, not the wealth of tradition we have today, to guide them in marking the great events of the life of Christ. So Holy Week and Easter, the Baptism of the Lord, Pentecost, and the Epiphany jumped off the pages of Scripture as great events which merited celebration. These few dates became fixed points on the calendar and were later surrounded over the centuries with numerous other feasts and saints’ days.

Two lessons from the visit of the Magi are worth considering. The first is that the wise men’s gifts were given after Christmas. Many Catholic cultures preserve the ancient tradition of giving gifts on the Epiphany, not on Christmas itself. This tradition separates the birth of Christ from gift giving. When these two things—the birth of Christ and the giving of gifts—are collapsed into the same day, it causes some confusion of priorities, and the birth of Christ never wins. Waiting to exchange gifts until January 6 lets the Child God have the stage to Himself for a day. It makes people, especially children, wait—a rarity in the modern Western world. Postponing gift-giving until January 6 makes for a long, leisurely Christmas season and has the benefit of tradition and good theology as well.

Another great lesson from the Magi is more theological—that a true religion must be true for everyone, not just for some people. Truth is not geographical. It climbs over borders. Truth by its nature conquers untruth. The Magi are the first non-Jews, or Gentiles, to worship Christ. They tell us that the mission field of Christ is the whole world, not just the Holy Land. The Church is forever bound, then, to teach, preach, and sanctify the world over.

The Magi crack everything open. The true God and His Church must light a fire in Chinese souls, Arab souls, African souls, and South American souls. This may take until the end of time, but Christianity has time on its side. The Magi give personal testimony to the universality of the Church, one of its four marks. The Epiphany is the start of the multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and faith-united society that the Catholic Church envisions as the only source of true human unity. Catholicism started multiculturalism and diversity without sacrificing unity and truth.

Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior, your minds were prepared to receive a greater truth. You give an example of holy curiosity, of pilgrimage by light to light. When you discovered your treasure, you laid down your gifts in homage. May our search also find. May our pilgrimage also end in truth.

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January 4: Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, Religious (U.S.A.)
1774–1821
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Catholic schools, widows, loss of parents

She had it all, lost it all, and then found it all again

In late 1803, Elizabeth Ann Seton, with her husband, left the United States for Italy, as a confident, high-born, wealthy, educated Yankee Protestant. She returned in June 1804, bankrupt, a widow, burning with love for the Holy Eucharist, tenderly devoted to Mary, and with the heart of a Roman Catholic. She was received into the Church the next year. Her upper-class friends and family abandoned her out of anti-Catholic spite.

Our saint was an unexpected convert. She was, well into adulthood, a serious U.S. Episcopalian. She loved the Lord. She loved the Bible. She loved to serve the poor and the sick. Her excellent Episcopalian upbringing provided sufficient preparation for not being Episcopalian any longer. She took that faith as far as it could go. She probably never suspected her faith was lacking until she experienced the abundance of Catholicism.

After her husband died of tuberculosis in Pisa Italy, Elizabeth and her daughter were taken in by family friends from nearby Livorno. In God’s providence, this Italian family lived their faith with relish. Elizabeth was not only consoled and cared for by them in her grief but also saw how engrossing their faith was. The longer she stayed in Italy, the more its Catholic atmosphere enveloped her. She wept at Italians’ natural devotion to Mary. She wondered at the beauty of a Corpus Christi procession through the narrow streets of her town. She understood the Holy Father’s link to the early Apostles with clarity. And so she came to see the gaps in her native religion. She hadn’t noticed them before. Having seen the real thing with her own eyes, she knew that she held a replica in her hands. The real presence of Christ in Catholicism is often understood only after a real absence is felt in non-Catholic Christianity.

After her conversion, Elizabeth spent the rest of her short life dedicated to Catholic education. She started a Congregation of sisters in Maryland that taught girls, especially poor girls who could not afford an education. She was the first of tens of thousands of teaching sisters to operate Catholic schools in the United States. She is rightly considered in the United States as the foundress of Catholic parochial education. Besides her husband, she also lost two of her five children during her lifetime. She struggled, like all founders, to build up her Congregation. But her intelligence, charm, and drive paid off. Her Order thrived and thrives still. The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul gather each year on this feast near her tomb inside an immense Basilica in Northern Maryland to thank God for their foundress, for a life so well lived.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, help us overcome the alienation of family due to our religious convictions. Aid us in persevering through the hardships of illness and death, and give us the same zeal for souls that you showed toward your students, seeing in each one the image of God.

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January 3: The Most Holy Name of Jesus
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Names are powerful, and none is more powerful than Jesus

Mary and Joseph did not sit across from each other at the kitchen table in the evenings debating a name for their child. They didn’t flip through the pages of a book of saints or bounce ideas off of their friends and family. The baby’s name was chosen for them by God Himself. They were just taking orders. The Archangel Gabriel announced to Mary, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus” (Lk 1:31). And Joseph had a dream in which the angel told him, "...you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Mt 1:21). The Gospel of Luke further relates that “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb" (Lk 2:21). Jesus was named eight days after Christmas, January 3.

The New Testament is filled with incidents where the name of Jesus is invoked to drive out devils, cure illnesses, and perform miracles. The Holy Name is explicitly exalted by Saint Paul: "...at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Phil 2:10). Jesus reinforces the power of His own name in St. John’s Gospel: "...if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you" (Jn 16:23).

“Jesus” was the given name of the Son of Mary, while “Christ” was a title. “Christ” is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Messiah,” meaning the “Anointed One.” “Jesus the Christ” was the original formula for describing the Son of Mary. But over time, “The Christ” became simply “Christ,” as if it were His last name. The name of the God of the Old Testament was holy, not to be written out, nor to be casually spoken. Invoking “Yahweh” could be so egregious a sin as to provoke the tearing of the hearer’s shirt in protest and repentance. Jewish law on God’s holy name is enshrined in the second commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord Thy God in vain.” This commandment prohibited the swearing of false oaths, that is, calling upon God as your witness and then making false statements. The opposite of a solemn oath is invoking the name of God to damn someone or something: a curse—the inversion of a blessing.

Saint Bernardine of Siena, an electrifying Franciscan preacher of the early fifteenth century, was the saint who most spread devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus. He ingeniously depicted the Holy Name with the well-known monogram “IHS,” derived from the Greek letters forming the word “Jesus.” In the sixteenth century, the Jesuits built on this tradition and utilized the “IHS” to embellish their churches, even making it the emblem of their Society. The mother church of all Jesuit churches, in Rome, is officially named in honor of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, although its name is commonly shortened to simply “The Jesus.”

There is raw power in the name Jesus. It makes polite company cringe. It divides families. It floats across the dinner table, letting everyone know exactly where you stand. A comfortable, vague euphemism like “the man upstairs” or “the big guy” just won’t do. “Jesus” does not convey an idea that everyone can interpret as they wish. It’s someone’s name. And that someone taught, suffered, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven.

Some people don’t like their names and seek to legally change them or to use a nickname instead. Names convey meanings. “Thor” sounds like a mythical god carrying a hammer, “Vesuvius” sounds like a boiling volcano about to erupt, and a “ziggurat” sounds like a zig-zaggy desert temple. The name “Jesus” sounds like a God-man beyond reproach. A child, when once asked to define love, said that “when someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. Your name is safe in their mouth.” The Holy Name of Jesus should be safe in our mouths even when we’re not receiving Holy Communion.

Son of Mary, may our same tongues that receive Your Holy Body and Blood prepare themselves for Your visit by saying Your Holy Name with great reverence. And may we not refrain from invoking that same Holy Name in our daily conversations with all whom we meet.

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January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Solemnity; Holy Day of Obligation (in USA: unless a Saturday or Monday)
Eighth Day of the Octave of Christmas;
Liturgical Color: White

No one knew Jesus like Mary

No one falls in love with a nature. We fall in love with a person. A woman loves a man, not mankind. And a mother pinches the pudgy little cheeks of a newborn baby, not the cheeks of a newborn nature. Saint Mary gave birth to a little person, a baby, unlike any other. In that little person, a human nature united with a divine nature at the moment of conception. So Mary was the mother of the person Jesus, and the person Jesus had two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine. Saint Mary was, then, the mother of Jesus’ human nature and of His divine nature. She was both the mother of a man and the mother of God.

Two false extremes must be identified and rejected here. Jesus was not really and truly only a God who just faked being a man. Nor was He really a man who just pretended to be a God. The Son of God did not wear a fleshy human mask to conceal the radiance of His real divine face. And Jesus the man did not wear His divinity like a cloak that He could remove from His shoulders when He walked in the door. Jesus was fully God and fully man in a mystery of faith we call the hypostatic union. And because a woman is a mother to a person, not just to a nature, Mary is the mother of God. This has been the constant doctrine of the Catholic Church since the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.

Saint Mary has many titles under which we honor her. Today’s Solemnity commemorates the utterly unique, and unrepeatable, bond she shared with Jesus, a bond no other saint can claim. Jesus and Mary probably even looked very much alike, as hers was the only human DNA in His body. What a beautiful thing that our God did not float down from heaven on a golden pillow. How good that He was not forged from a fiery anvil. How right that He did not ride to earth on a thunderbolt. Jesus could not redeem what He did not assume. So it was fitting that He was born like all of us—from a mom. We honor Mary today for her vocation as mother. If she had disappeared from the pages of the Gospels after giving birth to Jesus, she still would have fulfilled her role in salvation history. She was obedient. She was generous. She allowed God to use her, body and soul, to write the first chapter of man’s true story, the story of the Church. Like all true stories, the person comes first. A life is lived, and the book comes later.

God’s Mother gives us our mother, Holy Mother Church, who washes our souls in the saving waters of baptism, adopting us into God’s family. The Motherhood of Mary gives the world Jesus. Jesus gives us the Church. The Church then brings us into God’s family where Mary is our mother, Jesus our brother, and God our Father. This is the family of the Church. What pride to be members of so noble a family!

O Mother of God, you birthed the one who created all. How beautiful the mystery. How exalted your vocation that precedes and makes possible the Apostles’ own vocations. At home you bounced on your knee the one who spins the world on His finger. Help us start this new year with wonder more than resolutions, with eternal gratitude more than mundane goals.

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January 2: Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors
St. Basil: 329–379; St. Gregory: c. 329–390
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Patron Saints of Russia, monks, hospital administrators, and poets

Obvious truths are hard to explain, but smart theologians can explain them
The persecution of the Church in the first few centuries, sometimes aggressive, more typically passive, starved her skinny biblical frame of nourishment. When the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 A.D., the Church’s bones finally stretched, grew, and added muscle on muscle. Churches opened. Bishops preached. Schools taught. Theologians wrote. And, most significantly, Councils met. Three hundred years after Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, these large gatherings of bishops and theologians sought to end theological confusion, to settle thorny questions, and to establish a standard Christian doctrine. In the vast halls and churches of these councils, the great cast of theologians of the fourth century put their prodigious talents on full display. We commemorate two of the greatest of these bishops and theologians in today’s memorial.

Saints Basil and Gregory lived so long ago, were so prolific, and played such crucial roles in so many areas of Church life, that they could each be remembered for any number of contributions to liturgy, theology, ecclesiology, Church history, monasticism, and even popular customs, especially in the Orthodox East. Yet perhaps their greatest contributions were as theologians who defined, fundamentally and decisively, what the word Trinity actually means; how Jesus is both fully God and fully man; and how the Holy Spirit is related to God the Father. Such definitions and distinctions may seem technical, abstract, or remote. But it is always the most obvious things—the most necessary things—that are the most difficult to explain. Why do things fall down instead of up? Why does the sun rise in the east instead of the west? Why are there seven days in a week instead of nine?

The most fundamental doctrines of our faith, understood now as perennial, were not always perennial. They originated in the minds of certain people at certain times in certain places. To today’s saints we owe the decisive words that the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and the Son. These words fall simply and familiarly from our lips. But the word “proceeds” was the fruit of intense thought and prayer. The Father generated the Son, but the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from them both. Interesting. Dozens of millions of Catholics say reflexively every Sunday that the second Person of the Trinity is “consubstantial” with the Father. Not equal in origin. Not equal in role. But “consubstantial,” or equal in nature. Thank you, Saints Basil and Gregory! Thank you, great Bishops and Doctors of the early Church! Thank you for pulling aside the veil of mystery for a peek into the Godhead.

Without the teachings of the fourth century on the Trinity and Christ, there would be no Christmas trees. Think about that. Why celebrate the Christ child if He were not God? But He is God. So carols are composed, mangers are set up, lights are hung, and gifts are exchanged. Culture happens, culture flourishes, when theology makes sense. Thank you, Saints Basil and Gregory, for… everything!

O noble Bishops and Doctors Basil and Gregory, we ask for your continued intercession to enlighten our minds and to remove the dark shadows that cause confusion. Assist us to recognize that good theology understands God as He understands Himself. When you gave us good teaching, you gave us God. We seek nothing more.

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December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope
c. Late Third century—335
Optional Memorial; Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas;
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Benedictines

A new captain pilots the ship of the Church in calmer seas

One thousand four hundred years before Christ, approximately when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt, a pharaoh ordered his slaves to hew an enormous obelisk out of a bank of stone. It was the largest monolithic obelisk ever cut. While it was still recumbent, craftsmen carved hieroglyphs up and down its narrow sides. Then, it was hoisted upright to adorn a temple of Aten, a sub-deity of the Egyptian sun god Ra. And there the giant obelisk stood watch over the endless desert, like a lighthouse, for a thousand years. In the mid-fourth century A.D., a pharaoh of the West, the Roman Emperor Constantius II, wanted the obelisk to grace a new city. So it was dragged out of the sands of remote Egypt and placed on a specially constructed ship. It floated down the Nile, across the Mediterranean, and up the Tiber to Rome. This colossal ancient artifact, the largest of its kind in the world, stands today ramrod straight before the Basilica of St. John Lateran. And the name of today’s saint, Pope Sylvester I, is carved into its base.

Little is known of Saint Sylvester, though there are legends. He succeeded to the Chair of St. Peter in 314. This was soon after the military triumph of Constantine and his Edict of Milan granting toleration to Christians. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. This would not occur until 380. But Constantine did give the Church breathing space. The Church could now simply be herself. And so the faithful poured out of the dark confines of their house churches and into the open-aired basilicas. There were processions, statues erected in public, a new Christian calendar, sermons preached in the open, and proud bishops to lead a grateful people. Pope Sylvester led the Church as it grew by leaps and bounds, becoming the primary institution in the Roman Empire, even replacing the imperial government itself. Sylvester must have been a capable and even-handed leader. As pagan Rome slowly transformed into Christian Rome, any number of missteps could have halted the evolutionary process. But Sylvester and his successors stood confidently at the helm, kept a steady hand on the ship’s wheel, and guided the Barque of Peter to harbor with great tact.

Pope Sylvester did not attend the all-important Council of Nicea in 325, instead sending four legates. Constantine called the Council, kissed the palms of tortured bishops, was present at some of its sessions, and threw a large banquet at its conclusion. The Council was composed almost entirely of bishops and theologians from the East. Saints Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and Leo were still to come in the West. Real theology was done in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. Rome was in decline. Even Constantine himself fled Rome and re-established the imperial capital in Constantinople in 330. Yet…the Bishop of Rome was still the jurisdictional and symbolic head of the body of Christ. All looked to him for approbation if not enlightenment. All turned their heads and craned their necks to listen to what he said. The Bishop of Rome had no equal. It was this role that Sylvester fulfilled. He did not generate theology, but he did validate it and stiffen it with institutional force.

The inscription at the base of the Lateran obelisk states that it marks the location where Saint Sylvester baptized Constantine. This is now known to be an error. The religiously ambiguous Constantine was baptized in Northwest Turkey just before he died in 337, two years after Sylvester had passed. Saint Sylvester was buried near the Catacombs of Saint Priscilla. His remains were transferred in the eighth century to a church in the heart of Rome named in his honor, San Silvestro in Capite, where his stone cathedra, or papal throne, can still be seen and his remains still venerated. San Silvestro in Capite was built over the rubble of a pagan temple dedicated to the unconquered sun (sol invictus). It was precisely this Roman god whom Constantine abandoned when he accepted Jesus Christ. And it was the sun god of Egypt who was originally honored by the Lateran obelisk. A cross now crowns the obelisk. Rome’s massive Corpus Christi procession begins every year at the Lateran Basilica near the obelisk. No more pharaohs. No more emperors. No more sun gods. A new leader carries God in his hands, and His blessed people follow in solemn procession.

Saint Sylvester, give to our Holy Father a measure of your steadiness and courage in guiding a people from false to true belief, from darkness to light, and from chains to freedom. Help our Pope to sanctify, shepherd, and govern well in an often hostile atmosphere.

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December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr
c. 1119–1170
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: Red
Patron Saint of the clergy

Murder in the Cathedral!

Four knights hustled down the nave of England’s Canterbury Cathedral, weighed down with tackle, and found the church’s strong man. Eyes narrowed. Teeth clenched. Hard words were spit back and forth. Tempers. A tussle. Then the four knights brutishly struck down Thomas Becket, his blood defiling the sanctuary. People quickly flooded the Cathedral, but no one touched the dead body, none even dared go near it. The news blew like an ill wind through all of Europe. The December spilling of an Archbishop’s blood in his own Metropolitan Cathedral, a sin joining martyrdom with sacrilege, was perhaps the most stunning deed of the High Middle Ages.

Our saint referred to himself as “Thomas of London” and said his enemies alone styled him “Becket.” He was not of noble blood and rose in the Church primarily through the patronage of an admiring Archbishop, who dispatched Thomas to Rome several times on sensitive Church-Sate missions. Thomas was appointed Chancellor by English King Henry II, cementing their warm, personal bond. Perhaps hoping friendship had softened Thomas’ resistance to the royal will, the King proposed his friend as Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the English Church. The decision was ratified by the Pope, so Thomas, who had remained a Deacon until that point, was quickly ordained a priest and then consecrated a bishop. But his appointment to high ecclesial office poisoned Thomas’ friendship with Henry II, led to years of exile, and ultimately drove those four determined knights through the doors of Canterbury Cathedral.

Thomas Becket was a complex man in whose soul formidable virtues swirled as one with powerful vices. He was volatile, easily provoked, and vain. He relished the magnificence of his high status and travelled with a personal retinue of two hundred servants, knights, musicians, and falconers. He fought for England on the battlefield, engaging in hand-to-hand combat while vested in chain mail. But Thomas also fasted, endured severe penances, prayed devoutly, was generous with the poor, and lived a life of purity. Being ordained a bishop helped to cool his temper, abate his pride, and refine his coarser traits.

England’s two strongest men were destined to clash over their exclusive loyalties to Holy Church and Holy Realm. In 1164 King Henry II demanded significant concessions from England’s bishops: the abolishing of ecclesiastical courts, no appeals to Rome without the King’s approval, and no excommunication of landholders without the Crown’s consent. The King also imposed

higher taxes on the Church and curtailed priest’s rights. Thomas was aghast at the demands of his former friend and resisted the Crown’s demands at every step. The wick was now lit, and the flame slowly burned its way toward the explosive murder in the Cathedral.

In reaction to the King’s overreach, Thomas fled to France, met with the Pope, resigned, fretted, was reinstated, and waited. The struggle between State power and Church freedom dragged on for six years as various complex intrigues played themselves out. Thomas finally returned to England on December 1, 1170, to an admixture of hostility and joy. He would not live to the end of the month, and he knew it. In a fit of incandescent rage, King Henry II asked to be rid of Thomas, vague words taken to their most violent extreme by the four killers. When they rushed into the sanctuary, the knights shouted, “Where is Thomas the traitor?” Thomas replied, “Here I am, no traitor, but Archbishop and priest of God.” Thomas’ brains were soon washed over the floor. King Henry II did public penance, the Knights sought forgiveness from the Pope himself, and Becket was rapidly canonized. Saint Thomas Becket’s ornate tomb became a place of pilgrimage for centuries, until it was desecrated by a later King Henry, the eighth of that name, in 1538, when royal spasms once again brought violent blows down on the Church.

Saint Thomas Becket, your last few heroic minutes on earth made you a saint. Help all bishops, priests, and deacons to emulate your manly virtues in standing strong for the Church in season and out of season, whatever the cost, their whole life long.

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December 28: The Holy Innocents, Martyrs
c. 1 A.D.
Feast; Fourth day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of babies

No one is less deserving of death than a baby

Herod the Great was not great. He was evil. Herod the Sociopath, or Herod the Devil, would be more accurate titles. Herod murdered his own wife and preserved her corpse in honey. He had two of his own sons strangled to death. He routinely liquidated anyone suspected of disloyalty. He had a harem of five hundred women, a brood of illegitimate children, and a taste for the pages who served in his palace. The Roman Emperor Augustus, Herod’s patron, stood in awe of his bloodthirst. A contemporary historian wrote that Herod was “a man of great barbarity toward everyone.” Herod was simply the most ruthless king of his time. It was this Herod whose son beheaded John the Baptist. It was this Herod who frightened Joseph and Mary to flee into Egypt. It was this Herod whose fury would have hung each of the three wise men from a beam if they had not been warned by an angel to return home by another route. And it was this Herod whose savagery is commemorated today, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. He ordered the slaughter of numerous male babies in and around Bethlehem in the hope of eliminating just one. Weighed on Herod’s distorted moral scales, many deaths were worth one cancelled threat.

In the Old Testament, Pharaoh ordered the drowning of all Jewish baby boys in a desire to suppress the Israelite population and a possible threat to his rule (Exodus 1:22). As they grew to manhood, both Moses and Christ surely were made aware of the hard sacrifices others had endured so that they could live and fulfill God’s plan of liberation for their people. Moses and Christ are united by the twin effort of harsh rulers to snuff out their lives like a candle. Moses also stands at Christ’s side at the Transfiguration, which evokes Moses’ own transformational encounter with God at the burning bush. In many ways, then, Christ is a new Moses, the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy that God would raise up a prophet like himself to speak all that the Lord commanded (Deuteronomy 18:15–19).

Today’s innocents are considered the first martyrs of the Church, although it is more precise to say that they died instead of Christ rather than for Him. In both Scripture and secular history, innocents die so that the hero survives to achieve his mission. We can only imagine mothers’ faces creased with pain and fathers’ eyes filled with horror as their babies were forcibly torn from their arms, never to be returned to the soft cradle of family life. Many of these Innocents never bounced on grandma’s knee, took a wobbly first step toward their mother’s open arms, or built castles in the sand.

There is a more bitter sadness in the unknown of every “might have been” than in any “had and lost.” In dying so that Another might live, the Holy Innocents were other Christs. The fruits of many martyrs’ sacrifices are harvested long after their deaths, and today is no exception. Perhaps the Holy Innocents are very close to the altar of God in heaven right now. Perhaps they were the first to welcome Christ to His throne at His Ascension into heaven. Perhaps these first buds of Christian martyrdom flowered into adults in heaven. It is a truism of justice that it is better for nine guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be punished. No one is more innocent than a baby. Yet these babies died in the ultimate hate crime so that their own redemption could be accomplished.

Holy Innocents of Bethlehem, you died unnamed at the hands of a madman. May your pristine souls, washed in blood, give hope to all who suffer unjustly, that one day their sacrifice will be rewarded with triumph, if not for themselves, then for those who follow.

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December 27: Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist
c. Early First Century–c. 100
Feast; Third day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of authors, loyalty, and friendship

Outside of Christianity, few people believe God is love

Saint Jerome, while living in Palestine in the late 300s, relates a touching anecdote still being told at that time about John the Evangelist.  When John was old and feeble, Jerome recounts, and no longer able to walk or preach, he would be carried among the faithful in church and would repeat only one thing over and over again: “My little children, love one another.” Saint Polycarp, through Saint Irenaeus, tells us that Saint John’s long life ended peacefully in Ephesus about 100 A.D. John was the only Apostle not to die a martyr.

John’s old age in Ephesus was a long way from where his life began on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Young John was sitting in his boat mending his nets alongside his brother James when an enigmatic but straight-talking teacher who lived in nearby Capernaum (Mt 4:13) walked by. Jesus saw the brothers on the water and challenged them to follow Him and become fishers of men (Mt 4:21–22). John and his brother said “Yes.” Their immediate and generous response put them at the red hot center of a movement which would change the world. From that decisive moment onward, John was at Christ’s side in the quiet times and in the momentous times.

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Description automatically generatedPeter, James, and John were the select Three inside of the Twelve. John saw Christ transfigured on Mount Tabor and wondered at what it meant. He leaned against Jesus at the Last Supper and stood under His drooping body at the foot of the cross. John was the first to reach the empty tomb on the first Easter Sunday, though he deferred to age and authority and let Peter enter the tomb first. John sees the resurrected Jesus in the upper room and then back where it all began, at the Sea of Galilee. John perseveres despite persecution, even the religiously inspired murder of his brother. John likely accompanied the Virgin Mary to Ephesus, where both shared their memories and tender faith with the Christian community there over the decades and years.

John’s Gospel is stylistically distinct from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He likely wrote it in his old age. Perhaps many calm years mellowed the Gospel’s tone, allowing John to draw out God’s pure love more than His fight. John’s Gospel, his letters, and his Book of Revelation soar. They offer a high theology of Christ, a supernatural, often mystical vision of Christ’s role in salvation. John is the Apostle who best conveys God’s love. It is a commonplace to say that God is love. It is also commonplace to say that any further description of God complicates His simplicity and leads to arguments, division, and violence. Yet the Christian attestation that “God is love” is like a flag snapping in the wind at the summit of a mountain of thought—complicated and nuanced theological and philosophical thought. The simplest thing we can say about God is tied to the most complex thing we can say about God. It took centuries of hard climbing to plant that flag of love at the summit. To say God is love implies a wealth of supportive truths. 

The harshness and apparent injustice of life does not naturally lead to the conclusion that God is love, and no one said that God was love before Christians said it. For many, God was, and is, a master, a warrior, a hero, an oak, a waterfall, or a sunrise. God was a growling earthquake, a mighty storm, a tidal wave that drowned the new colony. God took vengeance for sins and flooded the earth when the people disobeyed. He was like a hunter on the prowl, his bow arched with arrow ready to fly. Reading the history of man and experiencing daily life, it is in no way clear that God is love. We have to be told this. We have to see this. We have to experience this. And the Church tells us and shows us this constantly.

That many people the world over instinctively think that God is love is a triumph of the Church and of Saint John the Evangelist. To say this and to think this is to break one’s lance against the brick wall of daily life. But it is also to say the truth, a received truth. God loves Himself in the Holy Trinity first, and then that loves radiates outward to all of us. Without knowing that, we cannot know the rest.

Saint John the Evangelist, you wrote of God’s love for you, Christ’s Beloved Disciple. Through your intercession in heaven, inspire all writers and evangelists to convey God’s goodness and love, so that the entire world knows that there is one person, a divine person, who cares.

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December 26: Saint Stephen, Martyr
c. Early First Century–c. 36
Feast; Second day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of deacons, altar servers, stonemasons, and headaches

Christ rises in indignation as the first martyr is brutalized

The practical explanation for a historical event is normally the most convincing. Psychological analysis, guesswork, and overinterpreting frowns and whispers are best ignored. Why did the army invade on this day and not the next? Because they ran out of food. Why did the capital move from the plains to a new location in the hills? Because of flooding. And why did Christians branch out from Jerusalem and not remain attached to its temple? Because they were running for their lives.

The stoning of today’s saint boiled over into an anti-Christian fever on the streets of Jerusalem. Christians were hunted down, imprisoned, or killed. The very day Stephen was martyred, “a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria...Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (Acts 8:1–3). So while Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19), early Christianity began to spread for a very practical reason—Stephen’s murder. His co-religionists, especially Greek-speaking former Jews like Stephen, fled to nearby lands. And thus fresh, baby-faced Christianity was lifted out of its cradle for the first time and carried out of Jerusalem.

Stephen is described as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit”(Acts 6:5) who is one of the first seven deacons of the Church, ordained into Holy Orders by the very hands of the Apostles to assist them in their priestly ministry. Stephen was “full of grace and power” and performed “great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). But his success provoked jealousy and hatred among his former fellow Jews, who slandered and distorted his words so grievously that Stephen was arrested by the Sanhedrin. What the Jewish leaders could not accomplish by argument, they would accomplish by force. Stephen gave a long and impassioned speech to the Jewish Council explaining how his belief in Christ fulfilled God’s plans for the Jews as foretold by Abraham and Moses and as embodied in Solomon’s temple. As Stephen’s words poured out, they spilled like fuel on his enemies’ burning rage.

Text BoxWhen Stephen called them Christ’s “betrayers and murderers,” the Jewish leaders “became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen” (Acts 7:52–54). Stephen then “gazed into heaven and saw...Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). The Lord whom the Creed describes as “seated at the right hand of the Father” seems indignant and rises from His throne at the injustice He sees unfolding below. Stephen is forcibly dragged out of Jerusalem and stoned to death, with the future Saint Paul a witness, if not a participant, to the brutal event. Stephen’s last words were to beg forgiveness of God for his attackers. Stephen’s death was not the result of a pogrom or mob violence. The Acts of the Apostles describes it as a quasi-judicial capital case presided over by Jewish authorities, perhaps in the power vacuum between Pontius Pilate leaving Palestine and the replacement governor’s arrival.

Devotion to the protomartyr Stephen was likely immediate, and he became an icon of Christian sacrifice throughout Roman times and beyond. Saint Paul continued viciously persecuting the Church until his conversion on the road to Damascus. But after his conversion, Saint Paul paradoxically carried out the mission of the man whose death he personally witnessed. Saint Paul brings the Gospel to the Gentiles, the non-Hebrews. Saint Paul goes to the Greeks, Stephen’s own people, and to the Latin speakers of Rome. The blood of Stephen watered Paul’s seed of faith. And the plant that grew from that seed gripped the soil the world over. Stephen died so that the faith could live. In this he emulated Christ Himself.

Saint Stephen, may your courage, conviction, and knowledge of Scripture inspire all teachers and apologists to likewise convince through their education, through their passion, and mostly through their example of noble suffering.

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December 25: The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)
c. 0
Solemnity
Liturgical Color: White

God robes Himself in flesh, and mission impossible begins

Since the dawn of time the pages of pagan mythology filled men’s imaginations to the brim with wondrous stories. Educated men who could read and write Latin and Greek, broad-minded men trained in philosophy, believed that the forests were thick with fairies, that the god of war launched thunderbolts across the sky, that a wise man carried the moon and the stars in a box, and that ravens prophesied. Some ancients wore a leather pouch around their necks stuffed with crystals to ward off evil spirits. Others bowed to the morning sun to thank that great ball of fire for rising.

And then…it all ended. A tired world retreated as man’s true story swept like fire over the earth. In 380 A.D. an imperial decree established the faith preached by the Apostle Peter to the Romans as the religion of the empire. Grass grew high in the Roman Forum. Weeds pushed through the cracked marble slabs of the ancient temples. Cows grazed where senators in white togas once offered incense to the god of this or the god of that. The priests walked away. Pagan altars crumbled. The vestal virgins found husbands. No one cared. Gorgeous marble was removed from abandoned temples and reused to clad Christian Basilicas in glory. Candles now burned before a new God-man hanging on a cross. Slowly, imperceptibly, God the Father’s hands were molding and forming and shaping a new Christian culture—our culture.

Christmas is the night the future began. When we hear now that a cow jumped over the moon, that a nocturnal fairy trades coins for teeth, or that a pot of gold sits at the end of the rainbow, we chuckle and slap our knee. The river of mythology had always run parallel to the river of philosophy. But in Christ these channels merge. In the Christian land, the river of truth flows into the river of the imagination. Ancient myths did not precisely disappear but were purified and fused with the new Christian reality. Magic and meaning formed into one beautiful, sacramental, compelling, intellectually satisfying force. Yet the Christian God became a man, not a book. And He did not come just to end mythology but in order to die. God came so close to us that we killed Him. God became man, paradoxically, so that He could cease to be God and taste death. Without this sacrifice, without this being-for-death, we would be unable to interpret nature, suffering, love, death, or war.

We did nothing to merit such a generous, self-emptying God. There is nothing here but grace. At Christmas, then, we commemorate not our search for God but God’s search for us. His searching and finding were His first mission. It is our duty to respond to this mission. God’s search for us does not cease as December rolls over into January. Christ’s voice never quiets and His steps never pause. Every day of every year He is walking at our side, waiting for our response: “Yes” or “No.” And with that “Yes” or “No,” our eternity hangs in the balance. A small God is an attractive God. Christmas is the day of days for this reason—it is easy to believe in God today. Christmas makes it simple to say “Yes” to God’s plan for our lives. Yet that baby, like all babies, grows up. And as He grows, He will become more demanding and more specific in His expectations of us. And our responses to Him will become nuanced and more complex. He will be a bit harder to love and much more challenging to serve. Christ will not judge us from a crib at the end of time. When His eyes sparkle like diamonds and His voice crashes like thunder at the Last Judgment, He will be the towering Christ. So while we fall in love with the Babe in the manger, we must mature with Him as the years pass. 

There’s a thousand ways to begin a story: “So, there I was”; “In a land far, far away”; “Once upon a time.” The Christian story starts, “This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about…” This wondrous beginning leads to a tragic middle and a rousing end. It is the story of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. He is born of Mary but is, more deeply, from the Father. The Christ Child is the wordless Word who begins His daring mission in all humility. He beckons us

closer to the crib for a moment, but many stay at His side their entire lives. We stay because we have real questions that demand real answers that can be found nowhere else except in the Church. While all other stories fade, the Christ story becomes more and more true as we mature. This story alone gives meaning to death, purpose to suffering, cause for joy, and consolation to the broken. This story alone rises above any one culture, city, language, or nation. Its plot is everyone’s drama, its heartbreak everyone’s sorrow, and its victory everyone’s prize. This is the story of Jesus Christ, and this story begins today.

Christ in the manger, Your humble coming as man fills us with hope that our lives matter, that God is truly with us, and that we are never alone, even in death. You shared our human nature in every way but sin, and so give us hope that we will one day share life in heaven with You.

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December 23: Saint John of Kanty, Priest
1390–1473
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: Violet
Patron Saint of Poland and Lithuania

Humility, austerity, work, and intelligence unite in one man

Conquering generals returning home from the rim of the Empire were awarded triumphal parades through Rome’s crowded masses. The booty of war entered the city first on carts—gold plate, silver goblets, piles of aromatic spices—then came the exotic animals, the caged prisoners of war, and row after row of legionaries. Finally, the victorious general split the crowd in a chariot pulled by two white horses. Slaves waving huge plumes fanned the emperor while another slave stood behind him, continually whispering in his ear: “Thus passes the glory of the world” or “Remember you are a mere mortal.” Tertullian, a North African Christian, specifically cites this triumphal custom: “...amid the honours of a triumph, (the emperor) sits on that lofty chariot, and he is reminded that he is only human. A voice at his back keeps whispering in his ear, ‘Look behind thee; remember thou art but a man’” (Apologies Chpt. 33).

Today’s saint needed no such professional whisperers. Nature spoke loudly into one ear and Christ into the other, reminding him of life’s fleeting nature, that the “here and now” must one day cede to the “there and then.” John of Kanty (or John Cantius) was impressively unimpressed with all that the world had to offer. Saint John’s prodigious intellectual gifts could have garnished his life with a fair share of the world’s riches, if he had desired them. But the only glory Saint John sought was knowledge of God, the hard floor he slept on every night, and the hunger that seasoned what little food he ate. Saint John was a gifted student at Poland’s University of Krakow, who after priestly ordination became a professor of philosophy, theology, and Scripture there. Apart from a few year’s interlude serving in a parish, he spent all of his adult life as a professor. 

John gave to the poor until he deprived himself of life’s necessities. When he walked on pilgrimage to Rome, he carried his meager sack on his own back. His cassock was threadbare, he did not eat meat, and his personal sweetness and patience made his impressive theological knowledge even more impactful. He dismissed the concerns of friends that his punishing austerities would damage his health by invoking the example of Egypt’s long-lived desert fathers, whose gaunt frames were draped in skin as cracked and dry as the desert itself. John’s virtuous life proves the mutually reinforcing character of poverty and celibacy. Once a priest abandons his vow of poverty or simplicity and begins leading a bourgeoisie life of comfort, he risks abandoning his vow of celibacy too. He starts to imperceptibly drift downriver from where he first entered the stream of his vocation, until it’s too late, and he is swept over the falls into the sea of mere bachelorhood.

From an external perspective, Saint John lived a mundane, predictable existence. It is in keeping with his personal history that he is one of the most obscure saints on the Church’s liturgical calendar. His life was like a flat plain, without great events jutting up like mountains from the even, everyday terrain. Saint John was a humble scholar who sought no legacy through wealth, fame, property, marriage, or offspring. Such goods were arrows that glanced off his spiritual armor. He did not want to cheat death by colluding with the desires of his fallen nature. His mind, his body, and his life would serve no one and nothing except Christ and His Church. Such a serious, mortified life is not for the many, but a few are indeed called to live it.

After his death, John’s holiness and academic excellence were so highly esteemed that his doctoral gown was long placed on the shoulders of the University of Krakow’s doctoral graduates to ceremoniously vest them. On a pilgrimage to Krakow in 1997, Saint John’s countryman, Pope Saint John Paul II, prayed at his tomb, noting that his fellow Krakovian’s life exemplified what emerges when “knowledge and wisdom seek a covenant with holiness.”

Saint John of Kanty, we ask your heavenly intercession to infuse the virtues of poverty, chastity, and perseverance in all students of higher education, that they may be diligent in furthering their knowledge of all things sacred and mundane for God’s glory and their own sanctification.

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December 21: Saint Peter Canisius, Priest and Doctor
1521–1597
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet
Patron Saint of Germany

A zealous Jesuit is the tip of the Counter-Reformation spear

The deep impact of today’s saint so shook Germany that the reverberations of his work were still being felt centuries after his death. Saint Peter Canisius composed question and answer German-language catechisms for every educational level. These catechisms were clear, scriptural, and of the purest doctrine. Hundreds of editions were printed during his own lifetime and for centuries afterwards. Pope Benedict XVI, a German, said that in his father’s generation in the last half of the nineteenth century, a catechism in Germany was still known simply as “the Canisius.” This was three hundred years after Peter Canisius had died! If Saint Boniface was the Apostle of Germany in the eighth century, then Saint Peter Canisius was the Catechist of Germany in the sixteenth.

Peter Canisius was born in the Netherlands and attended the University of Cologne. During his studies, he prayed at a Carthusian monastery and came to know one of the very first Jesuits. After a period of discernment, he joined the Society of Jesus. He was ordained a priest in 1546 and just one year later participated in a session of the Council of Trent in the employ of a German bishop. Soon after this experience at the highest level of Church life, Peter was sent by Saint Ignatius of Loyola to teach at a minor Jesuit college, a test of Peter’s obedience. This ministry was short-lived, as Peter’s erudition and skills were destined to have a wider scope.

Peter was a working, teaching, preaching scholar who did all things well. He edited the works of Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Pope Saint Leo the Great, and Saint Jerome. He wrote over eight thousand pages of letters to people of every rank of society. His refinements of his popular catechisms never ceased, and he worked for years with other scholars to compose a work on Church history to counter a popular Protestant history book which twisted the truth of Catholicism’s role in European history. Peter’s life was spent crisscrossing Central Europe in an era fraught with religious tension. The concussive force of the Protestant Reformation stunned the cerebellum of Central Europe for decades. Shock, confusion, and violence spread outward from Germany in wave after confusing wave. Peter and many others slowly helped Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Bohemia to recover their mental health and to remain true to their historic Catholic identity.

Peter was in Vienna, where the people and princes wanted him to stay and be their bishop. But Saint Ignatius, his superior, said no, Peter’s skills were needed elsewhere. Then Peter was in Prague, starting Jesuit colleges, preaching to empty churches and, in the end, winning the day. Then Peter was in Bavaria, then Switzerland, and then Poland. His zeal, learning, and holiness were self-evident. He held blameless the majority of Protestants, who were such out of ignorance or apathy. He reserved his rare invective only for the heresiarchs themselves, and for other intellectuals who should have known better. He distinguished between those who were willful apostates and those who were the victims of circumstances.

Peter Canisius was a perpetual storm who rained down knowledge, apologetics, books, sermons, and letters over all of Central Europe. He brought calm and moderation to a violent, fevered time. One biographer estimates Peter traveled twenty thousand miles on foot and horseback over a period of thirty years to further his apostolic labors. Peter Canisius was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church on the same day in 1925.

Saint Peter, God raised you up at the right time to save the faith in Central Europe. Your even temper, broad knowledge, life of prayer, and personal virtue brought lost sheep back into the fold. From heaven, help all priests, deacons, and teachers to do the same.

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December 14: Saint John of the Cross, Priest and Doctor
1542–1591
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of contemplatives, mystics, and Spanish poets

A priest’s love of God is purified by the blue flames of contemplation and mistreatment

The Protestant Reformation sparked a purifying fire in the Catholic Church. Like a prairie fire scorches the thick grasses, thistle, and weeds, so the heat of the Counter-Reformation moved over the land, scorching the thicket of devotions, pious customs, and theological miscellania that had snagged and obscured the Church’s purest growth. Besides the universal reforms of the Council of Trent, men and women such as Saint John of the Cross were integral regional players in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This movement stripped even mighty dioceses and religious orders of all padding, of all unnecessary raiment, and then built up a lean and muscular Body of Christ that moved with purpose and vigor for the next four centuries. But for many purifiers, including Saint John of the Cross, the price of such reform was steep and personal. Needed changes to his beloved Carmelites would mean the disruption of comfortable patterns of life. John’s ideas had enemies, and for his efforts he suffered exile, hunger, public lashings, imprisonment, and defamation from the hands of his own fellow Carmelites!

Saint John was born into poverty and so was no stranger to need. He was raised by his mother and the Church after his father died at a young age. These two mothers imparted to his mind a solid formation in Catholic doctrine and to his soul an ardent love for the Lord Jesus. John was ordained a priest for the Carmelites in 1567. He loved solitude and contemplation and so considered entering the strictest of Orders, the Carthusians. But holy people cross paths, and a chance meeting with Saint Teresa of Ávila redirected John’s vocation. Teresa’s combination of charm, intelligence, and drive were difficult to resist, and John fared no better than most. He quickly joined her project to recapture the original purity of the Carmelite Order. Many customs had attached themselves to the Order over time like barnacles on a ship. Now was the moment to scrape off the barnacles. John set out to found new, reformed Carmelite houses and to reinvigorate existing ones.

The reforms John and Teresa implemented were practical. The monks and nuns were to spend more hours chanting the breviary in common, to do more spiritual reading, to spend more hours in silence, to practice contemplative prayer, to abstain completely from meat and to endure longer, more radical fasts. The reformed Carmelites eventually became known after their most noticeable change. They strictly adhered to the Carmelite Rule’s original prohibition against wearing shoes. So by the time they were canonically established as their own Order, distinct from the historic Carmelites, they were called the Discalced, or Shoeless, Carmelites.

Saint John spent his life traveling throughout Central and Southern Spain carrying out an intense priestly ministry all while living a recollected life which his own contemporaries recognized as saintly. He was a chaplain to convents, a spiritual director to university colleges, a confessor, a preacher, a founder and a superior of monasteries. And, most distinctively, he was a contemplative who wrote with elegance and artistic flourish about falling in love with God. His Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Canticle, Ascent of Mount Carmel, and Living Flame of Love are, on their surface, poetic masterpieces of the Spanish language. At a deeper level, they each describe, in surprising detail and through various biblical metaphors, the soul’s search for Christ and its joy in finding Him, or its pain in losing Him.

For John, being authentic was not a spirituality. Being bonded to Christ was. To see through material forms into God’s inner life, to contemplate God in His very nature, was prayer. The soul seeks God like the bride seeks her bridegroom. And the Bridegroom did more than manifest an image, He manifested reality. The Church is both mother and bride, and her faithful learn of Christ, and seek Him, only inside of her life. Saint John of the Cross deepened the word “mystery” to include more than its objective meaning in the Sacraments. For John, every soul had a mysterious union with God that had to be, and only could be, cultivated in silent contemplation.

Saint John of the Cross, your life of prayer was deepened by your life of suffering for the good of your Order. Through your writings on the mystery of God, may we come to love Him, if not understand Him, all the more.

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December 13: Saint Lucy, Virgin and Martyr
c. Late third century–304
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of virgins, the blind, and Syracuse, Sicily

A garden enclosed, no man would lock her in his embrace

Today’s saint is one of only eight women (Mary included) commemorated in Eucharistic Prayer I: “Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and all the Saints…” It was Pope Saint Gregory the Great (590–604), familiar with the Christian traditions of Sicily through his family, who inserted the names of the Sicilian virgin martyrs, Agatha and Lucy, into the Roman Canon. There is no doubt that an ancient cult to a woman named Lucy is connected with the city of Syracuse, Sicily, and that this devotion spread throughout Europe in the fourth through sixth centuries. Beyond that, however, there is no near-contemporary historical record verifying any facts of Lucy’s life or death. It is the preservation of her name in the Mass, more than anything else, which has secured Lucy’s place in the Catholic tradition.

Saint Lucy was killed during the Diocletian persecution in the early fourth century. Legends long post-dating her death state that Lucy was doomed to execution after a disgruntled pagan admirer exposed her as a Christian. A gruesome medieval addition holds that Lucy gouged out her own eyes prior to her execution to deter a suitor who delighted in their beauty. Another tradition states that Lucy could not be dragged to her execution site even by a team of oxen, so the guards piled wood all around her to devour her flesh with flames—but the kindling refused to ignite! Frustrated, one of the soldiers then thrust his sharp sword deep into her throat, bringing her brief life to a grisly end.

It is likely that since Lucy was born to Christian parents, she went on pilgrimage as a child to the shrine of Saint Agatha, a fellow Sicilian, in nearby Catania. Perhaps the witness of the virgin martyr Agatha, who perished about fifty years prior to Lucy’s time, inspired little Lucy to be similarly heroic when her own hour came. One legend states that Agatha appeared to Lucy in a dream, telling her that one day she, Lucy, would be the glory of Syracuse. For over a millennium, Lucy's Feast Day of December 13 fell very close to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. But the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582 corrected a ten-day drift between the calendar and scientific reality, leaving December 13 now eight days before the Solstice. Lucy’s symbolic resonance as a source of light in a dark season persists, despite the calendar correction distancing her feast day from winter’s blackest hour. Somewhat curiously, Sweden’s long-dormant Catholic heritage reasserts itself on December 13, a long winter night when Swedes gladly celebrate a saint whose Latin name evokes light and purity.

As the age of martyrdom waned with Christianity’s legalization, the untouched body of the virgin, not a bloody death, became the most potent expression of Christian sacrifice. The virgin’s body was the untouched desert. It bore the wax seal of the soul’s original, untarnished perfection and was a precious gift blessed by Christ. The intact flesh of all celibates, virgins, and continent men and women stood out as oases of freedom in a world otherwise enslaved by carnal desire. Virgins such as Lucy were the pride of the early Church, the unplucked harps whose self-control was a cause of

wonder to the broader pagan society. The virgin’s uncorrupted body was like a human votive candle, its pure flame burning through the long night of the world until Christ slowly dawned over the horizon at His Second Coming. That such a refined blue flame was so abruptly blown out by the executioner’s breath was shocking and memorable. We remember it still today.

Saint Lucy, you died young and innocent, unfamiliar with the world save for its savagery. May your double martyrdom, to the flesh and to life itself, inspire all youth to see Christ and His promises as worth sacrificing to attain.

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December 12: Our Lady of Guadalupe (U.S.A.)
1531
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of the Americas

A miracle hangs, frozen in time, in Mexico City

The humble Indian Juan Diego and his wife, Maria Lucia, had accepted baptism from the Franciscan missionaries laboring in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), the greatest city of Spain’s most impressive colony, the future Mexico. After his wife died in 1529, Juan moved to the home of his Christian uncle, Juan Bernardino, on the outskirts of Mexico City. On Saturday, December 9, 1531, Juan Diego arose very early to walk to Mass. It was a quiet, peaceful morning. As he walked by the base of a hill called Tepeyac, Juan heard the gentle singing of many birds. He looked up. On the top of the hill was a radiant white cloud encircling a beautiful young woman. Juan was confused. Was this a dream? Then the gentle, bird-like singing ceased, and the mysterious young woman spoke directly to him: “Juanito, Juan Dieguito!...I am the perfect and always Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God.” Mary went on to say many beautiful things to Juan, concluding with her desire that a church be built in her honor on that very hill of Tepeyac.

The Virgin Mary, a faithful Catholic, placed herself under obedience to the local bishop. She would not build the shrine herself or work directly with the nearby faithful. She required the bishop’s cooperation and support, and so told Juan, “...go now to the bishop in Mexico City and tell him that I am sending you to make known to him the great desire that I have to see a church dedicated to me built here.” There followed meetings with the good but incredulous Bishop Zumárraga, more brief apparitions, and more drama until matters culminated on Tuesday, December 12, 1531. Juan was waiting patiently in the Bishop’s parlour for hours. The Bishop’s aids wished he would just go away. But Juan carried a secret gift for the Bishop in his coarse poncho. It was stuffed full of fragrant Castilian roses. Juan had gathered them from Tepeyac despite the cold December weather. Mary had told Juan to present the roses to the Bishop as a sign.

After a long wait, Juan was finally brought into the presence of His Excellency. He recounted his conversations with Mary and then proudly unfurled his poncho. The fresh and dewy roses fell gracefully to the floor. Juan was content. But there was a gift within the gift. There was more than gorgeous roses. Everyone in the room fell to their knees in wonder. Juan was the last to see it. A gentle image of the Virgin Mary was impressed on Juan’s poncho. Could it be? Who could have possibly… It was a miracle! The Bishop immediately took possession of the poncho and placed it in his private chapel. Events now moved quickly. The miraculous image was put in the Cathedral. It was then brought in holy procession to a quickly built shrine on Tepeyac. Then there were more and more miracles. Then there were more and more pilgrims.

Mary is the woman who, under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, spoke with Juan on the Hill of Tepeyac. Our Lady of Guadalupe is the woman whose image is impressed upon Juan’s poncho. And it is that very same poncho which hangs to this day in the shrine built for and at the request of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The miracle first unfurled in the Bishop’s office in 1531 has been frozen in time. It is perpetually 1531 in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Everyone who gazes on the image stands in the shoes of Bishop Zumárraga. The image teems with mysterious symbols and meanings. The wholesale conversion of the tribes of old Mexico, a missionary effort that until 1531 had been a struggle, was directly attributable to Mary’s miraculous intercession. It was the greatest and most rapid conversion of a people in the history of the Church. It is Mary to whom we turn on this feast. She made herself a humble, indigenous, local, expectant mother to bring a good but pagan people into the embrace of her Son and His Holy Church. She models the precious gift of life and the costs required to protect it from harm.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, your miraculous image was made possible because of the humble cooperation of Saint Juan Diego. May our work in the mission fields of everyday life be as fruitful as your own. May we cooperate with you just as Juan did.

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December 11: Saint Damasus I, Pope
c. 305–384
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Archaeologists

A dynamic pope mentors Jerome and embellishes catacombs

Damasus reigned in the era when the popes died in their beds. The long winter of Roman oppression had ended. The arenas were empty. Christians were still occasionally martyred, but not in Rome. The many popes of the 200s who were exiled, murdered, or imprisoned were consigned to history by the late 300s. The Church was not merely legal by Damasus’ time but was established, by decree, in 380 as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The slow-motion crumbling of paganism was such that Christian Senators and Pope Damasus petitioned the emperor that a prominent and famed Altar of Victory in the Senate be removed. The request was granted. No more Vestal Virgins, pagan priests reading entrails, a Pontifex Maximus, or auguries either. The Church was in the ascendancy. As Rome’s military prowess deteriorated and the Eastern Empire was theologically mangled by the Arian controversy, the Bishop of Rome’s importance swelled. Pope Damasus rode the first wave of these historical and religious trends. He was perhaps the first pope to rule with swagger.

Damasus was of Spanish origins, and his father was likely a married priest serving in Rome’s church of the martyr Saint Lawrence. Damasus was probably a deacon in that same church. He was elected Bishop of Rome in 366 but not without some controversy. A rival was aggressively supported by a violent minority who defamed Damasus, though they never removed him. Damasus cared for theology and held two synods in Rome, one of which excommunicated the Arian Bishop of Milan, making way for Saint Ambrose to later hold that see. Pope Damasus also sent legates to the First Council of Constantinople in 381, which reiterated and sharpened the language of the Creed developed at Nicea in 325. Perhaps Damasus’ greatest legacy is not directly his own. He employed a talented young priest-scholar named Jerome as his personal secretary. It was Damasus who instructed Jerome to undertake his colossal, lifelong task of compiling from the original Greek and Hebrew texts a new Latin version of the Old and New Testaments to replace the poorly translated Old Latin Bibles then in use. The Vulgate, as Jerome’s work is known, has been the official Bible of the Catholic Church since its completion.

Description automatically generatedRome’s theological ascendancy made its bishop the Empire’s primary source and focus of unity. This, in turn, led to accusations, first aired in Damasus’ time, that Rome’s prelates lived in excessive grandeur. One pagan senator said mockingly that if he could live like a bishop he would gladly become a Christian. Similar charges would hound Rome throughout history. But Damasus strictly enforced a decree prohibiting clergy from accepting gifts from widows and orphans, and he himself lived a holy life. He restored his father’s house church, now called Saint Lawrence in Damasus. The church still reflects its origins and is found inside of a larger building, just where a house church would have been located in ancient times.

Pope Damasus also left a beautiful legacy in Rome’s catacombs, a legacy which has only been fully appreciated due to modern archeological excavations. Damasus was very devoted to Rome’s martyrs and embellished many of their tombs with brief Latin inscriptions. The papal crypt in the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus still houses the original marble slab engraved with Damasus’ moving eulogy to the popes and martyrs entombed nearby. The epitaph ends with Damasus stating that although he wished to be buried in that crypt, he did not want to offend such holy remains with his presence. But Damasus composed his most tender epitaph for his own tomb: “He who walking on the sea could calm its bitter waves; He who gives life to dying seeds of the earth; He who was able to loose the mortal chains of death, and after three days’ darkness could bring forth the brother for his sister Martha; He, I believe, will make Damasus rise anew from his ashes.” Damasus was clearly a Christian first and a pope second.

Saint Damasus, you led the Church with a mixture of theological acumen, administrative competence, holy witness, and artistic flourish. Intercede in heaven for all who exercise headship in the Church to lead Her with attributes similar to your own.

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December 10: Our Lady of Loreto
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: white
Patron Saint of air crews and builders

Heaven will reinforce what we know of Christ and Mary

When Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” (Mt 7:24), He likely had a specific house in mind—His own house in Nazareth where He grew up. The footings of many of Nazareth’s houses are lodged, even today, into the dense bed of rock that lies under much of the town. Ancient tradition holds that the Virgin Mary was raised in Nazareth, was visited by the Archangel Gabriel in her home there, and then lived in that same home with her husband, Joseph, and her son, Jesus. Jesus would leave Nazareth as an adult for the larger, more cosmopolitan town of Capernaum, about one day away by foot, but He was always identified with His hometown.

The Holy Family’s house in Nazareth has a complicated and obscure history. What is known is that the knights of the First Crusade took control of Galilee in 1099 and made Nazareth their capital. The Italian Angeli family began to reconstruct the Holy Family’s house when a Muslim army won a key battle in 1187 near Nazareth, forcing all the Europeans to flee. The Angelis disassembled stones of the Holy Family’s house and shipped them to Italy by way of modern-day Croatia. The stones were ultimately reconstructed in 1294–95 in their present location in Loreto, where the labors of the Angelis in bringing the stones by ship turned into the legend that “angels” had scooped up the home in Nazareth and transported it through the air to Loreto. In the succeeding centuries, the small stone house was enclosed within an elaborate marble structure within an ornate papal basilica, which became one of the most visited Marian shrines in the world.

Our Lady of Loreto is the title of the statue of the blackened Virgin found in the Holy House. By the 1600s, a beautiful “Litany of Loreto” enumerating Mary’s biblically rich and theologically evocative titles became a popular Catholic devotion. In October 2019, Pope Francis went on pilgrimage to Loreto and announced that December 10 would henceforward be the Optional Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto on the Church’s universal calendar. The formal decree instituting the change states that the new feast "will help all people, especially families, youth and religious to imitate the virtues of the perfect disciple of the Gospel, the Virgin Mother, who, in conceiving the head of the church also accepted us as her own."

The unwrapped gift of the Virgin Mary conceived the Lord amid her domestic concerns in the privacy of her family home in an insignificant hamlet. God did not spare Mary the demands He imposes on every human soul. The Christian God complicated Mary’s life just as He complicates every life. God is not an electric blanket or a pacifier. In satisfying His demands, we find ourselves; in imposing demands on ourselves, we find fulfillment. For the Christian, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning. And meaning is found by acquiring virtues, by attaining holy goals, by maturing through adversity, and by self-knowledge gained through prayer, among many other pathways. The dysfunctions of modernity are often the results of fools’ errands, of the search for deep meaning in hobbies, activities, clubs, sports, and occupations that, though worthy in themselves, are simply incapable of satisfying the most secret longings of the human soul. It is common to ask a pregnant woman, “What are you expecting?” Mary in the silence of her holy house was expecting the Savior, but she kept this immense secret locked inside the chamber of her heart. Perhaps Mary might ask us, with mirth, when we hopefully see her crowned in heaven, surrounded by a constellation of saints, “What were you expecting?” For the Catholic, heaven will be an intensification of what we already know.

Our Lady of Loreto, we ask your intercession to intercede on behalf of all who have recourse to you. Grant us the grace to respond generously to all of God’s invitations to holiness, though they may disrupt our domestic duties and life’s plans.

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December 9: Saint Juan Diego, Hermit
1474–1548
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: white
Patron Saint of indigenous people

Mary said to Juan: "Am I not here, I who am your mother?"

Good things happen to those who go to daily Mass. A very good thing happened to today’s saint on his long trek to daily Mass, something so extraordinary that it permanently altered a continent. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (the “Talking Eagle”) was born near present-day Mexico City in the pre-Colombian Aztec Empire, though he belonged to the Chichimec, not the Aztec, people. At the age of fifty, Juan received baptism from a Franciscan priest, about five years after those path-breaking missionaries had first walked barefoot from coastal Veracruz into the Aztec heartland. Juan must have quickly fell in love with his newfound faith, because he visited God as one visits a sturdy friend, more than just once a week.

On Saturday, December 9, 1531, Juan was walking to Mass and crossed over a small hill called Tepeyac. A mysterious woman appeared to him speaking Nahuatl, the local language. The woman quickly identified herself as the “Ever-Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the true God” and asked Juan to approach the Bishop to petition that a shrine be built in her honor on that very hill. So the humble Juan went and knocked on the door of one of the most powerful men in the new Spanish dominion. The Bishop was solicitous but cautious and requested a sign to buttress Juan’s credibility and his request. A series of events then transpired which culminated on Tuesday, December 12. On that day, Juan presented the Bishop with flowers, carefully cradled in his poncho, which Mary had directed him to collect. When Juan unfurled his poncho in the Bishop’s presence, everyone saw then what everyone sees now in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City—the young, pregnant Mary of Tepeyac emblazoned, in full color, on Juan’s coarse poncho.

An early document holds that, after 1531, Juan Diego, whose wife had died by then, spent the rest of his days living the life of a hermit near the chapel on Tepeyac housing the miraculous image. Juan likely welcomed the first waves of pilgrims who visited the primitive shrine to pay homage to Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is difficult to imagine anyone returning to his or her everyday existence after seeing, hearing, and conversing with God, Mary, or a saint. Some experiences are “before” and “after” events, their profundity divides life into halves or portions: a divorce, a dreadful medical diagnosis,  a financial collapse, a child’s death, a crippling accident, or, on the positive side and much more rarely, a divine locution, an apparition, or an unmistakable spiritual intervention, all divert the straight line of a life’s graph.

The days between December 9 and the vigil of December 12 are a kind of Mexican Triduum, when that nation celebrates founding events which have nothing to do with legal documents. Nation-building requires more than just a constitution or the winning of a key battle. Building an enduring people requires a shared language, a common history, an undivided religious outlook, and a unity of cultural expression. If there is a source of Mexican unity, it is found in the vision of the humble servant Saint Juan Diego. Millions of pilgrims endlessly process, day after day, year after year, century after century, before the miraculous image in the most visited Marian shrine in the world. These citizens don’t go to Mexico’s national archives to search for words on a faded parchment, but to a shrine to gaze in wonder at a young woman imprinted vividly on rough cactus fibers. The faithful arrive on pilgrimage, often on foot, to bow their heads, to light a candle, and to pray before the permanent miracle that is a simple Indian’s gift to the Church. They come to visit a person, not an idea, because a person can absorb our love and love us back.

Saint Juan Diego, we ask your humble intercession in heaven to assist all those who doubt the power of God and His saints. May your example of fidelity and service inspire us to holiness as much as your miraculous tilma.

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December 8: The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
c. 15 B.C.
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of Brazil, Korea, Philippines, Spain, and the United States

Only one person ever chose His own mother

The Ark of the Covenant was a sumptuously adorned chest housing the Jews’ most sacred objects: the tablets of the Ten Commandments, a pot of manna, and Aaron’s staff. Before its disappearance, the Ark was the centerpiece of the Holy of Holies, the mysterious chamber lying behind the curtain in Jerusalem’s Temple. Only the high priest dared to enter this sacred chamber. Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant. She is not a gold-encrusted trunk filled with artifacts but the flesh-and-blood person whose womb nurtured Jesus Christ. Today’s feast celebrates Mary’s own stainless conception, the remote preparation that formed her into that vessel of honor where the living Word first sprang to life. God prepared Mary from her first instant for this great purpose—to be the perfect edifice to carry, birth, and mother the Son of God, one to whom any taint of sin would be repugnant.

Mary was conceived in the natural human way by her parents, Joachim and Anne. But God had a plan and was eager to give Mary an utterly unique gift that could not wait until her childhood or adolescence to be unwrapped. The gift of the Immaculate Conception was given contemporaneously with Mary’s microscopic sparking to life. If we had the chance to choose our own mother, we would not select a selfish, disordered, mean, and sinful woman. We would lovingly accept such a mother but not deliberately choose her. God could choose His own mother, though, and so logically chose a perfect one. As the author of creation, He crafted a pristine soul incapable of sin or moral disorder. Alone among all creation, Mary reaped the spiritual rewards of her Son’s resurrection before its historical occurrence, saving her from death and bodily corruption, sin’s cruelest punishments. Mary was simply flooded with God’s grace in her very origins and has never ceased to be united with Him after that.

When she is just a fetus, a woman has as many eggs as she will ever have. The ovaries of a female fetus are saturated with eggs whose numbers will only decrease over time. So half of the genetic material necessary to form an embryo has waited, latent, inside of that embryo’s mother since the time that mother was herself in utero. The unbroken chain of human life is unfathomably beautiful. Grandmother, mother, and grandchild are, in a certain sense, bound together, united, in every woman expecting a daughter. When Mary was conceived in the womb of Saint Anne, then, the DNA of Jesus of Nazareth was already present in the embryonic Mary. This is a biological fact, not a statement of faith. At the Annunciation, when Mary miraculously conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, that “Lord and Giver of Life”spoke through the words of the Archangel Gabriel and sparked Christ to first stir with humanity deep inside the body where His genes had long been waiting.

Everything new is experienced as a miracle—a new dawn, a new baby, a new house, a new marriage. The Immaculate Conception is celebrated with the greatest solemnity around the world because it commemorates a new, pivotal moment. In Saint Anne, God was readying the fairest flower of Israel, her most modest daughter and humble rose, for Himself. Mary’s virtues of humility and obedience would straighten the path twisted by Eve’s sins of pride and disobedience. By God’s own choice, Mary alone would escape the grip of Adam’s sin. She would be the New Eve, that Spiritual Vessel, House of Gold, and Morning Star whose Immaculate Conception was the first flicker of a greater Light to come.

Mary of the Immaculate Conception, may your purity, virtue, and obedience be a perennial model for all the faithful of the humble and narrow pathways which alone lead to God. Be at our side to encourage and inspire us as we try to be ever nearer to your Son, Jesus.

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December 7: Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor
c. 337–397
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Milan and beekeepers

A mighty bishop guides Augustine, admonishes an emperor, and leads his people

If the noble Saint Ambrose had brought Saint Augustine into the Church and done nothing else besides, he would have done enough. Augustine’s conversion was a slow boil. He was ripe for baptism when providence placed him and his mother, Monica, in Ambrose’s orbit. In baptising Augustine, Ambrose harvested what the Holy Spirit had long cultivated. But Ambrose could be a mentor only because he had previously lived his own Christian drama, and because he was supremely prepared for leadership.

Description automatically generatedAmbrose was a high-born Roman, educated in the refined classical tradition of his age. He is perfectly emblematic of so many scholar-bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries who witnessed Rome’s slow fade and the subsequent Christian dawn. Christ first rose like the sun over Rome’s ruined pagan temples in Ambrose’s own lifetime. Ambrose’s father was the governor of Gaul, and the family was well connected to fellow elites. Ambrose studied Latin, Greek, rhetoric, law, and the classics in Rome. He was a patrician but also a Christian, albeit unbaptized. At a young age he was noticed by powerful mentors who recommended him for crucial civil posts, and when only thirty years old Ambrose was appointed governor of two Northern Italian provinces. He was living in Milan, where the capital had migrated from Rome decades before, when his great moment came. And it is in Milan where Saint Ambrose is especially revered down to this very day.

In 374 the Arian bishop of Milan died, leading to conflicts over whether his successor would be an Arian or an orthodox Catholic. Ambrose was a well-known and well-liked political figure who hovered in the Emperor’s court, so he was sent to pacify the crowds in the church where the contentious episcopal election was to occur. When he spoke to the faithful about the need for a peaceful election, they called out "Ambrose for bishop.” He was stunned, refused the honor, and went into hiding. He eventually ceded to the demands of both the region’s bishops and the Emperor and accepted the position. Ambrose was baptized, ordained into Holy Orders, and consecrated Bishop of Milan, where he would spend the rest of his days.

Ambrose’s asceticism and generosity increased his popularity. Augustine wrote that “great personages held him in honor.” This widespread esteem gave Ambrose a powerful voice with the emperor, whom he famously called to repentance after Roman soldiers committed a wanton massacre in Thessalonica. He also convinced the emperor, in lofty, elegant terms, to forswear support for pagan altars.

Saint Ambrose came late to the study of theology, but his scholarly training enabled him to master it quickly. He wrote works deftly refuting Arianism, others expounding on the true nature of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and still others on the Sacraments, virginity, ethics, Sacred Scripture, penance, and the duties of the clergy. Although not as original a thinker as Augustine or Basil, Ambrose was the very model of an educated, teaching, preaching, active, governing bishop with a pastoral heart. In his Confessions, Augustine relates how he asked Ambrose about Rome’s and Milan’s different days of fasting. Ambrose responded "When I am at Rome, I fast on a Saturday; when I am at Milan, I do not. Follow the custom of the church where you are.” This sage advice may be the source of the adage "When in Rome, do as the Romans." Ambrose may also have been the first to promote antiphonal chant, in which each side of a church or choir takes turns in singing a text. 

After twenty-two consequential years as a bishop involved in the highest matters of Church and Empire, and while in his mid-fifties, Bishop Ambrose died in Milan, where his remains are still venerated in a church dedicated to his honor.

Saint Ambrose, your education, courage, and teaching became a model for bishops for many centuries. Help all bishops to have bleeding hearts, iron wills, and razor-sharp minds so that they can lead the faithful as successfully as you did.

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December 6: Saint Nicholas, Bishop
c. Third–Fourth Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Russia, sailors, merchants, and children

Santa Claus signed the Nicene Creed

Traditions the world over are so embedded in the rhythms of daily life that their ubiquity goes unnoticed. Why a birthday cake with lighted candles? Why make a wish and then blow those candles out? The origin of this charming tradition is obscure. Why shake hands, toast by clinking glasses, cross fingers for good luck, or have bridesmaids? The sources of many traditions are so historically remote and culturally elusive as to allow diverse interpretations of their meaning. Today’s saint is without doubt, however, the man behind the massively celebrated tradition of Santa Claus, the most well-known Christmas figure after Jesus and the Three Kings. Santa Claus’ mysterious nocturnal visits to lavish children with gifts at Christmastime is not a tradition whose origin is lost in the mists of history. It is a tradition firmly rooted in Christianity. 

Little is known about the life of Saint Nicholas, besides that he was the Catholic Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the early fourth century. It is likely that he suffered under the persecution of Diocletian and certain that he later attended the Council of Nicea in 325. "Nicholas of Myra of Lycia" appears on one of the earliest and most reliable lists of the Bishops at Nicea. Some of the bishops at Nicea looked like soldiers who had just crawled off the battlefield; eyes gouged out, skin charred black, stumps for legs. These were the front-line torture victims of Diocelatian. The Emperor Constantine had called the Council, and when he entered the dim hall to inaugurate the great gathering, this colossus, the most powerful man in the world, dressed in robes of purple, slowly walked among the hushed and twisted bodies and did something shocking and beautiful. He stopped and kissed each eyeless cheek, each scar, gash, wound, and mangled stub where an arm had once hung. With this noble gesture, the healing could finally begin. The Church was free. The mitred heads wept tears of joy, and Saint Nicholas was among them. 

At his death, Saint Nicholas was buried in his see city. Less than a century later, a church was built in his honor in Myra and became a site of pilgrimage. And the Emperor Justinian, in the mid-500s, renovated a long-existing church dedicated to Saint Nicholas in Constantinople. In Rome, a Greek community was worshipping in a basilica dedicated to Saint Nicholas around 600. The church can still be visited today. These churches, and hundreds of others named for Saint Nicholas, prove that devotion to our saint was widespread not long after his death.

When Myra was overrun by Muslim Turks in the 1000s, there was a risk that the saint’s bones would disappear. So in 1087, sailors from Bari, Italy, committed a holy theft and moved Saint Nicholas’ relics to their own hometown. In 1089 the Pope came to Bari to dedicate a new church to Saint Nicholas. And just a few years later, Bari became the rendezvous point for the First Crusade. Saint Nicholas was the patron saint of travelers and sailors, making him popular with the crusading knights. These knights, in turn, later brought the devotion to Saint Nicholas they learned in Bari back to their villages dotting the countryside of Central and Western Europe. Thus it happened that a saint famous along the shores of the Mediterranean became, in ways not totally understood, the source of gift-giving traditions that perdure until today in every corner of Europe.

Legends state that Nicholas saved three sisters from lives of shame by secretly dropping small sacks of gold through their family’s window at night, thus giving each a marriage dowry. Other legends relate that Nicholas secretly put coins in shoes that were left out for him. Nicholas’ legacy of gift-giving became a Central-European and Anglo-Saxon expression of the gift-giving formerly exclusive to the Three Kings. Christmas night gift-giving in Northern lands thus slowly replaced the more biblically solid traditions of giving gifts on the Feast of the Epiphany, a custom more popular in Southern Europe and in lands which inherited its traditions.

The antiquity of the Church means it has played a matchless role in the formation of Western culture, a role that no faux holidays or new “tradition” can replicate. Santa Claus has roots. He wears red for the martyrs. He dons a hat resembling a bishop’s mitre. He often holds a sceptre similar to a bishop’s crozier. And he distributes gifts to children in humble anonymity on the night of Christ’s birth. Old Saint Nick, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, or Santa Claus is real, in one sense. In all likelihood, he signed the Nicene Creed. Our “Santa,” then, was an orthodox Catholic bishop who argued for correct teaching about our Trinitarian God. The gift of the truth was, then, his first and most lasting gift to mankind.

Saint Nicholas, your service as a bishop included not only teaching correctly the mysteries of our faith but also generous and humble charity in alleviating the material needs of your neighbor. Help all of us to combine good theology with Christian action like you did.

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December 4: Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor
c. 674–749
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of icon painters and theology students

A monk defends images from Christian attack

“Christ...did not save us by paintings,” a Synod of Bishops declared in Paris in 825. God, it could be added, did not become an icon. He became a man, and so sanctified creation itself, not just art. In the eighth century, a raging debate, even violence, over the role of images in Christianity tore at the fabric of the undivided Church. The deep wounds inflicted in the body of Christ by the iconoclastic controversy took decades to close. Today’s saint helped the healing start.

John of Damascene explained in clear, deep, and evocative language the theological significance of venerating images. He thus helped bishops, emperors, and popes to think their way out of the controversy. For his learned defense of images, Saint John Damascene was declared a Doctor of the Church centuries later, in 1890. Ironically, John’s brave defense of icons was possible because he lived behind the Muslim curtain, in Syria. He lived beyond the reach of the long arm of Constantinople, a city whose emperors opposed icons partly to appease their new and violent geopolitical neighbors, the Muslims, whose mosques were adorned with geometric patterns, not faces and bodies.

John of Damascus (or Damascene) is known primarily through his writings. The details of his life are few. When his native Syria was overrun in the 630s by a new, martial religion that blew like a strong wind out of Saudi Arabia, John’s family served in the local caliph’s administration. The Muslim conquest was facilitated by the local population of subjugated, but educated, Christians and Jews who were conquered but not displaced. They carried out the everyday tasks of empire building of which the illiterate horsemen of the desert knew nothing. John and his family were part of this large administrative class of Arabic non-Muslims. Our saint, then, personally lived the epochal transition of Syria from a Constantinople-focused Christian culture to a Mecca-facing Muslim one.

After receiving a complete education from a captive Catholic priest, John abandoned his secular career and entered a monastery near Jerusalem to become a priest and monk. The rest of his life was dedicated to his own perfection and to theological and literary pursuits. Islam’s prohibition of images forced Christian theologians to defend and explain something that had never before been challenged—the ubiquitous Christian use, in both public and private, of icons, statues, medals, crucifixes, and other forms of art. John was the first to distinguish between the worship rendered to God alone and the veneration given to images and those they represent. John noted that the saint is not the paint on the wood any more than Jesus is the ink on the page of the Gospel. Such distinctions were needed to respond to both Islam and to Old Testament strictures against using images, an exception to which was the God-sanctioned adornments on the Ark of the Covenant.

John Damascene argued that when God took flesh He ended the era of the misty, faceless God. Because God chose to be visible, the Christian can venerate the Creator of matter who became matter for man’s sake. Salvation was achieved via created matter, so we venerate that matter not absolutely, but contingently. Did not Christ hang on the wood of the cross? Did He not consecrate bread and wine? Was He not baptized in water? The matter of which images are made comes from God Himself and thus shares in His goodness. Even the Sacraments make use of the elements of creation to become vehicles of God’s grace. John’s ideas won the day, long after his death, at the Second Council of Nicea in 787, which condemned iconoclasm. From that point until the rise of Protestantism, art was correctly understood in Western culture as an extended celebration of the Incarnation. When we gaze in wonder at the mellow glow of stained glass, marvel at the smooth serenity of the face of Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà, or wonder at the explosion of the baroque in an Italian church, we should whisper thanks to today’s saint for saving the day just when it needed to be saved.

Saint John Damascene, you studied and wrote so that the illiterate of your time could “read” icons and so know and love the Lord by just looking at Him, His mother, and His saints. Help all catechists to use their education to defend the faith of those unable to explain it to themselves.

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December 3: Saint Francis Xavier, Priest
1506–1552
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of foreign missions

A missionary blazes a path for Christ in India and Japan

Today’s great missionary knelt on the floor next to Saint Ignatius Loyola and five other men in a church on Montmartre overlooking Paris in 1534 and took private vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Pope. It was the start of the Jesuits. Francis Xavier would be ordained a priest three years later in Venice and, in 1540, would sail from Lisbon, Portugal, to India, never to return.  The thirteen-month sea journey was brutal, but Francis was as tough as bark. He held his own with all the sailors, slaves, and criminals on board who were seeking to start anew for reasons noble and otherwise. When Francis arrived in Goa, India, he and his two confreres found a Portuguese settlement about thirty years old. As was sadly typical, the greatest hindrance to the success of Spanish, Portuguese, and French missionaries was their own countrymen. Slave traders, merchants, pirates, nobles, and crown officials gave a contrary Christian witness, which undercut the priests’ own teaching and example. It was said that when the Portuguese whipped their servants, they counted the lashes on their rosary beads.

Francis’ first goal was to evangelize the settlers. He preached, taught, heard confessions, and encouraged the Portuguese to live their faith if they harbored any hope of winning India for Christ. After working among his own for a few years establishing the basic structures of a church, including a seminary, Francis went on the first of his incessant voyages, the sub-missions inside of his greater mission to Asia. Among the people of the islands near modern-day Sri Lanka, Francis slept on the dirt like they did. He ate rice and drank water like they did. He put the Our Father and Hail Mary to music and so made these prayers easier to remember. He became a father to a humble people and baptized so many thousands that helpers had to hold up his arm to continue his sacramental work. That very arm is found today in a reliquary in the Jesuit’s mother church in Rome, the Gesù, near the tomb of St. Ignatius Loyola.

Francis used Goa as his base as he departed on one missionary journey after another among the islands off of Southeast Asia. He wrote letters to Ignatius and to the King of Portugal describing his labors and plans, bemoaning the lack of priests and the unethical behavior of his fellow Europeans. On one journey, he heard of an archipelago that no European had yet entered. It was Japan. Francis started to plan and, in 1549, he was the first missionary to plant his foot into the soil of the Land of the Rising Sun. The work was difficult. As so many Europeans noted, Japanese culture was fundamentally unlike other Asian cultures. The Japanese were intellectually sophisticated, sensitive to slights, honorable, open to reason, and naturally inquisitive. But the language was impenetrable, the leaders often hostile, and the monks welcoming only until they realized that Francis’ religion was a rival to their own. An expert missionary, Francis had to create a neologism adapted from Latin—Deusu—to convey the Christian concept of the word God. No equivalent existed in Japanese.

After little visible success in Japan, Francis had further adventures on land and sea before he embarked on a plan to enter the vast and forbidden territory of China. But it was not to be. On December 2, 1552, Francis Xavier died of fever at the age of forty-six on a small island a few miles distant from the shores of mainland China. Like Moses, he died seeing the promised land but never entered it. Francis was buried in a shallow grave in the sand as four people looked on. His body was covered with lime in case anyone wanted to recover it later. They did. This Apostle to the Indies and Japan was canonized in 1622 and is considered the Church’s greatest missionary after Saint Paul. His body is largely incorrupt and rests in a glass coffin in a church in Goa, India.

Saint Francis Xavier, your indefatigable journeying to spread the Gospel inspired generations of missionaries. May your legacy of generosity and vigor continue in us as we convert others through our own witness of virtue, work, and charity for all.

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November 30: Saint Andrew, Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Scotland, Greece, fishermen, sailors, and spinsters

A big-hearted fisherman becomes a daring Apostle

Andrew was a fisherman from Bethsaida in Northern Israel. He lived on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, which is really a lake, where many of Jesus’ miracles took place. Jesus chose mostly fishermen and small farmers to be His disciples, perhaps because in these professions a man can plan, sweat, and calculate, and still, in the end, fail. Success is not appreciated unless failure is an option. Farmers and fishermen must depend on God’s providence for success. No amount of preparation can make the clouds open and the rains pour down, and no amount of careful planning will make the nets burst with fish. Farmers and fishermen are hard-working, careful, thoughtful, and yet entirely dependent on the weather and other factors outside of their control. They must work, pray and trust in God in equal measure. They must have the discipline of faith. These are the qualities that made Andrew and others such great disciples.

Andrew was first a disciple of John the Baptist. Andrew was at John’s side when a man whom John had recently baptized walked by. “Look, here is the Lamb of God,” John exclaimed (Jn 1:36). Andrew was curious and, along with a few of John’s other disciples, followed the mysterious man. The next day Andrew breathlessly told his brother Simon “We have found the Messiah” (Jn 1:41) and brought him to Jesus, who renamed Simon as Peter. From that point forward, Andrew became one of Jesus’ most reliable Apostles, a leader among the Twelve whose name recurs time and again in the Gospels. There are various traditions about where Andrew evangelized after the Ascension of the Lord, with most focusing on Greece, Turkey, and north of the Black Sea. There are no certain facts about his manner of death, although various apocrypha state that he was tied to an x-shaped cross and then preached from that high pulpit for days until he died.

Saint Andrew sat at the table of the Last Supper, felt the hot breath of the Holy Spirit on his cheeks at Pentecost, saw the radiant body of the risen Lord with his own eyes, and endured physical hardships as he carried a new religion into old lands. We can suppose that he, like many of the Apostles, was content with his way of life before he met the Lord. Fishing on the tranquil waters of a lake, sharing daily meals with his extended family, chatting in the evenings with old friends before a fire. The Apostles did not abandon their lives to follow Jesus because their lives were miserable. It was a question of more. More meaning. More truth. More fulfillment. More challenge. More daring. There is nothing wrong with a good life, but there is something better about a great life.

The Apostles were mostly simple, intelligent, hardworking men whose outstanding characteristics were courage and daring. Many people who could have followed the Lord did not. The rich young man went away sad for he had many possessions. Perhaps the greatest thing that young man had was his youth. Andrew and Peter and John and Simon and all the others were young too. Yet they did not go away sad. They stayed, they followed, they were challenged, and they were contented. Andrew renounced his father, his boat, his nets, and all that was known and comfortable. He traded what was good for what was better. And for that generosity and daring we remember him today, so many centuries later. He was of that generation of pathbreakers who sowed the seeds whose harvests the Christians of today have reaped and enjoyed.

Saint Andrew, we ask your intercession as an Apostle in heaven to make all Christians more generous in responding to the Lord’s invitation to follow Him. Embolden us to share the faith with our families, as you did with your brother Simon Peter, and to be outspoken in our beliefs.

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November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
c. Late third–early fourth centuries
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of philosophers, apologists, and all who work with wheels

An obscure Egyptian wins the double crown of virgin-martyr

The armies of Alexander the Great swept south and east from Greece three hundred and thirty years before the infant Jesus ever gently swayed in His Mother’s arms. After Alexander conquered Egypt, he founded a new coastal city and crowned it after himself. Alexandria, Constantinople, Caesarea, Antioch, and numerous other foundations gratified the colossal egos of the mighty men who laid deep foundations and raised high walls to commemorate themselves and their patrons. How different from the Christian era and its venerable custom of naming places in honor of the Lord, Mary, and the Saints—San Francisco, Christchurch, El Salvador, Sao Paolo, Asunción, and on and on. Today’s saint—Catherine of Alexandria—appropriates Alexander’s name for Christianity, something beyond the imagining of that Greek pagan of old.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria was a virgin-martyr from the waning years of the persecuted Church in the early fourth century. Reliable documentation about her life may still lie undiscovered in a dusty codex whose heft is sagging a shelf in a neglected monastic library. Until such authentic corroboration of her life is brought to light, however, the total absence of verifiable facts make Catherine an enigmatic figure. Precisely due to this dearth of biographical information, Catherine’s feast day was removed from the Church’s universal calendar by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1969.

In 2000, Pope Saint John Paul II went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to properly commence the third millennium. Among the holy sites he visited was Mount Sinai, Egypt, on whose summit Moses received from God the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Orthodox Monastery on Mount Sinai is named in honor of Saint Catherine, after a legend which holds that her relics were borne there by angels upon her martyrdom. The Orthodox Abbot of the monastery sadly refused to pray with the Pope during his pastoral visit to St. Catherine’s. Among the unstated reasons for this rebuff may have been the Church’s decision to liturgically suppress Saint Catherine’s feast day in 1969. So, in 2002, Pope Saint John Paul II restored Catherine’s feast day, perhaps as a generous ecumenical gesture to the family of Orthodox Churches.

Devotion to Saint Catherine began in the late first millennium among the Orthodox. Her cult migrated to the West with the crusading knights when they returned from the Holy Land in the twelfth century. Devotion to Saint Catherine exploded in popularity throughout the High Middle Ages until she was one of the most commonly invoked saints in all of Europe. Even a college at England’s Cambridge University was established in Catherine’s honor in 1473. It is said that Catherine was a beautiful young woman from a noble Alexandrian family who had a miraculous conversion to Christianity, compelling her to make a vow of virginity. Her erudition and persuasive gifts convinced fifty of the Emperor’s most able philosophers of the truth of Christianity. Catherine then had further successful forays in converting the Emperor’s own household and soldiers. When she rejected the Emperor’s romantic entreaties, he sentenced her to be shred to pieces on a spiked wheel. But Catherine’s bindings were miraculously loosened and she survived the ordeal, only to then suffer beheading, thus earning the double crown of both virgin and martyr.

In the summer of 1425, a young French girl named Joan, standing in her parent’s garden, gazed into the mist closely enveloping her and saw something. It was Saint Michael the Archangel and two women wearing rich crowns. One of these women was Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Catherine spoke sweetly and softly to young Joan, saying that she would be Joan’s counsel, guide, and protector. She even promised to one day lead Joan to paradise. Years later, when Joan acquitted herself well under questioning by theologians, just as Catherine had done when questioned by philosophers, the townspeople said that Joan of Arc was none other than Saint Catherine of Alexandria come down to earth again.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, your intelligence and devotion led you to be outspoken for Christ. Intercede on behalf of all Christians, making them fearless in their advocacy for, and defense of, the truths of our faith, even to the point of death.

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Fourth Thursday in November: Thanksgiving Day (U.S.A.)

Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Life is a gift replete with countless gifts

It’s 1542, and the Spanish Franciscan Juan de Padilla, a rugged ex-soldier, is trekking through the high, waving prairie grasses of the buffalo plains of North America at the head of a small band of explorers. Suddenly, an Indian war party of the Kansas people appears on the low horizon. The Spaniards scatter into the tall grasses for cover. But Father Padilla stays, slowly kneels in the moist soil, bows his head in prayer, and doesn’t move an inch. The war party approaches, and as the Spaniards watch from afar, they stretch their bows and fill Father Padilla’s torso with a volley of arrows. He is the first North American martyr. There are no dissenting Protestants anywhere in sight.

It’s 1570, and five Spanish Jesuits establish a mission, with chapel and school, to evangelize Indians in the future state of Virginia. In February of 1571, all the Jesuits are hacked to death with the very axes they had given to the Indians for chopping wood. A relief boat arriving a few months later finds Indians on the shore dressed in blood-stained cassocks. The English Potestant settlement of Jamestown is still thirty-six years in the future!

It’s April 30, 1598, in modern-day New Mexico. A Spanish explorer and a team of Franciscan priests erect a large cross and solemnly consecrate the vast land before them to Christ the King. The local Indians accept baptism and a large banquet is held, and is still held annually, to commemorate the event. The pilgrims who would one day land in Massachusetts are, in 1598, still in Europe. Throughout the American borderlands, in the Southwest, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Texas, hundreds of Spanish missionaries in the 1500s were traversing the deserts, swamps, forests, and plains of the future United States of America saying Mass, teaching the faith, and baptizing, long before a single boat loaded with pilgrims ever slowly floated into an East Coast harbor.

The people of the future United States of America gave thanks in many and varied ways long before President Abraham Lincoln, in 1863, established the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” North America’s native tribes gave thanks in primitive ways common to all pre-modern societies. They honored the gods who formed the mountains like clay, who blew the winds across the prairies, and who caused the rain to fall. These Indians had their sacred dances, sacred dress, and sacred places where their holy men invoked the spirit gods equated with creation. These robust, but primitive, religious impulses lacked an equivalent moral dimension requiring respect for women, prisoners of war, children, or the unknown other. Christian missionaries brought a fuller, more complex religion which built a solid structure on the native culture’s wide base of nature-based cosmologies.

When dissenting Protestants disembarked in Massachusetts in 1620, they brought a deep belief in Jesus Christ and in His written word. After numerous settlers perished from disease, hardship, and starvation, they bonded with local Indians to offer thanks to God in 1621 for their tenuous survival. We need not live in desperate and difficult circumstances to fall to our knees in thanks to God for our life and all of its bounty. The intentional disciple must have a permanent attitude of gratitude if she finds it easy to believe when others struggle, if both of her parents were present as she grew up, if the children are healthy, if the job pays well, if the pain in the stomach was nothing at all, if the plane lands safely every time, if the bruised marriage heals, if there is always food at hand, gas in the car, a friend to call, or just one person who wonders where you’ve been the last few hours.

There’s a million reasons to be thankful and a million ways to express those million reasons. President Lincoln did not explain why he chose a Thursday as Thanksgiving Day, but perhaps the legacy of Catholicism influenced his decision. Jesus Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist, the ultimate act of Thanksgiving, on a Thursday evening—Holy Thursday. For the Catholic who goes to daily Mass, every day is Thanksgiving Day.

God, creation is not just a forum for action but a gift to mankind, a place for men and women, alone created in Your image and likeness, to work out their salvation, to exercise their gifts, and to render due homage and thanks to You for life itself, the gift of all gifts.

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November 24: Saint Andrew Dũng-Lac, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs
1795–1839; Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of Vietnam

Thousands of priests and converts are hunted down, tortured, and cruelly murdered

The tide of persecution repeatedly swelled, receded, and swelled once more against today’s martyrs in various eras of Vietnamese history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Matters were only slightly less brutal for Catholics living in communist North Vietnam in the twentieth century, but those victims are not included in today’s commemoration. Today’s one hundred and seventeen martyrs were beatified in four different groups, from 1900 through 1951, yet they were all canonised at the same Mass by Pope Saint John Paul II in Rome in 1988. These one hundred and seventeen include a rich mix of lay people, priests, and bishops who were mostly native Vietnamese but also include several heroic French and Spanish missionaries. Today’s martyrs each have a name and a historically verifiable narrative detailing their sad fate. Many tens of thousands more Catholics were martyred in Vietnam in this same period, yet their names are known to God alone. They will form part of that cloud of witnesses whom all the saved will one day see in heaven, wearing white robes and with a martyr’s palm in their hands.

Father Andrew Dũng-Lạc alone is named on this feast, not because his sufferings were more depraved than those of his co-martyrs, but because they were so similar. Andrew’s name is a touchstone for the entire group. Father Andrew was born to pagan parents but fell under the holy influence of a lay catechist, was baptized, became a catechist himself, entered seminary, and was ordained a diocesan priest. He was a model parish priest in every respect, and thus an ideal target once a new wave of persecution broke out. When he was first imprisoned, his parishioners raised enough money to ransom him. But about fours years later, he was arrested again, tortured, and beheaded, along with another priest, Peter Thi. The story of another of today’s martyrs, Father Théophane Vénard, made such a deep impression on the young Thérèse of Lisieux that she requested, unsuccessfully, to transfer to a Carmel convent in Vietnam.

The persecutions of the Church in Vietnam displayed characteristics similar to anti-Catholic attacks carried out in other Asian countries. In its first wave of missionaries, Catholicism’s arrival in Asia was seen as intriguing, beautiful, and new. Its priests were educated, heroic in their zeal, and culturally sensitive. Yet as its hold on the native population grew, Asian leaders became jealous and suspicious. They saw the Church either as foreign to their ancient culture’s long-established habits of life and thinking, or as an actual arm of a colonial power seeking to slowly subjugate an entire people for commercial benefit. At this historical flex point, brutal persecutions of Catholics broke out in Japan, Vietnam, and China. Yet as the Church matured over time and large native populations of Catholics survived, different persecutions, not related to colonialism, began. In the nineteenth century, Asian leaders often claimed that priests and bishops were in conspiratorial alliances with disaffected Catholic elites who sought to overthrow the reigning authorities for reasons of religion or state.

The persecution of the Church in Vietnam was outstanding for its ferocity and brutality. Asian cultures seem to excel at devising ever more brutal forms of inflicting physical and psychological pain on persecuted classes. Victims had their skin ripped off, were carefully sliced in pieces, were confined in cages hung in public squares like big cats, were compelled to trample on crucifixes, were separated from spouses and family, and often had the words “false religion” marked on their faces.

Vietnam’s communist government sent not a single representative to the canonization Mass for today’s martyrs in 1988, but thousands of Vietnamese faithful attended nonetheless, mostly from Vietnamese diaspora communities. Today Vietnam has over two thousand parishes and almost three thousand priests. Its population is about eight percent Catholic. The faith survived, even thrived, due to the exemplary witness of so many staunch disciples who did not bend to the powerful gusts that blew against them. Today’s victims bowed their heads to receive only two things—the waters of Baptism and the sword.

Martyrs of Vietnam, by your constancy and courage, help all Christians who struggle and doubt in any way to persevere in their vocations, to win the small battles over self every day, so that they can enjoy life with God and His saints one day in heaven.

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November 23: Saint Clement I, Pope and Martyr
First Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of sailors and marble workers

Primacy more than infallibility, service more than authority

Our loving maternal Church expresses herself through a paternal structure which makes decisions, resolves conflicts, intercedes in disputes, and governs the people who voluntarily gather in her strong embrace. The Marian Church of discipleship is without sin, like the Virgin herself, but the Petrine Church of authority is founded on a heroic, but flawed, man. Because it is rooted in the life of Saint Peter, Church governance is, by its nature, as imperfect as it is necessary. So while the pure Church of Mary awaits discovery in heaven, her pristine beauty is disfigured in this world by her commingling with the oh-so-human Church of Peter. The highest expression of the Church’s authority is the sole office built over the words of Christ Himself—the papacy.

Today’s Memorial commemorates the third successor of Saint Peter, who served as the Bishop of Rome in the last years of the first century. Pope Clement I and his two predecessors are named in Eucharistic Prayer I just after the list of the Twelve Apostles: “Linus, Cletus, Clement…” Though few details of Clement’s life are known, what is known is surpassingly important.

Clement is the very first Apostolic Father and may have been ordained by Saint Peter himself. In about the year 96 A.D., Clement wrote from Rome to the Church in Corinth to resolve some undefined disputes over authority tearing at that congregation. Clement’s letter is one of the most ancient Christian documents after the New Testament itself. It was so significant that in the second century it was read at Mass in Corinth and, in other regions, was considered part of the New Testament Canon!

The tone of Clement’s long letter is fraternal rather than domineering, more like an encyclical than a decree. Pope Clement encourages the faithful to be obedient to their priests and bishops, to be inspired by the example of the martyrs, and to lead lives of high moral virtue. The Church of Corinth could have looked to Saint John the Evangelist for guidance. In the late first century, he was an old man living in Ephesus, a city much closer to Corinth than Rome. But it was the long-dead Peter whose shadow towered over Corinth, not the living John.

Clement’s letter reveals an even-tempered soul, a shepherd eager to preserve the tenuous unity of his flock. The letter is invaluable as a proof of the centrality of the Bishop of Rome from the first chapter of the Christian story. The service of apostolic authority, of an interior organizing principle, is intrinsic to the Gospel itself, not a later addition. The primitive papal primacy exercised by Clement is not the imposition of a foreign power structure on an otherwise dreamy and innocent Church. The proto-Christians of Corinth needed clear, fatherly, instruction as they struggled to implement the Christian revolution in their homes, villages, shops, and town squares. Saint Paul had to write to them twice using strong language. It was evidently not enough, hence Clement’s letter a few decades later.

As the first generations of Christians realized that Christ was not going to return before they died, their understanding of the Church matured. Personal prophecies, individual teachings, and private spiritual gifts had to be incorporated into the broader life of the quickly expanding church. These personal gifts thus became subject to Church approval and to conformity with Scripture and previous teachings. In Clement’s time, the Church, rather than individuals, slowly became the repository of the accumulated wisdom of Christianity. And this early Church was not merely a society of learned men, an association of the perfect, or a cultural enrichment club. It was, and still is, a real Church, and so did what a real church does. The Corinthians, with Clement’s help, knew this essential fact—that to be a Christian and to be a member of the Church was one and the same thing.

Saint Clement, you spoke with fatherly authority to faithful men and women struggling to preserve Christian unity. May your balanced example inspire all in Holy Orders to gather, not scatter, to encourage, not scold, as they teach, preach, and govern in the name of Christ.

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November 23: Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro, Priest and Martyr (U.S.A.)
1891–1927
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

The proto-martyr of the age of the image

The emaciated holocaust survivor behind the barbed wire, gazing out, bewildered, as the
Allied soldiers walk up to the camp. Click. The slack body of a black man hanging from a stout limb, a thick crowd of whites gathered around. Click. A soldier shooting a young Viet Cong prisoner in the head on the frenetic streets of Saigon in 1968. Click. The President zooming through Dallas in a convertible when… Click. In the age of the image, a camera is always clicking or a device recording the action. Modern reality is experienced through images, lenses, and screens more than words. Like a red-hot iron searing a brand into a hide, a powerful image sizzles as it presses itself into our brains.

The photos of the execution of today’s martyr blister the mind. There are no photos of Polycarp as the flames licked his skin, of Felicity and Perpetua stumbling as the heifer ran them down, or of Kolbe quietly offering his life for a stranger in grim Auschwitz. The indelible photos of Father Pro being shot will have to suffice for all the undepicted others. The high drama of Pro’s last moments must substitute for every Christian stuffed in the trunk, worked to death in the Siberian gulag, or burned at the stake. No last words or gestures were recorded as the terror closed in on them. For so many who were “disappeared,” there were no witnesses, no documents, no legacy, no clicks.

Miguel Pro was born into a middle-class family in North Central Mexico. His family was large, pious, and close in the best Latino tradition. Miguel received his First Holy Communion from Fr. Mateo Correa, who would be executed just a few months before Father Pro for not revealing the confessions of his fellow prisoners. A much loved sister of Miguel’s became a nun, a Christian witness which inspired Miguel to enter a Jesuit seminary. Miguel’s seminary studies in Mexico were interrupted by the spasms of anti-Catholic violence which convulsed Mexico throughout the early twentieth century. He had to flee the country and studied in California, Nicaragua, Spain, and, finally, Belgium, where he was ordained a priest in 1925. The other men ordained with him gave their customary first priestly blessing to their parents after the ordination Mass. Father Miguel’s entire family was in Mexico, so he went back to his room, laid out all his family photos on a table, and blessed the pictures.

Fr. Pro’s first apostolic labors were in Belgium among working class miners. His health was a problem from his youth. He suffered painful bleeding ulcers, which required several marginally successful surgeries to repair. This constant physical discomfort likely hardened his will, deepened his life of prayer, and steeled his body for the heroism to come. Years of faithful attendance at the school of human suffering had braced him. Fr. Pro was a man in full.

In 1926 Father Pro returned to Mexico and began a clandestine priestly ministry in an atmosphere of high tension. Mexico’s lords of evil had a phobia of Catholicism and outlawed its every expression, from the wearing of priestly garb to the public celebration of the Sacraments. Pro was hunted like a bandit. In November 1927, an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the president-elect provided the pretext for punishing Pro, who was guiltless. He was discovered in his hideout. There was no trial, no evidence, no counsel, no defense, no judge, no jury, no verdict, and no sentence. There was just a squalid firing range down the street.

It was November 23. A photographer was sent to capture, for propaganda purposes, Pro begging for mercy. Not a chance! Father Pro briefly knelt in prayer, declined a blindfold, kissed his crucifix, and then stood and spoke in a strong voice: “May God have mercy on you! May God bless you! Lord, you know I am innocent! With all my heart I forgive my enemies! Viva Cristo Rey!” He then elevated his arms like the crucified Savior, a rosary in one hand and a small crucifix in the other when...click, click, click, click. It was 10:38 a.m. Pro is frozen in time. He is forever young. He is not before or after. He is his last seconds. He is those photos. To die is to do something. Blessed Miguel Pro did it as well as anyone ever did. He was beatified in 1988 and his memorial placed one week before the feast of Christ the King.

Blessed Miguel Pro, your gripping last moments sear the mind and pierce the heart. Grant us just an ounce of your ocean of daring, fortitude, and perseverance in living and sharing the faith. Help us to be more like you!

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November 23: Saint Columban, Abbot
c.543–615
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of motorcyclists and against floods

He led the first wave of Irish monks who stormed Europe

Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries, the great gales of Ireland filled the sails of countless boats packed with hardy Irish monks steering toward France. Once on Europe’s northern shores, these men scaled her sandy slopes and headed inland in a kind of recurring theological D-Day. A seemingly endless pilgrimage of Irish scholar-monks went into voluntary exile, left their rainy homeland, navigated the waters, and sunk their roots deep into the soil of post-Roman Europe.

Up and down today’s France, Switzerland, the Low Countries and Germany, Irish monks founded monasteries that plowed furrows, sang chant, grew vines, copied books, hewed wood, forged chalices, raised cattle, taught children, dug wells, consecrated altars, rendered tallow into candles, and preached the sweet love of Christ. The rough local populations were drawn to these monasteries like moths to a flame, creating some of the oldest towns in Europe. Saint Columban, the leader of the first wave of these great builders of Europe, is the avatar of the missionary Irish monk. His ceaseless labors and iron will bent the arc of European history toward Christ.

A monk named Jonas, living one generation after our saint, authored Columban’s Life based on the recollections of Columban’s own brother monks. Columban (or Columbanus) was born in Ireland about the same year that Saint Benedict died in Italy. He was a clever boy who received an excellent education in secular and theological letters. When he left home as a youth to enter a monastery, it was not to a soaring gothic structure of a later, more glorious age. The Irish monks of late antiquity had more in common with the Egyptian ascetics who vanished into the desert than with medieval Benedictines. Irish monasteries were small Christian farms, communes of low-slung buildings formed in a circle around a humble stone chapel.

After Columban distinguished himself for his learning and his severe penances, he received his abbot’s permission to sail to the continent at about the age of forty. A legend of the era told of holy monks who set off from the Emerald Isle in a boat without oars, willing to land and serve wherever God so willed. The boat Columban and his twelve companion monks climbed into had oars and landed on the Brittany coast of France around 585.

For the next thirty years, Columban founded monasteries, attracted countless vocations, introduced private confession to Europe, and impressed all with his self-punishing Irish asceticism. Yet Columban had conflicts with powerful French bishops over his communities’ Celtic dating of Easter, which deviated from the Roman dating, and conflicts over the strange Irish tonsure, so different from the round cutting of the scalp practiced in the rest of the Church. Further tensions with French nobility caused Columban’s arrest and forced exile to Ireland. But the boat transporting him back home met rough seas and returned to its French port. So Columban stayed in Europe and found his way to Northern Italy. His last years were active in refuting the Arianism still thriving among the Italian Goths and in founding the great monastery of Bobbio, where Columban died on November 23, 615. Columban’s disciples founded over one hundred monasteries throughout Central Europe! Columban’s strict monastic Rule was also widely used until it was eclipsed by the more balanced Rule of Saint Benedict.

In around 600, Saint Columban wrote a letter to Pope Saint Gregory the Great professing his docile obedience: “We Irish, though dwelling at the far ends of the earth, are all disciples of Saint Peter and Saint Paul...we are bound to the Chair of Peter.” Columban, who may have been the first man to use the word “Europe” in its modern sense, was the prototype for a thousand unnamed missionaries whose austere resilience and fine minds built Europe one soul, one book, and one monastery, at a time.

Saint Columban, you were an ascetic, a theologian, and a father of Europe. Help all who seek your intercession to be as dynamic as you in rooting the faith in the deepest and richest soil.

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November 22: Saint Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr
c. Third Century
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Music and Musicians

A girl martyr’s mysterious death seizes the imagination

The First Eucharistic Prayer, also known as the Roman Canon, is principally a liturgical document. But like so many things liturgical, it also has immense historical value. Only a tiny fraction of the ancient world’s documents have survived. Archives flood, libraries burn to ash, monasteries collapse, castles are sacked, and coastlines erode—the cities perched above them crumbling into the waves, everything lost, as the sea pushes inland. When documents disappear, historians must work from scraps of pottery and marble, or from the detritus of watery shipwrecks, to gather just tiny pieces of the fuller mosaic of what once was. The Catholic Church is a phenomenal exception to culture’s progressive Alzheimer’s. In its law, catechisms, calendar, feasts, buildings, hierarchy, and most especially in its liturgy, the Church’s past is never really past. Catholicism’s collective memory is stored, not in rack upon rack of digital servers in hermetically sealed rooms, but in the minds of its hundreds of millions of adherents. The faithful are the cloud. Priests and religious in particular circulate the living faith, ensuring that it is perpetually churning, flowing, and spreading like a rushing river.

The names of the martyrs listed in the Roman Canon include today’s saint, Cecilia. From one perspective, that is all we need to know. She lived. She was martyred. She was remembered. Cecilia’s name was included in the only Eucharistic Prayer then said at Sunday Mass, presumably because she stood out from the many other martyrs for a particular reason. That reason has been lost. Perhaps a stirring homily, committed to writing, preserved moving details of Cecilia’s life and tragic death. But maybe that homily was converted to cinders and slowly floated away when the enormous library of the Monastery of Cluny burned during the French religious conflicts of the 1500s. Perhaps there was a biographically detailed marble epitaph over Cecilia’s grave in the catacombs. Yet maybe that epitaph was wrenched from the wall by a barbarian plunderer who later used it as a sturdy doorstep for his house in Aachen.

Cecilia’s details are lost, for reasons unknown. But the Roman Canon is not lost, and it gathers together some notable virgin martyrs of the first few centuries: “...Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia…” Like flies in amber, their names are preserved, to be heard in hundreds of languages by millions of people every week until the end of time.

Cecilia was likely martyred by cuts to her neck after attempts to steam her to death were unsuccessful. She was then buried in a loculus near the papal crypt in the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus. After being the object of devotion in the catacombs for centuries, Cecilia’s remains were transferred by the Pope in the early 800s to her own Basilica in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome. During some restoration work on the Basilica in 1599, Cecilia’s body was uncovered and found to be incorrupt. Before contact with the atmosphere caused her fragile, paper-mache like skin to disintegrate, an artist carefully noted what he saw. His sculpture of Saint Cecilia is evocative and justly famous. The marble itself seems to rest in peace. It is not a forward, glorious pose in the Counter-Reformation tradition dominant when the statue was executed. The marble is white, reflecting Cecilia’s purity. The saint’s face and hair are mysteriously covered by a sheet, inviting the mind to wonder. Cecilia’s fingers seem to form a cryptic Christian symbol of the Trinity—Three in One. And her neck is sliced by the stroke of an axe.

The sculptor’s personal testimony is embedded in the floor near his work: “Behold the body of the Most Holy Virgin, Cecilia, whom I myself saw lying uncorrupt in her tomb. I have in this marble expressed for thee the same saint in the very same posture and body.” We don’t know the full story of our saint, but we are certain of her end—a generous act of self gift to Christ.

Saint Cecilia, you died an early death, preserving your virginity and choosing Christ over all others. Be an example to all youth of the true goal of their lives. Help them to seek God first and the good and holy pleasures of life only after Him.

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November 21: The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Mary was likely consecrated to God as a child

Stillbirths, infant mortality, and mothers’ dying during labor have been among the most predictable human tragedies since time immemorial. Medical progress has only in recent generations dramatically reduced such deaths, albeit unevenly throughout the world. In light of the real dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, the successful birth of a healthy baby has naturally given rise to ceremonies in many cultures thanking God for the precarious gift of new life. Jewish law required the ritual dedication of first-born sons to God in the Temple. It is probable that a similar custom, if not a law, called for Jewish girls to also be so dedicated. It is the likely presentation of the child Mary in such a ceremony that we celebrate today.

The Church does not claim that today’s feast is rooted in Sacred Scripture. There is no direct biblical support for Mary’s Presentation except in the apocryphal “Gospel” of Saint James, a problematic text replete with follies. The lack of textual support is, nevertheless, no reason to doubt the ancient tradition, especially preserved in Eastern Orthodoxy, that Joachim and Anne consecrated Mary, their daughter, to God at the age of three in the Jerusalem Temple. The prophet Samuel was similarly presented by his mother, Hannah. Both Hannah and her namesake, Anne, were long barren and were thus all the more grateful to see the fruit of their unexpected pregnancies.

It is a good and holy thing for Christian parents to proactively dedicate their children to God, or even to invite them to consider a life consecrated to God as priests or religious. While some may consider it an unwise imposition for parents to so explicitly encourage their children to take steps down that holy path, all parents, in fact, are energetic in promoting some level of conformity with their own religious or quasi-religious beliefs. These “beliefs” may be related to the environment, politics, leisure, art, sports, or a thousand other causes or hobbies. Parents always indoctrinate their children. It is intrinsic to their role. The only question is what the content of that indoctrination will be. Ideally, Christian parents hand on to their children their most deeply held beliefs—including their faith in Jesus Christ.

The essence of any sacrifice is to burn, kill, or destroy something of value in order to close the yawning gap between God and man. A sacrifice can be in thanksgiving, to repent of a sin, or in petition for a favor. Primitive priests in cultures across the globe since time immemorial have stood at their rough stone altars on behalf of their people to offer God fatted calves, heifers, sheep, the finest grain, red wine, and even their fellow man. Abraham was willing to offer his very own son to God. Blood sacrifice gradually receded in Judaism, however, to bloodless sacrifice, and eventually to non-sacrificial pathways to God. The age of priests in the Jerusalem Temple sacrificing animals gradually mutated, from the late first century onward, into rabbis in synagogues teaching from books.

To present a child to God, either in a formal ritual or in a private dedication, is to lay that child on a symbolic altar and to say to God: “You create. We procreate. My child is Your child. Do with this child as You will.” Such humble and antecedent submission to the will of God is not an abdication of the duty to form a child in human and religious virtue. It is just to be realistic. Children are gifts, not metaphorically but actually. A child is not a piece of property or an object a parent has a right to possess. No one understands this like the infertile couple. When parents consecrate a child to God, whether at baptism or otherwise, even informally, they are manifesting a willingness to return a gift to its remote source, to please the Maker by giving Him what He already possesses, life itself and all who share in it.

Saints Anne and Joachim, in gratitude for the gift of life, you presented Mary in the Temple. Help all young parents to see in you a model of dependence on God’s providence and may similar consecrations in today’s world prepare saints for the Church of tomorrow.

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Last Sunday in Ordinary Time: Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White or Gold

The vastness of creation serves as the Lord’s footstool

This last Sunday in Ordinary Time is dedicated to the very highest understanding of the nature, role, and purpose of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is multifaceted, the deep hues and contours of his personality revealing themselves to different races and ages in different ways. More personally, even inside of just one single life, a Christian can understand Jesus in more subtle and complex ways as that particular Christian matures. Carpenter, Miracle Worker, Son of Mary, Son of God, Prophet, Messiah, Son of David, Good Shepherd, Healer, Preacher, Logos, Lamb of God, etc. Yet all these titles and identities will give way as the world ends, time is fulfilled, and life with God becomes simply life itself. Jesus’ identity will culminate in His Kingship. It will not be a transitional but a terminal identity. The dead will come nose to nose with King Jesus, feeling His hot breath on their cheeks, as He judges them at their life’s end. And the saved will have King Jesus before them in heaven forever as He renders homage to God the Father in the power of God the Holy Spirit.

The feast of “Christ the King” was first established in 1925, and Pope Saint Paul VI expanded its name to “King of the Universe” in 1969. Jesus is not just a King of Hearts. He is more than mankind’s universal Coach, Teacher, or Counselor. By “King of the Universe” the Church is communicating Jesus’ metaphysical scale, that God encompasses all of reality, not just man’s reality. We say in the Nicene Creed that God created all things visible and invisible. So Jesus is King over all the planets, stars, black holes, quasars, and exploding suns in the blackest corners of remote space. He is King over the earth and all its waterfalls, rainforests, mountain peaks, desert plains, and dark sea floors. He lords over all creation because He is its source. Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that God is not the most perfect being inside of creation but being itself. God is reality, not just the most impressive being inhabiting the reality bubble.

This feast is an antidote to the private, or compartmentalized, Jesus who impacts only those spaces in the Christian’s life where He is allowed to enter. Jesus wants to reign in every sphere of our lives, at home, on the factory floor, in the yard, at the office, over drinks, on the sports’ field, in the car, at meals, on the phone, and on and on. His field of action has no borders. From one perspective, this is a challenging, and limiting, spirituality. Such an intrusive, all-encompassing God can make life feel like a cage, where self-expression is constrained by His rules. From another perspective, however, the total reign of God in our lives is freeing. It means that He is not found only in Church. Sunday Mass? Of course. But we need not have our fingers on the rosary to be close to God and Mary at all times. God is found inside of the daily duties that are the stuff of life. This is consoling. We are not distracted from the higher things as we manage a family, earn a living, exercise, raise the kids, or take care of the house. When the Lord is King of Everything, mundanities are not banalities. The world is richer and more alive when our life is an all-inclusive vocation.

The anointed King was a tangible image of the hidden God in Western culture until modern times. Every earthly king was validated by the mighty God King who stood invisibly behind him, the One who benevolently ruled the universe as His own sacred republic. This understanding of God as a Divine Ruler gave a real sense of order, unity, and common purpose to all of reality which is lacking in modern, secular, democratic societies. Today’s feast does not invoke, however, merely an image of Jesus representing someone else’s Kingship but Jesus actually reigning as King. All the baptized should be glad to be subject to such a benevolent monarch.

Christ the King, Your sovereignty over all creation is not heavy. You order all reality toward Yourself and govern Your creatures with justice and humility. Help us to be faithful and subservient to what You desire, so that we can live one day in Your heavenly kingdom.

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November 18: The Dedication of the Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
The Apostles Peter and Paul are the Patron Saints of the City of Rome

The barque of Peter is tethered to two stout anchors

A cathedral is theology in stone, the medievals said, a truism which extends to all churches, not just cathedrals, and to their sacred web of translucent glass, glowing marble, gold-encrusted wood, bronze canopies, and every other noble surface on which the eye falls. A Church mutely confesses its belief through form and materials. Today’s feast commemorates the dedication of two of the most sumptuous churches in the entire world: the Basilica of St. Peter, the oversized jewel in the small crown of Vatican City, and the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, a few miles distant, beyond Rome’s ancient walls. The foundations of these two Basilicas are each sunk deep into the blood-drenched ground of first-century Christianity, though today’s impressive structures stand proxy for their long-razed originals. If strong churches reflect a strong God, these Basilicas are all muscle.

The present Basilica of St. Peter was dedicated, or consecrated, in 1626. It was under construction for more than one hundred years, was built directly over the tomb of the Apostle Peter, and considerably enlarged the footprint of the original Constantinian Basilica. That prior fourth-century Basilica was so decrepit by the early 1500s that priests refused to say Mass at certain altars for fear that the creaky building’s sagging roofs and leaning walls would collapse at any moment. The ancient Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls was consumed by a mammoth fire in 1823. The rebuilt Basilica was dedicated on December 10, 1854, just two days after Pope Pius IX had formally promulgated the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. The Basilica’s vast classical elegance is breathtaking—its marbled central nave stretches out longer than an American football field.

The two Basilicas were, for centuries, linked by a miles-long, roofed colonnade that snaked through the streets of Rome, sheltering from the sun and rain the river of pilgrims flowing from one Basilica to the next as they procured their indulgences. Rome’s two great proto-martyrs were like twins tethered by a theological umbilical cord in the womb of Mother Church. The pope’s universal ministry was explicitly predicated upon these two martyrs. Rome’s apostolic swagger meant the Bishop of Rome’s headship was not merely symbolic but actively intervened in practical matters of church governance throughout Christendom. The pope, the indispensable Christian, was often depicted in early Christian art as a second Moses, a law-giver, who received from Christ the tablets of the New Testament for the new people of God.

At intervals of five years, every diocesan bishop in the Catholic Church is obligated to make a visit “ad limina apostolorum”—“to the threshold (of the tombs) of the apostles.” This means they pray at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome and personally report to Saint Peter’s successor. These visits are a prime example of the primacy of the pope, which is exercised daily in a thousand different ways, a core duty far more significant than the pope’s infallibility, which is exercised rarely.

There is no office of Saint Paul in the Church. When Paul died, his office died. Everyone who evangelizes and preaches acts as another Saint Paul. But the barque of Peter is still afloat in rough seas, pinned to the stout tombs which, like anchors, hold her fast from their submerged posts under today’s Basilicas. A church is not just a building, any more than a home is just a house. A church, like a home, is a repository of memories, a sacred venue, and a corner of rest. On today’s feast, we recall that certain churches can also be graveyards. Today’s Basilicas are sacred burial grounds, indoor cities of the dead, whose citizens will rise from beneath their smooth marble floors at the end of time, like a thousand suns dawning as one over the morning horizon.

Holy martyrs Peter and Paul, your tombs are the sacred destinations of many pilgrimages to the eternal city. May all visits to the Basilicas dedicated to your honor deepen one’s love and commitment to Mother Church.

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November 18: Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne, Virgin
1769–1852
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of perseverance amid adversity

Born into a refined French family, her life ended in hardship on the American prairie

Today’s saint was born into a large, refined, educated Catholic family situated in an enormous home in the venerable city of Grenoble, France. Rose’s parents and extended family were connected to other elites in the highest circles of the political and social life of that era. Despite this favored parentage, Rose would leave the world and all the advantages she inherited to become a hardscrabble missionary nun serving rough settlers and Indians in the no man’s land of the American plains. Saint Rose was named after the first canonized saint of the New World, Saint Rose of Lima. As a child, her imagination had been fired by hearing about missionaries on the American frontier. She dreamed of being one of them, yet her path to becoming a pioneer missionary would be circuitous.

When Rose felt the call to a contemplative religious life as a teen, she joined, against her father’s wishes, the Order that so many French women of status joined—the Congregation of the Visitation, founded by Saint Jane Frances de Chantal in the early seventeenth century. The massive social upheavals of the French Revolution shuttered her Visitandine convent, though, and she spent years living her Order’s rule privately outside of a convent as her country disintegrated into chaos. After the revolution, when religious life was no longer illegal, Rose tried to re-establish her defunct convent by personally purchasing its buildings. The plan didn’t work, and Rose and the few remaining sisters united themselves to a new French Order, which would later be known as the Religious Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

Saint Rose was destined to be a holy and dedicated nun in her Order’s schools. But in 1817, a bishop serving in the United States came to France on a recruitment tour, as so many bishops did in the first half of the nineteenth century. The bishop visited Rose’s convent in Paris, and Rose’s childhood dreams were rekindled. After receiving permission from her superiors, in 1818 Rose boarded a ship with four other sisters for the two-month sea voyage to New Orleans, U.S.A. The second act of her life was starting at age forty-nine. From this point forward, her life was replete with the physical hardships, financial struggles, and everyday drama typical of the French and Spanish missionaries who brought the faith to the ill-educated pioneers and Indians on the edge of the American frontier.

Rose and her troupe of sisters had to take a steamboat up the Mississippi River to Missouri after the bishop’s promises of a convent in New Orleans came to nothing. In remote Western Missouri, Rose began a convent in a log cabin and then started a school and a small novitiate. The people were poor, the settlers generally unschooled, the weather cold, the food inadequate, and life hard. Rose struggled to learn English. Yet after ten years, the Sacred Heart Sisters were operating six convents in Missouri and Louisiana. In 1841, the Sisters began to serve Potawatomi Indians who had been harshly displaced from Michigan and Indiana into Eastern Kansas. At seventy-one years old, Rose joined this missionary band to Kansas not for her practical usefulness but for her example of prayer. Saint Rose prayed so incessantly that she was on her knees before the tabernacle when the Indians went to sleep and kneeling there when they woke up, still praying. Wondering at this, some children put pebbles on the train of her habit one night. The next morning the pebbles were still there. She hadn’t budged an inch all night long! The Potawatomi called her “She Who Prays Always.” Howling cold and the rigors of frontier life forced Rose to return to a more humane convent existence for the last quiet years of her life. She was beatified in 1940 and canonized in 1988.

Saint Rose, you persevered heroically in your vocation despite serious challenges. Inspire all religious to continue in their unique vocations despite setbacks, and to unite, as you did, a quiet contemplative soul with a missionary’s courage and drive.

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November 17: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Religious
1207–1231
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Third Order of Saint Francis

A faithful wife loses her husband and becomes a Franciscan

The marriage of today’s saint was not any less happy for being arranged. Elizabeth of Hungary’s parents betrothed her at the age of four to a young German nobleman named Ludwig and sent her away as a child to live in his family’s court. Elizabeth wed Ludwig when she was fourteen and he twenty-one. Only in a post-industrial age have the teenage years been understood, in some countries but not all, as a time of self-discovery, boundary pushing, rejection of tradition, and excuse for total confusion. Puberty, not the entire span of the teen years, was historically understood as the passage to adulthood, responsibility, and a professional life. It was typical of her era, and of many other eras too, that Elizabeth would marry at fourteen. She was ready and became a contented, serious, and successful wife and mother, bearing three children, while still a teen.

Before Ludwig left on Crusade in 1227, he and Elizabeth vowed never to remarry if one were to die before the other. Then Ludwig died on his way to the Holy Land. Elizabeth was distraught but fulfilled her promise. So at the age of twenty, her already pious and prayerful soul waded into deeper Christian waters. Her mortifications became more rigorous, her financial generosity more total, and her prayer time more all consuming. Most of all, Elizabeth’s life now began to revolve almost uniquely around the poor, the aged, and the sick. She opened a hospice near a relative’s castle and there welcomed anyone in need.

Elizabeth also fell under the spell of a charismatic and over-bearing spiritual director who insisted that she make the most severe emotional and physical sacrifices in her quest for perfection. As a sign of her commitment to the poor, and to aid her in conquering herself, Elizabeth took the habit of a Third Order Franciscan in 1227. Franciscanism was spreading like wildfire throughout Europe, and Elizabeth was not the only noblewoman far from Assisi to be drawn to the message of Saint Francis so soon after his death. A native Hungarian, who came in search of Elizabeth in Germany at this time, was shocked to find her dressed in drab grey clothes, poor, and sitting at a spinning wheel in her hospice. He begged Elizabeth to return to her father’s royal court in Hungary. She refused. She would stay near the tomb of her husband, stay near her children, now in the care of nuns and relatives, and stay close to the poor whom she loved so much.

Most likely worn out by her austerities and near constant contact with the sick, Elizabeth died at the age of twenty-four on November 17, 1231. Miracles were attributed to her intercession soon after her burial, and testimonies to her holiness were collected so rapidly that she was canonized by the pope just four years after her death. In 1236 a shrine was dedicated to her memory in Marburg, Germany, and her remains were transferred there amidst great ceremony. Pilgrims continued trekking to her shrine throughout the middle ages, until a Lutheran prince, full of dissenting Protestant spit and vinegar, removed Elizabeth’s relics from her shrine in 1539. They have never been recovered.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, we seek your heavenly intercession on this date of your early death. Help all young mothers to persevere in their vocations and all young widows to not despair but to be confident as they walk forward in life, knowing that Christ is at their side.

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November 16: Saint Gertrude, Virgin
1256–1302
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of nuns and of the Diocese of Magdeburg, Germany

Incandescent visions of Christ drew her into the deep

Today’s saint, known as Saint Gertrude the Great, is one of the most provocative spiritual writers in the long and rich history of the Church. When just a child, she was placed in the care of Benedictine nuns, perhaps because of her parents’ early deaths. The high walls surrounding the cloister broadened the young girl’s mind, instead of confining it. For Gertrude, as for so many women of her era restricted by custom to narrow cultural lanes, a monastery-sponsored education amidst a self-governing community of women was superior to the forms of life otherwise available to them.

Gertrude flourished in religious life and became well versed in the humanities, theology, and Latin, a language which she showed mastery of in her spiritual writings. At the age of twenty-five, Sister Gertrude had a jarring spiritual experience which would divide her life dramatically into two halves, “before” and “after.” “Before,” Gertrude was a faithful nun but overly interested in secular writers and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. “After,” she buried her head in Scripture, read widely in the Fathers of the Church, and melted under the high-amperage gaze beaming at her from the eyes of Christ.

Gertrude struggled to convey in words the richness of her spiritual experiences. A distillation of her visions covers five volumes known in English as the Revelations of Saint Gertrude. Metaphors, adjectives, and other superlatives flow from our saint’s pen on page after page as she tries to capture the incandescent mystery of what she sees, hears, and feels. In a heavy, syrupy style common to her era, Saint Gertrude oozes about the intense love of Christ for mankind as symbolized by His Sacred Heart. More than three centuries before the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque in France, Saint Gertrude had visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus! In one vision, Saint John the Evangelist placed Gertrude close to Christ’s wounded side, where she could feel His pulsating heart. Gertrude asks John why he did not reveal the mystery of Christ’s loving heart to mankind. Saint John responds that his duty was to reveal the very person of Christ, but it was for later ages, colder and more arid in their love of God, to discover His Sacred Heart.

Gertrude lived a “nuptial mysticism” in which she was Christ’s bride and the Mass was the wedding banquet at which a chaste self-giving consummated the sacred bond of lover and beloved. Gertrude’s vowed virginity was the proof and basis of her enduring commitment to Christ, a promise made in the company of His mother, Mary, and all the angels and saints. Gertrude composed her spiritual diaries at the express command of her spouse, Christ. Their hymns, prayers, and reflections also show a profound concern for the holy souls in purgatory. Gertrude continually begged Christ’s mercy on them, and Christ responded that merely petitioning for the release of such souls was sufficient for Him to grant the favor.

In Gertrude’s visions, Jesus speaks to her almost exclusively at Mass and during the Liturgy of the Hours. This is consoling. Most Catholics meet Christ more through the Sacraments than through books, so Christ appearing in priestly vestments, holding a chalice, or standing at an altar is absolutely congruent with our experience of Sunday Mass. Apart from her writings, few details of Gertrude’s life are known. She left virtually no footprint besides her life of quiet fidelity as a contemplative nun. Like John the Baptist, she decreased so the Lord could increase. Gertrude’s alluring private revelations became common spiritual reading among the saints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continue to fire the imagination of all who read them today.

Saint Gertrude, as we turn the pages of your mystical revelations, we meet the true Christ, so powerful yet so close to us in His Sacred Heart. May we respond as you did to Jesus’ invitation and dedicate our lives totally to Him.

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November 16: Saint Margaret of Scotland
c. 1045–1093
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Scotland, large families, and parents who have lost children

A foreign-born royal becomes queen and inspires by her refinement and devotion

In the early eleventh century, a Danish Viking named Canute reigned as King of England. Canute exiled his potential rivals from an Anglo-Saxon royal family. One of these exiles, Edward, made his way to Hungary, married, and had a daughter named Margaret who grew up in a well-educated, royal, Catholic home. Margaret’s father eventually returned to England at the request of the king, his uncle Saint Edward the Confessor, and he brought his family with him, including Margaret. But Edward died shortly after coming home, leaving Margaret fatherless, and then Edward the Confessor died without an heir. War broke out. In 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon English lost to the Norman French. Margaret and her siblings were displaced to Scotland, far away from French efforts to eradicate Anglo-Saxon royals who had claims to the English throne. Thus was the circuitous route by which a woman of English blood who grew up in Hungary is commemorated today as Saint Margaret of Scotland.

Saint Margaret was known to her contemporaries as an educated, refined, and pious woman. She married a Scottish King named Malcolm who was far more rustic than herself. He could not even read. The earliest Life of Margaret, written by a monk who personally knew her, states that Malcolm depended on his wife’s sage advice and admired her prayerfulness. According to Margaret’s biographer, Malcolm saw “that Christ truly dwelt in her heart...What she rejected, he rejected...what she loved, he, for love of her, loved too.” Malcolm embellished Margaret’s devotional books with gold and silver. One of these books, a selection of Gospel passages with illuminated miniatures of the four Evangelists, is preserved in an English museum. King Malcolm and Queen Margaret, along with their six sons and two daughters, truly created a domestic church centered on Christ. One son, David, became a national hero as King of Scotland and is popularly referred to as a saint.

Margaret’s presence infused the unsophisticated, rural, Scottish court with culture. She brought her more Roman experiences of Church life with her to Scotland, and so pulled the Scottish Church into conformity with Roman and continental practice regarding the dating and observance of Lent and Easter. She encouraged the faithful to more fully observe Sunday by not working and, like so many medieval royals, she was also a prolific foundress of monasteries, including one she intended to be the burial place for Scottish kings and queens. Margaret was known for her concern for the poor, for dedicating hours a day to prayer and to spiritual reading, and for her great skill in embroidering vestments and church linens.

Saint Margaret died, not yet fifty years old, just a few days after she was informed that her husband and son were killed in battle. Margaret and Malcolm were buried together under the high altar of a monastery. Devotion to the holy queen began soon after her death, and she was canonized in 1250.

Saint Margaret of Scotland, you were the model of a virtuous queen who cared for both the spiritual and material welfare of your people. Inspire all leaders to give personal witness to holiness so that, through their leadership role, they inspire their people to be more virtuous.

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November 15: Saint Albert the Great, Bishop and Doctor
c. 1206–1280
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of natural scientists

He knew everything, taught Aquinas, and placed his complex mind at the Church’s service

Saint Francis de Sales wrote that the knowledge of the priest is the eighth Sacrament of the Church. If that is true, then today’s saint was a sacrament unto himself. There was little that Saint Albert did not know and little that he did not teach. His mastery of all the branches of knowledge of his age was so manifest that he was called “The Great” and the “Universal Doctor.”

Albert was born in Germany and educated in Italy. During his university studies, he was introduced to the recently founded Dominican Order and joined their brotherhood. While continuing his long course of formal studies, Albert was sent by his superiors to teach in Germany. He spent twenty years as a professor in various religious houses and universities until he finally obtained his degree and began to teach as a master in 1248. His most famous student was the Italian Dominican Thomas Aquinas, whose rare intellectual gifts Albert recognized and cultivated. Albert was also made the Prior of a Dominican Province in Germany, was a personal theologian and canonist to the Pope, preached a Crusade in Germany, and was appointed the Bishop of Regensburg for less than two years before resigning. Albert was neither ruthless nor politically minded, and the complex web of elites who had interests in his diocese required a bishop to display a sensitivity to power relationships which was not among Albert’s skills.

After his short time as a diocesan bishop, Albert spent the rest of his life teaching in Cologne, punctuated by travels to the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and to Paris in 1277 to defend Aquinas from his theological enemies. Albert’s complete works total thirty-eight volumes on virtually every field of knowledge known to his age: scripture, philosophy, astronomy, physics, mathematics, theology, spirituality, mineralogy, chemistry, zoology, biology, justice, and law. Albert’s assiduous study of animals, plants, and nature was groundbreaking, and he debunked reigning myths about various natural phenomena through close personal observation. He devoured all the works of Aristotle and organized and distilled their content for his students, re-introducing the great Greek philosopher to the Western world forever and always. This life-long project of philosophical commentary was instrumental in grounding subsequent Catholic theological research on a wide and sturdy platform of critical thinking, which has been a hallmark of Catholic intellectual life ever since.

Albert’s comprehensive approach to all knowledge contributed to the flourishing of the nascent twelfth-century institutions of learning known as universities. The “uni” in university implied that all knowledge was centered around one core knowledge—that of God and His Truth. The modern understanding is that a “multiversity” is merely an administrative forum in which numerous branches of knowledge spread out in pursuit of their separate truths unhinged from any central focus or purpose.

Saint Albert’s prodigious mind never ceased to be curious. Every bit of knowledge which he culled led him to gather even more. His encyclopedic knowledge embraced reality itself as one sustained instance of God loving the world. No bifurcation, no subcategories, no “my truth” and no “your truth.” God was real and God was knowable. Reality and Truth were one for Albert and his era, and autonomous reason could be trusted to lead the honest, rational seeker to those eternal verities. Albert was beatified in 1622 and was canonized and named a Doctor of the Church in 1931.

Saint Albert the Great, your knowledge of the sacred and physical sciences understood God as a total reality. Through your divine intercession, help the faithful to see reality not as divided but as an expression of the Trinitarian God, a knowable person who is accessible to reason.

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November 13: Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, Virgin (USA)
1850–1917
USA Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of immigrants and hospital administrators

Indomitable and charismatic, she moved mountains for God

The hurricane of apostolic activity that was Mother Cabrini motored powerfully over the Atlantic Ocean, gathered force as it swept into the American heartland, and then rested there, perpetually oscillating, for almost three decades. A serene eye, though, hovered at the center of this low roar of activity. Mother Cabrini accomplished so much, so well, and so quickly, precisely because her soul rotated calmly around a fixed point, the immovable Christ. A peaceful focus on God in the morning rained down a storm of good works in the afternoon and evening.

Frances Cabrini was the tenth child born into a rural but well-to-do family in Northern Italy. Her uncle, a priest, had a deep influence on her, as did the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, whose school she attended as a teen. After graduation, she petitioned for entrance into the Daughters and, later, the Conossian Sisters. But Frances’ tiny frame had never quite conquered the frailty resulting from her premature birth. These Orders needed robust women capable of caring for children and the infirm. Nuns did not take vows so they could take care of other nuns. So even an application from an otherwise stellar candidate like Frances was reluctantly rejected due to her ill health. Frances eventually obtained a position as the lay director of an orphanage. Her innate charisma pulled people toward her like a magnet, and soon a small community of women grew up around her to share a common religious life.

As proof of her apostolic zeal, Frances added “Xavier” to her baptismal name in honor of the great missionary Saint Francis Xavier. She then founded a modest house, along with six other women, dedicated to serving in the Church’s foreign missions. Frances was clearly the leader and wrote the new Institute’s Rule. Eventually the small Order received Church approval as the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The sisters’ excellent work became well known, and in 1887 Mother Cabrini, the Superior, met with Pope Leo XIII in Rome to inquire about her sisters evangelizing in China. The Pope listened to her in silence and then concluded simply: Her mission was “not to the East, but to the West.” The plug had been pulled on entire regions of Italy and their populations drained away to the United States. They needed the Church’s attention.

In 1889 Mother Cabrini left for the United States with six sisters. Disembarking from the ship in New York Harbor, they were met by not even a single person. No one expected them, and no one welcomed them. The Archbishop was cold and told Mother Cabrini that he wanted Italian priests, not sisters, and that her ship was still docked in the harbor if she wanted to return to Italy. She replied “I have letters from the Pope” and stayed and persevered amidst the most extreme hardships.

Starting from absolute zero, Mother Cabrini miraculously began her work among Italian immigrants. She would work almost exclusively with, and for, Italians the rest of her life. She begged, pleaded, and cajoled. She pulled every lever of charm and persuasion she could reach. It worked. Her deep spirituality and constant state of motion soon put her in contact with Italian benefactors eager to help their own. Mother Cabrini was then seemingly everywhere, doing everything. She founded hospitals, orphanages, schools, workshops, and convents in New York, Denver, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Chicago. She trekked to Nicaragua, Argentina, and Brazil. She sailed back to Italy nine times. She became an American citizen but remained fully Italian in her identity and a source of pride for America’s many “Little Italies.”

Mother Cabrini’s relentless energy, remarkable administrative skills, shrewdness, humility, and charisma quickly built an empire of charity. When she died in Chicago, she left behind sixty-seven institutions and a robust Order of dedicated nuns. On July 7, 1946, she became the first United States citizen to be canonized a saint.

Mother Cabrini, you were indefatigable in your work for Christ and the Church. You knew no rest, no stranger, and no obstacle that could not be overcome. Inspire all evangelizers and teachers to be so brave and tireless in their service.

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November 12: Saint Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr
1580–1623
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of reunion between Orthodox and Catholics

A holy bishop is murdered for unifying East and West

Saint Josaphat died for something few in his era died for—ecumenism. In fact, the word ecumenism did not even exist when Josaphat was martyred. Josaphat was born in Ukraine but grew to manhood working a trade in Vilnius, Lithuania. In his late teens, he felt called to be a monk, so he rejected an offer of marriage and joined a monastery in Vilnius in 1604. Josaphat’s austerities, intelligence, and prayerfulness made him a natural leader, and he was duly ordained a deacon and priest and earned a reputation as an effective preacher.

But it was a historic decision by Orthodox religious leaders, about ten years before Josaphat became a monk, that would bend the arc of his life and eventually lead to his death. In 1595 the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev and five other Orthodox bishops representing millions of Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) faithful met in the city of Brest and signed a declaration of their intention to enter into union with the Bishop of Rome. The Pope accepted their conversion from Orthodox to Catholic, while allowing them to keep their Byzantine liturgical rites and traditions. The Union of Brest was a one-of-a-kind event. Yet it triggered Orthodox violence and bitterness toward the Catholic Church which has endured into modern times.

Josaphat joyfully embraced the entrance of his native Orthodox faith into the Catholic fold. But he also insisted that the Eastern traditions of his pan-Slavic people should perdure, and be respected, while his people ecclesiastically migrated into the paddock of the Roman Pontiff. Unity, yes. Uniformity, no. The Church, historically, had long been composed of various liturgical traditions reflecting its numerous cultures. The Latin Rite, though, eventually predominated as Western nations grew stronger and colonized huge chunks of the world. The Union of Brest’s careful balance of accepting theological and jurisdictional unity with Rome while insisting on liturgical distinctiveness was confusing to many of the faithful Slavic peasants of Northeastern Europe. Nonetheless, when Josaphat was named a Bishop in present day Belarusia, he continued to champion the union with Rome with all his considerable powers and was largely successful in curtailing Orthodox clergy from exercising ministry in his diocese.

Because he represented something new, an Eastern Rite Catholic, Josaphat was misunderstood by his co-religionists who should have supported him the most, particularly Polish and Lithuanian bishops and princes. The tensions of the time came to a head when an Orthodox bishop established a competing diocesan and parish structure alongside that of Josaphat’s diocese and parishes. The faithful experienced two church structures that were virtually identical in their liturgy but divergent in their leaders and lines of authority.

In response to Orthodoxy’s aggressive incursion into his ecclesial territory, Josaphat put his usual vigor into preaching and teaching the importance of union with Rome. But in 1623, while seeking to stop an Orthodox priest from secretly ministering in his jurisdiction, Josaphat was ambushed by Orthodox faithful who conspired with their leaders to rid themselves of this thief of souls. Saint Josaphat was brutally attacked by a mob, his head was cleaved by an axe, and his body dumped into a river. Josaphat was beatified in 1643 and canonized in 1867. In the twentieth century, Josaphat’s remains were brought to Rome and buried under the altar of Saint Basil in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Saint Josaphat, you gave your life attempting to bring East and West together. Give us your spirit of unity so that our prayers bring all Christians into common union under the leadership of a common head, the successor of Saint Peter.

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November 10: Saint Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor
Late Fourth Century–461
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Patron Saint of popes and confessors

A Pope vigorously exercises his universal ministry and defines Christ’s divinity
History has so far conferred on just two popes the title of “Great,” and today’s saint is one of them. Leo the Great’s origins are obscure, so nothing is known with certainty of his early life. He was, though, ordained into Holy Orders and rose to prominence as a papal advisor in the 420s. He corresponded with imminent theologians and acted as a papal emissary before he was elected Bishop of Rome in 440. Leo was a pope’s pope. He expanded the power and influence of the papacy at every opportunity. The Church’s earliest theological tradition rooted Rome’s primacy in the double martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul in the eternal city. No other city could claim to have been sanctified by the blood of two martyrs. Pope Leo, however, emphasized what was to become a more dominant argument for papal supremacy—that the pope’s authority is not rooted merely on the historical fact that Peter and Paul died on roman ground but on the theological fact that the Bishop of Rome occupies the Chair of Saint Peter.

By word and action, Leo repeatedly taught that the pope’s power was unequaled and without borders, that the pope was the head of all the world’s bishops, and that every bishop could have direct recourse to the pope, and not just to the local archbishop, in disputed matters. Pope Leo thus accelerated an existing tendency consolidating church governance and authority under a Roman umbrella. Regional or even local decision-making by individual dioceses or groups of dioceses did occur. But in important theological, moral, or legal matters that affected the entire church, every bishop rotated in a steady orbit within the powerful gravitational field of Rome. Pope Leo also enacted a more aggressive papal role directly overseeing and enforcing discipline over bishops, intervening in and settling disputes. The Catholic Church is not an international federation of dioceses, after all. It needs a strong center of gravity to ensure that centrifugal forces do not unwind the universal church into a galaxy of independent national churches, united in name only.

Nowhere was Leo’s authority exercised more clearly and successfully than at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The theological issue at stake concerned Christ’s divinity. Some theologians in the East were espousing the Monophysite heresy, which argued that Christ had only one divine nature. The Council consisted of six hundred bishops from the Eastern Roman Empire, with a handful from Africa. Leo sent three legates from Italy who were treated with all honor and respect as representatives of Peter’s successor. They read out loud to the Council Fathers the “Tome of Leo” on the Incarnation. The pope’s words laid out, with force, clarity, and eloquence, that Jesus Christ had both a divine and a human nature “without confusion or admixture.”

When the legates finished reading, the bishops’ common response to the pope’s words was “This is the faith of the fathers; this is the faith of the apostles… Let anyone who believes otherwise be anathema. Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo.” The Tome of Leo from then on became the teaching of the Catholic Church. If Christ were not truly man, or not truly God, the babe in the manger would be just another child whose birth was no more worthy of celebration than that of Julius Cesar, Gandhi, or Marco Polo. Pope Leo saved Christmas.

In 452 Pope Leo entered the history books when he rendezvoused with Attila the Hun in Northern Italy, convincing him not to sack Rome. A legend says that Attila turned back because he saw Saints Peter and Paul standing right behind Leo. Pope Leo governed the Church as the Western Roman Empire was slowly disintegrating. He was courageous in alleviating poverty, protecting Rome from invaders, and maintaining Rome’s Christian heritage. While outstanding as an effective and practical leader, Pope Leo is most known for the concision, depth, and clarity of his sermons and letters, for which he was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1754. He was the first pope, after Saint Peter himself, buried in Saint Peter’s Basilica. His remains lie under a beautiful marble relief sculpture of his famous meeting with Attila.

Pope Saint Leo the Great, give to the Pope and all bishops pastoral hearts, sharp minds, and courageous wills, so that they may lead the Church by personal example, by correct teaching, and by their caring little for worldly criticism.

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November 11: Saint Martin of Tours, Bishop
c. 336–397
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of France, soldiers, and conscientious objectors

He gave away half of his cloak and then all of his life

Many great and holy men and women are unknown to history because they lacked the one crucial ingredient to become well known—a biographer. Today’s saint was one of the fortunate ones. A historian named Sulpicius Severus personally knew and interviewed Martin in the last years of Martin’s life and put it all on parchment. In an age of few books, Sulpicius’ Life of Saint Martin was a blockbuster. Over many decades and centuries, it slipped into the bloodstream of European culture until, by the medieval age, the Life was standard reading in all monasteries. Virtually every priest and monk in Europe was deeply familiar with the details of the life of Saint Martin of Tours.

The typical biography of a saint for the first few centuries of Christianity worked from the back to the front, from death to life. The real drama was how the saint died, not how he or she lived. Tales of bloody martyrdom, solitary exile, starvation and exposure were as moving and unfortunate as they were common. The Life of Saint Martin told of Martin’s adventures and heroism in living the faith, not just about his last few breaths. He was a saint for the new age of legalized Christianity. Martin of Tours died in his bed.

Martin was born to pagan parents in present-day Hungary but desired to become a Christian from a young age. His father resisted his son’s holy desires and obliged Martin to follow in his footsteps and serve as a soldier in Rome’s Imperial Guard. Martin was serving in France when the most iconic moment of his life took place. Martin was slowly approaching the city gates of Amiens on horseback one cold winter evening. A half-naked man shivered on the ground, begging for help. No one stopped. No one helped. No one cared. So Martin, clad as a soldier, pulled the cloak from his back, drew his sharp sword from its scabbard, and sliced his cloak in two. The poor man’s skeletal frame was covered with just half of the cloak. That same night, when Martin fell asleep, he had a dream. Jesus appeared to him clad in the cloak and said “Martin, still a catechumen, covered me with this garment.” Upon awakening, Sulpicius tells his reader, “Martin flew to be baptized.”

Martin subsequently befriended one of the great men of Gaul of that era, Saint Hilary of Poitiers, who ordained him into minor orders. After various apostolic adventures, Martin was chosen the Bishop of Tours in 372. In his twenty-five years as bishop, Martin was zealous, and jealous, for the House of the Lord. He aggressively tore down pagan temples, which he understood to be dedicated to demons. He traveled incessantly and was untiring in evangelizing the people of the countryside of Gaul and in founding churches. Martin also developed a reputation as a miracle worker and prophet. He cured the eye problems of Saint Paulinus of Nola, Saint Augustine’s good friend.

By the time of his peaceful death, Bishop Martin of Tours had a well-deserved reputation for holiness. Devotion to Martin spread as Sulpicius’ biography was copied and shared. Numerous churches were named in Martin’s honor in every country of Europe. England had one hundred seventy-three churches dedicated to Martin of Tours in 1800. The Shrine over Martin’s tomb was one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in all of Europe until France was riven by Reformation violence in the 1560s. In an interesting vestige of Martin’s enduring historic importance, Martin’s feast day in the Breviary is more fully elaborated with prayers and antiphons than almost any comparable saint on the Church’s calendar.

Saint Martin of Tours, your encounter with the beggar has fired the imagination of countless Christians. You were generous in every single way in living your faith. Through your intercession in heaven, assist us now to see Jesus in everyone, just as you did then.

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November 9: Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

Feast; Liturgical Color: White

A venerable basilica is the mother of all churches

In the eighth chapter of his Confessions, Saint Augustine relates the story of an old and learned Roman philosopher named Victorinus. He had been the teacher of many a Roman senator and nobleman and was so esteemed that a statue of him was erected in the Roman Forum. As a venerable pagan, Victorinus had thundered for decades about the monster gods, dark idols, and breathless demons in the pantheon of paganism. But Victorinus assiduously studied Christian texts and whispered to a friend one day, “You must know that I am a Christian.” The friend responded, “I shall not believe it…until I see you in the Church of Christ.” Victorinus responded mockingly, “Is it then the walls that make Christians?” But in his grey hairs, Victorinus finally did pass through the doors of a Catholic church to humbly bow his head to receive the waters of Holy Baptism. There was no one who did not know Victorinus, and at his conversion, Augustine writes, “Rome marveled and the Church rejoiced.”

A church’s walls do not make one a Christian, of course. But a church has walls nonetheless. Walls, borders, and lines delimit the sacred from the profane. A house makes a family feel like one, a sacred place where parents and children merge into a household. A church structurally embodies supernatural mysteries. A church is a sacred space where sacred actions make Christians unite as God’s family. Walls matter. Churches matter. Sacred spaces matter. Today the Church commemorates a uniquely sacred space, the oldest of the four major basilicas in the city of Rome. The Lateran Basilica is the Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Rome and thus the seat of the Pope as Bishop of Rome.

A basilica is like a church which has been made a monsignor. Basilicas have certain spiritual, historical, or architectural features by which they earn their special designation. Considered only architecturally, a basilica is a large, rectangular, multi-naved hall built for public gatherings. When Christianity was legalized, its faithful spilled out of their crowded house churches and into the biggest spaces then available, the basilicas of the Roman Empire. If Christians had met in arenas, then that word would have been adopted for ecclesial usage instead of basilica.

The Laterani were an ancient Roman noble family whose members served several Roman Emperors. The family built a palace carrying their name on a site which in the fourth century came into the possession of the Emperor Constantine, who then turned it over to the bishop of Rome. An early pope enhanced and enlarged the basilica style palace into a large church, which, in turn, became the oldest and most important papal church in the eternal city. The popes also began to personally reside in the renovated Lateran palace. By medieval times, the Basilica was rededicated to Christ the Savior, Saint John the Baptist, and Saint John the Evangelist. The popes lived at the Lateran until the start of the Avignon papacy in present day France in 1309.

With the Avignon papacy ensconced far from Rome for seven decades, the Lateran Basilica was damaged by fires and deteriorated so sadly that by the time the popes returned to Rome in 1377, they found the Basilica inadequate. An apostolic palace was eventually built next to St. Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican hill and has been the seat of the successors of Saint Peter ever since. The Lateran Basilica retains its venerable grandeur, despite now being a baroque edifice with only a few architectural traces of its ancient pedigree. Beautiful churches are like precious heirlooms passed down from one generation to the next in God’s family. Walls do not make us Christians, but walls do clarify that certain sacred rituals are practiced in certain sacred spaces and in no others. A family in its home. A judge in his court. A surgeon in her operating room. An actor on his stage. God on His altar. We come to God to show Him the respect He deserves. He is everywhere, yes, but He is not the same everywhere. And we are not the same everywhere either. We stand taller and straighter when we step onto His holy terrain.

Heavenly Father, we praise You more worthily when we are surrounded by the holy images in Your holy churches. Through Your grace, inspire us to render You due homage in the houses of God where Your presence burns brighter and hotter than anywhere else.

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November 4: Saint Charles Borromeo, Bishop
1538–1584
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Patron Saint of bishops, cardinals, and seminarians

A young nobleman becomes a Cardinal, exemplifies holiness, and reforms the Church

Today’s saint was born in a castle to an aristocratic family. His father was a count, his mother a Medici, and his uncle a pope. This last fact was to determine the trajectory of Charles Borromeo’s entire life. Pope Pius IV (1559–1565) was the brother of Charles’ mother. At the tender age of twelve, Charles received the external sign of permanent religious commitment, the shaving of the scalp known as tonsure. He was industrious and extremely bright and received advanced degrees in theology and law in his native Northern Italy. In 1560 his uncle ordered him to Rome and made him a Cardinal at the age of just twenty-one, even though Charles was not yet ordained a priest or bishop. This was brazen nepotism. But in this instance it was also genius. The Cardinal-nephew was a man of rare gifts, and his high office afforded him a wide forum to give those gifts their fullest expression.

At the Holy See, Charles was loaded down with immense responsibilities. He oversaw large religious orders. He was the papal legate to important cities in the papal states. He was the Cardinal Protector of Portugal, the Low Countries, and Switzerland. And, on top of all this, he was named administrator of the enormous Archdiocese of Milan. Charles was so bound to his Roman obligations, however, that he was unable to escape to visit Milan’s faithful who were under his pastoral care. Non-resident heads of dioceses were common at the time. This pained Charles, who would only be able to minister in his diocese years later. Cardinal Borromeo was a tireless and methodical laborer in the Holy See, who nevertheless always found ample time to care for his own soul.

When Pope Pius IV decided to reconvene the long-suspended Council of Trent, the Holy Spirit placed Cardinal Borromeo in just the right place at just the right time. In 1562 the Council Fathers met once again, largely due to the energy and planning of Charles. In its last sessions, the Council completed it most decisive work of doctrinal and pastoral reform. Charles was particularly influential in the Council’s decrees on the liturgy and in its catechism, both of which were to have an enduring and direct influence on universal Catholic life for over four centuries. Charles was the driving force and indispensable man at the Council, yet he was still just in his mid-twenties, being ordained a priest and bishop in 1563 in the heat of the Council’s activities.

In 1566, after his uncle had died and a new pope granted his request, Charles was at last able to reside in Milan as its Archbishop. There had not been a resident bishop there for over eighty years! There was much neglect of faith and morals to overcome. Charles had the unique opportunity to personally implement the Tridentine reforms he had played such a key role in writing. He founded seminaries, improved training for priests, stamped out ecclesiastical bribery, improved preaching and catechetical instruction, and combatted widespread religious superstition. He became widely loved by the faithful for his personal generosity and heroism in combating a devastating famine and plague. He stayed in Milan when most civil officials abandoned it. He went into personal debt to feed thousands. Charles attended two retreats every year, went to confession daily, mortified himself continually, and was a model Christian, if an austere one, in every way. This one-man army for God, this icon of a Counter-Reformation priest and bishop, died in Milan at the age of forty-six after his brief but intense life of work and prayer. Devotion to Charles began immediately, and he was canonized in 1610.

Saint Charles Borromeo, your personal life embodied what you taught. You held yourself and others to the highest standards of Christian living. From your place in heaven, hear our prayers and grant us what we ask, for our own good and that of the Church.

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November 3: Saint Martin de Porres, Religious
1575–1639
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of mixed-race peoples and barbers

A humble, mixed-race Dominican brother works miracles

Today’s saint was born in colonial Lima, Peru, to a well-connected Spanish father and a black Panamanian mother who had been a slave. While parentage is revealing, focusing uniquely on someone’s origins can also be a lazy shortcut which reduces a complex person to mere bloodlines, leaving aside a thousand more compelling factors that make a life interesting. It would be difficult, however, to overemphasize just how much Martin de Porres’ mulatto origins (Spanish and black) impacted his life. Even though his father was perfectly well known, Martin’s baptism registration reads “Son of an unknown father,” making Martin illegitimate, a severe disadvantage. To be half black in colonial Latin America was to start life’s race ten miles behind. Catching up to the Spanish-born colonists (Peninsulares) or to the locally born pure-blood Spanish (Criollos) would be impossible. On the many-runged ladder of social acceptability in the Spanish colonies, Martin was just above an African slave.

Martin’s father did make sure, however, that his son received a good education and enrolled him as a barber-surgeon apprentice in Lima. Martin learned how to set fractures, dress wounds, and treat infections according to the best practices of his era. And from his mother, he learned some unconventional herbal remedies that rounded out his more traditional medical education. These skills would hold Martin in good stead throughout his life. He treated the sick and injured regularly and, over time, earned a reputation as an extraordinary healer. He aided in founding a hospital and orphanage in Lima, distributed food to the poor, and cared for recently arrived African slaves. His extraordinary charity was his greatest attribute. You need candles? Of course. Blankets? One moment, please. Shoes and a comb? I’ll be back. Miracles and cures? Yes, God bless you. Martin de Porres became famous for doing many things—very many things—and doing them all well and with a smile.

In addition to his life of interrupted service, Martin was also a spiritual warrior. He became a Dominican lay brother but never a priest. He lived in community and proudly wore the Dominican habit. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor that jokingly acknowledged his lowly mulatto status. He abstained from meat, spent long hours in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and was witnessed displaying supernatural gifts. He levitated. He bilocated. His room filled with light. He possessed knowledge he could in no way have possessed naturally. His wide array of natural and supernatural gifts made him famous in Lima. When his life came to an end at the age of sixty, his body was publicly shown, and pieces of his habit were discreetly clipped off as relics.

Martin de Porres, canonized in 1962, was among the first generation of saints from the New World, along with his contemporaries Saints Rose of Lima and Turibius of Mogrovejo. Martin was also the first mulatto saint. He lived a traditionally pious spirituality in keeping with the medieval saints of Europe. But he was not from Europe, did not enjoy a European education, and did not have pure European blood. Saint Martin proved the Catholic Faith could migrate across the Atlantic Ocean intact. The ancient faith found a home in a mulatto soul. Catholicism had successfully made the passage to a new land and immediately drove its roots deep into that land’s native soil, converting a new mixed-race people to an old religion, making Jesus Christ the Lord of Latin America. Saint Martin de Porres was a harbinger of many good things to come.

Saint Martin de Porres, we present our humble petitions to you, so that your faith and humility may bring them to our Father in Heaven. You were close to both God and man on earth. Continue to be close to us as you live with the Lord in heaven and seek favors on our behalf.

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November 2: The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed
(All Souls Day)
Commemoration; Liturgical Color: White, Violet, or Black

The earthly Church prays for the Church in Purgatory in hope of a reunion in Heaven

Every country has a civic feast day dedicated to soldiers who died for the nation. Every country has a tomb of the unknown soldier where an honor guard stands solemnly erect near an unnamed hero whose grave represents all the unknowns who never walked off the ship to hug their wife, who never met their parents at the airport and drove home. All Souls Day is like such Memorial Days and Tombs of the Unknown. Because of the Church’s ancient pedigree, timeless customs, and unmatched role in shaping cultures, it is more apt to say, though, that civic customs and ceremonies imitate the Church’s practice rather than the opposite.

The Feast of All Souls is the Catholic Memorial Day. Today the Church commemorates the souls of all the baptized who have died and yet who do not yet enjoy life with God in heaven. It is Catholic teaching that souls needing post-death purification can benefit from the prayers, alms, sacrifices, and Mass offerings of souls on earth. The Old Testament recounts the Jewish belief that the deceased benefit from temple sacrifice made on their behalf (2 Maccabees 12:42–46). Continuing this Semitic practice, prayers for the dead were offered by Christians from the very earliest years of the Church. The walls of the Christian catacombs of Rome were crowded with innumerable marble plaques in succinct Latin praying for the dead. There has never been a time when the Church has not commemorated, remembered, and prayed for the dead.

Few die with their souls so perfectly purified from sin and imperfection that they proceed directly to the Beatific Vision. No one is prepared for a ten-thousand-amp light to shine into their eyeballs the moment they awake. Nor at the moment of death would most be prepared for the intense light of God Himself to gaze into our imperfect souls. We would simply not be ready for such a holy searchlight examining our every dark corner. The soul first needs to be purified. Its sins must first be burned away in the fire of God’s merciful love. This is purgatory. It is the ante-chamber of heaven, the place of waiting and preparation where the soul is readied to enter and absorb the whitest of God’s light. But souls in purgatory have no free will or ability to atone by themselves for themselves. They depend on us. They advance in purification due to our prayers and offerings for them. This is why we pray for the dead and offer Masses for their advancement into heaven.

The Feast of All Souls, then, is much more than a spiritual family reunion where we visit the graves of our ancestors and recall with a tear all the good times. All Souls Day longs for a deeper bond, for an ultimate reunion with God at the head of the family in heaven with all His saints and angels. The dark arts of pagandom understand well the role the dead play in the imagination of the living. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, and witches surface in many cultures on this day. They manifest a frustrated, non-Christian longing for the afterlife. These characters are the living dead who inhabit the middle ground between earthly life and ultimate death. The undead, the forever young, the “after life but before judgment” souls lust after the flesh and blood of the living to preserve their immortality. In this imaginary world, death feeds on the sacrifice of life, especially young and beautiful life, so that dark powers can slake their thirst.

Today we put such fiction to the side and mobilize Christian prayer and sacrifice for Christian souls on a Christian Feast. Through the Sacraments, grace, redemptive suffering, alms giving, good deeds, and fasting, we move through the shadowlands of occult fiction, horror movies, and vampire legends. The hidden land of the dead is not just beyond the edge of the woods or in the dark of night after the last ember of the campfire turns black. The Church offers mystery enough for everyone. The deathly battle of good and evil, of devils against angels, of sin against grace, and of the cross against temptation is not fiction. It’s as serious as cancer. In this supernatural arena, souls hang in the balance, with heaven or hell, eternal life or eternal death, resting on the scales. Today we put our fingers on that scale and tip the balance in favor of those we love who have gone before us.

All Holy Souls, our prayers and Mass offerings are directed to you this day in the hope that what we do on earth may benefit your advancement toward a fully divine life in heaven where you may, in turn, pray that we may one day join you there.

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November 1: All Saints
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

Heaven is populated with holy people known to God alone

Martyrs were so revered in the early Church that their places and dates of death were sanctified by the candles, prayers, and votive offerings of the faithful, grateful for their witness. So many were the martyrs, though, that by the early fourth century it became impossible to solemnize each individually on the Church’s crowded calendar. There thus arose, over centuries, and in different ways in different regions, the custom of commemorating the memory of all the holy ones on one specific day of the year. By the early eighth century, a Feast of All Saints was celebrated in Rome on November 1. The Feast was extended to the entire Church in the next century.

The universal sanctoral calendar of the Catholic Church is like a saint’s All-Star team. Only the most talented make the cut. There are many more canonized saints besides those on the universal calendar. Some saints are commemorated only locally or regionally, others are historically obscure, and still others did not give a sufficiently universal witness to merit inclusion on the Church’s universal calendar. The Church defines a saint as a soul enjoying the Beatific Vision in heaven. So, besides the famous saints found on the universal calendar and the lesser-known saints not on that calendar, there are still many more souls in heaven not officially recognized as saints at all. These are the saints we celebrate in a particular way today.

The Solemnity of All Saints commemorates all those holy men, women, children, martyrs, confessors, and unknown others who lived lives of such holiness that upon death they either entered directly into God’s presence in heaven or duly purified their soul of every imperfection in purgatory before then advancing into His presence. All-Star saints such as Saint Augustine and Saint Francis of Assisi stand shoulder to shoulder in heaven with forgotten grandmas, quiet uncles, and unknown martyrs. These unrecognized but holy souls did not convert entire tribes, found religious communities, or have their bones crushed by the jaws of lions in the arena. Maybe they just kept their mouth shut when they had just the right words to humiliate a family member. Magnanimity. Perhaps they cooked dinner night after night for their family out of a sense of duty, while they gazed out the kitchen window, dreaming of another life far away doing greater deeds. Humility. Or maybe they refused to cooperate with an immoral boss and lost their job, never to recover financially, their dreams ruined for a principled stance. Fortitude.

The dense population of heaven is unknown to us on earth, but not to God, the audience of One we should most desire to please. There are as many pathways to God as there are people, since God wants to make a project of each and every one of us. All the saints lived heroic lives in their own unique ways. Some were the steeple to the village, seen by all and inspiring others to greatness. But most saints had lower profiles. They were more like the squat stone blocks forming the church’s foundation, silently holding up the entire structure. They received little notice or credit despite buttressing the entire building. Without their support, the church and all of its luster would collapse.

Today we commemorate those silent and sturdy ones who, without cease and without complaint, buttressed the family, the marriage, the parish, the Church, the community, the faith. Among the communion of saints are some few illustrious citizens whose virtues sparkle on their special days. But today we honor, remember, and seek to imitate that broader population of heaven never raised to the public altars but who offered their lives in quiet ways to God. They received the Body of Christ and lived His teachings in an exemplary manner in season and out of season until all seasons converged and God called them back to Himself.

All holy men and women, so close to us yet still so far, gather our prayers to yourselves and intercede in heaven on our behalf. May our holy desires be accomplished through that chorus of prayers you constantly present to the Father surrounded by all His angels in heaven.

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October 28: Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of hopeless causes (Jude) and tanners (Simon)

The Apostles laid the foundation for the household of faith

There is often a crosshatch of bloody scratches on the right cheek of statues of the suffering Christ in Latin America. It’s called the “Judas Kiss,” a reminder of Judas Iscariot’s act of both affectionately greeting Christ and betraying Him in one sinister gesture. No one kneels before a statue of Judas Iscariot in a Catholic church. No one lights a candle to Judas asking that he restore their lost sight or heal their child’s cancer. But Judas Iscariot wasn’t the only Judas among the Twelve Apostles.

Today’s Saint Jude (or Judas) was often confused with his evil contemporary. Since Judas Iscariot was so despised and ignored, and since he shared a name with the good Jude, a tradition gathered over the centuries of petitioning today’s saint only when all other saints had failed to answer one’s prayers. Saint Jude became the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, then, probably because of the faithful’s reluctance to seek the intercession of one whose misfortune it was to share a name with Christ’s betrayer. Out of confusion or an abundance of caution, Saint Jude thus became a saint of last resort. When the dam was barely holding, when a pulse could no longer be felt, when the rains wouldn’t come, a candle was lit to Saint Jude, hoping against hope, that he would respond.

Saint Simon the Apostle is called the “Zealot” in Saint Luke’s Gospel. This may describe his zeal for the house of the Lord or denote his membership in a radical Jewish sect. Zeal is, in any case, a virtue. It must be joined with prudence to ensure that it does not offend for the sake of offending. A zealous soul will, however, lovingly provoke others to consider the things of God through his words, actions, and appropriate silences. Zeal for the house of the Lord has migrated to other concerns in many parts of today’s world. While religious zeal has unfortunately come to be understood as a negative virtue, zeal for planet earth and various other more “acceptable” causes are now seen as positive. The intentional disciple, however, understands zeal in its historical sense as a burning concern for perennial truths, not mere fads, and as a proactive form of love for all those things that lead mankind to God. God is a person, after all, and depends on His friends to defend Him.

Saints Simon and Jude disappear from the pages of the Gospels after the brief mentions of their names. Nothing is known of either of them with any certainty, not even where they evangelized or where they met death. As Apostles, however, we know with certainty that they were key actors in laying the deep foundations of the Church in the rock-solid substrata of the Middle Eastern culture in which they lived.

The Catholic Church is the household of faith. An earthly family is united by blood, while the theological family of the Church is united by the Sacraments and the Creed. But it is not sufficient for a family to be united by biological or theological DNA. A family is little if it is not a household. A household works together, prays together, and eats together. A household is where a family feels like a family. A boy may know who his father is, but if he doesn’t share everyday life with that father, their family relationship means little. It is in the household that life happens all over the globe. Mom and dad, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, in the kitchen, around the table, in the garden, at Mass, a band united in both mundane and sacred duties.

The Church is the household of faith where God’s family gathers week in and week out, century after century. Christians must not only be united intellectually, but must live united, and feel that unity in their bones. Today’s saints worked long ago to build the household we now enjoy. They dug the well so that we could pull up the water and drink. They planted so that we could reap. They lit the fire so that we could warm ourselves close to the flames, one universal family living in one universal household we call the Church.

Saints Simon and Jude, we ask for your intercession in heaven as members of the Twelve Apostles. Approach the Lord Jesus with our needs in your hands. Answer the prayers we present. Fulfill the petitions we seek.

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October 24: Saint Anthony Mary Claret, Bishop
1807–1870
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of textile merchants, the Catholic press, and vocational educators

A tireless bishop founds an Order and moves mountains

Today’s saint was a finely tuned, high-octane engine of evangelization. Anthony Claret was from Catalonia, the region around Barcelona, Spain. He studied for the priesthood in Rome, was ordained in 1835, and then returned to Spain to spend ten years giving missions. In 1849 he founded the Congregation of the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, more commonly known as the Claretians in honor of their founder. The Order was particularly focused on publishing works of devotion and piety, books offering spiritual advice, and numerous pamphlets of basic catechesis. The Claretians filled a need and, as publishers, enjoyed enormous success. They published millions and millions of books and pamphlets. And all of this was spearheaded by Anthony, who not only generated doctrinal content but who also mastered the technical details of printing, learned the business side of the industry, and edited the published works himself.

In 1851, when Anthony was appointed the Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, the full array of his talents were put on display. He added the name “Mary” at his episcopal consecration and began a remarkably fruitful seven years as Archbishop. He traveled incessantly throughout his territory, restored the seminary, established hospitals and dozens of new parishes, and personally visited the sick and dying. He was ever present and provocative in his pastoral outreach, so much so that attempts were made on his life by the apathetic offended by his success. He was severely injured in one of these attempts but survived.

Bishop Anthony was a true man of action. Creative ideas on how to spread the Gospel flowed constantly from his mind. Every tribulation and hardship was, for him, just an invitation to deeper commitment. It was nothing for Anthony to expend all of his energy one day and to wake up and do the same the next day. He was replenished by exhausting himself. In 1857 he resigned as Archbishop when he was recalled to Spain to become the personal chaplain to the Queen. This sedentary life was a cross for Anthony, who was a born missionary. But he continued to dedicate himself to apostolic activity as much as his court obligations allowed.

At the Royal Monastery outside of Madrid where he was assigned, he set up a science library, a school for music and languages, a museum of natural history, and a fraternity composed of cultural leaders and intellectuals that grew to national prominence. Anthony was such a motor of evangelization and cultural advancement that he earned powerful enemies who feared his success. They eventually drove him from Spain to France, where he died in 1870.

Like so many saints, Anthony Mary Claret was a double or triple threat. He was so multi-faceted, so skilled in so many diverse fields, that it is hard to believe that one man accomplished so much. He worked well, and he worked quickly. Like many other saints, behind Anthony’s labors was a regimented life of prayer, daily Mass, the rosary, fasting, spiritual reading, self-discipline and moral strictness. He was perpetually in the presence of God, and in his later years experienced spiritual ecstasies and performed miraculous healings. This incredible man of action and prayer was canonized in 1950.

Saint Anthony Mary Claret, you outdid all your peers in dedication to Christ, Mary, and the Church. We pray that you intercede in heaven to give all bishops the graces and the skills to lead their flocks in prayer, education, and devotion as you did.

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October 23: Saint John of Capistrano, Priest
1386–1456
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of military chaplains and jurists

A worldly man becomes a Franciscan and a great preacher

Today’s saint, like Saints Francis of Assisi, Maximilian Kolbe, Jerome Emiliani and many other male saints, was a prisoner of war. And just like all the others, imprisonment changed John of Capistrano forever. Being confined to the four walls of a prison made him realize how precious was the life that God had given him and how sad it was to waste it on frivolities. John had studied law before he was captured in battle and had even become the mayor of the major Italian city of Perugia. He was bright, energetic, and successful. Life was his oyster. John’s mature decision to enter religious life was not, then, an escape hatch from real life or the last exit on a dead-end road. He had silver in his hands but dropped it to stretch for the gold. In a shocking display of humility after giving his life to Christ, John mounted a donkey backwards and rode through the streets of his town wearing only a list of his worst sins. People ridiculed him and pelted him with mud and dung. In this forlorn state, he presented himself at the door of a Franciscan monastery to seek admission. He was immediately accepted. After studies, he was ordained a priest in 1421.

John’s well of humility had no bottom, and his physical austerities never ceased. He continually mortified himself. He fasted, went barefoot, and slept little throughout his life. He was a protégé of the great Saint Bernardino of Siena, a fellow Franciscan. Like Bernardino, John became a renowned preacher and traveled throughout Central and Northern Europe drawing vast crowds. John lived poverty so totally that he, along with other reforming Franciscans of his generation, made it appear as if they were the measure for Christ’s poverty, instead of Christ being the example and inspiration for Franciscan poverty. John’s radical poverty and other reforming efforts were also the beginning of the divisions that would eventually cleave the body Franciscan into three distinct Orders.

Already famous in his mid-sixties as a theologian, preacher, and inquisitor, John was appointed by the Pope to lead a team of Franciscan missionaries to Hungary and the Bohemian peoples of Central Europe. John Hus, a Bohemian priest, had been burned at the stake by the Church for heresy in 1415. This searing event had caused his followers, known as Hussites, to increasingly separate themselves from the Church. Hussite theology was a precursor to the Protestant movement that engulfed Northern Europe one hundred years after Hus’ death. The Pope wanted John of Capistrano to either convert the Hussites or to subjugate them.

John’s mission to Hungary and Central Europe produced mixed results. He was an effective crusher of heretics, but his techniques did not always display the tact such a delicate mission required. After the shocking fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, John led a preaching crusade to unify a Christian response to the threat of impending Muslim expansion. At the age of seventy, Saint John personally led troops in a successful battle to defend Belgrade from the Turks, but he died soon afterward. Over two centuries after his death, John and his melodic last name of Capistrano were immortalized by his Franciscan brothers when they named a large mission in Southern California in his honor. The Mission of San Juan Capistrano, although ruined by earthquakes, is a much visited stop on the famous chain of missions that wind up and down the spine of California. This soldier-priest and tireless reformer and preacher was canonized in 1724.

Saint John of Capistrano, we ask your intercession to embolden all preachers to present the truths of Catholicism in all their fullness and vigor, and to buttress that preaching by an impeccable life of virtue and apostolic activity.

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October 22: Saint John Paul II, Pope
1920–2005
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of World Youth Day

Fully prepared, possessing every skill, a pope for the ages makes maximum impact

Thirty-three years after the dark cloud of communism had settled over Eastern Europe, on a crisp autumn night, heavy bells across Poland began to sway and toll in their high towers. Their clangs peeled down the valleys, thundered through the town squares, and reverberated off every city street. Men and women spilled like water into the streets. Songs. Candles. Prayers. Flowers. Tears. Flags. Embraces. Champagne. Could it be true? A son of Poland had been elected Pope! The impossible had become possible!

In the town of Wadowice, Father Edward Zacher was paralyzed by emotion. He could not summon a single word for the faithful who crammed the church in thanksgiving. Late that night, he slowly opened the sacramental register of the parish. He leafed through the yellowed pages back to May 1920. Carolus Joseph Wojtyła. Father Zacher had taught him catechism as a boy. The register duly noted, in Latin, Karol’s dates of Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, Priestly and Episcopal Ordination, and consecration as Cardinal. In a margin at the bottom of the page, the old priest’s hand trembled as he made a new entry: “Die 16 X 1978 in Summum Pontificem electus et sibi nomen Ioannem Paulum II imposuit.”

Pope Saint John Paul II was a titan. He was as prepared as any man before him to be pope. He was all things—a highly educated European intellectual, a philosophy professor with two Doctorates, a mystic of intense spirituality, a working bishop of a large and dynamic Archdiocese behind the iron curtain, a Cardinal whose counsel was valued by the Pope, an active contributor at the Second Vatican Council, a polyglot, and a world traveler. Adding to this embarrassment of riches, he was an athlete and outdoorsman, had palpable charisma, an open personality, a manly presence, vast circles of lay friends, a resonant voice, and he was just 58 years old when elected!

Never had a conclave of Cardinals made a bolder, wiser choice. That John Paul II was the first Slavic pope, and the first non-Italian in centuries, was also interesting and became more significant as his papacy unfolded. The times and the man were a match. He was simply the perfect man for the hour and his long papacy disappointed in almost nothing.

The catalogue of accomplishments of John Paul II, both before and after his papal election, is long. He was a tornado of activity and displayed a physical stamina which might have buried a man half his age. He wrote profoundly on every subject: Saint Mary, the Trinity, the Church’ social teachings, suffering, Christ, work, moral theology, philosophy, and on and on. Every subject found ample space to grow in his capacious mind. His personal narrative was also compelling. He had personally experienced the effects of the twentieth century’s twin horrors, Nazism and Communism, both efforts to create a perfect society without regard for God or man’s dignity. He knew what it was to be personally degraded, to come close to death, to go into hiding. He had seen his entire nation brought to its knees in humiliation. He understood, at the deepest level, what the Church meant to the world.

The papacy of our Saint built on the international Petrine ministry first initiated, in small steps, by Pope Saint Paul VI. John Paul II made this universal ministry an enduring part of every pope’s profile. He said Mass on the altar of the world, where humanity itself was his congregation. He had the piety of a humble Mexican peasant and the sophistication of an erudite German professor. No one, and no type, was a stranger to him.

An assassin’s bullet almost killed him on May 13, 1981, but he survived, barely. The physical effects of his injuries, and other illnesses, laid bare his sufferings for all to see. On the night of April 2, 2005, this giant, this father to the world, this Moses to the Slavs, died as tens of thousands gathered in prayerful vigil outside his window in Saint Peter’s Square. His funeral Mass was timeless and supernatural in a manner felt by all, but difficult to capture in words. He was canonized in 2014 and is buried in a side nave of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Saint Pope John Paul II, you laid your superabundant gifts on God’s altar as a teen, and God used them to the fullest extent until your death. Help all Christians to put their talents at God’s service to help lead others to Christ and to His Church.

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October 20: Saint Paul of the Cross, Priest (U.S.A.)
1694–1775
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Ovada, Italy, and founder of the Passionists

He was a marathoner whose “runner’s high” lasted a lifetime

After unsuccessfully living the life of a soldier, today’s saint left the military to live a secluded life of prayer for over five years. But then in 1720, he received a vision instructing him to found a Congregation devoted to Christ’s passion. In 1727 he was ordained a priest by the pope, along with his brother, and novices began to come to his new Congregation in greater numbers. Paul was not a frivolous man, though, and the Congregation’s Rule was grueling. He and his brethren lived strict austerity, and their ministry focused on preaching the passion to the poor. The new priests did not socialize with people of means and lived as desperately poor as those they served.

The effects of poverty encompass more than economic deprivation. Poverty means lack of privacy, bed bugs, rotten teeth, soft apples, little rest, flea-infested clothes, open wounds, infection, putrid water, cold nights, going to bed hungry, violent fights over a handful of coins, lack of hope, and bitterness at one’s own miserable plight. The deep resentment poverty can engender powers the poor man’s emotions over the cliffs of envy and hate.

Living radical poverty, and experiencing life among the poor and their emotional plight, was too much for some of Father Paul’s novices. Rigors such as this were for the few, and many novices abandoned ship. But enough hardy and faithful men remained to enable the new Congregation to succeed. Provisional church approval came in the 1740s on the condition that the Congregation ameliorate its tough-as-nails Rule. Full papal approval for the Congregation came slowly, in 1769. The Congregation’s members were known as the Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They were more simply known as Passionists. All Passionists took a special fourth vow to preach Christ’s passion so that it never faded from the faithful’s memory. The Passionists’ black habits bore the distinctive badge of their brotherhood—a heart emblazoned with the words JESU XPI PASSIO mounted by a white cross with instruments of Christ’s crucifixion displayed below.

Saint Paul of the Cross was so united to the passion that it was said that his heart pulsated more quickly on Fridays. He was a powerful preacher, and both he and the Passionist fathers in general became known as expert retreat masters, confessors, and directors of parish missions. Paul’s heart melted with love for Christ his entire life. He spent hours in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, never failed to subjugate his body with mortifications and austerities, and was insistent about living radical poverty. Paul seemed to experience a type of spiritual “runner’s high,” something common to many saints known more for their ardor than their originality. As Paul fasted and prayed and lived poverty, it became easier and more joyful for him to fast and pray and live poverty. His virtues gained steam as he rolled through life and as his body sunk deeper and deeper into the person of Christ.

Paul also founded a Congregation of contemplative nuns devoted to the passion. The Passionists remained a relatively small order until they spread beyond Italy in the mid-1800s, including to England, a country which Paul always intended to bring back to the Church. Providentially, it was a Passionist priest, Blessed Dominic Barberi, who received the great Englishman Saint John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church. Saint Paul of the Cross’ legacy is his Congregation more than his few published works. He even developed a reputation as a miracle worker and healer in his old age. He was raised to the altars in 1867.

Saint Paul of the Cross, you lived an exemplary life of poverty, obedience, prayer, and mortification throughout your span of many years. May your followers remain faithful to your charism, and may all priests see in you an example of holiness.

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October 19: Saints Jean de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests, and their Companions, Martyrs (U.S.A.)
Saint Jean: 1593–1649; Saint Isaac Jogues 1607–1646; Frs. Gabriel Lalemant, Noel Chabanel, Charles Garnier, Anthony Daniel; and laymen René Goupil and Jean de Lalande
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of North America, co-patrons of Canada

French priests and laity leave hearth and home to be slaughtered on the edge of nowhere

Deep in the dense and endless forests of Iroquois nation, Jean de Brébeuf, bound tightly to a post, slowly stretched his neck and head toward the canopy high above, and prayed. An Iroquois war party had attacked his Huron mission the day before. He had a chance to escape but he chose to stay. The baptized and neophytes looked to him, needed him, and were captured with him. Saint Jean had long before witnessed, and chronicled, the Iroquois’ depraved treatment of their Indian enemies. Now he was the captive and now he would be the victim.

The painted braves prepared their instruments of torture and the ritual butchery commenced. The Iroquis peeled Jean’s lips from his face and cut off his nose and ears. Saint Jean was as silent as a rock. They poured boiling water over his head in a mock baptism and pressed hatchets, glowing red hot, against his open wounds. A hard blow to the face split his jaw in two. This was pain beyond pain, a living holocaust. When the saint tried to encourage his fellow captives with holy words, the Indians cut out his tongue. Near the end, they cut out his heart and ate it. Raw. Then they drank his warm blood. They wanted the blood of this lion to course in their own veins. Eye witnesses to Saint Jean’s torture and death, which took place alongside that of Father Gabriel Lalemant, escaped captivity and gave detailed accounts of what they had seen. Fellow Jesuits recovered the two bodies days later and verified their wounds. Brébeuf’s skull was placed in a reliquary in a convent in Quebec City. It is still there today.

Saint Jean de Brébeuf was born in Bayeux, France. Bayeux is a comfortable town with low, sturdy buildings and a handsome Cathedral. It’s the kind of town people want to move to. But Saint Jean went in the opposite direction. He left Bayeux to become a Jesuit priest. When he was chosen to become a missionary, he crossed an ocean to New France (Canada). He was well educated and was the first European to master the Huron language, to study their customs, and to write a Huron-French dictionary. He was a mystic who had an intimate relationship with Our Lord and a vivid spirituality full of saints and angels. He took a vow of personal perfection, striving to rid himself of every sin, no matter how small. He canoed thousands of miles over open waters, and trekked and portaged vast expanses of prairie and woods in search of a congregation for the Truth. In a frontier culture of trappers, loggers, and ruffians, he held his own. The Indians called him “Echon”—one who carries his own weight. His oar was always in the water. For all this missionary labor, there was some success. But there was more disappointment. Some of his assassins were Huron apostates.

A heroic death is not the fruit of a lukewarm life. Saint Jean was prepared for his gruesome martyrdom by many years of struggling to breathe inside of smoke-filled cabins, by suffering the bites of swarms of mosquitoes all night long, by shivering through cold nights, by eating disgusting food without complaint, and by trekking rugged terrain while poorly shod. Once, he fell on the ice and broke his collarbone, making it impossible for him to navigate jagged terrain upright. He crawled thirty-six miles on his hands and knees back to his mission.

Saint Jean also prepared himself for death through disciplined prayer and meditation. He prepared himself out of a profound acceptance of God’s will. Our faith teaches that grace builds on nature. This just means that a plant grows in the ground. Bad soil; sick plant. Rich soil; healthy plant. The seed of faith planted in Saint Jean by his parents and priests was dropped into rich, black, human soil. God’s grace grew in him. God’s grace thrived in him. God’s grace never died in him. And that same powerful grace comes to us today through the intercession of this mighty oak of a man.

Saint Isaac Jogues came as near to martyrdom as any man who ever lived to tell about it. Jogues was a professor in France who crossed the ocean to work among the Huron. For six years he labored as far west as Lake Superior, one of the first French men to see that lake of lakes. He was kidnapped by Mohawks in 1642 and held captive for thirteen months, during which time he witnessed, and suffered from, an orgy of barbarity similar to that later suffered by Brébeuf: torture by fire, removal of fingernails, gnawing away of fingers, whippings with thorn bush branches, cuttings, etc.

Jogues’ companion, Jesuit lay brother René Goupil, a trained medic, was tomahawked to death for making the sign of the cross on the forehead of a Mohawk boy. Incredibly, just when Jogues was about to be burned alive he was rescued by Dutch traders. Jogues returned to France half a man; skeletal, lame, and with stumps where some fingers had been chewed down to their knuckles. On home soil again, he went to the local Jesuit house, where the porter assumed he was an indigent beggar.

Jogues specifically requested to return to Canada, and crossed the Atlantic one last time in 1644. He was assigned to Montreal, where he crossed paths with Jean de Brébeuf, who thought Jogues was a living saint. When Jogues asked permission from his superiors to again evangelize among the Mohawks, he told a friend “Ibo, sed non redibo.” “I will go, but I will not return.” He was a prophet. He and layman Jean Lalande were captured and tomahawked to death on October 18, 1646. Their severed heads were placed as trophies on pikes. The North American martyrs were canonized in 1930.

Saints Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, and companions, you died far from the comforts of home and family. You accepted sufferings you did not deserve for the greater glory of God. Grant us patience when we are impetuous, endurance when tempted to quit, humility when confronted with ignorance, and physical toughness when the comforts of life are not to be found.

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October 18: Saint Luke, Evangelist
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of artists, physicians, and surgeons

A disciple of Christ gives the Church two foundational works

Saint Luke was one of the four Evangelists but not one of the Twelve Apostles. Like Saint Mark, Luke was not among that select group who walked step by step alongside Jesus as he journeyed through Palestine. Luke was more likely a disciple of Saint Paul, who mentions a Luke who accompanies him on his missionary journeys. Little is known with certainty of Luke’s life. What is known is that he wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles—over a quarter of the New Testament. The two volumes of Luke and Acts are foundational works for knowing Jesus Christ and the early Church. The third Gospel does not name its author and does not even claim to be an eye-witness account. But the earliest known manuscripts of the third Gospel are attributed to Luke, and even Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the late second century, names Luke as its author.

Every one of the four Gospels has a unique perspective, is written for a specific audience, and relates certain details and stories the other Gospels do not. Saint Luke likely wrote for a non-Jewish crowd. He translates into the Greek language words that the other Gospels leave in their original language, a hint that Luke’s readers were non-Jews who could not read Hebrew and Aramaic. Luke alone tells the story of Lazarus and the rich man who repents of having ignored him. To Luke alone do we owe our knowledge of the Incarnation. It is as if he is just behind the young Mary in the room when the Archangel Gabriel announces that she will be the Mother of God. Only Luke writes down the Virgin’s Magnificat and gives us the scriptural basis for the "Hail Mary.” Yet in all of this, Luke himself does not appear. He must have been humble, because he recedes into the crowd while the whole cast of the Gospel climbs on stage.

Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is a diary of the very early Church. Acts is often told from a first-person perspective with the use of the word “we.” Without this journal there would be yawning gaps in our knowledge of the nascent Church. It is to Luke, especially, that we are indebted for our knowledge of Pentecost and the workings of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. Luke is clearly on Saint Paul’s missionary team and remains at the great evangelist’s side until the bitter end. When Paul is imprisoned in Rome, with his beheading just over the horizon, he is abandoned by all his coworkers save one. From his prison cell, Paul writes "Only Luke is with me" (2 Tm 4:11).

Saint Augustine writes in the Confessions that the present tense of past things is called memory. The past is not really the past, then, if we remember it accurately. Memory can be ill-used when it carries a grudge and blocks forgiveness, or when it doesn’t let the past recede but allows it to invade the present so forcefully that no one is allowed to grow beyond their worst five minutes. Understood in a healthy way, memory makes the good past live again. When committed to writing, memory makes the past forever present for posterity.

The written Gospels make Christ come alive. Their pages are not Christ in full, as no one can be reduced to just their documentary trace. But the Word made flesh, the Word alive today in heaven, was captured at a certain moment in time by the words of Saint Luke. Christians believe that the Gospels capture the essentials of the life of Jesus Christ which God desires the faithful to know. And when these Gospels are read in the light of the living Gospel of the Church and supplemented by the grace of the Sacraments, the witness of the saints, the governance of the hierarchy, and the teachings of the Catechism, we have all that we need to achieve heaven. The Evangelists make the original events of the life of Christ present today. Without these inspired records, God would not cease to be God, but He would certainly be less vivid to us living so many centuries after His Son became man.

Saint Luke, your words preserving the life of Christ make Him knowable and lovable to the world today. Through your intercession in heaven, we ask that the riches of your Gospel, especially your words about the Blessed Mother, may inspire us to be more faithful disciples.

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October 17: Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr
c. Mid First Century–c. 110
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of the Church in Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa

An early Bishop-martyr elaborates on Catholic theology

Although not the most famous Saint Ignatius in the Church, today’s saint was the first to offer a theology of martyrdom. He also wrote seven famous letters en route to his ritual death in Rome which set forth, with surprising vigor for so early a Christian, some fundamental Catholic beliefs. Saint Ignatius was a successor to Saint Peter as Bishop of Antioch in Syria. Antioch is an ancient ecclesiastical see where the followers of Christ were first called Christians. Bishop Ignatius was arrested in Antioch and, for unknown reasons, was transported across half of the empire to Rome for punishment. During this long trek, Ignatius wrote seven hastily composed letters to seven cities. He also visited with Saint Polycarp, who referenced Ignatius’ letters in a subsequent letter of his own. Ignatius’ letters, perhaps miraculously, have survived. They paint a vivid picture of first-century Christianity and prove that what an educated bishop believed in 110 A.D. is essentially what Catholics believe today.

Some suffering souls have experienced the passion of Christ in the very same manner that Christ did. Stigmatists have had bloody holes pierce their palms, felt the pressure of a crown of thorns on their skull, or the pain of an open wound in their side. Such re-livings of the passion show an advanced spirituality in that they physically manifest a contemplative’s detailed meditation on Christ’s final hours. The earliest Christian martyrs, such as today’s saint, speak more generally. They want to offer their entire lives as a holocaust or to be ground like wheat in the jaws of lions. They want to emulate the Son of God in emptying themselves in an ultimate witness. Only later saints endured sufferings physically parallel to those of Christ. The original martyrs were just open to dying. Period.

Ignatius wrote in such explicit language about the Holy Eucharist, the Catholic Church, and the importance of bishops that modern Protestants have cast doubt on the authenticity of his letters or, at a minimum, questioned their ancient pedigree. Yet there is no reason to doubt Ignatius’ words or when he wrote them, and neither the early Church historian Eusebius nor the fourth-century Saint Jerome doubted Ignatius. Ignatius was the first to use the word “Catholic” in reference to the Church: “Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” He repeatedly understands the bishop as the image of God the Father, telling the faithful to “defer to him, or, rather, not to him, but to the Father of Jesus Christ, the bishop of all men.” Ignatius had a balanced Christology: “There is one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God…” He understands the Eucharist as literally the flesh of Christ. Writing against heretics he states: “They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ… Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again.”

Like Saints Polycarp and Maximilian Kolbe, Ignatius became what he celebrated, a living sacrifice offered to the Father. His body became the offering, a Roman amphitheater the church, the blood-soaked sand his marble floor, the spectators his congregation, and the cacophony of screams of bloodlust the sacred music that guided him in his last liturgical act, the gift of himself as he was torn apart by the powerful jaws of lions. Although Ignatius’ body was ripped to pieces, some few bones were picked out of the grains of sand and brought back to Antioch. They are now found in the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome.

Saint Ignatius of Antioch, your courageous acceptance of your impending martyrdom was an inspiration to your fellow Christians then and remains an inspiration today. Give all who seek your intercession just a small portion of your steely courage in the face of real danger.

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October 16: Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, Virgin
1647–1690
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of those with polio, devotees of the Sacred Heart, loss of parents

A cloistered nun’s visions of the Sacred Heart impact the Church like a meteor

Today’s saint, in the eyes of the world, was nothing special. She grew up in a medium-sized town, never traveled, received a standard education, was not wealthy, had normal intelligence, and died at the age of forty-three. But she had visions. Powerful, thought-provoking, descriptive visions.

If she were not a nun, people would probably have whispered that Margaret was eccentric and then politely ignored her. But Margaret’s austere life as a cloistered nun buttressed her credibility. And when a holy Jesuit priest, Saint Claude de la Colombière, disseminated the content of her visions, it sparked broader interest, which eventually spread like wildfire around the globe. The innumerable cells in the body of Christ carried Margaret Mary’s visions one to the other, until devotion to the Sacred Heart became so common as to be prototypically Catholic. But it was not always so. It was today’s saint who made devotion to the Sacred Heart commonplace.

Saint Margaret Mary grew up in a large, pious, middle-class family in France in the middle of its great century of Catholic revival. She was a daughter, so to speak, of Saints Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal. The latter founded the Order of the Visitation after being inspired by the life and writings of Francis de Sales. Margaret joined her local Visitandine convent in 1671 in Paray-le-Monial, just ten years after Jane had died. Margaret suffered from serious physical ailments and so was not outstanding for her practical service to the convent. But she was especially devout and dedicated to mental prayer.

From her childhood she had experienced a closeness to Jesus Christ so unique that she thought everyone experienced it. In the convent Jesus visited her often, speaking to her as if they were old friends. And like an old friend, He opened His heart to her and told her things He told no one else. He said He was sad. He said He was disappointed in the laxity of so many of the faithful, especially the laxity of those consecrated to Him. And then one day He did something extraordinary—He showed Margaret His human heart, red as a ruby.

These were not visions of the exalted, seated Christ as King of the Universe, nor of Jesus the High Priest consecrating the world to the Father surrounded by saints and angels. This was the humble, slightly sad and discouraged Jesus wondering where all His friends had gone: “I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrileges, and by the coldness and contempt they have for me in this sacrament of love….” It was all about the Blessed Sacrament. Jesus wanted more devotion to Him in the tabernacle, and He wanted it at specific times. He asked Margaret to come before Him for one hour at 11 p.m. every first Thursday of the month. He made promises to those who received Holy Communion on nine consecutive First Fridays. This was the seventeenth-century version of the twentieth-century Divine Mercy devotion.

Saint Margaret Mary was not the first person, nor the first saint, to talk about the Sacred Heart. But she was the first dedicated ambassador of this message of mercy. And God used her effectively. As part of her canonization process, her tomb was opened in 1830 and she worked a miracle of healing. Images of the Sacred Heart were commonly enthroned in Catholic homes with its promises described in detail. In 1919 in Paris, an enormous Basilica on Montmartre was dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Saint Margaret Mary was canonized in 1920. Her body can be seen under an altar in the chapel dedicated to the Sacred Heart at Paray-le-Monial.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, your life of prayer and devotion to Jesus was that of a prolonged discussion with an intimate friend. Help us to dialogue with Jesus like you, knowing Him and loving Him in the hiddenness of the tabernacle.

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October 16: Saint Hedwig, Religious
c.1174–1243
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of brides, widows, and Silesia

A wife and mother spreads the faith like a bishop

On every limb of the tangled branches of Saint Hedwig’s family tree sits a duke, landgrave, prince, king, queen, and count. The roots of Hedwig’s aristocratic tree likewise spread up and down the hills and valleys of Europe’s heartland. Her uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews occupied duchies, governed dioceses, sat on thrones, ran monasteries, and reigned over realms large and small in the medieval core of Christendom.

Hedwig was born in a castle to a duke. At the age of twelve, she married a duke, Henry the Bearded of Silesia, a region straddling present day Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Hedwig lived when the mortar in the walls of Europe’s castles was still wet, and their moats still freshly dug. She and her kind, the early nobility of Europe, correctly understood that culture and Catholicism were synonymous. To bring the Church to a people just stepping out of the darkness of paganism was to bring hospitals, monogamy, the Mass, literacy, knowledge, schools, law, monasteries, farms, care for the poor and widows, and the hope of the Gospel. Hedwig understood this perfectly. She unapologetically promoted the faith of Jesus Christ because it was as good for the people as it was for God.

Hedwig bore her husband seven children. She and Henry were a generous couple who personally cared for the sick, founded and patronized hospitals, and who promoted Catholicism through the establishment and endowment of religious houses. They established Cistercian, Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Dominican, and even very early Franciscan foundations. After their last child was born, Duke Henry and Hedwig took a mutual vow of chastity before their bishop and lived mostly apart. Henry received the tonsure and let his beard grow long. Hedwig moved close to the convent of Trebnitz, in present day Wrocław, Poland, which she and Henry had previously founded. It was the first women’s religious house in Silesia and part of Henry and Hedwig’s broader effort to develop Christian life and German culture throughout Central Europe.

After Henry died in 1238, the widow Hedwig took the grey habit of the Cistercian nuns at Trebnitz Abbey, where her daughter Gertrude was abbess. It was likely not easy for Hedwig, the mother, to live in obedience to her very own daughter. Hedwig did not, however, take formal religious vows, because her wealth was still needed to support the monastery. But Hedwig otherwise lived the austere life of prayer, mortification, fasting, and poverty, which the monastic community itself lived. Early biographies relate that Hedwig also performed miracles, saw into the future, and had the gift of prophecy, even foretelling her own date of death.

Saint Hedwig did not kiss the chains of her captivity, bleed to death as a martyr in the arena, or boycott her womb as a vowed and perpetual virgin. She was the wife of a powerful man and the mother of a large family. She walked the wide and well-traveled road of marriage and family domesticity. And it was along that path that she found holiness, carried the burdens of the Church’s mission on her shoulders, and left a legacy of church building normally associated with an indefatigable bishop. This wife and mother was canonized in 1267 and is buried near her husband in the abbey church at Trebnitz, where she last closed her eyes in 1243.

Saint Hedwig, your missionary fervor helped build the church in your native land. May your tireless work be an example to all the faithful to use whatever station in life they occupy as a platform to better know love, and serve God and His Church.

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October 15: Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin and Doctor
1515–1582
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of headache sufferers and lacemakers

A rich, fiery personality purifies herself and the Carmelites

The call for reform of the Church has rung out through the centuries down to today. However, it is largely misplaced. Reform of Church structures is required periodically for her internal well-running. But purification is needed more than reform. The constant purification in holiness of the baptized is harder, more efficacious, and more enduring than the reform of Church organs of governance. Today’s saint was a reformer, yes, but she was first a purifier. She purified herself, her religious sisters, and then the Carmelite Order. Structural reform came last, after she had died. Saint Teresa of Jesus, commonly known as Saint Teresa of Ávila, was the inspiration for the great Teresas who followed her: Saints Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Saint Teresa was born behind the high and thick walls of Ávila in Central Spain, amidst that country’s greatest century. She was from a large, middle-class and pious family. As a girl, Teresa dreamed of being a martyr, or a hermit, and loved to repeat the words “forever and ever and ever.” When she decided to become a religious, she entered Ávila’s Carmelite convent mostly because it was there. The convent was large and the nuns serious. But it was a bit too comfortable. Many nuns brought their social status into the cloister and had private kitchens, oratories, and guest rooms. Teresa was one of these. Visitors came and went at will. While the convent caused no scandal, it produced no saints either. Even so, Teresa remained faithful—she prayed, observed the rule, and endured the normal fasts and mortifications. But by the mid-1500s, the wave of Church reform, even spiritual reform, which had been rising in Central
Europe for decades, finally broke on the shores of Catholic Spain.

Teresa suffered various health scares, read some seminal works on mental prayer, had mystical experiences, and slowly became convinced that her convent was too lax. The Church and Christ demanded more. She had developed the practice in examining her conscience to not just weigh her virtues and vices but to consider all the graces, all the good, and all the holiness God desired of her which she had impeded. Inspired by the great reformers of her century, many of them fellow Spaniards, Teresa decided to found a new Carmelite convent. There was fierce opposition from within her own convent and from the Carmelite Order more generally. Her odyssey of reform, begun in the mid-1550s, bore fruit when her first convent opened in Ávila in 1562. Her sisters wore no shoes (the meaning of the word “Discalced”), were limited to thirteen per convent, and would accept neither dowries nor endowments. The Discalced Carmelites were to be utterly poor, to fast, to mortify, and to pray intensely. But Teresa also wanted no gloomy saints. She practiced, and expected her nuns to emulate, being ever more sociable as she progressed in holiness. Everyone liked Teresa, and she liked to be liked.

Teresa spent her last twenty years founding new convents as she traveled throughout Spain, all the while living in the most primitive conditions. By middle age she had earned a reputation for holiness, for legitimate mysticism, for affability, and for total obedience to the Church. She lived what she demanded of others. She led by example. And she did it all with a cheerful disposition and a rich personality that overcame deep-seated opposition.

The Discalced Carmelites were given their own Spanish province in 1580 and were recognized as a distinct Order in 1594, twelve years after Teresa’s death. On a banner day in 1622, Teresa was canonized with Saints Philip Neri, Ignatius of Loyola, and Francis Xavier. Teresa was the first female non-martyr to have her feast day extended to the universal Church, and due to the profundity of her mystical writings, she was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1970.

Saint Teresa of Jesus, your colorful character and recollected soul merged into a powerful personality that brought about needed change. Through your intercession in heaven, assist all religious to purify themselves and their orders in accord with God’s will for the Church.

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October 14: Saint Callistus I, Pope and Martyr
c. Late Second Century–222
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of cemetery workers

A slave takes charge of a catacomb and rises to the papacy

Popes owned slaves for centuries to row their boats, cook their meals, and care for their horses and carriages. Kings, nobles, and middle-class families owned slaves. Slavery was a ubiquitous institution not necessarily rooted in racism, which was a latecomer as a rationale for enslavement. Rather, prisoners of war and criminals of every skin color were enslaved as alternatives to capital punishment. Others were born into slavery from slave mothers, and still others in desperate circumstances sold themselves into slavery in exchange for food, shelter, and security.

Today’s saint, according to ancient sources, served as a slave in a Roman home for many years and thus was part of that massive social reality of slavery that not even Saint Paul explicitly condemned in his letter to Philemon. Since he was an intelligent and resourceful servant, Callistus’ master put him in charge of his personal bank. But when Callistus lost its deposits, he was blamed and was eventually exiled to the mines of Sardinia. At some point he was released from this hard labor and earned freedom from his slave status.

Pope Zephyrinus, elected in 199, placed the capable Callistus in charge of the most important underground Christian cemetery in Rome. Under Callistus it eventually grew into a sprawling, thirteen-mile warren of dark, narrow tunnels lined with tombs chiseled out of the soft tufa stone. 500,000 bodies were encased in its walls! Callistus was so successful in managing the cemetery that it came to bear his name, and bears it still—the Catacombs of Saint Callistus. Besides numerous martyrs, it also houses a famous chapel for nine third-century popes. The Catacombs were ground zero for early Christian devotion in Rome. They were not hiding places from persecution but sacred ground on which to kneel beside a martyr’s lifeless body. Saint Jerome himself writes about his regular visits to pray at the martyrs’ tombs in the catacombs a century and a half after Callistus expanded them. There were no Viking funerals, Hindu pyres, or urns on the mantle for these early Christians. They believed in the resurrection of the body, as the Church still does. They knew, instinctively, that it was more fitting to bury a body, to keep watch with the dead, than to casually bake a body like a pie.

The same Pope Zephyrinus ordained Callistus as a deacon. Deacons have a tighter bond, theologically, with bishops than with priests. Since the Acts of the Apostles, they were ordained specifically to assist the first bishops, the Apostles. The first three centuries of the Church resound with the names of deacons, such as Saints Lawrence and Vincent, who were martyred alongside the popes and bishops they served. Pope Saint Sixtus II was killed, in fact, along with his coterie of deacons after they were all arrested in the Catacombs of Callistus in 258. In approximately 217, Deacon Callistus was elected the Bishop of Rome, crowning his long and arduous path from slavery to a more exalted form of service to the Divine Master as head of the entire Church.

Pope Callistus encountered resistance over the perennial third-century theological-pastoral issue of how to reintegrate into the Body of Christ Catholics who had been forced to engage in emperor worship. Callistus held that if God could forgive murder and adultery he could forgive idolatry too. No sin was unforgivable. His bitter enemies, including the first antipope, Hippolytus, considered Callistus too lax and committed their calumnies to writing. This damaged Callistus’ reputation into modern times, when scholarship finally called into question the veracity of his enemies’ accounts. Saint Callistus’ life is not richly detailed, but he died in 222, most likely by martyrdom and, ironically, was not buried in his eponymous Catacomb. His original tomb was rediscovered in 1960. His remains had been transferred in the ninth century to Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which tradition holds was built over, or next to, an earlier church of which Callistus was the patron.

Saint Callistus, you served an earthly master as a slave and a heavenly master as a deacon and pope. You made Christian burial and praying for the dead a defining feature of the Church of Rome. May we honor you in death just as you honored so well your own forebearers in the faith.

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October 11: Saint John XXIII, Pope
1881–1963
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of papal delegates

A smart, fatherly priest becomes a warm-hearted pope

The first Pope John XXIII was an amoral antipope. He was one of three competing popes between 1409–1417, the confusing, final chapter of the Western Schism whose power struggles and political intrigues tore at the fabric of the Church between 1378–1417. When today’s saint was elected Bishop of Rome in 1958, being well versed in church history, he chose the name John XXIII to put to rest forever and always any lingering confusions about the historical status of the first John XXIII.

Pope Saint John XXIII was born Angelo Roncalli into a large, humble, rural family in a mountainous region of Northern Italy. He entered the local minor seminary at the age of eleven and persevered in his philosophical and theological studies, both locally and in Rome, until his ordination in 1904. Angelo had the good fortune to know, serve, and study under a succession of well-educated, charitable, and holy pastors. Both his formal and informal Church-sponsored education created in him the winning combination of rustic common sense, broad historical vision, and cultural openness that would mark his entire life. His simple, but not simplistic, farm background, stellar education, profound life of prayer, and total immersion in the rich Catholic life and history of his native region formed and molded him into a great man.

After his ordination, Father Angelo Roncalli became secretary to his bishop, a saintly and pastoral prelate whose total dedication left a deep impression on the young priest who was at his side for everything for almost ten years. Father Roncalli also edited a monthly journal, taught theology and history in the seminary, gave priestly guidance to various groups, and served as an army medic and military chaplain during World War I. His engaging personality and deep wisdom left a deep impression. He was, simply, an outstanding priest. In 1921 the Pope called him to Rome to serve the universal church in various roles, including as the Vatican representative in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, and then as the Apostolic Nuncio to Paris near the end of WWII and beyond. In 1953 he was made a Cardinal and the Patriarch of Venice, and thus returned to some of the direct pastoral duties he loved so much and which had been so reduced during his long administrative service to the Church.

In October 1958 his accumulated knowledge and experience were placed at the service of the universal Church, when at the age of seventy-six he was elected pope. He surprised the world soon afterward by calling for an Ecumenical Council, the meeting of all the world’s bishops that became known as Vatican II. As pope, he published some important social encyclicals, waded into the dawning theological debates of the Council, and then died in 1963, after reigning for only four and a half years.

From the age of fourteen, John XXIII had kept a spiritual journal he allowed to be posthumously published as Journal of a Soul. It reveals a trusting soul with a deep love of Jesus Christ and the Church, a man aware of all the major currents of culture, and a man of refined spirituality and profound humility. It reveals a saint. Pope John had said that he wanted to be like Pope Saint Pius X—to be born poor and to die poor. In his last will and testament he left $20 to each of the surviving members of his family. It was all he had. John XXIII was canonized on the same day as Pope Saint John Paul II on April 27, 2014. His feast day is not his date of birth, death, or ordination but the date of the opening session of Vatican II in 1962. His largely incorrupt body is visible to the faithful in a glass coffin in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Pope Saint John XXIII, may your long life of dedicated and selfless service to the Church and to her faithful be an example for all priests and bishops. May they see in you an example of the Good Shepherd who cares for his flock with wisdom and tenderness.

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October 9: Saint John Leonardi, Priest
1541–1609
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of pharmacists

“Either Christ or nothing!” was his cure for every ill

Today’s saint was among that first wave of post-Council of Trent priests and founders whose purification of the Church started with themselves. Saint John Leonardi was a man ardently in love with Christ and Mary and the sacred field of the Catholic Church, where theological truths grow tall and dense in the richest soil. Because that sacred field was so in need of clearing, pruning, and weeding in his era, Saint John stripped from himself every single personal interest, desire, or goal and merged his life totally with that of Christ. John was like a small twig grafted onto the verdant root-stem of Christ. John, Christ, and the Church all grew and thrived together as one living thing.

Like so many saints, John Leonardi was born into a large family. The hum and whistle of daily life, work, meals, conversation and prayer in large families is a small school where children learn generosity naturally. The large family’s numerous siblings serve as proxies for the diverse personalities found in the broader culture, better preparing the children for life outside the home. John’s parents won the battle for his soul early. He was a religiously inclined boy from the start. As a teenager, John studied to be a pharmacist under a local mentor for many years, leading to a life-long interest in medicine. But mature reflection eventually took him down another path. He would not apply essences, compounds, or poultices to patients’ bodies but rather feed the sacraments to people’s souls. John studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1572.

Father John served among the youth at parishes in his native city of Lucca, Italy, and was active in visiting hospitals and prisons. His ardour attracted a loyal following of laymen with whom he lived and worked and prayed. John’s life and priesthood flowed effortlessly into the great river of reforms that gushed from the Council of Trent, which had concluded just a few years before John was ordained. John was intensely focused on implementing the Council’s teachings. His local bishop tasked John with preaching in all of Lucca’s churches to straighten the crooked lines sketched by some theologically confused priests. Father John’s experience of orthodox preaching, and of the fierce resistance it generated, convinced him that only an impeccable moral and spiritual life could draw people to self reform and conversion. John thus sought to mirror every virtue, to be a lighthouse on the rugged cliff, drawing all people safely into the harbor of Christ.

John’s small band of brothers were eventually recognized as a Congregation by successive popes, but due to local resistance, John had to move his work to Rome. He befriended Saint Philip Neri, was entrusted with reforming several monasteries, and was instrumental in founding the seminary for the future Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a successful Vatican entity which formed priests for service in the foreign missions. John advocated the Forty Hours Devotion, frequent reception of Holy Communion, and the Christian formation of children at as early an age as possible.

By 1600 Father John Leonardi was a well-known Counter-Reformation force in Italy not due to his books, new ideas, or charisma, but due to his virtue and zeal for the house of the Lord. In 1609 our saint died well but too soon. He was infected with the plague while visiting the sick. The small Congregation he founded, the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of Lucca, continues until today, purposely small and focused on their important work. Father John Leonardo was canonized in 1938 and is buried in a handsome baroque church near the Roman Forum.

Saint John Leonardi, may your generous example of priestly service inspire a holy jealousy among priests so that they burn with the same desire that consumed you in service to Christ and Mary in the heart of the Church.

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October 9: Saint John Henry Newman (England and Wales)
1801–1890
Memorial; Liturgical color: White

As mellow as a breeze, as elegant as a swan, he walked alone the path to Rome

Pope Benedict XVI, a professional theologian, did not typically perform beatification ceremonies, instead entrusting them to his Cardinals. But such was Benedict’s immense respect for Cardinal John Henry Newman’s life and thought that the Pope not only personally celebrated Newman’s beatification Mass but even traveled to England, Newman’s homeland, to do so in September 2010.

Cardinal Newman is known to most American Catholics as the namesake of the Newman Centers, which are found on the campuses of many secular universities in the United States. Yet Newman’s profile casts a much broader shadow than these university centers alone. John Henry Newman was a man of vast learning culled from a life of prodigious reading. He was a one-man library who mastered both Greek and Latin, had a comprehensive knowledge of Scripture, and was conversant with the theological nuances of every great theologian of the first five centuries of the Church. In addition, Newman elucidated complex theological material in a prose so elegant that the words of his many essays and books seem to glide across the page.

It was precisely in his writing where Newman’s gifts sparkled. He had that elusive gift called style. Newman’s swan-like gracefulness can be favorably compared with any other man or woman who has ever put pen to paper in the English language. Newman’s ability to express lyrically and precisely his every thought would have counted for little if he had had nothing to say. But, of course, Newman did have something to say. He had much to say, in fact.

The silken threads of Newman’s words weave like a loom. His intricate sentences thread over and under and around each other, creating a taut and beautiful garment of masterful theology, original insight, and deep historical awareness. When a foe pulled at this or that thread of his theological fabric, Newman would unsheath his pen from its inkwell and wield it like a rapier to slice into shreds his opponent’s arguments, but never his character. Newman did not make personal attacks. Newman’s exquisite works make for compelling reading, provided the reader concurs. If not, Newman was, and is, a gigantic problem who must be confronted.

John Henry Newman was a convert to Catholicism. He was raised as an Anglican and was somewhat evangelical in his youthful love of the Lord Jesus. As his head sunk deeper and deeper into books in adulthood, however, he concluded that to be immersed in history was to cease to be a Protestant. His conversion to Catholicism shook the English academic world and led to decades of adversarial letters, books, and essays arguing disputed theological points between Newman and his colleagues. But Newman’s ability to express his ideas on the page was so superior, his arguments so unassailable, and the personal cost he paid for converting so agonizing, that the totality of his witness ultimately carried the day.

Yet Newman was more than just a brain in a jar. His bravery in converting to Catholicism manifested steely resolve and deep virtue not otherwise apparent in his genteel and sensitive personality. His conversion cost him almost everything—status, friendship, income, prestige, academic positions—and on and on. Yet his example emboldened numerous others in subsequent decades to walk the same path to Rome which Newman had first trod alone. A whole generation of English academic converts to Catholicism trace their theological lineage to Cardinal Newman.

In the last few years of his life, Newman lived like a monk without a desert. Though he was never ordained a Bishop, Father Newman was named a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. It was a wreath of laurel crowning a great man’s quiet holiness, brave perseverance, immense erudition, and unequalled polish in composing from within the most dramatic work he ever authored—the story of his own holy life.

Saint John Henry Newman, from your place in heaven, we ask that your virtues of serenity amid controversy, of erudition amid confusion, and of steadfastness amid attacks provide a holy example to all Christians to persevere in seeking the truth.

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October 9: Saint Denis, Bishop, and Companions
Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Paris

A missionary bishop is beheaded and the Church’s eldest daughter thrives

Therapod, Spinosaurus, Ornithopod, Ceratopsid, Triceratops. Creatures with strange names from long ago with three toes, sharp protruding vertebrae, duck heads, three horns and jaws that crushed like the serrated walls of a trash compactor. A cephalophore? A theological neologism for another creature from long ago—a martyr who carries his own head after being decapitated. Today’s saint, Denis, is the most well-known cephalophore. He cradled his own head in his arms as proof of his sacrifice, much like a soldier might point to his battle scars to prove his valor. An early medieval tradition states that Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris, after being beheaded, preached a sermon on forgiving his assassins from the mouth of his own severed head while walking seven miles from his execution site to his grave. This legend is, historically, as flimsy as tissue paper, but theologically as solid as granite.

Saint Denis was a missionary bishop sent to Gaul in the mid-third century, perhaps by the martyr Pope Saint Fabian. By that time, Gaul had been evangelized only in pockets. Blanket conversion of its numerous tribes was destined for a later century, when a unified kingdom imposed a unified faith. Even great movements must have modest beginnings. So the bishop Denis, the priest Rusticus, and the deacon Eleutherius made their way north to a small Roman city called Lutetia, on the banks of the Seine River, where they served both native Romans and the Parisii, the local Gallic tribe. Denis and his companions settled on an island next to Lutetia called, today, Île de la Cité. It is the heart of Paris, the site of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the zero point from which all distances are measured in France. Denis and his companions, embodying the three Holy Orders, were successful enough to provoke the envy of pagan priests who convinced the local governor to imprison and torture them.

Tradition relates that around 275 A.D., the martyrs were led to a pagan height overlooking Lutetia for their ritual beheading, thus lending the hill its name, Montmartre, or martyrs’ hill. After the sword dropped and Denis’ head separated from his torso, legend relates that he chose his own place of burial by walking, head in his arms, from Montmartre to the present day site of the Basilica for which he is the eponym. This church became the burial place of the kings of France, who strove to surpass each other in devotion to Paris’ patron.

The form of capital punishment speaks, consciously or unconsciously, to the crime being punished. The heretic is burned, like his books, his flesh melting in the fires which replicate on earth those waiting for him in eternal damnation for having led the faithful astray. Every false clause, sentence, and paragraph of the heretic’s books must float into the air as cinders, never to mislead again. Death by drowning during the Reformation killed those who rejected or taught falsehoods concerning the saving waters of baptism. Hanging, a firing squad, lethal injection, suicide by jumping, the electric chair: all convey subtle meaning via the manner in which they extinguish life.

Decapitation is the purest form of capital punishment, caput being Latin for “head.” The decapitation of a bishop, in particular, was meant to separate the head of the Church from its body, leaving the ship without its pilot. Saint John the Baptist, Saint Paul, Saint Cyprian, Pope Saint Sixtus II, were all Christian leaders and were all beheaded. The legend of Saint Denis is fanciful but profound. The story captures the meaning of decapitation and responds to it. Bishop Denis’ head is cleaved from his body but still united to it. Christ’s head can never be separated from His body the Church. Christ is one, head and body, and every bishop stands in Christ’s stead to exercise the fullness of Christ’s priestly ministry to teach, govern, and sanctify the people of God. A shepherd always pastors a flock, a pilot always helms a ship, and a bishop is always united to a diocese, even if that diocese is long dormant. The bishop images Christ the head to the earthly members of Christ’s body.

Saint Denis and companions, you died in the mission fields of the Church’s eldest daughter, France. Your blood spilled long ago so that our blood would not spill today. We thank you for your witness and ask your intercession to make us fearless like you.

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October 7: Our Lady of the Rosary
Memorial; Liturgical color: White
Patroness of Malaga, Spain, and the Archdiocese of Vancouver

Mary comes to the rescue, and the Catholic West avoids the fate of the Orthodox East

In 1204 Venetian Crusaders traveling to the Holy Land sacked Constantinople. Debts were not being paid, so something had to be done. Relics were packed up and shipped back to Italy, as well as gold, silver, precious stones, art, vestments, and booty. The city was stripped clean. The conquered have much longer memories than the conquerors, and Constantinople, the New Rome, never forgot 1204. So, in the first half of the 1400s, when Ottoman Turks ringed the walls of Constantinople, making it a tiny Christian island in a vast Islamic sea, unifying with Rome for common defense was not an option for the Orthodox.

As the Muslim noose tightened around the city’s neck, little by little, year after year, Constantinople struggled for air. Emperor and Patriarch were desperate, so they finally approached the Pope and Western princes. Help us! A deal was struck. The Orthodox would unify with Rome, just in time to save Constantinople! But the memories of 1204 were too much to overcome. The Orthodox faithful rejected the rapprochement. Westerners were hated; their help unwelcome. A Byzantine official, when asked about unifying with Rome, made the sad comment that “I would rather see the Muslim turban in the midst of the city than the Latin mitre.” And so in 1453 the high, thick walls of Constantinople were breached. The Turks let loose on the city, slaves were taken, churches desecrated, the Hagia Sophia turned into a mosque, and the last Roman Byzantine Emperor, ironically named Constantine like the first Byzantine Emperor, was killed. New Rome having been taken, Old Rome was next. All of Europe now lay before the Turks like an empty table. No one and nothing stopped the Ottoman Turks until Our Lady did. The naval battle of Lepanto was the “September 11, 2001” moment of its generation. On the first Sunday of October, 1571, the ships of a Holy League of Catholic Kingdoms and the Papal States defeated the Ottoman navy

decisively in the seas off of Greece. Islam was stopped in its tracks. There would be no repeat of 1453 in Old Rome. No desecration or pillaging, no murder of the Pope. A line had been drawn which has still not been crossed.

Pope Saint Pius V, a Dominican, animated and organized the Holy League. He implored the faithful throughout Europe to pray the rosary, and himself led a rosary procession in the Eternal City, for Christian triumph. The ships of the Holy League were outmatched and outnumbered and needed all the divine assistance prayer could muster. These prayers were answered. The doors to the Mediterranean, and to the Atlantic beyond, were shut on the Turks. In thanksgiving for this miraculous victory, Pius V instituted the “Feast of Our Lady of Victory,” later changed to “Feast of the Holy Rosary” and finally “Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.” Pope Leo XIII added the title "Queen of the Most Holy Rosary" to the Litany of Loreto in honor of Mary’s intercession through the rosary.

It may seem redundant to give Mary the title “Our Lady of the Rosary.” It sounds a bit like saying “Jesus of the Cross.” Of course she is Our Lady of the Rosary and of course He is Jesus of the Cross! Yet Mary and Jesus are multi-faceted, like diamonds whose angles and cuts play and sparkle as we admire their flawless symmetry. One mystery, then a doctrine, and then a truth, flash and blink as they rotate before us. The title “Our Lady of the Rosary” is like a facet. One aspect of the mystery of Mary shines in that title, deepening our love of the whole gem. Reflecting on one specific truth also helps the believer absorb the otherwise unfathomable greatness of God. Today our eye trains itself on the crown, the face, or just the cool elegance of our one-hundred carat Lady. Today we focus on Saint Mary, who loves to hear us call her by name, over and over and over again as our fingers run up and down the beads.

Our Lady of the Rosary, we implore your intercession day in and day out, in the morning and in the evening, because we love to say your name and you love to hear us invoke you. You defeated vast armies seeking to destroy the Church. Help us to conquer our sins.

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October 6: Saint Bruno, Priest
c. 1030–1101
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Calabria, Italy, and of Germany

Solitary confinement is not a punishment when it is voluntary and shared with God

Today’s saint was born in an unknown year. He left his native Cologne to study in Rheims, France, as a young man and was ordained a priest around 1055. Aware of Bruno’s obvious talents, the Bishop of Rheims demanded that the young priest remain in his diocese, where Bruno became the head of Rheims’ most illustrious school for almost two decades and then Chancellor of the diocese. Bruno’s trajectory was, at this point in his life, typical of talented, educated, and well-connected priests of his era. He was destined to become a good, scholarly, and politically aware medieval bishop, the kind whose graves fill the floors and stuff the side chapels of many Gothic cathedrals. But a bad bishop altered the arc of Bruno’s trajectory.

Bruno’s bishop-patron died and was succeeded by a corrupt aristocrat who had bought his office. This ecclesiastic had little concern for the Church except as a well of money and power from which he could freely drink. Revolt, sharp tensions, recriminations, and violence ensued. Everyone was damaged. Bruno withdrew from the scene, partly to avoid being named a bishop himself and partly to reevaluate what prize he was truly seeking in life. Bruno and some companions then sought out a well-known hermit in Southern France who, a few years later, would go on to found the Monastery of Citeaux, the mother foundation of the Cistercian Order. Citeaux was the very same monastery which had such an influence on Bruno’s contemporary Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. But Bruno was not meant to be a Cistercian. Still searching, Bruno and six companions approached the Bishop of Grenoble, France, who was favorable to their plan and granted them a remote location in the French Alps called Chartreuse. It was 1085. Saint Bruno’s successors reside at the Grande Chartreuse to this day, living the part hermit, part community of prayer, part work, part study, all poor, and all silent existence of Carthusian monks that Bruno envisioned.Though Bruno founded the Grande Chartreuse, he did not remain there for long. A former pupil of Bruno’s had become Pope, and he needed Bruno’s hand on the rudder to help him navigate the ship of the Church in the rough seas of medieval ecclesiastical politics. So Bruno moved to Rome and lived in a cell amidst the crumbled arches and half walls of the Baths of Diocletian. His every intention of returning to the Grande

Chartreuse was frustrated. The Pope compelled Bruno to remain in Italy in case his services were needed, even as the Pope and his court were on the run from determined enemies. Resigned to his exile, and refusing an appointment as bishop in Southern Italy, in about 1094 Bruno and some followers spawned a mini-Chartreuse in Calabria, Italy, called La Torre, although this second foundation was later to be absorbed into the Cistercian Order. Bruno died there, living in silence as a monk. He was never formally canonized and left no rule for his Order, leaving that task to a successor.

Saint Bruno had a burning love for the Holy Eucharist and for the Virgin Mary. Silence was also his muse. God speaks beautifully through His creation, but one must “hear” God’s silence to understand Him. Silence is a powerful form of speech, a negative word which God, as the Father of a large family, often uses to communicate. The internal word is not less of a word because it remains unspoken. A word is an internal mental tool for organizing thought before it is a means of communication. God’s own internal Word was so powerful that it became flesh and blood, a living Word more powerful than mere spoken language. Words are a form of action, but they can also limit meaning. God speaks most deeply in the action of creation, through His Son and in silence.

As lovers know, a glance, a touch, a smile, a thought is sufficient. Words may add to these things, but they can also subtract from them. It has been said that even if a marble statue of Saint Bruno could stretch open its mouth, he would still keep his vow and remain silent, for “When words are many, transgression is not lacking” (Prv 10:19).

Saint Bruno, your life of generous and active service to the Church was curtailed, and you chose the better portion, seeking God in silence, poverty, study, and prayer. Help all who are in the world to emulate your quiet dedication, focus, and endurance.

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October 6: Blessed Rose Marie Durocher, Virgin (U.S.A.)
1811–1849
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Invoked against the loss of parents

When the call came, she was prepared to say “Yes”

The story of today’s Blessed is largely one of waiting for the hammer to strike. Years of quiet, humble, and faithful generosity to family, the Church, and students prepared Eulalie (her baptismal name) for the moment when she was asked to sacrifice her entire life, eliciting from her a full throated “Yes.”

Eulalie was born into a successful Quebecois family of eleven children, where sharing, sacrifice, and service were not extraordinary but simply the way things were. Three of her brothers became priests, and a sister became a nun. At the age of twelve, Eulalie entered the convent boarding school where her sister was a novice. But poor health impeded her acceptance into Montreal’s Congregation of Notre Dame. Her boarding school classmates noted Eulalie’s sterling character, charm, meekness, and delicate attentiveness to the will of God.

When her mother died prematurely in 1830, Eulalie took on a maternal role, caring for her siblings and making the family’s house a home. A year later she, her father, and the family moved onto the premises of a parish where her brother was the priest. For twelve years, Eulalie served as the parish secretary and housekeeper, all the while keenly noting the desperate need for a religious congregation to educate the mass of rich and poor children of Quebec who remained ignorant for lack of schools.

In 1841, the great Bishop Eugene de Mazenod of Marseilles, France, the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, was coordinating with a Canadian priest to send a teaching order of sisters to Quebec. Eulalie learned of the effort and committed herself in advance. But it was not God’s will and the plan failed. Along with her earlier non-acceptance by the convent, this was the second great disappointment of Eulalie’s life. The Church was not yet ready to accept her “Yes.” Her long engagement with Christ

would again be delayed before the two could be permanently bonded at the altar.

When he realized his French-based missionary plan would fail, Bishop Mazenod recommended to the Bishop of Montreal that he start his own local congregation of teaching sisters. After the usual steps had been completed, in 1843 Eulalie’s dream came true. When the hammer finally struck and she was asked to become a sister, Eulalie’s powder was dry, her aim true, and her life ready to hit its target. The Bishop of Montreal, moreover, not only asked her to join the new Congregation but to lead it! Two other women trained with Eulalie under the guidance of an Oblate priest. In 1844 the three took vows and received the religious habit, with Eulalie taking the religious name Marie-Rose. The Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary were born, with Sister Marie-Rose Durocher as the Mother Superior.

The services of the new Congregation were in intense demand, and the sisters responded with due generosity. The number of students exploded, new convents were established, and vocations flourished. In just five years, by 1849, there were four convents of the Holy Names’ Sisters educating hundreds of boys and girls in both French and English. Our Blessed, though, had never conquered her poor health, and the non-stop work of the new Congregation weakened her already fragile frame. Sister Marie-Rose died in 1849 at the age of thirty-eight. Her marriage to Christ was late but not long.

In 1927 the local effort to investigate her heroic virtue commenced, leading to her beatification by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1982. With one more verified miracle, our Blessed will be canonized a saint. Blessed Marie-Rose lived a mostly quiet life of service to others, observing and absorbing where her spiritual and practical skills could most fruitfully be utilized. She was ready through long practice when the call to generosity finally came.

Blessed Marie-Rose, inspire all educators to dedicate themselves fully to the needs of the young so in need of religious instruction. May your example lead Catholic teachers to see their work as a vocation in service to Christ more than a mere profession in service to the world.

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October 5: Saint Faustina Kowalska, Virgin
1905-1938
Optional Memorial: Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Mercy

Her humble sail caught a powerful theological wind

The martyr Saint Faustino was killed in the second decade of the second century in northern Italy under the emperor Hadrian. Nothing else is known of him. Today’s saint was baptized Helen and, for unknown reasons, was given the martyr’s name when making her first religious vows. Saint Faustino must be honored, and grateful, to share his name with so holy and consequential a nun as Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, who was canonized in 2000, and whose optional memorial was added to the Church’s universal calendar in 2020.

Saint Faustina was a peasant in the best sense of the word. She could read and write but otherwise attended school for only a few years in her rural village in central Poland. Her large and pious family needed her hand on the plow, financially speaking, and so at the age of sixteen young Helen Kowalska obtained work as a housekeeper in nearby towns. She was expert in the domestic arts of sewing, cleaning, cooking, and the related skills which convert a house into a home. These skills served her well, but not long, in the convents where she resided throughout her short life.

While she felt called to be a religious sister as a child, Helen’s parents were reluctant to let her enter a convent at too tender an age. But then, in her late teens, Christ appeared and spoke to Helen in mysterious and deeply personal encounters, demanding that she not keep Him waiting much longer. These visions propelled the pious teen to seek acceptance in a big-city convent. She moved to Warsaw at nineteen, received advice from a sympathetic priest, and knocked on the doors of various convents hoping that one of them, just one, would accept her. One finally did. After proving herself in its novitiate, she took solemn vows and spent the rest of her life as a faithful nun doing humble chores alongside her religious sisters in convents in Poland and present-day Lithuania.

Like so many saints, the unseen vigils, prayers, mortifications, fasts, and sufferings were Faustina’s real life, while the visible realities seen by her fellow religious and the occasional visitor were of lesser importance. And what went unseen in Saint Faustina’s life was astounding! This humble nun experienced remarkably vivid, high-octane, technicolor, 3-D visions of Jesus Christ in the chapel, behind the door, in her cell, and around every corner for many years. Jesus’ strong voice spoke to her in a direct and unmistakably clear manner about His desires for her life. He commanded her, repeatedly, to spread the message of Divine Mercy. So Faustina had an artist paint a famous image of Christ with two rays emanating from his chest, promoted a liturgical feast day in honor of the Divine Mercy on the Sunday after Easter, and kept an exhaustive diary chronicling the content of her vivid spiritual experiences.

Saint Faustina’s message is not really Saint Faustina’s message. It is God’s message. God wants mankind to know, and to feel, the Divine Mercy oozing out of the heart of Christ. This mercy, unlike human or judicial mercy, can wash away even the most wretched sins. God’s mercy is not in competition with his justice but is an over abundance of justice. God knows all things and forgives all things when His mercy is freely requested. The modern western world is very focused on questions of justice – racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, etc… But it is, at the same time, opposed to judging. This dichotomy of favoring justice but abhorring judging is incongruous. The modern west suffers from similar tensions regarding the virtue of mercy.

An American Cardinal noted years ago that modern secular culture permits, even promotes, practically everything. It seems that no moral aberration, sin, or dysfunctional behavior is not smiled upon as a rightful expression of personal freedom. And yet…modern secular culture forgives almost nothing. “Just Do it!” But, beware, when you do do it, you might never be forgiven for having done it. The message of Divine Mercy is that because all can be forgiven, all relationships can be restored. Relationships precede our rights and even our choices. We are more than our choices! We are more than our rights! And when we receive mercy, or extend mercy to others, our relationships with ourselves, with friends, family, nature, and God are restored.

Every expression or reception of mercy is like a mini jubilee-year. Every traveler returns home, every field lies fallow, and every debt is forgiven. Mercy is the father waiting on the ridge. He sees the ragged figure on the horizon limping home in the evening light. The petition for mercy. The granting of mercy. The tight embrace. The relationship restored. The ring on his finger. The robe on his back. The calf on the spit. The feast begins. Divine Mercy conquers all.

Saint Faustina, your humble and generous service to the Church included sharing your visions and the message of Divine Mercy. Help all who seek your intercession to be blessed with your same virtue and your same docility to God’s will.

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October 5: Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, Priest (U.S.A.)
1819–1867
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Invoked against cancer

A good man becomes a great priest serving immigrants in the young United States

Ship after ship, riding low in the water with the weight of thousands of European immigrants, docked in the harbors of the great coastal cities of the United States in the nineteenth century. Transatlantic ship passage was by then routine and relatively safe. These immigrants traveled to America’s open prairies and virgin forests to carve out farms, charter towns, and establish schools where none had ever existed before. These daring men and women came to build new lives, lives often of deep faith. So priests and nuns came with them, planting the seeds of an ancient religion into fresh soil.

Today’s Blessed was one of those immigrants. Francis Seelos was born into a large family in Bavaria, a land thick with medieval castles, crusader tombs, and timeless traditions. Francis left that rich culture for a new life on the American frontier. He exhausted himself riding horseback, walking, and traveling by ferries and trains up and down and across the wide flowing rivers and narrow dirt roads of the young United States, serving new citizens but age-old Catholics.

Blessed Francis felt the call to the Priesthood from a young age. He had the support of his family and local clergy and duly studied

philosophy and theology from some distinguished professors in his native land. One of his Benedictine teachers was the pioneer who later brought the Benedictine Order to America. By accidents of history, the Redemptorist Order, though founded in Italy by an Italian, had become more prominent in Germany. Francis met Redemptorist priests during his education and became intrigued with their work among the immigrants who had emptied out swathes of Germany to go to America. So Francis joined the Redemptorists with the specific intention of serving the many priest-less German Catholics across the ocean.

It was not easy for Francis to leave his close-knit family. Only his father knew his secret plan. Only his father knew that Francis’ departure for the seminary would be the last time he would ever leave home. Francis embraced his mother and siblings and said goodbye. He then came to his father, who, wordless, tearfully gestured with his finger toward the sky. Son and father knew. They would meet again in heaven. Francis never saw his family again.

Francis arrived in New York in 1843 and was ordained a priest in 1844 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was first assigned to a parish in Pittsburg, and then was assigned to serve alongside Saint John Neumann, a fellow Redemptorist. They carried out ordinary parish duties and gave parish missions. Father Francis quickly gained a reputation as holy, always available, amiable, and wise. Like Neumann, he became well known as a sage confessor who exercised this ministry of mercy in multiple languages.

Father Francis’ apostolic zeal, prudence, kindness, and doctrinal integrity thrust him into positions of leadership in his order. He was so skilled a priest, and so admired for his virtue, that he was proposed to be the Bishop of Pittsburgh. Francis only narrowly avoided this exalted burden by personally writing to Pope Pius IX arguing for his own inadequacy. After years of priestly service in America’s eastern portion, Francis became an itinerant German and English preacher in the nation’s middle, crisscrossing Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

In 1866 Father Francis was assigned to New Orleans, where he continued his tireless, uncomplaining priestly service, and where his prayers were considered unusually efficacious. But in New Orleans

his service came to an end. He contracted yellow fever while visiting some of its victims. He died at 48 years old, but not before at least one miracle of healing was attributed to his intercession while he lay dying. His cause was opened in 1900, and Francis Seelos was beatified in 2000 by Pope Saint John Paul II. This priest par excellence stands shoulder to shoulder with Saints Marianne Cope, Damian de Veuster, John Neumann, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, and thousands of non-saint clergy and nuns, all nineteenth-century European immigrant missionaries to America. They each left things comfortable and known for their opposites. They each made immense personal sacrifices to pass on the faith, to give a new church new heroes.

Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, your zeal, intelligence, and innate goodness was plain for all to see. You were an ideal priest loved by all you encountered. Through your intercession, help all missionaries to persevere in their difficult vocations in unfamiliar lands.

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October 4: Saint Francis of Assisi
c. 1182–1226
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of animals, ecology, and merchants. Co-patron of Italy

A merchant’s son of eccentric sensibilities goes radical

Though originally baptized by his mother as Giovanni (John) in honor of Saint John the Baptist, today’s saint was renamed Francesco, or “Frenchy,” by his father Pietro de Bernardone after Pietro returned home from trading in France. Pietro loved France, and his son’s romantic, troubadour spirit likely flowed from that same cultural source.

Francesco grew up in a middle-class home that engaged in the sale of fine cloth. Francis was a skilled merchant in the family business, but he enjoyed spending money more than earning it. He was a man about town, a leader among his friends, and well liked for his concern for others. He was also a failed knight. When he was twenty, Francis joined a civic-minded Assisi militia in a battle against a neighboring city. When the militia was routed, Francis was spared death and instead held for ransom due to his fine livery. He was held prisoner in a rank dungeon for a year before the ransom was paid. He returned to Assisi a more reflective man. Subsequent military service for the Papal States ended abruptly when Francis heard a voice tell him, “Follow the master rather than the man.” He sold his expensive armor and horse, returned home, and began to spend hours in prayer.

Shortly after this turning point, Francis met a leper on the outskirts of Assisi. He initially recoiled, but then dismounted, gave the man some money, and kissed his putrid hand. This was the start of his frequent visits to leper houses and hospitals. When Francis heard a voice from the cross say to him, “Francis, go and repair my church, which as you can see is in ruins,” he sold a large amount of cloth and his father’s horse at a neighboring market town. Coming back to Assisi, he donated the proceeds to a priest at the church of San Damiano on the outskirts of Assisi. Francis’ father was irate. His son had sold cloth from the family store, and a horse, and had then

given away money that was not his. This was stealing, and Francis was put in prison. A dramatic scene then unfolds between Francis and his father in a church square, in the presence of Bishop Guido of Assisi and his court. Pietro demands the return of his money. The Bishop supports him and says the Church cannot accept stolen money. Francis returns the coins. But then Francis goes further. Piece by piece, he removes his clothing until he is naked before everyone’s eyes. He then says, “From now on I will not say ‘My Father, Pietro Bernardone’ but ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’” There is not a single reference in any contemporary Franciscan document to Pietro after this dramatic incident. Francis was now cut off, disinherited, and on his own.

Francis eventually begins to wear a rough smock which he ties around his waist with a cord. He lives alone in absolute poverty, prays, helps the sick, rebuilds nearby run-down chapels, and preaches and begs in Assisi. Men begin to follow his lead, and the first fire of the worldwide Franciscan order ignites. The “Lesser Brothers of Assisi” is recognized by the Pope, Francis is ordained a deacon, and the Order’s explosive growth can only be called miraculous. Saint Francis is the first great founder of a religious order since Saint Benedict in the 500s. By sheer allure of personality, holiness, and vision, not intellect or organizational skill, he imparted a mysteriously powerful charism to his followers. He was ardent in his love for the Holy Eucharist and insisted that churches be well kept in honor of the Lord’s physical presence.

Francis died in his forty-fourth year and was canonized just two years later, in 1228. Saint Francis may be the most well-known person of the second millennium. A measure of his massive impact can be gauged by observing that it is not uncommon for Saint Francis to be seen as the ideal of Christian virtue and poverty, even over and above the religion’s very founder.

Saint Francis of Assisi, you held the Holy Eucharist in such holy reverence you dared not be ordained a priest. Your love of the Word of God complimented your love of His creation. Help all Christians to have your same balance of love for God, the Sacraments, and all God’s creation.

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October 1: Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin and Doctor
1873–1897
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of florists, missions, and aviators

A sensitive country girl wades into the deep

Thérèse Martin was a weepy child, as emotionally brittle as porcelain. She was easily offended and easily pleased. A furled brow or a sideways glance from her father would dissolve her into tears. A beautiful flower or a kind word and she would beam a smile. She grew up in a brotherless home. Her father, an uncle, and priests were the men in her life. Her parents were canonized in 2015, the only married couple ever raised to the altars. Thérèse and her four sisters all became nuns, with the cause for beatification and canonization of her sister Léonie being opened in 2015. The Martin home was totally absorbed in the mysteries of God, prayer, saints, the Sacraments, and the Church.

Thérèse grew up in Normandy, a region of Northern France. She left only once, to go on a month-long pilgrimage to Italy, where she met Pope Leo XIII at a public audience and begged his special permission to enter the Carmelites before the required age. On this trip she was also the object of some tender male glances. Conscious of her delicate emotions and eager to flee the world’s “poisonous breath,” upon returning from Italy Thérèse pulled every lever to enter her local Carmel. She finally entered at the age of fifteen in 1888. She was given the religious name “of the Child Jesus” and received permission to adopt a second name too, “of the Holy Face.” Once the door of the convent shut behind her, it never reopened. Her short life ended there just nine years later. Thérèse was a dedicated nun who strictly followed the demanding Carmelite rule. She kept silence when required, avoided seeking out her blood sisters, fasted, ingratiated herself with nuns she did not naturally find sympathetic, and spent long hours in prayer and work.

In the convent, Thérèse’s childish sweetness matured into a more durable spirituality. Her sensitivity mellowed. She was able to accept criticism. Her youthful presumption that all priests were as perfect

as diamonds became more realistic, and she prayed and sacrificed ardently for priests. The hard realities of convent life narrowed Thérèse’s spiritual goals. She no longer desired to be a great soul like Saint Joan of Arc. But with this narrowing came a deepening, a concentrated focus. She decided she would be God’s heart, not His hands or feet or mind. She decided that the only way she could fly close to the blazing sun of the Holy Trinity would be to become small.

Her petite voie (“little way” or “by small means”) was to spiritually reduce herself to a tiny creature carried in the claws of the divine eagle, Jesus Christ. As Christ soared in the heavens, she would be in His grasp, going only where He could go, until she was burned up in the Father-Son-Spirit love of the fireball of the Trinity. This was no broad path or wide way but a little way for a great soul. The goal was to reduce oneself to nothing so the Lord could transport you. The goal was to remove the “self” from “oneself.”

When Thérèse’s sister Céline entered the convent in 1894, she was given permission to bring her camera. Céline's pictures of Thérèse would be among the first ever taken of a saint. They complimented Thérèse’s letters and spiritual writings perfectly, heightening interest in Thérèse after she died. The intriguing photos and profound writings hinted at the secret depths concealed behind a convent’s four walls. Saint Thérèse suffered intensely from tuberculosis and died at an age when many lives are just beginning to flower. She was canonized in 1925, declared co-patron of France in 1944, and named the thirty-third Doctor of the Church by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1997, the youngest Doctor to date and probably the youngest the Church will ever recognize.

Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, you discovered deep truths in a confined space. Your soul was fertile ground for the mysteries of our faith. Lend heavenly assistance to all who try to emulate your example of suffering, prayer, and tender dedication to God.

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September 30: Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor
c. 345–420
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of archeologists, Biblical scholars, and librarians

A prickly scholar translates the Bible into Latin forever and always

Today’s saint was living in Antioch in the 370s when he had a vision. Jerome was standing in the presence of the seated Christ, who asked him who he was. “I am a Christian,” Jerome responded. “LIAR!” Jesus yelled. “You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian, for where your treasure is, there also is your heart.” Jerome indeed loved Cicero and other Latin stylists. The fine prose in their works gave him the greatest pleasure. But Jerome had also been reared in a Christian home, been baptized as an adult in Rome, and had frequently descended into the darkened catacombs to pray at the tombs of the martyrs and saints. His double identity as a scholar of Latin and Greek rhetoric on the one hand, and as a committed Christian on the other hand, dueled within him. Jerome fervently loved God and the Catholic religion with all his soul, but it was a troubled soul. Jerome was full of spit and vinegar. He was a complex man and a complex saint.

Saint Jerome was born in an unknown year in a region northeast of Venice, Italy. His father sent him as a young man to Rome to perfect his education under a famous tutor. Jerome was a superb student and mastered Latin and Greek. At about the age of thirty, he decided to become a monk and traveled to the desert of Syria. For four years he lived a life of austerity, penance, and isolation. He fasted from the classics he loved so much and instead studied Hebrew from a Jewish convert. When he finally came out of the desert, he was ordained a priest in Antioch but never truly exercised any priestly ministry. He studied under the great Saint Gregory Nazianzen in Constantinople and began to publish some translations and biblical commentaries. Around 382 Jerome went to Rome with his bishop to serve as an interpreter and aide. Jerome so impressed Pope Saint Damasus that the Pope then invited the young Jerome to be his secretary.

At this point, in his forties and while living in Rome, Jerome began the monumental task of translating the entire Bible into Latin from original Greek and Hebrew texts. It would take him years. The existing Old Latin Bible was not cohesive but a jumble of texts stitched together under one cover. Various scholars had generated divergent translations for purely local use. So the Gospel of John in a Jerusalem-based manuscript differed from the same Gospel in a manuscript in Gaul. The one Church, spread throughout the known world, needed one Bible to match its broad scope and theological unity. Jerome was the man for the job. After just a few years in Rome, after the death of his patron Pope Damasus, and due to the enemies his blunt words and fiery temper always seemed to create, Saint Jerome left Rome for the Holy Land. He lived in a cave near Bethlehem and focused on translating. Some holy and pious women from Rome followed him there and formed a quasi-monastic community around him.

Jerome’s translation, known as the Vulgate, became the standard Latin version of the Bible over time, pushing the Old Latin version into oblivion. The Council of Trent formally stated that the Vulgate was the official Bible of the Catholic Church. So Catholicism has a “The Bible,” a claim which no other church can make. No “The Bible” ever floated down from heaven on a golden pillow. Except for Jerome’s, a “The Bible” doesn’t exist. There are thousands of ancient scraps of Scripture from hundreds of ancient texts from scores of libraries and monasteries in dozens of countries, but a publisher and its consultants ultimately choose which texts to include in any published Bible and which to exclude. Catholicism has no such flimsy process. Its sacred word is not dependent on scholarly fashion and whim. It has a baseline.

The Vulgate is like a dropped anchor resting on the ocean floor. It keeps the ship of the Church from drifting. Catholicism is a religion of the Word more than of the Book, but it has a definitive book, nonetheless. The fiery Saint Jerome died peacefully in 420, exhausted from his scholarly labors and life of penance. His remains can be found directly below the high altar of Saint Mary Major Basilica in Rome in a handsome porphyry sarcophagus.

Saint Jerome, you lived a life dedicated to studying the Word of God, to penance, and to prayer. You placed your knowledge and scholarly gifts at the service of the Church which used them wisely. Help all the faithful to serve the Church as much as the Church serves them.

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September 29: Saints Michael, Gabriel, & Raphael, Archangels
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patrons of soldiers (Michael); mailmen (Gabriel); travelers and the blind (Raphael)

The air between God and man is thick with mystical beings

It is a principle of Catholic theology that salvation is mediated, that individual man does not go to God alone, and that God does not come to man alone. This means that there are layers of words, symbols, art, priests, nuns, catechists, music, books, churches, shrines, and endless other things and places and people that channel God to us. Even using the name “God” or “Father” or “Jesus Christ” presupposes the mediation of language. So although someone may say they want to “cut out the middleman”of the Church and go directly to God, they can’t. At some point in their youth, they absorbed who God was from others, so even the most basic, apparently innate knowledge we have of God is mediated, if only by nature itself. Today’s feast is about the created spiritual beings known as angels who fill the space between God and man, communicating His message, protecting man from harm, and battling against the armies of Satan. The Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael transmit some of God’s most important messages.

Michael leads the war cry in a mysterious, metaphysical battle against the Devil and his minions in the Book of Daniel. "There is no one with me who contends against these princes except Michael, your prince” (Dn 10:21), and "At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise” (Dn 12:1). Michael means “Who is like God.”

Gabriel is an essential figure in the events surrounding the Incarnation. We first meet him in the Jerusalem Temple, announcing the birth of Saint John the Baptist to his father, Zachary: "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news" (Lk 1:19). He later conveys the message of all messages to the Virgin Mary, eliciting her “Yes” to God’s sublime invitation. Gabriel means “the strength of God.”

Raphael appears in the disguise of a man in the Book of Tobit, guiding the young Tobiah along his journey. "…God sent me to heal you and Sarah your daughter-in-law. I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord" (Tb 12:14–15). Raphael means “God heals.”

The Old Testament description of the angels worshipping before the throne of God is one of fierce power: “...each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” (Is 6:2–3)

These beings are far from the pudgy, pillow-soft, fat-cheeked baby angels so often depicted in art. Today’s feast is for the mighty six-winged angels, the deadly serious ministers of God’s messages. These Archangels engage in consequential spiritual battle, know that God and His Word are not frivolous, and carry out their missions as emissaries of the Most-High. We invoke them now just as Saint Patrick did in the fifth century: “I arise today through the strength of the love of cherubim, in the obedience of angels, in the service of archangels, in the hope of resurrection to meet with reward.” Amen.

Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, we invoke your powerful intercession before the throne of God in heaven. By your spiritual assistance, protect us from harm, heal us of our infirmities, and convey to us God’s will for our lives.

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September 28: Saint Wenceslaus, Martyr
c. 907–929
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of the Czech Republic and Slovakia

A young duke is killed by a jealous brother and becomes a Czech icon

When the famous die young, their unwrinkled faces, dark hair, and youthful vigor are frozen in time, forever vital, forever attractive, forever fresh. Time is not given its chance to run over their skin like water over rocks. No shaping, cracking, molding or shifting of the surfaces. Before the modern cult of celebrity held up athletes, movie stars, and musicians for supreme adulation, most cultures revered their royalty, soldiers, or holy men and women. Kings and princes, bishops and saints, chiefs and warriors served the common good by governing, praying for, and protecting the people. No class of entertainers distracted a populace from the leadership that mattered. Today’s saint, Wenceslaus, Duke of Bohemia, was felled in a fateful encounter with his brother Boleslaus the Cruel. Wenceslaus was already famous when he died young and dramatically. All the ingredients needed to guarantee a lasting legacy were present, and his memory endured. He was recognized by the Church as a martyr, posthumously given the title of King, and quickly became an iconic figure to the Bohemian people such that his Feast Day, September 28, is a national holiday in the modern Czech Republic.

Wenceslaus lived as Christianity was still dawning in Central Europe. German missionaries had been laboring among pagan tribes for a few generations with success, but the visible layer of a Christian culture rested on a rock-hard pagan substrata. Central and Eastern Europe were passing through the normal stages of evangelization, as an age-old culture with all of its customs and traditions was slowly pushed back by a greater force moving across the landscape like a glacier. Catholicism had moved into Bohemia by the 900s, but the religious environment was not yet monolithic. As our martyr’s death attests, religious and political divisions still ran through the culture.

The grandfather of Wenceslaus may have been converted by no less than Saints Cyril and Methodius themselves. His grandmother Ludmila was an ardent Catholic and oversaw Wenceslaus’ excellent education in which he learned to read and write both Slavonic and Latin. Wenceslaus’ mother, Drahomira, clung to the old ways, though she was nominally a Christian. When Drahomira thought Ludmila was encouraging Wenceslaus to assume power as a teen, Drahomira had her mother-in-law strangled to death with her own veil. Once he did take power, Wenceslaus banished his own mother, solidified control of Western Bohemia, and became an honorable ruler. He followed the law, favored education, and promoted the form of Christianity practiced in Germany, not in the East. This was a fateful decision. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are Slavic peoples of the Latin Rite, unlike their Byzantine Rite Slavic cousins to the east of the Orthodox curtain. Wenceslaus was pro-Western theologically and liturgically, while retaining his Slavic identity and independence in other essential matters. This double allegiance endures and lends Slavic Catholicism its unique features.

But for all of Wenceslaus’ brief successes, in the shadows lurked Boleslaus, creating a power center in Eastern Bohemia. When Wenceslaus’ wife gave birth to a son, Boleslaus knew he would not succeed his brother, so he plotted his murder. Boleslaus and his henchman struck down the young Duke Wenceslaus in 929 on the Feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian and on the Vigil of Saint Michael the Archangel. “Brother, may God forgive you” were our martyr’s last words.

Saint Wenceslaus, you were the model of a just ruler in your brief reign. You saw it as your sacred duty to promote the true God and His religion. Help all rulers and leaders to see morality, liturgy, prayer, and catechesis as the bedrock of a just society.

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September 28: Saint Lawrence Ruiz & Companions, Martyrs
c. 1600–1637
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of the Philippines

A married father remains unbroken under the cruelest torture

Many lesser-known faces in the deep audience of saints bask in the soft glow of sanctity emanating from the more prominent “marquee” saints standing on stage. In the Church’s calendar of saints, these more obscure observers of the principle action are often classified as “companions.” They can encompass dozens, or even hundreds, of men and women on a given feast day. Today’s saint, Lawrence Ruiz, is commemorated along with fifteen just such “companions,” in this case mostly missionary priests. Interestingly, Saint Lawrence is not the companion to the priests he died with. The priests, instead, are listed as Lawrence’s companions. The married Lawrence is on stage while his companion priest martyrs are in the audience.

Saint Lawrence was born of a Chinese father and a Philipino mother, both of whom were Catholic. Growing up in the Philippines, he served as an altar boy, was educated by Dominican priests, and belonged to a fraternal society dedicated to the Holy Rosary. Because he was an educated and careful writer in a largely illiterate culture, he became a clerk and a calligrapher. He married a woman named Rosario, and they had three children. He and his family lived an ordinary, secure, peaceful life of faith. As 1636 dawned, there was no reason to guess that Lawrence would continue living anything other than a quiet life focused on home and work. But then everything suddenly and drastically changed.

Lawrence was implicated, falsely, in the death of a Spaniard. It was a charge so serious he had to flee the Archipelago. Through his friendships with priests, he was invited to board a ship with three Dominicans, a Japanese priest, and a layman. In June of 1636, the small vessel sailed for Japan, a hornet’s nest buzzing with anti-Catholic persecution. The ship intended to land in a peaceful region devoid of persecution, but instead errantly docked in Okinawa at the worst possible moment. Feudal Japanese Shoguns were out for the blood of Catholics, and the missionaries walked right into their tight grip. They spent over a year in prison before, along with still more Catholic prisoners, they were marched to Nagasaki for the inevitable slur against their deepest beliefs.

The Japanese had devised torture techniques carefully calibrated to elicit maximum agony and the renunciation of the faith. On September 27, 1637, the prisoners had huge amounts of water poured down their throats, were covered with boards, and then stepped on by guards, forcing the water to spurt out of their mouths, noses, and ears. Then they were tightly bound, with one hand free in case they wanted to signal renunciation of the faith, and hung upside down over a pit. Heavy stones were tied to their bodies to draw blood more quickly down into their torsos and skulls. As the red liquid painfully pressurized their cranial sacs, the torturers strategically cut the victim’s heads to release the collected blood. This prevented the loss of consciousness and prolonged the throbbing pain. Amidst this anguish, no one broke. No one renounced their faith. No one cried out for relief. Mental images of mother and father, of smiling wife and children, of home, the fireplace, and warm embraces, did not prevail. It was God or death. Lawrence’s reputed last words were “I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly accept death for God; Had I a thousand lives, all these I would offer to God.”

As their chest cavities filled with blood, the victims hearts could pump no more. Lawrence suffocated to death within a day or two. Some of the priests did not succumb as quickly and were beheaded. Lawrence’s fifteen companions were Japanese, Spanish, French, and Italian priests; a few consecrated women; and laymen, almost all Dominicans. Their bodies were burned and their ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. Lawrence was beatified in 1981 in Manila, the first beatification performed outside the city of Rome. After a Philippina baby with hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, was cured through his intercession, Saint Lawrence was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1987. He is the protomartyr of the only Catholic nation in Asia, the Philippines.

Saint Lawrence, you were a married father yet forsook return to your earthly home to win a more glorious home in heaven. Help all fathers to be generous in quiet and in tumultuous times, to persevere in small things so they are able to display fortitude in great things.

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September 27: Saint Vincent de Paul, Priest
1581–1660
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of all charitable societies, hospitals, and leprosy victims

A powerhouse priest organizes multitudes for charity and renews priestly formation

Today’s saint was one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of saintly men and women whose light rejuvenated Catholicism in seventeenth-century France. Saint Vincent de Paul established charitable societies that have endured to this day. He also founded male and female religious orders that still thrive in the twenty-first century. He was a trusted counselor to bishops, cardinals, and royalty. His ideas reformed how seminarians and priests were trained so fundamentally that this vision became normative for the world-wide Church. He was the hub of many spokes: a close friend of Saint Francis de Sales, his own co-founder Saint Louise de Marillac, and the almost-saint Pierre de Bérulle. Saint Vincent had a great influence over Jean-Jacques Olier, the founder of the Sulpician Order and a prime mover behind the group of French Catholics who risked everything to found Ville-Marie de Montreal, the explicitly Catholic settlement at the farthest edge of French Canada. Our saint also inspired Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, the lay intellectual who established the Saint Vincent de Paul Societies so commonly found in parishes throughout the world.

Few saints achieved as much as Vincent de Paul. He stood at the core of an evolving group of similarly minded French saints who left an impact like a meteor on the face of the Church. So, although he cannot be understood apart from the charitable Society that bears his name, neither can his achievements be confined to that Society alone. Saint Vincent tried to use his education and personal charm to correct the errors of Jansenism, an overly rigorous spiritual and moral approach to the Christian life that infected wide swaths of the French faithful. When his personal efforts were unproductive, he became more polemical and was instrumental in procuring a papal denunciation of Jansenism.

Our Saint’s contributions to the renewal of the life of the clergy were notable. He was a proponent and founder, along with de Bérulle, of the so-called French school of spirituality, which has been so universally adopted in priestly formation that there is, in reality, no other approach. This spirituality combines asceticism, practical and active concern for the poor, a missionary drive to the unconverted, a sophisticated theological education, simple and direct preaching, and a total reliance on the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity in seeking to do the will of God. These high ideals, this total approach, also inspired Vincent’s near contemporaries Saints John Eudes, Louis de Montfort, and Jean-Baptiste de La Salle to become who they were.

To be a man of action and contemplation. To be educated but able to discourse with the simple. To focus on the salvation of souls but also on the material concerns of the needy. To be fully a priest but to have wide circles of lay friends and followers. This was the vision of Saint Vincent de Paul for all priests, and the vision he himself put into action in his own life. He was a force of nature who stormed through life for the glory of Christ alone. Devotion to Saint Vincent followed soon after his death. He was canonized in 1737. His remains are displayed for veneration in a glass coffin above the altar in the ornate chapel of the Vincentian Fathers in central Paris, not far from the chapel of the Miraculous Medal. A partially concealed staircase allows access for the faithful to see the great man up close.

Saint Vincent de Paul, you worked tirelessly for the poor, orphans, and widows. You gathered around yourself numerous helpers. Your primary motivation was not social justice but the pure will of God. Inspire us to be so committed, so dedicated, and so faithful.

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September 26: Saints Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs
c. Late third–early fourth century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of doctors, barbers, and pharmacists

Holy twins are honored for their healing, their poverty, and their deaths

The ancient walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem enclose the sacred ground where the life of Jesus Christ culminated in His death, burial, and resurrection. Both the modest hill of Calvary and the rock-cut tomb in which His corpse was laid are found under the roof of this venerable church. Calvary and the tomb have long been protected from relic hunters by slabs of marble and stone cladding that conceal the rough, first-century substrata resting just below. There is a custom, still common today, of allowing the faithful to sleep overnight inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. From the time the heavy wooden doors close at dusk until they creek open again at sunrise, the pilgrim must remain in the church. This pious custom of resting and watching in the dark, all night long, near a holy site in order to soak up its latent power is called “incubation.” The custom originated in an ancient church in Constantinople housing the remains of today’s saints, Cosmas and Damian, where the faithful incubated themselves in the hope of a miraculous cure.

Similar to Saint George, legends about Saints Cosmas and Damian far outrun any verifiable historical details about their lives. The devotion to today’s saints across epochs and cultures is as broad as an ocean but as shallow as a lake. Upon a slender bed of long-lost documents rests the narrative that Cosmas and Damian were twins and natives of Saudi Arabia who studied medicine in Syria. They became known as the “moneyless ones” for not accepting payment for their healing services. They were likely martyred north of Antioch in the early fourth century.

The earliest historical anchor planting these holy brothers in the ground of history dates to around 400 A.D., when a pagan visitor recorded a visit to a shrine dedicated to Cosmas and Damian in Asia Minor. In the fifth century, a church was built to their memory in Constantinople and, in the sixth century, a pagan temple in the Roman Forum was rededicated as a Basilica in their honor. The bright apse mosaic of Rome’s Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian still shines and shows Saints Peter and Paul presenting the twins to the glorified Christ.

Most of the wealth of miracles that have long been attributed to Saints Cosmas and Damian involve healing, in keeping with their medical profession. The fame of these miracles, together with their martyrdom, was so widespread in the early Church that they joined that elite class of martyrs, saints, virgins, and popes whose names were inserted into the Roman Canon, or Eucharistic Prayer I, where they are still read at Mass today. Their names also ring out in ancient litanies still sung at solemn Masses. Yet close familiarity with their names may dull our curiosity about their gory end.

No details have been preserved, but it can be supposed that Cosmas and Damian died like so many other martyrs: by crucifixion, beheading, or drowning at sea; by the goring of beasts, or by their flesh being burned off in a roar of flames. The chilling sentence of death read by a Roman official sent a cold shiver up the spine. It was irrevocable. The martyr’s fate was often to be publicly shamed, tortured, and physically destroyed in a brutal fashion in keeping with a brutal world. No miracle saved Cosmas and Damian from their violent end. As physicians, they knew well the frailty of the human body. They understood their own bodies to be cracked vessels flooded temporarily with the Holy Spirit of God. And when the time came for that earthen vessel to return to the clay from whence it came, they bravely gave up what was never theirs. They offered a witness so shocking that it was seared into the memories of those who saw it, a witness so other-worldly that a few emulated it, and untold masses of others honored it through prayer and devotion, as we still do today.

Saints Cosmas and Damian, through your heroic witness of martyrdom, we ask your intercession to embolden the weak, to strengthen the hesitant, to give words to the meek, and to unleash the hidden power of the Gospel in all those who could do more.

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September 23: Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio), Priest
1887–1968
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of civil defense volunteers and adolescents

A humble friar’s love for Christ burns holes in his hands

Long-married spouses often develop similar patterns of speech. A boy might learn to walk just like his father, and a girl might favor the same hairstyle as her mom. Teenagers in the same cliques dress alike and cut their hair in a similar fashion. It is natural to adopt the traits of the one you love, to mimic their behavior, dress, speech, and habits, consciously or unconsciously. Lover and beloved converge, master and disciple unite, leader and follower bond. Today’s saint did not have a reference group apart from Christ Himself. Jesus Christ inhabited every corner of the mind, soul, and imagination of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina. Pio’s life fused with Christ’s so totally that Pio’s very body bore the marks of his beloved. Not the same haircut, clothes, or gait, but the same nail marks and bloody wounds. Father Pio merged with Christ such that to look upon the friar’s hands was to see the crucified palms of the Son of God on Calvary.

Padre Pio grew up dirt poor and uneducated in a village near Naples, Italy, in 1887. Neither his parents nor his grandparents could read or write. He was baptized as Francesco and helped on the family’s small plot of land as a boy. The family was deeply religious, in the good, medieval way that perdured in rural Southern Europe far longer than it did in Northern lands. Saints, feast days, devotions, processions, fasts, the Mass, angels, saints, the Virgin, and God were the stuff of life. They saturated the atmosphere of Pietrelcina. Little Francesco and his family breathed Catholic air. It entered their bloodstream, circulated in their veins, and oozed out of every corpuscle. When he was about ten years old, Francesco decided to dedicate his life to God as a Franciscan friar. After completing some schooling and being privately tutored, he entered a nearby Franciscan friary at age fifteen. He took the name Pio (Pius) after a saint honored in his hometown. He was ordained a priest in 1910.

Padre Pio lived virtually his entire priestly life at a modest Franciscan friary in the rural town of San Giovanni Rotondo. Beginning in 1918, he began to experience the stigmata, or marks of the sufferings of Christ. He bled where Christ bled. Holes perforated his hands. He had sharp pains in his side. He also began to display supernatural gifts: bilocation, prophecy, miracles, and healings. His personal routine of prayer and mortification was also stupefying. He did not want his private passion play to go on tour, but it did. He became famous throughout Italy for being holy. Then he became widely known the world over. By the time of his death in 1968, Padre Pio was a bona fide Catholic superstar.

Padre Pio had mystique. That mystique was not rooted in good looks, a chateau on the Côte d’Azur, or in movie stardom, but in how he said Mass. People flocked to witness Padre Pio say long, intense, devotional Masses. In the modern world, sin has mystique. It’s cool, retrograde, impulsive, and “edgy.” A life of sin and vice is seen as more authentic than a life of goodness and virtue, because the sinner supposedly does not hide his real self behind a social curtain. Padre Pio hid nothing. He was totally authentic, totally sincere, and totally holy. His life was a rebuke of sin. He did not pretend to “share” others’ burdens by joining them in sin. He entered into the real drama of life by embodying Christ. A true Christian is authentic when he separates himself and his friends from sin, when he creates the mystique of Christ around him, and when, like Christ, he draws all men to himself.

Saint Pio, your intense love of God was communicated to the faithful in your celebration of Mass, your wise counsel in the confessional, and in your mystical experiences. What was so manifest in you was rare but lies latent in every priest. Help every priest to be an icon of Christ.

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September 21: Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of bankers, accountants, and money changers

A lover of money becomes greedy for God

People leave their jobs for all sorts of reasons: more pay, better opportunity, a shorter commute. Today’s saint left his job for a better boss. Matthew was at work in the city of Capernaum, a bustling town with a customs house. It was just another day, and Matthew was going about his job of collecting taxes. Nearby, Jesus was doing his job too, curing a paralyzed man. It was an ordinary day for both of them. But after performing His miracle, Jesus walked down the main street of Capernaum, saw Matthew outside of the customs house, and then...the normal day ended. Jesus said to Matthew, simply, directly, and with force, “Follow me.” And then something astonishing happened. Matthew followed Him. Fistfuls of Roman coins may have spilled from his hands, or he may have swallowed a gulp in his throat, quickly adjusted his tunic, and then scurried to walk in the small clouds of dust that puffed up behind Jesus as His sandals slapped the dry ground. In an instant, Matthew’s life changed forever and always. He had become a follower, a joiner, of the most important man in the history of the world.

The Gospel of Matthew nowhere mentions that it is written by a man named Matthew. But it was attributed to him very early in the life of the Church. It was compiled by 80 A.D., at the latest. Matthew’s Gospel is clearly written by a Jew and for Jews. It references the Old Testament repeatedly and notes how Jesus fulfilled those ancient Scriptures. Matthew’s Gospel is the only one which identifies him as a tax collector. Mark and Luke refer to him as Levi, which may have been his birth name, while Matthew (“gift of Yahweh”) was his post-conversion name. Because it begins with a genealogy, Matthew’s Gospel, but not Matthew himself, is in art represented by a man or by a man’s face. After his big moment in Capernaum, Matthew’s name consistently appears in the Gospels’ lists of Apostles, but little more is said about him, apart from a feast he hosts in honor of Jesus. It is not known where he evangelized or where or how he died. Four churches in France alone claim to have Matthew’s head, implying that no one has his head.

Christ passes by in every life. Everyone has their chance to say “Yes” or “No,” to stay or follow, to change or remain the same. That moment may come only once and never return. Sudden callings, and sudden conversions, are rare, but they do happen. A life is more likely to plot gradually up or down like a line on a graph than to take a sharp right angle in either direction. Matthew’s life angled sharply when his personal trajectory intersected with Christ’s. The moment is captured in all of its drama by the painter Caravaggio in his Calling of Saint Matthew. A broad shaft of light beams through the room from above Christ’s head. His bony finger points to a well-dressed man at a table with his hands over a pile of coins. The scene unfolds not in the street but in a darkened room. Light and darkness play. Sin and virtue tussle. Past, present, and future hang in the balance. Christ seems to say, “Will you take and eat, will you go and sell, will you come and follow me?” Difficult, challenging questions. But Matthew gave the difficult, generous answer in response, and we remember him today due to that one moment.

Saint Matthew, you made the right decision at the right time and so changed your life and those of millions of others who know Christ because of you. Help us to recognize when a pivot point arrives in our own life, when we must change direction, and help us to choose that direction well.

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September 20: Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, Priest, and Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and Companions, Martyrs
Nineteenth century
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of Korea

Their martyrdom for a new faith caused the Christian sun to rise in Korea

Catholicism was not originally brought to the isolated Korean Peninsula by celibate missionaries who trekked over its remote borders or who landed on its far shores from the outside. Instead, native Korean intellectuals had heard interesting ideas and had read intriguing books imported from nearby China about a new faith. These diplomats, professors and poets went in search of the Church. They crossed their own borders to speak with Jesuit priests in Beijing. The Koreans dialogued with the Jesuits, read their works, witnessed the celebration of the sacraments, and saw the Chinese Church in action. One of these Korean scholars, a man named Yi-Sung-hun, was baptized as Peter in Beijing in 1784 by a French missionary. Newly minted in Christ, with a convert’s fervor, Peter filled his baggage with catechisms, crucifixes, statues, rosaries, and images of the Virgin Mary and headed back to Korea excited to unpack the new faith for all to see. Peter baptized some of his friends and together they formed the first community of Catholics in Korea. They met in a house where sits, today, the Cathedral of Myeongdong.

The evangelization of Korea dawned as a thoroughly lay initiative. And once the Catholic seed was planted in Korean soil, it first grew slowly among scholars but then more steadily among the larger populace over time. Today’s feast commemorates the official persecution that burned hot, then cold, then hot, for decades as those first Christian seeds germinated. As the Church grew like a plant, it protruded too high over the land and was repeatedly cut down in the bloody harvest commemorated today. Hundreds of martyrs, mostly lay men and women, but some French missionary bishops and priests as well, were murdered by successive Korean governments throughout the last decade of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth for the crime of being baptized Catholics. They posed no other threat.

Paul Chŏng Ha-sang was a nobleman whose father and brother were martyred. Sacrifice was in his genes. Paul traveled to Beijing nine times, pleading for the Chinese Church to send priests to the lay-led Korean Church. Along with others, he sent a letter to Pope Pius VII describing the plight of the Korean faithful. Once clandestine priests began to arrive regularly in the 1830s, Paul would go to the Korean border to escort them to the communities of the faithful and lodge them in his own home. Paul was executed in 1839. His mother and sister were killed shortly after him.

Father Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn was the very first native-born Korean priest. He departed Korea in 1837 for the Portuguese settlement of Macau to complete his seminary studies. He was ordained by a French missionary bishop in Shanghai in August 1845. He then guided back to Korea the same bishop and a French priest. His priestly ministry would be to die. He was arrested less than a year after his ordination. The authorities were so impressed with his personal bearing, education, and linguistic abilities that they agonized over whether he should be executed. They wrestled with their consciences, but their consciences, in the end, lost. Father Andrew was beheaded at the age of twenty-six in September 1846.

The struggle to establish an organized Church structure in Korea was brutal. Today’s martyrs, whose names are all known and about whom basic facts are verified, stand in the fore. Yet behind them stand, faceless and nameless, thousands of other martyrs known to God alone. They perished by the sword, by crucifixion, in prison, or of starvation, rather than renounce their Christian faith when faced with certain torture and death. The Catholic Church in South Korea today is immense and vibrant, fully Korean and fully Catholic. The Church in North Korea does not effectively exist, and martyrs may still be dying there today, squeezed to death in the iron grip of its dictators. The story of the Korean Church is one of daring, one of steely courage, but one of tears. Only in 1886 did the century of persecution end, with a French-Korean treaty. Pope Saint John Paul II canonized Father Andrew Kim, Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and 101 other Korean martyrs on May 6, 1984, at a Mass in Seoul, South Korea. It was, at that time, the largest gathering of humanity in the history of the Korean peninsula. The martyrs’ blood was fertile.

Holy Korean martyrs, known and unknown, we implore your powerful intercession in heaven. Give us half your courage, a quarter of your daring, and just one percent of your faith. With that we can emulate you in the easy circumstances of today, where we suffer metaphorically, but rarely in our bodies.

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September 19: Saint Januarius, Bishop and Martyr
c. 300
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Naples

An early bishop martyr is honored due to an enduring miracle of blood

In every lost corner and hidden valley of the Catholic world is a painting of the Virgin Mary that cries watery tears, a crucifix whose growing hair must be cut with scissors, a white host oozing drops of red blood, or a sacred pool whose baths make the blind see and the lame walk. Of all the miracles, wonders, and theological rarities that leave God’s family in awe, the miracle of today’s saint is one of the most astounding. Three times a year—on his day of martyrdom, September 19; on the day of his commemoration as Patron of Naples, December 16; and on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, recalling the gathering together of his various relics—the blood of Saint Januarius liquefies.

Since at least the 1300s, a small glass vial holding a deep-red, stable substance has been removed from a safe location and brought before the faithful in the Cathedral of Naples by a priest or bishop. The vial is placed near the other relics of Saint Januarius which rest under the altar. And then the drumbeat of prayers start. They sometimes continue for hours and sometimes for minutes. God is bidden, fuel is poured on the fire of faith, and the mysterious moment arrives. Spontaneously, the stable, solid, red substance is transformed into a liquid that splashes around the inside walls of the vial for all to see. The blood of Saint Januarius has come to life. The city of Naples fires a twenty-one-gun salute from a nearby castle to signal that the transformation has occurred.

There is no explanation for how this happens. But it happens, happens often, and has happened consistently for many centuries. The proof is the outcome itself. That a solid substance liquifies cannot be debated. The liquified blood must be the starting point for speculation, not a presumption of magic or sleight of hand. That some things of God cannot be explained without the informed trust of faith is simply to state that believers did not make God up. He is not understandable. If He were, then He would fit conveniently into our tiny brains and thus not be God. But no faith is needed to accept this miracle. What happens is a fact.

Little is known about the life of Saint Januarius. An extant letter from 432 mentions him as if he were already well known. It states that a nearby bishop, a friend of Saint Augustine named Saint Paulinus of Nola, had a vision of Januarius just before Paulinus died, and that Januarius was a bishop and martyr and a well-known member of the Church of Naples. It is believed that our saint was beheaded during a persecution under the reign of Diocletian, in the decade before Christianity was legalized in the early 300s.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the liquifying of Saint Januarius’ blood is that it occurs for no specific purpose. No sick person is healed, no sacrament is celebrated, no bishop is elected. It is a divine folly. It occurs to edify, to entertain, and to inspire, as if religion were a theological sport, with God simply putting His talents on display for all to behold the spectacle from the pews, to gaze, mouth agape, at a wonder that can neither be explained nor be resisted.

Saint Januarius, you died for the faith of the Church just as the Christian era dawned. May we follow your example of generous witness and stand astonished at the mysterious miracle that puts your name on so many lips so many centuries after you perished for Christ.

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September 17: Saint Robert Bellarmine, Bishop and Doctor
1542–1621
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of catechists and catechumens

A learned scholar with a warm personality drives the Counter-Reformation forward

A massive, multi-volume work of Christian theology was published in the 1580s refuting Protestant errors. The volumes were of such encyclopedic and commanding erudition that readers assumed that the name on the books’ spines, “Bellarmine,” referred to an entire faculty of scholars. But the volumes were the work of just one incredible man, today’s saint, Robert Bellarmine. He was a one-man university. The Bellarmines had a pope in the family and gave their son a broad education from his youth. Young Robert mastered numerous subjects, including the art of playing the violin. He joined the Jesuits in 1560 and taught the classics while simultaneously studying theology on his path to the Priesthood. After his ordination in 1570, he became a professor at the University of Louvain, in modern-day Belgium, and then at the Jesuit College in Rome.

During his long career as a professor, Father Bellarmine never stopped learning. He was rigorous in his intellectual approach, read everything, and was particularly focused on refuting, with nuance, Protestant errors. He even learned Hebrew and wrote a Hebrew grammar to counter the thesis of a then popular Protestant history book. The times demanded that Bellarmine develop an expertise in apologetics, to be totally engaged with the red-hot controversies of his day. This was not the age for theological speculation or philosophical rumination, as the medieval scholastics could indulge in. This was the age to master first principles, to delve into the ancient sources, to root out error, and to express the perennial truths of Catholicism with renewed vigor surrounded by new art, architecture, and sacred music. It was a total mind-body approach. It was the Baroque exploding before your eyes. It was the onslaught of the Counter-Reformation, and Robert Bellarmine was the tip of the spear.

Bellarmine’s long list of accomplishments is astonishing. He helped produce a new edition of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, participated in the revision of the Julian calendar, and contributed to the authoritative Catechism which the Church published for over three hundred years. He served on a papal commission that arbitrated a major conflict over the Kingship of France, became a regional superior for the Jesuits, and was ordained a bishop and consecrated a Cardinal. He was a trusted adviser to successive popes, was tasked with resolving a bitter dispute over the theology of grace between Dominicans and Jesuits, and escaped being elected Pope himself by the narrowest of margins in 1605. After this near miss with destiny, he was appointed to serve on various Roman Congregations and as prefect of the Vatican library, so he resigned from his diocesan responsibilities and returned to Rome for the rest of his life, where he became the Holy See’s indispensable man. His long and faithful service at the highest levels of the Church culminated in his playing a role in the famous process against Galileo, who was Bellarmine’s personal friend. Our saint’s last years were spent writing devotional works on prayer and dying well.

Robert Bellarmine accepted the trappings of his office—robes, servants, and a carriage—but he lived austerely and expected all priests to do the same. His virtues equaled his achievements. He had an attractive blend of warmth, intelligence, and big-heartedness that earned him a huge circle of friends. He knew the truth like few others but listened carefully and respectfully to all who challenged it. Robert Bellarmine was canonized in 1930 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931. He is buried in the Jesuit Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome.

Saint Robert Bellarmine, we see in your life a beautiful dedication to theological truth, personal austerity, and openness toward others. We ask your intercession before God to give all the faithful the gift to live so balanced and integrated a life.

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September 17: Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Virgin and Doctor
1098-1179
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of philologists

A one-woman magisterium orchestrates a life in tune with the Creator

In the high Middle-Ages, she was New-Age. Before farm-to-table was a term, she lived organically. Before alternative medicine was de rigueur, she catalogued the medicinal benefits of herbs, plants, minerals, and potions. And before anyone ever “went green” to save planet earth, she talked about the “viriditas,” or greenness, of God, meaning how His graces watered a desiccated soul until it flowered with fresh, green, life. Hildegard of Bingen was far, far, ahead of her time even though, from an external perspective, she lived the austere, rigorous, cloistered life common to the female religious of her era.

Hildegard was born in the Rhineland, the very western region of modern Germany, to a minor noble family. Her mother and father placed her in the care of a well-known local abbess for her education at the tender age of eight, where she learned Latin and the teachings of the Catholic religion. Her world deepened and broadened inside the four walls of her simple Benedictine convent. When her mentor died, Hildegard became the abbess and soon moved the convent, generating some tension in the process, to a new location where it could better flourish as her fame attracted more and more notice and vocations.

Hildegard was unusual for her time. She was unusual, in fact, for any time. She was a polymath with eclectic interests in numerous fields of study. She was a sophisticated and prolific composer of sacred music whose voluminous works surpass the output of almost any other Mediaeval musician. She had an advanced understanding of medicine and the human body, including an almost complete knowledge of how blood circulated in the body - four centuries before such knowledge was verified through post-mortem studies. Hildegard also had detailed knowledge of animal and plant life, of rocks, reptiles, fish, and the natural sciences in general.

Yet if she must be known for one thing above all, it must be for her pyrotechnic visions of God and the cosmos. Hildegard’s colorful visions are difficult to classify. She described them as a wide-awake spiritual awareness of the “reflection of the living light.” From childhood, she felt her entire body – bones, nerves, veins, senses – all rising ever higher into the vault of heaven where she experienced all of creation in its particularity and in its oneness. These were not ecstasies or physical transportations, but an eyes-wide-open, all-sensory experience of sermons, virtues, writings, and other human actions as if they were shimmering like the sun on the mirror-like surface of a lake. The over-arching theme of these visions was the mystical marriage between God and His creation through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, a union consummated on the cross, where Christ makes his Bride, the Church, fertile for humanity.

As Hildegard’s writings became more well-known, the Pope was asked for his appreciation of their theological orthodoxy or heterodoxy. Pope Eugene III approved of Hildegarde’s description of her visions, with a prudent warning for Hildegard to avoid any pride in being so blessed. The great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a famous contemporary of Hildegard, was also asked his opinions about her writings and the two exchanged letters. In fact, many people, both humble and exalted, corresponded with Hildegard, leaving behind one of the most massive caches of extant letters from mediaeval times.

In the last years of her life, despite worsening health, Hildegarde’s prestige was such that she was given permission to leave her convent in order to preach in town squares and Churches, something almost unheard of for a woman of her era. She died in the odor of sanctity on September 17, 1179, the day on which her liturgical memorial is celebrated today. In the 2012 Papal Bull declaring her a Doctor of the Church, Pope Benedict XVI wrote that “the corpus of her writings, for their quantity, quality and variety of interests, is unmatched by any other female author of the Middle Ages.”

Saint Hildegarde, your creative and versatile soul brought a feminine genius to the Church’s theological and spiritual patrimony, using poetic and symbolic language to express the mysterious richness of God and his creation. Inspire all Christians to read creation like a book of divine life.

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September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr
c. Late Second, or Early Third, Century–253
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of cattle, domestic animals, and earache sufferers

A Pope reigns for two years, excommunicates a schismatic, and dies in exile

The twenty-first pope of the Church, Saint Cornelius, succeeded no one. After the death of Pope Saint Fabian, martyred in January 250, persecutions prohibited the clergy of Rome from electing a successor, so the Chair of Saint Peter was vacant for over a year. Finally, when the cruel Emperor Decius departed Rome on military campaign, the clergy chose Cornelius as Bishop of Rome. Not everyone was happy with the choice, especially the former future pope Novatian, who had led the Roman clergy during the vacancy and had convinced himself that he was going to be elected. Novatian’s supporters consecrated him bishop and refused to acknowledge Cornelius. Sides were taken, letters were written, and tensions heightened. After consolidating support from the esteemed Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, and others, Cornelius resolved the dispute by convening a synod of bishops which excommunicated the schismatic Novatian and his followers.

Pope Cornelius reigned for a little over two years, from March 251 to June 253. Even though his time in office was brief, he made some important decisions and left an interesting legacy. Decius’ persecution gave rise to the greatest pastoral dilemma of the third century—how, and whether, to reintegrate Christians who had offered pagan sacrifice, regretted it, and desired to enter again into the embrace of Mother Church. The related question of whether bishops, priests, and deacons who had apostosized could perform valid sacraments would vex Cornelius’s successors. There were two camps on this issue. Novatian held that lapsed Christians were idolaters, and idolatry was, in the Old Testament especially, unforgivable. The Church could not absolve such apostates. They were to be judged by God alone at death. Cornelius, Saint Cyprian, and other bishops occupied a more moderate position. They taught that the lapsi could be reintegrated into the Church through repentance and an appropriate penance. Cornelius’ position won the day, forever and always, establishing an important theological precedent: There is no sin that cannot be forgiven.

Pope Cornelius also left, in his letters, an important record of the size, state, and organization of the Church of Rome, hard facts so obvious to those inside of a culture that they often go unreported in historical documents. Decius’ successor as Emperor was named Gallus, and he was no friend of Christians either. He banished Cornelius to a city not far from Rome where the Pope died of physical hardship. Saint Cornelius was buried near the papal crypt in the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus. One day in 1849, an amateur archeologist, a layman who worked in the Vatican library, found a small marble shard that read NELIUS MARTYR in a field on the outskirts of Rome. But there was no martyr named Nelius. He then found another shard that read COR. The inscription is still visible today in the Catacombs of Callixtus: Cornelius Martyr.

The Romans unsheathed their long knives in the 250s. Pope after pope was martyred by various means. But the Church did not run and hide, it stayed and grew. The blood of Cornelius and other pope-martyrs wet the soil, and the seeds of faith moistened, grew, and sprouted into the vast garden of Catholicism that slowly, and imperceptibly, took deep root in the ground of Europe. Saint Cornelius’ name is read at Mass in Eucharistic Prayer I even today, next to Saint Cyprian’s. He was staunch in his defense of the Church, yet appropriately lenient to his fellow Christians who did not possess his same fortitude. In this respect, he was as wise a pastor as he was brave a martyr.

Saint Cornelius, our Lord said that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he would lose his own soul. You gained the papacy, not the whole world, yet gave it up rather than bend to the will of the Church’s enemies. Help us to persevere like you.

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September 16: Saint Cyprian, Bishop, Martyr
c.200–258
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Algeria and North Africa

The faithful soak up the blood of their beheaded bishop

The elegantly named Thaschus Caecilius Cyprianus was born in an uncertain year in that buzzing beehive of early Christianity known as Roman North Africa. His biography epitomizes that of many greats of his era: a classically educated Roman citizen of renown finds Christ as an adult, leaves behind his exalted civic status, trades Empire for Church, and places his gifts and reputation at the service of the people as a bishop of consequence. But because he lived in times of hot persecution, Cyprian’s life did not come to a peaceful end like others with similar biographies, such as Saints Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, or Paulinus of Nola. The mighty Bishop Cyprian was sentenced to death by a local bureaucrat. On the fateful day, he knelt in the burning sand and waited for the heavy Roman sword to lop off his head. Cyprian’s cult of martyrdom sprang up instantly, even as the faithful, carrying white cloths, soaked up the holy blood that dripped from his torso. His name was soon placed in the Roman Canon, where it remains today, spoken from the altar and heard by the faithful at Mass in Eucharistic Prayer I.

Cyprian was a big-hearted, well-educated “man about town” when, in his mid-forties, he was converted by the example and words of an old priest. He redirected his life, made a vow of chastity that astonished his friends, and even abstained from his greatest pleasure—the works of pagan authors. In all of Cyprian’s Christian writings, there is not one single citation of these pagans whose style and thought Cyprian had so admired. Once converted, Cyprian’s mind focused on Scripture and the growing canon of Christian theology, mostly that of his fellow North African Tertullian. Soon after his baptism, Cyprian was ordained a priest, and in 248, after first resisting the appointment, he was made the bishop of his home city of Carthage. His impressive bearing and refined education earned him deep respect among the faithful. His biographer, a deacon named Pontus, wrote about Cyprian precisely so that the great man would be known for the example of his entire life, not just his last few heroic moments.

Under the persecution of the Emperor Decius (249–252), which so marked the life of the third-century Church, many Christians lined up at the office of their local Roman official to offer token worship to pagan gods and to receive a libellus, or small sheet, documenting their apostasy. Cyprian lost all his possessions in this persecution but avoided capture by going into hiding. He governed his diocese remotely through letters. He was also compelled to defend his flight against criticism levelled by bishops in both Rome and North Africa that he was avoiding martyrdom. Once the tide of persecution subsided, Cyprian returned to Carthage and was lenient but clear, like his contemporary Pope Cornelius, in reintegrating the lapsi back into the Church once they had performed a suitable penance.

The roiling debate over how to pastorally respond to the lapsi divided the Church in North Africa, with some priests arguing no forgiveness was possible for idolaters, and others demanding that the lapsi perform onerous penances before they were received again into the fold. Cyprian responded to these divisions by writing a treatise on Church unity, arguing that the Pope’s teaching on this matter must be obeyed: “There is one God, one Christ, and but one episcopal chair, originally founded on Peter, by the Lord’s authority. There cannot be set up another altar or another priesthood.” Cyprian later clashed with Pope Stephen I over the validity of the sacraments performed by priests who had apostatized, a matter resolved after both mens’ death in favor of the Roman position of leniency.

Cyprian’s fellow North African, Saint Augustine of Hippo, in Book Five of his Confessions, recounts how his mother, Monica, prayed in a shrine dedicated to Saint Cyprian in the port city of Carthage around 375 A.D. So, approximately one hundred and twenty years after Cyprian’s death, his legacy was firmly established, fresh and alive, as it still is today.

Saint Cyprian, you served the unity of the Church as a bishop, understood the beauty and necessity of the sacraments, and accepted death over apostasy. Inspire all bishops to be magnets, drawing the faithful toward Christ and the Church through their teaching and witness.

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September 15: Our Lady of Sorrows
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of Slovakia

A mother is only as happy as her saddest child

Every life climbs its Calvary. Every soul has its quiet sorrow which cannot be shared in full with any other soul. This concealed pain is the very real drama that plays out behind the curtain of the duties and distractions of everyday life. Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, shared in all things human, save sin, including pain and sorrow. So He wept at the death of Lazarus, and He balanced the heavy cross on His sore bones and trudged up a hill to His own execution. Thoughts and ideas can be shared in their totality. Emotions and experiences only partially so. Suffering is intensely private in that it is a personal, lived experience. The intense sufferings of Jesus Christ were intensified by His perfection. It was more unjust, more cruel, that one so perfect should suffer at the hands of creatures of His own making. Only a perfect being similar to Jesus could enter into His sorrow, could experience it somewhat as He did. That person was Mary. She was not a Goddess, of course, but the New Eve, the perfect person God intended that every person should be from the start. Because she was perfect, she most understood, and felt, the pain of her perfect Son. Shared perfection led to shared sorrow.

Today’s feast commemorates the sorrows of Mary, most especially those lived during Jesus’ passion and death. Devotional images of Mary show her heart pierced by seven swords, symbolic of seven sorrows: the prophecy of Simeon; the flight into Egypt; Jesus being lost in the temple; meeting Jesus on His way to Calvary; standing at the foot of the Cross; being present when Jesus was removed from the Cross; and her presence at His burial. Mary was perfect, but her life wasn’t perfect. She was squeezed by the same wine press of pain, humiliation, and sorrow that squeezes every life. She was unmarried and pregnant and must have heard the neighbors’ whispers as she walked the dusty streets of her town. She and her family had to flee to a far-off land to escape the murderous King Herod the Great. She lived a real life stuffed with real human drama. But her most intense sorrows were felt when she was in her late forties, when her one and only child died a public death, leaving her, already a widow, totally alone, her middle-aged face stretched with sorrow.

When our fingers and thumb walk up and down the chain of God’s mercy, we ruminate over things glorious, joyful, luminous, and sorrowful. We recall historical events like Christ’s Baptism and the Last Supper, and theological events like the Assumption and the Coronation.

The Sorrowful Mysteries are historical. Mary hovers just off center stage. She stands nearby, amidst the crowd on the path to Calvary, upright and brave at the foot of the Cross, weeping as her dead boy is wrapped in a sheet and delicately placed on a cold slab in a rock-cut tomb. She is Our Lady of Sorrows because she, and the Church, are mothers. They give and nurture life. They feel more than men. They respond to suffering with co-suffering, not so much through actions and solutions. On today’s feast, we recall Mary’s sorrow and share in it. But our sorrow is not that of a godless Viking, a pagan Roman, or a modern secularist. Christian grief is not godless grief. Our grief, like Mary’s grief, is ameliorated by the sure and certain hope that the last word in our book is not death and despair but hope and life. Mary’s sorrow is temporary, as all of our sorrows one day will be. There is nothing that does not have a context, except for God. And the context for Christian sorrow is the Resurrection.

Mary of Sorrows, you shared the pain and sorrow of your perfect Son but were never forlorn. Help all who turn to you to unite our sorrows to yours and His so that we may co-suffer in His death and co-share in His Resurrection.

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September 14: Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patronal Feast of Cortona, Italy

A torture device is transformed into a universal symbol of hope and peace

If the Romans had hung criminals from a gibbet, then Catholic churches would display a noose in their sanctuaries instead of a cross. Or a statue of Jesus’ lifeless body would be hanging in the sanctuary from a sturdy branch with a rope wrapped tightly around His neck. If the Romans had practiced stoning as their chosen form of capital punishment, then there would be a pile of rocks for the congregation to gaze at in hope, with Jesus’ body, bruised and broken, lying lifeless nearby. We are accustomed to the cross. We wear it around our necks, chisel it onto our tombstones, tattoo it onto our arms, and anchor it into rocky mountain peaks. We even top our steeples with the cross and illuminate it at night. The Church has been so spectacularly successful in communicating its truths about suffering and death, about resurrection and life, that we perhaps don’t notice that, over long centuries, a device of torture and death has been reinterpreted as the world’s greatest symbol of life and peace.

This is the paradox of the cross. Today’s feast commemorates the Cross because in spiritual combat with life, the cross lost. A conqueror might plant the head of his decapitated opponent on a spike, a soldier might return from a far-away war with an enemies’ flag captured in the heat of battle, or an American Indian might tuck the scalps of his poor victims under his saddle. Trophies of war take many forms. The Cross is Christ’s war trophy. The Church exalts the Cross on this liturgical feast because this enemy of life was felled like timber by the Son of God. The Cross was brought low and humbled. It was mocked when Jesus rose from the dead. The Church holds up the Cross to say “Behold what the cross did not do. Behold that life conquers even a cruel and public death.”

God’s self-emptying started at the incarnation. He humbled himself to walk among us when He restricted Himself to the limitations of His own creatures. God continued to pour Himself out until He climbed onto the wood of the Cross, completing the total self-gift that was His life. Our God is not like a general who sends a subordinate to carry out a dangerous mission, like an absent parent who pays someone else to raise his children, or like a physician who coldly touches his patient’s body and then washes in antiseptic. No, our God is like a surgeon who, before he cuts, points to his side and says to the patient with empathy, “I had the same—see my scars.” Our God points to the wound in His open side and says, “I too was the victim of evil and death.” God bore the Cross and its cruel death so that He could drink from the same bitter cup as man, so that He could enter more fully into the world’s sorrow.

Death on the Cross was not preordained. God could have freely chosen other ways to redeem the human race—through intelligence, wisdom, charm, money, or education. But then, to participate in His redemption, we would have to study for a PhD, attend etiquette school, get a good job, earn an excellent wage, or receive good grades. Not everyone can do these things. But everyone can die. Death is egalitarian. Everyone does it, eventually. So God did it and “so made the grave a sign of hope that promises resurrection even as it claims our mortal bodies,” as the graveside prayer states. The Cross, then, is everyone’s trophy, raised high with one arm, head cocked to the side. It is in this sense that the Cross is a sign of hope. Because the Cross lost the fight with Christ, death is not the final answer. The Cross says that our God does not answer the question of suffering and death in a partial academic way. He responds in a total human way. He responds with His life. He doesn’t explain; He shares. He responds with empathy by taking up His Cross and inviting us to do the same.

Jesus Christ, Your three hours on the Cross gave that wicked device a new meaning. Through contemplation of Your sufferings, may we transform all the wickedness and sin in our lives into something valuable. May we convert evil, transform sin, and, like You, go from death to life.

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September 13: Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor
c. 347–407
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of preachers and speakers

A great preacher, writer, and intellectual suffers for the faith

In the tug and pull of the theological disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries, today’s saint was a seminal figure. Along with other luminaries such as Saints Ambrose, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil and many others, he tunneled deep into Scripture and the existing Christian tradition to carve out what is today known as the deposit of faith. Saint John Chrysostom was from Antioch, that “Metropolis of heresy” in Saint John Henry Newman’s words, where Arianism was bred, incubated, thrived, and died in the period between the Council of Nicea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381.
John received an excellent education in the liberal arts and was baptized at the age of eighteen, in keeping with the custom of adult baptism common to his era. He joined a rustic group of hermits in the hills outside of his hometown in his mid-twenties. The conditions were so physically and psychologically brutal, though, that he left after seven years. Living always isolated and mortified would not be his path. He was ordained a priest in 386. His bishop recognized his gifts and put him in charge of the physical and pastoral care of the poor of Antioch, a ministry in which he honed his natural gifts as a preacher. He was so skillful in preaching that he was given, a century after his death, the title of chrysostom or “golden mouth.” John’s theological acumen was no less impressive. His sermons and letters display a refined understanding of the intricacies of the Holy Trinity and of the Gospels. His beautiful theological and spiritual reflections are referenced numerous times in the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In 398 Saint John was consecrated the Archbishop of Constantinople, the New Rome, provoking jealousy among some contemporaries. John did himself no favors by his overaggressive reforms as Archbishop. He bluntly criticized women for wearing make-up, Christians for attending races and games on holy days, the imperial court for its extravagances, and the clergy for their laxity and wealth-seeking. Recriminations soon followed. He was falsely charged with treason and other crimes and was exiled in 402. He was reinstated after an earthquake in Constantinople was interpreted as divine punishment for his banishment. But John was exiled a second time shortly thereafter. Like other saints, his time of exile proved fruitful. He wrote numerous letters, specifically to bishops in the Western Empire, including the pope. But also like other exiled popes and bishops, assertions of support were only as sturdy as the paper on which they were written. Practical help never materialized.

John died in exile in 407, a victim of cold, rain, a forced march and lack of food. Within a decade after his death, his reputation was restored by the pope, and his remains were transferred for burial in Constantinople. He was recognized as a Father of the Church at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1568.

Saint John suffered for his zeal. He was exiled by civil power in an age when correct theology was understood as a form of patriotism, and heresy as treason. He crossed the civil powers of his age, did not back down, and paid a severe price for his fidelity. When Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, they stole John’s relics and carried them back to Rome. In 2004 Pope Saint John Paul II authorized the return of some of John’s remains to the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch in Saint George Church in present-day Istanbul, John’s own episcopal city.

Saint John Chrysostom, the heat of your words burned so hot that you were persecuted for your ardor. Inspire all Christian preachers to light a fire of faith in their congregations, without fear for their own reputations or of recrimination.

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September 12: The Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Every name begins a relationship

A name doesn’t imply that you know everything about someone, but it does make a person “invocable.” To know that there is a “someone” standing before you is not to know too much. When that “someone” has a name, however, he or she is placed in relationship with you, and relationships are what matter most. By means of a name, we go beyond a mere concept, beyond a mere thing. A name includes another in our circle of shared existence. No one wants to be a mere number, or to be just a “Nigerian,” just an “athlete,”or just an “accountant.” Titles and monikers flatten people. They reduce someone to where they came from, what they excel at, their profession, their hair color, their language, and on and on. A name opens a door to the more complex reality that is every human soul.

The God of Christianity is not a mere concept who “does” but a being who “Is.” He has a name. He is “Abba” or “Father.” He is Jesus Christ. He is the Holy Spirit. It’s hard to imagine truly knowing, or loving, a nameless entity whose identity is its function. We don’t, after all, love “country.” We love Poland, or the Philippines, or Bolivia. And we don’t love “husband” or “wife,” we love the concrete, specific, named person to whom we are married. Our love of God begins in the same way our love of people does—by asking His name.

Jesus Himself called out “Mary!”in the garden on the morning of His resurrection, and her spoken name elicited a beautiful response: “Rabboni!” In Chapter Three of the Book of Exodus, God calls Moses by name to approach Him in the burning bush. God first states that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Moses is not completely satisfied with knowing that God is, or for whom He is. So Moses asks the question everyone asks when they want to deepen a relationship: “What’s your name?” God then pulls the curtains aside and invites Moses into His inner life, into relationship with Him. He reveals something more intimate. He tells Moses His name—“Yahweh” or “I am Who I Am.” God hands over part of Himself to man. He can now be called upon. He is invocable. No one can force you to reveal your name. It’s personal, because to reveal your name is to become vulnerable.

Today the Church commemorates a name as much as the person who bears it. The holiness of the name of God, which the Second Commandment forbids man to take in vain, is reflected in the holy names of all the saints and holy things and holy places dedicated to Him. The name of the Mother of God, the Holy or Blessed Virgin Mary, should be safe in our mouths. This feast falls during the Octave of the Birthday of the Virgin Mary and was inserted into the Church’s universal calendar just after the triumph of the Christian army over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The feast was suppressed after Vatican II but once again placed in the calendar by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2002.

Mary’s name evokes tenderness and maternity. All Christians should call upon the blessed name of the Mother of God as the most powerful intercessor before the throne of Her Son in heaven. Her name puts us in relationship with her. She is not far away. She is close to us, as a mother should be, and she wants to be called upon by her children who are so in need of her.

Saint Mary, may your holy name be always respected and honored, because you are closer to God than we are, because you know Him more intimately than we do, and because we trust that you will be with us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

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September 9: Saint Peter Claver, Priest (U.S.A.)
1580–1654
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of slaves, Colombia, seafarers, and missionaries to Africa

A builder of the Spanish Bridge, he personified respect for human rights

It is commonly taught that human rights were born in the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This thesis holds that non-Catholic, nominally Christian intellectuals, including the founders of the United States, were the first generation of thinkers to philosophically articulate, and legally protect, man’s inherent, universal human rights. And, this train of thought concludes, these steps forward were possible only after the heavy chains of traditional Christianity fell to the ground. In other words, human rights were the obverse of Catholicism. As the shadow of the Church and its archaic teachings receded, the theory goes, the inherent dignity of individual man moved into the light. The problem with this thesis is twofold: first, it ignores one thousand seven hundred years of history; second, most Enlightenment thinkers owned other human beings just like they owned cows, or at least depended on the services of slaves or took advantage of slave women.

Today’s saint was among numerous Spanish priests, nuns, and lay men and women who built the Spanish Bridge from the Old World to the New. They knew what Jesus taught. They internalized the content of the papal encyclicals condemning the indignity and immorality of slavery. They battled over human rights in royal courts, they risked life and limb confronting their own unscrupulous countrymen in the fields and ports of New Spain, and they sacrificed their personal health to care for slaves. Their intellectual advocacy for, and practical living out of, human rights is the true source of the Western world’s embrace of human rights, not those few Anglo-Saxon intellectuals whose culture raised them to despise a broader tradition of which they were ignorant.

A converted former slave owner and fellow Spanish priest named Bartolomé de las Casas laid the intellectual groundwork for people like Peter Claver, today’s saint. Claver practiced, in flesh and blood, what Las Casas had taught a few generations before him. Peter Claver lived human rights. He cared for actual persons at great cost to his own health. He did not write books like Las Casas or just give lip service to human dignity like many colonists. He implemented Catholic social teaching for over forty years, universalizing the concept of neighbor to include everyone, because everyone is made in God’s image and likeness. He epitomized the sweet and sacrificial love of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Saint Peter Claver was from the region around Barcelona, Spain. He joined the Jesuits and requested to serve in the American missions. Like so many saints, when he left for God, he left for good. He never returned to friends and family in Spain. He was ordained a priest in the port city of Cartagena, Colombia, in 1615, and immediately and from then on dedicated himself to the physical and spiritual care of African slaves. But he didn’t just care for them in the fields or plantations of Colombia. He met every slave ship he possibly could as soon as it dropped anchor in port. Using interpreters, he greeted the traumatized chained men and women with fresh water, ripe fruit, bandages, perfumes, food, medicine, lemons, a broad smile and charitable caresses. When weather prohibited seafaring and he didn’t have to be in port, Peter instructed and baptized whatever slaves were open to it. He baptized more than forty thousand souls.

It is said that Saint Peter Claver lost his senses of taste and smell due to his long years of breathing obnoxious odors. He called himself the slave of the slaves. He also labored among the Spanish slave traders, attempting to convert them from their evil ways. When visiting his fellow Spaniards, he did not stay with them but in their often rancid slave quarters. This apostle of Cartagena died forgotten, alone, and poor. He was canonized in 1888.

Saint Peter Claver, you worked among the most traumatized and destitute populations of your time, caring for slaves, because they were made in the image and likeness of God. Help us to understand, protect, and exalt the inherent dignity of every human person, just like you did.

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September 8: Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Late First Century B.C.
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of silversmiths, potters, and chefs

The last and greatest figure of the B.C. era causes its end

The birthdates of great men and women are remembered for posterity. The presidents of the United States are commemorated near the February birthday of George Washington. Many nations celebrate their birthday on the date they gained their independence. The Church celebrates its birthday, so to speak, on the Feast of Pentecost. However, the Church typically commemorates its saints on their date of death, ordination, or other significant milestone. Only Christ Himself, Saint John the Baptist, and the Virgin Mary have feasts commemorating their births, because only they were holy from the start. They were sanctified by God in the womb, not made holy through grace and long trial during their earthly lives.

Nowhere in Scripture is the place and date of birth of the Virgin Mary recorded. Nor are the names of her parents found in Scripture, although tradition tells us they were Joachim and Anne. It is not until the sixth century that there is certain knowledge of a liturgical commemoration of Mary’s birth. This is not unusual. Mary lived a largely hidden life, and her theological and historical significance remained somewhat veiled until the Council of Ephesus in 431 formally declared her the Mother of God. Since that definition, every aspect of her life has become the source of a rich spiritual and theological heritage.

The Word of God, for the Catholic, is more than its written form. We are a people of the Word, not a people of the Book. Scripture is just one expression of the Word made flesh, the Word spoken by the Father from all ages. This means that a richer, more layered meaning of the events of the New Testament perpetually unfolds in the Church. The written Word of God in the Bible is limited by the fixed nature of all written words. Once put on paper, they don’t change. The Living Word is something more, and it is the Living Word that the Church teaches, preaches, and lives. Just like a person, the Body of Christ expresses itself through both formal language and through body language. The words of the Catechism, prayers, and Magisterial documents use formal language. But the liturgy, sacraments, music, architecture, pious devotions, processions, etc., are more like body language. They communicate the same written truths as the Catechism and Scripture yet in a different, more corporeal, more lived way.

The silence of Mary, the hiddenness of so much of her life, is intriguing. It is an invitation to prayer and spiritual reflection. Her silence, and the silence of Scripture on so many events which must have occurred but are not referenced, means that there is, and will always be, more for the Church to reveal about Her greatest truths. It is not just Scripture that is inspired but the Church as well. She pulls from Her storehouse things old and new, polishes them off, and offers them to the faithful in culturally compelling language to deepen the content of faith and the faithful’s response to it.

But even more than offering old things in new ways, even more than preserving past truths, the Church is a generator of revelation. She is the Living Word in the world of today, the vibrant Magisterium who absorbs the world’s questions and challenges in every age and gives them compelling answers. Tradition for the Church, then, is not just a jewel to be guarded. Tradition is forward-looking, dynamic, and active. And this positive tradition continues to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary because it was she, the last great figure of the B.C. era, whose birth itself gave birth to a new world. No Mary, no Christ. Her birth was the start of the future we all now inhabit.

Saint Mary, we celebrate your holy birth in the land your Son made holy. Your discreet life of prayer and service obscures so much but speaks loudly as well. May our lives be discreet in their goodness, known to God and to those few who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

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September 5: Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Religious
1910–1997
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Mother Teresa is not on the Church’s universal calendar but is included here due to her renown)
Patron Saint of the Archdiocese of Calcutta, India

She equals in generosity the great ‘Teresas’ she emulated

Anjezë (Agnes) Gonxha Bojaxhiu was a tiny Albanian woman whose strong-as-iron faith served as a fulcrum to budge the world closer to God. She was born into a devout family in Skopje, in present day Macedonia. Her parent’s marriage had been arranged, according to custom, and was happy and fruitful. The family was prosperous and regularly helped the poor and abandoned. There was seldom not a destitute person sharing the family table at lunchtime. Little Agnes benefited from the then recent reforms of Pope Saint Pius X lowering the age of First Holy Communion and thus received the Eucharist for the first time at the very young age of five and a half. After her father died young, Agnes’ firm, loving, and religious mother had the greatest influence on her. The vibrant life of her local parish also impacted her faith. The priests there talked about the missionary work of the Church in far away lands, and Agnes internalized every word they spoke.

Feeling the call to serve Christ and the Church, Agnes decided to become a nun with the Loretto Sisters who were based in Dublin, Ireland. So when she was eighteen, a large procession of family, classmates, and parishioners accompanied her to Skopje’s train station. After tender farewells, everyone wept and waved handkerchiefs as the train slowly pulled out of the station, and Agnes leaned out the window and wept and waved her handkerchief back at them until the train disappeared around a bend. Agnes would never see her beloved mother again. In the convent, Agnes chose the name Thérèse in honor of the Saint of Lisieux. But another nun had already chosen that name, so Agnes became Teresa, spelling the name in the Spanish style. After learning the Rule of her Order and basic English, she sailed on the long voyage to India, arriving in Calcutta in January 1929. India would be her home for the rest of her life. 

Sister Teresa taught at a girls’ primary school in Calcutta, taking final vows in 1937, and was known warmly as Mother Teresa. Due to her open personality, self-discipline, deep prayer life, organizational abilities, and native intelligence, she became the school principal in 1944. Everyone loved her, especially her students, and Mother Teresa was a contented nun doing important work for the Church. Her youthful zeal had been fulfilled. But then something happened to alter her life’s course, something entirely unexpected. In 1946, while riding on a train to her annual retreat, Mother Teresa received her “call within a call.” Jesus told her, by mysterious means, that He desired her to serve Him in the poorest of the poor, who were so ignorant of Him and of His love. She must start a religious order.

Two years of organizing passed until, in August 1948, Mother Teresa donned her famous white and blue sari for the first time. She left the comfort and predictability of the Loretto convent school for a hard life on the street among the slums of the poorest, hungriest, and dirtiest people in Calcutta. Her order, the Missionaries of Charity, was formally established in 1950 and drew its first sisters from among Mother Teresa’s former students. The order soon exploded with growth and expanded internationally. Missionaries of Charity sisters worked with AIDS patients, the dying, the starving, in soup kitchens, orphanages, and directly with the poor lying in filthy gutters.

By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity had over four thousand sisters serving in about one hundred and twenty countries. Mother Teresa became internationally famous, an icon of charity and peace, for all the right reasons. After her death it was revealed that she struggled to feel God’s presence for much of her life but persevered in prayer and sacrifice nonetheless. She was constructed of steel, in perpetual motion, and operated on almost no food or sleep. All of her religious sisters are similarly indestructible. She was canonized by Pope Francis in 2016.

Saint Mother Teresa, your generosity to the poor and destitute inspired millions. Your life of dedication to prayer, to the Church, and to the dignity of all life inspires us still. May we emulate your life of total service and total love by loving God first.

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September 3: Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor
c. 540–604
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of musicians, singers, students, and teachers

A gifted nobleman serves Rome, becomes a monk, and then a consequential pope

When your salad is awesome, your car amazing, and your internet connection is great, there’s a problem. Overused superlatives diminish their own meaning and crowd the linguistic space reserved for things which are truly awesome, amazing, and great. Today’s saint sent the large missionary party that trekked across Europe and converted Saxon England to Catholicism, establishing a culture that endured for almost a millennium. That’s awesome! He wrote a theological work that was used for centuries by thousands of bishops to help them become more fatherly pastors. That’s amazing! Gregorian chant is named after him; he is one of the four Latin Fathers of the Church; he was the first pope to use “Servant of the Servants of God” as a papal title; he alone preserved the memory of Saint Benedict with a biography; he made revisions to the content and structure of the Mass which are part of the liturgy until today; and he was the most impactful pope of the long span of centuries from the 500s to the 1000s. That’s great! These accomplishments thus truly merit the title Great with which Saint Gregory has been justly crowned by history.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great was born into a noble Roman family with a history of service to Church and empire. The family home was perched on one of Rome’s seven ancient hills, the Caelian, which Via San Gregorio still cuts through today. His father was a Roman senator, although at a time when Italy was in decline and the imperial government was based in Constantinople. Gregory received an education in keeping with his class and became the Prefect of Rome, its highest civil position, in his early thirties. In 579 he was chosen by the pope as his emissary to the emperor’s court in Constantinople, primarily to seek the emperor’s assistance in protecting Italy from the Lombard tribes that had long ago overrun her.

Gregory was elected the bishop of his home city in 590 and was thus obligated to abandon the quiet life of a monk, which he had been living with some friends for a few years in a small monastery near his family home. In numerous letters which have fortunately been preserved, Pope Gregory, soon after his election, bemoans the loss of his monastic solitude, peaceful recollection, and life of prayer. But he had only been a monk for a few short years. Gregory’s skills as an administrator, honed in his long years of prior civil and church leadership, proved valuable when he sat on the Chair of Saint Peter.

He drew into the orbit of papal authority the bishops of France and Spain who had, until then, been operating somewhat autonomously. He secured the allegiance of Italy’s northern tribes to orthodox Catholicism, compelling them to abandon the counterfeit Arian Christianity they had held for centuries. And Gregory made the fateful decision to personally organize and promote the great, and highly successful, missionary journey of Saint Augustine of Canterbury to the Kingdom of Kent in England.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great’s legacy in liturgy, pastoral doctrine, and miracles left a deep mark on medieval Europe and beyond. The Council of Trent in 1562 mandated the suppression of votive Mass cycles for the dead or for any other need. But the Council Fathers made one exception: The Mass of Saint Gregory, a cycle of thirty Masses on thirty consecutive days for the release of a soul from purgatory, was not suppressed. Almost a thousand years after his death, Gregory’s memory was too venerable to suppress. Gregory was an encourager of the encouragers, a bishop who modeled, strengthened, and explained how and why his fellow bishops should be fathers first and lords second.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great, your example of holy leadership, of scholarly practicality, of balance between universal and local concerns, helps all Christians to weigh their many duties in a proper balance and to choose correctly what matters most to God and their own salvation.

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August 29: The Passion of Saint John the Baptist, Martyr
c. 29 A.D.
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

A desert-dwelling, locust-eating, weed-wearing, celibate ascetic dies for marriage

Saint John Vianney was so opposed to the dances held routinely in his small town of Ars that he dedicated a small chapel in his parish church to Saint John the Baptist. At its entrance was painted, perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, a warning of the evil effects produced by lust and drink: "His head was the price of a dance." Saint John the Baptist’s head was, indeed, the wage rendered by an older man for the satisfaction of watching a young girl dance at his birthday party. More remotely, however, John’s beheading was not caused by a suggestive dance. He paid with his head for poking the bear. John denounced King Herod Antipas, to his face, for divorcing his lawful wife and taking as his own Herodias, his sister-in-law, the wife of his still living half-brother Philip. (Convoluted family blood lines also made Herodias Herod’s niece.) John the Baptist died a martyr for marriage.

Herod Antipas was a tetrarch—one of four rulers who co-governed ancient Palestine as client kings under the oversight of a Roman governor. Herod Antipas learned cruelty at home on his father’s knee. His father, Herod the Great, had two of his own sons strangled to death, murdered his favorite wife, and ordered the slaughter of all the male babies of Bethlehem. Herod Antipas’ imprisonment and execution of John was more aggressive than his restrained interaction, a few years later, with John’s cousin. Jesus had called Herod a “fox” when some pharisees told Jesus that Herod was plotting His death. Pontius Pilate later sent Jesus to Herod for interrogation after Pilate determined that the Jew’s complaints about Jesus fell more under Herod’s jurisdiction than Pilate’s own. At this strange audience in Jerusalem between Herod and Jesus on Good Friday, Herod wanted Jesus to perform a miracle for him, as if Jesus were a mere magician who pulled rabbits out of hats. But Jesus said not a word to the man who killed His beloved cousin. Jesus, after all, did not come to provide bread and circuses to the curious. He performed miracles to elicit and to reward faith. So the fox sent Jesus back to Pilate for what always happened next.

Herod is to John the Baptist what Pilate is to Jesus. Neither Herod’s nor Pilate’s first choice was to order an execution. But cowardice and fear coalesced until commanding the death of an innocent man was more expedient than braving the ridicule and threats of subordinates. According to Saint Mark, “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man…When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him” (Mk 6: 20). “[Herod] was deeply grieved” (Mk 6: 26) that he had to order John’s death. But he didn’t actually have to order John’s death. If he were truly grieved, he could have stood up in the midst of the happy crowd, said “I made a stupid promise which I now regret,” and granted Salome (her name is not found in the Bible) some other handsome gift instead of a blood-splattered plate. Herod beheaded a man to save face, to avoid embarrassment, and to avoid having to say “I made a mistake.”

The Passion, or Beheading, of Saint John the Baptist is one of the very oldest liturgical feasts on the Church’s calendar. John’s birth may be the oldest feast. Along with the feasts of Holy Week, the original event of John’s death is right there on the surface of Holy Scripture, and so likely was commemorated as soon as the Church started commemorating anything. John the Baptist’s colorful life on the edge of respectability came to an abrupt end due to the weakness of a weak man, Herod, and due to the revenge sought by the troubled conscience of Herodias, who despised John for mentioning the obvious. Saint Jerome writes that Herodias’s rage was not satiated by the grisly head of her tormentor on a platter, but that she rabidly stabbed the tongue which had indicted her even after it was silenced.

Saint John the Baptist, your penitential life ended abruptly when you spoke the truth to power. You did not flinch, vacillate, or equivocate. You were imprisoned and then killed for defending the dignity of marriage. Help us to be as courageous and plain-spoken as you.

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August 28: Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor
354–430
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of theologians and printers

A psychologist, theologian, and working bishop is the greatest convert after Saint Paul

The mighty African Saint Augustine climbed the heights of thought, stood upright on their peaks, and turned toward Rome, and thus spread his long, deep shadow over the entire globe. As a Christian thinker, he has few equals. He is the saint of the first millennium. Augustine was born in the small Roman village of Tagaste, in Northern Africa, to a minor civil official and a pious, head-strong mother. Tagaste had no swagger. Its simple people were bent over from working the land since time immemorial. The great African cities hugged the Mediterranean coast, far from Tagaste, which was cut off, two hundred miles inland. When he was a boy, Augustine imagined what the far-off waves of the sea were like by peering into a glass of water. When he was twenty-eight, he descended from his native hills and sailed for Rome to find himself, God, and holy fame. When he returned to Africa many years later, it was for good. The hot-tempered young African had matured into a cool-headed spiritual father. He was now their bishop, lovingly and tirelessly serving the open, forthright townsmen that were his natural kin.

It is challenging to categorize someone who is the founder of an entire genre or school of thought. No one knew what an autobiography was until Augustine wrote his Confessions. There was Caesar’s Gallic War before, and there would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions later. And there is volume after volume now. All pale. Augustine wrote the Confessions as the Bishop of Hippo when he was about forty-three, covering his early life up to the age of thirty-three. It is not a great book due to its density of historical detail. The reader hungers for facts and is left unsatisfied. Whereas autobiographies are normally stuffed with people, places, and things, Augustine says almost nothing about his father, only mentioning his death in passing. He does not clarify how many siblings he has. It is often not clear when, or where, events occur. Augustine is clearly not concerned, in short, with his outward journey. It is the inner drama, the drama of the soul, that he wants to recount. The Confessions changes the answer to the perennial question “What really happened?” from the outside to the inside. Augustine is the author of the first “Story of a Soul.”

Augustine is the world’s first great psychologist. He does self-reflection and analyses ages before Saint Ignatius and perceives unconscious motivations centuries before Freud. The painfully self-aware, tell-you-everything, what-are-you-hiding, hyper-modern psyche of today is deformed Augustinianism. It took a long time for the future to catch up to him. Augustine does so many things first, does them better, and does them as a Catholic. With the historical details left to the side, he self-investigates his early childhood, his unsatisfied father-hunger, the emotional darkness caused by the death of friends, his enduring guilt for stealing some pears, his complex love for his mother, and how hard it is…how hard…to leave the woman he has loved for fifteen years. They have a child together after all. But Augustine must let her go. He must move on, and he does. She is the Confessions’ mysterious character. He never even gives her name.

Reading other great theologians, one knows almost nothing about them, their friends, or their personal thoughts or desires. Reading Augustine, you get the man in full. He is concerned with relationships, that of his to God and to his mother, and that of others to himself. He would start his personal letters with Dulcissimus concivis—My dearest friend. And he meant it. He was a highly educated scholar, a great letter writer who worked in the close orbit of the Roman imperial court, and a sophisticated thinker who most opened the intellectual path the Church would walk until the scholastics of medieval times introduced Aristotle to Christian thought.

When Augustine turned his head from the beauty of the senses toward the holy beauty of God, his personal sensory privation was more than an absence. It was a total commitment. In the second phase of his life, Augustine placed the heavy cross of routine pastoral care on his shoulders. He became a working bishop and excelled at this role. This complex man, this highly fruitful, working intellectual, asked to be alone in his room when death finally came for him in his seventy-fifth year.

Saint Augustine, may our own examination of conscience be like yours—continual, honest, and Christ-centered. You achieved a high level of self-awareness not for its own sake but to prune all sin from your soul. May we be as self-focused, and as God-focused, as you were.

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August 27: Saint Monica
c. 331–387
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of difficult marriages, homemakers, and mothers

Without her example of persevering prayer, her gifted son would not have converted

Most of the female saints of the first few centuries of the Church are virgins, martyrs, or both. Most of the medieval and modern female saints are nuns, especially foundresses of religious orders. Married female saints are relatively rare. With some few contemporary exceptions, they are the mothers of kings, of emperors, or of other canonized saints. Saint Monica is the mother of Saint Augustine. She was raised in a Catholic family in long extinct Christian North Africa, probably in the small town of Tagaste in modern day Algeria. Tagaste had been Christian for over two hundred and fifty years by the time Monica was born. So although from a present-day perspective she was born in ancient times, just after the Council of Nicea, her family’s faith likely dated to the first waves of African Christianity, long before Nicea.

Monica had at least three children: Navigius, Perpetua, and her oldest and dearest son, Augustine. No mother can be reduced just to what they mean to their children, yet it is due exclusively to her son Augustine that so much is known about the life of Monica. Augustine seemed to never stop writing, and after God and Augustine himself, Monica is the central character in his autobiography, the Confessions. Monica is ever concerned about, and ever present to, Augustine. She won’t let him out of her sight.

When Augustine is preparing to sail for Italy from the port at Carthage, he is surprised to learn that his mother intends to travel with him. So he deceives her about the ship’s departure time and escapes without her. But she is persistent. She later follows him to Rome only to find that he has moved on. So she follows him to Milan, finds him, and moves in with him and his friends. It is no wonder that Augustine wrote: “She liked to have me with her, as mothers do, but far more than most mothers.”

Monica married a man named Patricius and converted him, at least superficially. He was a difficult man whose early death left her a widow at forty. Monica and her husband wanted their gifted son Augustine to receive the best education possible, so they sent him away for schooling. And there Augustine fell into the serious and enduring moral and theological errors which would form the central drama of Monica’s life. It is said that all of the plots in the world can be reduced to just five or six. One of those is “Get back home.” Saint Monica’s life was dedicated to getting her son back to his home, the Church. She wept, she prayed, she fasted. Nothing seemed to work for fifteen years while her son strayed far from the Catholic path, seemingly without remorse.

In the midst of her spiritual trials and sufferings over Augustine, Monica had a vision. She was standing on a wooden beam. A bright, fluorescent being told her to dry her eyes, for “your son is with you.” Monica told Augustine about the vision. He responded that yes, they could indeed be together if she would just abandon her faith. Monica immediately retorted: “He didn’t say that I was with you. He said that you were with me.” Augustine never forgot her quick and insightful answer.

In Milan, Monica befriended the great Saint Ambrose, who played such a key role in Augustine’s conversion. The seed of her prayers bore fruit when Augustine abandoned his sinful life, was baptized, and decided to return to North Africa as a Christian leader. Her son had come home to the Church and was returning to his native land. Her life’s mission accomplished, Saint Monica died in her late fifties in the Roman port of Ostia, while waiting to board the ship to cross over to Africa. In her final hours, Augustine asked if he should transport her body to Tagaste for burial next to her husband. She said she was happy to be buried wherever she died, for “nothing is far from God.” Her remains are now found in the Basilica of Saint Augustine in central Rome.

Saint Monica, you were persevering in your efforts to straighten the crooked paths of your son’s life. Your prayers, pilgrimages, fasts, and words were fruitful, but only after many tears. Help us to be as concerned as you for the immortal souls of those who are close to us.

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August 25: Saint Louis
1214–1270
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of barbers, grooms, and Saint Louis, Missouri

A king leads in piety, mortification, and faith, and dies crusading for the King of all

Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24). Today’s saint fulfilled Christ’s commandment in two ways. First and most obviously, King Louis IX of France, or Saint Louis, took up his cross by practicing serious physical mortifications his entire life. He wore a hair shirt, fasted, never took God’s name in vain, and would not tell jokes or even laugh on Fridays. Secondly, he had a cloth cross woven onto his tunic and thus became a knight crusader. Louis and countless other medieval knights understood the commandment to “take up their cross” to be fulfilled not merely through physical mortification but by wading into battle with the sign of Christ on their chests. That visible cloth cross boldly proclaimed a man’s commitment to liberating the Holy Land from Muslim control through hard battle.

When Louis was a child his mother told him, “I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.” He never forgot her words. After his father’s early death, Louis was crowned, or anointed, king in the quasi-liturgical ceremony whose main elements can still be seen at modern coronations. He married at twenty, and he and his wife had eleven children. He was totally devoted to Christ and the Church. He prayed the breviary every day, attended daily Mass, and constructed stunning churches, including Paris’ Saint Chapelle to house his collection of relics, including the true Cross of Christ. He was so disturbed by the sin of blasphemy that he promulgated a law that all blasphemers be branded on the lips. He waged war against the Cathars of Southern France and, together with the Dominicans and the Inquisition, vanquished their heretical movement.

Louis possessed an elusive charisma that made people not only want to be in his presence but also to touch his person. He was well educated, friendly, curious, and truly humble. Every man was his friend. He invited the quiet Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was studying in Paris at the time, over to dinner for the joy of theological conversation. He promulgated laws respecting the presumption of innocence and due process for everyone. He was, in short, a model Christian king who reigned over a golden century in which France was the largest, most unified, and wealthiest kingdom in Europe.

Despite his fame and the creature comforts of home, Louis made the courageous, if reckless, decision to personally lead two crusades. The first was initially successful but ended disastrously with Louis’s capture and his army being crushed in battle. Only a king’s ransom secured his release. The second crusade he embarked on was even more disastrous. King Louis died of typhus, along with many men in his camp, on the shores of modern Tunisia, having just begun their journey. One of his last acts was to kneel by his bed to receive Holy Communion. He had wanted to die a martyr, or a confessor, for the faith. His desire was not technically fulfilled. But he did give his life sacrificially in the noble, centuries-long, quixotic quest to reconquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land for Christian pilgrimage. He was canonized in 1297.

Saint Louis of France, you were intrepid in your love for Christ and the Church. Impart from heaven to all modern Catholics some of your same daring spirit—to be courageous in living and spreading the faith, to give and not count the cost.

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August 25: Saint Joseph Calasanz, Priest
1556–1648
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Catholic schools and school children

A visionary implements his plan, is defamed, and forgives

The star of today’s saint burns less brightly than others in the great constellation of counter-reformation saints. But the educational vision of Saint Joseph Calasanz and the ultimate spread and triumph of his order after his death have had an enduring impact far exceeding his humble reputation.

Calasanz was born into a minor noble family in Spain, the youngest of eight children. His parents valued education and sent their boy to religious schools to receive a fine training in the classics. While a teenager, he decided that God was calling him to be a priest. After finishing his university studies with distinction, he was ordained in 1583. He carried out several sensitive and important pastoral and administrative duties for his local bishop and then made a life-altering decision. In 1592 he resigned his appointments, gave away his inheritance to his sisters, funded some worthy projects for the needy, and departed for Rome. He would live there for the next fifty-six years of his long life.

Like his Roman contemporary Saint Philip Neri, Joseph saw the pressing need to educate the great mass of poor children who spent their days doing everything except going to school. With the assistance of highly placed connections in the Church and Roman nobility, Joseph was given rent-free space in a parish where he offered free classes to poor children. The only schools in existence at the time were tuition based. Without knowing it, Joseph had done something revolutionary. He had started the first free school in modern Europe, although similar initiatives were quick to follow. Joseph’s free school for the poor immediately exploded in size to over a thousand students. He and his co-workers quickly founded similar schools in other regions of Italy, became more disciplined in their approach, and sought, and received, official status in the Church. In 1622 the pope approved the Order of Poor Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, or the Piarists, as they were commonly known. They were the first order of priests dedicated to primary school education.

While his successful educational vision was being implemented, Joseph’s work provoked envy among the upper classes, clerics included, who resented educating, for free, the lower echelon of society. Joseph also aroused suspicion for his personal friendship with Galileo Galilei, who was under investigation by Church authorities for his theory that the earth moved around the sun. Crises internal to the Piarists concerning the sin that dare not speak its name caused even greater alarm. All of these pressures and intrigues led to Joseph’s arrest and humiliation by the Inquisition for a brief period in 1642. Two of his own Piarist priests were his most bitter enemies, and, in their attempts to cover up their own sins and incompetence, they pulled every lever of influence they could put their hands on to remove Joseph as the head of his own order. Joseph was not bitter, said it was the Lord’s will, and forgave them. Due to its internal problems, however, the order was suppressed in 1646.

When Joseph died in 1648 at the age of ninety, his life-work had been obliterated. But the Piarists were resurrected in the following decades, thrived, and opened schools in various countries. Piarist fathers helped stem the Protestant tide in Poland, educated luminaries such as Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, and Goya, and provided the model for free public schools later adopted by Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle and Saint John Bosco. Joseph Calasanz was canonized in 1767 “a perpetual miracle of fortitude and another Job” in the words of a pope.

Saint Joseph Calasanz, you were disgraced, defamed, maligned and imprisoned and yet forgave all who had robbed you of your most precious personal possession: your reputation. Help us to be so forgiving toward those who steal from us what we have taken so long to build up.

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August 24: Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of bookbinders, butchers, and leather workers

The Church conquered an imperfect world due to the heroic witness of the Apostles

Little is known with certainty about today’s Apostle, and perhaps Saint Bartholomew is just fine with that. If he were like Saint John the Baptist, he would want Christ to increase and himself to decrease. It is possible, although not certain, that Bartholomew is the same Apostle as Nathaniel. Bartholomew means “Son of Tolmai” and is not a name, technically, but a patronymic, like the Scandinavian “son” found in “Anderson” or “Erikson.” The Bartholomew of Matthew, Mark, and Luke may describe the man known in the Gospel of John more correctly as Nathaniel. Bartholomew is paired with Philip in some Gospel lists, which corresponds, interestingly, with Philip being an old friend of Nathaniel in John’s Gospel. But so little is known with certainty about the Apostles that these conjectures will likely never be resolved.

After his appearance in the Gospels, Bartholomew first resurfaces almost three hundred years later in the works of Eusebius, a bishop and church historian who wrote around 300 A.D. Eusebius relates a story about a Christian teacher traveling in India who is told that an Apostle, presumably Bartholomew, had preached there long before him and had brought a Hebrew Gospel with him. Equally vague traditions have Bartholomew evangelizing in Persia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The details of his death likewise dissipated in the fog of ancient history. One tradition holds that he was flayed alive, a story reflected in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, which depicts Bartholomew holding his own skin. Because of this tradition, Bartholomew is the patron saint of tanners. History holds that Bartholomew’s relics are in the church named after him on an island in Rome’s Tiber River.

The Nicene Creed states that we believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The Church, then, is an object of faith in the same way that God is an object of faith. She is not the end result of a world-wide community of believers or merely a forum for belief. She gathers. She is not gathered. The Church is the mother of Christians, not their offspring. The Church is more than a carrier of faith, more than a train whose cargo barrels through the centuries transporting the heavy freight of the Gospels and tradition to diverse cultures. The Church not only bears a message, then, She is the message.

Unfortunately, the Church’s sins and failings are, for many, the primary obstacle to belief in Christ. It is not just that the Church’s holiness is not apparent. It is that Her unity is questioned due to deep theological divisions. And Her members’ struggles for power, wealth, and prestige also obscure a more pristine Christian faith which She should project. But to think that the Church could be sublimely holy, totally unified, and pristinely sinless is to dream. The Church exists in the world, reflects the world’s dramas, and suffers from Her same sins. We do not believe in the Church because She is perfect, but because there is nothing else like Her. She is unique. She is better than any alternative. If we expect from the Church the Sacraments, we will never be disappointed.

Today’s saint lived and evangelized in the era of the dreamy early church, when the fire of Christ’s love burned hottest, when the Gospel was as fresh as baked bread, and when gusts of the Holy Spirit blew through the Apostles’ hair. And yet…Bartholomew still had his skin slowly peeled from his body by a sharp knife, or was crucified, or both. The world was wicked in the first century too, and so the Church had problems in that era as well. Just read the letters of Saint Paul. The Church was born into a rough pagan world and still exists in a rough, though different, secular world. Saint Bartholomew died at the hands of imperfect pagans for an imperfect Church. Yet the imperfect, primitive Church persevered in her infancy because of the witness and sacrifice of many saints. The imperfect, modern Church will continue to persevere in Her adulthood because of our witness and sacrifice today.

Saint Bartholomew, help all Christians to see in your example of martyrdom a heroic witness to perseverance in the face of difficulty, of fidelity in the face of doubt, and of courage in the face of timidity. May we have just a portion of what you had in such abundance.

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August 23: Saint Rose of Lima, Virgin
1586–1617
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Peru, florists, and gardeners

America’s first saint, she conquered herself by direct attack

Today’s saint was born Isabel Flores de Oliva in colonial Spain, today’s Peru, to a middle-class Catholic family. She took the name “Rose” when she was confirmed by Lima’s bishop, the future Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo. “Rose” had been her nickname since infancy after a servant said that she was as beautiful as a rose. Young Rose was indeed beautiful and attracted the attention of various suitors. But she had decided from a young age to give herself to Christ alone, so she actively deterred male interest by cutting off her hair, rubbing pepper into her pure skin to blister her face, and by damaging her feminine hands with the acidic juice of limes.

Her natural affinity for the things of God was not reciprocated by her father, who blocked her desire to enter a Dominican convent as a nun. Instead, Rose became a Third Order Dominican, a lay woman dedicated to living Catholicism in accord with Dominican spiritual ideals outside of the cloister. But Rose pushed her Third Order spirituality beyond its natural limits. She lived poverty, chastity, obedience and numerous other virtues far more rigorously than most professed nuns. Bending somewhat to his daughter’s desires, Rose’s father allowed her to live apart from the family in a small hut on his property. From that hut, and from a room in the family home where she cared for the sick and the poor, Rose became famous throughout Lima.

Rose’s fame was due to her generous care for the sick and, perhaps most of all, due to her extraordinary austerities and some related miraculous events. Rose’s spiritual model was Saint Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century Italian mystic who was also a Dominican tertiary. Saint Catherine also lived at home, was from a large family like Rose, and had a high, a very high, threshold for physical pain and suffering, just like Rose. Rose did not fast merely on certain days or at certain times. She fasted from life itself. She seemingly ate only Holy Communion. What little she did consume she would often force herself to vomit up afterward. She ate no meat, slept on a bed of tile shards, and wore a crown, disguised with flowers, equipped with small spikes which pierced the thin, taut skin wrapped over her skull.

Saint Rose’s short life was, on one hand, the full, ripened fruit of sixteenth-century Spanish mysticism—pious, mortifying, Christocentric, and theologically orthodox. From a different perspective, Rose’s sustained and extreme mortifications were on the far margins of psychologically healthy. Her self-attacks would today be considered expressions of bulimia, mental instability, and self-hating to the point of illness. But Rose is not here to be interviewed on the Freudian couch, and to describe her personality, in any case, is not to judge it. Saint Rose lived a model life for her era, was clearly motivated by love of God, and expressed such control over her natural, corporeal needs that sanctifying grace as her hidden strength cannot be discounted.

Rose died in the perfume of holiness at the age of thirty-one. Her funeral was held in Lima’s Cathedral with all local dignitaries in attendance. She was beatified in 1667 and canonized in 1671. She is interred in the same church as Saint Martin de Porres in central Lima. Her pre-Vatican II feast day of August 30 is a national holiday in Peru, and her image graces that country’s highest denomination currency. She is known as a powerful miracle worker credited with numerous physical healings unto today.

Saint Rose of Lima, you were young and holy. You dedicated your body and soul to God while still a child. Through your example and through your heavenly intercession, help all Catholics, especially the young, to dedicate their lives to God from the very start.

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August 22: Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

The mother of a king is a queen who receives honor in her son’s realm

Mary is both a queen and a mother, but she is more mother than queen. Mary’s Queenship and “mothership,” or motherhood, spark to life simultaneously. In the very moment Mary becomes a mother at the Annunciation, she also becomes a queen. The Archangel Gabriel tells Mary that her Son will sit on “the throne of his ancestor David” and that “He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:32–33). Since Jesus is a king, and since He is conceived in the womb of Mary, and since in Israel the mother of a king was always a queen, (the daughter not necessarily so), Mary becomes a queen. Some texts from the early centuries of the Church call Mary the “domina,” the female of “dominus,” Latin for “master” or “Lord.”

It is not royal blood, but her motherly relationship, that makes Mary a queen. And since nothing is excluded from the realm of Christ the King, Mary is the Queen of that same realm, including both heaven and earth. This realm was not earned through violent conquest or political machinations. The Kingdom of Christ the King was purchased through a blood sacrifice of the King Himself who died on the cross. Soldiers were not killed so that Christ could walk over their corpses on the battlefield in order to rule a vanquished people from a secular throne. No, of course not. Christ humbly allowed Himself to be murdered so that He could rise forty hours later and ascend into heaven to be seated, like a king, at the right hand of the Father. (Kings sit. Their audience’s stand.) Christ gives the world a new form of reigning, a reinterpretation of the words “I win!”

Mary is that heavenly queen in the mysterious vision of the Book of Revelation in which appears “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rv 12:1–3). The complex symbolism of this crowned empress encompasses Mary, Israel, and the Church Herself. Mary’s coronation, the Fifth Glorious Mystery of the rosary, has not been defined dogmatically but has been celebrated liturgically and depicted in art since early medieval times.

The most ancient depiction of Mary as queen is a mosaic from the 500s in a small church in the historic center of Rome! But the feast day of her Queenship was only placed in the Church’s calendar in 1954. Vatican II stated unequivocally that “Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen of the universe…” (Lumen Gentium, 59). After the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, the octave of Mary’s Assumption was abrogated but is still recalled in her Queenship being commemorated eight days after August 15, showing the link between the two celebrations.

Earthly kings, queens, and kingdoms, so present throughout the lived history of mankind, are, more cosmically, images or signs of the structure of authority that lies behind all creation. Mankind naturally organizes its public life to ensure peaceful co-existence with others, to promote order and tranquility, and to foster the common good in a thousand ways. This secular response of establishing a structure to manage together what cannot be managed alone is universal and always includes certain leaders to represent the organized community. All of this has a religious equivalent. A sacred canopy hangs over the world. A timeless, divine mega-structure encompasses under itself all of the smaller, temporary civic structures. The man anointed as king, the woman crowned as queen, the order they impose through a just rule in a secular polity, point to something else—an underlying, and overarching, sacred polity in which God rules His creation like a fatherly king. In this timeless theological union, the feminine presence is felt. The queen mother is there, interceding with her King-Son on behalf of His subjects. She worships with them but also receives their honor. The accolades directed at her are deflected, mirror-like, to the greater One to whom she is holy daughter, holy mother, holy spouse and holy queen, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

Mary, Queen of the Universe, in your Son’s Kingdom, the faithful struggle to be faithful and to be fruitful. We are under your regal yet maternal care. May we please both our King and Father, and you, our Queen and Mother, since all parents are deserving of their children’s honor.

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August 20: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot and Doctor
1090–1153
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Cistercian Order, beekeepers, and candlemakers

A reformer par excellence, he saved the Benedictine Order and rejuvenated monasticism

Today’s saint was like a medieval rock star who never stopped touring Europe. He traveled with an entourage, drew enormous crowds, was wildly popular, and called the cream of society his friends. The details of Saint Bernard’s life, though he lived before even Saint Francis of Assisi, the Magna Carta, and Dante, are abundantly documented. He was nearly as prolific a writer as Saint Augustine, but primarily via letters, not thick books. And these letters outline his character in sharp profile. He was intelligent, emotion laden, erudite, forceful, and contemplative. He spoke and wrote poetically, beautifully, clearly, and deeply. Pope Pius XII called him “the last of the Fathers” of the Church.

Bernard was born in a castle to a highborn family and was sent away by his parents during his youth to receive a classical education. After the death of his mother left him in a depression, he pondered more seriously what God wanted of him. When Bernard was a child, in his native region of Southeastern France, a local monk decided to try something new. He founded a new monastery at a place called Cîteaux in the hope of living the Benedictine Rule with exactitude and rigor. At the age of twenty-two, still mourning his mother, Bernard decided to dedicate his life to God and to enter this new, experimental monastery. But Bernard being Bernard, with all the force of his mind and personality, when he knocked on the door of the abbey, he was not alone. Behind him at the door stood a long train of thirty of his brothers, cousins, and friends, all noblemen. Bernard was the leader. They were the followers. They wanted to become monks because he wanted to become a monk. When he asked, they answered, and they answered “Yes.” This natural gift to command and lead was a sign of things to come.

Cîteaux inspired and gave its name to the Cistercian movement of monastic reform. Because of Bernard’s dynamic presence, Cîteaux soon overflowed with monks, and Bernard was sent, as Abbot, to found a new monastery at Clairvaux, or Clear Valley. This was his base for the rest of his itinerant life. As the first Abbot of Clairvaux, Bernard stamped the Cistercian movement with its distinctive character: sobriety in art and architecture, solemnity in liturgy, austerity in life, industriousness in labor, strictness in observance of the Rule, and silence pervading all. Cîteaux gave birth to Clairvaux, and Clairvaux spawned a vast Cistercian family that considers Bernard its founder. By the time of Bernard’s death, there were 343 Cistercian monasteries the length and breadth of Europe.

For an austere contemplative monk, Bernard, ironically, spent much of his life on the road. His gifts were such that he was consulted by princes, kings, and popes on every imaginable issue. He participated in Church councils, mediated civil conflicts, inaugurated Crusades, and wrote long commentaries on prayer, theology, and Scripture. He had to employ secretaries, like a minister of state, who recorded the prodigious correspondence that flowed constantly from his mouth. He became famous as a miraculous healer. Crowds of people lined his route to receive his blessing or to feel his hands press against their skulls. In one incident, after wading into a large, clamoring crowd desiring his miraculous touch, he had to fight to return to his lodging as the people tore at his habit. A wit wrote that the real miracle was not his healing, but that Bernard escaped alive.

Bernard’s authentic and tender devotion to the Virgin Mary was expressed sublimely in his writings. For his Marian devotion, eloquence, and contemplative spirit, Bernard substitutes for Beatrice as Dante takes the final steps of his mythical voyage toward God in the Divine Comedy. In the blazing fire of pure love that is the Beatific Vision, Bernard is at Dante’s side as their eyes drink in the vision of a splendid, holographic, white rose emanating like a vision from the Godhead’s bright light. The Queen of this mystical white rose is the Virgin, and “faithful Bernard” gazes in silent admiration at the woman he loves so dearly. Saint Bernard was canonized in 1174 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1830.

Saint Bernard, may we see in your devotion to Mary, endless travels, strict life, and keen eye for beauty, the model of an educated and devoted monk. Intercede for all religious, and for all those with a contemplative heart who are in the world, to love God half as well as you did.

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August 21: Saint Pius X, Pope
1835–1914
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of First Communicants and pilgrims

Born humble and poor, he never forgot his origins while in the Chair of St. Peter

In the long span of three hundred and forty years between the death of Pope Saint Pius V in 1572 and today’s pope-saint, who died in 1914, not one pope is a canonized saint. It is a sign of the Church’s solid foundations and rock-like durability that less than holy men have normally led her, and still she has thrived. Analogous to the doctrine of ex opere operato, which holds that a sacrament’s grace is communicated by merely being performed, the headship of the universal Church is exercised well by intelligent men who care for her good, even if they are not personally holy. But that a pope be holy makes the Church even more impressive, in the same way that a priest’s holiness doesn’t make a sacrament more a sacrament but does make it more fruitful.

Pope Saint Pius X was born Giuseppe Sarto in Northern Italy to humble parents in a poor home, the second of ten children. He entered the seminary as an adolescent and was ordained a priest at the young age of twenty-three. He served for many years in parishes and seminaries before being made a bishop and then a cardinal. His life experience in the Church was almost exclusively pastoral, that is, concerned with the care of souls. He was not a university professor, Vatican diplomat, scholar, or ecclesiastical bureaucrat. He was the only pope of the twentieth century without a doctoral degree. He was a parish priest, confessor, spiritual director, and boots-on-the-ground diocesan bishop. His rural background and forthright view of the faith lent Pius a common touch which sympathized with the faith of the “everyman” who fill the pews on Sunday morning. But Pius’ past limited him somewhat as well. In his desire to protect the faithful from error like a good father protects his children, he could be overly suspicious of, and reactionary toward, a great deal of theological scholarship that would later be absorbed into the universal body of Christ at the Second Vatican Council.

Pius X made changes to the Church’s liturgical and sacramental life that proved to be enduring and popular. He lowered the age of First Holy Communion from twelve to seven and encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion instead of the once-a-year, Easter Duty reception that was then typical. Pius simplified the Breviary, the book of Psalms that priests and nuns pray every day, encouraged the use of Gregorian chant at Mass, and mandated that the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) be present in every parish in the world to teach catechism to children. He also began the enormous process of gathering and synthesizing the Church’s massive, centuries’ old body of law into an easy to handle Code of Canon Law which was promulgated in 1917.

Pius reacted strongly and negatively toward various schools of theological scholarship he lumped under the imprecise title of “Modernism.” Pius was intransigent and relentless in weeding out from the garden of the Church all those with non-scholastic methods and conclusions in philosophy and theology. That is, he distrusted research and teaching not rooted in the approach of Saint Thomas Aquinas and similar medieval thinkers. The “Modernist” approach to ancient texts, language studies, scriptural analysis, church history, comparative theology, etc. would eventually become standard in Catholicism. But it took many decades for these more critical approaches to merge with theological orthodoxy, deep spirituality, and fidelity to Rome in the powerful synthesis taught by Vatican II and beyond.

Saint Pius X stayed humble and poor his entire life. He was embarrassed by the pomp of papal ceremonies but nonetheless understood their significance to the faithful. Three of his unmarried sisters lived in near poverty on the outskirts of Rome while he reigned as pope. He could have, but did not, favor them with titles or other privileges to ease their burdens. Pius died the same month as the guns of August roared a start to World War I. His death resulted partly from a deep melancholy that Christian Europe had once again devolved into such conflict. He was canonized in 1954.

Pope Saint Pius X, your doctrinal fidelity, Eucharistic piety, and devotion to Mary were exemplary. May your simplicity of life, common touch, and bravery in fighting the enemies of the Church, inspire all who lead the Body of Christ on earth in whatever capacity.

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August 19: Saint John Eudes, Priest
1601–1680
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Diocese of Baie-Comeau, Québec

His fine education led to a life of deep prayer and identity with Jesus

Many educated Catholics are familiar with the great Spanish saints of the 1500s: Saints Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and many more. They are saints of the counter-reformation era but not counter-reformation saints. Due to the reforms of a visionary Spanish cardinal long before Father Luther went mad, there was no reformation in Spain that needed countering. This sixteenth-century, Spanish golden age has a counterpart in seventeenth-century France. France in the 1600s produced Saints Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Margaret Mary Alacoque, Jane Frances de Chantal and today’s saint, John Eudes, among many other men and women outstanding in holiness. The reforms of the Council of Trent were slow to be implemented in France, but their seeds eventually sprouted abundant spiritual, theological, and missionary fruit, including the founding of Québec, Canada, and Ville Marie de Montreal, a specifically Catholic settlement.

John Eudes was born to pious but uneducated parents in a tiny town in Normandy just as the hot religious wars of the 1500s in France simmered to a boil. He was deeply impressed with his Jesuit teachers at a Catholic high school and began to think about religious life. As he fell under the holy sway of some of the great priests of his era, he decided to emulate their pattern of life. He was ordained a priest for a French version of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in 1625.

Father John then became a tireless preacher of parish missions for many years. He preferred to preach in a town for at least six weeks in order to counter the widespread religious ignorance of the faithful. He desired of his hearers nothing less than a total change of life, a complete conversion. He used processions, works of theater, mimes, and whatever else he could think of to draw a congregation. Once in his presence, they learned the creed, the sacraments, an examination of conscience, the laws of morality, and all the fundamentals of the faith. Father Eudes preached Christ in full—a total God who demanded a total human response.

Essential to Father Eudes’ spirituality was a profound identity with the emotions and humanity of Jesus. He thought that the mysteries of the Word of God are forever unfolding, that there are always hidden depths of Scripture remaining to be discovered. The meaning of the Word of God, both written and in the flesh, will never be exhausted on earth. This means that Christ’s divinity is accessed through his humanity but is never exhausted by his humanity. There is always more God to know and more God to love. This accords with Christian common sense. To assert that a passage of Scripture has been understood in its totality is to limit God’s providence and to place one’s own mind over God’s. That Scripture does not contain error is not the sole proof of its perfection. Scripture is inspired not just for being error free but for what it will communicate, one day, in heaven. God, the Lord and Giver of Life in the Holy Spirit, is the primary author of Scripture, meaning divine truths await discovery, and, more subtly, will always await discovery.

As a door of entry into the mystery of Christ and His Blessed Mother, Saint John Eudes tirelessly promoted a liturgical feast in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and what he termed the “Holy” Heart of Mary. Saint John’s Sacred Heart devotion was more theological, and less anatomical, than the similar devotion advocated by his contemporary, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Christ’s heart, for Saint John, was emblematic of His interiority, His hiddenness. It was a symbol of the heart of all mankind encased in the chest of God. John’s devotion to the Sacred Heart led, inevitably, to a very high ideal of the Catholic priest as a man after the heart of Christ, a would-be saint who acts in the person of the one high priest, Jesus Christ. This “French school” of theology and spirituality was fresh thinking in the seventeenth century and put a dagger in the heart of any conception of the priest as a Church bureaucrat who merely performs rituals, for a certain price, to dispense God’s grace.

John suffered grievous calumnies and attacks from many in the Church when he left the Oratory to start his own Congregation of secular priests. His promotion of a feast to the Sacred Heart also incurred enemies who misunderstand his theology. The Congregation of Jesus and Mary, commonly known as the Eudists, is still active in parish missions and in teaching in several countries, though France’s historic anti-Catholicism removed them from many of their prior apostolates. There is presently an active effort in the Holy See, spearheaded by French priests and bishops, to have Saint John Eudes declared a Doctor of the Church.

Saint John Eudes, your deep identification with the person, emotions, and heart of Jesus Christ inspired all who heard and knew you. May your tireless pastoral efforts, life of prayer, preaching, and writing give powerful example to all priests, whose sacramental dignity you championed.

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August 16: Saint Stephen of Hungary
c. 975–1038
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Hungary and of kings

Baptized by his pagan father, made King by the Pope, his heirs demolished his legacy

Saint Stephen of Hungary was a warrior king whose silhouette stands proud on a far distant horizon as the sun rises behind him at the dawn of the medieval age. His year of birth can only be guessed, as ancient chronicles give conflicting dates. His father was of that generation of rough pagans who had to confront the new, vibrant force of Catholicism which challenged the old ways of paganism and its local gods who satisfied local needs. The Mediterranean Basin had long been Christian by the tenth century. But daring missionaries had only recently penetrated deep into the wide plains of the Magyars, the Bulgars, and that vast land of the Rus that lay beyond. That Christian dawn in Eastern Europe is when our saint first comes on the scene.

He was born Vaik and baptized Stephen when his father, a duke, converted to Christianity. When he was about twenty-two, he succeeded his father as a Magyar leader and warlord. After consolidating his territory and power through various wars, he sent an emissary to the Pope in Rome to petition for the founding of Church structures in his land. Pope Sylvester II concurred with Stephen’s plans and took him one step further. Tradition holds that the Pope had a crown fashioned for Stephen and sent it to Hungary, where the papal ambassador crowned Stephen king in 1001.

King Stephen took his duties as a Catholic king with utmost seriousness. He founded an enormous Benedictine monastery, numerous dioceses, and mandated one tax-supported parish with a priest for every ten towns. He built a shrine to the Virgin Mary, which became the sacred forum for the coronations, and burials, of the kings of Hungary. He aggressively punished those who practiced the outlawed pagan customs of yesteryear and prohibited marriages between pagans and Christians. Interestingly, he required that all his subjects be married, except for priests and religious.

After sadly familiar intrigues over succession, money, and power, Stephen died on August 15, 1038. Most of his children had died as infants, and his one adult son, his presumptive heir, died in a hunting accident in 1031. Thus Stephen’s efforts to establish a Christian state were placed in jeopardy. Just as Stephen had feared, once the mighty king died, all of his accomplishments were neglected. Chaos and civil war raged for decades after his burial. The two ostensibly pagan kings who succeeded him were apathetic, or even antagonistic, toward Christianity. The fruits of Stephen’s Christian efforts rotted on the tree, and his immediate legacy dissipated.

Eventually, order was restored to Hungary, and Stephen’s greatness was recognized. He was canonized in 1083. He is now a revered saint-founder of the Hungarian nation. The Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals don’t have a nation today. Over time, these pagan tribes
were absorbed into the stable cultures they invaded. They melted into the many nations and identities of modern Europe. The Magyars, however, did not disappear, merge with other peoples, or melt away. They have their own nation, language, culture, art, and history. They are the people of Hungary, and they owe their enduring identity to Saint Stephen. He imposed the stability of a first-class religion on a horse-riding clan and so transformed that roaming tribe into a stable nation.

Stephen gave his people God. And to God and His Church they were faithful. Hungary matured over the centuries like wine, until it was a refined Christian nation, a defender of Christ and the Church. Neighboring tribes resisted the gospel and dissipated into thin air with the passing of time. Saint Stephen was a model King because he knew that to found a country you have to found a Church along with it.

Saint Stephen, you bear the name of the first martyr of the Church and showed similar courage in battling the enemies of God. May your brave and visionary leadership embolden all civil and church leaders to lay the foundations for a success which flourishes long after they have died.

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August 15: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of France and Lebanon

God wants Mary for Himself

Today’s Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary body and soul into heaven commemorates, liturgically, a dogma. Catholicism celebrates her dogmas like a country celebrates its independence day or its military victories. The Church processes up and down city streets for the Body and Blood of Christ; she builds crèches and composes Christmas carols for the dogma of the Incarnation at Christmas; she names cities, such as Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, after dogmas such as today’s Feast. We strew flowers, sing songs, walk on pilgrimage, construct shrines, and kneel in prayer for our dearest truths. Tradition in the Church is not a locked chest. It is a vital force, like a rushing wind, that purifies and is purified, that is ever ancient and ever young, and that informs all that the Church teaches and does. The sacramental family of the Church celebrates her most deeply held, specifically defined beliefs, or dogmas, in beautiful ways.

The Assumption of Mary into heaven is a logical consequence of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Because Mary was born without original sin, she did not suffer its consequences, among which is death. Because she was a kind of Ark of the New Covenant, carrying the Church in the person of Christ, God preserved her from sin and wanted her in His presence when her time on earth ceased. No saint has ever enjoyed such a privilege, because no saint ever had the relationship with Christ that Mary enjoyed. A pious tradition says that the choirs of angels in heaven whispered in awe to each other as Mary was assumed into God’s presence, “Who is this woman treated with such unique respect and honor?”

Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the beauty and majesty of a massive landscape without a person to give it scale. How high is that waterfall? How tall that mountain peak? How far that shore? Place a person in the field of vision and suddenly the image makes more sense. God fills every scene with his majesty. He is almost too much to take in. But Mary gives God scale and perspective. She humanizes the view. Mary is always there in the foreground, showing the faithful how to approach God and render Him due honor.

Devotion to the Virgin Mary is not just a more intense version of devotion to a saint. It is so much more than that. True devotion to Mary is on a higher plane of spirituality, something “cradle Catholics” know instinctively, even if they cannot explain it. With Mary as our mother, the Church and her doctrines are vivified. They seem to matter more. The Church is closer to us and we to her because of Mary. Marian spirituality is more than religious wisdom in the Eastern tradition. It is more than acknowledging that Jesus Christ came from a particular woman and a particular town. To be “Marian” is to know why God would want her assumed into heaven, body intact. To be “Marian” is to understand that no one asks about a baby without asking about its mother in the very same breath. Mary was not just the first Christian. She was, for years, the only Christian. She was, for years, the entire Church.

The dogma of the Assumption, like all dogmas, is liberating. Borders make one go deeper, just like irrigation channels guide the water where it’s needed so that a harvest will come. “No” can lead to new discoveries as much as “Yes.” Good theology sometimes says “No” to bad theology. This usually leads to a deeper spirituality. We need sound mysteries of faith to contemplate, to consider, and to commemorate. Without them, we would be focused either on falsehoods or on ourselves, and we might then become the mystery of faith rather than the truth or God. Profound dogmas of faith such as the Assumption of Mary walk hand in hand with a vibrant spiritually. Mary’s Assumption into heaven opens new horizons to the mind and imagination in prayer and a holy desire to discover more in the life to come.

Saint Mary, assumed into heaven, may your life with God, body and soul, be our goal. May we see your quiet devotion to God and the Church as an example to be followed, a target to be aimed at, and a destiny that awaits the serious Christian who emulates your subtle virtues.

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August 14: Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, Priest and Martyr
1894–1941
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of prisoners, drug addicts, journalists, and the pro-life movement

Prisoner 16670 was tough, immersed in God, and ready when the moment came

Saints are made, not born. Even more so martyrs. Maximilian Kolbe was so impressive a man that he may have been canonized even if that oh-so-brief, oh-so-intense, my-life-for-his exchange in the grim prison yard of Auschwitz had not led to his martyrdom. Baptized as Raimund, from a young age Kolbe felt the call to self-sacrificing holiness. When he was a boy of twelve, the Virgin Mary came to him in a vision and held out two crowns for him to choose from: one white for a life of purity, and one red for martyrdom. The pre-teen Maximilian responded to his Lady: “I choose both.”

Maximilian, along with his older brother, entered a local Franciscan seminary as a teen. When he was just eighteen, his superiors sent him to study in Rome, where he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology summa cum laude. He was ordained a priest in 1918 and the next year returned to the new, post-World War I country of Poland. For the next twenty plus years, Father Maximilian powered his way through life. He taught in a Franciscan seminary. He started an immense publishing house which printed devotional materials promoting the Army of the Immaculate. He founded a new Franciscan monastery, which rapidly grew into one of the largest in Poland. And in 1930 he became a missionary to the Far East. He went to China, had little success, and so went on to Japan, where he founded a monastery near Nagasaki. He also started a publishing house in India. In 1936 he returned to Poland due to ill health. But he didn’t stop. He continued to manage various Marian publications, which were widely circulated, and even procured a radio license and began broadcasting from his own monastery radio station. As he immersed himself in the thousands of details of these varied apostolates, Father Kolbe maintained a disciplined life of prayer, mortification, and daily Mass.

After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Kolbe’s apostolates were curtailed. He organized a hospital at the monastery and, along with the reduced community of brothers, gave shelter to refugees, including about 2,000 Jews. He was arrested by the Germans in 1939 and held for almost three months. He was pressured, but refused, to sign a document recognizing his German ancestry (Kolbe’s father was an ethnic German) in exchange for more food rations and better treatment. In February 1941, German SS men came and shuttered his monastery. Kolbe and four other friars were arrested, though twenty other brothers offered themselves in their stead. In May 1941, Kolbe was transferred to the heavy labor division of Auschwitz for the last act of his life.

He carried out his priestly ministry as best he could in the hell of Auschwitz and endured severe beatings for it. In July, just two months after he arrived, a prisoner escaped from the camp. As both deterrent and reprisal, the head of the camp ordered ten men to be starved to death in the escapee’s place. The victims were chosen at random from a prisoner roll call. One of the unfortunate chosen, a married man named Francis, begged for mercy: "My wife! My children!" What followed this desperate pleading was profound, left an indelible impression on all who witnessed it, and is packed with an almost liturgical character.

Perhaps remembering his childhood vision of the Virgin, and perhaps inspired that the chosen man shared the name Francis with the founder of his religious order, Kolbe removes his cap and slowly emerges from the bedraggled group of prisoners. A filthy, striped rag of a uniform is draped over his skeletal frame. He is barefoot. But he has dignity. There are no frivolous men in Auschwitz. He speaks directly to the commanding officer in German: “I want to take his place.” Kolbe’s bearing must command respect, because, according to an eye-witness, the officer responds to him using the formal “You.” “Warum wollen Sie für ihn sterben?”—“Why do you Sir want to die for him?” “Because he has a wife and children.” “What is your profession?” “I am a Catholic priest.” A few moments of silence and then “Gut.” “Good” or “Right.”

After two weeks of no food or water in a bunker, a guard injected carbolic acid into the arm of the indestructible Kolbe on August 14. His body was cremated the next day. His ashes floated from the smokestack over the gray wasteland of Auschwitz on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. He, a priest, became what he offered. Like Saint Polycarp of old, burned like bread at the stake, Kolbe’s life ended in a liturgical doxology where his own body became the bread of sacrifice.

First-class relics of Saint Maximilian exist only because his Franciscan barbers thought he was a saint. They saved hairs from his head and beard without his knowledge. The man whose life he saved, Francis Gajowniczek, lived for another fifty-three years, to the age of 93, dying in 1995. He was present in Rome when Pope Saint John Paul II, who lived just an hour from Auschwitz in 1941, canonized his fellow Pole Saint Maximilian Kolbe in 1982.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, you were prepared to be generous in your last moments by a long life of sacrifice, humility, and devotion. May we so prepare ourselves day in and day out, so that when a moment of heroic generosity presents itself, we will respond like you.

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August 13: Saints Pontian, Pope; & Hippolytus, Priest: Martyrs
Late Second Century–c. 235
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Montaldo Scarampi, Italy (Pontian) and prison guards (Hippolytus)

An exiled Pope dies along with a learned priest

Today’s martyrs died on the island of Sardinia, perhaps from overwork in the mines or perhaps from starvation or neglect rather than execution. In a pacific interlude following the persecution which was their doom, a later pope, Fabian, returned their bodies to Rome for dignified burial. Pontian was interred in the papal crypt in the Catacombs of Callixtus near so many of his fellow popes of the 200s. In 1909 the original marble epitaph on Pontian’s tomb was found among the shards littering the floor of the catacombs. It reads ΠONTIANOC ƐΠIC MPT (Pontian, Bishop, Martyr), although the abbreviation for “martyr” was engraved by a different hand. Tombstones are very economical. Hippolytus was buried in a Roman catacomb, subsequently named in his honor, which became a pilgrimage site. The links among today’s martyrs are their common date of burial, August 13, and their place of death. Hippolytus is by far the more significant figure.

Pope Saint Pontian was consecrated Bishop of Rome in 230. He is chiefly known for convening a Roman Synod which confirmed a prior condemnation of the Egyptian theologian Origen. Like so many other bishops of his era, Pontian also dealt with divergent positions over how the Church should re-integrate Christians who had abjured their faith during a persecution. Should they be re-baptized, do public penance, or be welcomed back privately? Tensions over this issue perdured for many decades and deeply wounded Church unity. During a persecution, Pontian was exiled, but first graciously resigned in 235 so that a successor pope could be elected. For this magnanimous act, he was remembered as “distinguished” in contemporary documents.

Saint Hippolytus is an elusive figure. He was most likely from Rome. Some traditions, however, state he was from Lyon and was a disciple of Saint Irenaeus. Incredibly for a saint, Hippolytus is also traditionally labeled an anti-pope for resisting Pope Callixtus’ lenient attitude in reintegrating into Church life the lapsi who had rendered homage to false gods. Hippolytus was later reconciled to the Church which he loved enough to disrupt. Besides being a controversialist, Hippolytus was the most impactful theologian in Rome before the legalization of Christianity. When the great theologian Origen came to Rome from Caesarea, he heard Hippolytus preach. Most of Hippolytus’ works have been lost, but enough translated fragments of his original Greek writings survive to capture his importance. He wrote on Scripture, dogma, law, apologetics, Christ, and also authored a comprehensive polemical work entitled A Refutation of All Heresies.

Hippolytus is most famous as the author of the Apostolic Tradition, which preserves some of the most ancient liturgical texts of the primitive church. The original of the Apostolic Tradition does not exist, and later translated fragments are of dubious provenance, making the work a fluid, composite text of different eras. Nevertheless, the core document is a one-of-a-kind artifact, allowing a modern Christian to peek through the keyhole into the liturgy of the early, praying Church. Hippolytus doesn’t just describe the words and actions of the liturgy, as the earlier Didache and Saint Justin Martyr did. Instead, he writes down the actual prayers.

The Apostolic Tradition contains the earliest known rite of ordination. The ordination rite of a bishop used today by the Catholic Church still largely adopts this ancient text. Hippolytus provides the first example of the Virgin Mary being invoked in liturgical prayer. And Hippolytus’ prayers for the Eucharistic banquet include the third-century words of consecration! This text is the source for a significant portion of today’s Eucharistic Prayer II, perhaps the most commonly used Eucharistic prayer at Mass. When the faithful throughout the world hear the familiar cadence of Eucharistic Prayer II each Sunday, they are hearing a distant echo—it’s the sound of priestly voices from the third century.

As he did on so many significant Roman tombs, Pope Damasus (366–384) wrote an inscription on the tomb of Hippolytus more than a century after the saint died. Part of it reads: “Wherever he was able to go, he had spoken of the Catholic faith so that all might follow it. Thus our martyr deserves to be acknowledged.” Indeed. And at the entrance of the forever-closed catacombs of Saint Hippolytus, a personalized graffiti from an ancient pilgrim is carved into the wall, a tender petition invoking today’s saint: “Hippolytus, keep Peter the sinner in mind.” Saint Hippolytus, keep all of us in mind.

Saints Hippolytus and Pontian, you lived at a difficult time and gave such public witness that you were exiled when many others were not. Your headship of the Church led to your demise. You were isolated, suffered want, and died as a result. May we count our own hardships little in light of yours.

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August 12: Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, Religious
1572–1641
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of widows and parents separated from their children

An aristocratic widow’s grief is transformed into love of God

Today’s saint was well born and acted like it. She was educated, refined, beautiful, witty, and wealthy. She married a baron, lived in his castle, and together they raised four children. But then tragedy struck like lightning. Her husband was killed in a hunting accident. Jane was a widow at just twenty-eight. She found it nearly impossible to forgive the man who had caused her husband’s death. Grief and anger consumed her. But in 1604 she heard a homily that she needed to hear, from a wise, holy bishop who spoke with great erudition, passion, and eloquence. It was the great Saint Francis de Sales on one of his endless tours across Southern France. He was in Dijon, Jane’s homeland, and she saw in him the embodiment of the spiritual guide whom God had promised her in a mysterious vision. The two bonded in a holy friendship not unknown among the saints and remained close until de Sales’ death.

Jane de Chantal wanted to become a nun, but Francis dissuaded her…for the time being. Once she had provided for her children and taken care of various practical matters, she was finally ready to uproot herself and move to Annecy, near Geneva, Switzerland, to start a Congregation of religious sisters. Her fourteen-year-old son was rightly perplexed at his mother’s decision to leave him for God, even though Jane had arranged for the boy to be cared for by Jane’s brother, a bishop. In one of history’s most poignant, yet humorous, illustrations of Christ’s commandment to leave father and mother and wife and children for Him, the boy dramatically blocked his mother’s departure for the convent by lying on the floor across the threshold of the door. A priest in the room asked Jane if her son’s tears would change her mind. “No,” Jane replied, “but still, I am a mother.” She cried, and then stepped over her son’s supine body, and left. Moved? Yes, definitely. Deterred? No. Not in the least.

Jane Frances de Chantal founded the Congregation of the Visitation in 1610. Its sisters were often women who had been unwelcome in other religious congregations due to illness, age, or the inability to live the strict life of penance and fasting required in most convents. The Visitation nuns’ initial active apostolates were eventually curtailed in favor of a cloistered existence based on the traditional rule of Saint Augustine. Saints Francis and Jane prized two virtues in their nuns above all others: humility and gentleness. The Annecy Visitation Convent grew into a magnet for Catholic aristocrats, princes, and princesses attracted to Jane’s practical savoir-faire, charm, gentility, and holiness.

After the death of Saint Francis de Sales in 1622, Jane destroyed all of the correspondence they had exchanged over the years. They were truly co-founders of the Visitation order and spiritual twins. Incredibly, another spiritual giant, Saint Vincent de Paul, replaced Francis de Sales as Jane’s spiritual director. Jane grew in holiness behind the walls of her cloister and developed a reputation as a saint, one which she rejected. After many physical and interior sufferings, she died a holy death, was beatified in 1751, and canonized in 1767. She was indeed rewarded by Christ a hundredfold for having cut ties with her family. There were eighty-six Visitation convents established by the time of Jane’s death, and the Order continued to expand after she died. Visitation convents are still present in many countries throughout the world. Saint Jane Frances de Chantal is buried in a sumptuous golden tomb in the Visitandine church in Annecy, just a few feet from the tomb of her holy mentor, Saint Francis de Sales.

Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, your commitment to God grew out of grief over your husband’s untimely death. May we convert every sadness, loss, and trial in our lives toward the good, redirecting our hurts into an ever more intense love of God.

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August 11: Saint Clare, Virgin
c. 1193–1253
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Patron Saint of embroiderers, goldsmiths, and laundry workers

She heard Francis, left comfort, and slept on the floor for forty-one years

Silicon Valley is not, topographically, a valley. The name is a contrivance dating from the 1970s and 80s. The actual valley is named after today’s saint. Santa Clara Valley, running southeast from the southern shores of San Francisco Bay, was named after its beating heart, Mission Santa Clara de Asís—a church, school, and farm—founded by Franciscan Friars in 1777. The current mission church, a beautiful twentieth-century idealization of mission architecture, sits on the site of the original Mission structure and is the iconic campus centerpiece of Santa Clara University, California’s oldest. It’s likely that Saint Clare never left her convent in Assisi, Italy, for the last forty years of her life. Yet a valley, city, and university in far away California are named in her honor. That a medieval, cloistered, Catholic nun is still so present to a hyper-modern portion of the world is a testament to the global reach and cultural impact of Catholicism and the Franciscan order.

Clare of Assisi was born about a decade after and in the same small town as Saint Francis. Many of Clare’s earliest friends became nuns in her community, survived her, and gave testimony in her canonization process, reporting interesting details about her early life. Clare was from an economically comfortable family in the upper part of Assisi, in the neighborhood of the nobility. She had two younger sisters. Her mother was pious and had gone on long pilgrimages to holy shrines. Her household included knights and soldiers. From an early age she was interested in religious life and gave religious instruction to the many servants and others in her vast household.

Clare was a prize to her father, as eligible daughters were like pawns whose marriages could seal alliances with other noble families. An Assisi marriage broker testified, after Clare’s death, that he had approached Clare various times with offers of marriage from interested suitors. She turned him down each time and instead challenged the broker about the quality of his own Christian commitment. If Clare had never met Saint Francis, she may well have become a Benedictine nun in a convent for noble women, putting her education to good use in the copying of sacred manuscripts.

But she did meet Saint Francis, so her natural religiosity turned more radical. At the age of eighteen, Clare heard Francis preach in a local church and was deeply moved, as so many were, by his presence as much as his words. She began to meet with him privately to talk about the things of God and a new plan for her life. On Palm Sunday in Assisi, there was a tradition that eligible young ladies would process down the aisle of the Cathedral to receive a blessed palm branch from the Bishop’s own hands. Interested local bachelors showed up to watch this kind of sacred debutante parade. Clare was in the Cathedral on Palm Sunday 1212, but she did not process with all the others. Instead, the Bishop, known to history as Guido, descended the sanctuary steps and extended a palm to her as she remained in her pew. Christ would be her spouse. Her plan was about to unfold.

That very night, Palm Sunday 1212, Clare secretly fled her family home and, with Francis’ help, entered behind the barred doors of a local convent. She donned a rough habit, and her hair was shorn. The men in her family were alarmed and rushed to bring her home and to her senses. Clare would not budge. As they tried to drag her out of the chapel, she grabbed the altar as an anchor and tore its linens to the floor. The men finally recognized the law of sanctuary and retreated. Clare never deviated from the path she chose that Palm Sunday night. Her close, holy relationship with Francis would endure until his death. He was the leader, the giver, the essential figure. She provided support and allegiance.

Clare would go on to become the first woman to write a rule for other women. She became the foundress of all female Franciscan religious, who number in the tens of thousands today. She had an iron will, a great capacity for physical suffering, and lived a cloistered life of intense and continual prayer. For Clare and her spiritual progeny, the Poor Clares, religion was not primarily an internal disposition. Religion cannot be reduced to mere feelings, pious thoughts, or holy words. It is not a truly great and religious thing to separate the paper from the plastic in the recycle bin. It is a truly great and religious thing to go barefoot, to fast, to abstain from meat, to remain chaste, to wear a coarse habit against the skin, to pray long hours on your knees, to sleep on the floor, and to spend the night shivering in the cold. Such a life is for the few. But there are such few in the world, even today. Of their lives, nothing is counterfeit. Of Saint Clare’s life, nothing was counterfeit either.

Saint Clare of Assisi, you chose a radical form of love of God as a cloistered nun. May your example and your prayers inspire all Catholics, especially female religious, to organize their entire lives around God, His Son, and His Church.

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August 10: Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr
c. Early Third Century–258
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of deacons, comics, and cooks

A Deacon heads the Church for four days, then perishes like his fellow deacons

The Church’s liturgy, like all public rituals whether sacred or secular, is inherently conservative. Its form is not easily altered. Its content shapes, more than is shaped by, the Church and the wider culture. The liturgy moves through time like a great river moves through the land. It plows its own path, carving the terrain, gradually and incontrovertibly forming a new landscape. One generation is too few to notice, but a few generations pass and, suddenly, a river separates two families, a valley turns into a lake, a dam submerges a city, water destroys what once had been, and the world is different. Feast days and solemnities, most notably Christmas and Easter, shape entire cultures too: their calendars, music, food, festivals, dress, dance, language, art, architecture, and on and on. There is almost nothing that the liturgy and its calendar do not touch. Liturgy creates worlds.

Besides being culture creators, liturgical Feast Days also preserve the past for the present and the future. A Feast Day freezes time and preserves the memory of the world’s oldest mind—that of the Catholic Church. The Church does not suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. She is rejuvenated with every baptism and so is perpetually young, impervious to the dementia typical of great age. Today’s saint, the Deacon Lawrence, is celebrated with a Feast on the Church’s calendar, not just a memorial or an optional memorial. This liturgical fact is revelatory and beautiful. He was martyred so long, long ago. He is not Christ, Mary, or a pope. Yet he has a Feast Day! What is the past telling us by this? What is the Church’s calendar communicating to the faithful by this interesting fact?

This Feast opens the curtains on the events of August 258 as if they were as fresh as buns right out of the oven. Look and see the cast of characters. Emperor Valerian is to the side, sitting on his marble throne. An official reads the Emperor’s decree aloud: “All bishops, priests, and deacons are to be summarily executed.” Pope Sixtus II is roughly taken away by Valerian’s soldiers during Mass in the candlelight of a catacomb on August 6. Six of Rome’s seven deacons are killed with Sixtus. In accord with the Church’s theology, they were closer to their bishop than to any priest, so they die with him. The Church has been almost decapitated. There is only one deacon left. The hunt is on for Lawrence, the ranking head of the Church. He is found. He is martyred. It is August 10. The curtain closes.

In a tradition already ancient by the third century, Rome had seven deacons to minister to the material needs of the impoverished, widows, and orphans of Rome. Lawrence excelled at this task, which he operated out of a house-church in Central Rome. When the popular and well-loved Lawrence died, he was venerated with a fervor unlike almost any other early martyr. His cult spread like the fire that tradition says roasted him alive. Devotion to him spread as far north as Scandinavia, England, and Germany. Traditions large and small abounded.

The details of his martyrdom are incomplete. But holy legends have supplied what documents could not, and none of them are illogical, mythic, or banal. They might contain the essential facts—he was burned alive on a gridiron. Lawrence was buried just outside the walls of ancient Rome, where a minor basilica, also the burial site of Pope Pius IX, still stands. Numerous other churches in Rome are dedicated to his memory, including the house-church where he ministered. The current church on the site is, to this day, still enclosed inside of a larger building just as the house-church was. The deacon-martyr Lawrence gave a witness so powerful to Rome that his death may have been the no-going-back-moment which proved that Christianity was here to stay, forever, in the capital of the world.

Saint Lawrence, may your example inspire all clergy, and especially deacons, to remain close to both their bishops and their people, providing faithful witness to the truths of our faith, which are worth living and dying for.

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August 9: Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Virgin and Martyr
1891–1942
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Co-Patron Saint of Europe

A Jewish intellectual discovers St. Teresa of Ávila, converts, and dies for her race

Edith Stein, today’s saint’s given name, was a highly cultured European intellectual. She obtained a doctorate in philosophy summa cum laude from a German university after being accepted as a student by a renowned philosopher. She mastered numerous languages and worked as both a nurse and interpreter during World War I. She was a naturally gifted and effective teacher. She translated various works of Saint John Henry Newman from English and a work of Saint Thomas Aquinas from the original Latin. She published a book called Potency and Act on some foundational concepts in Thomism. Her erudition opened doors to elite circles of artists, philosophers, and other creators of culture. Yet she decided, in the flower of her life, to leave the shore, to wade into the sea of God, and to dive deep for the pearl of great price.

Years after converting to Catholicism, Edith took vows as a Carmelite nun, becoming Teresa Blessed (or “Benedicta”) of the Cross. Yet in the convent, her worldly achievements counted little. When she first walked through the doors, one of Mother Superior’s initial questions to her was: “Can you sew?” The science of the Cross had begun.

Edith Stein was born and raised a Jew, the last of eleven children in a pious, middle-class German family. But she lost a living faith as a teenager and stopped praying. After passing all of her courses with distinction, and after serving at a war hospital in Austria, she finished a doctorate on the subject of empathy. She then became a full-time assistant to her philosophical mentor. Edith had various positive experiences with individual Christians during the war years. She saw, first hand, how Christians understood their own loss and suffering in light of the Cross of Christ. On a visit to the Cathedral of Frankfurt, these experiences of others’ faith merged, rather suddenly, with a profound experience of her own. From the back of the church, Edith saw a woman with a shopping bag enter, kneel in prayer for a few moments, genuflect, and then depart. Our saint was deeply moved by the mystery of it. The woman clearly came into the church to have a short conversation with someone. Edith had never seen anyone do this in a synagogue or in a Protestant church. It struck her—Truth is a person, not a mere concept. God is living, breathing Truth in the person of Jesus Christ.

A couple of years later, in 1921, while spending time at a friend’s home, she discovered an autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila in the home’s library and started reading it. She read all night. She read until the sun came up. In the morning she bought a Catholic Catechism and devoured that too. She had finally found the truth she couldn’t quite find in her philosophical studies. She would convert to Catholicism. On January 1, 1922, Edith Stein was baptized. She was confirmed the next month by the local bishop in his private chapel. When she went home to tell her mother that she was now Catholic, the two could only cry in each other’s arms at their complex emotions. After her conversion, Edith taught at a Dominican high school, engaged in scholarly work, and lectured on women’s issues with the encouragement of her bishop.

Finally, in 1933, after experiencing the dawning anti-semitism of the Third Reich, Edith fulfilled a long-held dream and entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne. Before entering, she went home to say a bittersweet goodbye to her family and attended synagogue one last time with her mother, who felt betrayed and who never responded to any of her daughter’s many subsequent letters. Sister Teresa Benedicta took final vows in 1938. On New Year’s Eve of that same year, she secretly transferred to a Carmelite convent in the Netherlands to escape Germany’s insane anti-semitism. There, she was a model nun, devoted to Saint John of the Cross and to the Carmelite spirituality of the Cross. She prayed in front of the tabernacle for long hours and wrote for many more.

After the Dutch bishops released a letter protesting the deportation of Dutch Jews, the retaliation against the Church was swift and merciless. The gestapo soon pounded on the doors of all local convents to take away any Jewish converts. On August 2, 1942, Edith was praying in the chapel when the gestapo came. She had five minutes to leave. Edith and her sister Rosa, also a convert who was helping in the convent, were taken away. They were transported in trains, like cattle, to Auschwitz, gassed to death, and cremated, most likely on August 9, along with hundreds of other Jews. Edith Stein was sharply aware of her double spiritual identity as a Jew and a Catholic. She knew she was dying, spiritually and physically, for each of her identities. Her iconic life and death, so redolent of the tensions of the twentieth century, caused Saint John Paul II to name her a co-patron of Europe. She was beatified in Cologne in 1987 and canonized in 1998 after a miraculous healing of a little girl in the state of Massachusetts was attributed to her intercession.

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, you were Jewish by blood, Catholic by baptism, and Carmelite by solemn vows. Your multiple spiritual identities, complex mind, and education found their unity in Christ. May we follow your example in finding our unity in Him as well.

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August 8: Saint Dominic, Priest
c. 1170–1221
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Dominican Republic, astronomers, and the falsely accused

A one-man army for God; long practice taught him how to preach the Truth

Today’s saint and Saint Francis of Assisi were close contemporaries. They both founded influential religious orders, collaborated with the same popes and cardinals, and were canonized soon after their deaths. Francis remains a rich, technicolor, three-dimensional figure even many centuries after his death. Dominic, on the contrary, is a shadow. Francis jumps off the page. Dominic is found between the lines. No cult of personality developed around Dominic as it did around Francis. Yet whereas Francis was unsuited to leadership and perplexed by organizational necessities, Dominic quietly excelled in every area. Because of Dominic’s skills, his well-structured order had none of the grave problems that almost doomed Franciscanism. Dominic’s personality retreats behind the hum and whistle of the order that embodied his vision.

Dominic, born in Spain, spent many years dedicated to his university studies before accompanying a local bishop on a royal errand that took them across Europe, including through Southern France. In the city of Toulouse, France, Dominic had his first encounter with the Cathars, a heretical sect of rigorist purists on the margins of Christianity. Dominic would spend the better part of ten years of his short life strategically contemplating and implementing a pastoral plan to bring the Cathars back into the arms of Mother Church.

Dominic concluded very early on in this missionary endeavor that the witness of priests had to be more authentic for them to be effective among the Cathars. No more traveling by horse. No more nice meals. No more inns. No more beds. No more shoes. The priests who went to the Cathars must beg like the Cathar holy men. They must walk, not ride, like the Cathar holy men. They must go barefoot, fast, pray, be humble, wear simple clothes, and live strict chastity and celibacy like the Cathar holy men. Then, and only then, would the Cathars listen to the priests. The Cathars listened to Dominic. He had been practicing these many disciplines rigorously and joyfully for many years. He was the very icon of a holy, authentic priest. Dominic, in short, had credibility, and his learning was self-evident in his preaching. Nonetheless, Dominic’s pastoral efforts, in the end, had to cede to the religious violence so common to the time. Church and state authorities ran out of patience, and the Cathars were ruthlessly crushed in their vice.

His many years of heading a band of educated preachers amidst a difficult pastoral situation equipped Dominic for leadership and gave him a strong sense of how sound theology impacted pastoral practice. Loving God was not like going on a blind date. The Church provided the faithful with the tools to know God, not just know about Him. The Church gave the faithful concrete means to love God, not just to talk vaguely about loving Him. Dominic knew the truth and how to present it, by word and example, effectively. By 1215 he had received papal permission to lead his own group of preachers. That same year, he attended the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome to solidify his canonical position.

From 1215 until his death, Dominic traveled, organized, recruited, and planned. He was driving the foundations of his order deep into theological and canonical bedrock. Amidst this tornado of activity, he lived perfect poverty, chastity, obedience, humility, and charity. He was known to often say “Whoever governs the passions is master of the world. We must either rule them, or be ruled by them. It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.”

He shared the fruits of his contemplation in every conversation and encouraged his brothers to do the same. His poverty was such that when he died in Bologna, in his early fifties, he lay in someone else’s bed, because he didn’t have one of his own, and was wearing another man’s habit, because his own had crumbled to pieces. The Dominican Order exploded with growth during Dominic’s lifetime. It is still today one of the Church’s preeminent, and truly global, Orders dedicated to scholarship, preaching, education, publishing, and evangelization. If causes are known by their effects, Saint Dominic was a relentless one-man army for God.

Saint Dominic, your dedication to the truths of the Catholic faith gives beautiful witness to the faithful. Help us to emulate your poverty, charity, and chastity in our daily lives and to strive to obtain your erudition and verve in evangelizing others in our words and deeds.

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August 7: Saint Sixtus II, Pope; and Companions, Martyrs
Early Third Century–258
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Bellegra, Italy

The Pope is murdered in cold blood

The sixth pope was named the “Sixth” or, in Latin, “Sixtus.” He reigned from 115–125 A.D. The next Sixtus was today’s martyr, who reigned from one August to the next in 257–258. Sixtus II (or Sixth, the Second) is listed in the Roman Canon’s select roll call of sainted popes: “Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian…” The preservation of his name in the liturgy is compelling proof of the lasting impact of his bloody witness. After the legalization of Christianity in 313, perhaps two popes were martyred, although various others died unnatural deaths. But throughout the 200s, solid historical evidence proves that more than a dozen popes were assassinated by Roman authorities just for being Christian leaders. Many of their remains were interred in an ornate burial chamber in the catacombs of Saint Callixtus, which was excavated in the 1850s.

Sixtus II succeeded to the Chair of Saint Peter at a difficult time. The on-again, off-again persecutions of the early Church were on-again in the 250s. The Roman Emperors Decius and Valerian sought the blood of Christians not only to try to decapitate the surging Church but also to confiscate the wealth and property of Christians. The tensions in Church-State relations were no less serious than internal Church tensions tearing at its unity. The persecution of Decius from 250–251 was wicked. Decius’ edict required everyone in the empire to sacrifice to a Roman god in the presence of a state official, with a signed libellus, or certificate, being issued afterward as proof that the sacrifice had been offered. Many Christians were weak and afraid and so sacrificed to gods they knew didn’t exist. Some Christians purchased a libellus, some fled to the safety of the countryside, and some refused to sacrifice and were cruelly martyred.

Christians’ divergent responses to the persecution—some heroic, some weak, some uncertain—were traumatic for the Church. Many in the African and Asiatic Church said that those who sacrificed (the lapsi) must be re-baptized. Pope Stephen I, Sixtus II’s predecessor, said that the lapsi must only repent to be reconciled with the Church. The theological positions of the two camps were each sincere and hardened over time. There was no easy answer. After Pope Stephen died, it seems that Pope Sixtus II was more diplomatic in seeking reconciliation with the African and Asiatic churches over this controversy, although it would not be theologically resolved until Saint Augustine wrote one hundred and fifty years later.

Sixtus II had to be consecrated as Pope in secret because of the times. In 257, the formerly peaceable Emperor Valerian issued an anti-Christian edict which forbade Christians from assembling in cemeteries. Sixtus avoided persecution for many months. But in early August 258, Valerian got serious. A new edict focused on essential targets. Bishops, priests, and deacons could be put to death without a trial. On August 6, 258, Pope Sixtus II was with his flock, seated and preaching the word of God, probably at Mass, in the catacombs. A small troop of soldiers was on the hunt. The Pope must die. With torches lighting the way, the soldiers scurried through the warren of dark and narrow passageways toward the underground chapel. Perhaps they heard some singing. They acquired their prize soon enough, and the deed was done.

Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, North Africa, received the news shortly afterward and, before being martyred himself, wrote a letter to his flock: “Valerian has issued an edict to the Senate to the effect that bishops, presbyters, and deacons shall suffer the death penalty without delay…I must also inform you that Sixtus was put to death in a catacomb on the sixth of August, and four deacons with him...Let all our people fix their minds not on death but rather on immortality...knowing that in this contest the soldiers of God and Christ are not slain but rather win their crowns.” An inscription placed on Sixtus II’s tomb over a hundred years after his death by Pope Saint Damasus, rediscovered in the 1800s, verifies the drama of Sixtus II’s last moments. It notes that the shepherd gave his life for his flock. The faithful with Sixtus that fateful day walked up the steps of the catacomb into the daylight totally unharmed, while their pastor lay dead. The companions martyred with Sixtus were the deacons Januarius, Vincentius, Magnus, and Stephanus. The deacons Felicissimus and Agapitus were martyred on the same day, but not with Pope Sixtus.

Pope Saint Sixtus II, you were a servant and a leader; a confident shepherd to a frightened flock; a central actor, not a bystander; a witness to truth, not an outside observer; a light generating others’ shadows. You are known because you were courageous. Make us faithful like you.

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August 7: Saint Cajetan, Priest
1480–1547
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Argentina, the unemployed, and gamblers

A reformer before his time

Gaetano di Conte di Thiene, today’s saint, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he spit it out. His father was a count, his family noblemen, and his status and wealth secure. Gaetano studied theology and law and became a senator of his city-state. When he went to Rome, he rose straight to the top and became a functionary in the curia of Pope Julius II. But he secretly desired more—meaning that he desired less. It was not his calling to use his education, position, and family contacts to rise ever higher in the church and society. He wanted a more intense encounter with God, so when Pope Julius died in 1513, Gaetano resigned his papally appointed office and studied for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1516, in his mid-thirties, a late vocation by the standards of his own time or even today.

After ordination, Father Cajetan returned to Northern Italy, his native land, and joined a confraternity of devout men. The men of the confraternity were from the lower rungs of society, signaling Cajetan’s break with his own family’s privileged background. He then began a life-time of service to the sick and poor in various hospitals and distinguished himself by caring for the most hopelessly ill patients. Father Cajetan’s negative personal experiences of the Church of his era, and of priests specifically, were, unfortunately, common. He was scandalized by the tepid spirituality and lax morals of some clerics and saw the need for an ecclesial cleansing.

Father Cajetan saw exactly, or even more of, what Father Martin Luther saw in the same span of years and in the same exact city—Rome—but Cajetan had a far different reaction than Luther. There was no reason to sever a limb from the body of Mother Church. Cajetan sought to transform, not to rupture. He desired purification, not reformation. A different Cajetan from Italy, an erudite Cardinal but not a saint, would debate Luther in Augsburg at a pivotal point in the early Reformation. Our saint didn’t debate the finer points of philosophy and theology like Cardinal Cajetan, although that was certainly needed. Saint Cajetan’s response to the need for purification in the Church was to purify himself and to invite other priests to join him.

In 1523 Father Cajetan went to Rome to dedicate himself to the renewal of the clergy along with some like-minded friends. They founded a small Congregation named after Theate, the city where one of the co-founders was a bishop. The four founding members of the Theatines were all well-educated noblemen, including one who would later become Pope Paul IV. In 1524 they exchanged their robes of honor for humble habits and professed vows in St. Peter’s Basilica. Their charism was to preach correct doctrine, to care for the sick, to encourage frequent reception of the Sacraments, and to restore love of poverty, knowledge of Scripture, and dignified liturgical practice among priests. The Theatines spread throughout Italy doing pastoral work and serving heroically among the sick. Cajetan also engaged in some creative pastoral ministry late in his life by establishing Christian pawnshops which granted loans to the poor, saving the vulnerable from rapacious money lenders.

Saint Cajetan and the Theatines were eventually eclipsed, however, by the more dynamic Saint Ignatius of Loyola and his powerhouse Order, the Jesuits. Saint Cajetan died disappointed at the lumbering pace of the on-again, off-again Council of Trent. He is among that second tier of lesser known saints of the early sixteenth century who spurred the Church to change by their ardor for God and their lives of high virtue. The Council of Trent would not have gathered except for Cajetan and numerous others like him. Great reformers are really purifiers, and they come before, not after, Councils. Our saint was canonized in 1671, and his Theatine Order continues, although only in pockets.

Saint Cajetan, you gave a powerful witness of moral rectitude and of creative apostolic effort. Inspire all priests to live their sacred callings to the full, to purify themselves before they purify others, and to be absolutely dedicated to the truths of the faith.

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August 6: The Transfiguration of the Lord
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: White

A preview of coming attractions, our destination is a person more than a place

It was not a miracle that Jesus Christ transfigured Himself on Mount Tabor before the Apostles. It was a miracle that He maintained His common, earthly appearance for the whole of His life. It was a miracle that His face was not glowing like the sun as He walked the hills and valleys of the Holy Land. Christ’s normality, His sustained suppression of His divine radiance, was a miracle of humility, of slavish devotion to His vocation to incarnate, teach, suffer, and die for mankind.

The Christian believes in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting in that body. We believe this because of the appearances of the risen Christ after His resurrection, because of His bodily Ascension into heaven, because the gospels specifically mention the empty tomb, and because of the events of today’s feast. The Transfiguration shows the splendor of truth. It is a peek into the life of heaven, where we see that Christ will not shed His human skin. Christ will bring His humanity to heaven and glorify it. This exaltation of flesh and blood is one reason why the Church has such immense respect for the human body.

The Church’s understanding is contrasted by two extreme views on its flanks: one overly spiritualizing man, and the other overly materializing him. The religions of the Orient stress the inner life of man to such an extent that they see him as a pure spirit caged in the body, glad to escape the confining carcass at death. From this Oriental perspective, the body is a trap for the soul. On the other flank is the Western materialist view. It sees the body as having priority over the soul to such an extent that physical, sensory experience is the best, and only, path to knowledge. This Western lens sees the body as a sensory sponge meant to soak up as many external experiences—pleasure, music, travel, conversation, food—as possible. If you don’t experience something yourself, you can’t assess its truth or value. This personalizing of existence reduces all reality to “me” and leads to cultural breakdown.

But neither an excessively spiritual approach nor an excessively material understanding does the body justice. A balanced understanding of the relationship between the body and soul is a hallmark of traditional Christianity. When Christ reveals His glory, He doesn’t point a long, bony finger to a colorful rainbow on the horizon. He doesn’t puff His cheeks and blow a strong rush of wind on the Apostles’ faces. And He doesn’t sit down and start playing soothing melodies on a harp. Christ shows the Apostles the truth by showing them Himself. He shows them His arms and legs and torso and face and hair. It’s a real body. Jesus gives us a target to aim for. He shows us that the destination is Himself. We desire heaven because Jesus is there. If He were not there, then heaven would not be heaven. He, not a place, is the true destination.

A mystery is not something we can know nothing about but something we can’t know everything about. A comprehensible God would not be God, but an entirely opaque God would also be too remote for us to care. Catholicism’s theology of the body has a beautiful equilibrium because our God is knowable and yet mysterious. Food, drink, dancing, smoking, romance, music, and beauty are not sins. The body is good, and God took one Himself as proof of that. But while nature is the source of human operations, a person operates them. So the person prevails over the tools he uses. The body, then, must ultimately be a servant. We are enfleshed souls. In heaven, hopefully, we will be most truly us and have our ideal body. Every man and woman will be transfigured like Christ and radiate the glory of the Trinity in heaven, like a white sheet on the line radiates the sun shining behind it.

Lord of the Transfiguration, Your glorified body gives us hope of the glories to come in heaven, where You will be the destination. May Your glorified body inspire all Christians to live well their body-soul uniqueness on earth until they are perfected in heaven through You.

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August 5: Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major
Fifth century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

A venerable basilica preserves its ancient aura

A house is more than a building. When it personifies the family within, it is a home. Or at least it should be. That an office building contains businesses; a house—a family; a barracks—soldiers; and a hotel—guests, is merely to cite particular instances of the architectural credo that “form follows function.” Buildings look like what they do. When they don’t, everyone suffers from the incongruities. A modern sports stadium doesn’t look like a gothic cathedral, because the two architectural forms have two different functions: to entertain or to worship God. Today’s feast commemorates a building, not a person. It is a memorial to the “baptism,” or dedication, of one of the oldest churches in Rome dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The Basilica of St. Mary Major (meaning the “greater” or “larger” church of St. Mary) was first built in the 350s, in the decades after the legalization of Christianity in 313, when the Church could finally build big. After the Council of Ephesus’ dogmatic definitions on Mary as the God-bearer in 431, the Basilica was restored and rededicated.

Of the four major basilicas in Rome, St. Mary Major most retains the atmosphere, the “feel,” of antiquity. The sites of the Basilicas of St. Peter and St. John Lateran are ancient, but the present baroque structures date from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. And the ancient, Paleo-Christian Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls burned almost entirely to the ground in 1823. The present structure is an impressive replica, but relatively modern. The fourth-century core of St. Mary Major is, however, intact. It has been embellished, added to, and redecorated over the centuries. Nevertheless, it is to Christian Rome what the Pantheon is to pagan Rome—a complete, entire, and unscathed survivor from a built environment which has otherwise disappeared.

For Catholics, every church is a Domus Dei, a house of God. Whether it is full of one thousand souls, or silent and empty, it is a house of God. A church does not just keep one warm when it is cold, or dry when it is wet. A church does not become such only on Sunday. A church is more than a shelter, just like a home is more than a house. A good church is theology in stone. It reflects the truths it teaches in its very shape, in its steps, in its arches, windows, doors, lighting, marble, statues, mosaics, floors, and altars. Every Catholic church should be able to pass the “deaf test.” That is, when a hearing-impaired person enters a church, he or she should be able to easily understand what that church is teaching without hearing a single word from the pulpit or one verse sung from the choir. A religion’s hierarchy of truths should be expressed, in a confident and certain manner, by the structure where that religion’s faithful gather to worship God. One should understand with the eyes. It is not for the Catholic to “shiver in the barn of the Reformation,” as one theologian wrote, and to guess what the building is trying to say.

If God himself were to pull open the immense doors of St. Mary Major, one imagines He would walk down the central nave, look to his His right and to His left, smile, and slowly nod His head in pleasure and agreement. There, in an ornate chapel to the right, is Pope Saint Pius V. “How well he guided the rudder of my ship on earth.” There, under the altar, are the bones of Saint Jerome. “Oh cantankerous Jerome, you gave my Church the definitive text of my Word.” There, below the high altar, is a relic of the manger of Christ. “And there it all started. Resting in that wood, My Son brought the Old Testament to an end.” And on and on and on: saints, popes, the Virgin, the tabernacle, the confessionals, the Stations of the Cross. God the Father would not be a stranger in St. Mary Major. He would feel at home, surrounded by the things, signs, pictures, and emblems of the family life of the Universal Church.

Rome is a small planet of art and beauty. The density of artistic treasures in St. Mary Major, and so many other Roman churches, exercises a gravitational pull drawing all those enamored with God and His beauty toward the sacred core of the eternal city.

Holy Trinity, our worship of You is a matter of justice more than charity. We owe You reverence in the same way a child owes honor to his parents. Our love is inflamed by the sacred beauty of churches where You, Mary, and the saints are honored with such effusions of human genius.

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August 4: Saint John Vianney, Priest
1786–1859
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of parish priests

A farmer knows God through prayer, not books, and becomes a holy priest

“Is Mr. Vianney good?” the Vicar General asked. “He is a model of goodness,” the seminary official responded. “Very well. Then let him be ordained.” And thus the last obstacle was removed from the long and winding path to Holy Orders of John Marie Vianney. Young John had difficulty learning Latin, and all seminary courses were in Latin. He had difficulty, in fact, learning anything. He had received almost no primary school education. His father needed John’s rough hands on the plow to work the soil of the family farm. Education was a luxury, and poor families had no such luxuries. Schooling was for others. After deciding to enter the seminary, John had to be privately tutored, was almost compelled to transfer to a less demanding diocese, was in and out of different seminaries, and finally personally interviewed to determine if his simplicity disqualified him from ordination. A man hears a call, but it’s the Church that responds “Yes” or “No.” The Vicar General—courageously, wisely, and correctly—answered, “Yes.” Saint John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, was ordained in 1815.

After a brief assignment as Vicar in the parish of a mentor, Father Vianney was made pastor of the parish in Ars, a small, dead-end village of farmers, seemingly dropped in the middle of a remote countryside. It was so tiny that, on his first visit, the new priest couldn’t find it without local help. When he first stepped foot in the parish, he dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. Father Vianney’s humble, servile gesture was known to Pope Saint John Paul II, who emulated it on every first visit he made to a country as Pope.

Father Vianney would spend the rest of his life, forty plus years, in Ars, burning his candle at both ends until there was nothing left to be consumed. His big heart enfolded the small town within itself. Father Vianney had a simple pastoral plan. His goal was that every single person in Ars go to Mass every single Sunday. Every. Single. Person. Every. Single. Sunday. To implement his plan, he acquainted himself with everyone, fasted and prayed, taught, and heard multiple hours of confessions every day. And he preached, unremittingly, about the fires of hell. If anyone thought there was no hell, then his sermons would have made no sense, because hell was his constant theme. His personality was not for everyone. He could seem fanatical, rough, and just a bit beyond zealous. But his total commitment, purity of life, and moral strictness were obvious. There was also that special something which only a saint has. Father Vianney had it. Like body language, which everyone can read but no one can explain, holiness surrounded him like an aura.

Crowds of people started coming to Ars just ten years into his time there. The nearest large city, Lyon, added trains to and from Ars to accommodate the crowds. Father Vianney himself was the destination of these pilgrimages, not Ars. Unusual spiritual phenomena added to the mystery. People were physically healed, and Father Vianney could read souls, see into the future, and prophecy. But his greatest gift was his own example of holiness. His pithy wisdom in the confessional was so sought after, the lines seeking his counsel so long, that he was made a prisoner of that sacramental box. Near the end of his life, people grabbed at his cassock to obtain a relic. And the night he finally succumbed to his pastoral burdens and died, the simple faithful stripped the bark from the trees in front of his rectory just to have a small chunk of something the holy man had looked at, or which his shadow had darkened. Father Vianney converted his parish one soul at a time using the perennial tools of the Church: prayer, fasting, the sacraments, and preaching.

Saint John Vianney, may your example of dedication to prayer and the sacraments provide an example of holiness to all parish priests so that they may embody for their parishioners the fundamental spiritual truths of our faith.

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August 2: Saint Peter Julian Eymard, Priest
1811–1868
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Apostle of the Holy Eucharist

The Eucharist was the pearl that shone in his eyes

The great artist Auguste Rodin, who sculpted “The Thinker” and other world-famous pieces, met today’s saint in 1862 and joined his Congregation as a lay brother. Rodin was despondent over the death of his sister and wanted to abandon art and dedicate his life to God. Saint Peter Julian Eymard burned like a bonfire for God, but this was one vocation his flames would not consume.

Father Eymard could see Rodin’s prodigious talent in an evocative bust Rodin sculpted of the future saint while Rodin was a religious brother. Eymard told Rodin to return to the world to pursue his artistic calling. So while Father Eymard was as apostolic and demanding as any saint, he was also just as wise as any saint. Not every man who felt a vocation truly had one. It was for the superior to discern the validity of the calling. Father Eymard knew this well from personal experience. He had lived at least three priesthoods inside of his one priesthood: as a diocesan priest in a parish, as a religious priest in the Marist Order, and as the founder of the Congregation of the Most Blessed Sacrament.

There was never a time when Peter Julian Eymard did not love Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. At the age of five, he disappeared from home one day. His siblings went in search and found him standing right next to the tabernacle in their local church. When they asked him what he was doing there, little Peter responded, “I am here listening to Jesus.” His father did not want Peter to be a priest but a blacksmith. He relented a bit over time and then died prematurely, removing all opposition. Peter was ordained a diocesan priest in 1834 and served in a parish. But he felt a slightly different call within his call and began to seek admission to the Society of Mary, or Marists. His diocesan bishop was reluctant to let Father Peter go. The bishop relented in 1839, writing to the Marist superior that “I have given sufficient proof of my high esteem for the Society of Mary in giving it such a priest.”

Father Peter’s personal energy, apostolic zeal, and prayerfulness led to his being named a Marist Provincial. He traveled throughout France and became acquainted with nocturnal and perpetual adoration societies. He became expert at preaching about the Eucharist and at directing lay Eucharistic societies. During a Corpus Christi procession in 1845, he had a mystical experience while carrying the Blessed Sacrament. His attraction to the Eucharist became so personal and so intense that he resolved “to preach nothing but Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ Eucharistic” from then on. Discussions with his superiors about orienting the Marist’s more toward a Eucharistic identity were frustrated. It was not their primary charism. On January 21, 1851, at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fourviere overlooking Lyon, Father Eymard received the inspiration to found a new Order dedicated exclusively to the Blessed Sacrament. This third call within his one priestly call would consume the rest of his life.

In 1857 the Society of the Blessed Sacrament was formally established in Paris. One year later, the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament for nuns would be founded. Father Peter and his few companions did not limit their Eucharistic dedication to piety and prayer. They prepared children to receive First Holy Communion, reached out to lapsed Catholics, and promoted frequent reception of Holy Communion for all Catholics. The normal struggles of every young Congregation bedeviled Father Eymard: extreme poverty, atrocious lodgings, lack of vocations, and problems of growth.

Rodin’s bust captures the essence of Father Eymard better than any photo. Eymard’s mass of hair is out of control, communicating his passionate eccentricity. His gaze is penetrating. He knows the mysteries of God and other secrets of the soul. His thin face, straight nose, and protruding cheekbones say he is a mortified ascetic. And buried in his vest, just over his heart, is a scroll. Only a few words of it can be read. It is a fragment of Emyard’s prayer: “O Sacrament Most Holy, O Sacrament Divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine.” His love of the Eucharist pulsated in sync with his heart, every moment of every day of his fifty-seven years. Our saint is buried in his Congregation’s chapel in Paris. He was canonized in 1962 and in 1995 his Optional Memorial was finally included in the Church’s universal sanctoral calendar.

Saint Peter Julian Eymard, your ardent love of the Blessed Sacrament consumed your thoughts, words, preaching, and life. May such a healthy devotion mark all of our lives. May we satisfy Christ’s thirst for our presence by not making Him wait too long between our visits.

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August 2: Saint Eusebius of Vercelli, Bishop
Early Fourth Century–371
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Piedmont, Italy

A bishop suffers exile and abuse for his defense of orthodoxy

Eusebius was chosen Bishop of the Northern Italian city of Vercelli by popular acclaim in the 340s, even though he was an immigrant from the island of Sardinia. Twenty years after Eusebius’ death, the great Saint Ambrose, bishop of the nearby city of Milan, wrote to the Christians of Vercelli during a period of conflict in their diocese. Saint Ambrose’s letter survives and is valuable contemporary evidence of the great esteem in which Saint Eusebius was held by an equally great prelate. Saint Ambrose calls Eusebius “a great man.” Eusebius was great because of his close attachment to his city, to his priests, and to correct theology.

Regarding attachment to his city, Bishop Eusebius was the first Christian of Vercelli and acted like it. He gave an impeccable witness of poverty, fasting, and prayer. He did not see himself as the leader of only the Christians under his authority but also of the still numerous pagans in the countryside around Vercelli. As one of the first bishops of Northern Italy whose name is known to history, Eusebius lived early enough to have established the first, most basic structures of the Church. He promoted devotion to Mary in local shrines, founded parishes, and ordained and encouraged priests. He promoted Christian identity as more fundamental than one’s earthly identity. Rome will come and go, but the heavenly Jerusalem is forever, and all the baptized are future citizens of that heavenly city.

Regarding attachment to his priests, Eusebius was innovative. He had been deeply influenced by Saint Athanasius’ Life of Saint Anthony and so emulated that monk’s life of detachment amidst the hustle and bustle of urban life. Eusebius gathered his priests around him in a community of life which observed a monastic rule. They prayed, ate, and recreated together. They shared the concerns of their people with each other and made those problems their own, as true pastors do. In living this common life, Eusebius and his priests gave a powerful example of Christian solidarity to the city they led. They also prefigured the various forms of diocesan community life which would proliferate many centuries later in the Church, most notably in the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri.

Regarding attachment to correct theology, Eusebius’ life intersected with the intense theological polemics of the fourth century, debates which were often intertwined with Church and imperial politics. Eusebius accepted, in full, the teachings of the Council of Nicea. He defended the Council’s wording that Jesus Christ was “consubstantial with the Father.” He was in good company in defending this proposition—but not in powerful company. The Emperor Constantius, the son of Constantine, was an Arian, and so held to a simplistic, albeit politically expedient, Christology in conflict with Nicene Christianity. The Emperor demanded that Eusebius and other bishops condemn the great flag-bearer of Nicene orthodoxy, Saint Athanasius. Eusebius refused, stating that Athanasius was innocent of any wrongdoing or error.

For Eusebius, it was more noble to defend the truth than to curry political favor. For his defense of orthodoxy, Eusebius was condemned to a long exile in faraway Palestine, Asia Minor, and Egypt. He was mistreated, imprisoned, and abused by his Arian captors, including by an Arian bishop. Theology in the fourth century was played for keeps, it was a zero-sum game in which whatever one player gained, the other lost.

The political winds shifted in 361 when a new Emperor who cared nothing about Christianity took power. Eusebius’ long exile thus ended. He then traveled throughout the Eastern Mediterranean attempting to repair the theological tears in the garment of the Church, with limited success. Upon returning to his beloved Vercelli, Eusebius served another ten years as bishop, his quiet and faithful service leaving no documentary trace, a faithful populace his lasting legacy.

Saint Eusebius, you suffered for the truth, not just spiritually but physically. You endured exile from family, friends, and church rather than capitulate to false teachings. May your example inspire, and your intercession empower, all pastors and teachers to equal bravery.

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August 1: Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, Bishop and Doctor
1696–1787
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of moral theologians and confessors

A lawyer becomes holy

Today’s saint was given the gift of a comprehensive education by his parents from a young age. He finished his university studies with degrees in civil and canon law when he was just sixteen years old. After practicing law for eight years, and declining a marriage arranged by his father, the noble, highly educated, and intelligent Alphonsus made a mistake. A bad mistake. He overlooked a simple matter of fact in a legal proceeding and lost an important case for his client. Alphonsus was crushed by the embarrassment. He had never made such a galling, avoidable, public error before. But this one mistake would redound to the great benefit of the Church. Alphonsus decided to abandon the practice of law and his lust for vanity, wealth, and earthly glory. Shortly afterward, he heard an inner voice speak to him, on two separate occasions, while visiting the deathly ill at a hospital: “Leave the world and give yourself to me.” This was the turning point. Alphonsus made a dramatic gesture. He went to a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, placed his sword on the altar, and petitioned acceptance to a local religious Order.

He was ordained a priest in 1726 and travelled throughout the region of Naples as a missionary, becoming well known as a lion in the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional. In 1732, after forming various friendships with local clergy and convents of nuns, he founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. The rest of Alphonsus’ long life was spent building up this Order. Like so many nascent Orders, it struggled with internal divisions over its identity, matters of authority, and its specific mission in the Church. These struggles caused our saint no end of spiritual torment, especially after a deep division resulted from an act of forgery and betrayal by one of Alphonsus’ closest priest collaborators.

Saint Alphonsus took a personal vow to never waste a moment of time. It showed. He did everything, and he did it well. Amidst all of his duties as a founder and priest, he stole an hour hour here and an hour there to write a page or two, to dictate a few lines, or to take rough notes on a train of thought that had just crossed his mind. Over time, these stolen hours accumulated, and Alphonsus composed volume after volume on theology and devotion. He became particularly well known as a moral theologian. In that sensitive field of study, he acquired just the right balance. He was clear on the Church’s teachings and demanding of its faithful but was not overly rigorous. His razor-thin moral distinctions clarified correct behavior on contentious topics but may seem belabored and overly detailed from a post-modern perspective. Alphonsus was personally scrupulous but aware of it. He never imposed his finely tuned conscience on the morally deaf. A Pontifical University in Rome dedicated to moral theology was founded by the Redemptorists and is named the Alphonsianum in his honor.

Saint Alphonsus was made a bishop, over his objections, when he was sixty-six years old. He brought his typical energy and zeal to his diocesan responsibilities, demanding his priests celebrate Mass with true devotion or not at all. He maintained contact with every class of society as a bishop, no matter how downtrodden, poor, or forgotten a group was. His works on the Blessed Sacrament, the Virgin Mary, and Prayer became widely read. His reflections on the Stations of the Cross are still used in many parishes over two hundred years after his death. Alphonsus was also a talented musician and composed the music and words for a beloved Italian Christmas carol. After a long and holy life, he died at the age of ninety-one, an image of the Virgin Mary resting in his hands.

Saint Alphonsus, may your life of spiritual suffering, writing, dedication to the truth, and apostolic energy provide sufficient witness for all priests and religious to do half as much as you did, laboring without cease for the good of the Church and the world.

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July 31: Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Priest
1491–1556
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of soldiers, retreats, and the Basque country

A soldier reads, becomes holy, and founds a mighty company

Like so many other male saints, today’s saint began his adult life as a knight and soldier. In the service of a local noble, he learned the male sins that armies and royal courts excel in teaching: gambling, fighting, treachery, and womanizing. When courageously defending a fortress in Pamplona, Spain, Ignatius was hit by a cannonball. One leg was shattered and the other badly damaged. A long and painful recovery ensued. During this convalescence, he consciously decided to exchange his service from an earthly to a divine Lord. Yet Ignatius’ initial conversion developed, over time, into something far more subtle. As he moved toward the Priesthood, Ignatius engaged in profound reflection on the nature of Christian self-awareness, on prayer, and on what it meant to be radically committed to Christ and the Church.

For all of his worldliness and martial experience, Ignatius’ conversion started, ironically, with books. To counter the endless boredom of his recovery, he began to read about Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic, and other saints. He wondered if he could be like them. And then he wondered, a minute later, if he could court and marry a beautiful woman he desired. And then he was carried away thinking about new military expeditions. And on and on his mind wandered, as most minds do. But then came a spiritual breakthrough.

Ignatius reflected on reflection and thought about his thoughts. He plumbed his own depths, in the tradition of Saint Augustine, and analyzed the “shelf life” and quality of his emotions and mental experiences long after they had passed. He observed that reading the lives of the saints and thinking about earthly adventures were both pleasurable. But as time passed, reflection on holy things did not dissipate, while thoughts of earthly pleasures did. Saint Ignatius’ astute spiritual self-reflections spurred him to change the entire trajectory of his life. He wanted permanent happiness. He wanted joy. He repented of his past sins and decided to walk the way of the saints.

Saint Ignatius documented his spiritual progress, eventually publishing his insights in his classic, the Spiritual Exercises. Other saints and mystics had previously written sophisticated reflections on the normal objects of Catholic devotion. But Ignatius focused on the subject of prayer—the human person—as well as on the object of prayer—God. The mystery of God was equalled by the mystery of man. Ignatius was an innovator in describing the psychological process of praying, in advocating for a systematic examination of conscience, and in encouraging a planned method of introducing into the imagination specific biblical scenes or other objects of Christian faith for reflection. The Spiritual Exercises taught the Christian to profit from himself.

Saint Ignatius had an eventful life of wide travel, study, and apostolic activity after his conversion. His high ideals and creative leadership drew throngs of impressive followers. He chose a military name for his new order—the Company of Jesus. By the time of his death, this Company was widespread and continued its meteoric growth long after his passing to become the preeminent Catholic Order of men in the world. It is not too much to say that the Jesuits saved Europe from Protestantism, evangelized entire countries by themselves, educated the higher classes of many nations for centuries, and taught a Catholic humanism of the highest caliber. “One man and God make an army,” a saint once said. Ignatius supplied the soldiers, and God did the rest.

Saint Ignatius, may your method and example of prayer, mortification, and study inspire all modern apostles to make Christ the destination and the path, the end and the means, the way, the truth, and the life.

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July 30: Saint Peter Chrysologus, Bishop and Doctor
c. 380–c. 450
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Imola, Italy, invoked against fever and mad dogs

A golden tongued bishop preaches to a golden city

In 330 A.D., the Emperor Constantine transferred his capital from Rome to a newly constructed city he named after himself in present day Turkey. The Roman Empire and its ancient traditions continued but under a new guise. The Empire slowly oriented itself toward Greek, not Western, art and culture; adopted Orthodoxy, not Catholicism, as its religion; and communicated in the Greek, not the Latin, language. Contantinople’s walls were finally breached in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, bringing a definitive end to Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire, after more than a millennium. Due to the capital’s transfer in the fourth century, Italy was in disarray at the time of today’s saint in the fifth century. Weeds pushed through the cracked marble of Rome’s ruined temples. The Western emperors, more warlords than kings, migrated back and forth throughout the 400s between disintegrating Rome and a newly fortified city on the Adriatic Sea. It was imperial Ravenna, Byzantium’s sole toehold in Italy. It was a jewel box of a city sparkling with mosaics. Ravenna throughout the 400s and 500s was a mini-Constantinople, Byzantine to its fingertips, basking in the glow of imperial splendor, and abuzz with the construction of palaces, churches, and mausoleums. And it was of vibrant fifth-century Ravenna that Saint Peter Chrysologus was appointed archbishop in about 425 A.D. He served the city well for the next twenty-five years.

Saint Peter preached his first episcopal homily to the empress and is depicted alongside her and the emperor in a contemporary mosaic, proving Peter mingled with the elites and enjoyed their support. Peter developed a reputation as a skilled preacher. One-hundred-and-seventy-six of his sermons still survive. In later centuries Peter would be given the moniker Chrysologus, the “Golden Worded,” in recognition of his oratorical skills. The name may also have been given by Western theologians to purposefully rival the Eastern world’s famous Saint John Chrysostom, the “Golden Mouthed.”

Apart from his homilies, the only surviving document of Peter’s is a letter he wrote to Eutyches, a central figure in the complex, and sometimes vicious, Christological and Marian debates of the fifth century. Peter vigorously supported Pope Saint Leo the Great’s teachings on the Incarnation, while Eutyches and others in the East had drifted into monophysitism or versions of it. Monophysitism held that Christ possessed one mixed nature which mingled both human and divine elements. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 would formally adopt Leo’s teaching, condemn monophysitism, and teach forever and always that a fully divine nature and a fully human nature dwelled inside the one person of Jesus Christ without confusion, co-mingling, or alteration. This complex reality, called the hypostatic union, is precisely what gives such meaning, color, and richness to all that Christ said and did.

During the burning theological controversies preceding the Council of Chalcedon, just after Pope Saint Leo clarified orthodox teaching on Christ’s one person and two natures, Chrysologus wrote his letter to the very confused Eutyches. Concisely and charitably, Chrysologus encouraged the heretic to submit to the Bishop of Rome: “Obediently heed these matters of which the most blessed Pope of the city of Rome has written, because Blessed Peter, who lives and presides in his own See, proffers the truth of faith to those who seek it…we cannot decide upon cases of faith without the harmonious agreement of the Bishop of Rome.” Peter’s letter proves just how widespread early Christianity knew that the Bishop of Rome was the one hub where all of Christianity’s many spokes were joined.

Although much is known of Peter’s time and place, both theologically and culturally, few details remain of his life or ministry apart from his sermons. These sermons show rhetorical flair in expounding on the Incarnation, Mary’s role in mankind’s redemption, and in the need for penance and conversion. Saint Peter’s golden words impressed the populace of a golden city for decades. We can assume that our saint lived as elegantly as he preached. Saint Peter Chrysologus was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1729.

May all priests and deacons be graced with your passion, clarity, and eloquence, Saint Peter. Help the faithful who seek the fullness of the Word of God to find Him and aid those who are distracted and apathetic to pay heed to God’s interventions in their lives.

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July 29: Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus
First Century
Memorial: Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saints of siblings

Jesus, an only child, is attracted to family life

Jesus goes to the home of Zacchaeus to encourage his conversion. He goes to the home of Matthew after the tax collector becomes a disciple. And he goes to other homes to challenge religious elites or to speak strong words of censure. Jesus goes to the home of Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, though, just to linger with close friends. Jesus was an only child and probably enjoyed warm fraternization with these siblings around a fire, some light conversation over a meal, or a mellow roof-top chat as the fiery sun set over the ridge of the Mount of Olives just above them. Bethany, it seems, was Jesus’ haunt. God loves families and Jesus Christ gravitated toward, and eagerly shared in, the family life of the siblings Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.

For many centuries, the Church’s liturgy taught that the “Mary” of Bethany and the “Mary” of Magdala were one and the same, with the “composite Mary” feast day on July 22. The liturgical reforms after the Second Vatican Council, however, specifically identified the memorial of July 22 as that of Saint Mary Magdalene, leaving unresolved whether she is, or is not, the same person as Mary of Bethany. In 2021 Pope Francis resolved this question, at least liturgically. The memorial of July 29, until 2021 dedicated exclusively to Saint Martha, was expanded to include Mary and Lazarus as well. So the memorials of July 22 (Mary Magdalene) and July 29 celebrate two distinct Marys. Mary of Bethany is not Mary of Magdala!

Normal, everyday family life is inherently attractive. The chatter across the dining room table, the squabbles over who forgot to feed the dog, the girls who stand too long in front of the mirror, and the boys who leave the room a mess. The tug and pull of family life can be rough, domestic drama, but it is real drama. It’s not a video game. It’s not virtual reality. Like moths to a flame, people are drawn to healthy families, especially those who come from broken families. And so they come around — the only child from the house next door, the old woman whose children now live hours away, or the childless couple who wonders what might have been. Jesus came around too.

The celibate Jesus may have wondered what it would have been like to have had a brother and some sisters. He seems to enjoy the hustle and bustle of a busy family home, to have a full-throated laugh when something funny is said. Mary is attentive to Jesus. She knows one man very well, her brother Lazarus. Yet Jesus is not like her brother. Not at all. There is something mysterious and powerful about him, something people whisper about but which no one can explain. Mary is so very honored that He is there, she just sits on the floor nearby and listens intently.

Martha is honored as well, and perhaps embarrassed at the state of the house. She is distracted and worried, in the ageless tradition of women who see their homes as extensions of themselves. So Martha doesn’t stop cleaning and fussing, even after her guest arrives. She complains, perhaps lightheartedly, perhaps seriously: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” The Lord answers “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” It is a woman’s duty to worry. It’s a way of expressing concern and empathy. She worries about the kids, the house, the food, the family schedule, etc., because if she doesn’t worry about these things, no one else will. Jesus reminds Martha, though, that worrying and distraction have limits.

On another occasion, it was not an untidy home compelling Martha to speak. Lazarus has died. Jesus is moved at the news and comes from afar to console the family. Martha goes out to meet him: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” The ensuing conversation is compact, powerful, and saturated with faith. "Yes, Lord," Martha says, foreshadowing the promises at Baptism, "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world."

After Jesus resuscitated their brother from the dead, Martha and Mary were fundamentally changed. Lazarus had been cold to the touch, dead and wrapped like a mummy for four days. And then the sisters held his warm hand in their warm hands once again. Skin on skin - their brother was alive! And the good sisters undoubtedly asked Lazarus, as everyone surely asked him, what it had been like to be dead. Lazarus eventually died again...and was not resuscitated a second time. This family of Bethany followed together the lone man among men who rose Himself from the dead...and who never died again.

Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, your family life of faith provides a model of unity to all siblings. May all brothers and sisters rise above mundane family tensions and disagreements and unite around things eternal and transcendent. Amen.

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July 26: Saints Joachim and Anne
Late First Century B.C.–Early First Century A.D.
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saints of grandparents and of Canada (Anne)

God has a family tree, just like all men

Many parents think their child is perfect. Only two sets of parents were ever right. Saint Mary and Saint Joseph had a child through grace and raised that perfect God-son to adulthood. The parents of Saint Mary conceived their daughter in the normal human fashion but without the stain of original sin. So their daughter was superior to them from the start, yet it had nothing to do with hubris. Today’s feast celebrates those humble parents of Mary known to long tradition as Saints Joachim and Anne, though they are unnamed in Scripture. The first mention of Anne and Joachim in the Christian tradition is an apocryphal text from the second century which was judged to be fraudulent by the earliest scripture scholars. The Muslim Quran refers to Saint Anne in Arabic as Hannah, says that she conceived in her old age, expecting a male, but was given a daughter and named her Mary. We honor Saints Anne and Joachim because they reared the perfect child and were grandparents to the Son of God.

It is natural for the Church to exalt the earthly origins of Jesus of Nazareth. It communicates something important—that everyone comes from somewhere and someone, even God. The historical Jesus plants a flag in the ground of a certain place, a certain time, and a certain family. No one is from everywhere. No one is from always. No one is a citizen of the world, really and truly. Everyone has one mom, one dad, and four grandparents.

There is a powerful modern tendency to spiritualize Jesus of Nazareth, to assert that what matters most is that He was, not who He was or what He did. This spiritualizing sees Jesus as the highest human manifestation of an ideal, a concept, or a religious principle, but not necessarily as a real man. Such thinking readily accepts that the divine is in the grand sweep of time, in the universal vagaries expressed by karma, transcendentalism, the chi, the tao, nature, and the dreamcatcher. This approach implicitly sees material reality as a mask, and the natural environment as a curtain that must be pulled to the side to reveal the truer, hidden realities of the spirit-based world that invisibly governs the earth. There are many problems with such a worldview. Most significantly, it rejects, a priori, that God would communicate Himself to us in outward, tangible, historical forms.

Christianity is not a pastiche of environmental concerns, emotions, moral truisms, and soft love. The Church is not a big electric blanket that covers the whole world. She doesn’t exist to make us feel cozy. God comes to us through the very outward, historical forms of a hierarchical institution, through the water, bread, wine, and oil of the sacraments, through words, events, and people. God can speak to us from the inside, from the spirit, from the quiet of the heart. Yes. But He comes to us primarily, in a manner protected from subjective misinterpretation, in outwardness, in time, and in structures. The Supreme Being not only sustains history, then, He is found at a certain point inside of history. History, for the Christian, doesn’t just recede further and further into the past. It is ever present to us because God is ever present to us.

For the salvation of just one single man, there would be no need for a Church, for the incarnation, or for the cross. But no one exists by himself, and so no one can save himself by himself. There is never just one man. Everyone comes from two others. The body implies descent from others in a way a spirit does not. Jesus Christ gave us His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist, not a treatise of lofty ideals. He did not hand out Bibles at the Last Supper, look the Apostles in the eyes, and say “Read this in memory of me.” When He gives us His body, He gives us the DNA of Mary and Anne and Joachim. We touch God. We eat God. We digest God. God becomes part of us. His body becomes our body. And that Body, that flesh and that blood, came down through His grandparents, Saints Joachim and Anne.

Saints Joachim and Anne, may your quiet, hidden roles in the Divine plan inspire all who do the Church’s work behind the scenes and out of view to persevere in supporting the Church's saving mission.

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July 25: Saint James, Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Spain, equestrians, and pilgrims

Herod strikes again

The primary legacy of the Twelve Apostles is silence. Yes, their voices are sometimes heard in the Gospels, briefly. Yes, they traveled, evangelized, and built up the Church, discreetly. And yes, they were martyred, save John, though obliquely. Who went exactly where, and did what, is guesswork. When, how, by whom, and where each Apostle died is largely conjecture. Even most of their burial places are uncertain. After the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, and especially after the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, the Apostles dispersed throughout the deserts and mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean world. They gave their backs to Jerusalem. And as they walked away, their trails were lost, sand filled their footsteps, and history’s endless cycles erased their exact tracks. With some few exceptions, most of the valuable details were forgotten. The Apostles are now twelve islands of names in a sea of silence.

Some footprints of today’s saint, James the Greater, were preserved by Scripture. James was a member of the Twelve and of the Three; Peter, James, and John were the inner core that formed a shield of fidelity encircling Jesus Christ. James and his brother, John the Evangelist, author of the fourth Gospel, were fishermen who were called from their job on a lake to become fishers of men. It’s possible that other men were called before or after James and John, and that these unknown men laughed in Christ’s face, thought Him crazy, asked a thousand questions first, or just refused to follow a man they did not know and who offered no assurances. Those who said “No” to Christ are lost to history. Christ’s was not an open invitation. He was on a mission and kept walking. There was a moment, and then the moment passed. James and John seized their Christ-moment with both hands and never let go.

Peter, James, and John were in the home of Jairus when his servant was raised from the dead. On Mount Tabor they gazed in awe at the illuminated face of Christ, His translucent skin radiating like the sun. And these three were at Christ’s side in the intense stillness of a Thursday evening in the Garden of Gethsemane, providing what consolation their presence could. In the Gospels, Saint James is impetuous and full of character. He was not like vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes vanilla ice cream. James’s personality seemed to be more like sandpaper or barbed wire. You felt his roughness. You got hurt if you crossed him. James wanted Christ to rain fire on the Samaritans for their obduracy. He even desired to be seated at Christ’s right hand in the Kingdom of God, which led the Lord to prophesy his fidelity unto death.

Saint James’ shocking martyrdom was dutifully recorded by the early Church. Saint Luke’s Acts of the Apostles states that "King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword” (Acts 12:1–2). No other Apostle’s martyrdom is recorded in the New Testament. Perhaps he was singled out by Herod because of his fiery temperament. He would not have been one to retract a statement. He and his brother, after all, earned the nickname “Sons of Thunder” from Christ himself (Mk 3:17). And so it was that James probably knelt, his neck resting on a block of wood as his head extended just past it. And then the sword fell, the red blood ran, and the holy crown of martyrdom rested gloriously on a head without a body.

Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in a letter sent to the Church of Ephesus in about 110 A.D., wrote “The more I see a bishop keeping silent, the greater should be the reverence I have for him.” A vast forest grows in total silence. The martyrdom of James was like a large tree crashing to the floor of that forest. His death shook the land. Yet the forest continued growing. And it has been growing now for two thousand years. Like a great, but silent, verdant forest, the Church’s growth continues. Thousands of miles from Jerusalem and two thousand years after his death, the silence of this Apostle, as that of all the Apostles, still echoes. Every time a baby is baptized, a Mass is said, or a priest quickly walks through the door of a hospital room to anoint a dying man, the mission of the Church which the Apostles established carries on.

Saint James, you died a shocking and unjust death. May your courageous witness to Christ at the end of your life, and your impetuous generosity toward Him during your life, make all Catholics bold and forthright in their love of the things of God.

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July 24: Saint Sharbel (Charbel) Makhluf, Priest and Hermit
1828–1898
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Lebanon

The purest cedar of Lebanon

Today’s memorial was first inserted into the liturgical calendar in the United States in 2004. Prior to that, today’s saint was known primarily among the Christians of Lebanon, either in their homeland or in Lebanese diaspora communities outside of the Middle East. The dominant form of Catholicism in Lebanon is the Maronite Church. Maronites are united to the Bishop of Rome. The universal Church is like an umbrella under which are found different rites, or ritual forms of praying. The vast majority of the world’s Catholics pertain to the Latin Rite. But millions of other Catholics, fully members of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, worship using an Eastern, or Middle Eastern, liturgy. To the casual Western observer, this liturgy can seem exotic. The Maronite liturgy, rituals, church customs, and forms of prayer are, however, of ancient origin and enrich an already diverse Church with theological fruit picked from one of Christianity’s oldest orchards.

Saint Sharbel, baptized as Youssef (Arabic for Joseph), was one of five children born into a poor family from a remote village in the hills of Lebanon. They were devout Maronite Catholics whose relatives included priests and monks. Youssef shepherded his family’s small flock of animals when he was young. Very early on, he displayed a tender devotion to the Virgin Mary and a natural disposition toward prayer. In his early twenties, he left the family home to enter a monastery. In due time he made his religious profession and took the name Sharbel (or Charbel) after a second-century martyr from Antioch, a city not far from Lebanon. He then studied, was ordained a priest in 1859, and returned to his monastery to live as a strictly observant monk practicing austere mortifications. In 1875 he was granted the privilege to live as a hermit in a chapel under his monastery’s supervision and care.

And there he stayed—alone, isolated, mortified, poor, reflective, and silent—for the next twenty-three years in Christian “solitary confinement,” willingly separating himself from the world so he could more easily attach himself to Christ. He died of a stroke at the age of seventy while saying the Divine Liturgy. He slumped to the floor with the Holy Eucharist still in his hands! Saint Sharbel lived the model life of an Eastern hermit-monk in the ancient tradition of Saint Anthony of the Desert.

Western monasticism is focused on community life and liturgy, common meals and spiritual reading, farming, schools, chant, and hospitality. The Eastern monastic tradition has less engagement with the world, and the monks have less contact with each other. Eastern monasteries are often perched on remote mountaintops. They are inaccessible, unadvertised, and imposing. Their monks are like eagles, proud and alone, dwelling in the heights. Western monasteries, on the contrary, are easily found, open their doors to every visitor, and often flower into schools and universities. Some Benedictine monasteries are even embedded within bustling campuses. The different modes of life, rules, and apostolates of Eastern and Western monasticism are stark.

Although little known during his lifetime, miracles were attributed to the intercession of Saint Sharbel soon after his death. His body was exhumed and for many decades was found to be incorrupt, although it eventually decomposed. Father Sharbel was never photographed during his lifetime, and only a few monks ever saw him after he entered the monastery. But in May 1950 some Maronite monks from the U.S. visited Father Sharbel’s grave on his birthday and took a photo. When the film was developed a mysterious hooded figure with a white beard appeared among them. When shown the photo, some elderly monks from the monastery had no doubt. It was Sharbel. All images of the hermit Sharbel are based on this photo.

Saint Sharbel was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1965 at a Mass at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. And in 1977 he became the first Eastern Christian to be canonized in modern times. Various Lebanese government officials attended the Canonization Mass, along with members of Saint Sharbel’s family. At the time, a proud Lebanese-American bishop described the new saint as the “Perfume of Lebanon” and as proof that the Maronite Church “is a living branch of the Catholic Church and is intimately connected with the trunk, who is Christ…” Devotion to Saint Sharbel is widespread in Eastern Christianity. In an unusual but beautiful proof of the universality of the Church, devotion to Saint Sharbel was also brought by Lebanese immigrants to Mexico, where images of the pensive, hooded, mysterious looking saint are ubiquitous, and his intercession constantly sought.

Saint Sharbel, may your serene example of prayer, fasting, and mortification be an inspiration for all who do battle in the spiritual desert, for all who struggle with the sins and temptations offered by the world, the flesh, and the devil. Help us to follow your unique path of holiness.

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July 23: Saint Bridget of Sweden, Religious
1303–1373
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Europe, Sweden, and widows

A royal widow’s visions awe the masses

Upon entering the baroque Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome, on the first pillar to the right, is a fragment of a medieval fresco by the master Giotto. It is incongruous with the style of the rest of the often restored Basilica. The fresco has been preserved, partial but unchanged, because of its historical importance. It depicts Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming the first Jubilee Year in 1300. That Jubilee, and its indulgences, brought so many pilgrims to Rome that the original intention to celebrate a Jubilee every one hundred years was reduced to every fifty years. 1350, then, saw the second great Jubilee. Ironically, the Pope was living in Avignon at the time. For political reasons, he was unable to visit the eternal city during the very Jubilee he had called.

Among the throngs of pilgrims who did swamp Rome in 1350, however, was today’s saint. Saint Bridget made the grueling journey from far away Sweden. Unlike a typical pilgrim, however, she did not return home after earning her indulgence. Rome became her new home and the platform that made her, and her writings, famous. Bridget only returned to her birthplace twenty-three years later, when her daughter Catherine, also a canonized saint, carried her mother’s remains triumphantly back to Sweden. They rest today in a secular museum which, before the Reformation, had been the first monastery Bridget founded.

The details of the first half of the life of Saint Bridget of Sweden evoke a place long lost to history—Catholic Scandinavia. For hundreds of years, the true faith thrived in these lands and incubated great saints such as Bridget. She was married at the age of thirteen and lived happily with her husband for twenty-eight years, bearing eight children. They were a pious couple, even completing the famous pilgrimage to the Shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. But her husband died while Bridget was only halfway through her life’s journey. Bridget then spent three years in mourning in a Cistercian monastery. During this period, the spiritual visions she had experienced throughout her life increased in number and vivacity.

After a particularly powerful vision in 1346, she founded the monastery that would eventually be her burial place. But it wasn’t built to house an existing order. Responding to the words of Jesus, Bridget wanted to reform monastic life by founding a new congregation, the Order of the Most Holy Savior, or the Bridgettines. The Rule for the new Order was revealed to her throughout numerous and detailed visions. The Order was based on the Rule of Saint Benedict and was approved by the Pope only near the end of Bridget’s life. The Bridgettine Order spread throughout Europe and is found in numerous countries today, due largely to its founder’s incredible spiritual visions.

Saint Bridget, like Saint Catherine of Siena, labored to convince the popes to return to Rome from Avignon. She invoked the Lord’s opinions about the papal exile as He expressed them in her visions. One letter she wrote to the pope was so strongly worded that her envoy refused to read it when he was in the Holy Father’s presence. An Italian woman Bridget had become friends with during the Jubilee of 1350 donated a large palace in central Rome to Bridget. Saint Bridget and her sisters established their Roman foundation in that centrally located palace, and within its walls Saint Bridget died. A Bridgettine convent occupies the very same building today and preserves the founder’s rooms, as well as a relic of Bridget and her saintly daughter.

Saint Bridget was canonized eighteen years after her death, in 1391, due to her Christian virtue, her deep and sincere piety, her life of strict poverty and assistance to the poor, her devotion to the Virgin Mary, and her many pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints. She was a saint who loved saints. But she became famous for other reasons—mainly because of her intense, highly detailed, and provocative spiritual revelations. The revelations were written down in both Swedish and Latin, translated into multiple languages, and then diffused throughout Europe. Christ’s arresting words on death and judgment, heaven and hell, and right and wrong sparked the imaginations of all who read Saint Bridget’s writings. Saint Pope John Paul II named Saint Bridget a co-patron of Europe in 1999.

Saint Bridget, may your example of poverty, devotion, and prayer be an example to all who seek to live a life in Christ, and may your writings fire our imaginations to burn ever hotter and brighter with love of God.

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July 22: Saint Mary Magdalene
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of perfumers, converts, and hairdressers

An Apostle to the Apostles first spreads the Good News

“Cherchez la femme“ is a French phrase meaning “Look for the woman.” It is used as a convenient shortcut in movie or literary criticism to discover what is driving a plot, especially in a detective story. Why did the man risk his life? Cherchez la femme? Who had a motive to lie? Cherchez la femme? Where is the treasure buried? Cherchez la femme? It’s a cliché, of course, but clichés often convey some truth. Look for the women in the Gospels, and you will not be disappointed. Search for one woman in particular, Mary Magdalene, and you will find yourself present at all the most important Gospel events: the passion, the crucifixion, the burial, and in a garden for the resurrection, just moments after a huge stone is rolled away from a tomb, allowing the Lord to step forth into a new world. Saint Mary Magdalene is present at key moments, says key things, and is a key witness. She opens the door to Gospel scenes that would otherwise remain hidden from view.

Saint Mary Magdalene was among that troop of women who congregated on the outer edge of the twelve Apostles. These were probably women of means, who “provided for” Jesus and the Apostles “out of their resources” (Lk 8:3). When these women are named, Mary Magdalene is always named first, similar to Saint Peter’s position in the listing of the Apostles. Mary Magdalene is named many more times in the Gospels than most of the Apostles themselves, signaling her importance. The Gospel of Luke relates that seven demons were driven from her (Lk. 8:2). But there is debate over whether Mary Magdalene is also the sinful woman who anoints Christ’s feet and if she is also Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Building on the presumption that the sinful woman was Mary Magdalene, medieval traditions wrongly described her as a repentant prostitute. Artistic depictions almost universally show her as sultry, forlorn, and repentant. Despite the dubious connection between Mary Magdalene and prostitution, this association continues today and will likely take centuries to purify.

A “combined Mary” understanding rolls all three of the above Marys—the woman from whom demons were expelled, the repentant sinner, the sister of Lazarus—into the one person of Mary Magdalene. Mary was an extremely common Jewish name. It requires, then, careful attention to the text to sift which Mary is doing what in the New Testament. Magdala was a town on the Sea of Galilee. So when Mary from Magdala is referenced, the reader can trust that her town is adjoined to her name on purpose to distinguish her from other Marys.

An old Christian tradition calls Mary Magdalene the “Apostle to the Apostles.” The resurrected Christ appeared to her first, before all others. She is the proto-witness. Mary and other women go to the tomb of Jesus to anoint His body. They see the stone rolled away and enter. The body is not there. An angel tells them to not be afraid, “But go, tell his disciples and Peter” (Mk 16:7), so Mary dutifully fulfills his angelic orders. It is a woman, then, who tells the men, who spreads the news of all news to everyone else. The men come running and verify her account. The tomb is empty. As usual, Mary respectfully remains on the fringe of the Apostles. She weeps outside the tomb while Peter and John are inside. Time passes as they try to absorb what this all means until, finally, the “disciples returned to their homes” (Jn 20:10). But Mary does not go home.

And then it happens. Mary is alone again, crying. She just can’t believe it. She has to take another look. So she bends her body in half to peer into the low empty tomb once again. When she straightens up, she notices a man standing just behind her. She thinks he is a gardener. A short, awkward conversation follows and then abruptly concludes: “Mary!”...“Rabbouni!” (Jn 20:16). Her name is in the mouth of God! A name is enunciated and a new life begins! At Baptism. At Confirmation. At religious vows. May we all hear the voice of the risen Christ speak our name, directly to us, just as Mary Magdalene did, when we hopefully walk for the first time in the garden of paradise: “Ashley!” ”Susan!” “Tom!” “Marty!” “Quinn!” “Juliette!”...and on and on and on until the end of time.

Saint Mary Magdalene, assist all who seek your intercession to be humble followers of Christ, doing, from the margins, what is necessary to carry forward the ministry of Christ’s Church, quietly accomplishing God’s will without recognition except for its eternal reward.

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July 21: Saint Lawrence of Brindisi, Priest and Doctor
1559–1619
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Brindisi, Italy

A little-known Doctor of the Church did it all and did it well

Julius Caesar Russo was born into a religious family, yet from a young age was drawn to join another religious family—that of Saint Francis of Assisi. After his father’s early death, little Julius was placed in the care of the Friars Minor by his mother. Upon moving to Venice, though, he came to know the Capuchins, another expression of Franciscanism, and joined their Order as a teenager. He took the religious name of Lawrence, was ordained a priest in 1582, and from that point on plowed his way through life like a high speed train. Father Lawrence bulleted north and south, east and west, stopping in Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, Bohemia, Spain, and Portugal. This one-man army seemed to be everywhere, doing everything, and yet always made the salvation of his own soul his highest priority.

Father Lawrence was smart. Very smart. His intellectual gifts were fully deployed in the service of the Lord to master whatever discipline he studied. He learned the biblical languages of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac. In addition to his native Italian, he also spoke Spanish and German, which he put to extensive use in his ministry in Central Europe. His knowledge of Scripture was so wide and so deep that it seemed he had memorized the entire Bible. He even earned the esteem of Jewish scholars for his profound understanding of rabbinic texts.

Lawrence also cultivated a burning love for Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Eucharist in long hours of prayer. It sometimes took hours for him to say Mass. He seemed to be carried away in ecstasy and had the gift of tears. This level of fervor, education, poverty, intelligence, and devotion to the Church made Saint Lawrence of Brindisi the ideal priest for his time and place. He was many things, but among them he was the ultimate Counter-Reformation warrior.

Saint Lawrence explained with great force and lucidity the truths of the Catholic faith to those who had fallen into the trap of Protestantism. He calmly elaborated upon the Scriptural and patristic foundations of the Papacy, Bishops, Mary, and the Sacraments. Lawrence was the anti-Luther and the epitome of the great Capuchins who invigorated Franciscanism in the 1500s and beyond. Amid all of his labors as a preacher and teacher, Lawrence also carried out a parallel set of demanding duties in the administration of the Capuchin Order. He was a novice master, provincial, and minister general, or head, of the Order. Father Lawrence completed mountains of work, day in and day out, for many years, a sustained drive and competence which inevitably led to him being burdened with still more weighty responsibilities.

As a Franciscan dedicated to preserving and restoring peace, Lawrence was tasked by both the Holy Father and secular princes with various diplomatic missions geared toward settling controversies among Christian states and between these states and the surging Ottoman Empire. Yet Lawrence’s desire for peace was not divorced from truth, from the right to self-defense, or from love of Christian Europe.

He was the chaplain of a Christian army which was mustered in Germany against the Turks at Lawrence’s insistence. Lawrence then personally led the troops into battle with his crucifix held high. The German army’s victory was attributed to our saint’s intercession and inspiring example. Saint Lawrence died on his birthday, July 22, at age sixty, while on a diplomatic mission to Lisbon, Portugal. He is buried in a monastery in Northern Spain and was canonized in 1881. In 1959 Pope Saint John XXIII proclaimed Saint Lawrence of Brindisi an Apostolic Doctor of the Church for his creative yet orthodox writings on the Virgin Mary and for his commanding erudition in, and harmonious presentation of, Scripture, patristics, and fundamental theology. He is the third Franciscan Doctor of the Church, along with Saints Bonaventure and Anthony, and, unfortunately, one of the least well known.

Saint Lawrence, you were ideally suited to the needs of your age and moved all you met through your virtuous example, vast knowledge, and life of prayer. Through your intercession, help all priests, especially Franciscans, to not spare themselves but to emulate your zeal.

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July 20: Saint Apollinaris, Bishop and Martyr
First or Second Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Ravenna, Italy, and invoked against gout and epilepsy

An elusive early bishop’s memory is preserved in art

Ravenna, a city on Italy’s eastern Adriatic Coast, is a miniature Istanbul. It has perhaps the most impressive groupings of Byzantine churches and mosaics outside of the former Constantinople. In the centuries after the Western Roman Empire declined, Italy was ruled by various Northern tribes. The Roman Empire was thus reduced to its eastern half in today’s Greece, Turkey, and Syria. Its capital was Constantinople, and its westernmost outpost, and only secure toehold on the Italian peninsula, was Ravenna.

Ravenna’s art and architecture, then, reflect Eastern styles rather than Western ones. And it was in Ravenna where today’s saint, Apollinaris, was bishop for twenty-six years, and where two basilicas with impressive artistic and historical pedigrees still bear Apollinaris’ name. These two permanent proofs of his significance date from the sixth century and, together with an almost equally ancient church in Rome dedicated to his honor, testify to Apollinaris’ legacy in the early Church.

The life of Apollinaris is the subject of conjecture more than analysis. Very little is known about him. Some traditions hold that he was a disciple of Saint Peter and came from Antioch, where Saint Peter was the first bishop. Other traditions, based on some historical evidence about the sequence of bishops in Ravenna, assert that he was bishop there in the late second century. Some legends speak of him as a martyr, while others say he suffered for the faith in the manner of a confessor but was not a blood martyr. Owing to these conflicting histories, and to his apparent lack of universal significance, Saint Apollinaris was removed from the sanctoral calendar in 1969 as part of the liturgical reforms after the Second Vatican Council. There was never any question, however, of removing him from the Church’s official roster of saints. After a long absence, the 2002 edition of the Roman Missal restored the Optional Memorial of Saint Apollinaris.

In the older of the two churches of Saint Apollinaris in Ravenna, an ancient mosaic communicates the essentials. The mosaic is not peripherally located. It is front and center in the main apse, in the direct field of vision of any and all who walk through the doors of the church. It shows a man with white hair. He is old. His skull is shaved. It is the tonsure, showing his religious dedication. A large golden halo circles his head. He is a saint. He is wearing liturgical vestments—a chasuble and stole. He is a priest or bishop. His arms are wide open in what is called the orans, or praying, position so common to early Christian frescoes and mosaics. He is saying Mass. He is wearing a pallium, a small band of white lamb’s wool worn by Metropolitan Archbishops. He is the Archbishop of Ravenna.

Twelve lambs, representing the faithful, look to the figure from both sides. He is an important pastor, a shepherd. His main garment is a white alb. In keeping with the mosaic’s age, and with Ravenna’s status as an imperial city, the alb looks more like a flowing Roman toga. The empire is alive and well. The figure is an equal to all the powerful of the city. Above the figure, tiny, dark stones spell out: ＋SANTUS APOLENARIS.

Most of the church’s mosaics were wantonly destroyed, likely by the soldiers of a neighboring city, in the fifteenth century. But not this mosaic. It was famous then and is famous now. It is the most tangible evidence imaginable of the importance of today’s saint, an early bishop who suffered for a revolutionary new faith that knew about conquering death.

Saint Apollinaris, we know little about you except what is most important. You were ordained to participate in the fullness of the priesthood of Christ. You gave witness to the faith that your people remembered and memorialized. May we lead lives that are equally deserving of honor and commemoration.

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July 14: Saint Camillus de Lellis, Priest
1550–1614
In the U.S.A. this Optional Memorial is transferred to July 18
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of hospitals, nurses, and the sick

A one-man Red Cross who burned with love for the sick

Like so many saints, Camillus de Lellis ran hard in whatever direction he was heading. When he was a soldier, he ran hard toward the noise of battle. When he was a gambler, he ran hard toward the betting tables. When he was a sinner, he ran hard toward his taste of the day. And when he had a conversion, he ran hard toward the tabernacle. And there, finally, he stopped running. Once he found God, he stayed with Him. Today’s saint spent long hours with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Silent contemplation fueled his soul, and he motored through each day with a high-octane love for the sick and the dying, which attracted numerous followers, led to the founding of a religious order, and eventually made Camillus a saint.

As a physically large teenager, Camillus became a soldier, alongside his soldier father, to fight the Turks. In the army he learned to gamble, an addiction that matured with him and which ultimately reduced him to abject poverty. At a low point in his life, he volunteered to work at a Franciscan monastery that was under construction and became inspired by a monk to seek admission to the order. But they wouldn’t take him. Camillus had a serious leg wound that refused to heal. He would have been more burden than blessing, so he moved on. He went to Rome to care for the sick in a hospital where he had previously been a patient. But he was repelled by the inadequate medical care, the moral deprivation of the nurses, and the lack of spiritual attention given to the patients. Camillus decided something better was needed for the sick and found the solution when he looked in the mirror.

Camillus was inspired by his saintly spiritual director, Saint Philip Neri, to establish a company of consecrated men who would serve the sick purely out of love for God. They served in the hospital of the Holy Spirit, still found today on the Tiber River close to the Vatican. Camillus and his co-workers earned a reputation for providing excellent medical care, for indefatigable service, and for doing their work with an intense spirit of prayer. While carrying out this demanding apostolate, Camillus also attended seminary and was ordained a priest in 1584. As the years passed, more men joined, new houses were established in other cities, and the rule for the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm (M.I.), simply known as the Camillians, was approved by the Pope in 1591.

Father Camillus instituted medical reforms that were rare for his time in regard to cleanliness, diet, infectious diseases, the search for cures, and the separation of healthcare administration from healthcare itself. When his order expanded to other countries, they even staffed a medical field unit accompanying soldiers in battle, an important innovation. This, together with his order’s habit bearing a large, simple, red cross on the front, made Camillus a precursor of the modern Red Cross.

Saint Camillus was practical as well as mystical. He wanted the best, physically, spiritually, and morally, for all those he cared for. Every patient was his Lord and Master. No patient, no matter how diseased, foul, dirty, or rude, was beyond his care. Along with his religious brothers, he even took a special fourth vow to care for those with the plague who might infect him. Two Camillians died of the plague in Camillus’ own lifetime. “More love in those hands brother” was his constant refrain to his confreres. His example resonated, and the work of the Camillians continues today in various countries.

After his order was firmly established, Saint Camillus succumbed to various diseases in 1614 in Rome. Soon after his death, two doctors from Holy Spirit Hospital came to examine the body, as Camillus was already considered a saint. They cut open his chest wall and removed his heart. An eyewitness wrote that his heart was huge, and as red as a ruby. Camillus was canonized in 1746, and a large statue of him adorns a niche in the central nave of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Along with Saint John of God, who was also a soldier, Saint Camillus is the patron saint of hospitals and the sick. Just a few hundred feet from the tourist hordes crushing to enter the Pantheon in the heart of Rome, the modestly sized but luxurious baroque church of Saint Mary Magdalene fronts a small piazza. Inside, usually alone, and resting in peace, are the remains of Saint Camillus de Lellis.

Saint Camillus, you knew the rough life of the soldier, gambler, and wanderer. Because of your experiences, you practiced great empathy for the outcast, the sick, and the dying. Help us to be like you, to translate our empathy into action, and to be motivated primarily by love of God.

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July 16: Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of the Carmelites, and for deliverance from Purgatory

A Crusader legacy enriches the Church’s inner life

A few miles from Lebanon near Haifa, a large city in the north of present-day Israel, is the Holy Land’s Masada of Catholic prayer and spirituality. Mount Carmel rises high into the sky, dominating the landscape below. On this promontory, one of the most dramatic and memorable scenes of the Old Testament unfolded.

In the ninth century before Christ, the prophet Elijah made a death challenge to hundreds of pagan prophets to determine if the God of the Jews was greater than Baal. Two altars are built. Wood is laid about both. Two oxen are slaughtered and placed on the altars. The pagans pray to Baal to accept their sacrifice. Nothing. They pray through the morning. Nothing. They pray through the afternoon. Elijah mocks them. They hop around the altar. They slice their skin, mixing their blood with that of the oxen. Still nothing. They move to the side. Elijah steps up and gives commands. Yahweh’s altar is drenched with water. It is drenched twice more. Elijah pleads that Yahweh accept the sacrifice. And then…a ball of fire cuts through the night sky and BAM! The water evaporates and the sacrifice is totally consumed by the blazing fire of the true God. Then the shocking revenge. Elijah slits the throats of the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal at a brook that soon runs red.

God showed His power in stunning fashion on Mount Carmel centuries before Christ ever walked the earth. Two millennia later, the Holy Land was Crusader territory. Chivalric Orders of Knights had conquered Jerusalem and dotted the Mediterranean Coast with Crusader castles to protect the flow of pilgrims and soldiers to and from the holiest sites of Christianity. Some of those knights and dames knew Mount Carmel was holy ground. So in the crags, folds, and valleys of this isolated mountainscape, pocked with numerous caves and grottoes, hermits retreated to lead lives of prayer, fasting, and penance. When political and social realities changed by the end of the thirteenth century, and Christians once again lost the Holy Land, these hermits returned home and established new “Mount Carmels” throughout Europe, evoking the spiritual isolation of their lost mountain in Northern Israel.

The Order of Mount Carmel is an engine room of prayer, a religious family of both male and female contemplative religious. Carmelites’ radical dedication to contemplative prayer, detachment, poverty, and death to self has attracted and formed men and women of the greatest holiness: Saints Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). Integral to Carmelite spirituality is the Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

The origins of today’s liturgical feast are somewhat unclear, but the underlying devotion is not. The Virgin Mary’s steady, quiet presence in the life of our Lord is notable for its subtlety. Her inner life and secret generosity is what attracts, more than her actions or speech. No word is limited to a book. The Word of God existed from eternity in the Trinity, became flesh, taught, performed miracles, died and rose long before the Word was written down. Mary is the mother of that rich Word. Her word of “Yes” to the Archangel Gabriel gave space for the Word to dwell among us.

In his 1994 book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Pope Saint John Paul II wrote that “Carmelite mysticism begins at the point where the reflections of Buddha end…” The goal of spirituality is not merely to renounce the evil world but to unite the soul to the personal God of Jesus Christ. Purification and detachment are not ends in themselves. They help one cling to God more easily. Our Lady of Mount Carmel is not a chameleon. She doesn’t change colors to satisfy any and all “spiritualities.” She is the mother of God and the icon, par excellence, of the queen of the virtues—humility.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, through your example of humble docility to the will of God, we seek your intercession to make us more prayerful, more detached, more recollected, and more committed to whatever God asks of us.

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July 15: Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor
1221–1274
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of those with intestinal problems

He seemed to have escaped the curse of Adam’s sin

The scholarly heft of Saint Bonaventure legitimized the eccentric Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Bonaventure was to the Franciscans what Thomas Aquinas was to the Dominicans. These contemporaries form twin summits of scholastic thought, first-rate intellectuals whose eminent writings lent their young, revolutionary religious orders credibility. Aquinas and Bonaventure received their doctorates on the very same day and are shown as equals in Raphael’s Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. Both Thomas and Bonaventure were also pious, poor, humble, and holy, giving their theological work even greater weight. Saint Bonaventure was part of that huge influx of second-generation Franciscans who never knew their founder. He joined the order in 1243, received his doctorate in theology from the University of Paris, and became master of the Franciscan school at Paris in 1253. In 1257 he was elected minister general of the entire Franciscan order. He was just thirty-six years old.

The pressing responsibilities of religious leadership constrained Bonaventure from total dedication to the life of the mind. He had limited time to read, write, and do research once he was elected head of his order, making the first half of his life his most prolific period of scholarship. But that scholarship was so comprehensive as to be a complete system of thought. He wrote on everything—fundamental theology, the nature of dogma, Scripture and history, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, angels, creation, the virtues—and all of it was suffused with a mature spirituality focused on the individual soul progressing toward God. With this intensely spiritual focus, Bonaventure is said to be more Augustinian in his theology than Aquinas, who is more Aristotelian. The former’s goal was to love, the latter’s to speculate and to know. Bonaventure’s writings on dogma were influential at the Council of Trent and continue to be read.

Bonaventure led his order in a period of sharp tension among Franciscans over the legacy of Saint Francis. Should the order own property directly or just use property owned by others? Should the brothers be educated and teach or remain simple and only preach? Should the brothers live in the growing cities of the medieval world or stay in the country like Francis himself? Should the brothers in Northern Europe be allowed to wear shoes or must they go barefoot like Saint Francis commanded? These, and many other questions, cleaved the body Franciscan. Many of the diverse interpretations of Francis’ legacy were unresolvable, and, in the early sixteenth century, the order morphed into three entities, each embodying a particular spiritual emphasis.

Saint Bonaventure navigated these sharp tensions with great skill. His erudition, great patience, and love of others sewed the diverse patches of Franciscanism into a whole cloth. He had to chastise, punish, and correct too. But he was outstanding in listening to every side before making his final decisions. That Franciscanism survived is thanks to today’s saint, who has been called the Franciscans’ “Second Founder.”

In 1273 Bonaventure was made a cardinal bishop by the pope. Knowing of this Franciscan’s humility and his refusal to accept a previous episcopal appointment, the pope inserted into his bull an order that Bonaventure could not decline the honor. Bonaventure was in the kitchen washing dishes when the papal envoys arrived with the news. Saint Bonaventure died with his boots on, while participating in and aiding the pope at the Council of Lyon in 1274. Aquinas had died on the way to the same Council. Bonaventure was buried in Lyon, canonized in 1482, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1557. Unfortunately, his tomb was desecrated by French Protestants and revolutionaries in later centuries, and his body has been permanently lost. His first professor at Paris, Alexander of Hales, gave him a supreme compliment. He said that Bonaventure “seemed to have escaped the curse of Adam's sin.”

Saint Bonaventure, you had few equals in knowledge, love, prayer, and virtue. Through your heavenly intercession, help all Catholics to progress toward union with God by the many paths you yourself walked so long before us.

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July 14: Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin (U.S.A.)
1656–1680
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Canada and orphans

Tough as a hide, pure as a fawn

Kateri (Iroquois for “Catherine”) Tekakwitha lived a short life of twenty-four years, the same age attained by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux at her death. Kateri’s father was a pagan Mohawk Chief and her mother a Christian Algonquin. The Mohawk people were the easternmost tribe of the larger Iroquois Confederacy. Her younger brother and both of her parents died in a smallpox epidemic which damaged young Kateri’s vision and scarred her face. She was taken in by an aunt and an uncle, the Chief of the Turtle Clan, and grew up in their longhouse. Over time she mastered the domestic arts typical of the women of her tribe—fashioning animal skins into belts and clothes, weaving, cooking, and other skills. Kateri was shy, perhaps due to her impaired vision and damaged skin. But she listened carefully. Very carefully. Jesuit missionaries visited her relative’s home and taught them about Jesus Christ and the Catholic religion. Kateri was there in the background, sweeping, cooking, and sewing, paying close attention to what the adults were saying around the table, something typical of adolescents in every culture.

More than being converted, Kateri converted herself. After dramatically refusing an arranged marriage, eighteen-year-old Kateri approached a Black Robe, Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville, and requested baptism. He guided her through the Catechism. After a few months she told him, “I have deliberated enough. For a long time my decision on what I will do has been made. I have consecrated myself entirely to Jesus, son of Mary, I have chosen Him for husband and He alone will take me for wife.” She was baptized in honor of Saint Catherine of Siena on Easter Sunday, 1676.

Soon after her baptism, encountering some resistance from her fellow Mohawks, Kateri left upstate New York and crossed into present day Canada to live close, but not too close, to the French and their religion, in a village called Kahnawake. This was a traditional Iroquois settlement—it survived on fishing, hunting, and farming—with a twist. Its inhabitants were Iroquois Catholics. They did not allow polygamy, premarital sex, divorce, or abuse of alcohol. The Indians did not want to become French but to merge their traditional way of life with their newfound religion. The Jesuits served these Catholic Iroquois from the nearby mission of Sault Saint-Louis. A Jesuit priest’s letter from 1682 vividly describes life in Kahnawake and specifically mentions, but leaves unnamed, a young female Mohawk convert of extraordinary piety. It was Kateri.

Kateri and a group of like-minded Mohawk women bonded in a warrior sisterhood that practiced traditional Catholic piety with an indian emphasis on voluntary suffering. These women were as tough as bark. They wanted to emulate the sufferings of Christ, to atone for sins, and to mortify themselves in the tradition of so many great European saints. They wore hair shirts and put on iron belts with small metal spikes. They stood in ice water while praying the rosary. Bearing pain, publicly, was part of their culture and native religion. Catholicism’s traditional theology of atonement and mortification melded perfectly with aspects of the Iroquois’ native religion.

Kateri was devoted to the Holy Eucharist and Mary. She was reserved and contemplative by nature. She delighted in nature’s beauty—in trees, birds, and wildflowers—and gathered these last to decorate the altar for Mass. Kateri remained a virgin and is called the Lily of the Mohawks for her purity. Her delicate health failed her early and she died with the words “Jesus, Mary, I love you” on her lips. Minutes after her death the people at her bedside noticed something. The scars that incised her cheeks were slowly repaired, and her skin became pure, smooth and beautiful. The faithful maiden of the woods had earned her reward.

Saint Kateri, we ask your humble and pious intercession to inspire all young people, especially girls, to attain the virtues which came so easily to you—to be uncomplaining, physically tough, contemplative in spirit, chaste in body, pious, and charitable to all.

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July 13: Saint Henry
973–1024
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the childless and Benedictine Oblates

A king walks the tight path of virtue

Passing through the heroic-sized doors of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the pilgrim walks into a vast interior space, his gaze slowly rising to silently absorb the sublime vaults, criss-crossed by ethereal beams of sunlight. Yet as the pilgrim meanders, head tilted upward, eyes drinking in the beauty, he is actually walking on art too. Near the end of St. Peter’s central nave, embedded in the elaborate marble floor, is a large, deep red disk. It is porphyry, a rich purple granite prized by the emperors and nobles of Rome. This disk, harvested from an Egyptian quarry, was originally placed in a Roman home or public building. But the Emperor Constantine pilfered it. He had the disk transplanted to near the main altar of the fourth-century basilica he built in honor of Saint Peter, and the disk has been preserved, in a different location, in the present sixteenth-century basilica. And on this lush granite disk numerous kings and emperors, including Charlemagne and today’s saint, Henry II, humbly knelt to be crowned by popes. Saint Henry made the long journey from Germany to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Benedict XIII on February 14, 1014. Not just common men but kings too went on pilgrimage to Rome to seek Saint Peter’s blessing.

The life of Saint Henry shows that even a king has a King. Even the powerful are under Someone who is more powerful. Good kings know that; bad ones don’t. King Henry lived a life in many ways typical of the royals of his era. He was involved in almost continuous political intrigues and military battles to protect and expand his kingdom. There were fights to attain power and fights to retain power. There were long military campaigns in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Italy. There was court intrigue, a strategic but childless marriage, the envy of nobles, and all the other ingredients inherent to the struggle for power. But Henry is the only Holy Roman Emperor ever to be canonized a saint for a reason. He had deep faith. He loved the Church. He lived the virtues to a heroic degree. He received the Sacraments. He was devoted to Saint Mary.

Saint Henry was outstanding in utilizing his wealth and position to advance the apostolates of the institutional Church. He formed a new diocese, endowed others, founded monasteries, donated land, and had close relationships with powerful bishops. Under his care, the church became an arm of the imperial government, with bishops of large dioceses even becoming princes wielding both civil and ecclesiastical power. This blurring of the lines between Church and State in Germany became problematic in later centuries when imperial officials tried to wrest church governance from the pope’s hands and flexed their secular muscle in crushing heretics. But under Saint Henry the mingling of church and state was mutually beneficial. It created a united love of fatherland and religion, of culture and liturgy, of patriotism and faith, which lasted until the early sixteenth century throughout all of Germany and until the Napoleonic era in large swaths of it.

The rich and powerful are subject to temptations just like the common man, yet their wealth and influence can carve new pathways of sin not open to the common man. So when a king, queen, president, prime minister, multi-millionaire, or movie star walks the straight road and enters through the narrow gate, there is a bit more to celebrate. The sinful road not taken, the evil path that could have been trod but was not, is a cause for rejoicing for every man, but especially for the powerful man. Every soul can indulge in some legitimate Christian pride for what it has not done, for having conquered temptation and sin by strategically avoiding it. Many paths opened up before King Henry during his life. He walked the tight path of virtue and entered heaven by the narrow gate and thus exalted his royal status to one even higher, that of a saint.

Saint Henry, you were an exceptional benefactor of the Church, living sacrificial generosity to advance her apostolates. May your example help us all to be generous, in every way, when our religion demands a generous response.

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July 11: Saint Benedict, Abbot
c. 480–c. 550
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Europe and monks

His Rule helped create Europe, one monastery at a time

Before the time of today’s saint, to be a monk meant to wander into the Syrian desert and never come back, to climb a rocky summit in the Sinai and never descend, to sit cross-legged atop a pillar, to fast to emaciation, or to remain wordless as a hermit in a damp cave in Lebanon. Saint Benedict changed all of this. This revolutionary introduced evolutionary change, a new way for monks to be radically committed to Christ. No more would a monk have to perch like a hawk in its eyrie, alone, gazing over the valley below. When Benedict opened his mouth and called the monk out of his desert, down from his mountain, off of his pillar, and out of his cave, monks answered.

Benedict founded Western monasticism, the communities of monks who pray, eat, work, and socialize together in a common chapel, refectory, field, and workshop. Benedictine monks created Europe out of the vacuum of blackness and disorder which enveloped the land after Roman order disintegrated. So many centuries later, the pioneering path that Benedict cut for Western civilization is difficult to appreciate. What was fresh is now ancient. What was revolutionary is now just the way things are.

Little is known with certainty of Saint Benedict’s life. No contemporary preserved his essential details, as the great Saint Athanasius did for Saint Anthony of the Desert. Decades after Benedict’s death, Pope Saint Gregory the Great recorded some precious few anecdotes of the great monk’s life, but the lack of hard facts and historical chronology leave room for speculation. What is known for certain is that he held in his hands what the world had to offer for a few short years and then dropped it like a murder weapon. He would live for Christ and Christ alone. He joined a primitive community of consecrated men for several years but departed after some unspecified intrigues to form his own small monasteries. Exercising spiritual and practical fatherhood over his brother monks, he was inspired to write a Rule. Benedict became famous, in time, not due to a wealth of biographical detail but because of his Rule. Saint Benedict is his Rule and his Rule is him.

The Benedictine Rule came to dominate all of Europe. In a Christian age when monasteries dotted every low valley and high town, when the local abbot was as powerful as the bishop, and when schools and culture were synonymous with monastic learning, these communities almost always lived by the Rule of Saint Benedict. Benedict’s Rule became widespread because it was both deeply spiritual and imminently practical. It demanded uncompromising dedication to work and prayer but held individual and community goods in a careful balance.

A Benedictine monastery was not just a place for penance or asceticism but a family. It was a finely tuned orchestra with the abbot waving his wand at the front, eliciting from the monks’ individual gifts a common harmony to soothe God and correctly order nature itself. The monastery’s structured routine of chanting the Divine Office, of work, of study, of constructing a community for community’s sake, gave Europe a finely tuned rhythm that drove technology, the arts, and scholarship forward by leaps and bounds over other lands.

Until the time of Saints Francis and Dominic in the early 1200s, there was only one founder worth noting in the church, and that was Saint Benedict. The immense legacy of the founders of large, powerful, and lasting Orders in the Church is mysterious. Founders influence the Church’s spirituality and theology almost as much as Divine Revelation itself. And Benedict was the founder of all founders. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Benedict’s only serious competition for the greatest saint of the first millennium, also left a widely adopted rule, but it never produced the unified and practical communities which Benedict’s Rule generated. Saint Benedict rests in peace near his twin sister, Saint Scholastica, in a crypt under the historic Monastery of Monte Cassino. The “upper room” of Monte Casino became European culture’s symbolic Acropolis and Temple Mount, the beacon to the town, the lighthouse of Western civilization, and it was Saint Benedict who first lit its lamp.

Saint Benedict, you were a humble monk whose life remains largely unknown, yet you left a massive legacy. Help each Christian in his home, church, and workplace to labor from the shadows to create light, to be the unseen cause behind
great effects, and to light lamps that guide others through the darkness.

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July 9: Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, Martyrs
1746–1815
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

New saints for an ancient land start the Third Millennium

Today’s feast commemorates one hundred and twenty martyrs, eighty-seven native Chinese and thirty-three Western missionaries, killed in a long trail of blood from 1648 to 1930. This roll call of heroes includes lay women, catechists, seminarians, bishops, priests, a cook, a farmer, a widow, a seventy-nine-year-old man and a child of nine. Some were killed while taking sanctuary inside of a church. A large number died during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when fanatical Chinese peasants slaughtered thousands of Christian converts and foreign missionaries for no reason other than their faith and their foreignness. Some lives were ended by beheading, quickly; others by neglect in prison, slowly; and many by strangulation, painfully.

The one saint the Church names on this feast is Saint Augustine Zhao Rong. Like so many other saints, he began his professional life as a soldier. As part of his military duties, Augustine was assigned to escort a French priest in China. The priest’s holy example made such a deep impression on Augustine that he decided to convert to Catholicism. After his baptism, he went for the gold— he entered the seminary and became Father Augustine. His priestly ministry was short lived. Father Augustine was jailed, tortured, and left to die in prison during the reign of an emperor insanely hostile to Christianity and to Chinese priests in particular. Numerous other Chinese and foreigners were swallowed up in the same persecution along with Father Augustine. All refused to apostasize and many were atrociously tortured.

After some faint contact with Christianity in the first millennium, European missionaries first ventured deep into China in the last decades of the 1500s. These missionaries were chosen for their great erudition, sagacity, and Christian spirit. In contrast, the first boatloads of Spanish missionaries unloaded into Latin America were a mixture of holy, educated men, along with others who were almost ordained pirates, adventurers whose zeal for the house of the Lord was so total that they were oblivious to the sensitive cultural realities they, and the West itself, were encountering for the first time. Mayan and Aztec Codexes’ were burned, finely carved statues were shoved off temple platforms, and palaces were razed to the ground out of an authentic, but misguided, Christian fervor. No such haphazard cultural destruction took place in China. Missionaries to China were finely tuned to the local wavelength. They learned the challenging language, respected local spiritualities, and were exquisitely respectful of the ancient, studious, and complex society that had welcomed them. These sterling missionaries inspired a large number of Chinese converts who remained fully Chinese while, at the same time, becoming fully Catholic. Catholicism enriched and purified all that it meant to be Chinese.

Yet the missionaries’ success was also the seed of their destruction. Chinese strongmen invariably saw the missionaries as agents of Western colonialism rather than as emissaries of Jesus Christ. No matter how delicately the missionaries inculturated the faith, or how many locals converted, Catholicism was a non-native reality that threatened ancient Chinese patterns of life and thought. And so the persecutions came.

The Protomartyr of China was Francis Fernández de Capillas, a Dominican priest who was tortured and beheaded in 1648 while praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Numerous Franciscans, Salesians, Dominicans, and Jesuits were killed in the intermittent waves of persecution. These martyrs’ crime was their faith and energetic evangelical efforts. They were not involved in politics or trade. They were not spies or government agents. They died for the most noble and purest of reasons—their faith. The ancient nation of China had no saints before October 1, 2000, when Pope Saint John Paul II canonized today’s Chinese martyrs. Not one of the canonized was killed under the communists who have ruled China since 1949. Catholics executed by the communists await a future unfurling of their banners in St. Peter’s Square. More Chinese martyrs, some already dead, some still to die, will be canonized in an unknown year by a future pope as the history of redemption reveals its secrets.

Martyrs of China, you were brave in keeping a tight grip on the pearl of great price. Help all Christians to value their faith in easy times so that when times of persecution come, we may stand upright in the storm.

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July 4: Saint Elizabeth of Portugal
1271–1336
(Celebrated July 5 in the U.S.A.)
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of widows and victims of adultery

A widowed queen embraces Sister Poverty

Beautifully placed in the center of a graceful arch, behind the high altar in the Franciscan convent of Saint Clare in Coimbra, Portugal, is an impressive silver and glass sarcophagus. Circular windows cut into the upper portion of the finely wrought box allow the pilgrim to peer down into its contents. You see rumpled printed cloth. You struggle to discern what else you are looking at. But then...you see…the form of a body, covered by a shroud. It is her. You are looking at a sleeping queen, Saint Elizabeth of Portugal. Only a hand protrudes from under the cloth. It is a right hand. It is visible. It is white. It has refused decay. It is incorrupt. The rest of her body? Only God knows, and maybe the local bishop.

Today’s saint was also known as Elizabeth of Aragon. She was born into a royal Spanish family with a saint in its bloodline. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was her great aunt and namesake. In a pious age, the piety of today’s Saint Elizabeth stood out. She loved the Lord and all that it meant to be Catholic. She was wed to the King of Portugal at a tender age, moved to his land, and had a family with him. The holy child Elizabeth became the holy adult Elizabeth. She involved herself in matters of war, state, and politics. But she was more concerned with her own soul, the poor, and the sick.

Elizabeth had the luxury of leisure due to her wealth and noble status. She could dedicate time to Mass, to prayer, and to her spiritual exercises. Her resources of time and money also allowed her to assist the poor, which she did generously, even to the annoyance of her husband, the King. It is easy to say that money doesn’t matter when you have money. Only people with money, in fact, say that money is not the only thing. Money did not matter to Elizabeth, precisely because she did not lack it. She simply gave it away. And she fortified her financial generosity with her personal example of prayer, fasting, poverty, and holiness, edifying her people. She was not an advocate of social justice, but justice. She did not promote charitable giving, but living charity itself.

After her husband died and her children were grown, she entered the convent of the Poor Clares, which she herself had founded in Coimbra. She took vows as a Third Order Franciscan, abandoned her royal status, and lived in obscurity with the other sisters. Coimbra had a long attachment to the Franciscans. It is the city where Fernando of Lisbon, an Augustinian, decided to become Anthony, a Franciscan, the future saint whose shrine is in Padua. Saint Elizabeth’s choice to become a lay Franciscan shows just how far and wide the influence of Saint Francis of Assisi was felt, even among the upper classes. The Queen of Portugal gives away her wealth, cares for the poor and the sick, is devoted to the Sacraments, actively promotes peace in her domain and in her family, establishes a female Franciscan convent, and herself becomes a Franciscan, and all within one hundred years of Saint Francis’ death. After Elizabeth had given away all that she had, she gave away herself, and then there was nothing left to give. She was a model Catholic Queen.

Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, help us to see all wealth, of time or money, as a gift and an opportunity to serve the Lord and our fellow man. You promoted peace in your realm and in your family, in the spirit of Saint Francis. Help us to do the same.

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July 6: Saint Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr
1890–1902
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of rape victims and teenage girls

A country girl suffers death for knowing right from wrong

The family of today’s saint was so poor that they farmed other people’s fields. They lost their own land and became migrant laborers who ate what they grew and harvested, their rough fingers rarely touching a coin or printed money. It was a hardship for the parents to house, feed, clothe, and educate their seven children. And then things got bad. The father died of malaria. The family was now forced to share a modest home with another family, and the mother had to work the fields alongside her children day in and day out. In the midst of all this cruel hardship, tragedy struck.

Maria typically stayed home to cook, clean, sew, and care for her baby sister. It was while she was alone with the baby at home one day, mending a shirt of Alessandro’s, the teenage boy of the family that shared the house, that Maria was attacked. Alessandro had returned—and he wasn’t looking for his shirt. It was not the first time he had imposed himself on eleven-year-old Maria. And it was not the first time she had refused. She tried to stop him again. She screamed that it was a mortal sin. She yelled that he would go to hell. Alessandro didn’t care. She ran for the door, but it was too late. He stabbed her multiple times in the throat, heart, and lungs.

Little Maria was brought to the hospital where doctors tried in vain to save her life. Before dying, she revealed to her mother, and to the police, for the first time, that Alessandro had tried to rape her twice before. Since he had threatened her with death if she told anyone, she had kept silent. Before succumbing to her wounds, Maria forgave her attacker and said she wanted Alessandro to one day be with her in paradise. Maria’s last twenty-four hours were dramatic. She explicitly chose death rather than to allow another’s mortal sin. She suffered sexual violence like so many female martyrs of the early Church. And on her deathbed, with her body weakening, she forgave her murderer. This was all extraordinary. This was the stuff of saints.

Maria Goretti was canonized in 1950 by Pope Pius XII in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The huge number of the faithful made it impossible to say the Mass inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Maria’s mother and siblings were at the canonization, as was Alessandro. After initially refusing to communicate with anyone about the murder, he opened up to a local bishop who took the time to visit him in jail. Alessandro told the bishop he had a dream in which Maria presented him with lilies, symbols of purity. But the lovely flowers scorched his hands as soon as he touched them. He later asked Maria’s mother, Assunta, forgiveness for his crime. Like her daughter, she forgave him. Alessandro served twenty-seven years of his thirty-year sentence. After being released, he became a lay Franciscan and served as a gardener in a monastery until his death.

Saint Maria showed uncommon maturity for her age. Her poor, rugged life in the fields, and her father’s early death, made life itself serious very early on. Starving people are not frivolous. Death, suffering, poverty, migration, and loss figured prominently in her life before she ever even attended school. She knew no comfort apart from the closeness of family life and the security of faith. When she chose to give up her life rather than participate in another’s sin, she was not saying goodbye to a beautiful house, creature comforts, or earthly possessions. She had the clothes on her back and sanctifying grace in her soul. Nothing else. That grace was the secret possession she would not trade for life itself. She kept a tight grip on her soul, and God rewarded her tenacity by granting her life in heaven with Him forever.

Saint Maria Goretti, mature beyond your years, inspire all young people to value purity and chastity as God-given gifts. Help them to follow your example in valuing virtue over vice, love of God over love of man, and a rich future in heaven over a poor future on earth.

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July 5: Saint Anthony Zaccaria, Priest
1502–1539
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of physicians

The man of the hour for his time and place

In thirty-nine niches in the nave and transepts of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome are thirty-nine statues of saints who founded religious congregations. Some of these saints are very well known, like Saints Benedict, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Ávila. Today’s saint is among the lesser-known founders. The statue of Saint Anthony Zaccaria looks down from a second-tier niche, high above the Basilica floor. Saint Anthony’s distance from the faithful in art reflects his relative remoteness from modern life. Not every saint can be a rockstar. The Church preserves the legacy of this holy man on its universal calendar, though, for very solid reasons.

Saint Anthony was born in Northern Italy just as the powder keg of the Protestant Reformation was about to ignite. He studied medicine and became a practicing physician. But his real love was people’s souls, not their bodies, and he dedicated most of his time to teaching the catechism to the poor. Like so many priestly vocations, others recognized his gifts before he saw them himself. Friends and family encouraged him to study for the Priesthood. Saint Anthony was ordained in 1528 and soon moved to the bustling city of Milan. He became a roving chaplain to nobles and to diverse lay groups committed to charitable works and to invigorating Milanese society with an authentic Catholic spirituality.

Along with two noblemen, Saint Anthony founded a Congregation of priests whose goal was to “regenerate and revive the love of divine worship and a properly Christian way of life by frequent preaching and faithful ministering of the sacraments.” There is nothing new, creative, or groundbreaking in such goals. But as would be highlighted a few decades after Saint Anthony by Saint Charles Borromeo, the vigorous Archbishop of Milan, Northern Italy in the sixteenth century was in a state of religious decrepitude. Today’s saint and his co-founders needed to found a Congregation to blow life into the dormant coals of people’s faith and to rekindle their love of the Mass and the Holy Eucharist. No one else was carrying out these fundamental evangelical tasks. The secular clergy were moribund, and bishops often did not even reside in their dioceses. Someone had to do something, and thus the “Clerks Regular of Saint Paul Beheaded” was born and formally recognized in 1535.

The Congregation’s members became more commonly known as the Barnabites after a Church in Milan where they were eventually headquartered or perhaps due to Saint Barnabas’ status as one of Saint Paul’s closest companions. The Barnabites encountered fierce opposition from local clergy who were offended by the imputation that they were derelict in their duties and needed reform. These internecine knife fights were quickly settled in the Barnabites’ favor.

Saint Anthony popularized the Forty Hours Devotion, where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed over a three-day period corresponding to Christ’s forty hours in the tomb. He encouraged churches to toll their bells on Friday afternoons, and preached indefatigably in the streets on the crucifixion, on the Eucharist, and on the texts of Saint Paul. The age for scholastic theological distinctions as fine as lace had long ended by the early sixteenth century. The one-church world was crumbling and with it the luxury of inter-Catholic speculations of a purely theoretical nature. Dissenting Protestantism was spilling into Northern Italy. What was needed was preaching in the streets, raw fervor, and the core biblical message. Some priests spoke with quiet erudition and convinced the few, others explained the catechism well, but only inside of churches to the scattered faithful in the pews. Saint Anthony’s method was, essentially, to walk into the town square, light his hair on fire, and yell “Watch me burn!” It worked—but not for long. Saint Anthony Zaccaria flamed out at the early age of thirty-seven. He was canonized in 1897, and his remains are venerated today in the crypt of the Barnabite church in Milan. The Congregation he founded is of modest size yet still vigorously serving in the heart of the Church.

Saint Anthony Zaccaria, inspire us to do the simple things of our faith well, before we attempt to do the complex things less well. Keep us focused on the events of the Gospel as the Church presents them to us through her structure, her Sacraments, and her devotions.

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July 4: Independence Day—USA
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

“...nobis donet en patria.”

Father hunger—the primordial longing to impress, to emulate, or just to find dad—moves us more fundamentally than any thirst for mom. Mom’s warm love and constant presence is typically assumed. She is always near. We spend the first nine months of life sheltered inside her sanctuary, a memory of closeness and protection buried deep in our psyche. But dad comes later, a remote creature orbiting around mother and child with a deep voice, sandpaper face, and rugged hands. Knowing him, and loving him, takes some work, and for that reason seems more worth it. The desire for a pater, a father, goes hand in hand with our need for a patria, or fatherland. To be a citizen of the world is not to be a citizen at all. The world is not a country. We don’t want to be born at sea, drifting under a flag, any more than we want to be born into family. We want to be born into a family. We want to master one language, stir upon hearing one hymn, and stand with our civic siblings to honor one flag. We want, and need, to love a patria. Independence Day of the United States of America commemorates the founding events of a country as worthy of admiration and appreciation as any country ever was. The United States merits respect for a thousand compelling reasons, but honoring her also points to the inherent limits of even the healthiest love of fatherland.

There are only a few things a man will die for: family, religion, and country being the most obvious. To emigrate to the United States many immigrants have, for centuries now, disrupted family life, bid farewell to well-loved homelands, abandoned historic family farms, and been absent from spouses and children for months and years. Why? Because it was worth it! A country worth dying for is a country worth dying to get into. No country has ever afforded its citizens what America has afforded them. Its success is unequalled. And yet, for all of its flourishing opportunity, robust legal structures, and protection of human rights, the patria of the U.S. is not, and no patria could ever be, Heaven itself. A country provides meaning, but not ultimate meaning.

When Americans die they will not be judged by Uncle Sam. An old man with a long white beard wearing a star-spangled waistcoat will not stand before the individual soul. Uncle Sam won’t judge anyone because Uncle Sam doesn’t exist. He is as real as the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or Lady Liberty. The Statue of Liberty consists of a rigid iron frame draped in thin copper. That’s it. “She” rusts. Meaningful secular holidays invite reflection upon what kind of truth perdures and upon the difference between two close cousins, faith and patriotism. Jesus Christ is not like Uncle Sam. He is not an anthropomorphism, a depiction in human form of a non-human reality. We have statues and paintings of Jesus Christ for the same reason we have statues and paintings of George Washington—because the camera hadn’t been invented yet. If there had been cameras in first-century Palestine, Jesus’ face would be as correctly shown as Abraham Lincoln’s.

Our crucifixes don’t symbolize God. They show God. Jesus is not a metaphor. He is not the human representation of ethereal God-like qualities. Jesus thundered with the authority of God, referred to Himself as God, and performed Godly acts, including the ultimate miracle of raising Himself from the dead. Jesus doesn’t represent something else, or someone else, that hides behind a curtain or a mask. Our love of God, then, should run deeper than our love of country because God will, by definition, never end. Mighty Rome ended. Weeds grew, and still grow, in the bustling forum where Julius Caesar was knifed in the back. America’s raw military power, global cultural reach, and thumping economy will not last forever. Countries rise and countries fall, but God and His Church will endure.

Geological time uses immense spans of millennia, ages, and eons to capture the reality of glacial movement, tectonic shifts, and continental splitting. We should use similar references of time when describing the vastness of God. A two-thousand-year-old Church is ancient of days in man-time. But in God-time the Church is just a babe rocking in a cradle. Geologically we would understand this. Theologically we should as well. The United States will pass into history in one blink of God’s eyelashes. So we should love more what deserves more love. We should love less what deserves less love. And we should live more fully only for a deathless God who grants endless life in a true homeland that will never cease.

God the Father, may our hearts bear a deep love for our earthly fatherland as an extension of our love for You, our Father in Heaven. May our one heart burst with love for all those that deserve our love, most especially our family, our nation, and our Church.

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July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of doubters and architects

‘Perhaps’ - the crack in the unbeliever’s wall of certainty

All unbelievers have a type of faith. They firmly believe in God’s non-existence and in the weakness, not wisdom, of trusting in a reality greater than oneself. Atheism is a belief system, though its object of faith is obviously not God but other sacrosanct, secular “doctrines.” Yet the unbeliever’s secular faith, just like every believer’s, is continually tempted by doubt. The unbeliever, whether fixated on a friend’s lifeless body in a coffin, dumbstruck while gazing at the vastness of the sea, or just when lying in the dark of night, wonders if he has everything figured out. Although he shows a brave front, the unbeliever secretly doubts. He is not certain. He is threatened. There is always the great “perhaps.” Perhaps, just perhaps…the believer is…right. The atheist is under constant assault from faith, primarily from inside himself. Only when trying to quit religion does he realize, painfully, that the drama of being a man cannot be avoided. He exchanges the uncertainty of belief for the uncertainty of unbelief.

Today’s saint, known as “Doubting Thomas,” is Christianity’s icon of doubt. He loves, serves, and follows the Lord. Upon hearing of the death of Lazarus, Christ decides to go to Judea, where He had previously come under attack. The Apostles are concerned for Christ’s safety, but Thomas supports Him, saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn 11:16). Thomas is strong and generous. But he is also a man, so he does what men do—he doubts. Christ’s crucifixion was a searing experience for His Apostles, and Thomas doubts that one so cruelly and publicly murdered could be alive. He is told by his co-Apostles that the Lord is risen and has appeared to them. Yet still Thomas doubts. He will only believe if he can place his hands in Christ’s very wounds.

To satisfy his skepticism, Thomas joins the others and waits patiently on the Sunday after Easter. The risen Lord appears again in the same place. “Peace be with you,” He says to all. And then to Thomas himself, “Put your finger here and see my hands...Do not doubt but believe.” “My Lord and my God!” is all the flabbergasted Thomas can muster in response (Jn 20:24–29). Thomas’ simple declaration of faith—“My Lord and my God!”—is whispered by millions of faithful at the consecration at Mass, words of faith forged from the anvil of doubt.

Doubt is often the starting point, the context, and the invitation to faith for so many modern doubting Thomases. Yet true doubting leads to true searching. And a true search is not perennially open-ended but risks finding what is sought. Saint Thomas’ doubt, his moment of weakness, served a higher purpose when Thomas found what he was looking for. The Son of God said “...the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls…” (Mt 13:45) and “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how” (Mk 4:26–27). The kingdom is not the fine pearl. The kingdom is the merchant in search of fine pearls. The kingdom is not the seed. It is the man scattering the seed. The search, the scattering, the effort, the struggle, the journey. These are often the first stages of finding God. Honest, authentic inquiry is god-like. Every legitimate search presupposes, after all, that there is something, or someone, to find.

Doubt is the plow that opens the furrow where the seed of faith can fall and germinate. Saint Thomas the Apostle is our guide and patron in understanding how doubt sparks faith. Being absent, he heard. Hearing, he doubted. Doubting, he came. Coming, he touched. Touching, he believed. And believing, he served.

Saint Thomas, help all who struggle with belief in God. Through your example and intercession, assist all those overwhelmed by distractions and doubts to come to a well-informed trust in the Father and Lord of all.

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July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest
1713–1784
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of California and vocations

“Always forward!” was his motto and his life

The United States of America’s impressive Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., includes the majestic, semicircular Statuary Hall. Each of the fifty states chooses two citizens of historic importance to represent it in the Hall. Statues of one nun and four Catholic priests, two of them saints, grace Statuary Hall, including today’s saint. Junipero Serra was the founder of California. He was the pathbreaking, indestructible priest who trekked California’s mountains, valleys, deserts, and shores to found nine of its eventual twenty-one missions. California’s rugged cattle culture, its luxurious orchards and rolling vineyards, its distinctive Mission architecture, and its blending of Mexican and Native American heritage are the legacy of Father Serra and his Franciscan confreres. The Franciscan city names tell the story: San Francisco, Ventura (Saint Bonaventure), San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Our Lady Queen of the Angels (Los Angeles) and on and on. The Franciscans simply made California what it is.

Father Junipero Serra was baptized as Michael Joseph on Mallorca, an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain. He grew up dirt poor and devoutly Catholic. He joined the Franciscans as a youth and moved to the large city of Palma de Mallorca, where he took the religious name of Junipero in honor of one of Saint Francis of Assisi’s first followers. After priestly ordination, Father Junipero obtained a doctorate in philosophy and taught Franciscan seminarians. He was destined to lead a successful life as an intelligent, holy, and pious intellectual. But in the Spring of 1749, he felt the Lord calling him to become a missionary to New Spain (Mexico). On the fateful day of his departure from his large Franciscan monastery, he kissed the feet of all his brother Franciscans, from the oldest to the youngest. He then boarded a ship and sailed away from his native island for the first time and the last time. He would never see his family again. Our saint’s life began in earnest in middle age. Long years of intellectual, spiritual, and ascetic preparation steeled his body, mind, and will for the rigors to come.

Arriving in the port of Veracruz, Father Serra walked hundreds of miles to Mexico City rather than travel on horseback. Along this first of many treks, he was bitten by either a snake or a spider and developed an open wound that never healed, causing him near constant pain for the rest of his life. Father Serra spent the first several years of his missionary life in a mountainous region of Central Mexico among an indigenous population that had encountered Spaniards, and the Catholic religion, two centuries before. Father Serra wanted a rawer missionary experience. He wanted to meet and convert pagans who knew nothing of Christianity. After years of faithful service as a missionary, church builder, preacher, and teacher in Central Mexico, Father Junipero finally had his chance. The Franciscans were tasked with leading the religious dimension of the first great Spanish expedition into Alta California, the present day American state. If Father Serra had never gone to California, he may still have been a saint, but one known to God alone. It was the challenge of California that made Father Junipero into Saint Junipero.

Already in his mid-fifties, Father Serra was the head priest of a large migration of men, women, soldiers, cattle, and provisions whose goal was to establish Spanish Catholic settlements in California. Integral to this cultural and evangelical effort was the founding of California’s missions, the vast farms, cattle ranches, churches, communities, and schools that have left such an enduring mark on California. For the last fifteen years of his life, Saint Junipero was seemingly everywhere in California—walking, confirming, working, building, preaching, fasting, planning, sailing, writing, arguing, founding, and praying. He exhausted his poor, emaciated body. He was recognized by all as the indispensable man.
Father Junipero died quietly at the San Carlos Mission in Carmel just as the United States was becoming a country on the other side of the continent. He did for the West Coast what George Washington and better known founders did for the East Coast. He founded a society, in all of its complexity. Decades later, Americans migrated to far-off California, newly incorporated into the federal union, looking for gold, and were surprised to discover a distinctive culture as rugged, layered, and rich as the one they had left behind.

California’s foundational events were distinctly Catholic just as the Eastern colonies’ were distinctly Protestant. When ceremoniously inaugurating an early mission, Father Junipero said a High Mass, sang Gregorian chant, processed with an image of the Virgin Mary, and had the Spanish galleons offshore fire their cannons at the consecration. What powerful solemnity! The roots of large regions of the United States run deep into Southern, not Northern, soil, and were watered by the Catholic faith, not dissenting Protestantism. The United States was baptized Catholic but raised Protestant. Father Junipero represents the best of that “other” founding of the United States of America.

Saint Junipero Serra, inspire us to follow your example of physical perseverance, doctrinal commitment, and spiritual discipline for the good of the Church. You were a model priest, missionary, and Franciscan. May we, too, be great in all that we do.

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June 30: First Martyrs of the Church of Rome
64
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red or White

A madman burns Christians like human torches

Wave after wave of huge British and American bombers, pregnant with ordnance, opened their bays over Dresden, Germany, on February 13 and 14, 1945. Fire joined fire until the city itself was a raging, screaming bonfire. A tornado of flames hungered for oxygen, sucked all air from the atmosphere, and suffocated to death anyone caught in its vortex. The center of Dresden melted. Only some stone walls remained erect. Human skeletons were mixed into the rubble of a skeletal city. In the old town of Dresden today, a modest memorial marks a mass grave, the location where an unknown number of civilians’ scant remains were cremated shortly after the fire. It’s easy to walk by without noticing it. Any number of countries have similar memorials marking the mass graves of the victims of plane crashes, sunken ships, war atrocities, or natural disasters.

Many countries also have a memorial to an unknown soldier. That unknown fighter represents all those drowned at sea, lost in the jungle canopy, eviscerated by enemy fire, or simply never recovered in the heat and sweat of battle. On civic feast days, presidents, governors, and mayors lay wreaths and flowers at the graves of the unknown. In honoring him, they honor all. A nation’s official remembering—in stone, statue, speech, or ceremony—preserves the past. A nation’s common memory is preserved by its government, which guards against national forgetting through official acts of national remembering.

The Church’s liturgical calendar is a continual, public remembering of saints, feasts, and theology, by mankind’s most ancient source and carrier of institutional memory—the Catholic Church. Today’s feast day commemorating the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome did not exist prior to the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Instead, the sanctoral calendar was crowded with various feast days to particular martyrs from this early Roman persecution. Apart from their centuries on the calendar, however, little else supported these particular martyrs’ existence.

Today’s feast is a liturgical expression of the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the flowers left at a mass grave marker. This feast commemorates those unknown and unnamed men and women who were cruelly tortured and executed in the city of Rome in 64 A.D. But instead of meeting in a park to sing a patriotic hymn and to see an official lay a wreath, we do what Christians do to remember these martyrs. We meet as the faithful in a church, in front of an altar, to participate in the sacrifice of the Mass and to remember our remote ancestors in the faith who died so that the true faith would not.

In 64 A.D. a huge fire of suspicious origins consumed large sections of Rome. A deranged emperor named The Black (Nero) blamed Christians for the conflagration and executed large numbers of them in retribution for their supposed treachery. A vivid description of the persecution survives from a Roman historian named Tacitus, who relates that some Christians were sewn into the skins of animals to be attacked and consumed by beasts. Other Christians were slathered with wax, tied to posts, and then burned alive, human torches whose glow illuminated Nero’s garden parties. Still others were crucified. This was not the barbarous hacking off of limbs and splitting of skulls later suffered by missionaries in the forests of Northern Europe. Nero’s madness was highly refined evil. Today, we commemorate these Christians in the same fashion in which they would have commemorated the Lord’s own death—by prayer and sacrifice. We are separated from 64 A.D. by many centuries, but we are united to 64 A.D. by our common faith. We remember because the Church remembers.

Anonymous first martyrs of Rome, your blood is still wet, and your sufferings still felt, in the same Church of Christ to which you belonged through baptism. Through your intercession, help the baptized of today be as courageous as you in all things.

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June 29: Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of the city of Rome

Like the sun, Peter and Paul rose in the East but set in the West

Jesus Christ is the head of the Church. The Pope is the head of the churches. The invisible, heavenly Church, mystically depicted by the Book of Revelation and described by Saint Paul as “our mother,” is the “Jerusalem above” (Ga 4:26). This perfect, inner, Church of God has theological priority over all earthly churches, which are its shadow. The first Christian congregation, in Jerusalem, anticipated and grew into the universal Church. For a short period, the Jerusalem Church was the universal church. And from this original whole, smaller parts formed, until the one Church became present throughout the world. Unity exists, then spreads. The children do not create the parents. The many dioceses throughout the world are not stitched together into a patchwork quilt called the universal Church. Catholicism is not an international federation of dioceses or the end result of its own geographic stretch. The one Church precedes the many churches. It gives them birth. The progression is from God outward, from spirit to flesh, from ontological to historical, from Jerusalem to Rome, and from Rome to the world.

All dioceses are sisters to one another. So Manila, Philippines, is a sister diocese to that of Vilnius, Lithuania; and Lagos, Nigeria, is a sister diocese to that of La Paz, Bolivia. But the universal Church is not herself a diocese. She has no sisters, lest her oneness be compromised by having a mirror church. The universal Church is a mother, not a sister. And the Mother Church was established in Rome by Saints Peter and Paul, whose feast we celebrate today. This feast also implicitly commemorates Rome’s position as head of all the churches. Rome’s particular vocation is to preserve the unity of God’s Church on earth. This vocation is not an accidental historical addition to the Church’s original nature. Unity is intrinsic to the Church’s theology, and so there must be a practical force or power, internal to the Church, to preserve her unity. God’s Son, after all, has only one bride, with whom he celebrates only one heavenly banquet for only one eternal, mystical wedding.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ states in unmistakably clear language that He will build His Church on Saint Peter (Mt 16:17–19). This was not a claim from Peter but a statement of fact from Christ. For many centuries, this text has been cited in support of both Roman primacy and papal infallibility. Yet an even more fundamental historical, not biblical, fact originally supported Roman primacy. The great Saint Irenaeus in the late second century clarifies that Rome is “the greatest and most ancient Church, founded by the two glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul.” No other city could claim to be the seat of two martyred Apostles. Not Jerusalem, not Antioch, and not Alexandria. Constantinople, the “New Rome,” could not claim to have been built over the bones of even one Apostle. Rome’s headship over all the churches is rooted most deeply in the martyrdoms in the eternal city of Saints Peter and Paul, the Christian counterparts of Rome’s twin pagan founders Romulus and Remus.

Rome, the two-Apostle city, continues to draw pilgrims. If a plumb line were dropped hundreds of feet from the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, it would come to rest directly over the tomb of the Apostle himself in the necropolis below the Basilica’s main altar. A few miles away, under the main altar of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, lies the mortal remains of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. The inscription naming Saint Paul on an ancient marble cover for his tomb leaves no doubt whose bones were placed there. The cover even has small holes through which pilgrims could lower ribbons to touch Saint Paul’s bones and thus complete their pilgrimage to Rome with a third class relic. It is a recent phenomenon to go to Rome to see the reigning pope. Traditionally, pilgrims went specifically to pray at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul.

Our beautiful Church is a miracle. Theologically perfect but humanly flawed. Mystical and historical. All soul and all body. The Church reflects mankind—capable of so much, yet limited by her imperfections. The Church is founded upon a perfect God and two very different, great, and imperfect men whom God chose—Peter and Paul.

Saints Peter and Paul, deepen our filial devotion to our Mother the Church, who gives us life through the sacraments and who preserves our hope of attending the eternal banquet of God in heaven. Protect our Mother from corruption to be a more perfect spouse of Christ.

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June 28: Saint Irenaeus, Bishop and Martyr
c. 125–c. 200
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of apologists and catechists

The Church was explicitly Catholic from the start

The iconic opening words of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War are “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” The chieftains of these three regions of Roman Gaul (France) met yearly in the southern city of Lugdunum, known today as Lyon. These rough noblemen and their large retinues trekked to Lyon in 12 B.C. for the dedication of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls on the slope of Lyon’s hill of the Croix Rousse. The inauguration ceremony was an elaborate reinforcement of Rome’s military, religious, and commercial dominance. Pagan priests performed pagan rites on pagan altars to pagan gods, asking those gods to favor the new sanctuary, the tribes present, and the city. This important sanctuary remained a focal point of Lyon’s civic and religious life for centuries. And in the sand and dirt of this Sanctuary of the Three Gauls, in 177 A.D., the blood of the first Christian martyrs of Gaul was spilled. Here they were abused, tortured, and executed. Killed for their faith were about fifty Christians, including the Bishop of Lyon, Pothinus, and a slave woman named Blandine. While they were imprisoned and awaiting their fate, these future martyrs wrote a letter to the Pope and gave it to a priest of Lyon to carry to Rome. That priest was today’s saint, Irenaeus.

With the dead bishop Pothinus’ mutilated remains tossed into the river, Irenaeus was chosen as his replacement. He would remain the Bishop of Lyon until his death. It was in this way that the tragic end of some raised others to prominence. As the first generation of Christians in Gaul retreated from history, the great Saint Irenaeus, the most important theologian of the late second century, emerged. Copies of Saint Irenaeus’ most important works survived through the ages, likely due to their fame and importance, and are now irreplaceable texts for understanding the mind of an early Church thinker on a number of matters.

Irenaeus was from Asia Minor and a disciple of Saint Polycarp, a martyr-bishop of Smyrna, who was himself a disciple of Saint John the Evangelist. The voice of Saint Irenaeus is, then, the very last, remote echo of the age of the Apostles. Similar to those of Saint Justin Martyr, Irenaeus’ writings astonish in proving just how early the Church developed a fully Catholic theology.

In keeping with other theologians of the patristic era, Irenaeus focused more on the mystery of the Incarnation, and Christ as the “New Adam,” than on a theology of the Cross. He also called Mary the “New Eve” whose obedience undoes Eve’s disobedience. Irenaeus’ writings primarily critique Gnosticism, which held that Christianity’s truths were a form of secret knowledge confined to a select few. The only true knowledge is knowledge of Christ, Irenaeus argued, and this knowledge is accessible, public, and communicated by the broader Church, not secret societies. Irenaeus fought schismatics and heretics, showing just how early the connection between correct theology and Church unity was understood. His main work is even entitled “Against Heresies.”

He promoted apostolic authority as the only true guide to the correct interpretation of Scripture and, in a classic statement of theology, Irenaeus explicitly cited the Bishop of Rome as the primary example of unbroken Church authority. Like Saint Cyprian fifty years after him, Irenaeus described the Church as the mother of all Christians: “...one must cling to the Church, be brought up within her womb and feed there on the Lord’s Scripture.” This theology notes a beautiful paradox. While in the physical order, a child leaves his mother’s womb and grows ever more apart from her as he matures, the Church’s motherhood exercises an opposite pull on her children. Once she gives us new life through baptism, our bonds with Mother Church grow ever stronger and tighter as we mature. We become more dependent on her sacraments, more intimate with her life and knowledge, as we grow into adulthood. The Church becomes more our mother, not less, as we age.

On Pope Saint John Paul II’s third pastoral visit to France, in October 1986, his very first stop was the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls in Lyon. Excavated and opened to the public in the mid-twentieth century, it rests largely unknown, a ruin, in a residential neighborhood. Before dignitaries and a large crowd, the Pope prostrated himself and kissed the site where the many martyrs of Lyon died so many centuries before. Saint Irenaeus may have been looking on from the stone benches that fateful day in 177 A.D. when his co-religionists were murdered. The blood of those forgotten martyrs watered the seed that later flowered into the great saint we commemorate today.

Saint Irenaeus, may your intercession strengthen our wills, enlighten our minds, and deepen our trust. Like you, we want to be loyal sons and daughters of God, and loyal, educated, and faithful members of His Church. Help us to fulfill our loftiest and our most noble goals.

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June 27: Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop and Doctor
376–444
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Alexandria, Egypt

He was the ultimate adversary

What appears from a modern perspective to be theological hairsplitting and intellectual contortionism was, in the fourth and fifth centuries, the stuff of intense, erudite, and sometimes violent debate. Today’s saint was of that heroic age when the Church, just legalized, came bursting out of her cage like a lion. She had been locked up, roaming her cramped space, half starved and small muscled when, all of a sudden, the door was lifted and the world was hers. There followed two centuries of aggressive debate, sharp criticism, harsh reactions, rough counter reactions, and prolific letter writing until several Church Councils standardized the Church’s basic theology. Saint Cyril was a key actor in this theodrama. He was educated, irascible, strong willed, politically astute, brilliant, and utterly convinced that his theology of Christ was correct. It was. What mattered in the fifth century still matters today.
Saint Cyril was the Patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt, from 412–444 A.D, when it was a major city in the late Roman Empire. The Patriarch of Constantinople as of 428 was a monk from Antioch named Nestorius. He taught that Saint Mary was the Christ-bearer but not the God-bearer. Nestorius is also associated with the related false teaching that there are two hypostatic unions in Jesus Christ, one divine and one human, a theory which locates two persons in the one body of Jesus. Various critics immediately identified the errors in Nestorius’ teachings, but Cyril of Alexandria was the most tenacious in denouncing him. Cyril wrote to the Pope and demanded that the Patriarch of Constantinople either retract his false teaching or be excommunicated.

A church council was called in Ephesus in 431 to settle the matter. The forceful Cyril took total command of the Council’s proceedings, and, after numerous machinations as political as they were theological, the council declared Mary the Mother of God—and Nestorius a heretic. With explicit papal support, Nestorius was removed from his see. Recriminations and counter-recriminations followed, damaging the reputations of all involved. Some regions of Syria followed Nestorius’ teachings and separated from the Church over the question of Christ’s natures. Certain divisions remain even until today. But the teachings of the Council of Ephesus, and the related Council of Chalcedon in 451, dogmatically defined the Church’s Christology for posterity. Cyril and his followers saved the day.

The theological issue at stake was theoretical, but not merely theoretical. How could one person, Jesus of Nazareth, be both fully human and fully divine? Wouldn’t the superior divine nature crowd out His human nature like light crowds out darkness? Some theologians before Cyril taught that the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, was a replacement for Jesus’ human soul. This idea was condemned. Others, like Nestorius, claimed that behind the mask of Jesus, a Logos and a human soul lurked side by side. This created problems too. Most obviously, when Jesus said “I thirst” from the cross, was He speaking as God or man? What about when He said “Before Abraham was, I am”? Who wept over the death of Lazarus? Who raised him from the dead? Who lifted the chalice and spoke at the Last Supper? Who, precisely, was the “I” of Jesus of Nazareth? The Christ riddle needed to be solved. By the early fifth century, many had tried and failed. Saint Cyril solved this perennial riddle by teaching that the subject behind the “I” of Jesus was one, not two. Jesus was a complex God-man of two natures, united in one person, and these two natures continually exchanged their respective theological and human attributes.

Despite Cyril’s theological accomplishments, the tensions inherent to understanding a God-man still perdure. There are images of a tan Jesus with sandy blond hair and radiant white teeth tossing a frisbee: California Jesus. There is stained glass of a crowned Christ on His throne, scepter in hand, robed in majesty: Christ the King. And there is the wounded, naked, forlorn Jesus, hungry for air on the cross: The Suffering Servant Jesus. The Church’s theology places guardrails on the road to make sure we don’t veer off into heresy. Yet much is still left to the realm of prayer, spirituality, and mystery. Saint Cyril placed those guardrails. Don’t go beyond here. Be careful there. Stay on the well-trod path. One person. Two natures. Indivisible. Without confusion. Perfect in Godhead. Perfect in manhood. Truly God. Truly man. Born of the Virgin Mother of God. Every heresy conquered is not a gravestone but a brick in the huge theological cathedral of the Church. Saint Cyril laid many of the bricks in the lower courses of our theological home.

Saint Cyril of Alexandria, assist and inspire all teachers, preachers, writers, and thinkers to follow your example of rigorous analysis, of fidelity to Church councils, and of understanding tradition not as an anchor but as a dynamic force.

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June 26: Saint Josemaria Escriva, Priest
1902–1975
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Saint Josemaria is not on the Church’s universal calendar but is included here)
Patron Saint of diabetics

Work is our sacrifice and the earth is our altar

When today’s saint was a young priest, he was a rather well-known speaker in Madrid, Spain. Besides being an excellent homilist, he also preached retreats, gave parish missions, and taught classes. A young woman heard that Father Josemaria was scheduled to give some lectures nearby and, in light of his reputation, was eager to hear him. But first she went to one of his Masses. After that, the woman had no interest in hearing him lecture; instead she wanted to discover God’s will for her life. Saint Josemaria’s example of intense devotion and prayerfulness in saying Mass made her rethink her entire vocation. A good priest disappears into his vocation, submerges himself in Christ, and communicates a divine, not a personal, message. He makes people think of God, not him. At Mass the priest is not himself, yet is fully himself. He performs a sacrament because he is a sacrament. The Sacrament of Holy Orders is hidden behind the aspects of a man, similar to how the Holy Eucharist is hidden behind the aspects of bread and wine.

It is the theology of the Church that every sacrament validly performed is efficacious, that it transmits sanctifying grace to the soul. But the fruitfulness of a sacrament for its recipient, either psychologically or spiritually, fluctuates. It can hinge on any number of factors, from the beauty of a Church, the quality of a homily, the sacredness of the music, or the intellectual preparation and ardor of the one receiving the sacrament. A holy, charitable, and educated priest infuses every sacrament he celebrates with a theological meaning that yields spiritual fruit that goes beyond efficaciousness. Saint Josemaria’s writings, preaching, lectures, and talks were so rich, so chock-full of practical purpose and high meaning, that a great international family gathered around him, harvesting from his sustained example and insights an abundant banquet for their spiritual table.

Josemaria Escriva was born in a small town in rural Spain. He attended diocesan seminaries in the nearby city of Zaragoza and was ordained a priest in 1925. In 1928 he experienced a vision which spurred him to found Opus Dei, an institution that quickly spread to all the major Christian countries. Opus Dei consists primarily of married lay men and women, while some members are unmarried and consecrated celibates. A few members are priests. After two thousand years of Catholic spirituality, it might be asked what new insight warranted the foundation of a new Church institution? It is a sign of the Church’s theological and spiritual fecundity that Saint Josemaria did offer a new, innovative approach to living as a disciple of Christ nineteen hundred years after Christ returned to the Father.

In a homily from 1967, Josemaria states his spirituality in clear terms: "...God is calling you to serve Him ‘in and from’ the ordinary, material, and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day in the laboratory, in the operating room, in the army barracks, in the university, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it."
In other words, there is no need for a serious lay Catholic to abandon his work and routine, his family life, or his everyday relationships to fulfill God’s will. God is found in and through ordinary life. Cardinal Albino Luciani, later Pope John Paul I, perceptively noted that Saint Josemaria was not teaching a ‘spirituality for lay people,’ as Francis de Sales taught, but a 'lay spirituality.' It is not a question of praying the rosary while sweeping the floor, or contemplating scripture while driving. It is about “materializing” holiness by converting ordinary, well-done work into a sacrifice and prayer to God. Ordinary work, then, is not just the context, but the raw material, for lay holiness. All jobs are important. Daily life is not a distraction from God’s will for us. Daily life is God’s will for us. When we get to work, we get to God.

Saint Josemaria, may your intercession help us to follow your teachings in making our daily labors divine labors. May our work, well done, mingle with Christ’s work and sacrifice to form one perfect offering of praise and thanksgiving to God the Father.

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Immaculate Heart of Mary
Saturday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Wing to wing, oar to oar, heart to heart

The images by which the Church describes Herself are primarily feminine—Bride, Mother, Virgin, Spouse—while masculine terms are used for the Church’s ministry— the Office of Saint Peter, Office of Bishop, Holy Orders, etc. The fatherly labor and paternal structure of the Church are an outgrowth of her essentially maternal nature. Ecclesia Mater, Mother Church, loves with a huge heart, while Apostles, bishops, priests, and deacons hold souls together in their common mother’s embrace. In the thinking of Pope Saint John Paul II, the “Marian Church,” the Church of discipleship, precedes and makes possible the “Petrine Church,” the Church of office and authority. So authority serves discipleship, and discipleship has preeminence over, and makes sense of, authority. Even the fatherly and authoritative Saint Paul speaks with maternal concern, calling new Christians his “children,” saying he is like a “nurse” to them, and bragging that he has “begotten” them through the Gospel.

On today’s Feast of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, the maternal warmth radiating from the core of Mary bakes the faithful soul. Our hearts glow when we look upon the seven-pierced heart of the mother of Jesus and commiserate with the holy longing in her tender eyes. Our love for Mary also softens our love for our mother the Church. Our minds know that the Church loves us and nourishes us with sanctifying grace. But intellectual convictions need to be felt. In the same way that Christ concretely and historically images the Father, so too Mary images, concretely and historically, the Church. Mary is not a mere symbol of the Church but anticipates and embodies what she gave birth to. Absent Mary, the Church would be just a little bit too hard, too distant, and too austere. It would be like a camping site or a large, cold, house, providing shelter but lacking a woman’s touch. Mary converts the dry household of faith into a cozy family home. Without her heartfelt love, the house would simply not be the same.

The prophecy of Simeon in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel is the first biblical indication of Mary’s interior suffering. Simeon tells Mary that Jesus will be a sign that will be contradicted and that a sword shall pierce her own heart. Years later, Mary and Joseph panic when Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem while they return to Nazareth. When they recover him in the temple and return home, Luke tells us that Mary “treasured all these things in her heart” (Lk 2:51). At the foot of the cross, Mary’s pondering heart is crushed and bewildered when sin closes in on her Son. But just when Christ’s life appears to be stillborn, Mary’s heart is vivified by the resurrection, and she becomes the first-century Church’s indipensable witness and most sturdy anchor.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary is not a closed garden. We don’t peek in through the window of the family home in Nazareth to spy Mary standing in the kitchen. Mary’s life was not as public as her Son’s, but it was not as private as her contemporaries. And in the Book of Revelation, her mystical significance is exposed for all to see. She straddles heaven and earth in a duel with the devil. Mary’s wounded maternal heart beats strong and fast for the faithful and for the world, then, on a cosmic stage. Her heart is sinless but bruised, slit by seven swords of sorrow and dripping red for love of man. Vatican II’s description of Mary as the Temple of the Holy Spirit (Lumen Gentium 52-53) implies that her heart is the red-hot tabernacle of that Temple. Today’s feast was first referred to as Mary’s “Admirable Heart” or “Most Pure Heart.” Yet all the titles reflect the same truth; just like the love of Jesus’s Sacred Heart, Mary’s love for Christ and us is a tangible, human love. The Queen and King of Hearts are united in their love of all that is worth loving.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, your bruised but beating heart softens our love for you and the Church. Your love is maternal, warm, docile, and concerned. Infuse our hearts with love like yours so we can live like you in this world and the next.

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June 24: Birth of Saint John the Baptist
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White or Gold
Patron Saint of converts and epileptics

A rugged forerunner cuts a path for his cousin

“Dies natalis” means “birthday” or “anniversary” in Latin. But for early Christians, “dies natalis” referred to a martyr’s date of death and its subsequent commemoration in the Church’s liturgy, most typically through the assigning of a feast day. Most saints, martyrs or otherwise, are commemorated on, or near, the date of their death, the date their body was transferred to its final resting place, or on another significant date in their lives—date of ordination, coronation as pope, consecration as nun, etc. Besides Christ Himself, only two saints’ birthdays are commemorated liturgically: The Virgin Mary’s on September 8, exactly nine months after the Feast of her Immaculate Conception; and Saint John the Baptist’s on June 24, today’s feast. Saint Mary and Saint John were both sanctified, or made holy, before they first opened their eyes to the light or ever gulped a mouthful of fresh air. A long span of years did not turn them into saints. God made them holy from the start. So we commemorate their lives from the start, from their birthdays.

Only the Gospel of Saint Luke tells us the details of John’s birth. John’s mother and father were Elizabeth and Zechariah. They were beyond the age for having children. But Zechariah, a priest who served in the Temple in Jerusalem, was told one night by the Archangel Gabriel that Elizabeth would give birth to a boy they must name John. Zechariah was dumbfounded. Literally, when he disbelieved this annunciation, he was rendered speechless until the child’s birth. When his speech was finally restored, a torrent of praise gushed out in the canticle known as the Benedictus. It is prayed as part of the Breviary every single day at morning prayer by hundreds of thousands of priests and nuns the world over. Zechariah’s prayer of praise lives on.

The celebration of the nativity of John the Baptist is perhaps the oldest liturgical feast day in all Christendom, much older than the Feast of Christmas itself. It was at one time celebrated with three distinct Masses—vigil, dawn, and daytime—just like Christmas still is. The beheading of John, celebrated on August 29, is of equally ancient origin. The oldest liturgical books even, incredibly, indicate that there was once a liturgical commemoration of the conception of John the Baptist celebrated nine months prior to his birth, on September 24.

Today’s feast is placed three months after the Annunciation, on March 25, because that gospel scene tells us that Elizabeth, John’s mother, was pregnant for six months at the time. Three more months take us to June 24. (The one-day discrepancy between March 25 and June 24 is an accident of counting. If December and June each had thirty-one days, there would be no discrepancy.) Three related feast days line up beautifully: March 25, the Annunciation; June 24, the birth of John the Baptist; December 25, the birth of Christ. John’s birth foretells Christ’s birth. Although the historical chronology may not be exact, the dates show the theological interconnection among the three feasts.

All parents are naturally curious to discover the sex of their child in utero. Some allow themselves to be told the sex. Others wait in high suspense. Elizabeth and her spouse Zechariah were told by a winged messenger of God Himself that they would have a boy. That little boy grew to be a man, a great man among men who accepted death rather than swallow his words criticizing the powerful Herod Antipas. John ran ahead of Christ, clearing the ground so that the Lord’s pathway would be clear. This forerunner baptized the Christ, preached and prophesied like the Christ, fasted and prayed like the Christ, and died for the truth like the Christ. But he did not rise from the dead like the Christ. There is only one Easter. We rejoice at Saint John the Baptist’s birth, because what followed merits rejoicing. We rejoice at his birth, because of the generous God who intervenes in our lives, who discovers us before we discover Him.

May the birth of Saint John the Baptist deepen our love for all unborn babies, who must be given the chance to grow, to live, and to become the great men and women God invites them to be. God respected the laws of human biology when intervening in history. May we follow His example of seeing every child, every life, as a gift.

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Sacred Heart of Jesus
Friday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

Behold the heart which drips red for love of man

It’s always the tissue of male heart muscle when the molecular structure of a Eucharistic miracle is examined under a microscope. Jesus had “heart” but, more importantly, He had a heart. The word “heart” is synonymous with grit, soul, intuition, love, strength, generosity, and, in its most total sense, the very center of man. Today’s feast embraces all of those meanings. Christ’s Sacred Heart teaches us that God loves us as a friend loves a friend, as a parent loves a child, or as a sibling loves his closest brother or sister. That is, Christ loves us in the same way as a person loves us, only more intensely. Our God doesn’t shift the planetary order, redirect the rays of the sun, or create a parallel gravitational field to magnetize His love for mankind. Science fiction requires a fluid imagination. Understanding God’s love should not, and does not, demand such mental contortionism. Understanding God’s love should be as simple as recalling your little hand in your father’s big hand as you walked next to him at night as a little girl. It requires remembering running into your mother’s soft embrace, cheek to cheek, after skinning your knee. Jesus Christ’s love for man is as human and as clear as a beating heart. Simply put, Jesus loves us from just above His solar plexus, where His heart pulsates with emotion for every sacred creature who harbors a human soul.

The widely loved devotion to the Sacred Heart is not rooted in a feast of ancient pedigree similar to those of Holy Week. No Christian of the first millenium ever gazed into the haunting eyes of Christ as He stared out from a Sacred Heart image enthroned on the family-room wall. It was only in 1856 that Pope Pius IX placed this feast on the Church’s universal calendar. The Pope acted after almost two centuries of devotion to the Sacred Heart, which had grown out of the thinking, preaching, and prayer of the indefatigable Saint John Eudes and out of the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Both of these saints were indebted, in turn, to the medieval revelations of the Sacred Heart granted to Saint Gertrude the Great.

We love the Heart of Christ because His heart loved us first. We adore the adorer, love the lover, and worship the worshiper. Because God comes first, all of our love for Him is the repayment of a debt. We are not doing God a favor by loving him any more than a hammer does a carpenter a favor by slamming nails into wood. Religion is about raw justice, not doing God favors. That God loves us is not readily apparent from creation itself or from the history of mankind. The gods were many things to many races throughout the ages, but love was not one of them. Christianity had to tell the world that God was love. And Jesus had to attach His arms to a cross and die for that message to be convincing. The visions of Saint Margaret Mary made God’s love concrete and comprehensible, while the visions of Saint Faustina Kowolska deepened the meaning of this feast still more. In these challenging visions, Christ rips open His heart to Sister Faustina and shows her a calm and deep ocean of mercy waiting to bathe repentant sinners in its saving waters. Three strands—the Sacred Heart, love, and mercy—are now braided in a tight belt of spiritual truth.

True heart is not proven by waving to the crowds from a car in a victory parade or by luxuriating on the beach with friends. Real heart is in the last stretch of the neck over the finish line, in climbing the stage to receive a diploma after years of academic struggle, or in pulling yourself out of bed to go to nocturnal adoration. True heart is synonymous with long suffering, perseverance, and conquering through adversity. True heart is dying on the cross when you didn’t deserve it. A true heart is a Sacred Heart. That’s the heart of our God. No athlete goes to the Olympics to compete for the silver. Jesus reached for the gold from the dais of the cross, slick with his own blood. There’s no need for us to keep on searching for a heart of gold in this world. We know in exactly whose body that heart beats. It’s all gold, it’s all sacredness, and it loves us like Himself.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, You told us to ask and we shall receive, to seek and we shall find, to knock and the door shall be opened. Today, we ask, we seek, and we knock, in the sure and certain hope that you will hear us and answer us.

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June 22: Saints John Fisher, Bishop and Martyr,
& Thomas More, Martyr
John Fisher: 1469–1535; Thomas More: 1478–1535
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of the Diocese of Rochester (Fisher)
and of lawyers and politicians (More)

They would not bend to the marriage

In 1526 a German painter named Hans Holbein could not find work in Basel, Switzerland. The Reformation had come to town. It shattered the stained glass, burned the wooden statues, and sliced up the oil paintings. Protestants don’t “do” great art. There were no more commissions. So Holbein went north, to Catholic England, in search of wealthy patrons for his craft. On his way, he passed through the Netherlands to procure letters of introduction from the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was a friend of Sir Thomas More, an English humanist of the highest caliber. And thus it came to pass that one fine day, in England in 1527, Thomas More sat patiently while Holbein’s brush worked its magic.

Holbein’s extraordinary portrait of Thomas More captures the man for all seasons, as one contemporary called More, at the pinnacle of his powers. More’s head and torso fill the frame. There is no need for context, landscape, or a complex backdrop. More’s mind is what matters. He is what matters. Nothing else. The shimmering velvet of his robes, the weighty gold chain of office resting on his shoulders, the detailed rose badge of the House of Tudor lying on his chest, all tell the viewer something important—this is not a frivolous man. He serves the King. His work is consequential. He also wears a ring. He is married and has children. He dons a cap. It is England, and he is cold. His stubble is visible. He is tired from overwork and did not have time to shave. He holds a small slip of paper—perhaps a bribe he rejected. His gaze, slightly off center, is earnest, serious, and calm. It is almost as if he is searching the room, attentive to any threat lurking behind the painter. He is watchful. The entirety of the work conveys that elusive quality that denotes great art—interior movement. The gears of More’s brain are rotating. His personality has force. The viewer feels it.

Saint Thomas More was the greatest Englishman of his generation. In a land with a highly educated aristocratic class, his erudition was unequalled. He was a devoted family man who carried out an extensive correspondence with his children and ensured that his daughters were as well educated as his sons. He served the English crown faithfully both at home and abroad. He charmed his many friends with a rich and engaging personality. He published scholarly works and communicated with other humanists of his era. Yet despite all of these accomplishments, the fraught times he lived in eventually overwhelmed him. He could not save his own head.

More was a thoughtful and serious Catholic. He refused to bend to the will of King Henry VIII regarding divorce and Henry’s self-appointment as head of the Church in England. For his silence, or lack of explicit support for Henry, More was brought to court, where a perjurer’s words knifed him in the heart. More was condemned to death by beheading. This was a favor from the King, who admired More but could not brook his dissent. More had originally been sentenced to a far crueler form of capital punishment, but Henry decreed that his life end with one blow of the axe. So the unconquered Thomas More climbed a shaky scaffold on July 6, 1535, and had his head lopped off. His head was stuck on a pole on London bridge for one month afterward, a trophy to barbarity. More died a martyr to the indissolubility of marriage.

Saint John Fisher was an academic who held various high positions at the University of Cambridge, one of the two universities in all of England, eventually becoming its Chancellor for life. He was a Renaissance humanist, like Thomas More, who encouraged the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Fisher was the personal tutor of Henry VIII when Henry was a boy, and he preached the funeral homily of Henry’s father, Henry VII. John Fisher lived a life of extreme personal austerity and even placed a human skull on the table during meals to remind himself of his eventual end. He had many of the same qualities as More—great learning, personal uprightness, and academic accomplishments.

But easy times don’t make martyrs. When King Henry wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Fisher became her most ardent supporter. He openly stated in court that he would die for the indissolubility of marriage, thus incurring the lasting wrath of his former pupil Henry. All the bishops of England, save Fisher and two others, lost their courage and acquiesced, without a fight, to Henry VIII’s takeover of the Catholic Church in England. Their weakness brought to a sudden, crashing end a thousand years of Catholicism in England. The faith endured in some form, of course, but would never be the culture-forming force it had been for so many centuries. It is an embarrassment of Catholic history that almost all the bishops of England fell like dominoes, one after another, at one slight puff of the breath of King Henry VIII on their cheeks.

After various nefarious machinations, John Fisher was imprisoned in the harshest of conditions for over a year, even being deprived access to a priest. During this time, the Pope named him a cardinal, although Henry refused him the ceremonial placing of the red hat on his head. After a brief trial with the usual perjury, Cardinal John Fisher was beheaded on June 22, 1535. In order to avoid inevitable comparisons between Cardinal Fisher and John the Baptist, King Henry moved the cardinal’s execution to avoid any connection to June 24th’s Feast of Saint John the Baptist. Both Johns were martyrs to marriage. But there was no silver platter for John Fisher. His head was placed on a pole on London bridge for two weeks, only to be replaced by Thomas More’s head. Saints John Fisher and Thomas More were beatified in 1886 along with fifty-four other English martyrs. The two were canonized together in 1935.

Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, through your intercession, give all Catholics courage to resist the pressure to conform to falsehood, to the broad way, to popular opinion. You were both thoughtful and granite-like in your resistance. Help us to be likewise when times call for such.

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June 22: Saint Paulinus of Nola, Bishop
c. 354–431
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of bell makers

The best of Rome—the best of the Church

Saint Paulinus was to the manor born. And it was a very nice manor. He was raised on an aristocratic estate near Bordeaux, France, in an elite Roman family replete with senators and other high officials of empire. Paulinus received a superior education from a well-known tutor and served, while still in his twenties, as Consul of Rome and Governor of Campania in Southern Italy. He was humble, sage, gentle, well read, and intellectually curious. Paulinus represented, in short, the very best of Rome. He would, in time, represent the very best of the Church.

While serving as Governor of Campania, Paulinus witnessed the simple but sincere piety of the common people who went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Felix of Nola, who had suffered for the faith around 250 A.D. The people’s faith moved Paulinus to his core and planted a seed in the soil of his soul. Paulinus suffered personal setbacks due to the political machinations inherent to empires, which awakened him to the fleeting nature of power and prestige. He moved to Milan and studied in the school of Saint Ambrose. When Paulinus returned to Bordeaux, he was baptized by the Bishop. The seed of faith planted in Campania had germinated in Milan and flowered in Bordeaux. It would bear fruit for decades to come.

Paulinus married a holy Christian woman from Barcelona, and the two soon became three. But their son died after only a few days. Paulinus and his wife were thunderstruck. Another turning point. Face to face with the mystery of suffering in its crudest form, they threw their lives at God’s feet. They abandoned their considerable material wealth and began to lead lives of continual prayer and asceticism. Paulinus rightly noted that poverty was not the goal, but the means to a closer bond with Christ: “...the athlete does not win because he strips himself, for he undresses precisely in order to begin the contest, whereas he only deserves to be crowned as victorious when he has fought properly."

Paulinus, though married, was ordained a priest around 394 and then returned to the land that had first nourished his faith—Nola, in Compania. He would never leave it. After his wife’s death around 410, Paulinus received episcopal ordination and served as Bishop of Nola until his death. He was part of a broader tradition of educated Roman men of the fourth and fifth centuries who served the Church as bishops rather than the empire as governors. As Bishop, Paulinus’ greatness revealed itself. Although he never wrote theological or scholarly works like Saint Jerome, he maintained a steady correspondence with this great biblical scholar and many others, including Saint Martin of Tours. Paulinus wrote to a North African bishop whose close friend had just had a powerful conversion. Paulinus was curious and asked the bishop for more information. The friend’s name was Augustine, and his response to Paulinus was the “Confessions.” History has Paulinus of Nola to thank for the world’s first autobiography, the groundbreaking work of the great Saint Augustine. Paulinus and Augustine became close friends, although they probably never met. Saint Augustine even wrote: “Go to Campania...there study Paulinus, that choice servant of God.” If a man is known by the caliber of his friends, Paulinus’ many impressive friends speak powerfully to his sterling character.

Saint Paulinus was a master of the art of friendship, particularly spiritual friendship. He understood the Church, the Body of Christ, as a forum where true friendship flourishes. He wrote to Saint Augustine: "It is not surprising if, despite being far apart, we are present to each other and, without being acquainted, know each other, because we are members of one body, we have one head, we are steeped in one grace, we live on one loaf, we walk on one road and we dwell in the same house." Beautiful! The Church is a communion of souls, a theological and sacramental family where deeper relationships take root and flower. Saint Paulinus is still venerated in Nola and its environs, where on his Feast Day the faithful carry in procession enormous lily-adorned towers in which stand large statues of Saint Paulinus.

Saint Paulinus of Nola, may your humility, education, and serenity be an example to all who are searching for God. May they imitate you in finding Him, in loving Him, and in dedicating their lives to Him amidst a large circle of like-minded friends.

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June 21: Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious
1568–1591
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Catholic youth and plague victims

Though he had many possessions, he did not go away sad

The Jesuit Order, from its very founding, had a sharp sense of its educational superiority, its fidelity to the Holy Father, and its mission to educate and spiritually guide the elites among the courts and aristocracies of Europe. The Order did not, however, develop a strong community identity. There were, and are, common houses. But Jesuit communities built on common prayer, meals, and apostolates were rare. Much more common was the Jesuit alone, trekking under the canopy of a Canadian forest, riding the waves like a cork in a boat off the coast of India, or hiking the narrow mountain pathways in the mists of the high Andes. Where there was one Jesuit, there were all Jesuits. Each man embodied his entire Order. It was a community of many ones. Jesuits were united by their vows, their long education, and their common mission. Actually living, praying, eating, relaxing, and working together, so crucial to the common life of other Orders, did not play an equivalent role among the Jesuits.

Jesuit superiors were aware of the dangers that isolation might pose to unity. So they encouraged, and even mandated, a means to sew into one fabric the patches of a thousand lives being lived across the globe. Letters! Jesuits were required to write letters to their superiors, giving regular accounts of their work. These letters had to be detailed, instructive, and inspiring. After they were reviewed, the most edifying were published and distributed to Jesuit houses. Through these letters, the Order was made one. Every Jesuit knew what at least some of his brothers were doing for God and the Church. These collections of letters, known as the Jesuit Relations, were eventually distributed beyond the confines of the Order. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Relations were often exciting best sellers recounting the apostolic exploits of isolated Jesuits walking along the rim of Christendom.

It was just such an inspiring letter, or relation, from India that inspired today’s saint, Aloysius Gonzaga, to become a Jesuit. Saint Aloysius was known to his family as Luigi, Aloysius being the Latinized version of his baptismal name. He was the eldest of seven children born into an aristocratic family from Northern Italy. Kings and Queens and Cardinals and Princes ate at the family table, were family themselves, or were at least friends or acquaintances. Young Luigi knew, and detested, the frivolous existence lived by so many in his aristocratic milieux. He also suffered from various physical infirmities, which produced that vulnerability and perspective which leads so clearly and directly to a deep dependence on God.

After receiving his First Communion at about the age of twelve, he came to personally know the great future saint Cardinal Charles Borromeo, who would later be his confessor and spiritual director. Borromeo was a Jesuit. His example, together with Aloysius’ reading about the works of Jesuit missionaries, convinced him to enter the Jesuit Novitiate, against his family’s wishes. So Aloysius went to Rome to begin his studies. And there he grew to embrace those of lesser education and refinement than himself. He volunteered to work bringing victims of a plague to a Jesuit hospital, despite his personal revulsion at the patients’ decrepit physical conditions. After his own physical limitations restricted his participation in this corporal work of mercy, he still persevered and insisted on returning to the hospital over his superiors’ objections.

While working in the hospital, Aloysius contracted the plague from a patient he personally cared for, was incapacitated shortly thereafter, and, a few months later, died on June 21, 1591. He was twenty-three. His reputation for purity, prayerfulness, and suffering led many to consider him a saint soon after his death. Aloysius was beatified just fourteen years later, in 1605, and canonized in 1726. He is buried in the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Rome. His contribution to the Jesuit canon was not a pagan tribe converted, a new ocean crossed, or an unknown language cataloged. His letter was his life, and it was to die young and to die holy.

Saint Aloysius, you laid all your treasures, including your youth, on an altar to God. May your example of generosity, and your service to the sick and dying, inspire all Catholic youth to give God the gold of their early years, not just the silver of middle age or the bronze of their retirement.

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The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
Thursday after Holy Trinity unless otherwise indicated.
In the U.S, the solemnity is transferred to the Sunday after the Holy Trinity
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

The gift of all gifts

Standing at the crowded table in the dim candle light of the Upper Room during the Last Supper, Jesus Christ did not hand out Bibles to the Twelve Apostles and solemnly tell them, “Take this, all of you, and read it. This is my book, written for you.” Jesus gives us Himself, not a book. On today’s Feast, we commemorate God’s greatest gift to mankind, the person of Jesus Christ. God gives us His Son, and then Christ gives us Himself, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the accidents of bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist. Gift, gift-giver, and receiver meld into one in this sacrament of sacraments.

In the era of the early Church, it was customary for an excess of bread to be consecrated at Mass so that the Eucharist could be carried to the sick who had been unable to attend the Holy Sacrifice. This practice led to the adoption of the pyx as the first sacred vessel for reservation of the Eucharist. Some modern churches pay homage to these Eucharistic origins by hanging an oversized pyx on their wall to use as a tabernacle, imitating the early Church custom. Permanent reservation of the Eucharist led, over the centuries, to enthroning the Lord amidst the greatest splendor in churches. By the early medieval period, the time had long passed when the Eucharist was reserved merely to be brought to the sick. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, street processions, chants, confraternities, songs, flowers, and all the splendid trappings of a feast day covered this dogma in glory by the High Middle Ages, and continue to wrap it in honor today.

Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that the most necessary sacrament was Baptism but that the most excellent was the Holy Eucharist. This most excellent sacrament has been, for some, too excellent. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus tells His disciples that they must eat His body and drink His blood, many are incredulous and walk away. But Jesus does not compromise or say He was misunderstood. He lets them keep on walking. This initially hard teaching for the few was destined, over time, to be lovingly welcomed by the many.

The Old Covenant of the Old Testament was gory. In a kind of primitive liturgy, Moses had goats and sheep slaughtered on an altar and their blood gathered into buckets. He then splashed this blood over the people, sealing their acceptance of the written law. Flying droplets of animal blood splattered against people’s skin to remind them of their promise to God. No such bloody drama breaks out at Sunday Mass. We each bless our head and torso with holy water and receive a pure white host on the tongue. The New Covenant is based not on the blood of goats, bull calves, or on the ashes of a heifer. It is rooted in the generosity of the Son of God, who “offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit.” Christ’s Covenant with his people is established verbally and liturgically at the Last Supper and physically on the cross the following day. The consecration of the Sacred Species at Mass continues Christ’s physical presence among us, while adoration of the Blessed Sacrament suspends the consecration of the Mass, stretching it out into hours, days, months, and years.

We naturally desire to leave a part of ourselves to our loved ones. We send photos, solemnly pass on a cherished memento, or give a baby a family name. Soldiers used to carry a locket holding a few strands of their wife’s or girlfriend’s hair. We need to be close, physically close, to those we love in concrete, tangible ways. Jesus desired the same, and, not being constrained by the limitations of human nature, He did the same, and more. He has left us Himself! That dogma processing down the street is a person! And that dogma behind the golden doors of the parish’s tabernacle is the same person! So bend that body low and set that heart on fire, for the Saving Victim opens wide the gate of heaven to all below. We stand as close to Christ in the Holy Eucharist as the Apostles ever did on Mount Tabor.

Lord of the Eucharist, we venerate You with heads bowed, as the old form of worship gives way to the new. With faith providing for what fails the senses, we honor the Begetter and the Begotten, loving back at what loved us first, apprentices in the school of love.

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June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot
951–c. 1025
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Founder of the Camaldolese Benedictine Order

To be alone with God is not to be alone

It is easy today to slip down a technological hole into a cave piled high with televisions, video games, and the toys of virtual reality. Many technological “hermits” disappear from meaningful contact with society, and instead marinate, perpetually, in the blue glow of their screens. Retreating from sustained contact with everyday life has always been attractive for a very small number of people. These people are called monks. But a religious monk’s motivation is not isolation for isolation’s sake. Nor is it flight from overwhelming adult responsibilities. Today’s technological monks separate themselves from society for different reasons than a religious monk does. Religious monks were not, and are not, merely recluses with antisocial or introverted personalities. They do not become monks because they are more comfortable playing war on a digital battlefield or retreating into sci-fi universes.

Although they may have an innate disposition toward the interior life, religious monks do not enter a monastery primarily to flee, or hide from, something. Instead, they run toward someone—God. A monastery is not a cave. It is an oasis. Monks seek a Christ-centered community where mortification and self-discipline are easier to practice, where a chapel and the Sacraments are always available, and where spiritual direction, Church approval, and the reinforcement of fellow monks assure the community that they are doing the will of God.

Since the time of Saint Benedict in the sixth century, there had essentially been only one monastic order in the Latin Rite Church, the Benedictines. Benedictine monasteries shone like stars in a broad constellation, blinking throughout Europe from east to west and north to south. Each monastery and school was like a vertebra strengthening the intellectual and spiritual skeleton of Europe. Over the centuries, however, and inevitably, the Benedictines atrophied, cracked from dryness, and needed new wine poured into their old wineskins. The saint who reformed Benedictine life and who founded the Cistercian Order was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. But he was not born until 1090. It was today’s saint, Romuald, much less well-known, who cleared the path for Saint Bernard and for the reform of monasticism, ensuring its survival in the middle ages.

Saint Romuald was born in the middle of the tenth century in Northern Italy. After his father killed a relative in a duel, Romuald entered a local monastery for a few weeks of penance. But the weeks turned into months and the months into years. He stayed. Unfortunately, the monks were as lukewarm as old bathwater, and Saint Romuald told them so. He had to leave. He put himself under the tutelage of a wise hermit, then traveled to Spain to live as a hermit on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery. He subsequently spent about thirty years walking the length and breadth of Italy. He had acquired a great reputation as an ascetic and master of prayer and so founded, or reformed, various monasteries which sought his assistance.

Finally, in 1012, he settled down in Tuscany and established a reformed branch of the Benedictines. The Order was named after the man who granted Saint Romuald the beautiful land on which he first built. The donor’s name was Maldolus, and the new community was thus called the Camaldolese Order. The Order still exists in several countries and continues to attract those few men and women inclined to the radical isolation, prayer, asceticism, and deep hunger for God, which only a hermit’s life can satisfy.

Saint Romuald planted the seed of his Order in the Benedictine garden. But Camaldolese monks emphasize solitude more than their monastic cousins. In a typical Benedictine monastery, every single monk places his oar in the water to pull the monastery’s school, or orchard, or farm, forward. The Camaldolese tradition is more hermit based (eremitical) while allowing some community based (cenobitical) life. Camaldolese monks generally live in individual structures but pray the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours together daily in the Church. They live simplicity, penance, and contemplation more intensely due to their total focus on these goals to the exclusion of all outside apostolates. Unlike modernity’s reclusive technological monks enraptured by their screens, the Camaldolese choose to live without phones, the internet, or television. The tabernacle is their screen, and the scene stays the same. With this intense focus on solitude and prayer, Camaldolese monks perpetuate, in their narrow, unique, and faithful way, the vision of their pioneering founder.

Saint Romuald, by your intense example of prayer, penance, and solitude, assist all the faithful to put God above all things, to conquer themselves before any other mountain, and so come to know themselves, and their Maker, more deeply.

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June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua
1195–1231
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of lost articles

He mastered the Word of God

Saint Anthony of Padua is a famous Franciscan saint especially honored at an impressive shrine in Padua, in Northern Italy. But he was not born as Anthony, was an Augustinian priest before he became a Franciscan, and was from Lisbon, Portugal, not Italy. Saint Anthony, along with Saint Bonaventure, another early Franciscan, lent theological heft to the somewhat esoteric movement founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis was uniquely sensitive and eccentric, unsuited to leadership, and vexed by the need to exercise authority. It was Saints Anthony and Bonaventure who gave the Franciscan Order credibility, who anchored it in sound theology, and who assured its survival and continued growth.

Today’s saint was baptized Fernando and grew up in a privileged environment in Lisbon. He received a superior education and entered the Augustinian Order as an adolescent. While living in the city of Coimbra, he met some Franciscan brothers who had established a poor hermitage outside of the city named in honor of Saint Anthony of the Desert. Young Father Fernando was very attracted to their simple way of life. From these friars, he also heard about the martyrdom of five Franciscan brothers at the hands of Muslims in North Africa. These martyrs’ bodies were ransomed and returned for burial in Fr. Fernando’s own abbey in Coimbra. Their deaths and burials were a life-changing moment for him. The Augustinian Fr. Fernando asked, and received, permission to leave and join the Franciscans. At that point he adopted a new religious name, Anthony, from the patron saint of the hermitage where he had first come to know the Franciscan Order.

The newly christened Father Anthony then set out to emulate his martyr heroes. He sailed for North Africa to die for the faith or to ransom himself for Christians held captive by Muslims. But it was not to be. Anthony became gravely ill, and, on the return voyage, his ship was providentially blown off course to Sicily. From there he made his way to Central Italy, where his education, mastery of Scripture, compelling preaching skills, and holiness brought him deserving renown. Paradoxically, it was because Anthony received excellent training as an Augustinian that he became a great Franciscan. Saint Francis himself soon came to know Father Anthony, a man whose learning legitimized the under-educated Franciscans. Saint Francis had been skeptical of scholarship, even prohibiting his illiterate followers from learning how to read. Francis feared they would become too prideful and then abandon their radical simplicity and poverty. Saint Francis only reluctantly, several years after founding his Order, allowed some of his brothers to be ordained priests. He had originally relied exclusively on diocesan priests to minister to his non-ordained brothers, and he distrusted his followers who aspired to the honor of the Priesthood. The presence of Anthony, and later Bonaventure, changed all that.

In time, Father Anthony became a famous preacher and teacher to Franciscan communities in Northern Italy and Southern France. His knowledge of Scripture was so formidable that Pope Gregory IX titled him the “Ark of the Testament.” In Anthony’s Shrine in Padua, a reliquary holding his tongue and larynx recall his fame as a preacher. These organs had not disintegrated even long after the rest of his body had returned to dust. Saint Anthony is most often shown either holding the Child Jesus in his arms or holding a book, a lily, or all three. His intercession is invoked throughout the world for the recovery of lost items and for assistance in finding a spouse.

Anthony died at the age of just thirty-five in 1231, about five years after Saint Francis had died. He was canonized less than one year later. In 1946 Saint Anthony was declared a Doctor of the Church due to the richness of his sermons and writings. He was conscious as he succumbed to death. In his last moments, the brothers surrounding his bed asked him if he saw anything. Saint Anthony said simply, “I see the Lord.”

Saint Anthony of Padua, we seek your powerful intercession to have the right words on our lips to inspire the faithful and to correct and guide the ignorant. Through your example, may our words also be buttressed by our powerful witness to Christ.

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June 11: Saint Barnabas, Apostle
Early First Century–c. 62
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Cyprus

A multi-talented disciple recruits Saint Paul

Today’s saint was an Apostle in the exact same sense in which St. Paul was an Apostle. Saint Barnabas was not one of the Twelve original followers of Christ nor a replacement for one of the Twelve, like Saint Matthias. But the term “The Twelve” quickly disappeared after the Gospel events, because “The Twelve” themselves propagated into dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of successor Apostles, known alternatively as Episcopoi or Prebyteroi: Overseers or Elders. Saint Barnabas is among that generation of Christian leaders whose name first surfaces immediately after the Resurrection. So although he was not in the circle of “The Twelve,” he stood in the next outer ring.

The earliest name for the movement initiated by Jesus of Nazareth was “The Way.” This term is used in the Acts of the Apostles and in the ancient catechetical document known as the Didache. But “The Way” was replaced early on by another term. The Acts of the Apostles explains: “Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. So it was that for an entire year they met with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called ‘Christians’” (Ac 11:25–26). We owe Saint Barnabas, then, the credit for the word “Christian” as the standard description of the followers of Jesus Christ.

The persecution and martyrdom of Saint Stephen forced many Christian leaders to flee Jerusalem. The unforeseen effect of Stephen’s assassination and the subsequent persecution of Christians was the spread of the Gospel into greater Syria, the Greek Islands, and North Africa. This expansion led to contact with Greek and Roman Gentiles, or non-Jews, a growth presaging the transformation of Christianity from a localized Jewish sect into a multiethnic worldwide Church. When some converts from North Africa and Cyprus went to Antioch, the capital of the Roman province of Syria, they converted a great number of Greek speakers. And when “news of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem...they sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he came and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast devotion; for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (Ac 11: 22–24a).

Saint Barnabas played a crucial role in the first unfurling of the Gospel message beyond Palestine. Acting as a kind of talent scout, he lassoed Saul from his hometown of Tarsus to begin the extraordinary missionary efforts which would forever change the Church and the world. Saint Paul and Saint Barnabas are repeatedly mentioned together in the Acts of the Apostles as they traverse the port cities, the waters, and the dusty highways of the Eastern Mediterranean world. Together, they call down the Holy Spirit, commission new Apostles, confront Jews and Roman citizens alike, challenge a magician, speak to governors, and, of utmost consequence for the Church’s future, convince the other Apostles not to force new converts to become Jews first and Christians later.

Saint Barnabas was a dynamic force of nature who spun like a tornado from town to town in the early Church. He was a giant of that first generation of risk-taking, manly, apostolic leaders. The citizens of Lystra in Asia Minor compared him to the Greek God Zeus. They were so impressed that they tried to crown him with garlands and to sacrifice the blood of oxen to both him and Saint Paul (Ac 14:12–18). After numerous adventures in tandem, Paul, the better preacher, writer, and organizer, ultimately sails off on his own. The last we hear of Barnabas, he is returning to the Island of Cyprus, his native land. When Saint Paul writes from his Roman prison in about 62 A.D., he mentions that Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, is with him (Col 4:10). Barnabas’ absence at Paul’s side in his hour of need is a clue that Barnabas is likely dead by the year 62. Tradition tells us that Barnabas was martyred on Cyprus, perhaps by a Jewish mob angered at his successful preaching in the synagogue of Salamis. His relics and memory are particularly honored on Cyprus to this day.

Saint Barnabas, you gathered infant Christianity from its cradle and carried it into the world beyond. You poured the message of salvation into new wineskins without any guile. May all Christians be so confident, so convincing, and so successful through your intercession.

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June 9: Saint Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor
Early Fourth Century–373
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of spiritual directors

The Harp of the Holy Spirit

The Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 ended a centuries-long scorpion dance. Bishops, theologians, and scholars from Egypt to Syria had long circled one another with suspicion, stinging their enemies with sharp words and pointed tongues. Did Jesus Christ have one or two natures? If two natures, were they joined in His will or in His person? If united in His person, at conception? Was He one person or was He two? Smart, educated men defended every shade of every subtlety of every complex question with all of their considerable skill. The answers hacked out at Ephesus and Chalcedon, whose hurly-burly political intrigues were less than inspiring, answered the relevant questions definitively, establishing orthodox teaching for all time. The theological language coined during those fifth century debates is still familiar to the Church today: hypostatic union, monophysitism, Theotokos, etc.

Today’s saint, Ephrem, was active a century prior to the great conclusions and clarifications of the fifth-century Councils. Although Ephrem did not deviate from what later Councils would explicitly teach, he used far different language to communicate the same truths, anticipating later teachings through poetry. Saint Ephrem was a poet and a musician first and foremost. His language is more beautiful, compelling, and memorable because it is metaphorical. Exactness in words risks dryness. You can say that the average density of the air in the ship’s hull eventually equaled the average density of the surrounding water. Or you can say that the ship sank like a stone to the ocean floor. You can write that a day’s high dew point caused the air’s water vapor content to slow evaporation. Or you can write that it was so hot and humid that people melted like candles. The Church can teach that we eat Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist. Or we can speak directly to Christ with the poet Ephrem and say, “In your bread hides the Spirit who cannot be consumed; in your wine is the fire that cannot be swallowed. The Spirit in your bread, fire in your wine: behold a wonder heard from our lips.”

The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon taught that the one person of Jesus Christ united in Himself a fully divine nature and a fully human nature from the moment of His conception. Saint Ephrem wrote “The Lord entered (Mary) and became a servant; the Word entered her, and became silent within her; thunder entered her and his voice was still; the Shepherd of all entered her and became a Lamb…” Poetry, metaphor, paradox, images, song, and symbols. These were tools in Saint Ephrem’s nimble hands. Theology for him was liturgy, music, and prayer. He was called the Harp of the Holy Spirit, the Sun of the Syrians, and the Column of the Church by his admirers, who included luminaries such as Saints Jerome and Basil.

Saint Ephrem was a deacon who declined ordination to the priesthood. He lived radical poverty, wearing a patched and dirty tunic. He had a cave for his home and a rock for his pillow. Ephrem founded a theological school and was deeply involved in catechesis through preaching, liturgy, and music. He died after contracting a disease from a patient he was caring for. Saint Ephrem is the Church’s greatest Syriac language writer, proof that Christianity is not synonymous with the West or European culture. Ephrem’s world thrived for centuries with its own unique Semitic identity in today’s Syria, Iraq, Iran, and India. Saint Ephrem’s Syria was not the “Near East,” as Europeans later called the region. To him, it was just home, the deep cradle of the new way of loving God that was, and is, Christianity. Saint Ephrem was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

Saint Ephrem, you wrote tenderly and lovingly about the truths of our faith. Help all Christian artists to stay true to the Truth and to communicate Jesus Christ to the world through beauty, music, and images that raise the mind and lift the heart to God Himself.

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June 6: Saint Norbert, Bishop
c. 1080–1134
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Bohemia and of expectant mothers

Thrown down like Saint Paul, he stood up a changed man

Today’s saint was born into an elite Central European family with connections to imperial dynasties and the nobility of his time. He received an excellent sacred and secular education in keeping with his high status. And as a young man he received tonsure, the particular shaving of the hair on the scalp denoting one a cleric. He was then appointed a canon, a member of a bishop’s inner circle who prayed the liturgical hours in common with other canons. As a young adult, Saint Norbert was well on his way to a career as an ecclesiastic typical of his era: well connected, intelligent, politically aware, committed to the Church, an adviser to princes and bishops, and materially comfortable. His life was almost indistinguishable from those of the laymen whose company he mostly kept. Norbert avoided priestly ordination and turned down a chance to become a bishop. In a one-Church world where civil power and church power were intertwined, canons lived comfortably and held a quasi-civil office which dispensed prayers, graces, and spiritual favors for which the populace paid handsomely.

If not for a near-death experience when he was thirty-five years old, Saint Norbert would be known as just Norbert, and he would be resting, forgotten, under the stone floor of a German cathedral. But one day in 1115, Norbert was riding his horse when a lightning bolt struck nearby. He was thrown hard to the ground and was unconscious for a long time but survived. It was jarring, both physically and spiritually. Norbert was changed. He was penitent. He would abandon his life of frivolity. He would take his religious commitment seriously. This powerful experience of the fleetingness of life and its pleasures compelled Norbert to deviate from the wide, crowded road he was traveling, in order to walk, instead, a narrower, stonier, less-traveled path. And as Norbert walked, he shed his past step by step until over many years Saint Norbert emerged, miter on his head, bishop’s crozier in one hand, and a monstrance in the other. One moment changed his life. It ceased to be just a moment, in fact, but was converted into a permanent event. God broke through, touched his deepest core, and created a new man.

Soon after this near-death experience, Norbert was ordained a priest, went on a month-long retreat, founded a monastery with his own wealth, and began to preach about the transitory nature of the world. He had the fervor of a convert, the ardor of one for whom all things were new. Life was a permanent Spring day. He sold all that he had except what was necessary to say Mass, divested himself of all his properties, and gave everything to the poor. He wore a simple habit, went barefoot, and begged for food.

He started to preach throughout France and Germany and became well known. At the instigation of the Pope, he founded a religious Order, which quickly expanded. He was so well respected in Germany that, despite being the founder of an Order, he was named bishop of a large see. Saint Norbert became involved in various ecclesiastical arguments of his day of both a political and theological nature.

Saint Norbert’s efforts to reform the clergy of his day were not always well received. He was spat upon and rejected. But he persevered. No one outdid him in devotion to the Holy Eucharist, which he preached about constantly. Centuries after his death his body was transferred to near Prague after the German city where he had been buried turned Lutheran. Saint Norbert is most often depicted as a bishop holding either a monstrance or a ciborium, both of which hold the Holy Eucharist. The Norbertine Order continues to thrive, nine hundred years after it was founded. Would that anyone would speak just our name nine hundred years after we die! The Church remembers her saints, preserves their memories, and ensures that the heroes of our faith are held up for emulation long after their earthly work is done.

Saint Norbert, your conversion led to your life of total dedication to Christ and the Church. This change was nourished by reception of and devotion to the Holy Eucharist. May we be continually nourished with and converted by the same food from heaven.

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June 5: Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr
c. 675–754
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Germany

Pagans cut down a man of action in his grey hairs

In the treasury of the Cathedral of Fulda, Germany, there is a medieval Codex, a large, bound book of prayers and theological documents, which very likely belonged to Saint Boniface. The rough cover of the Codex is deeply sliced with cuts from a sword. A tradition dating back to the generations just after Saint Boniface’s own time attests that he wielded this very book like a shield to ward off the blows of robbers who attacked him and a large band of missionaries in Northern Germany in 754. Our saint tried to protect himself, both metaphorically and literally, with the written truths of our faith. It was to no avail. Saint Boniface and fifty-two of his companions were slaughtered. Ransacking the baggage of the missionaries for treasure, the band of thieves found no gold vessels or silver plates but only sacred texts the unlettered men couldn’t read. Thinking them worthless, they left these books on the forest floor, to be recovered later by local Christians. The Codex eventually made it into the Treasury at Fulda where it is found today. One of the earliest images of Saint Boniface, from a Sacramentary dating to 975, depicts the saint deflecting the blows of a sword with a large, thick book. The Codex is a second-class relic, giving silent witness to the final moments of a martyr.

Saint Boniface is known as the “Apostle of the Germans” and is buried in the crypt of Fulda Cathedral. However, his baptismal name was Winfrid, and he was born and raised in Anglo-Saxon England. He was from an educated family, entered a local monastery as a youth, and was ordained a priest at the age of thirty. In 716 Winfrid sailed to the continent to become a missionary to the peoples on the Baltic coast of today’s Northern Germany. He was able to communicate with them because his Anglo-Saxon tongue was similar to the languages of the native Saxon and Teutonic tribes. Winfrid was among the first waves of those many Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks who saved what could be saved of Roman and Christian culture in Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed. Large migrations of Gothic peoples, mostly Arian Christians, pagans, or a confusing mix of the two, filled the vacuum created after Roman order disintegrated, and they needed to be inculcated in the faith to rebuild a superior version of the culture they had helped decimate.

Winfrid traveled to Rome the year after first arriving on the continent, where the pope renamed him Boniface and appointed him missionary Bishop of Germany. After this, he never returned to his home country. He set out to the north and proceeded to dig and lay the foundations of Europe as we know it. He organized dioceses, helped found monasteries, baptized thousands, pacified tribes, challenged tree-worshipping pagans, taught, preached, held at least one large Church Council, convinced more Anglo-Saxon monks to follow his lead, ordained priests, appointed bishops, stayed in regular contact with his superiors in Rome, and pushed the boundaries of Christianity to their northernmost limit. Boniface was indefatigable. He was in his late seventies, and still pushing to convert the unconverted, when he was surprised and slain in a remote wilderness.

Saint Boniface was well educated, and many of his letters and related correspondence survive. But he was, above all, a man of action. He was daring and fearless. He was a pathbreaker. His faith moved mountains and tossed them into the sea. His labors, combined with his great faith, are the stuff of legend. More incredibly, though, they are the stuff of truth.

Saint Boniface, through your powerful intercession, help all those who labor for the faith to be as intrepid as you were in challenging those who reject Christ. May your example of tireless witness inspire all missionaries, both at home and abroad, to persevere.

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June 3: Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs
1860–1886
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of African youth

Young African Christians die like the martyrs of old

Many of the faces of the saints in heaven that shine with the light of God are dark faces. North Africa was one of the first regions to be evangelized and was home to a vibrant, diverse, and orthodox Church for over six hundred years. North Africa had over four hundred bishoprics and enriched the universal Church with a wealth of theologians, martyrs, and saints. That Catholic culture drowned under the crushing waves of Arab Muslim armies that inundated North Africa in the seventh century, altering its cultural and religious landscape. Small pockets of Christianity continued to exist in isolation for a few centuries more. But by 1830, when French colonists and missionaries settled in Tunisia and Algeria, local Christianity had totally disappeared. The Christian light had gone out in North Africa centuries before.

Yet today’s saints are nineteenth-century African martyrs. While North Africa has remained in the tight grip of Islam, sub-Saharan Africa has lived a contrary reality. It has embraced Christianity. Throughout the nineteenth century, daring missionary priests and religious from various European countries penetrated deep into the towns, savannas, jungles, and river deltas of the “dark continent,” carrying the light of Christ. For the most part, they were well received and initiated the long and complex process of evangelization, inculturation, and education that has turned today’s sub-Saharan Africa into a largely Christian region.

Charles Lwanga and his companions were all very young men, in their teens and twenties, when they were martyred. They ran afoul of their local ruler for one reason and one reason only—they were Christians and adhered to Christian morality. The ruler did not otherwise question their loyalty, devotion, or service to him. He was suspicious of the European priests who had brought the faith, wary of outside interference in his kingdom, and also eager to impress his subjects with a display of ruthlessness and power. He was also a sodomite who wanted these young men to engage in unholy sexual acts with him. For refusing to satisfy his disordered and abusive lust, they became victims of homsexual violence.

The ruler and his court questioned the young males who served as their pages and assistants to discover if they were catechumens, had been baptized, or knew how to pray. Those who answered “Yes” were killed for it. One was stabbed through the neck with a spear and another’s arm was cut off before he was beheaded. But most were marched miles to an execution site, cruelly treated for a week, then wrapped in reed matts and placed over a fire until their feet were singed. They were then given one last chance to abjure their faith. None did. These tightly wrapped human candles were then thrown onto a huge pyre and reverted to the dust from whence they came. One of the executioners even killed his own son. The executioners and onlookers knew their victims had succumbed to the flames when they no longer heard them praying.

The site where these Ugandan martyrs died is now a popular shrine and a source of pride dear to the heart of African Catholics. Charles Lwanga and his companions, though new to the faith, acted with the maturity of the wise and the aged, choosing to sacrifice lives full of promise rather than surrender the pearl of greatest price—their Catholic faith.

Saint Charles Lwanga and companions, help us to be courageous in the face of threats, to stand tall for our beliefs, and to suffer ridicule and hatred rather than renounce or minimize our relationship with Christ and His truth.

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June 2: Saints Marcellinus and Peter, Martyrs
Mid-third Century–c. 304
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

Their memory was preserved by their very executioner

Saint Helen went to the Holy Land and returned to Rome with remnants of the true cross of Christ. This same Helen was the mother of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who legalized Christianity in 313 and who called the Council of Nicea in 325. When Saint Helen died around 328, her Emperor-Son placed her body in a monumental, sumptuous sarcophagus of rare, porphyry marble from Egypt. The deeply carved red stone shows Roman soldiers on horseback conquering barbarians. These are not scenes likely to adorn a pious woman’s tomb. It was probably meant to be Constantine’s own sarcophagus, but when his mother died, he used it for her. And Constantine did one more thing for his mother. He built a large church on the outskirts of Rome over the catacombs, or burial place, of today’s saints, Marcellinus and Peter, and placed his mother and her giant tomb inside of the church.

That one so famous and powerful as Constantine would build a church over the catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, and honor this church still more with his mother’s tomb, testifies to these martyrs’ importance to the early Christians of Rome. And since they were martyred in approximately 304, only a decade before Constantine conquered the eternal city, their memory must still have been fresh when Christianity was legalized. Until this time, Christians worshipped in dark, hidden places. As they first stepped into the public light to build the ancient churches whose walls, pillars, and foundations are still visible today, these Christians honored those who came before them. They honored those whose deaths were all the sadder because they perished so close to the day of Christian liberation. They honored Saints Marcellinus and Peter.

Little is known with certainty about Saint Marcellinus and Saint Peter. Tradition tells us that Marcellinus was a priest and Peter an exorcist and that they were beheaded on the outskirts of Rome. A few years after the bloody event, a little boy from Rome heard about their deaths from the mouth of their very executioner, who later became a Christian. That little boy was named Damasus, and he went on to became Pope from 366–384. Decades later, remembering the story he had heard as a child, Pope Damasus honored Marcellinus and Peter by adorning their tomb with a marble inscription recounting the details of their martyrdom as he had heard them so long ago. Unfortunately, the inscription is lost.

The circumstances of Marcellinus’ and Peter’s deaths were likely similar to those of other, better-documented martyrdoms: some public declaration of faith, arrest, perfunctory trial, a chance to offer sacrifice to a Roman god, a refusal, a last chance to be an idolater, a last refusal, and then a swift, businesslike beheading. It was over quickly. Then came the calm. Then came the night. And out of that darkness emerged a candle-lit procession of humble Christians, walking slowly and silently toward the place of execution. The headless corpses were placed on white sheets and carried solemnly to an underground burial niche. A small marble plaque etched with the martyrs’ names was placed nearby. An oil lamp was lit and left burning. Thus the veneration began. Thus it continues today.

Marcellinus and Peter were important enough to be included in the official list of Roman martyrs and to have their names remembered in the liturgy of Rome. As the Mass celebrated in Rome became standard throughout the Catholic world, the names of Marcellinus and Peter were embedded into the Roman Canon, the First Eucharistic Prayer. And there they are read at Mass until today, more than one thousand seven hundred years after they died. The Body of Christ forgets nothing, retains everything, and purifies its memory to honor those who deserve honoring.

The catacombs and the first Basilica of Marcellinus and Peter fell into ruins at the hands of two enemies—time and the Goths. A “new” church was built nearby to replace it and is still a parish. Saint Helen’s bones were removed from her imperial tomb in the twelfth century and swapped with the body of a Pope. The tomb was later emptied again and, in 1777, moved to the Vatican museums. Hundreds of thousands of tourists walk right by the tomb every year, seeing perhaps just a huge chunk of marble, oblivious to the rich history connecting the monumental tomb to ancient Christianity and the martyrs we commemorate today.

Saints Marcellinus and Peter, help all those who seek your intercession to face persecution and intimidation of any kind, via words, or arms, or threats, with bravery and heroic resistance.

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June 1: Saint Justin Martyr
c. 100–c. 165
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of philosophers

The cut and thrust of philosophical debate led him to Truth

On one of his first missionary journeys, Saint Paul found himself in Syria. He was at a crossroads and needed to decide where he would travel to preach the Gospel. Do I head east and bring the Gospel to the gentiles of Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and China? Or do I travel west, to the Greeks, Romans, Franks, and the people on the rim of the Roman Sea (the Mediterranean)? The Acts of the Apostles relates the mystical event that happened next: “During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them” (Ac 16: 9–10). Macedonia is in Greece. So Saint Paul’s sails opened and he tacked west. The rest is history.

In the person of Saint Paul, the Church herself turned toward Greece and her philosophical tradition. It was the plan of God that His Church would decisively encounter philosophical truth, not myth and custom, as its partner in dialogue. This intellectual engagement began the long process of melding philosophical truth with theological revelation, which transformed early, Jewish-based Christianity into something new—the powerful synthesis of theology, philosophy, spirituality, and structure known as Catholicism.

Today’s saint was a philosopher in the Greek tradition, born around 100 A.D. in Samaria to Greek parents. Saint Justin wrapped himself in the white, toga-style cloak of a Greek philosopher even after his conversion. He is the most well-known apologist of the second century, the only true Christian thinker known between the time of Saint John the Evangelist and Origen in the first half of the third century. Justin mercilessly criticized the intellectual dead end of the ancient paganism in which he was raised, seeing it as not merely neutral but as an obstacle to discovering the truth.

Justin loved the idea that Christ the Logos was the same in substance but different in person from the Father. Theological truth expressed in the concepts of Greek philosophy was very satisfying to him, because it was very true. Justin also provided some of the very first words on the Holy Eucharist outside of the New Testament itself: “And this food is called among us the Eucharist...we (have) been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” What a clear and remarkable testament to Christianity’s early belief in the Eucharist!

Justin moved to Rome to teach philosophy and spent decades there writing and interacting with the higher echelons of Roman society. But even a thoughtful intellectual was not immune from persecution for being a Christian. Sometime between 162 and 168 A.D., Justin and six companions were called to answer for their beliefs before the Prefect of Rome. The record of the trial has been preserved and shows the Prefect demanding that Justin sacrifice to the gods of Rome. Justin and his friends refuse and are threatened with torture and death. They respond: “Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols.” What bravado! They sternly refused to be idolaters. They were duly led away, scourged, and beheaded.

Justin chose, as the Church chose, the God of the philosophers over the false gods of paganism. This was a choice for truth over illusion. As Tertullian would later write: “Christ has said that he is truth, not custom" (De Virgin. Vel. 1, 1). The Christian God is both Father and the Prime Mover; the God of Jesus Christ and the Uncaused Causer; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and thought thinking itself. He is Father and He is Almighty. He is everywhere, because He is nowhere. He is paternal and close at hand but forever mysterious and inaccessible. He gives a name, “I am Who am,” which is a riddle. We take this complex understanding of God for granted today. But the labor of early Christians like Saint Justin Martyr dug the deep intellectual foundations into which were later driven the piers of sound doctrine. It takes very smart people to make simple points.

Saint Justin, you surrendered your life rather than worship an idol. Your refusal to abjure your faith gives an example to all Christian intellectuals and teachers that the deepest truths are not found only on a page but must be lived, and sacrificed for, even unto death.

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May 31: Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Feast; Liturgical Color: White

Two young mothers and their treasures meet

Only in the Catholic Church would a Feast Day first celebrated in the thirteenth century be considered “new.” But that is when the Visitation first appeared in some liturgical calendars. Our oldest liturgical feasts date from the apostolic period. That is, they were likely celebrated by the Apostles themselves in the years immediately following the earthly life of Christ. The original historical events of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday transformed into liturgical events so rapidly and so naturally that the earliest Christian writings are of a liturgical nature. Other Feast Days, such as Christmas, Mary the Mother of God, and the Birth of John the Baptist had to wait their turn. They are ancient but cede pride of place to the foundational events of Holy Week, just as America’s Presidents’ Day must cede to the more essential Independence Day. Without a country, there would no presidents, and without a death and resurrection, there would be no Christianity or Christian calendar in the first place.

The Visitation falls, liturgically, when it happened historically. Mary conceived Jesus Christ in late March. Saint John the Baptist was born in late June. And it was between these two bookends that pregnant Mary visited her pregnant cousin Elizabeth. Perhaps it was in late May. We may be surprised in heaven to discover that many of our biblically based feast days are commemorated on the exact historical dates they occurred. Would God deceive us otherwise? After all, no good father would tell the family to celebrate his son’s birthday on a date other than when he was born.

It is the Gospel of Saint Luke that recounts for us so many details of Mary’s life that otherwise remain untold. Saint John writes at the end of his Gospel that Jesus did and said many other things which are not written down. Perhaps the same could be said of Mary. Many words were spoken, gestures made, and events transpired, yet so much remains a mystery. Yet if we knew all there was to know about God and the things of God, then heaven would be a bore and not be heaven at all.

The Visitation is the first time that Mary publicly exercises her role as Mediator of the Son of God. God chose not only to become a man but to become such in the same way that all men do, through gestation and birth, with His virginal conception the sole miracle. Catholicism is a religion that believes in secondary causality. God directly intervenes in creation only rarely, instead inviting His creatures to perfect His raw creation by using their God-given talents. God did not cure the cancer. The skilled surgeon removed the tumor. He used the gifts God gave him. It was not a direct intervention. It was not a miracle. It was the doctor’s mind and hands being put to their highest use. Mary generously mediated the Incarnation, placing her body at God’s disposition. She, the Mother of the Church, carries the entire Church in her womb. She, the Ark of the Covenant, houses a treasure more precious than Moses’ stone tablets of old. And she, the Morning Star, shines in the blackness before the blazing sun rises in the east, dawning a new day.

Christ’s presence in Mary’s womb radiates outward with x-ray power and reverberates in the words of faith which arise from Elizabeth and her child, John. Jesus’ cousin leaps for joy inside his mother. And Elizabeth reacts by speaking those graceful words, which countless voices will go on to pray, in countless languages, many billions of times in the centuries since and in the ages to come: “Blessed are you among women, and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” The Visitation is one of the sources of the Hail Mary.

Elizabeth is a prophet. We are her hearers. For a prophecy to be a prophecy, it has to become true. Elizabeth’s words were true and are true. Mary is indeed blessed among women, and her fruit has indeed changed the world. Mary’s humility instinctively deflects. She praises the source of all goodness, God, rather than the goodness of her own generosity. All things, save evil, can be traced back to God. Mary is at the head of the trail in clearing the tangled path overgrown since the sin of Eve. With mankind close behind, Mary leads us back to discover anew the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty.

Mary and Elizabeth, your generosity in cooperating with God’s will initiated the events of the New Testament. May we be equally generous in cooperating with God’s plans for our lives, knowing the beginning but not the end, lighting a fire that warms the lives of unknown others.

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May 29: Saint Paul VI, Pope
1897–1978
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

An erudite introvert helms the Church in stormy waters

Over the two millennia of its storied existence, the papacy has piled prestige upon power upon privilege like so many bricks in a high, impregnable, theological fortress. The Bishop of Rome is without doubt the world’s greatest institutional defender of tradition. There is simply no other office which telescopes into one man all that is meant by the compressed phrase “Western Civilization.” Giovanni Baptista Montini, today’s saint’s baptismal name, was as perfectly prepared by education and experience as any man before him to carry the torch of tradition handed to him by his predecessor Pope Saint John XXIII. Yet for all of his erudition and decades of practice walking along the high ridges of church life, the mid-1960s suddenly demanded of the Pope a mix of lace-like delicacy and raw political power alien to his sensitive character. The unity of the Church after the Council was quickly unwinding under potent centrifugal forces. In order to keep the core intact, it was no longer enough for the Pope to be just the bearer of the great tradition. Paul VI had to be Peter, a man of office and authority, yes, but also a tireless missionary like Saint Paul, and a silently courageous disciple and sign of contradiction like Saint Mary.

The future Pope Paul VI was born in the last years of the nineteenth century in Northern Italy to an educated and dignified family that was deeply committed to the Church. Giovanni was ordained a priest at the tender age of twenty-two and entered the service of the Vatican a few years later. He spent approximately thirty years serving in the central administration of the Holy See in roles placing him in close contact with three popes. He was appointed Archbishop of Milan in 1954 and a Cardinal in 1958. “Habemus Papam” could have been announced before the Cardinals ever mustered in the Sistine Chapel for the papal conclave of 1963, as few doubted whose experience best prepared him to be pope or who Pope Saint John XXIII wanted to succeed him. Cardinal Baptista took the name Paul, the first Pope of that name in over three hundred years. The new Pope very consciously united the stability and authority represented by Saint Peter with the zealous evangelical outreach represented by Saint Paul.

Paul VI became the first pope ever to travel to other continents, going on apostolic pilgrimages to the Holy Land, India, Colombia, the United States, Portugal, and Uganda. Paul also continued the Second Vatican Council and shepherded it to its conclusion in 1965. After the Council, Paul VI promulgated a new liturgical calendar, missal, breviary, and simplified rites for all the sacraments, thus impacting the lives of Catholics the world over in a personal way that few popes had ever done before. Paul VI was also deeply immersed in the theological and moral deliberations over the Church’s response to new technologies making artificial means of contraception accessible and affordable to the masses. Paul’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, heroically restated the Church’s perennial teaching on the immorality of using artificial means of contraception.

Although Humana Vitae was not as compelling and humanistic a presentation of the Church’s rich teachings on married love as would later be advanced by Pope Saint John Paul II, it was replete with prophecies. Paul VI’s predictions about the far-reaching and negative repercussions of the widespread use of contraceptives have all come true! No other individual or institution at the time foresaw, or anticipated in any way, even one of the ticking time bombs whose cultural shrapnel Paul inventoried with such accuracy. The intense storms that blew over Humanae Vitae in Northern Europe and North America lashed the aging Pope, and he never issued another encyclical. At times in the late 1960s and 1970s, it seemed as if chunks of Catholicism, Christianity’s mighty rock of Gibraltar, might fall away and drop into the sea. But Paul VI’s steady, if undynamic, hand avoided fissures in the Church’s facade. Though no schisms surfaced during his pontificate, the Pope did publicly warn about the smoke of satan entering the temple of God.

Our saint was in many ways a tragic figure, tasked with leading a huge, complex Church in a confusing time. Paul’s confessor, a holy and faithful Jesuit, said, after the Pope’s death, that "if Paul VI was not a saint when he was elected Pope, he became one during his pontificate." The Church was Paul VI’s perennial love and undying concern. He died on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, and was buried, per his request, in a simple casket placed directly in the earth in the grottoes under St. Peter’s Basilica, near so many of his predecessors who sat on the same Chair of Peter.

Pope Saint Paul VI, you resisted a swell of voices to uphold the Church’s teachings on authentic human love. May all bishops and popes be as courageous as you in their fidelity to the Church’s undying tradition.

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May 27: Saint Augustine of Canterbury, Bishop
Early Sixth Century–604
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of England

The Church’s Augustus conquered by example

Gaius Octavius Thurinus was a noble Roman. Julius Caesar became his stepfather when he adopted Octavius, posthumously, in his will. Octavius then added his dead stepfather’s name to his own, becoming Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. He defeated his political enemies in 31 B.C. and thus became the first Emperor of Rome. To recognize his status, the Roman Senate added another link to his long chain of names—Augustus. And it is as Augustus that he is known to history. This very Augustus called for the census forcing Mary and Joseph to transfer to Bethlehem: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered” (Lk 2:1). Augustus reigned well and lived long, until 14 A.D. He is considered the iconic Emperor of the “Pax Romana,” a tranquil, vast, expanding, organized, rich, united, and unconquerable realm, an enormous map of which Augustus pondered from his throne in Rome. The eighth month was renamed to honor Augustus during his own lifetime.

But greatness is not limited to the Roman Emperor or his Empire. The best of Rome was absorbed, filtered, purified, and reborn in the Catholic Church. As Rome declined, popes and bishops did not pickpocket the corpse of Rome or rifle through the drawers of its abandoned dressers. The transformation from Empire to Church was organic, slow, and unrelenting, like all true cultural change. It happened imperceptibly, year by year, person by person, family by family, town by town, until one day everything was different. The arc of cultural change doesn’t have a right angle. It is fitting and poetic, then, that the Church has her own great Augustus, indirectly evoking the laurel-crowned Emperor. In fact, the Church has two Augustines: Saint Augustine of Hippo, in North Africa, a Doctor of the Church; and
Saint Augustine of Canterbury, today’s saint. But their marble statues are not in museums. They are in churches. Saint Augustine of Canterbury was born in an unknown year about a century after his Christian namesake’s death in 430 A.D. in North Africa. He also conquered a king, like his secular namesake, but not for his own glory.

Saint Augustine of Canterbury is called the Apostle to the English (not to the British.) The history is complex. Christianity was deeply rooted in Roman Britain. British bishops attended Church Councils in France in the fourth century, and two famous Roman British Catholics well known to history lived centuries before Saint Augustine—Pelagius and Saint Patrick. But after the Romans abandoned Britain around 410 A.D., invasions of the pagan Saxons from Northern Europe mixed with native tribes to alter the cultural and religious landscape. Old Roman Britain faded as Anglo-Saxon England dawned. Christianity was relegated to the margins of the British Isles, surviving in remote regions and in an extensive network of monasteries, not parishes or dioceses, under the wise tutelage of Irish monks.
This two-hundred-year British-Irish hibernation of Catholicism was aroused from its sleep when, in 595 A.D., Pope Saint Gregory the Great had a plan. The goal? Convert King Ethelbert. Why? Because he was an Anglo-Saxon pagan. The hope? His wife was Catholic. The means? A large missionary train. The man for the job? Saint Augustine. Our saint, an educated Benedictine monk from Rome, headed a large team that struggled through France on horseback, crossed the English Channel in simple boats, and finally walked to Ethelbert’s seat of power in Canterbury. The King of all Kent heard the missionaries and…converted to Catholicism! And then all his subjects converted as well. The plan worked. Mission accomplished!

More missionaries followed. Schools were established. Monasteries were founded. Bishops were appointed. Priests were ordained. Parishes were opened. Rough Anglo-Saxon England put on the yoke of Christ and the lovely, rolling, deep green countryside of England became Mary’s dowry. Nothing is known of the life of Saint Augustine before 595 A.D. He is famous because he was a missionary monk and later bishop. His life and his mission are indistinguishable. He accepted a dare from the Pope and did the impossible. He was himself the foundation stone upon which a Catholic nation built its house of faith for almost a millennium.

Saint Augustine, your long years of prayer, asceticism, and reading as a monk prepared you for greater things. May all who seek your intercession prepare themselves in times of quiet for future challenges. May all missionaries be as daring as you in fulfilling what is asked of them.

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May 26: Saint Philip Neri, Priest
1515–1595
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Rome, humor and joy

Everyone saw the halo

Saint Philip Neri often begged alms from his wealthy friends and acquaintances to redistribute to needy children. On one occasion, he approached a friend, held out his hand, and asked him, once again, for a few coins: “How about some help for the children.” The man slapped him hard across the face. Saint Philip quickly recovered from the shock, extended his cupped hand again, and said, “That was for me, now how about something for the children?”

Saint Philip was born into a well-educated, Catholic, middle-class home. He carried himself all his life with the bearing of an amiable, well-read, finely dressed, shrewd individual who knew no enemies. After growing up in Florence, he moved to Rome and spent many years as a layman studying theology and helping the poor in practical ways. While still a layman, Philip founded a group to care for the many impoverished pilgrims who came to Rome. He befriended the great reformer Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who wanted Philip to become a Jesuit. But after encouragement from his confessor, Philip was ordained a secular priest in 1551. Soon afterward, he had to formalize the large following he generated that wanted to live more fully the life he preached and modeled.

Saint Philip was so well loved and so well known in Rome that he is sometimes called its “Third Apostle” after Saints Peter and Paul. His personality radiated a natural warmth and cordiality. His priestly ministry could be fairly characterized as “evangelization by walking around.” He walked the streets of Rome from end to end continually throughout his long life. His life was a long conversation with a thousand characters on street corners, in shops, factories, churches, parks—wherever. He reached out to the destitute, prostitutes, poor children, and the uneducated. Saint Philip would often gather a group to visit seven churches in a row. As they went from one church to another, the group would picnic and listen to the musicians whom Saint Philip brought along for entertainment. These outings, understandably, became hugely popular.

Leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and scholars were also drawn to him, in addition to common folk, and formed the impressive circle of committed Catholics who first joined his apostolic efforts. Saint Philip and his companions were given charge of a parish where they held evening sessions filled with song, readings from the lives of the martyrs, the praying of the psalms, and rich conversation. Saint Philip called these gatherings the “oratory,” in part because the participants also listened to musical pieces called “oratorios.” So when it came time to formalize his newly founded community in Church law, the name “Oratory” was chosen. The Congregation of the Oratory, which is still thriving today, was recognized by the Holy Father in 1575 and given the magnificent, new parish of Santa Maria in Varicella, known as Chiesa Nuova (The New Church), in the heart of Rome. Oratorians are mostly diocesan priests and some laymen who live together in a loose brotherhood, taking no vows, while pursuing various individual ministries. The many dozens of oratories around the world are joined in an informal confederation, whereas canonical bonds tie the many houses of a religious order together in a far tighter union.

Saint Philip is one of the bright lights of the Counter-Reformation. He blazed a new path, like other reformers. But the new path he blazed was really just the old path, walked differently. Saint Philip was the silent observer, the cheerful listener, the priest always there, who spoke hard truths but always bent on the non-essentials. He mortified himself but never talked about it. He was poor but wore nice clothes. He looked like everyone else, yet…there was that intangible something: the sparkle in his eye, his polish, his lively concern, his clever wit, his courtesy, his wide education, his humor, and his constant turning of the conversation back to God. He was like everyone else, but he wasn’t, really. He radiated what twentieth-century psychologists would call the “halo effect.” Everyone saw the invisible halo casting a glow over Saint Philip, and people crowded around to stand in his mellow light.

Saint Philip did not start a university, reform an institution, write a classic, or formulate a new rule. He changed the world the only way it can truly be changed—one soul at a time. This army of one was canonized in 1622. His body rests in a glass coffin in Chiesa Nuova, the sumptuous Mother Church of the Oratory, where pilgrims come in faith, kneel before him, and seek his powerful intercession.

Saint Philip Neri, your good nature and charm, united with your theological orthodoxy and life of deep prayer, made you a powerful apostle for the people of Rome. May all evangelists, especially priests, see in your openness to others a pathway of changing the world.

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May 25: Saint Bede the Venerable, Priest and Doctor
c. 672–735
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of scholars

Life’s drama is found in going deeper, not wider

There is no world bigger than a monk’s cell. Those four, high walls shape thought like hard, steep banks contain the flow of a river. Rock curtains hanging on both sides force the raging river to carve a path through the landscape, always forward, always deeper. Here the tall banks stop the pounding river from pouring over into the plains. There the low banks allow the gentle current to run low and straight. A river without banks is a lake. And a mind without borders is a puddle—no forward movement and too shallow to sustain life. Borders, limits, and guardrails have expansive effects, paradoxically. A frame makes a painting burst to life; orderly lanes push traffic forward; and the edge of a canvas focuses the artist’s skill. Big thoughts start with boundaries. That’s why big thoughts happen in small spaces. Many thousands of monks’ minds were molded by the limits of the four, cold walls of their cells. And these scholar monks and saint monks gave birth to what we now call Europe.

Today’s saint was a model monk who lived his whole life in an English monastery, although he occasionally traveled to neighboring communities to teach young scholars. Venerable Bede’s cell and monastery were nothing like those impressive stone structures with soaring arches and large courtyards, which still stand as icons of medieval Europe. Bede lived long, long before that golden age of monasticism. He died less than two hundred years after Saint Benedict, the founder of monasticism. The monasteries of Bede’s era were more like farms, where the monks lived in a dormitory above a large chapter room or perhaps even in crude huts huddled around a squat stone church. These first simple efforts to plant religious life into English soil matured, over centuries, into a network of enormous English monasteries. And these monasteries, in their fullest flower, grew into the universities, towns, schools, hospitals, lodges, cathedrals, and trade centers of England itself, a rich garden of Catholicism known in medieval times as Mary’s Dowry. Venerable Bede and his monastic brothers planted. Later generations harvested. And King Henry VIII then confiscated the garden and handed it over to his friends, who uprooted its most beautiful plants. Ironically and sadly, the tombs of many English saints, including Venerable Bede, lie today in Protestant churches.

From his cell in remote England, Bede was enmeshed in the Church matters of his day. He was involved in the long simmering dispute over the date of Easter, promoted the practice of using Christ’s birth as the starting date for calendars, translated Christian works from Latin or Greek into Anglo-Saxon (to the immense good of the growth of the Church in England), and authored numerous works, the most famous of which is a history of the Church in England until his days. He was, in short, a prolific and wide-ranging scholar. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII honored that reputation by naming him a Doctor of the Church, the only native of England to be so honored.

Thomas à Kempis, in his classic The Imitation of Christ, writes that every time a monk leaves his cell he comes back less a man. In his cell the monk learns everything he needs to know about himself, the world, and God. It is inside of our vocations that we find God’s will and our own fulfillment. A deep and abiding commitment to a specific person, religion, home, job, school, parish, spouse, and family is the stuff of life. Wandering is fun for a while. Commitment, though, is more exciting in the long run. The banks of the river must be built up. The edges and borders stacked high. The rails set in place. Then, and only then, life starts to be lived. To go deeper, not wider. To run those roots down deep into the moist soil. When we leave the four corners of our commitments and vocation, it may be liberating for a while, but time rectifies the deception. Our vocation is our home, and in that home we find happiness, make others happy, and satisfy the divine plan of the God who made us.

Bede the Venerable, we see in your life a model of commitment to one place, one idea, one love, and one Church. We ask your intercession to aid all scholars, all monks, and all who waver, to stay at their desk, their kneeler, or their work bench to fulfill the task at hand.

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May 25: Saint Gregory VII, Pope, Religious
c. 1015–1085
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

A pope dies on the run

The last words spoken by Pope Saint Gregory VII were “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, that is why I die in exile.” His enemies would have claimed that they loved justice equally as much but understood it differently, which is why the pope had to die on the run. No one really wins epic battles for power, though one side may prevail in the short run. Everyone loses something in a fight: some their dignity, others their property, their position, or maybe their teeth. There is no such thing as a win-win outcome. Pope Gregory VII was a scrappy fighter who boxed his powerful opponents for years. Yet he didn’t fight for his own honor, wealth, or position, but because he believed that “the blessed Peter is father of all Christians, their chief shepherd under Christ, (and) that the holy Roman Church is the mother and mistress of all the churches.” He battled for the right of the Bishop of Rome to govern the Church’s internal life free of interference from worldly powers. Pope Gregory’s victories and losses colored all of medieval history and established key precedents for the perennial tensions between Church and State which continue until today.

Gregory VII was baptized as Hildebrand in the Tuscany region of Italy. He received an excellent education from Roman tutors, including one who later became Pope Gregory VI. Most of his adult life was dedicated to serving various popes in important diplomatic and administrative roles. He was one of the most essential papal advisers of his era, even helping to craft the Church law limiting papal conclaves to cardinals alone. While still a deacon, Cardinal Hildebrand was chosen Pope in 1073 by popular acclamation. He refused to be seated on the papal throne as the result of such an outlaw election and went into hiding. Not until a proper vote of the cardinals took place did Hildebrand accept his election as canonically legitimate. He was shortly thereafter ordained a priest and bishop and then crowned Pope Gregory VII on the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, June 29, 1073.

When Pope Gregory VII first sat on the throne of Saint Peter and gazed out at the universal church, he did not peer through rose-colored glasses. Long firsthand experience of the world made him no novice, so he set about with great determination to implement needed reforms. His twelve-year papacy would be one of the most consequential in history. Gregory first sought to carve out a space for the papacy to operate free from German meddling in its internal affairs. It was common at the time for princes, kings, and other powerful laymen to appoint clerics to their positions and to “invest,” or clothe, new bishops at their Ordination Masses with the symbols of office, such as their pastoral staff, miter, and ring. Gregory decreed an end to this practice, not least because of the confusion it engendered about who was the source of the bishop’s authority. But the “lay investiture” battle would continue for centuries, leading to recriminations on all sides, including Gregory’s dramatic excommunication of Emperor Henry IV and Henry’s deposition—and driving into exile—of the pope. Incredibly, as late as 1903, the Holy Roman Emperor still directly intervened in a papal conclave, exercising his ancient right of veto to block a cardinal from being elected pope.

Pope Gregory VII pulled every lever at his disposal to make priestly celibacy compulsory, sought to heal the Schism of 1054 with the Orthodox, railed against simony (the purchasing of church offices), and encouraged the recovery of the holy sites in Jerusalem, a harbinger of the Crusades which commenced soon after his death. Gregory also memorialized in the clearest of terms the Church’s theology of the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, a statement of faith that presaged the deep devotion to the Blessed Sacrament so characteristic of the High Middle Ages. Long before the popes were known as “Vicar of Christ,” they were called “Vicar of Peter.” Pope Gregory VII was a model medieval pope above personal reproach, ambitious only for the health and freedom of the Church. He represented both Christ and Saint Peter well.

Pope Saint Gregory VII, may your earthly example and heavenly intercession sustain and inspire the leaders of the Church to act impetuously, to fight ceaselessly, and to forgive generously when confronted by forces inimical to the well-being of the Church.

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May 25: Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, Virgin
1566-1607
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the sick

Life’s true drama is on the inside

Today’s Carmelite saint was the Italian counterpart to Spain’s famous Carmelite, Teresa of Ávila, although Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi is less well known than her Spanish contemporary. Teresa was a well-traveled and extroverted reformer and founder of a large and vital branch of the Carmelite Order. Mary Magdalene, on the other other hand, was not even a Mother Superior, much less a founder, and followed the ancient observance of Carmel, not its “Teresian,” or discalced, offshoot.

Named Caterina at her baptism, today’s saint was from a wealthy, pious, and respected Florentine family who expected their only daughter to marry young and marry well. But young Caterina was well trained in the things of God from the start and destined for a higher calling. While Caterina was still a girl, her spiritual director taught her the benefit and discipline of meditating half an hour a day. At the tender age of twelve, she experienced her first ecstasy. She gazed transfixed at the gorgeous sun setting over the rolling countryside and shook at the awesome beauty of God’s creation. Her mother was there, but little Caterina was speechless, unable to describe what hidden forces caused her body to tremble so.

When she was sixteen, she entered a Carmelite convent, over her family’s initial objections. Taking the religious name of Mary Magdalene, she experienced a number of shocking spiritual events, which were documented and witnessed by her fellow Carmelites and by priest confessors. The young nun was rapt in God for weeks and months on end. She shook violently and showed signs of the stigmata. In her ecstasies, she received a crown of thorns from Jesus to share in His sufferings and a ring to symbolize her mystical marriage to Him. She lived on only bread and water for years, in reparation for the sins of mankind. When a priest ordered her to eat the simple fare of the convent, she became ill and had to return to her more meager nourishment. After one ecstatic vision, a near-death experience, Mary Magdalene described how she had given her heart to Jesus and how He had returned it to her with the purity of the Virgin Mary’s own heart. Jesus Christ had even hidden Saint Mary Magdalene in His side, subjugating her will and desires to His own.

These many years of intense fireworks in her soul were followed by dark years of dryness and isolation. She felt a painful separation from Jesus her Spouse. During this time, Saint Mary Magdalene struggled with prideful self-love, distaste for God, and the all too common temptations of the flesh and the devil. But she persevered and became novice mistress of the Carmel, recommending poverty, obedience, and abandonment to the will of God as the surest forms of holiness. Mary Magdalene died young, exhausted from her spiritual contests, fasts, and demanding life of prayer. Behind her spectacular displays of spirituality was the day in and day out austerity of Carmelite convent life: the longing for a nice piece of meat, going to bed on an empty stomach, knees and hips aching from scrubbing the floor for endless hours, no dessert to satisfy the sweet tooth, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and almost falling forward due to eyes burning with lack of sleep. Only by long practice do actions mature into habits and habits into the highest virtues. The proving ground of a strict convent proves a soul, and only then might spiritual flowers bloom. Only then might bright ecstasies sparkle against the dark curtain of night, to the wonder and awe of all around.

For Mary Magdalene, Christ was not all rod and lash. She was a happy nun who played her part in keeping her convent running. She kept her personality, like all stigmatists and elite spiritual warriors, yet became one with Christ in a mysterious manner best described in poetic rather than theological terms. Her renown was widespread and her cult immediate. She was canonized in 1669. Her body lies in peace in her native Florence and is still incorrupt.

Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, we ask your divine intercession before your Mystical Spouse to give all Religious the gift of perseverance, obedience, and poverty. Your spiritual ecstasies were unique—and destined for few. Grant those gifts that are common—and destined for many.

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May 22: Saint Rita of Cascia, Religious
c. 1386–1457
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of abuse victims, sterility, and difficult marriages

She suffered for two spouses

Rita Lotti gave birth to her first son at the age of twelve. Fortunately the child was not born out of wedlock. Rita’s husband had been chosen for her by her parents, and they married when she was twelve. Throughout eighteen years of marriage, Rita endured her husband’s insults, physical abuse, and infidelity until the loathful man was stabbed to death by one of his many enemies. Rita pardoned her husband’s killers and impeded her two sons from avenging their father’s death. Marriage ends with death, so Rita was free after her husband’s passing to satisfy a holy desire of her youth and entered an Augustinian convent. The leadership of the local Augustinians was reluctant to admit Rita, however, because she was not a virgin. Despite wide precedence for widows entering religious life, Rita was compelled to wait a number of years before receiving the habit.

Rita was a model nun who lived to the fullest the spiritual requirements of her age. She was obedient, generously served the sick of the convent, and shared her wisdom of human nature, especially regarding marital distress, with the lay women who sought her out. Sister Rita was also devoted to prayer and meditated so deeply on the Passion of our Lord that she experienced a mini-stigmata. Instead of open wounds in her hands oozing blood, as Saint Francis and Saint Padre Pio displayed, a small wound appeared on Rita’s forehead. It was as if a thorn from Christ’s crown had penetrated the tightly wrapped flesh on her skull. There was no thorn visible, of course, just as no nails or spears pierced the bodies of other stigmatists. Rita’s wound refused to heal for a number of years. The unique statue, or image, showing a nun with a thorn stuck in her forehead is Saint Rita, making her one of the most easily identifiable people on the calendar of Catholic saints.

After Saint Rita died of natural causes, her body did not deteriorate. She was placed in an ornate tomb, her extraordinary holiness was attested to in writing, and healing miracles were petitioned for and soon granted through her intercession. These many cures led to Rita’s beatification in 1626 and her canonization in 1900. Leathery black skin still covers Saint Rita‘s habited body as she peacefully reposes in a glass coffin in her shrine in Cascia, Italy. She is invoked as a kind of female Saint Jude, a patroness of impossible causes, particularly those related to the difficult vocation of marriage.

Saint Rita was both a physical and a spiritual mother. She was a spouse of Christ—a perfect man, and of her husband—a flawed man. She knew intimately the vocation both to religious and to married life, giving her a certain status, or credibility, with both consecrated and married women, which few others saints enjoy. Rita’s dual vocation has given her a dual attraction, which is likely the cause of her fame and the continued devotion to her so many centuries after her death. In many ways, her life in the convent was not remarkable, except for the stigmata. There were surely many other nuns in Rita’s era and region whose virtue and prayerfulness stood out. Yet for reasons known to God alone and which are therefore sufficient, this nun, among so many others who brimmed with holiness, is still visited in her shrine, still invoked, and still thanked for the favors that she continues to rain down from her place in heaven.

Saint Rita, through your intercession, aid all women in difficult marriages and abusive situations. Help women in distress to think rationally, to be faithful to their husbands if possible, to be devoted to their vows if they are able, and yet to flee if they are in danger.

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May 21: Saint Christopher Magallanes, Priest and Martyr, and Companions, Martyrs
Fr. Magallanes: 1869–1927; 22 priests and 3 laymen: 1915-1937, the majority killed between 1926-1929
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

A Mexican bloodletting

The governor of Mexico’s Tabasco state in the 1920s, Garrido Canabal, was so insanely anti-Catholic that he named his three sons Lenin, Satan, and Lucifer. He was also a farmer and named one of his bulls “God,” a hog “Pope,” a cow “Mary,” and a donkey “Christ.” He ordered the removal and destruction of all crucifixes from public buildings and graveyards in Tabasco. Painful photographs of the destruction prove that it happened. For his vicious persecution of the Church, he was elevated to a national cabinet position in the 1930s. Canabal was a political protégé of the Mexican president, and later strongman, Plutarco Calles. Calles was an illegitimate child, born to unmarried parents. Calles hated being called an illegitimate child and especially resented the Roman Catholic Church for this title of illegitimacy. In time, Calles became a devout believer in the religion of atheism, eagerly shared his beliefs with others, and put great energy into evangelizing others to his side. As governor of the state of Sonora, he expelled all Catholic priests. As president of Mexico, he carried out an overtly violent, ferocious, scorched-earth attack on Catholicism without par in the twentieth century. Priests were killed for no other reason than for being priests. This led to a popular counterreaction known as the Cristero War, a slow burn of assassinations, pitched battles, skirmishes, and reprisals. Central Mexico was in a full-blown meltdown in the 1920s.

For a visitor to Mexico today, or to anyone familiar with its culture, such events are difficult to imagine or comprehend. Mexico harbors one of the most vibrant Catholic cultures in the entire world, thick with devotions, processions, Masses, feast day celebrations, and religious song and dress. Yet the Cristero War did happen, and not a thousand years ago.

The militant, anti-religious mentality of Anglo-Saxon secular humanism is familiar to many believers today. It is the air we breath. This educated secularism opposes the very idea of God, exalts a narrow understanding of freedom, denigrates the concept of belief, and transposes science as an object of faith rather than a formal creed. The militant anti-religious mentality of 1920s Mexico, and of other culturally Catholic nations, was and is different from Anglo-Saxon secularism. Anti-Catholicism in Catholic nations expresses itself in anticlericalism. Hatred is unleashed against bishops and priests and their instruments of ministry—altars, crucifixes, vestments, rosaries, statues, etc.—not so much against creeds or ideas. You don’t need to read Nietzsche or to master the Enlightenment canon to hate the Church. Whereas Anglo Saxon secularism wages its battles in the higher echelons of university classrooms and the courts, Latino anticlericalism is not too complex. Just kidnap a priest, blindfold him, tie his hands tightly behind his back, and shoot him in the head. Anticlericalism liquidates its enemies against the dirty brick wall behind the local police station. No courtrooms are needed.

Today’s saint, and the others canonized with him, were caught in the storm that was Plutarco Calles. Father Magallanes was a priest of humble origins similar to those of Calles, but Magallanes walked a different path than the strongman. After working the land as a youth for his poor family, he entered the seminary and was ordained a priest in 1899. He then served faithfully as a chaplain and as a pastor to the Huichole Indians for many years. By middle age, he was a priest of some stature. But the otherwise ordinary arc of his life took an extraordinary turn when, on May 21, 1927, he was on his way to celebrate the Feast of St. Rita of Cascia (May 22) in a small village. A shootout between Cristeros and Federal forces near the village led to Father Magallanes’ arrest, along with a brother priest, Father Caloca. There were no accusations and no trial. There was neither the presentation of evidence nor the right of defense, since priests had no civil rights in Mexico at the time. On May 25, 1927, the two priests were led to the courtyard of a municipal building for what always happened next. Father Magallanes stated: “I am innocent and die innocent. I absolve with all my heart those who seek my death and ask God that my blood bring peace to a divided Mexico.” The priests absolved each other, spoke some few words of comfort, and then were shot to death by a firing squad of fellow Mexicans in soldiers’ uniforms. Father Caloca’s last words were: “For God we lived and for Him we die.”

Twenty-five martyrs are commemorated today. All were diocesan priests, except for three laymen who died with their parish priest. They died in eight different Mexican states under circumstances similar to those of Frs. Magallanes and Caloca. One was hung from a mango tree in a town square, another from an oak in the country; one was shot for not revealing the confessions of his co-prisoners, one was bayoneted and beaten to death; one was shot and his body placed on railroad tracks to be mutilated by a train. The executioner of one priest refused to fire his rifle. He was shot right after the priest. Pope Saint John Paul II beatified the group in 1992 and canonized them in 2000. In addition to Frs. Magallanes (Cristóbal Magallanes Jara) and Caloca (Agustín Caloca Cortés), these martyrs were: Román Adame Rosales, Rodrigo Aguilar Alemán, Julio Álvarez Mendoza, Luis Batis Sáinz, Mateo Correa Magallanes, Atilano Cruz Alvarado, Miguel De La Mora, Pedro Esqueda Ramírez, Margarito Flores Garcia, José Isabel Flores Varela, David Galván Bermúdez, Salvador Lara Puente (layman), Pedro de Jesús Maldonado Lucero, Jesús Méndez Montoya, Manuel Morales (layman), Justino Orona Madrigal, Sabás Reyes Salazar, José María Robles Hurtado, David Roldán Lara (layman),Toribio Romo González, Jenaro Sánchez Delgadillo, David Uribe Velasco, and Tranquilino Ubiarco Robles.

Father Magallanes, your quiet witness and noble death are an inspiration to all who suffer physical violence for the faith in unknown ways and in unknown places. May your intercession and courage be an inspiration for all priests, laymen, and religious who are tempted to bend in the winds of persecution.

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May 20: Saint Bernardine of Siena, Priest
1380–1444
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of advertising and gambling

A sensational preacher popularizes the Holy Name devotion

Saint Bernardine of Siena was the Billy Graham of his day. Graham was a well-known American evangelist who traveled ceaselessly from city to city preaching the good news of the Gospel over many decades. Yet while today’s saint was certainly a roving evangelist, he was also much more. He was first and foremost vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Franciscan Friar. Saint Bernardine was also ordained into the one Priesthood of Jesus Christ by a successor of the Apostles. And he had received a long and complete theological and humanistic education before he ever opened his mouth in front of a crowd. He was even a doctor of canon law.

Fifteenth-century Italy was hot with reform of the Church. Ever since 1417 and the end of the Great Schism (an era of two and even three competing popes), talk of Church reform was on the lips of anyone who believed enough to care. Unfortunately, every effort to compel a bishop to live in his diocese, to form better educated priests, to purify indulgence selling, to streamline Church courts, to appoint holy bishops, to stop commerce in relics, and so on, was ignored or resisted. The roots of some weeds are tangled and ferocious. They cannot be pulled from the ground. The 1400s were a lost century for efforts to reform the Church. The popes tightened their grip on Church power so that no council would ever pry their fingers from the levers of ecclesial governance. The needed reforms would have to wait until the immensely successful Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. But it was too late by then. Father Martin Luther and others had been tired of waiting. The Reformation began in 1517, one hundred years after the Great Schism ended. Vast populations of Northern Europe were cleaved from the true Faith because the needed reforms came too late.

Saint Bernardine was one of the many bright lights of fifteenth-century Italy who did everything in his power to create a holier Church through his preaching. He was such a compelling and entertaining speaker that enormous crowds turned out to hear him, normally first thing in the morning. He encouraged devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus and often held the IHS monogram in his hand when preaching. This devotion was later incorporated as a feast day into the universal calendar of the Church. Bernardine dramatically exhorted his congregations to melt their mirrors, playing cards, perfumes, dice, wigs, and other worldly distractions in a “bonfire of the vanities” roaring near his pulpit. This was true drama.

In the Franciscan tradition, Bernardine of Siena walked everywhere. No horse or mule or carriage for the journey. He excoriated usury, superstition, and the deplorable scourge of homosexual acts, in the starkest terms. Compared to the modern penchant for market research, polling, and tailoring a message to audience expectations, Saint Bernardine was fearless. He spoke the unvarnished truths of his religion to the adherents of the same. Preaching, he understood, was an essential charism of the Priesthood of Christ, not an add-on. Saint Bernardine also published, far ahead of his time, works on entrepreneurship, business practices, a just wage, and the determining of just values for a product or service. Saint Bernardine was a sophisticated thinker with a common touch.

The fact that Saint Bernardine lived almost into the age of the printed book meant that many of his sermons were accurately preserved. It also meant that images of his likeness were uniform and accurate. A famous painting by El Greco shows the emaciated friar in a worn Franciscan habit, the three knots on his white cincture visible, representing poverty, chastity, and obedience. His right hand holds a standard bearing the monogram of the name of Jesus—IHS. In his left hand is a book, perhaps the Bible. And at his feet are three bishops’ miters. Saint Bernardine was three times offered to be made a bishop and three times he said, “No.” Thus, in addition to all of his other considerable virtues, our saint also possessed the queen of the virtues — humility. Bernardine of Siena was the Saint Paul of his era and was canonized in 1450, just six years after he died, numerous miracles having already been attributed to his intercession.

Saint Bernardine of Siena, inspire all preachers to not count the personal cost of stating uncomfortable truths but instead to suffer the repercussions of honest talk. Help priests to fortify their preaching with impeccable lives of prayer, fasting, devotion, and virtue, just as you did.

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May 18: Saint John I, Pope and Martyr
c. Late Fifth Century–526
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

The pope is crushed in a secular vice by two worldly masters

The early Popes were Roman citizens who retained their birth or baptismal names upon being elected to the See of Peter. Their names perfectly reflect a flourishing Roman culture rather than the Christian subculture which was gradually budding and flowering in its midst. So there are Popes Clement, Linus, Anacletus, Sixtus, Victor, Callixtus, Urban, and Fabian. It sounds like a roll call of Roman senators in white togas seated on the marble benches of the Forum. It is not until 254 that Pope Stephen bears a name from the New Testament and not until 336 does Pope Mark honor an Evangelist.

Considering the centrality of Saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist to the Christian story, it is surprising that five hundred years transpired before today’s saint, Pope John I, so honored their memory. A pope is only called the “First” once there’s a “Second.” In 533 a man named Mercurius succeeded today’s John as Bishop of Rome. Mercurius’ birth name was so overtly pagan—honoring the Roman God Mercury—that he chose to honor his martyred predecessor John by adopting his same name. Mercurius thus initiated the venerable tradition of a pope adopting a new name upon his election. At the same time he also retroactively turned Pope John into Pope John I.

The flow of the early martyrs’ blood had long since ceased by John I’s election in 523. There was no emperor or court even left in Rome by 523 for barbarians to attack. The traditional date of the fall of the Western Roman Empire is 476. John I was, then, the pope of a declining, far western outpost of an empire whose central government had been in Constantinople for almost two hundred years by John I’s election. Rome was fading.

The Empire’s long, slow decline in Italy had created a vacuum. Rugged tribes of the North, including the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths), poured south into the warm valleys and cultured towns of the Italian countryside and saturated Rome itself. The Ostrogoths had called the Italian peninsula home for so long that, by the sixth century, they were part Roman, part barbarian, and part Christian. Borderlands are always a mix. For complex historical reasons, the Ostrogoths and their Italian ruler, Theodoric, were Arians. Their prior isolation in Northern Europe had prohibited them from absorbing the teachings of the fourth-century Councils of Nicea and Constantinople. So the Ostrogoths were unaware that the Church had decisively rejected the Arian heresy, which held that Christ was a god, but not the God.

It was amidst these tense political and religious circumstances that poor Pope John I was placed in an impossible situation. John was caught between the Emperor Justin in remote Constantinople, who exercised significant control over Church discipline, and Theodoric, who was standing right at his side, breathing down his neck. Justin had issued an edict ordering the Arians, including the Ostrogoths in Italy, to surrender their churches to the Catholics. Theodoric would have none of it. He was as angry as a hornet. To him, it was the first step toward Constantinople reasserting its control over Italy, something the Ostrogoths would resist to the death. So Theodoric sent Pope John at the head of a large embassy of Roman dignitaries to Constantinople to demand that Justin withdraw the edict. Pope John obediently went. He was greeted in the capital with elaborate ceremony and honored as head of the Church. But he could not, and did not, secure what Theodoric so desired. It was impossible. The edict was binding.

When Pope John and his party crossed the Adriatic Sea to return to Rome, they landed at Ravenna. Theodoric, who had heard of Pope John’s failure to have the edict rescinded, imprisoned him. And there the Pope died, in Ravenna, perhaps of shock, perhaps of mistreatment. His blood did not run red like the martyrs of old, but he died a victim for Christ nonetheless, unable to simultaneously satisfy two powerful secular masters. John I’s mortal remains were returned to Rome. In keeping with the custom for all popes since Pope Leo the Great (440–461), Pope John I was interred in the nave of the Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter. When the new St. Peter’s was built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, John’s tomb did not surface nor did any epitaph. But Pope Saint John I is still there, somewhere, under the floor of St. Peter’s, arms crossed, facing up, ring on his bony finger, vested in gold, miter crowning his head, as waves of tourists walk on the marble floor above him. He rests in peace, forgotten to but a few.

Pope Saint John I, your fidelity to your vocation as Pope led to your death. You were faithful in the face of threats from civil power but did not bend to its will. May all popes look to your example for inspiration in leading the Church.

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May 15: Saint Isidore
c. 1080–1130
Optional Memorial (U.S.A.); Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of farmers and brick layers

Our daily duties are not a distraction from God’s will

It would be wonderful to see in a church a marble statue of a nurse taking a patient’s blood pressure. It would be edifying to see in a Basilica’s bright stained glass a housewife standing fatigued at the ironing board, running the iron over her kids’ shirts. And it would be marvelous to gaze in admiration at a well-executed painting of a factory worker pounding a piece of metal into shape with a hammer. Imagine if Catholic art presented these mundane scenes for contemplation in our churches, chapels, and shrines. Imagine kneeling before a bank of glowing candles and reflecting upon the everyday heroism of the lay vocation. We could light a small candle, step back, cross our hands, pause in silence, look at the layman in a suit at his desk in the mosaic before us, and whisper a prayer asking for his divine intercession to help us be a more charitable nurse, a more dedicated housewife, or a more honest worker.

There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. So our churches inspire us, ideally, with their statues, stained glass, paintings, mosaics, floors, and tapestries. The images of the holy men and women of our long Catholic tradition typically show popes, bishops, priests, nuns, abbots, monks, friars, brothers, missionaries, and others, dressed in their religious habit and armed with the symbols of their office and their life. All of this is good. All of this is necessary. All of this is inspiring. Yet today’s saint, Isidore, offers us a different pathway of holiness to consider—the broad and well-traveled pathway crowded with the Catholic laity on their way to work in the morning.

Saint Isidore was from Spain and was named in honor of Saint Isidore of Seville, a scholar, bishop, and Father of the Church who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries. The two Isidores could not be more different. Today’s Saint Isidore is known in Spanish as “Labrador” or “the farm worker.” He was not a scholar and probably had trouble reading. He was not ordained to Holy Orders but married and a father. He surely had calluses on his hands, a red, leathery neck burned by the sun, and a sore and twisted back for most of his life. He earned what little he had. No one gave it to him. He did not put food on his family’s table by generating great thoughts or publishing profound books. And due to exhaustion he probably had no trouble sleeping at night.

Numerous legends of miracle working and holiness attest to Saint Isidore’s influence on Spanish culture. In 1947 his partially incorrupt body was even put on public display to provoke prayers to bring a terrible Spanish drought to an end. Saint Isidore is the patron saint of Madrid and of numerous other towns, cities, and regions throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Processions, Masses, fireworks, and public devotions render him homage on his feast day. Yet besides his dedication to working the land, few details of Saint Isidore’s life are known with certainty.

Our religious faith cannot occupy only one sphere of our life, as if it were a hobby akin to building a ship in a bottle, flying a kite, or cultivating a garden. A real religion impacts everything. Even work. Especially work. We fulfill God’s will in our daily lives—which are packed full of work—by doing our work well. We should do our work diligently and at a high professional level, because it is an offering to God first and foremost. In other words, bad work equals a bad offering. Work is the practical use and expression of the skills God has
loaned us for our earthly pilgrimage. To misuse those skills, to let them lie fallow, or to put them to ill use, is to bury a treasure in the ground. “Ora et Labora” is the Benedictine maxim. Prayer and Work. Yet work is prayer for the vast majority of the baptized.

Saint Isidore’s life teaches us, indirectly, that God can convert an entire nation without ink or paper. A book might help, of course, but a religion of the Word is not the same as a religion of the Book, and Catholics are a people of the Word. Saint Isidore is the patron saint of farmers, day laborers, and brick layers. He is often shown wearing rough clothes, oxen leading him as he plows a furrow, with an angel at his side and a golden halo shining over him. A farmer saint. Why not?

Saint Isidore, your witness of dedicated and holy work is a model for all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. May your quiet and humble dedication to your lay vocation inspire all the baptized to see in “work well done” a source of dignity through which man participates in God’s creative act.

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May 14: Saint Matthias, Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of alcoholics and tailors

The Twelve were deeply biblical—Judas had to be replaced

Conservative Muslims believe that any territory that was once settled and governed by the adherents of Mohammed pertains forever and always to the Caliphate. Once Islamic, always Islamic. To illustrate, it took many generations for the Islamic fist to finally loosen its grip on Spain. Yet despite the Muslim armies being pushed back into the waters of the Mediterranean in 1492, some strict modern followers of Mohammed still harbor dreams of former glories and hope that Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) will one day re-emerge.

Catholicism harbors no such illusions of glory for formerly Catholic lands, but it does practice a theological form of “Once Catholic, Always Catholic.” Many Bishops who serve in the Roman Curia exercise no authority over a diocese. Auxiliary bishops likewise lack a territory. These two categories of bishops are thus given a “titular” episcopal see. It is a see in name, or title, only. The see is normally that of an ancient diocese whose existence ceased due to, typically, Muslim invasion. The custom of assigning “titular” sees to some bishops not only preserves the memory of lost peoples and dioceses, it also has some theological support. A bishop and his diocese are united, like spouses, in a marriage arranged in Rome. That’s why a bishop wears a ring. And a diocese, once created, cannot remain a widow. A new bishop is always appointed to be wedded to it. A diocese must have a spouse, even if he is a long way from home in distance and time. Titular bishops succeed in the present, if only in name, the past bishops of now defunct dioceses.

The tradition that all bishops, beginning with the Apostles, must have successors is rooted not just in the early Church but in Judaism. The Twelve Apostles are more often referred to in the New Testament by their number than their names. They are, simply, “The Twelve.” This custom is rooted in the twelve tribes who settled the land of Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt. These tribes were founded by the twelve sons of the Patriarch Jacob, later renamed Israel. It was inside of this Old Testament Jewish tradition that Jesus Christ acted when He chose twelve men upon whom to found His Church. Jesus specifically states that His followers will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Mt 19:28, Lk 22:30). And the Book of Revelation states that the names of the twelve tribes of Israel will be written on the gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rv 21:12 ff).

It was fitting, then, when “The Twelve” were reduced to “The Eleven” after Judas’ self murder, that the fullness of the biblical number had to be restored. And this is where today’s saint steps out from the shadows to play his role in Christian history. The first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the great history book of the early Church, tells us that, after the Ascension, the eleven Apostles returned to Jerusalem. There, Peter “stood up among the believers” to tell them that someone who had “accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us… must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” Two names were proposed to replace Judas: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas. Then the Eleven prayed to the Lord to show them the way. They cast lots. Matthias was chosen. An Apostle, for the first time, had a successor. And, of equal significance, the appointment came from the group, or college, of Apostles, led by Peter. Thus was established, just days after Christ left the earth, a form of Church preservation and growth which would be repeated, and is still repeated, tens of thousand of times in Christian history.

The Church has placed the Feast of St. Matthias purposefully close to the Feast of the Ascension, just as his election in Acts occurred so soon after that event in the Bible. The Holy Spirit had yet to descend at Pentecost, and still the Church performed the will of God with authority in selecting Matthias. It was all there in the beginning. It is still here all around us. The miracle of the Church and her Apostles continues. It will always continue.

Saint Matthias, we beg your intercession from your powerful throne in the Heavenly Jerusalem, that you fortify all who govern your Church to emulate “The Twelve” in their wisdom, trust, prudence, and daring in leading and spreading the Faith.

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May 13: Our Lady of Fatima
1917
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Like the moon’s mellow glow, Mary reflects a greater light

The ancient Greco-Roman world that Christianity replaced was deeply devoted to the gods, not God. Its landscape was dotted with a thousand shrines, oracles, sacred caves, and holy mountains where the god of this and the goddess of that lived or lurked. And the pagan faithful—and they were faithful—trusted that someone among this government of gods could be petitioned for this need or lobbied for that favor: so that the battle would be won, the harvest plentiful, the illness brief, the baby a boy, or the sea calm for the voyage. This all made sense. Just as human nature was expressed in countless persons, so too would the divine nature be manifested in myriad gods and goddesses. Countless stars populated the blackness between earth and sun. So too did gods thicken the reality between the realm of the flesh and the realm of the spirit in ancient paganism.

Over a span of centuries, Christianity methodically and inexorably displaced this ancient worldview. The Church rolled slowly on, like a colossal glacier, from east to west and south to north, gathering, pushing, and budging everyone and everything to the margins as it carved a new landscape for a new people. Yet the old worldview, while theologically childish, had deeply human elements. It is natural to think that between man and god there would be sub-gods or something of the like. It is natural to imagine that a local god would have local concerns and give a local answer to local people. It is natural to presume that a high summit is holier than a flat prairie and that to visit it, to make a petition, and to leave an offering would merit more than to do nothing at all. Greco-Roman paganism expressed the deep, universal, religious impulse found in every culture.

Christianity built on the same human foundations as paganism, and it responded to the same human longings. But Christianity built on that sound foundation a solid house of revealed theological truth. And that truth revealed that the one God—omniscient, omnipresent, all powerful—expresses Himself through the tool of creation, though He Himself is not creation. Christian truth also revealed that God not only acts through secondary causes but is also approached through them. So bread and water become Christ’s Body and Blood, water is blessed by a holy man and wets our foreheads when we mark ourselves with the cross, and certain men and women live so heroically the mystery of God in their lives that we call them saints. This constellation of saints has long replaced the confused, but understandable, pagan pantheon of old. Instead of a god of the sea, a god of war, and a god of rain, we have patron saints for sailors, soldiers, and farmers. We have saint intercessors for the mentally ill, for pregnant women, for impossible causes, and for a happy death. Catholicism has a saint for everything and for everyone, forming a more theologically satisfying worldview that nonetheless responds to the innate religious impulse of all men.

Today’s Memorial celebration commemorates the greatest saint of all, Saint Mary, as she manifested herself to three humble children in the Portuguese village of Fatima in 1917. Our Lady, the only mother ever chosen by her son, appeared in a particular place, at a particular time, to a particular people, to satisfy a particular need. She spoke to the children deep theological truths about heaven, hell, and purgatory. She performed a publicly witnessed miracle that made the sun dance, asked for increased devotion to her Son Jesus Christ, and pleaded for reparation for the many sins committed against Him. A shrine was built in the Blessed Mother’s honor at the site of her apparitions, which has welcomed millions and millions of pilgrims, including popes, over the decades. Our Lady is for the whole Church, of course, but she is closer to the faithful when she comes to them on their own terms—in their own tongue, skin, and dress, hovering over their own soil. There is one Mary, historically and theologically. There are many Marys, culturally and symbolically.

Pope Saint John Paul II was shot on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. He was grievously injured but survived. He later said that one hand pulled the trigger, but another hand guided the bullet. He went on pilgrimage to Fatima to give thanks for that saving hand. The bullet that penetrated his torso, and was removed by doctors, was placed into the silver crown of Our Lady of Fatima. It rests there today. We honor Mary for many graces, we petition her for many favors, and we thank her for many gifts—for the battle won, for the plentiful harvest, for the healthy baby, for the calm sea, and for the lives saved, dramatically, from an assassin, or mundanely, from everything else.

Our Lady of Fatima, your miraculous apparitions fill us with hope that you follow our concerns, intervene in our lives, and demand of us greater fidelity. May we heed your words and your warnings and carry out God’s will with your own life as our example.

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May 12: Saint Pancras, Martyr
Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of children, jobs, and health

A fatherless teen discovers a treasure worth life itself

In the late 500s, Pope Saint Gregory the Great appointed monks to staff a small church in Rome, already almost three hundred years old, which was dedicated to Saint Pancras. In 597 the same Pope Gregory sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury on a missionary journey to England, and Augustine copied his Roman mentor and established a church in honor of Saint Pancras. About sixty years after Augustine, a different pope sent relics of Saint Pancras to England. This further spread devotion to this boy martyr, until a total of six ancient churches were dedicated to Saint Pancras in England alone, including the oldest church still used for Christian worship in that old country.

Little is known with certainty about the life of Saint Pancras, but the essential facts are sufficient cause for admiration. Pancras was an orphan who traveled to Rome from the east in the company of his uncle. The pair converted to Christianity and then died for that conversion during the reign of Diocletian. Pancras was perhaps fourteen years old when he traded his earthly life for a better one in heaven. He likely became well known owing to his rare combination of youth and heroic witness. Our martyr was buried near a major Roman road, and a modest basilica was constructed over his tomb. The shrine and its catacombs became a popular pilgrimage destination, partly due to its healing bath, which was famous for its curative powers. The ravages of time and foreign armies degraded the shrine, but it was rebuilt several times over the centuries. In the seventeenth century, the Basilica of Saint Pancras was entrusted to the Discalced Carmelite Order, whose members still reside there today. Under the Basilica are extensive Roman catacombs, and a reliquary in the church contains the head of Saint Pancras. The rest of the saint’s relics were scattered to the four winds by anti-Catholic armies who occupied the church and despoiled many of its treasures.

Moments of great danger for the Church are also moments of great grace. In her long history, the Church has passed through, and continues to live, many such dangerous, grace-filled times. Saint Pancras’ times were precisely such. If he had stayed in his native land, he would likely have died of natural causes. But he went in search of something, perhaps wealth, fame, or family, in Rome, the big city, just as so many people search for the same in big cities today. But young Pancras found what he probably wasn’t looking for—God. And his decision to become a Christian, perhaps through the influence of a friend or priest or aunt, quickly took a very serious turn. He was threatened with death if he did not burn incense to a false god. The boy stood fast. Like other more famous young martyrs, such as Saint Agnes, the idealism of youth provoked both admiration and fury in his persecutors, and he was taken beyond the walls of Rome to be decapitated.

Our culture and its pressures are not from God. They are human constructs. But our Church, which is an object of faith, is from God. The friction caused by the collision of culture and church damages individuals, parishes, and governments. Sparks fly. Heat is generated. Objects melt. At times, wars ensue. Today’s martyr was an early victim to something far bigger than himself—the culture clash between a dying empire and a dawning religion. If he had gone to Rome just ten years later, Pancras would have lived in peace. Instead, Pancras and many others were executed, because they refused to bend to a leader who might die tomorrow in favor of a God who rose to life from a cold tomb.

Saint Pancras, you gave away your young life rather than offer worship to a false god. May your example inspire, and your intercession strengthen, all young people to put love of God above all else.

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May 12: Saints Nereus and Achilleus, Martyrs
c. Early Second Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

Roman soldiers made good martyrs

The earliest manuscript proving the existence of Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, a copy of one of his works, dates from the ninth century A.D. Caesar was stabbed to death in 44 B.C. So approximately nine hundred years separate the life of Caesar from the first tangible, physical, paper copy of one of his written works. The earliest manuscript describing Caesar, but not written by him, dates from after the ninth century, and so is even more removed from the man it describes. None of this means that Julius Caesar did not exist or that he did not compose the works attributed to him. First century B.C. Roman coins prove, unequivocally, that Julius Caesar existed.

No Roman coins prove the existence of today’s martyrs. Instead, something thousands of times larger than a coin proves they existed. There’s a church. In fact, there are two churches in Rome dedicated to Saints Nereus and Achilleus. These churches are not hard to find. You can touch their walls, open their doors, and sit in their pews. There is not one structure, much less two, in Rome or in any other city, dedicated to Julius Cesar. Even the exact location of his assassination is a matter of conjecture.

Almost nothing can be said with certainty regarding the lives and deaths of Nereus and Achilleus. There are conflicting traditions of when they lived, where they lived, and how they died. But…there are those churches. Two of them. In Rome. One is a fourth-century Basilica inside the Catacombs of Domitilla. The other, from the sixth century, was built on the site where an early Christian tradition says Saint Peter encountered Christ as Peter was abandoning Rome.

A stone is a valuable form of testimony. It is more permanent than paper. A stone doesn’t easily deteriorate. A stone is heavy and remains where its builder placed it. Its location itself provides important clues. The stones of the two Roman churches dedicated to today’s saints give powerful, if silent, testimony. The churches are planted in the earth like giant gravestones telling who can be found in or beneath them. Who would assume that the words etched into a gravestone were a lie? Who would think that a name carved into granite described no one? Who would imagine that the ground under a memorial was empty, holding no grave, no casket, no body? Only a fool would believe such things. But Christians are no fools.

An enormous death memorial, in the form of a church, was built by dedicated Christians in the fourth century in honor of today’s saints. Nereus and Achilleus were likely soldiers who were executed for their belief in Jesus Christ. An official list of Roman martyrs from the fifth-century names, specifically, Nereus and Achilleus, and states, specifically, that they are buried in the Catacombs of St. Domitilla. Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590–604, gave a homily, duly recorded and preserved, at the very tomb of Saints Nereus and Achilleus: “These saints before whose tomb we are assembled, despised the world and trampled it under their feet…” And more than one medieval manuscript records an ancient dedication to Nereus and Achilleus by Pope Damasus (366–384) attesting to their martyrdom for refusing to carry out military orders to kill Christians.

The relics of today’s saints were transferred from their ancient underground Basilica in the catacombs to their “new” Church sometime in the sixth century. By the ninth century, the Basilica had been forgotten as wave after wave of invasion and plague and sack and turmoil decimated the Eternal City until it was a shadow of its imperial glory. But in 1874, a pioneering archaeologist named Giovanni de Rossi began excavating the Catacombs of Domitilla. In the ruins of a subterranean Basilica there, he found two pillars, one of which had the name “Achilleus” carved into it. De Rossi also discovered chunks of the very marble slab bearing the dedication of Pope Damasus to Nereus and Achilleus! This discovery proved the medieval manuscripts describing the dedication were accurate. The stones spoke. The faithful listened. The traditions are true. The Church preserved its sacred history, and today the great tradition of honoring those who shed their blood for Christ perdures.

Saints Nereus and Achilleus, we know little about you, except the most important things—that you lived, that you converted, and that you chose to not continue living rather than to deny your belief in Christ. We know these things, and they are enough. Pray for us.

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May 10: Saint John of Ávila, Priest and Doctor
1499-1569
Optional Memorial: Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Andalusia Spain and Spanish clergy

His humble epitaph reads “I was a sower”

Some of the most passionate and daring missionaries stayed close to home. They never sailed the high seas or crossed a snow-capped mountain. Today’s saint was one of them. He was an only child, and after his parents died, Fr. John sold his family property, travelled to Seville, cut all ties, and prepared to sail to New Spain (Mexico), one more wave in that surging missionary tide which crashed on Mexico’s shores throughout the 1500s. But it was not to be. St. John of Ávila never walked up the ship’s plank. He never crossed the ocean. While waiting for his ship in Seville, his skills as a preacher and catechist, and his obvious holiness, were noticed by the local bishop, who convinced him to preach, teach, and evangelize in Andalusia, in Spain’s rugged south.

Saint John then spent himself crisscrossing a region that had only recently been conquered by the Spanish crown, and so was still populated by Spanish Muslims and Jews whose conversions to Catholicism were often more matters of expedience than religious conviction. In this newly opened mission field, our saint’s broad, humanistic education perfectly matched the pastoral need. Father John harmonized orthodox theology, renaissance humanism, rigorous morality, and an insightful spirituality into a powerful synthesis which, when conveyed through his compelling preaching, moved his congregations to their very cores. As John migrated through the great cities of southern Spain - Seville, Córdoba, Granada – large numbers of the faithful followed him everywhere, eager to absorb every word that flowed from his mouth or pen.

People of every class, educational level, and depth of religious commitment found St. John fascinating. In his own lifetime he came to be known as “Master Ávila” for his dominance of the sacred sciences and his vigorous pastoral efforts. He converted, or led to deeper conversion, Saint John of God, founder of the Hospitaller Order, and Saint Francis Borgia, a future Master General of the Jesuits. He was a friend of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and advised Saint Teresa of Ávila, foundress of the Discalced Carmelites. Despite these, and many other, personal connections to famous religious orders and their founders, St. John always remained a diocesan priest, not a religious order priest, something unusual for a priest of his era with such wide influence.

Saint John’s erudition and solid virtues were further buttressed by his life of abject poverty and physical suffering. He was also part of that loud, pan-European cry for church reform that preceded the Council of Trent by decades. Saint John established several seminaries and colleges, provided spiritual direction to multitudes of laity, religious and seminarians, wrote a long spiritual treatise called Audi filia (“Listen daughter”) and was invited by a bishop to attend the Council of Trent as his theological adviser, though illness prevented Saint John from making the journey.

John was declared Venerable in 1759, Blessed in 1893, and Saint in 1970. Proving that saints are always contemporary, he was declared a doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 after a petition from the Spanish episcopacy for such an honor was duly studied and approved by the Vatican. The Papal Bull declaring him a Doctor of the Church states: “The teaching of John of Ávila is outstanding for its quality and precision, and its breadth and depth, which were the fruit of methodical study and contemplation together with a profound experience of supernatural realities.”

In his last few years, Saint John suffered acute physical pain and was largely confined to his humble home. Confinement allowed him to finally perfect his theological and spiritual writings and to correspond with those seeking his wise counsel. The esteemed Master Ávila, a true Man of La Mancha, died clutching a crucifix, surrounded by many disciples, on May 10, 1569.

Saint John of Ávila, your refined education, broad mind, and ardent love of God and Mary showed itself in all you did and said. May our lives likewise reflect our deepest Christian beliefs, inspiring our friends and families to live saintly perfection.

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May 10: Saint Damien de Veuster of Moloka’i, Priest (U.S.A.)
1840–1889
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of those suffering leprosy

A joyful celibate brings hope and dignity to the walking dead

It is often just one decision that releases the bolt, opening the door to a new life. The first step down a new road of a thousand smaller steps begins with one choice—to board the ship or to stand on the dock, to accept the marriage proposal or to wait for another, to sign the document or to leave it blank. Without that first choice, a different life would have been lived. Everyone, at some point, stands at this crossroad. But an impulse must be obeyed or rejected for untold other events, decisions, and influences to begin to unwind. This is one of the mysteries of life, how so much depends on one brief moment.

Young Jozef De Veuster (Damien was his religious name), growing up in a large family in rural Belgium, could never have imagined where and how his life would end. He was most likely going to follow the path of most other young men of his time and place—get married, have a family, go to Mass on Sunday, and take over the family farm. But an older brother was a priest, and two sisters were nuns, so a religious vocation was always a possibility. Damien eventually responded to the Lord’s call and his own impulse toward religious life and entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, just as his brother did before him. But just as his brother, Father Pamphile, was slated to leave for Hawaiʻi as a missionary, he had to abandon his voyage for health reasons. And thus a decision had to be made. A pivot point had arrived. Was Damien to replace his brother and go to Hawaiʻi or not? Leave family forever or stay home? Be a foreign missionary or stay among his own? Brother Damien walked the long plank upward and boarded the ship. He arrived in Honolulu in March 1864 and was ordained a priest in May. He would live his entire priestly life in Hawaiʻi. He never left the Hawaiʻian islands again.

Father Damien served in parishes for several years, learning to love his parishioners and being loved by them in return. Then, in 1873, the bishop asked for volunteers to go to an isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka’i. Father Damien volunteered. For the next sixteen years, he dedicated himself without reserve to this exiled community. He carried out more than a “ministry of accompaniment.” He accompanied, yes, but he also led, taught, inspired, and died to self. Father Damien’s robust health and farm background made hard work natural. He enlarged a chapel and built a rectory, a road, a dock, and numerous cottages for the lepers. He showed the people how to farm, to raise cattle, and to sing (despite his diseased vocal cords), and to play instruments (despite his missing fingers).

He was a vital force walking in a living graveyard. Life on an isolated leper colony was psychologically difficult for everyone, even the priest. But Father Damien brought faith and human dignity to a depressed population alienated from family and society. He treated the sick and the dying—and everyone was sick and dying—with the dignity of children of God. A proper cemetery was organized, funeral Masses were said with the accompaniment of a choir, and solemn processions bore everyone to their final resting place. This was a far cry from the inhuman chaos that preceded his arrival.

Father Damien carried out all of his pastoral work with fatherly concern. He was there, after all, because he was a celibate priest. No married Protestant minister would have dared to place himself, his wife, and his children in such a dangerous situation, and none ever did. Like all good fathers, Father Damien was both joyful and demanding. He was open. He smiled. He cared. He scolded. His source of strength was not merely his solid foundation in human virtue but primarily his Catholic faith. Father Damien’s love for the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary deepened through the years. His greatest non-physical sufferings were the lack of a priest companion with whom he could converse and to whom he could confess his sins.

Father Damien contracted leprosy after eleven years in the colony. He personally never wrote to his mother with the news. But when the old widow in Belgium learned of her son’s illness, she died of a broken heart. Father Damien lived five years with leprosy, continuing his priestly work, and died in 1889 at the age of forty-nine. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 after two medical miracles were attributed to his divine intervention.

Saint Damien of Moloka’i, intercede on behalf of all fathers to make them ever more generous in serving without reserve the families they head, making your life not only a source of inspiration, but also of emulation, to all who know of your heroic generosity.

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May 3: Saints Philip and James, Apostles
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of hatmakers and pastry chefs (Philip) and pharmacists (James)

The smaller the town the bigger the man

The popes follow one another chronologically just like the presidents of the United States. One after another, after another, each inheriting the powers and responsibilities of his office. President John F. Kennedy followed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, just as Pope Saint John Paul II followed The Venerable Pope John Paul I. But there is a difference. Jesus’ placing of Saint Peter as the symbolic and jurisdictional head of the universal Church is, of course, more significant than the popular election of a political leader. The papacy is also different in that every pope is, theologically speaking, the “direct successor” of Saint Peter, the first pope. From this perspective, every pope after Saint Peter is a second pope. So, for example, the two hundredth pope, chronologically, was still the second pope, theologically. No president would claim he is the direct successor of George Washington. He is the successor of his predecessor. Theological truths transcend space and time, since their source, God, exists outside of space and time.

The Office of St. Peter is theologically guaranteed by the easy-to-find, on-the-surface-of-the-text words of Christ telling Saint Peter that he is the rock upon which He will build His Church. Today’s Pope, and every pope, occupies that same office, is protected by that same divine guarantee, and immediately succeeds Saint Peter when he is chosen by the Holy Spirit to occupy his chair.

What pertains to the Office of the Bishop of Rome also pertains to the Office of the Twelve Apostles. Today’s saints, Philip and James, were called by name by Christ Himself. And after being called, they took the step that many who are called never take. They followed! The Twelve walked at Christ’s side on dusty trails during His years of public ministry. They ate and drank with Him by the fire. They slept under the cold desert sky with Him. And Jesus looked right into their eyes, and only their eyes, and spoke directly to their faces, and only their faces, when He said on a Thursday night that was deeply holy, “Do this in memory of me.” And then they did that, and many other things besides, in memory of Him, for the rest of their lives.

The four marks of the true Church are proof of its authenticity. “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic” are the trademark stamp of the true Church, proving it is the Church founded by Jesus Christ. No other ecclesial community bears this trademark, and none except the Orthodox even claims to bear it. The mark of “One” means the Church is visibly one in spite of its many tongues, nations, classes, and races. The Church is one in her doctrine, her Sacraments, and her hierarchy. This oneness is not theoretical. It is tangible, real, and identifiable even to those without a doctorate in theology. This one, Christ-founded Church began with twelve followers who gathered as one around Jesus. These Twelve eventually appointed their own successors, who then, in turn, appointed successors, and so on through the centuries down to the present.

The universal college of bishops, the successor body to the Twelve Apostles, is the means by which the Oneness, or unity, of the Church is expressed, protected, and guaranteed. Bishops are not a secondary attribute or development of Christianity. They are embedded into and conjoined with the Word of God in one complex reality. They are not an outside source of authority external to Scripture. There simply would be no Scripture without that pre-existing authority which nurtured and developed it. The Church was the incubator of the New Testament.

Not much is known with certainty about the Apostles Philip and James, apart from their names and some few references in the New Testament. Saint James, commonly called the “Less” due perhaps to his short stature, was probably the cousin of Jesus. Saint Philip was from tiny Bethsaida in Galilee. After he received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, he descended the stairs of the Upper Room and just kept walking into the darkness, his later life and labors unknown to history. More than having specific details about their later Christian exploits, it is more critical to know that Philip and James, and all the Apostles, are the sheet of bedrock into which the nascent Church sunk her deepest pillars and upon whose sturdy foundation the Church’s great weight still rests. Philip and James’ theological legacy continues today in every Bishop who teaches, sanctifies, and governs the baptized people of God.

Saints Philip and James, your hidden witness to Christ is less well-known than that of other Apostles, but is eloquent testimony to your quiet fidelity to building the Church after the Ascension. From your exalted place in Heaven, intercede for all who seek your assistance.

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May 2: Saint Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor
c. 295–373
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of theologians

A fiery Egyptian saves the Trinity

The First Sunday of Advent of 2011 introduced to the faithful a new liturgical translation of the Mass in many English-speaking countries. The new translation had been many years in the making and had gone through numerous drafts and revisions. Of the many noticeable changes, some of the most extensive were made to the Nicene Creed. The phrase “one in being with the Father” was changed to “consubstantial with the Father.” This caused confusion and discomfort for some, as “consubstantial” was not a familiar English word and sounded more appropriate to the realm of mathematics. But “consubstantial” had a long historical and theological pedigree supporting it. Its noticeable use in the newly translated Creed, and the curiosity it provoked, was also a distant homage to today’s saint, Athanasius. He fought for, and suffered for, this one word.

Saint Athanasius was the sturdiest pillar of orthodoxy in the Patristic age. He was born to Christian parents in Egypt, raised in the faith, and mentored in his youth by the Bishop of Alexandria, whom he accompanied to the Council of Nicea. He later became the Bishop of Alexandria for forty-five contentious years and was exiled five times, some of them difficult, dangerous, and prolonged absences. He lived a colorful life at the very heart of the theological controversies of the fourth century. Athanasius, while still young, played an important role at the Council of Nicea in promoting the non-biblical, Greek word, homoousion, to describe Christ’s relationship with God the Father. The Western Church then translated homoousion as consubstantialis for its Latin Creed. Hence the English word “consubstantial.”

To say that Christ is “consubstantial” with the Father is to say that He is not one in person, one in mind, or one in will with the Father. He is distinct from the Father in His personhood, His mind, and His will. But Christ is entirely united to the Father in His substance, or nature. That is, Christ is God from God in the same way that light is from light or, to use the probable original analogy from that pre-electrified era, Christ is God from God and flame from flame. A wick carries a new flame away from its source, to burn the same or hotter somewhere else, without diminishing its “parent” fire. One source, two flames, generating heat and light in different places for different people.

Christ did not become God sometime after He was born of the Virgin Mary. He did not develop into God as a teenager. Nor was He bestowed with divine powers in some pivotal event. He was a baby God, a teen God, and an adult God because He was always God. Nor was His God nature a mere cloak under which was hidden a human self. Jesus Christ was fully human, of course, but also fully divine, and these two natures were united in one complex person. Most of the Church’s finer Christological definitions were destined to be clarified at later Councils. The first two Councils, Nicea (325 A.D) and Constantinople (381 A.D.) were concerned with understanding and defining the Trinity first. Once Trinitarian definitions were worked out, later fifth-century Councils would address more fully the nature of Christ Himself.

Before delving into what Christ did, it was necessary to establish who He was. His being preceded His doing. Saint Athanasius’ theological contributions to defining, for ever and all time, the metaphysical significance of the Incarnation is now taken for granted. But without this correct understanding, Christmas would be just a historic anniversary of an important birth, like that of Julius Caesar or other greats of history. But Christmas is Christmas because Christ was God from the start. Theology is not just a pillow on which the Church rests, of course, so the theology of the Trinity and of Christ has been greatly enriched since the Patristic age, most notably by an emphasis on the Cross as the fullness of the self-emptying that began with the Incarnation. Saint Athanasius was without equal in defining and defending the Church’s dogma on the true nature of the Trinity. And for that immeasurable contribution he is owed an immense debt of gratitude by all the Church.

Saint Athanasius, your perseverance in combating false teaching cost you comfort and security. May your example and intercession assist all teachers to lead others to reflect more fruitfully on the truths and mysteries of our Faith.

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May 1: Saint Joseph the Worker
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of workers

God wanted a working man to father Jesus

Besides the Virgin Mary, there are just two saints who have more than one feast day dedicated to their honor on the Church’s universal calendar: Saint John the Baptist and Saint Joseph. Pope Pius XII instituted today’s feast in 1955 in direct response to the surge of atheistic communism in the decades after World War II. Communism at that time was not so clearly understood as the dehumanizing, anti-man, politically corrupt, and economically anemic system that it later revealed itself to be. Communism, after all, had helped defeat fascism in Germany and Italy, so it was understood as a liberating force, not an oppressive one, in some countries. May 1, or May Day, was the day of the worker in communist lands: a day of rest, of triumphant militaristic parades, and of pride in all that communism had accomplished, supposedly, for the proletariat.

Keen observers, including many Catholic intellectuals, Pope Pius XII, and one future Pope then serving as a priest in Poland, knew better. They had already, intellectually, torn the mask from the true face of communism. Part of the Church’s response to the communist appeal to workers was to exalt Saint Joseph the Worker on May 1 as a Catholic alternative to May Day. Not only was Saint Joseph to be understood, then, as the husband of Mary and the foster father of Jesus, but also as the patron of labor. He was the carpenter, the working man, who taught his God-Son how to swing a hammer and run a planer over a rugged plank.

Pius XII’s exaltation of Saint Joseph the Worker was an attractive idea. Saint Joseph was a true icon of human labor in contrast to the rough factory worker in an industrial plant in Leningrad or the tanned farm hand threshing hay under the Ukrainian sun. Saint Joseph did not have his fist raised in anger at the capitalist oppressors of Nazareth. He was not leading a mob to burn down his boss’s house. Saint Joseph worked like a normal person worked. He was quiet about it. He did his duty. He provided his family with food and shelter. He didn’t see injustice lurking behind every corner. He most likely made excellent furniture and received a fair wage for his handiwork.

Work, from a Catholic perspective, is a source of dignity. It has to be done. A life of pure leisure is no life at all. Work and want and trying times are required ingredients in the recipe for a mature, responsible adult. No work, no adult. Work itself is not pure punishment. The onerous nature of work is one of the effects of original sin, though it was not so in the beginning. Work became a burden due to the sin of our first parents. What is the theology behind this? God the Father worked and God the Son worked. When man works, then, he is participating in God’s own work. Subduing the earth is one of God’s original commandments to man. And subduing the earth cannot come about except through work of one kind or another.

It has been observed that the dash (–) on a tombstone is far more important than the years that are on each side of it. What happened in the time of that dash is more important than one’s date of birth or death. For most people that dash denotes work. Mankind works. All the time. And the will of God for us cannot be found outside of what we spend most of our life doing. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have much of a religion. God is found in our work. So if we do it well, we give him glory, and if we do it poorly, we offer him a shoddy sacrifice. The earth becomes our altar when our daily work is our daily offering. Constant, daily work was good enough for Saint Joseph and for the Son of God. So it is good enough for all of God’s children as well. Work is a pathway to holiness, and Saint Joseph the Worker stands by our side to encourage us toward the reward that our daily sweat and labor will earn.

Saint Joseph the Worker, inspire all laborers of mind or body to work for their daily bread as much as for your glorification. May we work well to both perfect us and to make us participants in completing the creation begun in Genesis.

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April 30: Saint Pius V, Pope
1504–1572
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

One Shepherd, one flock, one Lord, one Church

Saint Pius V is buried in the Sistine Chapel, but not “that” Sistine Chapel. His body lies in a glass coffin in the stunning, baroque Sistine Chapel of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome. He is not far from other luminaries: the master artist Gianlorenzo Bernini is buried unassumingly in the floor nearby, and Saint Jerome’s remains can be found in a porphyry tomb under the main altar. Saint Pius V was not born a pope, of course. He was from a poor but noble family in Northern Italy and baptized Antonio Ghislieri. He entered the Dominican Order as a teenager and quickly rose to positions of authority and responsibility due to his intelligence, discipline, unassailable purity of life, and defense of the Church.

He was elected Pope in 1566. The Council of Trent had just concluded. The Counter-Reformation was so new it did not even have a name. The Muslim Turks were invading Europe from the East. Protestants occupied chunks of Northern Europe and were cracking the unity of the Church in France. In a truncated papacy of six years and four months, Saint Pius V rose to all of these challenges and more, leaving an enduring legacy disproportionate to his brief reign.

Our saint marshalled the coalition of Catholic princes and monarchs who defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. A loss would have opened the front door of Europe for Muslims to walk right in and make it their home. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England for heresy and schism, called her a pretender to the throne, and forbade Catholics to obey her. This led the Queen to seek the blood of English Catholics for treason. As momentous as these events were, and they each cast long and dark historical shadows, it was specifically as a churchman that Saint Pius V did his best work. He personally lived the reforms he expected of the Church as a whole, and he implemented those reforms first in the city of Rome itself, among his own ecclesial court and among his own people.

The Council of Trent met intermittently between 1545–1563. It was arguably the most successful Council in the history of the Church. Trent introduced numerous reforms that have long since been accepted as normative Church practice: a bishop must live in his diocese, priestly formation must occur in a seminary, the Mass must be said using a uniform language and ritual, a catechism must be published and its teachings learned by all, and religious and priests cannot easily skip from one diocese to another. The Council also clarified technical, and not so technical, questions of Catholic theology in the face of Protestant challenges. The Council’s documents were not put on a shelf to gather dust.
Trent’s immense treasure house of doctrinal, liturgical, and disciplinary reforms were implemented, fully and forcefully, over many succeeding decades. This was due to the perseverance and vision of many Counter-Reformation bishops, priests, nuns, and scholars, beginning with Pope Saint Pius V himself.

Pope Saint Pius V is viewed historically as a true icon of orthodoxy (correct doctrine) and also of orthopraxy (correct practice). It is an unfortunate truism of modernity that religious faith, submission to religious truth, or trust in a prior intellectual inheritance (as opposed to personal discovery of “truth”) are limiting forces which stunt personal growth, shield the believer from reality, or block more daring inquiry. A more honest perspective disproves these snide conclusions. Doubt, refusal, or negation are not necessarily open-minded pathways to discovery. It is acceptance, affirmation, and faith that open the mind to the widest horizons. It is “Yes,” not “No,” that leads to more complex and demanding relationships, including with God Himself. The orthodox believer makes no a priori decision to shut his eyes to the fullness of reality, in contrast to the atheist. The believer is open, truly open, to diverse arguments and to diverse experiences.

Defenders of orthodoxy, like Saint Pius V, have far more complex understandings of human anthropology and religion than commonly acknowledged. Conservatives are more intuitive anthropologists than liberals. They know how fragile truth can be when under pressure, and they take their job to protect it with utmost seriousness. Saint Pius V was the Pope, or Father, of a universal family. He protected the family’s unity with all his considerable skills and virtues, and left a highly united, disciplined Church as his legacy.

Saint Pius V, your dedication to the truth showed itself in your pristine holiness, unity of life, and defense of doctrine. From your home in heaven, assist all theologians and leaders of the Church to be as concerned as you were for the unity of God’s family on earth.

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April 29: Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin and Doctor
1347–1380
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Italy, Europe, and fire prevention

Her frightening intensity prayed the popes back to Rome

Saint Peter was not martyred in Frankfurt, Germany; Alexandria, Egypt; or Jerusalem. He could have been. God, in His Providence, wanted Saint Peter’s blood to spill on Roman soil, so that His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church would drive its roots into the ground of the then capital of the world. This does not mean that Catholicism is bound to St. Peter’s Basilica and Rome in the same way that Judaism was bound to the temple and Jerusalem. Rome does not have the same theological significance for Catholics as Jerusalem does for Jews, nor is Rome the successor of Jerusalem. Rome is not a holy city like Mecca is for the Muslims. The primacy of the Pope over the universal Church is based on his being the successor of Saint Peter. This is an indisputable historical fact. However, the Petrine ministry is one thing, and where it is exercised is another. The location of the Petrine ministry has never had the same theological weight as the ministry itself. Peter, yes. Always. Rome, yes. So far. Mostly.

Today’s saint was a Third Order Dominican, a mystic, a contemplative, and an ascetic who used secretaries to compose her letters, because she could not read or write until the last few years of her life. Yet for all of her interior distance from the world and its concerns, Saint Catherine of Siena threw herself at the feet of the Pope, then reigning in Avignon, and begged him to return to Rome. The “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy in Avignon had gone on for almost seven decades and caused grave scandal. The move to Avignon was not due to an irreversible cultural shift such as a Muslim conquest or a decimating plague. The popes did not abandon Rome because it was a carcass. The transfer of the papal court to Avignon, a city within the Papal States, was the result of politics.

It is not often that a single person can effect the course of history as much as a battle, a treaty, or a Council does. Incredibly, though, Saint Catherine of Siena’s efforts to return the papacy to Rome were successful. She wrote so powerfully, spoke so passionately, and exuded such intense holiness that the Pope was overwhelmed. She also seemed to have prophetic powers, even knowing what the Pope was thinking or had previously thought. She was frighteningly intense and could not be ignored. Thus, sixty-seven years of seven French Popes ruling far from Rome ended. In 1376, Pope Gregory XI finally abandoned Avignon and followed in the footsteps of so many medievals—he went on pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter. And he stayed. The eternal city was a widow no longer.

Saint Catherine was born the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children in a pious family imbued with the love of God. She eagerly drank in all that her parents poured out. She went for true “gold” early in life. She practiced extreme penances, eating only bread and raw vegetables and drinking only water for her entire adult life. She conversed with God, experienced ecstasies and visions, and dictated hundreds of letters, books and reflections filled with the most profound spiritual and theological insights. In 1970 she was the first layperson, and first woman, to be made a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of her profound mystical theology. Catherine died at the age of thirty-three, worn out by penances, travel, and the burden of her involvement in so many pressing ecclesial affairs. She was canonized in 1461. Her body lies under the main altar of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Her mummified head is found in her native Siena.

Saint Catherine of Siena, your love of God was expressed in so many vibrant ways and in a fervent love of His Church. We seek your powerful intercession from your exalted place in heaven to make all Catholics more ardent in their love of the Trinity, of the Passion, and of the Papacy.

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April 28: Saint Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr
1803–1841
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Oceania

Musumusu axed him to death for no reason at all

In Paris, just a few blocks down the Rue du Bac from the shrine of the Miraculous Medal, is a fine, imposing stone building. There are a lot of fine, imposing stone buildings in Paris, so from the outside this one is not exceptional. But once the visitor passes inside the complex of chapel, museum, dormitories, and garden, he understands what a venerable institution he is visiting—The Paris Foreign Mission Society. Approximately 4,500 missionaries went forth from this unique Society, mostly to Southeast Asia, to build the Church and preach the Gospel. From its beginnings in the seventeenth century until today, but most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, hundreds of priests and bishops from the Society were martyred, died violent deaths, or fell victim to tropical diseases. Of these, twenty-three Paris Foreign Missionaries are canonized saints. Other non-martyr French saints of the same era—Saint John Vianney, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint Catherine Laboure—together with the missionary martyrs, sparkle as the jewels in the crown of the vibrant Church of nineteenth-century France.

Today’s saint, Peter Chanel, was just one such Frenchman who left the comfort and familiarity of home to become a daring and rugged missionary priest. Peter Chanel grew up in rural France working as a shepherd. While in school, he loved to read about French foreign missionaries and wanted to emulate them. So he decided, “I will become a missionary priest!” After seminary studies, Peter was ordained a diocesan priest and served in parishes. But a few years later, he became one of the founding members of the Society of Mary, the Marists. And as a Marist father, he voyaged on the high seas to at last fulfill his missionary dreams. He sailed to one of the most tiny, remote, and unknown islands in the South Pacific. In 1837 Father Peter Chanel stepped ashore the speck of volcanic rock called Futuna to preach there, for the very first time, the name of Jesus Christ.

On unknown Futuna, Father Chanel gave his all, at first drip by drip and then all at once. A lay brother who was with him later said of Father Chanel, “Because of his labors, he was often burned by the heat of the sun and famished with hunger, and he would return home wet with perspiration and completely exhausted. Yet he always remained in good spirits, courageous and energetic…” His apostolic labors generated few converts, but there was some progress nonetheless. Like so many missionaries, Peter had to overcome the counter-witness given by fellow European Christians trading in the area who cared little about their religion. In 1841 when the local Chieftain’s son asked to be baptized, the Chieftain sent his son-in-law, Musumusu, to stop the conversion. A fight within the family ensued. Musumusu then went to Father Chanel’s home and clubbed the priest with an axe until his blood puddled in the dirt. Father Peter was not yet forty years old when his missionary dream was fulfilled in martyrdom, giving Oceania its patron saint.

The island of Futuna, in which our saint had such mixed success, converted completely and totally a few years after Saint Peter’s martyrdom. Musumusu himself repented of his crime and was baptized. The island is, even in modern times, almost one hundred percent Catholic. An impressive church is the heart and center of every small town. Saint Peter Chanel’s body now rests in a large Basilica in the city of Poi. The beauty and smell of tropical flowers always adorn the church. And on the night of April 27, the vigil of his Feast Day, hundreds of Futunians sleep outside the Basilica waiting for the festivities of their saint’s feast day to begin the next morning. The brief life and sudden death of Saint Peter Chanel is powerful proof of how the blood of the martyrs waters the seeds of the Church. One sows, another reaps, and still another enjoys the harvest.

Saint Peter Chanel, by your suffering and death, you converted a people. You were fearless in adventuring far from home to preach the Gospel. May your blood, spilled so long ago, continue to infuse all missionaries with courage and perseverance in their labors.

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April 28: Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, Priest
1673–1716
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of preachers

Intensely in love with God, his flame burned hot but not long

The English writer Graham Greene grew up Anglican with the typical anti-Catholic biases of his twentieth-century generation. One of those biases firmly held that Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary and thus deflected toward Christ’s mother the glory due to Him alone. But when Greene started dating an educated Catholic girl, she taught him that Catholics rendered latria (worship) to God, dulia (praise) to the saints, and hyperdulia (an abundance of praise) to Mary. It made sense. Worship is given to God alone. Praise is given to the saints. And Mary is rendered a unique intensity of praise in recognition of her unique role in salvation history. Graham was convinced. For these and other reasons, he entered the Church. He went on to become a well-known novelist on Catholic themes, in part because a teenage girl he once dated knew some basic theology.

Throughout the centuries since the Reformation, Catholics have been accused of granting to Mary what is due only to God. This false accusation is more apparent than real. But its appearance sometimes even bothers Catholics. As a young man, the future Pope Saint John Paul II wondered whether he gave Mary too central a role in his devotions, prayer, and reading. But the writings of today’s saint, Louis de Montfort, helped the young Pole place Marian devotion in its wider theological context. Pope Saint John Paul II routinely gave thanks to Saint Louis de Montfort’s book, True Devotion to Mary, for helping him develop a more mature Marian spirituality. The Pope even borrowed from de Montfort the Latin Totus Tuus as his papal motto. De Montfort had written to the Virgin, “I am all yours, and all that is mine belongs to you.” When we honor Mary, Mary honors God along with us.

Louis Grignion de Montfort was never not in love with God. He was one of eighteen children born to his parents. Eleven of them are saints—Louis and ten of his siblings who died as babies shortly after their baptisms. Even as a child, Louis was devoted to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. He studied under the Jesuits as a teen and then attended theology courses at St. Sulpice in Paris. He was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-seven. He at first wanted to become a missionary, like so many ardent French priests of his time. But a spiritual director advised against it, and Louis became a hospital chaplain, preached missions, and served as a confessor. Father Louis was interpersonally awkward and ardent to the point of making others uncomfortable, all of which confined his priestly ministry to non-traditional forums. He also lived radical poverty, owning nothing, carrying no money, and even abandoning his family name, Grignion, to be known only by his town, Montfort.

Louis de Montfort’s intense devotional life, theatrical preaching style, moral uprightness, and visions of Mary, the angels and satan, were interpreted as holy foolishness by many in the Church who wished him ill. The Jansenists, an ultra-rigorist branch of the French Church, particularly despised his preaching on God’s love and mercy. Saint Louis’ itinerant life ended due to physical exhaustion at the young age of forty-three. He practiced such extreme physical penances that his body was well prepared for the grave when he died. He was a priest only sixteen years. It is possible that his life and writings did more good for future ages than they did for his own. His writings on Mary, in particular, were rediscovered and published in the nineteenth century, leading to his canonization in 1947 and to his wide fame in the Church. Our saint died with a statue of the Virgin Mary in one arm and a crucifix given him by the Pope in the other arm. He felt attacked by the devil in his last agony and yelled at him, “You attack me in vain. I stand between Jesus and Mary. I have finished my course. I shall sin no more.” He was buried, per his request, under an altar dedicated to his Lady…to Our Lady.

Saint Louis de Montfort, we ask your intercession before God in Heaven to inflame in all hearts a fire that burns like yours with love for the Holy Trinity. Help all who read your works to profit from their wisdom and so grow closer to God’s mother.

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April 25: Saint Mark, Evangelist
c. First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of lions, lawyers, Venice, interpreters, and prisoners

He chronicled what the first Pope witnessed

John’s Gospel offers the reader this brief post-Resurrection scene: “Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat…” (Jn 21:3). The flock followed where Peter led. How easily Saint Peter moves to the fore in the Acts of the Apostles. How effortlessly he speaks for the entire Community of Faith. Saint Peter even leaves the running of the Church in Jerusalem to Saint James to show that he is not bound to one city or community. Instead, Peter walks toward the widest horizon of evangelization, the capital of the world—Rome. Traitor Peter becomes Pope Peter.

Peter was, of course, a simple fisherman. It is more interesting to note that he did not remain a simple fisherman. He grew. He matured. He led. And leaders don’t have followers as much as joiners. Saint Mark, whom we commemorate today, was one of the most significant of the many joiners who uprooted themselves to join Peter in his dangerous adventure of founding the Church. Nothing is known for certain of Mark’s origins or his youth. He is not mentioned in the Gospel that bears his name and only the faintest biographical sketch is possible. What is known is that Mark left his homeland in Palestine to follow first Saint Paul, and later, Saint Peter. Mark sailed dangerous seas in primitive boats. He walked long stretches through desolate lands. He tried to convince hardened pagans and skeptical Romans that the Gospel message was true. The words of the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Saint Paul, and the First Letter of Saint Peter all put dots on the large map of Mark’s life. Many blank spaces, however, still lay in between. Mark is traveling with Paul in Asia Minor, then he’s with Barnabas on a boat over here, then he’s with someone else over there, and then he disappears for a number of years. The scattered evidence ends, however, with clear testimony that Mark joined Peter in Rome. In Peter’s first letter, written from the city of his death to the Church in Asia Minor, Pope Peter sends greetings on Mark’s behalf and refers to him as “my son”(1 Pt 5:13).

Saint Mark is, of course, best known as the author of a Gospel. Like Saint Luke and Saint Paul, he was not one of the Twelve Apostles and so likely never met Jesus Christ in person. Scholars believe that the Gospel of Saint Mark relates the experiences of Saint Peter, Mark’s mentor. Each Gospel has its own unique sources, emphases, and audiences. Mark writes for non-Jews who would be impressed by Christ’s miracles more than His fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. So in Mark’s Gospel are found certain colorful details that suggest the writer was relating the words of an eye-witness. For example, in Mark 5:41 Jesus enters the home of Jairus, a synagogue leader whose daughter lay dead. Christ says to her, “Talitha koum.” Mark then tells the reader what “Talitha koum” means, presumably because his readers did not speak Aramaic. No other Gospel includes this touching detail of the untranslated words coming from the mouth of Christ that day. Mark also places other Aramaic words on Christ’s lips: “Ephphatha,” “Abba,” and “Hosanna.”

Peter was there when it happened. Peter heard the Lord speak. And Peter was getting old, in prison, or threatened with death. The Gospel he had repeated verbally so many thousands of times had to be written down to send to others, to preserve its accuracy, or to contradict counterfeit versions. And so the natural progression from oral to written history slowly occurred. The Gospel was spoken before it was a book, and the word has primacy over the book. Saint Mark the Evangelist preserved for all time the Word of God, Jesus Christ, by committing Peter’s words to writing, thus ensuring that the eye-witness accounts of Christ’s life did not just float away in the breeze. Once the Word was enshrined on papyrus, Saint Mark had accomplished his mission forever and always.

Saint Mark, you were a friend of the Apostles and shared their commitment to spreading the faith. From your home in Heaven, may you strengthen all those who lack the courage to live the Gospel message in their own lives so they can witness it to others.

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April 24, 2022: Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday)
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

True power pardons

In the Nicene Creed, we say that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father. When a judge walks into a courtroom, the bailiff announces, “All rise,” and the judge sits in judgment. In his see city, a bishop rests in his cathedra, and in his palace, a king reigns from his throne. A president signs legislation while seated at his desk. The chair is a locus of power. The power that emanates from such seats of authority judges, condemns, and sentences. Today’s feast reminds us, though, that authority also exercises power by granting mercy. When a judge pronounces innocence, the sentence is no less binding than one of guilt. The absolved exits the court into a new day, ready to begin again. And when the priest’s voice whispers through the screen, “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” guilt evaporates into thin air. The purest and truest expression of power is the granting of mercy.

Mercy is a superabundance of justice, not an exception to it. When faced with a wound to the common good, those responsible for repairing the damage do not have two contrary options: justice or mercy. Justice and mercy are not mutually exclusive. Mercy is a form of justice. Mercy does not ignore the tears to the fabric of the common good slashed by crime and sin. Rightful authority notes the torn fabric, weighs the personal responsibility of the accused, and distributes justice precisely by granting mercy. Mercy does not turn a blind eye to justice, but fulfills its obligations to justice by going beyond them. After all, one cannot be absolved of having done nothing. Similarly, where there is no guilt there is no need of mercy. When justice calls out, two words echo back off the hard walls: “condemnation” and “mercy.” Mercy runs parallel to, and beyond, the path of condemnation. This is the mercy we celebrate today, the mercy whose greatest practitioner is God Himself. Because He is the seat of all authority, God is also the seat of all mercy.

God plays many roles in the life of the Christian—Creator, Savior, Sanctifier, and Judge. Our Creed teaches us that God the Son, seated at the Father’s right hand, “will come in glory to judge the living and the dead,” both at the particular and at the final judgment. At that moment, it will serve us nothing to state, in excusing our sins, that “God understands.” Of course God understands. To state “God understands” is just another way to say that God is omniscient and all powerful. “God understands” implies that because God knows the powerful temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that He could not possibly judge man harshly. Yet “God understands” is a lazy manner of exculpating sinful behavior. When nose to nose with God one second after death, the repentant Christian should plead, instead, “Lord, have mercy.” Faced with the scandalous behavior of a friend or relative, the response should again be “Lord, have mercy.” Appealing to God’s mercy will melt His heart. Appealing to His knowledge will not.

The private revelations of Jesus Christ to Saint Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun and intense mystic who died in 1938, are the source of the profound spirituality of today’s feast. Sister Faustina was a kind of Saint Catherine of Siena of the twentieth century. She lived a regimen of fasting, meditation, liturgical prayer, and close community life that would have crushed a less resilient soul. But Faustina persevered, amidst debilitating illnesses, sisterly jealousy, and respectful but questioning superiors. Her diaries are replete with the starkest of language from the mouth of Christ, showing that moral clarity precedes the call for mercy. Sister Faustina faithfully recorded Christ’s manly commands in her diary. One of these commands expressly desired that the Divine Mercy be celebrated on the Sunday after Easter. In an age-old pattern familiar to an ancient Church, Saint Faustina’s private revelations were challenged, filtered for theological truth, sifted for spiritual depth, and granted universal approbation by the only Christian religion which even claims to grant such. In the soundest proof of their authenticity, the profound simplicity of the Divine Mercy revelations and of their related devotions were intuitively grasped and adopted by the Catholic faithful the world over.

Pope Saint John Paul II first inserted today’s feast into the Roman calendar on April 30, 2000, the canonization day of Saint Faustina. Saint Pope John Paul II was also canonized on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2014. And so the Church’s third millennium was launched with a new devotion that quickly eclipsed many older ones, a new piety rooted in the most ancient truths, a fresh appeal to a side of God that had not been fully understood in prior ages. Divine Mercy is the new face of God for the third millennium, a postmodern Sacred Heart. This is the God who leans in and waits with bated breath for us to whisper through the screen, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” This is the God who at the end of time, whether our own time or all time, waits to hear from our lips those few prized words “Lord, have mercy.” Having heard that, He need not hear anything more. And having received that, we need not receive anything more.

Divine Mercy, do not hold our sins against us. Be a merciful Father who judges us in the fullness of Your power, punishing when needed, but granting mercy when we need it more, most especially when we are too saturated with pride to request it.

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April 24: Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr
1577–1622
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of lawyers & the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples

His murderers cut a leg off his dead body in retaliation for his many journeys

To understand the historical and religious context for today’s saint, consider an event that took place fifty years before he was born. On January 5, 1527, in Zurich, Switzerland, a young man named Felix Mantz was taken hold of by local officials, had his hands and feet bound to a pole, and was rowed out in a boat to the deepest part of the local river. With a large crowd watching from the shores, he was tossed overboard into the dark water and immediately drowned to death. Felix Mantz’s crime? He believed only adults should be baptized, not children. Mantz was not killed by the Inquisition, the Pope, the local Bishop, or a Catholic mob. His cruel drowning, which mocked his views on baptism, was perpetrated by dissenting Protestants.

The Protestants of Zurich believed in infant baptism while rejecting all other Catholic beliefs. And they allowed absolutely no dissenting from their own dissenting from Catholicism. Felix Mantz was the first Protestant martyred by other Protestants. Heretics killing other heretics for not conforming to their heresy captures the chaos, intellectual dissonance, and cultural confusion in some regions of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. This total meltdown is known as the Reformation. Today’s saint, Fidelis of Sigmaringen, walked right into this still-raging storm of violence in the early seventeenth century, suffering a fate essentially similar to the Protestant martyr Felix Mantz, though for exactly contrary reasons.

Its very existence challenged by Protestantism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism swelled like a great ocean, lifting up a sea of scholars, monks, abbots, nuns, priests, and bishops who overwhelmed Europe with their teaching and witness to the perennial truths of Jesus Christ. Saint Fidelis was just one priest-monk among that great tide of the Counter-Reformation, but he was one who became a martyr. He was born as Mark Roy in the town of Sigmaringen in Prussia, in Northern Germany, and raised in the Faith. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1603 and degrees in civil and canon law in 1611, yet he became disillusioned with his career in law. He had always been an exceptionally ardent Catholic, so he entered the Capuchin Order and was ordained a priest in his thirties. He took the religious name of “faithful”—in Latin, “Fidelis.” Fidelis was intelligent, disciplined, and ascetic. His abundant human and spiritual gifts were amplified and sharpened when put in the service of the King of Kings, and he rose to important positions of leadership within the Capuchin Order.

Having become locally well known for his fervor and holiness, Father Fidelis was appointed by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome to preach, teach, and write in present day Switzerland, with the goal of exhorting the people to return to the embrace of the Mother Church which had given them birth. Father Fidelis desired martyrdom, and it came for him soon enough. In Switzerland, his zeal and example brought some prominent Calvinists back to the true Faith. This made him an official enemy of the Calvinists who controlled much of that land.

One day, when traveling between two towns where he was preaching and saying Mass, Fidelis was confronted along the road by Calvinist soldiers led by a minister. Fidelis had recently caused an uproar in a nearby town and had barely escaped with his life. The soldiers knew exactly who was before them. They demanded that he abandon his Faith. Fidelis answered, "I was sent to rebuke you, not to embrace your heresy. The Catholic religion is the faith of all ages, I do not fear death." His skull was then cracked open with the butt of a sword, his body punctured with stabs, and his left leg hacked off in retribution for the numerous journeys he had made into Protestant territory. Saint Fidelis died at the age of forty-five, ten years after entering religious life. He was canonized in 1746. Over three hundred miracles were attributed to his intercession during his canonization process. Saint Fidelis was faithful in life and continues to intercede faithfully in death.

Saint Fidelis, through your intercession before the throne of God, we ask you to fortify all teachers and preachers of the faith to remain faithful to the truth, even to the point of embarrassment, inconvenience, suffering, and death to self.

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April 23: Saint George, Martyr
c. Late Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of England, the nation of Georgia, and scouting

Widely venerated, historically elusive, his legacy is massive

Saint George suffered martyrdom in Palestine before the reign of Constantine. And that is all that can be said with certainty about Saint George. Yet where the documentary record is lacking, other traditions suffice. No one, after all, can document why we blow out candles on a birthday cake, where this nearly universal custom originated, or in what century it even began. Someone, somewhere, for some reason, thought it was a lovely thing to do, and started doing it, otherwise it would not be done today. But questions of where, when, and why fade when friends and family gather around their loved one in the dark, the simple joy on their faces captured in the flickering of the candlelight. Knowing the origin of a tradition matters, since it may reveal unappreciated depths to a common practice. But that a healthy tradition continues is more significant than knowing, or explaining, where it came from. Few Christians can explain the hypostatic union, but everyone loves to unwrap a gift on Christmas morning. No one can determine where and when Saint Valentine lived and died, but our lips broaden into a smile when we open a card on Saint Valentine’s Day. A good tradition conveys meaning implicitly whether its origin is obscure or not.

If traditions age like wine, then the traditions surrounding Saint George are of the rarest vintage. Devotion to Saint George is so ancient, so deeply rooted, and so cross cultural that to argue that it rose like a chimera from the hot desert sands would be ridiculous. In the remote valleys of the Judean Desert east of Jerusalem, clinging to the copper-colored cliffs shooting straight up from a wadi, is an ancient monastery named Saint George. It was founded in the fifth century. And amid the stately Roman ruins of Jerash, in Jordan, are the remaining stone walls and mosaic floors of the Church of Saint George, built around 530 A.D. Official devotion to Saint George manifests itself, then, in some of the oldest Christian structures in the Holy Land.

The murky origins of these early buildings merged with written traditions from centuries after George’s death until, over time, Saint George was known as a chivalrous knight who died for his faith under the Emperor Diocletian. The lore of a mounted warrior for Christ was immensely appealing to the Crusaders who populated the Holy Land in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They transported the hagiography of Saint George back to Europe with them. Oral tradition and popular custom then did its slow work until the ancient Palestinian devotion to Saint George was revived in a new age for new people in new lands. From the Byzantine East to the Latin West, from the Mediterranean South to the Saxon North, few saints became as popular as Saint George. He was named the patron of an enormous number of castles, kingdoms, churches, abbeys, cities, and orders, and even of England itself, where his dragon-slaying exploits still resonate in that country’s national mythology.

Traditions hold that Saint George was among the many soldier-martyrs of early Christianity who, instead of dying to protect the Emperor, were killed on the Emperor’s orders for refusing to deny Christ. A loyal soldier obeys his master and is prepared to offer his life for a higher good. Roman soldiers were naturally prepared to die for the faith, and many did, killed by their fellows perhaps with some regret. Though the legends swirling around Saint George cannot be verified, they have been accepted by the faithful of many nations for many centuries. Acceptance of traditions is a cultural sieve straining chunks of absurdity from the liquid truth. Saint George has passed through that filter all the stronger. He died for the faith when many of his contemporaries did not—and only the greatest of men did that.

Saint George, you were a loyal soldier and humble Christian who gave your life for Christ. Inspire us to have your same loyalty, your same courage, and your same nobility to die for a mighty cause, whether all at once or bit by bit over time.

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April 23: Saint Adalbert, Bishop and Martyr
956–997
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of the Czech Republic and Poland

Pagans cut down a courageous bishop in the frozen North

Old, stodgy, traditional Catholic Europe in tension with new, liberal, flexible Europe is not a new dichotomy. A millennium ago the roles were reversed. It was old, stodgy, traditional pagan Europe in tension with new, groundbreaking, and progressive Catholic Europe. As the missionary monks, abbots, and bishops of Europe fanned out, ever northward and ever eastward, into upper Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, and the Baltics, they met the warrior tribes and painted chieftains of old Europe, men with skin like bark. These forest clans gathered in sacred groves to offer sacrifice to their pagan idols under the broad canopies of large oaks. In these open- air temples, they butchered prisoners of war and cattle in offerings to their dark powers, sprinkling the blood of the slain on their bodies. Yet from the eighth through the eleventh centuries, missionaries poured into these remote lands, shining the light of the Gospel into its darkest corners. Teutonic and Norse paganism, for all of its unwritten creeds of courage and manliness, was doomed. It was strong, but the Church was stronger. Paganism could not stop vital, solid, well-organized Catholicism with its coherent monotheism, sacred worship, Ten Commandments, self-sacrificing missionaries, and its Gospel of love and respect for all.

The Catholic Church does not arrive to a mission territory, however, as a full-fledged institution. The Church arrives in a person who embodies all that the Church teaches and symbolizes. This person is the Church to those he encounters. Today’s saint was one of the first missionary bishops to penetrate into the lands of Prussia, in Northeastern Germany. And for daring to preach the Gospel to coarse men, he was murdered on the frigid coast of the Baltic Sea. The Prussians thought he was a Polish spy, and a pagan priest upset at the disruptions Adalbert was causing in Prussian society commanded his death. Saint Adalbert’s lifeless body was ransomed for its weight in gold by a Polish king and returned to Poland. He was eventually canonized as Saint Adalbert of Prague, since he was born and raised in Bohemia. He remains a saint equally claimed by both the Polish and Czech people and a seminal figure in early medieval Europe.

Courageous men like Saint Adalbert don’t just happen. They are forged over time in red hot fires. Adalbert had a long, difficult, and interesting ecclesiastical career before giving his life for the faith. He was baptized as Vojtěch. But he was so impressed with the saintly German Bishop named Adalbert who taught him, that he took his tutor’s name at Confirmation. Adalbert was then named Bishop of Prague at a young age, a consecration whose responsibilities turned him into a far more serious Christian. He quickly matured into his exalted vocation. Bishop Adalbert started aggressively challenging the people of his diocese to shed their pre-Christian customs and to learn what it meant to be true children of God. But Adalbert had a strong temperament and came from a noble family with serious enemies, all of which led him to abandon his diocese twice and flee to Rome. In the Eternal City, he came to know the Benedictines and lived as a monk for several months. Later he would establish Benedictine monasteries in the North in the hope of holding the Christian ground he gained. And to the North he always returned: to Bohemia, to Germany, to Hungary, and to Poland. He was a multilingual and multicultural Pan Slavic Bishop fully equipped to evangelize throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

The rough Prussian people who murdered Adalbert were not fully conquered and converted until 1239, when the Teutonic Knights planted themselves in that land more than two hundred years after Saint Adalbert’s death. Yet somebody had to take the first step on the long journey of converting the Prussians. Someone first had to hear “No” a thousand times before someone unknown, much later, ever heard “Yes.” Adalbert heard “No” first and died for it. His body absorbed the blows so that other bodies could walk safely. His suffering and death proved that he, an educated man, was just as sturdy as the rugged men he sought to convert, and so was worthy of adding the title of martyr to that of bishop and monk.

Saint Adalbert, we ask that you intercede before God to make all missionaries as courageous as you were, willing to place themselves in difficult situations for the good of the Church. By your example, may we be brave witnesses to the fact that death is sometimes preferable to life.

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April 21: Saint Anselm, Bishop and Doctor
c. 1033–1109
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

His pen pierced the blue sheet above, revealing God

Few bishops have been canonized as saints since the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The earlier history of the Church is, however, replete with saintly bishops. In the patristic era, in the first few centuries after Christ, a vast constellation of saintly bishops shined on the Church. Today’s saint was a scholar bishop in the mold of the educated churchmen of an earlier time. Saint Anselm was a world-class thinker, a politically aware defender of the Church’s rights, a contemplative monk, a faithful son of the pope, and the greatest philosopher of the eleventh century.

Saint Anselm entered the Monastery of Bec in Normandy, France, as a young man and quickly impressed his superiors with his character and incisive mind. He was elected prior, then abbot, at a young age. He was a deeply prayerful abbot who was close to his monks and who hated to be away from the cloister. The monastery had many dealings with England due to its close proximity to that country, though, so Anselm travelled there regularly. These visits eventually led to his appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm spent many years as archbishop in conflict with English civil power over who had the authority to “invest,” or empower, a bishop with the symbols of office at his installation Mass. The lay investiture controversy was a long simmering dispute throughout Europe. It was eventually resolved in favor of the Church’s right to invest its bishops with crozier, miter, and ring.

Much more than his role as a pastor in church-state conflicts, Saint Anselm’s most enduring legacy is as a philosopher and theologian. Thinking was his avocation even as the monastery was his vocation. Anselm’s famous definition of theology as “Faith seeking understanding” has guided centuries of Christian thinkers. Anselm was a working intellectual who produced erudite works on a range of complex subjects. He is the originator, in particular, of the ontological argument for the existence of God. The argument is ontological (or just “logical”) in that it is not empirical (scientifically verifiable). It does not argue from outward in, starting with external, observable evidence and then moving toward internal conclusions. The argument is powered, instead, by the raw strength of reason itself. As an example of a reason-driven argument, no one needs to search the world over for square circles to conclude that square circles don’t exist. Circles are round, by definition. And no one needs to interview every single bachelor to know that a bachelor is male. A bachelor is, by definition, male. Similarly, the very definition of God, Anselm’s holds, is proof that God exists.

Anselm argued that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined. Supposing that the mind can imagine nothing greater than God, and further supposing that what exists in reality is greater than what exists only in the mind, then God must exist in reality. God’s non-existence is, then, logically impossible. This argument assumes that the maximum, or upper limit, to what the mind can attribute to God is self-contained in the meaning of the word God. No such upper limit exists in defining pain, temperature, length, or numbers,
for example. A longer line can always be drawn, a greater number imagined, a sharper pain experienced, or a hotter temperature described. But to imagine a being greater than God would just be to imagine God more fully. As long as the mind’s concept of God is rational, then the argument is convincing. Anselm’s nuanced argument has provoked centuries of sophisticated commentary.

Anselm’s life began among the Alps of today’s Northern Italy, a land of jagged, snow-encrusted mountains which stand over the green valleys below. One night the boy Anselm, asleep in his remote valley home, had a vision. He was called to the court of God on a high summit. Ascending to the very peak of a mountain, he entered the presence of the royal court and sat at the feet of the Master. God asked the boy who he was and where he came from. Anselm answered well and was rewarded with sweet bread from heaven. And then he woke up. Anselm never forgot this dream. He recounted it, in detail, many decades later, to the fellow monk who wrote his first biography. Saint Anselm’s mind never really came down from that high court he first visited in a childhood dream. He walked in the highest ranges, above the clouds, hiking from summit to summit, his pen piercing the blue sky to gaze directly into the realm above.

We ask your intercession, Saint Anselm, to help our faith to understand its object. You did not leave man’s sense of wonder unchallenged but sought to organize human thought to meet the challenge of God. Help all thinkers to be open to finding as much as searching.

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Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
c. 33 A.D.
The first Sunday after the first full moon that falls on, or after, March 21
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White or Gold

Checkmate!

If you want to discover what’s really going on in a story, follow the women. Curious about how the plot of a book, movie, or show is going to resolve itself? Follow the female characters, because the men...and the rest of the story...will soon catch up with them. It is a female disciple, Mary Magdalen, who takes our hand and walks us quickly onto the stage of Easter Sunday. Mary doesn’t go to the tomb on Saturday, because no work can be done on the Sabbath. So early Sunday, while it is still dark, Mary walks alone to the burial garden and sees something, or, more precisely, doesn’t see something, that changes world history. The dead body of Jesus is not on the slab! The stone is rolled away! The tomb is empty! Mary Magdalen is witness one, the first of billions to know that Jesus rose from the dead. Witness one then quickly runs to tell the good news to witness two and three, the Apostles Peter and John. Thus the first links in the endless chain of believers were forged, a strong, enduring chain that has wended its way through history until today.

Relegating Jesus’ miracles to the bin of apocryphal but consoling stories, many moderns argue Christ’s most enduring legacy is the verifiable good He did for His fellow men. Yet the Gospels don’t tell us that Jesus went around doing good. They tell us He went around doing miracles. Jesus doesn’t help an old woman carry a load up a hill. He doesn’t dig His hand deep into His pocket and spare some change. Jesus doesn’t offer words of comfort to the sick; He heals the sick. Jesus doesn’t jump into the sea to save the drowning Peter; He walks on the water. Jesus didn’t volunteer in a soup kitchen; He miraculously multiplied bread and fish and distributed food to the masses. And Jesus didn’t save people from the danger of death; He raised them from the dead. Jesus temporarily resuscitated three people, all of whom later died, before He resurrected Himself forever. There was nothing dreamy about the Resurrection. Real people with real names in a real place saw the Resurrected Jesus with real eyes. Easter celebrates the miracle of all miracles, the greatest unexpected result of all time, the indispensable genesis event of Western Civilization.

So today we raise a toast to a fresh spring morning two thousand years ago. In a garden moist with dew, with small birds chirping and flowers’ bending toward the dawning sun, in a small, darkened hollow cut into the rock, a dead man, icy cold to the touch, zapped to life. He achingly rose from His stone slab and walked slowly toward the low entrance. He rolled away a heavy stone and stepped out into a new world where death was no longer the master. The ageless, see-saw battle between life and death was resolved in favor of the more powerful. Checkmate! The mind wanders at the beauty of it all.

The story is told of the conception of twins. In their first weeks of life they stretch and groan and grow. They are happy to be alive, to be together. They squirm and jostle and explore their cramped watery world. They are curious. They see a life cord tethering them to someone greater and are overjoyed. “How great is our mother’s love that she shares her life with us.” Weeks turn into months in their warm amniotic bath. The twins shift and change. “What does this mean?” Twin One asks. “It means that our life in the womb is ending,” Twin Two responds. “But I don’t want to leave the womb! I am happy here. I want to stay here forever, close to our mother!” “But we have no choice,” Twin Two responds again. “Besides, maybe...just maybe, there is life after birth.” Twin One: “But how can that be? The sac will break, the cord will be severed, and we’ll be cut off from our source of life. And besides, there’s evidence that others were here before us, and none has ever come back to tell us that there is life after birth. No, this is the end.” Twin Two begins to despair, “If life in the womb ends in death, what’s its purpose? It’s meaningless! Maybe...maybe we don’t even have a mother...maybe we just made her up.” Twin One: “But we must have a mother. How else did we get here? How else do we stay alive?”

And so the last days in the womb were filled with questioning and deep fear about the future. The moment of birth came at an hour they did not expect. The twins were emotional, wondering about the unknown, uncertain if they would ever see each other, or their mother, again. The transition was painful. They struggled. They heard screams. All that they knew disappeared. And then… light! Shocking bright whiteness. Their eyelids slowly peeled from their skin, and they gazed in confused wonder at a new world around them. Their life-source, their great mother, wept when they were placed in her arms. They could feel her love radiating into them. The twins were in an unknown world that calmed every fear, that exceeded their wildest dreams. Their eyes had not seen and their ears had not heard anything like this before. Their end was just their beginning. They were overcome and could do only one thing—cry out for joy.

Risen Lord, strengthen our faith so that we overcome all doubt, and place our trust in Your gift of life beyond the grave. May Your resurrection from the dead inflame in us an ardent desire to be holy in this life so that we can live with You, Mary, and all the saints in the next.

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Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)
c. 33 A.D.
Triduum; Liturgical Color: Red

No one knew love looked like this

One of the most famous Greek sculptures in the world, a larger-than-life marble statue of a female, reigns over a monumental staircase in the Louvre. A soft, unfelt breeze ripples through the thin, flowing sheets that wrap her frame. Two expansive, articulated wings sweep elegantly back from her torso, giving the impression that she has just floated down from on high and landed softly on the prow of an invisible ship. Though now headless, the statue’s sense of movement is so vivid that one can still “see” her neck craning, her jaw jutting, and her eyes looking carefully downward as she settles to ground. She moves and yet she is still. She is “Winged Victory,” Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

Victory in battle, conquest in war, and success in sport are typically celebrated with a blast of trumpets, gold medals hung around the neck, ticker tape parades, a crowning with laurels, or the placing of an elegant statue like “Winged Victory” to serenely personify triumph over one’s enemies. Jesus Christ changed all that. He changed what victory looked like. Jesus climbed a different podium to win a different type of victory over man’s greatest enemy. On Good Friday, the God of the Living descended into the depths of human experience to conquer death. His victory parade was the carrying of the Cross on His tender shoulders up the hill of Calvary, where His hands were nailed to a splintery timber. He was raised on high by centurions for mockery, not exaltation. He then died a slow, agonizing death as His thorax sunk lower and lower and His diaphragm sucked less and less air into His lungs. It was not fast and clean. It took three hours. No one knew it at the time, but this was the new look of love in the Christian age, this was the new victory pose. Not laurels, but thorns. Not trumpets, but screams. Not medals, but scars. On Good Friday, Christ redefined victory. The victor is not prideful or strong, but humble, meek, wrecked, injured, and dead.

Pain in the non-Christian world, whether in the past or today, has no redemptive power or reward. It is just mindless, arbitrary suffering. At best, it is stoicism. In the person of Jesus Christ, God does not explain human suffering. Instead, He gives it meaning. And giving meaning to something is a type of answer, although not a solution. We do not go to a funeral to solve a problem. We go simply to be present, to share the family’s sorrow. Sharing is a powerful response. It is more satisfying and profound to give something meaning than to make it disappear. The answer of Jesus Christ to human suffering is to share it. His answer is empathy. He suffers, dies, and is buried. No one can point a finger at God and say, “You don’t know what it’s like!” He certainly does know what it’s like! Jesus could have saved the world by cutting Himself shaving. But He didn’t. He experienced more than was necessary, because it was more fitting that God share every single human experience except sin. God drinks the common cup of human suffering to the dregs.

Jesus did not die full of years. He died young, like many tragic heroes. Christ’s death gives hope to all who are preyed upon by loneliness, depression, fear, illness, anxiety, confusion, sin, and shame. In His death, Jesus does not just tell us but shows us that all these things can be conquered when united to Him. Jesus did not leave us a book. He left us a life. And that life continues to be shared with us in word and sacrament, in the fullest possible way, in the Catholic Church. God did not die on the Cross so that artists could sculpt Him. God died for a higher reason. He died for us. In Christ, the gift and the giver, the priest and the sacrifice, merge, and the result is life. As in marriage, so also in the Trinity, self-gift merges in generative love and creates life. So we etch that powerful reminder of Christ’s life-generating gift of self—the Crucifix—into our tombstones and place it high in our churches. This universal symbol of redemptive love even hangs from fine chains on our necks. In hoc signo vinces. Christ is our new winged Victory, not with two glorious wings spreading out in a proud gesture of triumph, but with His two thin bloody arms pinned to the Cross. He hangs there in agony, gasping for air, and heroically waits for Sunday to come.

Crucified Lord, in Your passion and death, You walked for us the hard path to new life. You exited life through the door of death and so give us hope that the end is the beginning, that loss is gain, that defeat is victory, and that death is life.

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Thursday of Holy Week (Holy Thursday)
c. 33 A.D.
Triduum: Liturgical Color: White

No last will and testament has been as heeded as Christ’s

From the moment Christ first uttered the words at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday evening, the Church has never ceased to be faithful to them: “Do this in memory of me.” These words of a man about to die, if not a dying man, were a commandment more than a request, marching orders more than a mission statement. And everyone in that upper room understood exactly what He meant. No last will and testament of any man has ever been as faithfully fulfilled as these last words of Christ. What Christ asked to be done has been done, and continues to be done, every day, in every country, throughout the world, by every single priest who stands at an altar and recites the words of consecration in persona Christi.

The world has never moved on from Christ and never will. He is not in the world’s rear-view mirror. He is here, He is present, He is alive. And in every tight corner of the globe, from a tidy Polish village to a rambling Filipino city, from a Palestinian monastery hugging a sun-baked cliff to an Argentinian parish in a sprawling suburb, the Mass makes Him real because it is done in memory of Him. Literally every minute of every day, Mass is celebrated across the globe in a ceaseless offering to God the Father. “From the rising of the sun to its setting,” in a thousand tongues, priests bend slightly over their chalices and the white linens covering their altars and carefully repeat a chain of words in a cadence known to all the faithful: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it… Take this all of you, and drink from it…This is my Body… This is my Blood.” No words are more familiar. None! Not Shakespeare’s, not Caesar’s, not Lincoln’s. The everlasting words of the cross-cultural and cross-generational Christ simply have no equal.

If we expect from the Church the sacraments, we will never be disappointed. If we receive from the Church more than the sacraments, we should rejoice. The Last Supper fulfills and completes the Jewish Passover sacrifice ordered by God of Moses and the Jews in Egypt. The Last Supper, at the same time, prefigures in an unbloody way the physical sacrifice Christ would make on the morrow on the hill of Calvary. In the Last Supper, Christ also gives priests the perennial form for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Last Supper, then, is a composite act of Jewish and Christian ritual, of Old and New Testament theology, of historical and spiritual realities all packed into one dense liturgical act which the Church presents anew at every Mass. The Mass is the Christian work of art par excellence. It is the public act which never stops showing. It is the magnet which pulls mankind through the doors of thousands of churches every morning, noon, and night.

We do this in memory of Him because God deserves worship as a matter of justice, not charity. We do this in memory of Him because He ordered us to do so. We do this in memory of Him because it prefigures what we will hopefully do in heaven for eternity. And we do this in memory of Him for a thousand million reasons locked in the quiet places of a thousand million hearts: For Jill to come back home. So that Robert survives the war. In thanksgiving for a good husband. So that a pain in the gut not be what it might be. In gratitude for the rain that saved the crops. At a king’s crowning, a convict’s death, or the bond of marriage. For the shocked just after the martyrs’ mangled bodies were dragged over the red sand out of the arena. In thanksgiving because my father did not die of cancer, and in remembrance of my cousin who did. For the fireman who couldn’t find his way out of the building, for the barren woman, for the anniversary of an aged couple, or for the nation on its birthday. There is no end of reasons. Month after month, year after year, century after century, until the sands of time run out, the voice of the Lord on Holy Thursday echoes over the waters and down the halls of time: “Do this in memory of me.” *

Lord Jesus Christ, Your total physical gift of self on Good Friday began internally at the Last Supper. May the faithful often profit from Your priestly ministry by receiving Your body and blood consecrated on Your sacred altars by those who share in Your one priesthood.

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April 13: Saint Martin I, Pope and Martyr
c. 590–655
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

Exiled, abandoned, starving, a Pope dies for sound theology

After being elected the Bishop of Rome in 649, today’s saint called a local Council which established the correct theology of the Church regarding the two wills of Christ. For this teaching and its broad dissemination, Martin was abducted in Rome by emissaries of the Byzantine Emperor Constans II, brought to Constantinople, and humiliated. Martin refused to retract or bend to the Emperor’s incorrect theology, which denied that Christ had a human will. Martin was imprisoned, publicly flogged, maltreated, condemned for treason, and exiled from Constantinople to the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. And there the Pope died—naked, starving, forgotten, and alone—far from Rome, in the year 655, a victim of bad theology and the last pope, so far, venerated as a martyr.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had synthesized centuries of theological debate by teaching, authoritatively, that the divine nature of the Second Person of the Trinity and the human nature of Jesus were distinct but united in the one person of Jesus Christ. This merging of natures in one person is called the hypostatic union. The Son of God, then, truly took flesh and experienced all things, save sin, that a man experiences. So when Jesus said, “I am thirsty” (Jn 19:28), He didn’t mean to say, “Just my human nature is thirsty.” And when His majestic voice echoed off the stone walls of Bethany calling, “Lazarus, come out!” (Jn 11:43), He didn’t mean to say, “The divine nature inside of me, and only the divine nature, says ‘Lazarus, Come Out!’”

Yet Eastern Christians, primarily in Egypt and Syria, clung to a Monophysite, or one nature, theology of Jesus Christ long after Chalcedon had settled the matter. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 attempted, unsuccessfully, to pull the Monophysites back into the orbit of Chalcedon. By the 600s, tensions between Chalcedonians and Monophysites were a political problem for the Byzantine empire. So some Eastern theologians, supported by the Emperor, looked for common ground and proposed a one-willed Christ, instead of a one-natured Christ. This one-will heresy is called Monothelitism (monos = one; thelos = will). The issue of Christ’s will(s) had never been formally resolved, so the Emperor hoped a one-willed, instead of a one-natured, Christ would placate the Monophysites and unite his theologically diverse subjects.

Chalcedon’s teaching on Christ’s two natures was ontological, or just logical, and did not explain how a person operates with dual intellects and wills. Monothelitists argued that if Christ’s two natures could seamlessly unite in one person, then so could His two wills. There was no human will in Christ, the argument went, because it was totally subsumed into the mightier divine will. But Pope Martin and others knew that this was theologically impossible, since a Christ without a functioning human will would have been a zombie, a ghost of a man. Nor could one argue that Jesus had one will divided into a divine and a human sphere, as Jesus was not a schizophrenic with a split identity.

Martin’s theology of the two wills was vindicated after his death when it was explicitly defined by the Third Council of Constantinople in 681. This Council taught Christ’s human will was “in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will.” That is, Christ’s two wills were separate in their natures but freely united in their object. How do two wills inside of one person enter into communion? In the same way that two wills in two different persons enter into communion. Each will gives free and independent assent to a principle, idea, or truth shared with the other will. The two wills retain their independence but freely unite in their assent to a common value. Thus Jesus’ human will, in total freedom, submitted to the will of the Son of God.

During his captivity, Martin was hurt by the indifference which the Church of Saint Peter in Rome paid to one of their own. Martin was also deeply pained when a new Pope was elected though he was still alive. It is every pope’s duty to preserve the unity and integrity of the Church by preserving the unity and integrity of Christ. Martin did just that. The fruits of Martin’s martyrdom advanced theology toward its correct conclusion on Christ’s two wills in the decades after he died, even though poor Martin himself has been largely forgotten. His remains were returned to the Eternal City after his death and he now rests in peace somewhere under the marble floor of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Pope Saint Martin I, through your intercession before the Father in Heaven, fortify all teachers and leaders of the Church to remain steadfast in the truth, to advocate for the truth, and to suffer for the truth, no matter the personal cost.

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April 11: Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
1030–1079
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Poland

Royal fury fells a bishop

For many centuries, the coronation ritual of a king was considered to be a Sacrament of the Church. Such was the importance of the king’s role in protecting and promoting the faith in his realm that his enthronement was embellished with a liturgical pomp and splendor similar to the ordination rite of a bishop. The sacramental character of a king’s coronation was not reflected, however, in the ritual by which a woman became a queen. Only a man could be crowned, in the same way that only a man could receive Holy Orders. The parallel duties which kings and bishops owed to both Church and Kingdom sometimes led to irresolvable conflicts. Bishops resented kings infringing upon ecclesiastical affairs, while kings resented bishops meddling in civil matters. Since civil and religious life was, until very modern times, utterly intermingled in most cultures, the high tensions generated by the nearly co-equal powers and responsibilities of kings and bishops inevitably led to bloodshed.

The blood of today’s saint was spilled precisely due to such high tension. Saint Stanislaus was the Bishop of Krakow, Poland, in the century just after that nation’s baptism after the conversion of its king. Saint Stanislaus had various and serious disputes with Poland’s King Bolesław II: over property, over a war, and over the King’s moral failings. This led to Stanislaus excommunicating Bolesław, in seeming support of the King’s enemies. Although the precise details of this King-Bishop conflict have been lost to history, it is clear that Bolesław was outraged by Stanislaus’ sanction and labelled him a traitor. When the King entered Krakow’s Cathedral for Mass, the service was immediately halted due to his excommunication. Bolesław went into a fury and actively sought Stanislaus’ blood. The henchmen the King sent to assassinate Bishop Stanislaus, however, refused to carry out the deed. So King Bolesław entered through the doors of the chapel outside the city where the Bishop was saying Mass and cut Stanislaus down himself. Bishop Stanislaus was immediately venerated as a martyr, his relics were transferred to the Cathedral, and he was canonized a saint a century and a half after his death. For centuries, Polish kings were crowned at the splendid tomb of the martyr in the central nave of Krakow’s Cathedral. Saint Stanislaus is one of the patron saints of Poland, being especially venerated in the Archdiocese of Krakow.

On November 1, 1946, a young Polish man named Karol Wojtyła, in love with God and country, was ordained a priest and celebrated his first Masses in Krakow’s Cathedral of Saint Stanislaus. Father Wojtyła went on to become the seventy-sixth Archbishop of Krakow. He later became a Cardinal and then Pope John Paul II. He is now a saint. Pope Saint John Paul II had a great devotion to Saint Stanislaus and often prayed at his tomb. The Pope even planned his first pastoral visit to Poland to coincide exactly with the nine-hundredth anniversary of the saint’s martyrdom. John Paul II’s trip missed the exact anniversary, due to a lack of cooperation from the communist government, but the pope didn’t miss the year. 1979 turned out to be a pivotal year for Poland. The papal pilgrimage unleashed social movements that brought communism to its knees a decade later. The memory of long-ago Saint Stanislaus, then, played a remote role in conquering an unjust modern government.

Many details about the life of Saint Stanislaus are lost in the fog of the past. Only a basic outline of his life is possible. But his heroic example, precisely as a bishop, gave Karol Wojtyła a model to follow in his own life as a Polish bishop and Pope in far different circumstances of civil and ecclesiastical tension than those of the eleventh century. We can speculate that on May 13, 1981, when Pope John Paul II was shot and almost killed by a state-sponsored assassin, he thought of the state-sponsored attack which ended Saint Stanislaus’ life so many centuries before. Civil and Church power still clash, even in modern times, as the 1980 murder of the El Salvadoran Archbishop Saint Oscar Romero also proves. Pope John Paul II survived, thank God, perhaps through the intercession of the great patron of Poland we celebrate today.

Saint Stanislaus, you fearlessly confronted those who threatened the well-being of the Church, and so gave a heroic example of martyrdom to an entire nation. Help all who seek your intercession to be as brave and forthright as you in the face of threats and adversity.

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Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
c. 33 A.D.
The Sunday before Easter
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: Red

Beginning with the end we understand His greatness

One way to understand a book, or to watch a movie, is to begin at the end. To read, or watch, backwards allows every character and plot twist to be interpreted in light of their conclusions. Working backwards removes much of the drama and tension from a story, of course, but it also makes the story perfectly intelligible. No slow unwinding of the plot, no “whodunit,” no surprise around the corner, and no unexpected deaths. Skipping to the end makes the entire narrative clear, with prior knowledge infusing prior meaning into the story as it unfolds.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are essentially Passion narratives with extended introductions. There is plenty of evidence that the end of Christ’s life, particularly his last seventy-two hours, were well remembered by His disciples, the events being repeated in great detail until they were ultimately written down. The Evangelists eventually supplemented these often-repeated Passion narratives with further details about Christ’s life which had occurred long before Holy Week. These prior narratives are often inconsistent across the Gospels, emphasize diverse aspects of Christ’s life, and omit or add details in a seemingly arbitrary manner. What are very consistent, however, are the Passion narratives. Their vivid details are, without doubt, the heart and soul of the story of Jesus Christ.

On Palm Sunday we begin with the end. We read our way backwards. It is not possible for any Christian to think of Jesus Christ divorced from how His earthly life ended. Even the earliest Christian writings were composed from a post-Resurrection perspective. The “real” Jesus of history did not have miracles placed on Him like ornaments on a Christmas tree. His miracles were not later adornments hung on His human frame to lend Him credibility. The “real” Jesus is not the simple carpenter lurking in the shadows behind the Christ of Faith created by later generations. There are scant biblical references to Jesus’ occupation as a carpenter, or to His simple and humble existence in a provincial town. There is a massive amount of biblical evidence, on the contrary, that Jesus suffered, died, and rose from the dead. And this biblical evidence is buttressed by an abundance of postbiblical testimony and the universal witness of an army of Apostles, saints, and martyrs.

All of this means that the “real” Jesus is the Christ of faith! The “real” Jesus did suffer, die, and rise from the dead! The “real” Jesus is not found in the subtext of the Gospels—He is found in the text of the Gospels! And those texts are indisputably ancient. In other words, the narrative read at Mass on Palm Sunday is the oldest, truest, and most well-remembered portion of one of the most fully preserved and extraordinary documents from the ancient world—the New Testament.

Our faith is rooted in history, a miraculous history. The Passion of Jesus Christ is not a parable, analogy, or metaphor. It is not a story meant to teach us a lesson apart from its facts. It is not a morality play whose actors mean to teach a lesson. The Passion of Christ is theologically significant because it is historically true. If it were not historically true, it would have no significance beyond its power to inspire as a story. But every culture already has myths to inspire its people, or at least mythical figures whose superhuman qualities model greatness. The story of Christ is so much more. It is the true story of a God-man who was betrayed by a friend, suffered calumny from His enemies, was publicly humiliated, made to carry the instrument of His own execution, and then was left to die, naked on a rough-hewn tree. This story is not sad by analogy to another story. It is sad in and of itself. This is the story we hear every Palm Sunday. This is how a great man’s life came to an end. It is also the story of how the Son of God conquered death and opened the gates of heaven to all who not only believe in Him but who belong to Him through the Catholic Church.

Lord of the Passion, You suffered calumny and humiliation, You bore the Cross and did not complain. Intercede before Your heavenly Father that we may bear whatever crosses we must with fortitude. With Your grace, Lord, we can emulate You. Without Your grace, we are no better than Godless pagans, in search of frivolous signs to lend meaning to life.

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April 7: Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, Priest
1651–1719
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Christian teachers

Great faith, charm, and skill opened school doors to millions

A cowboy mounts a horse and lassos a calf to show the next cowboy how to wrangle. A fisherman tosses a net into the ocean so that his son learns to put food on the table for dinner. And a good teacher teaches an apprentice how to teach. The passing on of professional knowledge doesn’t happen by accident. Those who are skilled teach those who are less so. Today’s saint, John Baptiste de la Salle, was a lifelong educator, an excellent teacher who had innovative and effective ideas on how to educate youth. Most importantly, he also had faith, perseverance, and the administrative skills to bring his educational vision to fulfillment in the face of stiff resistance.

A good teacher must do much more than master content. He must do much more than manage his classroom. A good teacher is an artist who combines mastery of the material with psychological insights, discipline, charm, preparedness, and love, all in careful equilibrium. At the time Saint Jean Baptiste began to teach teachers, the custom in France was to teach children Latin. And once they had learned Latin sufficiently, the custom was to teach the students every other subject in Latin. Lower class, poorer children, were often not taught at all or only for a few brief years. Jean Baptiste wanted all children to have access to a good education, for their schooling to be free of charge, and for classes to be in French. These ideals, combined with his own charm, holiness, and refined savoir faire, drew many idealistic young men to his side. They wanted to be teachers too, and to dedicate themselves to the Lord. Originally, Jean Baptiste was reluctant to live with, and train, men who belonged to a social class far below his own. He remarked that his first teacher trainees ranked below his own servants. In the end, though, Jean overcame his reluctance and innate prejudice and threw himself wholeheartedly into the educational work that would make him famous.

So many young men gathered around him that Jean Baptiste founded an Order which was, after his death, officially recognized by the Church—the Christian Brothers. Just when his educational apostolates needed funds to expand, Jean Baptiste inherited a fortune from his parents. He was tempted to use the money to open new schools but instead donated it to the poor, deciding to rely only upon providence for the support of his schools. The members of his Order were intentionally not ordained to the Priesthood so that sacramental responsibilities would not distract them from teaching. His Christian Brothers also had no obligation to pray the Divine Office (the Breviary) and were prohibited from physical mortifications beyond the Church’s norms on fasting. Jean felt that teaching well was itself a mortification which required heroic self discipline. Jean wanted nothing less than ambassadors of Christ to the young, not just teachers. All of this was novel for its time—a body of men with no ordained members dedicated exclusively to education was unheard of.

For all his successes in opening new schools, however, Jean Baptiste had numerous setbacks. Over many years he was verbally attacked, sued in court, and vilified by some religious Orders and clerics. They saw his free schools and universal educational goals as a threat to their own local monopolies on education. Jean Baptiste dealt with all of this with admirable courage, humility, and magnanimity. It’s not easy times that make one great. It’s hardship, adversity, and persecution. Jean Baptiste’s trials made a good man into a great man, and a great man into a saint. He fasted continually, mortified himself harshly, and traded his early life of comfort for hard scrabble poverty. After relinquishing the heavy burden of his Order’s leadership and administration, Jean was so obedient to his successor that the new superior joked that Jean would not die unless he was given permission to do so. The Counter-Reformation fervor behind so many great saints of sixteenth-century Italy and Spain arrived late to France, but it arrived no less ardent. Jean Baptiste was one of its greatest exemplars. The Christians Brothers peaked at over sixteen thousand members in the 1950s and are still active today in numerous countries, operating over a thousand educational institutions. The legacy of their dynamic, innovative, and indefatigable founder continues to thrive.

Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, through your intercession, give all teachers of the Faith the perseverance, grace, and love they need to teach the uneducated, especially the poor and those who struggle to learn. Your determination inspires. Your heavenly assistance guarantees fruitfulness.

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April 5: Saint Vincent Ferrer, Priest
c. 1350–1419
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Patron Saint of builders

He slept on the floor, fasted endlessly, performed miracles, and converted thousands
Saint Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest, founded the Order of Preachers in the early thirteenth century. He wanted to establish an Order of priests who were well educated in theology, adept at preaching the truths they lived, and who had more flexibility than a monastery-bound priest to travel and evangelize. Over a century later, today’s saint was born in Saint Dominic’s own country, joined the Dominican Order, and carried out in the most dynamic and complete way the essential vision of Saint Dominic. Saint Vincent Ferrer was well educated and a powerfully effective preacher. He travelled almost without cease throughout Western Europe, impacting the lives of untold thousands of people through his example of holiness, his supernatural gifts, and his preaching. Saint Vincent was the ideal Dominican.

Vincent was born in Valencia, on the southern coast of Spain, to an English father and a Spanish mother. He was named in honor of Saint Vincent Martyr, who met his death in the same city in the fourth century. Vincent received an excellent education and earned a doctorate in theology at a young age. It was said that he read exclusively Scripture for three full years and had committed much of it to memory. He taught philosophy and then took up advanced studies, in Barcelona, of Islam and Judaism. Spain had a sizeable minority of Jews, and Muslims still controlled large portions of Southern Spain in Saint Vincent’s day. So these studies were not merely theoretical. Saint Vincent converted a large number of Spanish Jews and interacted with Spanish Muslims on a regular basis.

The ecclesial event which most marked our saint’s life was the Western Schism of 1378–1418. This painful episode saw two, and eventually three, cardinals claim to be the validly elected pope. This open wound pained the Church for two generations. Some Europeans lived their whole lives knowing only a bitterly divided papacy. The Western Schism proved so intractable a problem, and caused such scandal, that it can be argued that it was the remote spark of the Reformation which caught fire through Northern Europe about one hundred years later. Such were the complexities of the Schism that Saint Vincent found himself on opposite sides of the issue from Saint Catherine of Siena and various other deeply committed Catholics.

Our saint spent the better part of his life as a tireless itinerant preacher traveling along the highways and the byways of Spain, France, and Italy, drawing enormous crowds, inviting and inspiring them to a deeper life in Christ. Near the end of his life, Vincent’s effective preaching played a decisive role at the Council of Constance in 1414. He convinced the Spanish King to cease supporting the very pope who Vincent had previously backed in the Schism. Vincent was man enough to see that his candidate had become an obstacle to Church unity. Vincent thus lived a hard lesson in humility when his man was abandoned, excommunicated, and judged by history to have been an antipope. Saint Vincent fittingly died on one of his incessant missionary journeys, far from home in Northern France, at the age of sixty-nine. His reputation for holiness was such that he was canonized a saint in 1455, within the lifetime of many who had heard him preach.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, you lived a life of fervor and dedication to the truths of the Catholic faith, imparting the education you received to others through your witness and preaching. Come to the aid of all teachers and preachers to emulate your virtues with your same zeal for the house of the Lord.

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April 4: Saint Isidore, Bishop and Doctor
c. 560–636
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the internet

There was little he did not know

The vast colonial ambitions of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries went hand in hand with equally epic Catholic missionary efforts. This unity of purpose, these shared goals, with civil and ecclesiastical resources and powers working in concert, was the natural consequence of a country with a total unity of identity. Today’s saint was a singularly important, if remote, source for that powerful concurrence of Iberian theology, culture, art, and language which, after centuries of gestation, became the Spanish juggernaut that conquered and evangelized a hemisphere in the 1500s.

As a youth, Isidore received an excellent classical education in the Roman tradition, similar to the classical learning Saint Augustine imbibed two centuries before him and utilized to such great effect. Yet Isidore not only learned a great deal, he also remembered it and was uncommonly dedicated to his intellectual pursuits, writing numerous weighty tomes. The breadth and depth of his learning were without equal in his time. It was simply said that Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, knew everything. He is considered by many to be the last of the Latin Fathers of the Church, those early Christian theologians whose writings are the gold standard for all subsequent theologians.

His knowledge was put to good use. As the Roman world, which had dominated Spain for so many centuries, slowly crumbled away in the fifth and sixth centuries, Visigothic (Western Goths) tribes overran Spain. Like their Gothic cousins in Central Europe, the Visigoths were Arians, and Arians were heretics. They denied that Christ was consubstantial with the Father and accepted all that flowed from that erroneous starting point. Saint Isidore played an important role in the assimilation of the Visigoths to Nicene Catholicism after one of their Kings abandoned Arianism. Theological unity having been achieved, the old Roman culture of Iberia slowly blended with Visigothic culture to form something new—Spain. Saint Isidore was, then, a nation builder, because he was first a Church builder. And he built the Church not just through his massive erudition but also through effective headship in calling and guiding Church synods, by establishing liturgical unity through the Mozarabic Rite, and by encouraging scholarship and learning through the Cathedral schools he mandated in every diocese.

Saint Isidore’s most enduring work is his Etymologies (or Origins), an enormous compendium of universal knowledge. It was the standard encyclopedia in Medieval libraries and continued to be utilized as late as the Renaissance. No author’s manuscripts were more widely copied in the Middle Ages than Isidore’s. Although Saint Isidore was not a creative thinker in the same class as Saint Augustine or the Eastern Fathers of the Church, his mind was such a vast storehouse of knowledge that Pope Saint John Paul II named him the Patron Saint of the Internet.

After a long reign as Archbishop of Seville, in his last days Saint Isidore prepared for death by wearing sackcloth and ashes, confessing his faults to his people in church, and asking their forgiveness. He died in his late seventies in 636, just four years after Mohammed, the founder of Islam, died in Saudi Arabia. About seventy-five years after their deaths, Muslim armies crossed the strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and began the long conquest which obliterated the Visigoths. The Spanish reconquest of their nation would take centuries until, in 1492, the last Muslim stronghold, Granada, fell. Both sides were inspired by faith more than patriotism. Both sides fought. Both sides thought they were right. In the end, the nation Isidore created was the stronger and drove Mohammed’s heirs back over the waters to Africa. Isidore’s enormous legacy was a Catholic nation, and it prevailed.

Saint Isidore, you used your education and knowledge to great effect to evangelize a people. Help all who seek your intercession to unite their learning with zeal for the good of the Church and the many peoples it serves.

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April 2: Saint Francis of Paola, Hermit
1416–1507
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Calabria, mariners, and naval officers

He lived a perpetual Lent

The first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi were known as the “Mendicants from Assisi.” Yet as the group attracted men and women from all over Italy and beyond, a new name, not specific to Assisi, was needed. Saint Francis named his brotherhood the Ordo Fratrum Minorum (O.F.M.). This is typically translated from the Latin as the Order of Friars Minor, implying that there is an Order of Friars Major. A better translation might be the Order of Lesser Brothers. Saint Francis wanted himself, and all of his brothers, to be less in everything—less prideful, less well known, less wealthy, and less well nourished than anyone else.

Today’s saint, the Padre Pio of his era, was a holy priest from the town of Paola in Southern Italy. He was baptized as Francis by his parents when, after several years of going childless, they made a vow to name any son that might be born to them in the great saint’s honor. Francis of Paola was worthy of his namesake from a young age. His parents took special care with his religious upbringing and brought him to live for a year in a Franciscan monastery when Francis was just twelve. The young Francis developed a reputation for holiness even when just a teen. By the age of twenty, he was living as a hermit in a cave near Paola when local men began to gather around him. The fledgling group adopted the name “the Hermits of Brother Francis of Assisi,” a name later changed to the “Friars Minims,” or just “Minims,” meaning “less” or “least,” in the spirit of the “Lesser Brothers” that Saint Francis of Assisi had founded centuries before.

Francis of Paola desired humility, nothingness, and total self-abnegation. He and his followers lived a perpetual Lent. All Minims took the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But they also took a special fourth vow to abstain, all year long and all life long, from meat, eggs, butter, cheese, milk, and all dairy products. The fast never ended. This was mortification on a heroic scale. Vegetarianism, much less veganism, was a step beyond what Saint Francis of Assisi himself had lived. Saint Francis of Assisi ate what was set before him, including meat. He even criticized vegetarian brothers who refused meat, saying such an attitude questioned God’s providence and presumed the future, when a brother should instead gratefully accept whatever dish was placed on the table before him.
Francis of Paola’s veganism was united to a strict moral code, a community life built around the Sacraments, and a deep spirituality centered on Jesus Christ. To be “one with nature” does not mean to be morally ambiguous or to break with religious traditions. A diet should not be a creed. Saint Francis was organic in that he lived one with God, with nature, with his religious brothers, and with the Church. Francis was perennially concerned with the moral laxity of the Church of his era, and purposefully fasted and did penance in reparation for its sins. While Francis of Assisi lived austerely and suffered debilitating illnesses, he was nevertheless cheerful and animated in his dealings with others. No one ever accused Francis of Paola of being ebullient. He was a fully armed spiritual warrior of the most serious kind. He went barefoot. He slept on a board. He was a desert father without the sand.

After a very long life of fasting, prayer, miracle working, and wide fame for his holiness even outside of Italy, Saint Francis of Paola died in France. His order had by then spread throughout Europe. His reputation for sanctity was such that he was canonized in 1519, only twelve years after his death. In 1562 Protestant Calvinists in France unsealed his tomb and found his body incorrupt. They then desecrated the saint, scattering his remains. Saint Francis of Paola, after sacrificing everything in life, was not allowed to rest in peace. He was strewn about like trash, ensuring that only trace relics of him remained. Saint Francis wanted to be treated as the least of all. His desire was fulfilled both in life and in death.

Saint Francis of Paola, you lived an integrated life deeply united to God, nature, and your fellow man. Intercede before the Trinity in heaven on our behalf, assisting us to grow closer to God through death to self, through prayer, and through a deep attachment to Christ.

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March 25: Annunciation of the Lord
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

The flutter of a wing, a rustling in the air, a voice, and the future began to begin

The Feast of the Annunciation is the reason why we celebrate Christmas on December 25. Christmas comes exactly nine months after the Archangel Gabriel invited the Virgin Mary to be the Mother of God, an event we commemorate on March 25. The dating of these Feast Days, although interesting, is of minor importance compared to their theological significance. It is fruitful to reflect upon the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary as the antecedent to the explosion of joy, caroling, gift giving, eating, drinking, love and family unity that surrounds the birth of the Savior. Perhaps Mary had a sort of private and internal Christmas at the moment of the Annunciation. Maybe she felt the fullness of the world’s Christmas joy inside of her own heart when she realized she had been chosen to be the Mother of God.

God could have become man in any number of creative ways. He could have incarnated Himself just as Adam was in the book of Genesis, by being formed from the clay and having the divine breath blown into his nostrils. Or God could have slowly backed down to earth on a tall golden ladder as a twenty-five-year-old man, ready to walk the highways and byways of Palestine. Or maybe God could have taken flesh in an unknown way and just been found, like Moses, floating in a basket by a childless young couple from Nazareth as they enjoyed a Sunday picnic along the Jordan River.

The Second Person of the Trinity chose, however, to become man like we all become man. In the same way that He would exit the world through the door of death before His Resurrection, as we all have to do, He also entered the world through the door of human birth. In the words of the early Church, Christ could not redeem what He did not assume. He redeemed everything because He took on human nature in all of its breadth, depth, complexity and mystery. He was like us in all things save sin.

The incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity was a self-emptying. It was God becoming small. Imagine a man becoming an ant while retaining his human mind and will. The man-turned-ant would appear to be like all the ants around him, and would participate in all of their ant activities, yet still think at a level far above them. There was no other way to do it. The man had to learn through becoming, not because insect life was superior to his own, but because it was inferior. Only through descending, only through experience, could the man learn what was below him. All analogies limp, but, in a similar way, the Second Person of the Trinity retained His infused divine knowledge while reducing Himself to a man and learning man life, doing man work, and dying a man death. By such a self-emptying, He dignified all men and opened to them the possibility of entering into His higher life in Heaven.

The Church’s tradition speculates that one reason the bad angels may have rebelled against God was the besetting sin of envy. They may have discovered that God chose to become man instead of the higher form of an angel. This envy would have been directed at the Virgin Mary as well, that Vessel of Honor and Ark of the Covenant who bore the divine choice. God not only became man, we must remember, but did so through a human being, one prepared from her conception to be perfect. March 25 is one of only two days of the year when we kneel at the recitation of the Creed at Mass. At the words “...by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man” all heads bow and all knees bend at the wonder of it. If the story of Christ is the greatest story ever told, today is its first page.

O Holy Virgin Mary, we ask your intercession to make us as generous as you in accepting the will of God in our lives, especially when that will is expressed in mysterious ways. May you be our example of a generous response to what God desires of us.

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March 23: Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo, Bishop
1538–1606
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Latin American Bishops and native people’s rights

He died in the field six thousand miles from home

Today’s saint was the second Archbishop of the second most important city in Spain’s Latin American empire in the 1500s. Lima, Peru, stood only behind Mexico City in importance to the Spanish Crown during the pinnacle of its colonial ambitions. So when Lima’s first Archbishop died in 1575, the King of Spain, not the Pope, searched for a suitable candidate to send over sea and land to replace him. The King found his man close at hand, and he was more than suitable to the task.

Turibius of Mogrovejo was a learned scholar of the law who held teaching and other posts in Spain’s complex of Church and civil courts. Yet for all his learning, piety, faith, and energy, there was one huge obstacle to him being a bishop. Turibius was not a priest. He was not even a deacon. He was a very good, albeit unmarried, layman. The arrangement for centuries between Spain and the Holy See was that the Spanish Crown chose bishops while the Pope approved, or rejected, them. So after the Pope approved the appointment, over the candidate’s fierce objections, Turibius received the four minor orders on four successive weeks, was ordained a deacon and then ordained a priest. He said his first Mass when he was over forty years old. About two years later, Turibius was consecrated as the new archbishop, and then sailed the ocean blue, arriving in Lima in May 1581.

Archbishop Turibius was extraordinarily dedicated to his episcopal responsibilities. He exhausted himself on years-long visits to the parishes of his vast territory, which included present day Peru and beyond. He acquainted himself with the priests and people under his care. He convoked synods (large Church meetings) to standardize sacramental, pastoral, and liturgical practice. He produced an important trilingual catechism in Spanish and two native dialects, learned to preach in these indigenous dialects himself, and encouraged his priests to be able to hear confessions and preach in them as well. Archbishop Turibius’ life also providentially intersected with the lives of other saints active in Peru at the same time, including Martin de Porres, Francisco Solano, and Isabel Flores de Oliva, to whom Turibius gave the name Rose when he confirmed her. She was later canonized as Saint Rose of Lima, the first saint born in the New World. Saints know saints.

Archbishop Turibius was a fine example of a counter-reformation bishop, except that he did not serve in a counter-reformation place. That is, Peru was not split by the Catholic versus Protestant theological divisions wreaking such havoc in the Europe of that era. Saint Turibius implemented the reforms of the Council of Trent, not to combat heretics, but to simply make the Church healthier and holier, Protestants or no Protestants. From this perspective, the reforms of Trent were not a cure but an antidote. If Turibius’ energy and holiness were motivated by any one thing besides evangelical fervor, it was his desire to make the Spanish colonists of Peru recover the integrity of their own baptisms. The indigenous population needed authentic examples of Christian living to respect and emulate, and few Spanish colonialists provided such models of right living. Saint Turibius’ greatest enemy, then, was simply original sin, which returns to the battlefield every time a baby is born.

After exhausting himself through total dedication to his responsibilities, Saint Turibius fell ill on the road and died at age sixty-seven in a small town far from home. His twenty-four years as Archbishop were a trial of strength. He had baptized and confirmed half a million souls, had trekked thousands of miles on narrow paths made for goats, had never neglected to say Mass, and did not accept any gifts in return for what he gave. Turibius was canonized in 1726 and named the Patron Saint of Latin American Bishops by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1983. Perhaps his unforeseen ordination explains his sustained fervor and drive. What came late was valued for having come at all. He bloomed late and bloomed beautifully, becoming the Spanish equivalent of his great contemporary, the Italian Saint Charles Borromeo.

If a visitor searches for the tomb of the saintly Archbishop in the Cathedral of Lima today, he will not find it. There are only fragments of bones in a reliquary. His reputation for holiness was immediate and his relics were distributed far and wide after his death. He is in death as widely shared as he was in life, all the faithful wanting just a piece of the great man. In January 2018, Pope Francis prayed before the relics of Saint Turibius in Lima and invoked his memory in a talk to Peru’s bishops. Saint Turibius did not, Pope Francis said, shepherd his diocese from behind a desk but was “a bishop with shoes worn out by walking, by constant travel, by setting out to preach the Gospel to all: to all places, on all occasions, without hesitation, reluctance, and fear.”

Saint Turibius, we invoke your intercession to inspire all who share the gospel, in whatever form, to do so with ardor, skill, and charity, using all the means at their disposal, as you so powerfully did in your own life and ministry.

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March 19: Saint Joseph, Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Universal Church, fathers, and a happy death

Jesus and Mary lived under his gentle, fatherly authority

The husband of Mary had a perfect spouse, untouched by original sin. He was also the foster father to a boy who was the Son of God and the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Yet Saint Joseph, the least perfect member of his household, was still the head of the family. Authority does not always flow from moral or intellectual superiority. Authority in the Church, in particular, is God given. Because God chooses a certain person to fulfill a task in His household of faith, that person acts with a divine mandate to teach, sanctify, and govern the people and things entrusted to him. Saint Joseph is a model for how God uses imperfect instruments to exercise His perfect will. God does not want robots, machines, or zombies to mindlessly implement His plan for mankind. The history of the Church is replete with imperfect tools who have caused scandal and division. Wayward leaders have cost the Church entire countries. Yet despite all these unworthy instruments in the hands of the Divine Master, truth and shelter and grace continue to be provided to those baptised into the Church, the Master’s family.

God wants personality. God wants us to have character. God’s angels, created spirits, lack the restrictions imposed by a human body. But in not having a body, the angels also lack what makes us unique. They lack the spit, vinegar, and spark that make a man a man. Every man is an enfleshed soul, the coming together of a body and a spirit. This coming together is not half soul and half body, like the mythical centaur with the body of a horse but the torso and head of a man. When copper and zinc are welded together, they are superficially united into one larger piece of metal. But the union is not total and does not create something new. The copper is still copper, and the zinc is still zinc. But when copper and zinc are each melted down and then mixed together, they form brass. Brass is not just the joining of copper to zinc but an entirely new material with unique properties. In a similar way, the union of a body and a soul together composes a human person with unique properties, a child of God unlike any other. The saints, in particular, were unique people often possessing hot tempers, forceful personalities, and unbending wills. They placed their uniqueness at the service of God and His Church and helped to change the world. God did not make, and does not want, just vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes vanilla. But no one likes only vanilla. God wants flavor.

Saint Joseph was, like all the saints, unique. He probably had personal traits which were less than perfect. These imperfections were absolutely no obstacle to Mary and Jesus obeying him, loving him, and ceding to his authority in the Holy Family of Nazareth. Mary and Jesus would have happily bent to the will of their God-given guide, despite their metaphysical, moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority.

Ancient traditions hold that Saint Joseph was considerably older than the Virgin Mary. Other traditions tell that he was married previously and that the “brothers” of Jesus were half-brothers from Saint Joseph’s previous marriage. Scripture tells us Jesus was a carpenter and was known as the “carpenter’s son” (Mt 13:55). Joseph may have been more precisely a builder who worked with the native stone so common to Palestinian construction. A Jewish ritual bath made of stone discovered beneath the church of Saint Joseph in Nazareth, a church which long tradition says was built over the Holy Family’s home, may be Joseph’s very own handiwork. A firm tradition teaches that Saint Joseph died long before his Son’s death. This is based not on biblical evidence but on the lack of it. It can be reasonably presumed that Saint Joseph would have been present at his Son’s crucifixion, as was Mary. Yet no mention is made of him being there. From this absence, biblical scholars have, from the beginning of the Church, surmised that Saint Joseph was  
by then dead. Thus, Saint Joseph is the Patron Saint of a Happy Death, because he presumably died with Jesus and the Virgin Mary at his side. This is how all of us want to die, with Christ holding our hand on one side of the bed and the Virgin Mary seated beside us on the other side. Saint Joseph died in the best of company. May we do so as well.

Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, guide all those under the care of their pastors to see not their imperfections but their God-given obligation to fulfill God’s plan. May your humble and faithful service inspire all fathers to lead their flocks with tenderness, wisdom, and strength.

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March 18: Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop and Doctor
c. 315–386
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday)

A wise and persevering bishop teaches his flock

It is the Christ-given obligation of every Catholic bishop, and the priests and deacons who share in his ministry, to teach, sanctify, and govern all people under their spiritual care. Regarding teaching, the letters of Saint Paul, as well as the writings of early Christian theologians, abundantly attest to the duty of the Apostles and their appointed successors to ensure that false doctrine never infects their flocks. The episcopal duty to teach was not a charism or gift of the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues, performing miracles, or healing the infirm. Teaching correct doctrine might be aided by the Holy Spirit, but it was first a mandate from the Lord Himself. To not teach, to teach incompletely, or to teach falsely, was for the shepherd to ignore, neglect, or scatter the sheep entrusted to his care and protection.

Today’s saint, Cyril, the Bishop of Jerusalem in the late fourth century, was a model teacher of right doctrine. He did not just teach teachers what to teach. He did not deputize or delegate others to teach on his behalf. He was the local Father, and, concerned for Christian formation in the household of faith, he personally taught the faith. How do we know this? Two reasons: First, because a holy woman named Egeria went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 380s. She documented her travels in a journal identifying the bishop, known to be Cyril, as the catechist in the domed mausoleum covering the tomb of Christ (part of today’s church of the Holy Sepulchre). Second, we know of Bishop Cyril’s talks because many of them were dutifully recorded and preserved, presumably because of their high caliber. The talks are rich, early testimony to the perennial, consistent doctrines of the Catholic Church.

Egeria states that the bishop of Jerusalem taught about Lent and Easter to catechumens and neophytes (the newly baptized) by going through the entire Bible and the Creed, article by article. He taught for three hours each day, every one of the forty days of Lent and during Easter week. In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote, “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” (Rm 10:14). Bishop Cyril admirably fulfilled his apostolic duty to teach and to proclaim so that others would know the Lord.

Among the profound teachings of Saint Cyril on the Mass, Baptism, and the Sacraments are his extended reflections on the nature of the Holy Eucharist. He is explicit: "Since He Himself has declared and said of the bread: This is My Body, who shall dare to doubt any more? And when He asserts and says: This is My Blood, who shall ever hesitate and say it is not His Blood?...Do not think it mere bread and wine, for it is the Body and Blood of Christ, according to the Lord's declaration" (St. Cyril Catechetical Lecture XXII). Cyril notes that if Christ could change water into wine, why could He not change wine into His own Blood? Reading these words of Cyril, it is perplexing that any modern Christian could doubt the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. As Saint John Henry Newman wrote: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Introduction, Ch. 5).

Bishop Cyril was deeply involved in various consequential theological controversies of his day, was banished from Jerusalem, and participated in the First Council of Constantinople. He lived a long, complicated, and impactful life in the heart of the Church. He is in many ways a model to all bishops for his zealous yet tender care of souls, especially those preparing to be washed in the saving waters of baptism at Easter. Saint Cyril fortified the content of the Church’s teaching with his personal presence, and by extension, the presence of the Sacrament of Holy Orders in his very person. He is a bishop remote in time, yet near in doctrine. Far removed from us historically, he is still close at our side when we stand to recite the same Creed he recited at every Sunday Mass.

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, through your generous dedication to teaching the faith, come to the assistance of all catechists, ordained and lay, to be equally committed to teaching those under their care, in season and out of season, knowing that fidelity to the Lord and His Church is what counts the most.

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March 17: Saint Patrick, Bishop
Fifth Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Ireland

The black arts of pagandom bowed to this one-man fortress

Today’s saint, the Patron of Ireland, was English. He was born in an unknown year to Catholic parents in an educated home in Roman Britain. His father was a deacon and his grandfather a married priest. When he first went to Ireland, he did not go willingly. He was kidnapped by pirates at the age of sixteen and enslaved. He went from the warm embrace of his home to herding pigs, exposed to sleet and cold, starving on the rain-soaked coast of rural Ireland. Times of great danger and deprivation are often times of great grace. In young Patrick’s years of isolation, cold, hunger, and loss, prayer was his only nourishment and comfort. His captivity turned a boy into a man and transformed a tepid Christian into an ardent soul burning with love for the Holy Trinity.

After six years of torturous enslavement, Patrick escaped his captors and made the difficult voyage back to his own nation, family, and language. But the Irish were never far from his mind. One night, he had a dream. Patrick sees a man he knew in Ireland named Victoricus approaching from the west. Victoricus holds countless letters and hands one to Patrick. It is titled “The Voice of the Irish.” As he begins to read the letter, Patrick hears a multitude of voices rising, as if one, from a forest near the Western Sea: “We beg you, holy youth, to come and walk among us once more.” Patrick is deeply moved. Unable to read any more, he wakes up.

Patrick decides to be a slave of Christ and to return as a missionary to Ireland. Feeling himself unprepared, he first studies for many years at monasteries in France. After receiving an excellent education in the faith, he receives priestly and episcopal ordination. He then embarks as a fully equipped missionary for his adopted homeland. There he finds a rustic people steeped in paganism. It is not today’s paganism—well read, superior, and too sophisticated to believe in religious “mythology.” Real paganism, the paganism of remote Ireland, called upon dark forces to conquer the white spirits and angels of God. Real paganism casts spells, calls down lightning from the night sky, mixes potions to poison its enemies, and forms flames into swords for battle. Real paganism invokes the devil because it knows Satan keeps his appointments. This is the dark paganism Patrick finds lurking in the foggy hills and bogs of his new land. Fifth-century Ireland had a deeply entrenched, richly layered culture of pagan worship. And Bishop Patrick used his crozier, like a dagger, to stab it right in the heart.

Saint Patrick converted the Irish, one tribe after another. He matched the tribes’ preternatural forces with supernatural powers. There are numerous anecdotes, of dubious historicity, describing how Patrick turned an enemy into a fox, converted his walking staff into a tree, or drove all the snakes out of Ireland. These tales illustrate a deeper point—Saint Patrick had command over creation itself and used that power to communicate the truth of the Christian God who created creation. There is no doubt that Saint Patrick harvested an immense number of souls.

For the Church to send a bishop to Ireland in the fifth century was to land a man on the moon. Beyond Ireland there was no one and nothing. Patrick evangelized a rugged, clever people in a rugged, clever way. He conquered their witches, wizards, and warlocks with the Holy Spirit. He vanquished their incantations, potions, demons, and sorcery with a powerful brew, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Son of God in the Mystery of the Altar we call the Blessed Sacrament. He overcame the “black laws of pagandom” with a protecting God who walks always and lovingly at our side. Many centuries of saints, abbots, missionaries, scholars, and monks set sail from tiny Ireland to traverse the globe in service of the Gospel. They owe the rich Catholic culture of their homeland to that mighty pillar of faith known as Saint Patrick.

Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland, assist us through your intercession to trust in the raw power of God to conquer evil. Give us confidence to confront evil spirits, however they may show themselves, so that the peace of true religion may reign where it does not reign now.

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March 9: Saint Frances of Rome, Religious
1384–1440
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of motorists and widows

Just to be near her was thought a blessing

Today’s saint, born into a wealthy noble family in the Eternal City, was married to a man from a similarly privileged family when she was just thirteen. Saint Frances earnestly sought to do the will of God in serving her husband, her children, and her home while also attempting to live a high level of holiness modeled on the life of a nun. She had desired to enter religious life from a young age, but her father refused to break his promise to give Frances in marriage to a fellow nobleman. Frances struggled with an internal conflict between her married state and the religious state to which she had originally felt called. This was not a choice between a good and a bad option. It was a natural tension in the soul of a holy woman who saw two paths open before her, both of which led to God. After her husband died and her children were grown, Saint Frances did live the ordered life of a religious, albeit outside of a convent.

The divine pull that Saint Frances felt in the direction of two callings was not unusual. Other saints before her had been wives and mothers before becoming religious. The theology of the Church in the twentieth century, ratified by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, now offers a vision of holiness which resolves much of this tension in trying to discern a vocation. The primary calling of all Christians is imparted through Baptism, fortified in Confirmation, and nourished in reception of Holy Communion. These Sacraments are sufficient armor to fit one for holiness in any and all circumstances. The married life and its natural domestic concerns are, then, as much a theater for holiness as a cloister.

The Church wants all Catholics to understand daily life as its own drama in fulfilling, or rejecting, God’s will. It is not that one is distracted with the details of work, family, domestic chores, and children while the real action takes place in the parish, the monastery, the retreat center, or the convent. The real action is at home, in the domestic church. It is precisely at home where Christians spend most of their time, raise their children, engage with their spouses, and accomplish the multitude of tasks that make life happen. Home and work are not spheres of life. They are life. And it would be absurd to argue that the will of God lies outside of life itself. To say that holiness is for everyone is to say that all of creation is a forum to pursue it, and that no vocation limits the opportunity to accomplish God’s will.
Saint Frances of Rome was a model wife and mother for forty years, often in violent and difficult circumstances provoked by skirmishes related to the Western Schism, the era of more than one pope which divided Rome’s elites into warring factions. Frances’ husband loved and revered her, her servants admired her, and her children adored her. In addition to performing her domestic duties so faithfully, Frances also fasted, prayed, had a vibrant mystical spirituality, and was generous with the poor. Her charity toward the destitute was not the modern charity of making charitable donations. She did the work, not someone else. She herself made personal contact with the homeless, the hungry, and beggars. Her sterling example of piety and service led her to found a group of like-minded women who lived in the world but who bound themselves to a life of prayer and service. The group was later recognized as an Order in the Church under the title the Oblates of Saint Frances of Rome. So, in addition to fulfilling her own duties, Frances also helped similarly high-placed women to avoid lives of frivolousness and mundanity.

Saint Frances of Rome was generous in all things, saw her guardian angel at her side for many years, ate little more than dry bread, and had a provable gift of healing. As her reputation for holiness spread in her later years, to be in her mere presence was considered a blessing by the people of Rome. As wife, mother, and later Oblate, she stretched herself to the limit in seeking out and doing God’s will, precisely as that will was transmitted to her by the Church she loved with such fervor.

Saint Frances of Rome, through your intercession, aid all wives and mothers to live lives of generous service to their families. Help them to serve the domestic Church by creating, and fortifying, that cradle of holiness and culture the Church so needs to flourish.

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March 8: Saint John of God, Religious
1495–1550
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of hospitals, printers, the sick, and alcoholics

He walked the fine line between madness and holiness

There are many “Johns” who are saints, beginning with those found in Scripture itself: Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint John of the Cross, Saint John Fisher, etc. The name John has also been taken by many popes. Today’s John has the title “of God.” It is a simple and direct title. The word “God” conveys everything under God and everything that is God, without distinctions such as “of the Cross,” “of the Holy Name,” or “of the Infant Jesus.” Neither does it carry any hint of a homeland such as “of Assisi,” “of Calcutta,” or “of Padua.” All saints are “of God,” of course, but the plain title “of God” fits the personality, outlook, education, and simplicity of today’s John very well. The name was not given to him posthumously. John said that the Infant Jesus gave him the name in a dream. A Spanish Bishop who personally knew John and his work ordered him to bear this appellation once he knew its divine origins.

Saint John of God did not have the advantage of an excellent education. But what his mind lacked his heart supplied. He left his Portuguese home as a child in the care of a priest and went to neighboring Spain. From there he lived an itinerant life as a farmer, shepherd, adventurer, and then soldier. He travelled the length and breadth of Europe fighting in the service of kings and princes, mostly against Muslim Turks. Many years later he found his way back home and went to see if his parents were still alive. But he had been gone so long, and had left so young, that he could not even remember their names. An uncle told him that they had died. At this point, the wandering John decided to ransom his own freedom to North African Muslims in exchange for Christian hostages. The plan came to nothing and he returned to Southern Spain.

At this, the lowest point of his aimless life, John had a breakthrough, or perhaps a breakdown. He was selling religious books from town to town when he fell under the influence of a saint, John of Ávila. Saints know saints. Upon hearing John of Ávila preach about the martyr Saint Sebastian, and upon receiving his advice in spiritual direction, the wandering John stopped in his tracks. He fasted, he prayed, and he went on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain. So total was his repentance for his past sins that he was placed for a time in a hospital for the mentally ill. But his repentance was real. He changed forever and always and started caring for the kind of person that he used to be.

John somehow raised enough money to start a small hospital and thus began, in an orderly and professional manner, to care for the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, convert the sinner, and shelter the homeless and orphans. He had no equal in giving of himself to his patients, and his reputation for holiness spread across Spain. He gave away his cloaks so often that his Bishop had a habit made, ordered John to put it on, and told him not to give it away. John’s total dedication to the poor and sick drew many followers. They emulated his generosity, and soon an Order was born. The group was eventually approved by the Holy See in 1572 under the title The Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God. The Order spread quickly throughout the world, often with the support of the Spanish Crown. Its work on behalf of the poor continues today in numerous countries through hundreds of institutions.

Saint John of God practiced a type of Ignatian spirituality in evaluating his own life. But he was not just a spectator of his life, observing it from the outside. He became a student of himself, evaluated his own errors, listened to advice, stopped what he was doing, changed direction, and charted a new course in middle age. He was, in modern terms, a “late vocation.” He cared little for his own physical health and died on his fifty-fifth birthday while kneeling in prayer before an altar in his room. In some saints there is a fine line between sanctity and madness. Saint John of God straddled that fine line. He became mad for the Lord and was canonized by the Church for his holy madness in serving the poor and the God who loves them.

Saint John of God, help us to follow your example of service to the poor through gift of self. You did not just ask for charitable donations but for charity itself. You did not ask others to do what you did not do yourself. Through your intercession, may all those in need encounter a servant as generous as yourself to satisfy their basic needs.

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March 7: Saints Perpetua and Felicity, Martyrs
c. Late Second Century–203
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saints of expectant mothers, widows, and butchers

They bled to death as pagan eyes drank in the spectacle

Many centuries ago in the desert lands of North Africa, now populated by millions of the adherents of Islam, there was once a thriving Catholic Church. Dioceses, bishops, theologians, shrines, schools, monasteries, convents, and saints filled the towns hugging the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This vibrant Catholicism generated, and was inspired by, the witness of numerous martyrs. Many of their names are known, among them today’s saints, Felicity and Perpetua. Few documents in Church history can match the raw power of the first-person, eye-witness narrative of the passion of Perpetua and Felicity. It is a gripping account filled with breathtaking dramatic detail. The reader can almost feel the hot sand of the arena warming his feet, a gentle sea breeze caressing his cheeks, and the sweaty crowd pressing against him, their roar for blood echoing through the dry air.

Vivia Perpetua, twenty-two years old, was married, a noblewoman, and a new mother whose baby was still nursing. Her pagan father begged his favorite daughter to renounce her Christian faith, but to no avail. Felicity was a slave and pregnant when jailed. She gave birth a few days before her martyrdom. Her child would be raised by Christian women in Carthage. Perpetua, in her own hand, recorded the events leading up to her martyrdom, while an eyewitness to her death completed the text later.

When they were first thrown into the arena, Perpetua and Felicity were attacked by a rabid heifer, which was chosen because it shared the same sex as its victims. The young women were grievously injured by the mad cow and then momentarily removed from the arena until gladiators were brought in to conclude the day’s spectacle. The executioners carried out their duties quickly, though Perpetua had to guide the gladiator’s sword to her throat after he first painfully struck a bone instead of a vein. As the narration states, “Perhaps such a woman...could not die unless she herself had willed it.” Saints Perpetua and Felicity were imprisoned together, suffered together, and died together in 203 A.D. in Carthage, North Africa, along with other noble martyrs whose names are preserved in the same account.

The vivid description of their deaths was so moving that it was faithfully preserved down through the centuries and has come to us largely intact. Apart from the New Testament writings themselves, only a few documents from the early Church pre-date the passion narrative of Perpetua and Felicity. It invites tantalizing reflection on how many similar firsthand testimonies of famous martyrdoms from the early Church have been lost! What could have been known about the final moments of Saints Paul, Cecilia, Agatha, and so many apostles and popes! The accounts of Perpetua, Felicity, and Polycarp must fire our imagination for all the rest. The Church in North Africa so often read the account of Perpetua and Felicity in its public liturgies that Saint Augustine, a North African bishop living two hundred years after their martyrdoms, had to remind his faithful that the narrative was not on a par with Scripture itself.

The fact that women and slaves, both mothers who loved their children, were willing to die rather than renounce their faith, testifies to the revolutionary message of Jesus Christ. He gave us a true religion. But He also gave us a true anthropology. He has revealed to man his true origins, his high dignity, and his ultimate purpose. Jesus reveals man to himself. So when early Christians, or present-day Christians, understand that they are made in God’s image and likeness, and that His Son died for them as much as He died for anyone else, they stand a little taller. If a Christian is told he is garbage, property, a slave, old, a prisoner, or a foreigner, he shouldn’t flinch at the insult, because under such denigrations is a deeper identity: “child of God,” “made in God’s image and likeness,” and “worthy of the blood of the Lamb.” These are the titles of a citizen of the Kingdom of God, whose shadow covers the earth and comforts all those who live in its shade. Felicity and Perpetua clung to their identity as Christians in the face of imprisonment, ridicule, torture, and pain. The newness of the faith, and the dignity it imparted, fortified them to accept death rather than a return to rough paganism. May our faith be as fresh to us.

Saints Felicity and Perpetua, your martyrdom was an act of bravery, which moved the Christians of your age and continues to move us today. Give all who invoke your names similar courage, fortitude, and faith to overcome timidity in witnessing to Christ in difficult circumstances.

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Saint Casimir, King
1458–1484
March 4—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Poland and Lithuania

He lived not long, but well, a prince crowned with humility

Ever since the Three Kings came to leave their gifts at the altar of the crib in Bethlehem, the Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, has drawn generations of nobles, kings, and emperors to Himself. Today’s memorial commemorates a young man named Casimir, Prince of Poland, who died at the age of twenty-five. Casimir was the third child in a family of thirteen siblings and had everything that life could offer. But it was still not enough, and Casimir knew it. Unlike many wealthy, powerful, educated people, Casimir knew that life did not offer, and could not offer, what the soul most deeply yearned for. He had his head screwed on straight and tight. Casimir never lost sight of the higher things that truly mattered, even though his life was full of the intrigues and cares of war and state.

Any true search is open to finding. A search that begins with the premise that it will never find, or never end, is not really a search. It’s just wandering. A true searcher must be a finder. How many people claim to be searching for the truth, for God, for meaning! Yet when they unearth the elusive treasure, open it up, and see its contents, they are disappointed and move along to search for something else. Why? Perhaps because the treasure made moral demands on them, or required that prior life decisions be repudiated or modified. If a searcher sets personal conditions on what he will find, his search will never end. The search will just become a reflection of the searcher’s own personality and desires, not a true quest for something objective outside of himself.

Saint Casimir searched for God as a child and youth, as all children do. But his search unearthed a treasure very early on. What Casimir sought, Poland provided. Casimir imbued so totally what his Catholic birthplace offered that he is considered an emblematic Polish prince: pious, just, chaste, poor, and strong. A country, similar to a religion, is a carrier of meaning. It absorbs and refines, over time, millions of individual searches until it responds to its people’s searches in the form of heroes, flags, hymns, holidays, and statues. A patriot loves his country in the same way that a religious man loves his religion and God. His love is specific. He loves a country, a religion, and a God—and Casimir was no exception.

It is said that behind every great man is a great woman. Saint Casimir never married and preserved his chastity until death, despite offers of marriage. What was behind him was not a great woman but a great nation. Poland was his mistress. The faith and thick traditions of Poland developed over many centuries in response to man’s search for meaning in that great nation. The Polish nation did not understand Poland’s past as an anchor, an imposition, or a burden. Poles understood their nation’s cultural riches as a common inheritance of their ancestors. And Poles were eager to honor their forefathers by faithfully accepting, with gratitude, what they handed down.

The fullness of these ancient traditions was imparted to today’s saint from a young age by his teachers, especially by holy and learned priests who were like second fathers to him. Casimir learned to love the Lord’s Passion, the Sacraments, the Virgin Mary, and the Church. These loves deepened as he grew into adulthood and personally experienced the harshness and venality of life at court and on the march. He did not see the need to become a priest or a religious in order to live his faith. He remained a layman his entire brief life. In this he presaged the emphasis on lay vocations the Church would promote in the twentieth century. He was a layman, a prince, and a saint. Anything is possible in the Church for those who love God first and foremost.

Saint Casimir, we ask your intercession to aid all leaders of governments, churches, and families to emulate your virtues; to be poor in spirit, just, pure, and faithful. With your aid, may leaders guide those under their authority to love and serve their country and their God with greater fervor.

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March 3: Saint Katharine Drexel, Virgin (U.S.A.)
1858–1955
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of racial justice and philanthropists

From riches to rags, she lived the Catholic dream

Today’s saint wove in and out of oncoming traffic. She travelled north while everyone else was zooming south. Friends and acquaintances in her refined, educated, upper-class milieu glided past her in search of marriage, children, wealth, travel, security, and leisure. Katharine deftly avoided them and moved forward at her own deliberate pace, looking for poverty, chastity, obedience, solitude, and God. She turned down a marriage proposal, rejected a life of luxury, and resisted the expectations of her status. Katharine was deeply rooted in all things Catholic from her youth. She went from riches to rags, starting out immensely wealthy yet becoming progressively poorer with age. The classic American story is to begin with little, work hard, identify opportunity, live frugally, and ultimately attain success through sheer dint of effort. Saint Katharine Drexel’s father was immensely wealthy and powerful. He lived, even embodied, the American dream. His daughter lived the Catholic dream.

One of the reasons why Saint Katharine ever became a nun in the first place was because a Pope did his job. In 1887, Katharine and her two sisters went to Rome and were received in audience by Pope Leo XIII. Having come into enormous inheritances upon their father’s recent death, the young ladies were financially supporting some Indian missions in the American West. Katharine asked the Holy Father if he could send some missionaries to staff these missions. The Pope responded like a wise and zealous priest. He asked Katharine to send herself. That is, he asked her to consider consecrating her own life to Christ as a missionary sister. The Pope’s words were a turning point. She sought spiritual counsel from trusted priests and saw the path forward. In 1889, her local newspaper ran the headline: “Miss Drexel Enters a Catholic Convent—Gives Up Seven Million."

From that point on, Sister Katharine Drexel never stopped giving. Saint Teresa of Ávila said that one man and God make an army. With Saint Katharine Drexel, one woman and a fortune made an army. She founded an order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, with the counsel and encouragement of Saint Mother Cabrini. Her order began over a hundred missions and schools for American Indians and African Americans in the American South and West, including one of the first universities to admit racial minorities. Katharine was decades ahead of the civil rights movement which caught fire in the U.S. in the decade after her death. Sister Katharine spent a good part of her life on trains, travelling at least six months every year to visit her apostolates and the sisters who staffed them. Yet amid all this activity, she maintained an intense life of prayer. In this she emulated the balance typical of the greatest saints. Their concern for justice, not social justice, was rooted in a deep love of God present in the Blessed Sacrament. There was no duality in this. It wasn’t social work on one side and the sacraments and devotion on the other side. It was contemplation in action, love of God overflowing naturally into love of neighbor.
After a life of generous self-gift, Saint Katharine suffered a major heart attack and spent the last twenty years of her life largely immobile, in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. She had always retained the desire to become a contemplative, and it was granted, in a sense, in her last two decades. She died at a venerable age and was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000. Saint John Neumann, the Bishop of Philadelphia who died just two years after Katharine was born in his diocese, was a poor immigrant who embodied the best of the first wave of immigrant Catholicism in the U.S. Katharine embodied a succeeding generation of homegrown Catholicism. She was an icon of a new era of Catholic Americans who would power the incredibly organized and vibrant early and mid-twentieth century Church in the U.S: Catholic educated, socially conscious, pope-friendly, sacramentally focused, wealthy, and very generous. Saint Katharine lived and died a model nun.

Saint Katharine Drexel, intercede for all who love inordinately the things of this world. Your holy detachment from wealth and comfort freed you for a life dedicated to prayer and service. May we have that same detachment and that same commitment to God.

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Ash Wednesday, First Day of Lent
Liturgical Color: Violet

Without God we are a tiny pile of crumbs

The marauding pirates of the high seas had their tough skin inked with tattoos. Roman soldiers smothered their bodies in oil before a battle. Primitive peoples ritually paint a warrior’s face before a fight, stretch earlobes with hoops, or pierce noses with large rings. When American Indians wanted to emulate the ferocity or speed of an animal, sharp bone fragments were used to carve that creature’s outline into their skin, where it was then stained with dye or soot. Traditionally, when a simple man wanted to announce what tribe he ran with, what nation he would die for, or what woman he would defend, he didn’t need to say a word. He just lifted up his shirt a bit, rolled up his sleeve, or pointed to a mark on his neck. Clothes, hairstyle, and cosmetics communicate status, origin, belonging, and commitment well. But they can all be removed or changed. Tattoos, scalpings, piercings, brands, paints, and scars use the body as their canvas to convey what words cannot.

On Ash Wednesday, Catholics receive a temporary ash “tattoo” of a cross just above their eyes and nose. This primal gesture evokes the raw, uncomplicated, religious devotion at the core of our otherwise sophisticated theology. The Church consecrates the body externally with water and oil in Baptism, Confirmation, and Anointing of the Sick. The Church reads Saint Thomas Aquinas, sings refined Latin chant, and prays before luminous stained glass. And it also smudges black ashes on our faces. Real religions do things like this. A real religion has priests who smear your face with dirty ash as they whisper, “You’re gonna die.”

Man’s earthly end, the separation of soul and body, could have come about in many ways. But due to original sin, this end always comes through death. Death is a punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin of pride in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. This sin is not original in the sense of being authentic or unrepeatable, but in that it occurred at our common origin. As a permanent repercussion of His punishment, God made work burdensome and instituted death as the mysterious doorway through which all must walk to exit earthly life. God told this to our common parents in Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The last of these words are repeated to the faithful as the ashes are placed on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

But as these words of death and destruction, of returning to the ground, are spoken, the priest does not trace a circle or a question mark made of ashes. He traces a cross. In this sign we shall conquer. In no other sign will we conquer. So with death comes a promise. With the old Adam there comes a new Adam—Jesus Christ. This is how Jesus was first understood in the early Church. Mary was the New Eve. Christ was the New Adam. They untied the knot our remote ancestors had tied. They were faithful where Adam and Eve were unfaithful. They kept the promise Adam and Eve had broken.

The start of the forty days of Lent is a practice run. One day, we will all have to give an accounting of our lives. The balance sheet will have to be settled, the good and the bad weighed in their columns. Ash Wednesday is a reminder of something we know but don’t call to mind often enough. Without God all that remains of our greatness is a little pile of dust. We are, in a sense, marked with ourselves today. The tiny black crumbs of ash will fall away in a matter of hours, to be forgotten for another year. And life will go on. Such is our destiny. With God, everything. Without God, nothing.

God of all, we ask that we live a fruitful Lent starting on this Ash Wednesday. Help us to be faithful to our promises of penance, sacrifice, and repentance for past sins. May we see in the ashes of today our true nature without You. May we see in the cross our true destiny with You.

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St. Gregory of Narek, Abbot and Doctor
950–c.1003
February 27—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Widely venerated in Armenia

A mystical Eastern monk praises God like a troubadour

A crowning glory of the Armenian people is that their nation was the first to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Approximately twelve years before the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, an Armenian King converted to Christianity. Following the universal custom of mankind, the King’s religion then became his people’s. Though the actual conversion of individual souls required decades of subsequent evangelical effort, this early baptism of an entire nation has granted the Armenian Apostolic Church unique status as the custodian of Armenian national identity. Living proof of Armenia’s ancient Christian pedigree is found in the old city of Jerusalem. An Armenian patriarch, cathedral, and seminary anchor the peaceful Armenian Quarter, one of the four neighborhoods packed behind the walls of the city where it all began.

Today’s saint, Gregory of Narek, was a medieval Armenian monk who wrote mystical poetry, hymns, and biblical commentaries. He is one of Armenia’s greatest literary figures and poets. His principal work, the “Book of Lamentations,” consists of ninety-five prayers he composed as an encyclopedia of prayer for all people. The twentieth-century Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that while Western Medieval piety developed the rosary as a lay substitute for praying the Psalms, the Armenian tradition developed hymns and songs to Mary as the primary expression of popular piety, as seen in the works of St. Gregory of Narek (CCC #2678). Pope Saint John Paull II also referenced St. Gregory in his encyclical on Mary, Redemptoris Mater: “…with powerful poetic inspiration (St. Gregory) ponders the…mystery of the Incarnation, …an occasion to sing and extol the extraordinary dignity and magnificent beauty of the Virgin Mary, Mother of the Word made flesh” (31).

Like St. Ephrem, a centuries-earlier Syrian archetype of Eastern monasticism, St. Gregory uses metaphor, songs, litanies, and poetry to communicate Christian truth. The Western tradition, especially since the time of St. Augustine, tends to communicate the truths of Christianity in less artistic ways—through close reasoning, apologetics, the synthesis of Greek philosophy with Christian doctrine, and by showing the internal harmony of Scriptural texts.

The Armenian Christian tradition, like related ancient churches born near the cradle of mankind, has not sharpened its sword of thought by constant clashing with enemy metal, as has occurred in the West. The benefit of a monoculture—of a people who all speak the same language, kneel before the same God, profess the same faith, and sing the same songs—is deep unity. A monoculture has no need to hone arguments. When everyone agrees on the fundamentals, when the tapestry of a culture is not torn or frayed, the writer, priest, poet, composer, or monk can sing, whistle, ruminate, and dream like a madman or a troubadour. When he describes a rainbow as God’s bow in the sky, hears the sweet voice of Mary in a lark, imagines a devilish sea-monster lurking in the wine-dark sea, or is convinced that the blood dripping from the side of Christ soaks and sanctifies the earth itself, the faithful quietly nod in agreement and humbly whisper: “Thus it is. Thus it shall always be.”

Little is known of the life of St. Gregory of Narek, other than that he was a dedicated monk who lived his entire adult life in a monastery situated in todays’ eastern Turkey, in the Armenian homeland between the Black and Caspian Seas. Saint Gregory’s essence is truly to be found in the spaces between his words. He is his writings. Saint Gregory was never formally canonized, a not uncommon fact for holy men and women of his era. During a Mass in 2015 commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, Pope Francis declared St. Gregory of Narek a Doctor of the Church, the thirty-sixth person so honored and only the second from the churches of the East.

Surprisingly, St. Gregory was not a Catholic, though he did pertain to an apostolic church with legitimate sacraments and a hierarchical structure which, however, is not in formal communion with Rome. The narrow theological arteries that run east from Constantinople become thinner as they spread ever eastward, often terminating in ecclesiastical cardiac arrest—in churches without people, in thrones without bishops, in altars without sacrifices, and in monasteries without monks. It is one of the holy obligations of the still robust Roman Church to exalt those whom others cannot, to witness to beauty wherever it may be found, and to call Christian leaders to gather in the immensity of St. Peter’s Basilica to anoint the memory of a gifted Christian of long ago with the noble title of doctor.

Saint Gregory of Narek, your quiet, humble, and hidden life produced a rich garden of poems and prayers. May your redolent words and rich images fire our imaginations and inflame our hearts so that our flame of faith burns as hot as yours in its love for Christ and Mary.

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Saint Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr
c. 69–c. 155
February 23—Memorial (Optional Memorial if Lenten Weekday)
Liturgical Color: Red (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of earache sufferers

The dramatic death of a venerable bishop ends the sub-apostolic age

A Catholic bishop is brutally executed in Turkey. His assassin yells “Allahu Akbar,” stabs his victim repeatedly in the heart, and then cuts his head off. There are witnesses to the act. The few local priests and faithful fear for their lives. The Pope in Rome is shocked and prays for the deceased. Five thousand people attend the solemn funeral Mass. An event from long ago? No.

The murdered bishop was an Italian Franciscan named Luigi Padovese, the mourning Pope was Benedict XVI, and the year was 2010. Turkey is dangerous territory for a Catholic bishop, whether he is Bishop Padovese or today’s saint, Bishop Polycarp. For over a millennium, the Anatolian Peninsula was the cradle of Eastern Christianity. That era has long since come to a close. A few hundred miles and one thousand eight hundred years separate, or perhaps unite, Bishop Padovese with Bishop Polycarp. Whether shed by the sharp knife of a modern Muslim fanatic, or spilled by a sword swung by a pagan Roman soldier, the blood still ran red from the neck of a Christian leader, puddling in the dirt of a hostile land.

The news of the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, spread far and wide in his own time, making him as famous in the early Church as he is now. He was martyred around 155 A.D., one of the few early martyrs whose death is verified by documentation so precise that it even proves that he was executed on the exact day of his present feast—February 23. Polycarp was 86 years old when a rash of persecution broke out against the local Church. He waited patiently at a farm outside of town for his executioners to come and knock on his door. He was then brought before a Roman magistrate and ordered to reject his atheism. Imagine that. What an interesting twist! The Christian is accused of atheism by the pagan “believer.” Such was the Roman perspective. Christians were atheists because they rejected the ancient civic religion which had been believed by everyone, everywhere, and always.

The Roman gods were more patriotic symbols than objects of belief. No one was martyred for believing in them. No one fought over their creeds, because there were no creeds. These gods did for Rome what flags, national hymns, and civic holidays do for a modern nation. They united it. They were universal symbols of national pride. Just as everyone stands for the national anthem, faces the flag, puts their hand over their heart, and sings the familiar words, so too did Roman citizens walk up the wide marble steps of their many-columned temples, make a petition, and then burn incense on the altar of their favorite god.

It required heroic courage for Polycarp, and thousands of other early Christians, to not drop some grains of incense into a flame burning before a pagan god. For the Romans, to not burn such incense was akin to spitting on a flag. But Polycarp simply refused to renounce the truth of what he had heard as a young man from the mouth of Saint John, that a carpenter named Jesus, who had lived a few weeks to the south of Smyrna, had risen from the dead after His decomposing body had been placed in a guarded tomb. And this had happened recently, in the time of Polycarp’s own grandparents!

Polycarp was proud to die for a faith he had adopted through hard-earned thought. His pedigree as a Christian leader was impeccable. He had learned the faith from one of the Lord’s very own Apostles. He had met the famous Bishop of Antioch, Saint Ignatius, when Ignatius passed through Smyrna on the way to his execution in Rome. One of Saint Ignatius’ famous seven letters is even addressed to Polycarp. Polycarp, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon tells us, even travelled to Rome to meet with the Pope over the question of the dating of Easter. Irenaeus had known and had learned from Polycarp when Irenaeus was a child in Asia Minor. Polycarp’s own letter to the Philippians was read in churches in Asia as if it were part of Scripture, at least until the fourth century.

It was this venerable, grey-haired man, the last living witness to the apostolic age, whose hands were bound behind him to a stake, and who stood “like a mighty ram” as thousands screamed for his blood. Bishop Polycarp nobly accepted what he had not actively sought. His body was burned after his death, and the faithful preserved his bones, the first instance of relics being so honored. A few years after Polycarp’s death, a man from Smyrna named Pionius was martyred for observing the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp. In just this fashion links are added, one after another, to the chain of faith which stretches through the centuries down to the present, where we now honor Saint Polycarp as if we were seated within earshot of the action in the stadium that fateful day.

Great martyr Saint Polycarp, make us steadfast witnesses to the truth in word and deed, just as you witnessed to the truth in your own life and death. Through your intercession, make our commitment to our religion of long duration, a life project, enduring until our life of faith concludes with a death of faith.

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Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter
February 22—Feast
Liturgical Color: White

The Pope’s authority is a gift, serving order and truth in the Church

It’s kind of funny to have a feast day for a chair. When we think of a chair, perhaps we think of a soft recliner into which our body lowers itself as if into a warm bath. Or our mind turns to a classroom chair, a chair in a waiting room, or one at a restaurant. But the chair the Church commemorates today is more like the heroic-sized marble chair which holds the giant body of President Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. We commemorate today a chair like the judge’s in a courtroom or that unique high-backed chair called a throne. These are not ordinary chairs. They are seats of authority and judgment. They hold power more than people. We stand before them while their occupants sit. Judges and kings retire or die, but chairs and thrones remain to hold their successors. The Nicene Creed even describes Jesus as “seated” at God’s right hand. The fuller, symbolic meaning of the word “chair” is what today’s feast commemorates.

Against the farthest wall of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome is not a statue of Saint Peter, as one might imagine, but a gorgeous heroic-sized sculpture with a chair as its focus. To celebrate the Chair of St. Peter is to celebrate the unity of the Church. The chair is a symbol of Saint Peter’s authority, and that authority is not meant for conquest like military power. Ecclesiastical authority is directed toward unity. Jesus Christ could have gathered an unorganized group of disciples united only by their common love of Him. He didn’t. He could have written the Bible Himself, handed it to His followers, and said, “Obey this text.” He didn’t. Jesus called to Himself, by name, twelve men. He endowed them with the same powers He possessed and left this organized band of brothers as an identifiable, priestly fraternity specifically commissioned to baptize and to preach. In North Africa at the time of Saint Augustine, twelve co-consecrating bishops were canonically required at the ordination of a bishop, mirroring “The Twelve” called by Christ. What a profound liturgical custom! Today the Church requires only three co-consecrators.

What is even more striking about Christ’s establishment of an orderly Church structure is its double organizing principle. The Twelve’s headship over the many is itself subjected to the internal headship of Saint Peter. He is the keeper of the keys, the rock upon which the Lord built His Church. This all makes sense. What good would a constitution be without a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes over its interpretation? Any authoritative text needs a living organ to stand outside and above it to arbitrate, interpret, and define, with authority equal to the text itself, any and all misinterpretations, confusions, or honest disputes. Just as a constitution needs a court, the Bible needs a Magisterium. And that Magisterium needs a head as well.

The authority of the papal office, doctrinally, is a negative charism preserving the Church from teaching error. It is not a guarantee that the pope will teach, explain, or live the faith perfectly. Christ himself guaranteed that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. That’s a negative promise. But isn’t this promise also a prophecy that the Church, and the office of Peter, will be a lightning rod absorbing every strike from the forces of evil? That this Church, and no other, will be the target of the darkest of powers? A real Church has real enemies.

There was never an office of Saint Paul in the Church. When the person of Paul disappeared, his specific role did too. But the office of Peter continues, along with the office of all the Apostles, despite their deaths. In other words, the Church has not just a foundation but a structure built on that foundation. And authority in that structure is not transmitted personally, from father to son or from one family to the next. Authority attaches to the Office of St. Peter and endows its occupant with the charisms promised by Christ to Saint Peter. And this charism will endure until the sun sets for the last time. As long as there is a Church, it will teach objective truth, and objective truth requires objective leadership. And that objective leadership, symbolized in the Chair of St. Peter, is directed toward unity. One Lord. One faith. One Shepherd. One flock. The united fabric of the Church, so fought for, so torn, so necessary, is worth honoring in the liturgy of the Church.

God in Heaven, we thank You for the ordered community of faith we enjoy in the Catholic Church. Your chosen vicar, Saint Peter, guided the early Church and guides Her still, ensuring that we remain one, holy, catholic, and apostolic until the end of time. Continue to grace Your Church with the unity so necessary to accomplish Her mission on earth.

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Saint Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
1007–1072
February 21—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Faenza and Font-Avellano, Italy

A wise and holy monk becomes a Cardinal and thunders for reform in the Church

Every Catholic knows that the Pope is elected by, and from, the Cardinals of the Church gathered in the Sistine Chapel. Every Catholic knows that the Pope then goes to a large balcony perched high in the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica to greet the faithful and receive their acceptance. This is simply the way things are done in the Church. But it’s not the way things were always done. A Catholic in the early Middle Ages would have described a papal election as something like a bar room fight, a back-alley brawl, or a political horse race replete with bribes, connivings, and promises made just to be broken. Everyone—far-off emperors, the nobility of Rome, military generals, influential laity, priests—put their hands on the wheel to turn the rudder of the Church in one direction or another. Papal elections were sources of deep division, causing lasting damage to the Body of Christ. Then along came Saint Peter Damian to save the day.

Saint Peter headed a group of reform-minded Cardinals and others who decided in 1059 that only Cardinal Bishops could elect the Pope. No nobles. No crowds. No emperors. Saint Peter wrote that the Cardinal Bishops do the electing, the other clergy give their assent, and the people give their applause. This is exactly the program the Church has followed for almost a thousand years.

Today’s saint sought to reform himself first, and then to pull every weed that choked life from the healthy plants in the garden of the Church. After a difficult upbringing of poverty and neglect, Peter was saved from destitution by an older brother named Damian. Out of gratitude, he added his older brother’s name to his own. He was given an excellent education, in which his natural gifts became apparent, and then entered a strict monastery to live as a monk. Peter’s extreme mortifications, learning, wisdom, uninterrupted life of prayer, and desire to right the ship of the Church put him into contact with many other Church leaders who desired the same. Peter eventually was called to Rome and became a counselor to a succession of popes. Against his will, he was ordained a Bishop, made a Cardinal, and headed a diocese. He fought against simony (the purchasing of church offices), against clerical marriage, and for the reform of papal elections. He also thundered, in the strongest and clearest of language, against the scourge of homosexuality in the priesthood.

After being personally involved in various ecclesiastical battles for reform, he requested leave to return to his monastery. His request was repeatedly denied until finally the Holy Father let him return to a life of prayer and penance, where his primary distraction was carving wooden spoons. After fulfilling a few more sensitive missions to France and Italy, Peter Damian died of fever in 1072. Pope Benedict XVI has described him as “one of the most significant figures of the eleventh century…a lover of solitude and at the same time a fearless man of the Church, committed personally to the task of reform.” He died about one hundred years before Saint Francis of Assisi was born, yet some have referred to him as the Saint Francis of his age.

More than two hundred years after our saint’s death, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy. The author is guided through paradise and sees a golden ladder, lit by a sunbeam, stretching into the clouds above. Dante begins to climb and meets a soul radiating the pure love of God. Dante is in awe that the heavenly choirs have fallen silent to listen to this soul speak: “The mind is light here, on earth it is smoke. Consider, then, how it can do down there what it cannot do up here with heaven’s help.” God is unknowable even in heaven itself, so how much more unfathomable must He be on earth. Dante drinks in this wisdom and, transfixed, asks this soul its name. The soul then describes its prior earthly life: “In that cloister I became so steadfast in the service of our God that with food seasoned just with olive-juice lightheartedly I bore both heat and cold, content with thoughtful prayers of contemplation. I was, in that place, Peter Damian.” Dante is among refined company in the loftiest heights of heaven.

Saint Peter Damian, your reform of the Church began in your own monastery cell. You never asked of others what you did not demand first of yourself. You even endured the detraction and calumny of your peers. Help us to reform others by our example, learning, perseverance, mortifications, and prayers.

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Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order
Thirteenth Century
February 17—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Invoked to aid in the imitation of the charity and patience of Our Lady of Sorrows

Group dynamics encourage fidelity to individual good intentions

There are many reasons to join a group. To quilt, play soccer, learn chess, travel, or meet new friends. We accomplish personal goals in a group that we would never accomplish alone. Groups create positive peer pressure for their members to show up on time, read the book, do the exercise, or complete the task assigned. When we join a group we are freely creating obligations for ourselves, because we know, deep down, that accountability to others encourages fidelity to our own obligations.

The groups of the medieval world were called guilds. Craftsmen of similar skills and professions organized in guilds to learn, promote, and protect their trade. Guilds offered mutual assistance to their members that no individual could replicate. There was power in numbers. Today’s feast commemorates seven young men who belonged to a merchant guild in Florence, Italy, in the 1200s. These seven men were serious Christians. They loved God and the Church. And in addition to protecting their commercial interests by joining a guild, they also protected their souls by joining a local spiritual guild called the Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin, where their spiritual exercises were guided by a wise and educated priest who encouraged their devotion.

After the members of the Confraternity experienced mystical visions of the Virgin Mary, there was nothing left to do except abandon their worldly concerns, set aside money for their families to live without their help, and flee the busy city for a solitary life in the nearby mountains. The Seven fasted, prayed, and lived lives of such extreme austerity that a visiting cardinal admonished them to stop living like dogs. Over time they adopted a rule, accepted new recruits, elected leaders, and spread throughout Italy and beyond. They eventually took the name of the Order of Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as the Servants of Mary, or Servites.

The Seven Holy Founders were especially devoted to the Seven Sorrows of Mary, and the Servites were instrumental in the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows becoming part of the Church’s calendar on September 15. The Sorrows of Mary, the sword that pierced her heart, the tears she shed when witnessing Our Lord’s passion and death, motivated the Seven Holy Founders to promote devotion to Mary under this title. Mary was strong and stood at the foot of the cross. But she was also a mom who loved her boy. So she had a heavy heart that continually pondered what His suffering meant. We unite in joy at Christ’s resurrection on Easter and join with Mary’s sorrow just days before. The emotions of Scripture become the emotions of those who read it and those who live it in the liturgy and devotions of the Church.

The names of the Seven Holy Founders are known. But the Church celebrates them as a group, with their individuality ceding to their group identity. Together they accomplished more than seven men working separately could ever have accomplished. Their confraternity became an Order, and that Order still exists for the mutual spiritual benefit of all, a theological guild holding its members to high standards of spiritual perfection. Servite priests and brothers are still active in various countries around the world, hundreds of years after the Order’s founding. This is a testament to the immovable, rock solid, foundation on which its Seven Holy Founders constructed their spiritual and theological home.

On your feast day, our thoughts and prayers turn to you, the Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order. Help us to find mutual support and assistance in loving God and Mary through a holy alliance with like-minded Christians. Through your intercession and example of group love of God, may our love for Him burn hotter and longer than a single flame.

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Saints Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop
827–869; 815–884
February 14—Memorial (Optional Memorial if Lenten Weekday)
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Co-Patrons of Europe and Apostles to the Slavs

Two makers of Europe ignite the steady flame of Christianity in the East

The Cyrillic alphabet used by hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Russia, is named after today’s Cyril. Numerous proofs could be advanced for why a certain person is historically significant. Few proofs, however, can eclipse an alphabet being named after you. The evangelical labors of Cyril and Methodius were so path breaking, long lasting, and culture forming that these brothers stand in the very first rank of the Church’s greatest missionaries. Shoulder to shoulder with brave men such as Patrick, Augustine of Canterbury, Boniface, Ansgar, and others, they baptized nations, mustered clans from the forests, codified laws, transcribed alphabets, and gathered the crude pagan gropings for the divine into the transcendent worship of the one true God at Mass. Saints Cyril and Methodius helped form the religiously undivided reality of Christendom long before it was ever called Europe.

Cyril was baptized as Constantine and was known by that name until late in his life. He and Methodius were from Thessalonica, in northern Greece, where they spoke not only Greek but also Slavonic, a critical linguistic advantage for their later missionary adventures. Cyril and Methodius received excellent educations in their youth and, as they matured, were given important educational, religious, and political appointments in an age when those disciplines were braided into one sturdy cord. The people, the state, and the Church were an undivided whole. Cyril and Methodius served the imperial court, the one true Church, and their native land as professors, governors, abbots, deacons, priests, and bishops.

Sometime after 860 the brothers were commissioned by the Emperor in Constantinople to lead a missionary crew heading into Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. They walked straight into a tangled web of political, religious, linguistic, and liturgical controversies which have vexed Eastern and Central Europe even until today. The Church of Rome allowed only three languages to be used in its liturgical and scriptural texts—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—the three languages inscribed above Christ’s head on the cross. The Church in the East, juridically under Rome but culturally spinning off into its own orbit over the centuries, was a patchwork of peoples where local vernaculars were used in the liturgy. Languages are always spoken long before they are written, and the spoken Slavonic of Moravia had unique sounds demanding new letters populating a new alphabet. Cyril created that new alphabet, and then he and Methodius translated Scripture, various liturgical books, and the Mass into written Slavonic. This led to some serious tensions.

The newly Christianized German bishops were suspicious of missionaries in their own neighborhood who came from Greece, spoke Slavonic, and who celebrated the sacred mysteries in a quasi-Byzantine style. Moravia and the greater Slavic homeland were under German ecclesiastical jurisdiction, not the Greeks. How could the Mass be said in Slavonic, or the Gospels translated into that new language? How could a Byzantine liturgy co-exist with the Latin rite? Cyril and Methodius went to Rome to resolve these various issues with the Pope and his advisers.

The brothers were treated respectfully in Rome as well-educated and heroic missionaries. Cyril died and was buried in the Eternal City. Methodius returned to the land of the Slavs and to ongoing tensions with German ecclesiastics and princes. He translated virtually the entire Bible into Slavonic, assembled a code of Byzantine church and civil law, and firmly established, with the Pope’s permission, the use of Slavonic in the liturgy. After Methodius’ death, however, German and Latin Rite influences prevailed. The Byzantine Rite, the use of Slavonic in the liturgy, and the Cyrillic alphabet were all forced from Central to Eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria, shortly after he died. While they were always honored in the East, the Feast of Ss. Cyril and Methodius was extended to the entire Catholic Church only in 1880. Pope Saint John Paul II named Saints Cyril and Methodius Co-Patrons of Europe. Their massive legacy inspires the two lungs of the Church, both East and West, to breathe more deeply the enriched oxygen of the entire Christian tradition.

Saints Cyril and Methodius, you prepared yourselves for brave and generous service to Christ and His Church through long years of preparation and, when the time came, served heroically. May we so prepare, and so serve, until we can serve no more.

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Our Lady of Lourdes
February 11—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patroness of bodily ills

A heavenly lady appears to a county girl, and miracles follow

In 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous told her friends that a beautiful young lady was appearing to her in a rock formation on the outskirts of her small town of Lourdes. A friend asked Bernadette to do her a favor—to take her rosary along the next time she knelt before the beautiful young lady. Bernadette obliged. Later, Bernadette told her friend how the lady had reacted: the lady had noticed that Bernadette was not holding her own rosary, said that she was not there to make relics, and told Bernadette to return next time with her own rosary, not someone else’s.

Bernadette’s unvarnished recounting of the lady’s reaction was blunt, but reasonable and, more importantly, authentic. This plainspokenness fit a pattern. Over and over again, whenever little, uneducated Bernadette was asked about the beautiful young lady she saw in the grotto, her answers never changed and also included startling but authentic details. Bernadette reported that when she and the lady prayed the rosary together, the lady only said the Our Father and the Glory Be. Mary didn’t pray the Hail Mary. How could she pray to herself? Would she say “Hail Me?” Bernadette reported that the lady spoke to her in the Lourdes’ dialect which Bernadette herself grew up with, slightly different from standard French. Bernadette stated that a golden rose rested on each of the lady’s feet. Of course! And when Bernadette respectfully asked the lady her name, she didn’t understand the big words in the response: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

In addition to the miraculous cures associated with the healing waters of Lourdes, the very character of Bernadette, as well as the tone and content of her accounts, removed all doubt that the beautiful young lady she saw was indeed the Virgin Mary. Our Lady of Lourdes is perhaps the most powerful and prolific physical healer in the history of the Church after Christ himself. Through her intercession, and through the waters that flow in her magnificent shrine, many thousands have been cured of their infirmities, as medical records prove beyond any doubt. Holy Mary has appeared at various times and in various places, but mostly to the simple and mostly in the country. She loves the faith of the simple, and speaks to them in simple language. In this, Mary reflects the words of her Son Jesus. He speaks plainly. His message is clear. And Mary’s simple words always point to the simple words of her own Son.

God is like the sun whose fiery brilliance scorches the eyes of all who look right at Him. Get too close and you’ll be burned. Like the sun, the Creator of the world can be distant, mysterious, and intimidating. But Mary is like the moon, bathed in a soft, pleasant glow. She’s close to us, and easy on the eyes. The sun’s heat and light may make life possible, but the sun itself is dangerous and remote. But Mary can be approached by man. And like the moon, she doesn’t produce her own light, but just reflects in a softer tone the powerful rays of the enormous star whose light generates life itself.

Our Lady of Lourdes, give physical healing to all who invoke your intercession. The saving waters at your shrine have healed thousands of pilgrims. May all the prayers and supplications directed to you be immersed in the waters of your holy baths, so that what is asked may be granted through your intercession and according to God’s will.

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Saint Scholastica, Virgin
c. early Sixth Century–547
February 10—Memorial (Optional Memorial if Lenten Weekday)
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of nuns, convulsive children, education, and books

A mysterious, learned woman helps start Western monasticism

Saint Scholastica was born in the decades after the last Western Emperor was forced to abandon the crumbling city of Rome in 476. Power was concentrated in the East, in Constantinople, where the real action was. Many centuries would pass until the Renaissance would cover Rome again in its classical glory. But what happened in Western Europe between the end of the Roman era in the fifth century and the dawn of the Renaissance in the fifteenth? Monasticism happened. Armies of monks founded innumerable monasteries crisscrossing the length and breadth of Europe like the beads of a rosary. These monasteries drove their roots deep into the native soil. They became centers of learning, agriculture, and culture that naturally gave birth to the dependent towns, schools, and universities which created medieval society. Monks transformed the farthest northwestern geographic protrusion of the Asian landmass into, well, Europe.

Saint Benedict and his twin sister, Saint Scholastica, are the male and female sources for that wide river of monasticism which has carved its way so deeply into the landscape of the Western world. Yet very little is known with certainty about her life. Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590–604, wrote about these famous twins about a half century after they died. He based his account on the testimony of abbots who personally knew Scholastica and her brother.

Gregory’s biographical commentary emphasizes the warm and faith-filled closeness between the siblings. Scholastica and Benedict visited each other as often as their cloistered lives allowed. And when they met they spoke about the things of God and the Heaven that awaited. Their mutual affection grew out of their common love of God, showing that a correct understanding and love of God is the only source of true unity in any community, whether it be the micro-community of a family or the mega-community of an entire country.

The Benedictine monastic family tried to replicate the common knowledge and love of God which Scholastica and Benedict lived in their own family. Through common schedules, prayer, meals, singing, recreation, and work, the communities of monks who lived according to the Benedictine Rule, and who live it still, sought to replicate the well-ordered and fruitful life of a large, faith-filled family. Like a well-trained orchestra, all the monks melded their talents into an overwhelming harmony under the wand of the abbot, until their common effort swelled over into the beautiful churches and music and schools that carry on today.

The gravestones in monastery cemeteries often have no names engraved on them. The polished marble may say, simply, “A holy monk.” The anonymity is itself a sign of holiness. What matters is the body of the larger religious community, not the individual who was just one of that body’s cells. Saint Scholastica died in 547. Her grave is known, marked, and celebrated. She is buried in a luxurious sepulchre in an underground chapel of the monastery of Monte Casino in the mountains south of Rome. She is not anonymous in her resting place, like so many monks and nuns. But she is anonymous in that so few details illustrate her character. Perhaps that was by design. Perhaps it was humility. She and her brother are major religious figures whose stamp is still impressed into Western culture. Yet she is a mystery. She is known by her legacy, and sometimes a legacy is enough. In her case it is definitely enough.

Saint Scholastica, you established the woman’s branch of the Benedictine Religious Order, and so gave Christian women their own communities to govern and rule. Help all who invoke your intercession to remain anonymous and humble even when developing great plans for God and His Church. You are great and you are unknown. Help us to desire the same.

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Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin
1869–1947
February 8—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Sudan and human-trafficking survivors

Out of Africa comes a slave, to freely serve the Master of all

Black-on-black or Arab-on-black slavery normally preceded and made possible the white-on-black slavery practiced by the colonial powers. These powers—England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy—were not slave societies, but their colonies were. The complex, pancultural reality of the slave trade and of slavery itself was on full display in the dramatic early life of today’s saint. The future Josephine was born in Western Sudan, centuries after the Church and most Catholic nations had long since outlawed slavery. Enforcing such teachings and laws was infinitely more difficult, however, than issuing them. And so it happened that a little African girl was kidnapped by Arab slave traders, forced to walk six hundred miles barefoot, and sold and resold in local slave markets over a period of twelve years. She was forcibly converted from her native religion to Islam, was cruelly treated by one master after another, was whipped, tattooed, scarred, and beaten. After experiencing all the humiliations inherent to captivity, she was bought by an Italian diplomat. She had been too young, and it had been too long, so she did not know her own name and had unclear recollections of where her family would be. She, essentially, had no people. The slave traders had given her the Arabic name Bakhita, “The Fortunate,” and the name stuck.

Living with limited freedom as a maid with her new family, Bakhita first learned what it meant to be treated like a child of God. No chains, no lashes, no threats, no hunger. She was surrounded by the love and warmth of normal family life. When her new family was returning to Italy, she asked to accompany them, thus beginning the long second half of her life’s story. Bakhita settled with a different family near Venice and and became the nanny for their daughter. When the parents had to tend to overseas business, Bakhita and the daughter were put in the care of the nuns of a local convent. Bakhita was so edified by the sisters’ example of prayer and charity that when her family returned to take her home, she refused to leave the convent, a decision reaffirmed by an Italian court which determined she had never legally been a slave in the first place. Bakhita was now absolutely free. “Freedom from” exists to make “freedom for” possible, and once free from obligations to her family, Bakhita chose to be free for service to God and her religious order. She freely chose poverty, chastity, and obedience. She freely chose not to be free.

Bakhita took the name Josephine and was baptized, confirmed, and received First Holy Communion on the same day from the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, Giuseppe Sarto, the future Pope Saint Pius X. The same future saint received her religious vows a few years later. Saints know saints. The trajectory of Sister Josephine’s life was now settled. She would remain a nun until her death. Throughout her life, Sister Josephine would often kiss the baptismal font, grateful that in its holy water she became a child of God. Her religious duties were humble—cooking, sewing, and greeting visitors. For a few years she travelled to other communities of her order to share her remarkable story and to prepare younger sisters for service in Africa. One nun commented that “her mind was always on God, but her heart in Africa.” Her humility, sweetness, and simple joy were infectious, and she became well known for her closeness to God. After heroically enduring a painful illness, she died with the words “Our Lady, Our Lady” on her lips. Her process began in 1959 and she was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000.

Saint Josephine, you lost your freedom when young and gave it away when an adult, showing that freedom is not the goal but the pathway to serving the Master of all. From your place in heaven, give hope to those enduring the indignity of physical slavery and to those bound tightly by other chains.

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Saint Jerome Emiliani, Priest
1481–1537
February 8—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of orphans and abandoned children

He was forever grateful after surviving an encounter with death

In the year 1202, a wealthy young Italian man joined the cavalry of his town’s militia. The inexperienced soldiers went into battle against a neighboring town’s larger force and were obliterated. Most of the retreating soldiers were run through with lances and left for dead in the mud. But at least one was spared. He was an aristocrat wearing fine clothes and new, expensive armor. He was worth taking hostage for ransom. The captive suffered in a dark, miserable prison for a full year before his father made the payment for his release. He returned to his hometown a changed man. That town was Assisi. That man was Francis.

Today’s saint, Jerome Emiliani, endured much the same. He was a soldier in the city state of Venice and was appointed the commander of a fortress. In a battle against a league of city states, the fortress fell and Jerome was imprisoned. A heavy chain was wrapped around his neck, hands, and feet, and fastened to a huge chunk of marble in an underground prison. He was forgotten, alone, and treated like an animal in the gloom of a dungeon. This was the pivot point. He repented of his godless life. He prayed. He dedicated himself to the Madonna. And then, somehow, he escaped, chains in hand, and fled to a nearby city. He walked through the doors of the local church and headed to the front to fulfill a fresh vow. He slowly approached a much venerated Virgin and placed his chains on the altar before her. He knelt, bowed his head, and prayed. His life was about to begin again.

Some pivot points can turn a life’s straight line into a right angle. Other lives change slowly, bending like an arc over a long span of years. The deprivations endured by Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Jerome Emiliani occurred suddenly. These men were comfortable, had money, and were supported by family and friends. Then, shockingly, they were naked, alone, and chained. Saint Jerome could have despaired in his imprisonment. Many people do. He could have rejected God, understood his sufferings as a sign of God’s disfavor, become bitter, and given up. Instead, he persevered. His imprisonment was a purification. He gave his suffering purpose. Once free, he was like a man born anew, grateful that the heavy prison chains no longer weighed down his body to the floor.

Once he started sprinting away from that prison fortress, it was like Saint Jerome never stopped running. He studied, was ordained a priest, and travelled throughout Northern Italy founding orphanages, hospitals, and homes for abandoned children, fallen women, and outcasts of all kinds. Exercising his priestly ministry in a Europe newly split by Protestant heresies, Jerome also wrote perhaps the first question-and-answer catechism in order to inculcate Catholic doctrine in his charges. Like so many saints, he seemed to be everywhere at once, caring for everyone except himself. While tending to the sick, he became infected and died in 1537, a martyr to generosity. He was, naturally, the kind of man who attracted followers. They eventually formed into a religious Congregation and received ecclesiastical approbation in 1540. Saint Jerome was canonized in 1767 and named the Patron Saint of orphans and abandoned children in 1928.

His life hinged on one pivot. It is a lesson. Emotional, physical, or psychological suffering, when conquered or controlled, can be a prelude to intense gratitude and generosity. No one walks down the street more free than a former hostage. No one enjoys a warm, comfortable bed like someone who once slept on asphalt. No one gulps a breath of fresh morning air quite like someone who has just heard from the doctor that the cancer is gone. Saint Jerome never lost the wonder and gratitude that filled his heart at the moment of his liberation. All was new. All was young. The world was his. And he would place all his power and energy in God’s service because he was a survivor.

Saint Jerome Emiliani, you overcame confinement to live a fruitful life dedicated to God and man. Help all who are confined in any way—physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically—to overcome whatever binds them and to live a life without bitterness.

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Saints Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
c. 1562-1597; late Sixteenth Century
February 6—Memorial (Optional Memorial if Lenten Weekday)
Liturgical Color: Red (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saints of Japan

Native Japanese priests and laity die nobly for a new faith

The words of the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier capture the pathos of today’s memorial: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” The swift rise, and sudden fall, of Catholicism in Japan is one of the great “might-have-beens” in human history. Portuguese and Spanish priests, mostly Jesuits and Franciscans, brought the Catholic religion to the highly cultured island of Japan in the late 1500s with great success. Tens of thousands of people converted, two seminaries were opened, native Japanese were ordained as priests, and Japan ceased to be mission territory, being elevated to a diocese. But the rising arc of missionary success just as quickly curved downward. In waves of persecutions from the 1590s through the 1640s, thousands of Catholics were persecuted, tortured and executed until the Catholic religion, and indeed any outward expression of Christianity, was totally eradicated. Japan almost became a Catholic nation, coming close to joining the Philippines as the only thoroughly Catholic society in Asia. Japan might have done for Asia in the 1600s what Ireland did for Europe in the early Middle Ages. It could have sent scholars, monks, and missionary priests to convert nations far larger than itself, including China. It was not to be.

Paul Miki was a native Japanese who became a Jesuit. The Jesuits would not accept into their seminary men from India or other nations they considered to be of inferior education and culture. But the Jesuits had immense respect for the Japanese, whose culture was equal to, or even exceeded, that of Western Europe. Paul Miki was among those who, after being educated in the faith, evangelized their own people in their own language. He and others blazed a new pathway forward, allowing the Japanese to not only understand but to see, in flesh and blood, that they could retain the best of their native culture while being faithful to the newfound God of Jesus Christ.

Paul, a Jesuit brother, and his companions were the first group to suffer mass martyrdom in Japan. A military leader and adviser to the Emperor feared Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the island and ordered the arrest of six Franciscan priests and brothers, three Japanese Jesuits, sixteen other Japanese, and one Korean. The captured had their left ears mutilated and were then forced to march, bloodied, hundreds of miles to Nagasaki. On February 5, 1597, Paul and his companions were bound to crosses on a hill, like Christ, and pierced with lances. An eyewitness described the scene:

Our brother, Paul Miki, saw himself standing in the noblest pulpit he had ever filled. To his “congregation” he began by proclaiming himself a Japanese and a Jesuit… “My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves.” Then he looked at his comrades and began to encourage them in their final struggle…Then, according to Japanese custom, the four executioners began to unsheath their spears…The executioners killed them one by one. One thrust of the spear, then a second blow. It was over in a short time.

The executions did nothing to stop the Church. Persecution only fanned the flames of faith. By 1614 about 300,000 Japanese were Catholics. So more intense persecutions followed. Japanese leaders eventually chose to seal off their ports and borders from virtually all foreign penetration, a policy that would last until the nineteenth century. Only in 1854 was Japan forcibly opened to foreign trade and Western visitors. Then, thousands of Japanese Catholics suddenly came out of hiding, mostly near Nagasaki. They bore the names of the Japanese martyrs, spoke some Latin and Portuguese, asked their new guests for statues of Jesus and Mary, and sought to verify if a French priest was legitimate with two questions: 1) Are you celibate?; and 2) Do you come from the Pope in Rome? These hidden Christians also opened their palms to show the priest something else—relics of the martyrs who their remote ancestors had known and honored centuries before. Their memory had never died.

Saint Paul Miki, you accepted martyrdom rather than abandon your faith. You chose to serve those closest to you rather than to flee. Inspire in us the same love of God and man so that we too can know, love, and serve God in the heroic fashion that made you so brave and composed in the face of intense suffering.

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Saint Agatha, Virgin, Martyr
c. Third Century
February 5—Memorial (Optional Memorial if Lenten Weekday)
Liturgical Color: Red (Purple if Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Sicily, breast cancer, rape victims, and bellfounders

Of all the men drawn to her, she desired only one

Pope Saint Gregory the Great reigned as the Supreme Pontiff of the Church from 590–604. His family loved Sicily and had property there, so the young Gregory was familiar with that beautiful island’s saints and traditions. When he became Pope, Saint Gregory inserted the names of two of Sicily’s most revered martyrs, Agatha and Lucy, into the heart of the Mass, the Roman Canon. Saint Gregory even placed these two Sicilians just before the city of Rome’s own two female martyrs, Agnes and Cecilia, who had been part of the Roman Canon for many centuries prior. It was this papal decision that has preserved Saint Agatha’s memory more effectively than anything else. Liturgy is inherently conservative and protects the Church’s oldest memories. So on the lips of thousands of priests every day are the names of some of the Church’s most revered female martyrs: “Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and all the saints.”

Not much is known for certain about the life and death of Saint Agatha, but long tradition supplies what primary documents lack. Pope Damasus, who reigned from 366–384, may have composed a poem in her honor, indicating how widespread her reputation was by that early date. Saint Agatha was from a well-off family in Sicily in Roman times, probably in the third century. After dedicating her life to Christ, her beauty drew powerful men to her like a magnet. But she refused all suitors in favor of the Lord. Perhaps during the persecution of the Emperor Decius around 250, she was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and martyred. She refused to renounce her faith or to give in to the powerful men who desired her. An ancient homily relates: “A true virgin, she wore the glow of a pure conscience and the crimson of the lamb’s blood for her cosmetics.”

It is also the constant tradition that her torture included sexual mutilation. Whereas Saint Lucy is shone in art with her eyeballs on a platter, Saint Agatha is normally shown holding a plate on which rest her own breasts, as they were cut off by her pagan tormentors before her execution. This peculiar image is, in fact, carved into the wall over the entrance to the sixth century church of Saint Agatha in Rome, a church re-dedicated by Pope Saint Gregory himself so long ago.

Men commit most of the physical violence in the world. And when their victims are women, that violence can be particularly vicious because their victims are so defenseless. The stories of the early male martyrs of the Church relate tales of extreme torture by their Roman captors. But the stories of the women martyrs often relate something more—sexual humiliation. No male martyrs are known to have suffered similar indignities. Saint Agatha and others were not only physically tough to endure the pain they did, but also mentally and spiritually powerful to have resisted to the death the public embarrassment and degradation particular to them as women. They were the strong ones. It was their male captors who looked weak.

It was Christianity’s exaltation of women, children, slaves, prisoners, the old, the sick, the foreigner, and the outcast that caused the vast leaven of the Church to slowly rise in the Mediterranean world. The Church did not create a victim class who complained about a privileged class. The Church preached the dignity of persons. The Church did not even preach equality of individuals or teach that governments must enact laws protecting the unprotected. That is all so modern. The Church spoke in theological language and taught that every man, woman, and child was made in God’s image and likeness and so deserved respect. It taught that Jesus Christ died for every person on the cross. The Church gave, and gives, total answers to total questions, and those answers were, and are, compelling. The Feast of Saint Agatha is still massively celebrated on February 5 in Catania, Sicily. Hundreds of thousands of faithful process through the streets in honor of that island’s patron saint. The ancient traditions carry on.

Saint Agatha, you were a virgin espoused to Christ himself, a bride of the Lord who preserved herself for Him alone. Your vow to love God above all else hardened you to endure temptation, torture, and degradation. May we be as resolute as you when any type of persecution, however mild, seeks us out.

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Saint Ansgar, Bishop
801–865
February 3—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Scandinavia, Denmark, and Sweden

He sowed the frozen turf of the north, though nothing bloomed

Today’s saint walked the forests of Northern Europe during that stretch of history later known, prejudicially, as the “Dark Ages.” He lived three hundred years after the fall of Rome and yet three hundred years before the soaring gothic spires of the High Middle Ages pierced the blue sky. “Ansgar” is a grunt or a mere sound to modern ears. It seems fit for a remote, cold, and brutal age. It is difficult to imagine a child running into the warm embrace of a sunny Ansgar. But the real Saint Ansgar broke bread with Northern Vikings and rough warriors of the forest with names just like his own: Horik, Drogo, Gudmund, and Vedast. Ansgar was one of them, with one big difference—he was a Catholic.

The one thing, a very big thing, that links such long-ago saints, priests, and bishops to us moderns is the Catholic faith. We share the exact same faith as Saint Ansgar! If Saint Ansgar were to step out of the pages of a book today, in his bear fur covering and deerskin boots, and walk through the front doors of a twenty-first-century Catholic church, he would be at home. His eyes would search for the burning flame of the sanctuary lamp, and upon spotting it, he would know. He would bend his knee before a tabernacle housing the Blessed Sacrament, just as he did thousands of times in the past. He would walk past statues of Mary and the saints and know their stories. He would hear the same Gospel, make the same sign of the cross, and feel the same drops of blessed water on his forehead. Nothing would be unusual. Our faith unites what time and culture divide. The Church is the world’s only multicultural, transnational, timeless family. There is nothing else like Her.

Saint Ansgar left his native region in Northern France, after receiving a good Christian education, to become an apostle monk to Northern Germany. He was named by the Pope as Archbishop of Hamburg and, from that post, organized the first systematic evangelization of Scandinavia. These regions were far, far away from the more developed civilizations of Italy, Spain, and France. Yet Saint Ansgar and his helpers traveled that far, and risked that much, to plant the Catholic faith in the frozen ground of what is today Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

Yet nearly all the seeds of faith that Saint Ansgar planted were to die in the ground shortly after his own death. Sadly, his missionary efforts produced no long-lasting fruit. The age of the Vikings dawned, and it would be two centuries before Christianity would again flourish and spread across the northern arc of Europe. Yet even that second evangelization would come to a bitter end! In the sixteenth century, Scandinavia abandoned Catholicism for its shadow under the influence of Fr. Luther and his followers.

What a lesson to be learned! As Saint Paul wrote, one plants, one waters, and God gives the growth: “He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor” (1 Cor. 3:8). Saint Ansgar carried out God’s will. He labored for the Lord and for the faith. What happened after that was up to God in His providence. Carrying out God’s will should be enough for us, as it was for our saint today. We must plant and till, even though harvest time may never come.

Saint Ansgar, you persevered in difficult times to bring the faith to a pagan land. You saw success and then failure, glory and then disappointment. Your work did not outlast you, but pleased God nonetheless. May we see our work as our duty, and our vocation as God’s will, even when the fruit of our labor is harvested by someone else, or not at all.

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Saint Blase, Bishop and Martyr
c. early Fourth Century
February 3—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of wool combers and sufferers of throat diseases

The obscure memory of an early bishop-martyr endures

A secularist does not evaluate religion on its own terms but on its practical benefits. Is a religion true? It doesn’t matter. But if you can prove that empty stomachs are now full, that malarial fevers are cooled, and that formerly dusty roads are now paved due to religion, then religion is indeed useful and good, all truth claims aside. Religion’s role in physical healing would be another proof of its great good, if not its truth. For all the incontestable progress of medicine, cancers still spread, tumors still grow, and infections still poison. Even the most modern of moderns, in a state of total vulnerability, understands in his deepest of deeps that physical healings surge from sources other than modern science. PhDs wash in the River Ganges, rocket scientists lower their bodies into the cool baths of Lourdes, and surgeons spread sacred oil on their skin hoping against hope for a cure that has eluded them.

The memory of Saint Blaise, a man of obscure origins, stands behind one of the most enduring healing traditions in all of Christianity. In the holy name of Blaise, two candles are crossed, X-shaped, and pressed against the neck to ward off and cure diseases of the throat. Oil and ashes, candles and flames, bread and wine, words and blessings. God’s face does not appear in the ash cloud of a volcanic eruption or in a golden pile at the end of a rainbow. The Christian believes that God’s salvation and healing power come through His Holy Mother, through His saints, and through the creation He molded in His own hands.

A believer doesn’t believe in belief, any more than a soldier loves patriotism. A soldier loves his country, and a believer loves God. And because the believer loves God, he loves a someone, not a something, and waits in line and shuffles forward, step by step, to the priest holding those X-shaped candles on today’s feast. Saint Blaise is primarily a “northern” saint called upon to remedy mostly cold climate ills. Because it is usually winter, then, the believer adjusts his jacket collar, feels the milky wax candle against his tender throat, closes his eyes, and prays that the cough disappear, that his voice remain strong, or that the faintest lump turn out to be nothing at all.

Details of Saint Blaise’s life are difficult to verify. Some traditions, dating from centuries after he lived, state that he was a bishop in Armenia, east of modern day Turkey. His reputation for holiness drew people to him in search of a cure for their infirmities. It is said that Blaise was tortured and murdered in an anti-Christian persecution. Every saint, no matter how remote his life or obscure his story, casts some light on the truths of our faith. The life of Saint Blaise and the tradition of throat healing that still surrounds him tell us that holy lives have power. His life tells us that holy people intercede for less holy people, and that the less powerful, the less wise, and the less good depend on the strong, the intelligent, and the good in order to leave their state of dependence, ignorance, and sin. In the same way that salvation is mediated, healing is as well. Whether through the skilled hands of a surgeon, the chemicals of a drug, or the intercession of a saint, healing comes. The many channels branch out from the one source who is God. We, the faithful, when fragile and afraid, patiently sit in the doctor’s office for our name to be called, wait at the pharmacy counter for the prescription to be filled, or line up in church for the candles to rest softly on our clavicles. Healing is an offer, we are ripe to be cured, and any sacred intervention is welcome, no matter whence it comes.

Saint Blaise, many centuries ago you suffered for the same faith we now share with you. May we be ever united to you in our common Church, and may we be healed of all infirmities of the throat through your heavenly intercession.

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The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
February 2—Feast
Liturgical Color: White

God goes to Church

The various names, meanings, and traditions overlapping in today’s Feast churn like the crystals in a kaleidoscope, revealing one image and then another with every slight rotation of the tube. The Presentation of the Lord in the Temple is, rotate, also the Purification of Mary. But, rotate, it’s also known as the Meeting of the Lord in the Christian East. And, rotate, it’s also the Feast of Candlemas, marking forty days after Christmas, the end of that liturgical season. The multiple names and meanings of today’s Feast have given birth to surprisingly broad and varied cultural expressions. The biblical account of the Presentation is the source for the “two turtle doves” in the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” for the sword piercing Mary’s Immaculate Heart in Catholic iconography, for the Fourth Joyful Mystery of the rosary, and for the Canticle prayed by all the world’s priests and nuns every single night of their lives. The Presentation is even the remote source of the frivolous American folkloric tradition of Groundhog Day.

Behind all of these names and meanings are, however, a few fundamental theological facts worth reflecting upon. The Lord Jesus Christ, forty days after His birth, in keeping with the biblical significance of the number forty and with Jewish custom, was presented in the temple in Jerusalem by His parents, Mary and Joseph. Saint Luke’s Gospel recounts the story. After the Presentation, Jesus was to enter the temple again as a boy and later as an adult. He would even refer to His own body as a temple which He would raise up in three days. Jesus’s life was a continual self-gift to God the Father from the very beginning to the very end. His parents did not carry their infant Son to a holy mountain, a sacred spring, or a magical forest. It was in His temple that the God of Israel was most present, so they brought their son to God Himself, not just to a reflection of Him in nature.

The extraordinarily beautiful temple in Jerusalem, the very building where Jesus was presented by His parents, was burned and destroyed by a powerful Roman army under the future Emperor Titus in 70 A.D. It was never rebuilt. A tourist in Rome can, even today, gaze up at the marble depictions of the sack of the Jerusalem temple carved on the inside vaults of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. Christianity has never had just one sacred place equivalent to the Jewish Temple or the Muslims’ Kaaba in Mecca. Our faith is historical, yes, but it has a global reach which does not allow it to be planted in just one culture or just one location. Christ is destined for all cultures and all times. Every Catholic church with the Blessed Sacrament is a Holy of Holies, which fully expresses the deepest mysteries of our faith. There is no strict need to go on pilgrimage to Rome or to Jerusalem once in your life. But you do have to go on pilgrimage to your local parish once a week for Mass. Every Catholic church in every place, not just one building in one place, encompasses and transmits the entirety of our faith. God’s hand must have been involved in the headship of the Church migrating from Jerusalem to Rome in the first century. Our Pope does not live in the historical cradle of the faith he represents, because Saint Peter saw no need to remain in Jerusalem in order to be faithful to his Master. The Church is where Christ is, Christ is in the Holy Eucharist, and the Holy Eucharist is everywhere.

We go to church, as the Jews went to their one temple or to their many synagogues, because God is more God in a church. And when we experience the true God, we experience our true selves. That is, we are more us when God is more God. God is interpreted according to the mode of the interpreter, when He is sought in a glowing sunset, a rushing waterfall, or a stunning mountain. In nature, God is whoever the seeker wants Him to be. In a church, however, God is protected from misinterpretation. He is surrounded and protected by His priests, saints, sacraments, music, art, and worship. In a church, God is fully clothed, equipped, and armored. He can’t be misunderstood. So we go to find Him there, to dedicate ourselves to Him there, and to receive Him there in His Body and in His Blood.

Lord Jesus, as an infant You were brought to the temple by Your parents out of religious duty. Help all parents to take their duties to God seriously, to inculcate their faith in the next generation by their words and by their actions, so that the faith will be handed on where the faith is first learned—in the family and in the home.

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Saint John Bosco, Priest
1815–1888
January 31—Memorial
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of editors, publishers, schoolchildren and juvenile delinquents

His person radiated the warm love of God, drawing everyone towards him

Some saints attract the faithful by the raw power of their minds and the sheer force of their arguments. Think of St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine. Other saints write so eloquently, with such grace and sweetness, that their words draw people to God like bees to honey. Think of Blessed John Henry Newman or St. Francis de Sales. Still other saints say and write almost nothing, but lead lives of such generous and sacrificial witness that their holiness is obvious. Think of St. Francis of Assisi or St. Teresa of Calcutta. Today’s saint was not a first class thinker, eloquent writer, bloody martyr, or path breaking Church reformer. But he had abundant gifts of equal value.

St. John Bosco was, to put it in the simplest terms, a winner. His heart was like a furnace radiating immense warmth, fraternal concern, and affectionate love of God to every person in the room. His personality seemed to operate like a powerful magnet that pulled everyone closer and closer in toward his overflowing, priestly, and fatherly love. His country boy simplicity, street smarts, genuine concern for the poor, and love of God, Mary and the Church made him irresistible. Don Bosco (‘Don’ being a title of honor for priests, teachers, etc…) had charm. What he asked for, he received. From everyone. He built, during his own lifetime, an international empire of charity and education so massive and so successful that it is impossible to explain his accomplishments in merely human terms.

Like many great saints, Don Bosco’s external, observable, charisms were not the whole story. Behind his engaging personality was a will like a rod of iron. He exercised strict self discipline and firmness of purpose in driving toward his goals. His gift of self, or self dedication, was remarkable. Morning, noon, and night. Weekday or weekend. Rain or shine. He was always there. Unhurried. Available. Ready to talk. His life was one big generous act from beginning to end.

St. John grew up dirt poor in the country working as a shepherd. His father died when he was an infant. After studies and priestly ordination we went to the big city, Turin, and saw first hand how the urban poor lived. It changed his life. He began a ministry to poor boys which was not particularly innovative. He said Mass, heard confessions, taught the gospel, went on walks, cooked meals, and taught practical skills like book binding. There was no secret to Don Bosco’s success. But no one else was doing it, and no one else did it so well. Followers flocked to assist him and he founded the Salesians, a Congregation named after his own hero, St. Francis de Sales. The Salesian empire of charity and education spread around the globe. By the time of its founder’s death in 1888 the Salesians had 250 houses the world over caring for 130,000 children. Their work continues today.

Don Bosco was not concerned with the remote causes of poverty. He did not challenge class structures or economic systems. He saw what was in front of him and went “straight to the poor,” as he put it. He did his work from the inside out. It was for others to figure out long term solutions, but not for him.

Don Bosco did not know what rest was and wore himself out by being all things to all men. His reputation for holiness endured well beyond his death. A young priest who had met him in northern Italy in 1883, Fr. Achille Ratti, later became Pope Pius XI and, on Easter Sunday 1934, canonized the great priest he had known so many years before.

St. John Bosco, you dedicated your life to the education and care of poor youth. Aid us in reaching out to those who need our assistance today, not tomorrow, and here, not somewhere else. Through your intercession may we carry out a fraction of the good that you achieved in your life.

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Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor
1225–1274
January 28—Memorial
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of all universities and of students

A theological Grand Master, he positioned every piece exquisitely on the chessboard

The silhouette of St. Thomas Aquinas stands like a giant on the highest summit of human thought, casting such a wide and deep shadow over the surrounding landscape that all subsequent thinkers labor in the shade on the slopes below him. It is fair to say that Thomism, the thinking method and intellectual conclusions of St. Thomas, has been the Catholic Church’s standard theology since he lived in the thirteenth century.

St. Thomas understood that all thinking about God is done from inside original sin and within the parameters of human intellectual capacity. The uncreated, timeless, mysterious God, then, is by definition incomprehensible to creatures trapped in time, space, matter, sin, distraction, and confusion. God is outside of the universe, rather than being just one important ingredient in the recipe of reality. This essential “otherness” of God means that His presence is not completely accessible to the senses. It is not just a question of seeing farther, understanding more deeply, hearing more acutely, or feeling more intensely. Twenty senses instead of five would still not be enough to capture God because He transcends all other forms of being known to us. In the 1950’s, a Russian cosmonaut looked out over space from his orbit miles above the earth and declared “I have found no God.” He was looking for something that wasn’t there and answering a question that was poorly posed.

Sometimes God is described as the highest being in an immense hierarchy of beings. From this perspective, the tiniest specks of organic or inorganic life, up and onward through plant and animal life, mankind, the planets and the solar system itself, are all beneath, and owe their creation to, the super being of God Himself. In this “ladder of existence” understanding, every being is a rung leading to higher and higher rungs at the top of which stands God.

St. Thomas clarified that this approach was inaccurate. God is not the highest of all beings but being itself. Every person at one time did not exist. Creation itself, including mankind, is created, meaning at some point it was not. But God cannot not be. For St. Thomas, God’s essential action is to exist. It is intrinsic to His nature as God. God, then, is not something in the air, but the air itself. He is not the biggest whale in the ocean. He is the water. This means that there is no strict need to provide scientific evidence for God because even asking the question presumes the reality all around us. In other words, science can explain the chemical composition of ink, but science has nothing to say about the meaning of words printed with ink on a page. This does not mean science is undeveloped, but just that it has limits.

Thomism’s understanding of God as non contingent being itself which makes all dependent existence possible is intellectually sophisticated and also deeply attractive. This understanding of God meshes nicely with an appreciation for the natural beauty of the earth, love of art, and charity for our fellow man, while also allowing space for God to reveal Himself more fully, and gratuitously, in the person of His Son Jesus Christ.

St. Thomas’s encyclopedic knowledge and massive erudition existed harmoniously with a humble nature and a simple, traditional Catholic piety. He was a well-balanced man and a dedicated Dominican priest. This synthesis of childlike wonder and deep inquiry marked his life. After having a mystical vision of Jesus Christ on the cross while praying after Mass one day, he abandoned any further writing. He died on his way to the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, not yet 50 years old. He is buried in Toulouse, France, retaining his status as the Church’s most eminent theologian.

St. Thomas, your life of the mind co-existed with a deep piety. Your writings defend the faith of those who have neither the time nor the gift for higher study. Help all those who teach in the Church to follow your example of humble and faithful inquiry into the highest truths.

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Saint Angela Merici, Virgin, 1474–1540
January 27—Optional Memorial
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of disabled and physically challenged people and illnesses

A holy woman tries to change the world one girl at a time

Although not common, some older images and statues of St. Francis of Assisi show him balancing three orbs on his shoulders. They appear to be globes, heavenly realms, or the earth, the moon, and the sun. But the three orbs represent the three orders in the Franciscan family: the first order for men, the second order for women, and the third order for the laity who desired to live by the Franciscan rule. Today’s saint, Angela Merici, was a third order Franciscan, a lay woman who followed a strict rule of Franciscan life outside of a convent.

Angela’s holiness, mystical experiences, and leadership skills ultimately led her beyond her Franciscan commitment to found her own community of “virgins in the world” dedicated to the education of vulnerable girls, or, in common parlance, at risk youths. She placed the community under the patronage of St. Ursula. The community, after Angela’s death, was formally recognized as the Ursulines, and gained such renown for their schools that they came to be known as the female Jesuits.

St. Angela saw the risk that uneducated girls in her own region of northern Italy would end up being abused sexually or financially and sought to counter this possibility through education. She gathered a like minded group of virgins around her into a “company,” a military word also used by St. Ignatius in founding his “Company of Jesus” around the same time. Saint Angela organized her city into districts which reported to a “colonel” who oversaw the education and general welfare of the poor girls under their care. Saint Angela’s cooperators did not understand their dedicated virginity as a failure to find a husband or a rejection of religious life in a convent. They emulated the early Christian orders of virgins as spouses of Christ who served the children of their Beloved in the world.

Living in the first part of the 16th century, St. Angela was far ahead of her time. Teaching orders of nuns became normative in the Church throughout the centuries, staffing Catholic schools throughout the world. But nuns did not always do this. It had to start with someone, and that someone was today’s saint. Bonds of faith, love of God, and a common purpose knitted her followers together into a religious family that served the spiritual and physical welfare of those who no one else cared about. Women make homes. Men just live in them. Saint Angela sought to change society one woman at a time by infusing every home with Christian virtue emanating from the heart of the woman who ran it. She trained future wives, mothers, and educators in their youth, when they were still able to be formed.

The Papal Bull of Pope Paul III in 1544 which recognized her community stated of St. Angela Merici: “She had such a thirst and hunger for the salvation and good of her neighbor that she was disposed and most ready to give not one, but a thousand lives, if she had had so many, for the salvation even of the least… with maternal love, she embraced all creatures…Her words…were spoken with such unheard of effectiveness that everyone felt compelled to say: ‘Here is God.’”

St. Angela Merici, infuse in our hearts that same love for which you left worldly joys to seek out the vulnerable and the forgotten. Help us to educate the ignorant and to share with the less fortunate, not only for their spiritual and material benefit but for our everlasting salvation.

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Saints Timothy and Titus, Bishops, First century
January 26—Memorial
Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of Stomach Disorders

Saint Paul could not do it alone so he appointed helpers

Today’s saints were two bishops from the apostolic period of the Church, the decades immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ. In this grace-filled time, the Apostles and St. Paul were carving the first deep furrows into the pagan soil they traveled, planting in the earth the seeds of Christian faith which succeeding bishops would water, tend, and harvest.

Little is certainly known about today’s saints apart from references to them in the Acts of the Apostles and in the epistles of St. Paul. But these numerous references are enough. The generations of theologians, bishops, martyrs, and saints who lived in the post apostolic period give universal and consistent witness to the veracity of Paul’s letters and the events they recount. There are theological, rather than historical, lessons to be taken from the lives and ministry of today’s saints.

Saints Timothy and Titus were apostles of an Apostle. They shared in, and cooperated with, the ministry of St. Paul, who had a direct connection to Christ through a miraculous occurrence on the road to Damascus, a feast commemorated, not coincidentally, the day prior to today’s memorial. Timothy, Titus, and many others, known and unknown, carried out on a local level a priestly ministry which Paul engaged in on a more regional level. It was St. Paul’s practice, and probably that of the other surviving Apostles, to appoint assistants wherever they went who acted with the authority of the Apostle who appointed them. These assistants were variously called priests or bishops, terms that were often interchangeable. Deacons shared in the priestly ministry too, but more as assistants to bishops.

A direct connection to an Apostle, either through his direct ministry or through a group or person he appointed (presumably through an ordination rite), was fundamental to establish a church. Accredited leaders were needed. This is a constant theme in the writings of St. Paul. No Apostle—no Church. The body could not be separated from the head and still survive. In other words, the proclamation of the gospel always—always—occurred contemporaneously with the foundation of a solidly structured local Church. The modern tendency to emphasize the internal, personal, and spiritual message of Christ over the external, public, hierarchical Church which carried his message was a dichotomy unknown to early Christianity. The Church carries a message and is itself a message. The content of the gospel and the form of the gospel community go hand in hand. The constant, amoeba like, splitting of Protestant communities attests to the inevitable divisions which result when the Church and its message are separated.

A later tradition holds that St. Timothy was the first bishop of Ephesus, in modern day Turkey. Equally ancient traditions state that St. John retreated to Ephesus before eventually dying on the island of Patmos, and that the Virgin Mary followed John to Ephesus, living in a house above the town. It is possible, then, that St. Timothy drank from the deepest wells of the Christian tradition. Sitting around the warm glow of a fire in a dark room at night, he may have heard about the life of Christ from the very lips of the most important witnesses. We can imagine that he heard much of what is not today preserved, and from the very man, Saint John, who ends his Gospel by writing that “there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:25.)

Saints Timothy and Titus, through your lives dedicated to the missions, you helped lay the foundations of Christianity, and carried on the priestly ministry of Jesus by preaching, teaching, and governing His flock. Help us to be as bold now as you were then.

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The Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle
January 25—Feast
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of missionaries, evangelists, writers and public workers

One man can change the world

In the long history of the Church no conversion has been more consequential than St. Paul’s. Paul had not been ambivalent toward the Church before he converted. He had actively persecuted it, even throwing rocks at the head of St. Stephen, in all likelihood. But he changed, or God changed him, on one particular night. And on that night Christianity changed too. And when the course of Christianity changed, the world changed. It is difficult to overemphasize the impact of today’s feast.

One way to think about the significance of an event, whether big small, is to consider what things would be like if the event had never occurred. This is the premise behind the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You compare actual life with a hypothetical “what if” alternative scenario. What if St. Paul had remained a zealous jew? What if he had never converted? Never wrote one letter? Never travelled the seas on missionary voyages? It can safely be assumed that the world itself, not just the Church, would look different than it does today. Perhaps Christianity would have remained confined to Palestine for many more centuries before breaking out into wider Europe. Maybe Christianity would have taken a right turn instead of a left, and all of China and India would be as culturally Catholic as Europe is today. It’s impossible to say. But the global scale of the effects of Paul’s conversion speak to the significance of his conversion.

Some conversions are dramatic, some are boring. Some are instantaneous, some are gradual. Augustine heard a boy in a garden repeating “Take and Read” and knew the time had come. Saint Francis of Assisi heard Christ say from the cross “Rebuild My Church” and responded with his life. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, the father of abortion in the United States, renounced, repudiated, and repented of his life’s work and searched for a real Church to forgive his real sins. He ultimately bowed his head to receive the waters of baptism.

The details of Paul’s conversion are well known. He was thrown from his horse on the road to Damascus (except that Acts makes no mention of a horse). Maybe he just fell down while walking. While stunned on the ground Paul heard the voice of Jesus: “Why are you persecuting me?” Not “Why are you persecuting my followers.” Jesus and the Church are clearly one. To persecute the Church is to persecute Christ. Jesus is the head and the Church is his body. Paul did not convert to loving Jesus and say that the Church was just an accidental human construct that blocked him from the Lord. No, of course not. He believed what right minded Catholics have believed for centuries and still believe today. To love Jesus is to love the Church and vice versa. It is impossible to love the Lord while disregarding the historical reality of how the Lord is communicated to us. The Church is not just a vehicle to carry God’s revelation. The Church is actually part of God’s revelation.

Paul’s conversion teaches us that when Jesus come to us, He doesn’t come alone. He comes with His angels, saints, priests, and bishops. He comes with Mary, the sacraments, doctrine, and devotions. He comes with the Church because he and the Church are one. And when we go to the Lord we don’t go alone either. We go as members of a Church into whose mystical body we were baptized. Thus St. Paul heard from God Himself, and thus we believe today.

St. Paul, we ask your openness to conversion when we hear the Lord speak to us as He spoke to you. Assist us in responding with great faith to every invitation we receive to love the Lord more fully, to know Him more deeply, and to spread his word more broadly to those who need it.

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Saint Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor
1567–1622
January 24—Memorial
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of writers and journalists

A gentleman of sterling character and many talents leaves a legacy

It is almost an act of rudeness to limit the life of today’s saint to one page. Saint Francis de Sales was a religious celebrity in his own day and age. He was an erudite, humble, tough, and zealous priest and bishop. He was holy and known to be holy by everyone, especially those closest to him. He mingled easily with princes, kings, and popes, who enjoyed his charming and educated company. He incessantly criss crossed his diocese on foot and horseback, destroying his own health, to visit the poor and humble faithful who were drawn to him as much as the high born. He embodied to the fullest that extraordinary pastoral and intellectual productivity, characteristic of the greatest saints, which makes one wonder if he ever rested a single minute, or slept a single night.

St. Francis de Sales was born and lived most of life in what is today southeast France. His father ensured that he received an excellent education from a young age, and his son excelled in every subject. His intellectual gifts, holiness, and engaging personality made him, almost inevitably, an ideal candidate for the priesthood and eventually the episcopacy. He was duly appointed the bishop of Geneva, a generation after John Calvin, a former future priest, had turned that deeply Catholic city into the Protestant Rome, leaving St. Francis as bishop of Geneva in little but name only.

In carrying out his ministry, St. Francis’ weapon of choice was the pen. His apologetic and spiritual works brought back tens of thousands of former Catholics to the faith after they had dabbled in Calvinism. Saint Francis’s works were so profound, original, and creative, and his love of God so straightforward and understandable, that he would be declared a doctor of the Church in 1877. In his most well-known book, Introduction to the Devout Life, he addressed himself to “people who live in towns, within families, or at court.” His sage spiritual advice encouraged the faithful to seek perfection in the mechanics shop, the soldier’s regiment, or on the wharf. God’s will was to be found everywhere, not just in monasteries and convents.

Many arduous pastoral trips through the mountains of his native region eventually wore him out. He never insisted on preferential treatment despite his status. He slept, ate, and traveled as a common man would. When he lay dying, mute after a terrible stroke, a nun asked him if he had any words of wisdom to impart. He asked for some paper and wrote three words on it: “Humility, Humility, Humility.” St. Francis is buried in a beautiful bronze sepulchre displaying his likeness in the Visitation Basilica and Convent in Annecy France.

St. Francis de Sales, we ask your intercession to aid us in leading a balanced life of study, prayer, virtue, and service. You were a model bishop who never expected special privilege. Help all those who teach the faith to convey our doctrine with the same force, clarity, and depth that you did.

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Saint Marianne Cope, Virgin
1838–1918
January 23—Optional Memorial USA
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of lepers, outcasts, those with HIV/AIDS, Hawaiʻi.

An immigrant learns generosity in her large family, and practices it her whole life

Today’s saint was a model female Franciscan who emulated Saint Francis’ heroic example of personally caring for those outcasts of all outcasts—lepers. Saints are not born, of course; they are made. And Saint Marianne Cope came from a specific time, place, and family. She could have developed her abundant talents in many directions and used them for many purposes, but she re-directed what God loaned her to serve and honor Him, His Church, and mankind. The Church, the Franciscans, and Hawaii were the arenas in which this elite spiritual athlete exercised her skills. She was asked for much and gave even more. She became a great, great woman.

Marianne Cope was born in Germany and was brought to New York state by her parents when she was still a baby. She was the oldest of ten children. Her parents lived, struggled, and worked for their kids. She saw generosity in action at home everyday. She quit school after eighth grade to work in a factory to financially support her ailing father, her mother, and her many siblings. The challenges inherent to migration, a new culture, illness, a large family, and poverty turned Marianne into a serious, mature woman when she was just a teen. She fulfilled her long delayed desire to enter religious life in 1862. Once professed, she moved quickly into leadership positions. She taught in German-speaking Catholic grade schools, became a school principal, and was elected by her fellow Franciscans to positions of governance in her Order. She opened the first hospitals in her region of central New York, dedicating herself and her Order to the time-honored religious vocation of caring for the sick, regardless of their ability to pay for medical services. She was eventually elected Superior General. In her early forties she was already a woman of wide experience: serious, administratively gifted, spiritually grounded, and of great human virtues. But this was all preparation. She now began the second, great act of her drama. She went to Hawaii.

In 1883 she received a letter from the Bishop of Honolulu begging her, as Superior General, to send sisters to care for lepers in Hawaii. He had written to various other religious Orders without success. Sister Marianne was elated. She responded like the prophet Isaiah, saying, “Here I am, send me” (Is 6:8). She not only sent six sisters, she sent herself! She planned to one day return to New York but never did. For the next thirty-five years, Sister Marianne Cope became a type of recluse on remote Hawaii, giving herself completely to the will of God.

Sister Marianne and her fellow Franciscans managed one hospital, founded another, opened a home for the daughters of lepers, and, after a few years of proving themselves, opened a home for women and girls on the virtually inaccessible island of Molokai. Here her life coincided with the final months of Saint Damien de Veuster. Sister Marianne nursed the future saint in his dying days, assuring him that she and her sisters would continue his work among the lepers. After Father Damien died, the Franciscans, in addition to caring for the leprous girls, now cared for the boys as well. A male Congregation eventually relieved them of this apostolate.

Sister Marianne Cope lived the last thirty years of her life on Molokai until her death in 1918. She was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 and canonized by him in 2012. She loved the Holy Eucharist, the Virgin Mary, and the Church. And because she loved God first, she loved those whom God loves, her brothers and sisters in Christ. She sacrificed for them, left home and family for them, put her health at risk for them, and became a saint through them.

Saint Marianne Cope, help us to be as generous as you were in serving those on the margins, those who need our help, and those who have no one else to assist them. You were a model Franciscan in dying to self. Help us to likewise die so that we might likewise live.

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Saint Vincent, Deacon and Martyr
Late Third century–c. 304
January 22—Memorial
(Celebrated January 23 in the USA)
Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of vintners, brickmakers, and sailors

A Deacon’s bloody witness impresses the Christian world

There are a few famous saints who bear the name Vincent. Today’s saint is the first Vincent. He was a deacon from the Roman town of Zaragoza, Spain. Zaragoza also hosts a famous shrine to Our Lady of the Pilar based on an appearance of the Virgin Mary there so ancient that it is more precisely described as a bilocation. Saint Vincent certainly knew of this devotion in his own town. Though an early saint, then, he came from a city that, even in 300, already could brag of a mature Christian tradition.

As with so many martyrs whose names are known to us, Vincent died in the persecution of Diocletian, the last gasps of a dying paganism. Vincent and his Bishop were imprisoned around the year 303 and taken in chains to the city of Valencia on the Spanish coast. The Bishop was exiled but Vincent was subjected to such cruel and varied tortures that he died of his wounds. Tradition says that the faithful came to his cell during his sufferings seeking relics, dipping cloths into his bloody wounds.

Although pious oral traditions led medieval authors to embroider some of the details of the Church’s early saints and martyrs, the core facts of these narratives always have support. In Vincent’s case, no less an authority than Saint Augustine himself gave homilies on Saint Vincent which have been preserved. And Augustine states in these homilies that as he is speaking he has the official acts recounting Vincent’s martyrdom right in front of him. That anecdote is a wonderful proof of how widespread devotion to Vincent was in the early Church, even far from where he died.

Ordained permanent deacons disappeared from the life of the church for many centuries, only to be reintroduced in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. Yet deacons’ key roles role in preaching, serving the poor, evangelizing, and acting as delegates of their bishops is clear from the Acts of the Apostles and Saint Paul’s letters. As early as the second century after Christ the three Orders constituting the Sacrament of Holy Orders were already clearly identified and theologically developed, especially in the letters of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius saw each Order as participating, in a different way, in the one priesthood of the High Priest Jesus Christ.

It must be remembered that Vincent was a Deacon and was imprisoned along with the Bishop who ordained him. He must have understood the harmony and interdependence that God intended to exist among Deacons, Priests, and Bishops. This emphasis on Sacramental Orders underlines the fact that although early Christians may may have experienced more astounding gifts of the Holy Spirit than later Christians, it was still a living connection to an Apostle, not a personal charism, that authenticated and guaranteed one’s participation in the true body of Christ. Gifts were personal and private. They came and went. They could not be verified or even shared. But each Bishop was linked to an apostolic see, and bishops publicly ordained priests and deacons to share the duty to teach, govern, and sanctify the baptized. There was nothing private about any of that. Early Christianity was not a haphazard grouping of people who loved Jesus. It received a hierarchical structure from Christ Himself and immediately perpetuated, and built upon, Jewish forms of religious community life. The Church’s hierarchical community life continues today. Saint Vincent undoubtedly saw his ordination as a form of service, not power. He was undoubtedly a man of great importance to his Bishop. He likely gave generous witness to the Faith before he offered up his earthly life for a richer life beyond the grave.

St. Vincent, help all deacons to know, love, and serve God with all their heart, soul and mind. Few people are called to be tortured for the faith as you were, but suffering may come in more subtle ways. Help us to persevere in the face of whatever persecutes us, so that such challenges deepen our trust in God.

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Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children
January 22—USA Memorial
(Moved to January 23 when January 22 is a Sunday)
Liturgical Color: White or Violet

Abortion is a black eye on the handsome face of America

At 3:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964, a young woman parked her car next to her apartment building in Queens, New York. She got out and started walking toward the door when, in the darkness, she spotted someone in her path. She changed direction and ran toward a police call box. The man caught up and tackled her to the ground. He stabbed her in the back. She screamed for help. Lights blinked on, windows opened. She screamed repeatedly, “I’m dying! Help me!” The attack continued. Forty-five minutes later, a neighbor called the police. Officers arrived and identified the victim as twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese. At least thirty-eight neighbors heard or witnessed the attack. Not one of them came to her aid. Only one called the police, belatedly. The response to Kitty Genovese’s murder was widely studied and became known as the “Genovese Syndrome” or the “Bystander Effect.” As the number of bystanders to a crime or accident increases, the likelihood of anyone doing anything about it decreases. Everyone thinks someone else is going to intervene so no one does anything. Ironically, if Kitty’s attack had been witnessed by just one person, instead of thirty-eight, she probably would have survived.

Moral outrage is stifled, duty is diminished, and the desire to blend in predominates in groups. Even if a group is witnessing something awful, many individuals keep quiet. January 22, 1973, marks the dark anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, which blew the moral lights out for the protection of the unborn in the U.S. All right-thinking people have an obligation to name abortion for what it is, regardless of what the larger society may say. A country is like a big group, and we tend to conform to group norms. But scientific and technological advances have erased all doubt about whether pre-born life is human life. It’s a baby. When a woman is expecting, no one goes to a “fetus shower,” they go to a “baby shower.” It’s not a potential human life. It’s a human life with potential.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Jewish by blood and atheist by faith, was a Canadian-American doctor who not only advocated for the legalization of abortion, but who also, with his own hands, aborted two of his children. He is considered the “father” of the legalization of abortion in America, which culminated in the judicial decisions remembered today. One day in the mid-1970s, a doctor friend invited Nathanson to hold the ultrasound imaging paddle on a woman’s belly as the doctor aborted her child. Nathanson was horrified at what the paddle displayed on the ultrasound screen. The baby was vigorously flailing, trying to avoid the doctor’s instruments, pushing against the sharp objects jabbing his body. And then the baby’s mouth opened in a silent scream for help. Soon after, Dr. Nathanson gave up his lucrative abortion practice. And years later, after long and painful soul searching, Dr. Nathanson bowed his head to receive the waters of baptism in the Catholic Church, a real religion that forgives real sins.

Abortion corrupts all that it touches: family life, relationships between men and women, politicians, courts, the medical profession, and public life in general, which has become more hardened to the sufferings and vulnerabilities of those on the margins. But most of all, abortion has harmed every woman who has had one. There are psychological repercussions to the unnatural end of any pregnancy, but most especially when that end is violent, willful, and paid for by the one it harms. When the natural maternal instinct to nurture and protect is so violated, mom may never recover. The wound remains open. The healing is long and partial.

In this liturgical memorial, we commemorate an anniversary. So…Happy Anniversary abortion. You deceive, you divide, you destroy. You are darkness and you are death. You are the black eye on the handsome face of America. We pray that, someday, people will only speak about you in hushed tones, behind closed doors, whispering “abortion” like a dirty word. Happy Anniversary abortion; you are the pride in the devil’s grin.

Heavenly Father, and Mother Mary, today we storm heaven with our prayers, fasting, and almsgiving in the hope that all unborn children will be protected in law so that they can grow into the men and women you planned them to be.

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Saint Agnes, Virgin, Martyr
c. 291–c. 304
January 21—Memorial
Liturgical Color: Red or White
Patron Saint of young girls, rape victims, and chastity

A child knows that God is a person and that He deserves to be loved as one

Only the names of the earliest saints and martyrs are embedded in the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I. Saint Agnes is among those listed (Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, etc…) Devotion to Agnes as both Virgin and Martyr is of ancient origin and is specifically mentioned by 4th century writers, including Pope Damasus. A basilica was built during the reign of Constantine himself over the catacombs where St. Agnes’ relics were deposited. A later structure, with an ancient mosaic showing St. Agnes, is still an active church on that exact site today. The mobs of tourists and pilgrims who crowd the eternal city today, and who shuffle through Piazza Navona, may not realize that they are walking by the very site where Agnes was martyred. The beautiful Baroque Church of St. Agnes on Piazza Navona reminds the discerning pilgrim that our saint met her death at that exact spot.

Agnes was of a tender age when she was killed. She was just a girl. Tradition says that she was beautiful and wanted to dedicate her virginity to the Lord, despite numerous suitors desirous of her beauty. She was killed, then, both for her faith and for her steadfastness in refusing to violate her vow of chastity. It was a double martyrdom, made all the sweeter because of her youth. With poetic license and rhetorical power, St. Augustine imagines St. Agnes’ final moments: “You could see fear in the eyes of the executioner, as if he were the one condemned; his right hand trembled; his face grew pale as he saw the girl’s peril; while she had no fear for herself. One victim, but a twin martyrdom, to modesty and to religion. Agnes preserved her virginity, and gained a martyr’s crown.”

When making solemn vows at his ordination, a man marries the Church so that he can make her fruitful. But a woman’s vows to the religious life make her a spouse of Christ Himself. A man marries the Church, a woman marries Christ. This beautiful bridal imagery speaks the human language of love and commitment. God is a person, not just a prime mover or a higher power. So he loves us like a person, and we love Him back like a person. Part of this love is jealousy. God is a jealous spouse. He wants total commitment from those who have dedicated their lives to Him. He demands total fidelity. In extreme cases, even to the point of death. Little St. Agnes understood all of this with girlish simplicity united to a will of iron. Innocence alongside maturity. Chastity alongside toughness. Beauty holding hands with death.

St. Agnes, help all young people commit themselves to Christ when young, giving Him the most fruitful years of their lives. Inspire them to say “Yes” to God and not just as a “No” to the world. Help both young and old to see that although life is a gift, there are greater things than life, such as God in His glory.

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January 20: Saint Fabian, Pope and Martyr
c. 200–250
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Rome

The popes of the third century knew how to die

In the present-day suburbs of Rome, tour buses navigate winding, narrow, tree-lined roads to carry modern pilgrims to the Catacombs of St. Callixtus. The pilgrims descend a steep staircase until they find themselves in a vast, dark, underground space. The pilgrims slowly walk by early Christian graffiti blanketing the walls to their right and to their left. Marble scraps of early Christian tombstones have etched upon them Greek and Latin epigraphs briefly describing whom they honor. In 1850 an archaeologist working in the St. Callixtus Catacombs discovered, incredibly, just such a small chunk of marble with the following simple epitaph: “Fabian, Bishop, Martyr.” The epitaph confirmed the tradition that Fabian’s lifeless body was carried in procession to these Catacombs shortly after his death in 250 A.D. In the early 1700s, Pope Fabian’s relics were transferred to the nearby Church of Saint Sebastian, where they can be found today.

According to Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote a detailed history of the Church about fifty years after Pope Fabian’s time, Fabian was a layman who went to Rome after the death of the previous pope. He was elected Bishop of Rome due to a miraculous sign. In other words, Fabian did not strive to his high office. He did not seek to be important. He accepted his role in the full knowledge that it could lead to big trouble for him. And that trouble eventually found him.

A third-century letter of Saint Cyprian to the deacons and priests of Rome confirms the virtuous life and courageous death of Pope Fabian. Fabian reigned as Pope for fourteen years before being martyred in 250 A.D. The Roman Emperor Decius was his killer. Decius’ persecution was vicious but not universal. He tried to kill the body of the Church by cutting off the head, and so sought the Pope’s blood. But Decius’ ambitious project was never realized. About sixty-five years later, one of Decius’ successors, Constantine, would legalize Christianity, bringing to an end almost three hundred years of on-again, off-again persecution.

We can only imagine what it would be like today if the Pope were to be imprisoned and killed by the Prime Minister of Italy. Imagine the outcry! A secular power actively persecuting a religious leader! Yet perhaps such events are not so unimaginable. Pope Saint John Paul II was shot, and almost killed, in 1981, probably due to dark communist forces rooted in Eastern Europe. Assassins still exist, and popes are still their targets.
Pope Fabian’s martyrdom shows why the Church survived its early and vicious persecutions—it had leaders who knew how to die. Great deaths don’t follow shallow lives. The early popes didn’t give up or give in. They didn’t renounce the faith. They were fearless. They felt the cold, sharp metal of a knife against their neck and stood firm. A religious society with such models of courage in its highest ranks had to survive. And it did survive. We are living proof of that.

Saint Fabian, your papal death proved to the faithful that their leaders personally accepted what they demanded of others. Slaves, prisoners, women, outcasts, and popes all died for the faith. Help us, Fabian, to be further links in the Church’s long chain of Christian witnesses.

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January 20: Saint Sebastian, Martyr
Late Third Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of athletes, soldiers, and victims of the plague

A Roman soldier makes a rugged convert and stoic martyr

The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary are the most universally depicted scenes in Christian art. There is perhaps not a Catholic church the world over which does not house one or the other image, and often both. But today’s saint, Sebastian, follows close behind in terms of popularity and ubiquity. The iconic presentation of the wounded Sebastian shows his hands and arms bound to a post, his head tilted, and his almost naked body filled with arrows.

It is a powerfully evocative image. It suggests that the archers took their time. They were not rushed. They did not act in the heat of anger. Criminal psychologists have observed that killers only cover the faces of victims who they know. Otherwise, killers don’t mind watching their victims suffer and die. It seems that with Sebastian there was no hooded executioner. No anonymous hangman. The men in Sebastian’s firing squad must have gazed right into his eyes before they unleashed the tension in their bows. And when their arrows buried themselves in Sebastian’s torso, the archers must have heard his low moans. Perhaps there was an element of recrimination in all of this. Perhaps it was personal.

Sebastian was a soldier in the higher echelons of the Roman army. After his conversion to Catholicism, he went to Rome, around the year 300, likely seeking martyrdom. We can imagine that his fellow soldiers understood his conversion as betrayal or disloyalty to the empire and that this explains the unique manner of the assassination attempt. But, in the end, the attempt was a failure. Saint Sebastian, a rugged soldier, survived the arrows, was nursed back to health by Saint Irene, and later earned the martyr’s crown after being clubbed to death.

By the year 300 A.D., the Roman Emperors’ attempts to eradicate Christianity were too little too late. Nobles, senators, slaves, cobblers, carpenters, men, women, foreigners, and natives had all converted. They were men and women of every class and occupation. By 300 A.D., Christians comprised a significant portion of people at every level of society, up and down and around every Roman road. When high-placed soldiers such as Saint Sebastian were willing to die for Christ, it was a sign there was no going back to Rome’s pagan roots. All that was needed was a Christian Emperor to solidify the change. That would come soon enough in the person of Constantine. Sebastian’s heroic death was a harbinger of a world about to change. Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom was so widely known that he was honored through the construction of a Church on the Appian Way just outside of Rome. The church is still visited by pilgrims today, along with the Christian catacombs beneath it. His legacy carries on!

Saint Sebastian, we ask your intercession to fortify all those who are weak in their faith. You gave heroic witness in leaving a high station to accept a near martyrdom and then returned to suffer and die once and for all. Give us the grace to face our enemies when our weak nature wants to run the other way.

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January 17: Saint Anthony of the Desert, Abbot
251–356
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of butchers, skin diseases, gravediggers, and swine

A solitary monk trades the world for the desert sands

Many extraordinary people who live heroic, path-breaking lives remain unknown to posterity for one simple reason—no one writes their biography. How many other saints, heroes, and martyrs would be known to mankind if just one witness to their actions had put pen to paper! Just one author is needed to introduce a great man to subsequent generations. Today’s saint may have been forgotten forever—and may have wanted to remain unknown. But a talented and famous contemporary of his wrote what he knew. Saint Athanasius, the provocative champion of orthodoxy at the Council of Nicea, wrote a short biography of his fellow Egyptian, The Life of Saint Anthony the Great. Saint Athanasius’ work was so widely shared, and so often translated, that it was never lost to history. It has preserved Saint Anthony’s memory down to the present.

The first three centuries of the Church saw sporadic persecutions of Christianity, which at times turned vicious. These spasms of violence against Christians produced a large class of martyrs, many of whose last words and sufferings were recorded in official Roman judicial documents or in the written testimonies of witnesses. As Christianity was legalized at the start of the fourth century, martyrdom ceased to be the primary form of Christian witness. A new form of radical Christian discipleship emerged—the witness of total isolation, fasting, prayer, and penance of the desert fathers. These monks retreated into remote places to lead solitary lives of dedication to Christ. Foremost among these desert fathers was Saint Anthony of the Desert. He was not the first ascetic, but he was one of the first to take the radical decision to retreat into the desert.

Saint Anthony had money and property as a young man. But upon hearing at Mass the words of Christ to the rich young man to “...go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasures in heaven," Anthony decided to seek not silver or bronze but pure gold. He sold his goods, he removed himself from all temptation except those intrinsic to human nature, he battled the devil, he fasted, he prayed, and he even actively sought martyrdom. He became famous for being holy. Saint Anthony preceded Saint Benedict by two hundred years. He offers us an example of being a monk outside of a community of fellow monks in a monastery. He sought Christ alone while living alone. Alone in the desert, without family, community, or money, listening to the howling winds at night. Alone to the world, he clung to the only person who truly mattered—God Himself.

Saint Anthony’s path of holiness is both radical and refined. It is for few people to walk. But he was the first to walk it so well. Anthony shows us that being alone, stripped of all worldly concerns, is a sort of rehearsal for death, where we will meet God alone, every last thread tying us to the world having been cut.

Saint Anthony, we ask your intercession to help us cling to God alone. Help us to strip ourselves of those needs and concerns which stuff our lives from morning to night. Help us not to be distracted from the one thing, the only thing, the last thing—God Himself.

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January 13: Saint Hilary, Bishop and Doctor
c. 310–c. 367
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of lawyers

A pagan discovers Christ, converts, and then suffers for Him

Today’s saint was born a pagan, to pagans, in a pagan city. But his broad and deep education brought him into contact with Holy Scripture, where he found the truth he did not know he was seeking. He became a Catholic through reading. He was to then spend his adult life defending Catholic truth with his pen. The convert converted others and preserved the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed against the Arian heresy. Saint Athanasius called Saint Hilary a “trumpet” of orthodoxy against theological error.

Saint Hilary was elected the Bishop of Poitiers, France, about 350. His learning and intelligence placed him at the center of the violent theological battles of the fourth century. The Council of Nicea in 325 had left some theological definitions open to incorrect interpretation. A man named Arius caused immense confusion by just such misinterpretation. Arius argued that the words of the Nicene Creed meant that Jesus was less than God the Father, that Jesus had a beginning in time, and that Jesus was of like substance to the Father, not of the same substance. Saint Hilary was the first theologian from the West, as opposed to the more theologically mature theologians from Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, to see what a grave threat Arianism was.

Saint Hilary spent the better part of his adult life studying, writing, and arguing to ensure that the Nicene Creed was understood and adhered to throughout the Church. He was even sent into exile by the Emperor for not conforming his views to Arian teachings. But he used his time in exile to read and write extensively, eventually becoming such a thorn in the side of the Emperor that he restored Hilary to his diocese. Saint Hilary went on to attend various synods of bishops in an effort to maintain the truth of the Nicene Creed against determined opposition at the highest levels.

Hilary’s life proves that good theology matters. Bad theology easily leads to bad worship, bad morality, and the decline of true Christian community. To disrupt or correct bad theology is to disrupt or correct bad community. And it is sometimes the obligation of the Church to break up false ideas of the church, of marriage, of family, of government, etc. When certain things are built up, their opposites inevitably are broken up. Saint Hilary knew all of this. He knew that bad theology was not just bad in and of itself but that it also had negative repercussions in the lived reality of the Church. When Saint Hilary defended theological truth, he defended many other truths as well.

Saint Hilary, through reading and study, you came to love the truths of the Catholic faith. Your love then showed itself in your willingness to suffer for that truth. Help us to know, love, and serve God by knowing, loving, and serving the instrument of His truth on earth—the Catholic Church.

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January 7: Saint Raymond of Peñafort, Priest
c. 1175–1275
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of canon lawyers and medical record librarians

He wove scripture and the law into a harmonious tapestry

Today’s saint lived numerous lives inside of his one hundred years on earth. He was an intellectual prodigy who was teaching university-level philosophy by the age of twenty and who took degrees in civil and canon law from the premier law university of the time—Bologna. While in Bologna, he likely came to know the founder of a new religious Order who had also moved there and who would later die there—Saint Dominic de Guzman. The example of the Dominicans led Father Raymond to exchange the diocesan priesthood for the Dominicans.

Saint Raymond’s abilities and holiness were such that everyone seemed to want him in their service. Kings and Popes and Bishops and Orders all had plans on how to utilize him best. He was called to the Pope’s service to make the great contribution for which he is still known today, the organization of a huge compendium of Church law which served as the basic reference for canon lawyers until the early twentieth century. Exhausted by his three years of effort on this project, he returned in middle age to his native Barcelona.

But his life of quiet and prayer did not last long. He was shocked to learn from Dominicans sent to him from Bologna that he had been elected the second successor to Saint Dominic as the Master General of the Dominican Order. He served his Order well and dutifully as Master General but not long. He resigned due to old age when he was 65. But there was still a lot of life left to live. Saint Raymond’s activities in his old age included efforts to try to convert the Muslims then occupying Spain, his rejection of an episcopal appointment, the establishment of theology and language schools dedicated to converting Muslims, and his probable personal encouragement of the young Thomas Aquinas to write an apologetic work directed at non-Catholics, the Summa contra Gentiles.

Saint Raymond’s life shows an admirable synthesis of traditional piety and devotion, service to the Church, obedience to his superiors, love of theology, dedication to his Order, and respect and love for the law. To know, love, and follow the law is not contrary to charity. When kept, the law promotes charity and protects the weak, the poor, and the ignorant from being taken advantage of. It takes very smart and holy people to protect simple people and bad people from themselves. Saint Raymond was smart and holy. He laid his gifts at the altar of God, and God used those gifts splendidly.

Saint Raymond, teach us to see the law of God and the law of the Church as one harmonious law meant to foster true communion among men and true communion between God and men. May God’s law be our law. And may the law never be an obstacle to true love and devotion.

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January 5: Saint John Neumann, Religious (U.S.A.)
1811–1860
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Catholic education

He gave of himself until there was nothing left to give

Today’s saint worked like a mule. He studied, he wrote, he prayed, he preached, he traveled, he built, he founded, he guided, he taught. And then one day, carrying construction plans for his Cathedral in Philadelphia to an office, he died in the street. He had worked himself to death. He was forty-eight years old.

Saint John Neumann was born in Central Europe in what is today the Czech Republic. Like many people born in small countries, he had to learn more than his native tongue in order to become a success. But Saint John outdid himself. He learned seven languages in addition to his native Czech. He had a gift. Yet he found it hard to find a bishop to ordain him after he had completed his theological studies. He wrote to numerous bishops throughout Europe and to one on the other side of an ocean he had never seen. The other-side-of-the-ocean bishop wrote back: If you can get here, I’ll ordain you. Saint John got there and was ordained in 1836 by Bishop John Dubois of New York, himself a transplant from Paris, France.

He was assigned to rural areas in Upstate New York and was outstanding in his zeal for souls. But the isolation was a burden, and he felt the need for priestly community. So he joined the Redemptorist Order and began many years of priestly service in Maryland. His intelligence, ability to preach and hear confessions in multiple languages, extraordinary work ethic, life of poverty, good nature, and general holiness were traits that all observed and all admired. He was named the fourth Bishop of Philadelphia in 1852. The city’s growth was exploding, especially its Catholic population of immigrants. Saint John threw himself into his work with no concern for his own well-being. He was a tornado of apostolic activity. He was everywhere and did everything. The Church benefitted and grew at an extraordinary pace. But Saint John’s only gear was overdrive, and he did not personally benefit. Zeal for His house consumed him, and zeal for His house killed him. Yet that is probably the way he wanted it.

Saint John was buried in a Redemptorist Church in Philadelphia, and his reputation for holiness quickly spread after his death. The faithful asked. The faithful received. The miracles were documented, and Philadelphia had its saint. Saint John Neumann was canonized by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1977, an immigrant who was the first male American citizen to be raised to the altars.

Saint John, you left home and family to toil in the remote regions of the United States for the sake of the Gospel. Your tireless dedication to the needs of the Church is an inspiration to all, especially priests. Enkindle in the hearts of all priests the same fire of love that burned in your own.

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January 6: Saint André Bessette, Religious (Canada; U.S.A.)
1845–1937
Optional Memorial (Canada & U.S.A.); Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of family caregivers

He loved the Word of God, though he could not read

Saint Paul teaches in his letter to the Romans that faith comes by hearing. It’s a good thing it doesn’t come only by reading. Until modern times, a relatively small percentage of the population has been able to read. Today’s saint had faith enough to move mountains, yet if he looked at the page of an open book, he saw only impenetrable symbols. André Bessette was functionally illiterate. His faith did not come by reading or study. It came by hearing, by watching, by praying, by listening, and by reflecting.

As Catholics, we are not a people of the Book. We are a people of the Word. And that Word is an idea and a person long before it is a script. “In the beginning was the Word...and the Word became flesh,” Saint John’s Gospel begins. Our faith would live and thrive even if the Bible had never been compiled. The Church is a living Word. Saint André’s life witnesses to the primacy of the living Word over the written Word.

Saint André was the eighth child born into a large and desperately poor family from Quebec, Canada. Alfred was his baptismal name. His father died in a logging accident and his mother of tuberculosis by the time he was 12. The many children had to be dispersed to friends and relatives. Our saint then spent the next thirteen years doing manual labor, including factory and farm work, throughout the Northeastern United States. After he had wandered enough, he wandered back home by age 25. His perceptive parish priest noted his generosity of spirit and deep faith. He recommended the young man to the Congregation of the Holy Cross in Montreal, sending Alfred to them with an almost unbelievably prophetic note stating: “I am sending you a saint.”

Alfred took the name of this same parish priest, André, and after much difficulty was allowed to join the Congregation as a brother. He was given the unremarkable task of minding the door of a boys’ school, where he welcomed guests, delivered mail, and ran errands. But then something happened. And happened again. And then still again. Sick people who came to visit him were cured by his touch and his prayers. Brother André insisted it was God and Saint Joseph.

Thus began a many decades-long ministry to the sick of Canada who sought out his healing touch. The lines of sick people became so long that he could no longer do his job at the school door. He attended to people all day long. He became famous for all the right reasons. He built a modest shrine to Saint Joseph on a hill. The shrine became very popular and grew until it became, and still is today, the most dominant structure in all of Montreal. Our saint did not live to see it completed. But he lived so long and so well that one million people filed past his casket when he died. He edified people not by his learning but by his healing and by the warm humanity that animated it.

Saint André, you healed the sick and found time to attend to all who came to you. You encouraged those who sought you to confess their sins and to go to Mass. Intercede for all believers so that we see in Jesus our divine physician, healer of soul and body.

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January 4: Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, Religious (U.S.A.)
1774–1821
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Catholic schools, widows, loss of parents

She had it all, lost it all, and then found it all again

In late 1803, Elizabeth Ann Seton, with her husband, left the United States for Italy, as a confident, high-born, wealthy, educated Yankee Protestant. She returned in June 1804, bankrupt, a widow, burning with love for the Holy Eucharist, tenderly devoted to Mary, and with the heart of a Roman Catholic. She was received into the Church the next year. Her upper-class friends and family abandoned her out of anti-Catholic spite.

Our saint was an unexpected convert. She was, well into adulthood, a serious U.S. Episcopalian. She loved the Lord. She loved the Bible. She loved to serve the poor and the sick. Her excellent Episcopalian upbringing provided sufficient preparation for not being Episcopalian any longer. She took that faith as far as it could go. She probably never suspected her faith was lacking until she experienced the abundance of Catholicism.
After her husband died of tuberculosis in Pisa Italy, Elizabeth and her daughter were taken in by family friends from nearby Livorno. In God’s providence, this Italian family lived their faith with relish. Elizabeth was not only consoled and cared for by them in her grief but also saw how engrossing their faith was. The longer she stayed in Italy, the more its Catholic atmosphere enveloped her. She wept at Italians’ natural devotion to Mary. She wondered at the beauty of a Corpus Christi procession through the narrow streets of her town. She understood the Holy Father’s link to the early Apostles with clarity. And so she came to see the gaps in her native religion. She hadn’t noticed them before. Having seen the real thing with her own eyes, she knew that she held a replica in her hands. The real presence of Christ in Catholicism is often understood only after a real absence is felt in non-Catholic Christianity.

After her conversion, Elizabeth spent the rest of her short life dedicated to Catholic education. She started a Congregation of sisters in Maryland that taught girls, especially poor girls who could not afford an education. She was the first of tens of thousands of teaching sisters to operate Catholic schools in the United States. She is rightly considered in the United States as the foundress of Catholic parochial education. Besides her husband, she also lost two of her five children during her lifetime. She struggled, like all founders, to build up her Congregation. But her intelligence, charm, and drive paid off. Her Order thrived and thrives still. The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul gather each year on this feast near her tomb inside an immense Basilica in Northern Maryland to thank God for their foundress, for a life so well lived.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, help us overcome the alienation of family due to our religious convictions. Aid us in persevering through the hardships of illness and death, and give us the same zeal for souls that you showed toward your students, seeing in each one the image of God.

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January 3: The Most Holy Name of Jesus
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

Names are powerful, and none is more powerful than Jesus

Mary and Joseph did not sit across from each other at the kitchen table in the evenings debating a name for their child. They didn’t flip through the pages of a book of saints or bounce ideas off of their friends and family. The baby’s name was chosen for them by God Himself. They were just taking orders. The Archangel Gabriel announced to Mary, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus” (Lk 1:31). And Joseph had a dream in which the angel told him, "...you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Mt 1:21). The Gospel of Luke further relates that “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb" (Lk 2:21). Jesus was named eight days after Christmas, January 3.

The New Testament is filled with incidents where the name of Jesus is invoked to drive out devils, cure illnesses, and perform miracles. The Holy Name is explicitly exalted by Saint Paul: "...at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Phil 2:10). Jesus reinforces the power of His own name in St. John’s Gospel: "...if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you" (Jn 16:23).

“Jesus” was the given name of the Son of Mary, while “Christ” was a title. “Christ” is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Messiah,” meaning the “Anointed One.” “Jesus the Christ” was the original formula for describing the Son of Mary. But over time, “The Christ” became simply “Christ,” as if it were His last name. The name of the God of the Old Testament was holy, not to be written out, nor to be casually spoken. Invoking “Yahweh” could be so egregious a sin as to provoke the tearing of the hearer’s shirt in protest and repentance. Jewish law on God’s holy name is enshrined in the second commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord Thy God in vain.” This commandment prohibited the swearing of false oaths, that is, calling upon God as your witness and then making false statements. The opposite of a solemn oath is invoking the name of God to damn someone or something: a curse—the inversion of a blessing.

Saint Bernardine of Siena, an electrifying Franciscan preacher of the early fifteenth century, was the saint who most spread devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus. He ingeniously depicted the Holy Name with the well-known monogram “IHS,” derived from the Greek letters forming the word “Jesus.” In the sixteenth century, the Jesuits built on this tradition and utilized the “IHS” to embellish their churches, even making it the emblem of their Society. The mother church of all Jesuit churches, in Rome, is officially named in honor of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, although its name is commonly shortened to simply “The Jesus.”

There is raw power in the name Jesus. It makes polite company cringe. It divides families. It floats across the dinner table, letting everyone know exactly where you stand. A comfortable, vague euphemism like “the man upstairs” or “the big guy” just won’t do. “Jesus” does not convey an idea that everyone can interpret as they wish. It’s someone’s name. And that someone taught, suffered, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven.
Some people don’t like their names and seek to legally change them or to use a nickname instead. Names convey meanings. “Thor” sounds like a mythical god carrying a hammer, “Vesuvius” sounds like a boiling volcano about to erupt, and a “ziggurat” sounds like a zig-zaggy desert temple. The name “Jesus” sounds like a God-man beyond reproach. A child, when once asked to define love, said that “when someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. Your name is safe in their mouth.” The Holy Name of Jesus should be safe in our mouths even when we’re not receiving Holy Communion.

Son of Mary, may our same tongues that receive Your Holy Body and Blood prepare themselves for Your visit by saying Your Holy Name with great reverence. And may we not refrain from invoking that same Holy Name in our daily conversations with all whom we meet.

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Sunday after January 6: The Baptism of the Lord
First Century
Sunday after January 6 or the Monday after the Epiphany
Feast; Liturgical Color: White/Gold

He humbly bowed His head as an example, not because He was imperfect

Who would not want a doctor who, before he cuts, lifts his shirt a little, shows his own scar, and says to the patient, “I had the same. It’s going to be alright!” What soldier would not be just a little braver, stand a little taller, seeing medals for valor on his commander’s uniform? We want our heroes, our leaders, and our guides to lead through personal example. To have been there. To have done that. And we want our Savior to do the same. To empathize. To participate. To identify. To accompany. Actions resonate more than words.
Our sinless God “became” sin, in the words of Saint Paul. Jesus identifies with sin but never sinned. Jesus carries sin but is not a sinner. Why? Because to become sin is to become man. In order for God to enter into human reality, He had to identify with all that sin entails. God wanted to stand with us shoulder to shoulder. He did not fake becoming man but really became man. And if God came to forgive sins and sinners, and to shed His blood for them on the cross, He had to bear the burden they bore yet retain His perfection.
This is why our sinless God was baptized on today’s feast. God lays to the side His perfection and dignity and bows His head in the dirty waters of the Jordan River. He lined up with sinners to receive in humility what He did not need, to attend a school whose subjects He had mastered. Our God knew the value of empathy. He knew the power of example. And He knew that His ministry to mankind had to start not on a golden throne but in the mud with other men just trying to start again and again and again.

The fullness of the Holy Trinity, first revealed subtly at the Annunciation, is present and spoken for at the Lord’s baptism. The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovers. The voice of God the Father intones His favor over His Son. And the Son enters into the essential Christian pact with man—I will become like you so that you can become like me. Sins will be taken away through water and blood. I will suffer for your benefit. This is the promise. And the Church’s priests will carry on the baptizing, forgiving, and consecrating until the sun sets for the last time. God comes to us most intensely through the Sacraments. Jesus’ actions prove this.

O Lord, You are not remote. You know sin but are not a sinner. Help us to renew our baptism through a frequent reception of confession and the Holy Eucharist. By receiving one, we strengthen the others. By receiving You, we receive God Himself.

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January 2: Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors
St. Basil: 329–379; St. Gregory: c. 329–390
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saints of Russia, monks, hospital administrators, and poets

Obvious truths are hard to explain, but smart theologians can explain them

The persecution of the Church in the first few centuries, sometimes aggressive, more typically passive, starved her skinny biblical frame of nourishment. When the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 A.D., the Church’s bones finally stretched, grew, and added muscle on muscle. Churches opened. Bishops preached. Schools taught. Theologians wrote. And, most significantly, Councils met. Three hundred years after Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, these large gatherings of bishops and theologians sought to end theological confusion, to settle thorny questions, and to establish a standard Christian doctrine. In the vast halls and churches of these councils, the great cast of theologians of the fourth century put their prodigious talents on full display. We commemorate two of the greatest of these bishops and theologians in today’s memorial.
Saints Basil and Gregory lived so long ago, were so prolific, and played such crucial roles in so many areas of Church life, that they could each be remembered for any number of contributions to liturgy, theology, ecclesiology, Church history, monasticism, and even popular customs, especially in the Orthodox East. Yet perhaps their greatest contributions were as theologians who defined, fundamentally and decisively, what the word Trinity actually means; how Jesus is both fully God and fully man; and how the Holy Spirit is related to God the Father. Such definitions and distinctions may seem technical, abstract, or remote. But it is always the most obvious things—the most necessary things—that are the most difficult to explain. Why do things fall down instead of up? Why does the sun rise in the east instead of the west? Why are there seven days in a week instead of nine?
The most fundamental doctrines of our faith, understood now as perennial, were not always perennial. They originated in the minds of certain people at certain times in certain places. To today’s saints we owe the decisive words that the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and the Son. These words fall simply and familiarly from our lips. But the word “proceeds” was the fruit of intense thought and prayer. The Father generated the Son, but the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from them both. Interesting. Dozens of millions of Catholics say reflexively every Sunday that the second Person of the Trinity is “consubstantial” with the Father. Not equal in origin. Not equal in role. But “consubstantial,” or equal in nature. Thank you, Saints Basil and Gregory! Thank you, great Bishops and Doctors of the early Church! Thank you for pulling aside the veil of mystery for a peek into the Godhead.
Without the teachings of the fourth century on the Trinity and Christ, there would be no Christmas trees. Think about that. Why celebrate the Christ child if He were not God? But He is God. So carols are composed, mangers are set up, lights are hung, and gifts are exchanged. Culture happens, culture flourishes, when theology makes sense. Thank you, Saints Basil and Gregory, for… everything!

O noble Bishops and Doctors Basil and Gregory, we ask for your continued intercession to enlighten our minds and to remove the dark shadows that cause confusion. Assist us to recognize that good theology understands God as He understands Himself. When you gave us good teaching, you gave us God. We seek nothing more.

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January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Solemnity; Holy Day of Obligation (in USA: unless a Saturday or Monday)
Eighth Day of the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White

No one knew Jesus like Mary

No one falls in love with a nature. We fall in love with a person. A woman loves a man, not mankind. And a mother pinches the pudgy little cheeks of a newborn baby, not the cheeks of a newborn nature. Saint Mary gave birth to a little person, a baby, unlike any other. In that little person, a human nature united with a divine nature at the moment of conception. So Mary was the mother of the person Jesus, and the person Jesus had two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine. Saint Mary was, then, the mother of Jesus’ human nature and of His divine nature. She was both the mother of a man and the mother of God.
Two false extremes must be identified and rejected here. Jesus was not really and truly only a God who just faked being a man. Nor was He really a man who just pretended to be a God. The Son of God did not wear a fleshy human mask to conceal the radiance of His real divine face. And Jesus the man did not wear His divinity like a cloak that He could remove from His shoulders when He walked in the door. Jesus was fully God and fully man in a mystery of faith we call the hypostatic union. And because a woman is a mother to a person, not just to a nature, Mary is the mother of God. This has been the constant doctrine of the Catholic Church since the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.
Saint Mary has many titles under which we honor her. Today’s Solemnity commemorates the utterly unique, and unrepeatable, bond she shared with Jesus, a bond no other saint can claim. Jesus and Mary probably even looked very much alike, as hers was the only human DNA in His body. What a beautiful thing that our God did not float down from heaven on a golden pillow. How good that He was not forged from a fiery anvil. How right that He did not ride to earth on a thunderbolt. Jesus could not redeem what He did not assume. So it was fitting that He was born like all of us—from a mom. We honor Mary today for her vocation as mother. If she had disappeared from the pages of the Gospels after giving birth to Jesus, she still would have fulfilled her role in salvation history. She was obedient. She was generous. She allowed God to use her, body and soul, to write the first chapter of man’s true story, the story of the Church. Like all true stories, the person comes first. A life is lived, and the book comes later.
God’s Mother gives us our mother, Holy Mother Church, who washes our souls in the saving waters of baptism, adopting us into God’s family. The Motherhood of Mary gives the world Jesus. Jesus gives us the Church. The Church then brings us into God’s family where Mary is our mother, Jesus our brother, and God our Father. This is the family of the Church. What pride to be members of so noble a family!

O Mother of God, you birthed the one who created all. How beautiful the mystery. How exalted your vocation that precedes and makes possible the Apostles’ own vocations. At home you bounced on your knee the one who spins the world on His finger. Help us start this new year with wonder more than resolutions, with eternal gratitude more than mundane goals.

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January 6: The Epiphany of the Lord
January 6 or the first Sunday after January 1 where this feast is not a Holy Day of Obligation
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White/Gold

Catholicism did multiculturalism before anyone else

The Feast of the Epiphany has traditionally been considered more theologically important than almost any other Feast Day, including Christmas. The early Christians had only Scripture, not the wealth of tradition we have today, to guide them in marking the great events of the life of Christ. So Holy Week and Easter, the Baptism of the Lord, Pentecost, and the Epiphany jumped off the pages of Scripture as great events which merited celebration. These few dates became fixed points on the calendar and were later surrounded over the centuries with numerous other feasts and saints’ days.

Two lessons from the visit of the Magi are worth considering. The first is that the wise men’s gifts were given after Christmas. Many Catholic cultures preserve the ancient tradition of giving gifts on the Epiphany, not on Christmas itself. This tradition separates the birth of Christ from gift giving. When these two things—the birth of Christ and the giving of gifts—are collapsed into the same day, it causes some confusion of priorities, and the birth of Christ never wins. Waiting to exchange gifts until January 6 lets the Child God have the stage to Himself for a day. It makes people, especially children, wait—a rarity in the modern Western world. Postponing gift-giving until January 6 makes for a long, leisurely Christmas season and has the benefit of tradition and good theology as well.

Another great lesson from the Magi is more theological—that a true religion must be true for everyone, not just for some people. Truth is not geographical. It climbs over borders. Truth by its nature conquers untruth. The Magi are the first non-Jews, or Gentiles, to worship Christ. They tell us that the mission field of Christ is the whole world, not just the Holy Land. The Church is forever bound, then, to teach, preach, and sanctify the world over.
The Magi crack everything open. The true God and His Church must light a fire in Chinese souls, Arab souls, African souls, and South American souls. This may take until the end of time, but Christianity has time on its side. The Magi give personal testimony to the universality of the Church, one of its four marks. The Epiphany is the start of the multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and faith-united society that the Catholic Church envisions as the only source of true human unity. Catholicism started multiculturalism and diversity without sacrificing unity and truth.

Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior, your minds were prepared to receive a greater truth. You give an example of holy curiosity, of pilgrimage by light to light. When you discovered your treasure, you laid down your gifts in homage. May our search also find. May our pilgrimage also end in truth.