![Podcast Cover](https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_square_limited_480/images.spreaker.com/original/4cd1005975b401d4ee4d4cbbd94e716d.jpg)
Info
"Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume...
show more
"Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black.
These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.
show less
These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.
![Podcast Cover](https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_square_limited_480/images.spreaker.com/original/4cd1005975b401d4ee4d4cbbd94e716d.jpg)
Catholic Saints & Feasts
Catholic Saints & Feasts
31 AUG 2024 · 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.
29 AUG 2024 · 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.
27 AUG 2024 · 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.
26 AUG 2024 · 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.
25 AUG 2024 · 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.
25 AUG 2024 · 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.
24 AUG 2024 · 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.
23 AUG 2024 · 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.
22 AUG 2024 · 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.
21 AUG 2024 · 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.
"Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume...
show more
"Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black.
These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.
show less
These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.
Information
Author | Fr. Michael Black |
Organization | Michael Black |
Categories | Christianity |
Website | - |
- |
Copyright 2024 - Spreaker Inc. an iHeartMedia Company