Catholic Saints & Feasts

De: Fr. Michael Black
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  • Resumen

  • "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.
    Copyright Fr. Michael Black
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Episodios
  • August 24: Saint Bartholomew, Apostle

    August 24: Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
    Aug 24 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.
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    6 m
  • August 23: Saint Rose of Lima, Virgin

    August 23: Saint Rose of Lima, Virgin
    Aug 23 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.
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    6 m
  • August 22: Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    August 22: Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    Aug 22 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.
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    6 m
Ministerio y Evangelismo Espiritualidad
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Fabulous find

I enjoy the episodes… Just wish it was possible to reflect on tomorrow’s episode the evening before…

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