Episodes

  • December 7: Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor

    December 7: Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor
    Dec 7 2023
    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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    6 mins
  • December 6: Saint Nicholas, Bishop

    December 6: Saint Nicholas, Bishop
    Dec 5 2023
    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 ...
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    7 mins
  • December 4: Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor

    December 4: Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor
    Dec 2 2023
    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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    6 mins
  • December 3: Saint Francis Xavier, Priest

    December 3: Saint Francis Xavier, Priest
    Dec 2 2024
    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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    6 mins
  • November 30: Saint Andrew, Apostle

    November 30: Saint Andrew, Apostle
    Nov 26 2023
    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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    6 mins
  • November 28, 2024: Fourth Thursday in November: Thanksgiving Day (U.S.A.)

    November 28, 2024: Fourth Thursday in November: Thanksgiving Day (U.S.A.)
    Nov 26 2024
    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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    6 mins
  • November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr

    November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
    Nov 24 2023
    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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    6 mins
  • November 24: Saint Andrew Dũng-Lac, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs

    November 24: Saint Andrew Dũng-Lac, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs
    Nov 24 2024
    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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