Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Saints

  • The Solemnity of All the Saints (Evening Mass)

    The Solemnity of All the Saints (Evening Mass)

    Today’s readings

    How would you react if someone called you a saint?  We hear that, sometimes, don’t we?  When we do something good for someone, sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, thank you, you’re a saint!”  But how does that make you feel?  Do you bristle a bit and think, “not me!”?  I think we all have that kind of reaction.  Saints are the people we see in statues and hear about in amazing stories.  No way could we ever be confused with people like that.  More often than not, we would be likely to say to someone, “now I’m no saint…”

    … As if that were a good thing.  When we think about saints, we get stuck, I think, on those saints of statues and medieval stories.  But today, the Church is asking us to think about saints in a broader way.  Yes, we include all those “official” saints that have been canonized through the ages.  We are told that Pope John Paul II canonized some 482 saints during his pontificate.  Some criticized him for doing that, but his feeling was that the Church is in the business of bringing people to heaven, so canonizing many holy people was the right thing to do.

    And that’s an important piece of information about our official saints.  Canonization recognizes that the person is certainly in heaven from what we know of him or her.  That’s why the process is so intricate.  And this is contrasted with the fact that the Church has never said any person is in hell.  So we know of thousands of people that are certainly in heaven, but no one who is in hell.  This illustrates that God’s will is done in the end, doesn’t it?

    But, as I said, I think the Church wants us to think about saints in a broader way.  There is the story of a schoolteacher who asked her children what a saint was.  One little girl thought about the saints she saw in stained glass windows, and said “Saints are people the light shines through.”  Think about that for a minute – that little girl isn’t far from the kingdom of God there.  Because all people are called to let the light of Christ shine through them, and saints are those people who have made that the business of their lives.

    Heaven is that great multitude that John the Revelator tells us about in today’s first reading: that multitude “which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue.”  They are wearing, he tells us, white robes, which have been washed in the blood of the lamb.  That seems very counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?  Everyone knows that blood stains like nobody’s business.  But he’s speaking poetically here, and recognizes that nothing washes us sinners quite as clean as the saving blood of Jesus Christ.

    And that’s really the only way.  Because we’re quite right when we bristle a bit at being called saints.  We can’t be saints all on our own.  We aren’t good enough, we can’t make up for our sins with any kind of completeness, and there’s basically no way that we can jump high enough to get to heaven.  But this feast of All Saints recognizes that we don’t have to.  We don’t have to because Christ has saved us through no merit of our own but based solely on God’s love for us.  The fact that we can be called saints is a grace, and we dare not bristle so much that we turn away from that grace.

    We are all of us on a journey, and we know that our true home is not in this place, however good it may be.  We are on a journey to heaven, and that means that we are in the process of becoming saints.  The reason John Paul could canonize so many saints is because he had so many to choose from.  None of them were good on their own merit; they became more and more like their heavenly Father by joining themselves to Christ.  Jesus said, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” and there is no way to do that except to follow him.

    So, no, of course, not all of us will be canonized.  Most of us will go to the Kingdom rather imperfect in many ways.  But if we look to those canonized saints for inspiration, perhaps our relationship with the Lord will lead us and our brothers and sisters to that place where all the saints worship around the Throne of the Lamb.

    So yes, today we honor the great saints like Mary and Joseph, Patrick and Benedict, Michael and Gabriel, Francis and Dominic, and all the rest.  We glory in their triumph that was made possible by joining themselves to Christ.  We take inspiration from their battles and from the faith that helped keep them in Christ when they could have turned away.  If God could do that in their lives, he can certainly do that in ours too.  Perhaps, if we are willing to accept it, he can fill us with saintly attributes: strength in weakness, compassion in the face of need, witness to faith in times when society lacks direction, and so much more.

    Those virtues are virtues that we think about when we think about those official, canonized saints.  But they are virtues for which we can and should strive as well.  The desire and the grace to attain those virtues comes from God himself, and the reward for receiving that grace and living those virtues is a heavenly relationship with God.  What could be better than that?

    This is a lot of work, and it’s not easy to live a saintly life, but Jesus makes a promise today to those who strive to do so: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven!”

  • Solemnity of All the Saints

    Solemnity of All the Saints

    Today’s readings

    One of my friends told me that the nun who once taught him had a rather curious line to compliment a student when they had done a good deed: “May you die a martyr’s death!”  Well, knowing how some of those saints died would make anyone cringe a little and say “yeah, thanks Sister, you first.”  But we know the sentiment of Sister’s comment: the martyrs are saints and definitely in heaven.

    So many of us would bristle at the thought of becoming a saint.  Saints are those people in elaborate paintings or statues, who lived lives that we find very remote.  Saints just seem out of touch and sainthood out of our grasp.

    But that’s all wrong.  We were all made by God to come back to him one day: we were, in fact, made for heaven.  Becoming a saint is the vocation of all of us.  Because the most important thing we know about saints is that they are definitely in heaven, which is our true home, which is where we were meant to return some day.

    And so this feast in honor of all the saints is an important one.  We celebrate those saints we know of like Mary and Joseph, Peter and Paul, Patrick and Dominic and so many others.  But we also celebrate the ones we don’t know of; people whose faith and goodness only God knows.  And most importantly, in celebrating them, we vow to become like them: close to Jesus who leads those who believe in him past the gates of death to the glory of heaven, where our reward will be great, as Jesus says in the Gospel today.  On that day, we will indeed rejoice and be glad!

  • Ss. Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and Companions, Martyrs

    Ss. Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and Companions, Martyrs

    Today’s readings
    Mass for the school children.

    When I was your age, I used to like watching movies about the “wild west,” and playing cowboys and Indians.  It was fun to think about our history in those days and to re-enact what we thought it must have been like.  But the truth is, the history of the frontier that included our nation was pretty dark, and pretty barbaric, and quite often very sad.  Just like in lots of times and places in the world and in history, men and women who were people of faith gave their lives for the faith.  Life was dangerous and brutal, but courageous people brought faith to this land.

    Saints Isaac Jogues and John de Brébeuf were Jesuits from France.   They lived in the seventeenth century and worked among the various Indian tribes, bringing them the Christian faith.  Father Isaac worked among the Huron Indians.  The Hurons were constantly being attacked by the Iroquois.  Father Isaac was captured and tortured for thirteen months.  When he finally managed to escape back to France, he returned with many fingers missing from his torture.  Priests aren’t allowed to say Mass if they don’t have all of their hands, but Father Isaac received special permission to say Mass from Pope Urban VIII who said, “It would be shameful that a martyr of Christ be not allowed to drink the Blood of Christ.”  Now you’d think that having escaped to safety, Father Isaac would have stayed put, but he didn’t.  He still had a deep concern and love for his friends the Huron Indians and so he returned to the New World.  But on the way, he was captured by a Mohawk Indian party who tomahawked and beheaded him on October 18, 1646.

    Father John de Brébeuf lived and worked in Canada for 24 years until the English expelled the Jesuits from the land.  He returned four years later, also to work among the Hurons.  He composed catechisms and a dictionary in Huron, and saw 7,000 people converted to the faith before his death.  He was captured by the Iroquois and died after four hours of extreme torture.

    Father Isaac and Father John were two of eight Jesuits who gave their lives for the faith in North America.  They were canonized – made saints – in 1930.  They knew what Jesus meant in today’s Gospel when he said, “Even the hairs of your head have all been counted.  Do not be afraid.  You are worth more than many sparrows.”  Those eight men lived during very dangerous times.  They had seen a lot of violence in the New World, but they were not afraid.  They gave their lives willingly so that people would come to know the Lord Jesus who gave his own life for all of us.

    Now, you probably won’t ever have to decide whether to keep believing in Jesus and die or renounce him and live.  But you absolutely will have to decide to keep believing in Jesus even when it’s unpopular.  To believe even when your friends want to do something wrong.  Even when you are tempted to cheat in school, make fun of someone because everyone else is doing it, or try drugs, or look at things on the Internet you’re not supposed to, or hang out with the wrong crowd.  It’s going to be hard and maybe even a little scary to say no to those things and yes to your faith in God.  But that’s what Jesus is asking you to do today.  And he is telling you not to be afraid to do that, not to be afraid to stand up for your faith.  Because he will help you do the right thing.  And saints like Isaac Jogues and John de Brébeuf will intercede for you and will be your guides.  All you have to do is to decide to do the right thing.  Remember, Jesus tells you today, God takes care of even the little sparrows.  And you are worth more than many, many sparrows!

  • Saint Teresa of Avila, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

    Saint Teresa of Avila, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

    Today’s readings: Romans 8:22-27; Psalm 19:8-11; John 15:1-8

    Saint Teresa was a virgin, mystic, nun, reformer of the Carmelite order, and, with Saint John of the  Cross, foundress of the Discalced Carmelites. When she was a girl, her father sent her for a time to live in an Augustinian convent, until she became ill about a year or so later.  During her illness, she began to contemplate the prospect of living a religious life, and eventually decided to join a convent of Carmelite nuns, which her father strongly opposed.  After she turned twenty-one, she did join, and her father gave up opposition to it.  She was known to be a woman of prudence, charity and personal charm, and so many people came to be devoted to her charism.

    Teresa struggled, though, with personal prayer until her early forties.  Persevering in prayer, she found that she more and more enjoyed being in the presence of the Lord, and really began to grow in friendship with him.  This is the message of today’s Gospel: “Remain in me,” Jesus says to us.  The way that we do that is by persevering in prayer, whether it is difficult or easy.  The saints all tell us that staying with prayer, even in the hard times, is the key to a fulfilling spiritual life.  Sometimes it may feel dry or unfruitful, but the Spirit continues to work in us as we continue to pray.

    Saint Paul tells the Romans the same thing today: “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.”  So today we trust that, just like for Saint Teresa, the prayer of our hearts would find expression in whatever way God wants for us, and that we might always remain in Christ.

  • St. Thérèse of Liseaux, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

    St. Thérèse of Liseaux, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

    Today’s readings: Isaiah 66:10-14c; Matthew 18:1-5

    St. Thérèse knew well the instruction of today’s Gospel reading: “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest of the kingdom of heaven.”  St. Thérèse had a child-like faith, child-like, that is, in her trusting obedience to God’s will, even in the smallest of matters.  She truly believed that small acts of faith and love would work wondrous miracles for the Kingdom of God.

    Thérèse was a very sickly young lady. A childhood illness left her weak for the rest of her life, and during her last year on earth, she was dying of tuberculosis.  She entered the convent at the age of fifteen, and when she died she was just twenty-four years old.  Yet in that short span of time she wrote much about her faith and encouraged others to embrace a simplicity of life and a dedicated obedience to God’s will.  In 1997, Pope John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church, one of just three women to have that special title.

    Thérèse was not one who sought the limelight.  She did not seek to make a name for herself or become anything other than what God wanted her to be.  In Thérèse’s view, even the most menial tasks in the convent could be transformed into great acts of love.  And her preference for hidden sacrifice did indeed convert souls.  Thérèse is one of the most beloved saints in the Church.  Her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, is read and loved throughout the world.

    The Psalmist reflects Thérèse’s rule of life by singing, “In you, Lord, I have found my peace.”  Perhaps today we too can find the peace of God in doing small acts of love for the great glory of the Kingdom of God.

  • Saint Monica

    Saint Monica

    Today’s readings.

    The kind of persistent prayer for those who were important to Saint Paul, as he speaks about in today’s first reading from his second letter to the Thessalonians, was something that Saint Monica practiced every day of her life.  This was a woman in love with God and the Church, and her family, although the latter was pretty difficult for her.  But her persistent prayer won them for Christ and the Church.

    Although she was a Christian, her parents gave her in marriage to a pagan, Patricius, who lived in her hometown of Tagaste in North Africa.  Patricius had some redeeming features, but he had a violent temper and was licentious.  Monica also had to bear with a cantankerous mother-in-law who lived in her home.  Patricius criticized his wife because of her charity and piety, but always respected her.  Monica’s prayers and example finally won her husband and mother-in-law to Christianity.  Her husband died in 371, one year after his baptism.

    Monica’s oldest son was Augustine.  At the time of his father’s death, Augustine was 17 and a rhetoric student in Carthage.  Monica was distressed to learn that her son had accepted the Manichean heresy and was living an immoral life.  For a while, she refused to let him eat or sleep in her house.  Then one night she had a vision that assured her Augustine would return to the faith.  From that time on she stayed close to her son, praying and fasting for him.  In fact, she often stayed much closer than Augustine would have liked!

    Augustine, followed by his mother, eventually traveled to Rome and then Milan, where he came under the influence of the bishop, St. Ambrose, who also became Monica’s spiritual director.  There Monica became a leader of the devout women in Milan as she had been in Tagaste.

    She continued her prayers for Augustine during his years of instruction.  At Easter, in the year 387, St. Ambrose baptized Augustine and several of his friends.  Soon after, his party left for Africa.  Although no one else was aware of it, Monica knew her life was near the end.  She told Augustine, “Son, nothing in this world now affords me delight.  I do not know what there is now left for me to do or why I am still here, all my hopes in this world being now fulfilled.”  She became ill shortly after and suffered severely for nine days before her death.

    Monica was a woman who accomplished much by her persistent prayer.  It might be well for us today to ask for a portion of her spirit of prayer that we might accomplish God’s glory in our own time and place.

  • Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot and doctor of the Church

    Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot and doctor of the Church

    Today’s readings

    Learning to follow the path of perfection is the most important goal of the spiritual life.  How do we get our relationship with God right so that we can live with him forever in heaven?  That was certainly the goal of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast we celebrate today.

    In the year 1111, at the age of 20, Bernard left his home to join the monastic community of Citeaux.  His five brothers, two uncles and around 30 of his friends followed him into the monastery.  Within four years a that monastic community, which had been dying, had recovered enough vitality to establish a new house in the nearby valley of Wormwoods, with Bernard as abbot.  The zealous young man was quite demanding, particularly on himself.  A minor health problem, though, taught him to be more patient and understanding.  The valley was soon renamed Clairvaux, the valley of light.

    His ability as arbitrator and counselor became widely known.  More and more he was called upon to settle long-standing disputes.  On several of these occasions he apparently stepped on some sensitive toes in Rome, and at one point he received a letter of warning from Rome.  He replied that the good fathers in Rome had enough to do to keep the Church in one piece.  If any matters arose that warranted their interest, he would be the first to let them know.

    But his long-standing support of the Roman See was also well known, and shortly thereafter it was Bernard who intervened in a full-blown schism and settled it in favor of the Roman pontiff against the antipope.  The Holy See prevailed on Bernard to preach the Second Crusade throughout Europe.  His eloquence was so overwhelming that a great army was assembled and the success of the crusade seemed assured.  The ideals of the men and their leaders, however, were not those of Abbot Bernard, and the project ended as a complete military and moral disaster.  Bernard felt responsible in some way for the degenerative effects of the crusade.  This heavy burden possibly hastened his death, which came August 20, 1153.

    In striving for perfection throughout his life, Bernard responded to the call of today’s Gospel reading: “Come, follow me.”  That’s our call, too, and reflecting on the life of the saints, like Saint Bernard, can help us to follow that rather demanding path.  One day, we hope that striving for perfection will lead us to eternal life, the goal of all our lives.

  • Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

    Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

    Today’s readings

    Today we celebrate a feast that is a bit unusual for us.  First of all, it’s a saint’s feast day, and saints’ days don’t usually take precedence over a Sunday celebration.  Secondly, whenever we do celebrate a saint’s day, it is usually celebrated on the feast of their death, not their birth.  But today we do gather to celebrate the birth of a saint, Saint John the Baptist, and the fact that we’re celebrating his birth and his day at all on this Sunday points to the fact that St. John the Baptist had a very special role to play in the life of Christ.  In fact, the only other saint for whom we celebrate a birthday is the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that tells us something about how important John the Baptist is.

    Just as for Jesus, we don’t know the precise day John the Baptist was born.  So the feast of their Nativities – their births – was a tradition developed by the early Church. The dates the Church selected are significant.  Jesus’ birthday was placed around the time of the winter solstice, mostly to counteract pagan festivals of the coming of winter.  John the Baptist’s birthday was then placed around the time of the summer solstice for similar reasons.  But there’s more to it even than that.  In the Gospel of John, there is a passage where John the Baptist says of himself and Jesus, “I must decrease, he must increase.”  So John’s birthday is placed at the time when the days start to become shorter, and Jesus’ birthday is placed at the time when the days start to become longer.  John the Baptist must decrease, Jesus must increase.

    Today’s readings have a lot to do with who the prophet is.  St. John the Baptist was the last prophet of the old order, and his mission was to herald the coming of Jesus Christ who is himself the new order.  Tradition holds that prophets were created for their mission, that their purpose was laid out while they were yet to be born.  Isaiah, one of the great prophets of the old order, tells us of his commissioning in our first reading today.  He says, “The LORD called me from birth, from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.”  The rest of the reading tells us of his mission, a mission of hardship, but one of being compelled to speak the word of god as a sharp-edged sword.  His calling began as a call to preach to his own people, but by the end of the reading, it is clear that that commission became a call to preach to every nation on earth.

    Isaiah says that he was given his name while in his mother’s womb.  The same was true of St. John the Baptist, whose name was given to Zechariah and Elizabeth by the Angel Gabriel.  There’s a dubious story in my own family’s history that my mother had my name picked out from the time she was twelve.  But it’s pretty hard for me to believe that a young Italian woman would have picked the name Patrick Michael for her son.  But that’s how the story goes.  Names have meaning.  Maybe you know what your name means.  I looked mine up this week and found that Patrick means “nobleman,” so if you feel like bowing when you see me, it seems like that would be appropriate!  But far more significant are the names of the prophets we encounter in today’s Liturgy of the Word.  Isaiah means “Yahweh is salvation,” which pretty much encompassed the meaning of Isaiah’s mission, proclaiming salvation to the Israelites who were oppressed in exile.  The name given to the Baptist, John, means “God has shown favor.”  And that was in fact the message of his life.  He came to pave the way for Jesus Christ, who was the favor of God shown to the whole human race.

    The point is, these men were created for their prophetic calling.  That’s true for us too.  All of us who have been baptized have a prophetic calling that came before we were ever born.  God created us for something special.  He created us to be with him, he created us to follow him, he created us to draw other people to him.  This means that, according to our abilities, our vocation and station in life, we were meant to serve God in some way that God might be glorified and that others may come to know him.

    During these couple of weeks, we have been asked to observe a fortnight of religious freedom.  As our nation’s bishops point out, religious freedom is one of our first and most cherished freedoms.  It was largely in pursuit of religious freedom that our nation’s forefathers came to this great land, and in defense of that freedom that they fought and died.  But now, many issues have put that freedom in danger.  The so-called HHS mandate is kind of the banner issue on the religious freedom front.  The HHS mandate requires all employers to pay for birth control regardless of whether it is against their moral teachings, as it is for us.

    But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Another sad assault on religious freedom has been the requirement of any adoption placement agency to place children for adoption with people in same-sex unions.  Since our religion forbids this practice, we have been unable to comply, and so we have been pushed out of the adoption process, something that has been an extension of our acts of charity since this country began.

    The essence of the issue is that freedom of religion is now being defined in a very narrow way, which amounts to freedom of worship.  One is free to worship in any way one chooses, but must obey the law in all other things.  Let’s bracket for the moment the obvious objection that such a narrow definition was never intended by our founding fathers.  More important is that, for us, worship is not something we can separate from our daily living.  When we are sent out to “go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life,” we are just beginning to worship.  What we do in our daily life is our real worship, not just the hour we’re here on Sunday.

    So our worship of God may indeed call us to speak against issues of the day, or to take in an adoptive or foster child to share God’s love, or any number of charitable acts, and our Church should have the freedom to pursue those according to our moral teachings.  That’s the essence of religious freedom, and that is what we are seeking to defend.  The prophetic call in all of us absolutely must speak up for what we believe as a Church and preach the Gospel by the way that we live our lives.

    We live in a society that is all about protecting and promoting ourselves.  Saint John the Baptist would have us promote Jesus instead.  That’s what he was about.  As it was for him, so it is for us: we must decrease, Jesus must increase.

  • Saint Barnabas, Apostle

    Saint Barnabas, Apostle

    Today’s readings

    “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”

    Barnabas, a Jew of Cyprus, comes as close as anyone outside the Twelve to being a full-fledged apostle.  He was closely associated with St. Paul (he introduced Paul to Peter and the other apostles) and served as a kind of mediator between Paul, formerly a persecutor of Christians, and the still suspicious Jewish Christians.

    When a Christian community developed at Antioch, Barnabas was sent as the official representative of the Church of Jerusalem to incorporate them into the fold.  He and Paul taught in Antioch for a year, after which they took relief contributions to Jerusalem.

    We see in today’s first reading that Paul and Barnabas had become accepted in the community as charismatic leaders who led many to convert to Christianity.  The Holy Spirit set them apart for Apostolic work and blessed their efforts with great success.

    Above all, these men hungered and thirsted for righteousness, a righteousness not based on the law or any merely human precept, but instead on a right relationship with God.  This is a righteousness that could never be disputed and the relationship could never be broken.  Just as they led many people then to that kind of relationship with God, so they call us to follow that same kind of right relationship today.

    As we celebrate the Eucharist today, we might follow their call to righteousness by examining our lives in light of the Beatitudes.  How willing are we to enter into poverty of spirit, work for peace and justice and pursue righteousness?  Blessed are we who follow the example of St. Barnabas and blessed are we who benefit from his intercession.

  • Saint Matthias

    Saint Matthias

    Today’s readings

    We don’t really know much about St. Matthias. We have no idea what kind of holiness of life he led that led to his being nominated as one of two possibilities to take Judas’s position among the Twelve Apostles. But clearly, they would have nominated a holy and faithful man, and then they left the deciding up to the Holy Spirit. Praying, they cast lots, and the lots selected Matthias, who then became one of the Twelve. He is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament, so we don’t know much about his ministry.

    What is striking about the selection of St. Matthias though is that this is the first of the disciples or Apostles that was not selected directly by Jesus.  Jesus selected all of the original Twelve, but Matthias is the first to be selected by the fledgling Church on the authority passed on by Jesus himself. They act not on their own, but on the authority of Jesus, being led by the Holy Spirit for the glory of God the Father.

    A similar process has been repeated through the ages, over and over again, to select men to be popes, bishops, priests and deacons, and men and women for religious communities. It is the forerunner of the process of discernment that we use for leadership positions in our parish. The process begins with prayer and ends with thanksgiving and glory to God. People may propose the candidates as being noted for holiness and ability, but it is God who makes the final choice.

    Today we praise God for the Twelve Apostles, of which Matthias was one. We praise God for the authority of the Apostles which has echoed through the ages giving guidance to the Church. We praise God for the gift of the Holy Spirit who is active in all our decision making.