Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Saints

  • Ss. Simon & Jude, Apostles

    Ss. Simon & Jude, Apostles

    Today’s readings

    Today, we celebrate two apostles who, as often is the case, are relatively unknown except that they were followers of Jesus.  Jude is called Judas in Luke and in the Acts of the Apostles.  Matthew and Mark call him Thaddeus.  We have in the New Testament the letter of Jude, which scholars say is not written by the man whose feast we celebrate today.

    Simon was a Zealot, a member of a radical party that disavowed all ties with the government, holding that Israel should be re-elevated to political greatness under the leadership of God alone.  They also held that any payment of taxes to the Romans was a blasphemy against God.

    Neither of these men held any claim to greatness here on earth; they found their glory in following Christ.  Their joy was, as St. Paul instructs us in his letter to the Ephesians, in their citizenship which was of course in heaven, as it is for all of us.  We are merely passing through this place, and our task while we are hear, as was the task for Simon and Jude and all the apostles, to live for Christ and to live the Gospel.  The reward for them, then, as is for all of us, is in heaven, their and our true home.

    Their message, as the Psalmist says, goes out to all the earth.  Blessed are all of us when we catch that message and live that message, following the way to Christ Jesus.

  • St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr

    St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr

    Today’s readings | Today’s saint

    [Mass for the junior high school children.]

    Of all birds, sparrows are probably the most insignificant.  They are small in size and dull in color.  They undertake no great flights.  They live in bushes rather than in trees.  Though they are found in vast numbers all over the world, we take them completely for granted.  They so blend in with the earth and their surroundings that we hardly ever notice them.

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus wants us to know how far God’s love for us and care for us and knowledge of us goes.  In doing that, he didn’t talk about swans or eagles, even though these birds make a much more splendid appearance as opposed to the humble sparrow.  But listen again to what he says about them: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father knowing.”

    By this he means that everything that happens to any of his creatures, whether they are roaring lions or tiny sparrows, whether they are world leaders, or little children, whether they are great or insignificant, God still cares for them – they are still important to God.  He notices what happens to us, no matter who we are, he cares for us and wants us to be with him forever.

    In our day, there are lots of things to worry about.  Many people right now are worrying about the economy.  Will we be able to stay in our homes or will we lose them?  Will we be able to pay our bills?  Can we still afford to live in a safe place?  And there are lots of other things we worry about too.  We worry about people we love when they are sick.  We worry about passing tests, whether they are tests in school or medical tests.  We worry about our family and friends who are off in foreign lands fighting difficult wars.  There is no shortage of things to worry about.

    But Jesus reminds us today that we are in God’s hands.  The hairs of our head have been counted.  We are worth more than millions of sparrows, and God notices every single one of them.

    St. Ignatius of Antioch was a bishop at the end of the first and beginning of the second century.  At that time, Christians were often persecuted, this time under the Emperor Trajan.  Christians were being forced to deny Christ or lose their lives.  Many of them chose to give their lives for Christ, and Ignatius was one of them.

    When he was in prison, Ignatius wrote to the people in the churches he led.  He told them not to worry about him.  In fact, he told them not to try to intervene for him, not to try to stop what was going to happen.  He knew he would die for his faith, but he didn’t want them to try and stop it.  He was not worried about his life, because he knew that God would take care of him.  He wrote:  “No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.”

    He was killed for his faith and became a martyr.  We celebrate his courage on this feast day for him.  We celebrate his faith in Jesus, that faith that told him there was nothing to worry about because God loved him and valued him more than many sparrows.

    What we need to do today is to give our worries back to Jesus, to remember that we are in his hands, and to tell him that we trust in him.  After our prayers of the faithful, we are all going to come forward and offer our worries back to Jesus so that we can put them in his hands as we celebrate the Eucharist today.  After you come forward to give your worries to one of our students who will place them before the altar, I want you to return to your seat and imagine yourself giving that worry to Jesus.  Imagine him taking it from you, reassuring you that you are worth more than many sparrows, and imagine him embracing you and reassuring you that you will be cared for.

  • The Guardian Angels

    The Guardian Angels

    Today’s readings: Exodus 23:20-23; Psalm 91; Matthew 18:1-5, Matthew 18:10

    “For God commands the angels to guard you in all your ways.”  These are incredibly comforting words that the Psalmist sings to us today.  God never allows anything to overshadow us, never misses any event of our lives.  Moreover, he commands the angels, his servants, to watch over and guard us in all our ways.  Today we celebrate that the angels keep us safe and lead us ultimately to God himself.

    I love the feast of the Guardian Angels, because my Guardian Angel was probably the first devotion that I learned. I remember my mother teaching me the prayer. Say it with me if you know it:

    Angel of God,
    my guardian dear,
    To whom God’s love
    commits me here,
    Ever this day,
    be at my side,
    To watch and guard,
    To rule and guide.
    Amen.

    The impetus for today’s feast is summed up in the first line of the first reading. Hear it again:

    See, I am sending an angel before you,
    to guard you on the way
    and bring you to the place I have prepared.

    From the earliest days of the Church, there has always been the notion of an angel whose purpose was to guide people, to intercede for them before God, and to present them to God at death. This notion began to be really enunciated by the monastic tradition, with the help of St. Benedict, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and others. It is during this monastic period that devotion to the angels took its present form.

    Many of us have probably moved over on our seats to make room for our Guardian Angel. As amusing as that may be, the concept of an angel to guard and guide us is essential to our faith. The gift of the Guardian Angels is a manifestation of the love and mercy of God. Devotion to the Guardian Angels, then, is not just for children. We adults should feel free to call on our angels for intercession and guidance. We should continue to rely on that angel right up to death, when our angel will present us to God. We hear that very prayer in the Rite of Christian Burial:

    “May the angels lead you into paradise;
    may the martyrs come to welcome you
    and take you to the holy city,
    the new and eternal Jerusalem.”

    May the Guardian Angels always intercede for us. And, as we hear in today’s Gospel, may our angels always look upon the face of our heavenly Father.

    Blessed be God in His angels and in His saints.

  • St. Jerome

    St. Jerome

    Today’s readings

    It seems like St. Jerome had much in common with the disciples of today’s Gospel reading.  Jerome, rather unfortunately, was known for his quick temper and sometimes mean-spirited pen.  If they had email in those days, he’d be the one to fire off a quick nastygram without even taking time to think about it.  We all have our issues to deal with, unfortunately.

    But we need to be extremely thankful for St. Jerome as we open up the Scriptures today.  Without his tireless efforts, our understanding of Sacred Scripture would be quite limited, I think.  It was St. Jerome who spent so much time translating the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, creating what was know as the Vulgate translation.  This was the standard text of the Scriptures for a long time in the Church, and is still an important basis for today’s vernacular translations.  His commentaries on the Scriptures are important to us to this very day.

    Jerome was a pre-eminent scholar.  He studied the Scriptures all the time and was an expert in Biblical languages including Hebrew, Greek, Chaldaic and of course Latin.  He also spent a good deal of time in the Holy Land, walking the path of Christ, staying in the places where he stayed, even living for a time in the cave believed to have been Jesus’ birthplace.  He wasn’t just a scholar studying the Scriptures from a theoretical viewpoint; he was instead devoted to the Scriptures, pouring through them with love.

    For those of you who are part of our CREEDS Bible Study, today is a Patronal feast day for you.  St. Jerome’s love of Scripture has made it possible for all of us to come to know Christ in a more intimate way through our own study and devotion to the Word of God.  In honor of his feast, I will leave us all with the advice of one of my seminary professors.  Be certain to read some Scripture every day, even if it’s just a few verses before you turn off the lamp at night.  If you do that, on your last day on earth, you’ll close your eyes and be able to open them up in heaven and know exactly where you are.  Scripture gives us that intimate relationship with our God.  St. Jerome, pray for us, and lead us back to the Scriptures with the same love and devotion you had.

  • St. Vincent de Paul, priest

    St. Vincent de Paul, priest

    Today’s readings

    St. Vincent became a priest with the expectation of enjoying the easy, affluent sort of life priests had in those days.  That was his goal in some ways until he heard the deathbed confession of a dying servant.  That encounter led him to realize the extremely great needs of the poor in France.

    The servant’s Master had been persuaded by his wife to endow and support a group of missionary priests to serve the poor.  The countess asked Vincent to lead the group, and although he declined at first, he later returned to lead a group now known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Vincentians.  They took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and stability and devoted themselves to serving the poor in smaller towns and villages.

    What makes St. Vincent particularly interesting to us at this time is that he also founded, along with St. Louise de Marillac,  a parish-based society for the spiritual and physical relief of the poor and sick.  This is known as the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and we are currently forming one here at St. Raphael.  Vincent organized the rich women of Paris to collect funds for his missionary projects, founded several hospitals, collected relief funds for the victims of war and ransomed over 1,200 galley slaves from North Africa.

    I think St. Vincent heard the words of the wisdom writer in today’s first reading: “Rejoice, O young man, while you are young and let your heart be glad in the days of your youth.  Follow the ways of your heart, the vision of your eyes…”  In his youth, Vincent was converted from the cynical and even slothful ambitions of the clergy in those days, and turned instead to follow his true passion, bringing Christ to the needy and the downtrodden.

  • Ss. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang & Companions, Martyrs

    Ss. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang & Companions, Martyrs

    Today’s readings

    Korea was introduced to Christianity in the late 1500s when some Koreans were baptized, probably by Christian Japanese soldiers who invaded Korea at that time. It was not until the late 1700s that a priest managed to sneak into Korea, and when he did, he found about 4000 Catholics, none of whom had ever seen a priest. Seven years later there were over ten thousand Catholics.  So he was one busy priest!
    In the 1800s, Andrew Kim became the first native Korean to become a priest when he traveled 1300 miles to seminary in China. He managed to find his way back into the country six years later. When he returned home, he arranged for more men to travel to China for studies. He was arrested, tortured and finally beheaded.
    St. Paul Chong was a lay apostle who was also martyred. During the persecutions of 1839, 1846, 1866 and 1867, 103 members of the Christian community gave their lives for the faith. These included some bishops and priests, but for the most part they were lay people, including men and women, married and unmarried, children, young people and the elderly. They were all canonized by Pope John Paul II during a visit to Korea in 1984.
    Today’s first reading speaks of a kind of “everything old will be made new again.”  This is the hope of all the martyrs, those like Andrew Kim and Paul Chong and their companions who gave their lives so that the Gospel would be known in every corner of the earth.  What they gave was merely their corruptible body.  No one could take from them their souls, which had been made gloriously white and gleamingly new as they washed them in the Blood of Christ.

    Many of us have to deal with frustrations and ailments of all kinds.  So hearing about a new, incorruptible body is a source of joy.  But the words of St. Paul are also a cause for peace, that even in the midst of persecution, we will never lose anything we don’t need for all eternity.  Because our body “is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible.  It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious.  It is sown weak; it is raised powerful.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.”  No matter what may come to us in our life, we can be at peace with the words of the Psalmist, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.”

  • Ss. Cornelius & Cyprian

    Ss. Cornelius & Cyprian

    Today’s readings

    St. Cornelius was ordained as the Bishop of Rome in 251.  The Bishop of Rome is what we now call the Pope, so you can see the significance of his position.  His major contribution was to defend the faith against the Novatian schismatics, a group who denied the readmission of those who had lapsed in the faith by being made to perform a ritual sacrifice to pagan gods, under the threat of death by the Roman Emperor.  St. Cyprian was a brother bishop who helped him in this struggle.  Both men were subsequently martyred for the faith.  Cornelius died in exile in 253, and Cyprian was beheaded in 258.

    The focus of both men was to preserve church unity during a time when there was much oppression against the church.  They could well echo St. Paul’s call for unity in today’s first reading: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”  They reached out to those who repented of their lapse in faith and earnestly desired once again to be one with the church.

    Cyprian wrote to Cornelius, “Dearest brother, bright and shining is the faith which the blessed Apostle (that is, St. Paul) praised in your community.  He foresaw in the spirit the praise your courage deserves and the strength that could not be broken; he was heralding the future when he testified to your achievements; his praise of the fathers was a challenge to the sons.  Your unity, your strength have become shining examples of these virtues to the rest of the brethren.”

    In this year when our parish is focusing on welcoming then, we must also strive to focus on unity.  We are all one body in Christ.

  • Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist

    Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist

    Today’s readings

    What we are celebrating in today’s feast is the fact that prison bars cannot silence truth. John the Baptist was not asked to renounce his faith; indeed Herod was probably very interested in John’s faith and may have even asked him about it on occasion. Not that he wanted to convert, mind you, but he just seemed to have a kind of morbid fascination with the man Jesus, and anyone who followed him. But the real reason that he kept John locked up was that Herodias didn’t like John, who had a following, publicly telling them what they should and should not do. Herod’s taking his brother’s wife was not permitted in Judaism, but it would all blow over if John would just stop talking about it.

    But that’s not how the truth works. And John’s one purpose in life was to testify to the Truth — Truth with a capital “T” — to point the way to Jesus. So he was not about to soft-pedal the wrong that Herod and Herodias were doing. And that was something Herodias just could not live with. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she eagerly had John beheaded and rid herself of his prophecy. But that didn’t make her any less accountable to the truth.

    This could be a rather sad feast. The end of one who worked hard for the reign of God, and over something seemingly so silly. But, as St. Bede the Venerable says of him: “There is no doubt that blessed John suffered imprisonment and chains as a witness to our Redeemer, whose forerunner he was, and gave his life for him. His persecutor had demanded not that he should deny Christ, but only that he should keep silent about the truth. Nevertheless … does Christ not say: “I am the truth?” Therefore, because John shed his blood for the truth, he surely died for Christ.

    And so, for those of us who are heirs of the Truth, this is indeed a joyful feast. John the Baptist could not keep silent about the truth, whether it was truth with a capital or lower-case “T”. We must not keep silent about the truth either. We are called to offer our own lives as a testimony to the truth.

  • St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

    St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

    Today’s readings

    Life’s lessons are most often clearer in hindsight. Toward that end, St. Paul begins his letter to the Corinthians today with almost a litany of thanks. He thanks God for all of the members of the Church who have responded to his tireless preaching of the Gospel. For Paul, thankfulness was the only response possible to God’s grace, and he sees it at work everywhere.

    Today we celebrate the feast of St. Augustine. Augustine was a man who thought he had everything figured out at a young age. He was prideful, caught up in the world’s pleasures and focused solely on what could be learned from his own reasoning. He had no room for the religion of his mother, St. Monica, whose feast we celebrated yesterday. But through her tireless prayers, Augustine began to come to know the God she worshipped, and began to respond to grace. He was baptized at 33 years of age, became a priest at 36, and a bishop at 41. Grace can work fast in a person’s life.

    St. Augustine’s Confessions are among the best works on the spiritual life. In that work, he reflects, among other things, on his conversion, and how he felt called to repentance, but did not want to give up the world’s pleasures just yet. But throughout the work, he praises God for God’s work in his life. One of the best-known sections speaks of how the beauty of God was near, yet seemed beyond him:

    Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!
    Lo, you were within,
    but I outside, seeking there for you,
    and upon the shapely things you have made
    I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
    You were with me, but I was not with you.
    They held me back far from you,
    those things which would have no being,
    were they not in you.
    You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
    you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
    you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;
    I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
    you touched me, and I burned for your peace.

    St. Paul and St. Augustine were always grateful for the grace they saw at work in the world. Today, may we all be mindful and grateful for those gifts in our lives.

  • St. Pius X, pope

    St. Pius X, pope

    Today’s readings

    St. Pius would have been a great organizer of the feast that our Gospel tells us about today. The whole point of the feast is that all are welcome, but some choose not to come, or don’t come worthily. Jesus was speaking pointedly to the Jewish rulers who should have had the place of honor at the banquet. But they all had excuses that kept them away. And so the banquet was made available to all the nations – Gentiles too! – if they would come properly attired, that is, if they would come worthily, with open hearts and longing minds.

    St. Pius X was born Joseph Sarto, the second of ten children in a poor Italian family. He became pope at the age of 68, and he too wanted to open the banquet for all those who would come worthily. He encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, which was observed sparingly in his day, and especially encouraged children to come to the banquet. During his reign, he famously ended, and subsequently refused to reinstate, state interference in canonical affairs. He had foreseen World War I, but because he died just a few weeks after the war began, he was unable to speak much about it. On his deathbed, however, he said, “This is the last affliction the Lord will visit on me. I would gladly give my life to save my poor children from this ghastly scourge.”

    “The feast is ready,” we are told in today’s Gospel. May we all take this occasion to receive the Eucharist worthily and often, reviving our devotion and love for the Eucharist every day. May we all be among those brought in for the feast, and found to be appropriately attired with pure hearts.