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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

Von: Fr. Michael Black
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 "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 Christentum Spiritualität
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  • Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday)

    Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday)
    Apr 26 2025
    Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday) Solemnity; Liturgical Color: WhiteTrue power pardonsIn the Nicene Creed, we say that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father. When a judge walks into a courtroom, the bailiff announces, “All rise,” and the judge sits in judgment. In his see city, a bishop rests in his cathedra, and in his palace, a king reigns from his throne. A president signs legislation while seated at his desk. The chair is a locus of power. The power that emanates from such seats of authority judges, condemns, and sentences. Today’s feast reminds us, though, that authority also exercises power by granting mercy. When a judge pronounces innocence, the sentence is no less binding than one of guilt. The absolved exits the court into a new day, ready to begin again. And when the priest’s voice whispers through the screen, “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” guilt evaporates into thin air. The purest and truest expression of power is the granting of mercy.Mercy is a superabundance of justice, not an exception to it. When faced with a wound to the common good, those responsible for repairing the damage do not have two contrary options: justice or mercy. Justice and mercy are not mutually exclusive. Mercy is a form of justice. Mercy does not ignore the tears to the fabric of the common good slashed by crime and sin. Rightful authority notes the torn fabric, weighs the personal responsibility of the accused, and distributes justice precisely by granting mercy. Mercy does not turn a blind eye to justice but fulfills its obligations to justice by going beyond them. After all, one cannot be absolved of having done nothing. Similarly, where there is no guilt there is no need of mercy. When justice calls out, two words echo back off the hard walls: “condemnation” and “mercy.” Mercy runs parallel to, and beyond, the path of condemnation. This is the mercy we celebrate today, the mercy whose greatest practitioner is God Himself. Because He is the seat of all authority, God is also the seat of all mercy.God plays many roles in the life of the Christian—Creator, Savior, Sanctifier, and Judge. Our Creed teaches us that God the Son, seated at the Father’s right hand, “will come in glory to judge the living and the dead,” both at the particular and at the final judgment. At that moment, it will serve us nothing to state, in excusing our sins, that “God understands.” Of course God understands. To state “God understands” is just another way to say that God is omniscient and all powerful. “God understands” implies that because God knows the powerful temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that He could not possibly judge man harshly. Yet “God understands” is a lazy manner of exculpating sinful behavior. When nose to nose with God one second after death, the repentant Christian should plead, instead, “Lord, have mercy.” Faced with the scandalous behavior of a friend or relative, the response should again be “Lord, have mercy.” Appealing to God’s mercy will melt His heart. Appealing to His knowledge will not.The private revelations of Jesus Christ to Saint Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun and intense mystic who died in 1938, are the source of the profound spirituality of today’s feast. Sister Faustina was a kind of Saint Catherine of Siena of the twentieth century. She lived a regimen of fasting, meditation, liturgical prayer, and close community life that would have crushed a less resilient soul. But Faustina persevered, amidst debilitating illnesses, sisterly jealousy, and respectful but questioning superiors. Her diaries are replete with the starkest of language from the mouth of Christ, showing that moral clarity precedes the call for mercy. Sister Faustina faithfully recorded Christ’s manly commands in her diary. One of these commands expressly desired that the Divine Mercy be celebrated on the Sunday after Easter. In an age-old pattern familiar to an ancient Church, Saint Faustina’s private revelations were challenged, filtered for theological truth, sifted for spiritual depth, and granted universal approbation by the only Christian religion which even claims to grant such. In the soundest proof of their authenticity, the profound simplicity of the Divine Mercy revelations and of their related devotions were intuitively grasped and adopted by the Catholic faithful the world over.Pope Saint John Paul II first inserted today’s feast into the Roman calendar on April 30, 2000, the canonization day of Saint Faustina. John Paul II was also canonized on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2014. And so the Church’s third millennium was launched with a new devotion that quickly eclipsed many older ones, a new piety rooted in the most ancient truths, a fresh appeal to a side of God that had not been fully understood in prior ages. Divine Mercy is the new face of God for the third millennium, a ...
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    7 Min.
  • April 11: Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr

    April 11: Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
    Apr 9 2025
    April 11: Saint Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr
    1030–1079
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Poland

    Royal fury fells a bishop

    For many centuries, the coronation ritual of a king was considered to be a Sacrament of the Church. Such was the importance of the king’s role in protecting and promoting the faith in his realm that his enthronement was embellished with a liturgical pomp and splendor similar to the ordination rite of a bishop. The sacramental character of a king’s coronation was not reflected, however, in the ritual by which a woman became a queen. Only a man could be crowned, in the same way that only a man could receive Holy Orders. The parallel duties which kings and bishops owed to both Church and Kingdom sometimes led to irresolvable conflicts. Bishops resented kings infringing upon ecclesiastical affairs, while kings resented bishops meddling in civil matters. Since civil and religious life was, until very modern times, utterly intermingled in most cultures, the high tensions generated by the nearly co-equal powers and responsibilities of kings and bishops inevitably led to bloodshed.

    The blood of today’s saint was spilled precisely due to such high tension. Saint Stanislaus was the Bishop of Krakow, Poland, in the century just after that nation’s baptism after the conversion of its king. Saint Stanislaus had various and serious disputes with Poland’s King Bolesław II: over property, over a war, and over the King’s moral failings. This led to Stanislaus excommunicating Bolesław, in seeming support of the King’s enemies. Although the precise details of this King-Bishop conflict have been lost to history, it is clear that Bolesław was outraged by Stanislaus’ sanction and labelled him a traitor. When the King entered Krakow’s Cathedral for Mass, the service was immediately halted due to his excommunication. Bolesław went into a fury and actively sought Stanislaus’ blood. The henchmen the King sent to assassinate Bishop Stanislaus, however, refused to carry out the deed. So King Bolesław entered through the doors of the chapel outside the city where the Bishop was saying Mass and cut Stanislaus down himself. Bishop Stanislaus was immediately venerated as a martyr, his relics were transferred to the Cathedral, and he was canonized a saint a century and a half after his death. For centuries, Polish kings were crowned at the splendid tomb of the martyr in the central nave of Krakow’s Cathedral.  Saint Stanislaus is one of the patron saints of Poland, being especially venerated in the Archdiocese of Krakow.

    On November 1, 1946, a young Polish man named Karol Wojtyła, in love with God and country, was ordained a priest and celebrated his first Masses in Krakow’s Cathedral of Saint Stanislaus. Father Wojtyła went on to become the seventy-sixth Archbishop of Krakow. He later became a Cardinal and then Pope John Paul II. He is now a saint. Pope Saint John Paul II had a great devotion to Saint Stanislaus and often prayed at his tomb. The Pope even planned his first pastoral visit to Poland to coincide exactly with the nine-hundredth anniversary of the saint’s martyrdom. John Paul II’s trip missed the exact anniversary, due to a lack of cooperation from the communist government, but the pope didn’t miss the year. 1979 turned out to be a pivotal year for Poland. The papal pilgrimage unleashed social movements that brought communism to its knees a decade later. The memory of long-ago Saint Stanislaus, then, played a remote role in conquering an unjust modern government.

    Many details about the life of Saint Stanislaus are lost in the fog of the past. Only a basic outline of his life is possible. But his heroic example, precisely as a bishop, gave Karol Wojtyła a model to follow in his own life as a Polish bishop and Pope in far different circumstances of civil and ecclesiastical tension than those of the eleventh century. We can speculate that on May 13, 1981, when Pope John Paul II was shot and almost killed by a state-sponsored assassin, he thought of the state-sponsored attack which ended Saint Stanislaus’ life so many centuries before. Civil and Church power still clash, even in modern times, as the 1980 murder of the El Salvadoran Archbishop Saint Oscar Romero also proves. Pope John Paul II survived, thank God, perhaps through the intercession of the great patron of Poland we celebrate today.

    Saint Stanislaus, you fearlessly confronted those who threatened the well-being of the Church, and so gave a heroic example of martyrdom to an entire nation. Help all who seek your intercession to be as brave and forthright as you in the face of threats and adversity.
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    6 Min.
  • April 7: Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, Priest

    April 7: Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, Priest
    Apr 6 2025
    April 7: Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, Priest
    1651–1719
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of Christian teachers

    Great faith, charm, and skill opened school doors to millions

    A cowboy mounts a horse and lassos a calf to show the next cowboy how to wrangle. A fisherman tosses a net into the ocean so that his son learns to put food on the table for dinner. And a good teacher teaches an apprentice how to teach. The passing on of professional knowledge doesn’t happen by accident. Those who are skilled teach those who are less so. Today’s saint, John Baptiste de la Salle, was a lifelong educator, an excellent teacher who had innovative and effective ideas on how to educate youth. Most importantly, he also had faith, perseverance, and the administrative skills to bring his educational vision to fulfillment in the face of stiff resistance.

    A good teacher must do much more than master content. He must do much more than manage his classroom. A good teacher is an artist who combines mastery of the material with psychological insights, discipline, charm, preparedness, and love, all in careful equilibrium. At the time Saint Jean Baptiste began to teach teachers, the custom in France was to teach children Latin. And once they had learned Latin sufficiently, the custom was to teach the students every other subject in Latin. Lower class, poorer children, were often not taught at all or only for a few brief years. Jean Baptiste wanted all children to have access to a good education, for their schooling to be free of charge, and for classes to be in French. These ideals, combined with his own charm, holiness, and refined savoir faire, drew many idealistic young men to his side. They wanted to be teachers too, and to dedicate themselves to the Lord. Originally, Jean Baptiste was reluctant to live with, and train, men who belonged to a social class far below his own. He remarked that his first teacher trainees ranked below his own servants. In the end, though, Jean overcame his reluctance and innate prejudice and threw himself wholeheartedly into the educational work that would make him famous.

    So many young men gathered around him that Jean Baptiste founded an Order which was, after his death, officially recognized by the Church—the Christian Brothers. Just when his educational apostolates needed funds to expand, Jean Baptiste inherited a fortune from his parents. He was tempted to use the money to open new schools but instead donated it to the poor, deciding to rely only upon providence for the support of his schools. The members of his Order were intentionally not ordained to the Priesthood so that sacramental responsibilities would not distract them from teaching. His Christian Brothers also had no obligation to pray the Divine Office (the Breviary) and were prohibited from physical mortifications beyond the Church’s norms on fasting. Jean felt that teaching well was itself a mortification which required heroic self discipline. Jean wanted nothing less than ambassadors of Christ to the young, not just teachers. All of this was novel for its time—a body of men with no ordained members dedicated exclusively to education was unheard of.

    For all his successes in opening new schools, however, Jean Baptiste had numerous setbacks. Over many years he was verbally attacked, sued in court, and vilified by some religious Orders and clerics.  They saw his free schools and universal educational goals as a threat to their own local monopolies on education. Jean Baptiste dealt with all of this with admirable courage, humility, and magnanimity. It’s not easy times that make one great. It’s hardship, adversity, and persecution. Jean Baptiste’s trials made a good man into a great man, and a great man into a saint. He fasted continually, mortified himself harshly, and traded his early life of comfort for hard scrabble poverty. After relinquishing the heavy burden of his Order’s leadership and administration, Jean was so obedient to his successor that the new superior joked that Jean would not die unless he was given permission to do so. The Counter-Reformation fervor behind so many great saints of sixteenth-century Italy and Spain arrived late to France, but it arrived no less ardent. Jean Baptiste was one of its greatest exemplars. The Christians Brothers peaked at over sixteen thousand members in the 1950s and are still active today in numerous countries, operating over a thousand educational institutions. The legacy of their dynamic, innovative, and indefatigable founder continues to thrive.

    Saint John Baptiste de la Salle, through your intercession, give all teachers of the Faith the perseverance, grace, and love they need to teach the uneducated, especially the poor and those who struggle to learn. Your determination inspires. Your heavenly assistance guarantees fruitfulness.
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    6 Min.
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