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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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  • 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.
  • April 5: Saint Vincent Ferrer, Priest

    April 5: Saint Vincent Ferrer, Priest
    Apr 4 2025
    April 5: Saint Vincent Ferrer, Priest
    c. 1350–1419
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of builders

    He slept on the floor, fasted endlessly, performed miracles, and converted thousands

    Saint Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest, founded the Order of Preachers in the early thirteenth century. He wanted to establish an Order of priests who were well educated in theology, adept at preaching the truths they lived, and who had more flexibility than a monastery-bound priest to travel and evangelize. Over a century later, today’s saint was born in Saint Dominic’s own country, joined the Dominican Order, and carried out in the most dynamic and complete way the essential vision of Saint Dominic. Saint Vincent Ferrer was well educated and a powerfully effective preacher. He travelled almost without cease throughout Western Europe, impacting the lives of untold thousands of people through his example of holiness, his supernatural gifts, and his preaching. Saint Vincent was the ideal Dominican.

    Vincent was born in Valencia, on the southern coast of Spain, to an English father and a Spanish mother. He was named in honor of Saint Vincent Martyr, who met his death in the same city in the fourth century. Vincent received an excellent education and earned a doctorate in theology at a young age. It was said that he read exclusively Scripture for three full years and had committed much of it to memory. He taught philosophy and then took up advanced studies, in Barcelona, of Islam and Judaism. Spain had a sizeable minority of Jews, and Muslims still controlled large portions of Southern Spain in Saint Vincent’s day. So these studies were not merely theoretical. Saint Vincent converted a large number of Spanish Jews and interacted with Spanish Muslims on a regular basis.

    The ecclesial event which most marked our saint’s life was the Western Schism of 1378–1418. This painful episode saw two, and eventually three, cardinals claim to be the validly elected pope. This open wound pained the Church for two generations. Some Europeans lived their whole lives knowing only a bitterly divided papacy. The Western Schism proved so intractable a problem, and caused such scandal, that it can be argued that it was the remote spark of the Reformation which caught fire through Northern Europe about one hundred years later. Such were the complexities of the Schism that Saint Vincent found himself on opposite sides of the issue from Saint Catherine of Siena and various other deeply committed Catholics.

    Our saint spent the better part of his life as a tireless itinerant preacher traveling along the highways and the byways of Spain, France, and Italy, drawing enormous crowds, inviting and inspiring them to a deeper life in Christ. Near the end of his life, Vincent’s effective preaching played a decisive role at the Council of Constance in 1414. He convinced the Spanish King to cease supporting the very pope who Vincent had previously backed in the Schism. Vincent was man enough to see that his candidate had become an obstacle to Church unity. Vincent thus lived a hard lesson in humility when his man was abandoned, excommunicated, and judged by history to have been an antipope. Saint Vincent fittingly died on one of his incessant missionary journeys, far from home in Northern France, at the age of sixty-nine. His reputation for holiness was such that he was canonized a saint in 1455, within the lifetime of many who had heard him preach.

    Saint Vincent Ferrer, you lived a life of fervor and dedication to the truths of the Catholic faith, imparting the education you received to others through your witness and preaching. Come to the aid of all teachers and preachers to emulate your virtues with your same zeal for the house of the Lord.
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    5 Min.
  • Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord

    Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
    Mar 30 2024
    Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord c. 33 A.D. The first Sunday after the first full moon that falls on, or after, March 21 Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White or GoldCheckmate!If you want to discover what’s really going on in a story, follow the women. Curious about how the plot of a book, movie, or show is going to resolve itself? Follow the female characters, because the men...and the rest of the story...will soon catch up with them. It is a female disciple, Mary Magdalen, who takes our hand and walks us quickly onto the stage of Easter Sunday. Mary doesn’t go to the tomb on Saturday, because no work can be done on the Sabbath. So early Sunday, while it is still dark, Mary walks alone to the burial garden and sees something, or, more precisely, doesn’t see something, that changes world history. The dead body of Jesus is not on the slab! The stone is rolled away! The tomb is empty! Mary Magdalen is witness one, the first of billions to know that Jesus rose from the dead. Witness one then quickly runs to tell the good news to witness two and three, the Apostles Peter and John. Thus the first links in the endless chain of believers were forged, a strong, enduring chain that has wended its way through history until today.Relegating Jesus’ miracles to the bin of apocryphal but consoling stories, many moderns argue Christ’s most enduring legacy is the verifiable good He did for His fellow men. Yet the Gospels don’t tell us that Jesus went around doing good. They tell us He went around doing miracles. Jesus doesn’t help an old woman carry a load up a hill. He doesn’t dig His hand deep into His pocket and spare some change. Jesus doesn’t offer words of comfort to the sick; He heals the sick. Jesus doesn’t jump into the sea to save the drowning Peter; He walks on the water. Jesus didn’t volunteer in a soup kitchen; He miraculously multiplied bread and fish and distributed food to the masses. And Jesus didn’t save people from the danger of death; He raised them from the dead. Jesus temporarily resuscitated three people, all of whom later died, before He resurrected Himself forever. There was nothing dreamy about the Resurrection. Real people with real names in a real place saw the Resurrected Jesus with real eyes. Easter celebrates the miracle of all miracles, the greatest unexpected result of all time, the indispensable genesis event of Western Civilization.So today we raise a toast to a fresh spring morning two thousand years ago. In a garden moist with dew, with small birds chirping and flowers’ bending toward the dawning sun, in a small, darkened hollow cut into the rock, a dead man, icy cold to the touch, zapped to life. He achingly rose from His stone slab and walked slowly toward the low entrance. He rolled away a heavy stone and stepped out into a new world where death was no longer the master. The ageless, see-saw battle between life and death was resolved in favor of the more powerful. Checkmate! The mind wanders at the beauty of it all.The story is told of the conception of twins. In their first weeks of life they stretch and groan and grow. They are happy to be alive, to be together. They squirm and jostle and explore their cramped watery world. They are curious. They see a life cord tethering them to someone greater and are overjoyed. “How great is our mother’s love that she shares her life with us.” Weeks turn into months in their warm amniotic bath. The twins shift and change. “What does this mean?” Twin One asks. “It means that our life in the womb is ending,” Twin Two responds. “But I don’t want to leave the womb! I am happy here. I want to stay here forever, close to our mother!” “But we have no choice,” Twin Two responds again. “Besides, maybe...just maybe, there is life after birth.” Twin One: “But how can that be? The sac will break, the cord will be severed, and we’ll be cut off from our source of life. And besides, there’s evidence that others were here before us, and none has ever come back to tell us that there is life after birth. No, this is the end.” Twin Two begins to despair, “If life in the womb ends in death, what’s its purpose? It’s meaningless! Maybe...maybe we don’t even have a mother...maybe we just made her up.” Twin One: “But we must have a mother. How else did we get here? How else do we stay alive?”And so the last days in the womb were filled with questioning and deep fear about the future. The moment of birth came at an hour they did not expect. The twins were emotional, wondering about the unknown, uncertain if they would ever see each other, or their mother, again. The transition was painful. They struggled. They heard screams. All that they knew disappeared. And then… light! Shocking bright whiteness. Their eyelids slowly peeled from their skin, and they gazed in confused wonder at a new world around them. Their life-source, their great mother, wept when they were placed in her ...
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    7 Min.
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