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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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  • January 21: Saint Agnes, Virgin & Martyr

    January 21: Saint Agnes, Virgin & Martyr
    Jan 21 2025
    January 21: Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
    c. 291–c. 304
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red or White
    Patron Saint of young girls, rape victims, and chastity

    A child knows that God is a person who deserves to be loved

    The names of only the earliest saints and martyrs are embedded in the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I. Saint Agnes is among those listed (Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, etc.). Devotion to Agnes as both Virgin and Martyr is of ancient origin and is specifically mentioned by fourth-century writers, including Pope Damasus. A basilica was built as early as the reign of Constantine over the catacombs where Saint Agnes’ relics were deposited. A later structure, with an ancient mosaic showing Saint Agnes, is still an active church on that exact same site today. The mobs of tourists and pilgrims who crowd the eternal city, and who shuffle through Piazza Navona today, may not realize that they are walking by the very site where Agnes was martyred. The beautiful Baroque Church of Saint Agnes on Piazza Navona reminds the discerning pilgrim that our saint met her death at that exact spot.

    Agnes was of a tender age when she was killed. She was just a girl. Tradition says that she was beautiful and wanted to dedicate her virginity to the Lord, despite numerous suitors desirous of her beauty. She was killed, then, both for her faith and for her steadfastness in refusing to violate her vow of chastity. It was a double martyrdom, made all the sweeter because of her youth. With poetic license and rhetorical power, Saint Ambrose imagines Saint Agnes’ final moments: “You could see fear in the eyes of the executioner, as if he were the one condemned; his right hand trembled; his face grew pale as he saw the girl’s peril; while she had no fear for herself. One victim but a twin martyrdom to modesty and to religion. Agnes preserved her virginity and gained a martyr’s crown.”

    When making solemn vows at his ordination, a man marries the Church so that he can make her fruitful. But a woman’s religious vows make her a spouse of Christ Himself. A man marries the Church; a woman marries Christ. This beautiful bridal imagery speaks the human language of love and commitment. God is a person, not just a prime mover or a higher power. So He loves us like a person, and we love Him back like a person. Part of this love is jealousy. God is a jealous spouse. He wants total commitment from those who have dedicated their lives to Him. He demands total fidelity. In extreme cases, even to the point of death. Little Saint Agnes understood all of this with girlish simplicity united to a will of iron. Innocence alongside maturity. Chastity alongside toughness. Beauty holding hands with death.

    Saint Agnes, help all young people commit themselves to Christ when young, giving Him the most fruitful years of their lives. Inspire them to say “Yes” to God and not just “No” to the world. Help all to see that although life is a gift, there are greater things than life, such as God in His glory.
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    4 Min.
  • January 20: Saint Sebastian, Martyr

    January 20: Saint Sebastian, Martyr
    Jan 20 2025
    January 20: Saint Sebastian, Martyr
    Late Third Century
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of athletes, soldiers, and victims of the plague

    A Roman soldier makes a rugged convert and stoic martyr

    The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary are the most universally depicted scenes in Christian art. There is perhaps not a Catholic church the world over which does not house one or the other image, and often both. But today’s saint, Sebastian, follows close behind in terms of popularity and ubiquity. The iconic presentation of the wounded Sebastian shows his hands and arms bound to a post, his head tilted, and his almost naked body filled with arrows.

    It is a powerfully evocative image. It suggests that the archers took their time. They were not rushed. They did not act in the heat of anger. Criminal psychologists have observed that killers only cover the faces of victims who they know. Otherwise, killers don’t mind watching their victims suffer and die. It seems that with Sebastian there was no hooded executioner. No anonymous hangman. The men in Sebastian’s firing squad must have gazed right into his eyes before they unleashed the tension in their bows. And when their arrows buried themselves in Sebastian’s torso, the archers must have heard his low moans. Perhaps there was an element of recrimination in all of this. Perhaps it was personal.

    Sebastian was a soldier in the higher echelons of the Roman army. After his conversion to Catholicism, he went to Rome, around the year 300, likely seeking martyrdom. We can imagine that his fellow soldiers understood his conversion as betrayal or disloyalty to the empire and that this explains the unique manner of the assassination attempt. But, in the end, the attempt was a failure. Saint Sebastian, a rugged soldier, survived the arrows, was nursed back to health by Saint Irene, and later earned the martyr’s crown after being clubbed to death.

    By the year 300 A.D., the Roman Emperors’ attempts to eradicate Christianity were too little too late. Nobles, senators, slaves, cobblers, carpenters, men, women, foreigners, and natives had all converted. They were men and women of every class and occupation. By 300 A.D., Christians comprised a significant portion of people at every level of society, up and down and around every Roman road. When high-placed soldiers such as Saint Sebastian were willing to die for Christ, it was a sign there was no going back to Rome’s pagan roots. All that was needed was a Christian Emperor to solidify the change. That would come soon enough in the person of Constantine. Sebastian’s heroic death was a harbinger of a world about to change. Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom was so widely known that he was honored through the construction of a Church on the Appian Way just outside of Rome. The church is still visited by pilgrims today, along with the Christian catacombs beneath it. His legacy carries on!

    Saint Sebastian, we ask your intercession to fortify all those who are weak in their faith. You gave heroic witness in leaving a high station to accept a near martyrdom and then returned to suffer and die once and for all. Give us the grace to face our enemies when our weak nature wants to run the other way.
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    4 Min.
  • January 20: Saint Fabian, Pope and Martyr

    January 20: Saint Fabian, Pope and Martyr
    Jan 18 2025
    January 20: Saint Fabian, Pope and Martyr
    c. 200–250
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Rome

    The popes of the third century knew how to die

    In the present-day suburbs of Rome, tour buses navigate winding, narrow, tree-lined roads to carry modern pilgrims to the Catacombs of St. Callixtus. The pilgrims descend a steep staircase until they find themselves in a vast, dark, underground space. The pilgrims slowly walk by early Christian graffiti blanketing the walls to their right and to their left. Marble scraps of early Christian tombstones have etched upon them Greek and Latin epigraphs briefly describing whom they honor. In 1850 an archaeologist working in the St. Callixtus Catacombs discovered, incredibly, just such a small chunk of marble with the following simple epitaph: “Fabian, Bishop, Martyr.” The epitaph confirmed the tradition that Fabian’s lifeless body was carried in procession to these Catacombs shortly after his death in 250 A.D. In the early 1700s, Pope Fabian’s relics were transferred to the nearby Church of Saint Sebastian, where they can be found today.

    According to Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote a detailed history of the Church about fifty years after Pope Fabian’s time, Fabian was a layman who went to Rome after the death of the previous pope. He was elected Bishop of Rome due to a miraculous sign. In other words, Fabian did not strive to his high office. He did not seek to be important. He accepted his role in the full knowledge that it could lead to big trouble for him. And that trouble eventually found him.

    A third-century letter of Saint Cyprian to the deacons and priests of Rome confirms the virtuous life and courageous death of Pope Fabian. Fabian reigned as Pope for fourteen years before being martyred in 250 A.D. The Roman Emperor Decius was his killer. Decius’ persecution was vicious but not universal. He tried to kill the body of the Church by cutting off the head, and so sought the Pope’s blood. But Decius’ ambitious project was never realized. About sixty-five years later, one of Decius’ successors, Constantine, would legalize Christianity, bringing to an end almost three hundred years of on-again, off-again persecution.

    We can only imagine what it would be like today if the Pope were to be imprisoned and killed by the Prime Minister of Italy. Imagine the outcry! A secular power actively persecuting a religious leader! Yet perhaps such events are not so unimaginable. Pope Saint John Paul II was shot, and almost killed, in 1981, probably due to dark communist forces rooted in Eastern Europe. Assassins still exist, and popes are still their targets.

    Pope Fabian’s martyrdom shows why the Church survived its early and vicious persecutions—it had leaders who knew how to die. Great deaths don’t follow shallow lives. The early popes didn’t give up or give in. They didn’t renounce the faith. They were fearless. They felt the cold, sharp metal of a knife against their neck and stood firm. A religious society with such models of courage in its highest ranks had to survive. And it did survive. We are living proof of that.

    Saint Fabian, your papal death proved to the faithful that their leaders personally accepted what they demanded of others. Slaves, prisoners, women, outcasts, and popes all died for the faith. Help us, Fabian, to be further links in the Church’s long chain of Christian witnesses.
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    5 Min.
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