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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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  • July 26: Saints Joachim and Anne

    July 26: Saints Joachim and Anne
    Jul 25 2025
    July 26: Saints Joachim and Anne
    Late First Century B.C.–Early First Century A.D.
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saints of grandparents and of Canada (Anne)
    God has a family tree, just like all men

    Many parents think their child is perfect. Only two sets of parents were ever right. Saint Mary and Saint Joseph had a child through grace and raised that perfect God-son to adulthood. The parents of Saint Mary conceived their daughter in the normal human fashion but without the stain of original sin. So their daughter was superior to them from the start, yet it had nothing to do with hubris. Today’s feast celebrates those humble parents of Mary known to long tradition as Saints Joachim and Anne, though they are unnamed in Scripture. The first mention of Anne and Joachim in the Christian tradition is an apocryphal text from the second century which was judged to be fraudulent by the earliest scripture scholars. The Muslim Quran refers to Saint Anne in Arabic as Hannah, says that she conceived in her old age, expecting a male, but was given a daughter and named her Mary. We honor Saints Anne and Joachim because they reared the perfect child and were grandparents to the Son of God.

    It is natural for the Church to exalt the earthly origins of Jesus of Nazareth. It communicates something important—that everyone comes from somewhere and someone, even God. The historical Jesus plants a flag in the ground of a certain place, a certain time, and a certain family. No one is from everywhere. No one is from always. No one is a citizen of the world, really and truly. Everyone has one mom, one dad, and four grandparents.

    There is a powerful modern tendency to spiritualize Jesus of Nazareth, to assert that what matters most is that He was, not who He was or what He did. This spiritualizing sees Jesus as the highest human manifestation of an ideal, a concept, or a religious principle, but not necessarily as a real man. Such thinking readily accepts that the divine is in the grand sweep of time, in the universal vagaries expressed by karma, transcendentalism, the chi, the tao, nature, and the dreamcatcher. This approach implicitly sees material reality as a mask, and the natural environment as a curtain that must be pulled to the side to reveal the truer, hidden realities of the spirit-based world that invisibly governs the earth. There are many problems with such a worldview. Most significantly, it rejects, a priori, that God would communicate Himself to us in outward, tangible, historical forms.

    Christianity is not a pastiche of environmental concerns, emotions, moral truisms, and soft love. The Church is not a big electric blanket that covers the whole world. She doesn’t exist to make us feel cozy. God comes to us through the very outward, historical forms of a hierarchical institution, through the water, bread, wine, and oil of the sacraments, through words, events, and people. God can speak to us from the inside, from the spirit, from the quiet of the heart. Yes. But He comes to us primarily, in a manner protected from subjective misinterpretation, in outwardness, in time, and in structures. The Supreme Being not only sustains history, then, He is found at a certain point inside of history. History, for the Christian, doesn’t just recede further and further into the past. It is ever present to us because God is ever present to us.

    For the salvation of just one single man, there would be no need for a Church, for the incarnation, or for the cross. But no one exists by himself, and so no one can save himself by himself. There is never just one man. Everyone comes from two others. The body implies descent from others in a way a spirit does not. Jesus Christ gave us His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist, not a treatise of lofty ideals. He did not hand out Bibles at the Last Supper, look the Apostles in the eyes, and say “Read this in memory of me.” When He gives us His body, He gives us the DNA of Mary and Anne and Joachim. We touch God. We eat God. We digest God. God becomes part of us. His body becomes our body. And that Body, that flesh and that blood, came down through His grandparents, Saints Joachim and Anne.

    Saints Joachim and Anne, may your quiet, hidden roles in the Divine plan inspire all who do the Church’s work behind the scenes and out of view to persevere in supporting the Church's saving mission.
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    6 Min.
  • July 25: Saint James, Apostle

    July 25: Saint James, Apostle
    Jul 24 2024
    July 25: Saint James, Apostle
    First Century
    Feast; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of Spain, equestrians, and pilgrims

    Herod strikes again

    The primary legacy of the Twelve Apostles is silence. Yes, their voices are sometimes heard in the Gospels, briefly. Yes, they traveled, evangelized, and built up the Church, discreetly. And yes, they were martyred, save John, though obliquely. Who went exactly where, and did what, is guesswork. When, how, by whom, and where each Apostle died is largely conjecture. Even most of their burial places are uncertain. After the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, and especially after the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, the Apostles dispersed throughout the deserts and mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean world. They gave their backs to Jerusalem. And as they walked away, their trails were lost, sand filled their footsteps, and history’s endless cycles erased their exact tracks. With some few exceptions, most of the valuable details were forgotten. The Apostles are now twelve islands of names in a sea of silence.

    Some footprints of today’s saint, James the Greater, were preserved by Scripture. James was a member of the Twelve and of the Three; Peter, James, and John were the inner core that formed a shield of fidelity encircling Jesus Christ. James and his brother, John the Evangelist, author of the fourth Gospel, were fishermen who were called from their job on a lake to become fishers of men. It’s possible that other men were called before or after James and John, and that these unknown men laughed in Christ’s face, thought Him crazy, asked a thousand questions first, or just refused to follow a man they did not know and who offered no assurances. Those who said “No” to Christ are lost to history. Christ’s was not an open invitation. He was on a mission and kept walking. There was a moment, and then the moment passed. James and John seized their Christ-moment with both hands and never let go.

    Peter, James, and John were in the home of Jairus when his servant was raised from the dead. On Mount Tabor they gazed in awe at the illuminated face of Christ, His translucent skin radiating like the sun. And these three were at Christ’s side in the intense stillness of a Thursday evening in the Garden of Gethsemane, providing what consolation their presence could. In the Gospels, Saint James is impetuous and full of character. He was not like vanilla ice cream. Everyone likes vanilla ice cream. James’s personality seemed to be more like sandpaper or barbed wire. You felt his roughness. You got hurt if you crossed him. James wanted Christ to rain fire on the Samaritans for their obduracy. He even desired to be seated at Christ’s right hand in the Kingdom of God, which led the Lord to prophesy his fidelity unto death.

    Saint James’ shocking martyrdom was dutifully recorded by the early Church. Saint Luke’s Acts of the Apostles states that "King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword” (Acts 12:1–2). No other Apostle’s martyrdom is recorded in the New Testament. Perhaps he was singled out by Herod because of his fiery temperament. He would not have been one to retract a statement. He and his brother, after all, earned the nickname “Sons of Thunder” from Christ himself (Mk 3:17). And so it was that James probably knelt, his neck resting on a block of wood as his head extended just past it. And then the sword fell, the red blood ran, and the holy crown of martyrdom rested gloriously on a head without a body.

    Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in a letter sent to the Church of Ephesus in about 110 A.D., wrote “The more I see a bishop keeping silent, the greater should be the reverence I have for him.” A vast forest grows in total silence. The martyrdom of James was like a large tree crashing to the floor of that forest. His death shook the land. Yet the forest continued growing. And it has been growing now for two thousand years. Like a great, but silent, verdant forest, the Church’s growth continues. Thousands of miles from Jerusalem and two thousand years after his death, the silence of this Apostle, as that of all the Apostles, still echoes. Every time a baby is baptized, a Mass is said, or a priest quickly walks through the door of a hospital room to anoint a dying man, the mission of the Church which the Apostles established carries on.

    Saint James, you died a shocking and unjust death. May your courageous witness to Christ at the end of your life, and your impetuous generosity toward Him during your life, make all Catholics bold and forthright in their love of the things of God.
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    6 Min.
  • July 24: Saint Sharbel (Charbel) Makhluf, Priest and Hermit

    July 24: Saint Sharbel (Charbel) Makhluf, Priest and Hermit
    Jul 24 2025
    July 24: Saint Sharbel (Charbel) Makhluf, Priest and Hermit1828–1898Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: WhitePatron Saint of LebanonThe purest cedar of LebanonToday’s memorial was first inserted into the liturgical calendar in the United States in 2004. Prior to that, today’s saint was known primarily among the Christians of Lebanon, either in their homeland or in Lebanese diaspora communities outside of the Middle East. The dominant form of Catholicism in Lebanon is the Maronite Church. Maronites are united to the Bishop of Rome. The universal Church is like an umbrella under which are found different rites, or ritual forms of praying. The vast majority of the world’s Catholics pertain to the Latin Rite. But millions of other Catholics, fully members of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, worship using an Eastern, or Middle Eastern, liturgy. To the casual Western observer, this liturgy can seem exotic. The Maronite liturgy, rituals, church customs, and forms of prayer are, however, of ancient origin and enrich an already diverse Church with theological fruit picked from one of Christianity’s oldest orchards.Saint Sharbel, baptized as Youssef (Arabic for Joseph), was one of five children born into a poor family from a remote village in the hills of Lebanon. They were devout Maronite Catholics whose relatives included priests and monks. Youssef shepherded his family’s small flock of animals when he was young. Very early on, he displayed a tender devotion to the Virgin Mary and a natural disposition toward prayer. In his early twenties, he left the family home to enter a monastery. In due time he made his religious profession and took the name Sharbel (or Charbel) after a second-century martyr from Antioch, a city not far from Lebanon. He then studied, was ordained a priest in 1859, and returned to his monastery to live as a strictly observant monk practicing austere mortifications. In 1875 he was granted the privilege to live as a hermit in a chapel under his monastery’s supervision and care.And there he stayed—alone, isolated, mortified, poor, reflective, and silent—for the next twenty-three years in Christian “solitary confinement,” willingly separating himself from the world so he could more easily attach himself to Christ. He died of a stroke at the age of seventy while saying the Divine Liturgy. He slumped to the floor with the Holy Eucharist still in his hands! Saint Sharbel lived the model life of an Eastern hermit-monk in the ancient tradition of Saint Anthony of the Desert. Western monasticism is focused on community life and liturgy, common meals and spiritual reading, farming, schools, chant, and hospitality. The Eastern monastic tradition has less engagement with the world, and the monks have less contact with each other. Eastern monasteries are often perched on remote mountaintops. They are inaccessible, unadvertised, and imposing. Their monks are like eagles, proud and alone, dwelling in the heights. Western monasteries, on the contrary, are easily found, open their doors to every visitor, and often flower into schools and universities. Some Benedictine monasteries are even embedded within bustling campuses. The different modes of life, rules, and apostolates of Eastern and Western monasticism are stark.Although little known during his lifetime, miracles were attributed to the intercession of Saint Sharbel soon after his death. His body was exhumed and for many decades was found to be incorrupt, although it eventually decomposed. Father Sharbel was never photographed during his lifetime, and only a few monks ever saw him after he entered the monastery. But in May 1950 some Maronite monks from the U.S. visited Father Sharbel’s grave on his birthday and took a photo. When the film was developed a mysterious hooded figure with a white beard appeared among them. When shown the photo, some elderly monks from the monastery had no doubt. It was Sharbel. All images of the hermit Sharbel are based on this photo.Saint Sharbel was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1965 at a Mass at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. And in 1977 he became the first Eastern Christian to be canonized in modern times. Various Lebanese government officials attended the Canonization Mass, along with members of Saint Sharbel’s family. At the time, a proud Lebanese-American bishop described the new saint as the “Perfume of Lebanon” and as proof that the Maronite Church “is a living branch of the Catholic Church and is intimately connected with the trunk, who is Christ…” Devotion to Saint Sharbel is widespread in Eastern Christianity. In an unusual but beautiful proof of the universality of the Church, devotion to Saint Sharbel was also brought by Lebanese immigrants to Mexico, where images of the pensive, hooded, mysterious looking saint are ubiquitous, and his intercession constantly sought.Saint Sharbel, may your serene example of prayer, fasting, and mortification be ...
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    7 Min.

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