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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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  • August 19: Saint John Eudes, Priest

    August 19: Saint John Eudes, Priest
    Aug 17 2024
    August 19: Saint John Eudes, Priest1601–1680Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: WhitePatron Saint of the Diocese of Baie-Comeau, QuébecHis fine education led to a life of deep prayer and identity with JesusMany educated Catholics are familiar with the great Spanish saints of the 1500s: Saints Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and many more. They are saints of the counter-reformation era but not counter-reformation saints. Due to the reforms of a visionary Spanish cardinal long before Father Luther went mad, there was no reformation in Spain that needed countering. This sixteenth-century, Spanish golden age has a counterpart in seventeenth-century France. France in the 1600s produced Saints Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Margaret Mary Alacoque, Jane Frances de Chantal and today’s saint, John Eudes, among many other men and women outstanding in holiness. The reforms of the Council of Trent were slow to be implemented in France, but their seeds eventually sprouted abundant spiritual, theological, and missionary fruit, including the founding of Québec, Canada, and Ville Marie de Montreal, a specifically Catholic settlement.John Eudes was born to pious but uneducated parents in a tiny town in Normandy just as the hot religious wars of the 1500s in France simmered to a boil. He was deeply impressed with his Jesuit teachers at a Catholic high school and began to think about religious life. As he fell under the holy sway of some of the great priests of his era, he decided to emulate their pattern of life. He was ordained a priest for a French version of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in 1625. Father John then became a tireless preacher of parish missions for many years. He preferred to preach in a town for at least six weeks in order to counter the widespread religious ignorance of the faithful. He desired of his hearers nothing less than a total change of life, a complete conversion. He used processions, works of theater, mimes, and whatever else he could think of to draw a congregation. Once in his presence, they learned the creed, the sacraments, an examination of conscience, the laws of morality, and all the fundamentals of the faith. Father Eudes preached Christ in full—a total God who demanded a total human response.Essential to Father Eudes’ spirituality was a profound identity with the emotions and humanity of Jesus. He thought that the mysteries of the Word of God are forever unfolding, that there are always hidden depths of Scripture remaining to be discovered. The meaning of the Word of God, both written and in the flesh, will never be exhausted on earth. This means that Christ’s divinity is accessed through his humanity but is never exhausted by his humanity. There is always more God to know and more God to love. This accords with Christian common sense. To assert that a passage of Scripture has been understood in its totality is to limit God’s providence and to place one’s own mind over God’s. That Scripture does not contain error is not the sole proof of its perfection. Scripture is inspired not just for being error free but for what it will communicate, one day, in heaven. God, the Lord and Giver of Life in the Holy Spirit, is the primary author of Scripture, meaning divine truths await discovery, and, more subtly, will always await discovery.As a door of entry into the mystery of Christ and His Blessed Mother, Saint John Eudes tirelessly promoted a liturgical feast in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and what he termed the “Holy” Heart of Mary. Saint John’s Sacred Heart devotion was more theological, and less anatomical, than the similar devotion advocated by his contemporary, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Christ’s heart, for Saint John, was emblematic of His interiority, His hiddenness. It was a symbol of the heart of all mankind encased in the chest of God. John’s devotion to the Sacred Heart led, inevitably, to a very high ideal of the Catholic priest as a man after the heart of Christ, a would-be saint who acts in the person of the one high priest, Jesus Christ. This “French school” of theology and spirituality was fresh thinking in the seventeenth century and put a dagger in the heart of any conception of the priest as a Church bureaucrat who merely performs rituals, for a certain price, to dispense God’s grace.John suffered grievous calumnies and attacks from many in the Church when he left the Oratory to start his own Congregation of secular priests. His promotion of a feast to the Sacred Heart also incurred enemies who misunderstand his theology. The Congregation of Jesus and Mary, commonly known as the Eudists, is still active in parish missions and in teaching in several countries, though France’s historic anti-Catholicism removed them from many of their prior apostolates. There is presently an active effort in the Holy See, spearheaded by French priests and bishops, to ...
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    7 Min.
  • August 16: Saint Stephen of Hungary

    August 16: Saint Stephen of Hungary
    Aug 16 2025
    August 16: Saint Stephen of Hungary
    c. 975–1038
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of Hungary and of kings

    Baptized by his pagan father, made King by the Pope, his heirs demolished his legacy

    Saint Stephen of Hungary was a warrior king whose silhouette stands proud on a far distant horizon as the sun rises behind him at the dawn of the medieval age. His year of birth can only be guessed, as ancient chronicles give conflicting dates. His father was of that generation of rough pagans who had to confront the new, vibrant force of Catholicism which challenged the old ways of paganism and its local gods who satisfied local needs. The Mediterranean Basin had long been Christian by the tenth century. But daring missionaries had only recently penetrated deep into the wide plains of the Magyars, the Bulgars, and that vast land of the Rus that lay beyond. That Christian dawn in Eastern Europe is when our saint first comes on the scene.

    He was born Vaik and baptized Stephen when his father, a duke, converted to Christianity. When he was about twenty-two, he succeeded his father as a Magyar leader and warlord. After consolidating his territory and power through various wars, he sent an emissary to the Pope in Rome to petition for the founding of Church structures in his land. Pope Sylvester II concurred with Stephen’s plans and took him one step further. Tradition holds that the Pope had a crown fashioned for Stephen and sent it to Hungary, where the papal ambassador crowned Stephen king in 1001.

    King Stephen took his duties as a Catholic king with utmost seriousness. He founded an enormous Benedictine monastery, numerous dioceses, and mandated one tax-supported parish with a priest for every ten towns. He built a shrine to the Virgin Mary, which became the sacred forum for the coronations, and burials, of the kings of Hungary. He aggressively punished those who practiced the outlawed pagan customs of yesteryear and prohibited marriages between pagans and Christians. Interestingly, he required that all his subjects be married, except for priests and religious.

    After sadly familiar intrigues over succession, money, and power, Stephen died on August 15, 1038. Most of his children had died as infants, and his one adult son, his presumptive heir, died in a hunting accident in 1031. Thus Stephen’s efforts to establish a Christian state were placed in jeopardy. Just as Stephen had feared, once the mighty king died, all of his accomplishments were neglected. Chaos and civil war raged for decades after his burial. The two ostensibly pagan kings who succeeded him were apathetic, or even antagonistic, toward Christianity. The fruits of Stephen’s Christian efforts rotted on the tree, and his immediate legacy dissipated.

    Eventually, order was restored to Hungary, and Stephen’s greatness was recognized. He was canonized in 1083. He is now a revered saint-founder of the Hungarian nation. The Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals don’t have a nation today. Over time, these pagan tribes
    were absorbed into the stable cultures they invaded. They melted into the many nations and identities of modern Europe. The Magyars, however, did not disappear, merge with other peoples, or melt away. They have their own nation, language, culture, art, and history. They are the people of Hungary, and they owe their enduring identity to Saint Stephen. He imposed the stability of a first-class religion on a horse-riding clan and so transformed that roaming tribe into a stable nation.

    Stephen gave his people God. And to God and His Church they were faithful. Hungary matured over the centuries like wine, until it was a refined Christian nation, a defender of Christ and the Church. Neighboring tribes resisted the gospel and dissipated into thin air with the passing of time. Saint Stephen was a model King because he knew that to found a country you have to found a Church along with it.

    Saint Stephen, you bear the name of the first martyr of the Church and showed similar courage in battling the enemies of God. May your brave and visionary leadership embolden all civil and church leaders to lay the foundations for a success which flourishes long after they have died.
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    6 Min.
  • August 15: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    August 15: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    Aug 15 2025
    August 15: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    First Century
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of France and Lebanon

    God wants Mary for Himself

    Today’s Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary body and soul into heaven commemorates, liturgically, a dogma. Catholicism celebrates her dogmas like a country celebrates its independence day or its military victories. The Church processes up and down city streets for the Body and Blood of Christ; she builds crèches and composes Christmas carols for the dogma of the Incarnation at Christmas; she names cities, such as Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, after dogmas such as today’s Feast. We strew flowers, sing songs, walk on pilgrimage, construct shrines, and kneel in prayer for our dearest truths. Tradition in the Church is not a locked chest. It is a vital force, like a rushing wind, that purifies and is purified, that is ever ancient and ever young, and that informs all that the Church teaches and does. The sacramental family of the Church celebrates her most deeply held, specifically defined beliefs, or dogmas, in beautiful ways.

    The Assumption of Mary into heaven is a logical consequence of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Because Mary was born without original sin, she did not suffer its consequences, among which is death. Because she was a kind of Ark of the New Covenant, carrying the Church in the person of Christ, God preserved her from sin and wanted her in His presence when her time on earth ceased. No saint has ever enjoyed such a privilege, because no saint ever had the relationship with Christ that Mary enjoyed. A pious tradition says that the choirs of angels in heaven whispered in awe to each other as Mary was assumed into God’s presence, “Who is this woman treated with such unique respect and honor?”

    Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the beauty and majesty of a massive landscape without a person to give it scale. How high is that waterfall? How tall that mountain peak? How far that shore? Place a person in the field of vision and suddenly the image makes more sense. God fills every scene with his majesty. He is almost too much to take in. But Mary gives God scale and perspective. She humanizes the view. Mary is always there in the foreground, showing the faithful how to approach God and render Him due honor.

    Devotion to the Virgin Mary is not just a more intense version of devotion to a saint. It is so much more than that. True devotion to Mary is on a higher plane of spirituality, something “cradle Catholics” know instinctively, even if they cannot explain it. With Mary as our mother, the Church and her doctrines are vivified. They seem to matter more. The Church is closer to us and we to her because of Mary. Marian spirituality is more than religious wisdom in the Eastern tradition. It is more than acknowledging that Jesus Christ came from a particular woman and a particular town. To be “Marian” is to know why God would want her assumed into heaven, body intact. To be “Marian” is to understand that no one asks about a baby without asking about its mother in the very same breath. Mary was not just the first Christian. She was, for years, the only Christian. She was, for years, the entire Church.

    The dogma of the Assumption, like all dogmas, is liberating. Borders make one go deeper, just like irrigation channels guide the water where it’s needed so that a harvest will come. “No” can lead to new discoveries as much as “Yes.” Good theology sometimes says “No” to bad theology. This usually leads to a deeper spirituality. We need sound mysteries of faith to contemplate, to consider, and to commemorate. Without them, we would be focused either on falsehoods or on ourselves, and we might then become the mystery of faith rather than the truth or God. Profound dogmas of faith such as the Assumption of Mary walk hand in hand with a vibrant spiritually. Mary’s Assumption into heaven opens new horizons to the mind and imagination in prayer and a holy desire to discover more in the life to come.

    Saint Mary, assumed into heaven, may your life with God, body and soul, be our goal. May we see your quiet devotion to God and the Church as an example to be followed, a target to be aimed at, and a destiny that awaits the serious Christian who emulates your subtle virtues.
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    6 Min.
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