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  • January 2: Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors

    January 2: Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors
    Jan 1 2024
    January 2: Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors
    St. Basil: 329–379; St. Gregory: c. 329–390
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

    Patron Saints of Russia, monks, hospital administrators, and poets

    Obvious truths are hard to explain, but smart theologians can explain them
    The persecution of the Church in the first few centuries, sometimes aggressive, more typically passive, starved her skinny biblical frame of nourishment. When the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 A.D., the Church’s bones finally stretched, grew, and added muscle on muscle. Churches opened. Bishops preached. Schools taught. Theologians wrote. And, most significantly, Councils met. Three hundred years after Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, these large gatherings of bishops and theologians sought to end theological confusion, to settle thorny questions, and to establish a standard Christian doctrine. In the vast halls and churches of these councils, the great cast of theologians of the fourth century put their prodigious talents on full display. We commemorate two of the greatest of these bishops and theologians in today’s memorial.

    Saints Basil and Gregory lived so long ago, were so prolific, and played such crucial roles in so many areas of Church life, that they could each be remembered for any number of contributions to liturgy, theology, ecclesiology, Church history, monasticism, and even popular customs, especially in the Orthodox East. Yet perhaps their greatest contributions were as theologians who defined, fundamentally and decisively, what the word Trinity actually means; how Jesus is both fully God and fully man; and how the Holy Spirit is related to God the Father. Such definitions and distinctions may seem technical, abstract, or remote. But it is always the most obvious things—the most necessary things—that are the most difficult to explain. Why do things fall down instead of up? Why does the sun rise in the east instead of the west? Why are there seven days in a week instead of nine?

    The most fundamental doctrines of our faith, understood now as perennial, were not always perennial. They originated in the minds of certain people at certain times in certain places. To today’s saints we owe the decisive words that the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and the Son. These words fall simply and familiarly from our lips. But the word “proceeds” was the fruit of intense thought and prayer. The Father generated the Son, but the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from them both. Interesting. Dozens of millions of Catholics say reflexively every Sunday that the second Person of the Trinity is “consubstantial” with the Father. Not equal in origin. Not equal in role. But “consubstantial,” or equal in nature. Thank you, Saints Basil and Gregory! Thank you, great Bishops and Doctors of the early Church! Thank you for pulling aside the veil of mystery for a peek into the Godhead.

    Without the teachings of the fourth century on the Trinity and Christ, there would be no Christmas trees. Think about that. Why celebrate the Christ child if He were not God? But He is God. So carols are composed, mangers are set up, lights are hung, and gifts are exchanged. Culture happens, culture flourishes, when theology makes sense. Thank you, Saints Basil and Gregory, for… everything!

    O noble Bishops and Doctors Basil and Gregory, we ask for your continued intercession to enlighten our minds and to remove the dark shadows that cause confusion. Assist us to recognize that good theology understands God as He understands Himself. When you gave us good teaching, you gave us God. We seek nothing more.
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    5 Min.
  • January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God

    January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
    Dec 31 2024
    January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
    Solemnity; Holy Day of Obligation (in USA: unless a Saturday or Monday)
    Eighth Day of the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White

    No one knew Jesus like Mary

    No one falls in love with a nature. We fall in love with a person. A woman loves a man, not mankind. And a mother pinches the pudgy little cheeks of a newborn baby, not the cheeks of a newborn nature. Saint Mary gave birth to a little person, a baby, unlike any other. In that little person, a human nature united with a divine nature at the moment of conception. So Mary was the mother of the person Jesus, and the person Jesus had two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine. Saint Mary was, then, the mother of Jesus’ human nature and of His divine nature. She was both the mother of a man and the mother of God.

    Two false extremes must be identified and rejected here. Jesus was not really and truly only a God who just faked being a man. Nor was He really a man who just pretended to be a God. The Son of God did not wear a fleshy human mask to conceal the radiance of His real divine face. And Jesus the man did not wear His divinity like a cloak that He could remove from His shoulders when He walked in the door. Jesus was fully God and fully man in a mystery of faith we call the hypostatic union. And because a woman is a mother to a person, not just to a nature, Mary is the mother of God. This has been the constant doctrine of the Catholic Church since the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.

    Saint Mary has many titles under which we honor her. Today’s Solemnity commemorates the utterly unique, and unrepeatable, bond she shared with Jesus, a bond no other saint can claim. Jesus and Mary probably even looked very much alike, as hers was the only human DNA in His body. What a beautiful thing that our God did not float down from heaven on a golden pillow. How good that He was not forged from a fiery anvil. How right that He did not ride to earth on a thunderbolt. Jesus could not redeem what He did not assume. So it was fitting that He was born like all of us—from a mom. We honor Mary today for her vocation as mother. If she had disappeared from the pages of the Gospels after giving birth to Jesus, she still would have fulfilled her role in salvation history. She was obedient. She was generous. She allowed God to use her, body and soul, to write the first chapter of man’s true story, the story of the Church. Like all true stories, the person comes first. A life is lived, and the book comes later.

    God’s Mother gives us our mother, Holy Mother Church, who washes our souls in the saving waters of baptism, adopting us into God’s family. The Motherhood of Mary gives the world Jesus. Jesus gives us the Church. The Church then brings us into God’s family where Mary is our mother, Jesus our brother, and God our Father. This is the family of the Church. What pride to be members of so noble a family!

    O Mother of God, you birthed the one who created all. How beautiful the mystery. How exalted your vocation that precedes and makes possible the Apostles’ own vocations. At home you bounced on your knee the one who spins the world on His finger. Help us start this new year with wonder more than resolutions, with eternal gratitude more than mundane goals.
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    5 Min.
  • December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope

    December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope
    Dec 30 2024
    December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope
    c. Late Third century—335
    Optional Memorial; Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas;
    Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of the Benedictines

    A new captain pilots the ship of the Church in calmer seas

    One thousand four hundred years before Christ, approximately when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt, a pharaoh ordered his slaves to hew an enormous obelisk out of a bank of stone. It was the largest monolithic obelisk ever cut. While it was still recumbent, craftsmen carved hieroglyphs up and down its narrow sides. Then, it was hoisted upright to adorn a temple of Aten, a sub-deity of the Egyptian sun god Ra. And there the giant obelisk stood watch over the endless desert, like a lighthouse, for a thousand years. In the mid-fourth century A.D., a pharaoh of the West, the Roman Emperor Constantius II, wanted the obelisk to grace a new city. So it was dragged out of the sands of remote Egypt and placed on a specially constructed ship. It floated down the Nile, across the Mediterranean, and up the Tiber to Rome. This colossal ancient artifact, the largest of its kind in the world, stands today ramrod straight before the Basilica of St. John Lateran. And the name of today’s saint, Pope Sylvester I, is carved into its base.

    Little is known of Saint Sylvester, though there are legends. He succeeded to the Chair of St. Peter in 314. This was soon after the military triumph of Constantine and his Edict of Milan granting toleration to Christians. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. This would not occur until 380. But Constantine did give the Church breathing space. The Church could now simply be herself. And so the faithful poured out of the dark confines of their house churches and into the open-aired basilicas. There were processions, statues erected in public, a new Christian calendar, sermons preached in the open, and proud bishops to lead a grateful people. Pope Sylvester led the Church as it grew by leaps and bounds, becoming the primary institution in the Roman Empire, even replacing the imperial government itself. Sylvester must have been a capable and even-handed leader. As pagan Rome slowly transformed into Christian Rome, any number of missteps could have halted the evolutionary process. But Sylvester and his successors stood confidently at the helm, kept a steady hand on the ship’s wheel, and guided the Barque of Peter to harbor with great tact.

    Pope Sylvester did not attend the all-important Council of Nicea in 325, instead sending four legates. Constantine called the Council, kissed the palms of tortured bishops, was present at some of its sessions, and threw a large banquet at its conclusion. The Council was composed almost entirely of bishops and theologians from the East. Saints Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and Leo were still to come in the West. Real theology was done in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. Rome was in decline. Even Constantine himself fled Rome and re-established the imperial capital in Constantinople in 330. Yet…the Bishop of Rome was still the jurisdictional and symbolic head of the body of Christ. All looked to him for approbation if not enlightenment. All turned their heads and craned their necks to listen to what he said. The Bishop of Rome had no equal. It was this role that Sylvester fulfilled. He did not generate theology, but he did validate it and stiffen it with institutional force.

    The inscription at the base of the Lateran obelisk states that it marks the location where Saint Sylvester baptized Constantine. This is now known to be an error. The religiously ambiguous Constantine was baptized in Northwest Turkey just before he died in 337, two years after Sylvester had passed. Saint Sylvester was buried near the Catacombs of Saint Priscilla. His remains were transferred in the eighth century to a church in the heart of Rome named in his honor, San Silvestro in Capite, where his stone cathedra, or papal throne, can still be seen and his remains still venerated. San Silvestro in Capite was built over the rubble of a pagan temple dedicated to the unconquered sun (sol invictus). It was precisely this Roman god whom Constantine abandoned when he accepted Jesus Christ. And it was the sun god of Egypt who was originally honored by the Lateran obelisk. A cross now crowns the obelisk. Rome’s massive Corpus Christi procession begins every year at the Lateran Basilica near the obelisk. No more pharaohs. No more emperors. No more sun gods. A new leader carries God in his hands, and His blessed people follow in solemn procession.

    Saint Sylvester, give to our Holy Father a measure of your steadiness and courage in guiding a people from false to true belief, from darkness to light, and from chains to freedom. Help our Pope to sanctify, shepherd, and govern well in an often hostile atmosphere.
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    7 Min.
  • December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr

    December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr
    Dec 28 2023
    December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr
    c. 1119–1170
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: Red
    Patron Saint of the clergy

    Murder in the Cathedral!

    Four knights hustled down the nave of England’s Canterbury Cathedral, weighed down with tackle, and found the church’s strong man. Eyes narrowed. Teeth clenched. Hard words were spit back and forth. Tempers. A tussle. Then the four knights brutishly struck down Thomas Becket, his blood defiling the sanctuary. People quickly flooded the Cathedral, but no one touched the dead body, none even dared go near it. The news blew like an ill wind through all of Europe. The December spilling of an Archbishop’s blood in his own Metropolitan Cathedral, a sin joining martyrdom with sacrilege, was perhaps the most stunning deed of the High Middle Ages.

    Our saint referred to himself as “Thomas of London” and said his enemies alone styled him “Becket.” He was not of noble blood and rose in the Church primarily through the patronage of an admiring Archbishop, who dispatched Thomas to Rome several times on sensitive Church-Sate missions. Thomas was appointed Chancellor by English King Henry II, cementing their warm, personal bond. Perhaps hoping friendship had softened Thomas’ resistance to the royal will, the King proposed his friend as Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the English Church. The decision was ratified by the Pope, so Thomas, who had remained a Deacon until that point, was quickly ordained a priest and then consecrated a bishop. But his appointment to high ecclesial office poisoned Thomas’ friendship with Henry II, led to years of exile, and ultimately drove those four determined knights through the doors of Canterbury Cathedral.

    Thomas Becket was a complex man in whose soul formidable virtues swirled as one with powerful vices. He was volatile, easily provoked, and vain. He relished the magnificence of his high status and travelled with a personal retinue of two hundred servants, knights, musicians, and falconers. He fought for England on the battlefield, engaging in hand-to-hand combat while vested in chain mail. But Thomas also fasted, endured severe penances, prayed devoutly, was generous with the poor, and lived a life of purity. Being ordained a bishop helped to cool his temper, abate his pride, and refine his coarser traits.

    England’s two strongest men were destined to clash over their exclusive loyalties to Holy Church and Holy Realm. In 1164 King Henry II demanded significant concessions from England’s bishops: the abolishing of ecclesiastical courts, no appeals to Rome without the King’s approval, and no excommunication of landholders without the Crown’s consent. The King also imposed

    higher taxes on the Church and curtailed priest’s rights. Thomas was aghast at the demands of his former friend and resisted the Crown’s demands at every step. The wick was now lit, and the flame slowly burned its way toward the explosive murder in the Cathedral.

    In reaction to the King’s overreach, Thomas fled to France, met with the Pope, resigned, fretted, was reinstated, and waited. The struggle between State power and Church freedom dragged on for six years as various complex intrigues played themselves out. Thomas finally returned to England on December 1, 1170, to an admixture of hostility and joy. He would not live to the end of the month, and he knew it. In a fit of incandescent rage, King Henry II asked to be rid of Thomas, vague words taken to their most violent extreme by the four killers. When they rushed into the sanctuary, the knights shouted, “Where is Thomas the traitor?” Thomas replied, “Here I am, no traitor, but Archbishop and priest of God.” Thomas’ brains were soon washed over the floor. King Henry II did public penance, the Knights sought forgiveness from the Pope himself, and Becket was rapidly canonized. Saint Thomas Becket’s ornate tomb became a place of pilgrimage for centuries, until it was desecrated by a later King Henry, the eighth of that name, in 1538, when royal spasms once again brought violent blows down on the Church.

    Saint Thomas Becket, your last few heroic minutes on earth made you a saint. Help all bishops, priests, and deacons to emulate your manly virtues in standing strong for the Church in season and out of season, whatever the cost, their whole life long.
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    6 Min.
  • December 28: The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

    December 28: The Holy Innocents, Martyrs
    Dec 27 2025
    December 28: The Holy Innocents, Martyrs
    c. 1 A.D.
    Feast; Fourth day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saints of babies

     No one is less deserving of death than a baby

    Herod the Great was not great. He was evil. Herod the Sociopath, or Herod the Devil, would be more accurate titles. Herod murdered his own wife and preserved her corpse in honey. He had two of his own sons strangled to death. He routinely liquidated anyone suspected of disloyalty. He had a harem of five hundred women, a brood of illegitimate children, and a taste for the pages who served in his palace. The Roman Emperor Augustus, Herod’s patron, stood in awe of his bloodthirst. A contemporary historian wrote that Herod was “a man of great barbarity toward everyone.” Herod was simply the most ruthless king of his time. It was this Herod whose son beheaded John the Baptist. It was this Herod who frightened Joseph and Mary to flee into Egypt. It was this Herod whose fury would have hung each of the three wise men from a beam if they had not been warned by an angel to return home by another route. And it was this Herod whose savagery is commemorated today, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. He ordered the slaughter of numerous male babies in and around Bethlehem in the hope of eliminating just one. Weighed on Herod’s distorted moral scales, many deaths were worth one cancelled threat.

    In the Old Testament, Pharaoh ordered the drowning of all Jewish baby boys in a desire to suppress the Israelite population and a possible threat to his rule (Exodus 1:22). As they grew to manhood, both Moses and Christ surely were made aware of the hard sacrifices others had endured so that they could live and fulfill God’s plan of liberation for their people. Moses and Christ are united by the twin effort of harsh rulers to snuff out their lives like a candle. Moses also stands at Christ’s side at the Transfiguration, which evokes Moses’ own transformational encounter with God at the burning bush. In many ways, then, Christ is a new Moses, the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy that God would raise up a prophet like himself to speak all that the Lord commanded (Deuteronomy 18:15–19).

    Today’s innocents are considered the first martyrs of the Church, although it is more precise to say that they died instead of Christ rather than for Him. In both Scripture and secular history, innocents die so that the hero survives to achieve his mission. We can only imagine mothers’ faces creased with pain and fathers’ eyes filled with horror as their babies were forcibly torn from their arms, never to be returned to the soft cradle of family life. Many of these Innocents never bounced on grandma’s knee, took a wobbly first step toward their mother’s open arms, or built castles in the sand.

    There is a more bitter sadness in the unknown of every “might have been” than in any “had and lost.” In dying so that Another might live, the Holy Innocents were other Christs. The fruits of many martyrs’ sacrifices are harvested long after their deaths, and today is no exception. Perhaps the Holy Innocents are very close to the altar of God in heaven right now. Perhaps they were the first to welcome Christ to His throne at His Ascension into heaven. Perhaps these first buds of Christian martyrdom flowered into adults in heaven. It is a truism of justice that it is better for nine guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be punished. No one is more innocent than a baby. Yet these babies died in the ultimate hate crime so that their own redemption could be accomplished.

    Holy Innocents of Bethlehem, you died unnamed at the hands of a madman. May your pristine souls, washed in blood, give hope to all who suffer unjustly, that one day their sacrifice will be rewarded with triumph, if not for themselves, then for those who follow.
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    5 Min.
  • December 27: Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist

    December 27: Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist
    Dec 27 2024
    December 27: Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist
    c. Early First Century–c. 100
    Feast; Third day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of authors, loyalty, and friendship

    Outside of Christianity, few people believe God is love

    Saint Jerome, while living in Palestine in the late 300s, relates a touching anecdote still being told at that time about John the Evangelist.  When John was old and feeble, Jerome recounts, and no longer able to walk or preach, he would be carried among the faithful in church and would repeat only one thing over and over again: “My little children, love one another.” Saint Polycarp, through Saint Irenaeus, tells us that Saint John’s long life ended peacefully in Ephesus about 100 A.D. John was the only Apostle not to die a martyr.

    John’s old age in Ephesus was a long way from where his life began on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Young John was sitting in his boat mending his nets alongside his brother James when an enigmatic but straight-talking teacher who lived in nearby Capernaum (Mt 4:13) walked by. Jesus saw the brothers on the water and challenged them to follow Him and become fishers of men (Mt 4:21–22). John and his brother said “Yes.” Their immediate and generous response put them at the red hot center of a movement which would change the world. From that decisive moment onward, John was at Christ’s side in the quiet times and in the momentous times.

    Text BoxA picture containing building, window, large, woman

    Description automatically generatedPeter, James, and John were the select Three inside of the Twelve. John saw Christ transfigured on Mount Tabor and wondered at what it meant. He leaned against Jesus at the Last Supper and stood under His drooping body at the foot of the cross. John was the first to reach the empty tomb on the first Easter Sunday, though he deferred to age and authority and let Peter enter the tomb first. John sees the resurrected Jesus in the upper room and then back where it all began, at the Sea of Galilee. John perseveres despite persecution, even the religiously inspired murder of his brother. John likely accompanied the Virgin Mary to Ephesus, where both shared their memories and tender faith with the Christian community there over the decades and years.

    John’s Gospel is stylistically distinct from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He likely wrote it in his old age. Perhaps many calm years mellowed the Gospel’s tone, allowing John to draw out God’s pure love more than His fight. John’s Gospel, his letters, and his Book of Revelation soar. They offer a high theology of Christ, a supernatural, often mystical vision of Christ’s role in salvation. John is the Apostle who best conveys God’s love. It is a commonplace to say that God is love. It is also commonplace to say that any further description of God complicates His simplicity and leads to arguments, division, and violence. Yet the Christian attestation that “God is love” is like a flag snapping in the wind at the summit of a mountain of thought—complicated and nuanced theological and philosophical thought. The simplest thing we can say about God is tied to the most complex thing we can say about God. It took centuries of hard climbing to plant that flag of love at the summit. To say God is love implies a wealth of supportive truths. 

    The harshness and apparent injustice of life does not naturally lead to the conclusion that God is love, and no one said that God was love before Christians said it. For many, God was, and is, a master, a warrior, a hero, an oak, a waterfall, or a sunrise. God was a growling earthquake, a mighty storm, a tidal wave that drowned the new colony. God took vengeance for sins and flooded the earth when the people disobeyed. He was like a hunter on the prowl, his bow arched with arrow ready to fly. Reading the history of man and experiencing daily life, it is in no way clear that God is love. We have to be told this. We have to see this. We have to experience this. And the Church tells us and shows us this constantly.

    That many people the world over instinctively think that God is love is a triumph of the Church and of Saint John the Evangelist. To say this and to think this is to break one’s lance against the brick wall of daily life. But it is also to say the truth, a received truth. God loves Himself in the Holy Trinity first, and then that loves radiates outward to all of us. Without knowing that, we cannot know the rest.

    Saint John the Evangelist, you wrote of God’s love for you, Christ’s Beloved Disciple. Through your intercession in heaven, inspire all writers and evangelists to convey God’s goodness and love, so that the entire world knows that there is one person, a divine person, who cares.
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    6 Min.
  • December 26: Saint Stephen, Martyr

    December 26: Saint Stephen, Martyr
    Dec 26 2024
    December 26: Saint Stephen, Martyr
    c. Early First Century–c. 36
    Feast; Second day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of deacons, altar servers, stonemasons, and headaches

    Christ rises in indignation as the first martyr is brutalized

    The practical explanation for a historical event is normally the most convincing. Psychological analysis, guesswork, and overinterpreting frowns and whispers are best ignored. Why did the army invade on this day and not the next? Because they ran out of food. Why did the capital move from the plains to a new location in the hills? Because of flooding. And why did Christians branch out from Jerusalem and not remain attached to its temple? Because they were running for their lives.

    The stoning of today’s saint boiled over into an anti-Christian fever on the streets of Jerusalem. Christians were hunted down, imprisoned, or killed. The very day Stephen was martyred, “a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria...Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (Acts 8:1–3). So while Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19), early Christianity began to spread for a very practical reason—Stephen’s murder. His co-religionists, especially Greek-speaking former Jews like Stephen, fled to nearby lands. And thus fresh, baby-faced Christianity was lifted out of its cradle for the first time and carried out of Jerusalem.

    Stephen is described as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit”(Acts 6:5) who is one of the first seven deacons of the Church, ordained into Holy Orders by the very hands of the Apostles to assist them in their priestly ministry. Stephen was “full of grace and power” and performed “great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). But his success provoked jealousy and hatred among his former fellow Jews, who slandered and distorted his words so grievously that Stephen was arrested by the Sanhedrin. What the Jewish leaders could not accomplish by argument, they would accomplish by force. Stephen gave a long and impassioned speech to the Jewish Council explaining how his belief in Christ fulfilled God’s plans for the Jews as foretold by Abraham and Moses and as embodied in Solomon’s temple. As Stephen’s words poured out, they spilled like fuel on his enemies’ burning rage.

    Text BoxWhen Stephen called them Christ’s “betrayers and murderers,” the Jewish leaders “became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen” (Acts 7:52–54). Stephen then “gazed into heaven and saw...Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). The Lord whom the Creed describes as “seated at the right hand of the Father” seems indignant and rises from His throne at the injustice He sees unfolding below. Stephen is forcibly dragged out of Jerusalem and stoned to death, with the future Saint Paul a witness, if not a participant, to the brutal event. Stephen’s last words were to beg forgiveness of God for his attackers. Stephen’s death was not the result of a pogrom or mob violence. The Acts of the Apostles describes it as a quasi-judicial capital case presided over by Jewish authorities, perhaps in the power vacuum between Pontius Pilate leaving Palestine and the replacement governor’s arrival.

    Devotion to the protomartyr Stephen was likely immediate, and he became an icon of Christian sacrifice throughout Roman times and beyond. Saint Paul continued viciously persecuting the Church until his conversion on the road to Damascus. But after his conversion, Saint Paul paradoxically carried out the mission of the man whose death he personally witnessed. Saint Paul brings the Gospel to the Gentiles, the non-Hebrews. Saint Paul goes to the Greeks, Stephen’s own people, and to the Latin speakers of Rome. The blood of Stephen watered Paul’s seed of faith. And the plant that grew from that seed gripped the soil the world over. Stephen died so that the faith could live. In this he emulated Christ Himself.

    Saint Stephen, may your courage, conviction, and knowledge of Scripture inspire all teachers and apologists to likewise convince through their education, through their passion, and mostly through their example of noble suffering.
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    6 Min.
  • December 25: The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)

    December 25: The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)
    Dec 24 2024
    December 25: The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) c. 0 Solemnity Liturgical Color: White God robes Himself in flesh, and mission impossible begins Since the dawn of time the pages of pagan mythology filled men’s imaginations to the brim with wondrous stories. Educated men who could read and write Latin and Greek, broad-minded men trained in philosophy, believed that the forests were thick with fairies, that the god of war launched thunderbolts across the sky, that a wise man carried the moon and the stars in a box, and that ravens prophesied. Some ancients wore a leather pouch around their necks stuffed with crystals to ward off evil spirits. Others bowed to the morning sun to thank that great ball of fire for rising. And then…it all ended. A tired world retreated as man’s true story swept like fire over the earth. In 380 A.D. an imperial decree established the faith preached by the Apostle Peter to the Romans as the religion of the empire. Grass grew high in the Roman Forum. Weeds pushed through the cracked marble slabs of the ancient temples. Cows grazed where senators in white togas once offered incense to the god of this or the god of that. The priests walked away. Pagan altars crumbled. The vestal virgins found husbands. No one cared. Gorgeous marble was removed from abandoned temples and reused to clad Christian Basilicas in glory. Candles now burned before a new God-man hanging on a cross. Slowly, imperceptibly, God the Father’s hands were molding and forming and shaping a new Christian culture—our culture. Christmas is the night the future began. When we hear now that a cow jumped over the moon, that a nocturnal fairy trades coins for teeth, or that a pot of gold sits at the end of the rainbow, we chuckle and slap our knee. The river of mythology had always run parallel to the river of philosophy. But in Christ these channels merge. In the Christian land, the river of truth flows into the river of the imagination. Ancient myths did not precisely disappear but were purified and fused with the new Christian reality. Magic and meaning formed into one beautiful, sacramental, compelling, intellectually satisfying force. Yet the Christian God became a man, not a book. And He did not come just to end mythology but in order to die. God came so close to us that we killed Him. God became man, paradoxically, so that He could cease to be God and taste death. Without this sacrifice, without this being-for-death, we would be unable to interpret nature, suffering, love, death, or war. We did nothing to merit such a generous, self-emptying God. There is nothing here but grace. At Christmas, then, we commemorate not our search for God but God’s search for us. His searching and finding were His first mission. It is our duty to respond to this mission. God’s search for us does not cease as December rolls over into January. Christ’s voice never quiets and His steps never pause. Every day of every year He is walking at our side, waiting for our response: “Yes” or “No.” And with that “Yes” or “No,” our eternity hangs in the balance. A small God is an attractive God. Christmas is the day of days for this reason—it is easy to believe in God today. Christmas makes it simple to say “Yes” to God’s plan for our lives. Yet that baby, like all babies, grows up. And as He grows, He will become more demanding and more specific in His expectations of us. And our responses to Him will become nuanced and more complex. He will be a bit harder to love and much more challenging to serve. Christ will not judge us from a crib at the end of time. When His eyes sparkle like diamonds and His voice crashes like thunder at the Last Judgment, He will be the towering Christ. So while we fall in love with the Babe in the manger, we must mature with Him as the years pass.  There’s a thousand ways to begin a story: “So, there I was”; “In a land far, far away”; “Once upon a time.” The Christian story starts, “This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about…” This wondrous beginning leads to a tragic middle and a rousing end. It is the story of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. He is born of Mary but is, more deeply, from the Father. The Christ Child is the wordless Word who begins His daring mission in all humility. He beckons us closer to the crib for a moment, but many stay at His side their entire lives. We stay because we have real questions that demand real answers that can be found nowhere else except in the Church. While all other stories fade, the Christ story becomes more and more true as we mature. This story alone gives meaning to death, purpose to suffering, cause for joy, and consolation to the broken. This story alone rises above any one culture, city, language, or nation. Its plot is everyone’s drama, its heartbreak everyone’s sorrow, and its victory everyone’s prize. This is the story of Jesus Christ, and this story begins today. Christ in the manger, Your ...
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    7 Min.