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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

By: 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 Christianity Spirituality
Episodes
  • June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot

    June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot
    Jun 13 2024
    June 19: Saint Romuald, Abbot 951–c. 1025 Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White Founder of the Camaldolese Benedictine Order To be alone with God is not to be alone It is easy today to slip down a technological hole into a cave piled high with televisions, video games, and the toys of virtual reality. Many technological “hermits” disappear from meaningful contact with society, and instead marinate, perpetually, in the blue glow of their screens. Retreating from sustained contact with everyday life has always been attractive for a very small number of people. These people are called monks. But a religious monk’s motivation is not isolation for isolation’s sake. Nor is it flight from overwhelming adult responsibilities. Today’s technological monks separate themselves from society for different reasons than a religious monk does. Religious monks were not, and are not, merely recluses with antisocial or introverted personalities. They do not become monks because they are more comfortable playing war on a digital battlefield or retreating into sci-fi universes. Although they may have an innate disposition toward the interior life, religious monks do not enter a monastery primarily to flee, or hide from, something. Instead, they run toward someone—God. A monastery is not a cave. It is an oasis. Monks seek a Christ-centered community where mortification and self-discipline are easier to practice, where a chapel and the Sacraments are always available, and where spiritual direction, Church approval, and the reinforcement of fellow monks assure the community that they are doing the will of God. Since the time of Saint Benedict in the sixth century, there had essentially been only one monastic order in the Latin Rite Church, the Benedictines. Benedictine monasteries shone like stars in a broad constellation, blinking throughout Europe from east to west and north to south. Each monastery and school was like a vertebra strengthening the intellectual and spiritual skeleton of Europe. Over the centuries, however, and inevitably, the Benedictines atrophied, cracked from dryness, and needed new wine poured into their old wineskins. The saint who reformed Benedictine life and who founded the Cistercian Order was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. But he was not born until 1090. It was today’s saint, Romuald, much less well-known, who cleared the path for Saint Bernard and for the reform of monasticism, ensuring its survival in the middle ages. Saint Romuald was born in the middle of the tenth century in Northern Italy. After his father killed a relative in a duel, Romuald entered a local monastery for a few weeks of penance. But the weeks turned into months and the months into years. He stayed. Unfortunately, the monks were as lukewarm as old bathwater, and Saint Romuald told them so. He had to leave. He put himself under the tutelage of a wise hermit, then traveled to Spain to live as a hermit on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery. He subsequently spent about thirty years walking the length and breadth of Italy. He had acquired a great reputation as an ascetic and master of prayer and so founded, or reformed, various monasteries which sought his assistance. Finally, in 1012, he settled down in Tuscany and established a reformed branch of the Benedictines. The Order was named after the man who granted Saint Romuald the beautiful land on which he first built. The donor’s name was Maldolus, and the new community was thus called the Camaldolese Order. The Order still exists in several countries and continues to attract those few men and women inclined to the radical isolation, prayer, asceticism, and deep hunger for God, which only a hermit’s life can satisfy. Saint Romuald planted the seed of his Order in the Benedictine garden. But Camaldolese monks emphasize solitude more than their monastic cousins. In a typical Benedictine monastery, every single monk places his oar in the water to pull the monastery’s school, or orchard, or farm, forward. The Camaldolese tradition is more hermit based (eremitical) while allowing some community based (cenobitical) life. Camaldolese monks generally live in individual structures but pray the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours together daily in the Church. They live simplicity, penance, and contemplation more intensely due to their total focus on these goals to the exclusion of all outside apostolates. Unlike modernity’s reclusive technological monks enraptured by their screens, the Camaldolese choose to live without phones, the internet, or television. The tabernacle is their screen, and the scene stays the same. With this intense focus on solitude and prayer, Camaldolese monks perpetuate, in their narrow, unique, and faithful way, the vision of their pioneering founder. Saint Romuald, by your intense example of prayer, penance, and solitude, assist all the faithful to put God above all things, to conquer themselves before any other mountain, and so come to know ...
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    7 mins
  • The Most Holy Trinity

    The Most Holy Trinity
    May 26 2024
    First Sunday after Pentecost: The Most Holy Trinity
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

    God is more like a family than a monk

    We pray in the “name” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in their “names.” God must logically be only one. To hold that there is a vast government of gods is to hold that two mountains are the tallest in the world, that three oceans are the deepest, and that on four days the sun shone the brightest. Another way to say “God” is to say “the best.” God is the best. And there can only be one “best,” “tallest,” “deepest,” and “brightest.” God is the ultimate superlative adjective whose nature admits of no competing god. Christian monotheism stops us from approaching different gods for different things. We believe in one God with one will, one mind, and one plan for mankind.

    The Holy Trinity, the God of Christianity, is complex. Clear language must be used and clear thinking deployed to grasp the Christian God. There are no backyard garden statues of the Holy Trinity like there are of Saint Francis of Assisi, because the Trinity is cerebral in a way that Saint Francis is not. On this solemnity, we celebrate the dogma of all dogmas because dogma matters. We sing songs to dogma, put flowers on the altar to dogma, and wear our best clothes for dogma. The Church’s thinking about God is not child’s play. Once we accept thoughts, they own us. At some point we no longer choose our thoughts, they choose us. So we must get God right so that we get everything else right—marriage, family, work, love, war, money, philosophy, humor, religion, fun, sports, etc. Bad people can be forgiven, but bad ideas less so. And bad ideas about God are dangerous. They caused skyscrapers to crumble to the ground.

    The Church believes that God is one in His nature and three in His persons. This means that if you were in a pitch-black room and sensed a presence nearby, your first question would be “What is that?” “Is it the dog or the cat, my spouse, or the wind?” If it were God in the darkness, He would answer the question of “what” by saying “I am God.” Satisfied that the presence was a person and not an animal or the wind, the next question would be “Who are you?” And to that question, God would reply in three successive voices: “I am the Father. I am the Son. I am the Holy Spirit.” A nature is the source of operations, but a person does them. A statue has eyes but it is not its nature to see. It is not man’s nature to lay eggs or to breathe under water, but it is the nature of a bird or of a fish to do so. Our nature sets the parameters for what actions are possible for us. The daughter of a lion is a lioness and does what lions do. The son of a man is a man and does what men do. And the Son of God is God and knows, loves, and acts as God does, perfectly.

    Our Trinitarian supernova is both a unity and a plurality, both one and many at the same time. This means that God does not exist alone but in a community of love. God is not narcissistic, admiring his own beauty and perfection. Instead, the love of the Father is directed toward the Son for all eternity. And the love of the Holy Spirit animates, and passes between, the Father and the Son. The Trinity’s three persons do not share portions of the divine nature, they each possess it totally. This theology means, by extension, that because man is made in the image and likeness of God, every person is created in order to model the Trinity by living with, and for, another, just as God does in His inner life. Because God is a Trinity of persons, His perfection is more fully embodied by an earthly community, such as a family, rather than by a lone monk.

    The Trinity is not just scaffolding which obscures the true face of God. Nor are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit three masks which conceal the one face of God. The one God exists as a Trinity. The Church’s belief in God and the Church’s belief in the Trinity stand and fall together. The Trinity is not just the summit of our faith, something we work toward understanding, but also our faith’s foundation. The truth of the Holy Trinity is learned early and often. Our God, distinct in His persons, one in His essence, and equal in His majesty, is solemnly invoked as the water spills on our heads at Baptism and as the oil is traced on our palms at our anointing. God, in all of His complexity and in all of His simplicity, is with us always in this world and, hopefully, in the world to come.

    Most Holy Trinity, we look to Your three persons as a model of true love, knowledge, and community life. Help all marriages and families strive for the high ideal of perfection You set before the world, no matter the discouragement resulting from our sins and imperfections.
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    7 mins
  • June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua

    June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua
    Jun 12 2025
    June 13: Saint Anthony of Padua
    1195–1231
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of lost articles

    He mastered the Word of God

    Saint Anthony of Padua is a famous Franciscan saint especially honored at an impressive shrine in Padua, in Northern Italy. But he was not born as Anthony, was an Augustinian priest before he became a Franciscan, and was from Lisbon, Portugal, not Italy. Saint Anthony, along with Saint Bonaventure, another early Franciscan, lent theological heft to the somewhat esoteric movement founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis was uniquely sensitive and eccentric, unsuited to leadership, and vexed by the need to exercise authority. It was Saints Anthony and Bonaventure who gave the Franciscan Order credibility, who anchored it in sound theology, and who assured its survival and continued growth.

    Today’s saint was baptized Fernando and grew up in a privileged environment in Lisbon. He received a superior education and entered the Augustinian Order as an adolescent. While living in the city of Coimbra, he met some Franciscan brothers who had established a poor hermitage outside of the city named in honor of Saint Anthony of the Desert. Young Father Fernando was very attracted to their simple way of life. From these friars, he also heard about the martyrdom of five Franciscan brothers at the hands of Muslims in North Africa. These martyrs’ bodies were ransomed and returned for burial in Fr. Fernando’s own abbey in Coimbra. Their deaths and burials were a life-changing moment for him. The Augustinian Fr. Fernando asked, and received, permission to leave and join the Franciscans. At that point he adopted a new religious name, Anthony, from the patron saint of the hermitage where he had first come to know the Franciscan Order.

    The newly christened Father Anthony then set out to emulate his martyr heroes. He sailed for North Africa to die for the faith or to ransom himself for Christians held captive by Muslims. But it was not to be. Anthony became gravely ill, and, on the return voyage, his ship was providentially blown off course to Sicily. From there he made his way to Central Italy, where his education, mastery of Scripture, compelling preaching skills, and holiness brought him deserving renown. Paradoxically, it was because Anthony received excellent training as an Augustinian that he became a great Franciscan. Saint Francis himself soon came to know Father Anthony, a man whose learning legitimized the under-educated Franciscans. Saint Francis had been skeptical of scholarship, even prohibiting his illiterate followers from learning how to read. Francis feared they would become too prideful and then abandon their radical simplicity and poverty.  Saint Francis only reluctantly, several years after founding his Order, allowed some of his brothers to be ordained priests. He had originally relied exclusively on diocesan priests to minister to his non-ordained brothers, and he distrusted his followers who aspired to the honor of the Priesthood. The presence of Anthony, and later Bonaventure, changed all that.

    In time, Father Anthony became a famous preacher and teacher to Franciscan communities in Northern Italy and Southern France. His knowledge of Scripture was so formidable that Pope Gregory IX titled him the “Ark of the Testament.” In Anthony’s Shrine in Padua, a reliquary holding his tongue and larynx recall his fame as a preacher. These organs had not disintegrated even long after the rest of his body had returned to dust. Saint Anthony is most often shown either holding the Child Jesus in his arms or holding a book, a lily, or all three. His intercession is invoked throughout the world for the recovery of lost items and for assistance in finding a spouse.

    Anthony died at the age of just thirty-five in 1231, about five years after Saint Francis had died. He was canonized less than one year later. In 1946 Saint Anthony was declared a Doctor of the Church due to the richness of his sermons and writings. He was conscious as he succumbed to death. In his last moments, the brothers surrounding his bed asked him if he saw anything. Saint Anthony said simply, “I see the Lord.”

    Saint Anthony of Padua, we seek your powerful intercession to have the right words on our lips to inspire the faithful and to correct and guide the ignorant. Through your example, may our words also be buttressed by our powerful witness to Christ. 
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    6 mins
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