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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

De: 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 Cristianismo Espiritualidad Ministerio y Evangelismo
Episodios
  • December 28: The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

    December 28: The Holy Innocents, Martyrs
    Dec 28 2024
    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.
    Más Menos
    5 m
  • 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.
    Más Menos
    6 m
  • 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.
    Más Menos
    6 m
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I enjoy the episodes… Just wish it was possible to reflect on tomorrow’s episode the evening before…

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Impressive storytelling. Humanizes the exceptional faithful people who have lived among us. These truly are models for all of us.

Enlightening

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