Catholic Saints & Feasts

By: Fr. Michael Black
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  • Summary

  • "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
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Christianity Spirituality
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Episodes
  • November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr

    November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
    Nov 24 2023
    November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
    c. Late third–early fourth centuries
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of philosophers, apologists, and all who work with wheels

    An obscure Egyptian wins the double crown of virgin-martyr

    The armies of Alexander the Great swept south and east from Greece three hundred and thirty years before the infant Jesus ever gently swayed in His Mother’s arms. After Alexander conquered Egypt, he founded a new coastal city and crowned it after himself. Alexandria, Constantinople, Caesarea, Antioch, and numerous other foundations gratified the colossal egos of the mighty men who laid deep foundations and raised high walls to commemorate themselves and their patrons. How different from the Christian era and its venerable custom of naming places in honor of the Lord, Mary, and the Saints—San Francisco, Christchurch, El Salvador, Sao Paolo, Asunción, and on and on. Today’s saint—Catherine of Alexandria—appropriates Alexander’s name for Christianity, something beyond the imagining of that Greek pagan of old.

    Saint Catherine of Alexandria was a virgin-martyr from the waning years of the persecuted Church in the early fourth century. Reliable documentation about her life may still lie undiscovered in a dusty codex whose heft is sagging a shelf in a neglected monastic library. Until such authentic corroboration of her life is brought to light, however, the total absence of verifiable facts make Catherine an enigmatic figure. Precisely due to this dearth of biographical information, Catherine’s feast day was removed from the Church’s universal calendar by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1969.

    In 2000, Pope Saint John Paul II went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to properly commence the third millennium. Among the holy sites he visited was Mount Sinai, Egypt, on whose summit Moses received from God the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Orthodox Monastery on Mount Sinai is named in honor of Saint Catherine, after a legend which holds that her relics were borne there by angels upon her martyrdom. The Orthodox Abbot of the monastery sadly refused to pray with the Pope during his pastoral visit to St. Catherine’s. Among the unstated reasons for this rebuff may have been the Church’s decision to liturgically suppress Saint Catherine’s feast day in 1969. So, in 2002, Pope Saint John Paul II restored Catherine’s feast day, perhaps as a generous ecumenical gesture to the family of Orthodox Churches.

    Devotion to Saint Catherine began in the late first millennium among the Orthodox. Her cult migrated to the West with the crusading knights when they returned from the Holy Land in the twelfth century. Devotion to Saint Catherine exploded in popularity throughout the High Middle Ages until she was one of the most commonly invoked saints in all of Europe. Even a college at England’s Cambridge University was established in Catherine’s honor in 1473. It is said that Catherine was a beautiful young woman from a noble Alexandrian family who had a miraculous conversion to Christianity, compelling her to make a vow of virginity. Her erudition and persuasive gifts convinced fifty of the Emperor’s most able philosophers of the truth of Christianity. Catherine then had further successful forays in converting the Emperor’s own household and soldiers. When she rejected the Emperor’s romantic entreaties, he sentenced her to be shred to pieces on a spiked wheel. But Catherine’s bindings were miraculously loosened and she survived the ordeal, only to then suffer beheading, thus earning the double crown of both virgin and martyr.

    In the summer of 1425, a young French girl named Joan, standing in her parent’s garden, gazed into the mist closely enveloping her and saw something. It was Saint Michael the Archangel and two women wearing rich crowns. One of these women was Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Catherine spoke sweetly and softly to young Joan, saying that she would be Joan’s counsel, guide, and protector. She even promised to one day lead Joan to paradise. Years later, when Joan acquitted herself well under questioning by theologians, just as Catherine had done when questioned by philosophers, the townspeople said that Joan of Arc was none other than Saint Catherine of Alexandria come down to earth again.

    Saint Catherine of Alexandria, your intelligence and devotion led you to be outspoken for Christ. Intercede on behalf of all Christians, making them fearless in their advocacy for, and defense of, the truths of our faith, even to the point of death.
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    6 mins
  • November 24: Saint Andrew Dũng-Lac, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs

    November 24: Saint Andrew Dũng-Lac, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs
    Nov 24 2024
    November 24: Saint Andrew Dũng-Lac, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs
    1795–1839; Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saints of Vietnam

    Thousands of priests and converts are hunted down, tortured, and cruelly murdered

    The tide of persecution repeatedly swelled, receded, and swelled once more against today’s martyrs in various eras of Vietnamese history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Matters were only slightly less brutal for Catholics living in communist North Vietnam in the twentieth century, but those victims are not included in today’s commemoration. Today’s one hundred and seventeen martyrs were beatified in four different groups, from 1900 through 1951, yet they were all canonised at the same Mass by Pope Saint John Paul II in Rome in 1988. These one hundred and seventeen include a rich mix of lay people, priests, and bishops who were mostly native Vietnamese but also include several heroic French and Spanish missionaries. Today’s martyrs each have a name and a historically verifiable narrative detailing their sad fate. Many tens of thousands more Catholics were martyred in Vietnam in this same period, yet their names are known to God alone. They will form part of that cloud of witnesses whom all the saved will one day see in heaven, wearing white robes and with a martyr’s palm in their hands.

    Father Andrew Dũng-Lạc alone is named on this feast, not because his sufferings were more depraved than those of his co-martyrs, but because they were so similar. Andrew’s name is a touchstone for the entire group. Father Andrew was born to pagan parents but fell under the holy influence of a lay catechist, was baptized, became a catechist himself, entered seminary, and was ordained a diocesan priest. He was a model parish priest in every respect, and thus an ideal target once a new wave of persecution broke out. When he was first imprisoned, his parishioners raised enough money to ransom him. But about fours years later, he was arrested again, tortured, and beheaded, along with another priest, Peter Thi. The story of another of today’s martyrs, Father Théophane Vénard, made such a deep impression on the young Thérèse of Lisieux that she requested, unsuccessfully, to transfer to a Carmel convent in Vietnam.

    The persecutions of the Church in Vietnam displayed characteristics similar to anti-Catholic attacks carried out in other Asian countries. In its first wave of missionaries, Catholicism’s arrival in Asia was seen as intriguing, beautiful, and new. Its priests were educated, heroic in their zeal, and culturally sensitive. Yet as its hold on the native population grew, Asian leaders became jealous and suspicious. They saw the Church either as foreign to their ancient culture’s long-established habits of life and thinking, or as an actual arm of a colonial power seeking to slowly subjugate an entire people for commercial benefit. At this historical flex point, brutal persecutions of Catholics broke out in Japan, Vietnam, and China. Yet as the Church matured over time and large native populations of Catholics survived, different persecutions, not related to colonialism, began. In the nineteenth century, Asian leaders often claimed that priests and bishops were in conspiratorial alliances with disaffected Catholic elites who sought to overthrow the reigning authorities for reasons of religion or state.

    The persecution of the Church in Vietnam was outstanding for its ferocity and brutality. Asian cultures seem to excel at devising ever more brutal forms of inflicting physical and psychological pain on persecuted classes. Victims had their skin ripped off, were carefully sliced in pieces, were confined in cages hung in public squares like big cats, were compelled to trample on crucifixes, were separated from spouses and family, and often had the words “false religion” marked on their faces.

    Vietnam’s communist government sent not a single representative to the canonization Mass for today’s martyrs in 1988, but thousands of Vietnamese faithful attended nonetheless, mostly from Vietnamese diaspora communities. Today Vietnam has over two thousand parishes and almost three thousand priests. Its population is about eight percent Catholic. The faith survived, even thrived, due to the exemplary witness of so many staunch disciples who did not bend to the powerful gusts that blew against them. Today’s victims bowed their heads to receive only two things—the waters of Baptism and the sword.

    Martyrs of Vietnam, by your constancy and courage, help all Christians who struggle and doubt in any way to persevere in their vocations, to win the small battles over self every day, so that they can enjoy life with God and His saints one day in heaven.
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    6 mins
  • November 23: Saint Columban, Abbot

    November 23: Saint Columban, Abbot
    Nov 23 2023
    November 23: Saint Columban, Abbot
    c.543–615
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of motorcyclists and against floods

    He led the first wave of Irish monks who stormed Europe

    Throughout the sixth and seventh centuries, the great gales of Ireland filled the sails of countless boats packed with hardy Irish monks steering toward France. Once on Europe’s northern shores, these men scaled her sandy slopes and headed inland in a kind of recurring theological D-Day. A seemingly endless pilgrimage of Irish scholar-monks went into voluntary exile, left their rainy homeland, navigated the waters, and sunk their roots deep into the soil of post-Roman Europe.

    Up and down today’s France, Switzerland, the Low Countries and Germany, Irish monks founded monasteries that plowed furrows, sang chant, grew vines, copied books, hewed wood, forged chalices, raised cattle, taught children, dug wells, consecrated altars, rendered tallow into candles, and preached the sweet love of Christ. The rough local populations were drawn to these monasteries like moths to a flame, creating some of the oldest towns in Europe. Saint Columban, the leader of the first wave of these great builders of Europe, is the avatar of the missionary Irish monk. His ceaseless labors and iron will bent the arc of European history toward Christ.

    A monk named Jonas, living one generation after our saint, authored Columban’s Life based on the recollections of Columban’s own brother monks. Columban (or Columbanus) was born in Ireland about the same year that Saint Benedict died in Italy. He was a clever boy who received an excellent education in secular and theological letters. When he left home as a youth to enter a monastery, it was not to a soaring gothic structure of a later, more glorious age. The Irish monks of late antiquity had more in common with the Egyptian ascetics who vanished into the desert than with medieval Benedictines. Irish monasteries were small Christian farms, communes of low-slung buildings formed in a circle around a humble stone chapel.

    After Columban distinguished himself for his learning and his severe penances, he received his abbot’s permission to sail to the continent at about the age of forty. A legend of the era told of holy monks who set off from the Emerald Isle in a boat without oars, willing to land and serve wherever God so willed. The boat Columban and his twelve companion monks climbed into had oars and landed on the Brittany coast of France around 585.

    For the next thirty years, Columban founded monasteries, attracted countless vocations, introduced private confession to Europe, and impressed all with his self-punishing Irish asceticism. Yet Columban had conflicts with powerful French bishops over his communities’ Celtic dating of Easter, which deviated from the Roman dating, and conflicts over the strange Irish tonsure, so different from the round cutting of the scalp practiced in the rest of the Church. Further tensions with French nobility caused Columban’s arrest and forced exile to Ireland. But the boat transporting him back home met rough seas and returned to its French port. So Columban stayed in Europe and found his way to Northern Italy. His last years were active in refuting the Arianism still thriving among the Italian Goths and in founding the great monastery of Bobbio, where Columban died on November 23, 615. Columban’s disciples founded over one hundred monasteries throughout Central Europe! Columban’s strict monastic Rule was also widely used until it was eclipsed by the more balanced Rule of Saint Benedict.

    In around 600, Saint Columban wrote a letter to Pope Saint Gregory the Great professing his docile obedience: “We Irish, though dwelling at the far ends of the earth, are all disciples of Saint Peter and Saint Paul...we are bound to the Chair of Peter.” Columban, who may have been the first man to use the word “Europe” in its modern sense, was the prototype for a thousand unnamed missionaries whose austere resilience and fine minds built Europe one soul, one book, and one monastery, at a time.

    Saint Columban, you were an ascetic, a theologian, and a father of Europe. Help all who seek your intercession to be as dynamic as you in rooting the faith in the deepest and richest soil.
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    6 mins

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