St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), also known as St. Teresa of Jesus, was born in Spain to a large, devout, and prominent Catholic family. Fascinated with the lives of the saints taught to her by her pious parents, as children she and a brother tried to run away from home to seek martyrdom among the Moors. After an uncle found them and returned them home, they built hermitages for themselves in the family garden. At the age of 14 Teresa was plunged into sorrow upon the death of her mother; to find consolation she asked the Virgin Mary to be her new mother. When she began to exhibit worldly vanities, her father placed her in a convent to be educated with other ladies of her social class. Determined to avoid marriage, and motivated more by the need for security than love for God, at the age of twenty Teresa entered religious life as a Carmelite nun. For two decades she led what she describes as a mediocre prayer life, hindered by too much socialization with visitors. However, an intense prayer experience in her forties helped her to renounce worldly attachments and enter deeper into a life of prayer. She advanced rapidly and taught others to do the same, being encouraged by a vision of the place reserved for her in hell if she was unfaithful to God’s graces. She had many profound mystical experiences for which she was often slandered and ridiculed. After the reform of her own life she worked hard to reform the laxity of many Carmelite convents, and was successful even while being greatly opposed in her efforts. She was a strong and important female figure of her era, and her great progress in the spiritual life led her to write the spiritual classics Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. For these works St. Teresa of Avila was named the first female Doctor of the Church. Her feast day is October 15th.
This saint has the honor of having founded a religious order which, as the saying goes, has never had to be reformed because it was never deformed. No doubt both the founder and the members would reject such high praise, but it is an indication of the saint’s intense love of a penitential life in solitude.
Bruno was born in Cologne, Germany, became a famous teacher at Rheims, and was appointed chancellor of the archdiocese at the age of 45. He supported Pope Gregory VII in his fight against the decadence of the clergy, and took part in the removal of his own scandalous archbishop, Manasses. Bruno suffered the plundering of his house for his pains.
He had a dream of living in solitude and prayer, and persuaded a few friends to join him in a hermitage. After a while he felt the place unsuitable and through a friend, was given some land which was to become famous for his foundation “in the Chartreuse”—from which comes the word Carthusians. The climate, desert, mountainous terrain, and inaccessibility guaranteed silence, poverty, and small numbers.
Bruno and his friends built an oratory with small individual cells at a distance from each other. They met for Matins and Vespers each day and spent the rest of the time in solitude, eating together only on great feasts. Their chief work was copying manuscripts.
Hearing of Bruno’s holiness, the pope called for his assistance in Rome. When the pope had to flee Rome, Bruno pulled up stakes again, and after refusing a bishopric, spent his last years in the wilderness of Calabria.
Bruno was never formally canonized, because the Carthusians were averse to all occasions of publicity. However, Pope Clement X extended his feast to the whole Church in 1674.
Reflection
If there is always a certain uneasy questioning of the contemplative life, there is an even greater puzzlement about the extremely penitential combination of community and hermit life lived by the Carthusians. May we mirror Bruno’s quest for holiness and unity with God.
The patron saint of Italy, Francis of Assisi was a poor little man who astounded and inspired the Church by taking the gospel literally—not in a narrow fundamentalist sense, but by actually following all that Jesus said and did, joyfully, without limit, and without a sense of self-importance.
Serious illness brought the young Francis to see the emptiness of his frolicking life as leader of Assisi’s youth. Prayer—lengthy and difficult—led him to a self-emptying like that of Christ, climaxed by embracing a leper he met on the road. It symbolized his complete obedience to what he had heard in prayer: “Francis! Everything you have loved and desired in the flesh it is your duty to despise and hate, if you wish to know my will. And when you have begun this, all that now seems sweet and lovely to you will become intolerable and bitter, but all that you used to avoid will turn itself to great sweetness and exceeding joy.”
From the cross in the neglected field-chapel of San Damiano, Christ told him, “Francis, go out and build up my house, for it is nearly falling down.” Francis became the totally poor and humble workman.
He must have suspected a deeper meaning to “build up my house.” But he would have been content to be for the rest of his life the poor “nothing” man actually putting brick on brick in abandoned chapels. He gave up all his possessions, piling even his clothes before his earthly father—who was demanding restitution for Francis’ “gifts” to the poor—so that he would be totally free to say, “Our Father in heaven.” He was, for a time, considered to be a religious fanatic, begging from door to door when he could not get money for his work, evoking sadness or disgust to the hearts of his former friends, ridicule from the unthinking.
But genuineness will tell. A few people began to realize that this man was actually trying to be Christian. He really believed what Jesus said: “Announce the kingdom! Possess no gold or silver or copper in your purses, no traveling bag, no sandals, no staff” (Luke 9:1-3).
Francis’ first rule for his followers was a collection of texts from the Gospels. He had no intention of founding an order, but once it began he protected it and accepted all the legal structures needed to support it. His devotion and loyalty to the Church were absolute and highly exemplary at a time when various movements of reform tended to break the Church’s unity.
Francis was torn between a life devoted entirely to prayer and a life of active preaching of the Good News. He decided in favor of the latter, but always returned to solitude when he could. He wanted to be a missionary in Syria or in Africa, but was prevented by shipwreck and illness in both cases. He did try to convert the sultan of Egypt during the Fifth Crusade.
During the last years of his relatively short life, he died at 44, Francis was half blind and seriously ill. Two years before his death he received the stigmata, the real and painful wounds of Christ in his hands, feet and side.
On his deathbed, Francis said over and over again the last addition to his Canticle of the Sun, “Be praised, O Lord, for our Sister Death.” He sang Psalm 141, and at the end asked his superior’s permission to have his clothes removed when the last hour came in order that he could expire lying naked on the earth, in imitation of his Lord.
Reflection
Francis of Assisi was poor only that he might be Christ-like. He recognized creation as another manifestation of the beauty of God. In 1979, he was named patron of ecology. He did great penance—apologizing to “Brother Body” later in life—that he might be totally disciplined for the will of God. Francis’ poverty had a sister, Humility, by which he meant total dependence on the good God. But all this was, as it were, preliminary to the heart of his spirituality: living the gospel life, summed up in the charity of Jesus and perfectly expressed in the Eucharist.
Saint Francis of Assisi is the Patron Saint of:
Animals Archaeologists Ecology Italy Merchants Messengers Metal Workers
St. Theodore Guerin (1798–1856), also known as St. Theodora, was born in Etables, France, towards the end of the French Revolution. She was a pious child who loved prayer and who knew her vocation was to be a nun. However, she was delayed in following this path after the murder of her father when she was 15, which, in addition to the previous death of two of her siblings, sent her mother into a deep depression. St. Theodore took on the household tasks and the care of her mother and her remaining sister. Finally, when she was 25, her mother gave her consent, and Theodore left home to enter the religious life. She joined the Sisters of Providence who served God by educating children and caring for the poor, the sick, and the dying. In 1840 she was asked to lead a band of missionary sisters and establish her order in the United States of America, specifically to serve the pioneers in Indiana. Even though her health was fragile, she crossed the Atlantic and then traveled by steamboat and stagecoach until she reached the wilderness mission of St. Mary of the Woods, which consisted only of a tiny log chapel. She and her five sisters endured the extreme hardships common to life on the frontier. Less than a year after arriving she opened an academy which became the first Catholic women’s Liberal Arts college in the United States, still active today, called St. Mary of the Woods College. St. Theodore also established numerous schools, pharmacies, and orphanages throughout the state of Indiana. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II and canonized in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI. Her feast day is October 3rd.
The Archangels St. Gabriel, St. Michael, and St. Raphael share a feast day on September 29th. These are the only three angels mentioned by name in Sacred Scripture.
St. Gabriel means “Power of God.” He is the messenger or herald angel most famous for appearing to the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Annunciation (Luke 1:11-38).
St. Michael means “Who is like God?” He is the warrior angel, the famous foe of Satan, who is the champion of God’s people and guardian and protector of the Church (Rev. 12:7-9).
St. Raphael means “God has healed.” He is a companion and healing angel, most famous for curing a man’s blindness and for traveling with Tobiah in the book of Tobit (Tob. 12).
If saints have been falsely characterized as “other worldly,” the life of Wenceslaus stands as an example to the contrary: He stood for Christian values in the midst of the political intrigues which characterized 10th-century Bohemia.
Wenceslaus was born in 907 near Prague, son of the Duke of Bohemia. His saintly grandmother, Ludmilla, raised him and sought to promote him as ruler of Bohemia in place of his mother, who favored the anti-Christian factions. Ludmilla was eventually murdered, but rival Christian forces enabled Wenceslaus to assume leadership of the government.
His rule was marked by efforts toward unification within Bohemia, support of the Church, and peace-making negotiations with Germany, a policy which caused him trouble with the anti-Christian opposition. His brother Boleslav joined in the plotting, and in September of 929 invited Wenceslaus to Alt Bunglou for the celebration of the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian. On the way to Mass, Boleslav attacked his brother, and in the struggle, Wenceslaus was killed by supporters of Boleslav.
Although his death resulted primarily from political upheaval, Wenceslaus was hailed as a martyr for the faith, and his tomb became a pilgrimage shrine. He is hailed as the patron of the Bohemian people and of the former Czechoslovakia.
Reflection
“Good King Wenceslaus” was able to incarnate his Christianity in a world filled with political unrest. While we are often victims of violence of a different sort, we can easily identify with his struggle to bring harmony to society. The call to become involved in social change and in political activity is addressed to Christians; the values of the gospel are sorely needed today.
The deathbed confession of a dying servant opened Vincent de Paul’s eyes to the crying spiritual needs of the peasantry of France. This seems to have been a crucial moment in the life of the man from a small farm in Gascony, France, who had become a priest with little more ambition than to have a comfortable life.
The Countess de Gondi—whose servant he had helped—persuaded her husband to endow and support a group of able and zealous missionaries who would work among poor tenant farmers and country people in general. Vincent was too humble to accept leadership at first, but after working for some time in Paris among imprisoned galley slaves, he returned to be the leader of what is now known as the Congregation of the Mission, or the Vincentians. These priests, with vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability, were to devote themselves entirely to the people in smaller towns and villages.
Later, Vincent established confraternities of charity for the spiritual and physical relief of the poor and sick of each parish. From these, with the help of Saint Louise de Marillac, came the Daughters of Charity, “whose convent is the sickroom, whose chapel is the parish church, whose cloister is the streets of the city.” He organized the rich women of Paris to collect funds for his missionary projects, founded several hospitals, collected relief funds for the victims of war, and ransomed over 1,200 galley slaves from North Africa. He was zealous in conducting retreats for clergy at a time when there was great laxity, abuse, and ignorance among them. He was a pioneer in clerical training and was instrumental in establishing seminaries.
Most remarkably, Vincent was by temperament a very irascible person—even his friends admitted it. He said that except for the grace of God he would have been “hard and repulsive, rough and cross.” But he became a tender and affectionate man, very sensitive to the needs of others.
Pope Leo XIII made him the patron of all charitable societies. Outstanding among these, of course, is the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833 by his admirer Blessed Frédéric Ozanam.
Reflection
The Church is for all God’s children, rich and poor, peasants and scholars, the sophisticated and the simple. But obviously the greatest concern of the Church must be for those who need the most help—those made helpless by sickness, poverty, ignorance, or cruelty. Vincent de Paul is a particularly appropriate patron for all Christians today, when hunger has become starvation, and the high living of the rich stands in more and more glaring contrast to the physical and moral degradation in which many of God’s children are forced to live.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian (d. 287 A.D.) were twin brothers born in Arabia. They both became skilled physicians who practiced in Asia Minor. They took no money for their medical services, for which they were well-respected. Because of their charity they drew many to the Catholic faith. During the Christian persecution under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, Cosmas and Damian were targeted, arrested, and tortured. After being miraculously preserved from injury throughout their cruel tortures, holding firm in their faith to the end, they were finally killed by beheading. They were martyred together with their three brothers. Their remains were buried in Syria and many miracles were attributed to them. In gratitude for the healing he received through the intercession of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, Roman Emperor Justinian I (6th c.) restored a church dedicated to their honor in Constantinople, which became a place of pilgrimage. Sts. Cosmas and Damian are regarded as the patron saints of physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists. They are mentioned by name in the Roman Canon of the Mass, and share a feast day on September 26th.
St. Cleophas (1st c.) was one of Jesus’ seventy disciples, and one of the two disciples who were traveling along the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem, as recounted in Luke’s Gospel. The resurrected Jesus appeared and walked along the road with St. Cleophas and his companion, explaining the events of his Passion and how they fulfilled the Holy Scriptures. According to one tradition, Cleophas (also known as Alphaeus), was a relative of Jesus; he was the brother of St. Joseph, and therefore was Jesus’ uncle. Cleophas was the husband of St. Mary of Cleophas, and they had three sons we know by name: St. Simon, St. James the Less, and St. Jude. St. Cleophas, through his daughter Mary Salome, was also grandfather to St. James the Greater and St. John. Therefore three of his sons and two of his grandsons were among the Twelve Apostles. According to tradition, St. Cleophas was martyred by the Jewish authorities in the same home in which he received Jesus as a guest. His feast day is September 25th.
St. Gerard Sagredo (980–1046 A.D.) was born in Venice, Italy. From an early age he desired to dedicate his life to God, and as a young man became a Benedictine monk. He first served as abbot at a monastery in Venice, but left to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. While passing through Hungary he met the Hungarian king, St. Stephen, who asked him to stay in his country to evangelize and minister to his people. St. Gerard agreed, and was named Bishop of Csanád and the royal tutor of the Hungarian prince. He ministered tirelessly among the Hungarian people and helped to convert the whole country to Christianity, for which he is called the “Apostle of Hungary.” After the death of King St. Stephen there was a pagan uprising against the Christians, and St. Gerard was martyred for the faith along with two others. His death took place on a hill in Budapest which is now named after him; according to one tradition he was placed in a barrel lined with spikes, and rolled down the hill. He was declared a saint in 1083 by Pope St. Gregory VII. St. Gerard Sagredo is the patron saint of Hungary, and his feast day is September 24th.
