Catholic Saints & Feasts

August 24: Saint Bartholomew, Apostle
First Century
Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of bookbinders, butchers, and leather workers

The Church conquered an imperfect world due to the heroic witness of the Apostles

Little is known with certainty about today’s Apostle, and perhaps Saint Bartholomew is just fine with that. If he were like Saint John the Baptist, he would want Christ to increase and himself to decrease. It is possible, although not certain, that Bartholomew is the same Apostle as Nathaniel. Bartholomew means “Son of Tolmai” and is not a name, technically, but a patronymic, like the Scandinavian “son” found in “Anderson” or “Erikson.” The Bartholomew of Matthew, Mark, and Luke may describe the man known in the Gospel of John more correctly as Nathaniel. Bartholomew is paired with Philip in some Gospel lists, which corresponds, interestingly, with Philip being an old friend of Nathaniel in John’s Gospel. But so little is known with certainty about the Apostles that these conjectures will likely never be resolved.

After his appearance in the Gospels, Bartholomew first resurfaces almost three hundred years later in the works of Eusebius, a bishop and church historian who wrote around 300 A.D. Eusebius relates a story about a Christian teacher traveling in India who is told that an Apostle, presumably Bartholomew, had preached there long before him and had brought a Hebrew Gospel with him. Equally vague traditions have Bartholomew evangelizing in Persia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The details of his death likewise dissipated in the fog of ancient history. One tradition holds that he was flayed alive, a story reflected in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, which depicts Bartholomew holding his own skin. Because of this tradition, Bartholomew is the patron saint of tanners. History holds that Bartholomew’s relics are in the church named after him on an island in Rome’s Tiber River.

The Nicene Creed states that we believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The Church, then, is an object of faith in the same way that God is an object of faith. She is not the end result of a world-wide community of believers or merely a forum for belief. She gathers. She is not gathered. The Church is the mother of Christians, not their offspring. The Church is more than a carrier of faith, more than a train whose cargo barrels through the centuries transporting the heavy freight of the Gospels and tradition to diverse cultures. The Church not only bears a message, then, She is the message.

Unfortunately, the Church’s sins and failings are, for many, the primary obstacle to belief in Christ. It is not just that the Church’s holiness is not apparent. It is that Her unity is questioned due to deep theological divisions. And Her members’ struggles for power, wealth, and prestige also obscure a more pristine Christian faith which She should project. But to think that the Church could be sublimely holy, totally unified, and pristinely sinless is to dream. The Church exists in the world, reflects the world’s dramas, and suffers from Her same sins. We do not believe in the Church because She is perfect, but because there is nothing else like Her. She is unique. She is better than any alternative. If we expect from the Church the Sacraments, we will never be disappointed.

Today’s saint lived and evangelized in the era of the dreamy early church, when the fire of Christ’s love burned hottest, when the Gospel was as fresh as baked bread, and when gusts of the Holy Spirit blew through the Apostles’ hair. And yet…Bartholomew still had his skin slowly peeled from his body by a sharp knife, or was crucified, or both. The world was wicked in the first century too, and so the Church had problems in that era as well. Just read the letters of Saint Paul. The Church was born into a rough pagan world and still exists in a rough, though different, secular world. Saint Bartholomew died at the hands of imperfect pagans for an imperfect Church. Yet the imperfect, primitive Church persevered in her infancy because of the witness and sacrifice of many saints. The imperfect, modern Church will continue to persevere in Her adulthood because of our witness and sacrifice today.

Saint Bartholomew, help all Christians to see in your example of martyrdom a heroic witness to perseverance in the face of difficulty, of fidelity in the face of doubt, and of courage in the face of timidity. May we have just a portion of what you had in such abundance.

August 23: Saint Rose of Lima, Virgin
1586–1617
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Peru, florists, and gardeners

America’s first saint, she conquered herself by direct attack

Today’s saint was born Isabel Flores de Oliva in colonial Spain, today’s Peru, to a middle-class Catholic family. She took the name “Rose” when she was confirmed by Lima’s bishop, the future Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo. “Rose” had been her nickname since infancy after a servant said that she was as beautiful as a rose. Young Rose was indeed beautiful and attracted the attention of various suitors. But she had decided from a young age to give herself to Christ alone, so she actively deterred male interest by cutting off her hair, rubbing pepper into her pure skin to blister her face, and by damaging her feminine hands with the acidic juice of limes.

Her natural affinity for the things of God was not reciprocated by her father, who blocked her desire to enter a Dominican convent as a nun. Instead, Rose became a Third Order Dominican, a lay woman dedicated to living Catholicism in accord with Dominican spiritual ideals outside of the cloister. But Rose pushed her Third Order spirituality beyond its natural limits. She lived poverty, chastity, obedience and numerous other virtues far more rigorously than most professed nuns. Bending somewhat to his daughter’s desires, Rose’s father allowed her to live apart from the family in a small hut on his property. From that hut, and from a room in the family home where she cared for the sick and the poor, Rose became famous throughout Lima.

Rose’s fame was due to her generous care for the sick and, perhaps most of all, due to her extraordinary austerities and some related miraculous events. Rose’s spiritual model was Saint Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century Italian mystic who was also a Dominican tertiary. Saint Catherine also lived at home, was from a large family like Rose, and had a high, a very high, threshold for physical pain and suffering, just like Rose. Rose did not fast merely on certain days or at certain times. She fasted from life itself. She seemingly ate only Holy Communion. What little she did consume she would often force herself to vomit up afterward. She ate no meat, slept on a bed of tile shards, and wore a crown, disguised with flowers, equipped with small spikes which pierced the thin, taut skin wrapped over her skull.

Saint Rose’s short life was, on one hand, the full, ripened fruit of sixteenth-century Spanish mysticism—pious, mortifying, Christocentric, and theologically orthodox. From a different perspective, Rose’s sustained and extreme mortifications were on the far margins of psychologically healthy. Her self-attacks would today be considered expressions of bulimia, mental instability, and self-hating to the point of illness. But Rose is not here to be interviewed on the Freudian couch, and to describe her personality, in any case, is not to judge it. Saint Rose lived a model life for her era, was clearly motivated by love of God, and expressed such control over her natural, corporeal needs that sanctifying grace as her hidden strength cannot be discounted.

Rose died in the perfume of holiness at the age of thirty-one. Her funeral was held in Lima’s Cathedral with all local dignitaries in attendance. She was beatified in 1667 and canonized in 1671. She is interred in the same church as Saint Martin de Porres in central Lima. Her pre-Vatican II feast day of August 30 is a national holiday in Peru, and her image graces that country’s highest denomination currency. She is known as a powerful miracle worker credited with numerous physical healings unto today.

Saint Rose of Lima, you were young and holy. You dedicated your body and soul to God while still a child. Through your example and through your heavenly intercession, help all Catholics, especially the young, to dedicate their lives to God from the very start.

August 22: Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

The mother of a king is a queen who receives honor in her son’s realm

Mary is both a queen and a mother, but she is more mother than queen. Mary’s Queenship and “mothership,” or motherhood, spark to life simultaneously. In the very moment Mary becomes a mother at the Annunciation, she also becomes a queen. The Archangel Gabriel tells Mary that her Son will sit on “the throne of his ancestor David” and that “He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:32–33). Since Jesus is a king, and since He is conceived in the womb of Mary, and since in Israel the mother of a king was always a queen, (the daughter not necessarily so), Mary becomes a queen. Some texts from the early centuries of the Church call Mary the “domina,” the female of “dominus,” Latin for “master” or “Lord.”

It is not royal blood, but her motherly relationship, that makes Mary a queen. And since nothing is excluded from the realm of Christ the King, Mary is the Queen of that same realm, including both heaven and earth. This realm was not earned through violent conquest or political machinations. The Kingdom of Christ the King was purchased through a blood sacrifice of the King Himself who died on the cross. Soldiers were not killed so that Christ could walk over their corpses on the battlefield in order to rule a vanquished people from a secular throne. No, of course not. Christ humbly allowed Himself to be murdered so that He could rise forty hours later and ascend into heaven to be seated, like a king, at the right hand of the Father. (Kings sit. Their audience’s stand.) Christ gives the world a new form of reigning, a reinterpretation of the words “I win!”

Mary is that heavenly queen in the mysterious vision of the Book of Revelation in which appears “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rv 12:1–3). The complex symbolism of this crowned empress encompasses Mary, Israel, and the Church Herself. Mary’s coronation, the Fifth Glorious Mystery of the rosary, has not been defined dogmatically but has been celebrated liturgically and depicted in art since early medieval times.

The most ancient depiction of Mary as queen is a mosaic from the 500s in a small church in the historic center of Rome! But the feast day of her Queenship was only placed in the Church’s calendar in 1954. Vatican II stated unequivocally that “Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen of the universe…” (Lumen Gentium, 59). After the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, the octave of Mary’s Assumption was abrogated but is still recalled in her Queenship being commemorated eight days after August 15, showing the link between the two celebrations.

Earthly kings, queens, and kingdoms, so present throughout the lived history of mankind, are, more cosmically, images or signs of the structure of authority that lies behind all creation. Mankind naturally organizes its public life to ensure peaceful co-existence with others, to promote order and tranquility, and to foster the common good in a thousand ways. This secular response of establishing a structure to manage together what cannot be managed alone is universal and always includes certain leaders to represent the organized community. All of this has a religious equivalent. A sacred canopy hangs over the world. A timeless, divine mega-structure encompasses under itself all of the smaller, temporary civic structures. The man anointed as king, the woman crowned as queen, the order they impose through a just rule in a secular polity, point to something else—an underlying, and overarching, sacred polity in which God rules His creation like a fatherly king. In this timeless theological union, the feminine presence is felt. The queen mother is there, interceding with her King-Son on behalf of His subjects. She worships with them but also receives their honor. The accolades directed at her are deflected, mirror-like, to the greater One to whom she is holy daughter, holy mother, holy spouse and holy queen, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

Mary, Queen of the Universe, in your Son’s Kingdom, the faithful struggle to be faithful and to be fruitful. We are under your regal yet maternal care. May we please both our King and Father, and you, our Queen and Mother, since all parents are deserving of their children’s honor.

August 21: Saint Pius X, Pope
1835–1914
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of First Communicants and pilgrims

Born humble and poor, he never forgot his origins while in the Chair of St. Peter

In the long span of three hundred and forty years between the death of Pope Saint Pius V in 1572 and today’s pope-saint, who died in 1914, not one pope is a canonized saint. It is a sign of the Church’s solid foundations and rock-like durability that less than holy men have normally led her, and still she has thrived. Analogous to the doctrine of ex opere operato, which holds that a sacrament’s grace is communicated by merely being performed, the headship of the universal Church is exercised well by intelligent men who care for her good, even if they are not personally holy. But that a pope be holy makes the Church even more impressive, in the same way that a priest’s holiness doesn’t make a sacrament more a sacrament but does make it more fruitful.

Pope Saint Pius X was born Giuseppe Sarto in Northern Italy to humble parents in a poor home, the second of ten children. He entered the seminary as an adolescent and was ordained a priest at the young age of twenty-three. He served for many years in parishes and seminaries before being made a bishop and then a cardinal. His life experience in the Church was almost exclusively pastoral, that is, concerned with the care of souls. He was not a university professor, Vatican diplomat, scholar, or ecclesiastical bureaucrat. He was the only pope of the twentieth century without a doctoral degree. He was a parish priest, confessor, spiritual director, and boots-on-the-ground diocesan bishop. His rural background and forthright view of the faith lent Pius a common touch which sympathized with the faith of the “everyman” who fill the pews on Sunday morning. But Pius’ past limited him somewhat as well. In his desire to protect the faithful from error like a good father protects his children, he could be overly suspicious of, and reactionary toward, a great deal of theological scholarship that would later be absorbed into the universal body of Christ at the Second Vatican Council.

Pius X made changes to the Church’s liturgical and sacramental life that proved to be enduring and popular. He lowered the age of First Holy Communion from twelve to seven and encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion instead of the once-a-year, Easter Duty reception that was then typical. Pius simplified the Breviary, the book of Psalms that priests and nuns pray every day, encouraged the use of Gregorian chant at Mass, and mandated that the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) be present in every parish in the world to teach catechism to children. He also began the enormous process of gathering and synthesizing the Church’s massive, centuries’ old body of law into an easy to handle Code of Canon Law which was promulgated in 1917.

Pius reacted strongly and negatively toward various schools of theological scholarship he lumped under the imprecise title of “Modernism.” Pius was intransigent and relentless in weeding out from the garden of the Church all those with non-scholastic methods and conclusions in philosophy and theology. That is, he distrusted research and teaching not rooted in the approach of Saint Thomas Aquinas and similar medieval thinkers. The “Modernist” approach to ancient texts, language studies, scriptural analysis, church history, comparative theology, etc. would eventually become standard in Catholicism. But it took many decades for these more critical approaches to merge with theological orthodoxy, deep spirituality, and fidelity to Rome in the powerful synthesis taught by Vatican II and beyond.

Saint Pius X stayed humble and poor his entire life. He was embarrassed by the pomp of papal ceremonies but nonetheless understood their significance to the faithful. Three of his unmarried sisters lived in near poverty on the outskirts of Rome while he reigned as pope. He could have, but did not, favor them with titles or other privileges to ease their burdens. Pius died the same month as the guns of August roared a start to World War I. His death resulted partly from a deep melancholy that Christian Europe had once again devolved into such conflict. He was canonized in 1954.

Pope Saint Pius X, your doctrinal fidelity, Eucharistic piety, and devotion to Mary were exemplary. May your simplicity of life, common touch, and bravery in fighting the enemies of the Church, inspire all who lead the Body of Christ on earth in whatever capacity.

August 20: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot and Doctor
1090–1153
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Cistercian Order, beekeepers, and candlemakers

A reformer par excellence, he saved the Benedictine Order and rejuvenated monasticism

Today’s saint was like a medieval rock star who never stopped touring Europe. He traveled with an entourage, drew enormous crowds, was wildly popular, and called the cream of society his friends. The details of Saint Bernard’s life, though he lived before even Saint Francis of Assisi, the Magna Carta, and Dante, are abundantly documented. He was nearly as prolific a writer as Saint Augustine, but primarily via letters, not thick books. And these letters outline his character in sharp profile. He was intelligent, emotion laden, erudite, forceful, and contemplative. He spoke and wrote poetically, beautifully, clearly, and deeply. Pope Pius XII called him “the last of the Fathers” of the Church.

Bernard was born in a castle to a highborn family and was sent away by his parents during his youth to receive a classical education. After the death of his mother left him in a depression, he pondered more seriously what God wanted of him. When Bernard was a child, in his native region of Southeastern France, a local monk decided to try something new. He founded a new monastery at a place called Cîteaux in the hope of living the Benedictine Rule with exactitude and rigor. At the age of twenty-two, still mourning his mother, Bernard decided to dedicate his life to God and to enter this new, experimental monastery. But Bernard being Bernard, with all the force of his mind and personality, when he knocked on the door of the abbey, he was not alone. Behind him at the door stood a long train of thirty of his brothers, cousins, and friends, all noblemen. Bernard was the leader. They were the followers. They wanted to become monks because he wanted to become a monk. When he asked, they answered, and they answered “Yes.” This natural gift to command and lead was a sign of things to come.

Cîteaux inspired and gave its name to the Cistercian movement of monastic reform. Because of Bernard’s dynamic presence, Cîteaux soon overflowed with monks, and Bernard was sent, as Abbot, to found a new monastery at Clairvaux, or Clear Valley. This was his base for the rest of his itinerant life. As the first Abbot of Clairvaux, Bernard stamped the Cistercian movement with its distinctive character: sobriety in art and architecture, solemnity in liturgy, austerity in life, industriousness in labor, strictness in observance of the Rule, and silence pervading all. Cîteaux gave birth to Clairvaux, and Clairvaux spawned a vast Cistercian family that considers Bernard its founder. By the time of Bernard’s death, there were 343 Cistercian monasteries the length and breadth of Europe.

For an austere contemplative monk, Bernard, ironically, spent much of his life on the road. His gifts were such that he was consulted by princes, kings, and popes on every imaginable issue. He participated in Church councils, mediated civil conflicts, inaugurated Crusades, and wrote long commentaries on prayer, theology, and Scripture. He had to employ secretaries, like a minister of state, who recorded the prodigious correspondence that flowed constantly from his mouth. He became famous as a miraculous healer. Crowds of people lined his route to receive his blessing or to feel his hands press against their skulls. In one incident, after wading into a large, clamoring crowd desiring his miraculous touch, he had to fight to return to his lodging as the people tore at his habit. A wit wrote that the real miracle was not his healing, but that Bernard escaped alive.

Bernard’s authentic and tender devotion to the Virgin Mary was expressed sublimely in his writings. For his Marian devotion, eloquence, and contemplative spirit, Bernard substitutes for Beatrice as Dante takes the final steps of his mythical voyage toward God in the Divine Comedy. In the blazing fire of pure love that is the Beatific Vision, Bernard is at Dante’s side as their eyes drink in the vision of a splendid, holographic, white rose emanating like a vision from the Godhead’s bright light. The Queen of this mystical white rose is the Virgin, and “faithful Bernard” gazes in silent admiration at the woman he loves so dearly. Saint Bernard was canonized in 1174 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1830.

Saint Bernard, may we see in your devotion to Mary, endless travels, strict life, and keen eye for beauty, the model of an educated and devoted monk. Intercede for all religious, and for all those with a contemplative heart who are in the world, to love God half as well as you did.

August 19: Saint John Eudes, Priest
1601–1680
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Diocese of Baie-Comeau, Québec

His fine education led to a life of deep prayer and identity with Jesus

Many educated Catholics are familiar with the great Spanish saints of the 1500s: Saints Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and many more. They are saints of the counter-reformation era but not counter-reformation saints. Due to the reforms of a visionary Spanish cardinal long before Father Luther went mad, there was no reformation in Spain that needed countering. This sixteenth-century, Spanish golden age has a counterpart in seventeenth-century France. France in the 1600s produced Saints Francis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Margaret Mary Alacoque, Jane Frances de Chantal and today’s saint, John Eudes, among many other men and women outstanding in holiness. The reforms of the Council of Trent were slow to be implemented in France, but their seeds eventually sprouted abundant spiritual, theological, and missionary fruit, including the founding of Québec, Canada, and Ville Marie de Montreal, a specifically Catholic settlement.

John Eudes was born to pious but uneducated parents in a tiny town in Normandy just as the hot religious wars of the 1500s in France simmered to a boil. He was deeply impressed with his Jesuit teachers at a Catholic high school and began to think about religious life. As he fell under the holy sway of some of the great priests of his era, he decided to emulate their pattern of life. He was ordained a priest for a French version of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in 1625.

Father John then became a tireless preacher of parish missions for many years. He preferred to preach in a town for at least six weeks in order to counter the widespread religious ignorance of the faithful. He desired of his hearers nothing less than a total change of life, a complete conversion. He used processions, works of theater, mimes, and whatever else he could think of to draw a congregation. Once in his presence, they learned the creed, the sacraments, an examination of conscience, the laws of morality, and all the fundamentals of the faith. Father Eudes preached Christ in full—a total God who demanded a total human response.

Essential to Father Eudes’ spirituality was a profound identity with the emotions and humanity of Jesus. He thought that the mysteries of the Word of God are forever unfolding, that there are always hidden depths of Scripture remaining to be discovered. The meaning of the Word of God, both written and in the flesh, will never be exhausted on earth. This means that Christ’s divinity is accessed through his humanity but is never exhausted by his humanity. There is always more God to know and more God to love. This accords with Christian common sense. To assert that a passage of Scripture has been understood in its totality is to limit God’s providence and to place one’s own mind over God’s. That Scripture does not contain error is not the sole proof of its perfection. Scripture is inspired not just for being error free but for what it will communicate, one day, in heaven. God, the Lord and Giver of Life in the Holy Spirit, is the primary author of Scripture, meaning divine truths await discovery, and, more subtly, will always await discovery.

As a door of entry into the mystery of Christ and His Blessed Mother, Saint John Eudes tirelessly promoted a liturgical feast in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and what he termed the “Holy” Heart of Mary. Saint John’s Sacred Heart devotion was more theological, and less anatomical, than the similar devotion advocated by his contemporary, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Christ’s heart, for Saint John, was emblematic of His interiority, His hiddenness. It was a symbol of the heart of all mankind encased in the chest of God. John’s devotion to the Sacred Heart led, inevitably, to a very high ideal of the Catholic priest as a man after the heart of Christ, a would-be saint who acts in the person of the one high priest, Jesus Christ. This “French school” of theology and spirituality was fresh thinking in the seventeenth century and put a dagger in the heart of any conception of the priest as a Church bureaucrat who merely performs rituals, for a certain price, to dispense God’s grace.

John suffered grievous calumnies and attacks from many in the Church when he left the Oratory to start his own Congregation of secular priests. His promotion of a feast to the Sacred Heart also incurred enemies who misunderstand his theology. The Congregation of Jesus and Mary, commonly known as the Eudists, is still active in parish missions and in teaching in several countries, though France’s historic anti-Catholicism removed them from many of their prior apostolates. There is presently an active effort in the Holy See, spearheaded by French priests and bishops, to have Saint John Eudes declared a Doctor of the Church.

Saint John Eudes, your deep identification with the person, emotions, and heart of Jesus Christ inspired all who heard and knew you. May your tireless pastoral efforts, life of prayer, preaching, and writing give powerful example to all priests, whose sacramental dignity you championed.

August 16: Saint Stephen of Hungary
c. 975–1038
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Hungary and of kings

Baptized by his pagan father, made King by the Pope, his heirs demolished his legacy

Saint Stephen of Hungary was a warrior king whose silhouette stands proud on a far distant horizon as the sun rises behind him at the dawn of the medieval age. His year of birth can only be guessed, as ancient chronicles give conflicting dates. His father was of that generation of rough pagans who had to confront the new, vibrant force of Catholicism which challenged the old ways of paganism and its local gods who satisfied local needs. The Mediterranean Basin had long been Christian by the tenth century. But daring missionaries had only recently penetrated deep into the wide plains of the Magyars, the Bulgars, and that vast land of the Rus that lay beyond. That Christian dawn in Eastern Europe is when our saint first comes on the scene.

He was born Vaik and baptized Stephen when his father, a duke, converted to Christianity. When he was about twenty-two, he succeeded his father as a Magyar leader and warlord. After consolidating his territory and power through various wars, he sent an emissary to the Pope in Rome to petition for the founding of Church structures in his land. Pope Sylvester II concurred with Stephen’s plans and took him one step further. Tradition holds that the Pope had a crown fashioned for Stephen and sent it to Hungary, where the papal ambassador crowned Stephen king in 1001.

King Stephen took his duties as a Catholic king with utmost seriousness. He founded an enormous Benedictine monastery, numerous dioceses, and mandated one tax-supported parish with a priest for every ten towns. He built a shrine to the Virgin Mary, which became the sacred forum for the coronations, and burials, of the kings of Hungary. He aggressively punished those who practiced the outlawed pagan customs of yesteryear and prohibited marriages between pagans and Christians. Interestingly, he required that all his subjects be married, except for priests and religious.

After sadly familiar intrigues over succession, money, and power, Stephen died on August 15, 1038. Most of his children had died as infants, and his one adult son, his presumptive heir, died in a hunting accident in 1031. Thus Stephen’s efforts to establish a Christian state were placed in jeopardy. Just as Stephen had feared, once the mighty king died, all of his accomplishments were neglected. Chaos and civil war raged for decades after his burial. The two ostensibly pagan kings who succeeded him were apathetic, or even antagonistic, toward Christianity. The fruits of Stephen’s Christian efforts rotted on the tree, and his immediate legacy dissipated.

Eventually, order was restored to Hungary, and Stephen’s greatness was recognized. He was canonized in 1083. He is now a revered saint-founder of the Hungarian nation. The Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals don’t have a nation today. Over time, these pagan tribes
were absorbed into the stable cultures they invaded. They melted into the many nations and identities of modern Europe. The Magyars, however, did not disappear, merge with other peoples, or melt away. They have their own nation, language, culture, art, and history. They are the people of Hungary, and they owe their enduring identity to Saint Stephen. He imposed the stability of a first-class religion on a horse-riding clan and so transformed that roaming tribe into a stable nation.

Stephen gave his people God. And to God and His Church they were faithful. Hungary matured over the centuries like wine, until it was a refined Christian nation, a defender of Christ and the Church. Neighboring tribes resisted the gospel and dissipated into thin air with the passing of time. Saint Stephen was a model King because he knew that to found a country you have to found a Church along with it.

Saint Stephen, you bear the name of the first martyr of the Church and showed similar courage in battling the enemies of God. May your brave and visionary leadership embolden all civil and church leaders to lay the foundations for a success which flourishes long after they have died.

August 15: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
First Century
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of France and Lebanon

God wants Mary for Himself

Today’s Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary body and soul into heaven commemorates, liturgically, a dogma. Catholicism celebrates her dogmas like a country celebrates its independence day or its military victories. The Church processes up and down city streets for the Body and Blood of Christ; she builds crèches and composes Christmas carols for the dogma of the Incarnation at Christmas; she names cities, such as Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, after dogmas such as today’s Feast. We strew flowers, sing songs, walk on pilgrimage, construct shrines, and kneel in prayer for our dearest truths. Tradition in the Church is not a locked chest. It is a vital force, like a rushing wind, that purifies and is purified, that is ever ancient and ever young, and that informs all that the Church teaches and does. The sacramental family of the Church celebrates her most deeply held, specifically defined beliefs, or dogmas, in beautiful ways.

The Assumption of Mary into heaven is a logical consequence of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Because Mary was born without original sin, she did not suffer its consequences, among which is death. Because she was a kind of Ark of the New Covenant, carrying the Church in the person of Christ, God preserved her from sin and wanted her in His presence when her time on earth ceased. No saint has ever enjoyed such a privilege, because no saint ever had the relationship with Christ that Mary enjoyed. A pious tradition says that the choirs of angels in heaven whispered in awe to each other as Mary was assumed into God’s presence, “Who is this woman treated with such unique respect and honor?”

Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the beauty and majesty of a massive landscape without a person to give it scale. How high is that waterfall? How tall that mountain peak? How far that shore? Place a person in the field of vision and suddenly the image makes more sense. God fills every scene with his majesty. He is almost too much to take in. But Mary gives God scale and perspective. She humanizes the view. Mary is always there in the foreground, showing the faithful how to approach God and render Him due honor.

Devotion to the Virgin Mary is not just a more intense version of devotion to a saint. It is so much more than that. True devotion to Mary is on a higher plane of spirituality, something “cradle Catholics” know instinctively, even if they cannot explain it. With Mary as our mother, the Church and her doctrines are vivified. They seem to matter more. The Church is closer to us and we to her because of Mary. Marian spirituality is more than religious wisdom in the Eastern tradition. It is more than acknowledging that Jesus Christ came from a particular woman and a particular town. To be “Marian” is to know why God would want her assumed into heaven, body intact. To be “Marian” is to understand that no one asks about a baby without asking about its mother in the very same breath. Mary was not just the first Christian. She was, for years, the only Christian. She was, for years, the entire Church.

The dogma of the Assumption, like all dogmas, is liberating. Borders make one go deeper, just like irrigation channels guide the water where it’s needed so that a harvest will come. “No” can lead to new discoveries as much as “Yes.” Good theology sometimes says “No” to bad theology. This usually leads to a deeper spirituality. We need sound mysteries of faith to contemplate, to consider, and to commemorate. Without them, we would be focused either on falsehoods or on ourselves, and we might then become the mystery of faith rather than the truth or God. Profound dogmas of faith such as the Assumption of Mary walk hand in hand with a vibrant spiritually. Mary’s Assumption into heaven opens new horizons to the mind and imagination in prayer and a holy desire to discover more in the life to come.

Saint Mary, assumed into heaven, may your life with God, body and soul, be our goal. May we see your quiet devotion to God and the Church as an example to be followed, a target to be aimed at, and a destiny that awaits the serious Christian who emulates your subtle virtues.

August 14: Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, Priest and Martyr
1894–1941
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of prisoners, drug addicts, journalists, and the pro-life movement

Prisoner 16670 was tough, immersed in God, and ready when the moment came

Saints are made, not born. Even more so martyrs. Maximilian Kolbe was so impressive a man that he may have been canonized even if that oh-so-brief, oh-so-intense, my-life-for-his exchange in the grim prison yard of Auschwitz had not led to his martyrdom. Baptized as Raimund, from a young age Kolbe felt the call to self-sacrificing holiness. When he was a boy of twelve, the Virgin Mary came to him in a vision and held out two crowns for him to choose from: one white for a life of purity, and one red for martyrdom. The pre-teen Maximilian responded to his Lady: “I choose both.”

Maximilian, along with his older brother, entered a local Franciscan seminary as a teen. When he was just eighteen, his superiors sent him to study in Rome, where he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology summa cum laude. He was ordained a priest in 1918 and the next year returned to the new, post-World War I country of Poland. For the next twenty plus years, Father Maximilian powered his way through life. He taught in a Franciscan seminary. He started an immense publishing house which printed devotional materials promoting the Army of the Immaculate. He founded a new Franciscan monastery, which rapidly grew into one of the largest in Poland. And in 1930 he became a missionary to the Far East. He went to China, had little success, and so went on to Japan, where he founded a monastery near Nagasaki. He also started a publishing house in India. In 1936 he returned to Poland due to ill health. But he didn’t stop. He continued to manage various Marian publications, which were widely circulated, and even procured a radio license and began broadcasting from his own monastery radio station. As he immersed himself in the thousands of details of these varied apostolates, Father Kolbe maintained a disciplined life of prayer, mortification, and daily Mass.

After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Kolbe’s apostolates were curtailed. He organized a hospital at the monastery and, along with the reduced community of brothers, gave shelter to refugees, including about 2,000 Jews. He was arrested by the Germans in 1939 and held for almost three months. He was pressured, but refused, to sign a document recognizing his German ancestry (Kolbe’s father was an ethnic German) in exchange for more food rations and better treatment. In February 1941, German SS men came and shuttered his monastery. Kolbe and four other friars were arrested, though twenty other brothers offered themselves in their stead. In May 1941, Kolbe was transferred to the heavy labor division of Auschwitz for the last act of his life.

He carried out his priestly ministry as best he could in the hell of Auschwitz and endured severe beatings for it. In July, just two months after he arrived, a prisoner escaped from the camp. As both deterrent and reprisal, the head of the camp ordered ten men to be starved to death in the escapee’s place. The victims were chosen at random from a prisoner roll call. One of the unfortunate chosen, a married man named Francis, begged for mercy: "My wife! My children!" What followed this desperate pleading was profound, left an indelible impression on all who witnessed it, and is packed with an almost liturgical character.

Perhaps remembering his childhood vision of the Virgin, and perhaps inspired that the chosen man shared the name Francis with the founder of his religious order, Kolbe removes his cap and slowly emerges from the bedraggled group of prisoners. A filthy, striped rag of a uniform is draped over his skeletal frame. He is barefoot. But he has dignity. There are no frivolous men in Auschwitz. He speaks directly to the commanding officer in German: “I want to take his place.” Kolbe’s bearing must command respect, because, according to an eye-witness, the officer responds to him using the formal “You.” “Warum wollen Sie für ihn sterben?”—“Why do you Sir want to die for him?” “Because he has a wife and children.” “What is your profession?” “I am a Catholic priest.” A few moments of silence and then “Gut.” “Good” or “Right.”

After two weeks of no food or water in a bunker, a guard injected carbolic acid into the arm of the indestructible Kolbe on August 14. His body was cremated the next day. His ashes floated from the smokestack over the gray wasteland of Auschwitz on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. He, a priest, became what he offered. Like Saint Polycarp of old, burned like bread at the stake, Kolbe’s life ended in a liturgical doxology where his own body became the bread of sacrifice.

First-class relics of Saint Maximilian exist only because his Franciscan barbers thought he was a saint. They saved hairs from his head and beard without his knowledge. The man whose life he saved, Francis Gajowniczek, lived for another fifty-three years, to the age of 93, dying in 1995. He was present in Rome when Pope Saint John Paul II, who lived just an hour from Auschwitz in 1941, canonized his fellow Pole Saint Maximilian Kolbe in 1982.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, you were prepared to be generous in your last moments by a long life of sacrifice, humility, and devotion. May we so prepare ourselves day in and day out, so that when a moment of heroic generosity presents itself, we will respond like you.

August 13: Saints Pontian, Pope; & Hippolytus, Priest: Martyrs
Late Second Century–c. 235
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Montaldo Scarampi, Italy (Pontian) and prison guards (Hippolytus)

An exiled Pope dies along with a learned priest

Today’s martyrs died on the island of Sardinia, perhaps from overwork in the mines or perhaps from starvation or neglect rather than execution. In a pacific interlude following the persecution which was their doom, a later pope, Fabian, returned their bodies to Rome for dignified burial. Pontian was interred in the papal crypt in the Catacombs of Callixtus near so many of his fellow popes of the 200s. In 1909 the original marble epitaph on Pontian’s tomb was found among the shards littering the floor of the catacombs. It reads ΠONTIANOC ƐΠIC MPT (Pontian, Bishop, Martyr), although the abbreviation for “martyr” was engraved by a different hand. Tombstones are very economical. Hippolytus was buried in a Roman catacomb, subsequently named in his honor, which became a pilgrimage site. The links among today’s martyrs are their common date of burial, August 13, and their place of death. Hippolytus is by far the more significant figure.

Pope Saint Pontian was consecrated Bishop of Rome in 230. He is chiefly known for convening a Roman Synod which confirmed a prior condemnation of the Egyptian theologian Origen. Like so many other bishops of his era, Pontian also dealt with divergent positions over how the Church should re-integrate Christians who had abjured their faith during a persecution. Should they be re-baptized, do public penance, or be welcomed back privately? Tensions over this issue perdured for many decades and deeply wounded Church unity. During a persecution, Pontian was exiled, but first graciously resigned in 235 so that a successor pope could be elected. For this magnanimous act, he was remembered as “distinguished” in contemporary documents.

Saint Hippolytus is an elusive figure. He was most likely from Rome. Some traditions, however, state he was from Lyon and was a disciple of Saint Irenaeus. Incredibly for a saint, Hippolytus is also traditionally labeled an anti-pope for resisting Pope Callixtus’ lenient attitude in reintegrating into Church life the lapsi who had rendered homage to false gods. Hippolytus was later reconciled to the Church which he loved enough to disrupt. Besides being a controversialist, Hippolytus was the most impactful theologian in Rome before the legalization of Christianity. When the great theologian Origen came to Rome from Caesarea, he heard Hippolytus preach. Most of Hippolytus’ works have been lost, but enough translated fragments of his original Greek writings survive to capture his importance. He wrote on Scripture, dogma, law, apologetics, Christ, and also authored a comprehensive polemical work entitled A Refutation of All Heresies.

Hippolytus is most famous as the author of the Apostolic Tradition, which preserves some of the most ancient liturgical texts of the primitive church. The original of the Apostolic Tradition does not exist, and later translated fragments are of dubious provenance, making the work a fluid, composite text of different eras. Nevertheless, the core document is a one-of-a-kind artifact, allowing a modern Christian to peek through the keyhole into the liturgy of the early, praying Church. Hippolytus doesn’t just describe the words and actions of the liturgy, as the earlier Didache and Saint Justin Martyr did. Instead, he writes down the actual prayers.

The Apostolic Tradition contains the earliest known rite of ordination. The ordination rite of a bishop used today by the Catholic Church still largely adopts this ancient text. Hippolytus provides the first example of the Virgin Mary being invoked in liturgical prayer. And Hippolytus’ prayers for the Eucharistic banquet include the third-century words of consecration! This text is the source for a significant portion of today’s Eucharistic Prayer II, perhaps the most commonly used Eucharistic prayer at Mass. When the faithful throughout the world hear the familiar cadence of Eucharistic Prayer II each Sunday, they are hearing a distant echo—it’s the sound of priestly voices from the third century.

As he did on so many significant Roman tombs, Pope Damasus (366–384) wrote an inscription on the tomb of Hippolytus more than a century after the saint died. Part of it reads: “Wherever he was able to go, he had spoken of the Catholic faith so that all might follow it. Thus our martyr deserves to be acknowledged.” Indeed. And at the entrance of the forever-closed catacombs of Saint Hippolytus, a personalized graffiti from an ancient pilgrim is carved into the wall, a tender petition invoking today’s saint: “Hippolytus, keep Peter the sinner in mind.” Saint Hippolytus, keep all of us in mind.

Saints Hippolytus and Pontian, you lived at a difficult time and gave such public witness that you were exiled when many others were not. Your headship of the Church led to your demise. You were isolated, suffered want, and died as a result. May we count our own hardships little in light of yours.