Traditional Catholic Daily Devotional

• "The First Espousals" — From the Assumption to Advent
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Today is the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, but this year it also falls on Rosary Sunday, which gives us a perfect excuse to look at a side of Francis we don't talk about nearly as often: his deep love for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Francis is usually remembered for poverty, the stigmata, and maybe a bird or two.

But one of the deepest threads running through his spirituality was his love for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Francis lived before the Rosary had developed into exactly the form Catholics know today, so we shouldn't picture him walking around Assisi with a modern five-decade rosary. But Marian prayer was everywhere in his life.

And one little chapel became especially important.

Early in his conversion, Francis discovered a crumbling church outside Assisi dedicated to Saint Mary of the Angels. We know it better as the Portiuncula. Francis repaired it with his own hands and came to love the place so much that it became the spiritual home of the entire Franciscan movement.

He wanted his friars close to Mary.

According to his early biographer Thomas of Celano, Francis had an almost indescribable love for the Mother of Jesus because, as he put it, she "made the Lord of Majesty our brother."

That's such a Franciscan way of looking at Mary.

He loved her because she gave us Jesus.

Francis composed prayers in her honor as well. In his *Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary*, he piles title upon title upon her: Holy Lady, Queen, Mother of God, Virgin made Church.

And his Marian devotion became part of the DNA of the Franciscan Order.

Later Franciscans became some of the strongest defenders of the Immaculate Conception. Blessed John Duns Scotus provided the theological explanation that became enormously influential in the Church's understanding of the doctrine. Franciscans also helped spread devotions such as the Franciscan Crown, a seven-decade rosary meditating on the Seven Joys of Mary.

So there's a beautiful connection this year with Saint Francis's feast falling on Rosary Sunday.

Francis didn't see devotion to Mary as something competing with devotion to Christ. Quite the opposite.

Mary fascinated him because everything about her pointed toward Jesus.

And perhaps nowhere is that clearer than at the end of his life.

When Francis knew he was dying, he asked his brothers to carry him back to the Portiuncula.

Back to Saint Mary of the Angels.

Back to the little chapel dedicated to Our Lady where so much of his vocation had begun.

There, lying near the tiny church he loved, Francis died on the evening of October 3, 1226.

For all the enormous basilicas, paintings, statues, and stories that later surrounded him, Francis chose to finish his life beside a little chapel of the Blessed Virgin.

That's not a bad image for Rosary Sunday.

Stay close to Mary.

Because Francis understood exactly where she always takes us.

To Christ.

Saint Francis of Assisi, devoted son of Our Lady and joyful brother of Christ, pray for us.

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Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus is famous for her "Little Way," the idea that holiness doesn't necessarily require doing spectacular things. Sometimes it means doing something very small that costs you quite a lot.

And one of my favorite examples involves a nun Thérèse simply could not stand.

Thérèse entered the Carmelite convent at Lisieux at only fifteen. Life there meant living every day with the same small group of women. You prayed together. Ate together. Worked together. Saw each other constantly.

And inevitably, there was one sister whose personality rubbed Thérèse completely the wrong way.

Thérèse never names her in Story of a Soul, which is probably the first charitable thing she did for her.

She admits that this sister had "the faculty of displeasing me in everything." Her mannerisms bothered Thérèse. Her personality bothered her. Thérèse couldn't even explain everything that irritated her.

So she made a decision.

She would treat this sister as though she were her favorite person in the convent.

Whenever they met, Thérèse gave her a warm smile.

She prayed for her.

She looked for opportunities to help her.

When the sister said something irritating, Thérèse tried not merely to suppress an annoyed response, but to answer with genuine kindness. She even tried to discover something admirable about the sister so that her charity wouldn't become completely fake.

And apparently Thérèse became too good at it.

One day the sister finally asked her something along the lines of, "Sister Thérèse, would you tell me what attracts you so much to me? Whenever you look at me, I see you smile."

That's the best part of the story.

The poor woman had absolutely no idea.

Thérèse writes that what attracted her was Jesus hidden within this sister, because Christ makes lovable even what naturally seems unlovable.

There's another wonderfully human convent story. During prayer, a sister near Thérèse repeatedly made a small clicking or rattling noise that drove her crazy. Thérèse couldn't stop noticing it.

So instead of spending prayer mentally complaining about the noise, she deliberately listened to it and turned it into a kind of music offered to God.

That is the Little Way in real life.

Not floating around the convent feeling affectionate toward everyone.

Not pretending difficult people aren't difficult.

It's recognizing, "This person is driving me absolutely nuts, and I am going to love her anyway."

Thérèse died from tuberculosis in 1897 at only twenty-four. She never traveled as a missionary, founded a religious order, or accomplished anything the world would have considered particularly important.

She smiled at the nun who annoyed her.

She tolerated the irritating noise.

She did tiny things with enormous love.

And the Church eventually declared her a Doctor of the Church.

Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, teacher of the Little Way and saint of ordinary acts of love, pray for us.

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The Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels celebrates one of those Catholic beliefs that many of us learn as children and then perhaps don't think about nearly enough as adults: God has entrusted each of us to the care of an angel.

The idea is deeply rooted in Scripture. Christ Himself speaks of children whose angels "always see the face of my Father who is in heaven." In the Book of Tobias, the Archangel Raphael accompanies young Tobias on a dangerous journey, protecting and guiding him even though Tobias initially has no idea who his traveling companion really is.

Early Christians took this very seriously.

Church Fathers wrote about angels assigned to individuals, and over the centuries devotion became increasingly personal. By the Middle Ages, Christians were regularly praying to their guardian angels for protection against temptation, danger, and especially a sudden or unprepared death.

But interestingly, the feast itself took a while to develop.

Local celebrations honoring guardian angels appeared during the Middle Ages, particularly in Spain. In the sixteenth century, devotion spread rapidly, and in 1608 Pope Paul V approved a feast of the Guardian Angels. Later in the seventeenth century, Pope Clement X extended it throughout the universal Church and fixed its celebration on October 2.

That placement makes perfect sense.

September 29 honors Saint Michael and the Archangels.

Three days later, October 2 honors the angels assigned to ordinary people like us.

One of the most charming parts of this devotion is how universal it became. Catholic children across completely different cultures learned essentially the same habit: before bed, ask your angel to watch over you.

The familiar English prayer begins, "Angel of God, my guardian dear," but versions of that prayer exist in languages all over the Catholic world.

And Catholic tradition doesn't imagine guardian angels merely preventing car accidents or helping children sleep peacefully.

Their real job is much bigger.

They help us get to heaven.

Saints wrote about asking their angels for help during prayer, sending them ahead when entering difficult conversations, and asking their guardian angel to cooperate with the guardian angel of another person. Saint Padre Pio famously encouraged people to "send me your guardian angel" when they needed his prayers.

There's something wonderfully humbling about the whole idea.

According to Catholic teaching, an intelligent spiritual creature far more powerful than we are has been given an assignment by God.

You.

Not because you're famous.

Not because you're important.

Simply because God considers one human soul worth guarding.

And apparently, our guardian angels have been watching us make questionable decisions since childhood without requesting reassignment.

That's patience.

Holy Guardian Angels, our unseen companions and guides on the road to heaven, watch over us and pray for us.

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Saint Jerome is one of the great Doctors of the Church, but he may also be one of the saints you'd least want criticizing your work.

He was brilliant, sarcastic, argumentative, occasionally hot-tempered, and absolutely obsessed with getting the words of Scripture right.

Jerome was born around the year 347 in Stridon, somewhere near the borderlands of the Roman Empire in the Balkans. His family sent him to Rome for an excellent education, and Jerome became fascinated with classical literature. He loved Cicero and the great Latin authors so much that, according to his own account, he once had a terrifying dream in which he stood before God's judgment seat and was accused of being "a Ciceronian, not a Christian."

That got his attention.

Jerome eventually embraced a much more serious Christian life and spent several years living as an ascetic in the Syrian desert.

But he brought books.

Lots of books.

He studied Greek, and then did something unusual for a Western Christian scholar of his time: he learned Hebrew, reportedly receiving lessons from Jewish teachers. That decision would eventually change the Bible used by Western Christianity.

In the 380s, Pope Damasus I asked Jerome to revise the existing Latin translations of Scripture, which varied considerably from place to place.

Jerome didn't simply tidy up the wording.

He spent years comparing manuscripts, consulting the original languages, and eventually translating much of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew. The result became the foundation of what we call the Latin Vulgate, the Bible that would shape Western Catholic worship, theology, art, and culture for more than a thousand years.

And Jerome definitely had opinions while doing it.

His surviving letters show a man who could be warm and deeply pastoral one moment and absolutely devastating toward an opponent the next. He once complained about people criticizing his translations who didn't know Hebrew themselves. Jerome was not especially interested in losing an argument politely.

Later in life, he settled in Bethlehem, where he established monasteries and spent roughly three decades studying Scripture near the place of Christ's birth.

Visitors to the Church of the Nativity can still visit a cave traditionally associated with Jerome's years of work. There's something wonderfully fitting about imagining one of history's greatest biblical scholars surrounded by manuscripts in a cave beneath Bethlehem.

Artists often depict Jerome with a lion because of a later legend that he removed a thorn from the animal's paw and the grateful lion remained with him afterward. He's also usually surrounded by books, which is probably much closer to historical reality.

Jerome could be difficult.

He could also be wrong.

But he believed Sacred Scripture deserved a lifetime of serious study.

And he gave it one.

Saint Jerome, brilliant Doctor of Scripture and tireless translator of the Word of God, pray for us.

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The Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, traditionally called Michaelmas, was once one of the great landmarks of the year in Catholic Europe.

We know Saint Michael from Scripture as the great defender of God's people, the archangel who battles the dragon in the Apocalypse. But September 29 developed a personality all its own, combining liturgy, pilgrimage, harvest customs, food, folklore, and even the way people organized the calendar.

The feast's September date is traditionally connected with the dedication of a basilica of Saint Michael near Rome. By the Middle Ages, Michaelmas had become an important feast throughout Western Europe, and because it arrived just after the autumn equinox, it naturally became associated with the end of the harvest.

In England and Ireland, Michaelmas goose became the traditional dinner. There's even an old belief that eating goose on Michaelmas would protect you from financial need during the coming year. Geese were fat after feeding on the harvested fields, so the tradition was practical as well as festive.

Then there are the blackberries.

An old British and Irish legend says that when Saint Michael cast Lucifer from heaven, the devil landed in a blackberry bush. Furious, he cursed the berries, and in some versions spat on them. So after Michaelmas, you weren't supposed to eat blackberries anymore.

It's probably one of the stranger ways a theological battle ever became agricultural advice.

Michaelmas also became a major legal and economic date. Rents were due. Accounts were settled. Servants were hired. Courts opened. Even today, British universities such as Oxford use the name Michaelmas Term for their autumn academic session.

Across Europe, meanwhile, Saint Michael became associated with extraordinary mountaintop shrines.

In Italy, pilgrims traveled to the ancient sanctuary of Monte Gargano, where tradition holds that Saint Michael appeared in the fifth century. In Normandy, the magnificent Mont-Saint-Michel rose from a tidal island. Across the Channel, England had its own Saint Michael's Mount in Cornwall.

And strangely enough, several famous shrines dedicated to Saint Michael appear along a roughly northwest-to-southeast line across Europe and the Mediterranean. Modern popular devotion sometimes calls this the Sword of Saint Michael. The idea of a deliberately designed ancient straight line is modern rather than an old Church tradition, but the geography itself is fascinating.

Michaelmas was also traditionally one of the quarter days in England, dates that divided the year into four sections for contracts, rents, and business. So September 29 wasn't merely something Catholics noticed at Mass.

It helped organize ordinary life.

That's perhaps the most interesting thing about Michaelmas. Medieval Catholics didn't keep feast days locked inside the church building. A feast could determine what you ate, when you harvested, when you paid your rent, when school began, and where you went on pilgrimage.

September 29 meant autumn had arrived.

And standing at the doorway of the darker half of the year was Saint Michael, sword in hand.

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

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Saint Simon de Rojas became famous for a prayer containing only 2 Latin words.

Ave Maria.

He loved the name of Mary so much that those words seemed to follow him everywhere.

Simon was born in Valladolid, Spain, in 1552. According to tradition, he was unusually slow to begin speaking as a child, which worried his parents. When he finally did speak clearly, the first words attributed to him were "Ave Maria."

Whether that happened exactly as later tradition remembered it or not, it certainly predicted the rest of his life.

Simon entered the Trinitarian Order, the community originally founded to ransom Christians held captive in Muslim territories. He was intelligent, became a priest, studied theology, and eventually taught philosophy and theology himself.

But Simon's real gift was dealing with people.

He became a celebrated preacher and confessor and eventually attracted the attention of the Spanish royal family. King Philip III and later Philip IV trusted him enough that Simon became connected with the royal court and served as spiritual adviser to members of the family.

That's usually where court life gets comfortable.

Simon somehow made it uncomfortable instead.

He used his access to the wealthy to talk constantly about the poor. Money and gifts given to him had a habit of disappearing into the hands of struggling families, prisoners, and people living on the streets of Madrid.

He became especially concerned about poor children and founded charitable works to provide them with food and education.

But the devotion that defined Simon was his love for the Holy Name of Mary.

He wanted people to develop the habit of calling upon Our Lady throughout the day, so he promoted the simple greeting "Ave Maria" everywhere he went. He even founded the Congregation of the Slaves of the Sweet Name of Mary to spread Marian devotion and care for the poor.

Simon apparently greeted people with "Ave Maria" rather than the ordinary greetings of the day.

Eventually people began calling him the Apostle of the Ave Maria.

There's something wonderfully simple about that.

Simon was a theologian. He advised kings. He held important positions in his religious order.

Yet the message people remembered was basically:

Say Mary's name.

Remember her.

Ask her to lead you to Christ.

Simon died in Madrid in 1624. His reputation for holiness was so strong that enormous crowds came to honor him, including members of the royal court and many of the poor whom he had served.

His story fits beautifully near the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary. Simon understood that sometimes the shortest prayers are the ones we can carry with us everywhere.

Three words were enough for him.

Saint Simon de Rojas, Apostle of the Ave Maria and friend of the poor, pray for us.

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Saint Hiltrude of Liessies is one of those saints whose life never became famous far beyond her own region, but whose story has been quietly remembered in northern France for more than a thousand years.

She lived during the eighth century and was born into a noble Frankish family. Her father, Wibert, founded a monastery at Liessies, near what is now the French-Belgian border. Her brother, Guntrad, became its abbot.

Hiltrude, meanwhile, was expected to get married.

A suitable husband was found, the arrangements were made, and everyone seemed to know what Hiltrude's future would look like.

Everyone except Hiltrude.

She wanted to give her life entirely to God.

According to tradition, when the proposed marriage became unavoidable, Hiltrude fled rather than go through with it. She eventually returned after her family accepted her decision and allowed her to live as a consecrated woman.

But she didn't simply join a large convent.

Instead, Hiltrude chose a much more secluded life.

She lived in a small cell near the monastery at Liessies, close enough to participate in its spiritual life but separated enough to maintain the solitude she desired. Her brother, as abbot, became an important support in her vocation.

There's something interesting about that arrangement.

Medieval Christianity included all sorts of religious vocations that don't fit neatly into our modern categories. Some people became monks or nuns. Others became hermits. Still others, like Hiltrude, lived almost as recluses, attached to a church or monastery but spending much of their lives in prayer and solitude.

Hiltrude became known locally for exactly that kind of hidden holiness.

No enormous missionary journeys.

No royal courts.

No theological controversies.

Just years of prayer in one small corner of northern France.

After her death, her tomb at Liessies became a local place of pilgrimage, and devotion to her spread through the surrounding region of Hainaut. Her relics were treasured there for centuries.

The monastery itself had a much longer life. Liessies Abbey grew into an important Benedictine house and survived for roughly a thousand years before the French Revolution brought monastic life there to an end. Much of the abbey disappeared, but the village still preserves its memory, along with that of the young woman who chose solitude over the comfortable future her family had planned.

Hiltrude's story isn't dramatic.

That's actually what makes it interesting.

She believed that a life could be completely given to God without being particularly visible to anyone else.

And for her, that was enough.

Saint Hiltrude of Liessies, hidden daughter of prayer and solitude, pray for us.

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The North American Martyrs were eight French Jesuit missionaries who entered seventeenth-century North America knowing that the work might kill them.

For several of them, it did so in extraordinarily brutal ways.

The best known are Saints Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, and their six companions. They worked primarily among Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada and the northeastern United States, especially the Wendat, or Huron. Their mission unfolded amid warfare, epidemics, and fierce conflict among Native nations, so their story is inseparable from a very complicated period of North American history.

Brébeuf arrived in New France in 1625.

He threw himself into learning the Wendat language and culture. He became so fluent that he compiled dictionaries and translated prayers and catechetical material. The famous Christmas hymn known today as the Huron Carol is traditionally attributed to him, originally composed in the Wendat language.

Isaac Jogues had an even stranger story.

In 1642, he was captured by Mohawk warriors, tortured, and held captive for months. Several of his fingers were mutilated, creating a serious problem for a priest because Church law at the time normally required intact hands for celebrating Mass.

Eventually Jogues escaped.

He made it back to France.

At that point, most people would probably consider the mission complete.

Jogues asked to go back.

The pope gave him special permission to celebrate Mass despite his damaged hands, and Jogues returned to North America, knowing exactly what might happen.

In 1646, he was killed in present-day New York.

Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were killed three years later during attacks on the Wendat missions. Others among the eight died at different mission stations during the same violent period.

But there are fascinating pieces of their world still visible today.

Near Midland, Ontario, the Martyrs' Shrine stands near the reconstructed Jesuit mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. In Auriesville, New York, another shrine remembers Jogues and his companions near the area traditionally associated with his captivity and death.

And there is an extraordinary connection to another saint.

At the Mohawk settlement where Jogues had once been held prisoner, a girl was born about ten years after his death.

Her name was Kateri Tekakwitha.

The missionaries died without knowing what would become of their work. Their missions were destroyed, communities scattered, and years of labor seemed lost.

Yet the faith they planted didn't disappear.

Saints John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, and the Holy North American Martyrs, courageous missionaries of the New World, pray for us.

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Saint Vincent Strambi is one of those saints whose story becomes especially interesting near the end, when an elderly bishop apparently offered his own life for the pope.

He was born in 1745 in Civitavecchia, the port city outside Rome. His father hoped he would marry and continue the family business.

Vincent had other plans.

He wanted to become a priest, although by his own admission he wasn't naturally very pious as a boy. After ordination, he became increasingly drawn to preaching and eventually met Paul of the Cross.

Vincent joined the Passionists.

It was a perfect fit.

The congregation centered its spirituality on the Passion of Christ, and Vincent became an extraordinary missionary preacher. He traveled throughout Italy giving missions that could last for days or weeks. His preaching was direct, emotional, and practical, and crowds came in enormous numbers.

He also became one of Saint Paul of the Cross's closest companions and eventually wrote his biography, giving us much of what we know about the Passionist founder today.

Then Vincent was made Bishop of Macerata and Tolentino.

He didn't want the job.

That seems to happen to saints fairly often.

As bishop, Vincent lived simply, visited parishes, improved seminaries, and continued preaching. But his episcopacy happened during one of the most chaotic periods in Italian history: the Napoleonic era.

When Napoleon demanded an oath of loyalty that Vincent believed violated his obligations to the Church, he refused.

So he was expelled from his diocese.

For years, Vincent lived in exile before eventually returning after Napoleon's fall. By then he was elderly and exhausted, and he finally received permission to retire.

Then came one last remarkable episode.

Vincent moved to Rome and became a close adviser to Pope Leo XII. In 1823, the newly elected pope became gravely ill. According to Passionist tradition, Vincent celebrated Mass and offered his own life to God in exchange for Leo's recovery.

The pope recovered.

Vincent became ill almost immediately.

Within days, he was dead.

He was seventy-nine years old.

Whether we understand that event as miraculous or as a beautiful act of self-offering, it fits Vincent's entire life. He belonged to a religious community built around the Passion of Christ, and his final act was an attempt to imitate Christ by offering himself for another.

His relics are venerated in Macerata, while his memory remains especially strong among the Passionists.

Vincent spent decades preaching about the Cross.

In the end, he tried to make his own life into one final sermon.

Saint Vincent Strambi, Passionist preacher and generous shepherd of souls, pray for us.

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