Traditional Catholic Daily Devotional

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The Feast of Our Lady of Ransom has one of the more dramatic origins among the Church's Marian feasts. It grew out of a very real medieval problem: Christians were being captured, enslaved, and held for ransom around the Mediterranean.

In the early thirteenth century, Christian and Muslim powers were constantly fighting across Spain and the Mediterranean. Raids produced captives on both sides, and Christians taken into North Africa could spend years in slavery unless family, religious communities, or charitable organizations could raise enough money to free them.

Into that world came Peter Nolasco.

Peter had already begun using his own money to ransom Christian captives. According to Mercedarian tradition, however, something extraordinary happened on the night of August 1, 1218.

The Blessed Virgin appeared to Peter and asked him to establish a religious order dedicated specifically to freeing captives.

And the tradition says he wasn't the only one.

Our Lady also appeared separately to King James I of Aragon and to Saint Raymond of Peñafort. When the three men compared what had happened, the mission became clear.

The new community became the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy, better known as the Mercedarians.

Their members took the usual religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Then they added a fourth.

If necessary, a Mercedarian promised to take the place of a Christian captive whose faith was in danger.

Think about that for a moment.

These men didn't simply collect donations for prisoners.

They promised that if the ransom couldn't be paid another way, they were willing to remain behind themselves.

Mercedarian friars traveled repeatedly into Muslim-controlled territories carrying money donated by Christians throughout Europe. They negotiated with captors, located prisoners, paid ransoms, and brought the freed men, women, and children home.

Over the centuries, the order traditionally claimed tens of thousands of captives redeemed through its work.

Devotion to Our Lady of Ransom, also called Our Lady of Mercy, naturally grew alongside the order. Mary was pictured sheltering captives beneath her mantle or holding broken chains, a powerful image for families waiting at home for someone who might never return.

The feast eventually spread beyond the Mercedarians and was placed on September 24 in the Roman calendar.

There's something wonderfully concrete about this title of Our Lady.

"Ransom" isn't poetic language here.

There were actual prisoners.

Actual chains.

Actual money exchanged.

And religious men willing to trade their own freedom for somebody else's.

That makes the title point beautifully toward Christ Himself, who said He came "to give His life a redemption for many."

Our Lady of Ransom, Mother of Mercy and hope of captives, pray for us.

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Saint Adomnán of Iona is one of those saints who becomes more interesting the more you dig into him. He was a monk and abbot, but also a historian, biographer, diplomat, traveler, and the driving force behind one of medieval Europe's earliest attempts to protect civilians during warfare.

He was born in Ireland around 624 and eventually entered the great monastery of Iona, the island community off the coast of Scotland founded by Columba.

About a century after Columba's birth, Adomnán became Iona's ninth abbot.

And fortunately for us, he liked to write.

His Life of Saint Columba is one of the most valuable works surviving from early medieval Britain and Ireland. Adomnán collected stories from older monks who had known people close to Columba himself. He recorded miracles, voyages, conversations, kings, monasteries, and little details of daily life that otherwise would have disappeared completely.

So a surprising amount of what we know about Saint Columba comes from Adomnán.

He also wrote a fascinating book about the Holy Land.

Adomnán had never been there.

Instead, a Frankish bishop named Arculf was apparently shipwrecked near Britain after making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He eventually reached Iona and described everything he had seen. Adomnán carefully interviewed him and turned those conversations into On the Holy Places, complete with descriptions of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other biblical sites.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of Adomnán's story came later.

According to Irish tradition, he encountered a woman who had been brutally injured during warfare. The experience deeply disturbed him.

Adomnán began pushing Irish kings and churchmen to agree that some people simply should not be legitimate targets in war.

In 697, a major gathering at Birr adopted what became known as the Law of Adomnán, or Cáin Adomnáin. It offered special legal protection to women, children, and clerics and established penalties for killing, assaulting, or abusing them.

For the seventh century, that's extraordinary.

It wasn't modern humanitarian law, of course, but it came from a strikingly familiar conviction: even warfare needs limits, and the vulnerable deserve protection.

Adomnán died in 704, leaving behind something unusual for an early medieval saint. We don't just have legends about him.

We have his books.

You can still visit Iona today and walk the island where he governed the monastery and gathered stories about Columba more than thirteen centuries ago.

Saint Adomnán reminds us that preserving history, protecting the vulnerable, and telling the stories of holy people can themselves become works of Christian charity.

Saint Adomnán of Iona, keeper of sacred memory and defender of the vulnerable, pray for us.

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Saint Thomas of Villanova became an archbishop, but he apparently never got very good at looking like one.

He was born in Spain in 1486 and grew up in Villanueva de los Infantes. His family was comfortable but remarkably generous. His father regularly gave food to the poor, and Thomas absorbed that habit early. One story says that when his parents were away, young Thomas gave away several of the family's chickens to people who needed food.

That instinct never really left him.

Thomas was brilliant. He studied at the University of Alcalá and became a professor of philosophy before entering the Augustinian Order in his thirties. He quickly became known as an exceptional preacher and eventually served in leadership positions within the order.

Then, in 1544, he was appointed Archbishop of Valencia.

Thomas did not want the job.

When obedience finally forced him to accept, the cathedral chapter gave him money to furnish his new residence appropriately.

Thomas gave the money to a hospital.

Apparently, the old furniture was good enough.

That pretty much describes his entire episcopacy.

Thomas wore patched clothing, kept a simple household, and distributed enormous amounts of the archdiocese's income to the poor. People sometimes criticized him for giving money too freely, but Thomas was actually quite thoughtful about charity. He didn't want merely to hand someone a coin and send him away. He tried to provide work, tools, education, and opportunities that could help families escape poverty permanently.

He also had a particular concern for abandoned babies.

Valencia had many infants left without families, so Thomas established programs to provide them with nurses, clothing, food, and eventually apprenticeships or dowries as they grew older.

His generosity became so famous that people called him the "Father of the Poor."

But Thomas wasn't simply a charitable administrator.

He was also trying to reform an archdiocese badly in need of attention. He visited parishes, improved the formation of priests, established a seminary, and preached constantly. His sermons became famous throughout Spain for being direct, practical, and understandable.

There's a wonderfully characteristic story from near the end of his life.

Thomas knew he was dying and began giving away almost everything remaining in his possession. He even gave away the bed he was lying on, although he borrowed it back long enough to die in it.

That's Thomas of Villanova in one image.

Even his deathbed wasn't really his anymore.

He died in 1555 while Mass was being celebrated nearby. His funeral drew enormous crowds, especially the poor of Valencia, who knew they had lost someone who had treated them not as a problem to manage, but as members of his own family.

Saint Thomas of Villanova, father of the poor and humble shepherd of Valencia, pray for us.

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Saint Matthew has one of the shortest conversion stories in the Gospel.

Jesus walks past a tax booth, sees Matthew sitting there, and says, "Follow Me."

Matthew gets up and goes.

But there's much more packed into that moment than it first appears.

Matthew was a publican, a tax collector working within the Roman system. Tax collectors were deeply disliked, partly because they cooperated with the occupying power and partly because the system gave plenty of opportunity for corruption. To respectable Jewish society, Matthew was not an obvious candidate for an Apostle.

Jesus chose him anyway.

And Matthew's first reaction is interesting.

He threw a dinner.

He invited Jesus, the disciples, and a collection of tax collectors and other people respectable society labeled "sinners." Matthew had only just begun following Christ, but he was already bringing his friends along.

After Pentecost, Matthew disappears from the New Testament record, and this is where ancient traditions begin to diverge.

Early Christian writers agreed that he preached first among the Jews. Papias of Hierapolis, writing in the early second century, recorded a tradition that Matthew compiled sayings of Jesus in the "Hebrew dialect." Exactly how that relates to the Greek Gospel of Matthew we possess today remains debated, but it shows how early Matthew was connected with preserving Christ's teaching in written form.

Later traditions send him much farther afield.

Some place his missionary work in Persia. Others speak of Syria or lands south of the Caspian Sea. The strongest later tradition associates his martyrdom with Ethiopia, although ancient sources differ enough that we shouldn't pretend we know exactly where or how he died.

His relics have an interesting story too.

By the Middle Ages, they were believed to have reached southern Italy and eventually the city of Salerno. Today, the Salerno Cathedral is dedicated to Saint Matthew, and his relics are venerated in the crypt beneath the cathedral. His presence became so important to the city that Matthew is still honored as Salerno's patron.

There's also a nice bit of symbolism in Christian art.

Matthew is represented by a winged man or angel, one of the four creatures associated with the Evangelists. The symbol fits because his Gospel begins with Christ's human genealogy: "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ."

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Matthew is still that tax booth.

Christ didn't wait for Matthew to clean up his reputation, find better friends, or prove himself worthy.

He simply said, "Follow Me."

And Matthew stood up.

Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, who left everything at the call of Christ, pray for us.

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The story of the Korean Martyrs begins in a way that's almost unique in Catholic history.

Christianity reached Korea before missionaries did.

During the eighteenth century, Korean scholars traveling to China encountered Catholic books written by Jesuit missionaries. They brought them home and began studying Christianity on their own. A small group became convinced that the faith was true.

There was just one problem.

They didn't have any priests.

So Korean lay Catholics began teaching one another, baptizing converts, gathering for prayer, and building an underground Church largely by themselves. When they eventually learned more about how the Church actually worked, they wrote to the Bishop of Beijing essentially saying: please send us a priest.

That request became increasingly dangerous.

Korean society was built around Confucian customs, including ancestral rites that Catholics came to understand they could not participate in as religious worship. Christianity also taught that every person possessed equal dignity before God, an idea that could unsettle a rigid social hierarchy.

Persecution followed.

Over the next century, thousands of Korean Catholics were killed.

Among the best known was Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, the first native Korean Catholic priest. His journey to ordination was incredible. Because there was no seminary in Korea, he secretly traveled hundreds of miles to Macau, studied for the priesthood, was ordained in Shanghai, and then slipped back into Korea to serve Catholics in hiding.

He lasted about a year.

Andrew was arrested in 1846, tortured, and beheaded at only twenty-five.

Another remarkable figure was Saint Paul Chong Hasang, a layman who repeatedly crossed into China seeking priests for Korea. He even wrote directly to the pope asking for help establishing a permanent Catholic mission.

He was eventually executed too.

What makes the Korean Martyrs especially striking is the variety among them.

They included priests and laypeople, nobles and servants, husbands and wives, elderly believers and teenagers. Some families lost several generations.

And yet the underground Church survived.

When religious freedom finally began emerging in the late nineteenth century, missionaries discovered something astonishing: Catholic communities had continued praying, baptizing children, teaching the faith, and waiting for priests through decades of persecution.

Today, several major shrines around Seoul preserve their memory, especially the sites where executions took place along the Han River.

The Korean Church wasn't originally built around a missionary arriving from somewhere else.

It began with ordinary laypeople reading books, discovering the Catholic faith, and deciding it was worth risking everything to keep it.

Holy Martyrs of Korea, courageous priests, families, and lay apostles who kept the faith alive, pray for us.

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Saint Januarius is one of those early martyrs whose death is remarkable, but what has happened to his blood afterward has made him one of the most famous saints in Italy.

Januarius, or San Gennaro as the Italians call him, was Bishop of Benevento during the persecution of Emperor Diocletian around the year 305. When several Christians were arrested near Naples, Januarius didn't keep a safe distance.

He went to visit them.

That got him arrested too.

Among those caught up in the persecution were the deacons Festus and Proculus, the lector Desiderius, and the laymen Sosius, Eutyches, and Acutius. Ancient traditions vary on some details, but all seven came to be remembered together as companions in martyrdom.

According to one popular account, they were thrown before wild beasts.

The animals refused to attack.

So the authorities settled on something considerably more reliable.

They beheaded them.

Januarius's body was eventually brought to Naples, where he became the city's great patron. But sometime afterward, another tradition appeared. A Christian woman named Eusebia was said to have collected some of Januarius's blood after his execution and preserved it in small glass ampoules.

Those ampoules still exist.

And this is where the story gets fascinating.

Several times each year, the dried substance inside is publicly displayed in the Naples Cathedral. During the ceremony, what normally appears as a dark solid mass frequently becomes liquid.

Neapolitans have been watching this happen for centuries.

The best-known ceremony takes place around September 19. The cathedral fills with people, including a traditional group of local women known affectionately as the "aunts of Saint Januarius," who pray, call out to the saint, and sometimes become increasingly impatient if the liquefaction takes too long.

It's one of those wonderfully human Catholic traditions.

When the blood liquefies, bells ring and word quickly spreads through Naples.

The Church permits devotion to the phenomenon but has not defined the liquefaction itself as a supernatural miracle. Scientists have proposed various explanations, but because the sealed relic cannot simply be opened for unrestricted testing, the phenomenon remains a fascinating subject of debate.

For Neapolitans, however, San Gennaro is much more than a scientific curiosity.

His image appears throughout the city. His feast fills the streets. His treasure includes centuries of gifts from kings, queens, popes, and ordinary people. Even Neapolitans who rarely enter a church often speak of him almost like a member of the family.

Seventeen centuries after Januarius and his companions were executed, Naples still waits every September to see the blood of its bishop.

That's a remarkable afterlife for a martyr Rome intended everyone to forget.

Saint Januarius and Companions, martyrs of Campania and courageous witnesses to Christ, pray for us

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Saint Joseph of Cupertino may have one of the strangest biographies in the entire calendar. He struggled in school, was considered absent-minded and clumsy, barely made it through his studies for the priesthood, and then became famous because he reportedly flew during prayer.

He was born in 1603 in Cupertino, southern Italy, into a poor family. Joseph had difficulty concentrating and learning, and even simple tasks seemed to go wrong. He tried joining religious communities and was dismissed because he wasn't considered capable of handling the work.

Eventually, the Conventual Franciscans allowed him to work in their stables.

Joseph was good with animals.

And slowly, something changed. The friars noticed his humility, obedience, and remarkable life of prayer. They eventually allowed him to become a Franciscan and begin studying for the priesthood.

This created another problem.

Joseph was terrible at studying.

According to the famous story, he managed to learn one Gospel passage particularly well: "Blessed is the womb that bore thee." When his examination for the diaconate arrived, the bishop happened to ask him about exactly that passage.

He passed.

Later, during the examination for priestly ordination, the candidates questioned before Joseph answered so well that the bishop simply passed the remaining men without examining them individually.

Joseph became a priest almost despite himself.

Then things got much stranger.

During Mass or intense prayer, Joseph would sometimes fall into ecstasy. Witnesses reported that he actually rose from the ground, sometimes remaining suspended for significant periods. These incidents became so frequent that crowds started coming specifically to watch him.

Imagine being his superior.

You're trying to maintain a quiet Franciscan monastery, and one of your friars keeps levitating during Mass.

Church authorities investigated the reports carefully. Joseph was even questioned by the Roman Inquisition. Rather than being celebrated publicly, he was repeatedly moved and eventually ordered to avoid public ceremonies because the crowds had become so disruptive.

One particularly famous story says that when Joseph saw a statue of the Blessed Virgin being carried in procession, he suddenly flew toward it in ecstasy.

For obvious reasons, he eventually became the patron saint of aviators, pilots, and air travelers.

Students also adopted him as a patron, especially students facing examinations. Given the rather unusual way Joseph passed his own exams, that devotion makes perfect sense.

But underneath all the extraordinary stories was a remarkably humble man. Joseph never treated these experiences as achievements. In fact, they frequently embarrassed him. He preferred ordinary work, silence, and prayer.

He died in 1663 at Osimo, Italy, where his body remains venerated today in the Basilica of Saint Joseph of Cupertino.

Joseph's life is a wonderful reminder that God does not necessarily choose the person with the best résumé.

Sometimes He chooses the friar who barely passed the exam.

And occasionally, apparently, He lets him fly.

Saint Joseph of Cupertino, patron of students, aviators, and everyone who has ever struggled through an exam, pray for us.

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The Commemoration of the Stigmata of Saint Francis celebrates one of the strangest and most extraordinary events in the life of one of the Church's best-known saints.

It happened in September of 1224, just two years before Francis died.

By this point, the Franciscan Order had exploded across Europe. Thousands of friars had joined, and Francis increasingly withdrew from leadership. He was physically exhausted, often sick, and worried that the movement he had begun was becoming something much bigger and more complicated than he had ever intended.

So he went somewhere quiet.

Francis withdrew to Mount La Verna, a rugged mountain retreat in Tuscany, to spend several weeks fasting and praying in preparation for the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel.

According to the earliest Franciscan accounts, Francis prayed for two particular graces before his death: to understand something of the love Christ experienced during His Passion, and something of the suffering He endured on the Cross.

Then came the vision.

Around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Francis saw what appeared to be a seraph with six wings, bearing the figure of a crucified man.

When the vision disappeared, Francis discovered wounds on his own body.

His hands and feet bore marks corresponding to the nails of the Crucifixion, and his side carried a wound resembling the wound made by the soldier's lance.

Francis tried to hide them.

That's an important detail.

He wasn't showing people the wounds or using them to prove his holiness. He wrapped his hands, wore footwear when possible, and told very few people what had happened. Brother Leo and a handful of companions eventually saw enough to understand.

After Francis died in 1226, however, the wounds were seen openly by many who came to view his body.

The event became known as the stigmata, from the Greek word meaning a mark or brand. Francis is traditionally regarded as the first person in Christian history to receive the visible wounds of Christ in this extraordinary way.

La Verna remains one of the most moving Franciscan pilgrimage sites in Italy. Pilgrims can still walk through the mountain forest to the rocky place traditionally associated with the event. A chapel now stands there, and each day the friars process from the basilica to the Chapel of the Stigmata, singing and praying along the same cliffs where Francis once sought solitude.

The Church eventually gave the event its own liturgical commemoration on September 17.

And perhaps the most important part of the feast is easy to miss.

Francis had spent his entire Christian life trying to imitate Christ.

Near the end of that life, according to Franciscan tradition, that imitation became visible even in his flesh.

Saint Francis of Assisi, marked with the wounds of the Crucified Christ, pray for us.

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Saint Euphemia is one of those early martyrs whose story didn't end with her martyrdom. More than a century after her death, her tomb became connected with one of the most important councils in Church history.

Euphemia lived in Chalcedon, across the water from Constantinople, around the beginning of the fourth century. She came from a Christian family and was still a young woman when Emperor Diocletian's great persecution reached the city.

According to the ancient accounts, the governor ordered everyone to participate in sacrifices to the pagan god Ares.

Euphemia refused.

She was arrested with other Christians and subjected to a series of tortures intended to make her abandon the faith. The traditional account describes the rack, fire, and eventually the arena, where she was exposed to wild animals. She died around the year 303.

Christians buried her with honor in Chalcedon, and a great basilica eventually rose over her tomb.

And that's where the story gets especially interesting.

In 451, nearly 150 years after Euphemia's death, hundreds of bishops gathered in Chalcedon to settle an enormous controversy over the Person of Christ. The question was how Christians should speak correctly about Christ being both truly God and truly man.

The meetings took place in the basilica dedicated to Euphemia.

According to a beloved Eastern Christian tradition, the disagreement became so intense that representatives placed competing statements of faith inside Euphemia's tomb and sealed it.

Then everyone prayed.

When the tomb was reopened, tradition says the orthodox profession was found in Euphemia's hand, while the rejected statement lay at her feet.

Whether we treat that account as miraculous history or later devotional tradition, it tells us how closely Christians associated Euphemia with the Council of Chalcedon. She became not merely a martyr of the early persecutions, but a symbol of the Church's defense of the truth about Christ.

Her relics also had quite a journey.

After Persian invasions threatened Chalcedon, they were eventually brought across the Bosporus to Constantinople. During the later Iconoclast persecutions, tradition says her relics were thrown into the sea, recovered, and eventually restored.

They can still be venerated today in the Church of Saint George in Istanbul, the cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

That's an extraordinary journey for a young woman killed more than seventeen centuries ago.

Euphemia never wrote a theological book.

She never attended a council.

She simply refused to deny Christ.

Yet generations later, bishops debating exactly who Christ is gathered around her tomb to do it.

Saint Euphemia, great martyr and witness to the true faith of Christ, pray for us.

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The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows asks us to look at the life of Christ from a perspective we don't always stop to consider: what was all of this like for His Mother?

Catholics have meditated on Mary's suffering since the earliest centuries, especially her presence at Calvary. Simeon had foretold it when Jesus was still an infant: "Thy own soul a sword shall pierce." Medieval Christians eventually began identifying particular moments when that sword seemed especially sharp.

These became the Seven Sorrows of Mary: Simeon's prophecy, the Flight into Egypt, losing the Child Jesus in Jerusalem, meeting Christ on the road to Calvary, standing beneath the Cross, receiving His dead body, and watching Him placed in the tomb.

And devotion to them became enormous.

By the Middle Ages, Christians were meditating on Mary's sorrows through prayers, artwork, processions, and hymns. The most famous is the Stabat Mater, traditionally attributed to the thirteenth-century Franciscan Jacopone da Todi. Its opening image is simple and devastating: Mary standing beside the Cross while her Son dies.

The Servite Order made this devotion especially their own. Founded in Florence in the thirteenth century by the Seven Holy Founders, the Servites spread devotion to the Seven Sorrows throughout Europe. The familiar image of Mary's heart pierced by seven swords comes directly from this tradition.

Interestingly, the Church eventually had two feasts honoring Mary's sorrows.

One developed on the Friday of Passion Week, focusing particularly on Mary's compassion during the Passion. The other was celebrated by the Servites in September. In 1814, after returning to Rome following his captivity under Napoleon, Pope Pius VII extended the September feast to the universal Church in thanksgiving. Pope Pius X later fixed it on September 15, immediately after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

That placement is almost perfect.

September 14: look at the Cross.

September 15: look at the Mother standing beneath it.

The feast also inspired some striking traditions, particularly in Mediterranean countries. In Spain, Italy, Malta, and parts of Latin America, statues of the Sorrowful Mother are carried through streets dressed in dark robes, sometimes beneath elaborate canopies. During Holy Week, confraternities still carry enormous images of the Dolorosa, surrounded by candles and flowers, while crowds watch in silence.

Our Lady of Sorrows isn't really about asking which of Mary's sufferings was worst.

It's about remembering that she stayed.

At Bethlehem, she held Christ when almost no one knew Him.

At Calvary, she remained when almost everyone had left.

Our Lady of Sorrows, Mother who stood faithfully beneath the Cross, pray for us.

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