Catholic Saints & Feasts Podcast Por Fr. Michael Black arte de portada

Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

De: Fr. Michael Black
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 "Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black.

These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.Copyright Fr. Michael Black Cristianismo Espiritualidad Ministerio y Evangelismo
Episodios
  • May 25: Saint Bede the Venerable, Priest and Doctor

    May 25: Saint Bede the Venerable, Priest and Doctor
    May 23 2024
    May 25: Saint Bede the Venerable, Priest and Doctor
    c. 672–735
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of scholars

    Life’s drama is found in going deeper, not wider

    There is no world bigger than a monk’s cell. Those four, high walls shape thought like hard, steep banks contain the flow of a river. Rock curtains hanging on both sides force the raging river to carve a path through the landscape, always forward, always deeper. Here the tall banks stop the pounding river from pouring over into the plains. There the low banks allow the gentle current to run low and straight. A river without banks is a lake. And a mind without borders is a puddle—no forward movement and too shallow to sustain life. Borders, limits, and guardrails have expansive effects, paradoxically. A frame makes a painting burst to life; orderly lanes push traffic forward; and the edge of a canvas focuses the artist’s skill. Big thoughts start with boundaries. That’s why big thoughts happen in small spaces. Many thousands of monks’ minds were molded by the limits of the four, cold walls of their cells. And these scholar monks and saint monks gave birth to what we now call Europe.

    Today’s saint was a model monk who lived his whole life in an English monastery, although he occasionally traveled to neighboring communities to teach young scholars. Venerable Bede’s cell and monastery were nothing like those impressive stone structures with soaring arches and large courtyards, which still stand as icons of medieval Europe. Bede lived long, long before that golden age of monasticism. He died less than two hundred years after Saint Benedict, the founder of monasticism. The monasteries of Bede’s era were more like farms, where the monks lived in a dormitory above a large chapter room or perhaps even in crude huts huddled around a squat stone church. These first simple efforts to plant religious life into English soil matured, over centuries, into a network of enormous English monasteries. And these monasteries, in their fullest flower, grew into the universities, towns, schools, hospitals, lodges, cathedrals, and trade centers of England itself, a rich garden of Catholicism known in medieval times as Mary’s Dowry. Venerable Bede and his monastic brothers planted. Later generations harvested. And King Henry VIII then confiscated the garden and handed it over to his friends, who uprooted its most beautiful plants. Ironically and sadly, the tombs of many English saints, including Venerable Bede, lie today in Protestant churches.

    From his cell in remote England, Bede was enmeshed in the Church matters of his day. He was involved in the long simmering dispute over the date of Easter, promoted the practice of using Christ’s birth as the starting date for calendars, translated Christian works from Latin or Greek into Anglo-Saxon (to the immense good of the growth of the Church in England), and authored numerous works, the most famous of which is a history of the Church in England until his days. He was, in short, a prolific and wide-ranging scholar. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII honored that reputation by naming him a Doctor of the Church, the only native of England to be so honored.

    Thomas à Kempis, in his classic The Imitation of Christ, writes that every time a monk leaves his cell he comes back less a man. In his cell the monk learns everything he needs to know about himself, the world, and God. It is inside of our vocations that we find God’s will and our own fulfillment. A deep and abiding commitment to a specific person, religion, home, job, school, parish, spouse, and family is the stuff of life. Wandering is fun for a while. Commitment, though, is more exciting in the long run. The banks of the river must be built up. The edges and borders stacked high. The rails set in place. Then, and only then, life starts to be lived. To go deeper, not wider. To run those roots down deep into the moist soil. When we leave the four corners of our commitments and vocation, it may be liberating for a while, but time rectifies the deception. Our vocation is our home, and in that home we find happiness, make others happy, and satisfy the divine plan of the God who made us.

    Bede the Venerable, we see in your life a model of commitment to one place, one idea, one love, and one Church. We ask your intercession to aid all scholars, all monks, and all who waver, to stay at their desk, their kneeler, or their work bench to fulfill the task at hand.
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    6 m
  • May 25: Saint Gregory VII, Pope, Religious

    May 25: Saint Gregory VII, Pope, Religious
    May 24 2025
    May 25: Saint Gregory VII, Pope, Religious
    c. 1015–1085
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

    A pope dies on the run

    The last words spoken by Pope Saint Gregory VII were “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, that is why I die in exile.” His enemies would have claimed that they loved justice equally as much but understood it differently, which is why the pope had to die on the run. No one really wins epic battles for power, though one side may prevail in the short run. Everyone loses something in a fight: some their dignity, others their property, their position, or maybe their teeth. There is no such thing as a win-win outcome. Pope Gregory VII was a scrappy fighter who boxed his powerful opponents for years. Yet he didn’t fight for his own honor, wealth, or position, but because he believed that “the blessed Peter is father of all Christians, their chief shepherd under Christ, (and) that the holy Roman Church is the mother and mistress of all the churches.” He battled for the right of the Bishop of Rome to govern the Church’s internal life free of interference from worldly powers. Pope Gregory’s victories and losses colored all of medieval history and established key precedents for the perennial tensions between Church and State which continue until today.

    Gregory VII was baptized as Hildebrand in the Tuscany region of Italy. He received an excellent education from Roman tutors, including one who later became Pope Gregory VI.  Most of his adult life was dedicated to serving various popes in important diplomatic and administrative roles. He was one of the most essential papal advisers of his era, even helping to craft the Church law limiting papal conclaves to cardinals alone. While still a deacon, Cardinal Hildebrand was chosen Pope in 1073 by popular acclamation. He refused to be seated on the papal throne as the result of such an outlaw election and went into hiding. Not until a proper vote of the cardinals took place did Hildebrand accept his election as canonically legitimate. He was shortly thereafter ordained a priest and bishop and then crowned Pope Gregory VII on the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, June 29, 1073.

    When Pope Gregory VII first sat on the throne of Saint Peter and gazed out at the universal church, he did not peer through rose-colored glasses. Long firsthand experience of the world made him no novice, so he set about with great determination to implement needed reforms. His twelve-year papacy would be one of the most consequential in history. Gregory first sought to carve out a space for the papacy to operate free from German meddling in its internal affairs. It was common at the time for princes, kings, and other powerful laymen to appoint clerics to their positions and to “invest,” or clothe, new bishops at their Ordination Masses with the symbols of office, such as their pastoral staff, miter, and ring. Gregory decreed an end to this practice, not least because of the confusion it engendered about who was the source of the bishop’s authority. But the “lay investiture” battle would continue for centuries, leading to recriminations on all sides, including Gregory’s dramatic excommunication of Emperor Henry IV and Henry’s deposition—and driving into exile—of the pope. Incredibly, as late as 1903, the Holy Roman Emperor still directly intervened in a papal conclave, exercising his ancient right of veto to block a cardinal from being elected pope.

    Pope Gregory VII pulled every lever at his disposal to make priestly celibacy compulsory, sought to heal the Schism of 1054 with the Orthodox, railed against simony (the purchasing of church offices), and encouraged the recovery of the holy sites in Jerusalem, a harbinger of the Crusades which commenced soon after his death. Gregory also memorialized in the clearest of terms the Church’s theology of the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, a statement of faith that presaged the deep devotion to the Blessed Sacrament so characteristic of the High Middle Ages. Long before the popes were known as “Vicar of Christ,” they were called “Vicar of Peter.” Pope Gregory VII was a model medieval pope above personal reproach, ambitious only for the health and freedom of the Church. He represented both Christ and Saint Peter well.

    Pope Saint Gregory VII, may your earthly example and heavenly intercession sustain and inspire the leaders of the Church to act impetuously, to fight ceaselessly, and to forgive generously when confronted by forces inimical to the well-being of the Church.
    Más Menos
    6 m
  • May 25: Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, Virgin

    May 25: Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, Virgin
    May 24 2024
    May 25: Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, Virgin
    1566-1607
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of the sick
    Life’s true drama is on the inside

    Today’s Carmelite saint was the Italian counterpart to Spain’s famous Carmelite, Teresa of Ávila, although Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi is less well known than her Spanish contemporary. Teresa was a well-traveled and extroverted reformer and founder of a large and vital branch of the Carmelite Order. Mary Magdalene, on the other other hand, was not even a Mother Superior, much less a founder, and followed the ancient observance of Carmel, not its “Teresian,” or discalced, offshoot.

    Named Caterina at her baptism, today’s saint was from a wealthy, pious, and respected Florentine family who expected their only daughter to marry young and marry well. But young Caterina was well trained in the things of God from the start and destined for a higher calling. While Caterina was still a girl, her spiritual director taught her the benefit and discipline of meditating half an hour a day. At the tender age of twelve, she experienced her first ecstasy. She gazed transfixed at the gorgeous sun setting over the rolling countryside and shook at the awesome beauty of God’s creation. Her mother was there, but little Caterina was speechless, unable to describe what hidden forces caused her body to tremble so.

    When she was sixteen, she entered a Carmelite convent, over her family’s initial objections. Taking the religious name of Mary Magdalene, she experienced a number of shocking spiritual events, which were documented and witnessed by her fellow Carmelites and by priest confessors. The young nun was rapt in God for weeks and months on end. She shook violently and showed signs of the stigmata. In her ecstasies, she received a crown of thorns from Jesus to share in His sufferings and a ring to symbolize her mystical marriage to Him. She lived on only bread and water for years, in reparation for the sins of mankind. When a priest ordered her to eat the simple fare of the convent, she became ill and had to return to her more meager nourishment. After one ecstatic vision, a near-death experience, Mary Magdalene described how she had given her heart to Jesus and how He had returned it to her with the purity of the Virgin Mary’s own heart. Jesus Christ had even hidden Saint Mary Magdalene in His side, subjugating her will and desires to His own.

    These many years of intense fireworks in her soul were followed by dark years of dryness and isolation. She felt a painful separation from Jesus her Spouse. During this time, Saint Mary Magdalene struggled with prideful self-love, distaste for God, and the all too common temptations of the flesh and the devil. But she persevered and became novice mistress of the Carmel, recommending poverty, obedience, and abandonment to the will of God as the surest forms of holiness. Mary Magdalene died young, exhausted from her spiritual contests, fasts, and demanding life of prayer. Behind her spectacular displays of spirituality was the day in and day out austerity of Carmelite convent life: the longing for a nice piece of meat, going to bed on an empty stomach, knees and hips aching from scrubbing the floor for endless hours, no dessert to satisfy the sweet tooth, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and almost falling forward due to eyes burning with lack of sleep. Only by long practice do actions mature into habits and habits into the highest virtues.

    The proving ground of a strict convent proves a soul, and only then might spiritual flowers bloom. Only then might bright ecstasies sparkle against the dark curtain of night, to the wonder and awe of all around. For Mary Magdalene, Christ was not all rod and lash. She was a happy nun who played her part in keeping her convent running. She kept her personality, like all stigmatists and elite spiritual warriors, yet became one with Christ in a mysterious manner best described in poetic rather than theological terms. Her renown was widespread and her cult immediate. She was canonized in 1669. Her body lies in peace in her native Florence and is still incorrupt.

    Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, we ask your divine intercession before your Mystical Spouse to give all Religious the gift of perseverance, obedience, and poverty. Your spiritual ecstasies were unique—and destined for few. Grant those gifts that are common—and destined for many.
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    6 m
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I enjoy the episodes… Just wish it was possible to reflect on tomorrow’s episode the evening before…

Fabulous find

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