Catholic Saints & Feasts

By: Fr. Michael Black
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  • Summary

  • "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
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Christianity Ministry & Evangelism Spirituality
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Episodes
  • February 17: Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order

    February 17: Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order
    Feb 15 2025
    February 17: Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order
    Thirteenth Century
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
    Invoked to aid in imitating the charity of Our Lady of Sorrows

    Groups buttress fidelity to individual good intentions

    There are many reasons to join a group. To quilt, play soccer, learn chess, or travel. We accomplish personal goals in a group that we would never accomplish alone. Groups create positive peer pressure to show up on time, read the book, do the exercise, or complete the task assigned. When we join a group, we freely create obligations for ourselves, because we know, deep down, that accountability to others encourages fidelity to our own obligations.
    The groups of the medieval world were called guilds. Craftsmen of similar skills organized in guilds to learn, promote, and protect their trade. Guilds offered mutual assistance that no individual could replicate. There was power in numbers. Today we commemorate seven young men who belonged to a merchant guild in Florence, Italy, in the 1200s. These seven men were serious Christians. They loved God and the Church. And in addition to protecting their commercial interests by joining a guild, they also protected their souls by joining a local spiritual guild called the Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin, where their spiritual exercises were guided by a wise and educated priest who encouraged their devotion.

    After the members of the Confraternity experienced mystical visions of the Virgin Mary, there was nothing left to do except abandon the world, set aside money for their families, and flee the busy city for a solitary life in the nearby mountains. The Seven fasted, prayed, and lived lives of such extreme austerity that a visiting cardinal admonished them to stop living like dogs. Over time they adopted a rule, accepted new recruits, elected leaders, and spread throughout Italy and beyond. They eventually took the name of the Order of Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as the Servants of Mary, or Servites.

    The Seven Holy Founders were especially devoted to the Seven Sorrows of Mary, and the Servites were instrumental in the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows becoming part of the Church’s calendar on September 15. The sword that pierced Mary’s heart, the tears she shed when witnessing Our Lord’s passion, indeed all the Sorrows of Mary motivated the Seven Holy Founders to promote devotion to Mary under this title. Mary was strong and stood at the foot of the cross. But she was also a mom who loved her boy. So she had a heavy heart that continually pondered what His suffering meant. We unite in joy at Christ’s resurrection on Easter and join with Mary’s sorrow just days before. The emotions of Scripture become the emotions of those who read it and those who live it in the liturgy and devotions of the Church.

    The names of the Seven Holy Founders are known. But the Church celebrates them as a group, with their individuality ceding to their group identity. Together they accomplished more than seven men working separately could ever have accomplished. Their confraternity became an Order, and that Order still exists for the mutual spiritual benefit of all, a theological guild holding its members to high standards of spiritual perfection. Servite priests and brothers are still active in various countries around the world, hundreds of years after the Order’s founding. This is a testament to the immovable, rock-solid foundation on which its Seven Holy Founders constructed their spiritual and theological home.

    Our prayers turn to you, Seven Holy Founders of the Servite Order. Help us to find mutual support in loving God and Mary through a holy alliance with like-minded Christians. Through your example, may our love for God burn hotter than a single flame.
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    5 mins
  • February 14: Saints Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop

    February 14: Saints Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop
    Feb 12 2024
    February 14: Saints Cyril, Monk, and Methodius, Bishop
    St. Cyril: 827–869; St. Methodius: 815–884
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    (When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
    Co-Patrons of Europe and Apostles to the Slavs

    Two makers of Europe light the flame of Eastern Christianity

    The Cyrillic alphabet, used by hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Russia, is named after today’s Cyril. Numerous proofs could be advanced for why a certain person is historically significant. Few proofs, however, can eclipse an alphabet being named after you. The evangelical labors of Cyril and Methodius were so path breaking, long lasting, and culture forming that these brothers stand in the very first rank of the Church’s greatest missionaries. Shoulder to shoulder with brave men such as Patrick, Augustine of Canterbury, Boniface, Ansgar, and others, they baptized nations, mustered clans from the forests, codified laws, transcribed alphabets, and transformed the crude pagan gropings for the divine into the transcendent worship of the one true God at Mass. Saints Cyril and Methodius helped form the religiously undivided reality of Christendom long before it was ever called Europe.

    Cyril was baptized as Constantine and was known by that name until late in his life. He and Methodius were from Thessalonica, in Northern Greece, where they spoke not only Greek but also Slavonic, a critical linguistic advantage for their later missionary adventures. Cyril and Methodius received excellent educations in their youth and, as they matured, were given important educational, religious, and political appointments in an age when those disciplines were braided into one sturdy cord. The people, the state, and the Church were an undivided whole. Cyril and Methodius served the imperial court, the one true Church, and their native land as professors, governors, abbots, deacons, priests, and bishops.

    Sometime after 860, the brothers were commissioned by the Emperor in Constantinople to lead a missionary crew heading into Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. They walked straight into a tangled web of political, religious, linguistic, and liturgical controversies which have vexed Eastern and Central Europe until today. The Church of Rome allowed only three languages to be used in its liturgical and scriptural texts—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—the three languages inscribed above Christ’s head on the cross. The Church in the East, juridically under Rome but culturally spinning off into its own orbit over the centuries, was a patchwork of peoples where local vernaculars were used in the liturgy. Languages are always spoken long before they are written, and the spoken Slavonic of Moravia had unique sounds demanding new letters populating a new alphabet. Cyril created that new alphabet, and then he and Methodius translated Scripture, various liturgical books, and the Mass into written Slavonic. This led to some serious tensions.

    The newly Christianized German bishops were suspicious of missionaries in their own neighborhood who came from Greece, spoke Slavonic, and who celebrated the sacred mysteries in a quasi-Byzantine style. Moravia and the greater Slavic homeland were under German ecclesiastical jurisdiction, not Greek. How could the Mass be said in Slavonic, or the Gospels translated into that new language? How could a Byzantine liturgy co-exist with the Latin rite? Cyril and Methodius went to Rome to resolve these various issues with the Pope and his advisers.

    The brothers were treated respectfully in Rome as well-educated and heroic missionaries. Cyril died and was buried in the Eternal City. Methodius returned to the land of the Slavs and to ongoing tensions with German ecclesiastics and princes. He translated virtually the entire Bible into Slavonic, assembled a code of Byzantine church and civil law, and firmly established, with the Pope’s permission, the use of Slavonic in the liturgy. After Methodius’ death, however, German and Latin Rite influences prevailed. The Byzantine Rite, the use of Slavonic in the liturgy, and the Cyrillic alphabet were all forced from Central to Eastern Europe, particularly into Bulgaria, shortly after Methodius died.

    While they were always honored in the East, the Feast of SS. Cyril and Methodius was extended to the entire Catholic Church only in 1880. Pope Saint John Paul II named Saints Cyril and Methodius Co-Patrons of Europe. Their massive legacy inspires the two lungs of the Church, both East and West, to breathe more deeply the enriched oxygen of the entire Christian tradition.

    Saints Cyril and Methodius, you prepared yourselves for brave and generous service to Christ and His Church through long years of preparation and, when the time came, you served heroically. May we so prepare, and so serve, until we can serve no more.
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    6 mins
  • February 11: Our Lady of Lourdes

    February 11: Our Lady of Lourdes
    Feb 11 2025
    February 11: Our Lady of Lourdes
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
    Patroness of bodily ills

    A heavenly lady appears to a country girl, and miracles follow

    In 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous told her friends that a beautiful young lady was appearing to her in a rock formation on the outskirts of her small town of Lourdes. A friend asked Bernadette to do her a favor—to hold the friend’s rosary in her hands the next time Bernadette knelt before the beautiful young lady. Bernadette obliged. Later, Bernadette told her friend how the lady had reacted. The lady had noticed that Bernadette was not holding her own rosary but someone else’s. The lady further said she was not there to make relics and told Bernadette to return next time with her own rosary instead of another’s.

    Bernadette’s unvarnished recounting of the lady’s reaction was blunt but reasonable and, more importantly, authentic. This plainspokenness fit a pattern. Over and over again, whenever little, uneducated Bernadette was asked about the beautiful young lady she saw in the grotto, her answers never changed and included startling but authentic details. Bernadette reported that when she and the lady prayed the rosary together, the lady only said the Our Father and the Glory Be. Mary didn’t pray the Hail Mary. How could she pray to herself? Would she say “Hail Me?” Bernadette reported that the lady spoke to her in the Lourdes’ dialect which Bernadette herself grew up with, slightly different from standard French. Bernadette stated that a golden rose rested on each of the lady’s feet. Of course! And when Bernadette respectfully asked the lady her name, she didn’t understand the big words in the response: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

    In addition to the miraculous cures associated with the healing waters of Lourdes, the very character of Bernadette, as well as the tone and content of her accounts, removed all doubt that the beautiful young lady she saw was indeed the Virgin Mary. Our Lady of Lourdes is perhaps the most powerful and prolific physical healer in the history of the Church after Christ himself. Through her intercession, and through the waters that flow in her magnificent shrine, many thousands have been cured of their infirmities, as medical records prove beyond any doubt. Holy Mary has appeared at various times and in various places, mostly to the simple and mostly in the country. She loves the faith of the simple and speaks to them in simple language. In this, Mary reflects the words of her Son Jesus. He speaks plainly. His message is clear. And Mary’s simple words always point to the simple words of her own Son.

    God is like the sun whose fiery brilliance scorches the eyes of all who look right at Him. Get too close and you’ll be burned. Like the sun, the Creator of the world can be distant, mysterious, and intimidating. But Mary is like the moon, bathed in a soft, pleasant glow. She’s close to us, and easy on the eyes. The sun’s heat and light may make life possible, but the sun itself is dangerous and remote. But Mary can be approached by man. And like the moon, she doesn’t produce her own light but just reflects in a softer tone the powerful rays of the enormous star whose light generates life itself.

    Our Lady of Lourdes, give physical healing to all who invoke your intercession. The saving waters at your shrine have healed thousands of pilgrims. May all the prayers and supplications directed to you be immersed in the waters of your holy baths, so that what is asked may be granted through your intercession and according to God’s will.
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    5 mins

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Fabulous find

I enjoy the episodes… Just wish it was possible to reflect on tomorrow’s episode the evening before…

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