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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Written 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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Episodes
  • April 28: Saint Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr

    April 28: Saint Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr
    Apr 27 2024
    April 28: Saint Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr
    1803–1841
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Oceania

    Musumusu axed him to death for no reason at all

    In Paris, just a few blocks down the Rue du Bac from the shrine of the Miraculous Medal, is a fine, imposing stone building. There are a lot of fine, imposing stone buildings in Paris, so from the outside this one is not exceptional. But once the visitor passes inside the complex of chapel, museum, dormitories, and garden, he understands what a venerable institution he is visiting—The Paris Foreign Mission Society. Approximately 4,500 missionaries went forth from this unique Society, mostly to Southeast Asia, to build the Church and preach the Gospel. From its beginnings in the seventeenth century until today, but most conspicuously in the nineteenth century, hundreds of priests and bishops from the Society were martyred, died violent deaths, or fell victim to tropical diseases. Of these, twenty-three Paris Foreign Missionaries are canonized saints.  Other non-martyr French saints of the same era—Saint John Vianney, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint Catherine Laboure—together with the missionary martyrs, sparkle as the jewels in the crown of the vibrant Church of nineteenth-century France.

    Today’s saint, Peter Chanel, was just one such Frenchman who left the comfort and familiarity of home to become a daring and rugged missionary priest. Peter Chanel grew up in rural France working as a shepherd. While in school, he loved to read about French foreign missionaries and wanted to emulate them. So he decided, “I will become a missionary priest!” After seminary studies, Peter was ordained a diocesan priest and served in parishes. But a few years later, he became one of the founding members of the Society of Mary, the Marists. And as a Marist father, he voyaged on the high seas to at last fulfill his missionary dreams. He sailed to one of the most tiny, remote, and unknown islands in the South Pacific. In 1837 Father Peter Chanel stepped ashore the speck of volcanic rock called Futuna to preach there, for the very first time, the name of Jesus Christ.

    On unknown Futuna, Father Chanel gave his all, at first drip by drip and then all at once. A lay brother who was with him later said of Father Chanel, “Because of his labors, he was often burned by the heat of the sun and famished with hunger, and he would return home wet with perspiration and completely exhausted. Yet he always remained in good spirits, courageous and energetic…” His apostolic labors generated few converts, but there was some progress nonetheless. Like so many missionaries, Peter had to overcome the counter-witness given by fellow European Christians trading in the area who cared little about their religion. In 1841 when the local Chieftain’s son asked to be baptized, the Chieftain sent his son-in-law, Musumusu, to stop the conversion. A fight within the family ensued. Musumusu then went to Father Chanel’s home and clubbed the priest with an axe until his blood puddled in the dirt. Father Peter was not yet forty years old when his missionary dream was fulfilled in martyrdom, giving Oceania its patron saint.

    The island of Futuna, in which our saint had such mixed success, converted completely and totally a few years after Saint Peter’s martyrdom. Musumusu himself repented of his crime and was baptized. The island is, even in modern times, almost one hundred percent Catholic. An impressive church is the heart and center of every small town. Saint Peter Chanel’s body now rests in a large Basilica in the city of Poi. The beauty and smell of tropical flowers always adorn the church. And on the night of April 27, the vigil of his Feast Day, hundreds of Futunians sleep outside the Basilica waiting for the festivities of their saint’s feast day to begin the next morning. The brief life and sudden death of Saint Peter Chanel is powerful proof of how the blood of the martyrs waters the seeds of the Church. One sows, another reaps, and still another enjoys the harvest.

    Saint Peter Chanel, by your suffering and death, you converted a people. You were fearless in adventuring far from home to preach the Gospel. May your blood, spilled so long ago, continue to infuse all missionaries with courage and perseverance in their labors.
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    6 mins
  • April 28: Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, Priest

    April 28: Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, Priest
    Apr 26 2024
    April 28: Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort, Priest
    1673–1716
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of preachers

    Intensely in love with God, his flame burned hot but not long

    The English writer Graham Greene grew up Anglican with the typical anti-Catholic biases of his twentieth-century generation. One of those biases firmly held that Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary and thus deflected toward Christ’s mother the glory due to Him alone. But when Greene started dating an educated Catholic girl, she taught him that Catholics rendered latria (worship) to God, dulia (praise) to the saints, and hyperdulia (an abundance of praise) to Mary. It made sense. Worship is given to God alone. Praise is given to the saints. And Mary is rendered a unique intensity of praise in recognition of her unique role in salvation history. Graham was convinced. For these and other reasons, he entered the Church. He went on to become a well-known novelist on Catholic themes, in part because a teenage girl he once dated knew some basic theology.

    Throughout the centuries since the Reformation, Catholics have been accused of granting to Mary what is due only to God. This false accusation is more apparent than real. But its appearance sometimes even bothers Catholics. As a young man, the future Pope Saint John Paul II wondered whether he gave Mary too central a role in his devotions, prayer, and reading. But the writings of today’s saint, Louis de Montfort, helped the young Pole place Marian devotion in its wider theological context. Pope Saint John Paul II routinely gave thanks to Saint Louis de Montfort’s book, True Devotion to Mary, for helping him develop a more mature Marian spirituality. The Pope even borrowed from de Montfort the Latin Totus Tuus as his papal motto. De Montfort had written to the Virgin, “I am all yours, and all that is mine belongs to you.” When we honor Mary, Mary honors God along with us.

    Louis Grignion de Montfort was never not in love with God. He was one of eighteen children born to his parents. Eleven of them are saints—Louis and ten of his siblings who died as babies shortly after their baptisms. Even as a child, Louis was devoted to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. He studied under the Jesuits as a teen and then attended theology courses at St. Sulpice in Paris. He was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-seven. He at first wanted to become a missionary, like so many ardent French priests of his time. But a spiritual director advised against it, and Louis became a hospital chaplain, preached missions, and served as a confessor. Father Louis was interpersonally awkward and ardent to the point of making others uncomfortable, all of which confined his priestly ministry to non-traditional forums. He also lived radical poverty, owning nothing, carrying no money, and even abandoning his family name, Grignion, to be known only by his town, Montfort.

    Louis de Montfort’s intense devotional life, theatrical preaching style, moral uprightness, and visions of Mary, the angels and satan, were interpreted as holy foolishness by many in the Church who wished him ill. The Jansenists, an ultra-rigorist branch of the French Church, particularly despised his preaching on God’s love and mercy. Saint Louis’ itinerant life ended due to physical exhaustion at the young age of forty-three. He practiced such extreme physical penances that his body was well prepared for the grave when he died. He was a priest only sixteen years. It is possible that his life and writings did more good for future ages than they did for his own. His writings on Mary, in particular, were rediscovered and published in the nineteenth century, leading to his canonization in 1947 and to his wide fame in the Church. Our saint died with a statue of the Virgin Mary in one arm and a crucifix given him by the Pope in the other arm. He felt attacked by the devil in his last agony and yelled at him, “You attack me in vain. I stand between Jesus and Mary. I have finished my course. I shall sin no more.” He was buried, per his request, under an altar dedicated to his Lady…to Our Lady.

    Saint Louis de Montfort, we ask your intercession before God in Heaven to inflame in all hearts a fire that burns like yours with love for the Holy Trinity. Help all who read your works to profit from their wisdom and so grow closer to God’s mother.
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    6 mins
  • April 24: Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr

    April 24: Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr
    Apr 24 2024
    April 24: Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr
    1577–1622
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of lawyers & the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples

    His murderers cut a leg off his dead body in retaliation for his many journeys

    To understand the historical and religious context for today’s saint, consider an event that took place fifty years before he was born. On January 5, 1527, in Zurich, Switzerland, a young man named Felix Mantz was taken hold of by local officials, had his hands and feet bound to a pole, and was rowed out in a boat to the deepest part of the local river. With a large crowd watching from the shores, he was tossed overboard into the dark water and immediately drowned to death. Felix Mantz’s crime? He believed only adults should be baptized, not children. Mantz was not killed by the Inquisition, the Pope, the local Bishop, or a Catholic mob. His cruel drowning, which mocked his views on baptism, was perpetrated by dissenting Protestants.

    The Protestants of Zurich believed in infant baptism while rejecting all other Catholic beliefs. And they allowed absolutely no dissenting from their own dissenting from Catholicism. Felix Mantz was the first Protestant martyred by other Protestants. Heretics killing other heretics for not conforming to their heresy captures the chaos, intellectual dissonance, and cultural confusion in some regions of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. This total meltdown is known as the Reformation. Today’s saint, Fidelis of Sigmaringen, walked right into this still-raging storm of violence in the early seventeenth century, suffering a fate essentially similar to the Protestant martyr Felix Mantz, though for exactly contrary reasons.

    Its very existence challenged by Protestantism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism swelled like a great ocean, lifting up a sea of scholars, monks, abbots, nuns, priests, and bishops who overwhelmed Europe with their teaching and witness to the perennial truths of Jesus Christ. Saint Fidelis was just one priest-monk among that great tide of the Counter-Reformation, but he was one who became a martyr. He was born as Mark Roy in the town of Sigmaringen in Prussia, in Northern Germany, and raised in the Faith. He earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1603 and degrees in civil and canon law in 1611, yet he became disillusioned with his career in law. He had always been an exceptionally ardent Catholic, so he entered the Capuchin Order and was ordained a priest in his thirties. He took the religious name of “faithful”—in Latin, “Fidelis.” Fidelis was intelligent, disciplined, and ascetic. His abundant human and spiritual gifts were amplified and sharpened when put in the service of the King of Kings, and he rose to important positions of leadership within the Capuchin Order.

    Having become locally well known for his fervor and holiness, Father Fidelis was appointed by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome to preach, teach, and write in present day Switzerland, with the goal of exhorting the people to return to the embrace of the Mother Church which had given them birth. Father Fidelis desired martyrdom, and it came for him soon enough. In Switzerland, his zeal and example brought some prominent Calvinists back to the true Faith. This made him an official enemy of the Calvinists who controlled much of that land.

    One day, when traveling between two towns where he was preaching and saying Mass, Fidelis was confronted along the road by Calvinist soldiers led by a minister. Fidelis had recently caused an uproar in a nearby town and had barely escaped with his life. The soldiers knew exactly who was before them. They demanded that he abandon his Faith. Fidelis answered, "I was sent to rebuke you, not to embrace your heresy. The Catholic religion is the faith of all ages, I do not fear death." His skull was then cracked open with the butt of a sword, his body punctured with stabs, and his left leg hacked off in retribution for the numerous journeys he had made into Protestant territory. Saint Fidelis died at the age of forty-five, ten years after entering religious life. He was canonized in 1746. Over three hundred miracles were attributed to his intercession during his canonization process. Saint Fidelis was faithful in life and continues to intercede faithfully in death.

    Saint Fidelis, through your intercession before the throne of God, we ask you to fortify all teachers and preachers of the faith to remain faithful to the truth, even to the point of embarrassment, inconvenience, suffering, and death to self.
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    6 mins
Spirituality Ministry & Evangelism
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