Martyrs of September

Feast date: Sep 02

The September Martyrs are a group of 191 faithful Christians who were martyred at the hands of the French Revolution on September 2 and 3, 1792.

After refusing to take an oath in support of the civil consititution of the clergy, an act condemned by the Vatican which placed Catholic priests under the authority and control of the state, these priests and religious brothers and sisters were imprisoned in a Carmelite convent and then massacred in the space of two days by bloodthirsty revolutionary mobs.

They were beatified on October 17, 1926 by Pope Pius XI.

 

Among the martyrs were Louis and Francis de la Rochefoucauld, the bishops of Saintes and Beauvais respectively, Apollinaris of Posat, John Francis Burte, Charles de la Calmette, Augustine Ambrose Chevreux, Andre Grasset de Saint Sauveur, John Mary de Lau, Severin Girault, Julian Massey, and Louis Barreau de la Touche.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


Saint Beatrice da Silva Meneses

Feast date: Sep 01

St. Beatrice was born to Portuguese nobility in Cuerta, Portugal, in 1424.  She was the daughter of the Count of Viana, and the sister of Saint Amadeus of Portugal. She was raised in the household of the future Queen Isabel of Portugal and spent some time in her royal court in Castile following the Queen’s marriage to John II.

She soon got tired of the empty life at court and joined a Cistercian convent in Toledo.  She lived at the convent until 1484, when she answered a summons from God to found a religious order. The Congregation of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was begun, and with the help of the Queen, she founded a house outside of Toledo where she lived and served as superior until her death  on September 1, 1490.

Saint Beatrice was canonized in 1976 by Pope Paul VI.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


Saint Aristides

Feast date: Aug 31

Not much is known about the life of St. Aristides, excpet that he lived during the second century and was an avid confessor of the faith and Athenian philosopher. He wrote an Apologia for Christianity, which he presented to Emperor Hadrian in 125. His text was included in a work by Sts. Barlaam and Josaphat.

His feast day is August 31.

Printed with permission from Catholic-Defense.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


Saint Jeanne Jugan

Feast date: Aug 30

On Aug. 30, the Catholic Church celebrates Saint Jeanne Jugan, also known as Sister Mary of the Cross. During the 19th century, she founded the Little Sisters of the Poor with the goal of imitating Christ’s humility through service to elderly people in need.

In his homily for her canonization in October 2009, Pope Benedict XVI praised St. Jeanne as “a beacon to guide our societies” toward a renewed love for those in old age. The Pope recalled how she “lived the mystery of love” in a way that remains “ever timely while so many elderly people are suffering from numerous forms of poverty and solitude and are sometimes also abandoned by their families.”

Born on Oct. 25, 1792 in a port city of the French region of Brittany, Jeanne Jugan grew up during the political and religious upheavals of the French Revolution. Four years after she was born, her father was lost at sea. Her mother struggled to provide for Jeanne and her three siblings, while also providing them secretly with religious instruction amid the anti-Catholic persecutions of the day.

Jeanne worked as a shepherdess, and later as a domestic servant. At age 18, and again six years later, she declined two marriage proposals from the same man. She told her mother that God had other plans, and was calling her to “a work which is not yet founded.”

At age 25, the young woman joined the Third Order of St. John Eudes, a religious association for laypersons founded during the 17th century. Jeanne worked as a nurse in the town of Saint-Servan for six years, but had to leave her position due to health troubles. Afterward she worked for 12 years as the servant of a fellow member of the third order, until the woman’s death in 1835.

During 1839, a year of economic hardship in Saint-Servan, Jeanne was sharing an apartment with an older woman and an orphaned young lady. It was during the winter of this year that Jeanne encountered Anne Chauvin, an elderly woman who was blind, partially paralyzed, and had no one to care for her.

Jeanne carried Anne home to her apartment and took her in from that day forward, letting the woman have her bed while Jeanne slept in the attic. She soon took in two more old women in need of help, and by 1841 she had rented a room to provide housing for a dozen elderly people. The following year, she acquired an unused convent building that could house 40 of them.

During the 1840s, many other young women joined Jeanne in her mission of service to the elderly poor. By begging in the streets, the foundress was able to establish four more homes for their beneficiaries by the end of the decade. By 1850, over 100 women had joined the congregation that had become known as the Little Sisters of the Poor.

However, Jeanne Jugan – known in religious life as Sister Mary of the Cross – had been forced out of her leadership role by Father Auguste Le Pailleur, the priest who had been appointed superior general of the congregation. In an apparent effort to suppress her true role as foundress, the superior general ordered her into retirement and a life of obscurity for 27 years.

During these years, she served the order through her prayers and by accepting the trial permitted by God. At the time of her death on Aug. 29, 1879, she was not known to have founded the order, which by then had 2,400 members serving internationally. Fr. Le Pailleur, however, was eventually investigated and disciplined, and St. Jeanne Jugan came to be acknowledged as their foundress.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


The Beheading of John the Baptist

Feast date: Aug 29

On this day, the universal Church marks the beheading of John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus. As an adult, he lived as a hermit in the wilderness. After the Spirit inspired him, he went about preaching that the people should repent of their sins and be baptized in order to prepare for the Messiah.

Herod imprisoned John because he had condemned Herod for committing adultery by living with his brother’s wife, Herodias.

 At he celebration for Herod on his birthday, the daughter of Herodias danced for him, and Herod was so impressed that he said he would offer her anything she liked. She consulted with Herodias who told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod did not want to kill John for fear or what his follwers might do, but because of his promise to the girl he could not refuse, and so John was beheaded.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


St. Augustine

Feast date: Aug 28

Today, August 28, the Church honors St. Augustine. St. Augustine was born at the town of Thagaste (now Souk-Ahras in modern day Algeria) on November 13, 354 and grew to become one the most significant and influential thinkers in the history of the Catholic Church. His teachings were the foundation of Christian doctrine for a millennium.

The story of his life, up until his conversion, is written in the autobiographical Confessions, the most intimate and well-known glimpse into an individual’s soul ever written, as well as a fascinating philosophical, theological, mystical, poetic and literary work.

Augustine, though being brought up in early childhood as a Christian, lived a dissolute life of revelry and sin, and soon drifted away from the Church – thinking that he wasn’t necessarily leaving Christ, of whose name he acknowledges “I kept it in the recesses of my heart; and all that presented itself to me without that Divine name, though it might be elegant, well written, and even replete with truth, did not altogether carry me away” (Confessions, I, iv).

He went to study in Carthage and became well-known in the city for his brilliant mind and rhetorical skills and sought a career as an orator or lawyer. But he also discovered and fell in love with philosophy at the age of 19, a love he pursued with great vehemence.

He was attracted to Manichaeanism at this time, after its devotees had promised him that they had scientific answers to the mystery of nature, could disprove the Scriptures, and could explain the problem of evil. Augustine became a follower for nine years, learning all there was to learn in it before rejecting it as incoherent and fraudulent.

He went to Rome and then Milan in 386 where he met Saint Ambrose, the bishop and Doctor of the Church, whose sermons inspired him to look for the truth he had always sought in the faith he had rejected. He received baptism and soon after, his mother, Saint Monica, died with the knowledge that all she had hoped for in this world had been fulfilled.

He returned to Africa, to his hometown of Tagaste, “having now cast off from himself the cares of the world, he lived for God with those who accompanied him, in fasting, prayers, and good works, meditating on the law of the Lord by day and by night.”

On a visit to Hippo he was proclaimed priest and then bishop against his will. He later accepted it as the will of God and spent the rest of his life as the pastor of the North African town, where he spent much time refuting the writings of heretics. 

Augustine also wrote, The City of God, against the pagans who charged that the fall of the Roman empire, which was taking place at the hands of the Vandals, was due to the spread of Christianity. 

On August 28, 430, as Hippo was under siege by the Vandals, Augustine died, at the age of 76. His legacy continues to deeply shape the face of the Church to this day.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


St. Monica

Feast date: Aug 27

On August 27, one day before the feast of her son St. Augustine, the Catholic Church honors St. Monica, whose holy example and fervent intercession led to one of the most dramatic conversions in Church history.

Monica was born into a Catholic family in 332, in the North African city of Tagaste located in present-day Algeria. She was raised by a maidservant who taught her the virtues of obedience and temperance. While still relatively young, she married Patricius, a Roman civil servant with a bad temper and a disdain for his wife’s religion.

Patricius’ wife dealt patiently with his distressing behavior, which included infidelity to their marriage vows. But she experienced a greater grief when he would not allow their three children – Augustine, Nagivius, and Perpetua – to receive Baptism. When Augustine, the oldest, became sick and was in danger of death, Patricius gave consent for his Baptism, but withdrew it when he recovered.

Monica’s long-suffering patience and prayers eventually helped Patricius to see the error of his ways, and he was baptized into the Church one year before his death in 371. Her oldest son, however, soon embraced a way of life that brought her further grief, as he fathered a child out of wedlock in 372. One year later, he began to practice the occult religion of Manichaeism.

In her distress and grief, Monica initially shunned her oldest son. However, she experienced a mysterious dream that strengthened her hope for Augustine’s soul, in which a messenger assured her: “Your son is with you.” After this experience, which took place around 377, she allowed him back into her home, and continued to beg God for his conversion.

But this would not take place for another nine years. In the meantime, Monica sought the advice of local clergy, wondering what they might do to persuade her son away from the Manichean heresy. One bishop, who had once belonged to that sect himself, assured Monica that it was “impossible that the son of such tears should perish.”

These tears and prayers intensified when Augustine, at age 29, abandoned Monica without warning as she passed the night praying in a chapel. Without saying goodbye to his mother, Augustine boarded a ship bound for Rome. Yet even this painful event would serve God’s greater purpose, as Augustine left to become a teacher in the place where he was destined to become a Catholic.

Under the influence of the bishop St. Ambrose of Milan, Augustine renounced the teaching of the Manichees around 384. Monica followed her son to Milan, and drew encouragement from her son’s growing interest in the saintly bishop’s preaching. After three years of struggle against his own desires and perplexities, Augustine succumbed to God’s grace and was baptized in 387.

Shortly before her death, Monica shared a profound mystical experience of God with Augustine, who chronicled the event in his “Confessions.” Finally, she told him: “Son, for myself I have no longer any pleasure in anything in this life. Now that my hopes in this world are satisfied, I do not know what more I want here or why I am here.”

“The only thing I ask of you both,” she told Augustine and his brother Nagivius, “is that you make remembrance of me at the altar of the Lord wherever you are.”

St. Monica died at age 56, in the year 387. In modern times, she has become the inspiration for the St. Monica Sodality, which encourages prayer and penance among Catholics whose children have left the faith.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


St. Jeanne Elizabeth des Bichier des Anges

Feast date: Aug 26

St. Jeanne was born July 1773 at La Blanc, France and died August 26, 1838. She was canonized in 1947 by Pope Pius XII.

Born to nobility and educated in a convent school, Jeanne Elizabeth witnessed closely and was personally affected by the events of the French Revolution which shook France when she was just 16 years old.

Upon the death of her father, she moved to La Guimetiere with her mother, and in 1796, realizing that she needed to do something to defend the Church and keep the faith alive amidst the attacks of the revolutionaries, she decided to begin a ministry of teaching and serving the poor.

She gathered groups of faithful in the town – which was at this point without a priest or community of religious – and organized meetings of prayer, studying of the Scriptures, and singing hymns.

She entered a Carmelite convent upon her mother’s death in 1804, and later the Society of Providence, with the advice of Saint Andrew Fournet, an underground priest who was forced to remain clandestine because he refused to make a pledge of allegiance to the government of the new republic.

He realized that she was the one God had called to lead a community of women he had gathered, and she cofounded the Daughters of the Cross with him in 1807 to care for the sick and poor, and to teach the faith.

By the time of her death in 1838, the community had more than 60 houses all over France.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


St. Louis IX of France

Feast date: Aug 25

St. Louis was born to King Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile, at Poissy on April 25th 1215. Louis was made King at only 11 years of age, and was the father of 11 children. He led an exemplary life, bearing constantly in mind his mother’s words: “I would rather see you dead at my feet than guilty of a mortal sin.” His biographers have written of the long hours he spent in prayer, fasting, and penance, without the knowlege of his people.

The French king was an avid lover of justice, who took great measures to ensure that the process of arbitration was carried out properly. All of 13th century Christian Europe willingly looked upon him as an international judge.

He was renowned for his charity. “The peace and blessings of the realm come to us through the poor,” he would say. Beggars were fed from his table; he ate their leavings, washed their feet, ministered to the wants of the lepers, and daily fed over one hundred poor. He founded many hospitals and houses: the House of the Felles-Dieu for reformed prostitutes, the Quinze-Vingt for 300 blind men (1254),  as well as hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, Compiégne.

St. Louis was a patron of architecture. The Sainte Chappelle, an architectural gem, was constructed in his reign as a reliquary for the Crown of Thorns, and it was under his patronage that Robert of Sorbonne founded the “Collège de la Sorbonne,” which became the seat of the theological faculty of Paris, the most illustrious seat of learning in the medieval period.

St. Louis died of the plague near Tunis, August 25th, 1270, during the Second Crusade.  He is the patron of masons and builders.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith


St. Bartholomew, Apostle

Feast date: Aug 24

Saint Bartholomew is one of the Twelve Apostles, mentioned sixth in the three Gospel lists (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14), and seventh in the list of Acts (1:13). The name (Bartholomaios) means “son of Talmai” which was an ancient Hebrew name.

Besides being listed as an Apostle, he is not otherwise mentioned in the New Testament, at least not under the name Bartholomew: many ancient writers, and Catholic tradition have identified Bartholomew as Nathaniel in the Gospel of John (John 1:45-51, and 21:2).

The Gospel passage read at Mass on the feast of Saint Bartholomew is precisely this passage from John (1:45-51) where Nathaniel is introduced to Jesus by his friend Phillip, and Jesus says of him “Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him (1:47).”

We are presented with the Apostle’s character in this brief and beautiful dialogue with the Lord Jesus. He is a good Jew, honest and innocent, a just man, who devotes much time to quiet reflection and prayer – “under the fig tree (1:48)” – and has been awaiting the Messiah, the Holy One of God.

At Jesus’ mention that “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you (1:48),” Nathaniel responded “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel (1:49)!” 

Being “a true child of Israel,” Nathaniel was a man well-read in the Scriptures and knew what they said of the Messiah and where he would come from. This is why he is skeptical of Phillip’s claim that Jesus is the Messiah, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth (1:46)?”

But Nathaniel was lacking “duplicity” – that is, his heart was undivided, his intentions pure – his openness to reality was always ready to recognize and surrender to the truth when he encountered it. He remained open to his friend Phillip’s invitation to “Come and see (1:46).”

In encountering Jesus and hearing His words, he found himself face to face with the Truth Himself, and, like John the Baptist’s leap in his mother’s womb at the Lord’s presence, Nathaniel’s words lept out of his own heart in a clear and simple confession of faith, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”

Jesus, in Matthew 5:8, says, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” In Nathaniel we have an example of the pure man who sees – recognizes –  God when confronted with Him, and on seeing Him believes in Him, and upon believing in Him, follows Him.

Nothing is known for sure about the life of Nathaniel/Bartholomew after the Ascension of Jesus, but tradition holds that he preached in the East and died a martyr’s death in Armenia, being flayed alive for having won converts to the Lord Jesus.

Daily Reading

 

Daily Meditation

 

More...

The Word Among Us

Regnum Christi

One Bread, One Body

Evangeli

Living Faith