St. Bernard de Clairvaux

Feast date: Aug 20

On August 20 the Church celebrates the feast day of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a Doctor of the Church thanks to his writings and sermons which greatly influenced Europe during the 12th century, and his numerous efforts which helped to avoid a schism in the Church in 1130.

Born in 1090, Bernard spent his early years near Dijon, France before leaving to joining the Cistercians at the age of 22. He was well educated and so passionate about his faith that he convinced his brothers, his uncle, and many of his friends to join him at the abbey.

Bernard first entered the abbey at Citeaux, but only three years later was sent with 12 other monks to establish another monastery in the Diocese of Champagne. The monastery came to be known Clairvaux (Valley of Light). He led the other monks there as the abbot for the rest of his life.

St. Bernard knew how to harmonize the contemplative life with important missionary work, as the Pope noted in 2006. However, the saint’s strict observance of silence and contemplation did not impede him from living a very intense apostolic life. His humility and his commitment to tame his impetuous temperament were exemplary, he said.

The Pope also highlighted the saint’s focus on the truth that God, who is love, created mankind out of love and that man’s salvation consists of adhering firmly to Divine love, revealed through the crucified and risen Christ.

“The richness of St. Bernard’s preaching and his theology were not in pursuing new paths,” the Pope said, “but in succeeding to propose the truth of the faith in a clear and incisive way so as to fascinate the listener and lead the person to prayer.”

St. Bernard is also well-known for his Marian devotion, especially in using and promoting the “Memorare” prayer.  

He became widely known throughout Europe and was consulted by Popes and political leaders. He died in 1153 and was canonized less than three decades later in 1174.

In August 2008, Pope Benedict spoke of the saint during his weekly general audience.  He recalled that Pope Pius VIII labeled the “Honey-Sweet Doctor” for his eloquence and that he traveled throughout Europe defending the Christian faith. 

Benedict XVI added, “He was also remembered as a Doctor of Mariology, not because he wrote extensively on Our Lady, but because he understood her essential role in the Church, presenting her as the perfect model of the monastic life and of every other form of the Christian life.”

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St. John Eudes

Feast date: Aug 19

St. John Eudes was a French missionary and the founder of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity, and was also the author of the liturgical worship of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. 

St. John was born at Ri, France on November 14th, 1601.  At the age of fourteen he took a vow of chastity and since the time he was a child he tried to live in imitation of the Lord Jesus. When he was ordained a priest in 1625, at the age of 24, he was immmediately thrust into the service of victims of the plague, whom he cared for at great risk to his own life. He also began preaching missions and was known as the greatest preacher of his age, preaching missions all over France, especially throughout Normandy.

In 1641 he founded the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Refuge, to provide a refuge for prostitutes.  In 1643 he founded the Society of Jesus and Mary for the education of priests and for missionary work.

He was also instrumental in encouraging devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Holy Heart of Mary, writing the first book ever on the devotion to the Sacred Hearts, “Le Coeur Admirable de la Très Sainte Mère de Dieu”. He died at Caen, on August 19th, 1680.

His virtues were declared heroic by Leo XIII, on January 6th, 1903. The miracles proposed for his beatification were approved by Pius X, May 3, 1908, and he was beatified April 25th, 1909.  He was canonized in 1925.

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St. Helena

Feast date: Aug 18

Not much is known about Saint Helena but it is probable that she was born in the middle of the third century in Asia Minor. She worked as a stable maid as a young woman, according to Saint Anselm.

Helena later married a young Roman official, Constantius Chlorus, who took her as wife despite their difference in social status. In around the year 270 she gave birth to their first son, Constantine.

Constantius quickly rose in the ranks of the Roman military and due to political reasons he was forced to repudiate Helena and marry another. Helena remained at a distance as she watched her son rise in the court of Diocletian.

In 305, Constatius, now Augustus, and Constantine went to Britain to fight against the Picts. Constantine became emperor when his father died unexpectedly at York. As the new emperor, his first action was to recall his mother Helena.

Shortly after her son’s accession, Helena converted to Christianity. Her faith moved her to care for the poor by providing for their needs through generous almsgiving. She also worked to liberate prisoners and those sent to the mines or into exile.

Constantine’s reign took a downward turn when he ordered the death of his son and that of his second wife. The family tragedy pushed Helena to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 326. There she ordered the construction of the Basilicas of the Nativity in Bethlehem and of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. The work was overseen by Helena whose faith was rewarded when the True Cross was discovered. The identity of the Cross was confirmed when a dead man was laid on the wood and was miraculously restored to life. The three nails from the Crucifixion were given by Helena to Constantine.

Helena died in an unknown location in 329. Constantine had her body brought back to Rome.

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St. Hyacinth

Feast date: Aug 17

St. Hyacinth was one of the first members of the Dominicans (the Order of Preachers) and the “apostle of the North”, and is also called the “Apostle of Poland.”

Hyacinth was born into nobility in 1185 at the castle of Lanka, at Kamin, in Silesia, Poland, and received an impressive education, becoming a Doctor of Law and Divinity before traveling to Rome with his uncle, Ivo Konski, the Bishop of Krakow.

In Rome he met St. Dominic and decided to join the Order of Preachers immediately, receiving his habit from Dominic himself in 1220.

After his novitiate he made his religious profession, and was made superior of the little band of missionaries sent to Poland to preach. In Poland the new preachers were well received and their sermons produced a deep conversion in the people.

Hyacinth also founded communities in Sandomir, Kracow, and at Plocko on the Vistula in Moravia. He extended his missionary work through Prussia, Pomerania, and Lithuania. Then, crossing the Baltic Sea, he preached in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Russia, reaching the shores of the Black Sea.

On his return to Krakow he died, on August 15, 1257.

Some of his relics can be found at the Dominican church in Paris.

St. Hyacinth is a patron of Poland.

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St. Stephen of Hungary

Feast date: Aug 16

On Aug. 16, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast day of King Saint Stephen of Hungary, the monarch who led his country to embrace the Christian faith during the 11th century.

Before the future saint’s birth in 975, his mother, the duchess Sarolt, is said to have received a vision in which the original Saint Stephen – the Church’s first martyr – appeared telling her she would bear a son who would evangelize their land.

Together with her husband, the Hungarian duke Geza, Sarolt is believed to have been converted and baptized by the bishop Saint Adalbert of Prague. The same saint baptized their son Vaik in 985, giving him the name of Stephen.

Geza had desired to convert the Hungarians to the Catholic faith, a passion shared by Stephen once he reached adulthood and succeeded him in power. After conclusively defeating an alliance of rival pagan nobility, he used their acquired wealth to build a monastery, and invited clergy to convert the people.

Stephen established laws favoring Christianity over paganism, and sent an emissary to Rome with a request for the Pope to proclaim him as king. Pope Sylvester II accepted the request, sending him a crown and a gold processional cross, while also giving Stephen certain religious privileges.

He showed great diligence as king, while devoting the rest of his time to his religious duties – including charity toward the poor and sick, as well as the worship of God – and to his household. Gisela, Stephen’s wife, was the sister of the ruler later canonized as the Holy Roman Emperor Saint Henry II.

Greatly devoted to the Virgin Mary, Stephen had several churches built in her honor both in Hungary and outside the kingdom. Her intercession is credited with preventing a war between Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire under Conrad II, and stopping an assassination plot against Stephen himself.

The Hungarian king also established a monastery in Jerusalem, and set up institutions to aid pilgrims in other major cities. Stephen counted saints among his friends and correspondents, and fulfilled the Pope’s charge to use his royal authority for the good of the Church.

Suffering came to the king, however, when only one of his children survived to adulthood. Stephen’s only living son Emeric received a strong Catholic upbringing, and was expected to succeed his father. But Emeric died before Stephen, after a hunting accident in 1031.

Emeric was later canonized as a saint in his own right, and Stephen eventually came to rejoice that his son had been permitted to enter God’s presence before him. The king’s final years, however, were marked by illness as well as a succession dispute among his relatives.

In 1038, on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Stephen delivered his final words to leaders of the Church and state, telling them to protect and spread the Catholic faith.

To the Virgin Mary, the king directed one of his final prayers: “To thee, O Queen of heaven, and to thy guardianship, I commend the holy Church, all the bishops and the clergy, the whole kingdom, its rulers and inhabitants; but before all, I commend my soul to thy care.”

St. Stephen of Hungary died on Aug. 15, 1038. He was buried alongside his son St. Emeric, and the two were canonized together in 1083.

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The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Feast date: Aug 15

Today, Catholics and many other Christians celebrate the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This significant feast day recalls the spiritual and physical departure of the mother of Jesus Christ from the earth, when both her soul and her body were taken into the presence of God.

Venerable Pope Pius XII confirmed this belief about the Virgin Mary as the perennial teaching of the Church when he defined it formally as a dogma of Catholic faith in 1950, invoking papal infallibility to proclaim, “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

His Apostolic Constitution “Munificentissimus Deus” (Most Bountiful God), which defined the dogma,

contained the Pontiff’s accounts of many longstanding traditions by which the Church has celebrated the Assumption throughout its history.

The constitution also cited testimonies from the early Church fathers on the subject, and described the history of theological reflection on many Biblical passages which are seen as indicating that Mary was assumed into heaven following her death.

Although the bodily assumption of Mary is not explicitly recorded in Scripture, Catholic tradition identifies her with the “woman clothed with the sun” who is described in the 12th chapter of the Book of Revelation.

The passage calls that woman’s appearance “a great sign” which “appeared in heaven,” indicating that she is the mother of the Jewish Messiah and has “the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” Accordingly, Catholic iconography of the Western tradition often depicts the Virgin Mary’s assumption into heaven in this manner.

Eastern Christians have also traditionally held Mary’s assumption into heaven as an essential component of their faith. Pius XII cited several early Byzantine liturgical texts, as well as the eighth-century Arab Christian theologian St. John of Damascus, in his own authoritative definition of her assumption.

“It was fitting,” St. John of Damascus wrote in a sermon on the assumption, “that she, who had kept her virginity intact in childbirth, should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death,” and “that she, who had carried the creator as a child at her breast, should dwell in the divine tabernacles.”

In Eastern Christian tradition, the same feast is celebrated on the same calendar date, although typically known as the Dormition (falling asleep) of Mary. Eastern Catholic celebration of the Dormition is preceded by a two-week period of fasting which is similar to Lent. Pius XII, in “Munificentissimus Deus,” mentioned this same fasting period as belonging to the traditional patrimony of Western Christians as well.

The feast of the Assumption is always a Holy Day of Obligation for both Roman and Eastern-rite Catholics, on which they are obliged to attend Mass or Divine Liturgy.

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Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Feast date: Aug 14

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest, missionary and martyr, is celebrated throughout the Church today, August 14.

The saint died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, during World War II, and is remembered as a “martyr of charity” for dying in place of another prisoner who had a wife and children. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982.

St. Maximilian is also celebrated for his missionary work, his evangelistic use of modern means of communication, and for his lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception.

All these aspects of St. Maximilian’s life converged in his founding of the Militia Immaculata. The worldwide organization continues St. Maximilian Kolbe’s mission of bringing individuals and societies into the Catholic Church, through dedication to the Virgin Mary.

St. Maximilian, according to several biographies, was personally called by the Virgin Mary, both to his holy life and to his eventual martyrdom. As an impulsive and badly-behaved child, he prayed to her for guidance, and later described how she miraculously appeared to him holding two crowns: one was white, representing purity, the other red, for martyrdom.

When he was asked to choose between these two destinies, the troublesome child and future saint said he wanted both. Radically changed by the incident, he entered the minor seminary of the Conventual Franciscans at age 13, in 1907.

At age 20 he made his solemn vows as a Franciscan, earning a doctorate in philosophy the next year. Soon after, however, he developed chronic tuberculosis, which eventually destroyed one of his lungs and weakened the other.

On October 16, 1917, in response to anti-Catholic demonstrations by Italian Freemasons, Friar Maximilian led six other Franciscans in Rome to form the association they called the Militia Immaculata. The group’s founding coincided almost exactly with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the Marian apparitions at Fatima, Portugal.

As a Franciscan priest, Fr. Maximilian returned to work in Poland during the 1920s. There, he promoted the Catholic faith through newspapers and magazines which eventually reached an extraordinary circulation, published from a monastery so large it was called the “City of the Immaculata.”

In 1930 he moved to Japan, and had established a Japanese Catholic press by 1936, along with a similarly ambitious monastery.

That year, however, he returned to Poland for the last time. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Fr. Kolbe was arrested. Briefly freed during 1940, he published one last issue of the Knight of the Immaculata before his final arrest and transportation to Auschwitz in 1941.

At the beginning of August that year, 10 prisoners were sentenced to death by starvation in punishment for another inmate’s escape. Moved by one man’s lamentation for his wife and children, Fr. Kolbe volunteered to die in his place.

Survivors of the camp testified that the starving prisoners could be heard praying and singing hymns, led by the priest who had volunteered for an agonizing death. After two weeks, on the night before the Church’s feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the camp officials decided to hasten Fr. Kolbe’s death, injecting him with carbolic acid.

St. Maximilian Kolbe’s body was cremated by the camp officials on the feast of the Assumption. He had stated years earlier: “I would like to be reduced to ashes for the cause of the Immaculata, and may this dust be carried over the whole world, so that nothing would remain.”

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Saint Maximus

Feast date: Aug 13

“To harbor no envy, no anger, no resentment against an offender is still not to have charity for him. It is possible, without any charity, to avoid rendering evil for evil. But to render, spontaneously, good for evil – such belongs to a perfect spiritual love.” – Saint Maximus.

St. Maximus is also known as “the Theologian”, and as “Maximus Confessor”. He was born in Constantinople around the year 580, and died in exile August 13, 662. He worked with Pope Martin I against the Monothelist heresy, and attended the Lateran Council of 649. He was one of the chief doctors of the theology of the Incarnation and of ascetic mysticism, and remarkable as a witness to the respect for the papacy held by the Greek Church in his day.

This great man came from a noble family of Constantinople. He became first secretary to Emperor Heraclius, who greatly valued him, but despite the favor of the emperpr, Maximus resigned to the world and gave himself up to contemplation in a monastery at Chrysopolis, opposite Constantinople. He became abbot there- but seems to have left this retreat on account of its insecurity from hostile attacks.

Falsely accused of treason due to his defense of the orthodox faith, he was arrested and forcibly returned to Constantinople, where he spent several miserable years in prison, and at age 82 received his final sentence:

He was anathematized, and with him St. Martin and St. Sophronius. The prefect was ordered to beat them, to cut out their tongues and lop off their right hands, to exhibit them thus mutilated in every quarter of the city, and to send them to perpetual exile and imprisonment. A long letter of the Roman Anastasius tells us of their sufferings on the journey to Colchis where they were imprisoned in different forts. He tells us that St. Maxirmus foresaw in a vision the day of his death, and that miraculous lights appeared nightly at his tomb. The monk Anastasius had died in the preceding month; the Roman lived on until 666.

St. Maximus died for orthodoxy and obedience to Rome. He has always been considered one of the chief theological writers of the Greek Church, and has obtained the honorable title of the Theologian. He may be said to complete and close the series of patristic writings on the Incarnation, as they are summed up by St. John of Damascus.

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Saint Pontian and Saint Hippolytus

Feast date: Aug 13

St. Pontian became Pope in the year 230. Five years later, after Pope Urban I, he was exiled to the mines of the Italian island of Sardinia during a period of Christian persecution. There, he decided to resign from his papal office and died a martyr for the faith.

Hippolytus was a priest and well-respected theologian in the early third century. But in 217 he rebelled against the Church when Callistus became Pope. He, too, was exiled in 235 to the Sardinian mines, where he met Pontian. Pontian helped Hippolytus reconcile with the Church bevore he died, and Hippolytus, too, died as a martyr. His writings were important, including “A Refutation of All Heresies”, “Song of Songs”, and “The Apostolic Tradition”.

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Blessed Pope Innocent XI

Feast date: Aug 12

Benedetto Odescalchi was born at Como on May 16, 1611, and died in Rome, August 11, 1689.

He was educated by the Jesuits at Como, and studied jurisprudence at Rome and Naples. Urban VIII appointed him successively prothonotary, president of the Apostolic Camera, commissary at Ancona, administrator of Macerata, and Governor of Picena. Innocent X then made him Cardinal-Deacon of Santi Cosma e Damiano on March 6, 1645, and, somewhat later, Cardinal-Priest of Sant’ Onofrio.

As cardinal he was beloved by all on account of his deep piety, charity, and unselfish devotion to his duties. When he was sent as legate to Ferrara in order to assist the people stricken with a severe famine, the pope introduced him to the people of Ferrara as the “father of the poor”, “Mittimus patrem pauperum”. In 1650 he became Bishop of Novara, a capacity in which he spent all the revenues of his see in order to relieve the poor and sick of his diocese. With the permission of the pope, he resigned as Bishop of Novara in favour of his brother, Giulio, in 1656 and went to Rome, where he took a prominent part in the consultations of the various congregations in which he was a member.

Odescalchi was unanimously elected pope on September 21, 1676, and he took the name of Innocent XI. Immediately upon his accession he turned all his efforts towards reducing the expenses of the Curia. He passed strict ordinances against nepotism among the cardinals, and he himself lived very parsimoniously and exhorted the cardinals to do the same.

His pontificate was marked by the prolonged struggle with Louis XIV of France on the subject of the so-called “Gallican Liberties”, and also about certain immunities claimed by ambassadors to the papal court. He died after a long period of feeble health on August 12, 1689.

The cause for his canonization was first introduced in 1714, but the influence of France forced it to be suspended in 1744. In the 20th century it was reintroduced, and Pius XII announced his beatification on October 7, 1956.

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