ABOUT SOME SAINTS
ST ALPHONSUS LIGOURI
Feast Day : 1 August
Founder of the Redemptorists, a good preacher, writer in moral theology and devotional topics.
He arrived in his writing and in his preaching at simplicity, gentleness and intelligibility.
To read more about Alphonsus Liguori, click here.
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SAINT ANTHONY OF PADUA
Feast Day : 13 June
Also known as the Evangelical Doctor, Anthony's wealthy family wanted him to be a great nobleman, but for the sake of Christ he became a poor Franciscan Priest.
When the remains of Saint Berard and his companions, the first Franciscan martyrs, were brought to be buried in his church, Anthony was moved to leave his order, enter the Friars Minor and go to Morocco to evangelise.
Shipwrecked at Sicily, he joined some other brothers who were going to Portiuncula. He lived in a cave at San Paolo leaving only to attend Mass and sweep the nearby monastery.
One day, when a scheduled speaker failed to appear, the brothers pressed him into speaking. He impressed them so that he was thereafter constantly travelling, evangelising, preaching and teaching theology through Italy and France.
A gifted speaker, he attracted crowds everywhere he went, speaking in multiple tongues. Legend says that even the fish loved to listen.
A wonder worker, one of the most beloved of saints, his images and statues are found everywhere.
He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church on 16 January 1946.
Born : 1195 at Lisbon, Portugal
Died : 13 June 1231
Canonized : 30 May 1232 by Pope Gregory IX at Spoleto, Italy
Name Meaning : inestimable
Patronage : against shipwrecks; against starvation; against starving; American Indians; amputees; animals; asses; barrenness; boatmen; Brazil; diocese of Beaumont, Texas; domestic animals; elderly people; expectant mothers; faith in the Blessed Sacrament; Ferrazzano, Italy; fishermen; harvests; horses; Lisbon, Portugal; lost articles; lower animals; mail; mariners; oppressed people; Padua, Italy; paupers; poor people; Portugal; pregnant women; sailors; seekers of lost articles; shipwrecks; starvation; starving people; sterility; swineherds; Tigua Indians; travel hostesses; travellers; watermen
Representation : book; bread; Infant Jesus; lily
Source : http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/sainta01.htm
ST BENEDICT
Feast Day : 11 July
The patriarch of Western Monasticism and co-patron of Europe.
A man of great prudence and moderation, he achieved a monastic way of life which was complete, orderly and workable.
The monasteries that followed his rule were centres of learning, spirituality and culture, hospitality and medicine.
Click here to read more about St Benedict.
ST BONAVENTURE
Feast Day : 15 July
Friar, Bishop, Cardinal and General of the Franciscans.
Nominated Archbishop of York in 1265 but he declined.
In 1273, when the papal messenger arrived with news that he was to be a Cardinal, he was washing the dishes and asked him to wait until the job was finished.
Click here to read more about St Bonaventure.
SAINT BONIFACE
Feast Day : 7 June
Born as Winfrith, possibly at Crediton in Devon about 675AD, Boniface was killed in the Netherlands on this day in 754AD.
After several years as a monk and teacher at Nursling, Hampshire, he went to evangelise the Germanic peoples.
Ordained Bishop, he was given wide-ranging Papal commissions throughout Germany and Gaul.
With much support from England in materials and personnel, he founded monasteries and established dioceses, presided at synods and liaised with Kings.
He is remembered as a determined missionary and also church organiser and reformer whose work shaped the future of Europe.
He is buried in his Abbey of Fulda and is honoured as an apostle of Germany.
Click here to read more about St Boniface.
ST IGNATIUS LOYOLA
Feast Day : 31 July
One of the great Christian leaders, founder of the Jesuits.
He wished then to be willing to go anywhere or undertake any work that was for the good of the Church. Obedience to the Pope was their hallmark.
To read more about Ignatius Loyola - follow :
http://www.ignatiushistory.info/
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ST JAMES, THE APOSTLE
Feast Day : 25 July
The brother of St John, like him "a son of thunder".
Peter, James and John witnessed the Transfiguration and the Agony in the Garden.
He was the first Apostle to die for the faith.
SAINTS JOACHIM AND ANNE
Feast Day : 26 July
Neither is mentioned in the Scriptures but, in honouring them as the parents of Our Lady, we honour their child and Christ Himself.
SAINT JOHN FISHER
Feast Day : 22 June
Saint John Fisher was born in Beverley, East Yorkshire in 1469, the eldest of four children of a local merchant. He first went to school at Beverley Minster and, at the age of 14, was sent to Cambridge in order to become a priest.
In 1491 he was ordained but continued to serve in Cambridge, becoming a Master of his college at the age of 28. In 1501 he received his Doctorate and was elected as Vice-Chancellor of the University.
Henry VII recognised his qualities and, in 1504, appointed him as Bishop of Rochester.
His connection with Cambridge continued and he was instrumental in the completion of the famous King's College Chapel.
In 1509, at the age of 40, he preached the funeral sermon of King Henry VII.
With the propagation of Luther's ideas, he became drawn into the controversy on the side of the established views of the Church. Then, when King Henry VIII sought to divorce Queen Catherine, he took a stand against this proposed action.
At a court held in 1529, in front of Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio, he publicly declared his opposition. At this stage Henry failed to obtain his divorce and Fisher was allowed to withdraw to Rochester for a time.
In February 1531, Henry VIII declared himself as Supreme Head and Protector of the English Church and Clergy. Fisher forced an amendment to this decree "so far as the law of God allows".
The declaration, and Henry's consequent divorce and marriage to Anne Boleyn, forced the English Church into schism. Following a series of legal actions by Thomas Cromwell, Bishop John Fisher, together with Sir Thomas More, was committed to the Tower of London for failing to acknowledge the King's supremacy over the Church. Shortly afterwards, Pope Paul III created him a cardinal.
Finally, in 1535, at the age of 66, he was found guilty of "denying the King's supremacy". On June 22nd he was taken to Tower Hill, declaring to the crowd, "I am come hither to die for the faith of Christ's Holy Catholic Church" and was then beheaded. He was canonised by Pope Pius XI in 1935.
An appropriate epitaph is that from his fellow-prisoner and fellow-martyr, Sir Thomas More. "I reckon in this realm no one man, in wisdom, learning and long approved virtue together, meet to be matched and compared with him."
Source : http://www.rc.net/uk/leeds/ssfishermore/
ST JOHN VIANNEY
Feast Day : 4 August
Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney was a farm hand who taught children their prayers and catechism.
He reached the priesthood with great difficulty ... he was ordained in 1815, although it took several years study as he had little education, was not a very good student and his Latin was terrible.
In 1818 he was assigned to the backward parish of Ars (a village near Lyons), which suffered from very lax attendance. He made it famous by transforming that small community; he began visiting his parishioners, especially the sick and the poor and spent days in prayer, doing penance for his parishioners. He excelled at counselling and spent up to 16 hours a day hearing confessions.
Spent 40 years as the parish priest and is the model and patron of parish priests.
Source (part) : http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintj18.htm
ST MARTHA
Feast Day : 29 July
She received Christ into her home at Bethany, which was specially loved by Him.
Christ once again had supper there six days before His Passion.
It was she who elicited from Him the words "I am the resurrection and the life."
SAINT MARY MAGDALEN(E)
Feast Day : July 22
She is called "the Penitent". St Mary was given the name 'Magdalen' because, though a Jewish girl, she lived in a Gentile town called Magdale in northern Galilee and her culture and manners were those of a Gentile.
St Luke records that she was a notorious sinner and had seven devils removed from her. She was present at Our Lords' Crucifixion and, with Joanna and Mary, the mother of James and Salome, at Jesus' empty tomb.
Fourteen years after Our Lord's death, St Mary was put in a boat by the Jews without sails or oars along with Saints Lazarus and Martha, St Maximin (who baptized her), St Sidonius ("the man born blind"), her maid Sera and the body of St Anne (the mother of the Blessed Virgin).
They were sent drifting out to sea and landed on the shores of Southern France, where St Mary spent the rest of her life as a contemplative in a cave known as Sainte-Baume.
She was given the Holy Eucharist daily by angels as her only food and died when she was 72.
St Mary was transported miraculously just before she died to the chapel of St Maximin, where she received the last sacraments.
St Mary Magdalen was well known as a sinner when she first saw Our Lord. She was very beautiful and very proud but, after she met Jesus, she felt great sorrow for her evil life. When Jesus went to supper at the home of a rich man named Simon, Mary came to weep at His feet. Then, with her long beautiful hair, she wiped His feet dry and anointed them with expensive perfume. Some people were surprised that Jesus let such a sinner touch Him but Our Lord could see into Mary's heart and said "many sins are forgiven her because she has loved very much." Then, to Mary, He said kindly"your faith has made you safe; go in peace."
From then on, with the other holy women, Mary humbly served Jesus and His Apostles. When Our Lord was crucified, she was there at the foot of His cross, unafraid for herself, and thinking only of His sufferings. No wonder Jesus said of her "she has loved much."
After Jesus' body had been placed in the tomb, Mary went to anoint it with spices early on Easter Sunday morning. Not finding the Sacred Body, she began to weep and, seeing someone whom she thought was the gardener, she asked him if he knew where the Body of her beloved Master had been taken.
But then the person spoke in a voice she knew so well. "Mary!" It was Jesus, risen from the dead. He had chosen to show Himself first to Mary Magdalen, the repentant sinner.
Source : http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=83
ST MATTHIAS, APOSTLE
Feast day : 14 May
As he could bear witness to the Resurrection of Jesus, he was chosen to replace Judas Iscariot.
He preached the Gospel for more than 30 years.
Source : http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintm17.htm
SAINT THERESE OF LISIEUX
Patron of the Missions
Feast day : 1 October
Generations of Catholics have admired this young saint, called her the "Little Flower", and found in her short life more inspiration for own lives than in volumes by theologians.
Yet Therese died when she was 24, after having lived as cloistered Carmelite for less than ten years. She never went on missions, never founded a religious order, never performed great works. The only book of hers, published after her death, was an brief edited version of her journal called "Story of a Soul." (Collections of her letters and restored versions of her journals have been published recently.) But within 28 years of her death, the public demand was so great that she was canonized.
Over the years, some modern Catholics have turned away from her because they associate her with over-sentimentalised piety and yet the message she has for us is still as compelling and simple as it was almost a century ago.
Therese was born in France in 1873, the pampered daughter of a mother who had wanted to be a saint and a father who had wanted to be monk. The two had gotten married but determined they would be celibate until a priest told them that was not how God wanted a marriage to work! They must have followed his advice very well because they had nine children. The five children who lived were all daughters who were close all their lives.
Tragedy and loss came quickly to Therese when her mother died of breast cancer when she was four and a half years old. Her sixteen year old sister Pauline became her second mother -- which made the second loss even worse when Pauline entered the Carmelite convent five years later. A few months later, Therese became so ill with a fever that people thought she was dying.
The worst part of it for Therese was all the people sitting around her bed staring at her like, she said, "a string of onions." When Therese saw her sisters praying to statue of Mary in her room, Therese also prayed. She saw Mary smile at her and suddenly she was cured. She tried to keep the grace of the cure secret but people found out and badgered her with questions about what Mary was wearing, what she looked like. When she refused to give in to their curiosity, they passed the story that she had made the whole thing up.
Without realizing it, by the time she was eleven years old she had developed the habit of mental prayer. She would find a place between her bed and the wall and in that solitude think about God, life, eternity.
When her other sisters, Marie and Leonie, left to join religious orders (the Carmelites and Poor Clares, respectively), Therese was left alone with her last sister Celine and her father. Therese tells us that she wanted to be good but that she had an odd way of going about. This spoiled little Queen of her father's wouldn't do housework. She thought if she made the beds she was doing a great favour!
Every time Therese even imagined that someone was criticizing her or didn't appreciate her, she burst into tears. Then she would cry because she had cried! Any inner wall she built to contain her wild emotions crumpled immediately before the tiniest comment.
Therese wanted to enter the Carmelite convent to join Pauline and Marie but how could she convince others that she could handle the rigours of Carmelite life, if she couldn't handle her own emotional outbursts? She had prayed that Jesus would help her but there was no sign of an answer.
On Christmas day in 1886, the fourteen-year-old hurried home from church. In France, young children left their shoes by the hearth at Christmas, and then parents would fill them with gifts. By fourteen, most children outgrew this custom. But her sister Celine didn't want Therese to grow up. So they continued to leave presents in "baby" Therese's shoes.
As she and Celine climbed the stairs to take off their hats, their father's voice rose up from the parlor below. Standing over the shoes, he sighed, "Thank goodness that's the last time we shall have this kind of thing!"
Therese froze, and her sister looked at her helplessly. Celine knew that in a few minutes Therese would be in tears over what her father had said.
But the tantrum never came. Something incredible had happened to Therese. Jesus had come into her heart and done what she could not do herself. He had made her more sensitive to her father's feelings than her own.
She swallowed her tears, walked slowly down the stairs, and exclaimed over the gifts in the shoes, as if she had never heard a word her father said. The following year she entered the convent. In her autobiography she referred to this Christmas as her "conversion."
Therese be known as the Little Flower but she had a will of steel. When the superior of the Carmelite convent refused to take Therese because she was so young, the formerly shy little girl went to the bishop. When the bishop also said no, she decided to go over his head, as well.
Her father and sister took her on a pilgrimage to Rome to try to get her mind off this crazy idea. Therese loved it. It was the one time when being little worked to her advantage! Because she was young and small she could run everywhere, touch relics and tombs without being yelled at. Finally they went for an audience with the Pope. They had been forbidden to speak to him but that didn't stop Therese. As soon as she got near him, she begged that he let her enter the Carmelite convent. She had to be carried out by two of the guards!
But the Vicar General who had seen her courage was impressed and soon Therese was admitted to the Carmelite convent that her sisters Pauline and Marie had already joined. Her romantic ideas of convent life and suffering soon met up with reality in a way she had never expected. Her father suffered a series of strokes that left him affected not only physically but mentally. When he began hallucinating and grabbed for a gun as if going into battle, he was taken to an asylum for the insane. Horrified, Therese learned of the humiliation of the father she adored and admired and of the gossip and pity of their so-called friends. As a cloistered nun she couldn't even visit her father.
This began a horrible time of suffering when she experienced such dryness in prayer that she stated "Jesus isn't doing much to keep the conversation going." She was so grief-stricken that she often fell asleep in prayer. She consoled herself by saying that mothers loved children when they lie asleep in their arms so that God must love her when she slept during prayer.
She knew as a Carmelite nun she would never be able to perform great deeds. " Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love." She took every chance to sacrifice, no matter how small it would seem. She smiled at the sisters she didn't like. She ate everything she was given without complaining -- so that she was often given the worst leftovers. One time she was accused of breaking a vase when she was not at fault. Instead of arguing she sank to her knees and begged forgiveness. These little sacrifices cost her more than bigger ones, for these went unrecognised by others. No one told her how wonderful she was for these little secret humiliations and good deeds.
When Pauline was elected prioress, she asked Therese for the ultimate sacrifice. Because of politics in the convent, many of the sisters feared that the family Martin would taken over the convent. Therefore Pauline asked Therese to remain a novice, in order to allay the fears of the others that the three sisters would push everyone else around. This meant she would never be a fully professed nun, that she would always have to ask permission for everything she did. This sacrifice was made a little sweeter when Celine entered the convent after her father's death. Four of the sisters were now together again.
Therese continued to worry about how she could achieve holiness in the life she led. She didn't want to just be good, she wanted to be a saint. She thought there must be a way for people living hidden, little lives like hers. " I have always wanted to become a saint. Unfortunately when I have compared myself with the saints, I have always found that there is the same difference between the saints and me as there is between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and a humble grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by. Instead of being discouraged, I told myself: God would not make me wish for something impossible and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint. It is impossible for me to grow bigger, so I put up with myself as I am, with all my countless faults. But I will look for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new.
" We live in an age of inventions. We need no longer climb laboriously up flights of stairs; in well-to-do houses there are lifts. And I was determined to find a lift to carry me to Jesus, for I was far too small to climb the steep stairs of perfection. So I sought in holy Scripture some idea of what this life I wanted would be, and I read these words: "Whosoever is a little one, come to me." It is your arms, Jesus, that are the lift to carry me to heaven. And so there is no need for me to grow up: I must stay little and become less and less."
She worried about her vocation: " I feel in me the vocation of the Priest. I have the vocation of the Apostle. Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this dream has grown with me. Considering the mystical body of the Church, I desired to see myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was burning with love. I understood that Love comprised all vocations, that Love was everything, that it embraced all times and places...in a word, that it was eternal! Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love...my vocation, at last I have found it...My vocation is Love!"
When an antagonist was elected prioress, new political suspicions and plottings sprang up. The concern over the Martin sisters perhaps was not exaggerated. In this small convent they now made up one-fifth of the population. Despite this and the fact that Therese was a permanent novice they put her in charge of the other novices.
Then in 1896, she coughed up blood. She kept working without telling anyone until she became so sick a year later everyone knew it. Worst of all she had lost her joy and confidence and felt she would die young without leaving anything behind. Pauline had already had her writing down her memories for journal and now she wanted her to continue -- so they would have something to circulate on her life after her death.
Her pain was so great that she said that if she had not had faith she would have taken her own life without hesitation. But she tried to remain smiling and cheerful -- and succeeded so well that some thought she was only pretending to be ill. Her one dream as the work she would do after her death, helping those on earth. "I will return," she said. "My heaven will be spent on earth." She died on September 30, 1897 at the age of 24 years old. She herself felt it was a blessing God allowed her to die at exactly that age. she had always felt that she had a vocation to be a priest and felt God let her die at the age she would have been ordained if she had been a man so that she wouldn't have to suffer.
After she died, everything at the convent went back to normal. One nun commented that there was nothing to say about Therese. But Pauline put together Therese's writings (and heavily edited them, unfortunately) and sent 2000 copies to other convents. But Therese's "little way" of trusting in Jesus to make her holy and relying on small daily sacrifices instead of great deeds appealed to the thousands of Catholics and others who were trying to find holiness in ordinary lives. Within two years, the Martin family had to move because her notoriety was so great and by 1925 she had been canonized.
Therese of Lisieux is one of the patron saints of the missions, not because she ever went anywhere, but because of her special love of the missions, and the prayers and letters she gave in support of missionaries.
This is reminder to all of us who feel we can do nothing, that it is the little things that keep God's kingdom growing.
Source : http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=105
THOMAS MORE
Feast Day : 22 June
Saint Thomas More was born in 1478, the second of six children of a London lawyer. At the age of twelve he was entered as a page to the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Morton. Two years later he went to Canterbury College, Oxford to study Classics.
When sixteen, he moved to an Inn of Court to begin legal studies. He apparently contemplated life in a religious community at one point but instead chose to become a lawyer. In 1505, he married Jane Colt, with whom he had four children. She died in 1511, and he remarried a widow named Alice Middleton.
By this time he had also produced two works, Utopia and A Life of Richard III, that have become classics in their own right. In 1517 he entered service in the Court, becoming increasingly useful to the King. By 1523 he had become the Speaker of the House of Commons, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and High Steward of both Oxford and Cambridge.
in 1529, he became Lord Chancellor in succession to Wolsey. When Henry VIII, started the process of separation from Rome and divorce from Catherine, he became increasingly disturbed. The day after the final separation, he resigned his position on the grounds of ill health and was absent from the wedding with Anne Boleyn.
From this point, Thomas Cromwell tried to implicate More in treasonable action, but failed. However, the silence of one of England's former great ministers was seen as a persistent threat. In 1534, he was required to sign the Act of Succession but refused and was soon committed to the Tower of London.
While in the Tower, at the same time as John Fisher, he wrote two devotional works. Just as he was to write about the arrest of Christ, his books and writing materials were seized. In July 1535, he was tried and convicted on the perjured evidence of Richard Rich.
On 6 July, he was executed. In his brief speech on the scaffold he declared that he died "In and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church", "the King's good servant but God's first".
Saint Thomas More was canonised by Pope Pius XI in 1935. As a practicing politician and a practicing Christian, Thomas More was faced with the constant tension between moral philosophy and practical expediency. The path that he followed ultimately cost him his life. Perhaps recognising this, on the 5th November 2000, Pope John Paul II named St Thomas More the patron saint of politicians.
