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
  • April 2: Saint Francis of Paola, Hermit

    April 2: Saint Francis of Paola, Hermit
    Apr 1 2024
    April 2: Saint Francis of Paola, Hermit
    1416–1507
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of Calabria, mariners, and naval officers

    He lived a perpetual Lent

    The first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi were known as the “Mendicants from Assisi.” Yet as the group attracted men and women from all over Italy and beyond, a new name, not specific to Assisi, was needed. Saint Francis named his brotherhood the Ordo Fratrum Minorum (O.F.M.). This is typically translated from the Latin as the Order of Friars Minor, implying that there is an Order of Friars Major. A better translation might be the Order of Lesser Brothers. Saint Francis wanted himself, and all of his brothers, to be less in everything—less prideful, less well known, less wealthy, and less well nourished than anyone else.

    Today’s saint, the Padre Pio of his era, was a holy priest from the town of Paola in Southern Italy. He was baptized as Francis by his parents when, after several years of going childless, they made a vow to name any son that might be born to them in the great saint’s honor. Francis of Paola was worthy of his namesake from a young age. His parents took special care with his religious upbringing and brought him to live for a year in a Franciscan monastery when Francis was just twelve. The young Francis developed a reputation for holiness even when just a teen. By the age of twenty, he was living as a hermit in a cave near Paola when local men began to gather around him. The fledgling group adopted the name “the Hermits of Brother Francis of Assisi,” a name later changed to the “Friars Minims,” or just “Minims,” meaning  “less” or “least,” in the spirit of the “Lesser Brothers” that Saint Francis of Assisi had founded centuries before.

    Francis of Paola desired humility, nothingness, and total self-abnegation. He and his followers lived a perpetual Lent. All Minims took the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But they also took a special fourth vow to abstain, all year long and all life long, from meat, eggs, butter, cheese, milk, and all dairy products. The fast never ended. This was mortification on a heroic scale. Vegetarianism, much less veganism, was a step beyond what Saint Francis of Assisi himself had lived. Saint Francis of Assisi ate what was set before him, including meat. He even criticized vegetarian brothers who refused meat, saying such an attitude questioned God’s providence and presumed the future, when a brother should instead gratefully accept whatever dish was placed on the table before him.

    Francis of Paola’s veganism was united to a strict moral code, a community life built around the Sacraments, and a deep spirituality centered on Jesus Christ. To be “one with nature” does not mean to be morally ambiguous or to break with religious traditions. A diet should not be a creed. Saint Francis was organic in that he lived one with God, with nature, with his religious brothers, and with the Church. Francis was perennially concerned with the moral laxity of the Church of his era, and purposefully fasted and did penance in reparation for its sins. While Francis of Assisi lived austerely and suffered debilitating illnesses, he was nevertheless cheerful and animated in his dealings with others. No one ever accused Francis of Paola of being ebullient. He was a fully armed spiritual warrior of the most serious kind. He went barefoot. He slept on a board. He was a desert father without the sand.

    After a very long life of fasting, prayer, miracle working, and wide fame for his holiness even outside of Italy, Saint Francis of Paola died in France. His order had by then spread throughout Europe. His reputation for sanctity was such that he was canonized in 1519, only twelve years after his death. In 1562 Protestant Calvinists in France unsealed his tomb and found his body incorrupt. They then desecrated the saint, scattering his remains. Saint Francis of Paola, after sacrificing everything in life, was not allowed to rest in peace. He was strewn about like trash, ensuring that only trace relics of him remained. Saint Francis wanted to be treated as the least of all. His desire was fulfilled both in life and in death.

    Saint Francis of Paola, you lived an integrated life deeply united to God, nature, and your fellow man. Intercede before the Trinity in heaven on our behalf, assisting us to grow closer to God through death to self, through prayer, and through a deep attachment to Christ.
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    6 mins
  • March 25: Annunciation of the Lord

    March 25: Annunciation of the Lord
    Mar 24 2025
    March 25: Annunciation of the Lord
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White

    The flutter of a wing, a rustling in the air, a voice, and the future began to begin

    The Feast of the Annunciation is the reason why we celebrate Christmas on December 25. Christmas comes exactly nine months after the Archangel Gabriel invited the Virgin Mary to be the Mother of God, an event we commemorate on March 25. The dating of these Feast Days, although interesting, is of minor importance compared to their theological significance. It is fruitful to reflect upon the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the womb of the Virgin Mary as the antecedent to the explosion of joy, caroling, gift giving, eating, drinking, love and family unity that surrounds the birth of the Savior. Perhaps Mary had a sort of private and internal Christmas at the moment of the Annunciation. Maybe she felt the fullness of the world’s Christmas joy inside of her own heart when she realized she had been chosen to be the Mother of God.

    God could have become man in any number of creative ways. He could have incarnated Himself just as Adam was in the book of Genesis, by being formed from the clay and having the divine breath blown into his nostrils. Or God could have slowly backed down to earth on a tall golden ladder as a twenty-five-year-old man, ready to walk the highways and byways of Palestine. Or maybe God could have taken flesh in an unknown way and just been found, like Moses, floating in a basket by a childless young couple from Nazareth as they enjoyed a Sunday picnic along the Jordan River.

    The Second Person of the Trinity chose, however, to become man like we all become man. In the same way that He would exit the world through the door of death before His Resurrection, as we all have to do, He also entered the world through the door of human birth. In the words of the early Church, Christ could not redeem what He did not assume. He redeemed everything because He took on human nature in all of its breadth, depth, complexity and mystery. He was like us in all things save sin.

    The incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity was a self-emptying. It was God becoming small. Imagine a man becoming an ant while retaining his human mind and will. The man-turned-ant would appear to be like all the ants around him, and would participate in all of their ant activities, yet still think at a level far above them. There was no other way to do it. The man had to learn through becoming, not because insect life was superior to his own, but because it was inferior. Only through descending, only through experience, could the man learn what was below him. All analogies limp, but, in a similar way, the Second Person of the Trinity retained His infused divine knowledge while reducing Himself to a man and learning man life, doing man work, and dying a man death. By such a self-emptying, He dignified all men and opened to them the possibility of entering into His higher life in Heaven.

    The Church’s tradition speculates that one reason the bad angels may have rebelled against God was the besetting sin of envy. They may have discovered that God chose to become man instead of the higher form of an angel. This envy would have been directed at the Virgin Mary as well, that Vessel of Honor and Ark of the Covenant who bore the divine choice. God not only became man, we must remember, but did so through a human being, one prepared from her conception to be perfect. March 25 is one of only two days of the year when we kneel at the recitation of the Creed at Mass. At the words “...by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man” all heads bow and all knees bend at the wonder of it. If the story of Christ is the greatest story ever told, today is its first page.

    O Holy Virgin Mary, we ask your intercession to make us as generous as you in accepting the will of God in our lives, especially when that will is expressed in mysterious ways. May you be our example of a generous response to what God desires of us.
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    6 mins
  • March 23: Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo, Bishop

    March 23: Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo, Bishop
    Mar 21 2025
    March 23: Saint Turibius of Mogrovejo, Bishop 1538–1606 Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet (Lenten Weekday) Patron Saint of Latin American Bishops and native people’s rights He died in the field six thousand miles from home Today’s saint was the second Archbishop of the second most important city in Spain’s Latin American empire in the 1500s. Lima, Peru, stood only behind Mexico City in importance to the Spanish Crown during the pinnacle of its colonial ambitions. So when Lima’s first Archbishop died in 1575, the King of Spain, not the Pope, searched for a suitable candidate to send over sea and land to replace him. The King found his man close at hand, and he was more than suitable to the task. Turibius of Mogrovejo was a learned scholar of the law who held teaching and other posts in Spain’s complex of Church and civil courts. Yet for all his learning, piety, faith, and energy, there was one huge obstacle to him being a bishop. Turibius was not a priest. He was not even a deacon. He was a very good, albeit unmarried, layman. The arrangement for centuries between Spain and the Holy See was that the Spanish Crown chose bishops while the Pope approved, or rejected, them. So after the Pope approved the appointment, over the candidate’s fierce objections, Turibius received the four minor orders on four successive weeks, was ordained a deacon and then ordained a priest. He said his first Mass when he was over forty years old. About two years later, Turibius was consecrated as the new archbishop, and then sailed the ocean blue, arriving in Lima in May 1581. Archbishop Turibius was extraordinarily dedicated to his episcopal responsibilities. He exhausted himself on years-long visits to the parishes of his vast territory, which included present day Peru and beyond. He acquainted himself with the priests and people under his care. He convoked synods (large Church meetings) to standardize sacramental, pastoral, and liturgical practice. He produced an important trilingual catechism in Spanish and two native dialects, learned to preach in these indigenous dialects himself, and encouraged his priests to be able to hear confessions and preach in them as well. Archbishop Turibius’ life also providentially intersected with the lives of other saints active in Peru at the same time, including Martin de Porres, Francisco Solano, and Isabel Flores de Oliva, to whom Turibius gave the name Rose when he confirmed her. She was later canonized as Saint Rose of Lima, the first saint born in the New World. Saints know saints. Archbishop Turibius was a fine example of a counter-reformation bishop, except that he did not serve in a counter-reformation place. That is, Peru was not split by the Catholic versus Protestant theological divisions wreaking such havoc in the Europe of that era. Saint Turibius implemented the reforms of the Council of Trent, not to combat heretics, but to simply make the Church healthier and holier, Protestants or no Protestants. From this perspective, the reforms of Trent were not a cure but an antidote. If Turibius’ energy and holiness were motivated by any one thing besides evangelical fervor, it was his desire to make the Spanish colonists of Peru recover the integrity of their own baptisms. The indigenous population needed authentic examples of Christian living to respect and emulate, and few Spanish colonialists provided such models of right living. Saint Turibius’ greatest enemy, then, was simply original sin, which returns to the battlefield every time a baby is born. After exhausting himself through total dedication to his responsibilities, Saint Turibius fell ill on the road and died at age sixty-seven in a small town far from home. His twenty-four years as Archbishop were a trial of strength. He had baptized and confirmed half a million souls, had trekked thousands of miles on narrow paths made for goats, had never neglected to say Mass, and did not accept any gifts in return for what he gave. Turibius was canonized in 1726 and named the Patron Saint of Latin American Bishops by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1983. Perhaps his unforeseen ordination explains his sustained fervor and drive. What came late was valued for having come at all. He bloomed late and bloomed beautifully, becoming the Spanish equivalent of his great contemporary, the Italian Saint Charles Borromeo. If a visitor searches for the tomb of the saintly Archbishop in the Cathedral of Lima today, he will not find it. There are only fragments of bones in a reliquary. His reputation for holiness was immediate and his relics were distributed far and wide after his death. He is in death as widely shared as he was in life, all the faithful wanting just a piece of the great man. In January 2018, Pope Francis prayed before the relics of Saint Turibius in Lima and invoked his memory in a talk to Peru’s bishops. Saint Turibius did not, Pope Francis said, shepherd his diocese from behind a desk but was “a ...
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    7 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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