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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

By: Fr. Michael Black
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 "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 Christianity Ministry & Evangelism Spirituality
Episodes
  • May 18: Saint John I, Pope and Martyr

    May 18: Saint John I, Pope and Martyr
    May 17 2025
    May 18: Saint John I, Pope and Martyr c. Late Fifth Century–526 Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red The pope is crushed in a secular vice by two worldly masters The early Popes were Roman citizens who retained their birth or baptismal names upon being elected to the See of Peter. Their names perfectly reflect a flourishing Roman culture rather than the Christian subculture which was gradually budding and flowering in its midst. So there are Popes Clement, Linus, Anacletus, Sixtus, Victor, Callixtus, Urban, and Fabian. It sounds like a roll call of Roman senators in white togas seated on the marble benches of the Forum. It is not until 254 that Pope Stephen bears a name from the New Testament and not until 336 does Pope Mark honor an Evangelist. Considering the centrality of Saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist to the Christian story, it is surprising that five hundred years transpired before today’s saint, Pope John I, so honored their memory. A pope is only called the “First” once there’s a “Second.” In 533 a man named Mercurius succeeded today’s John as Bishop of Rome. Mercurius’ birth name was so overtly pagan—honoring the Roman God Mercury—that he chose to honor his martyred predecessor John by adopting his same name. Mercurius thus initiated the venerable tradition of a pope adopting a new name upon his election. At the same time he also retroactively turned Pope John into Pope John I. The flow of the early martyrs’ blood had long since ceased by John I’s election in 523. There was no emperor or court even left in Rome by 523 for barbarians to attack. The traditional date of the fall of the Western Roman Empire is 476. John I was, then, the pope of a declining, far western outpost of an empire whose central government had been in Constantinople for almost two hundred years by John I’s election. Rome was fading. The Empire’s long, slow decline in Italy had created a vacuum. Rugged tribes of the North, including the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths), poured south into the warm valleys and cultured towns of the Italian countryside and saturated Rome itself. The Ostrogoths had called the Italian peninsula home for so long that, by the sixth century, they were part Roman, part barbarian, and part Christian. Borderlands are always a mix. For complex historical reasons, the Ostrogoths and their Italian ruler, Theodoric, were Arians. Their prior isolation in Northern Europe had prohibited them from absorbing the teachings of the fourth-century Councils of Nicea and Constantinople. So the Ostrogoths were unaware that the Church had decisively rejected the Arian heresy, which held that Christ was a god, but not the God. It was amidst these tense political and religious circumstances that poor Pope John I was placed in an impossible situation. John was caught between the Emperor Justin in remote Constantinople, who exercised significant control over Church discipline, and Theodoric, who was standing right at his side, breathing down his neck. Justin had issued an edict ordering the Arians, including the Ostrogoths in Italy, to surrender their churches to the Catholics. Theodoric would have none of it. He was as angry as a hornet. To him, it was the first step toward Constantinople reasserting its control over Italy, something the Ostrogoths would resist to the death. So Theodoric sent Pope John at the head of a large embassy of Roman dignitaries to Constantinople to demand that Justin withdraw the edict. Pope John obediently went. He was greeted in the capital with elaborate ceremony and honored as head of the Church. But he could not, and did not, secure what Theodoric so desired. It was impossible. The edict was binding. When Pope John and his party crossed the Adriatic Sea to return to Rome, they landed at Ravenna. Theodoric, who had heard of Pope John’s failure to have the edict rescinded, imprisoned him. And there the Pope died, in Ravenna, perhaps of shock, perhaps of mistreatment. His blood did not run red like the martyrs of old, but he died a victim for Christ nonetheless, unable to simultaneously satisfy two powerful secular masters. John I’s mortal remains were returned to Rome. In keeping with the custom for all popes since Pope Leo the Great (440–461), Pope John I was interred in the nave of the Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter. When the new St. Peter’s was built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, John’s tomb did not surface nor did any epitaph. But Pope Saint John I is still there, somewhere, under the floor of St. Peter’s, arms crossed, facing up, ring on his bony finger, vested in gold, miter crowning his head, as waves of tourists walk on the marble floor above him. He rests in peace, forgotten to but a few. Pope Saint John I, your fidelity to your vocation as Pope led to your death. You were faithful in the face of threats from civil power but did not bend to its will. May all popes look to your example for inspiration in ...
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    7 mins
  • May 15: Saint Isidore

    May 15: Saint Isidore
    May 15 2024
    May 15: Saint Isidore
    c. 1080–1130
    Optional Memorial (U.S.A.); Liturgical Color: White

    Patron Saint of farmers and brick layers

    Our daily duties are not a distraction from God’s will
    It would be wonderful to see in a church a marble statue of a nurse taking a patient’s blood pressure. It would be edifying to see in a Basilica’s bright stained glass a housewife standing fatigued at the ironing board, running the iron over her kids’ shirts. And it would be marvelous to gaze in admiration at a well-executed painting of a factory worker pounding a piece of metal into shape with a hammer. Imagine if Catholic art presented these mundane scenes for contemplation in our churches, chapels, and shrines. Imagine kneeling before a bank of glowing candles and reflecting upon the everyday heroism of the lay vocation. We could light a small candle, step back, cross our hands, pause in silence, look at the layman in a suit at his desk in the mosaic before us, and whisper a prayer asking for his divine intercession to help us be a more charitable nurse, a more dedicated housewife, or a more honest worker.

    There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. So our churches inspire us, ideally, with their statues, stained glass, paintings, mosaics, floors, and tapestries. The images of the holy men and women of our long Catholic tradition typically show popes, bishops, priests, nuns, abbots, monks, friars, brothers, missionaries, and others, dressed in their religious habit and armed with the symbols of their office and their life. All of this is good. All of this is necessary. All of this is inspiring. Yet today’s saint, Isidore, offers us a different pathway of holiness to consider—the broad and well-traveled pathway crowded with the Catholic laity on their way to work in the morning.

    Saint Isidore was from Spain and was named in honor of Saint Isidore of Seville, a scholar, bishop, and Father of the Church who lived in the sixth and seventh centuries. The two Isidores could not be more different. Today’s Saint Isidore is known in Spanish as “Labrador” or “the farm worker.” He was not a scholar and probably had trouble reading. He was not ordained to Holy Orders but married and a father. He surely had calluses on his hands, a red, leathery neck burned by the sun, and a sore and twisted back for most of his life. He earned what little he had. No one gave it to him. He did not put food on his family’s table by generating great thoughts or publishing profound books. And due to exhaustion he probably had no trouble sleeping at night.

    Numerous legends of miracle working and holiness attest to Saint Isidore’s influence on Spanish culture. In 1947 his partially incorrupt body was even put on public display to provoke prayers to bring a terrible Spanish drought to an end.  Saint Isidore is the patron saint of Madrid and of numerous other towns, cities, and regions throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Processions, Masses, fireworks, and public devotions render him homage on his feast day. Yet besides his dedication to working the land, few details of Saint Isidore’s life are known with certainty.

    Our religious faith cannot occupy only one sphere of our life, as if it were a hobby akin to building a ship in a bottle, flying a kite, or cultivating a garden. A real religion impacts everything. Even work. Especially work. We fulfill God’s will in our daily lives—which are packed full of work—by doing our work well. We should do our work diligently and at a high professional level, because it is an offering to God first and foremost. In other words, bad work equals a bad offering. Work is the practical use and expression of the skills God has loaned us for our earthly pilgrimage. To misuse those skills, to let them lie fallow, or to put them to ill use, is to bury a treasure in the ground. “Ora et Labora” is the Benedictine maxim. Prayer and Work. Yet work is prayer for the vast majority of the baptized.

    Saint Isidore’s life teaches us, indirectly, that God can convert an entire nation without ink or paper. A book might help, of course, but a religion of the Word is not the same as a religion of the Book, and Catholics are a people of the Word. Saint Isidore is the patron saint of farmers, day laborers, and brick layers. He is often shown wearing rough clothes, oxen leading him as he plows a furrow, with an angel at his side and a golden halo shining over him. A farmer saint. Why not?

    Saint Isidore, your witness of dedicated and holy work is a model for all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. May your quiet and humble dedication to your lay vocation inspire all the baptized to see in “work well done” a source of dignity through which man participates in God’s creative act.
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    7 mins
  • May 14: Saint Matthias, Apostle

    May 14: Saint Matthias, Apostle
    May 13 2024
    May 14: Saint Matthias, Apostle
    First Century
    Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of alcoholics and tailors

    The Twelve were deeply biblical—Judas had to be replaced

    Conservative Muslims believe that any territory that was once settled and governed by the adherents of Mohammed pertains forever and always to the Caliphate. Once Islamic, always Islamic. To illustrate, it took many generations for the Islamic fist to finally loosen its grip on Spain. Yet despite the Muslim armies being pushed back into the waters of the Mediterranean in 1492, some strict modern followers of Mohammed still harbor dreams of former glories and hope that Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) will one day re-emerge.

    Catholicism harbors no such illusions of glory for formerly Catholic lands, but it does practice a theological form of “Once Catholic, Always Catholic.” Many Bishops who serve in the Roman Curia exercise no authority over a diocese. Auxiliary bishops likewise lack a territory. These two categories of bishops are thus given a “titular” episcopal see. It is a see in name, or title, only. The see is normally that of an ancient diocese whose existence ceased due to, typically, Muslim invasion. The custom of assigning “titular” sees to some bishops not only preserves the memory of lost peoples and dioceses, it also has some theological support. A bishop and his diocese are united, like spouses, in a marriage arranged in Rome. That’s why a bishop wears a ring. And a diocese, once created, cannot remain a widow. A new bishop is always appointed to be wedded to it. A diocese must have a spouse, even if he is a long way from home in distance and time. Titular bishops succeed in the present, if only in name, the past bishops of now defunct dioceses.

    The tradition that all bishops, beginning with the Apostles, must have successors is rooted not just in the early Church but in Judaism. The Twelve Apostles are more often referred to in the New Testament by their number than their names. They are, simply,  “The Twelve.” This custom is rooted in the twelve tribes who settled the land of Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt. These tribes were founded by the twelve sons of the Patriarch Jacob, later renamed Israel. It was inside of this Old Testament Jewish tradition that Jesus Christ acted when He chose twelve men upon whom to found His Church. Jesus specifically states that His followers will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Mt 19:28, Lk 22:30). And the Book of Revelation states that the names of the twelve tribes of Israel will be written on the gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rv 21:12 ff).

    It was fitting, then, when “The Twelve” were reduced to “The Eleven” after Judas’ self murder, that the fullness of the biblical number had to be restored. And this is where today’s saint steps out from the shadows to play his role in Christian history. The first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the great history book of the early Church, tells us that, after the Ascension, the eleven Apostles returned to Jerusalem. There, Peter “stood up among the believers” to tell them that someone who had “accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us… must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” Two names were proposed to replace Judas: Matthias and Joseph called Barsabbas. Then the Eleven prayed to the Lord to show them the way. They cast lots. Matthias was chosen. An Apostle, for the first time, had a successor. And, of equal significance, the appointment came from the group, or college, of Apostles, led by Peter. Thus was established, just days after Christ left the earth, a form of Church preservation and growth which would be repeated, and is still repeated, tens of thousand of times in Christian history.

    The Church has placed the Feast of St. Matthias purposefully close to the Feast of the Ascension, just as his election in Acts occurred so soon after that event in the Bible. The Holy Spirit had yet to descend at Pentecost, and still the Church performed the will of God with authority in selecting Matthias. It was all there in the beginning. It is still here all around us. The miracle of the Church and her Apostles continues. It will always continue.

    Saint Matthias, we beg your intercession from your powerful throne in the Heavenly Jerusalem, that you fortify all who govern your Church to emulate “The Twelve” in their wisdom, trust, prudence, and daring in leading and spreading the Faith.
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    6 mins
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