Episodes

  • September 26: Saints Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs

    September 26: Saints Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs
    Sep 24 2024
    September 26: Saints Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs
    c. Late third–early fourth century
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saints of doctors, barbers, and pharmacists

    Holy twins are honored for their healing, their poverty, and their deaths

    The ancient walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem enclose the sacred ground where the life of Jesus Christ culminated in His death, burial, and resurrection. Both the modest hill of Calvary and the rock-cut tomb in which His corpse was laid are found under the roof of this venerable church. Calvary and the tomb have long been protected from relic hunters by slabs of marble and stone cladding that conceal the rough, first-century substrata resting just below. There is a custom, still common today, of allowing the faithful to sleep overnight inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. From the time the heavy wooden doors close at dusk until they creek open again at sunrise, the pilgrim must remain in the church. This pious custom of resting and watching in the dark, all night long, near a holy site in order to soak up its latent power is called “incubation.” The custom originated in an ancient church in Constantinople housing the remains of today’s saints, Cosmas and Damian, where the faithful incubated themselves in the hope of a miraculous cure.

    Similar to Saint George, legends about Saints Cosmas and Damian far outrun any verifiable historical details about their lives. The devotion to today’s saints across epochs and cultures is as broad as an ocean but as shallow as a lake. Upon a slender bed of long-lost documents rests the narrative that Cosmas and Damian were twins and natives of Saudi Arabia who studied medicine in Syria. They became known as the “moneyless ones” for not accepting payment for their healing services. They were likely martyred north of Antioch in the early fourth century.

    The earliest historical anchor planting these holy brothers in the ground of history dates to around 400 A.D., when a pagan visitor recorded a visit to a shrine dedicated to Cosmas and Damian in Asia Minor. In the fifth century, a church was built to their memory in Constantinople and, in the sixth century, a pagan temple in the Roman Forum was rededicated as a Basilica in their honor. The bright apse mosaic of Rome’s Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian still shines and shows Saints Peter and Paul presenting the twins to the glorified Christ.

    Most of the wealth of miracles that have long been attributed to Saints Cosmas and Damian involve healing, in keeping with their medical profession. The fame of these miracles, together with their martyrdom, was so widespread in the early Church that they joined that elite class of martyrs, saints, virgins, and popes whose names were inserted into the Roman Canon, or Eucharistic Prayer I, where they are still read at Mass today. Their names also ring out in ancient litanies still sung at solemn Masses. Yet close familiarity with their names may dull our curiosity about their gory end.

    No details have been preserved, but it can be supposed that Cosmas and Damian died like so many other martyrs: by crucifixion, beheading, or drowning at sea; by the goring of beasts, or by their flesh being burned off in a roar of flames. The chilling sentence of death read by a Roman official sent a cold shiver up the spine. It was irrevocable. The martyr’s fate was often to be publicly shamed, tortured, and physically destroyed in a brutal fashion in keeping with a brutal world. No miracle saved Cosmas and Damian from their violent end. As physicians, they knew well the frailty of the human body. They understood their own bodies to be cracked vessels flooded temporarily with the Holy Spirit of God. And when the time came for that earthen vessel to return to the clay from whence it came, they bravely gave up what was never theirs. They offered a witness so shocking that it was seared into the memories of those who saw it, a witness so other-worldly that a few emulated it, and untold masses of others honored it through prayer and devotion, as we still do today.

    Saints Cosmas and Damian, through your heroic witness of martyrdom, we ask your intercession to embolden the weak, to strengthen the hesitant, to give words to the meek, and to unleash the hidden power of the Gospel in all those who could do more.
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    6 mins
  • September 23: Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio), Priest

    September 23: Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio), Priest
    Sep 22 2024
    September 23: Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio), Priest
    1887–1968
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of civil defense volunteers and adolescents

    A humble friar’s love for Christ burns holes in his hands

    Long-married spouses often develop similar patterns of speech. A boy might learn to walk just like his father, and a girl might favor the same hairstyle as her mom. Teenagers in the same cliques dress alike and cut their hair in a similar fashion. It is natural to adopt the traits of the one you love, to mimic their behavior, dress, speech, and habits, consciously or unconsciously. Lover and beloved converge, master and disciple unite, leader and follower bond. Today’s saint did not have a reference group apart from Christ Himself. Jesus Christ inhabited every corner of the mind, soul, and imagination of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina. Pio’s life fused with Christ’s so totally that Pio’s very body bore the marks of his beloved. Not the same haircut, clothes, or gait, but the same nail marks and bloody wounds. Father Pio merged with Christ such that to look upon the friar’s hands was to see the crucified palms of the Son of God on Calvary.

    Padre Pio grew up dirt poor and uneducated in a village near Naples, Italy, in 1887. Neither his parents nor his grandparents could read or write. He was baptized as Francesco and helped on the family’s small plot of land as a boy. The family was deeply religious, in the good, medieval way that perdured in rural Southern Europe far longer than it did in Northern lands. Saints, feast days, devotions, processions, fasts, the Mass, angels, saints, the Virgin, and God were the stuff of life. They saturated the atmosphere of Pietrelcina. Little Francesco and his family breathed Catholic air. It entered their bloodstream, circulated in their veins, and oozed out of every corpuscle. When he was about ten years old, Francesco decided to dedicate his life to God as a Franciscan friar. After completing some schooling and being privately tutored, he entered a nearby Franciscan friary at age fifteen. He took the name Pio (Pius) after a saint honored in his hometown. He was ordained a priest in 1910.

    Padre Pio lived virtually his entire priestly life at a modest Franciscan friary in the rural town of San Giovanni Rotondo. Beginning in 1918, he began to experience the stigmata, or marks of the sufferings of Christ. He bled where Christ bled. Holes perforated his hands. He had sharp pains in his side. He also began to display supernatural gifts: bilocation, prophecy, miracles, and healings. His personal routine of prayer and mortification was also stupefying. He did not want his private passion play to go on tour, but it did. He became famous throughout Italy for being holy. Then he became widely known the world over. By the time of his death in 1968, Padre Pio was a bona fide Catholic superstar.

    Padre Pio had mystique. That mystique was not rooted in good looks, a chateau on the Côte d’Azur, or in movie stardom, but in how he said Mass. People flocked to witness Padre Pio say long, intense, devotional Masses. In the modern world, sin has mystique. It’s cool, retrograde, impulsive, and “edgy.” A life of sin and vice is seen as more authentic than a life of goodness and virtue, because the sinner supposedly does not hide his real self behind a social curtain. Padre Pio hid nothing. He was totally authentic, totally sincere, and totally holy. His life was a rebuke of sin. He did not pretend to “share” others’ burdens by joining them in sin. He entered into the real drama of life by embodying Christ. A true Christian is authentic when he separates himself and his friends from sin, when he creates the mystique of Christ around him, and when, like Christ, he draws all men to himself.

    Saint Pio, your intense love of God was communicated to the faithful in your celebration of Mass, your wise counsel in the confessional, and in your mystical experiences. What was so manifest in you was rare but lies latent in every priest. Help every priest to be an icon of Christ.
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    6 mins
  • September 21: Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

    September 21: Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist
    Sep 21 2024
    September 21: Saint Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist
    First Century
    Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of bankers, accountants, and money changers

    A lover of money becomes greedy for God

    People leave their jobs for all sorts of reasons: more pay, better opportunity, a shorter commute. Today’s saint left his job for a better boss. Matthew was at work in the city of Capernaum, a bustling town with a customs house. It was just another day, and Matthew was going about his job of collecting taxes. Nearby, Jesus was doing his job too, curing a paralyzed man. It was an ordinary day for both of them. But after performing His miracle, Jesus walked down the main street of Capernaum, saw Matthew outside of the customs house, and then...the normal day ended. Jesus said to Matthew, simply, directly, and with force, “Follow me.” And then something astonishing happened. Matthew followed Him. Fistfuls of Roman coins may have spilled from his hands, or he may have swallowed a gulp in his throat, quickly adjusted his tunic, and then scurried to walk in the small clouds of dust that puffed up behind Jesus as His sandals slapped the dry ground. In an instant, Matthew’s life changed forever and always. He had become a follower, a joiner, of the most important man in the history of the world.

    The Gospel of Matthew nowhere mentions that it is written by a man named Matthew. But it was attributed to him very early in the life of the Church. It was compiled by 80 A.D., at the latest. Matthew’s Gospel is clearly written by a Jew and for Jews. It references the Old Testament repeatedly and notes how Jesus fulfilled those ancient Scriptures. Matthew’s Gospel is the only one which identifies him as a tax collector. Mark and Luke refer to him as Levi, which may have been his birth name, while Matthew (“gift of Yahweh”) was his post-conversion name. Because it begins with a genealogy, Matthew’s Gospel, but not Matthew himself, is in art represented by a man or by a man’s face. After his big moment in Capernaum, Matthew’s name consistently appears in the Gospels’ lists of Apostles, but little more is said about him, apart from a feast he hosts in honor of Jesus. It is not known where he evangelized or where or how he died. Four churches in France alone claim to have Matthew’s head, implying that no one has his head.

    Christ passes by in every life. Everyone has their chance to say “Yes” or “No,” to stay or follow, to change or remain the same. That moment may come only once and never return. Sudden callings, and sudden conversions, are rare, but they do happen. A life is more likely to plot gradually up or down like a line on a graph than to take a sharp right angle in either direction. Matthew’s life angled sharply when his personal trajectory intersected with Christ’s. The moment is captured in all of its drama by the painter Caravaggio in his Calling of Saint Matthew. A broad shaft of light beams through the room from above Christ’s head. His bony finger points to a well-dressed man at a table with his hands over a pile of coins. The scene unfolds not in the street but in a darkened room. Light and darkness play. Sin and virtue tussle. Past, present, and future hang in the balance. Christ seems to say, “Will you take and eat, will you go and sell, will you come and follow me?” Difficult, challenging questions. But Matthew gave the difficult, generous answer in response, and we remember him today due to that one moment.

    Saint Matthew, you made the right decision at the right time and so changed your life and those of millions of others who know Christ because of you. Help us to recognize when a pivot point arrives in our own life, when we must change direction, and help us to choose that direction well.
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    5 mins
  • September 20: Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, Priest, and Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and Companions, Martyrs

    September 20: Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, Priest, and Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and Companions, Martyrs
    Sep 19 2024
    September 20: Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn, Priest, and Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and Companions, Martyrs
    Nineteenth century
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saints of Korea

    Their martyrdom for a new faith caused the Christian sun to rise in Korea

    Catholicism was not originally brought to the isolated Korean Peninsula by celibate missionaries who trekked over its remote borders or who landed on its far shores from the outside. Instead, native Korean intellectuals had heard interesting ideas and had read intriguing books imported from nearby China about a new faith. These diplomats, professors and poets went in search of the Church. They crossed their own borders to speak with Jesuit priests in Beijing. The Koreans dialogued with the Jesuits, read their works, witnessed the celebration of the sacraments, and saw the Chinese Church in action. One of these Korean scholars, a man named Yi-Sung-hun, was baptized as Peter in Beijing in 1784 by a French missionary. Newly minted in Christ, with a convert’s fervor, Peter filled his baggage with catechisms, crucifixes, statues, rosaries, and images of the Virgin Mary and headed back to Korea excited to unpack the new faith for all to see. Peter baptized some of his friends and together they formed the first community of Catholics in Korea. They met in a house where sits, today, the Cathedral of Myeongdong.

    The evangelization of Korea dawned as a thoroughly lay initiative. And once the Catholic seed was planted in Korean soil, it first grew slowly among scholars but then more steadily among the larger populace over time. Today’s feast commemorates the official persecution that burned hot, then cold, then hot, for decades as those first Christian seeds germinated. As the Church grew like a plant, it protruded too high over the land and was repeatedly cut down in the bloody harvest commemorated today. Hundreds of martyrs, mostly lay men and women, but some French missionary bishops and priests as well, were murdered by successive Korean governments throughout the last decade of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth for the crime of being baptized Catholics. They posed no other threat.

    Paul Chŏng Ha-sang was a nobleman whose father and brother were martyred. Sacrifice was in his genes. Paul traveled to Beijing nine times, pleading for the Chinese Church to send priests to the lay-led Korean Church. Along with others, he sent a letter to Pope Pius VII describing the plight of the Korean faithful. Once clandestine priests began to arrive regularly in the 1830s, Paul would go to the Korean border to escort them to the communities of the faithful and lodge them in his own home. Paul was executed in 1839. His mother and sister were killed shortly after him.

    Father Andrew Kim Tae-gŏn was the very first native-born Korean priest. He departed Korea in 1837 for the Portuguese settlement of Macau to complete his seminary studies. He was ordained by a French missionary bishop in Shanghai in August 1845. He then guided back to Korea the same bishop and a French priest. His priestly ministry would be to die. He was arrested less than a year after his ordination. The authorities were so impressed with his personal bearing, education, and linguistic abilities that they agonized over whether he should be executed. They wrestled with their consciences, but their consciences, in the end, lost. Father Andrew was beheaded at the age of twenty-six in September 1846.

    The struggle to establish an organized Church structure in Korea was brutal. Today’s martyrs, whose names are all known and about whom basic facts are verified, stand in the fore. Yet behind them stand, faceless and nameless, thousands of other martyrs known to God alone. They perished by the sword, by crucifixion, in prison, or of starvation, rather than renounce their Christian faith when faced with certain torture and death. The Catholic Church in South Korea today is immense and vibrant, fully Korean and fully Catholic. The Church in North Korea does not effectively exist, and martyrs may still be dying there today, squeezed to death in the iron grip of its dictators. The story of the Korean Church is one of daring, one of steely courage, but one of tears. Only in 1886 did the century of persecution end, with a French-Korean treaty. Pope Saint John Paul II canonized Father Andrew Kim, Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and 101 other Korean martyrs on May 6, 1984, at a Mass in Seoul, South Korea. It was, at that time, the largest gathering of humanity in the history of the Korean peninsula. The martyrs’ blood was fertile.

    Holy Korean martyrs, known and unknown, we implore your powerful intercession in heaven. Give us half your courage, a quarter of your daring, and just one percent of your faith. With that we can emulate you in the easy circumstances of today, where we suffer metaphorically, but rarely in our bodies.
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    7 mins
  • September 19: Saint Januarius, Bishop and Martyr

    September 19: Saint Januarius, Bishop and Martyr
    Sep 19 2024
    September 19: Saint Januarius, Bishop and Martyr
    c. 300
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Naples

    An early bishop martyr is honored due to an enduring miracle of blood

    In every lost corner and hidden valley of the Catholic world is a painting of the Virgin Mary that cries watery tears, a crucifix whose growing hair must be cut with scissors, a white host oozing drops of red blood, or a sacred pool whose baths make the blind see and the lame walk. Of all the miracles, wonders, and theological rarities that leave God’s family in awe, the miracle of today’s saint is one of the most astounding. Three times a year—on his day of martyrdom, September 19; on the day of his commemoration as Patron of Naples, December 16; and on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, recalling the gathering together of his various relics—the blood of Saint Januarius liquefies.

    Since at least the 1300s, a small glass vial holding a deep-red, stable substance has been removed from a safe location and brought before the faithful in the Cathedral of Naples by a priest or bishop. The vial is placed near the other relics of Saint Januarius which rest under the altar. And then the drumbeat of prayers start. They sometimes continue for hours and sometimes for minutes. God is bidden, fuel is poured on the fire of faith, and the mysterious moment arrives. Spontaneously, the stable, solid, red substance is transformed into a liquid that splashes around the inside walls of the vial for all to see. The blood of Saint Januarius has come to life. The city of Naples fires a twenty-one-gun salute from a nearby castle to signal that the transformation has occurred.

    There is no explanation for how this happens. But it happens, happens often, and has happened consistently for many centuries. The proof is the outcome itself. That a solid substance liquifies cannot be debated. The liquified blood must be the starting point for speculation, not a presumption of magic or sleight of hand. That some things of God cannot be explained without the informed trust of faith is simply to state that believers did not make God up. He is not understandable. If He were, then He would fit conveniently into our tiny brains and thus not be God. But no faith is needed to accept this miracle. What happens is a fact.

    Little is known about the life of Saint Januarius. An extant letter from 432 mentions him as if he were already well known. It states that a nearby bishop, a friend of Saint Augustine named Saint Paulinus of Nola, had a vision of Januarius just before Paulinus died, and that Januarius was a bishop and martyr and a well-known member of the Church of Naples. It is believed that our saint was beheaded during a persecution under the reign of Diocletian, in the decade before Christianity was legalized in the early 300s.

    Perhaps the most interesting thing about the liquifying of Saint Januarius’ blood is that it occurs for no specific purpose. No sick person is healed, no sacrament is celebrated, no bishop is elected. It is a divine folly. It occurs to edify, to entertain, and to inspire, as if religion were a theological sport, with God simply putting His talents on display for all to behold the spectacle from the pews, to gaze, mouth agape, at a wonder that can neither be explained nor be resisted.

    Saint Januarius, you died for the faith of the Church just as the Christian era dawned. May we follow your example of generous witness and stand astonished at the mysterious miracle that puts your name on so many lips so many centuries after you perished for Christ.
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    5 mins
  • September 17: Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Virgin and Doctor

    September 17: Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Virgin and Doctor
    Sep 16 2023
    September 17: Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Virgin and Doctor
    1098-1179
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patroness of philologists

    A one-woman magisterium orchestrates a life in tune with the Creator

    In the high Middle-Ages, she was New-Age. Before farm-to-table was a term, she lived organically. Before alternative medicine was de rigueur, she catalogued the medicinal benefits of herbs, plants, minerals, and potions. And before anyone ever “went green” to save planet earth, she talked about the “viriditas,” or greenness, of God, meaning how His graces watered a desiccated soul until it flowered with fresh, green, life. Hildegard of Bingen was far, far, ahead of her time even though, from an external perspective, she lived the austere, rigorous, cloistered life common to the female religious of her era.

    Hildegard was born in the Rhineland, the very western region of modern Germany, to a minor noble family. Her mother and father placed her in the care of a well-known local abbess for her education at the tender age of eight, where she learned Latin and the teachings of the Catholic religion. Her world deepened and broadened inside the four walls of her simple Benedictine convent. When her mentor died, Hildegard became the abbess and soon moved the convent, generating some tension in the process, to a new location where it could better flourish as her fame attracted more and more notice and vocations.

    Hildegard was unusual for her time. She was unusual, in fact, for any time. She was a polymath with eclectic interests in numerous fields of study. She was a sophisticated and prolific composer of sacred music whose voluminous works surpass the output of almost any other Mediaeval musician. She had an advanced understanding of medicine and the human body, including an almost complete knowledge of how blood circulated in the body - four centuries before such knowledge was verified through post-mortem studies. Hildegard also had detailed knowledge of animal and plant life, of rocks, reptiles, fish, and the natural sciences in general.

    Yet if she must be known for one thing above all, it must be for her pyrotechnic visions of God and the cosmos. Hildegard’s colorful visions are difficult to classify. She described them as a wide-awake spiritual awareness of the “reflection of the living light.” From childhood, she felt her entire body – bones, nerves, veins, senses – all rising ever higher into the vault of heaven where she experienced all of creation in its particularity and in its oneness. These were not ecstasies or physical transportations, but an eyes-wide-open, all-sensory experience of sermons, virtues, writings, and other human actions as if they were shimmering like the sun on the mirror-like surface of a lake. The over-arching theme of these visions was the mystical marriage between God and His creation through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, a union consummated on the cross, where Christ makes his Bride, the Church, fertile for humanity.

    As Hildegard’s writings became more well-known, the Pope was asked for his appreciation of their theological orthodoxy or heterodoxy. Pope Eugene III approved of Hildegarde’s description of her visions, with a prudent warning for Hildegard to avoid any pride in being so blessed. The great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a famous contemporary of Hildegard, was also asked his opinions about her writings and the two exchanged letters. In fact, many people, both humble and exalted, corresponded with Hildegard, leaving behind one of the most massive caches of extant letters from mediaeval times.

    In the last years of her life, despite worsening health, Hildegarde’s prestige was such that she was given permission to leave her convent in order to preach in town squares and Churches, something almost unheard of for a woman of her era. She died in the odor of sanctity on September 17, 1179, the day on which her liturgical memorial is celebrated today. In the 2012 Papal Bull declaring her a Doctor of the Church, Pope Benedict XVI wrote that “the corpus of her writings, for their quantity, quality and variety of interests, is unmatched by any other female author of the Middle Ages.”

    Saint Hildegarde, your creative and versatile soul brought a feminine genius to the Church’s theological and spiritual patrimony, using poetic and symbolic language to express the mysterious richness of God and his creation. Inspire all Christians to read creation like a book of divine life.
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    6 mins
  • September 17: Saint Robert Bellarmine, Bishop and Doctor

    September 17: Saint Robert Bellarmine, Bishop and Doctor
    Sep 16 2023
    September 17: Saint Robert Bellarmine, Bishop and Doctor
    1542–1621
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of catechists and catechumens

    A learned scholar with a warm personality drives the Counter-Reformation forward

    A massive, multi-volume work of Christian theology was published in the 1580s refuting Protestant errors. The volumes were of such encyclopedic and commanding erudition that readers assumed that the name on the books’ spines, “Bellarmine,” referred to an entire faculty of scholars. But the volumes were the work of just one incredible man, today’s saint, Robert Bellarmine. He was a one-man university. The Bellarmines had a pope in the family and gave their son a broad education from his youth. Young Robert mastered numerous subjects, including the art of playing the violin. He joined the Jesuits in 1560 and taught the classics while simultaneously studying theology on his path to the Priesthood. After his ordination in 1570, he became a professor at the University of Louvain, in modern-day Belgium, and then at the Jesuit College in Rome.

    During his long career as a professor, Father Bellarmine never stopped learning. He was rigorous in his intellectual approach, read everything, and was particularly focused on refuting, with nuance, Protestant errors. He even learned Hebrew and wrote a Hebrew grammar to counter the thesis of a then popular Protestant history book. The times demanded that Bellarmine develop an expertise in apologetics, to be totally engaged with the red-hot controversies of his day. This was not the age for theological speculation or philosophical rumination, as the medieval scholastics could indulge in. This was the age to master first principles, to delve into the ancient sources, to root out error, and to express the perennial truths of Catholicism with renewed vigor surrounded by new art, architecture, and sacred music. It was a total mind-body approach. It was the Baroque exploding before your eyes. It was the onslaught of the Counter-Reformation, and Robert Bellarmine was the tip of the spear.

    Bellarmine’s long list of accomplishments is astonishing. He helped produce a new edition of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, participated in the revision of the Julian calendar, and contributed to the authoritative Catechism which the Church published for over three hundred years. He served on a papal commission that arbitrated a major conflict over the Kingship of France, became a regional superior for the Jesuits, and was ordained a bishop and consecrated a Cardinal. He was a trusted adviser to successive popes, was tasked with resolving a bitter dispute over the theology of grace between Dominicans and Jesuits, and escaped being elected Pope himself by the narrowest of margins in 1605. After this near miss with destiny, he was appointed to serve on various Roman Congregations and as prefect of the Vatican library, so he resigned from his diocesan responsibilities and returned to Rome for the rest of his life, where he became the Holy See’s indispensable man. His long and faithful service at the highest levels of the Church culminated in his playing a role in the famous process against Galileo, who was Bellarmine’s personal friend. Our saint’s last years were spent writing devotional works on prayer and dying well.

    Robert Bellarmine accepted the trappings of his office—robes, servants, and a carriage—but he lived austerely and expected all priests to do the same. His virtues equaled his achievements. He had an attractive blend of warmth, intelligence, and big-heartedness that earned him a huge circle of friends. He knew the truth like few others but listened carefully and respectfully to all who challenged it. Robert Bellarmine was canonized in 1930 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931. He is buried in the Jesuit Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome.

    Saint Robert Bellarmine, we see in your life a beautiful dedication to theological truth, personal austerity, and openness toward others. We ask your intercession before God to give all the faithful the gift to live so balanced and integrated a life.
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    6 mins
  • September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr

    September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr
    Sep 16 2024
    September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr
    c. Late Second, or Early Third, Century–253
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of cattle, domestic animals, and earache sufferers

    A Pope reigns for two years, excommunicates a schismatic, and dies in exile

    The twenty-first pope of the Church, Saint Cornelius, succeeded no one. After the death of Pope Saint Fabian, martyred in January 250, persecutions prohibited the clergy of Rome from electing a successor, so the Chair of Saint Peter was vacant for over a year. Finally, when the cruel Emperor Decius departed Rome on military campaign, the clergy chose Cornelius as Bishop of Rome. Not everyone was happy with the choice, especially the former future pope Novatian, who had led the Roman clergy during the vacancy and had convinced himself that he was going to be elected. Novatian’s supporters consecrated him bishop and refused to acknowledge Cornelius. Sides were taken, letters were written, and tensions heightened. After consolidating support from the esteemed Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, and others, Cornelius resolved the dispute by convening a synod of bishops which excommunicated the schismatic Novatian and his followers.

    Pope Cornelius reigned for a little over two years, from March 251 to June 253. Even though his time in office was brief, he made some important decisions and left an interesting legacy. Decius’ persecution gave rise to the greatest pastoral dilemma of the third century—how, and whether, to reintegrate Christians who had offered pagan sacrifice, regretted it, and desired to enter again into the embrace of Mother Church. The related question of whether bishops, priests, and deacons who had apostosized could perform valid sacraments would vex Cornelius’s successors. There were two camps on this issue. Novatian held that lapsed Christians were idolaters, and idolatry was, in the Old Testament especially, unforgivable. The Church could not absolve such apostates. They were to be judged by God alone at death. Cornelius, Saint Cyprian, and other bishops occupied a more moderate position. They taught that the lapsi could be reintegrated into the Church through repentance and an appropriate penance. Cornelius’ position won the day, forever and always, establishing an important theological precedent: There is no sin that cannot be forgiven.

    Pope Cornelius also left, in his letters, an important record of the size, state, and organization of the Church of Rome, hard facts so obvious to those inside of a culture that they often go unreported in historical documents. Decius’ successor as Emperor was named Gallus, and he was no friend of Christians either. He banished Cornelius to a city not far from Rome where the Pope died of physical hardship. Saint Cornelius was buried near the papal crypt in the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus. One day in 1849, an amateur archeologist, a layman who worked in the Vatican library, found a small marble shard that read NELIUS MARTYR in a field on the outskirts of Rome. But there was no martyr named Nelius. He then found another shard that read COR. The inscription is still visible today in the Catacombs of Callixtus: Cornelius Martyr.

    The Romans unsheathed their long knives in the 250s. Pope after pope was martyred by various means. But the Church did not run and hide, it stayed and grew. The blood of Cornelius and other pope-martyrs wet the soil, and the seeds of faith moistened, grew, and sprouted into the vast garden of Catholicism that slowly, and imperceptibly, took deep root in the ground of Europe. Saint Cornelius’ name is read at Mass in Eucharistic Prayer I even today, next to Saint Cyprian’s. He was staunch in his defense of the Church, yet appropriately lenient to his fellow Christians who did not possess his same fortitude. In this respect, he was as wise a pastor as he was brave a martyr.

    Saint Cornelius, our Lord said that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he would lose his own soul. You gained the papacy, not the whole world, yet gave it up rather than bend to the will of the Church’s enemies. Help us to persevere like you.
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    6 mins