Ruminations of an Amateur Monastic
Today is the feast day of Sainte-Foy, a saint almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, she is one of my favourite saints, and I wear a medal with her image. She has become very dear to me. Sainte-Foy was born around AD 291 in the Gallo-Roman city of Aginnum, modern-day Agen in France. She suffered martyrdom about the year 303 at the […]
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Were it not Sunday, today we would be celebrating the Memorial of Saint Francis of Assisi. In fact, today is the 800th anniversary of his death, and the Franciscan Friars and Sisters around the world are celebrating this great jubilee. Just about everybody knows Saint Francis. He’s the plaster birdbath guy, right? The saint who hung around with fuzzy pastel […]
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Do you pray to your Guardian Angel? Do you ask them for advice or help? Why not? The Church teaches that we all receive a guardian angel at birth, an angel assigned to guide and protect us, to watch over us. As it says in scripture: There shall no evil come to thee: nor shall the scourge come near thy […]
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Saint Jerome was both a brilliant translator and expounder of the scriptures and a grumpy old man. Born in the Roman province of Dalmatia in modern Slovenia, he studied in Rome starting in about the year 360. During a journey to Syria in 373, he fell ill and had a vision that caused him to devote the rest of his […]
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Today is the “Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels” or, in the old calendar, the “Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Michael the Archangel”. Whatever you call it, the most common name is Michaelmas. It is one of several harvest festivals celebrated throughout Christian Europe. So happy Michaelmas! In England this is one of the “quarter days”, which […]
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Saint Hildegard of Bingen is one of those medieval figures who can cause a lot of confusion to people not paying close attention. She (or, rather, a version of her with her Christianity stripped out) has been adopted by some of the New Agers as one of their own. Of course, if you strip the Christianity out of the life […]
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“We make Idols of our concepts, but Wisdom is born of wonder.” (Pope St. Gregory the Great) Only a handful of Popes ever get named “Great”. Today in the Ordinary Roman calendar is the feast of one of them, Pope Saint Gregory the Great, confessor and doctor of the Church (540 – 604). His feast, originally celebrated on the day […]
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Today is one of the more interesting feasts on the liturgical calendar, for today is the feast of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. OK, nowadays they’ve slightly sanitized the name; it’s now officially called the “Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist”, but for the sheer Catholic joy of calling a spade a spade, I’m sticking […]
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In this very volatile moment in our history, both of the United States and of the world, where things seem to be unravelling and so much anger rises to the surface so quickly, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the meaning of our times. This anger and factionalism and the accompanying doom-saying are hardly unique to our age. […]
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Today is the memorial of Saint Monica, beleaguered mother of Saint Augustine, whose feast is tomorrow. I’ve had many occasions to pray for her intercession, but since last year, this day has hit a little differently for me. In the modern Roman calendar, her memorial is listed simply as that of “Saint Monica”, but before the calendar reform of the […]
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Today is the feast of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. And at this moment in the history of the Church, we could very much use another like him. Born in 1090 to a noble Burgundian family near Dijon, he entered the monastery at age 23. In less than three years, he was sent by his abbot to found a new monastery […]
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On today’s Vigil of the Assumption, we celebrate also the memory of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan Friar and priest who spent much of his life as a missionary. He returned to his native Poland, where he helped lead a publishing house that produced religious tracts and anti-Nazi literature. The friary itself provided shelter to refugees, including some 2,000 Jews […]
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I often think about Saint Lawrence, the Deacon martyr whose feast is today. Many is the time I’ve sought his intercession. There are so many stories about him that it’s hard to sum him up briefly, although Pope Saint Leo the Great did his best: “The Lord has desired to exalt his glorious name in the world so much that […]
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Today is the feast of Saint Dominic de Guzmán. He was born near Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain, just north of the Camino, in 1170. Legend has it that before his birth, his barren mother made a pilgrimage to Silos, and dreamt that a dog leapt from her womb carrying a flaming torch in its mouth – and it […]
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Depending on your particular calendar, today or tomorrow is the memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), a great saint and Doctor of the Church who founded the Redemptorists and wrote on the spiritual life. I particularly enjoy his Way of the Cross and a short book (pamphlet, really) called How to Converse with God. Perhaps because of his voluminous writing, […]
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Today is the memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, founder of Ignatian spirituality, and the only saint so far as I know who had a leg shot off by a cannonball. Ignatius was from a minor Basque-Spanish noble family, raised to be a soldier. After serving as a page in the household of a relative (who […]
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Today is the Feast of Saint James the Greater, known throughout the Spanish-speaking world as Santiago and in French as Saint Jacques. He was one of Christ’s Twelve Apostles. Saint James is the patron saint of the Archdiocese of Seattle. May you have the joy of the feast! James and his brother John were natives of Galilee, sons of the […]
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