Venerate the saints and martyrs, Church Fathers: Day 358

Venerate the saints and martyrs

St. Jerome lets his notorious temper loose against one Vigilantius, who had been scandalized by the way relics of the martyrs were venerated. Jerome tells him that he would not be scandalized if he really believed what Scripture says: that the martyrs are alive now and with the Lamb.

Among other blasphemies, he may be heard to say, “Why do you kiss and adore a bit of powder wrapped up in a cloth?”

Madman, who in the world ever adored the martyrs? Who ever thought man was God? Did not Paul and Barnabas, when the people of Lycaonia thought them to be Jupiter and Mercury, and would have offered sacrifices to them, rend their clothes and declare they were men? Not that they were not better than Jupiter and Mercury, who were but men long ago dead, but because, under the mistaken ideas of the Gentiles, the honor due to God was being paid to them.

It is nothing less than the relics of the martyrs which he is vexed to see cov­ered with a costly veil, and not bound up with rags or hair-cloth, or thrown on the trash heap, so that Vigilantius alone in his drunken slumber may be worshiped. You show mistrust because you think only of the dead body, and therefore blas­pheme. Read the Gospel: “The God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob: he is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). If then they are alive, they are not, to use your expression, kept in honorable confine­ment.

Will you lay down the law for God? Will you put the Apostles into chains, so that to the day of judgment they are to be kept in confinement, and are not with their Lord, although it is written concerning them that they “follow the Lamb wherever he goes”? If the Lamb is present everywhere, the same must be believed about those who are with the Lamb.

–St. Jerome, Against Vigilantius, 6

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

When non-Catholics question our veneration of the saints, do I know enough about the subject to be able to defend Catholic practice?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, I give you thanks for all the saints of old, the Apostles, patriarchs, prophets and martyrs, who have shown us the way of salvation. 

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