I wrote once that the saints are hard corps. I used a battlefield story from the Korean War era to make my point about how the saints can motivate us to be better Christians. That is, unless they repel us and shame us with their bravery. Like today’s saint, for example.

It is the feast day of St. Benjamin. He was martyred on this day in the year 424 in a manner that brought renown to a certain Transylvanian nobleman named Vlad. But this killing of a devout Christian, for proclaiming the Gospel, happened in Persia long before Bram Stoker was around to write Dracula.

Benjamin was a deacon too. So although he was pretty involved in the affairs of his parish,  he was still a little guy like you and me. A warrant officer on His Majesty’s Ships muster roll.

Here is some handy background information that I gleaned from the internet.

The Christians in Persia had enjoyed twelve years of peace during the reign of Isdegerd, son of Sapor III, when in 420 it was disturbed by the indiscreet zeal of Abdas, a Christian Bishop who burned the Temple of Fire, the great sanctuary of the Persians.

Zealots…I hate those guys! Which sounds like one of my favorite lines delivered by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Usually hurled at Nazis,other bad guys, etc. As for zealots, it takes one to know one, for as Marines go, I practiced that trade with missionary-like zeal for quite some time.

So this Bishop Abdas got inspired and decided to use the scorched earth policy versus the heathen. Fighting fire with fire. Here is how it worked out.

King Isdegerd threatened to destroy all the churches of the Christians unless the Bishop would rebuild it. As Abdas refused to comply, the threat was executed; the churches were demolished, Abdas himself was put to death, and a general persecution began which lasted forty years.

Notice we aren’t marking the feast of St. Abdas? Well we will be, just not until May 16. That is the day King Isdegerd rounded him and seven others up and had them killed in the year 420. Remember the original 12 disciples? There was a zealot (or two?) among them as well. The Lord loves his zealots, as well as his fishermen and tax collectors, prostitutes, the lame,  and even rich guys hiding in the Sanhedrin.

King Isdegerd died in the year 421, but his policies lived on. His son and heir named Varanes assumed the throne with the intentions of remembering his dad’s legacy, not to mention with the intent to placate the institutional anger of his pagan subjects who remembered well that their temples had been destroyed. Actually, King Varanes was going to show his departed dad how he should have handled these pesky Christians.

So here is little Deacon Benjamin, who was sitting in irons for a year, probably since he couldn’t hide from King Varanes and his stool-pidgeons forever. Good news though! An ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople negotiates Benjamin’s release from jail. But on one condition: Benjamin must never speak of his religion again. You know, to the authorities. Just keep quiet Benjy and all will be well. Maintain a low profile. Live for another day.

Benjamin decides not to play this game. Instead he,

declared it was his duty to preach Christ and that he could not be silent. Although he had been liberated on the agreement made with the ambassador and the Persian authorities, he would not acquiesce in it, and neglected no opportunity of preaching.

Uh-oh. Another zealot. This is going to end badly.

Here is how King Varenes handles Benjamin,

He was again apprehended and brought before the king. The tyrant ordered that reeds should be thrust in between his nails and his flesh and into all the tenderest parts of his body and then withdrawn. After this torture had been repeated several times, a knotted stake was inserted into his bowels to rend and tear him. The martyr expired in the most terrible agony.

Martyrd by Varenes the Impaler.

But Benjamin’s soul lives on. Do you know the origins of the motto of the State of New Hampshire, Live Free or Die?  The complete saying is taken from a toast by General John Stark, retired from the victorious Continental Army, given in 1809. It goes:  Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils.

Spoken like another zealot. I think, nay, I know St. Benjamin would agree. For as today’s reading from Isaiah (50:7-8) makes clear,

The Lord GOD is my help, therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
He is near who upholds my right; if anyone wishes to oppose me,
let us appear together.

St. Benjamin, pray for us.

On the trail of St. Joseph, because he is my patron and because his feast day is approaching (March 19), I stumbled across Teresa of Avila. And when I did, I sat down for a spell, and after I had sat in her presence, I didn’t want to leave. That’s what the saints will do for you—so convince you of the truth of the Christian claim that you want to spend the rest of your life at their feet.

Teresa’s devotion to St. Joseph, and so mine to her, began in 1538, when she was 25 years old. A Carmelite nun in the throes of a complete physical breakdown that she laid to heart trouble, Teresa despaired of conventional medical treatments and “decided to seek a cure from ‘heavenly doctors,’” according to biographer Shirley du Boulay:

She had Masses said for her—strictly in accordance with the church’s teaching, for she had no patience with unorthodox ceremonies—and she commended herself to someone who was to become her favorite saint, St. Joseph. Strong-willed by temperament, yet determined to be obedient, she found she could submit to the image of one to whom Christ himself was subject on earth. She attributed her improvement—it could not be called a cure, because she was at no time completely well—entirely to him and never ceased to commend him to others. She would make requests of him every year on his festival, claiming that they were always granted, even that “if my petition is in any way ill directed, he directs it aright for my greatest good.”

From then on, Teresa would always observe Joseph’s feast day with particular devotion. In her Life, she would write of St. Joseph:

I wish I could persuade everyone to be devoted to this glorious saint, for I have great experience of the blessings which he can obtain from God. I have never known anyone to be truly devoted to him and render him particular services who did not notably advance in virtue, for he gives very real help to souls who commend themselves to him. For some years now, I think, I have made some request of him every year on his festival and I have always had it granted. If my petition is in any way ill directed, he directs it aright for my greater good.

I only beg, for the love of God, that anyone who does not believe me will put what I say to the test, and he will see by experience what great advantages come from his commending himself to this glorious patriarch and having devotion to him. . . .

In her forties, Teresa began to experience visions, raptures, locutions—the mystic experiences for which she is perhaps best known—though she was one hard-boiled, down-to-earth mystic, who founded seventeen reformed Discalced (Barefoot) “Carmels” in her lifetime, working like a modern-day businesswoman on a fast track. St. Joseph sometimes appeared to her in visions. When in 1562, at age 47, she founded her first Carmel, she named it St. Joseph’s. She viewed her new reformed foundation as being like the home of the Holy Family in Nazareth, “a heaven, if one can be had on this earth.”

His Majesty earnestly commanded me to strive for this new monastery with all my powers, and He made great promises that it would be founded and that He would be highly servied in it. He said it should be called St. Joseph and that this saint would keep watch over us at one door, and our Lady at the other, that Christ would remain with us, and that it would be a star shining with great splendor.

From then on, no matter where she traveled through Spain in a covered wagon that maintained her enclosure from the world, St. Joseph’s would be Teresa’s home. St. Joseph himself was always at the ready, always nearby. In 1575, en route to founding one of her Carmels, according to du Boulay, Teresa’s party—

took the wrong turn, realized they were lost, and, at Teresa’s injunction, began to pray to St. Joseph. At once they heard a distant voice calling out that they must stop immediately, otherwise they would fall over a precipice. They obeyed the invisible command and discovered they were indeed in a perilous position, a chasm yawning beneath the wagon wheels, but what could they do? How could they turn round in the narrow path? The voice told them to go gently backward for a hundred turns of the wheels; they would come to no harm and would find the track again. It was just as the voice said.

In an essay on “The Historical Development of the Holy Family Devotion,” Joseph F. Chorpenning, OSFS, writes that Teresa’s devotion to St. Joseph is one of the key reasons that we honor him and, indeed, the Holy Family as such today. Chorpenning traces this devotion from the late Middle Ages, through Teresa’s time in the sixteenth century, right down to our times, when Pope John Paul II wrote Redemptoris Custos, his Apostolic Exhortation “on the person and mission of Saint Joseph in the life of Christ and in the Church.”

But I’ll leave that for another post. I’ll end simply with the last line from du Boulay’s biography of the Carmelite saint and the first female Doctor of the Church, Teresa of Avila:

To anyone asking for proof of the existence of God, anyone saying, “Is God there?” Teresa’s whole life offers a resounding “Yes.”

On this day we celebrate the feast of St. Polycarp, an Apostolic Father of the Church. He was eighty-six years old when he was captured, arrested, and publicly executed by the Roman authorities on this day in AD 156. He was the Bishop of Smyrna and had been a disciple of St. John, the Apostle.

He died a martyr when he was stabbed after an attempt to burn him at the stake failed. This is true Christian martyrdom in the example of  Our Lord, St. Stephen, and all the Apostles (except St. John)—death freely accepted rather than deny the Faith. Not martyrdom by way of killing a bunch of innocent bystanders with a suicide bomb wrapped around your waist. Not lashing out with a sword to see how many of the enemy you can take with you to the grave. Instead, a simple refusal to deny Our Lord when tempted to do so and an acceptance of the sentence as meted out by the authorities.

What follows is Polycarp’s famous refusal to revile Our Lord and the account of the prayer he prayed when the authorities attempted to burn him at the stake.

But when the magistrate pressed him hard and said, “Swear the oath, and I will release thee; revile the Christ,” Polycarp said, “Fourscore and six years have I been His servant, and He hath done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

And when the funeral pile was ready, Polycarp, laying aside all his garments, and loosing his girdle, sought also to take off his sandals, a thing he was not accustomed to do, inasmuch as every one of the faithful was always eager who should first touch his skin. For, on account of his holy life, he was, even before his martyrdom, adorned with every kind of good. Immediately then they surrounded him with those substances which had been prepared for the funeral pile. But when they were about also to fix him with nails, he said, “Leave me as I am; for He that giveth me strength to endure the fire, will also enable me, without your securing me by nails, to remain without moving in the pile.”

They did not nail him then, but simply bound him. And he, placing his hands behind him, and being bound like a distinguished ram taken out of a great flock for sacrifice, and prepared to be an acceptable burnt-offering unto God, looked up to heaven, and said, “O Lord God Almighty, the Father of thy beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, by whom we have received the knowledge of Thee, the God of angels and powers, and of every creature, and of the whole race of the righteous who live before thee, I give Thee thanks that Thou hast counted me worthy of this day and this hour, that I should have a part in the number of Thy martyrs, in the cup of thy Christ, to the resurrection of eternal life, both of soul and body, through the incorruption imparted by the Holy Ghost. Among whom may I be accepted this day before Thee as a fat and acceptable sacrifice, according as Thou, the ever-truthful God, hast foreordained, hast revealed beforehand to me, and now hast fulfilled. Wherefore also I praise Thee for all things, I bless Thee, I glorify Thee, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, with whom, to Thee, and the Holy Ghost, be glory both now and to all coming ages. Amen.”

“Martyrdom of Polycarp” from Ceiling of the Church of St. Polycarp, Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey)

Take a look at the video by Drive Thru History:

It is easy to dismiss as legend the one and only chestnut we usually read about St. Scholastica, sister of St. Benedict: That she prayed to God to be allowed to talk longer with her brother; that God rewarded her with a lightning storm that forced the siblings to spend the night together in spiritual conversation; and that three days later, when his sister died, Benedict had a vision of a dove rising to heaven. Just another Catholic legend, right?

But wait. Consider the source. “Almost everything we know about Saint Scholastica comes from the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great.” Gregory is a Doctor of the Church, one of the great Catholics in all of history, and he was born (540 AD) three years before the death of St. Scholastica. Gregory was born in Rome, about 90 miles from the place of Scholastica’s death in or near Montecassino, site of Benedict’s first monastery. Montecassino is on a road south from Rome, effectively en route to Sicily, where Gregory’s father had extensive land holdings. Gregory himself became a Benedictine monk and abbot before becoming Pope.

If the final days of St. Scholastica are “only legend,” then they are not legends like Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox Babe. They are more like a family story told by one generation, who saw the events, to the next generation, eager to learn—young and impressionable maybe, but hardly gullible or stupid.

Witnesses testified that when Joan of Arc died at the stake about 900 years after Scholastica’s death, a dove flew out of the flames. Another legend, right? Except that no life of a saint is more documented than Joan’s.

These things interest me as the older brother of four sisters and the father of two grown daughters. I am always deeply impressed by the reverence my Church shows for great women of faith. In the story of the lightning storm, God was on Scholastica’s side, not that of her older, more powerful brother.

Guest post by Allison Salerno 
My 13-year-old mistook me for a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. When I told Gabriel last week I had been fasting for Haiti, his response was “I don’t think that is necessary, Mom. No one is against Haiti right now.” Our son’s frame of reference for fasting was the tradition of a hunger strike—where participants fast in a public way as an act of political protest or to bring about a policy change. Such strikes happened in 2005 among Guantanamo Bay detainees, to protest their innocence and the conditions of their detainment.

Fasting in the Catholic tradition is far different, a concept lost on my altar-serving confirmandi boy-turning-man. And if he doesn’t understand it—a boy whose parents are deeply involved in the life of their parish—how about teens with a more tenuous hold on our faith?

I don’t blame my son for his ignorance. Not until May 2007 did I really understand the meaning of what had, until then, been a phrase to me: “the communion of saints.”

That was when our second son, Lucas’s, CCD teacher gathered us “First Communion parents” (there were six communicants and six moms showed up for the meeting) in the parish hall for a meeting to prep us for the sacrament.

“Do you understand what is going to happen Sunday?” the 28-year-old Catholic mother of two asked. Our answers were boilerplate: “They are undergoing a sacrament of initiation in the Catholic Church.” Or “They will receive the body and blood of Christ for the first time.”

“Okay,” she challenged us, “but what is really happening?” We had no answers.

She went on to describe how we all are part of a family that exists beyond the bounds of space and time. I left that meeting understanding—finally, at age 43—that this communion of saints is real. Each of us is part of the mystical body of Jesus Christ. That body includes those of us living in the “real” world, who pray for one another, and those who have gone before us, are living in a heavenly dimension, and are praying for us.

“Your children will fully enter into the mystical body of Christ on Sunday,” she said. “This is forever. Souls in heaven will be praying for them now, and when they die, your children will be praying for the souls on earth.”

Never has this communion of saints felt more powerful to me than right now. Consider that tens of thousands of people died in the Haitian earthquake without time to prepare. We can pray for their souls. We can pray for the families they left behind. We can offer our temporary suffering to relieve a piece of theirs.

In partnership with my parish priest and another mom who coordinates youth group with me, our parish is organizing a teen Fast for Haiti. Inspired by a movement loosely affiliated with Catholic Relief Services and being organized through the Internet, Catholics throughout the world have been donating $5 a meal to the Catholic Relief Services’ efforts in Haiti.

At our tiny parish, we hope to educate young parishioners about the role of fasting in one’s spiritual life. We plan to meet on a Friday night during Lent to fast and pray, play some quiet board games and make tee shirts that say “Fast for Haiti.” Teens will ask sponsors for $5 each, to be donated to CRS. Most powerfully, we hope to share with our young parishioners the value of prayer and fasting in relieving human suffering.

Because I am Catholic, I have the great comfort in knowing we can pray for the souls in heaven or on their way to heaven (the process known as Purgatory) and that the souls in heaven pray for all of us, too.

I hope my son and our other young parishioners will learn this essential lesson long before I did.

As husband and father, I sometimes find the notion of virginity perplexing—impressive in its total commitment to Christ, but also pretty hard to fathom. St. Angela, featured in today’s Office of Readings, is listed as “Angela Merici, Virgin.” This, and the beautiful reading itself, reminded me happily of supper last night.

Katie and I were guests of the Memores Domini house in Boston’s North End. Within the larger world of Communion and Liberation, Memores Domini is a subset of lay people who have consecrated themselves to Christ by taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It’s a sort of third order with ultimate commitment: These folks work in the world as PhD’s, MD’s, and the like, while living communally (sharing their financial resources) as virgins. Although they cannot perform the sacraments, they otherwise live like priests and religious, without collars or habits, invisibly to you and me, but with a profound effect on us.

I can testify to this effect. It was Katie’s birthday, and two of the guys had conspired, unbeknownst to me, to gather other Memores folks for a five-course celebration, plus two courses of wine, plus homemade cheesecake, plus pineapple flambée—the pièce de résistance, requiring all lights to be extinguished, et cetera, et cetera—everything done with a great sense of humor. The whole thing came off perfectly in the Boston Memores house, a converted rectory shared by five or six guys, all Italian by birth and brilliant by the evidence. (That’s one of the convincing things about CL: these men and women are faithful, hopeful, charitable, yes, but also, as Frank would say, dang smart.)

Memores women live in their own houses, but one of them, a lovely 28-year-old PhD candidate in medieval history from Rutgers, was a special and especially radiant guest. Like many Italians in CL, she is from Milano, home to Don Giussani until his death in 2005. St. Angela was born in 1470 in Desenzano, only about a 90-minute drive from Milano. After losing her sight, having it miraculously restored, and founding the Ursuline Sisters, St. Angela died in 1540 at Brescia, which is a bit closer to Milano. Her relics and incorrupt body are today at the Church of St. Afra in Brescia.

Excerpts from today’s reading, from the Spiritual Testament by St. Angela, are a perfect reflection of the spirit of charity Katie and I experienced last night:

Mothers and sisters most dear to me in Christ: in the first place strive with all your power and zeal to be open. With the help of God, try to receive such good counsel that, led solely by the love of God and an eagerness to save souls, you may fulfill your charge. 

Only if the responsibilities committed to you are rooted firmly in this twofold charity will they bear beneficial and saving fruit. As our Savior says: A good tree is not able to produce bad fruit.

He says: A good tree, that is, a good heart as well as a soul inflamed with charity, can do nothing but good and holy works. For this reason, Saint Augustine said: Love, and do what you will, namely, possess love and charity and then do what you will. It is as if he had said: Charity is not able to sin….

Typical of Memores Domini, the young lady from Rutgers proved to be as brilliant as she is radiant. Already a published author, she is working on her second book, about an unknown 14th-century merchant who built a spectacular fortune in international trade, then gave it all for the construction of a cathedral. From such charity, such radiance, brilliant things arise.

Posted by Webster 
As I head to our first men’s group of 2010, I come across today’s reading in honor of Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen. Like many readings from the Office, I begin it half asleep and finish it fully awake. This excerpt from a sermon by St. Gregory speaks to our men’s group, in particular, and Christian friendship between men, in general.

Today’s meeting is my first as secretary, which means, in theater parlance, that I book the acts. Today’s act is Big Bill—Cursillo. We have a Little Bill, too, which is why today’s Bill is known, to me alone, as Big Bill.

This will be Patrick’s first meeting as president, and as such, he will make the coffee and wield the invisible gavel against filibustering. I hope Patrick remembers the coffee.

Our outgoing president, my big brother Ferde, will be there, tickled to be relieved of the coffee duties after three years of building the group from scratch and surviving a terrible intramural crisis eighteen months ago about whether to put cinnamon in the coffee. Ferde said yea, everyone else said nay; Ferde was president; it was messy.

Jonathan, the outgoing secretary, will be there as well. Which is always a blessing, because Jonathan and Little Bill actually know something about Catholicism, its history and culture. They are, hands down, the two most knowledgeable Catholics in the group. Sorry, Ferde, that includes you. Same with you, Big Bill.

What touches me about the saints for today, both born in the same year, 330 AD, in Asia Minor, is that we remember them as friends. I wonder if friendship in Christ between men is illustrated in the lives of Sts. Basil and Gregory more vividly than in any other two saints’ lives. I don’t have the knowledge to judge this question, but I do have today’s reading.

I read St. Gregory’s words, and they are touching:

Basil and I were both in Athens. We had come, like streams of a river, from the same source in our native land, had separated from each other in pursuit of learning, and were now united again as if by plan, for God so arranged it. 

All of us come from the same river; some of us are “united again.” Do we acknowledge that this might be “by plan, for God so arranged it”? Who chooses our friends for us?

Such was the prelude to our friendship, the kindling of that flame that was to bind us together. In this way we began to feel affection for each other. When, in the course of time, we acknowledged our friendship and recognized that our ambition was a life of true wisdom, we became everything to each other: we shared the same lodging, the same table, the same desires, the same goal. Our love for each other grew daily warmer and deeper. 

The key here is the joint ambition: a life of true wisdom. Men have many ambitions. Men, more than women, are known for ambition. We think of ambition sometimes as an outward expression of testosterone. But these fourth-century saints had a particular ambition that had nothing to do with possessions or acclaim. And it bound them together. Read their short biographies and you’ll see. Basil is here and Gregory is here.

The icon at the top of this post shows Basil (left) and Gregory (right) flanking St. John Chrysostom. I like this illustration because it seems to say what the preceding paragraph says: that for two men to be joined in true friendship, there must be a third factor present, and “a life of true wisdom” as a joint ambition will do very nicely.

The same hope inspired us: the pursuit of learning. This is an ambition especially subject to envy. Yet between us there was no envy. On the contrary, we made capital out of our rivalry. Our rivalry consisted, not in seeking the first place for oneself but in yielding it to the other, for we each looked on the other’s success as his own. 

Testosterone breeds envy, and in two men vying for wisdom there is a great temptation to envy. I don’t think men have an edge on women in the envy department, but men or women, we can take a lesson from this: Basil and Gregory “made capital” out of their rivalry. And ended cheering for each other’s successes. The excerpt closes with these words:

Different men have different names, which they owe to their parents or to themselves, that is, to their own pursuits and achievements. But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians. 

Father Barnes—no fan of filibustering and no regular at men’s group—once gave a homily about being called a Christian. He said that when the time comes for someone to say our eulogies, all we should want is to be “called Christians.” The rest of the details—what we did, who we knew, what we accomplished—are trivial. “He was a Christian” should be good enough for us. It was good enough for Sts. Basil and Gregory.

Posted by Webster
Sometimes you read about a saint for the first time and you think, I want to know everything I can about him. Or her. That’s how I feel about Blessed Mary Frances Shervier, whom we remember December 15. OK, she is not a fully accredited “saint” yet, but so what? Her canonization is “pending.” Meanwhile, let me tell you what I have learned about Blessed Mary Frances Schervier. . . .

Born in Aachen, Germany in 1819 (imagine growing up in the shadows of Aachen Cathedral, left), Mary Frances was the goddaughter of an Emperor (Francis I of Austria). Her mother and two sisters died of tuberculosis when she was sixteen. So what did she do? Took over the household of her father, the wealthy owner of a needle factory. (Who gets wealthy owning needle factories anymore? That’s worthy of notice.)

In 1844, at the age of 25, she became a secular Franciscan. The following year, she and four friends founded an order dedicated to caring for the poor, Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis. Twelve years later, she inspired a male friend to found the Brothers of the Poor. Six years further on, we find Blessed Mary Frances on the battlefields of America’s Civil War ministering to wounded soldiers.

Frankly, this is where she gets me. What was she doing on this side of the Atlantic taking care of our heroes? If you served those brave soldiers—as Blessed Mary Frances did, as Walt Whitman did—you have my vote.

In 1868, Mother Frances wrote to all her sisters, reminding them of Jesus’s words: “You are my friends if you do what I command you. . . . I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” (John 15:14,17)

She continued: “If we do this faithfully and zealously, we will experience the truth of the words of our father St. Francis who says that love lightens all difficulties and sweetens all bitterness. We will likewise partake of the blessing which St. Francis promised to all his children, both present and future, after having admonished them to love one another even as he had loved them and continues to love them.”

The Catholic Church offers us a wealth of saints and blesseds to venerate. Today, let’s all say a prayer for Blessed Mary Frances Schervier and ask her to pray for us. You can read about the order Blessed Mary Frances founded right here.